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Gratitude - an Important Component
of your Marketing Plan
Gratitude is a fundamental practice of Authentic Self Promotion and should
be one of the components of your marketing plan. Noticing all that you
have to be grateful for, and regularly writing thank-you notes, are cornerstones
of prosperity.
Experience this for yourself. Stop right now and make two lists. On one,
name the five people who have caused you the most grief in business in
the past year. On the second, name the five persons who have brought you
the greatest benefits.
Address 10 envelopes, one for each of the names on your two lists. Every
week for the next 10 weeks, write a thank you note to one of these 10
people and send it.
Naturally, it will be relatively easy to say what you are thankful for
when you write the five people who have brought you clear benefits. If
you only do this much, you will experience more positive moods and you
will notice more of the pleasant aspects of doing business. As a result,
it will be more pleasant for others to do business with you, and they
will tend to do more of just that.
But don't stop there. When you write letters of gratitude to the five
people who have brought you grief, I predict you will uncover learnings
that will open the door to new opportunities for success. While you may
choose not to send the letters to the folks who have caused you grief,
by mining the painful experiences for the learnings at their core you
will be radically altering the way these experiences influence your business.
How are you supposed to find something to be thankful for when a relationship
has been troubled, perhaps even damaging to your bottom line? I propose
that you cannot afford to have a loss you do not learn from, and once
you have mined the learnings from a bad situation, you clearly have something
for which to be grateful.
Informed Gratitude
Informed gratitude means being able to distinguish the
value of lessons learned from the sometimes toxic source of those
lessons. Cultivating appreciation and gratitude for all learnings
is not to be confused with agreeing to be abused or mistreated.
This is not mere verbal sleight of hand. It is a practice of mental and
emotional hygiene that is essential for maintaining a generative approach
to the ups and downs of being in business.
This action requires that you be rigorously honest. It asks you to look
deep into your heart and into your history to discover what your most
difficult relationships or transactions have taught you. Then it asks
that you graciously acknowledge, if only to yourself, the people who have
been party to that learning.
It may be that you choose not to send the second set of notes. Perhaps
you choose not to be in relationship with one of these people for very
good reasons. In that case, you can still write your gratitude for lessons
learned in your journal. This is not about sacrificing your dignity or
compromising your values; it's about harvesting the learning from the
bitter fruits as well as the sweet.
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© Molly Gordon, 2006. If you'd like to republish the above article,
please read our simple reprint terms.
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Develop Your Small Business
Marketing Plan - Index
Writing a marketing
plan || 20 helpful
questions for creating a marketing plan outline
A list of small
business marketing strategies for developing your marketing plan
Gratitude as a component of a marketing plan || Your
Marketing Plan Evaluation
Marketing Plan Resources
|| Reprint Terms for Marketing
Plan Articles
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Learn more about Authentic Promotion - a comprehensive
small business marketing resource that turns marketing and promotion into
a path of increasing self-awareness, authenticity, and right livelihood.
In particular, the principles you apply and the tools you learn build
the solid foundation for writing a marketing plan that works.
* * *
Contact an acknowledged expert
on small business marketing Molly Gordon at:
Shaboom Inc. Life could be a dream…
PO Box 195
Suquamish, WA 98392-0195
mgordon@authenticpromotion.com
As a business coach and small
business marketing consultant, Molly Gordon, MCC, is available in Greater
Seattle Area and internationally |
