To Be a Success

I think you may now have firmly grasped the idea that to be a success with building one’s confidence, or any personal growth pursuit, one needs to:

• learn the techniques thoroughly
• make sure we carry out ALL the baby steps completely
• build the muscle of the success tool, starting with small goals
• be persistent until it starts working for us.

There is an attitude you can adopt to help you with the first two suggestions above. The last point can also be expanded upon.

To avoid becoming over confident with regard the simple success tools I shall share with you on this site and on the online/face-2-face personal development courses, we can decide to have the attitude of:

• someone who is wanting to learn
• someone who hasn’t got any of the answers
• and is keen to try out everything more than once!

I find that the people who adopt this attitude – and some of them have lots of qualifications and knowledge about personal growth – are the ones for whom my workshops and courses work to the greatest degree. Those who do not adopt this attitude – whether they have knowledge or not – find it all hugely interesting but do not get the same results…

As I said on my first post, I find it a great tragedy that only 10 – 20% of people who join personal growth seminars around the globe actually get the results they are after. I want you to get the most from any self improvement training you may undertake, so I’m going to persist with this, until all the baby steps are revealed.

Persistence is a key ingredient to building confidence in any sphere of life, including personal development. Just like anything that is new to us, when we start to learn the new skill for the first time, we are hesitant and make lots of mistakes. When you learned to walk: did you fall down a few times or were you up and running the very first time you tried? When you learned to ride a bicycle: were you speeding around and doing wheelies or riding with no hands the first time you tried, or did it take time to develop the necessary balance and skill?

It’s the same with techniques for personal success and well-being. The success tool may appear to be very simple, and we are familiar with similar techniques. Just as there is only a subtle difference between being balanced upon two wheels and being unbalanced, there are often subtle differences between recognising a technique, and its successful implementation.

The subtleties of success tools are usually not apparent until we have tried it a couple of times. For me, this is one of the most satisfying times of any personal development course: when someone comes back with questions after they have tried a particular technique and now find new layers of enquiry (sometimes stated as a problem) – wonderful, we are now getting to the subtle aspects that will make it really work!

Reasons for a Success Tool NOT to Work

To be a success, takes more than a familiarity with the ideas – a recognition that we have heard something like this before – it takes ACTION!

I suppose over confidence comes from a familiarity with certain ideas. As I’ve mentioned, there is a lot of popular psychology out there, and techniques are bandied around like confetti.

Sometimes a student on a confidence building course, or assertiveness training will say they have tried such-n-such a technique and it didn’t work for them. Why might this be?
It might have been the wrong technique for the result they wanted, or the timing wasn’t right for it to work. It may have been they needed the help of an experienced therapist to make it work (i.e. in the case of EFT, NLP or Hypnotherapy), or the tape/CD didn’t hit the right button or was made by an inferior therapist. It might have been that they didn’t get shown how to do it accurately so a vital ingredient was missing. There are many reasons for a technique not to work the first time it is used.

Two of the most common reasons for a success tool NOT to work are because we didn’t build the foundation of the baby steps and/or we didn’t put the effort in to build the muscle of the new behaviour/attitude.
Someone on one of my personal development training courses was absolutely adamant that goal setting and affirmations do NOT work and action is the key. What they missed was the fact that goal setting and affirmations ARE actions, and if we dismiss them – or any of the other success tools I’m going to share with you – then we may be missing a crucial ingredient to our self-fulfilment and well-being.

Intermediate Level of Personal Development?

Since this may well be the case, I need to ask: why does the 60 year old lady going to a computer class for the first time feel terrified of computers - she has been around 60 years and surely must know a thing or two? If you are saying 'just because she has been around a while and has lots of different experience doesn't mean there isn't something (such as computers) she doesn't know about and has to start at the beginning', then why do people presume they are at an intermediate level of personal development?

I think they have been conned! There is so much cliché about personal growth, and so much tripe within magazines (popular psychology) with their 10 Ways to Catch a Man, and How To Be a Successful Supermum, or the personality trait questionnaires. Everyone thinks they are an armature psychologist, yet on my courses I get students with a psychology degree (as well as Reiki Masters, Counsellors, NLP Practitioners and Life Coaches).

If we decide to wait till we are going to be challenged, we may find the techniques do not work for us - we haven't built the necessary foundation due to thinking we are above it (we might be, but with the wrong muscles for this technique to work...). I suppose what I am saying is that there is such a thing as over confidence. When we are over confident we miss out crucial steps to success, thinking we do not need them.

We need to start with baby steps to build the muscle, or build the new behaviour/belief/self-image/etc., and it is crucial to build the right muscles - whatever your personal development level, have you built the right muscles for your next step?

Build The Muscle of Self Esteem

So why is it that so often, when presenting personal development workshops and the like, I keep meeting people who have a particular goal in mind, their ultimate goal, but do NOT wish to create baby goals for their personal growth (confidence, self esteem, assertiveness, etc.) in order to build the muscle? I say to students, "build a list of all your good qualities and achievements and read it to yourself every day for one week" - very simple and anyone can do it. Yet a week later they want the next step to being successful and confident but haven't taken the initial step to build the muscle of self-esteem...?!

I'm just thinking out load now but maybe people think they are already at an intermediate stage in their personal growth, so they do not need the baby steps - or to use our earlier analogy, they feel they need larger weights to be challenged?

Building the Muscle of Self-improvement

Personally, I find it a great tragedy that only 10 – 20% of people who join personal growth seminars around the globe actually get the results they were after. This is why I am going to dedicate some web space, time and effort into giving you sound guidance on how to be one of those who gets more out of life.

We cannot treat self-improvement in the same way as retail therapy... The joy of instant gratification is not the way to long-term confidence, enhanced self-image and greater fulfillment.
To become confident, we need to take a different route. Let’s take, as an analogy, the example of a weight lifter. The most successful weight lifters have muscles upon muscles and are just huge! The weights they lift are also huge and the bar bends when they lift it. So, if I were to find some weedy person who has decided their GOAL is to be a successful world champion weight lifter - just as the present world champions must have been at some point - then could they become a success in their chosen sport if they ONLY tried to lift the immense weights the present champions throw above their heads? They, in fact, would NOT be able to shift the bar and could NEVER build the muscle in order to lift it!! What they would have to do is start by lifting small weights to begin the process of building the muscle. In this way their confidence builds also.