Passions That Pay

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This blog has been a little quiet this last week as I was in Knoxville, Tennessee with my youngest daughter who had made it through to the Destination Imagination Globals (http://www.destinationimagination.org/ and http://www.global-finals.org/ ). They performed extremely well and we were all very proud of them. But we met some very serious coaches down there – coaches who had their teams practising for several hours a week, coaches who had made it to Globals many times (this was our teams first visit) and so were very experienced in what the judges were looking for. Our team on the other hand had always just seen the whole thing as fun. Although they had worked hard, practice had been confined to an hour and a half a week. In the face of this competition, we, the parents all prepared our children to face the fact that just being at Globals was a huge win and not to expect anything more. The children therefore went into closing ceremonies without really a hope that they would actually place amongst the 79 other teams competing for the Hit or Myth Elementary level challenge.

Our intentions were noble – we wanted to avoid our children having to face too much disappointment but we made a fatal mistake. One that many of us make in business – we sized up the competition and felt that we fell short. How often have you visited a competitor’s website and felt that it was far better than what you could do? If you are a podcaster, do you feel others are much more talented than you are? How does this affect you? Does it make you strive even harder as your competitive spirit comes to the fore or does it make you feel that there is not much use in even trying? If it is the latter than you have a major mind shift to make. Here are some questions to ask yourself to help make the shift.

1. On what criteria are you judging the website/podcast etc? Sometimes having all the bells and whistles can actually be a detriment depending on your target market. Many potential customers prefer plain and simple and are put off by anything too complicated. If you are speaking to and thus attracting YOUR target market then your website is doing its job and you can just forget about the competition.

2. Have you asked the opinions of those you trust to give you a more objective viewpoint? Often it’s just the old negative self-talk that informs us that we are inferior whereas that may be far from the truth.

3. What systems do you have in place to objectively measure how effective your website is? Hard, cold numbers do not lie and if your website is doing what you want it to do (and to know this you need to have very clear and measurable goals) then similarly to the advice in point 1, who cares what the competition is doing?

Finally, although it is useful to keep an eye on what our competition is doing, if you find it is too detrimental to you emotionally because of the negativity, then just stop looking for a while until you are more confident in your own business.

So how did my daughter’s team do in the end? They  placed fifth!