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Many people are holding their personal development up by ignoring an important step – accepting repsosibility for their actions. Read more…

Social Media Rockstar

Do you want to be an overnight success? It’s easy – all you have to do is put in a lot of time, effort, persistence and possibly money and the chances are you’ll succeed!  I read somewhere, and I’m sure he’ll correct me if I’m wrong, that Chris Brogan took 6 years to  be an “overnight success” and a social media rockstar!

Read more…

A while back I wrote a post called 10 Things I Wish I Had Known And Stuck To From Early On. Here’s another ten things I’ve learned, occasionally quickly, more often only after repeatedly banging my head against a brick wall! Read more…

On a scale of  1 – 10 where 1 represents not intelligent and 10 is very intelligent, how do you rate your intelligence? Don’t scroll down the page until you’ve evaluated yourself, or you will spoil the fun.

In rating yourself, how did you define intelligence? Traditionally, educators have followed the example of the IQ or similar test and focused on attainment in maths and your mother tongue. Yet, this is a very narrow definition of intelligence.

How come when children enter school at age 5 they are pretty much all of them creative. yet when they go to senior school at 11 or 13, very few of them are creative? What’s happened? Why do we not include creativity in our definition of intelligence?

Look at someone like Gillian Lynne – teachers thought she was failing at school because she never appeared to be paying attention and was always fidgeting. The world was indeed fortunate that she was sent to a psychologist who recognised the signs and saw that she interpreted the world through physical motion. He suggested she be sent to stage school. These days, most psychologists would have diagnosed ADD/ADHD and put her on Ritalin! Why do we not include physical expression as a form of intelligence?

The huge irony in this is that IQ tests were never intended to test how intelligent we are in terms of degrees of intelligence. Alfred Binet, one of the co-developers of IQ tests, was commissioned by the French government to develop a test that would identify children whose intelligence was blow a minimum threshold so that they could receive remedial schooling. He rejected the idea of using his test to compare intelligence or to select individuals on the basis of their scoring well.

Lewis Terman, who revised Binet’s test and developed what is known as the “Stanford-Binet” test, had a completely different agenda. He was a major player in the eugenics movement and all that that implied!

There is an increase in interest in areas like Emotional and Spiritual Intelligence, particularly in the workplace. I suggest that we need to rethink what we mean by intelligence in school too.

But I am interested, how did you define intelligence when you were rating yourself?

What’s stopping you from achieving personal growth? Michael Jordan recently said that the only thing that held him back was himself and there’s a lot of truth in his statement. So let’s have a look at the ten most common reasons for our not achieving what we want to. Read more…

I recently came across a disturbing blog article where the author, George Cloutier – “ The Turnaround Ace” had written the following:

“Your cell phone is for keeping in touch with clients and sales managers in the field, not for taking calls from your spouse throughout the day about what groceries to pick up on the way home. Cutting out early to take your kids to baseball practice three times a week, or picking up your Aunt Tilly or Uncle Ned from the airport, are unacceptable interruptions to success. Read more…

I realise looking back over the posts of the last couple of weeks that I have posted a lot about social media. Whilst social media and networking are an important tool for being able to unleash your potential, I want to open up the blog and look at unleashing potential from other angles.

Sometimes, it can be very easy to get bogged down in the minutia, the small stuff, and to lose sight of what’s really important to us. This can lead to us losing focus, friends and even important relationships. It’s especially easy to do so in the world of social media and networking – there are so many articles to read, so many blogs to visit, so many people to Tweet that we can all too easily fall into the trap of letting our 0n-line relationships replace our human contact!

Add to the mix the seductive lure of being a ‘player’, or perceiving ourselves to be one in whatever is our niche, and it becomes even easier to lose sight of what’s important.

To check whether you are on that slippery slope, ask yourself the following

1.What do you want to achieve with your life?

2. What does true success mean to you?

3. What is the most valuable thing in your life that money cannot buy?

4. What are your 3 most important tips for enduring health?

5. What do you believe is your life’s purpose?

6. If you knew that the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do today?

7. What are  the 3 biggest mistakes that you have made in your life?

8. What are the main lessons that you have learned from your answers to question 7?

9. Where/with whom do you find comfort during difficult times?

10. Who are the most important people in your life? What do you do to maintain and build your relationship with each one?

and a bonus question! What is the biggest unsolved relationship problem in your life right now and what are you doing to solve it?

A short post today as I’ve come upon this great site that puts the fun into important issues – check out the video below!

Box of Crayons have several similar videos, including “Find your great work, the movie” and “The 5.75 Questions You’ve Been Avoiding”

The Secret and the Law of Attraction are deserverdly popular – they have focused people’s attention on the important part their beliefs play in their daily lives.

However, there is a missing element in the way in which so many people apply them, and that missing element is effort. Positive thinking and/or beliefs on their own are not enough, otherwise we’d all win the lottery.

To rephrase Einstein, E=MC4; effectiveness = motivation x commitment x concentration x clarity x consistency, where motivation and commitment both include action as well as positive thinking, concentration is focus and clarity is having a clear objective.

We have are many fears that may limit our success; in this two-part article, I will be examining 10 of those that jeopardise way of our health, wealth and happiness..

1. Fear of Failure

Do you hold yourself back from doing what you really want to do because you’re afraid of failing? If so, ask yourself a simple question – how do you know you will fail? If you really feel a calling to do it, whatever ‘it’ might be, then know that you are supported in your efforts, you are not alone.

And anyway, in the unlikely event that things didn’t turn out as you had hoped, what would be the cost of failing? Often it’s just time and perhaps a loss of face – another tip for you:

Reframe ‘Failure’ as feedback and look for the positive

As many people know, Eddison took over 10,000 attempts before successfully inventing the light bulb and saw each ‘failed’ attempt as having discovered one more way that didn’t work. Anthony Robbins went bankrupt before reinventing himself and becoming possibly the most successful inspirational speaker on the planet. Study the biographies of people like Joe Vitale, Richard Branson, Amitabh Bachchan, Pat O’Bryan, Oprah Winfrey and many others; you’ll find that in most cases, they suffered setbacks on the way.

All too often, we fear a loss of control or believe that we have no choices. That’s partly because we see things in a single frame of reference, but by reframing, we re-affirm to ourselves that we have options and choices, that we have some control over our lives.

One of the big differences between successful and unsuccessful people is the ability of the successful to reframe negative situations. While the ‘average’ person looks at the undesirable result as failure, the successful person looks at it simply as an outcome, then tries something else and ultimately produces their desired result.

2. Fear of Success/It takes so much energy to succeed.

Whilst some people are afraid of failure, others are afraid of the success, or of their perception of the price that they will have to pay for their success.

Or they would rather find a short cut that makes it effortless? Either way, they are not prepared to put in the effort required to ensure success. Some are lazy; others have been seduced by the books that suggest that if they utter a few affirmations and believe in the ‘Law of Attraction’, health, wealth and happiness will fall into their laps. There is nothing wrong with the Law of Attraction but somewhere along the way it became over-simplified. You still have to take direct action!

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. The negative aspect is greed, keeping it all for yourself, wanting money for money’s sake. 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

You are wealthy right now! We all have riches, whether family, friends, place of worship, financial wealth, work, organisations we belong to etc. The thing is, only financial wealth pays the bills. You can choose to build your riches, including your financial wealth, or you can undermine yourself with poverty consciousness and believing you are unworthy to have money. It’s up to you! 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 success 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; your perception is your reality, as we will see later. If you continue to believe that it’s ‘Your way or the highway’, then you are right, it won’t work for you; A closed mind closes down its options.