The holidays are packed with all kinds of gatherings.  You’ll see people you don’t often see.  It’s a natural time for catching up and finding out what’s going on.  You’ll be asking questions and answering questions.  And now you’ll be asking and answering those questions with a consciousness you might not have brought to the table before.

What is your business about?  If you said helping people finding a solution to their economic issues, you’d be right.  If you said helping people become more independent to spend their time the way they want to, you’d be right.  So your job is to pay attention and be aware of someone’s need that you think your business might be able to remedy.  Anytime you are around people is a great time to be paying attention and the holidays are no exception.

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Self Fulfilling Prophecies

Self fulfilling prophecy, we’ve all heard about that.  There’s lot of literature that supports the idea that we tend to get what we expect.

A coaching client of mine is President of her local school board and is currently fighting what she calls the “culture of low expectations.”  In other words, if you expect students to do poorly, you set up the culture that gets you, that’s right, poor results.  The kids may do well in your ‘dumbed down’ classes, but of course they don’t look good when compared to kids participating in challenging curriculum.  It makes it pretty easy to say, “See I told you so.”

Too often we do the same thing in our businesses.  We expect that our businesses won’t do well so we set up a business culture that proves us ‘right.’  We ‘dumb down’ or curtail our money making activites.  Obviously, we don’t take chances.  Too risky.

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Where Do You Fit?

There are two parts to having money; making it and keeping it. We’re talking about the making of it part here. Although both aspects are critically important to respecting money and what it can bring us and just as importantly what it doesn’t bring. Being broke is not fun. It limits our personal growth. For example, it is tough to travel and experience the world without money. It limits what we can do with and for our families. Being broke truncates our ability to participate in our community. Like it or not money is our economic system. The more money you have the more you can participate.

I know personally that broke is not fun. I also know that regardless of the circumstances of my ending up broke (economy, people, etc), in hindsight, I realize I had more control than I thought I did. In other words, I had a hand in creating my ‘broke.’

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