Create a Successful Mindset

Choose Your Attitude

By Zach Machado

What is the purpose of a coach?  Nine times out of ten the coach is yelling and screaming about something we already know.  A coach is always pointing out the obvious, giving canned speeches and adding their own twist on a famous quote.  So, what makes a good coach, why do we still have them in our lives?

They possess an innate ability to get inside heads and create an invincible mindset overflowing with confidence that makes blood boil and adrenaline rush.  A coach finds that extra 10% of effort needed to overcome obstacles on the field, in a boardroom, or even life.  Developing and maintaining a confident and hungry mindset is a coach’s number one job.  Without a positive mindset success is impossible and the coach is out of a job.

Part of the mindset is to always have a strategy.  Assess the current situation, know where the next goal is and figure out the steps to get there.  Most importantly, after the strategy is in place, activate it!  Don’t sit there admiring the ability to plot out a “roadmap” to success, get going, step on the gas and drive!  Go create your opportunity, if you sit there waiting for it you are accepting the same standards as the rest of the world.

Raise the bar on yourself, in yourself, and within your friends.  A successful mindset is a lifestyle, not something you take on and off with your business attire.  Wear your passion on your sleeve (add a content filter if things fall out of your mouth uncontrollably) and always ask yourself if what you are doing is going to improve your life.

Improving your life includes your friends, acquaintances, jobs etc.  Make a list of people, places, and possessions and put them in 3 columns.  Column one should be full positives that improve your life and/or increase your personal value.  In the second column, “Limbo,” is everything neutral on and in your life; you can’t dump this column, and you can’t spend too much time in it…so it sits waiting for when you have some extra time to spend.  The difficulty is figuring out who or what goes in the Neutral Column or the Bad Column – if there is hesitation place them in the Neutral, keep an eye out and reassess in the near future.  Part of the successful mindset it to not accept failure, to not accept mediocrity and never stop believing.  This brings us to column 3 where all things negative are placed.  Anyone or anything (job included) that holds you back or limits your growth goes in this column.  Now dump column three and don’t repeat the mistake of collecting in that column again.  Just remember who you associate with is a direct reflection of you.

Everyone needs to make changes in their life to make it better.  Positive thinking and a successful mindset will always make the changes less painful.  Maintaining the successful mindset will ensure bad habits do not resurface and goals remain in focus.  Remember, all the analytics, strategizing and pep talks are useless without action, so put your success in motion!

Create Your Own Luck

By Zach Machado

According to Merriam-Webster the definition for Luck is: 1) a force that brings good fortune or adversity 2)the events or circumstances that operate for or against an individual.  This is the basis of the entire blog; create your own luck!

There are thousands of quotes about luck, but the best quote, the quote that sums it all up is by Thomas Jefferson, “I find that the harder I work, the more luck I seem to have.”  There are some instances where being lucky is just being lucky, like winning the lottery.  More often than not, hard work performed intelligently and efficiently will produce many more instances of “luck” than watching a Jerry Springer marathon all day.

College educated or not, luck is earned (excluding the random variable of winning the lottery).  It is earned through more ways than just hard work.  Attitude is a big factor in degree of luck a person possesses.  Constantly complaining about life means the focus is all wrong, instead of focusing on the negatives more focus should be on the positive.  Remembering negative events in life should be for one purpose only, to learn lessons, not dwell on it in self-pity.  This is true in the personal side of life as well as the business, a positive attitude is critical to being lucky

People’s perception of reality is directly related to how lucky they are.  Misfortune happens to everyone, but an unlucky person becomes a victim and magnifies the problem, while a lucky person gets creative to regain control and looks at it as a lesson learned.  DoesChesley Sullenberger, the pilot of US Airways flight 1549 that landed on the Hudson saving 155 people, feel unlucky or lucky?  His passengers are the true lucky ones.  Every decision he made after one engine failed determined the outcome of everyone’s luck.  Before the flight Chesley was a normal guy from Danville, CA with a job as an airline pilot.  After the flight he was a “Hero Pilot” making television appearances and publishing a book, all because he remained composed and was positive throughout an unimaginably terrifying event.

Rolling with the punches is another trait often associated with “lucky” people.  Going with the flow and being flexible is important because it means a person has the ability to remain calm when others become anxious.  An anxious person’s judgment can be clouded from the stress, while a calm person is able to see the details.  Think about it, does anyone ever tell the story of how they met their spouse by saying, “This particular night I was laser focused on finding the perfect mate…”?  No, it doesn’t happen that way, just like the car keys become impossible to find whenever I am running late.  A person with confidence has the ability to recognize a break, even when shrouded in a dark cloud, and seize it.  Maintaining a watchful eye, being creative, using persuasion, being personable and extraordinarily persistent is the key to being lucky.

Start thinking lucky, roll with the punches, and act on intuition.  Stop watching the lucky people and become one.  Take control, create your own luck!

Key to Inspiration – Be Curious

By Liz Stubbs

Be Curious

The other morning, I did something I used to do all the time when I was a student. I consulted the dictionary. Specifically, I looked up the words ascetic and bespoke. I hear or read them occasionally and never know exactly what they mean even though the context usually gives a clue. But bespoke always confounds me because I have no idea what root it derives from and can’t puzzle it out in my head that way. So this time, instead of remaining in the dark, I dusted off my dictionary and enlightened myself.

I am a creature of habit. Mostly. I do like the comfort of familiarity and I feel secure when I know the playing field of a situation or a project or a place. But I also recognize that routine can quickly lead to rut and boredom and boringness is often not far behind. I work in fields where creative output is my currency. Therefore, creative input is my responsibility. I must feed consistently myself creatively to be able to have a storehouse of inspiration when I need it. So, instead of waiting for inspiration to visit on its own ethereal schedule, how can we nurture and create sources of inspiration?

Every week I like to either bring home a new food from the farmer’s market or try a new ingredient combination in one of my meal concoctions. On a recent local photo safari, I kept exploring what was around the next corner… just to see what there might be to see. At least once a week, I take a left turn where I typically take a right turn and see what sites the new route has to offer.

Taking a cue from my favorite childhood storybook monkey, one of my constant sources of inspiration is to be curious. Curiosity always leads to something new. Even if it’s just a new spice in my hot chocolate, it’s a new and different experience. A little jolt of new energy. An atom-sized iota of what the explorers in our history books must have felt when they gazed upon new vistas, ate exotic foods, experienced realities beyond anything they had known or imagined before. A new brew in our lives, no matter what form it takes, sparks new questions, new experiences, new dreams, new connections, new feelings…in short, curiosity feeds inspiration.

Feeling stuck? Be curious.

Liz Stubbs is an award-winning writer and book author. She writes often at http://frompuccitopudding.typepad.com about marathon, photography, travel, good health and fabulous food. Please visit her series on inspiration sources there.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?Key-to-Inspiration—Be-Curious&id=4264371 Key to Inspiration – Be Curious

Life Math

“Education costs money, but then so does ignorance.”
– Sir Claus Moser

By Zach Machado

I have long been a proponent of educating high school juniors and seniors about money management, credit cards, FICO scores, mortgages, etc., etc.  I call these items Life Math…math that is truly necessary on a daily basis to get by in life.  Our future depends on teaching our children how to navigate this complicated system chocked full of pitfalls and land mines.  Not only do we (as a Country) need to start providing a road map to help develop their common sense on the subject, we should be required to teach them the math involved – the system and the math are inseparable.  Look, if our youth are smart enough to build websites, hack into the CIA, change our culture with Facebook, Microsoft, Apple (all started when they were our sweet “kids”)…then they possess the intelligence to comprehend how their FICO score affects their interest rates, which affect their monthly payments, which affects how much of their income goes out in bills…and so on.  How to balance a check book could be taught to 5^th or 6^th grade children…and should be…the earlier good habits are formed the harder they are to break.  Where this Country went wrong financially all starts with balancing a checkbook – and understanding the difference between red (bad) and black (good).

Part of the education needs to start at home, but a lot of the problem stems from the fact too many generations have slipped through and we have a large group of parents that don’t know where to begin – they are lost themselves.  Here is a pretty good article on how to start teach children about credit if you don’t know where to start.  If you do a Google Search on How do I teach my children how to balance a checkbook you will find a ton of links offering free or paid advice.

If the good habits are formed early and maintained throughout life we will have less instances of consumers becoming road kill while corporations take advantage of the system and maintain course…often times coming out stronger (granted…scores bit the dust this go around).  If we had taken just some of the Bailout money and used it for education maybe we’d see a difference.

According to the US Census Bureau as of July 1, 2008 there were 21,514,358 people ages 15-19 in the United States.  CNN’s Bailout Tracker Website shows the United States has committed $182,000,000,000 to AIG (just one of many, and not even the most money) to help bail them out of their mistakes…losing other people’s money.  If all of that money were committed to the 21MM+ ages 15-19 each of them would receive an educational grant of $8,459.47.  According to this Bank Rate article the average one year tuition at a Community College is $2,360 – which means a grant of $8k+ will pay for their 2 year Community College Education (and board if necessary).  If they don’t use the rest on boarding they have enough left over to help pay for books when they move onto a 4 year school to finish their education.  I wish I knew a math whiz that could come up with some algorithm that would help quantify the value of paying for post-secondary education for 20MM+ of our youth vs. “bailing out”/lining the pockets of company executives.

Or, if you take the approach college is too expensive and doesn’t necessarily guarantee a financially comfortable future then you can argue the money be better spent on grants for small business.   There are stats galore of how important small business is to our country.  Educating the future business owners on the basics of running a business can be a condition of the grant – to receive money classes must be attended.  The SBA already has a pretty informative site to educate small business owners, and maybe some of the bailout money would help expand the resources and beef up personal support systems.  As this WSJ Article points out, small businesses are finding it more and more difficult to find financing for their dreams…funding from Angel Investors fell 30% in the first half of 2009.

Instead of bailing out private lenders by giving them a student loan guarantee commitment of $195 Billion, give it to the students…then they won’t need as big of a loan, making it easier to pay off after graduation when they get into the workforce.  Not everyone can be a Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerburg, and quit college because they have billions of dollars already rolling in.

Since not everyone can start that way, we need to give everyone a good foundation of knowledge that will create generations of fiscally responsible people.  Maybe then we can stop blaming corporations for taking advantage of us and the system, and we can start taking responsibility for being uneducated, naïve targets.