Everyone in business wants to get into what is referred to as “the zone”, the mental state in which you are able to perform at your best. The next time you wish to achieve your peak performance, there are a few tips to remember that may come in handy.

One such tip is that there is actually no such thing as “the zone” when it comes to new activities. Upon starting a new task, you are not going to be able to find flow. Being in “the zone” means the activation of a subconscious part of your brain, and this is not accessible if you have never done a certain activity before.

The right environment is also important for getting into “the zone”. Whether it is a quiet library or a crowded cafe, you need to work out the settings which best facilitate your flow and then work in them whenever you can.

Emotions are also very important to getting in “the zone”. You need to be able to find the emotions which allow your subconscious to take over. One way of activating such emotions is with music, so you might want to find artists, songs or albums that get you in the appropriate mood and can help you to block out distractions.

One very important method of becoming a more effective learner is just to keep on learning. An article in the magazine “Nature” back in 2004 pointed out that people who learned juggling had increased how much gray matter they had in their occipital lobes, which is the part of the brain which is associated with visual memory. That gray matter then vanished again when the individuals ceased to practice their new skill!

If you are trying to learn something such as a new language, then continuing to practice is incredibly important so that you will be able to maintain the gains which you have managed to achieve. This phenomenon – referred to as “use it or lose it” – involves a brain process which is called “pruning”. Some pathways within the brain are maintained, while others are simply eliminated. If you want new information that you have just learned to stay there, then you need to keep on practicing and rehearsing it.

A detox is a method of cleansing toxins from the body which can result in you feeling bloated, irritable or sluggish, and may even have a negative affect on your skin and hair. When unhealthy living practices are starting to take their toll on your body and your mind, it is time to start detoxing.

In many ways, detoxing really just means good healthy eating which isn’t marred by foods that slow down and clog up the body such as sweets, fried food and takeaways. Rather than just detoxing so many times over the course of a year, it is a good idea to instead attempt to make eating healthily a continuous practice and thus encourage body to be in a continual state of healthy detoxification. This doesn’t mean depriving yourself altogether – the occasional treat is fine but stay away from junk food and alcohol binges.

If you are experiencing a sudden onset of acne, severe mood swings or unwanted bloating, detoxing could be the solution you need.

The days when anyone who wanted to start a business had to rent out an office are well and truly over. Nowadays even people who still generally work in the traditional office environment will occasionally find themselves working from home or while on the road. This kind of flexibility is very liberating, though it also brings up the challenge of how to remain productive in these unusual settings.

One good tip when working from home is to have a particular place designated as your work space and to have it where you also have a door that is able to be closed so as to prevent distractions. Another good tip is to take a break when you are entitled to one – when its lunchtime go and have lunch somewhere else, even if it just a different room in your house, rather than have it in your work space. Everyone needs time to regroup and have a break, and home workers are no different.

I often ask clients the Following Question:

What is Your Most Important Business Asset?

Answer: Your customers and your relationship with them.

Right now that sounds a little meaningless doesn’t it? Let me clear this up. This asset is so seriously underutilised in most businesses that it warrants further examination.

Quite simply, if those customers are any good and you have a strong relationship with them then you are sitting on a gold mine of opportunity.

I admit this may sound a little abstract but hear me out. You need a customer to make a sale. You can make multiple sales to the same customer. Now the most important factors in lowering sales resistance are credibility and authority.

If you have sold something to a customer you’ve established your credibility and authority. Your customers are more likely to trust your recommendations after you’ve made this first sale.

What many business owners fail to capitalise on is this: the credibility and authority you establish with a customer after the first sale and the fact that your customers are also candidates to buy any number of other things related to what you first sold them.

Say you are a vet; you can probably arrange to sell your clients their pet food. Even better, you can sell them pet food on continuity. That is they buy a month’s food off you each month until they no longer need it. Every check up you have a chance to revise the mix of the client’s order so that it is nutritionally sound.

Now I’d bet you that a vet’s customer database is actually a list of people that own pets. So what else do pet owners need to buy? Pet insurance, grooming, holiday kennelling, kennels, leads, pet clothes could easily be sold to their existing customers. I’m pretty sure you could sell all of them successfully to your list of customers who go to that particular vet.

There are speciality businesses around every one of those products I just mentioned. But they all could be sold to a vet’s customer list quite easily. You are amassing a list of customers as a by product of doing your core business. Why not form a conglomerate around your customers and meet more of their needs.

If you don’t know where to start, start with building an ironclad relationship with your customers. It is the key to keeping them buying your current offering and building for additional sales in the future.

To find out if our simple turnkey system to do exactly this is right for you, then request a newsletter suitability audit. Ongoing communication is the key to maintaining your relationship, credibility and authority with your existing customers. Together we can determine if this strategy will work for your business and get you ready to succeed. Call 1300 120 006 now or go to www.newslettermarketingsystems.com.au/get-started

Studying may be the key to doing well on spelling quizzes and math tests, but it’s a crucial success skill beyond the school walls. The ability to concentrate and prioritize without the prospect of earning a letter grade is crucial to children’s success in college, and throughout their career. Help your child master the art of studying by sharing these tips:

• Use your time effectively. When are you at your brightest? Are you an early bird or a nighthawk? Are you sleepy and distracted after lunch? Try to schedule study time during your peaks.

• Develop your concentration. How long is your concentration span? Find out by recording your start time when you read from a textbook or other course material. As soon as your mind begins to drift, record the time again. Try this several times until you can gauge your average concentration span. Most people take nearly imperceptible “refresher” breaks every few minutes.

• Read actively. Keep your mind alive while you’re reading. Use a highlighter to mark important passages; write down questions about items you don’t understand; try to predict what will be on the next page or connect what you’re reading with other material you’ve read.

• Manage your internal distractions. When random thoughts surface, don’t try to suppress them. Instead, quickly jot them down for consideration at another time. Sometimes a memory or a thought that appeared to be unrelated to your reading yields interesting insights into the subject upon later reflection.

• Create the right environment. Be aware of your optimal study conditions, and use this awareness to reduce distractions around you. Are you more relaxed with absolute silence, or with classical music in the background? Do you have enough light to read without straining? How is the temperature? Is your chair comfortable?

• Reward yourself. Remember that making the most of your study time means having more time for your other activities.

Some managers worry so much about what they can’t say to employees that they shut up and limit their conversation to “Do this” and “Good job.” But you can’t run a workplace without active communication.

These useful phrases and questions can help enhance employee morale and productivity:

• “How can I help you with . . . ?” This doesn’t mean volunteering to do employees’ jobs for them. Just make sure they have the resources to do good work and remove any unnecessary obstacles.

• “Good work on _____.” The key is specificity. A generic “You rock!” doesn’t tell employees what to repeat. When you praise an employee’s work, point out exactly how it succeeded to reinforce the results.

• “I want your opinion on . . .” Asking employees what they think shows you trust their judgment and value their ideas. But don’t ask for input unless you’re willing to seriously consider it. If employees think you’re just pretending to be interested in their thoughts, they’ll stop sharing.

• “Thank you for ____.” Don’t take a “That’s their job” attitude. Show genuine appreciation for employees’ efforts. They’ll reward you with greater openness and loyalty.

Over Easter I had the pleasure to spend 6 days on the Central Coast and go to Bluesfest. Five stages, each one playing live music for about 12 hours for five days – epic festival.

While watching the likes of Crosby Stills and Nash, The Pogues, John Foggarty, Maceo Parker, G3, Lucinda Williams, Seasick Steve, Canned Heat, Earth Wind and Fire, The Specials, Sublime (with Rome), Trombone Shorty, Buddy Guy, Keb Mo, Eugene ‘Hidaway’ Bridges, Brian Setzer’s Rockabilly Riot (The Stray Cats came too), Steve Earle, his son Justin Townes Earle, Slightly Stoopid, Zappa Plays Zappa The Melbourne Ska Orchestra and the Round Mountain Girls  to name but a few… I noticed some marketing ideas being implemented in and around all that music.

Some 80,000 people attended over the five days. Each person shells out a considerable sum of money. Over $100 a day for short passes once the line up is announced. You can get 5 day passes for $299.00 if you buy next year’s ticket within a couple of months of the last festival finishing. But most will buy based on line-up and pay more for the privilege. Add food, beverages accommodation and narcotics to the bill.

Peter Noble and the marketing team are putting their brains to work. They secured their own venue, which is a Tea Tree farm the rest of the year. Don’t snicker. They get harvestable cash crop every year that pays for the venue and its own costs. It is the agricultural equivalent of buying a large commercial space. Leasing part of it to your own business and tenanting the rest of it to pay the mortgage.

These guys are getting much more aggressive and sophisticated about their marketing and business operation in general. The 23^rd Bluesfest will run Easter 2013, (80,000 people a year for many years) so they have built a sizeable database of people many of whom are willing to come up every year and people within ‘driving distance’ of the festival grounds.

Now they are adding multiple single day music events, another multiday festival to their calendar. They already have a large database of music fans for a handful of specific genres. The database is full of big spenders – this isn’t a cheap festival. Odds are you get bands they want to see to play at their festivals and concerts then you can be sure that they will come.

Work to sell the tickets to these extra events amounts to a few emails, text messages putting up a few new web pages and creating a new entry in their shopping cart. That isn’t Rocket Surgery for them it’s only brain science…

This is the power of being able to acquire new customers to build your database at a profit or breakeven then find all these additional ways to make money off of the same customers. The value of their database to them has can be expanded no end because they have all these additional sales they make to their existing customers.

Every business can be enhanced by copying this strategy. But it can’t happen without that database and securing each person on the database’s loyalty with good products and services as well as a strong personal relationship. To find out how you can build that relationship with your customers automatically go to newslettermarketingsystems.com.au/get-started or call 1300 120 006.

Reviewing and reflection are two methods of thinking about anything that you have just recently learned. Reviewing can of course be undertaken mere moments after a question has been posed, a passage has been read, directions have been given, a comment has been made or an activity has been performed, allowing some time to be given over to think about what has just taken place, to process that information and then to react in an appropriate manner.

Reviewing also needs to be undertaken at periodic intervals over the course of a year, so that students have the chance to be able to revisit, clarify, relearn and then consolidate what they have learned to memory.

Reflection meanwhile encompasses not just the way the actual material is or has been responded to, but also taking into account the way in which one actually goes about the process of learning in the first place.

“Immature poets imitate,” wrote poet T.S. Eliot; “mature poets steal.” The path to success isn’t always based on coming up with your own unique ideas. Sometimes the best route is to follow someone else’s approach. From the book Steal Like an Artist, by Austin Kleon (Workman), here’s how to harvest good ideas from the sources around you:

• Pick a handful of thinkers to emulate. Instead of trying to immerse yourself in an entire subject, select two or three representatives to study at a time. The effort will be less daunting, and you’ll get a good view of the issues and ideas swirling around the topic. Find out where they’re coming from and how they see the world, and use that to inform your perceptions.

• Change the scenery. Don’t just sit at your computer when you’re trying to generate ideas. Get out into the world: Move around, observe your surroundings, record your impressions without worrying about how logical they may be, and then spend some time assembling your thoughts around the experiences you’ve collected.

• Widen your perspective. Avoid taking a narrow focus in your work—or your life. Explore different interests and passions. Most of the time your various activities will complement each other, and you’ll be able to use what you learned in one area on a different project. Keep your eyes and your mind open to the resources around you.