Come claim your FREE “The EFT Way To Market Your Services: More Clients, Money & Fun in 2010″ intro class at http://eftmarketingschool.com You’ll learn more in this FREE CLASS than you will in any other, AND GET COACHED ON YOUR BUSINESS. More genuine “take-action takeaways” than you’ll experience any other place.

Why You Need To Take This Class Now

Gary Craig, the founder of Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT, is retiring after many years, and taking his massive, resource-crammed website down. Latest reports say he has put off his retirement from January 15th to March 1st due to the overwhelming amount of requests for a little more time to copy website materials and shut down the business. I for one have benefitted tremendously from Gary’s work and want to tender a personal “thank you and well done – rest well deserved”. Without EFT, there would be no Energy Coach Institute and I would not have been able to create the profession of Energy Coaching!

In this week’s tribute to Gary’s work, my colleague Pat Carrington brought up that people were upset over the fact that Gary’s fantastic marketing skills that would no longer be available to the community. “Who will teach us how to market our businesses when Gary is gone?” she cites one client as saying.

Just as I took up the challenge to help Gary market EFT along with several other top tappers and EFT Masters five years ago, I’m taking up the challenge today to offer this kind of training to you, the EFT Practitioner.

Gary and I both trained in the same neurolinguistic programming business marketing methods, and I have additional experience as a professional industrial psychologist researching what makes products & services sell, plus training in Guerrilla Marketing, in how to Get Clients Now and Book Yourself Solid. These are only three of the over thirty service business marketing programs I’ve taken in the last ten years.

I’ve spent probably fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars to learn these secrets and now, I am going to share them with you in a unique program created especially for EFT Practitioners, Coaches & Therapists – a unique blend of time-tested techniques you simply CAN’T learn elsewhere.

If you’re ready to stop practicing at it and get really good at your business – good enough to take lots of time off, be there when you want to for your family, take liberal vacations, buy whatever you need without worry and all the other things you may have been putting off, go over to:

http://eftmarketingschool.com

and GRAB YOUR SEAT FAST. We have two FREE classes that begin next week, so hop to it!

The New Year is here. 2010 – woohoo! We’re all sure it’s going to be a MUCH better year financially and every other way. But what if your business “isn’t there yet”? What if you’ve never made a dime of take-home profit? Are you at the point of giving up? Of retooling? Of running screaming back to corporate life?

If so, come take a FREE CLASS SERIES with me as I share the same marketing ideas Gary Craig, creator of Emotional Freedom Techniques, asked me to share as I helped him with his marketing of EFT. All that is right here PLUS you get a bonus free eBook from Joe “Mr Fire” Vitale on spiritually marketing your business!

http://eftmarketingschool.com

I’ve been enjoying the posts of several people around the issue of transparency. One of them, a young lawyer-turned-coach, Elizabeth Potts Weinstein had an interesting opinion on the “six/seven figure coach” – most of them aren’t making what you think because they’re plowing all the money they make back into their businesses. In the interest of full disclosure, I, like Elizabeth have put most of the money made back into my business from the start. I feel fortunate to have had the resources to do that and still live a rather nice lifestyle. We can all take a valuable lesson from this: Revenue Does Not Equal Profits.

If you still need profits and revenue however, you’ll want to join me for this free class series. Even if you’re in another part of the world and the time doesn’t work, sign up anyway – you’re going to get a free replay, even if you come across this blog post a year or two down the line. Again, the free class is here:

http://eftmarketingschool.com

I just found ALL of Napoleon Hill’s classic 1960 era made-for-tv 13 part episodes explaining his Mastermind princples. If you’re a coach, therapist or business maven, you’ll already know the power of the mastermind. This is NapHill at his finest, and well worth viewing. Classic & timeless, the lessons are the real power behind “The Secret”. All 13 will play for you right here in this window. Click play and enjoy!

http://task.fm is the hottest new outsourcing “Get ‘er done” tool among the coaching set. It’s free, you can record your tasks in slang, just the way you speak and the app will translate perfectly.

For instance, “Pick up dry cleaning a week from today after lunch” gets translated into “Pick up dry cleaning” with the date being exactly a week from the time you ordered the task, at 1pm.You can choose email, SMS or call-to for task reminder.

Cool? You bet. And for a cheapo $4 a month upgrade, you can log tasks by calling them into the service’s own 800 number and other refinements.

Best of all, you can synch up with Twitter, DM Task.fm and never have to log in. For the socmedia maven, a blessing. Here’s the lowdown from the FAQ:

• natural language input

  don’t enter dates and times manually. Save time by speaking in plain english

• twitter integration

  works with Twitter. Create reminders by sending us a Direct Message.

• sms, email and voice

  recieve reminders via sms, email, twitter or voice call. Change reminder types with a click

• add reminders via email

  create reminders directly from any email client. Never leave your inbox

• groups and contacts

  sending reminders to others is as simple as CC’ing a contact

• to-do lists

  task.fm includes a built in to-do manager. create unlimited lists

• tag and search

  add tags to any reminders to search and group. Supports hashtags via twitter and email

• voice transcription

  create reminders using your voice. Use a toll-free number

Kudos to Andrea Lee on her Multiple Streams Advanced Strategies program!  I have been learning from Andrea for a long time, from the days of her being General Manager at CoachVille, through the first Mulitple Streams club & buy-a-book-get-a-conference-free in San Mateo, CA and the PinkSpoon teachings. You really showed us how to ethically increase our revenues with integrity, and greatly informed my marketing capabilities.

If you’re marketing a service business, to illustrate the Multiple Streams principles, here are a few of my points of leverage, from this material:

Pink Spoons:
http://maryamwebster.com/blisskit/
http://ethosmethod.com/quickstart/
http://everydaybliss.org
http://certifiedenergycoach.org/free-preview/

Beginning of the Marketing Funnel:
(Here are lifechanging audios, ebooks & learning programs)
http://www.maryamwebster.com/shop

Median Portion of the Funnel
(Pre-recorded classes that were particularly stellar & group coaching):
http://ethosmethod.com/lyla/
http://12keys2bliss.com (in revision)

High End of the Funnel:
(Full Coaching Programs & Private Coaching and corporate services)
http://certifiedenergycoach.org
http://maryamwebster.com/services/
http://www.maryamwebster.com/mwg_about/

All in all, following the Multiple Streams model quadrupled my IP and more than tripled my income over single session-only coaching. Kudos!

I’m back from my email hiatus…just barely.

I’m quasi-back from my six week hiatus from email though not back in the office. What I deduced is that I need far more time offline, off email and incubating the juicy things bubbling on the back and middle burners in my life. On the front burner? Family, friends, real experiences (ie; offline, in the real world, like sand squishing between my toes and taking a whole hour to follow the flightpath of just one gull at the beach) and very long bouts of meditation. Lots more swimming. Softness of mittie ears rubbing affectionately against my ankles in the bower. Sunshine and moonlight. Yes.

Others are experiencing this need to unplug, in increasing amounts. The more I enjoyed my own vacation from electronical the more people began to gripe about it. Two items on the news the day I came back to watching a little limited tv – one on having teens unplug their cells and computers for 10 days (the teens actually recommended it to their peers) and another on “Staycation my ass, I’m saving up to go to freakin’ HAWAII. I DESERVE IT.” by an employee (one of many) on the edge. Scary, kids, but not all that unusual. We’re fed up, had it and not about to take anymore.

Here’s some help. Alex Fayle is guest writing on Men With Pens. He’s doing good work teaching soloprenurs to unplug and take real vacations. Read his sage words, they make sense. Then drop down and see what Byron Kati has to say below this:

First Alex’s blog post: http://bit.ly/17WE3W

And another, from which I quote: “frickin’ learn to delegate!” http://bit.ly/2Y0vvu

Then proceed on to a fix Alex offers in the form of inspiring emails designed to get you relaxing and recreating no matter where you are: http://bit.ly/8va00

“But Maryam, I *can’t* just uproot my life and go, what would people think??!”

I’m now getting this on a regular basis from coaching clients who just can’t see their way clear to making time for themselves. “What are you, meshugginah? Crazy? I got stuff to do and people to see. It would hurt my business if they thought I was being a slacker or a flake by taking time off for myself. That’s nuts!”  Sometimes it takes a doctor telling them to chill out or face a double bypass.

Or we could all just truly listen to our bodies.

Are you listening to your body? To your heart? Are heart and head in congruence?

Byron Katie has some interesting words that parallel my experience on this. She says that another person’s opinion of you is never personal, because it’s not really about you, it’s totally about them.

What YOU think and feel about things is about you and is my business. And what someone else thinks and feels is THEIR business. If I get upset about how you feel about me, I’m minding your business. And if I’m minding in your business, how can I be conscious, alive and present to my own life and business? The answer is that I can’t.

So ask yourself again, can you let go of others opinions of you? And if so, when?

Can you listen to the subtle voices of your body, and heart before they become the scream of the ambulance siren? When?

And anything that wouldn’t allow that to happen, you can uncreate, dissolve and release. Pulse your three cues:

yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes-yes…seeing the rose opening its petals to all possibility…feeling the delicious deep relaxation sweeping over you and clearing the way to manifesting magic in your life.

What other wild, wonderful, wacky and delicious things are possible?

Remember, there are no limits…

In the last eighteen months or so, mothers are hesitating to nurse at work – assuming the workplace still provides daycare. They are not asking for time off to deal with a child’s needs, and are neglecting their own health to work when ill themselves. Moms, are you afraid to ask for time off to deal with your child’s parent-teacher meeting, illness or botched daycare arrangement? Are you choosing NOT to telecommute for fear of losing your job?

As job cuts roll through all  industries in America and abroad, job privileges are increasingly being reduced and the more traditional job-centric workers being favored over parents who telecommute or ask for time off to deal with their children’s issues.  This recent article by Annys Shinn from the Washington Post asks: “Will Working From Home Lead to a Layoff? Recession Pushes Some to Eliminate Flexible Job Policies.”  -

Emily Muschinske, mother of two in South Orange, N.J., says she “could see the purse strings kind of closing” before her job was cut.  “Anybody with a flexible arrangement feels like their job is on the line,” said Muschinske, who cut back to working four days a week after her son, Jake, was born three years ago. Muschinske cited her reduced work schedule as a major factor in her recent layoff.

With the recession forcing businesses to cut back on workers, employees are increasingly doing all they can to hang onto their jobs and are forgoing many of the benefits that once allowed them to balance the demands of work and family life.

In good times, workers frequently seized the opportunity to use “flex time” and family leave, to telecommute and to take paid sick days. But, according to workplace consultants, human resources specialists and employees themselves, those days are slipping away. More workers are giving up those arrangements, or resisting asking about them in the first place, out of fears that doing so will make them appear less committed to their work and therefore more expendable.

Some workers’ advocates say they are particularly concerned about the consequences for women.

There’s now a “silent fright” among workers, said Joanne Brundage, executive director of Mothers & More, a 21-year-old networking group, likening the atmosphere to what she saw 20 years ago, when working mothers were advised not to keep pictures of their children in their cubicles…   (view the entire article here)

Shocking that we are regressing to pre-1990’s company policies.  Does this frighten you? Piss you off? Make you want to scream? Or maybe this whole thing opens up new horizons and opportunities for you? If you have an idea feel free to post your comments, thoughts, or strategies for other professional moms below…

Seth Godin describes a “tribe” as a group of people that have characteristics in common that bind them in some way. Like a bunch of midlife moms, CPA’s, coaches-in-training, aspiring pilots, etcetera. Marketers typically look for tribes because tribes are niches and niches have wants and needs marketers have products or services to fill. Some complain they can’t find a niche or don’t know how to serve one. But there’s a way you can find such a tribe and ethically procure business from it easily, and in the course of doing your own thing.

Several years ago I was involved in a high-end program for such a tribe of close to a hundred participants, headed up by several “gurus” in the field. One of the perks was a lavishly decorated and branded online community promised to be filled with audio, video and special messages to help us learn. A core membership of thirty of us talked it up in the forum and discussed audios of teaching calls. The first month went by with only a brief greeting from each of the gurus.

The second month, two of the four teachers put brief “keep it up” posts in the forums – this was the only content contributed. Teachers were noticably absent when perplexed attendees asked an increasing amount of questions about the process. The final third month of this program passed without any further online content but call recordings.

When asked we were brushed off with “Oh, we’re very busy, ask people in the forum”. People began speaking under the table about their dissatisfaction. The so-called gurus didn’t keep their promises to the community. And as the experience ended, core members began to plan for closure of the online community.

Myself and two others stepped up, offered our expertise and reconstituted the community elsewhere and kept masterminding for the better part of a year. Though we did not set out to, we all got clients out of this, simply by being there when needed and being willing to jump in the gap. The three of us provided slightly different but complementary services that were the “other half” the original gurus promised to have provided but didn’t.

In such a situation, you can ethically serve a pre-existing tribe well and have the blessing of both the tribe members and the person/s who initially began service to the tribe. You’re relieving them after all, of work they clearly did not want to do. This process has been replicated many times by people I’ve observed in adopting nearly-dead networking clubs, Meetups, charities and just about any other group you can think of.

Here’s the process, outlined:

1. Notice or become involved in a tribe that you have the skills to serve. Bonus points if these folks are people you really like.

2. Notice that these people have been provided only half the service they really should have gotten with their membership.

- OR-

2.5. Notice that they have been abandoned by the original service provider who perhaps or provides clients a forum but then skips out on posting to it, or sells a product but provides no follow-up in how to “digest” that product.

3. Provide that other half of the service that they didn’t even know they wanted or needed, but love once they get. Note that you don’t need permission of the service provider who abandoned the tribe, nor do you necessarily need to inform them you’re doing it. Your unspoken contract as it were, is with the tribe, not the previous provider.

3.5 This “other half” service should speak to the tribe’s WANTS, not their needs. Why? Because Wanting something is far more emotionally charged – and therefore marketable – than something they know they need.

Contrast these two statements:

Purchase Statement #1: “I need a good business suit, my old one is worn out” and the accompanying heavy sigh at the thought of the money spent or because the person would really rather shop for clothes to go clubbing or hates crowded malls.

Purchase Statement #2: “Oh my god!I WANT that Armani suit with the Manolo pumps! I’ve just GOT to have it. Just wait’ll they see me at the office!”. It may not be disco wear, but it has if possible, even more cachet, mystery and allure.

The former statement is perfunctory, the latter a “must-do at all costs”.

Exactly.

4. Other-Half services needn’t be time-consuming or costly. A short report, a how-to audio, filling in on a forum, answering tech questions, sharing your rolodex of trusted service providers, providing a group space on your server to share uploads, donating time on your bridgeline, etc. are all low-time and cost to you, but highly valued to those you share these services with.

5.You naturally speak about your services and your offers in the course of providing the other-half service to the tribe. So do others, but the tribe, having identified you as a leader, will listen to you first in rank order of others who might provide the same service. Note: Speak of what you do naturally, in the flow of conversation, without being “sales-y”.

5.5. A larger than normal majority of the tribe you’ve taken over will be predisposed to accept your offer because they’ve had an excellent taste of your tender loving care. For those that do, contentment is a foregone conclusion as long as you continue great service to them. Done=Done

* The phrase “Abandoned Tribes” comes courtesy of Andy Wibbels (Twitterfeed: @andymatic), as we were brainstorming this idea around the other night. By golly, ya can’t beat that for a hook. Thanks, buddy. 

From Yahoo HotJobs, by Chloe Dowley

Job stress is one of the most common complaints among Americans, and research indicates that it has become a more widespread problem in recent years. In 1992, the United Nations named job stress “The 20th Century Disease,” and the World Health Organization has called it a “World Wide Epidemic.” Also, studies have shown that too much negative stress can contribute to health problems ranging from migraine headaches and depression to life-threatening illnesses such as heart attacks. Is that pension plan really worth it if you won’t be alive to cash it in?

Turn Off the Career Pressure-Cooker

What’s an overworked guy or gal to do? Though it may seem out of the question after a 60+ hour workweek, redirecting some of your energy toward identifying and training for a new career may be the best investment you can make. The careers listed below are not anxiety-free (every job by nature has some elements of positive and negative stress), but they do offer a combination of freedom, creativity, and personal satisfaction that can help keep your pulse rate normal.

Check out the list of The 10 Least Stressful jobs, and full article at Yahoo News here.

An Open Letter from Maryam

In case you read the blog but are not on my email list, this is to let you know that effective immediately, all of my public offerings, including classes at The Energy Coach Institute, are on indefinite hiatus.

Thank you, for the beautiful memories, and invaluable experience.

I’m taking my own advice, following my Bliss, and honoring that I need to take a break from teaching to rest, renew and research new possibilities.

This is something I am doing mindfully and with great joy. It feels light in body, mind and soul, and I’m full of gratitude to have the full support of my family and those close to me.

If you’re worried about me – please don’t be – I’m just fine, am moving onward and upward, and looking forward to the infinite possibilities. What grand and glorious adventures are around the corner? It’s going to be so much fun finding out!

Until then…you can follow me on Twitter if you’d like a running stream of consciousness:

http://twitter.com/maryamwebster

Or connect on Facebook:

http://maryamwebster.com/facebook.html

And please take my invitation to get started benefitting yourself and the world around you with  The ETHOS Method. Bonus points if you join our community and start sharing in the forums!

Live Your  Bliss…

Warm Blessings,
Maryam