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Category Archives: Life Balance

How to Leverage Yourself: Work Smarter Not Harder

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You can’t be in more than one place at a time. Physically speaking, it’s impossible, yes? Let’s think outside the box a little bit so you can learn how to leverage yourself in order to have a real financial impact.

Leveraging Yourself for Financial Success

A lot of you are familiar with the concept of leveraging yourself, yet I often find that many people out there don’t fully appreciate the importance of leveraging. It’s one of those terms that get bandied about in the business world so often that people take it for granted, one of those “Here we go again” terms. Yet, a huge part of financial success building is leveraging.

It simply means doing more with less. The idea is to work smarter not harder, get more done and deliver more value. You know you’re leveraging to the maximum when you’re away from the things you don’t enjoy and are doing what you really love to do. That means you’ve changed your blueprint about what’s available for you in your life, where you can be and how you play the game.

How does this apply to the average person?

You can start a business with little or none of your own money. It means delegating as many tasks as possible to others. It means using other people’s talents, skills, contacts, abilities and resources for mutual advantage. You’re good at whatever you do, but other people are better than you in other areas. Do what you’re good at and let others do the rest.

After you’ve gotten over the blueprint barrier, the next step is coming up with what will maximize your ability to leverage a talent, product, or idea. Can you create a book, program or a technology, and license it for royalties? That’s one of the easiest ways to generate easy, lucrative, passive income.

Using your resources

When it comes to leveraging, though, you’re not just maximizing other people’s skills and resources. You also want to get more out of yourself. That means enhancing your business knowledge and developing yourself personally. Be a constant learner. The best form of leveraging is self-education.

When you know certain things and develop yourself, you put that into action. If you’re not doing something with your skills, your knowledge becomes useless, it stagnates, and you start to feel bad about yourself. Who needs any more of that?

You vs. Your Health

If you really want to take it to the next level, leverage yourself by increasing your:

  • Health
  • Stamina
  • Energy
  • Anything business related

Get into shape. “I don’t have time” is an easy excuse. However, a person can think that they don’t have time to work out. Think about how much could get done when you have more energy to keep going instead of feeling fatigued and drained.

In general, leveraging means managing your time effectively. Less turns into more: more you, more money, and more of what you really want out of life.

Exercise: Think about what you could leverage and act on it.

  1. What’s that one thing that you know you should not be doing because it is not a good fit for your skills and time?
  2. How can you give it to someone else that is better suited to take it on?
  3. Act now to get your “leverage momentum” moving forward!

Has this post helped you to learn how to leverage yourself? Let us know in the comments section below!

Up Next: How To Be More Than Just Interesting With Your Marketing

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 03/26/10.

Change How You Define Success By Taking Time For Yourself

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There’s always something to do, right? Somewhere to be. Someone to meet. Commitments to fulfill. We all have our reasons, but there’s one thing we need to ask ourselves: Is this really taking me toward my idea of success? How do I define success?

How To Define Success By Taking Time For Yourself

We can define success by financial abundance or happiness in relationships and family. But we’re really looking for common underlying themes, no matter what the category. Some of these themes are peace of mind, a sense of calm, and for things to slow down so we can actually enjoy our lives and take time for ourselves.

In other words, what we’re looking for is the exact opposite of the typical hectic lifestyle most people live.  The irony in all this is how we define success as a society encourages you to live a hectic life where you can’t take time for yourself. You feel the need to reach for success now, so then you can finally relax, slow down and enjoy a sunset in the future.


But when does that moment come? Next week? Next vacation? Next year? When we finally reach a long-standing goal? When we retire?

It becomes a never-ending cycle of work for play; only a lot of people forget to actually take time to play now because of how they define success! When work is over, then errands. And when errands are over, then it’s obligation A, then B. Then it’s time to just crash and get ready to do it all over again so there’s no opportunity left to take time for yourself.

No doubt, hard, effective work can pay off, but at what price?

We need to change how we define success. Our definition of success needs to be one that speaks to our needs for:

  • more balance
  • more time to be with those we care about
  • more time for play
  • more time to take care of ourselves
  • more time to do the things we really want to do, not just what we feel like we have to do

Why do so many people “work” their lives away and busy themselves to death?

One word: FEAR!

People fear that they’re not doing enough, or for that matter fear they are not good enough. They fear that if they don’t spend enough time on results-driven activity, then they won’t get anywhere.

The mind can be our greatest ally or our greatest obstacle, striving to protect the Ego that above all else wants safety, security, and to make sure we have “enough”. But if you’re always looking for “enough,” you never get to experience it, do you? You’re always doing, always going after it, as if it’s not possible that enough is enough right now.


Naturally, I’d be the first one to say that finances and your career are important to how we define success, but not at the expense of your physical, mental, and emotional health. Not for the price of your sense of peace, your family or your few moments when you get to take time for yourself and enjoy life.

Don’t just spend time; take time!

Exercise: What’s Important To You?

  1. List your values for how you define success:
    • What’s most important to you?
    • If you didn’t have to work, how would you spend your time and take time for yourself?
  1. In order to take time for yourself:
    • how could you leverage yourself (i.e. earn money while you sleep)?
    • Who can you delegate some of your time-consuming tasks to?
  1. Then adjust your schedule for the next month by assigning specific times you take for yourself. Block out these times first. Consider them appointments and keep them as you would any other.

I want to hear from you.  Can you relate to the challenge of the “never-ending cycle of work for play?” If you had to create a definition about how you define success right this minute, what would it be? (You can always tweak it later, but I want to know what comes to your mind first–what does your gut tell you? Declare it here in the comments . . . and then go live it!

This article has been updated for relevancy and accuracy. It’s original publish date was 01/07/10.

Practicing Happiness Now To Make It A Habit

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Practice makes perfect, right? Wrong! First of all, nothing’s ever perfect. I’d even say you don’t really want anything to be “perfect.” Why not? Well, once you’ve reached it, where else is there to go but backwards or, even worse, nowhere? Practicing happiness or anything else should be a process.

How To Start Practicing Happiness In Your Life Now

When this post was originally written, the Winter Olympic Games were just starting, I started to think about the art of practice and perfection. Watching the athletes get ready to compete, I am in awe of their strength, dedication, and focus. There is no doubt these athletes are striving for pure perfection.

The point of practice isn’t perfection

We want to strive for perfection, yes, but that’s only going to work if you understand that it’s not just about the destination but the journey, as well.

That’s why it helps to look at process when it comes to those outcomes we’re reaching for. Because what would be the point of getting to where you always wanted to be, if you’re beat up and worn out by the time you get there? Where’s the happiness in that?

Happiness Is A Process As Much As An Outcome

I mean, don’t get me wrong. A hard-earned victory is awesome. But think about it; should happiness in life be restricted to success in finances, or business, or career, or the attainment of goals?

We have all been there at some point in our lives, saying something like, “If only I had [fill in the blank], I’d be so much happier.” Hey, sometimes we may even get whatever it is we think will make us happy, but what usually ends up happening? We’re psyched for a little while—if at all—and then we find out it wasn’t really enough to make us as happy as we thought it would. There’s always more.

You can work your butt off to get to where you want to be by practicing your delivery, your backhand swing, your investment strategies—you can practice anything until you get it down, but that doesn’t mean things are always going to turn out perfectly.

Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent.

Practices Becomes Habit

Practice becomes habit, and habits become permanent unless we consciously change them. We’re practicing something all the time through our habits, even when we’re not really thinking about it.

If you practice the thought that “I’ll be happy when [fill in the blank] happens,” then guess what? You’re always delaying your happiness until [fill in the blank] happens. Not because things will never be great, but because you’ve become a master at being unhappy. Unhappiness will be your habit!

You have to prioritize happiness. You have to practice being happy no matter what is going on in life; whether you win or lose, succeed or experience temporary setbacks, whether everything is the way you have always dreamed or if you are still on the road to your next major destination.

Practice Whatever You Want To Be In The Future Now

If you want to be more patient and less reactionary, practice patience now. If you want to be a manager of your own personal wealth, start managing your finances now, no matter how much money you earn. If you want to be successful, then practice being successful now. If you want happiness, start practicing happiness now.

The key is to enjoy the process, enjoy the journey. We can have moments of perfection, times where we wouldn’t want a single thing to change, but it’s unfair and unrealistic to ask that of life all the time. But it’s totally within our control to practice being whatever we want to be right now!

Now that you hopefully understand why you should practice happiness, you might be wondering how to do it.

I’ve been prioritizing happiness for a long time, studying and practicing what it really takes to be truly happy. Would you like to know what I’ve discovered?

Well, I’ve got some great news! I’ve developed a set of seven principles that have transformed my life and made me a much happier person. One of them, which we’ve been talking about here, is that you have to prioritize happiness. 

I’d love to share the other six with you, so I’ve put together a FREE, brand-new online training to walk you through them. It’s called: 

The Shocking Truth About Happiness

If you join me for this FREE training, I guarantee you will be much better equipped to create real and lasting happiness in your life. 

Here’s a taste of what you’ll discover:

  • Why happiness is your natural state of being 
  • How to eliminate the true source of UNhappiness
  • How to be happy AND achieve more in life
  • The 7 precepts of happiness you MUST understand in order to be truly happy

And much, much more!

Remember, time is your most precious asset. In less time than it takes to sit through a few episodes of a Netflix show, you can attend this class and get on the path to a completely new and much more joyful life.

In fact, just by signing up, you’re taking your first action step in prioritizing your own happiness. 

Click here to pick the best date and time for you. I hope to see you there!

What’s one way you could practice your happiness today? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

For Your Freedom,

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Being Present and Finding Happiness in Your Life