Archive for 'The Ultimate You'
You Don’t Have to Go it Alone
December 23rd, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
Making a mental inventory is a way of performing a self-assessment of your attitudes towards different situations. For example, does your stomach knot up at the thought of what it takes to achieve your best ROI ever, or do you feel energized and excited? The danger with attitude is that it’s usually on autopilot, and if a challenging situation automatically causes strife, then you’ve got a problem before you’ve even started. Identifying and mapping out factors that trigger anxiety or excitement is extremely important. Identifying negative attitudes will show you areas you need to control and will encourage you to confront such situations, taking the “fight” route instead of “flight.” Negative thought can suck you in and overwhelm like a flash flood, so you may need to retrain your brain to catch it when it first rears its ugly head. Sometimes it’s as simple as telling yourself to think about something else-don’t dwell on what’s got you down, keep moving forward. Other times, when you feel yourself in the shadows of pessimism, a good dose of sound reasoning can shed some positive light. If you make the effort to evaluate your negative thoughts and doubts, you’ll probably find that there isn’t sufficient evidence to maintain those insecurities-study the facts, not your fears.
Using the Law of Attraction to Get Exactly What You Need
December 3rd, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
The Law of Attraction, in its simplest form, states that “like attracts like.” Whatever you focus on the most is what will be most attracted to your life. At first glance, that would seem to state that since we all think about being healthy, rich, and having fulfilling lives, that we should all be living happily ever after, right?
Not quite. Although it is true that if we properly focused on those things that they would come to us in abundance, the truth is that most people don’t focus on having those things–they focus on the fact that they don’t have those things!
So, going back to the definition of the Law of Attraction, “like attracts like,” if all you ever do is think about how much you wish you were healthy, or how much you wish you were rich, or how much you wish you were happy, do you know what the Universal Law of Attraction will bring you? You guessed it; a life full of wishing you had all of those things.
To attract what you truly desire, you’ve got to stay focused on it, continuously block out negative thoughts and pair that with real action. Go get ‘em tiger!
Create a Positive Belief System
November 26th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
And You Will Succeed
People enter their work situation with a negative belief system; blocked mentally. You need to establish self-training to unblock yourself. You need to emotionally experience your goals as if they’ve already happened, so your subconscious accepts it as normal, or preexisting. Once it’s fully accepted in there, it just goes…preprogrammed for success. Just think of all the doubts, worries and pressures of your daily life. These things add up and create a detrimental, hampering residue through which your mind must make its way through in order to achieve success. But with the right attitude, a true belief in the positive, then you completely bypass that plaque and simply accept that success is guaranteed.
This system will undoubtedly produce exponential growth in business and in life; consistently. Build your skill set and expectations right, and they’ll last you a lifetime; without constant effort.
Put Your Subconscious on Autopilot
November 20th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
The thinking side of business is just as important as the doing part of business. You learn the how-to stuff, but you also have to work on the belief as well. Everything begins with a vision. If you want to create change in your life, you have to: 1) see it mentally; 2) feel it emotionally-emotions supercharge the process; 3) believe it-emotion creates belief; 4) do it-belief charges you to be proactive; 5) have it.
We don’t necessarily find leaders, they’re easier to build. You’ve just got to be a person of vision. Ask yourself what it would feel like to accomplish your goals-really try to feel it. Now, hold on to that feeling. Use that feeling to drive you. Let that feeling power your actions. Hold that feeling in your subconscious as if your dream has already come true. Once you do that, you put your mind on an autopiloted course to success.
Outdo Yourself to Better Yourself
November 15th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
Once you are settled into a particular pursuit, building up 10,000 hours’ worth of experience usually depends on seizing skill-building opportunities both on and off the job.
I worked as an editor for a publishing company during the time our offices made the transition from typewriters to computers. The company sent me to classes to learn the basics of Windows 3.1 and also Adobe Pagemaker because they wanted me to shift from editing to graphic design. (I had pursued an art minor in college.) Soon after completing the introductory classes, I sought permission to start doing volunteer layout jobs for local nonprofit organizations using company computers. My employer gladly gave me the keys to the offices so that I could let myself come and go during weekend hours when no one else was around. I designed newspapers, brochures, and ads for groups happy for the donated labor, but at the same time I sharpened my skills for my company. It was a win-win-win for all of us: my company, my favorite charities, and me.
However, becoming a master of your trade requires something more than accumulating hours of experience. Malcolm Gladwell says that you also need to choose challenging assignments. If you never feel an ounce of fear when beginning a new project, you are probably not doing enough to advance your skills. Get out of your comfort zone and try something difficult!
The Art of Pacing Yourself
November 12th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
Malcolm Gladwell has noted that most people underestimate how many hours of sustained effort are needed in order to master a field of endeavor. The magic number, he says, is 10,000. That’s how long student Bill Gates programmed computers before eventually starting his own company.
I first realized I could be a good trumpet player the year I turned nine. That summer, my director at band camp named me the school’s most improved trumpeter. For the next four years I faithfully practiced my music for the recommended 30-60 minutes a day. By age thirteen, I had copped first chair in our school’s trumpet section. Did that make me a musical prodigy? Hardly. Four years of daily tooting had netted me at most only 1,460 hours of practice–a full 8,530 hours short of Gladwell’s golden 10,000. At the rate I was going, I would have needed another 23 years of daily rehearsal to become an expert!
Truthfully, I never envisioned for myself any greater musical accomplishment than reaching first chair by eighth grade. That’s why another of Gladwell’s tips for career success is so important: the need to vividly envision the reward that your efforts will bring. After all, when you’re busy building up 10,000 hours of experience in your chosen field, you want to feel more than the burn. You want to know in your soul the passionate thrill of chasing a dream as wild as a mustang–and as real as a fistful of mane once the dream is within your grasp.
Finding the “Me” in Meaningful Work
November 10th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
According to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers, the first key to career success is finding meaning in your work. Usually those who choose their employment wisely have few problems with this. They resist all of the usual influences that could lead them into a disappointing line of work: the pressure of living up to others’ expectations of them, the temptation to go for the easy or the quick money, the tendency to let the job market decide their careers for them.
Sometimes a valid reason exists for accepting an unsuitable job, but this should never be done without, at the same time, promising yourself to keep looking for a better one. Then share that promise with a trusted friend. This is someone who will ask you regularly how your job hunt is going and will remind you of the reasons why you never intended your present position to be permanent. Equally important, this person will serve as your personal cheerleader whenever the going gets tough.
While waiting for that perfect opportunity to surface, you also need to focus on the ways that your current work makes a positive difference in the lives of others. For example, one woman who was moving back into the work force after raising a child took an online tutoring position. While waiting for the job of her dreams to materialize–one that made optimal use of her master’s degree in psychology–she experienced the satisfaction of helping academically challenged youngsters.
Turn Your Shortcomings Around
October 22nd, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
When something goes wrong in our lives, it can be hard to see the forest for the trees. We try to find the source of the errors in the world around us. It seems obvious that there must be someone or something “out there” conspiring against us. How could we ever succeed with the deck stacked against us like it is?
This is the wrong approach. Defeatist thinking patterns place the locus of control outside of your power, making the obstacles worse than they seem. You must realize that the only thing you have the ability to change is your attitudes toward your situation, so you must be brutally honest with yourself. If you were outside of the situation, where would you place the blame? What could you have done to make the situation better? How can you move forward, minimizing the effects of any mistakes you have made?
By bringing the locus of control back under your power, you seize the ability to improve your situation. You gain the resilience and strength that you need to ask not what made this situation go badly, but what can you do to prevent mistakes in the future.
Succeed by Studying Failure
October 10th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
Many self-help books and entrepreneurial guides tell us that we will succeed if we study those who are themselves successful. While this is often a good strategy, we cannot all be just like Donald Trump, Bill Gates, or Oprah Winfrey. Sometimes we learn best by seeing what not to do.
If you are starting a new business in a city or town, consider the businesses in the area which have failed recently. Do you share any commonalities? Did any of these commonalities lead to the other business’s downfall? While people don’t like to talk about their failures, you may learn a tremendous amount from speaking with those who did not succeed.
Even if your ambition is not to own your own business, you can improve your standing in your own workplace by observing your co-workers’ reprimands. If Tom is rebuked for not starting enough projects, maybe you should inspect your own initiative. If Betty is told to be more courteous to customers, treat the next difficult person with respect and dignity. You will become a better employee and will have fewer confrontations with your boss. In learning by trial and error, not all the errors have to be our own.
Fear, Forgiveness, and Freedom
October 8th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
Mistakes and failure scare us, sometimes even to the point of paralysis. Many people replay their errors in their mind over and over, kicking themselves repeatedly. In essence, these people are stuck in the moment.
If you find yourself in a constant cycle of blame, stop for a moment and step back from the situation. Put your error in perspective: did you say the wrong thing to your supervisor or did you cost your company thousands of dollars? In either case, admitting that you made a mistake is the first step to minimizing its effects.
After you have made amends at work, you must forgive yourself. Figure out what you have learned from this experience and move forward. Every experience makes you wiser, if you treat life as a learning experience. Trial-and-error was key to learning when we were children; there is no reason that should stop now.
Winston Churchill once said, “Success is not final, failure is not fatal: it is the courage to continue that counts.” When you master your fear of failure and forgive yourself, you gain the freedom to try new things and the wisdom to make the best of your situation.