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Daniel M. Wood
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Posts by Daniel M. Wood
How the Act of Daily Goal Setting Makes You Successful
Nov 22nd
Photo credit: tomoski (CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Successful people “think” success all the time. That is why their goals are firmly lodged in their subconscious. The subconscious is brilliant at prioritizing. It listens to you and gauges from your thoughts what you think is the most important task.
This means that what you think about most of the time is what The Subconscious will think is the most important thing for you and will try to find creative solutions. If you think about problems, The Subconscious will try to find you more problems. If you think about solutions, goals and dreams, it will try to make them come true.
But The Subconscious goes even further when trying to understand what you think is important; it “listens” to your feelings.
A thought imbued with a powerful emotion must be more important than a thought that had didn’t emotionally affect you at all, even if you think that through over and over and over again.
Luckily, it has been proven that a positive thought is over 100 times as positive as a negative thought. This makes it a lot easier to drive positive emotions into your Subconscious.
This makes it all easier
It is enough to be positive and keep your thoughts on what you want — and you don’t have to go monitoring your thoughts all the time.
It is enough to imbue your thoughts a few times a day with a powerful positive emotion when thinking about your goals. The more you can do it the more powerful this exercise will be.
For many, reading their goals or making plans become a chore, something that fills them with negative emotions. This ruins the full potential of these activities; filling yourself with positive emotions while thinking about your goals will make them a lot more powerful.
Over the last several years I have been taught several exercises that can help you focus more on your goals and spend more time thinking about and feeling about them. What I want you to remember when doing these exercises is to have fun. Never see them as a chore, you are living your goals, it is something to enjoy.
If you don’t feel uplifted at the thought of focusing on your goals, you might as well not do the exercise today. Do it tomorrow instead, because it will do more harm than good if you are in the wrong mood when thinking about your goals.
How this power can affect your life
In my business, I constantly need to come up with new ways to improve efficiency, new ideas to test and new subjects to teach. It takes a lot of creative work — and creative work has always been one of my weaker areas. Luckily, thanks to all my work with goal setting (and because of my focus on my goals), my Subconscious knows these are the things I need the most help with and that they are very important to me.
Every day I get new ideas of things I can try out, products I can create, seminar subjects I can offer, and so on. All of them aren’t good, but when you throw enough “mud against the wall”, something will stick. And that is what my Subconscious does — it feeds me idea after idea.
An Easy Exercise
Daily Goal Setting
This method is used by countless thousands around the world and for everyone who has tried it, the effects have been incredible.
- Each morning take a pen and a piece of paper and write down your 10 top goals. Don’t look at the day before, just think about what you want to most and write them down.
- Remember to write them in the positive present tense and remember to set a deadline for each goal. Just like we did when setting your long term and short term goals. (For example you could set the goal “I make 10 000 dollars per month by the 31 of December 2010.”)
- Do this for all 10 goals.
In the beginning, writing down 10 goals might be difficult. Each day they might look a bit different and some of the goals you write never come back again. If you forget a goal, it is because it wasn’t all that important and something more important has taken its place.
What difference does it make?
By starting your day setting your 10 top goals you jump-start your creativity — which will motivate you for the rest of the day. You will have programmed yourself to focus on your goals and to move towards them and their completion.
What will happen to you?
If you do this, you will start to realize what is important to you. You’ll see what goals keep surfacing and what goals vanish. You will know what you want and you will find yourself presented with opportunities that you haven’t noticed before. You will be more creative in finding ideas and chances to make your dreams reality.
An Action Exercise
- Buy a notebook and a pen at your local bookstore.
- Start writing down 10 goals every morning, without looking at the day before.
- Take advantage of the opportunities that come your way and capitalize on them.
Daily goal setting can change your life for the better. It will help you keep moving faster and faster towards your goals and dreams.
How to Make a Plan That Will Help Your Business Thrive
May 24th
What is the difference between a successful company and an unsuccessful company? Why do some entrepreneurs succeed where others have failed miserably?
What makes someone successful?
Everyone is looking for the answers to these questions; everyone wants to find the keys to succeed, the shortcut that will make it all easier.
The problem is in that word, shortcut.
The real key, the real secret is that there is no shortcut.
You need to work hard, endure long hours, and maintain focus if you want success.
You can succeed
Many studies have been made to why some entrepreneurs succeed while others don’t.
In many cases, it all comes down to planning.
There’s an old saying: every minute spent on planning saves up to 10 minutes in execution. Even though we know this, very few people spend enough time planning.
Spending time before you start your business making plans is tiresome to many. You are essentially working without getting paid, in the short run. But when you plan you create a roadmap; you build yourself a guide that will help you on your entire journey towards success.
Successful entrepreneurs plan and then do something completely different
The hard part about planning is getting it right. When you plan you try to foresee circumstances in the future, to predict how things will play out and make plans for how you will react and what you will need, you can’t always get a 100% success rate. Since no one knows what the future brings, most plans become obsolete as soon as the entrepreneur starts his business.
All successful entrepreneurs started off with a set of plans, but many ended up doing something completely different. (But they all had a plan).
Unsuccessful entrepreneurs fail because of lack of planning
Because studies show that many original business plans become obsolete soon after the business gets off the ground, some entrepreneurs decide to skip the whole planning process. But without an exact idea of what they are going to do, what they need, what opportunities to look for and without a frame of reference to evaluate situations by, they fail.
Successful entrepreneurs have a plan to update
When you have a plan, you can modify it, you can evaluate things happening around you and compare them to your plans. You will be able to see if this opportunity is in line with your goals, values and dreams. If it isn’t, you know it is a bad idea to follow. Thanks to this whole planning process, you will have a long term mindset, you will constantly be thinking about what the things you are doing today will have for affects on your future.
This mindset is a precious commodity and one of the most important parts of being an entrepreneur. Remember, all successful entrepreneurs have made business plans, even if they didn’t always do exactly what they expected.
Action Exercises
1. Create a business plan
Ask yourself the following questions – What do you plan on doing? Who is it you are selling to? What do you need to be successful at it? How much do you need to sell to brake even? What costs will you have? How many employees do you need? What kind of office space will you require? What can you delegate? What do you need to do yourself?
2. Create a vision
Try to crystallize the values you want your company to stand for in simple terms. Make sure everyone who joins the company learns about what the company stands for, and prove it to them by living by those values.
Let the employees be a part of the creative process, come back to it once in a while, look it over, and let them give you their input.
3. Never be afraid to update your plan
You will need to update your plan many times, you might even change to a new industry after some time has passed. Don’t be afraid of this, but make sure that the change is in line with your goals and your vision. If the path you are on won’t lead you to your goals, change that path now to one that is more suitable.
The Art of Stress-Free Work
May 20th
Stress is a poison in today’s society.
The negative effects of stress are numerous. It weakens our immune system, which causes sickness. Because of stress, people produce less. When stressed people are less creative. The list goes on and on.
Problems caused by stress cost our society billions of dollars every year.
On the flip side, this means that anyone who can lower their stress levels and produce at a high level is at an advantage in the workplace. Those people will quickly become the most valued assets in any organization.
Looking to the Future
For many, there doesn’t seem to be any end to the stress. Companies and organizations keep expecting more for less which means we have to work harder, produce more, and get better results.
This means that if we are to solve the situation we cannot look to the outer world. We have to look inside ourselves and make a change.
When I Learned the 80/20 Rule
Most of us get caught up in tasks that really don’t have much of an impact on our future.
I started to think about it this way: 20 percent of the activities we do stand for 80% of the results we produce.
Another way of putting it is that if you have a list of 10 actions, 2 of those actions will have a greater effect on your future than the other 8 put together.
When I looked at my own work schedule this was really obvious.
When I first started thinking about the 80/20 rule, I was working as a sales manager with 5 sales people under me. My task list was as follows:
1. Making sales calls
2. Coach sales people
3. Sitting in meetings with my bosses
4. Prepare marketing and sales campaigns
5. Answer and reply to emails
6. Write standardized offers
7. Create campaign banners
And a few other unimportant things.
When I looked through this list, I realized that 80 percent of the value I created for my company came from coaching sales people and making my own sales calls. Most of the others were unimportant or easy to delegate.
Once I started focusing on those 2 tasks, my numbers and value skyrocketed…which quickly got me a promotion.
How to Focus Your Efforts
A few years ago I was taught a great method for decreasing stress. This guide will help you by getting thoughts, deals and commitments out of your head and on to paper, someplace you know you will be able to go back and review it regularly and that you know you will not forget it.
By not having to keep everything in your mind, you will be able to review it and decide which are activities comprise that crucial 20%, and you will be able to focus single-mindedly on those tasks without having to remember lots of other thoughts and ideas.
Step 1 – What is taking up a lot of your focus and energy?
Write down a list of everything you are thinking about and stressing about.
Step 2 – What would be a successful outcome to this situation?
To each point on the list, visualize what a perfect solution would be and then write it down.
Step 3 – How important is it that this task is done?
By answering this question, you learn if this task is something you need and should do or if it really isn’t that important and can be eliminated.
Step 4 – What action could you take to move the project towards that goal?
Once you know that the idea is an important one, write down what the next action you can take to move the goal towards its perfect solution.
Step 5 – Decide when you are going to do the action
Write it down in your calendar.
Let Go and Relax
Do you feel how much more relaxed you are now that you don’t have to remember all your ideas? Now that you know that they will be done?
This exercise has helped people all over the world get their ideas in writing, find actionable steps to take on their workloads, and start moving towards their major goals. It is a great cure to procrastination and a great way to increase your productivity start living a stress-free life.