Tag Archives: Goals

Push and Pull Your Way To Success

I knew a guy once that I hadn’t seen in a long time before I ran into him recently. It was one of those relationships that fall kind of halfway on the border between a friendship and an acquaintance. Like when you first meet somebody, and you kind of hit it off, but for some reason, you don’t usually hang out on purpose, you just kind of bump into this person whenever you are involved in whatever mutual activity through which you met in the first place. And when you go a while without seeing this person, you can remember them enough to put them in the category of some pretty cool guy that you used to know, but they haven’t been elevated into real friend status where you make it a point to keep up with each other and find out how each other is doing at least a couple times of year. Because the feeling in these relationships is generally mutual, when you bump into each other, it’s usually with mutual happiness, and there isn’t any guilt or implied anger at each other for not keeping in touch.

Like I used to live in this small town that had this really cool Mexican restaurant. They were right on the beach, and their business was about fifty/fifty take out and eat in. They weren’t that expensive, but the tacos they make are probably in the top three most delicious I’ve ever eaten, including the ones I’ve eaten in Mexico.
But every time I went away, I would quickly forget about that little restaurant, and even Mexican food completely if I happened to be traveling in a foreign country.
Only when I come back in town do I remember how delicious these tacos are and how happy I am that I can remember that that little restaurant is always sitting there waiting for me.

When I saw my old acquaintance again, it took me a while to recognize him. He seemed different, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was different about him. After a few minutes of catching up, I tried to work in a polite question about what had changed. I didn’t want to blurt out that he looked different. I made that mistake before with an old friend who had some kind of hair replacement surgery. This was many years ago, when hair replacement surgery wasn’t as sophisticated as it is today, so it was an awkward situation.

It turns out the guy had an incredible amount of success recently. He changed careers, found a really fantastic woman that he fell in love with and married, and he has one kid, and another one the way. He actually didn’t lose any weight, and there was nothing else physically different about him. He just had this glow like he had finally found out the secret to life. Like when you walk into a supermarket and they tell you that because you are the one-millionth visitor you can have anything you want from the supermarket for free. Or you are walking up to a big department store, and your hands are full, and you are trying to figure out how you are going to open the doors in front, but just as you approach them, they open completely automatically, making it a lot easier than you expected.

I asked him what his secret was, and he said it was because of a goal-setting seminar that he went to. He said he was convinced to go to this seminar because of the advertisement that claimed that life would look completely different after the seminar than before, and you will forever be changed. The instructor at the seminar was very skilled in these matters. Because he was such a nice guy, he told me what the secret was. The secret is to choose three or four specific goals you want to achieve. And everything you come across in your life, you can use as either a positive motivation to pull you to your goals, or a negative motivation to push you away from where you are towards your goals. If you see a really successful person, you can imagine that you are them, and use those feelings to pull you towards that good feeling. If you are in an unhappy situation, you can fully embrace it and use the bad feelings to push you away from where you are and move you towards where you want to go. When you begin to see everything in your life as either something that is pushing you away from bad things and towards good things, or just pulling you towards good things. Then the whole world and everything in it takes on a whole new meaning. All of a sudden the whole world is conspiring to help you, no matter how messed up you used to think your situation was before you came to this realization. And I thought he was pretty nice to share this wonderful insight with me, and I hope that you can do the same.

How to Shut Off the Voices from Your Past

I knew this guy that had bought a new car recently. For him it was a big deal, because all of the cars he’s ever driven have been used. And when he bought them used, they were at least several years old. He is a very successful businessman, and I always wondered why he didn’t want to spend a lot of money on cars, because I was sure he could afford it. He had expensive clothes, and he lived in a nice area of town, in a very upscale apartment building, so I wasn’t really sure why he insisted on buying used cars all the time.

But whatever the reason, he apparently got over it, as he bought a brand new, state of the art, top of the line SUV. I think it was made in Germany because the quality was incredible. One thing though, he didn’t like at all. It had this navigation system that would always talk to him while he was driving. None of his other cars had navigation systems, and he had always prided himself on being able to find his way around, even when he drove to strange cities that he’d never been to before. He said he could “sniff” where he wanted to go. When he was going to a meeting or something important to his business, he would only get the major cross streets, look at a map briefly before he left, and then go only by memory or by instinct. So when he got this talking car that told him what was what every time he turned a corner, I could understand why he was so frustrated with it. Especially since it was always telling him some potential danger up ahead.

He said it was like having a voice in your head that is always telling about something bad that will happen. Like when you want to get up and give a speech or ask out a pretty girl, there’s always this voice saying, “be careful, you might get hurt or embarrassed.” Most people hear that voice and then obey it completely, like it is a voice from God himself or something. Others don’t even hear it at all, they just get a funny uncomfortable feeling, and when they decide not to do what they were thinking of doing, the voice shuts up and the feeling goes away.

One interesting thing my friend did was figure out how to reprogram his navigation system. What he did was program his goal, or destination into the system, and then put in the time he needed to be there. Then whenever it talked to him, it only told him things specific to his goal. When he realized that the voice he kept hearing were only suggestions, and because it was some mechanical robot voice making them, he didn’t have to take them into consideration if he didn’t want to. He could always listen to them, and then decide what to do based on what they said. Most of the time he just ignored the voice, although sometimes he paid attention just to see what happened. And the time that he did that, although it saved him a few minutes, he decided that it wasn’t that much fun paying attention to some robot voice. So eventually he took his car to the dealership and had the thing dismantled.

And when I finally asked him about why he always drove around used cars, it was because when he was a kid, his dad was a used car salesman. And his dad had told him that since used car salesman always have a bad reputation, he would try really hard to give people an honest deal. So when my friend would buy a different car, he would specifically buy them from used car lot out of respect for his dad. When he figured he’d respected his dad enough, he decided that it was time to move on, and generate some of his own respect. Which is one of the reasons, I think, he became so successful.

Sail Your Way To Pleasure

I have a friend that has just been promoted at work. He works for a large, multinational company that designs, makes and sells many different kinds of consumer products. The company has been around for over a hundred years, and is pretty much a household name. My friend was just promoted to the regional distribution manager for the entire western United States. He is in charge of making sure that there is a clear connection and communication between the designers, the needs of the marketplace, the manufacturing centers around the world, and the end points of sales in various cities in the United States. He frequently flies all around the world in many capacities, and is well known in the industry as an authority in his field. Needless to say, he makes a ton of money, and gets a great deal of respect from those that he works with and even competitors in his field

It wasn’t always like this. I didn’t know this guy before he became successful, I only met him afterwards. We actually me at a seminar that taught different aspects of communication not taught in any business school. There was a huge range of people at this seminar. One of the great things about being able to meet so many people is that you get so many different ideas and viewpoints on the same things. And it really expands your mind to the idea that there are really many ways to look at one situation. Sometimes I think I learned more that seminar from the other participants than I did from the actual instructors. It wasn’t uncommon for several us to sit up until the early hours of the morning in our hotel lobby just talking different aspects of why we were there and how many different ways there were to accomplish what it is that you want to accomplish something.

This guy mentioned that he used to be unhappy. Although he had a pretty decent job, with decent pay, something was missing. He seemed to be just going along without any real purpose. When he was in college, he didn’t really know what he wanted to do, and he just kind of fell into his job, and slowly moved up the ranks without really paying attention to where he wanted to go.

Then one day he was in a bookstore, and for some reason he ventured into the area of the bookstore that he didn’t usually go into. I don’t know if you’ve ever actually counted the different sections in the bookstore, but there is a lot. He got a book on sailing. He had never sailed before, but for some reason he thought that sailing would be an interesting thing to learn. The book talked about how important it was to be able to read maps, and be able to use a compass, and how to properly steer the boat in the right direction. The book said that one of the biggest dangers was just kind of going in a direction that seemed to be ok, but after you’ve been traveling for a while, you realize that you are in the middle of nowhere. And if you end up in the middle of nowhere without any supplies, it can be pretty dangerous. So the book recommended that you choose a direction, and take your time choosing. And you make sure you know how to get there, and realize that you are likely to get blown off course, so make sure you have extra time planned on your journey to where you are going.

After he studied sailing for a couple of years, he really started to discover his passion. He went and talked to an HR manager at his company, and asked him about a possible career path. The HR manager told him that it was a big company, and there are many opportunities. You can choose whatever path you want, and if you do the proper training and build your skills, there is no reason why you can’t choose your own success. They both discussed what he needed to do in order to succeed, and where he needed to learn more skill and improve on the skills you already have.

That conversation took place about a year before I met him at that seminar, and he told us the story of how he was able to create his own success, simply by taking the time to choose a direction, a destination, and the proper tools that would get him there.

Choose Your Focus And Attract Help From Others

The other day I was talking to a friend on the phone. Actually we were talking through Skype. I don’t know if you’ve ever done this before, but it really is a great way to communicate with somebody. Especially if you are the kind of person that likes to make friend with a lot of people from around the world, Skype is a great way to stay in touch. I don’t have a camera hooked up, but my people talking with both voice and video so you can actually see the person you are speaking with. I remember reading an article in a sales magazine a while back and it said when you speak face to face, there is much more information passed on than just through email or even through the phone. When you can pay attention to facial expressions and body language it can be really easy to communicate well with others.

My friend was telling me about a problem that she was having. She had recently taken up photography, and was really interested in taking many photos. She was really intrigued by a modern artist who takes photos mainly of people. She was greatly inspired by his work, and really wanted to increase her skill in that area. There was one problem though. She was told in one of her photography classes that it is in extremely poor taste, and in many cases illegal to take peoples photographs without their permission. For her this was a huge problem, because she is naturally shy and can’t really find it easy to see an interesting person and then just approach this person to ask if she can take their picture.

She had all these wild imaginations of bad things that might happen if she just approached strangers and asked to take their picture. She was having problems with this, so she decided to approach her professor and ask his advice.

What her professor told her really surprised her. He told her that all she needed to do was to get clear in her own mind first, why she wanted to take the other persons picture. Did the colors of their clothing match well with the background, was their a unique couple, where they sitting in nice environment, did they have a particular friendly expression that would create feelings of happiness when people saw the photo? The professor said that all she needed to do, was to ask her self these questions, then simply to go and introduce herself, explain that she was a photographer, describe why she wanted to take the persons picture, and then ask their permission. He told her that it would also help of she created some business card with her name and email, so in case they had any questions later on they could contact her. He also made sure to instruct her to ask for parents permission if she wanted to take pictures of kids playing in the park for obvious reasons.

She thought about this, and then tried it. She was amazed at the response she got. While a few people said they didn’t really want to have their picture taken, most people did. And many times when others saw her taking pictures of couples, or children on bicycles, they asked her if she was working for a magazine. And something really interesting happened. Because got into the habit of giving out her business cards, many people started contacting her for actually business purposes. When she first started, all she wanted to do was to take some pictures that would be nice to look at. Then she created a web site, and put up many of the pictures on the web site. Pretty soon she started getting many offers to take pictures for birthdays, retirement parties.

What started out as a hobby, turned into a lucrative business for her, all because she figured out exactly what she wanted, and just approached people and asked them if they wouldn’t mind participating.

Focus on Actions, and Results are Automatic

So the other day I was out walking, like I do every morning. It was kind of cloudy. I’d been frustrated because I have this goal I’d been meditating on, and for some reason I had a funny feeling. Not really a funny feeling, kind of a disconnected feeling. Like when you shift a car into gear, and you shove the gear shift where it is supposed to go, and it feels like the proper pieces of machinery have engaged, but when you apply the gas, all you get is strange, unhealthy sounding complaint from the engine. So you have to stop, yank the gearshift back, and then put it back, only slightly different. Slightly different in position, and slightly different in results. This time the gear slides smoothly into place, and when you slowly release the clutch your car takes off smooth as silk.

I had formulated this goal several weeks ago, and had been meditating on in regularly, with positive intentions, proper visualizations in several different representation systems. But something switched, and I hadn’t noticed it. I had been visualizing the overall completion of the goal, which is about two or three months out, but I came to a significant milestone last week with regards to the short term completion of it. Something that placed the realization of my goal less in my hands, and more in the hands of others. Before last week, the realization of the goal was completely in my hands. When I achieved the milestone last week, I neglected to change the wording of my goal. Since last week, I was still phrasing my goal the same way, but was expecting others to do the work. Once I realized this while walking, I suddenly released all the frustration I’d been carrying around, and suddenly felt a surge of motivation.

The purpose behind visualizing and meditating on your goals is to give your unconscious mind a clear direction of where you want to go. So long as the result that you want is under your control, your unconscious mind will have absolutely no problem figuring out a way to get you there. For example, if you want to lose weight, and you visualize yourself slim and healthy, with sufficient motivation, you will get there, because your weight is completely under your control.

However, the mistake that many people make, especially when applying “The Law of Attraction,” is somehow expecting others to magically fill in the gaps where you have no control. For example, if you have a business, and want your sales to double in three months, you can approach in two different ways. You could focus on doubling your sales by other people magically discovering your business and making calls to you to buy your product. This puts the ball completely in their court, and you have no power over the outcome. By focusing on passively receiving an increase in sales orders, you aren’t giving your unconscious much to work with. This will increase your frustration and anxiety, which may cause you to give up trying to increase your business. On the other hand, if you focus on changing your behaviors so that an increase in business is a natural result, then you’ll have a much easier time. Your unconscious will then be able to feed your conscious mind ideas in the form of insight and intuition on what you can do specifically to increase your sales.

It’s fairly straightforward to do this. Simply choose an outcome that you want, and then focus on what behaviors will create this outcome. If you are not sure what to do exactly, look around and find people that have done what you want to do, and just copy them. The great part about this is once you focus on your own behaviors, it doesn’t really matter if you get it right the first time. As long as you stay focused on the outcome that you want in terms of your own behavior, you can easily adjust your behavior along the way. If you try something and works a little, try something a little bit different and see what different results you get.

It’s like playing golf if you aren’t very good. Sometimes you hit the ball, and it goes too far to the left. You observe where the ball went, and adjust your next shot accordingly. You keep adjusting your swing and aim until the ball is in the whole. The cool thing about setting goals is that you don’t need to keep score. Just keep adjusting your behavior slightly until you get where you want to go. Then simply move on to the next thing you want to create.

Beware of believing in magic. It seems like a great idea to be able to create something simply by wishing for it, but unfortunately, it doesn’t work like that. When you realize that a strong desire of an outcome, coupled with an intense drive to get there solely on your own behavior, you will be able to achieve anything. Focus on the action, and the results will be automatic.

Whose Thoughts are in YOUR Monkey Brain?

The other day I was sitting at a coffee shop. It is kind of a mix between a coffee shop and a bagel shop. Because I was only drinking coffee, in my mind I was at a coffee shop. Of course had I been eating bagels, I would have remembered it as a bagel shop. Interesting how the mind works like that. You can remember something, and based on slight change of angular memory, the past can take on a whole new meaning. Meaning is a fairly slippery thing. Many people don’t realize just how slippery it is. I guess that’s why so many people get into arguments about things that happened before. They aren’t really arguing about the events per se, rather the meaning each individual gave to the meanings that they each subjectively applied to the past. Because they each applied a different subjective meaning, or interpretation to the past, they actually stored the memory differently in their brain, from a neuro-chemical standpoint, which gives the illusion that they are remembering different things.

I was listening to a lecture once about this subject. The professor who was speaking was exploring how we code and store events have a large effect on how we remember them. She went on to explain that when some people say they have a “memory problem,” that is not entirely accurate. What they really lack is a storage problem. And because most people don’t consciously choose to store their memories in a certain way, when they go and try to recall them, they not only can’t remember where they put them, but they don’t remember what kind of box they put them in. Which makes looking for old memories a problem when you don’t know what color the box is.

So anyways, I was sitting there, drinking my coffee, waiting for the movie to start. It was one of those international blockbusters that has been heavily marketed, with signs everywhere, and trailers before every movie. I was looking forward to it, because I read the book, and I enjoyed it. I actually read the book twice, by accident. And when I say by accident, I don’t mean that I fell down a flight of stairs and read the book on the way down. I read it, and forgot that I read it. Then a couple years later I read another book by the same author, which I really enjoyed. Then I went to the bookstore to find other books by the same author. That’s how I generally read books, by the way. I’ll read one author, and if I like them, I’ll go to the bookstore or the library and read all their other books. So I went to the bookstore, found another book by the same author of the second book, and picked out the first book, which I’d read before and didn’t remember. Then about halfway through it, I realized, “Hey! This seems familiar, I think I read this before!” Of course I kept on reading, because I wanted to see if it turned out differently than before. Because I didn’t remember how it turned out from before, I wasn’t sure if it was the same ending. Which of course, made sense when I saw the movie, because then, everything fell into place, even though they changed some parts from the book.

So my friend walks in this coffee shop, and has this really confused look on his face. Like he was just finished reading this really confusing article on the Internet or something. I asked him what happened, and he told me that he just got back form a lecture. It turns out some really cute girl gave him a flyer for a lecture that some metaphysicist was giving. He doesn’t normally go into metaphysical lectures, but because this girl was really cute he decided to go. I asked him what the lecture was about, and he tried his best to describe it to me. There were several different lectures, and they kept finishing up where each other started. There was one guy that had this really long beard, and another guy that had some really strange sandals.

He said that most people are walking around in a cloud of ambiguity. Because we are so conditioned to get other people to think for us, when there is nobody there to make a decision, you just kind of walk around with a vague sense of waiting to be told what to do. Which normally isn’t a problem. It makes sense to be this way at work for example. It wouldn’t really be very productive to have a bunch of people at work just doing their own thing, or arguing with the boss whenever she gave you an instruction. I don’t know if this is a leftover from evolution, or if it is something that is just hardwired into us, but the brain will always look for shortcuts in thinking. Kind of like when you are driving on the freeway, and you get a traffic report of an accident up ahead, you can imagine ways to go around the problem, so you don’t be late for your appointment. The brain will always find the easiest path to get to a decision. Which worked pretty good when we were cavemen running around chasing our food, or running away from dinosaurs that thought we were food. But in today’s society, when there are about a billion things coming at you at once, it’s hard sometimes for our monkey brains to make a good decision. So modern man has learned to kind of have this vague cloud of ambiguity floating around, waiting for clear instructions. He said that the two biggest forms of guidance come in the form of social proof, and authority. Social proof, of course, is when you go along with the crowd. Everybody has experienced this. You do something, because everybody else is doing it. Of course, this isn’t what you tell yourself, we always have some other reason why we think we are doing something.

The other shortcut is authority. When a police officer, or a doctor tells you to do something, you rarely question them. Unless you are a criminal of course. So in the absence of these two elements, he explained, it can be hard to figure out what to do.

I asked him if he explained how to get around this, and he said he did. I asked him what it was, and he told me.

The best way to get around this is to have clear, strong, powerful goals. That way you will start to see everything in relation to your goals, and your automatic monkey response will decrease, and your evolved human response will become stronger and stronger, and you turn your mind/body system into a goal-seeking missile, instead of an automatic monkey responder.

And he concluded his speech by saying that the choice is up to you. You can let other people choose your goals for you, and walk around in an ambiguous monkey daze, bouncing from one mental shortcut to the other, or you can choose your own goals, and let your goal seeking mechanism do all work to create the life that you want. Then you can eat bagels, AND drink coffee at the same time.

Making Connections can lead to Engaging Ideas

So I was sitting in the airport, waiting for my friend to come through the gate. The airport I was wasn’t an international one, just one that has domestic flights to different parts of country. My friend, however was coming from a connecting flight from an airport that was a major international hub. Because the island I live on doesn’t have an international airport, you can’t fly here directly from outside the country. You have to make a connection.

Some people don’t like to make connections. I remember I had a connection once in Seoul, where I had to wait for about ten hours. I don’t know if you’ve stayed ten hours in an airport where you were stuck in the international section, but it’s pretty boring. Because you are only passing through, and not staying, you can’t really go outside, because you’d have to go through customs, and figure out what to do with your bags, and it is generally a big hassle. Of course if you have to stay in such a boring section of an airport with uncomfortable seats, and only one channel on TV, then you can figure out a way to go outside your comfort zone and explore what is outside. There can be some pretty cool stuff out there sometimes.

Other people will go to great lengths to avoid making a connection. I don’t know if they think that making a connection is an inconvenience, or something bad will happen, like they might lose something. Sometimes people can’t help, despite how hard they try but to make a connection. Personally, I think connections can e really good. They can really make a trip more enjoyable. It adds to the distance between where you are coming from, and where you are going. Some people would just like to disappear at point A, and then reappear at point B. For them, traveling is a nuisance to be avoided at all costs. I suppose if you were going to an important business meeting where people would be discussing life and death situations of profits and mergers and other issues, you might want to stay focused, and teleport yourself there. But when you are traveling for fun, I think connections are fantastic.
The most elaborate sequence of connections I made was for a seminar I went to on an island in Belize. First I flew from LAX to Miami. Then I took another big plane from Miami to the Capital of Belize. Then I took a small chartered plane from the capital of Belize to the island. Then, because the part of the island I was going to wasn’t connected by enough land to build a road, I had to wait for a taxi boat to take me to my final destination. Then I had to walk through sand to get to my bungalow. It really made feel like I was in a completely different world. Los Angeles seemed like a whole other side of the galaxy, a million light years in the past.

Some connections can be long, some can be short, others can be really interesting and unexpected. Somebody I was talking to in an airport bar told me that connections aren’t really a hindrance, they’re really are a conspired sequence of people and events that are helping you to get where you are going. And it’s pretty cool knowing that wherever you want to go, you’ll likely run across a secret group of people to pop out of nowhere and help you along the way.
Who knows, you may even be one of these secret people that can pop out of nowhere to help somebody else.

When my friend finally showed up, she was really glad to be here. I asked her if she had any jet lag, and all she said was that although she had remembered thinking before she left that she might have jet let when she got here, she didn’t think her jet leg was nearly as bad as she had predicted before left. Which just goes to show, that when you get something new, like this, you can’t help but wonder why you didn’t discover this before, simply because you were able to make the connection.

Ignore Their Fears and Follow Your Dreams

So I had just finished lunch yesterday. A friend and I went to this new bagel shop in town. It is underneath a movie theater I like to go to, next to a game center. The game center has a small place outside where people can sit and smoke, because there is not smoking allowed inside. The problem is that most of the people that go to the game center are Junior High School students, so I think they take the outside smoking area as an invitation to light up. As a result, whenever we leave the bagel shop to go upstairs to the movie theater, we have to pass through a gang of chain smoking 14 year olds, trying their hardest to look dangerous.

One thing I like about the bagel shop is that they make a wide variety of bagel sandwiches, and even stuff that isn’t on the menu, they will make as a special order. Some places only know how to make what is on the menu. That is one of the reasons that it’s my favorite bagel shop, is because they are really flexible. They aren’t limited to whatever decision somebody made before on what kind of menu they should have. They have the awesome ability to look at all your resources, and combine them in whatever combination the customer asks. It doesn’t matter if it’s never been done before, or if they think it is strange, or unusual. They have made the decision to be completely open minded, and as a result, their business has been able to consistently make more money, and attract more people to come and eat in their bagel shop.

So as we were leaving, (I had just finished a peanut butter, fried egg and tomato and cheese on toasted onion) we were walking up the steps to the movie theater. I saw this older gentlemen that looked strangely familiar. I’m sure you’ve had this happen before (seeing a familiar face, not eating a peanut butter, fried egg, tomato and cheese bagel), right? Except that I wasn’t quite sure where I’d seen him before, or even if I knew his name.

I once had the embarrassing situation of seeing a girl I was sure I recognized from a social situation, so I walked up and starting talking to her as if we were long time friends. She looked a little taken aback. I didn’t realize until about halfway through the conversation that I actually recognized her from where I take my shirts to be cleaned, and I’d never exchanged any words with her before. Turns out that she owns the shop with her husband, and she was wondering why one of her many customers was talking to her like she was an old friend. That is an awkward situation to be in, as once realized my social blunder, I had quickly and painlessly extricate myself from the conversation, the whole time trying to look l knew what I was doing. It was a while before I felt comfortable enough to go back to her dry cleaners. She must think I’m some kind of kook or something.

So as I was mentally scratching my head, he was looking at me with the same look of half realization and half “who are you?” when he got a sudden burst of realization in his eyes. I was relieved, as he was going to be the one to explain how we knew each other, so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself again.

“You!” he said.
“Yep, me.” I smiled.
“It really is you!” He said again.
I smiled again.

“How’ve you been?” He asked, clapping me on the shoulder. He was alone.
“Pretty good. Pretty good. Yourself?” I responded. Waiting for some information.
“Oh, same as usual. Before we left last time, there was something I wanted to tell you.”
“Oh?” I asked. This ought to be interesting.

What I wanted to tell you was about that thing you are thinking of doing. I know you aren’t sure if it will work out or not, or if you will be completely successful, but don’t let that stand in your way. You need to really focus on your dreams, and not let others stand in your way. That’s what I wanted to tell you. Many people will tell you not to go ahead with what you want to do, but the reality of the situation is that they are really afraid. And although most people will try and tell you that they are trying to look out for your best interests, don’t listen to them. They are really just imaging themselves in your shoes, trying to do what it is that you are going to do, and it scares them. Most people want an easy, comfortable life, where they don’t have to risk anything. And here you come along, telling them of all your dreams and plans, and it makes them nervous. So they tell you their own fears and anxieties, but they dress them up to make it sound like they are really concerned about you. Don’t let yourself be influenced by others fears. The sum of most people’s lives is just an obedience to their fears. Don’t listen. Just smile, nod your head, say thank you and go on your way.

I was shocked. I don’t remember ever telling anybody my secret plans, but here this stranger (I still don’t know who he was) was telling me exactly what I needed to hear.

It’s cool when something like this comes out of nowhere to inspire you.

Ask and You Shall Receive

Have you ever wanted something, but weren’t exactly sure how to get it? Like you had this thing in mind, and you knew that you really wanted this, but you really have any clue about how to even begin to go after this, and make this yours? I read this one book on persuasion that said that you need to develop super top secret covert manipulation skills to trick people into giving you what you want. But I don’t really think this is true, maybe, I don’t maybe this can be true for you, but then again, maybe not.

When I was a kid, I really wanted this really cool electronics kid from Radio Shack. It was a science geeks dream. You had this circuit board with all kind of electronic components on it. And depending how you connected things, you got a different result. At first it was really intimidating. It looked like if you hooked up something wrong it would blow up in your face. Like if you connected the wrong wire to the wrong piece of whatever, it looked as though if you made a mistake the results would be catastrophic. So despite wanting this thing for so long, when I finally opened the box, I was a bit intimidated.  And the instruction manual seemed to be filled with complex circuit diagrams meant for an electrical engineer.

I used to work with several engineers, and they seemed to be an interesting bunch of people. I should be careful here, because I was one of  them, living among them like a human lives with wolves. However, I did learn something from them. When they were in their element, they can be an aggressive bunch. If you give a group of engineers a goal, they will make it happen, by hook or by crook. In fact, many of our technological marvels that we enjoy today in large part come from byproducts of the work of engineers during the space race. It’s amazing what happens when you develop a clear goal. It’s like when you see this, and you know that you really want this, magical things can happen.

Which is what happened with my all in one electronics kit from radio shack. I really wanted it, but I didn’t have any money. So I asked my dad what I should do. He suggested I go up and down the street and knock on the neighbors doors and see if they needed any odd jobs done around the house. After I was able to develop a clear goal with an accompanying plan of action, I was all set. It was like I was able to find extra motivation to get what I wanted.

And normally, I thought it would have been scary to go knocking on the neighbors doors asking for money. But when I was able to hold a clear goal in mind, it made being able to ask for things much easier. And it’s remarkable when you do this. You think of a goal, and then when you imagine that goal as the other side of the person you are asking for whatever you want, it becomes really easy to simply ask for and get what you want.

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Program Your Mind For Success and Wake Up Happy

What do you do just before you shut down before bed at night? (assuming you go to bed at night)? I mean before you shut down the TV, all the lights, and put he dirty plates in the to wash sometime in the next few days? What is your routine or ritual that you go through every night before going to sleep? If you’re like most people you don’t give your final routine much thought. You do whatever you do, until you get sleepy, or it gets late, then shut everything down and collapse into bed. What if by spending a few minutes just before bed, you could not only drastically improve the quality of your sleep, ensure that you would wake up in a great mood with creative ideas on how to tackle your tasks for that day?

It’s a fairly simple procedure that I’ve recently discovered, part by studying various improvement techniques, and part by accident. The accidental part came from a course I recently went through on how to set solid goals and how to easily  make them happen. One of the techniques in the course is to review your goals, review the things you’ve done recently to achieve them, and then map out the next baby steps to take in the direction of their completion.

Normally, before I go to bed, I waste time surfing the internet. When I say waste time, I mean I don’t spend time reading informative articles, or watching inspirational videos on YouTube. I usually read the news sites, and sometimes check into a few forums that I participate in. I’ve found that some forums, no matter how positive the discussion starts out, it can sometimes turn negative rather quickly. And on top of that, I find myself sometimes agreeing with the negativity. I’ve noticed that nights I spend reading and agreeing with negativity, I not only have a hard time falling asleep,but I usually wake up in a crappy mood.

Then one night recently, instead of reading those internet forums with the same arguments made by the same people, I decided to journal on my goals. I just started free noting about what I’d done that day towards my desired accomplishments. Little things that I’d done to push myself forward. If you haven’t free noted, it’s not a really difficult thing to do. It just means to type without worrying about grammar or spelling. Something happens when you convert thoughts into words that you can read while you write. It’s like the solidify the thoughts in the brain, and when you do if for a while, you learn to not censor yourself, so you pretty much write whatever’s on your mind.

That night that I free noted I went to sleep in a lot better mood, I slept better, and I woke up really happy the next morning. To make sure it wasn’t a fluke, I tried it on a couple nights. The big test was on a Sunday night, to see how it would effect me on Monday. Sure enough, it worked. The technique is simple.
Just take something that you are working towards. Any goal will do. Weight loss, cutting back on smoking, anything. Then just write down any little thing that you did that day that was in the direction of your goal. It will train your mind to appreciate the effort you are making to improve yourself, and you’ll naturally start seeing more opportunities everywhere. And it only takes five or ten minutes a night.

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