Rob Shultz has done it again.

The creator of Audacious Audio and 5 figure Teleseminars has taken a saucy, perhaps even taboo topic - like our big fat BUTS - and turned it into a valuable lesson for life and business.

Want to see if YOUR big fat But featured on Rob’s blog? Investigate here:

How Big is Your But?

He’s right, too. Strugging solo professionals and closet entrepreneurs have some of he biggest Buts around.

Some sparkling excerpts from Rob about our Buts:

Admit it: you’re madly in love with your fat ugly but, regardless of how much pain you say its causing you. And until you become more attached to your dream than your excuses, your big but is only going to grow bigger…
If you want to be in pain, get a job. Its easier and you can’t beat the benefits. If you’re going to be in business for yourself, you might as well have fun doing it. And you can’t do that doing what you despise…

Because the happy truth is you created your big fat but. And you can get rid of it. Without dieting. Without exercise. Simply by getting over yourself and getting on with it. Honest.

This is the first time I’ve thought about my oversized But with humor and optimism, Rob. Thanks for showing me a new angle from which to view my But.

*** 

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies on how to shrink your biggest But (and maybe even put it to work for your business!), sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

***

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 1st, 2007 at 2:45 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Allen and I LOVE Melanie Benson Strick. As “The Entrepreneur’s Success Coach,” Melanie is amazing in every single way - upside down, forward, backward, and sideways. She studies success, entrepreneurial do’s and don’ts, mindset, wealth, lifestyle, and how to kick butt in life around our passions, authentic talents, and best selves.

Having met Melanie several times - we’ve seen her speak at boot camps, socialized with her, worked with her, chatted with her on the phone, learned from her, and laughed with her many times (especially over the course of the last 10 months) - we can say she’s a dynamic, genuine, calm, focused, driven, and wonderful woman who wants to help as many people succeed in life and business as possible. We tell you this because you can learn a heck of a lot from this chick, and it would be a shame to hoard a resource like Melanie all to ourselves.

I was inspired to blurt this little fan entry about Melanie because I just read her latest “Success Connection” ezine article, Your Focus Can Make or Break a Million Dollar Opportunity: A “Real Life” Story. (I also listened to her great podcast of the article, which is perfect for those who prefer listening to reading! Check out all her podcasts here.)

After sharing a story from one of her own recent experiences in which millions of bucks were left on the table of a business strategy exercise to deal with a faux problem costing *just* $300,000, Melanie offers five powerful questions we can all use (and from which we can all benefit!) in our day-to-day business adventures. They are:

• What does the problem cost compared to the opportunities on the table?
• Will having this problem cause you to be unable to pursue the opportunities (in other words, does it negatively impact your resources or time?)
• What is the worst that could happen if you don’t resolve it? Compare that to the positives of what would happen if the opportunity is achieved.
• Would the problem cause long-lasting damage that you could not recover from?
• If you focus on creating a bigger opportunity, would it eliminate or mitigate the problem?

There’s a lot of talk about mindset these days. It’s really helpful to see what a difference a shift in mindset can make to your bottom line, whether it’s a pretend bottom line or the one that’s paying your mortgage.

Soooo….

Where are the opportunities YOU’RE missing in your life and business, because the “big, fat, hairy problems” are blocking your view?

Maybe, just maybe, the best way around the problems in your life and biz is a head-first dive into the opportunities that’ll make ya soar right around ‘em.

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

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This entry was posted on Friday, April 13th, 2007 at 1:21 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Dances With Gurus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I may have just died and gone to my messy Heaven!

An e-newsletter from Creativity Coach Susan Fuller sent me to an article in Inc. magazine touting the virtues of being messy — er, I mean, being too darn brilliant and wildly entrepreneurial to live by the completely impractical advice doled out by get-organized gurus.

As someone who’s been downright depressed for never being able to keep a clean desk for more than a millisecond (THIS Herculean feat of forced clutter control broke records by lasting for two days!), an anarchical premise like this is DIVINE.

Here’s a sample snippet of the five-page counter-cultural blast:

 The business world–indeed, the whole world–is much too biased toward neatness and order and overlooks the benefits of at least a modest level of messiness and disorganization. In contradiction to a hundred years of personal productivity and management wisdom, being somewhat disordered can be quite smart. And this holds true not just for personal neatness and organization but for structuring companies and designing work processes. And it applies to offices and homes and even to science and art and the rest of society.

Let’s take a simple example: the messy desk. Most of us have one, according to the survey, and if you think about it, it probably works quite well. Researchers who have taken the trouble to study desk neatness, like Microsoft senior researchers Abigail Sellen and Richard Harper, generally find that messy desks do a good job of reflecting the way people work–and thus can be more productive than a neat desk. No wonder. To keep a desk free of clutter, you’ve got to get everything that comes across your desk filed away or else processed and shipped to someone else’s desk. That may sound gloriously efficient, but it’s really anything but. For one thing, it takes time to get everything promptly filed or processed, and that’s time you could have spent making decisions or talking to customers. In other words, there’s a cost to neatness, one that people tend to ignore. In addition, by trying to deal with everything on your desk, you’re spending time with papers that could be safely ignored for a while–that’s bad prioritization. And, of course, if you want to retrieve a document, you’ve got to hunt it down in filing cabinets that often seem to eat important papers.

With a messy desk, on the other hand, you’ll end up with piles of clutter in which the more important, more urgent work naturally tends to end up close by and near the top, while the safely ignorable stuff gets buried near the back. You’ll sometimes have to hunt through a pile to find a document, but you’ll probably have a good idea where to look. That would explain why people who claim to have “very neat” desks in our survey report spending 36 percent more time looking for things than people who say they have “fairly messy” desks. Not only will work be at hand and be easier to find with a messy desk, and not only will you avoid the time cost of having to file and process, but you’ll also get the special benefits of serendipity–that is, you’ll occasionally stumble onto a useful document that if filed would have remained hidden forever and perhaps even make an inspired connection between two seemingly unrelated documents that end up together. (A National Institutes of Health scientist named Leon Heppel made such a connection while excavating through his spectacularly messy desk in the 1950s, and it led to a Nobel Prize for a colleague.) That may be why, according to a survey conducted by professional staffing firm Ajilon Office, office messiness tends to increase sharply with increased education, salary, and experience. Yet there are still many companies in the U.S., including General Motors and UPS, where you can get reprimanded for having a messy desk.

If you’ve ever struggled with organization, or felt unworthy because you “prefer” sweeping, plain view, horizontal filing systems to those pristine hidden filing get-ups, check out the whole article. It’ll make you feel so much better about yourself (dare I say, SUPERIOR to neat freaks?), and it may change the way you look at your awesomely creative desk, home, and lifestyle for the rest of your life.

Ditch the stress, own your mess!

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Posted in Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters | 2 Comments »

This entry was posted on Thursday, January 11th, 2007 at 5:03 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

In 2007, one of the things I want to get better at is logging the “A-Has” I find out in the *real* world (whatever THAT is!). Cuz I DO come across them, often and always. I just don’t always have my handy-dandy blogging machine close by. (Cue melancholy violin solo.)

Anywho…

There’s this AMAZING business woman, Stacy Brice, and her natural penchant for “A-Ha-ing Herself” is downright humbling. Stacy is the brains, brawn, and dare I say, MOXIE, behind the incomparable AssistU - birthingplace of the finest Virtual Assistants on Earth.

She’s also methodically laying claim to one of the best and most underused words in the English language: Moxie. Ohhhh, but it’s a beautiful word! The definition on Dictionary.com hardly does it justice…

1.	vigor; verve; pep.

2.	courage and aggressiveness; nerve.

3.	skill; know-how.

It’s bigger. It’s bolder. And Stacy knows this. Here’s HER definition:

Moxie. It’s an attitude; a way of being in the world that creates immense freedom. It’s where savvy, committed, smart and highly skilled meet spunky, shameless, gutsy, and brazen.  

She’s got a blog called Virtual Moxie, and she’s offers Moxie Coaching to lucky female professionals who earn the privilege of her time and experience. (She’s also an active contributor to several others (including Virtualosophy and The Virtual Wire.)

Through her coaching, Stacy pursues her one-woman mission to make sure other smart, success-minded women get over the crippling Ms. Nice Gal thing and take pride in becoming “too big for their britches.” Not in an “I ate too much turkey on Thanksgiving” kind of way, but in work, life, and vision. I’ve been having some issues with claiming my mojo lately, so I really appreciate that kind of, well, moxie.

I call all this to your attention simply to demonstrate how powerful an “A-Ha!” - bold insight PLUS joy-filled action - can be. Stacy earns “Epiphanies, Inc. Posterchild” status with a simple sentence she shares on her www.MoxieCoach.com site:

Moxie Coaching was born, as so many of my adventures are, with a sudden spark followed by a flood (and I mean a flood) of creativity.

That’s it, people. That’s the whole game, the entire recipe, right there is a divine little sentence.

Sudden sparks may come and go, but the ones that get that wild OOMPH! of action being them? Oh, yeah. That’s the sweet spot, right there.

Good things are born.

Destinies are met.

The world becomes a better, more vibrant, more moxie-full place.

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Posted in A-Has in the Ether, Call in the Coach, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Insight + Action | No Comments »

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 7th, 2007 at 1:59 am and is filed under A-Has in the Ether, Call in the Coach, How do you "A-Ha Yourself"?, Insight + Action. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

…A “very special and wise” mystery man, and presumably a friend of Lisa Wilder’s, since she ended her “How to Cope When Life Spins Out of Control” article with his profound quip:

“Keep your chin up and your t*ts off the floor!”

Amen to that!

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Posted in Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 20th, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Mood Boosters. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

I’ve been blog hopping today.

From Seth Godin’s post on Brand as mythology to Lisa Wilder’s posts (first, one on www.Coachamatic.com re: “How to Shift Out of Fear” (Parts 1 & 2), then, on her www.TheWilderZone.com blog, “Contemplating the Coming Year“), then finally all around Acorn Creative’s “Nuts & Bolts” Blog, a la Kevin Skarritt…

Seth’s post talks about how effective storytelling - with the requisite HEROIC OUTCOMES implied or outright stated - can be weaved into a company’s culture and marketing to create powerful brands that resonate deeply with their core audiences.

Lisa reminds us how easy it is for us to become excellent storytellers of our own imminent DOOM…and urges us to consider becoming just as good (or, preferably, better!) at our imminent SUCCESS. As she says:

“If we’re going to spin stories, and we all do, we may as well spin positive stories that will empower and uplift us and keep us moving forward proactively.”

And Kevin…well, he advocates the practice of IDEA MASHING. Which brings me to my suggestion for you and your ventures, business, and vision:

Instead of (or in addition to) the standard goal sheet or vision statement for 2007, why not spin a beautiful, bountiful, big-vision story of your IDEAL OUTCOME, your BEST CASE SCENARIO, your ULTIMATE SUCCESS STORY?!!!!

Have some fun with it. Weave in details.

• Who will you meet?
• Who will you partner with?
• Will you become a media darling?
• Will you rise to some glorious occasion and inspire charitable donations around the world?
• Are you featured on the cover of Inc. or Entrepreneur magazine?
• Do you have a major business breakthrough that transforms your future?
• Do you FINALLY hit your stride, and become the industry powerhouse you always knew you could be?

The reason everyone who’s anyone recommends storytelling as a biz success tool is because it CONNECTS with the core of your being. It’s memorable. It drives EMOTION. And if done right, it’s downright MAGICAL. 

If you write a version of your own HEROIC adventure for 2007, it may be just the script that helps you play out the details so they become your reality.

So…What’s YOUR HEROIC MYTH for 2007?

Write it. Read it. Learn it. Live it!

For FREE articles, tips, and strategies designed to catapult your content and electrify your business, sign up for our ezine, “The Inciter,” at EpiphaniesInc.com!

Posted in Call in the Coach, Storytelling, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!" | 1 Comment »

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 13th, 2006 at 3:05 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach, Storytelling, Tools to "A-Ha Yourself!". You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Way back in June, we wrote about our experience with Michael Port, creator of the “Book Yourself Solid” lead generation and small biz marketing system, and co-founder of both the “Product Factory” (”The #1 Product Creation, Marketing and Sales Resource on the Internet”) and “Traffic School” (the “Ultimate Website Traffic and Conversion System”).

Well, as a wonderful little bonus, we got the benefit of a laser coaching session with Lisa Wilder, a Certified Book Yourself Solid coach who’d been working with Michael for almost two years. She has her own site, “The Wilder Zone,” which offers “Personal & Professional Support & Resources for Stepping Boldly Out of Your Comfort Zone.”

(Lifestyle side note: Lani couldn’t join the call because she got to take our son to a pre-school nature program. She may have missed out on Lisa personally, but she’ll still get the benefit of hearing the call, because I recorded it with Audio Acrobat. Lucky girl - it’s like having your cake and eating it, too!)

Lani and I are about to develop our first information product - and by an incredible coincidence, Lisa is developing a program to teach people how to do just that! (More details when Lisa launches it.) And Lisa, game gal that she is, let me entirely change our planned topic of discussion and rolled with this question on the fly:

If you had ten days to create an information product from concept to reality, how would you do it?

The conversation went a little longer than the planned 20 minutes…and she had fabulous advice to offer. One of her recommendations I’ll mention, that’s outside the 10-day scope (but integral to the success of that process): Build your relationships with potential strategic partners BEFORE you start asking for help promoting your product.

Even if you’ve got the best idea, the best pitch, the most perfectly complementary-but-not-competitive product to share with that partner’s audience…you’ll have a bear of a time bringing them on board if they’ve never heard of you before.

Lani and I have also had a gap in our own business offerings - no value-added offer to help persuade people to sign up for our ezine, The Inciter. After the call, I immediately signed up for Lisa’s “How to Create an Irresistible and Highly Effective Opt-in Offering” ecourse (which you can sign up for, too, when you click on that Wilder Zone link above).

I’m wicked excited to read it, and I’m over the moon about my coaching call with her. I feel like something just snapped into place inside my head.

She’s warm, insightful and witty, and says the one-on-one coaching sessions are what she loves most about her business. After my call with her, I believe it. And as a last note, since Lisa’s Wilder Zone blog also addresses not just the business side of being an entrepreneur, but the personal side, too - you can’t really separate them, can you? - please do check it out. Her personality comes through there just as strongly as it does over the phone.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 2:52 pm and is filed under Call in the Coach. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.