Creating supportive environments is imperative to your success as an entrepreneur. It goes without saying that if you have environments that will support you and your passion, it’s going to be much easier and more enjoyable for you to do your work. In Part 2 of this series, I’m going to touch upon a few more of the environments that I believe are most essential to your success and well being.
Let me ask you something. Are you like me and by about mid-February, you’ve had it with the gray day after day? Not feeling sunlight for days at a time really affects my mood and my motivation levels. And sometimes, when you work at home, it’s easy not to go outside for days at a time. I try to make any effort to spend at least 15 minutes outside, soaking up some sun. What about natural light in your work space? Windows? Clean and fresh air? Are these things part of your everyday creative environment, as they should be?
Exercise 5:
If you aren’t getting enough natural light, fresh air, and can’t see the outside world, you are stunting your creative flow. If there is anything you can do to change or improve your natural environment in this way, I encourage you to do it now.
Your energy field is one of your most important environments. It doesn’t only include your own energy and the sources from which you get it, but it also includes the energy, positive or negative, that you get from your spouse, your friends, your children, your other family members, and your clients or customers.
Since our relationships are so important to us, it is very difficult sometimes to set appropriate boundaries, and we tend to tolerate behaviors and actions that are detrimental to our own well being. In order for you to be as successful as you want to be (remember that everyone’s definition of success is different), you need to take a hard look at the relationships that are not nurturing you, that are sending negative vibes into your energy field, and recognize that you are allowing it. And then you need to make adjustments.
You will either need to set clear and solid boundaries, or you will need to let go, as hard as that may be. I found I had to do this with a few very old friends several years ago. As much as we share a history that I treasure, when I was making some major transitions in my life, the only “support” they could give me was to remind me how miserable it all was, even when I had moved through the misery of it and had created a new and happy life for myself. They just wanted to stay stuck in the misery of it, and you know why…because they were miserable! It was hard, especially because we had a lot of mutual friends, but I have never regretted that decision. And you know what happened? Several new amazingly wonderful supportive friendships showed up in my life soon afterwards.
Cutting ties with old friends is hard, but dealing with not-so-supportive family members is even more difficult. My favorite tactic is to not react to anything they say or do, to just simply respond. It is very hard to not be attached to the feelings that a family member can arise in you (guilt, worthlessness, stupidity), but at some point you have to take back your power and not allow them to make you feel that way anymore. Their issues are their issues and you need to let them own that – don’t carry it for them.
I have found that when I am able to respond instead of react, they tend to give up and move on much faster. And each time I do this, I get better at it, and they get the message more and more clear. And suddenly I have found them on my side, being a cheerleader for my work and my life. Believe me that it is worth it to stand up for yourself with grace.
As for dealing with clients or customers who drain your energy, your best bet is to create an Ideal Client Profile and stick judiciously to it. The ICP is not a new concept, by any means, but it is one of the best ways to create an environment around your work that is full of supportive and wonderful people who love what you do and who make you want to do more for them because of it.
Exercise 6:
Choose one person, if needed, in both your personal and professional life to whom you either need to let go of, or set some clear boundaries with, and get to work.
You’ll find that your inner environment will improve as you make positive changes to your outer environment. In addition, making space in your mind for your creativity to flow is important for you to be able to bring your best self into the world.
One of the ways to do this is to invest a bit of time each day into writing what Julia Cameron calls “Morning Pages,” which is three pages of free writing at the beginning of each day to clear your mind of some of the unnecessary clutter. Sometimes what you write will seem trivial, but it’s that trivial stuff that takes up much needed space in your head! Other times you’ll enjoy some real breakthroughs. I highly recommend engaging in this practice. I have been journaling all my life, but the practice of Morning Pages really does help the creativity flow – besides that I believe that every life that is worth living is worth recording.
Exercise 7:
Your assignment then is to purchase a journal or notebook, or create a new file on your computer, and start tomorrow writing three pages of whatever comes to mind. Make this a daily practice and watch what happens.
Making an effort over time to create supportive environments for the things that are most important to you will open doors and opportunities that you might never have received otherwise. You deserve to be supported in your work and your life, so choosing to allow those people and things into it that bring out your best is not only a gift to yourself, but also a gift to the world.
I’d love to know your thoughts on creating environments that support you – please leave your comments below.
I’m writing this on my laptop in a Cosi café in Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C. The reason I am here has nothing to do with me or my business, but the reason I can continue to be successful in my work is because I have set myself up to do so. How? By creating supportive environments. In this case, the laptop, the appropriate software, and the ability to connect to the Internet, as well as the support of my husband, all contribute positively to my accomplishment of the task: writing and submitting this piece on deadline and without stress.
Creating supportive environments is imperative to your success as an entrepreneur. It goes without saying that if you have environments that will support you and your passion, it’s going to be much easier and more enjoyable for you to do your work. I’m going to touch upon the environments that I believe are most essential to your success and well being.
There are many environments in your life, and most of them intertwine. Being aware of these environments will ensure that you have a hand in creating them, and not allow them to be created for you by tolerating those people, situations and things that you shouldn’t.
Important areas of your overall environment include your home, office/work space, body, energy, and nature, which all impact your mental, spiritual, and emotional environments.
In your outer environment, your home is one of the most important. Your home should be a sacred place for you, a place where you feel safe, taken care of, and content. Clutter and chaos in the home should be kept at a minimum, but your bedroom and your work space in particular should reflect calm. I know sometimes it just isn’t possible to stay on top of it all, but if you make a consistent effort to divide and conquer – and ask for help! – over time you can make a huge difference in the quality of your home environment. As bonus, you’ll create space for other more appropriate and wonderful things to enter as well!
Exercise 1:
If you have a list of things that are broken, need replacing, or just need to be tossed, then start doing this today. Pick three things that are in your home right at this moment that you can either toss or give away. Then do so, and feel the space clear.
Nothing blocks creativity more than clutter in your office or work space. To be honest, I write that sheepishly thinking of the paper piles on the floor surrounding my desk at home. What I need are several filing cabinets so I’ve ordered the ones I want and just that simple decision is freeing a lot of mental stores.
Exercise 2:
If you have clutter in your work space, you are not allowing yourself to be more productive and creative. Give yourself the gift of a clutter-free space in which to bring your gifts into the world. Take ten minutes at the end of each day and tidy your space. File what needs to be filed, throw away anything that you no longer need and can honestly assess that you really won’t ever need, and make a plan for tomorrow.
Don’t ask yourself to be perfect in this; sometimes you are going to need to fly away from your work space and simply don’t have the time to do so. When that’s the case, then take the ten minutes in the morning to clear your space so you can clear your mind for the work of the day.
Having the right tools to work with will also make your work more enjoyable and much less stressful. My desktop died a slow tortuous death one summer and you can’t imagine my stress level at the time. It got so bad that I literally shut down and spent a week in a cabin in the woods, just working from my laptop, just to get away from it. And I also can’t tell you how happy I was when it finally bit the dust and I bought my new one. The lesson for me, though, was that I should have simply bought the new desktop when I knew that there was no saving my old one, instead of going through the stress of not being able to do my work, and not being as productive as I like and need to be to continue to be successful in my work. It certainly wasn’t worth it – on any level – to suffer through those last weeks.
Exercise 3:
As in your home, are there things in your office or work space that need to be tossed, replaced or upgraded? Are you tolerating things for financial or other reasons that are really counter-productive, like I did with my ailing desktop? Choose one thing that would make your work easier and more enjoyable if you replaced, upgraded or tossed it, and make the decision to do whatever it takes to make that happen as soon as reasonably possible. Stop tolerating what you shouldn’t and get on with bringing your work into the world.
Your body is an environment that you need to take care of as well. Are you getting regular exercise? Are you participating in something physical that you really enjoy, not something that you dread making yourself do simply because you know it’s good for you? Are you eating as nutritiously as possible, without feeling deprived of the foods you love? Do you get haircuts as often as you should and would like? Do you treat yourself to a manicure, pedicure, or some other spa treatment once in awhile? Do you get enough sleep? Do you rest when you need to? Do you run on adrenaline or do you use food and exercise as your means for energy? Our body is one of the environments that can be easy to ignore (until something is wrong), yet when we take good care of ourselves in this way, it is amazing how much more energy, patience, creativity and satisfaction we have.
Exercise 4:
Choose one area of your body environment that you know you can improve right away and make the commitment right now to do it. That could mean you will go to bed a half hour earlier each night, or that you will take a 30-minute walk outside today. You could not have a sugar-laden dessert tonight and instead opt for a lighter version of frozen yogurt with fresh fruit. What action could you take today that you know will make you feel proud of yourself for doing so?
I’d love to know your thoughts on hiring help in your business – please leave your comments below.
Building a responsive, high-quality list of email subscribers is the key to leveraging your marketing time and increasing your income. Here’s 6 specific ways to show you how:
1. Don’t Hide Your Opt-In Form
Don’t make your website visitors search for the opt-in form to your list. To make it super-simple for your visitors to sign up, do what I recommend to my clients – just a simple one-page website, that I call an Invite Site, where the only thing you’re doing on the site is inviting your visitors to sign up for your list.
Then there’s no confusion or question about what it is they should do. Once they sign up, you can redirect them to another page where they can gain access to more information from you.
2. Offer a Free Taste
Encourage people to sign up for your list by offering them something of value for free in exchange for their email address. Good choices are a mini-ecourse, a special report, a checklist, or a short audio program. Add some enticing copy describing the benefits your visitor will receive from your gift to increase your sign-ups.
3. Keep it Simple
If you only ask for your visitor’s first name and email address, you’ll get a higher response rate, meaning more people will sign up for you list.
Obviously, if you’re offering a physical Free Taste (like a CD), you’ll need to get your visitor’s shipping address as well. Just try to limit the information you’re asking for to increase the number of people who sign up.
4. Add Your Privacy Policy
Make your visitor feels comfortable giving you their email address by adding a short privacy policy right there with your opt-in form. Something as simple as “We will never share your email address, period” should suffice.
5. Include Testimonials
Even adding two or three testimonials of people who’ve signed up for your list and received your Free Taste will increase your list numbers. If you currently don’t have anyone on your list, send a copy of your Free Taste to a handful of colleagues and ask for testimonials in return (and offer to do the same for them).
6. Getting People to the Opt-in Page for Your List
Once you optimize your opt-in page, you need to get people to it. There are literally hundreds of ways that you can drive traffic to your web page where people sign up for your list (we cover 42 of them in my 21 Easy & Essential Steps to Online Success System™), but here are three of the best:
1. Utilize your email signature in every email you send out. Be sure you point people to your opt-in page in your signature with some enticing copy as to why they should click on your link.
2. Write and submit articles, including the link to your opt-in page in the author’s resource box.
3. Do a simple pay-per-click campaign to drive targeted traffic to your opt-in page.
Follow these tips and you’ll start increasing your email list subscribers today.
I’d love to know which of these resonates with you the most – please leave your comments below.
A question I get asked by entrepreneurs all the time is…
“Where do I start? With an ezine, a website, a blog, or what?”
The answer is – it depends. It depends on where you are at in your business building efforts. But after hearing this question asked often enough, I think there’s something else going on ~ a request for a simple way to understand how all the pieces fit together. So, here goes:
First, you want to have a clearly defined target market, and be offering solutions to the problems that market wants solved. Then follow the steps below to leverage your time in reaching them with your offers.
1. Create an Invite Site
The first step is to create what I call an Invite Site. An Invite Site is a simple one page website where the only thing you do is invite your visitor to sign up for your email list by offering them something of value for free in exchange for their email address. For the record, the ONLY website I had for the first three years in my business was an Invite Site and I’ve built a 6-figure just from that.
2. Write and send an ezine
As you build your list, you’ll want to stay in touch with your subscribers. The easiest way to do this is through an ezine, or online newsletter. If you’re just starting out, know it doesn’t have to be anything fancy. A short article in text format sent to your list on a consistent basis is enough to get you in the habit of writing and sending an ezine, and for staying on your reader’s radar screen.
3. Post your ezine article to your blog
Create a simple blog for free at WordPress.com, give it a name that incorporates what it is that you offer (for example, advice about marketing, dog grooming, real estate, etc.), and cut and paste your ezine article as a post to your blog. The search engines love blogs because of their text-based format. They also love fresh content and with a blog you can post new articles consistently, keeping the content fresh, whereas on a static website, the information doesn’t change very often.
BONUS: Record a podcast from your ezine article.
Give your audience another way to get to know you (and take advantage of the millions of people who are downloading and listening to information on their MP3 players) by offering a podcast. Simply take the content from the article you wrote for your ezine and use that as your script for your podcast.
I know this seems simple, but that’s because it really can be this easy. If you put just the first three steps into action, your business will start to grow. As it does, you can start adding more bells and whistles, like graphics or different sections to your ezine, or jazz up your blog. In the meantime, keep pointing people to your Invite Site to grow your list, stay in touch with them via your ezine, and post your articles online so more people will find you.
I’d love to know your thoughts on this – please leave your comments below.
I’ve been spending a lot of time lately getting ready for 2011 – planning, organizing, strategizing, visioning, and more. Once again, there are many transitions and transformations on the horizon for me and my business, and much to do to prepare for them, so I’m making space and opening the flow.
In Part 1 of this article, I shared 3 ways you can make space in your business. Now here are 3 ways I’m opening the flow in my business that you can do too:
1. Escape Email Overwhelm
The number one distraction to moving your business forward by leaps instead of baby steps is email. So here’s my system for handling email overload. If you can practice this 80% of the time, you’ll be way ahead of the game.
a. Delete: scan and delete junk emails first
b. Move: move any emails into an appropriate folder – and create a rule to make that happen automatically
c. Delegate: delegate any emails that should be responded to by someone else
d. Respond: respond to any emails that only YOU can respond to
The goal is to only have emails in your inbox that require action from you!
2. Track your money
One of the easiest ways to open the flow of money in your business is to start tracking exactly how much comes in on a daily basis. I give each of my Platinum clients a money tracking sheet that makes it super-simple for them to implement this tip, but you can create your own very easily.
Just create a simple form that lists the days of the month, with your monthly money goal listed as well. Each day fill in the amount of money that came into your business, and don’t forget to include affiliate payments and any other sources of revenue as well.
Just by paying attention to what’s coming in will open the flow to more, and before you know it, all the days of the month will be filled in with a number!
3. Don’t overbook
When putting together your master plan for 2011, make sure you don’t overbook yourself. If you do, you won’t leave space for other opportunities to show up that you likely aren’t aware of yet.
When I completed my own master plan for 2011, and then just recently with my Private Platinum clients, it was complete, but not overbooked. There was time off, as well as space for other exciting possibilities to come up.
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