If you are a home based business owner or an entrepreneur then you have probably ran into naysayers either criticizing you, your product, or your business. You are always going to run into people that have something negative to say, however how you handle yourself in those situations is important to the growth of your business. Today we’re going to discuss how to respond to your current situation and what steps you need to take in order for you to continue on the path to success.

In any situation whether it’s good or bad there are three ways to respond. You can React, Respond, or Initiate.

Reacting doesn’t take any thought, because it’s purely emotion. Acting on emotion is not a very smart move. We see in the real world many people going to jail and doing time because they reacted. The bottom line is that reacting requires very little thought.

Responding takes a little more effort and a little more thought. Some responses are good while others involve more emotion than thought which could lead a situation going nowhere. Responses are all over the place; responses to emails, verbal, responses, video responses, responses in forums, etc. If you are going to do any kind of response than I think you will need sit down and really think about what you’re going to say before you respond.

Seth Godin said in this book Tribes, “Initiating is really and truly difficult, and that’s what leaders do. They see something others are ignoring and they jump on it. They cause the events that other have to react to they make change.”

Initiating is by far the best of the three. Let me explain how I took the initiative in my business and totally bypassed reacting and responding. When I first got into network marketing I was approached by an “old schooler” who closed me hard and I joined his organization. I brought some people into the organization but it was like my job in the corporate world, their marketing tactics just didn’t fit my personality. It wasn’t fun, I was driving all over the place going to different meetings and presentations, and I was wasting a lot of my hard earned money.

Around the same time I discovered online marketing. It was way different than what it is today, but it caught my eye and I wanted to learn as much as I could. I approached my upline and told him about this new world of marketing that I discovered. His response to me was, “That’s not how this organization does business. You need to stick to the system.”

Well I didn’t like the system, I wasn’t content, and I wanted more. So I left that company. I didn’t leave because of the money; I left because I wanted to learn as much as I could about online marketing. You see, when he told me that I couldn’t market outside of their sales system I could have reacted with my emotions and gave him a piece of my mind, and I could have responded appropriately after thinking and formulating my response, but I chose to initiate my several yearlong study of online marketing. In a sense I was initiating my future.

Fast forward about 7 years and now I am in a social media class that Jonathan Budd, Katie Freiling, and a few others were teaching. They taught me how to blog, market through social media sites, and actually get traffic. After the course I started I initiating. I got busy implementing every strategy and tactic that they threw at me and I started to get traffic to my blog (real traffic….not my parents just stopping by) and the leaders started to notice me.

From there things just took off. I got asked to be a leader in another class, and I met 5 other great guys who are now my business partners and we formed a company called Empowered Tribe where we teach people how to set up a social media tribe that will help them quickly their business up and running online. All off this happened because I chose not to settle, but chose to initiate.

One leader defined the term leadership as a planned assault on the status quo. In other words, don’t settle for what is, initiate for what will be. Each person initiates differently. Some people may initiate by just getting their blog up and running and finally taking control of that, while other people may initiate by developing their own product and / or course. Still some people may initiate by breaking off with their currently company and going a totally different direction. In any case, nothing will get done, no progress will happen, and no change will take place until you first take the lead and initiate.

Sometimes we don’t know how to initiate, where to begin or what to do. I would suggest that you look to leaders in the industry that you admire and see how you can emulate what they are doing. Sometimes you need to pay a mentor to help you get started and help get your thought process down on what you want to do and how to get you there. That is perfectly alright because all leaders have mentors. We just need to take the first step and initiate it!

Below are 6 steps to help you initiate your future:

1. Analyze your current situation and see if you are satisfied with where you are in your business.

2. If you are not satisfied think of where you want to be and what you want your business to look like. Visualize what you want your business to look like.

3. Write out some clear and measurable goals for your business. These goals need to be as clear and specific. For example, I want to master social media is not a very strong goal. A better goal may be, I want to have 10 opt-ins a day into my autoresponder in 6 months by implementing the 10 tactics Michael Feil teaches in his autoresonder class. Can you see that the second example is much better than the first because it is specific and gives a time period?

4. Now that you have your goals you need to set up your plan. Basically, what steps are you going to take to get to your goal? All this needs to be documented in a place you can go back and look at it again and again.

5. Now comes the initiate part. Start working your plan and making a change. Like I said before, often the initiate part starts with breaking off of something you are doing that is not getting you to where you want to be. It’s time to leave the status quo and start making things happen.

6. Once you start working your written plan you should now be able to see a change. Things are now taking off and you are making a difference with your actions and your plan. This would be a good time to ask a mentor to check out what you’re doing to make sure you’re on the right track. You may have to pay for this or if you know the right people it may not cost you anything. If you do have to pay this would be money well spent.

Initiating is a 6 step process and most of the time it won’t happen overnight. It will take time and it will take some work on your end, but if you’re not satisfied what how things are going it probably is time to start initiating change, especially if you want to be a leader in your industry.

I want to encourage you that no matter where you are today you can be successful. You are someone of value and of worth and you are important to this world. You can make great things happen, all you have to do is bypass reacting and responding, and just roll up your sleeves and start initiating. The future is wide open. Visualize what you want, then start initiating to make the change towards your dreams and goals.

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