Do you ever feel confused by the overwhelming number of choices you can make in any one moment, day or week?  

This is the plague of the solopreneur!

Where to put your energy?
What to focus on?
Whats the best use of your time?

Here are a few tools that might help you be more empowered!

Thanks to Andrea Lee for the first two!

1.  ”Hell Yes, Hell No, Maybe”

 It is so simple and yet can really help get things in perspective very quickly!

Make three columns on your paper.

“Hell yes” are the ideas that are a clear yes and they get gold stars!

“Hell no” are just ideas that you have thought about for awhile because you think you  ”should” do them but they feel yucky and or not a good fit. These ideas get crossed off and thrown out immediately. Gone!

Maybe” are ideas to put to the side to let them percolate for only  a very short while. However, if they don’t move to the “Hell Yes” category they also need to be thrown out.

2.  ”Too little,  Enough, Too Much”

This is an especially good tool for assessing how you can move your energy for more productivity.

For the next few days just gently review the parts of your business and think about these three categories and where you feel not enough, too much or  just enough.

Where does it feel you have too little of something?
What are you doing too much of?
What parts feel they are in the perfect “just enough” place?

Make three lists of your business areas and activities under these three headings.  Look at the “Too little” category and jot down some ways to get that to move to the “Enough” list.  Look at the “Too much” category and write down some ways to decrease so they can also move to the “Enough” section. 

Notice if it’s easier for you to increase or decrease.  Good awareness!

3. Smiling White Board 

I created this tool for myself and it continues to help me stay on track, focused and helps me acknowledge what I’ve accomplished.

I have a large white board in front of my desk. I draw a smiling face on it every day before I quit work and  write down three things I absolutely want to accomplish the next day. These are things to do in between client meetings. 

As I go through my day and want to get pulled off course I make sure I complete these three things no matter what.  

It gives me a good feeling every time I can erase one off the list. At the end of the day when all three are gone I smile back at my happy face, draw a new one,  and then add the three for tomorrow.  

I can leave work peacefully knowing I don’t have to think about the next day. It also allows me to bring some creativity and fun into my work!

Which of these three ideas resonate with  you?
Are you ready to be less overwhelmed and more focused?

I’ve written countless posts on niche marketing and the importance  of focusing on your tribe. 

However, recently I have been made aware of an equally important piece that is often overlooked.  

This is about you being authentically you. 

I’m in that “fine tuning” phase of my marketing and looking at my own message and realizing that its not all about what tools I offer.

Much is about how I offer it and what is my way of being that is different from anyone else who offers similar solutions, whether it’s about marketing, mindset, or sales. 

It’s  about my personal branding in a way, and the reasons that people choose to work with me rather than someone else.

A few days ago one of my clients shared that she had been hiding a piece of herself that is so intrinsically part of her; her spiritual background.  

Her fear was that if she came out of the closet and integrated this in, people would disappear and think she was too new agey or something.

We talked about how she could bring this part into her message and  it would make her more aligned with her wisdom and gifts. People would notice and gravitate to her because of this. 

When I began my business  way back when, I had the feeling I needed to present as  ”businessy,” and for me that meant compartmentalizing myself in certain ways.  

I had lived in a community in New Zealand and my wild woman played on the beach and my wise woman ran the show. I decided (out of fear again) that this part of me wouldn’t give my potential clients the feeling that I could help them with their businesses.  ”Get real! Business women don’t howl at the moon!”  

However, this is such an intricate part of who I am, and in some ways I realized I left that part of me in New Zealand.  One of my new mastermind buddies told me I needed to make her part of my branding.

Funny how wrong I was, and how many women choose to work with me because I howl at the moon, and in fact,  they want to do it with me! 

So- my questions to you:

1. What part  of yourself have you left out of your business message?  
2. How have you cut yourself off from a deep piece of who you are, out of fear?
3. How can you integrate this in to make your message even stronger?

How is your old story holding you back in your business?

So much of who you are, the decisions you make and how you present yourself has to do with your story. 

I recently had one of those aha moments and uncovered another layer of my story and how its been running the show.

When I was in second grade I had an unfortunate experience with math at school. I was in one of these combined classes on grades two and three. One day my teacher was showing the third graders long division and the rest of us were supposed to be “not watching.”  

Being good, I didn’t watch but but some of my classmates didn’t listen and instead they learned long division and I was left to feel stupid.

I asked to be shown but she just told me to wait until next year. Evidently there were no points given for being good. A could have gleaned many messages from this incident but the one I adapted was that I wasn’t good at math and also not very smart overal. 

That stayed with me and as a result I stayed away from financial stuff, struggled and thought I wasn’t smart enough to make money. 

I’m not sure where I got the idea that it took higher than normal brains to be able to make money but I didn’t think I was smart enough. 

Not feeling smart came from that childhood message. Math was not my best subject in school after that and somehow I thought you couldn’t be smart unless you were good at math. It’s really amazing the twisted beliefs that get adapted at a young age and then the decisions that are made from those places. 

I only share this story as an example.  When I realized what my story had been all those years, I decided to re-write the story. In the new story it talks about a very smart little girl who was in a very low quality elementary school with poor teachers. She was bored and creative but had no outlet for her creativity there, so she learned to daydream and doodle away the hours. As a result she got low grades in math.  

However she grew up and got two masters degrees and got an A in statistics. She took a year of glaze calculation as part of ceramics and got in A in that, and this was before the use of calculators. ( ok- I am that old:) 

As a result of my new story, I realized I was certainly smart enough to run a business and understand the financial part. I also realized that one of my skills is to help other entrepreneurs to understand and change their own story to support their success.

Can you see how there might be a story from your early childhood that is affecting you today?  

What is your own story around being a successful entrepreneur?
What part of your story do you need to let go of?
What’s your new story?

I would love to help you unravel this. Contact me for a free discovery/strategy call

I  am doing a 30 day challenge with my mentor (Connie Ragen Green) to get myself moving and overcoming challenges.

It’s adding more stuff to do to my already busy schedule so my first thing to overcome is my mindset (as always:)

Today I am visiting three blogs written about my niche topic.  

I always want to do this but don’t get around to it regularly, so this is a good challenge for me!

Connie says:
1. Read their posts
2. Leave a comment.
3. Notice what they are doing that is similar to what you are doing.
4. Make some notes about what you liked and didn’t like.
5. Decide if this is someone who you want to connect with and why.

I love this activity and focus because it one part of creating joint venture partnerships.  

I’ve learned that it is essential to develop connections with people you can partner with.There is only so far you can go in your business without this piece.

Here are a few ways joint venture partners can help your business? 

• Building a community of peers which feels expansive. 
• Being part of a team of people with complimentary businesses.
• Offering mutual support when it comes to  promoting products.
• Creating affiliate partners income streams with people you trust. 
• Offering more resources and value to your clients.
• Developing products and programs together for higher value.

I just completed my first tele-summit which included all six points above. It was life-changing for my business and my own self-esteem as well. 

Next week I am off to Vancouver BC to attend the Midas Camp with Andrea Lee and so much of this event will be about meeting new potential joint venture partners. I’ll be writing some new blog posts from there with photos so stay tuned!

What are doing right now to nurture joint venture relationships? 
Join me in the blog challenge. If you are reading mine- you can count this as one of course!

There are clear and easy steps to marketing your service to the world.

And if you follow those steps impeccably you will be successful and make money!

It is logic in the purest sense.

Likewise, if you don’t follow the steps, you will make less money and be less successful.

Of course, there are many ways to judge success depending on what stage your business is at, and it’s important to acknowledge all the successes at each part of the process.  

This can be very hard if you are always looking at what you haven’t yet done!

At the beginning, it might just be having your first client or deciding on a domain name. Later you also might judge your success on how many income streams you have activated and how much money is coming in. 

Regardless of what stage you are at, the very first step is always to Shift Your Mindset. This is not something you do once, and you are done! It keeps coming up, over and over.

You want to expand  and shift into your entrepreneurial mindset.
Michael Gerber, author the the  ”EMyth Revisited” explains this very well!

“The entrepreneur is our visionary, the creator in each of us. An entrepreneur is a person who takes an idea, product or service and does whatever is necessary to introduce it to the marketplace where it can produce revenue.”

Most people who begin their service business, struggle to become a real entrepreneur. He says, “They fail to see the business as a product as an entrepreneur would. Instead, they see the business as a job.”  

If you are a therapist, coach, designer, or other practitioner you might relate to this and have found yourself stuck in that place of working hard and getting nowhere!

So, the first place to begin is in changing your mindset. This has not been a black and white shift for me!

Every new stage I get to in my business, the issues come up again. One of the big ones for me has been my money mindset. 

Here is one example that snuck in when I wasn’t looking.
In an effort to be financially responsible, I made decisions to use Free Conference Call for my teleclasses. I have over 60 hours I have recorded in the last few years. However the quality is so poor that I can’t really make them into a paid product or event make them into a Podcast for i tunes.  

It saved me money but disabled my business!

It was actually my scarcity mindset that made the decision, but I didn’t realize it. I got fooled!  Now I have shifted to Instant Teleseminar which is high quality and also  will allow me to have webinars with slides. It’s not free but so worth it! Plus I am an affiliate so I can earn money just by referring people.  Again- an entrepreneurial decision.

Here is my link. Please use it if you want to do teleclasses. I highly recommend not making the same mistake I did!  

http://kayalikes.com/instantteleseminar

You can immediately become an affiliate as well and very soon you will be making money rather than spending it. Another mindset shift! 

Here are a few questions to answer that will help you to have more insight around step #1

How is your mindset disabling your business?
What changes to you need to make that would make you be more of an entrepreneur?
What is one small thing you can do today to make a huge shift?

Come back later to hear about Steps 2-5!