Last Lecture

I have enjoyed my business class of learning different ideas in being an Entrepreneur this past semester. I learned many different points of views throughout the 14 weeks that will be life lessons in my personal business module and implement in my future. I feel I learned the most from reading the book “The Ministry of Business.” I loved how this book talked about many things that I like to have my personal and business life to model. First and foremost, having my Heavenly Father involved in all my dealings. I feel my family is blessed because I involved “Him” in my life. I also feel that everyone of us must have a mentor to look up to. If we have no one to implement after and use valuable things we learned from them and improve from what mistakes they made and learned from, then we will not become better. Most important is that financial fitness will help everyone be able to not be enslaved to debt. Debt controls us and if continue to let it control us, we will never have control of what we really want and dream in our lives. When we are free, we then can give back to our communities and help those in need. I feel that being an entrepreneur and bringing life to your ideas you have had in your mind come into fruition because you made a product or have an amazing idea to improve something, will help our world. Good entrepreneurs are needed and wanted. If I have anything to give to others for advice, would find happiness in what you want to be and do for a job/career. If you are not happy, you will never realize your dreams! I found my happiness, luckily when I was younger in being a Realtor. I love helping others and understand my industry well. I also can have my own schedule and my income is based on what I want to put into my business with my time management. I know when we have joy in our daily lives and live life to the fullest by what we enjoy, you will be so happy.

Attitude of Gratitude

This week I learned a lot about finding happiness in what we want in a job. We had many videos and examples this week that talked about this specific topic. The best one I liked was President Thomas S. Monson that we need to have Attitude of Gratitude. I feel that this is a vital part we need in all our lives. If we do not have Gratitude, I feel we will not have happiness and joy in our lives. We have so many people in our lives that have touched our lives in so many ways. I am grateful that I have come across these kinds of people in my lives that taught me so many things that modeled me to be me. My parents, my young women leaders, my co-workers, my friends, my neighbors and my husband. I pray that I can be the kind of example to teach my children the right way to be grateful for what they have learned in life and most importantly that they know their Heavenly Father loves them. As President Monson, said, we need to be grateful for our mothers and fathers, then teachers. I hope we have shown them the way to a grateful heart.

What is Business For?

This week in my Entrepreneurial class we read “What’s a Business For?” by Charles Handy. This book was quite an interesting read. It talked about how cooperate scandals are on the rise and like the book title- what is a business for? We were asked to answer some questions to the dilemma that is in the article below: Based on what you read in the first two pages, why are virtue and integrity so vital to an economy? I feel that rules are not being followed these days. It seems like everyone that runs a big company, is in it for themselves. It seems that CEO’s are not being honest. They are taking for their gain and trust is not like it used to be. Having trust in business, especially peoples trust, will make the consumer trust in the company more. I feel if running a business, you have to have your employees trust first, then the consumer/public. If you are genuine and real, others will believe in your company and product. According to Charles Handy, what is the real justification for the existence of businesses? The purpose of a business, is not to make a profit. IT is to make a profit so that the business can do something more or better. “That something” becomes the real justification for the business. Owners know this and investors do not care. What are two solutions proposed by Handy that you agree with and Why? I agree that the behavior needs to change in the coporate behavior and have a new vision. Companies are built to accomplish what others can’t do separately. Contributions is a motivating force. Footprints need to be set and purpose in life needs to be redefined. Creative is the key, spreading technology and raising productivity makes things affordable for the public and keeps costs down. Doing good is the answer!

Attitude of Money

This past week I read a great article called Attitude on Money by Stephen W. Gibson. He had some great insights and thoughts on how everyone looks at money differently. My instructor in my business class asked all his students to think of a couple of questions and give our answers below. What is my attitude on money? I would have to say that my attitude has changed dramatically the past year. I used to not want to talk at all about money, it actually scared me. I wanted to ignore it everyway that I possible could. We had a job loss and money wasn’t what it was, and I didn’t want to face reality and to find out we needed to have a budget. This was really hard for me. Now I think we need it to survive and to plan for our future. It is a necessity to get back on our feet financially and to have freedom this way in our lives. How can my view of money affect the way I live my life? Like I said above, we need to be prepared for a rainy day in our finances. We were and glad we did, but now we are rebuilding this goal again. These kind of feelings cause resentment and hurt. I want to be better in being positive with money and its benefits. What rules are recommended for prospering? Stephen Gibson gave the following 6 rules: 1. Seek the Lord and have hope in him; 2. Keep the commandments, that includes the temporal ones, tithing and fast offerings; 3. Think about money and plan how you can become self-reliant 4. Take advantage of chances for learning so you will not be ignorant of these matters. Education is the Key to Opportunity (President Hinkley); 5. Learn the laws upon which the blessings of wealth are predicated; 6. Do not send away the naked, the hungry, the thirsty or the sick or those who are held captive.

Surround Yourself with Greatness!

In Ecclesiastes 4:9-12 it reads: Two are better than one; because they have a good reward for their labour. For they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up. Again, if two lie together, then they have heat: but how can one be warm alone? And if one prevail against him, two shall withstand him; and a threefold cord is not quickly broken. Reading the Hero’s Journey this week in chapter 4 I learned-How can I build up myself and others? I need to ask these questions: Do I have companions who will help “keep me awake” on the journey? Where is my most dangerous blind spot? What has kept me from overcoming this weakness? How can I overcome it or compensate for it? How can I enlist the aid of someone who is strong in areas where I am weak? I need faithful companions who help me on my journey. Am I such a companion to others? How can I protect and nurture the relationships I already have? During hard times- who would continue to stand by me? Who will run?

Leadership with having the gospel

I really enjoyed the Leadership with a small “L” talk that Kim B. Clark gave at BYU in December 2007. I wanted to keep his thoughts he shared to reflect often on how to be a better leader in my life, when I have the Lord as my example. The Savior’s life is full of wonderful examples and powerful principles of just this kind of leadership. I would like to share with you today three principles of leadership that are important in any place you will work, but are especially powerful in leading a family. I know that all of you will need these principles in your lives. Principle #1: Lead by Example The Savior established this principle when He said, “what manner of men ought ye to be? Verily I say unto you, even as I am.”2 One of the most important things that leaders do is what they do. In your family, your most powerful influence on your children will be the example of your life. That example includes the actions that you take and the principles and values that guide you. Your children will watch you very, very closely. They will learn from you and follow your example—(eventually!). This is wonderful news! It means that you can lead your children in the paths of righteousness. I know you all want your children to be obedient and faithful, to love the Lord, to have the Spirit in their lives, to receive their temple blessings, to build an eternal family, and to bless you with grandchildren! The best way to lead them in that path is to be in that path yourselves. You teach your children to obey the commandments of God by keeping the commandments of God. It is important to talk with them and tell them what you are doing and why. But it is in the doing that there is real power to shape their lives. If you want to teach them to love the temple and to see its power and importance, put pictures of the temples on your walls, have lessons about the temple in family home evening, and go to the temple often. In this, and every other gospel principle, your life can be a living model of what you want your children to be. Principle #2: Lead with Vision The Savior used this principle all throughout His ministry on earth, and He uses it now. On many, many occasions he prefaced a parable with the words, “The kingdom of heaven is like . . .”3 and then He would connect a principle from familiar day-to-day life with salvation in His kingdom. He always held before His disciples, and holds before us, the ultimate purpose of our work and our lives. He gives us the vision of what we should do in our daily lives and what we might accomplish eternally if we will follow Him. One of the most important things that leaders do is to help the people they lead understand the larger meaning and purpose of their daily work. In your family this means teaching your children how cleaning their rooms, doing their homework, keeping the commandments, and learning to love each other is connected to exaltation in the celestial kingdom as an eternal family. It means filling your home with the Spirit. It means putting pictures of the Savior on the wall along with pictures of your family and teaching your children the connection between them and the Savior. But it may also mean leading your family through times of grief and pain caused by death or illness. It may mean teaching them and showing them that staying the course, moving forward despite the pain, is deeply connected to your family’s eternal destiny. Principle #3: Lead with Love The Savior’s life, suffering, and death are testimony of His perfect love for us. Everything He has done for us, He has done because of His great love for His Father and His perfect love for us. There is a powerful principle of leadership in John’s words about the Savior’s love: “We love him, because he first loved us.”4 Effective small “L” leaders learn to energize the people around them through love in action. To you mothers and fathers and prospective mothers and fathers, the very most important thing you can do for your children is to love each other and support each other and help each other become everything Heavenly Father wants you to be. You stand before God and your children as husband and wife, father and mother, equal partners in the sacred responsibility of creating an eternal family. As the leaders of your family and faithful disciples of Christ, you will put love into action. You will care for your children and nurture them. Every week in family home evening you will teach them to love and serve one another and to keep the commandments God. You will support them and encourage them and love them enough to put structure and discipline in their lives. You will pray with them and read the scriptures with them every day. You will lead them with love. In conclusion, I would like to leave you with a request and my testimony. Here is the request: When you leave here today, please take the Spirit of Ricks with you. Please take BYU–Idaho and what it means and what it stands for with you. You now represent the university. I hope and pray that wherever you go, whatever you do, the people around you will see in you the principles and the purposes of BYU–Idaho and will feel the Spirit that is on this campus.

Becoming a Great Entrepreneur

This past week I have learned so much about entrepreneurship in business. I have always loved the Mormon message that Jeffrey R. Holland talked about his life back as a young father and being postponed on his trip to go across country for a new pursuit in life. Twice he was delayed with his old car and almost the same place. He learned he needed to make a change in what he was doing, and the change was a new radiator in his car. This made me think that in business we are always learning and growing, and this makes us better in our pursuit in being the best we can be. I also learned some great thoughts I want to remember from the book “A Heroes Journey” by Jeff Sandefer. “When faced with problems, are you willing to try?” “Focus on your purpose, not on the present darkness. Remember your dream!” Being an entrepreneur is not an easy task and to be successful right off the bat in starting a business. Starting your business will be more downs then ups at first, but I learned that best thing is not to give up on your first hardship, your second or even your fiftieth. We don’t succeed, if not always learning and becoming better.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People Takeaways

I loved learning this past week about the summary of 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Steven R. Covey. His 7 Habits are: 1. Be Proactive 2. Being with the end in mind 3. First things first 4. Think Win Win 5. Seek to Understand and seek to be understood 6. Create Synergy 7. Sharpen the Saw. I would like to focus on the part I liked best the week, habit #7 Habit # 7 is: Taking Time to Sharpen the Saw In other words, don’t get so busy sawing that you don’t realize you are using a blunt saw. Take the time on a regular basis to sharpen your saw in the physical, spiritual, mental and social or emotional dimensions. Supporting Ideas Sharpening the saw involves four separate dimensions 1. Physical exercise – Spending a minimum of 30 minutes per day exercising will vastly improve the quality of the remaining hours every day. Exercise on a regular basis will preserve and enhance your capacity to work and adapt and enjoy. Exercise is rarely ever urgent, you have to be proactive and set your own standard. You also find as you exercise, you will experience a paradigm shift of your own self image. 2. Spiritual – Renewing the spiritual dimension provides leadership to your life. It is highly related to Habit 2. The spiritual dimension is at the very core of your value system, drawing upon the sources that inspire and uplift you. People draw spiritual strength in many different ways. Rather than concentrating on how this should be done, the key principle is to make sure it is being refreshed frequently in your own life. Immersion in great literature or music can provide spiritual renewal for some people. So too can time spent alone communicating with nature. Everyone has different needs, and draw upon different wells of spiritual strength. This is a definite Quadrant 2 activity. It is rarely ever urgent - we usually have to make time for spiritual renewal on a regular basis. The idea is to take the time to draw on the leadership center of our lives. As we consider our battles in the larger context, we can draw renewed strength for the challenges at hand. A personal mission statement can be very important to spiritual renewal. We can take this time to recommit ourselves to our center and purpose in life. We can mentally live out events before they actually occur. We can achieve our private victories before our actions ever move into the public gaze. 3. The mental dimension – Formal education teaches the processes of mental development, study discipline, exploration of new subjects, analytical thought and expressive writing. Many people trade the classroom for the TV set as the basis of their thinking when they leave school. Habit 3 gave the basis for developing the self-discipline to ignore TV and instead develop serious study programs around new subjects. Television is a good servant but a poor master.

Mastery

What is your Mastery? I have been reading the book “Mastery” by George Leonard. The last couple weeks in my readings, I have pulled out a couple of thoughts that I really liked from George Leonard. Here are couple things that I enjoyed reading: “Are we getting ahead of ourselves when we hit plateaus? We have many flaws. We are working hard, doing the best we can to improve our skills. Ambition is always there but is tamed. We need to make progress. Are we dedicated in our process to get where we need to go? What is our truest happiness? It’s the time when all the crap goes away.” “Goals and contingencies, as I’ve said are important. But they exist in the future and the past, beyond the pale of the sensory realm. Practice, the path of mastery, exists only in the present. You can see it, hear it, smell it feel it. To love the plateau is to love the eternal now, to enjoy the inevitable spurts of progress and the fruits of accomplishment, then serenely to accept the new plateau that waits just beyond them. To love the plateau is to love what is most essential and enduring in your life.”

Be the Best you can Be

This week I have learned a lot about being successful as an entrepreneur. I really enjoyed an article by Jeff Sandefer that was called Are successful entrepreneurs born or made? A couple of things he mentioned about skills I really liked. He said “It helps to be born with an engaging personality,” the man who had built a fortune in rent houses added. “But that’s no substitute for knocking on door after door and every time you are turned down, having the courage to knock again. Sales is a matter of learning about human nature, yours and theirs, through trial and error.” A list of important skills soon followed: “The ability to find good salespeople and manage a sales force.” “Having a firm grasp of which numbers are important.” “Knowing how to put together an assembly line or service delivery process.” More skills were added to the list: • “Being able to communicate clearly.” • “Listening and questioning customers.” • “Being a problem solver; thinking.” • “Being curious enough to uncover and unravel the strategies of competitors.” I feel to be successful is exactly what he mentioned above. I want to take these thoughts and use in my future business plan. I also enjoyed in the video of Heroes Journey, speaker Jeff Sandefer, this week as well. He said “if you give up measuring your self to others, you will be successful.” He also said to be hero, you must deice to be a person who gets, rather than a person who says I can’t- you can!” I want to be a doer and stop having excuses in my life of why I can’t- I can do anything I put my mind to in my life and goals.

Setting Goals for the Future

This past week, I have finished the Book, The Ministry of Business. I learned so much in this book to help me really work on setting my life goals. I have really struggled the last couple years on setting goals. I know that I used to thrive on setting my goals on a monthly basis. Life threw several curve balls to my family and I, and I didn’t keep my eye on things that would help my family be stronger- which was my daily tasks, short term goals, long term goals and governing goals. This book helped me realize that I needed to set these goals back up in my life and remember who I am. I look forward to the changes I will have set in front of me and will meet or supersede them by leaps and bounds. The other point I enjoyed from this book was remembering to giving back. I will work on giving back to my community by finding ways to serve. I will find a cause I believe and love and will help make the cause successful. I can be a part of making a difference in the world and I look forward to finding the cause soon.

Always learning

Reflect upon the things that you are learning and experiencing so far in this course. What are you looking forward to learning and experiencing? What did you learn from the readings and videos this week? I have learned a lot this past week of class. I really enjoyed reading about Yesil Magdelena. She had gained knowledge throughout her life. Ways that she did this was first in her education. She got her Masters degree in Engineering and then improved herself every couple years in her career by working in different companies and improving her knowledge, making the companies better and then leaving the companies better than she found them. She was a very sought out person that many wanted to employee and she got what she demanded in these jobs. I also enjoyed reading this week in the Ministry of Business. I enjoyed chapter six and the take away I had this week was that we can be financial independent. We do not need to be rich but be self-reliant. When we are self-reliant, we do not owe anyone, and we become free from our masters of debt. Financial freedom is a stepping stone toward greater goals and then we can focus on serving others. I learned that I can do these couple steps and work more faithfully on my budget with my husband and it needs to start now and not later.

This past week, I have learned a lot through setting my goals in my life, yet to happen. I really enjoyed reading the first three chapters of the book “The ministry of business.” I learned a lot about making business decisions in my life. I need to go to my husband in my business decisions. In the past I did not do this often. The past year, I have been opening to my spouse about how to help me in decisions that I needed a second opinion. He has been very helpful in opening my mind. I look forward to going to him in all my business decisions as well as our family decisions and not do decisions on my own. I am noticing our relationship is becoming stronger each day because I am not trying to do things on my own. I also enjoyed reading some insight from Randy Pausch. I read his book 11 years ago and really enjoyed his insight on life. He had so many dreams from being a child. He succeeded in many of dreams because his parents allowed him to dream. I liked how he told about writing on the walls in his home his goals and dreams and they were still up on their wall when he was a grown adult. I feel that dreaming helps us become who we are in life. Without dreams, we would not get anywhere in our lives and have a future. I made the dream when I was young to be a mother and wife and my dream came into fruition 17 ½ years ago. I have three amazing children that give my husband and I a love we never imagined we could have. We all love being with each other and I couldn’t ask for more.

A New Start

I am starting a new season in my life. I am back to college after 15 years of motherhood through the early to pre-teen years of my children's life. They have been my pride and joy in life. I have also enjoyed doing so by my husbands side. I am a real estate broker and have been in the industry for 18 years. I am looking forward to this class to help revamp myself in my work and how to improve myself in being a better entrepreneur. I enjoyed the readings in my college class this week. It is helping me realize to not settle in my goals, but to dream big and pursue my dreams. I am one that does not go out of my comfort zone very easy. This class will help me achieve the dreams I have thought often on, but never acting towards them. I want my family and I to have our dreams and achieve our goals, then in my business. I liked reading, Living Life as an Entrepreneurial Hero by Jeff Sandefer. There was a quote from Marcus Aurelius "It's not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live." I hope I can change the past and move the future. In the end of my life, I want to be able to ask these three questions: 1. Did I accomplish something meaningful? 2. Was I a good person? 3. Who did I love and who loved me? I want to be the best person I can be and treat others kind and loving.