Blog Village Goes Gonzo! – A Family Blog Carnival

Blog Village hosted a blog carnival tonight. It was an A Strategic Alliance event.

This is the original post; we’re running it here to provide additional exposure for those who participated.

For Your Success presents

It’s all about Family!

Family photograph courtesy of The Family, McCune {Machione}
November, 1928

Welcome Guests!

Dirty Butter – YESTERDAY’S MEMORIES of a Bygone Time – Determine Not To Have An Only Child

Kilroy_60 – Fear And Loathing – The Gonzo Papers – A Father’s Day Thought

Eric – Eric Has Issues – Mondays True Story IV

Janey Loree – Heartfelt Notes – Up With The Top Or I’m Not Going…

Barb – Skittles Place – Why I Have Gary Hair

Heather – Beautiful British Columbia – Does Your Family Smore?

Chara – Zero To Gourmet – here’s to staying blue-jean ready

Red Dirt Girl – Red Dirt Girl – My Childhood Family

Sparksfley – Sparks And Butterflies – Mom

Ruth – Me, My Life, My Garden – FAMILY – A Blogvillage Goes Gonzo Post

Chelle & Chel – She Says It’s Pretty Dumb – Mother-Daughter Communication

John Holland – altjiranga mitjina – Thursday Thirteen #8: Christmas Pictures

Random Encounters – Random Encounters of We – On Broadway in New York City

SweetSwede – In His Steps – Family of God

LJP – Save Save Save – AVIS Messes With Family Catch Up

Kim Banks – Blog Fabulous – Is Cooking The Secret of a Good Marriage?

CyberCelt – Texas RV Travel Blog – Do It For The Family

sarala – blogaway – Did you like your kid today?

Oh, The Joys – Oh, The Joys – Little Brother

Anthony – The Lives and Times… of Anthony McCune – Welcome Blog Villagers…to Post Number 99

Emma Noelle – Wiping Up Snot – Grandparents’ Rights To The Family

jillbeth – The Broken Cup: Christian Poetry – A Child’s Plea

Sue and Matthew – One Big Green Bus – The Whole Story {By Request!}

Joseph Potocny – Living With Alzheimers – What A Past 24 Hours

Eli – Almost Here – Jewels

Zorak163 – Grasshopper Ramblings – Create A Family

KBaggott – Babylune – Parenthood Can Be Danerous

Thomas Karkalas – MODUS VIDENDI – we are of the opinion that…

Crystal – Two Moms In A Blog – 13 Things I Have Learned As A Parent/Wife

Gtargirl – If Mom Had A Blog In 1942 – War Comes Home

JHSEsq. – Colloquium – Thursday 13: Edition #4

Naomi – Diary from England – BRITISH FAMILY LIFE IN THE 21ST CENTURY

Michelle – Scribbit – Shark or Squid?

Linda – Are We There Yet? – “Every man is a quotation from all his ancestors” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Tonya – There Is A Season – Selflessness

Carla – Self Esteem Awareness Blog – Emotional Abuse and low self-esteem

Edith OSB – Monastic Musings – The Media-A Third Parent?

Maggie – Ramblings of Maggie – Dear Aunt Irma

JBruno – The Voltage Gate – The Mystery of the Red Panda, Ailurus fulgens

Jan – The Poodle And Dog Blog – Police Dog Mothers Tiger Cubs

Kerry – West Coast Women – Second Guessing Ourselves

Marsha – Family Adentures – Baby Elephant

Old Lady – Eclectic Tales – Grandmama’s Muumuus

James – Points of Light – Convergence

Sheila – Alabama Kitchen Sink – Today Is A New Day

JAM – Least Significant Bits – Starting School

Dr. Richard P. Mungo – Teeth Care, Healthy Food and Dental Tourism – Saving Childhood Oral Health

Kim – Blog Fabulous – Is Cooking The Secret To A Good Marriage?

Thank You to all who participated.

Registration is open now for our next event.

A Strategic Alliance invites you to join our new link exchange program; it’s all about mutual benefit. We’re posting and adding new links tomorrow.

What Is Passion For Today’s Business Leaders?

What is Passion For Today’s Business Leaders?
By Leanne Hoagland-Smith

What is passion?

Recently after a presentation at a Leadership Conference of executive coaches, training and development practitioners, small business and leadership consultants, I was once again thanked for my passion. The compliment was genuinely given, as was my returned thank you.

However, as the day progressed, my thoughts kept returning to the question of: What really is passion? For the next several days as I attempted to ponder the answer to this question, another question surfaced. What does it mean when one has passion? Then additional questions bubbled up.

• What separates people with passion and those without passion?
• Is passion always positive?
• Could passion be negative?
• Is there a relationship between passion and purpose?
• And finally, How does all of this fit me?

Sometimes the best place to begin to define a word is with my trusted friend, Mr. Webster. Webster’s dictionary states that passion is an emotional response.

Being an intellectual conceptualizer or more simply stated a heurist, I wrote down three words – passion, purpose and performance. I then started putting these words into some sort of visual so that I could have better understanding of these three powerful words.

Consider the following: Imagine a leader standing with out stretched arms and open hands with one hand holding the word passion and the other holding the word purpose. There are high levels of energy flowing between the hands as well as around the individual.

What I would like you to contemplate is that passion is the present where others as well as ourselves see and feel our emotional responses. Purpose is the future, our true north, where we constantly strive towards to reach our vision and attain the emotional desires of our past and present dreams. And performance is the individual with the outstretched hands. Performance is the collection of all past experiences and current actions where we continually apply knowledge as we hold and share our passion and purpose. When all are connected, energy is visible.

Now take a few moments to think about a recent leader that you heard, enjoyed and even possibly motivated you.

• Did this individual seem to ignite the room upon his or her entrance?
• Did you have a thought about where was the source for all that boundless and endless energy?
• Did you wish that you had one-tenth of that energy?
• Did you feel a little slighted or even cheated?

I believe that leaders who have such energy have probably already connected their passion to their purpose to enhance their performance. NOTE: This does not necessarily mean that their passion is positive or negative, but rather that they have made sense of all three and have all three working together.

To live without passion suggests that our life is void of emotion, an empty vessle or person just existing, moving from one meaningless action to another and never achieving the next great step. Passion is the critical partner to purpose and performance. All three are necessary to achieve the present and the future dreams or results that we desire for our businesses, our families, our friends, our communities and ourselves.

So the questions to you are now three-fold:

• What is Your Passion?
• How Are You Using Your Passion as a Leader?
• Does Your Current Leadership Coaching, Leadership Development or Executive Leadership Training Invoke The Passion Necessary to Achieve Your Current and Future Goals?

Leanne Hoagland-Smith, M.S. coaches individuals & organizations to double results in warp time. The real question for securing sustainable change is “Not do you or they know it, but do you or they want to do it?” Call 219.759.5601 or visit http://www.processspecialist.com/. Mention this article and receive a complimentary 20 minute coaching session to help you begin to reach that next level of success for yourself or your small business.

One quick question,if you could secure one new client or breakthrough that one roadbloack, what would that mean to you? Then, take a risk and give a call at 219.759.5601 to experience incredible business results.

The Process Of Change

The Process of Change
By Anthony McCune

Change is an issue we face every day. Can I go about this differently; is there a way I can do this better; will leaving the old behind or embracing the new improve the quality of my life?

People may recognize the need to make changes. They may understand the benefits change will bring. They may truly want to see the process happen. A basic problem is understanding how to change.

Our behavior is largely based on habits. We don’t think; we do. Understanding that is the first step leading to change.

Change begins with the way you think about something.

A concerted effort is required. Practice, learn to think differently about the behavior you wish to change. Don’t expect to fully achieve the change instantly or even over a short-time. It is a process built upon the foundation of acceptance.

It is necessary to maintain a level of awareness regarding what you have done, the way you have done it and the result you are seeking to accomplish. Some days you’ll be more successful than others. The key is recognition.

If your actions do not reflect the change in behavior you want to accomplish, you need to recognize it. Accept that will happen at times and then continue the process. Habits are developed over time; change requires time as well. As long as you know when you’re falling back into the old habit it will be easier to change.

Given time, and practice, you will begin to think differently about that behavior. The change of thinking will bring a change in your action. The action will achieve a result that you desire. Success will reinforce that behavior. The behavior you wanted when you identified the need for change.

Changing the way you think, acting in a different way will change the way you feel about that particular behavior. That positive outcome will reinforce the importance of carrying forth the new attitude, the new belief you have developed in terms of that behavior.

Change the way you think; to change the way you act; to change the way you feel. That, in a nutshell, is the process of change.

<> Anthony McCune, Writer For Hire<>

Blog Village – A True COMMUNITY Of Bloggers

Blog Village – A True

COMMUNITY Of Bloggers

Recently Rosemary, aka Dirty Butter, the Administrator of Blog Village answered some questions about her family friendly community for bloggers.

For Your Success: How did Blog Village come about?

Rosemary: About a year and a half ago I looked at my first blog, and I’ll have to say it was not a pleasant experience. It just so happened that first blog was full of profanity and the pictures were child porn, as far as I was concerned. It’s a wonder I ever looked at another one! But I had read some articles suggesting that blogs were a good way to promote an online business, so I decided to educate myself in this new medium. At first all I did was join some traffic exchanges and surf a lot, reading what appealed to me, and ignoring what didn’t.

Finally, I took the plunge, and started the two blogs that are connected to our business, Yesterday’s Memories and Plush Memories Lost Toys Search Service. Both have evolved somewhat from what I originally envisioned them as being about, but I guess that happens to a lot of blogs over time.

Look for these banners while you visit the Blog Village Top List:

As I became more and more comfortable in the blogging community, I also became more and more disgusted by the large number of blogs that bombarded me with skin I did not want to see and words I did not want pushed at me, whether I wanted to read them or not. That’s when the idea for BLOG VILLAGE began to form in my mind. I put those thoughts into action, with the kind encouragement of one of the monitors of Blog Advance, on May 26, 2006.

For Your Success: What was your vision of what Blog Village would be?

Rosemary: What I envisioned for BLOG VILLAGE was a TopList with a community feeling to it, where the Villagers would consider the list to be an extended Blog Roll. I hoped that members would support each other’s blogging efforts by reading and commenting on each other’s blogs and voting for the blogs they liked each day. I was interested in opening up the Village to blogs of all types, as long as they met the basic criteria set out on the Blog Village News blog I started as a companion to the TopList. Basically, our Villagers do not post any pictures of a sexually suggestive nature anywhere on their blogs. They also do not use profanity or offensive language in any large print on their blogs. That is why we offer BLOG VILLAGE as a Family Friendly TopList. Even if an adult is viewing a blog on our list with children in the room, the children are not going to pass by the monitor and see something they shouldn’t be seeing.

For Your Success: How have you gone about accomplishing that?

Rosemary: By wording the criteria in this way, my goal was not to censor the content of anyone’s blog. Rather, I wanted to avoid having possibly offensive language “shoved in the reader’s face” when they opened someone’s blog. Many of our Villagers do not use any objectionable language in their blogs at all. Others use it within their posts, so it becomes the reader’s decision as to whether they want to return to that blog or not. Although I am a Christian, and profess my faith openly on my own blogs, emails, and websites, I was very determined to seek out a variety of quality blogs, whether Christian or not.

For Your Success: What challenges have you faced and how have you handled them?

Rosemary: When I first started the TopList I invited blogging friends I already had a relationship with to join, and I asked them to refer their blogging friends, as well. Then I went on an intensive 3 month search for blogs to invite. I scoured the Traffic Exchanges, read through, and commented on, hundreds of blogs, and sent out invitations. I looked at the Blog Rolls of blogs I thought would be good Villagers, and I read through and commented on the blogs I found there that I liked. I advertised the new BLOG VILLAGE TopList on all the forums I belonged to. It was a lot of hard work, but I wanted this list to be a success, and that meant putting time into developing it. I believed if I could get over 100 blogs of top quality to join, others would see the voting link banners and begin to ask for membership. That has been the case, as I very rarely invite new members now. Almost all of the newer members requested to join.

As you can see, this has been a time intensive undertaking. That has been one of my biggest challenges with BLOG VILLAGE. Even though I knew there would be a lot of work involved initially, I never anticipated how much time it would continue to take to keep it running smoothly. I’m always glad to help fellow Villagers, but I have been surprised by the number of members who needed help getting the voting banner on their blog correctly. That has been time spent that I had not anticipated. A TopList won’t work if the members don’t have a prominent voting link, or preferably a banner, on their blogs. I’ve had the unpleasant task of repeatedly warning, and finally deleting a large number of blogs, where the owners never did add the voting link. Not only is that time consuming, and means checking all the blogs monthly to see if the link is still there, but a few bloggers have become indignant at being deleted. That’s very stressful to me, as I am not comfortable with confrontation. There have also been a very small number of blogs that I have removed from membership, because I felt that subsequent posts or pictures did not fit with my criteria for the Village. When it all boils down to it, it’s my TopList, and my decision is final in all matters concerning it, and some folks just didn’t like that.

For Your Success: How would you characterize the state of things? What future plans and goals do you have?

Rosemary: As of this writing, we have 245 Active Members on our TopList, which I consider to be fantastic growth in a little over 6 months. I would hope that the list continues to grow, but certainly more slowly. As far as goals for the future, we have recently started featuring Villagers on the Blog Village News blog. This task has been taken on by one of our most active Villagers, Janey Loree, who has 3 blogs on the TopList and is an active commenter on a lot of the blogs. The interviews help to fulfill one of my goals, which is to help our members improve their SEO, by providing quality links to their blogs. I’m also hoping that these interviews will foster the feeling of community that I want this list to have. Right now, I would say there are maybe 25 or so Villagers who read and comment on each other’s blogs regularly. That is way too low a number for me to be happy with it. So improving that number is my biggest priority for 2007.

Make The Decision To Succeed

Make The Decision To Succeed
By Anthony McCune

Communication is faster and access to information is more readily available today than it has ever been. Ease of communication will increase. The ability to obtain the information you need will improve. On the other hand, the amount of time you have to make a decision that will benefit or harm the success of your endeavor will decrease.

If you have something good to offer, you must let the people who need it know about it. The step you take or choose not to take today will have ramifications for your business tomorrow.

Will your potential customer learn of, be contacted by, or worse yet, buy from your competitor who has a product or service that is inferior to what you offer?

What if this happens because you had an idea, or were given a suggestion, that you needed to think about; wanted to give additional consideration; took more time to further contemplate; had to have another look at, and/or felt you needed to seek out advice from just one more person before making the decision?

What if in the meantime, your competitor had the same idea or was given the same suggestion. Your competitor, unlike you, makes a yes, “go forward”, or a no, “move on”, decision.

If the decision was correct or incorrect, a decision was made as to the action that would be taken. The person will either benefit from or deal with the ramifications resulting from their decision. Whichever the case may be, the impact on your company will result from internal action.

Overthinking, delaying or having difficulty pulling the trigger can all significant effect the productivity of your decision. Any of these factors can put you in a position where the impact on your company is determined by the actions of someone else. Do you want YOUR business to be put in that position?

A yes or no decision, over time, will be determined to have been right or wrong. There are many variables that impact situations; we all know only hindsight is 20/20. There is no way, though, to avoid the fact that a decision today effects tomorrow one way or another to a lesser or greater degree.

Results of a single decision can extend through the life of your business. A single decision can lead to your endeavor thriving. Or your great idea, your groundbreaking solution, your better way of doing things can wither and die on the vine.

The ability to put ego aside, to be open to new ideas, to have the willingness to accept advice are all matters one must consider in relation to their decision making process.
The most common problem that causes companies to either not be as successful as possible or to fail is easily identifiable. A person enters the business world possessing a core competency in their given field of endeavor. Problems arise when that person extends beyond their area of expertise to become personally involved in other areas that would be better handled by people hired to do those jobs.

Delegating, trusting the people to whom you assign tasks and having the willingness to roll the dice with their work product are all critical factors. These considerations directly impact the ability to make good decisions in an expedient fashion and execute tasks that make your company more successful.

Make the decision to succeed.

<> Anthony McCune, Writer For Hire<>

Why “For Your Success”?

FOR YOUR SUCCESS is a Full Service Business Hub. As well as a Resource for Personal Growth and Self Help.What is this ABOUT?

I initiated and am leading the development of FOR YOUR SUCCESS for three reasons:

1. I gain a sense of personal satisfaction being a positive force in the world.
2. To attain a greater feeling of fulfillment in my career.
3. I am able to help people achieve a higher quality of life.

Knowledge is power. Perspective is an essential element to chart a course allowing you to be as successful as possible.

Having the right tool allows you to produce a superior product; it facilitate the ability to maximize results.

Bells and whistles do not impress me. Something that offers superior functionality, enables greater efficiency and maximizes the opportunity to advance one’s goal(s) is a must have.

The other must have is a team of quality people who are proud of the company for whom they work, that take pride in a job well done and that have no hesitation about going the extra mile.

These are the type of people with whom I have surrounded myself in creating FOR YOUR SUCCESS.

FOR YOUR SUCCESS will address a full spectrum of issues related to business. Unlike the typical business site, though, FOR YOUR SUCCESS takes a holistic approach. Topics related to the mind, body and spirit will be included. You can’t be most successful in business if you aren’t the best person possible.

We are here, FOR YOUR SUCCESS.

~ The Success Coach