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Sales Talk Tuesdays

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Maybe I did not mention this before, but I work as an assistant sales manager to enhance sales team performance.

Because I love teaching so much, I started an initiative called “Sales Talk Tuesdays” in late 2019 where I gathered new hires with seasoned sales employees to openly talk about their experience now that they are in the field to support them and motivate them.

I used to think and come up with a topic every week. It was not easy. I did not use slides. However, what helped was using some tips from the book The Art of Gathering which taught me to prime the attendees with a cool invitation and set rules for the meeting and end it sweetly. So I always got some kind of desert like donuts or marshmallows (When I talked about the marshmallow test) for example. Unfortunately, we paused these sessions since 2020 quarantine, and I did not attempt to do them online.

Now that we are all back to work, I kicked off this initiative again with a more structured format that extends 5 weeks. I have created a unique material for each week. This way I can re-use it with each new group while also getting the chance to refine it. The material is not perfect, but it is evolving. I still need to create a feedback form where attendees can let me know what topics they wish I cover more of during these sessions.

I am happy about this initiative, it lets me show up at my best and I created it to make my job more meaningful, what can you do to make your job more meaningful?

Sales Talk Tuesdays

Money Beliefs Session Recap

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I just hosted a Live Instagram session today with a super financial coach to talk about money beliefs and how they define our relationship to money. It was such an energizing conversation.

I started the Live by saying ‘I love money so much’ and asking the audience how does that statement make them feel. It’s really funny that if we replaced money with Pizza, as Jen Senciro said in her awesome money beliefs shaker of a book “You Are a Badass at Making Money”, we wouldn’t feel a thing about the statement, but saying that we love money triggers many reactions, most of which are judgmental.

We also talked about the need to challenge our limiting money beliefs using the 3-legged chair method. We need to find three supporting pieces of evidence to have a limiting belief hold. Most times we wouldn’t be able to.


We defined the difference between rich and wealthy. Wealthy is what we want to be where we don’t make money in exchange for our time, but instead have passive sources of income supporting us.

Throughout the Live, we kept repeating our current favorite money mantra

“I love money and money loves me”.

Try it. It’s powerful.

Watch the Live session here (Arabic).

Money Beliefs Session Recap

The magic of accountability

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I recently committed to #tweet100 initiative by Jay Clause which entails posting daily on Twitter for 100 days. This challenge is the external accountability I needed to re-commit to show up and write daily here on my blog, afterward I share my posts in tweets. 10 Days in and proud.

I have not been reading parenting books like I used to, so my friends and I created a mini book club and chose one to read this month, which we plan to discuss in 2 Zoom sessions. This made reading parenting books more exciting for me.

I have been spending more money than I should on Kindle books, therefore I created a rule where I had to send my friend before any purchase, providing her with the name of the book and its price. This is a friction point that made the spending habit more difficult for me.


That’s what you need to do too to move your goals forward, join a tribe that has the same purpose as yours, or even better, lead the way and create one.

The magic of accountability

How do you lead the way?

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We lead the way by embodying and sharing a better way to work where we can get what matters done over what’s latest or loudest. This can happen when we recognize our human tendencies of avoiding pain and seeking pleasure, where pain is the discomfort we feel when we share our work like publishing this post or doing that presentation or being afraid to start or finish, or even feeling all our feelings, and pleasure is that Dopamine hit we get scrolling our social media feed away from the work we need to do.

We lead the way by living purposeful days, where we make tiny, consistent and meaningful progress in our wellbeing. We eat well and move and meditate and pray and get in touch with the most important people in our life and save money and make more money and keep learning.

We lead the way when we have an idea of how we want to be remembered and what impact we want to leave the world better for living in it.

We lead the way when we bring joy and lightheartedness wherever we go. And when we fall short, which we will do as humans, we stand up again.

We lead the way by believing in the power of starting over and making amends. We lead by giving second chances and setting boundaries to protect our mental health and energy. We lead by taking care of ourselves to be able to help others who need us to lean on. We lead by quitting the belief in sacrifice as a badge of honor and martyrdom in our role as mothers.

We also lead the way by being in service to others and shining a spotlight on their wins.

(Thank you Forwardlink for this prompt)

How do you lead the way?

This happens once this year.

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If you are on my social media, you would already know how excited I am about today. I got so excited that I sent a voice note to my favorite local Arabic radio station. Listen here.

It is the only Sunday in 2021 that also happens to be the beginning of a new month. This is very thrilling news for us humans according to studies. We love to start something on special days. It feels good to commit at the beginning of a new week, also the start of a new month, but when they coincide? The mix is magical, or it just me?

Continue reading “This happens once this year.” →
This happens once this year.

Stop waiting

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Stop waiting for them to accept you, to embrace you, to be proud of you, to love you.

Do you understand that by waiting, you are giving up the responsibility of your own happiness over to them? Don’t you get that life is too short to put happiness off? It is too precious to wait for someone to change to feel good about yourself.

They have their own issues. They can’t give you the love the way you want them to. It’s about them not you or your worth. You are worthy one hundred percent. This is what they know. This is probably their best. Maybe they even do love you but their way is so far from what you need.

Accept them. Love them. Embrace them. Forgive them. Wish them well. Don’t expect too much from them. Never miss out on life by waiting for them.

You can be happy now.

Stop waiting

Extra Long Sunsets

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Today happens to be the Summer Solstice of 2021, it is the longest day of the year, but oddly enough not the latest sunset of the year as I suspected.
Enjoy these extra pockets of sunshine as long as we have them. We don’t have them for long.
Hello 8 PMish sunsets.

Extra Long Sunsets

Perfectionism is misplaced creativity

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In his 5-day Beyond Perfect Challenge that ended yesterday, the author Jon Acuff came up with a new definition for perfectionism that I would like to share with you today.

Perfectionism is creativity with misplaced focus on fear instead of hope.

This is how it operates:

  • It avidly tries to protect us from failure and rejection and criticism.
  • It worries we wouldn’t be able to handle them if they take place.
  • It prevents us from starting new habits because then, it believes, we need to commit forever, which is impossible because life will get in the way, so why even start?
  • It complicates our goals to make them more perfect, so they would become unachievable.
  • It does not allow us to finish what we start because then we will need to show what we made to the world and get subjected to the above-mentioned failure or criticism.
  • It makes us imagine what might go wrong, but rarely lets us imagine what if it goes right.
  • It considers any achievement less than 100% as nothing.
  • It compares our beginning to someone else’s middle.
  • It causes us to burn out by believing perfect results are attainable.
  • It makes us focus on outcomes we can’t control rather than our efforts which we can control.
  • It believes in “the hard way or no way”.


This was some of what I learned from the generous information Jon shared in the challenge and from reading his book Finish . He’s offering a course and lifetime access to the challenge here if you are interested.

Perfectionism is misplaced creativity

Help

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You are in resistance mode to your new reality.
You want out.
You want to sleep and wake up to a world with this new reality having vanished in thin air.You can’t believe this is how it going to be from now on. You don’t think you can take it. It’s too much to live in a world where this new reality happened. You wonder “Is it even OK to keep living normally now after this happened?”.

Everything reminds you of what you lost or about to lose. Your new reality. You try to escape it with denial. You act as if no new reality took place. But your body acts up with ugly habits, you eat too much or sleep too much or smoke too much. The dread is still there. The grieving. The regrets. They are not going away. You want to feel in control again, as if you ever were. You want yesterday back, before you knew what you know now. Before you made that decision that will cost you for years to come.

Then it hits you. You realize nothing you do will change what happened. This is your new world.

You still find it hard to go on. You need a new kind of strength you feel you don’t have.

So you look up or, if it makes you more comfortable, you look within, and ask for help.

You ask for help to wake up in the morning and function. You ask for help to be able to see things differently because you still can’t. You ask for help to remember there is so much good in the world to warm your heart of ice. You ask for help to remember you are loved and lovable no matter what mistakes you made. You ask for help to contribute again and give back to the beautiful people in your path.

You believe your call for help is received the instant it leaves your lips. You trust that help is on the way. You accept your new reality.

Help

Gratitude Note

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This is a note of gratitude for the end of this unconventional school year. For homework-free weekends and evenings. For zero notifications from Google Classroom. For quiet parents’ WhatsApp groups. For possibilities and a real hope this is the last time our kids go through this kind of remote learning.

We did it.

Thank you teachers so much, you learned so many new skills in no time to keep the learning process as smooth as possible for our kids. Thank you for your massive efforts and patience with us.

Thank you my dear parents in law for taking care of our kids during their online school hours while we were at work and especially for the delicious meals.

My dear kids, I am so proud of you both. We went through so many ups and downs together, because while I love to teach what I learn, I found it so hard to teach you what you learn, especially in the first semester, when online teaching was so foreign to us all. Thank you for bearing with me as I learned what worked best for you and your energy levels and rhythms. Thank you dear daughter for being responsible and managing your classes while I was at work.

I love you both and cherish you. Summer break here we come.

Gratitude Note