The First Post – What this blog is about

The writing here captures my thinking around creating faster achievement and in living the creative life. Basically, this blog is about how to ‘step up and step out’ and make things happen.

I want to help you find a way to reach your goals and dreams more quickly.

This blog focuses on four main areas

1. The Psychology Of Achievement: How to strengthen your mindset for creating faster achievement. 
2. The Power Of Focus: How to focus on the right things in the right way for faster results.
3. The Power Of Action: Understanding your action-taking style and how to make the most of this knowledge for accelerating your progress and results.
4. Learning To Succeed: How to learn quickly from experience to accelerate your results

I will also take time to share my own experience as I seek to achieve my important goals.

This is a blog for dreamers & achievers

Once a week I will write on at least one of those topics, and once in a while I will ‘go mad’ because I have something I just have to ‘get out of my system’. You can follow along by RSS, email updates, or just by checking in here at the site.

The key theme that links each of these topics is creating faster achievement. I want you to reach your goals and vision more quickly and in a way that works for you..

The essence of my philosophy is this:

• Life is too short to not go after your hearts desire – whatever it my be.
• You haven’t even scratched the surface of what is possible for you (regardless of what you might have achieved in your life to this point).
• The world needs what you have to offer. To the extent that you don’t get going with making your dreams and goals a reality, the world is a poorer place.

The reason why I created this blog

Apparently, according to the blog gurus, starting a blog is good for business but quite frankly I see that as a limited aspiration.

For me, this blog is a medium for bringing about positive change in your world.

My goal is to inspire you to make a difference in the world. And my hope is that, by creating practical and inspirational blog entries, you will go out and make it happen.

Warm regards

Lawrence

Focus & Achievement – the six critical steps

So you want to make stuff happen, you want to succeed, but you are not sure how. The critical ingredient for creating faster achievement is focus. That is, what you choose to focus on and how you choose to act in order to make things happen.

So what drives the creation of a powerful sense of focus? There are six critical actions necessary to create a powerful focus on achievement. These are:

1. Commitment
2. Planning tools
3. Energy management
4. Focus in action 1 – Routines
5. Focus in action 2 – Distraction management
6. Focus in action 3 – Progress management

1. Commitment

Nothing happens without commitment. And I am not talking about commitment with a small ‘c’. Making a commitment to your future success means being unwilling to settle for less. It means putting a ‘line in the sand’, which when you cross it, means you are fully committed to doing whatever it takes to succeed. It means deciding that success is so important to you, it becomes your number one priority and that you are prepared to organise your life to honour your commitment to yourself.

This kind of commitment creates a real sense of urgency and willingness to make the most of whatever time you have to support your success.

So have you ‘crossed the line’ yet? What would help you to do so?

2. Planning Tools

Everyone needs some kind of map to navigate the terrain between where they are now and where they want to be. This means having some kind of success planning system, a way of managing your achievement that works for you. Now it doesn’t really matter how much structure you bring to this process. Some people like a lot of structure before they are ready to act while others only need a loose map. The key however, is using a system that works for you as a basis for being clear about what is most important, and where you most need to focus your energies to make it happen.

If you would like my full planning system join my newsletter list, download it and use it as you see fit. If you would like a one-page plan go to the ‘How To’ section of this site.

3. Energy Management

Your energy is the currency of achievement. Without energy, nothing much happens and when it does it is much harder than it needs to be.  Here are some key questions:

1. When is your energy at it’s highest during the day, and across a week?
2. What do you do in your life that helps you build a high level of energy? (food exercise, sleep, relaxation etc.)
3. What would happen if you tried to achieve things when your energy was at its best?
4. What would happen if you were able to build consistently high levels of energy?

4. Focus In Action 1 – Routines

One of the ways that elite athletes develop deep levels of focus, in the moment of action, is through creating a pre-performance routine. That is, a series of steps that they go through that takes them into deeper and deeper levels of focus on what it is that they want to achieve. Okay, so how does this relate to you?

Take a few minutes to recall a time when you were focused around your work, a time when time just drifted by because you were so involved in what you were doing. That is, you were completely focused and ‘lost’ in your work.

Now what was it that allowed you to enter that deep level of focus? The answers are the ingredients for your pre-work routine for helping you to focus quickly.

5. Focus In Action 2  – Distraction Management

There are an infinite number of distractions – inside us and around us – that can take us away from our focus and good intentions. If you know when distractions are likely to occur then you have some choices about how to manage them.

What is most likely to take you away from working on achievement in a focused way? List all of them. What can you do to either remove yourself from the source of the distraction, or remove the distractions from your life?

6. Focus In Action 3  – Progress Management

Here is a simple truth. You are more likely to remain focused and persist with achievement if you are noting your progress along the way and the ways in which you are succeeding and moving loser to your goals and dreams. If instead, you notice how you are struggling, how far you have to go and even how you are not succeeding, you are not only likely to destroy your focus, but also your confidence. Pretty soon you will find it difficult to do anything.

So how do you notice your progress? Record your success and achievements along the way – no matter how small. And keep them in front of you as a reminder of just how much progress you are making.

The Ultimate Action Question

If I gave you the following three choices, which would you take:

1. The slow path to success or the fast path?
2. The hard path to success or the easy path?
3. The boring path to success or the fun path?

I am pretty sure that you would choose fast, easy and fun. Unless, of course, you are trapped by an idea that if you haven’t worked hard or struggled then you haven’t earned it.

Now, even the fast/easy/fun path to success requires effort and application, but as far as achievement goes, there is always a faster, easier, more enjoyable path to success.

It is your job to find it.

This is the essence of smart action. That is, having the greatest impact on making your dreams a reality in the least amount of time, for the least amount of effort, with the greatest amount of fun.

The least amount of time

There is always a slow and a fast path to success. If you do not consciously seek a faster path your default response will be to take a slower path and then tell yourself that this is the nature of success. Wrong! There is always a faster path to success waiting to be discovered. And if you don’t know it, others will because you can be sure that someone else at some point has attempted the journey you are taking successfully and that they have learned the critical lessons along the way.

The least amount of effort

The default response for most people is to put much more effort into achievement than they need to. This is because they don’t differentiate between taking action and understanding the few actions that really have a dramatic impact on their results. From a purely impact perspective, 95% of most peoples’ effort is wasted doing to much of the wrong things for success rather than focusing on identifying and applying the precious few.

The most amount of fun

Just because you need to do some work to succeed doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be fun. As far as success goes, it can be as much fun as you choose to make it. Just because others suffer and struggle doesn’t mean you have to. It is not compulsory. It is not a right of passage. It is just a bit of cultural baggage that too many people subscribe to.

A Creative Jolt – The Ultimate Action Question

So how do you jump yourself on to the faster/easier/more fun path to achievement? It is all in the possibility questions that you ask yourself. Consider the ultimate action question:

If it was possible to be successful in half the time, with half the effort, and twice the fun, how would I do that?

The Four Critical Skills For Learning To Succeed

To achieve your goals you need to learn. After all, learning is at the heart of the process of bridging the gap between where you are now, and where you want to be.

Unfortunately, there is no simple formula for learning to succeed. Each of us must find our own unique way of being successful through understanding ourselves, the the world we live in, the people we attempt to succeed with, and how these three elements relate to each other.

Therefore, learning to succeed is very much about learning how to learn, and this requires the ability to learn from experience. That is, being able to step back and reflect on the way you approach the challenge of achievement, the way you define and solve problems and the lessons you can learn in terms of accelerating your future success.

Unfortunately, most people miss the opportunity to learn from experience. This is because they are either so busy rushing around, or ashamed at their lack of progress, that they don’t take the time to step back and reflect.

This is a huge missed opportunity.

The secrets to your future success are in your current and past experience. You just need to take the time to look for them.

So what does it really take to learn successfully from experience? Here are the four critical skills:

1. The willingness to look inside
2. Generosity of spirit
3. The willingness to challenge your thinking
4. The willingness to experiment

1. The willingness to look inside

Experience is not neutral – at least not in terms of how we perceive it. We put labels on our experience such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’, ‘progress’, ‘winning’ and ‘losing’. Experiences that confront us with our own perceived shortcomings can teach, but only if we are willing to come to grips with our defenses against them. The experience of ‘struggle’ and ‘difficulty’ and ‘failure’ are more critical for our long-term success. But we can only make the most of the ‘gold nuggets’ in our experience if we are willing to explore the areas where we are less than perfect.

2. Generosity of spirit

How you view yourself as a learner matters. Give yourself permission to be imperfect. Give yourself permission to be a work in progress. View your mistakes as critical and necessary for your short-term development and long-term success. You can’t reach your full potential with out making hundreds of mistakes along the way. It is how you work with them that builds character and success.

If you find it hard to be generous with yourself as you learn, try this exercise. Imagine that instead of teaching yourself to learn from experience you are actually teaching a five-year old child to learn. What questions would you ask a child and how would you encourage them to learn?

3. The willingness to challenge your thinking

Here is some shocking news. You are not always right and there is always a better way waiting to be discovered. If you assume that how you see the world is ‘reality’ (rather than one version of reality) then you close yourself off to seeing better possibilities. You end up creating a rigid boundary around your learning because you limit your learning to seeing the world only in terms of how you believe it to be.

Instead, you need to be able to reflect on and observe experiences from many perspectives. For instance, your view vs. a child’s view vs. a genius’ view vs. an accountant’s view vs. an artist’s view etc. When you entertain other ways of seeing as you reflect on your experience, you can challenge your own beliefs and assumptions and open other possibilities.

4. The willingness to experiment

The best way to learn successfully is to see yourself as a scientist. That is, someone who is making a series of experiments about a topic in order to discover knowledge. In your case, it is knowledge about what it takes to succeed. Judging each ‘experiment’ as a success or failure doesn’t make you willing to experiment, let alone learn from the process. But if you view what you are doing as a series of experiments in your own journey of discovery, you will be much more willing to step out to the future.

How To Fail Successfully – Part 2

This is part 2 of a light-hearted look at ten steps to apply to guarantee you fail at everything in your life.

Step 6: Minimise performance preparation

People who are effective take time to prepare. Avoid this like the plague.  Also make sure you avoid any kind of mental routines that get you in the right frame of mind to perform well. When you have an important meeting, make sure you are do not prepare at all.  Instead, assume that everything is just going to work out for the best. And definitely avoid thinking about what problems might happen, and how you might manage them. If things go wrong in your business make sure you hold on to the dream of a quick-fix. Better still, don’t trust your own ability.  Take advice about your problems from absolutely everyone you talk to. That way you can move further and further away from your own thoughts and ability to solve problems. And when you come under pressure you will have no resources of your own to draw on. Then you can easily fall short or fail. This is guaranteed to support consistent failure.

Step 7: Avoid staying in the present

This is a key strategy for ensuring you do not achieve any kind of success.  At work keep thinking about what could have been achieved if ‘I had only done xyz…’ If somehow, you find yourself slipping into the present and focusing on one step at a time jump into the future and think about all the things that could go wrong…  ‘What if my project doesn’t succeed? What if my presentation flops?’ Alternatively, think about how successful your current project could be and the difference it could make to your business, but don’t do anything about it. That way you can hold on to the feeling that you are doing everything well without getting too involved with the messy business of trying to be more than you already are.

Step 8: Learn how to distract yourself

To ensure failure in your business it is crucial that you learn how to distract yourself easily, and develop a short span of attention. This means you should avoid anything that might represent any kind of success routine – no relaxation techniques, no recall of past successes, no imagining yourself being successful, and definitely no positive self-talk. Any kind of success routine is only likely to cause you to relax and concentrate at gradually deeper levels and when that happens your true potential begins to emerge. And if you find yourself in the unlucky situation of being effective at work, take the following steps. Stop eating and drinking water and triple your caffeine intake. If the hunger and thirst doesn’t get you, the caffeine will. The caffeine will speed you up so much you won’t be able to spell ‘focus’ let alone do it. If you’re really lucky though, you will be able to work up a half decent attack of the jitters and you won’t be good for anything for the rest of the day.

Step 9: Constantly imagine failure

If you are really going to build your abilities to fail then you need to constantly picture yourself failing. Therefore, make sure you don’t imagine yourself working well, succeeding or managing whatever challenges you might encounter. A better option is to imagine yourself making mistakes, embarrassing yourself in front of your customers and seeing yourself fail at every possible moment. Keep picturing the worst possible scenario in every situation and imagine the effects that it will have. To truly paralyze yourself, picture a giant movie screen just out in front of you that has 24hr repeats of you failing. And make sure you think about all the negative feelings associated with those failures constantly. Only then will a solid relationship with failure develop.

Step 10: Cultivate Mental Softness

The ability to bounce back when things go wrong at work, is important in being able to fully achieve your goals. If you want to constantly fail you need to develop mental softness instead. Begin by developing expectations of yourself that you can’t possibly achieve and then expect your work to go perfectly. Just because perfection in business is difficult to achieve doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t expect perfection every time. To get really mentally soft though, you need to learn to give up at the first sign of any obstacle or things not going your way.  At your work make other people responsible– if you are really lucky you will find an excuse. If you practice mental softness in this way often enough, it will become so normal that you won’t even have to think about it. Then (and only then) will you be able to avoid thinking like a champion. Otherwise you will find yourself making a promise to be responsible for yourself, to treat obstacles as temporary, and to see setbacks as a potential source of opportunity. That will only lead to success.

Remember. Constant failure is not accidental. You have to work at it. Follow the ten steps of the Total Failure Management (TFM) programme and you can have failure as much as you want, as often as you want. What could be easier?

How To Fail Successfully

This is part 1 of a light-hearted article that looks at ten steps to guarantee you fail at everything in your life.

For too long now people have been swamped by advice on how to improve themselves.  ‘Just do xyz and you will succeed’. Over and over and over. This can often result in many people giving into CSFS (Chronic Success Fatigue Syndrome) or self-help burnout. Maybe what people need is an opportunity to fully embrace the failure within. The solution – TFM (Total Failure Management) is the only ten-step failure programme that can free you from the trouble of having to succeed. Here are the steps.

Step 1: Avoid any attempts at understanding yourself

Regular efforts at understanding yourself can only lead to achieving your highest potential. Never think about what you did and how you did it when you have succeeded in your business.  If you find that you can’t help yourself (probably because you are not dedicated enough to failure yet) make sure that you don’t take the next step and start asking yourself how you could start again and achieve greater success in the future. This will only lead to more regular achievement at a higher level.  Also make sure you do what everybody else does even if it doesn’t work for you. If you’re a morning person, make sure you work late so that your business gets to have more of you performing below your peak.

Step 2: Avoid believing in yourself

Whatever you are trying to work at in your business, think to yourself ‘I can’t do this … I can’t do that … I am not good enough to pull this off’ etc. If somehow you do begin to think like a creative genius, make sure that you remove these thoughts from your mind quickly, because you will begin to work hard in a focused way (and we all know that this is no good). And make sure you allow yourself to get nervous around people who are “better” than you. Believe that you don’t belong, or that you shouldn’t be working with or talking to ‘more important’ people. Better still, believe that everyone around you is more competent than you are, that you are a fraud, and it is only a matter of time before you get found out. Forget about believing that you have talent or are outstanding in some way. That is no way to build a lifetime of regular failure.

Step 3: Punish yourself at length for every mistake you make

Make fun of yourself for not being perfect. In fact tell yourself you are going to make an even bigger mess of it next time.  If you notice yourself talking to yourself in a positive way, stop before it gets out of control. Positive, encouraging self-talk will only help you succeed. You would do better to keep telling yourself you are no good because performing below your potential is easier than trying to perform above your potential. Maybe you could even develop a failure list. Label it “A hundred ways to tell myself I am no good” and include some negative comments such as “Loser by name loser by nature”, “You’re on the wrong track now”, “You’re getting worse by the minute”, “If you keep going as you are then you really will fail”, etc.

Step 4: Don’t make any kind of commitment to anything

Make sure you avoid accepting any kind of goal. If you are in the awkward position where you have to act as if you are reliable, then make sure you go after it reluctantly. Being reluctant is also easier if you notice how difficult every step of the journey is. The reward? You can comfortably avoid any growth and joy related with fully accepting a challenge.  And you can remind yourself of how lucky you have been to avoid the possibility of not succeeding in any situation where you might have actually tried.

Step 5: Be totally disorganised

It is important to keep your diary full of activities that aren’t really important to you. This means that you have no time to develop and improve in the areas of your life and business that are important. And definitely avoid getting any kind of coach or mentor in your work. If you do, you risk introducing someone into your life who is going to believe in you, relate to your potential and encourage you to be more than you already are. Instead, surround yourself with people who are not as smart as you. It will help ensure you stay at the same level of ability or even lose some of your ability. Better still, make sure they never learn how to organise themselves either. That way the chaos in your business will become normal because everyone is doing it.

Part 2 next week…

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