As we navigate our path ahead through this economic downturn, I’d like to share with you some lessons that previous recessions have taught me.

These are all things I’ve learned as I’ve gone about building my businesses through multiple recessions.

These are a few practical things that I’d suggest you consider as we enter into the tough economic times ahead.

The first one is simple: instead of worrying about everything that’s going on in this given moment, set some long-term goals.

I can remember when I started my first business – the cleaning business. We were well into a recession, but to be honest with you, back then, I didn’t even know it. So it didn’t phase me.

They say ignorance is bliss, right?

Instead of worrying about what might happen, I truly believed the reason I wasn't getting results was because I wasn't working hard enough... so I started working harder and I stuck to my long-term goals and it served me well.

So try not to allow what’s going on around you to take you down a rabbit hole of negative thinking. It won’t do you any good. Believe me.

The second lesson I learned is this: stay focused on what you know and do best, and try maximizing the value you already bring to the market.

Right now probably isn’t the best time to experiment with something new. I’d suggest that you focus on your strengths and the value you already bring to the table, and maximize that. Even if it is not "your passion," per se, focus on what you know will make the cash register ring.

What I’ve found is that whether you’re in a recession or not, the more you provide value and maximize the value you provide, the longer customers will stick around, and the more likely new customers will find a need for your service.

Right now everybody is thinking about where they can cut costs.

People are looking at the subscriptions they have that they don’t need, the services they’re investing in that they don’t really need to be investing in, and they’re really evaluating what’s actually giving them a return on their investment.

So when your customers cut costs, they’re going to prioritize where they’re getting the most value.

And if you’re someone who is providing that value to them, they are far less likely to stop doing business with you.

So be sure to keep going the extra mile for your customers, even if it feels like it’s not paying off now.

Lesson #3 is this: keep in contact with your customers. And don’t always make it about what you’re selling. Develop the relationships and connections you have. Instead of trying to sell someone something, ask them what you can help them with. That conversation can lead down so many paths…

You never know who someone else knows or who may be in need of your service.

They say we’re only 6 social connections away from everyone in the world. That should make you excited and ready to get out there and start networking!

And one final tip I’ll add is this: to truly THRIVE in this economic downturn, the best thing you can do is invest in improving your sales skills.

I’ve already mentioned maximizing your value. But if you cannot communicate your value to the marketplace, you're going to become irrelevant.

Selling at a higher level is the one thing that is going to make the difference between your business surviving or not... and maybe even thriving.

I like to think of it like this. You can’t save your way out of a recession, but you CAN sell yourself out.

In the coming weeks, I’m going to be sharing more strategies on thriving through the recession, as well as some sales strategies so you can up your game and keep your business running.

I believe in you!!

Over the past couple months, I’ve sent you some emails regarding the current economic climate.

I shared some things you can do to prepare yourself and your business for what’s to come.

Yet, in those emails, there’s one thing I haven't mentioned yet.

And today I’d like to tell you what that is.

I was thinking the other day about how most people, let alone economists, don’t even contemplate this idea:

You can do everything you need to in order to prepare for your outer conditions and circumstances (and this is most definitely important), but at the end of the day, no matter what’s going on around you, you can rest in the understanding that nothing new needs to be added to you.

Perhaps it’s a quite abstract concept for the average person to spend time thinking about, but truthfully, it’s the most important thing we need to remind ourselves of.

I mean, something I learned early on from my mentor, Patrick Hayes, is that the "being" comes before the "doing."

And so, during times like these, it’s important to make the necessary pivots in our businesses and lives, but as we make those pivots, we have to remember who we are in our completeness.

We have to be reminded that we are indeed complete and whole, here and now. We are not struggling because we are lacking something, because something is missing from us.

People struggle because they are not aware of their completeness. Nothing new needs to be added to us. Only then can we truly live from the inside out.

I’ll put it this way. There are two ways to live:

The first way is the way most people live. They allow the conditions and circumstances around them to determine how they feel inside. And so they live from the outside in.

But friend, that’s not the way we were designed to live.

The second way is to live from the inside out. To live with a complete awareness of your completeness, and to allow the activation of that completeness to guide your actions outward and to influence your conditions and circumstances.

You see, there’s far more power in being able to first recognize your oneness with God, and then co-create with God.

When you reach that level of awareness that you are complete, as you begin making your preparations, you start to activate more of that completeness within you.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Thomas Troward’s essay on completeness.

"If we wish to attain to these great powers, the question is, where are we to seek them? And the answer is in ourselves. That is the great secret. We are not to go outside ourselves to look for power.

"As soon as we do so we find, not power, but weakness. To seek strength from any outside source is to make affirmation of our weakness, and all know what the natural result of such an affirmation must be."

Think about that. To look outside ourselves is to find weakness, but to search within ourselves is to find power.

Please be on the lookout for more information about a very special teaching coming soon where I’ll be diving deeper into the essay on completeness – to be announced soon!

For now, save the date: August 6 at 9am (ET).

Earlier this week, I sent you an email sharing a few ideas from Thomas Troward’s work on completeness.

Since it’s one of my favorite pieces of work, today I want to expand a bit on what I already shared.

If you missed that email, you can read it here.

To provide some context, I shared this one idea from Troward: one thing we fail to do is to contemplate our completeness and our oneness with God.

Instead, how many times do we dwell on the idea that we believe we’re incomplete? That we don’t measure up? That we are incapable of bringing forward that which we know, deep down, we desire?

If you think about it, most of us have experienced this feeling of incompleteness firsthand.

Perhaps you were given an opportunity to be part of something big; something you’ve dreamed about for years. But when opportunity knocked on your door, you didn’t open the door because you believed yourself incapable.

And this aligns perfectly with what Thomas Troward emphasizes in his essay on completeness.

He says, “To do any work successfully, you must believe yourself to be a whole man in respect of it. The completed work is the outward image of a corresponding completeness in yourself.”

Think about how powerful that is.

If we are to complete a project; a dream; a vision; a goal; we need to first find that completeness in ourselves.

Think of it like this.

Everything that happens externally is the result of something that happens internally first.

Think about the room you’re in right now. Whether it’s a picture frame, a table, a couch, a book – no matter what it is, before it was constructed in the physical realm, it was created in the spiritual realm in the form of a thought or idea.

It doesn’t happen the other way around. And it also doesn’t just happen. It requires our conscious effort.

We co-create with God. Someone had an idea to write a book, to build a table, to design a couch, and they had belief in themselves to bring it forward. And then they did it.

You see, what Troward is saying is that you can’t successfully attempt any work until for some reason or another, you truly believe yourself able to accomplish it.

That’s the gap between our ideas and our results: belief.

Our results are a reflection of what we believe about our completeness. It’s a direct reflection of our awareness of our potential.

It’s as simple as that.

So to get better results, it all starts with forming a complete image of ourselves; it starts with cultivating belief in ourselves.

It is impossible for you to have an awareness of a desire and you not be fully complete and fully resourced to manifest it into physical form.

That doesn’t mean you know how to access those resources. You may not.

It doesn’t mean you don’t need to develop those resources. You probably need to get better at a lot of things.

It doesn’t mean it’ll be easy; it’s likely going to be tough.

But all in all, you are still fully resourced to bring it forward – no matter how challenging it may seem.

But the promise is this: you have the capacity to tap into the vibrational frequency of an idea or a desire. And if you can tap into that frequency, you can live in that frequency.

It’s your recognition of your completeness that becomes the measure of your ability to do it.

So my question to you is this: do you have a complete view of yourself? Do you have belief in yourself and in your ability to bring forward your dream?

If the answer is no, don’t beat yourself up. I encourage you to keep an eye out for more emails like this one where I’ll be sharing some more insight on completeness and ways you can start building the awareness of your potential.

I believe in you!!