WORDS OF WISDOM BY BRIAN TRACY

Brian Tracy's Words of Wisdom
Brian shares his business insights and wisdom on a range of business topics
Brian shares his business management skills so that you can achieve more in your career. He will share business tips and insights on a range of business issues on everything from effective time management skills to training and business tools that you can use to accomplish more and reach your goals. www.briantracy.com




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

February 20, 2008
Who Are You?
You have extraodinary potential
You have extraordinary potential. You could not use all of your talents and abilities if you had 100 lifetimes. Whatever you have accomplished in your life so far is only a shadow of what is truly possible for you in the months and years ahead.

One of the indispensible requirements for great success is for you to “know who you are.” On a regular basis, you must sit down and think about yourself and the qualities, characteristics, abilities and experiences that have brought you to where you are today. It is only in this way that you can move ahead with greater confidence and clarity.

Here are 10 questions that you can ask yourself on a regular basis to keep yourself on track:

1. What are your three most important values in life right now?

2. What are the three things in life that are most important to you?

3. What are your three best qualities as a person?

4. What three personal accomplishments are you the most proud of?

5. What three skills or abilities are you the best at?

6. What have been your three biggest successes in your career so far?

7. What are the three best jobs you have ever had?

8. What three activities give you the greatest joy, peace and satisfaction?

9. What are the three most important lessons that you have learned in life so far?

10. Who are the three (or more) people you care about the most?

Socrates said, “The unexamined life is not worth living?”

There is no one in the world that has the special combination of knowledge, education, experiences, insights, wisdom, goals, desires, and aspirations that you have. In the poem Ulysses, he says, “I am a part of all that I have met.”

You are an amazingly complex individual. You have within you, right now, the ability to accomplish more than you ever dreamed possible. But all this experience and wisdom is of no value to you if you do not sit down and think about what you have learned, and how you can apply it to your future.

In a multi-year study of successful people, the researchers found that there was one characteristic that enabled certain people to rise far higher than their peers in almost any field. This was the quality of “thoughtfulness.”

Top people take the time to sit quietly by themselves and think about who they are, what they want, and what they are currently doing.

Peter Drucker suggests that you ask the following questions regularly: 1) What am I trying to do? 2) How am I trying to do it? 3) What are my assumptions? 4) If my assumptions were wrong, what effect would that have on my decision making? 5) Could there be a better way?

In asking and answering these questions on a regular basis, especially when you are experiencing road blocks, obstacles or frustration in your current activities, you calm you mind, clarify your thinking and enable yourself to make better decisions for the future.

It is said that the average person uses only 10% of their potential. The actual number is closer to 2%. This is because people get into comfort zones, automatic routines which they repeat day after day, seldom challenging their own thinking or behaviors.

But this is not for you. Your goal is to “Be all you can be.” Your goal is to use more and more of your potential moving forward. They way you do this is by asking yourself focused questions that help you to develop absolute clarity about who you are and where you are going.

Good luck!

Brian Tracy

www.BrianTracy.com




--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

February 13, 2008
The Right Stuff
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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Summary

You have within you, right now, the ability to be, do and have, far more than you have ever accomplished before. The only limit to what you can achieve in the future is your imagination.

You can learn anything you need to learn, to accomplish any goal you can set for yourself. You can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, and achieve any level of income you desire, if you will but apply yourself, and practice the seven qualities of top people until they become lifelong habits.

Good luck!

Brian Tracy






-----------------------------------------------------------

January 03, 2008
Leadership Quality
More than 3300 studies have been done over the years in an attempt to identify the qualities of leadership. What makes one man or woman rise to the top of an organization or empire while most others simply lead average lives?

The most common quality found in all these studies was that of “Vision.” The difference between leaders and ordinary people is that leaders have an exciting vision for the future; average people do not.

In our seminars, we teach the importance of “Future-orientation.” It seems that successful people throughout the ages have a clear idea of the kind of future that they wish to create for themselves and others. If they are starting a business on a kitchen table, there vision is of a large, successful company serving enormous numbers of customers with high quality products or services. If they are running for office, they articulate a vision of the kind of city, state or country that they are committed to creating if they are given the power or authority.

The key part of vision is “idealization.” This means that the leader projects forward into the future and creates an ideal future image of what his or her role would look like if it was perfect in every way.

In your own life you become a leader when you develop a vision for yourself. When you begin to idealize about your future and think about all the wonderful things that you could do, be and have in the months and years ahead, you begin to think, act, walk and talk like a leader.

Imagine that you could wave a magic wand and make your future life perfect in every respect. If your life was ideal in five years, what would it look like? How much money would you be earning and what kind of work would you be doing? What kind of lifestyle would you be living and what kind of life would you be providing with and for your family? What kind of health and levels of fitness would you have? How much money would you have in the bank and how much would that money be earning for you each month and each year?

The strategic planner, Michael Kami, once said, “Those who do not think about the future cannot have one.”

Peter Drucker said, “The very best way to predict the future is to create it.”

If your goal is to make 2008 the best year of your life so far, what would have to happen, starting today, for you to create a wonderful life? What would you have to do more of to achieve your goals and create your ideal life? What would you have to do less of? What would you have to start doing that you are not doing today? What would you have to stop doing altogether to create the wonderful life that is possible for you?

The most important work that you do every day is “thinking.” The better you think, the greater clarity you have with regard to the kind of future you want to create, the faster you move toward it, the faster it will move toward you.

Don’t have a great year. Make it a great year!

Brian Tracy www.briantracy.com