Would you like to know the secret to being able to do more and to be happier?

When I was younger (a long time ago now), I used to look for the one big idea that would enable me to be more successful. The more meetings I attended and the older I got, I soon realized that I needed to give up believing in the magic bullet, that one big idea was going to magically change and improve my life. I realized that the concept of overnight success was a myth. The secret was understanding that hard work, consistency and grit are the key ingredients to achieving our goals, allowing us to do more and to be happier while doing so.

I now know that making small continuous improvements every day will be compounded over time and will give us our desired results. That is why I now believe that while it is still best to plan for your long-term future, I now focus mostly just on the day ahead of me and aim to improve by a small percentage every day.

This was the thought process that inspired my wife and fellow director, Donna, and me to create the “CAN DO” conceptual model. This model consists of practical, proven ideas and trusted advice that aim to immediately improve our mindset and our businesses by small amounts, thus enabling us to make massive incremental gains over time by focusing on five key areas. “CAN DO” is an interconnected model, so improvements in one area will often lead to exponential improvements in each of the other areas as well. In this Focus Session, we will be looking at examples from each of the elements. Having delivered similar talks on many occasions previously, I have found that most people come away with plenty of new ideas to implement immediately. We have been building the “CAN DO” library for many years, borrowing the best ideas that we have come across so that it now consists of over 300 of these ideas.

So what are the five key areas in “CAN DO” that we need to work on?

1. Communication
2. Attitude
3. Numbers
4. Dedication
5. Organization

Better Communication skills are the absolute essentials for us to master in our lives, whether they be with friends, family, our clients or our teams. I have always believed that if people have better communication skills, then the world would be a happier place, and we would all be better understood and more successful.

The right Attitude is essential for success. It doesn’t matter how skilled we are; we have to engage with the world with the correct, positive attitude for continued improvement. At the end of the day, how we approach life and how we deal with problems comes entirely down to us and our attitude. If we really want to do something, we’ll find a way. If we don’t, we’ll find an excuse.

An understanding of the importance of Numbers will allow us to get certain information across better to our clients. Not everybody agrees with me, but I have always found that numbers can actually be fun when we look at them in the right way. Even if we don’t have a natural affinity with numbers (I’m certainly not a mathematician), learning some of the basic rules of thumb help us to focus on our clients more than on our numbers.

Our business is not necessarily complicated, but it can be hard. You will need Dedication to survive and thrive, to do the best for you, your business and your clients, day after day after day.

Finally, better Organization of ourselves and our teams will help make our lives simpler and easier to control and lead us to greater success.

While we know there is no overnight success, there are no barriers to further success either. Everybody who attends this session, whether a first-timer, a seasoned veteran, someone who owns their own company or someone who works for a bigger team, will be fundamentally very ordinary; nobody is born destined to be any more successful than anybody else. I strongly believe that it is what we do, rather than who we are, that shapes our destiny.

What improvements has “CAN DO” made to my business?

There have been so many benefits and changes made to the business since we started to formally introduce these ideas back in 2016, not least of all moving from Member to a consistent Top of the Table business.

Some examples include most recently changing from internal staffing to outsourcing, which has reduced our overhead and given us greater professional flexibility; the introduction of new technology such as an advanced back-office system; implementing a paper-free client annual planning process; the introduction of cybersecurity measures; as well as generating ideas for me to be able to speak at various events and MDRT meetings, including here in Nashville.