Motivational Mondays-Feeling unsupported

 “The worst part is that my friend started doing [enter business here] and she’s watched me try to grow this business for six months, she’s never hosted a party for me, but she’s pushing me to buy from her every day now.”

“Everyone invites me to their events for their business but never comes to any of mine.”

“I shop with [enter business] all the time.  I share their business with everyone, and I send everyone to them.  I sing their praises all the time, but they have never, ever, not even once shared my business, purchased from me, hosted a party, or come to an event.”

There are times when it feels like everyone with a business is just focused on making sure you see them without ever paying attention to anyone else's business.  When you’re feeling down about your own business, these feelings amplify.  I have seen friends stop being friends because both of them started different businesses and were so focused on themselves that they forgot about each other.

We all want our businesses to be noticed.  We all want our friends and family to support us in everything we do.  We all want the praises we sing for other businesses to be sung about us in return.

This rarely happens, and you can’t measure your success by using the people who don’t shop with you as the ruler.

Every single day, even top earners in your company have to wake up and make a choice.  Do I work my business today, or do I let yesterday’s failures lead the way?  What do you think they choose?

If the very top of your upline spent as much time dwelling on the people who don’t do business with her, would she be at the top of your upline?  Not at all.  Does that mean she never feels what you’re feeling?  Absolutely not.  Every person who has ever owned a business has struggled with feeling unsupported. 

Should you stop singing the praises of businesses you love just because they don’t sing back?  No way!  Just because your favorite local business isn't doing business with you now doesn't mean that they never will, unless you stop loving them out of spite.  Why don’t they return the favor?  There isn't a need right now.  Does that mean there never will be?  No.  Keep singing, because when they do realize a need for your business, they are going to remember your connection with them and do business with you instead of someone else.

Keep working on the relationships you build with other local businesses.  Set the bar for how you wish all businesses behaved and let that bar dictate your actions.  Stop focusing on all of the people who don’t notice you and focus on the ones who do.  You will see so many businesses rise and fall around you.  One of the things that makes businesses fail faster than ice in a hot oven is focusing on the nagging negative like people who don’t support you, join other teams instead of yours, or never do business with you.  The businesses that succeed roll up their sleeves and find the people who will support them, will join their teams, and will do business.  Be the reason someone chooses to do business with your company.  Go out there and work it.

Motivational Mondays-the first Monday of the month challenge

Today is a new day.  A new Monday.  Not only is today a new Monday providing you a clean slate for the week, it’s the first Monday of a new month.  No matter what happened in the month before, today starts it all over.

What does that mean?

New month, new promotions, new leads, and a blank canvas just waiting to be filled with ideas.

Today is a perfect day to start a new training, implement a new process, and pick up that dreaded phone and start calling your leads.

Was last month a rock star month?  Great!  You have a record to beat!

Was last month a dismal failure leaving you feeling worthless and incompetent?  Even better, you have the opportunity to crumple that month up and toss it in the garbage. 

The word of the day is PROCRASTINATION.

We've all done it, we've all battled with it, and we've all lost to whatever show we were plowing through on Netflix.  We've all drifted off to sleep with a million great ideas that we’ll start working on TOMORROW.

Not this time.  Here’s your Monday challenge this week:

Sit down and list the top three things that distracted you from success last month.  If you feel you had a successful month, list three things that you still feel you could have done better.

Those are the three things you’re going to work on today.  For each of those three things, list three ways to overcome them. 

Is one of your items television? I’m not asking you never to watch it again, I’m asking you to think about setting up a reward system.  Something like, I get three minutes of television for every call I make.  Is my show an hour long?  How many calls do I have to make that day?

Is one of your challenges not calling leads?  Set up a reward system for calling them.  Maybe you will reward yourself a pedicure if you can call ten leads every day this week.

Your biggest defeats will come from yourself, so it’s time to train yourself to work on those weaknesses by rewarding yourself when they are complete. 

What’s holding you back today from being Captain Amazing?

Motivational Mondays-I hate Mondays

Every Monday, the same thing happens.  Everyone drags their feet, grumbles about the fact that it's Monday, and sets themselves up for a negative unproductive day.

As a society, we've made it appropriate to hate the beginning of the week simply because we have to go back to our jobs from a long lazy weekend....or more likely, we're exhausted from a crazy two days of shuttling kids from event to event, running around like crazy people, and trying to cram in as much playing into 48 hours as we possibly can.

No wonder we hate Mondays.

How can you expect to have a productive week if you and everyone around you starts it out with anger, resentment, disgust, hate, and loathing?   You can't!  

Whatever you put out into the world is what comes back to you.  If you fill your environment with negativity and your feed with negative memes, what happens to you as a business owner?  Your Mondays will never be good because you have created a negative connotation, would you agree or disagree?

At some point, if you want to start your week off successfully, you are going to have to shift your perception.  It won't be easy, because it's been beaten into us that Mondays are bad.  Many of us grew up believing they were the worst day of the week because our parents always said it was.  Changing a pathway in the field of your brain is going to take more than just agreeing with me.

You're going to have to work at it.  You're going to have to remind yourself every Sunday night that tomorrow is Monday, and it is going to be the most amazing day.  You have to do it every single week until it becomes habit.   When you wake up in the morning, you're going to have to remind yourself to get excited, and you're going to have to send a ripple into the universe that says, "Guess what?  I no longer hate Mondays!  I accept them, I love them, and I refuse to squander the gift of an entire day!"


And change your memes.  

Once you take the steps to reclaim Monday, something amazing is going to happen.  You're going to accomplish tasks, you're going to be productive, and if your business runs on a 5-day work week, your are going to see a 20% increase in your business as a whole.

Once you take control of that day and find a reason to make it exciting, you will see a boost in your mood.  People around you will take notice and want to make the change in their own lives.  Your entire environment will become more uplifting and you will feel more fulfilled.  There will be no more spending and entire day dragging yourself around in a series of forced movements, because you refuse to let a bunch of silly cartoons and negative Nancy's get you down.  

When you shift your Monday perception, so will the rest of the people on your team.  Not only will you have 20% more productivity, so will they!  How exciting is that?

What are you waiting for?  Take your Monday back!

Sunshine O'Connor is a successful Senior Mentor of a Damsel in Defense team working as a Damsel in Defense Independent Pro.  If you're looking or a crime-fighting team with a heart, contact her at sunshine@yourdamseldiva.com or on the web at yourdamseldiva.com.

Shine bright like a diamond

Reach your full potential

There is something terrible lurking about.  It’s everywhere, watching all of us, waiting for that moment when it can pounce and take us down.  It seeps into our work life, our family life, our faith, and our self-worth.  It’s dark, it’s ugly, and it won’t hesitate to tear you apart without missing a beat.  

The beast I speak of is doubt.

I battle with doubt, and I feel ashamed.  I doubt myself, I doubt my faith, and I doubt my ability as a wife, a mother, and a human in general.  Doubt is like a terrible companion that overstays its welcome.  Like a family member who I can’t tell to leave, doubt sits next to me while I eat my breakfast.  It walks with me when I do my job.  It stares at me through judgmental eyes as I go about my daily activities.

While this evil little twerp called doubt sits on my shoulders, I look at people around me and feel less than them.  I look at women in my field, and I feel like they should be the ones doing this, because I am totally clueless.  I look at women of faith, and I wonder why they can stand up and be so strong when I feel like I don’t deserve God’s grace.  I watch other moms, and I feel like they are doing a much better job than me.  Worse yet, I see other wives and feel like a fraud. 

Then I grab that sucker off my back and I drown him in the sink. 

Everyone comes face –to-face with doubt.  It can eat you alive from the inside if you don’t first recognize it, then kill it, and realize that like a good parasite, it will find you again when you least expect it.  There are some great practices you can put into place to help you pull yourself back to safety when doubt wears you down.

•    Keep a pamper basket on hand- Think of your very favorite things.  Your favorite scented lotion, your favorite color of fingernail polish, your favorite place to eat, your favorite place to shop, and any of your other favorite things.  Keep pampering products, gift certificates to your favorite places, and a sweet treat in your pamper basket.  When you feel doubt start to take you down, pull it out and spoil yourself.
• Take a break-Step back for a while.  Sink into a book like The Confidence Gap: AGuide to Overcoming Fear and Self-Doubt by Russ Harris. 
• Keep a goal journal-Write down your goals and journal about your achievements, and when you doubt yourself, pull that journal out and remind yourself of what you've done.
• Talk to your support system-We have a great slogan in our Damselin Defense sisterhood, “When you’re feeling up, call down, when you’re feeling down, call up”.  What that means is that when you are feeling up, call your down line and help them with their success.  When you’re feeling down, call your recruiter, and keep calling right up the line until you get the wind back in your sails.  If you’re feeling doubt as a mom, call another mom.  If you’re feeling doubt as a wife, call another wife.  If you’re feeling doubt in your faith, call another believer.  Reach out to the people in your circle and let them know you’re struggling.  I promise they’ll help.
• Meditate-Take some time to close your eyes and refocus.  Come back in line with who you are.  Picture yourself achieving your goals.  Imagine yourself in the role you want to be in.

Doubt may be watching and ready for you at any time, but if you’re ready for it, you won’t even loose entire days any more.  It starts with you.  First you have to take the initiative to make changes in your patterns.  After that, the sky is the limit.

If you’re ready to reach your full potential, email sunshine@yourdamseldiva.com  to learn more about joining a company that puts the mission first.

How to get rid of negative labels in your life

"Sometimes I feel like a kid walking around in my mom’s clothes."

It’s a form of insecurity that sneaks up on a lot of us.  Questions are born in these moments when we’re unsure we’re even in our own skin. 

Will they discover I’m a fraud?

How long will it take for everyone to see through me?

What am I doing?

Do I even know what I'm doing here?

Am I a fraud?

Then come the labels.  Fake.  Fraud.  Doppelganger.  Then those labels plant seeds that grow into bigger labels:

•   Idiot
•   Failure
•   Liar
•   Looser  
• Worthless
• Incapable
• Ugly

 These moments happen far too often to far too many people to be ignored.  Let’s not only talk about the elephant in the room, but let’s train it to do our laundry.  Our dirty laundry.

First, everyone fails at something.  Some of us are better than others at recovering from landing in the bottom of pitfalls.  Maybe our parents let us fail enough as children then led us through the path to resilience.  Maybe we have always been strong.  Maybe we have overcome something in our lives so massive that we realized our full potential.  Some of us are not as good at recovering, and we have to wallow in the mud for a while.  Some of us never recover and learn to live in a dark damp world void of light.  The most amazing thing about being a human is that we can change our trajectory at any time.  

 I want you to think about the five most successful people you know.  Use your own definition of success, but really picture them.  Close your eyes and spend some time thinking about them.  Now take out your handy dandy notebook and write down the first five words about their successful personality that come to your mind.

Guess what?  They have failed before.  We cannot achieve success without first overcoming failure.  

Second, you are not a fake.  Unless you have a fake name on your ID and are pretending to be a person other than the one you were born being, and you're not trying to flee from a deadly abuser or in the witness protection program, you are not fake.  The key to being real is becoming comfortable in your own skin.  The first step to becoming comfortable in your own skin is to accept that you are an imperfect beautiful creation.  Even your flaws are beautiful.  People who know you think you're beautiful.  I think you’re beautiful.  

I want you to think of the most successful person you know.  The one that commands a room the moment they enter it and is unafraid to speak with anyone they come in contact with.  They aren’t afraid to ask the hard closing questions, and everything they do turns into something that benefits them, almost as if they have the superpower of bending the will of others.

Guess what?  You are as real as they are.  Cell by cell, breath by breath, follicle by follicle.  Now, I want you to close your eyes again and imagine yourself walking into that same room and filling it with confidence.  Visualize your confidence as a drop of pink food coloring in a clear glass of water.  Slowly, it stretches through every molecule until the glass is entirely filled with pink water.  Really feel everyone in that room respecting you.  Imagine yourself laughing and mingling, rubbing elbows with all of the beautiful people.  Imagine them all wanting to be near you and hear what you have to say, because they want to be like you and to be liked by you. Then, I want you to close your eyes and remember that feeling every time you get ready to walk into a situation where you might feel like you don’t know what you’re doing.  Fill that room with the pinkness of your confidence and use that as the lens you view life through.  There's truth to the old saying about rose colored glasses.

The only people who don’t succeed are the people who were sure they would fail before they even got started.  It might not have even been a conscious though, but on some level of their being those labels are still sticking.  You will never succeed if you let labels like fake and failure rise up above you like real life conversation bubbles.  

I don’t care if you think you’re too awkward, too tall, too fat, if you hate your nose, or if you are too afraid to pick up the phone and talk to your customers, first you identify your pitfalls, then find a way to work around them without falling in.  Any shape and size of person can walk into any room of people with the right attitude and confidence and win.  The image you project of yourself in your own mind is the image others will see.  

The next time you feel like a kid in grown up’s clothes, picture an elephant in a pink apron hanging your clean laundry on the line, and remember that you are real.  You are beautiful.  Put on your rose colored glasses.  Change your labels.  You are:

• Amazing
• Beautiful
• Successful
• Worthy
• Capable
• Respected
• Trusted
• Loved

If you're looking for a group of amazing women who can help you realize your full potential, please email sunshine@yourdamseldiva.com and find out how you can join my Damsel in Defense team.  Head over to my Facebook page and join the safety community.

Motivational Mondays-do overs

Even if today was a total disaster, don't worry.  Tomorrow is a new day.  Take what you learned from this day and apply it from here forward.

When you own your own network marketing business like I do with Damsel in Defense, there are days you will be on fire and taking names.  There will also be days when you can't seem to pick up the phone, file a single sheet of paper, or get more than a couple of things on your to-do list out of the way.

THAT'S OKAY!  Take a deep breath and think about where your day went wrong.  Was it that little voice in your head trying to sabotage you?  Was it that you are unorganized and don't know where to begin?  Or was it that you are overwhelmed, have too much on your plate, and your brain is telling you that if you don't schedule some 'me' time, it's going on strike?

Most of the time, it's the latter.  Me time is so important, especially in a network marketing job.  There are always a million things to do, training calls to be on, webinars to tune into, books to read, leads to call, orders to place, parties to book, and the list goes on and on and on.

Make sure to fit some time for self care in your schedule, or you might burn right out.

Not sure if network marketing is right for you?  Email sunshine@yourdamseldiva.com with questions or visit yourdamseldiva.com and check it out for yourself.

Motivational Mondays-Tiny bits of magic

Sometimes our biggest enemy is the voice inside of our heads.  We get hit with grand ideas all the time, but as excited as the thought of them coming to fruition could be, we deflate them with negative self talk.

The most frustrating thing about the voice of negativity living inside all of our heads is that it can be defeated.  Most people look at the portrait painted by negative self-talk, and live out a lackluster life.  People believe their ideas are junk, that they are worthless as human beings, they'll just fail, or no one will take them seriously.

Then they just give up.  Another dream wasted and tossed away, only to be picked up by another.

How many of you have had a great idea that six months later ends up on an infomercial making someone else thousands of dollars?

I'm sure the majority of us have.

From now on, I want you to think of those ideas as tiny bits of magic, and you have two choices:  either grab hold of them with both hands and start working towards making them happen, or toss them out.  They're still still bits of magic lying on the side of the road waiting for someone else to notice and scoop them up.  Great ideas don't just disappear into the vastness of your mind never to be thought of again.  

Little bits of magic don't have to be about the next best selling thing, they can also be ideas for your network marketing business.  The sky is the limit and you are the only one in charge of where your business goes.  Those amazing highly driven thoughts you have in the wee hours of the night when you can't sleep?  Write them down, revisit them in the morning, but don't discount them.

Remember, the voice in your head is just a voice created by your inner self to sabotage everything you touch.  It's not Godzilla, it's not a werewolf waiting in the shadows of a full moon night, and it sure isn't a voice worth listening to.  It's a voice you have the power, the right, and the obligation to tell, "Shut up!"  


Don't ever think your ideas are less than they are: tiny bits of magic.  Let them power you to the moon.