Success Starts with Action – Make 2008 Your Best Year Yet
By Caterina Rando, MA, MCC

Every day, every moment you have a choice, a choice to be proactive or reactive in your life and business.  A choice to reach for the stars or keep holding on to the railing, a choice to take steps to create the success you want or to sit back and see what life serves up for you. Think about it: if life where a buffet wouldn't you be more satisfied with a plate of food you selected for yourself or a plate someone else put together for you, possibly full of foods you don't enjoy and missing your favorite items. The way to get what you want served up on your plate of life, and to achieve the success you strive for in your business, is to commit yourself to a lifestyle of action.

Ask yourself: are you fully in action? Are you taking steps every single day to get your goals or are you waiting to see what will happen before making a move? Are you more concerned with what other people will think than doing what it takes to get your sales and bookings up?

Action is more than doing – it is also an attitude. One where problems are seen as possibilities, setbacks as motivation to do more, cancellations as fuel to do better. When you are proactively engaged in your success process, any obstacles that present themselves are seen as opportunities to learn, occasions to do things differently and openings for positive unforeseen outcomes. What could be possible for you in your business if you committed to more action?

Strategies for Staying In Action

1. Commit Yourself to An Attitude of Action
Make an agreement with yourself that you are not going to take it easy in your business. Commit to being an engaged entrepreneur everyday.

2. Look and See
Where in your business is there room for more consistent action?
Where do you need to pump up the productivity? What are three things you could do everyday to increase revenue from your business?

3. Create a Sustainable Action Plan
This is a marathon, not a sprint. Identify what business actions you know, when regularly repeated, will build your business. For example: consistently doing two parties a week, consistently making calls three times a week, having appointments to talk to your leaders once a week.

4. Get Into Action
Thinking and planning is very important, and I encourage you to recognize it as a key success factor in your daily/weekly/monthly and yearly success plan. Do not stop at the planning. Follow your ideas through to the action. That is where the results happen.

5. Expect Success!
Do not get discouraged and give up when your actions are not reaping the results you want right away. It is consistent action over time that creates results. You have to stick with it and persevere through times when nothing is happening to get to what you want.

Being an action-oriented person does not come easily for all of us. Remember an object in motion stays in motion, an object at rest stays at rest. Once you get in action it will be easy to stay there.

Caterina Rando, MA, MCC, shows women in direct selling how to book, sell, recruit and lead with ease. She is the creator of the Business Breakthrough Coaching Program to accelerate your business growth. Visit http://www.directsalescoaching.com to sign up for Caterina’s free monthly business-building tele-classes, read more articles, listen to podcasts and find out about her coaching programs. Caterina can be reached by email at cat@directsalescoaching.com or by phone at 415-668-4535.