Are You Wasting All Your Education and Training?

Why Knowing What To Do and How To Do It Is Not Enough

This e-zine continues with the theme of building the bedrock foundation of your business–you!

Why Jill Had Trouble Succeeding

Jill returned to her business after attending an exciting conference held by her franchise. The conference had wonderful, exciting speakers who gave her detailed information about how to make her business a great success. It was all there; step-by-step. All she had to do is follow their plan to get great results.

She started out great guns, but now, after four months, she seemed to lose her focus. There seemed to be so many urgent things that distracted her from the main things she was supposed to do. Now she was again working too many hours. She felt stressed.

Feeling stressed was especially bothersome to Jill. She had learned that stress made you grow older faster. She read a scientific study that said, “Study confirms that stress helps speed aging. Scientists have identified the first direct link between stress and aging, a finding that could explain why intense, long-term emotional strain can make people get sick and grow old before their time.”

Jill felt disappointed because she wasn’t sustaining her success and was feeling high stress.

Obviously, Jill knew what to do to run her business successfully. She had times when she ran her business extremely well. Now she seems to have lost her touch. She was working long hours and making less money. What was happening? Why isn’t she maintaining and sustaining her success? Why would she sabotage herself this way?

The Answer to Jill’s Problem

The answer lay in her beliefs and attitudes about herself. Jill is comfortable only at a medium level of success. This is the infamous “comfort zone”.

Jill was wasting her hard-earned education and training. In addition to knowledge and skills, you need the right mindset. This includes believing in yourself, feeling worthy and deserving of success, being confident, having high levels of energy, and a strong desire. Believing that you are great and that others are great will give you the best results over the long run. Those that believe they are better than other people often succeed, but at the cost of having poor relationships. Obviously, those that believe they are not as good as others do not do well.

Let’s call all those things I just mentioned, your self-perception. If you rate yourself a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is high, your level of success will be medium. If you start performing better than that, let’s say at level 8, you will start to feel uncomfortable and start performing at a level that causes you to slide back to a five. Which is exactly what Jill did.

How well you perform in the outside world is regulated by your inner self-perception. As others have said, you create success from the inside out. Napoleon Hill understood this (only he did not express it in quite this way) when he wrote his famous book, “Think and Grow Rich”.

For long lasting, stress-free success, you not only have to invest in outside skills like delegating, time management, selling techniques, etc., you also need to invest in improving your inside– your self perception.

So, ask yourself:

1. What percentage of your time do you spend on improving your mental attitude, emotional attitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors?

2. What percentage of success in life and business do you believe is due to mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors?

Compare your answers to these two questions. Does the amount of time you spend on improving your mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and habit mastery reflect what you really believe?

Summary

The success of your business rests on you. To build a life and the business of your dreams, you have to have the right mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors. No matter how learned or how skillful you are, your self-perception determines how successful you can become. The higher your self-perception, the

How Movies and Television Affect Us – Pros and Cons

We’ve heard it a million times: film and TV are bad for us. Of course, in the Nineteenth Century, they said the same about novels. In general, any pastime that doesn’t involve physical activity gets accused of making people lazy and slothful. However, Movies and TV are actually a mixed bag. Yes, it is true there are downsides. However, there are positive sides as well. In this article, I will discuss some of the pros and cons of movies and television.

Pros

Increased Emotional Range: Movies and television can introduce us to new emotional experiences that we would otherwise not experience. This can include even such things as experiencing the thrill of successfully running to president to such bad emotions as a revenge movie. While there is, of course, a great deal of emotional content to our daily lives, our lives are rarely as complex as what we can see on television or films. Moreover, we only live our own lives. Increasing our emotion range can make us more empathetic to other people.

Emotional Training: By this, I am referring to how films can help us learn to deal with emotions before we need to deal with them in real life. A show involving the death of a spouse, for example, can help us to think about and develop our own emotional reactions so that when something similarly tragic happens to us, we will be more ready.

Imaginative Education: All of our thoughts are mediated through imagination. Think about something. Notice how you had an image that went with that thought? We constantly have our thoughts mediated by images, and experiencing new images gives us new ways of thinking about and reacting to things.

Cons

False Objects: I think I realized this when the character of one of my favorite shows apparently died at the end of a season. We become incredibly attached to characters on television and movies. However, those people aren’t real. This causes a couple of problems. First, we have a disconnect between our own emotions and the real world. Second, it splits our psyche. When our emotions feel something about objects our reason knows isn’t real, we become divided.

Addiction: Television, especially, is addictive. No one has ever given an especially good explanation as to why, but, for practical purposes, does it matter? We’ll often find ourselves sitting in front of the television, trying to find something to watch. The pleasure from films and television can become addictive, just like any other pleasure.

Non-Social: Movies and television are non-social activities, even when they are done with someone else. They don’t involve any personal interaction with the people around us, and envelop us in our own world. However, they give the appearance of being a social activity, which is why people go to movies together. This can give us the false impression that we are interacting with people more than we actually are.

Conclusion

Notice how I didn’t say that movie and television are wastes of time? I didn’t do so because that would be question-begging. Movies and television would only be wastes of time if they were bad; they cannot also be bad because they are wastes of time. Instead, movies and television have positive and negative elements, just like most pastimes.

Find Scrapbooking Titles in Music, Movies and Television

Are you ever stuck for a perfect phrase for your scrapbooking title? Maybe you just stick with the date or the seasons like summer or fall. Some scrapbookers title every page with the name of the subject in the photograph. It might be a place, like Disney World or the beach, or it could be a person’s name like Susan or Grandpa. Being creative with scrapbooking titles adds interest to a page layout just like embellishments and borders. Music, movies and television can offer inspiration and ideas for your scrapbooking titles that will capture the mood and theme of your next page layout.

Scrapbooking Titles in Music

Music inspires us all. How often have you heard a song on the radio and it immediately brings back a memory from years ago. It might be a song that was playing when you first dated your husband, or maybe it’s a song from your high school days that reminds you of your senior year. Songs have the ability to spark memories in all of us.

For your next page layout, look to music for your inspiration. Song titles are great sources for scrapbooking page titles. Quoting a single song title may be all you need to say to start singing that song in your head. Some examples of song titles that could be used as scrapbooking page titles are “Simply Irresistible,” “Brown-eyed Girl,” and “You Are My sunshine.” Keep a list of possible song titles that would work well on your scrapbooking projects.

Sometimes it’s the lyrics themselves that inspire us. You might want to use more than just the title. A lyric like, “These are the moments, and I could not ask for more,” will add just the right mood to a treasured photograph.

Scrapbooking Titles in Television and Movies

Consider adapting television show titles like, “The Brady Bunch” and “Days of Our Lives” to a scrapbook page. Maybe something simple like “Survivor” or “Lost” says it all. Movie titles, such as, “Mission Impossible,” “Little Miss Sunshine” or “Back to the Future,” might be perfect for one of your layouts.

Many TV and movie characters are known for a certain phrase or saying. These quotes often work well as scrapbooking titles. Does your favorite TV or movie character have a particular line that just fits with one of your photographs or scrapbooking pages? Think of phrases like, “How Sweet It Is,” “May the Force Be With You” or “Here’s Looking At You, Kid.”

Scrapbooking Titles in Commercials and Advertising

Slogans, sayings and jingles can all be a source of inspiration for scrapbooking titles. Those catchy phrases we never seem to forget also make fun headlines for our scrapbook pages. Scrapbooking titles can be found in the lyrics of commercial jingles, as well as, in the slogans on print advertising. The next time you are considering fast forwarding through the commercials of a taping of your favorite television show, you might consider listening to the advertisements for scrapbooking title ideas. There are many slogans that could easily be adapted to a page layout title. Consider using “I’m Lovin’ It,” or “Zoom, Zoom, Zoom,” or perhaps, “It’s the Real Thing” or “A Diamond Is Forever.”

Movies, music and television can inspire a huge list of potential scrapbooking titles for just about any page layout. The next time you need ideas for a scrapbook page title just turn on your radio or television for inspiration.

Are You Wasting All Your Education and Training?

Why Knowing What To Do and How To Do It Is Not Enough

This e-zine continues with the theme of building the bedrock foundation of your business–you!

Why Jill Had Trouble Succeeding

Jill returned to her business after attending an exciting conference held by her franchise. The conference had wonderful, exciting speakers who gave her detailed information about how to make her business a great success. It was all there; step-by-step. All she had to do is follow their plan to get great results.

She started out great guns, but now, after four months, she seemed to lose her focus. There seemed to be so many urgent things that distracted her from the main things she was supposed to do. Now she was again working too many hours. She felt stressed.

Feeling stressed was especially bothersome to Jill. She had learned that stress made you grow older faster. She read a scientific study that said, “Study confirms that stress helps speed aging. Scientists have identified the first direct link between stress and aging, a finding that could explain why intense, long-term emotional strain can make people get sick and grow old before their time.”

Jill felt disappointed because she wasn’t sustaining her success and was feeling high stress.

Obviously, Jill knew what to do to run her business successfully. She had times when she ran her business extremely well. Now she seems to have lost her touch. She was working long hours and making less money. What was happening? Why isn’t she maintaining and sustaining her success? Why would she sabotage herself this way?

The Answer to Jill’s Problem

The answer lay in her beliefs and attitudes about herself. Jill is comfortable only at a medium level of success. This is the infamous “comfort zone”.

Jill was wasting her hard-earned education and training. In addition to knowledge and skills, you need the right mindset. This includes believing in yourself, feeling worthy and deserving of success, being confident, having high levels of energy, and a strong desire. Believing that you are great and that others are great will give you the best results over the long run. Those that believe they are better than other people often succeed, but at the cost of having poor relationships. Obviously, those that believe they are not as good as others do not do well.

Let’s call all those things I just mentioned, your self-perception. If you rate yourself a five on a scale of one to ten, where one is low and ten is high, your level of success will be medium. If you start performing better than that, let’s say at level 8, you will start to feel uncomfortable and start performing at a level that causes you to slide back to a five. Which is exactly what Jill did.

How well you perform in the outside world is regulated by your inner self-perception. As others have said, you create success from the inside out. Napoleon Hill understood this (only he did not express it in quite this way) when he wrote his famous book, “Think and Grow Rich”.

For long lasting, stress-free success, you not only have to invest in outside skills like delegating, time management, selling techniques, etc., you also need to invest in improving your inside– your self perception.

So, ask yourself:

1. What percentage of your time do you spend on improving your mental attitude, emotional attitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors?

2. What percentage of success in life and business do you believe is due to mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors?

Compare your answers to these two questions. Does the amount of time you spend on improving your mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and habit mastery reflect what you really believe?

Summary

The success of your business rests on you. To build a life and the business of your dreams, you have to have the right mental attitude, emotional fortitude, life balance, and mastery over habitual behaviors. No matter how learned or how skillful you are, your self-perception determines how successful you can become. The higher your self-perception, the higher your level of success.

© 2006 Stan Mann.

Older posts »