The Soft Side
of Success™
5 Steps to the “S” Factor
for Stellar Success
in
Business and in Life
By Patty Purpur
Copyright 2011 Patty Purpur
TimeOut Services
Campbell,
California
Smashwords Edition
Smashwords Edition License Notes:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
The Soft Side of Success
© 2011 by Patty Purpur
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information, contact the publisher, TimeOut
Services, mailing address P.O. Box 189, Campbell, CA 95009. www.timeoutservices.com
Editing and book design by Kathy McHale http://www.mchalecreative.com
This book is also available in print at most online retailers.
This book is dedicated with
love to Greg
and our children, Donte, Ana, Ian and Colin
–
for the lessons they have taught me
and the many I have yet to
learn –
and to my parents as they celebrate
their 50th
wedding anniversary.
The “S” Factor
What is the “S” factor? Those who have it:
• Have an irresistible appeal
• Radiate positive energy
• Are passionate about what they do
• Inspire others to want to work with them
• Easily attract mentors, partners, loyal customers, and stellar employees
• Have a contagious enthusiasm for their work and for life
• Turn obstacles into opportunities
• Rise in seemingly effortless ways to success
People just naturally want to be around individuals who have these qualities.
The “S” factor is not taught in business school. It comes from the “soft” side, from personal skills and attributes that can make the difference between mediocrity and extraordinary success.
This book contains the five steps that will help you develop your soft skills and grow your “S” appeal, so you can create the results you desire – in your work and in ever y area of your life.
Table of Contents
Not Your Father’s Business Book
What You Need to Bring to the Table
Assess Your Strengths and Limitations
Be Grateful for Everything You Have
Pursue Your Passion and Purpose
“I can’t believe she did that!”
They didn’t say it out loud, but from their perplexed looks, I could tell that’s what they were thinking.
What had I done? Robbed a bank? Stolen a car? Cut to the front in the morning Starbucks line?
No, my offense in their eyes was that, without an MBA or even any business classes and without following all the rules, I started with nothing and built a multimillion-dollar company. Then I sold two divisions of it later for a handsome sum to a national corporation.
Why weren’t they more positive about my achievement? The problem was that some of the professionals and intellectuals in my life, who have a solid business background or advanced degrees, hadn’t been able to achieve the same level of success. They just didn’t understand how I was able to do it.
Was it just a fluke or dumb luck? After experiencing first-hand how hard I had worked, I knew that wasn’t it. But I got curious, and this led me to try to understand my unorthodox success – to analyze why I was able to achieve so much without following, and even at times contradicting, the business “textbook.”
What I discovered was that I was successful for other reasons. My success came from employing some “softer” approaches and skills.
That’s what inspired me to write this book. I knew other people could benefit from using the skills I’ve applied. Some of these I’ve learned the hard way, through trial and error. Some I’ve come upon through good fortune. And many just come naturally to me – they’re part of my nature. These abilities have been key to my success. I also found as a business owner that the people who were most successful in my company also had many of these traits. But you won’t learn these skills in business school.
Something is missing from our business curriculum. Many employers today struggle when they hire candidates with impressive resumes and later realize the employees who looked so promising on paper are not getting along with other people and are not performing up to expectations or succeeding as everyone hoped. The employers are dissatisfied, and the employees are often miserable in their jobs.
I want to fill in the missing pieces, the valuable skills they don’t teach in business school, and speed you on your own path to success. If I was able to start a company and have this much success without an advanced degree and without an MBA, you can do it, too – with or without that degree. I want to inspire you to get out there and achieve more than you ever believed possible.
I hope that by sharing my story and my secrets of success, you will come to know that success is possible for you, too.
Could it be that you are:
• not as successful as you desire to be
• stalled in your job, career, or business and not moving ahead the way you want
• feeling miserable in your job
• dissatisfied with your current situation and thinking there must be more
• serious about moving ahead and willing to roll up your sleeves and put in the effort to transform your life?
If you answered yes to any of these, this book is for you.
You could be a woman, you could be a man, you could be young or old – in short you could be anyone who wants to be more successful and realizes that something needs to change for that to happen. No matter who you are, the thing that needs to change is you. You are the only raw material you have to work with to transform your career and life. And, used as directed, this book can help you do just that.
Not Your Father’s Business Book
There are many strictly business-oriented books out there that will tell you how to craft your resume, write a business plan, or set up a corporation. But solid business skills alone are not enough to ensure success. Your credentials may get you an inter view, but they won’t guarantee you will get the job or prosper in business. This is a different kind of business success book. This book goes beyond the resume and beyond the MBA.
I’m going to present a valuable set of softer skills and approaches that will propel you in powerful ways to success. This is the soft side that enabled me to succeed. I will share with you how I did it, what it takes to start a business or be successful in your career, to be creative, to believe in yourself, and to move forward – everything that I believe contributed to my success.
Some of the ideas I present might seem to have nothing to do with business. You might find yourself thinking, “What has this got to do with my career?” I can guarantee, from my own experience, that it does apply. I have learned that you can’t separate your career from the rest of your life. Business school may tell you it’s essential to compartmentalize your life, to focus tightly on your business, and leave the rest of your life outside the office door. But your personal life and state of mind have a powerful effect on your ability to perform and to achieve your business or career goals.
What You Need to Bring to the Table
I believe anyone can learn the attitudes, behaviors, and skills to approach success from the soft side. It requires willingness on your part: willingness to be receptive to new ideas, to look deep within yourself, and to take action.
The ideas in this book may resonate with you, or they may seem foreign, especially in a business context. Either way, if what you have been doing has not produced the results you want in your life, it’s time to try something new, even if it means stepping outside your comfort zone. It’s time to expand your vision of what is possible for you. If you remain open to the ideas and actions in this book, you will find they release powerful abilities within yourself that can lead to amazing results.
This is not just an intellectual exercise – it’s a process, and you need to participate fully. At the end of each section there are specific actions for you to take, and you will need to take them in order to reach the payoffs. The best ideas in the world are worthless unless you’re willing to apply them. You can read this book, understand the ideas, be clear on what’s important, and know what you’re supposed to do, but unless you act on it, nothing will ever come of it. At each step along the way, you must take some action to achieve the success you want.
In short, you actually have to do it. And the more fully you enter into the process, the better your results will be.
Ultimately, the Soft Side of Success – the “S” factor – is not about money, it’s not about the balance sheet, and it’s not about material goods. It’s about taking the best care of yourself and of others. You will find that if you apply the soft side in business, it will raise you to levels of success that focusing on the numbers alone will never enable you to reach.
“If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” – Henry David Thoreau
Let’s begin with an over view of the route you’ll be taking to success. Picture a pyramid with five levels:
The levels in the pyramid represent the five steps you will be going through: Knowing, Embracing, Nurturing, Inspiring, and Taking Action.
Before you set out on your journey, I want to equip you with a few key tools that you’ll need along the way: journaling, gratitude, and visualization. These three practices will be invaluable in helping you reach your goals.
Journaling is a powerful process you will use in every step. It should become an ongoing practice for you.
Putting your thoughts on paper allows you to gain clarity and put things in perspective. When you allow your mind to act like a monkey, swinging from thought to thought, you can become distracted, pulled in many different directions, or distressed by worries. But once you begin to write down a thought, it focuses your mind and allows your thought process to proceed to completion.
In their article “Why Journaling Works,” John and Patrice Robson present many benefits of writing a journal, among them:
• Writing slows down your mind, which shows you your thought process and allows deeper thoughts to emerge.
• It gives you a different, higher perspective on what you’re writing about, leading to greater clarity and understanding.
• It reduces the emotional charge around events, allowing you to see them more objectively.
• It enables you to know yourself better.
• It enhances learning, increases your memory, and stimulates using both halves of your brain.
• It harnesses the power of your subconscious mind.
“When you write down your ideas you automatically focus your full attention on them. Few, if any, of us can write one thought and think another at the same time. Thus a pencil and paper make excellent concentration tools.” – Michael Leboeuf
Clinical studies have even found that disclosing traumatic experiences has a positive effect on the immune system and that writing about emotional events can speed up the rate at which wounds heal.
Journaling also frees you to be your authentic self. You don’t need to worry about how others might react or judge you. You can let your imagination soar and be free to dream, without outside input or criticism.
“The positive thing about writing is that you connect with
yourself in the deepest way, and that’s heaven. You get a chance to
know who you are, to know what you think. You begin to have a
relationship with your mind.”
– Natalie Goldberg
It’s possible to go through years of counseling, coaching, and talking with others about what’s happening to you without getting any distance from it. When I was going through some of the worst times of my life, I would talk to anybody who would listen, and I’d tell the same story over and over again. Journaling allowed me to tell my story again, but from a third-person point of view, which removed much of the emotional charge. It allowed me to find a new and more useful perspective and to tell myself, “OK, this happened, these are the reasons it happened, this is how I felt about it, and maybe this is what I need to do to move on.” Being able to release the past this way was a huge step forward for me.
Reviewing your older journals also allows you to see the progress you have made. You can discover patterns of behavior, patterns that led to a successful outcome or those you would rather not repeat. For instance, you may spot a mistake you keep making and thus decide to take steps to make better choices in similar situations in the future.
Your journal can take a variety of forms. It can be a spiral notebook, a beautiful leather-bound journal, or on your computer. Whatever form it takes, it should be your private place, and it should be dedicated exclusively to journaling.
“Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” – Melody Beattie
Feeling and expressing gratitude is one of the most powerful things you can do to change your life. Rhonda Byrne, author of the book The Secret, wrote, “Whenever I am asked the easiest way to use The Secret, my answer is always the same. Gratitude! It is one of the most powerful emotions you can use to bring all-good into your life in absolute abundance. No matter who you are, not matter where you are, gratitude can dissolve all negativity in your life, no matter what form it has taken. … [S]omething as simple as gratitude can transform your life.”
If you look for what is broken, you will find it. If you look for reasons to be thankful, you will find them in abundance. Some days you may need to search under the couch cushions, but good things can still be found. Start now to adopt the attitude of gratitude for everything you have – large and small – even if your life isn’t exactly the way you want it to be. If you make a daily practice of focusing on the positive and feeling deeply grateful for everything you do have, it can have amazing effects on your life.
“If you look at what you have in life, you’ll always have more. If you look at what you don’t have in life, you’ll never have enough.” – Oprah Winfrey
I believe it is human nature to want to help those who show genuine appreciation for what you do for them – and the reverse. Here’s a down-to- earth example. I love my children dearly, but there are days when I simply don’t want to give any more, because they haven’t shown they appreciate what they have. When my son complains about the used car I gave him, or about the dinner I made, it certainly doesn’t inspire me to offer to help him with gas money. Have you ever had a neighbor or friend who took advantage of your good nature? Have you ever felt resentful that you worked hard on a project and yet were passed over for advancement? Did that motivate you to give as much the next time? On the other hand, when you are acknowledged and thanked for what you do, doesn’t that inspire you to do even more? When an employee would write me a thank-you note for a kind word or a gift card I had sent, that demonstration of a grateful heart would motivate me to do even more for that person. Expressing gratitude makes both you and the other person feel good.
“When you are grateful fear disappears and abundance appears.”
– Anthony Robbins
Visualization is the third powerful practice you will use to transform your life and bring about the success you desire. In this technique, you use your imagination to picture specific behaviors or events occurring in your life. Being able to use your imagination to visualize what is possible keeps you attuned to what you desire and is a catalyst for bringing that to fruition.
Visualization makes use of the deep connection between your mind and your body. Your body does not distinguish between something you imagine and the actual experience. For example, if you think about something exciting, you can feel your heart rate go up. If you think about something sad, you can feel tears start to come.
Athletes have been using visualization for many years to enhance their physical performance. In one study, basketball players who used imager y combined with relaxation performed better than players who did not. In another well-known study on visualization in sports, scientists in Russia gave four groups of Olympic athletes different training schedules that included varying amounts of physical versus mental training. One group engaged in 100 percent physical training. The second group combined 75 percent physical training with 25 percent mental training through visualization. The third group did 50 percent physical training and 50 percent mental training. And the fourth group did 25 percent physical training and 75 percent mental training. After comparing the results of the training schedules on the athletes’ performance, they found that the group that had devoted the majority of their time to mental training performed the best.
Patty’s story
I was an athlete at an early age, and I’ve used visualization since I was thirteen as part of my athletic training. In high school, my track coach would have us visualize what we wanted to accomplish in our sport. First he would show us videotapes of world-class athletes in our event and physically teach us the drills to emulate their techniques. Then he taught us to see ourselves replicating the movements “in our minds eye.” That practice helped me become a high school state champion and state record holder when I was still in junior high school.
My high-school coach also planted the idea in my mind that it was possible for me to earn an athletic scholarship to college. With that encouragement, I decided I was going to do it. I was going to go to college and throw the discus for a university track team — even though my parents had not gone to college. That’s what I was shooting for, and that’s what I kept visualizing. When I visited Stanford University in my senior year, I hadn’t yet chosen which school to attend. From that point on, I specifically visualized going to Stanford – and that’s what I ended up doing. I was given an athletic scholarship and was proud to wear that Cardinal uniform for four years.
Recently I had lunch with my college coach, and he told me how it wasn’t until he was in college that he imagined being on the Olympic team and that it came about by chance. Someone saw a picture of him and asked to use it in a drawing. But instead of the single ring representing the discus circle, the artist drew the five interlocking rings of the Olympic symbol. When my coach received the drawing as a gift, it sparked his imagination. All of a sudden he thought, “Well, why couldn’t I be on the Olympic team?” He started to imagine himself being in the Olympics and visualized it continually. He did make it onto the Olympic team – four times. And it all started with a little help imagining something that he had never even considered before.
You don’t have to be an athlete to employ visualization. Anyone can use it, not just to improve athletic performance, but also to change and improve any area in life. For years, Oprah Winfrey dreamed of creating her own television network. She said, “In 1992, I wrote in my journal that I had a vision of creating my own network.” And now she has done it. Visualization alone will not make you successful, but visualization combined with knowledge, skill, and practice will improve your performance substantially.
Visualizing is most effective if you repeat the exercise often, if you invoke as many of your senses as you can, and if you engage your emotions in the imagined experience. The more clearly you imagine your desired state or event – including the sights, the sounds, the smells, the tactile sensations – and the more powerfully you feel it, the more you will believe it is possible and the more likely it is to happen. It can be especially powerful to write down what you want in your life and visualize it right before going to bed. Doing this will allow your subconscious mind to work on it while you sleep.
“Man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” – Oliver Wendell Holmes
Some of the visualizations you will be doing as you go through the five steps in this book will be guided ones, using audio files that will be made available to you online. Others you will do by yourself.
I had an interesting experience with visualization recently when I returned to my hometown in North Dakota to speak at a women’s conference. While there, I also gave a presentation to a group of students at Red River High School, my alma mater. As I was talking, it looked like I was losing the kids; they didn’t seem very interested in what I had to say. So I switched gears and said, “You know what, let’s do something fun.”
I asked them to close their eyes, and I walked them through a graduation ceremony. I had them imagine that it was a warm day and the ceremony was taking place outside and to feel the sun on their faces. I asked them to picture their parents and best friends there, to picture themselves being handed their diploma, and to imagine the freedom it represented. I asked them to see how excited and proud their family was of them and how proud they were of themselves. I asked them to feel what a big accomplishment it was for them to be graduating and how excited they were about their future, whether it involved college or a career. We did this for about ten minutes, and the energy in that room was palpable.
When they opened their eyes those students were completely engaged and excited, and they wanted to know, “How did you learn to do that?” They had no idea of the power of visualizing, and they couldn’t believe how it stirred the energy inside them and felt so real. I hadn’t planned to do that exercise with them, but I’m so glad I did, because it was amazing!
Most of the students in the group, many of them honor students, take it for granted that they are going to graduate. In North Dakota, in my former high school, you graduate; that’s just the culture. But visualizing graduation still released this powerful emotion and energy in them. Not one of them lost interest. They were surprised and delighted to have experienced the power of using their minds to change their current emotional state and focus on something positive. At the end, I asked them to take it a step further, saying, “If imagining a simple thing like graduation stirs this emotion in you, just think what could happen if you started imagining what you want most in life, if you imagined something really great.”
These three practices – journaling, gratitude, and visualization – complement each other and can be used synergistically. You can journal about everything you are grateful for in your life. You can imagine a desired event and feel how grateful you will be when it happens, as part of your visualization. You can write in your journal about your deepest desires, then visualize them happening for you.
Some people are more visual, and some people will be more drawn to journaling. You can use one to support the other. In my case, I realized that when I do the exercise of imagining what I want in the future, it helps me to write down some specific details first. Then when I close my eyes to visualize, it’s easier for me to picture what I want.
Many of the action items at the end of the chapters will involve using these practices.
1. Get a journal. It can be a spiral notebook, binder, or beautiful bound journal. Whatever form you select, it should be dedicated to writing your thoughts and working on the action exercises in this book.
2. Start tonight, and as you go to sleep, imagine the future you want in great detail.
3. Ever y morning, spend a few minutes with your journal, writing down what you are grateful for in your life.
4. Block out and fiercely guard time in your daily schedule to read this book, complete the action exercises in each chapter, and write in your journal.
5. Commit yourself to this process.
As a reader of this book, you will have access to a number of resources online, some of which you will need for future action items. To access these resources, go to the website for this book, www.thesoftsideofsuccess.com, and add yourself to the email list. When you get the confirmation email, click on the link to the reader login, and put in the following user name and password to enter the private reader area of the site:
user ID = softside
password = success
• Article: “Why Journaling Works” by John & Patrice Robson. The article can be at: www.higherawareness.com/journal-writing/why-journaling-works.html
• Website : www.higherawareness.com – This site has a wealth of information on journaling, along with journaling tools and suggestions.
• Article: “Writing as Therapy” by Trisha Greenhalgh, British Medical Journal, July 31, 1999.
• Article: “Wounds heal more quickly if patients are relieved of stress” by Claire Laurent, The British Medical Journal, September 2003. This article reported on a study carried out by Suzanne Scott and colleagues from the Unit of Psychology at King’s College, London, which was presented at the annual conference of the British Psychological Society’s health division. The article can be found at: www.bmj.com/content/327/7414/522.6.full
• Book: The Secret Gratitude Book, Rhonda Byrne, Atria Books, 2007.
• Book: The Secret, Rhonda Byrne, Atria Books/Beyond Words, 2006.
• Movie: The Secret, TS Production LLC, 2006.
The first step in acquiring the “S” factor is Knowing: first knowing as much as you possibly can about yourself – in every area of your life – then learning as much as you can about all the resources available to you.
“One way of finding your bliss, your life’s work, or simply something you won’t mind spending eight to ten hours doing each day is to get to know yourself really, really well.” – Peggy Klaus
“I’m not afraid of storms, for I’m learning to sail my
ship.”
– Louisa May Alcott
To truly know yourself, you first need to take inventor y – a complete and honest inventor y of your life in ever y area: your health, your finances, career, relationships, environment, and spirit. Why every area? Because they all affect your career and your success in life.