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"Everything that's really worthwhile in like come to us free - our minds, our souls, our bodies, our hopes, our dreams, our intelligence, our love of family and friends and country. All of these priceless possessions are free."
~ Earl Nightingale

Think about it. You can lose all your money and start over. If your house burns down, you can rebuild it. It's the things that cost you nothing that you can never replace.

One of the most important keys to self-motivation is to clearly identify your core values in life. You must decide what matters most. Why the need to identify your values? Many people think, "I know what's important, I don't need a list to remind me." What they don't fully understand, however, is that the core values often serve as critical guides for making important decisions. When you're in doubt, your core values will cut through the fog like beacon.

We all know there are many distractions along the road of life that will try to pull us away from our values. Sometimes we are forced to make difficult choices. But a goodrule of thumb is that when you have to sacrifice material possessions for one of those "free things" that life has given you...you've made the right choice.

"For every unsatisfied customer who complains there are 26 other unhappy customers who say nothing. And of those 26, 24 won't come back."
-U.S. Office of Consumer Affairs

Even the best organizations sometimes stumble and deliver less-than-perfect customer service. Something not to be taken lightly when you consider this: a whopping 65 percent of customers who take theri business elsewhere do so because of poor customer service (only 30 percent leave because they find better or cheaper products).

These statistics apparently hit home for one Canadian company in the home health care industry. Nurse Next Door made pages of Fortune Small Business recently for it's "Humble Pie" program. When this company stumbles, it delivers a fresh-baked pie and a note apologizing for the poor service. Nurse Next Door estimates spending $1,500 on pies that have prevented $100,000 in annual sales from going elsewhere.

According to John Tschol, president of the Service Quality Institute in Minneapolis, the humble pie results are typical. His research shows that people who experience good customer service will tell five others, while people who receive bad service well tell ten others. (Online complainers can impact hundreds to thousands more.)

Nurse Next Door also uses continuous feedback to keep its customer service on track. Each month, customers are asked two questions: "On a scale of 0 to 10, would you enthusiastically recommend us to your friends?" and "what's the biggest reason for the score you've given?" The company acts quickly to correct any problems.

Something must be working...Nurse Next Door has grown more than 3,400% since 2001 to become the largest home health care provider in Western Canada.

Nurse Next Door's Core Purpose:
Making Lives Better through Home Health Care
Our Core Purpose is why we do what we do.
It is why we started the company and it is a reminder
of why we come to work every day.

Core Values:

Our Core Value represent the soul of our company.

Because of these core values, our employees feel that Nurse

Next Door is an exciting and special place to work.

Admire Our People

We recognize that people are the cornerstone of our success.

Our team has the important responsibility of helping our clients

live healthier and happier lives. Our people always come

first—happy employees mean happy clients,

and happy clients are what we are all about.

Wow Our Customers

Wowing customers with our compassion and service is our specialty.

The relentless commitment to customer service and friendly staff is

The Nurse Next Door Way. It's not what we do; it's how we do it.

We go extraordinary lengths to delight our customers, creating

WOW! experiences whereever and whenever we can. We take

pride in making our clients happy, striving to make each

personal contact one that is memorable and touching.

Find a Better Way

We will always promote an entrepreneurial culture

where individual initiative and out-of-the-box

thinking is the norm.

Be Passionate About Making a Difference.

We strive to do things for the common good. We work

together as a family, to innovate and grow. Nurse Next Door

is about building something much bigger together than any

one of us could create alone.

Service Lesson Learned:
Admit your mistakes and take responsibility.

"You are always only one choice away from changing your life."
~ Marcy Biochowiak

Think about that. One choice, just one, can change your life forever. Simply put, your life today is what your choices have made it, but with new choices, you can change directions this very moment. For me, that idea alone is highly motivational because it offers tremendous hope, regardless of circumstances, for a better tomorrow.

Your life-changing choice may be to switch careers, to leave an abusive relationship, to go back to school, to stop drinking, to adopt a child, to start a business, to lose weight, to start a charity...to name a few. If you have the courage to do so, you could make any one of those choices, or others, today. And you would change your life.

Sometimes it's a different kind of choice. It can be to not quit, to not give up in the face of adversity. We've all been there.

Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen received 77 rejections for their Chicken soup for the Soul. They had to make a decision each time...should they throw in the towel and say enough is enough, or should they keep trying to pursue their dreams? You know the rest of the story. The 78th publisher said "Yes" and they went on to sell over 100 million books,

So never forget that you are only one choice away from changing your life. Do you have the courage to make it?

Our emotions are powerful motivators, and more than almost anything else in our lives they will drive our behavior. Sometimes our greatest challenge is to get inside our own heads to understand what makes us tick. Why do we feel and behave the way we do?

Highly motivated, positive people are focused. The mind is clear, and energy levels are high. Also, many things can hold you back and prevent you from becoming all you can be. One of those things is…Emotional Baggage.

I know two family members who were best friends, but several years ago, one reminded the other of something that had happened thirty years earlier. One thing led to another and, you know what, they haven't spoken since.

Anger or resentment is like a cancer, and when you let it go untreated, it will put an invisible ceiling on your future. You don't know it…but it does.

William Ward identified the cure when he said, "Forgiveness is the key that unlocks the handcuffs of hate."

Those are powerful words, and I know from personal experience…forgiveness works. A few times in my life I've been greatly wronged and taken advantage of. My first reaction, of course, was anger and resentment. I held it for awhile and felt my stomach tie up in knots, my appetite wane, and the joy slip out of my life. The quote from Ward provided the wake-up call I needed to forgive the person who had wronged me. It was like I had been playing the first half of a basketball game with three-pound steel shoes, and in the locker room the coach said, "Mac, try these new Nikes in the second half." Multiply that by then and you'll understand how great it feels to unload your "emotional baggage" through the power of forgiveness.

In 1972 I had just accepted a position as vice president of sales for Orval Kent Food Company, a small enterprise that manufactured fresh-prepared salad products selling to delicatessens and restaurants. I had come on board to hire and train new sales people, but I knew absolutely nothing about the salad business. So Sid Caisman, who had spent most of his career selling to delicatessens, was assigned to show me the ropes. Sid was a pro, and he loved what he did.

I'd been there about two weeks when Sid came in smiling ear to ear. He said, "Mac, I've been trying to get an appointment with this large grocery chain for over two years and I finally have it next Friday. Do you want to go with me?" My response: "You bet I do!"

The big day arrived, and on our way out we picked up our refrigerated samples. When we arrived at their corporate headquarters I could tell Sid was pumped. The buyer came out and introduced himself, and we followed him back to his office. We sat down and he looked across his desk at Sid and asked, "What makes you think your product is any better than your competitors?"

That was Sid's cue to perform. He began to tell the buyer about why our potato salad was superior to anything on the market. He went into great detail about the quality, the fresh-diced vegetables, our special dressing and our stat of the art manufacturing plant. Then he said, "And I've saved the best for last…you're going to love how it tastes!"

With great fanfare, Sid popped open the lid of the sample container, and I couldn't believe it. Sitting right on top was a large, black, rotten potato about the size of a quarter. But Sid, seeing the potato before the buyer did, reached down and popped it in his mouth and said, "Bob, I just can't get enough of this stuff!" And to my surprise the buyer also reached down, grabbed some salad, and said "Sid, you're right. It tastes great."

It was a powerful moment. I had just witnessed a sophisticated buyer eating potato salad with his fingers and he didn't even know it! And it was all for one reason…Sid's unbridled enthusiasm.