Pushing From A Stand-Still

How often do you start something, work on it for a little bit, ACCIDENTALLY let life cut in, plan to getting back to what you were working on, then find yourself 3-4 months later back where you took that pause?

Well, I won’t say that’s where we have been. Though I suppose it could very well look like that. But be that as it may, things are moving along. Slowly, perhaps, but moving along none the less. Larry and I are both working on our respective individual activities and continue to gain focus on Biz-e-Life and the possible lack of sleep we may get by taking this on like we could/should.

So many things to work through, to work on and put together.  Most of it, all good. Some of it, nice and sentimental. A bit of it okie dokie. A tiny portion just a pain in the … (well, its there in everything that is worth doing). But in the end, it’s going to be something well work the time and energy and focus and improvement and self-motivation.

Monday Mornings Are What We Make em’

• Another day of the week.
• Another Monday
• Another new beginning
• Another chance for a change
• Another best day of our lives
• Another shot at getting more accomplished
• Another day to make the most of
• Another moring
• Another afternoon
• Another evening
• Another opportunity to do great things
• Another day to smile
• Another day to look forward to
• Another day like no other.

What is today about for you?

A Work In Progress Seems To Always Bring More Work

Why is it that I was compelled to “pretty up” the four blogs I have (even though I haven’t really posted to them in quite some time)? What made me make new banners for a couple of them, edit the sidebars on all of them, change a few link feeds that were not working in the first place, and then fight the urge of creating yet two other blogs just for the fun of it?

I like to think of it all as a simple work in progress. When I started this round of changing things around, all I was going to do was change the banner titles on 2 of the blogs which needed them.

And as is often the case, that one fairly simple activity lead to something else which lead to even more something else(es) which – you guessed it – lead to even more stuff. And I’m not even done yet since so many other ideas for change come to mind.

All of this coming on the day before I read Scott Ginsberg’s blog post today about things he wishes someone would have told him when he started his business. That is “Activity isn’t progress.” Read his post here
So naturally I have thought about that AFTER I have done all of this “necessary pretty work” on the blogs without really posting anything new. But I shall now begin to work on the progress part of the activities instead of just doing stuff to be doing stuff.

Now Here’s A Few Questions For You…

• What are you doing that is allowing you to progress toward what it is you want?
• Is what you are doing necessary or just filling time?
• What should you be spending your time on?
• When will you see the benefits?

The Soon To Be New & Improved You

By David Stoddard

www.biz-e-life.com

A couple of days ago, Larry wrote about those dreaded New Years resolutions and the frustrations most of us feel when we don’t quite live up to what it is we resolved to do (or not do). Sure, we were all gung ho the night before the new year began. And after we woke up on the 1st day of the year, we were still feeling positive, energetic and ready to see our new way of life into the future.

To view Larry’s post, click here.

But come a few days into the year, we may have fallen back into our own ways. We get frustrated at ourselves for not being this new person. And like the fans of the Chicago Cubs, we may think to ourselves, well, there is always next year.

Personally, I can not tell you how many times I have resolved to cut down on the drinking of diet soda. I will begin drinking more water instead of the flavored caramel colored water and other additives. But over time, I manage to feel soda has more flavor to it, so I will choose to have that more and more.

What I’ve come to understand it that saying point blank that you are going to begin doing something (or stop doing something) and sticking with it is tough to do. It isn’t necessarily something you can just say you are going to do or stop doing and make it last a lifetime.

It can happen, that’s true. But more often than not, it takes time, effort, discipline and a desire to want to make this change you are resolving to make.

So if this year, you have found yourself back in your old ways (pre New Year’s resolution), take a moment and get back to the reasoning behind your wanting to change what you are wishing to change.

* What are you wanting to change?

* Why do you wish to make this change?

* Is this change for yourself or for others?

* What are your feelings right now?

* What do you think you will feel during the change process?

* How will you feel once this change becomes the “new you?”

Go ahead and write down the answers to these questions. Print them out if you wish and put them somewhere you will see them. If this change is important to you (and perhaps someone you care about), then seeing the reasons behind this want/need to change can push you forward when you feel yourself slipping back. Next time, we’ll get to the more fun and funny aspects of doing what we do, changing what we change, becoming who we are meant to be, and we might even answer some viewer mail.

Speaking Of Frustration, Fear & Other Frivolously Flighty Feelings!

Speaking Of Frustration, Fear & Other Frivolously Flighty Feelings!

By Larry L. Nichols

www.Biz-e-Life.com

      Speaking of frustration, fear and other frivolously flighty feelings, I thinks it’s only fair and fitting to finally face the facts and force these farcically false and formidably fatal, fanatical fancies from our frantically forlorn foreheads and fiercely fling them into the fabulous fierce fires of freedom forever!

      If that last sentence makes you want to explete a few “F” words of your own, feel free to join right in. 

      I simply don’t understand how so many of these so called renowned and world famous “Super Gurus” of Life and Business can continue to get away with so of these utterly inhuman and ridiculously robotic, mechanical mantras and mystical mush-headed mottos such as: “To be truly successful, you must always remain thoroughly positive, unabashedly strong, constantly upbeat unalterably optimistic!

      What a total bunch of cr*p these phony puppets are proudly proclaiming through their problematically profound pie holes!

      Question: Can any human being do so?

      I’m a pretty well read guy. If you look throughout all of the much revered religious books studied throughout the ages and from around the entire globe, you will find a vast collection of ancient stories of even the very deities that control the universe, angrily shaking the Earth with earthquakes, throwing lightning bolts, and whipping up raging sea storms to drown stubborn sailors who chide and jeer at the gods they won’t fear.

      Hey even in the Bible, God admits he has some regrets about how things have turned out with Mankind and Jesus wept. But somehow we mere mortals are somehow supposed to be able to always keep it together and be thoroughly smiling and happily upbeat all of the time, or we are instantly doomed to utter and complete failure. WOW, what a total and complete downer that would be if it were even partially true!

      The truth is, it’s not even about what we as human beings allow ourselves to feel. Not allowing yourself to feel creates horrible blockages of denial which eat away at the very fabric of your consciousness like a self created, internal cancer. No, we are supposed to face and deal with our feelings, allow them to teach us whatever we need to learn from them and then let them go.

      Instead, it’s really what we actually choose to do about those feelings that counts and matters most! The fact is, we humans can never hope to learn to completely control what all we think and feel.  

      It’s simply genetically not in our make up, we are not mere  programmable computers, but are, in fact, all extremely complex and intricately weaved webs of cleverly creative and complicated character qualities and inner drives and passions that make us enigmas to even our selves.

      The lesson to learn is NOT that we are to avoid or deny or thoughts, fears, concerns, worries and nightmares, but rather we are to face them and not allow them to knock us off track or destroy us.

      Don’t hide from you your fear, if you do you will become a frightened and paranoid psychotic. Don’t deny your anger; if you do you will become a stone cold bully. Don’t run from your dreams or ignore your worries and concerns, they may be your inner self trying to send you a very vital and valuable message.

      Simply face your fears and feelings and learn what you can from them as you meanwhile dedicate yourself more committedly to continue to move forward on your chosen path and beyond this precise point in the path where the fear or feeling’s message is pertinent to your process and progress.

      Only automatons don’t have moments of normal human frustration, disappointment, worry or even fright. Automatons can’t help you to become a better person, because they are NOT people themselves.

      Don’t fall for their insanely inane and idiotic antidotes to human feeling. Success in both business and life is all about following and pursuing your personal passions. How can you pursue passion if you can’t feel your feelings?

      Isn’t time for us all to get passionate once again about those very things we once were so very passionate about that they served to make us who we are, and drive us to where we want to go and be in life? By Job, I think we’ve got it!

Copyright © 2008
www.Biz-e-Life.com
Your Success Is Our Business -
Your Satisfaction Is Our Life!

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

PUBLISHING GUIDELINES:

This article may be reprinted, without modification, provided that the copyright notice remains completely intact. Email notification of your intent to publish would be sincerely appreciated.

The Biz-e-Life Guys:

Larry L. Nichols: Your Business Building Best Buddy

David Stoddard: Life’s Cruise Director Extraordinaire.

Separately, for over three decades now, they’ve helped thousands of people just like you to set out for, build, maintain and grow their uniquely personal dreams, goals and passions in both Life and Business.

Together, as a team, they work with patience and humor in a very “down to earth” manner to help to guide people to see, understand and utilize the various powerful principals necessary to develop both success in Business and satisfaction in Life!

Don’t Let Those New Year’s Blahs, Blues & Bah Humbugs Get You Down!

Don’t Let Those New Year’s Blahs, Blues & Bah Humbugs Get You Down!

By Larry L. Nichols

www.Biz-e-Life.com

One of the biggest and most time wasting and energy draining mistake that approximately 90% of us human souls make each year right about this time, is to get all ticked off, frustrated and annoyed with ourselves for already dropping the ball on that big “News Years Resolution” that was going to completely turn our life around into something utterly, magically wonderful in one sudden fell swoop.

Please do yourself and the rest of us a really huge favor and simply decide NOT to go around beating yourself up over something so innately and intrinsically common as merely showing clear and definitive signs that you are, in fact, HUMAN!

Remember, “Rome wasn’t built in a day” and Rome was just a bunch of inanimate material without any mind, heart, subconscious conscience or soul full of a life long collection of various disorganized and often conflicting emotions, fears, passions, hopes, concerns, insecurities, dreams, feelings and worries.

If rock and glass can’t be tossed together in a single day, why would you logically expect it to be plausible, even possible for something as complex and amazingly elaborate and symbiotically involved as a human being to change completely in one single day?

By the way, who decided that “New Years Day” is to be officially accepted by all as the official magical, mystical moment that all significant, personal change can and should be made?

Was there an election I never heard bout, or an official proclamation from God on high that I didn’t get the memo on? No, it’s just some arbitrary day that someone came up with out of the ether of pure imagination, and “BOOM” everyone just jumped on board like a bunch of sheep heading to slaughter.

First off, anyone who knows anything at all about psychology 101 knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that real, significant change takes more than a single day to set in process.

It is a matter of consistency over time that helps us to build new improved thought patterns and life-style habits. Some Psychiatrists, Psychologists, Doctors, Universities and Professors claim that it takes precisely 30 days to make any significant change in one’s life. Others say only 21, if one is really truly sincerely serious about making the change.

Either way, that’s a heck of a lot longer than the single 24 hour period supplied by the arrival of New Years Day. So give yourself a break and understand that 99.9% of all attempted change takes consistency of dedicated effort over a period of time, usually from 3 to 4 weeks.

So don’t get angry or frustrated with yourself because you promised you would stop smoking, lose weight, quit cussing, find true love or build a bigger more successful business stating this New Years, and you haven’t made your dream a reality yet.

Listen, getting angry, mad and upset about it only hinders your efforts further, making you more stressed and anxious and far less effective and resilient in your efforts, so getting ticked off is actually one of the powerful, self destructive things you are doing to set yourself up for utter failure.

Instead, it’s time to loosen up and lighten up. Then you can finally be fully free to really listen up. Change takes time, it takes effort, it takes dedication and most important, it takes consistency, as you develop a NEW better, healthier more positive and self satisfying HABIT or life-style.

Please don’t take it out on the one person who really truly wants what you want, longs for what makes you sincerely happy and honestly loves you and wishes you only the very best in happiness and success, yourself!

Copyright © 2008
www.Biz-e-Life.com
Your Success Is Our Business -
Your Satisfaction Is Our Life!

All Rights Reserved Worldwide.

PUBLISHING GUIDELINES:

This article may be reprinted, without modification, provided that the copyright notice remains completely intact. Email notification of your intent to publish would be sincerely appreciated.

The Biz-e-Life Guys:

Larry L. Nichols: Your Business Building Best Buddy

David Stoddard: Life’s Cruise Director Extraordinaire.

Separately, for over three decades now, they’ve helped thousands of people just like you to set out for, build, maintain and grow their uniquely personal dreams, goals and passions in both Life and Business.

Together, as a team, they work with patience and humor in a very “down to earth” manner to help to guide people to see, understand and utilize the various powerful principals necessary to develop both success in Business and satisfaction in Life!

A Cookie For Your Actions

Many would call sitting in a room at a table with 60 others in the area, watching the clock for your turn to talk, waiting for the unknown to arrive and pat you on the back and give you a cookie, a waste of a day.

Actually, I decided to get up and get my own cookie from one of the vendors. After 6 hours, I learned it wasn’t just going to hop off the plate and come to me by itself.

It was the St. Louis Chapter WAHMfest conference. It’s designed for Work-At-Home Moms (and dads) and those who may be interested in working from home. (The web site address is at the end of this article).

My main reason for being there was to give a presentation on the personal side of working from home. That tied in well with the conference theme, as well as with the motivational end of what I hoped to continue to do professionally.

I’m glad my friend Terry agreed to take part in the conference with me. We believed that if nothing else, it would be a bit of exposure for the two of us. And the presentations we were giving would certainly mean something to those in attendance. At least that was our main thought at breakfast.

To make a long story short, 270 people attended the event. There were about 50 vendors set up in the main room. We had maybe 20 people visit our table, 10 who filled out entries for the drawings we had, and a grand total of three attended our presentations throughout the entire day.

Needless to say, that part was pretty depressing. But I should mention that my presentations had twice as many attendees as any of the other presentations. I had 2 people come to see me. (Oooooh!)

On the other hand, I think of it this way. Just maybe my advice or suggestions during the presentation got the two of them started in a whole new direction. Maybe they discovered new working opportunities they might not have previously thought of. Maybe one is writing an article about the conference right now and sending it out to a newspaper.

The person in Terry’s audience bought one of his e-book CDs. It turned out to be the only sale Terry made that day. But it meant something to him. That one sale has given him the push to keep going, to keep striving, and has kept him believing in what the two of us talked about earlier in the year: that this is the year we get things going.

You see, for years the two of us had been doing a lot of talking and thinking of doing different things. Eventually we got deeper into it. We began to actually plan things. We planned to think about thinking about what we could do or become. Still, we never quite got to the point of getting off the ground.

When we met for breakfast in January, we talked about a lot of things. We made the decision that this was going to be the year. We knew we could not just keep waiting for the perfect moment, or for the planets to align, or for that winning $220 million lottery ticket to be drawn.

Little did we know, that one decision, along with a lot of little things we had done, would bring us to playing a central role in a conference.

As mentioned, things did not work out as well as we had hoped. But in the end, we got out there and did something different. So what if it seemed “out of character” for either of us? We made the commitment not only with the conference organizer, but with each other and ourselves. We learned a lot of different things, not only about the conference or what it takes to get prepared for one, but also about ourselves.

We learned that you have to take chances at times. We learned that just because things don’t work out as you may have hoped, it isn’t fatal. We learned that saying things like “But there is so much to do, why even bother,” is just an excuse. We learned when you make the effort, no matter how small, great things can begin to happen. And we learned that we can do more than we have ever thought in the past.

And for that, I think we deserve a cookie.

 

© 2002-2007 David Stoddard

Welcome Biz-e-Life(ers)

Hello and welcome to the Biz-e-Life Blog (and web site combo).

Just as Julie McCoy was the Cruise Director on the Love Boat bringing fun and adventures for the passengers, we shall do our part to do the same. Except for the fact there are two of us, that just shows you how great a job Julie did.

As for us, Larry and I shall be your guides on this journey of life and it’s connection to business. Now before you think this is going to be more like reading the Wall Street Journal or Entrepreneur Magazine, relax.

While yes, business is about those things. But there is also the business of your life, the business of your career, the business of your hobbies, the business of your family, the business of your future. It’s about mind-ing YOUR business.

Over time, you’ll be able to tell which of us is writing. But if not, just look up under the title of the given post. Plus we may even tell you in the process of the post.

In the near future, we shall have actual affordable information for your interest, improvement and involvement in the shop. Personally, I’ve never believed in ebooks and the like being sold for more than $10. It’s not like those selling them had to print anything. Yes, the information within might be more valuable than that, it’s better to get it into as many hands as possible to do the most good.

Anyway, there I go again making a post longer than it need be. To learn more about us, check out the about us link up top or click here. or check out our individual sites online as well. Larry is here at www.wordandwebwiz.com and www.writeforme.com

David is out there at www.writingmyway.com

Until our next message, Peace.

Run For The Roses

There comes a time in life and business where you come across an opportunity, an idea, a thought, a feeling, a wish, a conversation, an observation, moment in time where you get this urge to do something.

Maybe it was planned, maybe it was just a fluke of some kind, but you find yourself in a situation that you have the opportunity to do something wonderful, terrific, great, super-duper awesome. Something that can take you to the next level of your own or your business success.

It’s that moment when you just have to take your shot, do your duty, and run for the roses.

When Dan Fogelberg passed away this past Saturday, one song of his came to mind more than any other. It sums us pretty much what living life is about.

To take a single moment and go for it. To make the most from it. To enjoy it, live it and give it everything you’ve got. We must “Run For The Roses.”

Run For The Roses – Dan Fogelberg

And it’s run for the roses as fast as you can
Your fate is delivered, your moment’s at hand
It’s the chance of a lifetime in a lifetime of chance
And it’s high time you joined in the dance 
www.danfogelberg.com 

Thank you for everything you have meant Dan. R.I.P.