GUIDE TO IDENTIFYING YOUR UNIQUE BUSINESS STYLE.

How we feel about ourselves and our business is crucial to how we manage ourselves and our business. To become truly powerful and confident in your life and your business, you need to identify what your natural style is and work it to benefit you, not try and pretend to be someone else. After all, everyone else is already taken, you can only be you!!
It’s absolutely time to be thinking about:

• What do YOU want to do?

• What do YOU want to achieve?

• What is success to YOU?

When you begin to understand what it important to you rather than what is important to your partner, children, parents or even friends and colleagues, then you can begin to develop your own unique style that defines who you are and what your business is and watch as people turn around their views and admire you for who you are.

Life is About Choices and the Decisions We Make

Find Your Higher Purpose

To find your natural style, you must find out what your passion is. To find out what your passion is then you need to work out your vision, your values and your principles.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a perfect way to start finding out what your vision, values and principles are. It helps us find our higher purpose and therefore our motivation.
Originally created in the 1950’s as a five level tier it was recently updated in the 1990s to an eight level model.


Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Our needs have a direct influence over our actions. A young child has a very different need for love from an adult who may still need love but is more motivated by being successful or having a lot of money. When one of our needs are satisfied, another need emerges and once that is satisfied (according to Maslow) another new and even higher need emerges, and so on.

Maslow’s Self-Actualizing Characteristics

• keen sense of reality – aware of real situations – objective judgement, rather than subjective

• see problems in terms of challenges and situations requiring solutions, rather than see problems as personal complaints or excuses

• need for privacy and comfortable being alone

• reliant on own experiences and judgement – independent – not reliant on culture and environment to form opinions and views

• not susceptible to social pressures – non-conformist

• democratic, fair and non-discriminating – embracing and enjoying all cultures, races and individual styles

• socially compassionate – possessing humanity

• accepting others as they are and not trying to change people

• comfortable with oneself – despite any unconventional tendencies

• a few close intimate friends rather than many surface relationships

• sense of humour directed at oneself or the human condition, rather than at the expense of others

• spontaneous and natural – true to oneself, rather than being how others want

• excited and interested in everything, even ordinary things

• creative, inventive and original

• seek peak experiences that leave a lasting impression

Find Your Vision
It is quite natural for your visions to change over time and that can apply to your own personal vision or your business vision. Whatever your vision is, make sure you make it as big and real as possible.

“The mind is the limit. As long as the mind can envision the fact that you can do something, you can do it – as long as you really believe 100 per cent.” – Arnold Schwarzenegger

 

What are Your Values?

When starting a business, your vision and values define what that business is and how it operates. Therefore you need to know what you truly want out of life and how your business will fit into that vision.

You need to know what you are naturally good at, how many hours per week that you want to work and how big you want your business to get.

If you are finding it difficult to know what your values are, do the following exercise.

?  What is it that I admire most about in my best friend or partner?

?  Write down the first five things that come to mind.

?   When you know what these five things are, use these as a starting point to add on more things that come to mind about what you value most in people and yourself.

What are Your Principles?
In teaching circles, there is a common belief that there are universal principles that we should all follow. These are:

• How we treat others
• How we operate
• Make a difference – either for local charity or volunteering as a teacher helper
• Pride in whatever you do
• Continue to learn and grow and then help others to learn and grow

Putting Your Vision, Values and Principles Together To Create Your Unique Personal and Business Style
Now that we have defined what our vision, values and principles are, we can create our unique personal and business style; one that will completely reflect who we are, what we represent and one that we can be truly proud of.
Julian Burton put it so eloquently:

“You have got to be authentic, remain true to yourself because there is no greater satisfaction than doing this. Surround yourself with good people, people you can trust, people that are honest; this is critical. Remember you have to have the fierce conversations; I’m really big on this. I mean the right conversations, with the right people at the right time. Get a handle on this and it will really make a difference. Finally to sum up, you always have to be grateful for what you’ve got, and always have the attitude that you can give.”

Once you have all of that together be sure to stick to being your authentic self in every situation in both your business and private life.

Don’t feel that you have to pretend to be somebody else in order to get someone to like you, that will only form a false relationship and if you truly want to get the best out of someone, they are going to work out who you truly are in the first place, and probably love you more!

Equally, don’t try and change who other people are either. If they are not a good match for you or your business, or if they have a set of values that are not congruent with your own, then go and find somebody else who is. There are many perfect relationships out there so don’t try and force something that isn’t meant to be.

By trying to work on a business or personal relationship that really won’t work in the long run, think about whether you are more focussed on the outcome of that relationship rather than the person themselves. There is absolutely no need to work together if you both have very different goals in mind and you could end up feeling taken for granted or used.

Ask yourself:

• What is my purpose in this situation?
• What am I trying to accomplish?
• What do I need to do first in order to accomplish my purpose?
• How does this differ from my partner? (whether business or personal)
• Does my stated agenda differ from my real one? If so, am I willing to admit to my real one? If not, why not?

If that last answer is difficult, then perhaps you are trying to fight against who you truly are and may need to remind yourself that your style is uniquely you – life is so much easier and happier that way!

Credit to Laurabb.