Success Is Not an Accident

by Tommy Newberry

  Vital Time Tactic #10: Run Masterful Meetings

  How do your meetings measure up? Are they an investment or a waste of time? Here are six essential guidelines for effective meetings.

  Know the purpose. Is the goal to solve a problem, to train employees, to share information, or to plan a project? Be able to define the purpose of the meeting in less than twenty-five words!

  Is the meeting absolutely necessary? Or is there another way to accomplish the same result? Who must attend? What is the worst thing that could happen if the meeting were not held at all? Most meetings are big time wasters, so view all meetings as investments that should reap large dividends. Multiply the hourly wages of meeting attendees by the number of hours of the meeting to determine the true cost of the get-together.

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  Rapid-Fire Time-Saver #20

  Create checklists for recurring activities like home maintenance, car maintenance, house cleaning, vacation planning, and grocery shopping. You won’t have to rethink them each time the need arises.

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  Develop a written agenda. E-mail a copy of meeting topics to participants in advance of the meeting. List the items in order of importance to the organization. Begin the meeting with a one-sentence statement of purpose, then give a specific adjournment time.

  Prepare! Prepare for the meeting as if it were a client presentation. Always do your homework, and never waste attendees’ time with tasks or dialogue that could be handled elsewhere.

  Lead the meeting effectively. Keep the meeting on track and state the outcome of each point discussed. Close each point before moving on, and don’t skip around. Assign all tasks and deadlines, including taking and distributing meeting minutes or notes. Determine how each task will be implemented and controlled. Be absolutely clear on what is to be done and why, and have employees restate the task, the deadline, and the purpose to make sure everyone understands what’s going on. Above all, make decisions. Meetings without decisions are worthless.

  Get out fast. If you are no longer necessary for the completion of the meeting, leave. Try to get items affecting you discussed first, and then leave and get back to work! Leaders should give their people permission to depart after their contribution has been made.

  We all have just twenty-four hours each day to achieve our goals and to become the person we are capable of becoming. As I said at the beginning of this lesson, no matter who you are, your progress and ultimate success in life will depend more on what you do with the twenty-four hours you’re given each day than on any other single factor. You can invest your time wisely or you can waste it foolishly. You can create Vital Time or you can let it slip away. The choice, as always, is yours. It’s completely up to you!

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  Rapid-Fire Time-Saver #21

  Do things right the first time. If you don’t have time to do it right the first time, when will you have time to redo it?

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  Remember, each of us has massive room for improvement and advancement. Your output can be more than increased—it can be multiplied repeatedly. In fact, I believe you have an obligation to maximize every drop of your potential. And when you’ve risen to this next peak of supereffectiveness, you’ll find it hard to believe you used to live any other way!

  Lesson 4 Questions for Reflection

  What is one area where you need to take action but have been procrastinating?

  What impact could your time-management skills have on the quality of your home life? What are your children learning from observing how you use your time?

  How much margin or unscheduled time do you need on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis to operate at your peak?

  In what ways has technology influenced how you invest or spend your time (Internet, e-mail, mobile phones, iPods, etc.)?

  What are the key activities that tend to create the biggest difference in your family life? at work? Which activities should definitely be pruned?

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  Whom can you influence with the ideas from this lesson in the next forty-eight hours?

  Lesson 4 Assignments

  1 | Determine how much your time is currently worth (see chart on page 119).

  2 | Determine how much your time should be worth to create the lifestyle you desire.

  3 | Make a list of your three highest payback activities, both personally and professionally.

  4 | Keep a log of how you spend your time for the next two weeks. (Use fifteen-minute increments.)

  5 | Based on this lesson, brainstorm a list of twenty specific ways you can improve your personal time management.

  Lesson 5

  Choose to Get Out of Your Own Way

  Whatever you direct your mind to think about will ultimately be revealed for everyone to see.

  In this lesson, you will learn to

  • Use the language of success

  • Flush unwanted dialogue out of your mind

  • Control your emotions

  • Build beliefs that make success inevitable

  • Get out of your own way

  • Reprogram yourself for extraordinary accomplishment

  Among the most powerful influences on your character, personality, and attitude is what you say to yourself and believe. During every single moment of every day, you are talking yourself either into or out of success. By talking yourself into success, I mean talking yourself into being the champion God designed you to become. Remember our discussion in lesson 2 about finding God’s unique purpose for your life. With every thought that races through your mind, you are constantly redefining yourself and your future. Your inner dialogue, or self-talk, can and must be effectively harnessed if you are to maximize your full potential. Harnessing your self-talk doesn’t require magic, just a deliberate effort to align your thought life with God’s best plans for your life. It’s training your mind via your mouth. Matthew 12:34 says, “Out of the overflow of the heart the mouth speaks” (NIV). Your words and mental images reflect what you believe in your heart—and if you change those words and images, you will also change your heart.

  Breaking Out of the Cube

  He’s been on the cover of Newsweek and Fortune, appeared as the spokesperson for a multimillion-dollar company, and two books written about him have ranked number one on the New York Times best-sellers list. No, I’m not talking about Jack Welch or Bill Gates; I’m referring to Dilbert, the popular cartoon character created by Scott Adams, who humorously reminds everyday office workers that they are not alone in their frustration.

  Adams has made a career of drawing out the humor in the typical office worker’s life. His nationally syndicated comic strip appears in two thousand newspapers in sixty-five countries, making it one of the more successful comic strips in history.19 Each year, devoted fans support the Dilbert merchandising empire by buying books, mouse pads, coffee mugs, and calendars.

  So how did Adams break out of his routine engineering job at Pacific Bell to become a successful cartoonist? He used a process called affirmations, which he learned from a friend who had read a book on the subject. She had tried it out for herself and had success, and Adams figured he had nothing to lose. The process consisted of visualizing what he wanted and then writing down that goal fifteen times in a row, each day, until he obtained the thing he’d visualized.20 Basically, he talked himself into being successful.

  Outside Help

  Although Adams had been successful in school, graduating from high school as valedictorian and receiving a bachelor of arts in economics from Hartwick College, he had little knowledge about his desired profession. He wanted to be a cartoonist, but he had no idea how to get started.

  In 1986, Adams took a significant step toward reaching his goal by contacting Jack Cassady, the host of a PBS special on cartoonists. Cassady answered Adams’s questions and encouraged him to submit his work. Adams sent his cartoons to a few publications for th
eir consideration and promptly received rejection letters. He said, “Discouraged, I put my art supplies in the closet and decided to forget about cartooning.”21 But a year and a half later, Adams received another letter from Cassady. The cartoonist egged Adams on and told him not to get discouraged. Cassady assured him that his work was very good. That provided the motivation Adams needed to try again.

  Helping Himself

  Adams had been using his affirmations process in a number of areas. After graduating from college, he wanted to receive an MBA from the University of California at Berkeley; however, he had not scored high enough on the entrance exam to be accepted. With his new system for positive thinking, he tried again: He visualized his goal of scoring in the ninety-fourth percentile, wrote the goal down fifteen times each day, and prepared for the GMAT with study guides and practice exams. When he received his results from the test, he could hardly believe his eyes. He had scored in the ninety-fourth percentile.22 And in 1986, Adams graduated from the University of California at Berkeley with an MBA.

  Now on his second try at submitting cartoons to various publications, he took the same success steps by writing out fifteen times each day, “I will become a syndicated cartoonist.”23 It was a huge goal for an unknown artist. Maybe one in ten thousand cartoonists actually gets published. But Adams knew what he wanted, and he went for it. He put together a polished presentation of his work and sent it to syndicators. Two years later, Dilbert was published. And now, almost twenty years later, it is still read by millions of people each day as they flip to the comics or business section of their newspapers.

  What Is Self-Talk?

  Self-talk is most simply defined as what you say or think to yourself, either silently or aloud. Silent self-talk is commonly referred to as your thoughts, but it’s actually a silent conversation that you hold in the privacy of your own mind. You are thinking all the time, day and night. In fact, psychologists estimate that the average person has between twenty thousand and sixty thousand thoughts per day. Every thought either moves you toward your goals and the person you intend to become or moves you away. No thoughts are neutral. Every thought counts. Unfortunately, approximately 90 percent of the thoughts you have today are repeats from yesterday and the day before, which is why effecting permanent, positive improvement in your life tends to be such an uphill challenge. The human mind loves the status quo, and if not trained otherwise, it will feed you a constant repetition of old ideas. Those old thoughts, like an automatic pilot, will steer your life in the same direction it has always gone.

  Here are some common examples of what people speak out loud or say to themselves silently.

  How to Talk Yourself Out of Success

  • I can never remember his name.

  • I just always seem to dip into my savings.

  • I lost my train of thought.

  • I can never say that right.

  • You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.

  • You can’t have your cake and eat it too.

  • I know my limitations.

  • I’m just this way.

  • I’m losing my mind.

  • That makes me sick.

  • Just my luck.

  • That’s out of my price range. I can’t afford it.

  • I don’t have enough time.

  • The ones I like don’t like me, and the ones who like me—well, there’s always something wrong with them.

  • That’s too rich for my blood.

  • If I had money, I’d just worry about losing it.

  • I’m living proof of Murphy’s Law.

  • I’ll never understand those types of things.

  • Everything I eat goes straight to my waist.

  • Nobody wants to pay me what I’m worth.

  • I used to have so much energy.

  • My metabolism is slowing down.

  • If such and such happens, I’m going to be soo mad.

  Pay attention to almost any conversation for about eight or ten minutes, and you’ll hear the toxic talk—the whining, complaining, blaming, condemning, and justifying. You’ll hear people passionately arguing in favor of their most cherished limitations, and you’ll also hear them knocking, sometimes subtly, those who have overcome those same limitations and done far more with their lives. Some insist that they’re not being negative, just realistic; they’re giving you an honest description of how their lives are right now. The reality is that where you’ve been and what you’ve done matter far less than where you’re going. But if you persist in thinking and talking about current or prior performance, then where you’ve been, where you are, and where you’re going will all be one and the same. This holds true for your golf game, your career, your marriage, and all the other areas of your life.

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  As King Solomon pat it several thousand years ago, “As [a man] thinks in his heart, so is he.”

  —Proverbs 23:7, NKJV

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  Become a Visionary

  The purpose of this lesson is to help you become a visionary with your life—someone who can sense things as they could be rather than just as they are, someone who acknowledges the sun when only clouds are visible. This is a vital skill in short supply, and when you master it, you can create opportunities for yourself and for others that most people won’t even accept as a possibility.

  Consider some part of your life that you’d like to improve. It could be a personal quality, a habit, an attitude, a financial problem, a challenge with your weight, or any other area of dissatisfaction. Since this area is below your standards, imagine yourself to be down in a hole, far beneath your potential. It doesn’t matter so much how you got in the hole—just that you’re aware that you’re in the hole. To get out, you’re going to have to think up, look up, speak up, and ultimately climb up. Remember this as the first rule of holes: If you’re in one, stop digging. Most people have difficulty climbing out of the holes in their lives simply because they focus more on the hole (which represents their current circumstance) than on where they want to climb (which is the goal or solution). They are bogged down in the reality of today, and as a result, they’ll keep getting more of what they already have.

  You must make the shift from reactive thinking to proactive thinking. You must stop working for your mind and instead enlist your mind to work for you. Remember, your self-talk tends to work against you unless you are aware of it and use it to further your mission, goals, and ambitions.

  For the rest of this lesson, I will use the word self-talk to refer to positive self-talk. Positive self-talk involves thoughts you intentionally choose to think because of the results they will produce in your life. It is a positive, assertive, present-tense description of a goal or other desired condition. It describes your character and lifestyle as it will be when you have fulfilled your potential and achieved your goals.

  We all have ingrained beliefs about ourselves and our capabilities. A belief is a collection of subconscious thoughts that represent what you consider to be the absolute truth about any given situation in your life. Beliefs provide a feeling of absolute certainty. Your beliefs are literally hardwired, primarily through repetition, into neural pathways in your brain. Incoming data from your senses travels along these pathways on its way to interpretation in the brain. This means that prior to the brain’s interpretation, incoming data is filtered through your beliefs. Reality is, therefore, not fixed but is manipulated by our beliefs. Self-talk represents specific mental energy that is received by the brain, then downloaded into neurological tracks and processed to create the actions we take.

  We are not consciously aware of most of our beliefs because we have been living with them for so long. As a result, beliefs are like assumed truths that need not be questioned. And if we never challenge a belief, it sticks with us forever, becoming an ever-stronger conviction.

  Typically, people will do just about anything to keep a belief intact, ev
en if it is damaging or self-defeating. Since replacing a limiting or erroneous belief requires a combination of curiosity, humility, and courage, it’s a rare occurrence. Many limiting beliefs also exonerate us from taking action and pursuing opportunities, from leaving our comfort zone or taking on greater responsibility. Still other limiting beliefs provide us with convenient alibis for doing less work.

  What Is Reality?

  It’s important to remember that what we perceive as reality is not necessarily true at all, but only our personal version of reality. We get only an edited look at the world around us. This is because our beliefs, for better or for worse, act as filters, screening out any evidence that doesn’t support them. We screen reality through our senses, our language, our inborn tendencies, and especially through generalizations we make relative to our personal experiences. It is in this fourth category of screening where we can make a substantial impact with positive self-talk. The beliefs that make up your self-concept come from the generalizations, many of them self-defeating, you have made throughout your life. In a number of different ways, we tend to cling to our limiting beliefs, like a child clings to a security blanket, even when there is evidence to the contrary.