One of their examples is not sending in rebate offers. We must confess to missing out on this opportunity before. But how long does it really take to fill out the form and send it in?

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Manufacturers know that a lot of us will figure that rebate into the price when we buy the item. However, we’ll never actually get around to sending in the form.

It’s a promotion without a deal!

One behavior may look like another

Have you ever noticed that people who are shy often get labeled “stuck up”? The two can look very similar on the surface.

The author of the article blames this on laziness. We wonder if it could be something else. Using the rebate example, what really caused you to miss out on that rebate?

Was it laziness or disorganization?
Maybe you got home, set down the rebate form and then it got buried underneath a pile of papers. It wasn’t laziness that caused you to miss out, it was lack of organization.

Was it laziness or different priorities?
Maybe there were fifteen other things on your to-do list. The next thing you knew, the rebate period had expired. It wasn’t laziness; it was that other things were more important.

Was it laziness or inertia?
Perhaps you have a routine and filing this rebate in a timely manner doesn’t fit it. Or you’re not good at following up on things in general. The ebb and flow of your daily activities doesn’t allow time for these intermittent events.

Was it laziness or a lack of understanding?
Could it be that you haven’t translated that $50 rebate into dinner out? You don’t see the benefit of filling out the form. If we were talking about something more complex, maybe you just don’t understand the task at hand.

Was it laziness or too much ambition?
It’s interesting that the reason you didn’t fill out the rebate form and mail it in could be the opposite of laziness. You may be so busy pursuing your goals that you really don’t have time for anything else. 

You have to diagnose properly to find the right prescription.

Seek to discover the real underlying reason why you aren’t accomplishing something. Be careful with labels. When you come up with a label, ask yourself if it could be something else in disguise.

Price isn’t the only factor

“Getting the best rate on your savings account” was first on their list. To get the best rate, they advise you to check with online banks because they often pay better rates than local banks.

It’s reasonable advice, except it strikes us that this article was written for entrepreneurs. It makes price (or in this case, return) the only issue.

What about that local bank that supports your local community which supports you?

Doesn’t that count for anything?

Our advice is to build a relationship with a banker so, when you need money to grow your business, you’ll have a place to go.

We understand this mindset of maximizing returns. But you have to be careful not to see the world too simplistically. There are more factors at play.

This doesn’t just apply to local banks. How about local stores and local restaurants? We have nothing against chains, many of which are franchises with local owners.

Local business supports local communities. Shouldn’t that be part of your buying decision?

We’re coming out of a period of time where we put profit above people. Isn’t it time that we all think about our community along with commerce?

If you’re a local business person or just an engaged member of your community, that’s a part of bigg success!

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Thanks so much for reading our post today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss charging more for your services. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00421-062209.mp3

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This made us wonder: as adults, can we get extra credit outside the classroom?

Survey said, “Sometimes.”

Consistently living up to your promises, even better exceeding them, will earn you extra credit. People know they can count on you to do what you say you’ll do. You build relationships by building your emotional bank account.

Going out of your way to help someone may earn you extra credit. They appreciate what you’ve done for them. As humans, we feel a natural inclination to help people who help us. This may be a customer, a family member, a friend, a co-worker or a business associate.

Simply taking a genuine interest in someone may earn you extra credit. Everybody wants to feel special. Intentional attention goes a long way toward building relationships.

But there are times when we don’t earn extra credit.

Bigg success is life on your own terms. There are five elements to bigg success. One of them is play. Play is all about your personal life – time with family and friends as well as time for yourself.

• If you spend so much time working that you have almost no time with your family, you don’t earn any extra credit.

• If you spend so much time working and being with your family that you don’t have any time for yourself, you don’t earn extra credit.

• If you’re so busy with work and family, and then you pour your remaining time into personal activities and neglect getting enough sleep, you don’t get extra credit.

You may be the primary breadwinner for your family. Your family may understand that you need to work long hours to keep the bills paid. It’s just important to understand that sacrificing in one area of your life may not earn you extra credit in another.

The bigg idea behind bigg success is synergy – look for ways to make all areas of your life work together. And make sure that how you spend your time matches your priorities. That’s bigg success!

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You get extra credit for reading our post today … thanks so much!

When we think of capital in business, it’s usually about money. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss a second form of capital that will be more important going forward.

Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00415-061209.mp3

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“Don’t live by old sayings that don’t apply to you. For instance – ‘Have a Plan B.’ Having a Plan B means you believe that Plan A might fail. Having a Plan B requires that you put time and energy into what you could’ve been doing for Plan A to make it work. And if Plan A doesn’t work, guess what, get a new Plan A.”

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There’s some real wisdom in his quote. We’ll look at it line by line:

Believe

He’s emphasizing how much we have to believe in success, not in failure. We have to believe, in ourselves and in our plan, in order to succeed. The first person who has to be on board with our plan – the first person who has to follow us so to speak – is ourselves. If we’re not in line, we’re in trouble!

Throw away the security blanket

There’s another thing that comes to light with this quote. Think Linus van Pelt, Charlie Brown’s best friend and Lucy’s younger brother. He never went anywhere without his security blanket. 

We can’t succeed if we hold on to our security blanket, or blankets, as the case may be. We have to throw it away once and for all if we’re going to succeed bigg.

A lot of times we hold on tightly to that security blanket just in case. Just in case, things don’t go as planned.

Well, here’s the brutal truth – no matter how good we get at planning, things never will go as planned.

That’s when we have to hunker done. We have to double our efforts to make our plan work. We have to overcome all the obstacles that we will face and keep the faith.

The covenant with Nature

We must keep on believing that we will succeed because we have no choice but to succeed. When we reach that level of resolve, the forces of Nature begin to conspire with us, instead of against us.

It’s not a miracle. It happens too frequently to think of it that way.

It is no accident. Because that implies a randomness that doesn’t exist.

It’s isn’t luck because it happens more often to people whose thoughts lead to certain behaviors. The more determination we have, the luckier we get!

It’s more like a covenant. Nature says, “This is how much you have to believe. Here is what you have to let go of in order to have my blessing.”

Now, let’s look at the next line …

Setting priorities

Since we only have a certain amount of time, we can’t afford to waste it if we’re going to succeed bigg.  It’s all about priorities.

We tend to think that:

• we’re super-human
• we can do ten things at once
• we don’t need to focus on just one or two major objectives at a time

The bare naked truth is … all of that is a lie!

We do have to determine what is most important right now in pursuit of that bigg success of which we dream. Then we have to focus all our energy on only that.

In the last part of his quote, he says,

So the question is, how do you know if Plan A isn’t working?

One way to judge it is if you keep running into the same wall over and over again.

You’ve tried to climb over it.

You’ve tried to go around it on one side.

Then you tried the other side.

You tried to dig under it.

You even tried to blast through it.

You’ve tried five times, but the doggone wall hasn’t budged.

Plan B is like Step 2

It may be time to start thinking of your alternatives. And here’s where we deviate slightly from Steve Harvey. Because we think Plan B is like Step 2 on your path to bigg success. You have to have a clear picture of what bigg success looks like to you before you start. Then you need to map out the steps to get there.

With your plan in place, you’ll focus all your time and energy on Step 1 before you begin to take the second step. So we’ve thought about it before we start, but we don’t worry about it until it’s time.

We think Plan B is just like that. Before we start working on Plan A, we should have thought about Plan B. We’ve prepared for the contingencies. But that’s where we stop.

And the important distinction is this ….

Plan B doesn’t send us back where we were before. Plan B moves us ahead in a way that Plan A didn’t. It makes that wall insignificant.

The only path to bigg success

But it doesn’t pay to spend too much time thinking about Plan B because the wall we face probably won’t be the wall we expect. So now we’re back on track with Steve Harvey.

Think about it a little, but don’t dwell on it. While you’re pursuing Plan A, keep Plan B out of your head. Because you have to if you want to succeed bigg.

Your mindset has to be, “This is my only path to bigg success.” By thinking that way, you will find bigg success. 

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Thank you for checking in with us today. Join us next time as we begin a two-part series on the ten early warnings of a business in trouble. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Direct link to The Bigg Success Show audio file:
http://media.libsyn.com/media/biggsuccess/00347-031009.mp3

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We only have one life to live, so why complicate it by trying to reach our goals in two separate worlds as if one doesn’t have anything to do with the other one?

You might find that it pays to NOT try to balance your life!
Thus the emerging trend of work life integration. This concept is still in its early stages, but more and more people are finding that it works better for them than trying to keep things in balance.

Work life integration is all about flowing seamlessly from one area to the other. Your spouse may say something that helps you at work. Your co-workers may give you insight for things at home.

Pay attention to all the important people and priorities in your life all the time, rather than thinking that you need to segment them.

A paradigm shift
That’s the essence of work life integration. It requires a paradigm shift … thinking about your life a different way. Instead of putting pressure on yourself to be great in two separate areas of your life, focus on doing your best in your single life. Remove the limitations that you’ve placed on yourself.

Limitation #1 – Place
Work only occurs at the office; personal only occurs at home. We shouldn’t mix the two. It’s how we’ve been trained to think. The problem is … it doesn’t work!

Limitation #2 – Time
Many people think they of work as the activities they do during certain times of the day (e.g. 9 to 5). Then they live their personal lives. It may make sense for you to adjust your schedule, depending upon the flexibility your employer allows.

A recent study by Hudson, a leading international recruiting firm, showed that nearly one-third of the people surveyed ranked flexibility as their #1 priority in considering a new job offer.

Limitation #3 – Daily reconciliation
We think that we need to achieve balance every day. In reality, sometimes work demands more of us; at other times, our personal life needs the most attention. Give yourself permission to focus on what’s most important. Don’t worry about whether everything is balanced every day.

If you think about it, work – life balance is sort of an unnatural expectation. Work – life integration is more congruent with how most of us actually live. It’s just more natural.
How we use work – life integration

Here at Bigg Success, we understand this concept very well because we live it. We work together, often at home. We play together. We often get to travel together, combining some pleasure with the primary purpose of the trip. We also find that a lot of personal conversations lead to ideas like the one you’re reading now.

Of course, not all spouses can (or should) work together. Do what works for you. The good news is that, according to the Chartered Management Institute, there will be a blurring of boundaries between work and family because more and more of us will be working virtually.

Our bigg quote today comes from Karl Weick.

So pull yourself together … integrate your lives.

Next time, we’ll discuss four things to pay attention to that pay off. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Related posts 

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We only have one life to live, so why complicate it by trying to reach our goals in two separate worlds as if one doesn’t have anything to do with the other one?

You might find that it pays to NOT try to balance your life!
Thus the emerging trend of work life integration. This concept is still in its early stages, but more and more people are finding that it works better for them than trying to keep things in balance.

Work life integration is all about flowing seamlessly from one area to the other. Your spouse may say something that helps you at work. Your co-workers may give you insight for things at home.

Pay attention to all the important people and priorities in your life all the time, rather than thinking that you need to segment them.

A paradigm shift
That’s the essence of work life integration. It requires a paradigm shift … thinking about your life a different way. Instead of putting pressure on yourself to be great in two separate areas of your life, focus on doing your best in your single life. Remove the limitations that you’ve placed on yourself.

Limitation #1 – Place
Work only occurs at the office; personal only occurs at home. We shouldn’t mix the two. It’s how we’ve been trained to think. The problem is … it doesn’t work!

Limitation #2 – Time
Many people think they of work as the activities they do during certain times of the day (e.g. 9 to 5). Then they live their personal lives. It may make sense for you to adjust your schedule, depending upon the flexibility your employer allows.

A recent study by Hudson, a leading international recruiting firm, showed that nearly one-third of the people surveyed ranked flexibility as their #1 priority in considering a new job offer.

Limitation #3 – Daily reconciliation
We think that we need to achieve balance every day. In reality, sometimes work demands more of us; at other times, our personal life needs the most attention. Give yourself permission to focus on what’s most important. Don’t worry about whether everything is balanced every day.

If you think about it, work – life balance is sort of an unnatural expectation. Work – life integration is more congruent with how most of us actually live. It’s just more natural.
How we use work – life integration

Here at Bigg Success, we understand this concept very well because we live it. We work together, often at home. We play together. We often get to travel together, combining some pleasure with the primary purpose of the trip. We also find that a lot of personal conversations lead to ideas like the one you’re reading now.

Of course, not all spouses can (or should) work together. Do what works for you. The good news is that, according to the Chartered Management Institute, there will be a blurring of boundaries between work and family because more and more of us will be working virtually.

Our bigg quote today comes from Karl Weick.

So pull yourself together … integrate your lives.

Next time, we’ll discuss four things to pay attention to that pay off. Until then, here’s to your bigg success!

Subscribe to The Bigg Success Show in iTunes. 

Subscribe to the Bigg Success feed.

Related posts 

25 Tips to Take Control of Your Life

Outsource Your Household Chores to Balance Your Life

Work – Life Balance Lessons From Stretch Armstrong

Leaping From Place To Place: See The World While You Work 

(Image by darktaco)