Put Yourself Out There

At the time of choice between acting in harmony with your goal or acting in a way counter to it, how do you improve your performance?

I suggest you consider putting yourself out there. Apply the influence of your friendships, peer pressure, to help you progress.

In January 2010 I sent written invitations to more than 200 people in my network. I invited them to attend a party I was giving a year later in January of 2011. The party was to celebrate my successful loss of fifty pounds.

Of course, I hadn’t actually lost the weight yet, but I told them that I would step on a scale that was projected on a screen, and that I would weigh 195 pounds. I asked them to attend and to please RSVP.

I received several responses including, “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. I’ll be there!”

I hoped that the peer pressure would help me make better choices when tempted to eat fast food or other unhealthy food.

Throughout that year my network friends asked me consistently about my progress. They noticed my progress and complimented me often. The support lifted and encouraged me.

Every time I had to make a food choice, I thought of my upcoming party. It spurred me to make better choices (most of the time).

About twenty people attended my party on January 11, 2011. We enjoyed healthy snacks, and visited about our success or lack thereof on our goals for the year.

I spoke to the group about the year’s journey, and about the importance of finding our own individual methods to overcome our bad habits.

At the end I projected my scale results — 198 pounds! Just three pounds short of my goal.

That was okay for me. I later lost the last three.

I put myself out there, risking failure and ridicule, for the accomplishment of this important goal.

So how can you put yourself out there?

Here are some possibilities:

  1. Get a goal friend agreement with one or more friends.
  2. Set up a reporting arrangement where you can share your progress daily or weekly.
  3. Create a simple blog and invite friends to view it regularly.
  4. Work with a coach (business coach, life coach, or goal coach) to develop a good plan.

If you have used an unusual approach to nailing your goals, please share them with me. I’d love to share it with others.

Put yourself out there.

If you want to participate in our Goal Friends Challenge, go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/iGoalFriends/

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The New iGoalFriends Challenge

Welcome

Welcome to the Goal Friends Challenge. We’re going to have a good time and we’re going to get results.

The Goal Friends Challenge will help you change everything.

To join, go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/iGoalFriends/

Many of our past participants have reached their goals, and have learned about themselves in the process. They’ve found it simple, enjoyable, and effective.

If you’re serious about reaching your goals, you should begin immediately. If you wait you will struggle to break your inertia.

This brief workbook will help you get a powerful start. It may take you a couple of hours to complete. You may want to do one section at a time, or you may want to make a quick pass through, and come back and refine your work in a day or so.

I recommend you take no more than three days to work your way fully through the workbook. You can do it easily, especially if you turn off your television set until you’re fully finished. As Brian Tracy wrote, “Your television can make you rich–but only if you turn it off.”

The Idea

Most people do really well with their goals in the first week, but they begin to lose steam in the weeks and months that follow. Maintaining enthusiasm for major changes can prove challenging. We’ve all misfired too many times.

The Goal Friends Challenge will help you no matter what you want to do?

  • Improve your finances
  • Lose weight
  • Stop smoking
  • Deepen your spirituality
  • Improve sales
  • Read more
  • Exercise consistently
  • Get out of debt

You will succeed beyond any past achievements by leveraging the power of Goal Friends.

  • Craft stronger goals
  • Build and keep to an implementation plan
  • Stay focused
  • Feel the pride of finally accomplishing a long-held goal
  • Develop new, more positive habits
  • Stay motivated even when it gets tough
  • Enjoy Goal Friends recognition
  • Overcome challenges that have always thwarted you
  • Take responsibility for your own success
  • Apply what you learn in the challenge to help you every year

You can stay with the Goal Friends Challenge as long as you want.

Work on one goal at a time, and when you reach it, move on to another.

To join, go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/iGoalFriends/

The Process

Here’s how the Goal Friends Challenge works:

  1. You will identify several possible goals, prioritize them, and select your first challenge goal.
  2. Next, you will brainstorm several daily actions you could make to achieve your goal, and select three or four daily actions for the challenge.
  3. Once you know your daily actions, you will define an acceptable daily level of performance. This will act as your Silver Day.
  4. Then you will define a crazy, successful day. This will represent achievement well beyond your expectations. You’ll call this a Gold Day. Reaching this level will be rare, and will merit special celebration and recognition.
  5. Every day, you will report your achievement for yesterday: Gold, Silver, or Bronze. A Bronze day is any day you don’t reach Silver or Gold. Just post your daily report to http://www.facebook.com/groups/iGoalFriends/.
  6. I will give special recognition to those who reach significant levels of achievement each month.
  7. We’ll also enjoy various weekly challenges to help you stay motivated and focused.

Selecting Your Goals

The Four Steps to Selecting Your Goals

  1. Decide exactly what you want. Be specific. Write it as if you are certain you will achieve it. Set a deadline.

Example: I will reduce my debt by half by 31 March 2013.

  1. Make a list of every activity you can think of that you could possibly do to achieve your goal.

Example: I will earn $XXX.XX commission every day. I will eliminate weekday restaurant and coffee shop spending. I will stick to my budget.

  1. Organize your activity list by both sequence and priority.
  2. Select three or four high priority activities you need to do in order to reach your goal.

Now you’re ready to define your acceptable daily performance.

Define Your Gold, Silver, and Bronze Days

You need a way to judge your performance each day. Did you perform the activities that will move you closer to your goals (Silver Day)? Did you reach a level of performance well above that (Gold Day)? Or did you miss the mark (Bronze Day)?

You define your Gold, Silver, and Bronze Days.

Example:

(Silver) I will earn $XXX.XX commission on seminar days. I will not visit a restaurant or coffeehouse. I will stay below my daily budget.

(Gold) I will earn double the Silver level commission. I will not visit a restaurant or coffeehouse. I will stay $50 below my daily budget.

(Bronze) I did not reach Silver or Gold today.

Your Gold Day should be defined high enough that achieving is very rare and is cause for celebration.

Your Silver Day should reflect the daily actions you must consistently make to achieve your goal.

Here are my personal definitions:

Silver

  1. I master the morning (prayer and scripture study, repeat my affirmations, push-ups and crunches, post to social media)
  2. I hit my silver sales goal.
  3. I stay below my calorie goal.

Gold

  1. I master the morning
  2. I double my silver sales goal.
  3. I stay 300 calories below my goal.

Bronze – I did not reach Silver or Gold today.

Gold, Silver, or Bronze Months

Now you should define Silver and Gold numbers for the current month. These numbers should reflect the progress you want to make this month.

Here is my Silver Month definition:

  1. I will average $XXX.XX commission per day.
  2. I will have XX active Goal Friends by the end of the month.
  3. I will master the morning at least 25 days.
  4. I will stay below my daily calorie goal 25 days.

My Goal Month definition:

  1. I will double my Silver average commission.
  2. I will double my active Goal Friends count.
  3. I will master the morning every day.
  4. I will stay below my daily calorie goal 25 days with five of them at 300 below the goal.

If You Fall Short

Some people get very frustrated if they earn too many bronze days. That’s a normal and healthy reaction. However, do not let that frustration lead you to giving up.

Most people quit their goal quests after such setbacks. You’ve done and so have I. But this time is different.

I guarantee you some bad days. But this time, with the help of your Goal Friends, you can dust yourself off, recommit yourself, and keep pressing toward your prize.

Once you’ve recommitted yourself, send an e-mail to your Goal Friends and see what happens. You’ll receive several messages of encouragement. Your Goal Friends will lift and inspire you to regain the excellence you want.

Honesty

Identifying Gold, Silver, and Bronze days and reporting them to your partner will help you under one condition—you tell the truth every day.

Call it what you will, fudging, exaggerating, mercy, or creativity, it’s still lying. Not telling the truth will stop your momentum, and remove any joy of the challenge you may have experienced.

The power of the Goal Friends Challenge is lost when you can miss your marks, but report success.

Develop the habit of viewing your results and reporting them honestly.

No Excuses

The first few days of a goal challenge encourage us. Our momentum grows.

After a few days or weeks, we feel tempted to make an exception. We excuse this because of some special situation or occasion. The chains of old habits then begin to wrap around us.

The only way to successfully form the new habits and complete our goals is to plan occasional grace days on certain ones. For example, I allow myself one day a week to not hit my calorie deficit goal. I also give myself one grace day per week on my sales goal. But those are the only goals on which I give myself grace. I need to hit my other goals every day.

Of course, the goals related to our values or excuses, or if we’re trying to break an addiction, we must not give ourselves grace days.

To join, go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/iGoalFriends/

Our Thoughts

Thoughts are things. You get what you focus on most. You attract abundance when you think abundant thoughts. You get what you expect.

I agree with all of these statements. But there’s more to the story.

You can think all the positive thoughts you want, but if you take no action, you’ll stay fat and broke.

The more you delay, the more likely you’ll fail.

Work on your thoughts. Read material that feeds you inspiring thoughts. Minimize brainless television shows. Listen to audio programs the raise your sights.

I will send you suggestions each week on inspiring material you may consider.

Own the Morning

“The first hour is the rudder of the day.” Henry Ward Beecher

Most sustained achievement involves the development of new and better habits. Success remains temporary as long as we depend on willpower. Once our new actions become habits, we can glide easily into sustained success.

What habits do you need to develop so you can enjoy and maintain your goals?

Create a group of your desired habits into your morning routine. By taking action on these habits before you move into your other morning activities you get a great start on the day. You will enjoy early success and get your momentum flowing.

I call my morning habits, “Own the Morning.”

Every morning I do the following:

  1. Perform my personal religious activities (prayer and scripture study)
  2. Do my pushups and crunches
  3. Post to my blog and/or post to my four social media sites
  4. Repeat my affirmations
  5. E-mail my day rating (Gold, Silver, or Bronze) to my Goal Friends

Once I’ve “owned my morning” I’m ready to clean up, and enjoy my breakfast.

I do this with the satisfaction that I’ve gotten my day going with a great start.

To join, go to http://www.facebook.com/groups/iGoalFriends/

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Trees Have Friends

An unusual storm hit Omaha, Nebraska mid-October 1997. We awoke to six inches of heavy, wet snow. Of course snow in Omaha is not rare, but receiving it that early brought devastation.

The trees still carried their leaves, providing more surface to which the sticky wet stuff could cling. The weight of heavy snow strained the trees beyond their strength, and 80% of the trees in the city received damage. Thousands fell altogether, while tens of thousands suffered severe damage.

The fallen trees disrupted the electrical power, clogged the streets, and damaged countless homes.

As I participated in the massive volunteer clean-up effort, I noticed something that has deeply changed me: those trees who stood alone fell, while those who stood in clusters survived.

Under the heavy burden of the wet snow, their limbs rested on the trunks of their neighbors. The support saved them.

This observation, along with others, has led me to understand the value of supportive relationships. We become stronger and better able to meet life’s challenge when we have support from good friends and family members.

Find people who will add to your strength when you need support. The combined strength of a group serves each member.

If you want a supportive, encouraging, and motivated group to help you stay focused on your goals–even when the challenges and the temptations seem overwhelming, join our free Goal Friends Challenge.

You can find it at http://daviddeford.com/ddblog/goalfriends/

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Two Audience Comments from the Back Row in Indianapolis

winners creed

Winners Creed by David DeFord

Excellent! One of the BEST I have attended so far!

Another…

David was excellent. This is the best workshop I have attended in my career!

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Hotel Showers and Life

Goal achievement, by its very nature, takes you out of your routine.

To achieve the higher results you desire you must change your ways and move into unfamiliar territory. You try new approaches and when you don’t get the desired results you adjust and try again.

Because I spend considerable time away from home, I often use unfamiliar hotel room showers. At home I know exactly where I need to set the knobs to get the shower temperature I want. But on the road I cannot get the results I want if I adjust the knobs exactly like I would at home.

I take a guess and turn the knobs to an initial position. If, when I test the water with my hand I find it too hot, I don’t give up in disgust and wash at the sink—I adjust the knobs and try again.

I continue testing and adjusting, testing and adjusting until I get the water to the right temperature. I have yet to stay in a hotel room where I wasn’t able to get the water to the temperature I want.

When you strive to achieve your goals and leave your familiar ways, you will rarely hit your targets on your first tries. When you fail to achieve your goals on the first try, you must not give up in disgust and decide the goal was flawed. You must test and adjust, test and adjust until you reach your dreams.

Keep at it.

Don’t adjust your dreams, adjust your approach.

With persistence and continual tweaking you will get your life to a setting you love.

Quotes

Progress always involves risk; you can’t steal second base and keep your foot on first. Frederick Wilcox

 

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Own the Morning

“The first hour is the rudder of the day.” Henry Ward Beecher

Most sustained achievement involves the development of new and better habits. Success remains temporary as long as we depend on willpower. Once our new actions become habits, we can glide easily into sustained success.

What habits do you need to develop so you can enjoy and maintain your goals?

Group many of your desired habits into your morning routine. By taking action on these habits before you move into your other morning activities you get a great start on the day. You will enjoy early success and get your momentum flowing.

I call my morning habits, “Own the Morning.”

Every morning I do the following:

  1. Perform my personal religious activities (prayer and scripture study)
  2. Do my pushups and crunches
  3. Post to my blog and/or post to my four social media sites
  4. Repeat my affirmations
  5. E-mail my day rating (Gold, Silver, or Bronze) to my Goal Friends

Once I’ve “owned my morning” I’m ready to clean up, and enjoy my breakfast.

I do this with the satisfaction that I’ve gotten my day going with a great start.

 

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Visualize Your Success

Visualization can be a powerful tool for you to keep your motivation high enough to achieve your goals. By seeing or feeling your ultimate success, you can build your enthusiasm and strengthen your resolve.

Affirmations

A powerful tool in achieving your desires is to build confidence in your ability to accomplish them. If you don’t feel you have the power, you won’t. However, if you know that you can achieve your desire—you will.

Confidence is an important key in accomplishment.

Several times a day, tell yourself that you will make it. Experience the feelings of success. Let your subconscious know that you have the tools, the wisdom, and the desire to accomplish your dream.

By doing so every day, you will gain the confidence you need. Be consistent. When you begin to doubt, replace those feelings with ones of confidence.

I am not advocating affirmations, where you pretend you already have achieved your dream. That’s where you say to yourself, “I am fit and trim” to yourself over and over again. If you are fat, you should continue to tell yourself you are fat. Just don’t say to yourself, “I am fat, and I’ll always be fat.”

If you practice affirmations, manipulating your mind to think that you already have what you want, you will likely feel no compulsion to change.

I once entered into a business opportunity that promised great earnings. The person persuading me to join the venture said that he was on tap to make $300,000 in his first year. I jumped in with great enthusiasm and expectation.

In meetings, I heard dozens of people saying they were making upper-six-figure incomes. I soon learned that the only way to persuade prospects was to make that same claim. Also, I finally figured out that the other associates were practicing the principle of affirmations. They taught their fellow-associates to act, think, and talk as if they had already achieved their dream. In other words, they lied to me and to every other prospect.

Affirmations can be lies to yourself and others. Don’t fall into that trap. Be honest with yourself. Admit your lack. It’s okay to see and feel success before it begins—just don’t lie to yourself.

Useful Affirmations

To make affirmations work, you must always realize that by feeling the success you seek, you understand that you have not yet achieved them. You should affirm that you CAN have them—that you DESERVE them. But your affirmations are seen always in the context that you WILL achieve them.

Use All Five Senses

Visualize your achievement with all of your senses. By involving them all, you can better perceive the victory. For instance, if you want to get to your ideal weight, use your senses like this:

  • Sight: visualize yourself at your goal weight
  • Taste: taste the victory
  • Feel: feel the excitement at having accomplished something so big
  • Hear: hear the compliments you receive for looking so good
  • Smell: well, smell the rice cakes you will never have to eat again.

Experiencing your success before it occurs will bring to you greater confidence and stronger will.

Selected quotes:

The basic goal-reaching principle is to understand that you go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will always be able to see farther. Zig Ziglar

Visualize this thing you want. See it, feel it, believe in it. Make your mental blueprint and begin. Robert Collier

 

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Why Do You Want It?

One of the most important steps of goal achievement is to determine “WHY” you want to achieve your goals, and “WHO” is counting on you. We all have our reasons for desiring achievement.

I need to reach my ideal weight because I have had a great deal of heart disease in my family. To reduce my risk, I must reduce my waist. My wife is counting on me to retire along with her. We have missions to serve and grandchildren to watch grow up. My grown children count on me for support—they need me. I must stay healthy for them.

Why do you want to reach your dreams?

Who is counting on you? Write down their names. By reviewing these reasons regularly, you can stay focused on your goals, and keep your incentive strong.

Here are some examples of reasons to achieve the listed goal:

Become debt-free

  • To use your whole income on living and growing your nest egg
  • To reduce your stress
  • To position you to live on less in case of lay-off or industry downturn
  • To position you to take the risk of going into your dream business

Become fit

  • To feel better
  • To increase your energy and endurance
  • To improve your mental functioning
  • To keep up with your children’s activities
  • To achieve some dream, like crossing the Grand Canyon, running a 10K or marathon, or bicycling coast-to-coast across America

Receive an education

  • To get into the career you have dreamed about
  • To start your dream business
  • To open your career possibilities and give yourself choices
  • To advance in your current company
  • To stop working for a parent

Seek a career you love

  • To use your talents more productively
  • To make more money
  • To improve your self-image
  • To better love your work

As you focus on “WHY” you want to achieve your goal, and on “WHO” is counting on your success, you position yourself to dig deeper when the way becomes difficult. These tools help you stay on track in the inevitable tough times.

Lately, stop-smoking products have begun to use this concept in their commercials. In one, they show little kids and tell some of the things we do for them because we love them:

  • We make them wear coats in cold weather
  • We don’t let them swim alone
  • We don’t let them swim until after an hour after they have eaten

Then, they talk about seeing them grow up and strongly state that if you don’t stop smoking, you won’t be able to see them through.

Identifying reasons, higher purposes, for your goals will help you accomplish them.

Difficulty is a necessary ingredient in lofty achievement—else the achievement cannot be considered lofty. In the movie, A League of Their Own, Geena Davis’ character, Dottie, the catcher of the highly-ranked women’s baseball team, tells her manager, Tom Hanks’ character Jimmy that she is quitting—that it just got too hard. He responds, “It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard everyone would do it. Hard is what makes it great!”

Achieving your dreams should be difficult—it needs to be, that’s what makes it great. That is the essence of achievement.

Selected quotes:
“Reasons come first. Answers come second.” Jim Rohn

“The sweetness of victory is magnified by the effort it took to achieve it.” Chris Widener

“Success is not measured by what you accomplish but by the opposition you have encountered, and the courage with which you have maintained the struggle against overwhelming odds.” Orison Swett Marden

“Show me someone who has done something worthwhile, and I’ll show you someone who has overcome adversity.” Lou Holtz

 

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Selecting Great Goals

Selecting your goals, of course, is a very important step. You must choose wisely. Most of us short change ourselves in selecting goals. We often choose well below our dreams and our abilities.

Zig Ziglar says that if you don’t know where you want to go, you’ll surely get there. The first step we take in planning any vacation is to decide where we want to go, or what we want to do.

Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to do, have, and be? Do you want to lose your extra pounds? How about becoming debt free? What earnings or sales goals have you set?

Success is a choice. Failure is usually the result of not choosing.

Your Dream List
Begin your goal selection process by making a dream list. What would you wish for yourself if you had no limitations? Jot down anything that comes to mind.

Don’t let your brain jump in front of your heart. Let it flow, writing down whatever comes to your mind—don’t argue with yourself.

In fact, as you prepare your dream list, expand it to 100 things I would like to do before I die. List what you would like to do or accomplish on your own, and what you would like to do you’re your family. Include your spouse or significant other in this dreaming.

One Great Thing

Now, what one great thing would you dare to dream if success was certain—writing a book, becoming completely debt-free, a college degree? What is your greatest dream? Write it down.

Henry David Thoreau said,

“Have you built your castles in the air? Good, that’s where they should be built. Now, go to work and build foundations under them.”

Examine your great dream. How badly do you want it? Is it worth the cost in time, funds, and energy? It probably is worth it if it’s your great dream. Now, how long should it take you to realize the dream? Will it take a year, two, three, or a decade? Set an ultimate date you want to strive for realization of your dream.

Step Goals
Make some related short-range and mid-range step goals to move you in the direction of your dream. For example, if you want to become debt-free, add up the total amount of your debt. Then, decide what you want to reduce it to by the end of the month, and then set another goal of where you want to have your debt at the end of the quarter. Write them down.

Now that you have selected your great dream, and set long-, mid-, and short-range goals for achieving it, select another dream from your list. If possible, find one that compliments your great dream. Also, find one or two dreams that are unrelated to the area of your life of your great dream. If your great dream is related to your career, select a dream or two in your personal, family, or spiritual life. Balance your goal achievement efforts to insure that you don’t give away what is most important in pursuit of one dream.

Select Four or Five

Now that you have identified the Great Dream, select four or five current major goals. If you choose more than four or five major goals, you will have little ability to keep the focus you will need to make them all happen.

For instance, I would like to:

  • Reach my ideal weight;
  • Become 100% debt-free
  • Write and publish best-sellers
  • Build a world-wide speaking career
  • Have over 100,000 subscribers to my e-zine
  • See all of my children fully committed to my faith
  • Leave corporate life
  • Escort my wife into her dream home
  • Spend several weeks per year in humanitarian work
  • Ride my bicycle across the United States (in one trip)
  • Volunteer several nights per month
  • Donate $100,000 per year to my favorite charity
  • Hike the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim
  • Serve multiple missions for our church
  • Float or ride bicycle the entire length of the Mississippi River
  • Send my kids and their spouses to the locations of their church missions
  • See Niagara Falls, Yosemite, the Black Hills, Palmyra, New York, Kirtland, Ohio
  • Hike all or some of the Appalachian Trail
  • etc.

All of these I want to share with my wife.

It makes no sense for me to concentrate on all of these goals today. I have selected five. As I achieve those, I’ll add more.

What Will These Goals Make of Me?

Ask yourself the following for each goal:

  • “Will achieving this goal strengthen my family?”
  • “Will it contribute to or violate my values?”
  • “Will it keep me from deserving the achievement of a great dream?”
  • “Can I become committed to achieving this goal?”

There is a great difference between being committed to a goal and being merely interested in it. In waking up on a rainy morning, an interested jogger must decide whether to run or not. A committed jogger must decide which rain gear to wear.

What Do You Need to Know?

In order to achieve your selected goals, what do you need to know? List the information you will need to obtain. How will you obtain it? Do you need a college degree? What books do you need to read? Perform a web search. You may find an e-course or an e-zine dealing with the subject.

Go after the required information aggressively. There is no information you can’t obtain.

Carry Them With You

Select the short-, mid-, and long-range goals related to these other dreams as you did for your great dream.

Now that you have selected these interim goals and written them down, type them into your computer and print them out, or write them on a small piece of paper that you can carry around with you. You may want to encase them in plastic to keep them looking fresh. Pull them out and review them several times a day—as you wait for a class or meeting to begin. Focus on your dreams and goals. The more you focus on your dreams, the quicker you’ll realize them.

You become what you think about all of the time. Thus, by referring to your goals often, they will become an important part of you.

The act of writing your goals on paper or in your computer will stimulate you to action. If you don’t write them down, you are just wishing—and wishing means passively hoping.

Mark McCormack reports in his book What They Don’t Teach you at Harvard Business School of a Harvard study conducted on the 1979 graduates of their MBA program. They asked the nearly graduated students, “Have you set clear, written goals for your future and made plans to accomplish them?” They found that only 3 percent of the graduates had written goals and plans. Thirteen percent had goals, but did not write them. And the remaining 84% had no specific goals. They only looked toward graduation and their summer plans.

Ten years later, they re-interviewed the class members. They found that those who had goals, but had not written them had average earnings twice of those 84% who had had no goals at all. Shockingly, the 3% who had written goals and plans before graduation had average earnings ten times higher than the other 97%.

Written goals count!

My Wife’s Example

As our children began to grow up and leave home, my wife, who had been a stay-at-home mom for over 20 years, needed to decide what she would next do with her life. At first, she went to work part-time as a receptionist in a dental office. Then, she had an opportunity at that office to begin assisting the dentist with his patients. She liked the work, and considered going back to school to become a dental hygienist. As we discussed her options, she said aloud the great dream of going to dental school and becoming a dentist. In the instant of saying the words, she knew in her heart that she should pursue it.

As she counted the cost, she saw that she would first need four years of undergraduate work, then four years of dental school. She anticipated the school debt, and the time commitment. It still felt right.

Eight years later, at the age of 49, she graduated from Creighton Dental School as a full Doctor of Dental Surgery. She had accomplished her great dream. She now loves practicing dentistry, and knows that the great difficulty of those school years have paid off.

You can do the same—your great dream has waited long enough. Build your castles in the air, and make plans to reach it.

————————————————————————————–

Selected quotes:

“Goals give you more than a reason to get up in the morning; they are an incentive to keep you going all day. Goals tend to tap the deeper resources and draw the best out of life.” Harvey Mackay

“Goals. There’s no telling what you can do when you get inspired by them. There’s no telling what you can do when you believe in them. There’s no telling what will happen when you act upon them.”  Jim Rohn

“Goals in writing are dreams with deadlines.” Brian Tracy

“Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.” Goethe

“Man, alone, has the power to transform his thoughts into physical reality; man, alone, can dream and make his dreams come true.” Napoleon Hill

 

Excerpted from Ordinary People Can Achieve the Extraordinary by David DeFord

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Wanting and Getting More

Motivation isn’t enough

Much good can be accomplished if we have the right motivation. This motivation often spawns from a defining moment that triggers us to say, “Enough!”

However, motivation alone will not always get us to our goals–vision, planning, action, and discipline must be employed.

Skill-building

Imagine setting a goal to double your income in five years. There are many paths to achieving that goal: find a new job, start a business, write a book. You could choose dozens of actions to get yourself there.

Most likely, you’ll need to learn and build new skills. You will, at least, need to improve and broaden your existing skills.

Balanced learning

To enhance our opportunities, we can spend our entire lives building our learning and wisdom.

Study a variety of subjects. Don’t confine yourself to one area of learning. If you have good knowledge in several areas, you can adapt your career to meet the market demands.

Through balancing your study, you also become a more engaging conversationalist. You’ll also better understand world events.

Perseverence

Be resolute like Heber J. Grant:
Mr. Grant, a great religious leader in the western United States loved hymns. Unfortunately, he was tone deaf.

Frances says of her father, “He had no sense of pitch at all. You could play a note on the piano then play a note four notes higher, and he could not tell if it was higher or lower.”

At age ten, he joined a singing class, and the professor told him that he could never learn to sing. Some years later, a man told him that he could learn to sing, but the man said he would like to be forty miles away while he was doing it.

But he persevered. “He would practice,” she recalled, “just playing a note on the piano with one finger and practice and practice. Of all his accomplishments he was proudest of learning to sing.”

Grant said, “The most I ever worked was to sing 400 songs in four days.” It may also have been the most work for Rudger Clawson and J. Golden Kimball too as they were with him on a trip when he asked if they had any objection to his singing 100 hymns that day.

“After I had sung about forty tunes,” he recorded, “they assured me that if I sang the remaining sixty they would be sure to have nervous prostration.” He still sang the full 100.

Grant often quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson: “That which we persist in doing becomes easy to do; not that the nature of the thing has changed, but that our power to do has increased.”

Building a library

Business philosopher Jim Rohn suggests that we should leave three important things behind for our families:

• our life in pictures
• our life written in our journals, and
• an abundant library

Building a library is a wonderful labor of love. We not only build up ourselves, but also our families as we build our libraries.

Areas of study

Rohn also suggests some sections for your library:
• History
• Philosophy
• Biographies and autobiographies
• Law
• Fine literature
• Accounting
• Economics
• Culture (Art, music, dance)

I would add the following sections:
• Spirituality
• Business
• Personal development

As we build our skills, seek balance in our learning, and build great libraries, we position ourselves for success in all areas of our lives: our personal lives, our family lives, our spiritual lives, our professional lives, and our financial lives.

Balanced success through balanced learning.

Selected Quotes:
“Formal education will make you a living; self-education will make you a fortune.” Jim Rohn

“Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.” Jim Rohn

“Never begrudge the money you spend on your own education.” Jim Rohn

“To earn more, you must learn more.” Brian Tracy

“None of us…knows enough. The learning process is an endless process. We must read, we must observe, we must assimilate, and we must ponder that to which we expose our minds.” Gordon B. Hinckley

“Hoping and dreaming of a better world are not enough if we are unwilling to work; but when we work towards our dreams, wonderful things can happen.” Lloyd Newell

 

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