How timely my post yesterday on Emotional Mastery? There was an article in the NY Times Magazine yesterday about how the field of 'positive psychology' is becoming a big thing on real college campuses and is now being studied for validity by psychologists.
It's a great story on the 'power of positive thinking,' a philosophy which has been around for decades and maybe even centuries, although Norman Vincent Peale started that phrase, I guess.
Anyway, here's the link to the article for anyone interested:
As we all look to get off to a fast start in 2007 and set the stage for a good year personally and professionally, I believe there is really only one skill we all need to master to really become successful.
This skill permeates every facet of our life and business and once mastered will virtually guarantee our long-term happiness and success. This skill is the foundation of everything else.
What is this skill?
It's 'Emotional Mastery.'
What do I mean by 'Emotional Master?'
I define 'Emotional Mastery' as the ability in any situation to adjust your thoughts to empower you to respond proactively and in a way that support your best interests while respecting all others. It is also the ability to maintain a positive mindset at all times.
This is the key to success and happiness in life and business. You know that life is a series of mountains, valleys and missiles and whenever we're on top of a mountain and thinking things are great, a missile is going to come at us and knock us off into a valley. How deep that valley is and how long it takes us to climb out of it, will determine our levels of success and happiness.
Learning 'Emotional Mastery' will allow you to maintain your place on top of the mountains longer, to anticipate the missiles and sidestep them when the come, and to ensure you are knocked into only shallow valleys and allow you to more easily climb out of them.
How would you rate your level of 'Emotional Mastery'? (scale of 1-10, 10=Emotional Master / 1=Emotional Mess)
Tp all AR acquaintances with whom I've begun to build a relationship with and all those with whom I am waiting to get to know, best wishes for an outstanding 2007!
On my list of the things I'm most grateful that 2006 brought into my business and my life is this outstanding community of success oriented professionals.
Here's to a new year of personal and professional growth. Commit to improving just 1% each day and you will be twice as good in 70 days! Not a bad resolution. Imagine if you were to select 1 area every two months to improve at that level, where could you be on 12/31/07?
Where will you commit to improving that 1% a day for the first 70 days of 2007?
Been away from AR for awhile as I was preparing for this past weekend. Wow, what a weekend. If I had a comfort zone going into it. It got blown up the past three days.
I just spent the weekend in Atlanta, Georgia working on my presentation skills with a real pro. What a comfort zone busting experience that was.
For two days I stood in front of a video camera in my coach's living room and had everything from my posture to my program content turned upside down, inside out and backwards. It wasn't a place for the faint of heart, or an ego.
But, what came out of this experience has changed me forever. I will never be the same. My comfort zone has expanded and my belief in my value to the world and to this community has exploded, so look out. Don't worry what I mean just yet, you'll be learning more about that as the details evolve.
The true purpose of this post is to ask you about your comfort zone. I believe our comfort is the number one enemy of achieving unlimited success.
What have you done lately to stretch your comfort zone? If you can't come up with something automatically, I challenge you do decide on doing one thing between now and New Year's Day that will stretch you. I guarantee it will make you a better person and a better professional.
So, to reward those that really go for it and do something different, our panel of judges here at the Business Achievement Gym will vote on the best story (it better be real 'cause we'll be calling for verification). Post your comfort zone busting activity and its results below.
There are three things I listen to when driving in my car. Some of you probably have some of your favorite things, these are my top three:
1) Personal/Professional Development CDs; 2) Bruce Springsteen Live concert recordings; 3) NPR, National Public Radio
I would say I balance my time between the three pretty well. Today I decided to revisit an old CD series I've had for about 6 years, Napoleon Hill's "The Science of Personal Achievement."
It's a 5 CD set so it will take a lot of driving over the next week or so for me to go through it all again, but it's really great stuff. It's old recordings of Hill's seminars and radio shows where he shares what he learned by studying for 20 years the most successful people of the early 20th century.
On this recording Hill identified 3 primary causes of failure and I'm wondering if anyone else knows what they are. I'm sure each of us has our own theory on what creates success or failure, and I'd love to hear those, too.
But I'd like to offer a challenge to everyone. I have a product called "End Procrastination NOW!" is an audio CD and e-workbook that i sell on my website for $47.
Whoever provides the correct answer to the question, "What did Napoleon Hill identify as the 3 Primary Causes of Failure?" will win my CD workshop & e-book (a $47 value) as a prize. Answer in the comment section below and if there is more than one correct responder, I'll have a random drawing for the prize.
One thing my professional baseball career taught me was not to get to high when things are going well, and never get too down when you're in the midst of a slump. Emotional swings are not conducive to long term success and long term sanity.
The same is true in business. That's why one of the 8-Essential Strategies of the Business Achievement Gym is 'Emotional Mastery & Breaking Through F.E.A.R.' Each month in the program we focus on one of the 8-Essential Strategies, and this month members of my coaching program are focusing on it.
I believe F.E.A.R. (an acronym for busting through fear - False Evidence Appearing Real) is one of the key emotions that prevents us from achieving the highest levels of success. It definitely stifles peak performance.
Those of us who can master our emotions and especially our fear best will end up being most successful.
One component of fear is assessing risk. Most of us don't do it well. My wife saw this article in Time Magazine this week about how human beings assess risk, it's quite enlightening and interesting - check it out:
Craig posted a question on his blog asking how much time people spend in ARand if they can quantify an ROI on that investment in time and it got me thinking.
One thing everyone, including myself, must guard against is that this type of site can become a very addictive place and can become a form of procrastination that keeps us from doing real business activity.
We can get lulled into thinking we're doing stuff to improve ourselves and our business, when in reality we are coming here because its comfortable, friendly and we don't really face the rejection we may subject ourselvles to by making the calls and putting ourselves in the position we need to, to really build our business.
I know this because I guard against it every day. When you come to AR, do so wtih a direct purpose and plan in mind. Set a time limit. Get in, Get Out and Get something of value every time but don't lurk around and surf endlessly.
Procrastination is a killer of our hopes and dreams, its a killer of our self-confidence, self-esteem and self-worth and causes much undo stress. A few years ago I created a program to help business professionals with this issue, it's called, "End Procrastination NOW!" and perfectionism is really just a fear of failure and rejection and is another form of procrastination.
Just my two cents (or maybe 3-4 cents)...hmm, maybe this should be my next blog posting, thanks CRaig for stirring my thoughts on this subject...
Now, I know from working with both realtors and mortgage professionals that procrastination IS an issue for many. Therefore, I'd like to help, but I need your help. That's why I have created a Procrastination/Peak Performance Survey just for Active Rain members, for those of you who decide to take part in my survey, you will receive access to an hour-long radio interview on ending procrastination I gave last summer.
Once I get feedback on the key issues from the survey, I'll share the results so no one feels alone, and see if I can provide some strategies to help break through.
I believe you can't do too much networking. You just never know who you will meet that needs your services.
Tonight, a colleague, friend and client called me about 4:55pm and asked me if I was going to our local Chamber's Holiday Business After Hours event fro 5-7pm. Fortunately, the event was about 5 minutes from my office, so I closed down for the day and headed over to meet him.
About halfway through the event a woman came up to me who I hadn't seen in about 5 years since I left my old position before I started my own consulting, training and coaching practice. She is now CEO of a local insurance agency with 4 locations and 35 employees. We reconnected for a few minutes, I told her what I was doing now and she told me that I should give her a call and send her my stuff.
I'm going to call her and set up an appointment for next week and see where it goes. This is the second time in 7 days that two people, whom I haven't spoken to in a long time, have invited me to meet with them to see how I can help.
This tells me I'm not doing enough marketing to my database. I do cull my database and call contacts I haven't spoken to in awhile and it always generates opportunities. Obviously, with these two contacts I made value judgements that they weren't prospects. Boy, was I wrong.
The only thing that brought me back in contact with each of them was a networking event, one directly and one indirectly.
Two lessons, 1) you can't do too much networking, and 2) you can never do enough re-connecting with the people who you know and who know you and see how you can help.
Who haven't you spoken to in a while that the holiday season would make a perfect excuse to reconnect and see where it goes? I'd challenge you to make a list of at least 12 of these contacts and commit to getting in touch within the next two weeks prior to the Christmas/New Year's Holiday week and see what happens.
Who's going to take me up on the challenge and report back to me on their results?
I am overwhelmed by the comments to my blog posting yesterday about the sales mistake I almost couldn't get myself out of. The follow up today from that situation is they called me back wanting more specifics as to the topics for workshops I could offer their best referral sources. They are going to take those topics and survey their best customers and select one of them to get started in the first quarter of the year.
One thing to remember regarding questioning and listening is that you have to be careful in how you ask the questions. You must do so in a conversational and inquisitive tone, sort of like the old investigative TV detective 'Columbo' played by actor Peter Falk. You don't want to come across as interrogative and belligerent. It's definitely an art that we all get better at with practice, but only when we are cognizant of our actions and speech patterns.
I was able to save the situation because I believe I practiced something I've been trained to do in my Yoga classes for the last 8 years and that is to be able to be 'the witness' of my own actions while I'm in the moment. It definitely takes practice but I'm proud to have realized that I have the power to do this and to actually use it for some good.
You also need participate in 'active' listening, which means you are acknowledging what the other person is saying, and responding with reassurances and supportive comments to make them feel comfortable and to gain trust. You must do this in a sincere way and not in a way that is condescending or overt.
Key skills to learn and practice. I encourage the teams I work with to schedule time in their weekly sales meetings for role playing exercises with these skills as it is the only way to get better and its better to make mistakes and get feedback from a colleague than to do it with a prospect and lose the business.
One of the best things I ever did at a workshop was two months ago, when I volunteered in front of about 70 other colleagues to go up on the 'hot seat' in the front of the room for some role playing. It was great. I recorded it and have listened to a couple of times to take key pieces from it for application.
My wife and I are presently in negotiations for a new home. Everyday we are reading the local and regional newspapers about the slump in the housing market in the Northeast (we live in the Hudson Valley region of NY).
I tihnk we'll get our price, but now I'm concerned our price is too high even though its coming in at 10% less than the listing price, and about 7% less than the last accepted offer in a deal that didn't go through about 5 months ago. I'm a little disappointed we couldn't do better, but at the end of the day I think long-term this will turn out to be a good deal for us as we are expecting this to be our home for a long time.
Time will tell. We should know if our final offer is accepted later today.
Disclaimer: ActiveRain Corp. does not necessarily endorse the real estate agents, loan officers and brokers listed on this site. These real estate profiles, blogs and blog entries are provided here as a courtesy to our visitors to help them make an informed decision when buying or selling a house. ActiveRain Corp. takes no responsibility for the content in these profiles, that are written by the members of this community.
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