The power and the why of changing your lifestyle

HOW AND WHY DO WE NEED CHANGE?

WHAT DO WE NEED TO DO TO START?

When I say change I mean the sort of change that makes us better.

I believe this change starts when we have decided that what we are doing now and who we are now is no longer good enough. What I am doing right now will not get me to the stage that I have dreamed of. It will not give me financial freedom it will not give me job satisfaction.

I want to go to bed at night and feel fulfilled and when I get up the next day I was to feel excited about what I can add to my life and to others. 

So how do you decide when enough is enough? 

Well are you completely happy right now, how many of you can say that I am right now, where I want to be?

We carry on the way we are because we believe that is the easy option, the easy option allows us to go to bed at night not satisfied, waking up not satisfied, doing our job not satisfied.

I decided the ‘easy option’ was no longer an option. If you were to ask anyone that has stepped out of that easy option comfort  zone and into a new way of life with constant self improvement and making a difference. They will say that was never an easy option looking back. When you have a plan with what you would like to achieve, life flows, reasons to be at your job are easier to find and when you go to bed you are satisfied and when you wake up you are satisfied.

So are you where you want to be?

 I know I am not, but I will work for the rest of my life towards reaching my goal and when I reach my goal I will set another one and work towards that.

I don’t think that I will reach a point of where I decide that I have done exactly what I want to do. I like to dream big

At 19 I ran my own business and I ran it for 2 years but I couldn’t see my future within my company because I had no direction and everything I dreamt of doing I was told that ‘probably won’t work’.  So in the end I decided to go back to employment, feeling like I had failed but also feeling like I had gained a lot of experience with some questions unanswered. 

So through employment on my next job I passed on the passion and experience and changed as much as I could. With my questions still unanswered.

So now I need to do something different I need to something where I am in control of how I feel and how I can create betterness in my life and others.

I asked myself what are my skills and what where does my passion exist, so that’s business and the people within it.

I wanted to be working hard at working clever instead of being clever and working hard. So how does someone that has a passion in business and also wants to work hard at working clever.

I wanted to be able to give something back to people that I interact with. So for me the natural fit was coaching on business and personal performance, aimed at people that really want to make a difference in their lives and are committed to this kind of change. My passion for coaching will rub off on anyone who comes to me, so far I have 100% success rate and that is to the credit of the passion from the clients I coach.

I want to make you ask the question what am I passionate about what do I want to achieve with my life what do I desire.

So what do we do with our vision and is it realistic?

This is a passage from an interview done on the founder of IBM

IBM is what it is today for three special reasons. The first reason is that, at the very beginning, I had a very clear picture of what the company would look like when it was finally done. You might say I had a model in my mind of what it would look like when the dream – my vision – was in place.

The second reason was that once I had that picture, I then asked myself how a company which looked like that would have to act. I then created a picture of how IBM would act when it was finally done.

The third reason IBM has been so successful was that once I had a picture of how IBM would look like when the dream was in place and how such a company would have to act, I then realized that, unless we began to act that way from the very beginning, we would never get there.

In other words, I realized that for IBM to become a great company it would have to act like a great company long before it ever became one.

From the very outset, IBM was fashioned after the template of my vision. And each and every day we attempted to model the company after that template. At the end of each day, we asked ourselves how well we did, and discovered the disparity between where we were and where we had committed ourselves to be, and, at the start of the following day, set out to make up for the difference.

Every day at IBM was a day devoted to business development, not doing business.

We didn’t do business at IBM, we built one.

So what we can learn from one of the most successful people in business and in history is that to start with the end in mind. Stephen Covey talks about starting with the end in mind in his book ‘the seven habits of highly successful people’ If we start with our vision our perceived future we can work our way backwards.

VISION
This is where we see our future the things we can picture to make us happy where we will feel content with our lives, satisfied and fulfilled.
GOALS
These are the things we put in place to make sure we achieve our vision, our perceived future. The things we can work towards to say that we have achieved that gets us that one bit closer to our vision.
STRATERGY
This is how we are going to achieve our goal, these are the standards we set our self by, how we carry ourselves towards our goals. What we need to do and how.
ACTION PLAN
This is the every step part. The every step I take is towards the vision. We must make sure at this stage that we do not lose focus that we are following the strategy towards our goals. We must remain in constant sight of our vision the reason why we are doing what we do never loosing focus.

I have met people that have said are you really going to achieve what you want. Is what your doing a waste of time. What happens if you do not become successful?
I know what I think when I hear these comments and I am sure you can come up with your own answers. And it all depends on your mind set.
I read a quote.

“It is not given to us to know what difference we can make, and perhaps we can make no difference at all. But that is no reason not to make the attempt"

It sums up for me the message I want to get across to all the disbelievers out there. If I fail I fail but I will be much further than you will ever be in my mind and in my heart because I took the risk for a want for a better future for myself, my family (which is in my vision) and for every person I come in to contact with.
As JFK said ‘the only thing to fear is fear itself’.
I have no fear of taking that risk.

A great video from someone who could have took the easier road...

What I would like to finish with is empathy. Not everyone’s situation allows for a complete over haul of life, sometimes we have to put our family and friends first which is important. So allowing for everyone’s circumstances from the most tied down of people to the freest of people, 

If I was to ask you if you didn’t have to worry about sleeping, money or your own self-doubt, in an ideal world where would you be in a week? 

This time next week what would you like to achieve?

 Think about this right now or on your way home tonight or on your way to work tomorrow, whenever you like but please think about it because this will be your first step to making your life slightly better and if anyone in this room could say they wouldn’t like something in their life slightly better they are lying but they are lying to themselves.
So spend time on your vision on your life and making yourself happy and remember what Bob Dylan once said

‘A person is a success if they get up in the morning and gets to bed at night and in between does what he wants to do’