Everyone wants success. But are you willing to change?
Without change, there can be no growth. And in order to get what you’ve never had, you must become someone you’ve never been. Before you go into the woods, you will need a map. Rest assured others have forged the route before you. Their experiences can help guide you to your own best you.
Success in life is not an accident. Focus is very good and it is a determinant of success, but when not guided by priority, it can lead to a great disaster. You might as well later realize that you’ve spent years of your life focusing on the wrong things and perhaps, you might have even done them so right, but they weren’t just the right things.
Live forward by making a life plan
With “Living Forward: A Proven Plan To Stop Drifting And Get The Life You Want,” authors Michael Hyatt and Daniel Harkavy help you begin to become the architect of your own life. Most of us make plans for everything — vacations, dinner, our children’s school functions. But rarely does a person make a life plan. If I asked you to summarize your life plan, could you tell me? Probably not.
If you finally want to live with more intention and purpose in your life or become an entrepreneur now and not later, then your extraordinary life is on the other side of your life-planning design process.
Understanding why you need a plan (because as humans, we drift and get distracted).
Learning how to create your life plan beginning with the end in mind (answering, “What legacy do you want to leave behind?”).
Many of us see change as threatening. Some even regard it as the destroyer of what is familiar and comfortable rather than the creator of what is new and exciting. Unfortunately, comfort is the enemy of excellence.
“For the timid, change is frightening, for the comfortable, change is threatening, but for the confident, change is opportunity,” motivational speaker Nido Qubein writes in “Stairway to Success: The Complete Blueprint for Personal and Professional Achievement.”
Decide what you will do with your current opportunity. In order to grow and achieve new heights in your life, you must make a commitment to change. Focus your attention on growing in areas that will add personal and professional value. Don’t let your comfort zone kill the excellence within your reach. Make your life plan today.
Distill your thoughts and attributes
Your thoughts are great forces to back up your success arena. They are always present to allow you act and as well do the right things.
New York Times best-selling author Brendon Burchard believes there are four cornerstones to achievement. In “The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive,” he writes that if you truly want to succeed in your career, you must develop four attributes: desire, direction, discipline and distraction radar.
Desire
You have to really want it. Your new endeavor should make you feel alive — it might even keep you up at night. Your desire to develop greater KSAs (knowledge, skills and abilities) will lead to you becoming a better person in the process. The challenges you encounter will test your boundaries, forcing growth.
Direction
Desire is one thing, but you need to harness it by learning to stretch your competency. You must be willing to educate yourself in new ways. You might take a class or attend a seminar, read a new biography, participate in a webinar, ask for help or seek out mentors. Learn how others have achieved a goal, model it, and mimic their strategies while you carve out your own path.
Be a student of life. Continue to read and expose yourself to new ideas. Never stop learning.
Discipline
Success is within your reach if you’re willing to be more consistent than ever before. You must establish habits and repeat them every day until they are second nature. Ask yourself, “What discipline could I consistently follow to get me where I want to be in my career?” Don’t think of discipline in a negative way. Think of discipline as the joyous pursuit of your dreams.
Distraction Radar
You inevitably will be distracted from your goals. Many things compete for your time — emails, phone calls, social media, television and the list goes on. The world will toss its agenda in front of you. You have to be savvy enough to recognize distractions and move them out of your way. Listen to those moments your distraction radar sounds a warning and take away these interruptions’ power to sap your
To begin thinking more intentionally about these four attributes, ask yourself a few pointed questions tomorrow morning:
What do I desire today?
What direction will I take today?
In which area will I be disciplined today?
To which distractions will I not succumb today?
Plan how you’ll deal with resistance to change.
In order to continually implement these four attributes, you need a system – a framework – to which you continually return when you fall off the motivational wagon. It’s resistance at work, and it happens to the best of us.
In Steven Pressfield’s book “The War of Art,” he puts it quite bluntly.
“Resistance’s goal is not to wound or disable,” Pressfield writes. “Resistance aims to kill. Its target is the epicenter of our being: our genius, our soul, the unique priceless gift we were put on earth to give and that no one else has but us. Resistance means business. When we fight it, we are in a war to the death.”
Start each day focused and productive
How you wake up and start each day is vital to your levels of success in every area of your life. Focused, productive, successful mornings generate focused, productive, successful days which inevitably create a successful life. In the same way that unfocused, unproductive and mediocre mornings generate unfocused, unproductive and mediocre days and ultimately a mediocre quality of life.
By simply changing the way you wake up in the morning, you can transform any area of your life, faster than you ever thought possible.
Aren’t you excited by the words you just read? I know I am. Remember, when you start changing your habits, you are changing who you are becoming. It’s by far the greatest determinant in your quality of life now and in the future. Still, most people avoid change. This will not be you. This is your time to banish self-limiting thoughts and share your gifts with the world.
SAVE yourself from an unfulfilled life.
S is for silence
Start your day silently to reduce stress and anxiety. During his silence, Elrod likes to meditate, pray, reflect, do some deep breathing and concentrate on gratitude.
A is for Affirmations
I challenge you to identify five simple outcomes that create personalized affirmations:
1. What you really want (program your mind with beliefs, attitudes and behaviors that are vital to you being able to reach Level 10 success).
2. Why you want it (when you are clear about your deepest whys, you will gain an unstoppable purpose).
3. Whom you commit to being, in order to create your new reality (life gets better only when you do).
4. What you commit to do to attain it (write down an action step or steps and stick to your list).
5. Which inspirational quotes and philosophies you’ll read to influence your thoughts.
V is for Visualization
This is a tool most successful athletes use. I like to call it intentional daydreaming. Visualization enables you to see a future you want. When you do it often enough, you’ll look for ways to make that future your reality. Visualization can be a powerful aid to overcoming self-limiting habits such as procrastination. It helps you find the willpower to take necessary actions and achieve your goals.
E is for Exercise
You may have suffered a lot and don’t recognize why. It is no joke that if you don’t make time for exercise, you’ll probably have to make time for illness. Get moving. You might never feel like working out, but remember that emotion follows motion. Once you start moving, you’ll feel good you did it.
You might think all this will take too much time to do. Realize it takes daily discipline to form new habits. “Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments,” Charles Duhigg writes in “The Power of Habit.” That bridge must be crossed daily. Habits are behaviors you repeat regularly and most often, subconsciously. As Duhigg puts it, “People do not decide their future, they decide their habits and their habits decide their future.”
The true key is consistency
