- understand my life as part of a macrocosmic whole by honoring my interdependence and Unity with the rest of the Universe.

- support evolution toward a peaceful, sustainable, inter-galactic community by working toward a world where the noble seed in every sentient being grows in a “soil” that’s “royal” enough for it to come to its fullest fruition.

- maintain the courage to live ethically by ongoingly exploring the landscape of hearts and minds, knowing that the ethical path is an active, thoughtful, challenging and adaptive journey wherein I’m 100% accountable for my choices.

- bring value to the table and values to the fore.

- cultivate spirituality, gratitude, generosity, clarity, charity, joy, pleasure, compassion, creativity, purity, well-being, benevolence, connectedness, consciousness and, most of all, love.

- embrace the Hindu principles of Satya – Sanskrit for truthfulness, Swadhyaya – study of self & scripture, Ahimsa – non-violence, and Ishwara-Pranidhana – surrender to the Divine.

- appreciate the impact my spiritual practices have on how I show up in the world.

- honor all sentient beings by enjoying power with, not power over or under, others.

- realize that I have enough, I am enough and there is enough for everyone.

- be authentic in word and deed, standing for what I believe in while respecting all beliefs

- communicate in ways that are true, necessary, and kind by speaking words that increase love and contribute to the highest good.

- fully express our primordial inner goodness by unleashing the divine spark that is unique in each of us but common to all.

Home based professionals, solopreneurs and small business owners do a unique juggling act. There’s nothing like commuting to the next room, a dress code that includes pajamas, and getting to kids’ concerts and games. But the flexibility of working from home has a front and a back. The front is an incredible blessing to everyone in the family but the back can lead to burnout unlike any other.

As a mother with a home-based international coaching/consulting practice, I coach successful professionals in the same way that Olympic coaches work with athletes. My clients run the gamut from United Nations members, corporate executives to solopreneurs in the US, UK and Canada. Many are parents either based at home or who have created a work life that highly values family time. They’ve taught me 5 important things about successfully working from home:

Expectations:

Discipline is necessary to make it from home but unrealistic standards cause stress. Stay at home moms and dads who aren’t running businesses can’t be the standard for those who are. Likewise, people who are on someone else’s payroll can’t dictate work parameters. Too often stay at home workers and the people around them believe they should produce full time homemaker results while producing more than full time work results. People are doing amazing things from dining room tables but unrealistic expectations are a set-up for personal and social angst.

Boundaries:

While home-based businesses break the confines of the standard workweek, they also require constant boundary setting. Many at home workers just don’t set clear enough ground rules like hours of operation, restrictions on interruptions, clarity on when it’s ok and when it’s not to throw in laundry, start dinner, do a favor for a friend.

The most successful at home workers allow their inner “diva” to prevail. Family and friends often just don’t get it about being self-employed so boundary crossings are an occupational hazard. Women are especially reluctant to say, “even though I’m technically home, I’m not available.”

Being able to set clear boundaries requires getting enough down and alone time – a Catch-22 because it takes serious boundary setting to create that quality of time. Recharging batteries isn’t a luxury. Too few home-based professionals account for cabin fever and the value of fresh air, mental stimulation, and new faces. It’s easy not to know where your boundaries are if you never get to see them from the outside.

Scheduling:

Especially when kids and/or businesses are young, it’s not only tempting but critical to break up the work day – and probably to work extraordinarily late or early hours. Very few jobs in the world require the extreme hat flipping and very few workplaces entail the range of agendas and unique surprises that work-at-home parents manage.

As the kids and/or the business hit subsequent developmental stages, new rhythms have to be established – a task compounded by the number of people in the family. Families and businesses have long range and day-to-day rhythms. It’s important to create leeway in the home-based schedule to account for the inevitable chaos between the times when work and family are in sync with one another. The solopreneur walks a delicate balance between honoring the family rhythm and honoring the rhythm of the diva s/he needs to be to realize professional and personal potential.

Since the office is always there, sometimes stay-at-home workers habituate to working when they know deep inside that it’s time to play with a kid or to date their spouse, which leads to all kinds of interpersonal stresses. It helps to stick with set hours unless certain pre-established criteria kick in, like a large order or a significant deadline, or to schedule time for some extra delicious playtime. Publishing a schedule/contract (often done on the refrigerator) and regular meetings with a peer mentor or coach can make all the difference for striking a satisfying balance of priorities.

Home based professionals, solopreneurs and small business owners do a unique juggling act. There’s nothing like commuting to the next room, a dress code that includes pajamas, and getting to kids’ concerts and games. But, the flexibility of working from home has a front and a back. The front is an incredible blessing to everyone in the family but the back can lead to burnout unlike any other.

Delegation:

One of the biggest causes for home-based burnout is the lack of delegation. Home-based working moms are the quintessential superwoman archetypes who are expected to do it all for everyone at all times.

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window.google_render_aIn early years before profits stabilize, most business owners are reluctant to hire enough help to take earnings to the next level. Work at home parents don’t hire home and/or business help soon enough and when they do, they spend far too much time justifying themselves for getting it. Too little help means not only that the business limps but family needs go unmet. And don’t forget, child labor has a very different meaning in the home-based business household! Let your kids and spouse see how much they matter – put them on the team. Twenty years of experience tells me that, despite the resistance, you’ll all be glad you did.

Support:

It can be a tough call between holding firm on your office hours and yielding to a carpool need. On the one hand, you chose your work setup to allow you to say yes to family, but on the other, you have to continually muster what it takes to stand firm for your work. Professional support is the best way to help yourself discern where the lines are and how to negotiate them so everybody wins.

Even if you barter with a colleague for a weekly mutual support call, it’s well worth the time investment because people who coach are better able to frame their unique circumstances so they can really enjoy the fruits of their labors. Home-based professionals/entrepreneurs who use coaches have a healthier grasp on work/life balance. They not only negotiate distractions far more effectively, they work forward so they have a competitive edge. Clients who coach develop their visions into reality faster and with more stability than those who don’t. MasterMind group members say the intensive support helps anchor their work and personal stakes and allows them keep their bearings. MasterMind members report a sense of equanimity so that all the juggling isn’t unsettling.

To prevent or remedy burnout: Rather than focus on failed expectations, weak boundaries, overwhelming hours, the never ending to-do list, etc., take an asset inventory. Take time to list what you’ve accomplished and what assets you bring in terms of talent, commitment, resources, and helpful family, friends and associates. List what shows up when you do, even on a bad day. That’s your real business and personal treasury and it’s easily several hundred items long!

Also, every time you feel guilty about not being at work or not being with family, take a moment to appreciate what’s going on and why. No matter how small, find something good about the moment and then expand on that thought, even if you have to start with being thankful for your chair. If you more naturally find gratitude for the big stuff, break it down to articulate just how good it all is. Gratitude will make you more effective in the moment and better prepared for what’s next. The act of gratitude has a neuro- and bio-chemical profile that can actually repair burnout symptoms and trigger insight.

It is truly amazing what can be accomplished in shorts and flip-flops, on patios, on the bleachers, and even in beds. At-home business owners and professionals are unsung heroes who are creating new social mores, living strong family values, and accomplishing the American dream.

By: Joni Carley

Article Directory: http://www.articledashboard.com

Dr. Joni Carley has worked with United Nations staff and with clients throughout the US, Canada and the UK. Joni has helped her clients reach beyond the status quo and live more fulfilled and enlighted lives. Visit Joni at www.wisdomatwork.biz and sign up for her free teleclass or to simply learn more about how she can help you move beyond the status quo.

Catell, the CEO, had the wisdom to realize that when the “softer” concerns are well met, the foundation of the organization is strengthened. This is a must-read for high level managers and their coaches because it helps broaden the definition of all that coaching and consulting can be.

Moore was the voice of wisdom at merger tables and in the lunch room alike. Catell claims the company yields exponentially on Moore’s salary.
The <a href=” “>CEO and the Monk<a href=” “> offers valuable insight on how to use coaching and the “softer” investments to

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Well, it’s happened. The financial meltdown so long predicted has begun for real. Even if we knew it had to happen, it’s scary. Stock markets crashing, foreclosures skyrocketing, the biggest banks going belly up, jobs disappearing. With so much suffering for so many, and more losses foretold, it’s hard not to feel the panic.

I’m scared of what that panic will do to our country–corroding our trust in each other and in the future, when we need it for the Great Turning. At moments I feel fear about my own life, wondering what it will mean for Fran’s and my work for the world, if the cushion of savings he’s so carefully husbanded evaporates. So I am grateful for teachers who, at just the right moment, remind me to hold a larger perspective. Here are three who have been of particular help: Minqi Li, Robert Reich, and Doris Haddock, known as Granny D., who remembers:

We were fountains of creativity.
We were fountains of friendship to our neighbors.
As a nation, we were a mighty river of mutual support.

Minqi Li is economics professor at University of Utah. He shook me awake to the realization that this economic collapse, far worse than anything since 1929, is what life on this planet needs for the survival of complex life-forms. He says that in order to cut greenhouse gas emissions sufficiently to avoid irreversible climate disaster, “the world economy must contract at a historically rapid clip–at an annual rate of
-1 to -3.4 % between now and 2050…. Economic growth will have to be thrown into reverse.”

The retrenchment he sees as necessary is about 55% over a span of 40 years; that is what occurred over four years in the Great Depression. As Stan Cox of AlterNet points out, everything depends on how the economic contraction is handled. If chaotic efforts are made to restore capital accumulation, life on Earth will continue to deteriorate. To cure the malignant economic growth that we’ve unleashed, new ways of thinking and acting must come from the bottom up and from both hemi-spheres of this ailing planet. The turbulent times that lie ahead may offer the opening we’ve been waiting for.

According to Robert Reich, Secretary of Labor under Clinton, the “deep recession” he foresees is the direct result of the economic inequality we’ve created. His analysis suggests that this economic failure is the price of moral failure. The top 1 percent of American earners take home about 20 percent of total national income. Reich says the last time that happened was 1928; after that the economy caved in. “The wealthy,” he reflects, “devote a smaller percentage of their earnings to buying things than the rest of us because, after all, they’re rich and already have most
of what they want. Instead of buying, they’re more likely to invest their earnings wherever around the world they can get the highest return….

“The underlying problem of such imbalance in earnings has been masked for years: first by sending more women into the work force, till working mothers with school-age children almost doubled since 1970, to more than 70 percent. The second coping mechanism was working more hours, till Americans became veritable workaholics, putting in 350 more hours a year than the average European. Then came a third way of coping: to borrow… But now with the bursting of the housing bubble, we’ve reached the end of our ability to borrow, just as lenders have reached the end of their capacity to lend. That means there’s not enough purchasing power in the economy to buy all the goods and services it’s producing.

“We’re finally reaping the whirlwind of widening inequality and ever more concentrated wealth… The long-term answer is for America to invest in its working people–health insurance, good schools and higher education, while also investing in the clean-energy technologies of the future, and adopting progressive taxes at
federal, state and local levels. Call it bottom-up economics. It would be a sad irony of the Wall Street bailout robs us of the resources we need in order to do that.”

Nine years ago at the age of 90, Doris Haddock, known as Granny D, walked
3,200 miles across the country to promote limits to corporate rule. Recently in Philadelphia, she shared her memories of the Great Depression and urged us to stop viewing it as a time of horror. Granny D’s words are such wonderful medicine for us all right now that I’ll not interrupt her till I sign off:

“Maybe we were hungry sometimes, but did we starve? No, because we had our friends and family and the earth to sustain us. Our memories of that time are more round and golden than sharp-edged. My husband, Jim, made an ice rink from a little meadow and he made a few dollars extra those winters of the Depression.
I learned to put on one-woman plays and performed in women’s clubs here and there, making the rest of what we needed. We were fountains of creativity. We were fountains of friendship to our neighbors. As a nation, we were a mighty river of mutual support.”

“Imagination! Let me suggest that a generation raised on books and storytelling, where one’s own imagination had to fill in the colors and details, made us a generation quite able to imagine marvelous ways to fill our family dinner table in those years. Let me suggest that the power of imagination was essential to the rise of all the grand improvements we achieved for each other and called our New Deal. Imagination allows the citizen and the politician to connect with people of every situation and condition. The foundation of right-wing politics is a grand absence of imagination. If you cannot imagine what people need until it happens to you, then I suggest you have never read a mystery book under your covers by flashlight…

“I want to tell you–especially if you are young and have not experienced true hard times–that there’s nothing much to it, if you will insist on creatively and ferociously loving the friends and neighbors around you. And fifty or seventy years from now,
if you are blessed with a long life, you will count those years as being some of your best, as indeed I do…

“Fear for the loss of material things is but the jitters of an addict, and the jitters go away once we relax into whatever new world we find ourselves come into…. If you own stocks, you own a small percentage of the nation’s economy. It’s like owning a family business. Some years your shares will be worth a lot, some years they will not. But they are your piece of the action and you should hold onto it. You might even use the current low prices as an opportunity to increase your share of the pie.

“Our real challenge is not the disaster caused by the deregulation of Wall Street, for which my friend Senator McCain must answer, but instead it is the dislocations– economic, food supply, coastline and weather dislocations–caused by our continued use of fossil fuels and the resulting warming of our atmosphere that is our real
emergency and the true challenge for our character.

“And I want you to understand that you must see beyond the distraction of these present headlines to the true challenges ahead, which have little to do with Wall Street and everything to do with changing the very ways we live, so that intelligent life on earth might prosper and survive.” – Excerpted from Granny D.

Joanna Macy, 2008. http://instituteforfeminismandreligion.org/

1. a triple bottom line – people, profit & planet

2. risk assessment that accounts for how personal and universal values align with ultimate outcome

3. better accounting for the fact that resources spent on non-billable hours for coaching and other professional, organizational, and community development yield extraordinarily high returns on investment

“Why Are Executive Coaches Used?

“In the early days of coaching, most efforts
were directed toward problem-solving and
“career saves”. An executive who wasn’t living
up to expectations was the most likely to
receive coaching. This created a stigma, in
certain circles, about coaching: “There must be
something wrong, or you wouldn’t need a
coach.”

There’s now meaningful movement toward
providing executive coaching as a pro-active
move. More coaching is now devoted to
developing leadership, and a smaller share of
coaching is designed to address specific
problems. As a result, having an executive
coach is not a sure sign of trouble any more. In
fact, it’s become a status symbol, the mark of
an up and coming leader being groomed for
greater possibilities.

The Sherpa survey asked coaches, HR
professionals and coaching clients to share the
ways they saw coaching used. Coaching is
becoming a more widely used leadership
development tool. Over three years’ time, the
use of coaching primarily for leadership
development has picked up from 43% to 50%.
In the same timeframe, coaching to address a
specific problem or challenge has dropped
from a previous high of 37%, down to 32% in
the 2008 survey. The remaining 19% of
respondents tell us that executive coaching is
most needed by people in transition:
promotions, transfers and new hires.

Compared to 2006, about seven percent of coaching has moved from specific problem-solving to
general leadership development. In a billion-dollar business, that represents re-allocation of $70
million dollars over 2006.

Among those who purchase or use coaching services, 70% feel executive coaching is most appropriate
for people who need leadership development.”

Return on investment in coaching is hard to track. We haven’t yet developed adequate measuring sticks for assessing the full value of devoting resources to leadership development coaching. But using the best practices available, Sherpa found a 144% return on investment in coaching. The Sherpa data on coaching fees suggests that Wisdom at Work delivers extremely high value on every coaching dollar invested.

Successful people know that if the quality of their deliberations are good, the outcome of those deliberations are likely to be sound. That’s why movers and shakers hire coaches. One of my European clients has her own coaching firm that specializes in Fortune 500 companies. She partnered with one of those companies to hire an independent study on the return on investment in coaching. The result: 150% ROI.

But that’s nothing, according to MetrixGlobal. Their April, 2004, study found that 95% of leaders who were coached made positive behavioral changes. 58% said they worked better with peers and team members, which seems low in my experience. Leaders who were coached also found positive impact on their quality of consulting and on client satisfaction as well as improvement in their promotion and retention rates. According to the 2004 MetrixGlobal Study, the return on investment in coaching: 689%

Here’s their conclusion:
“The Bottom-Line:
Coaching has positively impacted the ability of leaders to build competencies and deliver bottom-line value to the business. While all competencies were positively impacted, leadership behavior, building teams and developing staff were especially improved. The data
suggest that building these competencies led directly to positive impact on the business.

Teamwork and team member satisfaction were the top business impact areas cited by leaders. Combined, these two areas alone produced over $1.5 M in annualized benefits. Better integrating executive coaching as a centrally managed initiative with other corporate human
resources initiatives and development activities could potentially further accelerate building the required competencies.

The very positive ROI for coaching indicates that any further investment in coaching will more than pay for itself. The focus of decision-making regarding the future of coaching should shift from just what the cost of the coaching would be, to focus on the kind of value that coaching can provide to the business. ”

The study was done by:
ROI and Learning Evaluation, Leadership Coaching and Consulting
MetrixGlobal, LLC www.metrixglobal.net

A Values Based Business Marketing Approach
Published July 3, 2008 Business , Tim Klabunde,

I have seen the re-emergence of a refreshing way of doing business that is nothing less than exciting. It is the idea that being simply honest with your clients is no longer enough to separate you in the crowded marketplace. Rather companies are beginning to embrace the idea of ‘going the extra mile’ for their clients, the concept that I like to refer to as Values Based Business. The exciting thing about a Values Based Business approach is that it generates a marketing mechanism that cannot be stopped. I have seen companies that use a Values Based Business Marketing Approach enjoy rich profits, extremely loyal clientele, and a satisfaction that only doing a great job can give.

So, what is a Values Based Business Marketing Approach

A Values Based Business marketing approach is running your company not to make money or to grow, but specifically to help other people. It is the idea that, by running your business with integrity and honesty, faithfully serving your customer instead of your wallet or your own interests, you will experience true success. Let me clarify true success here: more profit, less hassle, a peaceful satisfaction every day on your way home from work, and a good nights sleep (this last one is for all the business owners that haven’t had a good night of sleep in years).

What it looks like

Values Based Businesses do several things that most profit and growth oriented businesses have a hard time swallowing. Here are just a few examples:

1. They always do something extra for free: I used to go to an auto shop that would always do something unexpected for me free of charge. They rotated my tires, replaced light bulbs, oiled squeaky doors; the list goes on and on. In return can you guess what I did? I never had my vehicle serviced at another shop and told everyone I knew to take his or her cars there.
2. Take on pro-bono work: Vales Based Businesses help out non-for-profits, low-income families, and even their everyday clients. They do it because it is right and because they really care. Finally, when they do it, they treat the non-paying client just as good as the paying client.
3. They treat every client like a first class client: Taking calls and returning e-mails promptly is just the tip of the iceberg. Values Based Businesses see what their clients need and help them to achieve it, even if it is out of their scope of work.

The Result

By putting others first you are beginning the process of controlling your own destiny. Values Based Businesses leverage their entire business as a marketing tool that uses referrals, recommendations, references, and relationships as their primary marketing vehicle. This allows a company to increase profitability and to grow far beyond that of a typical money and growth focused company.

Firms that practice this philosophy have strong client bonds based on trust and respect. They have a client base that refuses to work with anyone else because it is a known fact that you will always go the extra mile and never compromise the customer relationship. They have employees that are excited about coming to work to do something good. They have managers that choose what work they want to do and who they want to work for. Perhaps developing your company as a Values Based Business, focusing on others first, will allow you to achieve the success you have always hoped for.

A final note: Isn’t it amazing that when you change your focus to people instead of the bottom line, you begin to experience the success that you were looking for when you were focused on the bottom line.