Posted 9/23/2005 by Josh Hinds

One of the most common questions I get is from people asking me, "what is the best way to stay motivated?"

First, I'd say the answer is not quite that cut and dry. What motivates one person isn't going to necessarily do it for someone else. That's just the way it is. However, don't let that answer discourage you. Through personal exploration, and studying what works for others, you are certain to figure out what will work best for you.

In fact, I've just added an excellent article to our Motivation and Success Library by Dr. Denis Waitley called, How to Stay Motivated. After you've read it over I'm certain you'll be that much closer to achieving a continual feeling of personal motivation -- day in and day out.

And remember, as I always say, personal development is a hands on project... Therefore you've got to play the biggest part in your success journey. Learn new ideas, give them a try, if they don't work for you, try something else. In time you'll see the results you're after... To your success, Josh Hinds :-)

P.S. Read the article How to Stay Motivated by Dr. Denis Waitley.

Posted 9/23/2005 by Josh Hinds

Keeping Yourself Positive
By Brian Tracy

The most important thing you do for your success is to take control of the suggestive elements in your environment. Be sure that what you are seeing and listening to is consistent with the goals you want to achieve.

Listen Your Way To Success
Listen to educational audio programs in your car. The average person drives twelve to 25,000 miles per year which works out to between 500 and 1000 hours per year that the average person spends in his or her car. You can become an expert in your field by simply listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place.

Take Courses In Your Field
Attend seminars given by experts in your field. Take additional courses, learn everything you possibly can. Learn from the experts. Ask them questions, write them letters, read their books, read their articles and listen to people with proven track records in the area that you want to be successful in.

Get Around The Right People
Associate only with positive, success-oriented people. Get around winners. As we say, fly with the eagles. You can't fly with the eagles if you keep scratching with the turkeys. Get away from the go-nowhere types and above all, get away from negative people. Get away from negative coworkers. If you've got a negative boss, seriously consider changing jobs. Associating on a regular basis with negative people is enough in itself to condemn you to a life of underachievement, frustration and failure. Associate only with positive people. Get around winners.

Visualize Your Goals
The last thing before you sleep and the first thing in the morning, think about and visualize your goals as realities. See your goal as though it already existed. Your subconscious mind is only activated by affirmations and pictures that are received in the present tense. See your goal vividly just before you go to sleep. See yourself performing at your best. See the situations that you're facing, working out exactly the way you want them to.

Feed Yourself Mental Pictures
See yourself living the kind of life that you want to live. See yourself with the kind of relationships, the kind of health, the kind of car, the kind of home you really want. Visualize just before you fall asleep at night. The first thing you do when you get up in the morning is to feed yourself mental pictures. Those are the two times of the day when your subconscious mind is most receptive to new programming, when you fall asleep and when you wake up.

Action Exercises:
Here are two things you can do, all day long, to keep your mind and emotions focused on your goals and financial success:

First, listen to audio programs in your car and when you travel around. Continue feeding your mind with a stream of high quality, educational and motivational material that moves you toward your goal.

Second, resolve to associate with positive, optimistic people most of the time. Get around winners and get away from negative people who criticize, condemn and complain. This can change your lift as much as any other factor.
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Brian Tracy is a leading authority on personal and business success. As Chairman and CEO of Brian Tracy International, he is the best-selling author of over 17 books and over 300 audio and video learning programs. Brian addresses more than 250,000 people each year, has spoken in 23 countries, and speaks 4 languages. Visit the Brian Tracy web site and receive his e-mail newsletter!

Posted 9/22/2005 by Josh Hinds

On Education And Learning
By Kent Nerburn

Education is one of the great joys and solaces of life. It gives us a framework for understanding the world around us and a way to reach across time and space to touch the thoughts and feelings of others.

But education is more than schooling. It is a cast of mind, a willingness to see the world with an endless sense of curiosity and wonder.

If you want to be truly educated, you must adopt this cast of mind. You must open yourself to the richness of your everyday experience to your own emotions, to the movements of the heavens and the languages of birds, to the privations and successes of people in other lands and other times, to the artistry in the hands of the mechanic and the typist and the child. There is no limit to the learning that appears before us. It is enough to fill us each day a thousand times over.

The dilemma of how best to educate has always pivoted on the issue of freedom to explore versus the structured transmission of knowledge.

Some people believe that we learn best by wandering forth into an uncharted universe and making sense of the lessons that life provides.

Others believe that we learn best by being taught the most complete knowledge possible about a subject, then being sent forth to practice and use that knowledge.

Both ways have been tried with every possible method and in every possible combination and balance.

If we find ourselves tempted to celebrate one approach over the other, we should remember the caution of the Chinese sage Confucius, who told his followers, Study without thinking and you are blind; think without studying and you are in danger.

Formal schooling is one way of gaining education, and it should not be under estimated. School, if it is good, imparts knowledge, and a context for understanding the world around us. It opens us to ideas that we could never discover on our own, and makes us one with the life of the mind as it has been shaped by people and cultures that we could never meet in our own experience. It makes us part of a community of learners, and helps us give form and direction to the endless flow of experience that passes before us.

It is also a great frustration, because it often seems irrelevant to the passions of our own interests and beliefs.

When you feel burdened by formal education, do not be quick to cast it aside. What is happening is a great surge in your growth and consciousness that is screaming out for immediate and total exploration.

You must remember that all other learners have traveled the same path. And though all true learners have felt this urge to strike out on their own, formal education, in its many shapes and guises, has been sought and revered by all people and all cultures at all times. It has a genius that is greater than your passions, and is abandoned at your own peril.

Still, formal education will not inform your spirit and make you full. So, along with knowledge, you must seek wisdom. Knowledge is multiple; wisdom is singular. Knowledge is words; wisdom is silent. Knowledge is standing outside, understanding what is seen; wisdom is standing at the center, knowing what is not seen. No person can be whole without both dimensions of learning.

There are many ways to seek wisdom. There is travel, there are masters, there is service. There is staring into the eyes of children and elders and lovers and strangers. There is sitting silently in one spot, and there is being swept along in lifes turbulent current. Life itself will grant you wisdom in ways you may neither understand nor choose. It is up to you to be open to all these sources of wisdom and to embrace them with your whole heart.

So do not disparage the lessons of either the schooled or the unschooled.

Those who have less formal education may have learned some single thing more deeply, or they may have embarked early upon the search for wisdom. In their uniqueness, they have discovered something special about life, and it is yours to experience if you are open to what they have to teach.

Those who have devoted their life to formal learning may have walked further along a path than you can even imagine, and may be able to lead you to a vista that will take your breath away, if only you can overcome your boredom and fatigue in the rigors of the search.

Remember the words of the musician who was asked which was greater, knowledge or wisdom. Without knowledge, he answered,I could not play the violin. Without wisdom, I could not play the music.

Place yourself among those who carry on their lives with passion, and true learning will take place, no matter how humble or exalted the setting. But no matter what path you follow, do not be ashamed of your learning. In some corner of your life, you know more about something than anyone else on earth. The true measure of your education is not what you know, but how you share what you know with others.
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Kent Nerburn is an author, sculptor, and educator who has been deeply involved in Native American issues and education. Kent Nerburn holds a Ph.D. in both Theology and Art and lives with his family in northern Minnesota.

** This article was excerpted from the book Simple Truths: Clear & Gentle Guidance on the Big Issues in Life, ©2005, by Kent Nerburn. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, New World Library, Novato, CA 94949

Posted 9/17/2005 by Josh Hinds

A Lesson in Change that Changed My Life
By Alan Alda

I was in an ambulance, bumping down a mountain road for an hour and a half. Someone on a gurney was moaning at the top of his voice. It was me.

I was gripped by something that comes upon us from time to time, whether we like it or not: change. It wasn’t something I felt I really needed.

I was aware of being tripped up by change for the first time when I was seven years old. One day I was playing with my friends and the next I was in bed with a case of polio. I got over that, but a year later, my dog died from eating leftover Chinese food and I got introduced to the biggest change there is. I suddenly realized that death is permanent. It won’t go away; nothing you do can bring your dog back.

Then in my teens, I chose a profession that has change at its very core; I became an actor. People in other lines of work sometimes don’t change jobs until years have gone by. Actors change them every few weeks. M*A*S*H, of course, went on for eleven years, but that was an oasis that only made a desert of change seem even hotter. Every new job is another set of challenges, with new skills to master, or fail at in a public way. And every few years the kind of part you were once right for is only right for the generation behind you.

You’d think after forty years or so of a life like this that I’d be used to change. But it still could surprise me when it made its blunt and unforgiving entrance. I suddenly had to leave the familiar place I was in and go into the unknown. I did know that if I didn’t accept change I couldn’t grow, I couldn’t learn. I couldn’t make progress at anything unless I was willing to go through this dark tunnel of uncertainty. So I went through it, but usually I went through it warily, sometimes even a little suspiciously.

It took a lesson on top of a mountain in Chile to make me accept change in a way I never had before. I think I even began to like it.

I was in an observatory, in in a remote part of Chile, interviewing astronomers for a science program called Scientific American Frontiers. The show often called for me to do dangerous things in far-off places, and I was always a reluctant adventurer because I’m a cautious person. This wasn’t dangerous; it was just talk, but suddenly something inside me literally started to die. My intestine had become crimped and its blood supply was choked off. Every few minutes more and more of it was going bad, and within a few hours, so would the rest of me.

The astronomers brought me down the mountain and hustled me to the closest town; not a very big one, but amazingly, there was a surgeon there who was expert in intestinal surgery. I had only a few hours. There was no chance to fly to a larger city.

It’s not just that I’m cautious; I usually practice a form of caution almost indistinguishable from cowardice. And yet I wasn’t frightened. It happened too quickly for fear to set in. Knowing I might not wake up from the surgery, I dictated a few words to my wife and children and grandchildren. And then I went under.

I woke up a few hours later with a deep understanding that this surgeon had given me my life. I was grateful to him in a way I had never been grateful to anyone before; I was grateful to the nurses and to the painkillers; I was grateful to the soft Chilean cheese they gave me to break my fast. The first bite of that bland cheese, because it was the first taste of food I had in my new life, was gloriously complex and delicious. Everything about life tasted good to me now. Everything was new and bright and shining.

I hadn’t asked for this change and I certainly wouldn’t have picked it if I had a choice, but it actually transformed and excited me.

When I got home, I saw that I was paying more attention to things. The way the cheese tasted when they finally let me eat again became the taste of life for me. And I began doing more of the things I care about and caring more about whatever things I did. It didn’t matter if what I was doing was an official, important enterprise -- or a game on a computer screen. I gave it my attention. My sense of taste for everything had been heightened.

It’s only been two years since that night in Chile. Maybe this will all go away, and maybe I’ll take life more for granted again. But I hope not. I like the way it tastes.

Copyright © 2005 Alan Alda
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Alan Alda played Hawkeye Pierce in the television series M*A*S*H and has acted in, written, and directed many feature films. He has starred often on Broadway and his avid interest in science has led to his hosting PBS's Scientific American Frontiers for eleven years. He was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005 and is the only person to win Emmy awards for acting, writing, and directing. He is married to children's book author/photographer Arlene Alda. They have three grown children and live in New York.

** For more information, please visit www.alanaldabook.com

Posted 9/16/2005 by Josh Hinds

The Power Of Your Beliefs
by Lisa Jimenez, M. Ed.

Your beliefs are the driving force behind your behaviors. Beliefs send powerful messages to your brain that affect your actions (and their outcome) in either a positive or negative way. Your beliefs will cause you to do one of two things:

Be fearful and RETREAT, or Be empowered and ACT!

That's how powerful your beliefs are. Your beliefs about failure, risk-taking, and success will either cause you to repel success, or act and attract it to you. Success takes two ingredients: belief and time. The more belief you have, the less time it takes.

How can you ensure your belief system is empowering and is actually attracting success to you? Three things:

First, it is imperative that you are making daily efforts to get the negative messages out of your life. You need to create an obsession with filtering what you allow in. Television, newspapers, some movies and songs, negative thoughts and people, all need to be limited – even banned from your day.

Second, you need to expose and replace the negative beliefs you presently have. Think about what you say on a daily basis. Observe your habitual behaviors in different situations. Tell the truth. Expose these negative beliefs. Only then will you be truly free. Then, replace these negative beliefs and bad habits with empowering ones. Think on these new thoughts and beliefs about success and over time you will retrain your mind and change your heart.

Lastly, create a compelling vision of your success. Craft a picture of you – as the person you want to be – in your mind and THINK ON THIS throughout your day. Not only will this vision put a smile on your face, this habit will actually create success.

Remember middle school science class? You learned the difference between potential energy and kinetic energy. Potential energy is energy waiting to happen. Not until it's moving and active will you see it in its kinetic energy state. When it's in the kinetic state it is a reality. Wow! That means you can create reality (the kinetic energy) with your thoughts and beliefs (potential energy). Never underestimate the power of your beliefs!

Change Your Beliefs and You Change Your Behavior
Change Your Behavior and You Change Your Life!

Have a great day!

Lisa Jimenez M.Ed.
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Lisa Jimenez, M.Ed., has helped thousands of top salespeople shatter their self-limiting beliefs and finally get the breakthrough success they want. When it comes to personal productivity and creating unstoppable momentum—there is no one better for your salespeople than Lisa. Visit Rx-Success.com for business building success resources by Lisa Jimenez.

Learn more about Lisa's best-selling 'Conquer Fear! Ending Procrastination and Self Sabotage to Achieve What You Really Want' package!

Posted 9/07/2005 by Josh Hinds

We have added three new members to the Motivational Speakers Hall Of Fame. They include: William E. Bailey (Bill), Willie Jolley, and Dr. Stan Harris. Be sure to take a moment to learn about these motivational experts... All the best, Josh Hinds

Posted 9/06/2005 by Josh Hinds

Top Ten Ways to Achieve Your Goals
By Norma Reid

1) Write them down! Statistics show people who write down their goals have over an 80% higher success rate of achieving them. Start a Goals journal. Make sure they are SMART goals - specific, measurable, achievable, results-oriented and time-limited.

2) Create a plan made of small doable steps to get you where you want to be, with timelines. Review your plan monthly.

3) Write down your compelling reason for wanting the goal. Write it with passion, with feeling, with energy.

4) Create 3 to 5 believable positive power statements that will keep you on track. Make them juicy enough to excite you and keep you motivated. Use the present tense.

5) Visualize what it is like having achieved your goal. Visualize you are living it- taste it, feel it, smell it, see it, revel in it.

6) Start a daily routine. Each morning review your goals, your compelling reasons and say aloud your powerful positive statements. Visualize your goal already obtained. Write out one step you can take today to achieve your goal. Then do it! No excuses- make your goal a priority! Repeat your power statements throughout the day.

7) Replace negative self-talk/beliefs with life-enhancing ones. Know that you are the creator of your thoughts and beliefs, and choose ones that are life-enhancing rather than limiting.

8) Journal daily- your thoughts, emotions, barriers, possible solutions/alternatives, daily successes, your gratitudes.

9) Enlist support to keep you accountable! Find a buddy, join a group, hire a coach. Make sure your buddy is in tune with your goal, and will support you in a positive way.

10) Celebrate your successes! Set up small milestones in your journey, and when you reach them, celebrate! And at the end, celebrate some more!
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Norma Reid is a Certified Executive Coach and the owner of From Dreams to Reality Success Coaching. She is passionate about empowering others to make their professional and personal dreams a reality. For more info: www.fromdreamstoreality.ca or email her at norma@fromdreamstoreality.ca

------L@@K------

Posted 9/03/2005 by Josh Hinds

I wanted to give you a quick heads up that we've added two new Focus On Success Interviews to the site that you'll want to check out. They are Dan Robey - Author author of The Power of Positive Habits and Dr. Neil Fiore - Coach and life success expert. I'm certain you will find an abundance of great ideas in each.

-- Here's to your success, Josh Hinds :-)

Posted 9/01/2005 by Josh Hinds

Three Powerful Principles For Success
By Brian Tracy

Be Clear About Your Goals
There are many similarities between business and work. In both cases, the victor is the one who uses superior strategy against his or her competition. There are three principles of military strategy you can apply to your work every single day. The first idea from the military is called the Principle of Maneuver. The principle of maneuver says that you should be clear about the goal, but be flexible about the process of achieving it. According to the Menninger Institute, this quality of flexibility is the most important single quality that you will require for success in times of rapid change.

Be Open to Continuous Feedback
A key peak performance quality for you is to “accept feedback and self-correct.” Peak performers are those who can take information from their environment and even if the information is contrary to all of their planning, they can accept the information, modify their plans, and continue moving forward. They are always open to new ideas and insights.

Learn What You Need To Know
The second military principle you can use is the Principle of Intelligence. This principle of intelligence means simply, “get the facts!”

The most important thing in business decision making is for you to get accurate information. Facts don’t lie. It is important that you get the real facts, not the assumed facts or the apparent facts or the obvious facts, or the hoped for facts, but the real, provable facts.

Make Better Decisions
Perhaps the key job of the executive is decision making. The quality of the decisions that you make will be in direct proportion to the amount of time that you take to gather timely and accurate information. The very best thing that you can do, if you have insufficient information, is to delay making a decision at all.

Invest Your Resources Wisely
The third military principle applied to strategic planning is the Principle of Economy of Force. Economy of force means that you expend only the resources necessary to achieve the objective and not more. It also means that you commit sufficient resources to achieve the objective once you have decided upon it.

Since your own personal energy is all you really have to invest over the course of your lifetime, the military principle of economy says that you should be very selfish when deciding how you are going to use yourself. Keep asking yourself, “How important is this?” and more important, “How important is this to me?”

Action Exercises
Here are two ideas that you can apply immediately to be more strategic in your work and personal life.

First, remain flexible when you are working towards your goal. In times of rapid change, all of your best ideas can be contradicted by new information. Be willing to try different things. Be open to new inputs and ideas.

Second, get the facts! The more and better information you can acquire before you make a decision, the better your decision will be. The very best managers spend a good deal of time getting the real, provable facts before they take action.
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Brian Tracy is one of the world's leading authorities on personal and business success. His fast-moving talks and seminars are loaded with powerful, proven ideas and strategies that you can apply immediately to get better results in every area. Visit Brian's web site and take advantage of his FREE audio program offer.