Turbo Charge Your Personal Development

You have just purchased your next personal development program / book and now what do you do? They say only 10% of the people even get past the first CD/ Download / chapter, let alone finish.

Would you like to know how to get at least 90% more from all of the personal development programs you have just purchased? And no, I won't tell you to just listen to them 5 times.

Yes, that would increase your results, but not as much as what I am going to share. Besides who has the time to listen to their programs 5 times? How about getting more out of the first time?

Let's say you are one of the few people that actually gets to the end of one of those personal development programs. How would you like to have a system to guarantee that you implement all the great stuff you just learned? How many times have you heard some really great ideas, only to find yourself 4 weeks later not applying any of it?

Your first step is to setup a system to insure you actually finish the program. It will do you no good if you never hear the message. These steps might seem cumbersome, however at the end of this article, I will introduce you to a tool that will make these steps easier.

The first step is to get Accountable to someone that you will finish the program. Now this is a very easy step to brush off, but committing to someone else will send a very powerful message to your subconscious mind and clear away a lot of the future mental hiccups.

Tell your Accountability Buddy when you will complete this program and that you will be giving them weekly updates on your progress. I will explain what you will put in those weekly progress reports below.

Now you have a system in place to give you the best chance at completing your personal development program. It is time to start. Choose a schedule of when you want to learn the program.

Each day you scheduled yourself to listen to the program, write down a Yes or No to the question, "Did I listen to my personal development program today?" Next, write down the most important piece of information about the program you learned.

These two pieces of information are going to be what is in the progress reports you give your Accountability Buddy each week.

Once you complete the program, review your progress reports and celebrate your victory with your Accountability Buddy.

Why does this work?

There are a couple of forces at play here. The first is being accountable to someone else. We all want to look good to our friends, so being on the hook to complete the program will definitely get us to extend ourselves. We might not be 100%, but we will definitely get much more done then if we didn't employ our Accountability Buddy.

The next force at play is tracking what we are doing. No longer will life be a blur of events that get lost in the past. We will have a very specific history of where we are slipping and we will have the chance to make course corrections along the way.

We all make mistakes and slip up sometimes. It is only when we have no clue as to when it is happening that we can find ourselves in deep trouble.

Lastly, you are employing a system of super learning called spaced repetition to lock the new information into your long term memory. First, you listen to the material. Later that day, you write down the most important point anchoring that information in your mind.

Upon completion of the program, you lock the information in your long term memory with you're a final review, not to mention, it is always there if your need a quick refresh.

After you finish your personal development program and it is locked in your long term memory, it is time to put it into action. Follow the exact same system you used to finish the program in the first place.

1. Find someone to get accountable to implementing the new information in your life.

2. Set up the days you will work on implementing the system.

3. Write down the key thing you did to implement the new information on that day.

4. Share your progress reports with your Accountability Buddy.

5. Celebrate your success and review your progress reports when complete.

If the new information you learned will take a long time to implement, feel free to break it down into parts so you can celebrate on the way and review your progress. Now get accountable and get yourself going.

Plus-You Can Now Join Our FREE Mastering Success Facebook Community at www.masteringsuccess.group

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Investing In Yourself Is A Must For An Extraordinary Life

If you are not investing in your personal development, you are brutally limiting your true potential.

Personal development impacts your entire life, not just your work life, business life or your personal life.

It's shocking how many people don't try to improve themselves and sadly, these are the exact people who often complain how unfair life treats them and wonder why they are always dwelling in mediocrity.

In brief, here are some guidelines to follow when you embark your personal development journey:

#1 Imagine How You Want to Design Your Life

Without a vision, men perish.

You need a clear picture of where you want to go in order to determine what kind of life you want to live.

Success is change. You need to pre-determine the kinds of changes you must go through professionally and personally in order to arrive the Promised Land you've never reached.

What you practice in private will emanate in the public. Personal and professional lives always intertwine with each other.

For example, if you imagine yourself being more compassionate and forgiving to others, this trait will exude and impact both of your lives.

Also, if you wanted to develop your leadership skill for your local community, such improvement of skill will easily be transferrable to your professional career as well.

The key is to identify and imagine the kind of person you have to become in order to achieve your goals.

#2 Have A Reality Check

Before you resolve to any changes in your life, make sure you know where you are standing right now.

Discovering your current strengths and weaknesses will help you formulate a plan of action to make the necessary changes meaningful and effective.

#3 Set Ambitious Yet Realistic Goals

Once you know what your strengths and weaknesses are, create both long-term and short-term goals that you need to achieve in order to move towards your ultimate destination.

Never set goals without an action plan. You must set concrete, quantifiable, manageable milestones with clear deadlines so that you feel the urgency to take action and get things done.

#4 When Things Don't Work Out As Planned, Change

Change is the only constant in the Universe.

When plan A doesn't work out, you need to try plan B, plan C and so on until you succeed.

Planning doesn't guarantee success because no one can predict all the uncertainties that are shaping the future.

So don't be discouraged when your initial personal development plan fails. When you hit a roadblock, it simply means it's time for alternative solutions.

#5 Track & Evaluate How You Are Doing

When you have a small victory, have a look how you did against the plan of action steps.

This is critical because you always want to learn from any potential mistakes and subtle lessons along the way. Be brutally honest and truthful when you do your self-assessment.

Be okay if you suck at anything in the first few times. Mastery of anything takes years or even decades to develop.

Alternatively, have someone else perform this objective evaluation for you. It will definitely sound painful and ego-busting when you hear the brutal truth, but the benefits will well worth it.

Finally, remember to keep your personal development simple.

Don't overwhelm yourself with unobtainable goals that are setting yourself up for failure.

Sure, push yourself, expand your limit and keep going every day.

But always be aware of your current capabilities so that you are motivated enough to stay in the long game instead of giving up too early.

If you are committed to your daily tiny investment on yourself, you'll be assured to lead an extraordinary life very soon.

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How to Find Willpower When You’re Running On Empty

Have you ever tried to notice and track acts of will that you perform throughout your day?

That time when you decide to reject the offer of cigarette that comes from your friend. Maybe that morning you finally took yourself for a work-out routine.

Where do such acts come from?

Why in some cases are you resistant to any kind of temptations and just do what is right/logical/useful while in other cases you just can’t stand up to the seduction?

How to Find Willpower When It’s Running Out

Is there a limited resource of willpower for each of us?

And, if it’s true, can we somehow increase it or should we just stick with it like that chewing gum that has stuck to our shoe sole on the way to work. We can take time and fix that, but we have work to do and we are in a hurry.


Flexing The Muscle

“WILLPOWER IS LIKE A MUSCLE: IT NEEDS TO BE CHALLENGED TO BUILD ITSELF.” – MARTIN GINIS

If neuroscience has taught us something about our brain lately – it’s that it is no different than any other muscle in our body (except it’s unimaginably complex!).

If you have ever been to gym – you know how it works. Weak muscles won’t let you lift decent weights, the same thing basically happens to your brain when it is required to show some willpower.

There is a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex, it is located just behind your forehead and it’s believed to be responsible for behavior regulation and decision-making.

In easy words, that part of your brain is literally the willpower mission control center, and when you can’t handle the desire to eat one more sausage you know what is it to blame.


But how that does that help?

Well, knowing how an engine works gives you an opportunity to tweak and upgrade it.

According to Kelly McGonigal, Stanford University PhD, and author of The Willpower Instinct, the pre-frontal cortex is like a child that needs to be looked after.


You have to be responsible and fully involved in order to raise it properly, so you won’t feel embarrassed for it. There are things you can do to improve the pre-frontal cortex. Following them will literally increase it by consolidating grey matter around it.

As a result, you will gain a power to control over your desires and to act upon the interest of usefulness and healthiness. Instead of receiving a short-term sense of satisfaction. The basic recommendation break-down is:

1. Sleep well.
It is a well-known fact. Your whole organism restores and gathers power while sleeping and willpower is no different. You are very vulnerable to bad habits and other possible threats when you didn’t get enough sleep.

2. Eat well.

Digestion of proper food will supply your brain with necessary vitamins and minerals. Food is a fuel so be sure to keep the tank properly filled.

3. Exercise.

Physical exercises are proven not only to increase your body condition, but weekly exercise activities are experimentally proven to be a boost to your willpower as well.

4. Meditate.

Just a simple 10-minute breath meditation daily routine has proven to improve your body and mind on a many different levels. From improving your focus level to helping your sleep better, meditation has become a powerful tool to anyone seeking to increase their willpower reserve.

Following basic guidelines will definitely boost your self-awareness and the willpower itself. But what do you do when you seem to be out of the resource?


In Search Of A Willpower Boost Pack

Remember what we talked about earlier? About the comparison of our brain to muscles. Now that we know, it seems clear that we can “work out” and get our brain to consolidate the willpower at the times when it is most needed.

We just need to keep practising and pushing it to the limit.

Well, the truth is, it’s not quite right. The resource of your willpower is never unlimited. Especially on your first steps of mastering your willpower, you can easily find yourself in the situation when you are just out of it.

Once you learned how exactly your mind works when you are eating that caramel cake or passing a gym class you would need to learn how to force yourself doing the right thing.

But the problem is that you might face numerous situations throughout your day that would require you to challenge your power of will in order to motivate yourself.

If you’ll be too hard on that, you might just pass one through. You would think – I woke up early, I am not smoking for three weeks now and I laid out on a training today. So this sweet dessert after supper won’t cross out all my achievements.

And you’re right. You can’t be all-focused and determined non-stop 24/7. In this case, one day you would just have to give it a rest in order to release the tension that is tangling you.


So What Do We Do?

In order to avoid that, you need to carefully examine the level of your willpower. Evaluate how much is left in your willpower bank. That would enable you to plan your decisions and actions ahead of the challenges you face.

Becoming aware of the level of willpower you have gives you a chance to avoid seductions and temptations you might face later. For example, if you know that just can’t fight that social media feed checking habit, maybe you could try leaving the phone somewhere not near your workplace.

The other recommendation I would give is an obvious one, though it is also one of the hardest.

Once you have started working on improving your power of will, never let it go. Keep the focus and determination to fight your nasty habits for quite some time. Until you’ve worked out the manner to deal with them.

For example, at some point of my life I had a serious sleep deprivation problem. It was doing severe damage to my personal and professional life, so I had to do something about it.

Amongst all the solutions I tried, meditation was something that really worked, though I had to wait more than a month to see that. But, at some point, my sleep problems were just gone.

Everything went back to normal. And when everything is normal there is no need to make additional efforts to keep it that way, I thought. So I stopped meditating just to see that the problem came back.

That’s when I realized that I should always be focused and determined to steer my life in the right direction.


Drawing The Bottom Line

There is always a way to go when it comes to self-improvement, for all of us. Willpower is the most effective tool on the forefront of our personal growth and development.

While there are literal ways of improving your willpower, you should never forget that there is a resource that you are spending, especially on your first steps of mastering the power of will.

Are you struggling to find willpower? Leave a comment below.

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10 Ways Reading Enhances Personal Development

As a tween, I loved the Nancy Drew Mystery Series. I wanted to be like Nancy Drew. She had such a good head on her shoulders, even though she was constantly facing danger and never quite “hooking” Ned, the handsome guy whom the wealthy beautiful Helen was always throwing herself upon.

Through those characters, I was able to gain insight into the types of people I encountered in my daily life – character types – good, bad, selfish and unselfish, etc. This series probably began my love affair with books that continues today.

In high school, of course, we read all of the classics – To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, Hamlet, The Glass Menagerie, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities, and more.

Why Reading Enhances Personal Development

I don’t remember ever not liking a book we were reading. That continued in college too. And as an adult, the love affair continues, although some non-fiction is added to the list now and then.

But fiction is the great teacher – contributing to our own personal development in at least the 10 following ways:


1) Insight into Human Nature

We meet every possible personality through reading, and we gain understanding of what motivates the behaviours of people.

We can study the characters that appear on those pages, watch them as they react and respond to one another, deal with conflict, and expose their strengths and weaknesses. We gain perspective on such things as unselfishness, greed, ambition, egoism – the types of personality traits we encounter in real life.

Through analysing these characters in literature, I have developed better methods of dealing with people in my world.


2) Problem-Solving

One of the great things about literature is that the main character always has a conflict and problems to solve.

How those problems are solved, and the process that is used, gives us great training on solving problems (often how not to solve them) with which we are faced in life.

Of course, Romeo and Juliet did not solve their problems well, and we learn from this play the dangers of impulsivity – a good lesson for teenagers. Avid readers come to learn how to avoid the mistakes that fictional characters often make.


3) Imagination

As we age, many of us lose the imagination that so entertained us when we were children.


When we are taken to new places and meet unique people, our imaginations are stimulated. We place ourselves in those surroundings and imagine what they must be like. Science fiction does that for me, as do historical novels such as A Tale of Two Cities.

James Michener was a master at stimulating the imaginations of his readers – we are able to put ourselves there, geographically and historically, as his saga unfold. Nurturing our imaginations allows new ideas and divergent thinking.

4) Vocabulary and Language Skills

Avid readers have much larger vocabularies than those who avoid the past-time. And the reading of good books provides models of good language and writing. Research shows that the language development, both oral and written, that is fostered from reading books, results in better learning all around.

Adults who have read a lot and who continue to read are able to grasp complex written material far easier, and they are better writers overall. These are career skills which are difficult to learn later in life.


5) Relief from Stress/Escape

The mental and physical effects of stress are well documented. To relive stress, we engage in a number of activities – physical exercise, meditation, and, yes, reading. Studies have shown that blood pressure is reduce during the act of reading.

And reading allows us to focus on something other than our stressors and problems. A good story line carries us away to another place – a much healthier form of escape than alcohol or drugs.


6) Readers Develop Empathy and Tolerance

Empathy is the ability to place yourself “into the shoes” of another and see a problem, a circumstance, and a behaviour from their perspective.

As we do this in our reading, so it transfers over to real life. We learn to be less judgement of others, understanding that we have not had the experiences that have formed their personalities.


7) Readers are More Interesting People
The exposure to history, politics, the law, and unusual places, becomes a store of knowledge that we hold in our memories.

This knowledge base allows us to converse on a variety of topics, both socially and professionally. People with large bases of general knowledge are more highly valued in the professional world.


8) Readers Gain a larger Perspective

Ignorance of other cultures, religions, and ethnicity fosters hostility and fear. Knowledge and understanding of all of these fosters communication, acceptance and tolerance.

Given the global perspective which all of us must develop, reading is the next best thing to actual experience. And when we do face actual experiences with cultures, belief systems and other ethnicity, we have the understanding to establish solid and mutually respectful relationships.


9) Readers See Cause/Effect Relationships

Seeing cause-effect relationships is a critical thinking skill that is highly valued. Through fiction, we are able to see how choices that people make have an impact not only on themselves but on others around them and sometimes on society as a whole.

Readers come to understand the need to consider all of the possible effects when hard choices need to be made.


10) Readers Have Important “Alone Time”

The world is a busy place. We spend our days surrounded by others, inundated with stimuli that bombard our senses and our minds. Sometimes, it is difficult to shut down all of that stimulation and get the rest we need.

When we read, especially at the end of the day, our worlds becomes quiet. Our brains begins to settle down and prepare us for rest. Readers have a much easier time falling asleep at night – who doesn’t need a good night’s sleep?



The benefits of reading cannot be over-stated.

They are intellectual, psychological, and healthy. But even more than that, reading takes to places in our minds that we would never go otherwise. Read on!

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