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Most people may not be surprised to hear me say this, but I’ve never had a makeover, Mary-Lynn.

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You’ve never gone to the make-up counter for the “before” and “after” thing, huh?

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Oh, well now that you put it that way!

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Well, I’ve certainly had my share of makeovers. From long hair to short. Back to long. Then to medium length hair.

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If I had hair, maybe I could do that! Another popular makeover is a home makeover. Here’s the way ours works. I move the furniture to a new spot per Mary-Lynn’s order. Then I generally move it back to where it was originally per Mary-Lynn’s order!

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You can paint your rooms to give them a new feel. And for you, George, you just clean off your desk so you can see it again!

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Planned remodeling

In the retail business, there’s an unwritten rule that you should remodel your store about every seven years.

Your web site is your online storefront whether you’re in the retail business or not. There's a rule of thumb in web design that you should update your site every two years.

Whereas you might spend tens of thousands of dollars to remodel your bricks-and-mortar store, it costs relatively little to give your virtual store a makeover.

You don’t have to make drastic changes. You can add new tools or highlight things in which your site visitors might be particularly interested.

For instance, do you have a great resource page? Is it highly visible on your home page?

Do you publish a newsletter? Is it easy for your visitors to sign up?

Why the change?

We’re almost at the two year mark so we felt it was time to remodel. The look is different but the overall feel is not.

Another reason is that more people are accessing our site via mobile devices. Our old design wasn’t very friendly to these devices. You had to scroll through a lot of extraneous information to get to our post for the day.

Thanks to our graphic designer, Liz McMillen, we have an updated logo. It incorporates our tagline – Life on Your Own Terms – into Bigg Success.

Making Headway our Theme

We also had planned to upgrade to a premium WordPress Theme anyway. Our friends at Headway came out with their fantastic product at just the right time. (In the interest of full disclosure, we are now an affiliate of Headway.)

We do business with people we know and trust. Grant and Clay Griffiths certainly fit that description. They’ve done a great job with Headway and we expect it to be a bigg success.

Other people we know and respect are using the template too. There’s nothing like social proof! Chris Cree, Michael Martine – a.k.a. Remarkablogger – and John Haydon are all using Headway now for their blogs.

Headway makes it easy make updates to any site as it continues to evolve. It is easy to customize without having to know code. That’s a bigg time saver for any business owner looking to upgrade his or her site.

They have a great support forum that is both informative and robust. Clay and other Headway users do a great job of responding to technical and design questions.

Your thoughts?
Check out the “before” if you want and compare it to now. We'd love to hear your thoughts on the new design.

Do you like it? Any suggestions?

You can leave a comment, e-mail us at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com or leave a voice message at 888.455.2444 (BIGG).

Thanks so much for visiting the new Bigg Success site today. Please join us next time when we’ll discuss entrepreneuring your personal finances. 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/00485-092109.mp3

(Image in today's post by ratnesh)

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1 + 1 = 3

We saw an opinion recently that “synergy” is an outdated word. We disagree. When synergy exists, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

1 + 1 = 3. It doesn’t work in mathematics, but it does happen in our lives. With the right elements in place, a tiny spark can turn into a full-blown fire.

The bigg idea

That’s the bigg idea behind bigg success – finding ways to sync the five elements so we reach bigg success, life on our own terms, faster than we could otherwise.

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Here’s a very simple example of how these five elements come together. I want to take a course on CSS to improve my web design skills. That’s growth. It’s going to cost me a little bit of money. It’s also going to cost me quite a bit of time. But this new knowledge will allow me to get more work, which will help me make more money so I can travel more. That’s play! In the short term, it will cost me time but in the long term, it will me save time because I’ll be able to work more efficiently. That’s synergy!

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By thinking about the whole – all five elements together – and working on them all at once, we find solutions that we couldn’t, or at least didn’t, see before.

It empowers you

When you have a choice to make, you can use these five elements holistically to weigh how that choice impacts your vision of bigg success, of life on your own terms.

It empowers you as the entrepreneur of your life.

You can say “No” without guilt! If it’s not moving you closer to the bigg success you dream of, just say no.

You can say “Yes” when you clearly see that it is taking you down the path you want to follow.

Don’t balance, blend your work and life

Our idea goes beyond work – life balance. The old way of thinking was to draw a line in the sand. That was how we tried to separate our personal and professional lives.

It’s great if it works for you. Most people have found this nearly impossible to do in the 21st century. We use technology prodigiously and that technology is live 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have responded in kind which has placed stress on the idea of work – life balance.

So we moved to integration. Don’t separate the personal and the professional. Keep them both live simultaneously and move seamlessly between the two worlds.

We found this concept helpful, but it doesn’t go far enough. There is little benefit to integration other than giving ourselves permission to not feel guilty if we’re working when we should be playing or playing when we should be working.

So the bigg idea is synergy:

Our two worlds should not only blend, but benefit one another.

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I spoke with an inventor recently about how he discovered his latest idea. He said that he was reading a book for pleasure one weekend. This book sparked a thought that became his bigg invention. He wasn’t reading the book for any reason other than enjoyment, but he also kept his whole being, his whole mind, live. By not turning off his professional side as he read for personal reasons, he discovered his bigg opportunity.

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So as you can see, you don’t have to be in work mode to find something that can help you professionally and you don’t have to be in play mode to find something you might enjoy personally. Keeping our whole person live all the time leads to bigg success.

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The age of interdependence

There’s a final element to this synergy, to what’s running throughout the five elements. Synergy goes beyond just ourselves. The 21st century is the age of interdependence.

We can’t succeed bigg by ourselves. We must build relationships that build value. We add value by doing what we do best while working with others doing what they do best.

There’s the synergy; we create value together through interdependence. When we build together, we reach bigg success faster!

Let’s build bigg success together

So what does life on your own terms mean to you?

What challenges are you facing right now in your quest for bigg success?

How are you using synergy to get to bigg success even faster?

You can share that with us by leaving a comment below, calling us toll free at 888.455.BIGG or sending us an e-mail at bigginfo@biggsuccess.com.

We’ll take the most common challenges and do a show about them. We hope you will share your solutions to these challenges as well. Working together, we can all reach bigg success even faster!

We’ll also highlight how people are living life on their own terms. In these stories are lessons for all of us. So share your story and get in on the fun!

Thank you for reading our post today. Until next time, 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/00360-032709.mp3

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