Three steps to connecting to your reason WHY

Posted on 27th October 2021 at 15:05

… and why it’s important.

Many successful business owners, entrepreneurs and CEO’s attribute their resilience and ability to stay consistent, to having a strong connection to their sense of WHY.

Ultimately this determines your ability to motivate yourself and those around you in the long term. Having some initial excitement will power you through the preliminary stages of any project, but what keeps you going in the long run, is a strong sense of WHY.

If you and your team are fully aware of, and in sync with the reason WHY you’re doing what you’re doing, there’s a collective push towards the end goal. Your WHY will pull you through the dark days, through the feelings of despair and resentment, and those days when you dread getting out of bed.

So how do you connect with it? The first step is to first identify it. It’s likely that you already have a WHY, you can’t build a business or self-made career without one.

This may have started with something material like:

“I’d like to be successful so that I can buy my mum a house”

Or a collective goal for the business might be:

“I’d like the business to quadruple its revenue in 2 years”

And these are perfect, but we need to take it further and really anchor in the emotions that these achievements would bring… This is the next stage, which is called anchoring the goal. With your material goal in mind, ask yourself these questions:

What would it feel like to achieve this? Excited? Relieved? Grateful?

What would it bring you? A sense of achievement? A sense of giving back?

How would your mum’s expression when you hand her the keys make you feel?

What sort of house would it be? Where would it be? What would it look like?

Where would you host the staff Christmas party if you quadrupled your revenue?

What drinks would you serve, what awards & prizes would you dish out to the staff members?

A refined version of the goal might be: “I’d like to be successful and buy my mum a house so that she can look towards her retirement with more financial freedom”.

Get as clear as possible with feelings around the goal, and the details around what it would mean for you. Aka, buying a house with a spare bedroom so that you could visit your mum, or a house with a big garden because your mum loves gardening. These are all just examples, but the principle is the same, the idea is to anchor in as many sensory inputs as possible around the goal and be connected with all of the feelings around that goal.

Avoiding Burnout

Posted on 19th September 2021 at 14:36

Burnout is something we are all too familiar with... if you’re a business owner, it's more than likely that you’re intimately acquainted with the dreaded B-word. Any business endeavour that you’re passionate about can so easily take over your life and quickly overtake your personal needs. But as we all know; this can be very dangerous.

Why success starts with failure

Posted on 18th August 2021 at 14:09

It might be one of the hardest life lessons, especially in the age of the internet. And yet, it’s one of the best things we can overcome to achieve our success. Learning resilience in the face of failure is EXACTLY what’s needed when trying to achieve anything worthwhile. If you’re someone that feels disheartened by something you haven’t succeeded at, you struggle to get yourself back on the horse or maybe you don’t even try in the first place... I suggest you keep reading, this is for you.

If while learning how to walk, a child took its first step, fell down and then never tried again, we’d be fully grown adults crawling our way around. Without falling, or in other words ‘failing’ in the very first stages of our development as humans, we would have never succeeded in learning how to walk.

The same goes for reading, writing, eating, talking, swimming, throwing, running and using a toilet...you get the gist? The point is that to learn anything in your life, you needed a certain level of resilience. My guess is, that you can do a fair few of those listed above, and this means that to get where you are now, at some stage in your life you possessed that very resilience.

The fact of the matter is that with age, a sprinkle of social conditioning and some limiting beliefs (of which we all possess) there’s every chance you’ve gradually paralysed yourself into a place of believing that starting anything that could fail, might kill you... and is, therefore, to be avoided at all costs. But WHY does this happen?

The most common reason is that a lot of us place a sense of safety on the approval of others. This is because way back when, your tribe would help you to keep safe, retrieve food, care for the young and so on. If you ventured out by yourself you would likely get eaten, or worse. Now. This means that we have an innate feeling within us that encourages us to stay within the guidelines of what we perceive will be approved of by our peers. But this is no longer necessary, not to mention extremely limiting. For the most part, we can keep ourselves out of danger without the assistance of our peers.

In today's world, while everyone is busy (parading their achievements online, with added filters and edits to make things appear even more flawless), it’s not easy to then view failure as something beneficial. You don’t often see people posting about the job they didn’t get, or the business idea that didn’t work out, or the money they lost investing in a project that failed... However, funnily enough, this is usually what’s happening before you see the post about what went well - what we see online is the very tip of the iceberg.

So, what does this mean? Well, we know that the fear that exists no longer serves us and is now holding us back. What we are experiencing is just a feeling, so how do we tackle the feeling?

We actively do things to experience that feeling and simultaneously convince ourselves that we are safe whilst doing so.

3 books to read if you need a confidence boost: A personal experience

Posted on 24th July 2021 at 11:46

There comes a point when eating a family-sized bag of kettle chips, rotting away under your duvet having indulged in 8 hours of screen-time, doesn’t feel that soothing anymore. If you’ve found yourself hosting a royal self-pity party having taken a knock of some kind... Maybe you didn’t land the job you wanted, or you’ve recently been let go, it can suck, and often requires some acute attention in getting out of it.

Default Diary: What it is and why you need one

Posted on 7th June 2021 at 11:37

First of all, what on earth is it…?

The benefits of using DISC

Posted on 16th May 2021 at 08:54

We like to do things a little differently around here, you might have noticed. By this, we mean that we strive to be the best, to get results, and to bring home the bread. But what does this mean in a practical sense?

One of the reasons that we set ourselves apart from other PA businesses, is that we’re resourceful in our approach to or communication with clients, by way of DISC profiling. We use this system as a methodology throughout our practice, in attempting to understand all of the individuals that we work with and alongside. In doing so, we know how our clients work and have a much better understanding of how best we can serve them.

Conducting a DISC assessment is a relatively accurate way of determining someone’s working style. This means what their tendencies are when approaching tasks, what their strengths are, what challenges them and what they generally avoid. Each PA we work with has a full DISC profile on file, which we then use to help us during the pairing stage when onboarding new clients.

A word from the Director; Electra

Q: What's the criteria for matching a PA with a client, who decides and why?

“When having the first meeting with the client we begin to understand their business needs and what tasks they need help with. We have some very creative PAs and others that love getting tucked into tasks such as reporting and spreadsheets, so this is what we tackle first.

We then take into account any experience the PAs already have, the chances are, out of all of the PAs, there will be one that has relevant experience.

Finally, we’re left with a handful of suitable VA’s, we then use their DISC profiles and determine who we think would be the best fit for the client. Every single one of our PAs has S in them, which work well with high Ds and Is, which is what most of our clients are. They also get along with high Cs, but when Cs and Ss with together, it can slow the task down as they both go into great detail, so we have to bear this in mind.”

Q: Why do you deem it an important part of the process when onboarding clients

Naturally, our clients and VAs work extremely closely, so we want to ensure that it's going to be easy to build a trustworthy relationship. Ideally, we need the clients and VAs to be able to communicate seamlessly and get along famously; this is made easy when they share certain DISC personalities. As a rule of thumb, we try and match together people who are similar in the way they work. If the client is fast-paced, it helps that the PA is as well so they can pick tasks up quicker/may not need as much information to get started. Similarly, with slower-paced clients, they need someone to understand the detail just as much as they do.

Q: How successful have you found it

We noticed an immediate difference when we began incorporating it as a system.

Communications became more seamless, clients reported feeling more satisfied, and as a business, we were able to be more productive and proactive with our approach.

With regards to how it works for our clients, nine times out of ten, the client is extremely happy with who we have matched with them with. Until we know that our clients are completely satisfied, we always keep backup options in the locker.

Q: How did it start?

One of our biggest clients is Action Coach Bristol, working with them has proven to be eye-opening in many different ways. But working with DISC profiling and the results that it drives, really stood out to us. Now, we do DISC assessments before taking anyone on as a Virtual Assistant for Action PAs, which means set very high standards for the VAs that represent us.

Would you like to find out more about DISC?

Click here for further information about DISC and it's many benefits. What personality type are you?

How does Action PAs work?

Posted on 20th April 2021 at 09:10

A (very) quick guide.

We’ve had a lot of questions about this, so we figured it’s worth creating a quick guide.

And for all you high D’s and I’s (DISC reference), never fear, we’ve made this simple and straight to the point. ...If you’re thinking about getting yourself a VA but you have no idea where to start, this is how it works;

1. 10-minute Phone Call

We do this to gain a brief understanding of yourself and your professional pursuit. Within this phone call, we will discuss your business, your team size & your needs. At this point you’re free to ask any questions you may have about us and how we work.

2. Discovery Meeting

Here is where we go through things in more detail, we refine your specific needs, your business requirements, the criteria you want us to meet, and the days and times you would like the VA to be available.

3. Kick-start Meeting

The exciting part... This is where we introduce you to your personal VA and organise the work you’ve delegated to be handed over to them. Later we then check in to ensure everything is running seamlessly.