#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Professional

Topic: Entrepreneurship

So, You Want To Be An Entrepreneur?

So, you want to start the next chapter of your life as an entrepreneur? As many of you know, I formed my first company at age 19 and have since founded, bought and sold 16 companies and ventures. About half of my coaching practice consists of Business Coaching to small business owners, mid-cap companies and mom-preneurs just like you.

Entrepreneurship is highly attractive for many reasons. If it’s time you did something different this could be the best life move you ever make.

Want to join the club? These are the first steps you’ll want to make:

1) Learn What it Means and Decide if You are Still Willing to Pursue it

Entrepreneurship has become very trendy. That doesn’t mean it is just a trend, but there is a lot more to succeeding with a hot startup than writing a few lines of code.

First understand the differences between becoming your own boss as a freelancer, opening a small business, and launching a true fast growing startup that becomes valued at billions of dollars.

Learn what a startup entrepreneur really does. They don’t really get to continue on with their favorite hobby every day and make billions doing it. You may start doing something you love, but then have to very quickly learn to become a leader in your business. Become a business owner, evangelist, professional fundraiser, negotiator and big deal maker.

Even with 100 plus employees working for you, you’ll need to master many new roles. You may or may not still be your own boss at this company in a few years. Either way, you will be very busy. This isn’t really a four hour work week squeezed around your full-time gig of hiking the world and lounging at fabulous resorts.

With all that said, out of all the successful entrepreneurs I know, none of them want to go back to a regular job. The big question is do you have what it takes?

You can learn just about any of the leadership skills you’ll need. What you’ve got to bring to the table is relentless grit, the determination to never quit, and the ability to keep going no matter how hard, stressful or desperate things become along the way.

If you’re still interested in becoming an entrepreneur, here’s what you do next.

2) Pick a Business Idea

If you’re entrepreneurial you probably have ideas all the time. Which idea will you get started on?

If you are juggling a few business ideas, write them on a whiteboard and let them marinate for a week. Which idea can you live without doing? Which were you born to do?

Most highly successful entrepreneurs are just quitting jobs they hate to try and become their own boss, have an easy work week, get rich quick and live in semi-retirement for the rest of their lives. That is not realistic. Quite the opposite actually happens.

The most successful startups seem to share the trait that the founder found a problem they really wanted to solve, in a very big industry, and found several other great team members who were passionate about it too. They looked forward to building something from scratch even though they were typically in good-paying jobs they already loved or were in a good college.

Before you go all in, make sure you research your idea. Check out all the competition. Check for commercial viability and why no one else has done it or succeeded yet. Determine if it is a real urgent need that lots of others have, and are willing to pay money for.

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Personal

Topic: Emotional Intelligence

What’s Stopping You?!

Jack Canfield once said, “Everything you want is on the other side of fear.” And he’s right. But I’m going to take it one step further.

Pain, discomfort, shock, boredom, impostor syndrome, awkwardness, fear, being wrong, failing, ignorance, looking stupid: your avoidance of these feelings is what is stopping us from a life beyond our wildest imagination.

These are the feelings that accompany a life of success. And yet, these are the very feelings we relentlessly avoid!

Interesting how that works, right?

Wealth, optimal health, incredible relationships, deep spiritual maturity are all available to us. And, the primary obstacle in our way is how we feel about what we need to do to have these things.

Most people aren’t willing to feel difficult emotions on a regular basis. However, if you’re willing to disregard how you feel in the moment, you’ll have access to a world of opportunity unavailable to 99% of the population.

When we feel the fear and do it anyway, we get the satisfaction of living life on our terms. Instead of being a hostage to our emotions, we get to experience them more deeply.

Ironically, once we break past the emotional blocks and just act, it’s never as bad as we think it will be.

Make the decision and act

Napoleon Hill said, “When your desires are strong enough, you will appear to possess superhuman powers to achieve.” Similarly, Tim Grover has said, “When you crave the end result, the hard work becomes irrelevant.”

Put most simply: when your “why” is strong enough, you’ll be willing to do any “how”. The clearer and bigger the why, the bolder the how. Hence, if you 10x your why, you’ll have insights about how to do things far more effectively than the norm. As Supercoach Dan Sullivan has said, “When 10X is your measuring stick, you immediately see how you can bypass what everyone else is doing.”

If your dreams are big enough, you’ll have to do different things than you’ve been doing. Not all “hows” are created equal. You’ll have to do things you don’t feel in the moment like doing. You’ll resist the actions you need to take.

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Physical and Personal

Topic: Healthy Living

Your Healthy Day via Ancient Chinese Medicine

Most of us think of our Circadian Rhythm (body clock), as the internal system that regulates when we fall asleep and wake up. But there’s so much more to our inner timekeeper, especially when considered through the ancient wisdom of Chinese medicine.

According to the 2,500-year-old practice, just about every function of our body is linked to a specific time on our internal clock. Each organ has a time period each day when it’s in the spotlight. This the time when that particular organ, and its related energy meridians, are said to be most energized and working hardest, affecting everything from our emotions to our productivity.

Here is a tour of the Morning, Noon and Night body clock according to this ancient practice – tips on how to optimize it through food and lifestyle choices. Think of it as a roadmap that’s meant to guide you toward working with your body’s natural rhythms, rather than against them.

MORNING

Drink some water and do a gentle workout
Organ: Large intestine
Actions: Waking up and releasing
Emotions being processed: Guilt and stagnation

It’s best to start the day with water, as hydration allows the large intestine to begin its process of elimination. Sorry, but hot coffee doesn’t count…caffeine in the morning is what leads to the midday crash and the release of too much cortisol throughout the day. You should also give yourself time upon waking to relax and allow for your body to naturally detox.

Eat a nutritious breakfast
Organ: Stomach
Actions: Eating and nourishing
Emotions being processed: Despair

According to Chinese medicine, breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. A nutritious breakfast will assist in building good, long-lasting energy for the day.

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Financial

Topic: Millennial Investments

An Investment Gaining Popularity With My Millennial Followers

As I was researching for an upcoming blog post on the topic of Personal Finance, I came across some research I wanted to immediately pass-on to my Millennial followers: Like most investors, Millennials want convenient, simple ways to invest that will help them achieve their financial goals. Based on what these young professionals are doing with their company-sponsored and individual retirement plans, Millennials seem to be gravitating toward what many see as the perfect all-in-one investment vehicle to save for retirement: target-date funds.

Nearly two-thirds of professionals in their 20s who participate in 401(k) plans at work use target-date funds in their investment strategies, according to the latest available research from the Employee Benefit Research Institute. That compares to less than half for those in their 60s. With many employers offering target-date funds within their menu of investing options, the availability and simplicity of these funds makes them an obvious choice, and recent hires are gravitating toward them now more than ever.

What is a target-date fund?

One of the appeals of target-date funds is that they are easy to understand. The idea is that each fund targets individuals who intend to retire or otherwise get access to their money at a certain date in the future. In order to accommodate this time horizon, the investments that each target-date fund start out having an aggressive growth objective when the target date is far in the future. Over time, the fund then shifts to a more conservative approach, balancing growth and income needs gradually over time. By the time the target date is imminent, target-date funds have a greater emphasis on capital preservation than on future growth.

Let me mention, however, that these funds tend to be pretty broad and don’t make it possible for you to invest in certain stocks individually, especially your hand-picked social impact stocks.

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Personal

Topic: Abundance Thinking

Outwit Fear To Create Abundance

Hopefully by now you’ve read the classic Napolean Hill book, Think and Grow Rich. The final chapter of the book is entitled, “How to Outwit the Six Ghosts of Fear.” In this chapter, Hill names these six ghosts as:

. Fear of Poverty

. Criticism

. Ill Health

. Loss of Love

. Old Age, and

. Death

And, as if that were not enough, he reveals a seventh condition, which he says is “more deeply seated and more often fatal than all of the six fears.” This he calls “susceptibility to negative influences.”

Susceptibility to negative influences is more fatal than the six ghosts of fear.

– Napolean Hill in Think and Grow Rich

The point of identifying these troublesome ideas is clear: when we seek to apply the Law of Circulation by declaring our good through prayer, meditation and affirmation, resistance arises from within us in the form of these hidden fears and susceptibilities.

This is what prevents us from moving forward and achieving our deepest desires. To get rid of it, we must be willing to acknowledge them, release them completely and consciously reject the possibility of them re-entering our daily thoughts.

Hill writes that if we neglect this inner work, we will forfeit our right to attain the object of our desires. An honest inventory includes “identifying patterns of complaining, fault-finding, sarcasm, indigestion, hopelessness, self-pity, lack of self-confidence and worry.” These are only examples of the kinds of activities that prevent us from achieving our most desired outcomes.

Join me in applying a proven method from reversing such limitations: Begin by declaring that you no longer indulge in the debilitation behaviors that you previously used for some limiting purpose. Reject our past behavior, saying “That was then, this is NOW.” Then, fill your mind with the object of your greatest desire, and declare this to be the truth of your life right now.

For my FREE downloadable resource on Creating Effective Affirmations, click [here]. And, for my FREE 7-Day Mindfulness Meditation Audio Series, which includes seven 10-minute meditations (personally guided by me), simply click the meditation tab above or click [here].

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Personal

Topic: Creating Breakthroughs

The Three S’s To Create Any Breakthrough

A question I’m often asked by first time coaching clients when I first meet with them is: how will you create breakthroughs for me through your coaching, and how will I make them last? A breakthrough occurs at that Ah-ha moment when we see the light. The light bulb goes on and what was once viewed as impossible, we see the way clear to its achievement. There are three areas to break through in order to feel lasting success in any of the Seven Life Areas:

. Physical

. Financial

. Professional

. Relational

. Spiritual

. Personal, and

. Philanthropical

I will outline below the three areas to breakthrough in order to get lasting change. They are our:

. Strategies

. Story, and

. State

STRATEGIES

One breakthrough area is our STRATEGIES. I personally live for finding strategies—those shortcuts that help people get more done in less time. What is it that gets some people to succeed while others fail who seem to have equal enthusiasm or passion for the tasks at hand? They have insights, distinctions, and strategies that allow them to achieve more quickly.

For example, take someone who was born very poor, without an education, and had emotional and financial challenges but found a way to be highly successful and living an inspired life. I don’t believe that’s lucky—luck is what you do for a day or a week—strategies are what make it consistently happen for decades. A strategy can be found in the simplest or slightest distinction and it can happen in an instant.

As I described above, there are three elements that effect the long-term success or failure of a person and whether they break through or not. For example, there are hundreds or even thousands of strategies out there for losing weight, and frankly most of them are proven to work—if you work them! We’re not hurting for strategies. There are fitness clubs on every street, dieticians, health coaches, training videos, audios, books, etc. Yet 65% of the United States is overweight and 33% is obese, and those numbers are only growing geometrically. I would suggest to you that the problem for most people is not that they don’t have a strategy—it’s that they’re not using a strategy that works for them or acting upon it. Why? Because they have a disempowering STORY.

 In order to get out of a story you have to be triggered by hunger and desire

STORY

We all have stories—narratives we tell ourselves about why we can or cannot do or achieve something in our lives. To remind you of the infamous quote of Henry Ford’s that I’ve mentioned time and again: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right!” We’re right because our expectation controls our focus, perceptions, and the way in which we feel and act. When a person succeeds it’s because they have the right strategy, and they found it usually because they have a story that it was possible or they could make it happen. Often people are not losing weight because they have a simple story that says, “I can never keep it off.” With that as your core belief system you are never going to find a strategy, and even if you do you won’t follow through on it.

Your story may be true—you may have been through a horrific experience–but that’s not the reason why you can’t have the life you want. For example, you might have had a bad breakup five years ago, but that’s not the reason you haven’t found the passionate and loving relationship you deserve. A disempowering story is one of the things that controls people and makes them stuck in their beliefs.

Most people tell a story in a selective way so they don’t have to ever maximize their effort towards a strategy because they’re afraid they will fail. In order to get out of a story you have to be triggered by hunger and desire—if someone wants something strong enough they will break through the story that’s limiting them. We usually have to reach a point where we will not settle for anything else in that Life Area.

STATE

Of course, whether you have an empowering story or disempowering story is influenced most powerfully by the mental and emotional STATE you’re in at this moment in time. It’s human nature to develop emotional patterns—moods—that are mental or emotional states that tend to filter how we look at our life.

Those emotional states influence the stories that we make up about who we are, what we’re capable of, or what’s achievable or not. The states we go into most often then become the most powerful filter of all that will determine whether we find the strategies necessary to succeed and whether we come up with a story that will empower us. The big question then becomes, what is it that we can do to change our state of mind when we’re not able to maximize our true potential? One of mankind’s greatest scientific discoveries has been that we can change our emotional mood by a radical change in your “physiology.”

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Professional

Topic: Business Plan

Six Key Questions To Ask When Writing Your Business Plan

As many of you know, I started my first business when I was just 19 years old and have bought and sold 16 ventures since. I’ve written here before about the elements of a business plan, creating a pitch deck and have offered up FREE downloadable email templates to help you raise seed capital. Today, I want to talk to you about the many invaluable things you’ll learn writing your business plan and the merits, beyond raising capital, of going through the effort of taking your many thoughts out of your head and committing them in writing. By first writing a strategic plan, you can evaluate on paper without the risk of finding out the hard way by trial and error. At the very least, these are questions that any potential investor IS going to be asking of you and you better be prepared to answer:

1. Why you? Why your business or your product/service? What differentiates you from your competition?

I am, or any potential investor is, going to assume that your product or service fulfills a want, need or desire of the buying public. If it doesn’t, rethink your plans. Sometimes the market doesn’t know it needs your product – and that’s fine. Henry Ford famously said, “If I had asked them what they wanted, they’d have told me faster horses.”

The first step is to identify the need your product or service will fulfill. Then determine whether or not this need is currently being met and if so, how and by whom? The first question I always ask my business coaching clients is, “Why should a prospective customer buy your product or service rather than a competitor’s?” If they can’t answer this question clearly, concisely and definitively, I tell them that that is the first thing that we will accomplish in their business coaching.

The first step is to identify the need your product or service will fulfill. 

2. Is there a large enough segment of that buying public that will value that difference?

Identify the segment of the market that values whatever it is that differentiates your product or service. Estimate the size of the market segment. Now, reduce the size of this segment by the percentage of people who won’t be willing to pay what you will have to charge to make your business profitable and answer if you can still reasonably project enough volume to make your business economically viable?

3. Now, question whether that difference, the very things that set it apart, are indefensible?

If your idea is a good one, you had better know how you will keep a large competitor with deep pockets from knocking it off and running you out of the market. There are many examples of well-healed copycats overtaking people with good ideas. You need a plan to protect yourself from this. Perhaps you can protect your intellectual property through a patent. Perhaps your idea, for one reason or another, is difficult to copy. What barriers to entry are there to keep the competition from moving in?

Continue reading →

#GrowYourLife #BuildYourBusiness

Life Area: Personal

Topic: Productivity

10 Productivity Hacks We Can Learn From Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule

For my Sunday reading, I selected one of my favorite books off my bookshelf, an autobiography: Benjamin Franklin, America’s Original Entrepreneur.

In Franklin’s 84 years of life he was not only a statesman and one of the United States’ founding fathers, he was also an inventor, author, publisher, musician, diplomat, and founded many civic organizations including the library system and the University of Pennsylvania.

As I thumbed through the book, I noticed a number of productivity hacks and daily disciplines that you may want to integrate into your daily schedule.

Known as the author of many historic and modern-day axioms, such as “The early bird, gets the worm” and “A penny saved, is a penny earned”. What Franklin may not be so well known for is his self-discipline, including his daily habits and how he conducted his day. Here’s a view of his calendar on a typical day and some noticeable principles for us to imitate:

1. Keep it simple

The first thing to note about Franklin’s daily schedule is its simplicity. There are only six time blocks scheduled for each day, and one of these blocks includes sleep — an obvious necessity. There’s no overwhelming to-do list of things to get done. It’s simple, focused on the essential, and highly effective. Read this past blog post of mine, Try Time Blocking Instead of a To-Do List, to learn more about the merits of time blocking.

2. Go to bed and wake up at the same time each day

One of Franklin’s most popular axioms was “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” and according to this schedule, he definitely lived up to it. Each day, Franklin woke up at 5am and went to bed at 10pm, for a total of seven hours of sleep each night. It’s important to note however, that what matters most isn’t the time you go to bed or wake up, it’s the consistency of your sleep schedule. As you’ve heard me say before, your body will tell you the optimum amount of sleep and the hours of the day that are best for you. For instance, my optimum number of hours is 8 hours of sleep between the hours of 10pm and 6am. You know my standard answer by now when asked: “How do you have so much energy?,” it’s “Eat good nutrition and drink plenty of water, do some form of exercise daily, and get plenty of sleep!” By going to bed and waking up at the same time each day, you’ll train your brain to fall asleep faster and improve the quality of your sleep. To track the hours and quality of your sleep, try the Sleep Cycle app I discuss in my blog post: 8 Ways to Gain Energy Naturally or The Productivity Sweet Spot blog post or in the Talk with Tom podcast episode of the same name.

Continue reading →