Inside-Out Thinking Archives - Page 4 of 9

4 Sure Signs It's Time to Change Your Mind and How to Do It Completely and Powerfully

January 7, 2008 by Liz

When Our Thinking Is Broken

It’s easy to tell when a tool is broken. It doesn’t work. It doesn’t function quite as it should. We know it needs fixing or replacing. If we work with a broken tool, the work that we do will take longer or be less effective.

The way we think can be like a broken tool. We face a familiar decision, and we respond in the usual fashion. But, if we’ve changed and the world has changed too, the way we view ourselves and world is out of focus. The resulting decision could be the wrong one.

It’s a harder to tell when our thinking is off, when it works against us. It’s harder to realize when the premises and assumptions that back our decisions are faulty or broken.

4 Sure Signs It’s Time to Change Your Mind

How do we know when our thinking is off? How can we tell it’s time to change our mind? Here are 4 sure signs.

If I look around and everyone is lucky or smart — except me — I need to change my thinking.
If I look around and everyone is a jerk or lazy — except me — I need to rethink what I’m seeing.
If I seem to be the only one who cares, who tries, who does or doesn’t anything, it’s time to change my perspective.
When I start not liking myself or what I’m doing, it’s time to change my mind.

Me against the world is an awfully stuck place to be in. Wanting the world to change or questioning it has changed are sure signs that it’s time to change what we’re thinking. The most important thing we can do is take action.

The band, Sister Hazel, said it simply

If you don’t like how you’re thinking, change your mind.

And it simple. Changing our mind is matter of replacing an old belief with a new one.

How to Change Your Mind Completely and Powerfully

We usually recognize a broken thought by a behavior that isn’t working. If we take the time to identify the behavior and the broken thought that drives it, changing our mind can be immediate, complete, and powerful. I know. I’ve done it.

Recently, I faced up to a behavior that wasn’t working. I needed to be more direct with clients about what I charge for my time. I had to change my thinking. I went at it logically and step-by-step so that the change would stick and stay. Here’s how to do that.

Identify the behavior that isn’t working. In this case, it was that I wasn’t charging for my time.
Verify that the behavior is problem. I talked to people I trust about the issue. They confirmed my problem.
Identify the thinking behind the behavior. This was the hard nut to crack. I had to make a commitment to change my thinking. I had to unravel beliefs about generosity and define a solid offer people would understand, value, and pay for. The process worked in stages.

First, I looked to current disconnects. I realized that I was had trouble identifying “salable chunks.” Rather than define a clear offer — it had been easier to give the work away.
Second, I looked to past successes that used the same skill set — I’d use these to fix the disconnects. In the past, I had negotiated well and enjoyed the process. I compared then with now. Then, I had felt an equal contract. Now, the “equal” felt missing.
Third, I faced the facts. Fact: I give my work away; I’m agree to that contract. Fact 2: I can change that.

Replace the old thinking. I found a successful model in my personal life for deciding who gets how much for free. I slid that in the place of the old thinking.

As Drew McLellan would say, totally true.

I used this process to change my mind. The results have been complete, powerful, and immediate. As a matter of fact, it’s had an impact on my entire outlook. The world and I are on the same team again.

Are you using old thinking habits to make new decisions? Is time to change your mind?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

The Big Challenge is OVER, Keep that Energy Going ON

December 26, 2007 by Liz

Sometimes Timing Is Everything

This week’s challenge in the the b5media Business Apprentice Team Challenge . . . Kay’s finally settling into her role as entrepreneur. Kay hardly has time to read the whole web. What one blog post or article might I recommend that will help her move forward at this point?

In the apprentice story, Kay has made it through her first, and hugely successful, Christmas rush. Now Christmas is over and I’m guessing that Kay is only human. Sometime, win or lose, a big push in business can cause a dip in enthusiasm about the business we love.

The sheer investment of energy can leave feeling like we need a rest. Moving forward to face the next challenge can seem like something we have a right to put off. Unfortunately, a business won’t stand still while we’re resting and refueling. If we stop to do that we can find ourselves in crisis mode again when the new challenge rolls around.

The best business advice for a time like that is to have great habits to fall back on. An article over at LifeDev is just what this situation needs. It’s a simple method for time management. Simple is the key because, at a moment of regrouping, the way to entice ourselves back into involvement is by accomplishing little things that mean a lot.

Time Management, Simplified: How to Be Productive With No Worries simplifies the system and streamlines David Allen’s Getting Things Done for folks who want to reduce the time spent learning and maintaining Mr. Allen’s system. Leo Babauta who wrote the post says:

The fewer tasks you have, the less you have to do to organize them. Focus only on those tasks that give you the absolute most return on your time investment, and you will become more productive and have less to do. You will need only the simplest tools and system, and you will be much less stressed.

Boy do I agree.

In fact, that’s just what I’m going to start in today.

How do you keep your momentum going? Has a blog post ever made it easier for you?

Only 8 blogs are left in the Apprentice Challenge if you like my choice and this post, would you give Successful-Blog a vote in the poll in the sidebar at TAXGIRL?

The Blogs remaining in the challenge are:

Accounting Solver . . . Biz Chicks Rule . . . Greener Assets . . . Home Biz Notes
Leadership Turn . . . Small Business Boomers . . . Successful Blog . . . Yielding Wealth

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Holiday Bloggers' Block — What to Get to Let Ideas Come to You!!

December 17, 2007 by Liz

Get Out of Your Head!

When people speak of writerâ€™s block, often what they mean is that they donâ€™t know what to write about. Without that goal, they canâ€™t get started. It happens to bloggers too.

Whether we’re writing a single blog post or setting out to start a new blog, we have to know what we’re planning to communicate and the direction we want that communication to go.

In other words, we need something to say.

Get some help . . . by letting the ideas come to you.

Get out of your head and away from your computer. Ideas form and grow in our subconscious — quit thinking. The harder we try to access ideas the less likely we are to get through.
Get moving. Physical movement — walking, taking a shower, unpacking boxes, cleaning the refrigerator — gets our thinking mildly distracted by tasks we know how to do. That releases our subconscious — the proverbial back burner — to use the information we already have to think something new.
Get some input. Call a friend. Read a book. Go to a movie. Immerse yourself in something rich with thoughts, story, and color. Leave the quest for ideas back with your computer.
Get some perspective. Go back to read your archives, even if your blog is only one month old. You’ll see how you’ve grown and while you’re reading, you’ll remember what sort of ideas draw you in.
Get some sleep. Take a 20-minute power nap. Don’t sleep longer. It’s not an escape. It’s a task. Before you close your eyes, ask yourself to have a passel of ideas when you awake.

Ideas tend to hide when we try to hunt them. Those we find seem shallow and less than appealing. Ideas and people have that one huge thing in common. They’re easier to work with when they come to you.

Get it? Good.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

How Do You Know When You're Ready to Move to the Next Level?

December 3, 2007 by Guest Author

This guest post was contributed by friend and SOB, Sheila Scarborough. Her advice here is flawless and based in deep expertise. –ME “Liz” Strauss

Moving To The Next Level

by Sheila Scarborough

Most entrepreneurial online “digital creatives” find that their business moves through a progression.

At first, many writers, Web designers or other content providers often take most any job as long as it pays. In the quest to amass a decent portfolio or group of clips, it’s easy to succumb to the siren offers of “revenue sharing” or “exposure” or “future growth,” rather than demanding a higher per-word or per-project rate.

Blog for $50/month and post 5-7 times a week? Sure!

Heck, blog for nothing and hope for some ad revenue? Sure!

Anything to get a toe-hold as a freelancer.

There comes a time, however, when the digital entrepreneur is ready to truly make a living in his or her area of expertise, maybe even to be able to drop the side job that actually pays most of the bills.

How do you know when you’re getting ready to move to the next level?

I’ve asked myself that question a lot lately, as I approach two years as an active freelancer (a writer and blogger, in my case.) Here are some benchmarks that I’ve stumbled across at this juncture; you may find some similarities to your own situation, or as a newbie you can look forward to someday grappling with these turning points:

1) You can’t work by the seat of your pants anymore.

Perhaps you have more than one blogging commitment, plus offline work and some clients and consulting. Life starts to implode, you meet all of your deadlines but just barely, you gain twenty pounds, the house is a wreck and upon awakening you think, “Oh, no, I have no idea what I’m blogging about today, plus there’s a client meeting that I’m not ready for this afternoon and an article deadline by close of business.”

It’s time for a schedule, because it’s time to admit that this is your job and you’ve gotta get organized. Big wall calendar, some online software, a PDA, an old-school Filofax, whatever — you’re at the stage when you must get a grip on the madness. It’s time to hire a CPA for taxes, it’s time to buy Quickbooks or other bookkeeping software to track invoices, it’s time to buff up that blog/Web site, it’s time to….move into the bigger leagues.

2) You are ready to build a specific or at least semi-defined expertise.

At first, entrepreneurs will do most anything to make a buck, even if it isn’t what they like or isn’t what they’re very good at. For a PayPal transfer or an actual check, I’d write about most any topic when I first started out, for any publication that was halfway legitimate.

At some point, however, you know which subjects really make your heart sing, which ones call forth your best work, and it’s time to begin to focus and hone your expertise and creative efforts.

For writers, this is the moment to say, “You know, I write mostly about X, Y and Z. Someday I’d like to touch on A and B, but right now, I specialize in X, Y and Z.”

This is different from what you said in the beginning, which was roughly, “I’ll write about anything.”

3) Your time and effort are worth something to you.

At first, many digital creatives are so eager to succeed, they’ll leave no stone unturned to get their business off the ground. They sign up for every e-newsletter and magazine that seems professionally helpful, they have a gazillion RSS feeds, they go to every meeting that seems like a good networking opportunity, and the answer to every problem is to throw more work hours at it.

I personally have reached the point of admitting that I can’t know everything. I can’t read it all, can’t track all the feeds, can’t answer all the emails and memes, and most importantly, I should not feel horribly guilty about it.

To do my best work, I can no longer allow myself to overload my own brain. It’s time to prune the RSS feeds, not follow everyone on Twitter who follows me, unsubscribe from emails that I don’t really read nor care about, all so that I can concentrate on the information flow that is most helpful in my work.

It’s also time to be paid what I’m worth (for a writer, that’s no less than US$0.50/word and preferably US$1.00/word, and roughly $20/post for blogging) and to cast an unfriendly gimlet eye on work that may require a lot of wheel-spinning for a monetary pittance. Some occasional work may be worth lower or even no pay, for a variety of reasons, but my going-in position has shifted to an expectation of decent pay for the work that I do, rather than pleased gratitude that anyone pays me at all.

It’s scary to realize that your baby, your business, is at a turning point, but the good news is that it’s time to make some tough career focus decisions because….you’ve done well and are ready to do even better!

–Sheila Scarborough You’ll find Sheila and her blogs at SheilaScarborough.com

Isn’t Shelia amazing? So why not tell her? How will you know when you’re at the next level? Could you be there already?

–Liz
Work with Liz!!

Are You Making the Most of the Conversation?

November 28, 2007 by Liz

Which Conversations Are Important Too!

In the world of business, it takes an action to make something happen. Watching rarely gets anything done. A conversation is a great place to make things happen. Yet, many of us seem to be missing out.

Where do you fit in the conversation? Are you a lurker, a listener, or a participant?

If you’re a lurker, you’re getting the value of the information.

If you’re a listener, you’re also finding out who knows what and who’s a pretender. Listeners soon find out who’s connected to whom.

If you’re a participant, you’re making an impression. People are also finding out about you.

But this is only stage one.

Where the conversation occurs makes a difference. Are you only talking to the people you already know? When you move into a new network do you move down to the level of a lurker? I know that I used to do just that. Then I realized something important.

If we only talk to the same group of people, we’ll always be in that same group talking about the same things on and on.

Want to know, want to grow? You need to expand where you have your conversations.

In our circle of friends, we usually agree on the same ideas.

When we move out to a network of colleagues and acquaintances, we can share in new ideas and new thoughts.

If we want to move up and out, if we want to grow and become more, we have to get to know the folks who know what we need to know. That means reaching out of our personal network to explore many more networks — the networks to which those people belong — and letting those who need a hand up into our own.

Being part of a conversation is a step in the right direction. Using the conversation to reach out raises the bar. Are you taking the conversation as far as you might to grow?

–ME ‘Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Holiday Shopping 2007: The Business of Matching Hot Gifts to Cool People

November 26, 2007 by Liz

Buying Is a Business Skill Too

They call today, Cyber Monday, the busiest shopping day on the Internet. Folks in the US, returning to work after the Thanksgiving holiday, realize that the shopping window to the holidays is limited and that the sales have officially started.

We seem to be getting the hang of this online shopping thing.

Forrester Research says this year’s sales are projected to be up 21%. Consumers report that online hot spots that are taking off include jewelry, apparel, and accessories. As a buying group, we also getting more interested in free shipping and turning down “extras” in the form of gift wrap and overnight delivery.

Matching Hot Gifts to Cool People

Beyond the sheer fun factor, the ability to match a well-chosen gift the right person is a fabulous business exercise for any person who serves other people . . . bloggers who write for readers, folks who who work with clients . . .
at the heart of great gift giving is the passion to deliver something folks really desire or need.

That, of course, means starting with the people we’re “serving.” With that in mind, I’ve organized this list by the people not the gifts.

For the “IN” Crowd

Be they 5, 50, 500 years old, these are the folks who hang with the coolest crowd. They know what’s “in” often before we’ve even heard it exists When we shop for them it’s good to keep in mind one rule: Timing is everything. What they want will be in short supply. Buy their dream gift early in the season.

Watch the popular searches, if you’re not sure. At the moment, these are the predictions for what will be hot this year.

PS3, Wii and Elmo were among the top 15 product searches on Yahoo! Shopping, according to Chris Saito, the company’s vice president of products. Elmo placed at No. 13 on the list. — CNN Money

For the Musical Kids in All of Us

Toys that work with our MP3 players. C’mon they’re not just for kids.

Singing Barbie is a diva. Yep she’s a diva with all of her hair. This Barbie will answer her cell when you put it up to her ear. I’m sure some human divas don’t do that or do that well. The doll will perform three prerecorded tunes or will “lip sync” and dance to songs on your MP3 player.

Mattel’s “I Can Play Guitar System” takes Guitar Hero to a new level. Plug the minature into the TV, match the color-coded song notes to the color-coded finger position buttons along the shorter strings. Earn points and move up through the levels. $99.99

Hasbro’s “Power Tour Electric Guitar,” is made in partnership with Gibson. This minature electric guitar has 4 play modes, 12 preloaded songs, and can plug into an MP3 player.

For That Favorite Techie

To know a techie is to love one. To love one is to know that they have precise tastes. When in doubt, let them pick what they want.

Take phones, for example, a blackberry user wouldn’t be caught with an iPhone. Jeremiah suspects the Nokia could lighten his equipment load because of it’s 5 megapixel camera. It’s often a matter of individual needs and preferences. Buying a phone these days is like buying a car. The research takes 53 times longer than the purchase.

The Flip is popular, especially among nontechies– like me — trying out video. Emily Price is an expert on camcorders. I’m not even going to pretend to know more than what I’ve already said on the subject so far. Michael Carr at About.com discusses digital cameras in every price range. Digital Photography Review can keep you up to date on which cameras are popular.

Some folks just like to know where they are . . . Check out GPS devices.

Though someone told me yesterday he wants a Macbook Pro and another said she was looking at cool laptops. Before you buy me either, I’m wondering whether I want to wait for Tablet.

Still most everyone agrees, you could do worse than this Give One Get One laptop deal.

For Folks Who Love Low-Tech Too

Low tech can be incredibly elegant.

Which of the moleskines is your favorite? I’m partial to the tiny cahier ones that fit in my back pocket without discomfort.

An elegant writing instrument can make what we say seem more important. A note written with a beautiful pen seems to have more meaning.

Anyone with too little space or a collection out of control might be turned on by elegant organizers.

That graduate in that first career job might like something elegant to carry and use in business situations.

Then, of course, there’s tickets to trips, concerts, plays, games, and special events.

For Folks Who Don’t Treat Themselves

Some folks seem to have everything they need. For these folks, why not try a twist on the usual to offer them some luxury they wouldn’t get for themselves?

Instead of a new bathrobe . . . the most expensive, luxurious bath towels. Every day will feel like a royal stay at a fine hotel.

Instead of gloves, and hat . . . a cashmere scarf. When they wear it to the grocery store, they will feel as if they are going to an oscar-award event.

Instead of a new blanket or sheets for the bed . . . a fabulous new pillow or a feather bed. What better gift than beautiful sleep?

Think smaller, but more luxurious.

Holiday gift giving is a perfect time to practice Steve Farber’s Extreme Leadership philosophy, Do what you love in service to those who love what you do. It’s a great philosophy in business and life that fits any time, anyplace, anywhere.

How will you match the perfect gift to each person on your list this year?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

Be sure to check the Wall Street Journal for more information on perks Online Retailers will be offering this holiday season.