What will it take to up your game?

It doesn’t matter whether the driving force for change and growth is coming from within your business or something outside. What matters is motivation – noticing what motivates you, and turning that into the fuel for growth and change in your business.

Welcome to Bliss for Business! If you’re an entrepreneur, small business owner, or career-driven individual, tune in on Wednesdays to join Dani on an adventure to learn how to bring your work life in harmony with the thirteen Bliss Habits.

2012 was a huge year of growth for me. Maybe not growth in the traditional business sense of increased revenues and audience shares and things (although, looking back, it was) – but in the personal sense. What I want from my life started changing – and therefore my business started changing as well.

And here we are, not three weeks into 2013, and I’m seeing it happen again. This time, it’s an overwhelming sense that I’m ready. Ready to up my game, ready to take the next big steps, ready to tackle what’s coming next. Not only am I ready – I want to.

But this change isn’t being driven by business plans or ideas. It’s not a new product line, or a new target market. It’s driven by things that are important to me, things that lie well outside my business.

In the end, it doesn’t matter whether that driving force is coming from within your business or something outside. What matters is motivation – noticing what motivates you, and turning that into the fuel for growth and change in your business.

I’ve talked about growth before – specifically, growing smallness: the idea that you don’t have to “go big or go home”, as the old saying goes. And that’s true across the board – as true as it is that you need to take action if you want things to change. But there’s another layer to all that – you need to care.

It’s easy to say “I want to grow my business”. It’s easy to say you’re going to take certain steps, and easier to walk through them, unattached, because they’re the things you think you should do next to achieve a certain goal. But if you don’t care? If you don’t have enough give-a-darn to back that up? You won’t make it – and you’ll be miserable trying.

A strategy for successfully navigate growth and change – big or small – requires two things: a destination (where you’re headed, what that growth looks like), and motivation (the fuel to get you there). And that motivation sometimes comes from strange and unusual places.

What motivates you? Is it money? Security? Freedom? Flexibility? How can you use that to effect change in your business? And what would it take to get you to say “I’m ready to up my game”?

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Dani Nelson is a geek and a hippie with a passion for helping smart, creative entrepreneurs make their businesses better. Her secret ingredients? Strategy, tenacity, tasty beverages, and two unshakable beliefs: that you (yes, you) have awesome things to share with the world, and that marketing doesn’t have to be awful.