If you are in sales or business, and you learn how to manage your time well so that you get a lot done in the course of your working day, you are acting intelligently. If you do things that undermine your productivity or move you away from your goals, you are acting foolishly, in terms of your own goals.
Here is a key insight: Everything you do is either moving you toward one of your goals or moving away from it. Nothing is neutral. Everything counts. Each act you engage in is either a positive act that goes on the positive side of your balance sheet, or it is a negative act that goes on the negative side.
Perhaps another word for common sense is wisdom. Aristotle once defined wisdom as an equal combination of experience plus reflection. He suggested that you need to, first, have the experience and, second, take an equal amount of time to think about what happened to you and what you could learn from it.
The problem for most people is that they simply do not take enough time for reflection. They do not take the time to sit, write, think, and dialogue with others about their experiences.
Socrates once said that “We only learn something by dialoguing about it.” You only really understand something to the degree to which you can discuss it with others or explain it to a third party. Your ability to translate your experience into words, which only comes through thinking and reflection, is essential for your growth and wisdom and common sense.
What did I do right? What would I do differently?
The wonderful thing about these two questions is that the answers to both are positive and constructive. And when you dwell on the positive, constructive parts of your performance, present and future, these ideas sink deeper into your subconscious mind and program you to act in a manner consistent with that information the next time out.
First, accept complete responsibility for yourself and for everything that you are and ever will be.
Second, accept that you can change the situation only by going to work on yourself and learning the things you need to know to be better.
Third, set clear goals with timelines for the things you want and then work every day to bring those goals into reality.
In the final analysis, you triumph over adversity by having clear values, clear goals and plans, and complete control over your mind and your thinking. You win by thinking about winning all the time and refusing to consider the possibility of losing. You win by resolving to persist, no matter what the odds, no matter what happens, until you succeed. You recognize that persistence is a form of courage. It is the courage to endure in the face of adversity and disappointment, and it is the one quality that guarantees that ultimately you will be successful.
Nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.
Persistence is self-discipline in action.
Bismarck was famous for always having a Plan B for every situation.
You can tell how high a building to be by looking at how deep they dig the foundation. The height to which you rise in life will always be determined by the depth of your own personal foundation, which is almost always the quality and quantity of your failures, and what you have become as a result of them.
What he found, in studying the way that different people respond to disappointment, was that you could largely tell how high and how far a person was going to win in life by simply observing how they reacted when they faced frustration and setbacks in reaching their goals.
He found that the great majority of people do not prepare mentally for the inevitable disappointment that come in life, and when they arrive, they tend to be taken off guard and emotionally overwhelmed. They then generalize these disappointment and allow themselves to feel that, because they have not succeeded, they are not really very good at what they do.
They tend to interpret these disappointments as being indicative of their lack of ability and competence. As a result, they become easily disappointed in themselves, and they lose the courage and confidence that they need to press forward. Often they become depressed, and in the majority of cases, they gradually give up. They stop setting goals and working on themselves and become more concerned about security and potential loss than about taking chances and potential gain.
The high achievers responded to disappointment very differently from the low achievers. First, they mentally prepared for a disappointment, in advance, so that when it arrived, they had already given some thought to how they would react and to the possible courses of action open to them.
Napoleon was famous for taking the time to study the battlefield and to think through every possible eventuality of the pending battle. He prepared with no illusions and with an attitude that dealt with the worst possibilities and reverses that could occur.
The proven ability to function in a crisis is the absolute prerequisite for promotion to a senior position.
In a way, what we are really talking about here is character. One of your aims in life should be to develop your character, to become a better, finer, and stronger human being. The development of character, essential to your long-term happiness and well-being, requires that you go through the crucible of setback and temporary defeat and emerge victorious.
In the absence of adversity, however, you cannot develop a stronger character. You cannot become a better person. You cannot develop resilience, perseverance, and resoluteness of personality. You cannot develop into the kind of person who enjoy high levels of self-confidence, and a feeling that you can meet and master whatever you are faced with. You cannot grow stronger without the adversity that you so conscientiously avoid.
Napoleon called this “4 o’clock in the morning courage,” the kind of courage that is instantly available to a person woken up at that time, who has no time to prepare mentally and emotionally for a crisis. He called this the rarest form of courage, and, in his conclusion, very few people had it.
In military terms, they call this being under fire. A question that all soldiers, sailors, and airmen wonder about is how they and others will perform under fire. They know that this is the ultimate test of the character and training of an individual.
The Achiever Profile. The achiever is a person whose greatest sense of accomplishment comes from achieving something that is almost exclusively an individual activity.
The Leader Profile. The second type of motivation is that of power. A person with a strong power orientation is one who enjoys getting things done through others. Power in this context refers to being able to influence and coordinate the activities of others over a period of time to complete a complex task. A coach or a manager who really enjoys what he is doing would be a a person who is most motivated by this kind of power or influence.
The Affiliation Profile. A person with an affiliation motivation is one who most enjoys working harmoniously with other people as part of a team. This person enjoys both supporting others and being supported by others. He enjoys cooperating with others towards a common goal and seeing the goal achieved successfully.
In combination with integrity, courage is the most important quality you can have if you want to be happy and self-confident. If integrity means being honest with yourself, then courage means having the strength of mind to follow where your heart leads you. Courage means having the ability to push aside all other considerations in order to remain true to the very best that is in you.
It doesn’t matter where you are starting from; all that matters is where you are going.
And here’s the point. Men and women who achieve extraordinary things in life are merely ordinary men and women who have learned how to put themselves into “flow” and to function at peak performance more often than the average person.
The law of substitution states that “your conscious mind can only hold one thought at a time, positive or negative.” Whatever thought is held continuously in your conscious mind will eventually be accepted by your subconscious mind as an instruction or command.
You subconscious mind, in harmony with these other mental laws, will go to work 24 hours per day to bring your dominant thought or idea into reality. Your subconscious mind is inordinately powerful. It is the repository of all your emotions, beliefs, values, attitudes and feelings.
Thought is creative. You are not what you think you are, but what you think, you are. As you systematically and deliberately change your thinking about yourself, your outer reality changes to conform with it. Your thoughts create your life, including and especially your thoughts with regard to your feelings of self-confidence.
You inevitably attract into your life the people, ideas, circumstances and opportunities that are in harmony with your dominant thoughts. You attract whatever is consistent with what you are thinking about most of the time.
You can tell what you truly believe by observing what you do in any situation in which you have to make a choice. Especially when you are under stress, and pulled into two directions at once, with opposing demands or responsibilities, this is when your true values are revealed.
Whenever you act consistent with a higher value, you always feel terrific about yourself, and your self-confidence soars.
Values are non-negotiable. When you select a value, if it’s to be one of your values at all, it becomes inviolable. Either it is a fixed value and you live every part of your life consistent with it, or it is not one of your values. You cannot have a value when it is convenient and put it aside when it’s not convenient. You cannot have a little bit of integrity: It must be all or nothing.
The act of selecting your values is also the act of clearly stating to yourself, and sometimes to others, exactly how you will live your life from this moment forward. Once you have selected a value, and you have declared it to be one of your unifying principles, you are, in effect, saying that this is something on which you will never compromise. And your level of adherence to the values you have personally selected is the real measure of your character, your true quality as a human being.
Unshakable self-confidence comes from unshakable commitment to your values. When, deep down inside yourself you know that you will never violate your highest principles, you experience a deep sense of personal power that enables you to deal openly and honestly and with complete self-confidence in almost every situation.
If you’re having any difficulty in clarifying your values, a very helpful exercise is to take some time to write your own obituary or eulogy. This obituary can become your vision of the kind of person you wish to be and the kind of values that you wish to live by.
Men and women with the most rock-solid self-confidence are those who are absolutely clear about what it is they believe to be right and good and worthwhile, and who live their lives consistent with these values. Everything they do or say is an expression of their innermost convictions.
Not only have you made yourself into the person you are today, but you are continuing with the job of construction with every thought you think. Because this is an unavoidable fact of life, the smartest thing that you can do is to persistently think the thoughts that are consistent with the kind of person you would like to be.
Thoughts held in mind, produce after their kind. Like begets like. Your thoughts become your realities. You do become what you think about most of the time.
The development of unshakable self-confidence, therefore, begins with you taking full, complete, systematic and purposeful control of the contents of your conscious mind, disciplining yourself to think consistently about only the things that you desire and to resolutely keep your mind off the things that you fear.
All of life is from the inside out. It is from the inner to the outer. Your outer world will be a reflection of your inner world. What you see on the outside is largely a reflection of what is going on inside you.
Mental marathon.
What one great thing would you dare to dream, if you knew you could not fail?