Hello! Welcome to the first entry in my Entrepreneur’s Diary.
The goal of this series is simple. I’ve noticed that it’s incredibly important to take a step back every so often to reflect on everything that has happened in my business, MindValley. It’s good for me to zoom out to get some perspective.

So, I’m actually going to turn these reflections into a diary, which I will share with you. Hopefully you’ll glean something from my insights and learnings. Perhaps I’ll even inspire you to pursue your dreams, as I’m doing. Make sure you share what you’re going through too. Learning is a two-way street!

Thoughts for this week…

A Bad Sales Day Doesn’t Equal A Bad Mood

In the past, my mood used to be completely contingent upon how well the business was doing. My wife could read how the company was doing based on my voice when I said “hello,” as I came through the door after work. While this may be understandable – I can almost feel the empathy from the other business owners out there – I’ve only recently become aware of just how damaging this is. I used to check the sales stats every single morning. If the sales looked good, I’d be happy. If the sales looked bad, I’d be negative and stressed. Not only was this hard on me, but also on the other people in my life, including my wife and my team.

It was only when I really learned about the importance of focusing on all the great things that are happening in the business, instead of the small nuisances (such as a bad sales day), that I realized how much this way of being had impacted me. In theory, of course, I knew to focus on the positive, but to actually LIVE IT, is a different experience. I realized my blue moods were not serving me in any way, shape or form.

I now have this unwavering belief that MindValley will have an incredible 2009. We have a lot of things going for us: we have a fantastic team comprised of 21 of the smartest, most creative young people from over 12 countries around the world; an inspiring vision; and we’re working on exciting projects and initiatives that will move the business forward by leaps and bounds. A bad sales day doesn’t matter.

We will absolutely still hunker down and try to fix things the moment we see the numbers slipping, but I have a choice: I can either do it with a positive attitude or a negative attitude. Again, it’s my choice. The last few weeks, I’ve felt like a different person. (Perhaps the yoga has been helping too – I started going to yoga regularly a few weeks ago).  Anyway, even if we have a bad sales day, it’s not the end of the world.

Celebrate Every Small Victory, No Matter What

Everyone knows the global economic climate is not looking very upbeat right now. It’s all quite a challenge, especially for those of us in business for ourselves. For myself, I’m framing it as a chance to get creative and generate products and applications that will get us out of this panic spiral. This economic situation is not something that has happened to us. To a large degree, it’s something we’re doing to ourselves. And the mainstream media isn’t helping here.

In MindValley, to keep things positive, we ensure we celebrate all our victories every week. When we have our weekly team meetings, we even have a weekly report called the “Awesomeness Report” that celebrates the highlights of the week, which my business partner Vishen came up with.

There were a few weeks in there where I didn’t feel like celebrating because revenues and profits were down, but I’ve learned that no matter what happens, it’s very important to keep celebrating the small victories. If you don’t take the time out to celebrate the small victories along the way, then it is A LOT harder to take that next big step towards success. And it is even harder to motivate a team, as a leader, if you don’t make celebration a part of your company routine. T. Harv Eker says it’s incredibly important to celebrate your accomplishments, so we’ve made it a part of our company DNA, and it seems to being working splendidly.

And speaking of celebration, our company has created a new website application that will allow anyone to write down and share their gratitude. MindValley’s goal is to turn this gratitude website into “The Happiest Place on The Internet,” but more about that later…