Tapping Your Superconscious Mind

You have available to you, right now, a power like a supercomputer that can enable you to solve any problem, overcome any obstacle and achieve any goal you can set for yourself.

This power has been used throughout history to take people from rags to riches, from poverty and obscurity to success and fame, from unhappiness and frustration to joy and self-fulfillment. And it can do the same for you.

This power has been called many things by many people in many places. It is the fundamental principle of most religions, philosophies and metaphysical teachings. It underlies much of psychology and is the cornerstone of all success and achievement. In its simplest terms, it is called the “subconscious mind,” although this is a misunderstanding because the true subconscious mind is merely a memory bank of senses and impressions that reacts automatically based on your previous experiences.

It has also been called the “universal subconscious mind” and the “collective unconscious.” The great Austrian psychoanalyst, Carl Jung, referred to this as the “superconscious mind.” He felt that the collective wisdom and knowledge of all the ages was contained in this superconscious mind and was available to everyone.

Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to it as the “oversoul” and wrote that, “We live in the lap of an immense intelligence that, when we are in its presence, we realize that it is far beyond our human mind.” Emerson, the great American transcendentalist, felt that all power and possibility for the average person came from using this mind on a regular basis.

Napoleon Hill, perhaps the greatest researcher on success of the 20th century, called this power the “infinite intelligence.” After spending more than 20 years interviewing 500 of the most successful men and women alive in America at that time, he concluded that, without exception, their ability to tap into this higher form of infinite intelligence was the primary reason for their great success in life.

Whatever you choose to call it, this power is as available to you at this very minute as it ever has been to anyone, anywhere. I refer to it as the “superconscious mind,” the mind that is above and outside all other minds or intelligences.

The superconscious mind is the source of all examples of pure creativity. It is the superconscious mind that is functioning at the creation of anything that is completely new in the universe. The superconscious mind was tapped into and used by all the great inventors, writers, artists and composers of history on a regular basis, right up to the present day. Every great work of art or creativity is infused with superconscious energy.

Thomas Edison used his superconscious mind regularly to come up with hundreds of brand new ideas and inventions, more than 1,000 of which completely transformed America at the beginning of the 20th century. More recently, William Gates came up with an idea for a basic operating system for the early computers, which he called “MS-DOS.” It was so unique and revolutionary that he and Paul Allen were actually writing the program on the airplane as they flew to their meeting with their first customer. Today, Bill Gates is the world’s richest man, and it all came from a superconscious flash of insight. Bach, Beethoven and Brahms tapped into the superconscious mind regularly to write some of the finest music ever heard. Mozart was so finely tuned into his superconscious mind that he could both see and hear the music in his head and was then able to write down some of the most beautiful music of the ages, note perfect, the very first time he put pen to paper.

Whenever you see, read, listen to, or experience a great achievement of any kind that touches something deep inside you, you are witness to a superconscious creation.

Your superconscious mind can access every piece of information stored in your conscious and subconscious minds. It can also access data and ideas outside your own experience, because it actually lies outside your human mind. This is why it is called a form of universal or infinite intelligence.

You will often get ideas that come to you from far beyond you. It is not unusual for two people separated by thousands of miles of distance to come up with the same idea at the same time. When you are well-attuned to another person, such as your spouse or mate, you will often have thoughts identical to him or her at the same time during the day, and you will only find out that you had reached the same conclusion when you compare notes hours later. This is an example of your superconscious mind at work.

Sometimes when you are with other positive, goal-oriented people, your combined superconscious minds will form a higher mind that you can all tap into. This is why, when you are involved in a conversation or listening to a lecture, ideas and inspirations will often leap into your mind that have no direct connection to what is being discussed. But those ideas and inspirations may be exactly what you need at that moment to move you forward on your journey. Your superconscious mind is capable of goal-oriented motivation. When you are working determinedly toward a goal of your own choosing, your superconscious mind will generate a continuous flow of ideas and energy to help you move onward. In fact, your superconscious mind is a form of “free energy.” This free energy becomes available to you when you become excited or inspired about achieving something that is really important to you. You seem to be able to continue hour after hour without fatigue. Sometimes you even forget to eat, and you need far less sleep than you would normally. After you have achieved your goal, you may collapse in exhaustion, but while you are moving toward it, you seem to be flowing with continuous energy and enthusiasm. Your superconscious mind automatically and continually solves every problem on the way to your goal, as long as your goal is clear. Your superconscious mind will also give you the lessons and experiences that you need to succeed, in the form of setbacks, problems, frustrations and temporary failures.

Your superconscious mind will also bring you the exact answer you require to solve your problem or achieve your goal, exactly when you are ready for it. When your superconscious mind gives you a hunch or an inspiration, remember, this is time-dated material. You must act on it immediately.

I’ve had many experiences of wrestling with a problem that I have been unable to resolve until the last minute. Then, right when I need it, the answer becomes perfectly clear. This will happen to you as well when you use the power of your superconscious mind.

The critical factor in using your superconscious mind is your attitude. Your superconscious mind functions best with an attitude of calm, confident expectations. When you adopt an attitude of faith and acceptance, when you confidently accept and believe that everything that is happening to you is moving you progressively toward the achievement of your goal, your superconscious mind seems to come alive, like all the lights have been turned on in a room. This is why successful people seem to have tremendous clarity concerning what they want, along with tremendous calmness and confidence regarding their ability to achieve it. This combination of attitudes will throw the power switch on your superconscious abilities.

Because of your superconscious powers, anything that you can hold in your mind on a continuing basis, you can have. Emerson wrote, “A man becomes what he thinks about, most of the time.” Earl Nightingale wrote, “You become what you think about.” In the Bible it says that, “Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap.” And this law of sowing and reaping refers to mental states; to your thoughts. Of course, there is a potential danger in the use of your superconscious mind. It is like fire¾a wonderful servant, but a terrible master. If you use it improperly, and think negative, fearful thoughts, your superconscious mind will accept your thoughts as a command and go to work to materialize them into your reality. What is the difference between successful people and unsuccessful people? It is as simple as this: Successful people think and talk about what they want, and unsuccessful people talk about what they don’t want.

So here is a 10-step plan for plugging into your superconscious power to get what you truly want in life. Make this plan a regular habit, and you will be astonished at the results.

1. Decide exactly what you want. This is usually the biggest problem that people have. They don’t know what they want and then they’re surprised when they don’t get it.

2. Write your goal clearly in every detail. A goal that is not written down is merely a wish. When you write it down, you signal to your superconscious mind that you really want to accomplish this particular objective.

3. Write your goal in simple, present tense words on a three-by-five index card and carry it with you to read and re-read throughout the day whenever you get a chance.

4. Make a list of everything you can think of that you can do that will move you toward your goal. Making a list intensifies your desire and deepens your belief that the attainment of the goal is possible for you.

5. Organize the list by priority. What is more important and what is less important?

6. Resolve to take action every day on one of the items on your list. Do something every day that moves you toward your goal so that you can maintain your momentum.

7. Visualize your goal repeatedly. See it in your mind’s eye as though it were already a reality. The more clear and vivid your mental picture of your goal, the faster it will come into your life.

8. Get the feeling of pleasure and enjoyment that you would have if your goal were realized at this very moment. Create the emotion of happiness, satisfaction, and pleasure that you would have if you really achieved your goal.

9. Confidently behave as if your superconscious mind were bringing your goal into reality. Accept that you are moving toward your goal and it is moving toward you.

10. Release your goal completely to your superconscious mind. When you turn your goal over to the power of the universe and just get out of the way, you will always know the right actions to take at the right time.

Starting today, try this power of yours, your superconscious mind, on one goal or idea, and practice it continually until you succeed in achieving that goal. By doing so, you will move from the “positive thinking” of the hopeful person to the “positive knowing” of the totally successful person.

Taking Personal Responsibility

Did you ever stop to think that everything you are or ever will be is completely up to you? Just imagine! You are where you are because of who you are. Everything that exists in your life exists because of you, because of your behavior, words and actions. Because you have freedom of choice and because you have chosen each and every circumstance of your life, you are completely responsible for all of your success and failure, your happiness and unhappiness, your present and future.

That thought is like a parachute jump: It’s scary and exhilarating at the same time. It’s one of the biggest and most important ideas that can ever occur to you, or anyone else. The acceptance of personal responsibility is what separates the adult from the child. It’s the great leap forward into maturity. Responsibility is the hallmark of the fully integrated, fully functioning human being. Responsibility goes hand in hand with success, achievement, motivation, happiness and self-actualization. It’s the absolute minimum requirement for the accomplishment of everything you could ever really want in life. Accepting that you’re completely responsible for yourself and realizing that no one is coming to the rescue is the beginning of peak performance. There’s very little that you cannot do or have after you accept that “If it’s to be, it’s up to me!”

The opposite of accepting responsibility is making excuses and blaming people and things for what’s going on in your life. And since everything we do is a matter of habit, if people get into the habit of making excuses, they get into the habit of evading responsibility at the same time. If they set a goal or objective for themselves, they immediately create an excuse that they hold in reserve just in case the accomplishment of the goal is too difficult or requires more self-discipline and persistence than they had thought. As soon as things start to go poorly, irresponsible people trot out their excuse and let themselves off the hook. But that won’t get them anywhere in the long run.

A basic law of human life was first espoused by Socrates more than 400 years before Christ. It’s called the Law of Causality. We call it the Law of Cause and Effect. It states that for every effect in your life, there’s a cause. If there’s any effect that you desire, or desire more of, you can trace it back to the cause, and by duplicating the cause, you can have the effect.

For example, everyone wants to be healthy. If you set a high level of physical health and energy as your goal, or the desired effect, you can have it simply by finding out the cause, by finding out what other healthy and energetic people do with regard to diet, exercise and rest, and by doing the same thing. If you do, you’re likely to get the same result. This is no miracle. It sounds simple, but in many cases, it’s one of the hardest things in the world to do.

Unhappiness is an effect as well. If you wish to be happy, the first thing to do is to decide for yourself the kind of life situation in which you would feel wonderful. Think of the very best times of your life, and think of what you were doing, where you were doing it, and the people you were with at the time. Then write out, in complete detail, a description of your ideal lifestyle. Now you have defined the effect that you desire.

Next, look at your current life and ask yourself, “What are all the things in my life that are inconsistent with the lifestyle that would make me happy?” In other words, look at the causes of the effects that you don’t like. Then make a decision to begin alleviating or removing those causes, one by one, until what you have left is the kind of life you want to live.

Your thoughts are extremely powerful. They have the power to raise and lower your blood pressure, your pulse rate and your respiratory rate. They can affect your digestion. And if your thoughts are strong enough, they can even make you sick or healthy. Your thoughts tend to trigger images in your mind, and the feelings in your body are consistent with them. If you think or read happy, healthy thoughts, you will have happy, healthy pictures and experience happy, healthy emotions. As Deepak Chopra points out in his audiocassette program Magical Mind, Magical Body, every part of your mind is connected to every single part of your body in a complex web of messages and impulses that affect everything you feel, say and do.

Only you can think your thoughts, only you can decide what you’ll dwell upon, what you’ll read and listen to, who you’ll associate with and the conversations you’ll engage in; therefore, you are totally responsible for all the consequences of all those behaviors. It’s unavoidable.

Perhaps the most important part of the subject of self-responsibility involves your happiness and your peace of mind. There seems to be a direct relationship between responsibility and happiness on the one hand, and irresponsibility and unhappiness on the other hand. Let me explain.

First of all, the key to happiness is having a sense of control over what’s going on in your life. The more you feel that you’re in control, the happier you’ll be. Men and women who have risen to the top of their organizations tend to be far happier than people further down. This is because they feel far more in control of their destinies, far more capable of making decisions and taking action. The more responsibility you take in your company, the more power, authority and respect you’ll receive. One of the smartest things you can do is to take responsibility for the most important concerns of your boss. The more you accept responsibility for getting results in the areas that your boss considers most important, the more valuable and indispensable you’ll become in your organization. People who want more money and more respect often think that they can get it simply by asking for it or by politicking. The truth is that it will accrue to you rapidly as soon as you “step up to the plate” and undertake responsibility for results in your organization. The most respected people in any company are those who are the most capable of getting the most important jobs done on schedule.

The more responsibility you take, the more in control you are. And the freer you are, especially in your own mind, to make decisions and to do the things you want to do. So there’s a direct relationship between responsibility, control, freedom and happiness. The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their lives.

At the other end of the spectrum, there is irresponsibility, or the failure to accept responsibility. Each person is somewhere in between, moving toward a higher level of responsibility or irresponsibility with every word and every decision. In fact, a good definition of insanity is total irresponsibility, to the point of needing a straitjacket and a padded cell. Thomas Szasz, the great psychoanalyst, once wrote, “There is no such thing as insanity. There are only varying levels of irresponsibility.”

A person who is completely irresponsible is subject to anger, hostility, fear, resentment, doubt-all sorts of negative emotions. And here’s why. All negative emotions tend to be associated with blame. Fully 99 percent of all our problems exist only because we’re able to blame someone or something for them. The instant we stop blaming, our negative emotions begin disappearing.

What’s the antidote to blaming? It’s simple! Since your mind can hold only one thought at a time, either positive or negative, you can override the tendency to blame and become angry simply by saying, firmly, “I am responsible!” You can’t accept responsibility for a situation and be angry at the same time. You can’t accept responsibility and be unhappy or upset. The acceptance of responsibility negates negative emotions and short-circuits any tendencies toward unhappiness.

The very act of accepting responsibility calms your mind and clarifies your vision. It soothes your emotions and enables you to think more positively and constructively. In fact, the acceptance of responsibility often gives you insight into what you should do to resolve the situation.

Here’s an exercise: Look at the most common problems and difficulties that people have in life. Apply this simple remedy of accepting responsibility to each one, and see what happens.

People have problems with other people-their spouses, their children, their friends, their coworkers and their bosses. Someone once said that almost all of our problems in life have hair on top, come on two legs and talk back. So think of the people in your life who cause you any stress or anxiety and ask yourself who is responsible. Are they responsible for being in your life, or are you responsible for having them in your life?

According to the Law of Attraction, you’re a living magnet in that you invariably attract people into your life who harmonize with your dominant thoughts and emotions. The people in your life are there because you’ve attracted them by the person you are, by the thoughts you hold, by the emotions you experience. If you’re not happy with the people surrounding you, you’re responsible. You’re attracting them, and you’re keeping them there.

Let me give you an example. I have four beautiful children. For a long time, when my children were behaving in ways that I felt were inappropriate, I had a tendency to blame or criticize them. However, the more I studied child raising and learned about the subject, the more I found that children are almost totally reactive. Their behaviors are almost always responses to what is going on around them and to their relationships with their parents. So I began asking the question, “What is it in me that is causing my child to act this way?” As soon as I turned the question around, and looked to myself for the reason-in effect, accepted complete responsibility for my children’s behavior-I was able to see what I might be doing, or not doing, that my children were reacting to. Perhaps I wasn’t spending enough one-on-one time with them. Perhaps I wasn’t listening to them when they wanted to talk. Perhaps I was too quick to question their report cards.

I began to apply that simple principle to every other part of my life as well. I began asking, “What is it in me that is causing this external situation?” If the Law of Correspondence is true (and it is), and everything that is happening to you on the outside is due to something that is happening to you on the inside, then the first place to look is within. As soon as you do that, you begin to see things that you had completely missed when you were busy blaming others and making excuses. You begin to see that you’re responsible in large measure for the things that are happening to you.

If you’re in a bad relationship, who got you there? You likely weren’t marched into the relationship and kept there at gunpoint. So it’s largely a matter of free will and free choice on your part. If you’re not happy, it’s up to you to do something about it. As Henry Ford II once said, “Never complain, never explain.” If you’re not happy with the situation, do something about it. If you’re not willing to do something about it, then don’t complain.

There’s the story of the construction worker who opens up his lunch box at the noon break and unwraps his sandwich to find that it contains sardines. He gets really upset and complains loudly to everyone around him about how much he hates sardines. The next day, the same thing happens: a sardine sandwich. Again, the construction worker shouts and complains about how much he hates sardines for lunch. The third day it happens again. By this time, his fellow workers are getting fed up with his loud complaining. One of them leans over and says to him, “If you hate sardines so much, why don’t you tell your wife to make you some other kind of sandwich?” The construction worker turns to the fellow and says, “Oh, I’m not married. I make my own lunches!”

Many of us get into the same situation as the construction worker’s and complain about circumstances that are almost entirely of our own making. Is this true for you? Look over your relationships and ask where this might be true in your life.

Are you happy with your job? Are you happy with the amount of money you’re earning? Are you happy with your level of responsibility and your activities each day? If you’re not, you need to accept that you’re completely responsible for every aspect of your job and your career. Why? Because you chose it freely. You took the job, you assumed the responsibilities, and you accepted the wage. If you’re not happy with any of them, for any reason, then it’s up to you to do something different.

You’re earning today exactly what you’re worth-not a penny more, not a penny less. In life, we tend to get exactly what we deserve. If you’re not satisfied with the amount you’re getting, look around you, at people who are doing the kind of work you would like to do and earning the kind of money you would like to earn. Ask them what they’re doing differently from what you’re doing. What are the causes of the effects they’re getting? Once you know what they are, accept complete responsibility for your situation, apply your wonderful mind and abilities, back them with willpower and self-discipline, and get busy making the changes you need to make to enjoy the life you want to enjoy.

Your great aim in life is to develop character. Character is composed of self-esteem, self-discipline, the ability to delay gratification, and the willingness to accept full responsibility for your life and everything in it. The more you say to yourself, “I am responsible,” the stronger, better and finer a person you become. And every part of your life will improve at the same time.

Success Through Goal Setting

The ability to set goals and make plans for their accomplishment is the “master skill” of success. It is the single most important skill that you can learn and perfect. Goal-setting will do more to help you achieve the things you want in life than will anything else you’ve been exposed to. Becoming an expert at goal-setting and goal-achieving is something that you absolutely must do if you wish to fulfill your potential as a human being. Goals enable you to do the work you want to do, to live where you want to live, to be with the people you enjoy, and to become the kind of person you want to become. And there is no limit to the financial rewards you can obtain. All you have to do is to set a goal for financial success, make a plan, and then work the plan until you succeed in that area.

The payoff for setting goals and making plans is being able to choose the kind of life you want to live. So why do so few people set goals? According to the best research, less than 3 percent of Americans have written goals, and less than 1 percent review and rewrite their goals on a daily basis. So the reasons why people don’t set goals have been of considerable interest to me. I think that there are five basic reasons why people don’t set goals.

The first reason is that they are simply not serious. Whenever I speak with a man or woman who has achieved something remarkable, I learn that the achievement occurred after that person decided to “get serious.” Until you become completely serious and totally determined about your goals, nothing really happens.

The second reason why people don’t set goals is that they don’t understand the importance of goals. We find that young men and women who begin setting goals very early in life invariably come from families in which the importance of goals is emphasized. The discussion that takes place around your family dinner table is one of the most powerful formative influences in your life. If your parents didn’t have goals, didn’t talk about goals, didn’t encourage you to set goals, and didn’t talk about people outside the family circle who had goals and were moving toward a higher level of achievement, then you very likely grew up with the idea that goals are not even a part of normal existence. This is the case for most people. And for many years, it was the case for me.

The third reason why people don’t set goals is because they don’t know how to do it. One of the greatest tragedies of our educational system is that you can receive 15 to 18 years of education in our schools and never once receive a single hour of instruction on how to set goals. Yet we find that in certain schools where goal-setting programs have been introduced since first grade, young people become excited about goal-setting – even if the goal is only to increase the scores by 5 or 10 percent over the course of the semester, or to be on time every day in the course of a month. Children become so excited about achieving goals that by the third or fourth grade, they love to go to school. They get the best grades. They are seldom absent. They are excited about themselves and about their lives. So encourage your children to set worthwhile and realistic goals from an early age.

The fourth reason why people don’t set goals is fear of rejection. The fear of rejection is caused by destructive criticism in early childhood and is manifested, in adulthood, in the fear of criticism by others. Many people hold back from setting worthwhile goals because they have found that every time they do set a goal, somebody steps up and tells them that they can’t achieve it, or that they will lose their money or waste their time.

Because each of us is strongly influenced by the opinions of those around us, one of the first things that you must learn when you begin setting goals is to keep your goals confidential. Don’t tell anyone about them. Often, it’s the fear of criticism that, more than any other single factor, stops you from goal-setting in the first place. So keep your goals to yourself, with one exception. Share your goals only with others who are committed to achieving goals of their own and who really want you to be successful and achieve your goals as well. Other than that, don’t tell anybody about your goals, so no one is in a position to criticize you, or to discourage you from setting your goals.

The fifth reason why people don’t set goals – and perhaps the most important reason of all – is the fear of failure. People don’t set goals because they are afraid that they might fail. In fact, the fear of failure is probably the greatest single obstacle to success in adult life. It can hold you back more than any other psychological problem.

The primary reason why you fear failure is simply this: You probably do not understand the role that failure plays in achievement. The fact is that it is impossible to succeed without failing. Failure is an indispensable prerequisite for success. All great success is preceded by great failure. If you wish to fulfill your potential, you have to be willing to risk failure over and over and over, because there is no way that you can ever accomplish worthwhile goals until you have fallen on your face so many times that you have eventually learned the lessons that you need for great achievement.

In doing research for his classic book The Law of Success, Napoleon Hill interviewed more than 500 of the most successful men and women in America. All of them admitted to him that they had achieved their greatest successes just one step beyond the point where they had experienced their greatest failures.

A key to succeeding through goal-setting is expecting temporary setbacks and obstacles as inevitable parts of the goal-achieving process.

Now, in order to be successful, you need to focus your mental and physical energy in a single direction toward a predetermined objective. People who are especially energetic or talented have a hard time with this. They are the ones who try to do several things at once and end up doing nothing well.

Setting well-defined goals enables you to channel your efforts and focus your energy toward something that’s important to you. Goal-setting gives you a target to aim at and enables you to develop the self-discipline to continue working toward your target rather than becoming distracted and going off in other directions.

Let me share with you five keys that will help you to reach your goals more effectively. Each of these keys starts with one of the letters in the word goals. Whenever you find yourself getting off the track, simply repeat the word goals, and think about how each letter stands for a key that just might apply to your current situation. The first letter is G, and it stands for get to it. Sometimes, the only difference between a successful person and a failure is that the successful person has the courage to get started, to do something, to begin moving toward the accomplishment of a specific goal.

For example, when I was younger, I realized that because of my limited education, I was stuck in a low-paying job. I began reading the want ads and decided that I wanted to work in advertising, especially as a copywriter. I went to an advertising agency and applied for the job of writing advertisements. The head of the agency was very polite, but he told me that I was unskilled and totally unsuited for the position. He thanked me for coming in and wished me luck.

Now I was back on the street, but I had a goal. I wanted to be an advertising copywriter. I immediately took the first step, which was to learn more about how to write copy, so that I would not be turned down in the future because of a lack of ability. I went to the local library and checked out books on the subject of advertising and copywriting. Over the next 12 months, I checked out and read every single book in the library on the subject. Meanwhile, I read magazines and newspapers and thought about how I could improve their advertising. I wrote sample advertisements and began taking them to advertising agencies.

To make a long story short, at the end of the 12 months, two of the largest advertising agencies in the country offered me a job as a copywriter, and I accepted one of those offers. My income doubled. I had worked at other jobs in the meantime. But I had never lost sight of my goal, and I had kept on doing the things that I needed to do to put myself in a position to eventually achieve my goal.

You, too, may have a long-range goal. In order to achieve it, you need to sit down and make a list of all the steps that you will have to take to get from where you are to where you want to be. Then begin with the first and most obvious thing that you can do on that list. Complete it, and then start on number two. Don’t worry about the long term. Just concentrate on the obvious first step that you can take. Surprisingly enough, everything else will take care of itself. The Confucian saying, “A journey of a thousand leagues begins with a single step,” is so popular in so many languages because it is so true.

The second letter, O, stands for opportunity. Successful people do not wait for opportunities to turn their goals into reality; rather, they make their opportunities, because they are perfectly clear about the kind of life they wish to create. Once you have taken the time to decide exactly what you want, you will experience an endless flow of opportunities that will help move you in that direction.

For example, a young woman worked for me as an executive secretary. At the same time, she had a goal to be a successful real-estate agent and investor. So while she worked for me, she regularly took night courses to get her real-estate-agent’s license and also to learn how to buy and sell real estate profitably. Over the course of a year, she and her husband bought, fixed up and sold three houses. They made more money from their real-estate transactions than they did from their jobs. At the end of the year, she passed the test and got her real-estate-agent’s license.

Within a few days of getting her license, she and her husband were sitting in a small restaurant, and they got into a conversation with a woman at the next table. It turned out that this woman was a very successful real-estate agent who needed an executive assistant to work with her and learn the real-estate profession. They got along so well that my executive secretary was offered the job, where she would be earning double what she could earn as a secretary and have an unlimited upside potential.

My secretary did not wait for an opportunity to come to her. She set a goal, made a plan and went to work to prepare herself for the opportunity when it arose.

The letter A stands for ability. Many people hesitate to set high, challenging goals because they lack the ability necessary to turn those goals into reality. But remember that we all lacked knowledge and experience when we started out in our careers or fields of expertise.

Do you remember when you started your first job? You probably felt a little clumsy, inadequate and unsure about how to do it well. As you progressed and got more experience, you became more and more confident, and in many cases, you did an excellent job without even thinking much about it.

Since you gain the ability necessary for high achievement through knowledge and experience, if you increase the speed at which you acquire both of those, you increase the speed at which you move ahead. The letter L stands for leadership. Leadership is simply the ability to get results. And you begin to get results when you accept full responsibility for yourself, for your job and for the outputs required in your position.

You demonstrate leadership when you refuse to make excuses or blame anyone or anything for the problems you are having. The acceptance of the responsibility of leadership enables you to move ahead and take action.

When you are not satisfied with your job or income, and you sit down and make a written plan to change it, and then take action on that plan, without waiting for anyone’s approval or permission, you are behaving like a leader.

The final letter, S, stands for stay with it – the resolution to persist in the face of adversity until you succeed. Between you and every goal that you wish to achieve, there is a series of obstacles, and the bigger the goal, the bigger the obstacles. Your decision to be, have and do something out of the ordinary entails facing difficulties and challenges that are out of the ordinary as well. Sometimes your greatest asset is simply your ability to stay with it longer than anyone else.

When you look around you, you will see that all achievement is the triumph of persistence. You will see men and women everywhere who are struggling with and overcoming adversities in order to accomplish something that is important to them. And so can you.

So these are the words and phrases to remember in setting and achieving goals: The first is get to it! Get started; take the first action at hand. The second is opportunity. Begin to prepare yourself now so that you will be ready for the opportunities that will inevitably arise. The third is ability. Resolve to learn what you need to know to live the kind of life you want to live. The fourth word is leadership. Take charge of your time and your life, and accept responsibility for your results. And, finally, stay with it. If you stay with it long enough, nothing can stop you from finally winning through.

Sharpening Your Conversation Skills

There are three aims and purposes of conversation. The first is the plain enjoyment and pleasure of self-expression and interaction with other people. One of the most enjoyable things we ever do is to spend time with people we like and whose company we find stimulating. This potential pleasure is the driving force behind all of our social activities. We like to get together with people with whom we have a lot in common and just share ideas, letting the conversation go where it will.

The second aim or purpose of conversation is to get to know the other person better. In sales, and in all kinds of business, you require prolonged exposure to another person in order to get a feel for how he or she thinks, feels and reacts. This can’t be accomplished in a short meeting.

The third aim of conversation is to build trust and credibility between the two people. This is perhaps the most important thing we do as we proceed through life and it is only possible with the kind of continuous conversation that reveals us to each other. In our personal relationships, there is no substitute for extended periods of conversation in the development of friendships and more intimate relationships. People who get along very well together have almost invariably spent a lot of time just talking about various subjects as they come up.

One of the very best ways to learn about another person is to spend unbroken time in their company. I’ve found that a two- or three-hour car trip is one of the most revealing experiences you will ever have with another human being. People who have gotten along well for many years, working or socializing together in brief stints, will often find that an extended car trip brings out elements of their personalities that they did not know existed.

Before you enter into any serious business or personal relationship with anyone, you should spend several hours with them experiencing the ebb and flow of sustained conversation. It’s amazing what you will learn.

Many people think that the art of good conversation is to speak in an interesting and arresting fashion, to be noted for your humor, ability to tell stories and your general knowledge of a variety of subjects. Many people feel that, if they want to be better at conversation, they must become more articulate, outgoing and expressive. They must become better talkers.

Nothing could be further from the truth. As you’ve heard many times before, we come into this world with two ears and one mouth and we should use them in that same proportion. In conversation, this simply means that you should listen twice as much as you talk if you want to get a reputation for being an enjoyable person with whom to converse.

The art of good conversation centers very much on your ability to ask questions and to listen attentively to the answers. You can lace the conversation with your insights, ideas, and opinions, but you perfect the art and skill of conversation by perfecting the art and skill of asking good, well-worded questions that direct the conversation and give other people an opportunity to express themselves.

Ask open-ended questions that cannot be answered with a simple “yes” or “no.” Open-ended questions encourage the speaker to expand on his thoughts and comments. And one question will lead to another. You can ask open-ended questions almost endlessly, drawing out of the other person everything that he or she has to say on a particular subject.

In order to be an excellent conversationalist, you must resist the urge to dominate the discussion. The very best conversationalists seem to be low-key, easy-going, cheerful, and genuinely interested in the other person. They seem to be quite content to listen when other people are talking and they make their own contributions to the dialogue rather short and to the point.

In fact, good conversation has an easy ebb and flow, like the tide coming in and going out. Whether it is between two people or among several, the conversation should shift back and forth, with each person getting an opportunity to talk. Conversation in this sense is like a ball that is tossed from person to person, with no one holding on to it for very long.

If you feel that you have been talking for too long, you should stop and ask a question of someone in the group. You will be tossing the conversational ball and giving that individual an opportunity to converse.

Listening is the most important of all skills for successful conversation. Many people are very poor listeners. Since everyone enjoys talking, it takes a real effort to practice the fundamentals of excellent listening and to make them a habit.

Here are the four major rules for active listening in a conversation. They will work for you whether you are conversing with a sales prospect, a business associate, your manager or a friend or member of your family. They are powerful, practical and proven techniques to increase your influence with other people dramatically. The first key to effective listening is for you to listen attentively, without interruptions. When you pay close attention to another person, you convey to that person that you very much value what he or she has to say. This is very flattering to your conversation partners, and they will respond warmly to your attentiveness.

The major reason why most people are poor listeners is that they are busy preparing a reply while the other person is still speaking. In fact, they are not even listening closely to what the other person is saying. They are very much like boxers waiting for the other person to let their guard down so they can jump in with a quick verbal punch and take over the conversation.

But this is not for you. Effective listening requires that you lean slightly forward, face the other person directly, and hang on every word. Listen as though there were nothing else in the world more fascinating to you than what the other person is saying. The very best listeners seem to have developed the knack of making the person who is speaking feel as if he or she were the only person in the world. Good conversationalists can even do this in the middle of a crowded room.

In addition to listening without interrupting, you should also nod, smile and agree with what the person is saying. Be active rather than passive. Indicate that you are totally engaged in the conversation. Make eye contact as the other person talks. Relax your body and, if you are standing, allow your weight to roll forward onto the balls of your feet. Only you will know that you have done this, but the overall impression you will give is that your whole energy is now forward and focused on what the speaker is saying. The second key to effective listening is to pause before replying. A short pause, of three to five seconds, is a very classy thing to do in a conversation. When you pause, you accomplish three goals simultaneously.

First, you avoid running the risk of interrupting if the other person is just catching his or her breath before continuing. Second, you show the other person that you are giving careful consideration to his or her words by not jumping in with your own comments at the earliest opportunity. The third benefit of pausing is that you will actually hear the other person better. His or her words will soak into a deeper level of your mind and you will understand what he or she is saying with greater clarity. By pausing, you mark yourself as a brilliant conversationalist.

The third key to effective listening is to question for clarification. Never assume that you understand what the person is saying or trying to say. Instead, ask, “What do you mean, exactly?” This is the most powerful question I’ve ever learned for controlling a conversation. It is almost impossible not to answer. When you ask, “What do you mean?” the other person cannot stop himself or herself from answering more extensively. You can then follow up with other open-ended questions and keep the conversation rolling along. The fourth key to effective listening is to paraphrase the speaker’s words in your own words. After you’ve nodded and smiled, you can then say, “Let me see if I’ve got this right. What you’re saying is . . .”

By paraphrasing the speaker’s words, you demonstrate in no uncertain terms that you are genuinely paying attention and making every effort to understand his or her thoughts or feelings. And the wonderful thing is, when you practice effective listening, other people will begin to find you fascinating. They will want to be around you. They will feel relaxed and happy in your presence.

The reason why listening is such a powerful tool in developing the art and skill of conversation is because listening builds trust. The more you listen to another person, the more he or she trusts you and believes in you.

Listening also builds self-esteem. When you listen attentively to another person, his or her self-esteem will naturally increase. Finally, listening builds self-discipline in the listener. Because your mind can process words at 500-600 words per minute, and we can only talk at about 150 words per minute, it takes a real effort to keep your attention focused on another person’s words. If you do not practice self-discipline in conversation, your mind will wander in a hundred different directions. The more you work at paying close attention to what the other person is saying, the more self-disciplined you will become. In other words, by learning to listen well, you actually develop your own character and your own personality.

The final key to becoming a great conversationalist is to practice the friendship factor. The friendship factor is based on the three Cs of caring, courtesy and consideration.

You’ve heard it said that, “People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Caring is the catalyst in all good relationships. The people you like the best and who like you the best are the ones with whom you have the most caring relationships. Whenever you show another person that you genuinely care about him or her, you come across better as a conversationalist and as a friend. The second C in the friendship factor is courtesy. It is a magic quality of politeness that causes people to want to be around you. All good conversationalists make other people feel calm and comfortable in their presence. They never do or say anything that could hurt of offend the other person in any way. They are continually diplomatic and they keep their concerns and irritations to themselves. They always remain warm and friendly on the outside. The third C in the friendship factor is consideration. One of the major sources of positive emotions is the feeling that we are respected and considered highly by other people. Whenever you treat another person as an important and worthwhile human being, you trigger this consideration factor. You show that you not only value the conversation, but you value the speaker as well.

Becoming a good conversationalist is based on learning and practicing the Golden Rule. This simply says that you treat other people the way you would like them to treat you. Just as you would like other people to ask you questions about yourself and to listen attentively to you when you talk, others would like the same courtesy extended to them. Remember, the purpose of conversation is not to dominate, control, or be right. The purpose of conversation is to enjoy yourself and to make sure that others enjoy themselves when they are with you.

Setting Priorities

In 1970, sociologist Dr. Edward Banfield of Harvard University wrote a book entitled The Unheavenly City. He described one of the most profound studies on success and priority setting ever conducted. Banfield’s goal was to find out how and why some people became financially independent during the course of their working lifetimes. He started off convinced that the answer to this question would be found in factors such as family background, education, intelligence, influential contacts, or some other concrete factor. What he finally discovered was that the major reason for success in life was a particular attitude of mind.

Banfield called this attitude “long time perspective.” He said that men and women who were the most successful in life and the most likely to move up economically were those who took the future into consideration with every decision they made in the present. He found that the longer the period of time a person took into consideration while planning and acting, the more likely it was that he would achieve greatly during his career.

For example, one of the reasons your family doctor is among the most respected people in America is because he or she invested many years of hard work and study to finally earn the right to practice medicine. After university courses, internship, residency and practical training, a doctor may be more than 30 years old before he or she is capable of earning a good living. But from that point onward, these men and women are some of the most respected and most successful professional people in the United States. They had long time perspectives.

The essential key to success in setting priorities is having a long time perspective. You can tell how important something is today by measuring its potential future impact on your life.

For example, if you come home from work at night and choose to play with your children or spend time with your spouse, rather than watch TV or read the paper, you have a long time perspective. You know that investing time in the health and happiness of your children and your spouse is a very valuable, high-priority use of time.

If you take additional courses in the evening to upgrade your skills and make yourself more valuable to your employer, you’re acting with a long time perspective. Learning something practical and useful can have a long-term effect on your career.

The key word, then, to keep in mind when you’re setting priorities is sacrifice. Setting priorities usually requires sacrificing present enjoyment for future enjoyment. It requires giving up a short-term pleasure in the present in order to enjoy a far greater and more substantial pleasure in the future.

Economists say that the inability to delay gratification-that is, the natural tendency of individuals to spend everything they earn plus a little bit more, and the mind-set of doing what is fun, easy and enjoyable-is the primary cause of economic and personal failure in life. On the other hand, disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the highroad to pride, self-esteem and personal satisfaction.

So setting priorities begins with your deciding what you want most in life and then organizing your time and activities so that everything you do is the most valuable use of your time in achieving those objectives.

With your larger, long-term priorities in order, you can much more easily decide upon your short-term priorities.

You can say that the process of setting short-term priorities begins with a pad of paper and a pen. Whenever you feel overwhelmed by too many things to do and too little time in which to do them, sit down, take a deep breath, and list all those tasks you need to accomplish. Although there is never enough time to do everything, there is always enough time to do the most important things, and to stay with them until they are done right.

Peter Drucker once said, “Efficiency is doing things right, but effectiveness is doing the right things.” And this requires thought. Once you have listed your tasks, ask yourself this question: “If I were to be called out of town for a month, and I could finish only one thing on this list, which one thing would it be?” Think it through, and circle that one item on your list. Then ask yourself: “If I could do only one more thing before I was called out of town for a month, what would it be?” This then becomes the second thing you circle on your list.

Perform this exercise five or six times until you have sorted out the highest priorities on your list. Then number each according to its importance. With these priorities, you are now ready to begin working effectively toward the achievement of your major goals.

Another popular method for setting priorities on your list, once you have determined your major goals or objectives, is the A-B-C-D-E method. You place one of those letters in the margin before each of the tasks on your list.

“A” stands for “very important; must do; severe negative consequences if not completed.”

“B” stands for “important; should do; but not as important as my ‘A’ tasks, and only minor negative consequences if not completed.”

“C” stands for “nice to do; but not as important as ‘A’ or ‘B,’ and no negative consequences for not completing.”

“D” stands for “delegate, or assign to someone else who can do the task in my place.”

“E” stands for “eliminate, whenever possible.”

When you use the A-B-C-D-E method, you can very easily sort out what is important and unimportant. This then will focus your time and attention on those items on your list that are most essential for you to do.

Once you can clearly see the one or two things that you should be doing, above all others, just say no to all diversions and distractions and focus single-mindedly on accomplishing those priorities.

Much stress that people experience in their work lives comes from working on low-priority tasks. The amazing thing is that as soon as you start working on your highest-value activity, all your stress disappears. You begin to feel a continuous stream of energy and enthusiasm. As you work toward the completion of something that is really important, you feel an increased sense of personal value and inner satisfaction. You experience a sensation of self-mastery and self-control. You feel calm, confident and capable.

Here are six ideas that you can use, every day, to help you set priorities and to keep you working at your best:

1. Take the time to be clear about your goals and objectives so that the priorities you set are moving you in the direction of something that is of value to you. Remember that many people scramble frantically to climb the ladder of success, only to find that it is leaning against the wrong building.

2. Develop a long time perspective and work on those things in the present that can have the greatest positive impact on your future. Maintain your balance in life by setting priorities in the areas of your health, your personal relationships and your financial goals.

3. Make the commitment to improve those aspects of your life that are most important to you. If you’re in sales, learn how to be an excellent salesperson. If you’re a parent, learn how to be an outstanding mother or father. The power is always on the side of the person with the best practical knowledge.

4. Be sure to take the time to do your work right the first time. The fewer mistakes you make, the less time you will waste going back and doing it over.

5. Remember that what counts is not the amount of time that you put in overall; rather, it’s the amount of time that you spend working on high-priority tasks. You will always be paid for the results that you obtain, not merely the hours that you spend on the job.

6. Understand that the most important factor in setting priorities is your ability to make wise choices. You are always free to choose to engage in one activity or another. You may choose a higher-value activity or a lower-value activity, but once you have chosen, you must accept the consequences of your choice.

Resolve today to set clear priorities in every area of your life, and always choose the activities that will assure you the greatest health, happiness and prosperity in the long term. The long term comes soon enough, and every sacrifice that you make today will be rewarded with compound interest in the great future that lies ahead for you.

Seeing With Your Mind’s Eye

Success is not an accident. It is a deliberate, systematic process of deciding where you want to go and what it will look like when you get there, and then taking the steps, day by day, to turn those dreams into realities. And perhaps the most powerful of all tools for success you can learn to use is visualization, seeing with the mind’s eye.

Visualization is an absolutely amazing process that is used by highly successful men and women. However, it is a power that is available to everyone. And the better you get at visualization, the more rapidly you move forward to accomplish your goals and aspirations. Perhaps the best statement on visualization comes from Denis Waitley, who says, “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.”

All improvement in your life begins with an improvement in your mental pictures. Your mental pictures act as a guidance mechanism that causes you to act in ways that make your mental pictures come true in your life.

The Law of Correspondence says that “As within, so without.” It says that your outer world tends to be a reflection of your inner world-like a mirror. What you see in the world around you will be consistent over time with the world inside you. The Law of Concentration says that “Whatever you dwell upon grows in your reality.” Those two laws in combination explain much of success and most of failure.

Successful people are those who continually think about pictures and images of the people they would like to be and the lives they would like to lead. Unsuccessful people, unfortunately, are those who continually dwell upon and imagine exactly the things they don’t want to happen in their lives.

Your subconscious mind is extraordinarily powerful, but it is a servant, not a master. Your subconscious mind coordinates every aspect of your thoughts, feelings, behaviors, words, actions and emotions to fit a pattern consistent with your dominant mental pictures. It guides you to engage in the behaviors that move you ever closer to achieving the goals you visualize most of the time. But your subconscious mind merely accepts commands from your conscious, visualizing mind. If you visualize something that you fear, your subconscious mind will accept that as a command as well. It will then use its marvelous powers to bring your fears, instead of your dreams and aspirations, into reality.

Over and over, in surveys and tests, it has been found that successful, happy people think about successful, happy things most of the time. Unsuccessful, unhappy people, on the other hand, continually dwell upon and mull over the people they dislike, the situations they are angry about and the events that they don’t wish to occur in their lives. And-surprise! surprise!-whatever a person thinks about continually, either positive or negative, tends to materialize in the world around him.

Since virtually no schools or courses ever teach people about the power of visualization, average people use it in a random, or haphazard, way most of the time. Instead of continually thinking about the things they desire and, therefore, moving consistently toward them, average people think first about something they want, and then they think about something they don’t want. They think about things they desire, and they think about things they fear. They think about people they like, and they think about people they dislike. They think about success, and they think about failure. They think about wealth, and they think about poverty. They think about having a nice life, and they think about being impoverished or being deeply in debt. And then they can’t understand why their life seems to go back and forth, back and forth, and they make very little progress.

The starting point of great success in your life begins, in the simplest terms, when you discipline yourself to think and talk about only the things you want and refuse to think and talk about anything you don’t want. The fact is that your mind is so powerful that if you don’t want something, you must absolutely refrain from allowing yourself to think about it when it comes into your mind. You must push it out, knock it aside, get rid of it, and get your mind back on what you want.

One of the best formulas for positive thinking I ever learned was this: No matter what is going on around you, think about your goals. If you have problems with your finances, stop-refuse to dwell upon them-and instead think about your goals. If you are having difficulties with other people, change your mind by switching your thinking off of your problems with them and onto your goals.

Eventually, through repetition, you will find yourself thinking about your goals most of the time. And, as we’ve known for more than 2,000 years, as you think about your goals, you begin to move toward them, and they begin to move toward you. All manner of remarkable things happen in your life that bring you closer to your goals.

You see, your subconscious mind can’t tell the difference between something that you vividly imagine-such as a goal, a hope or a dream-and a real experience. For example, if you go to an automobile dealership and take your dream car for a drive, and, as you drive along, you imagine you already own that car, and you create the feeling of enjoyment that would accompany your being the proud possessor of that beautiful machine, your subconscious mind simply accepts that the car belongs to you. It doesn’t argue; it doesn’t complain; it doesn’t try to change your instructions. It simply tries to make your instructions a reality.

Think of your subconscious mind as a photo lab and your conscious mind as a camera, or a photographer. Your conscious mind takes pictures of what you want and passes the film to the photo lab, your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind then develops the pictures and passes them back up to your reality. The photo lab doesn’t argue with you over the content of the film that you sent to it. It simply develops the photographs exactly as you saw them through the lens of your mind’s eye.

To get back to our car example, when you resume driving your old car after having driven the new car from the dealership, your subconscious mind accepts the new car as your desired reality and the old car as your past situation. Your subconscious mind then goes to work and consistently, continuously begins to urge you in the direction of doing the things that will make it possible for you to have that new car.

A friend of mine, who was unemployed at the time, decided to use this technique to get a new BMW. He began visiting the dealership every Saturday and taking a new BMW for a drive. He feasted his mind and senses on the car. He smelled the leather, he looked through the windshield and at the dashboard, and he thought of himself owning this car as he drove it around on test-drives. He got a brochure on the car from the dealership, cut out the pictures and put them everywhere, including on the steering wheel of his old car. Each time he glanced down at the steering wheel and saw a picture of his new BMW, he imagined that he was already driving it.

The most remarkable things began to happen. First, he went from being unemployed to being employed. After two months, he changed to a better job, and after four months, he changed jobs again. By the end of the year, he was making three times what he had made at his very best job in the past. This time, he was working in an area of sales that was totally suited to him. Almost exactly to the day one year after he began this visualization process, he walked into the BMW dealership, traded in his old car, bought his brand-new BMW, and drove it away. He was still driving it the last time I spoke to him. Does visualization work? Well, here’s an exercise that has worked for me and might work for you.

Everyone I know wants to have his “dream home.” The first problem with obtaining a dream home is that most people have never even sat down to think about what it would look like.

Many years ago, when my wife, Barbara, and I were going through financial difficulties, we began putting together a composite of our dream home. We subscribed to magazines full of beautiful pictures and descriptions of lovely homes for sale. We cut out pictures and descriptions that were consistent with what we were looking for. We discussed our dream home at great length. We went to open houses in the best neighborhoods in the city. We looked at beautiful, expensive homes and at the details and furnishings in them. We read Architectural Digest and House Beautiful. We eventually came up with a mutually agreed on composite of what our dream home would look like. Within a year after beginning this exercise, we moved from a rented home to a beautiful home that we had purchased. It wasn’t quite what we had in mind, but we both recognized at the time that it was merely a stepping-stone to what we really wanted. A year later, after looking at 150 houses in different cities, we walked into a home that was for sale, took one look around and, without speaking, both knew that we had found it. This was the home that we had been looking for. It cost twice as much as we ever had imagined paying for a house, and it required a good deal of renovation to make it conform to the mental pictures we had developed. Nonetheless, we bought it, renovated it, repainted it, furnished it and landscaped the grounds exactly as we had imagined. And it all began to come together after we had carefully crafted a clear mental picture of what it would look like when it was done.

Many, many books and articles have been written on the process of visualization. I’ve personally studied the subject for many years. Because the ability to visualize is a natural attribute, it is something that you can learn to do extremely well with practice. If you do it properly, and consistently, visualization can help you to move ahead further and faster than perhaps any other process you could engage in.

There are four specific dimensions of visualization that can contribute to its effectiveness in bringing you the things you want in life.

The first of these is vividness. The more vividly you can see something that you want in your mind’s eye, the more rapidly it will materialize in your reality. Most people have only a vague, fuzzy picture of what they want. They say they want to be rich or healthy or happy. But when you ask them exactly what that means to them, they don’t really know. If it fell on them out of the second story of a building, they probably wouldn’t recognize it.

Vividness refers to the clarity of detail in your mental pictures. The more time you spend examining pictures of your desired goals, or drawing your own pictures of them, or writing out clear descriptions of what your goals and dreams would look like when they came true, the more rapidly the pictures are accepted by your subconscious as a command. Your subconscious mind immediately goes to work to coordinate all of your other resources, internal and external, to bring those desires into your life. “As within, so without.” The clearer and more vivid your goal is in your mind’s eye, the more rapidly it materializes in the world around you.

The second dimension of visualization is intensity. This refers to the amount of emotion you accompany your mental pictures with. Emotion is central to all accomplishments. There is a little formula, T x F = R. Thought times feeling equals realization. This means that the thought or picture multiplied by the feeling or emotion that accompanies it equals the speed at which it occurs in your reality. For example, you might think of increasing your income by 20 percent this year. The thought in and of itself has no power to affect your subconscious mind or your behavior. But then combine the thought of an increase in income with the emotion and excitement of what that would mean to your standard of living. Think of why you want to earn more money, what you would do with it, how you would spend it, and how it would improve your standard of living. Think of the vacation you could take, the clothes you could buy, the home you could live in, the beautiful furniture you could acquire, the car you could drive. The more you think about those exciting reasons for increasing your income, the more emotional and intense you become about it. You become more excited and enthusiastic about any increase in income, and this emotional energy begins to drive you toward doing the things that make your income increase a reality.

Men and women whose lives don’t improve from year to year are those who have never thought about why they want their lives to improve in the first place. If you don’t think about the reasons why, you can’t generate the emotional excitement and energy that motivates you to do the things that make your dreams come true.

One of the most important exercises in visualization is “getting the feeling.” This means that you imagine something you would like to be, have or do. You then imagine that you have already accomplished it, and you create the emotion that would accompany the accomplishment of the goal.

Let’s say that you wanted to win a prize for being the best achiever of the year in your company. Imagine you have already won the prize. Then imagine how you would feel accepting the prize in front of an audience of your peers. Imagine the pride and happiness and joy and satisfaction of having risen to the top. As you bask in that feeling, like a sunbather basks in the sun, the mental picture is combined with the emotion and passed on to your subconscious mind. Suddenly, amazing things will begin to happen. You will have more energy and enthusiasm. You will be more creative and imaginative. You will be more focused and directed. You will be more efficient and effective. You will do more and more of the things that move you in the direction of making that mental picture a real picture.

The third dimension of visualization is frequency. This refers to how often you play the mental picture of your desired outcome on the screen of your mind. You see, when you begin to think of yourself accomplishing something that you have never accomplished before, your subconscious mind will tend to keep you stuck in the old, lower levels of achievement. In fact, your subconscious mind will be a little skeptical of your new ambition. You must convince your subconscious mind that you really want it by repeating the command, that mental picture, over and over, until it is finally accepted as an absolute instruction for your subconscious mind to act on. When many people see others driving nice cars, wearing nice clothes, living in nice homes and going to nice restaurants, they say to themselves, “I surely wish I could do things like that.” Then, just as quickly, they start talking about their problems, their bills, their relationships, and what they are going to watch on television that night. Then they wonder why nothing good ever happens to them. In fact, if they think about what they are going to watch on television that night, that becomes their visual image, their guiding force, and their subconscious mind organizes their thoughts, feelings and activities so that they get home, get onto the couch and watch television. They have realized their visualization.

The fourth dimension of visualization is duration. This refers to how long you hold the mental image or picture in your mind at one time. The longer you can hold that picture, combined with emotion and vividness, in your mind, the more rapidly it will be accepted by your subconscious mind as new operating instructions. That is why you must think about your goals all of the time.

Highly successful men and women think about virtually nothing but the things they want to accomplish. For instance, wealthy people think about engaging in activities that will create wealth. Healthy people think about engaging in activities-proper diet, exercise and rest-that will bring about health. Men and women who are happy in their relationships continually think about the things they can do and the kind of people they can become so that they will be more enjoyable to be around. Successful people are serious about their lives, and they are especially serious about keeping their minds on what they want and off what they don’t want.

My friend Ed Foreman says that worrying, for example, is a form of negative goal setting. It is setting goals that you absolutely don’t want to accomplish. It is thinking about and vividly imagining and emotionalizing pictures of exactly the things that you don’t want to happen.

It doesn’t really matter to your subconscious whether your mental images are positive or negative. It will bring you whatever you ask for. There are seven methods that you can use to tap into the powers of visualization to help yourself move ahead more rapidly. You can use any or all of them. They are used by the most successful men and women in our society.

1. Continuously flood your mind with pictures and images of the person you want to be and the things you want to have and accomplish. Read magazines that contain pictures and stories of what you want to achieve. Go to stores and visit open houses that give you mental images of the kind of lifestyle you want to live. At the same time, stop watching long, drawn-out television shows depicting images of things that you don’t want to have in your life. Stop reading about characters you don’t admire and situations you don’t like. Stop associating with people who are going nowhere.

2. Read stories about and autobiographies by successful people. Continually read self-development materials filled with ideas and examples of men and women who have set goals, overcome adversity, and accomplished great things. As you read, you will begin to identify with those people, and you will actually begin to become like them in your own personality and character.

3. Listen to success audiocassettes, and watch success videos. Also, on television, watch the specials that feature biographies of successful people and interviews with men and women who have accomplished the kind of things that you want to accomplish. Soak your mind in images of success, and success soon will appear in the world around you.

4. Rewrite your major goals, in the present tense, each morning. When you rewrite your major goals for a greater income, thinner waistline, better relationships, and so on, stop to get the feeling or emotion of pleasure and satisfaction that would go along with the accomplishment of those goals. Imagine that you have achieved them already. Smile, and enjoy the feelings of achievement. If you do this every day, you will be amazed at how much more rapidly you will move toward achieving the things you really want.

5. Use the quick affirmation technique. Prior to every event in which you want to be successful, such as an interview or a sales presentation, close your eyes, and take a few seconds to create a clear mental picture of this meeting going extremely well. Breathe deeply. See yourself as relaxed, calm and confident, and see the other person as positive, happy and cooperative. See, in your mind’s eye, the exact outcome or result that you want at this meeting. Smile, and enjoy the feeling of success. Then open your eyes, stand up straight, and, with complete confidence, go into the meeting, knowing that you have already succeeded in your own mind.

6. Use the standard affirmation technique. On three- by five-inch index cards, write down your major goals, in the present tense, and review them on a regular basis. As you read a goal on a card-for example, “I earn $50,000 per year”-close your eyes for a few seconds, and imagine what it would be like if you were earning that kind of money. Visualize your ideal lifestyle. Imagine the restaurants you would dine at, the clothes you would wear, the car you would drive, the people you would associate with. Get the feeling of success and achievement that goes with that greater income. Then open your eyes, smile, and go about your business, knowing that you have already succeeded in your mind’s eye in achieving your goal.

7. Feed your mind a clear mental picture of your desired goals for the coming day, the coming week, the coming months, just before you go to sleep at night. You should use this method every day. We know that in the last 15 minutes before you drop off to sleep, your subconscious mind is the most receptive to the input of new commands. Since your mental pictures are a command, take those last few minutes before you fall off to sleep to daydream and fantasize about exactly the person you want to be and the life you want to have. Your subconscious mind will then take the picture down into its laboratory and work on it all night long. Very often, when you wake up in the morning, you will have ideas and insights to help make those mental pictures a part of your life.

Visualization is a wonderful power. But it is like fire. It can either create or destroy. It can generate warmth or heat and power, or it can cause destruction and failure. Your job is to join the rare few who consciously, consistently and deliberately use visualization to achieve the goals they want to achieve and to become the people they want to become. Your job is to use the power of visualization consciously and continuously to create the kind of future you want for yourself. Remember, as Denis Waitley says, “Your imagination is your preview of life’s coming attractions.” Use it with care.

Principles of Self-Management

The starting point of maturity is the realization that “No one is coming to the rescue.” Everything you are or ever will be is entirely up to you.

This life is not a rehearsal for anything else. This is the real thing. The game is on. Time is passing quickly, and all of your decisions and indecisions, your actions and inactions, have added up to create the life you’re living at this very minute. If you want things to be different in the future, you’ll have to make things different in the present. You’ll have to take complete charge of yourself and your life and make things change, because they won’t change by themselves.

Self-management is really personal management, time management, life management. It’s putting your hands firmly on the steering wheel of your life and then taking yourself in your chosen direction. Remember the old Confucian saying, “If you don’t change the road you’re traveling on, you’ll probably end up where you’re going.” Every successful man or woman in America made, at one time or another, a firm decision about where he or she wanted to go and then took deliberate steps to get there. And you can do this for yourself as well.

One of the most useful ideas I ever learned was to view myself as a “bundle of resources.” You can benefit from this idea by standing back and looking at yourself in terms of what you are, instead of what you do. We tend to define ourselves in terms of our work, in terms of what we’re spending most of our time doing at the present moment. When we meet someone, even at a bus stop, we describe ourselves in terms of our jobs. We say things such as “I’m a salesperson,” “I’m a manager,” or “I work in such-and-such a business doing such-and-such a job.” Since we tend to become what we think about, the more we describe ourselves to others as being what we do, the more we think of ourselves as what we do. Perhaps this is why people who are fired or laid off go through a period of shock and emotional turmoil. it’s as though they’ve been cut off from their identities. You may have had that experience.

The fact is that you’re not what you do. Instead, you’re a bundle of resources. You have the combination of ingredients that makes you a unique and remarkable human being, different from anyone else who ever has lived or who ever will live. You’ve undergone a wide variety of experiences, both positive and negative. You’ve had a formal education, and you’ve learned from the various jobs and activities that you’ve engaged in. You have a unique intelligence, much of which isn’t yet developed to the full. You have skills that you’ve acquired through hard work, discipline and practice. You have abilities that you were born with, which make it easy for you to do certain jobs and to accomplish certain tasks. You have energy and ambition and goals and opportunities. You have a philosophy of life, however developed it is, and you have attitudes and perspectives that make you extraordinary. The federal government has identified more than 22,000 different job categories; when you put all your skills together, you’re probably capable of excelling at hundreds of jobs, doing different things in different organizations, businesses and industries.

As the psychologist Abraham Maslow once wrote, “The story of the human race is the story of men and women selling themselves short.” The average person tends to settle for far less than he’s capable of and then wonders why he’s so dissatisfied and frustrated with his life.

The fact is that you have an inborn drive toward the realization of your full capacity. There’s a force within you that makes you restless and discontent, and that drives you onward and upward toward the achievement of your dreams and aspirations. Many people attempt to deaden that ambition by drinking too much alcohol, watching too much television, socializing too much and even resorting to drugs and dangerous activities. But it will not be denied. You have been put in this world to do something wonderful with your life. You have a unique destiny, a special purpose. And the starting point for realizing that purpose is self-management. It is taking full control over yourself and everything that you are doing so that you are moving progressively toward the realization of a worthy ideal, so that you are firmly on the road toward becoming everything you are capable of becoming.

In self-management, you begin by accepting that you are self-employed. You work for yourself. No matter who signs your paycheck, no matter if you’ve worked for a company all your life, you are always self-employed. You are the president of your own personal services corporation. You go out into the marketplace and sell your services to the highest bidder, but you always work for yourself.

One of the great tragedies of our educational system is that almost everyone is brought up to think of himself as an employee rather than an employer, as a company-owning entrepreneur. This attitude that most people accept unquestioningly is a major cause of unhappiness and underachievement in life. The myth of the employee leads people to see themselves as helpless and dependent. From an early age, they look for someone to provide them with work to do and money to live on. They see themselves as cattle being herded into the barn every day from 9:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. to be milked and then sent back to the pasture to graze and prepare for the next day’s milking. When you accept complete responsibility for your life and begin to view yourself as self-employed, you automatically move into the top 3 percent of employed men and women in America.

At the point where you see that you’re in charge of your working destiny, you begin to realize that self-management is the vehicle that you need to take you from wherever you are to wherever you want to go. You’re not a passive passenger. You’re not an idle dreamer. You’re not subject to the whims and fancies of fate and circumstance. You’re in charge. You determine your own cause of action. You decide where you want to work and what you want to do. Then you, first, prepare yourself and, second, go out to get the job that most satisfies you and allows you to use yourself to your best advantage. You start the process of self-management by looking deeply into yourself and asking, “What do I most enjoy doing? What have I most enjoyed in my work and activities in the past? If I won $1 million in cash tomorrow, what would I choose to work at for the indefinite future?”

Imagine, for a moment, that someone has offered to give you any job in the world and to pay you well at it if you can define that ideal job clearly on paper. By the way, most people find this to be a difficult, if not impossible, task. Most people are so used to accepting the job that is offered to them that the very idea of defining and determining their own job is somewhat overwhelming. But don’t worry. The more often you think about it and jot down your ideas, the clearer it will become to you. Then the most remarkable thing will happen: As a result of your being absolutely clear about what you want to do, you will find yourself moving toward your ideal job, and your ideal job will begin moving toward you.

Another way to determine your purpose in life, once you have accepted complete responsibility for yourself and begun seeing yourself as self-employed, is strategic thinking. Strategic thinkers are those who take the time to sit down and work out where they are and where they want to go. They determine how to achieve their goals in a step-by-step fashion. They look into the future and think about how they could allocate themselves as a bundle of resources to most rapidly move toward the accomplishment of their desires.

In personal strategic thinking and planning, you look at your unique talents and abilities and ask yourself, “Where can I best deploy myself in this marketplace to bring myself the greatest rewards?” A key part of self-management is disciplining yourself to work on only those things that can make the greatest difference in your life. If you are not extremely well-managed personally, you will find yourself spreading your efforts across a wide variety of tasks and getting nothing really important done. Self-management means self-mastery, self-control and even self-denial. It means putting off doing all the things of a lower priority so that you can work on just the one or two things that make all the difference.

Self-management means getting things done through yourself. It means standing back and looking upon yourself as a bundle of resources out of which you want to get the highest possible return. You need to organize, manage and motivate yourself as if you were your own employee.

The manager of an enterprise has seven basic functions, all of which are important. Sometimes one function is more important than another, but all are essential to success in the manager’s job. Those seven functions are: productivity, customer satisfaction, profitability and cost control, quality, people building, organizational development, and innovation. You must become capable of each of those functions in managing yourself so that you achieve the highest possible payoff.

Productivity improvement means constantly increasing output while maintaining the costs of input or even reducing them. You must continually manage yourself to produce more, faster, cheaper and better than you have before. To increase your productivity, you must think every day about the things that you can do to increase your value, to increase your ability to earn money by producing more and better goods and services for yourself and for your company.

One way to increase your productivity is to work on more important things. Another way to increase your productivity is to get better at your key tasks. You can increase your productivity by working longer hours or by working harder during normal business hours. You can increase your productivity by becoming an expert at time management and by always asking yourself the powerful question, “What can I do to increase the value of my service to my company today?”

Remember, you’re being paid today exactly what you’re worth, not a penny more, not a penny less. If you want to earn more tomorrow, you must increase the value of your output. There is no other way. The second self-management task is customer satisfaction. There’s a lot of talk today about total quality management. However, in its simplest terms, total quality management means finding out what the customer wants and then giving it to him or her. In managing yourself, you must be very clear about who your customers are. What do they need from you in order to be satisfied? Also, what does your spouse require from you? What do your children require?

At work, what are your boss’s top priorities? One of the main reasons you’re on the payroll is to please your boss by helping him or her to fulfill his or her responsibilities. The clearer you are about what you need to do to make your boss happy, the more successful you’ll be.

The third self-management task is profitability. That means increasing revenues while keeping costs constant or decreasing costs while keeping revenues constant. Your job at work is to help your company be more profitable, to contribute far more than your company pays you in salary or commission.

Personally, profitability means that you spend less than you earn, that you make a profit from your work. It means that you live within your means and save part of everything you earn. Perhaps the most important part of self-management is financial management. This means that you are 100 percent responsible for achieving your financial independence. And this is possible only by saving and investing part of your income every single paycheck.

The fourth function of personal management is quality, quality in the work you do. Vince Lombardi said, “The quality of a person’s life will be determined by the depth of his commitment to excellence, no matter what the chosen field.”

Your job is to become very good at what you do, to become valuable and then to become indispensable. Your job is to join the top 20 percent of people in your field, and then the top 10 percent, and then the top 5 percent. Excellent work is the key to high earnings, recognition, prestige and the esteem of those around you.

If you want to be successful, as a wise man once told me, “Get good; get better; be the best.” One of the most important self-management responsibilities that you take on is that of becoming very good at what you do.

The fifth job of management is people building. Most managers realize that the business of the company can’t get better unless the people get better. The very best companies in America spend 3 percent or more of their gross sales revenues on training their people. These are the most profitable and fastest growing companies in America.

By the same token, you need to build yourself continually. You need to read at least an hour a day about your chosen field. At least four times per year, you need to attend workshops and seminars given by experts. You need to work on yourself as though your life and your future depended on it, because they do. You must become a lifelong student of your craft just to stay even and, certainly, to get ahead.

The sixth management function is organizational development. For business managers, this involves planning and organizing resources in order to accomplish particular tasks and goals. In self-management, this means that you set clear goals for yourself in every area of your life and you make detailed plans to achieve them. You organize yourself, your time and your resources in order to move rapidly toward achieving the goals that are most important to your life and to your success. You continually upgrade and downgrade your priorities. You continually revise your schedule of activities so that you are always concentrating on the most valuable use of your time.

You determine how much you want to be earning five years from today, and how much you want to be worth in financial terms, and you organize yourself so that you are moving toward those goals every day, every week and every month. You keep saying, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

The seventh self-management function is innovation. You are born with enormous reserves of creativity that can enable you to improve every part of your life. Constantly seek for faster, better and easier ways to fulfill your tasks and goals. Read, research, and ask questions. Talk to others who are ahead of you on the road of life, and ask for their advice. Look into yourself, and listen to your intuition. You can achieve any goal, you can overcome any difficulty and solve any problem on the path to a goal, as long as that goal is clear. You have the creative resources within you to be, have or do anything that you could possibly want. The only limitations are the ones you place on yourself and your mind.

Today, modern management techniques rule the world. In your personal life, modern self-management techniques can make you rich and happy and healthy and fulfilled beyond your wildest imagination. it’s up to you to learn them and apply them in every area of your life.

Overcoming Adversity

Here’s a question for you: What are you made of? What are you really made of? When push comes to shove, when the rubber meets the road, when the chips are down, what lies at the very core of your character? You learn what you’re really made of only when things go wrong and you are tumbled, end over end, by some adversity or setback that hits you like a Mack truck coming out of an alley. Since your behaviors on the outside are the real indicators of who you are on the inside, only by observing how you behave when things go wrong can you tell what you really have inside you.

Let’s make one thing clear at the beginning. Life is a continuous succession of both small and large problems. They never end. No sooner do you get control of one situation when you are hit by another. Life is a process of “two steps forward and one step back.” When you become a great success, you simply exchange one type of problem for another. Before, you had small problems with limited consequences; now you have large problems with enormous consequences. No matter how smart and clever and careful you are, you’ll face challenges, difficulties and sometimes heartbreaking adversities every day, week and month of your life.

And thank heaven for that! You couldn’t possibly have become the person you are today if you had not had to contend with adversity on your way up. Perhaps your chief aim in life is to develop a noble character, to become an excellent human being, to become everything you are capable of becoming. Only by contending with challenges that seem to be beyond your strength to handle at the moment can you grow more surely toward the stars.

The starting point in dealing with any difficulty is simply to relax. Clear your mind. Get yourself into a state where you’re calm and cool and in full control of your emotions and senses. Back off mentally, and become as objective as possible. Step back and look at the problem with a certain amount of detachment, as if it were happening to someone else. When you can analyze your adversities clearly, you sometimes see opportunities to turn them to your best advantage. One of the rules in dealing with adversity in life is that you are only as free as your well-developed alternatives. You are only as free as the options you have. Only when you can switch and do something else can you be flexible in dealing with your current situation. If you have not developed an option or an alternative, you will become anxious and even panicky when you are threatened with a sudden loss or reversal in a particular area of your life.

For example, if you’re in business, look into the future and imagine that your biggest customer could go broke or start buying your product or service from someone else. If that were to happen, what would you do? How would you compensate for the loss of business? What could you do right now to ensure that it doesn’t happen? How could you increase the quantity or the quality of your service or your product in such a way that your major customer would never think of switching? How could you develop additional customers so that you wouldn’t be so dependent upon a single purchaser?

If you are in sales and your goal is to make a certain amount of money so that you can enjoy a certain quality of lifestyle, you have to look down the road in your sales work and ask, “Where will my sales come from? How many prospective customers do I have who can generate the business that I need to make my numbers?” And ask yourself, “What would I do if I lost my best customer? What would I do if I lost my biggest prospect?”

When I was a boy, I read a story that contained one of the most important messages about adversity that I’ve ever learned in my life. As I recall, in this story a young man went up to Alaska and worked with an old Indian trapper, learning how to lay traps, clean pelts, live in the bush and take care of himself in the wilderness. At the end of his apprenticeship, the old Indian gave him some advice. He said, “Remember this. Whatever you do when you travel, always use two logs crossing.”

He was referring to the best method for crossing the many small rivers and streams that the young man would come upon between the small town where the Indian lived and the distant wilderness where he would be trapping.

The young man went off on his own and trapped throughout the summer, until he had all the furs that he could possibly carry. When the leaves began to turn, he began his long hike back to the small town where he would trade his furs for enough money to live on for the winter and outfit himself again for the spring. He did everything exactly right, as he had been taught, until he came to the last, fast-running stream remaining between him and civilization. In his eagerness to get back to town, he tried to cross it on a single log that stretched from one bank to the other.

Alas! He lost his footing and fell into the stream. He had to throw off his pack to avoid drowning. He lost everything. His whole year was wiped out. He arrived in town, wet, bedraggled and exhausted. There he met the old Indian, who looked at him, shook his head and said, “You forgot to use two logs crossing.”

The moral of this story is clear. To contend with adversity in your life, you have to develop alternatives. You have to expand your range of choices. You can never afford to put all your hopes in a single person or a single possibility. You, too, must use two logs crossing. As a consequence of disregarding the Indian’s advice, that young man faced some truly dire circumstances. We can avoid tragedy on that scale by following a four-step method for dealing with any adversity. Dale Carnegie wrote about it more than 50 years ago, and it’s still one of the most powerful mental tools that anyone can use when confronted with problems or worries of any kind.

1. Define the problem clearly. What exactly is the problem? What exactly are you worrying about? Write out the definition of your problem. Make sure that it’s a single problem. If it’s more than one problem, write out clear definitions of all the problems that together constitute what you are worrying about right now.

2. Determine the worst possible outcome. Ask, “What’s the worst possible thing that can happen in this situation?” Be frank and honest with yourself. You might lose your money, or your relationship, or your customer, or someone or something else that is really important to you. If everything fell apart, what is the worst thing that could occur?

3. Resolve to accept the worst, should it occur. Having identified the worst possible outcome, you now can go through the mental exercise of accepting that it is going to happen, no matter what you do. The remarkable thing is that as soon as you stop resisting the worst possible outcome, you’ll relax, your mind will clear, and your ability to deal with the situation will improve dramatically. 4. Begin immediately to improve upon the worst, which you have already accepted is going to happen. Throw all of your mental resources into the battle to minimize the problem or resolve the difficulty. Concentrate on the future. Don’t worry about what happened, why it happened and who was responsible. Think only about the question, “What do I do now?” How can you minimize the consequences? What’s the first step you can take? And the second step? And the third step? And so on.

Successful people are not people without problems. They are people who respond quickly and positively to their problems. They think them through in advance; they anticipate them. And when they can’t, they use the four-step method to resolve whatever difficulty they face. They define the problem clearly. They define the worst possible thing that could happen as a result of the problem. They resolve to accept the worst, should it occur. And then they concentrate all of their energies on making sure that the very worst doesn’t happen.

In dealing with adversity effectively, your ability to ask questions is essential. As long as you are asking questions, you are expanding the range of options and possibilities that are open to you. As long as you are asking questions, you are keeping your mind calm and cool and objective. You are not allowing yourself to get caught up emotionally, thereby shutting down large parts of your brain and your creative powers.

Many problems and adversities arise because of misunderstandings and incorrect information. One of the smartest things you’ll ever do in facing any adversity is to ask yourself, “Who else may have had this problem, and what did he do?” Ask around. Don’t be afraid to admit that you’re in a bind. If you made a mistake, or dropped the ball and found yourself in a difficult situation, don’t be afraid to go to someone and admit that you need help. You’ll be amazed at the valuable advice that you can get from someone who has already experienced the difficulty that you’re going through.

In dealing with adversity, perhaps the four most important words that you can remember are these: “This, too, shall pass.” Whatever it is, however difficult it may appear, say to yourself, “This, too, shall pass.”

Remember, too, that you are never sent a difficulty that is too big for you to handle. Whatever problems or adversities you face, you have within you the resources to deal with them. You have the creative ability to find a solution to your problem. You have within you, right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.

One of your main jobs in life is to become an expert in dealing with adversity, to triumph over difficulty, to rise above the challenges of day-to-day life. Keep your thoughts on where you’re going, not on where you’ve been. Keep your eyes on your goals, and keep your chin tilted upward toward the sunshine. Resolve in advance that you will meet and overcome every difficulty, and then, no matter what happens, don’t give up until you do.

Mental Cross Training

World-class athletes have known for many years that the only way that they can perform at their very peak is by developing all of their various muscles and abilities in a balanced way. In its simplest form, physical cross-training requires that you work on endurance, strength, and flexibility in a rotating format. When I was lifting weights as a young man, it was quite standard for us to work on the muscle groups that were less developed to keep them growing in balance with those muscle groups that were further ahead.

In mental cross-training, you must do the same thing with your repertoire of knowledge and skills. First of all, you need to determine the subjects that you have to be good at in order to be in the top ten or 20 percent in your field. Your job is to make the decision, right now, to go all the way to the top. And the fortunate thing is that, if anyone else has done it, you can do it as well. You simply need to follow in their tracks.

Harvard Business Review did a study some years ago on a subject that they called, “Critical Success Factors.” The idea of critical success factors revolved around the discovery that to dominate any field of endeavor there are seldom more than five to seven skill areas that you absolutely, positively have to be good at. There may be a hundred or a thousand things that you have to do, but there are basically only five to seven areas where you need to commit yourself to excellent performance in order to move way ahead of the rest of the field.

These critical success factors are where you begin your program of mental cross-training. If you are in sales, for example, your seven critical success factors may be prospecting, getting appointments, establishing a relationship with the client, identifying the problem that the client has that your product or service will solve, presenting your product or service as the solution, closing the sale, and personal management. You will have to be absolutely, positively excellent in every one of these areas for you to be a great success in selling any product or service in any market.

And here’s one of the most important discoveries about mental cross-training. If you are weak in any one critical area, that one area will set the height at which you use all your other skills. It will be the chief factor that determines your income and your level of success in your field. If you are absolutely excellent in six out of seven critical success factors but you are terrible in the seventh, you will be held back from ever realizing your full potential in whatever it is you do.

Let me give you an example. Let’s say that you are absolutely excellent in every single part of selling except prospecting. Because of fear or negativity or competition in the marketplace, you are poor at getting appointments with new prospects who can and will buy your product or service. You may be outstanding at everything else but if you can’t get in front of people, you will ultimately fail.

In another example, let’s say you are good at prospecting and getting appointments and establishing rapport, but when it comes to actually getting the client to take action or to closing the sale, you tense up, you are unable to do it, and you leave empty-handed. Again, you could be outstanding at everything except closing the sale and that alone will sabotage your entire career.

If you are in sales, or in any other field, here’s an action strategy for assessing your current level of performance. First, identify your critical success factors, the key areas in which you must be excellent if you want to be successful. Then give yourself a score from one to ten¾with one being the lowest and ten being the highest¾in each area. You will find that areas in which you have given yourself a low score are primary areas of stress, frustration, anxiety, and underachievement in whatever it is you are doing. You need to have a score above seven in every area for you to perform excellently in a well-balanced way.

It is essential that you be perfectly honest with yourself. It will do you no good to pretend that you are good at something when in reality it is interfering with your success in your career. Once you have worked out your critical success factors and you have given yourself a score in each of the five to seven areas, take your score to someone who knows you and ask him or her to score you. The best person for this is your boss, but if you have a friendly customer, ask if he or she will give you a score as well.

If you are in management, there will also be seven critical success factors that determine your level of achievement in your position. They could be a variety of skills but the most common, what I call the “big seven”, are planning, organizing, staffing, delegating, supervising, innovating, and reporting. If you are poor in any one of these seven areas, that could be sufficient, in itself, to hold you back from using all your other talents.

Fortunately, if you feel that you are not particularly good in a critical success factor area, like delegating, you can read books, listen to tapes, and take courses, thereby bringing up your skills to above seven out of ten so that this area is no longer a problem for you.

In mental cross-training, the areas where you are weak are the sources of your major problems in your career. They are the areas that preoccupy you and concern you the most. And they are often in the activity areas where you get the worst results. You are likely to become anxious when it comes to performing those activities. If you are not careful, you will have a tendency to avoid performing in those areas, or even go one step further and convince yourself that you are already quite good in those areas. This is why it is so important that you ask other people around you to evaluate you in an objective way and tell you how well they think you are doing.

There is a new management technique that is becoming quite popular throughout the country. It is called the “360 Degree Method.” In this managerial method, managers and subordinates are evaluated by all the people who work around them. Questionnaires are sent out to everyone within an organization, and each person is asked to evaluate their superiors and their subordinates. These questionnaires are then collected and analyzed for presentation at a meeting where each person sits in the middle of a 360 degree circle and is critiqued and evaluated by all the people with whom he or she works.

If this is done properly, it is extremely helpful to people. It comes as a great shock to most people that in areas where they think they are quite good, their coworkers and subordinates think they are quite poor.

For example, I had an executive working for me some years ago who felt that he was absolutely excellent at hiring people. He would not take any advice or input from anyone. He made his hires from the seat of his pants. And every single person that he hired turned out to be a disaster. Eventually, his right and authority to hire people had to be removed completely. This inability to learn how to properly interview and select the right people eventually proved to be fatal in his career. He had to go back to working on his own because he was simply incapable of picking people to work with him, no matter what position he had.

So here’s the question: What are the areas you need to work on to bring yourself up to a high level of performance? If you are not sure, have the courage and the honesty to go to other people and ask for their feedback. Remember, feedback is the breakfast of champions. You can’t get better unless someone is willing to give you an honest critique and help you see yourself as you really are.

If you are in sales, it is absolutely essential that you get your sales manager or someone else to go out with you at least once per month for an entire day to evaluate your sales performance. When this person comes out, he or she should sit there quietly and say nothing, just watching the way you interact with the customer. Afterward, this person should tell you exactly what he or she saw, both the good and the bad. Unless you have this kind of honest feedback, it is impossible for you to improve. But once you get this feedback, instead of being defensive, make a decision to go to work on yourself and improve that skill area so that it is no longer a limitation on your performance.

There are three rules that I want to emphasize with regard to mental cross-training:

First: It doesn’t matter where you are coming from. All that matters is where you are going. The future is more important than the past. You can’t change the past, but you can change your future by changing what you do today.

Second: For your life to get better, you must get better. If you want to earn more, you must learn more. Knowledge is the chief source of value today. If you want to improve the quality of your life, you must improve the quality of your knowledge and skills.

Third: You can learn anything that you need to learn to become any person that you want to become and to achieve any goal that you can possibly set for yourself. There are no limits except the limits that you set on your own mind.

From this day forward, make yourself a “do-it-to-yourself project.” Begin and continue the lifelong process of continually getting better in all the areas that are important to you. Just as a champion athlete develops all of his or her muscles symmetrically and in balance, you must develop your mental muscles in a balanced way as well. Mental cross-training is truly an important step toward gaining control of your destiny.

Managing Your Time

Perhaps the greatest single problem that people have today is “time poverty.” Working people have too much to do and too little time for their personal lives. Most people feel overwhelmed with responsibilities and activities, and the harder they work, the further behind they feel. This sense of being on a never-ending treadmill can cause you to fall into the reactive/responsive mode of living. Instead of clearly deciding what you want to do, you continually react to what is happening around you. Pretty soon you lose all sense of control. You feel that your life is running you, rather than you running your life.

On a regular basis, you have to stand back and take stock of yourself and what you’re doing. You have to stop the clock and do some serious thinking about who you are and where you are going. You have to evaluate your activities in the light of what is really important to you. You must master your time rather than becoming a slave to the constant flow of events and demands on your time. And you must organize your life to achieve balance, harmony, and inner peace. Taking action without thinking is the cause of every failure. Your ability to think is the most valuable trait that you possess. If you improve the quality of your thinking, you improve the quality of your life, sometimes immediately.

Time is your most precious resource. It is the most valuable thing you have. It is perishable, it is irreplaceable, and it cannot be saved. It can only be reallocated from activities of lower value to activities of higher value. All work requires time. And time is absolutely essential for the important relationships in your life. The very act of taking a moment to think about your time before you spend it will begin to improve your personal time management immediately.

I used to think that time management was only a business tool, like a calculator or a cellular telephone. It was something that you used so that you could get more done in a shorter period of time and eventually be paid more money. Then I learned that time management is not a peripheral activity or skill. It is the core skill upon which everything else in life depends.

In your work or business life, there are so many demands on your time from other people that very little of your time is yours to use as you choose. However, at home and in your personal life you can exert a tremendous amount of control over how you use your time. And it is in this area that I want to focus.

Personal time management begins with you. It begins with your thinking through what is really important to you in life. And it only makes sense if you organize it around specific things that you want to accomplish. You need to set goals in three major areas of your life. First, you need family and personal goals. These are the reasons why you get up in the morning, why you work hard and upgrade your skills, why you worry about money and sometimes feel frustrated by the demands on your time.

What are your personal and family goals, both tangible and intangible? A tangible family goal could be a bigger house, a better car, a larger television set, a vacation, or anything else that costs money. An intangible goal would be to build a higher quality relationship with your spouse and children, to spend more time with your family going for walks or reading books. Achieving these family and personal goals are the real essence of time management, and its major purpose.

The second area of goals are your business and career goals. These are the “how” goals, the means by which you achieve your personal, “why” goals. How can you achieve the level of income that will enable you to fulfill your family goals? How can you develop the skills and abilities to stay ahead of the curve in your career? Business and career goals are absolutely essential, especially when balanced with family and personal goals.

The third type of goals are your personal development goals. Remember, you can’t achieve much more on the outside than what you have achieved on the inside. Your outer life will be a reflection of your inner life. If you wish to achieve worthwhile things in your personal and your career life, you must become a worthwhile person in your own self-development. You must build yourself if you want to build your life. Perhaps the greatest secret of success is that you can become anything you really want to become to achieve any goal that you really want to achieve. But in order to do it, you must go to work on yourself and never stop.

Once you have a list of your personal and family goals, your business and career goals, and your self-development goals, you can then organize the list by priority. This brings us to the difference between priorities and posteriorities. In order to get your personal time under control, you must decide very clearly upon your priorities. You must decide on the most important things that you could possible be doing to give yourself the same amount of happiness, satisfaction, and joy in life. But at the same time, you must establish posteriorities as well. Just as priorities are things that you do more of and sooner, posteriorities are things that you do less of and later.

The fact is, your calendar is full. You have no spare time. Your time is extremely valuable. Therefore, for you to do anything new, you will have to stop doing something old. In order to get into something, you will have to get out of something else. In order to pick something up, you will have to put something down. Before you make any new commitment of your time, you must firmly decide what activities you are going to discontinue in your personal life. If you want to spend more time with your family, for example, you must decide what activities you currently engage in that are preventing you from doing so.

A principle of time management says that hard time pushes out soft time. This means that hard time, such as working, will push out soft time, such as the time you spend with your family. If you don’t get your work done at the office because you don’t use your time well, you almost invariably have to rob that time from your family. As a result, because your family is important to you, you find yourself in a values conflict. You feel stressed and irritable. You feel a tremendous amount of pressure. You know in your heart that you should be spending more time with the important people in your life, but because you didn’t get your work done, you have to fulfill those responsibilities before you can spend time with your spouse and children.

Think of it this way. Every minute you waste during the waking day is time that your family will ultimately be deprived of. So concentrate on working when you are at work so that you can concentrate on your family when you are at home.

There are three key questions that you can ask yourself continually to keep your personal life in balance. The first question is, “What is really important to me?” Whenever you find yourself with too much to do and too little time, stop and ask yourself, “What is it that is really important for me to do in this situation?” Then, make sure that what you are doing is the answer to that question.

The second question is, “What are my highest value activities?” In your personal life, this means, “What are the things that I do that give me the greatest pleasure and satisfaction? Of all the things that I could be doing at any one time, what are the things that I could do to add the greatest value to my life?”

And the final question for you to ask over and over again is, “What is the most valuable use of my time right now?” Since you can only do one thing at a time, you must constantly organize you life so that you are doing one thing, the most important thing, at every moment. Personal time management enables you to choose what to do first, what to do second, and what not to do at all. It enables you to organize every aspect of your life so that you can get the greatest joy, happiness, and satisfaction out of everything you do.

« Previous Page — Next Page »