Author Archives: sheryleldene

by | March 10, 2011 · 4:15 pm

Following your Bliss or your Blisters?

By Sheryl Eldene, MA, MBA,

As you prepare your second quarter action plans, now might be a good time to observe if those plans represent a desire to follow your bliss or your blisters. Here are four tips to consider:

  1. Is that action step a reaction to a first quarter problem? If so, excellent, the business can continue to improve by evaluating what isn’t working and changing a policy, a practice, or an attitude that is detracting from your goals.
  2. Is that action step aligned with your annual goal? If so, excellent, your job as the Chief Operating Officer of your business is to keep your eye on the big annual goal and to make sure that those weekly, monthly, and quarterly action steps will take you to that objective.
  3. Is that action step aligned with you Big Dream? If so, excellent, your job as Chief Executive Officer is to set the mission and vision of your company and be sure that your company continues to be a picture your original vision.
  4. As you think about your second quarter, are you mostly a step one, a step two, or a step three. It is very easy, as an owner of a small business, to live in the put-out-fire zone(stage one), visit the COO zone(stage two), and forget the CEO zone(stage three).
    • Try setting the tone for each quarter with a week-end retreat to get back in touch with your mission and your own deeply held values and WHY for doing what you do.
    • Plan a week annual retreat to set the tone, mission, and vision for each year
    • Use your coach as a means to regularly check in on all three levels and keep yourself on track.

May you always follow your bliss, and treat those blisters – and let us know how are those second quarter plans coming.

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by | March 3, 2011 · 6:12 pm

Timid or Careful?

by Sheryl Eldene, MA, MBA, PCC

A forty five year old software engineer finally found employment after being laid off for 18 months. Her boss asks her to alter the financial reporting programs in a way that feels unethical to her. She’s been on the job for only two months, and doesn’t know the hierarchy in her new company and if what she is being asked to do is consistent with company policy, or is being done on the Q-T. She decides to work slower than usual on the project while she does some canvassing to find out what the legitimacy of this request really is. Is she being timid or careful?

A seventy year old woman with osteoporosis is walking across the street in the rain. She feels unsure of her footing, and is walking slowly, and more stiffly than usual in an attempt to protect herself from falling. Unfortunately, walking with this kind of tenseness increases her chances of losing her footing. Would you say she’s being timid and/or careful?

An entrepreneur whose business has flat lined over the last 24 months is both pleased that she is weathering the recession and nervous that neither her profits nor her market share are growing. She is contemplating a new social media marketing campaign the includes a new blog site, a new branding and new messaging to reach a more specific target market. The cost of creating this move represents about 25% of her current profits. She has had the proposal on her desk for three months now. Is she being timid or careful?

A two year old intently leaves the security of her hold on the end table and teeters toward her mother, slowly and carefully. Falls down, and tries again, holding onto that table for a little longer this time. Is she timid or careful? And clearly determined and focused!

Interestingly,TIMID, CAREFUL, and STUCK can all look the same. How are you doing in your business this quarter? Timid, Careful, Stuck or determined and moving slowly?

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by | February 24, 2011 · 7:57 pm

Manifestation through Balance

<div class=\"postavatar\">Manifestation through Balance</div>

by Sheryl Eldene, MA, MBA

During my corporate career, I was successful by using my strong will to drive myself to complete projects, and to please my employers. When I left corporate, quite burned out from 20 years of using that strong will, I was determined to run my private practice from the heart -to discover how to run a business as a spiritual practice.

What I’ve discovered over the last 15 years of managing the On Purpose Living center, is that without the discipline provided by that will, I can spend way too many hours playing computer games, creating new web pages and creating action steps that don’t get done. I am a powerful counselor, able to be fully present and to provide spot-on support when needed in my counseling room. However, without the discipline, I just jelly-fish my way through a feel-good day, if you know what I mean.

When I finally got very focused on what gifts I want to bring forward into the world and how I want that business to take shape, I began to see how those opposites of using my will OR my passion was holding me in an old belief pattern of the poor therapist OR the rich, heartless CEO. I am now on a mission to heal this distortion in my own life, and to create a successful business through helping people to bring their gifts forward and to become masters at manifesting wealth. Not specifically for the wealth (although that is important, too), but as a external mirror to the inner process of clearing, and allowing more and more of the abundance of the universe all the way through my heart into the core of our planet.

Yes, it is Big Dreams and Hard Work, but when that work is done purely from a strong will and without the passion of the heart, then it’s driving and striving, and eventual burn-out.

If you or someone you know is curious about the possibilities, let us know.

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by | February 18, 2011 · 12:54 am

New Habit? Keep Those Glasses ON

<div class=\"postavatar\">New Habit? Keep Those Glasses ON</div>

By Sheryl Eldene, MA, MBA

You may have heard that to change a habit, you need to practice the new lifestyle for 6 weeks for it to become your own. We have some interesting information now about how malleable the amazing brain is – it’s called the plasticity of the brain. Our brains are constantly adapting to our environment to a much greater extent that we ever recognized.

Well, here’s the story. Several years ago, NASA created eye glasses for astronauts that reversed images both right-left and up-down with the intention of helping them adjust more easily to weightlessness when up and down was not a given. They were to wear the glasses absolutely constantly whenever their eyes were being used (work, shower, eat, everything). To their surprise, they found that the brains of the astronauts completely rewired to correct the image by day 30. Amazing, huh? Here’s the other interesting part. When someone removed the glasses for just one day, say day 15, then the countdown began all over, at day 1, needing an additional 30 days to rewire.

When you create your written goals,  make a note of the day you begin and every single day for a full 30 days, speak an affirmation about that goal, feel the feeling of manifesting, look at the vision pictures, experience the joy of manifestation.  What have you tried that successfully helped you change a habit, and create a new part of your lifestyle?

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by | February 10, 2011 · 11:21 pm

If it Matters, Write it Down

SCIENCE OF AFFIRMATIONS

by Sheryl Eldene, MA, MBA

We know from a study from Yale in 1953 that the 3% of Yale graduates who had written goals had more wealth years later than the other 97% of the class combined. Also, in 1964, Harvard Business School did a similar study on the financial status of its students 10 years after graduation and found that:

  • 27% of them needed financial assistance
  • 60% of them were living paycheck to paycheck
  • 10% of them were living comfortably
  • 3% of them were financially independent.

The study also looked at goal setting and found these interesting correlations.

  • The 27% that needed financial assistance had absolutely no goal setting process in their lives
  • The 60% that were living paycheck to paycheck had basic survival goals;such as managing to live paycheck to paycheck
  • The 10% that were living comfortably had general goals. They thought they knew where they were going to be in the next five years
  • The 3% that were financially independent had written out their goals and the steps required to reach them.

What’s your goal setting process, and how does it work for you?  Leave your reply and let us know.

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by | January 28, 2011 · 1:45 am

Perfectionism Sucks

(the life right out of you)

Why is that? What’s wrong with doing everything RIGHT? How can that hurt me? Bottom line – it isn’t sustainable. It actually isn’t possible. You may be perfect in the way you dress, sort of, for one day according to a magazine you read. You may be perfect in the way you work, according to your last boss some days.

The tricky part about perfectionism is that the “perfect” bar is never static. You envision exactly how you think you “should” be, and the second – the nano-second you reach that place, you reset the bar and continue to be just a little less than adequate.

Here’s some tips for getting PERFECTIONISM out of your way before it sabotages your best intentions for your life, your health and for your business.

1) Separate YOU from your PERFECTIONIST. That is NOT you. Maybe it feels that way, especially if you are ALL OR NOTHING. Spend some time stepping back and observing your behavior. You are not your mind, and that mind of yours, which created the perfect list, just made it up out of the ethers. There isn’t a place where the perfect whatever is engraved in stone. There just isn’t.

2) Give that part of you a new name – something that gets your attention and helps you switch gears. Maybe you want to call your perfectionist self something like “it’s Anal Annie or Perfect Paula!” Remind yourself that you are not your perfectionism. Perfectionism is just a way of thinking and you can change that…IF you recognize it when it comes. For me, it comes when I’m updating my web site, or even putting this article together. I can easily spend 80% of the time I have to put up a web page on details that NO ONE but Anal Annie ever notices, like perfect margins, a font color exactly matching a border, a tilt on an illustration, yaddah, yaddah, yada. When 45 minutes has passed and the font color isn’t just right yet, and my shoulders hurt, and I have to pee, but won’t until it’s perfect, I finally notice who has the keys to my life, and change drivers. (I’m trying to get that lapse in judgment down, but 45 minutes it is what it is at the moment.)

 3) Don’t expect to be perfect in getting rid of perfection. Sometimes these strategies will work and sometimes they won’t. It is a process – a process that is well worth practicing. Actually, thoughts cannot be eliminated from the mind machine.  It’s the same with muscles.  Did you know that you literally cannot make a muscle stretch, you can only relax it and use a different muscle to straighten that flexed arm, for example. Similarly, you cannot eliminate those thoughts of “You blew it” “You’ll never be accepted if anyone sees that off color font”. However, you can say, “Oh, there’s Anal Annie talking again and I’m a good enough ___fill in the blank___________”.   

5) I like remembering that a Persian rug is always made with one flaw, since only God is perfect. Today I can try to be a perfect God (Goddess, actually) or I can be fully human, running my business the best I can, pee-ing when needed, and moving through my life with grace.

To your just right day, with its little flaws, its charming quirks and all the fun you can bring to the day.    Sheryl Eldene, MA, MBA

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