Author Archives: Steve Coxsey

Are Your Excuses As Big As These?

Leave a reply

I haven’t blogged anything forward in a while because Facebook and Twitter are very effective channels for sharing an interesting blog post or article. In fact, they serve that purpose for me better than this blog, because it’s very easy to pass something along when you see it on social media. And it’s easy for people to keep forwarding it.

The value of posting a link here is that it becomes part of these archives and is easier to find in the future. Barbara Winter shone the light on the following article by Jon Morrow of Copyblogger.

Any time you’re doubting, any time you’re questioning, any time you look at your vision for a custom-designed life and ask, Is it really possible? come back to this article. It will remind you that when you commit to your vision you can find a way.

Ignore the title, except the “Get Paid to Change the World” part, and be willing to read all the way through to the reality-jarring surprise. You’ll be energized to go blow up some excuses.

Read Jon Morrow’s blog post here.

Paranoid Traveling Jewelers

Leave a reply

I didn’t think I would be writing a blog post based on my explorations at the Art in the Square festival in Southlake. To do that, I would have to admit I fell off the wagon.

So, here goes. I fell off the wagon. I went to the festival originally as co-host of the Tapa Palapa internet radio show because our theme this month is fun and recreation. Co-host Francie Cooper and I have planned to record our shows in different fun venues and I was at the festival to see if I could record a clip to integrate into one of our shows. I was there for fun, although it was because of work. You see, ”Play is Serious Work.”

So I was there for work, but working as an internet radio show producer and co-host. I was there for inspiration on more ways to encourage people to set aside their everyday concerns and stressors and take a break. So as I walked around and thought mainly about the food vendors and their small businesses, and the artists as free agents traveling around selling to their target markets, I felt guilty. It was like I was cheating. I was there to explore fun but I had started thinking about my work helping people navigate entrepreneurship. That wagon’s pretty darn slippery.

I took off my Trailblazer hat and threw on my Panama Jack hat and looked at how people were having fun. Now, to be clear, wearing the Trailblazer hat is not difficult at all. In fact, it fits me so comfortably and I enjoy it so much I don’t always realize I’m working when I wear it. It was easy for my mind to go there last Friday night. But when I realized the festival had me thinking about ways to help clients navigate the entrepreneurial life more adeptly, I knew I was missing the point of exploring fun. So I hunkered down and had me some fun.

It turned out to be a lot of fun Friday night, especially watching the debut performance of local band Event Horizon. I was impressed that this group of old guys (some even older than me!) were so talented. They opened with Guns & Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle.” It’s hard for an amateur to take on Slash, but the lead guitarist handled it pretty well. I thought the silver-haired guy up front was lead guitar and the young kid way off to my left was just strumming along for fun. I even wondered if his input was turned off and they just let him be on stage to be nice to him.

By the second song my ignorant bias was gone. The kid, a high school student named Zak Hanan, has mad skillz. I stood there with my jaw hanging open watching his fingers dance across his guitar, song after song, in some amazing riffs. It was an unexpected freakin’ awesome delight to be there that night. Fun accomplished!

I didn’t think I would be back at the festival but I wound up there on Sunday. My mother-in-law and father-in-law had sent us pictures from their trip to the Main St. Fort Worth Arts Festival last week. I e-mailed my mother-in-law that I had attended our local art festival and she asked if I had pictures. When I needed to go to the Apple store to have them check out my MacBook, I wound up in the area with some extra time to kill. So I walked through the festival again taking pictures to show my in-laws examples of what was there.

I got to wear my Trailblazer hat this time and think from the entrepreneurial artists’ point of view. I even took a couple of minutes to talk with one artist who engaged me in a conversation. She was friendly and warm. She is in Texas a couple of times a year and travels to other events. She has audiences across the country, and clients who will travel quite a distance to an event to see her work and buy from her.

I walked down a couple of booths from hers and saw some handmade jewelry. I knew my mother-in-law would be interested, as well as my wife and her aunt and cousin. So I started to take a picture of the sign with their business name on it. The woman in the booth stopped me and told me they don’t like people taking pictures. I pointed out I was aiming my camera at their sign so I could tell people about them, and she still wanted me not to take any pictures. She handed me a business card instead.

I was stunned, so I didn’t keep my mouth shut. I said something like, “Heaven forbid that people should see examples of your work. They might want to buy something from you.”

I get that artists might be hesitant for other people to see their original designs, worrying they might copy them. It might be even more likely with jewelry. But as soon as someone buys a piece of jewelry and wears it, other people will see it and be able to copy it.

And I was standing several feet from the booth trying to take a picture with my phone. Not much chance of getting a good, detailed picture of any piece of jewelry that way.

The itinerant jewelers are entrepreneurs who need to create interest in a lot of places they’ll only stop for a few days. How in the world will they do that? Word of mouth, sure, but word of mouth needs to be backed up in this situation. Your statement that someone makes fantastic jewelry is not enough to get me to schedule time to go to a festival. The photo you show me will convince me. Even better, the web site you show me with several examples and explanations of how they find their materials and what is unique about their designs will convince me.

Okay, maybe not convince me. But they would definitely convince my wife, or her mom and aunt and cousin, or a dozen or so other people I know who really get excited about jewelry.

Here’s what the paranoid jeweler should have done. If there are reasons to keep people from taking pictures, that’s fine, but explain why. “These are all original pieces so when a customer buys one she knows it’s one-of-a-kind and no one else will have one. It’s up to her who she shows it to. However, we have this postcard with pictures of examples of our kind of work.” Or maybe, “However, here’s our web site, where we show elements of our design, explain how we choose materials, and explain what makes our approach unique.”

If she had done that I would be sharing the information about her business right here, right now. But she had such a strong reaction to the possibility I might tell other people about their work that there’s no way I’ll do that now!

Instead, I’ll tell you about Diane French’s art. She’s the warm and friendly artist who spent time smiling and telling me a little about her life as an artist traveling to different events and growing an audience across the country. Click this link and you’ll notice she has samples of her work for people to see. She also has a calendar of events so you can see where she’s going to be.

While I was talking with her I actually asked her if the web site had a listing of the shows she would attend so people could find her. She looked suddenly surprised and said she wasn’t sure if it had been updated recently (she has someone help her with that), but it would definitely be updated after she gets back from this show, less than a week from now – since I brought it up.

Now that’s what I’m talking about! Make it as easy as possible for people who show interest in you to find out about you and pass your information on to their family and friends.

Way to go, Diane!

Way not to go, unnamed paranoid traveling jewelers.

Oh, and rock on, Zak Hanan and Event Horizon. They’ll be back in the town square at Southlake on May 7 for a benefit event with a lot of amateur bands. I’m planning to take my younger son. He’s studying electric guitar.

Big Play Lab Day

1 Reply

I want to send a great big shout out to the Resource Group for MentorCoach students. If it wasn’t for them, I wouldn’t be posting this today.

Gayle Scroggs is co-facilitator of the Resource Group and runs a coaches’ MasterMind group I’ve attended for a couple of years now. She invited me to talk to the Resource Group about additional profit centers for coaches, ways to provide products and services beyond individual coaching. I was honored that she asked me, and eager to share what I know.

It seemed like serendipitous timing because I’ve recently settled on a theme for my coaching niche and suddenly I’ve been contacted ‘out of the blue’ to help people based on that theme. And I haven’t even made it public! It’s like a nod from the universe that I’m on the right track. Maybe even a divine thumbs up.

But right after getting puffed up from feeling flattered, I realized… I’d been ‘thinking’ about redoing my home page for quite a while, but I hadn’t done it! I’d been relying on all the old, worn-out excuses. I don’t have a professional photograph. I’m not sure if I should change the template. The new theme means I need to tweak my marketing message. Believe me, when it comes to excuses, I live in abundance.

To be credible telling a group of people to stop worrying about perfection and ‘just do it,’ I needed to get it done. Three hours before I was due to be on the call, I set aside my planned work and started focusing on my home page.

What would I write? Did I have a photo that was good enough for now, or would I rely on text? Would I plan a long introduction of my services or just a brief overview suggesting different pages to visitors based on their needs?

It seemed like a lot to decide in three hours, much less to write, edit, format, and upload! What a challenge it would be. What a fun adventure, or what a face plant. Either way, it would be a tale of the entrepreneurial life.

Then I remembered that the entrepreneurial life is about creative problem-solving, and experimenting, and play – the kind of play that’s about learning by trying new things in a low-risk way. It was time to take this challenge to my Play Lab. Not enough time to write and edit and format? Choose a different approach, one that’s more complicated and might take more time!

I’ve been wanting to record a video introduction for weeks now, so I said, What the heck! I grabbed the video recorder and tripod and headed to the wooded area along the edge of our property. I thought of the wording I would use to do a quick greeting and overview. I set up the tripod and did a couple of trial runs to get the distance and the composition right. Then I started recording. I fumbled on the first couple of runs, but I get to blame the jet flying right overhead for that second one. But then I found my groove and got through the intro seamlessly…

And I froze. I had welcomed people and called out to my tribe, telling them briefly how I can help them. But what then? Yes, the guy who regularly teaches that each marketing activity must have a specific purpose that leads people to take the next step was stuck. What was it I was going to ask people to do again? And the clock was ticking. Tick. Tick. Tick.

I sorted out my blueprint and recorded again. The words were good, but there were no smiles. Even a total amateur like me knows it’s better when people smile in videos! So I recorded again, feeling like I was smiling. When I reviewed it there were some smiles, but not as many as I was aiming for.

But perfect wasn’t my goal. My goal was to get it done before the call. I took my equipment in, uploaded the video to my computer, edited it on the front and back, and formatted it for the internet. Then I uploaded it to YouTube because that was the way I knew to embed it in my web site. I’ll figure out better ways to do it in the future in my HTML sandbox. But for now it’s good enough.

The video finished uploading to YouTube as I left to pick up my son from school. At his tae kwon do lesson I spent my time composing the new home page with the video and the sign-up form. It’s a very simple squeeze page, except it breaks an important squeeze page rule. There are tabs on it that give you choices besides filling in the sign-up form.

But you know what? I got it done. And I was happy to let the Resource Group know it was done.

I’m also happy to tell the world now. My new business theme? I’m The Trailblazing Coach ™. Trailblazing is the creative problem-solving, entrepreneurial way of life. Check out my new home page to see how it all turned out.

I was pretty happy that I got it done in time, and happy that people visiting my web site would see an updated home page. Then I thought, What if they visit my blog? I haven’t updated it since before the Super Moon, since before the seasons changed!

Thank you, Resource Group!

Auntie Smackdown

Leave a reply

Focused attention is a gift.

I have been recording and publishing a podcast with fellow coach Francie Cooper since the end of October. We have put out weekly shows with a monthly theme since November. Some people listen but it’s not a very big number, and the number doesn’t seem to be growing recently.

Francie and I tell people personally and also use social media plus our e-mail lists to get the word out about each show. But we get little response when we mention the podcast, especially on social media. I decided to find out why.

I asked people on Facebook what they think when I post about the podcast. I got two responses right away. One friend said she uses Facebook settings so posts with links get blocked. Aha! The other said, “What’s a podcast and what’s that ‘coaching’ stuff you talk about?” Aha, and aha!

Yes, my dear Watson, we started piecing together the puzzle. Then a good friend sent me what is metaphorically a snapshot of the whole puzzle put together. She took the time to compose a detailed e-mail about what she thinks and what she wonders when I post about the podcast. Her detailed explanation served as a much-needed smackdown to my whiny attitude of Why isn’t anyone responding to our podcast?

In fact, I’m going to call her Aunt Smackdown because she gave me the kick in the butt I needed. She’s around my mother’s age, a writer and a poet I met through a writers’ workshop over fifteen years ago. Even though she’s a marketing novice, she totally schooled me on basic marketing skills. What she sent is as valuable as a thorough marketing survey, so it was a powerful gift. Thanks, Aunt Smackdown!

The best marketing advice comes from your audience. Here’s what she told me:

I know you and what you do, but I still haven’t any idea what you are talking about in those squibs (short written pieces -Ed.) on Facebook. That Palapa – or whatever – haven’t a clue what it is. I get the impression it is a group of you who go somewhere and have a meeting. Maybe a group of psychologists? (She knows I was previously a therapist -Ed.)

In your squibs, I don’t know who you are – what you do. Is it conferences for people who want help? But then what? Are you a lecturer? Salesman? Group leader?

Do you go away to some hotel on the weekend? Get together and listen to a speaker?

For an unknowing reader, you are starting in the middle of things I think.

Who are you? Are there more than one of you? A group? A couple of people in practice together?

Who are you talking to most of the time? Each other?

This is what I think you need to say:

Are you stressed with your job? Are you looking for a new beginning? It is difficult these days to know where to turn… etc.

Start at the beginning – “I am Steve Coxsey,” then give your title or your profession. I am part of a group who work together, or I work alone.

I work with people who want a new beginning in their business, or a new direction for their business, or their spiritual life, or daily life, or whatever it is.

I offer group sessions, or individual sessions only, or telephone workshops.

Tell what this Palapa thing is in plain English: a retreat, or a podcast. Where is it? When? How often? What do you do at this particular event? Listen to a talk? Participate in a support group? Attend a conference?

I have been sort of trying to follow you, but I don’t know the answers to any of these things. Perhaps this is why you get no response. You mention people’s names. Who are they? What are they to you? Co-workers, lecturers that you attend, a sponsor? What do you do together?

I admit I don’t read everything carefully – but then I wouldn’t know what you were talking about if I did – even though I know what you do. Someone who doesn’t know you will be hopelessly lost. (emphasis added)

You need to keep repeating the intro about yourself periodically as you will not always have the same crowd. You need to say:

1. Hey! It’s you I want to help
2. I am qualified
3. Here’s how I can help
4. Here are some of my tools – palapa podcasts, etc.
5. Feel free to ask how I can help you.

I hope this is some help.

You are probably ready to shoot either me or yourself, but it is my reaction only to what I have seen.

Well, I certainly wasn’t ready to shoot her, or even myself. The next time I see her I owe her a big hug and a kiss.

She laid out basic marketing 101:
1) Call to your market by describing them and the problem or challenge they are facing
2) Establish credibility
3) Show the benefit of what you do
4) Explain the features of what you do, which means how you provide the benefit
5) Call them to a simple action step

I think Aunt Smackdown has a formula she can use to fill marketing guru workshops! I’m definitely going to put her recommendations to work and improve the way I talk about the podcast on social media.

What about you? Is it clear what you do when you talk about your business? Is it clear to people what you are asking them to do when you publicize your product or service?

Do they know who you help? Can they tell if it’s for them?

Do they know what you are offering to them? Do they know how and where to get it? Do they know what it costs in money, time, and commitment?

I wrote about clarity for self-employed people describing what they do back in November. I regularly see lots of people struggling with this and I thought it was sad that they couldn’t see it and didn’t know what the problem was. Now I’m extending a little more compassion… to all of us!

Often the answers can be clear and straightforward, but recognizing the problem is not.

Oh, yeah. About the podcast thing. I’ll be rewording the way I present it. Any suggestions?

Phantom Obstacles

Leave a reply

My coaching colleague Francie Cooper and I decided last October to create a weekly podcast together. Neither of us had ever produced a weekly podcast so we had a lot to figure out, but we said “yes” anyway. We had both produced weekly newsletters and regular blog posts so we knew we would be able to prepare content. We were mainly in the dark about the technology – recording, formatting, uploading, and publicizing – but we said “yes” anyway.

We thoughtfully planned lots of time for each of the steps of planning and learning different components and said, back in early October, that we would have our first podcast ready to distribute the first week in January. By the second half of October we had chosen the name Tapa Palapa and learned enough about the technology to record a “test” show. We decided to go ahead and post it as our first podcast. Obstacles were collapsing like paper dominoes.

By November we had developed a monthly theme and a series of related shows for the month, well ahead of schedule. Smooth sailing, simply because we decided to move forward, learn things, and try them out. We didn’t need nearly as much time as we had given ourselves… mostly because we decided not to worry about getting things just right and instead aimed for good enough.

As we got up to speed and started producing shows we talked about the fact we would improve things as we gained experience, would tweak the format as we figured out what worked, and would make ours a more “professional” product as we learned what that required. In the description of a more “professional” product we included publishing Tapa Palapa on iTunes. For some reason, probably just ignorance, we thought that would be complicated and involved.

Last week during an advanced coaching class I’m taking through MentorCoach we did an exercise to imagine our businesses five years from now. I realized I would like to see the audience for Tapa Palapa continue to grow so both Francie and I can serve more people. It was time to move Tapa Palapa to the next level, and as Francie and I talked we knew iTunes would be an important next level – some day.

My expectations about the challenge of getting on iTunes were pretty distorted, as most things created in fantasy without a reality check tend to be. So I figured I would run into lots of detailed things to learn and steps to accomplish. But I decided to start looking into it anyway. It turned out the plug-in I use to publish the podcasts through WordPress is set up to format a lot of what iTunes requires from a feed. Our Feedburner account let me do the rest. In only one evening I had everything in place to start the submission process. That kind of took my breath away. So I breathed and move on.

Submitting the podcast went quickly, too. I went to iTunes, clicked “Submit a Podcast,” and filled in the information. The feed was verified and I got a confirmation e-mail our show was being reviewed. I thought that might take a few days, but the next day it was approved. The day after that it could be found through the iTunes Store search feature. We’re on iTunes, just like that! The feed has some glitches, but I’ll get those worked out.

This was an important lesson for me. We identified real obstacles to designing, creating, and publishing a podcast, and we worked our way through them without any resistance. We identified phantom obstacles we guessed would exist about including our podcast on iTunes and avoided them as a challenge for a later day. When that later day came, the phantom obstacles faded quickly as I did the research and got real information that replaced our ghostly speculation.

Don’t get me wrong. I have not overcome this problem once and for all. I’m just hoping that the next time I get daunted by imaginary obstacles I’ll be quicker to stare the phantom down and find what real challenges remain after he fades.

Forget Finding Your Passions?

Leave a reply

*Content warning: This post is rated PG-13 – or, depending on your neighborhood, community, or sub-culture, possibly PG-7.

I met Marianne Cantwell at The Joyfully Jobless Jamboree. She trains, consults, and coaches on custom-designed careers and small business development primarily for people who want portable work so they can explore the world. Her business, blog, and Twitter account are named “Free Range Humans.”

Imagine my surprise when I saw this tweet from Marianne’s Twitter account that said “Why you should say F-you to ‘finding your passions…’ ” WTF?? “Follow your passions” and “Work at what you love” and “Find your true calling” and “Live a life you love” are the steady mantras of lifestyle entrepreneurs and custom career designers. Was Marianne calling this approach all wrong?

Turns out in her blog post with that title she doesn’t oppose the idea of people finding what they love to do and incorporating it into their work lives. What she does oppose is the frozen resistance of contemplating your navel waiting for a nearby bush to burst into non-consuming flames and tell you what your one great life purpose is.

Marianne’s preferred approach is to focus on what you really love doing, and to discover that by paying attention within, instead of looking without for some clue to an undiscovered deep calling. This is probably in line with Barbara Sher’s point of view that finding your calling is just finding what you love to do. Sher says what you love to do is what you are gifted at, and your calling is to do what you are gifted at – to develop and express those talents to share them with the world.

Marianne is energetic and joyful and a bit unconventional so you’ll probably enjoy her article and be interested in looking at more of her material. Since she likes to be provocative you’ll probably find yourself questioning old thinking, even the recently established old thinking of a fairly new movement like custom designed careers.

Marianne’s post got me thinking, or actually forwarded my thinking. Continue reading →

Sharing Gratitude Through Social Media

Leave a reply

Last week I was on a trip with my twelve-year-old son to Orlando. We planned a road trip to see the new Wizarding World of Harry Potter section of Universal’s Islands of Adventure theme park. We drove because we didn’t want to be “naked scanned” or groped in the airports, but mainly so we could make a couple of stops. On the way out we stopped to tour the USS Alabama battleship plus the planes, tanks, and submarine on display at the site. On the way back we took time to drive through the Civil War memorial at the Vicksburg battlefield.

It’s probably easy to tell my son is a Harry Potter fan and a fan of military history and weaponry. Okay, I’m also a Harry Potter fan, but I’m not crazy about military equipment and weapons the way my son is. He knew which tank was which. He was guessing about the details of the big guns on the battleship as we approached, and most of his guesses were right. He knew details of the cannons and rifled guns we saw on the Vicksburg battlefield. Obviously he had a great trip start to finish.

Along the way I took pictures of places we stopped and found it pretty easy to share them on Facebook. I created a photo file for our military tours that I named “BOOM BOOM Pow!” I created a file for our Universal experiences called “Perry Potter,” because when my son was very young and first heard of Harry Potter that’s what he called him. I also created a file called “Hakuna Matata” for our day of adventures at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. We had seen a documentary about how they planned, designed, and created the park so we were eager to take the safari ride, see the recreated African village, find the tigers in the Asian temple ruins, and experience the roller coaster on Everest.

I used Facebook because it was the easiest way to update extended family as we went. It turned out that some of my Facebook friends commented on the photos, asked questions, and had a chance to share the trip vicariously. Before long I was looking forward to posting photos updating everyone on what we were seeing and experiencing. I even took a photograph of butter beer in Hogsmeade village!

Sharing the photos and sharing our experiences became a way of recognizing and sharing my gratitude for the fun we were having, the new sites we were seeing, the fact we were able to take time off and enjoy a fun trip, and having the opportunity to see things we had been looking forward to seeing for a long time. Those photo albums became an impromptu gratitude journal.

Since writing in a gratitude journal daily – or posting to this blog on gratitude occasionally – aren’t things I do well, I like finding alternatives that I can do well. Capturing the moment in a photo to share on Facebook became a great way for me to savor those experiences.

I have tried to add the photo files to my Facebook business page but it’s not working out. They have recently added a feature where you can use a business page very much the way you use a personal page, but whenever I sign in to do that I can’t get the links to work.

If you’re a Facebook friend look for the photo albums. If not, go ahead and “like” my business page and you’ll be able to see the photos as soon as I’m able to post them. I sure hope they get that fixed soon. I’ll be really grateful when they do!

Prayers Of Thanks

Leave a reply

My stepfather had surgery a week ago Tuesday so last week my son was praying for his grandfather’s safety and then for his speedy recovery. We stop and pray together every morning, at least on weekdays, before heading out the door. I’ve been encouraging him to think of what he wants to include in prayer and to say it out loud to help him learn he doesn’t need me voicing his prayers. I hope this becomes a lifelong pattern of him praying on his own and with other people.

His prayers are usually petitions, asking for things. They might include simple things like peace and cooperation in his classroom when the kids return from a break, or more selfless notions like comfort for people in times of disaster or aid to those who are suffering. But usually he’s asking for something, even if it’s “Please keep my grandpa safe and help him heal quickly.” But I noticed a shift at the end of last week.

His grandpa came through surgery very well and was ahead of schedule on his progress. My son was very relieved and he added thankfulness to his prayers. We were thankful for the skill of the surgical staff, thankful for the technology that allowed them to do their work, thankful for the hospital taking good care of him, and thankful that surgery to repair his condition had been discovered.

In addition to being deeply pleased my son was remembering to include thankfulness in his prayers, I realized part of my own practice of gratitude shows up in prayer. That’s not to say I’m good, or even consistent, at prayers of thanks. I’m a lot more consistent at those Psalms kinds of prayers: Why are you letting this happen? and When will you smite my enemies?

But I do include occasional thanks in my prayers. Sometimes I include them in time I plan for praying – which isn’t really very often – but usually they show up in a few reflective moments when I notice something good happening, look up and smile, and then close my eyes and say “Thank you.”

This is definitely something worth cultivating, so I intend to look for more opportunities to do it.

Verisimilitude of Sincerity

Leave a reply

Within the past 48 hours I have seen one online marketing expert – with a big list and established name – exhorting people to use his “template for authentic marketing,” and another one telling people how to use marketing to distinguish their businesses when there is really nothing unique or remarkable about them.

Just mentioning this in case some of you don’t know why a lot of self-employed people recoil from marketing, thinking it’s a bunch of hype and manipulation. I’m using these road-kill vignettes to drive home the point.

Speaking of hype and manipulation, have you gotten a copy of my Demystifying Marketing: Teaser Sampler yet? It’s a give-away for signing up for my newsletter. Click here to be manipulated and hyped into giving me your e-mail address and I’ll send you the short e-book and subscribe you to the Twisting Road Traveler.

Wings and Feet

2 Replies

In a post by Jeff Walker called Let’s Go Negative the product launch wizard unpacks the problem of constant optimism in business planning. Although optimism is important to sustain you through the challenges of starting a business or launching a new product or service, he tells us, relentless optimism interferes with a key component to success.

In the post he lays out a process for taking an idea that has you excited and then brainstorming all the obstacles to implementing it. This meshes with a framework I use for talking about business ideas. They need wings, to take them into the future and to higher potential results. But they also need feet, so they can land in the real world.

That means they need to be practical, and to be practical you need to invite the skeptic to evaluate them. Small business owners need both capacities – visionary dreaming and proactive, practical, operational planning.

That skeptic guy may not be the life of the party, but he’s key to the life of the business. Offer to buy him a drink. Don’t worry; he’ll probably just have a glass of water.