None of us want to feel stupid. Especially not when you have been in business for ten, fifteen, twenty years or more. But when it comes to new technology, lets face it, we do!

The tough part is the speed at which social media changes. Take a look at these amazing statistics about social media.

• 3 out of 4 Americans use social technology
• 2/3 of the global Internet population visit social networks
• Visiting social networking sites is the 4th most popular online activity –actually ahead of personal email
• Time spent on social networks is growing at 3x the overall Internet rate, accounting for 10% of all Internet time
• Social media is shifting the power away from the editors and the publishers. You are in control!
• Estimated 100,000,000 videos are viewed on Youtube per day
• 13,000,000 articles are available on Wikipedia
• 3,600,000,000 photos has been received on Flickr since June 2009, that’s 1 photo per every two citizens of this planet
• 1382% is the monthly growth rate of Twitter users from January to February 2009
• 5,000,000,000 minutes spent on Facebook each day
• Total amount of time spent on Facebook increased by 566% between December 2007-December 2008
• Facebook’s greatest growth in global audience numbers has come from people aged 35-49
• If Facebook were a country, it would be the 8th most populated in the world (Mark Zuckenberg)
• 93% of social media users believe that a company should have a presence in social media
• 85% of social media users believe that a company should interact with its customers in social media

Social media is not going away. I don’t know about you, but for a while there I was totally content putting my head in the sand and just hoping it would go away (who wants to have to learn something new at this stage of the game ?

Especially when the learning curve involves a whole new language and a world you don’t really understand)

Yes, I like you, was hoping it would go away. But it hasn’t and deep down we all know, it won’t. So what do you do?

Well, you can always carry on feeling stupid. Or you could learn something.

But wait.

Wasn’t there a time, when learning was actually fun?

When your mind was open to new ideas, unlimited possibilities,  interesting new ways of seeing old things. Remember?

Like the sensation of being in love, learning creates expansion, not just in your mind but in your whole being. Because when the mind opens, we tune in and see things we didn’t see before. Like opportunities.

Have you ever put a box, a post-it note, or a folder somewhere to remind you to do something but then after a while, you don’t see it any more?

Right now there is an opportunity to fall in love with learning again.  To engage in what is new, exciting and relevant. (Not to mention good for business)

The choice: To feel young, relevant, engaged and up to date  or To feel stupid, old and outdated.

Now there is a tough decision….

Stop feeling stupid. Take action today by joining me and my social media advisor, Mande White on a teleseminar, Friday October 9 at 1 p.m. as we discuss “What is Social Media? Why Should I Care?”

To Your Success,

Mandy Bass

Priority Living Systems

Since going live with Free Speaker Match.com last week, I received dozens of emails asking about both the video on my personal website and my speaker’s digital demo.

So I went out on a limb and organized a video day for Saturday October 24th.

What my savvy associates are asking is:

“What is the quickest, least expensive way to get a really good, quality professional video?”

That is a really good question because there are probably 100 good reasons why you need at least one of these – here are my top ten:

1. Video is the most powerful medium to portray/sell anything –especially yourself.
2. Having a video an online, makes it possible for you to be “live” in ten, twenty (or even millions) places at once.
3. Since placing a video on my personal website, my new client conversion rate more than doubled.
4. Research proves that the more people see and hear you, the more likely they are to like and trust you.
5. When it comes to relationship building online, your video gives people an opportunity to connect with your essence, something that is just not possible with a static picture. So that even if you never meet someone in person, they can get a better sense of who you really are.
6. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words -  a good video is worth 1 million
7. There is no easier way for a meeting planner to be comfortable about booking you for a gig, then for them to actually see you in action.
8. The human brain employs 40% of the cortex to process video, meaning that humans are wired to scan the visual environment and are most attracted to visual stimulation. But they get bored quick. Seeing you in action and hearing you at the same time, people focus and pay attention.
9. Online video can spread your word like a wildfire.
10. Why wouldn’t you have the capability of being in ten places at once, if you can do it for under five hundred bucks?

So I  convinced Bob Chesney, the best in the business, and the guy who has done all my professional videos since 1996, to fly out here from California and spend a day in Fort Lauderdale on 10/24 so you can get your videos done. Quick and cheap.

For under $500 Bob will help you craft, stage, shoot and edit a professional, high quality video. Take a look. Bob will only be here one day so I hope you can make it work for you. He will prep you ahead of time (and I will help as much as I can too) then on the 24th he will shoot your video.

To maximize his time here, Bob will edit your video back in his studio in California and within a couple weeks your video can be live and online.

Get your reservation in now. There are only a limited number of slots.

Click here to take a look at his promo piece and make sure you reserve your slot.

The quickest way to the sign up sheet on his site is to click the “How much do I invest” link on the bottom left side of the page. Or just click here.

To Your Success!

Mandy Bass
Priority Living Systems

Researchers in Portugal recently discovered a remarkable thing about brains…

It turns out that when your body is under stress, you are MORE likely to repeat behaviors, even behaviors that are BAD for you.

Which sounds counter-productive, doesn’t it?

Precisely when you SHOULD take bold NEW actions (and PROACTIVELY make some NEW decisions), your body pulls you into old habits.

This research, published last month in the journal Science, MAY help explain why the pressure to get something done may actually TRIGGER procrastination.

Let’s say you need to do your taxes. Or complete some other task that’s been nagging at you for too long. Maybe there’s a dreaded phone call you DON’T want to make, but you know you have to.

Uh-oh, the stress is rising, which triggers a whole cascade of biochemical changes and hormonal responses that you notice right away.

Breathing, heart-rate, maybe even sweating.

You FEEL stressed.

What do you do to GET yourself to do the task? What do you say to yourself, or picture in your imagination? HOW do you get the job done when the pressure’s on?

Mother Nature is a comic genius

The technical term for it is perseveration, or “uncontrollable repetition,” and it’s astonishing how simple it is to make it happen.

Just add stress. A lot of it.

The more the better.

Obviously scientists can’t use humans to do this research, so they reach their conclusions by testing lab rats. (Personally, I abhor this type of testing but that doesn’t mean I can’t appreciate the results.)

To create stress, researchers used repeated electric shocks, encaged the animals with aggressive dominant animals, even held them underwater. The rats were helpless to prevent these negative stimuli from happening.

In just a few weeks of this environment, the relentless stress produced two physical changes in the animals’ brains:

1. Brain regions associated with executive decision-making and goal-directed behaviors shriveled
2. Brain regions associated with habit formation bloomed.

These twin brain-changes showed in their behaviors quite clearly.

The rats fell back on familiar routines and habitual responses, even when there was no present-time value to doing so. (Such as pressing a lever to get food pellets they were not going to eat.)

Robert Sapolsky, a neurobiologist who studies stress at Stanford University School of Medicine, commented on the research: “This is a great model for understanding why we end up in a rut, and then dig ourselves deeper and deeper into that rut.”

“Behaviors become habitual faster in stressed animals than in the controls, and worse, the stressed animals can’t shift back to goal-directed behaviors when that would be the better approach,” one of the researchers said. “I call this a vicious circle.”

To Your Success,

Mandy Bass
Priority Living Systems

Imagine (heaven forbid) everything you own is taken from you.

Yes, EVERYTHING.

No computer, no job, no home, no car, no customers, no business.

No friends or colleagues either.

Nothing.

ZZZZAAAP, you wake up wearing nothing but the clothes you have on now, and you are physically in a dumpster in some downtown city. (In the US a dumpster is a large metal rubbish box where garbage is kept, behind shops and office buildings.)

You wake up, realize where you are, and then…

What would you do first? Yeah, I know, you would get OUT of the dumpster. But THEN what would you do?

How — exactly — would you recreate your lifestyle the way you had it before?

Or would you?

Maybe you would create a NEW and better lifestyle.

Probably not, but you darn sure wouldn’t STAY there in the dumpster, saying something to yourself about how this is your ‘new’ reality.

Instead, some impulse inside of you would say, “This isn’t who I am or how I should be living!”

THAT impulse would — somehow — carry you out and into a nonstop process of change that would really be automatic.

I mean, there’d be WORK involved — you’d have to get the food and shelter somehow — but you wouldn’t have to “get yourself” to take action.

You wouldn’t need a stack of Tony Robbins motivational tapes to keep you focused on your ‘goals’, that’s for certain.

In fact, if I caught up with you a year later, how likely is it that your life would resemble the life you had BEFORE the dumpster incident?

You’d have a new place to live, your new cable/sky TV just the way you like it, a new cell/mobile phone, clothes just the way you like them, your favorite shampoo, favorite beverage in the fridge, all just the way you like them.

Somehow, that IMPULSE inside you would carry you up to this familiar level.

That’s great!

But then that same Impulse would…STOP.

So here’s my question…

How would It know when to stop? In most cases, this impulse inside of you would RE-create your life the way it was, but not any MORE than the way it was.

Why is that? and can this be changed?

So you’d make a new home happen, but not two homes. And not a mansion, either, at least not any bigger than the one you’re used to.

You’d make a car happen, but not a fancier car than before.

You’d recreate your income, but your income just like before.

Where does that Impulse get its instructions anyway?

I know a man who fled a communist country years ago with NOTHING but his wife, his two children and one suitcase.

Fast forward a year, and he was in Chicago (a new country!) with the SAME lifestyle he had before.

No better, no worse. (He actually lived well, so his ‘normal’ was better than most people’s. The point is, it wasn’t any better than he had.)

If Donald Trump or Richard Branson woke up in that dumpster, with no resources at all, what would THEIR Impulse cause them to do and create?

Advanced Super Bonus question: HOW would their Impulse GET THEM to do those things?

Can you change your impulse? Can you improve it so that you have a new Impulse, aiming where you would RATHER be?

Experiencing this is the whole reason for my new program, “Get Wires for Wealth: How to turn on the Flow of Good Money from the Dark Side of Your Mind.”

It’s about finding and improving that Impulse. It is about changing your “wiring” on creating wealth and prosperity.

The focus is money, but you can use it for other skills too. (Love, Tennis, golf, swimming, banjo-playing, taxidermy, you name it.)

Here is that link…

http://mandybass.com/teleseminar

If your Impulse is to attend, register now.

It may be the best decision you have made in a while. What do you have to lose?

To Your Prosperity and Success!

Mandy Bass

P.S. Feel free to leave comments below about your experience with this exercise.

People often procrastinate because the task at hand seems overwhelming.  The action steps or what needs to be done to get the project complete – are jumbled together in one big nebulous mess.

You will be more likely to get unstuck if you stop and simplify what needs to get done into one simple action step you can easily see yourself accomplishing rather than a group of ill-defined, unspecified, nebulous activities.

Take a moment to ask yourself what is the next  baby step? When you come up with that answer ask yourself: Is there anything that needs to be done before I can do that? When you get that answer – ask the same question again. When you get to a point where there is nothing else to be done first– you have simplified your next single action – the ONE thing you can do right now to move your project forward.

The chances are that on any project you have been procrastinating about your next step  will take less than five minutes to complete. No matter how large or nebulous something may appear – completion will take a series of small specific definable actions. Little steps one at a time.

To Your Success,

Mandy Bass

I want to share something that happened the other day:

It was 9:25 AM Monday morning and I was waiting, phone in hand with my eyes glued to my email looking for word from my 9AM coaching client. I had been working with Roger {not his real name] for over six years. Not once had he been late or missed a call. Something was wrong.

I called Roger’s office and got his voice mail . After several tries he answered his cell phone.

“Roger, are you okay?”

Anxiously he said, “Geez, Mandy, I’m sorry.” I could hear his fast, shallow breath. He seemed almost out of control. “I was almost killed. A tractor trailer jackknifed – there’s a five-car pile up now. Oh my G-d!”

He had avoided the accident but he was in no shape to drive. Luckily the traffic wasn’t going anywhere.

What Roger was experiencing was a natural reaction to a life threatening emergency. It was if his adrenal switch flipped off his rational mind, shooting all his blood and energy flow down to his limbs. That is what happens when you are under stress. It is nature’s way of giving you the jolt you need to fight an attacker or get the heck out of dodge.

So what does this have to do with you?

Everything.

Unless you have been living under a rock, you have been over exposed to fear and anxiety over the last couple months. Fear about the the economy, fear about the markets, fear of  not having, fear of asking too much, fear of asking too little. Fear of loss. Fear of gain. Fear of what you shoulda, coulda woulda done if only …

Sometimes all you have to do is THINK about, say, m’oney pressure, and FFFRRRRRRRPP your body gets a shot of adrenaline, your skin gets cold and you feel your heart thumping in your chest.

Isn’t that a weird reaction?

All because of a little bundle of cells in your Limbic brain?

And it’s not the smart part of your brain that reads the paper or solves Soduko puzzles.

Your limbic brain handles the animal stuff — Fighting, Fleeing, Foraging and of course Procreation.

But when you are under financial stress, you actually don’t need the adrenaline and surge of energy. You don’t need the blood to stop flowing to your extremities and your higher brain functions to shut off.

You don’t NEED to fight off an animal; you NEED to wake up your creativity.

You NEED to make good decisions. You NEED to think clearly.

What you NEED is focus.

When you are under stress, you essentially become a scared animal.

Scared animals can run fast but they are lousy at making money.

On the other hand, creative focused humans FILL the entire list of the Forbes 400 wealthiest people on earth.

Some people talk about going from “fear to power”, I think a better approach is to go from fear to focus.

Wake up MORE of your brain and use that extra brainpower to creatively solve the problem.

So how do you do that?

Luckily I learned a kinesthesiology technique many years ago that is like psychological CPR.  In less than five minutes– right there and then — over the phone,  I was able to help Roger totally disintegrate the stress he was experiencing.  That same technique can help you melt away stress, eliminate fear-based thinking and open your mind to it’s creative, solution-oriented potential. Or not.

You see if it were simply up to me, I could zap away every little teeny bit of tension you feel, each fear-based thought you have, just like sunlight melting a cube of ice. Only quicker. A lot quicker. But it is not up to me.  I can ONLY give you the technique, but YOU have to do it.

Here is how:

__________________________________

This technique is called (this is a mouthful) “Frontal Occipital Holding”

That middle word is pronounced ock-SIP-it-uhl, by the way.

It’s a process that will literally move blood from the stem/limbic portion of your brain OUT to the higher executive thinking part of your brain (the top of your forehead) as well as to the back of your head where your visual cortex is.

That way you can think with more intelligence and creativity, AND you can see more attractive options for yourself.

You can use it to get rid of those pesky negative thoughts or hose fearful feelings.

So you can focus.

==========

This technique is REALLY simple. Sean Collins, my collaborator and co-conspirator asked his wife Clare to take a quick picture so you can see how simple it is (and how photogenic he is).

Do not adjust your set. This IS a black and white photo.

Steps…

1. Think the stressful thought and notice how stressful, scary, and, or negative it is for you (0-10 “peace to pain” scale).   “Scoring” it is the first step to resolution.
2. Place left hand on forehead lightly, touching the whole area.   Place right hand lightly on back of head (occiput). (This is called Frontal-Occipital Holding and comes from the field of specialized Kinesiology).
3. Think about the stressor or feel the negative emotions fully as you breathe deep, connected breaths.
4. (This is no time to “try to be positive.”   Fully get into the emotion, let yourself feel it more, get more neurology involved.   Sometimes it helps to catch onto the emotional self-talk and say it over and over, for example: “I’ll probably always be lonely!!!”   Sometimes it helps to think of the images that make you sad.)
5. While breathing deeply in connected never-ending cycles, gently and slowly rotate your eyes to different positions, eyes open.   If you find an eye position which increases the emotion, hold it there and breathe into the emotion.   When the emotion resolves, continue rotating your eyes until all positions are cleared.   Close your eyes and do the same thing.
6. When you feel the emotion resolved, you can stop and “rate” your emotions again on the peace to pain scale.   If you’re down to zero (peace) or even beyond that at euphoria, you’re done!   If not quite to zero, do it again, and this time do more to bring up the emotion (talk out loud about your greatest fears/ regrets in the situation, etc)   Also “track ” your eyes by shifting them back and forth from one area to another until you’re done.   (For example, go left-right-left-right-left-right… then up-down-up-down-up-down… then diagonally from upper right to lower left, over and over… then diagonally the other way…  then around in circles….  etc.)

To Your Success!

Mandy Bass

Most sales professionals and business owners make the mistake of denying their customers the opportunity to purchase a valuable add-on after they close the big deal for fear that they will risk losing the sale. “I’ll sell them more later,” they think. But they don’t.

In most cases, the customer is forgotten as soon as the purchase is done.

Not only does that attitude rob you of massive potential earnings, it also denies your customer the opportunity and the convenience of making a more satisfying purchase.

Research shows that your customers or clients feel most positive about you immediately after you close the sale.

This is why McDonald’s asks us if we want fries with our hamburger. And why the checkout at Bed Bath & Beyond has two hundred little house ware items to catch your eye just before you swipe your debit card. It’s also why Amazon.com always shows you a list of products on the way to the online checkout. (With the ingenious headline: “Customers who bought what you are buying also bought…”)

This is why mailing list brokers place a premium on buyers who’ve recently bought, and why catalog companies ALWAYS include a flyer, brochure or catalog when they ship your product to you.

They know that buyers buy more.

To use this principle in your own business, think about items or services you can sell at the following moments…

Immediately after you close a sale, and

Immediately when you deliver your product or service

Take some time to think through the needs of your customers. Are there other products or services that would naturally complement what you offer?

• A website designer’s clients could benefit from search engine optimization, or print marketing materials that build brand recognition and complement the website.
• A pool builder’s customers need fences.
• A small business advisor’s clients need retirement plans, access to credit, website development, marketing, bookkeeping, insurance and a host of other services.

IMPORTANT: This doesn’t mean you should distract yourself from your core business, or that you have to create a line of new products or services. Consider creating strategic alliances or joint ventures with other small business owners who complement what you do and will pay you for these referrals – pay you with a commission, mutual referrals or even a combination.

To Your Success!

Mandy Bass

A colleague invites you over to their house for coffee.

You’ve never been to their home before so you’re a little curious.

You pull up to the driveway and see right away that the house is gorgeous.
Manicured lawn, elegant style, the facade is immaculate.

You had no idea how lovely a home your colleague has!

But THEN you step inside.

First you notice the awful smell.

Then you see that months of stinky dirty laundry are strewn all over.

Not only that, but garbage has accumulated, and is piled up in every filthy corner. In the kitchen you see (and smell) stacks of crusty unwashed dishes in the sink.

It would shock you, wouldn’t it?

After all, most people wouldn’t WANT to live that way.

Yet when it comes to their own mind that is PRECISELY how they live. Their daily physical habits may keep them clean on the outside, but step into their mind and body and you find a VERY different story.

Old grudges and stresses have piled up, and never been removed. Physical tensions from past upsets have accumulated, forming a constant barrier to peace or comfort, and every day brings with it greater distraction, edginess and greater threat of disease.

This is why my Automatic Relaxation Process is a favorite of clients and seminar attendees.

It’s a daily housecleaning for your mind and emotions!

For anyone committed to superior performance, the skill of reaching deep levels of relaxation is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. It’s a form of mental and emotional hygiene that is to your psyche what a toothbrush is to your teeth.

There is no other skill — none — that can more rapidly effect the quality of your life than the skill of Automatic Relaxation.

By the way, remember that today is the last day to receive your download of my Automatic Relax audio.

Soon it goes to $27, but you can go and get it now for freee.

Click Here–> FREE AUDIO

p.s. You CAN let others know about this download, but please let them know that they must download soon, before I start charging $27 to access.

To Your Success!

Mandy Bass

In times of sudden change, even people who don’t usually procrastinate can have enormous difficulty in taking meaningful action. It is how one might imagine a deer might feel when he is out for an evening stroll and all of a sudden a Jeep Wrangler comes around the corner at fifty miles an hour, headlights blaring…

People seldom break through that kind of psychological block with willpower alone. It takes imagination and simplification.

Imagination is a tool – whether it works for you or against you depends on how you use it. If you use it to imagine all the things that can go wrong you will probably stay stuck. But if used constructively it can motivate you to do just about anything.

We are motivated by outcomes and purpose. Use your imagination to visualize the outcome you want, paint a picture in your mind of yourself enjoying all the benefits, feel what you would feel, hear people singing your praise, engage as many senses as you can . . . If that seems difficult for you, imagine what will happen if you don’t spring into action. Now think about the reason why you want (or don’t want) these outcomes. And let the most compelling image you can conjure up, drive you forward.

To Your Success,

Mandy

This is no time to be spinning your wheels if you are serious about reaching your goals.

That’s why I’ve posted a new (very short) interview that contains a fail-safe technique I absolutely guarantee will get you making the money you want.  It’s the exact two-minute-a-day technique that my clients have used to reach their optimistic income goals.

(Be careful, this method really makes goals inevitable. Don’t miss it. Yes, it’s free.)

Two Minute Daily Exercise

To Your Success,

Mandy