24 Jul Your next step FORWARD?
What is stopping you from getting what you want from life?
What really makes the difference?
What really motivates you?
I will in this article try and address these critical questions via profiling a CHAMPION.
You and I must take full RESPONSIBILITY for producing the results we want.
Your success depends on the product of
- Inherited talent / ability (DNA)
- Your MOTIVATION.
You can’t do anything about your DNA, but you can take more control over your MOTIVATION.
Why do so many people fail so miserably in life?
Its not because they lack opportunity, because there is more opportunity out there today, than even before. While our education system is internationally heralded as being top tier, while on the ground, it often lacks alignment between what is being taught and its application in the workplace. It doesn’t necessarily teach lots of people how to relate to other people, what they are made of what makes them tick, what makes them get out of bed in the morning.
Work on achievement begins with YOU. You must take responsibility for yourself, so that you can start to build your practical little CAPACITY steps, to enable you to move towards your new emerging definition of success as you see it. Success for you is when you are moving towards your own DREAM, rather than trying to live someone else’s DREAM.
Statistically less than 20% of people reach retirement age in good financial, physical, and mental health. The reason for this is that they failed to take RESPONSIBILITY for producing a result and learning how to become a CHAMPION.
To become a champion in your space, you must be excited by the prospect. What do you DREAM of becoming?
If you had the chance of restarting your life’s journey, what would it look like?
You have the choice of staying as you are or breaking out of your comfort zone and optimising your POTENTIAL to be your own CHAMPION.
Remember that in life and in business there is always a PRICE to be paid. There is a price for doing, there is a price for not doing, but it is never neutral. The challenge for you is—which PRICE are you going to pay?
Be careful and don’t be influenced by those who tell you what they are going to do and then do the opposite when they hit some roadblocks.
Profile of a CHAMPION.
Their main characteristic is their red-hot DESIRE. You too have a degree of desire but is it just a WISH rather than being of the red-hot type. DESIRE for champions is PURPOSEFUL. Their purpose is more transparent and bigger than themselves.
If you are only inspired to meet your NEEDS, you will never be prepared to pay the price to drive too far beyond your comfort zone. Needs are logical and logical things don’t compel you to reach beyond your pain threshold. Without this red-hot DESIRE, you are being tentative and anytime you are tentative you have no POWER.
If you get fired up re your desired state, you will be prepared to pay the price and you will no longer be pre-occupied with all the obstacles on your forward journey. When you surrender to your PURPOSE you can drive through the roadblocks, since your purpose is larger than the barriers.
Self Esteem / image.
This is the second trait underpinning champions. This is often the area where people destroy themselves. You mostly formed your self-image during your childhood years. During that period, you were like a sponge. You believed what you were being told.
- If you were told you were a fool or stupid, you eventually thought you were.
- If you were praised for achieving tasks, then you eventually believed you were a winner.
The microenvironment you grew up in has been critical to who you are today. Were you dictated to negatively?
- “Do that and I will kill you”.
- “Get up and wash the cups, you lazy sod”.
- “You couldn’t do that, leave it to Pat”.
Parents often do damage by these types of comments, even though they mean well.
All your BELIEFS play into the building of your self-image, which is either a paradise to foster in, or a prison to restrict your DNA potential.
Your TACTIC here is to forgive those who restricted you and now start taking responsibility for your forward journey. You are not a child now.
The worse tactic to improve your self-image, is to focus about things you will give up. This wouldn’t work. How many of your new years resolutions re things you decide to give up, have you successfully kept?
“That which you resist about you, persist about you”.
The best tactic is to focus on what you want to achieve and build some easy victory steps initially to get you started down that road. Little victories build on each other and start to give you confidence. You are starting now to win the debate in your head and thus willing to pay the price for forward movement towards your VISION.
Building your self-image is not about resisting. It is about starting from where you are today and building some victories /excitement into that new journey.
Objectives /Mind / Emotions.
These represent the bedrock from which you start to build your self-image. You education and micro culture has not prepared you to be objective driven. You were likely reared with the ethos –“If you want to get along, you go along”. In other words, don’t make waves by trying to go an independent route to their predetermined end game for you. It was more comfortable to go along the route influenced by your eco environment. You likely grew up being reactive rather than being proactive. If a bicycle is not peddled forward, it will fall over. Similarly, if you are not peddling forward towards your vision, you too will fall over early on that journey.
Just stand at the corner of your local village / town and observe the people walking past. You will intuitively identify those that are going somewhere versus those just killing time. The body language of those going somewhere will show a spark and a focus. Its natural for us to reach out, so let’s focus on what you are trying to achieve. Once you decide your objective(s), your mind will align automatically with it and help you to get there.
If you don’t know what you want, your mind will fill the vacuum with emotions of uncertainty, anxiety, and confusion. Like a cancer, these negative emotions feed off each other.
What you think, your mind will do its best to make it happen. A famous quotation by Henry Ford summaries this message.
“If you believe you can, or believe you can’t, you are right”.
By controlling your thoughts, you control your actions, which in turn control your outputs, eventually resulting in your size of your bank lodgements.
Emotions.
Baby cries and mum responds, which the baby likes. If you have a particular RESPONSE that you like and you get to know the tactics (behaviours) that triggers it, then you can turn it off and on. We learn how to avoid uncomfortable emotions as we grow up. We often use these uncomfortable emotions as crutches for not doing and achieving things. These emotions include.
- Fear of failure.
- Feeling undeserving.
- Feeling unloved etc.
If you have synchronised these labels to specific emotions, therefore you are the one who must break the links. Take RESPONSIBILITY for who you are today. Understand that you are now what you had planned in the past, either consciously or unconsciously to be. Responsibility is not like BLAME. Blame doesn’t work. Forgive all those you have tended to blame for your situation, take responsibility for yourself. From this new base move forward.
Commitment.
“Commitment is doing the thing you said you were going to do, long after the mood in which you said it has left you”.
Your mind is saying to you—commitment is tough. This is the emotion nonachievers experience when thinking about commitment. Commitment is going out on the limb irrespective to deliver your promise. Incidentally isn’t that where nature puts the best apples, out at the end of the highest branches.
Achievers embrace commitment as they see it as the INVESTMENT, they need to make to achieve their objectives / vision. The dynamic aspect of commitment is taking RESPONSIBILITY to keep your word. You POWER depends on how good you are at doing what you said you were going to do.
” John has a history of reliability”. What that means is that John delivers what he promises. He is a man of his word. Clients like dealing with such persons.
You need to quit dipping your toe around your intentions. You need to jump in and embrace your commitments until you achieve them. Then celebrate your victories. The pig is committed, as he/she must die so you can have bacon for breakfast. The hen just drops her egg and walks on. You must be more like the pig rather than the hen going forward.
Persistence.
Persistence is the dynamic step of your commitment. Don’t think of it as pain and struggle. Successful people hold persistence as the sauce that pulls the dish together. Eat the elephant bit by bit, until its digested.
“I shall persist until I shall succeed”.
A very good recent practical example of this is a 54-year-old sailor names Tim Shaddock, who was rescued two months after he went missing in open ocean on his 30 ft catamaran with only his dog Bella for company. He was a few weeks into the trip when a hurricane hit, stripping the boat of its sail, and destroying its navigation and cooking equipment. He and Bella survived on rainwater and raw fish, until they were eventually rescued by a Mexican tuna fishing boat. At the time they were 1,900 km from shore. He had survival skills he never knew he had. We too have this laten capacity, but we don’t often test it enough, to measure their stretch.
Enthusiasm.
It’s the least expensive and the most beneficial cosmetic in the world. You become enthusiastic if you are turned on about your objective(s). The tactic is to consciously start acting the part and visualise yourself as having achieved your objective. Start to feel and see it. This will pump your adrenaline resulting in a burst of energy / enthusiasm, which will drive you through the roadblocks on your journey towards your objective.
Time.
We all have the same 24 hours per day. The difference between us, is how do we spend this perishable resource. Time is a NOW experience. You can’t store it up for later. People often straddle time, with one foot in the past reliving all the horrible things that happened to you and one foot into tomorrow worrying about what it might hold. When you wakeup tomorrow, what you have is another NOW. Take each moment now as if it was your last but knowing that it is the beginning always. It is a wise use of time to be going towards something new. Relaxation is a useful use of your time, provided you have earned it.
To succeed you must get below the surface and sort out your emotions. Take responsibility for them and redefine them so that your self esteem is improved and built on.
Managing this change is only possible if its objective driven.
Blaise Brosnan ©