Courage of Conviction

It’s been said that change is the only constant.  I wholeheartedly agree.  If you know me, you know I not only embrace change, but thrive on change.  The key to successful change, I’ve found is being willing and open to making adjustments when the circumstances change.  In otherwords, if you have a goal you’re most likely going to have to change either your goal or the actions leading to the goal if you are going to be successful.

I’m in training for my sixth marathon in Hartford, CT this fall.  During the last week, we’ve had some significant heat and some cooling.  We’ve also had a short round of sick children in our home, which causes sleeping issues for my wife and me.

Regardless of the temperature and humidity and sick children, the training for the marathon must go on - without training, I just wouldn’t be able to do the marathon.

So what am I to do?  Adjust my training schedule.  Maybe after one night of being up with the children time after time I decide to skip my core exercises for the next day - I need sleep instead.  Doing the core exercises would actually be worse for me since my body would be worn down and there would be a greater risk for injury.

(Read the full article here)

What adjustments must you make to be successful today?

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I wanted to let everyone know that there’s a really neat political networking site - PoliticalNetworker.com.  It’s a great site.  First off, it’s free to use - a big plus.  My first impression is that it is professional looking, it’s easy to use and is completely focused on politics and political networking.  I’m starting to see political campaigns signing up as well.  From what I can tell, it seems like it can be a great campaign organizational and recruitment tool.

Check it out.  And when you do sign-up, reach out to me and invite me to your political network if I haven’t already reached out to you.  You never know when we can tap into each others’ political skills to help someone get elected, or push a cause, or who help a friend get a political job, etc.

It’s been said that knowledge is power.  That’s not exactly true.  Applied knowledge is power.  Over the past week, it’s easy to compile the list of things that you’ve actually learned.  The next step is to ask yourself some important questions:

So what did you learn today?  What will you do with this new knowledge?  How will you apply this knowledge to your business and life?

When you can answer these questions, you are taking your learning and education to the level of power.  When you have power, you can make stuff happen.

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Some of the best advice I’ve heard in my life can be boiled down to simple phrases.  So often we get caught up in the technical details that we forget about what’s really important.  I wrote an article about one of the golden nuggets of life - being yourself.

This past week I had the opportunity to be on a teleseminar about being a well-paid speaker.  The speaker has done over 2200 speaking engagements, so he had a wealth of knowledge to share.

I took some notes from the call, but stared and underlined one particular note.  The speaker was talking about speaking technique.  Now, most people would probably expect him to talk about standing posture, tone, what to do with your hands, walking, etc.  Instead, he gave the best advice I’ve heard in a long time - don’t worry about all that stuff - just be yourself.

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I love to use running as an analogy for life.  It’s about discipline, endurance, focus, pain, joy, etc.  I wrote a post about running in the rain and my thoughts about the experience.  You’ll want to go to the full article to read Mark Victor Hanson’s quote, which applies to so many areas of life.

It’s been said that the difference between successful people and failures are that successful people do the things that failures are unwilling to do.

I think this is true is every area of life - business, sports, health, family, etc.

Take a look at the different areas of your life that you deem successful.  I can guarantee that you’ve done some things in that area of your life that others are unwilling to do.  If it’s business, maybe that means cold calling, or networking, or some other activity.

A personal example for me was this past Thursday.  As you know, I started my training for the Hartford marathon three weeks ago.  On Thursday, I was scheduled to run six 800 meter fast paced runs.  During the course of these runs, it started to rain and then turn into a pouring rain.  I was soaked.  I could have easily called it quits since I was running down the street from our house, but I didn’t.

- Like what you are reading?  Want more?  Be sure to sign up for my free weekly newsletter - Passport for Success. It is delivered to you e-mail box every Monday morning.  Sign-up at somdayisland.com

Success is a topic that everyone loves to talk about, but few will do what is necessary to achieve success.  When it comes to success, it’s about shutting up and getting down to the business of success:

I can’t stress how important it is to actually define success. Without a clear definition of what success means to you, you’ll never know if you are successful.

So what is your definition of success? What does success look like? What does it feel like?