Gratitude, Aspirations, and Great Good Fortune
It's Thanksgiving week in the USA, and gratitude is a natural theme for this week's article. And, as important as gratitude is, the reality is that we don't always experience as much of it as we might wish. This got me thinking: How do we relate to gratitude when we aren't feeling grateful? That led to musing about the gap between what we aspire to and what we embody on any given day. And that led to wondering about alternatives to self-criticism and self-doubt. After all, it isn't very helpful to layer self-judgment on top of a lack of gratitude.

Does your pricing strategy prevent customers from committing?
Just between you and me, how do you feel about pricing your work? If you're like many accidental entrepreneurs, pricing is not your favorite topic. Charge too much, and you lose clients. Charge too little, and you can't earn a living. It doesn't have to be this way. Charging enough to make a good living is, in fact, one of the keys to getting and keeping committed clients and customers. How does charging enough relate to getting clients to commit? Like this. The splurge that wasn't a splurge. A few years

Why nice people should use fear to market their work
There's no mystery about why marketers appeal to fear. Fear mongering works. Before Madison Avenue taught us to fear it, body odor was just a fact of life. Same with gray hair, weeds in the lawn, and dingy whites. Advertising has transformed what were at most minor disappointments or inconveniences into occasions of fear and shame. We're right, I think, to deplore the wholesale manipulation of the consumer mind by appeals to fear. But we're wrong to avoid appeals to fear in our own marketing. How fear led me to bodywork Once upon a time I thought ma

When Trying Harder Gets in the Way of Prosperity
Photo Courtesy of: istockphoto The wealthy man is not he who has money, but he who has the means to live in the luxurious state of early spring. ~Anton Chekhov Have you ever had a friend who always seemed to date the wrong people? Often this is the result of a confusion of values and standards. If your friend is choosing prospective mates based on certain standards, perhaps looks, he may be unwittingly overlooking the woman who is a good match for his values. When your standards don’t match your values or vision, the harder you look for what you want, t

The Innocent Origins of Scarcity Thinking
Once upon a time there were three little pigs. The time had come for the little pigs to leave home and seek their fortune. Of course, the first thing they needed to do was to find shelter. The first pig built a house of straw he found scattered on the ground. The second pig built a house of sticks he scavenged from the woods. The third little pig discovered an abandoned cache of bricks. “These would be perfect for a house,” he thought. But then he decided to live out in the open because he just didn’t feel right about taking anything without asking and he did