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9 Ways To Incorporate Win-Win Philosophy Into Your Business

What kind of business are you running? Is your philosophy success at all costs? Do you care how your business practices affect people around you? In the answers to those questions lies the success of your enterprise. The days of cut-throat business practices are becoming numbered. More and more businesses realize that creating win-win conditions in all of their activities, be it with employees or their clients, can only improve their success ratio.

Just imagine the following situation. You have a competitor that constantly undercuts your prices. He often forces you into bidding wars, and generally your relationship with him is adversary. Now imagine that instead of waging the usual war, you decide to approach your competition from a different point of view. You come up with an idea of a cross promotion that will funnel your clients to him and his to you. You sell that idea to him, and you join forces in promoting this venture. It is so successful, that both of you make a lot of money from it. From then on your relationship changes; and instead of competing you join forces. You do many promotions like the first one and take your business to new heights of success. Thanks to your new partner - your former competitor.

So what can we do to incorporate more of win-win philosophy in our business? Here are a few suggestions:

1. Every time you make a decision in your business, consider how it will affect people around you. Will your decision have a positive effect on your clients, employees, competitors? If not, can there be anything done to change, improve the situation?

2. Be flexible. This is key, because if you are not flexible, the creation of win-win conditions will be impossible. Usually in order for both parties to win, they both will have to sacrifice first.

3. Communication is crucial. In order for you to be able to sell your proposal of win-win conditions you will first have to educate the other party. If you can’t do it effectively, there is no way will you be able to get them to agree to it in the first place.

4. You must sell your proposal to everybody involved. This, like any other sales process will require you to show clear benefits to the opposing party. Show them how they will win before you show them how you will.

5. Treating your employees as partners and creating win-win conditions when dealing with them, will probably be the best decision you have ever made. Your employees affect your business a lot more then your clients do, because they deal with your clients and represent you business on all levels of sales process.

6. Creating incentives can be a great tool to create win-win conditions. In selling your proposal to the opposing side, your proposal will hold a lot more weight if it comes with an incentive of one form or another.

7. Extend trust to the other party. One of the biggest problems that prevents win-win deals from happening is the lack of trust among parties involved. The surest way to start building trust is to be the first to extend it to your opponent.

8. Put your self in the other person’s shoes. Understanding where the other person is coming from, is imperative to be able to craft a strategy where both parties win.

9. Have a clear understanding of what is it that you are trying to accomplish. As with any other endeavor having clear goals will help you keep things in perspective and know when the goal has been accomplished.

Following this advice surely will allow you to develop long lasting fruitful relationships with your clients, employees and competition alike.
Business, Personal development, Success

Technorati Tags: Business, Personal development, Success

Overcoming Fears

We all have fears. For some it is a fear or heights, for some it is a fear of spiders. All of those fears are valid and how they affect our life is also important. If the fear stops you from living your life fully, you might want to consider trying to overcome that fear.

Let’s look first at what a fear really is. Most things we are afraid of are irrational. For example, a fear of spiders or mice. Those things can not really harm us, but our mind makes it out to be more then it really is, so we perceive it as if they could. This kind of division between rational and irrational fear is important to note. It would be probably not very wise to fight a fear of getting lung cancer when someone mentions that you should quit smoking. So the only fears that we should address are the fears that we know are irrational.

What do we do next? There are several ways to go here, but all of them boil down to few things we must do if we want to overcome fear.

We must examine where the irrationality of our fear comes from. Can we think of a reason why we are afraid of spiders? If yes simply acknowledge the fact don’t do anything else.

Next, we must admit to our selves that we are being irrational. Sometimes it is harder said then done, but it is unavoidable. In order for us to be able to take control over the fear, we have diminish it in our mind first.

After that, we must confront the fear. Here, smaller steps are better then big heroic leaps. So in the case of spiders, you can start by learning about spiders from a book. This will not be as effective, but with small steps we will eventually get us to the point where we can face what we are afraid off.

I need to clarify something here. Once we have confronted the fear, it will not magically disappear. As the matter a fact, you probably will not stop feeling uneasy about the thing you feared. The big difference is that you will now be able to control that fear, instead of it controlling you. Eventually if you face your fear enough times, it might diminish to the point where you will not be afraid at all. This however isn’t our goal here. What we want is to regain control over your emotions, so when you are put in the situation where you are afraid, you will be able to take control and handle whatever comes your way.

Technorati Tags: Fear, Personal Development, Success

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