Monthly Archives: March 2022

13 Easy Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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You’re going to have to free yourself of magical thinking if you want to start selling more copies of your books. Why? Wishing that you’d sell more books won’t get you book sales. It’s not enough just to want to sell your books. You have to take smart actions. This might help. Think of selling books as another artform, of sorts, a measurable artform.

Furthermore, selling books is a mix of online and offline marketing and promotion. That is, unless you plan to only focus on selling books through a single retailer like Kobo, Apple Books or Amazon. If you want to go wide, you’ll want to list your books with a wide range of online and offline bookstores and retailers.

Work with Book Distributors to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

Another action that you’ll want to take is to list your books with a broad range of book distributors. Ingram, Baker and Taylor, Bella Distribution, Heritage Group Distribution, CBL Distribution, Casemate and Publishers Group West are among dozens of book distributors. If you’re new to the book world, distributors get your books to online and offline bookstores and other retailers.

Because of the role that they fill, book distributors are as close to a must as you may get if you want to go wide and start selling more copies of your books. Therefore, entering into a contract with legitimate book distributors is an early step in the book sales process. Want to keep yourself honest? Create a spreadsheet and track which book distributors you contact, including the date and form of outreach (email, telephone, snail mail, etc.) that you use to introduce your books to distributors. Follow-up with distributors you haven’t heard from.

Before you reach out to book distributors, create a marketing strategy. For example, your marketing strategy might highlight social media marketing efforts, including the number of social media followers your literary accounts have. Other items you could include are scheduled book signings, public speaking events, scheduled book club discussions and the numbers of books you’ve already sold.

Although these aren’t part of the 13 easy ways to be start selling more copies of your books, they are keys to early and ongoing book success. For starters, write a great story. If you’re writing nonfiction, do sufficient research and lay discoveries out in an easy-to-understand way.

Due Your Due Diligence

After all, it’s what’s inside the front and back flaps of your book that readers most want. So, nail the book writing part. To ensure that you pull this off, make sure that an experienced and talented book editor reads your manuscript before you publish it. Another tip is to run a spell and grammar check on your manuscript, even before you send it off to a skilled book editor. Working with an editor who is familiar with the type of book you wrote (mystery/suspense, romance, science fiction, etc.) can yields great results.

Next, create an engaging synopsis, book title and book cover. Don’t skimp on these actions. They will play a direct role in your book marketing efforts and your book sales. Here’s another tip that I want to share with you.

Years of book marketing has taught me the importance of researching book editors, book publicity specialists and book marketing services before a deal is inked. The last experience that you want to have is discovering that you just paid two or three times more than you needed to for editing, cover design or book marketing services. You also don’t want to ink a deal with a specialist who does shoddy work.

Hence, do your due diligence. You’ll thank yourself later.

Easy Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

And, now for those 13 easy ways to start selling more copies of your books. Steps shared in this article deal with promoting a book that you want to market and sell online and offline.

  1. Create a website that you’re committed to updating at least weekly – Years ago, you could have simply designed an author website to sell books on and walked away, letting the website pull in book buyers. Those days may be over. To keep your author website relevant, update it no less than once a week. Ways that you could do this are to add a daily writing tip or fact about a character from one of your novels to the author website. Or, you could add a quote from one of your characters to your author website. Just commit to updating a data point at your website once a week or more. And, add strong meta data like targeted keywords to your website.
  2. Start a book blog – At this blog, you could write about book conferences, book festivals and book signings that you’ve recently attended or that you’re planning to attend. You could also share insights that are related to your latest book. Another step that you could take is to post feature interviews with other writers at your blog. As with your author website, the point is to keep the blog updated. In fact, you could link your blog to your author website and keep both updated with this one easy step. That’s what I do at chistell.com. This single, easy step pulls in thousands of potential book buyers a week at chistell.com.

Additional Ways to Start Selling More Copies of Your Books

  1. Send postcards and direct mail to bookstore buyers – Even further, build relationships with bookstore buyers. These relationships can make it easier for you to get your new books into bookstores months from now. To keep these relationships healthy, consider sending book buyers (including library book buyers) holiday greetings.
  2. Reach out to military exchanges through organizations like RangeMe to see if you can sell your books at military stores.
  3. Teach a course at a local college. Ask if you can sell and sign your books at the end of the course.
  4. Schedule and conduct podcast and radio interviews – Yet don’t just conduct interviews. Make sure that you interview on podcasts and radio stations that pull in your book’s target audience.
  5. Design a literary newsletter – Building a newsletter can help you to develop your own mailing list. Consider adding a free newsletter subscription form to your author website. Items to include in your literary newsletter are diverse, ranging from feature author interviews to book reviews to upcoming book events to discounts to holiday messages. Sign up for The Book Lover’s Haven to get a feel for more of what you could do with a literary newsletter.
  6. Attend book events – It’s true. You could sell thousands of copies of your books online, without leaving home. However, it’s also true that getting outside and attending book events is a great way to introduce your books to new readers. In fact, you could sell dozens of books at book conferences, book fairs and festivals.

Even More Ways to Gain Book Sales

  1. Use Sign-Up Sheets – When you attend book events, bring sign-up sheets with you. Let people know what you’re using the sheets for. As an example, you could use a sign-up sheet to grow your literary newsletter subscriber list. You could also use a sign-up sheet to email in-person event attendees information about your books, including how to order copies of your e-books.
  2. Feature your books on book promotion websites. Again, do your due diligence before you pay for services at book promotion websites.
  3. Do newsletter cross-promotions with other authors whose books are in the same genre as your books.
  4. Newsletter book market services – Pay for newsletter book marketing services. Make sure that you work with newsletters that have a high open-rate. It may not do you much good to pay for an ad in a newsletter that boast 10,000 subscribers but only has a 3% open rate. Also, work with services that have tapped into your book’s target audience.
  5. Zone in on Social Media – Just 10 to 15 minutes a day on social media can increase your book sales. Test different social media sites to discover which sites generate the best return for your books. Also, pay attention to what days of the week and times of the day are best to post book marketing material. Examples of this material are book covers, book reviews and book quotes.

Amazon Ads and Selling Books

Other actions that you could take to start selling books are to add your book cover, book title and author website URL to your email signature line. Definitely ask family and friends to tell people they know about your books. Reaching out to school book buyers is another way that you could generate book sales.

If you’re promoting a book that sells on Amazon, consider taking out Amazon ads, namely sponsored product ads. You could also build an Amazon store to introduce your entire line of books to readers. But don’t just start Amazon ads. Budget for the ads. Study relevant keywords. Be patient during this process, as this isn’t a quick process. Take your time and find dozens of relevant keywords. You also might find success with relevant Amazon ad categories.

Stay Motivated

It could take one to three weeks to start seeing results from your ads. So, keep your daily spend low or no more than $5 a day when you start working with ads. Download and review monthly reports until you start to notice which keywords, categories and similar products are working to bring in book sales.

Above all, don’t be dreamy about this. In fact, don’t be dreamy about any part of the book marketing process. It’s work. There’s nothing magical about it. Before long, you’ll witness the link between your efforts and the results that you’re seeing. Should a step not yield good results, consider altering a part of the action or replacing the action (in-store book signings, discussion board link shares, etc.) with another action.

Keep at it. There are readers waiting to read great books!

How to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Major life changes can happen absent warning, creating a painful internal struggle. Because of this, it’s advantageous to learn how to manage stress and avoid burnout. It’s also important to stay open, flexible and willing to try techniques that work for you.

A sense of hope, peace and happiness are byproducts of effective stress management. Even more, effective stress management could help you to achieve and maintain hormonal balance. Why? When you’re stressed, your body can get flooded with hormones. To bring the point across, it may help to think of stress in visual terms.

What’s Stress

Toward that end, Loud Cloud Health shares that stress is referred to as “any situation that causes a biological reaction”. Imagine seeing stress as a “situation”. That alone may help you to see just how many events in your day could be causing stress. To start, there’s the morning and evening commute, school assignments, work projects, health challenges, bills to pay, relationship strains, family obligations and tight schedules.

That’s a lot to juggle.

Left unchecked, stress impacts every bodily system. For example, stress can weaken the immune system. It can also produce increased cortisol which, in turn, can cause inflammation. If you’ve ever dealt with achy joints, you know what it feels like to deal with inflammation.

Inflammation can also cause dental and back pain. Live with stress too long without adequate relief intervals, and digestive and cardiovascular systems could suffer. In a nutshell, “Our bodies are well equipped to handle stress in small doses, but when that stress becomes long-term or chronic, it can have serious effects on your body,” according to the American Psychological Association.

Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

Additional symptoms caused by burnout and stress include shortness of breath, forgetfulness (grief can affect memory too – I could write a book about that), nausea, dizziness, constipation and headaches. But, you don’t need to be convinced that prolonged or chronic stress isn’t good for the human body. You already know this. The trick is how to effectively manage stress.

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Another reward is to find effective ways to live a full, rewarding life without running into burnout. Admittedly, pulling that off isn’t always a walk in the park. Today’s work world can easily push you into a 50+ hour workweek. Before you know it, deep sleep has become an odd and rare treat. Worse, a crammed lifestyle can let stress sneak up on you.

Symptoms That Show You Need to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

Talking about stress being sneaky, here are a few signs that you could be headed for stress or burnout:

  • You’ve become cynical. Spotting mistakes and wrongdoings at work could become second-nature should you reach the cynical stage. This is when complaining becomes “what you do”.
  • Just the thought of going to work feels like a burden.
  • Focusing and concentrating is like running a marathon. Concentrating and focusing is just hard to do once you enter burnout.
  • There’s no reward associated with your job that seems to be “enough”.
  • Turning to external substances like alcohol or food has become an easy “escape”.
  • Family and friends comment that you have become short, argumentative, judgmental or hard to be around.
  • And sleep – what’s that? Getting a good night of sleep is something that you may not have done in weeks.

Options to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

Below are a few ways that you could start managing stress and avoiding burnout. If you already use stress help techniques, see if any of the below actions resonate.

Combining one or more of the following self-care stress relief techniques to your existing routine could help even more. Fortunately, this may apply whether you’re dealing with stress at home, while visiting family or at work.

  • Practice Awareness – Notice how you are feeling. Even more, notice when you are experiencing early stress symptoms. As tempting as it may seem, stay free of turning away from what you’re really feeling. After all, if you get into the habit of turning away from what you’re feeling, you might start to believe that you’re merely irritated when you’re outraged. Or you might think that you’re just a little tired when you’re frustrated or entering early depression. Let this happen and you might not spot stress symptoms early enough to curb them before they get stronger.
  • Change Routines – Alter plans and change routines once you become aware that these routines and plans cause you to feel stressed. As an example, instead of saying “yes” each time a relative, colleague or friend ask you to babysit, work on a community project or help with an event at the worship center that you may attend, set healthy boundaries. If you’re like me, it may take several tries before you start to become comfortable with setting healthy boundaries and telling people that you’re not going to fulfill their request.

More Burnout and Stress Support Options

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  • Deepen Loving Relationships – Depending on how you deal with stress, this one could be challenging. A trick about stress is that, as you start to use stress reduction tools, you might want to flee. In fact, instead of turning to family and friends for stress support, you might want to hide. You might want to be alone, day after day. However, rather than giving into this desire, let trustworthy relatives and friends be there for you, the same as you’re there for them. Meet with family and friends in-person. Call loved ones and enjoy talking. Do so with people who you know are trustworthy, people who you genuinely trust. And, if you feel like there’s no one to talk with, take small steps. Start building new friendships. Of course, if you need more stress support, consider speaking with a professional, someone who has years of experience helping people move through stress and burnout.
  • Care for Your Body – Take good care of your body by eating and drinking healthy foods and beverages. Getting sufficient sleep is another way to take good care of your body.
  • Explore Nature – Try this stress and anger relief action and see if you don’t feel better. You might love walking, jogging, hiking or bike riding in nature. Do so in a safe environment.
  • Express Yourself – Back to stress support option #1. Consider journaling, painting, singing, dancing or adult coloring to express yourself. Let emotions that you’re feeling and thoughts that you’re thinking flow out while you express yourself.

Stress Around The World

Here’s something that you may find comforting. When it comes to stress and burnout, you definitely are not alone. Loud Cloud Health shares that 60% of adult Americans state that they deal with constant daily stress. Regarding work, 15% of American workers would like to resign from their job due to stress.

Furthermore, a 2018 study, found that 74% of people living in the United Kingdom felt so stressed that they felt overwhelmed or incapable of coping with the stress. More than half of these people shared that stress caused them to feel depressed. Higher numbers of people shared that stress caused them to feel anxious.

Take Action

It’s not better in other parts of the world. IT News Africa shares that, “The South African Depression and Anxiety Group (SADAG) reported that 1 in 4 South Africans struggle with depression.” Workplace politics, poor job satisfaction and challenging work environments are among the job stressors. Clearly. these issues are not going to go away on their own.

Both burnout and stress management and elimination require honesty. That’s where self-awareness comes in. Avoiding and healing from burnout and/or stress also requires the right actions. You deserve to be happy. Burnout and chronic stress shouldn’t be part of your routine. Please try different stress support techniques and incorporate ones that work for you into your day. The rewards could be lasting.

Everyday Blessings of Slowing Down Your Life

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Slowing down your life offers long-term gains. These blessings show up even if you slowdown from living a life of fun and excitement. For starters, your body gets a chance to get enough rest. Let your body rest enough and you could experience mental clarity, improved mood and peace, just to name a few.

Embracing a simpler life also leads to better relationships, better health, reduced stress, deeper sleep and a sense of fulfillment. However, there’s a belief that hustling or “doing more” yields the aforementioned benefits. You might have entered the “hustle culture” in your teens, pushed by the belief that more action equals greater good.

Before you know it, you feel like you’re always sprinting on a treadmill. Instead of slowing down your life, you add more to it, actions like new religious ceremonies, spiritual retreats, volunteer charity events, traveling abroad, etc. The aim is commendable. It’s just that a frenetic lifestyle rarely, if ever, leads you into peace and lasting fulfillment.

Shifting Into Slowing Down Your Life

Which is why you might be exploring a slower lifestyle. If simpler living appeals to you, it could be that you realize chasing possessions and living at a fast pace won’t yield the lasting satisfaction that you’re seeking. Fortunately, it’s easy to start the shift toward a simpler, more fulfilling life.

For instance, you could declutter your home. Toss out items you haven’t used in a year or longer. Empty space can open your energy so that you recognize new opportunities.

Living A Less Cramped Life

Here are more ways to ease into living a slow life:

  • Raising your windows and opening doors (Do all things in peace and safety.)
  • Starting the day with a thankful prayer or by simply raising your hands in appreciation
  • Walking in nature in safe places three to four or more times a week
  • Hiking, running on the beach and horseback riding one or more times a year
  • Listening to family and friends when they communicate with you (This means, that your cell phone and other distractors are not in sight.)
  • Treating yourself to a relaxing bath at least once a week

Additionally, you can invest 30 minutes of relaxation time in the end of your day. It’s as simple as sitting on the porch or front stoop listening to your favorite, relaxing music. Or you could simply sit and watch the neighborhood happenings.

Preparations for Slowing Down Your Life

These are just a few ways to start to shift out of a frantic, high-gear lifestyle into simpler living. Of course, if you live with someone, you may want to talk the lifestyle change over with them. And, who knows? You might be surprised to discover that they have wanted to live slower for a while.

A couple I interviewed on Off The Shelf Books had success with this approach. After they discovered that they both wanted to explore living a slow life, they spoke with their families, letting them in on their plans. Then, they sold their beautiful house in the suburbs.

In place of the large house, they bought an RV. Entrepreneurs at heart, it didn’t take them long to get their remote businesses going. This was years before COVID19. Now, not only do they operate their own successful businesses, they live debt free.

Debt Free – Link Between Money and Slowing Down Your Life

Besides the chance to live debt free, living a slow life offers the opportunity to enjoy deeper relationships with family and friends. Also, living a slow life reduces the feeling of needing to text or talk on your cell phone nonstop.

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Furthermore, it eliminates the need to log onto social media to measure how valuable others perceive you to be. Reduce cell phone and social media time and you could find it easy to actively listen to your loved ones. Signs of a slow life vary by person, but could find you:

  • Selling a big house and downsizing to a smaller house
  • Releasing clutter from your home and workspace
  • Reducing and eliminating debt
  • Spending more time outdoors
  • Turning to nature instead of substances to feel good and have fun
  • Watching less TV, news and opinion pieces

Better Mental Health

Check out these other blessings that you could experience after you start living a slow life. The good news is that living a simpler life doesn’t require money. All you generally have to do is to simply start to live slower. Here are additional blessings:

  • Better mental health (Less debt equals less stress.)
  • Reduced risky behaviors (When you stop trying to keep up with the Joneses, you might stop feeling like you have to engage in risky behaviors like over drinking, over eating and shopping beyond your income.)
  • More brain power (Not only does living a slow life boost brain power, live slower and you could find that you’re focusing better. This, in turn, could improve your decision making.)
  • Availability to increased energy (It’s no secret that clutter has an effect on energy. The less cluttered your home and automobile are, the more energetic you may feel.)

If you’re up for embracing a simpler life, you might opt to work jobs that align with your core principles. In other words, instead of working jobs that pay lots of money, you might start choosing jobs that make you feel you’re living in your destiny. These jobs might be structured to allow you to live the life you appreciate most.

About Those Surprises

Thanks to a growing remote workforce, jobs that offer flexibility are increasing. And, if you’re like the couple I interviewed on Off The Shelf Books, you might use technology to start and manage your own remote company. Enjoy these blessings while remembering that life in this world offers surprises.

Regardless of the lifestyle that you choose, experiences may come that cause you to feel fear-based emotions like frustration, disappointment, anger, sorrow and hopelessness. Practice daily self-love and you could find it easier to navigate through these experiences.

Benefits, lifestyle shifts and surprises surfacing, consider trying a slow living lifestyle. As previously mentioned, there are ways that you can ease into this new, rewarding lifestyle. Give yourself a month. After you’re living a simpler life, see if haven’t become more physically active.

Also, see if you haven’t become more patient, a better listener and a better communicator. You also might discover that your appreciation for life expands. As a tip, stay open to new changes. Live with courage and appreciation. It’s up to you to make your life rich, exciting, balanced and filled with the most amazing blessings.

How Goal Setting Can Make a Difference in Your Success

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By Books Author Denise Turney

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Desire for success and goal setting are like twins. When the former is paired with vision and powerful emotion, it can serve as an effective motivator. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the path will always feel easy. In fact, if you focus solely on what you want without developing and sticking to a goal setting plan, you might not ever realize your dreams.

Success Roadblocks – About Distractions

There are many reasons why this might happen. To begin, you could encounter distractions. I was thinking about this earlier today while I was walking outdoors. Less than 10 minutes into the relaxing walk, a northern mockingbird started making scratchy chat calls. Since I’d heard these aggressive, territorial birds screeching and making warning calls before, I didn’t think that the chat calls were meant for me.

So, I kept walking. Next thing I knew, the mockingbird swooped toward me. Then, it gave another round of chat calls and started to aim toward me again. This time, I turned with a bag I’d been carrying and prepared to fight back. As I watched the mockingbird glance toward a tree, I knew that it was protecting its young. It didn’t matter than I’d been walking more than 10 yards away from the tree. The bird had perceived me as a threat.

The First 90 Days

Between working to calm the bird and stay out of its path, it dawned on me that I also had to steer clear of oncoming traffic. That’s when I realized how easy it is to get distracted. One small experience, one seemingly tiny event, and you could be focused on something that has absolutely nothing to do with what you really want. It happens quickly. Even more, it happens so easily that it appears to occur absent thought. [When’s the last time you were distracted? What was going on?]

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And that’s just one real life example of how easy it is to get distracted. Decide to pursue your success goals, and you may encounter interference from old internal patterns. As a matter of fact, this may be why the first 90 days of a new initiative can stir up feelings of doubt, fear and overwhelm.

During the first 90 days, your brain has to shift out of old routines, making room for the newness that you want to introduce into your life. An example of this might see you arriving late for crucial 9am meetings simply because your brain is in the habit of starting your day at 11am. You might even convince yourself that you’re not a morning person. What’s really happening is that your routines are interfering with your big dreams.

Becoming Fluid with Goal Setting Success

This is a reason to stay flexible with goal setting success. To achieve a big shift, you’re going to have to be adaptable. This means that you’re flexible in your thinking, your perceptions and your actions.

To help yourself become flexible, start observing your routines. For instance, at this time in your life, do you stay up until early morning, retire to bed and then absolutely refuse to wake and get out of bed until 11am or later the following day?

Also, do you come up with reasons to avoid face-to-face communications? Have you started to feel more comfortable limiting communications to emails and texts messages? If so, this could signal that you have a pattern of keeping people at a distance. Areas that this pattern could turn into a success barrier for include sales, training, leadership and the arts.

Routines and Pattern Distractions

Pay attention to your routines. Left alone, they could become ongoing distractions. They could become like a bird that won’t stop swooping in on you. Before you know it, you could start to focus on steering clear of the bird to the point that you lose sight of your real success goals.

That’s when life may feel like it’s happening to you instead of like you are creating your life experiences. Therefore, practice awareness. Identify patterns, including thought patterns. Watch these repetitive choices. Don’t let them become distractions.

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To change patterns, get up at different times. Take a shower instead of a bath a few days a week or vice versa. Exercise in the morning instead of at night. Move furniture, food items, hygiene products each day. Little changes like these can help get your brain off autopilot, the process that routines hide in.

Goal Setting Using Small Goals

Other ways to stay flexible while you pursue goal setting success, are to break goal planning into small goals. Here’s an example. Let’s say that your desire is to earn six figures a year selling novels that you write.

Instead of trying to sell 25,000 copies of your first published novel within its first month of release, break the aim into little goals. Toward this end, you could create a schedule to write and publish a new novel every three months. Bake in time for a professional, experienced editor to review your manuscripts and offer quality feedback.

Small Goals at Work

Small goals to achieve your desire of earning six figures a year selling novels could include:

  • Designing and copying colorful book marketing flyers
  • Distributing a certain number of flyers a week, locally and nationally
  • Scheduling radio and podcasts interviews
  • Completing and submitting author vendor applications to attend cultural, book and arts festivals that attract thousands of attendees
  • Preparing content to push out via automated social media platforms
  • Developing and mailing postcards that spotlight your books
  • Building and promoting your author website
  • Setting up relationships with book distributors, bookstore buyers and wholesalers

This list could expand considerably. There’s that much that you could do to promote and market your books, if that’s what you want to do. Monitor your results. Pay attention to which actions get you closer to your goal of earning six-figures a year selling novels that you write.

Achieving Success After Success

But, here’s the thing. It’s important to stay flexible, to remain fluid. Why? Like that bird that seemingly swooped in out of nowhere, you may not be aware of every thing that’s coming. Furthermore, to continue achieving success after success, you will have to adjust small goals.

Who knows? Along the way, you might even have to discard goals that you’d been pursuing for years. So, stay open to change. Learn to pivot.

To stay encouraged, read motivational success quotes in the morning and at night before you retire to bed. Additionally, you might find it helpful to put on earphones and listen to recordings of positive affirmations for success. Twice a year, pause and acknowledge your achievements. But don’t stop. After all, success is not final.

Keep going. Stay flexible. Watch patterns and routines that could transform into distractions. Should you get distracted, refocus on your deepest desires, your largest goals. Break those goals down into small goals, if you start to think that your goals are too big for you, and again – keep going.