 of life. When you want to thrive, you know that you need discipline, right? So, for example, if you want a physically healthy body, you need the disciplines of eating nutritionally, exercising regularly, sleeping enough and having loving positive relationships. Well, when it comes to your business, there are also a set of disciplines and I want to share with them with you in this short video. So, here are the seven disciplines of an authentic business. If you build these in, you will have a much better chance of having an authentic and successful and thriving business. So, the first discipline is, let me just name the seven real quick and I'll talk about each one very briefly. Joyful productivity, consistent content creation, collaborations, paid distribution of your content, audience research and offer rhythm and customer feedback. So, let me quickly talk about this. One is joyful productivity. So, joyful productivity includes all of your self-care practices like sleeping, eating well, exercising, all that stuff, but it also very importantly includes this practice of reframing every day that you work and every moment that you work. So, instead of working to say, oh, I'm just trying to get this done, it's not a very positive attitude doing your work, you say, how can I bring a little bit more virtue into this moment of work? Whether, how can I bring a little bit more love into doing this video? Or, how can I bring a little bit more diligence into doing this bookkeeping, whatever? How can I bring a little bit more joy into doing this administration work or whatever work it is? Don't just get stuff done, bring a little bit more some spirit into whatever you're doing and that's a very important part of joyful productivity. So, that's, joyful productivity is a whole set of skills, but that's the first discipline of authentic business. The second discipline is having a consistent content creation rhythm. If you're not creating content consistently, what are you doing? And I say this in a loving way because content creation is not just about, oh, you can grow an audience eventually and then sell stuff. No, content creation has a much more profound purpose to it. When you create content consistently, you are exercising your muscle of creativity and you are also getting smarter in your field. Now, you might say, well, George, I'm getting smarter by working with my clients, but yes, you work with your clients, but how do you reflect on the lessons from working with those clients? Creating content is the best way to reflect on those lessons. You create content to say, here's what I'm learning as I work with my clients and that of course gets you more interest in people working with you as well. So, that's why I create content consistently because it helps me get smarter. It helps me stay in the game for my creativity and being better in my field. The third discipline is collaboration. This is something I don't talk about often enough and I'm going to talk about this more and more going forward. This is actually how I built my business from the beginning. When I first started in 2009, I had no audience. I had no network. I had no products and services, but I had the intuition. I had the instinct to start collaborating right away. So, whatever level you're at, even if you're just starting out, you need to start collaborating right away. Collaborating is as simple as connecting with another startup business owner, someone who is brand new. If you're brand new, connect with others who are brand new and talk, practice sharing what products you might want to create, what marketing message you might want to say, and by practicing that with other startup business owners, you get more clear and you see your position in the marketplace. If you already have an audience, you'd better be collaborating because that's how you grow your audience by collaborating with others who already have an audience, et cetera, et cetera. So, collaboration is very important. I'm going to be talking about that more and more. I actually have an online course coming up. If you want to learn collaborations with me and collaborate with other people in my course, let me know if you want to sign up for that course. It's $75. I think it's quite affordable and you learn the ins and outs of collaboration in a very simple way and you get to practice it. Collaboration is a third discipline. The fourth discipline is paid distribution of your content. Did you just think you could just make Instagram videos or YouTube videos or Facebook videos and suddenly you have people following you? It usually doesn't work like that. It usually requires some kind of paid distribution. That's why I run Facebook ads all the time. I run Instagram ads. I am going to be running YouTube ads soon and Google ads as well. But this is how you really grow an audience with content is by using paid distribution and with collaborations too. Collaborations is an alternative to paid distribution. But if you can learn both and use both, it's even better. So, that's the fourth one is paid distribution of your content like Facebook ads, for example. The fifth discipline is audience research. Because how do you know what service and products you should be offering unless you have an intimate understanding of your audience? And to get that intimate understanding, you look at their profile, social media profiles, you can do that, but you should really have a one-on-one conversation with your audience members as many as you are able to schedule in. And in that one-on-one conversation, you ask them what have they purchased in the realm of what you offer, what kind of stuff they have they purchased in the realm of what you offer. And as you understand what they've spent their money on, you understand your market because your market is literally what your audience spends money on. That's your market. The more intimately you understand your market, the more you're able to shape your product and services to meet what gaps that they have are in the market, what they're not finding that's ideal for them yet, et cetera. You get to fill those gaps. You get to read. And as you fill those gaps, when you sell anything, all you have to do is whisper and people buy. So, that's audience research, very important. The sixth discipline is having a rhythm of offerings, meaning selling enough so that your audience knows what you offer. So many of you create content, that's wonderful, but you're not selling enough. And when I say selling enough, I don't mean making a hard sell or anything. I just mean reminding your audience of what you offer. A lot of you aren't doing this enough. My recommendation is to have one kind of selling thing or reminding of what you offer, one out of every five to 10 content pieces that you put out there. And that's my rhythm. If you go to my Facebook business page, which is where the headquarters or where my content is, you can see that for every once a week, I create seven pieces of content a week, one out of those seven is asking my audience to either buy something or asking them about surveying them about something I'm about to sell. So, it's a very gentle, it's a very invitational, it's a very friendly approach and it works. So, an offer rhythm is very important. And then finally, the seventh discipline is customer feedback. Do you have a rhythm to get feedback from your clients, from your customers about how it's going with your services and your products? If you don't, you can't really improve on it. And I'm obsessive about getting customer feedback. The students in my courses, I always ask them, how can I improve the clients that I work with? I keep asking them after every session. It's an automated email that goes out because I use acuity scheduling. That's a software I use to schedule my appointments. And I could set up an automated follow up email and in that automated email, I ask them, hey, how did it go with the session? How can I improve? And I always get, I don't get a reply for every single time. But I do get enough where I understand how I can improve all the time. So, those are the seven disciplines. You may want to watch this video again to get those seven. And I hope you're working with your own coach on these seven disciplines. And if you're interested in working with me personally on it, I'm going to be opening my group coaching program for the next year. In the next couple months, I'll be opening it. And in my group coaching program, I work with each participant to work out their seven disciplines on a consistent basis. I keep following up with them throughout the whole year. So if you're interested in that, you can let me know and I can add you to the waiting list for when my group program opens. But otherwise, I really hope that you'll, no matter what, you'll work on these seven disciplines because that's how you're going to sustain a business that actually you love and that you can grow and thrive in that business. I hope this is helpful and I look forward to any comments and questions that you may have. All right, be well.