Five Success Skills

To Power Up Your Career and Life


Your career and life can become much more successful by just concentrating your effort on building the five most important success skills!

Success Skills These success skills enable you to unleash much greater potential because they work around the most awesome asset - your mind power.

Whether you are confident or doubtful of your real capability, the truth is, everybody has enormous resources within them waiting for discovery. We all have the potential to build a strong mind and body that brings balance, harmony, success and abundance to our life and career.

You may have gone through years of education and training, but never learned the skill of managing your mind –the most powerful tool you ever possess. You may be highly trained in technical and professional skills, but neglected the need to put your mind on a power drive. A powerful mind is capable of drawing deeply into the inner resources for unlimited supply of wisdom and capability.

When a car engineer starts conceptualizing a new car model, the first thing to consider is not the size of the car or the engine power, but the power of the car brake. Without an adequate brake to control the car, all the engine power it has will only bring higher chance of disasters.

A person with personal power is typically balanced, poised, alert, focused, calm, resourceful, controlled, healthy and intuitive. He exudes an unmistakable aura of confidence and positive energy. The secret lies in his ability to garner the power of his mind, to develop a set of critical success skills that form the basis of his personal power.

What are the critical and success skills that we all need, to build a successful career, to stay resilient in difficult time, and to become a better human being?

1. Health/Wellness Skills

A fit and healthy body, with boundless stress-free energy, is the foundation of a great life. When one is mentally and physically healthy, he is capable of doing the best work with his talents and expertise. In our competitive society, many people are driven to acquire more technical and professional qualifications at the expense of health. While these qualifications are important in securing a good job, if they are acquired at the expense of health, the long-term career will be greatly hampered when the body is unable to function well to deliver the best performance at work.

Wellness goes beyond physical fitness and health; it includes an optimism and passion for life. It builds a mental strength to face challenges in life, as well as to celebrate these challenges as we embrace them. Using success skills to develop your health and wellness, you lay a strong foundation for all other aspects of personal development.


2. Performance Skills

Peter Drucker, one of the great thinkers of modern management, observed that young executive stalled in their career because they don’t develop the skill to walk into a situation and grasp the whole picture at once – the gestalt.

It is amazing how much details we failed to notice, when our perception is clouded by our pre-conceptions, judgment and values. Our own thoughts are often quick to perform all the analysis, and distract us from hearing, sensing and seeing the obvious that is just in front of us. By neglecting the change in voice tone, tightening of jaw muscle, tension in the shoulder, or subtle change in the eye, we often hear the words without getting the real message.

In executive career, our performance hinges on our ability to grasp the critical information that really matters, rather than being distracted by the fuzzy noises. Our performance depends on well-developed success skills in perceptual sensibility – our instinct, creativity and imagination.

Instinct, creativity and imagination can be learned and developed, and they go a long way in creating our success in career and life at large.


3. Visionary Skills

Today, with information growing at breakneck speed, the ability to see the future has become a critical executive life skill.

While not everyone is borne to be great visionary leader, everyone is capable of being the visionary of his own life. We all have the power to create our future if we master three visionary skills – intuition, reasoning and decisiveness. With the inner skills that build intuition, reasoning and decision making, we create a vision for our future. As we develop better insights with our inner skills, we see greater clarity in our chosen path. With a future long-term path clearly in sight, our resolve is galvanized and our passion ignited.

There is nothing to stop a mind that is empowered in all capacities.


4. Leadership Skills

Great leaders lead people into massive action to achieve massive success. They exercise personal power through three critical mind skills: Will, self-confidence and self-discipline.

Great leaders make things happen through powerful mind. With their mind power, they command respect, inspire awe, and garner admiration. Contrary to what most people would think, mind power is not a result of intelligence, talents, or education. Every human mind has enormous power. The success of individuals varies according to the extent they develop the success skills to tap the mind power.

Even if you have no inclination to be great leader of people, you should at least be leader of your life. Whatever way you may define your goals of success, the critical factor is found in your mind power.


5. Spiritual Skills

While we can be empowered with knowledge, power and influence with the inner skills of our mind, these are incomplete on their own. Power corrupts, unless it is counter-checked by human spirit.

All the tools that we acquired with our mind power will not make us a complete human being, if the human spirit is lacking. Human spirit is the finest aspect of our personality. It brings freedom from fear and pain, and gives purpose and meaning to our life.

We often start our career defining what we know to be success, and work for it passionately years after years. Many of us reached varying degree of success in career and life, only to start rethinking what it all means. If we are not successful as human beings, all the material success looks painfully shallow.


Conclusion:

Utilizing the power of concentration, the ultimate successful executives build the following arsenal of success skills:

* Health/Wellness Skills – for Balance
* Performance Skills – for Sensitivity
* Visionary Skills – for Insight
* Leadership Skills – for Power
* Spiritual Skills – for Harmony

When fully mastered, these success skills enable you to build significant personal power to live an empowered, abundant and fearless life.



GOAL SETTING WITH NLP

Or… How to get what you want and want what you get.

NLP gives us a lovely way to not only set goals but to uncover problem areas that might be keeping us from getting there. Below are the well-formedness conditions–NLP guidelines for goal setting.

Well Formedness Conditions

1) State goals in the positive. Say what you want–not what you don’t want.

Lot’s of people make the mistake of saying what it is they don’t want. “I don’t want to weigh this much,” “I’m tired of this pain,” “I constantly hook my drives.” Because the mind has a harder time processing negatives, it’s generally better to state what it is you want rather than what you don’t. “I weigh between 140 and 145 lbs.,” “I feel comfortable,” “My drives go just where I want them to.”

2) Describe your goal in sensory-based language.

What will you see, hear and feel upon attaining your goal? What will be your evidence that you have achieved it? If you have a goal to make a certain amount of money (for instance), how will you know you’ve achieved that? Will you look at your bank account balance and see a certain figure? Will you live in a certain kind of place or drive a certain car? How will you feel and what will you see and hear that lets you know you’ve reached your goal?

If the goal floats your boat (get”s you excited), great. If your goal doesn’t seem exciting to you at this point, you have some valuable information. You’ve discovered a big reason why you don’t have it! Either you don’t really want this thing (maybe someone else has convinced you it would be good), you think getting the goal would make you lose some benefit you have already (“I’d have to work 18 hours a day and I wouldn’t get to see my kids”) and/or it’s not ecological (see “ecology” below).

If you run into this, simply make sure the goal meets the other guidelines and check back. Chances are, after you’ve made sure the goal is ecological and maintains the benefits of the current behavior, you’ll be excited about it.

3) Appropriate chunk size

Is the goal big enough to be compelling? Is it a small enough chunk to be doable–not overwhelming? You can break a big goal in to smaller chunks to make it more manageable or take a small goal, figure out what’s important about it and make a larger, more encompassing goal.

“I want to eat less at lunch today.” (Might be too small). “I want world peace.” (It might be better to start with peace at home or work).

4) Initiated and maintained by self

A well formed goal will be under the control of the person setting it. “I want George to treat me better,” is not under Dave’s control. “I act in a way that maximizes the chances of George treating me better and when he does not treat me well I react calmly and appropriately” is under Dave’s control.

5) Ecological

How would having the goal affect other areas of your life? You work? Your relationships? Financial status? Your health? Your leisure time?

6) Appropriately contextualized

When, where and with whom do you want this goal? In what situations? I’ve had a lot of people come in to my office and ask to be happier or calmer. Sure, that’s nice. But do you want to be happier at a funeral? More calm when your favorite sports team is winning?

7) Maintain the benefits of the current behavior






The reason a lot of folks have not reached their goals is that whatever they’re currently doing pays off in some way that getting the goals does not. For example, someone who wants to exercise but lays on the couch instead may be getting relaxation in a way the would not if they got up and exercised. A well formed goal makes sure the person gets relaxation (in the example) as good or better than they get currently.

There are lots of payoffs in our lives. A client may get attention and feel like they matter through having a physical condition. Someone may get a new perspective from going outside and having a cigarette. Being a jerk might make someone feel powerful. It’s important, when setting goals to make sure the goal setter still feels like they matter, still gets perspective or still feels powerful.

In this phase of the process (goal setting) it’s not critical to know how the get the feeling, it’s enough to have them be able to imagine it.

Outcome Based



When I work with folks, I like to be outcome based (goal oriented). It helps things go quickly and smoothly. The beauty of the NLP well formednes conditions is that they not only help you to be more outcome focused but they help you discover what’s holding a person back from reaching their goal. In fact, with many people, you’ll discover well forming a goal is most of what you need to do to help them get there.