First sit down and write out your goal list. At this point you’re just trying to list your goals; it doesn’t matter how specific. What is it that you want to achieve this year, next year, or in the next ten years? Write down everything! Higher salary, new car, inner peace, whatever it is; write it down now! I like to shoot for fifteen goals. For me it’s a good number that’s just outside of my comfort zone. Whatever number you choose, make sure it’s enough to both excite you and scare you a little bit. Remember that true personal growth happens when you’re outside your comfort zone.

After you finish your list, expand on it. If you said you wanted a higher salary, now’s the time to specify how much. Do you want to make $50,000 or $100,000? When you’re doing this, make sure that your goal is obtainable. If you’re making $32,000 now and your goal is to make $100,000 next year, you’d better have one heck of a plan or it’s not going to happen. Once you’ve made your goals specific, the fun part begins.

Create a goal scrapbook! If you wanted that iridium silver 2008 Benz, then find pictures of it in magazines and make a page exclusively dedicated to that goal. You could have the car in an open road setting or maybe you could create a picture of your Benz pulling up to red velvet ropes or driving through the wine country, whatever! It’s your goal, have fun with it! This exercise accomplishes two things. First, taking the time to put these pages together will solidify the goal in your mind. You wouldn’t take the time to do this if you weren’t truly serious about achieving your goals. This determination will put your subconscious to work and steer you towards success. Second, after you’re finished making your scrapbook you’ll have a constant and vivid reminder of what you want in life. Any time you feel like quitting, you can flip through your scrapbook and remind yourself how much you want to succeed.

Remember that anybody can say they want something. It takes someone who’s driven to articulate exactly what they want and make it real enough to go for it!

In Unlimited Power, Robbins shows you how to identify disempowering beliefs that you hold such as, I have to do everything myself and teaches you to question them and break them down using neuro-linguistic programming. It’s truly amazing how many beliefs you develop that have little or no evidence to back them up! You see, the mind doesn’t like information gaps so when you lack enough information your mind will fill in these gaps to reach a conclusion. Some of these conclusions are preventing you from achieving your ultimate potential in life. Unlimited Power gives you step-by-step instructions to identify these disempowering beliefs, challenge them, and replace them with empowering beliefs so you can move forward in your life and achieve the success you deserve!

The book would be great even if it stopped there but Robbins takes in a step further and dedicates an entire section of the book to building a winning team. Most self help books focus solely on self improvement, but Robbins realizes that no one is an army of one. In order to put together a powerful team, Robbins teaches you a variety of techniques such as mirroring. When you mirror someone you mimic, to a degree, the mannerisms of the person you’re talking to. People like others that are like themselves. It’s true that birds of a feather flock together. If you are driven to be successful then you have to align yourself with other people who want the same thing. Unlimited Power is not only about bettering you; it’s about building a powerful alliance and growing together.

If you think you’re going to be an army of one, go ahead and try. But your chances of success are about as good as John Doe winning the war on terror by himself. When you have a group of like minded people working with you, there’s no limit to what you can achieve and Unlimited Power will teach you to do just that.

What do I mean by weaponizing your day exactly? Too many of us go into our days without a plan. We simply take whatever task presents itself, complete it, then move on to the next task. What you need to do is determine ahead of time what tasks are important? What tasks are going to be the most productive for you? Think about that for a minute. What tasks are hanging over your head right now? What tasks would advance you most financially, professionally, or personally if they were completed tomorrow? Now write those tasks down! Take a page from David Letterman’s playbook and make a top ten list. This list will be the backbone of your day. Come rain or shine, if nothing else gets accomplished, these 10 items will be done! Do this each and every day. I find that it works best if I make it part of my nightly routine. Before I brush my teeth for bed, I write my top 10 list down in my trusty notebook.

So what’s making a top ten list going to do for you? Well, first of all it will help you prioritize your day. You’ll no longer be a slave to those little projects that seem to pop up out of nowhere. When you prioritize your most important tasks it makes it infinitely easier to say no to the little things that crawl out of the woodworks to drain suck up your precious time. Every time someone asks you to do something you’ll immediately think, “Is this task really important enough to take time away from my top ten? Should I delegate this task or just say no all together?” By setting a goal for yourself ahead of time you’ve ensured that you don’t wander through your life just trying to keep up. You have a plan, a purpose, a direction; and nothing will derail you from that unless it’s of the utmost importance.

Failure is a tool to build success. Success is the good stuff. It’s the goal. But failure is what will lead you there. Failure is a learning experience. From success you get nothing in terms of development. When you fail you haven’t really made a mistake, you’ve simply found the wrong path to success. After a while you’ll get on the right track and success will be yours as long as you have the guts to keep on going.

Persistence is what separates the achievers from the naysayers. Too may people have it in their heads that you should never fail. If you’re one of those people then I can say with absolute certainty that true success will never be yours. You’ll have a lot more success and a lot more fun in life if you not only accept failure but seek it out! Why not? Make it one of your goals this year to have a spectacular failure. I mean a real bomb!

Why the heck would anyone tell you to fail? To get you to try! What is it that you’ve always wanted to do but have been too afraid to take on? Go ahead and do it! The fear of failure has prevented more people from achieving their dreams than any other force on this planet. A failure is not someone who fails; it’s someone who gives up trying before their goal is reached. Give yourself permission to fail and see what happens. At the worst you’ll get a great learning experience and who knows, you might just make your dreams come true.

NLP stands for Neuro-Linguistic Programming. In essence you’re using the nuances of language to change the way you think about things. This way of behavior modification was originally the brainchild of a personal development author (Richard Bandler) and a linguist (John Grinder) and it gets its base in Gestalt therapy.

In order to understand NLP, you really need to have a basic grasp of the theory behind Gestalt therapy. Gestalt works on the assumption that people fill in information gaps. For example, have a look at this:

Do you see three random dots, or do you see a triangle? The vast majority of people would say that these dots aren’t random and form a triangle even though the lines and angles necessary for a triangle to exist aren’t really there. Your personal beliefs can form in the same way. You get a couple of small pieces of information and your mind develops a complex belief system around them. NLP tries to change this belief system by challenging these conclusions.

NLP supposes that there isn’t any evidence for the negative beliefs that you hold. You just hold these beliefs because your mind is filling in the gaps and forming a reality that isn’t really there. For example, a commonly held belief is that you need to excel in academics if you want to succeed in life. If you were a student of Neuro-Linguistic Programming, you’d look for examples to prove this belief wrong. In this case you could read about Richard Branson, the multi-billionaire behind the Virgin Empire. Branson suffers from dyslexia and as a result, he preformed poorly in his academic career. He’s also worth $7.8 billion dollars! Obviously not everyone who does poorly in school fails in life.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming is about challenging your perception of the world. All you have to do is make a list of all the beliefs you have that are holding you back and find evidence that those beliefs aren’t really the triangle they appear to be. If you need some help along the way, pick up a copy of Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins. You’ll learn a lot more about NLP and you might just drastically improve your life.

Zig Ziglar once said that the reason nothing can live in the Dead Sea is because it accepts water from rivers flowing into it but never lets anything out. Wealth works in much the same way. If you’re only interested in acquiring wealth and never give to the less fortunate you can bet that either the money will stop coming to you or all meaning will begin to drain from your life. Ziglar put it best when he said, “You can have everything in life that you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.” But what can you do? How can you make a difference?

The “I’m just one person” excuse is a common one. The truth is, one person can make a world of difference! Take St. Jude’s for example. It takes over $1.2 million dollars a day to run that children’s hospital! How is the majority of that money raised? It’s raised when someone goes to Chili’s and pays a dollar to color in a chili pepper or when someone goes to Target and says yes when the cashier asks for a donation. Millions of people who are only one person give what they can and the seemingly impossible gets accomplished.

What will your contribution be? What are you passionate about? Do you want to improve education levels? Feed the hungry? House the homeless? Whatever your cause is, go out and find an organization that champions it and join! If you’re too busy to give your time, think of how you can integrate that cause into your business. If you’re in sales, donate a portion of your commission to your cause. You could host a fundraiser in conjunction with your business. What a great PR opportunity that would be! Think of all the free press it could generate!

Even if you simply help your organization raise money it will make a world of difference. Do you think the doctors and scientists at St. Jude’s would be able to make medical breakthroughs and save lives if there was no one out there raising money for them? No way! Remember, when you work for the good you are as those who do the good. You may just see one of the most curious laws of life; the more you give, the more you seem to get.

Positive thinking is the ability to always see the positive option of everything. It doesn’t mean that you don’t even want to consider the bad options but that you’ve analysed them enough to know that they aren’t a big deal and aren’t worth your time.

What you want to be able to do is to find what is positive to your life and make it even better. Life is to be lived once and you must make sure to enhance it by any means. Would you ever consider living your whole life under pressure because of works and peers? That would be a nightmare. But everyone does it… Why? Because most people don’t live their life, their life lives them (they do not decide what they want in life).

Positive thinking is an healthy habit to maintain. It’s not lying to yourself, it’s simply going for what you want, maybe failing, but not over-analysing the situation which leads to action-paralysis. Once you get into the habit of seeing the positive in what could be accomplished, you won’t care if you fail because the end result will generally be better than your false conception of WHAT COULD OF happen… Yea, like it would happen, 100% sure…

Self talk. This is an interesting subject. You know, when you’re talking to yourself in your head? That’s self talk. The idea here is to simply provide you tools which will allow you to DO what you want instead of freezing up in front of situations which could lead to a win situation for you.

First, I must say that I’m not in the favor of what is called affirmations, those little sentences you tell yourself and supposely do magic. The problem with those and why it doesn’t work for most who try them out is that they aren’t authentic. They don’t come from a place of true belief and purpose. What is better is actual affirmation, in the moment. Say you are about to go do a presentation in front of a huge crowd. You start feeling not really good, but you’ve done this before. At least once.

You’ve done it once, and here we are again. What can happen now? The worst? People laughing at you, you getting unconcious, etc? Now that you’ve imagine what could happen, think about what you just imagined. Yes, it’s exagerate, fun, near impossible. Now, remember the last time, it was FINE! You did well, maybe even better than you expected. It’s going to be the same now.

The best self talk you can give yourself is from a place of confidence. If you feel like you king of the world, it will show in your actions. Confidence is gained by acting confident in inconfident situations.

I would suggest you try this: If you happen to feel stressed or unconfident in yourself at a certain point in your day, especially if you’re going to do something like speaking in front of an audience, asking a girl out, asking for a raise, etc., to tell yourself to FEEL confident and able to do the task, EASILY. We are the only person who can control our internal system, and if we decide we want to act confident, we must tell ourself to become confident.

The point of this is for you to realise, AFTER it’s been done, that the task wasn’t as huge as you IMAGINED it. Huh? Imagination again? Yes. It is the only thing that stops us from acting upon our needs and feelings.

Positive thinking with self talk will be great tools to you, if you use them, because, like knives, they need to be sharpened before they can work perfectly.

I won’t write a book review yet since I don’t know how the rest of the book will unfold, but from the small advices I’ve learned so far, I think many are worth sharing.

1. If you’re following the GTD method (Getting Things Done), look at your list of to-dos and see if you could cut that list in half. Find stuff that aren’t worth working on, or stuff you could delegate, but you didn’t delegate for any specific reason.

2. If you’re working on many different aspects of your life right now, take some time and analyse what brings you joy. Use the 80/20 rules to help you out. 20% of what you do actually brings 80% of your happiness. By the same token, 80% of what brings you stress, anger and such is brought by 20% of the people you know, stuff you do, tasks you have, etc. If you can do without them, wipe them out of your life for good.

3. If effectiveness and efficiency is what you strive for, ask yourself at least twice per day “I’m I being productive or just active?” If it is the latter, stop what you’re doing at that moment, and focus.

4. On effectiveness. It’s not worth being efficient if you’re not doing something effective, meaning that you must work toward your goal. If what you’re doing is “productive of a result”, that’s what you’re looking for. If you’re only doing without any goal in mind, it’s not worth doing. Note that those “results” must be toward the accomplishment of goals you’ve set yourself. Goals toward a life you want to live.

5. Do stuff that get you out of your comfort zone. I’ll never repeat this one enough, getting out of your regular stuff is something you MUST be able to do by yourself. When it’ll be normal for you to be incomfortable, you’ll have a huge advantage compared to other people, and you’ll have knowledge they don’t have: scary stuff isn’t that scary when done once.

6. This tip is GTD related (I’ve been reading this one too). Daily, set yourself one goal you want to accomplish. Then, find what the next action toward that goal is. Be the most explicit possible. i.e. “Call Joe at 555-1010 and ask prices for the new Madza RX-8″. Someone else must be able to do the next action for you only by reading the description. But don’t use more than one sentence, that’d be overdoing it.

7. “Cut the fat”. Stop looking at your email each half hour. Decice on ONE time per day which will be your email reading and replying time. Don’t be afraid of doing it. Many think they’ll miss opportunities by doing so, but it’s pretty impossible. If you’re afraid of missing such opportunities, set up an autoresponder which will say “If your email is urgent, please call me @ 555-5555″. This will prevent you from missing “that” opportunity.

8. Try doing stuff in batch. This is related to the last point. If you can do a task once instead of spreading it through the day, it will be much more efficient since you won’t be disturbed while doing it. Yes, make sure you don’t get disturbed during those “intensive” work period.

9. Stay focused. When you’re working on a specific task, avoid at all cost going to email, msn, phone or doing something else than what you primary focused yourself on. This will allow you to be much more efficient and will produce better results.

10. Do the impossible instead of the possible. Make goal impossible to reach in order to make sure that you do more than required. It’s not by setting up easy stuff to do that you’ll be considered someone who achieve. It’s by going for what you truly want that you’ll be able to make those “impossible” goals possible.

Well, if you answered that you’d be looking around, you do not have leadership skills yet.

Leaders enter every place having in mind that they are the leader and that people will be looking at them for cues on how to behave in their presence. They have an aura of confidence and they let no one walk on their foot.

Improving your leadership skills

Increasing your leadership skills is a question of taking responsibility and especially assuming them.

First, you must accept to take responsibility you would not take in the past and you must accept that you might do them not correctly. It is fine for everyone to learn and to make errors. Imagine if you were to start learning out to write and you wouldn’t be allowed to practice. If after a few time you were not able to write correctly, you would have quit, who would you been now? Well, you wouldn’t be able read this and you wouldn’t be able to comment or to write anything. You would not be able to get a job that requires you to report to someone else. You would not be able to communicate over the Internet with others using e-mails. You see, it’s okay to fail even if it’s the first time or 2000th time.

Second, like it was stated before, you must take responsabilities and then assumed them. Assuming means you must take action and to take action is to take decisions. Not only will it take decision, but you will follow them. When you follow what you’ve decided you go forward. This way you’ll be learning much faster from your errors, and you’ll become one of the best.

You see people call other geniuses. What is a genius? Someone was born with the talents or someone that is so good that everyone thinks he’s a genius? You see, most people accept that geniuses are people that are good at what they’re doing. I don’t think that someone was born with the talent of a genius so he could play the piano. They must have learned, failed, worked hard to become what is called a genius. It’s not that hard to become a genius. All you have to do is dedicate some time to one of your passions and get into it as far as you can.

Everyone wants to become a leader but most don’t become leaders because it involves too much work and especially too much stress. All that stress is caused by fear. Fear of the unknown. When you know what to do and you accepted to take responsabilities and assume them, becoming a leader is much more interesting than being one of the crowd.

Go work on your leadership skills. Accept your responsabilities and take actions.

Lately, I’ve been looking to acquire social skills which I is something I wasn’t looking for in the past. Since I had no experience in this “expertise”, I didn’t know where to begin. So I started at the bottom, trying the best I could to gain experience but it simply didn’t work. I was even getting in the other direction which wasn’t great at all.

I follow the saying : “If something doesn’t work, do the opposite“, so I went ahead and stopped going on too strong, and it progressively came to me. It was weird at first because giving less interest in others was actually getting them more interested. I have felt and understood why certain person get rejected fast, and I mean REALLY FAST. It’s unbelievable. People are so much based on first impression that it’s understandable that we often avoid getting to know new people which is quite sad to me. Social surrounding is, in my opinion, the best way to enjoy your life fully. A self-centered person can only lose from being that way because he/she loses much experience from others. Think about it, if you want to have a lot of experience in different situations, how do you do it? Watch movies? Hell no. You experiment with tons of people.

As a matter of fact, people are in a scarcity mentality. Everyone is afraid of everyone. At least, for a big part of the population. Those who become rich and become successful in life are often those unique person who develop leaders traits. And what is great about this is that it’s not hard to shift of mentality. It just need a bit of work of your part and massive action. Push your limits, destroy them, show yourself you can be better than you already are. It’s all about that.

If you want to get what you want, you must do what is required first. Then you’ll get what you want, WITHOUT ANY PROBLEM. If you want a new car, make money. If you want to make money, get a job. If you already have a job, find a way to increase your revenue. If you want to increase your revenue, find new opportunities, new ideas, etc. You see, this is almost a perpetual circle of improvement. Each time you improve something on that ladder, you improve your “chances” of getting what you want, because you know, everything in life is about chance. Let just say that by following those steps (pushing your limits, improving everything that relates to what you want), probabilities will most likely play in your favor.