PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT BY BRIAN TRACY

QUALITIES OF SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE
Throughout human history, the very best thinkers have asked the question, “Why is it that some people are more successful than others?”

This is the underlying question of most history, philosophy, religion, metaphysics, psychology and success literature. Aristotle said that behind every desire we have is yet another desire, until you come to the basic desire of all people, “The wish to be happy.”

Throughout your life, you constantly strive to move away from pain toward pleasure, and away from discomfort toward comfort. Consciously and unconsciously, you strive to be happy. In business and in sales, we define happiness as “fulfilling our full potential and achieving everything that is possible for us.”

What then are the qualities of the most successful and happy people in sales and business? Over the years, based on thousands of articles and research studies, I have concluded that there are basically seven qualities, each of which is learnable via practice and persistence. Here they are:

1.First, successful people are ambitious. They have an intense, burning desire to be successful, to achieve more and more, and to constantly raise the bar on themselves.

In addition, ambitious people see themselves capable of “being the best.” From the time they begin their sales or business careers, they strive for excellence, to be among the very best people in their industry. They set bigger and bigger goals for themselves, and persist longer than anyone else to achieve those goals. And they never give up.

2.Second, successful people are courageous. They work to confront the fears that hold most people back. The two biggest fears that interfere with your success are the fear of failure and the fear of rejection. The fear of failure causes you to think more of what you might lose if you take a chance than what you might gain. The fear of rejection makes you hypersensitive to the opinions or criticisms of other people, and especially to the negative reactions you get from prospective customers.

Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Do the thing you fear and the death of fear is certain.” What this means is that successful people confront their fears, face their fears, master their fears, and do it anyway. The wonderful thing is that, the more you do the things you fear, the less you fear doing them. Eventually you become fearless, and then unstoppable.

3.Third, successful people are committed. They believe in their companies, their products, their customers and themselves. They actually become emotionally involved in what they sell and who they sell it to. You’ve heard it said that, “They don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” Successful people care.

Because they are committed, top people love their work. They can hardly wait to get started in the morning and they hate to quit in the evening. This infectious enthusiasm for their products and services transfers into the minds of their customers. The customers then want to buy from these people and recommend them to their friends.

4.Fourth, top sales people and businesspeople see themselves as professional. They see themselves as consultants, dispensing good advice, council and recommendations to their customers. They see themselves as “helpers,” continually looking for ways to help their customers to get more enjoyment and benefit from what they sell.

Instead of talking incessantly about their products or services, they ask good questions and listen carefully to the answers. They look for ways that they can improve the life or work of their customers with their products or services. Their goal is to help their customers to be better off with their products or services than they could be without them.

5.Fifth, top people are more thoroughly prepared than average performers. Preparation is the mark of the professional in today’s competitive environment. Top people take the time to do pre-call research, finding out everything they can about their customers before they approach them the first time. They set pre-call objectives; determine exactly what questions they will ask, and what results they want to achieve in a particular sales meeting. Finally, top salespeople do detailed post-call analysis, writing down everything that was discussed in the sales meeting so they don’t forget it later.

Because they are so well prepared, top salespeople have more confidence when they approach a customer. And customers can tell. Customers know when the salesperson has taken the time to do his preparation. This dramatically increases the salesperson’s credibility with the customer, and makes it much more likely that the customer will listen to the salesperson and buy his or her products or services.

6.Sixth, top sales professionals are dedicated to continuous personal and professional development, to lifelong learning.

They realize that, “To earn more, you must learn more.” Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to get you any further. Your current level of knowledge and skill is only sufficient to keep you where you are, but does not allow you to go any further. To increase your income, to grow in your field toward being one of the highest paid people, requires that you continually learn and apply new ideas.

The key to continuous learning is simple: Read in your field of sales and business 30-60 minutes each day. This will amount to about one book per week, or 50 books per year. Since the average sales or business person reads less than one book per year, reading regularly in your field will give you a distinct advantage over your competition.

Next, listen to audio programs in your car. The average sales professional sits behind the wheel of his car 500-1000 hours per year. This is the equivalent of 3-6 months of 40 hour weeks, or 1-2 university semesters. By listening to audio programs, by turning your car into a university on wheels, you can become one of the best educated, most knowledgeable and most skilled professionals in your field.

Finally, take all the seminars and additional courses that you possibly can. Attend sales seminars given by professionals in your city. Enroll in on-line learning programs for sales effectiveness. Become a life-long “do-it-to-yourself” project. Never stop learning and growing.

7.Seventh, and as important as anything else, top professionals see themselves as 100% responsible for themselves, and everything that happens to them.

Because they are responsible, they do not make excuses or blame other people. They do not criticize or complain. They say, “If it’s to be, it’s up to me.”

This attitude causes top people to see themselves as self-employed, as “Presidents” of their own personal sales corporations. They see themselves as responsible for every aspect of their own personal entrepreneurial business, including production, quality control, marketing, promotion and training and development.





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February 13, 2008

The Power of Personal Charisma
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines charisma as "a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure."
Become An Irresistible Person
Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary defines charisma as "a personal magic of leadership arousing special popular loyalty or enthusiasm for a public figure."

Develop Personal Magnetism
Charisma is also that special quality of magnetism that each person has and that each person uses to a certain degree. You have a special charisma to the people who look up to you, who respect and admire you, the members of your family and your friends and coworkers. Whenever and wherever a person feels a positive emotion toward another, he imbues that person with charisma, or attractiveness.

Project Yourself Positively
In trying to explain charisma, some people speak of an "aura." This aura is a light that is invisible to most people, but not to everyone, and that radiates out from a person and affects the people around that person in a positive or negative way. The halo around the heads of saints and mystics in many religious paintings was the artist's attempt to depict the light that people reported seeing around the heads of these men and women when they were speaking or praying, or in an intense emotional state.

Control the Impression You Make
You also have an aura around you that most people cannot see but that is there, nevertheless. This aura affects the way people react and respond to you, either positively or negatively. There is a lot that you can do, and a lot of good reasons for you to do it, to control this aura and make it work in your best interests.

Sell Your Way to the Top
If you're in sales, this aura, reflecting your level of charisma, can have a major impact on the way your prospects and customers treat you and deal with you. Top salespeople seem to be far more successful than the average salespeople in getting along with their customers. They're always more welcome, more positively received and more trusted than the others. They sell more, and they sell more easily. They make a better living, and they build better lives. Salespeople with charisma get far more pleasure out of their work and suffer far less from stress and rejection. The charismatic salesperson is almost invariably a top performer in his field and enjoys all the rewards that go with superior sales.

Influence People Around You
If you're in business, developing greater charisma can help you tremendously in working with your staff, your suppliers, your bankers, your customers and everyone else upon whom you depend for your success. People seem naturally drawn to those who possess charisma.

They want to help them and support them. When you have charisma, people will open doors for you and bring you opportunities that otherwise would not have been available to you.

Enhance Your Personal Relationships
In your personal relationships, the quality of charisma can make your life more joyous, happier. People will naturally want to be around you. Members of your family and your friends will be far happier in your company, and you will have a greater influence on them, causing them to feel better about themselves and to do better at the important things in their lives.

Action Exercises
First, identify the people with whom you seem to have a lot of charisma - the people who know you, like you, respect you the most. How could you increase your charisma with these people?

Second, identify the people who have charisma to you, the people you most like and respect and admire. What is there about them that you could copy or emulate? If you think charisma, you'll have more of it.






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February 11, 2008
Excerpt from: Personal Success
Your Ideal Self and Life
Your self-concept is made up of three parts, each of which affects each of the others.
Your Ideal Self and Life
By: Brian Tracy

Your self-concept is made up of three parts, each of which affects each of the others. Understanding these three parts enables you to put your hands on the keyboard of your own mental computer. When you learn to take charge of the development of a new and positive self-concept of selling, you can then control your sales destiny for the rest of your career.

Determine Your Direction
The first part of the self-concept is the "self-ideal." Your self-ideal largely determines the direction in which you are going with your life. It guides the growth and evolution of your character and personality. Your self-ideal is a combination of all of the qualities and attributes of other people that you most admire. Your self-ideal is a description of the person you would very much like to be if you could embody the qualities that you most aspire to.

Strive Toward Excellence
Throughout your life, you have seen and read about the qualities of courage, confidence, compassion, love, fortitude, perseverance, patience, forgiveness and integrity. Over time, these qualities have instilled in you an ideal to which you aspire. You might not always live up to the very best that you know, but you are constantly striving to be a better person in light of those qualities that you value so highly. In fact, everything that you do on a day-to-day basis is affected by your comparing your activities with these ideal qualities and your striving to behave consistently with them.

Clarity is Essential
Successful salespeople have very clear ideals for themselves and their careers. Unsuccessful salespeople have fuzzy ideals. Successful salespeople are very clear about being excellent in every part of their work and their personal lives. Unsuccessful salespeople don't give the subject very much thought. One of the primary characteristics of successful men and women in every walk of life is that they have very clearly defined ideals and they are very aware of whether or not their current behaviors are consistent with their idealized behaviors.

Set Challenging Goals
Part of your ideals are your goals. As you set higher and more challenging goals, your self-ideal improves and crystallizes. When you set goals for the kind of person you want to be and the kind of life you want to live, your self-ideal rises and becomes a greater guiding and motivating force in your life.

Your Future is Unlimited
Perhaps the most important thing for you to realize is that whatever anyone else has done or become, you can do or become as well. Improvements in your self-ideal begin in your imagination, and in your imagination, there are no limits except the ones that you accept.

What is your ideal vision of the very best person you could possibly become? How would you behave each day if you were already that person? Asking yourself these questions and then living your life consistent with the answers is the first step to creating yourself in your ideal image.

Action Exercises
Here are two things you can do immediately to put these ideas into action.

First, dream big dreams. Set big, exciting, challenging goals and ideals for yourself in every part of your life. Allow yourself to imagine a wonderful life ahead.

Second, think about how you would act if you were an outstanding person in every way. Then, practice being this person, as though you were acting a role in a play. You'll immediately notice a difference in your behavior.

www.BrianTracy.com