Author: Mike Balof

A retired Air Force Master Sergeant, Mike used to lay in bed at night and worry about what would happen if his plant closed or found himself without a job. One day his plant closed. Rather than panic and hysteria (OK, maybe a little) Mike found himself carried away on the adventure of his life. Mike started with the best job he ever had working at Home Depot. He spent 8 years working with job seekers at a local workforce center, helping them to find employment. He then started his own company developing courses, writing books and urging others to follow their own paths into the future. Mike holds a Master of Arts in Adult Education and Training and a Bachelor of Business Management, earned through the University of Phoenix and an AAS degree in Electronics Systems Technology from the Community College of the Air Force. Mike is a member of the Delta Mu Delta Business Honor Society.

Subtleties

A fine artist starts with subtleties, soft backgrounds, and sweeping vistas of ideas that he or she builds. The Strata of the painting slowly build and link. Thus, understanding with enlightenment is available to be seen and understood in the eyes of the beholder.

When a good life coach works with a client, they rarely jump in trying to shock or upend a client on the first meeting.  Especially a new client. The coach needs to start off talking with a client to understand where the client is. The coach needs to know what is going on in a client’s life. The most important thoughts for the session may be things the client does not consider especially relative.  A client’s ideas may be false assumptions and pretend barriers, which the client is taking for truth.

The coach needs to help each client paint their verbal picture to look at it and understand what comes from where and what is and is not valid. It is hard for us to look at her painting by ourselves and understand what is and is not the truth. It usually happens because it is our picture, and we’re standing too close to it. A good coach can stand with you, help you back up a little, and maybe see a better aspect of the panoramic when you were only looking at one small part.

The coaches who can do this are the ones who have worked at it for years. The ones who do the best are worth their weight in g…. Not really, yet at least a reasonable hourly rate. A good coach is worth it. A good coach helps you understand in a much shorter time what only you can do to fix real problems and ignore all of the false ones.

If you’re looking to solve a problem, look for a good life coach.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Have You Sat Down and Figured It Out

Have you sat down and figured out where you’re going? If you have not, that is your first step. If you don’t know where you’re going, you’re just wandering in circles.

Have you looked where you want to, and the milestones needed to get there? If you have none, you are missing the points that will assure your direction and timing. If we’re going to go somewhere, we should do so without going astray and not wasting what precious little time we have.

Have we decided who is going with us on this journey? It would be terrible to get where you want to be and find out you forgot to bring Friends and family along. You need to make plans. And, plans call for decisions.

Have you done your due diligence? Is your destination what other people tell you it should be? Is your goal what you assume? Is your destination something that you have surveyed and planned out? I have seen too many people get to the destination they desired, only to find out it wasn’t what they desired at all. Have you done your homework?

If you have done all this and mapped it out, so it’s easy to follow? If you have, that is great. I wish you luck, and I hope to see you along the trail. If you have not done this yet and made your map, why? We all know the time waits for no one.

If you need help in accomplishing these tasks, please contact me. Where you are going; I have been. No one can do it for you. I have trained in many areas to help you. Please contact me if I can be of service.

Mike Balof, Director

Reveille.Rocks

425 N. Tejon St.

Colorado Springs, CO 80903

719-205-2773

Mikeb@reveille.rocks

http://www.reveille.rocks

It Is All in The Mind

Work is what we make of it. Work can be drudgery. And work can actually be something that refreshes both the soul and the body. Work is like anything else; it’s what we make of it. Results are determined not by the Chore and not by the length; outcomes are determined by the worker’s mind.

Two people get off the plane in a remote area of the world. They are there to work for a year. The first person who gets off the Jet looks around as he walks down the steps and says, “This place stinks. This is going to be the most awful year of my life.”

 The person behind him gets off the plane and says, “This is fantastic. The party starts here.”

When the two people leave their work behind at the end of the year and get on the plane to fly home, a magical thing happens. It turns out they both were right.

This really happened. It happens more often than we think. Only we can control our destiny. Only we can control our thoughts and our actions. If you don’t like where you are or what you are doing, don’t talk to everybody around you. Start by talking to the person in the mirror.

Trying to control your own thoughts and your own beliefs may seem like a large undertaking. Yet, it’s like everything else; you need to practice something to build strength in it. You can find good and depravity in anything. If you want to live well, find the good. The less you practice this, the harder it will be. First, I can assure you the ability is within each and every one of us.  

If you need help, there is a lot of good free help or nearly free help to be had these days. Check on Meetup, Eventbrite, Thinkific, Udemy, and other platforms that offer classes. And if you can’t find anything, write me at mikeb@reveille.rocks.  I will give you a free 90-minute session to help get you started. Please consider this offer. I would be happy to help.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Managing Ebbs and Flows

Life moves in ever-expanding circles. Sometimes it moves incredibly fast, and sometimes it moves extremely slow. And though you would swear time has stopped completely, it is not.

We need to get used to the ebbs and flows of time. If we are smart, we learn to control those ebbs and flows by always having something to do when something else has slowed to a crawl. It is not hard to accomplish.

It isn’t easy to know exactly where you’re going to find an ebb or a flow. You can, though, always know where you are and what small tasks you can squeeze into 15-minutes while you’re waiting for a computer to reboot, a cleaning routine to complete, or the 10-minute delay in a zoom. Just have a list of those small minutia jobs you must do and usually would not have time to complete. While you are waiting for one significant thing, maybe you can kick a couple of those small things out and still be ready for your meeting.

Speaking about downtime and not much to do, if you are free on 2 February at 2:30 mountain standard time, grab a ticket from Eventbrite In join us for some communications training. It will probably run an hour and a half, and it has some good things that we’ve been working on a long time.

To grab your free ticket, please go to:  

https://www.eventbrite.se/e/your-journey-forward-tickets-131452358543
Please join us 2 February 2021, at 2:30 PM (MST) (9:30 UTC).  You will get to have some fun and hopefully learn a little something about communications.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Meetup Group

Hi everyone. I’m hoping you’re having a safe, warm, and fantastic day today. It’s been snowing here since early yesterday evening. It is very white outside and a wonderful stay to stay home if you do not absolutely have to go out.

I am running a Meetup Group, called Finding Gainful Employment, on Tuesdays between 2:30 and 4:00. Next week I am inviting the group to a training session given on Eventbrite. That will also be 2:30 on Tuesday, February 2, 2021. For the rest of the weeks, we will have the group session through Meetup.  The price to come to the sessions is free or, as it says in the ad, 0.00 USD.

To get your free tickets for the training session given on Everbrite, please go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/your-journey-forward-tickets-131452430759?aff=ebdssbeac&keep

Join us for our free regular Tuesday meetings on Meetup for Finding Gainful Employment, starting on February 9, 2021, at 2:30 p.m.

Clear as mud? Email me at mikeb@reveille.rocks for any questions.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

In the Jungle

In the jungle, when it gets hot and sweaty, Tempers shorten considerably. If you can’t get a word in edgewise on an average day at a normal temperature, good luck trying to talk in a jungle when the other people and yourself are miserable beyond belief. Are you really looking for a reasonable conversation? Then you may want to jump in the river and cool down first. Just watch out for Schistosomiasis.

Being stuck in the ‘Jungle of No Return’ is no picnic. It is a beautiful backdrop for studying how people handle themselves and each other under stress. Please join us as we learn something about communications, not giving up, and keeping our heads together. All this as we try to push forward under some of the harshest circumstances anyone could ever think of facing.

Can we assure you of anything? I’m not even sure if it’s going to snow that day. Although I am not stuck in the steaming jungle. Please join us. We will share what we hope you find is an exciting story and some new things to learn.

Please join us 2 February 2021, at 2:30 p.m.  (MST (USA)) (9:30p.m. UTC).  You will get to have some fun and hopefully learn a little something about life values and communications.

To Grab your free tickets to this event, before they are all gone, please go to:

https://www.eventbrite.se/e/your-journey-forward-tickets

Thank you for being with me. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

Can They Possibly Get Out

Our family team started out running from the security police in their city when Sam broke the mandatory curfew. The security police chase them up an ancient rope bridge in the middle of the night. Strong winds cause the bridge to tip over. each member of the family team fell down a 200-foot waterfall into the river that flowed through the jungle of no return.

Since then, the Family had to find each other and figure out what they had to do to survive in the jungle. They needed to follow the river towards the ocean to get out of the jungle.  They needed to get back to their own civilization. Their biggest problem right now is that they’ve been toiling in this hot jungle for well over a month, and the most significant thing that they have gotten so far is hot, sweaty, and tired. For all their hard work, they’re getting close to mental exhaustion. The biggest question is how they will solve this problem and move on to find a way home?

What Life coaching methods can the family use to help save them and keep them on track?  To find out, join our class on Eventbrite:

To get your free tickets to this event, please go to:

https://www.eventbrite.se/e/your-journey-forward-tickets-131452358543
Please join us 2 February 2021, at 2:30 p.m.  (MST (USA)) (9:30p.m. UTC).  You will get to have some fun and hopefully learn a little something about life values and communications.

Thank you for being with me for this first Sunday edition of my blog. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

What Would You Do?

If you had to leave your city and run for your life, and if you fell down a 200-foot waterfall and miraculously survived, what would you do? Our training revolves around a family story, a team of four, who had to do this. They understood technology, Herbalism, ancient writings, and supervision and management. What they didn’t know about themselves and each other could fill the Grand Canyon. This is a story of their fight through a jungle to get back to where they belonged. This is their story of learning about themselves and each other.

This story is the background for our learning module, presented on the 2nd of February 2021 at 2:30 PM (MST). It will be 9:30 PM UTC. We’re going to take a chapter of the story, use it as the backdrop to learn better communications, and figure out what happens when everyone is trying to do their desired tasks when so much counts on what they do for survival.

They are not sure if they can get out of the jungle and back to where they belong. And the question comes up, is getting out even possible, or is the family just going to die trying. I genuinely hope it’s not the latter. But you will have to join us and help us figure that out.

To get your free tickets to this event, please go to:

https://www.eventbrite.se/e/your-journey-forward-tickets-131452358543
Please join us 2 February 2021, at 2:30 PM (MST) (9:30 UTC).  You will get to have some fun and hopefully learn a little something about communications.

Thanks for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

A Great New Class

I have a small secret I would like to share. Along with a few friends, I have been working on an exciting story that we will use to provide some outstanding training to whoever is interested. Our premiere of this training will be on 2 February at 1430 ( 2:30 pm mountain standard time.) That would convert to 9:30 pm UTC.

Our story is about a family team who found themselves lost in the jungle. They need to work together to battle their way out of their predicaments and back into civilization. I can’t do this entire scenario justice so let me give you a little bit of the story:

~ Slowly, small gripes turned into finger-pointing, and finger-pointing eventually turned into name-calling. Everyone was at each other’s throats. They each felt that they were doing more than anyone else in their team was doing, and they were calling each other out about it. The truth was, they were working as hard as they could and yet trying to do the required work and their own unique projects at the same time. It just made everything even harder. ~

What do you think will happen? How will they solve the problems and get back to the tasks at hand, the things they need to do to get back to civilization?

To learn more, please join us. Go to Eventbrite and sign up for Your Journey Forward. The class will be on 2 February 2021, at 9:30 pm UTC.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.

World of Uproar

Each of us must remember that the ‘World of Uproar’ does not have to be our world, and the majority of the time, it does not have anything to do with our real goals. It is always good to stay abreast of what is happening in the world. We just need to understand that we have minimal sway over anything that happens out there.

I can control little, so I must pay attention to those things that I can avoid or capitalize upon. To do that, I need to stay abreast of trends and happenings. This doesn’t mean that every second can be devoted to wading through daily news up to my shoulders.

The majority of news lately is an attempt by one side or another to sway us to their way of thinking. I like reports that tell me the facts and leave it in my hands to figure out how it affects me. I can usually find that if I watch the news from other countries that don’t have an immediate stake in what they are talking about and reporting on.

I am not knocking our homegrown new services. The majority of them do excellent jobs and are very diligent in getting the facts right. However, we all have to admit some news services are formed merely for us trying to sway the public one way or another.

We should consider our news the same way that we treat our email. It is excellent to check for two or three times a day and be left off the rest of the time to get our real work done. Sitting on the couch, watching things for hours that we can not control, does not do any good for us or anyone else. Mail gets checked at 8 AM, 12 PM, 4 PM, and 8 PM. Why not check the news at seven, noon, and five? Just one man’s thoughts.

Thank you for being with me today. I hope to be with you again tomorrow.