THE FOUR STEPS TO UNSHAKEABLE COMMITMENT WITH ANY GOAL - part 2 of 2

by Logan Marshall
 

How To Go All Out: 4 Steps to Unshackled Commitment

Are you ready to go all out? Are you ready to throw off the bowlines and fully commit yourself to achieving a life of freedom and adventure?

If so, here’s how.

1. GET YOUR MINDSET RIGHT

Success in any aspect of life starts with your mindset. Faulty beliefs and assumptions are like powerful headwinds halting your progress and blowing you off course.

In order to truly “go all out” and make unprecedented progress, you must make the decision at a core level to hold nothing back. You must take a good look at your life and decide that nothing is going to stand in your way of success.

Back in high school I made the decision that no one was going to beat me to the finish line. I made a commitment at a fundamental level that I was going to do anything it took to achieve my goal.

This kind of raw, unrestrained dedication is extremely powerful. Trust me.

2. REFINE YOUR GOALS

It’s hard to commit yourself to something if your finish line is just a nebulous point off in the distance. So before you do anything, get ruthlessly clear about what your ultimate outcome looks like. Nail down exactly what you want, how you are going to get there and on what sort of timeline you plan to reach your destination.

For me, I want to have the freedom to pay my way through college, go to Alaska next summer and help build a school for 100 orphans in India.

This is what motivates me to continuously give my all. Your goals will undoubtedly be different, and that’s fine.

The key is to sculpt a vision that is so freaking awesome you are willing to do anything to achieve it.

3. FOCUS ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT

While the right mindset will give you the motivation you need to bring your A Game, if you focus on unimportant activities you still aren’t going to get anywhere!

“Going for it” doesn’t mean quadrupling your work load. Work for the sake of work is not the goal.

The goal is to live and work on your own terms.

This is especially significant if you already have a busy life full of responsibilities. In order to achieve freedom and escape the trap of selling your time for money, you must be ruthlessly selective about what you work on and what you ignore.

What should you work on? It all depends upon what stage you are on right now.

But if I could work on just one aspect of my business, creating invaluable content would be it. No question. Hands down.

4. HOLD YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE

Unfortunately, personal drive usually isn’t enough. It may be enough to get you started, but after a week or two the “new years resolution effect” begins to set in and your initial enthusiasm slowly begins to fade.

In order to stay committed, you need a way of holding yourself accountable.

How? Here are my top three ways:

·         Use the Weekly Daily Goals system to keep track of your most important tasks. At the beginning of each week, write down your top goals for the next 7 days. Before you go to bed each night, write down 2-3 key tasks that, if accomplished, will leave you satisfied with your day. Once you complete your goals for the day, stop guilt free.

·         Tell others what you are doing. At the very least, tell your family about the goals you’re trying to reach. Even if their reactions are less than supportive, getting your ambitions out in the open will help you stay committed.

·         Join a community. Surrounding yourself with like-minded people who are rooting for (and expecting) your success can be extremely powerful. It can provide you with the confidence and motivation you need to take your business to a whole new level.

Final Thoughts

If you’ve been putting off anything in your life, I invite you to ask yourself why. What are you waiting for?

If you’ve been waiting for the stars to align in your favor, if you’ve been waiting for that perfect moment to arrive… I’ve got some news for you:

It will never come.

There will always be a new problem standing in your way. Something you need to do before you can fully commit yourself. As William James once proclaimed, “To change one's life: Start immediately. Do it flamboyantly. No exceptions.”

Life is short. Give something (or everything) your all.

5 Simple Steps to Make You a Better Negotiator

BY ELIZABETH MACBRIDE

The modern framework for negotiation is broken: Most of the prevailing theories see negotiations as battles in which the players act rationally in their own best interests. If you are lucky, this is a battle you might win.

But what if you reframed the whole idea, to think of a negotiation not as a fight but as a problem-solving exercise? And one in which emotions can play a systematic and powerful role?

Strike a powerpose for 2 minutes

In a new book, Getting (More of) What You Want, Stanford GSB professor Margaret Neale and co-author Thomas Lys challenge longstanding conventional wisdom on negotiating. They say that when people cease to see negotiation as a fight, they open themselves up to more creative solutions and are more able see more situations as opportunities to negotiate.

To write the book, the duo drew on economics and behavioral economics to systematically analyze how emotions tend to affect negotiations. Perhaps the most important effect is that when people are drawn into the battle, they will sometimes give up too much--even against their own interest--just for the sake of coming to a resolution.

"Agreements for the sake of agreeing are not so great, unless of course agreement is all you care about," says Neale. "But then, if that were the case, you wouldn't need to negotiate. You'd just accept your counterpart's first offer."

There are other powerful psychological processes that can affect negotiations. For instance, merely expecting an outcome, or creating an expectation in your counterpart, can affect what happens at the table. And Getting (More of) What You Want leverages decades of research to help answer questions such as who should make the first offer and how do you create a packaged offer.

A "negotiation is about finding a solution to your counterpart's problem that makes you better off than you would have been had you not negotiated," Neale says.

In the business world, the "wins" are almost always defined by dollars. In Lys and Neale's view, what you value in the deal--what you want--can range from the traditional view of dollars to control of your time, a better relationship with your counterpart, or achieving a particular outcome in a meeting.

Neale and Lys offer a five-step road map to negotiating:

1. Assess.

Look at the situation and decide if this is a place where you can negotiate: "Can I change the outcome in a way that makes me better off?" One of the questions is whether you have the information you need to help you construct viable offers and creative packages in the negotiation.

If the answer to your assessment is yes, then move on to stage two.

2. Prepare.

This is where most people fall down, Neale says.

"We are struck by how many smart people act as if negotiation is simply improvisational theater rather than an interdependent process that requires planning and preparation, making strategic choices, and maintaining discipline," write the authors.

The key is to figure out as much as you can about where you stand and where your counterpart stands prior to negotiating. "People may have positions, but those positions may have very little to do with what is driving the issue or dispute," write the authors.

For instance, when Neale was asked by an associate dean at a previous post to take on a program directorship, she discovered that he'd been instructed to do so by his boss--and that one of the things driving him was that the program was important to the overall institution. She was able to factor in how to show loyalty to the school as she negotiated her compensation.

3. Ask.

Conventional negotiating wisdom holds that "whoever makes the first offer loses the negotiation."

But that old-school line of thinking ignores "anchoring." When you make the first offer--informed by everything you've learned in your preparation about what you need and what your counterpart wants--you are anchoring the negotiation closer to where you want it.

There are ways to make that first offer more appealing: The more objective your first offer appears, the more value you're likely to get. And precise offers (and counteroffers) are better than "round numbers." For instance, research shows that homes with precise listing prices sell for more, on average, than those with a more rounded listing--even when that rounded figure is higher.

4. Package.

To avoid the battle mentality, prepare a proposal that is an entire package. You can then say, "How can we talk about crafting an outcome to make it work for us?"

Among other things, that gets the counterpart committed to the deal.

Packaging is an especially valuable tactic when you are the party with less power in a negotiation. If you can work hard enough to find creative sources of value--for instance, identifying your counterpart's emotional need to save face or to look like a hero in the eyes of his or her boss--you can design a package that is more likely to be accepted--and is a better value for you.

5. Adopt a powerful mindset.

Expectations are incredibly influential, including your expectations of yourself. Neale suggests that adopting a powerful mindset at the negotiation table is easier and more formulaic than you think. Here are some tips to remember when you are sitting down to begin:

Recall a time when you had power over another person. Focus on what happened, how you felt, and what that experience was like.

Think about a time when you felt physically attractive. "Although it may surprise you," the authors write, "research shows that recalling a time when you felt physically attractive influences your ability to claim value in the negotiation.”

Try power poses. In a series of studies, researchers have demonstrated that sitting or standing in an expansive pose, versus a constricted one, can influence your levels of cortisol (the stress hormone) and testosterone (the power hormone) as well as your willingness to take risks.

Source:

http://www.inc.com/stanford-business/5-simple-steps-to-better-negotiating.html

Your Daily Quote - Gladiator or Champion

Anyone can train to be a gladiator. What marks you out is having the mindset of a champion.

Manu Bennett

Tony Robbins - RELATIONSHIP : LOVE : LIFE : PASSION : MINDSET: MONEY

This video sums it all up. There are five disciplines of LOVE and if you want to stand by your partner, and for them to stand by you, make these part of who you are and what you breathe.

Be in the space of UNCONDITIONAL LOVE