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.
No comments:
Post a Comment