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7 Ways to Accelerate Your Success

7 Ways to Accelerate Your Success Introduction

It is a dream scenario. Having everything go off without a hitch. Flawless execution. Unfortunately, as ideal as that sounds, it is not very realistic. While you cannot completely eliminate mistakes, there are some bad habits that almost everyone falls into at one time or another that increase the chance of making mistakes. These behaviors contribute to your lack of success. If you can understand them and put a plan in place to change, you will experience greater success and avoid failure.

Don’t Fear Making Mistakes First off, mistakes do not define you. Mistakes are an experience. And just like all experiences, it is what you make of it. Have you ever wondered why two people can go to the same party and have a completely different opinion of it? One comes back raving about how amazing everything was while the other person cannot stop complaining about the consistency of the dip. It is all about how you chose to view the experience. In other words, you can let the experience shape you or you can shape it. You can interpret mistakes and setbacks as evidence of your shortcomings, lack of knowledge, or perceived worthlessness. Alternatively, you can take the same events and view them as steps that help you move up your learning curve and along the path to success. You may not have landed the deal or you may not have achieved your sales goal, but an experience was created. How will you choose to let the experience shape you? If all you focus on is the zero-sum—the success or the failure of the event—then you are missing a learning experience that will help you become successful.

Build Networks and Develop Relationships If you are not actively building your network and developing close relationships, you are limiting your ability to get things done with fewer mistakes or setbacks. There is a limit to how much you can do in a day. Once you have reached that limit everything else needs either to be abandoned or deferred to another day. A strong and deep network puts you in a position to leverage other people’s know-how, time, contacts, and wealth to help you achieve your goals. However, having a strong network is not only about what you get, it is about what you can give. Knowing what you can offer and providing it are sure ways to expand your network. A talented, responsible individual is a treasure in anyone’s network and is an invitation that will attract similar people into your network. When building your network, think quantity AND quality. If you are simply adding people to your address book without either truly knowing them or letting them know you, then

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you are just filling up pages. One of the keys to building a strong network is in the development of the relationships within the network. Get to know the person beyond their job title. That is not to say you need to invite your loan officer over for dinner with the family, but understand his or her working style. How well can you trust him or her? How well can they trust you? Is he or she willing and creative enough to help you out of a bind? Do you provide skills that make his or her job easier? You never know what fruit a relationship may yield, so treat each one as a found treasure. A strong network built with strong relationships will help you accomplish more than you could by yourself, give you the opportunity to bless others, and keep you from making the mistakes the people in your network have already made.

Develop Your Confidence While Practicing Humility Confidence is one of the single biggest contributing factors to your success. Arrogance—on the other hand—can be the greatest stumbling block. Ignoring your limitations, especially when it comes to knowledge, can quickly get you in over your head. So how do you develop confidence without crossing the line into arrogance? Confidence is nothing more than a memory of past successes and faith in your ability to handle what lies ahead. Arrogance comes into the mix when your memory of past successes becomes colored by time and you start thinking every good thing that has happened is solely because of you and every bad thing was caused by someone else’s incompetence. The truth is anyone can claim brilliance with the benefit of hindsight. The trick is to understand what you did not know at the time, how you gathered the information, whose expertise you leaned on, and what role good fortune played in the mix. The path to success requires you to leave your comfort zone repeatedly. This is the only way you will grow. When you leave your comfort zone, you are in uncharted territory for you. However, it is not uncharted for everyone. If you build your network (see above) and humble yourself to use it, you will have a resource that will help instill in you confidence—but not arrogance—to use your knowledge, skills, and abilities to tackle any problem that may lie along your path as you venture outside of your comfort zone and move towards attaining your goal. Another excellent way to practice humility is to mentor or share what you know with others. On the surface, this may sound counter-intuitive. You may say, “Don’t I need to be an expert if I am going to teach someone?” While a solid understanding is foundational, sharing what you know with others forces you to examine your knowledge more objectively. What do you truly know? Do you know why it works or are you just sharing past experiences that happened to turn out successfully?

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It is often said that the teacher learns more than the student does. Sharing your knowledge with others will help you identify gaps in your knowledge base and create a list of topics you can work from to further your own education thus helping you know what you do not know and keeping you from crossing over the line from confidence to arrogance.

Don’t Take Things Too Personally One of the hardest words to hear when pursuing your goals is “no.” It can be taken as an insurmountable roadblock or another step backwards. Worst case, it can be taken too personally. If you take it too personally, it can kill the drive to succeed and create doubt within you. When you are too worried about what people think, you do not take action at all or do not ask for what you need, simply because you are afraid of what “might” happen. Be careful not to have your ego too wrapped up in outcomes. When you let the fear of looking stupid, needy, foolish, etc. get in your way, you are becoming the thing you want to avoid. If you do not open your mouth and ask for what you want or need for fear of looking foolish, you are becoming just that—foolish. If you do not ask for help because you do not want to appear needy, you are becoming needy since you still do not have what you need. If you do not pursue an opportunity because you do not want to “look stupid,” you are keeping yourself “stupid” by robbing yourself of the experience. It is not all about you. Do not make it all about you by taking things too personally. Relax, play the game, and enjoy the experience.

Use Feedback as a Tool for Growth You are constantly receiving feedback every day. It may be direct feedback from others. It may be solicited or not. It may be in the results you are getting or the lack thereof. It can even be the feeling in your gut. Nevertheless, all of it is feedback and it is coming at you all the time. When you choose to use it, you accelerate your success. The first step in using feedback is recognizing how you think about it. Feedback comes in two forms—positive and negative. Positive feedback is easy to take. It reassures you, builds you up, and motivates. Negative feedback on the other hand, typically has the opposite effect. If you can change how you think about negative feedback, half of the battle is already won. Think of negative feedback as the patient teacher contributing to the education of the student. It is showing you where you need to make adjustments, try a little harder, or learn a little more. When you dig in your heals and ignore—or worse refuse to acknowl-

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edge—feedback, you are committing to relearning the same lesson again and again until you pass the test and move on. For example, by refusing to alter your sales presentation after months of what you perceive as “dead-end” leads, you are subjecting yourself to more of the same. Choosing to use feedback as a tool to keep you on course is another step in being a success. A religious leader once said, “I don’t walk the straight and narrow path, but I make sure I cross it as many times as possible.” Think of feedback as a warning that you are off-course. If you immediately course correct at the first sign of negative feedback, then you will be back on the path to your goal and will reach it that much sooner. If you ignore the feedback and continue, you become further and further off-course. An airplane is off-course nearly 90% of the time it is in the air. The only reason it reaches its intended destination is that the pilots have been constantly course correcting the entire time while in the air. You should do the same.

Play to Your Strengths Just as you want to build a network of people with specific talents and skills, you need to recognize your strengths and play to those. By not trying to be everything to everybody, you focus on your core competencies and accelerate your success. When you attempt to be everything to everybody, all you accomplish is becoming a watered-down version of your best self. Often, people are uncomfortable telling people “no” for many of the same reasons they do not like to hear it themselves (see above). The problem is when you do not set boundaries, when you don’t focus your talents for their greatest good, and when you do not leverage your time well, you do a huge disservice to the person you would not say “no” to in the first place and to yourself. We live in a day of specialization. As you find your niche, you will become more valuable in today’s marketplace. While exposing yourself to different options in the beginning is good, over time you need to hone your focus. For example, real estate investing covers a multitude of disciplines. From wholesaling to trailer parks to commercial to rehabbing, the list can go on and on. If you seek to develop all these areas, you may find some success, but you will never reach élite status. By focusing your passion and talents on a select few, you will grow into an expert in your chosen field.

Play to Win Watch a few locker room interviews or press conferences and you are bound to hear the following from the losing team: “We were playing not to lose instead of playing to win.” While it may be an overused sound bite, it contains a lot of insight and is another way you may be keeping yourself from success. Whenever you start focusing on not making mistakes instead of executing your game plan, you set yourself up for attracting the very thing you are attempting to avoid. For example, if you are worried about one aspect of a real estate transaction falling apart—say financing—you might begin to devote so much attention to that area 5


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that you take time and attention away from another area that ends up becoming a problem which brings the whole deal down. If you focus on executing your plan (i.e. playing to win), you will make sure that all aspects of the “game” receive the correct amount of attention.

The Bottom Line By changing how you think about mistakes, building relationships, recognizing what you don’t know, learning how to handle rejection, using feedback to your advantage, finding your niche, and executing your plan, you can be more successful in your pursuits. If you follow the tips listed here, you can accelerate your success and diminish the effects of mistakes if and when they happen.

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To help you prepare to implement these principles, we’ve included a simple, but powerful exercise to help you gather your thoughts. As you fill out the worksheet, take special note of the areas that may have been difficult to complete. These areas provide great clues as to where you need to focus your efforts.

Instructions 1. Where Do You Want To Be? Starting on the right side of the worksheet, list where you want to be. What do you want your life to look like? What is it that you really want to accomplish? Be specific. 2. Where Are You Now? Moving on to the left side of the worksheet, take inventory of where you are now. Define your current situation. What is your life like right now? Is it what you want? Are you doing what you want with your life? What do you have to work with? Also, during this step, ask yourself: “If nothing changes, what will my life look like in five years?” 3. What Has Held Me Back? In the lower center of the page, list the obstacles that are holding you back from where you are and where you want to be. What is holding you back? If you have tried and failed, what did not work? What has kept you from taking action? 4. Answers/Steps/Solutions/Plan After you list what has held you back, write some possible solutions come to mind. List those items in this section. Knowledge, application, accountability, motivation, and time all contribute to building the bridge that allows you to cross the gap of where you are to where you want to be. On each line, write one thing in each area that will help you to get the right knowledge, apply the right things, be held accountable, be motivated and stay consistent over time. 5. My Why Finally, list the reason(s) why you are willing to take this journey. A motivating “why” is something that will make you pursue where you want to be, even when it is really difficult. What is your unique reason for wanting to change? Why are you willing to do what so many others are not? Write it down. There you have it. You are now ready take action. A representative from Rich Dad Coaching will call you how to talk about how we can help you get to where you want to be.

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Where are you now?



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Answers/Steps/Solutions/Plan KNOWLEDGE APPLICATION ACCOUNTABILITY MOTIVATION TIME

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