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4 Steps to Declare Your Independence

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INDEPENDENCE


Yes that’s me.

My birthday is July 3. The country’s birthday is July 4. I have a cousin who’s 361 days younger than me.
Those three facts added up to personal birthday celebrations that were often combined and moved around because of the holiday and the idea that one party — usually a picnic — meant less disruption for everyone.

As I got older, I reached adult birthday status much earlier than my much older brothers — whose birthdays fell on days that had no competition with other events. They got their private parties well through high school. My birthday more quickly became a piece of another event rather than my own day. We’d go see fireworks or a parade to celebrate, but those events were bigger than my birthday.

4 Steps to Declare Your Independence

The fact that I was born on the Eve of Independence Day was never lost on me. I was already saying “My birthday is the day before 4th of July.” when I was kindergarten. My birthday couldn’t compete. I was never at the center of my birthday. Being a painfully shy child, I have to think that worked for me.

But there comes a time in any life that we have to claim our own independence. We have to learn how to make ourselves the “center of our own life’s plan,” or we’ll end up spending the time of our life without actually living it. Here are 4 steps to declare your independence right now.

  • Decide who you are. At first it seems natural to let the people around us define us. Our family teaches us how to be social. Our teachers and peer groups tell us what they see. The universe is larger than the thoughts and images those groups put in our minds. Our potential is too. Don’t rely on the observations of the world to tell you who you are. They haven’t lived your life. The world can’t get together to take a vote on who you are. Choose your own best true story. Decide and show them instead.
  • Be that person now. Don’t try to be that person. Don’t work toward some future date when you’ll know you are. None of us have enough future to waste on getting there. You know what you value. You know who you admire. Define yourself with those and be what you’ve defined immediately.
  • Surround yourself with people who recognize you. Use your values to choose the people you trust. Shared values reinforce themselves. Time is unrenewable. Spend your time with people who make you feel proud to be who you are. You’ll know them because you’ll never have to focus on what you want or need. Being with people who see, hear, and understand us, frees us from having to highlight, underscore, or prove who we are. It move us away from living through self-consciousness, self-centeredness, and a conflict of selfishness with selflessness to consciousness, centeredness, and a balanced view of ourselves.
  • Own the good things about you. Influence yourself. Get to know and value what others see and value in you. That’s how you’ll grow what’s good in you naturally. You can’t share or give what you don’t truly own.

Somehow we have it backwards. We live as if at the end of our life, we’ll know …

who we are.
what we’ll do.
where we will end up.

Decide those things first. — The Problem Isn’t Not Knowing What You Want to Do …

Before I found my own independence, sharing my day always felt a bit disappointing. Hearing folks say, “enjoy YOUR day,” didn’t resonate with me. Yet once I decided who I am, began to live that, focused on people who truly see me, and learned from them what I offer, sharing my day — any day, any amount of time — became as easy as breathing. That’s how I learned to live the moments of my life.

Once I declared my independence, I learned how irresistible the people in my life truly are.

Have you declared your independence?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Related: Top 10 Ways to Start Living Your Life

Influence: How to Attract Maximum Support for Your Business Idea

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IRRESISTIBLE BUSINESS: Network Building

Ask Everybody

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I had THAT conversation again. You might be surprised how often it happens. It’s basically the same conversation with entrepreneurs, small businesses, and career professionals who have a new idea they want to present to their corporate team. The conversation goes something like this one.

I ask someone what he or she is working on.
I hear about a new product, service, or idea that has that someone truly interested, invested. and intrigued by possibilities.
I ask few questions and get some answers such as:

  • Why are you the best person / team / business to make it real?
  • Who do you know needs this idea?
  • What core group of people will find your idea absolutely irresistible?

Whenever I have this conversation, it’s rare that people answering these questions offer much detail. They seem to know far more of the intricacies and inner workings of their brain child than they do about the people who will actually use it.

That’s not good.

If you’re going to solve a problem, the better you know the people who have that problem the more likely you are to be able to attract those people to you.

Influence: How to Attract Maximum Support for Your Business Idea

Attraction is the power of evoking interest or drawing something to another. Mere exposure can build familiarity, but it takes some compelling similarity — something that reaffirms ourselves and our values — to build a true and lasting attraction.

Start with your existing network. Don’t ignore the people who love you to chase the people who are ignoring you. Find your first support in your existing network. Look at the people right next to you, they’re the people you have already attracted.

To build the deepest influence build out your business idea, product, or service by starting with start with what has attracted other people to you on the deepest levels — your core competencies and values — to what you want to see happen — your business idea, product or service.

Use the first question to qualify your business idea.

Why are you the best person / team / business to make it real?

  • Know your value. Who are you with respect to your business idea? What competencies, skills, and talents qualify you?
  • Know what attracts you. What about this idea attracts you emotionally? Just because you CAN do something doesn’t mean you SHOULD.
  • Be invested. Why would you choose this idea over all others as where you invest your time?
  • Identify your unique attractiveness. What unique value and values will you bring to making it real?

Use the second question to qualify your core community.

Who do you know needs this idea?

  • Know who already values your competencies, skills, and talents. Who in that group will be most interested in what you’re doing? Who knows others who would be interested? How does your idea solve an important problem for them? How will you get their best thinking?
  • Know what attracts them. What about this idea will attract them emotionally? How seamlessly does it fit what they’re already doing?
  • Be worth investing in. What unique value and values will they see? How much time / money / resources are you asking? What’s their payoff for participating — what makes their work / life easier, faster, more meaningful?
  • Identify their unique attractiveness. Who in your network will increase the attractiveness of your idea by participating? How will you identify them?

Use the third question to combine the first two and refine them into an irresistible offer.

What core group of people will find your idea absolutely irresistible?

  • Name and claim your core group. Maximum support stand on deep relationships. 12 apostles can do more than 1200 subscribers. Who are the 20% who will give you the 80% of your support always? Who will spend the most time / money / resources on this idea? Focus there. Build your first offer to show you know them deeply.
  • Raise the value in your value proposition. What does your core community love most about your idea? How can you enhance that, refine that, and deliver it more seamlessly?
  • Lower or remove the irrelevant details. What does your community not care about or find irritating? How can you limit that, lower that, or remove it completely?
  • Be uniquely satisfying. What would delight and surprise your core community? How can you introduce something only you might add to the idea that would uniquely satisfy the community because you know them so intimately?

Keep the community in the process. Constantly talk to people about what you’re thinking and seeing. Ask them if they’re having the same experience. Whenever community members offer valuable insight, think of ways to bring them closer to what you’re doing. Encourage your fans to ask their friends what you’re wondering. Tell them how you’d like people to think of you and ask if that’s what they’re saying about you. Solicit their suggestions, insights, and corrections.

None of us can be inside and outside a system at the same time. As you stay inside the thinking on your idea, product, or service, find ways to share what you’re doing. Invite your influence network or community bring you news of what they’re seeing. That outside point of view will raise their investment and prove your assumptions.

The closer you get to your community, the closer they’ll be to you.

And that’s irresistible.

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

Are You Using History Strategically … to Claim Your Business and Life Future?

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History Invents Itself

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The town I grew up in had a population of 20,000 people. The school I went to kept the same kids in the same classes all through 8 grades … then many of us went to the same high school.By third grade the first week of school held few surprises. I suppose that way good in some ways.

But in one way that situation made for a terribly skewed view of how the world worked.

We grew up in a universe where the people rarely changed. That was true in too many ways.
We rarely changed in that

      we were the same individuals with the same names.

 

      we were the same in our relationships to each other.

 

    we were the same in that we couldn’t change or outgrow the stories we knew about each other.

The “kid who wet his pants in first grade” was still that “kid who wet his pants in first grade” on the day he graduated high school. And I can still tell you his name today.

Anyone who’s ever attended a family or school reunion knows what this means. We live up to the stories that define us and sometimes when we get back to the people who were there when those stories first came to be, we revert to being who we were when the story happened.

We believe that our history defines our present.
Don’t believe that. Claim the right to define your business and your life.

The Place of History in Business and in Life

We’ve all heard that history repeats itself. That those who don’t pay attention to it’s lessons are bound to end up learning them again. But not all of histories lessons remain important and relevant. And staying tied to them when situation, skills, and experience change isn’t always a good thing.

That boy who had a bathroom accident at age 6 is now quite successful business man. The people he meets today never see him as that “kid who wet his pants in first grade.” Part of the man’s success is that he knows that story from the past might be true, but it’s irrelevant. He doesn’t let it define the person he is today.

The gorgeous cheerleader named “Cookie” who had straight As, personality, and the coolest crowd going for her in high school is now working as bartender in that small town of 20,000. She still tries to live the old stories, but they’ve faded.

History can be dangerous in it’s ability to keep us stuck in the past. Like a fifteen-year-old hairstyle, if you’re still telling a story from the past to define why your life or your business isn’t good — the story isn’t working for you.

Wisdom comes when we learn from history and use it to write a new and more successful story now. That’s true of business as well as life.

Using History Strategically to Claim the Future

Once SEARS was the World’s Largest Store and named a radio station WLS to celebrate that. The catalog won that title is gone. ABC bought WLS in 1960 and the SEARS Tower was sold in 1994.

Sears story of past success is irrelevant, unless they look at how a future SEARS might apply what they did in the context of a 21-century Internet environment. Even with the same vision and mission, Sears is in a new position with new conditions. They’ll need to make new decisions, build new networks, and new systems to find the unique opportunities to build success — much as they did in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries.

Numbers are important and useful, but they are not as deep as the questions we ask. All numbers we have — sales numbers, revenue numbers, even responses to commercials, ads and blog posts — report history, the success or failure of we did in the past. We can set new goals and build new plans with numbers to measure them, but once we execute to where the measurement occurs that action is past. Those mile markers on the road, at best, show us how far we’ve come.

History can’t drive the present into the future. The right questions will lead to our best true story now. A typical view of history and numbers will inform that, but the right questions will ask:

  • what were missed opportunities.
  • what behaviors always led to your successes.
  • what you’ve learned from wrong turns.
  • and what you want to learn to make your future stronger, faster, easier, more meaningful.

In other words, use history to benchmark how you’ve grown and to guide your path. But make your one true story about who you are and where you’re going and why your history doesn’t draw the picture only adds nuance to the colors.

Research and mine your history to know what was and might have been true once. Then interpret and reapply that lesson to the new situation, skills, and experience to use history to invent a new future — combining what you wish you knew then, what you know now, and the two offer unique future opportunities for you to go.

Are you using history to claim your business and life opportunities?

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Make Your Own Opportunities

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A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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The only way to know for certain that you won’t win the Publisher’s Clearinghouse is to
not enter the sweepstakes.

The same principle applies to just about every opportunity out there. The successful
entrepreneurs, A-list bloggers, and business leaders all made it because of two things:
?rst, they had radar for opportunities, and second, they seized them.

Think about it. What might have passed you by in the last week or so because you
thought it was too dif?cult, you didn’t have time, you didn’t have the skills, or you just
plain thought “I’ll never make it.” Instead, you should be opportunistic in a good way.

Here are some tips:

  • Recognize your little voice – when it starts telling you why you can’t grasp that chance, don’t listen. Tell it to take a break while you submit that guest post inquiry.
  • Train yourself to see opportunities – you need ?nely tuned opportunity radar. Notice the call for speaker submissions and recognize it as a chance for you to shine.
  • Remember that if you don’t ask, you don’t get – the only reason I am blogging here right now is because I summoned up the guts to ask. Take a deep breath and do it.
  • Don’t get discouraged – the other differentiator for successful people is that they use every rejection as a springboard to the next opportunity. They move on quickly to the next one until they are successful.
  • Always have “lines in the ocean” – you can add so much excitement to your life if you have several things out there, waiting for a response. Will you get accepted to that course? Will your panel proposal be accepted for the conference? Will your photograph win the contest? How much fun to go through life waiting for exciting news!

How about an assignment this week? Go right now and ?nd an opportunity, then just go for it without fear. Tell them Rosemary and Liz sent you.
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Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Images & Words: Are You Ready to Make Opportunity and Change the World?

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When I started blogging in summer 2005, I wanted to keep the writer’s discipline of writing every day. No one could have predicted, that it would lead me to several blogs, a fabulous business partner, a conference and consulting business, and place in a fabulous community. When I started photographing the sunrise in spring 2011, I wanted to keep a writer’s discipline of remembering to look out my window every day. The photos are starting to write stories with me. Now I’m starting to wonder where that will lead …

How to Make Opportunity and Change the World

Our businesses and our lives are in a constant state of change. We can try to tie things down, keep things where they are. It’s a battle that we’ll never win. On the other hand, they say some things never change. And the more they change the more they stay the same.

Change is like the rain. It’s not good or bad. How we see it is what makes us think that.
Do you see change as a problem or an opportunity?

See the opportunities.

Do you live in the sun or the shadow?

It’s your choice you know.

Do you see the clouds on the horizon …
or the color beyond them?

Maybe it’s time to move your focus.

Sunrise looks empty without the clouds

Notice how everything contributes.

Sunrise – sometimes it’s where you look for it.

Find and define new ways of seeing things.

Carry a sunrise in your heart today!

Shed light on the good things that you can make happen.

Problems and opportunities are the same things seen with a different attitude.
The minute we quit fighting a problem it becomes an opportunity.

To make opportunity, we need to trust enough to see what we’re not yet imagining.
To change the world, we probably should change how we see what’s wrong with it.

Are you ready to make opportunity and change the world?

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

4 Steps to a Job When You Graduate

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A Guest Post by
Darren McCloskey

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Fully Prepare

Dissertations have been handed in and the months until graduation are quickly slipping past – but what next? It won’t be long until graduates start out on their intrepid job hunting adventures and companies begin to snap them up into employment. It’s now time to sit back and begin to plan your next steps. Finding a job is a time investment and you’re going to need to be fully prepared. Thankfully, we’ve created an expert guide on graduate job seeking so you know how to move onto the next stage of your life.

The Bottom isn’t so scary

For those of you are who are lucky enough to know what you want to do in the future, the best first step to take is to make note of organisations you would love to work for. Whether it’s because they offer high wages or just seems to have the best cultural fit, make a list of them all and spend some time looking up the various roles they offer. If there aren’t any at your graduate level, look at roles that are lower down – even if this means starting at the bottom. If you can show passion and a great work ethic at lower levels, why would they hire someone else when an opening for your ideal role appears?

Head to your chosen employers website and try to glean some information regarding their recruitment process. If they use a particular recruiter, make note of their name or find out the names of the in house recruitment team members. Remember not to dismiss any role that you can apply for – it’s not just a job but a networking opportunity, a valuable asset when only 40% of jobs are openly advertised to job seekers.

Internships aren’t always Unpaid

While unpaid internships seem to be floating around at an increasing rate, there are ways to make them work for you if you don’t live at home or have savings to support yourself. Internships are a valuable way to get work experience and gather a number of industry contacts for later use in your career. If you can’t manage to work unpaid for a month or so, ask if you can work on a part time basis, so you can balance unpaid work with another paid part time job. Even asking for an afternoon every week to do some work experience will be beneficial to you in the long run and allow you to get a grasp of job roles and contacts in the industry.

There’s Plenty out There

There’s a whole industry of recruiters devoted to placing graduates into suitable roles, so don’t fret, there’s definitely a job out there for you. Of course, there may be a higher amount of competition for certain roles, but determination and persistence can get you anywhere. On average it takes around 60 job applications to get an interview or two, but if you’re still struggling to hear anything then perhaps you should consider getting your CV checked over, or downloading a new CV template.

Your university should offer careers advice and set you on the right track. They may even advise you on contacts they have so you can call up for an impromptu chat or networking events that you can attend to widen your horizons.

Always make sure you have thoroughly researched the company that you’re sending an application to. Considering the amount of competition your application might have, it’s best to be right the first time and show you have commitment to learning more. For instance, looking up potential colleagues on LinkedIn or finding their blogs online will be another point you can cover in future interviews and make you memorable.

Companies want to know about YOU

Reports have shown that the quality of applications that employers have received has improved. Graduates have proven to be adept at answering competency based questions but seem to falter when it comes to what motivates them! Beware of tricky questions such as “Where do you see yourself in five years time?” and “Why do you want this role with us?” as questions such as these cannot be blagged. They require preparation and a thought as to what your goals in life are. Once you have an interview set some time to sit down and go through as many possible questions you can think of. Make sure you know what you want and why you want it – if you can’t explain why you want a job, why should they give it to you?

So there you have it, four simple pieces of priceless advice to get you on your way to graduate employment.

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Author’s Bio:
Darren McCloskey is a freelance writer working within the recruitment section with the people of monster to help promote how employment agencies can help find engineering jobs

Thank you, Darren!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!