Achieving Personal Excellence

By Brian Tracy

Personal excellence is perhaps the most important of all invisible and intangible assets that you can acquire. Achieving personal excellence in your business or industry requires lifelong dedication. But once you get into the top 10 percent of your field, you will be one of the highest paid people in the country. You will enjoy the respect and esteem of the people around you. You will be able to live your life the way you want to live it. You will enjoy high levels of self-esteem, self-respect, and personal pride.

Build Your Intellectual Assets

Each person has or can acquire three forms of intellectual capital. These require an investment of study and hard work, but they pay off in higher income for the rest of your life. The first type of intellectual capital you can acquire consists of your core knowledge, skills, and abilities. These are the result of education, experience, and training. They determine how well you do your job and the value of your contribution to your business.

Build Your Internal Knowledge

The second form of intellectual capital that you posses is your knowledge of how your business operates internally, in comparison to that of your competitors or any other business. Each business develops a series or systems, procedures, methods, techniques, and strategies to market, sell, produce, deliver products and services, and satisfy customers. Each business has internal systems for accounting, administration, and financial controls. These systems take many years to develop and considerable time for a new person to learn. A person who knows and understands these systems intimately has a form of intellectual capital that is difficult for the company to replace.

Build Your Ability to Get Results

The third form of intellectual capital that you possess, and that is perhaps the key determinant of your earning ability, is your knowledge and understanding of how you can get financial results in a competitive market. This includes your knowledge of your products and services and how to sell them. It includes your knowledge of customers and suppliers and how to deal with them. It embraces your familiarity with bankers, lawyers, accountants, and government officials and how to interact with them effectively. This form of intellectual capital may take years to build, and it is extremely valuable to your organization. You first responsibility to yourself is to develop your earning ability to a high level. You do this by continually increasing your intellectual capital, by upgrading your ability to do your job, by becoming a valuable part of your organization, and by getting more and better financial results for your organization.

Action Exercise

Take time to get to know every component of your business. Get to know your customers and learn everything there is to know about your products and services.

All of life is a series of projects. A project is a complex task. It is often called a multitask job. This type of job requires the coordination of efforts of several people, each of whom is responsible for a part of the job, with every part of the job being necessary for successful completion. Your ability to handle these multitask jobs is a critical skill for success. All achievements of consequence are complex, and they involve the cooperation of many people.

The Key Management Skill
A study by Stanford University of the qualities that companies look for in promoting people into the position of chief executive officer concluded that the ability to put together a team to accomplish a task was the single most important identifiable quality of an executive who was destined for the fast track in his/her career. Your ability to put together teams to do multitask jobs or complete complex projects will determine the course of your career as much as any other factor. It will enable you to multiply yourself times the talents and efforts of others, and accomplish vastly more than you could do on your own.

A Learnable Skill
Project management is a learnable skill, like riding a bicycle. It can be divided into a series of steps, each of which you can master, one at a time. In managing any project, you begin by defining the ideal desired result of the project. What exactly are you trying to accomplish? What will the project look like if it is a complete success? Start by defining a successful completion of the project, the ideal desired result.

Start at the Beginning
Once you are clear about your desired result, you then start from the beginning. Determine what you are going to have to do to get from where you are to the completion of this project, on schedule and on budget. Determine a specific deadline or target to aim at. Make sure that it is realistic and achievable.

Assemble the Team
Bring together all the people whose contributions will be necessary for the success of this project. Sometimes you need to assemble a team before you can even decide upon the ideal result and the schedule. Remember that people are everything. Take ample time to think carefully about the people who are going to be the team members.

Develop a Shared Vision
A shared vision is an ideal future picture of success that everyone buys into. How do you develop a shared vision? You sit down with the members of your team and work with them to answer the question, “What are we trying to accomplish?” You encourage everyone to contribute, visualize, and to imagine the ideal outcome or desired result of the project. Once this vision is clear and shared by everyone, you move on to the development of “shared plans” to achieve the vision.

Set Schedules and Deadlines
Once you have a shared vision and shared plans, and everyone knows exactly what is to be done and what the ideal results will look like, the next step is for you to set a deadline for project completion based on the consensus of your team.

Action Exercise
What project are you trying to complete? What kind of employees do you need to successfully work on the project? What is your deadline? What is your sub-deadline?

You’ve gone as far as you can with what you now know. Any progress you make from this moment onward will require that you learn and practice something new.

Commit to Lifelong Learning
One quality of leaders and high achievers in every area seems to be a commitment to ongoing personal and professional development. They look upon themselves as self-made people, as “works in progress.” They never become complacent or satisfied. They are always striving toward ever greater heights of knowledge and understanding.

Get to the Top in Five Years
Earl Nightingale said many years ago that one hour per day of study in your chosen field was all it takes. One hour per day of study will put you at the top of your field within three years. Within five years you’ll be a national authority. In seven years, you can be one of the best people in the world at what you do.

Read Everything You Can
Read all you can about your field. Subscribe to the executive book clubs and book summaries. Build your own library of important books in your field. Never be cheap about your education.

In fact, if you make a decision today to invest 3% of your annual income back into yourself, back into your own personal and professional development, you will probably never have to worry about money again.

Go Through 50 Books Per Year
If you read one hour per day in your field, that will translate into about one book per week. One book per week translates into about 50 books per year. 50 books per year will translate into about 500 books over the next ten years.

Join the Top 1% of Money Earners
If you read only one book per month, that will put you into the top 1% of income earners in our society. But if you read one book per week, 50 books per year, that will make you one of the best educated, smartest, most capable and highest paid people in your field. Regular reading will transform your life completely.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into practice.

First, ask the successful people around you for their best book recommendations. Whatever advice they give you, immediately go out and buy those books, take them home and begin reading for one hour every morning before you start work.

Second, when you read, underline and take notes when you find important ideas that you can use. Implement them immediately. Take action of some kind on good ideas. You will be amazed at the change in your career.

Being the Best In Every Area
What is character? Your character is the degree to which you live your life consistent with high, life-enhancing values. A person who lacks character is one who compromises on higher order values in favor of lower order expedience, or who has no values at all. Your adherence to what you believe to be right and true is the real measure of the person you have become to this moment.

Define What “Excellence” Means to You
Let us say that one of your values is “excellence.” Your definition of excellence could be, “Excellence means that I set the highest standards for myself in everything I do. I do my very best in every situation and under all circumstances. I constantly strive to be better in my work, and as a person in my relationships. I recognize that excellence is a life-long journey and I work every day to become better and better in everything I do.”

Organize Your Actions
With a definition like this, you have a clear organizing principle for your actions. You have set a standard by which you can evaluate your behavior. You have created a framework within which you can make decisions. You have a measuring rod against which you can compare yourself in everything you do. You can continually grade your activities in terms of “more” or “less.” You have a clear target to aim at and organize your work around.

Decide What You Want for Your Family
It’s the same with each of your other values. If your value is your family, you could define this as, “The needs of my family take precedence over all other concerns. Whenever I have to choose between the happiness, health and well being of a member of my family, and any other interest, my family will always come first.”

Keep Focused
From that moment onward, it becomes easier for you to choose. Your family comes first. Until you have fully satisfied the needs of your family, no other time requirement will side track you into a lower value activity.

Shape Your Own Character
The wonderful thing about values clarification is that it enables you to take charge of developing and shaping your own character. When your values and goals, your inner life and your outer life, are in complete alignment, you feel terrific about yourself. You enjoy high self-esteem. Your self-confidence soars.

When you achieve complete congruence between your values and your goals, like a hand in a glove, you feel strong, happy, healthy and fully integrated as a person. You develop a kind of courage that makes you completely unafraid to make decisions and take action. Your whole life improves when you begin living your life by the values that you most admire.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do to put this ideas into action immediately.

First, create a clear, written description of your values and what they mean to you. From that point on, resolve to live consistent with your own definition.

Second, discipline yourself to live in complete alignment with the values, virtues and qualities that are most important to you. This is the key to character.

Relationships Are Everything!

by Aura Ziv, RNC CPT

Your Foundation for Success
Relationship in the workplace is the core of a strong career. Your ability to develop and maintain long-term customer relationships is the foundation for your success in business. Relationships requires a clear understanding of the dynamics of the people around you and how you are experienced by your peers.

Propose a Business Marriage
For your co worker, usually means a decision to enter into a long-term relationship with you and your company. It is very much like a “business marriage.” Before the co-worker decides to trusts you, he can take you or leave you. He doesn’t need you or your company. He has a variety of options and choices open to him, of who to befriend and trust at work. People need and want to feel appreciated, adored and most of all respected.  Showing people that you care about them, will in turn make them care about you and you will gain respect in the workplace by your bosses and peers. Remember that you have to genuine in your sincerity, otherwise people will think that you are trying to get something from them. If your peers even suspect that you are even half sincere, you will lose their trust and it will be very difficult to get it back.

Fulfill Your Promises
It’s as simple as that! When you make commitments, stick to them! Be on time and
show up with your full attention to that person, group or committee. That will result in people trusting you more. If you are late, don’t follow through or don’t volunteer to be apart of things with your heart, you may find it difficult to get along with others and in your career.

Focus on the Relationship
Because of the complexity of today’s hi-tech world the relationship is actually more important than the work you do, in terms of getting along with others and being promoted. So in reality, the co-workers decisions about you is based on the fact that he/she has come to trust you and believe in what you say.

Keep Your Co-Workers for Life
The single biggest mistake that causes people to not get along with others at work is taking those co-workers  for granted. This is a form of “employee entropy.” It is when the manager relaxes his efforts to listen and begins to ignore the employee. Almost 70 percent of employees who walked away from their existing jobs later replied that they made the change primarily because of a lack of attention from the company.

Once you have invested the time and made the efforts necessary to build a high-quality, trust-based relationships with your co-workers, you must maintain that relationship for the life of your business and your career. You must never take it for granted.

Action Exercises
Begin to be as sincere as you can in the workplace, and see how your relationships at work develop because you are showing those around you that you care about them.

A Special Kind of Courage
By: Brian Tracy

There are several different aspects of courage. Perhaps the most important is the courage to endure, to persist, to “hang in there” in the face of doubt, uncertainty and criticism from others.

Practice Patience in Adversity
This is called “courageous patience,” the willingness and the ability to “stay the course” in the face of uncertainty, doubt and often criticism from many quarters.

Stay the Course
In my experience, there is a critical time period between the launching of a new venture and the results that come from that venture. During this hiatus, this waiting period, many people lose their nerve. They cannot stand the suspense of not knowing, of possible failure. They break and run in battle, they quake and quit in business.

The True Leader
But the true leader is the person who can stand firm, who refuses to consider the possibility of failure. The turning points of many key moments in human history have been the resolution, or lack thereof, of one person. Courageous patience is the acid test of leadership.

To encourage others, to instill confidence in them, to help them to perform at their best requires first of all that you lead by example.

Allow Honest Mistakes
The second thing you can do to help alleviate the fears of failure and rejection in others is to encourage them to take calculated risks and allow honest mistakes.

Build People Up
Give the people who look up to you regular praise and approval. Celebrate good tries as well as success, large and small. Create a psychological climate where people feel safe from censure, blame or criticism of any kind. Then do things that make people feel terrific about themselves.

Become Unstoppable
Courage comes from acting courageously on a day-to-day basis. Your personal development goal should be to practice the behaviors of a totally fearless person until you become, in your own mind, unstoppable.

Action Exercises
Here are two ways for you to develop courageous patience.

First, prepare yourself in advance for the inevitable disappointments and setbacks you will experience on the way to your goal. Don’t be surprised when they occur.

Second, resolve in advance that you will bounce rather than break and continually encourage others to think and act the same way.