Personal Skills For Business Success

By Author: Max Muller
Total Articles: 98
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Essential ideas and skills for business success: The first essential skill set which we all need to be successful I business is to have a idea which is a product or service which other people need to solve a problem – either in their personal lives, or in their careers, or their business.
Once you have your idea for a product or service which people will find useful or essential then the next step is to market yourself. This is a huge area where you will get a huge range of advice. Here are a few essentials:
Branding
Sort our your branding so that it clearly communicates to your market how they will benefit from your products or services. You will need to get some help from someone else as by yourself you will focus only on yourself and not what your customers are focussing on.
Website
You must have a website – it needs to be done by someone who knows what they are doing. You need an SEO package to get your site noticed.
Social Media
You will be amazed at how effective social marketing is for getting your site noticed. I was highly sceptical but got 30 hits from 800 emails and ...
... 60 hits form a few tweets. Again this might be something to engage someone who is a specialist to do with you or for you.
Marketing
Find someone who can advise you or provide you with a marketing service. They will now how to get you into conventional media and what works and what does not in your area.
Once you have your branding, website, social media, marketing sorted out you will probably need to do some re-positioning of your products in the light of what you have learned. You now have products and services on the shelf and are ready to go. What’s next? – dealing with people.
Networking
There are thousands of opportunities to meet other business people in networking meetings. Here you get to meet and pitch yourself and your business to others who may need what you offer or be able to refer on or back to you. You will be amazed by the people you will meet. This will test your personal skills in terms of communication, state management, confidence and whole range of personal and communication skills.
Who do you turn to to ensure your people skills and personal self management are what you need in order to be successful. Unless you business is wholly internet based you will have to work successfully with others and manage your own state and motivation to focus on what is important and not just interesting. There are hundreds of coaches and personal development trainers out there but who has the skills and expertise to provide you with the support you need to succeed.
All of these coaches and trainers will offer different types of support. There are many business coaches with experience in business at all levels. If you need support in your business development then business coaching will be a good bet for you. If you have all the business plans, processes goals and targets in place and you still encounter difficulties yourself in your own performance that is when a personal coach is the person to turn to. These are often referred to as life coaches or executive coaches depending on the market they are aiming for. If you find yourself being out of your comfort zone in dealing with people, closing sales, self sabotaging, lacking self confidence, encountering unexplained limits to your success then the type of support which will work best or you is to work with a coach certified in Neuro Linguistic Programming. (NLP).
How will NLP develop your business success?
Working with people
Rapport
The skills of establishing rapport are essential to interacting with others is achieved through operating our rapport skills. These are innate and automatic but can be drastically improved through training and coaching (http://www.simplycoach.me) . Reading about the skills will give you an insight but you need to practice these in real life with real people in order to develop your abilities in this area. They comprise, breathing, posture, micro muscle movements, language patterns, posture eye contact and a whole lot more. Rapport skills are the first and most powerful step in business success. Once you get in rapport with others you can begin to interact and communicate with them in a meaningful manner.
Language
Awareness of the types of language people are using gives you the ability to communicate more effectively. This is a very broad generalisation but people have a limited number of ways in which they organise their thinking which are related to our senses they might be very visual and need to see the picture or get a good perspective of something. People who are auditory will like the way something sounds, or hear the answer loud and clear. People who are kinaesthetic will get a gut feeling or get a handle on something. Once you know your own communication preferences you become more aware of others. You learn how to translate your own language into that of others. When you do this you become a much more effective communicator. A good business communicator is successful in getting business. NLP has been used in sales training for forty years and is based on using people sensory language as well as highly suggestive and persuasive language patters. These are all covered in a basic NLP practitioner course but you can equally develop them quickly working with an NLP certified Coach or trainer on a one to one basis.
Working with yourself
State choice
You will know that how you feel affects how you think and behave. All of these are linked. Any modern coach or therapist good at Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (http://www.simplychanged.me) will be able to show you how these are linked. If you adopt a physiology of having a lot of energy – you suddenly find you have a lot of energy which communicates itself to others though the change in your language and behaviour. How you manage your state is crucial to being successful in business. How you perceive and use feedback from your efforts is key to getting successful and staying successful. How do you react to failure? If you let it get to you - you feel down – it affects your behaviour and communication with others. If you can reframe failure into feedback – or ‘feed-forward’ accept it as just that – another piece of information then your state, belief, confidence and language will stay in the optimal state for your business to succeed.
Having a well formed outcome
NLP coaches and trainers are exceptionally effective in developing goals with you in such a way that they become part of your unconscious thinking. You start working towards them unconsciously and determinedly looking for opportunities to move towards achieving them without you noticing them! You can apply developing a well formed out come to your business as a long term plan but this would ignore your personal and family life as well as your health and wider well being. An NLP coach or trainer would never do this as they work with you in the whole ensuring you well formed outcome will achieve what you need in every area of your life. This is what is called personal ecology. In developing a well formed outcome, your coach will work with you to develop a full and detailed description of your life in every aspect - this will be written using highly sensory language to use all of the resources - they will then work with you and your unconscious mind to allow the unconscious to take on the planning and embed it into your daily behaviour and thinking. This is an exceptionally powerful process and needs to be undertaken with utmost care as we all operate to internal plan which can be formed in literal terms in an instant. When we are re-working our plans it is essential to consider every consequence on every part of our lives - not just our businesses. This is why someone certified in NLP is going to be the best person to undertake this planning with you
Business Values Your Values
How often do businesses consider their values? When do you last consider yours? Do your values and those of your business sit together? This is essential if your business is going to succeed and support your wider well being. NLP coaching is values based and at the core of the work which a coach or trainer will do with you. When your personal and business values are the same we say that they are congruent. This is essential for health and well being and to reduce stress. Sounds too simple – too obvious then imagine work values which clashed with personal values and how comfortable would that feel? NLP coaches and trainers are expert at eliciting your values, motivation patterns, beliefs and personal behavioural preferences (For example if you are motivated towards or away from things – this makes a huge difference). If you are totally congruent then you are intimately more likely to succeed in business and personal life.
Ultimate business success
Ultimate business success is based on your business values being the same as your personal values which in turn support the rest of your life. Once you have this congruence and then add excellent communication skills, state management, and cast iron self confidence a strange thing happens – people start to notice you. What they pick up on is what we call charisma or presence. We have all met such people in different walks of life where just meeting them has a huge impression. Its is mistakenly thought that this is something we are born with – or not as the case may be. This is not true – Charisma or presence is the tell tale sign of excellence in key areas and when it is driven into business or enterprise the results are astounding.
The business world and business people in particular have so much to benefit from the insights and understandings which the world of NLP has uncovered. If you are looking to achieve excellence in every aspect of your life – and you should be then there are simple learnings, techniques and understandings which NLP coaching and training will give you and which will have impact on your life forevermore. Ultimate business success is ultimate personal success and ultimate personal success is surely what we seek every day.

Andy Lee is a certified NLP Coach Master Practitioner and Trainer, with 30 years experience in people development in education working with hard top reach individuals and families. He is an expert in people development in a range of contexts and achieves outstanding results in a very wide range of contexts. He contributes to leading on line forums and leadership and personal development sites. He operates in the North of England as a Coach and trainer. He offers the NLPremium Practitioner which is believed to be the most exciting personal development opportunity in Europe. He has an international reputation for excellence in coaching, training and people development.