View your cup as both half full and half empty.

View your cup as both half full and half empty.

Business Inspirational Speakers

There are obvious benefits from observing the people around you that have achieved the type of success you want to achieve. When you observe the actions they take, the places they spend their time, the books they read, the way they talk and how they conduct their lives. You have a set of guidelines that you can use to structure your life, a recipe for creating similar success in your own life. The same is true for the people in your environment that constantly make the same errors in judgement and seem to be trapped on a treadmill of challenges. When you observe their behaviours, you become aware of all the places to avoid, things not to do, in fact you have a perfect blue print for helping you to eliminate all the things from your life that are holding you back and keeping you trapped in the average.

There is a school of thinking that promotes the idea that states, we must only focus on the positive going on around us and that we must avoid even seeing or allowing ourselves to be exposed to any negative in our lives. I think this is a very naive strategy and only gives you half of the picture. I most certainly do not want to go through my life only seeing half of the picture and living an unrealistic life, in which I believe that everything should just be positive and go smoothly.

Business Inspirational Speakers

It is this very unrealistic set of expectations that actually sets people up for massive and unexpected falls. Just as there is no such thing as a one sided, positive magnet, there too is no such thing as a one sided positive life. Challenges arise all the time, which test your resolve and make achieving success a bumpy road. I say that when you look around you and you see the cup as both half full and half empty, you allow yourself to have a complete perspective and you have a complete picture of all the possibilities. You get to observe the possible challenges and you have a better perspective and a more complete picture of the entire situation. This gives you more information to help discover and exploit any opportunities and plan for the inevitable challenges that will cross your path.

When you have a balanced perspective and you look at the world from a realistic point of view, where you know your abilities and believe you are capable of achieving a positive outcome, yet you expect, anticipate and plan for obstacles, roadblocks and challenges. You equip yourself to travel a path to long term sustainable success. On the other hand if you try to live an impossible life, where you only see the positive around you and you ignore any talk about negative, you are setting yourself for disappointment and disaster. Accept that believing in yourself and that you can and will succeed is always a crucial part of the success process. It is just as important to balance this optimism with a balanced perspective around the potential to encounter challenges. This balanced and harmonious perspective will give you the tools and inspiration to manage any challenges that may cross your path.

It is for this reason that observing the all the activities “Failures” engage in, is a great success tool and one of the ways to accelerate your own success. You can save yourself a whole lot of time and heartache, if you learn all the things to avoid and as such you are able to focus your energy on carrying out activities that will contribute positively to the outcomes you want to achieve.  

Author: Andrew Horton Business Inspirational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

Turn Activity Into Effectiveness

Turn Activity Into Effectiveness
Here is a plan to multiply your effectiveness and efficiency that at first glance seems very simple and just plain common sense. Unfortunately just because something is common sense, it is not often common practice. The reason I present this plan to you, is to help you to multiply your effectiveness and the quantity and quality of the results you are able to enjoy. Please make sure that you draw a clear distinction between activity and productivity. I am by no means saying that you need to pack more work in your daily schedule. I am talking about learning a new system that will help you to become more effective at producing results.

·         More Money.

·         Effective relationships.

·         Better Health.

·         Easier goal attainment.

·         Super achievement.

You can have all of the above while living a life filled with less stress and more time with your family. All that you need to do is to apply a little discipline in your life, a small dose of willpower until you can develop a few new daily disciplines that over time will evolve into your new success habit set.
Invest the time to narrow your goals down to a maximum of three. We cannot focus on achieving more than three big goals each year. We dilute our efforts and we never seem to achieve anything, when we try to achieve all our dreams at once. Choose three goals that when you have accomplished these three goals, you would be in a far better place that you currently find yourself.
Now choose one goal that you are going to focus all your energy on for the next 90 days. The other two goals are put on the backburner and all your energy is focused on achieving this one goal. The first step is to look at this goal and see how you can break it back even further into projects or smaller bite size chunks. When big goals are viewed as a whole they seem unachievable. When we begin to break them back into bite size chunks, we have smaller individual projects we can begin to tackle. Identify between one and three projects that you are going to tackle over the next thirty days and put all the other projects onto the backburner. This focused approach, where you focus all your energy on a few things at a time allows you to see great progress in a short space of time.
Once you have chosen the three projects you are going to focus all your energy on for the next thirty days. Break these projects back further into individual actions. Create a separate action list for each project. These action lists are your source document detailing the individual actions that you will take each day.
Make Time Available
Look at your schedule for the next thirty days and set sufficient time aside each day to carry out a minimum of five activities from your action lists. I like to call these time slots “Meetings with my Future”. These are time slots that are penned into your dairy and can only be rescheduled if a real emergency comes up. When you go into these meetings it is crucial that you encase yourself in a cone of silence. Place to be a library, an unused conference room or even just in your car parked somewhere quiet. There must be no distractions – it is best to go into an environment where you cannot be disturbed. I find the best. You will get an incredible amount of focused, effective  work done when you separate yourself from the normal daily distractions, during your meetings with your future.  
Now that you have prioritised your top three goals, broken them back into individual actions and created time to carry out these tasks, you have set the foundation for achieving all your goals over time. I will highlight the next steps in my article tomorrow.
Author: Andrew Horton Business Inspirational Speakers
http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

The Secret to Achieve More is To Do Less

The Secret to Achieve More is To Do Less
There is a massive difference between being busy all day, even burning the midnight candle day after day, believing that by outworking everyone around you, you can achieve anything, when the reality of being effective, efficient and productive is something completely different. Most people confuse feeling busy with being productive. This cycle of constant busyness and activity, where we are striving to be superhuman, where we attempt to apply excessive activity to everything we do, overstretches us and actually steals our productivity and effectiveness from us. This just results in us feeling overworked, overstretched and in many cases even overwhelmed and yet we still do not get to see the type of results, this level of activity should deliver. I want you to take a breath and begin to change your life from feeling overworked, overstressed and with a schedule that stretches you to one of efficiency and real effectiveness. You can produce amazing results with far less effort and in much less time if you learn to apply a few new routines and habits into your life.
The place to start is to first look at the real top achievers that have achieved extra-ordinary results in their lives. These people have exactly the same amount of time each day as we do, yet they are able to achieve incredible results with their time, whilst we seem to work longer and harder and achieve less. What makes them different? The thing that stands out the most for me is that people like Oprah, Richard Branson, Donald Trump and Nelson Mandela do not do more than everyone else. In fact it is not what they do that makes them so extraordinary, it is what they choose not to do that makes them so amazing. The one most powerful skill that all extraordinary achievers have that makes them stand out is the ability to know when to say no to the good, so that they have time to say yes to the great. The skill of knowing when to say no is the master skill possessed by all achievers.
We all have limited time in our schedules and limited resources available. Every time we say yes to something, we are effectively closing ourselves down to say yes to something else. The secret to move to the next level of achievement is not to pack more and more into your schedule, it is to take a step back and look at everything you are doing each day. Identify the things that are or have the potential to deliver great or extraordinary results and focus your energy on those and have the courage to delegate or remove those things that are just taking up your time from your life altogether. We are constantly pulled and tugged in many different directions each day, until you take some time to slow down and see the few important issues requiring your attention and you remove the unnecessary clutter from your life, you are going to remain stuck on the treadmill of relentless busyness. Look to remove the time, energy and effectiveness activities form your life and start to focus your energy on only things that matter and will make a difference in your life.
Make the decision from today to learn the art of saying no, more often and start to take more time to focus on the few things that will bring you the greatest return. Take time to look back over your calendar for the last month and see where you could have said no to anything. Look to identify areas where you spent time and energy on activities, over the past month that were no aligned with your top major goals. Now have the courage to remove these activities from your schedule going forward.
The next step is to look at your schedule going forward and to use the insight you have gained from looking at your previous month and remove any activities that are not contributing to your overall big picture. Learn to delegate, delete or decline anything in your schedule that does not contribute to the most effective outcome you want in your life. This may feel difficult at first, but once you have mastered this very necessary skill, you will begin to see time almost miraculously clear up in a schedule that you thought was filled to capacity. You will begin to feel less overwhelmed, have more energy and time to focus on things that really matter and you will become far more effective and productive.
http://www.andrewhorton.co.za

You are the product of all the choices you make

You are the product of all the choices you make

Business Inspirational Speakers

The results you get to enjoy or not to enjoy in your life are all rooted in one single factor, namely the choices you make or fail to make each day. As difficult as it may be for you to accept your current circumstances are the result of all the choices, both good and bad that you have made. The state of your health, business success or lack thereof, the type and quality of all your relationships and your bank balance are all a result of your accumulated choices. When you can see that all your accumulated choices have added up until they created all the problems you are experiencing in your life right now, you soon realise that the only way to change things is to begin to make different, better choices.

The only challenge you face is deciding on what the right choices are. All progress requires change, unfortunately not all change results in progress. As long as you keep doing things the way you have always done things, you will most certainly keep getting the same results. So in order to see different results you must commit to do things differently. Will all the changes you make to the way you do things bring about the results you desire? Of course not. The secret is to constantly review your progress and if any changes you make are not delivering the desired results, then make a new choice. Keep improving, making positive changes until you see the progress that you desire.

There is a simple formula that will help you to make better choices that will ensure that the changes you make will deliver better results.

·         Increase the time you invest into your personal growth.

·         Spend more time each day doing things that are aligned with the outcome you want to achieve.

·         Don’t avoid doing things that appear difficult.

·         Do those things that you don’t want to do.

When you explore the path of most resistance, you very often uncover different or better ways of achieving the outcomes you desire. This path is the one you resist following the most, yet in many cases this is the exact path that leads you to the success that you desire. Achieving the outcomes we want in our lives is always about making the right choices and having the discipline to sometimes do things that are difficult or unpleasant. When you learn to focus on the outcome and all the benefits that this outcome will bring, you do not seem to notice the short term discomfort and you have the willpower to do the tough things.

The reality is simple, if you are not happy with the outcomes you have been enjoying in your life, up until now. Then a lot of the choices you have been making are not aligned with what you want. You need to make different choices that will work and will deliver on your expectations. The definition of insanity is “Repeating the same behaviour day after day and expecting different results”. Commit to make some meaningful choices today and stop expecting the path of least resistance to deliver on your dreams.

We work best when we have routine in our lives, we are creatures of habit and most of what we do is governed by our habits. As long as you allow your success to depend on your current habits and routines, nothing will change. You need to talk yourself out of accepting the easy path of low resistance or from expecting the comfortable route to deliver on your dreams. When you make this choice, your unconscious negative habits are like a strong flowing river, they will continue to take you downstream, away from your goals and dreams. Until you make the choice to make some different choices and you commit to begin doing things that may at first feel uncomfortable or difficult. You will remain trapped in an unfulfilling and empty life. When you make the choice to do things differently and to do things that at first may appear difficult, you are effectively using your willpower to begin forming a new success habits that will deliver on your dreams. After applying your willpower to carry out these daily tasks for around 66 days, these very tasks that felt uncomfortable and were unpleasant, will now become your new habit set and they will just be how you do things. Research has shown that any repeated behaviour will become an entrenched habit after about 66 days. If you want to change the results that you are enjoying, then you must commit to use your willpower to create a new set of success habits that will support the success that you desire.

Author: Andrew Horton Business Inspirational Speakers

http://www.andrewhorton.co.za