J. Sands Loch

2020 Day 29: Create a habit in 29 and a half days

I just talked with my brother about synchronicities and how they are different from coincidences. A coincidence is buying two lottery tickets and both have the number 23 on them. A synchronicity is being too late to pick your numbers like you normally do and just buying a random set of numbers, and then realizing that the number you always pick, 23, is one of the numbers on the randomly generated lottery ticket.

I found it really difficult to write today. I was back in my old habits of stock checking and consuming instead of creating. Besides catching up on AAPL and AMD earnings reports, things I consumed today were coronavirus epidemic, quantum mechanics and psychology, Osaka University’s iPS cell-based heart cell transplant, and impeachment.

Since the lunar cycle is 29 and a half days long, then I think this feels like a good length of time to create a habit. It certainly doesn’t feel like I have created a habit yet. So, with this new belief, I will embrace my habit of writing every day half-way through tomorrow.

2020 Day 28: Helping Healers determine what to charge for their offerings

This is post number 4 of a series of posts going through 2020 Day 21: Surfing Universes – Life Coach – 60 Needs that Healers Have. I’m focusing this series on individual healers serving other individuals.

In 2020 Day 26: Helping Healers identify products and services to offer I offered some questions that you can ask yourself in order to brainstorm and narrow down the products and services you wish to offer to your desired target market. In this post, I’d like to discuss how to determine a price to charge for your products and services.

For a sustainable business, the price you charge for a product or services needs to be greater than the cost to the business and less than the amount that the customer is willing to pay. The amount the customer is willing to pay is different than the value to the customer. The customer may not even be aware of the actually value of the product or service. In fact, it may have no value or infinite value, and both the healer and client may be unaware of the true value. What does matter somewhat is the customer’s perceived value of the product or service in the moment that they commit to purchase the product or service.

Cost of Product/Service < Price of Product/Service < Price Customer Will Pay

Price Customer Will Pay < Customer’s Perceived Value

While it is difficult to determine the value of a product or service to a customer, especially for those in a healing profession, it is not difficult to determine the customer’s perceived value. This can be done easily by setting different prices for a product or service and seeing how many people pay that price. If you want to geek-out on this, you can calculate and graph the price elasticity of demand for each of your products and services. I would encourage you to have an intuitive feel for how changes in price affect the demand for your offerings. This will give you information either about your customer’s perceived value of your products/services or their ability to pay.

Price Customer Will Pay < Customer’s Ability to Pay

It’s good to know which of these, your customer’s perceived value or their ability to pay, is more of a factor in limiting the price your customer will pay. You can gain information on this by offering a sliding scale along with trying different top prices. You can also gain information on this through adopting a “gift” price determined by the customer.

For the minimum price to charge, you must know the full cost of your product/service. If it’s a product, it will have a Cost-Of-Goods-Sold (COGS) amount which includes the total per-item cost of the product. You will also have the overhead for you business which includes all of the fixed costs that don’t directly depend on the amount of products/services you sell. Advertising is best considered as a separate cost. Ideally, you would have focused advertising and track your advertising costs for each product/service. Then you can more easily calculate your Advertising Cost of Sales (ACoS) for each product/service. For services, the COGS should include the total costs of the employees, including yourself, who are providing the services. Your per item Profit will then be your Price charged minus the COGS and ACoS.

Profit = Sales of Product/Service – COGS – ACoS

2020 Day 27: SP500 has largest single-day drop since Oct 2, 2019

The S&P 500, Dow, and Nasdaq all fell over 1.5% today. This is in alignment with the feeling I mentioned in 2020 Day 25: Wuhan Coronavirus in the Year of the Rat. However, the feeling I felt seemed to be further in the future. What’s more interesting to me is how I’ve been affected – specifically my desire to remove an old habit of checking the stock market. It seems that as my will power strengthened, the multiverse showed me her power and tested my will power until I eventually succumbed and checked the stock market. I now feel surrounded by lots of universes where I check the stock market multiple times daily. The multiverse amuses me when she shows herself to me in this fashion – humbling my ego that believes that free will alone can get me to where I want to go.

Coronavirus update:

First coronavirus death in Beijing;
82 deaths and over 2,700 cases confirmed in mainland China;
China reports that people can spread the coronavirus before symptoms, although CDC says no clear evidence that this is the case;
Sri Lanka reports first case of Wuhan coronavirus;
Cambodia reports first case of Wuhan coronavirus;
Canada’s first two cases of Wuhan coronavirus are husband and wife;

2020 Day 26: Helping Healers identify products and services to offer

This is post number 3 of a series of posts going through 2020 Day 21: Surfing Universes – Life Coach – 60 Needs that Healers Have. I’m focusing this series on individual healers serving other individuals.

Determining the products and services you offer is an important step in developing a successful healing practice. This step should be done immediately after determining your desired target market. You may revisit your desired target market after completing this step.

Below are some questions to help you brainstorm and narrow down your potential products and services. Writing (or typing) the answers down will help you gain clarity.

What are the needs of my desired target market? What challenges do they have? What products or services are they currently paying for? What products or services would address their needs or challenges?
What are my unique strengths? What do my friends say are my unique strengths (ask them)? What would my friends pay me for (ask them)? What products or services have I purchased for myself or others that I could offer to others?
What products or services have I made or offered in the past? What products or services am I qualified to make or offer currently? What products or services would I like to be qualified to make or offer in the future?
What products or services do I wish that someone offered to me earlier in my life? What impact would this have had on my life?
What products or services would, by providing these to my desired target market, make the world a better place? How would this occur?
What products or services would, by offering them, give me a sense of meaning, purpose, and connection? Why?
What products or services can I see myself most easily providing? What products or services do I feel would be a challenge for me to provide? Why?
If I provided just one product or service, what would it be? Why?
Which products or services would I be willing to offer for free to my friends and family? Which would I be willing to offer for free to anyone on a limited basis? Which would I be willing to offer at half-price to anyone? Which would I only offer if I were paid full price? Why?
Which products or services do I feel I would be most successful in offering? Why?

2020 Day 25: Wuhan Coronavirus in the Year of the Rat

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Photo Credit: The Institute of Microbiology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences released yesterday the first close-up images of the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Sixteen days ago I decided to write a blog post: 2020 Day 9: New Strain of Coronavirus found in Wuhan, China. Eight days ago I felt called to dive into the details of the Wuhan Coronavirus in a second blog post: 2020 Day 17: Wuhan Coronavirus infections in Thailand and Japan. I’m now beginning to wonder if these two blog posts will be understood more clearly through a universe surfing viewpoint that does not require time to move in only one direction, and instead allows for anyone to quantum feel possible futures. Quantum feeling is different than prediction. Prediction assumes a classical arrow of time in one direction and looks for cause-and-effect relationship to justify a predicted outcome. Quantum feeling assumes a bi-directional arrow of time and allows future events to “cause” events that precede it, in our normal classical way of measuring time. Quantum feeling starts with an unexpected event – such as me deciding to blog about a new strain of coronavirus – and then imagines different futures that would be connected to that unexpected event when looking backwards in time from the future. Quantum feeling is a key step in universe surfing because it shows you a window to your possible futures in a way that expected events, such as habits, cannot.

In the last week, the following events have happened:

Five days ago (Jan. 20), the first case of “Novel Coronavirus” was reported in the Republic of Korea (WHO news: Novel Coronavirus – Republic of Korea). This case involved a 35-year-old female who resides in Wuhan and who did not report visiting any wet markets (such as Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market from where environmental samples have tested positive for the virus).
Four days ago (Jan. 21), the CDC confirmed the first U.S. case of the Wuhan Coronavirus in a male traveler from Wuhan who resides in Seattle, Washington.
Three days ago (Jan. 22), researchers published an article with genomic evidence of cross-species transmission from snake to human.
Two days ago (Jan. 23), the CDC raised its travel alert for the coronavirus outbreak to Level 3, Avoid Nonessential Travel. The CDC is still calling it an ‘outbreak’ versus an epidemic or pandemic. Guan Yi, a virology professor at the University of Hong Kong, director of the State Key Laboratory of Emerging Infectious Diseases, and member of team that first identified SARS, believes that the scale of infection will eventually be 10 times higher than SARS. After visiting Wuhan, he said
- “I’ve experienced so much and I never felt scared. Most of them are controllable. But this time I’m afraid.”
Yesterday (Jan. 24), the CDC confirmed the second U.S. case in a female traveler from Wuhan (Jan. 13) who resides in Chicago, Illinois. Over 1200 confirmed cases and at least 41 deaths in mainland China have been tied to the Wuhan Coronavirus. Factcheck reports that social media posts are spreading a bogus Coronavirus conspiracy theory that the virus was made in a lab and purposely released in order to make money selling a vaccine that has already been developed. Researchers reported in a preprint that basic reproduction number of the Wuhan coronavirus infection (R_0) is 3.6-4.0, which indicates that to keep the number of infections from increasing, 72-75% of the transmissions must be prevented by control measures. The first cases (3 in France) of the virus were confirmed in Europe. Cases of the coronavirus have been confirmed now in Mainland China (1287), France (3), Hong Kong (5), Japan, Macau (2), Nepal, Australia (1), Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan (3), Thailand, the United States (2) and Vietnam. In an interesting universe merging, Saudi Arabia denied reports of a case of Wuhan Coronavirus and instead reported that a male Indian nurse tested posted for MERS, which is caused by a different coronavirus with a similar genetic sequence. The number of google search results for “wuhan coronavirus” increased from 14.6M yesterday evening to 17.9M this morning and 20.4M this evening. For reference, MERS has 62.7M google results and SARS has 86.3M.
Today (Jan. 25) is the first day of the Lunar New Year – the year of the Rat, the first year of the 12-year cycle of animals. 15 cities in Hubei province are on lockdown with public and commercial transportation in and out of the cities suspended. Shanghai reported its first coronavirus death. Hong Kong leader Carrie Lam announced an emergency, closed schools for two weeks, and cancelled a four-day carnival and fireworks show.

Quantum sensing can also appear as a déjà vu feeling. Laurie Garrett, a reporter for CNN, reported yesterday that when she read reports of patients exhibiting symptoms of pneumonia as early as December 12, 2019, she had a “chilling sense of déjà vu”. Seventeen years ago she reported on the SARS virus pandemic that caused illness in at least 8000 people across 37 countries and was associated with at least 774 deaths, including 299 in Hong Kong.

Quantum sensing can also appear as fear. Guan Yi’s quote above (“but this time I’m afraid”) is not encouraging.

Universe interference can be seen when events happen that appear to come from a different universe. For instance, Dr. Liang Wudong fell ill last week and died from an Wuhan coronavirus infection. He had been the head of the ear, nose and throat department at one of Wuhan’s top hospitals, Hubei Xinhua Hospital. He was “at the front line” fighting against the coronavirus. However, he also retired last year and there’s a universe where he was not involved in fighting the coronavirus. The Wall Street Journal’s reporting was perhaps affected by this universe when someone wrote “It isn’t clear if Dr. Liang had been involved in the treatment of other patients.” Or maybe they were just trying to calm the stock market and make sure that the party continues. I’m feeling now a universe where the stock market is negatively affected by the Wuhan coronavirus.

WuhanCoronavirusCloseup20200124

Photo Credit: IVDC, China CDC