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Nov 23 2011

Create a Compelling Vision For Your Future

Nothing is possible without a Vision.

“Where there is no Vision, the people perish” - Proverbs 29:18

“If you don’t know where you are going any road will take you there.” – Lewis Carrol

It’s important to have a compelling Vision. Without a destination you could end up anywhere.

There is nothing less compelling than a vague, ill defined Vision.

For a Vision to compel you to take action it must be specific and clear. If your Vision is compelling enough you will be pulled to it.  You won’t need someone to motivate you. Your Vision will be inspire you.

If you are going to have a Vision, why not dream big?  Why not reach for the stars?  Do you really think a mediocre Vision is going to compel you into action?

But, how do you create a compelling Vision?  How do you envision your future?  Well, for starters you have to start thinking about it, A LOT!

Here are 8 steps to create a Compelling Vision:

Start With The End In Mind -  It’s easy to get caught up in the details or actions it would take to accomplish your vision.  It’s even easier to discount ideas or dreams because they are “impossible’  without seriously considering them.  Don’t fall into those traps,  just think about what the ideal Vision is for you.  What is your ideal Vision in your business, your family, your body, your social life, and your relationships?  What kind of money would you like to make?  What kind of body would you like to have?  The sky is the limit with your vision.  Really start imagining what it would be like.  Imagine what life would be like if this had already happened.   Remember it has to be compelling and specific. Don’t use murky statements like “I want to make more money”,  that’s not specific enough. Be clear about exactly what it is you want.  Be extremely detailed.  Clarity of in your Vision is power.

Ask The Right Questions about Your Vision – Now that you have thought about your vision ask yourself questions about it.  Is this really what I truly want?  What are all the reasons I have for wanting this vision to become a reality?  Why does this vision make the most sense for me? What will it feel like to have this vision become a reality?  Will I love the process?  Will it make me happy?  Follow your intuition but make sure this is what you really want. For your Vision to come true you cannot be in conflict with yourself, you must be aligned.

Write Your Vision Down -  After you have taken the time to brain storm and really picture your absolute ideal Vision, write it down in the most vivid detail possible.  Once you write something down it become more permanent to your mind. After your write it down, keep the written copy somewhere  you will review it every day. 

Create a Vision Board For Your Vision -  Buy magazines and images that relate to your Vision. Create exactly what your vision looks like on a Poster Board and put it up somewhere that you will always see it.  This way you can always be reminded of your Vision and what it will look like.

Think About Your Vision Every Day -  Think about your Vision as much as possible.  Once you have a Vision, Don’t Forget About it! Make sure you don’t forget about your vision and go back to your normal routine.  Make it a habit to think about your vision for at least 15 solid minute every day.  A great way to do this is to think about it when you first wake up and right before you go to sleep.

Tell Everyone About Your Vision – Don’t keep your Vision a secret. Start talking about it as much as possible.  Don’t be afraid to share it no matter how crazy it might sound to other people.  Ignore them if they sound skeptical, but keep talking about it confidently as if you expect it to become a reality at any moment. Do you think we would have put a man on the moon if the idea was kept a secret? No!  JFK told his Vision to the whole country!

Drill Your Vision Into Your Subconscious – Use your subconscious to your advantage.  One way you can do this is to create an Audio recording of your Vision.  Use you microphone on your computer and read your Vision you wrote down in detail. Read this with enthusiasm and repeat it.  Burn yourself a cd or put it on your ipod. It doesn’t have to be very long,  only 5 minutes. Use this to drill your Vision into your subconscious. It might sounds a little crazy but this really works. 

Reverse Engineer Your Vision -  Now you should have a compelling and clear vision.  If you took all these steps you are probably even dreaming about your Vision at night. Now you must reverse engineer your vision and make a plan to achieve it. What are all the steps you are going to have to do to get you there?  Start thinking of steps you can start on right now to get you closer to your Vision.

Every morning when you wake up ask yourself: 

What do I need to do today to get closer to my Vision?

Before you go to sleep ask yourself: 

What did I do today to get closer to my Vision?

Remember everything created by human kind was at one point just a Vision or an idea.

What’s your Vision?

By admin • Uncategorized • 0

Nov 17 2011

Everything Is Within Reach

Everything is within your reach.  But you have to actually reach for it.  You have to reach for the stars.  If you don’t reach then you will not be able to grasp your goal.

What do I mean by that: Everything is within your reach?  You might say to me,  It’s too hard.  What if I can’t reach those stars?  I am having difficulty writing this post because I may have over extended myself. I challenged myself the reach for 4 blog post drafts in 1 hour. That may seem like a lot because most of the time I an only write 4 posts a month! When I turned 27 this year I said that I was going to hold myself to a higher standard and part of holding yourself to a higher standard is stretching your limits of what you think is possible.  These posts are within reach and I can tell you that your dreams and your goals are in reach but that you have to actually reach for them.

Most limits, I believe, are self imposed. Think about what your self imposed limitations are.  Maybe you think you don’t have the resources you need.  Or you think you don’t have the money, or the knowledge, or your boss is a jerk, or you didn’t have the right people, or you lost money in the stock market, or whatever the countless reasons are.  The fact is you can be resourceful enough and you will find a way to overcome these things. But you have to reach past your self imposed limitations.

What if you were just an inch or two away from reaching a tasty apple in an apple tree?  Would you just give up.  Or would you jump up and grab it?  What if it was a couple feet, you say to yourself I can’t jump two feet in the air.  What if you grabbed a ladder? Could you reach the apple then?

That certainly changes what’s within your reach, doesn’t it?

Okay but an apple is not a promotion, or a new car, or six pack abs.  Well, maybe you need to jump metaphorically.  Maybe you need to get a metaphorical ladder.  Just because it’s a foot away doesn’t mean it’s not within reach with the right psychology and the right tools.  This 4th blog post draft of the hour isn’t turning out so bad after all.  Looks like my goal is within reach now, doesn’t it?

Writing gets easier the more I do it.  It’s just like lifting a metaphorical weight. Reaching is like lifting a metaphorical weight too. The more you reach past your limitations the better you’ll get at it.

So Get moving, start reaching.  Get a ladder, JUMP but keep reaching.  You can do it, I know you can.

One more thing, if you get a spare moment I’d be really interested in hearing what are some examples are of times where you pushed past a limitation you believed you had.  Leave it in the comments section if you have a chance!

(Interesting side note on this post:  I was looking for a cool image for this post on Google Images but instead I found a Trojan virus that took out my laptop.  It took a few hours but I’ve reached passed these issues!  It did make me wonder, if you had the creative energy to create something that would help people, why would you choose to create something that hurts them instead? )

By Dermoney • Uncategorized • 2

Nov 8 2011

Winter Is Just Around The Corner

"Ant's don't think summer, they think winter" Jim Rohn

Have you heard Aesop’s  fable of the Ant and the Grasshopper?  The Ant works diligently through the summer collecting food for the winter.  Meanwhile, the grasshopper goofs off all summer long not collecting a single scrap of food for the winter.  When winter finally comes the grasshopper has no food. He asks the ant for food but the ant tells him he should have been working instead of goofing off. The Grasshopper then dies while the ant has plenty of food to last until spring.

Kind of harsh, right? My first thought was: “Wow that Ant is not very nice!  He should give the Grasshopper some food! “ (Soup kitchens were invented after Aesop)

In our modern times being lazy in America probably won’t make you literally die of starvation, probably the opposite. BUT it can metaphorically starve your dreams to death.

That’s why I believe laziness is so insidious.  It can completely derail the best intentions.

This fable, while morally interesting doesn’t really offer any practical advice on how to beat laziness.  Aesop certainly didn’t write a “How to Guide”.

Here are 5 ways to beat laziness and become more like the ant instead of the grasshopper

1) Take a small step or a small action – This is the best way I’ve found to beat laziness.  Identify what you are procrastinating.  Is it going to the gym, writing a paper?  Maybe it’s working on a project.  Work on it for 10 minutes.  Or even 5 minutes.  But build momentum.  One of my goals has been to write more.  In some cases I’ve sat at the computer screen and just stared at it blankly, or I would start reading news articles. Before I knew it I had put off writing and wasted a whole hour of my time.    Now what I do is I will force myself to write for 5 minutes.  It doesn’t matter what I am writing just as long as my hands are banging on the keys and writing sentences.  Sure it’s not that great all the time but once I do that, it’s like I poked a hole in the dam.  After the 5 minutes goes by I’ve written for 10 minutes and then yesterday before i knew It I’d written for 3 hours straight just on pure momentum alone. Now I don’t believe in writers block. I say to myself, “You don’t have writers block, you’re just not writing.”

That’s what taking a small action is going to do for you.  It’s going to break your through your laziness.  Even if I only did write for 5 minutes and stopped at least I got 5 minutes of writing in.  That’s better than nothing.   Once you finish reading this, pick something you have been putting off.  Try working on it for just 5 minutes.  See what happens!

2) Schedule A Time In Your Calendar- A common excuse for not taking a step is that you don’t have enough time.  I bet you have 10 minutes.  If you don’t have time, schedule it in your google calendar.  Everyone has 10 minutes.  That’s not a good excuse, it’s just the grasshopper talking.

3) Tap Your Social Network -  If you can’t do it on your own, find a friend.  Make a friend that has a similar goal and work together on it at the same time.  Hold each other accountable. Be careful though, if you try this strategy and start hanging out with other grasshoppers instead of ants it’s not going to work.

4) Block out all distractions – In many cases it’s not that I didn’t have every intention of working on my goal it’s that I was completely distracted by something else.  I would get so distracted that I would even forgot about what I was working on in the first place.  If you work on a computer, I know you know what I am talking about.  The Internet provides instant gratification for just about everything, it makes me wish I had a typewriter so that I can be away from the temptation of 24 hour distraction!  Not only that but if you have an iphone it’s like you have a distraction devise at your finger tips all the time.  So turn off your phone, allow no distraction and focus on the task at hand. You will be amazed at how much you can get done when you block out all your other distractions.

5) Imagine how amazing it will be once you complete what your working on -  I know you are not just working for works sake, right?  Most of us are doing work because there will be a payoff or reward at the end.  Think about the end result and not just the work itself. Really visualize how amazing it will be and use that as motivation to use step one.

Closing Thought:

The reality is that we put off things because we believe there is going to be some huge pain involved in doing the work.  We will sit and imagine how difficult it will be, or how it probably won’t work out.  So we procrastinate until it becomes too late.  What you will find if you start working on what you were putting off it is never as bad as you built it up to be in your mind. If you take one thing away from this post:  Take a small step. Take a small action.  Taking a small step or action is by far the most powerful way to beat laziness and the grasshopper within.

By Dermoney • Uncategorized • 0

Oct 31 2011

The Difference Between Can’t And Won’t

Unleash Your Energy

Have you ever heard someone say they can’t do something? 

“I CAN’T run a marathon.”

“I CAN’T stop smoking.”

“I CAN’T move away from here.”

“I CAN’T go traveling.”

“I CAN’T quit my job.”

“I CAN’T change careers.”

Does this sound familiar?

Don’t get can’t and won’t confused.

I’m not suggesting any of these changes are easy, or don’t require work, planning, effort, and maybe even some pain.  They might require all these things.  Most likely it’s not that you can’t do them.  It’s that you won’t.

Please don’t get these two simple words confused because they make world of difference.

Next time you hear the word can’t in a sentence.  Ask yourself:

Is this impossible to do? 

Or is it that they won’t put forth the effort to make it happen?

Can’t suggests impossibility, where there most likely is none.

Won’t can be converted easily into WILL.

What WILL you do?

By Dermoney • Uncategorized • 0

Oct 26 2011

The Happiness Virus and the Golden Rule

Imagine if you woke up feeling immense gratitude simply for being alive.  What would happen if you passed on this feeling to the first five people you came into contact with?

I mentioned a scientific study a few years ago on this blog that relates to happiness.  According to this study, happiness can spread through social networks like a virus.

Not only do you have the ability to effect those around you.  You have the ability to effect people you don’t even know simply by spreading your emotions or actions.

Could this same principle work with any emotion, success, physical fitness, or even finances?

I believe it can.

If you want to be extremely happy, make friends with happy people.  If you want to be extremely successful, make friends with successful people.  If you want to be in the best shape of your life, hang out with people who are in the best shape of their life.

If these things are contagious you should hang out with as many people who have the happiness virus as possible.

You are not just helping other people when you give off positive vibes, it comes back to you exponentially.  Do you ever find if you are cheerful that is what you receive in return?  Or if you are angry do you get anger in return?

The Golden Rule is not new. It’s been around for a thousands of years. It’s roots are in almost every religion. The ancients knew these rules, there just wasn’t a peer reviewed journal to back it up.

If you want to be extremely happy, spread happiness.  Or if you wanted to be extremely angry, spread anger.

Imagine that.

By Dermoney • Uncategorized • 0