Tweet

New Eyes Transform Results

Written by: Jamie Broughton

Article Overview: “Discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”~Marcel Proust In this article, we’re going to turn your problem on its head. We’re going to create dramatically different CONTEXT for your “problem.” Take your story and turn it around to its opposite. In essence, create an opposite belief. You may wish to create two or three of them.

New Eyes Transform Results

Over 10 years ago now April, my wife, had quite a serious accident. Without getting into the details here, let me just say it was quite a difficult time.

One of the impacts of the injury was a partial paralysis on the right side of her body. Over time and through a LOT of hard work on her part, she was able to minimize the impact this had on her. In her right hand, all that remained was a slight loss of dexterity.

This change in dexterity affected how she loaded the dishwasher (of all things). It was a challenge to slip the dishes smoothly into their slots. Often they would clang and clink quite loudly. Sometimes I’d be in the other room listening and flinching as each collision occurred.

It didn’t take long before many of our dishes were chipped.

At that time we were just starting out financially. My career was young, we’d just got married, and money was tight. The idea of spending more money on dishes (in the face of all our other expenses) didn’t appeal.

Although I didn’t realize it at the time, I had grown a little resentful at our “dishes situation.” Each time I’d use a dish that had a chip in it, I’d get that tight little “groan“feeling in my stomach.

One morning April was out and I was alone, making breakfast. I picked a chipped bowl out of the cupboard and poured my cereal and milk in it. The house was quiet. I stood in silence with my thoughts as I ate my cereal and looked at the chip.

The familiar feeling of frustration and negative chatter started to emerge when I stopped and realized…

These chips weren’t about April being clumsy and not caring about the dishes (or the money to replace them).

In actuality, perhaps she WAS trying to be a productive, contributing member of our family. She wasn’t going to sit around, NOT do anything and let her circumstances rule HER. Darn it, she was doing her best to help out with the chores DESPITE her situation.

Somewhere along the line, I’d unknowingly come to the conclusion she just didn’t care and was behaving like that was the truth. It wasn’t!

In the blink of an eye, the chipped dishes meant something COMPLETELY different to me. They shifted from “clumsiness and lack of care” to “courage and determination to contribute.”

Guess what? Ten years later, we still have our chipped dishes.

Why would I replace them?

Fieldwork:

In the above article, my “story” was:
“April doesn’t take care with the dishes.”

I now ask you to consider other questions about YOUR story (or thought) last issue. Ask yourself:

1. “Is this story the absolute truth?” Yes or no. No maybes.
2. “How do I respond to this story?” (Attitudes, feelings, behaviours)
3. “What are those responses costing me?”
4. “What would my life be like if that story didn’t exist?”

In this article, we’re going to turn your story on its head. We’re going to create dramatically different CONTEXT for your “problem.”

5. Take your story and turn it around to its opposite. In essence, create an opposite belief. You may wish to create two or three of them.

For example: “April doesn’t take care with the dishes” could turn into:

a. “April DOES take care with the dishes.”
b. “April actually IS trying her best to contribute to the household.”
c. “April really doesn’t want to chip the dishes either.”

6. Look for real live examples that illustrate the new opposing belief. Be honest with yourself. Take a moment. I bet you’ll find them. For each of the above, some examples that come to mind are:

a. She doesn’t rush when she loads the dishwasher.
b. She hasn’t tried to make the dishwasher loading “Jamie’s job.” She’s definitely not sitting on the couch eating Twinkies while I do housework.
c. April gets really frustrated and down on herself when she chips the dishes.

7. Stop for a moment and really ask yourself: are your new opposing beliefs (in #5 above) just as true or truer than the original story you created? Yes or no.

I bet you answered ‘yes.’ In most, if not all, cases, the opposing belief is just as “provable” as the initial story.

If the old belief is costing you (see your #3 answer) and there is so much more available to you with another belief (your #4 answer), why not choose the new belief?

Related Articles
  How can your sponsoring skills improve?
  Eye Contact
  Do You Know How to Brag?
  The 3-Most Powerful Words in Sales
  Get Consistent Results with Consistent Action

Article Tags: 10 years, actuality, cereal, chips, chores, circumstances, clang, conclusion, cupboard, dexterity, dish, dishes, dishwasher, familiar feeling, frustration, partial paralysis, silence, slots, stomach, time one



Related Forum Posts
Run a major competition - You beat me to the punch LoveInventions! I was just on my way to post this! The idea is simple: run a competition for a major prize to get people posting. In this case Darren put up a $729 Nikon DSLR up for grabs as the top prize. The winner was selected randomly and each post you wrote gave you another chance to win. [quote:1nc4sv0r]The Goal - the aim of the exercise was simple. To sign up new members to my forum and increase page views. My hope was to have a bumper month but also get new members signed up to have an ongoing impact on overall activity going forward.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Traffic - Over the full month traffic was increased 66.7%.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: New Members - Recruiting new members to the forum was another goal of the competition. We’d had an influx in January of 1803 new sign ups as a result of a previous smaller competition but since had been around the 1200 per month. April however saw a boost in numbers by an extra 2823 members.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r]Results: Activity - Another bonus related to increased traffic is the increases in user activity on the forum. Here’s the increase in new ‘threads’ to the forum (up from the 1500’s to just over 4000 for the month). And here is the increase in new posts (up from 1400 per month to over 43000 for the month).[/quote:1nc4sv0r] [quote:1nc4sv0r] The Downside So far it’s sounding fairly rosy isn’t it. Increases in traffic, members, activity and even earning are all good. However there was two downsides. 1. Moderation Workload - I have an amazing team of moderators to DPS but the month of April was the hardest that they’ve ever worked. I totally underestimated the extra load upon them in setting up this competition. It has made me reconsider how I run future competitions. 2. Impact upon Quality of Reader Interaction - over all the increased activity of the site brought in some wonderful new members who are interacting on the site with genuine interaction. However a small number of new members were just there for the competition - even though I made it clear that spammy entries wouldn’t win. This impacted moderators workloads but also the overall morale on the site a little. I think we managed to contain it but again - next time I run a competition it’ll not be based upon post numbers but rather some sort of quality level of interaction.[/quote:1nc4sv0r] What do you guys think? Is it worth testing out? Considering we already give out over $1,000 in month prizes, what would be the ultimate prize that we award at the end of the competition?
$3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO - $3000 per mo Site for Sale: $65,000 OBO Content and Community Driven Pet Websites ________________________________________ Profile: Two Pet Related Websites Price: $65,000 OBO Age of sites: 2 years 4 months Monthly revenue: $3300 (plus or minus a couple hundred) Key details: Growth Year over Year: 641% Uniques: 200,000 per Month Page Views: 1 mil + per Month Referrers: 10,000+ Monthly Search Engine Traffic: 61% Members: 7500+/- Articles: 318 Blog Posts: 189+ Forum Posts: 256,000+ Topics: 19,000+ Adsense Revenue: $1500-$1700 per month Kontera Revenue: $900+ per month Direct Advertisers: $90 - $300 per month Monthly Server Costs: $100 Monthly Advertising Costs: $0 Total Profit Per Month $2500 - $3000 Organic Growth Month over Month: 10% +/- (Zero spent on advertising – all word of mouth and search engine) Software Licenses: All Open source and thus free: Linux, Apache, MySQL, Zen Cart, PHPLIST, WordPress, SMF, and the rest Custom Programming. Software Editions: All software running latest releases. Uniques Last Month: 200,000 Page Views Last Month: *2,000,000+ per month Referring Sources: 1,000 different referrers Referring Keywords: 60,000 Search Terms First Page Results: Thousands of keywords and keyword combinations Indexed pages (Google): 65,000+ Indexed pages (Yahoo): 26,000+ Google page rank: 5-6 (Lots of 3’s and 4’s throughout the sites) Pages of Content: 60,000+/- Alexa site rank: 124,000 (way off the mark due to audience profile) Compete Site Rank: Much closer but still off.. See image Brand Value: All Original Creative and Content including Logo, Forum Template, Front-end, CSS, Code, Images etc. Extremely well made to render fast as well as accessible, to both humans and search engines. Search optimized throughout. Description: I actually posted this for sale almost 11 months ago but didn’t take any offers. Since then traffic has increased almost 650% and revenue has increase by almost as much, closer to 600%. Revenue comes from direct advertising ($150-$350 per mo) but primarily Google Adsense ($1500 - $1750 per mo) and Kontera Links ($700-$900 per mo). Letting go as I’m working full time and just started Business School… I just don’t have the time. However, these sites are ripe for one to build a better business direction. I started these sites as the pet industry happens to be exploding, exponentially and almost parabolically. Google “pet spending” to find a glimpse. Some articles you’ll find: “The Growing Pet Industry Is One Trend You Can Bank On” "In the past 10 years, pet spending has more than doubled to an estimated $38.4 billion for 2006." "According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the pet industry is now the seventh largest retail segment in the country." “We have only begun to see the tip of the spending iceberg" “Pet Spending at All Time High” "Pet ownership is on the increase in the US, and the amount of money spent on pets is dramatically increasing too." The two sites are content and community driven websites with 350+ health related articles on pets, a pet blog that discusses current issues, and a very active message board and community. They compliment each other perfectly and as such are being sold together as a package. The templates are completely custom designed and CSS powered. They would be XHTML Strict Compliant however we’ve included a couple of things that just wouldn’t let it pass. There are almost 8000 members between the two sites. Several hundred more between the blog subscribers and the email list subscribers. At one time we had a store (its all still there however it’s been shut off) and we had about 200 customers. The store lasted only about a month and a half as our careers just didn’t allow us to provide the customer service this site deserves. We also had a drop ship company that worked out really well, (and we still do if we want them). Much more work than our careers had time for. The logos are custom. I’ve got the logo in vector version for Signs and tee shirts. The Design is custom. All software front-ends are custom and running clean - open source applications. Runs extremely well. The entire 2 sites run on a dedicated server that runs about $100 a month.. The sites run on a LAMP environment, meaning Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. All of the software is open source and requires no fees. We run PHPLIST, Zen Cart, and SMF Simple Machines Forum. The blog is Word Press. The article system is completely custom however the back end panel is ran simple from phpMyAdmin – straight to the database. I think there is enormous potential with the two sites as the brands have a very loyal following and is growing by leaps and bounds. It has been mentioned in 10 or so online and offline newspapers (that I am aware of) as well as a magazine – all of which will be provided. The site was featured as Yahoo’s Site of the Week. The site was forever (and perhaps still is) the number one pet site viewed on StumbleUpon.com. The blog also has 177 links from 56 sites according to Technorati.com and ranks 52,000. The database is huge. It’s full of fully owned content, images, customer data, subscriber data, members etc etc. The brand really sells when it comes to tee shirts and calendars. We have a drop shipper when needed that we buy tee’s at 4 dollars a shirt. Each shirt sold for $20 so there was a great margin. The two sites have a solid existence and are trenched well into all the major search engines with perhaps thousands of first place results for keywords and keyword combinations. The majority of traffic is all organic from Google, Yahoo and MSN and it will stay that way forever. The site was built solidly by SEO pros with Search Engine Spiders in mind as every part of the site is search friendly. All pages have been correctly and lightly coded. The database powers the meta tags, title tags, h1’s, h2’s, image titles and bold tags. The site has tens of thousands of dollars put into the design and functionality. petsite4sale@gmail.com


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Tweet

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

The Death of the Sales Magazine

What If You Had a 100% Success Rate?

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.