But Why Is All the Money Gone?
It happens to me every payday: I get my paycheck, pay my bills, maybe get some groceries, and continue on with my life. Days, maybe a week later, I look into my chequing account and it just doesn’t seem to be the way I left it.
The money’s all gone!
Now I’m left calculating how much I’m going to need to survive for the new week before I can start this cycle all over again.
Do you ever find this happening to you?
You know you don’t have a debit card hacker, but you just can’t seem to figure out how you spent all that money.
It’s usually after I check my statement that I see that I have spent a lot of money. A lunch or dinner out here, a new outfit there, a cab ride when I was too lazy to take the subway, and all of those little things that tend to eat up your paycheck. This isn’t such a big deal if you can make it like this week to week while still enjoying yourself, but what about your savings?
We tend to forget about planning for the future when we’re enjoying ourselves so much right now. Unfortunately, we probably have goals, like paying off a mortgage, or even retiring one day, but those seem so far off that we push them away and instead buy a new outfit because we “needed” it.
The worst part of it is that all these little things, that tend to add up, usually are so meaningless to us after a short while.
Follow these tips to stop your spending cycle:
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Take a good hard look at your paycheck and where it’s all going.
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Set up budgets and stick to them.
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Treat your paycheck like a big pie and divvy it up each month. Leave money for those things you love but also leave money for savings.
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Make sure you divvy it up immediately. Don’t hope that you’ll have enough left over for savings at the end.
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Keep yourself accountable. You want that new top? Save for it or don’t buy it. There are no in-betweens. What’s more important in the future is how you plan for it, not how you look when you get there.
With these tips you can finally have an organized and responsible life without having to spend another week stretching your cash with a dumbfounded look on your face. Take back control of your money and your life!
So You Think You Can’t Sell?
Working in sales is hard.
You have to be actively trying to get what you want,while also trying to give someone what they want, or even trying to convince someone that they want what you’re selling, even if they really don’t!
Most of us don’t think we’re very good at sales.
But think about these scenarios:
You are trying to get your kid to eat their vegetables. You are telling someone about the movie you saw last night. You are praising someone else’s work You’re asking your friend for a favour. You are trying to convince yourself that today’s a good day to start your diet. What do these scenarios have in common? You guessed it: you are actively trying to sell someone or something. “That’s not selling!”, you say? Then what the heck is selling? Well, technically speaking selling is a form of influence to reach a desired outcome. We are so used to describing selling as the used car salesman’s pitch but it’s more than that. It is also an essential life skill that goes back to the stone age and something that everybody does everyday, all day. The reality is that some people are just better at it than others. And it sucks if you aren’t good at it. What is the hardest sales pitch? Selling YOU to YOU! It’s damn near impossible to sell, convince, or influence yourself when the controlling voice in your head slams the phone down on the sales call day after day.
The common denominator to your success and failure is….YOU!
If you constantly blast yourself with external, negative crap that doesn’t mean anything except what you make it mean (the “I am not good enough, I can’t do this, it’s too hard”…that crap) you will never close the deal with yourself.
It comes down to choice; will you or will you not listen to that little voice that can stop you dead?
So if you can’t sell YOU to YOU, then you will have an even harder time selling something to someone else.
Try this on for size; change the word sell to help. Instead of selling, you are helping.
Zig Ziglar taught us: “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want”.
Shifting your mindset from selling to helping will change your behaviour and your sales results. Giving and helping activates the power of reciprocity.
The greatest competitive advantage to you and your business is the art of selling or helping. Master it! Blow it up! Milk it! Do it like your life depends on it! Selling is the #1 skill you need to have in your business and in your life.
Sales = Income. 95% of businesses fail because the proprietor believes the product or service will sell itself.
That’s craziness. That’s laziness. That’s failure in the making.
Selling is a learned skill, not an innate way of being.
The bottom line is this: if you aren’t good at sales, life will be more difficult for you. Period. So what do you do about it? Listen and learn, and practice, practice, practice!
You do not need a fancy car or fancy shoes to be a sales person. You do not need a ‘sales force’ in your business. You don’t even need money or education to sell your business.
The bottom line is this: if there is a cash flow problem in your business, then you don’t know how to, refuse to, or think it’s not important enough to know how to sell.
Here are more than 30 ways to be more successful at selling. Implement the easy ones first, then tackle the rest one a time. There are a ton more tips, so create your own list.
- Work hard on sales, but work harder on yourself.
- Dress like you don’t need the sale.
- You’ve got two ears and one mouth. Listen twice as much as you talk.
- Change the word “selling” to “helping.”
- Change the way you think about selling vs. helping.
- Have a positive attitude.
- Be willing to learn.
- Don’t lie.
- Be prepared.
- Develop a team.
- Talk to anyone about your business.
- Write down all the people you know, whether you like them or not.
- Do not pre-qualify your list.
- Follow up.
- Don’t be shy.
- Fake it.
- Do not assume anything.
- Do it everyday.
- Read lots of good business books.
- Be coachable or teachable.
- Hold yourself personally accountable.
- Don’t make excuses.
- Don’t blame.
- Squash your fear of what others think or don’t think about you.
- Show gratitude for what you have.
- Barter.
- Ask for referrals.
- Ask for the sale.
- Stop thinking and start doing.
- Don’t quit.
- Hire a coach.
- Have positive affirmations that override your little voice.
- Invest in yourself.
- Be consistent, diligent and persistent.
- Never underestimate how big you really are.
- Be the person you know you can be.
The bottom line is this: results cannot exceed your self concept. People love to be right: if you think you can’t do it, you’re right, you won’t. Good luck with that!
If all else fails think back to those little selling scenarios in your life and sell with the ferocity that you’d use to try and get your kid to eat those darn peas!
**Edited by Taylor Brown, Associate Editor of Goddess Connections’ publication Women Who Run It.
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