Be confident under stress – when performing under pressure by changing one word of your self-talk. ”Inner talk is one of the most effective, least utilized tools available to master the psyche and foster life success.” May/June 2015, Psychology Today. Recently, a client I’ll call Ava changed one word in her self-talk and increased her self-confidence to a level of eight out of a possible 10 from a two out of 10 (where zero is no confidence and 10 is the most confidence she has ever had). Ava, a corporate trainer, was using her self-talk to prepare for a presentation to a group of peers. She’s a good presenter, but her confidence was in the crapper for this one. Change one word and immediately gain self-confidence. The change she made was a simple one, but the results were dramatic. She stopped using the first person―affirmations such as “I can do this!” “I’m

In the life of caring for chickens, there are only a handful of things that can happen: egg laying, rooster drama, illness, death (not always by a natural predator, sometimes, it’s a dog), broody hens, and flying the coop. I’ve had to address all of these issues in the past few years. I entered this spring season feeling really good about what was happening up at the coop. We had plenty of hens laying lots of eggs, and an inquisitive rooster who hadn’t become aggressive (yet). With spring comes the maternal instinct. Suddenly I found myself with not one, but two broody hens. This time around, I was determined to have a better outcome than last summer’s fiasco, when we had three broody hens sitting on 36 eggs and gathering up all the other hens’ eggs – in other words, no eggs for us. So, on Good Friday in the

“Jim, what has made all the difference in the last few quarters is that our managers aren’t just communicating, they are connecting.” I recently heard this from Andy, the Integrator at Weather Shield Roofing Systems in Grand Rapids. How cool is this? His comment was a light bulb moment for me. It has been said many times, and proven through research, that people don’t leave companies, they leave managers. There are always exceptions, but most often this is true. I realized that Andy and his team are cracking the code. If you truly connect with your team and they know that you care about them at a deeper level than just as a means to get stuff done, they are most likely going to stick around. I know, I know. Right now some of you are saying, “well duh, Jim”. But before you throw your tomatoes, answer me this: how

I was a migrant Southerner living away from home in Boston, leading a start-up tech firm. We had tons of press, a game-changing business model, and a few brand-name clients. We were on the verge of breaking out, but we were coasting on fumes with less than 4 weeks of cash. My family hadn’t seen me in months, I had 3 kids in college, and we were mortgaged to the hilt.  Welcome to entrepreneurship. Growing a private business is an emotional roller coaster. Self-doubt, discouragement, and setbacks are part of the journey. There are days when getting out of bed is a challenge. I call it the “entrepreneurial blues”. In “Entrepreneurial Leap”, Gino Wickman says “Fighting like hell for 10 years” should be expected by every entrepreneur going through the journey. In “The Dip”, Seth Godin says “The middle of anything feels like a failure”. In my story, we were able