Master Your Fears
Posted by davev in Take Action on February 15th, 2010
By Brian Tracy
Perhaps the greatest challenge you will ever face in life is the conquest of fear and the development of courage. Fear is, and always has been, the greatest enemy of mankind. When Franklin D. Roosevelt said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was saying that the emotion of fear, rather than the realty of what we fear, is what causes us anxiety, stress, and unhappiness. When you develop the habit of courage and unshakeable self-confidence, a whole new world of possibilities opens up for you. Just imagine-what would you dare to dream or be or do if you weren’t afraid of anything in the whole world?
Develop the Habit of Courage
Fortunately, the habit of courage can be learned just as any other habit is learned, through repetition. We need to constantly face and overcome our fears to build up the kind of courage that will enable us to deal with the inevitable ups and downs of life unafraid. The starting point in overcoming fear and developing courage is to look at the factors that predispose us toward being afraid. The root source of most fear is childhood conditioning, usually associated with destructive criticism. This causes us to develop two major types of fear. These are the fear of failure, which causes us to think “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and the fear of rejection, which causes us to think “I have to, I have to, I have to.” Our fears can paralyze us, keeping us from taking constructive action in the direction of our dreams and goals.
The More You Know, the Less You Fear
Fear is also caused by ignorance. When we have limited information, our doubts dominate us. We become tense and insecure about the outcome of our actions. Ignorance causes us to fear change, to fear the unknown, and to avoid trying anything new or different. But the reverse is also true. The very act of gathering more and better information about a particular subject increases our courage and confidence in that area. You can see this in the parts of your life where you have no fear at all because you know what you are doing. You feel competent and completely capable of handling whatever happens.
Analyze Your Fears
Once you have identified the major factors that cause you to feel afraid, the next step is to objectively define and analyze your personal fears. At the top of a clean sheet of paper, write, “What am I afraid of?” Remember, all intelligent people are afraid of something. It is normal and natural to be concerned about your physical, emotional, and financial safety and that of the people you care about. A courageous person is not a person who is unafraid. As Mark Twain said, “Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear—not absence of fear.”
Action Exercise
Begin your list of fears by writing down everything, major and minor, that causes fear, stress, or anxiety. Think about the parts of your work or personal life where your fears might be holding you back or forcing you to stay in a job or relationship in which you are not happy. Once you have written down your fears, arrange them in order of importance, and then pick them apart one by one.
What Turkeys Know About Marketing?
Posted by davev in Take Action on December 22nd, 2009
Will you sit down for Thanksgiving dinner eager to dig in to a feast of tasty turkey, succulent sweet potatoes, green beans, gravy, cranberry relish, fresh rolls and an array of apple and pumpkin pies?
In our house, the cooking begins the day before. Homemade pumpkin and pecan pies start popping out of the oven - but we can’t eat them yet. Early Thanksgiving morning, the big bird gets washed and stuffed and hefted into the oven. Then the work of preparing all the side dishes commences.
Walk into our house on Thanksgiving day, and you’ll be greeted by delectable smells. I’m sure most of your homes are the same.
By noon, the roasting turkey smells delicious, and you’re making frequent trips through the kitchen hoping to sneak a bite. You’re ready to eat, but if your family is like ours, you don’t sit down for the Thanksgiving meal until mid- or even late afternoon. By that time you’re very hungry.
Do you need to be sold on the idea of digging into this delicious meal?
Of course not. When you’re hungry and someone offers you something to eat you don’t need to be convinced. The hungrier you are, the more impatient you are for a meal and the better the food tastes.
Wouldn’t you like to be in a similar situation with your business? How would you like to have prospects so eager to buy that you didn’t have to sell and could focus instead on taking more orders?
If you’re like most business owners, marketers and sales people, you want to increase sales, but you don’t want to be so pushy that you turn people off. The problem is that you aren’t selling a delicious Thanksgiving dinner to family and friends. What can you do to increase the success of your marketing?
Focus Your Marketing On Your Prospects’ Hunger.
Food, family and friends are what motivate most of us to sit down to Thanksgiving dinner. What are your prospects hungry for? You need to know in order to attract them to contact you and motivate them to buy.
Are they looking to eliminate wrinkles in their skin, get rid of back pain, avoid costly data loss, increase sales from their web site, increase repeat sales, look younger, make more money in a volatile stock market, or save on taxes?
Everybody is hungry for something and their hunger prompts them to take action. The hungrier they are, the more likely they are to take action.
Make a list of the five top reasons your prospects seek out your products and services. Next, list the reasons that it’s important or urgent for them to buy from you right away. Then use this information to focus your marketing.
Help Your Prospects Get What They Want.
When you sit down for your Thanksgiving dinner and someone asks you if you want turkey, rolls or cranberry relish, you don’t feel like they are trying to sell you. You’re pleased that they’re helping you get what you want - delicious food.
Your prospects don’t want to be sold, either. They want help solving a problem or satisfying a need. The fastest way to get them to buy is to stop trying to sell them and help them get what they want.
Picture this: before you get your fork anywhere near a plate of your Thanksgiving favorites, the cook insists on telling you where he or she bought the turkey, what it had been fed, where it was raised, how it was roasted, etc., etc. You’d probably never eat another bite of the big bird.
Instead, imagine what your reaction would be if the chef of the day simply asked you what you want to eat, and helped you get another serving of your favorite dish.
In your ads, your marketing brochure, your web site and your sales conversations, tap your prospects’ hunger for solutions to their needs. Speak to their concerns, problems and goals. When you communicate to prospects in terms of their hunger, you’ll get their attention and their business.
What do turkeys know about marketing?
Nothing, obviously. Turkeys’ brains are said to be about the size of a walnut and they have fewer brain cells than a cockroach. But they sure taste good when you’re hungry.
Eating the Elephant
Posted by davev in Start Thinking, Take Action on December 7th, 2009
By Brian Tracy
You have heard the question, “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is, “one bite at a time.” This metaphor applies to achieving any big goal, as well. How do you achieve a huge goal? You accomplish it one step, one task, one measure at a time.
Identify Your Most Valuable Task
Ask your boss, “What one thing do I do that is more valuable than anything else?” Whatever his or her answer, look for ways to perform more and more of that task and to get better and better at doing it. It is absolutely amazing how much you can accomplish if you break your tasks down into bite-sized pieces, set deadlines, and then do one piece at a time, every single day.
Continuous and Never Ending Improvement
If you want to increase your hourly rate and your income, look for ways to get a little bit better at the most important tasks you do, every single day. Read one hour per day in your field. Listen to audio programs on your way to and from work. Take additional courses whenever you can. These activities will propel your entire career onto the fast track. When you invest an extra one or two hours per day in self-improvement, the cumulative effect on your greater ability to get results can be extraordinary.
Save Your Pennies and the Dollars Will Save Themselves
If you want to become wealthy, begin to question every single expense. Set a goal to save $3, $5, or $10 per day. Put this money away in a savings account and never touch it. As it grows, invest it carefully in well-chosen mutual funds or index funds. Make daily, weekly, and monthly saving and investment into a habit, and keep it up for the rest of your working life.
Become a Learned Person
If you read fifteen minutes each evening, rather than watching television, you will complete about fifteen books per year. If you read the classics of English literature for fifteen minutes each day, in seven years you will have read one hundred of the greatest books ever written. You will be one of the best-educated and most erudite people of your generation. And you can achieve this just by reading fifteen minutes each evening before you go to bed.
Increase Your Income
If you are in sales and you want to increase your income, keep careful track of how many calls, how many presentations, how many proposals, and how many sales you are making each day, each week, and each month. Then set a goal to increase your number of calls, presentations, and proposals per day. Set a goal to increase your number of sales each week and each month. Every day, measure yourself against your own standards.
If You Measure It, You Can Manage It
In each area of your life, analyze your activities carefully and select a specific number that, more than anything else, determines your level of success in that area. Then focus all of your attention, all day long, on that specific number. The very act of focused attention will cause you to perform better in that area, both consciously and unconsciously.
Action Exercise
Set a minimum, specific amount for daily, weekly, monthly saving and investment, discipline yourself to put away those amounts.
The revolution begins now!
Posted by davev in Start Growing Rich, Take Action on December 3rd, 2009
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Dave V.
Take Those Rocks Out of Your Head!
Posted by davev in Start Thinking on December 2nd, 2009
Your thoughts can no more tell you what is true about your possibilities
than can a set of stream-side boulders know the nature of the waters
that rush by them.
The Secret of Knowing Without Thinking
Imagine for a moment what your life might be like if you never again were to pick up a complaining thought or feeling. Think of how your days would flow without carrying the additional weight of those inner voices always telling you, “I’m too tired,” or “This is too much for me!” The weight of the world would be replaced by a new sense of freedom. Fresh, new energies would flow.
If this is the kind of inwardly carefree life you really want, then look closely into these next two ideas that together tell one story of freedom: leaving troubled thoughts right where you find them is the same as not picking up what troubles you. And if you can leave just one of these weary thoughts behind you, then you can leave two, and three, and four, and fifty!
Most people tend to worry that if they don’t worry, something bad will happen to them. But what they don’t see is that these worried thoughts they’ve picked up by mistake are the very storm they fear will come!
You may wonder, “But what happens if I make a mistake? How can you tell which thoughts and feelings are the right ones to leave where you find them, and which ones do you pick up? What if I choose wrong?” You needn’t worry about such questions. Here’s why.
There’s a way to know, without ever having to think about it, exactly which of your own thoughts and feelings are your friends, and which are foes — a totally thought-free way to understand which of your thoughts are practical and necessary for everyday life, and which are stealing your life with unsuspected self-compromise. It’s true. You possess unsuspected powers of perception just waiting to be awakened. The following technique will help you get started.
Stop reading this for a minute and allow your eyes to fall on something familiar in the space where you are. Notice how your mind immediately gives that object a name. Having done this part of the exercise, keep your attention on whatever you’ve selected, and then continue to watch how more thoughts come into your mind about what you’re seeing.
Now, while you’re witnessing both that object and your growing stream of associative thoughts and feelings about it, just drop these thoughts and feelings.
You can still see the object, and you still know what it is — but now you are knowing without thinking. This is your introduction to an unconditioned relationship with life.
In this form of higher attention, of knowing without thinking, you can see that the meaning of the object before you has not changed. The difference is that now its meaning speaks directly, silently to you — instead of you listening to your thoughts tell you about its meaning.
When it comes to seeing a chair or a pencil, this new kind of thought-free state may not seem too profound. But this practice can, and should, be enlarged to encompass your whole life.
The benefits behind the ability to understand something, or someone, without having to go into thought, cannot be over estimated. You may not be able to think your way out of a nagging problem, but you can see your way clear of it. This special kind of inner seeing is safety. Waking up to yourself is the same as letting go of all those self-defeating thoughts and feelings that have been telling you how to win.
