Posted 3/28/2006 by Josh Hinds

Qualities Of Success
By Zig Ziglar

Dr. William "Bill" Ross was truly one of a kind and was known for his sense of humor and his zest for life. He had exuberance for living, a love for medicine, and a concern for his patients that is seldom equaled anywhere. . . .

He was elected president of the Texas Medical Association in 1981 and received numerous honors and recognition. He received his undergraduate degree from Stephen F. Austin University and worked his way through the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas by selling watermelons. He interned at Parkland Memorial Hospital and later moved to San Benito, Texas.

When he arrived, Dr. Ross was told there was not room for another doctor, but he chose not to take their advice to move on. He built his practice in a simple but effective way. On house calls he would deliberately go to the incorrect house to the right side of the correct address and introduce himself. They told him where the correct house was but he repeated the process at the house to the left of the correct one. Three months later he had a thriving practice.

Dr. Ross helped build the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School at Dallas into a premier training ground for family practitioners. However, he is well remembered for his first day on the job. He arrived at the school wearing overalls and driving a pickup truck.

Later he said it was like "two culture shocks--theirs and mine." However, behind that "country" demeanor was a brilliant mind and a commitment to medicine, wrapped up in a love for his fellow man, which made him a standout in the medical world. Come to think about it, the qualities I just identified will be useful to anyone, whatever their profession. Think about it and I'll see you at the top!
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Zig Ziglar offers a weekly newsletter filled with more of his inspiring stories as well as practical ideas to help you in the areas of sales, marketing, customer service, and related topics. You can subscribe to the Zig Ziglar Newsletter at www.ZigZiglar.com.

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Posted 3/19/2006 by Josh Hinds

Success is Built on Inconvenience!
by Gary Ryan Blair

Instructions: Grab a beverage, print this lesson, and contemplate how it can be applied to your life.

Inconvenience: noun. The quality or increasing discomfort.

Success can be difficult to define, but having invested a large part of my adult life to performance related initiatives, I have witnessed first-hand, a strong understanding of all peak performers. This understanding, while unconventional and often unspoken can be best summarized in this statement:

All progress, change, and success is based on a foundation of inconvenience!

This truth applies to every definition of success, it applies to everyone and to every endeavor. In short, inconvenience is the one constant denominator of success.

Understanding the importance of behavioral inconvenience in relation to success is so big, so powerful, and so vitally important to your future and mine that I'm not going to mince words. In this lesson, I'm going to "cut to the chase" and present it in such a way that everyone can understand why becoming uncomfortable is not a nuisance, but a necessity!.

Inconvenience is part of the foundational building blocks of success. Every person who has ever been legitimately successful has formed the habit of doing things that others don't like to do. Our society has placed such a high premium on convenience and expediency that it has enabled weakness, while also creating an inability for many to perform at peak levels.

It's just as true as it sounds and it's just as simple as it seems. You can hold it up to the light, you can put it to the acid test, and you can beat the snot out of it until it's worn out, but when you are all through with it, it will still be the one constant denominator of success, whether you like it or not.

The acceptance of inconvenience and discomfort explains why people with every apparent qualification for success become disappointing failures, while others achieve outstanding success in spite of many obvious and discouraging handicaps.

Since your ability to embrace inconvenience and discomfort will help to create your future, it's a brilliant idea for you to use it in determining just what sort of a future you are going to have. In other words, let's take this big, all-embracing concept and boil it down to fit the individual you.

If true success lies in one's ability to understand and enforce inconvenience, let's start the boiling-down process by determining what are the things that most don't want to be inconvenienced by. The things that people don't like to be inconvenienced by are the very things that you and I, and other human beings, naturally don't like to do.

In other words, we've got to realize right from the start that success requires an unconventional approach and a much different philosophical view. True success is something which is achieved by the minority of people, and is therefore unnatural and not to be achieved by following our natural likes and dislikes nor by being guided by our natural preferences and prejudices.

The Inconvenience Factor

The list of things that most people don't want to be inconvenienced by is too long to permit specific discussion, but they can all be disposed of by saying that they all emanate from a willingness to embrace easy and convenient solutions to just about any situation.

The quest for convenience and expediency is like a drug that continually tempts people to avoid engaging in honorable and admirable behavior.

For the purpose of this lesson, I present the following as an exercise to spotlight inconvenience and expose behavioral convenience for the fraud it really is:

* It's inconvenient to work out when you're tired. It's convenient and easy to make an excuse!

* It's inconvenient to be forgiving when someone has hurt you or a family member. It's convenient and easy to hold a grudge!

* It's inconvenient to be loving when someone has acted inappropriately. It's convenient and easy to be angry!

* It's inconvenient to ask for help or assistance. It's convenient and easy to use guilt!

* It's inconvenient to teach your child how to tie their shoes. It's convenient and easy to provide them with slip-ons.

* It's inconvenient to be tranquil in a traffic jam. It's convenient and easy to get stressed out.

* It's inconvenient to accept 100% responsibility for your behavior. It's convenient and easy to blame someone else.

* It's inconvenient to tell the truth to ourselves and others. It's convenient and easy to lie or engage avoidance.

* It's inconvenient to go the extra mile for a client. It's convenient and easy to say no, it can't be done.

* It's inconvenient to prepare and practice. It's convenient and easy to be unprepared while offering a cop out.

* It's inconvenient to confront problems head on. It's convenient and easy to pretend that they don't exist.

* It's inconvenient to sacrifice and enforce self-discipline. It's convenient and easy to be lazy and procrastinate.

* It's inconvenient to break free from a comfort zone. It's convenient and easy to stay where you are.

* It's inconvenient to speak up when injustice occurs. It's convenient and easy to look the other way.

* It's inconvenient to swallow your pride. It's convenient and easy to be stubborn.

* It's inconvenient to be open minded and understanding. It's easy and convenient to be judgmental.

* It's inconvenient to be empathetic and understanding. It's convenient and easy to be callous and cynical.

* It's inconvenient to do the right thing. It's convenient and easy to be selfish!

* It's inconvenient to be patient with a child who's crying at 3am. It's convenient and easy to get upset!

* It's inconvenient to practice the golden rule. It's convenient and easy to be self-centered.

* It's inconvenient to to tell people what they need to hear. It's convenient and easy to tell them what they want to hear.

* It's inconvenient to put other peoples needs first. It's convenient and easy to focus only on our personal needs and wants.

* It's inconvenient to deal with hard facts and differences of opinion. It's convenient and easy to view life through one paradigm - yours!

Perhaps you have been discouraged by a feeling that you were born subject to certain dislikes peculiar to you, with which the highly successful men and women in our society are not afflicted.

Perhaps you have wondered why it is that some people seem to like to do the things that you don't like to do.

Well, they don't and the truth is, no one likes being inconvenienced. It's just that high performers understand that the road to success is constantly filled with acts of discomfort. They choose to do what needs to be done.

But if they don't like be inconvenienced for whatever reason, then why do they embrace it? Because by doing the right things at the right time, they can accomplish the things they want to accomplish while feeling great about how victory was achieved.

Successful people are influenced by the desire for pleasing results. The overwhelming majority of people are influenced by the desire for pleasing methods and are inclined to be satisfied with such results as can be obtained by doing things they like to do or simply what they find to be convenient.

Why then are successful people able to accept inconvenience, discomfort, and sacrifice while most are not?

Because successful people have a purpose strong enough to make them form the habit of doing things they don't enjoy doing in order to accomplish the purpose they want to accomplish and become the person they they want to become.

Sometimes even the most disciplined opt for convenience. When someone goes for the easy way out, it simply means that they have reached a point at which, for the time being, convenience is more desirable an outcome than inconvenience.

And when this occurs you must focus on the bigger picture, on your purpose, and you will at the next opportunity behave properly and do the right thing.

Many clients and friends whom I have discussed this unconventional view of success have said at this point, "But how can I be expected to always embrace inconvenience when the temptation for convenience is so strong. Isn't wanting to be a good person a strong enough purpose?

No it isn't!

Simply wanting to be a good person isn't a sufficiently strong purpose to make you embrace the importance of behavioral inconvenience for the very simple reasons that it is easier to adjust ourselves to the hardships of a poor quality of life and low levels of peace of mind than it is to adjust ourselves to the hardships of making a much better one.

If you are still suspicious, just think of all the things you are willing to go without in order to avoid doing the things you don't want to be inconvenienced by. All of which seems to prove that the strength which holds you to your purpose is not your own strength but the strength of the purpose itself.

The Habit of Inconvenience

Every single qualification for success is acquired through the habit of inconvenience. People form habits and habits form futures. If you do not deliberately form good habits, then unconsciously you will form bad ones.

You are the kind of person you are because you have formed the habit of being that kind of person, and the only way you can change is through habit of inconvenience.

But before you decide to adopt the habit of inconvenience, let me warn you of the importance of habit to your decision. I have worked with and spoken to people throughout the world and have often wondered why, in spite of the fact that there is so much good in them, do so many people seem to get so little lasting good out of themselves.

Perhaps you have participated in a workshop or speech and have left determined to do the things that would make you successful or more successful only to find your decision or determination waning at just the time when it should be put into effect or practice.

Here's the reason why. Any resolution or decision you make is simply a promise to yourself, which is worthless unless you have formed the habit of making it and keeping it.

Impress this four-step philosophy on yourself, family, friends and associates:

* If you set a goal, achieve it, even if it's inconvenient.

* If you make a mistake, fix it, even if it's inconvenient.

* If you start something, finish it, even if it's inconvenient.

* If you make a promise, honor it, even if it's inconvenient

* If you make a commitment, fulfill it, even if it's inconvenient.

It's important to take note that you won't form the habit of making and keeping commitments unless right at the start you link it with a definite purpose that can be accomplished by keeping it.

In other words, any resolution or decision you make today has to be made again tomorrow, and the next day, and the next, and the next, and so on. And it not only has to be made each day, but it has to be kept each day, for if you miss one day in the making or keeping of it, you've got to go back and begin all over again.

But if you continue the process of making it each morning and keeping it each day, you will finally wake up some morning a different person in a different world, and you will wonder what has happened to you and the world you used to live in.

As long as you live, don't ever forget that while you may succeed beyond your fondest hopes and your greatest expectations, you will never succeed beyond the purpose to which you are willing to surrender.

Furthermore, your surrender will not be complete until you adopt the winners philosophy that all progress, change, and success is based on a foundation of inconvenience!

Everything Counts!
Gary Ryan Blair
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Gary Ryan Blair is President of The GoalsGuy. A visionary and gifted conceptual thinker, Gary is highly regarded as a speaker, consultant, strategic planner, and coach to leading companies throughout the globe. Visit The GoalsGuy.

Posted 3/13/2006 by Josh Hinds

Move Beyond Your Limitations
By Steve Brunkhorst

Limitations are often temporary barriers that block the view of one's true potential. Barriers might be self-limiting beliefs, fears of failure or success, discouragement from the past, or simply the need to take a well-deserved rest. They could also be disguised blessings that build strength and courage.

Look Beyond Your Barriers - Refuse to allow barriers to limit your view of the possibilities available to you. To gain a wider vision, we need to consciously move beyond perceived limitations. It only takes one life and one small action to make a tremendous difference in our world.

Narrow Your Focus - Begin by naming your limit. Then focus on one small action-possibility. What would be the first step you would need to take to out distance your best? What would it require of you to move closer to that promotion, complete that project, release a fear, or continue on the journey to your fondest dream?

Step Forward - When you feel that you've reached your limit, stop and think. Then, step out. Lighten your load, draw a new map, or take a different path. Take one more step.

That small step could eventually change many lives for the better. You'll find that your faith, vision, and resolve will allow you to fly than higher any limitations that stand in your way!

© Copyright 2005-2006 Steve Brunkhorst.
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Steve is a professional life success coach, motivational author, and the editor of Achieve! 60-Second Nuggets of Inspiration, a popular ezine bringing great stories, motivational nuggets, and inspiring thoughts to help you achieve more in your career and personal life. Get the next issue by visiting AchieveEzine.com.


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Posted 3/08/2006 by Josh Hinds

Three Easy Ways to Maximum Motivation
By Brian Tracy

Appreciate People For Everything They Do
There are three keys to getting the best out of others, and the first of these is appreciation. Every time you thank another person, you cause that person to like themselves better. You raise their self-esteem and improve their self-image. You cause them to feel more important. You make them feel that what they did was valuable and worthwhile. You empower them.

Build Your Own Self-Esteem
And the wonderful thing about thanking other people is that, every time you say the words “thank you,” you like yourself better as well. You feel better inside. You feel happier and more content with yourself and life. You feel more fully integrated and positive about what you are doing. When you develop an attitude of gratitude that flows forth from you in all of your interactions with others, you will be amazed at how popular you will become and how eager others will be to help you in whatever you are doing.

Praise and Approve Others Continually
The second way to make people feel important, to raise their self-esteem and give them a sense of power and energy, is by the generous use of praise and approval. Psychological tests show that, when children are praised by the people that they look up to, their energy levels rise, their heart rates and respiratory rates increase and they feel happier about themselves overall.

Make People Feel Important
Perhaps the most valuable lesson in Ken Blanchard’s book The One Minute Manager is his recommendation to be giving “one-minute praising” at every opportunity. If you go around your home and through your social relationships praising and giving genuine and honest approval to people for their accomplishments, large and small, you will be amazed at how much more people like you and how much more willing they are to help you achieve your goals.

Practice the Law of Reciprocity
There is a psychological law of reciprocity that says, “If you make me feel good about myself, I will find a way to make you feel good about yourself.” In other words, people will always look for ways to reciprocate your kindnesses toward them. When you look for every opportunity to do and say things that make other people feel good about themselves, you will be astonished at not only how good you feel, but at the wonderful things that begin to happen all around you.

Pay Attention When They Talk
The third way to empower others, to build their self-esteem and make them feel important is simply to pay close attention to them when they talk. The great majority of people are so busy trying to be heard that they become impatient when others are talking. But this is not for you. Remember, the most important single activity that takes place over time is listening intently to the other person when he or she is talking and expressing himself or herself.

Take Every Opportunity to Build People Up
Again, the three general rules for empowering the people around you, which apply to everyone you meet, are appreciation, approval, and attention. Voice your thanks and gratitude to others on every occasion. Praise them for every accomplishment. And pay close attention to them when they talk and want to interact with you. These three behaviors alone will make you a master of human interaction and will greatly empower the people around you.

Action Exercises:

Now, here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, make people feel important. Look for ways to express praise and approval at every opportunity.

Second, practice the special art of listening to people when they want to talk. It makes people feel special and appreciated.
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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 the Brian Tracy web site.

Posted 3/08/2006 by Josh Hinds

New Updates...

We've just added a new article to our Motivation and Success Articles Library by speaker and author Barbara Sher entitled: Are You a Scanner? -- we have also added new listings to the Motivational and Inspirational songs section on our site.

-- All the best, Josh Hinds :-)

Posted 3/06/2006 by Josh Hinds

“Before There’s Spring, There’s…What?”
By Julie Clark Robinson

“Without change, something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens.” -- Frank Herbert.

A person expects it to some degree, whether they are aware of it or not. You squeeze through the aisle -- trying not to bonk anyone in the head with your carry-on –mumble words of appreciation to the flight attendants, and step down the ramp into another city’s version of an airport. Change is literally in the air, albeit institutional and somewhat stuffy. You pick up your pace and follow the overhead signs to your final destination.

But when the month is March and you’ve traveled from Cleveland to Palm Springs, as I did recently, you get more than the usual blur of people who look somehow different from the bundled up, meat and potatoes bunch perched in the waiting area at your departure gate. When it’s March and you step into an open-air desert Mecca, change smacks you in the face. And if you’re like me, you snap to attention and lap it up.

What’s that smell….flowers? “But where are they? I don’t see any flowers,” I thought. Did the city of Palm Springs hire Bath & Body Works to pump their best spring-like scent into the air? Nope, it was the real deal, I noticed as I made my way from the gate to the baggage claim and into the mouth of nirvana. Change was everywhere I looked. Beautiful white peaked canopies marked a skyline made of mountains.

Now that my senses were smiling, even the smallest of changes in scenery delighted me. In my Midwestern blur of McDonalds and Burger Kings, I’d forgotten about Jack In The Box and Carl’s Jr. Instead of Kroger and Giant Eagle there were Ralphs and Vons. (You can always count on Starbucks to bridge the gap, however.) And the sky, the endless blue thing that was only interrupted by the jagged rocky snow-capped things.

What a concept – to enjoy the aesthetic crispness of snow without getting my socks wet. But alas! No need for socks! Even my toes will enjoy this two-day sojourn to a place that’s infinitely different from whence they came.

The rest of my trip followed its breathtaking suit, and I was back in Lake Erie country before my alabaster skin could even pink up. But what lives on is my reaffirmation that change is indeed good.

I’ve always known that I thrive on change, but what I needed was a reminder that even the smallest of breaks in routine can be incredibly uplifting. After all, I’ve been known to rearrange furniture even when I didn’t need to squeeze a Christmas tree into an already crowded room. Sometimes a person just needs to stare at a different wall, you know? One time, I even changed jobs for the simple reason that I wanted to drive in a different direction every morning.

Okay, so as it turned out, that wasn’t my brightest move. But I still believe that after we reach a certain age and life’s traditional “big” moments are behind us, we can still shake things up a bit. I’m not going to swap my husband for a newer (less grouchy) model or defy science by trying to have another baby. I like being a brunette with no highlights, and in spite of the exhilaration I feel when I travel, I love living in the Midwest.

Instead, I think I’ll dig around in the basement for my Fiesta ware.

Visual Exercise: Take fifteen minutes to rearrange your family room in any way! If there’s absolutely no “new” arrangement that makes sense for the furniture, you can still make some quickie changes. Take all the books off the shelves and put something else there. Put the rug away for a while. Remove one piece of furniture completely and enjoy the space for a change. If after a few days, you simply don’t like it, put everything back. But I’ll bet you had some fun.
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Julie Clark Robinson is the author of Live in the Moment a fresh, funny and blatantly honest book about creating one's own daily joy. Visit her site at www.JulieClarkRobinson.com.