Stop thinking about yourself

© Copyright 2002 Maria Marsala — Business & Life Coach - ConsultantE-mail: Maria@CoachMaria.com © Web: www.CoachMaria.com © (360) 598-3880Thinking About Starting A Business? Let’s Talk About What’s Next…Page 1Thinking About Starting A Business ? Let’s Talk About What’s Next… Creating a business that brings you joyThe top 10 essentials for making a hobby into a businessWhy incorporate your businessChoosing the right business structure for youYour business success check listFree resources for new business ownersRecommended book listBy Maria Marsala © Copyright 2002 Maria Marsala — Business & Life Coach - ConsultantE-mail: Maria@CoachMaria.com © Web: www.CoachMaria.com © (360) 598-3880Thinking About Starting A Business? Let’s Talk About What’s Next…Page 2Creating A BusinessThat Brings You JoyBuilding a strong business foundation is one of the keys to owning a successful busi-ness. Best of all, you can start to create your business while you're working at another job. Create a business your heart desires and have fun, too! You just won the lottery and in order to receive your check, you must have a full time job. What would you be doing? Would it be what you are doing now? If not, ask yourself why. Do you just need to add a little fun to your career or business, or is it that you are not happy with your current position and feel ready to go for what you REALLY want to do? Following are some ideas on how you can make the most of where you are, or take the steps to get to where you want to be. •Choose a career that "makes your heart smile." It's your desire level and commitment that will keep you going during any rough times. Use this guide "Finding Your Ideal Career (or Business)" to assist you as you create a business around what you enjoy. Make sure that your end product (your business) has a market, too. www.coachmaria.com/article/idealcareer.html •Know what helps you maintain your integrity -- your top 5 values, needs and wants. Base your decisions on what's important to you. Read Tony Robins book, Awaken The Giant Within for more information. www.coachmaria.com/personalbooks.html •Be prepared financially when transitioning into your business by making sure that you have a reserve of money in the bank or another income. Even with the best plan-ning strategies, "things do occur" that end up costing us more money than we had planned to spend. •Build a strong support system - business and volunteer network, and friends. Join a success group www.coachmaria.com/events.html for support or hire a coach to assist you in your business evolution. •Recognize your strengths and work from them:. Acknowledge your weaknesses and failures (life's way of providing feedback) and grow from them. Read The E-Myth Re-visited by Michael Gerber . it's a "must have" business book. •Create a strong business foundation: a business plan, marketing plan, and operations manual. Follow them. Create forms and processes to keep you on track, etc. Choose to be organized and consistent. Your clients and employees will appreciate it! •Develop your boundaries and standards. They affect your business too! There are some wonderful Top Ten Lists on both topics at www.topten.org. •When business is no longer fun, it is time to reassess what you are doing. Even bet-ter - step back and assess your "fun" quotient every six months. Hey! Maybe its time © Copyright 2002 Maria Marsala — Business & Life Coach - ConsultantE-mail: Maria@CoachMaria.com © Web: www.CoachMaria.com © (360) 598-3880Thinking About Starting A Business? Let’s Talk About What’s Next…Page 3to take Stop thinking about yourself Stop thinking about yourself Bởi: Joe Tye “Of all the things people think about during the day, the one topic of thought related to the worst moods is the self The reason for this seems to be that generally when a person thinks about him- or herself, the first and often the only thoughts that appear in consciousness have to with things that are going wrong – for instance, about getting old, fat, or losing one’s hair, or feeling that one is not successful in some aspect of life.” Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: The Evolving Self: A Psychology for the New Millenium Dr Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the leading authority on the optimal experience of flow, a state of total absorption in one’s work that requires forgetting about the self When you are fully engaged in your work, you aren’t thinking about yourself or your problems In those moments you are not obsessed about getting old, fat, or becoming a failure But after your world turns upside that those self-absorbed thoughts can overwhelm you Here’s the paradox: it is easy to forget yourself and your problems when things are going great It is hardest to so when your world has turned upside, but that is precisely when it is most important for you to so Focusing in on yourself and your problems just makes you more depressed, and the more depressed you are the more difficult it is for you to connect with other people, effectively search for a job, start a new business, write your novel, or whatever it is that should come next in your life Pay attention to what’s going on in your head As soon as you see your thoughts beginning to focus on your Self, immediately shift your focus outward Think about the work you need to do, think about others you need to meet, think about the contributions you can make 1/1 I magine you’ve just had an amazing experience: You were able to save someone’s life by performing CPR. You want to share the experience with three people: your father, your best friend, and the admissions offi- cer at your first-choice college. How will you describe what happened? Will that description be the same for each person? Probably not. Although the subject remains a constant, each person is a different audience, requir- ing different word choices, levels of formality, and tone. Because you are sharing the experience with these three people for different reasons, the purpose of your description changes, too. You might tell your father to let him know that his advice about taking a CPR course was invaluable. To your friend, you might stress the emotions the experience evoked. In your college application essay, you place an emphasis on the experience’s revelation of your competent and responsible nature. Audience and purpose not only determine how you write; they shape your content, or what you write as well. Therefore, the first step to writing better essays is to understand who you are writing for and why you are writing. LESSON Thinking about Audience and Purpose LESSON SUMMARY The first step toward effective essay writing is to know why and for whom you’re writing. This lesson explains how to understand your audience and purpose and how these two factors affect your writing. 1 19  Understanding Your Audience Imagine that you’ve been asked to write about your life-saving experience for the local hospital newsletter. You expect your audience to be adults, so you plan and draft your article in anticipation of that audience. But when you submit it, you find that the hospital plans to use your article in a supplement for elementary school students. Can they print it as written? Not if they want their readers to understand what you’ve written. Understanding your audience is a critical component of effective writing. Before you begin any type of essay, you must find out: 1. Who will read your essay and why are they reading it? 2. What do they know about your subject? 3. What is your relationship with the reader? Pinpointing Your Audience If you’re writing for a teacher, you know his or her name and face, as well as the expectations he or she has for your writing. But determining your audience doesn’t always mean knowing exactly who will be reading, grading, or scoring your essay. In fact, often you’ll need to write for someone, or a number of people, you’ll never meet. For example, if you are taking the ACT or SAT, you know that two people will read your essay and score it. You also know the criteria for each score. You don’t know the readers’ names, or where they’re from, but you know enough about what they’re looking for to understand how to write to them. Knowing your audience in this case means knowing what they’re looking for. In other words, your readers will pick up your writing in order to give it a grade or score. You need to know their expectations in order to fulfill them. What does your English teacher consider an A essay? How does a col- lege admissions officer judge an essay? For the SAT and ACT, what does the scoring rubric look like? What are the differences between an essay that gets a 6, and one that gets a 2? Here are some general guidelines: WHO THEY ARE WHAT THEY’RE LOOKING FOR Admissions officer an engaging essay that reveals your personality, goals, and values; evidence that you can organize your thoughts and © Copyright 2002 Maria Marsala — Business & Life Coach - Consultant E-mail: Maria@CoachMaria.com © Web: www.CoachMaria.com © (360) 598-3880 Thinking About Starting A Business? Let’s Talk About What’s Next… Page 1 Thinking About Starting A Business ? Let’s Talk About What’s Next… Creating a business that brings you joy The top 10 essentials for making a hobby into a business Why incorporate your business Choosing the right business structure for you Your business success check list Free resources for new business owners Recommended book list By Maria Marsala © Copyright 2002 Maria Marsala — Business & Life Coach - Consultant E-mail: Maria@CoachMaria.com © Web: www.CoachMaria.com © (360) 598-3880 Thinking About Starting A Business? Let’s Talk About What’s Next… Page 2 Creating A Business That Brings You Joy Building a strong business foundation is one of the keys to owning a successful busi- ness. Best of all, you can start to create your business while you're working at another job. Create a business your heart desires and have fun, too! You just won the lottery and in order to receive your check, you must have a full time job. What would you be doing? Would it be what you are doing now? If not, ask yourself why. Do you just need to add a little fun to your career or business, or is it that you are not happy with your current position and feel ready to go for what you REALLY want to do? Following are some ideas on how you can make the most of where you are, or take the steps to get to where you want to be. • Choose a career that "makes your heart smile." It's your desire level and commitment that will keep you going during any rough times. Use this guide "Finding Your Ideal Career (or Business)" to assist you as you create a business around what you enjoy. Make sure that your end product (your business) has a market, too. www. coachmaria.com/article/idealcareer.html • Know what helps you maintain your integrity -- your top 5 values, needs and wants. Base your decisions on what's important to you. Read Tony Robins book, Awaken The Giant Within for more information. www.coachmaria.com/personalbooks.html • Be prepared financially when transitioning into your business by making sure that you have a reserve of money in the bank or another income. Even with the best plan- ning strategies, "things do occur" that end up costing us more money than we had planned to spend. • Build a strong support system - business and volunteer network, and friends. Join a success group www.coachmaria.com/events.html for support or hire a coach to assist you in your business evolution. • Recognize your strengths and work from them:. Acknowledge your weaknesses and failures (life's way of providing feedback) and grow from them. Read The E-Myth Re- visited by Michael Gerber . it's a "must have" business book. • Create a strong business foundation: a business plan, marketing plan, and operations manual. Follow them. Create forms and processes to keep you on track, etc. Choose to be organized and consistent. Your clients and employees will appreciate it! • Develop your boundaries and standards. They affect your business too! There are some wonderful Top Ten Lists on both topics at www.topten.org. • When business is no longer fun, it is time to reassess what you are doing. Even bet- ter - step back and assess your "fun" quotient every six months. Hey! Maybe its time © Copyright 2002 Maria Marsala — Business & Life Coach - Consultant E-mail: Maria@CoachMaria.com © Web: www.CoachMaria.com © (360) 598-3880 Thinking About Starting A Business? Let’s Talk About What’s Next… Page 3 to take your vacation!! • CHAPTER 1 Microeconomics, A Way of Thinking about Business In economics in particular, education seems to be largely a matter of unlearning and “disteaching” rather than constructive action. A once famous American humorist observed that “it’s not ignorance that does so much damage; it’s knowin’ so darn much that ain’t so.” . . .It seems that the hardest things to learn and to teach are things that everyone already knows. Frank H. Knight rank Knight was a wise professor. Through long years of teaching he realized that students, even those in advanced business programs, beginning a study of economics, no matter the level, face a difficult task. They must learn many things in a rigorous manner that, on reflection and with experience, amount to common sense. To do that, however, they must set aside – or “unlearn” -- many pre-conceived notions of the economy and of the course itself. The problem of “unlearning” can be especially acute for MBA students who are returning to a university after years of experience in industry. People in business rightfully focus their attention on the immediate demands of their jobs and evaluate their firms’ successes and failures with reference to production schedules and accounting statements, a perspective that stands in stark contrast to the perspective developed in an economics class. As all good teachers must do, we intend to challenge you in this course to rethink your views on the economy and the way firms operate. We will ask you to develop new methods of analysis, maintaining all the while that there is, indeed, an “economic way of thinking” that deserves mastering. We will also ask you to reconsider, in light of the new methods of thinking, old policy issues, both inside and outside the firm, about which you may have fixed views. These tasks will not always be easy for you, but we are convinced that the rewards from the study ahead are substantial. The greatest reward may be that this course of study will help you to better understand the way the business world works and how businesses might be made more efficient and profitable. Much of what this course is about is, oddly enough, crystallized in a story of what happened in a prisoner- of-war camp. The Emergence of a Market Economic systems spring from people’s drive to improve their welfare. R.A. Radford, an American soldier who was captured and imprisoned during the Second World War, left a vivid account of the primitive market for goods and services that grew up in his prisoner- of-war camp. 1 A market is the process by which buyers and sellers determine what they 1 R.A. Radford, “The Economic Organization of a POW Camp,” Economica (November 1945), pp. 180- 201. F Chapter 1. The Economic Way of Thinking 2 are willing to buy and sell and on what terms. That is, it is the process by which buyers and sellers decide the prices and quantities of goods that are to be bought and sold. Because the inmates had few opportunities to produce the things they wanted, they turned to a system of exchanges based on the cigarettes, toiletries, chocolate, and other rations distributed to them periodically by the Red Cross. The Red Cross distributed the supplies equally among the prisoners, but “very soon after capture . . .[the prisoners] realized that it was rather undesirable and unnecessary, in view of the limited size and the quality of supplies, to give away or to accept gifts of cigarettes or food. Goodwill developed into trading as a more equitable means of maximizing individual satisfaction.” 2 As the weeks socialmediatoday.com http://socialmediatoday.com/pruneau/1031651/time-stop-pretending-about-content-marketing? utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Social+Media+Today+(all+posts) Time to Stop Pretending About Content Marketing. Posted by:Paul Pruneau Please login or register to follow this user. Like it? Posted November 26, 2012 If you've been a bit distracted by the relentless pace of the change in online marketing, you may have missed all of the buzz about Content Marketing. With the power of self publishing on the Internet now in the hands of the many, claims about Content Marketing replacing advertising continue to increase in both volume and frequency. What's more, advocates and a growing number of organizations are onboard with the idea that any brand can become a continuous publisher of content that their prospects and customers will f ind relevant and valuable. But before you drink the Kool-aid, fire your agency and set out to meet the new requirement to add “publisher” to your title and responsibilities, let’s step back a moment and consider what success in this emerging discipline might actually take. First, what’s Content Marketing? In a nutshell, it’s the fuel that drives successful: inbound marketing and lead generation search engine optimization social media marketing Why is it now so hot as a marketing discipline? Because prospects t oday have become more advanced and demanding. And it’s now up to a brand to quench their expectationswith valuable content that helps them make more informed and better decisions before and after they purchase a product or service. What’s the point and what do you get? The short answers to these reasonable questions include: 1. Search Engine Optimization Recent search engine updates now favor frequently published, unique and popular content. The result is that frequent and consistent creation of content to your site or blog is now required to drive traffic and support natural link building. 2. Referral Traffic Good problem- solving and/or entertaining content makes other websites and blogs want to link to it. The result of these highly valued connections is a 3-5X better conversion (action) than vanilla organic search. 3. Reason f or Social Media Marketing Without real problem-solving and/or entertaining cont ent to post in social media, what will you share? If it’s not obvious, we’ve long passed the days of tweeting about your lunch. So if you’re participating in Social Media, it should be enhancing traffic to your site from the content that you’re sharing in these channels. 4. Reput ation & Sentiment Management By actively engaging in content marketing, a brand can choose to lead the conversation about their domain of expertise. The cumulat ive result, over t ime, helps to build trust, posit ive sentiment and brand equity around the unique value that you offer to customers. If you think t his is just a frivolous exercise, you can always trust that job to someone else. Perhaps your competitor? What kind of investment do you have to make? First, dismiss any notion that this is a no brainer, a piece of cake and anyone can do it. Assuming all of your effort is based on a content calendar, aligned with the needs of your target cust omer personaswith clarity on how the content asset will further t he selling cycle to turn a prospect into a paying customer, there’s a lot t hat needs to get done f or every asset that you creat e. So no matter how you slice it, hours and resources, per month, are going to have to be accounted for and applied to: