Erich Stauffer

Tag: Self-Talk

  • Determining Your Purpose in Life or Process

    Brainstorming

    Occasionally, you should take time out to stop and evaluate why you are doing the things that you are doing.  Slow down to think if what you’re doing is the best idea or not. Brainstorm with pen and paper (yes, actually grab a pad of paper and a pencil).  The best ideas come by brainstorming, which provides an opportunity to evaluate your productivity, your methodology, and your overall goal. Brainstorming brings diversity of knowledge and perspectives effective for a more forward looking career. Brainstorming is a great activity, but it’s also good to talk to someone about what you are doing, in order to help establish the purpose.

    Mentor Review

    Take someone you admire out to lunch and pick their brain.  Tell them about what you are doing to get feedback from them.  Write down their responses, whether you believe them or not, and thank them for their time.  Make sure you pay for their meal.  Successful people like to share what they know (that’s why I have this blog) so don’t be afraid to ask them.

    Technology Review

    Also, keep yourself up on new technology and continue educating yourself to keep yourself alive and fresh.  It’s easy to become stale no matter what business you’re in.  Try to spend at least 2-3 hours a week just researching and finding new ideas.  It’s hard to break away from the normal routine but brainstorming with new ideas is refreshing and can renew enthusiasm.  This is part of innovation and entrepreneurship, which looks for innovations in changes in technology, among other things.  It could be that the way you have been doing things is no longer relevant at worst or at the very least, no longer efficient.  Ask yourself the following four questions:

    1. Is there any new technology I could be using? — Technology may have become more efficient since you first developed your original time-saving method. Relying on an old template could be costing you time and money.
    2. Have I learned any new ideas lately that I need to apply here? — You may have acquired some new skills or read about some new ideas that will handle your project even better than the time-saving technique that you are using now.
    3. Are there new requirements that mean that I need to review this process? — The client may have updated his or her requirements for their projects. Using your old template or time-saving tools may not meet the client’s newest requirements.
    4. Are there any other new tools I could be using? — There may be new tools or resources available to do the work that weren’t originally available when you developed your template.

    Personal Brainstorming

    At least once a month I block off an hour to go into a dark room and just wait for ideas to come.  I don’t anticipate thinking about any one thing, but there is something about the pitch black silence that allows great ideas to surface.  I’ve had many revelations, not just about business or problem solving, but figuring out why I thought certain ways about certain things.  It’s a chance to re-evaluate all aspects of your life and help you determine your purpose in life or in process.

  • You’re so money and you don’t even know it!

    If you’ve never seen the film “Swingers”, I highly recommend it.  It came out in the mid-nineties and struck a chord with many in the Gen-X and Gen-Y crowd.  To get a great feel for the kind of movie this is, check out the short clip below from Youtube (it is an R rated movie and contains profanity):

    httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODjE-_OB3JI&feature=related

    The characters from the movie have taken the words “money” and “baby” and given them wholly new meaning within the context of their group of friends.  Vince Vaughn’s character paints a great picture of what kind of attitude Jon Favreau’s character should have about himself.  It’s not just about self-esteem, its about what kinds of actions he should take if he’s really going to act like a bear with this bunny!

    Now, it’s tricky to draw a metaphor from a theme in a movie that is being made by another metaphor, so I’ll try to distill the truth that I believe the metaphors point to.

    Let’s say that you are looking for a job (here is my metaphor), and you are frustrated at a lack of opportunities.  Now, even a cursory knowledge of successful thinking strategies will remind you to stay positive, but it still doesn’t seem to be enough.  You’re right.  It is not enough.

    You need to think through both sides of the transaction.  In this case, the transaction is a business looking for a new employee and vice versa.  Now, even referring to the former as a “business” may be the wrong word to use.  Chances are (depending on the size of the company), that it is a human resources director or some specific manager that is looking to fill a position.  Now, if you were looking to fill a position with your company, and you knew that the new employee’s success (or lack thereof) would have some sort of repercussion with you, what would you do?

    Would you look in a phonebook and choose the people with the three best ads?  How is this different from having a well put together resume?

    In all actuality, you would probably rack your brain to think of somebody whom you already know that would be a good fit, whether they are currently looking for a job or not.  Next, you would probably look to the people whom you trust and ask them who they might recommend for the position in question.  Only then would you put out a listing for a new employee in some sort of job-finder service.

    So, what does this tell us?  If you are looking for jobs that are listed online, it’s either because the business could not find anyone else who was qualified, or all of the people they have already talked to about it are not interested in taking it.  Its not the prettiest picture, but it is closer to accurate than you might think.

    Without a strong, but healthy belief in yourself, you will either stand still and achieve nothing, or stand still and unwisely wait for success to find you.

    So why do I encourage you to be a bad man from the rated R movie and not the guy from the PG-13 movie who everyone really hopes makes it happen?  Because we live in an R rated world, and great opportunities are MADE and not handed out.

    If you think too highly of yourself, you will expect the winning lottery ticket to be mailed to you, even if you don’t play the lottery!  You believe that you are destined for greatness, but immune to the preparation and effort that goes before it.  Even if you are handed a baton (let’s throw another metaphor in, shall we?), and you haven’t prepared yourself with effort and determination, you will falter.  You may get the digits, but by waiting too long to call, you will blow the opportunity.

    The other extreme is to be meek, and to look at opportunities with fear and trembling.  You can see 10 ways in which the endeavor will fail, so you abort before launch.  Even if you see one or two ways in which it could succeed, you stand still to avoid the possibility of failure.  The truth is that standing still is a failure all by itself.

    The key is to be balanced and healthy.  Get out there and talk to the people you already know.  Let them know that you are serious about finding something new and you value their opinion.  They may just refer you to someone else, but it is highly unlikely that they will ignore you.  In fact, the only way to guarantee that you will end up with nothing is to venture nothing with your current contacts.

    Whether you want digits, a job, a relationship, or a new chapter in your life, it takes belief in your mind before you can go safely in your body.  Don’t just think “money”…. BE “MONEY”!

  • 4 Steps from Wanting to Receiving

    I went to bed last night thinking about my experience earlier in the day with my daughter at the gas station.  We walked there to get my wife a coke, but had some “extra” money to get her some candy.  When we walked through the candy aisle, she started looking at the bags of candy on the left and I looked at the money I had.  I had to bend down and tell her that she could only look on the other side of the aisle, in a section in which I could afford to buy her something.  In bed that night I started thinking how much more awful it would be to do similar things in the future to clothes she’ll want to buy, trips she’ll want to go on with friends, etc..

    All that we have been reading about, hearing about, and preaching about, start doing and acting on it – believing it.  We know it’s true, but I would encourage you to develop the faith.  If I could boil all of our conversations about this down, it would go something like this:

    Develop and understand what you want.     – Desire, or love, is what keeps you attached or attracted (as in Law of Attraction) to the rest of the steps involved. I would venture to guess that for both of us right now, this desire is to first be able to pay all of our bills monthly, then be able to provide extra for our families.

    Believe or train your mind to believe it. – Faith is the next step, bridging the what (desire) and the how.  This is where limiting thoughts from yourself, friends, family, and society creep in, but can be let go through self-talk or mental exercises.  It’s a matter of being acutely aware of your thoughts and managing them towards your stated desires.

    Act as if you have already received it.     – This means both being thankful for everything you have now, but also what you will have in the future.  It also means acting how you will be after receiving the desire, for example, developing systems and/or routines for paying bills and saving money once the revenue starts coming in, believing that it will and we need to be prepared for it.

    Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. – This adage means to not review a gift before accepting it.  Once you have the desire, have trained your mind to believe it will occur, and have started changing actions to prepare for it’s arrival, the next step is it’s arrival.  Make sure that for more open-ended desires like “more money” you are also open-ended on where you expect the money to come from.

    I’ve been listening to an audio version of Peter Drucker’s Innovation and Entrepreneurship book.  In that book, Drucker talks about how entrepreneurship is not about starting a new business, but identifying surprises, incongruities, or miss-assumptions, and then creating something new that shifts resources from an area of lower yield to an area of higher yield.  The reason I bring this up is because sometimes businesses, which are ran by humans with similar brains and emotions to our own, go through this same process.  Some succeed and some fail.  Let me give you an example:

    Drucker talks about Macy’s department store in the early 1960’s.  We can assume that the desire of the business was to earn revenue.  They believed that they could and acted as if they had already received the revenue by purchasing buildings, inventory, and machines to process the transactions.  But in the early 1960’s, more revenue started coming from appliance sales than from fashion and for twenty years, managers worked to suppress these appliance sales in order to keep the ratio of fashion-to appliances the same.  Then in the late 1970’s new management embraced the change and despite rampant inflation, Macy’s department stores began beating the market.

    Another story is about IBM thinking they would sell equipment only to universities and scientists until one day they were bothered by a woman who complained that she could not get an IBM sales rep to come down to her library to talk to her.  The next morning, the head of IBM walked into that library and closed a deal with enough revenue to cover next month’s payroll.  That was when IBM decided two things: that they would start selling to anybody and start asking for the money up-front.  You see, the original sales rep desired to make a sale, he believed that he could make sales, but when a sale came by that didn’t match his idea of what a sale would look like, he passed it over.

    Even I encountered this yesterday while doing micro-niche searches for the Thirty Day Challenge.  I kept coming up with results matching resumes and jobs, but every time, rejected them as not what I was looking for.  Then it dawned on me that what I was looking for should only be classified by the mechanisms and categories that got me there.  As long as it fit the goal (desire) of finding a micro-niche that had over 80 hits a day and less than 30,000 competing websites with phrases that matched mine, I had found what I needed.  To clarify, there are two steps past that (SEO competition review and Monetization) which my brain may have been pre-filtering for, but it’s hard to tell pre-filtering from bias.

    Be sure and check out what Zac has to say about this topic in particular in a blog post he wrote back on January 6, 2009 entitled Who Limits Your Success?

    More > If you liked this post, be sure and check out > The Law of Focus…

  • How to Turn the Ship Around – Just Say the Word, Captain

    Have you ever heard the expression that, “It is not all about semantics, it is ALL about semantics.”?

    Why are we in a recession? Because we said we were – and so it was.  Ask and you shall receive.  This could be a domino effect from excessive margin trading on Wall Street, a multi-national debasement of currency, or it could simply be the effect of real-time media spouting “RECESSION IS COMING! RECESSION IS NEAR, ALAS RECESSION IS HEAR!” My wife actually mentioned to me the other day, “Did you hear the government officially announced we are in a recession?”  My wife knows nothing about the news or economics.  All the news she reads is in a forum from other like-minded stay-at-home moms.  That means the other stay-at-home moms are also talking about it.  It is truly a household expression.

    We are in a recession.  Now what? If semantics got us into this, can it get us out? While possible, it may be harder because terms for the opposite of recession like bull market are not household terms.  What if the Big Five advertising companies got together and announced a new term for the opposite of recession?  It would have to be something that exemplified American spirit, a phrase or preferrably a word that encompassed growth and prosperity, something that is the opposite of the word recession or depression.  Lets give them a start:

    recession – noun. two or more consecutive quarters of negative growth in the economy; a slight depression or indent; a period of rest when productivity stops, such as when a court or classroom breaks for recess.

    [opposite of recession] – noun. two or more consecutive quarters of positive growth; a slight rise or bump; a period of growth and increase in productivity, such as when more available people and equipment are in use.

    Words that would mean the opposite of recession that would stick in peoples minds and could become a household term:

    • incession
    • uncession
    • unionsion
    • producsion
    • improvsion
    • lacession
    • warcession
    • growthcession

    Words that do not end in “sion” that might also come to mean [opposite of recession]:

    • warcycle
    • beatperiod
    • upturn
    • uptick
    • growthturn
    • fastbreak

    Phrases that might also mean opposite of recession:

    • AMERICA: My boyfriends back.
    • AMERICA: The sleeping giant wakes up and wants to know what’s for breakfast.
    • AMERICA: Build it. Buy it. Bring it.
    • AMERICA: Growth for OUR sake.
    • Power up, America.
    • Don’t mess with US.
    • Pull yourself up by your bootstraps, America. Its time for you to stand up so the world can stand down.

    Is America’s role as an economic world leader over?  If the events of the past three months are any indicator, the answer is an astounding NO.  China and India, the future of world growth, tripped at the first sign of America’s financial collapse.  Conspirators may hypothosize that America’s role was being compromised, but by debasing the worlds currency’s, America, which still has relatively wealthy citizens is now poised to take advantage of all the new “deals” around the world in the prime growth markets.  But conspiracy theories aside, for nearly 100% of the world it doesn’t matter anyway.  We have to deal with things as they are, no matter who controls the purse strings.  So lets get out there and start talking POSITIVE!

    Its time to “break the fast” and welcome America to the AWAKENING, the opposite of a recession in America.