You can be happy Right Now

Happiness like success is very often misunderstood and too many people think that happiness is a function of how much money you have.  Most people wrongly believe that if you make enough money, you can buy happiness.  I have had the experience of pursuing money at the expense of everything else in my life and woke up one day with a very empty life and no one to share my life with me.

Money will bring temporary relief and instant gratification, but I can guarantee very little real happiness.  I have since expanded my definition of success and what is required to be truly happy, to include far more than merely a measure of how much money I could accrue or things I could own. For me success is about discovering the things around you that bring fulfillment and meaning into your experience and then inviting that fulfillment and meaning into your life by taking inspired action every day. Life truly is a journey of creation, growth and becoming.

Happiness is a personal choice and not the product of anything outside of you.

Material things can never have the power to make you happy in the long term.  Real meaningful and sustainable happiness is a function of the level of internal satisfaction you have. The path needed to uncover this satisfaction, is paved with discovery, growth and consistent creation. Stop looking for happiness in trinkets and external factors, which as you know, bring comfort and enjoyment only in the moment, accept that they can never bring any lasting happiness into your experience.  Happiness is a choice, how happy you are is a direct result of the amount of joy you allow yourself to experience.  Happiness comes from within and as such you have complete control over how happy you are or even if you feel any happiness at all. The more meaning, fulfillment and contentment you bring into your life, as you align yourself with your purpose and you stop focusing on yourself, the more happy you will feel.

There may be certain circumstances in your life right now, which seem difficult or challenging.  The secret to not to allow these circumstances to overwhelm you and to steal your happiness and is best achieve, when you have a crystal clear picture or vision of exactly what you want in your future. This allows you to focus on all the possibility and potential, which is available to you and to choose happiness. The external factors can only rob you of your joy and happiness, if you lose focus and you allow yourself to lose faith in your ability to deliver the future you have envisioned. Believe in yourself and your potential, take inspired action daily, choose to be happy and your life will unfold   in a bubble of joy. Your happiness is very specific to you and as such never allow your happiness to depend on what someone else thinks you should be or have. Your happiness must come from within and be fueled by your purposeful actions and the deep rooted meaning you have in your life.

Action Idea: Gaze into your future and get a crystal clear picture of exactly what you want to enjoy in your future. Turn this into a written down vision, written in the present tense. It must be filled with vivid pictures of what you will see, experience, where you will be, who will be around you. Try to involve all your senses when building the picture or vision you want to live. Feel the joy, happiness, sense of purpose, meaning and fulfillment today.

Wake up every day and before you even start your day focus on the feelings that your vision invites into your experience. Repeat this a few times during day, feel the glow of the success and fulfillment you will enjoy as many times as possible throughout the day. Go to bed and as you start to dose off at night, focus on this beautiful picture. This will allow you to percolate in your dream world for the next 6 – 8 hours focusing on the positive experience you have visualized in your magnificent future.

When creating your dream lives focus on happiness and fulfillment as key factors, rather than material or external empty gratification. Creating the life of your dreams does not have to be trying, exhausting or draining. When you are living on purpose and you have a clear picture of where you want to get to and a clearly defined plan that will get you there, things will unfold and develop.  When you truly believe in your success and happiness, everything will effortlessly unfold and deliver your bliss. 

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Pursuing happiness is as effective as chasing a rainbow

Attempting to pursue happiness is as effective as attempting to discover the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. The harder you try to find happiness, the more you pursue it, the further out of your reach it will become. Happiness is never something you pursue; it is something you choose to enjoy, because of internal feelings of contentment and meaning. It is a state of mind, you can choose to invite into your experience at any time. If you allow your happiness to depend on factors outside of your control or things in your environment, over which you have little or no control, any small change in your circumstances or in your environment, will result in changes to your state over which you have no control.

I am sure that enjoying a delicious ice cream will make you happy. The challenge though, is when you allow that ice cream to be the catalyst for your happiness. What happens if someone, accidently knocks the ice cream out of your hand? Do you immediately change your state, from happy to angry? If you are outward looking for your happiness, it will be fleeting and temporary. The art of enjoying positive feelings or sustainable happiness, which is not dependant on any extraneous factors, is to find meaning and ways of inviting fulfilment into your experience. 

When you invite meaning and fulfilment into your life, you will have discovered a way of feeling happy and content, despite any changes in your circumstances or any small mishaps, which may occur. A life of meaning, where you have a deep sense of purpose and value, will most certainly never change, because someone knocks an ice cream out of your hand. When you have meaning and you have invited fulfilment into your life, you are living in a state of joy and happiness, which is not dependant on purely fleeting emotions.

Action Idea: Start to explore your environment and try discovering areas where you can find meaning and fulfilment.

• Try to discover ways of developing deep meaningful connected relationships with people around you
• Look for a cause larger than you, which you can support.
• Make a contribution to others, with no expectation of receiving anything in return.
• Look for and discover all the wonders, which are in your life right now and feel real gratitude for them.
• Commit to a life of on-going learning and growth, as you grow and become more, you will invite far more meaning and fulfilment into your experience.

Try to bring one or all of these factors into your experience, you will be amazed at how they will contribute to your feeling of contentment and bring meaning into your experience. The most wonderful side effect of working to bring any of these concepts, I have described above, into your experience, is that as wonderful as it is to cross the finish line in each case. The journey, which you must travel to invite this level of meaning and fulfilment into your experience is almost magical.

One of the easiest ways to immediately change your state and to begin your journey towards meaning and fulfilment is to explore your life and find all the wonders in your life, for which you are grateful. When you take the focus off you and place it on all the positive things you have in your life to be grateful for, you immediately feel more positive an upbeat. Gratitude helps you to wash away all the fear and anxiety. You cannot feel gratitude and fear and anxiety at the same time.

So whenever you are looking for ways to invite happiness into your life, simply change your focus off everything, which may be wrong and instead think about all the wonderful things you have to be grateful for in your life. Another way to invite happiness into your experience is to do something special for someone else. Any selfless act will bring buckets of happiness, contentment and fulfilment into your life. Why not give it a whirl, living a life of meaning and fulfilment, is such a satisfying place to live.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

The Power of Your Imagination, Will Create the Future you Desire

I have often pondered the question around, what drives one person to consistently take the daily actions, which result in great success and what encourages someone else with the same potential, to sit back and do nothing. The research that I am conducting is pointing me towards, a finding that highly driven or inspired achievers find their strength in the power of their imagination. It seems that people, who can visualise a crystal clear picture of exactly what they want in their future, will endure short term pain for long term gain. In other words the people who see or visualise possibility, i.e. prize of what is possible, are willing to pay a price today, to earn the prize they have visualised for tomorrow.

As humans we are wired to be pleasure seeking and pain avoiding. Our natural tendency as humans is thus to avoid anything, which will cause us pain, even if that pain is the small daily discipline, or daily action required to achieve success. It is a natural drive within all of us to move toward pleasure and avoid the possibility of pain at all costs. Unless you have something to focus on, which will result in you enjoying a far greater degree of pleasure in the future, it is extremely unlikely that you will take action every day to realise a better future, as the actions you need to take will result in discomfort or pain.

When you understand this about yourself, can you now see how crucial it is to have crystal clear vision of exactly what you want in your future and for you to make this picture as pleasurable as possible? The more you can envision yourself in a pleasurable place, where you can actually feel, taste, smell, hear and see yourself experiencing incredible levels of pleasure, the more likely and easier it will be for you to inspire yourself to experience the daily pain associated with carrying the actions you need to succeed. Your vision of the future allows you to see everything, including challenges and the daily action you need to take as something, which is “ON YOUR WAY” and as such, you always find ways to “GET SOMETHING” from the challenge or the daily actions you take.

Understanding our imagination

Our frontal lobe separates us from every other species on earth. It allows us to have an imagination. We are able to see things, not as they are today, but rather how they can be in the future. This amazing ability allows us to gaze into the future and based on our beliefs, values and expectations, allows us to draw a mental picture, which we can then turn into our reality in the future. Our imagination is the first step in the creation process.

The power of our imagination and our ability to turn a clear vision into a tangible future, was proven in research conducted by Dr David McClelland of Harvard University. He utilised a number of “projective tests”, in which he used photographs or drawings depicting various scenarios, to test people’s level of motivation. One of the experiments he conducted was done using a picture of a person lying in bed, with their eyes closed and their hand raised over the alarm clock. The window in the background was very bright, with the sun’s rays clearly shining through the window, indicating that it was morning. The people were then asked to tell a short story about the person in the picture.   

Dr McClelland’s hypothesis was that “motivation comes from internal images” The subjects in his research study who told the most inspiring stories and demonstrated the most active levels of imagination, were the people who become the most successful in the future.

This study was conducted over a fourteen year period and to ensure that their responses were solely a function of levels of motivation and no other factors played a part in his findings. All the subjects were of the same sex, age, social background and level of education. His extensive experiments, proved his hypothesis. The subjects who gave the most passive responses, like the person was lying in bed and about to go back to sleep because it was a Saturday and they did not have to go to work, were the least successful, ten years later. The people who gave the most active answers and said things like “The person is waking up early so that they can complete an important project”, were far more successful ten years later.

The experiments conducted by Dr McClelland were very complex and extensive. They most certainly proved his hypothesis around motivation and the direct link to imagination. If you want to be successful and live your dreams, fuel your fertile imagination with crystal clear pictures of exactly what you want in your future and you will be driven and motivated to do what it takes to realise exactly that in your future. When you hold a vivid picture in your mind of exactly what you want to achieve, the enormous power of your mind goes to work to deliver exactly that to you. The more detail you can build into the image, the easier it is for your brain to go to work and bring just that imagined picture into your reality.

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You can Change your future by changing your vision of what is possible

Let your mind out for a walk today and explore the question “what do I really want in my future?” When you gain clarity around this issue, you become a creator of your circumstances. Continue to blunder, blindly through life and you will remain a creature of your circumstances. For you to finally begin to manifest your true aspirations, you must clearly articulate these aims to both yourself and the universe. When you clarify your aspirations, they take on a new substance and what was a mere wish, before becomes real and achievable.

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 rather by our vision of 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 to create your own blue print ot make that happen. 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 then clarify these and then create a blue print for your success.

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. 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 that 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.

Live in the moment, never allowing your dreams to run ahead of you, for the person that only looks outside of themselves is simply a dreamer, those that learn to look into their heart, awaken their belief in their ability and they unleash their unlimited potential. Recording and time defining your dreams is simply the start, realizing them is the art

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Stop Attempting to Solve Problems Any Longer – Just Make Different Decisions

Working with the concept of problem solving, introduces a number of challenges for me. I believe that what we think about, we most certainly, through our thoughts and actions, eventually bring about. So the very act of viewing something as a problem causes us to engage in negative thought processes. These negative thought processes sees us approaching any event which has occurred from a very negative standpoint. We view the event as something we need to overcome, rather than simply an event, which has occurred that, is not aligned with the outcome we want to achieve.

When you make this shift, where you no longer view any changes that you need to make or events, which are not aligned with the outcome you want to achieve, as problems, you remove the negative connotation associated with overcoming problems. You instead allow yourself to operate from a far more positive position. This subtle shift then allows you to view these changes or undesirable outcomes, which you need to make, as merely a set of different choice or decisions away. This subtle shift, will allow you to operate from a more positive position. You no longer have to overcome anything, all you need to do is make a few calculated and focused different decisions or choices and the outcome or result will change.

My experience has shown that once you make this shift away from viewing any undesirable result, as a problem you need to overcome. Instead you see it as an event which is not aligned with the outcome you want to achieve, you immediately remove the feeling of overwhelm and move into a proactive position, where you feel empowered. It is obviously far easier to make meaningful, appropriate decisions, when you are operating from a positive modality, where you feel underwhelmed. Rather than from a pressured position of overwhelm, as you tackle a problem and try you overcome it.

Change the way you look at problems and the problems will change into manageable, undesirable events, which can be altered, by simply making a few different choices or decisions. Now that you know that there is no such thing as problems, it is time to offer you a few tools to help you make better decisions. The better and more informed your decisions are, the better will be the new outcomes you will be able to achieve.

This dynamic environment we live in often requires us to make decisions, very quickly.is. The rapidly changing world we live in means we are expected to make high quality decisions almost in an instant. Deciding and acting is always the responsibility of the leader in any business. It has however become very challenging leaders to make any decisions, because of the dynamic nature of the business environment, with far more inputs and a myriad of interdependencies.

This challenge is exacerbated by the way data is presented. Reports are designed to inform, rather than to provide insights. These reports are designed to report by category or to merely offer metrics. This way of presenting data was effective, when there were fewer connections between data. This meant that there was a small gap between having information and utilising this to make any decision. The dynamic nature of the business environment and the ever shifting and changing world, has now resulted in a huge gap forming between the available information and its effectiveness as a decision making tool.

For Example: It is important to know the consumer buying habits and patterns in any market. The current way of providing reports as used by companies at the moment, only provides metrics, there is no provision made to consider crucial factors such as strategy, core competencies and the company’s competitive position. Strategy, core competencies and the competitive position of any business are the key factors, which drive any decisions, which need to be made.

It is for this reason that the current way of providing reports, where only metrics are presented, should be revised to include more relevant information around core competencies, strategy, market conditions and competitive position. It is no longer adequate to provide discrete facts, it has become crucial to provide meaningful information, which provides real answers. The information should be prepared to provide data relative to the decision, which needs to be made or that provides actual answers to crucial questions, needed to make great decisions.

For Example: most scorecard reports are designed to list categories. They list each metric, their current level of performance and then this compared to some sort of historical data. All this information is useful in certain contexts, but does not reveal the real information you need to know, when looking at a scorecard. Your goal when exploring any scorecards is most certainly not to be informed about targets, performance or history. Your role as a leader is to have meaningful information, which will give you the necessary background to allow you to create a plan and to take action. If reports are prepared with the result in mind, they will be far more effective and provide a meaningful support mechanism to any leader.

Obviously when you review a traditional report detailing categories and metrics, you will go through the report line by line. As you try to absorb all the data overwhelm, your brain will be trying to compare this data with previous information, which you have encountered and it will be filtering, eliminating and removing potentially crucial information, simply because of the information overload. We look at the data overload and try to answer the same question as we progress down the report, line by line. “Is the metric on target and what is the trend telling me”? This is a really ineffective and inefficient way of analysing data. Why ask the same question, repeatedly, when you can organise the data to allow you to discover the info you need to allow you to make any decision.

Rather create a decision or outcome driven report. This way you only present the crucial or relevant data, which you need to use to make the decision. You organise the metrics according to the question you need answered or the decision you need to make, rather than the data being organised on the report in terms of the metric, with no thought about the decision you need to make. This simplified way of analysing only the data you need, in a way that answers the question you need answered or the decision you need to make simplifies the process and allows you to get a clear picture.

This will allow you to immediately know where to focus your attention. This focused approach eliminates the need to wade through unnecessary rows and rows of repetitive data, which only overwhelms the reader. When you organise the data according to the focused approach as defined above, there is no need to wade through reams of data to get the answer. This organised, decision driven approach provides all the answers you need. The raw numbers are irrelevant, all the reader is interested in is what the numbers or trends mean and what action is required.

This approach allows you to very quickly get the answers you need and to track only the trends you need to be observing. Of course you can still analyse the raw data and use the numbers, if necessary to further understand or diagnose any challenges. The raw data or metrics are merely an input; they are not the answer you are looking for. So having all the numbers on any report, will actually just slow you down and even force you to become overwhelmed and overloaded. Too much data on any report is difficult to analyse and will result in your brain filtering or ignoring crucial information.

Action Idea: Think about all the reports you utilise to assist you when making any important decisions. Are you asking and answering the same questions on every line or even if you have become more organised and have adopted a colour coding scheme to highlight and track certain issues. Does the report actually answer the questions you have around the decision you need to make. To make the reports you use in future really effective, where they will serve as a powerful decision making tool. Organise the report to answer the real questions you have and simplify the process, by using the process I described above.

When you are rethinking how you can utilise the data you need in future, to assist you to make meaningful decisions, you need to make. Will require a major shift to the way you have operated in the past. Your historical practices of analysing, reading and attempting to analyse rows and rows of metrics, will most certainly not serve you going forward.

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The Art of Making Decisions that Can Change your Life or Business

The ever increasing rate of change in our world, over the past few decades, has resulted in the challenges we face, becoming more and more complex. There is a constant barrage of data and information, through which we need to sort, before we can even begin making any decisions. These constant, accelerating changes, the vast amount of information and the complexities we face every day, has also resulted in much larger interdependencies amongst those impacted by any decision we make. All of these factors have added up and have made decision making far more difficult and complex for leaders.

The vast amount of data available and the tools, which can be used to help leaders shift through and analyse the data overwhelm, has seen leaders respond to these new complexities, by placing a far greater focus on analytics and data driven decision making. Leaders are becoming far more dependent on vast amounts of data to make decisions and are losing the confidence to listen to their internal voice of experience. They have turned down the volume on their leadership intuition and instead have learnt to trust the data to guide them, when making decisions.

I have observed a definite trend, in all the leaders, at the businesses where I consult. They have all moved toward an increased need for data and tools to analyse this data. Yet, despite, this increased attention, massively increased volume of data and tools to analyse and interpret the data, the decisions made by all these leaders does not always improve. I accept that the rapid rate of change, the complexities we face and the interdependencies amongst those impacted by every decision, makes data and analytical tools crucial to any leader. The challenge is that the leaders I have observed rely completely on the data, to guide them to make decisions.

The data and tools for analysing the data are only support mechanisms for any leader and are by no means enough on their own. The data and analytics only support the leader to make any decision and are by no means enough on their own. If any leader is to excel in their role as a leader and to ensure that the decisions they make are valid and in the best interest of all stakeholders. They must ensure that they trust their insight, experience and ability to effectively interpret all the data they receive. The reason many leaders fail to make credible decisions, is because they rely almost exclusively on the data they have analysed and they do not listen to their inner voice of experience, insight and foresight.

The second challenge I have observed in the leaders I have consulted with over the past few years, is that they are relying on analytical tools and techniques, which are outdated. If leaders are to begin making credible and effective decisions going forward, I believe that it is time to rethink how we use all the data, which is all around us and that leaders need learn to trust themselves, where they use their innate leadership intuition to analyse and more effectively utilise the data. This is best achieved when leaders commit to flex their decision making muscle, as often as possible and they work to consistently improve their skill and ability to lead and make decisions.

Effectively analysing and Utilising Data to Make Decisions

It is most certainly time to rethink how we utilise, analyse and interpret the massive amount of data all around us. The analytical tools and techniques employed by most of the leaders I have observed, were designed for a much simpler world. The rapid rate of change and the ever increasing amount of data, which is available, has seen these tools become ineffective and outdated. This means that leaders are making decisions, with flawed information. As they have begun to rely exclusively on the analysed data and have turned down the volume on their own leadership intuition and foresight, they often make ineffectual decisions, which have a negative impact on their businesses. Leaders are also allowing themselves to become overwhelmed with data overload.

Understanding How Your Brain Manages Data

Your brain is designed to work hard to map what it currently sees or observes, to what it already knows. To do this when it is overwhelmed with a vast amount of data overload, it must distort, ignore and sub optimise data. This system of comparing everything to what you already know was a very effective system forty thousand years ago, when our brains were evolving to their current structure. Back then things were pretty static and everything in our world changed really slowly. Therefore the brains ability to link all the new things it encountered to the old things it had already experienced, if not always accurate, provided our species with a survival advantage.

The challenge we face today is that we live in a vastly differently world, than we inhabited forty thousand years ago. Things are changing so rapidly in our world today, the business cycle is getting shorter and shorter, companies are developing products with an expected life cycle of only six months, completely new products, which did not even exist are created every thirty seconds today. This rate of change is not showing signs of slowing down either. The rate of change is accelerating at an ever increasing pace.

All of this means that your brain is completely overwhelmed with new data and input information, resulting in your brain kicking into a higher gear, where you distort, ignore and sub-optimise the entire data overload at an ever increasing rate. All the graphs, charts and reports become overwhelming and as such your brain will filter as much of the information as possible. This entire process happens subconsciously and so the more irrelevant data you try to utilise and analyse to make decisions, the more likely it is that your brain will filter the information and the less likely you are to see any problem data areas.

The secret to making effective decisions is to limit the data overwhelm and to ensure that all the data you utilise to guide you when making any decisions, is correctly analysed and processed before you even see it. It is also crucial that you turn the volume up on your own leadership intuition and that you once again learn to trust your experience and follow your gut feel. Flex your decision making muscle as often as possible. Become decisive and trust yourself. Too much analysis and data overwhelm, will often result in paralysis and ultimately poor decisions.

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Make The Most of Your Personal Power as a Leader

All really great leaders know the few leadership secrets I am going to share with you in this article. They know that there are a few crucial personality traits, which they can use to empower themselves as leaders. These personality traits or rather personality powers, will help them to increase their level of influence and as you know leadership is all about a leaders ability to influence their team to perform optimally.

I am sure you have sat in a room where someone has put their hand to their mouth and yawned. How long did it take before everyone in the room felt a virtually uncontrollable urge to yawn themselves or put differently, mirrored their behaviour? We have billions of mirror neurons in our brains, which drive us to mirror the behaviour of the people around us. These mirror neurons are crucial to our development and help us to learn and grow. Any great leader knows how to use this concept and knows that emotions are contagious, or rather that the people around them mirror the emotions they project to the world.

Your Emotions are Contagious

When any leader consistently projects an aura of enthusiasm to everyone around them, everyone in their team, feels more excited and driven to participate in supporting the team’s success. The more excited a leader is about accomplishing anything, the more excited and driven everyone in their team will be to help the leader succeed. Emotions are most certainly contagious and so, the more passion you have for your life and everything you do, the more charisma you will project and the more driven people in your team will be to co-operate with you as their leader. Every great leader, who has lived has been passionate and driven by a cause greater than them and as a result, has attracted the support and co-operation of a myriad of people, who supported them to achieve the outcome they wanted.

As people mirror the behaviour of the people around them it is crucial that anyone, who wants to become a great leader, must develop expertise and competence. Any leader knows that their team will very quickly lose trust and respect in them, if they are consistently incompetent and do not possess sufficient knowledge and expertise. The opposite is also true. The more knowledge and expertise any leader has in their respective field, the easier it will be for their team to trust and respect them, as their leader. When any leader is consistently competent and leads by example, their team members will exhibit the same level of competence and willingness to always deliver their best. When you are a competent leader and consistently perform at a high level, you will naturally attract a team, who will support you and help you to succeed.

The Power of Preparation

All great leaders also know the power of preparation. The more prepared you are to lead your team, prior to tackling any task, the more your team will respect and trust you as their leader. When preparing to tackle any new task or project, it is crucial that you research and have a deep understanding of what you want to achieve. You as the leader must have an overall vision or direction that you want your team to travel in. Everyone in your team must know their individual role in delivering on this vision.

As you however introduce any new task or activity, which will assist the team to achieve this vision, you must be absolutely clear in your mind about why you need to carry out that specific task or activity. This clarity must be clearly communicated to all team members. Each team member must be left with no doubt as to their individual role in carrying out the new task or activity. Clarity and an understanding of purpose, will act to inspire all team members and allow them to completely support you as their leader. The more prepared you are as a leader, where you have invested time to think through different scenarios, considered numerous possibilities and explored all the different ramifications. The more you will be able to positively influence and inform your team about the new project and their role in achieving the outcome you need.

As any great leader knows, you lead by example. Always strive to do things right the first time and everyone in your team will soon mirror this positive behaviour too. You and everyone in your team is a work in progress, show your commitment to keep growing and expanding and you will very quickly see all your team members show a willingness to keep growing themselves.

Action Idea: What can you do from today to make a real difference to you as a leader?

• Get excited and passionate about your teams goals and project this enthusiasm to everyone in your team. You will be amazed at how quickly the members of your team will start to exhibit the same level of enthusiasm and willingness to support you as their leader.
• Commit to constantly grow and expand in every area of your life and encourage every team member, with your example, to do the same. Your encouragement and example will most certainly, over time, encourage everyone in your team to grow, learn and expand themselves.
• Show your belief and commitment to every team member and ensure that they are completely clear about their individual role on delivering on the team’s vision.
• Always ensure that you are adequately prepared and strive to always be the example you want your team members to be.

When you commit to introduce these few new behaviours and you bring these few new action ideas into your leadership style, you will very quickly see a dramatic improvement in the performance of all your team members and ultimately the results you will achieve.

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Share in the Abundance, Which Ebbs and Flows all Around Us

I very often get asked by people, why I write an article every day, in which I aspire to add inspiration to as many people’s lives as possible and freely share my take on personal development. They cannot understand how I can give so freely to others and ask nothing in return. My answer is always very simple, we live in an abundant universe and the more we are willing to share and give to others. The more open we are to receive ourselves.

Imagine standing with your hands clasped tightly against your chest, where you are attempting to cling onto everything you know and possess, so that no one can get any of it. Those clasped or closed hands can only hang on to what you have; it is very difficult for them to open so they can gather anything more. Contrast that picture with someone, who stands with open hands, freely sharing everything they know and possess, with others. Yes those open hands do give away plenty. But they are open and welcoming, inviting so much more into their experience.

I believe that the secret to creating a life of meaning and living a fulfilling experience, where you constantly grow, expand and share your abundance with others, is to strive to be a person of value, rather than a person, who possesses trinkets and a vast fortune. There is an incredible quote written by Albert Einstein, which epitomises this concept. “Try not to become a man of success but rather become a man of value” The more value I am able to add to the lives of others, the more value, love and grace flows into my life. Every act of kindness you are able to bestow on people around you, will not only fill the receiver with joy and happiness, but will allow you to feel good too.

When you are no longer self-focused and you consistently think abundant thoughts, in which you are outward looking and you actively look for ways to help and grow the people around you. It is almost magical, how many people around you do exactly the same for you. What you think about, you bring about. When you are thinking positive, good, sharing thoughts and you are in a modality of always looking to improve the lives of the people around you, exactly that will be reflected back at you. I am most certainly not suggesting that you give to others, with a deep rooted expectation that you will get something in return. The very thinking, which goes with that selfish motivation, will have you thinking thoughts and acting in ways, which will interrupt the flow of abundance into your experience.

Imagine what a wonderful, abundant world we would inhabit, if everyone gave freely of themselves and only wanted the best for everyone around them. Imagine if we all wanted to be people of value, or rather people, who add real value to our world. This planet would be incredible. Start to play you role today, no matter how small and strive to add some value to someone in your environment. As you strive to be a person of value, in every facet of your life, career, financial, spiritual, family, social, etc, you may give away more than you are accustomed to at first. However it is my deep rooted belief that if you have an abundant mind-set and you give freely without the expectation of ever receiving anything in return, where you strive to give as much value to those around you as possible, you will see buckets of success and abundance flow into your life.  

Accepting that there is abundance all around you and becoming a value adder, is not a part time shift that you need to make. It must become your new way of thinking and acting from this moment on. When all of us become value adders and we have open hearts, hands and heads, where we share freely, we invite happiness and abundance into our lives too.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Real winners never cross the line, they Keep Moving the Goal Posts

Whenever I watch the athletes being interviewed, before the Olympic Games I can quickly tell who the winners and who the participants will be. The most reliable way of doing this is by simply listening, to their answers, during sports interviews. Those that say “I am just glad to be here” are not going to be wearing the champion’s rings, when the games are over. They have achieved their goals before the games even started.

As you move through the different phases in your life and you get to achieve your goals. You have to continually set more, new and ambitious ones, which will constantly stretch and challenge you. Real great, long term, sustainable success is the result of not only setting and achieving big goals, but is about constantly getting and creating new goals along the way. Super achievement is not about “goal setting”, it is the result of a constant hunger, for consistent growth, in other words, you must be a new goal getter.

Vision and success is a direction, never a destination. The secret to living a life of meaning and fulfilment is to know that, yes, we must achieve a few milestones along our journey towards the success, we have envisioned. But they are merely milestones, not the reason we started the journey in the first place. A young man may set a goal to mow 100 people’s lawns during his summer vacation, so that he can buy an old jalopy to impress his girlfriend. Once he has earned sufficient money and actually bought the car, the real lesson and purpose of setting the goal in the first place, was never to impress his girlfriend. It was to learn the crucial lesson of solid work habits and experiencing the joy of setting and achieving a goal.

Accumulating sufficient money to actually buy the car is of course a wonderful reason to celebrate. He has after all reached a really fantastic milestone on his journey toward meaning and fulfilment. The secret to sustain this success and to keep moving in the direction of the success he desires, is to immediately set an even more ambitious goal, which will keep stretching him and moving him down the path of growing and becoming. Remember that “As you become more, you will constantly keep attracting more”.

The lessons learned by the young boy, that setting goals, applying daily discipline and hard work to anything, he wants to achieve, will result in a desirable outcome. Has most certainly allowed him to grow expand and become more. As the universal law say, “As you become more, so you will attract more” This young man has thus started his sustainable success journey through life. To live a life of meaning and fulfilment and where he can achieve true success. He must keep moving the goal posts and keep setting and getting more and more ambitious goals as he reaches each milestone.

There are so many companies, which were really amazing blue-chip companies at one time, but have faded into just memories today. Companies like Studebaker, W.T Grant and Triumph Motor cycles. These companies had a goal of reaching the top, which they did, but they allowed themselves to falter, because, they never moved the goal posts and expanded their game. I am sure that you have seen it happen to people around you. The sales guru, who topped the charts for years and then overnight, everything just falls apart and they tumble off the no. one slot, all the way to the bottom. Tiger Woods is a perfect example of this. Yes there was infidelity and too many women involved in his life to count, but the real reason he fell from the number one slot and is finding it difficult to get back on top, has nothing to do with infidelity. It has everything to do with reaching the pinnacle of success and then not moving the goal posts.

As you set and achieve goals, always stretch yourself, by setting more and more ambitious ones. Never allow yourself to lose your way and think you have reached your destination. Don’t lose your hunger, desire and your need to keep growing, innovating and expanding. It is extremely unlikely that you will ever exceed your own expectations. So dare to dream big, set big hairy audacious goals and as you get close to crossing the line and achieving any goal you have set, keep moving the goals posts and becoming more.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Allow Your Excellence to Shine

Our level of productivity and the delivery of the commitments we make to our future success, is seriously under threat, due to our lack of commitment to carry out the necessary daily actions, we know are needed, to deliver our dreams.  We are so wrapped up in doing our daily JOB (Just Over Broke) that we never make time available for the really important task of making time available to work on our goals and plans that will create the future we really desire. Stop allowing your lack of discipline, to carry out the small daily actions, needed to succeed, from stopping you living your brilliance.

Strive to become and remain inspired, stay focused on your success, work to remain creative and make time available for the important task of carrying out the daily small disciplines that will move you one small step at a time, closer and closer to your dreams.

Stay tapped in to the flow of your excellence and creativity and allow your brilliance to shine with every small, disciplined action you complete daily. Ensure that you make the necessary time available, to carry out the actions needed, by planning your week in advance and setting aside time slots every day in which you will perform these activities. I refer to these time slots as “meetings with my future”.

These meetings are cast in stone and should something really urgent and unavoidable come up, these “meetings with your future” must be rescheduled, never ever cancelled. These meetings or time slots in your daily agenda are as important as meetings with one of your most important clients and must be treated as such. If something really urgent comes up, you would reschedule an appointment with your clients, you would never summarily just cancel it. These meetings with yourself are really crucial if you are to ever move out of the rut that you may be stuck in.

Earl Nightingale was quoted as saying that he can tell exactly how successful someone will be, purely by looking at the daily agenda. Are you satisfied with your daily agenda? Will it lead you to the dreams you hold so dear?

As long as you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting what you have always got. Develop the discipline to carry out the necessary daily actions needed to realise your dreams and goals, keep your commitment to remain focused and driven to keep carrying out your daily commitments and your success becomes inevitable. 

Upgrade your circuitry of your productivity, daily discipline, time allocation and commitment to your dreams and you will manifest the most incredible life for yourself and your family. When you develop the new success habit set of consistent daily action that is focused specifically on realising your dreams, your success will feel effortless and you will start to live a complete and fulfilled life.

Commit to create a new routine that is focused on ensuring that you move out of the rut of “only getting through your day”, where all your effort is focused on simply surviving and rather move to a place where you “see what you can get from every day”, by committing to a few daily disciplines focused on carrying out tasks geared to realising your dreams.

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Recruiting the right people is the no one Business Skill that ensures sustainable business success

Your business is no different to any other, it is simply a group of people that have joined together to achieve a mutual outcome or result that will be beneficial to all stakeholders. It is irrelevant what the objectives of your business or organisation might be, the success or the quality of the outcomes you will enjoy is directly proportional to the calibre of the people within your organisation. Your most valuable asset owned by your organisation is thus your people. They will serve as the greatest determining factor that will determine how successful your business will be or in many cases how unsuccessful it will be.

It is for this reason that you must have a really refined recruitment policy within your business. When the success of any organisation depends on more than one person to achieve any outcomes, it becomes imperative that you ensure that you only bring the correct people with the correct skills into your business. It is not only crucial that you have the right people sitting in the correct seats on your businesses bus of success, but that they are all committed to give their best to achieve the common purpose or vision of the organisation.

When you explore any great business that has become very successful, the one factor present in all of them is that they are filled with great people, who are driven to accomplish a unified purpose and inspired by a great vision. No great success can ever be achieved in any organisation without the support of everyone within the business. The secret to building your business and turning it into a huge success is to fill your business with people that have strengths that support your efforts and are aligned with the outcomes you are trying to achieve.

Never be shy to fill your teams with people that are smarter, more skilled or far more talented than you are. This will equip your business for great achievement and long term sustainable success. One of the easiest ways to ensure that your business becomes really successful and a great contributor to all stakeholders is to surround yourself with people that excel in areas where you struggle. This next piece of advice may sound obvious and common sense; I assure you that it is by no means common practice. You should aim to fill all the positions in your business with people that have strengths and almost feel like their work is fun and what they love doing. When your management team is smarter, more talented and skilled than you in their specialised areas, you have built a quality team that will turn your business into a super organisation. 

   

The message I want to pass onto you is that it is never your intelligence, experience, knowledge, skill or background that will decide how successful your business will be. The way your business turns out will depend on one thing only – Your ability to find, train, retain and empower the right people. The number one skill you thus need to develop and hone is the ability to assess, hire and inspire the right people to deliver their best every day. Always strive to hire people that are authorities in their field. No one is inspired or driven to succeed by people that act from a position where they are IN authority. No matter what product or service you sell, how large your manufacturing facility or warehouse may be, your most valuable asset will always be the quality of the people in your organisation.

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Connect with the Right People and you will Dramatically Increase your Sales

It is a well-known fact that people buy from people they know, like and trust. So if you have a desire to increase your sales, then you need to stop sitting with your feet braced firmly against the table, with a desperate look on your face trying to sell your products or services. Instead you need to invest effort into fostering mutually beneficial relationships with business partners. Your objective, when developing these relationships, must be to about solving challenges for your new partners, or rather providing them with solutions, which meet or exceed their expectations. This can only be achieved if you are supplying products or services; you completely believe in and trust yourself.

Learn the art of listening twice as much as you speak and ensure that you completely understand the needs of your partners. If any partnership is going to work, you must be certain that your product or service can completely satisfy the needs of your new partner. When you listen and completely understand their needs, you believe in your product or service and trust that it is exactly what they need. You have the ingredients you need to begin creating that mutually beneficial relationship, which will ensure that any relationship will be sustainable.

Your main objective when you work with any client has got to be one of building mutually beneficial relationships and creating partnerships, which will be of value to both parties. To become successful and to move “YOUR BUSINESS” to the next level, you must change your mind-set around the relationship you need to foster with your clients or partners. When I refer to “YOUR BUSINESS”, I do not care whether you own the business or you are an employee at a business owned by someone else. Unless you look on the portion of the business, where you are selling products or services as your own, you will struggle to get your mind-set right, where you are able to build the mutually beneficial relationships, you need with your clients and prospects.

You must believe 100 % in what you are selling and see your products as solutions to partner challenges. If you look on your products or services as a commodity, it will be impossible to convince anyone you are committed to build a mutually beneficial relationship and that your product or service is a solution to any need they may have. As long as you allow the relationship to remain one where, you are the sales person and they are the buyer of your product or service. They hold all the power and you are a subservient junior partner in the relationship. The person, who holds the purse strings, is in charge. You become merely an order taker, who merely writes down the instructions of someone, who needs the commodity you have to sell.

When you believe in the value proposition of your product or service and you always have your clients’ or rather your new partners, needs as the prime objective. Your partners will very quickly see your pure intentions and will eagerly partner with you and your product and service. The will start to buy from someone they know, like and trust and someone they believe will add real value to their business. You can awaken your own sales giant today, if you are willing to make the crucial shift away from trying to sell a product or service, which you view as a commodity. Toward seeing your products or services as a real value proposition, which when integrated into your partners business, will solve their challenges and meet their needs.

As you build mutually beneficial sales relationships with your new partners, there is an immediate shift in power. You are no longer viewed as a junior partner and provider of a commodity, but an important cog in the wheel of your new partners business. As you shift away from the old school hard selling tactics and begin to use new age mutually beneficial relationship building and sales influence as a selling strategy, you will unlock your hidden sales super and you will become unstoppable.

Action Idea: Take a close look at your current sales strategies and answer these questions:

• Do you believe in the product or service you are selling? 
• Would you want to buy what you have to sell?
• Do you really believe your product or service is a good value proposition for any client?
• Do you believe that your product or service is value for money?
• Are you just an employee, trying to get through the day, or are you involved in building your own business?
• Do you have the intimate knowledge of your market and partners business, necessary to become a partner and challenge solver in their business?
• Would you like and trust you, if you were the client?

Invest sufficient time to answer the questions above and after conducting an honest audit of your current selling strategy. Begin the process of improving all the areas in your business, which may be below par, so that you can make the shift you need. Where you move away from selling, towards building partnerships with people who know, like and trust you and who see your product or service as a great value proposition.

As you develop a real belief in what you have to sell, you completely understand your market and individual partners needs within that market, you will no longer just be selling products or services. You will be forming mutually beneficial relationships with partners and solving any problems they may have. As you continue to grow into this new modality, you are no longer selling; you are building connection and fostering relationships with people, your products or services, help and support.

As long as you really know your markets and individual partner’s needs within those markets, you always have their best interests at heart and you believe 100 % in what you have to sell, you will succeed in growing your sales beyond even your wildest dreams.

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Reward Your Successes, Re-Energise and boost Your Productivity in The process

If you are like most of the people I meet every day, you are searching for ways to reduce the overwhelm you feel, finally begin to make some real headway on your big goals and yet still have some time left over, to enjoy your favourite and most nurturing activities. The challenge we all face though, is that in order to reduce the overwhelm we feel and to make headway on our goals, we need to become more organised, focused and disciplined, which does not leave much time to engage in our nurturing activities. We constantly break our promise with ourselves and never seem to have time for the last item on our list. We constantly tell ourselves we will find time, when we get an opportunity to enjoy a weekend away or when we have time for a special event or just simply just another time.

This is the pattern I have observed in just about everyone I speak to. They are so busy spinning their wheels, achieving very little, because they never allow themselves to stop, rejuvenate and make time to engage in their most nurturing activities. If you are one of those people who think that, the time you spend resting or engaging in any nurturing activities, is a waste of time, then this article is just for you. There are a number of benefits which flow to you when you allow yourself to pause, recover, regenerate and recharge your batteries.

The mere act of resting, engaging in a nurturing activity or giving yourself permission to recharge your batteries can firstly act as a reward mechanism, which you can use to help you stay inspired. We all encounter challenges and obstacles on our success journey. When you have a positive nurturing experience to focus on, as a reward, once you have overcome or neutralised any challenge, it is far easier to avoid feeling overwhelmed or beaten. Find a really enjoyable nurturing experience, which really resonates with you and who you are.

Next time you encounter any challenges or obstacles, reward yourself by engaging in that activity, as a reward once you have neutralised that challenge or obstacle. As you learn this new process and you reward yourself every time you encounter any challenges or obstacles. When you reward yourself every time you overcome any challenges, you will no longer view them as such a huge issue, when you encounter them in the future. You will just manage any challenge or obstacle, enjoy the reward and come back afterwards, rejuvenated and with a fully charged battery.

As you learn this skill of constantly rewarding yourself with an opportunity to rest and recharge your batteries. You actually get to rest, which in itself will re-energise you. But you also get to flex your commitment muscle. The more you keep the commitments you make with yourself. For example, you keep your promise to allow yourself to engage in that nurturing experience every time you overcome a challenge, or carry out your daily goal specific priorities. The more you will bolster your energy, by matching your words and actions. When your promises are consistently backed by concrete action, you heighten your inspiration and you are far more inclined to tackle the most daunting tasks and succeed every time.

I am sure you can see the benefits of allowing yourself to rest, rejuvenate and recharge your batteries. But I can hear you asking, so how do I do it? How do I learn the art of giving myself permission to “WASTE” time?

Action Idea:

• Like anything in life, nothing can or will ever happen, unless you actually take action. If you are accustomed to constantly breaking your word with yourself, you need to gradually build trust, by only making small commitments to rest and reward yourself if you know; you will actually follow through and keep the promise. I know this sounds crazy; we are after all speaking about commitments and promises you make with yourself here. But like anything, if you take a gradual approach and you commit to grow into it, you will eventually begin to allow yourself to rest like you need to.
• If something really important does come up, which forces you to push past the promise you made to yourself. Do not simply cancel, just reschedule. By reschedule I do not mean, promise yourself you will do it when you have time. I mean actually pen the time into your dairy at a later date. Treat this reward or rest as really important. Scheduled rest and recovery time is crucial to your success.
• Break your goals down into smaller steps, so that you can regularly experience small successes. Don’t push yourself too hard trying to achieve overambitious goals or benchmarks. The more often you experience small successes and the more often you are able to enjoy the rewards, the more inspired you will feel.
• I have found that when you go public about your small successes and the reward or rest you intend engaging in. You are less likely to break your word with yourself. Ask a close friend or spouse, to check in to ensure that you are keeping any promise you have made to yourself
• We operate really well when we have a routine. Try to include your rest and rewards as a daily occurrence. The more you practice anything, the easier it becomes.
• Start slowly and over time gradually escalate the amount and size of the rewards you offer to yourself. As you engage in more rest and reward, you will see constant improvement in the results you are able to enjoy. You will over time become more energised, creative and innovative, because you will be rested and always operating at your best.
• As your success grows, you will see the benefit of rest and rejuvenation. As you see these benefits accumulate, you will allow yourself to rest and recharge your batteries, independent of any achievement. 

There are incredible benefits that flow from allowing yourself to rest and recharge your batteries. In addition to the short term benefits, there are numerous other benefits, which will flow to you too. You will feel far healthier, your stress levels will reduce and you will feel far more alert, energetic and be far more productive. Making time for yourself, to rest or engage in a nurturing activity is always within your power. When you keep your promises with yourself and you actually give yourself permission, to rest and recover. Your energy, effectiveness and efficiency will receive a huge boost.  

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za