Cooking shows are as addictive to watch as they are tantalizing. What’s easily missed, among the chopping, dicing and slicing is the constant clean up and maintenance of the workspace. They’re always moving! By taking a few moments during the preparation of a dish to re-sharpen knives, or clear away clutter, the chef is focused and prepared to get into the action with less hassle.

This is also a best practice for owners and employees, whether you are doing at your office (or home office, for that matter). Stay organized and keep moving and you’ll get better results.

In Twyla Harp’s landmark book The Creative Habit: Learn it and Use it for Life, she discusses a writer who believed there was a mental correlation between cleaning his room, and arranging his brain. While possible, Harp was convinced it was not just the idea of organizing that helped him focus but rather the physical movement and action involved that helped direct his efforts.

Fitting in three to five minutes to focus on your breath and fill up with nourishing oxygen, helps feed muscles tensed under the strain of thinking, and allows your brain to take a minute to replenish its focus for a fresh return to the task at hand. When you take breaks, stand and stretch while you organize your space or deal with files. Or perhaps take a walk over the lunch break while you strategize a business initiative. The idea is to keep moving.

There are innumerable websites with effective office exercises to be perused and sampled until you find a set that works for you. In your off-time, take meditation classes, yoga instruction or even arts like Tai Chi, that are very portable and only require a little space and a bit of privacy.

One last thing: encourage your employees to keep moving at work. Joining a friend, or starting a little group at the office, can open up more than just your mind to working harder, it can help develop better relationships.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

The second most powerful sales tool you need to master is the ability to qualify your prospects quickly. Chasing down prospects for a long period of time is disheartening and does not make a girl happy. Neither will you get a good feeling from heading into a full pitch to a prospect and then finding out, after all that hard work, they never had any intention of buying. It’s enough to make a girl want to hit them over the head with her high heels.

Sales is about finding the people who need or want your product or service. That’s all. It’s not about manufacturing a need, or convincing people to buy something they don’t want. It’s about finding the right prospects.

How do you do that? You qualify them.

A qualified prospect gives you a ‘yes’ to each of these questions:

1. Do they have the money to buy?

2. Do they need or want the product/service soon?

3. Do they have the authority to make the buying decision?

If you only get 1 or 2 ‘yes-es’, then they are not a qualified prospect. Don’t waste any more time or energy on them. Move onto another prospect with a higher chance of selling success.

Fiona Walsh, CEO, FM Walsh & Associates Inc., www.fmwalsh.com

Whenever you’re hunting for new business opportunities it’s vitally important to stay curious. When you get attached or desperate, you lose all of your creative and intuitive powers. It’s like putting on a pair of blinders and heading out in to a forrest. You’ll never see anything but what’s right in front of you and therefore will miss over 270 degrees of view. Often times the most exciting opportunities are already in your life, it’s just that you haven’t noticed them in that way. When you turn on your right brain, get creative and innovative, and are curious about what opportunities are all around you – you start to notice things in a new way.

Take notice over the next week of your ability to remain curious and see what opportunities you can spot and furthermore hunt up.

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc

When you’re hunting for new business, and especially when you’re a single shingle entrepreneur, it’s important for you to stretch your resources. One of the easiest ways to do that is to find the watering holes where your niche markets hang out together. If you can have an opportunity to speak to your target audience in a group, you’ll get far greater results than if you tried to find them and speak to each of them individually. Start today by profiling who is your niche market? What are their commonalities? What kinds of books/mags/websites etc. do they read? Where do they hang out? What do they watch on TV?

Once you’re clear on who they are and where they can be found (aka the watering hole), hunting becomes a walk in the park.

Happy Hunting!

All the best,

Heather White

CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

Even with my Psych degree in hand, even I forgot what is probably the easiest way to realign yourself and channel your passion for business – take care of your basic needs! As women especially, we are so good at taking care of everyone else and ensuring that their needs are met. But, what about us? If you’re having trouble connecting with your enthusiastic, passionate self, ask yourself “am I taking care of my basic needs?” It may be a simple concept, but, don’t ignore it’s importance. It’s impossible for you to be passionate when you’re tired, or haven’t fueled your body with nutritious food, or are trying to buy the farm when you haven’t paid the heat bill in the house. Take a trip down memory lane and revisit Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to make sure you’re giving yourself the best chance to be passionate and if you’re not, do yourself a favour and get back to basics.

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

There is one definite inevitability in life and that is, of course, death. Not usually a topic that most people want to talk about or frankly think about, but, nevertheless something that we cannot escape. Personally, my consideration of the concept is something that has given me an incredible amount of strength thus far. Whenever I have a desire to do something there is the almost immediate reaction from my mind. Sometimes it tells me why I can’t do it, sometime why I shouldn’t, sometimes it just laughs at my plans. I’ve heard many theories about why this happens, why do we get in our own way, why would we stop ourselves from giving something a try? We shouldn’t! We have to go for it!

When I watched the below video I was further convinced. The man on the video has been diagnosed with terminal cancer and given only months to live. In this, his last lecture, he gives a moving, practical, matter of fact speech about how and why to live a life in pursuit of your dreams. There is no time to put things off – we have to pursue those things that we have a desire to!

A version of Randy Pausch’s last lecture as seen on Oprah

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

Last week we talked about being selfishly selfless as a rule to live by. If you did your homework, you should have a long list of things that you need to take care of in order for you to be operating at optimal capacity. Today, we’re talking about the next step in this process, which is: communicating your new rules.

In my experience, in my own life, one of the reasons I struggled to put this selfishly selfless concept in to place was because of how it was going to affect the other people in my life. For example, in the early days of my relationship we were on totally opposite schedules. I worked all day, he worked all night (well, almost). I’d often stay up and/or wake up when he got home in order to hang out and spend time together and hear about one another’s days. BUT, when my alarm went off at 6am the next morning – I was tired! And, as you know by now, I don’t do tired well. Something had to change, but, at the same time, I didn’t want to miss out on the opportunity to hang out with my boyfriend….what to do??

First – I had to get clear on what I really wanted – #1 to hang out w/ my boyfriend + #2 a good night sleep. So how could I be selfish in this case and get both? I needed to COMMUNICATE my new rules. So that’s what I did.

We came up with a new plan that included a special ‘date day’ every week, when we could coordinate our schedules in order to hang out and catch up with one another and meanwhile, there was no more getting up in the middle of the night. In retrospect, I realize that I was nervous to ask for what I really wanted out of some fear that I had made up in my own mind. (i.e. Would he commit to this new plan, would I miss out on something if I didn’t get up in the middle of the night, would my relationship last if I didn’t spend every chance I had to work on it?)

As you can imagine – none of this was true, but, I needed to experience enough pain (feeling exhausted all day) to realize that this wasn’t working for me. Then I needed to get clear on how things would work for me. And lastly, I needed to communicate what I wanted/needed to change in order for me to operate at optimal capacity. This is the same for you. After last week, you now know what you need – this week – communicate those needs/wants to those in your life who will support you in honouring you.

Let me know how it goes!!

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

Selfishly selfless – what does that mean exactly? Well, for starters it means taking care of all your personal needs before anything else. Yeah, I know, sounds great eh? But the question I get over and over again, how? How exactly do I ‘do’ that?

Not unlike making any change, you have to begin with an audit, in this case of yourself. Do you even know what you would need to change in your life to be selfishly selfless? For me, I need a lot, but here’s a sample:

1. Food – I don’t know about you, but, if I’m hungry, I don’t cope well.

2. Sleep – unlike Tiger Woods, 5 hours doesn’t do it for me – I need 7-8 hrs

3. Exercise – I LOVE working out (I know, I know, you can punch me in the face now), but, I’m serious, I really do. For my entire life I’ve been an athlete. Athletics and working out my body is so much more to me than just staying in-shape. I’m the first to admit, I like the side effects, but moreso, I like the adrenalin rush, the connection with my body, feeling powerful and the confidence that comes as a result of exercising and challenging my body.

4. Music – it’s a constant for me, can’t live without it.

5. Money – I have a certain lifestyle that I enjoy, and that often requires a monetary exchange. Managing mine (both in my business and personal life) is a must.

I could go on and on, but you get the point.  Now it’s your turn.  This week I want you to identify what your non-negotiable needs are. Write them all down.  Then…

Tune in next week for the next step: Communicating Your New Rules

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.

If you were like billions of people around the world, you kicked off the New Year with a resolution to do more. Make more. Network more. Call more. More, more, more…

But instead of always seeking to do more, wouldn’t most of us benefit by actually doing less? Did you feel frazzled, always rushing, never quite getting everything on your list done? For many of us, a New Year is the time to de-clutter your mind and your life (See Work Life Balance).

When we resolve to do more activities for our business or outside of our professional lives, we can run into the classic problem of biting off more than we can chew. And when you promise to do something and fail for lack of time, you’ll be in worse shape than before, because now you’ll be dealing with the guilt of failure and procrastination.

I know from personal experience and from helping my clients that good things happen when we organize our activities to focus on a few things – and for everything else, have someone else do it.

Revisit your resolution from last week. If you really do have the time to commit to this promise, that’s great. Stay with it. But if you don’t really have the time to do it, then you’re better off canceling that resolution sooner than later (Think of it as a 10-day resolution return policy).

Have a look at your calendar and note all of the hours you’re putting into various activities. Now, think about the time you put into each activity and what you’ve gotten out of it. Make sure you’ve got a red marker handy to start crossing off those activities that aren’t really doing much for you and aren’t likely to produce in future. When you’re done, make a new resolution to stop those activities and focus on the ones that are really getting results. As Chris says, do more of what works and less on the stress.

Linda Chu
CEO – Out of Chaos, Professional Organizing Solutions
www.outofchaos.ca

This year is going to be fantastic – as long as you’re ready to take 100% responsibility for that to be the reality you create. So often it is us, ourselves, that are the biggest road blocks getting in our way and often times it’s because we have a bunch of rules that govern our life, that are not serving us. It’s time to take stock of the rules you use to govern yourself and decide which rules are serving the advancement of your goals and aspirations for the year and which ones are no longer serving that purpose.

Let me give you an example. The first ‘working’ day after leaving my corporate job, looked almost identical to the kind of day that I had when I worked for the corporation. I got up at 6am, got on my computer, checked email, answered voicemail, tidied up some administrative stuff and then prepared to hit the road. I did this for at least a year without ever giving it one second of thought. Then one morning I woke up and for some reason I had a thought float through my head – I’m tired, I want to stay in bed longer. To which I quickly replied to myself – if you think you’re going to make something of yourself lying in this bed – you are sadly mistaken. Get your ass out of  bed and get to work! Aha – embedded right here in this mental dialogue was a major rule, a huge barrier to living my life the way I wanted  - and the road block was me!

The first step to changing and adjusting some of your rules to better serve you is to first, observe and learn what rules you already have for yourself. This might sound like an easy task, but, trust me, raising your conscious awareness to a place where you can observe your subconscious activity can actually be quite challenging. You must carefully listen to your inner dialogue to pick out when you are being governed outside your free will. That’s the easy part. Then you must be willing to make changes in your actions in order to adopt new rules that serve you in moving forward with your life. Furthermore, your subconscious is so powerful, that it will wait for just the right moment of weakness to squeak back in to your mind and before you know it – you’ll be acting in your old ways. Be gentle on yourself during this process – it’s not easy and you will slip back from time to time. This is normal. Stick with it.

Rules are just rules – they can be broken and they can be adjusted. I don’t get up at 6am anymore and yet I’m more successful, more profitable, more happy and more fulfilled than I’ve ever been.

It’s a new year – adjust your rules to make it a new you!!

All the best,

Heather White, CEO, 2020 Communications Inc.