Hope you enjoy them

9 Personal development posts to enlighten your mind

Want to Fail? Just repeat these 3 phrases daily - LifeDev.com

Forgive an accident - The Happiness Project

Take back your personal power part 1 - Craig Harper writing for Lifehack

Create a profitable online store in 5 easy steps - MyWifeQuitHerJob.com

System Overload - Edragonu.ro

How to build a high traffic blog without killing yourself - Tim Ferris

Work-Love-Sing-Dance - Quantum Learning

Ghost in the machine - MindHacks.com

How to become more successful - StevePavlina.com

Success is a favorable or desirable outcome, the attainment of wealth or favor, as defined Webster’s Dictionary.  Success is different for everyone, but it is definitely not an easy thing to accomplish, otherwise, everyone would do what it takes for success.

Success is a feeling and can be created and recreated again and again.  Here are some tips to create success in your life:

Tip #1:  Enjoy and celebrate each moment on the way to success. Success doesn’t have to be associated with wealth attainment.  In fact, most people have achieved a level of success in some part of their lives, achieving a “desirable outcome.”  Reminisce the feeling associated with your success achievement.  You must have been very happy, inspired to achieve more, and desired to repeat your success.  You may have thought that it wasn’t really that difficult to achieve success or maybe it was the hardest thing you did, enjoying in the feeling of accomplishment.  As you reach for your next goal, focus on progress only, rewarding yourself every small step of the way.  Each daily accomplishment is a small success story on the way to the bigger success story.

Tip #2:  Keep the end in mind, always. If you have been striving for success in an area of your life, wealth or other, and are not reaching success, you might have lost sight of the end goal.  You might have given up because it was too hard, too much work, or maybe you think that you don’t deserve your goal in the first place.  Maybe someone convinced you that you can’t do what you set out to do and you folded and listened to them.  You may think that you don’t know enough to be successful.  If you focus on the end result as you defined success, you will keep striving for it and no one, not even you, will convince you otherwise.

Tip #3:  Create, evaluate, and recreate. Life is about recreating yourself.  If something doesn’t work, rather than fold, find a way to recreate.  Troubleshoot or recreating is very similar.  You create, evaluate and then refine.  Keep up this pattern, with rewards for each step of the way on your path to success.

Tip #4: Success can be for anyone. Get out of your head that the successful are gifted or that they were handed their success on a silver platter.  If that were the case, they really haven’t achieved success.  Success takes work, perseverance, and determination.  It doesn’t matter your education, height, knowledge or other factors.  It can be for anyone that wants it bad enough.

Tip #5:  Success is all about mindset. Know that you can, and you will achieve your goal.  Visualize your goal, and you will be even closer.  You will remain on the path and you will achieve your success.  Be positive and remain on the path to success!

When you see “If Success was Easy, Everyone Would do it,” you may think that it’s too hard to achieve and you might just give up.  Follow every tip given here, focus on your end result and you will enjoy success!

Top 10 personal development posts of this week

Top 10 thinking traps exposed - LiteMind.com - If you’ve never visited this blog before you should get over there as soon as possible. Luciano Passuello has been writing for some time and some of his articles just hit the spot. This is one of them about the thinking traps we put ourselves in, very insightful indeed.

Dealing with Energy Vampires - CelstineChua.com
- I find it difficult dealing with people who drain my energy and try and avoid them. Celstine Chua gives a bit of advice for dealing with people who drain your energy. This is a great blog which has only been going around 6 months or so.

How much of life are you actually living - PluginID - A blog run by Glenn Allsop with some great articles on living the dream. This particular article is about finding happiness by living in the now, it also has a great example and story of a zen buddhist.

How to succeed in life as a late bloomer - Wikihow.com - This is not from the last week however I first spotted it this week. Wikihow has some great articles and I thought this was a great one for people on the verge of change.

What is management and what do managers do? - GreatManagement.com - I am not usually a reader of management articles however Andrew Rondeau is someone I’ve followed for a while and his writing is well wroth reading. Ever wondered what managers do - Andrew will tell you.

Who needs approval - AdvancedLifeSkills - Another well written article from Jonathan Wells and a great conversation by way of comments at the end of the post. The thing about this article is that Jonathan gave an explanation as to why we week approval and it’s not why you might think, very thought provoking.

How to silence the mind - DrJenniferHoward - Only found this blog by accident and read this article and thought it was simple yet effective.

5 Reasons why Billy Mays is annoyingly persuasive - Persuasive.net - This is another great blog you might not have heard of run ny A J Kumar about persuasion techniques. This article is about Billy Mays a character promoting products on TV and why his style of advertising works. I thought this was interesting from both a business a psychological perspective.

Healthy relationship tips - DreamLifeCoaching - A Cody Butler blog which is worth a visit. This article has some good tips on keeping your relationships alive.

I don’t care about Michael Jackson - ADaringAdventure - Not what you might think it is about. This post by Tim Brownson echoed my own thoughts exactly which is why I have included it here and also the fact that Tim has a brilliant blog worth visiting every few days.

I hope you enjoyed this week Sunday Siesta. If you have any suggestions for next weeks Sunday Siesta please get in touch or leave a comment below.

What is this person teaching me about myself?

I am intolerant of negative people - wow!, what a revelation (sarcastic tone there) , how is this relevant? Well, I do counselling work  for a living and being intolerant of certain types of people is not a good thing and that will come across to the person who is talking to me.

What am I teaching them about themselves?

If someone who has a dark outlook on life is talking to me and I am giving them vibes that I don’t like talking to them this is going to re-enforce their belief about themselves that nobody likes them, the world is a dark place etc etc.

What I did to change

I looked at the person in a different light.  That person was there to teach me patience, to teach me tolerance and I had to remind myself of that.  I was there to ask him a simple question ‘Why is your world so dark?’

This is exactly the question I asked him and he was taken aback when I asked that.  He didn’t really think he had a dark outlook on life and it was a bit of a revelation to him as well.  We spoke about it for a while and by asking that simple question he was able to change almost instantly as his perception of his world had changed.  The next few sessions revealed that he had changed the way he looked at life and constantly asked himself what he would do if he was a positive person, obviously there were still dark moments but he was much more able to cope with them.

Everyone is a teacher

This was a great lesson for me and it’s one of those moments that changed a certain aspect of me for a lifetime.  It’s those moments that make us grow as people and we can’t change overnight but we can have lots of a-ha moments which help to shape our lives.

What is someone trying to teach you?

I intended on writing a piece on them each but I am being whisked away as I type to a surprise fathers day meal by my wife and two sons. So for this week I will just send you the top 10 posts I have read this week.

Hope you enjoy them

Sunday Siesta - Relax and learn

In my Fathers Arms - Happy Fathers Day: BunnyGotBlog

Stop being the victim - The Rate Race Trap

Waking up early - Edragonu

The Golden rule is wrong guest post by Robin Kriglestein - A Daring Adventure

Everyone’s in a hurry - Quantum Learning

Tim Ferris & Kevin Rose discuss their top 5 must reads - Tim Ferris Blog

The 5 dimensions of knowledge - Advanced Life Skills

5 Ways to boost your work performance outside the office - DumbLittleMan

How to escape the toxic friends holding you back - Scott H Young

10 Business lessons learned - SmallBizBee

Is money the root of all evil?

We have been programmed to believe that the pursuit of money is bad and it’s not good for the soul.  This is without doubt one of the biggest lies we have been told as children, that and Santa Claus (I was gutted when I was told that Santa was a lie and I was 23 imagine how children feel!)

You’ve more than likely heard these sayings in your life:

• ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees you know’
• ‘We can’t afford it’
• ‘Money can’t buy you happiness’
• ‘The rich get richer and the poor get poorer’
• ‘To make more money you have to work harder’
• ‘Money is the root of all evil’

Until you rid yourself of the guilt of trying to better yourself financially you can’t begin to create more money into your life.  We’ll speak about four steps to creating more money in your life a bit later but for now I’d like to speak about the difference between greed and making more money.

Greed and money

Thinking of some of my heroes I used to think why would they try and make more money when they obviously don’t need it.  I am thinking of people like Richard Branson, James Dyson, Warren Buffet and Tony Robbins to name but a few.  However when reading their biographies, watching and listening to them on interviews it is clear their goal is not to make more money but to feel alive by building on their brand and their customer loyalty, with the possible exception of Warren Buffet who is an investment genius.  So their goal is not to make more money it is a by-product of their goal of achieving more in their life.  They are also philanthropists and they give back a hell of a lot to the world in the form of donations, settings up schools, giving knowledge and time to the younger generation.  This is not greed it’s a desire to reach their potential, which is what Abraham Maslow speaks about in his ‘hierarchy of needs’ theory.

Greed is a different animal altogether.  Greed is defined in the ‘New Oxford English Dictionary’ as: ‘Intense and selfish desire for something, especially wealth, power or food.’ If your goal is to create more money into your life simply for your own selfish needs then life will be empty after a while.  Giving back something to the world in the form of money, knowledge, education, and time is something everyone should strive for, I believe.

Four steps to creating more money in your life

I have learned these lessons the hard way and it has taken me over twenty years to finally be able to understand them, from the beginnings of selling sweets in the playground to where I am now.  I still want to make more money and be financially able to do whatever I want but I am closer to my goal than when I first started out.

Step one - Blasting through your limiting beliefs

As I said in the beginning of this post we have been programmed to believe the pursuit of money and wealth is not good.  Get rid of this thought as quickly as you can for it will hinder you from making progress in your life’s goal to create more money in your life.  Money is the pathway to freedom for yourself and for others in your life.  You will have the ability to help more people by being wealthy than you will be by being poor.  Think of this for a moment:

More money in your life will mean you will buy more, when you buy more it means small and large businesses can stay in business, when they stay in business it means the banks can lend more money to them to expand therefore keeping the banks in business, when the banks are healthy financially it means they can lend more to people for loans and mortgages, when mortgages are purchased it means house builders are thriving, when house builders thrive it means more choice for house buyers and more social housing stock, when there is more social housing stock it means people getting out of poverty and bad housing conditions…………………….this could go on and on.

Look at the situation just now and what has happened to the whole economy because the banks have made poor decisions.  However we as a nation are perpetuating the situation by not spending the way we used to and if we are really honest our situation has not really changed we still earn the same monthly income, the price of food is the same, the price of clothes has gone down, the price of cars has gone down so we should be spending the same to keep the economy afloat.  However because a global financial crisis is great news for newspapers they print their horror stories and suddenly people have stopped spending, small businesses are going bust, house builders have stopped building and banks have stopped lending.  Do you think if the ‘Global Crisis’ was never reported on TV, on the internet or in newspapers we would be in this situation right now, I definitely believe we wouldn’t.  Yes this is an overly simplistic view of how the economy works but believe me when I say there are people out there making millions because the herd have listened to the media.

You were born to reach your full potential and that certainly does not mean living in poverty and scrimping and saving to get by in life.  There is enough money in the world for everyone to thrive and that includes you.  It’s time to open up your mind to the possibilities of making more money.

Step 2 - Creating your future

You can’t row your own boat until you know your destination.    You can certainly row someone else’s boat and that is what most of us do in life.  We go to school, leave and then go to university, leave and then row someone else’s boat by working for them, then we jump off the boat after 45 years service and retire when it’s almost too late to really enjoy life.  That’s not a life it’s an existence.

Rowing your own boat means controlling your own life.  yes it also means taking more risks and failing more but you will learn a hell of a lot about the world works and how you work and how to better yourself.  To do this you have to know what you want to do with your life, you need dreams to follow, you need a vision to hold and passion to drive you.

Start small, think big and build yourself up from there.  What do you want in life?

Now you know what you want you need to know how you get it.

Step 3 - Help someone create their dream

Yours dreams are undoubtedly different from mine however the key to making more money in your life is to help people realise their dreams.  What I mean by this is create something or pass on knowledge which will help someone else realise their dream.  Now, the dream the other person has might not be huge but if you help them and they are willing to pay for it then you have helped yourself and someone else at the same time.  When one person has a dream there are some others who have the same dream.

A fantastic example of this is someone who is selling an ebook right now, you can check it out on Google, called ‘How to build your own chicken coop‘.  You might think this is a crazy idea, but the owner of the ebook thought ‘If I wanted to know how to build a chicken coup, there must be others too’.  And now there are hundreds of happy people who had a tiny dream to build their own chicken coop and found someone willing to impart their knowledge for a small fee.  This book is doing great and making the owner a lot of money.

So you see, people have all different kinds of dreams big and small and if you can help people realise their dreams, big or small you can help yourself create more money in your life and help people around the world.

Step 4 - Once you’ve made it it’s time to share it

I am nowhere near this stage yet but it is my ultimate goal that when I have become wealthy enough to have anything I want in life I will share my successes and teach people how they can emulate my success.  And I will do this freely to people who have not made it yet and charge for it to businesses who are in the latter stages of step 3.  This way the knowledge is always going round and being shared and I cannot think of a better way to enrich the world than by sharing knowledge on how to better create more money in people’s lives.

I was supposed to get my telephone number changed with BT as I wanted on old number back and instead of changing the number they decided to cut my line off instead which cut BT broadband off and Cut off the BT Vision off as well.  So I called customer service, quite angry, and after being passed around 5 different departments  was advised that the line had been cut off, duh!.

When I asked what they were going to do about it, they advised they would get me back on in 7 days time.  By this time I was fuming so I asked to speak to a manager and got a  Miss R Nelson who apologised and all that and promised me my line would be on within a day but the broadband was going to be 1 week.  Again I complained.  Miss Nelson advised she would call me within a few hours.  5 hours later and I received a call from a customer service advisor saying miss Nelson was away for the day and advised me she could not put the order through that day as there was some kind of problem.  I was then promised a call back in the morning which did not come until the afternoon and was told the Broadband would be going on for the 17th June.

I waited another day for the line to go on and nothing.  So I called and spoke to someone from India who advised me the line would be activated on the 17th, I advised I was told that the line would be activated on the 10th June and wished to make another complaint to the telecoms body and wanted the telephone number I was then given a telephone number of 0800 800152 which I know to be the business department and certainly not complaints, when I queried this the girl from India assured me that this was the number for complaints and then promptly hung up on me.

BT, if you monitor the net to find out what people are saying about you then I have this to say:

“Your treatment of your customers is an absolute disgrace and I am appalled at the customer service I have been given over the last 10 days.  Instead of laying off 10,000 employees I suggest you get back to basics and make customer service a priority where people actually own the call and we do not get the ‘BT Shuffle’.

You have a fantastic product in BT vision, your Broadband is a mess with your capping of download rates, your phone lines are always reliable, but please invest in your own people and give customers what they want and need from you or your share price and your place in the market will disappear fast.”

“What is this place?” asked the human

“Your life!” replied the devil smiling excitedly “Your life, and all it’s darkest moments filled with regret, sadness and despair.”  The devil led the human to one of the doors and motioned for the human to open the door.

Tentatively the human slowly opened the door and peaked at what lay beyond it.  His mouth opened wide at the sight before him.

He saw himself  in a beautiful house laughing and fooling around with his children and his wife looking at them in the background  content and happy.  There was his dream car sitting in the driveway, a dog barking excitedly running around and chasing birds on the lawn and neighbours mulling around doing their gardens.  The human looked at the devil:

“What is this, I split up from my wife years ago?”

“Yes you did!” the devil replied, laughing and almost skipping to the next door.  “Look in this one, look in this one.”

The human, puzzled, opened another black door.  Again his mouth fell open.  He saw himself again sunning himself on the deck of a boat with his family and friends around him enjoying time together.  His son sat at one end of the boat fishing whilst his other son was sitting next to him reading a book.  He closed the door with a heavy heart.

“I don’t understand” the human said looking into the eyes of the devil.

“Ah, most people don’t.  I love it, I love it!” the devil could barely contain himself.  “Try another one.”

The human opened another door and saw himself working in some kind of workshop speaking to some other people he did not know.  He looked around and saw a sign which read ‘DreamHomes’.  The human gasped, this was the business he had always dreamt of starting up and didn’t follow through with it.  It had been a pipedream to him and although his wife had encouraged him to go for it he never got round to it, instead electing to work for another building company with long hours and low pay.  It started to dawn on the human, this was his dream life he was looking at, all the doors contained elements of his dream life.

“Why?” was all the human could ask.

“Why show you this? because this is all mine, for every dream you didn’t act on, I stole it and started living it.  I live millions of dreams and it’s wonderful, wonderful, wonderful.” The devil was almost skipping with joy. “You human’s haven’t a clue.  You are put on earth to live for around 70 years, you go to school for 20 of those years, work for 45 of those years and suffer for around five of those years until you eventually die.  Yeah, you have a few enlightening moments and you follow a few dreams, which annoys the hell out of me, but on the whole you are all pretty much the same.  It’s wonderful, I get to live out all these dreams.”

The human, saddened by the devils words, kept walking and came to a white door.  The devil stopped smiling and looked at the human.  “That’s your door.” he said, “this is where you live.” The human opened the door and saw himself working on a building site, he was high up on some scaffolding just staring out into the sunset and at that moment he was catapulted back to the building site, no devil, no road, just himself watching the sunset.  He looked at his watch, a few hours to go and he had to rush back to phone his son to ask him how his gig at the club went, his son had been playing in a band for a while and they were starting to get noticed.  At that moment, he decided he was going to go to the club to see his son live instead of asking about it.  He climbed down the scaffolding,  walked to the site office, took off his hardhat and bid goodnight to the foreman.

29 Ways to increase your feeling of self worth

Doing It Right

Now you know what to do and you’re doing it. You’re past learning, you enjoy having, using and promoting your construction. The maturity period is the most rewarding age from an entrepreneur standpoint. You’re in the middle of something but you can also control it and observe it from the outside. You can’t be wrong.

Whenever your cash-flow is steadily positive for more than 2 years, you can bet you’re in a maturity period. Steady pool of clients and loyal employees are also a sign of a business maturity. If you stared the business with outside financing, this is usually the time when you’re able to pay your debt and make break even.

Past partnerships are running smoothly because they were verified in the attention period. Your products or services are solid and you make a lot of recurring sales. Your clients knows you and you don’t need to convince them to buy from you anymore, they’re just buying. Your role is mostly to observe and adjust.

What To Avoid

Although you reached a more than stable point, there are still some thins you can do wrong in your maturity period. Here’s what I find out it’s better to avoid:

Relaxation

This is the biggest trap in the maturity period. Being successful doesn’t necessarily mean you DID IT. One of the secrets of successful entrepreneurs is that they never think they did it. Success is just a temporary station on the road to the next one. Nevertheless, the relaxation temptation will be very strong. After the first 3 periods of very high involvement, all you have to do now is to observe and adjust. Just don’t relax too much otherwise you’ll miss some important details and you won’t make the necessary adjustments.

Partnerships

This must confuse some of you. In the maturity period, I avoided all kind of partnerships. All my successful partnerships were done in the attention phase. But in the maturity period, although I received almost weekly a new partnership proposal, I avoided it constantly. At some level, I was just postponing the most important ones to the next stage, the expansion. And at the other level, I was trying to avoid some brand dissolution. If you’re known in your market, the best way to still be remembered is to just remain the same.

Expansion

Just because you can predict your processes and profit of your company doesn’t mean you’re ready to expand. In my experience, expansion was a constant temptation, during all stages, but was much more present when I experienced a moderated success. Expansions means partnerships and the same reason for avoiding partnerships was applied to expansion: keeping a strong market image. Also, expansion works much better if you have at least 3 years fo constant growth behind.

What To Do

As always, each business stage is better suited for specific activities. Here’s something I successfully did during the maturity stage.

Invest

Don’t be afraid to put your money where your business is. Invest constantly in your processes, in your employees, in your products. Your positive cash-flow will be able to sustain short and medium term investments. Depending on your business type you will want to invest in materials, stocks or people. I had a business in services so most of the investment was done in people. I started to add consistent incentives to increase performance and started a team building program. And of course, I started to invest in me, by attending several courses and starting an MBA. Didn’t finish the MBA, but it was a nice experience.

Enjoy

It’s your right! You’re successful, enjoy it. I met a lot of entrepreneurs in the maturity stage of their business with quite a sad attitude. Although they had a successful business they were constantly worrying. Most of them lost their businesses shortly after the maturity period. I do think a balanced and happy attitude is one of the keys to constant success. There is no better stage to really enjoy the benefits of your work than the maturity period. As long as enjoying is not equal relaxation, you’ll be fine.

Prepare

During this relatively stable period it will also be very good to start preparing for the next challenges. Maturity is usually followed by expansion, one of the most demanding and risky periods in your business. Approaching it in a good shape will be one clever move. Preparing means observing your market, identifying other key players, assessing new products and markets, hunting for new employees. All that will be needed in the next stage. Preparing also ,means observing your cash-flow and making provisions for your next fights. Last, but not least, prepare means just getting ready to run again.

From Maturity To Expansion

If you made it till maturity, you’ve already accomplished a lot. But you’re not even by far at the end of race. You’re heading towards expansion. The next phase will be demanding and you better get ready for it. I remember that, when I was in the maturity stage, I had no idea that I’m facing expansion, so I made one of the mistakes I told you to avoid: I relaxed too much. When I had to face the decision: grow or die, it was like hitting a train. Well, I survived.

The maturity period lasted about 3 years for me (from a total time frame of 10 years of having a business from the first stage to the last one). It was the only period where I enjoyed a positive cash-flow and also it was the most fulfilling one. If I would start a business again - which is not at all improbable - I would do my best to start it directly into the maturity stage.
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You can find the remaining 6 ages of your business on these fine personal development and business blogs: