Create Your Business Success Habits

Create_Your_Business_Success_Habits

Personal, spiritual and business growth are all based on taking focused action in the right direction. If that doesn’t happen on a consistent basis, however, progress will never come.

That’s why successful people build solid habits first before they expect a business to grow or their personal development to be taken to the next level.

Habits are not just important, they are the foundation of success in any area of life. And while you know that only by flossing and taking good care of your teeth on a daily basis can you improve your dental hygiene, and that by eating enough proteins, veggies and foods that give your body the nutrients it needs, together with living an active lifestyle, can you be fit and energetic, let’s see how that applies to business.

Success habits are those things you consciously teach your mind to get used to, that will slowly but steadily get you exactly where you’re headed in life. In terms of business, it means choosing the right metrics and keeping an eye on them while they are increasing due to strategic actions you take. It means waking up early to do the most important work connected to the project, even though you’re still at your regular job and haven’t slept as much as you want to. It means cutting your expenses to the bare minimum in order to be able to quit your job now and dedicate the new few weeks or months solely to your new online business idea.

All these are habits. It’s not easy to start a new behaviour, and sticking to it is even harder, but there’s no other way to build a successful business, make a profit, turn it into your new career, and live a life of freedom, other than to do what it takes day after day.

If you’re already a proud business owner, you should still develop new success habits, be it to keep the business running, or grow and reach bigger business goals.

Such a habit might be going to one networking event in your field every month, even though it feels uncomfortable and isn’t something you’ve done before. Each time you drag yourself there, though, you’ll have the chance to listen to some of the smartest people in business talking about how they started and what helped them get to the top. You’ll be in the company of the influencers in your niche and will have the chance to start conversations. You’ll hear ideas, will get motivation directly from the source, will take notes and then check out the resources mentioned, will form relationships and then follow up via email, will hand out your business card and make a good impression.

Another success habit you can work on building is branding. Too many business owners neglect that aspect of the work, but in the digital era, it’s key.

To turn it into a habit means to do at least one little thing daily that will help you improve your personal brand over time. It could be joining a new social media channel, tacking a design element on your site, emailing a customer to ask him what you can improve about a product, taking professional photos of you, guest posting on another blog in the niche, updating your profile on LinkedIn, etc.

Each of these becomes a significant part of your overall presence online. And that’s why if you keep doing this, new clients, fans of your brand, potential partners and investors, will find you through search engines, or social media, or word of mouth.

So these are the types of success habits I’m talking about that can help you skyrocket your business this year. Which one sounds best? What’s the first step you can take to develop it as a new behaviour?

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Increase Your Success – Do What You Love

Increase_Your _Success _ Do_What_You_Love

Most people spend a lifetime looking for the secret recipe to success. They try to find out the smartest strategy in the world, the set of steps no one else has taken, the shortcut, and so on. When, in reality, increasing your success in life, together with your level of happiness, is much simpler – it’s about finding what you love and making it a daily thing.

Passion drives the world. Maybe you’ve noticed that if you aren’t passionate about something, you simply can’t do it right.

I’d go even further and say that if there’s no passion, it’s not worth doing it at all. Be it a university course your family wants you to complete, a relationship you’ve started just because it seems like the right decision, a business idea you’re after because of the money, or else.

All that is pointless. It will make you unhappy, and it won’t let you see any benefits.

Instead, dedicate your life to finding what you’re passionate about the most, and then find a way to turn it into your career, or your daily hobby.

But it’s not just an interest we’re talking about here. It’s the one thing. The thing that you can talk about for hours without getting exhausted, the thing that makes you laugh and cry, the thing that engages your mind so deeply that nothing else matters when you’re doing it.

That’s your calling in life, but it’s your job to find it. It might be hidden behind daily life.

Maybe you’ve aways been disapproving of the educational system because you didn’t think teachers are doing their job right. Maybe when someone asks you for advice, you give him practical tips, and really care about whether or not he/she follows them. Maybe you like spending time around children because they ask you for questions and instructions. Maybe you’re good at taking information about a subject and turning it into an understandable piece of knowledge that others can easily grasp.

Well, guess what? That’s your passion and you won’t find success or happiness unless you follow it.

Luckily, with the opportunities of the Internet these days, you can do anything without any money or experience.

So in this case, do an extensive research on what products you can create that will teach others something you know a bit more about. Will you self-publish a short but actionable eBook on Amazon? Will you start a blog and post long, informational articles a few times a week, until you grow the site and start offering your services in the form of Skype sessions where you’ll be the tutor? Or are you the type of person who can create video lessons and turn them into a course?

You’ll love every second of it, and the hard work won’t seem tedious at all. After that, however, when you do have students and people learning from you, you’ll feel so satisfied that no other feeling would compare to this.

That’s because you’re following the right path, and things just fall into place.

Keep doing this with passion, and be sure that the money will follow too.

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Creating A Business, Not A Job

Creating_A_Business_Not_A_Job

“If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!” 
― Michael E. Gerber, The E-Myth Revisited

If you own a small business, Michael E. Gerber believes you rely too heavily on remaining small.

Instead, Gerber says that the natural progression of a successful business is to grow it big enough to sell it.   
As a leading small business guru for 40 years, Gerber has been transforming the state of small businesses worldwide through his transformative books, coaching, and programs.

He published his latest book, Beyond the E-Myth (2016), at age 80.  In it he explains how to grow your business from “a company of one to an enterprise of 1,000.” 

 “Comfort zone living is death,” he says in a Small Business, Big Marketing podcast. “It’s implicit upon every one of us to grow.”  Move beyond where you are and “search and seek out” things not yet discovered. Otherwise, “living in your comfort zone means you’ve stopped climbing.”

Gerber teaches the essentials for growing a successful small business in his classic business book, The E-myth Revisited (2004):

First, focus on the three parts or personalities to running a business. You need all three to make a business work:

  1. Technician—the skills you have that make a difference
  2. Entrepreneur—the dreamer with a fresh idea who reaches for the stars
  3. Manager—the organizer who takes care of the details of the business

 

Use a Franchise Prototype to Set You Up for Success

Next, develop a franchise prototype or a system that sets up the business to operate and thrive even when you’re not there 24/7.  Gerber believes that a business that is dependent on the founder is not truly a business, but just a job that stops when you stop.

Gerber uses the franchise prototype of McDonalds to show how a well-functioning small business can expand and grow.  Franchise prototypes use manuals describing in minute detail how to run the business so that customers will have the same experience the world over. Use this same strategy to put in place a well-documented system for running and growing your own business.

Your business model’s goal is to provide customers with consistently high service. Make it easy for everyone to follow the same model. Provide structure by following previously agreed upon guidelines.

 

Practice Innovation, Quantification, Orchestration

Innovation means “providing a product or service in a more efficient, higher quality, or more profitable way.  You need to be continuously innovating to improve your business.”

Quantification combined with innovation determines what process works.  Gather information and measure what’s working and what needs to change.

Orchestration is the standardization of what works. Once you’ve tried and measured an innovation, it becomes part of “standard operating procedure.”  Everyone learns and implements it; this ensures consistent quality for your customers.

 

Create Aims, Objectives, and Opportunities

  • Establish a “Primary Aim” for your life. Then create a “Strategic Objective” for your business that will fulfill your primary aim. The strategic aim usually focuses on money, such as how much you’d like to make in five years or how much you’d like to sell your business for in 10 years.
  • Decide if an opportunity is worth pursuing. Will it meet your financial needs? Does this business idea solve a frustration for a large group of consumers?

 

Implement Successful Strategies

Organization – Figure out what roles your company needs and who will fill them.  “Replace yourself with a system,” Gerber advises in The E-Myth Revisited.   Each of the 12 positions Gerber identifies should have a “position contract” with a list of responsibilities that employees sign.

Management – Have an overall management strategy in place that allows your systems to work effectively.

People – Gerber suggests approaching your “people strategy” as a game in which employees want to take part in.

  • Make the game fun and something “you’d be happy to do yourself; otherwise other people won’t want to participate either.”
  • Allow for rewards and victories, but don’t make it so that people can reach the ‘end’ of the game.
  • Be open to changing the game parameters as needed.

 Marketing – Your marketing should persuade people’s unconscious minds. Learn about your key customer demographics.  How do they think? What problems do they need solved? What appeals to them about your products and services?  How do they regard the world around them?  Notice how other businesses market to similar demographics.

Systems – Understand and adopt the systems that are important for your business:                                              

  • Hard or physical systems, such as software or a website platform, solve problems, help you concentrate on providing value for your customers, and make your company more successful.
  • Soft systems give people a framework for doing their job well and providing high quality work.
  • Information systems gather information and data about the business and its operations. Learn how others respond to your products and services by studying analytics, such as website visits and page clicks. 

 Are you ready to grow big?  Share your successes in the comments below.

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Showering To Increase Productivity

Showering_For_Productivity

If the weather is getting cold where you are, one of your favourite activities might be to run to the shower, crank it on high, and enjoy the heat. But if you’re aiming for productivity, the better route might be to turn down the temperature. Cold showers have been shown to have amazing health benefits, and we all know that a healthier body is a more productive one.

Why Cold?

Cold water sounds like a miserable experience to most people. Why put yourself through the cold. Isn’t it dangerous to get too cold? Yet reports from those who tried it say they aren’t damaged by the experience and achieve great physical and mental invigoration from the experience.

There is more than just anecdotal evidence and here are some studies that back this up. 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4049052/

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17993252 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17958903

I think we can all agree that reduced fatigue and depression can lead to an increase in productivity. The first study shows many other benefits of immersion in cold water, including:

  • Improved circulation
  • Reduced hair loss
  • Stronger immune system
  • Improved hormones (esp. testosterone)
  • Increased energy

The reason for all these benefits is that the body must make a drastic response to the temperature change. It’s much like how high-intensity exercise can make you feel great for hours even if the exercise session is awful. This could be related to the phenomenon of hormesis. Hormesis, technically, is the body’s ability to adapt positively to low doses of something toxic or harmful in high doses.

A simple example is sunlight. Moderate exposure to the sun isn’t going to kill you. If you are out in the sun regularly in small doses, you’ll get a nice tan and you’ll get used to the heat. But if you’re an indoor dweller and you’re tossed out on a hot day with no protection, sunburn and heatstroke are sure to follow.

Cold water may have a similar effect. If you stayed for hours in cold water, you’d run the risk of hypothermia. But short exposures to cold like in a shower, or even a 20-minute bath, are enough for the body to respond in a positive way.

Many cold shower reporters say that they feel benefits even after just one cold shower, but that the effects multiply when you take them over several weeks. Your body will adapt to the cold over time, reducing the discomfort, and the span of the benefits will grow longer and longer.

However, there are a few medical conditions where cold showers are a bad thing. If you have heart problems, high blood pressure, or are feverish, you should avoid icy showers. It may be possible to acclimate to them if you lower the temperature gradually over time but speak with your doctor.

How to do it

There are two schools of thought about cold bathing. One says to go cold immediately and stay there. The other says that you should alternate between hot and cold. The jury is out as to which one is better for you.

Traditional cold bathers in Scandinavia like to alternate between sauna sessions and diving into icy water. Most of us don’t have a sauna and a frozen lake nearby, so we have to improvise with our showers. Followers of alternating temperatures say that the temperature swings cause more stress to the body and invite a stronger response.

Straight-cold bathers say that jumping from normal to icy and staying there causes a cold-shock in the body that provides most of the benefits. That initial experience of rapid heart beat and gasping for air is the body adapting to the cold. Thus, you should stay in the cold until that experience passes and all parts of your body are no longer affected by the cold.

You’ll have to experiment to see which one works best for you, but one thing all cold bathers agree on is that it can be hard to rinse the soap off your body with cold water. It can be done, it just takes longer to do it. Coconut-oil soaps are easier to wash off in cold water, so try those if your showers are taking too long.

Will it be hard in the beginning? Definitely. But if you’re looking for a productivity boost, a simple change that increases energy, mental alertness, reduces fatigue and depression, and improves your testosterone is worth exploring. Try a cold shower each morning for a month and see how you feel. We think you’ll like the results.

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Why Design Your Ideal Lifestyle

Why_Design_Your_Ideal_Lifestyle

The term ‘lifestyle design’ doesn’t appeal to people who aren’t familiar with it. But chances are, you’re already doing it one way or another.

Are you spending you free time doing things you enjoy? Do you choose your friends based on common interests and/or goals? Do you wake up a bit earlier in order to organize your day and get ready for going out without being in a hurry? Do you want more freedom in life and think that starting a business of your own might be the solution?

Well, all of that is lifestyle design. It means living life on your own terms, doing things exactly the way you want.

But anything I mentioned can be done unconsciously too, and without having a clear vision of the ideal lifestyle. It’s worth defining what you truly want, though, before you actually turn it into reality.

Here are some ideas on how to design your ideal lifestyle over time:

1. Monetize Your Passion.

Think of the things you’re passionate about and how you can start making money from them.

Go back to your childhood if you have to and bring back the memories of what you enjoyed doing, which made you lose track of time.

Consider the topics you enjoy reading about, the type of conversation you prefer to have with a dear friend, or the thoughts that engage your mind when you have nothing else to do.

All these, when combined, will help you find and clearly identify the one thing you’re good at and love doing. Then, you should do an extensive research and explore all options to see how you can turn it into your career.

 

2. Do It Remotely.

Next, it’s time to not just get rid of the regular job (it’s a huge barrier to designing the lifestyle of your dreams), but of the employee mindset, the fixed working hours, lack of creativity and focus, and the environment that doesn’t help you succeed even more.

Once you start making money doing what you love, you can turn it into your very own home based business. Working online is freedom as you’re the boss of your time, can start new projects whenever you feel like, can diversify your income streams by doing something new, can reject clients that don’t seem like a good fit for you, and can build your personal brand every day.

Working remotely also gives you the chance to either travel the world and still make money from your laptop, or move to your dream location and begin a new chapter there.

 

3. Organize Your Day In The Most Productive and Enjoyable Way

Next, you can create the ideal daily routine too.

Decide when you want to wake up and go to bed every day, and go from there.

It’s okay if you’re not a morning person. Now you have the freedom to wake up later, and still do all your work and have time for anything else you feel like doing.

Some freelancers or online entrepreneurs prefer to begin their day in the early hours, dedicate the first few hours to focused work, and thus feel accomplished before noon. Then, they arrange meetings and other things like daily chores or a workout for the second part of the day. The evening is a chance to meet with friends, go out, or just relax at home. Sounds perfect, right?

Designing your ideal lifestyle can become a hobby, actually. There’s always something to optimize. But that’s also what makes it fun.

So, what will you start with?

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Self-Improvement Your Greatest Return on Investment

Self_Improvement_Your_Greatest

If you’re a business person, you’ll know that return of investment, or ROI, is one of the metrics that concern you the most.

We’re talking about what you get when you invest something. And that can be applied to any other area of life. Self-improvement is no different.

Every small action you take today changes you a bit, it either gets you closer to the ideal lifestyle or distracts you from your most important goals, and it will have an effect on your way of thinking in the future.

“An investment in knowledge pays the best interest.” Benjamin Franklin

When most of the actions we take daily are unproductive, for instance, it’s no wonder that you won’t start a home based business, won’t get fit, and won’t excel at work.

But if you focus on self-improvement as your one priority, it means that anything you do or think about will be with this goal in mind – to improve yourself and your lifestyle.

 

Thinking Like an Investor

Investors are pretty smart people. They have the knowledge to manage their money well, to predict trends in the market, to deal with risk, measure progress against objectives, and seize opportunities. One thing that comes with enough practice, though, is thinking long-term.

An investor would take some time to see the real costs and benefits of an investment and take a decision based on the end result he’s after.

An investor will keep learning and trying even when everything seems to be falling apart.

An investor won’t follow any get-rich-quick schemes, as he knows the risk of that is even bigger in the long run. Instead, he’ll carefully watch what others are doing and what has worked before, will study the market, will invest only a small amount of his money and will test the water before jumping in.

We should all think like investors and strive for personal development on a consistent basis.

If before doing something you stop and ask yourself whether it’s something you’ll be happy you did some time from now, you’ll make wiser choices and end up working on things that will pay off in the future.

Such a mentality leads to the biggest progress of all because it’s not about doing what feels comfortable now, or avoiding any type of change, but about taking one step in the right direction daily and analyzing the results.

This way you’re building skills, learning stuff, gaining experience and always moving forward.

Self-improvement is as strategic as investing, if you want to do it right.

That’s why goal setting is such a big part of it. Every week and month you should revisit your goals, see how far you’ve gone, and plan the next steps.

Being a lifelong learner is yet another factor. Keep reading, learning from experience, listening to mentors and like-minded people, and even turning to your inner self every now and then so that you can stay focused, on the right path, and be sure you want all that you’re currently doing with your life.

At some point, personal growth itself will make you feel alive enough, will help you become the best you can be, and enjoy every second of every day at the same time, as you’ll always be doing something to improve your lifestyle and that thought itself is liberating.

“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune”. Jim Rohn

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Give Generously to Start Receiving

Give_Generously

Is there a secret to success?  Some say it’s about being generous.

Because “giving starts the receiving process,” as entrepreneur and motivational speaker Jim Rohn once noted.  

But how does generosity result in a more successful business?  

For many businesses, generosity marketing is on the rise and offers a successful model. Think Zappos, for going beyond expectations and providing superior customer service.  Or Toms, with its One for One® model, which helps one person in need around the world for every product sold.    

For every large company that advocates generosity, there are many entrepreneurs who give as part of their business message and mission.  They might support global initiatives or smaller community charities by giving their time and or money. They often build their generosity campaigns into their businesses right from the start.

Even if you can’t give at this level just yet, don’t assume you have nothing to give. There are plenty of ways you can be generous in your home based business and your life.

But there’s an important mindset to have when you’re being generous. Give without expecting anything in return. Simply be generous because you can and because it feels good to help others.

Your generosity will come back to you in unexpected ways.

 

Here Are A Few Ways You Can Practice Generosity:

Express Your Spirit of Generosity In Your Own Unique Way. Delivering a great personal experience is one of the best things you can give your customers. You’ll be promoting social connection and making people feel at ease. And because they feel appreciated, they’ll also be more responsive.

Create Meaningful Relationships. Give more of yourself—through encouragement, opportunities, connections, and support. Empower the people around you. Compliment your client, recognize a vendor’s good service, or respond to a blog commenter. 

Share Your Best Self. A simple thoughtful comment has amazing ripple effects. The next time you think about how much you appreciate your customer, why not share that thought?  You never know when that one positive remark will change the day for someone.  Or how it will end up affecting you.

Be A Mentor.   Even if you’re just starting out with your business, there’s someone who could use your expertise and knowledge.  Share your experiences and provide advice and direction to those who ask. Even an hour from a busy schedule will have a significant impact. And the invaluable knowledge and expertise could mean the world to them.

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Why Increasing Numbers of People Are Creating Lifestyle Businesses

Lifestyle Businesses


We live in the best time to do what we love for a living, follow our dreams and have the ultimate freedom.

More and more people are realizing that all this can be earned by creating and running a lifestyle business.

It all begins by not being satisfied with the life you live, and thinking that maybe there’s a more meaningful, productive and enjoyable way to spend your days than to be stuck in a corporate job for 8 hours, 5 days a week. All that, just to wait for the workday to be over, for the weekend to come, and – eventually – for your vacation (which still can’t be enjoyed knowing you’re going back to the 9-to-5 prison).

 

It’s Time To Get Out Of The Cubicle.

Long gone is the time when the only known way to enter the adult world successfully was to get good grades at school so that you can get a good job in the industry after that, and – ultimately – to have all the time and money once you retire.

That’s the lie the system is selling you, and it goes together with being accepted by society for living this way, and having the illusion of security.

But there’s nothing safe about working for someone else, living by someone else’s expectations, and wasting the most promising years of your life.

However, people are opening their eyes for the truth and deciding to take a path of their own, knowing that even if it doesn’t work, they’ll try something else. Because the biggest risk is not taking any risks.

The good news is that the number of small businesses today is bigger than the number of big ones, and they even employ more people. Such inspiring statistics!

 

So, What Is A Lifestyle Business Exactly?

That means building a small business based on passion, putting in the hard work yourself in the beginning to get it off the ground, employing enough people or automating the process to an extent where you’ll need to work less and have more free time, which will then be spent living your life to the fullest.

Other characteristics of this type of business are that it provides an income that’s just enough so that you can live the way you want, gives you the freedom to be anywhere in the world and still make money, and lets you spend time with family, scale the business if you want to, or just take a vacation whenever you feel like.

The world is full of success stories that should inspire you to take action and start building your lifestyle business today.

James Schramko, the owner of Superfast Business, by building a team to handle the day to day activity within his business. Has successfully structured his days to revolve around the tides so that he can surf each day and only spends few hours a few days a week working in his business on the tasks he enjoys.

Another reason to want to build a lifestyle business is if you’re a parent who wants to spend time with his children, and do that not just at home. Some couples have decided to work remotely so that they can travel the world and even homeschool their kids along the way.

Dale Beaumont is the creator of Business Blueprint and when Dale became a father he decided to start travelling with his young family. Following the formula, two months work one month adventure, Dale with his wife Katherine and two boys have now travelled to over 60 countries.

If you’re looking for inspiration and a step-by-step plan on how to design your lifestyle this way, grab ‘The 4-Hour Workweek’. Tim Ferriss’ book, and so many others out there, have helped to show people that a lifestyle business is not a fantasy. That they actually do exist and are not beyond the reach of the average person.

What do you think? And what’s your definition of lifestyle business?

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

How Focusing on the Now Increases Your Effectiveness

Focusing on the Now

“In mindfulness, one is not only restful and happy but alert and awake. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encounter with reality.” – Thich Nhat Hanh

We live in a world of distractions. It seems that we are focusing on several things at once and none of them adequately enough to do them well. Our scattered thoughts and efforts can cause us to become stressed and ineffective. Learning to focus on the now can help change all that.

While studies show that multitasking doesn’t work, that doesn’t prevent most of us from trying. The more we try to somehow make multitasking work, the more we end up feeling more and more as if we are chasing our own tail and getting absolutely nowhere.

We’ve all heard about “being in the now,”  and in a recent study conducted by the University of Washington, researchers concluded that in groups of workers who were used to multitasking, those who were trained in meditation or mindfulness were better able to stay on task and made fewer task switches. These same workers also reported fewer incidents of negative emotions after performing tasks as well as a notable increase in memory.

In today’s world, focusing on the present moment can seem like a luxury, but it can make a huge difference. No matter the stresses of your day or the demands of your life, your mental and emotional state and your effectiveness can be improved simply by being mindful and in the present moment.

The workplace is where most of us tend to be constantly focused on achievement.  Employers have seen the value of mindfulness and single focus and many companies, such as Adobe, Google, Facebook, Hubspot, and Rolls Royce have all started meditation groups for their workers to help them become more effective in their work and in other areas of their lives. If these companies have seen the value of mindfulness, then won’t you want to make in expensive initiative a part of your home based business.

 

How does one become mindful?

Mindfulness is achieved by focusing your awareness completely on the present moment and where you are within it.  Can being mindful help us in the workplace? Some experts, such as author Eckhart Tolle, say that it can. According to Tolle, “Life is just a series of present moments. “

Here Are Some Ways in Which Focusing on Mindfulness and Staying in The Now Can Increase Your Effectiveness

  1. Focus – When we focus our thoughts on a specific task, focusing on a single thing can be likened to focusing the sun’s rays with a magnifying glass. The intensity of that focus can generate heat and cause things to happen.
  2. Stress Reduction – Day to day stresses are addressed through our hippocampus and can seem almost like an addiction. Those who have suffered from intense stress levels such as PTSD or depression may have a smaller hippocampus than those who don’t suffer from intense stress. Practicing mindfulness and focusing on them now can increase body awareness, increase pain tolerance and assists in more complex thinking, introspection, and an increased sense of self.
  3. Maintaining Brain Health – Along with keeping us focused on our tasks and reducing the dangerous effects of stress, it helps the brain to self-regulate and become more agile. Increased brain agility can direct attention and suppress tendencies toward knee-jerk reactions and reduce conflict in the workplace.
  4. Increase Listening & Relationship Skills – Mindfulness assists focus. When listening to someone else, that mindfulness can help you focus on listening to them more intently. It is said that good relationships are built on good listening skills. When we are focused on the person and what they are saying, we are more apt to gather their meaning through their vocal inflection, body language, and tone. When we really listen, we make others more likely to listen to us in return.
  5. Accepting Feedback and Criticism – Criticism is a part of everyday life and we may face it most often in the workplace. When we practice mindfulness, it can increase our capacity to slow down and listen to the feedback that we are receiving. From being in the now, we are able to slow down and also make note of our reaction within our own bodies and consider the feedback and act on it in more constructive ways.

Beginning Mindfulness 

You can practice mindfulness throughout your day both in your home based business and family life. Morgan Dix of AboutMeditation.com recommends taking a few 1 minute breaks throughout the day. All you need to do is to simply stop, take a few deep breaths and focus on the moment. You may find that doing so may improve your performance in your business and have other unexpected benefits.

 

You hold the power to transform your life!

Why Continuous Learning Is the Key

There are 2 main types of education – formal and informal.

The former is the learning the system wants to give you. Its purpose is to prepare you to be an average person and give you the knowledge necessary to have a regular job. We’re talking about the schools, high schools, and even business schools, that aim at teaching you specific things and then let you use them in your own way. That education is classroom-based and provided by professionals who have received the same at an earlier age.

As Jim Rohn says, “formal education will only make you a living.”

 

Why is that?

Because it literally prepares you to be part of the corporate world, and by the time you’re done with learning, you don’t want to continue gaining knowledge in any way, and consider getting a job in the field a success.

Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Here’s why:

  • to stop learning at a certain age means to stop growing;
  • formal education helps you develop a fixed mindset, where you consider what’s in front of you the truth and don’t believe there’s a lot more behind it. Which means that success is a result of what you already know, and that’s as far as you get. So this type of education limits your potential, creativity and individuality;
  • you might be taught how to think logically, but the greatest things in life weren’t created this way. We’re talking about the game-changing inventions that seemed like an impossible idea at the time, the products on the market that truly satisfy millions of customers by solving a common problem, the works of art we admire to this day, etc.

So, if that education isn’t enough, and can have a negative effect on us, what should we learn then, and how?

The quote I mentioned from Jim Rohn continues like this: “self-education will make you a fortune”.

That’s the second type of education you can get, and luckily, that can be in addition to the regular one so that you don’t let your family down.

Informal education is the one you get yourself, where you decide to become a lifelong learner and to always be open to new knowledge. It’s the type of education that lets you question everything around you and thus accept new ideas, try new ways to do regular stuff, study new markets and apply the knowledge to the one you’re working in, understand people different from you, and be able to change your perspective when necessary.

These people are the ones who build profitable businesses, who design the ideal lifestyle for themselves, who have a lot of fun and challenge themselves continuously.

That’s the kind of employee you’ll want for your company, even if he doesn’t have experience in the niche. Because of his curiosity, his desire to learn, and his growth mindset.

 

Self-education is one of the most exciting things you can be doing with your life.

Here’s why and how it will pay off in the long run:

  • you’ll understand that success is a result of hard work, not of whether or not you’re born with certain traits. What’s more, you’ll realize that you can improve or change completely any quality you have and still master a skill, or reach any goal. It’s just a matter of time, strategy and determination;
  • there are no limits as to how far you can get, and that itself is inspiring;
  • anything you learn can be applied to your home based business in ways you can’t imagine;
  • your brain will start working in incredible ways – you’ll begin to combine seemingly unrelated things and will get something even better as a result;
  • choosing ongoing learning is the only way to stop working for somebody else and create something of your own.

I can go on like that forever, but you get the point.

Continuous learning is the key to… well, everything.

What other differences are there between formal and informal education? What ways to practice self-education in daily life can you think of?

 

You hold the power to transform your life!