What Your Gut Instincts Can Tell You In Business

People will tell you that your emotions will kill you in business, and a good deal is done with a poker face and the drive of a hired assassin. However, what if your business is about freelance writing, or about something where you’re passionate about what you do? That’s when your emotions are there for a reason, but they can still lead to being used by others who try to take advantage of that emotional charge.  The key to understanding how your emotions can help, instead of hurt you, in business is to learn how to use your business judgment, along with your emotional instincts, to cue you into bad customers before you get into relationships with them.

Every Business Relationship Is Like Dating

We can laugh or cringe at the dating horror stories of the woman who always ends up with the batterer, the drunk, or the just plain weirdo. Yet, sometimes our businesses attract the same types of deadbeats and we just drum it up to a bad economy, when it might be the way we’re doing business that is generating these bad business relationships. Just like a woman who does too much upfront in a relationship, a business owner who provides too many products or services before figuring out what the other party is going to provide back is in for the same sort of co-dependent, miserable, times as a single on the dating scene.  How do most people avoid these soap operas in their lives? They tend to rely on their “gut instincts” and emotions to let them know when they should pass on a relationship that’s going to be a downer, no matter what. When faced with a one-liner from a potential deadbeat customer (whether romantic or business), your gut instincts will tell you something is really wrong, and you can choose to acknowledge this or face the consequences later.

So Many Frogs, Few Princes

There was a question posted on Facebook recently: “Do I prefer the customer who offers a high price and fails to pay on time or the one that offers a low price and pays immediately?” What’s missing from this question is the value of the work. What sort of value do you place on your work? Is the customer willing to recognize the actual, intrinsic, value of the work or are they looking at the dollar bills? If you are working with a low-paying customer, be assured they’ll never be satisfied with the value of the work. They’ve already said as much by refusing to pay what it’s worth. More than likely they will try to chintz you even more in future projects. The same is true for the one that offers a high price and refuses to pay, as if your work is free or you are not a top priority when it comes to paying their bills. Sometimes, you get a high paying customer that is so demanding that you spend so much time with them, that if you added up the hours, you’d make less than the low-paying clients. Unfortunately, the additional criticisms and demands spell out exactly the same thing:” They don’t value your work.” Which begs the question:

Why don’t they go elsewhere then?

How You Create Your Own Customers

The reason, as hard as it may be to believe, is that you allow them to stay there repeatedly disrespecting the value of your work because you don’t believe it’s worth much either. The irony of the whole situation is that just like an abusive partner picks someone who they admire to belittle,  these customers actually like your work or they wouldn’t be there. It gives them great joy to find someone who wants to be involved with them because they don’t think much of themselves either. As the relationship continues, of course, the emotions become louder. Something is wrong, but the familiarity of it may lead to ignoring the fact that the pay is getting less and the demands are getting more. It may be hard to cut these people out of your life, but ultimately, it may be what your business requires to survive.  Ignore your gut instincts at your own peril at this point.

Learning To Trust Yourself In Business

Once you learn to disentangle yourself from these types of customers, the newer ones that are worth your time will appear. At the point you start to trust in your own innate worth, the deadbeats and abusers will begin to scatter because you either 1) Refuse to engage these customers, or 2) State the value of your work upfront and expect and get fair recompense for your work or they walk away. You learn to negotiate difficult customers so that you’re both on the same page or you clearly realize from the start that the relationship is not a match. At that point, you will have learned to trust yourself and appreciate the value of your own work enough for it to generate the customers who can do likewise. Whether in dating or business, once you learn to trust your own judgments and listen to what your emotions are telling you about the other party, the ability to select the right relationships becomes clearer and easier, and far more profitable.

Appreciation And Manifestation

I have been practicing my appreciation and gratitude, and I’ve noticed that when things are darkest, that’s when we can really mine these attitudes and make them our backbone through future misfortunes. I’ve also noticed that sometimes I appreciate things before they happen, and just through the act of expressing thankfulness, that thing manifests in my life. Take for instance, my cat, Shakespeare.

Shakespeare is a sissy cat (don’t let him hear me say that), but he is adorable and ever loving. He does have a hunter instinct, but he doesn’t have much to hunt in the house. So, I was appreciating Shakespeare one day in my gratitude journal and how we have no mice in the house because of him. I figured that just his presence scared them away. Well, a day later, Shakespeare caught a mouse and laid it out all dead in front of bathroom door, where I couldn’t possibly miss it because that’s the first place I go in the morning. So, while I was appreciating the fact that we have no mice because of the presence of my cat, right after that Shakespeare caught one and killed it! So, apparently we did have a mouse in the house (although a rather skinny one, thank god!) and maybe my appreciation helped him to manifest the kill! So, now Shakespeare’s nick name is “mighty hunter”!

That’s not the only thing that has turned out a bit conspicuously “coincidental” between my appreciation journal and my reality. At times, my work has slowed and I began to appreciate the fact that I am self-employed and not a laid off employee. That while my work might slow down, it won’t ever go away completely. So, I was expressing my appreciation for the work that did come in, during one of the slow periods, and for the ability to work at home and a day later, I got a huge order for work. Coincidence?

I see more and more of this dynamic as if appreciation is the oil that powers the engine of manifestation. It can be something very small or big, but eventually as I read back on my appreciation journal, I begin to see more and more that the things I appreciated before became heightened in my awareness and manifested more clarity and solidity in my reality. So, I am continuing to write in my appreciation journal and it has been a very fascinating experience!

For all those in New Orleans, my heart goes out to you on Gustav. You are all in my thoughts and prayers these last few days…

Manifesting Free Laptops

If over two years ago someone had told me it was possible to manifest a free laptop, I would have wanted to know how much I had to pay for such a program. Sadly, there are many “free laptop” baits out on the Internet that have you sign up for a program that eventually costs you more than the laptop. However, I decided several years ago that I create my own reality and even though it took a while to learn how to manifest large items, I have manifested not only one but two free laptops at this point.

Now, I realize manifesting a free laptop is EASY!!! I am very serious. I have no idea why I thought it was hard. In this culture that believes in throwaway electronic products there are tons of people out there trying to get rid of things – including laptops. All you have to do is believe it. If you don’t believe you can manifest a free laptop, you won’t. It’s as simple as that. If you do believe it, you still have to prove it to yourself. I have proven it to myself twice now. I have no doubt I can manifest any number of free laptops I desire, if they are in my highest spiritual good. This isn’t about greed. But, I didn’t get there by starting with a laptop. I started with a penny.

That’s right. I started with one free penny. You might wonder why one penny? It was because I had a belief that others deserved wealth more than me and I realized that I had to be proactive in addressing this belief or I’d never manifest anything, not even an extra penny. So, I went out of my way to take a free penny out of the free penny bowl near cash registers, even when I didn’t need it. This small action immediately imprinted itself in my consciousness and helped me to release the fears associated with receiving money or wealth for small things. Then, I slowly worked my way up to free parking spaces, free food, free anything I could think of to try and manifest. When I realized I wanted a laptop, that was a BIGGIE for me and it took me seven months for someone to volunteer a free laptop for me. However, that is all you need. It took me no time at all to manifest the second one. It came even before I had the urge to really focus on it a lot because I just said,”Oh, I would sure love a laptop with WI-FI on it.” and it appeared when someone got rid of their’s at that time. By that time, I realized I wanted one with WI-FI even though someone had given me a WI-FI device but I couldn’t figure out how to install it. The new free laptop came with a newer version of this device driver which clued me into how to install the older device. Now, I not only have a new free laptop, I also have one with WI-FI.

I’m thinking of manifesting a free new car…