Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life: How to Unlock Your Full Potential for Success and Achievement (17 page)

As you can imagine, many employees are completely baffled when they are confronted with this exercise. The very idea of thinking through their current jobs and describing them in the form of a business proposal, along with a justification for why they should be paid the amount that they are asking, is an overwhelming task. Most people have never thought about their jobs in this way before.

Finally, the boss adds one more detail. He tells them that they will each be competing against other people who will also be sub-mitting proposals for the same jobs. Whoever offers the company the best deal or price will get the position.

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DETERMINE EXACTLY WHAT YOU DO

If you were put into this position and you had to write out a proposal for your job, starting with the most important and valuable things that you do for your company, how would you explain yourself? How would you sell yourself to your current employer? How would make a case for the kind of money you want to earn?

What are your
core competencies
? What special talents and abilities do you have that make you valuable and set you apart from others? What
should
your core competencies be, or what
could
they be in the future? What is it that you do in such an excellent fashion that you are worth the kind of money that you want to earn? Your answers to these questions are essential to your success in your career.

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HOW GOOD ARE YOU?

There is a simple way to determine how good you are at what you do:
Are you in great demand?
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ually trying to hire you away from your current employment. You receive regular job offers. If you are self-employed, you have more business than you can handle. You get a steady flow of recommendations and referrals from satisfied customers.

When you are in demand, you have complete job security. You know that if something happened to your current job, you could walk across the street and get another job tomorrow. You never worry about the ups or downs in the economy because you always have far more opportunities than you can handle in a 24-hour day.

When you reach this point, you will know that you are one of the very best in your field. You will feel terrific about yourself. You will have complete control over your future.

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DO WHAT YOU LOVE TO DO

You may be wondering how you go about determining your area of excellence, if you don’t already have one. If you are already very good at what you do, you should know that with change taking place so rapidly in your field, within a few years you will probably find yourself in another job, doing something different, with a different area of excellence.Whatever got you to where you are today is not enough to keep you there.

Here is one of the most important parts of changing your thinking.
Successful people do what they love to do.
They do their jobs for the art and joy of it. They would do what they are doing even if they weren’t being paid for it. Ask yourself this question:
“What would I
choose to work at if I was financially independent and could do anything
I wanted?”

How would you change your life if you won a million dollars?

The great majority of people, if they won a million dollars, would immediately quit their current jobs. If you would quit your current job if you won a million dollars, this is a danger signal. It means that you are in great danger of wasting your career and wasting your life.

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DETERMINE WHAT YOU ENJOY DOING

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it with their whole heart. Most successful people feel that they don’t really work at all. Some of them say, “I haven’t worked a day in my life.” Their work and their play are intermingled. They don’t know where one begins and the other ends. When they are not at work, they think about it and talk about it. And when they are at work, they lose themselves in it.

There are more than 22,000 official job categories in the United States alone. Among these 22,000 categories, there are subcate-gories that bring the number to easily 100,000 different jobs that you could be doing. And most of the jobs that people will be doing in the twenty-first century have not even been invented yet.

Of the many thousands of jobs that exist, there are numerous jobs at which you could work and earn an excellent living.Your goal must be to select the ideal job for you, the one that gives you the greatest joy, satisfaction, and rewards, and then channel all of your energies into becoming absolutely excellent in that one area.

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SUCCESS LEAVES TRACKS

The starting point of identifying your special talents and unique abilities is for you to think back into your past. What sorts of activities have given you your greatest results and rewards?

When you were in school, what subjects interested you the most? What subjects did you get the best grades in? You will always be best at doing something that
fascinates
you, that holds your
attention
, that captures your
interest
, and that you are naturally
attracted
toward.

One of the tests for whether something is right for you is your desire to learn more about it.You will enjoy
reading
about it,
talking
about it, and
learning
about it. Not only that, but you will naturally admire the people who are the most successful in the field for which you are ideally suited.

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GO BACK TO YOUR CHILDHOOD

One way to determine your future is to examine your past. Look back to what you
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to pursue any subject that attracted you. What did you most enjoy doing? If you don’t remember, go and ask one of your parents.

They will usually remember how you spent your time when you were younger.

A participant in one of my seminars told me that this principle applied to him exactly. When he was between the ages of 7 and 14, he loved to build model airplanes. He spent many hours, long into the night, building more and more complex models. Soon, he was building model planes with small engines and entering them in contests. As he grew older, he built larger planes, remote-controlled, and flew them in competitions around the country.

When he finished high school, he attended university and earned a degree in aeronautical engineering. He now owns three companies. In one company, he designs small aircraft. In a second company he leases and charters aircraft, and he owns a third company that does aircraft maintenance. He told me that he was worth several million dollars and he felt that he had never done a day’s work in his life. He was still doing what he most enjoyed doing when he was a young man. And he was only 35 years old.

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YOUR FEELING OF IMPORTANCE

Dale Carnegie once wrote, “Tell me what gives a person his greatest feeling of importance and I will tell you his entire philosophy of life.” What gives you your greatest feeling of importance? What gives you a heightened sense of self-esteem when you do it successfully?

What do you most enjoy doing, so much so that you are drawn back to it continuously?

Napoleon Hill once said that one of the great secrets of success is to
decide what it is that you most enjoy doing, and then find a way to
earn a good living at it
. Most people get it backward. They do what they feel they
have to do
so that they can finally acquire the time and money necessary to do what they really
want to do
.Your goal should be to reverse this order. You should do what you really enjoy doing from the very beginning. In this way, you will get better and better doing more and more of the things that give you your greatest feeling of importance.

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FACE THE FACTS

One of the most important parts of changing your thinking is the development of the quality of
courage
. I will discuss this subject in greater detail later, in Chapter 12. For the moment, in terms of doing what you love to do, you need courage to face the fact that, right now, you might not be in the right job, place, or relationship for you.You may be on the wrong path.

Most people back into their jobs and their careers, and even their relationships, like backing up their car and hitting something, and then getting out to see what it was. They do not have clear goals, so they accept whatever happens to them. They take the job that is offered to them at the time they are starting work or making the transition from one job to another. They do the work that is assigned to them. They allow their boss to determine their career path.

Their entire work lives soon become organized around the expectations of the people who sign their paychecks. If they are not careful, years will go by and they will completely lose sight of the child in them who started off in life with hopes and dreams, entering a world of untapped possibilities and potentialities.

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BE TRUE TO YOURSELF

Joseph Campbell, the late professor of mythology, told a story on the
Bill Moyers Special
television show some years ago. It took place in a small local restaurant that he patronized with his wife. One day another couple, along with their young son, came in and sat down for dinner at a nearby table. Halfway through the meal, the boy spoke up and said that he didn’t like his dinner, and he wasn’t going to eat it. The father became extremely angry and insisted that he eat it whether he liked it or not.

The boy refused and said to his father, “But I don’t
want
to eat it!”

At this, the father blew up and shouted, “You don’t
want
to?

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Campbell went on to point out that many people are in that same situation. Many people feel that they have lived their whole lives doing things that other people wanted them to do because they never had the courage to do just what
they
wanted.

Campbell then said that the key to success and happiness in life was to “follow your bliss.” It was to do what you most loved to do. It was to look over the landscape of your life and determine those activities that you enjoyed doing more than anything else, the things that you would do if you had no limitations, and then to build your life around those activities.

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BE PREPARED TO WALK AWAY

Many of the happiest men and women in our society today are those who, at a certain point, got up and walked away from a situation that they finally realized was not making them happy or fulfilled. They had the courage to decide that they were going to do what they loved to do, rather than what they felt they had to do. They looked deep within themselves and honestly assessed their own natural talents and abilities. This often changed their whole lives.

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LISTEN TO OTHERS

Some years ago, I began thinking in earnest about what it was that I really wanted to do. My current job was coming to an end, and the prospects for the future, because of the economy, were not very encouraging. Meanwhile, although I had a very good idea of what I wanted to do, I wasn’t sure.

At this point, I suddenly asked a friend of mine what he thought I would be good at doing. He replied, without a moment’s hesita-tion, “You’d be excellent at teaching and giving seminars.” That turned out to be exactly what I had been thinking, but I was nervous about directing my whole career into a completely unknown field. My friend’s comment made me realize that often the people around you can see clearly what you should be doing, even if you can’t see it yourself.

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If you are at all unsure about your area of natural talent and ability, ask someone who knows you well what he or she thinks your ideal line of work would be. The people who know you and care about you will often give you ideas and insights that change your whole life. Often these insights will reveal to you your heart’s desire.

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YOUR HEART’S DESIRE

Your heart’s desire is that one special thing that you were put on this earth to do. No one else can do it in the same way that you can.

It is something that may have been calling to you for many years, like the sound of distant music. It is something that has interested you and attracted you since you were young.

Perhaps you have never told anyone about it. Perhaps, deep in your heart, you were afraid of the enormous changes you would have to make to pursue your heart’s desire. But the fact is that you will never be truly happy or satisfied until you let yourself go and throw your whole heart into whatever it is.

Eric Butterworth wrote in his book
Discover the Power within
You
(Harper & Row, 1968), “You are not what you
are
; you are what you
can be
.”

Imagine! You are not what you are, but rather,
you are what you
can be
when you discover and develop your natural talents and abilities to the full.

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BE HONEST WITH YOURSELF

One of the marks of personal leadership is that you see yourself as you really are. You are completely honest. You recognize and accept that you are completely responsible, the president of your own personal services corporation. You accept that excellent rewards come only from excellent performance in your chosen field. You view yourself strategically, as if you were looking at someone else. You plan every part of your life, knowing that no one is going to do it for you. Especially, you establish your own program for personal and professional improvement to assure that you become one of the very best people in your field.