energy – Small Business Odyssey

March 29, 2012

Eckhart Tolle: Aligning Outer Purpose with Inner Purpose

Eckhart Tolle discusses the need to align your outer purpose (taking action in everyday life) with your inner purpose. He describes this ‘awakened doing’ as a means to transforming your life and work. The secret to achieving the alignment is consciousness – in this way your daily activity can be infused with your inner purpose.

Aligning your outer purpose with your inner purpose through consciousness

Whether you are a small business owner engaged in small business marketing or an Internet marketer, the same principles apply. There are some clear lessons for small business marketing in Eckhart Tolle’s work. He specifically talks about the limitations of your thoughts and emotions (the EGO) on your capacity to take right action in any circumstance. Eckhart Tolle argues that creativity is released through consciousness.

In a previous article, I identified ways to develop consciousness while using technology. This article drew on Eckhart Tolle’s discussion with Google staff about Technology and Consciousness and provided some concrete recommendations for tapping into the energy of the present moment.

I have taken these recommendations further in another article where I describe five ways to develop consciousness. I also illustrate the power of consciousness through an example.

You might ask, ‘Why develop consciousness?’ The answer lies in the improved quality of life that you will experience. Not only will you be able to access your creativity but also be able to enjoy peace, tranquillity, joy and happiness. When you bring your outer purpose (your daily actions) into alignment with your inner purpose, you will also experience a renewed enjoyment and enthusiasm for what you are doing.

Awakened doing – the three ways to gain alignment with your inner purpose

Eckhart Tolle describes these three ways as ‘the three modalities of awakened doing’. While they represent ways to achieve alignment between your outer and inner purpose, they also represent states of being – ways of being in the world. I will describe each of the three ‘modalities’ below:

1. Acceptance – at peace in an unwanted situation

You will often find yourself in a situation that you do not enjoy. It may be a testy customer, a computer breakdown, spilt soup over your work, lost papers or any other situation that tries your patience. You can rant and rave, blame others for the situation or become frustrated and unfocused…or you can surrender to the situation and accept it with calmness. This alternative is what Eckhart Tolle calls acceptance. He argues that acceptance brings peace which has its own vibrational energy. Through acceptance, you are attaining consciousness in the moment and taking responsibility for your own life and its quality. I have found that this simple state of acceptance has enabled me to be at peace when I would otherwise be in turmoil because of my thoughts and attendant emotions. An associated benefit is that because acceptance requires you to access your consciousness, you are open to creative ways to handle your undesirable situation.

2. Enjoyment – the joy of being conscious

There is so much that you do that you may find boring or tedious. It could be social bookmarking, travelling to your work, taking out the rubbish, clearing the dirty dishes or even writing. You could focus on how life will be different in an ideal future or regret how much better it was in the past – and exacerbate your unease. Alternatively, you could develop consciousness in the moment and enjoy being fully present to what you are doing. Consciousness gives you access to joy – the joy of being fully present. So it is not the action that brings enjoyment but accessing the power of consciousness and enabling it to pervade what you are doing.

3. Enthusiasm – energy through realisation of your outer purpose

Have you ever found yourself highly enthusiastic in undertaking some task or project? What was driving you to renewed levels of energy? Eckhart Tolle suggests that if you continue to pursue the awakening of consciousness (your inner purpose), you will eventually gain a realisation of your outer purpose – what you are meant to achieve ethrough your life and work. Your activity then becomes infused with more meaning and you exude enthusiasm and new found levels of energy. At this stage, you have achieved an alignment between your inner purpose and your outer purpose and the outcome is renewed enthusiasm for, and creative pursuit of, your vision.

February 20, 2012February 20, 2012

Is Indecision Crippling Your Productivity?

Indecision has a major impact on productivity – in fact, it can cripple your productivity. When you are undecided, your cannot focus or gain momentum in a particular direction. You spend all your energy on the decision process rather than taking action.

Have you experienced yourself ‘going around in circles’ – unable to decide which direction to move in? Or have you sat there at your table endlessly tapping your pencil (as in the image above) – and becoming agitated by the pain of the decision process? Indecision can not only detract from our positive energy, it can also create negative energy and lead to exhaustion and depression. The best antidote for depression is action – but indecision prevents us taking action and becoming productive.

[Photo credit: Tapping Pencil by Rennett Stowe]

Dealing with indecision to improve your productivity

Sometimes indecision is a result of too many opportunities. If you try to pursue every opportunity, you will dissipate your energy and achieve very little on any front – you need to grasp the nettle and make a decision. Until you do decide, your indecision will erode your energy and your productivity. You will spend all day ‘tapping pencils’.

It’s always hard to make that decision – you are torn between too many alternatives. Your emotions tell you one thing and your mind another. Deciding is about making a choice between alternatives – in the process you not only decide what you will do, but also what you will not do. This exclusion process is the hard part of decision making. Often, we really don’t decide – we say that we are going to do one thing and then continue to do the other thing in our ‘spare’ time. The net result is that our productivity suffers and we are unable to give the one important thing our full focus.

Making the decision – a process to improve productivity and overcome indecision

There are many decision making processes you can use and sites like MindTools offer great advice and tools for decision making. One of the decision making approaches that I have used recently (and found very useful) is the cost/benefit analysis approach.

Basically, you look at the likely benefits (upsides) and costs (downsides) for each option you are considering and evaluate the overall net value of each option. You need to decide then which option will give you the greatest net value (benefits over costs). It pays to do this process with someone else and talk through your analysis and decision dilemmas. Often another person can offer an alternative perspective and help you make your decision.

While ever you are stuck in indecision, you can’t move forward and your productivity will definitely suffer.

February 14, 2012February 22, 2012

7 Ways Focus Improves Your Productivity

I’ve been reflecting on how focus has helped me to improve productivity with respect to blogging. Over the last 3 months, I have written 80 blog posts for my Small Business Odyssey blog (from 400 to 1000+ words each), while in the previous three months I wrote only one blog post. This improved productivity is the result of focus.

One of my early posts on this blog was about the benefits of focus for small business marketing. In this current blog post, I want to discuss how focus improves productivity – as it has obviously done for me with regard to blogging.

[Photo credit: Close Focus Lens by SqueakyMarmot]

7 ways to improve productivity through focus

There is no doubt in my mind that focus was one of the key means that helped me to improve productivity. In reflecting on this, I identified 7 key ways focus contributed to my productivity improvement:

1. Focus builds momentum

Early definitions of ‘momentum’ described it as ‘the power residing in a moving object’. You know yourself that once you get a heavy object moving, it gains momentum and is a lot easier to push (e.g. trying to push a broken-down car). For me, momentum is the key benefit of focus. Once I decided that I would focus on writing a blog about small business marketing, I began to overcome the resistances (the heavy objects) that were residing in me – the barriers to productivity. Once I started writing blog posts with my new-found focus, I began to gain momentum – writing blog posts became easier and I looked forward to writing them.

2. Focus is motivational

Once you become focused, you start to achieve things that seemed impossible before. You become more disciplined, avoid distractions and build sound habits that help to improve productivity. The sense of achievement you gain is motivational – it provides the intrinsic reward, a sense of satisfaction, that keeps you going. Extrinsic rewards, in the form of increased traffic and revenue usually follow, but it is the inner sense of achieving a worthwhile goal that provides the initial impetus. Focus enables you to gain this sense of achievement and the resultant motivation that leads to improved productivity.

3. Focus channels energy

Focus brings an alignment of your energies (mental, physical, emotional) so that you are able to pursue a single goal or direction with increasing energy. You know yourself that a lack of focus dissipates energy – you are ‘all over the place’. Focus, on the other hand, results in harnessing energy towards a single goal. I think of the analogy of using a magnifying glass to focus the energy of the sun’s rays to burn a hole in a piece of paper (as we used to do as kids). The sun’s energy is there all the time, but it is unfocused unless you capture it with a magnifying glass (or nowadays with solar panels to produce electricity). It is the focus (or the focusing instrument) that channels and concentrates energy. This channelled energy helps you, in turn, to improve productivity.

4. Focus creates a new significance

Lou Tice, famous organizational psychologist, used to talk about the power of organization vision to ‘create a new significance’ – visioning is about focusing on a desired future state that you want to work towards achieving. He explained that the process of visioning, focusing of some desired future, activates a part of the brain called the RAS (reticular activating system) which is responsible for arousal and activating the conscious mind. So, for example, you may be driving to work in a ‘mindless state’, almost on remote control. Then suddenly you see the rear lights of the car in front of you turn read (the brake light). It is the RAS that tells your body to take evasive action (your brain has recognised the significance of the red light – you are going to crash if you don’t stop or swerve away). TheRAS brings you back to a heightened state of consciousness. And so it is with focus in any arena of life, especially in small business marketing. The consequence is that you start to see things you did not notice before, new resources come to your attention, and you recognise new resource people – your brain has created a new significance around your focus and this new consciousness helps you to improve your productivity because you become better resourced and informed.

5. Focus attracts productive people to you

Other people value focus because it demonstrates commitment and achievement – a goal that many people aspire to but cannot achieve. People who have achieved in life are attracted to other productive people and recognise their expertise. Here’s a simple example from my own experience. I decided a few years ago to spend a year acquiring expertise in Squidoo and eventually attained the level of Giant Squid100 (100 excellent Squidoo lenses determined by Squidoo itself). This enabled me to write many blog posts about Squidoo and create an e-book on Squidoo Marketing Strategies which I sold via Paypal. As my expertise developed I came to the attention of Mari Smith, Facebook expert, who asked me to run a webinar for her on Squidoo for her Social Media Certification Course. This gave me increased exposure and access to resources and contributed substantially to my visibility, branding, motivation and productivity. Mari is a great example of how focus attracts others, builds expertise and increases personal productivity.

6. Focus improves efficiency

Efficiency is about achieving more in less time – the hallmark of productive people. With focus you are able to avoid distractions and use your time better. You can overcome information overload because your focus gives you the basis for ignoring, or attending to, the endless bits of information that you are bombarded with. You can sift through information quickly and attend to only those things that further your goal (your primary focus). As you become more time efficient through your focus, you improve your productivity in terms of achieving your goal.

7. Focus taps emotional energy

It is very difficult to sustain a focus unless there is some emotional attachment to the goal underlying your focus. So in my case, the focus on small business marketing contributes to two key goals of mine – the promotion of my own HR consultancy business and the development of a future stream of revenue when I wind down from running workshops. I have a very strong, emotional commitment to both these goals which are interrelated and intertwined. This enables me to tap into the emotional energy involved in my focus and to improve my productivity. The positive emotional energy sustains me when the going gets hard – writer’s block, downtime on my computer, the pressures of my offline business and illness. A key lesson here is to align your focus with a goal you find emotionally energizing and your focus will help you to sustain and improve your productivity.

For further information on ways to enjoy the benefits of focus and learn to improve productivity in your small business marketing, subscribe to my free e-course on how to be productive.

November 2, 2011

7 Benefits of Focus in Small Business Marketing

Focus is a key component for small business success. When we write about focus in the context of small business, we are talking about your focus on a target market, on specific offerings for that market (products and services) and on specific marketing strategies.

Without focus, you are attempting to be all things to everybody, and that is a recipe for failure.

This article is not about how to decide your focus, that’s another issue. What I am exploring here are seven (7) benefits of focus in the hope of assisting you to build and maintain your own focus.

1. Focus builds commitment

When you decide your focus, you are immediately inspired to action. You suddenly see a way ahead and your goal is seen as achievable. The act of choice – deciding what to do and what not to do – frees up your creative capacity and enables you to move forward. The experience of progress builds commitment to your chosen course of action.

2. Focus saves time

Focus stops you from trying to be everything to everybody. Trying to fulfil everyone’s needs is both time consuming and exhausting. Focus saves you time because it enables you to let go of a lot of things and concentrate on the things that are important.

3. Focus overcomes information overload

In this era of endless information, your focus helps you to decide what to look at and what to avoid. It becomes a benchmark for deciding relevance. For example, I used to focus on affiliate marketing and I would read everything I saw about the subject (a massive area). Now that I have re-focused onto small business marketing, I can let all the affiliate marketing information pass me by.

4. Focus attracts others

When you are focused you demonstrate commitment, enthusiasm and energy – all personal qualities that attract others. Think of someone who is really focused and recall the energy they emit and how much easier it is to be attracted to them and their business In contrast, think of someone who is “all over the place” in their activity. This lack of focus makes it really hard to get on board and get energised by what they do. In fact, this kind of person can actually repel you because they tend to “suck up” your own energy because their energy is so dissipated.

5. Focus develops disciplined energy and enhances productivity

You have to have discipline to focus your energy in the first place. Then, as you grow and maintain your focus, you strengthen your discipline and you begin to develop productive habits. Your deepening focus enables you to ward off distractions, to set priorities and to choose activities that will lead more directly to your small business goals. Focus brings into play the power of concentration.

6. Focus develops expertise and Trusted Authority status

Through your focus, you are better able to increase your knowledge and understanding of your target market and their needs. You feel more committed to use your expertise and core competence to help your customers solve their real, everyday problems. Through this assistance with problem resolution you are able to build your status as a Trusted Authority – one who is not just an expert but who has demonstrated the capacity to use their expertise to help customers solve their problems. So you become the Trusted Authority in your marketplace.

7. Focus creates wealth

Focus enables you to direct your energy and creativity to identifying and meeting your customers’ needs – the foundation for real small business growth and personal wealth. As a friend of mine, Jennifer Ledbetter, often states in the context of small business marketing:

If you are willing to do for a year what others won’t, you can spend a lifetime doing what others CAN’T.

Focus brings multiple rewards. It builds your commitment and develops your Trusted Authority status. Through focusing you save time, overcome information overload and attract others. Focus helps you to develop disciplined energy, to improve your productivity and, in the final analysis, to create wealth.