Throughout most of human history, we have been accustomed to evolution, or the gradual changing and progressing of events in a straight line. Sometimes the process of change was faster and sometimes it was slower, but it almost always seemed to be progressive, from one step to the other, allowing you some opportunities for planning, predicting and changing.
Today, however, the rate of change is not only faster than ever before, but it is discontinuous. It is taking place in a variety of unconnected areas and affecting each of us in a variety of unexpected ways. Changes in information processing technologies are happening separately from changes in medicine, changes in transportation, changes in education, changes in politics and changes in global competition. Changes in family formation and relationships are happening separately from the rise and fall of new businesses and industries in different parts of the country. And if anything, this rate of accelerated, discontinuous change is increasing. As a result, most of us are already suffering from what Alvin Toffler once called, “future shock.”
You can’t do very much about the enormity of these changes, but the one thing that you can do is to think seriously about yourself and your basic need for security and stability. In no area is this more important than in the areas of job security and financial security. You must give special attention to your ability to make a good living and provide for yourself in the months and years ahead.
Above all, to position yourself for tomorrow, you must think continuously and seriously about your work today, your earning ability , and the work that you will be doing one, three, and five years from today. You must plan to achieve your own financial security, no matter what happens.
Charles Kettering said that you should give a lot of thought to the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life. One of the greatest mistakes that people can make, and the one with the worst long-term consequences, is to think only about the present and give very little thought to what might happen in the months and years ahead.
When our grandfathers started work, it was quite common for them to get a basic education and then go to work for a company and stay with that same company for the rest of their working lives. When our parents went to work, it was more common for them to change jobs three or four times during their lifetime, although it was difficult and disruptive.
Today, with increased turbulence and change in the national and global economy, a person starting work can expect to have five full-time careers between the ages of 21 and 65, and 14 full-time jobs lasting two years or more. According to Fortune Magazine, fully 40 percent of American employees in the 21st Century will be “contingency” workers. This means that they will never work permanently for another company. They will continue to move as needed, from company to company, from job to job, earning less money than full-time employees and accruing very few, if any, benefits in terms of health care and pension plans.
Imagine what your job will look like five years from today. Since knowledge in your field is probably doubling every five years, this means that fully twenty percent of your knowledge and your ability in your field is becoming obsolete each year. In five years, you will be doing a brand new job with brand new skills and abilities. Ask yourself, “What parts of my knowledge, skills and work are becoming obsolete? What am I doing today that is different than what I was doing one year ago and two years ago?” What are you likely to be doing one year, two years, three years, four years and five years from today? What knowledge and skills will you need and how will you acquire them? What is your plan for your economic and financial future?
We are now in the knowledge age. Today, the chief factors of production are knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to achieving results for other people. Your earning ability today is largely dependent upon your knowledge, skill and your ability to combine that knowledge and skill in such a way that you contribute value for which customers are going to pay.
The Law of Three says that you must contribute three dollars of profit for every dollar that you wish to earn in salary. It costs a company approximately double your salary to employ you in terms of space, benefits, supervision, and investment in furniture, fixtures, and other resources. For a company to hire you, they have to make a profit on what they pay you. Therefore, you must contribute value greatly in excess of the amount you earn in order to stay employed. To put it another way, your earning ability must be considerably greater than the amount you are receiving, or you will find yourself looking for another job.
To position yourself for tomorrow, here is one of the most important rules you will ever learn: “The future belongs to the competent.” The future belongs to those men and women who are very good at what they do. Pat Riley, in his book The Winner Within, wrote that, “If you are not committed to getting better at what you are doing, you are bound to get worse.” To phrase it another way, anything less than a commitment to excellent performance on your part is an unconscious acceptance of mediocrity. It used to be that you needed to be excellent to rise above the competition in your industry. Today, you must be excellent even to keep your job in your industry.
The marketplace is a stern task master. Today, excellence, quality, and value are absolutely essential elements of any product or service, and of the work of any person. Your earning ability is largely determined by the perception of excellence, quality, and value that others have of you and what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and it pays below average rewards or unemployment for below average performance. Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive. It’s not personal. It’s just the way our economy works.
To earn more, you must learn more. You are maxed out today at your current level of knowledge and skill. However much you are earning at this moment is the maximum you can earn without learning and practicing something new and different.
And here’s the rub. Your accumulated knowledge and experience is becoming obsolete bit by bit, day by day. The knowledge in your field is doubling every three to five years. That means that your knowledge must double every three to five years just for you to stay even.
The solution to the dilemma of unavoidable change and restructuring is continuous self-development. Your personal knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge are your most valuable assets. To stay on top of your world, you must continually add to your knowledge and your ability. You must continually build up your mental assets if you want to enjoy a continuous return on your investment. And only by building on your current assets do you stop them from deteriorating.
By engaging in continuous self-improvement, you can put yourself behind the wheel of your own life. By dedicating yourself to enhancing your earning ability, you will automatically be engaging in the continuous process of personal development. By learning more, you prepare yourself to earn more. You position yourself for tomorrow by developing the knowledge and skills that you need to be a valuable and productive part of our economy, no matter which direction it goes.
By: Brian Tracy
www.focalpointcoaching.com
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Increasing Your Value
We are living in an economic age for which most people are largely unprepared. Massive shifts in economic activities and incredible dislocations of businesses and industries are taking place all over the country. Being either an employer or an employee today is like being a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking chairs.
Your goal is to organize your life in such a way that you enjoy a good income, a high standard of living, and that you are the master of your economic destiny rather than a victim of changing economic times.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, America and Americans entered into a golden age that had never existed before and will never exist again. Those of us who grew up during this golden age developed a particular way of looking at the world that was greatly influenced by what was going on in America at the time. We developed certain assumptions about our lives and about business in general, and we have a hard time giving them up. But give them up we must if we are going to survive in the economy of the future.
At the end of World War II, America and American industry dominated the world. We had not only abundant natural resources but also advanced technology, an intact industrial base, most of the money in the world, an advanced educational system, millions of competent workers, and a fully integrated system of roads, schools, hospitals, cities, and farms. It was said that America got rich by coming late into two world wars, and it was certainly true in the late ‘40s and ‘50s.
Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized world, in both Europe and the Far East, was bombed to rubble. Our industrial and economic competitors had been ravaged by war. For this reason, anything that American factories produced found a ready market, both nationally and internationally. The economy took off. There was good-paying work for everyone. The ‘50s became an age of expanding prosperity, tremendous job security, and opportunities for all.
In this economic environment, anyone could get a job. Not only that, but there were plenty of low-skill jobs that paid high salaries and benefits for average work. A working person in America could have a nice house, a car⎯maybe two cars⎯and eventually a motor home, a boat, and all the other trappings of the good life.
After a few years of this robust, expanding economy with opportunities and jobs for all, Americans began to accept the good life as their birthright. People began to feel that because they were born in America, they were entitled to the good life, whether or not they worked hard. The Unions took full advantage of this mind-set and negotiated ever higher wages and benefits from American manufacturers. The increased costs of the products and services were simply passed on to the customers. Since the rest of the industrial world was still rebuilding, the only products to buy were American products. And since American consumers were also workers who were making good wages, as prices went up, sales also went up.
But by the '60s, the world was already changing. Our industrial competitors, especially Germany and Japan, had begun to rebuild and to manufacture and export products. Competition for the good life began to emerge all over the world. The pace began to pick up, slowly. The average American wasn’t aware of it, but the golden age was coming to an end.
In the '70s, America began to be flooded with high-quality products from all over the world. American companies and American working people had become complacent with their captive markets and had let their quality deteriorate. Low-price, high-quality products coming in from Japan, Germany and other countries began to take sizable chunks of the market. The affected industries cried out to government for protection, which was just another way of selling higher-priced goods to captive customers. And it didn’t work.
By the '80's, we were in a real race. Everyone in the world wanted to enjoy the same living standards Americans had. And people were willing to work long hours and produce high-quality goods and services in order to achieve those living standards.
We lost our advantage in natural resources. We lost our edge in technology. And we lost our edge in capital. Today, any change in economic policy anywhere, in any country, instantly causes capital to flow in or out of the affected areas. Countries can not even control the value of their currencies.
The one edge that America maintained is that we have the most productive workforce in the world. America and Americans produce more goods and services per capita than any other country. But there is a race on, and we are in it, and if you want to be employed in a good job for the indefinite future, you must get in and start competing as you have never done before.
Your job is an opportunity to contribute a value to your company in excess of your cost. In its simplest terms, your job is as secure as your ability to render value in excess of what it costs to keep you on the payroll.
If you want to earn more money at your current job, you have to increase your value, your contribution to the enterprise. If you want to get a new job, you have to find a way to contribute value to that enterprise. If you want any kind of job security, you must continually work at maintaining and increasing your value in the competitive marketplace.
And here's a key point. Your education, knowledge, skills and experience all are investments in your ability to contribute a value for which you can be paid. But they are like any other investments. They are highly speculative.
Once you have learned a subject or developed a skill, it is a sunk cost. It is time and money spent that you cannot get back. No employer in the marketplace has any obligation to pay you for it, unless he can use your skill to produce a product or service that people are ready to buy, today.
Whatever job you are doing, you should be preparing for your next job. And the key question is always: Where are the customers? Which businesses and industries are growing in this economy, and which ones are declining?
I continually meet people who ask me how they can increase their income when their entire industry is shrinking. I tell them that there are jobs with futures and there are jobs without futures, and they need to get into a field that is expanding, not contracting.
There are three forms of unemployment in America: voluntary, non-voluntary, and frictional. Voluntary employment exists when a person decides not to work for a certain period of time, or not to accept a particular type of job, hoping that something better will come along. Non-voluntary unemployment exists when a person is willing and able to work but cannot find a job anywhere. Frictional unemployment is the natural level; this includes the approximately 4 or 5 percent of the working population who are between jobs at any given time.
However, there are always jobs for the creative minority. You never have to be unemployed if you will do one of three things: change the work that you are offering to do, change the place where you are offering to work, or change the amount that you are asking for your services.
If there is no demand for your particular skills and experience, you will have to learn to do something else and provide skills that are in demand at the time. Employers don't care about your past. They care only about your future and your ability to contribute value to their customers.
You can change your location. Sometimes you will have to move from one part of the country to another, from where there are few jobs to where there are more jobs. Many people transform their entire lives by moving from an area of high unemployment to an area of low unemployment.
The third thing you can do to get back into the work force is to lower your demands. Remember, because your labor is a commodity, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand. If you ask too much, people will not hire you, because customers will not pay your demands in the price of the product or service that your organization produces. It is not the employer who is forcing this downward revision in wage requirements; it is the customer, through his or her buying behavior.
There is a small, creative minority in America who are never unemployed. No matter what happens, they always have a job⎯sometimes two jobs. If they lose a particular position in one place, they find another position doing the same thing, or something else, somewhere else. They are fast on their feet. They move quickly and they don't accept unemployment as an option. And they always have jobs.
There are always jobs to be done. Even in the worst economy, there are always problems to be solved and consumer needs to be met. For this reason, all long-term unemployment is ultimately voluntary.
There are more opportunities for you to fulfill your dreams and aspirations in the American economy than have ever before existed, or than exist anywhere else in the world. You can be, have, or do anything that you can dream of by preparing yourself for better and better jobs. It is never crowded at the top. There are no traffic jams on the extra mile. Your job is to get good, get better, and then make yourself indispensable.
By: Brian Tracy
www.focalpointcoaching.com
Your goal is to organize your life in such a way that you enjoy a good income, a high standard of living, and that you are the master of your economic destiny rather than a victim of changing economic times.
In 1945, at the end of World War II, America and Americans entered into a golden age that had never existed before and will never exist again. Those of us who grew up during this golden age developed a particular way of looking at the world that was greatly influenced by what was going on in America at the time. We developed certain assumptions about our lives and about business in general, and we have a hard time giving them up. But give them up we must if we are going to survive in the economy of the future.
At the end of World War II, America and American industry dominated the world. We had not only abundant natural resources but also advanced technology, an intact industrial base, most of the money in the world, an advanced educational system, millions of competent workers, and a fully integrated system of roads, schools, hospitals, cities, and farms. It was said that America got rich by coming late into two world wars, and it was certainly true in the late ‘40s and ‘50s.
Meanwhile, the rest of the industrialized world, in both Europe and the Far East, was bombed to rubble. Our industrial and economic competitors had been ravaged by war. For this reason, anything that American factories produced found a ready market, both nationally and internationally. The economy took off. There was good-paying work for everyone. The ‘50s became an age of expanding prosperity, tremendous job security, and opportunities for all.
In this economic environment, anyone could get a job. Not only that, but there were plenty of low-skill jobs that paid high salaries and benefits for average work. A working person in America could have a nice house, a car⎯maybe two cars⎯and eventually a motor home, a boat, and all the other trappings of the good life.
After a few years of this robust, expanding economy with opportunities and jobs for all, Americans began to accept the good life as their birthright. People began to feel that because they were born in America, they were entitled to the good life, whether or not they worked hard. The Unions took full advantage of this mind-set and negotiated ever higher wages and benefits from American manufacturers. The increased costs of the products and services were simply passed on to the customers. Since the rest of the industrial world was still rebuilding, the only products to buy were American products. And since American consumers were also workers who were making good wages, as prices went up, sales also went up.
But by the '60s, the world was already changing. Our industrial competitors, especially Germany and Japan, had begun to rebuild and to manufacture and export products. Competition for the good life began to emerge all over the world. The pace began to pick up, slowly. The average American wasn’t aware of it, but the golden age was coming to an end.
In the '70s, America began to be flooded with high-quality products from all over the world. American companies and American working people had become complacent with their captive markets and had let their quality deteriorate. Low-price, high-quality products coming in from Japan, Germany and other countries began to take sizable chunks of the market. The affected industries cried out to government for protection, which was just another way of selling higher-priced goods to captive customers. And it didn’t work.
By the '80's, we were in a real race. Everyone in the world wanted to enjoy the same living standards Americans had. And people were willing to work long hours and produce high-quality goods and services in order to achieve those living standards.
We lost our advantage in natural resources. We lost our edge in technology. And we lost our edge in capital. Today, any change in economic policy anywhere, in any country, instantly causes capital to flow in or out of the affected areas. Countries can not even control the value of their currencies.
The one edge that America maintained is that we have the most productive workforce in the world. America and Americans produce more goods and services per capita than any other country. But there is a race on, and we are in it, and if you want to be employed in a good job for the indefinite future, you must get in and start competing as you have never done before.
Your job is an opportunity to contribute a value to your company in excess of your cost. In its simplest terms, your job is as secure as your ability to render value in excess of what it costs to keep you on the payroll.
If you want to earn more money at your current job, you have to increase your value, your contribution to the enterprise. If you want to get a new job, you have to find a way to contribute value to that enterprise. If you want any kind of job security, you must continually work at maintaining and increasing your value in the competitive marketplace.
And here's a key point. Your education, knowledge, skills and experience all are investments in your ability to contribute a value for which you can be paid. But they are like any other investments. They are highly speculative.
Once you have learned a subject or developed a skill, it is a sunk cost. It is time and money spent that you cannot get back. No employer in the marketplace has any obligation to pay you for it, unless he can use your skill to produce a product or service that people are ready to buy, today.
Whatever job you are doing, you should be preparing for your next job. And the key question is always: Where are the customers? Which businesses and industries are growing in this economy, and which ones are declining?
I continually meet people who ask me how they can increase their income when their entire industry is shrinking. I tell them that there are jobs with futures and there are jobs without futures, and they need to get into a field that is expanding, not contracting.
There are three forms of unemployment in America: voluntary, non-voluntary, and frictional. Voluntary employment exists when a person decides not to work for a certain period of time, or not to accept a particular type of job, hoping that something better will come along. Non-voluntary unemployment exists when a person is willing and able to work but cannot find a job anywhere. Frictional unemployment is the natural level; this includes the approximately 4 or 5 percent of the working population who are between jobs at any given time.
However, there are always jobs for the creative minority. You never have to be unemployed if you will do one of three things: change the work that you are offering to do, change the place where you are offering to work, or change the amount that you are asking for your services.
If there is no demand for your particular skills and experience, you will have to learn to do something else and provide skills that are in demand at the time. Employers don't care about your past. They care only about your future and your ability to contribute value to their customers.
You can change your location. Sometimes you will have to move from one part of the country to another, from where there are few jobs to where there are more jobs. Many people transform their entire lives by moving from an area of high unemployment to an area of low unemployment.
The third thing you can do to get back into the work force is to lower your demands. Remember, because your labor is a commodity, it is subject to the laws of supply and demand. If you ask too much, people will not hire you, because customers will not pay your demands in the price of the product or service that your organization produces. It is not the employer who is forcing this downward revision in wage requirements; it is the customer, through his or her buying behavior.
There is a small, creative minority in America who are never unemployed. No matter what happens, they always have a job⎯sometimes two jobs. If they lose a particular position in one place, they find another position doing the same thing, or something else, somewhere else. They are fast on their feet. They move quickly and they don't accept unemployment as an option. And they always have jobs.
There are always jobs to be done. Even in the worst economy, there are always problems to be solved and consumer needs to be met. For this reason, all long-term unemployment is ultimately voluntary.
There are more opportunities for you to fulfill your dreams and aspirations in the American economy than have ever before existed, or than exist anywhere else in the world. You can be, have, or do anything that you can dream of by preparing yourself for better and better jobs. It is never crowded at the top. There are no traffic jams on the extra mile. Your job is to get good, get better, and then make yourself indispensable.
By: Brian Tracy
www.focalpointcoaching.com
Monday, May 17, 2010
Increasing Your Earning Potential
Throughout most of human history, we have been accustomed to evolution, or the gradual changing and progressing of events in a straight line. Sometimes the process of change was faster and sometimes it was slower, but it almost always seemed to be progressive, from one step to the other, allowing you some opportunities for planning, predicting and changing.
Today, however, the rate of change is not only faster than ever before, but it is discontinuous. It is taking place in a variety of unconnected areas and affecting each of us in a variety of unexpected ways. Changes in information processing technologies are happening separately from changes in medicine, changes in transportation, changes in education, changes in politics and changes in global competition. Changes in family formation and relationships are happening separately from the rise and fall of new businesses and industries in different parts of the country. And if anything, this rate of accelerated, discontinuous change is increasing. As a result, most of us are already suffering from what Alvin Toffler once called, “future shock.”
You can’t do very much about the enormity of these changes, but the one thing that you can do is to think seriously about yourself and your basic need for security and stability. In no area is this more important than in the areas of job security and financial security. You must give special attention to your ability to make a good living and provide for yourself in the months and years ahead.
Above all, to position yourself for tomorrow, you must think continuously and seriously about your work today, your earning ability , and the work that you will be doing one, three, and five years from today. You must plan to achieve your own financial security, no matter what happens.
Charles Kettering said that you should give a lot of thought to the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life. One of the greatest mistakes that people can make, and the one with the worst long-term consequences, is to think only about the present and give very little thought to what might happen in the months and years ahead.
When our grandfathers started work, it was quite common for them to get a basic education and then go to work for a company and stay with that same company for the rest of their working lives. When our parents went to work, it was more common for them to change jobs three or four times during their lifetime, although it was difficult and disruptive.
Today, with increased turbulence and change in the national and global economy, a person starting work can expect to have five full-time careers between the ages of 21 and 65, and 14 full-time jobs lasting two years or more. According to Fortune Magazine, fully 40 percent of American employees in the 21st Century will be “contingency” workers. This means that they will never work permanently for another company. They will continue to move as needed, from company to company, from job to job, earning less money than full-time employees and accruing very few, if any, benefits in terms of health care and pension plans.
Imagine what your job will look like five years from today. Since knowledge in your field is probably doubling every five years, this means that fully twenty percent of your knowledge and your ability in your field is becoming obsolete each year. In five years, you will be doing a brand new job with brand new skills and abilities. Ask yourself, “What parts of my knowledge, skills and work are becoming obsolete? What am I doing today that is different than what I was doing one year ago and two years ago?” What are you likely to be doing one year, two years, three years, four years and five years from today? What knowledge and skills will you need and how will you acquire them? What is your plan for your economic and financial future?
We are now in the knowledge age. Today, the chief factors of production are knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to achieving results for other people. Your earning ability today is largely dependent upon your knowledge, skill and your ability to combine that knowledge and skill in such a way that you contribute value for which customers are going to pay.
The Law of Three says that you must contribute three dollars of profit for every dollar that you wish to earn in salary. It costs a company approximately double your salary to employ you in terms of space, benefits, supervision, and investment in furniture, fixtures, and other resources. For a company to hire you, they have to make a profit on what they pay you. Therefore, you must contribute value greatly in excess of the amount you earn in order to stay employed. To put it another way, your earning ability must be considerably greater than the amount you are receiving, or you will find yourself looking for another job.
To position yourself for tomorrow, here is one of the most important rules you will ever learn: “The future belongs to the competent.” The future belongs to those men and women who are very good at what they do. Pat Riley, in his book The Winner Within, wrote that, “If you are not committed to getting better at what you are doing, you are bound to get worse.” To phrase it another way, anything less than a commitment to excellent performance on your part is an unconscious acceptance of mediocrity. It used to be that you needed to be excellent to rise above the competition in your industry. Today, you must be excellent even to keep your job in your industry.
The marketplace is a stern task master. Today, excellence, quality, and value are absolutely essential elements of any product or service, and of the work of any person. Your earning ability is largely determined by the perception of excellence, quality, and value that others have of you and what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and it pays below average rewards or unemployment for below average performance. Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive. It’s not personal. It’s just the way our economy works.
To earn more, you must learn more. You are maxed out today at your current level of knowledge and skill. However much you are earning at this moment is the maximum you can earn without learning and practicing something new and different.
And here’s the rub. Your accumulated knowledge and experience is becoming obsolete bit by bit, day by day. The knowledge in your field is doubling every three to five years. That means that your knowledge must double every three to five years just for you to stay even.
The solution to the dilemma of unavoidable change and restructuring is continuous self-development. Your personal knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge are your most valuable assets. To stay on top of your world, you must continually add to your knowledge and your ability. You must continually build up your mental assets if you want to enjoy a continuous return on your investment. And only by building on your current assets do you stop them from deteriorating.
By engaging in continuous self-improvement, you can put yourself behind the wheel of your own life. By dedicating yourself to enhancing your earning ability, you will automatically be engaging in the continuous process of personal development. By learning more, you prepare yourself to earn more. You position yourself for tomorrow by developing the knowledge and skills that you need to be a valuable and productive part of our economy, no matter which direction it goes.
By: Brian Tracy
Today, however, the rate of change is not only faster than ever before, but it is discontinuous. It is taking place in a variety of unconnected areas and affecting each of us in a variety of unexpected ways. Changes in information processing technologies are happening separately from changes in medicine, changes in transportation, changes in education, changes in politics and changes in global competition. Changes in family formation and relationships are happening separately from the rise and fall of new businesses and industries in different parts of the country. And if anything, this rate of accelerated, discontinuous change is increasing. As a result, most of us are already suffering from what Alvin Toffler once called, “future shock.”
You can’t do very much about the enormity of these changes, but the one thing that you can do is to think seriously about yourself and your basic need for security and stability. In no area is this more important than in the areas of job security and financial security. You must give special attention to your ability to make a good living and provide for yourself in the months and years ahead.
Above all, to position yourself for tomorrow, you must think continuously and seriously about your work today, your earning ability , and the work that you will be doing one, three, and five years from today. You must plan to achieve your own financial security, no matter what happens.
Charles Kettering said that you should give a lot of thought to the future because that is where you are going to spend the rest of your life. One of the greatest mistakes that people can make, and the one with the worst long-term consequences, is to think only about the present and give very little thought to what might happen in the months and years ahead.
When our grandfathers started work, it was quite common for them to get a basic education and then go to work for a company and stay with that same company for the rest of their working lives. When our parents went to work, it was more common for them to change jobs three or four times during their lifetime, although it was difficult and disruptive.
Today, with increased turbulence and change in the national and global economy, a person starting work can expect to have five full-time careers between the ages of 21 and 65, and 14 full-time jobs lasting two years or more. According to Fortune Magazine, fully 40 percent of American employees in the 21st Century will be “contingency” workers. This means that they will never work permanently for another company. They will continue to move as needed, from company to company, from job to job, earning less money than full-time employees and accruing very few, if any, benefits in terms of health care and pension plans.
Imagine what your job will look like five years from today. Since knowledge in your field is probably doubling every five years, this means that fully twenty percent of your knowledge and your ability in your field is becoming obsolete each year. In five years, you will be doing a brand new job with brand new skills and abilities. Ask yourself, “What parts of my knowledge, skills and work are becoming obsolete? What am I doing today that is different than what I was doing one year ago and two years ago?” What are you likely to be doing one year, two years, three years, four years and five years from today? What knowledge and skills will you need and how will you acquire them? What is your plan for your economic and financial future?
We are now in the knowledge age. Today, the chief factors of production are knowledge and the ability to apply that knowledge to achieving results for other people. Your earning ability today is largely dependent upon your knowledge, skill and your ability to combine that knowledge and skill in such a way that you contribute value for which customers are going to pay.
The Law of Three says that you must contribute three dollars of profit for every dollar that you wish to earn in salary. It costs a company approximately double your salary to employ you in terms of space, benefits, supervision, and investment in furniture, fixtures, and other resources. For a company to hire you, they have to make a profit on what they pay you. Therefore, you must contribute value greatly in excess of the amount you earn in order to stay employed. To put it another way, your earning ability must be considerably greater than the amount you are receiving, or you will find yourself looking for another job.
To position yourself for tomorrow, here is one of the most important rules you will ever learn: “The future belongs to the competent.” The future belongs to those men and women who are very good at what they do. Pat Riley, in his book The Winner Within, wrote that, “If you are not committed to getting better at what you are doing, you are bound to get worse.” To phrase it another way, anything less than a commitment to excellent performance on your part is an unconscious acceptance of mediocrity. It used to be that you needed to be excellent to rise above the competition in your industry. Today, you must be excellent even to keep your job in your industry.
The marketplace is a stern task master. Today, excellence, quality, and value are absolutely essential elements of any product or service, and of the work of any person. Your earning ability is largely determined by the perception of excellence, quality, and value that others have of you and what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance, and it pays below average rewards or unemployment for below average performance. Customers today want the very most and the very best for the very least amount of money, and on the best terms. Only the individuals and companies that provide absolutely excellent products and services at absolutely excellent prices will survive. It’s not personal. It’s just the way our economy works.
To earn more, you must learn more. You are maxed out today at your current level of knowledge and skill. However much you are earning at this moment is the maximum you can earn without learning and practicing something new and different.
And here’s the rub. Your accumulated knowledge and experience is becoming obsolete bit by bit, day by day. The knowledge in your field is doubling every three to five years. That means that your knowledge must double every three to five years just for you to stay even.
The solution to the dilemma of unavoidable change and restructuring is continuous self-development. Your personal knowledge and your ability to apply that knowledge are your most valuable assets. To stay on top of your world, you must continually add to your knowledge and your ability. You must continually build up your mental assets if you want to enjoy a continuous return on your investment. And only by building on your current assets do you stop them from deteriorating.
By engaging in continuous self-improvement, you can put yourself behind the wheel of your own life. By dedicating yourself to enhancing your earning ability, you will automatically be engaging in the continuous process of personal development. By learning more, you prepare yourself to earn more. You position yourself for tomorrow by developing the knowledge and skills that you need to be a valuable and productive part of our economy, no matter which direction it goes.
By: Brian Tracy
Tuesday, May 11, 2010
Hello Mr. President!
While speaking at a seminar the other day, I asked the audience, “How many people here are self-employed.” Of the 3,000 people who had come for motivation and inspiration, only about 300 raised their hands.
That’s the usual number. About 10 percent. I know because I ask audiences that question all the time when I’m trying to make a key point.
I then tell them, “The biggest mistake you can ever make is to think that you work for anyone else but yourself. You’re all self-employed. From the time you take your first job to the day you retire, you’re working for yourself.” And this goes for you as well.
You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You are the Chief Executive Officer, the Chairman of the Board. Legally, you can form your own sole proprietorship, and using your own name (William Smith and Associates, Susan Jones and Associates) just by deciding to do so. You can print business cards today with your name and the word “President” under it.
You don’t need permission from anyone. You don’t need to register anywhere. You can be the president of your own legal corporation from this moment forth.
You are the president of your own career. You are the boss of your own life. Your current employer is merely your “best client.” If another client offers you a better deal, you can take your personal services and sell them elsewhere.
How, some things in life are optional and some things are mandatory. Going to Fiji for your vacation is optional. Being president of your own life is mandatory. The only question is whether you accept it or not.
The very act of defining yourself as self-employed, no matter who signs your paycheck, moves you into the top three percent of Americans. These are the people who “act like they own the place.” This elite is distinguished from others by their attitude toward themselves and their lives. They are proactive rather than reactive. They take charge of their work situations rather than accepting them passively.
You choose your own job. You set the terms of your employment. You decide your own pay. If you want a raise, look in the mirror and negotiate with your boss. You’re in charge. How, what are you going to do about it?
By: Brian Tracy
That’s the usual number. About 10 percent. I know because I ask audiences that question all the time when I’m trying to make a key point.
I then tell them, “The biggest mistake you can ever make is to think that you work for anyone else but yourself. You’re all self-employed. From the time you take your first job to the day you retire, you’re working for yourself.” And this goes for you as well.
You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You are the Chief Executive Officer, the Chairman of the Board. Legally, you can form your own sole proprietorship, and using your own name (William Smith and Associates, Susan Jones and Associates) just by deciding to do so. You can print business cards today with your name and the word “President” under it.
You don’t need permission from anyone. You don’t need to register anywhere. You can be the president of your own legal corporation from this moment forth.
You are the president of your own career. You are the boss of your own life. Your current employer is merely your “best client.” If another client offers you a better deal, you can take your personal services and sell them elsewhere.
How, some things in life are optional and some things are mandatory. Going to Fiji for your vacation is optional. Being president of your own life is mandatory. The only question is whether you accept it or not.
The very act of defining yourself as self-employed, no matter who signs your paycheck, moves you into the top three percent of Americans. These are the people who “act like they own the place.” This elite is distinguished from others by their attitude toward themselves and their lives. They are proactive rather than reactive. They take charge of their work situations rather than accepting them passively.
You choose your own job. You set the terms of your employment. You decide your own pay. If you want a raise, look in the mirror and negotiate with your boss. You’re in charge. How, what are you going to do about it?
By: Brian Tracy
Monday, April 26, 2010
Give Me A Break
The most dangerous and life threatening psychological illness-afflicting America today is what Dr. Martin Seligman calls “Learned Helplessness.”
More than twenty-five years of research in cognitive psychology, the study of how your thoughts affect your behaviors, has reached a startling conclusion; chains of our own making bind us all.
Amahans Maslow said that the story of the human race is the story of men and women “selling themselves short.” We have a tendency to settle for less and to make excuses instead of progress.
Give me a break! You’ve heard the saying, “I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.” Well, I’m just as tempted, as you are to fall in love with my excuses for the things I’m not happy about, but unfortunately, it can become a real trap!
Everyone wants to be happy, healthy, and financially independent and working at something they enjoy. Well, why aren’t they? Why aren’t you? What are your excuses? What’s holding you back?
But, you say, “I have very good and valid reasons for being in this unsatisfactory situation.”
Do you? Here’s the test. Ask yourself, “Is there anyone else with my particular problem or obstacle that is succeeding in spite of it?”
If there is, your excuse doesn’t hold water. Whatever it is, there are probably thousands of men and women who’ve had it far worse than you could ever imagine, who have overcome their obstacles and are doing well.
There are men and women who have become paraplegics and quadriplegics, confined to wheel chairs for life, who are busy, happy, successful and respected by those around them.
There are men and women with every conceivable problem who are building good lives for themselves.
Give me a break! What they have done, you can do. They’d probably give anything to trade places with you. Your excuses don’t hold water. Go for it!
By: Brian Tracy
More than twenty-five years of research in cognitive psychology, the study of how your thoughts affect your behaviors, has reached a startling conclusion; chains of our own making bind us all.
Amahans Maslow said that the story of the human race is the story of men and women “selling themselves short.” We have a tendency to settle for less and to make excuses instead of progress.
Give me a break! You’ve heard the saying, “I cried because I had no shoes. Then I met a man who had no feet.” Well, I’m just as tempted, as you are to fall in love with my excuses for the things I’m not happy about, but unfortunately, it can become a real trap!
Everyone wants to be happy, healthy, and financially independent and working at something they enjoy. Well, why aren’t they? Why aren’t you? What are your excuses? What’s holding you back?
But, you say, “I have very good and valid reasons for being in this unsatisfactory situation.”
Do you? Here’s the test. Ask yourself, “Is there anyone else with my particular problem or obstacle that is succeeding in spite of it?”
If there is, your excuse doesn’t hold water. Whatever it is, there are probably thousands of men and women who’ve had it far worse than you could ever imagine, who have overcome their obstacles and are doing well.
There are men and women who have become paraplegics and quadriplegics, confined to wheel chairs for life, who are busy, happy, successful and respected by those around them.
There are men and women with every conceivable problem who are building good lives for themselves.
Give me a break! What they have done, you can do. They’d probably give anything to trade places with you. Your excuses don’t hold water. Go for it!
By: Brian Tracy
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Getting Your Ideas Across
Over the years, I’ve learned that fully 85 percent of what you accomplish in your career and in your personal life will be determined by how well you get your message across and by how capable you are of inspiring people to take action on your ideas and recommendations.
You can be limited in other respects⎯by education, contacts and intelligence⎯but if you can interact effectively with others, minute by minute and hour by hour, your future can be unlimited.
I an going to share with you some ideas, techniques and skills that you can use to accelerate your progress toward power communication. But first, there are two major myths about communication that must be dispelled.
The first myth, which many people believe, is that because they can talk, they can communicate with others. Men especially, according to the research, think that by speaking louder and faster, they’re more effective in dealing with people. Many people think that because they have the gift of gab, because they have no problem talking to others on any subject that comes to mind, they’re good communicators.
Often, exactly the opposite is true. Many people who talk a lot are often poor communicators⎯even terrible communicators. Many people in sales and business think that being able to string a lot of words together in a breathless fashion makes them excellent at getting a message understood by others. However, in most cases, those people are seen as boring or obnoxious, or both.
Let me say this slowly and clearly: The ability to talk is not the same as the ability to communicate. As I will discuss later, the ability to communicate is the ability both to send and to receive a message. The ability to communicate is the ability to make an impact on the thoughts, feelings and actions of someone. Many people who consider themselves excellent talkers are not very effective at all in this regard.
So let’s dispel the first myth, the myth that talking is equal to communicating. Don’t allow yourself to become complacent. The ability to talk to one or more persons is only the basic requirement for communication. It’s the starting point. It’s the jumping-off place. Effective communication is something else again.
The second myth about effective communication is that it’s a skill that people are born with. Either you have it or you don’t have it. If you’re not extroverted, gregarious and outgoing, you don’t have what it takes to be a good communicator.
Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Communication is a skill that you can learn. it’s like riding a bicycle or typing. It takes time and practice, over and over. But if you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life, as you will soon see.
Communication requires both a sender and a receiver. The process of communication happens rapidly, and this same process takes place whenever two or more people exchange ideas. First, the sender thinks of an idea or image that he or she wishes to convey to the receiver. The sender then translates the idea or image into a form, or words, either written or spoken. Those words constitute the basic message that is transmitted to the receiver. The receiver catches the words, like a baseball player catches a baseball, and then translates the words into the ideas and pictures that they represent in order to understand the message that was sent.
The receiver then acknowledges receipt, and replies by translating his or her ideas and pictures into words and transmitting them to the sender. When the message has been sent and the receiver has acknowledged receiving it by transmitting a response that the sender receives, accepts and understands, the communication is complete.
If this sounds complicated, it is. Probably 99 percent of all the difficulties between human beings, and within organizations, are caused by breakdowns in the communication process. Either the senders do not say what they mean clearly enough, or the receivers do not receive the message in the form in which it was intended.
An enormous number of factors can interfere in any communication, and every one of them can lead to a distortion of the message in some way. Probably every problem you’ll ever have will be somehow associated with a failure or breakdown in the communication process.
Let me explain. According to Albert Mehrabian, a communications specialist, there are three elements in any direct, face-to-face communication: words, tone of voice and body language. You’ve probably heard that words account for only 7 percent of the message, tone of voice accounts for 38 percent of the message, and body language accounts for fully 55 percent of the message. For an effective communication to take place, all three parts of the message must be congruent. If there is any incongruency, the receiver will be confused and will tend to accept the predominant form of communication rather than simply the literal meaning of the words.
Very often, you will say something that you feel is innocuous to a person and he will be offended. When you try to explain that you felt the words you used were inoffensive, the person will tell you that your tone of voice was the issue.
The third ingredient of communication, body language, is also very important. The way you sit or stand or incline your head or move your eyes, relative to the person with whom You’re communicating, will have an enormous effect on the message received.
For example, you can dramatically increase the effect of your communications by leaning toward the person You’re speaking with. If You’re sitting down, this is easy. If You’re standing up, you can accomplish the same effect by shifting your weight forward onto the balls of your feet and leaning slightly toward the person You’re talking to. When you make direct eye and face contact with the person, combined with focused attention, you double the impact of what You’re saying.
In fact, one of the easiest ways for you to break off a conversation, almost like knocking a needle off a phonograph record, is by just turning away from a person and looking into the distance when he is speaking. That will usually abruptly cause the person to stop speaking. He will feel that he’s just been abandoned in the middle of the conversation.
So your choice of words is important, but even more important is your tone of voice and your body language. The better you can coordinate all three of those ingredients, the more impact your message will have, and the greater will be the likelihood that a person will both understand it and react the way you want him to.
you’ve heard the saying that God gave man two ears and one mouth, and in conversation, you should use them in those proportions. Truer words were never spoken. The best communicators are excellent listeners. The worst communicators are continuous talkers. In fact, often the most important part of the message is the part that is conveyed by the pauses you make between thoughts and ideas. The message is conveyed in the silence that takes place during the lulls in conversation. All master communicators have learned to be comfortable with silence. Remember that a person can absorb only a certain amount of information, as ground can absorb only a certain amount of water. If you pour too much water onto the ground, it will form into puddles instead of soak in. A person’s mind is very much the same. If you don’t give someone an opportunity to absorb what you’re saying, by pausing and waiting quietly and patiently, he will be overwhelmed by the continuous stream of thoughts and ideas, and often will distort the message and miss the point.
One of the most vital requirements for effective communication, especially with important messages, is preparation. Preparation is the mark of the true professional. The late Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant of the University of Alabama football team was famous for saying, “It’s not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that counts.” In all communications, the will to prepare in advance of talking and interacting with people is the key to achieving maximum effectiveness.
In high school and college debating, where the individuals and teams are judged on the effectiveness of their ability to get their ideas across and to win their points, they’re taught to prepare exhaustively. Especially, they’re taught to prepare the debate from the point of view of the opposition before they prepare their own arguments. Lawyers were taught to do this in law school. Before they go into court, lawyers think through every possible piece of evidence or information that favors the opposing party. They then prepare their arguments in such a way as to undermine what they think the opposing party will present as its strongest point.
Remember that in communicating, people do things for their own reasons, not for yours. Everyone’s favorite radio station is WIIFM, which means “What’s in it for me?”
The more important the communication, either in business or personal life, the more important it is to prepare for it. Think through where the other person is coming from. What is his or her point of view? What are his or her problems or concerns? What is he or she trying to accomplish? What is his or her level of knowledge or information about the subject under discussion?
The best communicators do not use a lot of words, but they choose their words carefully, in advance. People appreciate straight talking. Avoid the tendency to dress up your message and sugarcoat it. When you have a question or a concern, or you want something, come right out and say it without confusion or distortion. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel and how much more positively someone will respond to your message.
In getting your point across, perhaps the most important word of all is the word ask. The most effective people are those who are the best at asking for what they want. They ask questions to uncover real needs and concerns. They ask questions to illuminate objections and problems that people might have with what They’re suggesting. They ask questions to expand the conversation and to increase their understanding of where people are really coming from.
You get your message understood by getting out of yourself, by putting your ego aside, and by focusing all of your attention on the other person. You get people to do the things you want them to do by presenting your arguments in terms of their interests, in terms of what they want to be and have and do. You prepare thoroughly in advance of any important conversation. You think before you speak, and you think on paper. You can say almost anything if you say it, or ask it, pleasantly, positively and with courtesy and friendliness.
The ability to communicate is a skill that you can learn by becoming genuinely interested in people and by putting their needs ahead of your own when sending a message or asking them to do something for you. When you concentrate your attention on building trust, on the one hand, and on seeking to understand, on the other hand, You’ll become known and respected as an effective communicator everywhere you go.
By: Brian Tracy
You can be limited in other respects⎯by education, contacts and intelligence⎯but if you can interact effectively with others, minute by minute and hour by hour, your future can be unlimited.
I an going to share with you some ideas, techniques and skills that you can use to accelerate your progress toward power communication. But first, there are two major myths about communication that must be dispelled.
The first myth, which many people believe, is that because they can talk, they can communicate with others. Men especially, according to the research, think that by speaking louder and faster, they’re more effective in dealing with people. Many people think that because they have the gift of gab, because they have no problem talking to others on any subject that comes to mind, they’re good communicators.
Often, exactly the opposite is true. Many people who talk a lot are often poor communicators⎯even terrible communicators. Many people in sales and business think that being able to string a lot of words together in a breathless fashion makes them excellent at getting a message understood by others. However, in most cases, those people are seen as boring or obnoxious, or both.
Let me say this slowly and clearly: The ability to talk is not the same as the ability to communicate. As I will discuss later, the ability to communicate is the ability both to send and to receive a message. The ability to communicate is the ability to make an impact on the thoughts, feelings and actions of someone. Many people who consider themselves excellent talkers are not very effective at all in this regard.
So let’s dispel the first myth, the myth that talking is equal to communicating. Don’t allow yourself to become complacent. The ability to talk to one or more persons is only the basic requirement for communication. It’s the starting point. It’s the jumping-off place. Effective communication is something else again.
The second myth about effective communication is that it’s a skill that people are born with. Either you have it or you don’t have it. If you’re not extroverted, gregarious and outgoing, you don’t have what it takes to be a good communicator.
Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Communication is a skill that you can learn. it’s like riding a bicycle or typing. It takes time and practice, over and over. But if you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the quality of every part of your life, as you will soon see.
Communication requires both a sender and a receiver. The process of communication happens rapidly, and this same process takes place whenever two or more people exchange ideas. First, the sender thinks of an idea or image that he or she wishes to convey to the receiver. The sender then translates the idea or image into a form, or words, either written or spoken. Those words constitute the basic message that is transmitted to the receiver. The receiver catches the words, like a baseball player catches a baseball, and then translates the words into the ideas and pictures that they represent in order to understand the message that was sent.
The receiver then acknowledges receipt, and replies by translating his or her ideas and pictures into words and transmitting them to the sender. When the message has been sent and the receiver has acknowledged receiving it by transmitting a response that the sender receives, accepts and understands, the communication is complete.
If this sounds complicated, it is. Probably 99 percent of all the difficulties between human beings, and within organizations, are caused by breakdowns in the communication process. Either the senders do not say what they mean clearly enough, or the receivers do not receive the message in the form in which it was intended.
An enormous number of factors can interfere in any communication, and every one of them can lead to a distortion of the message in some way. Probably every problem you’ll ever have will be somehow associated with a failure or breakdown in the communication process.
Let me explain. According to Albert Mehrabian, a communications specialist, there are three elements in any direct, face-to-face communication: words, tone of voice and body language. You’ve probably heard that words account for only 7 percent of the message, tone of voice accounts for 38 percent of the message, and body language accounts for fully 55 percent of the message. For an effective communication to take place, all three parts of the message must be congruent. If there is any incongruency, the receiver will be confused and will tend to accept the predominant form of communication rather than simply the literal meaning of the words.
Very often, you will say something that you feel is innocuous to a person and he will be offended. When you try to explain that you felt the words you used were inoffensive, the person will tell you that your tone of voice was the issue.
The third ingredient of communication, body language, is also very important. The way you sit or stand or incline your head or move your eyes, relative to the person with whom You’re communicating, will have an enormous effect on the message received.
For example, you can dramatically increase the effect of your communications by leaning toward the person You’re speaking with. If You’re sitting down, this is easy. If You’re standing up, you can accomplish the same effect by shifting your weight forward onto the balls of your feet and leaning slightly toward the person You’re talking to. When you make direct eye and face contact with the person, combined with focused attention, you double the impact of what You’re saying.
In fact, one of the easiest ways for you to break off a conversation, almost like knocking a needle off a phonograph record, is by just turning away from a person and looking into the distance when he is speaking. That will usually abruptly cause the person to stop speaking. He will feel that he’s just been abandoned in the middle of the conversation.
So your choice of words is important, but even more important is your tone of voice and your body language. The better you can coordinate all three of those ingredients, the more impact your message will have, and the greater will be the likelihood that a person will both understand it and react the way you want him to.
you’ve heard the saying that God gave man two ears and one mouth, and in conversation, you should use them in those proportions. Truer words were never spoken. The best communicators are excellent listeners. The worst communicators are continuous talkers. In fact, often the most important part of the message is the part that is conveyed by the pauses you make between thoughts and ideas. The message is conveyed in the silence that takes place during the lulls in conversation. All master communicators have learned to be comfortable with silence. Remember that a person can absorb only a certain amount of information, as ground can absorb only a certain amount of water. If you pour too much water onto the ground, it will form into puddles instead of soak in. A person’s mind is very much the same. If you don’t give someone an opportunity to absorb what you’re saying, by pausing and waiting quietly and patiently, he will be overwhelmed by the continuous stream of thoughts and ideas, and often will distort the message and miss the point.
One of the most vital requirements for effective communication, especially with important messages, is preparation. Preparation is the mark of the true professional. The late Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant of the University of Alabama football team was famous for saying, “It’s not the will to win but the will to prepare to win that counts.” In all communications, the will to prepare in advance of talking and interacting with people is the key to achieving maximum effectiveness.
In high school and college debating, where the individuals and teams are judged on the effectiveness of their ability to get their ideas across and to win their points, they’re taught to prepare exhaustively. Especially, they’re taught to prepare the debate from the point of view of the opposition before they prepare their own arguments. Lawyers were taught to do this in law school. Before they go into court, lawyers think through every possible piece of evidence or information that favors the opposing party. They then prepare their arguments in such a way as to undermine what they think the opposing party will present as its strongest point.
Remember that in communicating, people do things for their own reasons, not for yours. Everyone’s favorite radio station is WIIFM, which means “What’s in it for me?”
The more important the communication, either in business or personal life, the more important it is to prepare for it. Think through where the other person is coming from. What is his or her point of view? What are his or her problems or concerns? What is he or she trying to accomplish? What is his or her level of knowledge or information about the subject under discussion?
The best communicators do not use a lot of words, but they choose their words carefully, in advance. People appreciate straight talking. Avoid the tendency to dress up your message and sugarcoat it. When you have a question or a concern, or you want something, come right out and say it without confusion or distortion. You’ll be amazed at how much better you feel and how much more positively someone will respond to your message.
In getting your point across, perhaps the most important word of all is the word ask. The most effective people are those who are the best at asking for what they want. They ask questions to uncover real needs and concerns. They ask questions to illuminate objections and problems that people might have with what They’re suggesting. They ask questions to expand the conversation and to increase their understanding of where people are really coming from.
You get your message understood by getting out of yourself, by putting your ego aside, and by focusing all of your attention on the other person. You get people to do the things you want them to do by presenting your arguments in terms of their interests, in terms of what they want to be and have and do. You prepare thoroughly in advance of any important conversation. You think before you speak, and you think on paper. You can say almost anything if you say it, or ask it, pleasantly, positively and with courtesy and friendliness.
The ability to communicate is a skill that you can learn by becoming genuinely interested in people and by putting their needs ahead of your own when sending a message or asking them to do something for you. When you concentrate your attention on building trust, on the one hand, and on seeking to understand, on the other hand, You’ll become known and respected as an effective communicator everywhere you go.
By: Brian Tracy
Tuesday, April 6, 2010
Generating Energy
You may have a thousand different goals over the course of your lifetime, but they all will fall into one of four basic categories. Everything you do is an attempt to enhance the quality of your life in one or more of these areas.
The first category is your desire for happy relationships. You want to love and be loved by others. You want to have a happy, harmonious home life. You want to get along well with the people around you, and you want to earn the respect of the people you respect. Your involvement in social and community affairs results from your desire to have happy interactions with others and to make a contribution to the society you live in.
The second category is your desire for interesting and challenging work. You want to make a good living, of course, but more than that, you want to really enjoy your occupation or profession. The very best times of your life are when you are completely absorbed in your work.
The third category is your desire for financial independence. You want to be free from worries about money. You want to have enough money in the bank so that you can make decisions without counting your pennies. You want to achieve a certain financial state so that you can retire in comfort and never have to be concerned about whether or not you have enough money to support your lifestyle. Financial independence frees you from poverty and a need to depend upon others for your livelihood. If you save and invest regularly throughout your working life, you will eventually reach the point where you will never have to work again.
The fourth category is your desire for good health, to be free of pain and illness and to have a continuous flow of energy and feelings of well-being. In fact, your health is so central t your life that you take it for granted until something happens to disrupt it.
The common denominator of these four goals, and the essential requirement for achieving each of them, is a high level of energy. The achievement of even a small amount of success in any one of these areas requires the development and expenditure of energy. Energy is a critical fuel and the one ingredient without which no other accomplishment is possible.
The aim of strategic planning for corporations is to find ways to organize the business to increase ROE, return on equity. ROE refers to the return on the capital invested in the enterprise. By shifting resources from areas of lower value to areas of higher potential value, the ROE in the business an be increased. In personal strategic planning, the aim is similar. It is also to increase ROE, but in this case, ROE stands for return on energy. All the work on personal development, self-improvement, goal setting, and time management is aimed at helping you to increase your return on energy, or as my friend Ken Blanchard calls it, “your return on life.” You are continually organizing and reorganizing your time and your resources so that you can get the very most pleasure, satisfaction, and rewards from the time and energy you put into your activities on a day-to-day basis.
Whereas companies have financial capital, you have human capital. Your human capital is composed of mental, emotional, and physical energy. The more energy you have to invest, and the more intelligently you invest it, the greater will be your rewards.
It is not the amount of time that you spend at your work or on your relationships that matters. Rather, it is the amount of yourself that you put into the time. If you have gone to bed late, gotten up early, and gone to work tired, you may be physically present for eight hours, but the quality and quantity of work that you can accomplish during that period of time is compromised. You’ll achieve only a small percentage of your potential productivity compared with what you can accomplish when you are fully rested and filled with enthusiasm.
In every area of your life, it is the quality of the time that you put into your activities that determines the rewards and satisfaction that you receive from them; this depends upon your energy level.
Building and sustaining your energy level is imperative. Since your energy is central to everything you accomplish, you should be very sensitive to things that either build or deplete it. Here are six keys to building and maintaining a high level of energy and vitality:
1. Proper weight. Carrying extra weight on your body is like carrying a pack loaded with bricks on your back — uphill. Excess weight tires you out. It taxes your heart, your lungs, and your muscles. Extra weight forces your body to burn up more energy than it normally would just to maintain life and proper functioning.
On the other hand, losing weight will increase your energy level almost immediately. Your self-esteem will go up. You will feel healthier and happier. As you lose weight, you will feel a greater sense of power and personal control. When you reach your ideal weight, you will be more effective in everything else you do.
2. Proper diet. The foods you eat have a tremendous impact on your energy level throughout the day. Changes in your diet can make you feel fresher, more alive, more alert, and filled with greater vitality than you can imagine.
The way to live to a ripe, happy, healthy old age is to shift the proportions of food you eat so you are consuming more fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain products. When you get used to eating highly nutritious foods, you’ll be less willing to eat foods that are not particularly good for you.
3. Proper exercise. The more regularly you exercise, the more energy you have, the better you feel, and the longer you will live. Regular exercise enhances your digestion, reduces the number of hours that you need to sleep, and increases your vitality in the physical, mental, and emotional realms.
There are three basic types of exercise: flexibility, strength, and endurance.
Flexibility exercises, such as yoga, require gentle stretching of all your muscles and the articulation of each of your joints each day. The more you stretch your muscles on a regular basis, the more relaxed, coordinated, and looser you will feel.
Strength exercises include calisthenics, weight lifting, and other exercises that build your muscles.
But perhaps the most important are endurance, or aerobic, exercises. One of the keys to long life and good health is aerobic exercise at least three times per week for a minimum of 30 minutes per time. You can achieve aerobic fitness by walking, running, swimming, cycling, rowing, or cross-country skiing. The important thing is that you exercise at least three times per week — and many people say five times per week — for the rest of your life. This will affect your levels of health and energy in everything else you do. Everything counts.
4. Proper rest and recreation. On average, you need seven to eight hours of good, solid sleep each night. Some people can get by on less. But you should plan and organize your evenings so that you are “early to bed and early to rise.” Remember, nature demands balance in all things. If you are going to work hard during the day, you must take time off to rest and recuperate in the evenings and on the weekends. The more balance you have between work and recreation, the more energy you will have and the more productive you will be.
5. Proper breathing. By breathing, I mean deep diaphragmatic breathing, where you fill your lungs to the count of 10, hold to the count of 10, and then exhale to the count of 10. If you do this seven to 10 times, two or three times per day, you will be amazed at how much fresher and more relaxed you feel.
6. Proper attitude. Positive Mental Attitude seems to go hand in hand with great achievement and success in every walk of life. The more positive you are, the more energy you have. The more positive you are, the happier you are. The more positive you are, the more positive are the people and situations you attract into your life. The more positive you are, the easier it seems for you to get the cooperation of other people. The more positive you are, the more effectively you perform.
On the other hand, negative emotions drain your energy, enthusiasm, and vitality. They tire you out and depress your immune system. Bouts of fear, anger, doubt, resentment, or guilt will be manifested in your physical body.
Keep your energy level high by always looking for the good in every person, in every situation. Seek the valuable lesson in every setback or adversity. Look for the equal or greater benefit that comes out of every disappointment. Be a perennial optimist. Be cheerful and positive. Be helpful and supportive. Be a source of encouragement and inspiration. Be the kind of person everybody looks forward to seeing and talking to.
Every success is the result of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of tiny efforts that nobody may ever see or appreciate. These tiny efforts, sacrifices, and disciplines accumulate to make you an extraordinary person.
Everything that you do counts in some way. Nothing is neutral. Everything either helps you or hurts you. Everything either adds up or takes away. Everything either propels you toward your goal or moves you away from it. Everything counts.
With regard to your levels of health and energy, everything that you do, or don’t do, will have an impact on how you feel and how you perform. And the results of all these activities are cumulative. People who are healthy and energetic in their 50s and 60s were engaging in positive health habits in their 20s and 30s. People who live a long, healthy, happy life into their 80s are people who began planning for it and disciplining themselves in their 30s and 40s. Everything counts.
By: Brian Tracy
www.focalpointcoaching.com
The first category is your desire for happy relationships. You want to love and be loved by others. You want to have a happy, harmonious home life. You want to get along well with the people around you, and you want to earn the respect of the people you respect. Your involvement in social and community affairs results from your desire to have happy interactions with others and to make a contribution to the society you live in.
The second category is your desire for interesting and challenging work. You want to make a good living, of course, but more than that, you want to really enjoy your occupation or profession. The very best times of your life are when you are completely absorbed in your work.
The third category is your desire for financial independence. You want to be free from worries about money. You want to have enough money in the bank so that you can make decisions without counting your pennies. You want to achieve a certain financial state so that you can retire in comfort and never have to be concerned about whether or not you have enough money to support your lifestyle. Financial independence frees you from poverty and a need to depend upon others for your livelihood. If you save and invest regularly throughout your working life, you will eventually reach the point where you will never have to work again.
The fourth category is your desire for good health, to be free of pain and illness and to have a continuous flow of energy and feelings of well-being. In fact, your health is so central t your life that you take it for granted until something happens to disrupt it.
The common denominator of these four goals, and the essential requirement for achieving each of them, is a high level of energy. The achievement of even a small amount of success in any one of these areas requires the development and expenditure of energy. Energy is a critical fuel and the one ingredient without which no other accomplishment is possible.
The aim of strategic planning for corporations is to find ways to organize the business to increase ROE, return on equity. ROE refers to the return on the capital invested in the enterprise. By shifting resources from areas of lower value to areas of higher potential value, the ROE in the business an be increased. In personal strategic planning, the aim is similar. It is also to increase ROE, but in this case, ROE stands for return on energy. All the work on personal development, self-improvement, goal setting, and time management is aimed at helping you to increase your return on energy, or as my friend Ken Blanchard calls it, “your return on life.” You are continually organizing and reorganizing your time and your resources so that you can get the very most pleasure, satisfaction, and rewards from the time and energy you put into your activities on a day-to-day basis.
Whereas companies have financial capital, you have human capital. Your human capital is composed of mental, emotional, and physical energy. The more energy you have to invest, and the more intelligently you invest it, the greater will be your rewards.
It is not the amount of time that you spend at your work or on your relationships that matters. Rather, it is the amount of yourself that you put into the time. If you have gone to bed late, gotten up early, and gone to work tired, you may be physically present for eight hours, but the quality and quantity of work that you can accomplish during that period of time is compromised. You’ll achieve only a small percentage of your potential productivity compared with what you can accomplish when you are fully rested and filled with enthusiasm.
In every area of your life, it is the quality of the time that you put into your activities that determines the rewards and satisfaction that you receive from them; this depends upon your energy level.
Building and sustaining your energy level is imperative. Since your energy is central to everything you accomplish, you should be very sensitive to things that either build or deplete it. Here are six keys to building and maintaining a high level of energy and vitality:
1. Proper weight. Carrying extra weight on your body is like carrying a pack loaded with bricks on your back — uphill. Excess weight tires you out. It taxes your heart, your lungs, and your muscles. Extra weight forces your body to burn up more energy than it normally would just to maintain life and proper functioning.
On the other hand, losing weight will increase your energy level almost immediately. Your self-esteem will go up. You will feel healthier and happier. As you lose weight, you will feel a greater sense of power and personal control. When you reach your ideal weight, you will be more effective in everything else you do.
2. Proper diet. The foods you eat have a tremendous impact on your energy level throughout the day. Changes in your diet can make you feel fresher, more alive, more alert, and filled with greater vitality than you can imagine.
The way to live to a ripe, happy, healthy old age is to shift the proportions of food you eat so you are consuming more fruits, vegetables, and whole-grain products. When you get used to eating highly nutritious foods, you’ll be less willing to eat foods that are not particularly good for you.
3. Proper exercise. The more regularly you exercise, the more energy you have, the better you feel, and the longer you will live. Regular exercise enhances your digestion, reduces the number of hours that you need to sleep, and increases your vitality in the physical, mental, and emotional realms.
There are three basic types of exercise: flexibility, strength, and endurance.
Flexibility exercises, such as yoga, require gentle stretching of all your muscles and the articulation of each of your joints each day. The more you stretch your muscles on a regular basis, the more relaxed, coordinated, and looser you will feel.
Strength exercises include calisthenics, weight lifting, and other exercises that build your muscles.
But perhaps the most important are endurance, or aerobic, exercises. One of the keys to long life and good health is aerobic exercise at least three times per week for a minimum of 30 minutes per time. You can achieve aerobic fitness by walking, running, swimming, cycling, rowing, or cross-country skiing. The important thing is that you exercise at least three times per week — and many people say five times per week — for the rest of your life. This will affect your levels of health and energy in everything else you do. Everything counts.
4. Proper rest and recreation. On average, you need seven to eight hours of good, solid sleep each night. Some people can get by on less. But you should plan and organize your evenings so that you are “early to bed and early to rise.” Remember, nature demands balance in all things. If you are going to work hard during the day, you must take time off to rest and recuperate in the evenings and on the weekends. The more balance you have between work and recreation, the more energy you will have and the more productive you will be.
5. Proper breathing. By breathing, I mean deep diaphragmatic breathing, where you fill your lungs to the count of 10, hold to the count of 10, and then exhale to the count of 10. If you do this seven to 10 times, two or three times per day, you will be amazed at how much fresher and more relaxed you feel.
6. Proper attitude. Positive Mental Attitude seems to go hand in hand with great achievement and success in every walk of life. The more positive you are, the more energy you have. The more positive you are, the happier you are. The more positive you are, the more positive are the people and situations you attract into your life. The more positive you are, the easier it seems for you to get the cooperation of other people. The more positive you are, the more effectively you perform.
On the other hand, negative emotions drain your energy, enthusiasm, and vitality. They tire you out and depress your immune system. Bouts of fear, anger, doubt, resentment, or guilt will be manifested in your physical body.
Keep your energy level high by always looking for the good in every person, in every situation. Seek the valuable lesson in every setback or adversity. Look for the equal or greater benefit that comes out of every disappointment. Be a perennial optimist. Be cheerful and positive. Be helpful and supportive. Be a source of encouragement and inspiration. Be the kind of person everybody looks forward to seeing and talking to.
Every success is the result of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of tiny efforts that nobody may ever see or appreciate. These tiny efforts, sacrifices, and disciplines accumulate to make you an extraordinary person.
Everything that you do counts in some way. Nothing is neutral. Everything either helps you or hurts you. Everything either adds up or takes away. Everything either propels you toward your goal or moves you away from it. Everything counts.
With regard to your levels of health and energy, everything that you do, or don’t do, will have an impact on how you feel and how you perform. And the results of all these activities are cumulative. People who are healthy and energetic in their 50s and 60s were engaging in positive health habits in their 20s and 30s. People who live a long, healthy, happy life into their 80s are people who began planning for it and disciplining themselves in their 30s and 40s. Everything counts.
By: Brian Tracy
www.focalpointcoaching.com
Monday, March 29, 2010
Gaining Visibility
Have you noticed that some workers receive more promotions and greater pay than do their colleagues do, even though they are apparently not as competent or as capable as their colleagues are? This doesn’t seem fair. Why should some people get ahead when others who seem to be working far harder, and even longer hours, get passed over for promotion and the additional rewards that go with it?
The fact is that to be a great success, it is important not only to be good at what you do, but also to be perceived as being good at what you do. Human beings are creatures of perception. It is not what they see but what they think they see that determines how they think and act.
If your coworker is perceived as being more promotable than you are, for whatever reasons, then it is very likely that your coworker will get additional responsibilities and more money, even though you know that you could do a better job, if given the chance.
Fortunately, however, there are several things that you can do to increase your visibility and accelerate the speed at which you move ahead in your career.
The starting point to attain high visibility is to develop competence. Determine what parts of your job are most important to your boss and to your company, and then make the decision to become very good in those areas. You must be perceived as being very competent at what you do; your future depends on it. That perception alone will bring you to the attention of more people faster than you can imagine. The perception of excellent performance will open up opportunities for greater responsibilities, higher pay and better positions. Becoming good at what you do should be the foundation of your strategy for gaining higher visibility and rapid advancement in your career.
Employers everywhere are looking for men and women of action, people who will get in there and get the job done right as soon as possible. When you develop a reputation for competence and capability, you quickly become visible to all the key people in your working environment.
Excellence at what you do is essential, but it’s not enough. There are additional elements that go into the perception that others have of you. And one of the most important elements is your overall image, from head to toe. How you appear to others makes a real difference.
A recent survey of personnel executives found that the decision to hire or not to hire is made in the first 30 seconds. Many people believe that the decision to accept or reject a job candidate is actually made in the first four seconds. Many capable men and women are disqualified from job opportunities because they simply do not look the part.
There are many elements of your life over which you have no control and which you cannot choose. But your external dress and appearance are totally a matter of personal preference. Through their choice of clothes, their grooming and their overall appearance, individuals deliberately make a statement about the kind of people they are. The way you look on the outside is a representation of the way you see yourself on the inside. If you have a positive, professional self-image, you will take pains to make your external appearance consistent with it.
It’s a good idea to dress the way the senior people in your company dress. Dress for the position two jobs above your own. Since people judge you largely by the way you look on the outside, be sure to look thoroughly professional. Consequently, the perception of the people who can help you in your career will be positive. They will open doors for you in ways that you cannot now imagine.
Another powerful way to increase your visibility is to join one or two professional associations connected with your business or field. Begin by attending meetings as a guest to carefully assess whether or not a professional association can be of value to you. Determine if the members are the kind of people you would like to know and are well-established in their careers. Then, if you have decided that becoming known to the key people in this association can advance your career, take out a membership and get involved.
Most people who join any club or association do little more than attend the regular meetings. For some reason, they are too busy to assist with the various things that need to get done. This is not for you. Your job is to pick a key committee and volunteer for service. Find out which committee seems to be the most active and the most influential in that organization, and then step up to the plate. Volunteer your time, expertise and energy, and get busy. Attend every meeting. Take careful notes. Ask for assignments, and complete them on time and in an excellent fashion.
In each case, you have an opportunity to perform for other key people in your profession in a non-threatening environment. You give them a chance to see what you can do and what kind of a person you are. You expand your range of valuable contacts in one of the most effective ways possible in America today. The people you get to know on these committees can eventually be extremely helpful to you in your work and in your career.
Also, join a well-known charitable organization, such as the United Way, and become active by donating your services to its annual fund-raising programs. You may not be wealthy now, but you do have time, and your willingness to give of yourself will soon be noticed by people who are higher up. Many men and women with limited contacts and limited resources have risen to positions of great prominence as the result of getting to know the key community leaders who participate in charitable organizations and professional associations.
Some years ago, I joined a statewide chamber of commerce and volunteered to work on its Economic Education Committee. As usual, very few of the members contributed any time or effort to the committee, so there was always lots of work for those few people who were willing to put in the effort. Within one year, I was speaking at the annual convention for this association. The audience was composed of some of the most influential business executives in the entire state. In the following year, I was invited to give a key briefing to the governor and his aides at the state capitol. I became so well-known in the business community that within six months, I was offered a position to run a new company at triple my former salary. It all came from becoming active in the chamber of commerce and becoming known to the other members.
About three years later, I volunteered to work with the United Way and had a very similar experience. In fact, my whole business life was changed because of my involvement in helping that charitable organization in its annual fund-raising drive.
It’s amazing how far and how fast you will go when you begin to give your time and energy to others on a volunteer basis. It’s one of the fastest ways up the ladder of success in America.
There are many other things that you can do to increase your visibility⎯things that don’t occur to most people. For example, a study of 105 chief executive officers concluded that there were two qualities that would put a person onto the fast track in his or her career. The first quality was the ability to set priorities, to separate the relevant from the irrelevant when facing the many tasks of the day. The second quality was a sense of urgency, the ability to get the job done fast.
Managers place very high value on a person who can set priorities and move quickly to get the job finished. Dependability in job completion is one of the most valued traits in the American work force. When your employer can hand you a job and then walk away and never worry about it again, you have moved yourself onto the fast track, and your subsequent promotion and pay are virtually guaranteed.
Another way to increase your visibility is to continually upgrade your work-related skills, and to make sure that your superiors know about it. Look for additional courses you can take to improve at your job, and discuss them with your boss. Ask him or her to pay for the courses, but make it clear that you’re going to take them anyway.
A young woman who worked for me was able to double her salary in less than six months by aggressively learning the computer, bookkeeping and accounting skills she needed as our company grew. And she was worth every penny.
Ask your boss for book and audio program recommendations. Then follow up by reading and listening to them and asking for further recommendations. Bosses are very impressed with people who are constantly striving to learn more in order to increase their value to their companies. Doing this regularly can really accelerate your career.
Finally, you’ll be more visible if you develop a Positive Mental Attitude. People like to be around and to promote people they like. A consistent, persistent attitude of cheerfulness and optimism is quickly noticed by everybody. When you make an effort to cultivate an attitude of friendliness toward people, they, in return, will go to extraordinary efforts to open doors for you.
In summary, here are the five keys to increasing your visibility so that you can be more successful, faster in your career:
1. Become excellent at the important things that you have been hired to do. Excellence in your chosen occupation is the primary stepping-stone to higher positions and better pay.
2. Look, act and dress the part. Become knowledgeable about styles, colors and fabrics. Dress the way senior people in your company dress. Never take anything for granted. Remember that in the area of image, “casualness brings casualties.”
3. Develop your contacts, both inside and outside the company. Always be looking for ways to give of your time and effort, as an investment, so that others will be willing to give of their time and effort to help you sometime in the future.
The most successful men and women in any community are those who are known by the greatest number of other successful people. Begin with your professional association or club, and join a local charity that you care about and that also has a prestigious board of directors.
4. Take additional courses to upgrade your skills, and make sure that everyone knows about it. Ask your boss for book and audio program recommendations. Then read and listen, and go back to your boss with your comments on what you’ve learned and to ask for further recommendations.
When your boss feels that you are eager to learn and grow, often he’ll become a mentor to you and will help you up the ladder of success. This process of being mentored, or guided, has been instrumental to the careers of many successful executives in America.
5. Be positive, cheerful and helpful. Be the kind of person other people want to see get ahead. Treat other people with friendliness and patience, and always have a good word to say to the people you work with.
In the final analysis, taking the time to become an excellent human being will do more to raise your visibility and improve your chances for promotion than will any other single thing that you can do. And you can do it if you really want to.
By: Brian Tracy
The fact is that to be a great success, it is important not only to be good at what you do, but also to be perceived as being good at what you do. Human beings are creatures of perception. It is not what they see but what they think they see that determines how they think and act.
If your coworker is perceived as being more promotable than you are, for whatever reasons, then it is very likely that your coworker will get additional responsibilities and more money, even though you know that you could do a better job, if given the chance.
Fortunately, however, there are several things that you can do to increase your visibility and accelerate the speed at which you move ahead in your career.
The starting point to attain high visibility is to develop competence. Determine what parts of your job are most important to your boss and to your company, and then make the decision to become very good in those areas. You must be perceived as being very competent at what you do; your future depends on it. That perception alone will bring you to the attention of more people faster than you can imagine. The perception of excellent performance will open up opportunities for greater responsibilities, higher pay and better positions. Becoming good at what you do should be the foundation of your strategy for gaining higher visibility and rapid advancement in your career.
Employers everywhere are looking for men and women of action, people who will get in there and get the job done right as soon as possible. When you develop a reputation for competence and capability, you quickly become visible to all the key people in your working environment.
Excellence at what you do is essential, but it’s not enough. There are additional elements that go into the perception that others have of you. And one of the most important elements is your overall image, from head to toe. How you appear to others makes a real difference.
A recent survey of personnel executives found that the decision to hire or not to hire is made in the first 30 seconds. Many people believe that the decision to accept or reject a job candidate is actually made in the first four seconds. Many capable men and women are disqualified from job opportunities because they simply do not look the part.
There are many elements of your life over which you have no control and which you cannot choose. But your external dress and appearance are totally a matter of personal preference. Through their choice of clothes, their grooming and their overall appearance, individuals deliberately make a statement about the kind of people they are. The way you look on the outside is a representation of the way you see yourself on the inside. If you have a positive, professional self-image, you will take pains to make your external appearance consistent with it.
It’s a good idea to dress the way the senior people in your company dress. Dress for the position two jobs above your own. Since people judge you largely by the way you look on the outside, be sure to look thoroughly professional. Consequently, the perception of the people who can help you in your career will be positive. They will open doors for you in ways that you cannot now imagine.
Another powerful way to increase your visibility is to join one or two professional associations connected with your business or field. Begin by attending meetings as a guest to carefully assess whether or not a professional association can be of value to you. Determine if the members are the kind of people you would like to know and are well-established in their careers. Then, if you have decided that becoming known to the key people in this association can advance your career, take out a membership and get involved.
Most people who join any club or association do little more than attend the regular meetings. For some reason, they are too busy to assist with the various things that need to get done. This is not for you. Your job is to pick a key committee and volunteer for service. Find out which committee seems to be the most active and the most influential in that organization, and then step up to the plate. Volunteer your time, expertise and energy, and get busy. Attend every meeting. Take careful notes. Ask for assignments, and complete them on time and in an excellent fashion.
In each case, you have an opportunity to perform for other key people in your profession in a non-threatening environment. You give them a chance to see what you can do and what kind of a person you are. You expand your range of valuable contacts in one of the most effective ways possible in America today. The people you get to know on these committees can eventually be extremely helpful to you in your work and in your career.
Also, join a well-known charitable organization, such as the United Way, and become active by donating your services to its annual fund-raising programs. You may not be wealthy now, but you do have time, and your willingness to give of yourself will soon be noticed by people who are higher up. Many men and women with limited contacts and limited resources have risen to positions of great prominence as the result of getting to know the key community leaders who participate in charitable organizations and professional associations.
Some years ago, I joined a statewide chamber of commerce and volunteered to work on its Economic Education Committee. As usual, very few of the members contributed any time or effort to the committee, so there was always lots of work for those few people who were willing to put in the effort. Within one year, I was speaking at the annual convention for this association. The audience was composed of some of the most influential business executives in the entire state. In the following year, I was invited to give a key briefing to the governor and his aides at the state capitol. I became so well-known in the business community that within six months, I was offered a position to run a new company at triple my former salary. It all came from becoming active in the chamber of commerce and becoming known to the other members.
About three years later, I volunteered to work with the United Way and had a very similar experience. In fact, my whole business life was changed because of my involvement in helping that charitable organization in its annual fund-raising drive.
It’s amazing how far and how fast you will go when you begin to give your time and energy to others on a volunteer basis. It’s one of the fastest ways up the ladder of success in America.
There are many other things that you can do to increase your visibility⎯things that don’t occur to most people. For example, a study of 105 chief executive officers concluded that there were two qualities that would put a person onto the fast track in his or her career. The first quality was the ability to set priorities, to separate the relevant from the irrelevant when facing the many tasks of the day. The second quality was a sense of urgency, the ability to get the job done fast.
Managers place very high value on a person who can set priorities and move quickly to get the job finished. Dependability in job completion is one of the most valued traits in the American work force. When your employer can hand you a job and then walk away and never worry about it again, you have moved yourself onto the fast track, and your subsequent promotion and pay are virtually guaranteed.
Another way to increase your visibility is to continually upgrade your work-related skills, and to make sure that your superiors know about it. Look for additional courses you can take to improve at your job, and discuss them with your boss. Ask him or her to pay for the courses, but make it clear that you’re going to take them anyway.
A young woman who worked for me was able to double her salary in less than six months by aggressively learning the computer, bookkeeping and accounting skills she needed as our company grew. And she was worth every penny.
Ask your boss for book and audio program recommendations. Then follow up by reading and listening to them and asking for further recommendations. Bosses are very impressed with people who are constantly striving to learn more in order to increase their value to their companies. Doing this regularly can really accelerate your career.
Finally, you’ll be more visible if you develop a Positive Mental Attitude. People like to be around and to promote people they like. A consistent, persistent attitude of cheerfulness and optimism is quickly noticed by everybody. When you make an effort to cultivate an attitude of friendliness toward people, they, in return, will go to extraordinary efforts to open doors for you.
In summary, here are the five keys to increasing your visibility so that you can be more successful, faster in your career:
1. Become excellent at the important things that you have been hired to do. Excellence in your chosen occupation is the primary stepping-stone to higher positions and better pay.
2. Look, act and dress the part. Become knowledgeable about styles, colors and fabrics. Dress the way senior people in your company dress. Never take anything for granted. Remember that in the area of image, “casualness brings casualties.”
3. Develop your contacts, both inside and outside the company. Always be looking for ways to give of your time and effort, as an investment, so that others will be willing to give of their time and effort to help you sometime in the future.
The most successful men and women in any community are those who are known by the greatest number of other successful people. Begin with your professional association or club, and join a local charity that you care about and that also has a prestigious board of directors.
4. Take additional courses to upgrade your skills, and make sure that everyone knows about it. Ask your boss for book and audio program recommendations. Then read and listen, and go back to your boss with your comments on what you’ve learned and to ask for further recommendations.
When your boss feels that you are eager to learn and grow, often he’ll become a mentor to you and will help you up the ladder of success. This process of being mentored, or guided, has been instrumental to the careers of many successful executives in America.
5. Be positive, cheerful and helpful. Be the kind of person other people want to see get ahead. Treat other people with friendliness and patience, and always have a good word to say to the people you work with.
In the final analysis, taking the time to become an excellent human being will do more to raise your visibility and improve your chances for promotion than will any other single thing that you can do. And you can do it if you really want to.
By: Brian Tracy
Monday, March 15, 2010
Forging Your Self-Confidence
A young woman wrote to me recently, telling me that her whole life had taken a different turn since she heard me ask the question, “What one great thing would you dare to dream if you knew you could not fail?” She wrote that, up to that time, this was a question she had never even dared to consider, but now, she thought of nothing else. She had realized, in a great, blinding flash of clarity, that the main thing separating her from her hopes and dreams was the belief in her ability to achieve them.
Most of us are like this for most of our lives. There are many things that we want to be, and have and do, but we hold back. We are unsure because we lack the confidence necessary to step out in faith in the direction of our dreams.
Abraham Maslow said that the story of the human race is the story of men and women “selling themselves short.” Alfred Adler, the great psychotherapist, said that men and women have a natural tendency toward feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Because we lack confidence, we don’t think we have the ability to do the kind of things that others have done, and in many cases, we don’t even try.
Just think: What difference would it make in your life if you had an absolutely unshakable confidence in your ability to achieve anything you really put your mind to? What would you want and wish and hope for? What would you dare to dream if you believed in yourself with such deep conviction that you had no fears of failure whatsoever?
Most people start off with little or no self-confidence, but as a result of their own efforts, they become bold and brave and outgoing. And we’ve discovered that if you do the same things that other self-confident men and women do, you, too, will experience the same feelings and get the same results.
The key is to be true to yourself, to be true to the very best that is in you, and to live your life consistent with your highest values and aspirations.
Take some time to think about who you are and what you believe in and what is important to you. Decide that you will never compromise your integrity by trying to be or say or feel something that is not true for you. Have the courage to accept yourself as you really are—not as you might be, or as someone else thinks you should be—and know that, taking everything into consideration, you are a pretty good person.
After all, we all have our own talents, skills and abilities that make us extraordinary. No one, including yourself, has any idea of your capabilities or of what you might ultimately do or become. Perhaps the hardest thing to do in life is to accept how extraordinary you really can be, and then to incorporate this awareness into your attitude and personality.
In developing unshakable levels of self-confidence, your self-esteem and self-regard are important starting points, but they are not enough. People have tried positive thinking and wishing and hoping for years, with only mixed results. To develop the deep-down kind of self-confidence that leads to victory, you need positive knowing, not just positive thinking.
Lasting self-confidence really comes from a sense of control. When you feel very much in control of yourself and your life, you feel confident enough to do and say the things that are consistent with your highest values. Psychologists today agree that a feeling of being “out of control” is the primary reason for stress and negativity and for feelings of inferiority and low self-confidence. And the way for you to get a solid sense of control over every part of your life is to set clear goals or objectives, to establish a sense of direction based on purposeful behavior aimed at predetermined ends.
Being true to yourself means knowing exactly what you want and having a plan to achieve it. Lasting self-confidence comes when you absolutely know that you have the capacity to get from where you are to wherever you want to go. You are behind the wheel of your life. You are the architect of your destiny and the master of your fate.
Instead of being preoccupied with the fear of failure and loss, as most people are, you focus on the opportunity and the possible gains of achievement. With a clearly defined track to run on, you become success-oriented, and you gradually build your confidence up to the stage where there is very little you will not take on.
Another essential way to build your self-confidence, through positive knowing rather than just positive thinking, is to become very good at what you do. The flip side of self-confidence is “self-efficacy,” or the ability to perform effectively in your chosen area.
You can raise your self-confidence instantly by the simple act of committing yourself to becoming excellent in your chosen field. You immediately separate yourself from the average individual who drifts from job to job and accepts mediocrity as the adequate standard.
Some years ago, a young man named Tim came to one of my personal-development seminars. He was shy and introverted. His handshake was weak and he had tremendous difficulty making eye contact. He sat in the back of the seminar room with his head down, taking notes. He seemed to have few friends, and he didn’t socialize very much during the breaks. At the end of the seminar, he told me that he was in sales and hadn’t been doing very well up to that time. But he had resolved to change, to go to work on himself, to overcome his shyness and to become very good at selling for his company. He then said good-bye, and I wished him the best of luck as he went on his way.
A year later, he came back to take the seminar again. But this time, he was distinctly different. He was calmer and more self-assured. He was still a little shy, but when he shook hands, his grip was firmer, and his eye contact was better. He sat toward the middle of the seminar room, and he interacted quietly with people around him. At the end of the seminar, he told me that he was starting to move up in his sales force and had had his best year ever. He was determined to do even better in the year to come.
About 14 months later, Tim came back to the seminar. This time, he brought five people from his company, all of whom he had convinced to come to the seminar, and he had offered to pay their tuition if they weren’t satisfied. He walked right up to me and shook hands firmly, looking me straight in the eye with a strong, self-confident smile. He asked if I remembered him, and I told him that I remembered him very well. He said that he had brought something that he wanted to show me. He took out of his pocket a letter from the president of a national corporation—one of the biggest companies in the country—personally congratulating him for the outstanding job he had done in sales in his territory in the past year.
It turned out that Tim had gone from number 33 to number one out of 42 salespeople. His income had risen from $26,000 a year to $98,000, and he had increased his sales volume at a faster rate than any other salesperson in the country had. He was still quiet, but he had a wonderful air of power and purposefulness about him. He had taken the steps and paid the price to build himself into a fine young man. He had made the decision to do whatever was necessary to overcome his shyness and to develop the kind of personality that he admired in others. He was, and is, in every sense of the word, a self-made man.
Perhaps the most wonderful result of developing high levels of self-confidence is the positive impact that your personality will have on your relationships. There are two mental laws that are always operating and that determine much of what happens to you in your interactions with people. The first is the law of attraction, which says that you will inevitably attract into your life people who are very much like you. The second law is the law of correspondence, which says that your outer world of relationships will correspond perfectly, like a mirror image, to your inner world of personality and temperament.
In combination, these laws simply say that as you change in a positive direction, you will find yourself surrounded by people who are very much like the new person you are becoming. As you get better, the quality and quantity of your relationships will get better. You will meet nicer, more self-confident, more interesting and enjoyable people. You will find yourself getting along better with members of the opposite sex, including your spouse. You will find yourself doing better at your job, or even in a new job, and getting along better with your boss and your coworkers. Your attitude of confidence and calm assurance will make you more attractive to people. They will want to be around you, to open doors for you, to make opportunities available to you that would not have arisen when you didn’t feel as terrific about yourself as you do now.
Often, people lack self-confidence in their relationships with others because they judge themselves poorly in comparison. Sometimes you become self-conscious of what you are doing and saying, and sometimes you are afraid that people will not like you or accept you the way you want them to. Well, there is an important mindset that you can adopt to improve your ability to get along well with others in a more relaxed and confident fashion.
It’s important to remember that no one can affect your thoughts or feelings unless there is something that you want from him, or something that you want him to refrain from doing. As soon as you begin to practice detachment and decide in your own mind that there is nothing that you want or expect from another person, you will find that his ability to shake your self-confidence is greatly reduced. The people who are the most successful in human relationships are those who practice a calm, healthy detachment from others, and although they are friendly and engaged in the conversation, they don’t allow the behaviors of others to determine how they think and feel about themselves.
As you can see, it is our fears and doubts that, more than anything else, undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence and cause us to think in negative terms about ourselves and our possibilities. As Maslow said, we begin to “sell ourselves short” and see all the reasons why something might not be possible for us. We magnify the difficulties and minimize the opportunities. We become preoccupied with the possible losses we might suffer and the possible criticisms we might endure. Our fears and doubts paralyze us, preventing us from acting boldly, lowering our self-confidence and causing us to think and talk in negative terms. In fact, this probably describes the great majority of mankind. Most people are so preoccupied with their fears that they have time for little else, and this preoccupation manifests itself in much of what they say and do.
The only real antidote to doubt and worry and fear and all the other negative emotions that sabotage our self-confidence is action. Your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, positive or negative. When you engage in systematic, purposeful action, using and stretching your abilities to the maximum, you cannot help but feel positive and confident about yourself.
Act as though it were impossible to fail. Act as though you already had a high level of self-confidence. And continually ask yourself, “What one great thing would I dare to achieve if I knew I could not fail?” Whatever your answer, you can have it if you can dream it, and if you have the self-confidence to go out and get it.
By: Brian Tracy
Most of us are like this for most of our lives. There are many things that we want to be, and have and do, but we hold back. We are unsure because we lack the confidence necessary to step out in faith in the direction of our dreams.
Abraham Maslow said that the story of the human race is the story of men and women “selling themselves short.” Alfred Adler, the great psychotherapist, said that men and women have a natural tendency toward feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. Because we lack confidence, we don’t think we have the ability to do the kind of things that others have done, and in many cases, we don’t even try.
Just think: What difference would it make in your life if you had an absolutely unshakable confidence in your ability to achieve anything you really put your mind to? What would you want and wish and hope for? What would you dare to dream if you believed in yourself with such deep conviction that you had no fears of failure whatsoever?
Most people start off with little or no self-confidence, but as a result of their own efforts, they become bold and brave and outgoing. And we’ve discovered that if you do the same things that other self-confident men and women do, you, too, will experience the same feelings and get the same results.
The key is to be true to yourself, to be true to the very best that is in you, and to live your life consistent with your highest values and aspirations.
Take some time to think about who you are and what you believe in and what is important to you. Decide that you will never compromise your integrity by trying to be or say or feel something that is not true for you. Have the courage to accept yourself as you really are—not as you might be, or as someone else thinks you should be—and know that, taking everything into consideration, you are a pretty good person.
After all, we all have our own talents, skills and abilities that make us extraordinary. No one, including yourself, has any idea of your capabilities or of what you might ultimately do or become. Perhaps the hardest thing to do in life is to accept how extraordinary you really can be, and then to incorporate this awareness into your attitude and personality.
In developing unshakable levels of self-confidence, your self-esteem and self-regard are important starting points, but they are not enough. People have tried positive thinking and wishing and hoping for years, with only mixed results. To develop the deep-down kind of self-confidence that leads to victory, you need positive knowing, not just positive thinking.
Lasting self-confidence really comes from a sense of control. When you feel very much in control of yourself and your life, you feel confident enough to do and say the things that are consistent with your highest values. Psychologists today agree that a feeling of being “out of control” is the primary reason for stress and negativity and for feelings of inferiority and low self-confidence. And the way for you to get a solid sense of control over every part of your life is to set clear goals or objectives, to establish a sense of direction based on purposeful behavior aimed at predetermined ends.
Being true to yourself means knowing exactly what you want and having a plan to achieve it. Lasting self-confidence comes when you absolutely know that you have the capacity to get from where you are to wherever you want to go. You are behind the wheel of your life. You are the architect of your destiny and the master of your fate.
Instead of being preoccupied with the fear of failure and loss, as most people are, you focus on the opportunity and the possible gains of achievement. With a clearly defined track to run on, you become success-oriented, and you gradually build your confidence up to the stage where there is very little you will not take on.
Another essential way to build your self-confidence, through positive knowing rather than just positive thinking, is to become very good at what you do. The flip side of self-confidence is “self-efficacy,” or the ability to perform effectively in your chosen area.
You can raise your self-confidence instantly by the simple act of committing yourself to becoming excellent in your chosen field. You immediately separate yourself from the average individual who drifts from job to job and accepts mediocrity as the adequate standard.
Some years ago, a young man named Tim came to one of my personal-development seminars. He was shy and introverted. His handshake was weak and he had tremendous difficulty making eye contact. He sat in the back of the seminar room with his head down, taking notes. He seemed to have few friends, and he didn’t socialize very much during the breaks. At the end of the seminar, he told me that he was in sales and hadn’t been doing very well up to that time. But he had resolved to change, to go to work on himself, to overcome his shyness and to become very good at selling for his company. He then said good-bye, and I wished him the best of luck as he went on his way.
A year later, he came back to take the seminar again. But this time, he was distinctly different. He was calmer and more self-assured. He was still a little shy, but when he shook hands, his grip was firmer, and his eye contact was better. He sat toward the middle of the seminar room, and he interacted quietly with people around him. At the end of the seminar, he told me that he was starting to move up in his sales force and had had his best year ever. He was determined to do even better in the year to come.
About 14 months later, Tim came back to the seminar. This time, he brought five people from his company, all of whom he had convinced to come to the seminar, and he had offered to pay their tuition if they weren’t satisfied. He walked right up to me and shook hands firmly, looking me straight in the eye with a strong, self-confident smile. He asked if I remembered him, and I told him that I remembered him very well. He said that he had brought something that he wanted to show me. He took out of his pocket a letter from the president of a national corporation—one of the biggest companies in the country—personally congratulating him for the outstanding job he had done in sales in his territory in the past year.
It turned out that Tim had gone from number 33 to number one out of 42 salespeople. His income had risen from $26,000 a year to $98,000, and he had increased his sales volume at a faster rate than any other salesperson in the country had. He was still quiet, but he had a wonderful air of power and purposefulness about him. He had taken the steps and paid the price to build himself into a fine young man. He had made the decision to do whatever was necessary to overcome his shyness and to develop the kind of personality that he admired in others. He was, and is, in every sense of the word, a self-made man.
Perhaps the most wonderful result of developing high levels of self-confidence is the positive impact that your personality will have on your relationships. There are two mental laws that are always operating and that determine much of what happens to you in your interactions with people. The first is the law of attraction, which says that you will inevitably attract into your life people who are very much like you. The second law is the law of correspondence, which says that your outer world of relationships will correspond perfectly, like a mirror image, to your inner world of personality and temperament.
In combination, these laws simply say that as you change in a positive direction, you will find yourself surrounded by people who are very much like the new person you are becoming. As you get better, the quality and quantity of your relationships will get better. You will meet nicer, more self-confident, more interesting and enjoyable people. You will find yourself getting along better with members of the opposite sex, including your spouse. You will find yourself doing better at your job, or even in a new job, and getting along better with your boss and your coworkers. Your attitude of confidence and calm assurance will make you more attractive to people. They will want to be around you, to open doors for you, to make opportunities available to you that would not have arisen when you didn’t feel as terrific about yourself as you do now.
Often, people lack self-confidence in their relationships with others because they judge themselves poorly in comparison. Sometimes you become self-conscious of what you are doing and saying, and sometimes you are afraid that people will not like you or accept you the way you want them to. Well, there is an important mindset that you can adopt to improve your ability to get along well with others in a more relaxed and confident fashion.
It’s important to remember that no one can affect your thoughts or feelings unless there is something that you want from him, or something that you want him to refrain from doing. As soon as you begin to practice detachment and decide in your own mind that there is nothing that you want or expect from another person, you will find that his ability to shake your self-confidence is greatly reduced. The people who are the most successful in human relationships are those who practice a calm, healthy detachment from others, and although they are friendly and engaged in the conversation, they don’t allow the behaviors of others to determine how they think and feel about themselves.
As you can see, it is our fears and doubts that, more than anything else, undermine our self-esteem and self-confidence and cause us to think in negative terms about ourselves and our possibilities. As Maslow said, we begin to “sell ourselves short” and see all the reasons why something might not be possible for us. We magnify the difficulties and minimize the opportunities. We become preoccupied with the possible losses we might suffer and the possible criticisms we might endure. Our fears and doubts paralyze us, preventing us from acting boldly, lowering our self-confidence and causing us to think and talk in negative terms. In fact, this probably describes the great majority of mankind. Most people are so preoccupied with their fears that they have time for little else, and this preoccupation manifests itself in much of what they say and do.
The only real antidote to doubt and worry and fear and all the other negative emotions that sabotage our self-confidence is action. Your conscious mind can hold only one thought at a time, positive or negative. When you engage in systematic, purposeful action, using and stretching your abilities to the maximum, you cannot help but feel positive and confident about yourself.
Act as though it were impossible to fail. Act as though you already had a high level of self-confidence. And continually ask yourself, “What one great thing would I dare to achieve if I knew I could not fail?” Whatever your answer, you can have it if you can dream it, and if you have the self-confidence to go out and get it.
By: Brian Tracy
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Finding Your True Calling
In my courses on time management, I point out that the very worst use of time in life is to stay at a job for months and years for which you are completely unsuited. There are a great number of people who spend their whole lives doing something during the week so that they can somehow find something enjoyable to do on the weekends.
In every case, these are men and women with very little future before them. They look upon their jobs as a form of drudgery, a penance they have to pay in order to enjoy the rest of their lives. And because of this attitude, they will seldom advance or be promoted. They will stay pretty much at the level they are, moving from job to job, and always wondering why other people seem to be living the good life while they feel like they are living lives of quiet desperation.
People who are not successful and happy in their work are those who have not taken the time to sit down and deal honestly and openly with themselves. They have not looked deep within themselves to find the inner treasures of talent and ability that they have demonstrated throughout their lives. They are content to do work that other people design and to achieve goals that other people have set.
Over time, people who are not following their true callings begin to feel helpless. They feel that there is nothing they can do to change things. Their income only rises enough to meet their expenditures, and they worry about money all the time. The future looks to them to be very much the same as the past. But this is not for you. Your aim in life is to become everything you are capable of becoming, to enjoy full self- expression of your talents and abilities. Your job is to develop yourself to the point where every day is a source of joy and satisfaction, and you have so many interesting things to do that you do not have enough time to do them. Your job is to continually hold up a mirror to yourself and refuse to work at anything that is not an expression of everything that is good and capable within you.
Success comes from being excellent at what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance and below-average rewards⎯and insecurity⎯for below-average performance.
But excellence is a journey, not a destination. You never really get there. You can never relax. The market is always changing and what constitutes excellence today will be different tomorrow and very different next year and the year after.
All really successful and happy people know in their hearts that they are very good at what they do. If you are doing what you really love and enjoy, if you are following your true calling, you will know because of your attitude toward excellence.
When you have found your true calling, nothing but the best will do for you, and you will go any distance, pay any price, overcome any obstacle to develop yourself to the point where you are really good at your occupation.
When you find your true calling, you will have a continuous desire to learn more about it. People who are not driven to learn more about their fields are people who are in the wrong jobs. And if a person is in the wrong job and not constantly learning and growing in their field, their value and their employability is diminishing with each passing day.
When you find your true calling, you will be determined to join the top 10 percent of people in your field. You will be willing to pay any price that is necessary to rise to the top. You will be willing to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. You will take additional courses on the evenings and weekends.
You will see technology as an opportunity to do your job better. You will be interested in the various learning programs that you can install on your computer that can help you learn better and faster. You will be hungry for new knowledge in your quest to move upward in your chosen field.
A simple test as to whether or not you are in your true calling is this: If you are doing the job that is meant for you, that uses your unique talents and abilities, you will automatically admire those who are at the top of your field. You will look up to them and want to be like them. They will be your role models and you will pattern your work and activities after them. You will want to meet them, talk to them, read their books, and listen to their talks. The very best people in your chosen field will become the examples that give you guidance, both spoken and unspoken, on your upward journey.
Throughout the years, I have been continually asked by people what they can do to be more successful. In almost every case, they are working in jobs that they don’t like, for bosses they don’t particularly respect, producing or selling products or services to customers they don’t care about. And many of them think that if they just hang in there long enough, the clouds will part and everything will get better.
But the fact is that you are where you are and who you are because you have chosen to be there. Nobody can help you or change your situation for you. The economic goal of your company is to hire people at the very lowest cost so that they can serve customers at the very lowest cost in a competitive market. For this reason, no one has any obligation to pay you any more than you are getting. If possible, they would like to pay you less.
The one thing I tell people over and over again is that they must become very good at doing what they are doing if they want to move up. And if they don’t have the inner desire to be very good at their jobs, it means they are probably in the wrong jobs.
The great tragedy is the number of people who do their job in an average or mediocre fashion with the idea that, when the right job comes along, they will really put their heads down and do a good job. But for some reason, the right job never comes along. They are always passed over for promotion and advancement. They are always the last ones hired and the first ones laid off.
If you’re still not sure about your true calling, ask the people the closest to you. Ask them, “What do you think I would be the very best at doing with my life?” It is absolutely amazing how people around you, including your spouse, your best friends, and your parents can see clearly what you should be doing when often you cannot see it yourself.
Remember, you are put on this earth to do something wonderful with your life. You have within you talents and abilities so vast that you could never use them all if you lived to be a thousand. You have the natural skills and talents that can enable you to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you could ever set for yourself. There are no limits on what you can be, have, or do if you can find your true calling, and then throw your whole heart into doing what you are made to do in an excellent fashion.
By: Brian Tracy
In every case, these are men and women with very little future before them. They look upon their jobs as a form of drudgery, a penance they have to pay in order to enjoy the rest of their lives. And because of this attitude, they will seldom advance or be promoted. They will stay pretty much at the level they are, moving from job to job, and always wondering why other people seem to be living the good life while they feel like they are living lives of quiet desperation.
People who are not successful and happy in their work are those who have not taken the time to sit down and deal honestly and openly with themselves. They have not looked deep within themselves to find the inner treasures of talent and ability that they have demonstrated throughout their lives. They are content to do work that other people design and to achieve goals that other people have set.
Over time, people who are not following their true callings begin to feel helpless. They feel that there is nothing they can do to change things. Their income only rises enough to meet their expenditures, and they worry about money all the time. The future looks to them to be very much the same as the past. But this is not for you. Your aim in life is to become everything you are capable of becoming, to enjoy full self- expression of your talents and abilities. Your job is to develop yourself to the point where every day is a source of joy and satisfaction, and you have so many interesting things to do that you do not have enough time to do them. Your job is to continually hold up a mirror to yourself and refuse to work at anything that is not an expression of everything that is good and capable within you.
Success comes from being excellent at what you do. The market only pays excellent rewards for excellent performance. It pays average rewards for average performance and below-average rewards⎯and insecurity⎯for below-average performance.
But excellence is a journey, not a destination. You never really get there. You can never relax. The market is always changing and what constitutes excellence today will be different tomorrow and very different next year and the year after.
All really successful and happy people know in their hearts that they are very good at what they do. If you are doing what you really love and enjoy, if you are following your true calling, you will know because of your attitude toward excellence.
When you have found your true calling, nothing but the best will do for you, and you will go any distance, pay any price, overcome any obstacle to develop yourself to the point where you are really good at your occupation.
When you find your true calling, you will have a continuous desire to learn more about it. People who are not driven to learn more about their fields are people who are in the wrong jobs. And if a person is in the wrong job and not constantly learning and growing in their field, their value and their employability is diminishing with each passing day.
When you find your true calling, you will be determined to join the top 10 percent of people in your field. You will be willing to pay any price that is necessary to rise to the top. You will be willing to start a little earlier, work a little harder, and stay a little later. You will take additional courses on the evenings and weekends.
You will see technology as an opportunity to do your job better. You will be interested in the various learning programs that you can install on your computer that can help you learn better and faster. You will be hungry for new knowledge in your quest to move upward in your chosen field.
A simple test as to whether or not you are in your true calling is this: If you are doing the job that is meant for you, that uses your unique talents and abilities, you will automatically admire those who are at the top of your field. You will look up to them and want to be like them. They will be your role models and you will pattern your work and activities after them. You will want to meet them, talk to them, read their books, and listen to their talks. The very best people in your chosen field will become the examples that give you guidance, both spoken and unspoken, on your upward journey.
Throughout the years, I have been continually asked by people what they can do to be more successful. In almost every case, they are working in jobs that they don’t like, for bosses they don’t particularly respect, producing or selling products or services to customers they don’t care about. And many of them think that if they just hang in there long enough, the clouds will part and everything will get better.
But the fact is that you are where you are and who you are because you have chosen to be there. Nobody can help you or change your situation for you. The economic goal of your company is to hire people at the very lowest cost so that they can serve customers at the very lowest cost in a competitive market. For this reason, no one has any obligation to pay you any more than you are getting. If possible, they would like to pay you less.
The one thing I tell people over and over again is that they must become very good at doing what they are doing if they want to move up. And if they don’t have the inner desire to be very good at their jobs, it means they are probably in the wrong jobs.
The great tragedy is the number of people who do their job in an average or mediocre fashion with the idea that, when the right job comes along, they will really put their heads down and do a good job. But for some reason, the right job never comes along. They are always passed over for promotion and advancement. They are always the last ones hired and the first ones laid off.
If you’re still not sure about your true calling, ask the people the closest to you. Ask them, “What do you think I would be the very best at doing with my life?” It is absolutely amazing how people around you, including your spouse, your best friends, and your parents can see clearly what you should be doing when often you cannot see it yourself.
Remember, you are put on this earth to do something wonderful with your life. You have within you talents and abilities so vast that you could never use them all if you lived to be a thousand. You have the natural skills and talents that can enable you to overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you could ever set for yourself. There are no limits on what you can be, have, or do if you can find your true calling, and then throw your whole heart into doing what you are made to do in an excellent fashion.
By: Brian Tracy
Monday, March 1, 2010
Exercising Your Influence
The ancient Greeks spent a lot of time thinking and writing about the effect of one personality on another. They broke down the process of communication into three parts, which they called ethos, pathos and logos.
The ethos of communication is defined as the ethical part. This revolves around the person you really are and, more important, the person you are perceived to be. If you are in sales or business, the way you are perceived by someone, which will largely determine the influence you have over him or her, will be strongly affected by your level of credibility, your ethos. In the area of personal credibility, the rule is that everything counts. Everything you do or don’t do either adds to or takes away from your credibility and your capability to influence someone. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in essence, that what you are shouts at me so loudly, I cannot hear a word you are saying. Ethos is very important.
Perhaps the simplest example of the application of this rule, that everything counts, involves your image or appearance. You’ve heard it said that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. The fact is that when you first meet a person, he makes a judgment about you in approximately four seconds, and his judgment is finalized largely within 30 seconds of the initial contact. In a survey of the members of the American Personnel and Guidance Association⎯those men and women who are responsible for hiring people for large companies⎯members generally agreed that they made their decision to hire or not to hire a person within 30 seconds of the first meeting.
Everything contributing to the way you look on the outside is important. If it’s not helping you, it’s hurting you. While you cannot control your physical features, you have total control over your dress and grooming. In fact, we generally assume that a person consciously and deliberately makes a personal statement about himself with every part of his appearance that he can affect in any way.
Your clothes are responsible for 95 percent of the first impression that you make on someone because, in most instances, your clothes cover 95 percent of your body. Your grooming, your hair style and the other ways you can determine your appearance from the neck up also exert an inordinate influence on the way that you are perceived, on your ethos with someone. Your accessories, such as purse or briefcase, watch, tie, rings, pens and other elements, all make a statement that will or will not help to put you in a position to influence someone.
The second part of communication and influence that the Greeks wrote about is pathos. Pathos refers to the emotional elements of a conversation. In modern selling and marketing, pathos is the ability to communicate with the deep, subconscious needs of a customer. Human beings are largely emotional, in that everything that we do and say, all of our decisions, and our indecisions, are determined by our emotions. Therefore, to have a great influence on others, we need to be able to connect with whatever causes them to feel strongly one way or another.
There is a little saying that we teach in our sales seminars: “If you can see Joe Jones through Joe Jones’s eyes, you can sell Joe Jones what Joe Jones buys.” This simply means that if you can develop a high level of empathy and put yourself into the mind and heart of a person, you can have an inordinate influence on his actions and his behaviour.
The best salespeople and the most effective influencers of behavior are extremely empathetic and sensitive to others. They listen closely to what others are saying, and they listen for the messages that are being conveyed between the lines. They are aware that there are things that are said and things that are not said. If you can get your ego out of the way long enough to focus in, like a laser beam, on a person, you will often be aware of concerns that the person has⎯concerns that you might have missed if you had allowed yourself to get wrapped up in your product or service, or in your desire to communicate your message.
Perhaps the most powerful ability you can develop to influence others is the ability to ask questions carefully and to listen attentively to the answers. Remember, listening can build trust and credibility. The more you listen to what a person is really saying, the more the person will trust you and be open to your influence. A basic rule is that you should never say anything if you can find a way to ask it instead. Telling is not selling.
The third part of communication, or human influence, is logos. The logos discussed by the Greeks refers to the factual content of a message, the words used. It refers to the argument that you present on behalf of your point of view. (However, we know that the facts themselves, although they are important, are not as powerful or as influential as the emotions are.)
In selling, we know that there are three parts to the process. These are, first, establishing rapport with the prospective customer, second, identifying the problem or need that the prospective customer has and, third, presenting the solution. These are the ethos, the pathos and the logos of selling to someone.
Your success in every area of life will be based largely on the quality and quantity of relationships that you can initiate and develop over time. In the world of business and sales today, relationships are everything. We often call this the “friendship factor.” We have discovered that a person will not do business with you until he or she is convinced that you are his or her friend
and are acting in his or her best interest. In other words, someone cannot be influenced by you unless he or she likes you in some way. Of course, it’s often possible for you to influence a person if he fears you, but that type of influence lasts only until the person can rearrange his situation and escape from the circumstances that enable you to have control over him.
The safest way to influence someone, then, is to earn his liking and respect by appealing to the friendship factor. This requires spending time with him, caring for him and respecting him. The more time that you are willing to spend with the person, the greater will be his tendency to trust you and to feel that you are acting in his best interest. The more obvious it is that you care about the person, about what he really needs, the more likely it is that he will be open to your influence. This is even more important in your personal relationships, with members of the opposite sex, your friends and your children. The more that people feel you care about them, the more open they will be to your influence in some way. The third ingredient of the friendship factor is respect. Being respected by others is very important to each of us. A survey done by the Gallup organization found that the most prominent living Americans rated the respect of others as the most important measure of success in life. They worked very hard to earn the respect of their parents, the respect of their spouses and children, the respect of their peers and colleagues, and the respect of mankind at large.
It seems that we truly respect ourselves only when we feel that we are respected by others, and we will go to great lengths to earn and keep that respect. When we feel that someone respects us for who we are and what we have accomplished, we tend to be more open to that person’s influence.
We can do two things to put ourselves in a position to be respected by others. The first is to develop our knowledge of our field. The more people perceive you know about your subject, the more they will respect you. The highest-paid people in almost every field are those who know more than the average people. They are recognized as experts, and they develop what is called “expert power.” Because of their superior knowledge, they are looked up to and listened to, and they are much more capable of influencing others to act in a particular way than they would be if their knowledge level were just average.
The best salespeople are those who know their products cold. They deeply understand every aspect of their products and the ways in which their products can be used to achieve the most important goals of their customers.
A good example comes from the field of life-insurance sales. One of the most successful and famous insurance salesman of all time is Ben Feldman. Ben Feldman is a legend in the life-insurance business. He has been written up in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest salesman in the world.
There are many books and articles by and about Ben Feldman that describe one of the most important activities he engaged in to achieve his level of success. For many, many years, Ben Feldman spent two hours every night, from 10:00 P.M. to 12:00 midnight, studying the field of life insurance. He studied not only life insurance but also selling methodologies, persuasion skills, financial planning, actuarial tables, and every other subject he could think of that would make him more knowledgeable and, therefore, more capable of serving his customers. He became respected far and wide for his extraordinary ability to tailor a variety of life-insurance instruments to help individual business owners achieve and maintain financial estates that would live on after them. He became a walking embodiment of “expert power,” and because of that power, he had tremendous ability to influence others. As a result, he became a very wealthy, successful and respected businessman.
Another way to influence others is through expertise. Expertise is closely tied to knowledge, but it is a little different. Expertise is the ability to do, the ability to perform well in your chosen field. Men and women with expertise are those who practice over and over in whatever they do until they become known far and wide as the very best in their fields.
One of the most important qualities necessary for influence and success is result-orientation. It is the ability to get results, to get the job done, to deliver the goods. Your ability to get results, to make a commitment to achieve a set of goals and to go out and do it, will earn you the respect of everyone around you, and it will enable you to exert influence over people far out of proportion to what the average person could accomplish.
In every company, there are those men and women who can always be counted on to deliver the goods. They are the men and women who fulfill their commitments. They say that they will do something, and they don’t just accomplish it; they exceed expectations. They are relied upon to make a significant contribution to the goals of the organization. And when they speak, others listen. They have a tremendous ability to influence people⎯people above, below and at their level⎯because everyone looks up to them as people who deliver the results. And so can you, by deciding to do so and then by working on it.
Another way to become more influential is by developing a positive mental attitude. The more positive and enthusiastic you are about yourself and your work, the more influence you will have over people. The fact is that emotions are contagious. Your emotions have an impact on the behavior of others. When you get excited about what you are doing, you get others excited as well. The more positive and optimistic you are about what you are doing, about what you are selling or servicing, the more positive others will be toward you. Hence, the easier it will be for you to influence them to buy your products or services, to accept your ideas, to do what you want them to do to help you achieve your goals.
Perhaps the best way to develop a more positive mental attitude is to continually look for the good in every situation. Become an “inverse paranoid,” in that you assume that there is a conspiracy to make you successful, and always look for the silver lining in every cloud. No matter what problems or objections your prospective customers have, look for a constructive way to turn those objections around, to turn them into reasons for going ahead rather than not buying.
Every time you read a positive book, listen to a positive audiocassette, or interact with positive people, you are reinforcing your positive mental attitude and making yourself a more influential and persuasive person.
Perhaps the most powerful principle of all in personal influence is contained in what is called the Law of Reciprocity. It is also called the Law of Sowing and Reaping, and the Law of Action and Reaction. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to it as the Law of Compensation, and Napoleon Hill called it the Law of Overcompensation. Probably the best summary of the Law of Reciprocity is the Golden Rule, which says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, to love others as you love yourself.
After extensive research, Dr. Robert Cialdini of the University of Arizona concluded that the fastest and most powerful way to influence someone is to do things for that person. He found that each of us hates to be under a sense of obligation to another. When someone does something for us, we have an enormous desire to pay back the person, so we can be even. This is another way of saying that there is a deep, subconscious desire in all of us to be fair in our interactions with others. If someone has done something kind for us, we feel it is only fair to pay him back in some way.
One of the best ways to influence someone is to do something nice for him. I know many successful salespeople who make a habit of taking their prospects out to breakfast or lunch. During the breakfast or lunch, they do not talk about their products or services unless the client brings it up. They merely make small talk, ask questions and listen. They work on building trust, and they work on establishing a friendly relationship. At the end of the breakfast or lunch, they tell the prospect that they will be getting in touch with him sometime in the future with the possibility of talking to him about helping him in some way.
The best salespeople and businesspeople in America today are those who look upon their customers and prospective customers as friends and partners. They always look for ways to help their partners improve their lives in ways that are not directly related to the products or services they sell. They sow seeds, and they reap a harvest. They trigger a desire in people to reciprocate. When the time comes for those salespeople to approach their prospects with the possibility of buying their products or services, the prospects are wide open to the questions and inputs of the salespeople. The prospects have a deep-down desire to reciprocate.
One of the best ways to use this principle in your interactions is to continually look for ways to say and do positive things for people. Look for ways to do kind acts and favors for your friends and prospects. Send thank-you notes. Send birthday cards. Send clippings from newspapers about subjects that you feel may be of interest to them. Always keep your promises, and follow up on your commitments. Always do what you say you will do. Do everything possible to put in, knowing confidently that you will ultimately be able to get out far more. You will reap if you sow.
Someone has observed that no one ever built a statue to a person to acknowledge what he or she got out of life. Statues are built only to people to acknowledge what they gave. The most powerful, influential and successful people you will ever meet always look for ways to do nice things for others. When you meet someone under almost any circumstance, one of the best questions you can ask is this: “Is there anything that I can do for you?” Always look for ways to put in rather than to take out. The successful man or woman of today is a “go-giver” as well as a go-getter.
The more that people feel that you are open and empathetic and sensitive to their needs and concerns, the more open they will be to your influencing them positively in some way. And the more you can influence others with the power and impact of your personality, the more you will accomplish, and the faster you will accomplish it. The more rapidly you will move toward the great success that you desire and deserve.
By: Brian Tracy
The ethos of communication is defined as the ethical part. This revolves around the person you really are and, more important, the person you are perceived to be. If you are in sales or business, the way you are perceived by someone, which will largely determine the influence you have over him or her, will be strongly affected by your level of credibility, your ethos. In the area of personal credibility, the rule is that everything counts. Everything you do or don’t do either adds to or takes away from your credibility and your capability to influence someone. Ralph Waldo Emerson said, in essence, that what you are shouts at me so loudly, I cannot hear a word you are saying. Ethos is very important.
Perhaps the simplest example of the application of this rule, that everything counts, involves your image or appearance. You’ve heard it said that you never get a second chance to make a good first impression. The fact is that when you first meet a person, he makes a judgment about you in approximately four seconds, and his judgment is finalized largely within 30 seconds of the initial contact. In a survey of the members of the American Personnel and Guidance Association⎯those men and women who are responsible for hiring people for large companies⎯members generally agreed that they made their decision to hire or not to hire a person within 30 seconds of the first meeting.
Everything contributing to the way you look on the outside is important. If it’s not helping you, it’s hurting you. While you cannot control your physical features, you have total control over your dress and grooming. In fact, we generally assume that a person consciously and deliberately makes a personal statement about himself with every part of his appearance that he can affect in any way.
Your clothes are responsible for 95 percent of the first impression that you make on someone because, in most instances, your clothes cover 95 percent of your body. Your grooming, your hair style and the other ways you can determine your appearance from the neck up also exert an inordinate influence on the way that you are perceived, on your ethos with someone. Your accessories, such as purse or briefcase, watch, tie, rings, pens and other elements, all make a statement that will or will not help to put you in a position to influence someone.
The second part of communication and influence that the Greeks wrote about is pathos. Pathos refers to the emotional elements of a conversation. In modern selling and marketing, pathos is the ability to communicate with the deep, subconscious needs of a customer. Human beings are largely emotional, in that everything that we do and say, all of our decisions, and our indecisions, are determined by our emotions. Therefore, to have a great influence on others, we need to be able to connect with whatever causes them to feel strongly one way or another.
There is a little saying that we teach in our sales seminars: “If you can see Joe Jones through Joe Jones’s eyes, you can sell Joe Jones what Joe Jones buys.” This simply means that if you can develop a high level of empathy and put yourself into the mind and heart of a person, you can have an inordinate influence on his actions and his behaviour.
The best salespeople and the most effective influencers of behavior are extremely empathetic and sensitive to others. They listen closely to what others are saying, and they listen for the messages that are being conveyed between the lines. They are aware that there are things that are said and things that are not said. If you can get your ego out of the way long enough to focus in, like a laser beam, on a person, you will often be aware of concerns that the person has⎯concerns that you might have missed if you had allowed yourself to get wrapped up in your product or service, or in your desire to communicate your message.
Perhaps the most powerful ability you can develop to influence others is the ability to ask questions carefully and to listen attentively to the answers. Remember, listening can build trust and credibility. The more you listen to what a person is really saying, the more the person will trust you and be open to your influence. A basic rule is that you should never say anything if you can find a way to ask it instead. Telling is not selling.
The third part of communication, or human influence, is logos. The logos discussed by the Greeks refers to the factual content of a message, the words used. It refers to the argument that you present on behalf of your point of view. (However, we know that the facts themselves, although they are important, are not as powerful or as influential as the emotions are.)
In selling, we know that there are three parts to the process. These are, first, establishing rapport with the prospective customer, second, identifying the problem or need that the prospective customer has and, third, presenting the solution. These are the ethos, the pathos and the logos of selling to someone.
Your success in every area of life will be based largely on the quality and quantity of relationships that you can initiate and develop over time. In the world of business and sales today, relationships are everything. We often call this the “friendship factor.” We have discovered that a person will not do business with you until he or she is convinced that you are his or her friend
and are acting in his or her best interest. In other words, someone cannot be influenced by you unless he or she likes you in some way. Of course, it’s often possible for you to influence a person if he fears you, but that type of influence lasts only until the person can rearrange his situation and escape from the circumstances that enable you to have control over him.
The safest way to influence someone, then, is to earn his liking and respect by appealing to the friendship factor. This requires spending time with him, caring for him and respecting him. The more time that you are willing to spend with the person, the greater will be his tendency to trust you and to feel that you are acting in his best interest. The more obvious it is that you care about the person, about what he really needs, the more likely it is that he will be open to your influence. This is even more important in your personal relationships, with members of the opposite sex, your friends and your children. The more that people feel you care about them, the more open they will be to your influence in some way. The third ingredient of the friendship factor is respect. Being respected by others is very important to each of us. A survey done by the Gallup organization found that the most prominent living Americans rated the respect of others as the most important measure of success in life. They worked very hard to earn the respect of their parents, the respect of their spouses and children, the respect of their peers and colleagues, and the respect of mankind at large.
It seems that we truly respect ourselves only when we feel that we are respected by others, and we will go to great lengths to earn and keep that respect. When we feel that someone respects us for who we are and what we have accomplished, we tend to be more open to that person’s influence.
We can do two things to put ourselves in a position to be respected by others. The first is to develop our knowledge of our field. The more people perceive you know about your subject, the more they will respect you. The highest-paid people in almost every field are those who know more than the average people. They are recognized as experts, and they develop what is called “expert power.” Because of their superior knowledge, they are looked up to and listened to, and they are much more capable of influencing others to act in a particular way than they would be if their knowledge level were just average.
The best salespeople are those who know their products cold. They deeply understand every aspect of their products and the ways in which their products can be used to achieve the most important goals of their customers.
A good example comes from the field of life-insurance sales. One of the most successful and famous insurance salesman of all time is Ben Feldman. Ben Feldman is a legend in the life-insurance business. He has been written up in the Guinness Book of World Records as the greatest salesman in the world.
There are many books and articles by and about Ben Feldman that describe one of the most important activities he engaged in to achieve his level of success. For many, many years, Ben Feldman spent two hours every night, from 10:00 P.M. to 12:00 midnight, studying the field of life insurance. He studied not only life insurance but also selling methodologies, persuasion skills, financial planning, actuarial tables, and every other subject he could think of that would make him more knowledgeable and, therefore, more capable of serving his customers. He became respected far and wide for his extraordinary ability to tailor a variety of life-insurance instruments to help individual business owners achieve and maintain financial estates that would live on after them. He became a walking embodiment of “expert power,” and because of that power, he had tremendous ability to influence others. As a result, he became a very wealthy, successful and respected businessman.
Another way to influence others is through expertise. Expertise is closely tied to knowledge, but it is a little different. Expertise is the ability to do, the ability to perform well in your chosen field. Men and women with expertise are those who practice over and over in whatever they do until they become known far and wide as the very best in their fields.
One of the most important qualities necessary for influence and success is result-orientation. It is the ability to get results, to get the job done, to deliver the goods. Your ability to get results, to make a commitment to achieve a set of goals and to go out and do it, will earn you the respect of everyone around you, and it will enable you to exert influence over people far out of proportion to what the average person could accomplish.
In every company, there are those men and women who can always be counted on to deliver the goods. They are the men and women who fulfill their commitments. They say that they will do something, and they don’t just accomplish it; they exceed expectations. They are relied upon to make a significant contribution to the goals of the organization. And when they speak, others listen. They have a tremendous ability to influence people⎯people above, below and at their level⎯because everyone looks up to them as people who deliver the results. And so can you, by deciding to do so and then by working on it.
Another way to become more influential is by developing a positive mental attitude. The more positive and enthusiastic you are about yourself and your work, the more influence you will have over people. The fact is that emotions are contagious. Your emotions have an impact on the behavior of others. When you get excited about what you are doing, you get others excited as well. The more positive and optimistic you are about what you are doing, about what you are selling or servicing, the more positive others will be toward you. Hence, the easier it will be for you to influence them to buy your products or services, to accept your ideas, to do what you want them to do to help you achieve your goals.
Perhaps the best way to develop a more positive mental attitude is to continually look for the good in every situation. Become an “inverse paranoid,” in that you assume that there is a conspiracy to make you successful, and always look for the silver lining in every cloud. No matter what problems or objections your prospective customers have, look for a constructive way to turn those objections around, to turn them into reasons for going ahead rather than not buying.
Every time you read a positive book, listen to a positive audiocassette, or interact with positive people, you are reinforcing your positive mental attitude and making yourself a more influential and persuasive person.
Perhaps the most powerful principle of all in personal influence is contained in what is called the Law of Reciprocity. It is also called the Law of Sowing and Reaping, and the Law of Action and Reaction. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to it as the Law of Compensation, and Napoleon Hill called it the Law of Overcompensation. Probably the best summary of the Law of Reciprocity is the Golden Rule, which says to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, to love others as you love yourself.
After extensive research, Dr. Robert Cialdini of the University of Arizona concluded that the fastest and most powerful way to influence someone is to do things for that person. He found that each of us hates to be under a sense of obligation to another. When someone does something for us, we have an enormous desire to pay back the person, so we can be even. This is another way of saying that there is a deep, subconscious desire in all of us to be fair in our interactions with others. If someone has done something kind for us, we feel it is only fair to pay him back in some way.
One of the best ways to influence someone is to do something nice for him. I know many successful salespeople who make a habit of taking their prospects out to breakfast or lunch. During the breakfast or lunch, they do not talk about their products or services unless the client brings it up. They merely make small talk, ask questions and listen. They work on building trust, and they work on establishing a friendly relationship. At the end of the breakfast or lunch, they tell the prospect that they will be getting in touch with him sometime in the future with the possibility of talking to him about helping him in some way.
The best salespeople and businesspeople in America today are those who look upon their customers and prospective customers as friends and partners. They always look for ways to help their partners improve their lives in ways that are not directly related to the products or services they sell. They sow seeds, and they reap a harvest. They trigger a desire in people to reciprocate. When the time comes for those salespeople to approach their prospects with the possibility of buying their products or services, the prospects are wide open to the questions and inputs of the salespeople. The prospects have a deep-down desire to reciprocate.
One of the best ways to use this principle in your interactions is to continually look for ways to say and do positive things for people. Look for ways to do kind acts and favors for your friends and prospects. Send thank-you notes. Send birthday cards. Send clippings from newspapers about subjects that you feel may be of interest to them. Always keep your promises, and follow up on your commitments. Always do what you say you will do. Do everything possible to put in, knowing confidently that you will ultimately be able to get out far more. You will reap if you sow.
Someone has observed that no one ever built a statue to a person to acknowledge what he or she got out of life. Statues are built only to people to acknowledge what they gave. The most powerful, influential and successful people you will ever meet always look for ways to do nice things for others. When you meet someone under almost any circumstance, one of the best questions you can ask is this: “Is there anything that I can do for you?” Always look for ways to put in rather than to take out. The successful man or woman of today is a “go-giver” as well as a go-getter.
The more that people feel that you are open and empathetic and sensitive to their needs and concerns, the more open they will be to your influencing them positively in some way. And the more you can influence others with the power and impact of your personality, the more you will accomplish, and the faster you will accomplish it. The more rapidly you will move toward the great success that you desire and deserve.
By: Brian Tracy
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Everything Counts
The most profound truths in the business of life are usually quite simple. So simple that they are either overlooked or ignored by almost everyone. And this is one that causes the most misunderstanding and the most unhappiness, frustration and failed potential.
Everything counts! Not just what you want to count, but everything. It all adds up. Wolfgang von Goethe, the German philosopher and one of the most brilliant men of history, said that the greatest invention of his age was double-entry bookkeeping.
When he was asked why such a simple aspect of accounting appeared so important to him, he replied that the process of accounting for debits and credits explained the human experience, and individual results, better than any other method.
In double-entry bookkeeping, every transaction is recorded as either a debit or a credit. In life, everything you do is either a plus or a minus. In bookkeeping, a company with more credits than debits is solid, solvent and profitable. In your life, when you rack up more pluses than minuses, you are happy, healthy and prosperous. And everything counts.
I have a friend who is chronically overweight by about 30 pounds. He insists that all he eats is “fresh fruit, salads and vegetables” and he can’t understand why he has a weight problem.
One day, I found him polishing off his second piece of cheesecake over lunch and I asked him about it. He looked me squarely in the eye, pointed to the dessert and said, “I don’t count that.”
The world is full of people who hope and wish and pray that everything doesn’t count. They don’t realize that everything they do adds up to either a great life or an unhappy one.
If it’s not moving you toward your goals, it’s probably moving you away. Every action (and inaction) is going onto your personal balance sheet. Everything counts and the clock is running.
Make sure that everything you do is moving you in the direction of where you want to end up. Because if you do, you will.
By:
Brian Tracy
Everything counts! Not just what you want to count, but everything. It all adds up. Wolfgang von Goethe, the German philosopher and one of the most brilliant men of history, said that the greatest invention of his age was double-entry bookkeeping.
When he was asked why such a simple aspect of accounting appeared so important to him, he replied that the process of accounting for debits and credits explained the human experience, and individual results, better than any other method.
In double-entry bookkeeping, every transaction is recorded as either a debit or a credit. In life, everything you do is either a plus or a minus. In bookkeeping, a company with more credits than debits is solid, solvent and profitable. In your life, when you rack up more pluses than minuses, you are happy, healthy and prosperous. And everything counts.
I have a friend who is chronically overweight by about 30 pounds. He insists that all he eats is “fresh fruit, salads and vegetables” and he can’t understand why he has a weight problem.
One day, I found him polishing off his second piece of cheesecake over lunch and I asked him about it. He looked me squarely in the eye, pointed to the dessert and said, “I don’t count that.”
The world is full of people who hope and wish and pray that everything doesn’t count. They don’t realize that everything they do adds up to either a great life or an unhappy one.
If it’s not moving you toward your goals, it’s probably moving you away. Every action (and inaction) is going onto your personal balance sheet. Everything counts and the clock is running.
Make sure that everything you do is moving you in the direction of where you want to end up. Because if you do, you will.
By:
Brian Tracy
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