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Cara Milan, Executive Communication Strategist and CEO of AMP Marketing and Public Relations.
As the CEO and founder of AMP Marketing and PR, I’ve sat in rooms with founders and CEOs from companies like big-name companies, including some of the country’s largest energy providers. My job is to help them tell their public stories, but often, I hear the personal ones too.
I often ask what made their business work.
Nobody says timing. Nobody says luck. Nobody says they were in the right place at the right time, even when they were. However, they do describe specific, learnable, unglamorous habits that they practiced so long, they became automatic.
PROMOTED
Realizing this changed how I view success. Business well-being isn’t a lottery. People who achieve success mastered practices that most people never do. And these practices, unlike luck, can be learned.
Here are seven key practices I’ve consistently seen highly successful business leaders possess.
1. Self-Belief
There’s a difference between hustling and driving. Hustling is motion. Driving is direction. Driving requires you to keep your foot on the gas when there’s no guarantee you’ll reach your destination.
One founder told me his secret to success was cutting the brakes off and stepping on the gas. This was a metaphor for his business. When something failed, he didn’t doubt himself. He learned his lesson and kept going. To him, failure was data.
Dream big, but be willing to do that work to get there. If you don’t believe you’re capable of the outcome, you’ll find an excuse to stop long before you get there. Trade that doubt for self-belief, and you might surprise yourself with the outcome.
2. Protecting Your Time
The most valuable thing a leader owns is a calendar. Successful people guard it intensely.
They end conversations. They leave rooms. They decline meetings with no clear purpose. Early in my career, I found this jarring. Now I understand it. They’re not dismissing you; they’re protecting the only resource they can’t get back: their time.
Protecting your time also means delegating properly. Delegation has two parts. Handing off a task is the easy part. The other is investing time to train someone properly. If you’re still doing most of the work three months later, you didn’t delegate. You postponed.
3. Self-Discipline
Discipline is what happens when nobody’s watching and nothing is due.
It’s skipping drinks with friends because you have an early commitment. It’s sticking with a plan through the eighteenth month when it was more exciting in the second. Discipline keeps you on track when the work stops being fun, the point where many people give up.
Social media has made this harder. There’s an entire economy built on the illusion of fast money and effortless scale. It’s convinced a generation that if something is challenging, they must be doing it wrong. However, most success, even when it’s seemingly overnight, is the product of years of work, determination and patience.
4. Patience
Every plan worth executing has a valley in the middle. There’s a stretch where you’ve done the hard part and still have nothing to show for it. This is where most people quit. They don’t go home to rest. They go looking for a faster plan with no valley. They start over, hit a new valley and quit again. Ten years later, they’ve started 15 things, finished none of them and concluded they have bad luck.
But if you’re always hunting for the next quick win, you’ll never build the success that takes decades to build.
Patience allows us to sit quietly and ride out the slow periods. It gives us space to tune into our intuition and see opportunities that we’d otherwise overlook.
5. Relentlessly Networking And Nurturing Relationships
The people who surround you should reflect what you want to be. When you are around people who embody successful traits, you have the opportunity to integrate their good habits into yours.
Every executive I’ve worked with treats their network as an asset that requires maintenance. It’s not just a contact list. They meet in person whenever they can. They follow up when there’s nothing to gain. They build the relationship years before they need it.
Opportunity moves through people. If your network is thin, your opportunities will be thin no matter how good you are.
6. Doing What You Say You’re Going To Do
Keeping a promise should be obvious, but not everyone does it. This trait sets apart the people whose word carries weight.
Don’t commit to something you already know you can’t or won’t do. Don’t tell someone you’ll do something when you have no intention to. Saying yes is easier than saying no, but that easy yes is a lie with manners. It costs the other person when you don’t follow through, and it costs you your credibility.
7. Doing Uncomfortable Things, Repeatedly
Bestselling author Tony Robbins said the most important trait for success is the ability to do the uncomfortable thing repeatedly. Lead the meeting. Give the presentation. Make the ask that might get a no.
Most people read the racing heart and the tight stomach as a warning sign. It’s not. It’s your body arming you with what you need to perform.
The first presentation is terrifying. The tenth, uncomfortable. The fiftieth, just a normal day. Nothing about the presentation changed. What changed is you.
None of these seven practices require a specific degree, background or luck. They simply require a vision, a belief in yourself. A repetition of habits even after the decision to try stops feeling exciting.
Source: Forbes
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