High school. We all remember it. The anxieties. The drama. The cliques. The pain of being looked down on. Death by a thousand cuts.

Besides the endeavor to get an education (or a boyfriend or girlfriend), or the related athletic or artistic activities, the main thing many of us focused on in high school is “Do they like me?” What we wore, how we walked, how we talked, what we said or did, even what we ate, was all calculated in terms of how we would be looked at by other people.

Unfortunately, too often that type of thinking carries over into our adult lives, and can affect our sales or our business. In a sales conversation, if I’m thinking, “What will they think of me?”, I’ve already lost. Now my focus is on me instead of on serving the client. If I have a client that’s hired me to advise them, but they’re not taking the recommendations and not doing what they should, my wanting them to like me does not serve them. Because it allows them to keep doing the activities that get the wrong results.

For me to be an adult, a professional, I am no longer focused on “Will they like me?” Instead, I am doing what needs to be done and speaking what needs to be said, in a way that truly serves the other person. And everyone benefits.

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

Movies can be very inspiring. Rocky. Apollo 13. Hoosiers. Stand and Deliver. Remember the Titans. Seeing people overcome adversity and achieve their dreams through hard work and determination. But there’s an aspect of that that can be really misleading. For the sake of telling the story, in the movies we usually see someone’s growth from fumbling amateur to consummate professional take place in a 5 minute montage of scenes, or maybe in 20–30 minutes of plot development. And then we can get a real misconception of how things work.

In our society, we place a great emphasis on speed. We like fast food, overnight delivery and instant gratification. We’ve also come to expect instant transformation as well. Which is great, except for the fact that it usually doesn’t work that way. An internal transformation, a shift in our way of thinking and seeing the world, can take place in an instant, but the development of skills and abilities and talents and the accomplishment of results in the outer world often takes a lot longer. When we watch Rocky, we get a sense that he worked hard to succeed as a boxer, but it’s still hard to realize how many hours he put in, with no apparent progress, and how lonely that felt.

In learning any skill, there’s a continuous scale from 0 to 10. All of us start at zero. Not everyone ends up at 10. We might think that through sheer willpower we can jump from a 3 to a 7 on the scale, or even go from 1 to 10. The reality is, no one skips a step moving along this scale. It is possible to move up quickly, but it’s a continuous progression from 0 to 1, 1 to 2, 2 to 3, etc., and eventually from 9 to 10. At different places along the scale we learn different things, and have different challenges to overcome.

Thinking that I should be somewhere on the scale that I’m not can be very discouraging. The truth is, different people progress at different rates. I can generally make much faster progress with a good coach than I can on my own, but it’s still going to take some time. The important thing is to stay on the path. Whether it takes me 6 months or 6 years, the path to mastery is a walkable one as long as I keep making forward progress.

You can’t skip your own evolution.

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

I have two things to share with you this week.

The first is a client website launch. We have a coaching process that we take our clients through that is very powerful. We use it to create a website that clearly communicates the value of what someone has to offer. That message is reinforced by the website design, its functionality and its content. Here is our most recent launch that shows the difference this process can make.

Before: http://old.jonathanmanske.com/

After: http://jonathanmanske.com/

The second is a great opportunity for all of you who are business owners and would like to be doing better in your business. Jonathan Manske, whose website is featured above, is a world class coach. He has a powerful process himself called Breakthrough to Unprecedented Results. He’s done this program for various groups and in a live format here in Denver. Next week, for the first time ever, he’s opening up this program to business owners around the globe. If you have any interest in taking your business to the next level, I recommend that you check out his program.

http://jonathanmanske.com/breakthrough/

• Do you feel stuck, disappointed, or frustrated?
• Do you wonder why your business isn’t growing faster?
• Do you suffer from action deficiency?
• Or are you in action but not getting the results that you should?
• Do you feel like you are in your own way?

These experiences are the result of limiting beliefs, lousy mindsets, and other head trash. We can only be as successful as our heads will allow us to be. So when we are not getting the results that we want, the first thing we need to do is to get our heads straight.

However, many people are not sure how to do this or need support. The Breakthrough to Unprecedented Results group coaching program shows you how and provides that support. Here’s the link again:

http://jonathanmanske.com/breakthrough/

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.

I used to really struggle with goal setting. I hated setting my goals low, but I felt like such a failure if I set them too high and didn’t achieve them. And I was embarrassed to share them with anyone. Then one of my coaches shared with me three concepts from Heidi Grant Halvorson’s book Succeed that really changed my relationship with goal-setting.

1) Goals are to keep us aiming in the right direction. They are not for us to arrive at. Goals should be big and challenging and should keep us moving forward. If you’re consistently accomplishing your goals, you’re probably setting them too low.

2) Goals are not about proving that I’m good enough to hit them. Goals are about constantly growing and improving my skills. Dr. Halvorson says, “Focus on getting better, rather than being good.” If we set goals that we know we can achieve, then there’s no growth involved. Setting goals that require us to learn, to acquire new skills, and to go outside of our comfort zone are what cause us to grow.

3) My goals are not my identity. My goals are a tool to help me grow. Not hitting my goals says nothing about me. Constantly growing and getting better says a lot about me.

So set high goals. Work hard to reach them. And be happy when you don’t. The only reason they’re there is to help you get better and better. And when you do reach them, keep moving the goal post!

Some of you may have set a goal to grow your business this year. If you’re looking to increase your sales by a lot, your website can be a big factor in making that happen.

We have clients who have increased their sales by $100,000 per year, $300,000 per year, and a few have increased even more than $1,000,000 per year by making their website their number 1 employee. If this is something you’d like to discuss, contact me and we can set up a time to talk.

Steve Johnsen is a marketing strategist, a business coach, and the Founder of Cloud Mountain Marketing. He is also the author of the Amazon #1 best-seller, 5 Easy Steps to Make Your Website Your #1 Employee.