Success Is A Choice

Doing well in life is not just about knowledge, but also having the right attitude.

Highly successful people don’t let other people or situations affect their mood or put them off their game. They control the tempo.

Learning how to put yourself in the most productive mindset for each occasion is called compartmentalizing and enables you to filter out thoughts & emotions from other parts of your life and focus on the job at hand.

This skill is essential in making sure you are in the most productive mindset, even if everyone else around you is losing their cool or even if you need to separate your private life from your work to get the best outcome.

Clear all your thoughts and focus on regulating your breathing.

Visualize a character who embodies the attitude you need for the moment.

This process works even better if you can visualize yourself in that attitude from a previous occasion.

Anchor that mindset or attitude with something relevant to the mood.

Successful people plan out their day the night before.

Making decisions is both time & energy consuming. And you can never guarantee that you are in the best mindset each day to make the best decisions on the spot. So, plan not to do it.

Spend 15 – 20 minutes each evening going through the next day’s schedule.

Take a little time to get yourself in the most productive mindset and make the decisions you have the most problems with.

If you have a habit of making poor on the spot food choices, then plan all of your meals, locations and menu when you are relaxing, rather than when your brain is bedazzled by the sights and smells of unhealthy food.

Then stick to your plan. Refuse to compromise and make sure you achieve the goals you plan for.

It’s easy to get off track when you don’t have a plan, but efficient scheduling ensures that your productivity levels will soar and you can achieve almost anything.

Successful people spend time connecting with their thoughts.

In life, we will meet many teachers, but the wisest people listen to their own counsel.

They understand that no one can make important decisions for themselves, no matter how good the advice is or how much experience the other person has, because they can only advise you on what they would do in your circumstance.

This is not to say that successful people don’t listen to good advice, but that they understand we all process information in our own way and have different agendas.

Successful people don’t play the blame game.

They understand that taking responsibility for their failures can be a huge learning process and great achievements are seldom made without a few hiccups.

They have a strong mentality and see failure as obstacles on the road, but success as the final destination.

The problem with making excuses for where we are in life is that there is nothing learned, nothing gained and no positive experience, and when we blame other people, we also give away our power to change or fix the situation.

Whether it’s in your personal life or at work, try and be a little more self-critical and see how you could have handled a situation better.

When you have a bad feeling about a conversation or a meeting, then go over it again in your head and look for the mistakes you have made.

If you often find yourself justifying your actions and behavior, then be wary of pride and your ego, especially if you have upset other people. Nothing good comes from pointing fingers, but magical resolutions happen when we apologizes as we have found a way to re-open communication from a humble perspective – and as Christians already know, it’s the meek that shall inherit the earth.

Successful people inspire those around them.

They know that success is a team effort. People may forget what you did and even forget what you said, but they will always remember how you made them feel.

Great people have the knack of remembering names and the truly great make it their job to remember other details like your children’s names too. They also remember important events in your life like birthdays or a big meeting at work, and are able to make you feel like they truly care.

If there is one skill that I would choose to improve upon more than any other, it would be this one.

There are lots of tips to help improve your memory and association of faces and details, but you cannot really learn how to show more care.

The closet skill is to practice listening.

I’ve noticed that really inspiring people treat the doorman and the CEO with the same level of respect.

They are able to rise high because they have many who are loyal to them in their company or community, as a result of many years of giving time and attention to the people and earning their devotion.

Now, while we can all study successful habits, it’s meaningless if we don’t implement that knowledge.

Knowing and doing what’s best is one of the first lessons that separate successful people from the rest of us. The ability to turn good ideas into action and the discipline to put in the hard work that lies behind a successful outcome is not a gift, it is a choice.

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit – Aristotle.