In the No Self Help Guru Required I promised you.
There is a specific thing you need to look at when modeling successful people.
The thing that separates them from the masses.
The key to modeling them successfully.
Secrets they probably keep even from themselves.
(I know, it should be think differently. Sue me, I’m a Mac fanboy.)
Last time I talked about modeling successful people and anti-modeling unsuccessful ones. Say you get a really successful person where you can sit down and talk to them. What do you ask?
To really get what separates them those who don’t succeed you have to find out how they think.
John Maxwell in his book Thinking For A Change said he wrote the book because of two childhood experiences. One was his father. His father told him that he struggled with being a really negative person, but he knew that wouldn’t get him where he wanted to go in life. So he determined to change the way he thought. He constantly read encouraging books. Books about improving himself. He cultivated friendships with people who were positive and tried to do what they did. And he tried to learn how these people thought and think the same.
The other experience involved a summer job he had. He lived in a small town and there were really only two families that were successful in that town. Everyone knew them. John knew he wanted to be successful so he got a summer job working for these people. John knew he was a hard worker and that could be traded not just for money, but for the chance to hang around successful people and learn from them. Which is what he did. From observation he learned they thought differently than everyone else. From that time forward he decided to learn to think better.
That’s what we do here at Distinctions For Life: we learn to think better.
There are lots of different ways to think better. Heck, John wrote a whole book on it. So we’ve got lots of material to cover. But here are a few tips for now.
The core of optimism is the belief in opportunities. Optimists aren’t pie in the sky, blind faith kind of people who thing everything will go well if they just think positive thoughts. They just believe it is possible to do things other people don’t. There will be obstacles and challenges to accomplishing their goals, but they can be overcome.
When most people see an opportunity they immediately start thinking about all the way things could go wrong. An optimist thinks about what would happen at the end, the good outcome. Then they think about ways to get there. Along the line they figure out what could go wrong and compensate for it.
When talking to your success role model, ask them how they think about new opportunities.
“Goals may give focus, but dreams give power.”
It is amazing how many of our limits are inside of us. They are limits we put on ourselves. We don’t believe something is possible so we don’t attempt it, and therefore don’t accomplish it.
You never accomplish anything you don’t try.
Only when you think big – way beyond what you think can be done – will you accomplish the big things. Then you’ll look back at yourself and wish you had dreamed bigger.
When talking to your success role model, ask them what they are dreaming about.
“The difference between average people and achieving people is their perception of and response to failure.”
Everyone fails. What differentiates one person from another is how they handle that failure.
Achievers fail more than most people. Why? Because they try more. They don’t let a failure stop them.
I know in my life there have been times where I screwed up and then curled up in a ball and did nothing. I swore I’d never do the thing I failed at ever again.
That is the wrong way to succeed. You have to get up and try something different.
When talking to your success role model, ask them what their biggest failure was and how they handled it.
