Human beings have a difficult time with the idea of limitations. We don’t want to be told there are things we cannot do, which is why we hold stubbornly to the idea that “if we really put our minds to it,” there’s nothing we can’t accomplish.

Over my years as a psychologist and coach, I have witnessed, firsthand, the frustration, disappointment, depression, and stress of those who cling to this belief. And honestly, there’s nothing more difficult than watching someone trying and failing, over and over again, to fulfill a dream or desire they have no real aptitude for.

The fact is, certain people are better at certain things than others. By embracing these “limitations” and focusing on our gifts, we actually free ourselves up to be happier and more successful.

I didn’t always feel this way. In fact, when I was still an idealistic senior in college I wrote a paper that embraced the viewpoint of Dr. Fritz Perls, the father of Gestalt Therapy, who
described diagnoses as labels that put people into pigeonholes and prevent us from having a genuine experience with others. Dr. Perls embraced the idea that our freedom lay in having no preconceived notions about different “types” of people (or, in the context of my training, their psychological differences).

In this paper, I argued for an approach to human interaction without preconceived labels or categories of any kind. This, I maintained, was the only way to have true, honest, and genuine encounters with our fellow human beings.

My professor for the class helped me to understand that what I advocated in my thesis was impossible. He patiently and kindly pointed out that labels and categories were the basis of
human learning and that, without them, every moment of every day would be unique and overwhelming. We would be like newborns, encountering everything for the first time, with no
history and no context within which to understand anything beyond the immediate sensation it created. Not a desirable way to live!

I point this out because I am often challenged by people who take umbrage with the categories that form the core of Perceptual Style Theory, which I helped to develop. These are people who resent the “limitations” of the six innate Perceptual Styles, who believe these labels can only be treated mechanically, rather than as a means to experience the unique human being beneath them.

Labels, whether they are Perceptual Styles or diagnoses, have always been, for me, a tool that provides important insights about the inner experience of another person, providing a place to start in helping clients discover themselves. Rather than limiting our freedom, they can provide the focus that helps us to discover who we are – a roadmap that can guide us in developing our gifts and talents and prevent us from wandering aimlessly in life.

Research shows that those who become specialists are happier, more successful, and have more meaningful lives than those who remain generalists. And yet, so many people spend the majority of their time and energy trying to get better at the things they have no real aptitude for, rather than polishing their own natural skills and abilities.

When used properly, as keys rather than as locks, labels give us a starting point to discover and explore the behaviors that can set free our most amazing gifts and talents – those lying dormant within us, just waiting to be discovered and developed.

So don’t try to do it all, and don’t be a Jack-(or Jill)-of-all-trades – embrace your limitations and fully explore your natural gifts and talents. Find those things you do really well and do more of them, more often. You will be pleasantly surprised to find that it will allow you to focus on what is truly meaningful and important in your life.

About the Author:

Gary Jordan, Ph.D., has over 27 years of experience in clinical psychology, behavioral assessment, individual development, and coaching. He earned his doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the California School of Professional Psychology – Berkeley.  He is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. He’s a partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., a consulting firm that specializes in helping people discover their true skills and talents.  For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com

Around this time of year, we take some time away from work. At least those who have jobs…

For those of us who own the business, such time away seems elusive.

Here are some reactions I receive when I coach entrepreneur owners to positively take time away from work and my responses:

“I can’t afford to take any time away.”

You can afford it, and will benefit.

Recall the last time you tried to remember something—a customer’s name, your password, or a vendor—and failed. The harder you tried, the further it crept into your memory.

When did you remember it?

As you went on to something else and relaxed your mind.

It’s so easy for us entrepreneur owners to keep digging when we find ourselves in a hole. To assert our strong wills and work harder in the same rut…forgetting that the only difference between a rut and a grave is a few feet.

Just as we relax and remember, when you positively take time away from work and return, you come back with a renewed mental ability to see more clearly the strengths to accentuate and how to solve system problems. You Work Positive again with a recreated energy and reconnection with your emotional engagement.

“When the cat’s away, the mice will play.”

If we see ourselves as the cat and our employees as mice, we’ve set up for ourselves a predator-prey relationship. As Mark Crowley says in Lead from the Heart, this adversarial work environment is why over half of all workers hate their jobs, productivity suffers, and top talent walks out the back door.

Employees require training and development which pays significant dividends over the long term. Unless you only want employees to micromanage and control as an extension of your fragile ego, hire folks with core values like honesty, integrity, strong work ethic, etc. Constantly evaluate and be evaluated, but just as character is defined by what you do when no one is looking, so is the employees’ ability to achieve peak performance. As you take time away, you discover the strengths of your team and your training, any weaknesses, and adapt accordingly.

Also, you find some more unique relationships in which only you can invest. For instance, I recently took off a few days to celebrate my wife’s birthday. We went antiquing, spruced up some things around our home, and I had a dinner party in her honor. She’s telling all of her friends first about the days off I took to invest in her and only when they ask about the presents I bought.

How’s that for developing a relationship?

“Time is money.”

If this is true, we really bought ourselves a job, not a business and will make more money per hour and enjoy more time away working for someone else.

Is your business scalable? Train others.

How’s your production capacity? Hire others.

Time is more than money.

At our younger daughter’s track meet one year, I overheard her conversation with a fellow runner.

“Your Dad comes to all of our meets. I wish my Dad did,” her friend said.

“Yea, he does,” our daughter replied. “He says he gets one shot at being my Daddy and I’m important enough to take off work for.”

One of our strengths as entrepreneur owners is we can figure out a way to make money.

Time is more than money. Invest wisely.

Positively take some time away from work.

About the Author: 

Dr. Joey Faucette is the #1 Amazon best-selling author of Work Positive in a Negative World (Entrepreneur Press), coach, and speaker who help professionals discover success in the silver lining of their business and achieve their dreams. Discover more at www.ListentoLife.org/speaking.

After thirty years in business coaching, there are a few things I know to be true: 1) different people have different innate skills and abilities, 2) most people are currently performing jobs that are not supported by their natural skills and abilities, and 3) when people connect with jobs that are supported by their natural skills and abilities, they shine.

All of which I’ve always found reflected in the following quote from Confucius: “Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life.”

However, I recently ran across a couple of blog posts that gave me pause to reflect on this quote, its meaning and how others sometimes interpret it differently than I do. You can peruse these posts online: “The Overjustification Effect” by David McRaney at and “Bad Career Advice: Do What You Love and You’ll Never Work a Day” by Chrissy Scivicque.

Mr. McRaney states there’s a misconception that “there is nothing better in the world than getting paid to do what you love” and the truth is actually “getting paid for doing what you already enjoy will sometimes cause your love for the task to wane because you attribute your motivation as coming from the reward, not your internal feelings.”   The key difference is the emphasis placed on reward – in my view (much like Confucius) the reward is never the primary motivation, it’s icing on the cake.

According to Ms. Scivicque: “this absurd axiom suggests that you can simply take what you already love, turn it into something for which you get paid, and it won’t ever feel like anything other than that thing you love.” Perhaps if I interpreted the quote the way she does, I would agree with her conclusions. But my view of the quote goes more like this:

“If your job requires you to perform activities that make use of skills and abilities that are innately yours, you will find that your work ceases to be drudgery and becomes something significant, meaningful and enjoyable.”

Here’s the first point of distinction between Ms. Scivicque’s interpretation and mine: choosing a job you love does not necessarily mean choosing a job for which you have a passion. You can love the fact that your nonprofit helps kids connect with mentors, but still hate picking up the phone. You can love technology, but hate dealing with people who don’t know how to make their router work. In other words, you can love what your business does, but not what you do in your business.

Here’s another important difference between my interpretation of the quote and Ms. Scivicque’s: doing a job you love does not mean you will not have to expend effort, or that there will not be struggles and challenges along the way. I do not believe that working at a job you love will always be fun or easy – only that jobs that reflect who we are in what they call on us to actually do provide satisfaction in a way that jobs we’re only doing for the money never will.

The meaning of the quote turns on the word ‘work’ and how different people perceive the word. So many of us define the word from a completely economic point of view, rather than what we do to develop our innate gifts and talents. From this economic viewpoint, work consists of activities that we don’t even like, much less love, and that we would prefer to avoid.

I view work as part of being human. It is something we do because we are alive, and part of the human imperative is to do as well as to be. Work, by its very nature, requires effort – skills must be developed, talents discovered, old abilities refreshed and new capacities revealed.

But effort and drudgery are not the same thing.

Work, as Fredrick Buechner’s defined it, is “the place where your deep gladness meets the world’s deep need.” Work is not something to be avoided or transformed; rather, it is something to embrace. Why? Because it illuminates our excellence, both to ourselves and others.

Does my interpretation of Confucius’ quote differ from that of Ms. Scivicque and Mr. McRaney? Absolutely! And perhaps from yours as well. That’s okay with me – the innate differences between people are what my work is all about.

About the Author:

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com.

I’m sitting in my local café, you know, my second office.  It’s the place I come when I need some space and inspiration.  Strangely enough the bustle, movement and background music gives me the peace and quiet I need to write.

The space is right, the deadline is here (and I love deadlines, they never fail to get me into action) and the music is great!

I’m in such a place of serene calm that each idea that surfaces just makes me smile and the page remains blank.

Every now and then email arrives in that 2 second flash at the bottom of my screen; enough to take notice and see the first few words, not enough to know the full content.  The email tells me that my website is being erratic, my assistant is trying to resolve a problem, a client has a query, and my students are submitting material for review. And I’m distracted enough not to write, but remain in the calm space of the blank page.

And then the story pieces start to show up…

We met after many months.  I adore his energy, his humor.  He is smart, original and his work is so important…and he’s broke.  He’s SO good at what he does, and no one knows him.  He’s convinced that his story is fine…yet he’s still struggling and telling himself more self-sabotaging stories.

She is flying high on the salary, the car, the great bonuses and the drugs.  No, she doesn’t call them drugs, it’s just to get a handle on the migraines and the pressure.  She’s loving life so hard, it’s killing her and every time she sees a movie, she cries.  A little girl still waiting for daddy to approve of her…

He’s 10 years old and tells me that when he’s really tired he just sits on the ground with his legs crossed and imagines the light entering each part of his body.  Starting from his feet and going right up to his head.  It lights him up and relaxes him, when he opens his eyes he feels much better.  I said, you’re amazing, you’ve taught yourself what takes most people years, to meditate.  And he shrugs and says, must have learnt it in my past life…

She exercises regularly, eats healthily and sleeps like a log.  She’s super-organized, remembers everything and never makes mistakes. She’s always on time, reminds everyone else about their commitments and bakes her own bread.  She craves cigarettes and smokes whenever no one is looking.

The stories are all around us.  Some fact, some told, some ignored and some assumed.

They are the people we know, the stories they tell us and the stories they tell themselves.

They are the stories that create our reality, from them and for us.

Did you find you?  Did you find someone you know?

We always have a choice, the choice to tell stories that keep us stuck, stories that hurt us, or the empowering stories, stories that inspire us.

What you’re choice?  What’s your story?

This morning, it went off and the sun was still asleep and it was dark. I don’t like that.

Welcome to the first workday of Daylight Savings Time.

Sure, I’ll enjoy an extra hour of sunlight this evening. But that didn’t help any this morning.

Somebody moved my time.

Seems like somebody is always moving something, aren’t they? Especially in business…

Since everything is changing so rapidly, how do you keep up?

Here are 3 tips to help you positively spring forward at work:

Remind yourself: Change happens.

Of course this isn’t my first change to Daylight Savings Time. They move my time every year. In fact, they recently changed when they move my time. Kind of a double change…

Whether you’ve been in business a couple of years or a couple of decades, your business has experienced change. Some of the change was cyclical and you anticipated it. Other change was unpredictable, perhaps blind-sided you. You worked in the darkness.

Change happens.

Sure, our brains crave the familiar. Our minds seek out patterns we recognize. We want to do business in predictable, anticipated ways that create the results we want every time.

If such a time did exist, it’s gone forever.

Remind yourself daily that change happens…to everyone, everywhere.

Remember a previous change experience you survived

Since this isn’t my first change to Daylight Savings Time, I can remember a previous time that I survived. I can recall working in my rose garden in that extra hour of daylight. Or, trail riding our horses with my wife, enjoying a beautiful, hour-delayed sunset.

You can remember a previous time at work when change intruded on your familiar-driven business, plunging you into temporary darkness. Your vendor changed price structuring. The bank changed credit terms. Your key employee left you to change jobs. You preferred the light, i.e., your previous way of doing your work.

However, you discovered a way to survive the change. You adapted successfully. In fact, you found a way to make the new become familiar—through repetition, the same way you learned your multiplication tables in third grade. You just kept going until you did it.

Remember that time of change. Sit down and soak in the success of that experience. You survived it, perhaps now thrive because of it. And you will this one as well.

Relax and focus on your positive strengths

Yes, somebody moved my time, but there remain some constants in the change. I still have a vast reserve of positive strengths to call on in dealing with the changing time. I can relax and call on my time-adapting skills and embrace the change.

Your Work Positive strengths are still yours. What you do well may take on various expressions in a changing environment, but you have strengths that are still viable and necessary to your business.

Relax into your strengths. Now that you are reminded of the endemic nature of change, and remember a previous, successful experience with it, release the anxiety that often accompanies change and relax enough to do what you do well in your business.

The time may change, but the clock continues to work.

And so will you.

Positively spring forward as you Work Positive today.

As a business coach with over thirty years of experience, I’ve seen it in action, over and over again: people succeed when they put themselves in a position to truly use their natural skills and abilities. Happiness leads to success.

When I talk about this—it seems clear that everyone in the audience knows exactly what I’m talking about, because the result is almost universally positive.

People like the idea of developing their natural skills and talents, and they are familiar (usually from early childhood) with the meaning and satisfaction that comes from engaging in activities that are supported by their innate Perceptual Style.

While this “sounds good” to almost everyone, most people don’t believe that it’s possible to succeed in business by focusing on their natural skills and abilities.

Talking to people after a presentation, I have heard many variations on the same theme: “Sounds great, but I have a business to run and don’t have time to be distracted,” or “Sounds like a lot of hard work,” or “You can’t just focus on the positive.”

Recently, though, I discovered an answer to why people can be so negative about being positive! Research in positive psychology shows that many people have a formula for happiness set up in their heads that goes like this: “If I work harder, I will be more successful. If I am more successful, then I will be happy.”

Telling someone who has this formula in his head to work on those skills and talents that are “easy” rather than “hard” is the same as telling him to give up on success and happiness and settle for what they have.

Research, however, has shown that this formula doesn’t work. Hard work may lead to some success, but success doesn’t lead to happiness. The truth is 180 degrees different: Happiness leads to real success. When people are happy and focused on the positive aspects of themselves and the world, their brains perform 31 percent better than if they are negative, neutral, or stressed. They are more intelligent, more creative, and have more energy. In fact, when people are happy, their performance improves on every single measure of business outcome.

According to Shawn Achor, founder and CEO of Good Think, Inc., “If we study what is merely average, we will remain average.” What we focus on and study creates our reality. If you focus on discovering and developing your weaknesses, your will have a never-ending list of acquired skills that you must work hard to develop. While you may become proficient in those skills over time, you will also be physically, emotionally, and psychologically stressed. And we now know how much less efficient our brains are when we are stressed!

If you want to be truly successful, first you must be happy. To be happy, you must focus on what you genuinely enjoy doing, and focus on developing what you already do well. Almost anyone who has mastered any discipline will attest to the truth of this.

So, to those who question the investment in their own talents and abilities, I say: If you want to be happy and successful, you must focus on your natural gifts and talents. It’s not a lot of hard work, it’s a lot of easy work. What you are doing now is hard work!

About the Author: 

Lynda-Ross Vega: A partner at Vega Behavioral Consulting, Ltd., Lynda-Ross specializes in helping entrepreneurs and coaches build dynamite teams and systems that WORK. She is co-creator of Perceptual Style Theory, a revolutionary psychological assessment system that teaches people how to unleash their deepest potentials for success. For free information on how to succeed as an entrepreneur or coach, create a thriving business and build your bottom line doing more of what you love, visit www.YourTalentAdvantage.com.

Step 1 – Make your days count with high impact business-building activities. And this to me was the most important step.  I had to ask myself, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis, “What am I doing now that should be delegated or dropped in order for me to work part-time?”  What can go… what must go so that I can accomplish this?

First, figure out what days and hours would work best for you in order to have your ideal lifestyle.  Once you decide the part-time hours you want, block that time off.  These are your new, dedicated work hours, and your productivity becomes magnified during these hours.  Get rid of all non-service delivery tasks, for example writing copy for ads, scheduling meetings, checking your emails, networking, working on your e-zine, even sales activity.  And when you work from home, like I did, you have to resist the urge to start cleaning the house, make shopping lists, and start dinner.

You will need to develop what I call a “delegation consciousness”.  In every moment of every day, ask yourself, “should I be doing this?”  I’ll give you an example of how this worked for me, and it was life-changing.  I have an e-zine that I send out to my list, and I decided to hire a virtual assistant team to take charge of the process for me, because I was spending way too much time on it.  By delegating my e-zine maintenance, that put into place a circumstance that allowed me to have a team already in place when the floodgates opened and business started pouring in.  I was ready for it.  I needed to push against my fears that I should do it myself and that I couldn’t afford to outsource this.  And it felt great when I let go of it.

Are you making proclamations that don’t really apply to the person you are now?  Maybe you’ve caught yourself being sucked into something you know isn’t the best use of your time, and you swear you’re not going to get caught up in it again.  But the next time it comes up, there you go.  We go to business events, read books, attend networking meetings, make cold calls… and this is ok to do once you’ve gotten your part-time hours under control.  But for now, get rid of anything that is not essential to you right now.  This is going to be extreme, you will be cutting back to bare minimums.  But don’t just cut back, be very conscious of what you are bringing in to your business, as well.

Solutions only have the opportunity to present themselves when you make a decision.  You’ll find many things that can wait if you really want to work part-time.  What is the benefit of working part-time?  Only you can answer that for yourself.  For me, it re-energized me, and gave purpose to everything I did with my business, and allowed me to live the life I’d only dreamed of.

About the Author:

Lisa Cherney, a.k.a. the Juicy Marketing Expert, founded Conscious Marketing 12 years ago to help small business owners find their authentic marketing voice, attract their ideal clients and increase their sales. Following her own Stand Out & Be Juicy program, which centers on owning your unique self and laser-focus marketing, Lisa has tripled her income while working
part-time.

Prior to Conscious Marketing, Lisa worked with many Fortune 500 companies, including AT&T, Lipton, Nissan, Blue Cross and Equal. She is a highly sought after speaker and often shares the stage with experts such as Jack Assaraf (The Secret), Jack Canfield and Jill Lublin. Learn more about Lisa at www.consciousmarketing.com or call 887-771-0156.

AccountingDegree.com: The worlds of business and dating have more in common than you may think. There are relationships, growth, and negotiation in both situations, and good ideas from one may apply in the other. Check out these trusted business rules that are great to follow in the dating world as well.

1. Be ready for growth: Businesses and relationships can both start out small, but grow quickly. Always have a plan for what you’d like to do with future growth.

2. Build trust: Businesses must be trustworthy to win and keep clients, and the same is true in relationships. Build trust within your relationship so that you’ll have a strong foundation.

3. He who cares least, wins: This saying is true in negotiations as it is in relationships. Be careful not to invest too much into a new relationship too fast, while the person you’re dating cares less than you do.

4. Find a mentor: It’s a great idea to have a mentor for your career, but there’s great value in having one for your dating life as well. Enlist a trusted friend who has been there to offer advice and emotional support.

5. It costs much more to get a new customer than it does to retain an existing one: Saving a relationship that’s worth working through is usually better than starting over from scratch.

6. Interview lots of customers (dates): This is particularly true in online dating. Cast a wide net, and pick out only the best.

7. Get involved in the community: Businesses can improve their profile by interacting within their communities, and those who are dating can benefit from this as well. Getting out there and being involved in your community can be great for meeting new people and enriching yourself.

8. Never sleep with your boss: This rule is true in business and dating — it’s just too messy to sleep with a coworker, especially your boss.

9. Use an appropriate tone in correspondence: When writing business emails, it’s important to consider how what you’re saying may be taken-and the same is true for dating.

10. Don’t leave customers in limbo: You wouldn’t leave a customer hanging with a need or a complaint, so make sure and resolve issues within relationships as well.

11. Listen to your employees: Business owners can’t get far without paying attention to the needs of their employees, and your relationship won’t do well if you don’t listen to your partner’s needs, either.

12. First impressions are important: When meeting someone for the first time, pay attention to how you may be coming across.

13. Show off your best work: Businesses like to highlight their best projects and most satisfied customers. Do the same in dating by highlighting your best attributes.

14. Under-promise and over-deliver: Businesses make their customers happy by exceeding expectations, and this concept works in the dating world, too. Surprise your date with something delightful and unexpected.

15. Remember to participate: Conversations work two ways, so listen and respond meaningfully.

16. Address problems promptly: Businesses can do well by finding and resolving problems quickly. In relationships, this is important as well, keeping small issues from becoming big ones.

17. Be consistent: Businesses must keep a consistent look, feel, and rules. When dating, make sure that you’re always your genuine self any time you’re interacting with others.

18. Stay flexible: In order to stay in business, it’s important to adapt to the needs of your market. In dating, you must be willing to be flexible and compromise in a relationship.

19. Get over it: Don’t let resentment and anger keep you down, whether it’s with a customer or your date.

20. Be honest: Businesses that engage in shady ethics often don’t stay in business very long, and the same is true for relationships. Be open, honest, and always tell the truth.

20 Established Business Rules You Should Bring to the Dating World [AccountingDegree.com]

Nearly 300 years ago, a British physician, preacher and intellectual by the name of Thomas Fuller said, “Health is not valued till sickness comes.”

Such sage historical wisdom still holds true today. Those who hope to achieve the highest heights in the 21st Century economy need to take care of something as simple as personal health. Making a commitment to healthy living is a prerequisite for success. But it’s not only physical health that matters.

Those who enjoy long-term success realize that their personal lives must be in order. That means you should care for your mental, physical, emotional, spiritual and financial health as much as the health of your career.

It is very difficult to be successful at work when your personal life is a mess. If your marriage is dysfunctional, it’s hard to focus on high-level career achievement. If you lack a set of core beliefs, you may not be able to create philosophy of life that guides you to some great achievement. If you are barely keeping your financial head above water, you don’t have the financial ability to take on entrepreneurial endeavors. Whatever the problem, you will be more successful in all facets of life if you take care of things at home.

A good attitude does wonders for your success. Think positive thoughts and constantly reinforce yourself in your own mind. As Norman Vincent Peale taught us in his famous book, The Power of Positive Thinking, you can cause successful outcomes by forcing yourself to be optimistic.

After you adopt a positive attitude, there are several other things you can do that will make you a healthier person.

If you have a faith, I recommend you practice it. Believing in and answering to a higher power has an amazing affect on career success. Prayer, meditation or whatever you choose to call it, purges the toxins from your mind and gives you strength and confidence.

After faith comes family. No matter how ambitious you are, your family should be one of your highest priorities. Do whatever it takes to protect your familial relationships. If things ever get really tough, you want to be able to depend on those who share your blood. Stick up for your family members and look out for their interests. In the long run you will be far richer if family comes before career.

Close friends are almost as important as family. A long-time friend who truly understands you is worth his or her weight in gold. Put the important people in your life on a pedestal and make them your priority. If you go out of your way to put people first, you will have more business opportunities than you can handle.

Because family and friends are so important, you should adopt an attitude of acceptance. Let them be who they are and enjoy them in spite of all their flaws and weaknesses. Forgive them any time they wrong you. Bite your tongue, when you feel like saying something hurtful to a friend or family member. These relationships are so important, that it’s foolish to put them at risk over some temporary passion.

While relationship-building contributes to career success, so does physical health. You don’t have to be an obsessive gym rat, but being in shape and consuming the right nutrition gives you more energy and stamina.

Keep your home life organized. Make sure your house is generally clean and tidy. Have a good system for organizing your bills and other important papers. Develop systems and routines for the simple, daily things. If you run a tight ship at home, you will have time for important things. After all, it’s awfully hard to conquer the world if you’re constantly misplacing your car keys.

Hobbies and recreation are also parts of a healthy life. Having enjoyable stimulation outside work recharges your battery and contributes to creative thinking. Just don’t go too hog wild with your hobbies. Some people get so deeply involved in hobbies that they hurt their job performance and drain their bank accounts.

Speaking of bank accounts, personal financial discipline is part of a healthy lifestyle. Just as you need to get your body in shape, you need to shape up your financial condition as well. A long time ago, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.”

There has always been a portion of the population that has chosen to live on the edge of the financial abyss, recklessly spending all they have, investing little or nothing. Unfortunately, that portion of the population has been growing rapidly, and it’s becoming quite a problem.

Living a financially reckless life will eventually catch up with you and hurt your career. If you have no savings, you have no “go-to-hell-money,” the power to walk away from a job or a client when you’re not happy. A lot of financial debt can prevent you from taking some lower paying job that might actually make you happier. For every minute you spend worrying and fretting about how you will make ends meet, you are taking away time from your grander goals.

It sounds so elementary, but it’s worth a reminder. Live a balanced and healthful life in order to reach the top.

That said, let’s end with one disclaimer: don’t be obsessive-compulsive in your quest for a healthy lifestyle, because as comedian Redd Foxx said, “Health nuts are going to feel stupid someday, lying in hospitals dying of nothing.”

About the Author:

Jeff Beals is an award-winning author, who helps professionals do more business and have a greater impact on the world through effective sales, marketing and personal branding techniques.  As a professional speaker, he delivers energetic and humorous keynote speeches and workshops to audiences worldwide.   You can learn more and follow his “Business Motivation Blog” at http://www.JeffBeals.com.