Overcome Limiting Beliefs

Everyone has the potential of achieving success. Yes, everyone has the same physical anatomy but why some of them can achieve more than others? There got to be some difference, and it have to do with the brain. I am not talking about extraordinary brain power to do complex calculations or high IQ. It is the way that their brains are "wired" differently.

Everyone has a unique set of connections in their brain and almost anything that you had experienced and learnt determines how neuron connections are made. Over the years, you develop beliefs, which form from your experience, observations throughout your life. Some beliefs are good while many others are bad, and we got to overcome them in order to succeed.Limiting beliefs are beliefs that stop you from doing something, or hinder your decision making process. They are subconscious defense systems that are wired wrongly. Some of the common limiting beliefs that most people have:

"I can't do it. I don't have what it takes" This is the number one killer of success! It discourages you from taking action. Failures and bad experience is usually the cause of it. People gave up trying when they fail or things do not turn out in their way.

"I am not as lucky like others"  They witness a lot of failures and see downfalls of other people and develop a fear of trying new things. They even enforces their beliefs when they see people gave up and the hardship they experience. And when they see others succeed, they think that is their luck and their fate that brought them there.

"Do it another day, I am happy the way I am now" Procrastination and settling for less is a common limiting beliefs. Some people just didn't want to get out of their comfort zone, even they know that they can do something that is going to benefit them in the future. Their desire to succeed is weak and it is optional for them.

Do you have such beliefs? I used to have them too. They were so bad, that I have a million excuses not to do something. But not anymore now, because I manage to overcome them and I am going to share my secrets with you today. But first of all, before you do anything, you need to believe that your fate is in your hands. For something to change, you will have to change too!

Success doesn’t come in a single try. High achievers fail more than anyone else before they succeed. It is a wrong perception that successful people are are just lucky or naturally talented to get it right in the first time. Thomas Edison didn’t invented the light bulb overnight, he had actually found more than 1,000 ways not to make a light bulb! Failures are merely steps to success, like many others, they gave up without learning from their failures. Highly successful people learn from their failures and change their strategy and try again. And something better, do you know that the more times you try, the better chances luck happen on you? That’s how others are lucky!

 

If it is not a Must, then you will never do it. Yes, so true. If it is just a wish or a dream, then you will never have the willpower to do that. Everyone WANT to be successful, but very few ever make it happen. Only when you put something as a Must, you are able to channel all your energy and do whatever it takes to get it. Look at others who are successful, many of them have stories of staking everything they have and they had no choice but to succeed.

 

If you are able to fully understand these 2 points, you will realize that success isn’t something that is by luck or by power. It is in fact the result of perseverance and willpower that brings success to you. The following 2 books talk in depth of limiting beliefs and ways to overcome them,The Energy of Belief: Psychology's Power Tools to Focus Intention and Release Blocking Beliefs and Belief Re-patterning: The Amazing Technique for "Flipping the Switch" to Positive Thoughts. These are interesting resources that you can employ to develop a full set of empowering beliefs that will enable you to overcome negative and limiting beliefs through their proven methodologies.

    

Improve your Presentation Skills

No doubt presentation skills are some of the most important skills at work. Excellent presentation skills allow you to communicate with others, sharing your thoughts, convincing customers, negotiating deals and selling proposals. It is one of the most sought after skill among candidates when it comes to hiring, as this tells how proficient a candidate can convey the message and organize thoughts effectively.

Unfortunately, presentation skills in many many companies are pretty plain and ineffective. A typical set of presentation slides are full of bulleted descriptions and contain a lot of text. Charts, diagrams are used in appropriately, resulting in more confusion and harder to convey. Such presentation slides doesn’t really help the organizations very much, perhaps only 50% of the message is clearly conveyed if using such conventional, ineffective way and guess what? Most managers actually like such presentations! They think that this is the standard way and this is the best way to do a presentation. In short 99% of the people out there are using such presentations.

So if we can be different, and convey messages more effectively, we can easily become the top 1% of the people around! That makes us more valuable and important in the organization. So today, I shall share my presentation tips and tricks which have been really successful to me. My gardening talks are always full and my organization presentations always attracted someone to give me a pat on my back. You can really feel the difference if you use a different way to convey messages. Below are the three points that I strongly recommend:

 

Less is more. Simplicity makes your focus clearer and straight to the point. Avoid including items that allow others to digress and stray away from your objectives. Use single and strong words to convey your message and describe from there verbally, instead of showing “Jan – Mar, we have sold 100 items ” which sounds plain and boring, try something like showing “100” and you verbally describe it “We sold 100 products in 3 months!”. This is much more clearer when you try to emphasize on 100 products sold. Avoid meaningless images / cliparts that doesnt add any value to your slides. Plain and lots of white space are preferable. In short, use a minimalist approach, “Less is More”. Simplicity is an art, and trust me it is not easy to achieve that level of simplicity!

Give meanings to words and numbers. This is the BEST way to convey useful information to others. Presenting numbers, charts or statistics without giving a meaning to it is almost useless. Numbers are numbers and they are plain data. Try to give meaning to your data, instead of telling everyone “We have a total of 5 million subscribers now”, sounds impressive but it will sound even more better like this “We have a total of 5 million subscribers, its one and half times more than the entire population of Singapore!”. See the difference? Numbers can be powerful, if we give meanings to them.

Plan, Develop and Rehearse. Three essentials steps to good presentation. Presentation is not only about doing great slides, you will need to be a good storyteller too! Generally, top presentators spent more time in planning their story than actual developing the slides. I took 5 hours to draft out a flow and a good storyboard for my 30 mins gardening talk. Presentation is like a show, you need to plan every detail of it, how the slides will look like, how your scripts going to work together with the slides, etc. So I recommend you to spend more time in this, than jumping into doing the slides. Also, rehearse and rehearse! I know many of us can present almost immediately without and preparations, but most of the time you will find it ineffective, you are not familiar with the slides, what are the coming slides, how to create anticipation, and how to execute transition from point to point.

 

After understanding these three points, have you notice that these are lacking in many presentations today? In fact, I have never seen any of these in my organization presentations. And when I tried them out, everyone were overwhelmed and applauded for my great presentation! You should try them out too! If you need more ideas and how to go about applying these 3 points, watch some of these great presentations online. Steve Jobs is one of the greatest presentators of all, you can watch those he presented in Apple Events. Al Gore presenting global warming, see how he brings meaning to numbers. There are also books that give you a good analysis of how Steve Jobs did his presentations from the very beginning to the end, The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience , wonderful book that I always refer to. Another great book, Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter) , gives you the principles of presentation and how to convey effectively across the meeting room. With all these, I am sure you can become one of them in the top 1%, easily!

                          

You might also be interested in the following:

• How To Deliver A TED Talk: Secrets Of The World's Most Inspiring Presentations
• slide:ology: The Art and Science of Creating Great Presentations
• HBR Guide to Persuasive Presentations (Harvard Business Reveiw Guides)
• Resonate: Present Visual Stories that Transform Audiences
• Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal

The Four Habits of Very Successful Individuals

What is the best way to achieve success? The quickest and most effective way is to model someone who had succeeded! Not only we should research on their steps to success, we also need to study and learn from the mindset of these people. Thousands of scientists and psychologists have spent millions of hours to understand their way of thinking, the decisions they made and the actions they take that allows them to outperform the others. After reading numerous books on success stories and methodologies, I came out with a simple list of habits that many successful individuals have.

1. Take control of everything happening around you. Yes. These super-individuals take control of how things happen, being proactive and influential in their daily life, they inspire others to follow them and take initiative to act when they feel that their method or thoughts are better than others. And because they are putting their thoughts into action, these people are 100% committed. Whenever you talk to them on their future plans, you will find out that they go to great extend to get things done, in their way. Many had micro-manage mediocre tasks, just to ensure that they know everything is working right. When things go wrong, they take full responsibilities to ensure that things are rectified, and change their strategies according. They do not give excuses to themselves, and they believe that they have the power to change things.

 

2. Passion & Commitment. Successful people do things they truly love doing. Not for the sake of money, but the satisfaction they gain from their actions. Many great businesses start out as a passion, and because of the passion is the driving force, it attracted money too! Money is secondary to them, so don’t ever do something that you won’t enjoy for the sake of getting rich. It is a hard and torturing journey for yourself. Do something you enjoy a lot, and you will eventually feel very committed to it. Because of your passion, things you do is no longer a “want-to-do” kind of thing, it’s more like “must do!”. Because you seriously enjoy every moment of it and will dedicate your time and energy to enjoy every bit of it. It is this kind of driving force you should have to be successful. Make everything a “Must” and no longer a “wish” or a “want”, which is much weaker desire.

 

3. Create value. Be sure that there are always people out there doing the same thing as you are doing right now. Competition is almost inevitable in any thing you do today, Internet and communications are closely knit together and you are no longer competing around you, but really across the globe. If you don’t create value, you are as good as out-of-business, because millions of people out there can do better than you!  In other words, what ever you do, you will need to surpass people’s expectation. Selling fruits is not going to last long, but selling high quality fruits will do better. The best thing is customers out there are willing to pay for a premium for these higher value products!  So always do things above expectations and create value, not only you will attract the right people, right resources but also more opportunities to you.

 

4. Accept failures as lessons. Success does always come from a single try, you should be considered lucky if you can succeed in a few tries! Failures are considered as part of the steps to success. Successful individuals expect failures to come and they accept them as good lessons. Also, trying again and again is not going to help if you continue doing the same thing. Learnt from the failures and be ready to change your way of doing things and try again! They are persistent and never give up until they succeed. Like myself, I don’t grow beautiful plants that earn envy from every other gardeners around in one go, I probably killed more plants than anyone else before I know the right way to grow them well! So the thought that successful people succeed in a single attempt is false.

 

These habits are important elements for success. Without them, you will be lost and start to procrastinate and settle. Or you will just gave up and start giving excuses that it’s just too hard and difficult. One good way to cultivate such habits is to keep reading on success stories, whenever I feel stressed and wanting to give up, the success stories showed me that others persevered in more difficult scenarios to succeed. That kept me going, even today.  These apply to everything you do, and you will see the difference. You start to see more opportunities around you, regardless in work, hobbies, business!

I strongly recommend you to find out more about the mechanics of success. The Success Principle is a great resource to start with, understand the principles of success and ingredients to it. Different perspective of successes and shed more light to enlighten yourself. Another good interpretation of habits, Success Habits Generator , gives you more success stories and perspectives of achieving success. Find out more about them in the links provided, you will be amazed. I become really enthusiastic as these materials made me realize that success can be easily achievable, it’s really yourself that is stopping you. Trust me when you tasted success, you will be “addicted” to it. Invest your time and resources to this and I am sure you already getting more of it back in the near future!

Great plans come from Great Vision… Can you see clearly what it takes?

Most successes doesn't come from pure luck, in fact most of them are through careful planning and leveraging the opportunities to happen. Mark didn't make Facebook more than a million users overnight, Larry didn't make Google one of the best search engine ever. All of them have a humble beginning and a great plan.

Your plan truly determine the probability and level of success. It gives you clarity to make the correct decisions and drive towards success. Making wrong decisions either stall your progress or even destroy the entire plan. So planning is a critical step that you have to do it in order to succeed. Planning is an art, many learnt from their mistakes, which took them on long detours before they finally succeed. Other learn through following successful plans, which is a great idea, but always be ready to change according to the opportunities happening around you.

Before you can start planning, you need to know what's at the end of the road, things that you want to achieve. In short, Vision. Great plans come from great vision. Crystal clear vision can show you every step you need to make to succeed. Vague or vision with little details are almost useless, because you cannot plan effectively, ending up going in circles or wrong direction. A vision " Setting up a supermarket in my town" is too vague to give you good details to plan. "Setting up a 10,000 sq foot supermarket with products from 100 vendors in the downtown area in 2 years time" See the difference? This will guide you to plan appropriately. You will devise a plan on how to work with 100 vendors, and also search for potential rent space in downtown. Do you think it is easier to succeed than saying "Setting up a supermarket"? Yes it does!!

Vision is what you want to achieve and different levels of success will require a whole new vision and plan. A vision and plan of setting up a supermarket will be different from setting up a global chain of supermarket. You will also need to think about expansion and regional distributors, how to manage a chain of outlets etc.

So how high should you aim for success? Of course as high as possible! The higher you aim, the better your rewards from success! You shouldn't be saying "It's too difficult" or "I don't think I can do it". You already got a great vision and plan! You are almost halfway there, you are far better than the majority of them. Don’t settle for less, it limits your ability to grow. And if your big plan doesn’t turn out as well, you will still be far better than you used to be! A global chain may not work or fail to take off, but your plan is already good enough to sustain a regional chain of supermarkets, does it sound good too compared to nothing?

So always set a clear vision, only then you will see the goals you need to accomplish in order to succeed.  With these, you will be able to plan in great details, almost like a blueprint to success. There a lot great resources out there, but the hidden message of great vision and great plan is something that not many resources actually talk in depth to it. I hope you are enlightened by now. Here are some books that help you out on goal settings, proven methodologies and systematic approach to achieve your goals. I read many of such books, but it is really the hands-on, practical application of vision that make you realize that everything is possible. Nevertheless, these books are going to help you a lot, reducing your learning period to succeed,  so read them and apply them, you will be amazed. If you want to learn from success stories and analysis of their methodologies, i recommend Goal Setting: 13 Secrets of World Class Achievers, great resource! If you want more in depth knowledge on accelerated goal achievement, this is something you will be looking for, Goals!: How to Get Everything You Want -- Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible .

           

First step to positive cashflow. Are you ready to change for the better?

If you clicked on the title and reading this right now, I know you are ready to make things right in your life! Congratulations for taking this important step. Before we can start thinking about brining in more money, we need to look at something else that is happening right now. Positive cashflow doesn’t mean how much you’ve got in your bank, but the inflow of your money, income, and also the outflow, your expenses. So increasing your inflow and reducing your outflow will result in positive cashflow, so let’s work on managing your expenses first.

Expenses can be classified into 3 categories:

1. Necessity. Necessity expenses are money spent on things you NEED. Food, Water, basic clothing and transport to work are examples. These are money spent to ensure that you cannot survive without it, very basic kind of things that will keep you going. Money spent here will never come back, so these outflows go directly to the drain.
2. Optional. Optional expenses are things that you spent on that you can live without it. Things that help you to enhance and improve your lifestyle, add comfort or gratification are all optional expenses. It is hard for some people to differentiate Necessity or Optional expenses. Well, most millionaires cut down a lot of their optional expenses because they can live slightly out of their comfort zone and able to wait out for better optional expenses. So expenses here are discretionary and it is the factor that determines how fast you can increase your cashflow. If you can settle for less, the earlier you will achieve higher positive cashflow and resulting better results. For me, I do set aside a fixed monthly amount for optional expenses and it is working well for me. I agree that we need to spend something that make ourselves happier and motivated al the time. :)
3. Investment. Investment are money you spent which you expect yielding more returns in the future. It may not be in monetary form, it might be in other forms like health or skills. You can invest in a pair of sports equipment so that you can go jogging everyday and keep yourself fit. Or you spend money to attend a financial management course that will help you to understand managing your funds. Many people use investments as excuses to spend on optional things, like I need a faster and more powerful computer so that I can perform better. True it helps, but can you do without it? Is it worth the money you “invested” in? The return of investment is something to consider in this case. And of course monetary investments in buying financial products like mutual funds, stocks, investment packages will increase your return.

If you can effectively manage how you use your money, you can control your expenses well and gradually increasing your positive cashflow. How often do you do financial management? Millionaires do it everyday! They spend an hour or so, assessing their expenses and reviewing their funds on their desks or spreadsheets in their computers. It’s a habit that we should adopt too, by looking through what you spent everyday is an easier way to see how much you spent on necessities or optionals and even investments. A general guide is necessities should be roughly the same amount every period and  spend less in optionals and spend most of it in investments. Let most of your money work for you and not working for money!

So the first thing is to invest in your ability to reduce your expenses. Do spend some time researching on how you can cut down your expenses, look through your daily expenses and determine what are optionals / necessities and how you can use your money for investments. Here are some really great books that I recommend, Wink and Grow Rich (Wealth Dynamics), which helps you to understand the concepts behind handling cashflows and different ways to leverage flows for better results and also the popular book, Rich Dad's CASHFLOW Quadrant: Rich Dad's Guide to Financial Freedom, that shows you the tools and methodologies used by successful millionaires to create and increase their cashflows. So start looking at your expenses today!

                       

Setting up your Millionaire Mindset

Do you ever wonder why some people are just lucky enough, or capable of making a lot of money, while many others struggle their entire lives and get nothing? Well, these millionaires got to have something different! It is the mindset, the way they perceive money and the way they use it. If you want to be one of them, you got to change your mindset, different from the others! You got to think and act like one of them, and I am sure, one day you will be truly a millionaire.

A millionaire mindset is very different from most people. Their mindset drives their energy to develop habits and actions so differently, that many others do not develop. Here are the main 5 characteristics of a millionaire mindset:

 

1. Invest more, spend less. Many people have always think that these people are stingy and selfish, in fact millionaires are very careful in their spending. They know that when money are spent, they will not get them back. But when it comes to investing money, investing in developing skills, through books, courses or workshops, they do not hesitate even a single second! They know that every cent they invest is going to bring them back more money!
2. Gratification. When you receive a pay rise, or a big bonus, do you spend more money ? I bet most of us will say Yes!  Increase in income usually mean increase in spending power. You feel that you have more money now to afford better things to satisfy yourself and make yourself happier, right? Millionaires don’t usually gratify themselves very often, they reuse their extra income to generate more income in the future! They can forget about a getting a sports car and aim to get a supercar in the next 5 years. Many of us cannot resist the temptation on spend all of the extra income to make ourselves happier. So in order to be like them, you got to work hard to kick this habit.
3. Eye for opportunities. Opportunities are almost everywhere, it’s the matter that if you can spot it and leverage on it. Millionaires are good at this, they act quickly when the opportunity comes and try to reap the most out of it. They are always on a constant lookout, wherever they go.
4. Perception of Failure and Risks. Failure to them are simply lesson learnt, they did not fail but they found out they did something wrongly and will try again. In fact millionaires failed more than most people do, because they keep trying and every failure made them stronger and better. Many people are fearful of risks. Its human nature but they think differently, risks to them are probabilities of delayed successes. If the risk is high, the chances of succeeded is delayed and not diminished, and millionaires do assessments and thoughts before taking on such risks. Calculated risks are essential, which will help them to decide if they can afford the wait before getting any return back.
5. Clear vision and goals. Millionaires are people with great plans, they plan ahead and manage well to keep their cashflows going and make good decisions. A clear vision is needed in order to make the right decision. Millionaires diligently do daily financial planning, manage their expenses regularly. They plan their financials well, and keep everything in place, taking control of things. And because they are clear of what they want, they can react to another issues or obstacles that come along, they can work out a better strategy when opportunites or obstacles come.

 

Clearly, the millionaire mindset is truly the fundamentals of being one of them. Some of them learnt from their parents or relatives, other learnt from their personal experiences and some others achieved it through personal development through books and seminars. They put into practice of what they believe and they excel from there. That is why some millionaires are bankrupts who eventually able to turn everything around and becoming more successful. They know that they have the millionaire mindset and with it, can create remarkable results. So if they can do it, you can do it too! We are not bankrupts and we are in far more better positions to succeed, if we adopt the same mindset as them!

 

                                       

There are a lot of great books talking about the millionaire mindsets. They share about the habits, the differences and the principles of millionaires and how to achieve them/ If you want more indepth knowledge of setting a great mindset, I highly recommend this two books,Secrets of the Millionaire Mind: Mastering the Inner Game of Wealth and The Top 10 Distinctions Between Millionaires and the Middle Class, which covers the essentials and mindset differences and changes you will need to adopt, to be as successful as them. Don’t wait anymore, the opportunity is here today!

Get out of the rat race! Stop trading time for money

Everyone trades time for money. Every working day you will wake up and go to work for the entire day and earning a sum of money for the hours spent at work. And you do this for the next 30 years of your life! It is an one to one exchange, when you stop giving time, you won’t be getting any money. Everyone has the same number of hours everyday, 24 hours, but why some people can earn more every day? Yes the higher paid workers are doing more value work, but was paid below the value they have contributed to the company.

Most corporate employees are paid fairly low, do a quick calculation: Monthly Salary / (9 working hours * 20 working days).

So if you are earning $2,400 a month, you are paid $13 per hr (~$30,000 annually)

If you earn $4,000 a month, then you are paid $22 per hr (~$50,0000 annually)

If you earn $8,000 a month, you are paid $44 per hr (~$100,000 annually)

Compare if others that have successfully got out of the rat race and not trading time for money. One had created a stream of income by writing a book and earning royalties, annually he is earning $50,000 on the first year, which he had invested 100 days writing it. So that translates easily to $55 per hr. And did you realize he only need to work 100 days rather than the usual 200+ working days? This does not stop here, the following year his book gain popularity and royalties rose to $80,000 and he had not spent anytime on it, the average hourly rate rose to a whopping $144 per hr for that 100 days he spent in the first year! If he keep up the momentum and write more books, the return is exponential!

Can you see the difference now? It is about investing time in the right thing that will bring you exponential return. Passive incomes are incomes that keep coming in without you having to trade with time. So if you are able to create more passive income, you will only need to spend less time for money. And if you reach a stage that money flow in more than what you trade time for money, you don’t have to work anymore! That is financial freedom, the passive incomes you created started to bear fruits that you no longer have to worry about it any more.

Although you might have tried and passive incomes may not come as much yet, say $1000 a month, isn’t that better than trading time for money? You have at least additional income to now, and passive incomes grow on their own, and you can expect more to come gradually. So don’t get discouraged when it doesn’t work to your expectation. Hang on and you will be there soon enough!

 

                

You can gain more tips and guides from many sources about creating passive income. I recommend you to find out more and read a couple of books that will accelerate you to creating your first passive income. Personally I enjoy reading  Secrets To Creating Passive Income and becoming financially free - even in a slow economy, its inspirational as the book guides you through various methodologies and concept of creating passive income and how to stay immune to other factors that might affect you one way or the other. Another very popular book, The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime. sets your mind in the right direction and get out the rat race, through creating passive incomes and spotting opportunities!