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The Power of Gratitude

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Be grateful!

We hear it all the time, at least in a community of fellow seekers who want to grow their financial success building as much as their spiritual peace. Life has its highs and lows, but the one thing that’s the same no matter where we are on the wheel is that there are always many things to be grateful for.

It’s easy to be grateful when it doesn’t really require a ton of effort, like saying “please” or “thank you.” It’s easy to be grateful when things are going great. But what about when things aren’t going quite as planned?

Everyone’s been there. The mind starts going into “what’s wrong,” or what’s not enough, what’s too much to deal with, too much to do in order to overcome an obstacle and reach a goal. In some ways it’s natural, but when it becomes a habit then the pity party is simply a safer choice.

The truth is it takes much more courage to appreciate what we’ve got—no matter how little it may seem—than it is to surrender to the scarcity model and let ourselves off the hook for taking action because something isn’t enough.

Our egos will tell us that if we spend too much time being grateful for what we have, we won’t try to get more, and we’ll become stuck with being “content” instead of happy.

Wanting what we currently have has nothing to do with somehow tricking ourselves into “settling.” Just because you’re buying an economy car now that’s practical but not so hot-looking doesn’t mean you won’t want a Ferrari three years from now when you’re rich. It’s not hard to be grateful for that fact that you have four wheels to drive that gets you where you need to go. There are plenty of people in this world that don’t have that, with consequences we couldn’t imagine.

It’s the lack-based protective mind that continuously hungers for more, like a squirrel hoarding nuts for winter. The scarcity model, constantly looking around, overlooks and discounts what’s right in front of us. We have to consistently remind ourselves to look for “what’s right” in our lives instead of “what’s wrong.”

Then we’ll be less likely not to forget to show our appreciation to the people who are closest to us; our family, friends, loved ones, co-workers, employees. Then there are teachers, postal workers—all the people that make our daily lives more convenient and enrich our larger communities. And let’s not forget to say “thank you” to the Universe for our many blessings.

Gratitude particularly holds true when it comes to finances. To have abundance, be grateful for and properly manage whatever wealth you have now, even if you don’t think it’s much. Why? If you’re not appreciating what you already have, that means you’re not maximizing what’s available right now. If you can’t do that, why should the Universe believe you can handle more?

Now it’s your turn! Who and what have you not fully appreciated?  What are some of the things that you think we tend to take for granted? Below list the people and things in your life for which you are grateful. Show your appreciation to the people who mean the most to you for all that you have.

For your freedom,

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A Different Kind of Blueprint

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By this point, we can talk for days about our money blueprint, yes?

It’s that program we created, or way of being that we’ve grown accustomed to, in relation to money—mostly without us being aware of it. Our money blueprint manifests our financial reality. Like the blueprint of a physical structure, it’s either going to be drawn up big or small—to accommodate a lot of money, or little.

That kind of blueprint is about the mental game of money, but let’s take a look at a different kind of blueprint—the one that encompasses the machine, the vehicle that will build your wealth—that is, your business.

A lot of people start their businesses without any blueprints. They say, “Well, I’ve got a couple of clients. Then I’ll figure out all the marketing stuff and get some more clients.”

That actually could work, but the downside of that kind of success—without a system in place that can handle the new volume—could lead to having so many customers that you literally don’t know what to do with them. You could end up losing as many potential repeat customers as you will the additional word-of-mouth customers those lost repeaters could have served up for you.

Designing a basic blueprint for your business allows you to get the lay of the land for your enterprise and understand how your business is organized. Maybe even more importantly, your business blueprint can show you those critical success factors that aren’t in your business. Enjoying the fruits of owning your business is much different when you can take a six-month vacation from it, yet it’s still running the way it should when you get back.

No matter what the business, there are four basic blocks that need to be included in the foundation of your business’ blueprint:

  • Leadership. This is the part that provides vision, inspiration and makes most of those key, highest-level decisions about how things should be run.
  • Business development. This is mostly marketing and sales. That’s where all the business comes from. These are the team members—and the processes in place—who find those prospects that want your product or service. Business development is where your promises are made and disseminated.
  • Delivery. Once those promises are made, somebody’s got to do the work, yes? In manufacturing, those are the people who create the product. In other businesses, it’ll be those people who provide the service. Those are the fulfillment people, those who deliver on the promises.
  • Administration. These are the often unheralded (don’t take them for granted, though!) people behind it all: accounting, legal, payroll, etc. It’s a separate yet very important group because that’s exactly where a lot of systems and processes often go awry.

Again, no matter what the business, every one of them is going to have these four essential components.

Similar to our psychological blueprints, what’s under the ground creates what’s above the ground. So many of the obstacles we come across in business can be tracked to structure and systems. As intensely as we work on the mind game of money, so to we need to pay special attention to the actual structure of our money making machine.

What do you think? We want to hear your comments and stories!!!

Aim to Please

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There was a study out a few years ago that said 80% of millionaires are self-made. That is, they didn’t inherit their millions, and they didn’t win the lottery. They literally started out wanting to be a millionaire—like everybody else—but found a way to earn their millions.

Ten percent of self-made millionaires are people who work for self-made millionaires. They join a company like Apple when it’s small and grow financially and professionally with the company. Only about 8-9% of millionaires are professionals like doctors, lawyers, architects, engineers, athletes, entertainers and such. Inheritors represent about another 1 percent. These are ballpark figures.

For a vast majority of millionaires, the one skill they had in common that made them millionaires was simple: the ability to sell something at a higher price than it costs them to produce.

So for you, the purpose of a millionaire-making enterprise is to create customers in a cost effective way, and your job is to innovate what you’re selling and market it. Those are the only two things that create customers: to find newer, better, faster, cheaper ways to help people achieve their goals or get what they want, and to let as many people know about it as possible.

The measure of the success of a business is customer satisfaction. If your customers are pleased, you’ll know because you’ll still be in business. When you realize, “It’s not about me, it’s about the customer,” you become focused on that, not ‘How can I rip them off, how can I get the money and run, how can I get them to buy once and never buy again.’

Once you have learned how to build a successful business, you can use the same principles to build business after business after business. That’s how millionaires stay millionaires.

Yet, here’s another sobering fact: a vast majority of businesses go broke in the first three to five years. Businesses started by people with no experience go broke more often than not. Businesses started by people with experience succeed 90% of the time or more.

People starting out don’t know how to sell; they don’t know how to satisfy customers; and they don’t know how to create and keep customers.

The good news is all business skills are learnable. When you realize that there are certain things successful people do over and over again—and if you can learn what they are and do them yourself over and over again—you’ll eventually get the same result.

People will say, “Well, I’m not very good at selling.” Get over it! You may not be very good at it, but it’s a learnable skill.

So what is the highest paid work in our society, for most people? It’s not doctoring, or lawyering, ball playing, or singing. It’s thinking.

Think, “What can I sell that I’m passionate about but also adds value to other people’s lives in some kind of way, and how can I do this profitably?”

The customer may not always be right, but never let them know that. You want raving fans. You want supporters. You want critics who care. You want to see those people again and again. Like any relationship, it’s not only about you and what you get out of it. It’s building and sustaining rapport while your profits soar to millionaire heights.

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