1. Fear of Failure

This is one of the most common fears impeding our personal growth. Are you afraid of failing? Are you afraid of the scorn or “I Told You So” response from those around you?  If so, ask yourself a simple question – how do you know you will fail? And how do you perceive failure? One of the big differences between successful and unsuccessful people is the ability of the successful to reframe negative situations. The ‘average’ person looks at the undesirable result as failure and beat themselves up over it as I wrote here.  The successful person looks at it simply as an outcome, then tries something else and ultimately produces their desired result.

2. Fear of Success/Personal Growth Means Hard Work.

Whilst some people are afraid of failure, others are afraid of achieving their goals or of  the price that they fear they may have to pay for their success. So they stagnate rather than enjoy the benefits of growth at a personal level. Fuelled by quick fix, get rich quick schemes, many people are loathe to put in effort, to take direct action. Others are afraid of the jealousy it might cause in people around them and the friendships they might lose.

3. Poverty or Scarcity Consciousness

Most of us were told when we were growing up that we should not be greedy or selfish. We may also have been brought up to believe that the world has only a limited amount of resources, that there’s not enough to go round so we’re being selfish if we succeed.

John Kehoe (1992) summed it up when writing:

“Imprint these 4 prosperity beliefs into your unconscious mind:

1. It’s an abundant Universe
2. Life is Fun and rewarding
3. Staggering opportunities exist for me in every aspect of my life
4. Having lots of money is good. It is my responsibility to be successful. “

There is nothing greedy or unspiritual about having money; it’s what you do with it that matters. Greed is keeping it all for yourself, wanting money for money’s sake, which is selfish. The positive is all the good you can do with the money you earn – it’s difficult to make a difference in the world without earning the money first.

4. Life is hard with little reward

Yes you have to put the effort in, and the reward is commensurate with the effectiveness of the effort you put in. Note the subtle difference – I didn’t write that the ‘reward is commensurate with the effort you put in’, but with the ‘effectiveness of the effort.’ There’s a huge difference!

The distinction is simple – effectiveness means doing the right things (as opposed to efficiency which means doing things in the best way), so are you being effective? In other words, is everything you do aimed at living your dream? If the answer is ‘no!’, then yes, life can appear to be hard with little reward.

True achievement never diminishes someone else, is never selfish. Make sure that you never allow yourself to be jealous of someone else’s success. Instead, see it as proof that if they can succeed, so can you! As well as the direct benefits your service provides, there are also the indirect benefits; you spend the fruits of your success, creating profit for others, contributing to the economy as those people in turn spend their greater profits and so on.

5. Having a closed mind

This is typified by phrases such as ‘There are already so many books out there’, ‘That won’t work for me because…’, ‘It won’t work in the current economic climate’, ‘That might work for most people, but I’m different/my situation is different’, and so on. A closed mind is another way of saying that ‘My perception of the world is right and is the only valid one.’ It actually becomes a self-reinforcing, vicious circle. A closed mind closes down its options.

6. Money is unspiritual

You can be spiritually rich and financially prosperous. As you reap your rewards, think about all of the causes you’ll then be free to support, to invest in! While money is unspiritual if you allow it to manage you, the more money you make, the greater the causes you can invest in!

7. I am unworthy/nothing good ever happens to me

This is one I can really identify with; for a long time, due do an overheard conversation that I misunderstood, I believed that my younger brother was more intelligent than me and that nothing good every happened, or would happen, to me. I guess that this was exacerbated by my mother’s death, which served to reinforce the belief that only bad things happen to me. It’s a dangerous mindset to have, because anything to the contrary is discounted or ignored, which ultimately is the path to depression.

8. Nothing I do is good enough

Do you believe this? If you do, my question for you is what are you using as your comparison? Good enough compared to what or whom? And look at your belief…nothing? Have you never produced a good result at anything? At some stage in your life, you must have succeeded at something. So you can get good results. Which means that the belief is false. Time to reprogram yourself!

9. My failure is a result of bad karma from a past life

Make it a regular practice the philosophy of Givers Gain, espoused by BNI, for example. That will quickly cancel any “Karmic Debt” you may carry. And there’s a bonus – The more you give, the more you’ll receive! Give more, get more, give even more, get even more and so it goes on!

10. God will provide so I don’t need to do anything

God/the Universe/Spirit are available to help you if asked, but they won’t do it for you; as I’ve said before, you have to play your part. My wife has a great expression “Trust God but lock the car doors when you park.”

It’s the People! SM is not about the technology, whether that be hardware or software. It’s about people. This may appear to be self-evident but there is a lot of bandwidth wasted on discussions about the newest tweak to this or that. SM is a set of tools that allow you to communicate, to connect, engage and share and thus to build relationships.

Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I’ve lost count of the number of different Social Media Sites out there but I recently came across software offering to connect you automatically to the top 250 Social Media sites. You provide a profile and a CSV file of members from an existing network and it does the rest. But then what? The software makes the initial connections but how do you engage and share across all of those sites? Most of us have to work for a living away from SM. If you spread yourself that thinly, where will you find the time to connect, engage and share in a meaningful way? And how does it look if your profile on a site reveals your background, some contacts and perhaps one or two posts, the last of which was written 3 months ago?

Connect, engage and share with “real” people. It’s easy for many of us to spend much of our time communicating geek to geek and forgetting “real” people. It doesn’t matter whether you are one of the well-informed minority or the “What’s this all about” majority. We all know how to communicate – SM merely provides a different set of tools. Connecting with people, engaging them in conversation in a natural way and sharing knowledge will allow you to build a deeper connection, engage on a deeper level, share more information and so on, round and round, building what Thomas Power calls “Connectedness”.

Only automate when necessary. Whilst technology helps us to be more efficient, it should never replace human interaction.  It’s a fine line – auto-responders to advise someone who has emailed you that you are out of the office makes sense. But remember, even Gary Vaynerchuk commits himself to answering every e-mail he receives! There are people in leadership positions in the SM world who never reply to e-mails or personal messages. There’s a real risk of them appearing to be incongruent.

Similarly, I’m amazed at the number of people who post articles on their own blogs and on sites like ecademy and never reply to comments. To me, this has nothing to do with social media or networking: it’s plain, old-fashioned courtesy!

Never Mind the Width, Where’s the Depth? I often ask myself whether, with the benefit of hindsight, I’d have joined the auto-connect experiment on ecademy. I would, but only because I believe that soon, we will be given the tools to enable us to create clusters of members within our networks around keyword searches.

Let’s say I want to engage with people in my network who, for example, live in the South West, are healers with an interest in Chinese Medicine and in using modern technology to enhance healing. I should be able to enter those keywords within my network, identify those who fit the description and then send them a message. At the moment, this is not possible on any site of which I’m aware.

Real Time Relationships are Still The Most Important Ones. How many of us have heard comments from loved ones like “Are you on Facebook/ecademy/LinkedIn/that blog again?” or “You spend more time with your on-line networks than you do with me!” Unless you are very disciplined, it’s easy to drift into this habit. I wonder how long it will be before “Too much time on-line” will be seen as a justified reason for a partner’s filing for divorce?

Be Yourself. Have you noticed how many cloned sites there are out there? Sing your song, with your voice and don’t be afraid to be different! People will connect and engage with others with whom they feel comfortable. Fakes are spotted sooner or later and it’s difficult to feel comfortable with someone who’s a fake.

Communicate Rather than Broadcast. This takes me full circle. Membership of too many sites leads to a situation  in which it’s impossible to engage in meaningful 2 way communication with people. You end up either “broadcasting” rather than “communicating” or neglecting people, which is a surefire way to kill relationships.

Nick Tadd made an enigmatic comment on Tuesday suggesting he had learned much about this on  his recent trip to the USA and I hope he jumps in here. Whether he does or not, have I missed anything out? What are the lessons you have learned about Connecting, Engaging and Sharing?

This has taught me that whether they think they can, or think they can’t, everyone has the ability to be innovative. It just takes time, practice and daring. The box of crayons in kindergarten were not limited to those who possessed potential; because the truth is, everybody has potential for personal development. You are not stuck with who you are now, unless you choose to be.

How long did it take you to learn to drive a car and pass your test? How long did it take you to learn anything worthwhile? The trouble is we live in a get rich quick, fast fix world. But reality is not like that; it takes patience, it takes time and it takes effort. And a sense of humour helps too!  It’s the same with innovation. It takes a bit of practice and a lot of time before the mind accepts that you are innovative, especially if you are out of practice.

Creativity is a Licence to Play. You weren’t always like that, just look at small children. They are so innovative and creative and this article will teach you a few tips on how to remember what it was like as a child and to bring innovation back into your life. You may need to learn to play again and to not beat yourself up over the slightest mistake.

Don’t be constrained by what other people say. Sing your song in your voice – it’s unique to you! Trying to include elements of other people will only bring cacophony to the music you are trying to make. If you have an original idea, don’t waste your time and effort trying to make people understand. They won’t. And the help you will probably get comes in the form of negative feedback. By all means listen to the feedback and adjust if you truly believe it to be necessary – but that’s not the same as copying other people from the start.  If all those geniuses listened to their peers, we would probably still be living in the middle ages.

Find your own style. You can always tell a Van Gogh from a Matisse. You’ll know Hemingway wrote something by the choice of words on the paper. So it is the same with you. People will appreciate your innovation more because it is uniquely yours and that no one else would have thought of what you were thinking. That will let people see how valuable an asset you are.

Spend time on it. I cannot stress that enough; it takes time, effort and discipline. If you are juggling your innovative side with a day job, this involves some tricky time management. But with a little discipline you’ll be able to squeeze both in.

Exercise Tip. Take a walk. Run a mile or two. Send all those endorphins coursing through your veins. Exercising certainly clears and relaxes your mind and allows for anything to pop up. If you don’t like that kind of exercise, take the dog for a walk or spend a couple of hours making mad passionate love with your partner – that releases endorphins and serotonin!

Record your dreams. Aren’t some of them just the craziest things that your conscious mind would never have thought of? If you’ve had these dreams before, and I’m sure have, this only shows you the untapped innovative power you have lying within. So jot down those notes. Those dreams may just create an innovative spark in you.

Don’t hide behind technology, gadgets or tools. Don’t mistake the technology with the goals. I’ve made this mistake, continually fine-tuning my website believing that if I could only make it perfect, people will flock to it. You don’t need the most expensive set of paints to produce a masterpiece. The same way with writing. You don’t need the most expensive laptop or desktop to write high quality material. fact, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book of the Harry Potter Series on bits of tissue. I’ve come to the conclusion that as I improve, it’s better to reduce the number of tools I use and to get the most out of those I use regularly and therefore understand.

Be Selective. The internet is teeming with advice, some of it good, much of it contradictory. It’s tempting to try to chase down the latest piece of information, believing that with it we will have the answers to all of our problems. In reality, it always boils down to the same thing: do the basics well. Find the sources you feel comfortable with and stick with them. Most of us who are interested in on-line writing have spent hours visiting site after site after site.  The truth is? Most of that time would have been better spent being creative!

Nothing will work without passion. It’s a much over-used word these days, but I can’t find a better synonym. As I wrote in an earlier article, you need to find your passion. What wakes you up in the mornings? What keeps the flame burning? What is the one thing that you’ll die if you don’t do? Sometimes people with talent are overtaken by the people who want it more. Think the hare and the tortoise.

Ellen Degeneres once said that if you’re not doing something that you want to do, then you don’t really want to do it. And that’s true. Sometimes you just want something so bad you become a virtual unstoppable. And that is passion. Passion will keep you going.

Don’t Wait for Inspiration. You can’t force it; inspiration hits when you least expect it to, for those unpredictable yet inevitable moments you should prepare. An idea could strike you on the subway, yet alas, you poor unfortunate soul; you have no sheet of paper to scribble down a thought that could change the world. Avoid these disasters. Have a pen and paper within your arm’s reach at all times. Or use your smart phone!

I hope this article has helped you bring more innovation into your life. Keep in mind that you’re doing these things for your own satisfaction and not anybody else’s. But soon enough they will notice, and everything should snowball from there.

And remember what Einstein said: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex… It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.”

Which ones are important to you and are there any you would add to the list?

The good news for anyone wanting to change is that all of these excuses are just, well, excuses! Neural plasticity means that our brains are able to create new neural pathways no matter what our age! Which means that you can change any aspect of your personality that you don’t like. And it means that age is no barrier to personal growth.

So, let’s look at personal growth the Benjamin Franklin way.  In his autobiography, he tells how he decided that he wanted to change some aspects of his personality so embarked on a bit of personal growth.  He detailed 13 qualities that he wanted to develop in himself and in a little book, he set aside a page for each of these qualities and journaled the progress he made in his personal growth.

He realised that to try to develop them all at once would be futile so he decided to devote a week to each one; when, after 13 weeks, he had got through all 13, he began again. In a year, that meant he went focused on each aspect 4 times.

His approach encapsulates for me a very sensible approach to personal development: analyse yourself, find the change(s) you want to make, be realistic in how much change you can make in one go, journal your progress and be patient. Franklin’s results? People around him were amazed at the changes he made in himself.

I searched the internet for lists of qualities people admire in others, and from what I found, composed the following. In no particular order:

Honesty
Selflessness
Passion
Good Listener
Hard Working
Close With Family
Love
Humor
Humility
Dignity in Face of Adversity
Sense of Play and Fun
Patience

What qualities do you admire in others and would you like to change in you?

Endless Possibilities

If you are someone that needs to find a vision for yourself you will want to make sure that you are following through with what life has in store for you. You also need to make sure that you don’t get locked into one set way of achieving that vision. There are endless possibilities for everyone.  If you are looking to make something great of yourself then you will need to set some priorities and goals to set you on your way to a better and bigger future.

Three Important Questions

When you are looking for something to keep you motivated, you need to first think about what you are doing for your own life:

What are the most important things to you?

Are you satisfied with everything that you are doing?

Are you ready for a change in your life?

If you are answering these questions truthfully, you may soon realize that maybe you are not living life to your full potential and maybe there is something better out there for you.

Make sure that you are thinking about your goals and dreams in life.  You need to think about what you want to do in your future.  Setting goals for long term and short term may be one thing that makes your life so much better and easier because you are going to have something to look forward to in the end.

Focus on What You Want

The pace of life these days mean that long term goals are difficult to make. Or more specifically, it makes it difficult to include how you are going to achieve them. Be flexible. For long term goals, focus on “what” you want and be less precise about the “how.”

Don’t let age stop you – you are never too old to dream, never too old to change. Never give up on something that you really want. If you have goals set for yourself you will want to make sure that you are doing everything possible that you can so that you can feel good about who you are.

Prepare to Work Hard

Now the unpopular bit – be prepared to work hard at your goals.  So much of today’s society is based around get rich quick, minimum effort, wishful thinking schemes. Life is not, and never has been, like that.

There is nothing that should ever stand in your way.  You need to recognize that you are the one that is going to be in control of your life.  When there is something that you really want to have, you should try to find different ways to go about them.  Finding motivation is important.  When you are energized and motivated to make something happen you will get there.

Think about what you are doing and why you are doing it. If that doesn’t motivate you, you need to ask yourself if you’ve got the right goals! Thinking about something that makes you happy will help you get to where you need to be.  There is nothing wrong with making choices that fit your needs.  Do not be afraid to go out there and make things work for you. It is going to take time but if you end up achieving success as you have defined it , then it will be worth it.

Define Success

Only you can define what success means to you as it means balancing so many variables. Decide what are the “musts”. What must be included in your definition of success? Another way of looking at this is to list all of the things you are not, under any circumstances, prepared to sacrifice along the way. It will include key relationships, health, core values etc.. You have to be willing to provide yourself with a set of goals that are going to work for you and all of your needs.

What point is there, for example, in being a successful author of 10 books that sell well if in the process you have locked yourself away from family and friends? When you are not happy with something that you are doing you should go out there and make your life just how you want it to be.

If you find that your behaviour contradicts either your vision of the future, or that you are endangering the “musts”, then you know that you need to change what you are doing.

I hope that this has been useful. In the next article I will be looking at how Abraham Lincoln approached this issue and ended up transforming himself. Have a great day and let me know what tips you would  add to this article.

However, there are a few things I wish I had discovered, learned or been told earlier in life that would have made things a whole lot easier. Or maybe I just wasn’t ready to hear those messages back then – these things have a habit of happening when they should!

What follows are just a few of those things. Just the “benefits of hindsight ramblings of an old git?” Maybe, but if it helps anyone else deal with the issue quicker than I did, that’s good.

1. Money management and in particular two aspects: the first is how to avoid or control spending on impulse. I’m betting better at controlling the impulse, but it still bites me, especially when it comes to buying books. The second is how to plan financially – not in terms of complex investments etc but simple planning.  If I’d learned these two things 30 years ago, life would be far more secure now.

2. The importance of exercise. Well, this is ironic – I studies physical education, played sport at a good level and then around the age of 43 or 44 stopped. My weight went up by over 15 kilos (33 pounds for those not fond of metric measurements) and although I’ve reversed this, I’m still wageing war with those extra few pounds. The turning point for me was when I realised that I was getting out of breath walking up the two flights of stairs to our apartment.

3. Don’t confuse activity with effectiveness. This one I still find difficult. If I find something interesting I can become totally absorbed in it. This happened recently when I was researching social media – I found myself on it for 8 hours a day but to what end? Fortunately my wife gave me some feedback about this and I have changed my on-line habits. (You tend to listen if your wife has a degree in psychology and represented her country at martial arts!)

4. Find your passion and focus on it. Well, I got this one half right – I was extremely fortunate to find my passion, writing and running training courses, early in life. The bit I got wrong, and still do sometimes, is the focus bit. Right from the start, the aspect of training I was most passionate about was personal development – helping people to unleash their potential in mind, body and spirit. Whenever I deviate for this for any time, I get into trouble, one way or another.

5. Take time for the key relationships, especially family. If I have one regret in life about something that was within my control, it is in not spending more time with my children when they were growing up. When I was growing up, my father was away a lot so this was the norm for me. And whilst I swore that “when I have children I will be home for them”, history repeated itself and I travelled a lot for work. I do now miss those years of their youth and they can never be recaptured. But I suppose I must have a touch of gypsy blood in me as I still travel a lot. Fortunately, I’m now married to a wife who enjoys travel even more than I do!

6. The relationships that matter in your life are far more important than possessions, TV, the internet etc. Each is like a rare and precious flower – take time to nourish them and they will reward you spectacularly. Neglect them and you risk them dying on you.

7. True happiness comes from within. I’ve spent my fair share of time chasing happiness in all forms and I guess my Higher Self has now got its revenge – my body now has a very limited, and sometimes zero, tolerance of alcohol. I was also a bit of a spiritual tourist, thinking I could find happiness and fulfilment if I could only read the right book. Eventually (and perhaps I should have taken out shares in Amazon, so much have I spent with them), I realised that the books might provide the key but I had to put in the effort and find happiness within. I’ve also discovered that focusing on being grateful for life rather than worrying about what I don’t have, helps.

8. Talk with your partner. Most of used to at the start of a relationship but it’s easy to get out of this habit due to work pressures, particularly if you are self-employed. And tell them that you love them… not occasionally but every day… not once but several times during the day.

9. The end of a life is not the end of a relationship. My mum died when I was 17, which affected me hugely and for a long time I ran around, chasing comfort tricks to distract me from the pain. Many years later, my wife introduced me to the phrase at the beginning of this paragraph and it finally helped me to put a lot at rest. Someone dies physically but they live on in the hearts of those who love and remember them.

10. Don’t beat yourself up over the mistakes – they have been part of the experience that have led to you being who you are. If you can bear the above in mind and get to a situation where you do what you love, love what you do, and get handsomely rewarded for doing it… it was all worth it!

As a starting point, I took the blogs of 8 of the top Social Media Bloggers and looked at their percentage use of “I”, “We”, “You” and “They”. In each case, I collected at least 5,000 words, which for most equates to between 6 and 8 articles.I know it’s not a very large sample of writers or words, but I wanted to see if any patterns emerged. And they did!

Louis Gray blogs more about developments in SM and emerging technologies, so I had thought that perhaps he would have used “me” more often, as he is often giving his opinion. But he still managed to use “you” more often than “I” and “We” combined

Chris Brogan uses the first person singular a lot in the sample tested but there’s a good reason for it – among the posts that I sampled were several explaining how he uses mind mapping, how he doesn’t use LinkedIn as he feels he should etc.. I’m going to go back and examine his more general articles to see the pattern there.

As can be seen from the table, all of the others use “you” almost twice as often as they use “I”, the exceptions being Seth Godin who uses “you” 3.5 times as often as he uses the word “I” and Karen Skidmore who uses it a whopping 8 times as much!. This is entirely consistent with SM articles being about engaging with other people and drawing them in. With the exception of self -disclosure articles of the type Chris Brogan has been writing recently, most of us would soon get bored with, and probably stop reading, writers who used “I” twice as much as they use “you”.

There’s a lot more I’m going to be analyzing, such as percentage of past, present and future orientated words, the percentage of nouns vs verbs etc

The conclusion? These people are some of the top in their field – anyone wanting to be up there with them needs to be looking at their writing style. The small words matter. You will find another article here that examines the subject in more detail, and announces a new service for writers.

A lot of people confuse leadership with management, thinking that the two are synonymous. Nothing could be further from the truth and in this article we are going to draw clear distinctions between the two before looking at the specifics of servant leadership.

Putting it simply, leadership is about deciding the right things to do whilst management is about doing things in the right way. Management is particularly concerned with the efficient use of resources. Peter Drucker once wrote that most organisations are over-managed and under-led and this can be seen when examining bankruptcies. The courts are full of companies that were highly efficient at doing the wrong things!

This can also be seen in the uptake, or lack of uptake, of Social Media in organisations. Many managers prefer to optimise current work practices rather than embrace change. If those same organisations lack leadership with the vision to see that the game is changing, then they are unlikely to successfully integrate Social Media into their culture. They will be highly efficient players in a game that no longer exists – they may dislike change, but eventually they will come to realise that they will like being increasingly irrelevant even less!

Leadership is about doing the right things and this has two dimensions to it. Choosing the right activities to be involved in and also ‘doing the right thing’, in other words, choosing the morally right thing to do. And this is where servant leadership comes in. The title of ‘Leader’ is not something that someone awards to themselves. It is something that is recognised in the individual by other people. In the increasingly transparent world that is a result of Web 2.0 and 3.0, self-proclaimed leaders without the track record to back it up will have a very short shelf-life.

And other than with senior appointments in organisations (and even then I’d argue that most are managers rather than leaders), leadership will be something one does with people, not to them. In fact I’d go a stage further and suggest that Servant Leadership will often be characterised by what the Leader can do for her/his people. The very name suggests that servant leadership is concerned with issues such as “How can I Serve my Team?”

What are the qualities, skills and behaviours of Servant Leaders? To adapt one of my favourite pieces of writing, I suggest that in practical terms, Servant Leaders:

Are patient
Are kind.
Do not envy,
Do not boast,
Are not proud.
Are not rude,
Are not self-seeking,
Are not easily angered,
Do not keep no of wrongs.
Do not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
Will do the morally right thing rather than hide behind what is legal or expedient
Always protect, always trust, always hope, always persevere.