Personal Health Check

Knowing as much as possible about yourself, is one of the most important pieces in the puzzle, when preparing to live a life of meaning and success. Building an in-depth knowledge about your traits, strengths, weaknesses, abilities, interests and attributes is essential, if you want to successfully ride on the front end of the wave of success and become a champion of change. The time you invest into getting to know who you are, discovering your unique talents or challenges, special skills and abilities, the better equipped you are to manage the challenges and the inevitable change that will cross your path on your journey towards the success you desire. This small investment today will save you buckets of time and regret later, as you will know how to apply your strengths and avoid areas where you have weaknesses.

After you have consciously discovered everything you need to know about yourself and you have created absolute clarity about the areas of your life, where you lack knowledge, skill or ability. Create a plan to acquire all the knowledge or skill you require to successfully navigate the journey to the life you desire. Always remember that you should develop your strengths and never your weaknesses. Find people that have strengths in areas where you have weaknesses to support you and always concentrate on consistently developing your strengths.

Action Idea: Once you have a clear idea about what makes you tick, you must now turn this into a clear understanding about how this can help you to achieve exactly what you want. Find a quiet place where you can relax, breath and introspect. Sit or lie comfortably and explore what you really want, by asking yourself these few questions.

·         If you won ten million dollars today and money was no longer a factor, what would you change in your life?

·         How would you choose to spend your time, if money, time and your current circumstances were not a factor?

·         What is the one thing you enjoy doing most, which your current circumstances are stopping you from doing right now?

·         What unique and special talents or skills do you have that you are not utilising right now?

·         What activity, idea or concept, no matter how outrageous, really inspires you and makes you feel really passionate?

Listen to the answers that will flow from these questions and allow yourself to use this as a foundation for setting a new course, where you can live a life of meaning and fulfilment, a place where you feel complete. Success is always a direction and never a destination. Uncover the direction you want your life to go and you have discovered the key to unlock a life that is filled with joy and happiness.

Now that you have discovered your unique abilities, strengths and weaknesses, got to know what you really want to have, do and be in the future, the next step is to make a commitment to your on-going and never ending improvement. This commitment where you  wake up every day eager to see what you can get from each day, how you can continually improve and grow you knowledge and skills, will equip you for a life of never ending success and fulfilment.

Action Idea: Wake up every morning and read 5 to 10 pages of an educational or inspirational book. This small daily discipline, which weighs ounces, will allow you to effortlessly read between 7 and 15 books a year. Use the hour you commute to and from work every day to listen to audio books. This will cost you nothing in time, as you are using time that would have gone to waste, as an opportunity to learn. This will give you an additional 33, eight hour days to increase your knowledge and skill every year. What a small price you pay for such an incredible reward.

The only challenge you will face every day, is that as easy as these disciplines are to carry out, so easy they not to do. Make the choice right now, do you choose the weight of daily discipline that weighs ounces or the weight of regret later, which weighs tonnes?

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

You Can Achieve Financial Independence

Have you dreamed about living a life where you are financially independent, where you control your financial destiny and no one has claim to your financial resources? Achieving a life where you are the master of your financial future and you are able to live off the proceeds of your investments, without the necessity to work another day in your life, is a great place to aspire to reach. It is a place where you no longer need to work every day because you have to; everything you choose to do, you do because you want to. There is a whole new spectrum of opportunities, which open up to you.

Achieving financial independence is simply a case of consistently ensuring that your income exceeds your expenditure, over a long enough period, until you accumulate sufficient assets, which will generate sufficient income on their own, to cover all your expected future expenditure. It really is simple, if you are disciplined and you avoid raising your lifestyle, every time you generate more income. The reason so few people ever achieve financial independence, is that they are driven by instant gratification and so as they earn more, they simply raise their lifestyle and waste any opportunity to invest and grow their assets.

I want to offer you a few simple pieces of advice to allow you to start moving down the path towards financial independence. The advice I am going to offer is not earth shattering or something you are going to see for the first time in your life. All of the advice is common sense and something you have always known about, but is most certainly not something you have made common practice.

Action Idea: Eliminate all the debt you have, excluding debt that you have leveraged to purchase investment properties, as a matter of urgency. If you are carrying huge credit card debt, you need to make eliminating this a top priority. Explore all the expenditure you have and slash every one as ruthlessly as possible. You must put yourself on a spending freeze, until your credit card debt is eliminated. You can never create financial independence if you are constantly trying to catch up on debt. You need to first bring yourself back to zero and then start building from there.

Once you have brought yourself into a position where you are no longer working to finance a lifestyle that is beyond your current level of affordability. The next and obvious step is to create a plan for moving towards financial independence. No plan can ever be effective unless you are clear on what you are attempting to achieve. First decide what type of lifestyle you want to live. This will tell you how much money will you need to earn from your investments to thrive each year?

Example:                                                                                                                                

If you feel that you would like to live off an annual income of $ 100 000, then you would need to accumulate about $ 2 500 000 in income earning assets, to cover inflation and to finance your chosen  lifestyle for the rest of your life. I have experimented with a number of complicated formulas for performing this calculation, but after much trial and error, I have realised that a safe and realistic number is found by merely multiplying your annual income needs by a factor of 25.

Once you have clarity about exactly how much money you need, the next step is to go about the business of accumulating sufficient, income earning assets to achieve your goal. The most obvious place to start is with your income, you need to increase your income, WITHOUT increasing your lifestyle in equal proportion. The simple lesson I want you to take; is work to increase your income, but do not increase your expenditure, until you have achieved financial independence.

As soon as you have eliminated all debt, start to invest a minimum of 10 % of your annual income towards creating financial independence. Fortune magazine stated in an article that millionaires save on average 20 % of their income every year.

Action Idea: Set up an automated system where the proportion of funds you have chosen to invest is automatically diverted into your investments each month. This money must not even enter your normal bank account.

Make the decision today to be wealthy, start to act responsibly and completely believe that you can create the level of wealth you desire. Now all that is required is for you to take action daily to turn your dreams into reality. Your mind set, attitude and thoughts determine how your future will turn out; choose all three very wisely from this moment on.

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Feed your mind and nourish your Future Success

Our capacity to learn from birth, until around eighteen is dramatic; this accelerated learning curve equips us to learn a staggering amount in a very short space of time. We learn language, culture, manners, social skills, history, science, and mathematics-everything that makes us human. For some people this accelerated learning curve continues long after their eighteenth birthday and continues for most of their lives, but unfortunately for most people, it levels off as soon as soon as they get their first job. People are just inherently lazy, if there are no more exams to take, why waste time reading books or trying to grow your knowledge.

Look at a new born baby and then look at an eighteen year old adult. Can you see the dramatic growth that has occurred in a mere eighteen years? Can you imagine if you continue that accelerated growth curve, for the rest of your life and every eighteen years, you get to see the same dramatic growth in yourself? Can you imagine how you can accelerate your personal growth and how you will stand out from the herd? Imagine what you could become, the skills you could learn, the capacities you could develop, it is just too staggering to imagine.

Amazingly, even if you are in your late fifties or even sixties, it is not too late to rekindle that hunger for knowledge, which you had until you were eighteen. You can rekindle your appetite for learning at any time in your life. Begin feeding your mind and educating your philosophy, starting right now, by following the writings of people that have recorded their thoughts and shared their ideas with us through, books, magazines, video and audio recordings.

Amazing, influential people that have gone before us have left a trail of knowledge behind them. Winston Churchill may no longer be here, but we still have his books filled with untold wisdom. Aristotle has been gone for centuries, yet we still have access to his amazing ideas and philosophies. There are so many opportunities and a myriad of different ways to feed your mind and indulge in a feast of intellectual feeding.

Take the plunge today by taking advantage of the gift left by people who have gone before, to instruct and inspire us. The gift of their insights allows us to modify our plans if need be, by avoiding the mistakes they have made. When we arrange our lives based on the wise advice of the super achievers that have gone before us, we equip ourselves with a recipe for success.

Everything You Need to Succeed is Available Right Now

All the information you’ll ever need to completely change anything you wish to in your life, already exists. If your desire is to become more successful, financially independent, healthier, wealthier or even more sophisticated, the information is readily available. People from every conceivable sector or walk of life have written books, made audio or video recordings that chronicle their life experiences and offer advice which can and will help you achieve the most remarkable levels of success.

This wealth of knowledge is available everywhere and can be obtained free of charge from the libraries that are in every suburb. There really is no excuse for allowing yourself to remain stuck in poverty or in an unsatisfying career.  All that is required for you to turn yourself into a top achiever, is to commit to acquire the necessary knowledge and then to apply it daily in your life.

With all this available information, knowledge and insight which could and most certainly would transform your life, your fortune, your relationships, your health and happiness, how many of these nuggets of transformational power have you read, listened to or watched in the last ninety days? If you are part of the select group that has done the work of acquiring this knowledge, have you applied any of it in your life?

Seeking to constantly improve and grow is absolutely essential for anyone who wants to rise above the ordinary. Do not allow anything to stand between you and the knowledge, information or skill that can transform your life. A small amount of discipline practiced each day will have astounding results in every area of your life. Unfortunately the opposite is also true; if you fail to practice the discipline every day and you don’t expand your knowledge, then ignorance will quickly move in to fill the void.

Action Idea: Find a book that will help you to grow and to commit just 30 minutes every day to read that book. Also, get an audio recording that you can listen to as you commute in your car every day. These two new small disciplines will completely change your life and your fortune over the next few years.

There are also so many opportunities for us to do some talking and sharing with people around us. People that can help you to answer the important life questions, people that can help you to refine your own philosophy, assist you to weigh your values and help you to ponder all the questions you have about success and lifestyle.

Take all the wisdom that you gather from books, videos, audio programs and through discussion with mentors and use them all, as the building blocks for the success and on-going growth you desire. Commit to constantly improve and keep making the small daily adjustments to your philosophy and activities, this will keep you growing and ensure that you are constantly becoming more. These small almost imperceptible changes, over time add up to become very significant.

Commit to re-fire your accelerated learning curve and continue to feed your mind with great information and new ideas. Continue to grow and develop, it is never too late to commit to learning and growth. As you grow and become more, you will most certainly continue to attract more. Each new idea will keep refining your philosophy, which will better guide your life and the rest of your life will unfold in the most magical of ways.

Expanded Action Idea:

·         Break your year up into four 90 day segments.

·         Choose an area you want to improve in your life. For example: you want to improve your knowledge on leadership.

·         Select 3 books on the subject and devote your 30 minutes a day over the next 90 days to reading these books, cover to cover, as many times as possible. Highlight pertinent areas; write important facts in the margins. Finally summarise each book and identify the three most important issues raised in each book.

·         Select 5 Audio books that are focused in the area you want to study. Listen to these over and over again during your commute to and from work every day. As you arrive at your destination, invest 2 minutes recording the most important lesson you learnt during that 30 minute commute. Summarise each audio book and extract the three most valuable points from each audio book.

·         Attend one seminar on the subject during each 90 day segment. Take notes and after the seminar, highlight the three most important and valuable lessons you learnt.

·         Now take the most valuable lessons learnt from the three books you have read, the five audio books you have listened to and the seminar you attended during the 90 days and discover the three super lessons you have learnt.

·         These are the three lessons you are going to build into your success habit set over the next 90 days, by using your willpower to carry out these new ideas until they become new entrenched habits.

Author Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Change your future by changing your vision of what is possible

No matter how good your eyesight may be, it will be of little value if you do not have vision. This is your ability to see things that may be invisible to other people or to innovate and see things that may not even exist yet. The limitations we face in life are not due to our current circumstances or abilities, but are limited by our lack of vision, around what is possible for us. True vision is the ability to create pictures of what can be, it is a place where we appeal to our better selves, a place where we appeal to that hidden self and we strive to become more.

We are visual beings that do not only see with our eyes.  The building that you are sitting in right now was just an idea in someone’s head at one point. They then developed a clear picture of exactly what they wanted to create. This was then converted into a blue print and then built into the structure you are now sitting inside.

The way to create the future of your dreams is to first create a vivid picture of what you want, a clear vision for the future. Then you must invest the time to create your own blue print, to build exactly that future for yourself. As you think it, you must commit to ink it. The size and scope of your future is only limited by your ability to envision it.

Set your mind free and allow it the freedom to walk boldly into your future and see clear pictures of your dreams and fantasies. Commit to clarify these and then create a blue print for your success. As you build this blue print or plan for how you want your future to evolve and develop, remember to expect change, plan for change and be flexible in the execution of your plan, adapting to any change or challenge that may come your way.

Your future will turn out exactly the way you see it. Nothing will happen or ever has happened without someone first creating a vivid picture in their mind first. Begin today to start painting a better vision for your future. No matter what may have happened in your past, the slate for your future is spotless. Any change or challenge that may have crossed your path, until now, serves only one purpose and that is one of learning and growth.

You can paint any picture you can see onto this blank canvass. All the choices are open to you right now. You get to choose everything that you put into your picture of the future. Do not limit yourself by thinking small. It takes as much energy to dream small dreams, which will hold you from your potential, as it does to have huge dreams. Select the image you want for your future by searching deep within yourself and allow your mind to wander unfettered by logic or what you believe is possible for you right now.

Begin painting your picture for your future by exploring what is possible for the remainder of this year. Then begin to see bigger and bigger pictures form in your mind, as you allow yourself to stretch and expand into a worthy vision that will push you beyond your current comfort zone. Paint a grand picture of what is possible. It is widely accepted that we significantly over estimate what we can achieve in a year and that we dramatically underestimate what we can achieve in a decade. Take a longer view of all the possibilities that await you in the future and dare to dream big dreams. Change is inevitable and an integral part of any journey to the success you desire.

Identify and Leverage your Strengths

Do you remember when you were at school and you were getting an A for English and a C for math, how your parents and teachers encouraged you to work really hard on your math and not on your English, so that you could improve on your weaker areas? This concept of working on our weaknesses has stuck with us and although this is not the first time you are hearing that you should ignore your weaknesses and focus only on your strengths, I am sure that you are still focusing a whole lot of your energy on attempting to improve your weaknesses.

It is time to identify your unique skills, talents, advantages and abilities and to focus all your energy on improving these. Ignore your weaknesses and get people who play at what you struggle with, help you in these areas. The first step is to invest time into identifying your areas of strength and to begin the process of re-invention. This is where you begin to move your life from unsatisfactory and mediocre, to a place where you love who you are and thrive on what you do.

Make the commitment today, to identify what it is you really want to do with the rest of your life and then begin the process of growing and improving your own special gifts every day, until you become the type of person who can live exactly that life.

Action Idea: Begin the process of re-invention by asking yourself these few questions:

• What do I do better than almost everyone I know?
• What do I really enjoy doing?
• What comes really easy and naturally to me?
• What attribute or skill do people often compliment me on?
• What skill or attribute do I possess that I’m inspired me to practice?

Now explore what you really want to do with the rest of your life. Know what you want to do and what exhilarates and excites you

Have you ever asked the question, “What really excites and exhilarates me, what is my passion?” The answer does not need to be earth shattering or revolutionary. More often than not the answer you come up with will be simple and aligned with your unique skills abilities and talents.

When searching for the answer to this question ask yourself these few questions:

• What are the things you really enjoy to do in your life?
• What careers really excite you?
• What markets do you enjoy?
• What products do you enjoy?
• What industries do you like the most?
• What people excite you the most?
• What do you love to do the most?
• What are you doing when you feel most happy and content?
• What activities do you really enjoy?

Once you have found what you really want to do with the rest of your life, it is time to figure out how you are going to open the door to your new vocation. Take a really in-depth look at the supply chain, marketplace or industry where you want to build your vocation and answer these few questions:

·  Who are the vendors or businesses involved and what products and services do they work with?

·  Now look at the various options and see how you can align your unique skills and talents with building a career in that industry.

Once you have gone through this process you will have identified a perfect fit for yourself. Now all that is left to do is for you to pull the trigger and to either form a business performing that function or to present yourself to a business needing your specific talents and skills. The secret to make this work for you is to be flexible, patient and teachable. Nothing worthwhile comes without effort and without paying a price for tuition. Accept that you may need to take a few steps back, but as you are playing to your strengths, you will very quickly acquire the necessary skill and talent to excel in your new vocation.

Any thought of change frightens most people, so expect the people around you to criticise your decision to re-invent yourself. As you radically re-invent yourself and begin to pursue your dreams, everyone around you will try to stop you. One of the loudest voices will be your own; it will be really uncomfortable to step out of a place where you may not be fulfilled or happy; into a completely new life. As long as you have gone through the entire process I have described above and you are certain that these changes are necessary, feel the discomfort and go ahead and do it any way. The new fulfilling and complete life you’ll get to live will most certainly be worth the short-term discomfort.

You can make this process a lot less painful by building a great support team around you. Find mentors and a peer group who share your vision and ambition. These are people who’ll support you and act as your ally, as you embark on your new adventure to live the life of your dreams. Commit to learn all you need to, as you grow into your new life. Immerse yourself in the process and read as many books, watch as many DVD’s, listen to every possible audio and attend as many seminars as you can, to support and help you build the skills you need.

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Have the Courage to Break free from your Comfort Zone?

Your self-imposed comfort zone is an artificial place, which you have created in your mind, which limits your potential, to a minuscule part of what you are really capable of achieving. Break free from your SELF-IMPOSED comfort zone and stop limiting your achieving any longer, because of your lack of believing. Stop accepting mediocrity, because it is comfortable and begin to experiment and explore a little, break some new ground, try something new today.

The best way to grow and expand, into the type of person you need to be, to achieve your vision, is to commit to a lifetime of on-going and never ending improvement, where you consistently expand and grow, by learning something of value every day. Stay committed to experiment, try a few new things every day, accept that you will make some mistakes, respond to feedback and measure everything you do. It is far better to try to succeed, commit to on-going growth and expansion and encounter countless challenges, than it is to simply accept your circumstances and stay trapped in a life you hate.

As soon as you begin to take action and you show real commitment to continual growth and on-going learning and you remain open to experiment and explore, your days will no longer just blend one into the next, you will have discovered a way to get real meaning and value from every single day. As you gradually make these very necessary changes to the way you do things every day and you make the shift toward on-going and never ending improvement, you will have uncovered the key that will allow you to break out of a life you do not enjoy. You will begin moving toward a future that is filled with passion, fulfilment, meaning and happiness. . If you want the world to change, there is one thing that you have 100 % control over, to make this happen, that thing is YOU. Stop denying that you need to change and accept responsibility for changing yourself.

One of the most liberating moments of your life is the day you realise that “Change is a door that can only be opened from within”. As you begin to change the one thing you have complete control over, namely yourself and you begin the journey to break out of your self-imposed comfort zone. You will see that, by gradually changing all the things about yourself, which are keeping you trapped in an unfulfilling life, you will finally begin the process of reshaping your comfort zone and ultimately the life you get to lead.

This all starts with a shift around the way you view your self-imposed comfort zone and what you believe is possible for you and continues with your commitment to replace unproductive habits, with new success habits that will serve you. You never break bad habits they must be gradually replaced, by new more productive habits and routines. This is achieved by layering new behaviour patterns on top of the old unproductive ones.

Are your Habits Shackling your success?

You can either choose to consciously manage and control your habits as they form, turning them into your success habit set, which will serve your needs and assist you to effortlessly perform the daily activities you need to succeed, or you can leave the formation of your habits to chance, where your habit set will become your greatest limiting factor, keeping you trapped in a life you hate.

Your habits are like nuclear submarines, they run silent and deep, you don’t even know they are there  You will never discover them unless you actively search for them and even then, it is possible that they may still remain hidden from you. Have you got any idea, whether your habits are serving you, are they helping or hindering your progress each day?

Have the courage to explore your habits.  If they are limiting you or causing you to procrastinate, not take the appropriate daily action, causing you to spin your wheels or in any way limiting you, use the awareness that will flow from this article, to begin changing them for ones that will help you. We are creatures of habit and 96 % of our behaviour is dictated by our habits. Does it not make sense to rather have habits that serve your needs, rather than limiting habits that constrain your daily efforts?

Everything you learn, you either learn from observation, imitation or repetition. This learning over time gets converted into your habits, which either serve you or keep you trapped in a life of mediocrity. Perfect practice makes, permanent. Your habit set starts to develop from offhand remarks, fleeting ideas and vague images, which settle layer upon layer, in your mind.  Through repetition, these unimportant, wispy cobwebs keep growing until they turn into thick inflexible cables, which can either shackle and limit you or strengthen your ability to succeed.

 “We are what we repeatedly do, excellence is not an act it is a habit.” Aristotle.

Choose to create your new habit set, by design, from this moment forward. Something this important deserves some special attention and a lot of your time. Habits are like comfortable warm beds on a cold winter’s night, they are easy to get into, but really difficult to get out of in the morning. Start today, one small habit at a time and begin to design your perfect success habit set. The effort you put into designing a winning habit set will help you to effortlessly achieve any outcome that is important to you.

Have you ever driven to a familiar destination, arrived there and thought, “How did I get here, what route did I take” and no matter how hard you thought about it, you could not remember? You had safely negotiated dangerous traffic, turned at exactly the right time, stopped when the traffic in front of you did and yet you arrived at your destination safely, unable to remember how you did it. Those are you subconscious habits at work.

A great success habit set will work the same way for you, you will unconsciously carry out all the daily activities necessary to succeed, arriving at success one day, shaking your head, unable to remember how you got there. Choose your habits wisely as they dictate what you do most of the day, they can either slow you down, where you just spin your wheels all day or they can be the fuel that catapults you to success. You get to make your habits over time, but always remember that, it is your habits that will ultimately make you.

Action Idea: Identify a few new success habits or routines, which will assist your progress, toward creating the fulfilling life you want to lead and introduce these into your life as “Your Code Of Personal Achievement” This is a daily commitment that you make with yourself to carry out a number of new routines, which will help you to carry out the daily activities necessary to achieve your goals.

How does it work?

1)    Choose between 3 and 5 new productive habits or daily routines, which you introduce into your life. These habits or daily routines must support your goals and help you to keep moving in the direction of your vision.

2)    Use you willpower to carry out these tasks every day.

3)    Keep using your willpower for about 90 days, to carry out these commitments with your future. After about 90 days, these new routines should be ingrained enough, so that they will have replaced, your unproductive habits, which have kept you trapped in a life you do not enjoy.

These new positive routines when adhered to over time, will become second nature. Your daily routines will serve you by ensuring that you effortlessly take the right actions every day without even thinking about it. This new success habit set, will just be who you are and you will unconsciously take the action necessary to achieve outstanding results. Perfect practice, makes permanent, so commit to learn new success habits, which support your dreams and you will get to live a winning lifestyle that is fulfilling and aligned with your dreams. 

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Clarify Your Vision and Have the Courage to Re-invent Yourself

Although there appear to be 365 days in a year, in reality there are only as many days, as you actually make use of. Have the courage to put perceived failures behind you, build on the successes of the previous day and light the flame of possibility, at the dawn of each new day. Decide what type of days help you to be the most efficient and effective, days that leave you feeling the most satisfied and content. Now that you have a crystal clear picture of what works, aspire to create as many days exactly like that as possible

.

You are the creator of your own experience, the greater the clarity you have in your mind about exactly what you want, the greater the possibility for you to create exactly that in your life.

Action Idea: At the end of each day spend a few minutes going back over your day, examine all the things that worked and explore all the experiences that hampered your progress or were less than ideal. Reward yourself for all the experiences that worked and added value to your day, by allowing yourself to feel satisfied and content. Now actively build them into the following day, by visualising the next day running flawlessly, filled with all these positive outcomes. Learn as much as you can from any negative experiences and actively file that knowledge away, for use should you encounter a similar challenge in the future.

Now that you have a clear picture of how you want each day to unfold and you are actively working to create better and better days, as each month and year unfolds. Begin to process of re-inventing yourself and start creating the future you desire, day by day.

Start this process by answering the few questions listed below and see if you are living the life you really want. This is the first step to identify what you really want and desire.

·         If you won twenty million dollars today, would you change anything or everything in your life?

·         What would you change?

·         If you would immediately change almost everything in your life, if you won all that money, why are you not doing anything about making those changes in your life right now?

·         Why are you allowing yourself to live an unfulfilled life of dissatisfaction?

If these questions have highlighted the fact that you are living a life which is less than ideal, you are not alone.  In my experience, only a very small percentage of people actually get to live the life of their dreams. The rest, allow themselves to remain trapped in unhappy, empty lives, stuck on the hamster wheel of discontentment.

I speak from experience, since I lived the first 35 years of my life trapped in a cycle of unfulfilling careers and relationships. Although I always managed to generate great income, I never really created any meaningful level of sustainable wealth, even though, I’ve owned and operated several very successful yet diverse businesses over the years, in many different sectors, from conferencing/tourism to engineering and manufacturing.

None of these careers offered me any real satisfaction; I was involved in all of them for the wrong reasons. It was only when I finally decided to begin following my dream to become a professional speaker, who writes, researches and travels the planet, teaching and helping other people how to realise their full potential, that I began to feel fulfilled and content.

Rediscover the natural curiosity you exhibited as a child and become an ACTIVE LEARNER. This opens up a world of possibilities for you, prepares you to fully exploit opportunities and continually expands your body of knowledge. Top this off with longer and a better quality of life where you create you future experience day by day and you have the makings of a great and meaningful future.

I want to offer you a few of the tools and techniques I’ve learnt over the years, which helped me to make the shift, necessary to begin making the positive changes I needed to create a life where I am now financially independent and completely fulfilled. These tools and techniques are based on common sense and when consistently applied in your life, will allow you to gradually make the shift toward creating a satisfying life, which excites and invigorates you.

Action Idea: Allow your mind the time it needs to reveal the treasure box of ideas, inspirations and insights that lie hidden in your subconscious, by thoroughly examining your unique concept of success, until the vast panorama of possible options becomes clear to you. Reach deep inside yourself and uncover the resources, wisdom and conviction that will allow you to step outside your comfort zone. For it is here that you will begin to explore new territory and discover all the options that are currently hidden from you. 

The first answers that come to you are little more than ingrained regurgitations of your trained patterns of thought. Learn the art of staying with any question until you have explored it thoroughly and allowed your brain the freedom to reveal as many alternatives as possible. This allows you time to search through those billions of thoughts that are ricocheting through your brain until the right one comes into view.

After completing this process and finally uncovering exactly what you want, you have completed the first step on your success journey. This crystal clear picture, which is an accurate representation of exactly how you want your future to unfold, equips you with an incredible foundation for creating exactly what you have visualised.

Once you have a meaningful vision, a direction to focus your attention on, you now begin to see everything that comes your way as opportunities to grow and expand. The same event that you previously, viewed as being in your way is now on your way to the success that you desire and could now even be an opportunity filled with potential to help you to grow. Reach deep inside yourself and uncover the resources, wisdom and conviction that will allow you to step outside your comfort zone. For it is here that you will begin to explore new territory and discover many opportunities that are currently hidden from you.

 

Alter Things for the better By Design

This clarity of vision gives you a clear direction to keep following as you travel down the path of excellence.  Next we then build an action plan that will allow you to begin moving toward that outcome. Finally you must commit to apply daily disciplined action, that will ensure you carry out the necessary daily actions required to succeed and then success becomes inevitable. How simple does this process sound. If it is that simple, why do so many people allow themselves to remain trapped in lives of mediocrity which they hate so much? The answer to this question has eluded me for more than 20 years.

Achieving anything you want in your life is one choice and one meaningful decision away. Choose to introduce the simple process described above into your life today and make a decision to carry out the daily disciplined activity necessary to succeed. This will allow you to engage in the miracle process of transforming your life into one of joy, happiness, success and fulfillment.

Never lose sight of the value of patience; it is a really powerful tool in your arsenal of success. It keeps you inspired and persistent, brings greater wisdom and perspective to any challenges and allows you to stay focused and to see difficult, yet worthwhile, projects to completion.

Author: Andrew Horton Inspirational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Accept 100 % Responsibility for Creating Your Future Success

As long as you keep nourishing the cause of your frustration and you persist in doing nothing about the cure, you will live a very normal, basic life in which you never get to realize your potential or live a complete and satisfying life. You must stop cursing the effect of your unhappiness and lack of fulfilment, while not doing anything about the cause. Make the choice right now to stretch yourself out of your comfort zone and make something meaningful happen in your life.

The greatest threat to your future success has very little to do with anything outside of you. The greatest thief of your potential is not someone waiting in an alley, eager to rob you; it is your own mind. Don’t become a victim of yourself and allow your dreams to be crushed because you are limiting your potential with doubt and negative thoughts.

It is never what happens that determines the major part of your future or how your life will ultimately turnout. Whatever happens in your environment happens to many people in similar circumstances to you and yet they still manage to succeed, despite the challenges they may face. The major factor that will determine how your future will pan out and the quality of life you will get to live, is controlled by how you choose to respond to what happens to you. External factors or events that cross your path will only have a lasting effect on your life if you allow them to overwhelm you or if you habitually make poor choices.

Looking at things that are not ideal in your environment and acting like a victim, takes away all your power and sets you up to live a life of mediocrity. It is as effective as cursing the earth, rain and sunshine for your circumstances, when that is all you have. Allowing yourself to think like a victim and act like a victim will do nothing more than make you a victim, which is trapped and can do nothing but complain.

Confront the circumstances that surround you and accept that with effort even lemons can be turned into lemonade. Stop making excuses and walk away from the herd. Believe that you can walk ahead of the crowd, walk away from the 97 % of people that see themselves as victims and begin to shine. Stop using the excuses that has kept you trapped in an unfulfilling and empty life and finally take charge of your life and future. Everything you can have, do and be, is limited only by what you are prepared to do, with the circumstances you encounter along the path to success, never by what you encounter along the way.

Accept 100 % responsibility for everything in your life. It is very difficult to change the circumstances you face each day, the seasons, or the state of the economy will remain just the way they are. There is one thing that you can choose to change, if you are so inclined, that thing is you. If you want the world or your circumstances to change, the change must start with you.

You have complete control over the choices you make: you decide how much daily discipline you will apply; you decide how much you will read each day; you decide if you are prepared to acquire new skills or not; you decide if you will attend seminars or classes, which will help you to grow into the type of person you need to be to attract the success you desire.

All the choices you make or fail to make gradually mould your future and create the life you will get to live. Making, different, more positive choices will most certainly allow you to live a more meaningful life. Commit to a life of on-going learning and growth and strive to constantly become more.

Success is something you attract by the person you become; it is never something you pursue. Anything you pursue will elude you. Your earnings, relationships, health and future are dependent on how you train yourself to respond to events, which cross your path and how you manage the circumstances that surround you every day. As you grow your level of knowledge and skill, you equip yourself to make wiser and more informed choices. These better choices, will over time add up to a far more fulfilling life, which is aligned with your dreams and expectations. Commit to a life of continual and never ending improvement and choose your responses very carefully in the future. Every choice you make is moulding the future you will get to live.

Not every choice you will make, will deliver the results you desire. All progress requires change, but as you know not all change is going to result in progress. The only way to know if any new choices or changes you have made are delivering the desired results is to establish measurement criterion at the inception of any change and then to measure how these changes are performing daily, weekly and monthly. If the changes are delivering the desired results, keep applying them in your life, if they are not, have the courage to change them as soon as possible.

Always be open to listen to the advice and feedback you receive, but never become a slave to other people’s opinions. Feedback and advice are there to serve as instruments to measure your performance and assess whether or not the actions you are taking are aligned with the outcomes you desire. They are never orders or instructions on how you should proceed. As Abraham Lincoln said, “Since I will be no man’s slave, I will be no man’s master”

Author: Andrew Horton Motivational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za