One wealthy lady, Dr. Niki Shuhada had this to say about the steps she took to reach her own success. From her business coaching experience, Dr Shuhada has found that these steps are actually essential habits that one should adopt to become successful.
This is a quick blog from the JTFoxx family reunion currently being held in Orlando.
What I’d like to do in this blog is just give you a quick overview of Dr Niki Shuhada’s essential points and share a secret I’ve had for a long time about one of her essential points. First a quick overview of Dr Shuhada’s five essential habits.
Essential Habit 1: Do deals with champions
The first and perhaps most essential habit is to do deals with champions. Early in Dr Shuhada’s career, she was willing to work for free for companies and people who she wanted to emulate. These were the champions in her life. She would see how she could do deals with the champions.
If Dr Shuhada, could not do a deal with them, she would try to see if she could work for them. If these champions did not have any position open, she would volunteer to do errands for them. These errands could be anything from:
- Collect visitors from the airport
- Make the coffee and tea
- Do basic administration
By working with champions, Dr Shuhada was able to learn how the champions operate, how champions do deals, how champions get the most out of their staff, and the habits of champions. Finally Dr Niki Shuhada implemented these habits in her life.
Essential Habit 2: Read self-help books
Dr Shuhada is a great believer in self-help books. Her favourite is Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill which she has read over 100 times and has 20 plus copies around her house.
Books like “Think and Grow Rich” give her ideas to improve her business and help to inspire and motivate her take her businesses to new levels.
Essential Habit 3: Entertain yourself with motivational content
One interesting essential habit from Dr Shuhada was for you to choose the music you listen to and to choose the films you watch that will inspire and motivate you in your life.
Essential Habit 4: Attend training and coaching continuously
Dr Shuhada felt much of her business and personal growth can be attributed to getting coaching from people who would help correct her own business processes. She has spent a lot of money receiving training and coaching but that money has been a great investment in helping her multiply her personal success.
Essential Habit 5: Visit inspiring places
Dr Shuhada’s fifth and final essential habit was travelling to and visiting inspiring places. Visiting inspiring places reminds you of your dreams. Inspiring places teach you about the ingenuity, beauty and wonder of the world.
Dr Shuhada’s essential point that gave me tons of skills and finance
From my perspective, Dr shuhada’s first point “do deals with champions” really resonated with me. It is a piece of advice I am constantly giving people. Do what you are passionate about. Be willing to work for free, if necessary to gain the skills and the money will eventually follow.
Whenever I have wanted to learn a new skill, I’ve gone and worked within a company that has a certain type of client, sometimes I’ve worked for free. It creates a WIN-WIN scenario. Your WIN is that you get a new skill, insights and contacts.
The employer’s WIN is that they get someone who is passionate enough to do whatever it takes to help them with the multitude of business processes that a company has (and believe me there are many).
An example was when I worked for free in the security world. The champions illustrated in my example were the technical security gurus and the chief information security officers. At one stage I was credited with the most security podcasts.
People used to tell me how dumb I was, how I was under-selling myself and how I should get paid for the amount of time and travel money I was putting in.
Cost to me
The amount of time was about four-six hours to create a ten minute podcast. The time was broken up as follows:-
- Time to research interviewee and their capabilities/skills/products
- Time to get to interview,
- Time to interview
- Time to edit
- Time to add an intro/outro and
- Time to write the podcast description
- Time to upload and publish
Over time I created over 200 podcasts for free – ie 800 plus hours. Apart from time, it cost me in terms of transport, software, paper, portable microphone, camera, home video-camera. The service was a WIN-WIN because:-
- the security gurus got exposure that they normally did not get
- or the security gurus could use me as a voice to talk about stuff that they were not allowed to talk about (ie they would provide me with information off the record – which I could write about as long as the source of that information was undisclosed)
So how did this help me in my career? Well as a result of putting in all this time, here are examples of skills I learned as a result of helping others and three financial deals I was given :-
- I became experienced at creating audio content that provided informational content people wanted to hear.
- I became efficient with my interview techniques which allowed me to produce 3-4 podcasts per interview.
- I became a security expert in my own right due to all the coaching, mentoring, discussions with the security gurus and chief information security officers, I interviewed and generally hung out with.
- I became a confidante to many in an industry where people rarely trust other people (that is an essential nature of the security world).
Deals deals deals
- I was given a 2- month deal to broadcast security training to the Indian government and all the schools and universities. This deal amounted to £100,000.
- I was given a deal to create 20 x 5 minute podcasts for a multi-national. This deal amounted to £30,000
- I was given a content deal for a security website. This deal amounted to £30,000
You can guess that putting in this many hours in interviewing people gave me a lot more skills and deals but this is a quick blog so I’m signing off now to write the next one.
More from the JTFoxx Family reunion success event:
- Cerebral Palsy, Paralysed, Blind and successful
- Bleeding is part of success – A great conversation between myself and Paul Kanofski
Other articles you may like to read:
