Rule Number One

In which area of your life do not like the results you’re getting?

When I hit my all-time low in January 2019, there were too many areas to mention. Even though I felt quite lost, I did commit to change by focusing on a few of them by doing small things I could control. I knew I needed to clean up my own act and stop expecting anyone or anything else to change. I suspected it would be a slow process, but I had to rebuild my self-respect. It’s been a transformative journey since then and every week I continue to learn and, more importantly, apply new things that help speed up progress because now I know for sure:

Only you can make these improvements and, if you don’t, then things will stay the same.

You’re probably not at such a low point BUT there is an area or two in your life where your results are causing you some grief.

The wake-up call for me this week was from re-reading Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles. His very first principle states that:

If you want to be really successful in your life, then you have to totally give up

Blaming

Complaining

Making excuses

-??????They are all a complete waste of time. None of them move you toward your goals.

You create every outcome in your life.

If there’s a result you don’t like, it is YOU who created or allowed it. Not anyone else. YOU.

Until you accept this, the problem will always be ‘out there’ beyond your control and making you the victim.

This is an easy topic to dismiss because you’ve heard it before. But the reality is that few people live it. They get worn down and ambivalent or accept mediocre outcomes as ‘what I’m used to’ or ‘this is just the way it is.’ But is that really how you want your life to play out? If you’re the author of your script, you can write the rest of the script differently.

Even if an act of nature or an accident affects you, you may well understandably go through the five stages of grief, but at some point, you will still have one life to make the most of.

The best resource on this topic is Jack Canfield’s The Success Principles Workbook. It helps you uncover what you blame your lack of success on and how to take ownership for these thoughts.

For example, “Instead of blaming (e.g.) a lack of prospects for my slow business growth,

I could do this: (fill in blank) (e.g.) commit to a 20-point prospecting system; join a local networking group; organise bi-monthly business events to expand my network; volunteer on a committee to build relationships with more affluent people etc.

It also gets you to think through what your biggest complaints are and what you can DO instead of pointlessly complaining about them. This is surprisingly helpful because unwittingly we have the same revolving thoughts going through our head and too often these are worries and complaints.

You might say to yourself: “that sounds hard” and it probably won’t be easy to address, but remember:

If you want to be really successful in your life, then you have to give up:

Blaming

Complaining

Making excuses

In my book I tell the story of when I met Brian Tracy in 2006 in Milwaukee. I asked him a completely hopeless question - not least in that he’d just spent ninety minutes talking about keys to success. I said, “Your life story is remarkable. How did you do it?” He looked slightly exasperated at my broad question as if to say: “Didn’t you hear anything I just said?” but he quickly composed himself and said: “If I had to pick just one thing, it’s this: Most people take about a 6/10 responsibility for most areas of their life. If you want to be really successful, you’ve got to that get to a 9 or a 10.”

The mistake I’ve made a lot since then is that I’ve assumed I wasn’t ‘most people’ in certain parts of my life and therefore I was never a 6/10. I said to myself even that day what most people say to an observation like that: “I’m above average at most things so I am not ‘most people’. I could never be a 6/10 except at things I don’t like or care about.”

The best resource on the topic in Canfield’s brilliant workbook are ten questions to help you process through a difficult situation. “Many of the problems that remain unresolved for us are due to one thing: We don’t see that we are part of the problem.”?

The questions about this troubling situation include ones such as:

How are you creating it or allowing it to happen?

What are you pretending not to know?

What is the payoff for keeping it like it is?

What is the cost for not changing it?

What would you rather be experiencing?

What actions will you take to create that?

By when will you take that action?

The solution to whatever is bothering you is public knowledge; you can find the answers. The real question is whether you want to take full responsibility for it or remain on the lower-level prison-like discomfort of what’s ‘normal’ at the moment. I say it this bluntly because I’ve done this to myself for too long with certain things. I know how easy it is to deceive yourself and justify mediocrity.

What muddies the waters is that underlying a lack of action might well be the unconscious thought: “I don’t really deserve that high level of health/wealth/love/joy”. This is even more reason to get serious and, yes, obsessive about making consistent small changes in your life that build self-respect. Once you start doing your best at increasingly more things, you will in time realise that you were wrong to limit your thinking about what you’re capable of accomplishing. It’s not a fast process, but powerful things rarely happen fast. Seeds take time to flower.

I urge you to face what’s not working and decide to get really proactive about addressing it.

Let me know if I can help you or your company with training, coaching or resources to address these things.

Own it!

Matt

Copyright Matt Anderson, 2021