Time to make a brave change - guest post by Winston Marsh

This is a guest post from my mentor and friend Winston Marsh.

Whatever you've already decided you'll do next year, or if you're still doing some deciding, I reckon the following advice from Winston is highly valuable.

Let me ask you a question. If you do what everybody else does what result must you get? And the answer is pretty simple… the same as everybody else. And being the same as everybody else… is being average.

That’s somewhere between the cream of the crop and the cream of the crap, somewhere between the bottom of the best and the best of the bottom. Being there is crazy!

Being average is like having one hand in a bucket of freezing water and one hand in a bucket of boiling water and saying that, on average, you feel fine! And that’s garbage... one hand you’ve got frostbite and the other you’ve got blisters.

So in business you must change your thinking and…

Do what others don’t do!

If you do what others don’t do you’ll get the results that others don’t get. You’ll get sensational profits, great staff, fantastic customers and premature retirement to the beaches of the world.

Let me warn you that adopting this step, doing what others don’t do, isn’t easy… at first.

I call it the “loneliness of leadership”.

You know what happens. You go to a seminar or read a great book and you roar into your factory, shop, office and tell the team, “Things are going to be different around here.”

They will look at you and think “We’ve heard all this before and nothing ever happens if we ignore it” so they’ll probably snigger. You’ll persist and tell them, “No I heard this speaker or I read this book. We’re going to do some things differently. We’re going to do this and this and this.”

They’ll immediately respond with, “You can’t do that…”

You’ll ask, “Why not?” to which they will smugly reply, “Because nobody else does it.”

And that’s the opportunity…

When you do what nobody else does you get results that nobody else gets!

So, when somebody else tells you it can’t be done because nobody else does it, learn to respond this way. Shake your head backwards and forwards in agreement and slowly say “Go-oo-oood… now we can get results that other people don’t get”.