Changing a rule.

Lately I have been writing about the 5 determinant factors that I’m convinced, define how we live our lives. I still have two to go, but this week I want to share something I have been giving much thought to and I’d love to hear your point of view so PLEASE share your comments with everybody.

It’s about a change of paradigm, changing the rule or better said the way we think about money.

Do you want more money?

Well, here’s the change I’m talking about: You don’t necessarily need to make more money in order to have more of it available. On the contrary, what you need is to do is spend more…intelligently what you have.
I’m not talking about spending less and depriving yourself of the things you need or like, but rather I’m talking about clearly understanding what our real needs are.
If we do so we’ll see that we do have enough to cover the 100% of our needs.

It’s not new to say that in order for us to search for our personal realization; we first need to ensure all of our needs are completely met. And like it or not, these are mainly covered with economical resources.

But here is the secret of many millionaire men and women: To make money, first you have to get rid of the need of having money.

Usually we would be mistaken and think that we then needed to look for new ways to earn a whole lot more money. But that is exactly where the trap lies. This kind of thinking is desperate and desperation usually leads us to making impulsive decisions, which in this case, could mean accepting a work or commercial proposal that, even though could help us improve our economic urgency for 1 or 2 months, it would not ensure doing anything for us personally, and most likely than not, since we would be “making more money” we could start spending a lot more of it which would get us right back to our original predicament.

On the other hand, if we change the way we think about this, even when it may sound dangerous and even foolish, not to take the other job; by prioritizing our expenses and eliminating or at least reducing to a minimum those expenses that in the end don’t really add any value to our lives, we would be pushing aside the need to make extra money.
In my case, a useless expenditure that I have is all the chewing gum I buy.

By getting rid of this valueless expenditure we free a big amount of money, making it available to cover the really important needs we have in our lives, including, yes, even a lot of personal treats.

This way we can get rid of the need to earn more money because we would already have our needs satisfied; Something that would allow us to work on our personal and professional growth, making us more productive and efficient, which in the short, medium and long run, will result in having a better income and, of course, more money.

Again, with all this, I’m not saying that we should not look for a better job that promises a higher income, what I am saying is that when we do so, we better be sure that all our needs are already covered, so we can take the job not because of the money, but because it is right for us.

Factor #3: What we let into our mind: what we watch & read.

In his book The monk who sold his Ferrari, Robin S. Sharma makes an analogy of the human mind as if it was a garden that needs special care, that needs to be sown, watered and cleaned so it stays productive and in great shape, and he then explains how each of us needs to act as a soldier who is standing guard a the entrance our garden, so nothing and nobody enters it and pollutes it.
And I can’t think of a better comparison to talk about the third determining factor on how we live our lives: what we let get inside our mind, what we watch and what we read.

Definitely whatever we let into our mind, if we are selective and careful, can provide it with knowledge, energy, happiness and positive thoughts, or if we are not, can fill it with fear, decontrolling images, confusing ideas and stress.

How familiar is this situation to you? It is the end of day, its 9:00 pm and everybody at home went to their rooms to rest, your get to bed or sit on your favorite couch, you turn on the TV and tune in the first TV series that’s showing: a crude and violent, crime filled series where even the director gets shot. I think there’s even one promotional spot that actually says something like “now with more violence and kidnapings…”, Can you believe it?
But it doesn’t stops there, after the show finishes you tune in the late night news and spend the next hour watching all the tragedies, lies, frauds, crises and crimes that happened during the day. And right after that you want to go to sleep. Is it really surprising that after all the GARBAGE you let into your mind, you cannot go to sleep and have nightmares?

Let me share a couple of tips to improve the quality of what you let get inside your head:
1- Stop watching news every night! “oh but what is this guy saying! I need to stay well informed every day!” you might be thinking right now. But I couldn’t be anymore serious. Try this for a week: Next Monday watch the news and try to remember what important notes you saw, then do not watch or listen to any news show until the following Monday, I’m sure you will notice that you are listening pretty much to the same information you heard a week ago. And relax, if you are really worried that you might miss very important news, you’ll see you’ll find out anyway. And in case you cannot live without news, then use technology in your favor: download a RSS reader and select just the exact type of information you need and then the sources that you trust.
2- Change your preferences of TV content. I’m not suggesting you stop watching Warner Channel or Sony Entertainment to just watch National Geographic, I’m only saying that we all could be a little more selective about the stuff we expose our minds to. I mean, unless you are a serial killer in disguise, I don’t think you can be a big fan of TV shows where everybody is killing everybody in a very graphic way. We need to ask ourselves: Is this what I’d like my kids to see and accept as a normal part of life? Children do what they see, they learn doing what the see, so if they see you usually watch this type of series, they will see it as normal and will start watching those too, and whatever stuff good or bad they see in them, they will remember.So why not then try to watch something nicer for a change?

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Now, lets talk about what we read… … … … … … … … … … … …
It’s ridiculous how very little we read now a days. It results incredible that in this day and age, when information is more available than ever, people isn’t reading.
We are so spoiled by TV that it is really hard to find a young person reading a good book instead of watching the idiotic box.

I myself must confess that it wasn’t until I turned 23 that I really fell in love with reading. Before that I would refuse to read, I would rebel against it, and I would read only what was mandatory to pass a subject at school or college.
Until one day I bumped into a great science fiction novel by a very famous (but back then unknown to me) author: Dean Koontz, the name of the book: Fear Nothing. And I must say that I have not stop reading for a single day since then.

Maybe some are in a similar situation than mine 10 years ago, maybe some others do like reading but feel there is not enough time to do so, so I wanted to share a couple of advices I once was given:
1- “ Always, no matter where you are going, take a book with you. There are hundreds of times that you can use to read a good book: when you are in line in a bank, when you are having lunch by yourself, when you are waiting in a reception for a meeting, etc.”
2- “The person that you will be in 5 years from now, will be a direct reflection of two main influences: the people you meet and the books that you read.”

Don’t know what to read? Luckily technology comes to the rescue again! There are tons of on line sources where you can get great stuff to read, my favorites are:

www.Shelfari.com a social network around reading, where you can find what members around the world are reading and what they think of it.

Blogs, blogs and blogs! I’m pretty sure I’ve mentioned these before but here are my personal favorites:

• Make it great with Phil Gerbyshak
• Robin Sharma
• Sander Says
• Brazen Carrerist
• Mekate
• The marketing minute
• Idea Sandbox
  

Visit them, read them, enjoy them and share them, and tell me if with these you still think you don’t have great tools to stand guard at the entrance of the garden of your mind.

Fun Magicians

Well, before I start talking about factor #2, I wanted to share a fun video so we can start the week with a big smile!

Factor #2: Our talk.

Every time you say hello to someone in the morning, and they ask you how you are, what do you answer? “Not so good”, “bad”, “things are getting harder by the minute”, “hanging in there”, “at least I am here”, etc. Or do you give a more up beat and positive answer like “I’m doing great!”, “I’m happy to be alive!”, “I’m enjoying life!”?
Whenever you are talking with a friend, about another friend who is not present at the time, how do you refer to him? Do you criticize him and talk about all his defects? Or do you praise him and mention how much you like him?
The same goes for your job, when you talk about your daily tasks, your boss or the company you work for.
Exactly what type of language do you use?

The words we say, just like our thoughts, have a great influence on how we live our lives. When we talk negatively about anything, we surround ourselves with negativity. On the other hand, every time we talk in a positive, productive way, we create a positive context that invites us to continue doing so.
However, without a doubt, this is one of the hardest factors that determine the way we live our lives, to control.

I, personally, am still in the daily struggle to ensure that the words that come out of me are positive and productive, something that, specially in the beginning, is really hard to do because we are so used to answer just to answer, that in most occasions we don’t even think about what we are saying.
Luckily, just like any other habit in life, after practicing for a while, it should become a natural practice in us.

It’s like they say: “If you don’t have anything good to say, keep quite”.

But, just how can we break the habit of talking ill about anything? This is a question that I have not been able to easily answer, since, like I just mentioned, I’m still working hard to break it myself. And even though, as the time passes, I have more days in a row talking positively, there are still a lot of times when the bad habit of talking ill, judging or stereotyping gets the best of me.

That said, there is an exercise I once read about and that I have been trying to practice lately. It consists of asking yourself three questions right before you say anything:
1- Is what I’m about to say really necessary, will it really contribute to the conversation?
2- If I say this, could I be hurting, criticizing or affecting anyone, present or not?
3- Is this really the right moment to say this?

Worth giving it a try, don’t you think?

5 determining factors on how you live your life. Factor #1.

The more I meditate about it, the more convinced I am. There are, among various, 5 factors that are decisive when determining how we live our lives.
And no, it’s not the country where you live in or how old you are, neither the era you are living in nor you socio economical status. Of course all these set a certain context to our lives and work as a starting point, but these are not the most important factors that define how we live our life.
It’s definitely not a matter of how many material things you own that defines how happy you are, neither is it how much you suffer that determines how spiritual your life is.
It’s also not how many times you go to church which determines how many blessings you deserve in your life, nor what’s your education level that defines how happy you are with your professional career.

I believe, no, I know that what really defines how each of us lives our lives are 5 factors that are linked to each other:

1- Our thoughts: what we let live in our mind.
2- Our talk: what we let leave our mind.
3- What we watch, read and listen to: what we let into our mind.
4- Our actions: how we behave.
5- The people that we surround ourselves with.

Factor #1: Our thoughts: what we let live in our mind.

“Everything we create, we do it twice: when we think about it and when we actually do it”, they say.
What is the very first thought you have each morning? Is it what a pain it is, having to wake up that early just to go to work and spend the day with people you don’t really like? Or are you thankful for the opportunity to live another day so you can keep walking towards your dreams?
Whenever you face a problem at home or at work, do you keep asking why you, what did you do to deserve that? Or do you think that it is a challenge that you need to overcome and a lesson you need to learn and that, just like everything else in life, it will pass and, along with the pain it caused you, it will stay behind as you move forward in life with a lesson learned and a new set of tools that will be useful for the challenges ahead?

Definitely, the quality of our thoughts is automatically projected on to the quality of our life. Some times, especially at the beginning, it is really difficult to monitor the type of thoughts we have. (Hint: the average human brain has over 60 thousand thoughts in a normal day), even harder when we are used to complaining, however an exercise that always work to improve the quality of our thoughts is GIVING THANKS each and every morning when we wake up. Thanks for the gift of a new day, thanks because we are healthy and full of energy to live it fully, thanks because we will share another day with the people we love, thanks because we have a job to go to, thanks simply because we have a life to live.
Another great exercise that really helps align our thoughts is “Creative Visualization”.
This is something that even some of the top sports stars in world practice and it is very easy to do.
It’s all about drawing a mental picture of how we want to live our life. You can do it as big as to include all aspects of your life, adjust it to what you want for a special day or be as specific as Tiger Woods drawing a mental picture just before making one of his greatest shots, picturing each movement, each sensation from making a swing to the ball dropping into the green.
To some people this exercise sounds unreal or like it is too much work, but it really isn’t.
On the contrary it is absolutely real, because just like an architect needs to draw the plans of the building he is about to build, each person needs to be the “architect” of their life and draw the plans for what they want for it.
It’s also not that much work. What’s hard is really figuring out what you want out of life, but once you do this it’s easy to put it in paper. It can be a drawing, a list or a story, something you can revisit each morning to remind you how you want to live your life.

Why every morning? Ever since I read this for the first time I asked the same question. Today, after a good couple of years of practicing it and after seeing its positive results, I understand that, for me, being thankful and reading my life plan every day not only helps me focus on that plan but it also reminds me of how I want to behave each day to project that life. It also reminds me of the other 4 factors that help determine how I live my life, but I guess I can talk about these in the next post, in the mean time, think about it, share your comments and tell us: How do you want to live your life?

Put criticism aside and focus on the positive.

If you work in a corporation or any other type of organization, if you are a student at an institution or a member of an association, or even if you are a member of a family or have a group of friends, I’m pretty sure you have seen this happen at least once if not frequently:
Someone at work is promoted, somebody gets a scholarship, and someone else gets a raise or achieves something good for them, and its enough for others to start questioning why is that person doing so well.
Why is it that people can not be satisfied and celebrate that the other person is doing great? Why do we need to look for faults in that person so we can argue why they should not have received the promotion? Do you really think that criticizing that person and digging deep into them to find their greatest defects will produce a positive result for the criticizer? Do you suppose the group will somehow benefit by listing the reasons why they think that person should not have gotten the promotion, the scholarship or raise?

That way of thinking is just plain wrong, it shows envy and envy is a very poor sentiment and a thought of scarcity and it definitely goes against us in the end.

Think about it, I’m sure that most of us at some time or another, and I count myself in, must have made this very mistake. But really, what have we achieved by it, if not just giving ourselves a bitter moment and even worse, hurting someone who really happened to deserve that opportunity?

And we all really deserve every single opportunity life gives us; it’s up to us to decide whether or not to take it. But never should it be in somebody’s hands to judge if the other person deserves it or not.

So here is my proposal: Next time we see that someone around us is doing great, it can be colleague who got a promotion, a friend who just bought a new home, a brother who won a scholarship or a friend who just got married; instead of looking for the weak spot to criticize them, why not focus on the positive traits this people have, which helped them get what they got and praise those traits?

“It takes one to know one” they say, and I think that is absolutely right.
When we see all those positive traits in others it’s only because we are looking at a reflection of what is also inside us. If we recognize someone because she is always happy and smiling it is because we know that we also have the capability of sharing a smile with others. When we find a person who has the courage and strength to follow his dreams and work hard for them, it is because we know that deep inside us there is such a source of passion and strength too to follow ours.
So whenever we celebrate the good in others, not only are we praising them and encouraging them to keep it up, but we are also bringing out the good in ourselves.

Let’s not then bury all those positive traits in us under a deep cover of envy and scarcity, but rather next time you want to criticize or judge someone for having a great moment, stop and think about 5 positive traits that person must have had in order to get that opportunity. I’m sure that if you take a hard loving look, you will see each of those traits in you, thus opening yourself to the opportunities life has in stock for you too.

To sell more you need to stop selling.

For years I’ve heard the same thing every January, even worse I keep hearing it for the following 11 months as well.
No matter the company or the title o seniority of the person who says it, the words are always the same: “We have to sell more”, “Our sales objectives increased by xx% versus the prior year”, “We have to pre-empt our competitors”, “Bring in new accounts and look for new ways to get more money from your current ones”.

Attention is always focused on how to bring more money to the organization and how we are going to get our clients to give us more money. There are even entire strategies fully dedicated to selling more, and seminars teaching us how to be persuasive, have great presentation skills and be excellent objection’s managers.

But even with all this, every year we face the same problem: We are not meeting the numbers. And to justify this, a never ending series of reasons get thrown on the table: “The client hasn’t come back to me yet”, “They cut down their budget”, “Legal did not approve the contracts on time”, etc.
And in answer to these, we hear feedback like: “Forget the phone and have a face to face meeting”, “Take xx person with you”, “Make them see the mistake they are doing”, “Push harder”. All fair suggestions, after all a simple phone call is definitely not enough. To really communicate what you have to say you are better of having a face to face meeting; also bringing someone more experienced or with more seniority with you might really help you close the sale.
But even with all these the problem remains.

Maybe it is because of my background as an advertising professional, but I think that the real problem resides in that people get so obsessed with selling and selling more, that they forget what it is that which they were selling in the first place.
What I mean is when you work in the Client Services department of and advertising agency in a mid level position, your most important responsibility is to make sure that you PROVIDE your CLIENT with the best SERVICE. Your objectives are very clear; the reason for your position to exist is precisely to HELP your client, PROVIDE her with SOLUTIONS to the challenges she has, and work as a TEAM to really SATISFY her needs. And all of this without having to think about how much you should charge your client for it. Let the executives of the Agency worry about that. Or at least that was my training a 12 years ago when I started working in the Advertising industry.

The problems is though, that as you keep advancing in your career and moving up on the “corporate ladder” you risk forgetting about service and, without really noticing it, you start adopting the philosophy of “sell and sell more”. There is no more space left in your agenda to think about service, you let your team work on that, and you focus on coming up with new schemes to charge more.

Now, I must confess that at some point I too was guilty of this. Lucky for me though, I was able to stop and think and remember that in 12 years of professional career, the times when I’ve had the best sales results have been precisely those when I stopped worrying about sales and revenue, and started focusing on looking for new ways to collaborate with my clients and help them get better results for their business, not mine.
The times when my clients have been more opened to listen to my suggestions and following my recommendations have been those when I did not talk only about how much more money they would need to pay.
In fact, if you want to loose your client’s attention immediately, just tell them they need to spend more on you, let them know that you are there only for their money. Maybe, if you are a hell of a sales person, you might get to sell them once or three times even, but sooner or later they will catch up and realize you are just after their budget and, for them, talking to you will just not make any sense again.
On the contrary, when you demonstrate an authentic interest for their business and you are really focused on providing them with the best solutions you have available for them without discriminating the amount of their budget, you win not only a great credibility, but the certainty that that client will always be open to hear you out and accept your proposals even if those mean a big investment on their part. And they will invest what you propose because they will know that you are not just after their money, but rather you are looking out for them and what’s best for their project.

When I think of this I just can’t help remembering Robin Sharma’s advice: “People like to do business with the people they like”.

It really isn’t rocket science; there are no complicated recipes to do it. You just need to take away that eco that resonates inside your mind yelling: “Sell and sell more” and instead repeat to yourself: “seek first to understand your client’s needs and then make sure you are able to deliver on them”.

As Tim Sander says in his book: The Likeability Factor: “There is nothing like connecting with each person’s sweet spot to become relevant to them”.