Article 8a - ATTITUDE (1)

ATTITUDE (1)
by Tracy Brinkman of Brinkmann and Associates

On your road to becoming successful (no matter what your definition of success may be) there are a number of fundamentals or principles that you must make a part of your life both personal as well as professional.

I am making it my life’s mission to share with, as many people as possible the synthesis of what I have learned are life’s principles for success. Most are the fundamentals that we all are aware of and know deep in our hearts but have let the pressures of daily living cause us to set aside in an effort to take the short cut or the easy route.

The ignorant would have you believe that success or failure in your lifetime is a matter of luck, happenstance, fate or ‘the breaks.’ Let that be their excuse I say. Success put in it is simplest form is following commonsense rules or fundamentals that anyone can follow. It is the goal of this issue, and all following issues, of Success Atlas to help you understand and use those fundamentals and guidelines to reach your own desired level of success.

The starting point of this journey is your attitude. Whether you call it your disposition, manner, temperament, spirit, approach, position, posture, outlook or opinion your attitude has a major bearing on your level of success.

Attitude is defined as:
1. Personal view of something: an opinion or general feeling about something
• A positive attitude to change
2. Bodily posture: a physical posture, either conscious or unconscious, especially while interacting with others

Your attitude, feelings, or moods will infect or effect the actions, moods, and feelings of those around you. If you face the world with a cheerful expectant attitude, the world (and those in it) will know you expect more from it and will perform accordingly. If you face the world with a negative, down trodden attitude it will know you expect poor action from it and will give you those actions. Remember that the world will reflect your attitude back to you.

Your attitude to the world will determine its attitude towards you (cause and affect). So one of the main rules to a successful life is to know that the world is a mirror, often a merciless mirror, of our selves and the habitual attitude we carry within us.

Many people live a life of doubtful, defensive, skepticism. Walking with narrow doubtful visions, negatively commenting on the world around them, and building emotional walls to protect themselves. This poor attitude is a magnet for undesirable experiences. Therefore, these undesirable experiences come, as they must, because of their attitude. This reinforces their poor attitude and the circle starts again. This person has become the prophet and the prophecy. We get what we expect!

...... to be continued

Article 7 - ACCEPTING YOURSELF

ACCEPTING YOURSELF UNCONDITIONALLY
By: Brian Tracy

How Are You Treated By Others?
Self-acceptance begins in infancy, with the influence of your parents and siblings and other important people. Your own level of self-acceptance is determined largely by how well you feel you are accepted by the important people in your life.Your attitude toward yourself is determined largely by the attitudes that you think other people have toward you. When you believe that other people think highly of you, your level of self-acceptance and self-esteem goes straight up. The best way to build a healthy personality involves understanding yourself and your feelings.

Let the Light Shine In
This is achieved through the simple exercise of self-disclosure. For you to truly understand yourself, or to stop being troubled by things that may have happened in your past, you must be able to disclose yourself to at least one person. You have to be able to get those things off your chest. You must rid yourself of those thoughts and feelings by revealing them to someone who won't make you feel guilty or ashamed for what has happened.

Understand What Makes You Tick
The second part of personality development follows from self-disclosure, and it's called self-awareness. Only when you can disclose what you're truly thinking and feeling to someone else can you become aware of those thoughts and emotions If the other person simply listens to you without commenting or criticizing, you have the opportunity to become more aware of the person you are and why you do the things you do. You begin to develop perspective, or what the Buddhists call "detachment."

Be Honest With Yourself
Now we come to the good part. After you've gone through self-disclosure to self-awareness, you arrive at self-acceptance. You accept yourself for the person you are, with good points and bad points, with strengths and weaknesses, and with the normal frailties of a human being. When you develop the ability to stand back and look at yourself honestly, and to candidly admit to others that you may not be perfect but you're all you've got, you start to enjoy a heightened sense of self-acceptance.

Do An Inventory of Your Accomplishments
A valuable exercise for developing higher levels of self-acceptance involves doing an inventory of yourself. In doing this inventory, your job is to accentuate the positive and minimize the negative. Think of your unique talents and abilities. Think of your core skills, the things that you do exceptionally well that account for your success in your profession and in your personal life right now.

Think About Your Future
Think about your future possibilities and the fact that your potential is virtually unlimited. You can do what you want to do and go where you want to go. You can be the person you want to be. You can set large and small goals and make plans and move step-by-step, progressively toward their realization. There are no obstacles to what you can accomplish except the obstacles that you create in your mind.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action:
First, sit down with your spouse, or a good friend, and tell him or her about something that is troubling you and is still causing you unhappiness.
Second, develop perspective on your problem by standing back from it and imagining that it was happening to someone else. What advice would you give to that person?
Third, think continually about the good experiences and accomplishments you have enjoyed in the past. Remind yourself regularly that you are a pretty good person and you've done a lot of good things in your life.

Inspirational Quotes (3)

"Suatu PERUBAHAN bisa saja dianggap MENAKUTKAN dan bisa juga dianggap KESEMPATAN, mana yang bisa Anda peroleh, tergantung atas SIKAP Anda atas keduanya."
~Ernest C. Wilson~

Article 6 - Communication / Listening

LISTENING POWER

By: Brian Tracy

The art of good conversation centers very much on your ability to ask questions and to listen attentively to the answers. You can lace the conversation with your insights, ideas, and opinions, but you perfect the art and skill of conversation by perfecting the art and skill of asking good, well-worded questions that direct the conversation and give other people an opportunity to express themselves.

Ask Open Ended Questions

Ask open-ended questions that cannot be answered with a simple "yes" or "no." Open-ended questions encourage the speaker to expand on his thoughts and comments. And one question will lead to another. You can ask open-ended questions almost endlessly, drawing out of the other person everything that he or she has to say on a particular subject.

Be Content to Listen

In order to be an excellent conversationalist, you must resist the urge to dominate the discussion. The very best conversationalists seem to be low-key, easy-going, cheerful, and genuinely interested in the other person. They seem to be quite content to listen when other people are talking and they make their own contributions to the dialogue rather short and to the point.

Share the Opportunity to Talk

In fact, good conversation has an easy ebb and flow, like the tide coming in and going out. Whether it is between two people or among several, the conversation should shift back and forth, with each person getting an opportunity to talk. Conversation in this sense is like a ball that is tossed from person to person, with no one holding on to it for very long. If you feel that you have been talking for too long, you should stop and ask a question of someone in the group. You will be tossing the conversational ball and giving that individual an opportunity to converse.

Learn to Listen Well

Listening is the most important of all skills for successful conversation. Many people are very poor listeners. Since everyone enjoys talking, it takes a real effort to practice the fundamentals of excellent listening and to make them a habit.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, make a habit of asking good, open-ended questions of others in every conversation and in response to problems or difficulties. This shows interest and increases your understanding.

Second, take a deep breath, relax and let the other person talk more. Practice over and over until you become an excellent listener.

Article 5 - Time Management

(good article to read and implement immediately)

TIME: YOUR MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY
by Jeffery Combs

Regardless of our company, product, or services, what we are really selling is our time when we are in free enterprise. Most people don’t have a true concept of money, and they don’t realize that time is money, and so almost everyone gives their time away.

We hear in corporate America and in investing the term ”ROI” a lot which stands for “Return On Investment,” but what is much more important to an entrepreneur is our “ROTAE” or “Return On Time, Action, and Energy.” These are our strongest resources and we cannot afford to waste time. Most people view that time works against them as an enemy. Successful people use time as their ally. There are 86, 400 seconds, or 1, 440 minutes, or 24 hours in every day. Success is not really about what we do, but what we do daily. Time is our most precious resource and everything we produce is a byproduct of how we manage ourselves in the time we are given each day.

On a daily basis, I devote 14 to 16 hours to my craft, which I truly love, personal development and self-empowerment. I have never for one minute considered devoting this much time to my freedom as work. When you love what you do it is a pleasurable endeavor, not a painful one. When I sit down to do my tasks I know what I desire to accomplish and I make good use of my time.

As I stated earlier, most people don’t have a concept of time or money. Mention money and people become very uncomfortable. Mention time management and you get similar responses. When it comes to time, the average person equates time with work and that they have to “work hard.” In free enterprise, we don’t get paid for time. “Trading time for dollars,” is what most Americans do over and over, which is called a job, and jobs usually keep people broke because they are paid what the job is worth. The average person then brings a $10 - $15 an hour job mentality to their enterprise and is under the misconception that if they ‘work real hard’ they will get rich. Occasionally this philosophy works, but not very often. To be successful in free enterprise, our thoughts about time and time management must change. We get paid for ‘results’, not ‘time,’ and if we want to make more money here we have to become more ‘valuable’. How valuable we become through the service we perform is a real key issue. The key question we should be asking ourselves is, “How do I turn time into money?” How we manage our time effectively is going to have a direct reflection on our overall long-term results. I have found through my numerous years as an entrepreneur that there are four phases of the way people manage or mismanage their time:
1. spare time,
2. part-time,
3. full-time, and
4. all-the-time.
Unfortunately, most people confuse themselves and think they are doing one of these last three phases when really they are spare time because that is the kind of effort they are devoting to their freedom.

Let’s look at time management. The term ‘time management’ is really a misnomer because time itself is really unmanageable. It is a resource constantly being depleted at a predictable rate – 60 minutes an hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. What we have the ability to do is manage ourselves in a way that will make effective use of time. There are two key components to managing ourselves that have to be understood. The distinction between them can assist us to take stress out of our lives and put more productivity, satisfaction, and freedom into it. These components are efficiency and effectiveness. The distinction is efficiency is doing a task correctly, while effectiveness is measured in results, and when we are in free enterprise results are everything.

A big mistake I see people making is trying to make better use of their time by trying to do what they are currently doing more efficiently. It is a good idea, but the wrong starting point. It doesn’t matter how efficiently we manage our time if we aren’t spending it pursuing the results we desire. Our most effective use of time is the action part of the process, and 80% of our time should be spent prospecting and attracting new accounts, not shuffling papers, reading books, listening to tapes, gossiping, procrastinating, getting ready to get ready, and a multitude of other excuses people use to divert their attention from the very physical activity that will pay them. Do the right tasks inefficiently and our businesses will survive. Do the wrong tasks efficiently and we will go broke. Take the right action efficiently and someday we will be set for life. Efficiency is only valuable when it contributes to effectiveness.

Do what is urgent first, not what is important. Becoming successful requires a mindset that creates urgency in numbers, in action, in task, in leadership, and in all areas. Successful people get tasks done now – that is self-motivation. Average people don’t take on this sense of urgency; they ‘get to it’ when it is important, and usually too late; the train has left; they procrastinate. The ability to distinguish between urgency and importance is crucial to creating and living successfully because the inability to distinguish between them gets many people in trouble and ultimately results in broken dreams and shattered lives.

Every day we have situations that arise – situations happen, and we have things to do. Some are urgent and some are important, some are both, and some are neither. We have to understand that urgent situations are seldom important and important situations are seldom urgent. Most people spend 80% of their lives responding to the urgent as if everything that is urgent is important. You have to learn to separate the two. It is important that you take the proper action with a sense of urgency but not with a panicked or fear-stricken mindset. For instance, closing a sale or enrolling a client to use your product is urgent, but developing a flourishing organization is more important. Having a new car and wardrobe is urgent for a lot of people, but saving, investing, and developing a prosperity consciousness is much more important to becoming financially independent.

If we spend our time overreacting to the tyranny of the urgent, our lives will be far less successful than they could be. This is the very reason so many people today are working harder, living poorer, and feeling more time starved. They allow urgent situations to dictate how their time is spent and important situations go neglected. I am sure you can imagine what happens when important situations are neglected. Sooner or later they become urgent and important. They end up becoming crisis, i.e. money crisis, health crisis, enterprise crisis, family crisis, etc. Most would be preventable if we chose to spend our time doing what is important instead of overreacting to what is urgent. We have to learn that we are the sum of our choices and decisions. One of the most important choices we can make is to decide what is important, then commit ourselves to spending your time achieving important results, rather than responding to urgent and unimportant distractions. Procrastinating and getting ready to get ready is the main thief of the dreams of the average entrepreneur.
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Jeffery Combs is an international trainer, speaker, and author in the Network Marketing & Direct Sales Industry.