1. What is the highest and best use of my time right now?
2. What is the worst thing that can happen if ____ is not done today?
3. Is there anything I can delegate to someone else?
4. Is there anything I can totally eliminate from my list?

If you set up a triage process for your life, the important things will get done before the mundane ones. As a result, you will always be working on the highest value task.

Don’t worry about time management; work on task management. It’s much easier and more productive.

I would willingly stand at street corners, hat in hand, begging passers-by to drop their unused minutes into it.
Bernard Berenson
1865 – 1959

When you look in the mirror, how do you perceive yourself? Do you see a person possessing limited resources and abilities? Or do you see someone capable of learning and growing, and therefore able to get what they want from life?

No one knows your reaction but you. But if we answered honestly, I suspect a high number of us would confess to believing their resources and abilities are limited.

According to Sam Sommers, a psychology professor at Tufts University, “seeing the self as a static and stable entity is what puts us on the defensive and mandates chronic self-deception. You should train yourself to view intellect – and any other aspect of your personal skill set – as a muscle that grows with effort and atrophies with neglect.”

In fact, your perception of your own abilities can have a bigger impact on your success than you might think.

There was a study conducted at Stanford University where students were asked to send letters of encouragement to at-risk middle school students, to explain that there was hope for them. As part of each letter, the college students were told to relate the struggles they had faced and the obstacles they had overcome. The writers were instructed to emphasize the idea that natural intelligence is overrated; persistence is more important.

Did the letters help? We don’t know, because they were never mailed; the study was actually designed to measure the impact on their authors. And the simple experience of writing these letters had a profound impact on the college students. Their attitude towards school improved greatly, as did their grade point average – by one-third point on a four point scale. They took their own advice.

So what’s the lesson? That you shouldn’t think of yourself as having limited resources or fixed skill sets. Focus on effort. Remember that intellect and skills are like muscles: they grow with use. Make sure you’re building up your skills by using them and allowing them to grow.

Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you are probably right.
Henry Ford
1863 – 1947

When you’re charged with a task, whether it’s at work, home or with friends, does the reason why matter? Does your manager try to motivate you by instilling a sense of purpose in your work? Do you try to motivate your family members by sharing why you want them to do specific things a certain way? We often focus on the tasks we want done and the desired results, yet fail to understand the importance of why.

To illustrate the point, let me share an experiment done by Professor Adam Grant from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business. He was called in by another major university in an effort to improve the morale and productivity of the university’s call center. Most universities have call centers that regularly phone their alumni seeking donations –  a very challenging task. A high percentage of calls are unproductive and many folks are extremely rude to the callers, so the turnover rate is typically 400 percent.

Professor Grant asked about the intended use of the donations and learned that most of the money went to fund scholarships. Based on that information, he divided the call center employees into three groups.

The control group received no motivational speech. The second group was given a five minute pep talk about the skills they were learning in the call center and how the experience would benefit them later in life. The third group was given a five minute talk by a scholarship recipient; this student told call center employees how the scholarship had impacted his or her life and expressed gratitude for the valuable work performed by the call center staff.

The results? The first group’s collections remained at the same level. Surprisingly, the second group also showed no improvement. But the third group’s actual time on the phone went up by a factor of three. The number of calls they made per hour doubled. And the amount of donations they received went up fivefold.

What caused such dramatic change? It seems that when we work to benefit others, when we understand that we’re changing someone’s life for the better, we’re much more motivated to provide our best efforts.

It’s difficult to stay motivated by focusing on the benefits you will receive. Understand how your actions benefit someone else. If you want more out of life, find ways to help others.

If the human race wishes to have a prolonged and indefinite period of material prosperity, they have only got to behave in a peaceful and helpful way toward one another.
Winston Churchill
1874 – 1965

Today we’ll examine the final of the nine steps to greater success: focusing on what you will do, not what you won’t do.

Research has shown that when we try not to focus on a thought, that thought becomes more active in our minds. The same principle holds true for behavior: when we try to avoid doing something, the impulse to do it becomes stronger. So going back to “if, then” plans, make sure that you don’t use negatives in your plan. Don’t focus on what you want to avoid; focus only on what you will do.

Let’s recap the nine steps so you’ll have them all in one place.

1. Get specific about what you want and write it down. Determine what actions you’ll need to take to accomplish your goals. Engage in mental contrasting – switch focus between your goals and the actions required to reach them.
2. Set aside a specific time to take action on your goals. Use “if, then” planning to program your mind to take action.
3. Know how much more you need to do to achieve your goal. Emphasizing how far you’ve come can cause you to relax your efforts.
4. Be a realistic optimist. Believe that you can achieve your goals but don’t underestimate the effort necessary.
5. Focus on getting better rather than on being good. Realize that you’re going to make mistakes when trying something new. It’s okay to make errors: it’s part of the process of learning and growing.
6. You won’t achieve any worthwhile goal unless you stick with it. You need grit. Stick with your plan long enough to succeed.
7. Build your willpower. Willpower is like a muscle; it strengthens with use. But give yourself a break when you’re tired and your energy is low.
8. Don’t tempt fate. It’s much easier to avoid temptation than to resist it.
9. Focus on what you will do, not what you want to avoid.

These nine steps are taken from the book Nine Things Successful People Do Differently by Heidi Halvorson. It’s available as an eBook on Amazon.com for a little over $3. It’s short and easy to read, and it’s well worth the price.

If you haven’t been able to keep your New Year’s resolutions or to reach other goals, I strongly suggest you use these nine steps to develop a more successful you.

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.
Albert Einstein
1879 – 1955

We continue our series of the ways to be more successful with steps six, seven and eight.

Step six involves having grit: the persistence and commitment to your long-term goals. Study after study has shown that one key ingredient to success is deliberate practice. There’s no such thing as overnight success; success requires lots of work. It’s both easy and tempting to give up when things get a little uncomfortable. You need grit to stick it out.

According to Halvorson, “Grit is all about not giving up in the face of difficulty, even when you are tired, discouraged or just plain bored.”

Put this concept into action by examining your long held beliefs about what you’re capable of accomplishing. If you believe something is beyond your abilities, you’ll find ways to sabotage your results. Once you decide on a goal, make up your mind to stick with it until the end.

Step seven is in a similar vein: increasing your willpower. Willpower is like a muscle: it grows with proper exercise and use. So the more you exert your willpower, the more you’ll have.

Here are some tips for increasing your willpower.

• Don’t try difficult or demanding tasks when you’re tired or emotionally drained.
• If your willpower is running low, give yourself a rest before taking on something new and challenging.
• Don’t start by tackling large or difficult goals. Begin with easier goals and work your way up.
• Only pursue one major goal at a time.

To build your willpower muscle, remember to start small. If you’re feeling low, speed up your willpower recovery by doing something to lift your spirits or reward yourself.

Step eight is to avoid tempting fate. Don’t tax your willpower when you don’t need to do so; it’s much better and easier to avoid temptation than to fight it. We often think that we have more willpower than we actually do and put ourselves in situations where that willpower is sorely tested. Casually entering such situations is asking for trouble. You should identify specific circumstances that undermine your goals and drain your willpower so you can avoid them. For instance, if your goal is to lose weight, consider the times you strayed from healthy eating in the past; if a particular person, place, or activity caused you to overeat, you should avoid it whenever possible. It’s much better to steer clear of temptation than to try to resist it.

Think about your goals and what you want to accomplish, then think about times in the past when your good intentions were derailed. Seek ways to avoid temptation rather than using up your willpower unnecessarily. Remember the Lay’s potato chip ad: “nobody can eat just one.”

Great souls have wills; feeble ones have only wishes.
Chinese Proverb

Over the past two weeks, we discussed the first three steps to increase your success, using guidance from the book Nine Things Successful People Do Differently by Heidi Halvorson. In this lesson, we’ll cover step four (Being a Realistic Optimist) and step five (Focus on Getting Good Rather Than Being Better). These steps are extremely important, yet most people fail to get them right.

We’ve all been taught about the power of positive thinking. Optimism is essential to a healthy, happy life, and you’ll rarely achieve your goals unless you have positive expectations. But underestimating the obstacles in your way can prove disastrous. According to Halvorson, “Studies have shown that thinking things will come to you easily and effortlessly leaves you ill prepared for the journey ahead and significantly increases the odds of failure.”

In one study of weight loss among obese women, psychologist Gabriel Oettingen asked the women how they rated their chances of losing weight. Those women who were confident they would lose weight lost an average of twenty-six pounds more than the doubters. But the more intriguing result was the difference between the women who believed weight loss would be easy and those who were optimistic but thought it would be difficult. The realistic optimists lost an average of twenty-four pounds more than the women who thought the process would be easy. The lesson? Be optimistic, but realize that any worthwhile goal will take real effort. It won’t be easy.

On a related note, your focus should be on improving yourself rather than on proving that you already possess all the skills and knowledge to succeed. When we set out to achieve new goals, we often see it as an opportunity to prove ourselves, to show how capable we already are. Many of us believe that our abilities – mental, physical and personality – are fixed: that we’re as good as we’re going to get. This situation is known as fixed ability or a fixed mindset.

When we approach a new task or goal with a fixed mindset – an attitude that we need to be good – we’re bound to run into problems, because with anything new, we’re in unfamiliar territory. If we think that we have to prove our talent, we’re much more likely to screw up. According to Halvorson, “The pressure to be good results in many more mistakes and far inferior performance than would a focus on getting better.”

If we take the position that we’re simply trying to improve ourselves, we can expect to make mistakes along the way and we’ll embrace mistakes as part of the learning process. Making a mistake when you’re just learning is no big deal.

So the lesson is: give yourself permission to screw up. When you approach anything new, don’t try to prove how much you already know or how good you are. Approach the task with a desire to learn. You’ll make mistakes, but they won’t hold you back.

Put these ideas into action. Write out the difficulties you’ll face in achieving your goals. Be realistic about the obstacles. Give yourself permission to make mistakes and have setbacks. Remember your desire: to get better.

My greatest challenge has been to change the mindset of people. Mindsets play strange tricks on us. We see things the way our minds have instructed our eyes to see.
Muhammad Yunus
1940 -

In our first lesson for increasing your success, we discussed the two components of step one: getting specific about what you want, and using mental contrasting to link your goal with the actions needed to achieve it. In this lesson, we’ll cover steps two and three: deciding when and where to take action, and measuring exactly how much further you need to go to accomplish your goals.

Step two requires you to determine when and where to take action, a strategy known as if-then planning. Studies have shown that people who use if-then planning stick to their plans over 90% of the time, while those who don’t plan specific times or places for taking action will follow through in only 39% of cases.

An if-then plan can take several forms. Here’s one example: if I don’t finish this report by ten tomorrow morning, then I will skip lunch to complete it. Another form might be: if it’s Monday morning, then I’ll exercise for half an hour before work. According to Halvorson’s book, our brains are wired to remember contingencies. So if we plan using the format “If X, then Y,” we’re more likely to remember and take action on our plans.

Step three is to measure and identify exactly how far you have to go. To achieve any goal, we need regular monitoring of our accomplishments. Without feedback about the progress we’re making toward our goals, motivation decreases – and when you don’t know whether you’re on track, it’s not possible to adjust your plans accordingly.

Another danger is that we’ll look at how much progress we’ve made toward our goals and become complacent. We may start to coast toward the finish line. The solution is to stay focused on the finish line: know how much further you need to go.

At this point, you should have your written goals from step one. Make some if-then plans for when and where you’ll take specific actions toward your goals. My suggestion is to write out these action plans; writing things down eliminates wiggle room.

Also, decide on a feedback method so you can evaluate your progress; knowing that you’re on track will keep you motivated to achieve your goals. But remember to stay focused on how far you still have to go: don’t slow down until you’ve crossed the finish line.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at.
Henry David Thoreau
1817 – 1862

If you’re like most people, you have lots of intentions to improve your life. At this time of year, we usually tell ourselves that, starting January 1, we’re going to do things differently: we’re going to get out of debt, lose that extra weight, establish an exercise routine, and spend more time on the important things in life.

A large number of people make New Year’s resolutions, committing to specific changes in the coming year. Unfortunately, the overwhelming majority of these promises made to ourselves don’t last. We have good intentions, but for whatever reason, those intentions fail to translate into lasting changes in our lives and lifestyles.

I want to use this lesson and subsequent ones to share with you some wisdom from the book Nine Things Successful People Do Differently by Heidi Halvorson. Her ideas can be distilled into nine steps you can use to turn your resolutions into real life changes. (If you want to delve deeper into the concepts, her book is available electronically on Amazon.com for around $3 US.)

The first step is to get very specific about what you want. Resolving to get out of debt isn’t as clear as saying you want to pay off $12,000 in credit card debt over the next 18 months. Resolving to lose your extra weight isn’t as specific as saying you want to lose 12 pounds over the next 6 months. So the first step is to get clear about what you want.

Sounds easy enough, right? But part of step one is to get specific about what is standing between you and your goal. If your plan is to reduce credit card debt, what will need to happen? You need to go back and forth between what you want and what it will take to get what you want – a process called mental contrasting. You visualize the completion of your goal and all the associated benefits, then contrast that by visualizing the actions you need to take to achieve the desired result. Visualizing the process to reach your goal highlights the necessity of taking action. Most people fail to achieve their goals simply because they never take the necessary actions.

According to Halvorson, mental contrasting leads to greater effort and higher overall rates of completed goals.

One other suggestion: write out your goals and the obstacles standing in your way, stipulating the time frame available to complete your goal. If you plan to get out of debt or lose weight by a target date, you should set milestones along the way so you can track your progress.

This process will bring a much higher degree of success – if you follow the steps. You can’t take shortcuts. If you’ve made and broken your New Year’s Resolutions before, why not try a different approach – one designed using scientific studies to give the highest rate of success.

Take action now. Write down two or three goals. Be specific: what will success look like, and what obstacles are standing in your way? Engage in mental contrasting between your goals and the obstacles. And set aside some time each day to take action toward your goals.

It is no profit to have learned well, if you fail to do well.
Publilius Syrus
1^st Century B.C.

Your beliefs have a significant impact on your view of the world and the way you see yourself fitting into that world. As we approach a New Year, I think it’s important that we all take a look at our core beliefs and their origins.

My question to you is simple: are your beliefs based on your own observation, or do you simply accept the beliefs of others which have been passed on to you?

Galileo Galilei grew up believing the commonly accepted theory that the earth was the center of the universe. That belief had been passed on to him by his parents and teachers. Galileo has been called the “father of observational astronomy”. He’s probably best known for actually observing the solar system and then proclaiming that the earth was not the center of the universe – that, in fact, the earth revolved around the sun.

This conclusion was based on his observations. While it wasn’t widely accepted by his contemporaries – he was tried by the Roman Inquisition in 1633 and found guilty of heresy – we all know that he was correct.

It seems strange that people once believed the earth was the center of the universe. But on further reflection, you may recall other theories that were widely held beliefs and were later proven false by observation; one that comes to mind immediately was the belief that the earth was flat.

My point is that we often blindly accept commonly held beliefs about how the world works and where we fit in society. I think we would all be better off if we were a little slower to accept beliefs that are presented to us and put a little more effort into testing those beliefs against on our own observations.

Most advances in civilization required someone like Galileo to disregard conventional wisdom and instead rely on their own observations to determine what was true. I’m not suggesting you try to become another Galileo. What I am suggesting is that you question your own core beliefs. Are they serving you well, or limiting you? Are you living life according to someone else’s beliefs, or in alignment with your own observations?

You can lead a better, more satisfying life by being more observant about your choices and their outcomes.

People’s minds are changed through observation and not through argument.
Will Rogers
1879 – 1935

I know you’ve seen movies or TV shows where one person does an injustice to another. The offended person is often shown glaring at the offender with fire in his eyes and saying, “I’ll get you for this if it’s the last thing I do.”

We all know this is called revenge. And we also know how damaging it can be to the people who let the desire for revenge consume their lives.

If revenge can do so much damage, what about the opposite of revenge? Can it do enormous good?

This lesson isn’t about revenge; it’s about the opposite of revenge. And if more of us truly understood the tremendous benefits we could obtain via the opposite of revenge, we would all be better off.

First, what is the opposite of revenge? If revenge is getting even for something someone did to you, the opposite should be getting ahead by doing something good for someone else. It involves the principle of reciprocity: when someone does us a good turn, we feel obligated to return the favor. And more often than not, the favor returned is much greater than the original one granted.

Let me give you a couple of real-life examples.

You may remember the Hare Krishna Society. Years ago, their members worked the airports and gave unsuspecting travelers a flower. They basically stuck the flower in the person’s hand and said, “This is a gift from us.” Then they asked for a donation. Even though most of society had very negative feelings about the Krishnas, people still felt compelled to give them a donation: they felt obligated to reciprocate for the gift they were given.

Another example is the Disabled American Vets. They send you return address labels and ask you to send back a donation – in other words, they give you a gift and then ask for one in return. And a large number of people feel obligated to send a donation. This approach more than doubled their response rate and has been adopted by many other charities.

It’s a common marketing tactic to give someone a token gift, which makes them feel obligated to purchase something of much greater value. In the above examples, people knew they were being manipulated, yet they gave more than the value of what they received. If it works when you know you’re being manipulated, think how well it works when you give with no expectation of return.

People have an inborn desire to keep the score even. When we think someone has mistreated us, we naturally want to exact payment. And when someone has done us a favor, we feel obligated to return that favor.

So what exactly does this mean to you? It means that if you want more out of life, you need to utilize the principle of reciprocity. I’m not talking about using reciprocity in your business; what I’m really stressing in this lesson is use on a personal level. Tell me what you want more of and I’ll tell you how to get it. Do you want more love, friendship, admiration, respect, or material possessions? Then give more first. It will be returned many times over. Whatever you treasure, learn to give it away; under the principle of reciprocity, even more will be returned to you.

It’s very important to remember that you aren’t giving with the specific intent of receiving anything in return. That’s what marketers do, and it works well. But if you want even more, give without the expectation of any reciprocity. It will happen automatically. Maybe not from everyone you give to, and sometimes not from the original recipient; but if you truly learn to give with an open heart, you will be blessed with abundance.

You can and should give some of your resources to a church and other charitable organizations. One of your greatest resources is your time and talent. Learn to give more of yourself. Your gifts will be returned with interest.

So decide if you want to get even or get ahead. For me, I’ll let others get even. I want to get ahead.

Bring the full tithes into the storehouse, that there be food in my house; And thereby put me to the test, says the Lord of hosts, if I will not open the windows of Heaven for you and pour down for you an overflowing blessing.
Milachi 3:10