This year, I completed my taxes on March 15, not April 15 as I have done every year in the past. I felt tremendous peace this past weekend as I spent the weekend visiting with my parents; I was able to be mindful and present with them while my sister, who had waited until the last minute frantically scurried around looking for her husband’s information and fearing she owed until the last minute when she broke through into the black…
In the meantime, because of poor planning we received a rather large return that was banked a few weeks ago; most of it will go to necessities but we did treat ourselves to a new television for our room and a pair of Samsung Note 2’s. I’ve been using mine for almost two weeks now.
Point? There are rewards for working ahead, for not procrastinating. Next year, I plan to finish even earlier! If you’re one of those like I was — frantically looking for a place to drop your return before midnight — I feel your pain, but it is self-inflicted. Make a note now to do something different next year!
Why prefer Coke over Pepsi or GE over Samsung or Ford over Chevy?
In markets that aren’t natural monopolies or where there are clear, agreed-upon metrics, how do we decide?
Yes, every brand has a story—that’s how it goes from being a logo and a name to a brand. The story includes expectations and history and promises and social cues and emotions. The story makes us say we "love Google" or "love Harley"… but what do we really love?
We love ourselves.
We love the memory we have of how that brand made us feel once. We love that it reminds us of our mom, or growing up, or our first kiss. We support a charity or a soccer team or a perfume because it gives us a chance to love something about ourselves.
We can’t easily explain this, even to ourselves. We can’t easily acknowledge the narcissism and the nostalgia that drives so many of the apparently rational decisions we make every day. But that doesn’t mean that they’re not at work.
More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of our selves, reminders of who we are or would like to be.
Great marketers don’t make stuff. They make meaning.
“All you need is love.” The Beatles knew what was up! Love really is all you need… self-love, that is. The foundation of a happy life, healthy relationships, and achieving every bit of greatness you were put onto this earth for does not exist anywhere externally. Its all right inside! Tapping into love of self is what allows us to opens doors to infinite possibilities. Everything weve created in our outside world is a reflection of what is going on with us internally. So, if you have a tough time fully accepting and loving yourself because of past circumstances, or due to holding yourself up to ridiculous high standards, or because you dont believe the truth that you are meant to shine, than the world around you is going to reflect as such. When self-love is missing, it manifests into negative actions and emotions like insecurity, feelings of lacking, and unhealthy comparison to others.
Inner-peace, on the other hand, is the catalyst to rocking your outside world in a totally awesome way. Imagine being completely accepting of yourself, including all of your flaws and past mistakes: “Were not here to be perfect, were here to live and to feel and to learn and to grow!” Imagine being super-confident in your abilities and embracing the gifts that you have: “We all have our own unique talents that can literally change the world.” Imagine not easily being swayed by the opinion of others, I mean literally not caring what anybody else says or thinks because its just their opinion, which has nothing to do with you: “You know what you were born to do and nothing is going to stop you.” This is self-love, baby! Self-Love is not the same thing as vanity. But, we often get it twisted! Vanity and narcissism are actually the opposite of self-love, as they are based in fear and lack. It is when the ego mind wants to make you feel special or better than others and thus creates illusions to support the idea. Its when motivation comes from hopes of gaining attention or acceptance rather than coming from the heart and done with pure intentions. Confident people who love themselves unconditionally do not think they are better than anybody else. Contrarily, they tend to see the beauty and oneness in all. Having true love and acceptance of self allows you to love and accept others more deeply, as well as receive love more fully.
Personally, I prefer the term self-compassion, but the message is the same; it is very difficult to aspire to thought leadership if you have not met your inner critic with love and compassion. How can you rock the world if your inner world is rocked by turmoil?
Linking is a great way to increase your website’s value. However, there are good ways (white hat) and bad ways (black hat) to do things. We have all heard of the horror stories about what happened when people violated Google’s ethical linking practices. The infographic below has some of the stories and what Google did, as well as the red flags of bad linking.
If you typically eat three meals and two snacks each day, then over the next twelve months you will make 1,825 individual decisions about what you put in your mouth. And that’s not including the significant liquid calories you’ll probably consume in that time. In no small part, those 1,825 decisions will influence how your body looks, feels and functions a year from now.
This is a good reminder for me. If I want to stay shiny and play my ‘A Game’ every day, I need to be mindful of my choices. Am I the only one that ever let what I put in my mouth affect my mindfulness?
Friend and client Nilofer Merchant shares this thought:
Many scoff at Larry Lessig. They say he is an optimist, out of touch with reality.
But what it is that is said about the people who ultimately change the world? “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”- Ghandi
Larry Lessig, if you don’t already know of him is one of the original creators of the Creative Commons. Creative commons lets any individual creator manage their rights to content, fundamentally updating the original notion of copyright to be less-lawyer intensive and right-sized for the Social Era. Since then, he’s gone one to support the Sunlight Foundation, aimed at opening up transparency to who is financing what. More recently, he’s been focused on dealing with political corruption, at RootStrikers.
His TED2013 talk at TED was, well, a stunning talk, one of my top 5 that I’ve been waiting to share…and it went live on TED.com today. Although it’s focused on the US, the issues it raises apply far more broadly.
Ellie Gordon, a personal and executive life coach, helps us figure out what we really need to be thinking about when we’re looking for lasting, hard-to-make change.
1. Can I Replace The Word ‘Afraid’ With The Word ‘Alert’?
“An artist client recently introduced me to this question,” says Gordon, “and it quickly proved effective at dealing with fear.” Fear, as most of us know, is the biggest obstacle to change. Sometimes our fears are authentic (“My husband is going to leave me because he’s having an affair!”) and sometimes they are inauthentic (“My house is going to blow down even though it’s made out of brick, I have a new roof, and the wind isn’t blowing!”). Either way, we usually try to dismiss our exclamation-pointed feelings as silly, ignore them altogether or blow them up to such a hellacious magnitude that we can’t move, breathe, sleep or… well… live. Continue reading “The Questions Coaches Say You Need To Be Asking Yourself”→
![Learn How to Avoid the Link Apocalypse! [Infographic]](https://i0.wp.com/www.business.toddlohenry.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/The_Link_Apocalypse_.png)
Bright, shiny objects! 
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