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Do You Have a Score Board for Your Goals?

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This is what I see in my field of view, just above my two computer monitors, every single day.

It’s my Score Board.

Now, you might be asking, what the heck is a score board and what’s it for?

A Score Board is basically a tool that I use to help me FOCUS on the most important quantifiable result that I want to achieve in my life right now.

Personally I use a very simple whiteboard that I hung on my wall, in a location where it is always in my field of view while I’m at my computer – which is quite often.

The “Score” that I have right now registers in my mind when I’m consciously looking at the score board, and also subconsciously when I’m just looking at my computer monitors.

I have nothing else in my field of view to distract me.

Why You Need a Score Board for Your Goals

So why do we need a score board for our goals?

What’s it for?

Well, what a score board does is it allows you to select ONE goal achieving metric that is most important to you right now that you can track on a daily or weekly basis, to help you reach that goal.

If you think about it, most of us have multiple goals that we’re pursuing at the same time in our lives and it can get pretty confusing trying to keep track of them all.

What usually happens if you don’t have a score board is that the EASIEST goals, which require the least effort and the least growth on your part end up getting completed first.

What a score board does is it highlights the MOST IMPORTANT, not the easiest goal that you want to achieve in your life.

Of course we all would love to be able to achieve all of our goals all the time, but in reality that never happens.

We set many different goals, and accomplish a few of them, while the majority usually fall to the wayside.

A score board can help you to make sure that doesn’t happen with your MOST IMPORTANT goals.

Think about sports.

In sports, the coaches and the leagues track hundreds of stats on each team and their players.

As you’re watching a game, you’ll hear the commentators spouting out all kinds of numbers, stats and percentages.

But at the end of the day, regardless what the stats are showing, there is only ONE set of numbers that everyone is paying attention to…

THE SCORE!

At the end of the day it doesn’t really matter if the players are playing well, and their stats are good or bad, or which team had the better stats…

…at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is the final score of the game – that’s it!

Everything else is secondary.

In the same way, you want to have a score board in your life, so that on a daily basis you can see if you’re making progress towards your most important goal – or not.

When you do this – you activate a part of your brain that is incredibly powerful at seeking out and achieving goals.

Our minds are VERY powerful, but most of us don’t know how to activate that power, because we confuse our minds with too many goals, too many metrics, and too many things to track at once.

By putting up a score board, you FOCUS your mind on what you want it to help you achieve.

In my example above, I wanted to make sure that I write 21 blog posts in 21 days for the 21 Day Blogging Challenge I am a part of with Empower Network.

Since starting the challenge, I have had MANY distractions pop up in my life, such as getting sick with the flu, having some flooding in my basement which required emergency drainage work to be done on my house, and MANY other things that could have easily thrown me off track.

But by being CLEAR on what goal was most important to me during the last 21 days, I was able to write my 21 Blog posts in 21 days no matter what else was happening in my life.

How to Use a Score Board

The first thing you’ll need to do is go out and get yourself a scoreboard.

A whiteboard is best, but you can also use a piece of paper that you pin to a wall or a cork board.

Ideally, you’ll want to place the score board somewhere where you can see it most often throughout the day.

If it’s in your field of vision, it will register better with your subconscious mind.

Once you have your score board setup, you’ll want to figure out what specific metric you want to track.

Here are some criteria for picking the best metric to track:

  1. Quantifiable – Make sure that the metric you pick can be easily and accurately quantified.  For example, if your goal was to lose 25lbs of weight, you could track your daily weight on a scale.  That’s a number that’s easy to track and it’s accurate.The score board has to track something that gives your mind an idea of whether you’re moving CLOSER or FURTHER away from your goal.If your goal is to make a certain amount of money online, you could track your total online income, or the last 30 day’s income etc.Or you could track certain stats that lead to making money online, such as total number of visitors to your site, or total number of leads generated, or total email subscribers, or Facebook fans or whatever you’d like.

    Whatever you track, make sure it’s easily quantifiable and that the thing you’re tracking is something that brings you closer to your goal.

  2. Changes Often – Ideally you’ll want to pick a metric that changes often, such as on a daily basis or several times a week.You don’t want to track something that only changes once a month or once you complete your goal.  For example, you wouldn’t want your score board to say “Lost 25lbs? Yes / No” as that would mean that your score board would just say “NO” the whole time, until you lost 25lbs and then it would change to “YES”.That would not be useful.The more often you get up to go and update your score board with a new score, the more you’ll activate the “feel good” part of your brain that was designed to achieve goals.

    Of course, don’t overdo it either… you don’t want your score board to have to be updated 50 times a day otherwise all you’ll be doing is updating your score board!

    I usually like something that I can update once a day or once every few days.

    And if on some days I have to update it a few times, that’s okay too.

  3. Accumulated or Average Numbers are Better Than Numbers That Reset – I find that tracking numbers that accumulate or average over time is more exciting for me than something that “resets” often.For example, instead of tracking “Total # of Steps Taken Today” from a step counter, which would reset every day, I would track “30 Day Average Step Count”.Or instead of tracking, “Email Subscribers Today”, I would track “Total Number of Email Subscribers”.There’s something about seeing a number going UP and UP over time that gets the mind excited.

    In the network marketing world, you could track “Total # of Presentations Done” or “Total # of Leads” or “Total # of Team Members” etc.

How I’ve Used a Score Board to Boost Sales by Over $500,000

I first heard about the concept of score boards about 20 years ago, but I didn’t actually learn how powerful they can be until about 10 years ago when I was in charge of growing the sales numbers of a technology company.

This was back in the days when I still worked in the corporate world and I was put in charge of a team of sales people who had reached a point of stagnation and very little growth.

One of the very first things that I did when I was put in charge was to put together a tracking system to accurately track each sales person’s statistics over a period of a year.

Meaning, once my tracking was in place, each sales rep was able to see EXACTLY how much their sales totals were for the past rolling 52 week period.

I had my assistant put in charge of tracking and updating our numbers on a weekly basis.

Every week, she would update the numbers for the previous week, and she would print them out and post them on the wall in my office.

Then, the sales guys would all run into my office and stare at their updated numbers for a few minutes.

By doing this, I gave my sales team FOCUS.

They knew exactly what I was tracking and measuring their performance on.

I didn’t really have to say anything to them.  They just realized that I was tracking those numbers and they started focusing their energy on growing their numbers.

By using this tool I grew our yearly sales by more than half a million dollars.

Score Boards Work

If you study how the human brain works, and research systems and techniques for achieving goals and being productive, you’ll get a more in-depth understanding as to what makes something as simple as a “Score Board” so powerful.

But for now, you don’t really have to spend the next 6 months doing research.

Instead, get your Score Board setup today and you’ll experience how powerful of a tool it is first hand!

🙂

Grow Your Blog Audience by Polarizing

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About eight years ago I learned a very important lesson from Dr. Wayne Dyer, the best-selling author of over 40 books.

In one of his coaching programs he shared a story about when he was first getting started as an author that really helped me out.

Most of his books are centered around topics such as spirituality, inner peace, intuition, intention etc.

The story he shared was about when he first started becoming fairly successful as an author and when he was finally starting to sell quite a few copies of his books.

As his book sales and popularity started to grow, an interesting phenomenon started to happen to him.

The Rise of the Haters

What started to happen to him is that at the same time as he was getting more popular and loved by his fans, he started also getting letters from people who hated his work!

If you’ve ever read any of Dr. Wayne Dyer’s work, you’ll understand when I say that his writing is VERY peaceful and spiritual and very calming…

… yet SOMEHOW even Dr. Wayne Dyer gets HATERS who hate his work!

He tells the story of one time, early on in his career, when he received a box from a man with a little note attached.

When he opened the box, and read the note, it basically said that the man hated his book, thought it was complete garbage and was “returning it”.

Inside the box was the book with every page torn out and shredded!

Can you believe it?  Someone actually sent Dr. Wayne Dyer a shredded copy of one of his books – LOL.

That was not the only time he has received “hate mail”.

He has gotten many letters and emails from people complaining about his books and his work, as has pretty much EVERY successful author on the planet.

Of course they also get a tonne of fan mail from people who LOVE their work as well!

The reason Dr. Dyer shared this story in the coaching program was because he wanted to communicate the importance of NOT allowing your “haters” to stop you.

You MUST go after you dreams in life and not let “haters” stop you.

So how does this relate to growing an your Blog audience and your email list?

Well, to grow your audience you MUST learn to polarize!

What does polarize mean?

Polarizing Your Message

Polarizing is essentially the process of moving people to form a stronger opinion of you, regardless whether that opinion is positive or negative.

There are many ways to do this, but essentially the main idea is to SPEAK YOUR TRUTH and to not be afraid to express your beliefs publicly on your Blog.

I’ll give you an example of this right now.

I believe in the Law of Attraction.  I believe that the Law of Attraction is real, and it is an incredibly powerful tool that you can use in your life to either manifest what you want by learning how to use the Law of Attraction to your benefit – OR – you can also manifest what you don’t want, usually by being ignorant about how the Law of Attraction works.

The Law of Attraction does NOT care whether you believe in it or not – it still works, either way.

It’s a Universal law, that works just like gravity.  Gravity doesn’t care if you believe in it or not – it continues to work either way.

The Law of Attraction is NOT the only law of the Universe, there are others, but it is one of the most powerful Universal laws out there.

Now, by writing what I just wrote – I just polarized my audience (ie. you).

See, if you don’t believe in the Law of Attraction, and you think it’s just “woo woo crap” that New Age people delude themselves with, then reading what I just wrote probably polarized you at least a little bit against me.

Meaning, your opinion of me just strengthened in the direction of  “Hmm..I don’t know if I like this guy..he believes in that woo woo stuff.”

AND if you DO believe in the Law of Attraction, and you think that I’m totally right about what I just wrote above, you opinion of me just strengthened as well probably in the direction of “Hmm…I like this guy…he believes in what I believe in too.  Cool!”

Of course it’s no secret that I believe in the Law of Attraction.  Most of my readers have known about this since pretty much the first day I launched my Blog, so it shouldn’t be any surprise to anybody by now.

I just used this as an example so that you understand what polarization means.

Polarization means being truthful and honest about expressing your beliefs and being OKAY with the fact that SOME people will be TURNED OFF by what you write, while other people will be TURNED ON by what you write.

It means speaking your truth and not caring.

It means NOT trying to please EVERYONE.

If you try to please everyone you become irrelevant.

People will not want to read your Blog or subscribe to your email list if you are too scared to have an opinion!

Being Okay With Unsubscribers

Since starting my blogging journey I’ve built an email subscriber list of just under 10,000 people.

It actually used to be over 10,000 people, but I’ve been doing a bit of “pruning” lately.

Now let me share a little “secret” I have for building an email list of over 10,000 people.

POLARIZE, POLARIZE, POLARIZE!

When I first started building my email list, and I had my first 10 to 20 email subscribers, I got my first unsubscribe.

In my mind I thought “Oh NO!  Someone unsubscribed!  What did I do wrong?”

And so I looked at the reason they unsubscribed, and they didn’t put any reason.

I felt bad and wondered what I did wrong.

Then, I kept blogging and soon I had 50 subscribers, but with more subscribers I also had more unsubscribes as well!

I tried to figure out why people were unsubscribing and a few of them left a reason!

Their reasons were usually something like “Too many emails” or “Not interested in your crap” or “Scam” or something like that.

The funny thing is that I would get people saying “Too many emails” when I was sending out emails daily, and I would get the exact same message when I emailed my list once a month!

I would get people saying “Scam” as their reason for unsubscribing when I would write a Blog post where I would promote some kind of product or service as an affiliate, AND when I would write a Blog post that was just pure VALUE given away for free to my readers.

In other words, as I looked more and more into my “Unsubscribers” trying to figure out why the heck they are unsubscribing, I realized that no matter what I did or didn’t do, they still unsubscribed!

Meaning, it didn’t matter if most of my Blog posts were pure value, without me promoting anything ever, or if I was promoting multiple things in a month, and it didn’t matter if I was emailing daily or weekly or monthly…

… no matter what I did, I realized that a certain percentage of people are just going to unsubscribe and there’s nothing I can do about it.

BUT, what I did realize is that if I just keep blogging and keep WRITING what I believe, and do the right things to grow my list, my email list of subscribers will grow just as my list of unsubscribers will grow as well – and that’s OKAY!

In fact, over the last 8 years as my list of subscribers has grown to just under 10,000 people, guess how many people have UNSUBSCRIBED from my email list?

Yup, that’s right…I’ve had over 12,500 people UNSUBSCRIBE from my email lists for one reason or another!

Isn’t that crazy?

This means that I’ve actually had over 22,000 people subscribe to my email lists at one point during the last 8 years, and over 12,000 decided to unsubscribe.

And you know what?

I don’t care!

It doesn’t hurt my feelings.

I am completely neutral about it.

I don’t “hate” those people, nor do I dislike them.

They’re probably awesome people, living awesome lives, but for some reason or another, they either didn’t resonate with something I wrote on my Blog, or they simply weren’t interested in continuing to receive emails from me, or any number of possible reasons.

Whatever the reason is – I don’t care!

I don’t concern myself with those people who unsubscribe.

I only concern myself with those people who stay subscribed, and who DO resonate with my message, my beliefs and who want to continue to receive emails from me.

By making that energetic shift – of BEING OKAY with technically the MAJORITY of people NOT resonating with everything I write or with how I write my emails or how often I send them out, it allows me to form a stronger bond with those people who DO like what I’m doing.

I’m HAPPY with polarizing my audience.

I want people to either LOVE what I’m doing and stay subscribed for more or HATE what I’m doing and unsubscribe.

I don’t want people to be indifferent.

And that is one of the biggest things you have to realize about building an audience, and building your email list.

You MUST learn to be okay with the majority of people not liking you for who you are, and still feel comfortable enough to express who you are, because that is the ONLY way that you’ll build a solid following of people who DO like you for who you are.

DON’T try to be neutral, diplomatic, unopinionated, and hope that by staying sterile and neutral about everything you’ll attract the largest audience.

That is not the way it works.

You grow an audience by growing a pair and expressing your opinion, your beliefs, and being YOU.

Some people will LOVE you for it, some people will HATE you for it, and that’s okay!

How to Easily Take and Share a Screenshot in Windows

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Do you want to know how to easily take screenshots in Windows?

I have found that taking screenshots can be cumbersome and annoying.

Windows 7 and 8 come with a snipping tool which makes it pretty simple to take a screenshot of your screen, but if you want to share that screenshot with someone or upload it to facebook or to a Blog, the process requires multiple steps such as:

  1. Load Windows Snipping Tool
  2. Hit a hot-key button to activate screen capture mode
  3. Select the area you want to capture on your screen
  4. Windows Snipping Tool takes the screenshot
  5. Save the file to your computer, giving it a name you’ll remember
  6. Find the file on your computer and share it with someone, or upload to Facebook, or to your Blog

As you can see, there are 6 steps involved here.

It’s not that difficult, but it’s not a very efficient way of doing things if you take screenshots quite often.

Want to know a much better way of doing it?

Use ShareX

My friend, Tyler Cruz, shared with me that he uses this tool called ShareX for his screenshots.

It’s a neat little tool that you can download for free, which shortens the process of taking a screenshot considerably.

The reason it’s more efficient is because it automates a few key steps.

#1 – Auto-load on Windows Startup

You can setup the tool to automatically load up when you load Windows.

This means you don’t have to remember to load up the Windows Snipping tool each time.

ShareX simply maps itself to a hot-key you preset and then it just works.

The default setting that I use is the hot-key CTRL + Print Screen.

So any time I want to take a screenshot of anything, I just hit CTRL + Print Screen and ShareX pops up and gives me a selection tool to select which area of my screen I want to take a screenshot of.

#2 – Setup Automatic Uploading of Your Screenshot File

Once the software takes a screenshot of an area of your screen, you can set it up to automatically upload your file to an FTP server or any type of cloud service like Dropbox or Flickr or Photobucket or whatever you want to use to store your uploaded images.

I just set up mine to automatically upload the file to my FTP server so that I don’t have to waste any time uploading manually.

Also, I have my FTP server directory setup so that it puts all my files into a sub-folder on my Blog, so this way all my screenshots are also visible to anyone I want to share them with just by giving them the URL to the file.

#3 – Setup Automatic Copying of File URL to Clipboard

Once the software takes the screenshot, and uploads it to your FTP server or file sharing site, it can automatically copy the URL to the image directly to your clipboard.

This way, a few seconds after you take your screenshot the URL to the image is loaded up in your clipboard and you can then PASTE it into any window.

For example if I’m chatting with someone on SKYPE, and I want to show them something really quickly, I’ll just take a screenshot by hitting CTRL + Print Screen and then selecting an area on my screen and then as soon as I do that, the software uploads the file and copies the URL to my clipboard.

Then I just go to my chat window and hit CTRL + V (hot key for PASTE) and boom the software puts the URL to the file in the chat.

This way the person can click on the link in the chat window and see the screenshot.

Or if I want to upload something to Facebook, I’ll take a screenshot and 3 seconds later the file is uploaded to my FTP server and the URL is ready to be pasted.

Then I click Upload in Facebook and when it asks me for the location of the file – instead of spending time looking for the file on my computer’s hard drive I just PASTE the URL into the input box which asks me where I want to upload my file from.

This way Facebook actually pulls the file from my FTP server and uploads it to Facebook.

There are many other features that this software has, but even with just these three simple settings, I’ve shortened my screen capturing process from six steps to just three:

  1.  Hit a hot-key button to activate screen capture mode
  2. Select the area you wan to capture on your screen
  3. File is uploaded and the URL to it is copied to my clipboard, ready to be shared

Where to Get ShareX for Free

You can download ShareX for Windows for free by clicking here or on the picture below:

My 2015 Strategy For Making Money Online

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Just  before the new year started I had some time to sit down and really think about what I believe would be my best strategy for making money online in 2015 and beyond.

I looked back over the last 20 years of my life as an entrepreneur and the last 8 years as a blogger, affiliate marketer, network marketer etc., and I realized that my strategy up to this point has looked something like this:

Basically, when I started Blogging in 2006 I focused on that for a period of time and didn’t really do much else in terms of making money online as I was still very much working full time in the corporate world.

In early 2008 I got more serious about making money as a Blogger and started to build up my monthly blogging income to making several thousand dollars a month.

Then I decided to put the majority of my focus on affiliate marketing with PPC traffic, as I wanted to be able to quit the corporate world by the end of 2008.

By January 2009 I left the corporate world and focused entirely on affiliate marketing with some sporadic blogging from time to time.

As my affiliate income started to grow I started to get excited as it was growing so much faster than the income I made from blogging.

Then in November 2009 Google pulled the plug on affiliate marketing via their Pay-per click Google Adwords system and banned over 100,000 affiliates, including me.

My affiliate income basically disappeared overnight.

I went back to blogging for a short period of time, now having to re-build consistency with my blog and me readers.

Then, I decided to try doing affiliate marketing using SEO strategies.

That didn’t really work out too well, so I went back to blogging again…. once again having to re-build consistency and re-build my following.

Then I decided to try getting back into network marketing for a period of time.

When that didn’t work out with the company I was with, I decided to go back to blogging again – having to re-build consistency yet again!

Basically, over the 8 years that I’ve been a blogger I’ve started and stopped blogging on a consistent basis more times than I can count.

During certain period of time I’ve written daily blog posts for a month straight, and at other times I didn’t write a single blog post for a month.

Essentially I’ve been very inconsistent with my blogging audience and my email list.

Having said that, I still managed to build a following of over 10,000 email subscribers with my Blog, but in hindsight that list would probably be 10 – 20 times bigger if I just remained consistent!

I was still able to achieve my goal of being able to leave my corporate job behind in 2009 and to make a six-figure income from the comfort of my own home, but I probably COULD be making a 7-figure or even an 8-figure income if I did things differently.

(Income disclaimer – Results not typical.  Just because I make a six-figure income from home doesn’t mean that you are guaranteed to also.  See my income disclaimer below.)

Modeling Successful Online Marketers

When I sat down and documented what I have done to try to analyze what has worked for me really well and what hasn’t, I also did a careful analysis of some of the top income earners that I know who are making 7 and 8 figure incomes online.

They all made money online using different methods, however there emerged one single pattern that virtually all of them followed – with rare exception.

Pretty much all of them are doing one of two things:

#1 – Blogging daily, or at the very least 5 days a week.

#2 – Emailing their list daily, or at the very least 5 days a week.

If you look at virtually every successful marketer online, they are all doing ONE of these two things OR BOTH!

I’ve been a blogger for over 8 years, but I’ve never done ONE or BOTH of those things CONSISTENTLY for more than a month or so at a time.

That is the difference!

So, based on this, my NEW strategy for 2015 and beyond looks like this:

Basically what I’m planning on doing is to create a foundation of Blogging and/or emailing my list every single day or at the very least 5 days a week.

That is PRIMARY and mandatory for my business.

If I do nothing else, I want to stick to blogging and/or emailing my list every single day.

See, by doing that, by creating valuable content every single day, I *KNOW* that my online income will skyrocket at some point – it’s just a matter of time.

On top of that layer of daily blogging and/or emailing my list daily, the second later on top of that is embracing network marketing on a more consistent basis over a longer period of time.

I’ve kind of had a love/hate relationship with network marketing, mostly because I didn’t really understand it properly like I do now.

I didn’t know how to produce results in network marketing on a consistent basis or how to build a team long term.

Also it took me a long time to find a network marketing company with a product that I’m passionate about.

So now I also plan on being way more consistent with network marketing BUT it still comes second to Blogging which is my primary foundation.

See, once I’ve got my solid foundation of daily blogging and/or emailing my list every day, THEN I can pursue the many different income streams that show up in my life.

All those things are ON TOP of my foundation of Blogging.

Meaning, if I want to promote an affiliate offer that I’m super excited about, I can do that – AFTER I write my Blog post for the day and/or email my list.

If I learn some new Facebook traffic strategy, I can do that – AFTER I write my Blog post for the day and/or email my list.

If I want to take a paycation (vacation where you make money while vacationing!), I can do that – AND I can blog about it at the same time.

If I learn some new SEO strategy that I want to try out, I can do that – AFTER I write my Blog post for the day and/or email my list.

New exercise program?  Sure, I can do that, and Blog about it.

Basically, instead of bouncing around from strategy to strategy, making money online using all these different methods and then getting frustrated if something doesn’t work out or the environment changes on me and trying to go back to blogging again, now I’m just going to Blog on a consistent basis and just do all those other things ON TOP of Blogging.

See, long term I know with 100% certainty that if I just blog daily and communicate with my followers on a regular basis, I will achieve all my financial goals – period, end of story.

Why Not Just Blog Daily and That’s It?

Some of you might then think to yourself “Well if you already know that you’ll reach all your financial goals just by blogging, then why bother with all those other things anyways?”

That’s a great question, and I actually know some people who have tried doing that.

They just said to themselves “I’m just going to blog every day, and I’m not going to get involved or even look at ANY other systems out there, or any other ways of making money online, or network marketing or anything else…I’ll just Blog every day and make money by blogging.”

Without exception, EVERY single one of those people did NOT succeed as Blogger.

Why?

BECAUSE they ran out of things to Blog about!

See, Blogging is an amazing tool for personal development and learning how to communicate and for building a long-term online income – BUT – if the ONLY thing you ever do in your life is sit in front of your computer and Blog, you’ll run out of content!

And you’ll most likely have a really hard time attracting and maintaining an audience as your Blog will be BORING and all based on theory.

See, one of the reasons that I’ve been able to build a following of over 10,000 email subscribers with my Blog is because I’m ALWAYS trying out new things, testing out new things, and then Blogging about my results or the lack of results.

When I try a new diet and I Blog about it, people are interested because they’re curious to see if the diet actually works!

Even if they’re not trying to lose weight right now in their life, they’ll follow along because they want to know if the strategy works just in case they ever want to lose weight later on in their life.

And when I try out a new income stream, they want to know how it’s working for me.

So they tune in and read my Blog posts.

This is why I believe that Blogging is an awesome foundational strategy for making money online long term, but it has to be coupled with actually LIVING LIFE and BEING AN ENTREPRENEUR.

If the ONLY thing you’re doing is sitting at home and Blogging, pretty soon all your posts are just about Blogging.

I see many people making this mistake.

They start a Blog and their Blog’s topic is “Blogging”.

They write their first 5 or 10 posts talking about “How to make money with your Blog”, where they share 5 to 10 things THEY just learned about Blogging.

Nothing wrong with that.

But then, after 5 or 10 posts, they run out of things to say as nothing else is happening!

See, I *LOVE* the fact that I’m a scanner type personality where I’m always trying out new things, looking at new income streams, going to different events, trying out new personal development strategies, taking on new hobbies, meeting new people, etc.

By doing all of those things, I have a TONNE of content for my Blog for years to come!

I NEVER run out of things to Blog about, because there’s always something new I’m learning and some area in my life that I’m growing in and it’s a lot of FUN for me to share what I learn with others.

If you’ve struggled to make money online and jumped around from system to system, from strategy to strategy, trying out blogging here and there for short periods of time like I have in the past, you may want to consider making the decision that I made to get SERIOUS about consistent blogging.

Even if you’re a TOTAL BEGINNER, if you start TODAY, one year from now you could have over 360 articles/blog posts written on your site, you could be an established authority and a recognized name online and you could have a sizable online residual income growing.

If you’re interested in doing that, I invite you to join my team at Empower Network and start blogging today!

One year from now, you’ll be VERY GLAD you did!

Command, Don’t Control

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Something that I’ve been really learning in many different areas of my life recently is the interplay between the concepts of COMMAND and CONTROL.

Most people, especially poor and middle class people are OBSESSED with CONTROL.

They try to control EVERYTHING they possibly can in their lives to the last detail.

The typical belief of a poor or middle-class blue-collar worker is:

“If you want something done right, you’ve gotta do it yourself.”

People say that all the time, and I used to say it as well.

However, the challenge with this way of thinking is that it implies that there is only ONE way to do something right – your way.

In reality there are MANY different ways that something can be done, and yes sometimes the way you do something might be a slightly better way of doing something – BUT – is the other way of doing it really that much worse?

And what’s the tradeoff?

Living YOUR Mission In Life

The most important thing we should really be focusing on in life is connecting to OUR mission and living OUR mission here on Earth.

We all have strengths and weaknesses and to be successful in life we have to put a laser focus on our STRENGTHS and let go of control over everything else.

Living our mission in life means learning to take COMMAND of our lives in two ways:

  1. Learning to COMMAND YOURSELF
  2. Learning to COMMAND OTHERS

The most important first step that we must take is to learn how to take command over ourselves.

Self leadership is always the first step.

You can’t command and lead anyone else if you can’t even command yourself.

Our life is a life-long journey over learning how to become the “commander” in our lives.

Being in “command” of our lives means taking 100% responsibility for EVERYTHING that happens in our lives.

No matter what the situation is that shows up in your life, you have to take 100% responsibility for how you RESPOND to the situation.

Responsibility literally means RESPONSE + ABILITY.

Life may throw things at you from time to time that seem to come out of left field, but YOU always have the ability to choose how you respond to these things.

When you learn to COMMAND things in your life, by taking 100% responsibility, you become much more powerful.

The other part of learning to command things in your life is the ability to know which things in your life YOU want to be in full control over (usually your strengths), and which things to delegate to others.

Learning to COMMAND others involves learning to let go of the CONTROL that you would have over how something is done if YOU were the one doing it.

Command vs Control

Learning to be a good leader / commander of people in your life, involves learning certain skills.

One of those skills is developing the understanding that when you delegate something to someone, there’s always a balancing act of asking the person to do something – to produce a certain result – versus telling the person HOW to do something.

Being a good commander / leader of people involves spending more of your time and energy being very clear on WHAT you want done, and what result you want achieved, and LETTING GO of the CONTROL of how they accomplish that thing.

As long as the person produces the result that you desire, you have to be okay with letting them do that thing however they thought was the best way to do it.

The best leaders in the world surround themselves with people that they TRUST to produce the results that they want, and they are constantly challenging themselves to release more and more control over HOW things are done, in order to be able to have more COMMAND over more things in their lives.

When you release control over things that don’t really matter in your life – things that you shouldn’t be trying to control – it frees you up to have more focus on the things that really DO matter to you.

Otherwise, you can spend your entire life trying to do everything yourself, because you have this limiting belief that if YOU don’t do it your way, maintaining an iron grip of total control over it, then someone else will do it the “wrong” way.

Learning to Trust The Universe

Another side to the COMMAND vs CONTROL concept is learning to relinquish more CONTROL over to the Universe or God or whatever you believe in.

Often times we ask the Universe for something, issuing a COMMAND like “I want to make $5,000/m more than I do now”, but when the Universe starts to bring us opportunities to do just that, we start arguing with what shows up.

Meaning, we have some idea of how WE THINK that extra income might show up in our lives, but when the Universe manifests some other opportunity or way for it to show up, we ignore it or we fight against it.

We have to learn how to relinquish more control over the HOW that the Universe uses to accomplish what we want.

The “HOW” doesn’t really matter.

The Universe will often have a plan that is a hundred times better than whatever our mind can conceive, but we lack the necessary trust to keep going long enough to see that plan come to fruition.

Give the Universe a COMMAND… that is what your role in your life is – being the Supreme Commander in Charge of YOUR Life.

Your role is NOT being the supreme CONTROLLER of everything in your life!

You can’t control everything anyways – so it’s a futile thing to try to chase anyways.

Relieving Stress

The next time you’re stressed out about something, just ask yourself “Am I trying to CONTROL the situation too much?  Do I need to gain more clarity over what I WANT?  Do I need to become better at communicating with myself and others so that I can COMMAND myself and COMMAND others to do give me the results I want?”

Often times you’ll notice that stress comes from trying to CONTROL something you don’t really have control over anyways.

Take a few moments to relax and think to yourself “More COMMAND, Less CONTROL.”

Try to gain more clarity over exactly what you want, and work on your ability to COMMAND others to give you want you want, without trying to CONTROL every little detail of how they accomplish it.

You’ll be amazed how much stress you can release, just by letting go of some of the control you’re clinging onto.

🙂