Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 29, 2008
“The greatest joys in life are happy memories, and the great business of life is to create as many of them as possible.�?
My family and I took three days and went to Park City Utah to ski over the President’s Day weekend.
David and Sarah drove up from Las Vegas, while Christina, Damon and little Julie (15 months) flew in from Los Angeles. Barbara, myself and Catherine (16 years old) flew up from San Diego. After a little coordination, we all got together and drove up to the two condominium units we had rented at the base of the ski slopes in Park City.
We have not skied for two years so we had to remember and relearn the critical skills of turning and stopping as we went down the slopes.
The skiing is, in a way, a metaphor for life. One of the first things I learnt, to my surprise, was that the faster you skied, the more control you had.
My first ski instructor kept telling me to “Let the Skis do the work.”
She continued to repeat, “Lean over the front of the skis. You will go faster, but you will have more control in turning and stopping than if you lean back.”
In life it is very much the same. Sometimes the way you gain the most control is by taking bold action and aggressively pursuing your goals, even though you have no guarantee of success, and there is a high possibility that you will fail, at least in the short term.
The only way you learn to ski is by falling down multiple times until you finally master the balancing act of staying on your skis as they move forward. But if you are too afraid to fall at all, you can never learn to ski quickly and smoothly down the slopes.
Our children have all learned to ski at an early age. The advantage they had was that they were completely fearless. Because they were so close to the ground, falling for them meant sitting down into the snow, with no pain or discomfort.
As adults, we tend to play it safe. We are more cautious. We have a greater distance to fall, and it hurts more when we hit the ground.
The biggest single reason for failure in adult life is the fear of failure. It is not the failure itself that causes the problem; it is the thinking about the potential failure that holds people back.
The way you get over the fear of failure, whether in skiing or in life, is to confront your fears, and do the thing you fear. Throw your body over the front of your skis and focus on your goal or destination rather than thinking about falling or swerving off track.
There is another thing that I relearned on this ski trip with my family. The French essayist, Michel de Montaigne once wrote, “The greatest joys in life are happy memories, and the great business of life is to create as many of them as possible.”
The best moments of my life are the times that I spend with my family at dinners, on vacations, traveling or just hanging out.
In the non-stop world of business today, it is easy to lose sight of those things that are really important.
In your own life, your greatest joys will come from spending time with people that you care about. Your job is to create as many of those memorable moments as possible. Everything else will pass. The time will pass, and the money will be gone, but the memories will remain.
Talk to you again soon.
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 27, 2008
Management can be defined as “getting things done through others.”
Be a Low Pressure Persuader
Management can be defined as "getting things done through others." To be a manager you must be an expert at persuading and influencing others to work in a common direction. This is why all excellent managers are also excellent low-pressure salespeople. They do not order people to do things; instead, they persuade them to accept certain responsibilities, with specific deadlines and agreed-upon standards of performance. When a person has been persuaded that he or she has a vested interest in doing a job well, he or she accepts ownership of the job and the result. Once a person accepts ownership and responsibility, the manager can step aside confidently, knowing the job will be done on schedule.
You Have Two Choices
In every part of your life, you have a choice of either doing it yourself or delegating it to others. Your ability to get someone else to take on the job with the same enthusiasm that you would have is an exercise in personal persuasion. It may seem to take a little longer at the beginning, but it saves you an enormous amount of time in the completion of the task.
The Best Form of Leverage
A key form of leverage that you must develop for success in America is other people’s knowledge. You must be able to tap into the brain power of many other people if you want to accomplish worthwhile goals. Successful people are not those who know everything needed to accomplish a particular task, but more often than not, they are people who know how to find the knowledge they need.
What Knowledge Do You Need?
What is the knowledge that you need to achieve your most important goals? Of the knowledge required, what knowledge must you have personally in order to control your situation, and what knowledge can you borrow, buy, or rent from others?
Two Calls Away
It has been said that, in our information-based society, you are never more than one book or two phone calls away from any piece of knowledge in the country. With on-line computer services that access huge data bases all over the country, you can usually get the precise information you require in a few minutes by using a personal computer. Whenever you need information and expertise from another person in order to achieve your goals, the very best way to persuade them to help you is to ask them for their assistance.
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask
Almost everyone who is knowledgeable in a particular area is proud of their accomplishments. By asking a person for their expert advice, you compliment them and motivate them to want to help you. So don’t be afraid to ask, even if you don’t know the individual personally.
Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, multiply your output and rewards by persuading other people to do the job for you and do it well. Delegation is the key to personal leverage.
Second, identify the most important knowledge you need to do an excellent job and then concentrate on finding and using that knowledge.
The person who can find the knowledge in others is often more valuable than the person who possesses it.
Effective Manager Series
Tags: Leadership Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 27, 2008
Stress management requires that you take complete control over the activities of your daily life.
Set Priorities
Stress management requires that you take complete control over the activities of your daily life. This means that you plan your day, set priorities and work on high value tasks. The indispensable key to time management is concentration, the ability to focus single-mindedly on one thing, the most important thing, and to stay with it until it is 100% complete.
Create Chunks of Time
This is not only the hardest challenge that a manager faces, but the ability to concentrate single-mindedly is probably the rarest single ability in the workplace. Most of our important tasks take large chunks of time. We need to plan and organize our days in such a way that we allocate these chunks of time so that we can do the jobs upon which our success depends.
A Burst of Energy
The wonderful thing about setting priorities and concentrating single-mindedly is that, the very minute that you do these two things, you will begin to feel a tremendous sense of control and well-being. As you work progressively toward the accomplishment of your most important tasks, you will feel a flow of energy and enthusiasm. As you finish something that is relevant and significant to your company and to yourself, you get a burst of energy. Your self-esteem improves. You feel good about yourself. You have a wonderful sense of making measurable progress toward greater successful in your career. You feel like you are making a difference.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two ideas you can use immediately to concentrate single mindedly on the highest value use of your time.
First, analyze your work before you begin and then ask yourself, "What one thing, if I did it quickly and well, would have the greatest impact on my work?" Whatever it is, go to work on that one item immediately.
Second, once you have begun on a high value task, discipline yourself by repeating over and over, "Back to work, back to work, back to work!" This will keep you focused and on track until you finish the job.
The Miracle of Self- Discipline
Tags: Business Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 20, 2008
You have extraodinary potential
You have extraordinary potential. You could not use all of your talents and abilities if you had 100 lifetimes. Whatever you have accomplished in your life so far is only a shadow of what is truly possible for you in the months and years ahead.
One of the indispensible requirements for great success is for you to “know who you are.” On a regular basis, you must sit down and think about yourself and the qualities, characteristics, abilities and experiences that have brought you to where you are today. It is only in this way that you can move ahead with greater confidence and clarity.
Here are 10 questions that you can ask yourself on a regular basis to keep yourself on track:
1. What are your three most important values in life right now?
2. What are the three things in life that are most important to you?
3. What are your three best qualities as a person?
4. What three personal accomplishments are you the most proud of?
5. What three skills or abilities are you the best at?
6. What have been your three biggest successes in your career so far?
7. What are the three best jobs you have ever had?
8. What three activities give you the greatest joy, peace and satisfaction?
9. What are the three most important lessons that you have learned in life so far?
10. Who are the three (or more) people you care about the most?
Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living?”
There is no one in the world that has the special combination of knowledge, education, experiences, insights, wisdom, goals, desires, and aspirations that you have. In the poem Ulysses, he says, “I am a part of all that I have met.”
You are an amazingly complex individual. You have within you, right now, the ability to accomplish more than you ever dreamed possible. But all this experience and wisdom is of no value to you if you do not sit down and think about what you have learned, and how you can apply it to your future.
In a multi-year study of successful people, the researchers found that there was one characteristic that enabled certain people to rise far higher than their peers in almost any field. This was the quality of “thoughtfulness.”
Top people take the time to sit quietly by themselves and think about who they are, what they want, and what they are currently doing.
Peter Drucker suggests that you ask the following questions regularly: 1) What am I trying to do? 2) How am I trying to do it? 3) What are my assumptions? 4) If my assumptions were wrong, what effect would that have on my decision making? 5) Could there be a better way?
In asking and answering these questions on a regular basis, especially when you are experiencing road blocks, obstacles or frustration in your current activities, you calm you mind, clarify your thinking and enable yourself to make better decisions for the future.
It is said that the average person uses only 10% of their potential. The actual number is closer to 2%. This is because people get into comfort zones, automatic routines which they repeat day after day, seldom challenging their own thinking or behaviors.
But this is not for you. Your goal is to “Be all you can be.” Your goal is to use more and more of your potential moving forward. They way you do this is by asking yourself focused questions that help you to develop absolute clarity about who you are and where you are going.
Good luck!
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 13, 2008
“Why is it that some people are more successful than others?�?
Throughout human history, the very best thinkers have asked the question, “Why is it that some people are more successful than others?”
This is the underlying question of most history, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, psychology and success literature. Aristotle said that behind every desire we have is yet another desire, until you come to the basic desire of all people, “The wish to be happy.”
Throughout your life, you constantly strive to move away from pain toward pleasure, and away from discomfort toward comfort. Consciously and unconsciously, you strive to be happy. In business and in sales, we define happiness as “fulfilling our full potential and achieving everything that is possible for us.”
What then are the qualities of the most successful and happy people in sales and business? Over the years, based on thousands of articles and research studies, I have concluded that there are basically seven qualities, each of which is learnable via practice and persistence. Here they are:
First, successful people are ambitious. They have an intense, burning desire to be successful, to achieve more and more, and to constantly raise the bar on themselves.
In addition, ambitious people see themselves capable of “being the best.” From the time they begin their sales or business careers, they strive for excellence, to be among the very best people in their industry. They set bigger and bigger goals for themselves, and persist longer than anyone else to achieve those goals. And they never give up.
Second, successful people are courageous. They work to confront the fears that hold most people back. The two biggest fears that interfere with your success are the fear of failure and the fear of rejection. The fear of failure causes you to think more of what you might lose if you take a chance than what you might gain. The fear of rejection makes you hypersensitive to the opinions or criticisms of other people, and especially to the negative reactions you get from prospective customers.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” What this means is that successful people confront their fears, face their fears, master their fears, and do it anyway. The wonderful thing is that, the more you do the things you fear, the less you fear doing them. Eventually you become fearless, and then unstoppable.
Third, successful people are committed. They believe in their companies, their products, their customers and themselves. They actually become emotionally involved in what they sell and who they sell it to. You’ve heard it said that, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Successful people care.
Because they are committed, top people love their work. They can hardly wait to get started in the morning and they hate to quit in the evening. This infectious enthusiasm for their products and services transfers into the minds of their customers. The customers then want to buy from these people and recommend them to their friends.
Fourth, top sales people and businesspeople see themselves as professional. They see themselves as consultants, dispensing good advice, council and recommendations to their customers. They see themselves as “helpers,” continually looking for ways to help their customers to get more enjoyment and benefit from what they sell.
Instead of talking incessantly about their products or services, they ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers. They look for ways that they can improve the life or work of their customers with their products or services. Their goal is to help their customers to be better off with their products or services than they could be without them.
Fifth, top people are more thoroughly prepared than average performers. Preparation is the mark of the professional in today’s competitive environment. Top people take the time to do pre-call research, finding out everything they can about their customers before they approach them the first time. They set pre-call objectives; determine exactly what questions they will ask, and what results they want to achieve in a particular sales meeting. Finally, top salespeople do detailed post-call analysis, writing down everything that was discussed in the sales meeting so they don’t forget it later.
Because they are so well prepared, top salespeople have more confidence when they approach a customer. And customers can tell. Customers know when the salesperson has taken the time to do his preparation. This dramatically increases the salesperson’s credibility with the customer, and makes it much more likely that the customer will listen to the salesperson and buy his or her products or services.
Sixth, top sales professionals are dedicated to continuous personal and professional development, to lifelong learning.
They realize that, “To earn more, you must learn more.” Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to get you any further. Your current level of knowledge and skill is only sufficient to keep you where you are, but does not allow you to go any further. To increase your income, to grow in your field toward being one of the highest paid people, requires that you continually learn and apply new ideas.
The key to continuous learning is simple: Read in your field of sales and business 30-60 minutes each day. This will amount to about one book per week, or 50 books per year. Since the average sales or business person reads less than one book per year, reading regularly in your field will give you a distinct advantage over your competition.
Next, listen to audio programs in your car. The average sales professional sits behind the wheel of his car 500-1000 hours per year. This is the equivalent of 3-6 months of 40 hour weeks, or 1-2 university semesters. By listening to audio programs, by turning your car into a university on wheels, you can become one of the best educated, most knowledgeable and most skilled professionals in your field.
Finally, take all the seminars and additional courses that you possibly can. Attend sales seminars given by professionals in your city. Enroll in on-line learning programs for sales effectiveness. Become a life-long “do-it-to-yourself” project. Never stop learning and growing.
Seventh, and as important as anything else, top professionals see themselves as 100% responsible for themselves, and everything that happens to them.
Because they are responsible, they do not make excuses or blame other people. They do not criticize or complain. They say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”
This attitude causes top people to see themselves as self-employed, as “Presidents” of their own personal sales corporations. They see themselves as responsible for every aspect of their own personal entrepreneurial business, including production, quality control, marketing, promotion and training and development.
Summary
You have within you, right now, the ability to be, do and have, far more than you have ever accomplished before. The only limit to what you can achieve in the future is your imagination.
You can learn anything you need to learn, to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself. You can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, and achieve any level of income you desire, if you will but apply yourself, and practice the seven qualities of top people until they become lifelong habits.
Good luck!
Brian Tracy
Tags: Brian's Words of Wisdom
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 13, 2008
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines charisma as “a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure.”
Become An Irresistible Person
Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines charisma as "a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure."
Develop Personal Magnetism
Charisma is also that special quality of magnetism that each person has and that each person uses to a certain degree. You have a special charisma to the people who look up to you, who respect and admire you, the members of your family and your friends and coworkers. Whenever and wherever a person feels a positive emotion toward another, he imbues that person with charisma, or attractiveness.
Project Yourself Positively
In trying to explain charisma, some people speak of an "aura." This aura is a light that is invisible to most people, but not to everyone, and that radiates out from a person and affects the people around that person in a positive or negative way. The halo around the heads of saints and mystics in many religious paintings was the artist’s attempt to depict the light that people reported seeing around the heads of these men and women when they were speaking or praying, or in an intense emotional state.
Control the Impression You Make
You also have an aura around you that most people cannot see but that is there, nevertheless. This aura affects the way people react and respond to you, either positively or negatively. There is a lot that you can do, and a lot of good reasons for you to do it, to control this aura and make it work in your best interests.
Sell Your Way to the Top
If you’re in sales, this aura, reflecting your level of charisma, can have a major impact on the way your prospects and customers treat you and deal with you. Top salespeople seem to be far more successful than the average salespeople in getting along with their customers. They’re always more welcome, more positively received and more trusted than the others. They sell more, and they sell more easily. They make a better living, and they build better lives. Salespeople with charisma get far more pleasure out of their work and suffer far less from stress and rejection. The charismatic salesperson is almost invariably a top performer in his field and enjoys all the rewards that go with superior sales.
Influence People Around You
If you’re in business, developing greater charisma can help you tremendously in working with your staff, your suppliers, your bankers, your customers and everyone else upon whom you depend for your success. People seem naturally drawn to those who possess charisma.
They want to help them and support them. When you have charisma, people will open doors for you and bring you opportunities that otherwise would not have been available to you.
Enhance Your Personal Relationships
In your personal relationships, the quality of charisma can make your life more joyous, happier. People will naturally want to be around you. Members of your family and your friends will be far happier in your company, and you will have a greater influence on them, causing them to feel better about themselves and to do better at the important things in their lives.
Action Exercises
First, identify the people with whom you seem to have a lot of charisma - the people who know you, like you, respect you the most. How could you increase your charisma with these people?
Second, identify the people who have charisma to you, the people you most like and respect and admire. What is there about them that you could copy or emulate? If you think charisma, you’ll have more of it.
The Psychology of Selling
Tags: Sales Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 8, 2008
If you want to be wealthy, you must understand what wealth is.
The Definition of Wealth
By: Brian Tracy
If you want to be wealthy, you must understand what wealth is. Here is the best definition of wealth you will ever find. Wealth is "Cash flow from other sources."
Make Your Money Work For You
What this means is that, you are not wealthy just because you earn a lot of money. You are only wealthy when your money works for you. To become wealthy, your main job is to acquire money and then put it to work making more money for you.
Add Value Continually
The key to creating wealth is simple. It is called "adding value." Successful people are those who are always looking for ways to add value in some way to a person, a company, a product or a service.
Do It Faster
Here is an example of adding value: Domino’s Pizza. The founders of Domino’s Pizza took a common food, offered by thousands of little restaurants and added a value to the pizza by delivering it more rapidly than anyone else. The added value of speed enabled Domino’s to create a billion dollar empire and made the founder of Domino’s, Tom Monahan, one of the richest men in the world.
Buy It Cheaper Somewhere Else
Another way to add value is to buy something in one place at one price and then make it available in another place for another price. For example, buying a product or service manufactured in Europe or Asia, importing it to the United States and making it available to people to whom it was not available before, is a way of adding value for which you can charge a higher price.
Improve the Life or Work of Others
All manufacturing and marketing is based on this principle of added value. All importation and distribution aims to add value. Performing a service that enhances the life or work of another person adds value. A dentist who takes away pain is adding value. An accountant who saves a client money on taxes is adding or actually creating value. A salesperson who introduces a new product or service to a customer that helps that customer in some way is adding value. All financial success, especially business success, is based on adding value. It is based on the old saying, "Find a need and fill it."
Combine and Recombine the Elements of Value
All successful business is based on someone bringing together the factors of production, such as labor, capital, raw materials and management, and creating a product or service that a customer will pay a price for that is in excess of the cost of producing it.
How All Fortunes Are Made
Adding value is the way that all fortunes are made. Whenever you see an opportunity to give people what they want at a price greater than it costs you to produce that product or service, you see an opportunity to make a profit, build a business and begin moving toward financial success. Almost any business or occupation can make you financially independent if you can find a way to add enough value.
Action Exercises
Now, here are two actions you can take immediately to add more value to your time and activities:
First, take the time to be absolutely clear about what it is that people want and need to improve their lives and work. The more clear you are about their real needs, the easier it is for you to satisfy them at a higher level.
Second, look for ways to add value to what you are doing every day in every way. Never be satisfied with the status quo. One small idea to add value can be the starting point of a great fortune.
Outselling Your Competition *** Plus Bonus CDs
Tags: Financial Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 7, 2008
This law says that, “There is never enough time to do everything, but there is always enough time to do the most important thing.”
You Always Find the Time
When you run out of time and the consequences for non-completion of a key task or project can be really serious, you always seem to find the time to get it done, often at the very last minute. You start early, you stay late and you drive yourself to complete the job rather than to face the negative consequences that would follow if you didn’t get it completed within the time limit.
Rule: "There will never be enough time to do everything you have to do."
You Are Already Overwhelmed
The fact is that the average person today is working at 110% to 130% of capacity. And the jobs and responsibilities just keep piling up. Everyone has stacks of reading material they still have to go through. One study concluded recently that the average executive has 300-400 hours of reading and projects backlogged at home and at the office.
What this means is that you will never be caught up. Get that out of your mind. All you can hope for is to be on top of your most important responsibilities. The others will just have to wait.
Deadlines Can Be Counterproductive
Many people say that they work better under the pressure of deadlines. Unfortunately, years of research indicate that this is seldom true.
Under the pressure of deadlines, often self-created through procrastination and delay, people suffer greater stress, make more mistakes, and have to do redo more tasks, than under any other conditions. Often the mistakes that are made when people are working under tight deadlines lead to defects and cost overruns that lead to substantial financial losses in the long-term. Sometimes the job actually takes much longer to complete when people rush to get the job done at the last minute and then have to redo it.
The Key Question You Should Ask
The key question you can ask is: "What is the most valuable use of my time, right now?"
This is the core question of time management. This is the key to overcoming procrastination and becoming a highly productive person. Every hour of every day, there is an answer to this question. Your job is to ask yourself the question, over and over again, and to always be working on the answer to it, whatever it is.
Do first things first and second things not at all. As Goethe said, "The things that matter most must never be at the mercy of the things that matter least."
The more accurate your answers to this question, the easier it will be for you to set clear priorities, to overcome procrastination and to get started on that one activity that represents the most valuable use of your time.
Action Exercises
Take a few minutes each day and sit quietly where you cannot be disturbed. During this time, let your mind relax and just think about your work and activities, without stress or pressure.
In almost every case, during this time of solitude, you will receive wonderful insights and ideas that will save you enormous amounts of time when you apply them back on the job. Often you will experience breakthroughs that will change the direction of your life and work.
Time Power Package
Tags: Business Success
Posted by Brian Tracy on Feb 4, 2008
You can only gain control of your life to the degree to which you stop doing things that are no longer as valuable or as important to you as other things you could be doing.
You can only gain control of your life to the degree to which you stop doing things that are no longer as valuable or as important to you as other things you could be doing.
Your Dance Card Is Full
You already have too much to do and too little time in which to do it. The average person today is working at about 110% of capacity, or more. Your dance card is full. You do not have any spare time.
Change Your Priorities
As your life changes, your priorities change as well. Certain things that were important at one stage of your life or career are no longer as important as you move to another stage of your life or to another level of responsibility.
You must continually ask yourself, "What activities in my life can I cut back on, delegate, or discontinue to free up more time for my most important activities?"
Decide What to Discontinue
To start anything new, you must stop doing something old. We say that "getting in means getting out."
Analyze your time carefully and have the courage to stop doing things that are no longer as important to you as other things could be.
Starting up means stopping off. Getting in requires getting out. You cannot take on something new without deliberately deciding to discontinue something else. What is it going to be?
Action Exercises
Here is how you can apply this law immediately:
First, analyze your work and make a list of the items that consume most of your time. Which of these activities could you discontinue or delegate to free up more time for higher value work?
Second, compare your daily activities against your annual income. Would you pay someone else your equivalent salary to do the things that you are doing? If you wouldn’t, stop doing those things immediately and pass them onto someone who can do them almost as well as you can.
Time Management For Results
Tags: Leadership Success
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