How is your energy level? Feeling good about what you are doing? Have a little love for that thing you call life?

Are you doing what you love or are you doing something you could just as easily give up? Are you dreaming about doing something different with your life?

Okay, let’s say you are not doing exactly what you want, but the money is good and you can take a vacation every once in a while. That’s all well and good, but what are you really dreaming of? Who do you really want to be?

You would be amazed at the number of people who I come into contact with who are just counting down the days to when they can retire. Or they hate their job, but they don’t want to quit because they don’t want to have to find another job, or even worse do something hard.

Staying where they are, as much as they hate it, creates a certain stability for them in their lives.

They don’t like the people that they work with, they don’t care about the company, it’s just a paycheck until they retire or stumble into a new job. Of course they are not looking for a new job, and that retirement will happen whether they are ready for it or not.

These people do not have a vision of a future for themselves. Or for the few that do, they have a vision but it is only a dream that they really aren’t planning for. They don’t do any extra work or take any extra risk to make their dreams come true. They don’t have an organized plan, and they have no energy to create their dreams because they really don’t know how to make their dreams a reality, or worse yet they are just too lazy.

I hate to say this, but in my humble opinion, negative people are lazy. It is easier to be negative than try to do something different with your life.

Heaven forbid you should embark on an adventure! Let’s walk through life as easily as possible; let’s make sure that we aren’t doing anything hard or dangerous.

What can we do to change this? Here are my tips for making the love and energy for life work for you:

1. Do what you have to do in order to get to a specific goal. If you are at a job that you don’t like, save some money and start to make plans to open your own business or be able to leave that job to start something new. Or start an active job search for new work. Quit complaining because it only stops you from achieving what you want.
2. Be supportive of yourself, and if you don’t get support from the people around you, drop them. You may have to work with some people who are not supportive, and that’s okay. Just make sure you have a plan to move yourself forward. I know that even now I have people that I need to move forward from because we don’t have the same values or understandings.
3. Develop your insight into what is good for you. You need to discriminate what is intelligent and logical for your life. You must be aware of your own character for success. Understand the facts as they apply to you and do what you can do that is good for you.
4. Develop your potential and qualities for your improvement. This is your evolution of gradually unfolding a plan of change for yourself so that you may have more than just a state of existence.
5. Gain the education, knowledge, skill, and competence that will allow you to move forward and accomplish all of the dreams that you can turn into reality.

Commitment to this kind of process for continual growth will make your love and energy for life work to give you the future you deserve.

In case you haven't had the opportunity to see Step Jones' presentations live, check out the brand new demo video streaming now on the LifeMotivations.com website. Step can bring his message of success and maximum achievement to your company or organization. Contact us for more information.

To those of you who forwarded our newsletter and signed up for the free gift, thank you. Your CD is on the way. To everyone else, there are now just three weeks left to get your free CD.

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Step one of customer satisfaction is “The customer is not always right.” Yes, you read this correctly, the customer is not always right. I know you have heard that "the customer is always right." Well, that is not true.

Sometimes the customer is wrong.

The corralary to this is that just because the customer is wrong doesn’t mean that we treat the customer wrong.

In a lot of businesses we have the opportunity to do business with someone or choose not to. If you have a bad customer you do not have to do business with them. However, once you take the customer’s money, you have decided to do business with that customer, no matter what.

But you do have the option not to do business with a customer and not take their money.

I have heard of managers or businesses finding that that they have a customer problem and wanting to know if the customer is a “good customer,” whatever that means to the manager. Maybe they paid regular price and not a discounted price, or maybe they buy a lot of the company goods- whatever the definition is of a “good customer” is to that manager or business.

Once you take the money for a product or service you have committed to customer service and satisfaction. You cannot have a two-or-more tier system.

I was running a large service business with hundreds of customers a day, and a practice that the company had before I got there was to define certain customers, and stamp their invoices internally: VIP or not.

Let me share with you that customer satisfaction was in the dump and a lot of it was because of this practice. (Other tips to follow next week). Some people were getting preferred treatment and some were not. Don’t you think that customers find out, or see or hear of preferential treatment, and wonder why they are not getting it?

It is another situation if you charge for special treatment, as some people are willing to pay for additional services. But be careful with day-to-day operations. Do not decide arbitrarily whether you are going to take care of one customer and not the other.

Once you have sold to the customer you owe them service to the best of your ability. It doesn’t matter if they are “good customers” or not. Don’t sell to them if you don’t want to service them. I know this is hard, because our business genes say, “Sell everyone everything!”

Don’t.

Two, if you give service to one person that is different from another you are sending the wrong message to all of the employees in the company: We can decide who gets service and who doesn’t. “If we give someone bad service that is OK, because they are not VIPs.” This is very dangerous to the company morale, and to the ethics of the company.

Once you sell to a customer, you owe them your best service. If you don’t want to give a customer good service don’t sell to them in the first place, or be ready to give them their money back.

The customer is not always right- I know it and you know it- but don’t send a dangerous signal to your people or peers by offering different levels of service.

One of the tips to great customer satisfaction is treating your customers with one level of service, the best you can, and making sure that all of the people around you know that the service you are providing is the best, period.

If you decide to sell to them, service them.

This week’s challenge: the average American cannot run around the block, reads less that two books a year, and makes less than $40,000 a year. Now you may think to yourself, “Self, if this is average then I am King Kong”. Before you grab Fay Wray in the palm of your hand, remember the goal in life is to become better at something every day.

May I suggest you get out your Success Card, (if you don’t have one we will mail you one for free!) and pick one characteristic that you would like to improve on this week. Carry the card and think of the characteristic. At the end of the week what happened in your life? Did you get better?

Some estimates, even in new studies, show that 90% or more of us are "hard wired", but more about that in next week’s newsletter.

Let me know.

Thanks,

Step

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