Merry Christmas

Enjoy the beauty in the world

This is a piece I wrote several years ago to explain my philosophy in life. I work hard to achieve it. It doesn’t always happen, sometimes I miss the mark. That’s a legacy of being human.

I don’t give up. Life would be boring without the odd challenge along the way! I live my best life and I’m grateful.

Enjoy the Christmas season and may 2014 be your most successful yet!

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Find peace, contentment and fulfillment. Enjoy health and happiness.

Be connected to family and friends. Find love. Seek self-acceptance, wellness and gratitude.

Leave others better than you find them. Live your greatest life.

Discover your authentic self and be true to that which you value most. Seek growth.

Make a contribution and leave a legacy. No regrets.

And most importantly have fun and enjoy the journey.

Success and significance

Success does not preclude significance

There are so many demands on what we should do and who we should be that it’s easy to get lost.

Who are you?

I’m many things. What I am can change with circumstance, but not who I am.

Mostly I’m just me. I’m the person who has sole custody of my life.

Not just my life at work, life at home, life as a dad, brother, son, husband, friend or grandfather.

Not just the life of my mind, but of my soul.

Who am I?

Many of us get to a certain age and our focus shifts. We stop looking outward. We are who we are, and can be happy because that’s enough.

It’s easier to show what we have, than explain who we are. Yet obituaries describe who you were, not what you had.

Having is good. Being and having don’t have to be in conflict, despite what many would have you believe. Owning interesting things is a rewarding part of life. There’s no reason to feel guilty about enjoying them. Success and significance are not mutually exclusive. Balance is the key.

I love owning fine things; they make life’s journey rewarding, interesting and comfortable. Enjoy a nice car, wear fine clothes, live in a beautiful home, and travel the world in style. Love your family, enjoy your friends, find your purpose, feed your spirit and give back when you can. That’s the zest of life.

It’s not just about your bank account, but also your soul.

Take the time to stop and enjoy the moment. Which moment? Any will do. Find simplicity and peace as a pause in a hectic life. For a moment, allow time to stand still.
The best advice is very simple: get a life.

A life with people you love, and who love you. Be generous. Not only with money but with your time and talent; it’s fun to share. Many desire success. But without significance, it will never be enough.

Making your dreams feel real

                                                            From dreams to reality …

In the last post I challenged you to write down what your ideal life looks like in five years. I hope you enjoyed the process. Now it’s time to take the next step.

This is to look at what you’ve written and find within it a list of goals. Without considering ‘How I will achieve these’ just yet, highlight the statements on your list that work as goals.

The vision of ‘I will start a business to work on timber boats, my true passion, so I can live in a beautiful old home in a small town by the ocean, have time for writing and spend more time with my children to experience the pleasure of life …’ becomes a list of specific goals:

– I’m working towards starting a boat restoration business within the next three years

– I’m starting to research, locate and will purchase an older home in Surfbeach with ocean views

– I work hard in the spring/summer season to allow me time (four months per year) to travel with my children during the holidays, and also pursue my writing. I also structure my day to be free by 4.00 pm to spend time with my children when they get home from school.

These are great goals and are aligned to what you really want in life. If you had just sat down to write goals without a vision, you may have come up with a more traditional list that didn’t reflect your true desires. The more specific and detailed your list the better, as this enables you to paint a clear mental picture of what you plan to achieve.

Goals work best when worded in the present tense and in a style that feels right to you. This allows your subconscious to accept them as real and to begin working on them for you.

As you work through your five-year vision you may find you end up with many goals, or perhaps just a few. If you have many, the next step is to prioritise these to the six most important, 10 at the most if you have a few small ones in the mix. This is important because you can’t do everything at once. If you attempt too much you will lose the clarity and focus you require.

Don’t be concerned; you can revisit these goals when you have achieved the first ones. This provides for healthy and stimulating growth and a wonderful sense of achievement for many years to come.  In our next post we’ll look at how we turn these into reality!

 

How do we start manifesting our dreams?

Dreams to reality

It starts the same way; we wake up one day and realise we want more out of life than we’re currently getting. It may be at one of those dreaded ‘0’ birthdays – 30, 40 or 50 – when we tell ourselves that there must be more than this. It doesn’t mean you have to be in a bad place, broke or homeless. You may have a perfectly comfortable life, but also the desire for something more; a desire to test yourself, to take the next step and to improve your circumstances.

Change requires emotional leverage … a feeling of lack or emptiness that we want to fill. Without this feeling, we stay in our comfort zone. Comfortable, sure, but unchallenged and therefore dissatisfied. The desire for more grows until we’re ready to take action. That’s the first step.

The second step is to be clear on what you want. Don’t worry about goal setting; this is much easier and more fun! Get a piece of paper or open a new file and write/type ‘My ideal life’ at the top. Then start writing how in the next five years you’ll create your perfect life.

You can image anything you like. You can have a wonderful relationship, start a successful business, enjoy time with your friends and family and have a beautiful home overlooking the ocean. You may focus on business success, a life of creativity with music and the arts, or wealth and adventure. Imagine that you have the resources and time for all of it, without limitation.

There’s no right answer, it only matters that you want these things. And you may be surprised by what you write if you let yourself go. When you dare to think about your ideal life, the life you can have if you have everything you desire, you’ll see what is really important to you. It may not be what you expect!

Try it now; write what you will be doing, who with, where and why. Have some fun and write the ideal script of your life. Then in the next post we’ll take the next step. This is success without compromise – the things that are important in your life. Go.

Maintaining the mojo, baby!

Leaving the everyday behind ...

There’s a dark and frightening place that most self-help gurus won’t tell you about.

It usually creep ups when you’re busy being busy.

It is this: Have you lost your mojo?

It’s when you wake up one morning and realise you really want to do something different but don’t know what. And that your current work feels empty and meaningless. Afterall, you’re not getting any younger and is this all there is?

Sometimes it’s a side effect of success: you’ve strived for years to get to a certain position, you achieve it, and the euphoria wears off. Perhaps you just need a Xanax and a good lie down.

It may be a temporary plateau that needs to be crossed. It may be a signpost to look further and make changes. What was right yesterday may not be right tomorrow.

A good place to start is to examine your life as a whole. Perhaps you have put so much time and effort into work that you’ve let other things slide. It may be time to rekindle friendships, take up that dormant hobby or have a holiday with your family. It can be fun to ‘reboot’ your life!

We become complacent when things are going well. Take stock of your life and see what you’re thankful for: you enjoy your job and the people you work with; you’re paid well and have a certain level of freedom. You’re family life is good and everyone is healthy. There are lots of people that would love that level of ‘normality’.

Now look at what you still would like to achieve both professionally and personally. Set yourself new goals; goals that can benefit you, your family and your business. Be thankful for what you have and what you’ve achieved, then go and find out ‘what’s next’. A charity, hobby or helping others may provide the meaning you’re missing and will again provide relevance to your life. There can be great satisfaction in sharing and giving back.

Such activities aren’t a distraction from a productive life, they make a productive life! This is called work-life balance. So go and get your mojo back, baby. Oh yeah!

Making the break

Relax and enjoy life ...

Aloha from Waikiki beach Hawaii, a truly beautiful place. I’m sitting on the balcony of our hotel room overlooking the beach and feeling totally relaxed and realise this is the first time I’ve felt like this for a very long time.

The tropical paradise setting certainly helps and it’s a very different state to what I’m used to experiencing at home. Of course the week before we left was mayhem; far too many things to get done and can I really leave work in the hands of others for 2 weeks?

By the second day I was relaxed and feeling great, reconnecting with my wife and enjoying the many wonderful activities available. The things I was  concerned about last week have faded into insignificance, at least for the time being. Early morning surfs, relaxing on the beach, reading by the pool and enjoying leisurely meals all adding to the relaxed lifestyle. Quite a contrast to grabbing a sandwich between a seemingly never ending schedule of meetings.

And of course the business keeps running and people are doing what they need to and everything works just fine. For many years when I took a holiday I would constantly be on the phone and email believing this was necessary to keep things going. It’s not. I now leave my phone in the room and spend just a few minutes looking at email in the evening.

Already after 4 days I feel renewed and will return with a fresh attitude, a new perspective and lots of great ideas that come from clearing my mind of the day to day clutter. When was the last time you truly got away from your job or business? Are you willing to let those around you step up and show you what they’re made of? Think of the benefits to your health, life and motivation to allow some down time to recharge?

It’s difficult to make the break but worth it when you do. Last night was a wonderful dinner cruise; today we’re swimming with dolphins, tomorrow a trip to the north shore and a visit to Pearl Harbour. That, and a lot of white space, is all I have in the diary for the week. When will you allow it to be your turn?

The structure of success

Go hard or go home!

Success is a continuous journey to better ourselves, overcome our limitations and work towards our goals and aspirations.  There are no shortcuts; the journey requires perseverance, patience and constant work to lead the life we really want.

I’m amazed at the number of people who consistently fail to take action over many years and then wake up one morning and expect it all to happen immediately. They run around looking for the secret to success and expecting it to be easy. It doesn’t work that way.

It’s easy to spend time talking about making changes to your life. It’s good to talk and articulate what you should do, but the real test is whether you’re prepared to take action. Sometimes you just have to start. Try, fail, try again, have a small win, build on it; it will take time, usually years, so don’t allow yourself to be discouraged. The good news is that it’s never too late to start.

Success is not something that you can have just when you feel like it. Success requires discipline and regularity. Discipline is the motivation to continue doing the right thing – after a while it becomes a habit, a way of life, and you enjoy the benefits.

Success is exponential. The more you experience it the more you get. The first requirement is a desire for something better. Even if our goals and dreams are very modest, it is vital to have something to aim for. Try writing down a list of five items you would like to improve and give them priority in your life.

What’s luck got to do with it?

 

Good luck or good management?

The choices you make directly influence your results.  Which means success comes down to deciding what you want and then taking focused and consistent action towards it. Luck has very little to with it.

Some people make choices to be CEOs. Others make choices to do what they do. There’s no good or bad luck either way … there’s just living out those choices. Being a CEO or business owner is not for everyone, and that’s fine: people have diverse goals, aspirations and interests.

However, anyone can run into trouble if they set goals they ‘must’ achieve to be successful. The problem is wanting something but not doing anything about it. This is called dreaming, or waiting for success to find you. Often for such people, others’ success must only have been through good luck.

Successful people don’t require luck; they create success through positivity. They do whatever it takes to be in the right place, prepared, at the right time, as often as possible.

Persistence is a key; success doesn’t often present itself on the first try.

But some don’t see all that, they just see the results of others through envious eyes.

Successful people seek out opportunities that align with their goals. Once they find these opportunities they pursue them relentlessly. If opportunities don’t present, successful people create them.  What’s luck got to do with that?

Time and white space

white time

In an earlier series of posts we explored why time appears to pass quicker with each year. Time seems to fly by and we feel the pressure to accomplish more in less time.

For many of us, time is a commodity. We talk about using time, buying time, saving time, spending time or wasting time. We’re experiencing a time compression effect that makes us think we’ve less time to do the things we want to do. This contributes to more stress and less space for recreational activities. We have no white space in our lives, with every minute accounted for.

We mistakenly try to save time by eliminating the activities that add meaning to our lives: time spent on hobbies, leisure pursuits and even family. No white space for anything meaningful.

The cult of productivity dominates our work culture.  The philosophy of productivity is to do things we don’t enjoy doing as quickly and efficiently as possible, in order to have more time for what we do enjoy. But strangely enough, the upshot is that we actually spend less time enjoying life.

Treating time like a commodity doesn’t create white space, but mindfulness does.

When we’re completely in the now, we have no awareness of time. When you’re doing something, especially something you enjoy, remove the guilt and thoughts of what else you should be doing. Allow yourself this mental time out Be present, with a clear mind and an appreciation of  now, life and the spaces between.

The quest for space

 

The quest for white space

Finding available market space in a sea of complexity and clutter is a difficult skill to acquire. We’re programmed to see what’s there, not what isn’t – unlike, say, artists, who are trained to see and appreciate positive and negative space at the same time.

Business people need to think in the same way when looking at their markets. A new market or ‘white’ space is the key to growing your business. Going head to head with competitors and fighting over the same turf is not, unless you have a killer competitive advantage.

In Blue Ocean Strategy the authors refer to this as uncontested market space – finding a segment of the market that is new or different and tailoring an offer to fill it. Dell did it with direct- to-customer computers and Amazon with books.

What offerings are missing from your market? A good idea is to look at the market and see what people are doing and then design a product or service to help them – so-called needs-based innovation. Most businesses start with a product or idea and then hope to find a market for it. Some ideas are brilliant but never sell.

Instead, find out what your customers want and give it to them.