Chicken Soup For Your Blog: 4 Jack Canfield Life Coaching Tips For Blogging Success

This is a guest post by Stephan Wiedner from Noomii.com.

Everybody is familiar with Jack Canfield’s famous series of Chicken Soup books full of heart-warming success stories.

My personal favorite Jack Canfield book is “The Success Principles: How to Get From Where You Are to Where You Want to Be“.

Like most self-help books, there is a lot of information and I’ve forgotten most of it except for the 4 gems that have stuck with me for the last four or five years, and are applicable to blogging success.

For all the bloggers out there, here are the top 4 life coaching principles, taken straight from Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles.

1. Commit to Constant and Never-Ending Improvement

Your blog will never be done. Okay fine, maybe you’ll eventually stop blogging but it helps to maintain a belief and attitude that you’re in it for the long haul and that you’re not going to get it right the first time, or the second time, or the third time. So you might as well just keep improving.

Stolen from the halls of Toyota, our office regularly applies the principle of kaizen, a Japanese word for constant and never-ending improvement.

Without our commitment to kaizen, we would have quit a long time ago. We have redesigned our logo and slogan at least four times. Our homepage has been redesigned more than five times (and it still needs a lot of work). And I have spent countless hours kaizening our lead generation landing pages. But the tweaks and improvements are necessary to survive in the ever-changing landscape of the Internet.

You can always improve your writing, optimize your landing pages, create better products, get more followers, and ultimately, make more money. So before you hang your hat and say “that’s good enough”, why don’t you sleep on it one more time and see what improvements you can come up with tomorrow.

2. Practice the Rule of 5

Practicing the rule of 5 is about getting things done. It means completing 5 things everyday that move you towards your goals. But not just anything. You need to complete the right things.

If you are like me, you have a list of to-dos that is longer than a full roll of toilet paper. To combat the never-ending to-dos, get into the habit of asking yourself:

“What 5 things can I do today that will help me achieve my goals?”

When I’m feeling overwhelmed repeating the mantra “do more, do more”, I stop doing what I’m doing and check in with my list of priorities. I know there are always five little things that I can do that would be particularly beneficial to moving me towards my goals. When it comes to blogging, usually that means reaching out and contacting five other people.

I’m naturally a product-centric, introverted person. I like to focus on the things that I have control over like spreadsheets and word docs. Going out and talking to other people is like walking into the great unknown. But you know what, it takes very little time to reach out and send an email to someone and the results can be amazing.

There’s always someone you can praise and compliment, send an invitation to, or simply say hello. Try it today. Drop me a note at stephan[at]noomii.com. I’d love to hear from you.

3. Stay Focused on Your Core Genius

A leading positive psychology researcher and colleague of mine, Dr. Robert Biswas-Diener, once gave me a sail boat metaphor for looking at your strengths and weaknesses.

Think of your strengths as the sails and your weaknesses as little cracks in the hull. The smallest cracks can be left alone but bigger ones need to be patched or you’ll sink. But no matter how well you patch the holes, you’ll never go very far without a big sail to captures the winds.

In the context of blogging, there are a number of strategies that you can use to be successful. If you’re an amazing writer, do more of that. If you’re the idea generator, offload the writing to others. If you are a power networker, do more of that and avoid the things that slow you down.

Not sure what your strengths are? Take the VIA Strengths survey. You’ll be asked to register an account but it’s free.

4. Hire a Personal Coach

Let’s face it, most bloggers have the luxury of sitting at home in their underwear. What’s missing is human accountability and support: someone to hold your feet to the fire, be a sounding board, and to challenge your assumptions.

Jack Canfield recommends that you hire a coach and if you have the commitment and cashflow to justify working with a professionally trained expert, that’s great. There is no official governing body that licenses coaches but an experienced life coach, business coach, or career coach with proper coach training can be worth their weight in gold.

Like professional athletes, if you want to be at the top of your game, you need an outside perspective to help you perform better than you could on your own.

Coming from a cost-conscious, frugal, startup-minded environment, I am constantly looking to do more with less. To support others in their quest to success, my business partner and I are developing an 8-week paper-based program that you and a friend can follow to coach each other. It’s like having a gym buddy for all of your business and personal goals. Email me at stephan at noomii dot com if you are interested in a copy.

Summary: The Top 4 Life Coaching Principles

So there you have it, straight from Jack Canfield’s finger tips, 4 time-tested principles that you can apply to your blogging efforts:

1. Commit to Constant and Never-Ending Improvement
2. Practice the Rule of Five
3. Stay Focused on Your Core Genius
4. Hire a Personal Coach

If you are a keener, here is the full table of contents of The Success Principles:

Do any of these jump out at you? Leave a comment and tell us which principles work for you and how you apply them.

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Stephan Wiedner

Stephan Wiedner is the co-founder of Noomii.com, the Professional Business Coach Directory, that matches people with their ideal life or business coach. View all posts by Stephan Wiedner