Inspirational

I believe that being successful means having a balance of success stories across the many areas of your life. You can’t truly be considered successful in your business life if your home life is in shambles.

If you wait until all the lights are “green” before you leave home, you’ll never get started on your trip to the top.

When you set goals, something inside of you starts saying, “Let’s go, let’s go,” and ceilings start to move up.

Money isn’t the most important thing in life, but it’s reasonably close to oxygen on the “gotta have it” scale.

Statistics suggest that when customers complain, business owners and managers ought to get excited about it. The complaining customer represents a huge opportunity for more business.

You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.

Many companies have long contended that stress in the home causes productivity loss in the market place and it does. But research now reveals that stress on the job causes stress at home. In other words, they feed off each other.

The greatest good we can do for others is not just to share our riches with them, but to reveal theirs.

It is your attitude, not your aptitude that determines your altitude.

People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing; that’s why we recommend it daily.

………………Zig Ziglar

No matter how busy you are, make sure and find some time over the next two weeks to reflect, think, give and plan.

The ideal time for this is now. Try and slow things down. Spend time with the ones you love and care about. Take some time to talk to yourself and God about goals and dreams for the year. Use this as a time to recharge your batteries (and not just by watching TV the entire time) and with excitement think about a handful of changes or additions you want for your life in 2008.

I believe you will find the act of reflecting, thinking, dreaming and planning to be one of the most important exercises you can do that will positively impact the next 6 months.

And remember, do not neglect to commit yourself to set this time aside or you will find that the business of life can and will get in the way.

So let’s all take a moment to gather up the past year of victories and defeats, growing as well as those times of stagnation and use it to wipe a clean slate and thoughtfully design the next season the way we truly desire it to be.

1) Setting Goals. I call it the view of the future. Most people, including kids, will pay the price if they can see the promise of the future. So we need to consistently see a well-defined future for continuous motivation to pay the price today to attain the rewards of tomorrow.

2) Personal Development. Simply making consistent investments in our self-education and knowledge banks pays major dividends throughout our lives. I suggest having a minimum amount of time set aside for reading books, listening to audiocassettes, attending seminars, keeping a journal and spending time with other successful people. Charlie “Tremendous’ Jones says you will be in five years the sum total of the books you read and the people you are around.

3) Financial Planning. I call it the 70/30 plan. After receiving your paycheck or paying yourself, simply setting aside 10% for saving, 10% for investing and 10% for giving, and over time this will guarantee financial independence for anyone.

We must become good observers and astute evaluators of all that is going on around us. All events affect us, and what affects us leaves an imprint on what we will one day be and how we will one day live.

One of the major reasons why people are not doing well is because they keep trying to get through the day. A more worthy challenge is to try to get from the day. We must become sensitive enough to observe and ponder what is happening around us. Be alert. Be awake. Let life and all of its subtle messages touch us. Often, the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among the seemingly insignificant events of life. If we do not pay attention to these events, we can easily miss the opportunities.

So be a good observer of both life and the world around you.

We must become good observers and astute evaluators of all that is going on around us. All events affect us, and what affects us leaves an imprint on what we will one day be and how we will one day live.

One of the major reasons why people are not doing well is because they keep trying to get through the day. A more worthy challenge is to try to get from the day. We must become sensitive enough to observe and ponder what is happening around us. Be alert. Be awake. Let life and all of its subtle messages touch us. Often, the most extraordinary opportunities are hidden among the seemingly insignificant events of life. If we do not pay attention to these events, we can easily miss the opportunities.

So be a good observer of both life and the world around you.

It is often said that your association either break or make you…..how true

We are all products of influences (either positive or negative) and we’re being influenced on a daily basis either consciously or otherwise.

Here are three ways to handle associations or relationships that are holding you back.

1) Disassociate. This is not an easy decision, nor something you should take lightly, but in some cases it may be essential (please don’t email me asking to advise you about this, only you can decide). You may just have to make the hard choice not to let certain negative influences affect you any more. It could be a choice that preserves the quality of your life.

2) Limited association. Spend major time with major influence and minor time with minor influences. It is easy to do just the opposite, but don’t fall into that trap. Take a look at your priorities and your values. We have so little time at our disposal. Wouldn’t it make sense to invest it wisely?

3) Expanding your associations. This is the one I suggest you focus on the most. Find other successful people that you can spend more time with. Invite them to lunch (pick up the tab) and ask them how they have achieved so much or what makes them successful. Now, this is not just about financial success, it can be someone that you want to learn from about having a better marriage, being a better parent, having better health or a stronger spiritual life.

It is called association on purpose - getting around the right people by expanding your circle of influence. And when you do that, you will naturally limit the relationships that are holding you back. Give it a try and see for yourself.

Please sit back and digest thoroughly.   

For a leader, honesty and integrity are absolutely essential to survival. A lot of business people don’t realize how closely they’re being watched by their subordinates. Remember when you were a kid in grammar school, how you used to sit there staring at your teacher all day? By the end of the school year, you could do a perfect imitation of all your teacher’s mannerisms. You were aware of the slightest nuances in your teacher’s voice - all the little clues that distinguished levels of meaning, that told you the difference between bluff and “now I mean business”.

And you were able to do that after eight or nine months of observation. Suppose you had five or 10 years. Do you think there would have been anything about your teacher you didn’t know?

Now fast forward and use that analogy as a manager. Do you think there’s anything your people don’t know about you right this minute? If you haven’t been totally aboveboard and honest with them, do you really think you’ve gotten away with it? Not too likely. But if you’ve been led to believe that you’ve gotten away with it, there might be a good probability that people are afraid of you, and that’s a problem in its own right.

But there is another side of this coin. In any organization, people want to believe in their leaders. If you give them reason to trust you, they’re not going to go looking for reasons to think otherwise, and they’ll be just as perceptive about your positive qualities as they are about the negative ones.

A situation that happened some years ago at a company in the Midwest illustrates this perfectly. The wife of a new employee experienced complications in the delivery of a baby. There was a medical bill of more than $10,000, and the health insurance company didn’t want to cover it. The employee hadn’t been on the payroll long enough, the pregnancy was a preexisting condition, etc,etc,..

In any case, the employee was desperate. He approached the company CEO and asked him to talk to the insurance people. The CEO agreed, and the next thing the employee knew, the bill was gone and the charges were rescinded. Then he told some colleagues about the way the CEO had so readily used his influence with the insurance company, they just shook their heads and smiled. The CEO had paid the bill out of his own pocket, and everybody knew it, no matter how quietly it had been done.

Now an act of dishonesty can’t be hidden either, and it will instantly undermine the authority of a leader. But an act of integrity and kindness like the example above is just as obvious to all concerned. When you’re in a leadership position, you have the choice of how you will be seen, but you Will be seen one way or the other, make no mistake about it.

One of the most challenging areas of leadership is your family. Leadership of a family demands even higher standards of honesty and integrity, and the stakes are higher too. You can replace disgruntled employees and start over. You can even get a new job for yourself, if it comes to that. But your family can’t be shuffled like a deck of cards. If you haven’t noticed, kids are great moral philosophers, especially as they get into adolescence. They’re determined to discover and expose any kind of hypocrisy, phoniness, or lack of integrity on the part of authority figures, and if we’re parents, that means us. It’s frightening how unforgiving kids can be about this, but it really isn’t a conscious decision on their part; it’s just a necessary phase of growing up.

They’re testing everything, especially their parents.

As a person of integrity yourself, you’ll find it easy to teach integrity to your kids, and they in turn will find it easy to accept you as a teacher. This is a great opportunity and also a supreme responsibility, because kids simply must be taught to tell the truth: to mean what they say and to say what they mean.

“Praise is one the world’s most effective teaching and leadership tools. Criticism and blame, even if deserved, are counter productive unless all other approaches have failed.”

Now for the other side of the equation, we all know people who have gotten ahead as a result of dishonest or unethical behavior. When you’re a kid, you might naively think that never happens, but when you get older, you realize that it does. Then you think you’ve really wised up. But that’s not the real end of it. When you get older, you see the long-term consequences of dishonest gain, and you realize that in the end it doesn’t pay.

“Hope of dishonest gain is the beginning of loss”. I don’t think that old saying refers to loss of money. I think it actually means loss of self-respect. You can have all the material things in the world, but if you’ve lost respect for yourself, what do you really have? The only way to ever attain success and enjoy it is to achieve it honestly with pride in what you’ve done.

This isn’t just a sermon, it’s very practical advice.  Not only can you take it to heart - you can take it to the bank.

I think everybody should study ants. They have an amazing four-part philosophy, and here is the first part: ants never quit. That’s a good philosophy. If they’re headed somewhere and you try to stop them; they’ll look for another way. They’ll climb over, they’ll climb under, they’ll climb around. They keep looking for another way. What a neat philosophy, to never quit looking for a way to get where you’re supposed to go.

Second, ants think winter all summer. That’s an important perspective. You can’t be so naive as to think summer will last forever. So ants are gathering in their winter food in the middle of summer.

An ancient story says, “Don’t build your house on the sand in the summer.” Why do we need that advice? Because it is important to think ahead. In the summer, you’ve got to think storm. You’ve got to think rocks as you enjoy the sand and sun.

The third part of the ant philosophy is that ants think summer all winter. That is so important. During the winter, ants remind themselves, “This won’t last long; we’ll soon be out of here.” And the first warm day, the ants are out. If it turns cold again, they’ll dive back down, but then they come out the first warm day. They can’t wait to get out.

And here’s the last part of the ant philosophy. How much will an ant gather during the summer to prepare for the winter? All that he possibly can. What an incredible philosophy, the “all-that-you-possibly-can” philosophy.

Wow, what a great philosophy to have - the ant philosophy. Never give up, look ahead, stay positive and do all you can.

“Not long since I sought to formulate in my own mind the things that make life most worth living, without which it would have little meaning. Some of these things have been relegated to bygone days; some are regarded as long since outgrown. Nevertheless I believe they are every one of them fundamental and eternal. They are the principles on which my wife and I have tried to bring up our family; they are the principles in which my father believed and by which he governed his life. They are the principles, many of them, which I learned at my mother’s knee. They point the way to usefulness and happiness in life, to courage and peace in death. If they mean to you what they mean to me they may perhaps be helpful also to our sons and daughters for their guidance and inspiration. Let me state them:

. I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness;

. I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty;

. I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master;

. I believe in the dignity of labour, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living;

. I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs;

. I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order;

. I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character - not wealth or power or position - is of supreme worth;

. I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free;

. I believe in an all-wise and all-loving God, named by whatever name, and that the individual’s highest fulfilment, greatest happiness and widest usefulness are to be found in living in harmony with His will;

. I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.

These are the principles, however formulated, for which all good men and women throughout the world, irrespective of race or creed, education, social position or occupation are standing, and for which many of them are suffering and dying.”

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us; it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”