The Four Steps to a Super Attitude by Brian Tracy

Decide How to React
It is not what happens to you that counts. It is how you react to what happens to you, especially when you have unexpected problems of any kind.
Here are four things you can do to assure that your attitude is the very best it can be, under all circumstances.

Focus on the Future
First, whatever challenges you face, focus on the future rather than on the past. Instead of worrying about who did what and who is to blame, focus on where you want to be and what you want to do. Get a clear mental image of your ideal successful future, and then take whatever action you can to begin moving in that direction. Get your mind, your thoughts, and your mental images on the future.

Think About the Future
Second, whenever you´re faced with a difficulty, focus on the solution rather than on the problem. Think and talk about the ideal solution to the obstacle or setback, rather than wasting time rehashing and reflecting on the problem.
Solutions are inherently positive, whereas problems are inherently negative. The instant that you begin thinking in terms of solutions, you become a positive and constructive human being.

Look for the Good
Third, assume that something good is hidden within each difficulty or challenge. Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, a major proponent of positive thinking, once said, “Whenever God wants to give us a gift, he wraps it up in a problem.’ The bigger the gift you have coming, the bigger the problem you will receive. But the wonderful thing is that if you look for the gift, you will always find it.

Seek the Valuable Lesson
Fourth, assume that whatever situation you are facing at the moment is exactly the right situation you need to ultimately be successful. This situation has been sent to you to help you learn something, to help you become better, to help you expand and grow.

Decide to Be Positive
A Positive Mental Attitude is indispensable to your success. You can be as positive as you want to be if you will simply think about the future, focus on the solution and look for the good. If you do what other successful people do, if you use your mind to exert mental control over the situation, you will be positive and cheerful most of the time. And you will reap the benefits enjoyed by all successful people.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action:

First, become solution-oriented with every difficulty you face. Make a habit of looking for the answers to your questions, the solutions to your problems.

Second, seek for the valuable lesson in every adversity. Make a list of every idea or insight you can gain from every setback or difficulty.

Third, think on paper. Take some time to write out every detail of the problem, and then take the most logical next step to solve it.

Four Essentials for Happiness by Brian Tracy

You may have a thousand different goals over the course of your lifetime, but they all will fall into one of four basic categories. Everything you do is an attempt to enhance the quality of your life in one or more of these areas.

The first category is your desire for happy relationships. You want to love and be loved by others. You want to have a happy, harmonious home life. You want to get along well with the people around you, and you want to earn the respect of the people you respect. Your involvement in social and community affairs results from your desire to have happy interactions with others and to make a contribution to the society you live in.

The second category is your desire for interesting and challenging work. You want to make a good living, of course, but more than that, you want to really enjoy your occupation or profession. The very best times of your life are when you are completely absorbed in your work.

The third category is your desire for financial independence. You want to be free from worries about money. You want to have enough money in the bank so that you can make decisions without counting your pennies. You want to achieve a certain financial state so that you can retire in comfort and never have to be concerned about whether or not you have enough money to support your lifestyle. Financial independence frees you from poverty and a need to depend upon others for your livelihood. If you save and invest regularly throughout your working life, you will eventually reach the point where you will never have to work again.

The fourth and final category is your desire for good health, to be free of pain and illness and to have a continuous flow of energy and feelings of well-being. In fact, your health is so central to your life that you take it for granted until something happens to disrupt it.

Peace of mind is essential for every one of these. The greater your peace of mind, the more relaxed and positive you are, the less stress you suffer, the better is your overall health.

The more peace of mind you have, the better are your relationships, the more optimistic, friendly and confident you are with everyone in your life. When you feel good about yourself on the inside, you do your work better and take more pride in it. You are a better boss and coworker. And the greater your overall peace of mind, the more likely you are to earn a good living, save regularly for the future and ultimately achieve financial independence.

Life is very much a study of attention. Whatever you dwell upon and think about grows and expands in your life. The more you pay attention to your relationships, the quality and quantity of your work, your finances and your health, the better they will become and the happier you will be.

Action Exercises

Here are three things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, take time on a regular basis to think about what would make you really happy in each of the four areas.

Second, set specific, measurable goals for improvement in your relationships, your health, your work and your finances and write them down.

Third, resolve to do something every day to increase the quality of some area of your life - and then keep your resolution.

For more about Brian Tracy and his programs, please go to www.briantracy.com

You Deserve to Be Happy by Brian Tracy

Achieving your own happiness is the best measure of how well you are living your life and enjoying your relationships. You can learn how to be happier and more fulfilled in everything you do.

Everyone is Different
Happiness in life is like a smorgasbord. If 100 people went to a smorgasbord and each put food on their plate in the quantity and mix that each felt would be most pleasing to him, every plate would be different. Even a husband and wife would go up to the smorgasbord and come back with plates that looked completely different. Happiness is the same way. Each person requires a particular combination of those ingredients to feel the very best about himself or herself.

Listen to Your Heart
And your mix is changing continually. If you went to the same smorgasbord every day for a year, you probably would come back with a different plateful of food each time. Each day-sometimes each hour-only you can tell what it takes to make you happy. Therefore, the only way to judge whether a job, a relationship, an investment, or any decision, is right for you is to get in touch with your feelings and listen to your heart.

Be True to Yourself
You´re true to yourself only when you follow your inner light, when you listen to what Ralph Waldo Emerson called the “still, small voice within.’ You´re being the very best person you can be only when you have the courage and the fortitude to allow your definition of happiness, whatever it may be, to be the guiding light of every part of your life.

There Are No Limits
A very important point on the subject of happiness is whether or not you feel that you “deserve’ to be happy. Accept the notion that you deserve all the happiness you can honestly attain through the application of your talents and abilities. The more you like and respect yourself, the more deserving you will feel of the good things in life. And the more deserving you feel, the more likely you will attain and hold on to the happiness you are working toward.

Make Happiness Your Key Measure
You should make happiness the organizing principle of your life. Compare every possible action and decision you make against your standard of happiness to see whether that action would make you happier or unhappier. Soon, you will discover that almost all of the problems in your life come from choices that you have made - or are currently making - that do not contribute to your happiness.

Pay the Price
Of course, there are countless times when you will have to do little things that don´t make you happy along the way toward those larger things that make you very happy indeed. We call this paying the price of success in advance. You must pay your dues.

Sometimes these interim steps don´t make you happy directly, but the happiness you achieve from attaining your goal will be so great that it totally overwhelms the temporary inconveniences and dissatisfactions you have to endure in order to get there.

Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, accept that you deserve all the joy and happiness you can possibly achieve through your own efforts.

Second, make your own happiness the chief organizing principle of your life and judge everything against that standard.

Third, be willing to work hard and pay the price for the satisfaction and rewards you desire. Always go the extra mile and your success will be assured.

For more details on Brian Tracy and his products, please go to http://www.briantracy.com

Success is Not an Accident by Brian Tracy

Success is not a miracle. Nor is it a matter of luck. Everything happens for a reason, good or bad, positive or negative. When you are absolutely clear about what you want, you only need to copy others who have achieved it before you, and you will eventually get the same results that they have.

This is referred to in the Bible as the Law of Sowing and Reaping which says that, "Whatsoever a man soweth, that also shall he reap."

Sir Isaac Newton called it the third principle of motion. He said, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."

For you and I, the most important expression of this universal law is that, "Thoughts are causes and conditions are effects."

Put another way, "Thought is creative." Your thoughts are the primary creative forces in your life. You create your entire world by the way you think. All the people and situations of your life have only the meaning you give them by the way you think about them. And when you change your thinking, you change your life, sometimes in seconds!

The most important principle of personal or business success is simply this: You become what you think about most of the time.

It is not what happens to you but how you think about what happens to you that determines how you feel and react. It is not the world outside of you that dictates your circumstances or conditions. It is the world inside you that creates the conditions of your life.

To find out more about Brian Tracy and his programs or products, please go to http://www.briantracy.com

A Special Kind of Courage by Brian Tracy

There are several different aspects of courage. Perhaps the most important is the courage to endure, to persist, to “hang in there’ in the face of doubt, uncertainty and criticism from others.

Practice Patience in Adversity
This is called “courageous patience,’ the willingness and the ability to “stay the course’ in the face of uncertainty, doubt and often criticism from many quarters.

Stay the Course
In my experience, there is a critical time period between the launching of a new venture and the results that come from that venture. During this hiatus, this waiting period, many people lose their nerve. They cannot stand the suspense of not knowing, of possible failure. They break and run in battle, they quake and quit in business.

The True Leader
But the true leader is the person who can stand firm, who refuses to consider the possibility of failure. The turning points of many key moments in human history have been the resolution, or lack thereof, of one person. Courageous patience is the acid test of leadership.

To encourage others, to instill confidence in them, to help them to perform at their best requires first of all that you lead by example.

Allow Honest Mistakes
The second thing you can do to help alleviate the fears of failure and rejection in others is to encourage them to take calculated risks and allow honest mistakes.

Build People Up
Give the people who look up to you regular praise and approval. Celebrate good tries as well as success, large and small. Create a psychological climate where people feel safe from censure, blame or criticism of any kind. Then do things that make people feel terrific about themselves.

Become Unstoppable
Courage comes from acting courageously on a day-to-day basis. Your personal development goal should be to practice the behaviors of a totally fearless person until you become, in your own mind, unstoppable.

Action Exercises
Here are two ways for you to develop courageous patience.

First, prepare yourself in advance for the inevitable disappointments and setbacks you will experience on the way to your goal. Don't be surprised when they occur.

Second, resolve in advance that you will bounce rather than break and continually encourage others to think and act the same way.

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How To Squeeze The Most Out Of Your Time

How do you start your day? Years ago I started planning mine by writing everything down I would have to do, the night before. I found that drawing up your list the night before prompts your subconscious to work on your plans and goals while you sleep. When you wake up, you feel ready to tackle your challenges.

When prioritizing and planning your time, consider the following points:

Key questions
What is the highest value-added action I can do?
What can I, and only I, do that I've done well before to make a difference?
Why am I on the payroll?
The answers to these questions help identify all that needs to be done and in what order. That, in turn, will bolster personal productivity.

Values
Decide what's important to you, and in what order. Make sure your values don't conflict with work. Energy spent worrying diminishes your abilities.

Consequences
Every action has consequences - good and bad. Consider what rewards you'd reap by completing a task. Then, compare those rewards with the consequences of putting it aside. This process makes it easier to see which goals have a higher value.

The Pareto Principle
Vilfredo Pareto, a 19th-century engineer, argued that 20% of what you do accounts for 80% of the value. When considering the importance of a task, ask yourself whether it's among the 20% that creates the most value.

Urgency vs. Importance
An unexpected phone call or a drop-in visitor may be urgent, but the consequences of dealing with either may not be important in the long run.
The urgent is other-oriented, it's caused by someone else. Important things are self-directed and have the greatest value for you.

The Limiting Step
Standing between you and what you want to achieve is the limiting step. That's the bottleneck that determines how quickly you can reach your goal. It's important to identify that step and focus single-mindedly on getting that one thing done.

A Written Plan
Lists of goals, tasks and objectives are of no help unless they're written. Putting your plans on paper makes a seemingly elusive goal more concrete. There's a connection that takes place between the brain and the hand. When you don't write it down, it's fuzzy, but as you write it and revise it, it becomes clear.

Visualization
See yourself doing what you need to get done. Visualization trains the subconscious to focus on completing tasks. Say, for example, that you want to begin each morning by exercising. Visualizing yourself doing sit-ups and push-ups the night before conditions the mind to do those the next day. When you prime you mind, it wakes you up even before the alarm clock goes off.

Remember, you are a winner and preparation goes a long way in helping you achieve all your goals.

This post is by Brian Tracy and was published in the "Your Achievement Ezine". For more details on products by Brain Tracy, please visit www.yoursuccessstore.com