Welcome to Marvellous March! This month heralds the beginning of Spring and with lighter mornings and evenings, the clocks changing and daffodils and tulips appearing, the promise of new life sings its beautiful song. Even when uncertainty and negative news is out in the ether, I’m cheered by the reliability of nature and the uniqueness of each season. For us as a wellness brand, we also like to be a beacon of hope, assurance, and cheer. 

8th March celebrates International Women’s Day and I’ve been asked if I would share some of my wisdom as a women in business. I hope there will be some parallels for life even outside of a business context. I have the wonderful privilege of working with over 5000 women, so I guess I’m seen as a bit of a role model and mentor which of course I love and count as an honour.

Success has many definitions and is different for each of us. In business though I’m always keen to look at achievement through the lens of curiosity. What got that person to where they’re at, what was their journey, how did they cope with adversity, was it all planned, did they tread on people along the way, or did they inspire and take people with them? Stephen Covey wrote a best-seller called “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” (worth a read), here are a snapshot of my Seven Habits of Highly Successful People!

1. HARD WORKING

I’ve never met a successful person yet who was lazy. Quite the opposite, almost without exception the successful people I’ve known and observed are incredibly hard working. On their way up they might have held several jobs to pay for tuition, the mortgage or subsidise a business start-up. FOCUS is key. It’s possible that you can’t give 100% of your time to just ONE thing, but when you are doing that ONE thing, give it your full focus. If it’s time with your children, that comes first and shouldn’t be shared with a screen; if you model this, they can’t see you as duplicitous when you ask them to put their devices away at mealtimes. We all have to multi-task these days and most of us are doing too much with too little resource-wise, but it’s not possible to get to the important stuff if we laze in bed too long, waste our time on excess social media surfing, or procrastinating. Time = money and once it’s gone it’s gone, so be wise about how you spend your time.

2. FIVE P’s = PRIOR PLANNING PREVENTS POOR PERFORMANCE

Success doesn’t just happen; it has to be planned and strived for. That old adage “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail” is pretty true. We don’t drift to the top, it takes determination, discipline and planning. When I embark upon a project, be that a new product, new team member hire, new client and so on, I start with the end in mind. What does a successful outcome look like, what could take it from good to great? Work back from this, look at a realistic time-line, then one that has inertia behind it to see if you could fast track. Mark sometimes calls me ‘last minute Liz’ and I think he mistakes my last-minute-back’s-against-the-wall approach as a lack of planning, when actually it’s frequently when I do my best work and the adrenaline gets me through the line. However, I plan for this to happen and do my mind maps, mood boards and bullet point notes along the way. But know this, your greatest obstacle is procrastination, and you have to kick that enemy into touch.

3. THINK BIG

If your goals are small, they’re probably not goals, but things you can achieve in every day without stretch. Successful people have a BIG picture of what they want to achieve in work, personally and in life. We all have to fight mediocrity that begs for attention, ‘that’s good enough’ is not the language of achievers. They use adversity to spurt them on to become an overcomer. We all need a strong sense of WHY. Why am I doing this? Because I want a better life for my children than I had. I need to overcome my self-doubt and inner critic once and for all. To erode my debt and the shame that comes with it…and so on. Don’t be tempted to reduce your plans to the size of a postage stamp; Your vision, horizon and WHY has to be in full frame so that when the knocks and doubts come (which they do for all of us) you can focus on your end game.

4. SELF ANALYSIS

Achievers spend a lot of time saying, “what could I do better?” They’re not a finished piece of work, they’re a picture still being painted and refined. Many people say, “well that’s just the way I am and if people don’t like me, it’s too bad”. But that means they won’t and don’t want to change. A good place to trigger change is dissatisfaction. I spend a lot of time dissatisfied, and Mark is a perfectionist, so he is always looking for improvements, however in each case it drives us to change and move forward so it’s not a negative, but a positive thing. It’s so healthy to take a good stare and see if there are tweaks that would bring growth to your personal and work life; there is another saying, “if you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got”! Don’t beat yourself up though, we’re all on a journey and as long as you see progress, you’re on the right track.

5. PERSONAL BRANDING

We’re all aware of brands these days. It’s no longer enough to have a great product, there is an expectation it will be accompanied by great service, a fabulous experience and that the company has values, integrity and stands for something. If you make that parallel with yourself, what does your personal brand stand for? Here are some of the observations I have made about the achievers I work with.

They have PASSION, they have strong EMPATHY, they’re POSITIVE, they’re a success MAGNET, they’re STABLE & CONSISTENT, they have great POSTURE, they’re INSPIRING and they’re a beacon of HOPE. That’s quite a desirable list. Maybe make your own for what you feel you are and what you’d like to be known for. I feel one of my greatest strengths is ENCOURAGEMENT, it’s a mission of my life to see talent in other people that perhaps they don’t see in themselves.

5. PERSONAL BRANDING

We’re all aware of brands these days. It’s no longer enough to have a great product, there is an expectation it will be accompanied by great service, a fabulous experience and that the company has values, integrity and stands for something. If you make that parallel with yourself, what does your personal brand stand for? Here are some of the observations I have made about the achievers I work with.

They have PASSION, they have strong EMPATHY, they’re POSITIVE, they’re a success MAGNET, they’re STABLE & CONSISTENT, they have great POSTURE, they’re INSPIRING and they’re a beacon of HOPE. That’s quite a desirable list. Maybe make your own for what you feel you are and what you’d like to be known for. I feel one of my greatest strengths is ENCOURAGEMENT, it’s a mission of my life to see talent in other people that perhaps they don’t see in themselves.

6. VISION

One of the things I consistently share with our beautiful TEMPLESPA family is the need to have a clear horizon and vision. You absolutely have to have a dream, without one, your life will not reach its full potential. A dream will be how you see yourself a year from now, five years from now and so on. A dream will bring out passion and a desire to succeed, even in the face of set back and disappointment of which there will be plenty. For Mark and I, starting and then running a business has been hard, hard work. We still have massive, unfulfilled dreams and they have evolved and developed over the years, but since the beginning to this very day, we have balanced the dreams with hard core reality and that has been the relentless endeavour to create exceptional product and experiences.

7. COMMITMENT

Commitment is following through even when the feeling that you had when you made the commitment has left you! We can all make big, bold and brave statements about what we’re ‘going’ to do, but when the rubber hits the road and it gets difficult, it is very easy to give up and let go. We’re living in a ‘cancel’ age when people renege on commitments made, so you don’t know until an event takes place whether they’ll turn up, show up to do their shift, make the cake they said they would and so on. Commitment is a quality that I admire in winners, and it seems to be a trait they all share.

So, if you’ve waded through all of that, you deserve a medal and you ARE successful that’s for sure!

I hope you have a fabulous month.

Love, Liz x