Successful Blog

Is Success on Your Mental Playlist?

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by Sean Glaze

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You Control the iPod in Your Head

Your self-talk has a huge impact on your performance, and inside your mind is a mental playlist of phrases and thoughts that will either help ensure your success or sabotage your every effort.

Each of us has an internal iPod, and it is the mental playlist that we choose to replay to ourselves over and over throughout each day that influences our actions and ultimately the outcomes and results we experience. Many of us have simply carried around these sayings, assumptions, and phrases since early childhood. This self-talk has a tremendous power over our performance.

The truth is that people walk around listening to negative messages that keep them from achieving the success they desire.
Sometimes it is parents who shared criticism or negative comment.
Sometimes it is peers.

But the criticism and comments keep replaying on our mental playlists. If you think defeat and expect failure, if you are constantly reminding yourself of past mistakes, your mental playlist may actually be more responsible for your poor performance than your opponent or circumstances.

As Norman Vincent Peale writes, “Change your thoughts, and you change your world.”

Recognize that YOU control what gets added, what gets deleted, and what gets played when you listen to the voices and ideas inside your mind. By replacing those negative messages with positive affirmations and reminders of your successes, you greatly increase your chances of future success!

One of the best examples of how self talk has influenced performance can be found in the Hall of Fame career of pitcher Gaylord Perry.

Gaylord Perry began his Major League career in 1962, and soon became successful 9and famous) for his “spitball.” He was a five-time all-star, and played a total of 22 years – recording over 3500 strike outs over that time period and finished with a lifetime era of 3.11. But as strong as his pitching performances were, he was often dejected about his hitting.

Just over a year into his career, in 1963, he reportedly told a teammate “They’ll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run.” Not surprisingly, in 1969 he had compiled a horrible .141 career batting average. And his self talk proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the evening of July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong first stepped foot onto the surface of the moon, Gaylord Perry hit the first home run of his career.

He finished with six before he retired, but the impact of his self talk – the story he told himself internally and the mental playlist of assumptions about his own abilities – cannot be over emphasized. What he said is what happened.

What you say to yourself — and what you say to others — has a profound influence on their perceptions and performances.

Is Success On Your Mental Playlist?

Team development begins with individual improvement … and the most important conversations you have in life are with yourself. Are you talking to yourself about failure or success? Confidence cannot be bought. It is built – by replaying your past performances and filling up your mental playlist with positive affirmations.

So, what is on your mental playlist? Is your self talk positive and contributing to your success. Or are you allowing negative thoughts and expectations of failure sabotaging your attempts?

To be a better team builder, replace those negative messages on your mental playlist with positive thoughts and reminders of past success. Build and improve your own and your team’s confidence, self-perception, and performance by changing how you think.

Take a moment to review what you have on your mental playlist – and consider replacing those negative messages and thoughts with the positive videos and affirmations that will help everyone perform at their best!

Don’t wait. Start now.
Think one positive thought about yourself or your team’s performance.
Write it in the comment box right now.

Author’s Bio:
Sean Glaze is a Team Building Speaker who writes about teamwork and leadership at his Team Building Blog. He is also author of Fistitude. You can find him on Twitter as @leadyourteam.

Values Drive Value — Always Did

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You Don’t Have to Wait for a Response to Know, Do You?

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In a conversation on Twitter on Sunday, I asked what I thought was a simple question.

How do you know when you’re tweeting value?

I asked it because a new guy on Twitter wanted to know the answer. I thought I might see what ways other folks had for managing the value of their Tweet stream — keeping the signal higher than the noise, not drifting over into in to useless chatter.

Many people started with the idea that they know they have tweeted value by the response — the retweets, reactions, engagement, and new followers that come from what they tweeted. So many answers basically said, “Other people tell me whether I offer value.”

I was thrown by the sheer number of responses that came back like that.
Being a teacher and a business person, my first thought was “Is this how our schools and our businesses have undermined us? They teach us to defer to other people’s opinion of value?

Isn’t putting something out there and then deciding it’s value by how people respond what network television does?

Value Is Worth


BigStock: Value is worth.

Imagine a contractor saying he would decide what a house he built was worth by tracking how many people talked about it? Wouldn’t you hope that the contractor might have a sense of quality and value before he picked his materials and assembled them?

Our reasons for sharing and responding or not doing so are often unrelated to value. Sometimes we share to get attention, without discrimination, or just to fill up the silence. Sometimes we don’t share because we’re busy, bored, tired of the noise, or uncaring.

If you offer something of value and no one responds does it mean that it has no value? If no one visits Tiffany, or Cartier for a week, will that mean that the diamonds they sell will no longer we of value?

Value is not what provokes a response — we swat mosquitoes when they bite us, but we don’t value the experience of a mosquito bite. Value is worth — what people find worth thinking about, worth using, worth discussing, worth time and attention. Value is what people keep and remember — we remember it because of how it changes or adds to our lives.

Values Drive Value — Always Did

Values drive value. We stop and notice what we value. Value resonates. Value influences. Value moves us to act on it because we want to incorporate it or add it our lives and our businesses. Finding value is its own reward. Sharing value is a generosity.

If you want to find what resonates with, influences, and moves other people, start with what resonates with you. influences, and moves you. If you want to know what other people will value, start with what you value first. If you don’t know where to start, here are three universal values you might use to offer irresistible value in what you write, build and choose to share.

  1. Value simplifies. Simple is elegant. Fewer clicks, fewer buttons, fewer steps in a to complete a task means less less to learn and less chance of introducing error. Simpler can move us past building to using. We do less hunting and gathering, less collecting data, art, photos, words, music, books, videos, and more enjoying, participating, reading, reviewing, listening, analyzing and sharing what we’ve collected. Anything that simplifies the navigation or the process of collecting gets us more quickly to discussing, learning, interacting, and connecting with the people about what we’ve found.
  2. Value saves time, energy, and resources. Who wouldn’t value something that offered more time, more energy or more resources? We need all three to process information and to make connections to people. Information and people help us remove problems, disarm obstacles, or lighten burdens. Connecting us to people who and you free our attention and time for what we want even more of in our businesses and our lives.
  3. Value adds meaning. Meaning, passion, purpose is what keeps us moving forward and gives us something to look forward to. Meaning is how we define ourselves and what connects us to other human beings. Meaning helps us explain why we’re here, who we care about, and how we’ll invest our time, energy and resources. Friends, family, fortune, fame, fun, faith and so many others are meaningful to people. Share what’s meaningful to you.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that we stop listening for a response. Listening is a value in itself. It adds meaning to the relationships we’re building. Values attract people who value what you do. Serve them. Sharing values builds trust and trust simplifies, saves time, and adds meaning to a relationship.

Don’t build a life or a business around people who don’t share your values. They won’t value you. They won’t value your work. Why would you want to share what you value with people who don’t value it too?

Share what you know to be of value with people who value what you do. Then listen to their responses. Identify those who value you what you do and use what they say to serve them better, to think about what they might need next of value that will simplify, save time, and add meaning to their lives.

How do you know when you’re offering value?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

5 Rules to Live By and 5 Rules for Living Life

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How to Happiness

Do You Rule Out Living Part of Your Life?

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She showed me her blog post about how she wasn’t doing enough. It listed out all of the things she was inspired to do now. Wow. She said she was going to read so many books; write so many blog posts, go to so many events; meet up with so many friends and family members; and excel at work.

So much commitment … I was wondering where the time was be alive.

Commitments are good things, especially those commitments we finally learn to make to ourselves. Yet, we can throw ourselves off course with commitments and rules until we lose sight of the spontaneous, growing, learning and living human beings we are.

5 Rules to Live By

Can we really make rules to live by? We need the right navigational skills, knowledge, and tools true enough, but making rules for life … Isn’t that sort of like making definitive rules about how to paddle the rapids or drive the back roads? Don’t we have to let the conditions of the rapids and the roads figure in on our choices?

Now, I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to have a few “rules of the road” to guide us. I’m saying we could do a lot fewer of them …
Of course, we need a few stretchable boundaries. A little definition gives us purpose and raises our expectations.
I’d never say take off without any idea of a destination. Gotta know where we’re going.
I’m not even thinking that we should disregard our method of transportation.
It’s even probably a good idea to choose the general route we might be taking …

But, we don’t need to determine how many miles that we’ll be moving while the sun shines, where we’ll be stopping to take a photo, or how long we’ll be swerving to miss an unfilled pothole. We don’t need to be portioning out the hours, minutes, and seconds we’ll be talking to, listening to, or sharing silence with people we love. To do that we need to know what we value and who we care about.

    Rule 1: Choose what you value and your values. Like it or not, what you value will define you and attract people who value the same stuff.

    Rule 2: Have time and energy for the people who are important to you. Enjoy their successes. Never let them fail. You’ll never fear them when you feel most lost.

    Rule 3: Have a destination in mind. It’s okay to change it a few times.

    Rule 4: Pick a suitable method of transportation. Don’t try to walk to an island or swim to the moon.

    Rule 5: Sketch out a logical starting route that suits you and takes you in the right direction. Often taking the first step is the hardest, so get started soon as you can. Every step takes you closer to where you’re going.

But … remember that humans don’t come with an instruction manual or a rule book for life.
We learn who we are by living our lives.
We’re each a one-of-a-kind experiment.
We all need a few rules of our own.

5 Rules for Living Life

As kids, we all looked forward to growing up for the chance to decide when to eat ice-cream for breakfast and other such stuff. Then we found out those decisions aren’t the ones that count. Even worse, we found out that the rules we thought were guides of our lives aren’t the same for everyone in this bigger universe.

The entire world population can’t meet to decide what makes a life worth living. Who’d be in charge? How would we pick?

Deciding the rules that make your life worth living is really up to you.

For the sake of conversation, here are a few rules you might try out. I think of them of as rules for living life. They’re all adaptable to any size, temperament, time line, location, or living conditions you might design.


    Rule 6: Permit yourself to leave space, time, energy, consciousness for unexpected new stuff.

    Rule 7: Learn new things from people who’ve been where you’re going, from people who’ve been places you’ve never imagined, from people who are like you and from people who are not.

    Rule 8: Find out as much as you can about what you’re good at and figure out how not to care about what you’re not.

    Rule 9: Remember old things that you thought you’d forgotten, especially what made you laugh when you were young.

    Rule 10: See, smell, hear, taste, and touch what the world has to offer — surprise yourself.

Be open to the opportunity that serendipity serves up. Experience ideas that grab your attention. Realize what challenges you and discover what problems you can solve. Choose a few rules for living that make this life your own.

Knowing where you’re going is irresistible.
Being alive while you go is even more irresistible than that.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

How to Stop Common Workplace Accidents

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Jay Acker

Starting a small business is a huge undertaking. Not only do you have to worry about start-up capital, acquiring adequate space, creating a viable business model, and recruiting reliable employees, once the company is up and running, you also have to deal with the safety of your employees, customers, and clients. Although certain lines of work pose inherent workplace hazards, small business owners in every industry should take precautions to minimize the risk of accidents and injuries.

Drafting a thorough employment manual is a great place to start in an effort to create a safe working environment. Research suggests that careful planning can drastically reduce the incidence of workplace accidents. Therefore, before you launch your next business venture, consider these common injuries and the various ways a safety manual can help you address them.

1. Vehicle Accidents

If any employees drive during working hours for company business, or if any employees use company cars, a very specific policy concerning the operation of motor vehicles is imperative. First, prudent employers should scrutinize job applicants’ driving records before entrusting them with access to company vehicles. Company car policies should also emphasize the dangers of using cell phones and texting behind the wheel.

In addition, an effective safety manual will clearly outline the protocol for dealing with any sort of vehicle accident. That protocol should involve calling 911, gathering information from other individuals at the scene of the accident, and notifying the appropriate members of company management immediately after the accident occurs.

2. Workplace Violence

Employee-on-employee violence accounts for a staggering number of serious workplace injuries. Therefore, the employee manual for any reputable small business must stress the company’s zero tolerance policy on workplace violence. To prevent on-the-job physical altercations, some companies implement dispute resolution procedures. Under such policies, employees who are not getting along can try to settle their differences with the assistance of an impartial mediator. Safety manuals should also require staff members report incidents of violence or suspicious circumstances that suggest a dispute may be brewing.

3. Injuries from Overexertion

It’s no surprise that employees charged with regular heavy lifting are prone to various physical ailments, often focused on the lower back. However, even sedentary office workers can suffer injuries from overexerting themselves if they lift, carry, or pull an object in an unsafe manner. Because the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has not outlined definitive restrictions on the maximum weight an employee can safely lift, small businesses should encourage their employees to use good judgment when faced with moving items in the workplace. Companies should also have tools, such as hand trucks or dollies, on-site to aid the staff in moving heavy objects.

Safety manuals typically require employees who strain a muscle at work to immediately report the incident to a supervisor. Thereafter, management should assess the situation and direct the employee to consult medical attention if appropriate. Permitting injured employees to continue working only risks exacerbating the situation.

4. Repetitive Motion Disorders

When an employee repeats the same motions daily, whether it be typing at a computer or grabbing items on an assembly line, they are at risk for repetitive motion injuries such as tendonitis, bursitis, and carpal tunnel syndrome. A good safety manual will require these at-risk employees to take adequate breaks to give their muscles time to rest periodically throughout the day.

5. Slip and Fall Accidents

Accidents involving falling, slipping and tripping are a part of life. They happen everywhere, so creating a fall-free workplace would likely be a fruitless effort. However, taking precautions to reduce the incidence of injuries resulting from such accidents is a viable and important goal. Company safety policies include a hazard assessment process to identify loose cords, footing and poorly lit areas and take steps to correct them. Wet floors and untethered cords or wires, for example, deserve immediate attention, and employees must be encouraged to report unsafe conditions to manaegment.

6. Machine Related Injuries

Use of industrial machinery has led to some of the most gruesome and deadly workplace injuries around the globe. Therefore, companies must provide extensive formal training to employees before allowing them to operate dangerous equipment. If you use machinery requiring specialized training, include in the manual that employees without documented training are not allowed to operate it.

Safety-related education in this context should emphasize the importance of refraining from wearing loose closing and jewelry while operating machinery. Similarly, hair must always be restrained. Those items can easily get caught in the machinery, which often leads to devastating injuries.

A company safety manual is not only a legal requirement to provide to employees, it’s a tool for a business owner to understand the risks and potential hazards they might encounter on the job. By considering these early in the process of setting up your company, some hazards can even be mitigated. Do the best for your business. Keep it safe.

Author’s Bio:
Jay Acker runs safetyservicescompany.com the teams who make safety manuals, videos, posters, training kits and other items for safety training.

Humanize your LinkedIn Profile

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Rosemary O’Neill

Your LinkedIn profile can be a powerful calling card, even if you’re not looking for a new job. It will often show up on the first page of search results for your name in Google (try it), so why not take a moment to give it some personality?

Who’s searching for you?

In my case, I received two different invitations to speak at events after adding “speaker” to my LinkedIn profile. Coincidence? I also found out that my company had been highlighted on a “companies to watch” list based on the work we put into our corporate LinkedIn presence.

Both your personal and your corporate LinkedIn pages should reflect your style, personality, tone, and mission. Donâ’t make the mistake of using “corporate-speak” in your profile summary (unless you talk that way, in which case…stop it).

We’re all there to do business

Recent updates have made LinkedIn more visually appealing and more user-friendly, which may mean that more people are taking a second look. After all, Liz told you four years ago to start taking advantage of LinkedIn’s secret superpowers.


Humanize Your LinkedIn Profile

What are you waiting for?

Humanize your LinkedIn Profile

Grab those eyeballs with some LinkedIn profile bells and whistles:

  • Use your own tone of voice in your profile summary, and tell your story
  • Fill in the Volunteer Experience section; it makes you a whole person
  • Try adding the ReadingList app to show what books you’re reading
  • Add the SlideShare Presentation app and upload your marketing “deck”
  • Don’t forget to ask for recommendations when it’s appropriate, human voices on your profile are very compelling (be generous with your own recommendations too)
  • Try hard to include photo or video with your status updates

LinkedIn has said that they are working on enhancements to the company pages too, so start thinking about how you might spiff up your corporate presence as well!

Is your LinkedIn profile telling your story with pizzazz?

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 the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

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Gerald Gigerl

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Marketing and List Building Online

Today I will introduce you to the 5 pillars of successful list building, the main factors that can make or break your wealth.

It has to be mentioned that most online marketers have a wrong idea about what marketing online really means. Marketing is war, marketing is testing and marketing is about being the best.

To be good in list building you have to put in at least hundreds of hours to become good at driving traffic, split testing, creating products and writing email campaigns.

There are no shortcuts in making this work and as long as you are not trying to find a way around the hard work, you are not getting into any trouble.

The 5 Pillars Of Successful List Building

Let’s have a look at the 5 pillars of successful list building.

Pillar #1: Niche Selection

Unbelievable but true, I think there are way too many people who get into a niche that they don’t like and are comfortable with. Your goal is to spend enough time researching a market that is big enough and has substantial equity to making your business worthwhile.

Never enter a market that you are not passionate about because in most cases you will “quit” before you ever realize success. When things are tough, the only thing that keeps you going is your drive, passion and goals.

Pay attention to what kind of market you enter as well as how much demand there is. It’s easier to succeed in an already booming market than it is to achieve substantial results in a developing market. It takes more money, energy and time to reach breakthrough success in a “fresh market”.

Pillar #2: Business Model

Your business model is the single most important success factor for your chosen market/niche. As for pretty much everything else there are two options: You choose to create your own business model or you decide to go with an already successful business model.

What is actually meant by creating or following a business model? Basically, you have a very clear plan on how you do everything such as what kind of products you promote, what kind of bonuses you offer, what kind of OTOs (One Time Offers) you offer, optimizing squeeze pages, running split tests using Google Analytics/Experiments, creating email campaigns and much more.

While this might be exactly what you are doing for “planning”, all these skills can only be learned in the process of DOING. Yes, you have to have a plan on how to drive traffic and market your products, but without a strict discipline of doing exactly that, you are just wasting your efforts for planning.

It takes insane amounts of sweat to make anything work. The best you can do to reach your list building goal is to work as hard and smart as you possibly can.

Pillar #3: Squeeze Page Optimization

This is the step where you start making real money really soon if you are putting in consistent effort to make it work.

A squeeze page is a page where a person leaves the email address to get a free gift. The main goal is to drive as much targeted traffic to your squeeze page as possible and convert the traffic as good as possible.

The opt-in rate is mainly determined on how persuasive your sales page is, meaning how people perceive the value you are offering. To get the highest opt-in rate possible, you have to test titles, value proposition, colors, free products and much more.

The only way you can really test all those factors is by driving ongoing, highly targeted traffic to your squeeze page(s).

IMPORTANT NOTE: The message you spread on your squeeze page for your free information product should be consistent. Don’t give people information that is not accurate just to make them subscribe to your email list. The information on your squeeze page must be in congruence with your product.

If your message is providing wrong information, you will get a higher unsubscribe rate than you ever thought possible before. Therefore, your message (value proposition) needs to be consistent to attract targeted customers to your products.

Pillar #4: Traffic Generation

Traffic generation is something that you should never get sick of. There is unimaginable amount of equity in driving traffic to your squeeze page(s). The more ongoing traffic you are able to drive to your capture pages, the more possibilities you have to split test.

Some typical traffic generation methods include forum marketing, free product offers, SEO, PPC, social media, video marketing, article marketing, ad swaps, solo ads, JV giveaways and webinars.

You should never get stuck with one traffic generation method but focus on more techniques to drive high quality traffic.

Pillar #5: Email Marketing

Under email marketing goes everything that you do within your autoresponder. You have got to learn how to set up email campaigns, write newsletters, promote products and much more.

If you decide to market the best-selling products from an affiliate network like ClickBank, many vendors will have email campaigns ready for the promotion of their product. All you need to do is to simple copy and paste their prewritten email campaigns into your autoresponder follow up emails.

If you are promoting your own products you will always have to write your own email campaigns.

No matter what product you decide to promote make sure to keep a stable relationship between your list and you. Don’t bombard your list by sending several emails a day promoting different products all the time.

You want to build and sustain trust.. The best way to do that is by giving your list immense value in the form of free products, free reports, free articles and so on.

Now that you know the 5 pillars of successful list building, you can start producing amazing results for your business!

Author’s Bio:
Gerald Gigerl is a product creator, lead generation and affiliate marketing expert. Gerald creates information products on how to drive massive traffic to your website and generate up to 75 “product hungry” leads a day! If you are really serious about making massive amounts of money online you can learn more about Gerald here: The Affiliate Traffic Pro .