Eight Gifts That Don't Cost A Cent!

Eight Gifts that Don't Cost a Cent!

This simple checklist can help measure how you are nurturing your relationships.

The Gift of Listening.But you must really listen. Don't interrupt, don't daydream, and don't plan your response. Just listen.

The Gift of Affection. Be generous with appropriate hugs, kisses, pats on the back and handholds. Let these small actions demonstrate the love you have for family and friends.

The Gift of LaughterClip cartoons. Share articles and funny stories. Your gift will say, "I love to laugh with you."

The Gift of Solitude. There are times when we want nothing better than to be left alone.Be sensitive to those times and give the gift of solitude to others.

The Gift of a Favour. Every day, go out of your way to do something kind. Good deeds are cool.

The Gift of a Written Note. It can be a simple "Thanks for your help" note, or a longer expression of your appreciation for that person being in your life. A brief handwritten note may be remembered for a lifetime.

The Gift of a Compliment. A simple and sincere, "You look great in red," "You did a super job," or "That was a wonderful meal" can make someone's day.

The Gift of a Cheerful Disposition. The easiest way to feel good is to extend a kind word to someone.

These are eight important ways we can contribute toward whole and healthy relationships. They cost nothing, yet they may well be the most valuable gifts we can ever offer another person.

Eight Gifts That Don't Cost a Cent by: Phil Evans, who is a Personal Life Coach and Small Business Mentor specializing in Relationship Dynamics. He is a Keynote Speaker on Life Skills and a variety of Business Topics. Find out more at: www.peoplestuff.com.au

FACEBOOK AND WORD OF MOUTH MARKETING

I attended a high school reunion for the class that graduated a year before me. It was their 27th year since being out of school and one of the guys from the class set up a more intimate get together while he was visiting from out of town. There were two ways he did this which remind me of the forces that drive the network marketing industry.

First, he is on Facebook, not building a business but for social reasons. So he sent everyone he knew on Facebook an invite to the event (provided they went to our High School) and regardless of if they graduated in his year or not. You see he was using the network he built in school, not just of the people in his class, but of all the people he knew in high school. (hint: we network with other people in other networking businesses).

Second, word of mouth, all the people he invited sent the invitation to people they knew that went to high school with us. Again, the year they graduated didn't matter.

The outcome, through the internet and word of mouth, there was a great turnout for the event. Held at a local bar/restaurant near the school we graduated from.

And here is something else I noticed. The relationships we built 27 years ago, still applied this past weekend. New friendships and new memories were made. No matter how much time goes by those friendships never die. Build them once, build them right, build them to last your lifetime!

Gotta love Facebook! Bringing the world back together!

If you want to see some of the photos from our event you can check out my facebook page, add yourself as friend if you haven't done so already: www.facebook.com/theresagiambrone

Quality of a Leader!

There are many qualities that make a leader a leader and I will cover them over the course of the next month or so but I wanted to post this blog about four short words that sum up what has lifted most successful individuals above the crowd "a little bit more". They did all that was expected of them and a little bit more.

If you think about it, there really is no competition at the top. The top consistents of the three percenters who do "a little bit more". Most people think they can never attain greatness-and I understand the definition of greatness and success vary by individual- but if you knew, truly knew in your heart that you could be all and have all that you ever dreamed, what would your definition be? What little bit more would you do to get there? It isn't about luck, or smarts, or connections, or degrees, or location or circumstances or environment. It's about doing a little bit more than the average person on a daily and consistent basis. Making a little bit more of the right choices, that is what will get you what you want in life. Sitting around, hoping, praying, searching, playing the lotto. That won't get it for you. Making a decision TODAY, to do just a little bit more, to further your education, to invest in your future, to build your business, to nurture your children, to get healthy, that is the difference of a leader.

It starts with you. If you can lead yourself to greatness, you can lead an army.

And once you begin to lead, and you find your team duplicating, and others following, that is when you will join the three percenters who are leaders in this world.

J. Paul Getty, the first billioniare, “I’d rather be paid 1% of a hundred people’s efforts than 100% of my own”.

Happy Mothers Day!

Wow, Mothers Day is a great day, and being a mother of four kids, it gives me the time to reflect on exactly what kind of mother I have been and how that has impacted my children. It is not only a time to celebrate being a mom, but being the person in a childs life that instills values, love, committment, and the list is endless.


Being a mom is a huge responsibility but lets face it, there isn't really an owners manual on how to be a mom, and how to raise your child or children. And being in home business is no different. For example, some of us, make the decision to have kids, don't do any prep work, don't talk to other mothers, we just decide we want kids and we go ahead and start a family. Once the child is born, it is a learn as you go experience, we have setbacks, failures, make mistakes but all in all we learn and get better and adapt and change and if it works we continue to use it, if not, we chuck it and look for a new way.


Then there are those of us that prepare and prepare and prepare, and once ready we start our family. We have a schedule and timeline for everything, from how many kids we are going to have, how many years apart they will be, what schools they will go to, we start saving for their college, and wedding immediately. We read books, talk to other parents, talk to each other about how they are going to raise the kids, and then we get started, and guess what, along they way, there are detours, changes, nothing goes as exactly as planned but we know what our final goal is and we pretty much stay the course, and in the end (is there really an end, when it comes to kids?) in this instance, we will use the term end, as the moment the child moves out and is on their own, so in the end, we look at what we have created, what we have given the child, the mistakes and the successes of raising that child and what type of person that child is and what impact that child will have in the world. And we can be proud that we took action and did something, regardless of if we just did it or if we planned every step, the key is we took action and we can be proud that we did do our best.


So with that, take a look at where you are in your business. Are you ready to jump in or are you a planner. Either way do something, nurture it and do daily activities to make sure you are progessing. What kind of a parent are you, and what kind of an entreprenuer are you. One that sets goals and educates themself and then gets started, or the type that jumps right in feet first, learning as you go. Either way, with a great business model such as the one explained in the CoffeeHouse Letter, you can't lose. If you are looking for a way to be a better business owner and provide your family with financial stability and give your children the keys to being successful in whatever it is they choose, lead by example, and you make the decision today, to be your best and do your best.

Here is a quote from Jim Rohn: "If kids clearly see the promise, they will gladly pay the price."

Happy Mothers Day and to your continued success both personally and professionally in 2009!

Home Business Success

Are you considering getting started in a home business and wondering if you have what it takes to succeed? Are you the entrepreneurial type?

I read somewhere that there are four categories people fall into by the age of 65.

Out of 100 people:

36% will still continue to work after retirement, maybe they are the people greeting us at WalMart.

54% are dependent on social security and/or pension – and unbelievably, most of these people are happy to be getting 50% of what they made when they were working - something wrong with that picture.

5% have died.

4% retire financially dependent, meaning they have enough money to live on.

1% are independently wealthy.

Now not everyone can be in the 1% category, as someone has to provide certain services or none of us would survive. But I know which category I am in.

So if you are telling yourself you do not have at least $1500 to invest in a business, take a closer look at your circumstances. Somewhere something went wrong and you have to decide if you want to change it or continue on that same path.

Which category do you choose? If you choose the 1% are you willing to back it up and take the necessary actions to achieve that type of success. It is your choice. Life is all about choices. We have the Freedom to choose and do anything we want.

Success does not happen by accident, it is born out of intentions and action. It starts with your mindset.

Here are some great books to get you started:

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki
The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale
Excuse Me, Your Life is Waiting by Lynn Grabhorn

Step Back to Make Wise Business Decisions

The first 30 days of the year are behind us and although we should have been doing the following the latter half of 2008, there is still time to put together our business plan for 2009. You cannot afford to wait any longer, as your business year should be broken down into four cycles of three months each, and if you wait until the first cycle is over to re-evaluate where you are in terms of business, you will have lost 25% of your business profits.So with that, grab a pen and paper and jot down what your income goals were for 2008 and what your actual profit was and what actions you took to achieve them. If you did not reach your income goals the following evaluations are crucial to your success. (As a side note, if you did achieve your income goals - CONGRATULATIONS - but you still will want to take a look at the following steps, as you always want to improve on prior years and offer value to your customers/partners.)

1) Take a look at your primary company. How long have you been with them, if you are not making money how is the company doing as a whole? Do you believe in your products, could the product stand-alone, meaning would people purchase this product if there was not a business opportunity attached to it? Now is the time to make the decision on if you want to commit another year or move on to something else. Keep in mind, you don't want to jump from company to company, but just as in corporate America, a CEO is always a CEO regardless of what company he is with. So you will always be a network marketer, you just need to find the right fit for you. If you are committed to being a success choose wisely here and GO FOR IT!

2) Do you have multiple streams of income set up to finance your primary business? Such as affiliate programs, ebooks, marketing tools, etc. You can see some of the affiliate programs I have used and recommend right here at my blog on the right side.

3) Are you targeting the right market? Do you have different niche markets set up to target the right customers and business partners?

4) Are you using a company replicated website or do you have your own self-branded sites. This is crucial in marketing on the internet today, especially if you are advertising on GOOGLE as Google likes original content.

5) Do you have a system in place so that when a new business partner makes the decision to get started with you they can duplicate what you are doing and get into profit quickly? One that will teach them not only skillset and mindset, but equip them with tools to generate their own leads and create autoresponders.

As you can see that although the company you choose to represent is important, more important is that you have a system in place, that can teach you and others how to market, because you could have the best product in the world but without a system to share it with others, nobody would know about it.

If you want to read the famous CoffeeHouse Letter written by Mike Dillard of Magnetic Sponsoring fame, go here . Get the scoop on GPT or get paid today and join the ranks of new school network marketing! If you need assistance in learning how to market online check out this personalized program here by Nadira Haniff.

Don't Follow the Follower

I received this in my inbox early Friday morning, as I always receive a "Friday Story" by being on Bob Proctors email list, and I wanted to share because it is an awesome story. If you are not on Bob's list you can go here to sign up.

Processionary caterpillars travel in long, undulating lines, one creature behind the other. Jean Hanri Fabre, the French entomologist, once lead a group of these caterpillars onto the rim of a large flowerpot so that the leader of the procession found himself nose to tail with the last caterpillar in the procession, forming a circle without end or beginning.

Through sheer force of habit and, of course, instinct, the ring of caterpillars circled the flowerpot for seven days and seven nights, until they died from exhaustion and starvation. An ample supply of food was close at hand and plainly visible, but it was outside the range of the circle, so the caterpillars continued along the beaten path.

People often behave in a similar way. Habit patterns and ways of thinking become deeply established, and it seems easier and more comforting to follow them than to cope with change, even when that change may represent freedom, achievement, and success.

If someone shouts, "Fire!" it is automatic to blindly follow the crowd, and many thousands have needlessly died because of it. How many stop to ask themselves: Is this really the best way out of here?

So many people "miss the boat" because it's easier and more comforting to follow - to follow without questioning the qualifications of the people just ahead - than to do some independent thinking and checking.

A hard thing for most people to fully understand is that people in such numbers can be so wrong, like the caterpillars going around and around the edge of the flowerpot, with life and food just a short distance away. If most people are living that way, it must be right, they think. But a little checking will reveal that throughout all recorded history the majority of mankind has an unbroken record of being wrong about most things, especially important things. For a time we thought the earth was flat and later we thought the sun, stars, and planets traveled around the Earth. Both ideas are now considered ridiculous, but at the time they were believed and defended by the vast majority of followers. In the hindsight of history we must have looked like those caterpillars blindly following the follower out of habit rather than stepping out of line to look for the truth.
It's difficult for people to come to the understanding that only a small minority of people ever really get the word about life, about living abundantly and successfully. Success in the important departments of life seldom comes naturally, no more naturally than success at anything - a musical instrument, sports, fly-fishing, tennis, golf, business, marriage, parenthood.

But for some reason most people wait passively for success to come to them - like the caterpillars going around in circles, waiting for sustenance, following nose to tail - living as other people are living in the unspoken, tacit assumption that other people know how to live successfully.

It's a good idea to step out of the line every once in a while and look around to see if the line is going where we want it to go. If it is not, it might be time for a new leader and a new direction.

For those who have tried repeatedly to break a habit of some kind, only to repeatedly fail, Mary Pickford said, "Falling is not failing, unless you fail to get up." Most people who finally win the battle over a habit they have wanted to change have done so only after repeated failures. And it's the same with most things.

The breaking of a long-time habit does seem like the end of the road at the time - the complete cessation of enjoyment. Suddenly dropping the habit so fills our minds with the desire for the old habitual way that, for a while, it seems there will no longer be any peace, any sort of enjoyment. But that's not true. New habits form in a surprisingly short time, and a whole new world opens up to us.

So, if you've been trying to start in a new direction, you might do well to remember the advice of Mary Pickford: breaking an old habit isn't the end of the road; it's just a bend in the road. And falling isn't failing, unless you don't get up.

Earl NightingaleFrom The Essence of Success

Tarantula's in Network Marketing Part II of II

Okay, so now we all know I was a hysterical little girl deathly afraid of tarantulas and how I overcame my fear and got over it and now can hold my daughter Jessica’s tarantula Vorto. If you don’t know the entire story but want to read about it, check out my previous blog. And just to prove I did hold him here are two pictures of me with Vorto.


















So here is another lesson I learned by watching Vorto one day. If you don’t know, Tarantulas eat live crickets, so Jessica brings a couple home for Vorto and we put them in his glass enclosure, here is a picture of that.

And the cool thing about watching a tarantula catch his prey and eat it is pretty interesting and something that made me think of the newest way to build your internet business.

Vorto didn’t run around his home chasing the crickets like a crazed spider and getting all tired out, hoping to grab one or the other which ever he could get in his grasp and spitting his web this way and that. Kind of like newbie network marketers who will speak with anyone within a few feet of them, and just spew out all this information trying to get anyone into their new business.

What Vorto did was just pick a comfortable spot and he waited and waited and waited, for what seemed like a long time to me, but was really only a few minutes. But he waited until one of the crickets came up to him and still he didn’t snatch them up, he waited until they got a little closer, and closer still, until the crickets antennae were touching his legs and then the tiny hair on his legs (now I am not in anyway suggesting you let prospects touch your legs, this is just an analogy ok?). The cricket got closer and closer, getting more and more curious and when he was right underneath the spider, that is when Vorto moved faster than I could blink and he had the cricket and pulled him in. I couldn’t stay and watch after that, but here is my point. Vorto waited for the cricket to come to him and then he made his move, he didn’t chase. He even overlooked the first cricket that did that and waited until the bigger cricket showed up. And that is what the professional network marketer does.

He finds a way to draw in his prospects through articles, google ads, autoresponders, systems, whatever promotion that particular leader is using, and if he/she is smart, they will be using a lot of them. They have a system in place that generates their own leads, has prospects making the first step towards them and with the right system, even get paid before they speak to that prospect. I don’t know about you, but I would much rather build my business the tarantula way then the old fashioned way. I want to pick and choose who I work with and I also want them to find me. If my lead/prospect is not willing to do some work finding the right leader, they probably are not going to want to do any work.

To learn more about this brand of mlm and building your own online business, get a free report here. Or check out some awesome ebooks available about building online here.

P.S. There was also a lesson to be learned from the original story about my big brother Joe scaring me with the picture. As even something that seemed so devastating at the time taught me something and made me stronger in the long run. So a huge shout out and thanks to my big bro Joe, who without I wouldn’t have this story (and plenty more)! You really were doing it for my own good. LOL.

A tarantula in network marketing!!??

Part I of II

A tarantula in network marketing, now that would be scary, but let’s put it into perspective. My oldest daughter has a tarantula, I know, I know, YUCK! But as I always say things happen for a reason and you can learn something from every experience. So here are the things I learned by Jessica (my daughter) having a tarantula.

The first is personal and may seem like it has nothing to do with network marketing, but it does. I was deathly afraid of tarantulas almost my entire life, since I can remember. It probably had something to do with my brother chasing me with a full blown poster of a tarantula until I was sitting in the corner crying hysterically. Do you have a visual? LOL. But anyway, I was scared of them and all spiders for that matter, but when Jessica brought this tarantula home, I faced my fear and held it. Only for a second mind you, but I did do it. I overcame my fear by telling myself it was silly to be scared it was not going to bite me and even if it did, I wouldn’t die. It might hurt a bit, but I would survive. Well I have become more accustomed to the tarantula – which by the way is named Vorto – Vorto is Otrov spelled backward and Otrov means poisonous in Croation. I know, and I held it right? Well since that day I have been even more courageous and I had it on my belly the other day. Felt really weird. Don’t get a visual of that please. Well my point is this. I could have continued to be scared and not held Vorto, but I made the decision to do it anyway. And that is a skill needed in any business but especially a home based online business in the network marketing industry.

If you are going to build a business and speak with people you are going to have to face some of your fears like rejection, communication, either written or oral, learning new skills, your friends and family possibly laughing at you, failure and there are plenty more. You are going to have to decide what is important to you and how badly you want it. You see I didn’t want to be afraid of the spider but something ingrained in me a long ago time ago, which served no purpose now was holding me back.

What is holding you back? What will it take to get you past it? It starts with a thought, so what are you thinking about?

A great book I would recommend is "Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway" by Susan Jeffers. Great for personal development and to move past your fears. My mentor when I first got started in this industry, and whom I still work with Aaron Rashkin, a successful entreprenuer and six figure income earner, recommended that book to me years ago, and it has proven to be an invaluable part of my library.


Check back for part II of Tarantula’s in Network Marketing and some pictures of me with Vorto!