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Archive for March, 2010

Wednesday Wellness: Which Trail Will You Blaze?

By Tammy Parkinson | March 31st, 2010 0 Comments

Let’s say you are looking at yourself…at 5 years old. You are standing beside this child, ready to give advice on living a long and healthy life; one rich in vibrancy and pain free. What would you tell him or her about taking care of your own body?

Now you are standing beside yourself…at 19 years old. You are offering insight about how to approach your 20’s with a strong and fit body, one which can resist disease, have incredible energy and keep up with others your age climbing various “ladders”.

Now you are in real time. This time however, you have followed your own advice from age 5, through 19 and into the age you are now. You’ve adhered to the wisdom of your elders, so to speak. How would your life be different in this scenario than it might be now? Would you be healthier, more energetic, disease free?

Now you are in your 80’s. There were two paths to take…the one that you are currently on, or the one you started on at age 5 with the voice of wisdom ringing in your ears. Which path did you choose? When you look at this 85 year old, how is this person standing, feeling, thinking?

Whatever your answer, you have the choice to stay on your current health path, or jump on to a new one. Which trail will you blaze?

Monday Mojo: Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain

By Tom Tognoli | March 29th, 2010 0 Comments

“I’m not a morning person” I can’t tell you how many times I have heard that over the years.

So often people talk about how they just can’t squeeze in the most important activities in their life because “I’m not a morning person”. When we are young and with little or no responsibility except for ourselves…or retired and our kids are out of the house, it is easier to slip in those important activities after that first cup of Joe in the morning, at lunch, in the afternoon, in the early evening. For me, that is not an option…and my guess is for most of your reading this that is not an option either. We have kids, house, lunches to make, work, kids homework, little league, dinner to make, grocery shopping, wash…the list goes on and on.

Trust me, when my alarm goes off in the morning at 4:45, I am not all fired up to jump out of bed and “hit it”. Candidly, many mornings I am telling myself “you have got to be kidding me…it feels like I just closed my eyes”. But I know the short term pain and discipline of putting my feet on the floor and getting started with my day is easier than the long term pain of regret, disappointment and not accomplishing my goals.

Let’s face it…for many of us we have tried for years and years to squeeze in those most important activities sometime during the day, but then life gets in the way and the most important activities end up taking second fiddle to the chaos. I am not saying you have to wake up at 4:45, but if you really want to get those most important activities done, unless you are an anomaly, you probably need to do it first thing of the day before the chaos begins, while most of the rest of the world is still sleeping.

Remember, we are our biggest asset and if we don’t make a commitment to take care of our body, mind and soul no one else will. You can’t delegate it, you can’t run down to the store and buy it…you have to have the discipline to JUST DO IT!!!!!

We had our Intero Achievement Awards a couple of weeks ago and before I got up to give my talk this video on “The Creation of Monday Morning MOJO” was played. I thought you would get a kick out of it.

“I am a morning person.”

Cool Apps: Goin’ Mobile!

By John Thompson | March 26th, 2010 1 Comment

Everywhere you turn, everyone’s going mobile. Smartphones are everywhere, and not just in the hands of “business” people. Soccer moms, NASCAR dads, and yes, even kids, have them, and more users join the fray each and every day.

Now that the technology is really going mainstream, finding new ways to capitalize on it and monetize it is what everyone is clamoring for.

Raise your hand if you know what a QR code is. Anyone?

Outside of the world of tech-geekery, few people do, but I’ll bet you’ve seen one. See that little square up in the left-hand corner? Well, that’s it. But what is it? What does it do?

The answer is, “Quite a lot!”

Most smartphones — BlackBerry, iPhone, Palm Pre, Droid … you name it — have applications available that read those handy-dandy little codes (they read regular barcodes, too, but that’s not germane to this conversation). The neat thing is that you can use those apps (as well as countless web-based apps) to create QR codes. Even neater? You can make them to hold almost any information you’d like.

Code them with a link to your website. Or a website for your listing. Create a coupon that they could use for a discount on a particular service. Include a special message just for people who’ve got a QR code reader.

Think of the possibilities.

Once you’ve generated a QR code, you can place it on just about anything. Include it in property flyers. Put it on your business cards. Embed it in your website. You can even put them on t-shirts, mugs, or just about anything else you’d like.

All your potential customer has to do is point his phone’s camera at the QR code, snap its picture, and his code reader will send his “secret” message. Pretty cool, right?

This is still emerging technology, but being an early-adopter is cool! Take a look at QR codes. How could you use them to help your business? We’d love to hear your ideas!

Thursday Thoughts On Leadership: How Leaders Create Something Out of Nothing

By Gino Blefari | March 25th, 2010 0 Comments

In his book “The Score Takes Care of Itself”, Bill Walsh asks the question, “Should desperation be the primary determinant for seeking new direction, innovative solutions?” He asks this because when he found himself as the quarterbacks coach of the Cleveland Browns, in charge of an offense with no ability to run the ball and a backup quarterback with a weak arm, he had to think of something. He couldn’t change the calendar. They had to play on Sunday. They couldn’t move up the player draft and restock players. He had to face the challenge each week of figuring out how to move the ball on offense with limited options. His answer…creating a short precision pass-oriented offense that would take advantage of the entire field and five receivers, led by a quarterback, Virgil Carter, who, while not able to throw hard or very far, was extremely accurate. He created something out of nothing. The West Coast Offense.

In fact, it wasn’t really created from nothing. He was forced by circumstance to re-evaluate the situation he faced and all the assets available to him and find a solution to his problem. As he put it, “… it was created out of existing assets that only needed to be ‘seen’ and then capitalized on in new ways.” In his book, Walsh outlines four main concepts that can be used to model your own progression in any endeavor:

Success doesn’t care which road you take to get to its doorstep. Walsh did not let it bother him that many traditionalists looked down at his new style. In a manly game like football, you had to run the ball. As one executive sneered, “It’s not real NFL football”, but in football as in life, we only remember the result and after a while, those naysayers had to figure out how this new offense was beating them and in fact how to copy it.
Be bold. Remove fear from the unknown – that is, change – from your mind. Try new things, even if it is just a new wrinkle on the old. One of the secrets of Walsh’s offense was that he simply moved the point of attack from behind the line of scrimmage, where the defense was concentrated, to down the filed where there was only one or two defenders at most.
Desperation should not drive innovation. Don’t wait until you run out of options to try new innovations. Although he installed his offense only after losing his starting quarterback. In hindsight, the team would have been better off starting the back-up and running the new offense from the start as that system ultimately proved more successful than the traditional offense they ran before the change.
Be obsessive in looking for the upside in the downside. It would be a mistake to think that Walsh thought of his new offense after their starting quarterback was hurt. In fact, it was born by watching Virgil Carter in practice and on film before he knew he had to turn the offense over to him. He new that Carter did not possess a strong enough arm to make the throws the current offense called for. Because Carter was smart, agile and accurate, Walsh started to design plays that took advantage of those skills. Of course, once he became the starter, he had to change all the plays. But because he had already started to look for the upside in his backup quarterbacks limitations, he was ready.

Wednesday Wellness: The Dining Out Challenge

By Tammy Parkinson | March 24th, 2010 0 Comments

Last week, I was on vacation and had the “challenge” of dining out nearly every night! I know for many of you, business and social functions make this a weekly occurrence!

One of my friends, who is a Wednesday Wellness “reader”, suggested I offer some tips on making a 2000+ calorie dinner out into a 700 calorie dinner by offering out some quick suggestions!

When you eat out, never go starving! If you are starving as you leave the house, grab a few slices of an apple or similar and eat that on the way to the restaurant. Consider it your pre-appetizer appetizer!
If possible, right when you sit down, ask for water and a cup of hot tea. Drink the hot tea as you are waiting for your first meal (or only meal)
Scan the menu ahead of time on line if you know where you are going, so you don’t even need to open the menu when you get there.
If you don’t have the opportunity to get online, let your eyes go immediately to appetizers, salads and fish options. Don’t even tempt yourself with buttery pasta choices, red meat options and/or creamy foods.
Choose your meal to be made up of two types of foods:

Clean veggies (salads without nuts and cheeses)
Lean proteins (without sauces or glazes)

Decide ahead of time you either won’t have dessert, or you will only have 1 bite of a shared dessert (even a bite can add to 75-100 calories)
If you want a glass of wine, let this be your dessert
If you would prefer a cocktail, choose a no calorie mixer like club soda
And the biggie…either ask the server to take the bread/chips, etc away, or let the other end of the table nibble at it!

I hope this helps! By making these changes over the past 7 days of my vacation, I most likely saved myself 8,000 calories…just in dinner alone! That’s 2 pounds I now don’t have to burn off and THAT feels great coming back from a great vacation!

Monday Mojo: The Four Addictions

By Tom Tognoli | March 22nd, 2010 0 Comments

Did you know there are four addictions which stop us from living an extraordinary life?

Our addiction to the opinions of other people
Our addiction to the past
Our addiction to food
Our addiction to drugs and alcohol

The real interesting thing is our addiction to the past, our addiction to food, and our addiction to drugs & alcohol are all caused because of our addiction to the opinions of others. So, the key to having an extraordinary life is simply eliminating our addiction to the opinions of others. It’s what holds us back from really going for it. Because when we are addicted to the opinion of others we are afraid of failure and making a fool of ourselves, which in turn stops us from taking risks and doing the things necessary in order to have the kick ass life we want. So, screw it. Who cares what they think? Go for it!

To beat this addiction I tell myself over and over every day “What you think of me is none of my business.” That way I am not holding back and worrying about it. The more we tell ourselves this, the less we will be held captive by the four addictions which stop us from having the kick ass life we deserve.

Screw what other people think – it is none of our business. Go for it and have an EXTRAORDINARY life!

Cool Apps: Rediscover GOOGLE Apps!

By John Thompson | March 19th, 2010 0 Comments

Yes, yes. I know. Google Apps, the search juggernaut’s super-smart, everything-rolled-into-one-for-a-nifty-little-price business solution, isn’t exactly new.

Not exactly, anyway.

For while Google Apps has been around for a few years, an announcement last week merits your attention – in fact, it merits a good long look!

Google has completely upped its game by expanding Google Apps’ capabilities exponentially. They’ve done this by launching the Google Apps Marketplace.

If you’re at all familiar with the iPhone App Store – the collection of some 200,000 small applications that run on your phone – this news will seem familiar to you.

What this new Marketplace has done is to offer products and services that integrate fully with Google Apps. From accounting and finance tools, like Freshbooks, to image editing, like Aviary, as well as payroll tools, CRM, expense reports, and analytics tools for your websites. For the most part, these tools include single sign-on (so you don’t have to log in again and again and again), as well as Google’s universal navigation.

And you can count on the number of apps in the Marketplace to continue growing as programmers vie to make their latest creations available to the millions of Google Apps users.

In effect, what Google has done is make it possible to run your entire office from any location. Where you are doesn’t really matter.

In order to use the Marketplace, of course, you have to be a Google Apps user. If you’re not, take it out for a spin; you won’t regret it. If you’re already using Google Apps, then good on ya’. Step into the Marketplace and give it a try.

“New” doesn’t always mean “best” … sometimes we just have to look at something seasoned in a new way to find something that’ll change everything.

Thursday Thoughts On Leadership: March Madness

By Gino Blefari | March 18th, 2010 0 Comments

March Madness begins today. No, I’m not talking about your latest short sale. I’m talking about the NCAA Men’s basketball tournament. The top 64 teams in the country begin a single-elimination tournament today to crown a National Champion. If you win, you keep playing. If you lose … you go home. Anyone can win. In theory the worst team has the same chance as the top team to win it all. Of course in reality only the top teams win. The best coaches, with the best players and the best preparation win. In fact the “lowest” seed to ever win was the eight seeded Villanova Wildcats in 1985. In fact, in the 71 year history of the tournament, four universities have won the tournament a total of 28 times, almost half. Even more telling, 33 coaches have one championship while the remaining 48 championships have been one by just 13 coaches. Is this starting to sound like top producers in the top real estate companies? It should. Like the tournament, in theory anyone with a real estate license can finish as a top producer. In reality, the best prepared, hardest working agent finishes at the top.

How can an agent, a manager, or the CEO ensure that they finish at the top in an open competition, in a tournament of sorts? Is every listing up for grabs? Do all new agents or recruits spread out evenly to all of the companies? Success is not distributed evenly. Although it can seem chaotic, when you peel back the layers you find that the leaders in our industry are the hardest working, best trained, most dedicated individuals. Consider again the basket ball tournament for an example.

The University of California, Los Angeles holds the record with the most championships with a total of 11. Of those eleven one coach, John Wooden, led them to the top ten times. Far from the Madness we talk about today, for a time the tournament was very predictable. From 1964 to 1975, UCLA won the championship 10 times. As with so many examples of extreme success, it is easy to try and justify why he won so much. He had the best players. The truth is that only two of his players made it to the NBA Hall of Fame.

His secret was that his leadership attracted top players because he was always able to draw the best out of each and every one of them. He inspired his players to always achieve their greatest according to their abilities. This is evident in his sayings, “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best you are capable of becoming,” and “Don’t measure yourself by what you have accomplished, but by what you should have accomplished with your ability.” He was a great recruiter, he was a great teacher, and he was a great coach. He didn’t wait for the championship game to put it all together. He put it all together on the journey. He always emphasized that practice and preparation was the most important thing, so that when the championship game arrived, his team was always better prepared and inspired to win. And they did.

Finally, he built his teams on a Pyramid of Success based on principles such as enthusiasm, condition, skill, confidence, poise, team spirit with the top of the pyramid being competitive greatness that was applicable to not only basketball but to any endeavor. He explained competitive greatness by simply saying, “Perform at your best when your best is required. Your best is required each day.”

Wednesday Wellness: Summer Is Coming! Are You Ready?

By Tammy Parkinson | March 17th, 2010 1 Comment

As spring approaches, the down jacket gets packed, the long pants are the exception vs. the rule and (gasp) tank tops are donned! What does this mean? Skin is now exposed!

Simply put…it’s time to tone up!

We see the panic stricken friends come in to the studio to do double duty workouts and want quick options for losing the winter 10 pounds!

As you cling to your computer, hoping I’m going to give you the secret to lose body fat and lean up in 7 days or less….I am not! (sorry!) However…I can give you some tips that if you are diligent, you can get a head start on anyone who is watching the latest infomercial about quick weight loss.

Fitness:

Decide on an “amount” of minutes you will commit to towards exercising each week. For instance, if you decide you will exercise 150 min. a week, you can divide that in 2 days, or 7, just as long as you clock 150 minutes!
Get in a little extra upper body work by doing 10 push-ups a day, increasing this by 1 every day a week at a time (you can always begin by doing push-ups against the wall)
Once a week, make a date of sorts with a friend, coworker, spouse, child, etc to get outside and walk for at least 30 minutes. This beats Starbucks any day!
Hire a personal trainer 1x a week to give you a quick head start!

Nutrition:

For one week, cut out any foods made with white flour. This will help your blood sugar and will teach you how to make healthier choices, simply by committing to this one rule.
If you are used to having chips once a day, replace that with a piece of fruit or vegetable. Again, try this for one week
See if you can have dinner be 70% vegetables, again for one week. Ideally the other 30% should be a lean protein source like fish, egg whites, poultry or temphe.

If you try these little tips for 1week, see how you feel…if the answer is pretty darn good…try it for another week! It’s not necessary easy…but it’s simple!

Summer’s coming!! If you need a little “extra” push…call your favorite personal training and nutrition studio, Body Firm!

Monday Mojo: Ponds vs. River – What Type of Water are You?

By Tom Tognoli | March 15th, 2010 0 Comments

Do you know what percent of our body is water? We BEGIN life as a fetus at 99%. When we are born, it drops to about 90%. Then the average human body settles in around 70%. So, from a simple physical perspective, we are all made up for the most part of water!

Let me ask you a simple question – if you had a choice to drink from a body of water, which would you prefer – a river or a pond? Why?

Water in a river remains pure because it is moving, and it is generally agreed that the quicker it is moving, the more pure it is. When water is stagnating, trapped, or immobile, what happens? It collects a lot of crap and becomes polluted. Right?

So, what is the message we all can learn from water?

That it is critical for us to continue moving fast and forward if we are interested in improving. Otherwise we could be in danger of becoming idle, polluted, and turn into crap. It is interesting to note that as children, we are expected to grow and improve every year mentally, physically and emotionally. That is why we have different grades in school. And each year you must improve to continue on.

Then we graduate and what happens? Most people’s growth process stops or slows down drastically. And the unfortunate thing is when we stop growing, we don’t stay the same. We actually start to move backwards year after year. What are you doing to improve every year mentally, physically and emotionally? Are you reacting to life or are you attacking and taking from it?

Let’s all make a commitment to keep in action, keep moving, changing, flowing – mentally, physically, and emotionally. It is going to help purify who we are. Let’s choose to not turn into crap. Let’s choose to continue to become more pure!

Side Note:

Be sure and drink lots of water since 70% of our body is made up of it and we don’t want it just sitting in our bodies stagnant like a dirty pond – purge the old and replenish with new fresh clean water every day.

Like most of you, one of my New Year’s resolutions is to eat healthier. There is a group of about 20 people I am doing a food log with. Every day we send everyone in the group an e-mail with everything we ate/drank for the day, everything! It is amazing how much of an impact this little exercise has on your daily eating habits. One of the most important things we do in our group is keep each other accountable for drinking lots of water. I have been drinking about 100 ounces a day.

Archive for March, 2010

Wednesday Wellness: Which Trail Will You Blaze?

Monday Mojo: Short Term Pain for Long Term Gain

Cool Apps: Goin’ Mobile!

Thursday Thoughts On Leadership: How Leaders Create Something Out of Nothing

Wednesday Wellness: The Dining Out Challenge

Monday Mojo: The Four Addictions

Cool Apps: Rediscover GOOGLE Apps!

Thursday Thoughts On Leadership: March Madness

Wednesday Wellness: Summer Is Coming! Are You Ready?

Monday Mojo: Ponds vs. River – What Type of Water are You?

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