cymaustin的部落格

In this past season of giving, I wanted to write about one of the most overlooked and important components to success: giving and receiving.

It is universally known that to get something you need to give something. If there is something you want, you can ask yourself, "What do I need to give to get it$%:" Everything has a price. If you want money, the price may be action, right attitude, or a plan. There is always something you can do to have what you want. If you want more money, you need to give those things in your life that will bring you money. That includes your talents, skills, time, and energy.

If you are feeling a lack of abundance in your life, think of something you can give something to. Giving to others who are appreciative and can use your gifts can bring you some of the most wonderful feelings in the world. Giving affirms your abundance and helps you feel prosperous. Giving makes you strong. Think of something you could give to someone you know that would help him or her right now. Make a point of doing it, and you will find the universe will give to you as well.

Think of your every thought as an expertly aimed arrow, and a good thought to have is "Every gift I give serves and empowers other people".

While you want to give freely and generously to people, you also want to give to people in a way that truly serves their higher good. When you give money to people, be clear that you are giving money to create their prosperity, not to bail them out of a recurring situation. Give to people who will use your money and gifts to create positive changes in theirs and others lives. When you see people putting together concrete plans and going out into the world, coming from their true essence, that is the time to support them. Give in order to help people achieve their highest purpose, and release what you have given. Give your gift without strings attached! If you give away something and still think about how you could still be using it, wishing in effect that you hadn't given it away, you will be blocking the arrival of new things because you actually still have the old stuff! Be clear that you are really giving freely.

And remember to give others what they wish to receive. Not all gifts are appropriate. Make sure your gift is in a form that is acceptable to the recipient, and something he or she can truly use. If giving things to children, it's important that the parents are in agreement about receiving the gift, as well. Give freely, but also give those things that truly serve the person you are giving to. Lastly, but not least, give generously to yourself. Learning to give to yourself is important in maintaining the flow of abundance. If you cannot give to yourself there will be a block in the flow and eventually you will feel it. As the mother of four children, I have experienced this many times. It's easy to give and give and end up burning yourself out, but we need to feel nurtured and recharge our own batteries, as parents, partners and business people as well. Otherwise we can lose our enthusiasm for what we are doing.

It has been said that what you focus on comes to you. If this is true, then money will come when you put your attention into what you are giving to the world rather than thinking only of the money your work will bring you. Your willingness to do the best work, in a spirit of cooperation and love, with energy and commitment, is the greatest gift you can give to your family, your employer or customers. Your willingness to do this will gain you more money than cutting corners, not believing in what you are doing, resisting your work, or doing just enough to get by.

There is great power in the things we have not done...

When we fail, we must look at the failure and learn from it as quickly as possible. See it as the best thing that ever happened to you and see how you can profit from it. Make failure work for you. It is a well-known fact that most successful men and women find their greatest successes immediately after their greatest failure. By analysing the cause of their failures they found their own secret to success.

Are you paying attention to details in your work$%:

Are you correcting mistakes and learning from them quickly$%:

Are you keeping track of your expenses$%:

Are you testing and tracking, making sure that your customers are getting what they want$%:

Are you paying for any extravagances out of profit, not merely out of cash flow. The sure fire formula for failure is to spend more than you earn.

The original intention of many businesses, to sell a product or service for a nice juicy profit, frequently gets lost. Our personal life turns into a nightmare simply because we get bogged down with excessive expenditures.

Cutting overhead expenses is exactly the same for businesses as it is for private individuals. Every single overhead cost and expenditure should be listed in detail on a large sheet of paper. Put down your weekly expenditures as well as items that only crop up quarterly or annually. It's easy to forget items. We must rack our brains to think of forgotten expenditures, and invariably we can come up with one or two more hidden items. Once the list is complete, we must ruthlessly prune it to an absolute minimum. Only when this pruning is complete can we grow.

The secret for one person's success is different from the secret of another person. One person may have vision, but take no action. Another person may be persistent, but have no faith. Only when we analyse and discover our own "missing links" do we discover our own secrets to success. Reading and listening to teleseminars about the stories of millionaires is fine and good, and we all have something to learn from others, but in the end, we must learn not to care about what other people think about our decisions. In the words of Buffet: "Invest and be quiet".

So have patience with the small details, because, as the poet says:

Patience with small details makes perfect a large work, like the universe. --Rumi