One of the most important things to consider when you follow a substantial income opportunity is how you want to use the rewards to change your lifestyle. As you can see in my posts on my lifestyle making money from home I’ve used my success to both fulfill childhood dreams and take on new challenges. It’s no surprise that I think this is a great model for defining your dreams, turning them into goals and using it to motivate you to great levels of success.

First of all, ask yourself what you’ve always wanted to do. Is there a place you’ve always wanted to visit? Is there a car you’ve always dreamed of owning? Clothing? Be specific if you can. Thinking, “I want to finally own a nice suit” is good, but thinking, “I want an Armani” is even better. That gets you visualizing not only the results of your efforts, but helps you understand the dollar value of your dreams. You’ll know exactly how much money you want to make when you work from home.

In my case, as a long time motorcycle enthusiast I knew exactly the model I wanted. When I got my bike and the freedom to ride it whenever I wanted, I felt a sense of fulfilment that I hope you’ll feel when you make money from home. Keep your oldest dreams close to your heart – they’ll push you to succeed.

The other way to set a lifestyle goal linked to something new: a dream you’ve defined just as you start your business. Now is the time to think of adventures that you can try now that you have the freedom to set your own hours. What’s something you never thought you’d be able to do? What’s one thing you never considered having, but that could be in your grasp when you succeed? I attacked a new lifestyle goal when I started snowboarding lessons. I never did it before, but with my success I can devote the time and energy to learn new things.

What are your long-time dreams? What are your new dreams? Contact me for a work at home opportunity that can allow you to fulfill them all.

This time around let’s look at the practical things you’ll need to work from home. I’m talking about basic necessities. Beyond these, your needs are based on your own goals, and how you want to specifically capitalize on a substantial income opportunity. Some of these are real no-brainers, but you’d be surprised how often people forget about the fundamentals when they’re looking forward, following their dreams. Here’s what you need to stay grounded:

Accounting Tools: What’s the first rule of making money from home? Keep track of your money! There are a whole bunch of ways to do this, from hiring an accountant to keeping your own books. If you decide to do it yourself you may be intimidated at first, but it’s actually a simple process that can be as easy as keeping a written ledger or using very simple software. When it doubt about whether a piece of paper is important, keep it.

A Computer and Internet Connection: The internet is a vital part of any home based business opportunity. So is a computer. Chances are you already have both, so this is an easy requirement. You’ll use email to keep in touch with important contacts and your computer to keep records. You can use you regular home computer in most cases. The important thing is to keep your business files and email contacts organized so that they’re easy to find when you’re working.

Motivation: Why am I mentioning motivation in a practical article? Simple – it’s a practical need. A simple desire to make money and enjoy a better lifestyle is a good start, but one of the best ways to make your desires really drive success is to express them as set goals: things you want to own or do. There are techniques to do this well. I can show you how to harness your desires to focus your thoughts on succeeding at your home-based business opportunity.

Office Space: Now you don’t need a formal office. You can work anywhere. When I say “office space” I’m talking about a location to keep your papers, as well as a place you feel comfortable and motivated working in.

A Plan That Works: You may have the dreams and organization you need, but there’s one other ingredient that creates success: a turn-key home business opportunity that lays out a plan that will guide you every step of the way. Sharing this is my specialty; contact me and we’ll talk about it!

Here’s an interesting article about the way people who work from home could benefit the economy – even help bring it out of the recession. It lists these advantages:

Fuel Savings: You don’t have to pay for gas to drive into an office you don’t work at! This does more than save you money, too. It reduces road traffic, and pollution. It’s good for you, your wallet and the environment!

Time Savings: On average, Americans spend about 100 hours a year commuting. Some people have commutes of an hour each way or more. As the recession forces businesses to close up shop in smaller communities, people are driving two or even three hours to work. Of course, even if a commute looks short, traffic can screw that up. If people didn’t drive to the office, it would increase productivity by a huge amount.

The Technology is Here: Thanks to the Internet, business is completely portable. Between smart cell phones, laptops and wireless internet, there’s no reason your office can’t be your backyard – or even a tropical island with wireless access . . .

24 Hour Flexibility: With no physical need for office hours, people can schedule remote meetings and catch up on their correspondence from anywhere. This also means that people can pick up their kids, schedule quality time with friends and family and achieve true work/life balance.

Unfortunately, you have to ask yourself how many businesses are ready to take that step. The answer? Not many. Most people are going to have to take that step themselves, take advantage of their own labor and make money from home independently. Contact me for information on how to make this a truly substantial income opportunity.

Most employers want to look over your shoulder and measure your efforts, making it hard to stay motivated. After all, how can you honestly exercise self-discipline when you’re just doing as you’re told? After years of going through this, it may seem hard to work from home at your own business. If you’ve never known any other way, how do you get started?

This fear is normal, but it hides an incredible, substantial business opportunity. You not only have the power to make money from home, but the freedom to work in a style that launches you to your true potential. Once you discover how you work best, it’s easy to find your inner power. That’s what you need to tap into to make money from home in the amount you need to really enjoy life.

I’ll use myself as an example. In an office I’d be working 9 to 5:30 – half hour lunch, two 15 minute breaks. I don’t know about you, but my mind starts to wander about an hour into being at a desk in a cubicle. Oh, I can still work, but I’d be thinking about my next break – my next gasp of freedom – instead of really focusing on the task at hand. How many of you are in the same boat? How much better would you do if you were the master of your own labor?

Now, I work whenever and wherever I want to. I’ll keep the music playing to give me rhythm. I’ll head out on my motorbike when I need a change of scenery. People are often afraid they won’t get any work done, but I’ve found the opposite happens. I work when I want to, so I want to work at my best. It’s simple!

Now there’s one thing that isn’t so simple, and that’s having a plan, a structure that guides you when you are working and a business opportunity truly capable of generating a substantial income, with minimal hassle. Contact me; I help people find these solutions, and take that big step, from working at an office to working at home – the place where they find themselves.

Every crisis is filled with opportunities for those with the insight and positive attitude to look for them. Take the recession, for example. Lots of households with stay at home moms are feeling the pressure to supply an extra income stream, but leaving home to work is filled with its own complications. It imposes new expenses like daycare and transportation.

Many women have found a solution. They’ve become WHAMs: Work at Home Moms. It used to be the case that choosing to work at home limited your income opportunities, but nowadays it’s easier than ever to make money from home – as long as you have a plan. Women who’ve found the right way to become WHAMs have done far better than just earning a secondary income. The right work at home business is a substantial income opportunity. It can easily become the primary income for a household and not only solve financial worries, but free up the partner who’s driving to work every day. He can drop his job and help his wife with the more-profitable home-based business.

What do you need to succeed as a WHAM? First of all, you want to minimize the amount of stock you keep around. You need to keep things simple by sticking to a system, which is why turnkey business opportunities are so attractive for this group. This has another great effect: It is one of the easiest types of businesses to start up during a recession. You don’t need to spend thousands of dollars on a brick and mortar outlet, staff or the other expensive requirements of a “traditional business.” (Actually, I shouldn’t call these “traditional” any more – this is the 21^st century!)

I have the tools to help any woman start a successful home-based business. Contact me to start the process!

This time around let’s get simple and straightforward about what you need to work from home successfully. Let’s go!

A Dream: Dream of a better life for yourself and the substantial income that’s going to make it happen. Think of the time, the toys you can afford – think BIG!

Diligence: You don’t need to work so hard that you miss out on life, but you do need to work. Once you’ve set targets, you owe it to yourself to work hard enough to meet them. Of course, if you have the right plan, this work can be fun in of itself!

Imagination: The dream sets your aspirations high, but imagination puts you into the part of someone who’s going to fulfill it. Visualize yourself working from home. Think of how you want to lay out your office and what you’ll do with your afternoons. If every day is a joy, sticking to your plan is simple.

Inspiration: No man (or woman) is an island. Read, watch and listen to things that inspire you. Yeah, you might be the kind of person who never believed in those inspirational posters, but how much of that was disguised negativity? You need to keep an open mind to things that could make you happy and motivated.

Openness to Opportunity: When a substantial income opportunity knocks, are you ready to listen? When you see a chance to transform you income and life, follow up your doubts with forward-looking thoughts about how you can harness it to succeed.

Personal Responsibility: It all boils down to you. When you choose to make money from home you’re making a powerful statement: You want to be the master of your own life. That means when you make mistakes, you need to look to yourself as the first person to fix them. You’ll find that when you immediately deal with stumbling blocks they aren’t that tough at all. Things only get harder when you avoid them.

Planning: This is easily the biggest sticking point. You need to either create a set of concrete steps that move you toward your goals, or acquire a turnkey business opportunity. I can help you find the right plan. Contact me to find out more.

A Positive Attitude: When you encounter setbacks or your determination wavers, you need to keep a positive attitude, focused on your dreams and ideals. Follow up every negative feeling with a positive counterpart, and two questions. What did I learn from this? How can I turn the situation to my advantage?

Recreation: You need to have fun! That sounds easy enough, but one of the most common pitfalls in home-based businesses is that people devote all of their time to them and never take time to enjoy the fruits of their efforts. Having fun replenishes your energy and even gives you new ideas. This principle is important enough to me that I talk about my substantial income lifestyle here in my blog.

Self-Respect: You need to believe that you DESERVE a better life. The good things in life are blessings, true, but that doesn’t mean that the bad things are what are supposed to happen. The more you think of yourself as someone journeying through happiness, the more you’ll be “blessed.”

If you’re looking to start your own business you may find franchise opportunities tempting. They have several advantages, including a system and branding. Unfortunately, there are also many drawbacks. Joining a franchise means giving up a great deal of the freedom that should be part of starting your own business. Franchises have a standardized way of doing things. You can’t do what you feel is best for the business without getting approval. You have to purchase supplies from the franchise corporation, which often locks you in to higher prices, and you may have to pay fees to stay with the franchise. The franchise company can even determine where you get to do business, to prevent you from competing with other franchises. In short: Owning a franchise is a lot like just working for somebody else, except that you have to pay for the privilege. Still, some people need that kind of external structure and control.

I say more power to them, but at the same time there are better structured business opportunities out there. I don’t own a franchise because freedom is important to me. In my opinion, your freedom is the one thing you get to own without paying for it. You can’t buy freedom – you can only sell it off in exchange for something else. I decided to make money from home using a different system because I didn’t want to sell my freedom – I wanted to enjoy it. If you look around this site you’ll see examples of me doing just that. It’s why I’ve traveled and why I enjoy seeing nature from the back of a motorbike – and why I choose to make money from home using a method that doesn’t interfere with any of this. I set my own hours and goals.

Still, that doesn’t mean what I do doesn’t have any structure. Like most other people, I needed a system – the business opportunity that I talk about on this site. I really want people to know that they can succeed without selling their freedom, as long as they have the tools to channel their dreams into action. Contact me to find out more about this home-based business opportunity. I’ll show you how I’ve been able to succeed without losing my freedom – and how you can do it, too.

It’s all about mindset. When you watch all the news coverage about the current economic crisis it’s important to keep this in mind. You see, beneath all the facts and figures, the fact is that finance, like every other realm of human activity, is more influenced by attitude – “gut feeling” – than many people are willing to admit. Remember: A lot of what’s going on is very much driven by the fact that people’s faith in banks’ ability to manage and create wealth is badly shaken. If they got all those mortgages wrong, what else did they screw up?) If you want to make money from home in the current economy you have to keep that in mind.

How do you act on this? Here are the first two rules. First, have faith in yourself! Bad times pass, and good work is never worthless. You have to have rock solid confidence in your ability to work from home (or anywhere else). Next, be decisive. Once it’s time to act, don’t hesitate.

We see the results of indecision and low self-confidence all around us. We all know somebody who’s been working the same job for years, hates it and always says, “I’m going to quit and do what I’ve always wanted to” – but of course, they never quit. It would be better if he (or she) either left or resolved to be as good at his job as he could be, but you know the type. He puts in a sub par effort because he doesn’t want to be there, but he doesn’t actually leave. He gets passed over for promotions, and says he feels trapped in his job. When he gets let go, he doesn’t have a plan. He never believed in himself to actually make plans to take control of his life.

That’s what leads into the third rule – the one that separates success from failure, and fantasy from reality. Turn your dreams into a plan. Without a plan, you can’t focus your aspirations into a productive direction. The beauty of a turnkey business opportunity is that the plan’s laid out for you and best of all, it’s been tested by people who can add to it and make it better.

This is a new year, a new era. I want people to feel the confidence that’s served me so well, and find a plan that converts that energy into a practical opportunity to make money from home. Contact me to learn more about it.

It’s been a great week in the USA. About 2 million people game to greet Barack Obama as he became President of the United States of America. It’s been hailed as the fulfillment of a dream - and not just because Obama, as an African American, has demonstrated that the USA is abandoning an epoch of intolerance. It’s about the expansion of opportunity. That’s the essence of the American Dream, and if you want to make money at home that sense of boundless opportunity is something you have to harness for yourself.

Now it’s easy to look at this as a simple matter of boosting morale, but I want to make it clear that if you’re going to work from home you have to see this as a practical business matter, just like expenses and deductibles. Opportunity is not abstract - it just put a man into the highest office in America. If you want to make money from home your chief challenge is to find opportunities. You aren’t being led by the nose by a boss or a company with market research and business planning. You must accept the challenge to get out of the house, do your own research and realize the opportunities awaiting you.

Okay, once I put it that way it may sound frightening, but don’t worry: There’s a middle ground between working for someone else and flailing around in the dark, looking for substantial income opportunities without anyone to light your way. This is what many people call a “turnkey” opportunity and it’s what I provide to people who are serious about working from home but feel stalled because they’re in search of opportunities. This business lays out a plan for you so that you can avoid time-wasting activities and get right down to making money from home but it’s still your business. You seize opportunities but remain masters of your destiny - because without freedom, no opportunity can truly belong to you. That’s the lesson of these times.

Contact me for opportunities to make money at home.

I was at a business meeting in Whistler B.C. a couple of winters ago. While I was there, one of my goals was to learn to snowboard. Well picture this, sports fans: a graybeard (me) standing at the “snowboard lessons” sign waiting for an instructor. Along comes a young lady with a big smile; she introduces herself and asks me if I skateboard.

Uh, no, I don’t.

“That’s okay, but it would be a help if you did” she says. I gulp and think: What have I gotten myself into? The lesson starts off pretty well. Once I know how to slide along on one foot and push with the other she directs me to the bunny hill. I’m feeling pretty confident, to tell the truth. What’s this? I think. I want a mountain! At the top of the bunny hill she explains the mechanics of snow boarding and without further ado; I launch myself from the top.

I careen out of control for about fifty feet or so (I may not know how to steer, but I’m having the time of my life!) before a seven year old tyke steps dead in front of me. The “how to stop” part of my recent lesson goes out the window; I hit the deck instead. That spares the wee child, but not my butt, which grinds a decent-sized furrow in the snow. That’s when I really understand that to get it right, I need to shelve my dignity for a while. I keep my ego going, though. I’ve always used it as fuel to keep going, because even if I look silly, I’d rather not give up. That’s the kind of person I am, and today, it sustains me through multiple wipeouts. Never give up. Never.

It takes some time, and a couple of hard falls, but eventually, I graduate to the mountain.

The view from the top is spectacular – and the only way to the bottom is down is on a slippery piece of lumber everyone is calls a “snowboard” – an alien appendage that’s strapped to both feet. There’s no fear. I just feel a bit . . . . weird. Confident, but weird.

I tighten the bindings, point the snowboard down, holler “Fore!” and away I go! Right away, I notice there’s more room for error than on the bunny hill. The snow is a lot fluffier, which should cushion my falls. Things are going great!

I swoosh along, go around a corner and all of the sudden, the run narrows up, big time. So much for having room for error! There’s a tall timber on my left and a rough rock wall on my right. Suddenly, the mechanics of turning become really, really important to remember. I slide through the narrow spot and in front of me the view is great – but the snow’s running out. I’m hitting the end of the slope.

When I drop over the edge, my first thought is that the nice young lady who taught me might have a sadistic streak in her.

It was steep, steep, steep! In order to get down I have to do something that feels like it violates what I thought were the laws of physics: lean ahead to control my rate of decent. Trust me when I say that it takes a lot of discipline to lean forward when you’re sliding down a mountain.

When I hit the bottom (and live!), my instructor says that normally she’d take beginners down a gentler slope the first time down the mountain, but since I was quick learner and doing so well, she decided that I needed more of a challenge. Well, that gives me a shot of emotional fuel (remember my ego?) and I head back to the top, again and again.

I finally had to quit when the muscles in my legs were burning so bad, I could hardly stand. That evening when I was in the hot tub, feeling sore, but mighty fine about what I’d accomplished, I realized that if you want to do something bad enough, you need more than raw determination. You must believe that failure isn’t in your personal dictionary. You may fall again and again. The snow and the cold are bitter, but success is so very, very sweet.

P.S. I had taken my camera along to take some pictures for posterity, but even though it was in the front pocket of my ski pants I killed it on one of my more spectacular wipeouts. It turned out to be the only casualty.