Rendering Service to Others

“Consciously or unconsciously, everyone of us does render some service or another. If we cultivate the habit of doing this service deliberately, our desire for service will steadily grow stronger, and it will make not only for our own happiness, but that of the world at large.” – Mahatma Gandhi

To be of service to others is our highest calling.  To do this service with love in our hearts, is to know true and unbridled joy.  What better time of year to begin?

Forget the Stairs, Take the Elevator to Success (part three)

The third reason we take the stairs instead of the elevator is that we tend to have this nasty habit of not believing in our talents, skills and abilities.  In part two we discussed the importance of having written goals.  But all the written goals in the world won’t help us if we don’t believe we can achieve our intentions.  All too often we develop a dream, create an action plan, we start out, and immediately begin to doubt ourselves.  We remind ourselves of past failures and we convince ourselves we’ll never be able to accomplish our stated goal.  Our friends and loved ones begin to tell us how flawed our plans look, and how we’re sure to fail.  Does it sound painfully familiar?  Let’s take a closer look at these obstacles one at a time.

The key to overcoming self doubts is to keep a detailed inventory of your strengths and accomplishments.  Start today and make a list of all your strengths.  Ask your supporters for help in creating your list.  Stretch your memory for things you are good at in your work and home life, and go all the way back to your school days.  Do the same for your accomplishments.   Don’t discount the letter you won in high school or the spelling bee you aced in grade school.   You most likely will uncover talents and skills that you can leverage in your latest undertaking.  And you’ll feel better about yourself in the process.  Make a date with yourself to update and review your list often, at least once a month.

Next take a look at past failures.  Understand that nothing is a failure if it provides you with a lesson that shortens your learning curve as you move forward.  In his excellent book, “Think and Grow Rich”, Napoleon Hill describes how Thomas Edison approached his attempts at inventing the incandescent electric light bulb.  When interviewed, Edison explained to Hill that he considered each of his 10,000 “failures”  as  learning experiences that moved him closer to his goal.  This is a characteristic of the super successful that we should all adopt.  Super Achievers view both success and “failure” as progress towards achievement, and we can train ourselves to do the same.

Finally, I encourage you to challenge your negative thoughts and limiting beliefs to determine if the thought is even true.  All too often we consider a thought to be true simply because we thought it!  When held up to scrutiny, we can sometimes discover that the thought isn’t currently true, and perhaps never was.  When I was in high school, I had a math teacher who told me I just wasn’t good at math.  For years, I believed it to be true,  because  a teacher, someone I respected, told me it was.   Then one day I realized that I could easily handle the basic math required for my chosen occupation.   I was able to relinquish this stressful and limiting thought, and immediately felt better about myself.  Since then, I’ve discovered that I can do more than I expected in solving math problems, and when I can’t, there’s always someone who is willing to help me.

Now it’s your turn.  Get off those stairs, and hop on the elevator to your success.  Believe in yourself, tell yourself everyday that you have all the skills you need to accomplish anything you dream.  Don’t allow anyone to steal your dreams, and don’t destroy them yourself.  You can do it if you think you can!  As baseball great Tug McGraw liked to say, “You gotta Believe”!!

The Second Step in Riding the Elevator to Success

In my last post, I suggested that the number one reason we use the stairs and not the elevator to success is that we fail to harness our minds to succeed.  The second reason we’re huffing and puffing up the stairs is that we don’t tap into the power of dreaming BIG and developing written goals to achieve our dreams.

For years, the most successful motivational speakers quoted research done by Harvard or Yale on the remarkable results of graduates who identified their goals and put them in writing.  Recent information suggests that the survey was never conducted, and the whole thing is a myth.  Brian Tracey was quoted as saying that if it wasn’t true, it should be.  I agree!  True or false, if that “survey” motivated even one person to convert their dreams into written goals, it was a good thing.

Now let’s move on to what I’ve found to be absolutely true.  Up until last August, I was one of those people who resisted putting my goals into writing. I  had all kinds of good (read lame) excuses, and I pretended that I didn’t really need to write stuff down.   Then, I attended Jack Canfield’s Breakthrough to Success workshop and I put my goals into writing.  Better yet, I review my goals on a regular basis.  In the last 11 months, I’ve amazed myself with the progress I’ve made in several major areas of my life.

I encourage you to try it for yourself.  Start with one  goal.  Put it on an index card and carry it with you.  Review it several times a day.  Watch what happens.  Email me with your results.   I bet it won’t be long before we’re celebrating your success!  My email address is: mross@successseeds.net

Forget the Stairs, Take the Elevator to Success (part 1)

Ok, I admit it.  There was a time when I believed that you had to work hard to succeed.  I believed all those old sayings like “put your nose to the grindstone”,  “put your shoulder to the wheel”, but they really imply drudgery don’t they?  Success does require action, but not miserable and tedious work that we hate.  There is an easier way, I’ve found it and I want you to discover it also.  This is the first in a series of posts on riding the elevator to success!

The number one reason we fail to take the shortcut to success is we don’t harness our minds.  I like to call it “dressing our minds for success”.  This practice is the secret behind the success of professional athletes, and folks like Andrew Carnegie, Napoleon Hill, W.Clement Stone, Jack Canfield and many others.

Our minds are capable of over 50,000 thoughts per day.  Without any control, our minds bounce around like a ping pong ball on steroids.  On top of that, most of us produce an overwhelming number of negative thoughts.  We’re products of our environments, we’ve been fed negative messages in alarming numbers since childhood.  Studies show that the average 2 year old receives over 200 negative messages per day! It continues throughout our lifetime, so we have to be very careful to weed out the negative messages.  We can’t always control the environment, but we can control the thoughts we allow to dominate our minds.  The easiest way is to simply challenge the thought.  We often question the validity of a statement made by someone else, but if the thought is our own, we accept it as verbatim.  So thoughts such as “I’m too old to get a degree”, “I’ll never be promoted because my boss hates me”, “I’m  no good at math” are never questioned, just accepted as fact.

The next time you find yourself thinking a negative, limiting thought, stop and ask yourself if the thought is really true, if you absolutely know that it is true.  Next ask yourself how the thought makes you feel, is the thought helping you or hurting your chances to succeed?  If you decide that your thought is hurtful and hindering your chances for success, let it go!  There are a number of programs that can help you eliminate negative and limiting beliefs.  I recommend that you check out the Sedona Method or The Work by Byron Katie.  Be gentle in your practice to eliminate negative thoughts, you don’t want to replace one negative thought with another.  I promise that with practice, you can open up a gentler, more productive world for yourself.

Make it a daily practice to dress your mind for success by feeding it powerful thoughts and harnessing its power to work for you rather than against you!

Next week, we’ll discuss the second step in riding the elevator to success.   Until then, keep thinking those positive thoughts and dress your mind for success every day!

How Education and Training Helped Me NOT to Achieve My Goal!

It probably sounds crazy for a professional educator, trainer, and motivational speaker to write an article with that kind of title, doesn’t it? But it captured your attention, didn’t it? Well, I promise to explain further, but first I’d like to take you back to the start of my professional journey.

Almost twenty years ago, as a forklift driver, I ordered production materials from the stockroom, kept the assembly lines supplied, and delivered finished goods to a receiving area. But I wanted to be a shop floor supervisor.

My supervisor suggested I join APICS, an organization that specializes in educating operations management professionals. The local APICS chapter was very supportive—how could these professionals be interested in a blue-collar worker like me?–and I attended all their meetings, even joined their board of directors. As I began to pass exams, I gained confidence and contributed whatever I could to the APICS chapter. My company did not reimburse line workers for this kind of training, so my membership fees and certification expenses would have to come out of my own pocket. I worried constantly about the cost, worried that I was short-changing my family by spending family money for fees, study materials, and exams.

But becoming a shop floor supervisor was more than a goal, it became my passion. I started observing the actions of the supervisors and managers in my company, how they communicated with their employees, and came to realize that my soft skills and my technical skills would have to improve if I intended to reach my objective of supervising others. About that time, I saw an ad for the Dale Carnegie Course in Human Development. I knew I had to have this training. Once again, I had to plunk down my own dollars—and it felt like a lot of dollars—but I was sure I was on the right track, and thankfully, my husband supported my plans. My instructor, Les Singleton, welcomed me warmly into the class.

As soon as the class started, I realized that I had focused so much on the leadership skills the class promised to deliver that I had overlooked the public speaking aspect! During my first weeks, whenever I had to speak, I was so nervous that I could scarcely hear my own voice over the pounding of my heart. But little by little my confidence grew, and under Les’s tutelage, my speaking got better, and my self esteem grew as well.

By the time my Dale Carnegie class was over, my CPIM training was nearing completion, and my employer was downsizing. Suddenly, the opportunity I was looking for did not seem likely, at least not with this employer. I realized that if  I continued to work there, I wouldn’t be likely to achieve my goal. So I gave my notice, planning to take a part-time position and use the free time to work on my resume and hunt for the supervisory position I so passionately wanted.

At the same time, a funny, dynamic trainer named Phil Van Hooser spoke at an APICS meeting. He spoke about leadership, and about developing a positive attitude. He was about to lead a series of supervisory training workshops at the local college. I don’t have to tell you who signed up! When the class started I was the only non-supervisor in the room, and I was plenty uncomfortable about it. But I sat up in front so I wouldn’t have to think about how I didn’t belong there. I absorbed every word, took copious notes, and then read them over and over, committing it all to memory.

I realized I was building an arsenal in the pursuit of my goal. In addition to my CPIM training, the Dale Carnegie course, and the supervisory workshops, another powerful weapon was the Zig Ziglar tapes I listened to on my daily commute.

The job market in the late 1980s was pretty tight, so my daily search through the newspaper didn’t take much time. There was no Internet to search, and I was too shy to ask any of my APICS contacts for leads (I guess I was pretty naïve).

One day there was a small ad: “local manufacturer seeks administrative assistant.” Guess how much I knew about being an administrative assistant? If you guessed nothing, you’d be over-stating my abilities. But I prepared my resume, and drove to the address listed. The small building, situated behind a bar in an older business area of town, badly needed paint; there were beer bottles in the front parking lot and weeds growing out of the planters at the front door. But I went in anyway, left my resume in the hands of a woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt, and left wondering if they would be in business long enough to interview me. But they called the next day, and of course, I went.

The jeans-and-sweatshirt woman, Deborah Rollins, explained that this company was a tier-one supplier of automotive components to General Motors. It was a Just–in-Time satellite plant, the only one among seven family-owned facilities. We discovered quickly that we shared a passion for inventory control, and the interview, which should have lasted a half-hour, went on for almost two hours. Deborah was Production Control Manager, responsible for all material management, shipping and receiving, and personnel and payroll. They were seeking an assistant for her, since production was expanding and they needed to hire another twenty people. She had already interviewed someone else with extensive administrative experience, but I felt optimistic when I left and immediately sent her a thank-you letter. She called a few days later. They had chosen the other candidate.

Six or eight weeks later, Deborah called again. The administrative person was resigning. Was I still interested in the job? She didn’t even get the words out of her mouth when I assured her I was! I gave notice at my part-time job and started ten days later. I would be making less than at my former position, which made some people doubt my reasoning in ditching a first-shift job with one of the highest paying companies in our small town, just to take a job for which I was not especially skilled (actually not skilled at all). But my intuition was telling me that I could learn a tremendous amount from this company and this woman who was willing to take a chance on a rookie.

To say that I devoted myself to Deborah would be an understatement; to say that she worked her magic on my office skills would be no small exaggeration. Some days, she typed shipping documents for me while I solved inventory problems for her. Many times, we worked twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. When I wasn’t glued to her side, I was out on the production floor, watching operations, looking for my chance to contribute. I noticed deficiencies in facility safety and material traceability, and I developed programs that fixed both. Soon I was teaching our safety program at some of the company’s other locations.

About a year after I started, Deborah and her new husband, our district manager, asked me to stay late so that we could discuss something in private. I expected them to ask me to teach safety training at another facility. Instead they informed me that they were leaving the area to manage other facilities for the company. They then said that I had been approved to replace Deborah—if I wanted it!

I drove home on air that night! I couldn’t wait for the next APICS meeting so that I could share my good news with my new friends. One of my certification buddies remarked, “Wow, I knew these courses would help us climb the company ladder, but you’ve gone from forklift driver to middle manager in almost one fell swoop.” That’s when I realized that the education and training I invested in helped me not to achieve my goal-—it helped me achieve much more than I ever imagined.

Since that time, I’ve continued to invest in more certifications and training, I’ve continued to seek out mentors, and I’ve continued to act on their advice. I now have my own company, I teach certification courses for a number of APICS chapters, and I deliver motivational and leadership training.

I named my company Mental Apparel because I’ve come to believe that if we dress our minds for success—if we choose our attitude as carefully as we choose our clothes, positive thoughts will drive our behaviors, then positive actions will follow, and success becomes inevitable. If you’re wondering what you can do to succeed in any economy, I suggest that you invest in your education, hone your skills, think good positive thoughts, and seek out the advice of those you admire. If you follow this simple advice, I can promise you this: It will take you further than you can imagine!

Finding Beauty Everywhere

Three years ago, I was coming home from a convention when I was given a gift by a stranger in an airport. I was changing planes in Minneapolis, and dragging my laptop, books, and souvenirs.  I was pretty worn out when I approached one of the moving sidewalks. I noticed an airport maintenance worker, a little Vietnamese man get on in front of me. He had two dust mops, one on the inside of the walkway, one on the outside and he was dusting the chrome plating. He was singing away. I started to notice all the faces coming towards me from the opposing walk way. Many of the travelers had on expensive business suits and carried the type of gear I was lugging. In other words, all the trappings of what we tend to consider “success” Most were scowling and looking as weary as I felt. I wondered then, and I wonder now, what did this middle age man, engaged in what many would consider a menial task, know about inner peace and happiness that so many others seemed to have forgotten? As soon as we reached the end, I caught up with him, thanked him and I kissed his cheek. Then I went to my gate, I sat down wrote out the story of Seng and I keep it in a file with other stuff I call my “laughing out loud file”. It reminds me to notice and appreciate the beauty in the world around me. And guess what? Beauty is in your garden, it’s in the park, it’s in the airport, it’s on the factory floor. If you look hard enough for beauty and wonder, you will find it. Sometimes in the least likely places.

Encourage Risk in Yourself and Others

All too often, we come across someone at a cross roads in their life. They ask us for advice and we counsel them to take the safe road. Don’t take any risks we advise, be cautious, be conservative and be bored to tears. The poet David White tells us that we are not exhausted by hard work; we’re exhausted by half-hearted work. How sad but true! We toil away for little money, less satisfaction, and we yearn for that something more, if only we knew what that something was. And the really sad news is that in this day and age, not taking risks is riskier than taking them. The truth is, there is no job security anymore, but we cling to a job we hate, knowing that it has just as good a chance of being eliminated as any other! My challenge to you, find the work that brings meaning to your life, that gives you joy, that allows you to lead others to a better path. Do it for yourself, do it for others, do it full time or part time, but become a pathfinder and lead with love.

Are you Dressing your Mind for Success or Failure?

So what’s your mind wearing these days?  Do you know?  I suspect that if you’re not consciously choosing good, clean, powerful thoughts, your mind is filled with junk.  We’re conditioned to believe in the importance of dressing for success, of putting the best foot forward, and we act accordingly.  Few of us would show up for the important interview or business meeting dressed in a bathrobe and slippers.  Not many of us would even consider going to church or to work in our bathing suits.  So why do we give so little thought or attention to how we dress our minds, our most sacred environment?  Try this little experiment over the next several days.  Keep track of every negative, low energy thought you put into your mind, and then exchang the negative thought with something positive and energizing.  See how you feel and see if positive thoughts don’t cause you to act differently.  Just as we can choose to change our clothing, we can choose to change our thought patterns.  Over time, this powerful action will become a habit, a habit which will drive you to new heights of success.

Give Economic Fears a Rest Today

The headlines in yesterday’s Washington Post proclaimed “As Markets Sink, US Tries to Halt Cycle of Fear”.  I wonder just how successful the government will be if our newspaper continues to print headlines like this one.  The media, or the “Fear Merchants” as I like to call them, continue to sell papers and boost their ratings by selling bad news.

Just for one day, why not take a break from the bad news, and conduct a little inventory?  Let’s start with your health.  When you woke up this morning, were you able to see and hear?  Were you able to get out of bed and bathe and dress yourself?  If so, you are better off than millions of people who can not perform these simple functions for themselves.  Let look at your living conditions.  Is there a roof over your head?  Do you have a bed and a heated room to sleep in?  Around the world, there are whole families sleeping on the streets with barely enough clothing to cover their bodies.  In some countries, shoes are an unknown luxury.  Take a look in your closet and count how many pair you own.  Now let’s look at your finances, is there a little money in your wallet?  Do you have a job or skills to sell to a potential employer?  There are many who would gladly change places with you.  Do you have family and friends who you can call on, if only for advice?  Is so, you have wealth beyond measure.

Notice how it feels in your body when you focus on abundance thinking.  Tomorrow, when you’re back to scanning those headlines and listening to the announcers discussing every excruciating detail of the economic downturn,  take note of the effect it is having on your body.  Use the information your body is giving you to decide how to best protect yourself.  The economy may be suffering, but you don’t have to.  You always have a choice!

Beating the Bad Economy Blues: Hang Out With Positive People

Surround yourself with like- minded, positive people.  That means that if you have negative, fearful people in your life, you’re going to have to limit your exposure to them and be very clear about what type of conversations you wish to engage in.  I’ve checked myself out of the “ain’t it awful club” and I’m quick to inform anyone who wants to commiserate on the economy that I simply won’t fill my mind with fearful thoughts.  Try this and you will see that you’re not only helping yourself, you’re giving others a chance to think differently as well.  You wouldn’t allow anyone to dump hazardous waste in your home or yard, so don’t allow others to damage your mind with stressful thoughts!  Begin to see negative thoughts for the toxic substances that they are, and protect your mind as your most sacred environment.  Today, refuse to allow “drive by trashing” of your mind.