Thursday 6 October 2011

DETERMINATION/COMMITMENT

A need for determination and commitment


“Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes; but no plans.” - Peter F. Drucker

“Great organizations demand a high level of commitment by the people involved.” - Bill Gates

“Desire is the key to motivation, but it's determination and commitment to an unrelenting pursuit of your goal - a commitment to excellence - that will enable you to attain the success you seek.” - Mario Andretti

“The quality of a person's life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.” - Vince Lombardi

“When work, commitment, and pleasure all become one and you reach that deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.”

“There's a difference between interest and commitment. When you're interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permit. When you're committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.”

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Find your strength and act promptly

Motivation is what gets you started.
Habit is what keeps you going. - Jim Rohn

What is your motivation?
It can be money, fame, purpose, commitment or contribution. Whatever it is, it helps to have a goal that drives you.

“Every accomplishment starts with the decision to try.”

Elbert Hubbard said "It isn't more book learning we need, or instructions about this or that, but a strengthening of the backbone, to act promptly, to get going to do the thing we know we ought to do."

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Have a meaningful life

No horse gets anywhere until he is harnessed. No steam or gas drives any machine until it is confined, and no man gets anything until he is committed to a goal.

The poorest of all men is not the one without gold, but without a goal. Life to him has no meaning -- no reason for living.

"If you don't know where you are going, you will probably end up somewhere else." - Lawrence J. Peter

You got to be careful if you don't know where you're going, because you might not get there.

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Ultimate Success Formula?

Man alone, of all God's creatures, can change himself for the better.

Anthony Robbins in his Personal Power II tape, says that the following are The Ultimate Success Formula:
  1. Know your outcome.
  2. Get yourself to take action by deciding to do so.
  3. Notice what you're getting from your actions.
  4. If what you're doing is not working, change your approach.
What is your view about this success formula?

Anyway, I find it very similar to Six Sigma phases of Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve and Control (DMAIC).

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Monday 22 August 2011

The Power of Focus: How to Hit Your

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    • One thing that separates achievers from others is the belief they have in themselves. So, if you have the urge to become successful, the primary thing that you need to work on is to believe in yourself. This will pave the way for you to develop confidence in yourself, and improve your chances of attaining the success you seek.
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    But why is it essential to believe in yourself, and how will this kind of thinking help you to achieve the success that has been eluding you so far?
    One common mistake that parents and teachers make is that they instill a lot of negativity in the children under their care without realizing what they are doing. This negativity reinforces later in the person life, the feeling that they can’t achieve the success they long for. So everything they think of, hits the obstacle of an “I cannot do this” response that is automatically generated within the person’s mind.
    This negativity in the mind is the prime reason why many people are not able to achieve their goals even though they have many big aspirations and dreams to make it big and become successful in life.

    Since they have this negativity ingrained within their minds, they are not able to believe in themselves and set forth on their journey towards success. So they end up feeling despair that they are not able to achieve their goals and they start playing the “blame game” or seek excuses as to why they are not successful. As a result, their dreams remain a distant fantasy that they believe will never materialize.
    So in order to achieve your goals and aspirations it is absolutely essential to shed the negativity that you are harboring in your mind and aspire towards attain them by reinforcing the negative thoughts you hold with positive thoughts and attitudes. However, this is not possible unless you start believing in yourself and see yourself as an achiever that is capable of reaching great heights no matter what.
    So, make the decision today. Start believing in yourself and work towards achieving your goals with a positive mindset. Do you want to live the life of an average person or would you rather excel and live the life of a successful person? The answer lies within you.
    In this article called The Power Of Focus, Mark Victor Hansen shares with us how or hansen, he discovered the power of focus at a young age. His father who came to the United States at the age of 17, taught him that if wanted something bad enough he could get it by focusing the power of his mind on what he truly wanted, that sooner or later he would manifest it in his life.

    If you want something enough, and you keep your mind focused on it, you will eventually achieve it.
    This was brought home to me at a relatively early age by my father. My dad came to the United States from Denmark in 1921 at the age of 17. My father was impressed by the United States as a land of opportunity. Here you could want something, work for it and get it. He worked hard and while we were never rich, we also were never poor.
    When I was nine years old, just old enough to ride a bike well, I got a job delivering newspapers. From my newspaper route I earned enough money to buy a bicycle magazine.
    My goal was to get a bicycle. I had an ideal bike in mind. I wanted this bike with my whole heart, mind, body, and spirit. I cut out a picture of the bike, and kept it next to my bed. Nightly, I went to sleep dreaming about it. I could see that bike. I could feel it. I believed it.
    But when I went to my father and asked for the bike, he didn’t understand my desire. After some discussion, he said, “You can have it when you’re 16 years old.” I said, “Can I have the bike now if I earn the money myself?” I’m sure he never dreamed that a nine-year-old could earn the equivalent of $725-so he had little to lose, and he agreed.
    I wanted that bike so badly that in my mind I owned it already. I had engaged my mind power.
    Inside every mind are abilities that go beyond the normal. These abilities are tapped when we have a white-hot desire. We then figure out how to get whatever we really want to get.
    A Will and a Way

    I saw an ad in Boy’s Life magazine promoting the sale of Christmas cards. Instantly I believed that I could sell the cards. I immediately went to my mother, who was a phenomenal saleswoman. She had charisma, beauty, a radiant smile, a sincere interest in people, and she was a master storyteller. I asked her if I could sell. She said, “Not only can you sell, but I’ll teach you how! It’s important to have a smiling face, see a lot of people and ask everyone to buy your greeting cards. But it’s most important to use the ‘alternate choice’ close. Ask your potential buyers, “Would you prefer one or two boxes
    of Christmas cards?”
    So I began. I approached my neighbors in the winter of 1957 with deep snow on the ground. I went door to door every day, and when a mom answered the door, I would wipe my nose on a mitten and ask her if she’d like to buy some cards. How could she refuse a cute little kid with a runny nose? Generally she’d say, “Young man, come in here. We can’t let you stand out in the cold.”
    Once I got inside, I knew the sale was made. I would explain that I was earning money for my own bicycle. Then I’d ask, “Mrs. Shaw, would you prefer one box or two?”
    I was a great salesman. But I didn’t want to sell 376 boxes of Christmas cards. I had no desire to be the number-one salesman for American Greeting Cards. I didn’t enjoy going door to door in the cold. I was only interested in getting my bike.
    Focusing Produces Results
    From this experience I learned the importance of working hard to get what I want. And I learned how to handle money. I learned that if I wanted something and focused my energy on it, I could tap into my mind power. My mind power would show me the way and instruct me in what to do, so that I could have exactly what I wanted.
    I learned that focusing my energy works. First we visualize what we want, then we achieve it. Visualization is seeing with your mind. It is one of the most powerful principles available for creating your future.
    The Power of Focus: How to Hit Your
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    Learning to focus on ONE THING

    Learning to focus on ONE THING is quite possibly one of the best things you can do to invest in yourself. This is probably one of THE MOST overlooked areas of self improvement.

    You would think focusing on one thing is easy to do, but it’s actually pretty hard.

    To illustrate my point of how hard it is for people to focus, let’s focus on one of the things that a majority of people would like to accomplish:

    Make substantial income.

    The ways to make substantial income are endless. Here are just a few examples.

    Opening your own business Selling merchandise on Ebay Flipping houses Buying apartments to create passive cash flow Investing in the stock market Network marketing FOREX Writing a bestseller book Becoming a famous actor/actress Getting a high paying job

    We are constantly bombarded by ways in which to make substantial income whether through word of mouth, TV, radio, Internet, or by looking at other people who have made substantial income.

    To illustrate: the typical John Smith hears the rave on how real estate is the way to go. He buys the books, goes to the seminars, tries a few deals out that doesn’t do too well, and then tosses his hands up in the air and decides real estate is not for him and it’s not the way to go.

    Now he hears the market is hot, so he calls up his broker for stock tips, reads Buffet’s books, subscribes to magazines. After buying and selling a few stocks, he realizes it’s not for him.

    Now he hears people becoming millionaires on Ebay so he decides to do that. Contacts a few wholesalers, sets up a store, sells some items, but the business doesn’t really take off. Same result. Why is John Smith experiencing the same results of not creating substantial income over and over again?

    It all comes back to lack of focus.

    Let’s look back at some of the people who have learned how to harness the power of focus. Warren Buffet, when you hear his name, you think investing. Donald Trump, real estate. Thomas Edison, inventions. Tom Cruise, acting. Jay Leno, comedy.

    The pattern here is that all these people have chosen to focus on one subject and to keep at it.

    Google prided itself on being THE search engine. It now has ventures in pay per click advertising, video search, Google Earth, Froogle, etc. By establishing itself first in one venture, it was able to launch several other ventures without having to go through the monumental effort of establishing itself again.

    Some people might say Donald Trump makes substantial income via book writing and TV shows too. But that’s AFTER the fact that he made it big by focusing on real estate.

    You will find that if you focus on one single subject and excel at it, many other doors will begin to open for you.

    That last sentence is very important so I will reiterate it again. You will find that if you focus on one single subject and excel at it, many other doors will begin to open for you.

    Let me give you an example that will hopefully illustrate the power of focusing on one subject.

    Focusing on one subject is analogous to building your own staircase.

    The longer you keep focus on a subject, the more stairs you can build.

    Let’s say you keep focusing on a subject by reading about it, asking people about it, practicing it, whatever it is, so long as you’re focused on that one subject. You will soon have focused enough on learning that subject that you effectively built your first stair.

    Now you get to stand on that stair and look around.

    You’ll probably see things you’ve never seen before when you were at ground level.

    You’ll probably see things from a different perspective than when you saw them on ground level.

    Now that you’re on higher ground, you’ll have access to things you never had before because they were previously out of reach.

    Other people may be able to give you a helping hand on their respectively built staircases, since you are now within reach because of your newfound height.

    Keep focusing again on the same subject, and now you’re be able to build another stair and another stair, probably more faster than before as now you have access to resources to help you build faster that you previously did not have. As you climb higher and higher with each step you build, you will find more and more opportunities at your disposal.
    Now let’s say you don’t focus and skip from subject to subject. It’s the same as you building half a step and destroying it. Then building another step halfway and then destroying it.

    You’re always going to stay at ground level. You’re always going to stay at ground level. No, that’s not a typo.

    By focusing on one subject, you will start to capitalize on all the experience and knowledge you gain from it. And once you master that subject, you will have built stairs that will take you to heights that you’ve never been before and opportunities that would have never been available to you at ground level.

    Let’s use another example to illustrate.

    John Smith loves to play tennis. He’s not good, but he loves to play. So he practices, day and night. Gets lessons. Reads books. Watches professional players. Asks for help. Plays pickup games. Enters tournaments.

    Now he’s at a pretty good level. He can now teach neighborhood kids for money. He can enter tournaments and win prizes. He can play professionally. He can write a book. He can organize teams at the local park, and be an instructor there. He can publish beginner videos. The possibilities are endless. All because he decided to focus on one subject and to master it.

    That’s the power of focus.

    However, in order to fully utilize the power of focus you must choose a subject that you love to immerse yourself in. If you abhor Shakespeare, no matter how hard you try to focus, you’re not going to focus and master it.

    For most people, choosing that subject is the hardest part. Once the right subject is chosen, mastering it follows easily. If you don’t choose the right subject, mastering it will prove to be difficult. That’s why it’s so important to find what you love to do. If you haven’t already read my essay on how to find what you love, please do so here.

    So let’s say you found the subject you want to focus on.

    I guarantee your mind will start to stray.

    It’s easy to stray with all the distractions we have today. Internet, TV, magazines, cell phones, etc. What we don’t realize is that these distractions can lead off on tangents that will steal our focusing power. We may have chosen tennis to be our subject of focus, but we see the World Cup playing on TV and decide to switch to soccer. No. We must stay focused on the subject at hand.

    Above my computer on my desk, I have a quote printed out in big bold letters that reads “STAY FOCUSED ON THE SUBJECT AT HAND”. I then have another quote printed under it that I think sums up the gist of this article.

    “Do not scatter your powers. Engage in one kind of business only, and stick to it faithfully until you succeed, or until your experience shows that you should abandon it. A constant hammering on one nail will generally drive it home at last, so that it can be clinched. When a man's undivided attention is centered on one object, his mind will constantly be suggesting improvements of value, which would escape him if his brain was occupied by a dozen different subjects at once.” – Barnum & Bailey.

    Choose the subject you wish to focus upon wisely and then focus upon it, and only it. Do not stray and you will find a myriad of opportunities that will come about due to your constant focus.


    [Stay focused] [Stay focused] [Stay focused] [Stay focused] [Stay focused] [Stay focused]


    If you are ever tempted to stray, remember the staircase you are building.

    Invest in yourself and make it happen.
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    Tuesday 19 July 2011

    PERSONAL EFFECTIVENESS

     

      Personal Effectiveness

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    Personal Effectiveness

    Most people want to feel useful in their lives. They want to feel as though they are making a contribution of some kind.

    If you're employed, then work is one of the more important places where you will want to feel useful, valued and appreciated.

    When things are going well, your life feels effective and efficient and you're capable of handling whatever the workday throws at you.

    However, when things are not going quite so well, when too many demands are made on your time and you can't seem to see what's needed, then you may begin to feel ineffectual, de-skilled and pretty useless.

    On top of that, one of life's little ironies is that it only takes one small incident, one conflict, mistake or reprimand; something overlooked or a problem not sorted out to feel that everything you do is useless.

    It's not true, but human nature being what it is, most people tend to focus on what's wrong rather than what's right.

    When this happens, it's actually possible to feel so ineffectual that you become ineffectual.

    This is how negative reinforcement happens.

    In other words, one blip may create just that much extra stress that the rest of your work is affected; and then one blip, one small error or mistake, turns into many and you really do become a liability.

    In reality all those skills and abilities you have when things are going well don't go away, they just go to ground for a while.

    The trick is to get them back again before it all goes 'pear shaped'.

    Knowing what you do well, what you can rely on, what qualities you have are essential to maintaining your personal effectiveness.

    Being able to identify what makes you feel aligned, motivated and energised will also reinforce and build your confidence, so that when those blips come along (and they will), you can deal with them effectively.

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    Thursday 14 July 2011

    TOWARDS THE BEST IN ACADEMICS

    Moral or ethical issues are central to our lives. Our personal relationships can be positive and enhance our lives or be destructive. Societal norms can be based on fairness and ethical values or involve favoritism and disrespect toward certain groups. Ethical behavior is essential in a democracy where, as citizens, we regularly make decisions affecting others.
    Since the time of the earliest colonial colleges, American higher education has had a mission to foster its students' moral development. Today, there is concern about a growing incivility and an apparent decrease in level of caring for each other. In addition, some of the highest officials in the land—all college graduates—regularly display unethical behavior that may confuse the nation's understanding of morality. High rates of academic cheating by college students suggest we have a significant moral challenge—and opportunity—for student learning and development.
    Now our efforts to foster our students' moral development can benefit from four decades of empirical research, the findings of which can help us have a powerful impact on our students' lives and, through them, society more broadly.
    What Research Tells Us
    All four of these components, and perhaps others, work together to influence a person's behavior. Development in one component does not guarantee development in another; all four are necessary for moral action. Of the four components, the second, moral reasoning or judgment, is the most fully researched. It is a cognitive variable upon which we know colleges and universities can have a powerful impact.
    The conception of moral judgment used in this essay is based on the pioneering work of Lawrence Kohlberg as modified by more recent research by Rest. Kohlberg hypothesized six different stages or moral philosophies through which people can pass as they develop.
    Stage 1: A morality focusing on obedience—yielding to the wishes of those who are more powerful and thus avoiding punishment.
    Stage 2: An instrumental morality that seeks personal benefit with little concern for the needs of others. This is the Stage of "The Deal": caveat emptor.
    Stage 3: A morality that seeks to maximize the quality of relationships. A person does what will gain others' approval.
    Stage 4: A morality of law and order: One has a duty to obey the law and maintain the social order.
    Stage 5: A morality that focuses on social contract: What is moral is what people have previously agreed to.
    Stage 6: A morality that uses abstract, universal ethical principles to decide what is the moral act. Reasoning at this stage respects all people without regard to their ethnicity, age, class, or other personal characteristics.
    Comprehension of the various stages is gradually developed, provided one has appropriate experiences. Stages 5 and 6 involve using principles to think about relationships among people rather than rigid laws given by authority (Stage 4). What is moral is what advances implementation of a principle.
    Most people, including college undergraduates, primarily use the moral reasoning of Conventional Stages 3 and 4. Stages 1 and 2 are thus known as Preconventional and 5 and 6 as Postconventional. Many people never develop the capacity for substantial Postconventional reasoning. Although rigid Stage 4 authoritarian moralism and legalism may seem repugnant from a Postconventional principled perspective, achieving the shift from the more selfish personal perspective of Stages 1-3 to the sociocentric maintaining norms perspective of Stage 4 reasoning is an important moral advance, certainly over Preconventional lawless or criminal behavior.
    Developing upward through the various stages, one's reasoning is increasingly concerned with others' needs and less exclusively with one's own. There is a development in capacity to deal with the increasing cognitive complexity and abstraction required to comprehend the reasoning of each successive stage.
    Research shows a person can understand not only his/her reasoning currently used when dealing with moral dilemmas but also the reasoning of the stages below, having developed through all of these stages. However, s/he will tend to reject the lower stage reasoning as inferior, too simple, or childlike.
    Of the methods of measuring moral reasoning, the most widely used is the Defining Issues Test (DIT), a technically strong, objective paper-and-pencil test. In use since the 1970s, the DIT has been employed in more than 40 nations with hundreds of thousands of people in over 1,500 studies, with around 150 being published yearly. The DIT presents several moral dilemmas to test-takers, who are asked to respond to questions about each dilemma. A P Score, the percentage of Stage 5 and 6 principled reasoning people use in responding to the dilemmas, is calculated from the results and represents their current level of moral reasoning development.
    Numerous studies have examined factors that might influence the development of moral judgment. Findings show that although age is associated with stage of moral reasoning, the best correlate is level of schooling. Junior high school students have P Scores that average 21.9 (percent); senior high school students, 31.8; adults in general, 40.0; college students, 42.3; graduate students in business, 42.8; medical students, 50.2; law students, 52.2; liberal Protestant seminarians, 59.8; and graduate students in moral philosophy and political science, 65.2.
    Apparently, association with school activities is important for growth. Older people who have completed only high school tend to perform on the DIT like current high school graduates, and older college graduates appear stuck at the level of current college graduates.
    Some (e.g., Gilligan, 1982) have suggested women conceive of moral issues in terms of care-giving and relationships rather than justice as in Kohlberg's scheme. But available studies give mixed results (Evans, Forney, & Guido-DiBrito, 1998), and there are no significant gender differences in scores from DIT samples of thousands of people. Many dozens of studies have examined a possible Western cultural bias of Kohlberg's six stages of moral judgment. Meta-analyses of these studies reveal widespread, possibly universal distribution of these forms and this sequence of moral reasoning.
    What Teachers Can Do
    Numerous studies in moral education suggest practical tactics teachers can use that will help their students move toward more complex, principled ethical reasoning. Listed here are some methods consistent with the findings of research on fostering students' moral judgment.
    • Have students discuss controversial moral dilemmas. Identify disciplinary issues with moral content—that relate to moral values. Develop cases, problems, or scenarios that involve these values for students to discuss.
    • Have students play the roles of and explain the reasoning used by others to resolve moral dilemmas.
    • Allow students to discover how various cultural groups reason about moral issues.
    • All courses, even in disciplines such as mathematics or statistics that on their surface may appear to lack obviously moral content, offer rich opportunities for helping students develop their skill in moral reasoning. Every course can become a learning community where values of mutual respect, sensitivity to others' needs, and cooperation are emphasized and discussed.
    • Ensure all students have ample out-of-class contact with faculty members.
    • In addition to high involvement tactics, directly teach Kohlberg's model of six stages of reasoning as one would teach other, disciplinary concepts.
    • Use the DIT to help both teacher and students understand their moral reasoning and track and improve program effectiveness.
    College experiences can have a significant impact on students' moral reasoning. In fact, some of the strongest college effects found in the literature are on moral reasoning (McNeel, 1994). This impact is particularly strong in liberal arts colleges and in disciplines that explore people and values. Students in more vocationally oriented disciplines such as business and education have shown considerably lower DIT score growth over their college experience. In fact, after reviewing research on this issue, McNeel (1994, p. 34) has remarked, "There may be a moral development problem nationally in the areas of business and education," two fields with an enormous impact on society.    This essay focuses on aspects of moral development for which there is robust empirical support and sound guidance for teachers. A person's morality is influenced by a variety of internal and environmental factors. In one conception, moral action is determined by four components: (1) moral sensitivity (comprehending moral content when present in a situation), (2) moral judgment (determining what is the moral thing to do), (3) moral motivation (choosing to do what moral rather than other values dictate), and (4) moral character (having qualities such as strength of ego, perseverance, and courage to act) (Rest & Narváez, 1994; Rest, Narváez, Bebeau, & Thoma, 1999). (Unless otherwise indicated, descriptions of research and data are drawn from these two sources.)
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    Thursday 7 July 2011

    WILL POWER AND SELF DISCIPLINE

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