The Law of . By Brian Tracy

Every minute spent in planning saves ten minutes in execution. The purpose of strategic planning in a corporation is to reorganize and restructure the activities and resources of the company so as to increase the “return on equity,” or return on the money invested and working in the company. The purpose of “personal strategic planning” is for you to increase your “return on energy,” the return on the mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual capital you have invested in your life and career.

Every Minute
Every minute that you spend planning your goals, your activities, and your time in advance saves ten minutes of work in the execution of those plans. Therefore, careful advance planning gives you a return of ten times, or 1,000 percent, on your investment of mental, emotional, and physical energy.

10-12 Minutes
It takes only about 10-12 minutes for you to make up a plan for your day. This investment of 10-12 minutes will save you time of approximately two hours per day, or a 25 percent increase in productivity and performance, in ROE, from the first day that you begin planning your day in advance.

Time Planner
The key to personal efficiency is for you to use a good time planner. Virtually any planner will work if you will discipline yourself to use it as the core of your time management system. Today, Palm Pilots and personal digital assistants (PDA), in combination with personal computers, can enable you to plan your time with greater efficiency than has ever been possible.

“A Goal Without a Plan is Only
a Dream…”
If you dream of achieving great things in life, planning for making them a reality on paper is vital to your success.

The Life Planning Process is a step-by-step manual to help you set and achieve your goals. Using this Action Workbook will guarantee that you stay on course, on time and on target. Learn more here >>

Master List
Begin with a master list as the foundation of your time planning system. Write down everything that you can think of that you will need to do for the indefinite future. As new ideas, goals, tasks, and responsibilities arise; write them down on your master list. Don’t trust them to memory. Plan each month in advance by transferring the appropriate items from your master list to your monthly list. This is best done the last week of each month. Plan each week in advance by transferring items from your monthly list to your weekly list. This is best done the weekend before.

Plan Everything in Detail
Plan every project, meeting, and goal in detail, before you begin. The very act of planning forces you to think better and more accurately about everything you do. The more you think about and plan something on paper, the faster and more efficiently you will accomplish it when you start work.

Regular Planning
Regular planning assures that you spend more time on activities of higher value. This increases effectiveness and your efficiency in everything you do. Perhaps, the most important rule of all if for you to “think on paper!”

Action Exercise
Discipline yourself to work only on those activities that have the most significant impact and influence on your life. Get them done quickly and well. Once you develop this habit of planning and prioritizing, your stress level will decline, your productivity will increase, and your career will take off.

“Dare to Dream Big Dreams–Erase Fear and Doubt From Your Life”
Do you ever wonder how successful people always seem to get so much done, but also have time to do the things they love? Do you often wonder “how do they do it?” Now imagine yourself living the life YOU’VE always dreamed of; stress free and truly happy. Click for more >>

Social Networks: How to Click with Your New Tribe. By Dr. rick Kirschner

Human beings have a profound need for belonging, whether you call it company, family, community or tribe. We want to and need to click or connect with others. Social networks have become the new tribes. Now belonging is as easy as registering and filling out our profile, and making or finding a few contacts or “friends.” Staying connected is much easier, too. Twitter even brings it into real time. Opinions are everywhere, and people love to share them, so in your social network connections you can easily find people to discuss just about anything. And you can learn from the brightest minds.

Author Tom Peters used to say that “he who dies with the biggest Rolodex wins.” Business networks are the Rolodexes of today. It’s not so much who’s in your address book that counts, it’s who is in your business network that counts more. And your value to the network is related to the value of your network. That’s because business networks make what used to be invisible visible, by putting all your contacts and connections out in the open where others can have access to them.

But making connections with the connections of your connections requires a careful dance. Because if you ask to be connected without an introduction, the person seeking quality in their network is likely to decline. And if you ask for someone’s business merely because they are on the same network as you, the odds are good that your offer will be declined. Whether offline or on, you need to start and then build a relationship before you can do much with it. You need to “click” first.

To click with your new tribe, I offer you these cautions:

1. Don’t spam your network. SPAM, rather than the canned ham product, is an unsolicited commercial message sent electronically. The fastest way to keep a connection from happening is to try selling your ideas, products or services to people who don’t know you. That’s likely to be perceived, rightly, as SPAM. And I’ll say it again. DON’T SPAM YOUR NETWORK!

2. Don’t be a stranger. Learn something before saying something. Tell people how you found them, or find out how they found you. Find a reason to make the connection interesting. That’s different than a generic, “Hi, I found you and thought your resume was interesting.” Strangers talk in such big generalizations. When it’s personal, people click. Find something personal around which to connect.

3. You get out what you put in. Instead of asking for something, offer something. And I’m not talking about a free sample, either. Tell the network what you bring to it, whether it is knowledge, ability, or connections. Then make what makes you valuable to the network available to the network.

Online networks take time. Not a lot of time, but the more consistently you contribute to your online presence, the more likely you are to gain recognition and make connections with valuable allies and friends.

4. Go fast by slowing down. Years back, I read a satirical book called the One Minute Maniac. It talked about Turbo Networking. That’s where you rush up to people and say, “Hi, what’s in it for me?” That’s annoying, and adds pressure to an already pressure-cooked world. Yes, electronic communication happens at the speed of, well, electrons. But human beings tend not to move quite so fast when it comes to relationship building. Think of time as an ally. Take as much of it as you need to build some relationship before trying to get someone to click with you or your idea.

Dr. Rick Kirschner is co-author of the bestselling classic on interpersonal conflict, Dealing with People You Can’t Stand (McGraw-Hill, 1994, 2nd ed. 2002), and co-creator of the all-time bestselling audio and video program, How to Deal with Difficult People.

He is releasing his latest book, How to Click With People: The Secret to Better Relationships in Business and in Life.

A Secret Scrolls message from Rhonda Byrne.

Criticism can be very subtle in the way it creeps into our thoughts. Here are some examples of criticism to help you become aware of its subtlety, so you can eliminate it from your thoughts:

The weather is awful today.
The traffic is terrible.
The service is really bad.
Oh no, look at the line.
He/she is always late.
How long do we have to wait for our order?
That motorist is a lunatic.
It’s so hot in here.
I’ve been on hold for so long!

These are subtle things, but the law of attraction is listening to them all. You have the ability to appreciate something in every single circumstance. There is always something to be grateful for.

May the joy be with you,

Rhonda Byrne
The Secret… bringing joy to billions

A Good Decision: Don’t Be Distracted by .By Timothy Hartwell.

We’ve all heard them, the voices in our heads that condemn us and find us guilty of not doing enough or doing things differently. As important as your past is, you cannot change your past, but you can affect your future.

The negative messages in your mind may tell you that you’re not good enough, you’re a failure, you are not capable of doing a certain thing, and you’ll never get out of debt, or come out of a particular situation. You may repeat in your mind an event that happened in the past over and over again. This is a distraction. If the designer of negativity can keep you focused on the negative messages or your past failures, he knows you will never get to your true purpose or reach your destiny.

Examine how you respond to the majority of situations that life presents to you. Do you see the opportunity for learning, improvement, and success, or do you view most situations as another opportunity to not do well? Let’s establish some foundational truths about our lives and discover how to use those truths in place of the perceived fact or interpretation of life events; especially in the area of failure.

Our responses (positive) or reactions (negative) to any given situation are usually based upon our interpretation (belief) of an experience. These experiences can be seen, heard, or handed down to us from someone in our family.

These beliefs can have a positive or negative impact upon our thinking, depending upon the interpretation our mind gives to an experience. This interpretation can also shape our concepts of life, and drive our performance to success or failure.

You can live a life filled with love, joy, and peace. Live a life of forgiveness through the truth, and nothing you can do will separate you from the love you were designed to have once you invite that truth to be a part of your life.

Man tries to be too analytical, but the concepts are simple. Love and concern for each other, even in the business world with an attitude of serving others, will take you further than anything. Don’t try to analyze everything so much. Serve. The enemy of your future wants to make you think you cannot be loved or forgiven, and he constantly tries to remind us of the past.

The tendency can be to focus on the failures, pains, and hurts of the past, and it is all a distraction, period! If you can stay distracted by focusing on these things, you will never progress forward with life the way it should be for you.

Failure in anything when effort has been put forth is not failure, but merely a learning experience. However, there are certain patterns that we may develop, and those patterns can be detrimental to achieving a particular goal.

Some of the questions you may want to ask yourself are:

• Do I set unrealistic goals for myself?
• Do I expect too much from myself?
• Do I try to imitate others and follow their aspirations, rather than mine?
• Do I feel isolated at social gatherings or group meetings?
• Am I timid and afraid to take the risk?
• Am I afraid of success or failure?
• What does success mean to me?

Perhaps when you tried things in the past, they did not work out for you. Maybe you tried a business and it went bankrupt. So you fear you will fail again. We fear we will fail because we focus on that which is behind us, and not on what is ahead.

Don’t ever believe you are meant for failure or sickness, or to be stuck or unproductive, that it is the will for your life; it’s simply not true. As Zig says, YOU, were born to win.

Timothy Harwell is the author of Live Your Destiny Now, Not Later! Through the many challenges of life, Timothy has risen above it all. Having lost his father when he was fourteen, Timothy has always maintained the strong work ethic his family taught him. Having 18 years of experience in the construction industry, transitioning to television, then training and training development, business consulting and coaching, Timothy holds most dear the idea that we can all achieve the potential seeded within us.

Why dont you set goals? By Zig Ziglar

The two previous weeks have dealt with reasons one and two why most people don’t have an organized goals program. First is fear; second is a poor self-image. The third reason is that, though many people have been repeatedly told they need to have a goals program, most of them have never been completely sold on the idea. That’s one of the reasons over 80% of college graduates, ten years after completing their education, earn their living in a field which is unrelated to their college major. Think about how much farther along they would have been had they determined earlier what they wanted to do with their lives.

Several years ago, David Jensen at UCLA conducted a study on the people who attended public seminars where I spoke. These people come from every walk of life and include psychiatrists, truck drivers, military personnel, household executives, entrepreneurs, sales people, managers, business owners, physicians, educators and virtually every other occupation. Those who specifically set goals, and develop a plan of action to reach them, earn an average of $7,401 per month. Those who do not set goals earn an average of $3,397 per month.

The rest of the story is equally, perhaps even more, exciting. The people who set their goals were happier, healthier and got along better with the people at home, which simply means that not only were they more prosperous, but they had a much better balance in their lives. Think about it, If you have specific objectives in your personal, family and career life, combined with specific objectives in your physical, mental and spiritual life, with a game-plan for reaching each one, doesn’t it make sense that goal-setting improves your chances of doing something significant with your life? Think about it and I’ll SEE YOU AT THE TOP – if you set those goals. Next week we will deal with the fourth reason people do not set goals, which is they don’t know how.

This article is an excerpt from Zig’s book Over the Top. Zig Ziglar is known as America’s motivator. He is the author of 29 books and numerous audio and video recordings.

Quote
The basic goal-reaching principle is to understand that you go as far as you can see, and when you get there you will always be able to see farther. ~Zig Ziglar