I put on my workout clothes for later and head to the kitchen to make some coffee.
While the coffee brews, I do my sit ups and mentally review my list of priorities for the day.
My Power of Habits
Here’s what I do every day (no specific order).
1) Read/watch something that will educate me
2) Learn something about marketing
3) Connect with people that are making more money than me
4) Help another person move forward with their business
5) Blog
6) Miscellaneous other projects
7) Do some kind of exercise (pilates and golf are in the rotation right now)
Time flies by. My target is to complete my blog post by noon. Most days I’ll send an email to my list of followers as well. This is important to me because my followers are important to me.
Having developed the habit of moving myself and my business forward every single day has enabled me to do so many things the average person wouldn’t. The Power of Habit has helped me achieve outlier status. I’ve been able to achieve so much in my career not because I’m special, or lucky. It’s simply because I’m in the HABIT (again the power of habits) of taking action.
Finally, it brings me to my last habit, and one that I have struggled to implement for years. Yet it is the simplest of activities. It is mediation. I’ve tried, always quitting, to implement the habit in the past. This time, I’m participating in Oprah Winfrey and Depak Choprah’s 21-day Meditation Challenge – Perfect Health. I haven’t missed a day, and yes, I believe it has made a difference.
I love my life. My satisfaction comes from the Power of Habits, the strength of repetition, the backbone of success.
But the writing, the reading, the meditating, none of those come easy, save for the Facebook update. My monkey mind wants to chatter. It wants to read when I’m writing, and write when I’m reading. It wants to be on Facebook or in email all of the time. It wants to do anything else but the nothing that I want it to do during meditation. No matter what though, the chattering monkey mind, or The Resistance, as Steven Pressfield calls it, can be defeated over time, with your super human Power of Habit.
Habits are something we can all build over time. It starts with simple planning and preparation. You identify bad habits, find solutions, and implement them. You work on creating new habits, supporting them through planning and preparation.
Success is simple once you have the Power of Habit on your side.
The keys to your future are your daily habits. Start implementing new positive behaviors. Make them a habit, and take control of your future, today.
Use the Power of Habits to Create Your Own Success
What I’ve Learned From the Story of
the Wooden Bowl
You know how sometimes a story will teach you a life lesson.
I guarantee you will remember the tale of the Wooden Bowl tomorrow, a week from now, a month from now, a year from now.
The Wooden Bowl
A frail old man went to live with his son, daughter-in-law, and four-year-old grandson. The old man’s hands trembled, his eyesight was blurred, and his step faltered.
The family ate together at the table. But the elderly grandfather’s shaky hands and failing sight made eating difficult.. Peas rolled off his spoon onto the floor.
When he grasped the glass, milk spilled on the tablecloth.
The son and daughter-in-law became irritated with the mess. ’We must do something about father,’ said the son. ’I've had enough of his spilled milk, noisy eating, and food on the floor.’
So the husband and wife set a small table in the corner. There, Grandfather ate alone while the rest of the family enjoyed dinner.
Since Grandfather had broken a dish or two, his food was served in a wooden bowl.
When the family glanced in Grandfather’s direction, sometimes he had a tear in his eye as he sat alone.
Still, the only words the couple had for him were sharp admonitions when he dropped a fork or spilled food.
The four-year-old watched it all in silence.
One evening before supper, the father noticed his son playing with wood scraps on the floor. He asked the child sweetly, ‘What are you making?’ Just as sweetly, the boy responded, ’Oh, I am making a little bowl for you and Mama to eat your food in when I grow up. ‘
The four-year-old smiled and went back to work.
The words so struck the parents so that they were speechless. Then tears started to stream down their cheeks.. Though no word was spoken, both knew what must be done.
That evening the husband took Grandfather’s hand and gently led him back to the family table.
For the remainder of his days he ate every meal with the family. And for some reason,
neither husband nor wife seemed to care any longer when a fork was dropped, milk spilled, or the tablecloth soiled.
What I’ve Learned
I just love that story I’ve learned that, no matter what happens, how bad it seems today, life does go on, and it will be better tomorrow.
I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he/she handles four things:
a rainy day,
the elderly,
lost luggage, and
tangled Christmas tree lights.
I’ve learned that making a ‘living’ is not the same thing as making a ‘life.’ I’ve learned that life sometimes gives you a second chance. I’ve learned that you shouldn’t go through life with a catcher’s mitt on both hands. You need to be able to throw something back sometimes. I’ve learned that if you pursue happiness, it will elude you.
But, if you focus on your family, your friends, the needs of others, your work and doing the very best you can, happiness will find you. I’ve learned that whenever I decide something with an open heart, I usually make the right decision. I’ve learned that even when I have pains, I don’t have to be one. I’ve learned that every day, you should reach out and touch someone.
People love that human touch — holding hands, a warm hug, or just a friendly pat on the back.
Every morning, just before I start working on my tasks for the day, one of my first things I do is to review a set of daily inspirational and motivational documents. The document that interests me at the moment is “The Kekich Credos,” by Dave Kekich. It’s a list of 100 mantras for life and business. (I’ve attached a PDF copy for you as a bonus at the bottom of this post )
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
The first credo may be the most important. It starts,
“People will do almost anything to stay in their comfort zones. If you want to accomplish anything, get out of your comfort zone.” – The Kekich Credos
Unless we get out of our comfort zone, the reality is that we won’t make breakthroughs in our lives, our businesses, or our health.
You simply can’t coast through life if you want to get better. However, getting out of the old comfort zone is something everyone deals with and struggles to overcome.
Fighting the Comfort Zone
When you have bad days, you’ll be tempted to return to your comfort zone habits, (like eating poorly, etc.) but it’s also the time when you need to fight against that the most.
I fight that desire many days. I wanted to tell you this because I know you probably feel the same way some days.
It would be easier to go back to your comfort zone. It would be easier if you could give up and go back to doing whatever you wanted and skipping the time you devote to improve your life.
But we have to fight it. Every day we MUST fight it.
I might wake up some mornings and want to quit. You’ll do the same.
But we won’t quit. We never will.
Because the day we quit is the day we start living a life of regret.
That regret will be far more painful than any daily struggle we face while we work towards a better life. Whatever your goal, you must continue to learn and grow and have the discipline to do the things you don’t always necessarily want to do.
Comfort Zone Discipline
As the first Kekich Credo continues, “Strive to increase order and discipline in your life. Discipline usually means doing the opposite of what you feel like doing. The easy roads to discipline are:
Setting deadlines.
Discovering and doing what you do best and what’s important and enjoyable to you.
Focusing on habits by replacing your bad habits and thought patterns, one-by-one, over time, with good habits and thought patterns.”
For my goal of helping one thousand men and women transform their lives, I need to build a team, give powerful and accurate advice, and improve my leadership skills to allow more people to believe I can help them. That’s not going to happen if I’m not willing to change and get out of my comfort zone.
For you, it will require setting goals with deadlines, taking time for self-reflection to identify specifically what it is that you want to accomplish, and then to focus on creating the daily habits and positive thought patterns that move you closer to your goals each day.
It’s not easy, but you can do it if you are willing to change. Of course, change is a scary word. As the old saying goes, “people fear change.”
But that’s not completely accurate. After all, if I gave you $1,000,000 dollars, you wouldn’t be scared of that life change, right? Of course not. In fact, we embrace positive change.
What we really fear is negative change.
You need to look at what you might think are negative changes, and reframe them as positive changes to your lifestyle.
You have to focus on the small, but consistent increases in your second income you achieve from taking action every day. You’ll need to have gratitude for the new business partners you meet at seminars. Both of those take effort but bring with them great benefits as well.
Trust me, there will still be a time and a place in your life to slip back into your comfort zone activities, but that will be as a reward, not a daily habit.
If we want to make those big changes in our lives, then we need to break free from our comfort zones. We need to challenge ourselves. We need increase the organization, planning, discipline, and implementation in our lives.
If we do this consistently, we will develop new, stronger habits that will allow us to reach our goals.
Start by…
1) Setting deadlines for your new positive habits.
2) Making small changes every day.
3) Preparing for those days when we feel like doing the opposite of what we should be doing.
You can do it. You can break free from your comfort zone.
If you believe in yourself as much as I believe in you, you will succeed beyond your wildest dreams.
It may not be easy, but you can and will do it. I’ll be right here with you every step of the way.
Contrary to what “some people” believe, successful internet marketers don’t just lay around on the beaches of the world doing nothing, while money just piles up in their bank accounts.
Well, maybe there are a few successful internet marketers that do, but, believe me, they’ve put in the work.
What a Successful Internet Marketer Does
I don’t do anything different than any other successful internet marketer does here at Empower Network. For you curious people, I’ll simply post here the things that I do every single day to be a successful internet marketer here.
I am hyper goal-oriented, so I review my goals every day and take whatever steps I can, on that particular day to move forward.
I listen to at least one of the trainings from the products that I sell. The $15k formula is my favorite so far.
I meditate or work on some sort of personal development
I blog (you are reading my “work” right now)
I attend my team calls, if there are any
Here’s a video of me working today:
I love that I can live a successful internet marketer‘s lifestyle of my design, not anyone else’s.
Are YOU willing to do what it takes to be a successful internet marketer here at Empower Network?
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