Success Tips from Teri Hawkins

Teri Hawkins, best-selling author, Money magazine Top 100 Female Entrepreneur and coach to such leaders as Lee Iacocca and Liz Claiborne, engaged and captivated attendees at Comerica's first quarter Women's Business Symposium. This incredibly savvy entrepreneur challenged us to be ourselves to achieve maximum success. Women, as a group, are extremely good at developing personal relationships. However, many women, relying on male role models fail to capture the value of relationship building in business. She thinks that relationships are more important than ever with the epidemic need to be understood.

Some of Teri's additional success tips include:

• Let go of the need to always get things right.
• Make mistakes quickly and learn from them. Some of Teri's best ideas have come from messing up. The cost of seeking perfection is extremely high.
• The most successful entrepreneurs spend 95% of their time selling.
• Seize moments to interact, learn and be heard.
• Be sincere.
• To overcome event anxiety, Introverts should arrive early and volunteer to help.
• Be engaging when meeting new people. An engaging talker and engaged listener both have power.
• 98% of communication is nonverbal.
• Dress for who you are.

Sight Doesn't Ensure Vision

As my blog, "Everything's Connected" indicates, I embrace 100%, the premise that we are all connected. Though the uniformly accepted premise is that there are 6 degrees of separation, my premise is that in Houston, there are only 3 degrees of separation.

I had the most fortunate privilege of discovering a very "insightful" Houston entrepreneur who has converted his lack of sight (he's been blind since birth) to inspire us all to harness the unimagined.  Vince Morvillo is a highly successful business consultant and entrepreneur.  With no outside financial support, Vince personally built one of the largest sales organizations on the Gulf Coast, taking it to profitability in just two years. 

He has achieved the unimaginable, becoming the first blind person in history to win a national yachting championship. 

Vince has replaced lack of sight with incredible vision.  I hope that we can all learn to use all of our senses to achieve our ultimate potential.