The Secrets of Success: Personal Growth

By John C. Maxwell.

Have you ever noticed how small children spend a lot of time talking about “one day”? “One day, I’ll be big enough to ride that ride.”
“One day, I’ll be able to make my own decisions.”
“One day, I’m going to have a pony.”
When you’re a small child, you want to be a big adult. You don’t pay attention to the details of adult life. You just see that adults – big people – get more privileges, get to have more fun.
What we don’t understand until we’re adults is there’s a price to pay for growing up. You have to go to work – every day. You have to take care of things around the house – every day. You have to pay attention to things like bills, car maintenance, emails, and projects – every day.
Children think about “one day.” Adults think about “every day”.
Here’s the truth: if we want to grow, if we want get “big,” we have to get intentional about “every day”.
Last week I started the Secrets of Success blog series to highlight the three most impactful decisions you can make for your life. The idea is that the secret to your success lies in what you do each day. We began with health, because your body is a crucial asset. If you take care of it, it will take care of you!
This week, I want to focus on personal growth. And just like we must be intentional about our health every day, we must also be intentional about our personal growth.
Unfortunately, many people treat personal growth as a by-product of life. They seem to think if they stick around long enough, they will magically accumulate maturity, wisdom, and skill. But acquiring the right seasoning to make a difference in the world takes more than longevity. It takes a commitment to get just a little bit better each day.
Here are two things you can do daily to help your personal growth. They are simple, but just remember, simple to understand doesn’t always mean simple to execute.

Make Growth a Daily Priority

You’d be surprised at how many people fail because they don’t make growth a priority in their minds and schedules. They have every intention of growing and want to grow, but they lack the ability to translate their intention into action. They need something to help them get growing.
I’ve shared before about my Rule of 5. (Click the link if you haven’t heard of it before now.) It’s a simple but powerful system that helps me focus on the five small tasks I do each day to maintain my growth in certain areas.
For instance, if I want to continue to grow as a writer, I know I need to spend time each day reading, thinking, filing, asking questions, and—of course—writing! I could do all of those things each day without my Rule of 5, but I wouldn’t be nearly as intentional about it. One or more activities could easily fall through the cracks. It’s a simple system, but it helps me maintain my daily discipline of growing as an author.
To make growth a daily priority, make a Rule of 5 for personal growth. For example, if you want to get better at work, choose the five tasks, attitudes, or habits you need to emphasize each day to improve. It could look something like this:

1. Begin each day with the the two most important tasks
2. Spend time connecting with my supervisor and doing more than expected
3. Return client emails in a timely fashion
4. Choose to be positive with co-workers
5. Leave my office tidy and ready for the next day

Which five things you include in your Rule of 5 is up to you; in fact, you should adjust your Rule of 5 as you grow! Creating the system is the important thing because it creates a pathway for daily growth.

Make Growth a Defined Pursuit

But maybe you’re not a systems person. Maybe you work best when your options are open. You can still be intentional about your growth if you’ll get intentional about your time. Start with defining your priorities, and then allot each a certain amount of time based on importance. Give your growth activities more weight than your rote activities, to minimize the distractions that might set you back.
A great example is the email inbox. Set a time limit for checking email, say maybe 20 minutes at the start of the day, 15 minutes at lunch, and 10 minutes before you leave to go home. It sounds severe, but you’d be surprised at how quickly email can eat quality minutes from your day.
Defining how much time you’ll give to your priorities allows you to utilize that time to its fullest. Chances are you allow more time than you realize to slip through your fingers. After all, rabbit holes aren’t just for public speakers; anyone can get lost in a task that doesn’t offer much value.
How ever you choose to go about it, remember that growth doesn’t just happen. You have to plan for it. It’s what Kurt Campmeier taught me when I was just starting my career, and it’s something I’ve repeated countless times. I’m so dedicated to it that I created the Maxwell Plan for Personal Growth, which takes you even deeper into intentionally choosing a life of daily improvement.
Remember, personal growth is the cornerstone for success. By being intentional about growing better every single day, you can experience incremental growth, “five good swings” at a time.

The Secrets of Success:Health

 By John C. Maxwell
Why is it some people always seem to get ahead? How has that older couple kept the magic of their marriage alive all these years?
What does the fitness instructor at the gym, the one with the perfect biceps, know that you don’t?
It’s simple: the secret of your success is determined by your daily agenda.
That guy who’s always getting promoted knows he has to make decisions every day to grow better in his job. That couple celebrating 50 years of marriage knows they have to choose each day to love and honor their relationship. And the fitness instructor at the gym, the one with the perfect biceps, she knows you have to be disciplined in your daily choices in order stay fit and trim.
It’s the power of daily decisions. Everyone makes them – but not everyone makes them well. In my book, Today Matters, I outline how the key to being successful is determining ahead of time the decisions you will make and then managing them each day. The book takes a good long look at the twelve crucial decisions that shape our lives, and gives some powerful insights on how to manage those decisions each day.
But this is a blog, not a book. We only have so much space! That’s why over the next three weeks I want to focus on three critical decisions that impact everything else in your world. If you can win these three each day, you are on your way to living life successfully. We’ll cover one a week so you’ll have plenty of time to marinate on each one.
The first area I want to address is health. After all, you can’t do much of anything without your body and mind, can you?
As someone who hasn’t always taken his health seriously, I want to emphasize the importance of this area of your life. I took my health for granted until I had my heart attack in 1998 – and even after that, I struggled to embrace healthy living. Fortunately, I’ve gotten better over time. And I’ve discovered that there is no substitute for making daily choices to eat the right amount of nutritious foods and engage in the right amount of physical exercise. I talk regularly with my doctors to know what is safe and effective for me, and that’s a good place for anyone to begin.
You see, how you eat, how you exercise, how you choose to feel about the day, all have significant impact on your quality of life. If you eat poorly, it can make you feel tired. If you go to the gym early, it can be the kick start your day truly needs. Even something as small as waking up and saying to yourself, “Today, I will choose to be positive” can transform how you experience the day.
That’s what makes this decision so vital – the choices you make about your health affect everything else. And yet is there another area where people struggle more?
Quite often I hear people say they don’t have the time, or the resources, or the discipline to do better with their health. And my response is always the same.
“Yes you do. You just have to choose it.”
As simple as it sounds, that’s the truth. You can choose each day to live a healthy life. It doesn’t require a gym membership, or switching to a vegan diet, or anything more complicated than just making a decision you already know you need to make. It’s a two-step process, which I’ll explain right now:
1. I decide I will be healthy today.
2. I choose to eat, drink and do healthy things today.
That’s it! Nothing more to it – you simply repeat those two steps each day. But to give you some practical handles for this idea, allow me to suggest the following:

• Instead of taking the elevator, take the stairs.
• Instead of drinking a soda, drink water.
• Instead of ordering the super-size meal, order the small.
• Instead of parking next to the building, park farther away and walk.
• Instead of ordering dessert, be content to pass.
• Instead of allowing the day to dictate how you feel, choose to see the good in the day.

Your health is the accumulation of your choices, good or bad, over time. If you decide each day to make good choices, no matter how seemingly insignificant, those good choices compound as the days pass. You may not run a marathon on day two, but you might in year two – and that’s the point. When you choose each day to do what you can to be healthy, those choices add up.
I can think of no better decision I’ve made than the choice to manage my health. Every time I go to dinner with Margaret, or spend the weekend with my grandchildren, I’m reminded that the small sacrifices I make each day to be healthy give me so much in return. Because in the end, I’m not just choosing to be healthy for me; I’m choosing to be healthy for them as well.
My friend, you can do this. You can make the small choice to have a salad instead of a burger, to hear the compliment instead of the criticism, or to take the stairs instead of the elevator, and you can do it today. I promise you, if you’ll start today, and make the same healthy decisions tomorrow and the day after that, you won’t regret what you’ll gain.
You can be successful with your health. I believe in you – and I’m right here beside you.

The Four Emotions That Can Lead to Life Change.

By; Jim Rohn
Emotions are the most powerful forces inside us. Under the power of emotions, human beings can perform the most heroic (as well as barbaric) acts.

To a great degree, civilization itself can be defined as the intelligent channeling of human emotion. Emotions are fuel and the mind is the pilot, which together propel the ship of civilized progress.

Which emotions cause people to act? There are four basic ones; each, or a combination of several, can trigger the most incredible activity. The day that you allow these emotions to fuel your desire is the day you'll turn your life around.

1) DISGUST - One does not usually equate the word "disgust" with positive action. And yet properly channeled, disgust can change a person's life. The person who feels disgusted has reached a point of no return. He or she is ready to throw down the gauntlet at life and say, "I've had it!"

That's what I said after many humiliating experiences at age 25, I said. "I don't want to live like this anymore. I've had it with being broke. I've had it with being embarrassed, and I've had it with lying."

Yes, productive feelings of disgust come when a person says, "Enough is enough."

The "guy" has finally had it with mediocrity. He's had it with those awful sick feelings of fear, pain and humiliation. He then decides he is not going to live like this anymore." Look out! This could be the day that turns a life around. Call it what you will, the "I've had it" day, the "never again" day, the "enough's enough" day. Whatever you call it, it's powerful! There is nothing so life-changing as gut-wrenching disgust!

2) DECISION - Most of us need to be pushed to the wall to make decisions. And once we reach this point, we have to deal with the conflicting emotions that come with making them. We have reached a fork in the road. Now this fork can be a two-prong, three-prong, or even a four-prong fork. No wonder that decision-making can create knots in stomachs, keep us awake in the middle of the night, or make us break out in a cold sweat.

Making life-changing decisions can be likened to internal civil war. Conflicting armies of emotions, each with its own arsenal of reasons, battle each other for supremacy of our minds. And our resulting decisions, whether bold or timid, well thought out or impulsive, can either set the course of action or blind it. I don't have much advice to give you about decision-making except this:

Whatever you do, don't camp at the fork in the road. Decide. It's far better to make a wrong decision than to not make one at all. Each of us must confront our emotional turmoil and sort out our feelings.

3) DESIRE - How does one gain desire? I don't think I can answer this directly because there are many ways. But I do know two things about desire:

a. It comes from the inside not the outside.
b. It can be triggered by outside forces.
Almost anything can trigger desire. It's a matter of timing as much as preparation. It might be a song that tugs at the heart. It might be a memorable sermon. It might be a movie, a conversation with a friend, a confrontation with the enemy, or a bitter experience. Even a book or an article such as this one can trigger the inner mechanism that will make some people say, "I want it now!"

Therefore, while searching for your "hot button" of pure, raw desire, welcome into your life each positive experience. Don't erect a wall to protect you from experiencing life. The same wall that keeps out your disappointment also keeps out the sunlight of enriching experiences. So let life touch you. The next touch could be the one that turns your life around.

4) RESOLVE - Resolve says, "I will." These two words are among the most potent in the English language. I WILL. Benjamin Disraeli, the great British statesman, once said, "Nothing can resist a human will that will stake even its existence on the extent of its purpose." In other words, when someone resolves to "do or die," nothing can stop him.

The mountain climber says, "I will climb the mountain. They've told me it's too high, it's too far, it's too steep, it's too rocky, it's too difficult. But it's my mountain. I will climb it. You'll soon see me waving from the top or you'll never see me, because unless I reach the peak, I'm not coming back." Who can argue with such resolve?

When confronted with such iron-will determination, I can see Time, Fate and Circumstance calling a hasty conference and deciding, "We might as well let him have his dream. He's said he's going to get there or die trying."

The best definition for "resolve" I've ever heard came from a schoolgirl in Foster City, California. As is my custom, I was lecturing about success to a group of bright kids at a junior high school. I asked, "Who can tell me what "resolve" means?" Several hands went up, and I did get some pretty good definitions. But the last was the best.

A shy girl from the back of the room got up and said with quiet intensity, "I think resolve means promising yourself you will never give up." That's it! That's the best definition I've ever heard: PROMISE YOURSELF YOU'LL NEVER GIVE UP.

Think about it! How long should a baby try to learn how to walk? How long would you give the average baby before you say, "That's it, you've had your chance"? You say that's crazy? Of course it is. Any mother would say, "My baby is going to keep trying until he learns how to walk!" No wonder everyone walks.

There is a vital lesson in this. Ask yourself, "How long am I going to work to make my dreams come true?" I suggest you answer, "As long as it takes." That's what these four emotions are all about.

To Your Success,
Jim Rohn
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Jim Rohn was a leading author, speaker and business lecturer. He is the author of  7 Strategies for Wealth & Happiness: Power Ideas from America's Foremost Business Philosopher, among other fantastic books and audio programs.