The Secret in the Geode - and the Link to New Success

I got this thought hook from a recent email from the Napoleon Hill Foundation.


A CLOSED MIND STUMBLES OVER THE BLESSINGS OF LIFE WITHOUT RECOGNIZING THEM.

To the untrained eye, a geode looks pretty much like an ordinary rock.

But a trained geologist knows that inside the geode there is a beautiful crystal lining.

The story is the same for those who refuse to examine new possibilities because their minds are closed. Life’s greatest opportunities, like the geode, often come in ordinary packaging.

Do not allow yourself to become such a creature of habit that you simply go through the motions and let life happen to you. Just taking a new route to work, putting together a jigsaw puzzle, reading a newspaper instead of watching television, or visiting a museum at lunchtime will stimulate your thought processes and may help you open your mind to new possibilities.

Have a great new week!
and make it a GREAT day today!

My Mind is a Distillery - Paul E Grant

This is a great poem by a real hgero of mine, Paul E Grant.  I have written about him many time sin my blog.

Over to you now, Paul, for another potent poem....

MY MIND IS A DISTILLERY



My mind is a distillery
Separating all kinds of elements,
A depot also, storing deliveries
Of many kinds of rudiments


My mind becomes a clearing house
A kind of encyclopedia
In which I’m challenged to examine
Items from all kinds of media

Daily and hourly, incessantly,
Details invade its capacity,
Each of them demanding attention,
Data of wondrous diversity


God made this amazing organ,
A body-top computer,
Programmed to function for our good
It becomes a kind of tutor


It helps me to distinguish
The important from the trivial,
It also helps me segregate
The evil from the moral


It challenges me to discovery
To exploring things unknown,
To ascertaining accuracy
To accept or to disown

I’ve learned to give priority
To things of enduring worth,
For really and truly we have only
A very little time on earth

So I learn to distil the mysteries
Of God’s wonderful creation,
Best of all the provision
Of his amazing salvation

This world quickly passes away
That which is seen is temporal,
The things I really love to distil
Are the things that are eternal

Paul E. Grant
May 2009

Have You Got "A Mind to Succeed" - A Great New Book by @stevepenny

I have just been sent a copy of the new Steve Penny book, "A Mind to Succeed."

And it is VERY HARD to put down!

Check out some these quotes:

Success comes from the inside

Success comes from successful habits
Your thoughts are building your world
Everything you presently are – you built
What you think, you are
You will instinctively choose to walk in the direction of your dominant thoughts

Here are some more:

What you consistently think about will produce spontaneous actions

Your thoughts control everything you do
Thoughts are the language of your inner world
Thoughts are God’s way of communicating with us from His eternity

You can check out Steve here - http://www.stevepenny.org/

And his books are here with an online shopping cart - http://www.stevepenny.org/products-page/

Your mind is greatest untamed frontier of humanity. So many of us want to live a life of success, but we think success comes from the outside. Learn how to live from your inner world out – rather than from your outer world in – and discover the ETERNAL PLAN for you. Your life here on Earth will only be fulfilled once you gain control of your inner world.



Your mental attitude is the X factor that determines your destiny. You can’t improve your outer world until you’ve renovated your inner world. When you control your mind, you control the way you live. When you renew your mind from wrong thinking, a whole new way of living begins to materialize before your eyes.


This book reveals simple steps that will show you how to bring your thoughts into subjections to your will. You can control your thoughts. You can enjoy a life full of, love, joy and peace.


So make up your mind today that you want to be in control of the real you – your mind. Take the first step now to change your mind… to change your world!

My Attitude is My Boomerang to the World

I was recently reading something powerful from Lee Colan about attitude.

Here are some of the thoughts:

Your attitude toward life is the most important choice you make.

Your attitude reflects your past, describes your present, and predicts your future.

Your attitude is something you can always control. You are the conductor of your own attitude! Nobody else can compose your thoughts for you.

The pursuit of excellence requires you to control your own attitude. If you do, you will create a powerful ripple effect that can have a positive impact on many people and miles away. Your attitude is your personal boomerang to the world.

The right attitude is the root to success. It enables us to stand strong and prevail.

"An optimist sees an opportunity in every calamity; a pessimist a calamity in every opportunity." - Winston Churchill

"The greatest discovery of my generation is that human beings can alter their lives by altering their attitudes of mind." - William James

"There's very little difference in people. But that little difference makes a big difference. The little difference is attitude. The BIG DIFFERENCE is whether it is positive or negative." - W. Clement Stone

"Ask yourself a question: Is my attitude worth catching?" - Zig Ziglar

"Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul." - Samuel Ullman

How Successful People Think

If you have been following my blog for a bit now you will note I regularly mention the importance and power of our thinking.

One of the posts is here - it's called "Choose Your View."

And here is a powerful thought from the Bible....

Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.
Proverbs 4:23 (TEV).

Here is the start of a great blog post that Dr John Maxwell did recently - it is very powerful!

What’s a successful person’s greatest resource in difficult times?
Good thinking!
Good thinkers are always in demand. A person who knows how may always have a job, but the person who knows why will always be his boss.

Good thinkers solve problems, they never lack ideas for building an organization, and they always have hope for a better future.
Good thinkers rarely find themselves at the mercy of ruthless people who would take advantage of them or try to deceive them, people like Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler, who once boasted, “What luck for rulers that men do not think.”

Those who develop the process of good thinking can rule themselves – even while under an oppressive ruler or in other difficult circumstances. In short, good thinkers are successful.

I’ve studied successful people for forty years, and though the diversity you find among them is astounding, I’ve found that they are all alike in one way: how they think!

That is the one thing that separates successful people from unsuccessful ones. And here’s the good news. How successful people think can be learned.

If you change your thinking, you can change your life!

HOW TO BECOME A BETTER THINKER
Do you want to master the process of good thinking?
Do you want to be a better thinker tomorrow than you are today?

Then you need to engage in an ongoing process that improves your thinking.

I recommend you do the following:

1. Expose Yourself to Good Input
Good thinkers always prime the pump of ideas. They always look for things to get the thinking process started, because what you put in always impacts what comes out.
Read books, review trade magazines, listen to CDs, and spend time with good thinkers. And when something intrigues you-whether it’s someone else’s idea or the seed of an idea that you’ve come up with yourself-keep it in front of you. Put it in writing and keep it somewhere in a favorite place to stimulate your thinking.

2. Expose Yourself to Good Thinkers
All of the people in my life whom I consider to be close friends or colleagues are good thinkers. Now, I love all people. I try to be kind to everyone I meet, and I desire to add value to as many people as I can through conferences, books, audio lessons, etc. But the people I seek out and choose to spend time with all challenge me with their thinking and their actions. They are constantly trying to grow and learn.
The writer of Proverbs observed that sharp people sharpen one another, just as iron sharpens iron. If you want to be a sharp thinker, be around sharp people.

3. Choose to Think Good Thoughts
To become a good thinker, you must become intentional about the thinking process. Regularly put yourself in the right place to think, shape, stretch, and land your thoughts. Make it a priority. Thinking is a discipline.

Recently I had breakfast with Dan Cathy, the president of Chick-fil-A, a fast food restaurant chain headquartered in the Atlanta area. I told him that I was working on this book and I asked him if he made thinking time a high priority. Not only did he say yes, but he told me about what he calls his “thinking schedule.” It helps him to fight the hectic pace of life that discourages intentional thinking. Dan says he sets aside time just to think for half a day every two weeks, for one whole day every month, and for two or three full days every year. Dan explains, “This helps me ‘keep the main thing, the main thing,’ since I am so easily distracted.”

You may want to do something similar, or you can develop a schedule and method of your own. No matter what you choose to do, go to a special thinking place, take paper and pen, and make sure you capture your ideas in writing.

4. Act on Your Good Thoughts
Ideas have a short shelf life. You must act on them before the expiration date. World War I flying ace Eddie Rickenbacker said it all when he remarked, “I can give you a six-word formula for success: Think things through-then follow through.”

5. Allow Your Emotions to Create Another Good Thought
To start the thinking process, you cannot rely on your feelings. In Failing Forward, I wrote that you can act your way into feeling long before you can feel your way into action. If you wait until you feel like doing something, you will likely never accomplish it. The same is true for thinking. You cannot wait until you feel like thinking to do it. However, I’ve found that once you engage in the process of good thinking, you can use your emotions to feed the process and create mental momentum.
Try it for yourself. After you go through the disciplined process of thinking and enjoy some success, allow yourself to savor the moment and try riding the mental energy of that success. If you’re like me, it’s likely to spur additional thoughts and productive ideas.

6. Repeat the Process
One good thought does not make a good life. The people who have one good thought and try to ride it for an entire career often end up unhappy or destitute. They are the one-hit wonders, the one-book authors, the one-message speakers, the one-time inventors who spend their life struggling to protect or promote their single idea. Success comes to those who have an entire mountain of gold that they continually mine, not those who find one nugget and try to live on it for fifty years. To become someone who can mine a lot of gold, you need to keep repeating the process of good thinking.

This article is an excerpt from the introduction to my latest book, How Successful People Think. Available now from booksellers in the United States, it’s derived from my book, Thinking for a Change.
Edited and distilled down to the bare essentials, this book is designed to help you expand your thinking and achieve your dreams with the following…

11 keys to successful thinking:
1. Cultivate Big-Picture Thinking
2. Engage in Focused Thinking
3. Harness Creative Thinking
4. Employ Realistic Thinking
5. Utilize Strategic Thinking
6. Explore Possibility Thinking
7. Learn from Reflective Thinking
8. Question Popular Thinking
9. Benefit from Shared Thinking
10. Practice Unselfish Thinking
11. Rely on Bottom-Line Thinking

Thanks John!

Triggers - Powerful Insights

I am really enjoying this book called Triggers by Joe Sugarman.

This is why I am interested. Joe says,

"It is estimated that 95% of the reasons a prospect buys involve a subconscious decision."
He then says that "the purpose of this book is to show you what goes on during the sales process that triggers a sale and how the subconscious mind responds to various aspects of an offer. This knowledge will become invaluable to you, as you will soon discover."

Product Description
Dramatically increase your ability to sell by learning how to control the mind of your prospect using 30 psychological tiggers to motivate, influence and persuade.

About the Author
Joe Sugarman is one of America's top advertising and marketing entrepreneurs and the man who built several large busineses all through the creative power of his pen.

How Triggers Were Discovered
Joe Sugarman, the best-selling author and top copywriter who achieved legendary fame in direct marketing, ran a highly successful mail-order company in the 1980s, JS&A (the forerunner of The Sharper Image). Joe learned on a mass scale which ad approaches worked, and which ones didn’t. He studied the ads that achieved a high degree of success, and discovered that they were clearly successful because of certain underlying psychological triggers.

He identified 30 of these triggers that activate psychological forces buried deep within the subconscious brain, and cause people to buy.

Result: Through the effective use of psychological triggers, Joe sold over 20 million pairs of BluBlocker sunglasses, as well as countless other products. Joe also sold several million dollars’ worth of product on QVC – sometimes in a single day.

In his book Triggers Joe reveals his startling discovery of how to get into people’s minds, eavesdrop on their thoughts, know what they want – and make a fortune in the process.

Cracking the Psychological Code That Reveals Untold Secrets
Just as the human genome cracked the genetic code that reveals untold secrets of the human body, Joe Sugarman’s Triggers cracked the psychological code that activates a person’s buying sequence. This is the secret code that has eluded the sales industry for years.


I'll keep you posted on what I find!

4 Voices - Dan Reiland

I get this regular email from Dan Reiland. He is awesome and he is a great coach.

Here is an edited version of something he emailed out recently - it's called "4 voices"

Have you ever noticed it's difficult to find quiet as a leader?
So many people are talking. The noise can be overwhelming.

We as church leaders must discern the voices and know what to do.

Tough times call for clarity and decisiveness, and there are a number of opinions in play.
What agendas should be pushed?
What ministries should get attention and resources?
Who should you help in the community?

And all the while you try to gain momentum for the primary vision and mission of your church - to seek and save the lost and raise up mature disciples of Christ. I suspect that if you are like most leaders, you've experienced that the mission can fall victim to the competing demands within a local church.

So what's a pastor to do?
How do you handle the voices that are competing for attention?
How do you decide who to listen to and understand what they are really saying?

Part of the answer is first in understanding the four big categories the "voices" generally fall into. This helps you to listen better.
Secondly, learning how to discern which voice is speaking makes a huge difference.
When life is easy, discerning is not so difficult. It's under pressure that it gets complicated.

Consider the following 4 as the big groups you hear from and then think about who is influencing you most.

1. God
2. Devil
3. Others
4. You

I found the bit on "others" interesting. Here is what Dan also wrote:

Sometimes creating a picture or categories will help you sort out what you are hearing as you listen and lead.
Conflict - Is it a problem to be solved or a tension to be managed?
Clamour - It is someone who just wants to take your time but doesn't want to change?
Collaboration - Is it a person who can be a positive partner to your ministry?
Counsel - Is it a person who needs help and you can provide that help?
Contribution - Is it a person who can truly join the team and help make a difference.

Thanks Dan!!

So, who are you listening to these days and how do you respond?

The Power of Continual Learning

I saw this post recently from Word for Today and was really "gee-ed up" again.

I hope you get impacted too!

"And behold...honey...he took some."
Judges 14:8-9 NKJV

In their book, The Laws of Lifetime Growth, authors Dan Sullivan and Catherine Nomura explain,
"Continual learning is essential for lifetime growth. You can have a great deal of experience and be no smarter for all the things you've done, seen, and heard. Experience alone is no guarantee of lifetime growth. But if you regularly transform your experiences into new lessons, you'll make each day of your life a source of growth. The smartest people are those who can transform even the smallest events or situations into breakthroughs in thinking and action. Look at all of life as a school and every experience as a lesson, and your learning will always be greater than your experience."

In an old Peanuts cartoon, Charles Schulz shows Charlie Brown at the beach building a magnificent sandcastle. It's a work of art. As he stands back to admire it, suddenly it's destroyed by a big wave. In the last frame he says, "There must be a lesson here, but for the life of me I don't know what it is."

That's how many of us feel after a potentially valuable experience.

We go through it but don't grow. We attend meetings designed to help us learn, then do nothing with what we've heard after closing our notebooks. Don't get excited about a learning event, get excited about learning! And you haven't really learned it until you've applied it.

A few days after slaying a lion, Samson returned to the scene of victory and discovered two things in the carcass:
(a) Bees, that sting.
(b) Honey, that tastes sweet. "He took some" (Judg 14:9 NKJV).

In life, move beyond the pain and look for the honey!

Garbage Truck Rule

Got this email recently called Garbage Truck Rule. It's not bad!

Check it out!

One day I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We weredriving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of aparking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on hisbreaks, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us.

My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy.
And I mean, he was really friendly.

So I asked, 'Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!'

This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call, 'The Law of the Garbage Truck.'

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks.
They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, full of anger, and full ofdisappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it and sometimes they'll dump it on you.

Don't take it personally. Just smile , wave, wish them well, and move on. Don't take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home , or on the streets.

The bottom line is that successful people do not let garbage trucks takeover their day. Life's too short to wake up in the morning with regrets, so...
'Love the people who treat you right.
Pray for the ones who don't.'

Life is 10% what you make it and 90% how you take it!

What a great philosophy!

Choose your View

You may need to sit down for a bit to read this post.

Seriously.

It will be powerful.

Sitting down yet?

This is God's word:
Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.
Proverbs 4:23 (TEV)

Can I suggest you read it again?
Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.
Proverbs 4:23 (TEV)

Some of you may know this truth said slightly differently....
Keep vigilant watch over your heart; that's where life starts.
Proverbs 4:23 (MSG)

Keep your heart with all diligence, For out of it spring the issues of life.
Proverbs 4:23 (NKJV)

Above all else, guard your heart, for it affects everything you do.
Proverbs 4:23 (NLT)

I got this email letter from Lee Colan recently. I like Lee's work. I have used his stuff before here.

Before we go to Lee, Tracy did another quality post recently called "Find the Best, Not the Worst." You can read it all here. In it she makes a very honest statement, that links with what we are saying here about our thinking.

Last night God challenged me.

Everytime I catch myself with a negative thought about someone or something, I am to respond by finding 2 positive things. For every thought that focusses on the 'Worst', I am now challenged to find 2 thoughts that focus on the 'Best'.

This is my way of "doing my best" to fill my mind on the best, not the worst.

Wow!!

Here is what Lee writes - great perspective Lee!

Our experiences are much less important than how we choose to think about them.
The way we interpret our experiences shapes our beliefs about the past.
Furthermore, our interpretations either limit or enable our future success.

For example, a mission-critical project you are leading has "promotion" written all over it, but it bombs – it's over budget, past its deadline... the works. How you choose to interpret those facts is where you can shape your future. Are you a failure, a poor leader who is maxed out and on her way out? Or, are you a great leader in the making who is learning some tough lessons that will help ensure success on the next project when your true colors will show? Facts are facts, but the view you take is your choice.

Think the best ALL the time.
What's the harm?
If you choose to protect yourself from disappointment by always thinking the worst, you have also chosen disappointment as the filter through which you view all things and people... and that's just what you will get. On the other hand, you can choose to think the best all the time. Sure, you might be disappointed occasionally but, most of the time, you will be programming your mind and others to achieve their best.

If you find yourself having a negative thought, say "STOP!" out loud, and replace it with a positive thought. Saying "STOP!" out loud is important so that you can actually hear yourself controlling your own thinking. Let's see how it works.

A friend told me about a situation that used to drive him crazy. He would drive home after a hard day through rush hour traffic and find the driveway to his garage impassable, blocked by his children's bicycles and toys. He reacted something like this: "These kids have no sense of responsibility. They never pick up after themselves and it's a hassle for me to move their junk just to get in the driveway."

Then he said, "STOP!" out loud. He decided to choose a more positive view and he responded with, "My kids are still kids. It looks like they had a great time today. Boy, how time flies... I had better seize the moment with my kids."

Sure, the driveway still looked like a yard sale after a wind storm and his children did not put their toys away. Nothing changed except his interpretation of the facts. He substituted gratitude for anger and changed his mind for good.

Remember, when you change the way you look at things, things change the way they look.

I'll let you think about this for a bit!

PS - the power of our thinking is VITAL.

So in honour of that I am going to "label" or "blog tag" this post with the label "thinking." That way you be able to search in the future all posts about "thinking."

What do you "think" about that?! Ha ha!

And remember - let God's Word be the final word....

Be careful how you think; your life is shaped by your thoughts.
Proverbs 4:23 (TEV)