What can you expect to get out of using these six breakthrough strategies? The most common results for entrepreneurs include:

• Significant increase in income
  
• A goal achievement process that works
  
• A more satisfying lifestyle and workstyle
  
• Elimination of non-productive activities in favor of value-adding activities that propel you toward your goals
  
• A more predictable future
  
• Peace of mind and increased confidence in your ability to accomplish your goals faster and easier

1. Strategic Vision
This is the process of identifying and clarifying areas of significance to you and your business. For this breakthrough strategy, identify the eight or 10 key areas that are important and essential for your business and your personal life—cash flow, customers, employees, family, friends, spiritual growth, health and so on. Write them down. This is what strategic thinking is all about.

In each of these areas, develop a crystal clear vision of where you want to go. What’s possible? What does it look like when you’re living up to your best expectations in each of these areas? Describe as best you can, in writing, what it looks like and feels like when you reach the point of being satisfied in each of your key areas. This represents a picture of your future as you want it to be.

With clear purpose and direction, your efforts will be laser-focused on the results you want.

2. Tactical Action
These processes ensure that your actions and decisions are aligned with your values and vision. Through tactical action, you set critical milestones, success yardsticks and key tracking indicators so you achieve your goals faster and easier. 

Set aside a couple of hours this week to contemplate your three, four or five major business goals for the remainder of the year. Don’t get hung up on the small stuff. Look beyond today, this week and this month. Picture yourself on December 31, 2000, reflecting on the significant accomplishments of the year. What will have had to happen for you to be satisfied with your progress?

Don’t forget to include your personal goals. They may be family related and growth related (preferably both). When your monthly goals are in sync with your long-range goals, and your daily activities are leading toward your monthly goals, you achieve goal congruence, professionally and personally.

3. Quality Of Life
In our high-demand, knowledge-based economy, issues such as free time, satisfaction and peace of mind are not just nice-to-have. These things are crucial to your ability to operate an enterprise at peak effectiveness.

The emergence of creativity, ideas and information as our most valuable resources, and the pervasiveness of the global, 24-hour-a-day business world have changed our concept of “time equals money.” Now, it’s “results equals money.” And we all know that more time at the office does not necessarily mean more results. In fact, it often means fewer results and more mistakes.

The solution is to take time away from your business. Free time makes you sharper. Free time provides the rejuvenation you need to restore your confidence and sense of well-being. You come back from time off with a new perspective, a higher energy level, increased creativity and often, a breakthrough idea.

Take one vacation a year, get one breakthrough. Take two vacations, get two breakthroughs. Take three, get three.

Getting and keeping a superlative quality of life is best done systematically, not just when convenient. By consciously attending to the balance in your life, you can create a rich quality of life most people only dream of having.

4. Leveraging
Here, you will regularly examine the results you get from the investment of your time and money. Leveraging to produce high-impact results is attained through support people, automation, outside specialists, smart delegation and shrewdly managed priorities. Many entrepreneurs still operate under the mistaken belief that results are in direct proportion to how hard they work.

This is why it’s important to make wise decisions about how you invest time and energy. Why do you feel that there’s more to do than you can possibly do? Because there is more to do than you can possibly do. You must make choices; often very difficult choices.

It’s imperative that you are doing the right things, every bit as much as doing things right. You’ve heard of the 80/20 rule—20 percent of all activities produces 80 percent of the meaningful results.

What are your 20 percent? What are the handful of activities that produce the results that you want, that will make a difference, that will take you in the direction you wish to go? Remember, you are rewarded only for results.

5. Strategic Relationships
Inevitably, the largest share of your income flows from a relatively small number of key economic relationships, generally your top clients and referral sources. Identify these special relationships that require nurturing. Create action plans around retaining and developing maximum potential from each.

Truly effective entrepreneurs succeed because they are genuinely curious and concerned about people in general—and customers in particular. Their desire to understand the customer takes priority over their desire to sell products and services. The delightful irony, of course, is that the very reason they’re successful at selling is because they have made their desire to sell a secondary issue. The primary issue is the relationship they have with their customers. 

In too many cases, entrepreneurs focus on current transactions rather than relationships that will sustain and grow the business over the long run.

6. Learning And Constant Improvement
When you’re proactive about learning and improving instead of just letting it happen, you accelerate your capabilities, expand insight and experience startling advances in your thinking.

Effective learning must be conscious versus unconscious, active rather than reactive. It must be something you seek. If learning ability is not conscious, it can’t be improved. It just becomes another habit, without effective application to the circumstances in your business (and personal) lives.

To become a good learner, and subsequently, a good change master, become an active, conscious learner on a daily basis. Create a diary or log of your most important daily experiences. Set aside time daily to consciously learn from your experiences.

Putting The Strategies To Work
These six breakthrough strategies provide a practical, systematic way to achieve remarkable results. This approach, once mastered, becomes a habit that enables you to continue your program of extraordinary accomplishments over the remaining course of your lifetime.

Here’s how you get started. Pull out your appointment calendar and block out three or four hours each month when you can work. Use this quiet time to think seriously about your personal and professional life. Use the six breakthrough strategies as your guide.

In each planning session, focus on one or two of the breakthrough strategies. Articulate the desired end results, map the possibilities, and create an action plan for the coming three-month period. Refer to this action plan as you plan your time each day or each week.

About The Writer: Gary Lockwood is a business coach for entrepreneurs and professionals. He can be reached at 800-272-1575 or by e-mail at gary@bizsuccess.com.