8 Simple Tricks For Your Success

Everything that a human has created started with a dream. Mother Nature has plenty of inspiration for human imagination and creativity. Every human being has ideas, may be millions of them. They come to us instantly, unsolicited.

Some are good, some are bad. It is up to each and every individual to decide which ones to keep or to get rid of. For example, the person who invented the plane was inspired by flying creatures. It was a good idea to find a way for people to fly without wings. So we kept the idea and kept perfecting it.

The world has become like a village today because of men and women of purpose, passion, faith, plan, action and determination. All the successful people I know of today have consistently shown the following 8 habits.

1-Creating and maintaining a can-do- attitude

How often do your hear statements like” I can’t do it, it is too difficult for me, it sucks, “etc. What you say is recorded and acted upon by the subconscious mind. That’s exactly why you attract to yourself what you don’t want in your life. You reap what you repeat to yourself over and over again.

The successful people, once they are on their journey, they never complain about road blocks. Road blocks make them use their brain to solve the problem. Instead of saying “it is too difficult”, they say to themselves:” how can I get around this problem? How can I break this wall? Then the imagination and creativity kick in. The Universe sends them a solution.

2-Bring the Future in the Present

Whenever I walk through the city, there is this tall and beautiful building in the city centre in Toronto, Canada. It is worth billions. When I see I, I say to myself: this is my building. I took a picture and have it on my cellphone and my desktop computer. From the time I started this kind of visualization, I was renting an apartment. Now I manage two beautiful spacious bungalows closer to the city centre. I keep investing towards this goal and I keep my faith.

What I am trying to say is, consider your goal achieved. See yourself at destination. Then walk backwards to establish your steps.

3-Prioritizing

Many of us are struggling to create a plan of action. It is not hard but for some reason we don’t do it. We hate the constraint of planning but we ignore that planning and prioritizing can thrust us years ahead. Start doing the most important tasks that take you closer to your goal.

And like we said in our previous articles, mornings are the best to work on the crucial tasks. What if you could save two years of work by taking one month learning planning and prioritizing? Would you accept to waste two years or spend one month?

4- Cultivating an unshakable sense of Justice and Equity

I was on vacation in Uganda a few years ago.  There was this old lady who was doing a door-to -door, selling sweet potatoes. She knocked at the gate of my hotel manager and a gate keeper opened the gate. We were seated in the court yard chatting with the hotel manager.

The lady asked for help to get her heavy load off her head and received it. Then, addressing  the manager, she said: “I am selling fresh sweet potatoes. ” The manager asked:” how much?”

She replied that she wanted the equivalent of around $2.00 UD for a bag of 77 pounds. I was shocked by the price she was asking for. But I was more surprised when the hotel manager attempted to bargain and discounted the price to $1.00

I told the lady to leave the bag with me even though I did not know what to do with it. I paid ten times her asking price but did not show how much I was paying her. I folded the money, gave to her and with a smile, she grabbed it, thanked me,  left without counting it.

Paying the right price for the right service with bring you abundance. Cheating or exploiting people’s ignorance or lack of alternatives will take away abundance from you.

5-Communicating

• Look for ways to do or say something nice to people. Start out by emphasizing areas of agreement. This is what we do during coaching sessions. We ask the employee to come up with at least three strengths he/she thinks to possess. We discuss about the strengths and pass to the development opportunities or areas of improvement if you like. Once again, the employee will need to find out those areas some call weaknesses. All I have to do as a coach is to ask questions to guide the employee in the right direction. This process can also be applied to any other type of communication or relationship.
• Don’t accuse anybody. Don’t criticize. Avoid those negative affirmations towards your colleagues, your friends or even your family members. Who are we to judge other people? We should praise and never condemn. Instead minimize the bad and encourage little baby steps. Seek out even the most insignificant successes and celebrate them.
• Never neglect a gesture of kindness. Say thank you. Last week I was at work and it was cold. But I did not pay attention to the cold because I was busy working. A colleague who was coming from her break came to me and put on my desk a warm cup of coffee. She knew exactly what type of coffee I wanted but did not ask me. I was surprised and felt very happy. I like to say “thank you” at each and every opportunity.
• Let the other person do most of the talking. Listen patiently and don’t interrupt. Let your friends be better than you. Have you come across situations where people were interrupting each other? If you record the conversation and replay it later, you will feel how annoying it is. Quite frankly, it is a waste of time and energy because no one listens. If no one listens, then there is no solution.
• Ask questions: tell me what you expect of me? Once they have answered the question, ask again: what I can expect of you? People will generally live up to their commitments to you as long as they came up with those commitments on their own.
• Think always in terms of the other person’s point of view. Find out where they stand, where they come from. This is when we need to use Emotional Intelligence. Get out of yourself and become your own opponent. If you can do that, then you can again be yourself and meet your opponent half way.
• Everyone is looking for sympathy. Give it to them and they will love you. Be a caring person, be compassionate and you will make many friends.
• If someone is upset as he/she is talking to you, it is your time to keep it cool, give a soft answer. Do not extinguish the fire with the fire.
• Tell stories.” Make your ideas visible, concrete, people don’t know until you show them what you mean. This is the way I was educated even before I had a chance to go to school. It was always about animal characters and the moral of the story was a human behavior correction.
• Stimulate in others their innate desire to excel perhaps through a friendly challenge or through competition. I am amazed how laborious my youngest son becomes when I give him a challenge with a remuneration at the end. He loves video games but this is the time when he forgets them and focuses on the task.
• Ask questions rather than giving orders. People hate orders. I cannot confirm whether soldiers or clergy men like them. They may be just obeying the rules, right?
• Be very careful to help others preserve their dignity. I will never forget this school principal who entered a classroom and started scorching the teacher in front of the pupils. I still remember 50 years old incident as if it had happened this morning.
• People crave recognition: praise the smallest improvement and praise every improvement. Every time my wife prepares me a good food, washes my clothes I thank her from the bottom of my heart. It doesn’t cost me a penny to say “thank you”but it improves her mood, it makes her happy.
• Treat people as though they had the virtues you wished they possessed. It is a way of giving them a reputation to live up to and they will work like crazy to achieve their goal.

6-Collaborating

• Choose carefully your circle of influence. A bad choice of associates leads to one outcome: failure. I have lost lots of money in business because of the wrong selection of associates. Also a bad company can ruin your life and run you into trouble.
• change what you can control and accept what you can’t control. The simple fact of changing what you can control will help you influence the outcome.
• let go: if there is anything that bothers you, let it go. If an a team member or a friend has disappointed you, forgive and forget. If the behavior becomes a trend, then take a disciplinary measure or escalate the matter  to those who can take that decision. If it is a friend, then unfriend him/her.
• Be Here and  Now: Living in the present brings us closer to our goals. Having our body and mind in the same place at the same time makes us successful people.
• speak from the Heart: say what you mean and mean what you say. Be yourself in what you say, do, feel and in how you behave. Tell the truth before others can discover your lies. Speak with impeccability.
• When In Doubt, Check It Out: buy yourself time to find the truth about what you say of believe in. The people you work with want to look in your eyes and be assured that they can indeed trust you.
• Keep Your Agreements. Your promises, whether written or not make you liable. Honor them and people will always enjoy working with you.

7- Trusting and being trusted

• Start building strong relationships with people around you. Find effective, unconventional strategies for growing and nurturing a powerful network. Become the Ultimate Connector and the Ultimate Resource of people. You can easily build a successful career by becoming one of the most trusted middle men.
• Identify and develop relationships with world-class professionals. Your success will depend on the quality, the quantity of service you provide to people. It will also depend on the spirit in which you deliver the product or service.
• Enhance the value you deliver for your best clients and extend it to all your clients as you move forward.
• Position yourself for more quality introductions to ideal prospective clients. Introductions don’t need to be made physically. A phone call, an e-mail, a note well prepared can mean millions depending on the type of the service or product involved.
• Always reciprocate the services. You help me today and when you need help, I jump in. But this has to follow the law of the land. Nothing illegal should be done or solicited from a friend.
• Focus on small cycles of quality people, committed, motivated, like-minded and connected. Trust only those people and avoid those who share their negative influence.

8-Make your failures an asset for your business

• Realize your potential: understand your strengths, your limitations ( adapt them), have a passion, determination, persistence, faith. You can always compensate your weaknesses by using qualified associates. You can also incorporate the lessons from your mistakes in your next course of action.
• Create opportunities: identify a problem, determine a solution, research the market feasibility, understand target audience, appreciate the road ahead with its ups and downs.
• Define a vision: create your mission, define your cores values. Example: integrity, commitment, insight, spirit
• Outline basic strategies, Define your performance criteria and outline your decision making rules.
• Develop your plan: create and adapt the high level scoping plan, build out and adapt all detail plans, test your theories with small audience, incorporate and adapt lessons learned back into your plan, insure you have financial backing for your project.
• Reach your audience, execute on your plan, build market credibility, develop personal and professional networks, market and sell your idea
• Optimize your goal: leverage your success for more successes, fine-tune your  strategies for optimizing more positive results, continue learning from your mistakes and incorporating  changes into your plan.