Reach Your Dreams by Achieving Your Full Potential
Every now and again, I catch myself getting stuck in the daily grind of life. I find that I'm "accepting" what life throws at me instead of pursuing my dreams. I find myself settling instead of deciding what I really want, envisioning my dream life, and making a plan to get there. We all do it. Most of us never explore our full potential because we get stuck in a pattern of "small" thinking. We forget that our journey is always ultimately up to us. Reach Your Dreams by Achieving Your Full Potential Always dream and shoot higher than you know you can do. - William Falkner Thinking big requires a thick skin. If your dreams are bold, plenty of people will do and say little things to discourage you from chasing your potential. The greatest achievers have to face this challenge all the time. Learn to ignore it, or consider keeping your dreams to yourself. If you want to think big, try these tips: 1- Consider what will happen if you don't think big. You'll regret the things you didn't do far more than the things that didn't work out. So take a few minutes and imagine how you'll feel if you never even try to reach your dreams. Think about how you'll feel if in 10 years from now your journey has taken you even further from your dream life. Sometimes pain is the greatest motivator to truly explore your potential. How much pain will you feel if you don't take action today? 2- Be brave enough to let your creativity shine. The most important step towards exploring your potential is to realize that you're more creative than you think. We all are. Just watch a child play by him- or herself. You still have that ability to create with your mind. But if you're like most adults, you've learned to stifle or ignore it, and to suppress your dreams. Don't, because your imagination might be your greatest strength. Let it run free. 3- Stretch beyond your comfort zone. If you're not making yourself at least a little uncomfortable, you're not thinking big. If something seems comfortable to you, you're probably already doing it. If you're already doing it, it's not going to take you to the next level. That's a sure-fire way to prevent yourself from ever exploring your potential and achieving your dreams. Learning to deal with discomfort is an important part of growing. If you have enough motivation, anything is possible. Learning to lower your discomfort through healthy means is a crucial part of any upward journey. 4- It's easier than it has ever been. The Internet and other forms of mass media have made it easier to go global than ever before. All that's required is success on a local level. That success can then be propagated to other places. Think about how difficult it would've been to spread your ideas to other countries 50 years ago. 5- When exploring your potential, use your emotions as a guide. You'll know you're on to something when you're overwhelmed with positive emotions. Keep thinking big until you come up with an idea that truly moves you. Then think even bigger and imagine how you can use this idea to design your dream life. If you're like most adults, you've become too logical and practical. But you are more capable of doing what truly excites you than you realize. What do you really want to do? What inspires you? 6- Spend time each day thinking big thoughts and dreaming big dreams. Make it a habit to spend a few minutes each day coming up with great ideas. If you already have your idea, then spend the time developing ways to make your dream life become a reality. Keep mapping out your journey and improving your plan. Make it a part of your daily routine. One possibility is to go to bed earlier and spend 30 minutes letting your imagination run wild before you sleep. Most of us think too small. We underestimate ourselves. We worry about failure. We worry about being too successful. But the world needs your big ideas, and it needs your audacious dreams. You must think big to explore your full potential, both for your own sake as well as for the world's. Think big to live a life that's fruitful and fulfilling. Think big to live a life that's free of regrets. And start today.
4 Surefire Ways To Maximize Your Profits and Expand Your Business
It is a race, and your customers are fully aware. The market today is as competitive in terms of profit as never before. Moreover, things are expected to get even more fired-up in the coming months and years for business. By abiding by the following four awesome concepts, you will increase your profits without having to consume yourself in hard work for endless years. These are game-changing pieces of advice when it comes to your business life. 4 Surefire Ways To Maximize Your Profits and Expand Your Business 1) Give Your Business A Clear Mission If you want your business and your associates to display superior performance, you need to have a clear vision regarding your company’s place in the world and its destination. When you are off to define a mission, you should really try to answer this question: What is the reason for your existence? Are you solving any problems? When defining your purpose, you should always view it from the perspective of how other people are served and benefited through your business. An effective mission statement will include the way to follow in order to achieve the mission. Moreover, it will include a point of reference so that an objective assessor can evaluate whether the company fulfills its self-defined mission. 2) Define Your Business Segment With Accuracy It is almost unbelievable that massive numbers of people have no idea what business segment they belong to, although they spend all day working in it. Make sure you pinpoint your business according to how your customer views it. This means that your business’s definition will be dictated by what your services or products offer to your customer. How do they affect the personal and professional lives of your customers? How do your customers specifically benefit from what you have to offer? So, what’s your business in the eyes of your customer? What’s more, where do you find yourself the day after, taking into account the current trends in your field? Alternatively, what business are you in today, from your customer’s point of view? Also, what business will you be in tomorrow with the way things are going in your industry? More importantly, do you need to switch to a different business in order to survive and succeed in the fluidity of today’s competitive environment? And ultimately, provided that you are able to do what’s necessary to become a leader in your field, what business is best suited for you? After all, there is no better way to predict the future than creating it. To the words of strategic planner Michael Kami, “The future is there for those who plan for it.” It doesn’t really matter what is your current business since things are going to change drastically in the following years. What you have to do is to command this change, not be objectified by it. Defining your business segment accurately and be ready to make changes in order to lead this business is crucial to increasing your profits. 3) Define Your Customer With Accuracy This is what marketing, sales and profit potential is all about. To be able to accurately define your customer is the most important factor of succeeding in business. Be as precise and accurate as you can when defining your customer. This includes extended demographics (age, income, education, company position, philosophy, background, baseline value), geographic location, and position on the market landscape. More importantly what is your customer’s perception of value? Where does he or she prefer to invest his or her money? What are their needs and wants that aren’t met by anyone else at the moment? What makes your prospective customer trust your competitors with their money? What will it take to persuade your potential (but not actual) customers to switch their preference towards your own offerings? How would they be benefited from doing so? Employ “zero-based thinking,” with your client base and with your market segment. Assuming you weren’t offering your services or products in your current market, would you consider it a good opportunity to start today? Also, who do you see as your customer in the near or distant future? What if you decided to switch your services or products? What would be the best customer base if your goal is to make a substantial profit in the future? Finally, what do you need to change in your business so that your company becomes more attractive to the high-profit customer of the future? This is probably the most important riddle to solve on a daily basis when you are set to build and maintain high profitability. 4) Gain The Edge Over Your Competition Or Don’t Compete At All This is crucial. The existence itself of your business life depends on your capacity to create and keep some sort of significant competitive advantage. Is there something that your company excels at? At what field are you considered to be high level? How do your main products and services stand out? Your competitive advantage is the particular feature of your service or product that gives you a significant edge over your competition. The area where your competitive edge lies strictly depends on your customer’s wants, needs, and budget The existence of a competitive advantage, which is recognized and appreciated by customers, is the single common feature of every surviving and thriving company. On the contrary, all companies that face problems have either lost their competitive advantage in the market, or they never had one in, to begin with. How able you are to build, keep and safeguard your competitive advantage is a feature that no company that aspires to achieve high growth and profitability can do without. Because the modern marketplace evolves at such a rapid pace, you should always try to keep your competitive advantage one step ahead. If you want to be the leader of the pack, what should that advantage be? Provided you can change your offering as needed, what competitive advantage would you go for? Today, the primary competitive advantages are speed, lower price, or higher convenience; or a combination of all three, along with stellar customer service. Every successful and profitable company out there offer products and services of high quality and fast. Also, they provide impeccable customer service, and they continue to improve it further. All these allow them to be the fastest growing and most profitable companies in their respective fields. Where you should be as well.
How To Make Your Life A Masterpiece
Your life is the greatest masterpiece you can ever create. But to do this, you must first design it. How? You must have a vision of or image of what it looks like. Once you have a vision and design it then you can begin the process of building it. The questions below can guide you with your design: How do you classify your life when you are at your healthiest, strongest, and best How can you relate your family situation with your pursuits in success? What matters to you most in life? What priorities drive you each day? What makes you come alive? What are you born to do? What are you doing to live and share your purpose? How do you want to describe your experience in life when you look back into it? How do you want to feel? What will you have wanted to accomplish? What legacy will you have left? These questions are necessary because some people might believe they are building their masterpiece, but rather they are building a piece of junk. For some the answers to these questions may lead them to a new career because they try to meditate on them. However, for most, it’s simply a great change that will align your life with the vision and design you have for it. For example, you may need to exercise more and eat healthier to create your masterpiece. Or perhaps you may need to spend more time with your family because your masterpiece includes great relationships with your kids. Or you might realize that you are not spending enough time on your priorities and therefore your masterpiece is not developing as it should. Whatever your masterpiece looks like, your design will help you see what you need to do, or stop doing, to create it. It’s a great effort when someone stops trying to create someone else's masterpiece and instead focuses on designing and creating the masterpiece they're meant to build. Furthermore, it’s good to stay positive as you move from the design stage to the building stage because there would surely be challenges to be faced during the building stage. So, always remember that negative thoughts cannot solve anything but rather destroy it. Be flexible and adaptable through the process. It’s okay for your plans to change, especially when your plans must give way to the ultimate creator’s master plan. In conclusion, be sure to choose the right habits because that would affect who you are and your plans for each day .Your habits will transform your design, vision and plans into the masterpiece of your life. Today, you have the opportunity to transcend from a disempowered mindset of existence to an empowered reality of purpose-driven living. Today is a new day that has been handed to you for shaping. You have the tools, now get out there and create a masterpiece.
Work-life Balance is Out, It’s All About Work-Life Harmony
We’ve all heard how important it is to achieve "work-life balance." The ubiquitous piece of advice starts with the idea that we are all stressed out and over-worked -- a bunch of workaholics who need to get a life. Those who talk about work-life balance stress the need to integrate more of your personal life (aka, your life) into a busy work life. But is this right? Why should you treat your life like a competition between the dreary work that you have to do and all the parts of your life that you actually enjoy? Work-Life balance implies that you have to weigh the different parts of your life on a scale. Work-life Balance is Out, It's All About Work-life Harmony By contrast, achieving work-life harmony can be a better way to become a well-rounded person. Rather than striving to achieve some false constant balance in your life, it is about arranging your life so that the different parts are in harmony. The key difference is that achieving harmony means you can focus more on work sometimes and more on your family other times. You don’t always have to try to force everything to work at once. In this article we will examine five ways to create a better work-life harmony. Make Conscious Choices People who achieve work-life harmony make conscious choices in their lives. They know that you have to create a map if you want to reach a destination. It is certainly true that you can’t predict everything in life, but that doesn’t mean you should give up on planning. If you want to have harmony in your life you need to first ask yourself what you want out of your life. You need to reflect carefully on both the type of work you want to do and how much time you want to spend working. Likewise, you need to reflect on what you want to do when you aren’t working. Ask yourself about the quality and quantity of the time you spend with your family and friends. Consider other activities such as spiritual practices, hobbies, volunteer work, political involvement, entertainment, and the ordinary chores that you have to do. Conductors create harmony by getting different instruments to work together and by emphasizing different instruments at different times. Work with Passion It is cliché to say that if you choose a job you love, you will never work a day in your life -- but it's cliché for good reason. One of the most important ways you can achieve harmony in your life is to love what you do for a living. Admittedly, it is not always easy to find work that you love, but that doesn’t mean it's impossible. You need to begin by taking the time to analyze what you feel passionate about. What do you enjoy doing? Think about what gets your engine revving and how you can make money with it. Research different jobs in industries that interest you. Talk to people who work in those industries. You can find a job that is a good fit for you, but you'll need to put time into figuring out what that is. You are never going to love any job all the time, but loving what you do is an important step towards achieving work-life harmony. Prioritize Working with People You Like Let’s face it, it isn’t likely that you are ever going to like everyone you work with. There are difficult people at pretty much every job. However, your co-workers are an important part of your everyday life. You should prioritize working with people you like. That can mean finding a way to work with you friends. It can also mean making an effort to be friendly with your co-workers and turning them into friends. If you find yourself working in a toxic environment, think about what you can do to change that environment and better deal with toxic co-workers. Alternatively, consider finding yourself a better environment to work in. Your health, both physical and mental, is impacted by the people you work with, so prioritize working with people you like. Articulate Your Thinking Communication is critically important to achieving work-life harmony. One of the main difficulties people have is with saying no. It can be hard to say no when our boss or a co-worker asks us to do something. It can be hard to say no to our family and friends when they ask us to do something for them or want us to spend time with them. We have plenty of demands on our time. That is why it is so important to communicate frequently with your boss and co-workers, as well with your family and friends. Regular communication with the people that matter to you at work and at home creates harmony in your life, even when everything isn’t going smoothly. Create the Good to Deal with the Bad Bad things are going to happen in your life. That's just life. You’ll get stuck in traffic. Someone you think is less deserving will get the promotion you want. Your kids will get sick and need you to stay home with them. You will have a fight with your spouse. You can’t prevent every bit of misfortune that befalls you, but you can create good things. Stuck in traffic? Listen to a podcast, or think about going into work a bit later so you can breakfast with your family. Stuck at home with your kids who have the flu? Take that time to bond with them over pillow forts and chicken noodle soup. Creating the good means turning a cacophony of noise into a beautiful symphony. Conclusion Work-life balance is out. The Journal of Occupational & Environmental Medicine concluded in a 2003 study that workplace stress is an important contributing factor to the health problems of workers. The American Psychological Association has come to a similar conclusion. The idea of achieving complete balance between your personal and professional lives isn't working. Your attention will be split in too many directions if you try to pay equal attention to everything all the time. That is why you should focus on creating work-life harmony instead. An orchestra will sometimes stress more piano or percussion, but the end result is a pleasant harmony no matter which instrument or section predominates at any one time. Will you be like a maestro who conducts the different parts of your life to create a beautiful symphony?