Am I Good Enough?

What is stopping YOU from Realising YOUR dream and living the life you desire?

For those who prefer to read, here is most of the scripted dialogue from the video


Picture this situation:

You're at a seminar listening to a well respected, highly motivating and expert speaker challenging you to raise the bar and take that step towards making a change in your life. A change that you recognise needs to be made. The program that they are offering is valuable, proven to work and heavily discounted at the seminar price. Remember you are an action taker just by being there, right?

You feel yourself starting to get out of your seat to go to the back of the room but before you can gain enough momentum to launch out of your seat and take the next step, you hear a voice in your head, a voice you've heard many times before, a voice you don't want to hear or pay any attention to, but it is a voice that has controlled your decision making and kept you where you are for all of your life..........

"Who do you think you are? you're not good enough to make that happen. Why do you need to be doing that anyway, you're comfortable enough, aren't you? Why take the risk?"

How many times has that little voice in your head whispered those words to you just when you have been on the brink of wanting to do something to change the direction of your current path in life?

How many times?

You've heard of this phrase right........"If you keep doing what you've always done, you'll continue to get what you've always got!"

The problem is, most people spend much of their life being comfortable and unfortunately that is the problem.

Consider this:
Being comfortable:

1. didn't enable Thomas Edison to relentlessly pursue his dream of making the electric light a reality -
    even after 10,000 failures!

2. didn't enable Henry ford to realise his dream of enabling everybody the opportunity to own a
    family car, even after many failures and bankruptcy

3. didn't enable Walt Disney to realise his dream of building a place where everybody could just be
    happy, even if for a little while. He even went against the recommendations of his own board and
    numerous bankruptcies to realise his dream

And yet, we can sometimes baulk at stepping over the line because we either fear failure or fear what other people might think of us. For what?

An opportunity to make ourselves and the world a better place. 

Here's the thing, thinking small is not only restrictive but stops you from making a difference. What you need to do is get the focus off "you" and onto others. When that happens, you will start to think big picture and that's when things will start to happen for you. Guaranteed!

Why?

Well, because when you think big picture, there is no time think about the small things that we think are problems. Funny how they seem to disappear! 

So what is holding YOU back?

What excuses do you find yourself making on a daily or weekly basis that are cheating you out of leading a life of service, helping those in your world to be better people, to be making a bigger difference for the common good?

It all starts with your mind set and if you are finding it difficult to change it, I suggest you start by doing some really simple things:

1. Meditate on a daily basis, preferably in the morning for at least 20 minutes. As part of this,
    visualise what it is that you want down to the fine detail. This will set up your day.

2. Read books and teachings by those who are already successful and making a difference in the 

    world. There are thousands of them out there. Branson, Trump, Dalai Llama, John Maxwell,

    Dr John Demartini, Darren Hardy, Bob Proctor, John Assaraf, Joe Vitale, the list goes on........

3. Make sure your daily actions have a purpose. This will keep you focussed.

So, in conclusion, the next time you are challenged to step over the line to get out of your comfort zone and take action, are you going to listen to the voice in your head, or recognise its existence, ignore it and take the step anyway. Try it, you will be amazed at how empowered it will make you feel!

Until next time - stay safe but don't necessarily play safe!

7 Reasons '7 Habits of Highly Effective People' Lives on 25 Years Later

While thousands of leadership books are published each year, only a few might get some short-term success while the vast majority are quickly forgotten. So how has the bestseller The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People maintained its enviable shelf life for 25 years while so many other business and leadership books fade away fast?

First published August 15, 1989 by business management professor and leadership expert Stephen R. Covey, the book lays out seven core principles for achieving success in leadership and life—including often-quoted principles such as “Begin with the end in mind,” “First things first,” and “Think win-win.” The book has sold more than 25 million copies and continues to be used often in leadership training at companies and universities around the United States and worldwide. It’s been translated into 52 languages and helped build what’s now a $200 million enterprise.

After the huge initial success of the book, which remained on the New York Times bestseller list for 220 weeks, Covey was able to expand his training empire and author career. The book spawned an array of other books written by Covey, his family members, and others throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, including 7 Habits of Happy Kids, The 8th Habit, and 7 Habits of Highly Effective Families. More than 25 heads of state, including U.S. President Bill Clinton, asked Covey to help them learn and use the seven principles. Covey passed away in 2012 at age 79 after a bicycling accident but his empire lives on through the Utah-based global training company he helped build, Franklin Covey Co. The book’s enduring success has a lot to teach business owners and thought leaders even today, revealing lessons on clear thinking and motivational messaging a generation after it was published.

1. Be accessible. The book’s title spawned its share of imitators, proving its catchiness. But it also drew readers in, says Sean Covey, one of Stephen’s sons, an executive vice president at Franklin Covey. Stephen had originally planned to call his book “Restoring the Character Ethic,” but ultimately decided it needed a snappier title that explained the book’s takeaway in an enticing, clear way.

2. Make big ideas easy to relate to. Covey spent decades reading and contemplating the works of many “great American thinkers,” including everyone from Benjamin Franklin to Henry James Thoreau. He fine-tuned his seven key principles, based on those years of reading and research, Sean says. But he took it a step further and injected real-life experiences and examples into his book to make the seven principles more relatable to readers.

3. Don’t rush it. “This wasn’t something he pumped out over a few months,” Sean Covey says. “This was his life’s work.” Stephen first started using his seven principles in 1985 in leadership workshops at the Covey Leadership Center (which merged with Franklin Quest in 1997 to become Franklin Covey.) The workshops eventually became so popular that he decided to turn them into a book. Strangely enough, Sean adds, “at the time, they were a little bit nervous about publishing the book because they thought it might cannibalize the workshop they were teaching.”

4. Keep the message alive. The popularity of his book helped convince Covey that many people yearned for such information but needed help incorporating the principles into their lives and work. He expanded on the principles in his book by creating new training programs around them. Today, many people buy the book as part of their leadership training. As part of the 25^th anniversary, Franklin Covey has introduced a smartphone app called Living the 7 Habits for iOS and Android and introduced an updated (“4.0”) version of its training program for organizations and individuals.

5. Craft universal lessons. By the late 1990s, the book was being published all over the world and today “it’s just as popular in China, Puerto Rico and Brazil as it is in the [United States,]” Sean Covey says.

The seven key principles are so enduring, Covey says, because they are timeless and universal. They point to real-life experiences—interactions between people—that anyone can relate with. Thanks to the timelessness of the advice, the book's original text has been changed only slightly over the years.

6. Share ideas that can have impact. David Esposito, who runs a personal and professional development consulting firm and an early-stage medical device company in Portage, Michigan says the book has also had a profound influence on him and his life. Two principles in the book—“First things first” and “understand before being understood”—have particularly resonated with him as he tried to balance his family life with his career. It helped him understand the importance of learning others’ points of views before making judgments or expecting others to see his point of view. “I have pen markings throughout the book,” he says, “but certain parts have really changed how I view the world.”

7. Be clear and organized. DaVita Healthcare Partners, a Denver-based kidney dialysis provider, frequently uses 7 Habits in its employee and management training programs for of its more than 50,000 employees worldwide. Jennifer Colosimo, vice president of DaVita’s “Wisdom Group" and a former executive at FranklinCovey, says she first read the book in 1994 and recently trained a group of 50 DaVita executives on the seven principles. She cites its clear message as a major driver of its popularity. “[Covey] organized these principles in a simple way that—no matter where you were—you’d be able to understand them,” she says. Colosimo notes that even Covey frequently acknowledged these weren't unique ideas. “He just organized them well.”

Esposito first read the book as a young sales rep in 1994 and still keeps it handy on the bookshelf in his office. “There’s a lot of pump-up [business] books out there,” he says. “This book …took what could be very complicated ideas and boiled them down very clearly.”

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