Posted 8/28/2006 by Josh Hinds

Dirty Little Reminders
by Julie Clark Robinson

"One hundred years from now, it will not matter what my bank account was, how big my house was, or what kind of car I drove. But the world may be a little better, because I was important in the life of a child." -- Forest Witcraft

I had been feeling something ugly brewing for days - probably weeks - if I'm to be honest. And by ugly, I don't mean the brownish/grayish sunken circles under my eyes, they're a given at this point. (My beloved Sephora catalog still waits for me in my reading pile. Inside, my favorite, miracle worker concealer, awaits my order.)

This particular kind of ugliness starts in the pit of your stomach and ends up as a worried furrow on your brow, exposing every forehead wrinkle you've ever had. Finally, as I hurriedly pulled the not-so-clean sheets over my bed and mentally went over all the things I unrealistically hoped to accomplish that day, the ugliness spewed out into a sentence that alarmed me - and finally brought some clarity.

"I'm just too involved with my family."

I stopped tugging at the sheets and realized the absurdity of that particular combination of words. "Too involved"…"with family". Always one to be thrilled with creating an oxymoron, this one just seemed sad to me. Is helping my children get ready for their first day of elementary school too involved? Is coaching my daughter's first cheerleading squad and doing a nightly load of grass-stained clothes from my son's football practice too involved? (Note to self, remember to buy stock in Gatorade. And Spray 'n Wash.) Is finally living up to the promise of a walk to the world's most patient Black Lab too involved? And my husband doesn't even ask for any of my time at this point, he recognizes the bunched-up forehead and is steering clear.

Too involved? Surely not. But if I continue to beat myself up over the fact that I have a column to deliver, a database to create, a new book concept to put down on paper, an agent to seek and several email replies that need to go out, the one thing in my reeling mind that needed to go was the family. Not the people themselves, but everything they seem to require of me.

Don't worry, I heard it. The "DING DING DING" of the danger bells that always seem to peel at just the right moment before I go over the edge and lose all sense of priority. In fact, at the very moment that I realized how much more important it is, for me, to nurture this beloved family of mine than to seek the almighty by-line, I actually smiled. Right smack in the middle of a bedroom that needed to be dusted.

Suddenly I felt better than I had in weeks. One simple sentence that raced through my brain had freed me, for the time being, from the myriad of tasks that were plaguing my brain. Taking my kids for haircuts and new sneakers isn't a task, it's a privilege. Creating a database and replying to emails is a task.

Sometimes we all just need a little reminder of the difference.

Action Exercise:
If you're reading this, you've already done your homework! Hopefully, this piece put you on the path to sorting out the differences between the privileges and the tasks in your life.
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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.

Posted 8/22/2006 by Josh Hinds

Earl Nightingale Motivational Quote

"A great attitude does much more than turn on the lights in our worlds; it seems to magically connect us to all sorts of serendipitous opportunities that were somehow absent before we changed." -- Earl Nightingale

I hope you found the quote above inspiring. You can learn more about Earl Nightingale at our Motivational Speakers Hall of Fame.

-- To your success, Josh Hinds

Posted 8/18/2006 by Josh Hinds

Give Bad Habits The Boot
By Chris Widener

Everybody has bad habits. Everybody. Now granted, some people have less than others and some people's bad habits are more grating than those of others, but we all have them. What is great is that we don't have to! Imagine a life where you couldn't change? What kind of life would that be? But we can, so let's!

There are two kinds of bad habits: Those you know you have that others may or may not know about, and those you don't know you have but everybody else knows you have!

For the sake of everybody involved we ought to get rid of them all, right?

Well Chris, how can I get rid of a bad habit if I don't know I have it? Simple, but hard. Ask somebody to be brutally honest with you! You might think, "Yeah, but I'll be embarrassed." Would you rather everyone talk behind your back? Get up the courage and ask. Ask somebody who loves you and has your best interest in mind. Be gracious and don't defend your self. Just accept it and work on it.

What about the ones we know about - which are all of them once your good friend tells you the ones you were missing? Those are the tough ones. How do I know they are tough? They must be tough if you know about them and yet you still have them! If they weren't tough, they would be 'Former' bad habits! Got me? Good!

So how do you break a bad habit? How do you give it the boot out of your life? Here are a few things that must be a part of the plan in order to see that stuff gone forever!

1. You must want them to go. That's right, some people want them to stick around. I have seen dads choose alcohol over their grandchildren. I have seen smokers continue smoking while watching their parents die of emphysema. They don't want them to go. The first thing is to go deep into the recesses of your heart and ask, "Do I really want to give this up?"

2. You do? Good. Step two: Make up a list of all of the reasons you want to quit your bad habits. Make them positive. Make the list long! Start with the really powerful and dramatic if you need to. Now memorize them. Put them in your mind. You are making connections between stopping the bad behavior with what good things you will get from doing so. If you want to lose weight, then picture yourself slim and looking good in those skinny people clothes! If you want to stop smoking, picture your wife actually kissing you rather than sending you to the bathroom to brush your teeth!

3. Choose. That is right. Once you have the information, this comes down to one thing: It is an act of the will. Choose to do it. Say to yourself throughout the day, "I am choosing to..." Eisenhower rightly said, "The history of free men is written not by chance but by choice, their choice." It is your choice. You can write your history.

4. Take action! Point four is tricky because there are two philosophies about this. One theory is that you must take massive action. You must go all or nothing. Using the weight loss example, this person would go spend $500 to join a gym, rework their schedule and hit the treadmill everyday for a year. They will get rid of all fat in the house. They go all out! That works for some. Others would burn out on that, feel like failures and be worse off than before. They should start out slow, taking baby steps, but working diligently toward a planned goal. This person would decide to start walking three days a week. They would decide to limit dessert to two nights a week, down from seven. See how this works? Either way is okay as long as you get to the goal eventually.

5. Tell somebody. This is your accountability partner. Tell them your goal and tell them your plan. Write it down for them and have them ask you on regular intervals about your progress. This will prove invaluable!

6. Recover from failure. Inevitably most people will have setbacks. The key is to have them be setbacks and not turnbacks! Pick yourself up and get going again. Some people may want to lose 30 pounds and after losing fifteen they eat a gallon of ice cream. Then they feel bad and give up. Don't! Reset your goal for another two weeks and get going again. Chalk it off to experience! Say to yourself, "Sometimes you win and sometimes you learn."

7. Reward yourself. That's right. You should regularly congratulate yourself by rewarding yourself with some gift to yourself. Start small with small victories and plan a big one when you are finally and for sure over the habit.

Is it that simple? Most of the time, no. Habits are hard to break. There are so many intangibles that it would be hard to cover them all. But this is a simple and workable plan that will help you make great strides if you apply the principles.

Get going! Give those bad habits a boot! Good luck!

-- Chris Widener
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Chris Widener is a popular keynote speaker and writer as well as the President of Made for Success, a company helping individuals and organizations turn their potential into performance, and succeed in every area of their lives and achieve their dreams. Visit him at www.ChrisWidener.com where you can download a free mp3 audio by him.

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Posted 8/12/2006 by Josh Hinds

Liberate Yourself From Fear
by Mark Victor Hansen

Eleanor Roosevelt once said: "You gain strength, courage, and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You must do the thing, which you think you cannot do."

This quote states the problem and the solution. We must stop running away from things that frighten us, face our fears head on, then do the thing we fear the most.

Most of the time we'll find out that the "thing" was not that scary after all. Our imaginations had behaved like a super fertilizer and grown a grotesque monstrosity in our minds.

Remember, our imaginations are incredibly powerful. They can work against us, creating horrible images that leave us paralyzed with fear. But they can also work for us, building a world where everything we do is an adventure, a miracle.

And the most amazing thing is that we hold the power to control our minds - we allow fear to dominate our lives or we choose to dominate fear. Those are our only two choices.

Action Steps:

In closing I'd like to offer an exercise to complete in the week ahead:

What is it that you fear the most? Before you can eliminate fear from your life you'll need to identify exactly what it is that you fear.

You may only be able to come up with a few. Or you may need to buy a few notebooks to make your list. Whatever they are, and however many you have, it is up to you to name them and begin to delete them - one fear at a time.

How do you conquer fear? There's only one way - "do the thing you cannot do". Scary, but very necessary.

To begin to liberate yourself from fear take out your journal or notebook (or notebooks) and ask yourself these questions over and over again for each fear, until you get to its core.

1. What am I afraid of?

2. Is this a fear I want to overcome and delete from my life?

3. Am I allowing this fear to keep me from achieving my dreams?

4. If I did the thing that I fear what would happen to me physically?

5. What would happen to me mentally?

6. Would the opinions of others matter to me if I did this? If so, why?

7. What's the worst thing that could happen if I did this? Could I live with this outcome?

8. What's the best thing that could happen if I did this? Would this outcome make me happier than I am right now?

Imagine it's your last day on earth. As you review your life is this fear going to haunt you? Will you say: "I wish I had overcome this fear. I wasted years of my life allowing this fear to control me."?

Your answers to these questions - especially number 8 - will determine whether you should proceed to take action to eliminate each fear from your life. When the positive results outweigh the negative possibilities you'll know you need to destroy the fear - or it will destroy your dreams.

See you next time!

Mark Victor Hansen
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Article submitted by Mark Victor Hansen - Co-Author of the Chicken Soup For The Soul series of books. For over 26 years, Mark Victor Hansen has focused solely on helping people in all walks of life reshape their personal vision of what's possible for themselves. Visit MarkVictorHansen.com for resources, as well as Mark's speaking schedule and current projects.

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Posted 8/06/2006 by Josh Hinds

The Seven Habits Revisited: Seven Unique Human Endowments
By Stephen R. Covey

I see seven unique human endowments or capabilities associated with The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. One way to revisit The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is to identify the unique human capability or endowment associated with each habit.

The primary human endowments are 1) self-awareness or self-knowledge; 2) imagination and conscience; and 3) volition or will power. And the secondary endowments are 4) an abundance mentality; 5) courage and consideration; and 6) creativity. The seventh endowment is self-renewal. These are all unique human endowments; animals don't possess any of them. But, they are all on a continuum of low to high levels.

Associated with Habit 1:
Be Proactive is the endowment of self-knowledge or self-awareness, an ability to choose your response (response-ability). At the low end of the continuum are the ineffective people who transfer responsibility by blaming themselves or others or their environment anything or anybody "out there" so that they are not responsible for results.

At the upper end of the continuum toward increasing effectiveness is self-awareness: "I know my tendencies; I know the scripts or programs that are in me; but I am not those scripts. I can rewrite my scripts." You are aware that you are the creative force of your life. You are not the victim of conditions or conditioning. You can choose your response to any situation, to any person. So on the continuum; you go from being a victim to self-determining creative power through self-awareness of the power to choose your response to any condition or conditioning.

Associated with Habit 2:
Begin With the End In Mind is the endowment of imagination and conscience. If you are the programmer, write the program. Decide what you're going to do with the time, talent, and tools you have to work with: "Within my small circle of influence, I'm going to decide." At the low end of the continuum is the sense of futility about goals, purposes, and improvement efforts. After all, if you are totally a victim, if you are a product of what has happened to you, then what can you realistically do about anything?

So you wander through life hoping things will turn out well, that the environment may be positive, so you can have your daily bread and maybe some positive fruits. At the other end is a sense of hope and purpose: "I have created the future in my mind. I can see it, and I can imagine what it will be like." Only people have the capability to imagine a new course of action and pursue it conscientiously.

Associated with Habit 3:
Put First Things First is the endowment of willpower. At the low end of the continuum is the ineffective, flaky life of floating and coasting, avoiding responsibility and taking the easy way out, exercising little initiative or willpower.

And at the top end is a highly disciplined life that focuses heavily on the highly important but not necessarily urgent activities of life. It's a life of leverage and influence. On the continuum, you go from being driven by crises and having can't and won't power to being focused on the important but not necessarily urgent matters of your life and having the will power to realize them.

The exercise of primary human endowments empowers you to use the secondary endowments more effectively. We will now move from Primary to Secondary Endowments.

Associated with Habit 4:
Think Win-Win is the endowment of an abundance mentality. Why? Because your security comes from principles. Everything is seen through principles. When your wife makes a mistake, you're not accusatory. Why? Your security does not come from your wife living up to your expectations. Your security comes from within yourself. You're principle-centered.

As people become increasingly principle-centered, they love to share recognition and power. Why? It's not a limited pie. It's an ever-enlarging pie. The basic paradigm and assumption about limited resources is flawed. The great capabilities of people are hardly even tapped. The abundance mentality produces more profit, power, and recognition for everybody. On the continuum, you go from a scarcity to an abundance mentality through feelings of intrinsic self-worth and a benevolent desire for mutual benefit.

Associated with Habit 5:
Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood is the endowment of courage balanced with consideration. Does it take courage and consideration to not be understood first? Think about it. Think about the problems you face. You tend to think, "You need to understand me, but you don't understand. I understand you, but you don't understand me. So let me tell you my story first, and then you can say what you want." And the other person says, "Okay, I'll try to understand." But the whole time they're "listening," they're preparing their reply. They are just pretending to listen, selective listening. When you show your home movies or tell some chapter of you autobiography "let me tell you my experience" the other person is tuned out unless he feels understood.

But what happens when you truly listen to another person? The whole relationship is transformed: "Someone started listening to me and they seemed to savor my words. They didn't agree or disagree, they just were listening and I felt as if they were seeing how I saw the world. And in that process, I found myself listening to myself. I started to feel a worth in myself."

The root cause of almost all people problems is the basic communication problem people do not listen with empathy. They listen from within their autobiography. They lack the skill and attitude of empathy. They need approval; they lack courage. The ability to listen first requires restraint, respect, and reverence. And the ability to make yourself understood requires courage and consideration. On the continuum, you go from fight and flight instincts to mature two-way communication where courage is balanced with consideration.

Associated with Habit 6:
Synergize is the endowment of creativity, the creation of something. How? By yourself? No, through two respectful minds communicating, producing solutions that are far better than what either originally proposed. Most negotiation is positional bargaining and results, at best, in compromise. But when you get into synergistic communication, you leave position. You understand basic underlying needs and interests and find solutions to satisfy them both. You get people thinking.

And if you get the spirit of teamwork, you start to build a very powerful bond, an emotional bank account, and people are willing to subordinate their immediate wants for long-term relationships. With courage and consideration, communicate openly with each other and try to create win-win solutions. On the continuum, you go from defensive communication to compromise transactions to synergistic and creative alternatives and transformations.

Associated with Habit 7:
Sharpen the Saw is the unique endowment of continuous improvement or self-renewal to overcome entropy. If you don't constantly improve and renew yourself, you'll fall into entropy, closed systems and styles. At one end of the continuum is entropy (everything breaks down), and the other end is continuous improvement, innovation, and refinement. On the continuum, you go from a condition of entropy to a condition of continuous renewal, improvement, innovation, and refinement.

My hope in revisiting the Seven Habits is that you will use the seven unique human endowments associated with them to bless and benefit the lives of many other people.
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Written by Stephen Covey. For more information on TSTN (The Success Training Network) and their world-renown faculty of success and achievement thought leaders visit TSTN - The world's only television network dedicated to success and achievement. Get the competitive advantage in life - Subscribe to TSTN!

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Posted 8/04/2006 by Josh Hinds

“Wail On, Dear Locusts”
By Julie Clark Robinson

“Rest is not idleness, and to lie sometimes on the grass on a summer day listening to the murmur of water, or watching the clouds float across the sky, is hardly a waste of time.” -- John Lubbock

To normal people, a locust’s cry probably goes unnoticed. It doesn’t consistently chat like the cricket does – a regular rhythm of chirp…chirp…chirp. It doesn’t entertain with a sporadic song like a bird does. To a normal person, a locust is that big bug that sheds its skin and freaks you out if you cross its abandoned path.

I tend to freak out too, at the locust, but for an entirely different reason. In fact, this time of year, it seems that the random, lingering wail of the locust is all I can hear. It sounds like “Hurry! Summer’s almost over and you haven’t taken the kids to an amusement park yet.” Or, “How is it possible that you’ve pondered white, fluffy clouds and counted the seconds between lightening bolts and claps of thunder, but haven’t noticed one single shooting star?”

The locust is my version of an alarm clock. The sound of one somewhere in the distance jolts me out of a trance and reminds me that if I want to take in all that summer has to offer, I’d better get to it. So, like any red-blooded woman, I decide that a good place to begin is my closet. I look past the tank tops and capris that seem to have been my uniform so far this summer and reach for the black & white polka dot sundress that taunts me all winter long. So what if I’m only going to the grocery store today? The locusts remind me that it’s high time that I wear it.

Waaauh….waaauh…waaaauh…waaauh….23 more evenings that my kids don’t have homework, how shall we spend them?

Waaauh…waaauh…waaauh….waaauh…23 more days that we don’t have to be anywhere in particular.

Waaauh…waaauh…waaauh….waaauh…have I ridden my bike yet?

Waaauh…waaauh…waaauh….waaauh…there’s still time to read a (whole!) book by the pool. And so on – the locust reminds me that our family’s freedom is fleeting with every humid minute that ticks by. I want to exhaust my lofty options so that I am totally ready to surrender to the coziness of autumn by Labor Day.

There are still more s’mores to be toasted, more fireflies that need to do time in a Prego jar. So, in the interest of living in the moment, I’m outta here. This column may be short, but the carefree days (and nights) of summer suddenly feel shorter.

Action Exercise:

Don’t panic. Just put your calendar in front of you so you can see what you’re dealing with. Then, make a list of the things you’ll regret not doing if you don’t make time for them. Allocate time for these things on the calendar and pick them off, one by one.
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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.

Posted 8/01/2006 by Josh Hinds

photos from a recent Motivational Seminar I attended...

This past weekend I attended the 'Claim Your Power Now' seminar. I met a number of great folks and I've included several photos I took with various speakers including: Jim Rohn, Bob Proctor, and Bob Burg just to name a few. Head over to my photo album section if you'd like to check them out. Stay tuned as I'm planning to add other pictures taken at the event as well.

-- To your success, Josh Hinds :-)