Back in August, I picked up a book written by Mr. Mitsuhiro Masuda (in Japanese) who advocates the power of cleaning and decluttering.  He maintains that we can be happier and luckier by cleaning up our place of living.  I was a brand-new entrepreneur at that time, meaning my business was starting to attract some clients but not enough to be in full operation, so I had time and was willing to try anything to improve the situation.

Now, I know grabbing a dust cloth and reorganizing the bookshelf is as boring as it gets in personal development. But we intuitively know our environment affects our mood. When we are in a poorly-lit, cluttered room where we can’t find what we need and what we see doesn’t resonate with who we are, we feel messy, sad, frustrated, and out of place.  How can we feel bright, efficient, well-organized and be in the natural flow of energy?  Clean up!

Many people are big on decorating their place.  That is fine.  But cleaning needs to happen before decorating.  Before creating your new YOU, you need to let go of your old YOU. Physically taking care of your environment by cleaning and decluttering can stimulate letting go of your mental clutter that has been holding you in the old pattern.

The 21 Day Outside In Personal Development Program

The book came with the 21 day action plan.  It’s a good plan, but very women-oriented, so I have modified it to be helpful for everyone.  You work in one area for three days, totaling seven areas of your place of living.

Before you start, visualize who you want to be.  You are going to make your place fit for that person, your future self.  In my case, I visualized myself working happily and proudly as spiritual consultant, with many clients who appreciate my service dearly.

Ready?  Let’s begin.

Letting the fresh air cleanse and refresh the place

Day 1: Open the windows to change the air.

Day 2: Open the windows first thing in the morning and take a few deep breaths.

Day 3: Open the windows first thing in the morning, take a few deep breaths, and say “Thank you.”

You want to keep the good habit of caring for your personal space.  Changing air is the easiest and immediately-effective approach, so you are spending full three days to get this in your behavior system.  Keep doing this.  Open the windows whenever you feel stuck. And add the positive energy of gratitude.

What is your baggage literally?

Day 4: Take out everything from your wallet and throw away unnecessary items such as old receipts and coupons.  Wipe the wallet with soft cloth and put things back with gratitude.

Day 5: Do the same with your purse or bag.  Carry only what you need in an organized way.

Day 6: Check the address book in your cell phone or PDA.  Delete contacts you do not need.

You are literally taking care of your baggage.  Let go of the weight of junks and people who you know only drag you down. By making space for new things and people to come in, you are letting them in.

Bathroom: See yourself as you are to become who you want to be

Day 7: Clean the mirrors in the bathroom.

Day 8: Wipe the lights in the bathroom.

Day 9: Put away the personal care items in the cupboard and clean the vanity.

The bathroom is where you go naked and see exactly who you are, both physically and figuratively.  It may be uncomfortable to see yourself clearly as you are, but knowing who you are is the start of becoming who you want to be.

Bedroom: Energize yourself

Day 10: Move as many appliances, furniture and knickknacks out of the bedroom.  Vacuum (including the underneath of the bed).  Bring in only what is nurturing for your rest and relaxation. Other things such as electric gadgets go to your work area.

Day 11: Go through your wardrobe and throw away clothes that you don’t wear any longer.  You can donate them to Good Will if they are still in good condition, so don’t feel bad about this.

Day 12: Wash the bed linen and the clothes.

Comfortable and energetically-clean bedroom is critical to be recharged fully during your sleep.  Day 10 takes a lot of moving big items, so get help.  Then define your new self by the clothes.  This doesn’t have to mean you need to buy new clothes.  First, let go of clothes that don’t resonate with who you want to be.  They are holding you in your old roles.

Work Area: Make room for the new you

Day 13: Check your bookshelf.  Throw out books that you’ve read and don’t expect to read again, books you thought you would read someday but don’t see when that would be, along with old magazines and scraps.

Day 14: Clean up the desk drawers.  Keep only what you need in an organized way.  Other things can go to storage such as office supply box.

Day 15: Throw away your other “someday” items.  This may include exercise kits, hobbies you thought you might try later, anything that you are holding onto just because it was cheap, or expensive, or supposed to be useful but don’t really see how it fits into your life.

That vague “someday” never comes.  If you are serious about becoming the person you want to be, you have a plan – the fact that it stays someday means you don’t really need it. Let  go of your someday stuffs and make room for the very thing you really want.

Entrance: Clear your door way for better luck

Day 16: Designate area to take off shoes.  You don’t want to bring in the dirt, literally and figuratively, from the outside into your personal space.

Day 17: Clean up the door way.  The entrance is the first place your visitors see upon coming to your place, so strive to give great first impression.  No trash sitting there, please.  This also helps you feel better yourself when you come home.

Day 18: Clean your shoes.

The entrance is your interface with the outside world. You have prepared yourself by getting well recharged, letting go of the old, and making room for the new.  Now you are ready to receive the good, and the luck comes through the doorway, symbolically and sometimes even literally.

Living and dining area: Receive the goodness with gratitude

Day 19: Clean the dining table.  As usual, no unnecessary items – just clean placemats and a flower would do.

Day 20: Clean the windows.  (Have you been opening them occasionally?)  Let the light in.

Day 21: General clean up.  If there are items that seem to be out of place, decide if you need it, and if so, decide where it goes.  Each item needs its place.  You want your place in the world, too.

Living and dining area is where you eat, relax and enjoy yourself and your loved ones.  Are you fully ready to receive the good luck?  Make your living room comfortable by first letting go of the mess.

Congratulations, you made it!  Your place must be shining, and I’m sure you are feeling so proud.  You are also clear in your thinking without all the distractions.  You are on your way to be the person you envision.

How it worked for me

In September, my business grew big time and I’ve kept several weeks worth of waiting list since.  Do you think this is just coincidence?  Maybe.  But why don’t you try this program and see for yourself?

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About the writer: Akemi Gaines writes for Yes to Me – Spiritual Healing and Growth for Greater Success.  She is a new entrepreneur, serving people who are serious about personal and spiritual growth through her Akashic Record Reading.  You can subscribe to her blog here.

Traditional decision making processes and models are falling behind the fast pace of this new century, both for individuals and organizations.  Many of us are aware of this situation, but are feeling lost without a new approach to make good reliable decisions fast. In this article I will introduce you to a new approach to decision making; all you need is an open mind and a little practice.

A History of Decision Making

Before we go further, let’s review how you or your parents / grandparents made decisions.  This is admittedly a big blanket statement, but I think you will get the idea:

19^th century: You typically didn’t make decisions yourself.  Someone else who was more educated and/or had more authority, such as political or religious leaders, made the decisions and you just followed.  Individual thinking and decision making were discouraged for the cause of the groups.

20^th century: Mass education made it possible for many of us to think for ourselves and make decisions.  While there were many decision making techniques, most were based on logic taught at schools and other educational organizations.

21^st century: We start noticing the problems of traditional reasoning methods and decision making techniques based on such logic.

There are two major methods of reasoning: induction and deduction.  Induction involves gathering data to come up with the conclusion, or really just the possibility of the conclusion.  While no amount of data is enough to ensure the conclusion, we typically spend time gathering lots of data when we try to use inductive reasoning.  So it takes time.  In this fast paced world, it’s quite likely that the situation has changed already by the time we make decision based on induction.

Deduction doesn’t rely of gathered premises but it relies on logical premises.  In short, it assumes certain premises to be true in order for it to work.  But the advance of science is now questioning even basic ideas such as linear time.

Intuitive Decision Making – The New Possibility

Is there a better faster way?  I think so, and it’s based on intuition.  In intuitive decision making, you receive intuition and verify it by logic and data.  You are still using your thinking mind and hard facts, but they are secondary and work as backup system.

It can be really fast to receive intuition.  The topic of developing intuition is huge and outside the scope of this article, but I can say that we all have intuitive ability, the potential to use intuition.  Some of you are already using intuition, consciously or unconsciously.

I don’t think the challenge here is if it is possible to utilize intuition in our decision making. The challenge is if we can be open to its possibility.  When I was interviewed by Davina Haisell about intuition, there was a comment that said, “Intuition…sometimes I doubt it. Why? Because, almost without fail – it is right… I guess that’s a hard thing for me to get over, being able to fully trust my intuition.”

I respect the honesty of this commenter.  I know it is scary to trust intuition.  Our educational system discourages anything that can’t be “proved”.

Learning To Trust Our Intuition

I think the process of learning to make intuitive decisions is analogous to the aforementioned history of decision making.

Early childhood: You didn’t make many decisions.  Someone else with authority made them for you, and you were expected to follow.

School age and adulthood, until you realize the problem of logical decision making: You make decisions based on the logical decision making techniques that were approved by schools and most of societal organizations.  We may had clear intuitive sense as a child, but most of us stop using it as we get conditioned in the educational system.  Change can happen when you realize the limitation of logical decision making.

Intuitive decision making is self-empowering: Look back the time you had to make critical decisions in your life, such as deciding on which job offer to take.  Did you have a silent knowing that one option is more desirable even though it didn’t seem so on the logical level?  Did you go for your gut feeling or did you ignore it?  And what was the consequence?

Making decision intuitively empowers you.  When you make decisions based on logic alone, you rely on someone else’s theories, processes, and models.  It is you who is making the decision in the doing, but you are always subject to other authorities.  So you may keep wondering if you made the right decision, or worry if you had enough data, enough knowledge and skills, enough education, to make the decision.  Not so in intuitive decision making.  In intuition, you just know, and you are your own authority.

How do you feel about intuitive decision making?  If you have any questions, please write in the comment.

About the writer: Akemi Gaines is the Akashic Record Reading specialist who shares both practical and metaphysical tips on her blog, Yes to Me  – Spiritual Healing and Growth for Greater Success.  You can subscribe to her blog here.

I disagree.  In this article, I want to show you how spirituality can help new entrepreneurs in two major challenges they face in starting their own business.

For the purpose of this article, I am defining spirituality as our awareness of higher purpose and power.  That invisible something that transcends us as individuals.  I am not affiliated with any organized religions.

Spirituality offers sustainable motivation

I find it quite dangerous that so many people want to become their own boss because they hate their current jobs.  They want to escape from what they hate, be it the boring job itself or the demanding boss or the work environment.  I don’t say this is no good for moral reasons.  If you don’t like something or someone, then it is so, it’s not good or bad.  I find it dangerous because the escape mentality doesn’t offer any sustainable motivations.

You see, it’s actually so easy to escape.  If you have been tied to your job for many years, and you have been brainwashed in years of education prior to employment, you may find this hard to believe, but it really is so easy.  Too easy, in fact.  You step out, and the escape is done.  Then you are left with no real motivation to build your business other than financial need.

When you start your business to live your purpose and share your love, on the other hand, you have clear and sustainable motivation.  You know what you want to do, and you have the sense of direction where you are heading.  Your vision and love motivate you and help you endure the down times that most entrepreneurs have to go through.

Spirituality helps improve the quality of service

Let’s say the guy who escaped the job he loathed finds a nice business idea and figures out how to start his business.  So he is an entrepreneur now.  His motivation is to make money (and maybe become famous along the way.)

Of course, making money is essential in entrepreneurship.  If you don’t make enough money, you go out of business, and you are not an entrepreneur any more.  The catch is, when you focus only on making money, on what you can get, you become absent in the core of your business, that is, your products and services.

In contrast, when you start your business because you love what you have to offer and you want to delight your customers with your products and services, you naturally pay attention to how you can improve your service even more.  You give great value to your customers, they appreciate the value they receive from your business, and the money flows back to you as a result.  The customers even bring in their loved ones to you because they love what you have to offer.

Marketing becomes tremendously easy when this flow is established.  Even if you are shy, talking about your service becomes enjoyable because you love what you offer.  Your confidence is communicated, and people will pick up your passion.

How it worked with me

I know firsthand how spirituality can help entrepreneurship.  I didn’t particularly hate my corporate job.  In fact, I liked it because it offered me opportunities to work with many people in and outside of the company.  And it paid pretty well.  I would not have left there if I didn’t believe I could help more people live better lives.  The sense of service has encouraged me and sustained me through the early struggles as new entrepreneur.

And I love thinking about how I can make my service even better, more interesting, and more available to my existing and potential clients.  In fact, large chunk of my time goes into that part of business development, which is also the study of personal and spiritual development, and I know I am investing my time well.

Starting a new business is a leap of faith.  It is a jump into the unknown.  Once the initial excitement and the feeling of freedom subside, you are left with all kinds of challenges from making sales to recording them in the book and doing the actual work.  It is so easy to be caught up with the superficial problems and get discouraged.  This is why so many new entrepreneurs quit before they succeed.   I really don’t think I can go through all these day in and day out without my spirituality, without the power that transcends my ego.  My gratitude goes to the god of my understanding.

About the writer:  Akemi Gaines writes for Yes to Me  – Spiritual Healing and Growth for Greater Success.  She is a new entrepreneur herself, serving people who are serious about personal and spiritual growth through her Akashic Record Reading. You can subscribe to her blog here.

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I have been interviewing successful entrepreneurs for my blog, Yes to Me. So far, I have posted ten articles for this series, interviewing thirteen entrepreneurs (three posts feature a pair of entrepreneurs). These are small business owners who have built profitable businesses that resonate with who they are. Most are bloggers, or at least have web presence, but their businesses vary greatly, from internet marketing to pet insurance company. They include men, women, young, older.

Are there common traits among these entrepreneurs? I think so. This article reviews their answers to two of my standard questions and explores the theme among them so that we can learn from the mistakes and victories they have so gracefully shared with us.

What were the biggest challenges when you were starting as new entrepreneurs?

Lack of money, lack of sales / marketing expertise and self-doubt are the top three challenges they site, followed by lack of business plans, management issues regarding the employees and business partners, time management and multi tasking, and more.

Depending on the business, the capital it takes differs, but even for a one-person operation, money is a challenge. Some of my interview guests mentioned what it was like to bootstrap, and I’m guessing even the ones who didn’t mention it probably went through similar challenges.

The issue of money gets aggravated by the lack of sales and marketing expertise. Many new entrepreneur have the technical skills of their trade but not the sales skill to bring their products and services in front of their target customers in an effective way. They struggle to define their target clients (Stephen) and to find the right pricing (Susanna). They may not have many contacts to network (Monica). Harry says, “We had the skills and the business knowledge we needed, but we knew very little of bringing this to the virtual world.”

Self-doubt is a biggie that holds back many aspiring entrepreneurs, and it continues to interfere many even after they take the plunge. Christine says “I didn’t think I was good enough.” Jason says “it’s easy to start second-guessing yourself. ‘Am I crazy?’ seemed to be a recurring question that popped up in my head.”

How can we turn around the lack and get over our fear?

Christine says the lack of money actually worked favorably for her. She says “I had tried to start businesses on the side for years, but because I didn’t NEED them to succeed, they didn’t. When I quit my job and had no other options, I knew that I was either going to have to make it, or else.” She used the lack to motivate her and to stay focused.

Skip advises “Cash is king in a startup. Yet focusing on fund-raising has never been a favorite approach of mine. I’d rather ‘bootstrap’, demonstrate that I can get clients and build value without an investor.”

Sales takes a lot of courage and footwork. Lack of money, and therefore the naked need to promote our businesses, helps new entrepreneurs to gather the courage and to be humble enough to learn the new skill of sales and marketing. James says “Being an entrepreneur is more than just working on your own for a living. You suddenly wear many hats and you suddenly have to be an expert at everything, from salesperson to customer service representative . . .”

And so is getting over self-doubt. There is never a complete assurance. Business is an ongoing challenge, and even successful entrepreneurs have self-doubt from time to time. However, successful entrepreneurs put their fear aside and keep moving forward because they know the rewards outweigh the fear.

What is the best part of being an entrepreneur for you?

While my interview guests point out various challenges in entrepreneurship, they agree on the rewards of entrepreneurship. They may use different words, but they pretty much boil down to three points: Freedom, Confidence, Contribution.

Most of my interview guests mention the freedom to use their time in the way they see best, the freedom to do what they like and do well. Tony says “freedom is the driving force . . . I love being able to work when I choose. I also love being successful enough to turn down work I don’t want . . .” He goes on to express his view of freedom and responsibility saying “If I have to work for an idiot, I may as well work for myself”

The confidence comes by actually overcoming difficulties. As entrepreneurs, we come to realize we can really do what we vision. James says “Knowing that we are able to reach any goal we want and having the confidence to do so is the best feeling in the world.” We open up to the level of possibilities we didn’t know before. Christine says “The best part about being an entrepreneur is that you can see so many more possibilities in business and in life. Suddenly, anything really is possible.”

Being able to help others, the sense of contribution to the community through work and beyond, is also essential for many entrepreneurs. Many of them started their businesses to help others, and the sense of contribution is by itself one of the biggest rewards for them. Laura says “It’s such a cliché but it comes down to being able to build something from nothing that solves people’s problems. There’s no feeling like it.”

How can we make the leap to entrepreneurship?

I’d like to wrap up this article by quoting what Naomi had to say. “I read in a magazine once that you should never be 100% ready to have kids. If you think you’re 100% ready, you’re missing something. I think the same thing applies to business. If you wait until you’re 100% ready, you’ll be dead before you launch. Be 80% ready. Do the best you can and just go for it.”

Business is really like a baby for the entrepreneur. We need to prepare well for the challenges, and there is a point we need to jump if we are serious about having one. I hope this article serves to inspire and inform you in your journey to successful entrepreneurship.

List of posts in the Interview With Successful Entrepreneurs series at Yes to Me:

• Interview With Successful Entrepreneurs: Christine O’Kelly of Self Made Chick
• Making A Brand Out Of Adversity: Stephen Hopson of Adversity University
• No Money, No Connection, No Plan: Monica Flores of A Successful Woman
• Can Our Inner Child Become An Entrepreneur?: Kim & Jason Kotecki of Escape Adulthood with Kim & Jason
• Accidental Sparkles: Susanna Ordway of Susanna Ordway Jewelry Designs
• Serial Entrepreneur Meets College Intern: Skip Shuda & Yasmine Mustafa of Cheap Revolution
• I Can’t Not Do This: Naomi Dunford of IttyBiz
• If I Have To Work For An Idiot, I May As Well Work For Myself: Tony Lawrence of A.P. Lawrence
• Successful Entrepreneurs Are Great Problem-Solvers: Laura Bennett of Embrace Pet Insurance
• Power of Two: James Chartrand and Harrison McLeod of Men With Pens

Are you a successful or an aspiring entrepreneur? We would love to hear you thoughts regarding this article in the comments section below.

Akemi Gaines writes for Yes to Me – Life Purpose, Entrepreneurship, Spiritual Growth. She is a new entrepreneur herself, serving people who are serious about personal and spiritual growth through her coaching and soul (Akashic Record) reading. You can subscribe to her blog here.

The Interview With Successful Entrepreneurs series is ongoing and Akemi is always looking for quality interview guests. Please check this page and contact her if you are interested.

Image by Ordinary Guy.