The Starting Point for our journey to success rests deep within us… with our own unique Success Paradigm.

What do I mean by our Success Paradigm? Well in a nutshell it’s our belief model about what a successful person is and does. It’s our Belief about success, and how to “reach it” and deserve it.

Think about your own success paradigm. It might include a belief that successful people are active/ fit/ go for a run early in the morning. Or it might be that your ingrained belief is that successful people are up earlier than most. Or that they are exceptionally well-organised, and their office/ home/ life is clutter-free. Similarly, there are certain clothes that make you feel successful (despite what many people might say, if you work from home for example, dressing for success is still important – as I tell my Focus Gym clients “you’ll never get rich with your slippers on!”).

We all have an inner image of ourselves and know subconsciously at any moment where we are in relation to our own Success Paradigm. We know if there’s a gap. Our outer world is a reflection of this inner image of our place in the world.

When you know what the Success Paradigm includes, you then face a choice with each individual element, with making up the gap between the paradigm of success, and what you are doing every moment of the day, because the subconscious model is fed information and evidence from what you say, the way you act, how you look, your environment, and so on.

The choice is to Match or to Ditch.

You either conform to the pieces of the paradigm (match them), and therefore see yourself as being worthy of success, or you have to ditch that particular part of the belief, so that not matching it doesn’t hold you back.

Make a list of 6 keys to your Success Paradigm… 6 beliefs (by the way they might initially sound crazy – I have no way of knowing whether Richard Branson has a tidy office, or whether successful people are all out jogging as the sun comes up). Make your list, and match them… maybe start by matching 2 -3 of them, for 28 days.
See what happens.

It has become customary in some quarters for the first Friday 13th of the year to be “BSE day”- Blame Someone Else day! And it's an excuse to blame others for everything that goes wrong (internet/ web based card companies have latched onto it and you can send suitably negative downloadable greetings to people!)
 
But… The Blaming and Complaining virus is our worst pandemic! It’s our real millennium bug. It destroys us, it destroys our friendships, it destroys our relationships, it destroys our careers and it destroys our businesses.
 
So rather than seeking to blame and complain;  it’s time to TPR.
Take Personal Responsibility
 
All successful people begin by taking one fundamental step. That step is to realise and to believe that they are responsible for their own success. Whether that’s business success, showbiz success, sporting success, personal success. They all know that in the end it’s down to them: “If it’s to be, it’s up to me!” They Take Personal Responsibility.
 
So, instead of making Friday 13th May BSE day (blame someone else), make it TPR day… and discover the difference.

Rather than assuming that we'll get bad luck on Friday 13th, and that everything is someone else's fault, it's a day for thinking highly positively about how much personal control and responsibility we have over our own lives, our own successes, and that we can make our own luck!

So, here are 13 tips to help you TPR (and you can use these tips any day)

1. Choose your Attitude
• No more blaming and complaining.  Don’t blame the traffic, government, weather, anyone or any external factor for the way you feel.  Always remember you are free to choose your attitude.
• Go Happy Go Lucky.  Phil calls this the ‘Napoleon Factor’ as Napoleon when choosing his senior Generals always asked “Is he lucky” – the French being “Est-il hereux?” literally, is he happy! Great attitudes create luck!
• The power of a pause.  Cut up in traffic? Pause before you react.  Overlooked at the checkout? Pause before you react.  Turn knee-jerk reaCtion into Creation of response (“response-ability”), simply by the way you C it.

11. Do something good today, just for fun
• for you. Or share with a good friend. Self-care and efficacy can brighten up any day! Everyone deserves to feel special.
• for someone else. However great or small, do something kind for someone else, and tell no one of it. Don’t seek praise or recognition. Just do it, and enjoy being kind.

Have a Great Day!

The FEVER Formula

For making personal and business breakthroughs…
Can be applied to any of our “bugbear” tasks… eg for those people who suffer from call reluctance (most salespeople, and business people, if they are honest!) or to any goal which needs to have a new injection to make it happen!

F    =  Focus
E    =  Energy
V    =  Vision
E    =  Enthusiasm
R    =  Reason

Focus… beyond the goal / objective. In order to breakthrough a target, you need to be focused beyond it, on what the achievement of the target means to you.

Energy… include some very positive action as early and as urgently as possible to ensure a good start. Physical energy can help with the most basic business functions. Standing up to make an important phone call, for example.

Vision… have a strong mental image of the completed task, in as much detail as possible. Literally see the successfully completed task in your minds eye.

Enthusiasm… Coupled with Energy, in any action, this will engender speed. When you have energy and enthusiasm you can’t help but get the job done in optimum time. If you can’t get enthusiastic about it, is it what you should be doing. Sometimes we need to ACT enthusiastic to generate real enthusiasm.

Reason… have a strong reason for doing the task. It must be a personal reason… and make you want to peak perform. Offering yourself a reward for successful completion is a strong motive.

At my seminars I have often illustrated this point by creating a real breakthrough with a participant who gets to break through a wooden board (karate style) using this formula. The Focus is at a point beyond the wood. The key skill is to make the required action with speed (not strength). Energy and Enthusiasm do the trick here. Vision: well having a clear image in mind of the board broken in two is crucial. The Reason is created by peer group pressure and support, and also by a very specific personal reason, which we create live at the time... and it's this bit that makes the biggest difference in the way the participant approaches the whole breakthrough. The Motive for Action... Motiv-Action. 

Using this formula will help to set up you and your teams for taking full advantage of your opportunities and goals.

It will also help to overcome the procrastination which cripples so many people in business.
You may find it helpful to have the formula printed onto a card and put in the corner of your desk to remind you to use the formula when you need to make those breakthroughs.

What I learned from a Mediterranean street artist a few years ago, and have never forgotten.
…
I’m sure if you have been to one of the many islands in the Med, you will have seen this too…

In the square amongst all the restaurants (where the customers are!), an artist kneels on the pavement, his canvas laid out, among his pre-prepared frames, spray cans (for his paintings are spray paintings), the series of shapes to mask parts of the painting when applying the different coloured sprays, and a set of techniques honed over the years, and some minor knife work to spread bits of paint into certain shapes to add detail. Perfect colours, evocative of the Mediterranean, magically capturing the colours all around us, and particularly the sunsets, the sea, rocks and sand. 

The maths was interesting… at 20-30 Euros, they made great presents (an alternative to what is available from the shops), knocking out 10-12 per hour, and selling many more than that (approximately double the number), from his stock of pre-painted smaller versions. His 4 –5 hours per evening were certainly well worth it.

Regardless, what was striking was what a brilliant business… because he was operating the principle of sticking to the things you do well, and making sure your execution of these things is the best it can be.

This goes for the business as a whole as well as for you individually…
for the vast majority of businesses, for the small-medium businesses, the dynamic half of the western economies, which many of you belong to, it is essential to understand that YOU CANNOT DO EVERYTHING. AND YOU CAN’T be brilliant at everything.

This might come as astonishing news!!! Of course, it sounds obvious…
BUT if you know you can’t do everything, ask yourself what is it that you are deliberately setting out to be brilliant at.

This principle is all about identifying
what you do really well,
who you do it best for
how you can do it even better
and how you can attract those people to keep coming back for more, and more often,
and how they can be so bowled over by it that they want to introduce others of their ilk to come and enjoy it aswell.

It’s also about having no barriers to you doing that. To having nothing blocking the pathway, the whole process is simplified to allow you to execute your work, your business brilliantly.

Achieving goals relies on being focussed on doing a few key things well on a consistent basis. And so it is essential to make sure we have a structure in place that allows us to do just that, otherwise we get deflected, or sink into the quagmire of daily clutter.

I am always amazed how many people, how many businesses and organisations, how many teams, get “phased out” by the thought of creating “enabling structures” on the grounds that it “sounds complicated”. It’s not. In fact, the simpler the structures the better. Some of the best structures I’ve seen are simply checklists, or the allocation of time slots to certain tasks each week, or a simple method of delegation.

People also tend to get focused on the nature of these structures and systems rather than on what they are in place to enable you to do. The enabling structures must be there simply to support your key activities.

They are there to ensure we have enough “time over target” doing the things which we want to do to achieve the results we need to achieve to reach the goals we have set. They need to be strong enough to support you, yet adaptable enough not to strangle you. They are not a straight-jacket, but an enabler. And they are there to ensure we can sustain this focus over long time periods, so that growth, development and success are maintained.

Systemise –to –humanise! If there’s something in your life, business, or career, that you do on a routine and regular basis, chances are you can systemise 97 percent of it by creating a simple structure. That frees you up to focus on creating brilliant performance of what you do best- the 3 percent that makes a real difference.
 

Everyone has a Unique Talent
It’s where the spheres of our Innate Abilities, our Developed Skills, and our Particular Passions intersect (see diagram in The Inspiration Room on this website).

Abilities = those things that are innate, you are born with.
Skills = techniques, tools, knowledge and know-how you develop
Passions = those tasks and areas of life that you are attracted to, are passionate about, and which you simply love doing.

One of the most sought-after qualities in business is the ability to finish… and that 1 percent person who makes sure something really happens is a rare commodity.

Once you have your list, take yourself to “Finishing School”, and decide to finish something every day: just focus on finishing one of the things on your list each day. Plan what you are going to finish tomorrow and then time slot into your schedule a time to finish it. Decide to invest an hour or two finishing it. At work set aside that Golden hour as finishing time, or at home, sacrifice the lazy TV time, and just decide that between 8 and 9 pm for example you are going to finish something.

Finishing is an invaluable skill. And once you get into that habit, you’ll be amazed what you achieve in that month… and how you feel about being so productive and effective.

If you are more of a “Starter” then invest in a good finisher to help you. As all football teams know, it’s all very well having 90 percent of the possession, but winning the game is often about having in your team a great finisher …

So, here is a quick step-by-step process to help get your goals sorted for this period. It begins, of course, with taking the time to sit down and do it. No need for me to spell that lesson out, is there?

1. Remember: begin with the long term, and go from macro to micro, general to specific. So only set goals for the next 90 days when you’ve got clear long-term vision, clear long-term goals, and clear goals for the current year. Then make these goals for this quarter very specific. And measurable.

2. Write them down, clearly. Keep them in view: but keep them private… just for you.

3. Put them on an Index card which means you’ll read them every day.

4. Take immediate action. If you decide on a goal to complete a professional exam for example, send for the course material, and register for the exam immediately.

5. Create a “Butterfly moment”. Look for a big step you can take with one of the most exciting goals, and take that step within 24 hours. Even if it makes the butterflies do summersaults in your stomach!

6. Regime: make sure you have a regime which supports your goals. Create a weekly and daily “diet” that will allow you time and energy required to achieve them.

7. Block-busting: remove blockers. Give yourself the best chance of success, by removing anything which prevents you going for these goals.

8. Have a 5-star upgrade: upgrade your state of mind by:
i. the way you think about these goals… just decide to be positive about them
ii. the words you use (and particularly in relation to these goals). For example: avoid “In the next 90 days I’m going to try to achieve x…”
iii. the way you act: in relation to these goals in particular. Make your physiology strong… straight back, chest out, stomach in, head high! Powerful body language.
iv. The way you look: time to upgrade. It sends signals to you about the 90 days ahead.
v. Your environment: is it congruent? Consistent with the success you want? Have a clear out, and a clear up!

9. The FEVER formula:
i. Focus… on what the achievement of these goals will be like. Focus beyond them.
ii. Energy: get active
iii. Vision: create instant pictures in your mind’s eye of the positive achievement of these goals.
iv. Enthusiasm: attitude is the key
v. Reason and Reward… what will be your reward? How will you feel to have achieved such a great 90 days? And what will you specifically give yourself as a reward?