When I talk to business founders about why they made the leap to working for themselves I often hear them talk about the draw of entrepreneurial freedom. I sometimes reply with a lame joke about how entrepreneurial freedom means you can set you own hours, work any 100 hours of the week you want to… But the truth is that being your own boss does bring freedom; but that freedom means different things to different people.

To some Freedom means….

• Saying no
• Never having to worry about a merger, or buy-out making you “redundant”
• Being able to decide what your time is worth
• Being able to set your own priorities, tea party with the toddler on a sunny day, or time in the office
• Choosing who to work with, and being able to work only (or mostly) with people you like and respect
• Taking the vacation of your dreams while you’re young
• Being home for dinner every night

What does entrepreneurial freedom mean to you?

Sometimes when I have this conversation with a business founder it can be kind of a downer. They made the leap to have freedom, and they may have had it for a time, but they’ve traded some of that freedom for more success and business. Some of the work I do is to try to help businesses continue to grow so that the founders can get more of the freedom back.

Are you living the dream? What enabled you to stay with the dream, or what’s keeping you from living in the freedom you had in mind when you started out? I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Is this worthy of my full attention? I’ve been asking this question a lot lately.

It started when I saw a number of articles about the high cost of multi-tasking. There’s this study out of London that found “Those distracted by incoming email and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ – more than twice that found in studies of the impact of smoking marijuana”. Or this series from the New York Times about the dangers of parenting while plugged in which says that “feelings of hurt, jealousy and competition [from their parent's technology] are widespread”. Lastly there was Peter Bregman’s blog post at HBR.org in which he describes his process of giving up multi-tasking. Working with a single focus enabled him to make significant progress on important projects, reduced stress, and improved patience. This all sounds good!

So if the benefits of paying attention to what we are doing are high, and the costs of multi-tasking are severe, why do I keep trying to do things while I’m distracted? The sad truth is, I multi-task when I get bored. That’s right, if I’m  on a conference call (even with you) and the conversation strays to a topic that I don’t need to be 100% on top of, my eyes will flit to my twitter stream, or I might check my email (it’ only takes a few seconds, I won’t miss anything). When there’s a lull in our dinner table conversation; maybe I’ll check the weather for tomorrow… It’s insidious. It’s so easy to avoid even a moment of boredom that I will do it almost every time. The problem that the “escape” to technology poses is that instead of choosing what to do with that moment, I spend that time scratching my anti-boredom itch.  Do I need to know what tomorrow’s weather is? Are those updates in my twitter feed really that important? What if instead I listened to the conference call to see if there is something I can add? Or if there isn’t excuse myself to get something more important done, or redirect the conference call to matters that are truly valuable and engaging to everyone on the call.

When I flit to technology to easy my boredom everyone loses, I’m not present, I’m not giving my energy and attention to the conversation and if we all do it, then someone rambles on with no one listening, and they get no feedback that they are boring. Yikes!

This is why I’ve started asking the question, “Is this worthy of my full attention?” If it’s not I should move on, if it is I should pay attention. Nothing is worthy of my partial attention, nothing.

I need to be clear and set good boundaries, either this is worth my time or it is not.  But beyond that, there might actually be a value to being bored. Peter Bergman again:

“Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that’s where creativity arises.

My best ideas come to me when I am unproductive. When I am running but not listening to my iPod. When I am sitting, doing nothing, waiting for someone. When I am lying in bed as my mind wanders before falling to sleep. These “wasted” moments, moments not filled with anything in particular, are vital.

They are the moments in which we, often unconsciously, organize our minds, make sense of our lives, and connect the dots. They’re the moments in which we talk to ourselves. And listen.

To lose those moments, to replace them with tasks and efficiency, is a mistake. What’s worse is that we don’t just lose them. We actively throw them away. ” (From “Why I Returned my iPad” on Peter’s Blog)

Is being bored worthy of my full attention? Sometimes it is.

Once you’ve been doing something for a while you start to figure out what works and doesn’t work.  You know when the “conventional wisdom” is right and when it’s bunk. Having tried all the “short cuts” you can tell people when they really save time and when they don’t. Experts have found not just good ways to do things but also good ways to explain them to other people.  Experts, if you get them talking about their areas of expertise, are interesting.

Moreover, the best experts have opinions that are different, that stand out. No one asks you to come to a conference to espouse the same ideas you can find in a Marketing 101 textbook. You get invited to speak, and people read what you write, when it’s something contrarian, unexpected, or contains particular insights. It comes back to being an expert. Experts know something that not everyone knows; and they have the courage (almost a need) to share that knowledge with others.

This is why writing and speaking (and increasingly video) are key parts of every professional’s business development toolkit. People want experts, people who know that they know. The best way to demonstrate that is to show up somewhere (either in person or virtually) and demonstrate your expertise. Talk about what you know (in person or on video), write about what you know (articles, books, blogs, etc.) show others that you know what you know.

Doing this over and over not only sharpens your skills; makes you more sure of what you know.  But it also helps you to fine tune your ability to communicate it.  You find better illustrations, you develop new ways to answer questions or overcome challenges. You become a better expert.

So many professionals see speaking and writing as a big chore. “If I’m such an expert why do I have to demonstrate it all the time. If I’m good, work will come to me.” But speaking and writing is more than business development, it’s also personal development. Honing your message and sharpening your presentation doesn’t just attract clients, it makes you better as an advisor.

Lately I’ve been feeling a little blah about work.  Don’t get me wrong, I love my job, but I’ve been at this for almost 10 years now, a lot of this is stuff I’ve done before.  One sales call starts to look like another sales call; writing another proposal, or meeting new people at an event, well, doesn’t seem so exciting the 900th time.

So it was just at the right time that I picked up “The Inner Game of Work” by Timothy Gallwey.  Tim has a lot of good ideas in this book, but the one that I’ve been working with the most is that there are three measures of satisfaction in work, Performance, Enjoyment and Learning.  He says that if any of these three get out of balance (e.g. if you focus only on performance) then the other two will suffer. So if you are feeling flat about your work, you might try dialing back on the performance measures, and add a dose of learning.

But how do I add learning to tasks that I’ve done 900+ times?  Glad you asked!

One solution is to be really observant. I may be on my 5th interview of the day, but I can still watch really carefully for the facial expressions that the interviewee is giving me.  Even on the phone, can I recognize the emotion in their voice, are they excited, scared, nervous? By focusing in on these critical details I realize that this interview isn’t really the same as the other 4, their emotions are all different; in fact it’s at totally different person! Being observant has helped me to see what’s unique and different about this interview, and since it’s different there are things to learn.

A second solution is to challenge my own thinking. Writing that proposal, how can I get the idea across with fewer words?  Or what if I tried using an illustration, or a chart?  Would that improve the communication? Forcing myself to look at the challenge afresh, and maybe learn something new in the process keeps me learning.

Now comes the magic part; this not only helps me to keep focused on tasks that I’m not that fired up for, but it also improves my performance.

When I listen for the emotional clues in the interview, I’m listening much more closely to the interview.  When I try to craft the shortest sentence that communicates what I need, I think more deeply about what I need to communicate. You get the idea; it’s a double whammy!  Not only is the task more interesting and enjoyable, but the performance improves too!

So if you are doing more tactical work, or if what you have on your plate is too routine, see if adding some learning or challenge can help revitalize the task and improve your performance.

What do you do to rejuvinate your routine tasks?

For over a decade I worked in a job where I traveled 9 – 12 days each month; 40% – 70% of my days were spent somewhere else.  It seemed normal to me, most of my peers were doing it. If I wanted my career to go anywhere it was clear that travel was a part of that.  My boss and all the executives at his level were “Platinum” frequent flyers, it was part of the job.

I have now gone nearly a decade where I have only had one assignment that I had to fly to perform.  I recently had lunch with one of my colleagues from those days of heavy travel. He’s still traveling a lot and despite the fact that he had a heart attack, he’s overweight, puffy, and his joints are stiff and sore. It got me thinking about the long-term health effects of business travel.

When I traveled for business I ate almost exclusively in restaurants, and often indulged in foods or drink that I wouldn’t have at home.  I exercised less, stayed up late.  That’s just the physical challenges.  There’s also isolation, loneliness, stress of performing at a high level in unfamiliar environments and with people you may not know. The isolation isn’t just on the road, being gone a lot puts a lot of strain on your relationships at home, and with friends in your home town too.  You are not part of the community in the same way that you could be if you were home. Not everyone who travels experiences all of these issues, but I would say that everyone experiences some of them.

Businesses are talking a lot more about their corporate responsibility; they are trying not to externalize the costs of their environmental impact, provide workers compensation to offset the cost of injuries, and try to engage our communities to “give back” to those who help enable our success. In that context maybe business travel isn’t the world’s greatest threat, but the cost of business travel is extremely high, and I’m not sure we are doing enough to avoid it.

I know there are times when you have to be there.  Yesterday I lamented the ability of people who work behind a computer screen all day to build relationships, I know there is nothing like sitting face-to-face.  But if people saw business travel for the health threat that it is, I think that some creative ways could be found to avoid it. I’m not saying we need to eliminate business travel, but I believe it can be reduced or limited.  What if there was a rule that an individual couldn’t travel more than 5 days a month, or 20 days a year?  We’d get really picky about when it was important enough to get on a plane.  Sometimes it would be worth it, but other times…

Study after study tells us that healthy workers are more productive, we know that one of the most influential factors in your health is the community of people you hang out with.  If business owners really care about the health and well being of their workers (and themselves) then making an effort to reduce business travel is essential.

I know there are healthy people who travel a lot.  There are also people who smoke and don’t get cancer, but when we see someone who smokes we want them to stop.  I think if we are honest with ourselves we don’t need a government funded research study to tell us that extensive business travel is unhealthy. It’s time to make a decision to do something different, to find different ways to work, and ways to diminish the impact that working has on our team’s health.

What do you think?  Is it time to get off the plane?

I’m of the first generation of college students who brought computers to college and when I started my first job I was the only one in my department who had a computer on my desk.  In fact I was hired because I knew what to do with one!  We had a fancy network too, it was called the sneaker net.  Yep, if I wanted to move a file from one computer to another I copied it onto a floppy and walked it over there.

Now I carry a computer in my pocket that’s so advanced it can’t even compare with the power of that college computer; and I can reach the Internet from anywhere. I can drive down the freeway and listen music streamed over the Internet on a  radio station created just for me (really, check out Pandora, it’s the bomb).

I’m a huge fan of technology and all that it enables us to do, I love being able to work from a park bench, or coffee shop if I want to, I love being able to have a great bookkeeper who lives in Austin, Tx, a writer in Springfield, IL, and clients across the country.

Still there are changes that technology has brought that are less charming.  When I started in business we knew that in order to make a sale, in order to build a relationship, we had to go meet someone.  Social Networking is great, email is very convenient, but I still believe that we do business with people we know and like.  There’s nothing like the 3D, real-life, meatspace to push that relationship forward.

When I started in business we used overhead projectors and slides to make a presentation.  They were a pain to make, and took a lot of time, so we only had a few.  Now presentation software is so easy we end up with presentations with 40 slides and 100 words per slide.  One of my favorite bosses would make us put our last slide up first, if he agreed with our conclusion he would tell us to sit down, he didn’t need to hear the rest of the presentation.  If not, then he’d listen and see if he was convinced.  With slides you had to think on your feet, rearrange things and respond to your audience. Presentation software seems to make everyone expect to sit and be entertained/informed, instead of participating in the presentation.  This is a big reason that I only speak with a flip-chart today, no projector, no slides.

The business leaders I learned from were a cautious lot, they wanted facts and not opinions.  They wanted to really understand something before approving it. Today that seems to be coming back into fashion.  We went through a decade where almost anything sold, and half-baked ideas were the norm.  But it seems that time has past, and the caution that I learned from my mentors is back in fashion again.

Yep, things have changed a lot in the last 20 years.  I wonder what the next 20 have in store?

Did you know that fear makes you stupid? Fear is perhaps the most powerful stupid drug that the human body has ever felt.  When we are afraid our reasoning and thinking is disabled by our body and instead we are thinking with our brainstem, basically reacting to reflexes instead of acting.

You know who lives with a lot of fear everyday? Business owners. I know, I’ve seen it in their eyes and heard it in their voices.  They are afraid of all that is out of their control.  Customers and clients, employees and partners, the government regulators and tax collectors, lenders, investors; there are so many forces that bear down on a business owner it’s easily overwhelming.

If these fears aren’t enough, there is one fear that almost every business owner I’ve ever talked to has that is bigger than all the rest.  We all feel like frauds, like we were lucky to get this far.  Yes, we worked hard, yes we are smart, but really… Someone’s going to find out that I don’t have a license for this, that I’m not trained for this, that I can’t do this and they are going to take it all away.

It’s true.  Almost every business owner I’ve ever talked too is secretly afraid that they are doing it all wrong, that they are screwing everything up.  That they are making big mistakes, that they will never recover from.

What makes it worse is that the people around the business owner most likely look up to them for their risk taking ability, for their courage and strength at taking on new challenges.  No one sees the fear that’s inside. So it stays there, inside.

But it is there and it’s making you stupid. What does that worry do for you? Does it motivate you, or hold you back?  Does it make you too cautious, or too reckless?

You have worked hard, you are smart enough, and experienced enough.  How do I know? No one is that lucky.  If you have gotten this far, you have what it takes.  I know that you could have made some better decisions along the way, and you could have done more at times.  But think about your employees, do you think that they make mistakes sometimes?  How much does that bother them?  Are they losing sleep over those mistakes? So they are making mistakes and sleeping well and you are making mistakes and not sleeping?

What’s the difference between their mistakes and yours?  When they don’t know something, or make a mistake, they can get help.  Their boss (or you) might bail them out, or show them a different way to do it.  But if you own your business, who do you ask?

Find someone who can help you out.  Don’t go it alone. We are pack animals, find a tribe who can point you in the right direction. Who is excited when you succeed, and disappointed when you fail?  Who knows all the risks you have taken?

Because there is one thing that fear will never get you, in fact that fear will keep you from ever achieving.

Peace.

During January many of us spend time setting goals and making plans. Often these are based on our aspirations, who we want to become. But there’s another side to this, sometimes we need to set goals based on who we don’t want to become.

Matt Linderman on the SvN Blog had a great take on this, start with an enemy, what you don’t want to become. Is there a firm that you just hate, can’t stand, don’t respect? What is it that makes your blood boil? How can you design your service offering to be totally the opposite from that? Better yet, how can you design your service offering to appeal to a large market segment that also hates that thing?

Maybe it’s worth an hour or so to thing about what you don’t want out of 2010, who you don’t want to become, and things that you shouldn’t be spending your time on. This is tricky, you don’t want to trigger a fear response, “If I don’t accomplish this thing then I’m going to be doomed to be that person I hate.” But we can use these things we are driven away from to set a direction or position, then set a positive goal of what you want to become.

For example, I don’t want to grow my business just for the sake of getting bigger. I want us to impact more businesses and create workplaces where people love to come to work. I hate the idea of growth for the sake of getting bigger, but I do want us to work with more companies and have more impact. So I might set a positive goal of finding better ways to measure the impact we’re having on our client companies. This would both insure that we are making positive change and prevent us from taking on work where we can’t have that kind of impact.

What do you hate enough to get out of your comfort zone and accomplish this year?

I love to ski. But, much of skiing is not even skiing; it’s waiting in line and riding the lift. So, you learn to find enjoyment in those down times. When I’m riding the chair lift, I spend my time watching other skiers on the slope below. My eyes are usually drawn to the skiers who blast through the hill and catch an edge, leaving their hat, poles and skis all over the slope like a yard sale. Those are the ones I want to watch! Likewise, if I haven’t had at least one wipeout by the end of a day of skiing … well, I haven’t been skiing! No mistakes means I’ve been playing it too conservatively and not really getting the most out of my performance.

The same thing is true in business. Sometimes you make mistakes – big ones, little ones and everything in between. If you never make a mistake, then you are playing too conservatively, staying within a comfort zone. Sooner or later, you have to push out of your comfort zone.

Business owners make mistakes. Not only is this human but it’s an acceptable and expected part of running a business. At the risk of losing a few of you here, I’m going to cite a line out of The Magic School Bus: “…take chances, make mistakes, get messy!” This quote may as well be the theme song of every business owner out there. Your business can’t grow if you don’t take chances, and doing so may mean you make a mistake on occasion. The business owner who doesn’t make a single mistake is probably not leading a growing business.

What great mistakes have you made recent? Did it lead you to fail forward?

Seth Godin’s blog post today rang true for me. As a cyclist I know that everyone goes fast downhill, but uphill is when you separate yourself from the field.

In the last few weeks I have been riding the North Branch Trail, which has two overpasses that have short, but steep uphill sections. Twice in the last few weeks I have had riders pass me on the uphill sections of those overpasses. Now I’m a little competitive and I don’t like to get passed at all; but I was particularly upset about getting passed on the uphill. I knew that it is easy to keep pace on the flat, but the uphill is what tests your mettle. So getting passed on the uphill really frosted me.

At the same time it’s the work you do on the flats that makes you strong enough to compete on the uphills. If you don’t work hard on the flat sections, you don’t build the muscle and stamina that you need to be fast going uphill.

There’s one other thing about the uphill, I find myself anticipating the coasting on the other side, and so I don’t always go hard all the way up the hill, I might start to slow down that last 10% (and give up any gains I might have made).

Where are you “coasting” in your life right now? How can you prepare for the uphill to come?

Where are you on the uphill? How is it that you are going to improve your game to get better NOW?

Go ahead and read Seth’s Blog Post: Winning on the uphills. He might have a few ideas for you.

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Brad Farris is a small business advisor with Anchor Advisors, Ltd. in Chicago, Il. Since 2001 Anchor Advisors has been helping creative professional firms to grow, by helping them clarify their purpose, get the most from their people, keep their eye on key performance measures, and implement consistent processes.