Your thoughts are influenced by peers, world views, culture, the media religion and social expectation. They determine 95% of the emotions you experience every day. Most of our thoughts are automatic and habitual and control your pain, pleasure belief and values.

Just as gravity makes no distinction or judgments as to WHO it works for, Universal Laws operate with the same precise and absolute fashion. What you think about influences the actions you do and what you become. Your thinking creates a dominate thought and pattern. What you think about, emotionalize and visualize continuously grows in your reality.

So now that you know how your thoughts create your reality lets take a look at how you can transform your negative thoughts and attitude. So the good news is most of your negative attitude stems from the 95% of repeated negative thoughts. The bad news is that you’ve had these thoughts so often and for so long you actually believe they’re real, not just on the mindset level but on a cellular level.

1. Associate with inspiring people. We all have friends and family we love and care about that after a couple of hours in their company you feel upset and unhappy. Although I would be the last person to say stay away from them you can hang out with them in smaller doses. Instead of spend a day or in some cases a few hours with them make it a quick lunch instead. If you don’t know or can’t hang out with inspiring people then read inspiring stories and biographies.
2. Focus on what you have and not on what you don’t have. Spend more time thinking about what’s working in your life and not what’s not working and what you have control of and what you can’t control.
3. Ask yourself empowering questions. Even in the face of things you may not have chosen you can choose how your react by asking yourself questions that put you in control.

a. What’s good about this situation?
b. What can I learn from this and what opportunities are within my grasp because of this?
c. How can I make myself feel great about this? What story can I tell that would put this situation in a positive light.
d. How can I personally grow from this experience? Better yet how can I choose to grow from this experience?

We all have to learn to accept the things we cannot change but we can choose to think differently about a situation. Make the decision to change and affirm it every day by choosing positive thoughts. The process itself is pretty simple but having the constant preserverance to first recognize one of the 4 out of 5 negative thoughts and allowing that thought or the fact that it came into your mind to take control but to place that negative thought into a bubble and allow it to float away is an important part of this process.

So what has happened along the way that we believe we cannot fail or if we do it’s the end of the road. We have become a society obsessed with perfectionism and with instant gratification and over complicating situations. Fear of failure is rampant. There are entire books, websites, and programs designed around those three little words “fear of failure”. You’re afraid to make mistake, or are so easily overwhelmed when they happen you become afraid to take risks.

As a result as a business owner you consistently procrastinate focus on all the negative possibilities and no matter how farfetched the possibilities you believe the worse will surely happen in this situation. Or maybe you lack commitment discipline or patience.

But think about it. The not so popular idea of failure also has a positive side. Failure presents new opportunities and perspectives you may not have considered before. It teaches the value of hard work . The truth is if it were easy it wouldn’t be fun and you’d have no sense of accomplishment. The learning and the fun is in the journey. If that weren’t true most millionaires would stop after making their millions but instead most become more inspired and creative because they are searching for the next journey in their life. It make life more interesting and challenging and adds clarity to your decisions.

When you are failing here are a few things to avoid:

1. Spending time blaming yourself
2. Spending time trying to avoid failure (this one won’t work anyway)
3. Dwelling you past mistakes
4. Making excuse
5. Unnecessary stressing or worrying
6. Seeing failure as the end
7. Spending time blaming yourself or others
8. Seeing failure as the end

So what do you do when your staring in the face of failure. Immediately look for the opportunity. Spend some time learning from the experience. Acknowledge and take ownership and vie yourself a pep talk and some positive encouraging words.

Presumably you want to not feel like a failure, so rather than looking at what hasn’t gone as planned learn from your experience by asking “what can I learn from this? What could I have done differently? Where do I need to improve, What knowledge am I lacking, and What is good about this”.

On the surface this seems pretty simple maybe overly simplified, but as I mentioned earlier we tend to over complicate situation and look for hard answers when the easy ones are standing right in front of us.

Celebrate failure it can be the beginning of something great. Failing forward is an invaluable tool for your success. Where do you see yourself five years from now? Failing forward I hope.

We can do this by changing how we think about things. If you are prone to negative thoughts it is important to change your negative thoughts to positive ones, you can do this by first identifying negative thoughts and then by:

Turning your thoughts into an image. You can do this by using a vision board, or a service like Pinterest. Put all your negative thoughts into pictures on the vision board, then take one thing at a time and change it to positive. For example, today you live in an apartment, but you want to live in a nice house. Put up a picture of the apartment, then in the new vision board put a picture of your dream house. Do this with each negative thought until you’ve created a vision board with the positive images that you desire.

Choose an alternative thought. Focusing on an alternative thought will go far into making you feel like the positive alternative is the reality. After all, you are the one who is in charge of your reality. You are the one who is empowered to make change. You can change your life by changing your thoughts about your life. Further, by focusing on solutions instead of problems, you can work toward creating that ideal life you envisioned on the vision board.

In order to give yourself an emotional facelift ask yourself the right questions:

What’s great about today? — Be specific in your answers. Write down exactly what is great about today. Maybe the only thing great today is that you’re up and breathing, maybe you love the weather, maybe you got a big deposit into your PayPal account. Describe exactly what is great today in specific detail.

What do I like the most about this? — Now take what you like about today and expand about why you like it, and what part you like most. Do you like most the fact that you can still breathe and you’re alive so that you can contribute to society, or something else? Do you like the deposit into your PayPal account because it was residual income or because you worked hard for that payment? Explain it.

What am I most proud of? — Describe how the event above makes you proud. Are you proud that you can be happy you’re still breathing due to something you went through? Did you overcome an unhealthy life, lose weight, start exercising? Did you implement a lesson you learned and it resulted in earning money?

What am I most looking forward to? — What are you looking most forward to in your life? Does the advent of getting money in your PayPal account make you excited ? Why, what are you looking forward to?

How can it get any better than this? — What can I do to make it better? Or, can I revel in the experience by fully feeling how great I feel right now? Enjoy the feeling and then figure out how to do it again so you can have that feeling again.

Make client care a priority. After all, without clients, you do not have a business. You’re clients aren’t there for you, you are there for them. You provide a product or service for them, and without them, you don’t exist. Therefore, good customer service is imperative for the life of your business.

When you first start your business it is possible to handle the customer care yourself, as long as you make it your first priority each day to answer questions, fix issues, and make your clients happy. But, if you’re finding yourself putting this on the back burner more and more it’s time to outsource. Do not put client care on your to-do list, just do it. Right now. If you don’t, you’ll regret it. Better to create a plan of action while your business is still getting off the ground than to wait until ill will has already been creating. You want to avoid fires, not run around putting them out.

The worst thing that can happen to a company that doesn’t put client care first is that they will be seen as untrustworthy. Being trustworthy is an essential component to attracting clients and keeping clients. After all, people want to do business with people they trust. If they’re going to open their PayPal accounts to you, the very first thing they need to feel is trust. If they see the right items on your website, and get the right response to their questions, they will trust you and spend money with you.

It is important to remember the following:

• The Customer Pays Your Bills — Yes, you have your own business and you can choose not to do business with people you don’t like. However, you don’t want to turn off your entire niche by being hard to deal with. Your customer pays your bills! They are kind of your boss. There is a fine line, but you will need to learn to deal with people in a kind way.
• Appreciate Your Clients by Showing Them — Clients love being appreciated! Consider having a yearly client appreciation day, or simply letting them know via email on a regular basis how much you appreciate them.
• Teach Clients Your System — As a business owner you have your own system of how you want to accomplish tasks for and with your client. It is important that you teach the client your system because they can’t use it properly if they don’t know how to use it. Perhaps making some visuals via digital video to show clients how to do things will help.
• Say Yes Whenever You Can — If saying yes doesn’t affect your bottom line, or hurt your reputation, or cause any issues, why not say yes. “Yes”, is a very powerful word! You’ll need to consider each situation individually, but saying yes more, will automatically get you more business.
• Under Promise and Over Deliver — Don’t promise the moon and the stars and only deliver the moon. Deliver what you’ve promised, and then add a little more on top. That is why we love getting a cherry on top of our sundae! It’s the little extra, that makes it extraordinary.
• Ask For Feedback and Listen — After each service you provide, or a few months after your client receives your product, ask for feedback from your clients. Then, listen to it. Even if you get negative feedback always read between the lines for anything of value that you can use to make your services and / or product even better.
• Value Contractors — If you use contractors to perform any services, value them. Train them properly by giving them appropriate feedback. Sometimes it can be hard to give a critique on their performance because you don’t want to hurt their feelings, but you’re not doing them any favors by not telling them both positive and negative feedback.

Gratitude is one of the most powerful and transformational energies in the world. It can be expressed, as the definition explains, in many ways via your attitude and your actions. It can also be experienced and demonstrated both before and after you receive the benefit. Therefore, you can experience gratitude for something that will come, even if it’s not here yet.

If you learn to express gratitude internally and externally, you’ll fill your life with abundance. Abundance can mean many things such as money, love, or however you define the life of abundance that you want. If you desire abundance in your business, a spirit of gratitude will grow your business, but it will also improve your life in other ways, including personally.

Being in the essence of gratitude is our natural state and if we deviate from this it can cause depression and interfere in our energy in such a way as to remove from us the abundance we crave in our lives, including our business. Due to the pressures of life, we often lose our sense of gratitude. Try to remember back when you were a child and how happy the smallest thing made you. If you have a young child or grandchild, (observe one in the park if you must) observe how they act when they see a simple flower, or play in the water. They are full of joy and appreciation for every little thing!

That attitude of gratitude, now that you’re an adult, is a choice. But, remember, it was your natural state before you grew up. In each situation, there is always a lesson to learn, when you’re able to see the message, you will able to feel the gratitude. But, you have to first accept that you do have a choice in any situation to feel gratitude. Sometimes it may seem impossible to feel it but if your mind and heart are open to the idea, you can get there eventually. The trick is to notice when you’re not demonstrating gratitude, and to refocus your effort on that task.

You can work back to that natural state a little at a time:

• Wake up in the morning and stretch. Close your eyes, and slowly breathe in and breathe out, and feel the joy and gratitude for each breath and movement.
• As you work during the day or night, consider how fortunate you are to be able to do what you do. To have the use of the computer, to have the intelligence to do what you do, and the drive to do it.

As you create moments where you stop to feel the gratitude, you will start to notice more and more, that you are naturally feeling gratitude throughout the day, and you will be rewarded with more abundance, and more gratitude and then more abundance. It is a circle that you can make the choice to enter, by making that first step.

Secret #1 Identify Your Stressors

The very first and most important step to take when endeavoring to run a stress-free business is to identify your stressors and adjust them to make them stress-free. For instance, if you’re not a morning person why try to force yourself to get up in the morning to work on your business? Why not accept the fact that you’re not a morning person and work during the time that works best for you?

Or, what if you have trouble meeting deadlines, and this is what is causing stress in your life. Check to make sure you that you’re setting realistic deadlines. If you’re constantly struggling to meet a deadline, and barely making it, figure out how to ensure that this does not happen by creating a more realistic schedule, putting the tasks into your calendar so that you can’t forget, and better organizing your day.

Sit down and write down the situations that happen each day that cause stress. Once you’ve done that, it is also important to brainstorm on how to not just avoid the stressor, but to eliminate it. That doesn’t mean you don’t tackle the task, but it means you decide how to tackle the task without stress. For instance, the task is creating spreadsheet, you hate creating spreadsheets, so you avoid it, and then you rush to get it done at the last moment. Why not outsource the task! If you can’t outsource the task, mark out time each day that you’ll work on the spreadsheet in small components so that you aren’t doing it at the last moment.

Secret #2: Quiet Your Mind

At any moment during the day if you start to feel stressed out it important to catch the feeling and take a time out. Clear your mind, breathe in and out, focus on something else for a few moments and then go back to the other issue. Taking quiet time out to just focus your mind on breathing, music, mediation or prayer will go far in helping you combat stressful situations. You can even take a time out in your mind right in the middle of any stressful situation if you create a movement or motion or thought that is designed to calm you. Practice this during your daily quiet moments.

Secret #3: Celebrate What is Here and Now

One thing that universally creates stress for most people is not living in the here and now. If you find yourself constantly focusing on “what if”, this, or “what if” that, or what happened in the past, or what “might” happen in the future it, will be difficult for you to live a stress-free life and run a stress-free business. Some people call this being mindful. If you are mindful of what is happening right now, you’ll find yourself being less stressed. Right now the air smells sweet, right now I’m conquering this spreadsheet (halleluiah!), right now I’m being quiet and enjoying the moment.

There is a Song by Sheryl Crow called “Soak Up The Sun” which has a verse that goes as follows:

“I don’t have digital
I don’t have diddly squat
It’s not having what you want
It’s wanting what you’ve got”

The last line, “It’s wanting what you’ve got”, is a very important line. Learning to be thankful for what we have right now, will create a situation that allows us to work stress-free today because we are satisfied with how things are right now.

The old story I’m talking about is not the fairy tale story your mother told you before bed at night, but it’s the old story we drag around like a huge bag of useless rocks. Keeping this story alive drains your life force, your energy, and your very happiness. Keeping this story going allows you to wallow and remain a victim. If you choose, and it is a choice, to let go of this story you can craft a new life based on triumph, instead of victimhood.

It may sound simplistic to say that you can choose, but you can. In fact, you can not only choose your story, you can rewrite your story. After all, you’re not dead yet! The first step in this process is to simply stop telling that old story. That old story that makes you a victim. That old story that makes it impossible for you to move forward. Let go of that old story. That old story is over. That old story is just dragging you down.

The next step is to replace your old story with a new story, one that is full of gratitude. The truth is, it’s your life, so while you can’t change the past, you can change how it affects you. If something tragic happened to you in the past, you lost a loved one, suffered a divorce, failed at something you tried to do, you can change how the situation affects your life today by figuring out what you were supposed to learn from the event. By rewriting the story into one of gratitude, learning, and moving forward, you can transform the story from a victim story to one of empowerment.

Ultimately, it’s a choice that comes down to being free, or hanging on to that old story. By simply changing your reaction to a situation, you can make the story one that demonstrates your power, your victory over oppression, your success climbing out of despair, your joy after suffering from depression. In order to accomplish this, you will need to be very aware of how you react to each situation, and then learn to turn negative thoughts to positive thoughts.

Select an area of your life that’s important to you. One of the keys to changing your story is selecting a goal that truly matters. Ideally, you can find something you want more than anything. This will help keep you dedicated.

Be specific. The whole idea of choosing your own story can seem over-simplified. Here’s how to be more specific:

Be realistic. Set a realistic timeframe to complete your story.

For the choosing to be healthy instead of saying I want to get into shape consider committing to specifics such as, “I want to lose 3 inches from my hips or I want to walk for 40 minutes three times per week.

At first it will feel unnatural, but soon it will feel as natural as breathing, if you do the work and practice. Your first task is to accept that you do have a choice. Freedom, or hanging on to your old story.

Time that you treat as the most important and valuable in your day or week. This is time you don’t juggle around for anything but emergencies.

We all have time that we waste each day, whether it be from watching television, or grabbing an extra nap, there is time that you can devote just to your business.

How much time do you currently spend doing the things you know will give you more energy, consciousness, inspiration, and motivation to manifest the life you want?

Believe it or not, doing things that are energy producing such as exercise, eating right and taking care of yourself will add time into your day, rather than detract from it. So the first thing you need to do in order to ensure that you have sacred time for your business is take care of yourself! Ensure that you do the things you know you should do to take care of your mind and body and spirit so that you have plenty of mental and physical energy left to complete your commitments.

How often have you read about a great technique or exercise and you did not implement it, simply because you never make the time to follow through with a priority?

The next step to ensuring you have sacred time for your business is to actually make the time to implement a new technique when you learn it. How many times have you purchased a product or became involved in a service and never follow-up with what you learned? I know I have and that’s just a waste of time.

Daily Calendar friend or foe

When you learn a new process commit to it. The only way you can do this is to put it into your calendar in writing. Your calendar, your daily planner, is your friend. This is what you need to live and die by, when trying to organize your home business. If something is not written in your calendar, you’re less likely to follow through. If you write it down, you will treat it as important and do it. I often use Google’s free Calendar, it’s easy and convenient and I have it set up to send me email reminders!

Now what do I mean by “sacred time”?

I mean that you treat this allotted time as if it were an important meeting with someone ready to hand you over thousands of dollars just to attend. If you’re a coach, it no different then the time you set up with meeting with your coaching clients. I know you wouldn’t skip the coaching session because you got involved in a Facebook chat or decided to send a few more tweets. You only reschedule if it’s an important family emergency. Don’t interrupt your work time for a movie, coffee with friends, or to watch television. Think of how you accomplish so much at your job. You accomplish a lot because you have a set work schedule. A time in which you are expected to perform your job. If you treat your business the same way, setting aside specific working times, and don’t deviate unless it’s a true emergency in other words treat it just as you would a job then you’re on the right path.

You’re not going to have a home business if you don’t work in your home business. Much the same as you won’t have a job if you don’t perform at work!

The more you value this time, the more you will learn how to appreciate yourself so that you can manifest a business and life that you love!

Create a Plan – Plan one positive action for the day, before you start your morning routine. This will get you off to a great start each morning. Some ideas are to exercise, or eat a healthy breakfast. Other ideas are to say three nice things to yourself and others each morning. It’s up to you how you will carry out the positivity and totally dependent upon your personal goals. But if you have a plan you’ll be more likely to be successful.

Take Time in the Morning – Spend at least 10 minutes relaxing before heading out to face the day. Don’t roll out of bed and rush to the office, even if the office is simply in the other room. It is very important to take time out, at least ten minutes to relax with the paper, a cup of tea, or a soak in the tub. Getting up a bit earlier so that you don’t have to rush will create a positive vibe throughout your day and immediately reduce stress by not starting your day off with the production of stress.

Take Time in the Evening – Reflect on the day’s events and spend 10 minutes planning for tomorrow. It’s very important that you carve out the time for yourself to plan for the next day as well as think about how your day went. Think about the good and the bad, but only give yourself a specific amount of time to focus on it so that you can move on to the next thing and make plans for tomorrow.

Don’t be a People Pleaser – Quit playing the “I must please everyone” role. This is a role that many people take on themselves, especially mothers and wives. We are naturally prone to wanting to please those we love and sometimes even people we don’t even like! Good thing is that you can stop it right now. There is absolutely no reason to be a people pleaser. You don’t have to be mean to people, but ensure that you know why you are saying YES to anything you say Yes to and the reason best not be just to please the other person.

Stay Calm — When you feel stress, stop and take 10 breaths before proceeding. Just taking the time to breath can reduce a lot of stress. It might be hard to believe but most people don’t breath correctly. To breath correctly you must breath into your diaphragm filling your lungs with air, your abdomen should rise and fall, not just your chest. Try breathing in through your nose and out through your mouth for ten practiced breaths when you feel nervous, stressed, or just tired.

Positive Stress is Good — Remember that not all stress is bad, but all stress has the same effect on your body. Some stress can encourage you to try harder. For instance if you feel stress about a test, or about a report that you need to turn in, or even about a fun party, you’ll automatically work harder to either do well, or to have fun. Stress can be a huge motivating factor in your life if you learn to use it correctly.

Pushing yourself to work too hard, staying up too late, eating too much, or constantly worrying are not only stressful to the mind but to the body and can lead to heart disease, cancer and a variety of life altering illnesses. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s your choice. Be good to yourself and to your business by doing small things every day to live a stress free life.

So here’s a question only you can answer. What’s the fire behind your business?

Make marketing a priority?

Is marketing first on your list each and every week? Not just the weeks you feel like making extra money or the weeks that you find yourself low on cash. When you’re not consistent with your marketing it shows. Marketing is all about making the connection. Clients and potential clients have the uncanny ability to pick up on that vibe of desperation

Whether you have a services business or you sell products it is vital that you spend every moment of the time you’ve set aside for work, working, whether that is client work, administrative tasks, or marketing.

Here’s an important point. Client work puts money in your bank account today, but marketing or connecting with clients puts money in your bank account tomorrow, and the day after that, and the day after that…

So what’s next?

If you don’t have enough clients follow the 80/20 rule put 80% of your effort in marketing. If you’ve set aside 5 hours a day to work, and you have 1 hour of client work. Then you have four hours left. Spend at least 3 to 3.5 hours on marketing. If you do not have all the clients you want to have, and you’re not marketing well to quote a Michael Jackson song “(I’am) starting with the man in the mirror.”

If your running your business like a business then market your business just as you would any 9 – 5 job (not just when you feel like marketing). Sometimes working from home starts to feel like a hobby so it is imperative that you treat your business as what it is, a business — not a hobby.

One final point.

You may be thinking well what do I do how should I market, what is the best way to market. It doesn’t matter if you do in person networking, use social media, SEO, or buy ads. What is more important is that you DO IT. If you hate networking and you try to force yourself to network you may get out there to meet new people a couple of times but you won’t be consistent. On the other hand if you love in-person networking but hate social media then network. If you take pleasure from social networking, spend some of your time doing that. But, on the other hand if you hate article marketing, outsource it if you can. If you can’t outsource due to limited funds right now, make it a goal to outsource eventually. Because it’s the consistency that makes people stand up and take notice and ultimately connect with your message and purchase your products or services.

Once you create a marketing plan, spend most of your time marketing in ways that are most enjoyable for you.

Remember to stick with your plan. Just like you plan how many calories you will eat each day when you are on a diet, it is important to plan not only how much you will work each day, but to plan exactly what you will do each day with time for maximum effort in attracting more clients.

Have fun. Marketing is fun when you doing what you love and you’re connecting with people who love what you have to offer.