It’s the business disaster.

A business disaster is not fire, flood, or vandalism. It is the economic disaster that burns your bank account, submerges your spreadsheets, or pillages your paycheck. Your job is cut, or your sales evaporate. Your key employees leave — or maybe even worse…they stay and REALLY screw things ups. No matter what the cause is, survival is YOUR problem. FEMA ain’t coming to rescue you — ever. The only ones calling are creditors, and they aren’t bringing your bottled water.

If you, your business and your family are to survive, you need to hitch up your shorts. If you are to overcome adversity, you need to roll up your sleeves and get to work on your own disaster relief efforts.

Your personal disaster survival kit could contain all manner of tools and resources. To overcome these kinds of problems, there are a few basics tools that you cannot do without.

Business Disaster Survival Tool 1 – Your Reality Checklist

To overcome a business disaster, begin with a complete assessment of all your assets and liabilities. Include not just money, but skills, resources and personality traits. Make sure you know both the brutal facts and the signs of hope in your situation. The key is to see the whole truth about your life as it is now so that you are moving forward on solid factual ground. You will almost always find that your situation is not completely hopeless, and that you have more assets than you realized. Your reality checklist helps you find options that you didn’t see before.

Business Survival Tool 2 — Your Anti-Panic Pill

When balanced on the brink of financial disaster, it is natural, normal and understandable to feel panic. It’s just not helpful. The only way to prevent panic from taking over is to take action.

Several years ago, I lost my job. I had a family, a mortgage and no contingency plans. The panic quickly set in, bolting me awake in the middle of the night, taking my appetite and filling my gut with feelings of fear, dread and anger that I could not control. I found, however, that that I could take action. I threw myself into the work of finding work. This allowed me a sense of real progress, and my positive focus helped prevent me from being paralyzed by the panic I felt.

Business Survival Tool 3 – Your Emergency Beacon

Call for help. Besides the support of my friends and my family, the most valuable help I received was from a local outplacement counselor named Stacy. She helped me channel my fear and anger into a powerful, practical plan of action.

I might have figured it out eventually on my own, but it would have taken me much longer — probably too long. The plan she helped me develop involved literally calling everyone I could think of for ideas, advice and assistance. By not going it alone, I leveraged my own skills and maintained external accountability to make sure I was making progress with my plan.

Business Survival Tool 4 – Your Mental Meal Bars

It’s easy in the middle of failure to let your personal discipline fall apart. Again, it is natural and understandable. It’s just not helpful. In the midst of the mess, take time to practice the small disciplines that will feed your heart, your mind and your body.

• Get up at the same time each morning.
• Go to bed in time every night to get a good night’s sleep.
• Set aside at least some time each day to read and/or listen to positive useful ideas.
• Set aside time each day to exercise.
• Make sure at least 2 meals each day are low fat, high fiber, and heavy on veggies.
• Set aside 1-2 hours each week to plan out for the next 2 weeks.
• Schedule other things that are important to you and keep your appointments.

These healthy positive rituals have a direct and profound effect on your ability to recover from disaster. Your mindset can make or break you. Your health affects your energy and your emotional state.

In addition, these simple disciplines are almost always things that you have control over. In a disaster situation, you have lost control of many things, but you can control what you eat, what you hear and see, and how much you move your body. If you can’t do anything else, start there.

Business Survival Tool 5 – Your Road Map

Know where you are, and know where you are going. Spell out your goals with brilliant clarity. Break down your journey into small sections. Keep your focus on the destination, even if it seems really far away. Keep checking your progress and make regular corrections to stay on course. If you are not clear on what it means to be recovered from your disaster, you will delay your recovery and increase your frustration with your progress.

You may have noticed that these principles are principles that we should all be engaged in every day, even when we are not in disaster recovery mode. In fact, if you find yourself dealing with a disaster, the cause may well be related to the fact that you failed to practice one or more of these principles in ordinary times.

Don’t let the smoothness of your current path lull you into carelessness. Start now to incrementally build these tools into your everyday life. You will reduce the likelihood of disaster overtaking you, and you will be better prepared when it does.

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This article is available for reprint only if the following bio is included intact.

This article is written by David Denis owner of http://www.rocksolidwriting.com
David is a freelance writer for hire offering article writing, sales letters, training manuals, speech writing, seo content, sales writing, blog articles, copywriting service, sales scripts and business name ideas.
To learn more, or request a quote visit http://www.rocksolidwriting.com/freelance-writer-quote/

Yet, if you fail to put gas in the tank, the Bugatti Veyron 16.4 will take you exactly nowhere.

We’ve all been told that goals are the vehicle that will propel you to your destiny. And so we expend extraordinary amounts of energy crafting high-powered goals built for maximum thrust. We write our goals down. We carefully select a target date. We create detailed step-by-step plans. We evaluate our time, our resources, identify skills that we need to obtain and obstacles we need to overcome. We create pictures and visualizations and we even review our goals. We do all the things the motivational experts tell us to do because we are told that by building a turbocharged goal we are assured of success.

Yet too often we find that the goals we built to rocket us to victory just sit there in the drawer where we put them. Like the Bugatti with the empty tank, they take us nowhere because they lack the proper fuel. They simply are not meaningful enough. They fail to arouse our deepest and most powerful emotions, and so they end up sitting in the garage like an enormously powerful car with no gas.

Finding goals that are meaningful to you is not about logic. You can come up with a long list of logical reasons why a goal is good for you, and yet not really care about that goal deep down inside. Your most effective goals make your heart blaze like burning magnesium. It makes your eyes light up and lightning shoot out your ears. Effective goals are the ones you want so bad that you will crawl 50 miles over broken glass to achieve them. Effective goals get you so fired up inside just thinking about them that you feel as if you could leap tall buildings in a single bound. Walking on fire, crossing oceans, climbing the highest mountains are nothing to you if your goals tap into your emotional core, because your desire to achieve them will empower you to do whatever it takes.

Effective goals are the ones that you don’t have to make yourself do. They are the ones that you want to do, no matter what. Your emotions are the fuel that powers your goals. If your fuel — the emotional meaning of your goal — is weak, then your motivation to achieve the goal will also be weak.

So if you are wondering why you have been setting goals but not accomplishing them, then you may want to check the fuel gauge on those goals. Here are a couple of tips to help you design goals that are already loaded with a full tank.

Stop Using Other People’s Fuel for your Goal

Figure out what YOU really really want. Sometimes we choose goals because we think we SHOULD choose them, or perhaps we are imitating someone we admire. In fact, what we really want is entirely different. For instance, I find it annoying that so many motivational speakers love to talk about their mansions and private jets and limousines. There is nothing wrong with these things, but I get way more excited about a cabin in the mountains, a new Subaru (with a really nice stereo), and the chance to go skiing every day. By building my goals around those things that specifically excite ME, they add gas to MY fuel tank.

Tune Your Mental GPS to the Destination Goal

Mentally put yourself in the place of already having accomplished your goal. Ignore all the road inbetween and just focus on what it would be like to actually be there. All that stuff inbetween is about HOW, and it belongs to the logic side of the equation. There’s a time to take care of that later. Right now, you just need to check the fuel tank to see if this baby has enough go-juice to get you there. To do that, you need to program the end coordinates into emotional GPS.

Monitor the Feedback on progress to your Goal

This feedback will come from your body. Listen to what your body tells you. Does thinking about this goal make you feel like you just want to jump out of your skin? Does it send electric shockwaves up and down your spine? Does it make your respiration increase and make your heart race? If so, then that’s a good sign that this goal contains the fuel you need. If you don’t really feel much, then keep searching for the goal that will get you going.

Suspend Judgment on your Goal

When going through this process, suspend all judgment about whether this goal is realistic or attainable. The fact is, if you feel strongly enough about it, the concept of realistic is mostly meaningless. If you really get excited about the goal, but it also scares the goobers out of you, then you may have to play with the time frame or the size of your goal to get the right emotional feedback, but that’s just fine tuning. When you feel strongly enough about a goal, your mind and heart will find a way to overcome almost any obstacle to achieve it.

Consider the Negative Fuel to power your Goal

Finally, it is always best to fuel your goals with positive pictures and desires. Sometimes, however, you can use a matter-antimatter reaction to get extra mileage. This means that you can picture the pain that will come from NOT achieving your goal. If the idea of failure discourages you, then don’t use this technique. On the other hand, if it fires you up, and makes you feel more resolute and determined to overcome all odds, then dump that into your fuel tank. It can significantly increase the octane of your motivational fuel.

The bottom line is that the best goals come pre-loaded with a full tank of fuel that contains a million times the energy of liquid oxygen rocket fuel. Find a way to connect your goal to something that carries that kind of meaning for you, and you will be amazed at how far you can go. Just be sure to wear your seat belt. It’s gonna be one heckuva ride!

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This article is was previously published on the internet by Freedom Personal Development,  a company that specializes in personal development workshops and resources.  Workshops are offered nationwide.  To learn more, visit www.deliverfreedom.com, call 888-233-0407, or e-mail info@deliverfreedom.com

I worked by dead reckoning. I have enough hiking experience to judge how long it takes to cover a mile by the time elapsed, so I was confident that I would not miss the turnoff to the camping area. Yet after about fifteen minutes I came upon a trio of hikers engaged in intense conversation. As I approached, one of them turned to me and asked if I knew where the camping area was. I looked at my watch, did a quick calculation and said, “Sure. It’s probably about a half mile down. Maybe a little less.” This is where things got strange.

The man started to argue with me. He asserted the campground should be right here. I asked how he figured that, and he explained that his watch has an altimeter, a device that displayed the elevation above sea level. According to his watch, we were standing at the correct elevation where the turnoff for the campground should be. He was so positive and certain of this fact that I had to restrain myself from laughing. You see it was quite clear the side trail we were both seeking was indeed NOT at this location. Since we had not passed it on the way down, that meant that it had to be still further along. I said so. He remained unconvinced and repeated his faith in his altimeter.

I lost interest in the conversation after about 30 seconds. I wished them well and continued down the mountain. Sure enough, about 10 minutes later I came upon my destination. I never did find out what happened to those three hikers. For all I know they are still standing on that trail arguing over the lost campground.

How did they go wrong? They had good maps, were in decent physical shape, and knew their destination. The problem was not in their equipment or their planning. They were hung up by a false belief.

They had placed their trust in a wrist-mounted altimeter. Now this is a wonderful gadget, a marvel of miniaturized electronic technology. It does not matter whether his altimeter was broken, or had not been calibrated properly, or perhaps was simply affected by the change in barometric pressure brought on by the weather front coming in. His belief in what he thought the altimeter was telling him paralyzed him and prevented him from making timely progress toward his real goal.

Your Mental Altimeter

I myself have done the same thing many times, and in all likelihood so have you. Forming beliefs about how the universe behaves is a normal and healthy part of living. Our beliefs are like our mental gadgets that help us navigate the world. What you will find, however, is that some beliefs are more helpful than others. When we are not getting the results we want, we must evaluate our beliefs, and change or discard them if they are holding us back. This, however, is more difficult than it sounds.

My friend seemed to me to be very attached to his altimeter. He honestly had trouble conceiving that it could be wrong. I can imagine why. I’m sure he had invested a great deal of money to buy it, and a fair amount of time to program and calibrate it. When you are that invested in something, you don’t like to give it up and admit that it’s just wrong. When I basically told him he was wrong, it made him a little angry at me. Like so many of us, when reality clashes with dearly held beliefs about ourselves and about the world, we get anxious, stressed out, and tense and even angry. We are always free to hold onto our beliefs, but our unwillingness to change our view of ourselves and the world may cost us. That’s ok, if it’s an informed choice rising out of our will. If on the other hand, we are letting our emotional reactions control our destiny, that may not be the easiest path to your goal. So this is the Altimeter Dilemma. Do I hold onto something I have invested in, even when it is not helping me? Or do I discard my investment, and move my energy and capital in a different direction?

This questions can lead to pretty deep water. We don’t have the space or the time to get into in-depth psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, there may be a few questions you may want to ask yourself to see if you are holding onto false or misleading beliefs about your business, your relationships, your health, or any other part of your life.

• Is this reality?
• What do I want reality to look like?
• What can I do right now to bring reality in line with my vision?

If you answer these questions, and then act on the answers, you will almost certainly find the solution to your own Altimeter Dilemmas.

Is this reality, or just something I (or someone else) is projecting onto reality?

A map is not the terrain. It is a diagram on paper. Maps provide useful information and perspective on the country you are traveling through. Yet even the best maps leave out a lot of what is really going on. Hikers should use maps, but should also look at the actual countryside.

In business, you should keep one eye on your plan (the map) and another on the numbers (the terrain). When the numbers aren’t matching up to your plan, be ready to adjust your plan accordingly. I don’t mean change your goal. I mean that you should change the direction or the level of effort you are exerting to get back on track. What you decide to do will depend on how you answer the next question.

What do I want my reality to look like?

You can’t argue with reality, but you can take steps to shape it. If you believe that you don’t have the money, or the time, or the skill to accomplish a goal (is this reality, or just a projection?) you can take steps to change that. Clarify the reality you want and move toward your destination with purpose. I was much more interested in a hot meal and a good night’s sleep than I was in Louis’ altimeter controversy. So I simply walked on toward my goal.

In a perfect world, if you could have what you wanted, what would it look like? Don’t worry about all the reasons that can’t happen. Clarify what you want most. Then ask the next question.

What can I do right now?

So now you know where you want to be. You now have two choices. Move toward your goal, or do not move toward your goal. I found that simply putting one foot before the other was marvelously effective at eliminating the entire altimeter controversy. Louis and friends were stymied by the question, “Why isn’t camp here?” If they had looked up from the altimeter, decided they wanted to actually get to camp (rather than argue about it) the next step would have been pretty clear. Start walking.

In business, this will mean taking concrete action to solve the challenge in front of you. Rather than argue or fret about the disconnect between your plan and the numbers, decide how to change the way you use your time, or your money. Invest in training others or yourself. Your shareholders, creditors, and landlords really don’t care how you feel about your situation. They just want their check on time and they want it to clear. This only happens when you consistently take appropriate action. Even when you are confused because things aren’t adding up, and the bills are due, and deals are failing, you can take action right now. You will find, in all likelihood, that when you do, you will see your situation improving. And when that happens, it’s amazing how your beliefs adjust to keep up with the new reality you have just created.
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This article is available for reprint only if the following bio is included intact.

This article is written by David Denis owner of http://www.rocksolidwriting.com

David is a freelance writer for hire offering article writing, sales letters, training manuals, speech writing, seo content, sales writing, blog articles, copywriting service, sales scripts and business name ideas.

To learn more, or request a quote visit http://www.rocksolidwriting.com/freelance-writer-quote/