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Mark & Jack: Principle #4 - Believe In Yourself

This is the 4th week in my series, Mark & Jack: 52.4 Weeks of Living the Success Principles, my quest to master the Success Principles as written by Jack Canfield in his book of the same name. Last week’s blogs were about getting what you want and my approach to helping people create a Living Wealth Plan. If you didnt read it, check out how I applied this in my own life and some tips on how it can help you to be successful.

This week’s Principle is Believe in Yourself. I have been listening to Wayne Dyer’s latest audio book, Excuses Be Gone (recommended). It mentions another book called The Biology of Belief and how establishing a positive mental position for your intentions at some point goes beyond the thinking and starts to influence your actual cellular biology.

Heady stuff … I believe it. And, as we are discussing, that is the first step. Someone said the same thing about the Law of Attraction: you can either not believe in it and it will act on you without your participation (I prefer “full attention”) or you can believe in it and have it work for you.

At the end of the day, what is wrong with more positive thinking? Decide what one thing you want more in life right now. Financial stability is popular. To be a ranked USTA tennis player. To have self confidence to stand up to a bullying coworker. Put it into words and stand in front of the mirror, looking yourself in the eye and repeat the affirmation over and over, until you feel energized (or someone comes in and wants to know what’s wrong).

After awhile, I find that I cannot help but feel better. “I will be a million dollar a year public speaker in 3 years. I am knowledgeable, funny and helpful and 1000s of people will benefit from hearing what I have to say about being wealthy.”

That’s it - I am heading to the mirror right now. What are you waiting for?

September 23, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Creating Value

College Program Testimonial(s)

Just a couple of comments I had on my program this week (people saying nice things about me!). All of you Student and Career Services folks looking for someone who is going to make a difference in your students lives need to listen up!

“… another instructor and I were discussing what we liked best about Mark’s talk to (the Business Club). We both agreed on how grateful we were that he encouraged the students to add value to everything they do….whether they are presently flipping burgers or someday going to be pushing numbers as accountants.

Mark was the perfect person to make this suggestion because he was doing it as he spoke to our students. Mark exemplified value as he shared his knowledge, time and energy with 110% enthusiasm, spirit and soul.”

- Professor Elaine Bienvenue, Business Department, Sierra College. [Read more...]

October 25, 2008 | Leave a Comment

Identify Your Inner Expert

CAN You Decide What You Want? Sure You Can ….

The Mark & Jack series continues. This week I am helping you to figure out what you want (and dont want as it turns out).

What I do - and what I teach others - is to break things down into the different areas of their life that are important to them. In my book, The Wealth Manifesto, I use these as the different categories of wealth (or wellbeing) in your life. These are the ones I use (you may have different ones):

Health and fitness (physical)
Learning (mental)
Relationships (relational)
Service (charitable)
Self-esteem / Self-worth (personal) [Read more...]

September 6, 2009 | 1 Comment

Monetize Your Inner Expert

Recognizing the Limits of “Do What You Love”

In the last post I mentioned that finding your purpose might just be as easy as figuring out what you love doing and what you are good at doing and then figuring out how to make a living doing just that.

Works … sometimes. Think about it. How many starving artists and musicians are there? How many frustrated athletes who were the best in their high school and never started in college let alone get into the pros. Plenty of stories of people who followed their dream into bankruptcy.

What happened? If this is my “purpose” Mr Smart Guy, why didnt I succeed. Where is my Nike endorsement contract? Why doesnt The Donald return my calls? Why is God messing with me.

Actor Kirk Douglas had a great line (paraphrasing): “God answers all prayers. Sometimes the answer is ‘No.’” I suppose the quick way to wind down this post (part of my committment to write shorter blog posts) is when you are looking for your purpose, your passion your place, you have to be honest with yourself: is this real or just something you THINK you want? It is referred to as a ‘calling’ for a reason: is this what is really calling you or is it your ego talking? Recognizing that it doesnt always work out and you may have to ‘do what pays,’ for awhile longer while the planets line up is a call you may have to make.

I quit a long - and highly profitable - career in engineering to do my own thing. I was pretty successful but a) it was not quite right (more on that in a later blog) and b) I was not paying my bills (that is called cash flow negative in the financial parlance. I more into the idea of writing a book and being a trainer/speaker than having that be a call I was answering. So I went back to work in engineering. Now, my situation has changed in many ways and I am getting back into writing and speaking for more of the right reasons than I had before. I’ll get to that next post.

Heard a good joke from a homeless woman yesterday on the beach in La Jolla, CA:

What to know how to make God laugh? Tell Him your plans for the day.

August 25, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Market Your Inner Expert

Why Marketing Should Matter

Seth Godin is one of the most inventive and down to earth marketing guys around. He has written various books with titles that might lead you to conclude he looks at things a bit differently:

Meatball Sundae: Is Your Marketing out of Sync?

Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable

This latter example discusses his purple cow theory which, in a nutshell, is that you can take your business (or blog) to new heights by differentiating yourself from your peers.

In any event, one of his latest posts reflects on the concept of marketing budgets and whether ads work.

His blog is always brief and hits home with often a truly compelling message. I personally am better at the latter than the former … still have not figured out how to come up with a short blog post.

Maybe next time.

Read Seth’s blog. That’s all I really needed to say!

January 3, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Entrepreneurship

More on Getting What You Want: The Living Wealth Plan

Continuing with my exploration of Jack Canfield’s Success Priniciples in my series: Mark & Jack.

As you may have noticed, it’s not working out to one a week either…so what? When I work though each of these principles and figure out what they mean to me and how I can integrate my expereinces into what I teach others, THEN I move on.

Last time time I broke the different areas of our existence (ya know … life?) into 9 areas, physical, mental, financial, etc. (Mark & Jack post No. 6) to be used as categories for goal setting, etc. You may have 5 or 16 or you might like 9. It don’ matter tah me … do your own thing.

Set goals in each of these areas, implement an action plan (a HUGE factor in success … some of us are AWESOME at making To Do Lists and never finishing) and move on to the next fun thing. Some of these can be brief. A Physical goal for example might be “exercise 4 times per week” and/or “weigh 175 lbs. by Dec 31 2009″).

Could be complex too as you figure out your financial goals for different phases of your life. I actually recommend this, SPECIFICALLY for financial goals. If you say, “I want financial independence by age 48″, that is not specific. It is much more realizable to look at the next 30 days, the next 6 months, the range of 6 to 24 months, 2 years to 5 years, etc. and identify things like net worth, cash flow, debt, hard assets, etc. for those time frames.

It’s OK to start with, “$2.5M liquid net worth by age 48″ but you will have to break that down to an action plan that is starts in immediately. Then, and this is the good part, you tie that into the other aspects of your Living Wealth Plan and figure out where that monetary wealth is coming from (vocational), what you need to do to get to it (mental, realtional) and who you have to be (personal, spiritual) to get there.

Someone once said that the best thing about becoming a millionaire is not the million dollars but the type of person you become along the way.

Now that’s a plan.

September 13, 2009 | 1 Comment