July 2021 | SRD Success

How to Live Your Life with Intense Purpose

July 23, 2021/0 Comments/in Success Life

Wandering around aimlessly from day to day provides absolutely no benefit to you or those around you. An unspecified purpose leaves you frustrated and lacking direction with everything you do. If you don’t already know your purpose in life, take some time to reflect on what it may be (see below). Then make sure everything you do lines up with this purpose.

Discover Your Purpose

In order to find your purpose, look at the things you love to do and what makes you tick. The trick is to figure out where you draw your internal energy from and where your gifts and talents are best used.

What do you do to recharge your batteries? What do you absolutely love to do? Take a little time to figure this out and then focus on it. If you need more help discovering your purpose, our course Brain Training for Success can help!

Choose Activities That Fulfill Your Purpose

Once you identify your purpose, look at the things you do on a day-to-day basis. Do these activities add to your purpose or take away from it? Everything you say, do, think and act on should complement your purpose and help fulfill you. If it isn’t doing this, either drop the activity or delegate it to someone else.

An example of a purpose you might have is to provide a healthy and comfortable life for your partner and children. What types of activities do you think fall in line with this purpose? Let’s look at a few and see how they line up with your personal life purpose.

Cooking. Cooking your own food allows you to be the top chef. You get to choose the ingredients in your food, rather than relying on some other person or company. You can take out the salt, add flavor with herbs and spices, and reduce your portions to create something that fits within your family’s healthy lifestyle. Plus you’re saving money, which can be used for your children’s education or a family retreat.
Cleaning. Keeping a clean house fulfills both the healthy and comfortable parts of your purpose. By doing things like dusting, washing dishes, and taking out the garbage, you’re staying healthy. Removing the clutter creates a more comfortable environment.
Exercise. Exercising, along with activities like yoga and meditation, helps keep your mind and body healthy and comfortable. These activities keep your weight down and make you feel better inside and out, which will also keep you strong for your family.

As you can see, each one of these activities adds to your purpose. Things that distract you from your purpose might include eating out excessively, living beyond your means, and even sitting around doing nothing all day. Negative or unfulfilling activities can be exchanged for the ones that supercharge both you and your life purpose.

Live With Purpose at Work, Too

For your professional purpose, you might have a passion to plan social events for you and your coworkers. You can accomplish this by volunteering for your company’s activities committee or being on a board that plans events and meetings. You can also start your own activity group and get things together for employee birthday parties in the office.

You can see how these ideas and actions fall directly in line with your passion and purpose. Obviously, you still have to get your job done, but you can certainly use your free time to fulfill your purpose.

Once you’ve identified your purpose, I challenge you to live your life with intensity toward that purpose. Do everything you can to focus on your calling with the things you say, think and do. If it isn’t necessary or doesn’t align with your goals, let it go.

Living your life with intense purpose renews your passion for life and enables you to be the best you can be. It strengthens your self-confidence and, best of all, brings self-fulfillment. Find your purpose today, and give it all you’ve got!

The Two Most Effective Ways to Increase Your Productivity

July 9, 2021/0 Comments/in Building Your Business, Productivity, Success Life

For some people – perhaps even for you – increasing productivity is akin to finding the Holy Grail. Why has upping productivity taken on such mythical proportions?

Simply put, increasing productivity means increasing earning potential. If you own a business where you provide any type of service, taking steps to increase your ability to deliver the service in less time will allow you to take on more clients and earn more money.

Likewise, if you sell a product, finding a way to make or deliver that product faster will enable you to serve more customers, once again, making more money.

When you find ways to do the same thing in less time, you’re being more efficient. Efficiency and productivity go hand in hand.

Undoubtedly, the more efficient you can make the process of completing any task, the more productive you’ll be.

Use these strategies to increase your efficiency so you can be more productive:

Create a prioritized schedule for your work. Whether using a post-it note, a Microsoft Word file, or an online task management tool (such as Toodledo or Remember the Milk), almost everyone has some type of system for creating and editing the classic “to-do” list. These lists are sometimes a hodgepodge of ideas and tasks that need to be completed in the future and not-so-distant future.
There is nothing wrong with maintaining a to-do list, as it can make the difference between getting stuff done and going crazy trying to keep everything organized in your head. Still, the typical to-do list leaves much to be desired. Unlike a conventional to-do list, having a prioritized schedule takes things a step further, allowing you to increase efficiency and productivity. This is because prioritizing all of the tasks that you have in front of you while keeping track of a longer-term picture of your schedule for weeks to come, will allow you to really figure out what is the most important thing that needs to be done right now.

If you are creating a prioritized schedule and realize that you have a best friend’s wedding in two months, you’ll be able to bump getting a dress or tux way down the list, while still making sure to place it somewhere on your schedule. A prioritized schedule essentially puts things into perspective, allowing you to figure out what truly needs to get done this very moment and focus on that.

Seek out and accept specialized help. Whether you run your own business or are a stay-at-home parent, it will save you lots of time and energy at the start if you’re open to collaborating with others.
Bill Gates may be quite capable of developing all of the new programs needed to advance Microsoft as a company while working with prospective clients in addition to handling customer service and PR. However, Mr. Gates and most other successful individuals would never be caught doing this. No matter how much you can do by yourself, your resources are finitely limited by one single factor that trumps all others… time. So, rather than spend 8 hours a day answering phone calls, working on new products, shopping for groceries, and cutting your own hair, it may be a more productive use of your time to zero in on the one or two things that give you the most results for the amount of energy that you put into them. For example, if developing a new product will eventually double the size of your business by being able to cater to an additional market or consumer demographic, then this is time well spent.

Paying someone else to answer phones, freeing up your time to be devoted towards projects that will give you more returns for your time invested is the sure sign of a future Fortune 500 executive at work. (Check out this article from our parent company on how to find and Combining this strategy with using a prioritized schedule will enable you to focus on what’s most important for you and get it done. Your productivity will soar!

How Well Do You Really Know Your Ideal Client for Coaching?

July 2, 2021/0 Comments/in Building Your Business

We’ve all done the exercise. It’s the first thing you’re taught when you first start your business: Create an ideal client avatar.

This vision of your ideal client guides everything you do, including pricing (you can’t charge that single mom as much as you can the CEO of a Fortune 500 company), pain points (mom probably isn’t worried about shareholders), and even the color of your logo.

So you spend a few hours considering things such as:

Age group
Income
Family status
Education
Lifestyle goals
Location

Maybe you even write up a nice little story about your ideal client. You give her a name, a couple of kids, a husband who just doesn’t get it, and a load of student loans. You know quite a bit about her, you think.

But you would be wrong, and if you stop there, you may be missing a huge piece of the puzzle—and losing out on the best clients because of it.

Personality Mismatch

Here’s something that’s rarely considered in the “ideal client” equation, and it’s arguably the most important part: personality.

If you’re snarky, sarcastic, fun-loving, and loud, then a quiet, middle-aged mom who spends her time volunteering at the church is probably not a good fit for you. Sure, she might need your help, and she might love your products, but for one-on-one coaching, this match-up is a disaster. Either she will be uncomfortable with your style, or you’ll be miserable trying to reign in your natural exuberance.

Better to pass mom on to a coach who is a better fit for her personality-wise.

Drive Determines Success

This one can be difficult to calculate from the start, but once you recognize it (or the lack thereof) it’s worth paying attention to. The client without the drive to succeed will—more often than not—only end up frustrating you both.

Better to end your relationship as soon as you see the signs of this than to waste your time going over the same material and exercises again and again with someone who simply won’t do the work. Check out this article on how to define success for some ideas on how to see your client’s relationship with success. If you find that you just can’t reconcile your client’s relationship with success, an alternative might be to suggest that they take an online course or suggest a book they can read to help them find their “why” and increase their drive to succeed.

If you look at your current and past coaching clients, you’ll begin to see patterns. You can easily look back and see what made some clients a joy to work with, while others were a struggle. Think about what those differences are, and add them to your ideal client profile. Then compare any new potential clients to this ideal profile, and you’ll never again sign on with a less-than-perfect client.