Business Success | The Right Book At The Right Time | Part 3
In my quest to create the perfect life and business success for me, I’ve been working through Jinny Ditzler’s book “Your Best Year Yet” and you can get some background here
Business Success – The Right Book At The Right Time – Part 1
Business Success – The Right Book At The Right Time – Part 2
I managed to finish the book – and the exercises – this last weekend, with several more A4 pages in my spiral bound notebook filled to the brim with writing, thoughts, quotes and my answers.
Briefly, to save you reading the two previous blog posts (although you might enjoy that!) having written down all the things I accomplished in the time between September 2009 and September 2010, and having also listed my biggest disappointments, I made a BIG list of what I learned, then narrowed that down to the Top 3 Things I’ve learned, that if APPLIED in the next year, would make the biggest difference.
Things I Have Learned That I Need To Apply Next Year
1. I love and look after myself, and my family and friends and express that love freely
2. I trust my instincts, live in integrity, work in my flow, maximising my skills and strengths
3. I concentrate on creating “more than enough” positive cashflow, I have more than adequate savings and a financial cash reserve at all times.
This last one is a bit tricky because anyone who has been through the Money Gym struggles with keeping money in a bank, where it’s not earning it’s keep, so we tend to over-invest. And I found to my cost in the last year that you need a “bigger than you think you need” reserve to smooth out the bumps of life.
The next question was “How Do I Limit Myself & How Can I Stop” and I came up with five different ways. One of mine were that I’m lazy (physically, not mentally, my brain never stops!), I need to move more and make more effort, find some exercise I like and particularly make more effort in my social life, where you only get out what you put in.
Are You Willing To STOP Limiting Yourself?
You then have to say how you have benefited from limiting yourself and then answer, in writing, whether you are willing to STOP!
You then list what you focus on, all the time, and then you list what you get. No surprises there. Then I was asked to list HOW I could stop limiting yourself.
Now listen, I’m not great at this stuff but I did my best.
So I’m probably ahead of the thousands of people who read the book but who didn’t do the exercises!
I came up with a couple of statements that went along the lines of “I use my intelligence, energy, heart and bravery to create a new reality for myself. I CAN shift from limiting to empowering beliefs about myself and my life”.
That sounds a bit cheesy to me but I’m going with it for now.
By the way, you might be asking yourself “But Nicola, didn’t you DO ALL THIS ALREADY? Didn’t’ you train as a coach with Coach University, read “7 Habits Of Highly Effective People AND do the exercises, didn’t you work through all this stuff long before you started The Money Gym? Don’t you know all this stuff about yourself already?”
Well the answer is that I did it all to this level and further for the last time about 10 years ago. I suspended my cynicism and disbelief and started doing the exercises and miracles started happening, so I kept doing it and miracles kept happening.
Till one day, I over-reached myself and took on something so big, so huge, so dangerous to me in my ignorance and yes, arrogance, that the Universe or whoever sent me an almight slap to let me know that I hadn’t learned it all.
Worse, that I had stopped trusting my instincts and intuition.
I’ve been working with an amazing business coach, Judith Morgan for the last 7 or so years, and been surrounded by successful business mentors, so I haven’t felt the need of a coach of my own for a long time.
However, the slaps kept coming. Which tells you that you have more to learn.
We’ve bee so focused on wealth creation, and internet marketing, I haven’t been to many personal development workshops for a while and you really lose touch of your own feelings and needs, if you don’t keep on top of this stuff.
I’ve had so many knocks this year, which popular wisdom would say I’ve attracted to myself, and which I feel have come along to teach my something, that I wanted to start again from scratch, and I picked up Jinny’s book at the right time – hence the title of this blog post.
Moving On Through The Book
At the end of the section I got up to last time, Jinny encourages us to create a new, more empowering paradigm to replace the old, not so helpful rules I had previously created and I particularly liked this expression she used, as it fit my old Money Gym / Wealth Coaching principals perfectly.
“I will give truth to a new paradigm that gives me a better return on my investment”
Aha, so now we are talking my language! I understand about return on investment and you just wouldn’t put your money where it wasn’t giving you the best return, and obviously that is where I’ve been putting my energy.
In short, I am going to learn the art of transformation, shifting to my new paradigm whenever I’m feeling ensnared by the old one.
So that was last week!
I then listed my Personal Values, my Roles in life, and then came across another nice quote :-
“Aim to accomplish something meaningful each week in each role, this will increase your natural motivation”
This is good as the reason I picked up the book in the first place was that I knew I needed to set some goals but didn’t feel at all motivated to do so, in the usual way.
Next, we are encouraged to write some desired outcomes for each role, using the words
How….?
What…?
When…?
If…?
Who…?
Where…?
It’s all about becoming pro-active in planning our life, in each area. So for example, you could say one of your outcomes is “I want to spend more quality time with my teenage children” so you would say “How can I spend more quality time with my kids that we will all enjoy, and when am I going to to do that?
“One of the principle benefits of directing our lives this way is an increased sense of purpose making it easier to answer tricky questions such as “Who Am I?” or “What Am I Doing Here?” or “What’s The Point?”
So I’ve got my desired outcomes for each role and Jinny is advising “if you want something to happen, focus on it, just as the energy and power of the sun fire up the leaf, when directed through the magnifying glass, so you can create combustion in your life”
Laser Focused Questions
Which leads to a question that is really focused, like the sunlight though the glass.
If I could put one problem behind me, once and for all, what would it be?
And now here they come, Bam! Kerpow!
Focus question after focus question hits me now and I get some real big revelations. I do like a nice personal development revelation, don’t you?
Then you are encouraged to pick one role above all the others, where you feel that, by focusing on that role, you would probably achieve the breakthrough you seek.
Tick.
“People whose goals are aligned with their values achieve greater fulfilment in hearts and minds”.
At Last… Some Goal Setting!
And with that, here we are, ready to create out Best Year Yet Goals.
Jinny gives a few more guidelines about what makes a good goal, the difference between Results Goals and Process Goals (which I wrote about here recently, funny enough)
Jinny also talks about how your life goals (begin with the end in mind) feed back to your Five Year Goals which feed back to your Best Year Yet Goals, which feed back to the 3 Month Checkpoint.
I also picked up about taking responsibility for your goals; that you should only set goals that you are totally willing to take responsibility for.
In this section, too, was the great concept of “Little Wants” versus “Big Wants” and here’s a great example:
My Big Want = Weigh 10 stone and wear & look good in any clothes I want
My Little Want = A Glass Of Wine.
OK, finally I’m ready to set some goals. I choose three roles (having condensed my 7-8 roles into three main ones).
Me / Being My Own Coach – Areas covered are Health, Happiness & Love
Career & Money – Areas covered are Blogging, Author, Speaker & Investor
Family Member & Friend – Areas covered are the names of the people I love
I’ve created Outcome / Results Goals for each area and Process Goals to get there.
Jinny then closes this superb book with a chapter about what you need to be thinking about to help you actually make sure you start to take the actions to achieve your goals, how to keep your motivation up and all that good stuff.
Which was just as well because…..
But that’s a story for tomorrow!
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