10 Things Successful People Never Do Again

We all make mistakes but the people who thrive from their mistakes are the successful ones.

Henry Cloud       

“Never go back.” What does that mean? From observations of successful people, clinical psychologist and author of Never Go Back: 10 Things You'll Never Do Again (Howard Books, June 2014), Dr. Henry Cloud has discovered certain “awakenings” that people have—in life and in business—that once they have them, they never go back to the old way of doing things. And when that happens, they are never the same. In short, they got it.
“Years ago, a bad business decision of mine led to an interesting discussion with my mentor,” Dr. Cloud says. “I had learned a valuable lesson the hard way, and he reassured me: ‘The good thing is once you learn that lesson, you never go back. You never do it again.’
“I wondered, what are the key awakenings that successful people go through that forever change how they do things, which propel them to succeed in business, relationships, and life? I began to study these awakenings, researching them over the years.”
Although life and business have many lessons to teach us, Dr. Cloud observed 10 “doorways” of learning that high performers go through, never to return again.
Successful people never again…   

1. Return to what hasn’t worked.

Whether a job, or a broken relationship that was ended for a good reason, we should never go back to the same thing, expecting different results, without something being different.

2. Do anything that requires them to be someone they are not.

In everything we do, we have to ask ourselves, “Why am I doing this? Am I suited for it? Does it fit me? Is it sustainable?” If the answer is no to any of these questions, you better have a very good reason to proceed.

3. Try to change another person.

When you realize that you cannot force someone into doing something, you give him or her freedom and allow them to experience the consequences. In doing so, you find your own freedom as well.

4. Believe they can please everyone.

Once you get that it truly is impossible to please everyone, you begin to live purposefully, trying to please the right people.

5. Choose short-term comfort over long-term benefit.

Once successful people know they want something that requires a painful, time-limited step, they do not mind the painful step because it gets them to a long-term benefit. Living out this principle is one of the most fundamental differences between successful and unsuccessful people, both personally and professionally.

6. Trust someone or something that appears flawless.

It’s natural for us to be drawn to things and people that appear "incredible." We love excellence and should always be looking for it. We should pursue people who are great at what they do, employees who are high performers, dates who are exceptional people, friends who have stellar character, and companies that excel. But when someone or something looks too good to be true, he, she, or it is. The world is imperfect. Period. No one and no thing is without flaw, and if they appear that way, hit pause.

7. Take their eyes off the big picture.

We function better emotionally and perform better in our lives when we can see the big picture. For successful people, no one event is ever the whole story. Winners remember that—each and every day.

8. Neglect to do due diligence.

No matter how good something looks on the outside, it is only by taking a deeper, diligent, and honest look that we will find out what we truly need to know: the reality that we owe ourselves.

9. Fail to ask why they are where they find themselves.

One of the biggest differences between successful people and others is that in love and in life, in relationships and in business, successful people always ask themselves, what part am I playing in this situation? Said another way, they do not see themselves only as victims, even when they are.

10. Forget that their inner life determines their outer success.

The good life sometimes has little to do with outside circumstances. We are happy and fulfilled mostly by who we are on the inside. Research validates that. And our internal lives largely contribute to producing many of our external circumstances.
And, the converse is true: people who are still trying to find success in various areas of life can almost always point to one or more of these patterns as a reason they are repeating the same mistakes.
Everyone makes mistakes…even the most successful people out there. But, what achievers do better than others is recognize the patterns that are causing those mistakes and never repeat them again. In short, they learn from pain—their own and the pain of others.
A good thing to remember is this: pain is unavoidable, but repeating the same pain twice, when we could choose to learn and do something different, is certainly avoidable. I like to say, “we don’t need new ways to fail….the old ones are working just fine!” Our task, in business and in life, is to observe what they are, and never go back to doing them again. 
10 Things Successful People Never Do Again

3 Science-Based Mind Hacks to Get Into Flow

Flow is an optimal state of consciousness where you feel your best and perform your best.

Have you ever lost an entire afternoon to an engaging conversation? Or become so involved in a work project that everything else was forgotten? Then you’ve experienced firsthand what is known as “flow state.”
The best definition for this psychological event I’ve ever heard is this: “[Flow is] an optimal state of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.”
When you are in this state, every action, each decision, leads effortlessly, fluidly, seamlessly to the next. It’s high-speed problem-solving; it’s being swept away by the river of ultimate performance.

Related: How to Exponentially Improve Your Performance

Now, before you dismiss this as a New Age idea, consider the research. For more than 150 years, flow has been studied, picked apart and analyzed. It sits at the heart of almost every athletic championship, underpins major scientific breakthroughs and accounts for significant progress in the arts.
As Richard Branson says, “In two hours [in flow], I can accomplish tremendous things… It’s like there’s no challenge I can’t meet.”
How can we achieve this highly focused, productive, satisfying state of mind? In the 1970s, pioneering flow researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified three critical areas for triggering flow:

Trigger 1: Clear Goals

Goals tell us where to put our attention, and what we focus on becomes our results.
The key to creating clear goals which trigger the flow state is breaking down larger overarching goals into smaller subgoals. Clarity is of the utmost importance for staying present in finding flow.
With clarity from goal setting, the mind doesn’t have to expend energy thinking about what to do next. It already knows. This tightened concentration heightens motivation. Action and awareness start to merge, and it is at this point that we are pulled even deeper into the now, into the flow state.

Trigger 2: Immediate Feedback

As a focusing mechanism, immediate feedback is something of an extension of clear goals.
The better, more accurate the feedback, the more clarity we receive. Again, it is this clarity that allows our minds to relax and enter the now state, the trigger for flow.
Imagine for a moment if you implemented this in your work right now. What would happen if you were to tighten feedback loops? If you asked for and received more regular input from others—imagine that instead of quarterly reviews, it became daily reviews?
Immediate feedback polishes clarity further. With the constant tweaking of your goals through feedback, you’ll quickly develop a habit response of dropping into the flow state.

Trigger 3: The Challenge/Skill Ratio

Have you ever been tasked with a project that you felt was too challenging? Then you’ve experienced fear swamping your system. The most important psychological trigger for flow is being able to match the difficulty of the task and your ability to perform it.
While we all want to strive to push ourselves to bigger, better things, there is a danger in pushing too hard.
Flow appears near the emotional midpoint between boredom and anxiety. That means the most productive you will ever be is when you are engaged and confident in the tasks you have been assigned.

The Good News About Flow

Flow is already preprogrammed into your brain. It’s part of your evolutionary design and is a built-in feature of being human.
Cultivating and practicing the triggers described above will allow you to spend more and more time each day in a flow state.
And once you achieve regular flow, you’ll notice an immediate increase in your ability to accomplish your goals. How? Because you’ll be more engaged in your work. You’ll discover connections that you didn’t realize existed before. You’ll be feeling and performing at your best.
And that alone is worth giving these triggers a try.

Source 3-science-based-mind-hacks-to-get-into-flow

14 Things Ridiculously Successful People Do Every Day

Having close access to ultra-successful people can yield some pretty incredible information about who they really are, what makes them tick, and, most importantly, what makes them so successful and productive.

“Whenever you see a successful person, you only see the public glories, never the private sacrifices to reach them.” –Vaibhav Shah

Kevin Kruse is one such person. He recently interviewed over 200 ultra-successful people, including 7 billionaires, 13 Olympians, and a host of accomplished entrepreneurs. One of his most revealing sources of information came from their answers to a simple open-ended question:

In analyzing their responses, Kruse coded the answers to yield some fascinating suggestions. What follows are some of my favorites from Kevin’s findings.

1. They focus on minutes, not hours. 

Most people default to hour and half-hour blocks on their calendar; highly successful people know that there are 1,440 minutes in every day and that there is nothing more valuable than time. Money can be lost and made again, but time spent can never be reclaimed. As legendary Olympic gymnast Shannon Miller told Kevin, “To this day, I keep a schedule that is almost minute by minute.” You must master your minutes to master your life.

2. They focus on only one thing. 

Ultra-productive people know what their “Most Important Task” is and work on it for one to two hours each morning, without interruptions. What task will have the biggest impact on reaching your goals? What accomplishment will get you promoted at work? That’s what you should dedicate your mornings to every day.

3. They don’t use to-do lists. 

Throw away your to-do list; instead schedule everything on your calendar. It turns out that only 41 percent of items on to-do lists ever get done. All those undone items lead to stress and insomnia because of the Zeigarnik effect, which, in essence, means that uncompleted tasks will stay on your mind until you finish them. Highly productive people put everything on their calendar and then work and live by that calendar.

4. They beat procrastination with time travel. 

Your future self can’t be trusted. That’s because we are time inconsistent. We buy veggies today because we think we’ll eat healthy salads all week; then we throw out green rotting mush in the future. Successful people figure out what they can do now to make certain their future selves will do the right thing. Anticipate how you will self-sabotage in the future, and come up with a solution today to defeat your future self.

5. They make it home for dinner. 

Kevin first learned this one from Intel’s Andy Grove, who said, “There is always more to be done, more that should be done, always more than can be done.” Highly successful people know what they value in life. Yes, work, but also what else they value. There is no right answer, but for many, these other values include family time, exercise, and giving back. They consciously allocate their 1,440 minutes a day to each area they value (i.e., they put them on their calendar), and then they stick to that schedule.

6. They use a notebook. 

Richard Branson has said on more than one occasion that he wouldn’t have been able to build Virgin without a simple notebook, which he takes with him wherever he goes. In one interview, Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis said, “Always carry a notebook. Write everything down... That is a million dollar lesson they don’t teach you in business school!” Ultra-productive people free their minds by writing everything down as the thoughts come to them.

7. They process e-mails only a few times a day. 

Ultra-productive people don’t “check” their e-mail throughout the day. They don’t respond to each vibration or ding to see who has intruded into their inbox. Instead, like everything else, they schedule time to process their e-mails quickly and efficiently. For some, that’s only once a day; for others, it’s morning, noon, and night.

8. They avoid meetings at all costs. 

When Kevin asked Mark Cuban to give his best productivity advice, he quickly responded, “Never take meetings unless someone is writing a check.” Meetings are notorious time killers. They start late, have the wrong people in them, meander around their topics, and run long. You should get out of meetings whenever you can and hold fewer of them yourself. If you do run a meeting, keep it short and to the point.

9. They say “no” to almost everything. 

Billionaire Warren Buffet once said, “The difference between successful people and very successful people is that very successful people say ‘no’ to almost everything.” And James Altucher colorfully gave Kevin this tip: “If something is not a ‘Hell Yeah!’ then it’s a no.” Remember, you only have 1,440 minutes in a day. Don’t give them away easily.

10. They follow the 80/20 rule. 

Known as the Pareto Principle, in most cases, 80 percent of results come from only 20 percent of activities. Ultra-productive people know which activities drive the greatest results. Focus on those and ignore the rest.

11. They delegate almost everything. 

Ultra-productive people don’t ask, “How can I do this task?” Instead, they ask, “How can this task get done?” They take the I out of it as much as possible. Ultra-productive people don’t have control issues, and they are not micro-managers. In many cases, good enough is, well, good enough.

12. They touch things only once. 

How many times have you opened a piece of regular mail -- a bill perhaps -- and then put it down, only to deal with it again later? How often do you read an e-mail and then close it and leave it in your inbox to deal with later? Highly successful people try to “touch it once.” If it takes less than five or ten minutes -- whatever it is -- they deal with it right then and there. It reduces stress, since it won’t be in the back of their minds, and it is more efficient, since they won’t have to re-read or re-evaluate the item again in the future.

13. They practice a consistent morning routine. 

Kevin’s single greatest surprise while interviewing over 200 highly successful people was how many of them wanted to share their morning ritual with him. While he heard about a wide variety of habits, most nurtured their bodies in the morning with water, a healthy breakfast, and light exercise, and they nurtured their minds with meditation or prayer, inspirational reading, or journaling.

14. Energy is everything. 

You can’t make more minutes in the day, but you can increase your energy to increase your attention, focus, and productivity. Highly successful people don’t skip meals, sleep, or breaks in the pursuit of more, more, more. Instead, they view food as fuel, sleep as recovery, and breaks as opportunities to recharge in order to get even more done.

Bringing It All Together

You might not be an entrepreneur, an Olympian, or a billionaire (or even want to be), but their secrets just might help you to get more done in less time and assist you to stop feeling so overworked and overwhelmed.
A version of this article appeared on TalentSmart.

Travis Bradberry

Co-author of Emotional Intelligence 2.0 and President at TalentSmart

Award-winning co-author of the best-selling book, Emotional Intelligence 2.0, and the co-founder of TalentSmart -- a consultancy that serves more than 75 percent of Fortune 500 companies and is a leading provider of emotional intelligence tests, training and certification.
His bestselling books have been translated into 25 languages and are available in more than 150 countries. Bradberry has written for, or been covered by, Newsweek, BusinessWeek, Fortune, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and the Harvard Business Review.

Source

The Poison Tendrils of Negative Emotions

How negative emotions lead to self-regulation failure

For readers looking to jump into the deep end of understanding procrastination, I highly recommend the recent volume edited by James Gross, Handbook of Emotion Regulation (link is external). This collection of chapters provides the most current and thorough review of the research literature in the area. Because I have put such emphasis in my own writing on the role of emotions in understanding procrastination, I thought I would summarize aspects of just one of the many chapters of this excellent book. The reference to the chapter written by Dylan Wagner and Todd Heatherton is below.

I was amused and delighted by the metaphor and image that these authors used to depict the role of negative emotions (also called negative affect) in the self-regulation process. In a very typical, academic-style diagram of a model of self-regulation, they first depict a high-level theoretical perspective.
The essential components conceptually look something like this:

TEMPTATIONS & DESIRES    GOALS & STANDARDS    Success
(food, drugs, media use, etc.)         Monitoring    Capacity         Failure

At the center of the model are our goals and standards. In other words, central to self-regulation is monitoring our progress towards our goals and our capacity to do this.  What they depict as directly influencing our goals and standards are temptations and desires. You know, other more fun stuff.  Finally, the model makes it clear that depending on how well we can ignore the temptations while maintaining our goal pursuit predicts whether we succeed or fail. In sum, it’s a common, simple model of self-regulation that is typical of a scholarly paper.
The amusing bit is how they chose to depict the effects of negative affect (negative emotions). They have the same diagram but with a giant black hole underneath the model out of which evil tendrils emerge. These tendrils, as tendrils will, grab on to every component of the model. This model now emphasizes a failure outcome, and the final piece of the model is how failure now feeds back down to the hole from which the tendrils emerge and feed the negative affect.
[Note: While I am tempted to add a photo of their diagram here, there are copyright laws that prevent usage in this way, so I hope that this description allowed you to imagine this quite vivid depiction of a psychological model.]
As they note in the caption to this figure, “Negative affect spreads poison tendrils into every aspect of self-regulation, amplifying desires, decreasing monitoring, depleting limited capacity, and encouraging misregulation strategies (e.g., mood repair and escape from aversive self-awareness), which can relieve negative affect in the short term but often lead to further negative affect upon failure to meet one’s goals” (emphasis added).
Well done!  That’s certainly the lived experience of the effects of negative emotions on our self-regulation. The tendrils pull us down.
These negative emotions seem to emerge from a dark place within us, grabbing on to every aspect of our self, and undermine our ability to self-regulate. And, of course, as we fail in our attempts to self-regulate, the self-blame begins, as does the downward spiral of self-esteem and self-efficacy.
In the bulk of the chapter, Wagner and Heatherton summarize numerous studies related to the different ways that negative emotions, emotion regulation and self-regulation interact. It’s important to remember that these are interactive effects, or as I like to say, it’s a sort of dance between these processes that undermine our success. As the authors summarize this interaction, we learn the following:

• Negative affect (emotions) leads to a desire to “feel good now,” escaping the negative state by engaging in pleasurable activities and reducing self-awareness (to lower any potential feelings of guilt; a process I have described previously);
• These choices related to mood repair serve to increase the pull or attractiveness of immediately available rewards and temptations grow;
• With a focus on pleasure and lower self-awareness, the ability to self-monitor is diminished; and at the same time,
• Negative affect, which is related to rumination, puts an increased load on working memory that further weakens the ability to self-monitor and further undermines goal pursuit, or any further attempt at self-regulation (i.e., no monitoring, no self-control).

It’s not a pretty picture, is it?  But it’s certainly one that I think every human being knows. It’s that downward spiral we experience when “we don’t feel like it” and negative emotions begin to “weave their tendrils” (as these authors depict) throughout our self-regulatory process.

Interestingly, Wagner and Heatherton paint this despairing picture even a little darker, writing:
“Throw in the fact that prior self-regulatory effort may leave the individual in a depleted state in which both resources for further self-control are lacking and the strength of impulses and temptations are increased, and it is a small miracle that people are not constantly acting out their fantasies, drinking, smoking, or indulging in every gastronomic desire” (emphasis added).
This is indeed a pretty dire picture, and it’s not helped by the fact that there is very little research documenting how positive emotions might reverse this. Although there is some evidence to suggest that positive emotions might buffer against ego-depletion and enhance self-regulation, positive emotions are not simply the antidote.  In fact, positive emotions might feed further off-task behaviors if this becomes the new focus of attention; a sort of carpe diem or even “what the hell” effect where we give in and decide it’s time to eat, drink and be merry.
The authors end with this sentence:
“Negative affect is thus a particularly potent threat to self-regulation, because it not only reduces the capacity for control (increased working memory load, reduced self-awareness and monitoring) but it may also lead to increases in the strength of experienced desires and emotions, rendering them all the more difficult to resist.”
So, you might ask as you join me in this dark place, “what are we to do?”  How do we manage to self-regulate?  Well, this has been the focus of most of my blog writing over the past years, with all sorts of strategies derived from a variety of different studies.
In my last blog post, I re-emphasized the importance of not paying attention to these emotions when they arise. Not a simple thing, I understand, as I noted above that negative emotions (affect) are related to and even seem to cause rumination. This rumination is the antithesis of “not paying attention.” But you get my point, right? The research summarized in this chapter makes it clear that negative emotions really do undermine self-regulation through processes like rumination that puts too much load on working memory (which derails monitoring our goal pursuit), or by provoking a hedonic response to feel good now.

Gross offers some potential points of intervention in his own process model of emotion. And, although it’s simply not possible to go much further in a single blog post, I will note that one effective strategy that is incorporated into many successful procrastination interventions is learning to modify appraisals of our situation to alter its emotional significance (I’ll come back to this at some other time, as this was part of the work we did in our recent book Procrastination, Health and Well-Being (link is external)). In any case, the focus here is on cognitive change, the kind emphasized in cognitive behavioral therapies, for example.
I hope that you can see that despite the “poison tendrils” of negative emotions depicted so vividly by Wagner and Heatherton, there are routes to self-regulatory success.  For some of us, this is certainly made more difficult by personality traits such as low emotional stability, as we are more chronically attuned to negative emotions. However, we can learn to act out of character as we learn new strategies to cope. Strategies that are much more effective than avoidance, self-blame and behavioral disengagement, each of which has been demonstrated to be risks not only to our success, but to our health.

Source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dont-delay/201607/the-poison-tendrils-negative-emotions?collection=1096682
References
Pychyl, T.A., & Sirois, F.M. (2016). Procrastination, emotion-regulation and well-being. In F.M. Sirois & T.A. Pychyl, (Eds.), Procrastination, health and well-being (pp. 163-188). New York: Elsevier.
Sirois, F.M. (2015). Is procrastination a vulnerability factor for hypertension and cardiovascular disease? Testing an extension of the procrastination-health model. Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 38, 578-589.
Wagner, D.D. & Heatherton, T.F. (2014). Emotion and self-regulation failure. In J. J. Gross (Ed.), Handbook of emotion regulation (pp. 613-628). New York: The Guilford Press.

Timothy A. Pychyl, Ph.D., is an associate professor of psychology at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, where he specializes in the study of procrastination

What Happened When I Lived by Dale Carnegie's Rules

What Happened When I Lived by Dale Carnegie's Rules

Tony Rehagen      

Let’s just say I know Aubrey.       

Apple Store employees don’t wear name tags, but I remember that name. That moniker and the wiry young man with thick glasses that belong to it were the unwitting foci of my frustration and anger three weeks ago, the last time I was sitting here at the so-called Genius Bar. Aubrey was the so-called genius who told me in some esoteric techie dialect that my old MacBook was out of memory or washer fluid or whatever, that three years of work I had failed to back up was essentially lost, and that I was a moron. (OK, I said that last part, but he didn’t argue.)

Well, now I’m back, snarling for a fight after having been cast into the next-door Macy’s for more than an hour, waiting to be paged. My brand-new MacBook won’t start, and I’m certain that almost a month’s worth of un-backed-up work is gone and my life and career are over. And Aubrey, of all name-tag-less messengers, once again drew the short straw. After a few minutes of poking and prodding the machine, he tells me that it might just be my display on the fritz, that all my data might be safe. But the only way to know, says Aubrey, is to plug the laptop into an external display. And the only one, says Aubrey, in this whole entire computer store, is currently being used by an hour-long Apple Watch tutorial.

I’m ready to blow—when certain words come rushing back to me:

Give honest and sincere appreciation, I think.

I hear the imagined Midwestern accent of Dale Carnegie reciting the second tenet of his “Fundamental Techniques in Handling People,” the first section of his best-selling 1936 field bible for relationships, How to Win Friends and Influence People, a building block for so much of the personal development content that has come since.

“People will rarely work at their maximum potential under criticism, but honest appreciation brings out their best.”

“Appreciation is one of the most powerful tools in the world,” the passage reads. “People will rarely work at their maximum potential under criticism, but honest appreciation brings out their best.”

It reminds me to take a breath and consider Aubrey: While I was waiting, I had observed him floating between customers, effortlessly untangling the power cable of one patron’s computer as he talked someone else through an iPhone issue, somehow paying attention to both. Both had walked away smiling, their problems apparently resolved. When he came to me, he knew my machine intimately, had an instinct for what the simplest explanation for its malady might be and how to check. It occurs to me that while I have been furious with one person for being so calm while my world is crashing, he must be dealing with dozens of frustrated, frantic people like me every day. And yet he is reassuring and doesn’t talk down to me. He is really good at his job.

“Look, I know you deal with idiots like me all day,” I say. “I can’t imagine what it’s like trying to solve a billion little crises, one after another. I honestly don’t know how you do it. My problem isn’t your fault—if anything, it’s my fault for not backing up my work. In fact, maybe you could help me with that once we get the machine working…”

Aubrey and I start up a little conversation. He tells me he enjoys helping people but eventually wants to move up to a more supervisory role. In fact, he says, he has an interview for a higher position later today. I tell him it must be hard to focus on trouble-shooting these little glitches with that event on the horizon. He smiles, shrugs off the notion, and mentions that he might be able to find another monitor in the back that can help us solve my problem.

***

The assignment was simple: Read How to Win Friends and Influence People, then live by its advice for an entire month. My initial reaction was one of incredulity. Of course I knew of the book, which has sold more than 30 million copies worldwide and was one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential non-fiction books of all time. But I’ve never been into the self-improvement genre. It’s not that I’m perfect—I’ve just never thought to read an 80-year-old tome penned by a motivational speaker who died during Eisenhower’s first term.

There were grounds for skepticism: First of all, the material is a bit dated. Even after a second edition was released in the 1980s, leaving out the original sections on letter-writing for “miraculous results” and on marriage advice, the updated book comes off as a bit antiquated in places. For instance, the chapter suggesting that effective leaders use praise to sugarcoat criticism begins with an anecdote of President Calvin Coolidge telling one of his secretaries, “That’s a pretty dress you are wearing this morning, and you are a very attractive young woman,” before admonishing her for poor punctuation. (In 2011, Dale Carnegie & Associates Inc., which carries on the author’s teachings and training courses, put out a complete reboot, How to Win Friends and Influence People in the Digital Age, with a 21st-century spin on advice and anecdotes.)

The second reservation I had was that I knew the book had been critically skewered, through the years, as a guide for manipulating people. But Carnegie evidently anticipated such cynicism. In the second chapter of the book, he explains, “One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned…. No! No! No! I am not suggesting flattery!... I’m talking about a new way of life.”

“Do unto others as you would have done unto you” might sound like common sense until you consider that 1) How to Win Friends was revolutionary in its time, practically inventing the genre of self-improvement books; and 2) When you reflect on your own daily interactions, the idea of taking a moment to sincerely appreciate where your counterpart is coming from isn’t all that common.

At least that was the case with me. And among the corny expressions (“Bear Oil!”) and dusty stories about William Howard Taft and Woodrow Wilson, I found real nuggets that I put to use almost immediately.

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere.

“Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.” This one is a parenting must. When my 4-year-old failed to put her dirty clothes in the hamper, I didn’t yell this time. I bit my lip and told her she did such a good job putting away her toys that she just had to do the same thing with her shirt and pants. “If a desired outcome seems like a momentous task, people will give up and lose heart,” Carnegie writes. “But if a fault seems easy to correct, they will readily jump at the opportunity to improve.” And I was sure to “praise every improvement” when she finally did it—two weeks later.

Carnegie also came in handy with the missus. “Whenever we argue with someone, no matter if we win or lose the argument, we still lose,” he writes. He was obviously married.

During this assignment, my wife and I happened to be buying a new house, and we had the occasion to meet the sellers at the property after we had come to terms. Haggling over the price had been a little contentious, and the inspection even more so. Still, I made it a point to “smile” and “begin in a friendly way,” as Carnegie instructs. I offered the sellers a firm handshake and a sincere appreciation for how they had kept up the property. I was a “good listener” as they talked about improvements they’d made to the place, picking up a few tips to store away for myself. I “talk[ed] in terms of the other person’s interest”—in this case one of the sellers mentioned the herb garden she had planted—and my wife and I followed her on a tour of the yard as she enthusiastically pointed out the tarragon, rosemary and sage that we’ll now know to harvest.

Carnegie also implores us to “make the other person feel important—and do it sincerely.” Before we left, we asked for the inside scoop on the neighborhood, and the sellers immediately spilled the names of the plumber down the street, two auto mechanics we could trust, and the best off-the-menu Mexican food in the ZIP code.

***

More than any specific tip, however, a quick read (at 276 pages) of this book was a reminder that the key to being a human among humans is to always stop and consider the other person’s feelings and perspectives. The only way to break down any barrier between you and someone else is through mutual understanding—and it often has to start with you.

So back at the Apple Store, when I cork my internal tirade and recognize that Aubrey, my only chance at computer salvation, must be sick of my crap, I genuinely sympathize. I empathize. I try to connect on a human level. And when he returns from the back room with a newly rigged monitor, he quickly plugs it into my MacBook and establishes that it is indeed just a faulty display and that all of my files are fine. He indulges my paranoia and patiently waits while I back up my crucial data to a thumb drive, just in case. He tells me my machine will be ready in three business days. I thank him and wish him luck on his interview this afternoon.

As I leave, I’m happy, not only about my computer and files and the fact that the machine is still under warranty and the repair will be free, but that I might have made Aubrey’s day a little bit easier. I sincerely hope Aubrey’s boss recognizes and appreciates his skills. I sincerely hope he gets that promotion. And after I get my laptop back, I sincerely hope I never see Aubrey again.

http://www.success.com/blog/what-happened-when-i-lived-by-dale-carnegies-rules

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How Do High Achievers Really Think?

Beliefs that lead to success.

Posted Oct 19, 2011

Positive affirmations (link is external) are a staple of the self-help industry (link is external), but there is a problem with standing in front of the mirror every morning and saying something like: "I prosper wherever I turn and I know that I deserve prosperity of all kinds." "I am my own unique self—special, creative and wonderful." Or "I will be king of the world in just five days, I just know it." It makes you feel kinda silly (and sometimes worse).

What does research show (link is external) about how high achievers really think? High achievers are often marked, unsurprisingly, by a strong motive to achieve. Less accomplished individuals are often more motivated to avoid failure.
Achievement motivated individuals have a strong desire to accomplish something important, and gain gratification from success in demanding tasks. Consequently they are willing to expend intense effort over long timespans in the pursuit of their goals.
Failure-avoiding individuals are more focused on protecting themselves from the embarrassment and sense of incompetence that can accompany failing at a valued task. Consequently they are less likely to attempt achievement-oriented tasks, and may give up quickly if success is not readily forthcoming. Where total avoidance of tasks is not possible, failure-avoiding individuals may procrastinate, give less than their best effort, or engage in other self-handicapping behaviour that provides a face-saving excuse in the event of failure (e.g. drinking heavily the night before the morning of an important exam).
Of course, achievement motivation versus failure avoidance motivation exist on a continuum, with most of us falling somewhere in the middle. In the research literature, this continuum is described as Relative Motive Strength.
An individual's relative motive strength does not exist in a vacuum, but is associated with an elaborate matrix of beliefs that justify the commitment of intense effort toward goal achievement, or the relative lack thereof. The core beliefs that differentiate achievement motivated individuals are:

1. Success is your personal responsibility
Achievement motivated individuals tend to believe that initiative, effort, and persistence are key determinants of success at demanding tasks. Failure-avoiding individuals are more likely to view success as dependent on available resources and situational constraints (e.g. the task is too hard, or the marker was biased).

2. Demanding tasks are opportunities
Achievement motivated individuals tend to see demanding tasks where success is uncertain as ‘challenges' or ‘opportunities'. Failure avoiding individuals are more likely to see them as ‘threats' that may lead to the embarrassment of failure. An achievement motivated individual might tell a failure avoiding individual, "Anything worthwhile is difficult, so stop acting so surprised".

3. Achievement striving is enjoyable
Achievement motivated individuals associate effort on demanding tasks with dedication, concentration, commitment and involvement. Failure-avoiding individuals categorise such effort as overloading or stressful. They see perseverance in the face of setbacks and obstacles as slightly compulsive.

4. Achievement striving is valuable
Achievement motivated individuals value hard work in and of itself. Failure-avoiding individuals may mock achievement striving as uncool (e.g. the attitude that the L on learner plates stands for Loser). They may associate achievement striving with lack of a social life or even early death by heart attack.

5. Skills can be improved
Achievement-motivated individuals have a strong belief that they can improve their performance on demanding tasks with practice, training, coaching, and dedication to learning. Failure-avoiding individuals tend to see skills as fixed and/or dependent on innate talents.
The research into how skills can most effectively be improved is discussed here.

6. Persistence works
Achievement motivated individuals are inclined to believe that continued effort and commitment will overcome initial obstacles or failures. Failure-avoiding individuals are inclined to see initial failure as a sign of things to come.
So the achievement motivated individual says, "Don't assume that you can't do something until you've tried. And I mean really tried, like tried 3000 times, not that you tried three times, and 'oh I give up.'"
And the failure-avoiding individual responds, "You really need to learn when to quit."

The beliefs held by achievement-motivated individuals are not necessarily more logical or objectively correct than the beliefs held by failure-avoiding individuals, certainly not in all situations. However, they are empirically associated with high levels of achievement.

Once you understand the modes of achievement motivated versus failure-avoiding thinking, you will recognise them in the way that others talk about their goals, dreams, successes, and setbacks. You will also recognise them in your own thinking, and you can choose to cultivate the beliefs that will support you to achieve your goals. This is more effective than just trying to think positive and relying on the law of attraction (link is external) to provide you with what you want.

Carl Beuke, Ph.D., is a psychologist working in management and leadership. He works with the New Zealand Prisons Service and Ministry for the Environment, among others.

Source - How Do High Achievers Really Think?

Motivation for Smart People (Sans Chest Pounding)

July 25, 2006 by Steve Pavlina

Do you ever feel there’s a greater being inside of you just bursting to get out? You can feel its presence sometimes, can’t you? It’s the voice that encourages you to really make something of your life. When you act congruently with that voice, it’s like you’re a whole new person. You feel like a god in a human body. You’re bold and courageous. You’re strong. You’re unstoppable.

But then reality sets in, and soon those moments are history. Where did that powerful voice go? Were you merely suffering from delusions of grandeur?

It isn’t hard to temporarily put yourself into an emotional state of power. Just go to any Tony Robbins’ concert seminar, and he’ll have you dancing in the aisles feeling totally motivated. Put on your favorite fast-tempo music, stand tall, breathe strong, chest out, shoulders back. Strut around like a superhero. Shout, “Yes!” Pound your chest a few times for good measure. You’ll look like a dolt, but this does actually work.
But then you go home, and the emotional motivation fades away. Your great ideas now seem impractical. How many times have you been temporarily inspired with an idea like, “I want to start my own business,” and then a week later it’s forgotten? You come up with inspiring ideas when you’re motivated, but you fail to maintain that level of motivation through the action phase.
So how do you reach the point of high motivation and stay there?
Emotional motivation
Tony Robbins says the key to motivation is state management. This means conditioning yourself to feel a certain way via techniques like anchoring (connecting an emotion to a physical trigger). When Tony pounds his chest while speaking, he’s firing off anchors he previously conditioned. The downside is that you need to keep firing off these anchors as well as periodically reconditioning them to keep your motivation up. That means lots and lots of chest pounding.
As another motivational method, Tony suggests writing down the pleasure you associate to a task as well as the pain of not doing it. Again the idea here is to stir up your emotions, so you’ll be motivated to take action. This type of motivation is usually short-lived, even when the emotions involved are very intense.
I studied and practiced these kinds of emotional motivation techniques extensively during my 20s. In the long run, I didn’t find them particularly effective. My intellect saw right through all the chest pounding. The logical part of my mind was ultimately dissatisfied with attempts to induce motivation through emotional manipulation.
Have you ever seen one of those rah-rah motivational speakers? If the speaker is good, s/he will have an emotional effect on you and get you to feel motivated. But within a day or two, that emotional boost fades away, and you’re back to normal. You can listen to hundreds of motivational speakers and experience an emotional yo-yo effect, but it doesn’t last. I think this is especially common with technically minded people. We’re accustomed to thinking with our heads. We’re still emotional creatures on some level, but our emotional B.S. detectors periodically scrub our minds free of anything that doesn’t satisfy our logic.
Intellectual motivation
I used to get frustrated when my emotional conditioning fizzled out after a while. Eventually I realized that being guided by intellect, not emotion, wasn’t such a bad thing after all. I just had to learn to use my mind as an effective motivational tool. I stopped using emotional motivation techniques and decided to see if I could motivate myself intellectually. I figured that if I wasn’t feeling motivated to go after a particular goal, maybe there was a logical reason for it. Perhaps I just wasn’t taking my logic far enough to see it.
I noted that when I had strong intellectual reasons for doing something, I usually didn’t have trouble taking action. I’m motivated to exercise regularly because doing so is intelligent and reasonable. I don’t need to emotionally pump myself up to go to the gym. I just go.
But when my mind thinks a goal is wrong on some level, I usually feel blocked. I eventually realized that this was my mind’s way of telling me the goal was a mistake to begin with.
Sometimes a goal seems to make sense on one level, but when you look further upstream, it becomes clear the goal is ill advised. Suppose you work in sales, and you set a goal to increase your income by 20% by becoming a more effective salesperson. That seems like a reasonable and intelligent goal. But maybe you’re surprised to find yourself encountering all sorts of internal blocks when you try to pursue it. You should feel motivated, but you just don’t. The problem may be that on a deeper level, your mind knows you don’t want to be working in sales at all. You really want to be a musician. So no matter how hard you push yourself in your sales career, it will always be a motivational dead end. You’ll never convince your mind to give up on your more important dream of being a musician.
When you set goals that are too small and too timid, you suffer a perpetual lack of motivation. Try all the emotional conditioning techniques you want, but you’re wasting your time. Deep down you already know the truth. You just need to summon the courage to acknowledge your true desires. Then you’ll have to deal with the self-doubt and fear that’s been making you think too small. There’s no getting around that if you want to experience lasting motivation. Ironically, the real key to motivation is to set goals that scare you.
I recommend working through these kinds of blocks in your journal. Type a question like, “Why am I feeling unmotivated to achieve this goal?” Then type whatever answer comes to mind. You’ll often find that the source of your block is that you’re thinking too small. You’re letting fears, excuses, and limiting beliefs hold you back. Your subconscious mind knows you’re settling, so it won’t provide any motivational fuel until you step up, face your fears, and acknowledge your heart’s desire. Once you finally decide to face your fears and drop the excuses, then you’ll find your motivation turning on full blast.
When I use this process myself, I uncover new goals that seem unreasonably big. I admit that I want them, but I feel incapable of achieving them. However, when I finally step up and set goals that lie outside my comfort zone, somehow I end up feeling very motivated, and I summon all sorts of unexpected resources to help me.
Was it unreasonable to set a web traffic goal of reaching a million monthly visitors without spending any money on marketing? I originally thought so, but I privately set that goal before I ever launched this site because it inspired me. More reasonable traffic goals had no motivational effect on me. Now that I’ve achieved that goal, my next traffic goal is to reach 10 million visitors a month. Is that unreasonable? Probably. But somehow it’s very motivating to me.
It seems counter-intuitive that motivation may be highest when setting goals that lie outside your comfort zone, but I’ve seen this pattern too many times to discount it. Perhaps we have to set big, hairy, audacious goals in order to feel truly motivated. Maybe little goals just aren’t enough to trigger the release of motivational energy. If we think a goal is too easy, we won’t commit all our internal resources. It’s only when we set unreasonable goals that all our internal resources come online, including motivation and drive.
When I set a goal that’s big enough and challenging enough, I never need to pump myself up with emotional rah-rah. I feel motivated to pursue the goal because my intellect is fully behind it. I just find myself doing what needs to be done. No chest pounding required.

Source Motivation for Smart People (Sans Chest Pounding)

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Self Improvement and Self Growth

Simple Technique for Self Improvement and Self Growth

By Remez Sasson

Nowadays, there is a growing interest in self growth and self improvement techniques. There is a growing number of books, articles and websites dealing with these topics.

It seems that people are turning within them, to find the solution to their problems. They seek knowledge, techniques, workshops, lectures, and teachers, who can show them the way.

People are beginning to understand that self improvement and self growth can improve the quality of their lives.

The process of inner change requires inner work.
It is not enough to read articles and books. You also have to practice what you read. Inner change requires motivation, desire, ambition, perseverance and dedication.

When you starting with a self improvement program, it is common to encounter inner resistance that comes from your old habits and from your subconscious mind, and also resistance and opposition from the people around you.

The desire to change, build new habits and improve oneself must be strong enough to resist laziness, the desire to give up, and the fear and ridicule of opposition from family, friends or colleagues.

A simple technique
Let me tell you something about myself. I have been attracted to self improvement from an early age, and have regarded it as a source of inner strength and happiness, and a way to a improve my life.

One of the most useful techniques I discovered, was a simple, but very effective technique. It consisted of watching how people behaved and acted in various situations, and then looking inside myself, to find out if I behaved in the same way under the same conditions.

When I saw people with certain traits of character, or a certain kind of behavior that I did not like, I examined myself to see whether I possessed them too. If I did, I visualized and rehearsed in my mind a different sort of behavior. In my mind's eye, I saw myself with the opposite traits of character.

I visualized myself in various situations, in which I manifested the new behavior.

When I encountered traits of character or behavior, which I liked, I used to think about their advantages and benefits, and about their importance in my life. Here too, I used visualization and affirmations, and endeavored to enact them in my daily life.

In this way, I learned and benefited a lot from the behavior and actions of the people around me, at work, at home, on the street, and everywhere else. It was never for the purpose of judging them or taking advantage of them, but for learning how to act, react and behave in a better way.

This process had another benefit. It increased the knowledge and understanding about how the mind and thoughts influence the behavior and actions of people.

Tips for a Simple Self Growth Technique

1. Look around you and watch how people behave in various circumstances. Watch the people you meet at home, work, at the supermarket, on the bus, train and on the street. You may also watch and learn from people being interviewed on TV.

2. Watch how people talk, walk and react, and how they are treated by others.

3. Pay attention to the way people use their voice and how they react to other people's voices. Watch how you feel and how you react when people shout, or speak softly. Watch what happens when people get angry, restless and upset, and what happens to you and others, when they are calm and relaxed.

4. If you do not like what you see, analyze why you do not like it, and then analyze your own behavior to find out, whether you behave in the same way. Be honest and impartial in your analysis.

5. When you discover that you possess some of these undesirable traits of character and behavior, affirm to yourself often that every time you catch yourself indulging in these traits or behavior, you are going to be aware of them, and do your best to avoid them.

6. Play in your mind a mental scene of how you would like to behave. Repeat it several times a day, every day.

7. When you detect in someone a sort of behavior or character traits you like and desire to possess, try to act in a similar way. Here too, visualize several times each day a scene, where you act and behave in that different way.

8. Think and visualize over and again in your mind how you would like to act and behave. Constantly, remind yourself of the changes you desire to make, and strive to act according to them. Every time that you find yourself acting according to your old habit, remember your decision to change and improve, and act accordingly.

9. Do not be disappointed or frustrated if you do not attain fast results. It does not matter how many times you fail or forget to behave as you desired. Persevere with your efforts and never give up, and you will begin to see how you and your life change.

About the Author

Remez Sasson is the founder of Success Consciousness. He is the author of articles and books, teaching how to use your mental tools and inner powers to create a life of happiness, success, fulfillment and inner peace.

Source