June 17, 2018 · 3:00 am

Self-Confidence

self confidencePeople who are the best at what they do, have one thing in common, no lack of self-confidence.

Visualization

Whenever successful people want to accomplish something, they go at it absolutely convinced they will achieve it. Science has shown that when we visualize achieving a goal, making it real in our minds, we enhance our performance and boost our self-confidence.

Improve Your Self-Esteem

Besides visualizing success, there are other things you can do to raise your self-esteem. For example: Reach out to others. Say nice things. Lend a helping hand.

When we help other people, we begin to feel more in control of our own lives.

Avoid Perfectionism

We all would like to be perfect. However, perfectionism often paralyzes us and can actually keep us from accomplishing our goals.

Respect Yourself

List 20 reason why you should. If you can’t think of 20, think of what people who admire you would say. (They’re right, you know.)

Your Values

Act in accordance with your own values. Choose the path that feels right for you.

Treat Yourself

Be good to yourself. Do something, just for you, that makes you feel good every day.

Challenge Yourself

Pick up an encyclopedia, or go online to Wikipedia, and read one new entry at random. Take a course at your local community college. Travel to a new place. Eat a new food.

As you meet new challenges, you gain new confidence.

Practice Being Optimistic

Fight pessimism. Think of setbacks as temporary and one of a kind, not permanent and “complete” failures.

Don’t Take It Personally

Bad encounters often tell you more about how the other person feels at that moment in time, rather than representing a failure on your part.

Don’t Take Things So Seriously

Lighten up. Most of life’s little calamities have two sides. Try to gain a balanced perspective and you’ll bounce back more quickly from disappointments and embarrassing moments. And people will enjoy being around you.

Finally

Practicing these positive measures reinforces your own belief in your self-worth, and increases your self-esteem, which will make you more self-confident.

 

 

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June 9, 2018 · 8:18 pm

Stay Focused on Your Goals

goalsEveryone wants to see their hard work turn into successful outcomes.

So, why do some people achieve success and some do not?

The reason often comes down to one factor, lack of consistency.

Whether you’re trying to lose weight or play an instrument or anything else you want to achieve in life, each of your goals requires a sustained effort. Let me give you some ideas to help you sustain and focus your energies to achieve success.

Make Sure It’s Your Goal

Nothing will derail your success faster, then trying to achieve someone else’s goals for you. So, if you want to stay motivated, make sure you are the one setting the goal. When you’re excited about the goal, working to achieve it doesn’t seem like work.

Write Down Your Goals

Zig Ziglar always used to promote in his motivational and sales seminars, “You’ve got to have goals.” Sadly, about 84% of people surveyed said they didn’t have any goals.

Remember what Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will take you there.”

Writing your goals down turns out to be a critical step. Of the 3% of the people who have written goals, they earn on average about ten times as much as those who don’t.

When you write down your goals, you write them into your consciousness.

Plan Your Work, Work Your Plan

To stay focused and achieve your goals, you need to have an action plan. What are each of the steps you will take to move you from where you are today to where you want to be tomorrow, next month, next year etc.

Expect that as you proceed, things that you didn’t expect will cause you to make changes in your plan. That’s why you should write your goals in concrete, and your plans in sand.

Keep Track of Your Progress

Write down where you started and then keep a record of your actions and progress. Measuring how your changing provides you with a valuable feedback system to keep you focused.

Have a Support System

Read positive books. Keep a success journal. Invite people you admire to become your mentor and make you responsible to someone other than just yourself.

You want people who will encourage you to reach your goals and challenge you to set them higher than you might otherwise.

Work Toward Your Goals Daily

I’m in my 4th year of writing this blog. I’ve now written over a couple of hundred articles. My goal was to write an article a week, not a couple of hundred.

Make sure you break down your goals into bite sized pieces. Also, don’t set too many goals for yourself. You can achieve almost any goal you set, but not every goal, all at once. So, focus on just a few until they’ve been accomplished and then make some new goals.

Celebrate Every Success

Every time you do something that takes you closer to reaching your goal, celebrate. Celebration is a positive motivational tool to help you stay focused, energized and optimistic.

Tell yourself you deserve to succeed.

Here’s to your success!

 

 

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June 2, 2018 · 10:32 pm

Be Cool

graduation.jpegIt’s graduation time. Invariably, these occasions call for someone to make a speech. Often these speeches are about life and achieving success. Each speech has a way of treading a path of being forward looking and how one can seize the future.

What Would He Say?

Travis Graham was a law student at the University of Tennessee. He had a reputation among his classmates as a hardworking student, but socially quiet. What he would say at the graduation ceremony as class valedictorian was a mystery to all. So, after several typically musty speakers, he rose to deliver his address. Audience attention was then a bit sharper. After the obligatory acknowledgments, he promised to take only two minutes of everyone’s time and got to the heart of his thoughts.

He Had No Idea Either

He started by acknowledging that he had had difficulty deciding what “wisdom” to impart at the ceremony. For inspiration, he consulted quote books and speaker’s guides but came away uninspired. He reviewed the cases and the law he had studied and found nothing he felt appropriate to the moment. In fact, he said, he had no idea of what hard-gained understanding-born-of-study he could share until that very morning when he was sitting at his kitchen table, having a breakfast of made-from-packaged-dough biscuits.

Poppin’ Fresh Wisdom

There, on the newly opened roll of refrigerated biscuit dough, he spotted the lesson he knew he and his fellow graduates had in common, and felt worthy of the occasion.

The package, he said, cautioned “KEEP COOL.”

This advice, he was sure, would stand them in good stead all the rest of their lives. He continued after a dramatic pause, it went this succinct wisdom one better, by also advising, “BUT DO NOT FREEZE.”

And with that he thanked all assembled and returned to his seat.

Congratulations to all the graduates of the Class of 2018

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May 27, 2018 · 3:00 am

Repeat Customers Are Key to Profitability

welcome backThe radio advertising business is all about repeat customers. Radio’s power is its ability to deliver both reach (the number of people who will hear your advertisement) as well as frequency (the number of times a listener will hear the same advertisement). Radio, for all of my life has been the medium for delivering the best frequency for an advertiser, but in today’s world, it now is also the best for delivering reach too.

Relationships

It all starts with building relationships with your advertisers. People do business with people they know and like.

When I started out in radio sales, my first goal was to start making friends with each business person I called on. I used to say to myself, “If you can’t make a sale, make a friend.”

Advertising is an Investment

The problem in today’s fast-paced world is everyone wants things to happen immediately. Patience is at an all-time low.

When you’re dealing with people and human nature, things move at their own pace.

Farmers know when they plant a crop, they won’t be going out the next day to harvest it. Likewise, when you put an advertiser’s message on the radio, it will take time to grow in the mind of the consumer. Done correctly, a business can be harvesting sales 52-weeks a year.

Great Radio Ads

Great radio advertising can benefit the listeners of your radio station in addition to growing the business of your advertisers. Great ads speak about the customer’s wants, needs and desires.

Getting Referrals

Make money for your advertisers and they will be happy to refer you to other local business people who could benefit from your radio station’s audience. And unlike cold-calling (knocking on doors of people you don’t know), a referral is like getting a foot-in-the-door. It’s golden.

Fair Prices & Excellent Service

Studies have shown you don’t have to have the lowest price to attract repeat business, fair prices will do.

Combine fair prices with excellent service and you have a winning combination.

Your goal as a radio sales person should be to become a sustaining resource for your customers. A person who they call first when they need help with their advertising or promotions. A person they trust.

You Can’t Do It Alone

Everyone in your radio station that comes in contact with your listeners and advertisers impacts the future relationship your station will have with each of them. Everyone needs to be engaged in delighting your listeners and your advertisers.

It takes a team effort to be successful.

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May 20, 2018 · 12:35 am

Clean Desk = Empty Mind

Morley Safer OfficeOne of the snappiest dressers on television was Morley Safer. But if you were to peek into Morley’s office when he was off-camera, you would have seen an office that was quite the opposite.

Depending on your point-of-view, a cluttered desk might have been thought of as a cluttered mind or as the title of this article suggests, a clean desk means an empty mind.

Spatially Organized

Let me offer you a third perspective.

My desk is usually cluttered when I’m deep into a project. (But never quite as bad as Morley’s.)

What I learned about myself was that I tend to be spatially organized and when things get neatly put away, out of sight, in a file drawer, they are also out of mind. Mine!

Productive Workspaces

We’re all different.

When people try to design workspaces for others, it will most likely fail.

In his book, “Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives,” Tim Harford explains how engineered spaces can kill productivity and innovation, while having a messy workspace might actually help us to do some of our best work.

Arbitron

I remember entering Arbitron’s new facility when it opened in Columbia, Maryland. Everything was fresh and new and oh, so very sterile.

One of the managers could be seen chasing people around and chastising them for taping things to the walls or for having a cluttered desk.

This type of order is fine for an automobile assembly line, but not your radio station.

WLAN AM/FM

When I moved WLAN AM/FM from its original location in downtown Lancaster, PA to a brand-new facility, I told everyone that their workspace was theirs to decorate as they wished.

I even let everyone pick out their own style and color of desk and chair.

Everyone was excited for moving day to arrive and had been planning for months how they would set-up their new offices.

Studies have shown that when people are allowed to decorate their work place with the stuff and personal knickknacks they love, productivity can increase by as much as 32%. In fact, people are not only more productive, they are also happier and healthier.

Moves can be really disruptive to a business, but when I moved my Lancaster radio stations, we had a record setting year in both ratings and revenues.

Mix It Up

Another way to stimulate innovation and productivity in your station, is to create spaces where everyone bumps into each other on a regular basis.

When Steve Jobs was designing Apple’s new building, he purposely made sure there would be spaces that would cause employees from all sectors to come in contact with one another.

Diversity of thought and ideas come from everywhere and everyone.

So, break down the silos that walls create to have some space that brings your people together like a tossed salad.

The Take Away

The key thing to know about creating a productive work environment is this, you can’t dictate it. You have to empower your people to create it for themselves.

People who have power over their workspace tend to be more engaged, productive and collaborative.

Just remember, it can get a little messy at times, but that’s how greatness is birthed.

 

 

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May 13, 2018 · 3:00 am

What to Do When What You’ve Always Done, Doesn’t Work Anymore

dematurityBefore I begin with this week’s blog article, I wanted to share with you a milestone this blog reached this past Sunday (5/6/2018) at 11pm EDST. Dick Taylor Blog dot com marked 100,000 visitors to this blog site. DTB premiered on January 4th, 2015 with 75 people stopping by to visit.

Thank YOU for making this blog a weekly habit. -DT

There’s no doubt about it. We live in challenging times.

The big word of the day is “disruption.”

We read every day about how some new shiny toy is the latest radio disruptor.

But is that really what’s happening?

Dematurity

The radio broadcasting industry may be dealing with something bigger; dematurity. “Dematurity is what happens to an established industry when multiple companies adopt a host of small innovations in a relatively short period of time,” says John Sviokla. The term was coined back in the 1980s by Harvard Business School professors William Abernathy and Kim Clark.

Radio’s Dematurity

Think about this phenomenon as it applies to radio.

The internet introduced the concept of streaming radio. Two companies introduced nationwide radio coverage from satellites above America. The smartphone provided an opportunity for Pandora to stream to cellphones. Podcasters followed. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, SnapChat and others would compete for a smartphone owner’s attention on these same devices. Meanwhile, on the home front, Amazon developed its Echo voice activated device, as Google, Microsoft, and Apple followed with their own smart speakers. Facebook, not to be left out, says it will introduce its own smart speaker this coming July.

Each move by these technology companies might have seemed trivial when announced, but when looked at in total, they represent a crescendo of mini-disruptions.

The Currency of People’s Time

While most will focus on the shiny new innovation, what we’re really seeing is how people spend the most valuable currency in their lives, their time.

For broadcasters, the challenge is providing people with a listening experience worth a person giving us their time.

Government Regulations

Another factor that impacts business is government regulations. While radio broadcasting has been heavily regulated since the birth of commercial radio in the 1920s, we compete against online and satellite audio providers that are not.

Government regulations have enormous impact on the type of competition and the intensity it brings in your market.

Death & Taxes

Benjamin Franklin wrote in a 1789 letter that “Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be certain, except death and taxes.” In business, you probably can add dematurity. There is not a business that won’t be impacted by it, if it’s not already.

Ask the Right Questions

John Sviokla poses these questions for trying to get a handle on how to build value and sustain value:

  • What makes for efficient scale?
  • Who is the competition?
  • Who are the customers?
  • What do the customers want?
  • Who owns what?
  • Where is the risk?

Sviokla, in his book, The Self-Made Billionaire Effect, says more than 80 percent of the self-made billionaires he’s profiled made their money by reinvigorating a mature industry. “They either introduced a product tuned to new consumer habits, changed the technologies of production, adopted new ideas from another industry, adapted to new regulation, changed the distribution system, or made some combination of those moves,” says Sviokla.

While dematurity is inevitable for all businesses, brainstorming what change is happening, and making changes to take advantage of it, is the difference between crisis and opportunity.

“Change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change.”

-Milton H. Erickson

 

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May 6, 2018 · 3:00 am

Exploring America

USA mapI’m at that point in life when one starts taking a serious look at their “Bucket List” and all of those things they’ve yet to have done. (Bucket Lists are those things you want to do in your life before you die. This idea was memorialized in the 2007 movie “The Bucket List” starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman.)

Cross-Country Road Trip

A couple of weeks back, I mentioned in a blog article that it had always been my dream to get into my car and drive our country from the East Coast to the West Coast and back.

For too long, I’ve flown across this great land and seen it from 30,000-feet, gazing out of the airline window saying to myself, “One day, I’m going to drive from sea to shining sea.”

When I shared this Bucket List item with my fiancé, Sue, she said it was something she always wanted to do as well.

Let the Planning Begin

Planning a trip that will span about eight weeks and 8,000-miles is quite an ordeal.

Originally, I thought we could just wing-it by getting in the car and driving wherever the winds took us. But that turns out to be a little unrealistic, especially if, like the two of us, you have kids and grandkids along the route you wish to spend time with.

Once you start talking with them – after all they have lives they’re living and plans they’re making – you have to map out a specific route and timetable. Plus, when I started looking at hotels to stay at along the way, I realized that if you want to have a place “leaving the light on for you” when you pull into town, you’d better make reservations. Triple A says that they expect this summer to be a banner year for people going on vacation via their vehicles.

The Map Takes Shape

Once we firmed up our stays with our kids and grandkids, we began to map out our route and timetable for traveling coast-to-coast.

Starting this week, we will leave Virginia and head through Ohio.Cross Country Road Trip Map

I’ve never been to Dayton and I’m excited to meet a radio friend and blog reader, Kevin Cox Media Group DaytonFodor who is a radio programmer and news anchor at Cox Radio. The Cox Media Group in Dayton is print, TV, radio, digital and so much more in one location.

It should be an exciting start to our cross-country adventure.

Some of the High Points

Without getting too deep in the weeds, here are some of the high points of our cross-country trip.

Hitsville USAWe plan to cruise on the mighty Mississippi River, hear the Mormon Tabernacle Choir & organ, tour the Hoover Dam, stay in a haunted hotel, ride the Hooterville Cannonball to Petticoat Junction, wine in Napa Valley, walk through a giant redwood forest, see Howard Hughes’ “Spruce Goose,” watch Old Faithful, view Mount Rushmore, visit The House on the Rock, traverse a great lake on a ferry, experience Hitsville U.S.A. where the Motown sound was born, visit Radio’s Best Friend, Art Vuolo, art vuoloand tour the Henry Ford & Greenfield Village before heading back home to the Shenandoah Valley.Petticoat Junction

Oh, Sue just reminded me that we will be shopping the incredible thrift stores in Minneapolis too.

But the part that we are most looking forward to is spending time with our children and grandchildren. We have them in Nevada, Washington State and Montana.

What About the Blog?

Since I anticipate very little online time during this trip, I have been writing blog articles that will automatically post to this blog site while I’m on the road. I know some folks have become “addicted” to this weekly muse and so I don’t want anyone to suffer withdrawal. However, if something catches my ear that I think you should hear about, I will be sure to write about it and post it while we are on the road.

Now would be a good time to go to the blog website: https://DickTaylorBlog.com and sign-up to have each week’s new article delivered to you via email on Sunday mornings.

Thank You for reading and sharing your thoughts in the comments section.

It’s by sharing our wisdom, experiences and perspectives that we all learn and grow together.road trip

 

 

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