2 Ways to Get on Track for a Successful Life – and Stay There

Over 35 years in the Self Improvement industry, you see the same mistakes being made over and over again. I have a saying that is not very complimentary but says it all, “same dog, different fleas".

When I'm giving seminars or just communicating with clients or members on my site, people always want to get a short miracle list, a list of 2 or 3 items that will make them successful and happy, preferably with out any effort or work on their part. I usually try to discourage this type of cherry picking but after a while, even I break down occasionally.

Here are 5 ways that I can vouch for, ways that over the years have stood the test of time and the efforts of thousands of my clients who have used these tools and found them to be indispensable in becoming successful and then staying successful. Did I mention it also takes dedication, perseverance and just plain old fashion hard work?

Power Living Life List

Use whatever name you want, but you need a list that you make, and keep making until you no longer want to be successful, then you can stop adding to the list. There are many variations on the same theme, they all add up to the same in the end. You need a list that will help you keep abreast of what you want to do for the rest of your life. That is why I call our version, a Living Life List .

The list will live with you as long as you are breathing, or you decide you do not want to be successful, which ever comes first.

Over the years, I've seen that what causes people a great deal of stress and anxiety is the fear of the unknown. Not knowing what is coming around the corner can be very frightening. Your Living Life List can do way with most of that "not knowing what will be coming around the corner".

You want your Living Life List to be a large, all encompassing in-box for everything that crosses your mind, that you want to do, starting from today. Nothing is too small or insignificant to not be included in your list. The mistake that most people make is to put just the big stuff on their list. The problem with this process is that you end up with a list that is half complete and when you begin to sort things out and start to assign time to the things on your list, you will always be running out of time.

The purpose of your Living Life List is to enable you to start to plan immediate, short and long range activities based on an accurate idea of exactly what you really want to do with the time you have available to you. This whole process becomes unreliable and inaccurate if you have more tasks than time.

We are always in this position, to have to parcel-out time to the tasks that we want to do versus the tasks that we need to do. Very few of us are lucky enough to have the time to do the things we want to do as well as the things we need to do.

Treat Your Time With The Respect It Deserves

Time is a non-renewable resource; when it's gone, it's gone. Part of the process of establishing a Living Life List is to bring into focus what almost everyone discovers; we all have way to much list for the time we have available to us. When this fact sinks home, we all start to scramble.

Right now, in my personal life, I have to really start to separate the "I Want To" list from the actual "To Do List". There is a constant battle for my time, between the activities that I need to do and those that I want to do. This struggle does not get any easier as time goes on; I actually think it gets harder. Not a very encouraging prospect, is it?

With the demand for our time getting more competitive and our goals and wishes getting more plentiful, the squeeze on our non-renewable resource, our time, is approaching the breaking point. We should be aware of these converging factors when we parcel out our time. The only thing we can do to ensure we use our time as wisely as possible is to spend the appropriate time on Prioritizing and Time Activating our activities.

In the midst of being rushed and pressured, we need to remember how valuable and fleeting our time is. We need to resist the urgent tasks and to weigh what is really important to us and spend as much time as we can on those tasks.

2 More Ways To Get On Track For A Successful Life

Successful people are the ones who are able to get more things done, on a daily basis that benefits them the most. That's how they become successful; accomplishing what they want to do and when they want to do it. It sounds simple but there it is.

Defend Your Turf

This is how I describe the actions of successful people. They are able to defend their turf, defend what is theirs. It sounds a bit selfish and I suppose it is. The reality of the situation in life is this: you have a choice, you can be the person who gets ahead, or you can be the person that the other person gets ahead of. The result is, they will be further along in their pursuit of achieving their goals than you will be.

Lets take a very simple activity that happens millions of times a minute, all over the world. I'm talking about telephones ringing. When a telephone rings, you can be sure of one thing, the person who is making the call is doing so because they want to get something. They want to get you to pick up the phone and talk to them. Fair enough, that is how the process works, but what about you, the person whose phone is ringing. Where do you fit into this process?

You are sitting there and you have a decision to make. The phone is ringing and are you going to answer it or not. Are you going to interrupt what you are doing, interrupt what you want to do, what is benefiting you, and take a chance on the telephone call being equally advantageous to you? That really is the issue here. Stop what I'm doing that is benefiting me and take the call, which will benefit the caller, but not necessarily me.

This is where you have to Defend Your Turf. Do you give up your Turf, or do you say no, what I'm doing IS important and that call can wait. This example is a seminar staple and one that always gets the room hopping. There are those people who say how do you know what the call is about until you take it? Call display aside, what is important here is not whether one call is important or not, what is crucial is your intent and how you view your Turf and what is important to you.

For those people who say take the calls and then decide, they are simply abandoning the high ground, their Turf, in the hopes that they may get lucky and the call will be important to them. If you ever want to become successful, one thing you simply cannot do, is put your fate into hoping to get lucky more times than not.

I hope you fall into the group that sees the value in Defending Your Turf, not taking the call until it fits into your schedule and is at a time of your choosing.

A couple more of my favorite examples on when Defending Your Turf comes into play.

Do not reward the drop in visitor or the unannounced appointment. I can't think of a more blatant attack on your Turf or your time than these examples. Even if was sleeping in my office, when one of these occurrences happened, I would be booked up for the next week. It is during these occurrences when you have to establish, for those who deal with you, that you will Defend Your Turf and you take your time seriously.

I have left the best to the last, my favorite whipping boy: E-mail. Is there anything on the planet that invades our lives as much as E-mail? The problem with E-mail is that we let it in, we actually invite it in. That is what makes E-mail so pervasive. Just one word of caution, just because something, on one hand, can be so beneficial does not mean that, on the other hand, it can't be destructive.

Drive Your Own Agenda

This topic is closely related to Defend Your Turf so I included it here. The concept of Driving Your Own Agenda has evolved over the years. You work on certain principles and then you want to improve on the original concept. Driving Your Own Agenda morphed out of the concept that you want to go to work each day with your own set of Priorities and spend your day on these Priorities.

That is still a main part of the Power Time System but over time, the concept and image of Driving Your Own Agenda emerged. If it sounds eerily similar to a car commercial, I'm guilty, you are right. It just seemed so right. It seemed so right because it grasped the concept that if you want to succeed, you have to be the person in control; you have to be the driver, not the passenger.

Not only do you have to have the right idea, you have to be able to pass that idea on to the next person. Driving Your Own Agenda is something everyone can visualize; we all know what it means to be the driver compared to the passenger. The driver is the person in charge; the passenger is just along for the ride. When it comes to your life, reaching your goals, who do you want to be, the driver or the passenger?

Another aspect of this example is the ownership factor. I want people who are working with us to have an agenda, and then take ownership of their agenda, and then finally push that agenda throughout the day. Taking ownership of your agenda is also taking ownership of your own time. When you get to this point when you are aggressively looking at your time and how it will be used, you are well on your way to putting yourself in the drivers seat and that is putting yourself in a position to become successful.

3 Ways To Get On Track For A Successful Life

"Nobody Plans to Fail – They Just Fail to Plan."

Probably one of the oldest sayings in the book, but one of the truest. At the end of the day, when things did not go well for us, it is too late to change what happened that day. There is time to get properly ready for all of the rest of the days that will follow. The question is, will we make the necessary changes to the rest of the days?

If we fail to learn from history, we are forced to repeat it, again and again. How do we avoid having to repeat history, history meaning our past mistakes? Get a plan and work that plan is a great place to start

Getting a plan is pretty simple. Go on the Internet, there are hundreds of sites out there that offer systems and programs, some good, some not so good. I have a number of Systems you should look at; I believe they fit into the good category, judge for yourself. Regardless of where you go and what you decide to do, it's paramount that you find yourself a System, program or regime that suits you and your lifestyle.

My point is this, it will not happen by chance; you will not wake up one morning and be organized, have a plan, and have the tools to implement that plan. If it was that easy, as they say, we would all be rich and retired. I've been doing this for a many years and I have seen thousands of people file past my door and the one fact that screams out is this: unless you make a concerted conscious effort to get your life in order, it is not going to happen, period.

Some quick points about what constitutes a plan, a method of getting your life on track and then staying on track.

• A regime, method, system, whatever you want to call it, the name is not important. What is important is the fact that you have adopted an organized way that you will be using to run your life.
• You make a conscious effort to find this method and you commit yourself to following their guidelines.
• This regime must be in a written form, something that you can look at, refer to, analyze and use like you would a road map.
• Regardless of how busy you think you are, you must be prepared to commit as much of your time and energy as required to making this work for you.
• No gain without pain.
• You must have faith in the System that you are following. When things get tough, that is when it is most important to follow through with the decisions you have made, stay the course.

To use our roadmap analogy, you are rushing out the door on the way to a vacation spot you have never been to before. Despite being rushed and harried, kids, spouse, everyone is pulling at you in 10 different directions, what do you make time for? You may forget the tent, the cooler, sunglasses, but you better make time to remember the roadmap. Without it, everything grinds to a halt pretty quickly.

This may not be the best example I have ever given but it's not too bad. You get the point, I hope. Regardless of how things are going for us, regardless of how busy we are, how stressed out we are, if we do not take the time to remember our roadmap, our plan, we are just going to fall farther and farther behind.

Have a plan and then following your plan gives you the best possible chance of doing the following:

• Getting some, if not all of your Priorities accomplished before the roof caves in on you.
• Helps to get your Agenda out in front of the others around you.
• Will help you weather the bad times with less damage to yourself.
• Helps you recover from bad days faster and increases the odds of more good days than bad.
• When things are going well for you, you can better capitalize on them.

Lastly, one of the hidden gems of having a plan and then following it is the reduction in stress that you will experience. Probably the biggest contributor to stress that we have, is the anxiety and stress we feel when we are not in charge of our own destiny. The surest way to reduce this source of stress is to create a game plan for yourself and work that plan on a daily basis.

The One-Two Knock Out Punch; Prioritizing Then Time Activate

One without the other is like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the jelly. Most of us have heard about prioritizing our activities but not many of us have heard about Time Activating. I first heard about Time Activating around 1983 or 1984. When I heard about it, I realized that was the missing link in what I had been trying to do up to that point.

What I had been trying to do was not necessarily show other people how to get control of their time and accomplish what they wanted, when they wanted, but was to get my own Time Management house in order. I was trying to run a number of very busy, successful businesses and at the same time was just starting to open up my first Franchise operation, across Canada .

To be honest, I was struggling and was not doing a good job of running either operation. As rushed as I was, I signed up and attended a Time Management seminar, even though I was also giving my own seminars on the same topic. I spent the whole day in this seminar and it was mainly a re-hash of either my own material or material that I had already heard and had discounted.

There was however, one golden kernel among all the chaff, the concept of Time Activating your Priorities. When I heard this, a light went on. This was why I was not getting as much done as I should and the very reason my Priorities were falling by the wayside. The concept is simple, but incredibly powerful when used properly:

• Once you have established a Priority for any given day, you Time Activate (TA) that Priority into your Day Planner, in a particular time slot.
• It is not enough to say, "I want to do these 3 Priorities tomorrow", to get them done, you have to ensure that there is sufficient time to do them and then pick out the slots of time and TA, write those Priorities into those time slots.
• It is during this process of Time Activating that your day will start to take shape and conflicts regarding your actual real available time will emerge.
• Our reach always exceeds our grasp, our ability to get what we want done compared to the real time we have available in which to do all that we want.
• Among the benefits of Time Activating, walking through this process in advance of the actual day will show up the difference between the time it will actually take to do our Priorities and the actual time we have available to us.
• Time Activating is not just for Priorities, it is used for all blocks of time we need to set aside during any day. We TA the block of time we have set aside for clearing our emails, TA another block of time to deal with interacting with staff, visitors, appointments. We TA another block of time where we make and return phone calls. We TA another block for Housekeeping duties, we TA for anything that we know will take up our time during the day.
• When we can visually see how our day can be chipped away. Time Activate blocks of time and it brings into sharp focus how easily we can allow our day to be gobbled up by tasks, and other than the ones we want to do and should be doing.

Time Activating: the process is a way we can enforce an internal set of checks and balances on ourselves. That is why I say that TA is a powerful tool, if you use it, and allow the process itself to help you get organized and ensure that what is important to you gets done. You should be spending the appropriate amount of time to get to the point where you have identified what activities will do you the most good and then make sure those activities do not get crowded out by lesser activities that do not benefit you as much, or maybe don't benefit you at all.

I have referred to TA as a self-imposed checks and balance system. If you look at this activity as just that, a System that will keep you on the straight and narrow if you use it, you will be on your way to driving your own Agenda instead of being a passenger.

Prioritizing Your Activities

This is really the first part of the one-two punch, you Prioritize first, then you Time Activate. Most of us are familiar with this term so I will just touch on it briefly here.

Think of a successful person you know, pick just one. I do not who he or she is but I can guarantee one thing, that person got where they are because they were able to routinely accomplish more of their Priorities on a daily basis than those around them. That is the massive dividing line between successful people and those that are not.

Think about it, if you could operate in a vacuum, without interruptions, without the phone ringing, without drop-in visitors, without having to deal with suppliers, without the day to day interruptions we all have to deal with, if we could in fact operate doing just what we wanted to, wouldn't you be a lot more successful?

Successful people make their own vacuum. They isolate themselves and arrange the events around them so they can be the driver, not the passenger; they enforce their Agenda onto those around them. Part of the function of driving your own Agenda is establishing your Priorities. Here are some guidelines:

• A Priority is a task, function, activity that, when completed, will benefit you in some way.
• A Priority is something that you should impose upon yourself, it should be self-directed.
• A Priority should evolve from your Living Life List, your Activity Funnel, your Time Management Conduit, Priorities do not just happen to you, they are planned, they are a piece of your larger puzzle.
• Do not mistake something that is urgent with a Priority Someone walks into your office and says they desperately need to talk to you, it's urgent that they talk to you, that is not your Priority at that moment. It may be their Priority but it certainly is not yours, unless you choose to make it so. A rule of thumb, urgent matters benefit someone else, Priorities benefit you.

Prioritizing your activities is just half of the job. Without Time Activating your Priorities, you are leaving one of the most crucial aspects of your Time Management System up to chance. Does that sound like the actions of a successful person?

Think Twice – Act Once

I will borrow from the famous carpenter saying, measure twice, and cut once . When you are up to your armpits in chaos, already 3 hours behind and it's not even Noon and you have more work on your plate that when you started the day, guess what, you're done like toast. It is virtually impossible to turn a day like this one around. Once the disasters start to come, fast and furious, all that you are left with is just trying to survive till the end of the day. We have all experienced days like this one. The question is, what are we prepared to do so we don't experience any more like it? Try this,

• Spend 5 minutes per hour on planning your activities for every hour you will work the next day.
• For every hour of production or work you want to do the next day, spend 5 minutes on thinking about what and how you are going to do it.
• For an 8-hour day, you will spend 40 minutes, the day before getting ready for it.

When I say this in a seminar room, in front of 40 people, the room goes deathly silent. I can see them thinking, is this a joke or what, I'm already behind, I can't even begin to do what is on my plate now and he wants me to spend more time, time I clearly do not have, on just thinking about what I'm going to do? Yes, this must be a joke.

No it's not a joke. I'm deadly serious. If you are not serious enough to actually think about, plan, organize, prioritize your activities for tomorrow or any day for that matter, then you will be sentencing yourself to many more chaotic and unsatisfying days ahead.

It's ironic that the very commodity that we seem to be in so short supply of, time, is the commodity that will allow us to get control back, be more productive, get more done and ultimately become happier, if we just bite the bullet and use what we are already using, but in a more useful manner.

Forty minutes is not a long time. When was the last time you spent 40 minutes just getting your ducks in a row for the next day? Never, sounds about right for most people. Do not knock it until you have tried it.

They Lied to You, You Cannot Have It All

As time goes on, and I as I get better at what I do, it is becoming more apparent that the sooner we all realize we can not have it all, the better we all will be, including me.

My reference to them is the inhabitants and the practitioners in the multi Billion dollar self help, self-improvement industry. Make no mistake, it is an industry. Books, tapes, seminars, retreats, courses, all aimed at helping us find the way to fame, fortune, the easy life, happiness, you name, you can find someone who will give it to you, on a silver platter. You may find that my opinion of the industry that I also inhabit is not a very high one, you are right. Let me expound if you will,

• I absolutely abhor the gurus that write a book that basically says, if you believe strongly enough, it will magically happen. Sorry, not in my world and not in your world either. Everybody is entitled to their opinion and I‘m sure I have my detractors as well.
• The people who say that getting control of your time, increasing your productivity, being successful, being happy will happen with no work on your part. Yes all of these wonderful things will happen to YOU and the best part is, you do not have to anything that remotely looks like or feels like work. Not only will you not have to work, you will not have to change any of your bad habits, make any sacrifices of any kind and will certainly not have to do anything you do not want to do. This instant life changing conformation without an ounce of work or change on your part is what gives people like me a bad name. As the reporter on 20/20 says,” Give me a break “. Some people, it seems a lot of people buy into this patter. I hope you do not turn out to be one of them.
• The one-step approach. The golden bullet approach, by changing just one aspect of your life, everything in you life will be better, much better. There is no golden or silver bullet; you cannot improve your life by making a single change that will dramatically improve everything else.
• The software approach. Buy such and such program; plug it in and all of your worries are over. I wasn't aware that they had invented a computer that could think for us. What we all have to remember is this; regardless of what program you buy, what software you use, there are worthless unless the data you put into them is the right content. What I always say, get good, then get wired.

There is no easy fix, no magically secret, no one-step solution to getting our ducks in a row and getting the most out of our lives. I wish there was. What we are left with is the reality, as I see it, is working our way through life and trying to find a path that will get us to where we want to go and along the way, let us get as many of the things we want to get done, done.

This leads me to the main thrust of this article; the premise that if we want, we can have our cake and eat it too. The belief that regardless of how high we pile our plate with things we want to do, that yes, we can get them all done. All we have to do is plan carefully, use our time wisely and we can get everything done. 35 years and counting, and the longer I'm in this game, the more untrue this train of thought is.

Not only is it flawed, critically flawed; it is also the main cause of most people's unhappiness and dissatisfaction with their life. I'm not sure what is worse, reaching for the brass ring and not getting it, or reaching for the brass ring and never having a chance to get it because the ring was never obtainable in the first place.

What I pride myself in is this, giving people who really want to improve themselves and have a realistic set of goals, the tools and the means to achieve them. The key is establishing realistic obtainable goals and then setting out in an organized fashion, with the right tools to get the job done. Sounds easy, doesn't it!

As I mentioned, one of the greatest causes of stress, anxiety and dissatisfaction in most people lives is the sense of failure they have when they do not achieve what they want in life. The irony in this is that it's not their personal failure, it's not because they were inadequate or lacked the ability to accomplish their goals, it was the goals themselves. If we were to add up all the goals any of us have, it would take 3 or 4 people all working together to make them all happen.

What is the point in beating yourself up about something that was impossible to obtain in the first place? I'm the worst offender when it comes to trying to achieve the impossible dream, times a factor of at least three fold. I'm getting better at it, but it is a constant struggle to rein in my wish list to a place where I have a fighting chance to get it accomplished.

I'm not proposing that you stop reaching and expanding what you want out of life nor should you expect second place when you could have had first place. What I'm saying is that we all need to keep in focus what we want to do with available time, resources, and our ever-changing landscape around us.