Capitalizing on Your Strengths

One of the qualities of superior men and women is that they are extremely self-reliant. They accept complete responsibility for themselves and everything that happens to them. They look to themselves as the source of their successes and as the main cause of their problems and difficulties. High achievers say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.” When things aren’t moving along as fast as they want, they ask themselves, “What is it in me that is causing this problem?” They refuse to make excuses or to blame people. Instead, they look for ways to overcome obstacles and to make progress.

Totally self-responsible people look upon themselves as self-employed. They see themselves as the president of their own personal services corporation. They realize that no matter who signs their paycheck, in the final analysis they work for themselves. Because they have this attitude of self-employment, they take a strategic approach to their work.

The essential element in strategic planning for a corporation or a business entity is the concept of “return on equity.” All business planning is aimed at organizing and reorganizing the resources of the business in such a way as to increase the financial returns to the business owners. It is to increase the quantity of output relative to the quantity of input. It is to focus on areas of high profitability and return and, simultaneously, to withdraw resources from areas of low profitability and return. Companies that do this effectively in a rapidly changing environment are the ones that survive and prosper. Companies that fail to do this form of strategic analysis are those that fall behind and often disappear.

To achieve everything you are capable of achieving as a person, you also must become a skilled strategic planner with regard to your life and work. But instead of aiming to increase your return on equity, your goal is to increase your return on energy.

Most people in America start off with little more than their ability to work. More than 80 percent of the millionaires in America started with nothing. Most people have been broke, or nearly broke, several times during their young-adult years. But the ones who eventually get ahead are those who do certain things in certain ways, and those actions set them apart from the masses. Perhaps the most important thing they do, consciously or unconsciously, is to look at themselves strategically, thinking about how they can better use themselves in the marketplace, how they can best capitalize on their strengths and abilities to increase their returns to themselves and their families.

Your most valuable financial asset is your earning ability, your ability to earn money. Properly applied to the marketplace, it’s like a pump. By exploiting your earning ability, you can pump tens of thousands of dollars a year into your pocket. All your knowledge, education, skills and experience contribute toward your earning ability, your ability to get results for which someone will pay good money.

And your earning ability is like farmland. If you don’t take excellent care of it, if you don’t fertilize it and cultivate it and water it on a regular basis, it soon loses its ability to produce the kind of harvest that you desire. Successful men and women are those who are extremely aware of the importance and value of their earning ability, and they work every day to keep it growing and current with the demands of the marketplace.

One of the greatest responsibilities in life is to identify, develop and maintain an important marketable skill. It is to become very good at doing something for which there is a strong market demand.

In corporate strategy, we call this the development of a “competitive advantage.” For a company, a competitive advantage is defined as an area of excellence in producing a product or service that gives the company a distinct edge over its competition.

In capitalizing on your strengths, as the president of your own personal services corporation, you also must have a clear competitive advantage. You also must have an area of excellence. You must do something that makes you different from and better than your competitors. Your ability to identify and develop this competitive advantage is the most important thing you do in the world of work. It’s the key to maintaining your earning ability. It’s the foundation of your financial success. Without it, you’re simply a pawn in a rapidly changing environment. But with a distinct competitive advantage, based on your strengths and abilities, you can write your own ticket. You can take charge of your own life. You can always get a job. And the more distinct your competitive advantage, the more money you can earn and the more places in which you can earn it.

There are four keys to the strategic marketing of yourself and your services. These are applicable to huge companies such as General Motors, to candidates running for election and to individuals who want to accomplish the very most in the very shortest time.

The first of these four keys is specialization. No one can be all things to all people. A “jack-of-all-trades” also is a “master of none.” That career path usually leads to a dead end. Specialization is the key. Men and women who are successful have a series of general skills, but they also have one or two areas where they have developed the ability to perform in an outstanding manner.

Your decision about how, where, when and why you are going to specialize in a particular area of endeavor is perhaps the most important decision you will ever make in your career. It was well said that if you don’t think about the future, you can’t have one. The major reason why so many people are finding their jobs eliminated and finding themselves unemployed for long periods of time is because they didn’t look down the road of life far enough and prepare themselves well enough for the time when their current jobs would expire. They suddenly found themselves out of gas on a lonely road, facing a long walk back to regular and well-paying employment. Don’t let this happen to you.

In determining your area of specialization, put your current job aside for the moment, and take the time to look deeply into yourself. Analyze yourself from every point of view. Rise above yourself, and look at your lifetime of activities and accomplishments in determining what your area of specialization could be or should be.

And by the way, you might be doing exactly the right job for you at this moment. You already might be capitalizing on all your strengths, and your current work might be ideally suited to your likes and dislikes, to your temperament and your personality. Nevertheless, you owe it to yourself to be continually expanding the scope of your vision and looking toward the future to see where you might want to be going in the months and years ahead. Remember, the best way to predict the future is to create it.
You possess special talents and abilities that make you unique, different from anyone else who has ever lived. The odds of there being another person just like you are more than 50 billion to one. Your remarkable and unusual combination of education, experience, knowledge, problems, successes, difficulties and challenges, and your way of looking at and reacting to life, make you extraordinary. You have within you potential competencies and attributes that can enable you to accomplish virtually anything you want in life. Even if you lived for another 100 years, it would not be enough time for you to plumb the depths of your potential. You will never be able to use more than a small part of your inborn abilities. Your main job is to decide which of your talents you’re going to exploit and develop to their highest and best possible use right now.

So, what is your area of excellence? What are you especially good at right now? If things continue as they are, what are you likely to be good at in the future—say one or two or even five years from now? Is this a marketable skill with a growing demand, or is your field changing in such a way that you are going to have to change as well if you want to keep up with it? Looking into the future, what could be your area of excellence if you were to go to work on yourself and your abilities? What should be your area of excellence if you want to rise to the top of your field, make an excellent living and take complete control of your financial future?

When I was 22, I answered an advertisement for a copywriter for an advertising agency. As it happened, I had failed high-school English, and I really had no idea what a copywriter did. I remember the executive who interviewed me and how nice he was at pointing out that I wasn’t at all qualified for the job.

But something happened to me in the course of the interview process. The more I thought about it, the more I thought how much I would like to write advertising. Having been turned down flat during my first interview, I decided to learn more about the field.

I went to the city library and began to check out and read books on advertising and copywriting. Over the next six months, while I worked in a department store, I spent many hours devouring them. At the same time, I applied for copywriting jobs to advertising agencies in the city. I started with the small agencies first. When they turned me down, I asked them why they did so. What was wrong with my application? What did I need to learn more about? What books would they recommend? And to this day, I remember that virtually everyone I spoke with was helpful to me.

By the end of six months, I had read every book on advertising and copywriting in the library and applied to every agency in the city, working up from the smallest agency to the very largest in the country. And by the time I had reached that level, I was ready. I was offered jobs as a junior copywriter by both the number-one and number-two agencies in the country. I took the job with the number-one agency and was very successful in a short period of time.

The point of this story is that you can become almost anything you need to become, in order to accomplish almost anything you want to accomplish, if you simply decide what it is and then learn what you need to learn. This is such an obvious fact that most people miss it completely.

Some years later, I decided that I wanted to get into real-estate development. Again, I went to the library and began checking out and reading all the books on real-estate development. At the time, I had no money, no contacts and no knowledge of the industry. But I knew the great secret: I could learn what I needed to learn so that I could do what I wanted to do.

Within 12 months, I had tied up a piece of property with a $100 deposit and a 30-day option. I put together a proposal for a shopping center, and I tentatively arranged for major anchor tenants and several minor tenants that together took up 85 percent of the square footage I had proposed. Then I sold 75 percent of the entire package to a major development company in exchange for the company’s putting up all the cash and providing me with the resources and people I needed to
manage the construction of the shopping center and the completion of the leasing. Virtually everything that I did I had learned from books written by real-estate experts, books on the shelves of the local library.

As you might have noticed, the fields of advertising and copywriting and real-estate development are very different. But these incidents, and every business situation I have been in over the years, had one element in common. Success in each area was based on the decision, first, to specialize in that area and, second, to be extremely knowledgeable in that area so that I could do a good job.

In looking at your current and past experiences for an area of specialization, one of the most important questions to ask yourself is, “What activities have been most responsible for my success in life to date?” How did you get from where you were to where you are today? What talents and abilities seemed to come easily to you? What things do you do well that seem to be difficult for most other people? What things do you most enjoy doing? What things do you find most intrinsically motivating? What things make you happy when you are doing them?

In capitalizing on your strengths, your level of interest, excitement and enthusiasm about the particular job or activity is a key factor. You’ll always do best and make the most money in a field that you really enjoy. It will be an area that you like to think about and talk about and read about and learn about. Successful people love what they do, and they can hardly wait to get to it each day. Doing their work makes them happy, and the happier they are, the more enthusiastically they do it, and the better they do it as well.

In capitalizing on your strengths, the second key is differentiation. You must decide what you’re going to do to be not only different but also better than your competitors in the field. Remember, you have to be good in only one specific area to move ahead of the pack. And you must decide what that area should be.

The third strategic principle in capitalizing on your strengths is segmentation. You have to look at the marketplace and determine where you can best apply yourself, with your unique talents and abilities, to give yourself the highest possible return on energy expended. What customers, companies, markets, can best utilize your special
talents and offer you the most in terms of financial rewards and future opportunities?

The final key to personal strategic planning is concentration. Once you have decided the area in which you are going to specialize, how you are going to differentiate yourself, and where in the marketplace you can best apply your strengths, your final job is to concentrate all of your energy on becoming excellent there. The marketplace pays extraordinary rewards only for extraordinary performance.

In the final analysis, everything that you have done up to now is simply the groundwork for becoming outstanding in your chosen field. When you become very good at doing what people need, you begin moving rapidly into the top ranks of working people everywhere.

By: Brian Tracy

Beware the Boomerang

How do you tell a good thinker from a poor thinker? How do you evaluate and separate a good decision from a bad one.

The answer to these questions is often the difference between a good life and poor one.

It’s simple. Consequences! What’s likely to happen down the road if you do something today?

You know that there are two reasons for doing anything. There is the reason that sounds good and then there is the real reason.

The real reason is almost always self-gratification, personal benefit, immediate reward for the person doing it. We call this “motivation.”

The reason that sounds good is almost always noble and aimed at benefiting others in some way.

Virtually every political plan to do something for the “people” is based on these two reasons. The real reason, according to Nobel prize winning economist Dr. James Buchaner, is that the program or spending plan will most help the politician get re-elected.

But beware the boomerang! The secondary consequences of a poor idea or decision can be far worse than if nothing were done at all.

All actions and inactions have consequences, and the superior person thinks about what they might be, carefully in advance of deciding.

Many things with happy short term consequences have very negative long term consequences. Take eating for example. Delicious food in excess can lead to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, strokes and early death.

Lifelong learning is something with very positive long term consequences. Continually upgrading your skills and renewing your mind can lead to a life of material prosperity and personal happiness.

Too much television, newspapers, radio, socializing and unfocused activity may be fun at the moment. But these activities lead to underachievement, frustration and failure.

Beware the boomerang! Make sure that what you’re doing, what you’re spending out, will come back to you with the things you really want in the future.

By: Biran Tracy

Becoming a Person of Integrity

Integrity is a value, like persistence, courage and industriousness. Even more than that, it is the value that guarantees all the other values. You are a good person to the degree to which you live your life consistent with the highest values that you espouse. Integrity is the quality that locks in your values and causes you to live consistent with them.

Integrity is the foundation of character. And character development is one of the most important activities you can engage in. Working on your character means disciplining yourself to do more and more of those things that a thoroughly honest person would do, under all circumstances.

To be impeccably honest with others, you must first be impeccably honest with yourself. You must be true to yourself. You must be true to the very best that is in you, to the very best that you know. Only a person who is living consistent with his or her highest values and virtues is really living a life of integrity. And when you commit to living this kind of life, you will find yourself continually raising your own standards, continually refining your definition of integrity and honesty.

You can tell how high your level of integrity is by simply looking at the things you do in your day-to-day life. You can look at your reactions and responses to the inevitable ups and downs of life. You can observe the behaviors you typically engage in and you will then know the person you are.

The external manifestation of high integrity is high-quality work. A person who is totally honest with himself or herself will be someone who does, or strives to do, excellent work on every occasion. The totally honest person recognizes, sometimes unconsciously, that everything he or she does is a statement about who he or she really is as a person.

When you start a little earlier, work a little harder, stay a little later and concentrate on every detail, you are practicing integrity in your work. And whether you know it or not, your true level of integrity is apparent and obvious to everyone around you.

Perhaps the most important rule you will ever learn is that your life only becomes better when you become better.

All of life is lived from the inside out. At the very core of your personality lie your values about yourself and life in general. Your values determine the kind of person you really are. What you believe has defined your character and your personality. It is what you stand for, and what you won’t stand for, that tells you and the world the kind of person you have become.

Ask yourself this question: What are your five most important values in life? Your answer will reveal an enormous amount about you. What would you pay for, sacrifice for, suffer for and even die for? What would you stand up for, or refuse to lie down for? What are the values that you hold most dear? Think these questions through carefully and, when you get a chance, write down your answers.

Here’s another way of asking that question. What men and women, living or dead, do you most admire? Once you pick three or four men or women, the next question is: Why do you admire them? What values, qualities, or virtues do they have that you respect and look up to? Can you articulate those qualities? What is a quality possessed by human beings in general that you most respect? This is the starting point for determining your values. The answers to these questions form the foundation of your character and your personality.

Once you have determined your five major values, you should now organize them in order of importance. What is your first, most important value? What is your second value? What is your third value? And so on. Ranking your values is one of the very best and fastest ways to define your character.

Remember, a higher order value will always take precedence over a lower order value. Whenever you are forced to choose between acting on one value or another, you always choose the value that is the highest on your own personal hierarchy.

Who you are, in your heart, is evidenced by what you do on a day-to-day basis, especially when you are pushed into a position where you have to make a choice between two values or alternatives.

Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Guard your integrity as a sacred thing.” In study after study, the quality of integrity, or a person’s adherence to values, ranks as the number one quality sought in every field. When it comes to determining whom they will do business with, customers rank the honesty of a salesperson as the most important single quality. Even if a they feel that a salesperson’s product, quality and price is superior, customers will not buy from that salesperson if they feel that he or she is lacking in honesty and character.

Likewise, integrity is the number one quality of leadership. Integrity in leadership is expressed in terms of constancy and consistency. It is manifested in an absolute devotion to keeping one’s word. The glue that holds all relationships together—including the relationship between the leader and the led—is trust, and trust is based on integrity.
Integrity is so important that functioning in our society would be impossible without it. We could not make even a simple purchase without a high level of confidence that the price was honest and that the change was correct. The most successful individuals and companies in America are those with reputations of high integrity among everyone they deal with. This level of integrity builds the confidence that others have in them and enables them to do more business than their competitors whose ethics may be a little shaky.

Earl Nightingale once wrote, “If honesty did not exist, it would have to be invented, as it is the surest way of getting rich.” A study at Harvard University concluded that the most valuable asset that a company has is how it is known to its customers⎯its reputation.

By the same token, your greatest personal asset is the way that you are known to your customers. It is your personal reputation for keeping your word and fulfilling your commitments. Your integrity precedes you and affects all of your interactions with other people.

There are several things you can do to move you more rapidly toward becoming the kind of person that you know you are capable of becoming. The first, as I mentioned, is to decide upon your five most important values in life. Organize them in order of priority. Then write a brief paragraph defining what each of those values means to you. A value combined with a definition becomes an organizing principle⎯a statement that you can use to help you make better decisions. It is a measure and standard which enables you to know how closely you are adhering to your innermost beliefs and convictions.

The second step to developing integrity and character in yourself is to study men and women of great character. Study the lives and stories of people like George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Florence Nightingale, Susan B. Anthony and Margaret Thatcher. Study the people whose strength of character enabled them to change their world. As you read, think about how they would behave if they were facing the difficulties that you face.

Napoleon Hill, in his book, The Master Key to Riches, tells about how he created an imaginary board of personal advisers made up of great figures of history. He chose people like Napoleon, Lincoln, Jesus, and Alexander the Great. Whenever he had to make a decision, he would relax deeply and then imagine that the members of his advisory council were sitting at a large table in front of him. He would then ask them what he should do to deal effectively with a particular situation. In time, they would begin to give him answers, observations, and insights that helped him to see more clearly and act more effectively.

You can do the same thing. Select someone that you very much admire for their qualities of courage, tenacity, honesty, or wisdom. Ask yourself, “What would Jesus do in my situation?” or, “What would Lincoln do if he were here at this time?” You will find yourself with guidance that enables you to be the very best person that you can possible be.

The third and most important step in building your integrity has to do with formulating your approach based on the psychology of human behavior. We know that if you feel a particular way, you will act in a manner consistent with that feeling. For example, if you feel happy, you will act happy. If you feel angry, you will act angry. If you feel courageous, you will act courageously.

But we also know that you don’t always start off feeling the way you want to. However, because of the Law of Reversibility, if you act as if you had a particular feeling, the action will generate the feeling consistent with it. You can, in effect, act your way into feeling. You can “fake it until you make it.”

You can become a superior human being by consciously acting exactly as the kind of person that you would most like to become. If you behave like an individual of integrity, courage, resolution, persistence and character, you will soon create within yourself the mental structure and habits of such a person. Your actions will become your reality. You will create a personality that is consistent with your highest aspirations.

The more you walk, talk, and behave consistent with your highest values, the more you will like yourself and the better you will feel about yourself. Your self-image will improve and your level of self-acceptance will go up. You will feel stronger, bolder, and more capable of facing any challenge.

There are three primary areas of your life where acting with integrity is crucial. These are the three areas of greatest temptation for forsaking your integrity, as well as the areas of greatest opportunity for building your integrity. When you listen to your inner voice and do what you know to be the right thing in each of these areas, you will have a sense of peace and satisfaction that will lead you on to success and high achievement.

The first area of integrity has to do with your relationships with your family and your friends, the people close to you. Being true to yourself means living in truth with each person in your life. It means refusing to say or do something that you don’t believe is right. Living in truth with other people means that you refuse to stay in any situation where you are unhappy with the behavior of another person. You refuse to tolerate it. You refuse to compromise.

Psychologists have determined that most stress and negativity comes from attempting to live in a way that is not congruent with your highest values. It is when your life is out of alignment⎯when you are doing and saying one thing on the outside, but really feeling and believing something different on the inside⎯that you feel most unhappy. When you decide to become an individual of character and integrity, your first action will be to neutralize or remove all difficult relationships from your life.

This doesn’t mean that you have to go and hit somebody over the head with a stick. It simply means that you honestly confront another person and tell them that you are not happy. Tell them that you would like to reorganize this relationship so that you feel more content and satisfied. If the other person is not willing to make adjustments so that you can be happy, it should be clear to you that you don’t want to be in this relationship much longer anyway.

The second area of integrity has to do with your attitude and behavior toward money. Casualness toward money brings casualties in your financial life. You must be fastidious about your treatment of money, especially other people’s money. You must guard your credit rating the same way you would guard your honor. You must pay your bills punctually, or even early. You must keep your promises with regard to your financial commitments.

The third area of integrity has to do with your commitments to others, especially in your business, your work and your sales activities. Always keep your word. Be a man or a woman of honor. If you say that you will do something, do it. If you make a promise, keep it. If you make a commitment, fulfill it. Be known as the kind of person that can be trusted absolutely, no matter what the circumstances.

Your integrity is manifested in your willingness to adhere to the values you hold most dear. It’s easy to make promises and hard to keep them, but if you do, every single act of integrity will make your character a little stronger. And as you improve the quality and strength of your character, every other part of your life will improve as well.


By: Brian Tracy

Becoming a Master of Persuasion

Persuasion power can help you get more of the things you want faster than anything else you do. It can mean the difference between success and failure. It can guarantee your progress and enable you to use all of your other skills and abilities at the very highest level. Your persuasion power will earn you the support and respect of your customers, bosses, coworkers, colleagues and friends. The ability to persuade others to do what you want them to do can make you one of the most important people in your community.

Fortunately, persuasion is a skill, like riding a bicycle, that you can learn through study and practice. Your job is to become absolutely excellent at influencing and motivating others to support and assist you in the achievement of your goals and the solving of your problems.

You can either persuade others to help you or be persuaded to help them. It is one or the other. Most people are not aware that every human interaction involves a complex process of persuasion and influence. And being unaware, they are usually the ones being persuaded to help others rather than the ones who are doing the persuading.

The key to persuasion is motivation. Every human action is motivated by something. Your job is to find out what motivates other people and then to provide that motivation. People have two major motivations: the desire for gain and the fear of loss. The desire for gain motivates people to want more of the things they value in life. They want more money, more success, more health, more influence, more respect, more love and more happiness. Human wants are limited only by individual imagination. No matter how much a person has, he or she still wants more and more. When you can show a person how he or she can get more of the things he or she wants by helping you achieve your goals, you can motivate them to act in your behalf.

President Eisenhower once said that, “Persuasion is the art of getting people to do what you want them to do, and to like it.” You need always to be thinking about how you can get people to want to do the things that you need them to do to attain your objectives.

People are also motivated to act by the fear of loss. This fear, in all its various forms, is often stronger than the desire for gain. People fear financial loss, loss of health, anger or disapproval of others, loss of the love of someone and the loss of anything they have worked hard to accomplish. They fear change, risk and uncertainty because these threaten them with potential losses.

Whenever you can show a person that, by doing what you want them to do, they can avoid a loss of some kind, you can influence them to take a particular action. The very best appeals are those where you offer an opportunity to gain and an opportunity to avoid loss at the same time.

There are two ways to get the things you want in life. First, you can work by yourself and for yourself in your own best interest. You can be a “Robinson Crusoe” of modern life, relying on yourself for the satisfaction of your needs. By doing this, you can accomplish a little, but not a lot. The person who looks to himself or herself completely is limited in his or her capacities. He or she will never be rich or successful.

The second way to get the things you want is by gaining and using leverage. Leverage allows you to multiply yourself and get far more out of the hours you put in rather than doing everything yourself.

There are three forms of leverage you must develop to fulfill your full potential in our society: other people’s efforts, other people’s knowledge, and other people’s money.

You leverage yourself through other people’s efforts by getting other people to work with you and for you in the accomplishment of your objectives. Sometimes you can ask them to help you voluntarily, although people won’t work for very long without some personal reward. At other times you can hire them to help you, thereby freeing you up to do higher-value work.

One of the most important laws of economics is called “Ricardo’s Law.” It is also called the Law of Comparative Advantage. This law states that when someone can accomplish a part of your task at a lower hourly rate than you would earn for accomplishing more valuable parts of your task, you should delegate or outsource that part of the task.

For example, if you want to earn $100,000 a year, in a 250 day year, you need to make $50.00 per hour. That means you must be doing work that is worth $50.00 per hour, eight hours per day, 250 days per year. Therefore, if there is any part of your work⎯like making photocopies, filing information, typing letters, or filling out expense forms⎯that is not valued at $50.00 per hour, you should stop doing it. You should persuade someone else who works at a lower hourly rate to do it for you. The more lower level tasks you can persuade others to do, the more time you will have to do tasks that pay you higher amounts of money. This is one of the essential keys to getting the leverage you need to become one of the higher paid people in your profession.

Management can be defined as “getting things done through others.” To be a manager you must be an expert at persuading and influencing others to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things; instead, they persuade them to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines and agreed-upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he or she has a vested interest in doing a job well, he or she accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.

In every part of your life, you have a choice of either doing it yourself or delegating it to others. Your ability to get someone else to take on the job with the same enthusiasm that you would have is an exercise in personal persuasion. It may seem to take a little longer at the beginning, but it saves you an enormous amount of time in the completion of the task.

The second form of leverage that you must develop for success in America is other people’s knowledge. You must be able to tap into the brain power of many other people if you want to accomplish worthwhile goals. Successful people are not those who know everything needed to accomplish a particular task, but more often than not, they are people who know how to find the knowledge they need.

What is the knowledge that you need to achieve your most important goals? Of the knowledge required, what knowledge must you have personally in order to control your situation, and what knowledge can you borrow, buy, or rent from others?
It has been said that, in our information-based society, you are never more than one book or two phone calls away from any piece of knowledge in the country. With on-line computer services that access huge data bases all over the country, you can usually get the precise information you require in a few minutes by using a personal computer. Whenever you need information and expertise from another person in order to achieve your goals, the very best way to persuade them to help you is to ask them for their assistance.

Almost everyone who is knowledgeable in a particular area is proud of their accomplishments. By asking a person for their expert advice, you compliment them and motivate them to want to help you. So don’t be afraid to ask, even if you don’t know the individual personally.

The third key to leverage, which is very much based on your persuasive abilities, is other people’s money. Your ability to use other people’s money and resources to leverage your talents is the key to financial success. Your ability to buy and defer payment, to sell and collect payment in advance, to borrow, rent or lease furniture, fixtures and machinery, and to borrow money from people to help you multiply your opportunities is one of the most important of all skills that you can develop. And these all depend on your ability to persuade others to cooperate with you financially so that you can develop the leverage you need to move onward and upward in your field.

There are four “Ps” that will enhance your ability to persuade others in both your work and personal life. They are power, positioning, performance, and politeness. And they are all based on perception.

The first “P” is power. The more power and influence that a person perceives that you have, whether real or not, the more likely it is that that person will be persuaded by you to do the things you want them to do. For example, if you appear to be a senior executive, or a wealthy person, people will be much more likely to help you and serve you than they would be if you were perceived to be a lower level employee.

The second “P” is positioning. This refers to the way that other people think about you and talk about you when you are not there. Your positioning in the mind and heart of other people largely determines how open they are to being influenced by you.

In everything you do involving other people, you are shaping and influencing their perceptions of you and your positioning in their minds. Think about how you could change the things you say and do so that people think about you in such a way that they are more open to your requests and to helping you achieve your goals.

The third “P” is performance. This refers to your level of competence and expertise in your area. A person who is highly respected for his or her ability to get results is far more persuasive and influential than a person who only does an average job.
The perception that people have of your performance capabilities exerts an inordinate influence on how they think and feel about you. You should commit yourself to being the very best in your field. Sometimes, a reputation for being excellent at what you do can be so powerful that it alone can make you an extremely persuasive individual in all of your interactions with the people around you. They will accept your advice, be open to your influence and agree with your requests.

The fourth “P” of persuasion power is politeness. People do things for two reasons, because they want to and because they have to. When you treat people with kindness, courtesy and respect, you make them want to do things for you. They are motivated to go out of their way to help you solve your problems and accomplish your goals. Being nice to other people satisfies one of the deepest of all subconscious needs, the need to feel important and respected. Whenever you convey this to another person in your conversation, your attitude and your treatment of that person, he or she will be wide open to being persuaded and influenced by you in almost anything you need.

Again, perception is everything. The perception of an individual is his or her reality. People act on the basis of their perceptions of you. If you change their perceptions, you change the way they think and feel about you, and you change the things that they will do for you.

You can become an expert at personal persuasion. You can develop your personal power by always remembering that there are only two ways to get the things you want in life, you can do it all yourself, or you can get most of it done by others. Your ability to communicate, persuade, negotiate, influence, delegate and interact effectively with other people will enable you to develop leverage using other people’s efforts, other people’s knowledge and other people’s money. The development of your persuasion power will enable you to become one of the most powerful and influential people in your organization. It will open up doors for you in every area of your life.

By: Brian Tracy

Accessing Your Intuition.

It has been said that men and women start to become great when they begin to listen to their inner voices. Your intuition is your direct connection with infinite intelligence. Intuition is so powerful that it has been studies and written about by the greatest men and women of history for thousands of years. When you begin to use it regularly and systematically, there is virtually nothing that you cannot accomplish.

Your intuition has often been called the “still small voice” within. You may experience your intuition as a gut-feeling, as an inner sense of what is right or wrong for you. Sometimes your intuition manifests itself as a hunch or an inspiration. Often it comes as a flash of insight. Your intuition leads you to new ideas, concepts and breakthroughs. Sometimes, an intuitive flash will enable you to see a situation completely differently and solve it on a completely different level. Einstein was referring to intuition when he said, “No problem can be solved on the same level at which you meet it.”

In breakthrough thinking, we are taught to redefine a problem and take it to a higher level in order to find a solution for it. Since the more you do of what you’re doing, the more you’ll get of what you’ve got, trying to solve your current problem at your current level is often an exercise in frustration. You can unlock your intuition by using your imagination to think about your problem in a completely different way.

There are two major types of imagination that you use continually, both of which require the highest use of your intuitive powers. They are first, synthetic imagination and, second, creative imagination.
Synthetic imagination is your ability to assemble existing pieces of knowledge and information into new forms. It is very much like taking all the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, having a clear idea of the picture or goal that you want to accomplish and assembling them into a single piece.

This form of imagination is often called, “integrative intelligence.” It is one of the highest forms of intelligence for success and achievement anywhere. Integrative intelligence is defined as your ability to integrate a large number of different pieces of information into a single precept for decision and action. It is your ability to recognize and sort many different facts and insights together, emphasizing some and discarding others, in the process of making the correct decision. This form of intelligence is extremely valuable in fast-moving, fluid situations that require your considering a large number of different pieces of information in making a decision.

It has been estimated that you need between 20,000 and 50,000 bits of information at your disposal to be really successful in any field of endeavor. We live in the information age, and knowledge is the raw material of production and value in this age. So the more different bits or “bytes” of information that you have, the more effective your integrative intelligence, or synthetic imagination, will be.

The people who rise to the top of any field of endeavor are invariably those who know more than others. In fact, the division in our society today is not between those who “have more” and “have less” but between those who “know more” and those who “know less.” One of your jobs is to be continually gathering additional bits of practical and useful information so that you have plenty of different ideas and concepts to draw upon when you are wrestling with any problem or striving toward any goal. Your intuition then goes to work for you by helping you quickly sort out the relevant facts and giving you the answers you need when you need them.

The more ideas you expose yourself to, the greater the probability that the right idea will appear at the right time. When it does, your intuition will help you to recognize the idea and integrate it into everything else you are doing.

The second form of imagination is creative imagination. This is a higher form of imagination where intuition plays an even more important part. Creative imagination refers to your ability to come up with completely new and different ideas and concepts to solve your problems and achieve your goals. It is the highest form of imagination and is responsible for all the great breakthroughs in science, technology, art, music, literature, and medicine. The most successful men and women of all time have been those who have deliberately trained themselves to tap into their creative imagination on a regular basis. And so can you, if you learn how.

Your creative imagination is the source of all hunches, inspirations, imagination, flashes of insight and new understandings of complex concepts. The cultivation and development of your creative imagination can enable you to make more progress in one or two years than the average person might make in ten or twenty. And your creativity, your intuitive sense is like a muscle. It grows with use. The more you practice with it and rely on it, the stronger it becomes and the faster it acts for you.
Men and women who have highly developed imaginations have often reached the point where they completely trust their intuition, their inner voices, to guide them in every situation. They never speak or act until they feel an inner urging to do so. They know that their intuition will always bring them exactly the right answer, at exactly the right time.

Your intuition is your direct pipeline to a form of intelligence that is completely beyond your conscious brain. It is accessed by your subconscious mind, which his controlled by the thoughts you think and the beliefs you hold in your conscious mind. The more you affirm and visualize your desired goals in your conscious mind, the more readily they are picked up by your subconscious mind and the more rapidly your intuition or creative imagination is triggered. Successful, effective, happy people are those who have gotten onto the beam of their own intuitive senses and who rely continuously on their inner guidance. And they seldom make mistakes.

In your lifetime, you have made a lot of decisions, some of them right and some of them wrong. But when your intuition tells you to do or to not do something, it is always correct. If you have ever gone against your intuition, your inner voice, haven’t you regretted it? Wherever you have pushed aside that nagging inner feeling, hasn’t it come back to haunt you? This is because your intuition is always correct. It always gives you exactly the right answer for you at any given time, and in any given situation. One of the smartest things that you can ever do is to listen carefully to your intuition and to postpone making a decision until you have an inner sense of what choices are correct.

You will often find that your intuition will urge you to either speak up or to remain silent in a social or business situation. Later, it will turn out that that was exactly the right thing to do. In retrospect, you will find that your intuitive learning has always been more accurate than anything that you could think of with your conscious mind.
All the great writers, composers, artists, and scientists have developed the habit of listening to their intuition. You have access to the same intuitive powers as the smartest men and women who ever lived.

By the way, research shows that men and women, tested separately, have intuitions that are equally accurate. They seem to come up with the same intuitive answers for complex problems and questions. Why is it, then, that women’s intuition is more respected than men’s? The answer is simple. Women listen to their intuition more, while men have a tendency to brush it aside.

When a woman says, “This situation doesn’t feel right,” she views this feeling as a valid and important assessment of whether the situation is right or wrong. Women are very respectful of their intuitive feelings and they generally refuse to go against them. Men will often put aside their intuitive leanings in favor of short-term advantage, only to pay the price later.
Perhaps the best method for stimulating your intuition is by learning to practice solitude on a regular basis. Throughout the ages, the greatest thinkers of all time have practiced solitude as a regular part of their work and life. They have taken time to be alone with themselves. They have gone off and sat quietly prior to any situation of importance. Most of the great thinkers of today use solitude as an essential tool in developing the creative insights and intuitions that often have the power to change our lives.

Most people have never practiced solitude because they wrongly believe that they have no time for it. However, one good idea that comes to you in the silence of solitude can save you a year of hard work. You cannot afford not to practice solitude on a regular basis. Here’s how you do it.

First, find a place to sit where you can be completely alone, in silence, without interruptions. You want to avoid any activities that will disturb your reverie, such as eating, drinking, listening to music, and getting telephone calls. You can sit in your basement, your backyard, or on a park bench. The main objective is to be completely alone with yourself.

And second, force yourself to sit without moving for 60 minutes. The first 25 or 30 minutes will be excruciatingly difficult. You will have an irresistible urge to get up and walk around. But you must persist. You must force yourself to stay still.

After 25 or 30 minutes, a wonderful thing will happen. You will start to feel very good about yourself and your life. You will relax completely. Your mind will become calm and clear. You will feel energy flowing through your body. The situations and difficulties of your life will seem to fade away, and you will begin to get tremendous clarity on how to reach your goals.
At the end of your 60 minutes, get up and do exactly what your intuition told you to do. Don’t worry about whether or not people will like it or approve of it. Just take the action, make the commitment, do the deed. You will find later that this was exactly the right thing to do.

Solitude requires no energy, no effort, no trying at all. It simply requires a state of relaxed awareness where you open your mind to infinite intelligence. And at the right moment, exactly the right answer you need will come to you, in exactly the right form.

You can overcome any obstacle, solve any problem or achieve any goal by tapping into the incredible powers of your mind and by trusting your intuition in everything you do. Once you begin to develop and use your intuition, you will become more alert, more aware, smarter and more effective in everything that you do. And your potential will begin to unfold at a speed that you cannot now imagine.

By: Brian Tracy

Accessing Your Inner Guidance

We know that the body has a natural bias toward health and energy. It’s designed to last for 100 years with proper care and maintenance. When something goes wrong with any part of our body, we experience it in the form of pain or discomfort of some kind.

We know that when our body is not functioning smoothly and painlessly, something is wrong, and we take action to correct it. We go to a doctor; we take pills; we undergo physical therapy, massage or chiropractic. We know that if we ignore pain or discomfort for any period of time, it could lead to something more serious.

Every disease or ailment, whether it be cancer, diabetes, arthritis, high blood pressure or something else, has a series of warning signs. In every case, when we experience an abnormality, we tend to move quickly to do something to get back to normal. Our physical feelings tell us when we’re well, and they also tell us when we’re unwell, and we tend to obey them if we want to live a long, healthy life.

In the same sense, nature also gives us a way to tell what’s right for us and what’s wrong for us in life. Just as nature gives us physical pain to guide us to doing or not doing things in the physical realm, nature gives us emotional pain to guide us toward doing or not doing things in the emotional or mental realm. The wonderful thing is that you’re constructed so that if you simply listen carefully to yourself—to your mind, your body and your emotions—and follow the guidance you’re given, you can dramatically enhance the quality of your life.

Just as the natural physical state is health and vitality, the natural emotional state is peace and happiness. Whenever you experience a deviation from peace and happiness, it’s an indication that something is amiss. Something is wrong with what you’re thinking, doing or saying. You’re an incredibly complex organism, and your feelings of ease and unease, happiness and unhappiness, can be triggered by a myriad of factors. But the bottom line is that your feeling of inner happiness is the best indicator you could ever have to tell you what you should be doing more of and what you should be doing less of.

Unhappiness is to your life as pain is to your body. It’s sent as a messenger to tell you that what you’re doing is wrong for you.
There are many reasons why people don’t listen more closely to their feelings and, especially, why many people are reluctant to use their own happiness as the standard by which to judge the events in their lives. I’ve studied this subject for many years, and I think that there are three major myths about happiness that each of us believes to some degree.

The first myth about happiness is that it is not legitimate or correct for you to put your happiness ahead of everyone else’s. Throughout my life, I’ve met people who have said that it is more important to make other people happy than it is to make yourself happy. Of course, that is nonsense.

Human beings are happiness-driven organisms. Everything we do in life is oriented toward maintaining and increasing our level of happiness. We are psychologically constructed so that it’s impossible for us to be any other way without making ourselves mentally and emotionally ill. The fact is that you can’t give away to anyone else what you don’t have for yourself. Just as you can’t give money to the poor if you don’t have any, you can’t make someone else happy if you yourself are miserable.
The very best way to assure the happiness of others is to be happy yourself and then to share your happiness with them. Suffering and self-sacrifice merely depress and discourage other people. If you want to make others happy, start by living the kind of life and doing the kind of things that make you happy.

The second myth, which is closely tied to the first myth, is the admonition that we’re here to serve others rather than ourselves. Many poems and essays repeat that theme. They say that we’ve justified our life on this earth if we’ve made some other person happy on the way through. But as I’ve said before, making others happy goes hand in hand with making ourselves happy. It’s through service to others that we achieve a sense of meaning and purpose in life. Only when we lose ourselves in doing something that we feel benefits someone other than ourselves do we experience transcendence, do we feel ourselves rising above the tedium of day-to-day activity. To paraphrase Robert Louis Stevenson, everybody makes his living by serving someone. And the key is to serve with joy and happiness.

The third myth about happiness is that someone else’s definition of happiness is valid for you. Often, we feel a little uneasy if we’re not happy doing something that someone else thinks should make us happy. Many people allow their parents to influence their choices of career and find themselves miserable as a result. They want to please their parents, they want to make them happy, but they’re unable to experience any joy doing what they’re doing.

Happiness in life is like a smorgasbord. If 100 people went to a smorgasbord and each put food on his plate in the quantity and mix that each felt would be most pleasing to him, every plate would be different. Even a husband and wife would go up to the smorgasbord and come back with plates that looked completely different. Happiness is the same way. It’s composed of a great variety of ingredients, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. Each person requires a particular combination of those ingredients to feel the very best about himself or herself.

And your mix is changing continually. If you went to the same smorgasbord every day for a year, you probably would come back with a different plateful of food each time. Each day—sometimes each hour—only you can tell what it takes to make you happy. Therefore, the only way to judge whether a job, a relationship, an investment, or any decision, is right for you is to get in touch with your feelings and listen to your heart.

In the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand, there’s a scene where someone asks Cyrano why he, as an incredible individualist, should refuse to compromise his ideals or principles for anyone. He replies with these classic words: “I long ago made the decision that in every area of life, I will choose the path of least resistance in this, that I will please at least myself in all things.” That is one of the great lines in literature. To have the courage to please at least yourself in all things. Do what feels right for you, at the very minimum, and if it makes others happy as well, that’s terrific. If it doesn’t, you’ll know that you have done the very best you could under the circumstances.

You’re true to yourself only when you follow your inner light, when you listen to what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “still, small voice within.” You’re being the very best person you can be only when you have the courage and the fortitude to allow your definition of happiness, whatever it may be, to be the guiding light of every part of your life. Whenever you feel stressed, anxious, worried or uneasy about any part of your life, it’s nature’s way of telling you that something is wrong. It’s a message that there’s something that you need to address or deal with. There’s something that you need to do more or less of. There’s something that you need to get into or out of. Very often, you’ll suffer from what has been called “divine discontent.” You’ll feel fidgety and uneasy for a reason or reasons that are unclear to you. You’ll be dissatisfied with the status quo. Sometimes, you’ll be unable to sleep. Sometimes, you’ll be angry or irritable. Very often, you’ll get upset with things that have nothing to do with the real issue. You’ll have a deep inner sense that something isn’t as it should be, and you’ll often feel like a fish on a hook, wriggling and squirming emotionally to get free.

And that is a good thing. Divine discontent always comes before a positive life change. If you were perfectly satisfied, you would never take any action to improve or change your circumstances. Only when you’re dissatisfied for some reason do you have the inner motivation to engage in the outer behaviors that lead you onward and upward.

You’ve heard of Murphy’s Law, which says that whatever can go wrong will go wrong. Well, there’s another law, which says that left to themselves, things have a tendency to go from bad to worse. When something is making you unhappy, for any reason, the situation will tend to get worse rather than better. So avoid the temptation to engage in denial, to pretend that nothing is wrong, to wish and hope and pray that, whatever it is, it will go away and you won’t have to do anything. The fact is that it probably will get worse before it gets better and that ultimately you will need to face the situation and do something about it.
There’s an old saying that you can’t solve a problem on the level that you meet it. This means that wrestling with a challenge is usually fruitless and frustrating. For example, if two people who are in a relationship together are constantly fighting and negotiating and looking for some way to resolve their difficulties, they’re attempting to solve the problem on the wrong level. Dealing with the problem on a higher level, those people would ask the question, “In terms of being happy, is this the right relationship for us in the first place?” As soon as you begin to use happiness as your measure of rightness, you begin to see a situation entirely differently.

Many people work very hard and experience considerable frustration trying to do a particular job. However, in terms of their own happiness, the right answer might be to do something else, or to do what they’re doing in a different place, or to do it with different people—or all three.

Following are a few questions for you to answer in this arena of happiness. Many people refuse to even consider these questions because they’re afraid that if they do, they won’t like the answers. But nevertheless, have the courage to clearly define your life in your own terms. Here are the questions; write them down at the top of a sheet of paper, and then write as many answers to each one as you possibly can.

The first question is: “What would it take for me to be perfectly happy?” Write down every single thing that you can imagine would be in your life if you were perfectly happy at this very moment. Write down things such as health, happiness, prosperity, loving relationships, inner peace, travel, car, clothes, homes, money, and so on. Let your mind run freely. Imagine that you have no limitations at all. Write everything down whether or not you think you have the capacity to acquire it or achieve it in the short term. Your first job is always to be clear about what it would take for you to have your ideal life.
The second question is a little tougher. Write down at the top of a page this question: “In what situations in my life, and with whom, am I not perfectly happy?” Force yourself to think about every part of your day, from morning to night, and write down every element that makes you unhappy or dissatisfied in any way. Remember, proper diagnosis is half the cure. Identifying the problematic situations is the first step to resolving them.

The third question will give you some important guidelines. Write down at the top of a sheet of paper these words: “In looking over my life, where and when have I been the happiest? Where was I, with whom was I, and what was I doing?”
By asking and answering those three questions, you begin to delve deeper and deeper into yourself and your feelings. You begin to accept your own happiness as a legitimate standard by which to evaluate everyone and everything in your life. You begin to develop the wisdom, the courage, and the foresight to organize your life in such a way that you become a much happier person.

Once you have the answers to those questions, think about what you can do, starting immediately, to begin creating the kind of life that you dream of. It may take you a week, a month or a year, but that doesn’t matter. Every single thing you do that moves you closer to your vision of happiness will be rewarding in itself. You’ll become a more positive and optimistic person. You’ll feel more confident and more in charge of your life.

And now here’s the most important exercise of all. It is from the advice of Dr. Gerald Jampolsky, who asks, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” He recommends that you set peace of mind as your highest goal and that you select and organize around it all your other goals in life. You hold up each part of your life to this standard of peace of mind, and you either get into or get out of anything that adds to it or detracts from it.

The most important part in this process of getting in touch with your feelings is to begin to practice solitude on a regular basis. Solitude is the most powerful activity in which you can engage. Men and women who practice it correctly and on a regular basis never fail to be amazed at the difference it makes in their lives.

Most people have never practiced solitude. Most people have never sat down quietly by themselves for any period of time in their entire lives. Most people are so busy being busy, doing something—even watching television—that it’s highly unusual for them to simply sit, deliberately, and do nothing. But as Catherine Ponder points out, “Men and women begin to become great when they begin to take time quietly by themselves, when they begin to practice solitude.” And here’s the method you can use.
To get the full benefit of your periods of solitude, you must sit quietly for at least 30 to 60 minutes at a time. If you haven’t done it before, it will take the first 25 minutes or so for you to stop fidgeting and moving around. You’ll almost have to hold yourself physically in your seat. You’ll have an almost irresistible desire to get up and do something. But you must persist.
Solitude requires that you sit quietly, perfectly still, back and head erect, eyes open, without cigarettes, candy, writing materials, music or any interruptions whatsoever for at least 30 minutes. An hour is better.

Become completely relaxed, and breathe deeply. Just let your mind flow. Don’t deliberately try to think about anything. The harder you “don’t try,” the more powerfully it works. After 20 or 25 minutes, you’ll begin to feel deeply relaxed. You’ll begin to experience a flow of energy coming into your mind and body. You’ll have a tremendous sense of well-being. At this point, you’ll be ready to get the full benefit of these moments of contemplation.

The incredible thing about solitude is that if it is done correctly, it works just about 100 percent of the time. While you’re sitting there, a stream, a river, of ideas will flow through your mind. You’ll think about countless subjects in an uncontrolled stream of consciousness. Your job is just to relax and listen to your inner voice. At a certain stage during your period of solitude, the answers to the most pressing difficulties facing you will emerge quietly and clearly, like a boat putting in gently to the side of a lake. The answer that you seek will come to you so clearly and it will feel so perfect that you’ll experience a deep sense of gratitude and contentment. You may get several answers in one period of quiet sitting. But in any case, you’ll get the answer to the most important situation facing you every single time.

When you arise from this period of quiet, you must do exactly what has come to you. It may involve dealing with a human situation. It may involve starting something or quitting something. Whatever it is, when you follow the guidance that you received in solitude, it will turn out to be exactly the right thing to do. Everything will be OK. And it will usually work out far better than you could have imagined. Just try it and see.

That brings us to the final point on getting in touch with your feelings: You must learn to trust yourself. You must learn to take time to listen to your emotions and your feelings as to what makes you happy or unhappy, as to what feels right or wrong. You must absolutely trust that what is right for you is the right thing to do. You must never compromise on what your inner voice tells you to do. You must never go against what you feel to be correct. You must develop the habit of listening to yourself and then acting on the guidance you receive.

When you listen to yourself and act on what you hear inside, you are setting out on the road to personal greatness.

By: Brian Tracy

Empowering Others

Once you know how to empower people, how to motivate and inspire them, they will want to work with you to help you achieve your goals in everything you do. Your ability to enlist the knowledge, energy and resources of others enables you to become a multiplication sign, to leverage yourself so that you accomplish far more than the average person and in a far shorter period of time.

There are three types of people that you want to and need to empower on a regular basis. They are, first of all, the people closest to you: your family, your friends, your spouse and your children. Second are your work relationships: your staff, your coworkers, your peers, your colleagues and even your boss. Third are all the other people that you interact with in your day-to-day life: your customers, your suppliers, your banker, the people with whom you deal in stores, restaurants, airplanes, hotels and everywhere else. In each case, your ability to get people to help you is what will make you a more powerful and effective person.

Empower means “putting power into,” and it can also mean “bringing energy and enthusiasm out of.” So the first step in empowering people is to refrain from doing anything that disempowers them or reduces their energy and enthusiasm for what they are doing.

With regard to the first group, those people closest to you, there are several simple things that you can do every single day to empower them and make them feel good about themselves.

The deepest need that each person has is for self-esteem, a sense of being important, valuable, and worthwhile. Everything that you do in your interactions with others affects their self-esteem in some way. You already have an excellent frame of reference to determine the things that you can do to boost the self-esteem and therefore the sense of personal power of those around you. Give them what you’d like for yourself.

Perhaps the simplest way to make another person feel good about himself or herself is your continuous expressions of appreciation for everything that person does for you, large or small. Say “thank you” on every occasion. Thank your spouse for everything that he or she does for you. Thank your children for their cooperation and support in everything that they do around the house. Thank your friends for the smallest of kindnesses. The more you thank other people for doing things for you, the more things those other people will want to do.

Every time you thank another person, you cause that person to like themselves better. You raise their self-esteem and improve their self-image. You cause them to feel more important. You make them feel that what they did was valuable and worthwhile. You empower them.

And the wonderful thing about thanking other people is that, every time you say the words “thank you,” you like yourself better as well. You feel better inside. You feel happier and more content with yourself and life. You feel more fully integrated and positive about what you are doing. When you develop an attitude of gratitude that flows forth from you in all of your interactions with others, you will be amazed at how popular you will become and how eager others will be to help you in whatever you are doing.

The second way to make people feel important, to raise their self-esteem and give them a sense of power and energy, is by the generous use of praise and approval. Psychological tests show that, when children are praised by the people that they look up to, their energy levels rise, their heart rates and respiratory rates increase and they feel happier about themselves overall.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson in Ken Blanchard’s book The One Minute Manager is his recommendation to be giving “one-minute praisings” at every opportunity. If you go around your home and through your social relationships praising and giving genuine and honest approval to people for their accomplishments, large and small, you will be amazed at how much more people like you and how much more willing they are to help you achieve your goals.

There is a psychological law of reciprocity that says, “If you make me feel good about myself, I will find a way to make you feel good about yourself.” In other words, people will always look for ways to reciprocate your kindnesses toward them. When you look for every opportunity to do and say things that make other people feel good about themselves, you will be astonished at not only how good you feel, but at the wonderful things that begin to happen all around you.

The third way to empower others, to build their self-esteem and make them feel important is simply to pay close attention to them when they talk. The great majority of people are so busy trying to be heard that they become impatient when others are talking. But this is not for you. Remember, the most important single activity that takes place over time is listening intently to the other person when he or she is talking and expressing himself or herself.

Again, the three general rules for empowering the people around you, which apply to everyone you meet, are appreciation, approval, and attention. Voice your thanks and gratitude to others on every occasion. Praise them for every accomplishment. And pay close attention to them when they talk and want to interact with you. These three behaviors alone will make you a master of human interaction and will greatly empower the people around you.

It’s certainly possible for you to get the cooperation of others by threatening or brow-beating them, but you will only get minimal cooperation, minimal output, and minimal assistance. To move to the top of your field, you must appeal to people’s inner motivations and drives, their deepest emotions.

What motivates people in the world of work? The biggest motivator is clarity. People need to know exactly what it is that they are supposed to do. They need to know why they are supposed to do it and how it fits into the big picture. They need to know how it will be measured, and when it is due. They need to know what standard of quality is expected and how their efforts affect the work of others. The greater the clarity that a person has about his or her assignment and the order of priority in which it is to be done, the happier and more empowered he or she feels right from the start.

On the other hand, the biggest demotivator in the world of work is not knowing what is expected. It is being in the dark about what is supposed to be done and in what order of priority. People are especially demotivated when they don’t know why they are doing a task or how it fits into the overall goals of the company or department.

The more time you spend talking to your people and inviting their feedback and comments on the work, the more empowered they will be to do the work well. The word we are talking about in empowerment in work is the word “ownership.” Your job is to transfer the ownership into the heart and mind of the employee. When he or she feels personal ownership for a job and the responsibility for doing it well, he or she will be completely empowered. This is one of the most important aspects of the art of management.

Another major motivator at work is consideration. Employees report that the best managers they ever had were people who cared about them as people and as friends. These managers took the time to ask them questions about their lives, and to listen patiently while they talked about the dilemmas and problems and situations in their families. The more that the employees felt that the boss liked them and respected them, the more empowered and motivated they felt.

The flip side of this motivator is the demotivating feeling that the boss doesn’t care. This is almost invariably expressed in a lack of recognition, a lack of approval, a lack of appreciation and a general failure to pay attention to the employee over time.

Remember, the amount of time that you spend talking to and listening to an employee is a signal to that employee that he or she is important to you and to the company. This is why the very best bosses spend a lot of time walking around and chatting with their employees. They sit with them for lunch and coffee. They invite their comments and encourage open discussion and disagreements about work. They create an environment where people feel that the work belongs to them as well as to the company. In that environment, employees feel good about themselves and more fully committed to doing the job and doing it well.

To empower and motivate the third group of people, the people around you, your customers, your suppliers, your bankers and so on, you simply need to practice what we’ve already talked about. The most important of all is that you be a genuine, positive and cheerful person. You develop a positive mental attitude. You be the kind of person from whom, “never is heard a discouraging word.” You are easygoing, genial, friendly, patient, tolerant and open minded. You make people feel comfortable being around you.

Remember, everyone is primarily emotional. Everything that people do, or refrain from doing, is triggered by their deeper emotions. Your job is to connect with their higher and more positive emotions so they feel so good about you they want to help you and please you in some way.

For example, whenever you go into a crowded restaurant, or get on a busy plane, or go up to a busy hotel desk, instead of becoming impatient with the slow rate of service, you should put yourself in the other person’s place, practice the Golden Rule, and ask them how they are doing.

Whenever I go into a busy restaurant, I always ask the waiter for his or her name. Then I address them by name while observing sympathetically, “You seem to be working hard today.”

From that moment on, the waiter always gives me special attention. Why? Because I took the time to empathize with his or situation rather than looking for sympathy for mine.

Try this approach with all the people at your workplace. Observe their situation and empathize with how hard they are working, how many difficulties they have, how overloaded they are, and so on. It is absolutely amazing how much better people feel about you when you take a special interest in them, rather than just thinking about yourself.

In life, you always have a choice. You can either do everything yourself or you can get others to help you do some of the work. Our entire economic structure is built on the principle of specialization. Specialization means that some people become very good at doing certain tasks while other people become very good at doing other tasks.

For you to achieve your full potential, you must contribute the greatest amount of value possible. You must concentrate all your energies on doing certain specialized tasks in an excellent fashion so that you can be paid the amount you want to earn and you can move ahead at the rate you want to move ahead. But in order for you to specialize and do what you are best at, and more of it, you must delegate, relegate and outsource virtually everything else.

Some non-managers feel that the subject of delegation does not apply to them. But even when you ask your child to bring you the newspaper, you are delegating a task. When you go out to lunch rather than making it yourself, you are delegating. When you go into a full service gas station rather than filling your own tank, again, you are delegating. You are in a process of continuous delegation from the time you get up in the morning until the time you go to sleep at night. The only question is how you are at it.

Your ability to delegate effectively, which requires that you inspire and empower others to help you willingly, will determine how fast you move ahead. It will determine how much you earn in your job. It will determine the quality and quantity of your productivity. It will determine your ultimate financial success in life. And the key to all of this is your ability to empower others.

By: Brian Tracy

A Single Step.

The hardest part of achieving any goal is usually starting in the first place.

You have amazing possibilities and potentials just waiting inside you, but most of them can die stillborn waiting for you to take action. The Nike commercial contains one of the best pieces of advice in the world: “Just Do It!”

“A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step,” wrote Confucius.

Do you want to be happy? Do you want to be thin? Do you want to work at something you really enjoy? Do you want to make money?

Whatever it is, write it down. Take a few minutes for “Gap Analysis.” Look at where you want to be and then look at where you are.

Examine the gap that exists between the two and think about how you could close, it like building a bridge or staircase across an open space.

What would be your first step? What would be your second step, and so on? Most of all, what action would you take right now if you were guaranteed of success?

What would you do if you had no fear of failure? What would be your first step on the staircase toward your goal?

All great accomplishments begin with a leap of faith into the unknown. They begin when you take action toward your hopes and dreams before you have any assurance of success.

Most people are paralyzed by the uncertainty that surrounds any new venture. They hesitate. They stop. They turn back.
But not you. You know that “nothing ventured, nothing gained.” You know that you have to stick your head up if you want to get above the crowd. You know you have to go out on a limb if you want to get the fruit, because that’s where it is.

Go for it! Take that first step and everything else will follow.

By: Brian Tracy

A Sense of Alignment.

Your most important aim in life is to be happy, to be calm, confident and relaxed and to feel in complete control of every aspect of your life. Just as your car runs more smoothly and requires less energy to go faster and farther when the wheels are in perfect alignment, you perform better when your thoughts, feelings, emotions, goals and values are in alignment.

Nature demands balance in all things. You see balance all around you, from the most distant stars in the universe down to the individual cells of your body. Each of your billions of cells contains hundreds of chemicals, each of which is carefully regulated and kept in balance by your autonomic nervous system to ensure your health and longevity.

The wonderful thing is that balance is the norm in your life. Your body has a natural bias toward health and energy. It’s built to last for a hundred years and to perform smoothly and efficiently for most of that time. It’s only improper maintenance and incorrect operation that, in most cases, cause your body to get out of balance and lead to disease and pain, rather than ease and pleasure.
Emotionally, you also have a natural bias toward happiness and enjoyment. In fact, you have a natural barometer inside of you that tells you when you’re doing the things that are just right for your unique personality and temperament. This is your inner voice, your intuition, and it’s manifested in your level of peace of mind. Whenever you feel at peace with yourself and the world around you, you know that you’re doing the very things that you’re meant to do and that your inner and outer worlds are properly balanced and in alignment with each other.

There are two major areas of balance that you need to be concerned with on a daily basis. They are the physical and the emotional.

You need to adjust your behaviors in such a way that you enjoy high levels of physical health and energy most of the time. Even the richest person in the world is at a tremendous disadvantage if he loses his health. You need to guard your health like a sacred object. From the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night, you need to think about the things you can do to assure that you live a long, healthy life, free from the diseases and the debilitating illnesses that are causing our health-care outlays to be the highest in the world.

A study was conducted over a period of 20 years on 8,000 men to determine what physical habits they had that caused them to live longer lives or caused them to die earlier than their peers. This study, The Alameda County Study, discovered that there were seven common habits practiced regularly by the people who seemed to be the healthiest, live the longest and have the fewest sick days per year.

The first of these seven habits is eating regularly. Researchers found that people who ate irregularly, at different times and in different amounts throughout the day, were far more likely to be fatigued and have physical ailments than were those who ate on a regular basis.

The second habit is eating lightly. We know today that foods high in fat, sugar and salt are very bad for us. The more fruits, vegetables, whole grains and lean sources of protein you incorporate into your diet, the better you will feel, the deeper you will sleep, the fresher you will be and the better your whole life will be.

The third habit, which also involves diet, is not snacking between meals. The researchers found that when a person eats snacks between meals, the introduction of new food interrupts the ongoing digestive process and leads to drowsiness and improper digestion.

The fourth habit for longevity is not smoking. Smoking is so detrimental to the entire human system that it alone causes more illnesses than all the other environmental or hereditary factors put together. Researchers have identified at least 32 forms of illness, including a variety of cancers, that are caused by or aggravated in some way by smoking. The very act of quitting smoking can do more to improve a person’s overall health than a change in any other single health habit.

The fifth habit identified in the Alameda study is consuming alcohol moderately. This is a fairly narrow range that suggests not more than one or two drinks per day, and fewer is desirable. Since the number one cause of premature death up to the age of 40 is automobile accidents, and as many as 50 percent of automobile accidents are alcohol-related, this is a good piece of advice.
The sixth habit for longevity is sleeping seven to eight hours every night. Keeping yourself properly rested is one of the most important things you can do. If you allow yourself to become overtired for any period at all, your immune system begins to break down, and you become susceptible to a variety of illnesses, including colds, flu and even pneumonia. Getting regular rest is one of the most important things you can do to keep your physical life balanced.

The seventh habit identified in the Alameda study is exercising regularly. The rule with regard to your body is “If you don’t use it, you lose it.” Regular exercise, even moderate exercise, can have a tremendous impact in helping you to feel better, digest better, sleep better and be a happier and more positive person.

Since the Alameda study was completed, insurance companies have identified two additional habits: first, wearing automobile seat belts, to reduce the possibility of harm in an automobile accident; and, second, deep breathing each day, to improve your digestion, increase the amount of oxygen going through your brain, and enable you to relax into a “state of alpha” on a regular basis.
One of the very best ways to engage in the process of “centering” is to take a few moments prior to any event of importance to breathe deeply six or seven times. Deep breathing causes you to relax and makes you feel more confident and more in control of yourself and the situation. It brings your inner world into better alignment with what is going on around you.

In fact, whenever you face a stressful situation, you can better prepare yourself to deal with it by taking a few moments to breathe deeply before you say or do anything. When you prepare yourself in this way, your words and actions will be far more effective than they would if you had just reacted when the situation came up. You will feel more in balance. And the more you act as though you are in balance, the more it becomes a habit for you to behave in a balanced way.

Vince Lombardi once said, “Fatigue does make cowards of us all.” When you are physically out of balance for any reason, when you are tired or you have eaten too much, or too much of the wrong foods, your emotions, your level of energy and your reactions to the various situations around you are adversely affected. When you are in excellent health, well rested, properly exercised and properly fed, you tend to perform at your best.

The second area of balance that is important to you is your emotional life. We know that how you feel emotionally has a dramatic impact on your physical body. The field of psychosomatic medicine deals with the impact of psycho-, the mind, on soma, the body; according to studies in this area, 80 to 90 percent of all your physical illnesses are mentally and emotionally caused.

How can you tell if you are out of balance emotionally? it’s easy. Just listen to your body and your emotions. Like a doctor, take a stethoscope to your life and listen intently to how you feel about how things are going on around you. When you are in balance, you feel calm, confident, relaxed, poised and at peace with yourself and life. When you are out of balance, you feel unhappy, stressed, anxious, angry, resentful, negative, pessimistic and depressed.

In each area of your life, you will have a different set of feelings. In some parts of your life, you will be perfectly happy. In other parts of your life, you will feel uneasy, tense and sometimes frustrated. Your job is to go through your life, like going through your closet to weed through old clothes, and take the time to develop a strategy to deal with each part of your life that is detracting from your happiness.

The most important breakthrough in psychology in the 20th century may have been the discovery of the self-concept. You have a self-concept, as does everyone else. This self-concept is the master program of your personal computer. it’s made up of all the ideas, experiences, decisions, emotions, knowledge and beliefs that you’ve developed from infancy, and possibly from even before that. This self-concept forms the operating instructions for your computer, and you always behave on the outside in a manner consistent with your self-concept on the inside.

You cannot change anything in your outer world permanently unless you first change your self-concept. You have a self-concept for the kind of person you are, for your personality and your attitude and your values. You have a self-concept for the kind of life you lead, for your income, your home, your car and the type of work that you do. You have a self-concept for your health and your weight and your level of fitness, for how well you perform in any athletic endeavor. You have a self-concept that governs your level of creativity, intelligence, sense of humor, memory, ability to speak to a public audience and level of competence in everything else that you do. And you always act on the outside consistent with this self-concept.

To get your life into greater balance, it’s essential that you examine your inner world in relation to your outer world; compare both worlds to find where there is incongruence or imbalance that might be causing you to perform poorly or, more importantly, to be unhappy and frustrated.

Your self-concept is made up of three parts. The first part is your self-ideal. This is the person you would most like to be. This is a description of the values that you feel are the highest you can have and live by. Your self-ideal is made up of a combination of all the qualities that you most admire in yourself and in other people. Sometimes, you can define your self-ideal by asking yourself what you would look like, and how you would be described by others, if you developed yourself into the finest human being you could ever become.

The second part of your self-concept is your self-image. Your self-image can be defined as the way you see yourself in the present moment. Your self-image is a combination of how you see yourself, how others see you and how you think others see you. All three may be different. That is, you may see yourself in a certain way, you may think others see you in a different way, and, then, others may see you differently from your perceptions.

You always perform on the outside consistent with the mental picture that you have of yourself on the inside. If you see yourself as positive and happy and confident, competent and capable in your personal life and your work, you’ll behave like that on the outside, toward other people. You can always tell what your self-image is, in any area of your life, by examining how you feel when you’re with people. A person with a positive self-image is relaxed and confident with others. A person with a negative self-image feels insecure and inferior with others, especially with people he feels are ahead of him or better than him in some way.

Now, here’s the interesting thing about your self-image. When your self-image is fully integrated, the way you see yourself, the way others see you and the way you think others see you all are the same. And the more you’re living your life consistent with your values and ideals, the more integrated your self-image is, and the better you perform at everything you attempt.
The third part of your self-concept is your self-esteem. Your self-esteem can be defined as how much you like yourself and respect yourself. it’s your reputation with yourself. it’s how you think about yourself relative to the world when you’re in the privacy of your room. it’s the emotional component of your self-concept and is more important than anything else.

Your level of self-esteem determines your personality, your level of stress, how much enthusiasm and excitement you have in life, how happy you are, how positive you are, and how well you get along with people. Psychologists today have come to the overwhelming conclusion that your self-esteem is the real measure and monitor of your personality and largely determines everything that happens to you in your interactions and relationships with others.

And what is the key to high self-esteem? The key is simply this: When your external behaviors and your highest values and ideals are consistent with each other, your self-esteem goes up. When your ideals and values are clear, and when the qualities and behaviors that you most admire are the same qualities and behaviors that you manifest in your interactions with others, you like yourself better. You respect yourself more. You feel happier.

Whenever your inner world and your outer world are in alignment, whenever your activities and your values are congruent, whenever your activities are in balance with the highest values that you hold, you feel terrific and perfectly centered in your life.

If you say and do one thing while you admire and respect another set of behaviors, you feel unhappy and dissatisfied. You feel out of balance. You feel a sense of incongruency.
it’s not easy to attain a sense of balance and equilibrium. It requires effort on your part. It requires that you think through who you are and who you want to be. It requires that you take the necessary steps to do more of the things that are consistent with the actions of the very best person that you can imagine yourself becoming, and that you simultaneously stop doing and saying the things that are inconsistent with your best ideals and aspirations.

You achieve a greater sense of balance by, first of all, determining your values in each area¾in regard to your health, your relationships, your work, and so on. Next, you examine your behaviors and identify the things that you’re doing and saying that are not consistent with those values. And then you resolve to change them, one by one. In bringing your behaviors into alignment with your innermost convictions, you start to feel wonderful about yourself; you start to feel more in balance; you start to feel happier and healthier.

Just as a car with perfectly aligned and balanced wheels runs more smoothly down the highway, you also will run more smoothly down the highway of your life when you’ve taken the time and made the effort to bring everything that you do and say into balance and alignment.

By: Brian Tracy.

A Guide for Creative Thinking

Einstein once said, “Every child is born a genius.” But the reason why most people do not function at genius levels is because they are not aware of how creative and smart they really are.
I call it the “Schwarzenegger effect.” No one would look at a person such as Arnold Schwarzenegger and think how lucky he is to have been born with such tremendous muscles. Everyone knows that he, and people like him, have worked many thousands of hours to build up their bodies so they can compete and win in bodybuilding competitions. Your creative capabilities are just the same. They actually grow as they are used.

But you don’t need to spend thousands of hours to increase your creative-thinking abilities. By practicing a few simple exercises and applications, you can start your creative juices flowing, and you may even amaze yourself at the quality and quantity of good ideas that you come up with.
Let’s start off with the definition of creativity. In my estimation, after years of research on this subject, the very best definition of creativity is, simply, “improvement.” You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or an artist in order to be creative. All you have to do is develop the ability to improve your situation, wherever you are and whatever you are doing. All great fortunes were started with ideas for improving something in some way. In fact, an improvement needs to be only 10 percent new or different to launch you on the way to fame and riches.

It has been estimated that each year, driving to and from work, the average person has about four ideas for improvement, any one of which could make him or her a millionaire. The problem is not that you don’t have the ideas you need to accomplish anything you want but, rather, that you fail to act on those ideas. Most people dismiss their own ideas because they think that those ideas cannot be very valuable if they were the ones who thought of them.

Thomas Edison, arguably the most successful creative genius in human history, once said that creativity is 99 percent perspiration and only 1 percent inspiration. Extensive research on creativity tends to bear him out.

There are four generally accepted parts of the creative process: There is preparation, where much of the work is done. There is cerebration or rumination, where you turn the matter over to your subconscious mind. There is realization, where the idea or ideas come to you. And finally, there is application, where you work out the creative idea and turn it into something worthwhile. Of the four, preparation seems to be the most important, and it involves gathering the right data and asking the right questions.

Your success in life will be determined largely by the quantity of ideas that you generate. It seems that the quality of ideas is secondary to the quantity and that if you have enough ideas, one or more of them will turn out to be prizewinners.

You can begin building your creative muscles with focused questions. Some that you might think of are the following: What are we trying to do? How are we trying to do it? What are our assumptions? What if our assumptions are wrong?

All improvements begin with questioning the current, existing circumstances. If you are not making progress for any reason, stop and think, and begin asking yourself the hard questions that will stimulate your mind to consider other possibilities.

When they were doing the research to land a man on the moon, scientists were stumped for months and even years. They could not figure how to send a rocket to the moon with enough fuel to land on the moon, blast off, break the moon’s gravity and come back to earth. The problem was that if the rocket had that much fuel to start with, it would be too heavy to take off from the earth in the first place. Finally, they began to question the assumption that the lunar rocket ship had to land on the moon. When they questioned that assumption, the scientists concluded that a main rocket could orbit around the moon while a smaller module dropped to the surface of the moon and then rejoined the orbiting rocket for the trip back to earth. The mental logjam was broken, and the rest is history.

Asking focused questions—hard questions that penetrate to the core of the matter—is the real art of the creative person. The next step is to have the courage to deal with all the possible answers. Once you have come up with a possible solution, ask yourself, “What else could be the solution?” If your current method of operation were completely wrong, what would be your backup plan? What else would you or could you do? What if your current procedure or plan turned out to be a complete failure? Then what would you do? And what would you do after that? All of those questions will force you to think further and come up with better answers.
The second way to build your mental muscles is with intensely desired goals. The more you want something and the clearer you are about it, the more likely it is that you will generate ideas that will help you to move toward it. That is why the need for clearly written goals and plans for their accomplishment is repeated over and over. Any intense emotion, such as desire, stimulates creativity and ideas to fulfill that desire. And the more you write down your goals and plans, and review them, the more likely it is that you will see all kinds of possibilities for achieving those goals.

The third generator of creative-thinking muscles is pressing problems. A good question to ask is “What are the three biggest problems that I am facing in my life today?” Write the answer to this question quickly, in less than 30 seconds. When you write the answer to a question in less than 30 seconds, your subconscious mind will sort out all extraneous answers and give you the three most important ones.

When you have your three most pressing problems, ask yourself, “What is the worst possible thing that can happen as a result of each of these problems?” Then ask yourself, “What are all the things that I can do, right now, to alleviate each problem?” If you have a problem that is worrying you for any reason, think about what you could do immediately to begin alleviating that concern. This is a prime use of your creative powers.

So a key to success in creative thinking is clarity. Take the time to think through, discuss and ask questions that help you to clarify exactly what you are trying to accomplish and exactly what problems you are facing at the present moment. Just as fuzzy thinking leads to fuzzy answers, clear thinking leads to clear answers.

A second key is concentration. Put everything else aside, and concentrate single-mindedly on focusing all your mental powers on solving one single problem, overcoming one particular obstacle or achieving one important goal. The ability to concentrate on a single subject without diversion or distraction is a hallmark of the superior thinker.

A third key is an open mind. The average person tends to be rigid and fixed in his thinking about getting from where he is to where he wants to go. The creative thinker, however, tends to remain very flexible and open to a variety of ways of approaching the problem. The average person has a tendency to leap to conclusions and determine that there is only one way to achieve a particular goal. The superior thinker, on the other hand, tends to be more patient and willing to consider a variety of options before moving toward a conclusion.

There is one other creative concept that can be very helpful when it is used in combination with what we have already discussed, and it is called the “limiting step.”

Between you and any goal that you want to achieve or any problem that you want to solve, there is almost invariably a limiting step or a “choke point” that determines the speed with which you move from where you are to your destination. This limiting step may be another person, a particular obstacle, a specific difficulty, or even a lack of some information or skill. Invariably, there is a particular factor that determines how fast you get there. Your job is to think about it and decide what it is, and then go to work to remove it.

For example, if you are in sales, your limiting step may be the number of prospects you have. If this is the case, then your job is to do everything possible and to use all your creative capacities to increase your number of prospects until it is no longer a problem. Then, of course, there will be another limiting step, and your job is to go to work on that.

If you have a business, your limiting step may be the number of qualified people who are responding to your advertising. If this is the choke point that hinders the amount you sell and the speed at which your company grows, it behooves you to concentrate your mental powers on relieving that bottleneck. You must concentrate the very best thinking abilities of yourself and others on increasing the number of qualified prospects that your advertising and promotional efforts attract.

In relationships and misunderstandings between people, there is almost invariably a sticking point or subject area that needs to be resolved in order to bring about harmony again. Your job is, first, to identify this limiting step and then, second, to find a way to alleviate the difficulty to the satisfaction of everyone involved.

You are a genius, and you were born with the potential for exceptional creativity. But creative abilities are latent. They are like muscles that grow with use. You can increase your creative powers by using them, over and over, in every situation, deliberately and specifically, until creativity and a creative response to life is as natural to you as breathing in and out is. There are very few things that you can do that can have a more powerful positive impact on your entire life than becoming excellent in creative thinking. And you can if you think you can.

By: Brian Tracy