Kenyan or African Entrepreneurs blog

Many of us in Kenya or Africa are looking for ways to make a positive impact in our societies and it is evident that, many people are tired of the job rat race and is now embracing the spirit of entrepreneurship.

If you are that individual who has had thoughts of being self employed some day, then you have aspirations or dreams of starting your own business and hopefully this article will help you somewhat see the nuts and bolts of what you need to know before plunging into your next career move. Likewise someone who is already established into a business and is looking for fresh insights to propel them forward in their business.

Mindset and continual education are both essential for the foundation of being an entrepreneur. Lacking in those areas is what causes the majority of entrepreneurs to fail in business.

Marcus Baker brought up the point that one of the biggest barriers to business owners is that they hold onto the employee mindset. What an excellent point because most of us have been an employee at one time or another so we know being a good employee involves a mindset to please the superiors, follow a job description, etc. That mindset is not going to work for an entrepreneur who needs to make decisions that will directly affect his or her income generation. An employee gets paid the same wage or salary regardless of the output, unlike an entrepreneur.

Might your mindset be holding you back? What type of conversations do you have with yourself? Every person goes through the process of convincing herself of success or failure, victory or defeat. The self-talk of some people will even tell them, “you have to work extremely hard to succeed in all that you do.” While that is true, there is the emptiness of working hard and achieving no results at all, same way you work hard on a job with little or no fruits and recognition. As an entrepreneur, it is more about working smart in order to be successful.

What are you telling yourself? It is imperative that you analyze your internal conversations. That is the key to what is on your mind and how you feel about accomplishing your goals in life. You must train your mind to believe that you can accomplish whatever it is that you WANT in life. (In case you haven’t noticed by now, this topic is much bigger than running your own business – it’s about LIFE).

Once you have begun to lay the foundation of your entrepreneurial journey, you are ready to start looking into what type of business you want for yourself.
This is key because you need to find something that works for you on a variety of levels:

It needs to have the potential to meet your income goals
You need to be passionate about it
It needs to fit into your “why”
You should have some knowledge about it or at least the eagerness to learn
It should fit with your natural talents and abilities
You should be able to envision yourself accomplishing many goals through it

There are many, many options as to which direction you can go – but only you know yourself and the answers to the above points. Whatever you do, don’t let anyone else tell you what you have to do or what you can’t do.

Don’t limit yourself!

Everyone has their own ideas of what will work for you, but they are not you. You are you and you know what you love, you know what you are good at, you know what gets you up in the morning.

What do you want??

Perhaps you want to create something yourself. Many people choose this route and do very well at it. The important thing is to educate yourself. Find out what is needed to really make a living at what you are looking at – the output versus input. Time is of essence, so you want to also estimate how long it will take you to grow your business so that you can start achieving your long term business goals.

Last but not least, continue educating yourself from time to time on how to grow your business. research, read, connect with like minded individuals, go for trainings if possible in line with your business, synchronize your business ideas with the latest technology or market trends and better yourself in what you do. In my own opinion, personal development is also necessary to catapult you to your success. Everyone needs a dose of motivation and inspiration in all that they do to push them forward to achieve results and success.

In conclusion, there are diverse opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs especially in this day and age, your imagination and passion will only determine which way you will go, thus choosing your venture wisely and carefully. The sky is the limit for the 21st Century Entrepreneurs.

It’s your turn, so don’t hold back, plunge in where necessary and at the right opportune moment!

To Your Success!

Bouncing Back from Tough Times with Self-Encouragement by Jim Rohn

Increasing Your Resiliency

Resilience is the ability to return to the original form after being bent, stretched, or compressed. That’s the dictionary’s definition of resilience. It’s the ability to readily recover from illness, or depression, or adversity.

In our lives, resilience specifically means being able to withstand setbacks, broken hearts and broken dreams, financial crisis, loss of loved ones, loss of enterprise, and loss of health. How would you ever handle it if you lost everything you had today? What would your next step be? How long would you be depressed and upset and angry? What would it take for you to pull yourself up and start all over again? How resilient are you? Could you handle it? Could you learn from all of your disappointments and start all over again? What would it take?

Number one, it would take a lot of self-discipline. It would take a lot of positive self-talk to muster up the energy to begin again. It would take a lot of concentration to block out the noise and the clutter of all the negative voices trying to get through, as well as the negative voices of others around you. That’s a lot! It would take a lot of discipline to balance the fear and anxiety with the knowing that, if you did it once, you can do it all over again.

It would also take a lot of self-reliance. Whether your losses had anything to do with you or not, your future success has everything to do with you. It would take a lot of self-reliance to avoid blame. What’s happened has happened. You would need to get on with your life and begin again.

It would take a lot of faith. It would take a lot of faith and trust in God to move ahead.

If you lost everything tomorrow and you were gathering all the courage to try again, it would take a lot of self-appreciation. You need to know in your heart and mind that you have the skills, the talent, and the strength to do it one more time.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back from adversity, no matter how large or how small. You lose a client, one of your biggest ones. This client accounts for more than 25 percent of your gross revenues. Losing this client is going to hurt, financially and emotionally. Losing this client is going to negatively affect things for a while. The first thing you do is figure out why you lost this business. What role did you play; in what way are you responsible? You can’t just rant and rave, yelling and screaming at everyone in the office. Even if it was the wrongdoing of someone else, you can’t act like this, because it’s not professional. You’ll lose respect. And respect is hard to regain once you’ve lost it, whether it’s the respect of those you work with, your trusted colleagues, or your valuable support people. You have to approach the situation rationally and figure out how to bounce back from your loss.

You have to evaluate the situation and then start a plan to recapture the lost business. Consider how you can increase your market share with other businesses. Maybe you can network with associates to bring in a similar client or even a better one! You can’t sit back and dwell on what’s happened. You’ve got to get back into the marketplace and recapture what’s been taken from you. Get back at it and replace what’s gone.

Perhaps your loss is a personal loss. Maybe you’ve recently been faced with the death of a loved one, a divorce, or the loss of a very special friendship. If your loss is a deeply personal one, you must approach the situation a little differently. You must be patient with yourself and give yourself time to grieve, time to mourn, time to regroup.

The stages we go through in loss, be it the death of a loved one, the death of a relationship, or the death of an enterprise, are beautifully defined in Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ book On Death and Dying. Whether the death is a literal one or a figurative one, the stages are the same: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. And only by going through these stages, and reaching acceptance, can we rebound and begin again.

It’s said that children are more resilient than adults. Why? Maybe it’s because they don’t evaluate their current situation based on past experiences. They approach it in a fresh way, a new way. In their own minds, they deal with loss much better than adults.

Children who grow up in the unfortunate circumstances of poverty or abuse or neglect and later become successful are known as dandelion children. If they can succeed and prosper with terrible conditions, they can grow anywhere. It’s important to be more like a dandelion child. To be able to grow and prosper and succeed, despite our current conditions. To be able to grow and prosper and succeed despite our losses. To be resilient.

Cultivating a resilient character turns what others would call failure into success. A resilient person won’t give up. A resilient person will, in spite of all obstacles and setbacks, keep doing it until.

In their book The Resilient Self, Steven and Sybil Wolin have studied resilience and have found seven key characteristics which compose it.

Number one: Resilience requires insight. You need to develop the ability to ask tough questions of yourself and be honest with your answers. If you had something to do with your loss, be honest and responsible for it.

Number two: Resilience is independent. As a resilient person, you can count on yourself to bounce back into life

Number three: Although resilience is independent, it’s also tied to others. The more people you are responsible to, the greater your motivation to begin again. The stronger the reason, the stronger the action.

Number four: Resilience calls for initiative. You need to develop the ability to take charge of the situation, to take charge of the problem. You need to stand up and do whatever is necessary to get back on course.

Number five: Resilience has an element of creativity. With resilience, you are able to look at a situation and creatively determine the best way out. You are enterprising in your approach toward starting over.

Number six: A resilient person has humor. You may cry until you start laughing, but a sense of humor is so important when turning your life around. You’ve got to take your goals seriously, and you’ve got to take yourself seriously. But you’ve also got to be able to laugh at yourself and your situation at times. Somebody says, “You’ll look back on this and laugh someday.” Well, maybe today is the day to start.

Number seven: A resilient person has a strong sense of morality. Whatever you do to get back on your feet, whatever you do to bounce back into life, make sure it’s moral. Make sure that your upcoming success is at the service of others, not at the expense of others. Success, if it is yours to keep, must be at the service of others.
The more obstacles you face and overcome, the more times you falter and get back on track, the more difficulties you struggle with and conquer, the more resiliency you will naturally develop. There is nothing that can hold you back, if you are resilient.

By Jim Rohn

Happiness in Life: You Deserve it!

Posted by Brian Tracy

Achieving your own happiness is the best measure of how well you are living your life and enjoying your relationships. You can learn how to be happier and more fulfilled in everything you do.

Everyone is Different

Happiness in life is like a smorgasbord. If 100 people went to a smorgasbord and each put food on their plate in the quantity and mix that each felt would be most pleasing to him, every plate would be different. Even a husband and wife would go up to the smorgasbord and come back with plates that looked completely different. Happiness is the same way. Each person requires a particular combination of those ingredients to feel the very best about him or herself.

Listen to Your Heart

And your mix is changing continually. If you went to the same smorgasbord every day for a year, you probably would come back with a different plateful of food each time. Each day-sometimes each hour-only you can tell what it takes to make you happy. Therefore, the only way to judge whether a job, a relationship, an investment, or any decision, is right for you is to get in touch with your feelings and listen to your heart.

Be True to Yourself

You’re true to yourself only when you follow your inner guiding light, when you listen to what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “still, small voice within.” You’re being the very best person you can be only when you have the courage and the fortitude to allow your definition of happiness, whatever it may be, to be the guiding light of every part of your life.

There Are No Limits

A very important point on the subject of happiness is whether or not you feel that you “deserve” to be happy.

Accept the notion that you deserve all the happiness in life you can honestly attain through the application of your talents and abilities. The more you like and respect yourself, the more deserving you will feel of the good things in life. And the more deserving you feel, the more likely you will attain and hold on to the happiness you are working toward.

Make Happiness Your Key Measure

You should make finding happiness in life the organizing principle of your life. Compare every possible action and decision you make against your standard of happiness to see whether that action would make you happier or unhappier. Soon, you will discover that almost all of the problems in your life come from choices that you have made – or are currently making – that do not contribute to your happiness.

Pay the Price

Of course, there are countless times when you will have to do little things that don’t make you happy along the way toward those larger things that make you very happy indeed. We call this paying the price of success in advance. You must pay your dues. Sometimes these interim steps don’t make you happy directly, but the happiness you achieve from attaining your goal will be so great that it totally overwhelms the temporary inconveniences and dissatisfactions you have to endure in order to get there.

Action Exercises

Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, accept that you deserve all the joy and happiness you can possibly achieve through your own efforts.

Second, make your own happiness the chief organizing principle of your life and judge everything against that standard. Follow your inner guiding light.

Third, be willing to work hard and pay the price for the satisfaction and rewards you desire. Always go the extra mile and your success will be assured.

Your Achievement Challenge

Personal achievement legend Jim Rohn said that the problems and rewards of today are so absorbing to some human beings that they never pause long enough to think about tomorrow. “But what if we did develop a new discipline to take just a few minutes every day to look a little further down the road? We would then be able to foresee the impending consequences of our current conduct. Armed with that valuable information, we would be able to take the necessary action to change our errors into new success-oriented disciplines. In other words, by disciplining ourselves to see the future in advance, we would be able to change our thinking, amend our errors and develop new habits to replace the old.”

Seven Qualities of Master Achievers

If you think the way successful people think and adopt their success habits, you too can be successful. Here are seven qualities of the top 1% of successful people. They Are Ambitious They see themselves capable of being the best. … Continue reading →

Can Success Quotes and Affirmations Change Your Life?

You bet they CAN! By harnessing the power of your mind and using success quotes and prosperity affirmations you can attract money, wealth and abundance into your life.

Peace of mind, freedom from struggle, happiness and success are not only for some folks, they are everyone’s birthright.

Then why do some of us struggle so hard? Why is there always more month than money left at the end of our paycheck?

I don’t know about you but I grew up on such pearls of wisdom as, “Half a loaf is better than none,” “Money doesn’t grow on trees,” “Money is the root of all evil,” and many more statements that programmed me and probably you as well to believe we live in a state of lack.

The good news is that we can reprogram ourselves and our lives any way we like!

As William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher stated, “The greatest discovery of my generation is that man can alter his life simply by altering his attitude of mind.”

All it takes for prosperity to flow into our lives is a decision and a belief that it can. We need to decide to allow success into our lives and believe that it is possible and is our Divine right.

Another great success quote by Earl Nightingale, a pioneer in the human potential movement says that, “We must be the epitome-the embodiment-of success. We must radiate success before it will come to us. We must first become mentally, from an attitude standpoint, the people we wish to become.”

It really is simple, you can change your life by changing your mind. Prosperity and Success are already yours…enjoy!

About Network Marketing Business – The 21st Century Business

Network marketing business is becoming one of the popular home businesses and this is the direct selling business. This business requires a high level of passion for selling the product and a strong ability to build high performance team. The top sellers in the network marketing business achieve success because they are very enthusiastic, very passionate about the product, hard working, and most importantly they are good team players.

When you think you found someone with a business proposal that interests you, spend a little time to get to know the person. Ask the right questions and be sure their business offers the following 3 things:

1. Profitable Products

Look for high-priced, big profit products that deliver exceptional value. Why? Because it will take you the same amount of time, money and energy to sell a product with a small commission as it will to sell a product that can make you several thousand per sale.

 2. Back-End Sales

Make sure the business has a back-end product line that increase in price, value, and profit. Why? Because your repeat customers will make you bigger profits on their second, third and fourth purchases.

3. Residual Income

It is important that you are rewarded, as a business owner, and have the opportunity to create true wealth.  The only way true wealth is created is through passive, residual income.  That’s income that you do not have to work for everyday.  That’s true financial freedom.

“You are the embodiment of the information you choose to accept and act upon. To change your circumstances you need to change your thinking and subsequent actions.” – Adlin Sinclair