Biz Advice for a Smashing Fall - and Prepping Now for a Truly Stress-Free Holiday Season

The first quarter of the year is the strongest selling period in most consulting businesses – organizations have budget and consumers are on fire with the New Year energy! – but the two months of Fall are a close second.  The crisp, clear air, after the heat, humidity and lethargy of summer, and the return of the school year, puts a sense of urgency into people’s lives.  They are ready to invest in themselves and they are ready to pour the financial foundation for the new year of business.  It’s an important time to pour on the effort for marketing, releasing new products (especially those that could be purchased or gifted for the holidays), and unleashing your creativity for cooking up the cool beans for the new year.

In addition to your ongoing marketing and product development, it’s not too soon to start having conversations with your spouse and family about setting new dreams in place for what the holidays mean.  If you start now to think of ways to tell people that you love them, without spending money, you will have that money to invest in your business, in your continuing education and in your children’s future.  I tell my loved ones, in detailed letters, exactly why I adore them, citing specific examples.  I bake and crochet up a storm.  Kids get one gift each, sometimes bought and always educational. 

Every year, I make a list of fun, new, magical things I want to ENJOY.  I sip eggnog and decorate enough to feel festive, but not enough to be a significant time drain.  I drive or walk to admire other people’s light displays.  I love, love, love November and December.  How lovely, how magical, how full of love and good cheer.  And no stress.  In my early November issue, I’ll include some tips for your business and your stress-free life.  For now, start thinking about what is truly joyful and what could potentially be eliminated from your Shop and To-Do lists.  You don’t need to do everything this year.  The Grand Canyon was carved over time by the relentless flow of water, and it may take a few years of relentless chipping away to transform The Stress and Broke Season into the season of love and joy – but you can do it.

 

And you deserve it.

Come explore the power and excitement of entrepreneurship in a series of classes.... www.soaringdragon.biz.

How to Sell is A Variation on How To Get Anyone to Do AnyThing - A new approach for volunteer orgs as well as entrepreneurs

In entrepreneurship:

By now, you probably know that no one is going to purchase your high-value package or product “cold.”  People need to know, like and trust you.  You need to prove that you can do what they need, with strong social proof. 

Smart consultants like Ian Brodie (ianbrodie.com) and Meredith Eisenberg (mereditheisenberg.com & Time Traders) will tell you that you MUST begin your relationship with a prospective client by providing them with lots of real value.

Create a sales funnel by all means, just understand that people will be in various stages along the road, and make sure that you don’t give up on the people who just aren’t ready for your high-cost products yet.  Have something that they can use, now, and give them some easy, inexpensive entry ramp to the concept of spending money with you.

So you need to choose the enticement or gift that your prospects care about.  It's not just where they are at on the sales cycle, but the kind of Language that they prefer to hear most of the time.

In volunteer organizations, religious groups, other social situations where you want to encourage people to do something:

                You guessed it.  It’s the same situation, in different clothing.  You want the volunteers to want to volunteer more but they keep dropping out to attend to other needs or to join a different group.  The “reasons” are legion but they all come down to one thing: you haven’t convinced them to buy what you’re selling.  When YOU aren’t as committed to a group, you can be sure that they are not giving you what you need. 

                So how do you entice or reward your prospects or the other group you are trying to influence?  Don’t laugh: I have found great value in the Languages of Love concept.  Two decades ago, Gary Chapman outlined a framework to help people improve marriages, by getting people to understand what their partner really values.  I’ve been using this idea in business and social groups for about that long.  Chapman’s basic idea is that we humans tend to value 5 types of interactions, and some are more important to each of us than others.  They are Words of Appreciation; Physical Touch; Quality Time; Thoughtfully-Chosen Gifts; Acts of Service (doing something tangible to help me).

 

                Some people really just want to               be thanked, sincerely and regularly.  Other people want dedicated one-on-one time to discuss their concerns and be the center of your attention, regularly.  Other folks love the tangible swag.  And people like me love the people who use the sentence “Let me help you with that” regularly.  Acts of Service people value tangible help with problems and chores.

                This is how many volunteer-run groups run into trouble.  People will say that they have a lot of chores or they have to spend time with their kids, but the reality is that if the volunteering was something that they loved, they would do it with their kids and if they felt cherished and you were taking tasks off their list, they would take tasks off yours.  If people aren’t buying, it’s because what you’re offering is not what they need right now.  Cycle the offers to cover all the bases and Languages, or (if you’re clever) have people at different stages of the buy getting different offers. 

I remember spending years volunteer-teaching with a local organization.  The students were wonderful, engaged, funny, energizing people, and only a few other instructors taught as many classes – volunteered as many hours – as I did.  They appreciation events (Words of Appreciation) in which my name was honored, and they had food and appreciation events (maybe qualifies as Gifts), and the director was an incredible soul who gave you Quality Time when you needed it.  But an Acts of Service person like me never got what she really needed, which is an occasional exemption from the You Gotta Do This, You Can’t Do That that add stress, aggravation and problems to my day.  THAT is the only Language that means anything to me.  I don’t want to be thanked.  I don’t want pizza.  I want 10 less minutes of (to me, unnecessary) hassle.  I never got it.  When I found the same wonderful students in a less-inflexible world, I bailed.  Less dictation = Acts of Service.

When I was the Volunteer Director for a county government, I thanked the volunteers regularly (via email and events), I handed out high-quality swag (coffee-table books and bags were the hot “sellers”), I gave people my undivided attention when they needed it and I actively looked for ways to make life easier for them.  Most of the Languages were covered.

[Let’s dispose of the problematical one now.  The people who like Physical Touch, if they are appropriate, are the ones buffeting your shoulder, touching your arm when they want to emphasize a point or hugging you.  To deflect unwanted Touch, just say “Don’t hug me” or take the person aside and lay out a clear, courteous boundary, like “I’m uncomfortable when you .  Please respect my boundaries and don’t do that again.  I know you didn’t mean any harm, so I am sure that all will be well from now on.”  This is the one language that, because of the possibility of abuse, you might need to accept not being addressed.]

Applying this idea to my volunteers and to prospects is really helping me.  Hope it helps you too!

Visit me and my cool free stuff at www.soaringdragon.biz.  Links to free classes, You Tube, Learnitlive and more.....   You deserve to soar with dragons!

For Entrepreneurs: More Income + Life Satisfaction from Strategic Self-Care

Hey, I'M super-busy.  I barely stop on a daily basis.  

Except that I know that stopping for strategic self-care IS my road to income and to life satisfaction, which is why I started the business in the first place, right?

You don't need hours.  With 5 carefully chosen minutes a day - 5 MINUTES daily - you can have a tremendous impact on your income and your overall happiness.

I've researched and chosen the 5 elements with the most powerful and reliable ROI (return on investment) for your time.  Focus on them, make a commitment to every day - and watch your life blossom like all the spring flowers all around us.


https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/strategic-self-care-for-entrepreneurs-the-5-daily-tools-proven-to-lead-to-lots-more-income-and-life-satisfaction

Preventing Dementia and Cognitive Decline, Part 1 More Sleep

The key to getting more sleep is to carefully train your brain to the 8 hours that you need.  If you are currently getting 5 or 6 – or less – then you need to plan your evening so that you are asleep 15 minutes earlier than usual. 

Think of your evening as your prep for a big presentation before a live audience.  You hone your speech.  You prepare notes on cards or pages.  You check the lighting and the sound.  You breathe deeply to reduce nervousness.  You hit the loo 10 minutes before show time.  Well, it’s the same thing with sleeping.  You need to prepare. 

1)      Make sure that you get at least 20 minutes of exercise/movement every day.  It helps “tune” your body to better health on all levels of metabolism and circadian rhythm, as it improves your brain, and especially memory, function.

2)      Make sure that you aren’t eating a heavy dinner less than 3 hours before bedtime.  When I worked in a corporate job, and stayed late at my desk, I had dinner in the office fridge, then came home and had a 100 calorie snack before bed.  That snack stabilized my blood sugar for sleep.  I still do the 100 calorie snack.

3)       Stop thinking about business, politics, doing Facebook, or anything else serious or potentially upsetting (no email!) for at least an hour before bed.

4)      Two hours before sleep time, use Dump the Garbage or a similar tool from Take Back Your Lost Heart or 101 Stress Busters.

5)      Sometime in the evening, HAVE FUN, something that engrosses you and genuinely brings joy – which passively watching TV doesn’t, usually.  101 Stress Busters has lots of ideas. 

6)      If you feel resistance to sleep time rather than joy, take a deep breath or five, and see if you can hear the “I don’t want to go to bed and you can’t make me!” voice.  The more it sounds like a 3-year old, the closer you are to Reality.  This is the part of you that will keep you awake until it gets some fun – and no amount of substitutes (alcohol, sweets, TV, you name it) will really satisfy.

7)      Develop an unvarying Go To Bed routine.  Unvarying is important.  You want your brain to get programmed to wind down as you go through the routine.  I cover this in the Kick Weight Loss to the Curb class and will cover it in my newsletter.

8)      If you have a spouse or partner who snores, insists on watching TV in bed (a VERY bad idea, because it associates the bed with TV, not sleeping, to his/her brain) or in any other way disrupts your sleep, sleep somewhere else.  If they want to sleep with you, then they have to SLEEP in the bedroom and do other things elsewhere.  For the last 3 years, hubby has had to get up at 3:30AM and of course, goes to bed much earlier than I.  So we have slept apart on commute days and together on non-commute days.  If your partner doesn’t love you enough to put your needs ahead of their desires, then you do what you need to do to take care of your health and safeguard your mental acuity. 

9)      If you find your sleep disrupted by trips to the bathroom, stop drinking in the evening.  I can’t drink anything after 4PM myself.  I gathered data for 6 months before I came to the latest I could absorb fluids before I had night-waking troubles.  For most people it’s 3 hours, not 6, so see what it is for your body.

Our bodies change and shift over time, usually gradually – elders have more trouble staying asleep because brains get poorer at releasing enough melatonin, and the over-55 set gets less exercise, for example.  If it’s relatively sudden, first check any changes in medications; have you started or stopped anything?  Then think: are you eating differently or taking/stopping a new supplement?  

Check with your doc or pharmacist (the latter are easier to get time with), to see if there is a known sleep disruption associated with the chemicals involved.  Supplements are less safe than prescribed drugs in the sense that there is no quality or purity control imposed by a government agency focused on our safety, but assuming the pills really are what the label says, the pharmacist can tell you what is known about effects of the supplement.  

And then there are hormones of menopause and perimenopause (starting anytime after age 43, on average), which are known to wreck sleep for a while.  Absent any of these known reasons, sudden sleep changes warrant a medical visit.

Kick Dieting to the Curb: Get and Stay at Your Healthy Weight – Forever!

https://soaringdragon.leadpages.co/kick-dieting-to-the-curb-get-and-stay-at-your-healthy-weight-forever/

6 Key Principles for SUCCESSFUL, Permanent Health Changes

If you want to make changes in your life - and who doesn't, in January? - keep some principles in mind:

**  Choose small, reasonable goals that you

** Commit to - with your whole body and sou.

** Have a deep and compelling reason, and keep that reason at the front of your mind.

** Have a Commitment Buddy, and choose that one carefully.  Use your journal as your commitment buddy if the perfect person isn't available.  Check in every day for the first 21 days.

** Embrace deep surgery to replace internal resistance,through hypnotherapy.

And #6:  Take a no-nonsense, aggressive stance on eliminating the health impact of stress.  This will give you better sleep, weight loss, less internal resistance and higher income, especially in the small business world.  If you want more money, you want more sleep and you want de-stressing.  Full stop, no excuses.  You aren't more important because you are busy,busy.  It's not a badge of honor.  It's a badge of Dumb Choice.  Make a different one - with my help.

Here is the expanded video version.   www.soaringdragon.biz

Want the Fast Track to Getting What You Want??

Playing with my cats earlier today….

Orono (a Maine Coon, natch) knows how to play Bat At the Cat Toy. She has lots of fun leaping and pouncing, and she knows that the fun is prolonged when she simply “counts coup” on her enemy, leaving the toy available for an immediate new game. The challenge is in the doing.

Gabriel, alas, finds the subtleties of Orono’s strategy perplexing. For him, the name of the game is catch that bird-substitute, hold onto it with jaws of steel, give it a neck bite and drag it off one’s lair and gloat over your victory. I have seen him shake his head – a feline ploy to help snap the prey’s neck. Sigh. His insistence on refusing to catch and release means that every time he catches the toy I have to wrestle it away from him before any of us can have any more fun. (If I don’t wrestle it away, he shreds it in too-authentic predator style.) He cannot hold on to his gettings lightly. He doesn’t share anything; he treats every treat as though it will be his last. He never lets go. He does not believe that if he lets go that he will ever get another shred of prosperity again. All evidence to the contrary will not shake him.

We all know people like Gabe. They snatch. They hold on to their possessions and the people in their lives with a death grip. That approach, they think, at the deepest, unrational limbic system where humans make most of their decisions, will allow them to be financially, professionally and in all other ways happy.

Funny thing is – exactly the opposite is true. Avoiding extremes of fiscal extravagance and unconsciousness, of course, if you keep a light hand on the reins of your life, you can feel nuances and changing circumstances and have a much better chance of staying on the sunny side of the street. When you are desperately trying to control someone or something, your hands get hard and insensitive; you can’t feel the nuances any more. Batting at your fun (or your sorrows) allows more fun to come in to your life. Desperately grabbing onto every shred of fun and refusing to allow the positive energy to circulate in the world guarantees that less fun will come your way – you are a dead end and energy wants to circulate.    

If that’s too fanciful, here’s the more concrete version: if you touch all the things and people who come your way with a light touch (not grabbing like Gabe), if you are not desperate to get the business or convince someone of something, if you are not convinced that you can manifest any and every outcome your desires can conjure, you invite people to come closer. Open, welcoming arms, open minds and communication without needing a particular outcome is more likely to give you what you really need, in a day/week/month/year/life. If you stop trying to manifest and just go about your work in the world, stopping to say “thank you” for whatever shows up, whether you label it as “Good [I got what I want]” or “Bad [I didn’t get what I want],” then you have the magic formula for a happy life.  Regardless of whether you got the million-dollar income or the wonderful spouse, you will be centered, content, happy, with dozens of friends who just adore you, because you are life-giving sun, pouring joy into everyone else from your own limitless supply.

Another fish will be along in the universe’s own perfect time.  

Go to Soaring Dragon. 

Want High Income, Recession-Proof Career, Deep Soul Clearing + Huge Positive Impact on Your Health?

And it all comes from the same FUN activity!

Whatever your career or business and your satisfaction level with it, I am sure that you remember your parents and high school guidance counselors pounding the "You have to go to college" message into you.  You might also recall the disdain all these fine folk expressed, overtly or merely through tone of voice, for the blue-collar workers.  Their jobs, because they work with their hands, were being offshored, but you - with your shiny new BA (or MA) - were a knowledge worker.  YOU were golden.  

Fast forward some decades.  Sure enough, the good-paying blue collar jobs of the Midwest were offshored and the sorta-good-paying factory jobs of the South were taken over by illegal immigrants.  Huge transition from fathers being able to support their families to fathers stuck in permanent unemployment, with no unemployment help, or re-employed at much less $, no benefits.  A world of constant anxiety, no security and no self-esteem.

Sounds like your guidance counselors, parents, pundits, everyone really, was right.  If you want money, security and good health (from lack of stress and from access to medical care and quality food), then you need to go to college.  Case closed.

But......  what about the people who listened to that advice more recently, with college costs having skyrocketed?  Huge education debt that is acting as an economic and personal sea anchor, preventing young people from buying homes, starting families or even moving away from their parents.

Compounded, of course, by the end of that lovely fantasy that knowledge work can't be offshored.  It was always logically true that knowledge work is the easiest to offshore.  No new factories to build.  All you need is a cheap call-center or a wired world where everyone from accountants to radiologists can do their work with a Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese or Mexican accent.  Not to mention Hungarian.  My own work of deep transformational healing can be done from anywhere on Earth with a high-speed Internet link.  And not just by highly-skilled and experienced healers like me.  There are companies in the Puget Sound area who are hiring minimally-trained health coaches and hypnotists to work in crowded call-center environments at minimum wage!  Obviously, the quality isn't going to be as high as what I do with my academic degrees, certifications and years of experience, but this is exactly what has been happening to most of the knowledge-worker occupations.

So here is the actual reality:  A college degree is no longer the passport to the middle class, a road out of poverty and a road out of just-getting-by, that it used to be.  That equation is dead.  Unless you have a college degree in something immensely crucially essential and in demand, and which pays well, you may be feeding your mind, but you are wasting your money if you go anywhere other than the least expensive public college you can find.  [American Public University, entirely online, is very cost-effective, and I recommend it as one of a handful of quality for-profit colleges.]

Guidance counselors are still playing the "college for all" song.  So are all the "mean well" politicians.  But that is not the road to follow.  If you have someone in your family who is wondering how to get:

* Solid, steady income that cannot be offshored, ever, and which no recession will ever make a dent in AND
* a huge positive impact on your health because you have that steady security, and you can choose to either run your own business or work for a company AND
* the satisfaction of creation with your own two hands, 

.... then, my friend, you need to get them an apprenticeship in one of the eternal trades: plumbing, auto tech, electrician.  There are a few others, like chef and HVAC, that I can highly recommend, as well as craftsman carpentry.

Don't recoil in horror.

Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Enquiry Into the Value of Work (Matthew Crawford) sounded this alarm some years ago.  In my work with clients, I sound off on the value of creating things with your own two hands, as much as possible throughout the day, as the road to better physical health and to peace of mind.  The anxiety-stilling impact of doing creative work - anything from building a bird house to painting, coloring or crocheting - has been documented in medical studies as well as psychological.  The more you can create over the course of a day, the less tempting baby-back ribs are, the less self-control you have to exert to not eat dessert, the less onerous and more joyful exercise and movement becomes, the less interesting alcohol and tobacco addictions are, and the more "Damn, I'm GOOD!!!!" experiences you have in the course of a day.

Because I will assert to you with no equivocation whatsoever that the clothing you make yourself makes you feel like a queen, the doghouse you create yourself makes you feel as powerful as the Emperor Akbar and the book you write from the heart, or the paint you swirl on a paper or canvas is as sweet to your eyes as a priceless Turner.  

It's as close to the godly act of creation as we mere mortals ever get.  You need that fabulous feeling.  You DESERVE that fabulous feeling.  You can get that fabulous feeling.  

And when your grandkid the plumber arranges for you to never have a 4 hour wait for a stopped drain again, that feeling is priceless, too!  

Start today!

_______________________________________________________________________

Know what else you deserve?  You deserve to have all that procrastinating that you just can't figure out end too.  Every single time you waste time on Facebook instead of making progress toward your deeply felt dreams, you deserve better!  Every single time you decide that you will never succeed at what you want, you deserve better!

Accept my gift of a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch), and discover exactly what has really been holding you back or stopping you from achieving the life you really want.  Visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz, and we'll schedule your free session.  You need more than just "motivation" and inspiration.  You are plenty motivated to get what you want!  You just lack the specific tools to get back the barrier.   And I am very, very good at blockage-demolition!  www.soaringdragon.biz    victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com