It’s a question I get all the time:
“Should I work with a coach?”
And every time, I give the same answer:
“Which one?”
High performers learn from other high performers. If you want to manifest a change in your life or achieve a certain goal, the best thing you can do is study people who have already done it.
I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many hundreds of highly successful people.
Yet I’ve found that there are small things that distinguish the most successful few. One of those is role models.
I keep on my desk a summary of Dale Carnegie’s principles from his famous book, How to Win Friends and Influence People.
In his book he has some 30 simple principles you can easily use that he boils down to short statements like, “Give honest and sincere appreciation.”
I keep them as a reminder for myself and sometimes I work through them with my clients, such as today.
My client is having a difficult situation with one of her senior managers.
The manager has clearly made some mistakes, my client could have managed her better, but at this point my client wants to get the relationship back on the road.
After talking about it for a little bit, we went into each of Carnegie’s principles for being a leader.
It was a hugely constructive way for us to resolve this, and I thought some of you might benefit from reminding yourself of these principles too:
Be a Leader: How to Change People Without Giving Offense or Arousing Resentment
- Begin with praise and honest appreciation.
- Call attention to people’s mistakes indirectly.
- Talk about your own mistakes before criticizing the other person.
- Ask questions instead of giving direct orders.
- Let the other person save face.
- Praise every improvement.
- Give the other person a fine reputation to live up to.
- Use encouragement. Make the fault seem easy to correct.
- Make the other person happy about doing what you suggest.
Those of you who have been around here for a while and know how I roll, know that part of my life is exploring how deep the rabbit hole goes.
It’s “crazy” to tell a “normal” person that you do meditation and hypnosis a couple of hours a day because you perceive that world to be deeper than this one, but that’s the truth of how I live.
I’m not into wasting time reading the news or Facebook or some other crap that people waste their time on.
I avoid their programming. I’m into programming that makes my life better.
And I know that those of you who are serious about evolving beyond this monkey brain and body that we find ourselves shoved into feel the same.
So, I invite you to a game I’ve been playing with myself for a couple of months.
I saw this chart on LinkedIn, so I decided to rip it off and put it here.
Although it’s small, I hope you can get the notion.
I’ve personally experienced this journey a number of times, and many of my friends and clients have too.
They say it takes decades to become an overnight success, and this shows you how it happens.
The 1% aren’t winning. I say it over and over again in my work, but it’s a tough pill for most people to swallow.
Intellectually, we can understand that money is not the same as happiness. But on some basic level we are all taught to equate financial success with life success. No matter what our cultural programming, it’s a statistical fact that 2/3rds of workers in America, regardless of class, admit to being unhappy in their job.
But if the 1% aren’t winning, who is?
The builders. Creators. Sure, many of them may not yet have the success that they want, but they are living a life of purpose, driven by a vision and passion to make the world a better place.
Here are five of my favorite builders:
Anyone who works out regularly dreads this time of year. On January 2nd, gyms around the world are going to be crowded 24/7 with people who made a New Year’s resolution to get a six-pack.
Fortunately, they’ll all be gone in two weeks.
It’s a statistical fact that over 90% of New Year’s resolutions are broken. Any practice that fails over 90% of the time should be abandoned, but people still pretend to stick to it.
There’s a better way to set goals and change your life, it just takes a little work. Let me explain.
If I asked how you train your mind, what would you say?
- “I read a lot.”
- “I meditate for an hour every day.”
- “I journal every night.”
If any of those things are true, then you’re doing a great job of feeding your mind. But what happens when you feed yourself and don’t workout?
You get flabby.
People who hit the gym regularly have bodies that show it. The same is true for people who condition their minds. Conditioning isn’t about feeding your brain new information or how you brainwash yourself or finding productivity “hacks,” it’s about creating a training routine for your mind.
Thinking of your mind as a physical thing, a concept we call the body-mind, is a big shift for some people, but it’s fundamental to conditioning.
People who can’t conceptualize this are always at the mercy of their reptile brain and have little control over their thoughts.
I have a free e-book you can download for Building Your Limitless Mind. (and Audio Masterclass on it here)
But I’ve written this article for conditioning your mind for people who want to quickly take control of their thinking. If you want to be in your mind’s driver seat, the first step is to understand the physical forces that control your mind.
There are a plenty of reasons that your job can objectively suck:
- Compensation is headed in the wrong direction.
- Your career options are becoming more limited.
- Your workplace feels like a war zone or mental hospital.
You’d be smart for citing any of those as reasons for leaving; however, there are a number of self-deceptions we all suffer from that should lead you to question your motives before jumping ship:
The way we set goals in our society makes achieving those goals all but impossible, but it doesn’t have to be.
If you read a lot of the stuff that’s written on goal-setting, it usually contains the same, wrong-headed advice:
- Decide where you want to be 10 years from now
- Break that goal down into monthly goals
- Work towards those, and eventually, you’ll reach your destination
On paper that looks simple, but implementing it can be anything but.
Few people really know where they want to be in 10 years with any degree of specificity and even if they think they do, they’re likely to change their goals along the way. Trying to plan out the next 120 months of your life is an impossible feat and the reason most people simply avoid setting goals.
I’ve worked with some of the most successful CEOs and executives in the world and have created a system for setting goals that actually works. You don’t have to know where you’ll be in 10 years, you just have to know one thing:
After this article I wrote about quitting Goldman Sachs took off, I got a lot of attention.
Former colleagues and others wrote me wanting to know more, yet there was also some confusion about what I stand for.
My message has never been, and never will be: Quit your top job on Wall Street.
Too many faux experts preach mantras like:
- “Escape the 9-5”
- “Join the gig economy”
- “Achieve financial independence”
The only mantra I use is this:
“Live the life YOU truly want”
Do you see the difference? I’m into how you create your dream life. People who follow the faux experts are into creating an easy life.
Top performers don’t want an easy life. They want to challenge themselves to win, and take it as far as they can go.
If you want to rise to the top of your industry, then quitting a top job is the last thing you should do.
Everyone has an opinion on surviving a recession. You remember all those terrible news spots and articles in 2008:
- “Everyone should own a liquor store, downturns never affect them!”
- “You should work in healthcare. Even broke people get sick!”
- “Just start a dropshipping company and sell fake purses. It always works!”
And underlying all that advice is one thing:
Happiness in your career and life is irrelevant, just so long as you feel a little safer financially.
If that’s how you feel about your life, then there’s no reason for you to read ahead. Happily stagnate forever. If you want to live a life where you are constantly moving forward, where you are always bettering yourself and moving towards what you truly want, then read on.
I came across this cool idea from Dr. Wayne Dyer.
For too many of us, life feels like a “struggle,” where have to keep “pushing,” just to keep “making” things happen.
For many years I fell into that trap, and I spent even more years building and doing the mental practices to break out of it.
Yesterday, I heard Wayne Dyer’s solution to this problem, to simply remember that nursery rhyme you drilled as a kid.
Paraphrasing from his tape series, “Real Magic:”
- “Row, row, row YOUR boat: Notice that it doesn’t say your spouse’s boat, or your kid’s boat, or your neighbor’s boat… it says, YOUR boat
- GENTLY: Keep rowing every day, but do it easily, don’t struggle
- DOWN the stream: It doesn’t say, swim against the stream. It stresses that the right direction is down the stream, in the flow of the current.
- MERRILY, Merrily, Merrily, Merrily: You choose how you approach every aspect of your life.
- Life is but a DREAM: Or a nightmare…You choose.
Right after the credit bubble burst in 2008, shocked, people scrambled desperately for answers.
Turning to the economists, nearly all of whom failed to predict the deepest recession in decades, they asked, “What will happen next?”
Having seen the obvious writing on the enormous wall of debt shadowing the world, and positioned myself perfectly in a distressed debt investing job, I found it terribly amusing.
If the world’s “smartest” economists couldn’t even see the credit crisis coming, then, how would they have any clue about where we are now headed?
Obama And Trump Won The Same Way
I won’t even turn on the TV or Internet to watch the mostly useless talking heads endlessly debate how “this could have happened.”
Nearly all of them had absolutely no clue before, so, why on earth would they see it any more clearly today?
They won’t. You can already see them blaming Wikileaks, or whatnot.
They will cry in their lattes, but most of them will never get how Trump pulled this off, because they never bothered to ask how Barack Obama did it.
Mesmerized by his nice sounding words, and slow, melodic voice, buying into the meme of the messiah, they simply failed to see they were being influenced.
What’s the difference between a good life and a good job?
It might seem like a silly question. To a lot of people, having a good job is a big part of having a good life. But to the millions of people with good jobs who are still unhappy, the distinction is critically important.
I am often reminded of the difference between how we like to think the world works, and how it really works.
Years ago when we were doing some work for a public pension fund I learned that in some government jobs there’s a standard racket.
Pensions are set off their final year income, so it’s standard to jack up your overtime in your final year before retirement, so you not only earn more that year, but every year for the rest of your life.
To those who do it, it’s just part of the racket, it’s normal. It’s still wrong.
When you hear stuff like that you think, ugh, it just sucks that otherwise ethical people accept that as truth.
What is Truth?
There’s a lot of that in this election.
Everyone deals with anxiety—to one degree or another.
Some of us squash it down, some of us develop coping strategies, but nonetheless all of us know that gnawing feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That sense that things could go wrong.
It’s exhausting. It takes away from the quality of your work, and more importantly, the quality of your life. You wake up on days you should be excited with a sense of dread, and it wears at you.
But anxiety doesn’t need to be your foe. In fact, you can use the same mechanisms that cause anxiety to drive you towards what you want. The brain functions that cause anxiety are incredibly powerful, you just have to know how to use them.
I train my clients not on how to cope with anxiety, but on how to use it to get what they want.
It all starts with understanding where anxiety comes from.
Get harder.
More focused.
Become stronger.
Get better.
Keep going!
One of the fundamental steps to my system for getting what you want is that you must be committed to learning new skills. You can learn skills in a lot of different ways, but you will most commonly develop them by reading.
With this in mind, I’d like to issue a little challenge to those of you working to get what you want in you life:
I’ve put together a very short autumn reading list of books that teach skills anyone can benefit from. Read them all by the end of this autumn, and see what happens.
You can spend your fall watching football, eating pumpkin spice everything, and getting more or less nowhere, or you can challenge yourself to read these books and develop real skills.
If you do complete this reading list, I guarantee you’ll see the benefits, quickly, just in time for bonuses.
A lot of people are unhappy in their jobs. In fact, 2.8 million Americans quit their jobs every month.
I’ve written extensively about how you should quit your job, and for many people, that advice is all they need. There is, however, one situation where that advice does not suffice.
Some people are at the perfect company, but in the wrong job.
Walking away from one company and into another is a tricky path to chart, but transferring within the same company can also be like navigating a minefield.