Guest Articles to Help You
Master Motivation and Success

Sometimes I spend quite a bit of time working with my clients on personal productivity issues like time management, prioritization, and effective systems. We do this because it is much easier to achieve work-life balance when we are productive!

In working with clients over several years, I developed a scale that predicted their success. It wasn't based on how good their overall business model was, or the years of training they had or degrees they had accumulated. It was based on the amount of base metal they turned into gold.

It was mid-morning on a warm and pleasant Saturday. I was in the midst of my first skydive of the day. It was my 2,123th jump since having taken up the sport fifteen years ago. My parachute opened with some twists in the lines between the parachute and me. This is not that uncommon. What was different this time was that I was not able to clear the twists.

That sounds ridiculous. Of course you'd like to be rich, wouldn't everybody? But do you really? Your words might say you do, but our thoughts and actions very often say something entirely different. Consider this - your thoughts and actions can also act like a 'straight jacket.' They could be stopping you from reaching your fullest potential, or making it easy for competitors to knock you around.

How is your year so far? After good momentum from New Year's resolutions, and several months of hard work, it's a great time for a healthy review of action steps and results. This renewal process will help you curb tendencies towards burnout, and help you refocus on the path to success. But First, Ban the Inner Critic!

Imagine this, a co-worker enters your office and says: "Cathy, could I talk with you for a minute? I'm having a real problem with...." You glance at your watch and think of the report that’s due in an hour. What do you do?

Or you're cooking dinner, starting to unstress, the food preparation timing is coming together--for once, and your mother calls: "Could we talk, it’s important, I need someone to talk to?" What do you say?

If you’ve left the corporate world to strike out on your own in a home-based business, you'll know that your financial success is up to you and you alone, perhaps for the first time in your life. This means that you do everything. Although you are now CEO, you are also secretary, marketing director, receptionist and gopher.

As Donald Trump clearly states in his book, "Hope is Not a Strategy." From an energetic place, meaning, looking at hope from a vibrational-light energy view, hope is an unclear prayer. And unclear prayers / desires / intentions usually look to us as though they go unanswered -- un-manifested.

As a journalist and documentary filmmaker, I witnessed ordinary people performing extraordinary feats on countless occasions. I documented individuals in moments of crisis and emergency going beyond the limits they and society believed possible. Caught up in earthquakes, floods, hurricanes and accidents, I watched mild-mannered people become super-heroes. "Where do human beings get the power and knowledge to perform such implausible feats?" I wondered.

P.T. Barnum gave us with many valuable messages. The one that resonates deep within me is, “Without promotion a terrible thing happens, nothing.” According to statistics compiled by the US Small Business Administration, the top two reasons businesses fail in the first year is not under-capitalization, it’s poor management and lack of promotion?

What's your dream? Want to give your vision a jumpstart? Write down your goals and use these questions to speed up delivery of your dream. What's your highest priority this lifetime? What's most important for you to experience, explore or embrace this time around? Until you answer this question, your life goals will be off purpose.

One way to measure a great life design is how well it accommodates what you want to do. The goal should be to create a life with as few barriers and obstacles as possible. Like a good room design, thinking ahead about who you are and how you want your life to function is a good place to start.

Often when I ask new clients how they handle change, I hear responses such as "I hate change!" or "I'm terrible at change." It's very rare that someone says to me "I love change. When change appears in my life, I just go with the flow."

Just recently, I took a break and caught "The Return of the King" at the movie theater. At the same time, I was pondering a topic for this article. As often happens, the themes and timing converged. Here are 10 things you can learn about marketing your small business from the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Do you want to know the key to beating procrastination and achieving massive success? I had some work to do yesterday and I kept putting it off. I thought - I´ll wait until later when I feel more alert and in the right frame of mind to do it just right Then it hit me like a ton of bricks. If I wait for the perfect moment I will be waiting a very long time.

The strategy I call, "changing the scale" is about gaining perspective, getting a better look a reality, not obscuring it. Too frequently using an inappropriate scale can hide the reality behind a situation. Numbers are meaningless unless put into a scale, a context. Is $30,000 a lot of money? For a second-hand Yugo or a Rolls Royce?

When you look at your marketing to-do list, do many of the items on it look all too familiar? Have entries like "call Donna Sanchez" and "follow up with Floyd Corp." been copied from a previous week? Putting off unappealing tasks may be human nature, but for an entrepreneur, procrastination can lose business to the competition.

One day Pat O'Bryan, a wonderful Texas musician well known in Europe, walked into our Master Mind group and announced, "One day I'm going to write a book titled, 'The Myth of Passive Income.'" He was joking. Everyone laughed. He had been working hard on his website and realized from first-hand experience that there is little passive about passive income. I heard an opportunity.

We generally set goals because we are unhappy with where we are, either in life, our job, or a relationship. As Og Mandino says, "People don't change when they feel good. They change when they're fed up. When things are going all right, we all tend to do pretty much what we've been doing. Pain pushes us to those crucial turning points. We hurt, then we finally choose. Enough is enough.!"

Look at the world around you. Observe the buildings, yachts, and huge complexes that cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Can there be any doubt in your mind that this world has unlimited wealth? Yet, if you're like me, you've often wondered, "How do I get my share?" You wonder why and how some people seem to have it all, while others always seem to struggle just to keep ahead of the bill collectors.

In the world of birds, ruffled feathers is one sign of a virus. Isn't that also the case at work? Ruffled feathers can spread like a virus throughout your office, department or corporation. Depending on the influence of the 'ruffled one', that spread can be fatal. Infected birds shed the virus by exhaling and excreting. Isn't this also what happens in the workplace?

Last week David started a series in his Info Product Labs ezine discussing the 4 types of thinking that get in the way of your success. In this article he continues the discussion and adds a few more twists and turns to it to help you get one step closer to your goal. Here the "4 types" again.

25 Keys You Can Use to Unlock Any Door
Chapter 101 from 101 Ways to Promote Yourself
        1. Believe in yourself.
        2. Believe in success.
        3. Believe that you can and deserve to be successful.
        4. If you don't believe in yourself, in success, or in that you can
            be successful; invest in yourself and find out why you don't
            believe.
        5. Appreciate yourself. If you don't appreciate yourself....

Every so often you meet a bodybuilder who is very different. They radiate a mysterious strength, power, and charisma that is seldom seen. You may not be able to put your finger on exactly what it is that is that makes this person stand out, but something special is definitely there; they are a champion.

Hardly a day goes by I don't receive spam emails about grants. Spam that absolutely promises me I can buy a book and get a $30,000 grant, just for being alive on the planet. To some degree, those spam emails are why I established my online business, www.GrantMeRich.com. Because I have been a grants consultant for thirty years, I know the truth about grants, and I want to share that truth with you.

Offering free samples increases the Know-Like-and-Trust Factor that makes people buy. When you are selling a service, or a product with a high service component, potential customers have no way to see, feel, or taste what you will actually deliver. Providing a sample makes your service offering tangible, and builds your customer's trust. But if you're not careful, you can give away too much.

Many people go through their daily lives feeling overwhelmed. So many things to do, never enough time or energy to do them all. Have you promised yourself that this month you are going to make some serious changes but you just aren't sure what those changes need to be?

Traditionally, confidence is defined as "trust in" or "reliance upon". When you have self-confidence, you trust in, or rely upon, yourself. Possessing confidence in yourself means believing that you have the ability to become, achieve or acquire whatever you want.

With time flying by faster and faster every day, you already know it’s important to decide what you’re going to do each day. However, it’s equally important to know what not to do. Add some Don’ts to your day, and see how it helps with all those Do’s.

You know that episode of Seinfeld when Jerry or George asks Newman why it is that so many postal workers suddenly go off the deep end and blow their coworkers away with a semi-automatic? Newman's answer (in suitably melodramatic tone): "Because the mail ... never ... stops." Running an online business is a bit like that, so be prepared.