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Guest post by: Leanne Hoagland-Smith Become an Author

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During the last several weeks, the six following tips have been offered from the original article Top 7 Tips to Avoid the Top 7 Mistakes that Small Business Owners Make. The other articles are:

Tip #1 - Work on your business not in your business
Tip #2 - Assess your business both externally and internally
Tip #3 - Develop a strategic plan
Tip #4 - Work your plan
Tip #5 - Invest in your people
Tip #6 - Pay yourself first

The seventh tip for many is the most important because of the mistakes one through six.

Tip #7 - Keep balance between your personal and professional lives
Mistake: You are too busy to take the time with your family or friends. By attending to your work life balance as well as your personal and professional development, you will see incredible results happen within your business.

Through the executive coaching programs that I use with my clients, I have learned that for many a social life is running from one networking event or volunteer organization to another. In some cases, these dynamic and driven entrepreneurs have actually taken a part time job just for the social interaction.

A truly successful life is really a balance between our personal and professional lives. Think of your life as a wheel continually traveling down the road of life. If the wheel is balanced, the ride is smooth, but if the wheel is out of balance, the ride becomes very, very bumpy and consequently quite uncomfortable. Then our life begins to suffer.

Now is the time to assess yourself. Take a piece of paper and draw a fairly large circle. Divide the circle in half and then in quarters and then into eighths. Think of this as a clock and in the area near one-oclock write the word Career. Going clockwise fill in the next spaces as follows:

Family
Purpose/Passion
Mental
Financial
Social
Spiritual/Ethics
Physical

This is just one example as there are many Life Wheels. What makes this one somewhat unique, is there is a counter balances within the wheel. For example, Career is counter balanced against Financial and Mental is opposite Physical. What I have learned in working with my small business owners and business executives is that keeping balance within the wheel is important and what may throw off that balance is two related areas.

For example, to continually keep up with business, the entrepreneur may spend hours reading and improving her mental development. However, in doing so, her physical development or health suffers. Or, the executive uses business social events and forgets about family events.

This is why counterbalance is critical to the over all balance of the Life Wheel

If you are unsure of how to construct the wheel, you can click here to view the Life Wheel

As mentioned before, these 7 tips will help catapult your small business in warp time. Of course, if you like where you are now, then ignore these tips. However, can you be sure your competition will also ignore these tips? And what would happen, if they just implemented one tip less alone all 7?

2006© All rights reserved. Leanne Hoagland-Smith.

This article may be freely published. Permission to publish this article, electronically or in print, as long as the bylines are included, with a live link, and the article is not changed in any way (grammatical corrections accepted).

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