Becoming More Decisive

Decisions, decisions, decisions!

Maybe it's selecting what to order from an extensive restaurant menu. Or choosing which event to attend when two are happening at the same time. We are faced with many decisions every day. Hundreds of them, if you really stop to think about it.

Some of them are easy, like what to have for breakfast or what to wear (that one is generally easier for men than women, in my experience).

Other decisions are more involved. They may require gathering additional information or input from others.

One thing that is clear about highly productive and successful people is that they are good at making decisions. They make decisions in a timely manner, and deal with the outcomes as they occur.

To Decide Or Not To Decide

I don't know about you, but I am not a very good decision maker.

I can handle the easy stuff. In fact, I am pretty productive person and make lots of decisions that I can implement myself.

But when it comes to things that require the involvement of other people or more coordination, I struggle.

I get too wrapped up in the different possibilities. I magnify the things that need to happen in order to gather the appropriate information or to execute the decision. I worry way too much about making the wrong decision. (And later I beat myself up for making wrong decisions, or not making the right one soon enough.)

What happens is I freeze.

I do nothing. I wait to see if things will just "work themselves out."

And here's the thing. Stuff does actually work out one way or another. Days continue to go by. But there isn't a lot of change or growth that happens if you are frozen.

Being wrong

In order to become more decisive, I have to accept the possibility of being wrong.

I mean, no one can be right 100% of the time. We're human beings, and we make bad decisions all the time. It's not the end of the world.

Plus, a lot of decisions don't really have a "right" or "wrong," just different outcomes. Trade offs. Maybe several outcomes are good, just in different ways. Maybe none of the outcomes are good, but you have to choose one anyway (I hate those kind!!)

Making decisions takes a strength of character that can manage the outcomes, no matter what they might be.

Each year I choose a word to guide my actions, priorities and growth. This year, my word is decisiveness.

I will be working to improve my ability to make decisions with wisdom and courage. How about you? Could you be a little more decisive in your life and your business? Do you tend to freeze when faced with difficult situations? Maybe you have a different relationship with decisiveness. I think this is a valuable area to explore and discuss, so share your thoughts in the comments.

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

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7 Secret Ingredients Of A Happy Life

Anything that you could ever want more of, or any factor that you would consider important to YOUR happiness and achieving a happy life can be placed in one of seven categories of success.

These seven ingredients to a happy life are considered with everything ever written or discovered on happiness, success and self-improvement. They characterize the life and accomplishments of all high-performing men and women. They include everything you could ever want.
How To Achieve Your Ideal Life

Your ideal life is a blending of these seven ingredients to a happy life in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment.

By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim at. You engage in positive thinking. You can then measure how well you’re doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want self-improvement in your life.

1) Peace Of Mind

The first of these seven ingredients to a happy life, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. Because of this, you strive for it all your life. You usually evaluate how well you are doing at any given time by how much inner peace you enjoy.

Peace of mind and positive thinking is essential for the optimal performance and happy life of all human groupings, from your relationships with your friends and family to the business and organizations in which you work.

2) Health And Energy

The second ingredient to a happy life is health and energy. Just as peace of mind is your normal and natural mental state, health and energy is your normal and natural physical state.

3) Loving Relationships

The third ingredient to a happy life is loving relationships. These are relationships with people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how you are doing as a human being. Happiness or unhappiness in life comes from your relationships with others, and it is your relationships with others that make you truly human.

4) Financial Freedom

The forth ingredient of a happy life and success is financial freedom. To be financially free means that you have enough money so that you don’t worry about it continually, as most people do. It is not money that lies at the root of all evil; it is the lack of money. Achieving your own financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. It is far too important to be left to chance.

A feeling of financial freedom is essential to your self-improvement and to the achievement of any other important goal and you cannot be truly free until and unless you have enough money that you are no longer preoccupied with it.

5) Worthy Goals And Ideas

The fifth ingredient of a happy life is setting worthy goals and ideals. Perhaps your deepest subconscious drive, according to Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, is the need for meaning and purpose in life. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need positive thinking to get there. You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to the world.

Happiness has been defined as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You can only be happy with yourself when you are working step by step toward something that is really important to YOU.

6) Self Knowledge And Self-Awareness

The sixth ingredient to success and a happy life is self-knowledge and self-awareness. Throughout all of history, self-knowledge has gone hand in hand with inner happiness, positive thinking and outer achievement. To perform your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do.

7) Personal Fulfillment

The seventh ingredient to a happy life is a sense of personal fulfillment. This is a feeling that you are becoming everything that you are moving toward. It is the realization of your full potential as a human being. Your happy life begins with self-improvement and ends with a personal fulfillment that you have accomplished all that you wanted to.
Take Action

Take the brush of your imagination and begin painting a masterpiece on the canvas of your life. It is for you to decide clearly what would make you the happiest in everything you are doing.

Decide what is right for you before you decide what is possible. Create your ideal life in every detail. Don’t be concerned about the process of getting from where you are to where you want to go. For now, just focus on positive thinking and creating a vision of your perfect future.

Thank you for reading my blog on The Seven Ingredients to a Happy Life. I hope you will take some time to think about what YOU want to achieve in YOUR life and begin your self-improvement today!

If you enjoyed what you read, please comment below and share this blog with your friends.


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

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The Difference Between Goal-Setters & Non-Goal-Setters

Goal-setting has been one of the major cornerstones to my own personal success journey.

The ability to set and achieve a goal through systematic focus and accomplishment is the most powerful way to turn your dreams and visions into reality.

As I always say, people with clear, written goals, accomplish far more in a shorter period of time than people without them could ever imagine.

Throughout my life, I have encountered a lot of people who fail to buy into the idea of goal-setting. They insist that by simply having an idea in their head of where they’d like to end up, that they’ll be able to get there without a problem.

To address those who doubt the power of goal-setting, I’m going to present a comparison of two people who both want the same thing. One of them is a goal-setter, the other one isn’t.
Goal-Setters VS Non-Goal-Setters

Imagine this scenario. There are 2 people who both want to take a vacation in the summertime to their dream destination.
The Goal-Setter Scenario

Our goal-setter, we’ll call him John, decides he wants to take a vacation. He sits down and writes: Take a vacation in June 2017.

He then writes down 20 ways he can cut back on spending to make this happen.

He Mindstorms different solutions such as cutting back on his coffee shop purchases, saving $50 from his paychecks, and reducing the number of times he purchases lunch at work to just 2 times per week.

By his calculations, John now knows that he will save an extra $300 per month. In order to take his vacation in the summer, John needs approximately $1,200. So he’ll have to do this for 4 months in order to save that amount, which is perfect timing for his June trip to a tropical island.

Happy with his results, John begins to execute his plan.
The Non-Goal-Setter Scenario

Now let’s take a look at our non-goal-setter. We’ll call him Michael. Michael, unlike John, doesn’t like to plan things. He has great ideas and big dreams but doesn’t feel he has the time to set an exact plan for how to achieve them. He too wants to take a vacation this summer.

Michael thinks about the places he wants to visit, makes a mental note in his head to cut back his spending in certain areas of his life, but mostly continues to live the same way he has for the next few months.
What Happens To Each Person

Let’s fast forward this story 4 months into the future. It’s the beginning of spring and John and Michael start to get serious about their vacation plans.

John takes a look at his savings and has just enough for a round-trip ticket, a 3-night stay at a resort, and enough extra cash for excursions and meals. Michael, on the other hand, has enough to cover a ticket, maybe 1 night at a hotel, and will have to choose very wisely between eating and participating in activities.

Now, I don’t have to tell you who seems to have a better vacation planned.

This story is a very clear example of people who set goals and people who don’t.
Why Goal-Setting Is Important

Those of us that set goals are able to make an exact plan for how to get from where we are to where we’d like to be. We can visualize our ideal situation and take action on how to make it happen. This makes achieving the things we want easier than we ever thought possible.

After taking the initial time to Mindstorm and plan, all we have to do is stick to that path and we’ll end up with the result we want or something better.

Unfortunately, for those of us who don’t take the time to create and set goals, plans never fully materialize and the path to success is windy, confusing, and difficult to stick to.

Now, I’d love to hear from you, so my question today is:

“What is one goal you plan to achieve this year, and what are 2 things you can take action on TODAY to get closer to that goal?”

Leave a comment below. 

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7 Secret Ingredients Of A Happy Life

Anything that you could ever want more of, or any factor that you would consider important to YOUR happiness and achieving a happy life can be placed in one of seven categories of success.

These seven ingredients to a happy life are considered with everything ever written or discovered on happiness, success and self-improvement. They characterize the life and accomplishments of all high-performing men and women. They include everything you could ever want.
How To Achieve Your Ideal Life

Your ideal life is a blending of these seven ingredients to a happy life in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment.

By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim at. You engage in positive thinking. You can then measure how well you’re doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want self-improvement in your life.

1) Peace Of Mind
The first of these seven ingredients to a happy life, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. Because of this, you strive for it all your life. You usually evaluate how well you are doing at any given time by how much inner peace you enjoy.

Peace of mind and positive thinking is essential for the optimal performance and happy life of all human groupings, from your relationships with your friends and family to the business and organizations in which you work.

2) Health And Energy

The second ingredient to a happy life is health and energy. Just as peace of mind is your normal and natural mental state, health and energy is your normal and natural physical state.

3) Loving Relationships

The third ingredient to a happy life is loving relationships. These are relationships with people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how you are doing as a human being. Happiness or unhappiness in life comes from your relationships with others, and it is your relationships with others that make you truly human.

4) Financial Freedom

The forth ingredient of a happy life and success is financial freedom. To be financially free means that you have enough money so that you don’t worry about it continually, as most people do. It is not money that lies at the root of all evil; it is the lack of money. Achieving your own financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. It is far too important to be left to chance.

A feeling of financial freedom is essential to your self-improvement and to the achievement of any other important goal and you cannot be truly free until and unless you have enough money that you are no longer preoccupied with it.

5) Worthy Goals And Ideas

The fifth ingredient of a happy life is setting worthy goals and ideals. Perhaps your deepest subconscious drive, according to Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, is the need for meaning and purpose in life. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need positive thinking to get there. You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to the world.

Happiness has been defined as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You can only be happy with yourself when you are working step by step toward something that is really important to YOU.

6) Self Knowledge And Self-Awareness

The sixth ingredient to success and a happy life is self-knowledge and self-awareness. Throughout all of history, self-knowledge has gone hand in hand with inner happiness, positive thinking and outer achievement. To perform your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do.

7) Personal Fulfillment

The seventh ingredient to a happy life is a sense of personal fulfillment. This is a feeling that you are becoming everything that you are moving toward. It is the realization of your full potential as a human being. Your happy life begins with self-improvement and ends with a personal fulfillment that you have accomplished all that you wanted to.
Take Action

Take the brush of your imagination and begin painting a masterpiece on the canvas of your life. It is for you to decide clearly what would make you the happiest in everything you are doing.

Decide what is right for you before you decide what is possible. Create your ideal life in every detail. Don’t be concerned about the process of getting from where you are to where you want to go. For now, just focus on positive thinking and creating a vision of your perfect future.

Thank you for reading my blog on The Seven Ingredients to a Happy Life. I hope you will take some time to think about what YOU want to achieve in YOUR life and begin your self-improvement today!

Source

The 15 Success Habits All High Achievers Have

Ever wondered what success habits separate high achievers from the rest of the dreamers?

Some people perform better. They achieve more and always succeed in what they do. But what more do they have that helps them get such results?

Truth is, they aren’t any different from us – at the beginning we’re all equal. But what differentiates them from the rest is the behavior they adopt on the way to achieving their dreams.

15 Success Habits High Achievers Have

High achievers have different habits than the average people. Their days consist of others activities and their head is full of other thoughts.

So here are the success habits and best practices of such people that make them stand out, get things done and move forward:


1. They Get Up Early

The average person needs a lot of time to wake up. That’s because he usually goes to bed late, stays in front of the computer, and is now hitting the snooze button, trying to put off starting the day.

But if that’s the firth thing you want and think about in the morning – how to avoid an early start of the day – then how do you expect the rest of it to be any better?

A different approach, however, is to go to bed earlier and have a good sleep. To wake up motivated to take action because you got stuff to do. To face the day, make the most of it, realize what a gift it is and be excited about what it will bring.


2. They Read

Instead of checking email and using your phone all the time, watching TV, being on all social medias and constantly updating random statuses, you should sit down and do some reading, or writing.

That’s an activity for your free time that will make you think, grow, learn and improve in general. And it’s what high achievers do daily.


3. They Have A Morning Routine

Another thing you’d better do after getting up early is to have a success ritual.

The benefits are amazing – you get energized, boost productivity, jumpstart the day, have time for yourself, plan out the stuff you need to get done later, and have a peaceful morning.
So think about it if you don’t have a routine already.


When you’re serious about becoming successful and achieving more in life, sleeping in is not an option.

But it’s also important how you spend that first hour after leaving bed. And filling it with productive, positive and creative activities like meditation, a quick workout and some writing or reading, is the best option.


4. They Have A Vision

A life without direction is pointless.

Those who actually achieve something and get somewhere, are seeing that place much earlier than the time they actually get there. Because in their minds, they’re constantly visualizing the upcoming success in details.

That’s a powerful technique that can get you closer to whatever it is that you want in life. No matter how big.


5. They Rest Properly

Successful people sleep well, take breaks, power nap, meditate to clear their mind every day, and have other rituals that help them relax, rest their body and mind, and not feel drained at the end of the day.

This helps them work harder, be more focused, get better results, and eliminate stress and depression.


6. They Take Responsibility for their Actions

Blaming other people, or even circumstances or life in general, is an awful habit many people share. But that’s not how a determined person sees things.

Instead, he takes responsibility for his actions, even if he’s made a mistake, learns from it, accepts it, and moves on trying to do it right next time.


7. They Talk About Ideas with Other Purpose-Driven People

If you’re surrounded by negative people who let you down, complain about their lives all the time, or are just talking about other people and events in their life, you won’t change for the better.

But you can still turn that around and choose to communicate with positive individuals, spend time with creative people, full of life and positivity, ambitious human beings with goals and dreams.
And soon you’ll see yourself thriving.

After all, environment is crucial for success and we’re the average of the five people we spend most time with.


8. They Have an Evening Routine

For maximum results you should start the day with a morning routine, and end it with a bedtime ritual.

It may include stuff like examining the day and assessing your performance, making a plan for tomorrow, brushing your teeth and flossing, meditating (again), and doing some reading so that you can go to sleep faster.

And it definitely doesn’t include any food, electronic devices, alcohol, or falling asleep on the couch in front of the TV.

9. They Prioritize

Even if you have 50 things to do today, there are just a few that are really important. Your job is to define them and focus on them first.

These are the things that help you move towards your goals, that help you improve, earn more, be in a better shape, etc.


10. They Say ‘NO’ to Some Things

High achievers know they have to say ‘no’ to stuff that seems pretty tempting now, but which can only harm them in the long term.

So they often miss parties or other social events, get up early even though they really want to stay in bed, work out when their mind tells them to stay in front of the computer for a little more, and don’t eat the junk food they crave.

Sacrifices like that are what shapes your character and make you the person you need to become in order to lead the lifestyle you imagine.


11. They Grow Spiritually

As I mentioned, some of their best (and daily) practices include reading, meditating, interacting with creative and passionate people, etc.

And all that helps them grow. Soon, it becomes a habit for them to look for chances to learn new stuff, try new things, gain experience and evolve.


12. They Eliminate Distractions

Distractions are everywhere. And always will be. But if we realize how important our current activity is, and choose to focus only on it, other people coming in the room, notifications, worries, fears and random thoughts won’t matter that much.

So concentrate on what you’re doing now. And if it’s connected to your dreams, you’ll find a way to eliminate everything that distracts you and will actually get some work done.


13. They Take Immediate Decisions

People usually spend too much time trying to make a decision. Even if it’s an easy one, they struggle with choosing an option as they try to choose the best one.

But you should let go of perfectionism. And, instead, just take one of the two things and make the best of it.


14. They Get Rid of Time-Wasting Activities

Most of the things we do daily aren’t productive. In fact, they are only slowing down our self-improvement process. And the best we can do is stop doing them and do more of what works and has helped so far.

Reading newspapers may not have any positive effect on you, but if you spend that time planning out your whole day in details, you’ll be much more productive and will see the bigger picture of where you’re heading in life.


15. They Approach Other Successful People

Often we’re too scared to even try to talk to someone that’s superior to us. But people like that are usually friendlier and more open-minded than we expect.

After all, they too started somewhere and wanted to change and ask more successful individuals for advice. So they might as well take the time now to give you some tips, help you in some way or encourage you and give you feedback.


In Conclusion

Great habits, right? And none of them are hard. You can start applying them right now. But start small – one change at a time.

Can you add other practices that lead to greater results in life?

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