Taking time out to relax, refresh and retreat can be hard. The guilt factor kicks and the negative monkey sitting on your shoulder, turns into a gorilla as you kick yourself.

You need to remember to look after you. Not just the feed, bath etc, the real you. I found if I don’t treat myself as a friend, then I am pain the butt to be around. I get snappy, stroppy and stressful. This reflects in my work and family situation.

Taking time out gives me a chance to chew, to reflect, revamp, revisit ideas. Life is hard enough at times without us making it harder for ourselves.

Something I learnt a long time ago. It explains why I hated the old methods of sales I did when I did public relations, car sales and more. I didn’t believe in their approach. People are not fools. I couldn’t force myself to be pushy to con people. I even failed at telemarketing - ringing people on the phone from the telephone directory and selling stuff.

Ideas can inspire and create, excite and invite. I no longer "sell" stuff, I am an ideas person and writer. I create pictures, help a person see a new possibility, that there ideas/products can be looked at differently in a positive light.

Being an ideas person, is a great weight of shoulders! It is easier to create ideas, let a client grow with you and together create new possibilities.

The pressure is taken off when creating ideas or showing a client possibilities.

Thank you again for a being a positive light in my day.

I want to emphasize the disassociation theme.  It’s hard to come up with new ideas when you are enmeshed in all the information coming at you - reading 3 newspapers will give you lots of information, but will you really have time to think about the information, mull over it and come up with some new insight?

If you go back to some great thinkers of our time - Jefferson, Franklin, Edison, Einstein - they weren’t busy reading everyone else’s ideas all the time (althought they did read).  They were observing people, nature - themselves - and letting observations coalesce into understandings and insights.

If you’re looking for some new ideas, take a break from all the information absorption, work in the garden, really look at your kids playing and interacting, let some feelings sift up inside of you and notice them, go to the supermarket and just watch people shopping.  And give your brain time to sift through what you’ve noticed and make connections.

People are indeed looking for good advice and guidance these days.  Information is a useful ingredient for generating this - but nothing replaces direct observation and mulling over what you’re seeing and experiencing.

Sarah Clachar
health copywriter

Joe Sugarman gives a relevant example about one of his biggest products…

He was able to turn a potential flaw in the frequency setting of a walkie-talkie into it’s driving benefit by calling it, "The Pocket CB" and cashing in on the CB radio fad of the 70s.

But, without his past experience as a ham radio operator, he might not have seen this potential.

The demand to keep up with marketing trends can cause to develop tunnel vision. Which, ironically, is one of the problems we are hired by business owners to solve.

It makes us better marketers to get out and touch the world… Thanks for the reminder.

Great stuff!

Kevin Rogers