Terence's jottings

The Power of Asking: 7 Ways to Boost your Business

by Jack Canfield

The gift called “asking” has been around for a long, long time. One of life’s fundamental truths states, “Ask and you shall receive.” Kids are masters at using this gift, but we adults seem to have lost our ability to ask. We come up with all sorts of excuses and reasons to avoid any possibility of rejection.

Yet the world responds to those who ask! If you are not moving closer to what you want, you probably aren’t doing enough asking.

Here are seven asking strategies you can implement in your business (and in life) to boost your results and your bottom line:

Asking strategy #5: Ask for more business

Look for other products or services you can provide your customers. Devise a system that tells you when your clients will require more of your products. The simplest way is to ask your customers when you should contact them to reorder. It’s often easier to sell your existing clients more than to go looking for new ones.

Asking strategy #6: Ask to renegotiate

Regular business activities include negotiation. Many businesses get stuck because they lack skills in negotiation, yet this is simply another form of asking that can save a lot of time and money. Look at your vendors and suppliers and see if there are areas where you can be saving money. Just ask.
All sorts of contracts can be renegotiated in your personal life, too, such as changing your mortgage terms and rate, reviewing your cell phone plan and requesting a policy review with your insurance agent. As long as you negotiate ethically and in the spirit of win-win, you can enjoy a lot of flexibility. Nothing is ever cast in stone.

To be continued

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Jack Canfield, America's #1 Success Coach, is the founder and co-creator of the billion-dollar book brand Chicken Soup for the Soul and a leading authority on Peak Performance and Life Success. If you're ready to jump-start your life, make more money, and have more fun and joy in all that you do, get your FREE success tips from Jack Canfield now at: www.FreeSuccessStrategies.com

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Technical tips

Microsoft Excel

Using AutoFiltering

If you have a large list, then sometimes you only want to work with a subset of its records. This is where filtering comes in. In Excel you provide the criteria and only those list records matching the criteria will be displayed. The AutoFilter feature makes this task easy.

For versions of Excel prior to 2007:

• Select any cell in the list.
• Click on "Data / Filter / AutoFilter" - Excel will add pull-down arrows to the right of all of your column header labels (fields).

In the case of Excel 2007:

• Select any cell in the list.
• On the ribbon display the "Data" tab.
• In the "Sort & Filter" group click the "Filter" tool - Excel will add pull-down arrows to the right of all of your column header labels (fields).
• Click on the pull-down arrow to display the list of unique values.
• Select the appropriate value and Excel will display all records matching that value for that field.

The rest of the records in the list will be hidden and the pull-down arrow in that column will turn blue.

Microsoft Word

Let Word make your case

There are different reasons for using uppercase letters, but one thing on which we should all agree is that it should never be necessary to re-key, manually, any text just to change its case. There is a way to let Word make those changes for you.

To change the case of text in a document, select the text, and then click on "Format / Change Case". You will have several options from which to choose:

• Sentence case: This will capitalise the first letter of the first word only.
• Lowercase: converts all the letters to lowercase.
• Uppercase: capitalises everything.
• Title case: capitalizes the initial letter of each word.
• Toggle case: Reverses each letter of the selected text; capitals will be turned into lowercase and lowercase letters will become capitals. This is handy when you have inadvertently typed a paragraph or two with "Caps Lock" on.

If you have only a small amount of text where you need to change the case, highlight the selection and pressing Shift+F3 Using this keyboard shortcut will toggle between lowercase, title case, and uppercase.

Microsoft Access

Boost keyboard efficiency

If you regularly work in Access, then it is strongly suggested that you customise the way the interface responds to the keyboard.

To investigate what options you have, go to “Tools / Options / Keyboard” and to the section labelled “Arrow key behavior”. You can now choose your settings based on your most common editing activity.
 
If you do a lot of entering in a field and mostly replace the entire entry, you probably want to set the “Behavior entering field” selection to “Select entire field” and set the “Arrow key behavior” selection to “Next field”.
 
However, if you routinely only edit portions of entries in a field then if Access is set to select the entire field upon entry, you'll have to press [F2] or use the mouse to deselect the entry and get to work. So it would probably be better to change the “Behavior entering field” to “Go to start of Field” and set the “Arrow key behaviour” to “Next character”.

These, and other, tips have been garnered from many sources over the years. My grateful thanks to the originators.

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Time management

A clean desk

By: Dr. Donald E. Wetmore

We all run into people from time to time who work with a messy desk and messy work environment. They have stuff piled up here and there, on the floor, on the shelves, and even on a table behind their desk. (They have to buy furniture to put this stuff on!)

And whenever you try to encourage that person to clean up their messy work area, do they get defensive! They have snappy retorts like, “A messy desk is the sign of an organized mind.” Or, “This is my external filing system.” And if you really push them they will almost always tell you, “But I know where everything is!”

“Out of sight; out of mind”, the old saying goes and the reverse of that is just as powerful. When it’s in sight; it’s in mind and most cannot help but be distracted by what is before them. “I know I should be working on this report, but let me just go through this junk mail real quick.” A messy desk can easily lead to lost items and missed deadlines. It is time consuming too, going through the same pile of stuff day after day.

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For free Time Management articles to help you get more done in less time, with less stress, visit our website now at: http://www.balancetime.com

Don Wetmore | Professional Speaker | Productivity Institute Time Management Seminars 127 Jefferson St, Stratford, CT 06615 | (203) 386-8062 (800) 969-3773 | Fax: (203) 386-8064 Email:ctsem@msn.com

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