Archive for December, 2005
Evening All
Having written over the past few days about Vision Planning and having a clear plan for 2006 I have put my thoughts into a short eBook for you. It also includes a few Planning Tools which hopefully you will find of use in the coming year.
You don’t need to subscribe to any list or pay for it! To download a copy click on the link:
Mountain Top Planning Document
To save it to your own hard drive right click and save.
Take care
Paul
December 31st, 2005
Evening All
I have been doing a lot of pondering of late (it’s that time of year!) and revisiting some work that I did a year or two ago. I spent quite a bit of time looking at the types of people who became successful as part of some research.
One of the things that stood out time and time again from the people I talked to who were successful was that they consistently attracted other people to them who were being successful and as a result became more successful. Now most of these people when they started were not rolling in money but they behaved from the outset as if they were going to achieve success. They replicated the behaviours of those people who they took as role models and tried to promote an image of themselves which was “successful person.”
Now by this I do not mean that they were full of BS or over-hyped but instead that they talked in a measured and confident way; they always wrote in a way which conveyed confidence and self belief; they were kind to those around them and took time to say thank you to those that helped them. As my Grandfather said they “acted and dressed as if they were about to be promoted to the board.”
The one thing that these people had in common was that they believed they would be successful and acted in a way which told you that they knew they were going to be a success. As a result people who were already successful were attracted to them. Sometimes this route to success might seem at odds with the way of the world today when brashness of approach seems to be the way with many but perhaps it’s worth thinking about whether each of us attracts success to ourselves by the way we behave?
Worth pondering perhaps!
Take care
Paul
December 30th, 2005
Evening All
Isn’t it amazing here we are at 30th December 2005 and another year almost over! I have been talking and writing over the last few days about the importance of planning and having a clear vision of where you are aiming.
I think one of the best feelings you can get is when you achieve ahead of plan - the sense of satisfaction is amazing isn’t it! Well today I have managed to finish two websites that we have been working on ahead of schedule. They were both due to launch around mid-January 2006 and they have gone live today!
Seriously, one of the things that I have heard many times is if you are going to operate online and get your name known on the internet one of the things you must do is get a domain name in your own name! So after a few weeks of procrastination (yes I do sometimes suffer from it!) I got around to doing so and registered www.paulduxbury.com and it went live this afternoon.
Hopefully you will like it if you go to view it!
The other site that we launched earlier today is one that hopefully will help those who have overspent over Christmas or have given their Credit Cards a bit of a bashing. You can find our “Managing your Finances” Website by going to Sort your Finances and do let us know what you think.
I think I can justify that Champagne now on New Year’s Eve having achieved ahead of plan!
Take care
Paul
December 30th, 2005
Evening Again!
If you have been pondering signing up for Private Rights Success then you need finish pondering very soon! There are apparently only 17 places left and it looks like it will close by New Year!
Private Label Rights Offers
These are the three absolutely brilliant Private Label Rights products available at the moment that are literally being snapped up!
Private Rights Success
Private Label Rights Articles 2
Take care
Paul
December 29th, 2005
Evening All
I was chatting with some friends earlier today about their plans for the coming year and a couple of them commented that they expect to fail in some areas of their activity in the coming year. I challenged them about this and asked them what they meant. As we discussed their expectations of failure what became apparent was they were talking about “learning” rather than “failure.” You see we will all encounter boulders as we progress up our mountains and have to think about or re-think our way around them. However, if we see these boulders which appear as failures rather than learning opportunities we start to programme our minds with thoughts of failing - and no-one likes to fail do they!
When we experience a boulder on our way up the mountain that we were not expecting we need to take ourselves back up to the top of the mountain or to put it another way we need to review our plan.
Standing at the top of the Mountain is essential. Breathing in the air, the smells, the sights of the place where you are when you have achieved! That phrase “where you are when you have achieved” is so important - so many people when they first try this say things like ” I will never overcome my boulders” or “I just will not be able to sort that problem out” and the thing to remind them of as often as you need to is “You are at the place you want to be, you have overcome your boulders, you have sorted out your problems.”
They need to visualise the place where they want to be, imagine themselves living the life, running the business that they want to. Once they can break through the fog and the clouds and can see the place they want to be - then they can look back and they know that the boulders were overcome!
The change of mindset that this gives people is quite amazing to behold because all of a sudden you hear phrases like ” well if we do this” or”now this would solve that problem.” They start to talk in the language of achievement and action rather than the language of procrastination and obstacles.
Life is a never ending learning opportunity - don’t start failing just keep learning!
Take care
Paul
December 29th, 2005
Afternoon All
We often hear the old saying that Failing to Plan is planning to Fail. Planning is indeed critical if we are to achieve what we truly want in our lives. For me there are a number of stages to creating a Plan:
The Vision
What I quite often refer to as the “Mountain Top View.” Imagine that you are stood on top of a mountain and as you look around you everything you want in your life, in say five years time, is in place. Five years is probably as far as you should go and more often people feel more comfortable thinking about three years in the future. So as you look around you what do you see? Now don’t go putting barriers in the way because remember you have achieved what you wanted to achieve, you have climbed the mountain! Everything from where you are stood now is what you wanted to be able to see.
Now for me in five years time we will have stopped working in someone else’s box/business. We will instead be working in our own business, which will be based online, but have lots of real contact with people. We will be earning sufficient to maintain our lifestyle living in a wing of a large old Country House (of which there is a picture sat beside my computer monitor.) We will also be earning sufficient to keep us in the style we want to live long into the future when we move to live in Italy.
When I have worked with others in the past and when you are doing this part for yourself you should be able to say what colour Front Door your house or apartment will have etc in other words really paint the picture that you can see from the top of the mountain.
Boulder Avoidance.
This is where you look back down the mountain and try to spot the boulders you have overcome on your way to the top of the mountain. What were they? Were there some big boulders and some little ones? Make sure that you have a clear view of the things that tried to stop you getting to the top of the mountain so that when you sit down and work out your objectives over the medium and short term you know what you have got to overcome.
Now to give you an example probably the biggest boulder in our way at the moment is generating the income from our online activities and knowing which of the activities will generate what we need and which will not contribute to what we want to achieve. So here we are starting to think about where we need to focus our activities and are asking questions. Are there online activities which are taking up a large percentage of our time but contributing little to what we want to achieve?
It may be that there are some that you want to continue to take up a large amount of time without them contributing. However, you need to consciously be aware of that rather than bemoaning the fact that you are not achieving what you say you want to. If you are serious about running an online business and want to move full time online your mindset needs to change from “hobby” to “business”.
Now I will turn to the specifics of creating your Plan. The two elements I have mentioned so far are the parts which people normally miss out. However, they are critical if the detailed part of your planning is to have a context and an aim.
Detailed Planning
In terms of the detail of the Plan you create it needs to have a focus on the Vision and be constructed in the Long Term (9 months plus), Medium Term (1 to 3 months) and the Short Term ( the next month).
You need to have a very clear focus on what you want to achieve in those time frames. In order to do that I work with SMART Objectives:
Specific - what exactly do I want to achieve?
Measurable - what numbers or other measurable element do I want?
Achievable - is what I am proposing achievable? Relevant - is what I am proposing to do relevant to enabling me to achieve my Vision?
Time bound - so I will achieve by xx/xx/06
SMART has always worked for me and if you combine it with PDR (Plan, Do and then Review) it’s a surefire way of focusing you on what you need to achieve.
I will finish by simply saying that you should always keep asking yourself “have I done today what I planned to do and has it contributed to achieving my Vision?”
Take Care
Paul
December 29th, 2005
Previous Posts
