Posts tagged visualization
Success Tweet 15
May 7th
I’m really excited about the positive feedback I’ve been getting on my new book Success Tweets. I have a goal of giving away 10,000 copies of the eBook version of it by the end of June. To claim your free copy, just go to www.SuccessTweets.com.
I am in the process of doing a blog post to further explain the ideas in each tweet. Today is Tweet 15…
Napoleon Hill on visualization: “What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.” What is your vision for your future?
I am a big Chinese food fan. I sometimes find inspiration for blog posts in fortune cookies. It’s been a while since I did a fortune cookie post. But, as luck would have it, last night my fortune cookie read, “Advancement will come with hard work.” This career success coach agrees. This post is about doing the work necessary to make the vision of your career success a reality.
While you need to visualize your life and career success, your vision is for naught if you don’t have the will and determination to work hard at making it a reality. There’s a quote that I’ve seen attributed to many American football coaches, “Nobody ever drowned in his own sweat.” You have to be willing to work hard if you’re going to succeed.
Yes, you need to work smart, not just hard, but hard work is the best way to create the career and life success you want and deserve. Fortune Magazine says it succinctly: “There is no substitute for hard work.” Bobby Fischer became a chess grandmaster at age 16. However, he had nine years of hard work and intense study to get to that place. Few of us are willing to work that hard at that early of an age.
The success literature is a full of quotes on hard work. Take a look…
“I do not know anyone who has gotten to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It will not always get you to the top, but it will get you pretty near.” Margaret Thatcher
“I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” Thomas Jefferson
“Love conquers all, but if love doesn’t do it, try hard work.” Unknown
“If the power to do hard work is not a skill, it’s the best possible substitute for it.” James A. Garfield
“When you live for a strong purpose, then hard work isn’t an option. It’s a necessity.” Steve Pavlina
“There is no substitute for hard work.” Thomas Alva Edison
“The daily grind of hard work gets a person polished.” Unknown
“Unless you are willing to drench yourself in your work beyond the capacity of the average man, you are just not cut out for positions at the top.” J.C. Penney
“Hard work is the key to success, so work diligently on any project you undertake. If you truly want to be successful, be prepared to give up your leisure time and work past 5 PM and on weekends.” Charles Lazarus
“I learned the value of hard work by working hard.” Margaret M. Fitzpatrick
“Hard work has made it easy. That is my secret. That is why I win.” Nadia Comaneci
“Hard work certainly goes a long way. These days a lot of people work hard, so you have to make sure you work even harder and really dedicate yourself to what you are doing and setting out to achieve.” Lakshmi Mittal
“Striving for success without hard work is like trying to harvest where you haven’t planted.” David Bly
Here’s a story my friend Andy O’Bryan tells about his success journey…
The year was 2004. I had left my high-paying marketing director position and was trying to get traction with a fledgling home business. To pay the bills I was cold calling from 9-5 for $400 a week.
From 7pm to 1am every night I was interviewing. Authors, speakers, coaches, trainers, gurus, icons, industry leaders. For a while I was doing 6 or 7 interviews a week.
Life lessons, business advice, sales training, inspiration, just an amazing amount of content came out of these sessions.
The calls were recorded and the mp3′s were put up on a website:
http://www.AudioMotivation.com.
Co-founder Josh Hinds and I grew this site to over 1,500 paying members and 800 affiliates. There are over 100 interviews in there. It was a very challenging but extremely rewarding time of my life.
Andy now has a very successful home based business. But he put in the time and hard work it took to make it so.
The common sense career success coach point here is simple. Successful people heed the advice in Tweet 15 in Success Tweets. “Napoleon Hill on visualization: ‘What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.’ What is your vision for your future?” Achieve is the key word here. And achieve goes hand in hand with hard work. Successful people not only create a vivid mental image of their success. They put in the hard work necessary for realizing that vision. There are no two ways about it. If you want to create a successful life and career, you need to put in the time and effort necessary to succeed. Sometimes this means working longer hours than others. Tis career success coach has found that a well focused extra hour a week can yield big results.
That’s my take on Tweet 15 in Success Tweets, and hard work, high performance and success. What’s yours? Please take a few minutes to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
Success Tweet 14
May 6th
I’m really excited about the positive feedback I’ve been getting on my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less. I have a goal of giving away 10,000 copies of the eBook version of it by the end of June. To claim your free copy, just go to www.SuccessTweets.com.
I am in the process of doing a blog post to further explain the ideas in each tweet. Today is Tweet 14…
Don’t visualize the pain of failure, Visualize the euphoria of success.
I think it goes without saying that positive visualization is more productive than negative visualization. You don’t need a career success coach to tell you that.
“What if’s” can become a form of negative visualization. You know what I mean. “What if I try to do this, and I fail?” That’s visualizing the pain of failure, not the euphoria of success.
Positive visualization will help you create the life and career success you want and deserve. Take it from a career success coach; creating a vivid mental image of you as a career success is the first step in becoming a career success. As the tweet says, focus on the euphoria of success.
You get this; it’s the law of attraction at work. If you visualize yourself as a failure, you will attract failure. If you visualize yourself as a career success, you will attract career success.
‘Nuff said about that.
I’d like to spend some time discussing the importance of failure – specifically how learning from failure can help you create the life and career success you want and deserve.
The late Ted Williams is famous for having a season batting average of .411. That means that out of every 1,000 times at bat, he got a hit 411 times. This considered by baseball fans as one of the greatest records ever and unlikely to ever be broken. I met Ted Williams once. By a strange turn of events, we were staying in the same corporate suite at the same time. Ted Williams lived baseball. He told me that he learned from every at bat – whether or not he got a hit. He said that he wanted to get a hit every time he came to bat. When he didn’t, he said he analyzed the situation to see what he could learn.
Ted Williams failed over half the time in his record setting year. And he learned that failure is inevitable if you are trying for greatness. Failure is just a bump in the road to success.
Many people don’t even set out on the road to success because they fear that they may fail and not reach their destination. I was speaking with one of my career success coach clients today. She told me that she found a great job with Google – one that was a perfect match for her qualifications. But she didn’t even apply because she was afraid she wouldn’t get the job. By not applying, she guaranteed that she wouldn’t get the job.
To put this story in the context of Tweet 14 in Success Tweets, she visualized the pain of failure, not the euphoria of getting a job with one of the best companies in the world.
Fear works in a funny way. When you embrace the fact that you will fail on your journey to life and career success, you’ll find that you have nothing to fear anymore. When this happens you’ll keep your eyes open, pick yourself up, learn from the failure, and move on.
As I tell my career success coach clients, “Failure is never failure unless you fail to learn something from it.”
I choose to call the bumps in the road that I experience learning experiences, not failures. When things don’t work out for you, ask yourself, “What can I learn from this?” Even the smallest learning makes the experience worth it.
Treat failure not as an end but as a beginning. As Mike Ditka, the famous football coach says, “Failure is rarely fatal.” This is true. Treat failures as learning experiences; pick yourself up, make some adjustments and be on your way. There are always opportunities for new beginnings. Don’t quit in the middle of a problem; failure happens only when you quit. Don’t give up. Visualize the euphoria of success when you are tempted to quit.
The common sense career success coach point here is simple. Successful people don’t quit. They treat failures as mere setbacks on the road to career success. They heed the advice in Tweet 14 in Success Tweets. “Don’t visualize the pain of failure. Visualize the euphoria of success.” If you visualize yourself as a failure, you will attract failure. If you visualize yourself as a career success, you will attract career success. This doesn’t mean that the road will always be smooth. But this career success coach will tell you that the road will always be smoother when you have a vivid mental image of your success awaiting you at the end. Treat failure as the learning opportunity it is. Give yourself a minute or two to be frustrated. Find the learning in the failure. Then use this learning to move forward to the life and career success that you have visualized for yourself.
That’s my take on Tweet 14 in Success Tweets. What’s yours? Please take a minute to leave a comment sharing your personal triumphs with us. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
Success Tweet 13
May 5th
I am doing a series of posts further explaining the ideas in my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice; All in 140 Characters or Less.
Today’s post is on Tweet 13…
Your vivid mental image is a blueprint. It is a plan for success, but you still have to do the work to make it a reality.
I probably should amend the tweet to say, “Your vivid mental image is a goal. You need to create a plan (a blue print) to make this goal a reality – and then do the work.” Regardless, the career success coach message here is simple. You have to do the work to achieve your goals. It’s up to you. You’re the one who has to do the work.
My current vivid image of my career success is one in which I work primarily from home as an internet marketer.
I have a plan to make this vivid mental image come true. To implement this plan I need to manage my time well. Most of the really important work I do requires large chunks of unbroken time. I create large chunks of time for working on big projects and important activities – like writing books, blogging and creating products.
The same is true for you. You have to figure out what’s important to you and then create chunks of time to do what’s important. Besides my career success goals, my health is important to me; so I allocate 30 to 60 minutes a day for exercise. I’m going for a bike ride as soon as I finish writing this post. I have friend who reads inspirational literature for at least 15 minutes each night before he goes to sleep. He says that this helps him begin each day inspired and ready to move forward toward his goals.
The important point here is to plan your days in advance. Schedule specific fixed time periods for particularly important activities and tasks. Make appointments with yourself and then discipline yourself to keep them. Set aside thirty, sixty and ninety minute time segments in which you will work on and complete important tasks that move you toward your vivid mental image of success.
Stephen Covey tells us that successful people find the time to focus on the important, but not urgent tasks. If you’re not careful, your day will get taken up with urgent (sometimes important, and sometimes unimportant) tasks. If this happens, you will be keeping your head above water, but not gaining any ground. You won’t be moving toward your vivid mental image of your success.
Writing and posting this blog is a good example of one of the chunks of time I carve out for myself. My blog is an important, but not urgent activity for me. If you’re a regular reader, you know that I post every day, Monday through Friday. This structure helps me when it comes to composing my posts. Right now, I’ve added even more structure. I am doing a series of blog posts that further explain the advice in Success Tweets. This is the 13th post in the series. I will keep going until I have done a blog post on all 141 tweets – there is a bonus tweet in the book. If you want a free copy of the eBook version, go to www.SuccessTweets.com.
I usually write my posts two or three days ahead. At a minimum, I write blog posts the night before I post them. It takes me 30 to 45 minutes to write a blog post. My discipline in writing a day before I post means that I don’t feel under the gun to write something every morning. I think it results in better quality posts, and moves me toward my vivid mental image of success.
I post my blogs first thing every day. If I have a very early meeting, or will be traveling early, I post the night before. It takes me about 30 minutes to post this blog, as I post it in several locations. www.BudBilanich.com is the main page for this blog. However, I also post to several other sites.
All of this takes time and discipline. The time I spend writing and posting every day is a very important part of maintaining my internet presence. My internet presence is the cornerstone of my marketing efforts. I carve out large chunks of time to do the important, but not urgent task of building and maintaining my internet presence. I have disciplined myself to set aside 60 to 90 minutes per day writing and posting my blogs.
I also carve out time to comment on five blog posts, written by other bloggers, every day. This also helps with my internet presence and takes about an hour a day. I have identified a number of blogs I read regularly and on which I comment. It takes about seven to ten minutes to compose a thoughtful comment for each post.
In the past, I have had good intentions of doing this, but the urgent tasks that come up every day have made this a hit and miss proposition. Recently, I decided that I will take one hour at the end of every day to read and comment on other blogs. I will do this before I end my business for the day.
The common sense career success coach point here is simple. From a time perspective, you get the biggest bang for the buck from the activities that are important to your success, but are not urgent. Unfortunately, important but not urgent tasks often don’t get done because of all of the urgent tasks that come up during any given day. Tweet 13 in Success Tweets says “Your vivid mental image is a blueprint. It is a plan for success, but you still have to do the work to make it a reality.” One way to get started doing the work is to schedule time to work on the important but not urgent tasks that will result in achieving your vivid mental image of your career success. My best career success coach advice is to keep your commitment to yourself and your career success by planning you work and working your plan.
That’s my take on Tweet 13 in Success Tweets. What’s yours? Please take a few minutes to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
Success Tweet 12
May 4th
I am blogging about the advice in my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice, All in 140 Characters or Less.
Today, I’m focusing on Tweet 12…
Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed.
As a career success coach, I suggest that once you define what career success means to you personally, you need to develop a clear mental picture of your career success. This image should be as vivid as you can you make it. Try to create you career success vivid image in 3-D.
When I was 25, I conjured up a vivid image of myself as a career success coach, motivational speaker, management consultant and author. I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations. This office had a floor to ceiling wall of books that I could use for easy reference. It also had a state of the art IBM selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone. PCs and the internet were science fiction in 1975.
I also saw myself having one to one discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team building sessions in conference rooms at their locations. Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking.
I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks. I saw myself signing a book I had written at a bookstore. I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my speaking, coaching and consulting gigs.
All of these vivid images came true. My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has a two PCs and cell phone, not a selectric typewriter and clunky phone. The wall of books is there – overflowing. I’ve written 11 of the books on the shelf. People don’t smoke in my training and team building sessions anymore and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I’ve imagined it. I’ve spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia. I am a million mile flyer with Continental Air Lines.
I’m living my career success dream – in large part because I dared to dream it all those years ago.
What’s your career success dream? Have you created a vivid mental image of it?
I suggest that you take some time for yourself. Ask and answer these three questions:
- Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
- What will it look like and feel like when I’m there?
- What will my life be like?
Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success. This is not day dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind.
Keep this mental picture of your career success with you as you go about your day to day business. Every once in a while, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of career success. If the answer is no, make sure that you take at least one act the very next day to move closer to your vivid mental image of your career success. In this way, you’ll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your goal.
The common sense career success coach success point here is simple. Successful people define what success means to them. Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their success. They heed the advice in Tweet 12 in Success Tweets: “Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed.” They use their vivid mental image to help keep their dreams alive and to keep moving forward to what they want in their lives and careers. Creating a vivid mental image of your success is not day dreaming. It’s real work – it’s the work of designing your future, so you can take the steps necessary to create it.
That’s my take on Tweet 12 in Success Tweets. You can get a copy of the eBook version for free. Go to www.SuccessTweets.com. What are your thoughts? Please take a minute to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
Success Tweet 2
Apr 21st
This is the second in a series of posts further explaining the ideas in my new book Success Tweets: 140 Bits of Common Sense Career Success Advice All in 140 Characters or Less. The book is at the printer right now. I’m told that I will have the printed copies in my hand by the end of the week. Next week I’ll give away a few copies on this blog.
Here is Tweet 2…
The more clear you are about what success means to you personally, the easier it will be to create the life and career you want.
In the first post in this series, I told how I decided that I wanted to be an independent career success coach early in my career. I was fortunate in that I had several good role models – people with whom I was working who had the career to which I aspired. It was reasonably easy for me to be very clear on what I wanted out of my life and career.
I always advise my career success coach clients to develop a clear mental image of themselves as a success. I tell them that this image should be as vivid as they can you make it.
When I was 25, I conjured up an image of myself as a career success coach, motivational speaker, and management consultant. I worked in my home office – where I wrote and developed the programs I delivered at client locations. This office had a floor to ceiling wall of books that I could use for easy reference. It also had a state of the art IBM selectric typewriter and a big, clunky telephone. PCs and the internet were science fiction in 1975.
I also saw myself having one to one coaching discussions with senior leaders in a variety of organizations, conducting training and team building sessions in conference rooms at their locations. Amazingly, many of the people in the sessions were smoking. I had very vivid images of standing in front of large audiences at sales meetings doing talks. I saw myself at a book store signing a book I had written. I also saw myself on airplanes, traveling to my coaching, speaking and consulting gigs.
All of these vivid images came true. My office is much as I had imagined it – except it has a two PCs and cell phone, not a selectric typewriter and clunky phone. The wall of books is there – overflowing. I’ve written 11 of the books on the shelf. People don’t smoke in my coaching, training and team building sessions anymore; and I use PowerPoint instead of handwritten flip charts, but the big stuff is the same as I’ve imagined it. I’ve coached people and spoken to audiences all over North America, in Latin America, Europe and Asia. I am a million mile flyer with Continental Air Lines.
I’m living my dream – in large part because I dared to dream it all those years ago.
You can begin creating your vivid mental image of yourself as a career success with affirmations. Affirmations are positive self talk. The idea behind affirmations is that when you think of the things to which you aspire, like becoming a career success, and then tell yourself that you are a career success, you will believe that you can become a career success. More importantly, you will be more likely to do the work it takes to make that aspiration come true.
A couple of years ago, I wrote a book called Star Power, Common Sense ideas for Career and Life Success. I used a star to depict the ideas in the book. I urged readers to think of themselves as a star and to aspire to becoming a career and life star. I like the star metaphor. Daily, I repeat the following affirmation to myself: “Bud Bilanich is a star.”
I’ve done a lot of working in making this affirmation a reality – redoing my website, developing better promotional materials, speaking, writing books, blogging and podcasting.
I’ve also done something a little unusual. A few years ago, right after Star Power was published, I went to the “Name a Star” website and named a star after myself. Now I can say “Bud Bilanich is a star” and really believe it, because Bud Bilanich really is a star. It’s easy for me to visualize myself as a star, because I am a star.
Bud Bilanich the star, is Catalog Number TYC 868-1011-1 in the constellation Leo. Bud Bilanich has a Visual Magnitude indicator of 11.2. Right Ascension is 11h 58m 21s. Declination is 11degrees, 43,’18.” I don’t have a clue what all of these things mean, except the constellation Leo, which I chose because my birthday is August 14. But I do know one thing. Bud Bilanich is a star!
How’s that for an affirmation?
Affirmations work. I have become a minor star in the career success coach world. You don’t need to go to the lengths I did to make them work either. Just decide what you want, visualize yourself as having it, and tell yourself you have it. Then do whatever it takes to make your affirmation come true.
Affirmations alone, however, are not enough to guarantee your career success. You have to do the work. Spend the time necessary to accomplish your goals. Volunteer for projects that will get you noticed. Become an expert on your company, its competitors, and your industry. In other words, bust your butt, and you will succeed.
To develop a clear picture of you as a career success, you need to carefully think through your priorities – and then align your behavior to ensure that you are living according to them. To do so, ask yourself two very important questions:
- What do I want to do in this life?
- What is the result I want to achieve?
The answers to these two questions will not only guide the big decisions you make, they will serve as a guide for living your life on a day to day basis.
Here’s another way to look at it. Imagine that you’re nearing the end of your life. You feel happy, content and satisfied. You don’t fear death because you’ve had a happy and prosperous life. You’ve lived and loved and feel that you’ve been blessed.
Once you get yourself into this frame of mind, look back at your life and what you’ve accomplished. Of all these accomplishments, what matters the most to you? What challenges did you overcome along the way to these accomplishments? How did you do it? What messages did you send to others by the way you lived your life?
This visualization exercise will help you in clarifying your purpose and direction in this life. It’s important because it helps you create a vivid mental image of what success looks like for you personally. This is not day dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind.
When I was younger, I realized that my purpose in life is simple – to help others grow and succeed. I am a teacher and a helper. I enjoy helping others succeed. I’m good at it. It’s very fulfilling. When I’m at the end of my life, I expect that I’ll look back with great joy at the number of people I helped succeed.
I keep this mental picture in mind as I go about my day to day business. I ask myself a simple question almost every day. “Bud, did the things you did today support your life’s purpose of helping others learn, grow and succeed?”
If I answer, “yes,” I consider it a successful day. If I answer “no,” I think about what I can do the next day to get back to living my purpose.
Successful people have a clear and vivid mental image of what success means to them. They live their life’s purpose every day. If you haven’t clarified your purpose in life, this is a good time to start. Once you get clear on your purpose, live it every day in all your actions.
What’s your dream? Have you created a vivid mental image of it?
I suggest that you take some time for yourself. Ask and answer these three questions:
- Where do I want to be 10, 20 and 30 years from now?
- What will it look like and feel like when I’m there?
- What will my life be like?
Ask and answer these and any other questions that will help you develop a clear, vivid mental image of your career success. This is not day dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind.
The common sense point here is simple. Successful people define what success means to them. Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their success. They use this mental image to help keep their dreams alive and to keep moving forward to what they want in their lives and careers. Remember Tweet 2 in Success Tweets, “The more clear you are about what success means to you personally, the easier it will be to create the life and career you want.” Get clear on what you career success looks like, and then create it. Keep this mental picture with you as you go about your day to day business. Every once in a while, ask yourself if what you did that day brought you any closer to your mental image of you as a career success. In this way, you’ll be keeping your dream alive – and moving toward your career success goals.
That’s my take on clarifying exactly what career success means to you. What’s yours? Please take a few minutes to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
