How to Hire Positive Employees for Your Business Tune yourself to attract those with whom you can redefine your reality and make your business dreams come true.
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No entrepreneur is an island. You were created to work with others in a positive environment.
Your business success depends on you attracting customers and employees with whom you work well together. Such cooperation challenges the familiar notions of achieving success by becoming a self-made person and pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps. Despite its familiarity, such a notion is simply a myth. You've been the beneficiary of working with others since before you can remember.
Do you remember your mother and father getting up at two o'clock in the morning to feed you? Of course not. Even though it happened night after night for months, depriving your parents of much-needed sleep, these gracious acts of compassionate kindness your parents offered just because they loved you slip through your memory.
There are other gracious acts of cooperation others have done for you that similarly slip through. All of these cooperative acts combine to make you who you are today -- a unique human being capable of a positive workstyle.
The people around you--customers/clients, employees/employers, family/friends, and vendors/suppliers -- are there for you to lean on when the weight of doing business is too much for you to stand alone . . . and when isn't it? These people are your team.
Cooperating completely with others presupposes that you are incomplete alone, but complete with others. Sometimes, our ego gets in the way of understanding this concept. Part of the challenge for entrepreneurs is that we are really good at so many and varied tasks that we buy the lie that we can truly do it all. The truth is if we really want to make our dreams come true, we must redefine our egotistical reality of "I can do it all" to "There is something I missed."
One of the most essential ingredients of working positively and cooperatively with others is that how much you think you accurately perceive in life, there is something you miss -- or some subject that someone else knows more about than you do.
Related: How to Tap the Power of 'Thank You'
No matter which direction your business is going -- up or down -- you can use some help. The good news is you have it. The universe is designed to partner with you, to provide resources beyond your control for your business's well-being, including relationships with others who can help you.
The key to leveraging these relationships is to become the kind of person that you want to attract into your business life. You should be someone you would want to do business with.
Consider these questions in shaping yourself to attract positive business partners and clients:
- What are my core values, i.e., those character traits that I want to exhibit in my business relationships? What would my family members say are my core values?
- What are my life priorities--those matters in life that I consider most important not just in word, but in work behavior as well? How do my calendar and bank statement reflect these priorities?
- What is my unique contribution to make in the world through my business and how do I live into it daily?
Just as "birds of a feather flock together," you literally attract people with whom you share core values and life priorities. For example, if you conceive your business more positively, you will attract similar people with whom you can grow your business--and whom you can also help in their lives and businesses. Those who resonate on this frequency are drawn to you because of your common business life pitch.
Related: How to Create a Positive Business Outlook
Conversely, if your business life is more negatively grounded, you find people coming into your business--whether as customers/clients, employees/suppliers--who are more of a negative persuasion.
Do you ever find yourself complaining about your customers? They don't pay their bills on time, or maybe they're constantly trying to get something for nothing. Who attracted them to your business?
What about your employees? Ever hear yourself saying, "You just can't find good help these days" or "Nobody wants to want work anymore"? Who hired these employees?
Now stop, and ask yourself: "How am I attracting these people? What is there about me that attracts them, that pitches them in my direction?"
Related: Is an Office Vampire Draining Your Productivity?
One of the greatest challenges in creating a positive workstyle is understanding that like attracts like. These people onto whom you shift responsibility for your challenges are in your work life because you chose them. You attracted them by way of your business's core values, your business priorities, and your business's unique contribution.
Once you perceive your work life in a positive light, then, because you are created to cooperate completely, you begin to attract others to your team who share your positive direction. Those who choose to work positive will find their way to you.
This article is an edited excerpt from Work Positive in a Negative World, by Joey Faucette and published by Entrepreneur Press.
