Friday, March 8, 2013

Nine Things You Must Do In Life For Success and Happiness



Nine things you must do in life for success and happiness
Tim Connor, CSP

Yes, there are many more than the following nine things I have listed that people need to do to achieve success, but after traveling the world for over 40 years and speaking to over a million people who found themselves in a variety of business and life circumstances, I can tell you that when you do these nine you will not have to worry about the others – they will take care of themselves. The following are not in any order of importance but how you handle the first one will tend to impact all of the others. Here are the nine things:

Clean out your mental filter – Your mental filter or mindsets is the number one cause of failure, conflict, stress, disappointment as well as success, inner peace and happiness and numerous other life attitudes, behaviors and actions. Everyone filters everything they hear, sees and experiences. This mental filer, over the years beginning at childhood has been loaded with an incredible amount of information that is often untrue, unnecessary and conflicting. Your mental hard drive (comparing the mind to a computer) controls all of your decisions, opinions, prejudices and reactions to circumstances and people. Here’s the major problem – this filter over the years has become clogged with information that is no longer relevant to your current circumstances and yet we all allow this filtering process to influence our
approaches and responses to outside-in stimuli.

How did this happen? The ingredients of your mental filter – your past; emotions, regrets, memories, prejudices, opinions, experiences, feelings and attitudes have become a template that all new experiences must pass through in order to evaluate your reactions or responses to them. As a result you will tend to continue to react in similar ways to situations that in some way resemble past situations. This is not all bad as we can all learn from new ones that show up in our life. However, the brain is wired that its first response to all outside issues tends to be from a fear perspective. This hardwiring is millions of years old and plays a dominant role in all behavior.

What can you do? I could give you a long list of numerous actions you could take to begin to clean out your mental filter and your roles or responsibilities but I’ll give you three. One) Stay focused in the present. Use the lessons from the past but when you feel you are acting in auto-pilot get present. Two) Learn to come at everything in life from the perspective of appreciation. 3) Be careful what new information you allow access to your mind.

Thoughts become circumstances – What you focus on mentally tends to manifest itself in your reality and circumstances. Ask any psychologist, neuroscience physician or professional counselor and you will get the same answer. How you think dramatically contributes to your mindsets, attitudes and
thus your outcomes. This does not mean that every thought manifests itself into circumstances but that what I refer to as “thought tendencies or trends” is the major factor in the quality of your life and personal and business success.

Failure as a learning tool – Anything that has ever been invented or created was accomplished by someone or some organization that failed in its early attempts but they didn’t let this setback deter them. They kept on keeping on. Failure is a teacher but in order to learn its lessons we have top be a good and willing student. Unfortunately the vast majority of people give up when they first fail or don’t achieve their desired results. One of the keys to leadership is the ability to endure failure, learn from it and move steadfastly on towards success.

Act like a bird – Moving in the right direction – consistently – will always prove a better strategy than short term infinitives testing their outcomes that often lead to wasted resources and time. Consider a bird building a nest. It doesn’t have a plan, it doesn’t get stressed out if the nest isn’t built fast enough or it doesn’t look like he wants it to. He just patiently keeps adding sticks and leaves until the nest is finished. He doesn’t get discouraged if the nest won’t achieve some conventional wisdom approval or if other birds criticize his approach. He just keeps building one step at a time. Are you a person that tries to push the river and not let things work out over time as they are meant to and ultimately do? Or do you flow one step at a time letting the natural ebb and flow of creativity and performance create a results that may many times look or be better than you originally envisioned?

The past is dead – Yesterday is gone with all its pain, joy, success, happiness and disappointment. Now is all you have. Regrets are wasted energy. Past decisions that failed to yield the results you wanted are gone. Past actions whether noble or stupid are history. You can’t change a thing that happened yesterday or twenty years ago. All you can do is take the lessons from the past and try and create a different or better future in your now moments. Statistics indicate that the average person spends over 50% of their mental time in the past. Wasted time and energy. Life is lived now – not yesterday or tomorrow.

Pull the tooth – Ever had a toothache? If you have I’ll guarantee you didn’t live with the pain for months or even weeks. You want to the dentist to have the problem fixed. If the dentist said it could be fixed with a filling you most likely agreed with their decision and he or she fixed the tooth. However if the dentist said the tooth couldn’t be fixed and it needed to be pulled did you argue with them? No they pulled the tooth to end the pain. You can’t possibly imagine how many people live every day of their lives with any number of emotional pains simply because they would rather live with the pain than pull the tooth.
Is it a poor employee that needs to be let go? Is it a relationship that has long been over but you won’t end it? Is it a product or service that isn’t working? Whatever – are you pulling the tooth or are you living with the pain?

Throw away the remote – Life is not lived in the future or the past as I have indicated and you I am sure are well aware. The problem is that most people still keep hitting the rewind or fast forward button on their life’s remote hoping to get somewhere else or different sooner or faster or rewinding with the desire for the good old days or previous times that for whatever reason seemed to be better than today or now. It’s simple – hit the play button and throw away the remote if you want to achieve inner peace, happiness and yes success. This doesn’t mean you don’t plan, set goals or create strategies for the future but beware many of these keep us stuck in patterns or approaches that may not be headed for ultimate success.

Play the movie – I can’t tell you how many failures I could have avoided during my life if I would have played the movie prior to yet once more embarking on a journey that was destined to fail. Playing the movie is not trying to predict the future but an exercise in taking what you have learned and blending it with reality and then making decisions and taking actions accordingly. This exercise will not prevent failure but it can have a definite positive impact on your actions, decisions and outcomes. Just consider the decision and then play it forward using your unfiltered experience and knowledge and be willing to bring integrity to the process. If the future actions along the way don’t present insurmountable challenges and the outcome is possible as well as probable – go. If not carefully consider the potential ramifications if you go forward ignoring your gut reactions.

Say thank you – This is a short one. Today you have had upwards of 80,000 heartbeats and almost as many breaths. Are you taking these for granted or do you take time each day to just say thank you for all of life’s gifts? One day it will all end. Will it end with you filled with gratitude or sadness for what you missed and what you failed to take the ti

No comments:

Post a Comment