For those celebrating Christmas and Hanukah I hope that your holidays over the last few days have been meaningful with moments that fully made your inner lights glow.  

As we head into week 5 of our exploration into what makes a Marketing Warrior, keep in mind that we have previously explored Creativity, Clarity, Consistency and Content.  

Today we look at the element of being Customer Centric, which means making your customers the greatest priority in your business.

With this element in mind, I want to also ask you to think of how this critical fundamental that will make your business thrive in 2017. As you begin to get serious this week in putting the final polish on your goals for the year ahead how do your current customers fit into the equation?

For today’s letter I am going to share with you both a written and audio version of my rendition of Clement C. Moore’s “The Night Before Christmas” as my form of content this week I hope that you enjoy.

Perhaps one of the hardest feats to accomplish in running a business today is not allowing distractions to pull us away from where we really want to go. These distractions put us at risk of not achieving the most meaningful tasks that sometimes seem the most difficult to accomplish.

These tasks I am talking about are the ones that make us unique as we get our messages out into the world.  Those unseen tasks that demand us to fully strive forward in achieving the vision that is brewing deep inside of us.

Last week I shared with you element one of the Marketing Warrior - Creativity.

Are you ready for element two?

This element makes us pay extra special attention as we wrap up the current year already in progress and begin to envision what the next year of our lives will lead us towards.

Guessed it?

This second key element is Clarity – an essential for each and every one of us as we look towards identifying our true goals and dreams. Especially as you look towards how you share it through your messages to outside world

What are the elements that take us away from our craft – that main thing we enjoy performing the most and would prefer spending our days doing?

This question is what led me on my quest to write my new book the Marketing Warrior.

The vision I had in writing this book is really how do we let our best self-shine consistently. All the while insuring that we are inspiring our customers to allow them to know what we are up to in our business on a regular basis.

Sometimes victory takes a little longer than we initially expected.

Currently we are in the middle of what has turned into a pretty major home remodel. This project started from a little vision my husband had that quickly got bigger and bigger as the two of us collaborated over it.

We saw the need, or the dirt as Louise Hays shares in todays quote, and we were ready to create an element to our home that will make a major difference the moment you walk in our front door. 

As the words for today’s Victory Letter start to ooze from my brain I keep thinking what it is that actually happens to get us past the expected mile. In a world that can throw so much at us in a given day, the one human strength we each possess that rises us up past the daily grind - it is willpower.

The ability to move past the adversity and downfalls of our lives with the needed belief and faith, even when the cards seem stacked against us we head towards what matters most.  I can think of so many examples in the last few weeks where I have seen willpower in action.

Life is short and we never really know when it’s going to be done.  Something recently happened in my life to give me another big wake up call and reminder about making the most of each given day.

I had gone to the Woodland Park Chamber of Commerce to give a workshop on email marketing and as has been my experience with this particular chamber the audience was very interactive and ready to learn.

In this particular workshop there was one gentleman who stood out from the rest even from the moment I walked in the door. His name was John Carrigan and he was the first one there - having arrived 20 minutes early. Throughout the workshop he was fully engaged and asked many questions.

A deadline is a time limit to get something done and acts as milestone in the accomplishment of an achievement you desire.  Without accountability to a given deadline it’s like adding more air to the wind. It really does not serve a purpose.

Without the measurement of when something must be done, it could take many years to get the things we want in our life accomplished.

Last week I traveled to my nieces wedding in Orlando, Florida.  If you ever want to see the stress caused by the fear of not meeting a deadline, just talk to a bride just a few days before her wedding.  For so many brides, their wedding day is the day they have dreamed of most of their life and doesn't really have the ability for a do-over.