Recently, a friend asked me to talk with him over dinner because he was contemplating a major career change. Were not talking about a subtle one either. I won’t tell you exactly to protect my friends identity… Trust me, It was major. Let’s just say one career direction to another totally different one that would require school loans again, years of classes, certifications, internships, etc., etc.

After a long conversation over some excellent Italian food, I realized that many of the factors related to this decision were based in the current [Soon to be the past] job situation. The emotion backing the thinking behind this career move was all there. And why wouldn’t it be…Right? If there weren’t any emotions [negative ones] about the “Current” job, isn’t it possible that my friend wouldn’t have had as much motivation to make such an extreme move?

I decided that there must be a way to get him to focus on the decision without having as much of that decision process based in the past negative emotional state. But how?

Thinking on my feet, [actually, in my seat] I remembered Michael Losier’s worksheet on “Contrasting” from his book “The Law Of Attraction”

If you have the book it’s on page 67. [Ok, this is weird, I actually remembered it was on page 67! Wasn’t sure, so I looked it up and sure enough...] Also you can review my blog entries on A Simple Action Part 1,2, & 3 and other entries on contrasting Here:

A Simple Action Part 1 • A Simple Action Part 2 •  A Simple Action Part 3 • A bit more on contrasting

In Michael’s worksheet he teaches us how to make a split page. Place the things we don’t want on one side first, then using that list contrast them to create a list of what we do want on the other.

Don’t Want                  Want
_____________|_______________
.                   |
.                   |
.                   |

It occurred to me that my friend was looking at his new career in this emotional view from the past.

I explained what I had learned and used from Michael’s Law of attraction worksheet and suggested that he first do the same. But this time with a twist.

What if the very things he didn’t like were going to just re-appear in the new one? I think you’d agree that that is the case in most situations. New spouse? Same issues, New friends? Same problems, New Car? Same flat tires!

Many people will take this beyond the conscious level which I believe is the ultimate solution, but here… We’ll keep it to something you can see on paper and work-out on the conscious level first….

My next question for my friend about the worksheet was; Which things on the list that you “want” have a guarantee attached? In other words, If you are going to create a whole new career. Why not create it from the right side of the list (What you want) without the emotional attachment to the left side (What you don’t want)

THe process is to tap into the natural human nature and list the negative things that are covering up the true things you wanted in the first place. Once the “Don’t want” list is done it’s only then you can contrast and convert the don’t want to the want.

Ok, to help you follow what I’m saying here, here are a few things my friend had he didn’t like:

Don’t Want:
My boss doesn’t listen.
I primarily work inside with no windows.
I work to many hours for not enough pay.
The work load is to heavy and they are giving me more and more to do.

Want:
I want a boss that will listen to my ideas.
I want to primarily work outside with limited office time.
I want to work less hours for better pay.
I’m willing to take on any workload with the proper amount of additional staff to handle the project.

Is there a guarantee, after all the additional school loans, classes, certifications, internships, years of study, etc. that;
His new boss would listen? No.
That he’s work would primarily be outside? Possibly. But that depends on the nature of the new job.
Is there a guarantee for;
Less hours for better pay? not really.
the right amount of staff per workload on a project? again, No.

So, All said and done… The amount of items on his list that would be guaranteed by making this move was drastically less than he thought when he looked at it in the fully emotional “Don’t want” mode. And, by learning what things were possible in this new career decision. he had a bit of a guide as to what to look for as a new career and even what to request when interviewing for that job.

By going from “Don’t want” to “Want” to “What’s guaranteed?” You can see by my friends example there is less dependent on people and more dependent on the type of career itself.

Mainly, it helped him to re-design his plans to do a few things he had been dreaming of doing for years before stepping into a situation that may or may not improve his life. His decision to make this career change is still a positive goal, But now it is more focused on what he truly wants to do and under what conditions he is willing to do it.

Simply yours,
Ron

Thanks to Michael Losier and http://www.lawofattractionbook.com

The standard dictionary provides seven different meanings for the word discipline. We’ll focus on one.

A system of rules of conduct or method of practice:  - “for such a plan to work requires discipline”.

This definition implies that being disciplined requires a plan. For example, my plan is to get up every morning at 7:30, read some good literature for 30 minutes, then I’m out the back into the mountain trails to workout for an hour. Equally, as important as my plan is my personal action or self-discipline.

I hear ya… “Self-discipline is a Simple Action” Cool!

In my opinion, my resolve to get out of bed when the alarm sounds is critical to my plan’s success. As one comedian noted, “How many plans has the snooze button destroyed? As my first decision of the day, I will go back to sleep! Nothing like starting out the day with a little procrastination.”

Procrastination is the antithesis of planned success. For me, the first decisions of the day create a domino effect. If I start well, I end well. Why would I expect anyone to work with me in my business, unless I have the self-discipline to make the small decisions early in the day that forward my plan?

A good leader must have the discipline to work toward his or her vision single-mindedly, as well as to direct his or her actions toward the goal. Action is the mark of a leader. A leader can analyze aspects of their life or business actions as long as they do not get stuck in that mode. To analyze briefly is fine to gather information, track progress, assign duties to staff, etc. But it is always the “doing something” in pursuit of the vision and the inspiring of others to do the same that works.

I invite you to review your life plan or business plan. I invite you to be disciplined with your plan. I encourage you to include in your daily/weekly plan the following four action items:

1. Introduce or discuss your plan with at least two people you trust.
2. Enroll at least two people in a “Mastermind” group who will participate 100%.
3. Focus on your goals.
4. Encourage your mastermind team to keep you accountable to your commitments and be there for the other members of your team to hold them accountable as well!
Yours in Success,

Ron Maurer

Lists give you the big picture.  So now you have a whole bunch of stuff that you are going to do, it is all in front of you, and you are present to “How am I going to get them all done?”!  The answer is to schedule it.

Scheduling actions gets things out of your head.  Create the specific time period when you are going to do it, and then do it when you say you are going to do it.  You also want to schedule catch up time and your free time and recreation time and anything else that is important to you.  These times are SO important if you want any balance in your life.

Now you might be thinking “I don’t want to be slave to my schedule!”.  Just remember that YOU made up the schedule.  You made it up based on what results you are committed to and what is important to you.  Know that it will only be your thoughts and feelings that will get in the way and notice how those specific thoughts and feelings leave you disempowered and distract you.  Remember, you are just having them.  Let them be there, thank them for sharing, and kiss them good-bye!

Schedule the stuff you don’t want to do along with the stuff you want to do.  Just do it.  Since you have already scheduled the things you want to do that inspire you and will move your dreams forward, you know that they will get done (and when!).  Doing the stuff that you don’t want to do is NOT sabotaging your dreams, it’s being responsible.

To finish up, the most important thing to know is this…  You will only get done what you got done today and you won’t get done what you didn’t get done.  Acknowledge yourself for what you did and didn’t do.  Nothing is wrong, it is just what is so.  Then review your lists, schedule your actions and get some good sleep.  Sweet dreams!

Russ, Once again…Thanks for your timely words, wisdom and consistent willingness to share it!

Yours,

Ron

Thoughts and feelings will never get the job done.  Worrying and rolling things over and over in your head will never get the job done, and you will lose sleep and productivity.  Actions get things done.  A structure for existence is a system or tool you use to get all those thoughts out of head and into the world of action, and discipline will be required to manage your actions.  Your memory is the worst place to keep lists and is totally unreliable.  We WILL forget things.  The structure allows you to be totally present to what you are doing when you are doing it.

The first step is to make lists; three of them.  #1 What I am going to do now, #2 What I am going to do later, #3 What I am never going to do.  Face it, there are a lot of things that we think we have to do and we don’t, really.  Eliminating them right up front will unload a lot of burden.  Then prioritize your remaining two lists.  The first one will be short, the second very long.  As things on list #1 come off, things on list# 2 come on to list #1.  And since life will continue to life us, there will always be more things going onto both lists.  Just write the new stuff down during the day and do nothing with them until you add them to your lists.  You want to review and update your lists every day and have only ONE time during the day to do this.  I recommend the evening.  Plan the next day, not the one you are in.  What would it be like to wake up and know what there is to do today?  What would it be like to go to sleep knowing what you are already going to be doing the next day?

We’ll finish up things with more from Russ on lists tomorrow, Stay tuned!

Thanks for your valuable insight and advice Russ!

Hi Ron!
Good to hear from you.  I’d like to add a little to what you said in your post.  There is tons out there to help manage one’s time.  Companies, businesses, systems, hundreds of books all created to deal with that.  Not all are the right ones for certain individuals; I recommend Mission Control, and some of the content below was learned there.  What is important is to understand your story or interpretation of how time occurs to you.  Creating an empowering context is always the first thing to do.  For instance, if your story about time or yourself is “I don’t have enough time” or “I can’t get it all done”, guess what?  That’s what you will get!  You are always winning the games you are playing, so if this is your game, you will win!!  Create an empowering context for yourself and give up any attachment that you know how to do it.  If you did, you would have already done it.  The space of not knowing how is the space that you will grow into and expand yourself, allowing others to contribute and creates a clearing for new ideas to arise.

Overwhelm is quite distinct from performance and I will only deal with overwhelm for now.  Like everything in life, it is actually very simple in nature and we make it complicated.  Overwhelm is simply the lack of having a structure for existence that is big enough to manage the games that you are playing.  The bigger your games, the bigger a structure is needed to disappear overwhelm.  (You might want to consider that if you never find yourself in overwhelm, you might not be playing a big enough game.)  Overwhelm is an opportunity to expand and get bigger than you know yourself to be.  It is not a bad thing, and we will make it bad if we don’t expand the structures that we use to get out of it.  Over and over again.  You may already think you have a great structure, but are you using it?

I’ll post more from Russ tomorrow when he reviles “The Key to eliminating overwhelm”

It’s amazing, the SimpleActions concept continues to attract people looking to improve one area or another to the site. And even more amazing is how great that makes me feel. Thank You!

Over the last few weeks I have been in a state of overwhelm. Yesterday, with the help of a very dear friend… I went to my own site and reviewed the “Overcoming Overwhelm” post from January 18th, 2009.

Yes, I actually re-read and re-applied my own advice! It was cool. [and it helped]

Another friend suggested that the list created in this process of brainstorming be called your “Success List” rather than calling it a “task” or “to-do” list. And I truly felt Successful yesterday and today as I checked off some of the success items in my new success notebook. [Might as well call it that, right?]

So, if you are feeling a bit of overwhelm in these strange economic times… I suggest you go back to the post and give it a try.

Please feel free to share the site with friends, buddy up and hold each other accountable to the SimpleActions it takes to achieve your goals together.

As always…
Yours,
Ron Maurer

Here’s what you do; Write down what you don’t want first, then as I covered in the “Contracting” blog entry, use that list to mirror or reflect the opposite of what you don’t want.

You can learn more about this in Michael Losier’s book: “The Law Of Attraction”

But what’s this have to do with taxes?

I thought I had a system… Never again would I have to crunch at the last minute to get it all together… Instead, what I did get is a topic for my blog to offer you.

Here’s the deal; I have everything set up so each day, each week, each bank statement, or at least, each month I would have the opportunity to input each transaction for my business (and my personal items) into my quick books system.

The goal? Apply my own simple actions to the task at hand and this year I would be ready with time to spare… All I can say is “Not!”

So, here I am admitting to you that with all the opportunities that I have had to keep ahead of the curve this year I blew it!

Technically; I did get through March… but a hard drive crash took me off track. Then the whole month to fix it took me out of “habit”. And now, it’s the power supply to that computer. All excuses aside; What a perfect example of what not to do.

I didn’t re-set my priorities to fit the circumstances I was up against! If only I had a proper back-up. If only I would have taken April, May, & June to re-do Jan-March.

This is what I turned simple actions into… look close:

A simple action, inconsistently or not done, compounded over time, created a predictably out of control result! Grrr!

So for me, once again… It’s tax season with one catch. I have the crunch coming up to get it done. (the CPA is already ready and waiting for what they need)

A lesson learned about the very thing I teach as admittedly a hard lesson to learn!

Always yours,

Ron

____

How do athletes go from contender to superstar? How do ordinary people
become extraordinary? Here’s a secret to achieve breakthrough performance in
your everyday life.

Everyone has times when they feel like they are unstoppable, times when they
are doing whatever it is they do with ease, grace and incredible skill. But
no one, not even the best of the best, can operate in that ideal
performance-state 100% of the time.

The secret to achieving extraordinarily high levels of performance is
learning how to take command of your mind and body so that you can operate
at your peak when you need to, and relax and recover in between. Here’s how:

First, goal-setting is a key. Many people don’t like to set goals because
they don’t like to fail. However, you must develop mental toughness if
you’re going to grow, and setting and achieving goals is one way to do it.
Another way is to develop the ability to get rid of negative thoughts when
they occur and substitute images of success and positive results.

Finally, sticking to a sensible program of self-care - including good
nutrition, regular restful sleep, built-in periods of laughter and play, and
vigorous physical exercise - will do wonders for your self-image.

It is natural to start thinking about these things at a new year. So why not
take that natural new-year energy, refuse to settle for “ordinary” in your
life, and goal-set to go after the extraordinary.  If you do, go after it
with everything you have and believe in your ability to do it!

Lou Tice

The Pacific Institute

The Pacific Institute, Inc. copyrights 1997-2009. All rights reserved.

Winner’s Circle Network with Lou Tice (WCN) is a registered trademark of The
Pacific Institute.

_____

Have a GREAT day!

~Ron

Enough is enough!”   “I can’t take this anymore!!”   “There is simply too much on my plate, I don’t see how I can do it.”

Sound familiar? Well as Bob Dylan put it so well… “The Times They Are A Change’in”, and it seems that when it comes to feeling the stress and overwhelm, the changes aren’t making life any easier.

I thought that the advancements I dreamed of while watching “The Jetsons” as a kid would have been here by now. And I guess that many of them have arrived. But, they don’t seem to be making life any easier!

Change is in the air as we sit on the brink of a new President and just after a new year what better time than now to tackle this overwhelm head-on!

I invite you to take a deep breath, grab a pad and your favorite pen, and lets look at a simple tool to help you solve your most overwhelming problem - overwhelm.

Here we go; Get in a quiet place to do each step.

1) It’s brainstorm time; I want you to take as many lines or even pages and start writing down everything you have to do and everything you want to do…everything you have been assigned or asked to do by a boss or spouse. If “Go to Spain” comes up?… write it down. If “Brainstorm about all the things I am supposed to do” comes up?… You might want to go to the blog: www.SimpleActions.com because… You’re me! (Ha.. Just kidding.)

2) Now, Once you think you have everything you can think of. I want you to pick one thing. It could be an easy item or a tough one. It doesn’t matter. Just pick one!!

3) Grab another pad if you have one. If not… It’s OK, just flip a few pages back to allow for future items that you might think of to be added to step one’s list. Now, put that one item you chose in big letters on the top of the page.

4) Now repeat step one; But this time you are going to brainstorm about all the things that you could do to move forward on this item. And do it as if you had all the time, energy, and finances totally abundant and available to you right now!

5) Here’s the fun part. You can take a break at any time because you can pick up where you left off very easily in this process. But I do recommend that you do your best to finish each brainstorm as completely as possible especially when you’re on a roll!

Hint; It may help to think of it as a map you are creating from now to the point in time that this one item is complete. The goal is to break it down to simple steps you can do in a short period of time.

6) When you’re done with the first one, Stop and imagine how that would feel to actually be done with this item… pat yourself on the back and go to the next one. Which one? I don’t care, Just pick one!

**When I did this the first time I actually got three big 5-packs of letter size pads. Each one ended up with an item heading I called a “Project Heading” I went all out with three colors of G2 Gel pens, clipboards, nails in the wall, etc.

Do whatever works for you and is still something that keeps the process moving!

Some may argue that you have to prioritize each item. then that you must prioritize the task list aka: Action Items. I say “Bull _____” Yep, let others go out and prioritize and micromanage every minute I thought… That’s not for me. The point is that you are moving forward on the things that are important to you. And sometimes that’s a life long dream of doing something outrageously fun (Like that trip to Spain?)

I think that the things you have to do and the ones you love to do can be the same things. So just pick what you feel like doing that day that will move you forward toward the goal or completion of that project and one day… You’ll feel more like doing the things you didn’t want to do on another day, etc.

Are you ready to start moving forward toward your goals and dreams? Ok, Great! You are going to apply the simple actions concept to your lists.

7) Each time you find a few moments in your day to work on your project(s) It’ll all be right there. Pick what you can be passionate about in that moment by reviewing the project titles. Look through the list of tasks of that item and find something that you can do quickly. A phone call you’ve meant to make. An email to that contact that can help you achieve this goal., etc. and then it’s easy…

Now you got it? Great!… Do it!

You will find that when you do this consistently, compounded over time… you’ll see that you are creating the predictable and controllable results you’ve set out to achieve!

Get started Now!

Yours,

Ron

If we go back and think about it… would there ever be any misunderstanding in the presence of total understanding and clear information?

The next time you are tempted to tell someone that you misunderstood, stop yourself, take responsibility, and examine how you came to that conclusion. Did you gather all the information possible before deciding you had enough info to decide? Kinda the same thing right?

Information can lead you to a fuller plate to decide from or to understand better. It’s like having more targets to shoot at… There’s less chance to miss.

You can; Misjudge your situation, find yourself misaligned with others, your ideas can be misapplied, When a child knows the behavior expected and make the conscious choice to act up anyway they are misbehaving. The list goes on and on.

Questions can be a powerful tool and the bigger and better the question, the better your answers will become.

So, to avoid being misunderstood you could ask the question “Do you understand?” or even better “I want to be sure there are no misunderstandings, do you have all the information you need?” and “Are there any further questions you might have so we can avoid any misunderstandings?”

Also, along the same line of questions; You may want to ask “Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions to be sure I have gone over everything clearly?” This way you can review for them to be sure they understand.

Understandably Yours,

Ron