Are You a Dinosaur Or A Mouse

I was watching a documentary the other day about the demise of the dinosaurs. What was fascinating was that before the 6 mile wide asteroid hit what is now the Gulf of Mexico all those millions of years ago, dinosaurs dominated the earth. Dinosaur fossils have been found in vast numbers on every continent and their sheer size meant wherever they went, they were in charge!

But after the asteroid the only creatures that survived and then thrived were the tiny mammals and reptiles.

Why was that?

Its simple. Charles Darwin put it best:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.

These tiny creatures were able to survive because of their adaptability, their ability to move quickly and change according to circumstances, their ability to store energy and most importantly of all, their agility.

Looking at businesses today we can see that the corporate world is dominated by vast global enterprises but these enterprises have much in common with their ancient ancestors! When faced with challenges they don’t have the agility to adapt in a rapidly changing world. And the more energy they put into trying to change the world to suit them, the less they have for their true purpose. And the less sustainable they become.

The question is, is your business a dinosaur… or a mouse?

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More Momentum

Momentum is always a good thing so here’s another idea to get you moving when you’re feeling stuck.

When you are really stuck momentum is far more important than direction. Imagine trying to push a car. Would you try to push it round a corner from a standing stop? Or would you always get it moving first and then push it in the direction you want it to go.

Its the same with us, its much easier to move in the right direction once you’re actually moving. So when you are really stuck you need to find something that will raise your energy enough that you can regain some momentum. So here’s a suggestion:

When you’re feeling full of energy and optimism make yourself a big long list of at least 101 things you want to do, be, have or give in your lifetime. You can make it longer if you like and keep adding to this list all the time as you get new ideas. In fact I believe you should never stop adding to this list because the moment you do your life will start running out of energy! George Bernard Shaw said

“We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.”

And having goals is a huge part of playing!

Your list will contain some goals, some big and some small, and it will contain long term plans and every day to-do tasks, big things, small things, easy things, things you have no earthly idea how to do now and things you can do in the next 30 seconds, fun things and challenging things. The more you can put on this list the more useful to you it will be.

Now next time you are feeling stuck and you don’t know what to do next have a look at this list and pick one thing that jumps out at you and do it. It might have nothing to do with your goals or what you are supposed to be doing – you might decide to go and get a manicure when you “should” be finishing your book! But the simple act of taking action will create more momentum that sitting looking at the screen feeling guilty will ever do!

Give it a try next time you’re stuck and let me know how it goes.

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Momentum

Creating momentum towards a goal is one of the most powerful things we can do to make sure we achieve the goal but sometimes its really challenging to maintain that momentum, especially if its a huge goal that is going to take a lot of time to achieve.

I found this great post by Mike Michalowicz, author of The Pumpkin Plan which has some really good ideas about how to motivate yourself when the momentum seems to be running out. Lets face it, even the most motivated of us runs short of energy once in a while. But if we have strategies in place that can get us up and running again quickly we don’t need to take up residence in that stuck place!

Let me know what you think and please share the strategies you use when you get stuck.

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Start Your Day Up!

It doesn’t matter how much of a positive person you are, the reality is that the world out there can be pretty negative at times! That’s why its really important that the first thing you do every day is raise your personal energy and your mindset so that you have the resilience to deal with whatever the world throws at you!

Its so easy to get up and dive straight into your day without ever actually taking the time to ready yourself for the challenges that lie ahead. But the truth is, if you start the day half empty you’re not going to get beyond lunchtime before your resources are depleted and you just don’t have anything left to give. At best you only achieve half of what you intended. At worst, you have to resort to some energy vampire techniques just to get you through the rest of the day!

So how do you start the day up?

There are three areas you want to focus on energising. Mind, Body, Focus. Success expert Jack Canfield says we should devote just ten minutes a day to energising each of these areas and that can make a phenomenal difference to how we experience our lives and our results.

Research has shown time and time again that meditation benefits us in all areas of our lives. It can help us deal with stress, it can make us more focused, and it can even help us deal with physical illness. It can make us calmer, more creative, it can improve our relationships and it can help us learn. In fact its difficult to find any reason why we should not make meditation a regular part of our day. How you choose to meditate is entirely up to you, there are so many different ways so play around until you find one that works for you and that you WILL do every day. Here’s a great one to start you off! Get into the habit of doing just 10 minutes every morning as soon as you wake up and watch your energy levels soar!

Starting your day off with some physical exercise is a great way to remind your body that its alive! Movement is life! And yet we spend so much of our modern lives stuck in front of a computer, in a car, or on a comfy sofa in front of the TV. The fact is we are made to move, and movement is one of the ways our body integrates learning so any movement you do is actually making you more intelligent! Again, what you choose to do is up to you. What’s more important is THAT you do it! Yoga is a great way of starting off your day and it doesn’t need to take long. Here’s a really great sequence to lift your mood.

If you don’t fancy yoga, then even a quick walk round the block will get your blood flowing, and if you have a dog to walk, even better because they will not let you have a day off!

And once you’ve woken up your mind and your body its time to focus on what you want to achieve today. So often we float through a day responding and reacting to other people’s demands of us and the reason for this is we have never taken to time to focus on what WE want from the day. Take just 10 minutes to think about it and make a list of what you intend to do with your day, even if its just relax and have fun. That way you get to live your day on your terms and according to your goals not someone else’s! Staying focused on what you want to achieve means you will use your time wisely and on purpose. Just taking that 10 minutes to plan your day can make all the difference between having an unproductive frustrating day and a wonderful, purposeful and productive one. And even if your day goes completely pear shaped (yes we all have days like that!) having an action plan means that least you will end the day with more energy and focus than you would have done otherwise! But more importantly you will know exactly how far off track you are so you can get back on course easily and quickly.

So tonight go to bed early and set your alarm clock 30 minutes early and start your day UP!

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Surfing The Wave

One of the most helpful things you can learn when you are pushing forward with powerful goals is how to recognise where you are in that area between learning and consolidating that we call the comfort zone.

If we can learn to surf that wave, we maximise the speed of our progress and we minimise the levels of stress. So its a good thing to learn if you want results fast!

Firstly lets look at how it feels when we’re in flow. Flow is when your level of expertise perfectly matches the challenge of the task. Its when you do things almost automatically, you don’t have to think too hard about it, your whole system just knows what to do and gets on with it. If you’re an experienced driver you will be in flow much of the time. You don’t have to think about turning the wheel, you just think about where you want to be. When we are in flow time seems to slow down so your reactions become effortless, there’s no rush or panic, just a sense of calm focus.

Now, try to remember when you first started learning to drive. Remember how unfamiliar everything felt. There were so many things to think about. So many lights and levers and buttons and you wondered how you were ever going to master it. Things seemed to happen very quickly and you had to make so many decisions all at once and everything seemed disjointed and clumsy. You had to consciously think where your hands and feet were and what they were doing and panic was never far away! This is the learning zone.

Now imagine that your driving instructor took you out on Sheikh Zayed Road at rush hour. Now you have all the other drivers to think about as well, people are coming at you from all directions, beeping their horns, narrowly missing you, making rude gestures, and on top of that your instructor is shouting at you as well. Suddenly your mind goes blank, your hands start sweating, your heart is beating out of your chest, you have no idea what to do next and you freeze completely. This is the burn out zone.

Now imagine the next lesson. The instructor takes you round the back roads of a half empty industrial estate on a Friday (weekend) morning. He makes you go round and round and round, practising turning, reversing, stopping, starting, speeding up, slowing down and there’s no other traffic on the road and everything is calm. Suddenly all of those complicated actions start to make sense and the more often you do them the less you have to actually think about them. This is the consolidation zone where you practice what you’ve learned until it becomes a part of you.

Now imagine the instructor tells you to do this day after day and tells you never to go on the busy roads and only to drive when there’s no one else out. You’ve practiced everything a million times and you never seem to be getting anywhere. Suddenly you start to make silly mistakes. You lose concentration. You are bored to tears and you can’t remember why you ever wanted to learn to drive in the first place. You can never go anywhere because you might come across other traffic. All of your learning is now useless and pretty soon you give up. But if anyone suggests you try something a bit more challenging, fear comes up and you remember the burn out zone and stay exactly where you are. This is the rust out zone.

Both the rust out zone and the burn out zone are places you really don’t want to spend much time. If you are pushing ahead fast and really stretching yourself you may want to foray out into the burn out zone, but don’t stay too long and try to go with someone who has been there before so you can hang on to them!  Likewise, if you are tired and stressed you may want to rest for a little while in the rust out zone. But don’t get comfortable there or you’ll be stuck forever!

Learn to recognise the signs that you’re in these zones and you can avoid their perils and achieve incredible things in less time and with less stress than you ever thought possible!

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Goals Into Action

One of the things I see time and time again is that people do not distinguish between goals and action plans. The thing is, not doing so can get you stuck just about quicker than anything else. Its fantastic to set big hairy scary goals, in fact its the only way we ever get even close to living our potential. But when it comes to action plans its got to be easy and do-able, otherwise, chances are it won’t get done.

Here’s how I define the difference:

A goal is a result – so for example it might be a book completed, a weight loss target achieved, and income goal met or even a car owned.

The action steps are the things you need to do to achieve that result. Once you have set the goal you need to break it down into action steps and deadlines for those action steps to be completed.

In fact you can make it easier on yourself by breaking your goals down into smaller steps as well – that makes them so much easier to tackle. So for example, say you were to set a goal to lose 100 pounds by this time next year. That’s a big goal and your Inner reptile is going to go on high alert as soon as you set that as a goal so how about breaking it down a bit – how many months are we talking about – 12 of course. So your real goal is just over 8 pounds a month – is that actually do-able? There’s no point in setting a goal that is not ever going to be achievable. Experts tell us a two pounds a week weightless is healthy and sustainable so yes, its do-able. But its still a big scary number so lets break it down further – that works out at 2 pounds a week. Does 2 pounds feel less daunting that 100. Of course it does. So focus on the two pounds and the 100 will take care of itself.

You can do this same thing with income goals – say you want to earn 20k a month (dirhams, dollars, pounds, it doesn’t matter!). Its a big scary number in any currency if you are nowhere close to earning it. So break it down – what’s the most you’ve ever earned in a day? Can you see yourself doing that? You know you can because you already have. Ok now focus on doing that again and again until you have achieved your 20k,. It doesn’t even need to all be in one month to start with. Once you have achieved the number all you have to do now is work on the timescale.

If you focus on achieving it all in the first month you will scare your Inner reptile silly and we all know what the consequences of that are! And here’s the real problem, the more often you fail, the stronger the Inner Reptile’s hold on you will become. It won’t matter how strong your affirmations are, or how powerfully you visualise, your Inner Reptile is stronger and he will make it his mission to keep you safely where you are!

So now you have an easy goal to focus on that, if you do it enough times will take you to your big goal. Now look at the steps you need to take to achieve that goal. Break them down and down until you have really simple steps that you know you can do. This is your action plan. The biggest most unachievable-seeming goal is just a series of simple action steps and the easier you make it on yourself, the faster you will achieve your goals.

Goal achieving doesn’t have to be hard – its just one of those old reptilian tricks that makes us think that way!

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The Mystery

This is really wonderful!

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Like It Or Not….

Oops, I seem to have upset a few people with my post on winners and losers! I would imagine the people I upset most were the ones who identified themselves with the losers but honestly that was not my intention.

The thing is, in every situation there are going to be winners and losers. That’s just what life is like a lot of the time. It doesn’t really matter if you like it or not, its still true. The problem starts when politically correct types try to tell people that everyone can be a winner and that losing doesn’t matter.

But they can’t and it does.

And the biggest losers in this belief system are the losers. Because everyone has strengths and weaknesses and having enough self awareness to know what yours are is one of the things that will help you spend time and energy where its going to be most effective.

I know I’m never going to be a great athlete, but imagine if I didn’t know this. Imagine I was deluded enough to think that with enough positive thinking and self esteem and maybe a bit of meditation I could win an Olympic medal and people wanted to make me feel better by encouraging this belief, despite the fact that its obviously something I have no natural talent for. They’d be wasting my time and theirs, and worse than that they’d be helping me to waste my life and feel bad about myself! Far better to be honest and admit that my talents lie elsewhere and focus on developing what I am good at.

There are winners and losers in every field, and a person who is a loser in one area can be a champion in another. That’s what’s great about this life – there’s room for everyone to succeed as long as they focus on and nurture their personal genius within.

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Winners Work Hard

OK I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear!

We all want to believe that winners get there because they are lucky or naturally talented or they knew the right people or because they knew some magic “secret” that no one else knew. But the truth is that whenever you look closely at anyone who is really succeeding in life you find out that the harder they work the luckier they get.

Real winners know that in order to achieve lasting success sacrifices will have to be made. Real winners know that they will have to work really hard, often when they would rather be doing other things and often when they are really tired, frustrated, sick and broke. Real winners know that stress is part of the deal and that if they want to stay successful they are going to have to find a way to deal with stress rather than collapse with a nervous breakdown and let everyone else take the strain! Real winners know that lasting success takes time and they are prepared to stick with it until the job is done.

The thing is that not everyone has it in them to be a real winner. The sad truth about life is there are winners and losers and the winners generally win because they have put in more time, more energy, more effort, more thought, more passion. And sometimes they put all of that in and still don’t always win because, like it or not, life isn’t always fair.

But winning is not just a one time thing and if you consistently put in the time, the energy, the effort, the thought and the passion, over time you will find yourself so far ahead of what you believed possible you will know that it is always worth it.

You never know when you are going to make that breakthrough. But even when you make it, only your best effort will pull you through to true lasting success. So isn’t it worth making your best effort a habit?

 

 

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5 Days To Go!

There’s only 5 days left for me on the WordPress Postaday2011 challenge. Yes, I know there”s only 3 days to the end of 2011 but I didn’t start the challenge until January 3rd so it makes sense to me to keep going until I’ve done a full year.

I’m proud to say I have managed to post every single day in 2011! Its been a great challenge and I’ve learned so much about writing and about commitment. Its been really hard sometimes but often its been surprisingly easy to think of something to write. Life is all around us, all we have to do is observe and something interesting will pop up to write about.

Anyway, WordPress has been amazing in supporting this challenge and they’ve put up 11 questions about Postaday. Here’s my answers:

1. Why did you start the Post a Day/Week Challenge? – I started because it looked like a fun way to keep me on track. I was already blogging almost once a week so it wasn’t going to be a “challenge” for me to that take up so I decided to go for Postaday and see what happened. I thought I’d do it for a month or so but then I got hooked!
2. Describe the state of your blog at the time you started the challenge. – It was fairly new and I didn’t have a lot of followers and I was starting to ask myself what’s the point if no one’s reading it.
3. How did your blog evolve over the course of the challenge? – I’m not sure how it evolved. I found my writing became easier and more relaxed. A couple of themes emerged which I have to take further, like the Energy Vampires series and the Inner Reptile series.
4. Did you post as often as you had hoped? Why or why not? – I posted every single day! Some days I only posted a music link or a link to a great video but my commitment was to post a day and I did it! OK a couple of days I went just past midnight and one day I had a technical challenge and forgot to press “publish” but the next day I posted the one I meant to the previous night and posted another later in the day!
5. What type of blogging strategy works best for you? – Keeping my eyes open and look for inspiration in everything.
6. If you could go back to the beginning, what would you do differently? – Nothing. This was a huge learning experience for me so everything I did, right or wrong, added to my learning.
7. What are you most proud of accomplishing this year? – Blogging every single day. And the buzz I get when I bump into people and they say they read my blog and it really helps them.
8. Name 3 great blogs you discovered through the challenge. – there are so many amazing blogs out there its hard to pick just three. But I’ve met some wonderful people through this like Chris at bridgesburning.wordpress.com and Judith at growingyoungereachday.wordpress.com and some fantastic Dubai bloggers like Sally Prosser at http://mycustardpie.com/ and Sarah at http://www.thehedonista.com and of course my friend and inspiration Author Anne O’Connell at http://anne-writingjustbecause.blogspot.com/
9. What surprised you about the challenge? – How easy it was once the commitment was made.
10. What advice would you give to others who want to blog regularly? – Just do it. It doesn’t have to take a lot of time, you don’t have to be deep and profound every time and a short couple of lines is better than nothing. But make the commitment and tell people that’s what you’re doing so they keep you on track.
11. What are your blogging goals for 2012? – Not quite sure yet. I’m feeling slightly bereft that the challenge is almost over and the goal has been achieved. I’m wondering if I have the self discipline to keep posting every day or if I don’t need to do this any more. I will probably keep posting every day or almost every day because I enjoy doing it but I might give myself weekends off. Oh and to comment more on other people’s blogs. I’ve been a bit slack there but I know how much I love getting comments so I need to reciprocate.

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