How to Get Better 

The old adage that “practice makes perfect” needs some serious reconsideration. Practice is great if we’re practicing the right things. Unfortunately, most of us keep practicing the wrong things and wonder why things don’t get better.

So instead of “practice makes perfect,” we should think in terms of “practice makes permanent.” It’s particularly true in business. We keep doing the same things over and over again somehow believing that things will change. We wonder why business doesn’t improve, why employees don’t get along, and why we fail to make bigger sales. But we don’t analyze why these things occur, and we often do nothing to try to change the outcomes.

We also try to maintain the status quo, somehow believing that things won’t change. Things always change, but they seldom change for the better unless we take action. We want to lose weight but we don’t change our eating habits. We want to improve our golf scores, but we do little to improve our swing. We want to read more books, but can’t get started with the one at the top of our stack.

If this sounds futile, it is because we need to practice those things that make us better, not just permanent, let alone perfect. Practice won’t make us perfect at anything because perfection is an unattainable goal. But practicing the right things in business and in life will make us better. And better is what we want.

Here are a few Business & Life Tips to think about….

Business Tips:

• Partners with complementary skills are great for business if their views are not so extreme as to cause more problems than they solve.
• Your employees will emulate far more of what they see you doing than what they hear you say. If they don’t, well, enough said.
• Customers seldom know what they want when they enter a store. Great salespeople establish rapport and tell them what they need.

Life Tips:

• Believing you can succeed at whatever you’re doing is the key to succeeding at it. Have faith in yourself and just do it.
• Mature people control their emotions through reasonable actions and reactions, rather than outbursts that take people down.
• Most of us should try to listen more and be less defensive. Listening gives us a chance to learn about the other side of issues.

Tags: Advice, Business, Business Development, Business Tips, Change, Drive, Goal, Goals, Knowledge, Leadership Skills, Learning, Life Tips, Outcome, People Leaders, Perfect, Personal Development, Practice, Success, The Mind of a Leader