I THANK MY COMPETITORS

My competitors do more for me than my friends.

My friends are too polite to point out my weaknesses, but my competitors go to great expense to tell of them.

My competitors are efficient and diligent. They make me search for ways to improve my products and services.

My competitors would take my business away from me if they could.

This keeps me alert to hold what I have.

If I had no competitors, I would be lazy, incompetent, and complacent. I need the discipline they enforce upon me.

I thank my competitors. They have been good to me.

God Bless them all!

COMMUNICATION

When your instructions are followed incorrectly, do you blame others? Wait! Quite often, such errors are caused by a justified misinterpretation of your message. Here are three examples of how apparently simple instructions were misconstrued:

1. A merchant ordered 500 turkeys for the Thanksgiving season. A few weeks before the holiday, however, his sales dropped sharply. Afraid that he wouldn’t be able to sell all the turkeys, he phoned the distributor and instructed him to “Cut my order in half!” When his order arrived, guess what it contained? Five hundred turkeys, of course, each cut in half!

2. A new employee at a large company walked up to a paper shredder and stood before it looking confused. “Need some help?” the senior secretary asked. “Yes, how does this thing work?” “It’s simple,” she said as she took the thick report from her colleagues hand and fed it into the shredder. “See?” “I see,” he said, “but how many copies will it make?”

3. Upon approaching an airport for landing, just short of the touchdown, the pilot of a military planed determined that the runway was too short for his landing approach, so he’d better circle around and try again. He yelled to his engineer, Take off power!” The engineer reached up and turned off the engines. The plane continued downward and crashed at the end of the runway!

The pilot wanted the engineer to give him extra power for the takeoff.

SUGGESTION: Give clear instructions and ask clear questions, so you won’t be misinterpreted.

Life’s Contemplations - Goals

Life’s Contemplations

1. What one thing should I eliminate from my life because it holds me back from reaching my full potential?

2. Am I on the path of something absolutely marvelous or something absolutely mediocre?

3. What can I do to make better use of my time?

4. What impossible thing am I believing and planning for?

5. What good have I previously committed myself to that I have quit doing?

6. Of the people I respect most, what is it about them that earns my respect?

7. What gifts, talents, or strengths do I have?

8. What is one thing that I can do for someone who has no opportunity to repay me?

SOMETIMES YOU FIND THAT WHAT YOU LEARN ON THE PATH TO MEETING YOUR GOALS IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN THE GOALS THEMSELVES

It Is Not Easy

Let’s be honest. Ethics is not for wimps. It’s not easy being a good person.

It’s not easy to be honest when it might be costly, to play fair when others cheat or to keep inconvenient promises.

It’s not easy to stand up for our beliefs and still respect differing viewpoints.

It’s not easy to control powerful impulses, to be accountable for our attitudes and actions, to tackle unpleasant tasks or to sacrifice the now for later.

It’s not easy to bear criticism and learn from it without getting angry, to take advice or to admit error.

It’s not easy to really feel genuine remorse and apologize sincerely, or to accept an apology graciously and truly forgive.

It’s not easy to stop feeling like a victim, to resist cynicism and to make the best of every situation.

It’s not easy to be consistently kind, to think of others first, to judge generously, to give the benefit of the doubt.

It’s not easy to be grateful or to give without concern for reward or gratitude.

It’s not easy to fail and still keep trying, to learn from failure, to risk failing again, to start over, to lose with grace or to be glad for the success of another.

It’s not easy to avoid excuses and rationalizations or to resist
temptations.

No, being a person of character is not easy.
That’s why it’s such a lofty goal and an admirable achievement.

— Michael Josephson

Goals, Who Needs Them? You Do

by Gary L. Parker

In his book Getting Things Done, Ed Bliss writes, "Good self-management involves finding ways to put pressure on yourself to perform."

We all need a swift kick once in a while. That's why thoughtful development of personal goals is so important. It's a way to put pressure on yourself to perform. Goals provide a motive for better performance.

Successful businesses create goals as a basis for strategic decisions. Without goals, every decision is a crossroads. It's the same for us. The more clearly we understand our destination, the more likely we'll take the right path.

4 Keys To Goal Setting

1. Be Specific. Develop a clear vision of what you want to accomplish. The stronger the vision, the greater the motivation to put forth 100% of your effort and talent.

2. Write It Down. It's been said a goal not written down is just a wish. Write goals where you'll see them often. You can't do what you can't remember. And you can't remember what you can't find. Write goals in your Planner Pad.

3. Make It Measurable. When we know our destination, we can measure progress. Set definite time targets. A goal is a result that must be achieved within a particular period of time.

4. Calculate The Cost. Everything we want to do has a cost. The cost may not be out of pocket. We pay in other ways. Worthwhile goals require your time and effort. Compare costs to benefits carefully. Are you willing to pay the price?
The more clearly we understand our goals, the more likely it is that we'll be willing to give the performance today, this week, this month to achieve our objectives.

Excuse me, Are you Jesus?'

A few years ago a group of salesmen went to a regional sales convention in Chicago. They had assured their wives that they would be home in plenty of time for Friday night's dinner. In their rush, with tickets and briefcases, one of these salesmen inadvertently kicked over a table which held a display of apples. Apples flew everywhere. Without stopping or looking back, they all managed to reach the plane in time for their nearly missed boarding. ALL BUT ONE !!! He paused, took a deep breath, and experienced a twinge of compassion for the girl whose apple stand had been overturned.

He told his buddies to go on without him, waved good-bye, told one of them to call his wife when they arrived at their home destination and explain his taking a later flight. Then he returned to the terminal where the apples were all over the terminal floor.

He was glad he did.

The 16 year old girl was totally blind! She was softly crying, tears running down her cheeks in frustration, and at the same time helplessly groping for her spilled produce as the crowd swirled about her, no one stopping and no one to care for her plight.

The salesman knelt on the floor with her, gathered up the apples, put them back on the table and helped organize her display. As he did this, he noticed that many of them had become battered and bruised; these he set aside in another basket.

When he had finished, he pulled out his wallet and said to the girl, 'Here, please take this $40 for the damage we did. Are you okay?' She nodded through her tears. He continued on with, 'I hope we didn't spoil your day too badly.'

As the salesman started to walk away, the bewildered blind girl called out to him, 'Mister....' He paused and turned to look back into those blind eyes. She continued, 'Are you Jesus?'

He stopped in mid-stride, and he wondered. Then slowly he made his way to catch the later flight with that question burning and bouncing about in his soul: 'Are you Jesus?' Do people mistake you for Jesus?

That's our Destiny, is it not? To be so much like Jesus that people cannot tell the difference as we live and interact with a world that is blind to His love, life and grace.

If we claim to know Him, we should live, walk and act as He would.

You are the apple of His eye even though we, too, have been bruised by a fall. He stopped what He was doing and picked you and me up on a hill called Calvary and paid in full for our damaged fruit.

Excellence Is?

Excellence is…
An inspiration
An attitude
A pursuit
A way of life.

Excellence is…
All of us working together,
Aspiring to the fullness
Of our potential
Always in relentless pursuit
Of a higher standard—
Determined to do
Everything we do
Somehow better
Than it ever
Has been done before.

Excellence is found…
In the caring
In the trying
In the doing.

It is our objective.
We seek it with dedication.

Your State of Mind

If you think you can, YOU CAN.
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If you think you can’t, but really can –
It’s almost a cinch you won’t

For out in the world you’ll find
Success begins with a person’s will,
It’s all in your STATE OF MIND.

Many a game is lost
Before ever a play is run,
And many a coward falls
Before their work’s begun.

Think big and your deeds will grow,
Think small and you’ll fall behind.
Think you can and you will
It’s all in your STATE OF MIND.

If you think you’re outclassed, you are.
You’ve got to think high to rise.
You’ve got to learn to be sure of yourself
Before you can ever win a prize.

Life’s victories don’t always go
To the stronger or smarter woman or man.
But sooner or later the person who wins
IS THE PERSON
WHO THINKS THEY CAN!

How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others (and Stop Feeling Lousy About Yourself and Your Life)

by Henrik Edberg

“If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter, for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.” Quote by Max Ehrman

One very common and destructive daily habit is to constantly compare your life and yourself to other people and their lives. You compare cars, houses, jobs, shoes, money, relationships, social popularity and so on. And at the end of the day you pummel your self esteem to the ground and you create a lot of negative feelings within. And perhaps also outside of yourself.

So what can you do? How can you get a handle on this habit?

In this article I’ll share what I have done. I’ll start with two habits that I use to replace that destructive habit. Then I’ll move on to a few more general tips that have also helped me.

Compare yourself to yourself.

First, instead of comparing yourself to other people create the habit of comparing yourself to yourself. See how much you have grown, what you have achieved and what progress you have made towards your goals.

This habit has the benefit of creating gratitude, appreciation and kindness towards yourself as you observe how far you have come, the obstacles you have overcome and the good stuff you have done. You feel good about yourself without having to think less of other people.

You can make this habit stick by for instance taking a few minutes each day or just each Sunday (or any day that fits you) to use a journal to write down how you have grown, how much closer you are to your goals now, what you have overcome and learned and so on.

By doing so your thinking will over time shift and your thought patterns will automatically become more focused on comparing you to you rather than to other people.

Be kind.

In my experience, the way you behave and think towards others seems to have a big, big effect on how you behave towards yourself and think about yourself.

Judge and criticize people more and you tend to judge and criticize yourself more (often almost automatically). Be more kind to other people and help them and you tend to be more kind and helpful to yourself.

So focus your mind on helping people and being kind.

Focus on the positive things in yourself and in the people around you. Appreciate what is positive in yourself and others. This way you become more OK with yourself and the people in your world instead of ranking them and yourself and creating differences in your mind.

You are OK and so are they.

Now, a few more tips that can be helpful to move away from that comparison trap:

- Just realize that you can’t win. Just consciously realizing this is helpful. No matter what you do you can pretty much always find someone else in the world that has more than you or are better than you at something. Yes, you may feel good for a while when you get a nicer car than your neighbour. But a week or two later you’ll see someone from the next block with an even finer car than yours.

- Give up both sides of comparing. If you can’t stop doing the negative comparisons then stop doing the comparisons that make you feel good too. Give them both up, at least for a while. If you’re in the habit of comparing to feel better about yourself then it’s hard to just stop at that and to not also start comparing in way that make you feel worse and inferior too. So you may need to step out of that whole comparing habit because the two sides are often connected. Give up the upside to be able to move away from the downside.

And that is basically how I do it, that is how I keep those negative comparisons to a minimum in my life.

Winston Churchill’s Top 6 Fundamentals for a Successful Life

by Henrik Edberg.

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

Winston Churchill is probably no stranger to anyone. He was an inspirational British leader during the Second World War.

He was also a writer, historian, poet, artist and the only British Prime Minister to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Here are a few of my favorite fundamentals from Churchill on how to improve your life.

1. Focus on what you are doing right now.

“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.”

When you start to look too far into the future then any task or project can seem close to impossible. And so you shut down because you become overwhelmed and start surfing the internet aimlessly instead. That is one of the reasons why it is good to plan for the future but then to shift your focus back to today and the present moment.

Then you just focus on taking the first step today. That is all you need to focus on, nothing else. By taking the first step you change your mental state from resistant to “hey, I’m doing this, cool”. You put yourself in state where you become more positive and open, a state where you may not be enthusiastic about taking the next step after this first one but you are at least accepting it. And so you can take the next step. And the next one after that.

The thing is, you can’t see the whole path anyway and it will shift and reveal itself along the way. That’s why the best of plans tend to fall apart at least a bit as you start to put it into action. You discover that your map of reality doesn’t look like reality.

2. Be concerned about action.

“I never worry about action, but only about inaction”

Yes, taking action can lead to failure, rejection or making mistakes. There is always a risk for that. But if you stay in inaction then you are pretty much guaranteed that nothing will change or improve.

How can you improve your action habit though? Three tips:

- Reconnect with the present moment. This will help you snap out of over thinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done. It is one of the best tips I have found so far for taking more action since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. And it puts you in state where the right actions often just seem to flow out of you in a focused but relaxed way and without much effort. One of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on your breathing for a minute or two. Check out 7 more tips in 8 Ways to Return to the Present Moment.

- Lighten up. One way to dissuade yourself from taking action is to take whatever you are about to do too seriously. That makes it feel too big, too difficult and too scary. If you on the other hand relax a bit and lighten up you often realize that those problems and negative feelings are just something you are creating in your own mind. With a lighter state of mind your tasks seems lighter and becomes easier to get started with.

- Start small. To get from a state where you just feel like sitting on your chair and doing nothing much to one where you take action over and over you can do this: start small. Getting started with your biggest task or most difficult action may seem too much and land you in Procrastinationland. So instead, start with something that doesn’t seem so hard. One of my favorites is simply to take a few minutes to clean my desk. After that the next thing doesn’t seem so difficult to get started with since I’m now in a more of a “take action” kind of mode.

3. Be an optimist.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.”

Focusing on what helps you sure makes a huge difference compared to if you keep focusing on what is wrong in every situation or what makes you more of a victim. It’s like living in two different worlds.

How do you make the shift to a more optimistic attitude? Well, it takes time. But gradually you can change it. Four of my own most favorite tips are:

- Take care of the basic fundamentals. This is for me the most important thing you can do to maintain and strengthen your positive attitude. How you eat, sleep and workout is huge factor. A good lifestyle, how you live your life on normal days determine how you feel, think and how much energy you will have. For example, exercising and keeping my testosterone levels pretty high consistently I do that by focusing on free weight exercises that target many and big muscle groups – is a very simple way to get a lot of positive emotions to flow through my body automatically. A good workout always seems to do the trick.

- Positive influences. Fill your mind and emotional system with positive input from people, music and programs/books. Other people’s thoughts have a big influence and emotions are contagious. Limit your time with negative people. Reduce TV or magazines that may make you feel worse about what you don’t own or your body. Or just create fear and negativity within you (for instance a lot of news shows). Limiting negative influences can make it a lot easier to keep the positive attitude up.

- Set the context for your day. What you do early in the day often sets the context for your day. We have a tendency to want to be consistent with what we have done before. You can use that your advantage in few ways. You can for example do the hardest thing on your to-do list first. When it is done you’ll feel good about yourself and it makes the day feel easier and you’ll have less inner resistance to getting the rest of the tasks of the day done.

- Act as you want to feel. Act as if you are feeling positive. After a few minutes you will actually feel it for real. So smile. Use positive language. And so on. It feels weird at first but it really works.

Just practicing these four things in a consistent way can make a huge difference in your life.

4. Be persistent. Don’t give up.

“Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential”

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Since society often tells us to look for quick fixes it’s easy to make the mistake of giving up to soon. After you have failed perhaps 1-5 times. That’s the “normal” thing to do. But what could have happened if someone just kept going after that? And for each failure learned more and more about what works?

I think people often make a mistake of giving up too early. Your mind probably has a reasonable time-frame for success. This might not correspond to a realistic time-frame though.

It’s useful to take a break from advertised perspectives and let more realistic perspectives seep into your mind. Learn from people who have gone where you want to go. Talk to them. Read what they have to say in books or online. This will not give complete plan but a clearer perspective of what is needed to achieve what you want.

Now, that’s not to say that you should never quit. But it can be helpful to keep going on your current path for a while longer.

And that’s not to say that you should do the same thing over and over in exactly the same manner. It’s better to do and get an experience. Take the lessons you can learn from that real life experience. And then adjust how you do things as you try again.

It obviously helps immensely if you find what you really like to do. And what you really, really want. Then you’ll find the inner motivation to keep going, to get what you want and to build on inner strengths like persistence.

5. Don’t lose the enthusiasm.

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

It’s very easy to get down on yourself and your results when things don’t go as planned. What was once enthusiasm can quickly become apathy and pessimism.

But how do you do keep up the enthusiasm after things have gone wrong and you just feel like giving up? Well, as I mentioned in the previous fundamental, it certainly helps to have something you really like doing and something you really want.

And the tips found in fundamental # 3 such as keeping your energy up, acting as you would like to feel and keeping away from negative influences work very well here too. A good additional tip is simply to ask better questions in “negative” situations. Instead of asking yourself why this or you suck ask yourself questions that empower you.

Questions like:

What can I learn from this?
What is the hidden opportunity in this situation?

6. Remember, most troubles never happen.

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened”

One final, quick thought. But a very important one. Most things you fear will happen never happen. They are just monsters in your own mind. And if they happen then they will most often not be as painful or bad as you expected. Worrying is most often just a waste of time.

This is of course easy to say. But if you think back and remind yourself of how little of what you feared throughout your life that has actually happened you can start to release more and more worry from your thoughts.

This makes it a lot easier to start doing more of what you really want in life. And to move through your day to day life with a lighter, happier and more optimistic attitude.