Personal Achievement

There’s no better time to start your personal development program than right now. Any day of the year can be your personal New Year’s Day. I read about a man who was always happy, because he was convinced that all his troubles would be over in the spring. If he was ill, the spring would cure his illness. If he couldn’t afford some special purchase, no problem – he’d buy it in the spring sales.

Spring came and went, often without the benefits he’d anticipated, but he was certain the next spring would be better. Nor did he give up on spring until the middle of summer – it could just be that things were delayed. When it was clear that things simply weren’t going to happen this spring, not to worry, next spring was on its way, bringing with it all he hoped for.

When I suggest that you start your personal development program,  I should add that you need that man’s store of optimism, but yours must be based upon self-motivation and commitment to hard work, rather than hope and faith. I’ll keep on saying this: You can achieve whatever you want through hard work, by following a plan, focused on the right goals.

I outlined, in an earlier post, the areas I associate with personal development. These are:

• Occupational
• Recreational
• Creative
• Mental
• Physical
• Social
• Spiritual

They don’t have to be in this particular order. Previously, I showed them as a fully connected mesh network, from the thought process perspective. It makes sense to put Occupational considerations first, since, for most of us, our plans and ambitions will be focused upon our occupation. The activities that provide our source(s) of income are crucial to everything else we do.

Without money, life is miserable. No-one has yet persuaded me that less money is better than more money. Times when I’ve been well off, I’ve been very happy, compared to times when I’ve been poor.

So, start with your Occupational goals as the first step in your personal development program.

Think carefully about your present occupation and about the occupation you’d like to be engaged in, five years from now. Five years is a magic number in personal development. Always have your five year plan uppermost in your mind. You must ask yourself what you would like to be doing then. This will take you a while to mull over, and as you refine your ideas, it will take more and more research. Much of this will be online, but there are many other sources too. If you have a role model, see if you can get to interview them, by email, phone, Skype or letter. This is the sort of activity you must aim for, in setting your occupational goals.

You will make changes – many changes – starting as soon as you begin to set your goals.

To help you with the kinds of questions you should ask yourself, I’ve written a short list below. You must come up with many more than this, before making your final occupational plan.

Personal Development Program – Some Occupational Questions

• Do you want a new career that offers you a higher status in your community?
• Do you want a better job to earn more respect from friends and family?
• Do you want a new business that gives you greater potential for growth in your life?
• Do you want a different boss who can recognize and value your true worth?
• Do you want to work in a new location that gives a better quality of life for your family?
• Do you want a new vocation in life that allows you to feel more fulfilled and appreciated?
• Do you want to work to help disadvantaged people in a way you find rewarding?
• Do you want a business partner who shares your passion and motivation for your work?
• Do you want a new set of colleagues who value your vision for the business?
• Do you want a role that enables you to improve your work associates’ lives?
• Do you want a higher income to lift yourself out of the lifestyle you’re stuck in?
• Do you want a better standard of living to improve your loved ones’ opportunities in life?
• Do you want a more ethical line of employment that will demonstrate your integrity?
• Do you want to be an entrepreneur and create new jobs in your community?
• Do you want different working hours to give you more time with your loved ones?
• Do you want a more challenging position in order to show off your capabilities?
• Do you want a less challenging position to give you time to study for higher qualifications?
• Do you want to be your own boss so that your success depends on your own hard work?
• Do you want a more creative role so that you can build a reputation for innovation?
• Do you want a more manual, hands-on role so that you can lead from the front?
• Do you want a job where you interact with people and can motivate them?
• Do you want a job where you work alone so that you can build your prestige in your niche?
• Do you want to be able to work at home in the interests of efficiency and family unity?
• Do you want a job that involves mundane work that could give you time to plan your goals?

For a personal development program, the usual wisdom is to write down your strengths and weaknesses, your present knowledge and skills, your likes and dislikes… and so on.

I don’t advise that. You’re about to start a personal development plan that involves, at the very least, making big changes to your life. If you’re not prepared to make big changes, you shouldn’t embark on this program.

Suppose you’re a teacher and your dream is to become a farmer (or vice versa), then your view of the world is going to have to change dramatically. Your prejudices and false assumptions will have to be abandoned. Of course, you have to recognize them first!

To start your personal development program, then, you must ask yourself questions. Rather than state what you already know and what you are capable of doing, ask yourself what you dream of doing in the future. You can think of this as a kind of individual, inverted brainstorming. Instead of writing down all kinds of suggestions, write down all kinds of questions. The similarity to brainstorming is that you “defer judgement”, and you “reach for quantity” in your questions.

Look at the questions I listed above. You’ll see that they’re mostly of the form, “Do you want change X to occur in your life, in order to produce benefit Y?”

Your questions should generally follow this format.

In his classic book, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, Dale Carnegie tells us that American philosopher Dr. John Dewey asserted that the deepest urge in human nature is the desire to be important.

This applies to all of us, and the benefits in the questions are intended to feed this desire in some way.

When writing down your questions, try to ensure that your desire to be important is the main incentive that will motivate you to take action.

A useful exercise, before you write down your Occupational questions, is to make a list of things that could make you feel important.

Soon, I’ll talk about the Physical aspect of your personal development plan, which includes the way you dress, your modes of transport, what you eat, and so on.

Terry

It was around forty years ago that I found Martin Rhodes’ book, “Personal Achievement”, in a library sale, and it’s been close by me ever since. That was my first encounter with self-improvement and it was a real inspiration. Well, now, I want to talk about some Personal Development techniques of my own, and show you how they can help improve your life.

I often use the expressions “Personal Achievement” and “Personal Development” too loosely. It’s sloppiness, but for my purposes, they usually mean the same thing.

If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know I like to pull ideas from unrelated areas and build Personal Development messages from them. A while back, I mentioned my Protocol Model, in which I modified a few computer networking concepts. I’d like to begin explaining it here.

One of the basic principles of Personal Achievement is that you can achieve anything you want in life, if only you’ll work hard enough. It goes almost without saying, that hard work implies smart work. There’s no point working hard toward the wrong end. For that reason smart working always needs a plan.

I wanted to devise a model to help me plan and achieve personal development goals in a systematic way. I wanted a framework to guide me in asking the right questions. I figured, if I could get the questions right, then I’d be well on the way to building my implementation plan.

In creating this model, I looked for the common types of ideas I’d met in my personal achievement work. I came up with these:

• Occupational
• Recreational
• Creative
• Mental
• Physical
• Social
• Spiritual

The list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s always proved more than adequate for my purposes.

This is how it looked on paper:

Setting targets and achieving them would involve ideas from these areas. Any thoughts in one area could interact with those from one or more of the others. This is illustrated with links below, in what we call a fully connected mesh. You can trace a link from any one thought area to any other. These links are the paths over which the protocols (the rules) operate and they will be in the form of questions and answers.

For example, a spiritual question to the occupational area might be, “Is the sales copy I plan to use in my work legal, decent, honest and truthful?” Spiritual, in this model refers to the rules by which you live. So one person could give a valid answer, “Yes” to the question, while another would have to say “No”, because they live by different personal codes of conduct.

It’s useful at this point to give a name to these linked idea components. I thought long and hard about this, before settling for “Hubs”, because it’s simple.

The questions and answers between the hubs must be coordinated and the way to do that is through a supervisor, or controller, which happens to be you. You may have experienced your thoughts swirling around aimlessly at times, when suddenly you decide you have to take control. You may call it a light-bulb moment, or a eureka moment, or simply a pull-yourself-together moment. It means you have to get on top of the situation.

So the model now looks like this:

The power of this model is contained in the questions you’re forced to ask yourself in developing your plan. You can use it to build long-term or short-term goal plans by asking questions at the appropriate level. You can also sub-divide larger goals into smaller sub-goals, almost ad infinitum. In order to keep track of your plans and to communicate with the outside world, whether that is other people, a printer, the Internet, yourself via notes, or other goal plans – any interaction with this particular goal plan network takes place through the network’s Social Hub. You can think of each Social Hub as an Input/Output (I/O) unit or a communications port.

To be continued….

Terry

On several occasions recently, I’ve spent time replying to a post on a forum, only to find, when I hit the “Send Reply” button, that the thread is non-existent – i.e. it’s been deleted while I’ve been composing. Not wanting to waste anything I’ve spent time writing, you will be the beneficiary of the admin’s “Delete Thread” button. You don’t get the full context, but here’s part of my reply.

The question was:

Let me ask you this very important question:
How do YOU measure the quality of the man?

It’s over fifty years since I learned this code for living:

A Scout’s honor is to be trusted.
A Scout is loyal to his country and his employers.
A Scout’s duty is to be useful and to help others.
A Scout is a friend to all and a brother to every other Scout, no matter to what class, color or creed the other belongs.
A Scout is courteous.
A Scout is a friend to animals.
A Scout obeys orders of his Patrol Leader or Scoutmaster without question.
A Scout smiles and whistles under all circumstances.
A Scout is thrifty.
A Scout is clean in thought word and deed.

I’ve tried to abide by that code over the years. If you replace the word “Scout” by something more meaningful to yourself, it’s not a bad guide to how to conduct your life.

Some may say they  don’t obey orders from anyone, or that they don’t have an employer and so on, but the principles are the things that matter. I’ve found that I do, in fact, measure a person’s “quality” by those ten guidelines. Together, they add up to integrity, which counts for everything with me.

Terry

I’d spent enough time – it seemed like years – learning (or at least, reading) all about Internet Marketing. I’d lurked on forums based in both the UK and the United States reading about the fortunes people were making. I’d bought Rosalind Gardner’s SuperAffiliate Handbook and read it over and over again, so I knew my stuff. I was well versed in the methods used in 30-day challenges and I could do it all with my eyes shut. Okay. Time to stop reading and get down to work. Take Massive Action… that was the rallying call.

I paid a premium to join the Warrior Forum War Room and within a few hours, I’d found a product to promote. A Warrior was “giving back a ton of information” to fellow Warriors with a full course, including step-by-step details on how to promote his ClickBank offer. I couldn’t believe my good fortune.

I bought a domain name (a few, actually), changed the nameservers to point to BlueHost, then installed WordPress. I spent a couple of days setting up the site, making some snappy graphics and sounds and wrote a terrific review of the product (yes – I’d bought the product through my ClickBank affiliate link and yes, it was a good product). Did all the recommended SEO things – H1 tags, keywords in the <img> alt tags, etc. Then I looked around for “leaks” – places where my visitors could sneak out unnoticed and I blocked them all up. The only way out of that page was to click on my ClickBank link. Gotcha!

I know I had all the free traffic methods covered, but on top of that I decided to make sure, by using Adwords. Set up my campaign with Google.  All set to go and Google stopped me. I couldn’t believe it. I’d paid good hard-earned money for this advertising campaign! What right did they have to stop my potential customers discovering my product links? Not only that, but they left me to guess what I was doing wrong.

Eventually, after much, MUCH reading of the rules, it seemed that Google didn’t like me setting traps. So, PPC was not as straightforward as I’d been led to believe, after all. So, let this be a lesson to us all – READ THE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST.

Back to the War Room for another idea.

The Success Profile is a model I devised to illustrate the dynamics of  personal achievement.

First, a digression.

This graph shows what happens when a ball bounces. It’s a simple plot of the ball’s height against time. The bouncing decays and the ball comes to a standstill, because the energy it had at the beginning is converted into heat and  sound on each bounce. Unless work is done to replace that energy, it will stop.

This is how many people go through life.

If you think of this as a graph of success (and “success” means whatever you want it to mean – more on that later), then in any particular endeavor, long- or short-term, this is typically what happens.

“When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’ ”
— Lewis Carroll (Through The Looking Glass)

The plans are made, enthusiasm is boiling over and the project begins. Gradually, problems start to crop up. Results fail to match expectations. Enthusiasm wanes and effort diminishes, to the point where all interest is lost and a boost is needed to restore motivation.

Take Internet Marketing as an example. You’ve set out to make money online and your research throws up IM as the road to riches. You find your way to the Warrior Forum and, before long, you’ve purchased your first Warrior Special Offer (WSO) – a HUGE course, with TONS of secrets, written by a well-known GURU. It’s a 37-day challenge to make a grand in a week and it costs $37. You get a special offer because it’s the guru’s 37th birthday.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with this. It’s all part of building your knowledge through experience. What matters is how you use that knowledge. So, enthusiasm is high, and you start work with a vengeance.

You choose a niche, buy a domain name and hosting through GoDaddy and/or BlueHost. You install WordPress through CPanel and build a squeeze page, with an opt-in form, using an autoresponder from Aweber to build your list. You offer your freebie report as an incentive to sign up. You write half a dozen articles and submit them to EzineArticles. Throughout this, you’re using the special Secrets you’ve paid for. Then a few more articles. You check your stats. Nothing… Go back to the beginning and check everything – filling in the bits you overlooked and missed out. Keep checking the stats. Still nothing.

Enthusiasm and motivation eventually hit rock bottom and you scan the WSO’s for something else that offers the success you’re looking for. You buy another product and your enthusiasm goes up, but not to the level it was when you started out. The process is repeated, each time with dwindling motivation, until you either give up altogether or languish in the Slough of Despond, as a perpetual newbie.

Now look at this graph. You’ll notice it’s the bouncing ball reversed.

I call this the Trampoline profile, because it’s what happens when you keep pumping in more energy when you hit the trampoline. You get a bit higher each time. But there’s a physical limit to how high you can bounce, so once you reach that limit, there’s nothing more to play for. You’ll lose interest and the graph reverts to the bouncing ball profile.

In terms of the Success Profile, what this means is that we take on board the lessons from our experience and use them to go from strength to strength. As with the trampoline, though, we reach a limit and, once we realize we’ve peaked, and it’s hard work just to maintain this limit, we lose interest.

For the Internet Marketing example, you’re doing well to begin with. Your WSO’s are working for you and you’re building on what you’ve learned from your gurus, so you keep on buying until you realize you’ve hit a plateau. You’ve reached your limit and it doesn’t scale any more. Rinsing and repeating is no longer going to cut it. What you need is a way to move up a level.

In other words, you need a Success Profile that looks like this:

I named this the Trampoline Staircase profile, for obvious reasons. Each step has a trampoline, so before you reach your limit, you simply jump across to the next level. That way, you never reach a limit that you can’t break through. In theory, you could bounce your way to the top of the Great Pyramid of Giza with carefully placed trampolines!

I said earlier that success can be whatever you want it to be. If peace of mind or a greener world are some of your yardsticks for success, that’s great. You can cast a set of Success Profiles and provided there are no inconsistencies between them, you can work to keep them all in good shape. In your projects, and for each of your Life Protocols (shown here), you can define Success Profiles and use them as your guide for change. You will often be using subjective judgements but in IM, since we’re focusing on wealth (didn’t I mention that?), you have a quantitative way of measuring your success. You can measure it in terms of dollars per month. In the trade, the tendency is to talk of four- five- or six-figure incomes per month to give an order of magnitude rather than a specific earnings figure.

Okay, so what does the Trampoline Staircase profile mean in practice? Let me give you an example from someone I watched recently on Talk Marketing Now. Kieran McDonogh, a really nice, enthusiastic IM guy from New Zealand, used the expression, “align yourself with success.” I thought it gave a great insight into one way of climbing the Staircase. Essentially, Kieran said that when you’re a five-figure (per month) earner, associate with six-figure earners. Once you’re settled in the company of six-figure earners, associate with seven-figure earners.  In my model, this comes under the Occupational Protocol, but I’m sure you can see how the concept can be adapted to other protocols. Kieran was preparing to dine in the company of Donald Trump, by the way!

I’ve introduced two concepts here: the Success Profile and the Life Protocol, both of which come from my current work in progress - A Basic Model For Success (I’ve said before, I take concepts from things I’m familiar with elsewhere and form associations. I’ve done that here, once again). I’ll come back to these ideas regularly, so if they aren’t too clear right now, stay with me – you’ll find them valuable in the future, once we start to build up a fuller picture.

Here’s a plan for you to follow, now that you’ve read this.

1. Choose the first area you want to focus on in building your success.
2. Identify where you are on the Staircase and who your peers are on that step.
3. Gaze up at the next step and see who you should be aiming to associate with.
4. Research your potential future friends – IN DEPTH.
5. Have something REALLY USEFUL to say that is on their level.
6. Do everything you can to gain their attention and befriend them, but don’t be a nuisance.
7. Jump up onto the next step and start bouncing.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

See You Soon,

Terry