Vanya Wryter Consulting Services

Tag: Entrepreneur

  • Why You Need a Mentor

    Why You Need a Mentor

    Most learning experiences – including hour-long workshops to week-long conferences – teach you relevant lessons, but they may not give you the knowledge or skills you need to reach your goals. Having a mentor is advantageous when improving your career, business, or yourself.

    You can sign up for webinars to learn new skills. But when the webinar is over, it is up to you to apply the lessons you learned. The downside of this approach is staying motivated over time and continuing to apply the skills you learned.

    Another approach is to register for a course with live webinars and mentoring from the instructors and peers. As a result of the mentoring from this community, you may notice an immediate improvement in your learning experience for several reasons.

    Learning is personalized

    It’s easy to watch and observe while you’re learning something new. It’s easy to get excited about a new concept. But you don’t know if you’ve achieved true mastery of what you’ve learned until you apply it. Having a mentor personalizes your learning.

    The interaction during a live webinar is motivating when you hear about how your peers apply the lessons and get positive results. You’ll feel like you’re on the right track and not alone in your journey toward self-improvement.

    You have the opportunity to ask questions about your situation. Your mentor will give you feedback about your particular concerns and comment on your progress. With this type of learning, you’ll feel like your effort in the course mattered.

    After each webinar, some courses allow you to meet with peers on platforms such as Discord to practice what you learned and discuss your opinions about learning points. These interactions with peers make you more accountable for your learning. You’ll want to be the next person with a success story to share with the group.

    Opportunities to practice and improve skills

    With most courses and webinars, you take notes, then shelve your notebook somewhere until you need to reference a point from one of the lessons. However, the best and safest way to implement what you’ve learned from a course is with practice. You can make mistakes without worrying about making mistakes.

    A role-play to demonstrate the point of a lesson can be an effective way to get a message across to an audience. However, it is difficult to tell if you truly mastered the lesson’s objective by watching the sample role-play. For example, if you are learning to deal with a difficult work situation, you can watch a role-play of a conversation. When faced with a difficult situation at your workplace, however, you might not be able to follow the script from the demonstration.

    When you are involved in role-playing during a practice session, you have the opportunity to try out a situation in a safe environment. If you make a mistake, you can try again. You can say, “pause” to stop and think about what you should say next, and then “resume” the role-play when you’re ready to continue. You can repeat this several times to figure out the best solution for the situation. (Something you can’t do in real life.) Audience members can also sub in as you switch roles and test out alternate endings for a scenario.

    The practice sessions with peers are a valuable way to grow your skills. Most importantly, only by practicing do people realize what they don’t know.

    Opportunities for feedback

    Having a chance to practice what you learn and receive feedback from mentors is the best way to evaluate your learning. You have a safe environment to try out different scenarios and improve yourself. A mentor will tell you what you are and aren’t not doing well and provide suggestions that work for you.

    For example, if you are learning how to be a more effective public speaker, your mentor could watch your presentation and provide you with feedback afterward. Your mentor might notice that you need to interact with your audience more. Instead of reading through a checklist of all the methods for improving speaker/audience interaction, your mentor could suggest tips that work specifically with your personality style.

    Ongoing feedback is also critical to your self-improvement. In a live webinar course with role-play opportunities, you can role-play with peers during the course. After each session, you receive feedback on what you did well and what you need to improve. During subsequent sessions, you can review your notes on the feedback and apply them to your next role-play. Over time, you’ll notice a gradual improvement in your skills.

    Chances to review and reflect

    Group support and mentoring are very important in your learning and growth. When your peers talk about how the lessons have changed them, you realize that you are not the only one going through a period of transformation.

    It is very motivating when a peer shares how he applied the lesson and achieved a great result with a client. You feel motivated to do the same. You can relate when a peer talks about how she feels she’s changed because of the course.

    Mentorship is an effective way to learn. Your mentor is your guide as you develop new skills. Ongoing feedback from your teacher and the peers in your course allows you to learn at your own pace. The encouragement from your teacher-mentor and peer-mentors as you practice what you learn results in improved skills and knowledge.

    If you are ready to learn from a mentor, you can follow these tips on finding the best mentor for you.

  • Motivation to Travel and Explore

    Motivation to Travel and Explore

    “If you don’t get out of the box you’ve been raised in, you won’t understand how much bigger the world is.” – Angelina Jolie

  • 5 Time Travel Movies for Our Success

    5 Time Travel Movies for Our Success

    Have you ever wished that life had a Redo or Rewind button? Do you ever wish you could go back and change a moment in your past? Many people would answer Yes.

    Time travel would be an ideal answer to fixing past mistakes. Life is a harsh teacher. If we could fix awkward moments, an error in judgement, or most importantly, regrets, life would be less painful.

    Anyone who has made career decisions that took them off course or tried to start a successful business would agree that being able to correct the past would come in handy.

    In reality, we don’t have the luxury of a rewrite or a redo. Still, we can experience time travel from the safety of our couch and learn valuable lessons to apply to our own lives. Here are five time travel movies that teach valuable lessons about careers versus experiences.

    Constant Improvement Creates Major Results

    What if you found yourself in a time loop, reliving each day because you couldn’t have the love of your life? In Groundhog Day, the main character wants to win the heart of his coworker, which he discovers is a lifelong mission.

    Repeating the same day can be hell or a huge bonus. Since you can’t die in a time loop, you’re pretty much invincible, knowing everything will reset in twenty-four hours. Jumping in front of a car can’t be all bad.

    However, should you find yourself in a time loop, you shouldn’t waste the time you’ve gained. After all, you’re not going to age, and everyone around you won’t know about your secret.

    Our protagonist takes advantage of the perpetual Groundhog Day to learn new skills. He learns to play the piano, speak French, and help others.

    Instead of focusing only on winning someone’s heart, the main character starts to approach life with an open mind. He takes the time to get to know the people he interacts with each day and puts other people before himself. As a result, he becomes a better person and wins the love of his sweetheart.

    The protagonist’s formula for success is worth repeating. If you want to move forward in your career, increase your income, freelance, or start a company, first, work on building your skills. If you want personal success, also work on improving yourself. Take the time to appreciate the people around you as well.

    Constant improvement through small changes each day will add up to major results. You may not notice it at first with each piano song you master, or each new word you acquire in a foreign language. But when you look back, you will see the total value of what you’ve accomplished.

    Learning from the Past to Improve the Future

    Imagine dying over and over just so you can learn how to defeat the enemy. Would it be worth the pain and the sacrifice? In Edge of Tomorrow, the main character is also stuck in a time loop, but it is paramount that he remember each detail from the life before. No pressure at all.

    The lessons he learns with each repeat of the day are key to strategizing how to defeat the enemy: going left or right on the battlefield, striking or ducking. Each detail is vital to achieve success in the long run. Otherwise, all the losses are for nothing.

    Imagine having that same advantage if you want to succeed in your career or business. Instead of regretting a decision you made, you can keep repeating the day until you get it right. If you failed job interview questions, you could keep redoing the interview until your answers are perfect, and you get to hear the desired words “You’re hired.”

    It would be such a relief to a business owner who has made a bad decision to have a chance for a do-over. He could try different ways to market and sell his products until he finds the method that gets him the most sales. Or she could repeat a client negotiation that went badly until the conversation results in a contract.

    The possibilities are endless. You can re-evaluate all your past decisions. Money lost in a bad investment could become be money gained. All you need to do is try different scenarios until you find the winning combination. Depending on how much patience you have, you could try this tactic to discover the lottery’s lucky numbers.

    Live through the day, analyze, strategize, and learn from past mistakes to get the best possible results for the future.

    Try and Try Again Until You Create the Ideal World

    Each day, we find new inventions on the market that solve a problem, whether they save us time, money, or effort. Many entrepreneurs strive to create an invention that customers desire to buy because it improves their lives.

    In this next movie, an inventor creates a time machine that has the power to make our lives better… or worse. In the Back to the Future movies, we see the best and the worst of time travel. However, when we invent something, it’s hard to tell at the moment what will happen. Time machines can’t predict the future.

    At the end of the first movie, we find the lives of the main character’s family much altered from the beginning of the story. The bad guy gets what he deserves, and the main characters are more confident and live more successful lives. All these changes result from a past event when one character decides to stand up to a bully.

    The effects of a single event can ripple through time, causing a domino effect. In another Back to the Future movie, possessing a book with sports scores gives one person an unfair advantage, resulting in a dark and sinister world.

    If we possess a time machine, we can venture into the past and change the present. We can choose the road not taken and experience endless possibilities.

    We can correct past mistakes, erase a regret, or try the career path we turned down. We can create the ideal reality for ourselves by changing our careers, bringing back a lost friend, or stopping a tragedy from occurring.

    If you dislike shrimp, you could make them disappear from this century. No matter what path you choose if you have a time machine, the main lesson is the same: learn from the past.

    Work to Live or Live to Work

    Would you want to be a millionaire or billionaire? In this century, there are more millionaires than in any other time in history. It isn’t everyone’s goal to be rich, but almost everyone wants a life outside work. An exception is a person whose only love is money.

    Life for this person becomes all about the acquisition of wealth. Family isn’t important. Relationships and people don’t matter. Money is what motivates people obsessed with wealth.

    In this movie, a wealthy business owner would have lived a life surrounded by his money if three powerful ghosts hadn’t visited him one Christmas Eve. They show him what he has lost in life and what he still could potentially lose.

    Many versions of A Christmas Carol have the same valuable message. Modern versions have switched the protagonist to a wealthy woman, but the story is the same. Like the original movie, she is also visited by three ghosts in one night.

    Each main character wakes up on Christmas morning with a new outlook on life after their experience with the ghosts.

    As we build our careers, we can become so focused on achieving our next goal that our jobs become our life. As business owners, it’s easy for our business to swallow us whole and become our life: long hours to reach monetary goals.

    We can live from one day to the next without realizing that our careers are slowly devouring us. We don’t realize the change until we look back and see what our life was like before. It takes a lot of hard work to be successful.

    It’s possible to reach six figures in one year if we have the skillset or offer the right product or service to the right target market.

    However, as the ghosts of Christmas past, present and future point out in the movies, we need to step back and rethink what we want from life: wealth in money or wealth in experiences and relationships. Some people are rich and happy. Others aren’t rich but they are happy.

    If we are visited by the ghost of Christmas future, what would we want that ghost to show us about our future accomplishments? What relationships would we have with friends and family? Like they say, all that glitters is not gold.

    What Comes First: Family and Self, or Career and Community

    It is difficult for anyone to give up time with their family to serve the greater good. Sometimes, people don’t get to choose. What if they are the one person who can save their family – and the condition is never seeing them again?

    Our careers can define who we are and what we must do. In the movie Interstellar, a father of two is the only person with actual flight experience in space. He is chosen for a mission to save humankind. The price is a quick goodbye and never seeing his father or son again. He leaves his daughter when she is a child and is reunited only at her deathbed.

    The movie is a reminder that time can slip away on us. In the movie, a poorly made, split-second decision results in the loss of decades.

    We lose time just as quickly in real life. The daily drudgery of the 9 to 5 from week to week can drag on forever. In the blink of an eye, a year passes, another year, and then you look at a photo of yourself and your loved ones, and to your shock, you realize you’ve aged.

    What do we choose: family or career? From Monday to Friday, most of our day is spent at our job, away from family and friends. We cherish the experiences with the people we see on weeknights and weekends. For business owners, even more of their week is spent with their business instead of family.

    We cannot put time on hold or freeze the people we love until we have the time to spend with them again. Children grow up.

    How do we balance our careers with our personal lives? A movie like this, which accelerates time, is a strong reminder that we should think about what’s important to us. The average person with an average career spends 94,000 hours in their lifetime at their job.

    Are the thousands of hours spent on our career worth it?

    Key Takeaways

    Everyone has moments they wish they could redo to vanish mistakes, improve themselves and create better a future. The ability to relive the day or jump forwards or backwards in time can do wonders to change our present lives.

    If you had the opportunity to time travel, what would you do for self-improvement? How would you help others? What world would you create for us?

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  • Motivational Quotes: Robert Kiyosaki

    Motivational Quotes: Robert Kiyosaki

  • Business Etiquette for Entrepreneurs

    Business Etiquette for Entrepreneurs

    Life would be a little too easy if we could become an expert at one skill and then build a thriving business around it. Once we’ve figured out what we want to do, and we are open for business, we still have to market ourselves; otherwise, we may find ourselves waiting. Waiting like we do at a surprise party, wondering when the guest of honour will arrive. In this case, our guest of honour is our future client. And ideally, our future client would know how to find us. One way is to lead them to us with a trail of personal connections. You might have been thinking of bread crumbs, and metaphorically, you could think of it that way. Entrepreneurs are keen to add value and bring success to other people’s lives. If you aren’t in business to help others, then chances are, you won’t get far in your journey. After reading The 5 Essential People Skills by Dale Carnegie Training, I thought of some tips that really boost a business owner’s reputation and bring them more clients. I’ve even added some suggestions to the original list in the book. My biggest tip starts with the old adage, “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” This bit of advice applies the moment you venture out to meet new people.

    Social networking that grows your business

    If you’re looking to increase your client base, always search for networking events that your potential clients could be attending. A glance at the event description will help you gauge the likelihood that your potential client will be there. If you’re not sure, then ask yourself what your potential client is looking for and whether this event could be the answer to their search. When you are at the event, interact with as many people as possible. These opportunities are like mini job interviews. Introduce yourself and keep the conversation light with social or general work topics that avoid debate and hostility. For example, sports, current events, and the weather are fairly neutral. You may even talk about your background and your work. When you are asked a question, try to keep your answers less than a minute long to avoid babbling. Show that you’re interested in the other person by using your active listening skills. Nod and acknowledge points that he or she is making. Use appropriate body language, such as maintaining eye contact and facing the person you are speaking to. If the person you are talking to is a little on the quiet side, guide the conversation with open-ended questions such as, “How long have you been in business?” instead of closed questions (that request yes/no answers) such as, “Have you been to this event before?” Instead of expecting to get something out of the meeting right away, give value first. Instead of just looking for potential clients, and abruptly ending the conversation when you realize this person will never do business with you, find out what you can do to give them value. Ask what brings her to the networking event to see what she is looking for. Maybe she wants a specific type of business connection. Ask someone to tell you more about his business and compliment him on an aspect that you like. This attitude of giving value will make you instantly likable. As you continue to network, your new business acquaintance might introduce you to others at the event. Having someone introduce you to a stranger makes it much easier to connect with others than by starting a conversation from the cold. Similarly, introduce people you’ve just met to others. At the end of the event, you may find yourself with a whole deck of business cards and possibilities. In summary: connect by talking about social topics, practice active listening, add value to others, and introduce new connections to your network.

    Follow up with new connections as soon as possible

    When you return to your office after a networking event, it’s easy to get caught up with all the tasks that you missed during your absence, and to fall back into your usual routine. Set some time aside to follow up with the new connections you made at the event. If you can, send them an email within 24 hours. Keep your new collection of business cards organized. I sometimes write a quick note on each one to remind me where I met each person. If you’re more ambitious, enter each new connection into a database. This way, if someone asks you if you know an event photographer, you have people you can recommend. As I go through the list of new connections, I also note who I said I would follow up with. Following up on promises is crucial when you have your own businesses. People get a sense of how trustworthy and reliable you are right from the start of your new connection. If you said you would shoot them an email to set up a meeting time, send that email to mention where you connected and remind them of the purpose of your meeting. If you said you were going to introduce someone to your network, email them to make the introduction. It’s possible a quick email to refer Pam, who you met at the networking event, to Steven, who you know is great at marketing, will start a series of opportunities. You never know. For example, Steven may thank you by sending you some real estate business from his network. Or Pam might send you useful links to websites that give you some good business leads. The possibilities from a single networking event can be very far-reaching. In summary, follow up with connections as soon as possible, whether it is to set up a time for another meeting, or to introduce people to each other from your network.

    Check that your information is up to date and easily available

    New connections will want to know more about you. First, if they met many people at the event, they might not remember details about you right away. Have some keywords on your business card that jog their memory. “Realtor.” “I help you with your marketing needs.” “Business consultant.” If your business card doesn’t have your photo, make sure your LinkedIn profile has one. They may look you up on LinkedIn to remind them who they were talking with about X business opportunity! Your profile may also have details about skills that interest them, even if it didn’t come up in conversation. For example, a woman I met was looking for someone with publishing experience, but we had only talked about marketing. When she saw publishing in my profile, she inquired about it. Your website is also an excellent source of information about you and your company. A new contact can find testimonials vouching for your great service. It is also where they can subscribe to your blog and continue to get information about your business niche. I started a partnership when a new contact suggested posting a referral to his company on my website. The benefit was my clients could enjoy a discount for his services, and he would pay me an amount for the referral. It’s not the same as an affiliate program, but it’s a similar idea. In summary, your LinkedIn profile and your website are ways to help increase your business. When someone refers leads to you, promote them back by sending business their way. You can also work out a type of partnership that is mutually beneficial.

    Pay it forward

    The overall idea for successfully increasing your client base is to pay it forward. When you meet someone new at a networking event, or even online through a LinkedIn group, add value to them first. Always add value first. Even if it’s just to compliment them if you can’t think of a way to help out their business. When you meet someone for the first time, listen intently and show interest in what they do. It will make a favorable initial impression. You want people to see how much you want to help others, and how much other people matter to you. Think of ways to help people without considering how you can get money back for your time. Entrepreneurs aren’t paid by the hour or by salary. They don’t necessarily get rewarded every two weeks for their hard work with a paycheque. Sometimes they send out all these good vibes, follow up on leads, and build new bridges… and don’t reap the reward until weeks or months later when a referral turns into a paid project or a lucrative partnership. Sometimes a promising lead turns into nothing. However, if you focus on paying it forward, if you work on helping others first, eventually, you start to get results! If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to make sure you don’t miss the next post!