Clear Simple Business

Am I creative? No, I’m not creative. I’m not artsy so therefore I can’t be creative... Like Heather ( An Overachiever's Guide To Breaking The Rules: How To Let Go Of Perfect and Live Your Truth ), because I'm not artsy, I believed that I did not have a creative bone in my body.  But also, like Heather, I have somewhat recently discovered that I am in fact creative. I’ve learned and acknowledged that being artsy isn’t the only path to creativity.  I’m not really sure why we were both conditioned to think that creativity can only be found in the arts. Guess it’s another one of those subtle societal conditioning things. Oh the joys of societal conditioning! No matter where it came from, it’s time for it to die. Because everyone is creative.  With Heather’s help I rediscovered (and accepted) my creative side.  I looked for the evidence that points away from creativity and points towards creativity. And as you will see below, my list is quite lopsided! Not creative -...

Every business owner has a ‘ Business Junk Drawer ’. There is no use denying it! It’s full of all that stuff that you'll, “get to tomorrow”. All that stuff that you are secretly hoping will magically fix itself! The most common ‘item’ that is found in a ‘Business Junk Drawer” is the task of updating a process. A ‘Business Junk Drawer’ is full of processes that supported your company early on in the company life cycle; however, can no longer support your current business. Your employees DREAD working on them, and no matter how many times these processes are put back in your “business junk drawer” they will not fix themselves.   When a process gets put into that “business junk drawer” for too long, that's when problems can start to develop and snowball. That is when things start to get out of control. Not a pretty picture, is it? Have you reached the ‘out of control’ point or are you quickly approaching it? What if things could be different? What if I told you that there is a we...

I don’t think it’s any secret that I LOVE Excel.  With all the love I have for Excel, I’m still greatly perplexed as to why more people don’t utilize this amazing software more.  Why most people only use it to put together a basic spreadsheet to add up a column or two of numbers.   Come on people! Don’t you realize that excel can make your life sooooo much easier? Trust me on this one. Excel has been my main system for improving the lives of my clients! I shared some of my tips for streamlining excel in a previous blog post – 5 Easy Tips to Streamline Your Excel Experience. I don’t want to rehash these tips, rather I want to share with you some real-life examples of how I’ve improved my clients’ lives using only excel.  Here are some examples: Weekly Report There was once a weekly report that took all day on Monday to create. Data had to be pulled from multiple sources of truth, reformatted, manipulated, and put into graphs/tables so that it would make sense to ...

Oh Adulting…… why are you so joyless? Is that how you feel? Does adulting suck the life out of you?  It often does to me.  But why do we allow it to?  Why is it so acceptable to become joyless pits once we reach a certain age?  Can we reverse this trend?   Heather thinks so, in her book An Overachiever's Guide To Breaking The Rules: How To Let Go Of Perfect and Live Your Truth she explains how. First, it’s understanding that joy is a level above happiness. It happens in the present moment when we are fully present, when we have let go of our distractions. To me joy means belly laughing. You know that laugh that babies and kids do? That laugh that comes from deep down inside of you. That is full of pure joy and happiness. That is what joy means to me. And I have recently realized that I rarely do it. I rarely belly laugh, truly laugh. I may giggle at something. But I rarely allow myself to so deeply let go of the responsibilities around me to TRULY and deep...

Ok, I listened to my smart marketing people and first wrote some educational blogs about how many hours a week American's work on average and the effects, now I get to share my opinion and tell you my story! Why? Why? I think it's because many of us define our work success in the number of hours we work. We're really important at work if we have to work more than 40 hours a week.  We know that with each promotion, we need to add on a few extra hours a week. Why do we know this? Because this is what is presented to us when we first enter the workforce. We are constantly seeing the person at the level above us working longer than we are. It's what's to be expected.  My take on this: we're all very busy, but busy does not equal productive. Stigmatism that if you're not working 40 hours a week, that means you're lazy. But what if it's not lazy, what if it's working smarter, not harder ?  Let me use my career in corporate American as an example. I was...

I love the book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less by Greg McKoewn.  According to Greg, Essentialism is a systematic discipline for discerning what is absolutely essential, then eliminating everything that is not, so we can make the highest possible contribution toward the things that really matter. It is about doing less, but better, in every area of our lives. Essentialism is a movement whose time has come. I agree, the time has come.  But more on that later!  Let's jump back to Greg and what practicing essentialism means. Based on how you work, Greg would either consider you an essentialist or a non-essentialist. The best way to explain the difference between the two is with the figure below:                                          The same amount of energy is being exerted in both images; however, one is way more productive!  The image on the...

As I am being immersed more and more in the entrepreneurial world, I am coming across one topic over and over again. It’s not “How to leverage social media” or “Quick ways to make a million dollars.” This topic is “the power of your thoughts.” You can’t seem to take an entrepreneurial course or seminar without coming across teachings, phrases or quotes associated with the power of your thoughts. Some of my favorite examples are below:  “If you realized how powerful your thoughts are, you would never think a negative thought.” - Peace Pilgrim “What we think & how we think plays a major role in creating the life we live. If you want to change your life, change the way you look at things around.” - Taranpreet Singh “The closer you come to knowing that you alone create the world of your experience, the more vital it becomes for you to discover just who is doing the creating.” - Eric Micha'el Leventhal “The moment you think you can do something that you previously thought you couldn...