Today is the last day in the season of “ordinary time” in the church, and is marked by faithful and secular alike, by feasting, often on pancakes. Pancakes were the chosen food of the past because they use fat, flour and sugar, all things that people wanted to use up before the season of fasting called Lent begins the next day.

This is NOT a religion article, so if you are not a religious person, keep reading, the point of this article is not religious but applies to us all. It’s the concept of the value of fasting and feasting.

In the church, the season of Lent is a season of fasting, sacrificing and giving alms (giving to others) and is meant to prepare us for the greatest “feast” in the church calendar, Easter. While you may not celebrate Lent or Easter, we can all benefit from these age-old concepts. Fasting and feasting can be used together as a means to motivate and challenge us in our personal growth.

The idea of fasting is not terribly popular today. Those of us who live in the western part of the world, have come to take for granted that we should have whatever we want, whenever we want it. The media in all of it’s forms encourages us to: “have it your way”, “because you deserve it”. We’re told that we should have whatever we want, no matter the cost, for no other reason than because we want it.

At first it sounds like a great idea. After all, how could fulfilling all of my desires be a BAD thing? The problem is that human nature being what it is, if we live this way we will never be satisfied. When we live with an idea that we are empty and we need to “fill ourselves up” with stuff, we discover that no amount of stuff will ever fill us and we find ourselves on the hamster wheel of working more, to make more money, to buy more stuff. Then we have to work more to pay the bills on that stuff and on it goes.

That is  just one example. Is it possible that the obesity epidemic that is creating the first generation of children in our history in this part of the world, who will have a LOWER life expectancy than their parents, due at all to the idea that we think we should be feasting ALL THE TIME? I think so.

The benefits to FASTING from some of the things we like some of the time, are many. Through this practice, we learn self-discipline; about working hard for something we want; and about being happy with what we have. All good things for us to learn. Maybe the greatest benefit, and easiest one to see, is that by temporarily depriving ourselves of certain things for a period of time, we are able to ENJOY those things so much more when we allow ourselves to have them again. Would that Christmas turkey dinner be as good if you ate turkey every day? Doesn’t a cold beer taste better on a hot day? Fasting actually makes feasting MORE enjoyable.

So as Lent begins tomorrow, even if you aren’t going to participate for religious reasons, consider participating on another level. Think about something that you might deprive yourself of, or a new discipline that you might take on, as a way to grow. Happy Lent everyone!

If you have, you know how challenging they can be, especially in the beginning. While some puzzles are relatively simple, those will very small pieces and very similar colours, can be incredibly difficult. It’s often not until we are halfway through the puzzle or more, before it really starts to take shape and we can visualize the end result. I guess that’s why puzzle makers put that picture of the finished puzzle on the front of the box so that we know what the thing is supposed to look like:)

Isn’t life a lot like that sometimes? Have you ever had a time in your life where you felt a little lost? Where you felt that you weren’t sure what the end result would look like, or even if you were putting “the puzzle” together properly?

All too often in life, despite being well-intentioned, having established goals, and being a hard-worker, we can get stuck in a place where we aren’t sure we are putting the pieces together properly and the end result is so far off in sight that we just can’t get a clear visual of what it looks like.

When we hit these points, it’s helpful to remember what a big difference consistent, daily, action can have on long-term goals. Long goals, and major results don’t happen all at once. They don’t happen in a few hours, a few days or in many cases, even a few years. They take a lot of time. The progress is slow and there are many hiccups, speedbumps and roadblocks along the way. Those who win in life, much like those who win at the challenge of putting a puzzle together, are those who continue to make small progress over time until they can reap the cumulative results.

Have you ever been taught the power of saving with this example? Save $0.01 on the first day and then double the amount every day after that. Does that make you wealthy? Well after 7 days you only have $0.64 – not very exciting.Even by the end of two weeks you only have $81.92. Not bad, but nothing to write home about. But by one week later, you’d have over $21,000 and seven days after that, you’d have  $1,342,177.28! You’d be a millionaire in less than a month!

Granted few of us could do this kind of saving, but that’s not really the point. The point is to realize the power of slow, steady, progress. For example, let’s say you put $5000 in an investment earning 10% a year and you did that when you were 45yrs old. By the time you were ready to retire at 65, your $5000 would have become $33,637. Not bad. But, if you’d made the same $5000 investment and started instead when you were 25 instead of 45, that same $5000 would have grown to over $226,000! That’s an incredible difference in results for a relatively small difference in effort (you simply started a lot sooner). That’s the power of small, consistent effort over time.

So what’s the lesson. Get started today! Make small, consistent, progress each and every day. Don’t get discouraged when you don’t see much in terms of results initially. In the investment example, you’d only have $5500 after your first year. Just stay with the program, keep making those small investments (whether they come in the form of money, effort, time or all three) and down the road, the puzzle you’ve assembled will be something you can very proud of.

Have a great day!
Mark

For instance if I asked you, “What is your value”? How would you respond? What does the question even mean? Am I asking you what you are worth? How much would it cost to buy you? What your salary is?

How do you measure your value?

These questions are important ones to ask ourselves in all areas of our lives. They are particularly important to entrepreneurs, and those who work in a service oriented business. What is your service worth? What is the value of your time?

As a professional speaker, I am challenged to both understand, and be able to articulate, my value all the time. When clients book me, they aren’t making a usual purchase. It isn’t like buying a dozen eggs, a book or a car where there it is relatively easy to assess value based on the cost of similar products. In most cases, this is probably also true of you in some way.

If you are paid by the hour, why are you paid the rate you are? Why aren’t you paid $1.00 or $5.00 more or less an hour than you are? Because your company or your supervisor has decided that you have a value of “x” $/hr. Are they right?

If you work on a salary, it’s essentially the same concept except in many cases you are expected to do even more for less because you are paid for the whole year whether you are working 40hrs/week or 75. My question to you is, are you being paid something that is equivalent to the real value you provide?

I’m not for a minute suggesting that you aren’t by the way. In fact, statistically speaking, it’s quite likely that some of you who read this are actually being paid MORE than your actual value. So my point in raising this is not to start a mutiny of people heading to their boss to ask for a raise. I just want you to be aware of what your value is.

If you are someone is not being paid what you think you are worth right now, you have one job. Provide, and articulate the value that you provide. Before you go in and ask for a raise, you need to fully understand exactly the value that you are providing to your company and be able to demonstrate that to the person who decides if you will get more money. Are you making your company money? Are you doing it better than someone else who would take less money could?

When I potential client calls me to inquire about working with me they almost always want to know right away what the cost will be. I do what I can to help them to stop thinking in terms of “cost” and start thinking in terms of “value”. In other words, don’t think about how much my fee will be, think about how much value I will provide to you and then see if what I charge is equal to that. My goal is to make it so that what I provide in value far exceeds what the client pays in costs. Your goal should be the same.

If you are paid $50,000/yr but you can produce $100,000/yr for your employer, they should be happy to give you a raise. But if you are paid $50,000/yr and you produce $30,000/yr, or worse, you don’t even know what you produce or how you help the company, be happy that you are paid what you are, and be thankful:)

We are living in an age where VALUE is king. Those who can articulate and demonstrate the value they provide to others, and who deliver more VALUE than people pay for, are those who will succeed.

What is your “why” for your business, your relationships and your life? To me this is one of the most critical questions that people need to answer in order to find any level of success. Unfortunately, it’s also a question that many never bother to sit down and figure out an answer to. Most people, if pressed, don’t have an immediate answer to this question. It’s not because we are bad or lazy but just because in our incredibly busy lives, we never take the TIME to sit down and really think about it. Today I want to challenge you to spend some time thinking about what your answer is. WHY do you do what you do? What is it the drives you?

The reason that answering this question is critical is because inevitably on the road to achieving any goal, there will be hiccups and obstacles. Along the way there will be things that impede your progress. You ability to overcome, circumvent or transform those obstacles is the critical to your success and you stand a much greater chance of being able to do this if you have a big enough ‘why’.

Frederick Nietzsche, a German poet and philosopher once said something that said something that I think sums up everything we need to know about intrinsic motivation:

“He who has a big enough why to live for can bear almost any how.”

Why is this so important? Because it says that if you know WHY you are doing something, the path for how to get there becomes less important and imposing. You can gain the confidence in the knowledge that with a big enough reason for your actions, you can handle anything else that life throws at you.

Here is my favourite example. I want you to pretend that you aren’t employed right now but you are looking for a job. You’re looking through the job postings and you read this posting:

Work from Home!
Offering a great position! Promises great job satisfaction and fulfillment.
Tasks include: providing food and care, may include cleaning up vomit, and boidly fluids
hours can be long (up to 24hrs/day, 7 days/week). High stress. Massive responsibility.
No retirement plan is offered. This is a life-long position. Salary is $0/hr.

So, any takers? How does this job sound to you? Many of you have already figured out though what position this is advertising and many of you reading this have the position already… it’s called parenthood! If you read that job description most would say you’d be crazy to take a job like that. So why do so many of us do it? Because of LOVE. Because we love our kids. Our kids are such a big WHY that we’re willing to endure any HOW in order to be a parent. This is what I mean by finding a big why.

If you want to achieve anything in life you need to know WHY you’re doing it. If you can create a WHY that’s big enough, you can achieve any goal you want. If you look back over goals that you haven’tbeen able to achieve in your life, odds are good that the reason you didn’t achieve it wasn’t so much because it was too difficult, it was likely just because you didn’t have a WHY that was bigger than the HOW. The level of commitment and work it took was bigger than the reason you wanted to do it.

So this week, take some time and figure out your WHY. Once you have that answered, everything else falls into place.

Have a great week!

I’m not a big fan of days like today. They often make me feel tired and lazy. It’s harder to get up in the morning and keep myself going on days like this. So far today has actually been pretty good, but often on days like this, it isn’t. It sure isn’t for a few of my friends.

I got on the computer this morning and checked my emails. In my email I always get a summary of the posts from the different LinkedIn, Facebook and other groups that I’m a part of online. Usually I skim these quickly and delete them, but today one of the messages caught my eye. It was a post from a fellow transplant recipient saying that lately each day seemed to be harder and harder. She was starting to feel hopeless that things would never get better and was wondering whether going through the journey of transplant was really worth it.

Reading her post pulled at my heart. I had felt what she was feeling. I understood what it’s like to have “one of those days”. I wrote a reply trying, as best as I could, to reassure her that things would be better and to just “hang in there”. Did it help? I don’t know. But it reminded me of the importance of having hope in tomorrow.

Hope is an underestimated and undervalued treasure today. It isn’t talked about much and we usually don’t give it a second thought, But hope, I believe, is what holds us together above anything else. Without hope, we have nothing. With it, we can endure all things. That is why casting a compelling vision, as I talk about in the Adversity Answer, is so important.

The greatest value that tomorrow provides us is less about what will actually happen tomorrow, and more about the simple fact that it exists. Because tomorrow is there we know that no matter how bad today is, tonight we can go to sleep and when we wake up, it will be a new day. Will everything be “all better”? Probably not. But at least we get a chance to start fresh. To begin anew.

In that way, tomorrow is a metaphor for the way we ought to live our lives. When we screw things up. As, of course, we will. When we fail to live up to our own expectations and those of others; when we just don’t achieve all that we wanted to, we can rest in the knowledge that tomorrow is another day. There will be other opportunities.

So if today has you down; if you’re feeling defeated, discouraged or depressed, get in touch with that hope. The hope that is found in the knowledge that you get another chance to get it right tomorrow.

With such negative news, it can be easy to fall into discouragement and assume that there is no hope. Matters of the economy tend to make us feel even more like this because so much of it seems to be out of our control. The reaction of many to these times has been panic, confusion and despair. Most people complain, whine, and long for the “good ole days”. Those who are most successful however, realize that every crisis presents incredible opportunities. The question isn’t are they there, but rather, do I have the proper outlook and mindset to see them?

Here then, are 3 things you can do to discover the hidden opportunities amidst the crisis in your life:

1. See With New Eyes – If you look at the problems you face with the same mindset you had when you got into them, you are not likely to find the hidden opportunities. Many of the world’s best inventions came when someone looked at something conventional in a new way.

2. Swim Upstream – In any time of crisis, most people will react that same way. In a down market, most people will pull out of the market, and in a fire, most people will flee from the building, but those who win in those situations go against the grain. The heroes in a fire run INTO the building when others are running out. The winners in a down economy are BUYING the cheap stock that others are dumping it.

3. Ask “What If” Questions: The problem-solving process that is started when we’re thrown into crisis situations can be a catalyst for great things. The way to take advantage of these times is to ask as many “what if” questions as possible. For example, instead of playing the victim when there few jobs available, ask “what if instead of trying to get one of the few available jobs, I created my own by becoming an entrepreneur?”.

In the end, trouble and trials will befall us all, but some of us will suffer much more from them than others. What choice will you make?

I had an engagement at Oklahoma State University tonight.  I was due on at 6:30. After doing the MapQuest and GoogleMaps thing, I decided that I needed an hour and a half to get there, so in order to be there an hour early, as I like to be, I had to leave two and half hours early. I did that. The problem was, that hour buffer was eaten up when I got thoroughly lost on the way.

I won’t bore you with all of the details but suffice it to say there was construction around the exit I needed to take to get out of town and I missed the exit. So I was off track from the start. Then, after finding an alternative route on a back road, I ran into more construction that severely limited the speed I could go. To make things worse, I’d left my cell phone in my hotel room and the phone contained the name and number of the client. So I couldn’t even stop at a payphone to call and tell them what was up.

Thank God I arrive about 5 minutes before I had to go on and the crowd was small, we’d budgeted more time than needed and so, it all worked out. Except for the stress I caused my client wondering if I would get there, all was fine.

The bigger issue, and the one I hope you can learn from my experience, is that I should have known better. I should have learned this lesson better the first time (this has happened once before). What could I have done? I could have insisted on a GPS unit from the rental car company or gone to get one from another company. I could have planned an alternate route in the event that something like this happened. Or, most easily, I could have gone to the venue this morning (since I stayed just an hour away). The last time this happened to me, I promised myself that whenever I was going somewhere I’d never been before, I would sleep in the town where I was speaking the next day. I didn’t keep my promise to myself, I didn’t learn my lesson, and I had to experience the same crisis… again.

How much stress and worry could you we save ourselves if we did this one simple thing; learned from our mistakes? If you could just avoid making the same mistakes over and over, how much agony could be avoided? I don’t know about you, but in my life, the answer is a LOT.

So as you read this, challenge yourself to learn from your mistakes. Try to avoid making the same mistakes more than once. Since you are human, you will likely fail in this quest, but by making a concerted effort, you’ll succeed at avoiding many needless mistakes and thus evade much of the avoidable annoyances and pain we usually experience.

My hope for you is that you will learn form my pain and learn from your mistakes. You’ll save yourself a lot of grief:)

One business model that demonstrates the power of connection so well is the network marketing business. Now please, don’t stop reading. I’m not trying to sell you  anything here. I’m not in an MLM (although I have been before) I’m just talking about it. There is no soap, vitamins, or anything else to buy:) Seriously though, the basic premise of ALL network marketing businesses is that the more people you can connect together in a “community”, the more buying power you have, and thus the more income you can produce. There is a great lesson in this for you whether you are in business or not.

This week I have been asked to speak at an event for a non-profit organization. Like many these days, while they need my services, they don’t have the budget to cover my fees. When they contacted me, I could have said, “sorry, no money, no talk” but I didn’t. Instead, I thought for a minute about how I might use MY community, to help this group. I sent out a post on my Facebook pages and Twitter account telling people about the opportunity to sponsor my presentation for this group. Within 2 minutes I had someone already willing to give money. THAT is what connections can do.

Please understand, when I talk about connection, I’m not talking about “being connected” in the sense we’ve all seen on TV and movies where if you know the right people you can skip to the front of lines at clubs, get tickets to exclusive events etc. That might be a nice perk of having a friend somewhere, but that isn’t WHY you should be connecting. You should be connecting because it gives you reach; reach gives you influence; and influence allows you to help more people with what you do, and allows your connections to help you with what they do.

I’m sure that most of you are on Facebook and Twitter, many are also on LinkedIn and others. That’s great. They are great tools. My question would be; are you using them well? Do you post regularly? Do you post things of VALUE or do you tell people what you had for breakfast? Do you reach out to others or do you wait for them to reach out to you?

Start reaching out to the people that you’d like to get to know. Offer to help them with something you are good at or just ask if you can learn more about what they do (people love to talk about themselves). You’d be surprised who you can connect with simply by being polite, to the point and offering value first. The mistake most people make when trying to connect is they open by asking for something. Don’t be one of those people. Offer value first. Get to know the person first, then, after you’ve established a relationship inquire about what you think they could do for you. Nobody likes to be used, but everyone likes to help a friend.

Many people look at those they admire and wonder how they got where they are and how they do the things they do. No doubt they will tell you hard work, determination, drive all played a role. But I’m willing to guess that if you quizzed them deeper you’d learn that connecting also played a role. The ability to be able to call someone to solve a problem is invaluable. When you have a large network to call on, you are able to do that. When you don’t, you can’t.

What you know is important. Who you know, is important too. Not just for what it can do for you but what you, together, can do for others. So start reaching out. Do this enough, with your heart in the right place, and soon you will be the person people are reaching out to.

In today’s society we’re continuously bombarded by advertisers to pursue the exciting. We want to live a life that’s constantly on the edge, exciting, full of parties and fun. And there’s nothing wrong with a full and exciting life. After all, we’re only here for a short time, no need to make it boring. However, I think these messages we’re confronted with can blind us to the value and beauty of the ordinary.

When I was sick in hospital for six months waiting for a transplant I learned several valuable lessons but perhaps the most important one was the beauty and value of the ordinary. Needless to say there was not a lot of excitement in my days within those four hospital room walls, and yet, there were many very special moments.

My time in hospital showed me that the extraordinary is often found in the ordinary. If we are attuned to them, we can experience many incidents of extraordinary in the quiet, simple, seemingly ordinary moments of life. I experience these when I have a quiet moment feeding my baby son; when my three year old daughter smiles at me and tells me she loves me; and at this time of the year, when I go for a run and look at the beautiful foliage as it begins to change colours.

What are the extraordinary moments in your life that you may be missing? Are you waiting for the BIG times in the life to experience something special? Or are you too busy to notice these extraordinary moments within your daily routine? It’s very easy to skip over a lot of what makes life rich if we allow ourselves to become numb by “busy”ness. I want to encourage you to stop and smell the proverbial roses. Start looking for those extraordinary moment within your ordinary days, and enjoy them. They are there. You just have to notice them.