Master-Minds Daily

Taking Massive Action Defining your goals gives you clarity and the motivation to reach them. However, it’s massive action that ultimately helps you achieve them. Massive action means taking full ownership of everything involved in accomplishing your goal. This includes your failures, bad decisions and problems. It means no more making excuses for why you can’t follow through with your action plan. It means being deliberate with your movements and connecting with your goals on an emotional level. But what should your massive action plan involve to ensure you achieve results and reach success? 1. Acquire knowledge.  Are you one of those people who pause from reading to look up a word you don’t know? If you are, that says a few things about you. First, you’re thirsty for knowledge. It also reveals that you’re not ashamed to admit to yourself when you don’t know something. And most importantly, you take action to educate yourself before proceeding. It should apply ...

S.M.A.R.T. goals are a relatively new idea. In 1981, George T. Doran, a consultant and former director of corporate planning for Washington Water Power Company, published a paper called, “There’s a S.M.A.R.T. Way to Write Management’s Goals and Objectives.” In the document, he introduces S.M.A.R.T. goals as a tool to create criteria to help improve the chances of succeeding in accomplishing a goal. The acronym stands for:  S – Specific When setting a goal, be specific about what you want to accomplish. Think about this as the mission statement for your goal. This isn’t a detailed list of how you’re going to meet a goal, but it should include an answer to the popular ‘w’ questions: Who – Consider who needs to be involved to achieve the goal (this is especially important when you’re working on a group project). What – Think about exactly what you are trying to accomplish and don’t be afraid to get very detailed. When – You’ll get more specific about this question unde...

“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand brake on.” -- Maxwell Maltz Nobody is born with limitless self-confidence. If someone seems to have incredible self-confidence, it’s because he or she has worked on building it for years. Self-confidence is something that you learn to build up because the challenging world of business, and life in general, can deflate it. As we teach at Skill Incubator, building a successful business requires a thick skin and unshakable confidence in your ability to overcome obstacles. Here are 10 things you can do to build up your self-confidence. 1. Visualize yourself as you want to be. “What the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.” -- Napoleon Hill Visualization is the technique of seeing an image of yourself that you are proud of, in your own mind. When we struggle with low self-confidence, we have a poor perception of ourselves that is often inaccurate. Practice visualizing a fantastic versio...

Emotional stability is very important now a days. Here is some ways to be aware of your stability. 1. Be aware of what topics arouse you. If you know that a conversation about military service is especially valuable and sensitive to you, then you should let your friends know. Your support system for college is mainly them, people who you turn to when you need help and to have a fun time. Therefore, your friends should understand what you are particularly sensitive to so that they can help you work on not responding emotionally to future discussions. 2. Do not be afraid to admit that you need help. Emotional instability can be somewhat embarrassing. The vital message to remember is that you have family and friends that can and will help you. Overcoming fear and seeking assistance is the most crucial step in starting to better yourself and be more emotionally stable. 3. Practice some techniques that calm you down. They may include yoga, breathing exercises, swimming, taki...

8 step guide to be self-motivated.  1. Start simple.  Keep motivators around your work area – things that give you that initial spark to get going. 2. Keep good company.  Make more regular encounters with positive and motivated people. This could be as simple as IM chats with peers or a quick discussion with a friend who likes sharing ideas. 3. Keep learning.  Read and try to take in everything you can. The more you learn, the more confident you become in starting projects. 4. Stay Positive.  See the good in bad. When encountering obstacles, you want to be in the habit of finding what works to get over them. 5. Stop thinking.  Just do. If you find motivation for a particular project lacking, try getting started on something else. Something trivial even, then you’ll develop the momentum to begin the more important stuff. 6. Know yourself.  Keep notes on when your motivation sucks and when you feel like a superstar. There will be a pattern that, ...

The creative process of developing a visionary statement consists of four steps: Observe, Reflect, Write, and Speak. Here’s what we tell our executive clients about these processes: Step One: Observe In order to determine a vision, you must become an astute observer of your world. You have to immerse yourself in watching, listening, and wondering. Pay attention, ask questions, probe, discuss, and gather information. Step Two: Reflect Now you turn inward. For example, you look at important events in the company, or important events in your life and career, and ask yourself: What did I learn? What is this telling me? During reflection, you come up with stories and examples that form your vision and clarify your values. These stories enable you to speak authentically from your own wisdom and experience. In this reflecting stage of the process, it’s better to have someone listening and asking questions. A coach or trusted advisor can help you talk through a story or idea and ...

This kind of synergy occurs when we interact with other people but it rests upon us building a strong “internal base.” We build this “internal base” by learning and using habits 1-3 that apply to our own personal development (being proactive, beginning with the end in mind and putting first things first). Value the difference This is the toughest part of habit #6. Covey wants us to  value  other people’s  opposing  opinions. He mentions early in the book that we all have different frames of reference. To obtain synergy in our endeavours we need to seek out frames of reference that  differ  from ours and embrace them. The problem with this is it means well and truly parking your ego. That means having true control over your emotions. You are going to be in situations where you are really sure you have the correct answer but other people say you don’t. Can you embrace their point of view? Can you keep your emotions under control to...

Listening levels Many people do not listen well. They do not listen to understand. They are listening and preparing their response for when it’s their turn to speak. They are either speaking, or preparing to speak, but  not  listening. Typically we are listening at one of four levels: Ignoring : We’re not listening at all. Pretending : We say “uh-huh, right” but we’re not really tuned in. Selective listening : We hear  part  of what the person says but the rest of the time we’re distracted (maybe looking at our smartphone) or listening to the voice in our head (we all have one). Attentive listening : We’re actively listening, paying attention but not taking our listening to the ultimate level…empathetic listening. Uh-huh, what’s this empathetic listening then? Covey defines empathetic listening as listening with the  intent to understand , to really understand. In order to really understand he says you need to get inside another person’s  fr...

The Time Management Matrix is also known as the Eisenhower Matrix. It was created by Dwight D. Eisenhower, the 34th president of the United States, and was later popularized by Stephen Covey in his book,  The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . Using The Time Management Matrix, our daily activities can be broken down into 4 Quadrants, sorted by urgency and importance: 4 Quadrants of the Time Management Matrix along with examples (Image ©  Personal Excellence ) Quadrant 1: Quadrant of Necessity You will find your crises or emergencies here. Quadrant 1 screams for our attention because of its urgent and consequential nature. However, many people fall into the trap of getting caught up in Q1. By spending all our time here, we become  consumed with firefighting every day  instead of crisis prevention. Side effects include stress, burnout, constant firefighting, and resolving problems instead of preventing them in the first place. We often s...

When we begin with the end in mind, we have a personal direction to guide our daily activities, without which we will accomplish little toward our own goals. Beginning with the end in mind is part of the process of personal leadership, taking control of our own lives. All things are created twice. We create them first in our minds, and then we work to bring them into physical existence. By taking control of our own first creation, we can write or re-write our own scripts, thus taking some control and responsibility for the outcome. We write or re-write our scripts using our imagination and conscience. There are three major aspects of our personal and business management. First is  leadership  - what do I/we want to accomplish? Second is  management  - how can I best accomplish it? Third is  productivity  - doing it. According to Peter Drucker and Warren Bennis, "Management is doing things right; Leadership is doing the right things." A starting poin...

“Be Proactive” is habit #1 from Steve Covey’s   The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People . Being proactive means taking conscious control over your life, setting goals and working to achieve them. Instead of reacting to events and waiting for opportunities, you go out and create your own events and opportunities . Being proactive means that instead of merely reacting to events as they happen, you consciously engineer your own events. Most people think reactively. And reacting to certain events is all well and good. But it becomes a problem when that’s all there is to a person’s life — nothing more than instinctively reacting to stimuli. Steve Covey points out that there’s a gap between stimulus and response, and within that gap lies the potential for us to choose our response. Four special human endowments give us this power: Self-awareness  – the understanding that you do have a choice between stimulus and response. If someone insults you, you can choose not to beco...

"Life's not about waiting for the storm to pass, it's about learning to dance in the rain." - Vivian Greene Resilient people understand that pain, misfortune and failure are not end points. They understand that although Americans are given the right to the pursuit of happiness, there is absolutely no guarantee of happiness; and if we happen to be blessed with happiness, it is just one of many positive  and negative emotions  that we will experience. It is a feeling; a mood. Not a destination. Below are 5 tips to boost resilience: Find Meaning in Adversity.  Every pain contains a lesson. Find a lesson that makes you feel better and align with it. Build a Community of Support.  Equally important, decide that the support you're currently getting is good enough. Be grateful for it. Be Hopeful.  Hope, like hopelessness, is actually a choice. We all periodically feel hopeless. Resilient people know who they are ~ and they do not define themselves by t...