Bhante Vimalaramsi Visits High Country Meditators April 14

I am super excited to announce that for the second time, Bhante Vimalaramsi of the Dhamma Sukha Meditation Center is joining our weekly online Zoom meeting of the High Country Meditators. He will give us a dhamma talk with references to suttas, the Buddha’s teachings, as well as his own experience of over three decades being a Buddhist monk. His wisdom will guide us in our own meditation practice as well as in every day life.

The session will conclude with a Q&A session. Please come prepared with your questions about meditation, the Buddha’s teaching or how to deal with life’s ups and downs better.

Date: Wednesday, April 14, 2021

Time: 2 pm to 3 pm EDT.

The event is free of charge.

Sign up is no longer possible. Watch a recording here: https://youtu.be/NogU-_h4yIo

092: 5 Steps to Easily Set Up Member Areas

As you may know, Member Areas is a new feature rolled out by Squarespace that allows you to host an online course, offer a membership or other content behind a paywall, all on your current Squarespace website.

In Blog + Video No. 091, I walked you through the steps for setting up a login page so that your students can sign into your program. But before you can do that, you need five things ready to go. In this video, I will walk you through these five steps.

These five things are:

1. You need to enable Member areas
2. You need to purchase a plan - meaning subscribe to Member Areas.
3. You need to connect your payment processor - Stripe/Paypal or both
4. You need to create your member area  - meaning name your member area and set up your member fee - what your students or members will pay.
5. Then build out the content for at least the first page of your member areas such as a welcome page.

Host & Sell Your Courses, Memberships or Online Workshops through Squarespace Member Areas

Click the image below to watch video:

Let’s get started.

Step 1. Enable Member Areas

First, you will need to enable member areas, in other words activate it in your account. To do that, go into the backend of your website and head over to Settings. Then click on Member Areas and simply toggle it on.

Step 2. Purchase a Plan for Member Areas (Subscribe to Member Areas)

You can purchase a plan for Member Areas from your within your Pages Panel. So head over to Pages and then scroll down to Member Areas and click the blue arrow. It will tell you that it's an add-on feature.

So click the Select Plan button and choose from these three options. You have the break down here so you can make the best selection but a quick summary: if you want simply a single member area go for the Starter plan, if you want more than one and up to three go for Core and if you want 10 or so go for the Pro Plan.

Also notice the difference in the transaction fees at each plan level. After you have a plan that you like click select and purchase.

Step 3. Connect to a Payment Processor (Stripe or PayPal or both)

In your dashboard, head over to Settings and then Member Areas and then click Payments. Here you have the option to set up Stripe and PayPal. You can do both. Click on the Stripe Connect button and it will open up a window. If you already have a Stripe account then you can simply sign in and if you don't have a Stripe account at all, this is where you can set it all up. You can do the same to connect your PayPal. Simply click Connect and follow the instructions.

Step 4. Create a Member Area (Give A Name & Price)

Here you will select a name and set up the pricing. We are now in the Pages Panel. Come down to the Member Area section, click on the plus sign and then Setup Member Area. Here you can add a name for your online course or membership site. In my case, it is Squarespace Fundamentals On Demand Workshop.

You also have the option to set a recurring fee which is appropriate for a membership program or a one time fee or even free. In this case, I'm going to select One Time and add in the cost of the on-demand workshop. It will still say membership fee but we know it's just a one time fee. That's it. Now you're ready to set up the content.

Step 5. Build the Content Inside the Member Area

Creating content in your Member Area follows the same rules that you use for setting up other pages on your website. Simply click the plus sign here to add a new page and build your content area. You can select any of these layouts and add video, text content, audio files, PDFs and anything else that would help your students.

And that's it. These are the five steps that you need to have ready before we can go on and create a login page where your students can actually purchase your program and log into your Member Areas to access the content that you have created. Check out Blog No. 91 to see how you can do that. 

091: How to Set Up Login Page for Squarespace Member Areas

You may have heard about a new feature that Squarespace recently rolled out called Member areas. You may have seen it show up in your Pages panel. And I am so excited that Squarespace released it because all this time I have been teaching the students of my online course, Host Your Course, how to use Squarespace for hosting their online programs or memberships. And now Squarespace has just made the whole thing streamlined, more professional, simplified and just simply beautiful.

Now there’s a lot to cover about Member Areas but for today, I want to address only one thing and that is how do enable a login feature so that your students can sign into your program.

What you need to know is that before you can set that up, you need to have these five things in place.

1. You need to enable Member areas
2. You need to purchase a plan - meaning subscribe to Member Areas.
3. You need to connect your payment processor - Stripe/Paypal or both
4. You need to create your member area  - meaning name your member area and set up your member fee - what your students or members will pay.
5. Then build out the content for at least the first page of your member areas such as a welcome page.

And I say at least the first page because you don’t need to have all the content created in order to enable students to enroll. This is especially helpful if you are dripping content week after week. If you want to give access to content to your students week by week, then they can already purchase and start going through your welcome page content and you can then make the content available as it becomes ready.

But now let’s take the next step which is setting up a way for your students to log in to your program from your website.

Alright, so let’s jump in.

Create a Login Page For Your Squarespace Member Areas

Click the image below to watch video:

Activate the Login Link in Top Navigation
The first thing I want to show you is how to activate the login link on the top navigation of your  website. So head over to the back end of your website. And click into Edit Site Header. And then jump into Elements. You will see four option now and you wanna go to Account and activate it like so. Notice how the Login link instantly appears in the right corner of the top navigation. I am going to click save. And look at my site as a site visitor will see it using incognito. And I can see the login link is activated.

When I click on it a box opens up. And there are two things that a student can do here. 1. they can add in their email and password to login. and 2. They can create their account which will be important to do for new students.

Better Clarity For Enrolling New Students
When I am enrolling new students in my program, this box is not very clear and helpful as to what you need to do as a new student. So I want to make it super clear for my students. And so what I am going to instead is to create a special login page where I can have better instructions to my students. I will show you that in just a second. But I am glad I activated the login link because I can now copy the url of this box and use it on my special login page. This will be used by returning students specifically.

Creating a Special Login Page
So now I am creating a special login page. I’st essentially millionairewebdesigner.com/login. First, I will add a button that says Student login or rather Returning Student login. And place paste the URL that I just copied from the login link. It says millionairewebdesigner.com/account/login. 

So any student that is returning meaning they have already created a new account, can access the member areas by clicking here.

And then what I will do is create a way for new students to enroll. So I am going to choose a content block here that lets me add the Member Areas Sign up. This is similar to a product block if you have used that before. I will choose the Member Area (MWD - Program), and uncheck everything but the Show Join Button. I will call it “Create New Account”.

Now you can see there are two buttons but they are two different content blocks, one is a button and the other is a Member Areas Sign up content block. I can now direct my new students to go to this page so that they can create a new account, purchase and enroll into my program.

When somebody clicks the “create new account”, they can add their name, email and password and be directed to purchase and enroll into the program.

The “returning student button” allows students to login (those who have already created their accounts).

Disabling the Login Link in the Top Navigation
Now I personally don’t want the login button to show up on the top right navigation of my website. And that’s why I created a separate login page for all my students and it’s linked in the lower right corner of my footer. So I’ll just go in and disable the login link so it doesn’t show up in the top nav.

That’s really it. I like how the login page looks. It has two distinct buttons presented with crystal clear clarity so both my new and returning students know exactly how they can get into the program.

How are you using Member Areas?
I’d love to know in the comments how you are using Member Areas in your business. And if you are not, what kind of decisions you still need to make in order to make it happen. Chime in the comments and let me know!

Peace,

Sophia

090: What James Clear's Website Taught Me About Presenting Your One Thing

With the start of the new year, you may be thinking of giving your website a fresh new look. But before you scroll through new templates or change up the font or the color, I suggest you look at your website and ask yourself this question:

Is my website clearly presenting my no. 1 goal to my visitors within seconds of them arriving on the site? This single question will prove to be more effective in using your website to help realize the goals you have for your business.

Do this one thing before redesigning your website:

Figure out the No. 1 goal for your website & display it prominently on your site

Now your website can do a number of things for you. From positioning you as an expert in your field, to growing your email list to demonstrating case studies/your portfolio of work, getting new clients and selling your products. While your website can do all of these things, it needs to have one primary goal which you as the website/business owner need to be clear about. And this primary goal may change from season to season and accordingly your website needs to adapt to it - more on that in the example below.

The reason for this is that once you know the No. 1 goal of your website, all other decisions will come easily - whether it is the font and color choice, to what pages go in the footer vs top navigation, to what third party integrations you will need and so and so forth.

Let me give you an example: jamesclear.com. After reading a recommendation on the blog of my colleague, Sequoia Mulgrave I went ahead purchased the book as it is now on my reading list for 2021.

A beautiful minimalist website example that shows you how to display your primary goal prominently on your site.

Click the image below to watch video:

Let’s say you are an author who has just published a new book and want to sell more copies to the people who land on your website. You will want the new book to be front and center on your homepage, prominently displayed on your top navigation and on your about page for example. Readers of your site need to know about your book within seconds of landing on your page. An author that does this extremely well is James Clear, author of New York Times bestseller, Atomic Habits. Have a look at his site:

i. Home Page
On the Home page of JamesClear.com, the first thing you’ll notice right away is that James Clear is the author of the book Atomic Habits. The image of the book is prominent, right in the center. The position is inescapable.

Also hard to miss is the opt-in form which from a marketing-perspective seems to be the no. 1 function that I notice on all pages. From a value-perspective it’s very obvious to me that giving valuable content to the readers is the number one goal of the site.

Also notice the ample use of white space or negative space. The screen is not jam-packed with content, one of the hallmarks of minimalist design. There is lots of margin, as one would say in book design and a healthy headroom, as they say in filmmaking.

Plus notice the short sentences that take up no more than 2 lines each.

On the Home page of JamesClear.com, the first thing you see is the book Atomic Habits and an email opt-in for list-building. It’s prominent and inescapably positioned.

ii. Books Page
Now let’s look at the Books page. Not only is the book on the homepage, it also is the first link in the top navigation. When you click Books and land on the Books page, you recognize the Atomic Habits book and then you learn that there’s another one - The Clear Habits Journal. And both of these books have buttons with calls to action where the visitor is invited to go deeper and learn more.

And that is all on this page - more is not really needed.

The Books page is beautifully laid out with the Atomic Habits and The Clear Habit Journal presented with a CTA (Call to Action button) to learn more.

iii. About Page
Now let’s go on to the About page. I really like the content here above the fold. Notice that instead of diving into a long form bio, what you see is a short bio which does two things:
1. it lets you know that James Clear is the author of Atomic Habits and
2. it invites you to the newsletter signup

Then on the right you see a quick snapshot of some of the things he wants you to know about him. A new piece of info here I see is that he is the host of The James Clear Show - so I am intrigued and want to know more.

And then you learn more about him throughout the page and at the bottom is again the opt-in form.

About page also shows how the main goal of the site to position authorship of Atomic Habits is visible along with the invitation to sign up to the newsletter.

The opt-in form is on the bottom of the About page and displayed in a way that the visitor will not miss it.

iv. The Footer
One final thing I want to point out is about the footer. It’s very succinct and neatly presented. Plus, notice that we only see two social media links which I take as encouragement to pick one or two social media platforms than trying to be on multiple ones.

The footer is crisp and to the point.

If you looked at the other pages like Articles and Events, you will see a similar sense of coherence and simplicity which gives a clean look and has a calming effect. There are tons of good design decisions on this site and I absolutely love it!

So I hope this website example shows you visually how you can 1. get clear about your number one goal for your website. 2. prominently display it on your website.

I am so inspired by this website that I will be incorporating the design insights into my very own website refresh which I am embarking on this year. Stay tuned for that in the following months!

Now, it’s your turn. Have you run into websites that are exemplary in your view? Share them in the comments and let me know what you think they do best and what can other website owners learn from it.

To your success,

Sophia

089: Social Media: To Do Or Not To Do?

Earlier this year as the pandemic was just getting its hold on American soil, I quit all my social media except for my YouTube channel. I closed down my Facebook account, Pinterest and Instagram. I didn’t have a Twitter account so nothing to be done there. Although this is not a strategy that fits everyone, for me it was the right action that I needed to take to make some big changes in my life and my business. And it worked! In this article, I want to share the reasons why I quit, what transpired in my business during the time after I was social media-free and how I am intentionally coming back to social media. I want to share all of this in hopes to help anyone out there who is feeling overwhelmed by social media and is bombarded with mixed messages about both the pros and cons of participating in it.

Al’right, let’s dive in.

1| Why I quit social media in March 2020 and should you do the same?

As you may remember, March was an increasingly tense time here in the USA as the virus was spreading rapidly across the country. In the region where I live, people were still not seeing the growing intensity of the situation and my social media feed was being bombarded with posts from both people who were pro-masks and those who thought that we are just in for another type of a flu. My mind was influenced by this and I was getting obsessed with trying to sharing data to inform. So I took upon the role of information-sharing on my Facebook page. I was stressed by people not wanting to do the bare minimum of wearing masks or keep social distance. I spent many hours researching stats about the virus from University websites as well as various news sources and would post links to “inform” those who were not getting the news about the rapid spread and what we can do flatten the curve. Clearly, this was affecting my focus, my time and results at work.

On top of that, I also felt that if I wanted to succeed in business, I needed to be on all social media platforms, well, at least on the big ones - FB, Insta, Pinterest, Twitter. But as a solopreneur, this was just a bit too much to handle. Plus, I was not really good at any of the platforms, let alone all of them. And I also wanted to publish on my blog weekly.

Enter: overwhelm!

What I found out was that although social media was a way clients were finding me, when I looked carefully at my stats, it was really only my YouTube channel that brought me paying clients (many of them actually mentioned that that’s how they found my website). So I knew that YouTube was working but everything else was just creating a sense of overwhelm for me. Besides, I was spending way too much time scrolling my social media feed.

I am inspired by what immense successful folks do and there are stats noted in this Business Insider article that show that millionaires spend on average two and a half hours a week on social media versus 14 hours that the average American spends on it. My situation was less than 14 but enough to drag down my use of time in an effective way.

I considered just doing a social media detox and go off of it for a couple of weeks. But I had a feeling I needed to do something more drastic to send a clear message to my brain. Finally, I decided that I had to quit cold turkey. This may be what you need to but I won’t make that as a blanked suggestion for everyone because your needs may be different. But for me it was the right thing to do at that time because without any social media accounts to “waste” my time on, I found other rather useful ways to use my time which I will come to next. I also re-watched a Ted talk on why you should quit social media by Cal Newport, author of Digital Minimalism and I was inspired to make the leap.

Question: How is your relationship with your social media accounts and activities? How is it affecting your results in your business and your family life and your relationship with yourself? Is it time to reassess how you use it? How can you be more intentional in using social media for your business?

2| What was the impact of quitting social media?

There were several positive changes that transpired when I quit social media in March 2020. These changes were both in business and personal and here are a few of them:

1. I read 20 books last year, more than I did in 2019.
2. I opened up to new opportunities for my business that made a tremendous impact.
3. I substantially increased my business revenue in 2020, markedly more than 2019.
4. I actually connected with a lot more friends than I have, not just compared to 2019 but in the last few years even!
5. I was more present with my husband and my kitties.
6. I took care of my home in a way that I now have the most organized home and belongings I have ever had.
7. I had greater peace of mind as I was not incessantly worrying about the world and focused on my zone of influence.
8. This peace of mind allowed me to be more present with my clients and serve them generously.
9. My focus was not drained by distractions. More focus, less distraction.
10. Learning to say “No” to what was not good for me or was not working for me.
11. Being in touch with real people in more meaningful ways.

I’d say generally I was much more conscious and present in my day to day activities, had more focus and less distraction.

One of the most important side-effect was that my sense of belonging increased. The friends that I would have lost touch with by dropping Facebook, actually found other ways to stay in touch with me: via whatsapp video chats and Facetime video calls. It seems that on Facebook, we felt that we kinda knew what was happening in each others’ lives because we were watching and reading the posts. This sadly superseded real communication and real connection. Having no Facebook account, meant that we had to reach out in more meaningful ways and that has been especially powerful and a real solace during the lockdowns and the forced isolation due to the pandemic.

This connection was immensely important for me as it build a sense of belonging, friendship and sisterhood which helped to keep a happy mind when serving clients. And serving clients when in a happy mind is much more fun, right?

Question: What could be the benefits of a social media detox (or on the extreme case like me - quitting social media)? How would you show up in the world differently? How would you show up to your family and friends (your animals) and in your business to your clients differently?

3| How I am re-instating my social media portfolio in 2021?

Having such positive results not having social media, why then am I even considering to reinstate it in 2021? You see, I needed to quit social media and get to tabula rasa, a blank state, in order to remove the thing that was in my way (distraction) and to understand what I wanted.

Now that I know the benefits of not having social media, I am in a better position to strategically use it for my business goals as I know there are certain benefits of it that I do want to take advantage of. The benefits include building a brand identity, connecting with clients and colleagues, gaining search engine visibility to name a few. Plus, I am putting into place better structures so that it will not consume my time and attention.

How will my social media activities look like then?
I will be active on just this social media platform:
1. YouTube.
2. Twitter Update September 2023: I am now adding Twitter (link in the footer).

3. Pinterest and Update August 2021: I am dropping out of Pinterest again.
4. Instagram Update August 2021: I am dropping out of Instagram as well again.

YouTube is a huge source of client projects and it allows me to serve meaningfully to people with useful content. I will continue to post tech tutorials around web design and email marketing with a focus on Squarespace and ConvertKit. I will also be posting content that will be specifically serving budding web designers who want to build a successful web design business. As of August 2021, YouTube will be my one and only social media platform of choice.

Pinterest is a search engine powerhouse and your content is quite evergreen. Instagram allows people to more closely connect with me on a human level and I will use it specifically to present the person behind my business (me) on a personal level, including the occasional business tips and announcements. Instagram is also a wonderful way to build relationships with my colleagues in the web design field as well as other entrepreneurs that I admire and want to connect with.

Update as of Aug 2021: I am leaving Pinterest and Instagram to focus on YouTube. I want and need to declutter and focus my activities.

Question: What would a newly crafted social media strategy look like for your business so that it’s helpful and beneficial to you and your business instead of a source of overwhelm and burden?

I will be reassessing my social media engagement periodically and I am certain there will be refinements on how I show up on social media. But one thing that will continue to guide me is the question: how can I best use my time and resources to serve my clients, grow my business and grow as a person, so that it creates greater peace and harmony for myself and others.

I hope that this article has been helpful to you in how you approach the question of social media for your life and business. Let me know in the comments what your experience has been as I’d love to know!

Warmly,
Sophia

088: Success Habit of Millionaires That Will Speed Up Your Business Success

Do you know how many books you read in 2020? I am asking this not to make you feel bad if you didn’t - hey, 2020 has been tough on many fronts, needless to say. But the number of books and what type of books you read can be a key indicator and a key contributor to your financial and business success. And when you borrow books from the library, this reading habit doesn’t cost you a dime.

In this article, I will share some data on how many books millionaires and billionaires read, what my reading list is for 2021 and some links to blogs on how you help us build a reading habit ⏤ all of this to inspire you and myself to read more books in 2021, in order to learn, grow, and make a bigger positive impact in our world.

Let’s get started!

Let’s look at some research on how many books Americans read. According to the research done by Pew Research Center, the average American reads four books a year while 25% of Americans surveyed didn’t get their hands on even one. Compare that to immensely successful and influential billionaires such as Bill Gates who was mentioned article in this Inc.com article, and you get 50. Yes, he reads 50 books a year or around one book a week. If you want to know which 5 books he just recommended, check out his personal blog, GatesNotes.

Correlation between wealth and reading books
In this blog post, Sam Klemens lists ten data points that shows how many books the highly successful read. Now there’s no causal relationship established to show whether reading books led these people to become immensely successful. But in his article, you’ll see that Mark Cuban reads three hours a day while Warren Buffet reads 500 pages a day. Also, just think about Oprah and her love for books and one starts to wonder if indeed there is a causal relationship between wealth and reading. Plus, what type of books you read is equally important, right!

Making Reading a Daily Habit
To make reading part of the actions you take daily, it is important to make it a habit. Building a new habit is a skill and there’s research that says that it generally takes about 21 days to build a new habit. There are tons of books and Ted talks about how to build good habits. One trick that I learnt some years ago from Shawn Achor in his book, “The Happiness Advantage”, was to create positive triggers to help you build that habit. For example, if you want to practice the guitar everyday, keep the guitar in the middle of the living room instead of tucked away in a closet, so that it’s right in front of you. There’s less of an obstacle between you and the guitar. Using that example for reading then, one can keep the book next to your bed on the nightstand, carry it with you so you can read whenever you have to wait, and carve out a reading hour in the day where nothing else will compete with your attention. If you want to learn more about building a reading habit, read this book by James Clear called “Atomic Habits” which is all about building good habits (it’s was recommended by Sequoia Mulgrave of the DailyMode Studio and I’ve purchased the book and added it to my reading list for 2021). James Clear on his blog wrote on how to build new habits which you can read in a snap and use the tips he shares to easily implement right away.

Question: What strategies or tricks can you use to help yourself build this new daily habit?

Setting a Reading Goal for 2021
I want to read a lot more in 2021 and one thing I am doing to help me accomplish this is to create a reading goal. Earlier this week, I set the goal of reading 21 books in 2021. But then I made a list of all the books I read this year and it totalled at 20. So I am now changing my goal to reading 30 books next year. Seeing the stats of successful entrepreneurs who read up to 50 books a year, 30 is just a bit more than half, but for me this is a good goal and it’s both exciting and challenging. That’s roughly 2.5 books a month. I’ve also made a section in my bookshelf where I have placed some of books for the first half of the year. Seeing all these books in one place is motivating to me and I can’t wait to read them and gain golden nuggets of wisdom from each one of them.

Question: What will your reading goal be for 2021? And which books will make the list?

Sharing What You Learn
When working towards a new habit, not only sharing the goal can be very helpful but also sharing what you learn from them can be motivating. I’ve done that in the past on my personal development blog some years ago and I know that it greatly benefitted me when I shared some insights I gained. In fact, my very first YouTube video back in 2010 was a short book review where I shared 3 insights I gained from Jon Kabat-Zinn’s Wherever You Go, There You Are. I will get back to doing this in 2021 writing blogs or making videos about what I learn from each book.

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This is my lovely little bookshelf. Books from the 2021 reading list marked and set aside. Let’s get reading!

My Book List
It’s good to track what books one has read to encourage oneself to read more. So here are the books I read in 2020 and you’ll see a lot of them are about success mindset and motivation. It just so happens that the list totals at 20 books however, I had not made a goal of reading 20 books in 2020!

1. The Secret Door to Success by Florence Scovel Shinn (This was written in 1941. It’s in the creative commons and there are legally free PDF versions you can find on the web).
2. The Game of Life. Ibid.
3. The Power of the Spoken Word. Ibid.
4. Your Word is Your Wand. Ibid.
5. Dollars Want Me by Henry Harrison Brown (An old book written in 1903!)
6. The Abundance Code: How to Bust the 7 Money Myths by Julie Ann Cairns
7. It’s Not Your Money by Tosha Silver
8. You are Badass at Making Money: Master the Mindset of Wealth by Jen Sincero
9. The Ending of Things by Ajahn Brahm (freely available from the Buddhist Publication Society’s website).
10. Meditating on No-Self by Ayya Khema (freely available from the Buddhist Publication Society’s website).
11. The Decision: Overcoming today’s BS for Tomorrow’s Success by Kevin Hart (Audiobook)
12. Miracle Morning Millionaires by Hal Elrod, David Osborn, Honoree Corder (Audiobook)
13. Goodbye Things by Fumio Sasaki
14. Making Space Clutter-Free by Tracy McCubbin
15. The Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley
16. Stop Acting Rich by Thomas Stanley
17. Become Your Own Banker by R. Nelson Nash
18. Building Your Warehouse of Wealth by R. Nelson Nash
19. How Privatized Banking Really Works by Robert Murphy and Carlos Lara
20. The Anapanasati Sutta: A Practical Guide to Mindfulness of Breathing and Tranquil Wisdom Meditation by the Venerable U Vimalaramsi

To Read in 2021
(Update Dec 2021 - I read 25 books in 2021 which I’ve indicated below as Read. See complete list of books read in my 2021 Books Read Post).

1. We Should All Be Millionaires: A Woman’s Guide to Earning More, Building Wealth, and Gaining Economic Power by Rachel Rodgers - Read
2. Chillpreneur: The New Rules for Creating Success, Freedom, and Abundance on Your Terms by Denise Duffield Thomas - Read
3. Everything Is Figureoutable by Marie Forleo
4. Profit First by Mike Michalowicz - Read
5. Atomic Habits by James Clear - Read
6. 10x Marketing Formula by Garrett Moon
7. Invested by Charles Schwab
8. Weekend Millionaire Mindset by Mike Summey and Dawson
9. Playing the Matrix by Mike Dooley - Read
10. Show Your Work by Austin Kleon - Read
11. This is Marketing by Seth Godin - Read
12. Traction by Gino Wickham
13. Being Nobody, Going Nowhere by Ayya Khema
14. Why Not Me? By Mindy Kaling - Read
15. How to American: An Immigrant's Guide to Disappointing Your Parents by Jimmy O. Yang
16. Thought Vibration or The Law of Attraction in the Thought World by William Walker Atkinson - Read
17. Everyday Millionaires by Chris Hogan
18. The Millionaire Mind by Thomas Stanley
19. The Next Millionaire Next Door by Thomas Stanley - Read
20. Millionaire Women Next Door by Thomas Stanley
21. Think Like a Monk: Train Your Mind for Peace and Purpose Every Day by Jay Shetty
22. Becoming by Michelle Obama
23. Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life by Nir Eyal
24. Girl, Stop Apologizing: A Shame-Free Plan for Embracing and Achieving Your Goals by Rachel Hollis - Read
Six more to add to this list and I am sure I will be inspired next year to complete this list.

Until then, please do let me know in the chat what your book reading goals are for next year, and which books you’d recommend, especially those written by women entrepreneurs as both me and my book list need more woman power!

You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!

Peace,
Sophia

087: 5 Traits of A Successful Web Design Business Owner

You want to run a web design business that is successful? Of course, you define what success is and it will be different at each stage of your business. And to create that success, you need to develop the traits that will help you get where you want to go. These are the traits that will not only help you achieve that revenue goal you are aiming for but also help decision-making easier, serving your clients better, and even articulate yourself better in both client communications and content creation. It’s a win-win-win!

So let’s get into some of those traits that I believe have helped me tremendously to move the needle in my business in recent months.

Here are the five traits:

1| A Successful Web Designer Actively Generates Clarity
2| A Successful Web Designer Cultivates Patience
3| A Successful Web Designer Keeps An Optimistic Mindset
4| A Successful Web Design Business Owner Cultivates A Resilient Mind
5| A Successful Web Designer Knows She Is A Force For Good

Traits for a Successful Web Designer:

1| A Successful Web Designer Actively Generates Clarity

This is not the easiest one to start with but it’s been very important for me in the last year especially. Clarity, I realize, is not something that just exists. I have found that I have had to generate clarity in my business through a combination of thinking deeply about things, journaling, discussing with my coach or mastermind buddy and most importantly, by doing.

It’s like knowing the path that leads to your home from your favorite cafe or a place you frequent. You don’t need to follow a GPS or read instructions on how to get home. You just know it because it is clear in your mind. Such clarity is something you actively need to generate about your life, about what you value, about what you aspire towards (both in personal and business life), who your business serves, what your business offers (as services, products, programs), what design guidelines you hold valuable, how you want to communicate to your clients/students, and how you want to build relationships with your peers, and so on and so forth.

For example, if you are a parent and being present with your kids each evening is important to you, you then know clearly at what time you need to shut down your computer - without fail.

As you can see that this clarify goes beyond simply knowing your niche. It’s about what is important to you. Not all parts of you business and life are completely lined up neatly in a row at all times. But if you can take some time to get some of these overarching things crystal clear for yourself, you will find many other decisions and projects and actions will fall into place neatly. Also, once you get clear it seems that with regular reflection and journaling, you enter into a deeper level of clarity!

2| A Successful Web Designer Cultivates Patience

This is something that I am continuing to cultivate and patience is certainly a virtue. Patience is needed at all stages of starting and growing your business. Patience in gaining that clarity (mentioned in point 1), patience in acquiring clients, patience in building a portfolio, patience in crafting your voice, patience in seeing your bank balance grow, patience with your own design skills, patience with your business skills and so on and so forth.

One of the most important aspects of patience we need to cultivate is towards clients. As a self-employed web design business-owner, you are most likely dealing with clients directly. And your clients will come from all types of backgrounds and regions of the world and they will have various levels of intra-personal and communication skills. Plus, even the nicest, kindest person may have a bad day which will lead them to do certain things that could potentially trigger or upset you. Moreover, we may be having a bad day and could misinterpret a completely innocent comment of a client. (I have sadly done that one time and I know that he would never want to say anything intentionally hurtful). So the more we can cultivate patience for our clients, the easier the projects will be and our own experience in creating a successful result for them.

3| A Successful Web Designer Keeps An Optimistic Mindset

There’s a proverb, I believe, it’s an ancient Chinese saying that goes like this: “Keep a green tree in your heart and perhaps, a singing bird will come”. What I understand this means is that if we keep a positive mind, green and untainted by dirt, then we create a welcome home for a joyful singing bird, or opportunities and goodwill. Now being optimistic doesn’t mean being unrealistic and throwing facts out the door. But cultivating a positive mindset that is uplifting and focuses on the good is very important for persevering. You see, too often, our mind follows the line of what’s wrong: What’s wrong with my marketing, what’s wrong with my client acquisition skills, what’s wrong with my design skills, what’s wrong with me. And this is a very dangerous path. This tendency of the mind to notice what’s wrong puts a dark filter on our eyes through which we only see the “mistakes” and “errors”. And that can quickly drain one’s energy and self-confidence.

Of course, we can look at things that can be improved and tightened and refined in our business and I have shared in Blog 084 with the BBB method how to spot the bottleneck in your business and resolve it.

But we need to cultivate a habit of noticing progress made so far. We need to be aspirational for future opportunities. We need to cultivate an optimistic mindset so that when we face dire times, we can rely on our positive mindset to lift us up and out to the path of joy, peace and success.

There was a moment in my own business when I was lamenting how slowly my business was growing and how revenue was barely just trickling in. That’s when, sitting there in the middle of the living room, with tears flowing down my face, my husband brought up the spreadsheet that I had built to track my revenue. He took the data and made a graph out of it. And lo and behold, I was shocked. The graph showed me how my average monthly revenue was on the rise. I could not read the date on the spreadsheet to see that, but once I saw the graph, I was uplifted. That was the turning point in my business mindset. Now when thinking about my business revenue, instead of the voice in my head repeating “It’s growing so slowly!!!”, the voice in my head now said, “It’s on the rise!”.

4| A Successful Web Design Business Owner Cultivates A Resilient Mind

This is about being resilient in the face of rejections. And this trait has to be cultivate as well over time. Especially, in the early years of your business, when the momentum has still not picket up, you are likely to hear things like,

“You pricing is beyond our budget”
”Thank you but we have decided to go with another designer”
”We like what you have presented and at this time we have decided to stick with the site we have”
”We would love to work with you but right now we are swamped with projects”

And that’s if you are lucky. Often there’s just crickets - where the client seems to have fallen off the face of the earth and is no longer responding to your follow-ups. They could have run into personal challenges or just gotten busy with the million other things in their lives.

Also, if you are building an email list (which I highly recommend you start asap), you will notice that with each email you send out, somebody or the other will unsubscribe. And may be because we are so excited for the people in our email list, or we are just too sensitive as a starting business owner, I don’t know what all the reasons are, but that unsubscribe can hurt real bad. It’s like someone breaking up with you over the phone or worse just falling off the face of the earth (see earlier reference to people falling off the face of the earth!).

Yes, I have been there in both scenarios. Your fledging new business has not yet built the strength to withstand this kind of rejection. But the key word here is: yet. Soon, you will realize that clients who don’t want to work with you are creating room for you to focus on those who want, or creating time in your schedule so you can work on parts of your business that still need some care. Soon, you will realize that when people unsubscribe, it’s really nothing against you. They may even like you and follow you elsewhere but right now they are simply overwhelmed and want to streamline their inbox because they are working on their own sense of clarity. And you will realize that they are self-selecting themselves out of your email list and in that they are really doing you a favor because otherwise you would have to pay for an email subscriber who is not really your ideal client. How kind of them - you will soon thank them for their thoughtfulness!

And finally, the rejections from clients will not ping your heart that much. Soon, you will be focused on serving your dream clients and then when a potential client project doesn’t work out, you will know that divine timing is in play and they may come back to you at a later date when the stars are better aligned for your collaborative project. So, no big deal!

5| A Successful Web Designer Knows She Is A Force For Good

What do I mean by that? A force for good! Yes, a force for good. This is what I mean:

When you have cultivated the clarity in your business that you exist to serve and to help your clients, that because your business exists you are making a difference in someone’s life, then you know that you are a force for good. When so many clients are struggling to get their business become visible online, when they are striving through their own mind viruses of “I am not good enough” and still trying to make something happen, when clients have kids at home from school lockdowns and ailing family members, and find time at midnight to respond to your emails and make something moving in their business, when clients are trying to make a dream come true with their business while working a full-time job, when clients are afraid of technology because when she was a little girl some male-figure told her that she will break the computer or mess it up, and then she puts all her faith in you to help her navigate the scary online world, then you know that your business is needed and is making a difference for all of these people.

When you know that your business is helping people, you build a sense of confidence in your ability to make a difference. This confidence shows up in how you write client proposals, how you convey to them your design process over that virtual zoom meeting, and in how you deliver the work and work through challenges. When you know you are a force for good, all good forces come to uplift and support you.

What Traits Have Helped You On Your Journey?

So these are the five traits that a successful web designer needs to cultivate. And you may already have these and many other such traits helping you along the way. Let me know in the comments which other traits you’ve cultivated that made a difference in your business journey for the better!

You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!

Peace,
Sophia

086: Inner-Circle Method of Finding Your First or Next Web Design Client

Finding your first client as a new web designer might feel like climbing Mount Everest - an arduous, unfamiliar and challenging endeavor. But once you have the right approach and strategy, it doesn’t have to be. In this article, I will share with you one of many (web design) client finding strategies that you can put into practice today.

If finding your first client or even your next client is what you are trying to solve, then I’ll guess that you are working on solving through the bottleneck in the first quadrant of your business. I highly recommend that you read through blog article No. 84 which outlines the four categories of your business (quadrants) as well as introduces you to the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough strategy that you can use over and over as your business grows.

See that article here: 084: How to Grow Your Web Design Business Using the BBB Strategy

So this category you are working on solving is Marketing which includes any action you take to create traffic to your site and to build visibility of your business and specifically of your services. You need to start getting the word out about your web design business and let people know what your business is about and that you are ready to serve new clients.

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What do Web Design Clients Need?

Now, think about what do clients need before they can hire you? And here we are talking about people who know they need a website and are in the market for a web designer. These clients are already informed about what they need (their pain point) and have some sort of an urgency to get the website made.

They first need to:
1. know that you exist. They need to have seen your website or your content online or seen you in person or seen your business info in print somewhere.
2. they need to see that you can deliver what you say you will deliver. They need to see a portfolio or some kind of a qualification and expertise.

So let’s target the second need first - the need to see a portfolio. We address this first because if you don’t have a portfolio, then even if they know that you exist and find your website, they are less likely to hire you without a proof of your expertise. So let’s prepare your business to receive those clients by building a portfolio, building that credibility factor first.

But as soon as I said that, it sounds like a catch 22, right? How do I build a portfolio, if clients don’t hire me, and if they don’t hire me, how will I build a portfolio?

Don’t worry. Here’s my solution out of this dilemma:
Build a portfolio that you can then use to find your ideal clients in the future.

Reach Out To Your Inner-Circle

As a brand new web designer, what will be the quickest ROI (return of investment) of your time so that you can quickly build out a portfolio? The answer: reaching out to your inner-circle. You can reach out to your family, your friends and close relatives and let them know that you are doing web design and offering that as a service.

Now reaching to friends and family may not sound that exciting. But I am not talking about contacting every friend and family member. Consider a handful of close people at first whom you feel comfortable of reaching out. It’s quite likely that they may have a side-hustle or a project they would love to have a website for but they never told you about it.

Bank On Your Existing Social Capital

Why do I suggest reaching out to your inner-circle? Because these are the people with whom you have the greatest social capital. In other words, they already know, like and trust you. You don’t have to convince them of your skills. They know you and are familiar with what you are capable of and can trust you even without you showing them a portfolio. Plus, they know you can’t run away - they most likely know where you live. LOL.

That’s why you can very likely convince them to give you a chance to build a website so that you can create your first or second website and build out a portfolio. And this is what you need ⏤ a portfolio of websites to showcase that you know what you are doing. This is what will help you get out of your inner-circle pretty quickly and start getting clients outside of friends and family.

How many sites to aim for? My suggestion is to aim for minimum 3 and maximum 6 for your starting portfolio.

And just because you are building sites for friends and family, doesn’t mean you’ve gotta do it for free. You may not charge your full going rate that you are aiming to be hired for but a nominal fee will help them be invested in your project and value your work. You may feel the need to undercharge enormously for your first website and hey, if it’s for your mama or papa, don’t sweat it. There’s so much they have done for you that very likely that cutting them a deal won’t be a big deal! Most important is to get that portfolio of 3 to 6 websites created and under your belt.

This strategy of reaching your inner-circle is a great one for starting web designers. But it can literally be used any time in your career. Of course, as you become more established you will want to get paid like a business-owner ⏤ appropriately. There are other strategies that you can put into place once you have exhausted the friends and family inner-circle. And I will be sharing with you those ideas in my upcoming blogs and videos.

Action step: Think of 3 people whom you can reach out to today and offer them to build a website for your portfolio. Jot it down and see how that feels. Then write or call the first person you feel inspired to reach out.

Peace,
Sophia

085: How to Connect A Parked Domain to Your Squarespace Website

Did you purchase a domain name on Squarespace just so that you could secure it now and use it later when you are ready for a new website? Or you have a website already with a it’s own domain but now you want to direct to it a second domain that you had previously purchased on Squarespace?

In either case, if you have a “parked” domain name, a domain name sitting in your account but not being used anywhere, and want to connect it to a new or existing website, then this blog + step by step video will help you get that done.

Click to Watch Video:

To connect a domain you’ve already purchased, the first thing you might do is go into Settings and Domain and click on “Use a Domain I own”. You might then type in your domain name and click continue. Then you realize, “huh, what’s going on? How do I connect it. All I see are these instructions but now button to click.”

But because you now are watching this video, you will know that you don’t start at the website that you want the domain to go to. Rather you start with the domain that you’ve already purchased with Squarespace.

Step 1 | Go to Your Parked Domain in Your Squarespace Dashboard

So you go to your Home Panel, then click on your avatar on the very bottom and go to your Squarespace dashboard. This is where your website and your domains can be accessed from. Now you see on the upper left corner of the screen, you see the tab called Domains. Click into it and you should see your parked domain.

In my case it’s this domain: millionairewebdesigner.com which is a training program for new Squarespace Web Designers (Update 2023 - this program has been retired. Checkout the latest courses and offerings in the top navigation or drop me a line). Now you see the three dots on the very right of your domain name. Click into it and from the drop-down, select “Manage Domain Settings”. You should then see something like this. Again, this is for a domain name you’ve already purchased from Squarespace and it was just parked until you are ready to use it.

 
Now I see here that the there is a red line next to my domain and it’s tell me that email verification is required. So I know that’s something I will need to take care of and later I will show how to do that. But first I click into it and then scroll down to click on “Move Domain to Another Site”.

Step 2 | Select the Squarespace Site that this Domain Should Connect to

What you will see next all your Squarespace Sites if you have more than one. Now what is left to do is select the site where you want your domain name to connect with. Next, you will see a screen like this one. Where it will ask you to confirm that you want to move your domain to the Squarespace site you just selected. You can double check that it’s the right one by looking at the Name of the Site and the internal url of that site. Next click confirm.

You will see this notification that your domain has been moved.

Step 3 | Make It A Primary Domain

Next, click into the domain name here and select “make primary domain”. You wouldn’t do this if you have another domain as a primary domain obviously. But in my case this is the only domain connected to my site and I want to make it primary - the main domain name for my site. And you can also check the Lock Domain circle here so this domain cannot be transferred unless you want that in the future and then you can uncheck it.

If you want to look at the Advanced Setting, you can click here but you don’t have to do anything here. And if you want to look at the Registration Information to make sure everything looks correct, you can do that as well.

Step 4 | Verify Your Email

And finally, I see that there’s a red line next to the domain and it is informing me that an email verification is required. So just click into that now. And click resend verification email. I then go to my email and see this message has come in. All I need to do is click “Verify Now”. And return to account dashboard.

Now I am quickly going into incognito to check if the domain is loading correctly. And yes, it does. As soon as I purchase a plan and publish the site, it will no longer say Private Site. And that all you’ve got to do.

I hope this was helpful and easy to follow!

You have a dream to build your web design business. You can make it happen.

Peace,
Sophia

084: How to Grow Your Web Design Business Using the BBB Strategy

On your journey to building a successful design business, you will inevitably run into challenges. These are the bottlenecks to your progress. Each challenge, once you overcome it, brings you to the next level. Solve for the bottleneck and you unlock the next level. Knowing what kind of a challenge you are facing will help you tremendously in breaking through that bottleneck. In this article, I will share with you how to spot bottlenecks and ways to solve them using the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy.

Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy is all about understanding what the four main business categories are, how they apply to your specific business model and then learning to assess the revenue bottleneck through this lens. Read on to see my examples and explanation.

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Four Categories That Need Your Attention

As an online entrepreneur, these are some overarching categories in your business that need your attention:
1. Marketing (Content Creation, List Building, Public Relations, Ads - long term)
2. Acquisition (Short-term Client acquisition)
3. Production (Serving Clients)
4. Administrative (Accounting, HR, Taxes)

To make the distinction between Marketing and Acquisition, think of marketing as all the things you do to create traffic to your site, to create inquiries for your services. And acquisition is everything that you do to turn that traffic/inquiry into clients. So that means responding to client requests, writing proposals, doing complimentary consultations, these all fall under Acquisition.

Production is the actual delivering of the task you are hired for, so in your case the web site end result. Things that can be a bottleneck is your workflow, how you set boundaries, communication with your clients, scope creep where the project included x number of things and now it has grown to include several other things, delivering the launch training, domain transfer/redirect process, and so on.

Administration includes everything you need to keep the business running. Keeping records of income and expenses, doing the tax work, managing your team, taking care of legal aspects like establishing an LLC, privacy policy, and so on and so forth.

You need to find out what that bottleneck is, solve for it, and then move on to the next level. At each level, you will find a new bottleneck, either in the same category or in a different one. Round and round this goes!

Example of My Bottleneck

Let me give you an example of what I am currently facing in my business. I have a web design business where I am serving clients in a variety of ways. There are full website builds, smaller redesigns, quick fixes and tweaks, third-party app integration and one to one trainings or hourly packages. My previous marketing efforts are paying off for my design business as I have clients who find me and hire me. And now I am running into a bottleneck.

My bottleneck: hitting a revenue and time ceiling with 1 to 1 design projects.

The bottleneck is that I can only serve so many clients in the number of hours given. My time is limited and with 1 to 1 client projects so is my revenue. I am working for dollars in exchange of hours and so this is to be expected. I can continue like this and that can work fine. But I aspire to create more breathing room in my schedule. I aspire for more time and I want to find leveraged ways of serving so I can earn more as well. That’s where my bottleneck is.

That’s one of the reasons I created the Millionaire Web Designer Program so that I could serve more people in the limited time that I have while increasing my earnings. But now I am running into a new bottleneck.

New bottleneck: I am still building an audience base of web designers and I am at the early stage of marketing.

So my new bottleneck is marketing and finding the budding web designers for whom my offer can be really valuable. Once I can find them, build the like, know and trust factor, then we can work together in building their web design business.

This type of bottleneck is typical of any new business where you do not have an audience or a client base. So your first step is to find the right marketing tool that will help you find the clients for your product or service. New web designers face this problem where they have the skills and the desire to serve but don’t know how to find the clients who will hire them. Once you solve for this bottleneck, then you have made it to the next level. Later on that new level, you will solve for the next bottleneck such as communication, workflow, finance management, leveraged services/packages and so on. But for now, you have made progress!

So if you are new web designer working on creating a consistent income stream with web design projects, there’s one question I want you to ask yourself:  

What Bottleneck Am I Facing In My Business Right Now?

Is it that you don’t have your first client? (See blog 085 for a Client Finding Strategy you can put into place today.) Or you have clients but you are not scheduling them properly and finding that you are overbooking your calendar. Or you find a client, work for them, then you have no clients and you are in acquisition mode again. Then you get a client, deliver their website and after the project is over, you are back in search for the next client. Tell me in the comments what your bottleneck is. I will be happy to give you laser coaching in the comments to help you forward!

If marketing is a bottleneck for you, I want you to brainstorm ways you can get more eyes on your business. What kinds of things can you undertake so that you can get seen? There are many different options from creating content on your site, to guest-posting, to finding platforms where you can present your services, connecting with your existing network.

This is how you apply the Business Bottleneck Breakthrough Strategy to open up the revenue flow. Use this strategy and unlock the next stage in your business.

You have a dream to build a thriving web design business? You can make it happen!

Peace,
Sophia

083: 6 Ways to Save Time in Your Business with Squarespace Scheduling

Workflows. Processes. Systems.

Making the most of these will surely help you save time and streamline your business. But what if you can use a tool that not only saves you time but also opens up a streamlined way to generate new revenue in your business?

Enter Squarespace Scheduling.

As you may know Squarespace Scheduling is an app that’s integrated with Squarespace and I want to show you a few ways you can optimize it for your business. Those of you who are using Acuity Scheduling, this applies to you as well.

1. Book Complimentary Client Acquisition / Consultation Calls

After a potential client fills out an inquiry form to work with me, I invite them to book a complimentary consultation call. I have my availability set up there beforehand and clients can see which times and dates work for them. If I am in talks with the client via email and we agree on a date and time, I simply send an invite to them directly from the scheduling app by simply adding in their name and email and date of appointment. Since I have zoom integrated with scheduling, I can save time by not having to create or schedule meeting in there. Plus, clients get an automated email with link, date and time all in one.

I email my clients this link: https://sophiaojha.com/book-your-consult-call
It looks like the image you see on the right.

Click the image to go see the direct link live.

2. Book Paid Consultations

I don’t use this so often myself yet because clients often purchase a package with me which includes both implementation time as well as video consults and so I play it by ear and send them a zoom link for our meetings. But I have it set up just incase clients wanted to book right away. So if you wanted to block off set number of hours each week for paid consultations, this would work really well. Again it is all integrated with zoom and you preset your availability in the Scheduling calendar.

3. Book a Room or Facility

This is perfect if you have a facility where you book out different areas. I recently set up scheduling for a Canine Learning Center where their clients can book an indoor diving pool, a training course area and an outdoor pool.

Because of Covid, the owner needs time after each booking to block of half an hour for disinfecting the area and so that can be set up as well so no one can book in that half hour window right after another one client. That’s a super detailed feature that Squarespace Scheduling/Acuity provides and has come in really handy for this client.

You can go see the example live here: https://www.ink9lc.com/

4. Sell Online Zoom Yoga Sessions

Another client of mine is a yoga studio Canada who had to move everything online. Because of the nifty integration with Zoom, yoga studios can create an entire online calendar with all their varied class offerings. Yoga students can select the class they want to join, pay online and get an automated email with their unique zoom link.
The unique zoom link makes sure that only those who have paid can join the event. Plus, the Yoga Studio can creating a waiting room in their overall Zoom settings to admit only those who are on their list, for added privacy/security needs.

This is what the calendar looks like with all the weekly sessions. Check it out live: https://www.jadayoga.com/online

5. Sell Class Cards or Monthly Passes

Another feature of the Scheduling integration is that you can sell Class Cards or Monthly Passes. So for a yoga or fitness studio, this comes in handy. Let’s say the yoga studio offers Hatha Yoga, Iyengar Yoga, Vinyasa Yoga and Kundalini Yoga classes offer by different teachers. Then, they can set up a monthly pass or a weekly pass so that students can pay in advance and select from the different class offerings. Inside Scheduling, you can set up the limit based on the number of classes or the total amount. For example, you can select whether you want to have say 25 classes included in the Monthly Pass or allow students to select as many classes as they like until the value of $125. The app will keep track and once they hit the limit in the Monthly Pass, the students cannot book any more classes. You can also allow for a rollover to the next month of unused time or money. Pretty cool feature!

Check it out at: https://www.jadayoga.com/online

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6. Design Consultation and Check-ins with Clients

During my two week design workflow, I meet with my clients on Zoom multiple times. We start off with a first Design Consultation on the first day and we wrap up with a Launch + Training Call on the last day. And in between these two sessions, we can meet spontaneously for quick 10 minute check-ins to review something or clarify a question. For my design clients, I simply email them a Zoom link that can be used repeatedly. But the first and the last consultations are booked via the scheduling app so that they can select a time that fits best for them.

I hope these are some good ideas for you that can help save you time, easily receive payments and streamline your workflow. Let me know if you use this already in your business and what questions you have run into.

Peace,
Sophia

082: How to Open A Free Trial on Squarespace - the Exact Steps Demo

It’s important that you get a feel of the website building platform before you go ahead and hire a designer or start building your website yourself. So how do you do that? Start with a 14 day free trial. You won’t need a credit card. Just an email address.

So here’s how to get started with a new a trial account.

Watch the video or read the article below it.

1| Click on my 14 Day Free Trial Link

Now, if you like my free videos and the help I am providing, you can use my affiliate link to start your account. I will get a little something only if you choose to purchase a plan but it will cost you nothing. So consider starting a trial site from here:

14 Day Free Trial for US residents:
https://www.sophiaojha.com/squarespace-us

14 Day Free Trial of International Residents (Non-US):
https://www.sophiaojha.com/squarespace-world

Alright, now you will land on the Squarespace website. Click on “Get Started”.

2 | Now you go to Templates.

You can either click on one of the categories on the left as your starting point. Or preview the templates here.

Now as of July 2020, what you see here are all Squarespace 7.1 templates. There really is no difference between these templates in terms of what they can technically do. So if you start with any of the templates here and want to create the exact about page layout that is on a particular template, you can do it on any other other 7.1 template. They are all different starting points and you can create what you want with ease. Think of templates as your easy starting points not set-in-stone endpoints.

Just a note, if you know and heard about Squarespace 7.0, the predecessor of 7.1, you can find all those templates down at the bottom of the templates page. Look for the link saying “Looking for earlier versions? Click here” or something along those lines.

Now, when I build new websites I still build them on 7.0 and so do many of my colleagues only because we have found a certain list of things that are better done in 7.0 than in 7.1. But if you are a DIY’er and want to put up a website fast, don’t worry about 7.0. You can choose a 7.1 template. If you plan to hire a designer, know that they may still want to build your site on 7.0 and that’s because they can do a lot more design wise without having to resort to coding.

Alright, so now you pick your 7.1 template or your 7.0 (earlier version) template.

And then follow the directions.

Al’right so that’s it. That’s how you open up your brand new website account on Squarespace. Go ahead and start building your first page on your Squarespace site. And again if you like the free content I am putting out here, consider opening a trial account through my affiliate links (see above). And I thank you a ton for doing so.

Bye for now and see you in the next video!

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Al’right, so what’s the next step?

1 | Sign up for my workshop Squarespace Fundamentals
In this 90 minute workshop, I show you how to navigate your new Squarespace website. You will learn how to create a new page, add text and photos and understand how to use the different content blocks. This is a training of the 7.1 version of Squarespace.
See all details of the workshop here.

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Get Started on Your Dream!

Start your Squarespace website and let me know how it is coming along. Drop me a line in the comments and share with me what your business is and what you want to create.

Peace,
Sophia

081: 5 Reasons Why I Love Squarespace: The Best Website Builder for Online Entrepreneurs

As you might have guessed, as a Web Designer who specialized on Squarespace websites, I am a big proponent of Squarespace for building your online presence. If you are an entrepreneur of any kind - whether you are an author, an artist, or a creator or if you are someone who has an idea, someone who wants to inspire and impact positive change, Squarespace is your platform - the best platform in my opinion and experience.

There are at least 5 good reasons why I think so.

Watch the Video below or Read the Text

1. Squarespace was designed for DIY’ers. (Do-It-Yourself)

Squarespace was designed with you in mind - you, the creative business person and not for designers or developers. You are in the foreground of everything they do. In fact, that’s why they have over 80 professionally designed templates for a variety of niches so that you can pick any one of them and be off to the races. In fact, the newest version, Squarespace 7.1 had made it even easier for DIY’ers to build their website by making it more streamlined and user-friendly.

2. Squarespace customer service and help line

My experience of Squarespace support has been exceptional. You get a lightning fast response and the team is highly skilled not only in the topic but also in customer service skills. I’ve reached out to them and there has n’t been any issues that was not resolved. Having a professional team that is there to support you with your questions and helps you troubleshoot is priceless. Plus, there is a huge online collection of guides and video tutorials that their team has published that will be a good starting point for resolving your questions. Their knowledge base articles are detailed and highly useful and I have myself used them a lot.

3. Squarespace has a community behind it.

What do I mean by a community? There’s a community of web designers, web developers and bloggers who have put out tons of useful content on their blogs. They have created tons of video tutorials on YouTube and they have created workshops, programs and online courses. These are all packed in value and offer a huge resource at 4 am in the morning when an idea hits you and you want to run to your computer to implement it. This is important because it shows that Squarespace has already been tried and tested by thousands of users. And they are testament to the value Squarespace provides. See a directory of Squarespace Designers put together by my colleague Erin Neumann here: https://www.bealignedwebdesign.com/best-squarespace-web-designers

4. No coding, no design experience needed.

As I mentioned in point one, Squarespace is geared towards the non-designer. So you can create a highly professional website just by using their templates as a starting point. That means you do not need to know any HTML or CSS nor do you need a design-eye. Just switch out the template photos and content and you have a website that looks stunning and can get you started. This is the first barrier that is removed. Of course, you can do a lot to move away from the template and make it look more unique and fresh. But that can always be done in phase 2. It is so important to get started building your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) with your content and blogs. So my recommendation to you is just go and build your 5 most important pages and then you can tweak the design and make it all cool gradually.

5. It’s an all-in-one platform.

This is a really important point. Running an online business means there’s so much to think about and take care of. Then on top of that if you have a gazillion apps and third party integrations, then it just makes your business life very dense and complicated. And you didn’t get into business for more complication, I am guessing, but rather for optimizing your time, streamlining and powering up your life…to make an impact and grow your revenue, not to sort through hundred million different apps, right? That’s why Squarespace is really useful because you can do everything in one place: grow your email list, send out weekly newsletters, sell your services, sell your digital/physical products, demonstrate your expertise via a blog or podcast, host your online course, schedule free discovery calls with potential clients, sell paid consultations, run your website analytics, and so on and so forth. It’s all here in one place.

I run to websites on Squarespace, one you are on right now: sophiaojha.com for my web design business and the other for my site about mindfulness and meditation: reflectionpond.com which is the reason I got into online marketing and web design (I wanted to learn how to promote my meditation programs and that’s how I got into learning about web design…if you want to know more about that journey, see my Manifesto page).

Al’right, so what’s the next step?

Take it for a Test Drive.

Take it for a Test Drive. Just like you can take a car for a test drive, you can try out Squarespace for free. No credit card needed. Select your location below and start a free trial and play around with it. I will be posting more videos to show you how to create your first page on Squarespace so look out for that. Try it before you buy it!

14 Day Free Trial for US residents:
https://www.sophiaojha.com/squarespace-us

14 Day Free Trial of International Residents (Non-US):
https://www.sophiaojha.com/squarespace-world

Get Started on Your Dream!

Start your Squarespace website and let me know how it is coming along. Drop me a line in the comments and share with me what your business is and what you want to create.

Peace,
Sophia

080: How to Remove Background from Photos using Canva

First of all, I am so excited to restart my content creation for 2020! After the first two quarters of very busy client projects, I am back to creating new content for you.

In this video tutorial, I take just over 5 minutes to show you how to remove background from your photos using an app called Canva.

Show Me Your Work!

I love to see what you create. So drop in a link to your creation in the commetns below and let me see how you’ve used the instructions in this video,

Peace,
Sophia

079: The First Two Steps To Creating Leveraged Passive Income With Digital Products

Let’s begin with a pop-quiz!

Pop-Quiz: If you want to create a passive income stream with digital products, which of the following do you think would be your first two steps?

Drafting an outline of your online course
Deciding which format your digital product should take (audio, video, course, membership, etc)
Break writer’s block by just start writing your first chapter of your course

Review which online course platforms are the best for your business?List of equipment you need to buy for creating your digital product
Which third-party integrations will you need on your Squarespace website for selling your course?
Figure out how to price your digital product
Should you go on launch mode or evergreen it?

Yes, you will need do invest time and thought into these areas before you create your digital product. But none of these makes up the first two steps. Before you do any of the above steps, you first need to 1. find out what problems your own clients are asking you to solve for them and 2. find out if someone will pay for your digital product.

Step 1: Figure out what solutions my clients want

Step 2: Find out if someone will pay for your digital product

Let’s dive into each of these one by one.

Step 1: Find out what your clients want

You see, you have so much to teach and share that you could probably begin drafting an outline for an online course in a single afternoon, if you really wanted to. But what I found out from my year and half of online course making adventure several years ago is that, as much as you need to teach what you know, you also need to align it with what the market wants. I am not saying that the thing you want to make needs to be already have existed because with that logic the light bulb would never have been invented, nor would have the airplane. Or any of the millions of new innovations that continuously come into being. But they all came into being because there was a need for it, a yearning for it in some form or the other. The end result or the product that you create doesn’t necessarily need to be existing previously. But the problem that your product solves, now that, that does need to be existing previously.

The end result or the product that you create doesn’t necessarily need to be existing previously.
But the problem that your product solves needs to be existing previously.

So when it comes to creating your first online course, it is important that you know what problems exist. And more importantly, what problems your own paying clients are asking you to solve. That information is evident in the kind of things people are paying you for because a service provide you are closely aware of what you are getting hired for. This not only will help you for example to create a customized service package but it is very useful for another reason. And that’s this: if there are folks who are paying you for a custom solution, then there are surely multiple others who want that as well but cannot ask for a customized solution for it. That’s where you can create leverage with a leveraged product.

Example 1: For example, let’s take the example of a web designer, named Sophia (…see my head nodding). For every one person who hires me to custom design their website there are many others who are learning how to build their own site DIY (Do-It-Yourself) style. So if you are web designer, can you think of a solution that serves the DIY people and can instantly leverage your time and efforts? Perhaps, a 4-week mastermind to build their website or an online course that walks them through each part of the website building process. Now, you can serve a lot more people and you have leveraged your time and efforts while increasing the business’ bottomline.

Example 2: Take another example: a programmer, named Alex, who is hired to create high-end custom code for individuals. How about a portfolio of standard code products that are at a lower price point than the custom solution but can be used by more than one person. Instant leverage!

Example 3: Or think of a master hand lettering artist, named Shawna, who gets commissioned by big corporations to come in and create hand made unique art on large walls in their lobby. She can think of teaching other hand-lettering artists on how to get commissioned by big corporates. This could be a six month online coaching program that may even be a high-end offer but has instantly leveraged her time, while attracting very serious artists who want to take their art career to the next level. And it’s all digital with pre-recorded sessions interspersed with some live laser coaching.

Example 4: A piano teacher, named Robin, does live three-week group courses to teach beginners how to play the piano. They then move on to an intermediate course where they have established themselves further in their piano skills. Now she knows that she has students who love her teaching style and have already come to her for beginner and intermediate group courses. She knows they are hungry to get good at their craft with HER help. This is where the digital product leverage kicks in: she can create a VIP three-month deep immersion course to help build up their repertoire. This immersion course could be designed as an online course with three modules over three months. Each month they master one module, with a video per week that contains short weekly assignments to complete/practice. At the end of each month, they come together in a live zoom meeting to ask questions and to demonstrate how far they have come with their skills. And they repeat this for each module. At the end, they have three distinct pieces mastered, say one from Bach, one from Mozart and one from Beethoven. Or let’s say the whole three months is about Bach and then the can go to Mozart in yet another three month program and then Beethoven in another three month program. And now you have a 9 month immersion program! This could even evolve into high-end in-person retreat type offering eventually.

Now do you can see what I mean? We need to understand what we are already being paid to create and then extrapolate from there. Take whatever you are already doing for your current clients who are paying you big bucks to do it and then think of how you can translate that into a digital product that can be purchased by a lot more people, thus, leveraging your time (you make the thing once) and generate on-going revenue from it (launch it or do it evergreen).

Actionable Task 1: Take Inventory of Your Past Client Projects

So alright, you may ask, ”What is the actionable step from this?” Well, the actionable step is to answer this question: What are your clients paying you for?” Take inventory. Make a list of past client projects that you got hired for. Then see what they look like. Now you if you are a business coach, you may say, “all my clients hired me to help their business get to the next level.” If you are web designer, you may say, “all my clients hired me to design websites”, or if you are a piano teacher you may say, “my students hired me to get good at their technique”. Okay, that’s a nice response. Perhaps I should specify and articulate my question better:

Q: What common thread do you see in the projects you got hired for in the last six months?
Maybe your coaching sessions were all about figuring out a niche, or on how to create a service package to attract clients.
Maybe your piano students were all self-learned students who now wanted to develop their technique, or some wanted to master reading music or they are mostly high-school students wanting to prepare to get into advanced music school.
Maybe you designed a string of websites for non-profits, or authors and coaches, or yoga and wellness instructors.

Action Step: Make a list of past client projects that you got hired for. And see what common thread you see in the projects you got hired for in the last six months. Circle, highlight, or underline similar projects and you will get your answer.

What to do if you don’t have paying clients yet?

Now, if you are at the start of your entrepreneurial journey, the main goal then is to get clients and get paid for your services. Digital products can come but they may not take center stage right away because you still need to validate your business and see if there’s any traction. An avenue for research for those just starting out is to see what people are writing in the comments of your own blogs or of your colleagues, what are they asking you on your social media channels or on others channels in your niche, and you can even search what questions people are asking on forums like Quora or Reddit or Facebook groups. Are there people wanting to pay for your particular service offering at all? You need that to happen first, right?

The bills gotta get paid and in my experience, the fastest way to create revenue from an online business is to offer a customized one-to-one service for clients. Now, if you create physical products, that’s a whole different ballgame and I have no experience in that area, so I will leave that topic for another expert to talk about. But what I do know from my own experience as an online business owner who started offering services first, is that when I got my first $90 to setup a ConvertKit account back in 2016 for my very first client (majorly underpriced, but hey it was a start), that’s when my business was born. Getting the revenue doing services for individual clients then created the momentum for me where I could then begin to think of leveraging.

The fastest way to create revenue from an online business is to offer
a customized one-to-one service for clients.

Are you on a hamster wheel of serving clients?

As satisfying as working with clients can be, it also made me realize that I was still trading hours for dollars. Nothing wrong with that, at all. But as soon as I was finished working for a client, I was back in client acquisitions-mode which often felt like starting from scratch. And I’d wonder if this is the point in the journey of a business owner that the thought aries, “How long can I sustain this? What if I could leverage my time and create new ways to generate passive income?” It certainly was for me.

Even a $1000/per month of passive income can mean a huge boost for any business that is under six figures. And that’s when we start dreaming of digitizing. Is that how you feel? Well, my friend, I know exactly how you feel. So if you don’t yet have paying clients, roll up your sleeves and get that first client. If you already have clients but feel you are stuck in the never-ending cycle of serving clients then working on acquiring clients, then serving clients and back again on the hamster wheel, I’d say try to find an outlet of time, a window of time, during the day when you plan your exit from this exhausting cycle. Yes, it’s great that you are running your own business and doing what you love but you also built your business for time-freedom not just money-freedom, right? So be patient while you are in it, but start scheming your digital leveraged product adventure at any free moment you get. Serve one-to-one clients now but keep in mind the big picture of where you want to go with your business and consider how serving one-to-many digitally can be a viable route for your entrepreneurial journey. Alright, now let’s continue with step no. 2.

Step 2: Find out if someone will pay for your digital product

Okay, so back to the steps you need to take for your leveraged digital product creation. Let’s say, you have identified your most common projects you got hired for. For the sake of example, let’s look at the piano teacher, Robin, who offers individual piano trainings. Now she does the actionable task from step 1 (see above) and finds out that 70% of her students are high school seniors wanting to prepare their college application audition video to get into music school. She still has a good percentage of self-learned adults who always wanted to learn piano from a trained instructor and that’s a good bulk of her clients. But the 70% of college-wannabes is a good segment that she can start thinking about specifically.

Robin could start strategizing what type of a digital product she should create for the 70% of her students who want to prep an audition video that shows their piano skills for their college application. Her digital product could be a summer intensive that students join during the summer before they begin college applications. It could be made up of modules in which she helps them to pick out the music pieces that they would include in their audition video, guides them on practice habits and how to create a schedule of practice, guides them on the right recording equipment they need, and all the way to finally recording the application video and getting it ready to send out come September.

An alternate approach would be for her to first create a series of live online workshops for each module. With a live audience you can tune in (no pun intended) to what the piano students are asking. Then after the live session are over, she can get back to her desk, review the recordings and then create clean video modules. By the way, this is exactly how I created my Host Your Online Course program in 2019. This approach turned out to have so much less pressure for me because now I could create the content as I went instead of having all the videos pre-recorded. Watch this video where I explain how and why I decided to take this route.

Now at this stage where she has come up with an idea for an online workshop or course, it can be tempting for Robin to jump into actually creating the digital program. But this is exactly what she should avoid. The next step would be to write up a sales page that articulates all that her program would contain. Now for me, I go straight to the backend of my Squarespace website and start creating the sales page. For some others, it may be best to take a notebook or open up a word/pages file on their computer and start writing. The idea here is to get the details on to paper and then on to your website. This also gives you an idea of how you want to price it because you see all the components of the offer laid out in front of you. Then, send an email to your students either individually or if you have built an email list, send an email to the people on your email list with an early bird invitation. Again, the format could be an online course or a series of live workshops.

You’ll notice, that at this stage, you have not created a single module. You are simply pre-selling your course/workshop before you create a single slide, any other digital component of it. The only thing you will have created is the sales page with the offer expressed in detail.

This method is not new and I am not the first one to be using it. I discovered it through my own trials and errors of course-creation, where I jumped right into creating a massive course and then painfully found out that there were no-takers. Pre-selling is an easier and much faster and low-risk way to find out if there’s traction for your idea. Create the sales page with an early-bird pricing offer and send it to your audience. If no one purchases, you need to get back to finding out what you need to change. It doesn’t mean that your idea was not useful or good, may be your audience is not big enough or your sales page was not impactful or you may need to tweak some other aspect of understanding what your audience wants. Once you have real people putting out real money for your offer, that’s when you have real evidence that what you are offering is wanted by your audience and it goes beyond just an interest in your offering.

Pre-selling is an easier way to find out if there’s traction for your idea.
Create the sales page with an early-bird pricing offer and send it to your audience.

Actionable Task 2: Validate your idea by pre-selling

After you’ve taken inventory of the common thread of hired projects in the last six months, think of what is the main challenge that your clients have asked your help for. Now, you can brainstorm a way to leverage that solution so that you can serve many people by creating something once. This could be a series of live group workshops as I hinted in the earlier section. But it could also be an online course. What’s important though is to see if someone will pay for it. And the way to find out is to make the offer to your audience (current clients or folks on your email list). Now if it will be an online course, make sure to plan your time wisely and clearly say on your sales page when the course will be released. And remember things often take longer than we had planned, so add in a good buffer of extra time.

Action Step: Write out what your digital product will consist of and what it will achieve for your clients. Create a pre-sell sales pages and add it to your website with early-bird pricing. Invite your your students individually or send the invitation to your email list.

How to create a pre-sell sales page

I think when people hear the term, “sales page”, they get a bit uncomfortable. First, because the idea of selling can be uncomfortable, and second they may not know what to put on a sales page. Now I should perhaps write another blog all about how to write and design a sales page, but for starters, let’s not complicate it. The sales page that you write to test your new product needs to have at least the following six things:

1. Tell clearly what the program/digital product will do for them: the benefits
2. Outline the different modules and what it contains: the features (videos, pdfs, action plans, worksheets, audios)
3. Note any timelines if it’s a live workshop, example: The program starts on July 15th. Early-bird ends on July 1st, etc.
4. Clearly state what it costs $$ and how they can purchase: purchase button, or by application.
5. What some other students have said: testimonials (if it is a first launch, add testimonials of your other trainings, services or offerings).
6. An official bio and a nice smiling photo of yours.

You can always embellish this but start with the basics and then build upon it. I have myself fallen in this trap of perfection. This really is a mental vice, not exaggerating here. To fall in the trap of perfection is a game of the ego that only causes you hurdles on your path to progress, under the guise that it only wants to make sure you look good to others. Dare to look bad, look imperfect: that’s better than not have anything created at all. (Okay, I am finished giving a pep talk, but more than you, it’s mostly likely, me who needs to hear this right now).

To fall in the trap of perfection is a game of the ego that only causes you hurdles on your path to progress, under the guise that it, the ego, only wants to make sure you look good to others.
Vanity ≠ Progress

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Your path to creating leveraged passive income starts now

So I’ve outlined for you a possible path that you can take for creating your leveraged passive income. It’s now time for you to take action on it. It begins with first figuring out what kind of solutions your clients want, finding the common thread in the type of projects you were hired for, then translating that into a solution that will serve many in a leveraged way, and finally creating a sales page and inviting your potential and current clients to benefit from it.

Let me know in the comments what questions come up for you when you read this post and also share with me where in the passive income journey you are in right now.

Peace,
Sophia

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Related:
073: Sell your course before creating it:
www.sophiaojha.com/blog/073-sell-your-course-before-creating-it

067: Three things you should know about doing a live workshop series
www.sophiaojha.com/blog/067-three-things-about-live-workshops

053: How to build a landing page on Squarespace for a "survey"
www.sophiaojha.com/blog/053-landing-page-on-squarespace

052: Do this One thing to get to know the real needs of your audience
www.sophiaojha.com/blog/052-ask-the-audience

031: How to Create an Evergreen Sales Funnel Using Visual Automation in ConvertKit
www.sophiaojha.com/blog/031-how-to-create-an-evergreen-sales-funnel-using-visual-automation-in-convertkit

Read More

Why rearrange your priorities?

Banner Photo by Nikolay Zakharov on Unsplash

Why Rearrange Your Priorities?

“Insight into death rearranges your priorities.”
- Ajahn Brahm, British Monk living in Bodhinyana Monastery in Australia

During these days where the world seems to be grasped by the events surrounding COVID-19, the above quote from Ajahn Brahm makes a strong point. It’s not just death but the ongoing uncertainty and the realization of how things are impermanent that makes us reassess our priorities.

It’s not that this situation is unique to the spread of the virus. In fact, it was always like this. There was always uncertainty. There was always impermanence. There has always been death around us. But the current situation has simply underscored and highlighted these realities more than before. In fact, it has also brought into focus the stupidity and ignorance of us human beings, it has brought to the fore our own suppressed emotions which may have been residing in the deep recesses of our minds and hearts. Whatever was in the background, quietly hidden behind our blurred vision of our world and ourselves, has come starkly into view and has taken up residence front and center in our awareness.

So, what is it that we need to do?

Process Emotions
When feelings are arising in you, take that as a welcome opportunity to clean out old residue of unprocessed emotion. All that is required is: to acknowledge the emotion, notice it, and become aware of it. The task at hand may be simple but not easy. The emotion will slowly dissolve when you fully give it your attention and care. Not wanting it to go away, just allowing it to be and allowing it to fade way. Just like clouds arising in the blue sky. You watch them appear and slowly they disappear. The biggest hurdle you will create is to want to stop the emotion or want it to go away - in other words, resisting it instead of being present with it.

Process Things
As you stay at home more than normal due to the lock-downs or due to self-quarantine, you will be faced with your stuff even more. By stuff I mean things, objects, papers, furniture, decor, bedding, household items, books, jewelry, electronics, shoes and so on. This is a golden opportunity to let go of anything that has not served you well or has served you and is ready to move on. Things that you didn’t even notice before, now suddenly stand out because you are home more and see it more. Use this chance to assess what needs to go. Things hold energy and as you release them, you open up energetic channels within your body, within your home and even within your bank account to receive what is truly nourishing and uplifting for you. I remind myself this concept with a bookshelf metaphor: Let’s say I have a bookshelf filled to the brim with 50 books. But I want a 51st book that will truly serve me right now. I cannot put it on the bookshelf unless I make room for it and let go a book that has already served me. It is time to let go in order to make room for the new. A really good resource for decluttering things is this blog: Be More With Less

Process Time
By process time, I mean assessing what are the things that take up your time. Even without the virus amongst us, we are aware that we only have so much time on this earth. Sooner or later, our time shall come to shed this body and move on to a new life. So what are we doing with this life, with the time on our hands. Are we wasting it away on mindless social media? Are we spending it carelessly on that which is not wholesome and nourishing? We all do this in some form or another. How can you be vigilant of your time just like one would be of a tap that is endlessly running. We want to close that tap and conserve the precious resource of water. The same we want to do with the tap of time that we have left open. But first, we need to look at our day and see where the leakages are. The most common ones are social media and entertainment. For me, it is Facebook. I have tried to limit my time on FB but the habit has been set. My only option right now is to quit cold turkey. And today I will be sending a note to my friends that I will be ending my FB presence. I know that it will disconnect me from the life of many of my friends. But I’d rather have meaningful quality time with them via Facetime or Skype and eventually in person (after the quarantine and lock-down period is over, of course), than to superficially watch their life from afar. I want to plug those holes that are sucking out precious time away from that which truly matters to me.

Process Priorities
This one is linked to the process time bit. It may be easier to look closely at what your priorities are. If you have no idea what your priorities are, read this blog and do the exercise to find out what truly matters to you. Have your priorities written down on a piece of paper. I keep it in my journal and see it once or twice a week and sometimes every day. It serves as a guide to recalibrate my actions and my activities when I go off course. When one reminds oneself that we have limited time, and the events of our world bring that fact closer to our awareness, we start to reassess - what do I really want to do, how can I really be of use to others, how do I want to redesign and rearrange my time and my priorities.

When you invest the effort and the time in reassess the various areas of your life, you will find that there is much you can do to get in alignment with what’s in your heart, with what brings you true satisfaction and true fulfillment. It’s not an easy path and that is why so many people default to an un-assessed, mindless way of living. It takes time to reflect on our life, it takes courage to let go, it takes patience to see the benefits over time. It’s also not easy because we don’t see anyone in our life doing this and setting an example for us. So we go and seek out those who do. And they are out there. You can find them on the internet, you can find them in monasteries and nunneries, you can find them through books they have written or good deeds that they are doing. Find those that inspire you and then read their work, watch them speak, learn and implement what they teach so you can see for yourself if it makes sense and if it is of any value for your life.

Impermanence, uncertainty and death are part of life. Realizing and understanding them as characteristics of life, can help us live intentionally that gives meaning and fulfillment to us as we take courages steps to continuously reassess, reflect and make positive changes in our lives. It’s a gradual path and an ongoing process of change.

Much love and peace,

Sophia

PS: If you’d like to see the books that inspire me, see the books I love here.

*There are affiliate links on this site. When you purchase via such links, I will receive a small affiliate commission without any extra costs to you.

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This article is part of a series called “What truly matters” - all about finding out what’s really important in your life and then finding time to do it EVERY DAY. See preceding articles in this series below:

Feb 11th The 4-day workweek: Why I choose to work only 4 days a week and you can too (You are reading it)
Feb 4th The process of finding out what's truly important
Jan 28th What decluttering your home shows you about the meditation process
Jan 21st: What to do with the uncanny feeling you feel in your stomach or in your body? What does it mean?

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Now, it’s your turn to share:
Share with us how you are rearranging your priorities or sticking with what’s there.

I’d love to know so please share in the comments below.

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Uplifting Audiobooks: A Collection

Uplifting Audiobooks: A Collection

Banner Photo Source: Photo by Dedu Adrian on Unsplash

The year was 2017. I had just come back from my first 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in Georgia, USA. It was there that I learnt about the non-profit publishing house, Pariyatti. I went online and found so many free and for pay books and audiobooks. I selected my first audiobook from there, The Art of Living from their online streaming platform. It was there that I saw a note that said, anyone who would like to volunteer to record these audiobooks please contact us here.

That’s how I got started. By now, we have recorded three audiobooks. And I just got the green light to record an audiobook for a work by Ayya Khema. I am super excited. I am happy to share them with you here:

Stream/Download: You can either stream the audios on the website itself. Once you click the link of the book below, you will see the streaming section. It will look like the screenshot on the right. You can play the audio right there.

Or click the three dots on the very right to download the audio.

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Note: Descriptions have been copied from Pariyatti’s website.

1. Inspiration from Enlightened Nuns

Narrated by: Sophia Ojha Ensslin

“In this audiobook we will be exploring poems composed by the Arahat bhikkhunīs or enlightened Buddhist nuns of old, looking at these poems as springs of inspiration for contemporary Buddhists. Most of the poems we will consider come from the Therīgāthā, a small section of the vast Pali Canon. From the poems of the enlightened nuns of the Buddha’s time contemporary followers of the Noble Eightfold Path can receive a great deal of instruction, help and encouragement. These verses can assist us in developing morality, concentration and wisdom, the three sections of the path. With their aid we will be able to work more effectively towards eliminating our mental defilements and towards finding lasting peace and happiness.”

https://store.pariyatti.org/Inspiration-from-Enlightened-Nuns-br-audiobook_p_4982.html

2. The Elimination of Anger

Narrated by: Sophia Ojha Ensslin & Cristof Ensslin

“The Elimination of Anger, by Ven. K. Piyatissa Thera is a helpful manual highlighting methods that the Buddha taught to help understand and deal with anger. It also contains two stories retold from Buddhist texts, The Reviler and The Anger-eating Demon. This is an audiobook version of this booklet. It can also be found in the book Collected Bodhi Leaves Volume III.”

https://store.pariyatti.org/The-Elimination-of-Anger--MP3-Audiobook_p_5104.html

3. Mudita: The Buddha’s Teaching on Unselfish Joy

Narrated by: Sophia Ojha Ensslin

“This audiobook of Wheel Publicaton No. 170 contains several short essays, one by the editor, Ven. Nyanaponika, and three by lay practitioners on one of the lesser known and too-little practiced sublime states of mind. Mudita, usually translated "sympathetic joy," was designated one of the brahma-viharas by the Buddha, one of the sublime, noble states of mind. How is it to be practiced and what are the implications of mudita on the spiritual path? These essays address those questions. Stream the audio using the audio player below or download as multiple MP3s or a single, long MP3 file (Duration: 71 minutes).”

https://store.pariyatti.org/Mudita--MP3-Audiobook_p_4895.html

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More Audiobooks:

Pariyatti has many other audiobooks that you can find here: https://store.pariyatti.org/audiobooks. And you can also see all their other materials here: pariyatti.org.

We hope you will find them useful and will find inspiration and peace while listening to them.

Love,
Sophia + Cristof

How to craft a mini-retreat at home?

Banner Photo Source: Gaetano Cessati

How to Craft a Mini-Silent-Retreat at Home?

If you are doing a meditation practice weekly, that's already more than not doing any at all. A daily meditation anchors you even more smoothly to your habit of training the mind. It's the day-to-day maintenance to keep the weeds out and cultivate the roses of your garden. If you can bracket your day with a meditation in the morning and one in the evening, you are helping yourself even more. That's something we are working to make a habit of.

What's also helpful is a long retreat of three, five or ten days during which your sole purpose is to cleanse your mind, quiet the mind and go into the depths of your mind to dissolve the "defilements" of greed, hatred and delusion that lead to unwholesome thoughts, speech, and actions.

But when such a retreat is not feasible right away, a one day at-home mini-meditation retreat can come into play. You can do it yourself or with the help of a friend. This is exactly what we are doing this Sunday, starting with a mini-retreat for Cristof.

Three, Five, Ten Day Retreats

Taking time off to go on a ten-day meditation retreat is a wonderful way to rejuvenate our tired minds from the hustle-bustle of our busy lives and to deepen one’s meditation experience. I have done this thrice in the last few years and have found immense benefits of shutting off from the world.

But a ten-day meditation retreat is not always feasible. Many people may not have the opportunity to take ten days off from work and be away from their kids and family. Or the idea of a ten-day meditation retreat sounds simply too daunting. The costs are not necessarily a big factor because a lot of meditation retreats in the Buddhist tradition are donation-based, although traveling costs to those places may be a consideration. Or it could be that you have found a retreat center but it is full already or the next retreat date is months away. In any of those situations, a mini-retreat at home could be the answer.

What is the purpose of a mini-retreat?

A mini-retreat is time spent in meditation and introspection at home with the goal of withdrawing yourself from the daily activities and obligations and taking time to go inwards. It gives your mind and body the time and space to recharge. It allows you to decompress, process open emotional issues, and to be the witness to what’s going on. A mini-retreat can also help you take a breather after an intense period in your life - whether from a busy period at work or an emotional challenge or physical illness that you just had to tackle in recent weeks. Such mini-retreats sprinkled into your schedule can be very helpful to do throughout the year.

How to do a mini-retreat?

The mini-retreat can be crafted in a variety of ways to suit your specific needs and time availability. It can be laid out as a three-day retreat or a one day program or half a day session. Obviously, a three-day retreat allows you ample time to go deep in your practice while a half a day session is a quick dip into your inner-world and a day program can allow you just enough time to mix in a few different introspective exercises. Think of the half-day retreat as the essential building block. You can then repeat it twice to make the one-day retreat. And then use it again to carve out a three-day retreat schedule. See my example below:

The Half-Day Retreat Schedule

The Day Retreat Schedule

The 3-Day Retreat Schedule

Morning
Breakfast
Meditation
Reading
Watching a Monk/Nun talk on a Buddhist idea
Meditation

Morning
Breakfast
Meditation
Reading
Watching a Monk/Nun talk on a Buddhist idea
Meditation
Lunch

Afternoon
Walk
Meditation
Reading
Watching a Monk/Nun talk on a Buddhist idea
Meditation
Dinner

Repeat the Day-Retreat Schedule on three consecutive days. Alternatively,

Day 1 : Half Day Retreat Schedule
Day 2: Day Retreat Schedule
Day 3: Half-Day Retreat Schedule

* Note: Keeping noble silence is very helpful to quiet the mind. If you need assistance or need to convey an important matter for logistics of your retreat to your family, you may of course speak (but as minimally as possible).

As you can see, the main components of the retreat include:
1. Time for Meditation
2. Time for Reading
3. Time for Listening To A Monk/Nun or someone who can expound on meditation or spiritual matters

I have not included writing or journaling because that involves a lot of mental activity. But if writing down insights or ideas is part of your process, try it out but limit the time you do that during the retreat so that you can stay present with the other components of the retreat.

Regardless of what schedule you pick, a mini-retreat will allow you the space you need for inner-work.

Where to do the mini-retreat?

If you have the means to do it, rent a lovely Air BnB that is calm and peaceful. If you are doing this by yourself, see that you arrange for food and other needs before the retreat starts. Pick up food for three days and freeze it so you only have to warm it up.

If you can get your kids and spouse or friends on board to help you accomplish this, you can do this at home and it becomes even easier. See if you can have a bedroom or just a corner of the house where you will be undisturbed and without interruptions. When family members are involved in helping you, you feel an extra juice of support and love when they take care of household duties and all you have to do is focus on your retreat. Children can also be involved, for example, they can ring the bell when your meditation session is over or even join you in meditation if they already have been introduced to meditation before. Generally speaking, see that it is a retreat where you have the least contact with people because if you see your children in the room, their adorableness may distract you from the task at hand! But do what works. If your day retreat makes your children want to meditate, hey, that’s a wonderfully positive thing.

Mini-Retreat at Our Home

Let me share with you how my husband and I are planning on a mini-retreat at the end of this month.

We agreed that we each want to do an annual ten-day meditation retreat. But in the months before and after the retreat, we want to do a one-day retreat per quarter, so four times a year. Each one will be in charge of arranging the retreat logistics for the other. In that way, the person doing the retreat can truly have a break from all responsibilities and be present with their process.

So we will first start off with a day-long retreat for Cristof. We picked a Sunday. I will take care of preparing and serving breakfast, lunch, and dinner and have it served in the kitchen. I will also ring the bell to denote the transition from one session to another. Tea will be served throughout the day in between meal times. Cristof will pre-select his reading materials as well as audio teachings from a Monk or a Nun before the retreat day.

The room where he will do the retreat will either be my office or our bedroom. My office is quiet and sparse. My office has a desk, a chair and an IKEA lounge Flottebo sofa bed. There are no books, papers or other office supplies in that room as all those things are very “loud” and overwhelming for me when I work. I like to work in as empty and orderly a space I can find. That’s why the office also makes for a great space for a meditation retreat. But if Cristof finds the chair and desk and the sofa unnecessary, then we can set everything up in the upstairs bedroom which is even more sparse. We have two Japanese futon mattresses on the floor, a meditation cushion, a floor lamp, and an IKEA Stockholm side table. The mattresses can be rolled up and put away into the closet and the table can be moved to another room creating an empty room with no furnishings. Then all that will remain is a small lamp which can be used for reading. I think I will post some photos of the space that he uses just for ideas and inspiration for your own retreat.

Cristof’s Day Retreat Schedule

Morning
4:55 am Wake up
5:00 am Meditate
6:00 am Read (with tea)
7:00 am Meditate
8:00 am Dhamma Talk (Monk/Nun audio)
9:00 am Breakfast

9:30 am Meditate
10:30 am Read (with tea)
11:00 am Meditate

Afternoon
12:00 pm Lunch
12:30 pm Walk
1:30 pm Meditate
2:30 pm Read
3:30 pm Meditate
4:30 pm Dhamma Talk (Monk/Nun audio) with tea
5:00 pm End of Retreat

*Writing/Journaling as insights arise.
**Noble silence is maintained in the house by all.

Ultimately, it’s important to carve out an area in your home that will be suitable for your needs. Give it a try. It won’t be perfect but you will learn more about what is helpful and conducive for your mediation/silent retreat and what is not and make adjustments along the way.

Do let us know in the comments if you have done such a retreat and what were your experiences like.

Peace,
Sophia

PS: If you’d like to see what books have inspired and helped me, see my list of favorite books here.

*There are affiliate links on this site. When you purchase via such links, I will receive a small affiliate commission without any extra costs to you.

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Now, it’s your turn to share:
Have you done an at-home meditation retreat? What did you find conducive and helpful for your experience? What would you recommend others on their home retreat?

I’d love to know so please share in the comments below.

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The 4-day workweek: Why I choose to work only 4 days a week and you can too

Banner Photo Source: Shwetha Shankar on Unsplash

The 4-day workweek: Why I choose to work only 4 days a week and you can too

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This article is part of a series called “What truly matters” - all about finding out what’s really important in your life and then finding time to do it EVERY DAY. See preceding articles in this series below:
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Feb 11th The 4-day workweek: Why I choose to work only 4 days a week and you can too (You are reading it)
Feb 4th The process of finding out what's truly important
Jan 28th What decluttering your home shows you about the meditation process
Jan 21st: What to do with the uncanny feeling you feel in your stomach or in your body? What does it mean?

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Last week, I wrote about the process of finding out what’s truly important to you. I have been dealing with this question ever since I found myself feeling uncomfortable sensations in my stomach - a gut feeling that something’s not right and that something needs to change. (I wrote about this uncanny feeling in an article here and how you too can work through it).

What I discovered through this process was not something new - I had known this all along but now I became more fully and clearly aware of it. I became aware that one of the things I really want to do is to: ”Create videos, books, articles that help people live a life of happiness”.

But for that to happen, I need to make time for meditation, being in nature and being in silence. That’s because I can only help others through my own spiritual progress. I need to keep letting go and dissolving my negative mental states and shift into a positive state of love, equanimity, and inner-peace and then show others how they too can do this for their own lives. If I don’t intentionally allocate time in my life for that, then this cannot happen.

If you did the process of finding out what’s truly important, you too will have identified what is of essence in your life. But just knowing about it and being aware of it is not enough. You have to take bold steps and create the time and space in your busy life for it so that it actually manifests in your life. Otherwise, you become aware of it and then it gets put away in the back of your mind again or buried in some papers in a drawer somewhere. We need to make what’s important to us take up time on our calendar, it is to actually happen in our life.

Eight Hours a Week To Make Room For What’s Truly Important

So in order to offer these weekly classes to our community every Wednesday, we needed to block off one day a week for it. That means we have left 4 days left for our work week.

As I am self-employed running my web design and online marketing service, I do have a bit more freedom in planning my week. So, along with my husband, we decided to invest one day a week in writing, reading and meditating and volunteering once a week to facilitate a weekly meditation class for our community. (The classes are free to all - if you are in Boone, NC area you are welcome to come join us - see dates and location here)

And now we are both working only 4 days a week.

In other words, we have four days a week to earn our livelihood. We grew up around the 5 days a week work model and so this is an experiment. We know that we are not the only ones doing this kind of an experiment. Many companies are putting limits on the number of hours their employees work in a week, only to find an increase in productivity, creativity, satisfaction, and happiness of their teams. Some countries are even experimenting with a four-day workweek.

Make it Work for Your Current Schedule

This may or may not be possible for someone working a full-time job. But you can still carve out time in your workweek by getting a little creative. Start with an hour a day during the workweek. That’s five hours. Then, add an hour and a half on the weekends. That totals to eight hours a week. 8 hrs/week in this way = 1 day/week in our way.

Maybe it is only 3.5 hours a week for you or half an hour each day. You can carve out time in a way that works in your current schedule and still make it work. You will find that our lives are already filled with so many unimportant distractions that take up so much time - just remove those distractions and you will end up with more than enough time to devote to what’s truly important to you. Consider how much TV you watch or how much social media scrolling takes up your time. There are all kinds of distractions from useless conversations, activities that you said yes to that you only said yes to be polite, not saying no to all the people who want a piece of your time. It’s not easy, I know because we love our friends and the people in our lives. But you can start slowly, bit by bit.

How a 4-Day Work Week Impacts Our Income and Energy

How this change to a 4-day work week affect our productivity, income levels and time management is still something we are monitoring. Maybe our income will go down because there’s one day less to work on projects. Maybe it will go up because we’ve become more focused and productive (like all those studies show). I know that my time scrolling my Facebook feed has gone done tremendously this year because of our new plan because there’s just no time for it!

May be our current projects will overflow into the weekend. That actually just happened last week for my husband. He was working both Saturday and Sunday and now today is Monday and he is a bit ill because of a lack of rest. It sure is not easy to manage a full workload from a 5 day week into a 4 day week. Plus, our weekends are serious business usually - they are all about rest and recharging and so he is used to getting rejuvenated on the weekend to be at his best during the week. But without that weekend rest, it has affected everything. However, I know that this is part of our process. We have only started this new schedule six weeks ago. So there will be adjustment period and we may more such work overflows into the weekend.

But what I can say is that from volunteering our time once a week to the community towards a cause and a purpose that we deeply believe in (helping people find inner-peace through meditation), is very fulfilling for us. It has given us a deep sense of purpose and meaning.

And it has also contributed to an increase in actual physical energy on the days we do our meditation classes. We get a million things done on that day, starting from meditating in the morning, brainstorming topic for the class, drafting a 4 to 5-page handout, refining that text, printing copies for the participants, uploading the text to the blog, making a PDF version of the text for instant download, charging the batteries for the camera, preparing lunch, getting the gear ready (tripod, lav mic, extension cables, camera, water bottles), sending an email reminder to our group, driving to the center, holding our class, recording it, heading back home and picking up groceries on the way, transferring all the video and audio data to the computer, editing the two videos, rendering them, uploading them, publishing them, and embedding the videos on the blog and sending out an email with the link to the latest recording). All of this in one day!

On any other day, this would be a massive accomplishment leaving us drained. But on Wednesdays when we are holding our class for our community members, they give us enormous amounts of love, appreciation, encouragement, and energy. That’s how we can make it happen.

Saying No In Order To Say Yes

Of course, this has meant that we also have to say “no” to a lot of other invitations and activities - not because we don’t want to do them, or don’t want to hang out with the people in our lives. It’s just that we are still learning to get our most important goals accomplished in the time we have got. And to make time for what’s truly important to us has not been easy in light of all the external invitations and excitements all around us that we want to partake in. Brunch invitation from neighbors, lunch invitation from friends, a new art exhibit in town, this excursion, that gathering, that event, this conference.

But we have found that with a full-time workload, and working 4 days a week to come up with funds to pay all our bills, AND investing time in things that are truly important to us, we just cannot succumb to all of these invitations. That is why we have become more of a hermit/reclusive from the perspective of others, when it comes to social engagements. That doesn’t mean we don’t like to be invited to things. That always feels great to receive an invite. But we have just had to say no to a lot of things if we are to make time for our core goals and dreams happen - which already is not an easy task.

When you carve out a time slot in your calendar for the things that you want to pursue, the thing that falls under “most important”, you too will have to learn to say no to other very exciting things. And it may even disappoint others. But in order to make sure that what’s most important to you finds ample room in your calendar, you will have to say no to the other “distractions”. And saying no with love and compassion is an art and be sure to be kind in your refusals of invitations. People will understand when you outline what’s important to you and your own struggle with time to get that accomplished. You may even inspire others.

Find it! Find it!

Do take a few moments to do the introspective exercise I outlined in my previous blog post and then find the time in your calendar to devote to it. The exercise involves going over a handful of questions and seeing what answers emerge for you. Some answers may not be news to you. You may already know them. But the process will surely give you more clarity on what’s truly important to you. Then take out your calendar and find a time-slot where you can dedicate complete attention to this one thing that truly matters to you and take steps towards manifesting it in your life.

Peace,
Sophia

PS: If you’d like to see the books that inspire me, see the books I love here.

*There are affiliate links on this site. When you purchase via such links, I will receive a small affiliate commission without any extra costs to you.

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Now, it’s your turn to share:
Share with us how you are finding time for that which is truly important for you. Let us know in the comments how you’ve placed it in your calendar
and what you’ve had to say no to, in order to achieve this. If you are yet to make this part of your plan, tell us how you plan to do it!

I’d love to know so please share in the comments below.

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The process of finding out what’s truly important to you

Banner Photo Source: Quino Al

The process of finding out what’s truly important to you

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This article is part of a series called “What truly matters” - all about finding out what’s really important in your life and then finding time to do it EVERY DAY. See preceding articles in this series below:

Feb 11th The 4-day workweek: Why I choose to work only 4 days a week and you can too
Feb 4th The process of finding out what's truly important (You are reading it)
Jan 28th What decluttering your home shows you about the meditation process
Jan 21st What to do with the uncanny feeling you feel in your stomach or in your body? What does it mean?

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If I were to ask you, “What’s truly important to you?” what would you reply? And are you taking steps towards that which is truly essential for you?

This question has once again become important to me because recently I found myself feeling uncomfortable sensations in my stomach - a gut feeling that something’s not right and that something needs to change. (I wrote about this in last week's article here). Not knowing what that “something” is, I have begun an introspective process for myself so that I can follow this inner-calling, figure out what the cryptic messages mean and then go about taking actions towards it. But before I can take action, I need to unearth from deep within me, what that message is and what that new path is meant to be.

Not knowing what’s important in one’s life is a plague that many of us are afflicted with.

Since this uncanny feeling emerged at the start of this year (2020), I have read the book, Goodbye Things by the Japanese minimalist author, Fumio Sasaki who says that reducing our necessary items to a minimum is one way of unearthing what truly matters to us. It's not the only way and minimalism is not a goal but a process of getting down to what's essential. There's no judging involved about how many things you have because as long as you know what's important to you and you are living the life you want to live, then things around really don't matter. But for most of us, our things and our activities cover up what we really want to do with our time here on Earth. And so letting go of things is part of this process.

Today, I am sharing something that's part of my personal story and it feels deeply vulnerable to put it down on in a blog. But sharing this with you is part of my healing and I want to share it in hopes that it may add another spark to your journey of healing and inner-peace.

For me, this process of getting clear about what's truly important began several years ago when I would repeatedly go down a spiral of sad, depressing thoughts. I was living in Germany at the time (2005-2007) and doing my graduate studies at Jacobs University in Bremen - a very rainy city. But a bit of what was happening before I got to Bremen.

The Volume That Buries What’s Truly Important

There have been times in my life that I’ve felt overwhelmed with volume. The volume of things, the volume of activities, the volume of emotions with no time or a way to process them. Then, there’s also the volume of information, the volume of social expectations, the volume of people, and the volume of noise.

This volume clouds and covers up all that’s truly important, valuable and meaningful in one’s life. Have you ever felt this? And because of all this crowding and clouding that’s going on, I’ve felt confused, unfocused and unclear about my next steps, even sad, depressed and hopeless. This was the time when I was living in New York and working at the United Nations (2001-2005). Every day, my job was to talk about all the things that the UN was involved in and each morning we had an hour-long briefing about the latest world news, filled with details of civil war, violence, and poverty which we then had to convey to the visiting public by memory. This went on for four and a half years. And towards the end of this period, I had forgotten who I was, what I’d wanted to do with my life and had spent zero hours on anything creative. Having done my undergraduate studies at New York University in Film and Television production and being a creative person part of my identity, I had honed that creative bone for three and a half years. Now, I had not done a single piece of creative writing. I was feeling empty and didn’t really understand the pent up emotions that I was burying inside.

All of that exploded or rather imploded when I moved to Germany to pursue graduate studies and to be closer to the love of my life whom I had just met and who lived in Germany. I found it incredibly difficult to get out of bed to even get to my classes and then, in between class days I filled up my time watching movies that I rented from a nearby automated rental shop just to drown out the confusion and spiraling sad thoughts. (Yes, this was pre-streaming days when DVDs were still in demand)! There were times when I would find myself weeping at the plight of wild animals who were being hunted to extinction and stray dogs and cats in developing countries that were being neglected to a life of utter misery. The news would throw me into a downward spiral.

This was increasingly getting unbearable.

I did have thoughts of being freed from this life of suffering and misery but thankfully in retrospect, I was too depressed with a lack of energy to do anything about it.

The Miracle Of One Book

Life is miraculous and you never know when the next turn of good fortune comes your way. What happened next might look like a trivial matter but it had a life-changing consequence for me. I went to visit my boyfriend (now husband) who lived four hours away from the town where I was studying. He had a collection of books in his bookshelf.

While he went to work, I decided to browse his bookshelf and find something to pass the time with. And there it was - my turning point. Among the many books he had there, there was one that caught my eye. It was a book by Steven Covey called, “First Things First”, that he had received as a gift from his Dad.

Once I picked up this book, I couldn’t put it down. I read it at home. I read it at the cafe. I read it on the tram. And it’s a pretty thick book, probably, the first book I had read that was for leisure and not for some kind of a class assignment. Graduate school doesn’t really allow time for leisure reading, in my experience!

You can get the book here.

Anyways, this book by Covey had a certain grip on me. I can’t remember any more details except two ideas which I am paraphrasing:

1. He wrote in the book that we need to focus on what we can influence. I think he called it our zone of influence.

and

2. Take a few moments after something is said or done and respond consciously and with good intent, instead of reacting.

The first idea literally freed me from my suffering for world events that I could not directly influence or change. It reminded me that instead of having my mind worry about faraway matters that I can have a minuscule difference on (or none), rather focus on my immediate life, surroundings, people and on most importantly on myself that I can most directly and massively influence. This was life-changing and I could feel a kind of a burden lifting from my heart.

The second idea was all too new and unfamiliar to me but it did capture my attention. I had thought of reacting and responding as just two ways of expressing the same thing. To be alerted that there was a difference alone was eye-opening. However, it was only years later that I truly understood the distinction between the two and even now am still learning and figuring out how to truly respond with compassion, patience, and equanimity.

Over the next ten years, I found my way to visualization and meditation exercises that have gradually liberated me from the burden of my own thoughts.

What’s Truly Important To You?

To find out what’s truly important, we do need to dig a bit deeper. Quieting the chaos, calming the helter-skelter life and slowing down the running around from here to there, is an important component of the process. When you look outside a moving car, you see the outside world but in flashes. As you slow down the car more and more and eventually to a standstill, you begin to really see the details of the scene outside. This is what we need to for our inner-world as well. In order to really see what’s going on in there, we need to slow down more and more and come to a complete stop. Then the insights, the wisdom, the clarity arises within us. That’s how we can get in touch with what’s truly important to us, what’s truly of essence in our own lives.

Sometimes, the stepping stone to slowing down and meditating is clearing up our outer world. Reducing our belongings and activities to only those that we consciously choose to have in our live - like the Japanese minimalist authors such as Fumio Sasaki and Marie Kondo propound, can be one way to help us slow down, and to reduce the volume that is filling up our lives.

Another way, is to do an introspective exercise of closing your eyes and allowing some questions to flow over you. You may hear, see or feel the answers bubble up to the surface in response to these questions. Some of these questions are:

What do I truly want in my life?
What do I want to create in my life?
What do I want to do with my time on this planet?
What’s of real essence?
What matters?
What is truly important to me?
What path can I take to find and create the above?
What one thing do I want to create, have or experience that will make all the difference?
If I could have it all my way, what would I truly want in my life?
If time and money were of no concern, what would I do?
If I only had six months to live, what would I do with my time?

You can journal your answers and see what emerges.

This is what came up for me:

What is truly important to me right now?

Time invested in meditation
Time invested being with hubby 
Time invested being with cats
Time invested being in nature, in silence

What do I want to create in my life?

Simple minimalist life with very minimum things
Happy life with no burdens
Lots of openness, spaciousness in my living environment
Creative expressions - in the form of writing and creating videos
Reading and learning about how to create a life of peace and joy
Creating more than enough income to support our life and needs (Cristof, myself, our cats, our parents)

What do I want to do with my time on this planet?

Create videos, books, articles that help people live a life of happiness

What path can you take to find that true peace, true fulfillment?

Write, create and publish
Grow a following of people who want to cultivate inner-peace and help them
Sell courses and books to make a leveraged income
First, simplify and declutter my things and my time

None of these answers was a real surprise, but to have this kind of clarity is very helpful as I move forward to create what’s truly important to me and experience it in my life.

Peace,
Sophia

PS: If you’d like to see more book recommendations, see my list of favorite books here.

*There are affiliate links on this site such as the one linking Steven Covey’s book. When you purchase via such links, I will receive a small affiliate commission without any extra costs to you.

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Now, it’s your turn to share:
What do you think you will find when you remove the
excessive things and activities that fill up your life?

I’d love to know so please share in the comments below.

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