Posts tagged 'motivation'
How long have you struggled with a goal or tried to achieve success, never to see it happen? Have you stopped to think why? There is a way to win, and it begins with a strong and positive mindset. Our newest release, 88 Days to Any Goal, shows that magic can happen when you're fully committed!
Why 88 Days?
Research has shown that people tend to work harder when they're closer to their goals. This means that with every step you take towards your goal, the harder you'll push yourself to get there. To ensure that you're taking necessary action, you need to set up a system that you follow consistently. It can take close to 88 days to fully implement a system, and during that time, the behaviors and actions you take will become habits. Those habits are what set you up for success. Here are three steps to help you get started:
1. Follow the Critical Few
When going after a goal, there are many good, trivial things you can do to inch forward. However, in order to succeed, there are only 2-3 things you must absolutely do if you want to reach your goal. How can you determine what these critical few items are?
Action: First, write down your objective, being as specific as possible. Next, list out all the steps you think you'll need to take to reach your goal. For each step, write down the daily habits and behaviors you'll have to follow. Finally, review this list and circle the top 2-3 things that are most critical.
2. Face Challenges to Your Goal
As you start working towards your goal, it's important to think about the road ahead and what obstacles you might find. When you are aware of potential challenges, you can prepare with possible solutions.
Action: Take a moment to write down challenges you think you may face as you get closer to your goal. For each challenge that you identify, write down a solution to help you through.
3. Plan, Do, Review and Adjust
Although it can be very exciting to start on the path towards a new goal, it's the day-to-day behaviors that will actually get you there, which means focusing on your plan.
Action: Make sure to review your plan weekly, make adjustments as you go along, and continue following it. Ask yourself if there are gaps that you can fill with activities that support your goal, and confirm that your schedule is focusing on those critical few items.
Start your 88 day plan with 88 Days to Any Goal>>
Good leaders ask, “How do I tell better stories?” Great leaders ask, “What stories do I need to tell?”
Will you be a more effective leader if your stories are well-crafted and delivered? Of course. But the truth is, the story you tell is more important than how you deliver it. You're probably not an actor or a public speaker. You're a leader. Your audience doesn't expect perfection. They expect you to be decisive and helpful.
If you tell a story that helps them do their job better, but you forget the opening line, stutter a little, or even butcher the surprise ending, your audience will still learn from it. But if you tell them an irrelevant or unhelpful story even though you deliver it in a way that would make a Shakespearean actor proud, your audience will never forgive you for wasting their time.
So, what stories do you need to tell?
After conducting over 300 one-on-one interviews with CEOs, leaders, and executives in 25 countries around the world about their use of storytelling in business, here’s my list of the most important ten stories any leader needs to be able to tell at a moment’s notice.
1. Where we came from (our founding story) – Nobody ever quit their job and started a company for a boring reason. Find that reason for your company’s founder and tell that story. It will infect everyone with the same sense of purpose and passion.
2. Why we can’t stay here (a case-for-change story) – Human beings are creatures of habit. Change is an unwelcome visitor. This story provides the rationale for why change is needed and a real human reason to care.
3. Where we’re going (a vision story) – A vision is a picture of the future so compelling, people want to go there with you. And the best way to paint that picture is with a story about what that future will look like when you achieve it.
4. How we’re going to get there (a strategy story) – Strategy is how you’ll get from where you are now to where you want to be. In other words, strategy is a journey. And what better way to describe a journey than a story?
5. What we believe (a corporate-values story) – Values are only words on a piece of paper until they’re tested. This is a story of one of those awkward or uncomfortable moments one of your company values was put to the test.
6. Who we serve (a customer story) – There’s no substitute for getting out of the office and meeting your customer face-to-face. And for the majority of your organization that will never do that, this is a story you tell about one of your customer interactions so they’ll know that customer as well as you do.
7. What we do for our customers (a sales story) – A story about what you did for one of your customers that’s so impressive other people will want to buy what you’re selling as well.
8. How we’re different from our competitors (a marketing story) – You probably have a list of reasons why your product or service is better than your competition. Well, guess what? Nobody remembers your list. But they will remember the story you tell them that shows them those differences as they play out in a real situation.
9. Why I lead the way I do (a leadership-philosophy story) – No series of buzzwords on a piece of paper could ever articulate the subtle, human, and complex nature of your personal leadership philosophy. If you want people to understand how to expect you to lead, you need to tell them a story about what shaped the leader you’ve become.
10. Why you should want to work here (a recruiting story) – Every company claims they offer competitive pay and benefits, challenging work, and great advancement opportunities. If you really want to attract the best talent, you need real stories about why it’s so awesome to work there.
If you want to see an example of each of these stories, plus a few tips on how to come up with your own, you'll find them in the new book, The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell.
Good luck with your stories.
-Guest post from Paul Smith, author of The 10 Stories Great Leaders Tell.
How many times have you heard no? According to Forbes, 92% of people fail to reach their goals. This means that at some point, we all try and fail. However, rather than accept defeat, you can make your dreams a reality by pushing forward through rejection. Doing this requires transforming your mindset and igniting your passion. Don’t wait for your dreams to come true – make them happen!
The 12-steps from Create Your Yes! can lead you to the path of success. Here are four of them to help get you started:
1. Make Progress Your Primary Target
A Columbia Business School study showed that people tend to work harder when they are closer to their goals. This means that in order to accomplish the big wins, you need daily wins to help push you towards your goal.
Action: Write down daily or weekly goals that are within your control to accomplish. Focus on making progress and you will reach your milestones.
2. Determine Cheetah Goals vs. Gazelle Goals
As you work on making your goals a reality, there generally comes a time when you find yourself making no progress, no matter how hard you try. When you make it to this point, you need to stop and rethink your strategy by determining whether you need speed, like a cheetah, or stamina, like a gazelle.
Action: Ask yourself what your ultimate objective is and what is required to make it happen. Creating a new blog post each week is a cheetah goal, requiring speed, while making a business plan from scratch is a gazelle goal that needs time and persistence.
3. Create the Way to Make It Happen
Following the status quo keeps things comfortable, but prevents growth and change. So to make things happen, you need to push past "business as usual".
Action: When taking on a rejected goal or unfinished task, erase what you know and instead focus on your instincts. What direction is your gut telling you to take? Then, explore and pursue innovation solutions - that includes giving yourself permission to try the impossible.
4. Bulletproof Your Mind
According to the Mayo Clinic, there are many benefits to thinking positively, including greater achievement, higher persistence, better psychological and physical well-being and lower stress levels. Changing your mindset from a scarcity mindset ("it's never enough") to an abundance mindset ("there are possibilities everywhere") will allow you to see meaning in both your life goals and everyday tasks.
Action: Think about a current goal. Is it built on integrity, creativity and enthusiasm? If not, what can you do to change this?
For the rest of the 12 steps to success, check out Create Your Yes!>>
National Be a Millionaire Day (observed May 20th) is about taking steps to turn dreams into reality by making plans for your future. And what better way to get into the success mindset than with the modern-day bestselling classic, Think and Grow Rich! Author Napoleon Hill draws on stories from Andrew Carnegie, Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and more than 500 other wealthy people to teach simple and practical techniques for achieving great and lasting success with nothing but thoughts, ideas, and organized plans.
Hill delves into a method for changing your desire for riches into its financial equivalent with these six steps:
FIRST. Fix in your mind the exact amount of money you desire. It is not sufficient merely to say, “I want plenty of money.” Be definite as to the amount.
SECOND. Determine exactly what you intend to give in return for the money you desire. (There is no such reality as “something for nothing.”)
THIRD. Establish a definite date when you intend to possess the money you desire.
FOURTH. Create a definite plan for carrying out your desire and begin at once, whether you are ready or not, to put this plan into action.
FIFTH. Write out a clear, concise statement of the amount of money you intend to acquire, name the time limit for its acquisition, state what you intend to give in return for the money, and describe clearly the plan through which you intend to accumulate it.
SIXTH. Read your written statement aloud, twice daily, once just before retiring at night and once after arising in the morning.
To delve deeper into these principals, download the FREE Discussion Guide>>
For more on transforming your desires into riches, read The Five Essential Principals of Think and Grow Rich>>
As Earth Day approaches, it’s time to get honest with ourselves; it’s time to HUG OUR MOTHERS — Earth and Nature, that is. We know enough and we know better, so the fact that we are still not doing enough is no longer a problem of pollution but a more personal problem. Our planet doesn’t pollute itself. That’s on us. And it’s time for us to choose kindness. Hugging Mother Earth and Mother Nature matters. So now it’s time to take action.
Action 1 – Participate in or organize a community cleanup day. Find ways to get local companies, schools, churches, friends, and family members to join in. Make it fun and a day for everyone to show kindness to our mothers.
Action 2 – Reduce! Of all the R’s—Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—reduce is the best option. Take shorter showers, print on both sides, carpool, change your sprinkler timers, etc. You know these ideas already. Now you just have to do them.
Action 3 – Be kind to animals.Take time to research how humans are impacting the different species from around the world—from dolphins to elephants to orangutans to factory farm animals. Brace yourself. You won’t see a ton of kindness in your searches, but this is the very reason to get involved.
Matthew Emerzian
For more ways to live a life that matters, check out Every Monday Matters>>