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