Business Tips Guides

Running a business is tiring, stressful and challenging. Small business owners are required to wear many hats, often at the same time, while executives of large organizations often have more problems and politics to manage on a daily basis. It is not uncommon for the business to drain our energy and motivation, regardless of how much we enjoy the business. If you do not take time to recharge your batteries and refresh your perspective it is easy to find yourself frustrated with your business.

That is why it is imperative to have a personal motivation plan in place. This means taking advantage of opportunities that will help you maintain your motivation. Here are few suggestions to help get you started.

Get Motivated Every Day. Zig Ziglar was once confronted about being a ‘motivational speaker’. The guy said to him, “You guys come and get people hyped up and then you leave and the motivation goes away. It doesn’t last, and then you have to get motivated again.” Zig reminded the gentleman that baths are the same way but we think it is a good idea to take a bath every day! It is true that motivation doesn’t last. We have to renew it each and every day. That is okay. It doesn’t make motivation a bad thing. We simply have to realize that if we want to stay motivated over the long term, it is something we will have to apply to ourselves each and every day.

Attend a personal development workshop. Identify an area in your business or personal live that you would like to improve. At the beginning of each year, I determine what types of programs I want to attend and begin looking for them. I find that these sessions give me a short break from the daily grind of my business and help me see things from a different perspective. Training programs, night courses, or weekend seminars that focus on a specific topic can give you a much needed boost in your energy.

Have a vision for your life. The root word of motivation is ‘motive’. The definition of motive is, ‘A reason to act’. This is the cognitive or rational side of motivation. It is your vision. You have to have a vision that is big enough to motivate you. If you are making $50,000 a year, it isn’t going to motivate you to set your goal at $52,000 a year. You just won’t get motivated for that because the reward isn’t enough. Maybe $70,000 a year would work for you. Set out a vision and a strategy for getting there. Have a plan and work the plan.

Join a Master Mind group. Meeting with other like-minded people can help you see your business from a different perspective. An effective group will have between six and eight members from a variety of industries and will usually meet several times a year. If you have the right chemistry between members, these meetings will not only help you improve your business, they will also motivate you to try new approaches and market your business differently.

Exercise. I am an avid runner and have completed two marathons and several half marathons. I occasionally find myself in a position when I cannot run for a period of time due to illness, injury, or the demands of work. Without fail, I notice a decrease in my personal motivation during these times. Regular exercise helps your body work more effectively and efficiently. Although I usually catch myself thinking about work related issues during my runs, I often notice that I develop more creative solutions when I am exercising.

Work hard enough to get results. You can build on your motivation by getting results. The harder you work, the more results you will get and the more results you get, the more you will be motivated to get more. These things all build on one another. If you want to lose weight, then lose the first few pounds. When the belt moves to the next notch you will get fired up to get it to the notch beyond that!

Take time off. It is not a badge of honor to state, “I’m too busy to take time off.” In today’s fast-paced business world, it is critical to take time off for vacation and rest and relaxation. Even a long weekend away from your business can be restful. A true vacation also means completely avoiding email and voicemail. Yes, you will have hundreds of messages to deal with when you return, but you will have a renewed focus and energy to do this.

Lastly, associate with positive people. I have made it a point in the latter part of my career to distance myself from negative individuals. They drain your energy, will not support your goals and desires, and do little to motivate you. On the other hand, positive and optimistic people will uplift your spirits and help you through challenging times.

Find out what over one hundred people have said about Rebate Processor Jobs in the full review.

Steve Albright is the owner and chief editor of a Home Business Opportunity Reviews website.

Have you ever felt like no matter how hard you try you just can’t get ahead? It is almost like you are attracting new obstacles into your life. The truth is that you just may be. The obstacles in our lives hate the positive, and they are attracted to the negatives.

It is amazing how much I find myself thinking and acting in response to what I perceive as the negatives in my life. This focus always ends up leading to fear, anxiety, and seeing obstacles as bigger than they are.

This isn’t what I want. I want to make sure I am living and working from a foundation that assumes the positive. I want to see what is right and good and spring-board from that.

In relationships, it is often said that if you want to find Mr. or Mrs. Right, then you need to not look for them and focus on being them. If you are Mr. or Mrs. Right, then you will attract them. This truth extends way beyond relationships. When we are working hard to find the one right thing, we often get further and further away from ever finding it. We become stuck in a paralyzing position of fear as we look for ways around the obstacles we see. When we focus on our obstacles and weaknesses we tend to naturally gravitate to others’ obstacles and weaknesses, and we even attract obstacles and people with similar weaknesses.

Our negative attitude, whether we are aware of it or not, keeps us a victim with a victim’s mentality, and this keeps success away. It acts as a repellent. We may even find ourselves not trusting the positive or looking for the flaw in the success we may see around us or in us.

How we talk to ourselves and think about our lives reveals some core beliefs. If it is negative then we create negative emotional power around our goals and desires and we don’t realize them. If it is positive then we equally create a positive emotional power around our goals and desires and they come easily.

A great example of this law at work is the radio. At any given moment, wherever you are, there are all kinds of music around you. There is jazz, country, rock, rap, easy listening, and the list goes on. We may not be aware that the music is there but it is. All we have to do to hear it is to get a radio and tune it to the right frequency. Then we will get exactly what we want. However, if we want rock and have the frequency tuned to jazz, we will never get what we want.

When we have a goal or desire for our life or business but project a negative frequency we will never get what we want. In fact we will get what we don’t want. We don’t get to listen to the music we want, which is right there with us all the time. As a coach you don’t want to be trying to help others move forward while you are stuck listening to static, and you don’t have to. Find your frequency today and take your business and life to the next level.

Check Craig out at Neverland Life Design. For ready to use coaching products click on Good To Go Coaching.

The boss was losing his mind big style. His temperament was becoming erratic, his bad moods famous and his physical appearance was fast going downhill.

There was office gossip regarding his personal life. Apparently, his wife was having some kind of mid-life crisis and had taken off with a much younger toy boy. The other girls in the office thought it was more likely that she had seen the light and had enough of him.

A respected colleague took him to one side, pointing out some of these downfalls and the things people were saying and he did his best to pull it together. His first show of ‘I’m on top, I have everything under control, I’m doing just fine’ was his decision to re-fit the office.

Office furniture was turning up in delivery vans on a daily basis, still sitting unpacked in reception for some time. Flat pack desks piled against the wall and filing cabinets stuck in the corridors were a pain for the other staff until they took it into their own hands and organised the office furniture re-fit themselves, still with surplus.

Looking particularly dishevelled one morning, the boss arrived in a bad mood. Trying to brighten his day, he thought he would test out the new office furniture by sitting on the edge of his secretary’s desk and making unseemly advances.

Not wanting to leave her job, and trying to be more understanding than a lot of women would have been, she made a show of spilling her coffee on the desk and he took the hint, swiftly removing himself. Personally, I think he was lucky not to get a swift kick in the shins but he appeared to be going through some crisis that didn’t need worsening.

Maybe she thought twice the next morning when she arrived to find the corner of her desk had been sawn off by the boss in protest. Just as well there was an abundance of office furniture to replace it.

Later that day, the boss stormed through the secretary’s office to find Jeremy from accounts perched on the edge of her desk, discussing this month’s budget. Needless to say, by the next morning, she had no corner to her desk again and this was the way it stayed.

For some bizarre reason, the boss decided the office furniture was to be controlled and he vented his unknown problems on this, often found whiling away the afternoon with a set of alan keys and a socket set dismantling chairs, filing cabinets and desks galore. He would then begin rebuilding with all the wrong parts and even spare bits that occasionally got thrown out of the office door.

After another narrow escape involving a spare piece of office furniture whistling past the secretary’s head, she’d really had enough and began to pack her belongings with the intention of quitting her job as soon as it was safe to do so.

When her boss left for a lunch break, she put her letter of resignation on his desk and slipped quietly away. This did not make him happy! In fact, it was the last straw that finally tipped him over the edge.

Emerging from his office, he pushed over the spare filing cabinet, setting off a domino effect with the spare office furniture that was stacked along the corridor.

When Jeremy from accounts saw the steam coming from his ears he approached cautiously in an attempt to calm him down. For his efforts he received a punch in the jaw before the boss jumped on a swivel shair and catapulted himself out of the nearest window.

Mental health expert Catherine Harvey looks at how office furniture suffered at the hands of a stressed out man. To find out more please visit http://www.planscapeuk.com/

Running a home-based business offers many challenges and being a work at home mom offers many more! The number one challenge and probably the most important is staying organized; so things not only in your business but also in your home life remain as stress FREE as possible. To avoid work consuming your time and having the housework getting behind I will outline a few important steps to staying organized which I have found very useful.

Staying Focused - Setting Work Hours:
The hardest part about being home and working your home-based business is staying focused. Many things can and will interrupt your day unless you set work hours; treat your home-based business like a j.o.b. First and foremost is to establish the minimum number of hours you wish to work each week. Once you have done that then it is important to block out the hours on your calender to avoid interruption. Make sure when determining these hours that you take into consideration the best hours with the least amount of distraction.

My main reason for starting my home-based business was so I could work around my family however once I started I realized my families schedule and demands change on a monthly basis. Now how do you keep a focus on your business and still remain there for your family? This is when I realized the easiest way to do this is to gather the school calender, home calender and my business calender at the end of each month. I start by blocking off the activities for the month ie: orthodontist, school plays, school holidays etc. Then I block off my work schedule making sure I have my minimum hours that I originally established when I set out to start my home-based business. Now that I have my families schedule and my work schedule all mapped out on the calender I can arrange whatever else comes up without taking away from my business. This helps me stay focused and not get distracted; I find that I get much more accomplished with my business this way and avoid the easy distractions. My family and friends have also learned to respect that I am still only available to them certain hours of the day since I am working even if I am home.

Recruiting Family Members to Help: It is very easy to try and take on all the work load yourself however this is not the wise thing to do since you will discover burnout very quickly. Not only will you burnout from exhaustion but you will get very frustrated and overwhelmed. Recruit the kids to help out with the easy tasks such as folding the laundry, the vacuuming and more importantly make them pick up after themselves. You can even recruit the kids to help out with the business; they can help by preparing mailings, making copies, stuffing envelopes, etc. Obviously if you have small children this may be a little more difficult that is when you will have to rely on your significant other to help out.

Learn to let go; maybe the house isn’t as tidy as you would like it but remember you are home for the family. You have to have some trade offs in this deal.

Organize, Organize, Organize: It is very important to stay organized not only in your business but also in the household. I find lists and calenders are my savior without them I would never make an appointment. Get rid of the clutter starting with your desk or daily work space. Keep it simple! Once you have a system into place it is easy to remain organized. The hardest part is to get there; I find bins and trays work best for us. I use the stack trays for all the important things that come into the house via mail or school.

Once your work space is organized them move onto the next section of the house. Again keep it standard so the rest of the family will know the routine and were things go. Once you get the family involved with your new system things will start to fall into place; you will find everhting in the household and business running much more efficently.

By Lisa Burkhardt Editor of http://www.work-home-today.com; great resource for work at home ideas and opportunities.

A Center for Disease Control and Prevention recently reported that arthritis limits millions of working Americans’ productivity, activity, or ability to work. According to the Arthritis Foundation’s coverage of the report, state-specific data shows those reporting arthritis-related work limitations ranged from 25 percent in Nevada to 51 percent in Kentucky. The state median is 33 percent. These significant statistics come with a price tag with another CDC study showing state-specific earning losses in 2003 which ranged from $78 million to $4.3 billion due to arthritis. In that same year, the total cost of arthritis to the U.S. economy was $128 billion.

A previously released CDC report also shows unemployment is higher in every state among people with arthritis. CDC also anticipates that the number of people with arthritis will increase significantly over the next few years, resulting in a loss of human resources and a greater economic impact across the country.

“A strong nation needs a strong workforce,” said Geroges C. Benjamin, MD, FACP, FACEP (E), executive director of the American Public Health Association. “This study shows that our workforce is hindered, in some states quite substantially, by arthritis. Public health, in partnership with employers and communities can change that.”

Perceptions play a large role in empowering those in the workforce who suffer from arthritis. Co-workers who are unaware of you arthritis can become resentful if they feel you are not doing your share of the work.

Even those who may know about your arthritic condition may think of it as “aches and pains.” Because arthritis and related conditions are often “invisible” diseases, it makes them harder to explain. Or employees with arthritis may become worried that they will be treated differently or denied opportunities if people know about their arthritis. Or they may be tempted to ignore their body’s warnings and work harder to cover up their arthritis.

In all reality, it’s necessary to carefully consider when and if to tell an employer about your disease and how it affects you. If your company has a strong commitment to hiring people with disabilities, your disease could be an asset. It could also be an asset if the position requires someone who understands the effects of chronic disease. To aide in making your decision, consider three things:
1. Whether your disability is obvious.

2. Whether you need special accommodations in order to do the job.

3. The effort it will require to keep your arthritis hidden.

Depending on your answers to these considerations, you may choose to remain silent about your arthritis.

On the other hand, arthritis, or a related disease, is likely to raise questions in your employer’s mind about your ability to do the job. It’s important to discuss arthritis with your supervisor at a time when neither of you is under pressure. Make it plain you are not looking for sympathy, but for ways to resolve the problem that will benefit the company, your co-workers, and yourself. The goal of the meeting is to generate a supportive atmosphere. Be prepared to offer suggestions for possible changes, based on research you did before the meeting.

Know as much as possible about the ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act), items you need to do your job more effectively, the costs of these items (called assistive devices), and resources to help your employer. Tax deductions or tax credits may be available to certain employers who provide accommodations and/or jobs for people with disabilities. Chances are the changes you may need may not cost much.

Realize that subtle discrimination in some companies may still exist, especially when it comes to promotions. Some unions may have a problem with allowing workers with disabilities to take jobs that have been reserved as rewards for workers with seniority. Your company’s personnel manager may ask the union’s help in working out a solution in such instances.

Acheaway is now available for home use to soothe the aches and pains associated with arthritis, psoriasis, tired joints and sore muscles from an active lifestyle. Thousands have benefited from the pain relieving power of these safe, natural, non-prescription treatments.

My husband calls it prioritising. I call it being lazy. I have never seen him do more than one thing at a time. God knows how he gets by at work but at home he makes an issue out of having to lift his feet so I can vacuum beneath them, while joggling the baby on my hip to keep him quite and stirring the spag bol to make sure it doesn’t burn all on top of helping little Daniel with his homework.

Monday morning I woke up at 5am to the dulcet tones of a fractious, screaming, teething baby interspersed with the other half’s incessant snoring. Who needs sleep? All this and I still don’t wake up grumpy - I let him sleep in.

After soothing the baby, feeding the toddler, putting on the washing and preparing him upstairs breakfast, he comes down in a panic about not having his shirt ironed. What is his problem? He has more than one shirt and he wants the one that’s not ironed. He’s flapping about so unnecessarily and insists he can’t do his own shirt because he’s busy looking for his keys! Can this man not see what I’m doing? Does he seriously want a divorce?

In the usual way of the world, he is finally packed off to work, the kids are scrubbed, fed and watered and the house is in a state that might even pass the mother in laws standards. I make it out of the door with 2 minutes to strap the offspring into the car before making my way through the traffic, stopping off at pre-school, then the babysitter and finally into the office where I work.

Disaster of disasters, the car refuses to start! Please god, not on a Monday morning. All the prayers in the world are not helping and I have to phone the office and let them know I’m going to be late. I’ve tried ringing the other half but I really should have known how much help he would be.

Unbundling the kids from the car, we go back into the house so I can phone the garage. At least my husband managed to get one thing right and it turns out when he took out our insurance policy, I am entitled to a courtesy hire car.

At ten fifty the hire car turns up and, having been through the same feeding and cleaning process with the rugrats, I go through the rigmarole of re-strapping them back into the car and we’re off to begin our day two hours late.

Of course, the hire car is virtually running on fumes so a quick pit stop is called for. I pay for the fuel at the kiosk and make my way back to the hire car with a feeling of impending doom. What is that all over the window? Child number one got bored waiting and found a half eaten bar of chocolate down the side of the seat which he has proceeded to smear all over the window so he can draw faces in it!

This is going to cost me, I can just see it! With a little sense of relief, I drop them off at their various points and finally arrive at work hot and flustered, leaving the hire car in my normal spot.

I spend the rest of my day working at double speed to make up for the lateness. Getting back into my hire car at five o’clock, I look around to see where the sweet sickly smell is emanating from and remember the chocolate encrusted window that has been sitting in the heat all day.

I don’t have time to deal with this now. I have to pick the kids up, get home and put dinner on, thus starting the evening ritual all over again before not sleeping again tonight. Starting the hire car, I realise that something is stopping me from moving off and I get out of the car already knowing what it is.

The car park attendants are so hot round here that I forgot to inform them that I had a hire car today and not my normal car. I’ve been clamped. That just about does it for the day. I call my husband, inform him in a voice that tells him I mean business that he WILL be picking up the children tonight, he WILL be cooking dinner tonight and he WILL be sleeping in the spare room tonight. After securing a sheepish ‘yes dear’, I hang up the phone and make my way to the pub.

Expert working mother Catherine Harvey looks at the use of a hire car to get her out of a difficult position. To find out more please visit http://www.car-hire-uk.com/