Archives for August 2014
Using your Self-Sabotaging Fear to your Advantage
Your self-sabotaging fear is an indicator. It is a belief that is signaling to your body that whatever action or inaction will cause pain. Whether that be your fear to change careers, to start over, or to start your own business. Fear challenges you to act. Your action either overcomes or succumbs to fear. The choice is yours. No, really. The. Choice. Is. Yours. Let that one sink in for sec…The remainder of this article will provide you with some pointers to aid you in making your choice to overcome or succumb. Either way, you’re in the driver’s seat that takes you down any highway you choose.
4 Tips to Using your Self-Sabotaging Fear to your Advantage
- Let fear teach you. Seriously, take a moment to listen to your thoughts, to feel the sensations that run throughout your body about whatever is causing you fear. What is it? What is it indicating to you? Is it your ego second guessing your ability or a voice that self-sabotages your
quest for success? Write it down. Reflect. Ask yourself why this happens, how frequently it happens, how it makes you feel, and what you have done in the past that proves that misleading, fearful, hesitation is meer mud clouding up your sunny mind. - Get scared. Yes, that is right. Get scared. After running through #1, if you’re not freaked out a bit about the emotions behind your fear, you’re not digging deep enough. Here, think about what is it that is truly freaking you out. Why? What is your biggest concern about that fear? Is it that you feel inadequate or unworthy of success? Why do you feel that way? Seriously, get in touch with that inward pessimistic, miserable emotion causing thing in your head. Once you find it. You’ll know. You’ll probably cry. Write it down. Ask yourself, again, is this truly a representation of your most true, positive self? More than likely, no. This is that reality check signal to your brain that your fear is a disillusion causing pain and confusion.
- Air Traffic Control Your Thoughts. You have control over what you allow into your mind, how it impacts your physiological state, and how you choose to respond to those thoughts. This may be a tough pill for some to swallow, but you must. You are the gatekeeper to your well-being. You need to be on thought alert, and how your thoughts impact your state. To go through exercises #1 & # 2 only to get right back at letting such sabotaging thoughts right back in and expecting something different to happen is insanity! Get serious about protecting your thoughts, state, and responses to thoughts. You are the controller of what goes, stays, and leaves.
- Rinse & Repeat #1, # 2, & # 3. This is not a one-time exercise that will remove fear, self-doubt, or other limiting beliefs. Rather it is way of life to identifying, analyzing, controlling, and orchestrating the thoughts in which you allow in your life. You can either allow fear to run you, or you can recognize that fear is an illusion of a delusion. You can evaluate why it happens, what it means, confirm with historical personal experiences it is wrong, and move forward. Once one realizes and proactively works toward creating a healthy management of such thoughts, one can use that knowledge to create confidence. Then use that confidence and move forward.
Your life, your choice. Make the most out of your self-sabotaging fearful thoughts. You have control to act on those thoughts and the ability to turn them into something that can truly serve you.
by Katie Doseck, PhD
Chief Visionary | Viral Solutions LLC
8 Calls to Action to Increase Your Focus TODAY
New York Times Bestselling author of Focus, Daniel Goleman, breaks focus down into 3 categories: inner, other, and outer. Inner focus is our level of self-awareness. Meaning, inner focus is our attention toward values, feelings, and beliefs toward ourselves. This level of focus is an essential building block to self-confidence, abilities, and getting things done. Other focus is our empathy and understanding of the perceptions of others, and what we can do to help them be their best. The outer focus, deals simply with how we recognized outer things that shape our reality or perhaps, our strategy to shaping our reality. You’re in the driver seat as to how far, long, or effective your focus journey will take, continue, or end.
Look at these eight strategy steps as refueling stations to your focus journey.
- Create your personal setting, i.e. home office, work office, and the ambience of your life. You control your setting, not your setting controlling you.
- Mindfulness thoughts to remind you to eliminate distractions. Practice being in the moment, but not frazzled by a disruption. Train your mind, attitude, and emotions to be present and to identify what is necessary for you to maintain your focus, and what is a distraction. Stop
that distraction. Regain your focus. - Exercise your mind. Practice mindfulness activities for your brain to aid you in being the present moment. Meditation is an excellent exercise to aid in focus, clarity, and many other things. If meditation is new for you, research some amazing tutorials via Spirit Junkie or perhaps, check out the free Meditation App, Headspace.
- Willpower nutrition. Create and sustain willpower through minimizing stress and building relaxing platforms that promote focus and follow-through. Daniel Goleman also provides an excellent guide to help you relax and minimize stress.
- What you consume matters. Plan and eat healthy meals that give you the energy and nourishment your body and mind needs. Moderation of caffeine and carbs will also aid in preventing bursts of energy followed by dreaded energy crashes.
- Get feedback from an expert, such as a mentor, professional coach, or management professional that can aid you in identifying areas of improvement to strengthen your focus abilities.
- Make the time to work on growing and understanding your inner, other, and outer focus influences of your life, work, and organization. Doing so will aid you in conducting more effective situational analyzes that shape strategy. Personal and professional strategy requires focus.
- Sleep. Seriously, getting a good night’s rest is a dying necessity that takes away essential rest, recovery, and energy for the next day. If you struggle with falling asleep because your mind is running a hundred miles an hour, put on some relaxing music or download the Sleep Pillow app.
Make the best of your focus journey by not sacrificing one area of focus to another. Meaning, your inner focus is essential, but don’t get hung-up on only your perspective and neglect outer and other focus. Life requires alignment, understanding, and action. Managing that alignment through balanced focus is paramount to achieving and sustaining focus. Take time to get to know your inner focus, focus influences of others, and outside focus that can impact your internal personal and professional world. Doing so helps you to not only focus, but to shape strategy that is more productive, meaningful, and relevant to you, your clients, family, friends, colleagues, and Universe. Today is your day.
Good Reads…
Goleman, D. (2014). 7 Ways to Sharpen Your Focus. The Huffington Post. Retrieved http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dan-goleman/7-ways-to-sharpen-your-fo_b_4282640.html,
Schawbel, D. (2014). Daniel Goleman: Why Professionals Need Focus. Forbes. Retrieved: http://www.forbes.com/sites/danschawbel/2013/10/08/daniel-goleman-why-professionals-need-focus/.
Copyright Viral Solutions llc © 2014. All Rights Reserved.
by Katie Doseck, Ph.D.
Chief Visionary | Viral Solutions LLC
How to Be More Productive With Your Email
If you're not careful, email can quickly turn into a huge time suck that saps a lot of your energy and productivity. One study indicates that reading and responding to email makes up about 28% of the average person's work week! That's an absolutely staggering figure. Fortunately, there are ways that you can improve your email productivity and reduce that number.
Here are some tips, so you can be more productive with your email:
1) Unsubscribe from everything that isn't necessary. Over time, you've probably built up quite a list of subscriptions simply by filling your email out on web forms. One easy way to do this is to use a web app called Unroll.me, which will present you with a list of all the 
subscriptions you currently have with your email address and gives you the option either to unsubscribe or combine them all into one single message.
2) Turn off email notifications on desktop and mobile. It's natural to feel like you need to check your email and respond as soon as you get a notification, but this can easily derail you from accomplishing other important tasks. Instead, schedule certain times throughout the day where you'll check and respond to emails, and don't let yourself be distracted by notifications.
3) Keep your responses succinct. There's no need to add fluff to email messages; you're using them specifically for their convenience and efficiency. Get across the critical facts that you need to deliver and the main point you're trying to make without going too deep into unnecessary chit chat.
4) Use filters and folders for your messages. If you get a lot of emails every day, you may want to consider setting up custom filters to sort these messages. Put action items in one folder, emails requiring a response in another, lower-priority mail in another, etc. This will help you to easily prioritize and categorize what you have in your inbox.
5) Use canned messages when appropriate. If you find yourself sending out the same sort of email a lot (thanks for ordering, letters of introduction, etc.) create several canned messages that you can customize depending on the recipient. This will save you a ton of time in the long run.
Email is an important tool for business, but you shouldn't feel like it's running your life. For more information about how to make your email usage more productive, contact us today at Viral Solutions.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Important SEO Strategies for Small Business Owners
Over the last decade or so, SEO has changed just as much as it's grown in use. If you fail to stay up to date with the latest SEO trends, you could be using irrelevant strategies, like (shudder) keyword stuffing.
Feeling a little out of the loop? No problem!
Here are some SEO strategies for small business owners, that you should definitely employ, based on the most recent upgrades to Google's algorithms:
1) Create relevant and highly focused content.
The text on any given page on your website should be focused on specific topics, rather than multiple topics. This can be even more effective if you localize all your content. So for example, let's say you provide a specific 
service in five different cities. It can actually be more beneficial for you to create a page for that service in each city rather than just one general page for that service. Google has put a much greater emphasis on local search in recent years.
2) Create a profile with Google My Business.
This page allows you to create a profile with information about your business and to upload several photos. Include information such as hours of operation, a description of your business and more, and you can also use it to get reviews from customers. The service also allows you to put your business in two to five categories, which can help you out in local searches when people are searching for specific categories of businesses nearby.
3) Encourage online reviews from customers and clients.
Put “Review us” buttons on your website, send follow-up emails after purchases asking for reviews, or even ask for reviews in person. Whatever strategy you use, it behooves you to get as many reviews as possible, because that will help to increase your exposure in searches. It's also a great sales tool; good reviews from actual customers are extremely powerful referrals.
4) Get links from other websites, like organizations or blogs.
Linkbuilding is still an essential SEO tactic, and can also help your business to network with other organizations. Try getting links from the Better Business Bureau, a local Chamber of Commerce or other organizations related to your business. If you have a blog, you can also link to (and get links from) blogs related to your industry.
If you have any additional questions about today's most relevant and important SEO strategies, contact us today at Viral Solutions.
Watch out elephants! This slayer of business challenges comes with 30 years of record breaking sales, marketing, operations, training and leadership experience . He has worked face-to-face with 100’s of small business owners as well as large firms. His love of creating, communicating, developing and executing results for clients shines with each project, publication and training event. His entrepreneurial spirit, passion, industry experience, education, problem-solving prowess, charismatic personality and been-there-done that attitude leads his client focused approach.
Steps to increase your focus of being in the NOW
Are distractions hijacking your current inner-peace? Are you thinking about what you need to do today, notifications on your phone, or drawn back into the abyss of some time sucking activity online? If so, this article is for you. In fact, University of California professor, Gloria Mark suggests that this is not only a personal issue, but a business issue, costing hundreds of billions of dollars a year in lost productivity. So, whether you’re reviewing this article for self-help to improve focus or stumbled upon it and want to see how it could help your firm, read on.
The purpose of this article is to shed some light on mindfulness, multitasking, and steps to increase your focus of being in the NOW.
- Mindful. It isn’t a hipster new trend. It is a way of life. Mindfulness is the practice of being in the moment, recognizing and acting upon your thoughts, emotions, and perceptions toward whatever it is that you are experiencing. Mindfulness helps you to tune-out or at the very
least for beginner mindfulness practitioners, turn-down those distractions. Imagine being able to truly be and live in the moment. What would that feel like for you? Would you feel more control over you day versus your day controlling you? Would you be able to start and finish a project without thinking about the other ten, no wait, twenty things that you also have to do for the day? Would you able to truly know what you can handle, how you can handle it, and how to use that level of understanding to build an empire of success that fits your abilities versus running amok and hoping you can finish everything?
- Multi-tasking. Your distractions today, could be impacting your future for tomorrow. These distractions can come in many forms, including multitasking. Yes, multitasking could potentially be sabotaging your mindfulness focus, but it can also harm your overall productivity. In fact, Stanford University conducted a research study of participants that we in a traditional setting of distractions, such as emails, social media networking sites, and web browsing to one group of participants. Then in another group, no electronic distractions, and just the assessment in front of them. Participants that were in the multitasking group scored significantly lower than those in the other setting. Illustrating, that in highly saturated distraction environment, getting things done is significantly harder.
- Now. Being in the moment allows you to be you. To truly embrace your ideas, creativity, emotions, and analysis of whatever it is that is in front of you. Whether that is a huge business deal that could impact your career or being hit with your final notice and trying to figure out which direction to go. Mindfulness is a courageous tool to aid you in living in the now. To face the situation. To be at peace with the situation. To create more informed solutions, rather than running from stress of situations, people, or deadlines. Practice focus. Distance your distractions. This may include blocking out time for your project, turning off notifications, scheduling a time when you review your emails, voice-mails, or other communications. Basically, not making yourself readily available to anyone at anytime – you’re hurting your productivity, and quite frankly would be undeserving them. Therefore, make the time for each of your tasks, activities, or projects. Set that time. Stick to that time, and while you’re there, be there.
You, your clients, team, and management will thank you as your quality of life, projects, and interactions with people will improve.
Great Read that Will Rock Your Focus World…
Dumaine, B. (2014). The Kings of Concentration. Inc. Retrieved:
Copyright Viral Solutions llc © 2014. All Rights Reserved
by Katie Doseck, Ph.D.
Associate Dean of Business & Accounting at Stevens–Henager College
Chief Visionary | Viral Solutions LLC
Katie Doseck, PhD | Chief Visionary & Strategic Ace Up Your Sleeve. I catapulted my experience with extensive education, trainings, and personal coaching; earning a PhD in Organizational Management with a specialization in Human Resource Management, MBA in Organizational Leadership, and BA in Law & Liberal Arts. Subject Matter Expert (SME) areas: Human Resource Management, Employment Law, Organizational Change, Change Management, Resource Planning, Strategic Planning, Talent Management, Selling & Sales Management, Training & Development, Decision Making Models, Project Management, Customer Relationship Management, and Motivation. Dr. Doseck is based out of Logan, Utah.