Choose Goals With Passion

Determine what it is that makes your blood boil with passion. What is so important to you that you are eager to leave it as part of your legacy? Goals are more than dreams with a deadline, goals must inspire passion.

Entire sections of libraries are dedicated to goal setting. 99% of America makes a New Years resolution and breaks it within days, weeks or a few months. Why? You write down what you think you should want to do instead of what you passionately commit to do. I encourage you to choose a revolution, not a resolution. When you commit to a revolution, you’re all out committed.

Do you even know your most profound passionate desires? Have you buried them so deeply in your sub conscious that it requires a jackhammer to extract them?

Stop reading right this second and grab a tablet and pencil, pens run out of ink at the most inopportune times. Set a timer on your i phone or microwave or even your watch.

• Write as fast as you possibly can for ten minutes. Write everything you would love to do, places you want to go, achievements you desire.
• Dream, fantasize and free flow write
• In a perfect world with no restrictions. I would like to . . .
• DO NOT ANALYZE, JUST WRITE

When the timer rings, sit back and take a sip of water. Catch your breath. Now look at what you have written.

Break your goals into 4 categories: Personal Growth, Professional, Financial, and Fun. Within each category, break them down into time frames of 1 year, 3 years, 5 years and 10 years.

Check your heart. If they don’t make your heart beat a little faster and put a warm fuzzy smile in your soul, consider crossing them off the list. Luke warm desires bake a cake of disaster.

For each of your top 3 goals in each category write 5 compelling reasons why you will persist until the goals are achieved. If your “why” is not big enough, your “what” will not matter.

Within the 1 year category, break the targets down into time circles. On the outer ring write 1 year, the next smaller ring is 9 months, then 6 months, then 3 months, 1 month, one week and the bulls eye (center) is today. You should have 7 circles.

Targets do not inspire you? Make a Wheel of Fortune. Draw a circle the size of a tangerine in the center of a sheet of paper. Draw 6 spokes out from the circumference of the circle. On each line write one of your top 6 goals from any of the 4 categories. For instance if one of the goals was a new home, then add a picture of that ideal new home at the tip of the line. You mind thinks in pictures, give your sub conscious mind a picture to enhance the thought.

Tonight and every night write a list of 5 action steps to be accomplished the next day to move your life and your business forward. First thing every morning, review that list and check the items off as you complete them each day.

Develop a specific routine for the first activities each morning. Call it your Early Morning Success Routine. Select three to five activities you will absolutely complete upon awakening every morning.

1. Review your top 5 action steps for today
2. Read 30 minutes of educational, inspirational or personal development material
3. Write affirmations and or goals in your journal. Writing increases the emphasis
4. Morning exercise – strengthening, toning, cardio, stretching

Each evening perform your Late Night Success Routine. The subconscious mind is most receptive immediately before drifting off into an alpha state and immediately upon awaking from an alpha sleep. Use these critical times of the day for optimum positive impressions on your subconscious mind.

1. Write the top 5 action steps to be performed the next day
2. Write in your success or gratitude journal
3. Read 30 minutes of educational, inspirational or personal development material
4. You may also choose to say your prayers of thanksgiving for the day

For a complete personalized goal setting and goal achieving plan, join me at www.Elaine4Success.com

Grow and Prosper

You can not grow within and stand still in your life. Your personal life, financial life and business life absolutely prosper when you focus on your personal development. Jim Rohn, noted business philosopher, always declared the importance of working harder on yourself than you do on your business.

A major key to living a successful life centers around personal development. Throughout my life whenever I encountered a difficult situation, the cause was always related to my attitude. My feelings about a given situation or the people involved determined the outward results. Negative emotions or feeling out of control about anything in my life invariably led to a negative result. Blaming someone, including yourself, produces negative results. Playing the blame game never produces a positive result. For instance when you are lying awake at night tossing and turning and seething with angry thoughts, the other person sleeps peacefully. In many cases, the object of your distress may not even know a problem exists.

Somehow, even though it may feel difficult, search for the good in every event in your life. A job loss may feel like the end of the world for awhile. Pick yourself up, dust yourself off and examine your options. Record numbers of people are starting their own home based business right now. Before their employment status changed, it felt safer to stay with the job even though they were unhappy than to look for something new. The job status change necessitated investigating new options. Sometimes what seems to be devastating at the moment results in a wonderful future.

Jeff’s franchise business collapsed leaving him with over a quarter million of personal debt. After starting his home based business, he paid off the debt and started earning a profit within less than a year. If the franchise had not folded, he would have continued working long hours and he would have remained in the bondage of debt for many years. The end of the franchise terrified him for awhile but later proved to be a blessing in his financial and personal life.

Attitude about the situation makes a tremendous difference. Your internal attitude about an event largely controls the outcome. Examine your emotions and beliefs. Somewhere deep within your mental programming lies the cause of many of your problems as well as the solution. Grow as a person through each event in your life. Do an intense self examination to discover the possible causes which led to the event.

1. Did your childhood programming set a negative tone regarding your deservability of becoming financially successful?

2. How focused were you in the performance of your job or business?

3. How dedicated were you to learning and implementing new ideas in your work?

4. What was your attitude at and about your work?

5. How long did you persevere before you ended the business or job?

How much time and focus do you dedicate on a daily basis toward your personal development? How many books have you read recently on personal development? What cd’s have you listened to in order to expand your thoughts in a positive direction?

When was the last time you masterminded with another positive minded individual? When was the last time you attended a live seminar or even watched a mind expanding DVD? When was the last time you meditated on how to improve your life? What positive affirmations do you write and speak daily?

Growing personally will assist you in growing professionally. Growing as a person improves every aspect of your life. People choose to be around you when you profess and exude a positive attitude.

Life is a Garden

As a Kansas farm girl growing up, we had rich black soil. Everything we planted seemed to sprout up and grow happily. Years later I moved to Norfolk, Nebraska where we had hard clay. It felt like I needed a jackhammer to drill a little hole to plant a flower. The flowers choked for nutrition and struggled to survive.

Your mind is like that soil. Is your mind the fertile black soil which nourishes and brings forth value? Or is it like the hard clay which is closed and unreceptive to new ideas. The beauty is that you have the opportunity to choose. Every day you can decide to be whichever one you choose. Why not choose to grow and flourish. Jim Rohn, noted business philosopher, said that in order for us to receive more, we must become more.

Tony Robbins speaks about not going to your garden and chanting "There's no weeds, there's no weeds." Of course there are weeds. Weeds must be pulled out. He chooses not to see it worse than it is but truly as it is. Ideally see it better than it is and go to work to make it so.

There is the story of the beautiful garden on the garden tour. One of the visitors walked by a lovely garden and seeing the owner there decided to speak to him. Not wanting the owner to take full credit for the beautiful garden, the visitor said to the owner, "you and God have a beautiful garden here." The owner replied, "Yes, without the seed and the soil and the sun and the rain, it would have been very difficult. But, you should have seen it 2 years ago when God had it all by himself."

We are given everything we need to not only survive but thrive. We each received gifts: talents and abilities. Those gifts are the seed and soil for our personal growth and future prosperity. The sun and the rain are the opportunities we encounter in our life. We have the opportunities to learn and grow by reading, masterminding with other leaders and listening to educational materials. Opportunities to expand our mind and our self-worth abound. It is up to us to tap into those resources and increase our value to the marketplace.

Your mind can be like the fertile black soil and produce a beautiful garden for all to enjoy or like the hard clay and be unhappy and broke. Your choice. Your garden. Choose flowers or weeds. Choose prosperity or poverty. Life really starts and ends with our choices.

Always Be Giving - Mentoring

Mentoring comes in many forms. In Toastmasters, mentoring may be a simple as encouraging someone to quell the stage fright and relax. The butterflies do not always flay in formation. Even seasoned speakers still have “stage nerves” from time to time.

Mentoring may be assisting someone to reduce the number of Uh, Ah, Oops, filler words such as “and “ or “so.” We each have unconscious filler words or phrases. A mentor will hear these words with objective “fresh ears.”

We may have unconscious mannerisms or repeating one specific gesture too frequently.

Many of you know that I currently work in financial education. I obviously enjoy finances; however, my college economics professor was as exciting as watching grass grow. We managed to stay awake most of the time in class by counting his series of mannerisms. He would run his fingers through his thinning hair, straighten his tie, adjust his horn rimmed glasses, fiddle with his pen and ruffle his papers. We counted how many of this series of mannerisms he indulged in each hour. The man was brilliant but certainly not an engaging speaker. He certainly would have benefitted from a Toastmasters mentor.

Gently assisting him to add vocal variety, reduce the mannerisms, and even add a dash of humor would have made his class for more palatable. Unfortunately, that did not occur in my 3 years of enduring his classes.

Have you ever witnessed a speaker who spoke in a monotone or used annoying gestures or was as entertaining as watching paint dry? All of us have observed a speaker who “ah’d” us to boredom. One of my fellow Toastmasters sent me this link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThEAO0lt4Dw. You will recognize the speaker.

Mentors assist us in seeing ourselves as others will see us; however, a highly accomplished mentor will guide us as swiftly as we are ready to receive the information.

John Crosby’s statement is quite explicit, “Mentoring is a brain to pick, an ear to listen, and a push in the right direction.”

Mentoring is of tremendous value to the person receiving the feedback, but it is equally as valuable to the person providing the feedback. As I observe others, it also reminds me of so many things I choose to improve about my own speaking.

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Maya Angelou. The benefit is absolutely mutual. The more you give to aid others, the more you gain. This world is not all about giving or all about receiving, it is about improving the lives of everyone we touch. As we help others grow, we also grow ourselves.

“In every art beginners must start with models of those who have practiced the same art before them. And it is not only a matter of looking at the drawings, paintings, musical compositions, and poems that have been and are being created; it is a matter of being drawn into the individual work of art, of realizing that it has been made by a real human being, and trying to discover the secret of its creation.” Ruth Whitman