I’ve not had a hard time with making exercise a priority. I started running as a freshman in high school when I took up cross country and never looked back.
I jogged and then walked through my pregnancy and trained for a marathon when my son was very young by pushing him all those miles in his baby jogger — and this was up and down hilly terrain!
When I had to give up running due to bad knees and back, I started working out at the gym. I’m in better shape now than I was 20 years ago.
I’ve found that if I want to achieve a certain fitness goal, I have to make time for exercise — no matter what else is going on in my life.
This means that I do get up at 4:30 AM to get to the gym by 5:00 or I that I squeeze in a workout between work and making dinner no matter how exhausted I am.
As the Nike slogan says, “I just do it.”
Making time for my own marketing works the same way. It doesn’t really matter how much client work I have, or that I need to do my accounting, or that my desk is full of clutter that needs to be dealt with.
Marketing, like exercise, is important.
Exercising regularly means I enjoy excellent health and a fit body. Marketing my business on a daily basis means I continually bring in new business without suffering “feast or famine.”
And like exercise, marketing takes real discipline. Even though I get my butt to the gym at least four days a week, I still fight that voice in my head that says, “You can take a break today. You’ve worked hard. You deserve an hour to just sit and eat cheesy poofs and read a good book.”
When I hear that voice, I quickly change my clothes and high-tail it to the gym. I’m always glad I did.
I hear the same voice with regard to spending time on my own marketing. “You can skip today,” the sly voice says. “Your billable hours are filled for the month. You don’t really need to make those phone calls or write those blog posts.”
I learned this week that when I hear that voice, I need to double-down and get my butt in gear.
And despite the siren call of “the voice,” I did spend at least one hour per day this week working on my marketing. It felt really good. And you know what? Within 48 hours of making this my new habit for June, I became fully booked for June and half of July.
If you’ve taken up the challenge with me, what were your results?
I’m a huge fan of Leo Babauta, author of The Power of Less: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential, in Business and in Life and the publisher of the Zen Habits blog.
One strategy that Leo recommends in achieving the life you want is to make a list of what you want to change with regard to your life — and then focusing on changing or implementing one new habit per month.
I initially made a list of bad habits I have and half-heartedly tried to change a couple. But nothing stuck.
That’s because I wasn’t inspired by them and the pay-off was too small. I already exercise five days a week, I’m not overweight, I eat my fruits and veges, and I actually do a pretty good job of separating my work and personal life.
But I have one honking huge habit I’d like to change . . . I’d like to put my marketing first instead of last (or never). Before client work. Every day.
Like many freelancers and consultants, I use the same tired excuses for not doing my own marketing:
1. Billable work comes first.
2. I don’t have time.
3. I’m the shoemaker’s daughter.
4. Marketing is hard.
5. I have so many ideas I don’t know what to do first.
So, to make this new habit “stick,” I’m following Leo’s advice and posting it here. My goal is to work on my marketing at least one hour every day five days a week.
It’s a huge goal for me and one that will take some work. But the pay-off for me will be huge.
If you’re struggling with finding time for your own marketing, why don’t you join me?
I’ll keep you posted on my progress. If I don’t post anything here during the month, you’ll know I’m not keeping my goal!
I’ve heard and read lots of commentary about Tim Ferriss’ book, The 4-Hour Work Week, and what I heard made me believe I really didn’t need to read it.
I really have no desire to work / live in another country or sail around the world or anything of that nature.
And, I sold information products for over a year and realized that I really didn’t like doing that, either. (Part of Ferriss’ plan for “freeing” yourself includes developing a product or products you can sell.)
My ambitions are more modest — I want more time with my son, and I want to take Fridays off.
My son has become a teenager and while you’ll find lots of debate about the pros and cons of being a stay-at-home mom when your children are younger, it’s always been my belief that kids need you more when they go out into the world and confront complex life choices.
I’m not sure what got me to read Ferriss’ book. Maybe it’s because the revised version with the bright orange cover jumped off the Borders bookshelf and into my hands.
I started reading it on a Saturday afternoon and couldn’t put it down. I read all the way through and realized hat Ferriss gives you a plan of action for developing the life you really want — whether it’s living in Bora Bora six months out of the year or finding a way to take Fridays off.
The key to living the life you want is to eliminate and delegate those tasks that keep you from achieving what you really want. For me, that meant finding ways to eliminate the day-to-day minutia of running a business and a household.
The other key to Ferriss’ plan rests on questioning the status quo — do you *really* need to work 40, 50, or 60 hours a week? Conventional wisdom holds that the harder you work, the more successful you’ll be.
“Work harder” usually translates into “work more hours.”
However, “work harder” can also be translated into, “Work harder to find ways to work smarter so that you work fewer hours.”
Since reading The 4-Hour Work Week, I’ve managed to eliminate much of the junk that fills my inbox, get Basecamp up and running in order to better manage projects, move almost all of my software applications to cloud-based applications so that I can access them from anywhere, train myself to “batch” tasks, and work with my virtual assistant to help me learn how to delegate tasks to her — so that I can free myself up to think about how to get better results for my clients.
The result? I’ve taken the last three Fridays off. In fact, I spent last Friday walking the Freedom Trail in Boston with my son. It was a gorgeous spring day — the kind where the sky fills your senses and the spring air blows thrilling little breezes that caress your skin.
We walked the city, looked at people and historic buildings, and ate candy while sitting at Faneuil Hall.
At the end of the day, despite all his grumbling and moaning about having to “walk all day” and “being bored,” he said, “Thanks, Mom. I had a great day.”
It was in that moment that I realized that I would always remember this day with him — but I would never remember the day if I had worked.
And that my friends is why you need to read The 4-Hour Work Week. What do you want to achieve and what’s been keeping you from achieving it?
A few weeks ago I watched the 212 Extra Degree video on YouTube. The message of the inspirational video — that success comes with just a little bit of extra effort — stuck with me.
I found myself looking for little ways in my day-to-day life to “turn up the heat” a notch — to go from 211 degrees to 212 degrees. Surprisingly, these little things were pretty easy to find.
For example, instead of getting up at 5:00 AM — or 5:15 or 5:30 — I started getting up at 4:30 AM. And instead of putzing around the house and reading emails on my iPhone, I showered, ate breakfast, and went straight to my office. This put me at my desk at 6:00 AM (versus 7:00 or 7:30 AM).
An earlier start gave me more time to think and accomplish the “big” tasks for the day. The earlier start has also made me much more focused, and I’m finding I’m accomplishing a whole lot more.
Too often, I think, we tell ourselves we can’t be successful because ______________________ (fill in the blank). I’ve proven to myself that all it takes is just a little bit of extra effort — that one degree — to make a real difference in how I approach my life and my work.
Try it and see what you think.
(One caveat: A pan of boiling water will run dry so it’s also equally important that you recharge yourself in order to have plenty of energy to sustain your 212 degree focus.)
In May my desktop machine that I use for work got hit with *nasty* malware. Up until this point, I had been completely virus free — mostly because I have always practiced ultra-safe (re: paranoid) practices: i.e. don’t download files from people you don’t know, use virus scanning software, have a great firewall, etc.
So I have no idea how malware breached my defenses. I only know that once it infected my machine, it caused pain. Lots of pain.
I spent hours reading techie boards trying to figure out how to dislodge it.
I spent more hours running programs designed to delete it — to no avail.
I paid over $500 to have a computer tech guy come to my office and remove it.
Nothing worked. The malware was so evil, it turned off Windows automatic updates, refused to allow anti-malware programs to open and run, took over my scanner, and then ultimately my Web browser. When that happened, I knew I was hosed.
That morning I unplugged my machine and lugged it to the local computer fix-it guy who did a complete “wipe and reload” — computer speak for reformatting my hard drive and then reloading the operating system.
Because of the havoc with my machine, I had limited access to files and information, including Outlook and ACT! — and began using Gmail as a stop-gap measure.
Once I got machine back and began reloading all of my software programs, the proverbial light went on . . . and I realized how much time and money I had been wasting all these years on bloated software programs that forced me to work their way, not my way.
Using Google’s Gmail, Tasks and Docs apps got me thinking about cloud computing . . . which got me thinking about how I really work . . . which got me thinking about cloud computing again . . . which led me to doing demos with products that I had never even considered.
Thinking about how I really work made me think about my business in new ways — which opened up a whole treasure trove of ideas and possibilities. I even bought an iPhone, something I had resisted. Buying the phone made me see marketing from a whole different perspective.
I began asking myself, “What do I really want to do?”
In their book, The Power of Focus, Canfield, Hansen and Hewitt talk about how our normal behavior is based on ingrained habit. For example, we may have one way of driving to the supermarket — and take that way every single time — without thinking about it. Driving the same route means we never see anything new on the way to the market.
It’s the same for our work habits. We get locked into doing a task the same way — and never change — which can blind us to new opportunities or ideas.
Looking back at the notes I kept during my “malware” period made me see that having an infected machine was the best thing that could have happened to me — although at the time I didn’t see it that way.
It forced me out of my rut, got me to try new things, and opened my eyes to new ideas and vistas — all of which I’m in the process of implementing.
I don’t recommend infecting your machine with malware to get you to “think different.” However, I do recommend you try different ways of working to see what pops up for you.
Look at what you’re resisting and instead of resisting it, embrace it. For example, I am a book lover and could never imagine reading a book on an electronic device (shudder). However, I recently downloaded the Amazon Kindle iPhone App and can’t believe what a pleasure it is to read books this way. I even fell asleep on the couch while reading it — something I believed could never happen. How cool is that?
What do you think? Do you agree or disagree? Do you have an experience that forced you to do something in a different way — and what did you learn from it?
A friend and I were talking about the Law of Attraction the other day. Law of Attraction is the theory or belief that your thoughts manifest themselves physically.
Think negative thoughts and you’ll experience negative outcomes. Conversely, think positive thoughts and you’ll experience positive outcomes.
I started reading “Positive Mental Attitude” (PMA) books after reading about the topic in Selling Power magazine last year.
That article led to my reading dozens of PMA books, listening to PMA tapes, watching the movie, “The Secret,” and even taking a 3-month teleclass series on how to use the Law of Attraction.
Here is the bottom line: Positive affirmations, visualization and all of that is good. But your “outcomes” won’t change until you change what’s inside of you. In other words, you have to change the thought patterns in your head and the behaviors that spring from flawed or illogical thoughts / ideas.
So while I understood this theory intellectually, it took months for it to sink in.
It wasn’t until I realized that I had to change how I thought about my life and my talents that the “log jam” in my head began to dissipate.
It was then that I discovered “the secret”: Instead of wishing for more of whatever it is you desire, ask yourself what you’re willing to change to get what you want.
Once I started asking the question, “What am I willing to change?” — and then implementing those changes one at time — things started shifting for the better. One day I noticed I was no longer struggling and that I actually felt pretty excited at all the wonderful things that were happening.
Suffice to say, the Law of Attraction does work, but it’s a whole lot more than simply visualizing a new car or pots of money.
If you want to learn more about it, I recommend the following resources:
The Strangest Secret by Earl Nightengale — This recording, which is the first audio recording to go platinum (or something like that), is the grand daddy of the Positive Mental Attitude movement. Mark Victor Hansen, co-author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul books, credits this recording with his success.
Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill — This book is the foundation upon which an entire industry has been built. Many people credit this book with their success. I personally found it difficult to read, which is why I recommend you read:
Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by Napoleon Hill and W. Clement Stone — Many people don’t know that Hill died broke. That’s because he didn’t use his own ideas to create wealth. However, one man did — W. Clement Stone. Using Hill’s ideas, he created a sales system for selling insurance and built one of the largest insurance companies in the U.S.
The Power of Focus — by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt — This book is one of my favorites because it gives you plan of action for obtaining your goals. If you want to see the power of focus in action, be sure to read:
What It Takes to Be #1: Vince Lombardi on Leadership by Vince Lombardi Jr. — This book, by Lombardi’s son, illustrates what Lombardi did to become the top coach in the NFL. It will also help you answer the question, “What are you willing to change to get where you want to go?”
The Law of Attraction by Michael J. Losier — This book will give you the theory behind the law of attraction as well as discuss how to use it.
Choosing Prosperity — One of the best sites I’ve found regarding prosperity, Choosing Prosperity is run by Elyse Hope Killoran who provides group teleclasses and one-on-one coaching. The reason I like this site is because it’s resource rich (and many of the resources are free), Elyse doesn’t hype anything, and she doesn’t promise you’ll walk away a millionaire overnight.
Are you a student of the Law of Attraction and Positive Mental Attitude? Have you put it to work in your life? Feel free to share your story below.
I sent out my newsletter this week with two major typos — one of which was in the email subject line.
When someone called me to tell me about it, I was mortified. UGH.
Another good friend, Debra Helwig (who writes a FABULOUS blog), also called to nicely point out my typos, and as we talked about our other numerous errors in the past, Debra said, “Typos are like spinach on your teeth: Only your good friends will point it out.” Indeed!
I immediately sent out a “Typo Mea Culpa” email that said yes, my newsletter had two huge typos and explained how it had happened (bad habit: I edit while proofing). I also included this wonderful quote from Ben Franklin:
Whoever accustoms himself to pass over in silence the faults of his neighbors shall meet with much better quarter from the world when he happens to fall into a mistake himself.
I then went about my work . . . and continued to silently kick myself for being less than perfect (which I really do think is a woman-only thing).
But a funny thing happened after sending my “mea culpa.”
I started receiving wonderful emails from people telling me about their own typo mishaps. And even better, people that I didn’t even know except as names on my subscriber list told me they loved my content, that I have helped them with my own hard-earned advice, and to keep the newsletter coming.
Wow! The emails, and the sentiments they contained, brought tears to my eyes.
I started The Profitable Consultant because I wanted to help people like me. I know what it’s like to have to get up every morning and confront the fact that as an independent consultant, you’re responsible for bringing in the dough — which means you have to get out there and market yourself.
And for many people, marketing one’s self is just plain hard (even for me — and I’m a marketer!).
I’ve learned quite a bit being in business for myself for 11 years now — and I want to share what I’ve learned with others. If I can help people bring in more business and find marketing fun, then I’ve done my job.
So, the moral of my typo story is this: Don’t be afraid to try new things. If you make a mistake, own up to it and carry on. As the saying goes, the mistake isn’t in making a mistake. The mistake is in not trying something new.
If you have kids, you know how trashy your car can get. During the school year my car fills up with my son’s old homework, dead pens, art projects, and snack wrappers.
Over the winter the floor mats become crusted with sand (put down on ice-covered sidewalks and parking lots). Dog nose prints cover the back side windows and the windshield becomes “foggy,” reducing visibility.
When you’re busy and juggling work, kids, and volunteer duties, it’s easy to not see the mess. And truthfully, spending a weekend day “detailing” the car isn’t on the list of priorities.
Not only did I wash my car, I vacuumed it out — including the trunk and under the seats. I cleaned the foggy windows and sticky cup-holder, and threw away a ton of trash. I even bought new tires.
What a difference. Suddenly, my five-year old car, which had been looking a little ragged around the edges, sparkled again. I drove it around, enjoying the clean and crumb-free interior. What a nice ride!
A few days after I cleaned it out, I ended up driving one of my clients to lunch. Now how cool was it that I didn’t have to apologize for a messy interior?
The clean car lead to some other changes . . . I started dressing a little better for work. I took Alan’s advice and bought a nice pen to bring with me to client meetings. I traded my beat up 10-year old portfolio that holds my notepad and business cards for a high-end leather one.
And, instead of reading the gloom and doom newspaper at breakfast and lunch, I started reading books about positive mental attitude.
These changes, although small, improved my attitude. I felt *good.*
And here is the crux of the matter. Although sales didn’t magically increase over night, the phone did start to ring again. Each day something good happened until one day I was just as swamped as I had been before the financial meltdown / recession hit.
The reason for the turn-around is this: Your conscious affects your sub-conscious. If you drive around in a messy car or show up at a client’s with frayed cuffs or worn heels, these “little” things affect your attitude — without you realizing it.
Change these things . . . and you change your attitude. Change your attitude . . . and you change your outcomes.
So here’s my advice: go wash your car. Really spend some time on it — make it so clean that you can drive your best client around in it.
Once it’s clean, put on your best suit and take yourself out to lunch at a nice restaurant. While you’re there, read a book such as What It Takes to Be #1 by Vince Lombardi, Jr. or Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude by W. Clement Stone and Napoleon Hill.
Take notes on what you can do to improve your attitude — now, today, tomorrow.
You’ll come away feeling 100 percent better — and you’ll be open to all the opportunity that exists out there in the world.
Do you have a story for how you’ve weathered the recession? Be sure to post it in the comments below!
