Systematic Success

A few years back I had the good fortune to listen to a teleseminar hosted by Robert G. Allen and Mark Victor Hansen. The two of them had co-written the book The One Minute Millionaire and were challenging their listeners to become Enlightened Millionaires. During the course of the teleseminar, they spoke of one of Allen's favorite topics: leverage.

The principle of leverage is that using a lever and a fulcrum with the fulcrum placed close to the object you wish to move, you can use a small amount of force to move a much larger one. The longer the length of the lever on your side of the fulcrum, the less force you will need to successfully move your object.

"Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I will move the entire earth."
~ Archimedes (C. 287-212 B.C.)

Leveraging for success is the idea that there are elements that will enable you to move the immovable and achieve the things you desire. The six that Allen and Hansen mentioned in their teleseminar for entrepreneurs are a mentor, a team, a network, the infinite network, tools and skills, and systems.

The concept of having success systems has been weighing on my mind lately because I failed to put some in place before tackling my goal of writing a novel in a month. I quickly realized that it would be impossible for me to achieve my goal because there were too many distractions and deterrents that were preventing me from writing efficiently and effectively.

You might be wondering what a success system is. A success system is an organized and streamlined process that is designed to...

SAVE YOUR SELF TIME, ENERGY and MONEY!

I wasn't totally without success systems going into the NaNoWriMo challenge, but some had been neglected for a time to the point where they were no longer effective. My system for handling the bills and paperwork was no longer in place. My filing system had become pretty much non-existent. I failed to establish a system for keeping up on washing the laundry which is a chore that I lead for our family. I didn't even have a good system in place to insure that my writing would flow smoothly from one section to another. Other systems that I failed to put into place would include regular time with my family, minimizing distractions, regular writing times, sufficient sleep and so on.

After the first week of November, I realized that there was no possible way that I could succeed without doing serious damage to myself, my family and/or my finances, and I was not willing to do that sort of damage in exchange for the sense of achieving my writing goal.

I haven't given up, though. I decided that the best thing for me is to release my expectations of reaching the 50,000 words before November 30 in order to minimize my stress level. I am still writing, but I have decided to be happy with whatever word total I reach because that will be far more than if I had never done it at all. And I will have built up good momentum that will carry me on to the finish of the novel.

The second step I am in the process of taking is to reestablish the systems I had been neglecting and get them to the point of running smoothly again so that they will take minimal time and effort to maintain. And I am establishing new systems for the areas where no systems existed before. My new goal is to complete these by the end of the week so that I can focus more fully on my writing and make massive progress without fear of distraction or damage. At that point, I believe that I can write twice as fast as I will be able to focus fully on the novel without worrying about what is happening to my world around me.

Do you have systems in place when you go for your goals?

What are some of the things that occupy your time and attention and distract you when you should be working on your goals?

Perhaps you have housework issues and you feel like you are living in a constant mess. Some people hire a housekeeper to come in and clean as they could make more money by paying someone else to do it and use that time to work on their business. If that is not a valid system for you, take a look at the areas that you are struggling with and what the causes are of the problems in those areas.

In my home, the causes are primarily three little boys who love pulling out all their toys. Growing up, my mom instituted the 5-minute pickup rule. We were taught to get everything picked up at an early age in five minutes or less. She did that regularly with us throughout the day and we eventually stopped pulling so much stuff out.

But my kids aren't the only problem. We tend to accumulate clutter because we have developed the bad habit of just setting things down wherever we happen to be at that moment. I am encouraging myself and my family to never just set something down unless you are putting it in its proper place. We have been developing short-term storage systems for things that do not have a home, such as a decorative filing box my wife bought that sits on our kitchen counter by the phone where we put the bills that I need to look at and papers that we need to read through or file away in permanent storage.

For the deep cleaning, I know my wife has spent up to an entire day giving the whole house a thorough cleaning. Who has time for that? With the encouragement of the putting things in their proper place, I recommended that she set a regular schedule where she spends 15-20 minutes in a single room and give it a quick, but thorough cleaning. She could do the living room one day, the dining room the next, the bathroom the day after that (although with three little boys who have terrible aims, this is one room that may need two days a week), then the bedroom, etc. That way everything gets a thorough cleaning on a regular basis and it doesn't take a whole day or more to catch up. It's a great system!

This is a technique anyone can use for many areas of their life like their bills, their yard work and gardening, cleaning and maintaining their car and anything else that is stressing them out because they haven't found time to get around to it because they know it is going to take a long time. If they would just figure out a system for how they would like to handle these areas and start working that system today, adding a little bit of extra time so that they could make headway on the existing mess until they are all caught up.

One major benefit that results from having success systems for dealing with your everyday cares and worries is that it frees up your mind so that you can focus on achieving your goals and dreams. You will no longer have to spend excess mental time and energy thinking about these dull and taxing tasks because they have a time and place where you can give them your full attention for a short amount of time and then you can forget it until its time comes up again in the rotation. How awesome is that!

So let's establish success systems for your life right now:

1. Write down three tasks or areas of your life that you don't particularly enjoy thinking about but you find that they are constantly weighing on your mind because you know you need to do something about them.

2. Identify and list strategies that you can put into place that will minimize your efforts in each area or keep them from recurring more often than is necessary.

3. Give them a regular time frame with a minimal amount of time for you to give these areas or tasks your full attention (preferably in the very near future if these areas are already stressing you out). This can be daily, weekly, or monthly depending on how often you think is necessary.

4. Explain your new systems to your family, coworkers, or whoever impacts these areas and ask for their help and support.

5. Go to work in these given time frames and then forget about them the rest of the time to allow yourself to focus on more enjoyable areas.

Leave me a comment to let me and other readers know what new systems you implement! Good luck!

A Small Favor...

If you haven't already, please read my post on my other blog titled A Tribute. I ask a very small and simple favor at the end of it that I hope you will indulge me by fulfilling it. Thank you in advance!

The Prosperity Game

I want to share with you a tool that I stumbled across long ago that makes an incredible impact on me each and every day that I use it. It is called ...

The Prosperity Game!

A lot of people around the world are struggling right now financially. And even those who are not may be experiencing an unusual amount of stress and fear due to the unstable nature of our current economy. If you fall into either of those categories, The Prosperity Game is exactly what you need. And guess what - it is absolutely free to play!

What The Prosperity Game can do for you is help to shift your mental focus from lack to prosperity. Most of us struggle with the mental aspect of financial success. We fail to recognize that we will only be as wealthy and as prosperous as we think we can be. We have no problem digging right in physically and striving for a goal, but our minds may be more focused on the bills that are due or overdue, how prices are rising, how the economy is declining, and we get stressed out about our current financial situation and often times our future financial situation. We hate looking at the Sunday ads because they are just a reminder of all the things we can't afford right now. And we wonder why our situation is getting worse and worse and worse.

The Prosperity Game helps you overcome all that. Anyone who has been introduced to the Law of Attraction knows that "where attention goes, energy flows." We may say we want to be prosperous and well off or, for some of us, simply financially stable. But where is your attention as you work for that goal? Is it on the being financially stable or better? Or is it focused on your current lack of money and the difficulty you have paying your bills?

Think back to the last time you paid your bills and the level and quality of emotions you were experiencing. This is a good gauge of where you are putting your attention. If you were stressed out or angry, most likely you were not focusing on financial stability. You were focused on instability and wondering how you were going to make ends meet until your next paycheck arrives. You were "resistant" to prosperity and abundance and opening yourself up to the energy of lack, struggle and difficulty. The Prosperity Game has a simple system that enables you to flip that switch, closing yourself off to that negative energy and opening yourself up to prosperity.

The way that it works is every time you log in to the game (not just once a day, but every time you log in so you can use this more than once in a day if you feel the need to), you are given a virtual "check" starting at $100 and growing every single time you play. It isn't an amount you had to work for or struggle for. It is an amount that is given to you out of the abundance of the universe. You are encouraged to focus on the joy of receiving that check for a moment and just experience how good that feels to have prosperity flow to you effortlessly.

Then comes the best part - you spend the check! You outline what you would buy or how you would spend that check that would make you feel good. You are encourage not to just give it away, but I give the first 10% to my church as tithing out of gratitude to God for such great blessings because that makes me feel good. But you spend it how you want to spend it.

The next step is you measure on a scale of 1-10 your desire. What this does is it gets you to start paying attention to your levels of desire because that is a tremendous moving force for becoming prosperous and is a good measure of your energy level.

After measure your desire, you measure your resistance on a scale of 1-10. This is checking how you feel towards this message of prosperity. It may be a bit high for the first little while if you are new to this way of thinking. You may have some internal beliefs to overcome in the early stages of the game that can wreak havoc with your resistance levels at the start and cause it to jump around. That is okay. Just keep playing the game. The object is to ultimately lower your resistance level to a naturally low level on a consistent basis, thus opening you up to the thoughts and feelings of prosperity. It may take more time for some than for others but it will happen.

Then you have the opportunity to record your comments about the experience. How did it make you feel? What changes are you experiencing? It is a great way to record your development as you move from the feelings of lack to the feelings of prosperity.

Two other tools that are included in the game are your own personal Gratitude Journal and your personal list of 100 things you would like to be, do and have.

The Gratitude Journal is an awesome tool because it really helps you shift your focus to what is good in your life. I believe I have posted here before about how you can be grumpy and grumble about your electric bill as you pay it or you can write a simple "Thank You!" note thanking them for the service that lights and heats your home and their efficiency and accuracy in processing your payment and slipping that note in with your check. It is absolutely impossible to feel negative when giving a sincere expression of gratitude!

The list of 100 things you want to be, do and have are a reference point for the game as your "checks" come in. But it also serves to free you from the feelings of limitation. It enables you to think freely and openly about what you really and truly want rather than limiting yourself to thinking about what you can have.

The Prosperity Game really is a simple, yet amazing tool and I hope you choose to play. Let me remind you again that it is 100% free of charge and you can play it in less than five minutes, especially if you really know what you want. It will really change the way you feel each and every time you play and you will begin to feel more prosperous and abundant, which is the first step to fully experiencing that in your life.

If you do choose to play, leave a comment here saying simply "I'm in the game!". Then come back again and share your experiences that result from the game so that others can see how you have benefitted from this tool as well.

In closing, here is a quote about what playing The Prosperity Game can do for you:

By writing checks, using your imagination, writing the memos, focusing as you write, and feeling no resistance as you write the checks because there will be no fear of overspending, you will achieve what is necessary in the achievement of anything: You will have made a statement of desire while you are in the state of non-resistance, or better said, in the state of allowing.

So, not only will you have the benefit of an expanded imagination, but your point of attraction will shift, and your life experience will then shift as well. Not only will your financial situation improve, but all manner of things that you have focused upon with pleasure will begin to flow into your experience.

Joyously playing this Prosperity Game will not only improve your financial state of being, but every aspect of your life will improve as well. It will not only help you to activate more vibrations around things you want, but it will assist you in focusing, more of the time, in a way that allows the things that you want to flow into your experience.

Playing this game will cause you to offer a more expansive, expectant vibration. And it is our promise to you that manifestations will begin to arrive in response to your changed vibration.

-- Abraham-Hicks in Ask and It is Given pages 177 – 181

A Secret of Success

The heights by great men reached and kept
Were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept,
Were toiling upward in the night.
~ Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

There is no such thing as an overnight success. Even the people who explode into seemingly instant popularity on the stage and screen put in their time and efforts hour after hour, day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year to hone their talents to the point that they were recognized as a success. Even the American Idol contestants sang their hearts out in front of their bathroom mirrors dreaming of one day being a star.

What dream do you have? Are you willing to work harder, longer and later than the next person to achieve it? If you are, your chances of success are awesome!