Whether you love or hate Colin Powell, you need to check out his presentation on leadership. In this and the upcoming blog posts, I will tear his presentation apart, throw out the junks, and share all the good stuffs with you. Be ready!

Powell mentioned this sentence in his presentation:

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

According to him, it is the slogan of a person who is either complacent, arrogant, or scared.

Why?

To me, it all begins with complacency. A person gets too comfortable with everything around him that he will not do anything to improve himself.

Next, he thinks, “Things are already the best that they can be.” That’s arrogance.

Then, deep down inside there’s this fear in the person, a fear that says, “Why bother trying to change things? You might fail, and everybody will laugh at you!”

And that’s being scared.

Get Out of Your Own Illusion

It’s an illusion that today will continue to be the same tomorrow. Often enough, many people get caught off guard because things don’t turn out the way it’s supposed to (or hoped to). The economic crises have consistently proven this fact, yet no action is taken until someone gets hit right in the face.

And it’ll be too late.

No matter how good things are going, there’s always a better way to do something. And if that is true, why not do something better?

It’s time to wake up and go out to win your game!

You’re Must Be Prepared to Fail

Yes, you will fail and some people will laugh at you and say, “I told you so!”

Yet, those are the people who don’t dare to challenge themselves, so they are the cowards. Do you want them to stand between you and success? I guess the answer is a big NO.

What Can You Do?

1) Stop complaining and start doing something that helps you to be a better person every day. Don’t stay busy watching the TV when you should be building your business or learning how to market your products.

2) You can start helping your friends to do the same, by sharing your ideas with them. They are most likely struggling emotionally and financially too. Find strength in one another.

What You’re Thinking Right Now Is Right

Yes, the slogan is the culture of humanity, and it’s here to stay no matter how much we talk about it. As much as we hate to admit it, we are not born ambitious, humble, or courageous.

But you can be different, if you want to.

You can learn. You can grow. You can change.

And if that happens, your life will be different, I promise.

The most important thing I’ve learned from the 6 Minutes to Success program by Bob Proctor has got to be responsibility. The idea is that you are responsible for whatever results that you want to achieve in the future. Forget the past, it’s over and 10 years down the road. you’ll just laugh at any mistakes you’ve made anyway. Know that your future is in your hands, literally.

What are your circumstances?

Look around you, what are the people and environment you should surround yourself with? They’re called the circumstances. You don’t find them? No problem, go create your own circumstances.

Many people complain about their lives saying how unfortunate they are, and they’re right, they are unfortunate. But those who make a big impact out there are the ones who realize that complaining is useless. No progress is made by complaining, except the feeling that someone else now knows how unfortunate you are.

You’re responsible for changing yourself

Big thinkers know that in order for them to succeed, they’re responsible to change something within themselves. They have to realize that others are not responsible to help them succeed and so they have to create their own success stories.

Whatever that has happened to us until now have been the results of our actions in the past (I’m assuming you’re not 5 years old). Whatever that we want to happen will therefore be the results of our actions today. If we don’t work hard at building our business, don’t hope that someone will suddenly send you a check of $1 million. And even if you win the Mega Million, you’re responsible to buy the lottery ticket yourself!

Know someone successful?

Do you know someone who’s successful? If so, have their lives been smooth sailing since they were born? Most probably not. They had to overcome obstacles, challenges, and often unfortunate events. Those things are the ones that had shaped them who they are today. If they relied on others to do it for them though, they wouldn’t have been as successful as they are today.

In business, many people are conned, threatened, bankrupt. Yet the ones who are successful are the ones who never give up because they know they’re responsible for their own success. No one else is, not your parents, not your siblings, not your spouse. It’s you. You are the ultimate judge of what your life will be tomorrow.

Stop blaming others

Don’t blame others for your life, especially your parents. It’s true that they could have done something that would make you better off to a certain extent (sent you to a prestigious school, let you learn a new language, etc). But, you’re responsible for your life at your current state and change it to however you want it to be. They’re not responsible for you any more, so stop thinking they should be.

Decide to take responsibility

Make up your mind to change some results in your life. Once you do that, your life will not be the same again because now you know that things will remain the same as they are today if you do not change anything. It’s that decision, and that decision alone, that will help you to change whatever that you’ve been doing, and not been doing to create the circumstances that will get you to where you want to be.

The last sentence in the video by Bob got stuck in my head, “I take responsibility for giving you the best I’ve got, you take responsibility by giving the best you’ve got.” And I want to say the same to you, my fellow reader. Take responsibility of yourself, and you will be a brand new person today.

Are you willing to take responsibility?

What would you do today to change some results of your life?

Let me ask you this:

How often do we act in a way that others expect us to act?

Pretty often I’d say. I was watching this video by Malcolm Gladwell from TED, which he talks about how people act irrationally to satisfy the status quo, and he said:

If I asked all of you, for example, in this room what you want in a coffee, you know what you would say? Everyone of you would say, “I want a dark, rich, hardy roast. It’s what people always say when you ask what they want in a coffee: dark, rich, hardy roast. What percentage of you actually like a dark, rich hardy roast? According to Howard, somewhere between 25 and 27% of you. Most of you like milky weak coffee, which you will never ever say to someone who asks you what you want that I want a milky weak coffee.

Enough said.

Why break the status quo?

If you or me choose to do something that conforms to the society standards, whatever they may be, we should call ourselves crazy. Why? Well, why would you want to live according to the society standards, when the society doesn’t really care about you? I’m not being cynical or skeptical about the goodwill that people have, I do greatly appreciate that. But the fact is that most people don’t really care about you personally, unless they’re your good friends or family. They don’t care about your individual values, they don’t care about your individual needs, they don’t care about your individual wants.

People care in general

In general though, a lot of people care enough to volunteer their time and money to help the community. But that’s general help, not individual. What you and I need are the ultimate personal way to gain happiness, which could be only done by getting rich (define rich with your own number) and building character (again, define character based on what’s important to you). And only we could help ourselves.

Be extraordinary

You need to challenge yourself to do something that’s different from everybody else. Nobody’s gotten rich by being ordinary. They might appear to be ordinary, but they’ve done a whole lot backstage that you don’t see (which most people call an “overnight success” or “he’s lucky”). And building character isn’t about being like your neighbors, it’s about constantly challenging and committing yourself to new goals that would get you one step closer to your dream.

How can you live for yourself?

There are a lot of wonderful ways for you to develop personally , and if you look at the number of personal development blogs out there you’d be stunned. Everybody shares with you something that worked for them that might work for you. But you know that it ain’t gonna work if you don’t separate yourself from the crowd and dare to do something different which truly works for you.

Burning Desire

So, how do you do it? Burning desire is No. 1 trait that you need to possess in order to break that thinking status quo and become rich, according to Napoleon Hill, the author of “Think and Grow Rich”.

If you have the burning desire, you will be able to find ways to make whatever you desire happen. You will see things in ways that you’ve never seen before because your mind has turned on the switch to ‘search’. You’re in the zone. Anything you experience could very well give you some wonderful ideas to work on to achieve your goal. And that’s also how people get rich! They get rich by first having the desire to get rich, to desire to earn $1 million, the desire to be financially free.

A good example would be Warren Buffett. He loves money. He loves getting rich. He started doing business since he was young and his burning desire was to earn a lot of money. And he did, he’s the 2nd richest person in the world. And he’s never been an ordinary rich person either. He lives in an ordinary neighborhood. He would read company annual reports every day whenever he’s not playing Bridge online. He would have his board meeting in an ordinary coffee shop in Omaha. But those are not the status quo of the rich! And he didn’t care.

Sadly, status quo is everywhere

Almost everybody else wants you to think like them, because that’s how it’s been for years! If that was true though, you wouldn’t be reading all the personal development blogs on the internet because all of us would not have our own opinions and ideas. We’d be just following our parents’ ideas of going to school and getting a degree and then a job, and stop learning.

So, next time you find yourself thinking like the rest of the crowd, pause and ask yourself: Are those thoughts really yours? Do you really want to think like the crowd, act like the crowd, and be like the crowd? If the answer is no for many times, it’s about time to distance yourself and think about what you personally want. And that’s how you would find your own happiness – to be the person you want to be, not the person everybody else thinks everybody else should be.

What’s your personal burning desire? Let’s share it in the comments.

Stuck in your life?

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It feels frustrated, doesn’t it? Yet, what else can you do about it, right? Life is not fair because you were not born a rich genius. Right?

NO! You don’t have to stay in the same state as you are now, if you hate it. If you’re happy as you are, congratulations! For the rest who’s not there yet, know that there are many things you can do at this instant to get out of the rut. I’ve summarized them into 3 simple steps (not necessarily easy though):

1)      Assess where you are. What’s causing the frustration? How much control do you have over this situation – can you change it? If not, can you seek help from someone else to change it? Know where you are today so you can go somewhere you want to be tomorrow. As Zig Ziglar said, you can’t hit a target if you don’t have one. Taking it one step backward, you can’t have a target if you don’t know where you are!

2)      Think BIG! Don’t settle for less than your dream and spirit. Most people have much bigger dreams than they currently settle for, don’t you agree? They just simply settle for what they think they can achieve. Once you do that for a certain period of time, you will be stuck at that level. To change that, you HAVE to think BIG! (There’s a good book out there called “The Magic of Thinking Big” for which I’ve been an avid advocate for years.)

Stop listening to those failing stories from your friends or family, you’re aware of them already. Instead, choose to focus on the success stories from great leaders and revolutionaries. Life would be much better if the media would publish more positive news than negative ones, and that the weather forecasters would tell us today would be 60% sunny rather than 40% rainy!

3)      Take action. Actions always speak louder than words, you know it. Some people know what they need to do to get to where they want to be, but they often stop short of DOING it. But you’re different! You’re unique because you want to succeed. I know it because you’re reading this far in the post. So, I’d recommend reading this blog regularly and buying this book, “StrengthsFinder 2.0” by Tom Rath. Take the online assessment and find out what you top 5 strengths are. Align yourself with where your natural talents lie and keep building on them and live your passion. Now you’re doing something that would help you to “unstuck”. This book is good because it takes you less than 2 hours to get into what you want to know about your own strengths and what to do about them. The rest of the book is just about capitalizing on others’ strengths. If you think this won’t help you, just do something else that you think would help you. The primary key is to do something, since there’s no single formula for success anyway. At least if you move forward, you’ll be closer to living the life you’ve always wanted than if you stay still.

So, here you go: assess, think, and act. And let me know of your success!

(Photo: NIOSH )

One simple question: are you contented? Or rather, how contented are you? You might say you’re contented with what you have right now, or are you? Are you willing to stay in the same state for the rest of your life? If you’re not willing, read on.

Okay, you might have a great family, an excelling career, a wonderful spouse, and yet you are not contented. You want to achieve more in your life. You want to earn more money than you have. You want to be more respected. After all, who doesn’t right?

I was very surprised when a few of my buddies were telling me that they were contented with their life because I always thought that most people were not. It’s hard these days to find people who believe that their life is worth living. Most people would crave for more in their life, even though most of the time they don’t do much about it. They keep yearning for better life, yet no action is taken.

So, what can you do to be contented with your life and still have the motivation to keep going in life? Here are some suggestions that would work:

1)      Be grateful for what you have now, even though you know you would have much more later on. You know, we can always do better in our life no matter what stage we are at. It doesn’t mean you should stop working towards what you really want in your life. Just be thankful that you’re doing all you can towards your dream. It’s the best emotion on earth.

2)      List down what you have now. Compared the list to most of the population in our world, you are way better off! I know it because you’re reading this blog, when the other half of the world is starving every day. According to World Food Programme, about 1 billion people in the world today do not have enough to eat. That’s more than the populations of USA, Canada and the EU combined! Also, 25,000 people die every day from hunger and related causes. So, if you’re alive and full, you’re already ahead of 1 billion people in the world (plus you have a computer with internet access). Stop focusing negatively on what you don’t yet have!

3)      Enjoy what you’re doing. Work hard on things that you love, and not on things that you hate! It’s true that sometimes you would need to do things that you don’t like in order to get ahead. But if you find yourself doing that every single day and it makes your life miserable, pause and reflect: do you really want this kind of life? It’s most likely time to change something. Steve Jobs said it well:

“When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.”

4)      Tell your loved ones how much you love them. This seems like it’d make them contented, not you. But really, what could be happier than making your loved ones happy? And when you’re happy, you’ll more likely to appreciate the people and things around you. Remember, you might not have the same chance tomorrow. Live your life with no regrets because life is short!

Hope you’ll share your stories and suggestions on how to be contented with your life in the comment section!

(Picture created by ŭn-sŭng from Flickr. Thanks!)

I’ve been listening to Bob Proctor’s recordings and watching his “six minutes to success” videos for a while now. There’s this section that particularly strikes me: 3 questions you should ask yourself today.

The story goes like this: There’s a woman whose husband died very suddenly and left her an engineering company. It did about $10 million dollars a year. She never went to the office even though she’d show up during social functions. Everybody thought she’d sell the company since she wasn’t involved in the business operations at all. Surprisingly, she went in and called the heads of all departments. She asked them 3 questions:

1) What are you doing?

2) What works?

3) What doesn’t?

Then, she gave them permission to stop doing what doesn’t work and put the time and effort into what works. The company eventually turned into a $25-million-dollar company.  And that’s all she did, she’d ask them the 3 questions. Obviously, she doesn’t know the answers herself! But the 3 questions worked like a charm.

So, if you want to reach the top, stop wasting time on things that don’t work and put your time and energy into things that do work! Ask yourself these questions:

1) What am I doing?

2) What works?

3) What doesn’t?

Post your answers in the comments if you want to share them with other people!

(Picture by Eleaf from Flickr, Thanks!)

Have you ever thought about how you behave directly affects people you come into contact with? You may not realize this but all your behaviors actually have a great impact on the people around you. For instance, when you’re at work, you constantly whine about every single unfortunate event that’s happened to you for the past week or month. Yes you feel great after talking about it out loud, but have you ever imagined yourself being on the other end? Deadlines are already stressful enough for most people, yet you still have to endure the whiny complaints of your colleagues. What a life!

According to Wikipedia, “behavior” refers to the actions or reactions of an object or organism, usually in relation to the environment. Behavior can be conscious or unconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.

So, what kind of behaviors do you want to see or experience from people around you? Positive behaviors of course! Humorous, optimistic, and diligent behaviors are some of the good examples. Sure enough, you can’t change your behaviors overnight, unless you’ve experienced a drastic life event, such as death, marriage, birth, etc. And even so, the change might not be permanent and you’d most likely revert to your old behaviors after a short period of time. It should be simple and gradual process, in which you explore different ways to turn yourself into a more positive individual. You shouldn’t make the process overly laborious or rush it, otherwise you won’t stick to it. Instead, try the 30-day trial recommended by Steve Pavlina.

Thoughts influence actions. Actions influence behaviors. Behaviors influence results. To produce successful results, you need to have good behaviors (Mom was right about behaving yourself!). Good examples are behaviors that exude integrity, passion, and diligence. And because behaviors can be conscious or unconscious, you need to take actions to change your “bad” behaviors to good behaviors. Finally, if you’re reading this, you should understand if you are not aware of the need to change, you won’t change. That would be thoughts.

I’d like to recommend a coaching program by Bob Proctor that would plant great thoughts in your mind. Look to the right on the page that says “Six Minutes to Success” program and click on it. Register for the trial and give it a try. I’ve been with the program for 2 months and the results have been phenomenal! I get new ideas every day to work on and believe it or not, it’s improved my mental wellbeing significantly. I believe it’s important to do the mental exercise in the early morning so it can serve as a daily dose of motivation to drive you forward on what you do day in and day out.

Evidently, you don’t have to subscribe to only this particular program. There are definitely many other great programs out there but I just found this very useful. If you think that it’s costly though, think again. You pay $300 for a 1-year subscription and the videos are shown on weekdays. So that amounts to about a dollar and 15 cents per video. Are you willing to pay 115 cents a day to stay motivated throughout your life? I know I am. And if you break it down by the minutes, it’s less than 20 cents/minute out of 6 minutes a day. You invest few dollars per gym session to build up your body muscles and keep yourself fit and healthy. So why not invest a dollar in your mind? Now that’s truly healthy body, healthy mind.

Beginning from tomorrow, walk with your head held high. Behave as if you’re already at the top of your field. Don’t worry if you get bogged down by some negativity or distraction. Bring yourself back to positive track. Think only about good things. Talk only about good things. And most importantly, do good things! Appreciate things around you and praise someone for a job well done. Don’t criticize if you can’t come up with constructive criticism. Let’s do this together and change your life!

(Picture by Carl Johan from Flickr, Thanks!)

The road to success is like climbing a long escalator. In NYC subway station, if you want to go up faster, you stay on the left side because the line moves along quickly. If you’re sleepy in the morning and don’t feel like moving your leg muscles at all, stay on the right. I always go up on the left, because I can’t stay still without holding onto the handrail, which is disgustingly dirty (same goes to the handrail in the train!). Anyway, have you ever felt like you were going to fall down if you just stay still on a really long escalator? I don’t know about you, but I do. I feel like it’s just like our life. If you don’t climb up and keep moving, you’ll be shaken and might eventually fall down. Conclusion: you’re in the comfort zone. However, if you decide to go forward, you’ll move ahead of the pack so much quicker and also skip the headache of falling. And even if you do fall, you’d still be better off than if you had not climbed up at all.

So, life’s nothing but an escalator ride. If you don’t move faster than the crowd, you will not stand out from the crowd. If you don’t stretch yourself more than most people do, you will not get the rewards you’ve wanted to get. It’s interesting how we sometimes yearn for something fabulous, yet we do not take any actions to procure it. We know we will get it if we work harder than we do right now, but we give ourselves many excuses not to do it: one of them being too busy (read my post on this).

If you seriously want to succeed, you have to break the old habits that stand in the way between success and yourself. Walk 25% faster than you currently do and you’ll be ahead of the pack. Read 25% more than you currently do and you’ll learn much more than the rest in say 1 year. And no, it doesn’t have to be something as daunting as starting a business even if that’s one of your goals. You don’t want to give yourself too much pressure in the beginning, or you’d most likely give up very soon. You should just start altering your daily routines so that your motions will be in sync with your thinking. After all, actions speak louder than words. There’s no use to learn and talk about a great philosophy if you don’t act on it. Set smaller milestones so that you know you’re progressing, not just blindly charging forward without a direction. Keep hitting the small milestones and you will be on your way to the growth you’ve always dreamed of.

And now, think about a funeral that you attended (it doesn’t have to be depressing). Think about the people who stood to speak at the funeral of their friend. Then, everyone huddled around the tombstone of the dead. What do you see on the tombstone? The Dash (mp3 by Delatorro McNeal, a poem written by Linda Ellis). The dash between the birth date and the very last day of the person’s life. The beginning and the end were very important, but what was even more important was what happened between them. After all, what really matters is how you lived and loved and treated everyone around you while you were still alive. Be a little more tolerant and try to understand the way other people feel. Put yourself in someone else’s shoes and you might have a totally opposite (and often empathetic) perception about the person’s views. Begin to love those people in your lives like you’ve never loved before because you never know if you will still have the chance to do so 10 years later, 1 year later, next week, or tomorrow. Life changes too rapidly for anyone to predict. Finally, there’s a question for you from the poem: when your eulogy is being read, with your life’s actions to rehash, would you be proud of the things they say about how you spent your dash?

Think about it for the next 5 minutes. After that, gather all the energy you have in your life to work towards making the dash that you want and don’t let a single drop of energy follow you after the end of your journey. Remember these: think bigger than you are, start smaller than your goal, grow faster than the rest, and die emptier than a banker’s heart!

(Picture by David A. Villa from Flickr, Thanks!)

Love or bread? My buddy asked me this fundamental question one fine day, totally out of the blue. What’s your call? Love? Bread? But wait, why can’t you have both?

We’re conditioned to believing that we can only have very few things in our life – maybe just 1 out of these: wealth, beauty, health, friendship, relationship, etc. But why can’t we have everything? Or are we being a little greedy and naive here? Not really. Read this quote by Zig Ziglar: “You can have everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” Powerful. Don’t you get rewarded at work if you can motivate and inspire your organization to be more productive and competitive? Don’t you get rewarded if you will just solve others’ problems, one after another?

So, what’s holding you back from having everything you want in life? It’s the good ol’ outdated beliefs embedded in our paradigm. We were brought up with the belief that we can only ‘wish’ to be the next Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or whoever you consider successful. When someone around you says he or she wanna be the next _________ (fill in the blanks with your hero), wouldn’t others just laugh at the person’s naivety and foolish thinking?

“Who do you think you are?”

“You can try but you will fail! Haha!”

“Stop kidding me!”

If you’ve been the victim of negative thinking, stay away from those who mocked your dream from today onwards. You have to truly believe in your own dream if you want to achieve it. No one else will have the same passion and love for your dream as much as yourself. If you don’t have a strong personal conviction for it, you can bet that a small setback could easily throw your life upside down. The path to excellence and success is full of challenges, and that’s how we would learn and grow along the way. Sometimes, you have to dream of the “impossible”! Right, you might or might not get everything you want, but you will get nothing if you don’t try at all. In fact, Zig Ziglar said, success is not a destination, it’s a journey. You will surely gain a lot of valuable learning experiences that will help you excel in many aspects in life. Forget about the people who do not believe in your dream, what do they know about success if they are not successful themselves? Well, at least they serve a purpose – to challenge the belief of your dream and make it even stronger.

All of us have huge potential, but it would only be released if we believe it. For instance, you want to be a great speaker but you don’t think that you could be one, so you never bother to try. What’s really holding you back here? No, not your skills. You can speak comfortably with your friends and family. What you need is the will! The will to believe that you can do it. It only takes practice, practice, and more practice, and the will to not give up no matter how bad your next speech might be. I really don’t think that Obama was born a great speaker. He’s definitely practiced a whole lot throughout his entire life, especially during his role as a civil rights attorney in Chicago. Did he think big? You bet! To be the first African American President of the United States, it takes a tremendous amount of belief, courage, and persistence. Dr. David J. Schwartz wrote in his book, “The Magic of Thinking Big”, that YOU, no one else, have to believe big. Think little goals and expect little achievements. Think big goals and win big successes!

Also, if you are a parent, believe firmly in your child’s dream. If you don’t, no one else would. I’ve seen many people being deprived of their own dream because of their parents’ beliefs, or chasing their dream without the support of their parents. Don’t pass judgments on your children and say “I told you so!” when they come back failing. Believe in them, and believe in their dream as if it’s yours. You don’t need to give them money. You only need to give them words of encouragement and love, just like you always do. They might not succeed ultimately, but that’s okay because they’ve done their best and would have no regrets. You don’t want them to say “What if I had tried that?” 20 years down the road. The same thinking should apply to yourself, whether or not you’re a parent. Go for it and live like there’s no tomorrow!

So, beginning from this moment, change your old stinking thinking to a brand new big thinking. Remind yourself that anyone can be successful in their own ways. You don’t need IQ of 200 to be successful. Successful people are only people who firmly believe in what they do and do it with passion and diligence. When you’re faced with a challenge or when opportunity appears, think “I can do it and I will succeed”. Know that success is none other than believing in your ability to do it. Here’s a caveat by Zig Ziglar: “The most practical, beautiful, workable philosophy in the world won’t work – if you won’t.” Hope you find this helpful, and let’s meet at the top!

(Picture is created by adam*b from Flickr, thanks!)

Do you believe in change? I do and I know Obama does. For without change we will not improve. For without change we will not succeed. You know that deep down inside, so I’m just reinforcing the idea. So, what exactly is change? Simply put, it’s transformation. Transforming from something that’s unsatisfactory or simply something that is not good enough. It may be adequate for your basic needs, but you can always do better. Everybody can.

Why change though? Aren’t you already comfortable as you are now? Say, you’ve got a good job and a wonderful boyfriend/girlfriend. Everything is like a bed of roses. You don’t really have to change what you’re doing now, even though you know you could do much more. Right, you are comfortable. TOO comfortable. And that’s perfectly fine for some people. But if you have, even a tiny bit of desire within you that wants to break the habit and challenge yourself to live the life you’ve always wanted, you NEED to change.

What can you change? One thing you can change right now is your attitude towards life. Attitude is a choice, Bob Proctor said. It comes back to the idea of a glass being half full or half empty. The same situation happening to two different people, you and the person next to you, and it could yield totally opposite results. Sure, you might not have control over the situation, but you can ALWAYS control your attitude.

Attitude separates the successful people from the crowd. Do you think that the successful people never failed? They did indeed, and many times over! Take Walt Disney for example, his first studio went under in just a year after he started it. Most people would most probably give up and get back to their old job that they hated. But his attitude was different from the rest. When he wanted to build the Disney Land, everybody was laughing at him “absurd” idea. It turned out that the idea brought revolution to the entire entertainment industry until today! If Walt Disney didn’t have the right attitude and the big thinking, there wouldn’t be Disney Land or Disney World right now.

Bill gates dropped out from Harvard, that’s something everybody knew. Did he give up on himself and thought that he was worthless because he dropped out? No. He went on to create one of the world’s biggest companies – Microsoft. Attitude is the key.

According to Bob Proctor, we should respond to the situation instead of react. When you react to a situation, you simply let your negative emotions rule your thoughts. You let your guard down and self-defeat behaviors will quickly take over:

1) “I don’t deserve it. I never should’ve tried.” (Giving up)

2) “I knew it wouldn’t work. Who am I to think big?” (Losing faith)

3) “Gosh I hated it. Glad it was over!” (Excuse)

Instead, take a step back and choose your thoughts. Know that attitude will get to where you want to be no matter what the obstacles are. Know that failures are only temporary setbacks to success. You have to be persistent to succeed (read my another post on this). Ask questions like:

1) What could I learn from these?

2) What should I do differently from now on?

If your life is good and rosy, but you want to make it at least 10 times better, ask questions like:

1) How can I improve myself?

2) How can I do what I’m doing better?

3) What can I do today to help achieve my goals tomorrow and 10, 20, 50 years down the road?

And undoubtedly, THINK BIG! If you think big, your positive attitude will follow. When you think in positive terms, positive results will naturally follow. I love this quote in The Optimist’s Creed by Christian D. Larson, “To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.” Beginning from today, decide that you will choose positive outlook no matter what happens. Let the wonderful being within you come out. You will sleep better. And you will wake up with a smile every day because you know you’re making a positive difference to your life.

I will write about another change you could implement in the next weekly series. Write a comment about how you’re changing your life or send me an email. Hope it helps!

(Picture is created by “bixentro” from Flickr. Thanks!)