Successful Blog

Beach Notes: Brush Turkeys

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Australian brush turkeys, also called scrub or bush turkeys. The male is building the hollowed mound nest from leaves, other combustible material and earth. Typically more than one female will lay eggs there and the male then tends the nest for the next seven weeks till hatching. He checks the temperature regularly with his bill, then taking bits out or adding, to manage the temperature in a range of 33-38 degrees C (91-100 F). They look cute enough, but create a lot of mess along the beach walkways and if they nest near backyard gardens are known to acquire the gardeners’ mulch for their nests. Which may help to explain why they are listed on one site as one of a group of Australian “birds behaving badly.”

Hope your weekend doesn’t leave you thinking that brush turkeys have been around.

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Thanks to Week 307 SOBs

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Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

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They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

My First Big Failure and What It Meant …

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about my first big failure and what it meant

When I was in my 20s, I lost my job. The guy who said good-bye, my boss, did it in the nicest way. He talked about territory restructuring and other changes. The company gave me a lovely package so that I could move back to my home in Chicago. I might have tried to believe that I had no part in what happened, but in my heart I knew my job was gone because of nonperformance.

It was the first time I had failed at anything.

I’m not going to tell it was fun or that I learned a lesson then that changed my life. It wasn’t and I didn’t.

It took me a long time to even make sense of it. I was a winner, always successful. How was it that I totally missed on this one? How was it that I couldn’t seem to find a way to get to the winning? How did I get myself lost in a spiral of unhappiness that made every small loss lead to another slightly bigger one? What was I not doing or seeing?

Really I was blind to one HUGE thing.

It was the wrong job for me.

How hard I’d tried to fit myself into a space that didn’t fit me.

I bent and twisted, smashed and squished, curled and flattened, until I was walking in circles without direction. All the time that I was doing that, I was sure that my lack of performance was the problem — it was only a symptom. The problem was that I was trying to reconfigure myself to fit a job I’d taken.

We live in a time finding the right job may seem a challenge, but living in the wrong one still isn’t the answer.

Ever wonder what you bring to the world? … where you belong?

Look at what you’ve always done well, what problems you’ve always solved for other people, the things you do that other folks rely on. You’ve been successful before. Look inside those successes. You’ll find the answers have always been there.

I can say it’s so.
I know.
I’ve lived it.

All that my first big failure meant was that wasn’t MY path to change the world.

Be irresistible.

Liz's Signature

The Big Challenges of Working at Home

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A Guest Post by
Rachel Carlson

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BIG Challenges of Working From Home

One memory of my experience working from home sticks out to me – a video Skype meeting with one of my first clients. I rushed to put on some nice clothes, cleaned up my office a little and prepared as best I could. When the meeting finally happened, the client remarked “I expected to see a person in their pajamas in a tiny one bedroom apartment.”

And that’s a part of the “work from home problem” isn’t it? Normal business people, as they like to think of themselves, have some fairly critical prejudices against work-from-home workers. With that one remark, I realized that the client thought of people who work from home with two things in mind:

  • I was probably too lazy to put on some decent clothes for a meeting.
  • I was more than likely not making enough money to have more than a studio apartment.

This misconception is one of the biggest challenges of working from home – among many others. Once you convince your clients that you aren’t some slob, furiously clamoring for a living from the scraps of “real businesses,” you have an opportunity to overcome all the challenges and become a successful entrepreneur.

Setting Reasonable Hours

It’s true that few of us work the 9-5 grind. And why do so if you don’t have to? What is it really about that eight-hour period that makes it so “work-worthy?” I honestly admit that I hate working 9-5, and I don’t normally work in periods longer than four hours. When you work with clients, however, you have to set reasonable hours for when they can contact you. Try the following to keep those hours, without interfering with your preferred work schedule:

  • Make yourself available for calls at a normal schedule (like 9 a.m. to 10 p.m.). If you’re getting so many calls that it’s interfering with your life, you have a very good problem and might need to consider hiring some help. It should go without saying that a mobile phone is essential.
  • If you don’t want your mobile number published, simply forward your number through Phone.com with a more professional 888 number that you can give your clients. This has the added benefit of allowing you to see when it’s a work call (and avoid answering with a hearty “what’s up?”).

Competing With the “Big Box” Providers

This seems to be a bit of a misconception carried over from the brick and mortar business world. You can actually compete with larger companies quite easily. In fact, you have some decisive advantages:

  • You don’t have much overhead, meaning you can usually undercut like crazy. But don’t get carried away. Do some research to find out how much your major competitors are charging for similar services and set your prices just under theirs. If you go too cheap, clients won’t believe that you do good work.
  • You are a single person. Always highlight the fact that you are the only person a client needs to speak to – you take the order and finish it yourself. Clients usually love this. In many situations, you can even beat the turnaround times offered by large companies simply because of the lack of red tape.
  • Do research on every client and gear your pitch towards their needs. If they are a small company, they’ll love that you work alone. Larger companies might get concerned with your slower turnaround time. With these types of clients, you don’t need to stress that you work from home. You do need to stress that you have an unprecedented personal dedication to each client.
  • You can establish a deeply personal brand. If you design business cards, for example, and have received many compliments on your attention to raised print designs, leverage this with future clients. While larger companies have an army of professionals doing the same thing, nothing can beat your personal approach.

Meeting With Clients

It’s fairly rare that a client requests a face-to-face meeting. Actually, most of your clients will be very busy (or will want to seem like they are) and will convert after a single phone call or email. Some will prefer to do a video chat. If you serve some local clients, they might want to meet. But as a general rule, never invite the client to your home to do business. Instead, learn to love lunch meetings. Offering to take a client out to lunch to discuss a new contract is a great way to avoid having to reveal that you work from home, while showing a potential client that you have a professional attitude towards business.

On the other hand, I’ve secured more contracts over a beer than over lunch. If you work in a particularly casual industry like web development, SEO, or content writing, your best tool can be a clean, quiet bar. This works well for meetings after 5 p.m.

But remember that working from home is just an alternative to working in an office, not necessarily a license to show up in shorts and a t-shirt. Business people will still expect you to look professional, and you have to be very careful about casual business conversations. You still have a product to sell, and you need to project an image of professionalism at all times.

Sure there are little challenges that we face at home or in an office, but …

What do you find are the big challenges of working at home for you?

—-
Author’s Bio:
Rachel Carlson is a writer and student that works from home. While she spends a lot of her time writing, she also helps different companies like Clear Wireless with gaining exposure through various blogs and websites. She has recently started a new Twitter account and is finally going to give it a real shot. She can be followed at @carlson_rachel.

Thanks, Rachel. You covered this big topic in fresh way.

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

What is the Proper Way to Let an Employee Go?

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If you’ve ever gotten a layoff or fired notice, you know the range of emotions that overtake you.

Unless this was a forgone conclusion, you are likely feeling surprise, anger, bewilderment and more. One of the first questions you likely ask is why did I lose my job when things seemed to be going well at work?

With the economy still trying to take flight, losing a job in 2011 takes on even more significance, especially with no end in sight to when things will get better.

How Did You Learn of Your Dismissal?

I can speak from experience to being laid off, quite frankly to my surprise.

Working as an online editor for Insurance Journal magazine in San Diego beginning in 2001, I had been there just under five years when it all unraveled.

Working from home on a Friday, I had received an email from my manager about doing a conference call with her and the CEO that morning, no details provided. As fate would have it, the reporter curiosity in me came out that morning for several reasons:

  • I had just been in the office working the day before and everything was fine;
  • We never did conference calls on a Friday and if we did, it involved all of the team;
  • I had not received any complaints, concerns, etc. leading up to this call.

So, I emailed the manager back and asked her what we would be discussing that day. The next communication from her was that I was being laid off as a result of my position being eliminated, no more, no less. Given that the position was an important one for a company looking to increase its online presence, the shock of the layoff hit home even more.

Being realistic, I know that layoffs happen every day in this country and around the world. What caught me by surprise, however, was the way this company chose to handle this matter.

Rather than the publisher being man enough to tell me face-to-face the previous day when I was in the office and even briefly spoke with him, he let his daughter-in-law do the dirty work behind the comfort of a computer.

Employers and Employees

Needless to say, I lost a lot of respect for this publisher who I thought liked the work I was doing, not to mention who would have brought me aside if there were an issue we needed to hash out.

While employers are not bound to give the real reason of why someone is let go, it is the honorable thing to do, especially when their decision has a number of ramifications for the employee. Yes, knowing the real reason may not make things better, but it at least prepares you for the next job and what to do and not to do.

Even though I have worked other jobs since that day six years ago, my trust level of employers will never be the same.

Yes, the company paid me for five years, but I gave a lot to that company in return and then some. A simple man-to-man explanation for the dismissal would have been better than taking the easy way out and having someone lower down on the totem pool do it.

So, have you ever been laid off or fired and felt the way it was handled was inappropriate?

Photo credit: 247wallst.com

Dave Thomas writes extensively for B2b lead generation online resource Resource Nation that provides expert advice on purchasing and outsourcing decisions for small business owners and entrepreneurs. He is an expert writer on items like direct mail companies and is based in San Diego, California.

 

Train Your Brain to Generate Ideas When You Need Them!

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Stop Stopping the Ideas from Coming

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Walking, pacing, staring at a blank page, tearing at your hair, and wishing you could be just about anywhere that isn’t this place … the place where you need an idea and your mind is a blank.

The adrenalin is pumping. Mental sweat is dripping. You hear the sound of your own breathing and the irritating tick, tick, ticking of a clock — though every timepiece you own is digital.

Your mind is working overtime to find irrelevant attractions and less than useful distractions keep interrupting any chance of a reasonable thought that appears. One unanswered question — How will I ever get this done? — is from every direction neutralizing any chance of a new thought.

It’s not that you’re out of ideas.

It’s that you need to stop stopping them.

The RAS — Our Brain’s Stimulus Management System

Ever noticed that the best ideas come when you’re least trying to have them? Great ideas show up when we’re falling asleep, taking a walk or a shower, unpacking boxes and boxes, or sitting outside watching people and clouds go by.

Times like those, ideas seem to be everywhere.
But when we need one, we can seem to see one anywhere.

The problem isn’t that we don’t have anything to stimulate ideas! The problem is that we have too many things! Really.

Everyone has plenty of what they need to get ideas growing. The key is knowing how to work mindfully rather than on adrenalin.

The stimuli that get ideas growing are continuously and constantly bombarding our brains, specifically our subconscious. They come at such a rate that, if our brains let them all in, we wouldn’t be able to pay attention to anything — we’d be distracted by blinking, how it feels to be walking. the sound of our breathing, or the feedback of the chair where we’re sitting.

To keep our brains efficient, we come equipped –- at no extra charge –- with a stimulus management unit called the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS is a valve-like screening device at the base of our brains that filters out most of the unwanted stimuli. Think of it as closed door gateway that allows only useful information into our conscious brains.

Unfortunately that same RAS gateway can close access to the great ideas that we’ve been reaching for. The more adrenalin we have flowing the more it’s likely to be closing.

The good news is that the RAS can be trained.

Train Your Brain to Generate Ideas When You Need Them!

Anyone can increase the number of useful ideas they have. The art is in training our minds to see the ideas and pull them in before our thoughts edit, deflect, or vaporize them.

The best way to stop stopping the ideas from coming is to teach yourself how to keep the RAS open. Here’s how to how to practice using the filter the way you want.

Still yourself — mentally and physically. Spend a few minutes a day in stillness. Practice stillness so that you get good at it. Use that still time to develop these three process models. These ways of thinking keep the filter focused on finding the opportunity in a problem or a new idea from an old one.

  • Change points of vision. View the question from the inside out, vertically, laterally, at the detail level, and the aerial view.
  • Change your value system. Imagine the suggestions that you might get from a designer, a composer, a writer, a mathematician, a coder, a dancer, a chef, and understanding friend. Then do it again from the view of an employee, a vendor, a partner, a stockholder, a CEO, and a competitor.
  • Change your scope and sequence. Tinker with ideas and viewpoints to stretch them, bend them, reconstruct them into solutions that fit and work perfectly in specific situations. Make it bigger, smaller. Make last shorter and longer. Take out crucial steps and put them in a different order. Add something that doesn’t belong.

If you get in the practice of thinking during stillness, you’ll find that when you need ideas in a hurry, you can stop, be still and get them.

And

None of your decisions will be reactions to a crisis.

Have you ever tried anything like this?

Be irresistible.

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