Change Your Mindset and Achieve Anything

If you’ve read any self-help book, book on success or similar, then chances are that you will have come across this notion that you can get whatever you want from life simply by changing your mindset and changing the way you think. Can it really be so simple? How can your state of mind really affect your physical reality?

Actually, there are plenty of ways. Let me explain…

The Law of Attraction

The law of attraction is the name of a theory that explains why some people get everything they want and other people just don’t.Essentially, this law states that ‘like attracts like’ and that ‘as you act, so you will become’. In other words, if you act like someone who is rich, then you will attract other rich people and valuable items. Eventually, you will become rich.

And if you act like the most capable and amazing person in your workplace, then other people will start to take you more seriously, give you more work and help you to become that most capable and amazing person.This is the law of attraction and although it might sound like magic, there is actually a very good explanation for how it all works.

You see, when you start acting more confident in your workplace by standing a little taller, by puffing your chest out and by talking more firmly to people, you will find that other people pick up on that and they start to see you as a more confident person.

When someone sees you as being more confident in the workplace, they will instantly begin to see you as being more capable. And when they see you as being more capable, they will of course be more interested in working with you and offering you important tasks to be responsible for.

The same goes for wearing a nice suit. If you look like someone who takes care of themselves, like a professional, like someone who a company would be happy to speak to clients on their behalf… then you will be given more work as a result. How about acting wealthy? Well, one example of how this works is that people will notice your new more ‘premium’ taste and they will respond by giving you more valuable and expensive gifts – it really is that simple!

Acting wealthier and believing yourself to be can also again help others to want to work with you and invest in you and it can give you the confidence you need to take smart financial risks. The first step to becoming, is believing. It sounds corny but it is completely true.

Understanding Perception

Another thing to consider is how our perception of reality completely changes our subjective experience of this – and therefore the outcome. What do I mean by this? Simply that what you experience is actually less important for your state of mind than what you believe.

For example then, if you were to come face to face with a lion in the woods, there would be a good chance that you’d see your heartrate jump up sharply, your breathing become faster and shallower and your blood start rushing to your muscles, your eyes and your brain. This is what we know as the ‘fight or flight response’.

But what if you see the lion but don’t believe in the lion? What if you think the lion is animatronic? Then none of those changes will occur and you’ll remain entirely calm. The thing to remember is that many of the things we encounter in our daily lives are just like those lions.

When you encounter a challenge in the work place, a difficult friend or partner, or financial troubles. You can choose to see it as a lion, or you can choose to see it as no big deal.These strategies allow us to actively change the way we think about challenges, about ourselves and about our situations – and thereby to achieve incredible things and even completely remove fear!

Positivity and Belief

Finally though, what’s also highly important is that we have positivity and belief in what we’re doing. Positivity is one of the most powerful tools you have at your disposal and can help you to take chances, challenge the system and generally make waves.

If you are a pessimist with low self-esteem, is it like that you’ll set up your own business? No. If you’re someone who is afraid to take chances, then how likely is it that you’ll end up quitting your job and going travelling? Not very!
Too many of us are simply beaten down by our circumstances and our upbringing and we believe that the best way to get by is to stay quiet and try not to rock the boat.

The reality though is that you need to take chances and risks in order to truly live. Would you rather fail at doing something amazing, or succeed at doing nothing at all? And in order to take that leap, we need to change your mindset.

source http://www.forcesalign.com/change-your-mindset-and-achieve-anything/

How to Overcome Failure and Achieve Success?

You may have read all the self-help books and the autobiographies of men like Abraham Lincoln who failed all their lives and finally succeeded. It all seems so positive and feel good until you fail. One of Mike Tyson’s most famous quotes is, "Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth." There’s just no denying that failure is a bitter pill to swallow.It doesn’t matter how many times you fail, you’ll still feel that twinge of disappointment or some anger when your best laid plans collapse.

Usually, the most successful people are also the ones who are best at coping with failure. The reason for this is that they fail more than most people but they just never give up. That also means that they do more than most other people who quit the moment failure knocks on their door.There are many ways to cope with failure but you must understand that it is going to hurt when you fail.

Sometimes it may feel like the only thing you ever learn from a failure is that you failed. While this is not true, it will seem that way. We are all human and no one likes to see their efforts go to waste. It could be a business venture that collapses. Or maybe your relationship with your spouse crumbles and is beyond repair. Maybe your health takes a turn for the worse despite living a healthy lifestyle. All these are events.

Understanding this point makes all the difference between handling failure successfully or letting it break you. Failure is an event, not a person. Like they say, never let success get to your head and never let failure get to your heart. It will hurt and there will be disappointment but you must embrace the experience and push forward.Success is not final and failure is not fatal. As long as you’re breathing you still can turn your failures into successes.

It’s time to discover the 7 secrets that successful people use to cope with failure.

Different individuals may do it differently but the general rule of thumb is this – Failure is always temporary. Failure is not the opposite of success. It is part of success. Now let’s look at how you can cope with it when it comes your way… and you can rest assured that it will. So be prepared.

1. Don't take it personally
This is the biggest mistake that most people make. They blame themselves when things go wrong. Or they blame other people. When you do not separate failure from how you identify yourself, then your self-esteem will drop and you’ll be much more tempted to quit.

People usually quit on their dreams because they don’t believe that they’re capable of achieving what their hearts desire. They feel that it’s too hard and the reason they feel that way is because they may have failed. For example, when someone is trying to lose weight and watching their diet closely, there will be times when they give in to temptation and eat something they shouldn’t. When this happens, they feel guilt and regret that they failed at maintaining their diet.

What do they do then? They toss their diet aside and gorge themselves on food that they’re not supposed to. They believe that they lack the self-discipline to stay focused and lose weight… Just because of one temporary lapse in judgment. This is ridiculous and it’s like accidentally dropping your mobile phone once only to pick it up and keep smashing it on the ground over and over because of one accident. It doesn’t make sense… and yet people act in a similar way.

When you fail at something, whether it’s with your blog or your email marketing or if your latest product launch is a flop, do not assume that you’re useless and just throw in the towel. What defines you is how well you rise after falling.So the most important point to note is that you should not let failure define you as a person. Always know that you can do better.

2. Learn From Your Mistakes

All the most successful people have learned from their mistakes and try not to repeat them. Failure can also be treated as feedback. If some aspect of your online business fails, ask yourself why this happened. For example, if your product launch was a flop, there must be a reason why. Was your niche unprofitable? Did the sales page convert poorly? Did you not actively recruit affiliates?

Analysis is very important so that you do not repeat the same errors. This is the only way to make progress and succeed.Michael Eisner, the Chairman and CEO of the Disney Corporation said, “Failure is good as long as it doesn’t become a habit.”

The only way to prevent failure from becoming a habit is to take stock of your situation, learn from your mistakes and adapt. Try to maintain a certain degree of detachment so that you can evaluate your failure without feeling bitter. Sometimes it might be a good idea to take a break for a short while and come back to it when you’re feeling better. Either way, ALWAYS analyze your failures.

3. Stop Dwelling On Your Failures

You may have noticed that all some people can talk about is how life has treated them so badly. No matter what they do, they fail at it due to bad luck or unforeseen circumstances. We’ve all seen people like these… and while you may not know why these things happen to them, you know that things like these always seem to happen to people like them.Harsh but very true. Do not dwell on your failures.

Analyze them and move on. You have better things in store for you. Missed out on an opportunity? No worries. Better ones are coming your way. Product launch flopped? That’s ok the next one will sell thousands. Picked the wrong niche to monetize? No big deal. You now know how to find niches with people waiting to buy stuff. Problem solved.

It is inevitable to lose time, effort and money when something fails. If you keep focusing on what is lost, you’ll never be able to focus on what you can gain and there is so much more out there for you.
Focus on the positive and bury your failures.

4. Model Other Marketers

There’s a saying that you should always learn from the mistakes of others because you’ll never live long enough to make them all yourself. When trying to build an online business, instead of believing all the hype that you see in all the info-products that flood the market, you’d be better off watching what the successful marketers are doing. Do what they do and not what they say.

Most beginners to online marketing encounter failure repeatedly because they follow untested theory and blindly believe what they read or hear. You have to be smarter than that. If whatever you’re doing seems to be failing, then you need to look at what other marketers who are succeeding are doing  then model them.

That alone will reduce your learning curve and put you on the path to online success. Stop being like a housefly that repeatedly bangs its head on the window hoping to get out when the door is wide open for it to go through.

5. Assess Your Finances

One of the biggest concerns marketers have when they fail is that they’ve lost money. Creating a product costs money. Testing out ads costs money. Outsourcing costs money. There is no getting away from this. In fact, to run any business you need money. It’s like oxygen for your business and without it, your business will shrivel up and die. So, it’s crucial that you have a source of income coming in to tide you over if any online endeavour fails.

Some marketers quit their day jobs to make their online business work. When the business fails and the bills start piling up, they start getting desperate. At times like these, you just may need to get another job to get back on your feet. Do not feel like you have failed and are doomed to a life of ‘working for the man.’ This is just a temporary setback and like Joel Osteen, always says, “A setback is a set up for a comeback.”

Go ahead and take that job. It will feel like retrogression but you must understand that even a tiger crouches before it leaps. Once you have money coming in, the pressure that your finances are causing you will ease. You’ll be able to save up some money to keep funding your online business. That’s really how it is. Sometimes you just don’t have a choice.

Do not throw your efforts down the drain and quit online marketing totally just because you failed a couple of times. As long as you keep learning and doing, success is inevitable.

6. Release the Need for Approval from Others

This is a very common fear and makes failure seem worse than it really is. People often worry what others will think or say about them when they fail. It’s definitely true that you’ll have friends and family members who will tell you, “I told you so!” when you fail. Some of them may even take pleasure in it. This is human nature. It could even be your spouse or parents who don’t support your dreams.

When you fail and see their disapproving looks or hear their sarcastic words, it can seem worse.The truth of the matter is that you only have one life to live and you need to live it for yourself. It doesn’t matter what others say or think about you. Just because others think you’re dumb for failing doesn’t mean that you’re really foolish.

How people see you should have zero impact on how you see yourself. Have faith in yourself and don’t pay heed to the naysayers.

7. Take a Break

Time heals all wounds. Sometimes when failure really gets to you, it may be time to take a break and put some space between you and your business. This will help to clear your mind so that you can think objectively. While taking a break, you can self-reflect and think about your future plans. You may decide to have backup plans to correct any future failures or problems that may crop up.

Take the time to exercise. Research has shown that hard training like boxing, Crossfit, sprinting, etc. help people to release pent up frustration and anger. This can be therapeutic when coping with failure. Instead of hitting the bottle, you can hit a punching bag or lift heavy weights explosively during CrossFit sessions. Do what suits you best.

What is most important is that you not let failure make you quit. That is the most common consequence of failure. People fail a few times and they quit. If you read the story of Colonel Sanders, you’d realize that he was turned down 1,009 times before he finally found someone who would use his recipe. Walt Disney was turned down over 300 times before he received financing for Disney World.

source http://www.forcesalign.com/how-to-overcome-failure-and-achieve-success/

Creating Business Models That Succeed

In this article, I have occasionally challenged the notion that working hard is always a good thing. Sometimes, working hard means wasting your life on chores or wasting your life working for a company that doesn’t value you.
Much better than working hard then, is to work smart. That means that you stop focusing on working for the sake of working and start working in order to get results.

This is where it becomes important once again to assess your past mistakes and look at what has worked and what hasn’t. This will allow you to invest your time only where it counts and only where it matters.

Freeing Up Mental Space

And sometimes, this means finding ways to remove the unwanted distractions and clutter from your life. Work that does not take you closer to your goal is not work that is worth your time. Work that takes you away from the things you are passionate about is not worth your time. And so if you’re currently spending half your evening washing up and cleaning the house  it’s time to stop!

You worked incredibly hard in order to earn money for your family – you traded your time for resources – and now the little time you have left you’re going to spend washing up?? This is another cognitive shift you need to make in order to be truly successful – you need to start valuing your time more and be willing to spend your money to protect it.

You need to recognize that Time > Money. So instead of spending your time cleaning the house, why not hire a cleaner to do it? You’ve worked hard enough to deserve one and this way you can work on more fulfilling side projects (and earn back the money you’re spending several times over), you can spend time with your family and friends, or you can spend more time enjoying the hobbies that you are truly passionate about.

Likewise, you can give yourself more time by investing in a dishwasher, a robotic vacuum cleaner or maybe even a service that will deliver you readymade meals to your door for lunch and dinner! Invest in You Don’t think that this means you shouldn’t be spending time on your appearance though – you absolutely should. This takes us right back to our ‘law of attraction’ principle from the start of this book.

To get the best jobs and to have the most success with the opposite sex, you need to look the part.And to look the part, you need to spend time or money. You don’t have the time to spend hours ironing and run a second business from home – so spend the money on your looks. And believe that this money is going to come back to you. Believe in the law of attraction. That’s how those incredibly polished people who just seem to excel in everything they do got that way.

Creating Business Models That Succeed

This ‘results focused attitude’ is also how you’re going to design your business models and choose your projects. Think about the resources you already have available to you, the contacts you already know and the skills that you already possess. If you are the editor of a magazine on a certain topic for example, then you have a huge captive audience.

What business could you launch that you could aim at that audience? And as I’ve said already before: don’t think about success in terms of what others perceive as success.A lot of people will try and start businesses that they think will ‘change the world’ or ‘offer something completely unique’. But you know what? This type of business makes it much harder to find investors and much harder to market.

If you want to make money quickly, if that is your goal, then you’re often much better off just using a tried and tested business model that countless people have used before. Don’t invest huge amounts of money into a business before you have‘verified it’.Use the ‘fail fast principle’ by creating an MVP and seeing if it is successful before spending lots of time on it.

This will also let you stay lean and jump between multiple business models. If you’re willing to look for the shortcuts and if you understand the most important variables in each equation, then you can often sidestep the work and jump straight to the good part – earning lots of cash! Success really doesn’t have to be as hard as everyone makes it out to be. You just need to the right attitude and some gumption.

source http://www.forcesalign.com/creating-business-models-that-succeed/