Let’s face it, times are tough for a lot of people in this economy. People are losing their jobs, homes and families in in some cases. Most people have the ability to see the light at the end of the tunnel in bad situations, however this economy has even the more optimistic people feeling as if they were beat down to their knees. As your looking down the tunnel for a glimpse of hope you see a sign that says “The light has been temporarily turned off for failure to pay the electric bill”. Not only is the economy having an impact on peoples finances but the stress, in many cases, is carrying over and having an negative impact on individuals families and relationships. As the weight of the world is pressing on individuals shoulders I am seeing more and more people get the “why bother any more attitude.”

Well I have got news for everyone. You are definitely not in it alone, we will pull through this with time, things will eventually turn around and your life will eventually get back on track if you start taking action now. By action I mean taking the steps necessary mentally and physically to stay in the game. In these challenging times we always have to be focused on taking some chances, making some changes and always doing our personal best even when we feel as if it is not leading to progress. If we start getting that “what’s the point attitude”, which we all do from time to time, we need to stay true  to staying positive and snapping ourselves  out of  that destructive attitudes and feelings. Your happiness, success and quality of life is all directly correlated to well you can stay focused on continuously doing your personal best and pushing forward.

The time to be more diligent about always doing your personal best is when you start feeling a sense of hopelessness and an overiding sense that things aren’t going to pay off in the end for you. Trust me when I tell you, if you stay focused on your personal best, so much so that it becomes hard wired into your mind even when things seem tough great things will be in store for you. . More and more opportunities will start presenting themselves it’s just a matter of time.

In addition, when I speak of personal best I am not just referring to career or finance matters. I truly am speaking to everything that we do life. Most importantly we need to ensure we stay focused on our families and relationships. Keep in mind the amount of happiness and fulfillment that we receive in life is directly proportionate to the quality of  the relationships that we have in life.

Attached is a video / story  that I put together on an Olympic athlete that always focused on doing his personal best, regardless of the situation. Even when he could of played it safe and coasted he still pushed forward full throttle.

Stay positive, takes chances and get the life you deserve.

Right now Fast Company Magazine, one of the most well respected start up mags out there, is doing a feature on influential people. And they are going to post everyone’s photo in the magazine who registers (the size depends on how much influence you have.

Regardless of where you rank you will always be able to say you were in Fast Company magazine under the “Most Influential People”.

Go Here And Register (It Takes About 2 Minutes)

Presentation skills are extremely important in many aspects of your life. Some people think that these skills are only needed by sales and other people that are required to get up in front of people on a regular basis. Reality is that communication is key to a happy and successful life. The words that we use are not always the most important piece of that communication process, but rather how way say and conduct ourselves while saying them. Whether you like it or not we are all in sales and have to sell ourselves everyday. Spend some time developing your presentation skills and you will be amazed by how much further you get in life.

Understand:

1. What areas are you weak at when it comes to presentations?
2. Why do you feel it is important that you develop your presentation skills?
3. What benefits will come to you personally if you develop your presentation skills?
4. If you do not develop your presentation skills what will be the consequences over time?

Learn:

Prescribe:

1. What is the most important take away that you gained from the video?
2. How will you use that take away to improve your presentation skills?
3. Present on a topic and record yourself on video as if you were giving that presentation to your target audience. Watch the video, critique it, and if there are any flaws start the process over again until have given a presentation that you would deem to be a killer presentation based on the concepts above.

Have you ever woke up one day wondering what you were put on this earth for? What’s the higher level plan for my life? You have this pain deep down in your gut that you know there is so much more inside that you have to offer this world and yourself that you just are not accomplishing. You feel failure, trapped and potentially depressed. You find yourself blaming others, your past and the fact you didn’t get the breaks the truly happy and lucky people did.  You look around feeling lost, unmotivated, grasping at things to try to bring a sense of purpose to your life and the things that you have already accomplished. You basically just realize you are just distracting yourself with irrelevant things in life to take your mind off your internal torment and sense emptiness. Well if you have never felt like this I am happy for you, because you have truly aligned yourself right in life or I feel bad for you because you may just living in denial with that big fake smile on your face that people love to wear so much while they  are really hurting so badly inside. If you have had the feelings / realization I just mentioned, there is a lot of good news with that realization for you. First you are so not alone in feeling like that if you take comfort in the concept of strength in numbers and  second and most importantly you are conscious enough to life that you realized it already or maybe  you are just  realizing it now which means you can start designing that perfect life. That is where my sense of enlightenment and excitement comes from. If you are unhappy with life don’t get down, get excited because have the potential to get motivated and take the actions to write the future chapters of your life in away that it can be amazing!

Now don’t get me wrong, I feel I have accomplished a lot in life. I have beautiful kids that mean the world to me. I have some great friends that i would do anything for and also accomplished a good amount financially in the the past. There is only one issue with this, I never felt truly complete, I didn’t feel I was living up to my potential and never had a true sense of happiness and sense of self happiness.  I realized I was letting a lot of things in my past and fears that are still alive in my head control me. Bottom line is I felt IMPRISONED! That is until about 3am last night after I woke up out of a restless nights sleep, and it hit me. My life went racing through my mind much like they say happens in a near death experience, but this was no near death experience, it was a new life experience. I was excited and invigorated! I felt like Jerry Maguire did when he wrote woke up in the middle of the night and started passionately writing the new charter for how he wanted to conduct business and relationships moving forward in his life (that was for the movie buffs out there, great movie).  Despite always educating myself to the tune of  1 to 2 hours of self help and educational audio a day and at least 2 books and success magazines a month I still could not figure out why I was not truly happy. But it then hit me, happiness only comes from one place, and one place only and that is deep within side YOU, or me in this case

I’m probably not sharing anything with you that you don’t know at this point, but the thing I was missing and not following through on is letting things from the past, memories and experiences haunt me and occupy space in my mind. It’s amazing how much we have been programmed by other people in life and situations, and let me tell you some of these people should not even be programming a car navigation system let alone someone’s brain that totally determines that persons happiness, success and destination in life. If you think having money, having a job, having kids, having a relationship with someone is what really makes you happy then you are probably not being to honest with yourself or others. It’s about understanding yourself, how things align with your passions, your sense of purpose  and your sense of being. Once you have have and understanding on those things you focus on them like their is no tomorrow so they grow and flourish. I see so many people aligned in jobs they hate, especially with the economy the way it is. The are living unhappy lives, making less money then they use to, just trying to get by day to day with no hope or even a glimpse of future happiness ahead of them. Sometimes you need to do things you don’t want to support yourself and your family, but but the real question for you is are you going to just things the the way they are or align yourself  in a way that will bring you future happiness and take time to create a plan moving forward that, with some effort, will bring you to your promise land of that dream life. My belief is that we all truly have the ability to create dream lives in which we are inherently happy, satisfied and fulfilled. As we move in the right direction our happiness will keep getting stronger because its feeding off of contributing to others and the world in way that deep down you know you were put here to do. The challenge is I never constructed a true game plan for myself and life that will get me to true happiness. Trust me that it is not something that you just want to leave entirely to luck and at the end of your life sit there wondering what happened and blaming others for your failure to truly live life. What I realized last night is I didn’t take the time to understand what makes me truly happy and passionate about life. I have spent to much time doing the things that others from my past have put in my head and got me to believe that if I did those things they would provide me with happiness, and much of those things are and were implanted  in my head at a subconscious level like a bad computer virus.

Well, I am sticking my middle finger up right now saying thank you, but no thanks I will be taken charge of my brain, my subconscious, my  happiness, and my direction. I will understand and diligently start focusing on the things that make me feel good about what I contribute to this world in the way of my career direction, relationships and living up to my potential. The newspapers will now read: Rob has just made the greatest prison bust of all time!

No more fears, no more bad programming and feelings that have been embedded in my head from the past. This life is mine, and my dream life is creating happiness for myself so that I can infect others with my happiness so this world truly does become a better place to wake up to every day. So welcome to the first day of the rest of my life, it’s going to be an amazing ride. Stay tuned as I am working on my game plan and getting clear on my morals, the things I want to be known for, the type of person I want to become, the fears I am going to crush and the actions that are going to align around them consistently to help me create the dream life that I know is waiting for me. Let it begin

“I did everything right for someone that does everything wrong” ~ Elliott Smith

If you were offered that ideal job right now, today — would you be able to accept it? Would you be able to handle the responsibilities? Would you have the necessary skills, the knowledge, the contacts, the insight to succeed?

Would you be able to say yes to the opportunity of a lifetime, if it came along today? Opportunity, to be realized, takes more than willingness. It takes preparation. When you’re prepared for opportunity, it comes to you in abundance.

B

And there’s certainly nothing to be gained from a solution that merely masks or delays the problem without addressing the underlying cause. When there’s a problem in your life, get to work rooting out the core of that problem.

Facing a challenge requires effort, and yet that effort is necessary only for a relatively short time. Running from the challenge requires ever-increasing effort that has no end.

The sooner you start working through a problem, the more quickly you’ll have that problem behind you. The earlier you deal with the root cause of the problem, the more effective your efforts will be.

Truly eliminating the cause of the problem does indeed take more work than quickly fixing the symptoms. Yet once the difficult work is done to remove the problem, it’s gone for good.

Do the work to root out each problem at its core. And your efforts will bring lasting rewards.