Renew by re-thinking

Feeling a bit stale? It could be time to try bungy jumping – just don’t do it with your business. MARCIA GRIFFIN

By Marcia Griffin

I was speaking to a CEO the other day who said he was feeling very stale – he needed to renew, reinvigorate and revive himself!

I think we have all reached that point at some stage in our business life and life overall!

I have a few solutions for this. If your staleness is coming from your life generally, here are a few ideas:

• Do something different in your life.
• Go somewhere you have always wanted to go.
• Take up or renew an activity that you used to enjoy or would enjoy.
• Do a course not in any way related to anything you currently do (in a state of staleness once I embarked on a sailing course and spent the first session on rough seas and feeling quite green; but after that it was quite a lot of fun!).
• Go somewhere to meet new people.
• Do some challenging physical exercise.
• Get out of your comfort zone.

If you feel so stale that you need to take a crazy risk, do that outside your business. As one of my favourite thinkers Robert Kiyosaki would say, go bungy jumping – just don’t bungy jump in your business!

Inside your business/business life you might start to do some different thinking; read the book by W Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne, Blue Ocean Strategy. The book is about creating new paradigms and is a whole new way of thinking about business.

An example cited in this book is Cirque du Soleil – after all who would have thought that a great way to become a global leader in circuses would be by having no animals, charging high prices and having a performance backed only by music!

The founder of this circus created a whole new uncontested market space, made the competition irrelevant and created and captured new demand. I well remember my first Cirque du Soleil experience; it was like being in a different world – a magical one. The last thing I would think about was the high cost of the ticket!

Other examples of course for “blue ocean” thinking come from the internet – Google is one of the best, I feel. It is so powerful that we now “google” rather than search for information.

Just when we think everything interesting in the world has been done, some fresh thinking creates something new and exciting. To keep fresh and to renew ourselves we need to be part of that!

To read more Marcia Griffin blogs, click here.

High Heeled Success is Marcia Griffin’s latest book, and is a frank account of building a business from a solitary sales person to a multi-million dollar business with 4700 sales consultants around Australia and New Zealand. It recounts successes and failures along the way and was written to inspire entrepreneurs-particularly women to triumph in business.

High Heeled Success (Kerr Publishing) is available directly from Marcia (marcia_Griffin@msn.com.au) or Domain Books www.domainbooks.biz.