Today I participated in a fabulous Mastermind Group meeting faciliated by Gihan Perera, a website developer and mentor for presenters, coaches, consultants and trainers.

I was very interested to see how Gihan approached the whole web development process, what information he shared with others and how he was using technology in his own business and for his clients, as mentoring, web design & technology are core elements of my business.

I was pleasantly surprised to see two main things:

1.  Many of the suggestions that Gihan was making were in line with what I am already implementing in my own business, thus validating my knowledge and approach.

2.  There was still much to learn from someone else who has spent the past 15 years working in the industry and has developed a very solid sales model and methodology for doing business.

As I listened to Gihan field questions from members of the group it became clear to me that Gihan was a very gifted facilitator, drawing out of the group their desire and then helping them to clarify for themselves how that desire could be transformed into a refined niche and then pitched to potential clients.

I think the overall learning that I got from the morning, apart from specific sales models and website theories, was that you never know where your next step is going to come from in this world of learning. When Gihan invited me as a guest to his group, it just happened to coincide with a week when my husband was on leave and I was able to respond positively.  Had he not been on leave it would have been really difficult to get to the session.

I feel this is serendipitous for me, because just like when I went and interviewed Tracy Hodgkins recently and discovered some fabulous gold nuggets, I felt a shift internally again in relation to how I operate my own business and also in how I can pass on my skills and knowledge to my clients.

I would encourage you, if you are a business owner, to surround your life with people that are going to extend your thinking, your knowledge and your experience.  I met Gihan on the site, Thought Leaders Central.  I didn’t know when I went to look at the site out of curiousity that I would find and meet such an extradordinary bunch of gifted people.  Sometimes we just have to follow our gut and see where it leads us and we never know who is going to come along our path who will cause us to take that next big step in our journey.

One fabulous resource that Gihan shared with me from his site was a book he has written entitled Websites for Teachers, Trainers, Coaches and Consultants, which teaches you the basics of business models and what to include in your website and more importantly the WHY.