What Makes You a Success?

Written by

Have you ever properly thought about what the word ‘Success’ means? We know it’s the accomplishment of an aim or purpose, or a favourable outcome or result, and of course we know the opposite of success is ‘failure’, a flop or disaster, in other words a bad outcome. Sr. Thomas Watson has been quoted as saying “To be successful, you have to have your heart in your business, and your business in your heart.” I found this interesting because now we’re talking about having passion, and this passion playing a key part in us being successful, particularly in business. There is another quote which reads “Success does not lie in ‘Results’ but in ‘Efforts, ‘Being’ the best is not so important, ‘Doing’ the best is all that matters…” Unknown Here, we’re talking about success being us doing the best we can regardless of the outcome. As business owners, we certainly

Sometimes We Just Have One of Those Days!

Written by

Have you ever experienced those days when absolutely everything goes wrong; nothing goes right; when you sit down to do some work, your brain seems to freeze, and you can’t think straight? We can all have days like that and it’s hard to snap out of it and try to start again. Wouldn’t it be great if we were like a computer and we could hit the reset button, and everything would be like it was? At the same time, we feel like this, we also seem to feel like everyone is against us; nothing is worth it anymore; what we’re trying to achieve won’t work anyway. And it all just seems to go downhill from there, and we have no way of making it stop! It’s interesting why these days happen and what triggers them. Sometimes it might be something that was said, something we heard or something we

Is LIFE your teacher?

Written by

What lessons does life teach us? If we were asked specifically about what life has taught us, what might we say? Having given this some thought and being inspired by a colleague recently who reflected on people in his life that had played a significant part in his learning, he concluded that life was what had ultimately taught him and become the main area of his learning. He felt that the lessons he had learned and the changes he had made were a reflection that LIFE was his teacher more than a person! This led me to think about what areas in LIFE do we learn from constantly and these were two areas I felt were relevant – you may have others: Life Purpose – If we don’t have a purpose in life, goals, aspirations or a vision of where we want to be, what we want to be and

LOOK Where You’re Going!

Written by

LOOK Where You’re Going! You may have heard the quote by Oliver Wendell "It is not the position where you are standing, but which direction you are going." This has often made me think about what success means and how we can define it. If we believe that success is not the position where we stand but the direction in which we look, then how do we measure success? From this quote it sounds like success is about how we got where we got, what it took and how we worked it out along the way. Booker T Washington is quoted as saying “Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome.” I believe this more clearly explains how we measure our success in that it’s what we have achieved despite those challenges that

No buts….

Written by

No buts…. I love books, don’t you? Some books I read for pleasure and some I read for learning and widening my horizons. You might be the same. But! What do we do with what we have learned? Many e-books or audio books are full of amazing and helpful tips and tools to help and motivate us, to enable us to make positive changes in our lives. But! Do we follow through? Do we make those changes or do we ‘intend’ to make those changes but never do? It reminds me of going to a seminar or a workshop and coming away inspired and invigorated, revved up with a desire to take what we have heard and do something with it! Unfortunately, most of us, get back to the real world, back to our everyday lives and whilst the intention is there the energy isn’t or we forget, remembering only

No Regrets

Written by

There is a saying: “Never regret a day in your life: good days give happiness, bad days give experience, worst days give lessons, and best days give memories” I always find it interesting that as we go through our lives experiencing the things we do, that we do tend to focus on the negatives rather than the positives. Why is this I’ve always wondered, because whether an experience is good or bad there is nearly always learning or something positive that we can take from this. Now we know that some of us are pessimists, always thinking the worst can or will happen, whereas others are optimists focusing on the positives and knowing everything will be okay in the end. This saying I feel gives reasons for any and every experience that may happen to us and almost puts them in a box. We have choices to look back on

Sometimes we just need to be shown how!

Written by

Sometimes we just need to be shown how! Reece Witherspoon once said, “With the right kind of coaching and determination you can accomplish anything.” Often, we are so determined or stubborn that we want to work things out for ourselves no matter what. To ask for help may not be in our psyche, nor receiving offers of help, support or guidance. Pride sometimes becomes our block preventing us from seeking that help. There are various reasons why we might not think about asking for coaching or help, and often this is dependent upon how determined we are. This reminded me of something that happened to me years ago and I often tell the story over and over to many people as an analogy of how coaching can really help us all and save us time in the long run. I used to play pool many years ago and used to

Coping with Disappointment

Written by

There’s a saying “The measure of success is how we cope with disappointment” which made me wonder how true this is. I know there have been times when I’ve been bitterly disappointed with things that haven’t materialised or something that I’ve missed out on. However, did I feel how I dealt with it was a measure of my success or not? For me, how we deal with any setbacks in life reflects on what our outlook is, whether we take the optimistic view that everything will be okay, or whether we take the pessimistic view of, this is really bad news and will affect me badly. You could argue that always having a positive outlook, not only is healthy, but by reflecting on this with a good attitude will surely start us in the direction of thinking of options on how we can fix this, or what we can change

Choices, Chances, Changes

Written by

There’s a saying ‘The 3 Cs of life’: Choices, Chances, Changes – you must make a choice to take a chance or your life will never change. I came across this again recently, and it got me thinking about how these 3 Cs are woven into our everyday lives without us really thinking about it. For some, this might come easy and seem almost unrecognisable, whilst for others it is obvious these three things need to happen but are avoided due to fear or lack of confidence. We can often feel that we don’t have any choice sometimes, but if we are honest with ourselves we always have choices with everything we do. The trouble is we often don’t see them because we are focused more on the problems than the opportunities, or if we do see we have a few choices, we offer good reasons why we can’t make

Get Ready – Get MIND Set – Get Go PACE

Written by

Do you often feel like you’re in a race, or that the race is the wrong one for you, or you’ve started the race on the backfoot, or the race is never-ending and can’t find the finish line? I have! Have you? I have recently undertaken to participate in a local Park Run. The Park Run is 5kms and I am not a runner, I don’t particularly like running; walking YES, running, NO! I part jogged, part ran on my first race. For the second race, I decided to use a different strategy. I would jog faster, with fast walks in between. My time was no faster, in fact slower, ending up finishing completely out of breath and more tired than the first time, as I was unable to sustain the fast walks between jogs. I decided yet another strategy was called for in my third race. This time I