Stress happens. Not to be flip or cliche, but in every life, whether you’re an entrepreneur or not chances are you will experience stress. How you deal with that stress can make a difference in your overall health and productivity.
Here are my tips for dealing with stress in both work and life:
Take a hike. I love being in the out of doors — away from electronic devices and work. I hike the mountains, clear my mind and come back refreshed. Additionally, exercise helps you maintain overall physical and mental health.
Breathe deeply. If you can’t get away from it all and take a walk, push your chair back from your desk and take some deep breathes. When you’re stressed, you tend to take shallow breaths and this leads to muscle tension.
Eat a healthy diet. Eating potato chips when you’re in a stressful situation, won’t help alleviate it. Eating an overall healthy diet, though, can cure a lot of ills and can help boost your immune system and may help you deal with stress better.
Get involved in a hobby. Whether you read or swim or crochet or do woodworking or pottery, having a hobby that you love gives you something to focus on and helps relieve stress and tension.
Stay connected with your friends. When you’re in a highly stressed state it is tempting to isolate yourself. Staying connected, getting out of the house and having coffee at a coffee shop is much better than being alone. Pick up the phone and connect with a friend who is far away. Ask for support if you need it in a stressful time.
At the very least, I recommend taking a ten minute break every hour or two to simply reconnect with yourself, take a walk around the house or the office. Relax. Recharge.
With the new year soon to be upon us, it’s a time to reflect and and set resolutions for your upcoming successful year. The sad fact is that many people make resolutions only to see them fail. As I’d written in a previous post, “A goal unrealized can have the power to take you down a path of despair and the inability to complete other tasks on your list.” However, if you set a goal aka resolution and meet it, the success of that will feed further success and achievements.
How can you keep your resolutions? Here are three ways:
Write down the end goal. Break a large goal into bite sized chunks. Set deadlines to keep yourself on track. Build in a cushion and make allowances for interruptions and meetings you didn’t plan for.
Write a to-do list and feel power you realize when you cross a task off. Daily progress documentation keeps you on target amps up the motivation.
Find a trusted colleague to pair up with and work to keep each other on track. Report in several times a week. Share successes. Discuss setbacks. Move forward from a “failure” and look at it as a learning experience — ask your accountability partner to help you brainstorm potential reasons for and solutions to any deadlines you may have missed.
Blogging is one of those social media “fads” that is not going away. If you ever feel skeptical and wonder if there is any reason for you to be blogging, check our these statistics from Social Media Today about blogging:
Seventy percent of consumers find companies through blogs and online articles
A business that blogs generates 126% more leads than one that doesn’t
More than 60% of all consumers in the United States have make a purchase based on a blog post
These numbers don’t lie when it comes to reasons why you should take up the blogging mantle. If you don’t know where to begin, there are any number of blogging professionals (our company is one!) who can help you get started and keep going!
These 5 “tips” are strategies that have made the efforts of many great people grow exponentially.
What are you doing to stay ahead of your business competitors? There are steps you can take to edge them out and here are just five of my favorites:
Believe – Believe in yourself and your success. What you tell yourself is a self fulfilling prophesy. Tell your self great things!
Failure Is A Lie – You can’t fail if you do not quit! Do NOT quit! Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and start over.
Maintain Integrity – Have a strong work ethic for yourself and your staff. Be the compass others around you use to find their way.
Be Decisive – Putting off decision-making leads to stress and will cause you to miss many great opportunities that you are exposed to every day.
Become and Stay Healthy – Operate at peak levels all the time! Take care of your mind as well as your body. Rest, eat right, exercise. Realize your most creative moments come from a healthy and rested mind.
Make these 5 things your daily experience and I assure you you will prosper at levels you never knew were possible. This is a great start in staying ahead of your competition!
2015 is fast approaching and it’s the ideal time to make plans for your 2015 networking strategy. Networking events not only help grow your business, but they get you out of the office and meeting new people and exchanging new ideas.
Here are tips to assure your networking efforts bear fruit:
Understand who will be at the events and in which areas they practice to uncover who you might want to meet. Pre-planning means knowing what you hope to accomplish: To collect and pass out business cards? Make meaningful connections?
You don’t want to tell a new connection who you are and what you can do for them (although that is certainly part of it). Instead, ask open ended questions to get to know the other person. When you meet someone for the first time, it should be a give and take conversation. He should give you time to tell who you are and what you do and you should have the opportunity to do the same.
Pay attention when the person is talking. Don’t be scanning the room for the next person you want to speak with.
Mark your calendar now for networking events to attend that will kick your new year off right.
If you want to grow your business, one ideal way I have found to do that is through speaking engagements. If you have a niche area of expertise and want to reach an audience — in a group setting — that is your ideal client base gathering them all in one room to talk with them is a great way to make the most of your time, money and efforts.
When you’re sending in a speaking request you will be asked to supply a bio to the group for whom you will be speaking. Do you have a business bio at the ready? If not, here is information you will want to add to it:
Keep your audience in mind. What portion of your area of expertise do you want to highlight? Make that prominent in the bio you submit. If you’re being asked to speak at a conference, it might make sense to inquire as to the make up of the audience itself — its interest, business or trade and the conference theme.
Look at LinkedIn profiles of those in your profession and see how they present themselves. Use their profiles as inspiration for your bio.
Brainstorm on your top three qualifications and what inspired you to hone in on those qualifications. In other words, what sets you apart from the competition. What makes you the most qualified person to speak on the topic of XYZ Widgets at this conference.
Keep it short. While you don’t want to short change yourself when attempting to sell yourself on a speaking engagement, you don’t want to send a 5,000 word manifesto of your experience since grade school. Touch on the most salient points and those points which, again, highlight your qualifications for speaking to this particular audience.
Take time today to write your business bio — you never know when you’ll need it!
