The Personal Success Handbook E-Book

Curly Martin

• Herausgeber: Crown House Publishing
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 350

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2008

Beschreibung

We are all different and success means different things to different people. Curly's new title, aimed at the individual, leads readers on a journey to define success. Once defined, she encourages us to look at ways to be successful in many different elements of life.

Leseprobe

Acclaim for The Personal Success Handbook

“I love books that make a difference – and The Personal SuccessHandbook is one of those! Packed full of useful ideas, it gives direction and a sense of purpose as you read it. It focuses attention on the practical and possible action steps needed to move anyone’s life forward in all areas. The illustrative stories add to our understanding and the many exercises and activities woven throughout the text, encourage us gently, but firmly, along the path of change. Easy to read, free of jargon, thought provoking and purposeful – a book for those people serious about life improvement – so LET’S DO IT!”–Gill Fielding, The Wealth Company (The Secret Millionaire, Channel 4)

“CurlyMartin tops off a terrific trilogy in her ‘handbook’ series with an intensive examination of the multi-faceted and elusive gem we know as personal success.

Here we are not only introduced to a whole host of subjects that can enhance our lives, but are treated to Curly’s very own RAWPOWER model, borne from over two decades of her own personal success. I found this to be a highly useful tool that I could apply instantly to my life to help expedite success.

The Personal Success Handbook is written in Curly’s warm and absorbing style once again, which makes the subject matter breathe with her fresh perspective and delightful humour. It offers the reader plenty of opportunity to reflect on what is being presented, as well as encouragement to take action to move us forward on our journey to success – something not always present in books of this nature.

Quite simply put, this book would be outstanding addition to the library of anyone who is serious about personal development; whatever your current level of achievement, the Personal Success Handbook will help propel you off the starting blocks down the track to YOUR personal success with a renewed perspective and inspired confidence.”–GrantWillcox – Success Coach – 2Excel Coaching

“One of Curly’s many strengths is her ability to put across (complicated) information in an easy to understand manner. Having met Curly various times I can wholeheartedly say that she is a living and breathing example of her methodologies. Her first two books were great; this is even better. The Personal SuccessHandbook is fun, informative and potentially life-changing”–JoeBenitez, IKEA Business Manager (UK)

“This superb practical book starts by asking you to define what success means for you. Once that is decided you can select topics ranging from health, finances, spiritual, emotional control, career planning, getting the ideal job, easy to use models for influencing your boss and relationships. All chapters have stories for each area and soul searching questions to guide you towards attaining your success. No hype, just great easy to use ideas and strategies so that you can get out of bed on a wet Monday morning with a smile on your face!”–ZoëFakouri LLM, MCIPS.

“Curly Martin has a unique talent to take what is good and make it even better. The Personal Success Handbook is an extension of Curly’s insightful expertise and wisdom in self-development. If you have not been lucky enough to attend one of her courses or hear her speak in public, this is the next best thing. Since working with Curly I have built a thriving business and a wonderful reputation as both a coach and therapist, earning me a place in The Daily Telegraph’s Top 20 Health Gurus in 2007. I owe much of my success to Curly’s invaluable knowledge and motivation.”–ChrisSmith – Professional Coach, NLP Practitioner and Hypnotherapist

“I have been studying personal development for over 20 years and when I picked up the Personal Success Handbook I thought it would just be re-iterating what I had already covered. I was pleasantly surprised that the approach of the book is different to many that I have read. It contains aspects that I had not previously covered. When I find myself now incorporating things that I learned in this book, I smile. I also get the desired results! Thank you Curly for another great book.– Ric Hayman – Performance Coach, Hypnotherapist and EFT Trainer

The Personal Success Handbook

Curly Martin

To the memory of my fatherFrank Glanville James Martin.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction: Some personal notes from Curly Martin

Chapter One Success Defined

Chapter Two Goal Success

Chapter Three Health Success

Chapter Four Emotional Success

Chapter Five Self Success

Chapter Six Financial Success

Chapter Seven Relationship Success

Chapter Eight Spiritual Success

Chapter Nine Influencing Success

Chapter Ten Neuro-Linguistic Programming Success

Chapter Eleven Interview Success

Chapter Twelve Career Success

Chapter Thirteen Entrepreneurial Success

Chapter Fourteen Beyond Success

Epilogue: Over to You

Author Resource Guide

Testimonials for Curly Martin

Index

Copyright

Acknowledgements

My outstanding team including Chris Smith, Ric Hayman, Margaret Edmonson and Veronica Cooper for all the support, laughs and challenges you have given me along the way.

Jackie Fletcher for her amazing proofreading expertise and for the many funny comments in the margins of the manuscript, which always made me laugh out loud. Colin Edwards for all his literary advice, wizardry and late-night editing, which provided the means for this work to get to the publishers within the very tight deadline. Mary Edwards, yet again, for her support of Colin.

Muriel Martin, Mary and Pat McEntee, Muriel and Roger Walters, the rest of my family and my loyal friends, who understood that I could not come out to play while managing a successful business and writing a book simultaneously.

To Keith Down who has always been there for me. The Bidlake bunch for the many diverting hours spent around the kitchen table. Dr Fiasal Samji, who saved my life and Anne Williams who taught me how to perform lymphatic drainage on my right arm so that I can write; both of whom made the recovery from breast and lymphatic cancer, a rewarding journey.

My husband, Pete, for his love, support and for regularly reminding me to go and run along the beautiful Bournemouth beach, which kept me focused and fit.

For all the wonderful people who have trusted me to train them to become outstanding coaches, who are now running their own successful businesses. To my team of mentor coaches who unreservedly give of their knowledge and experience to our new fledgling coaches, you can see them by visiting Our Coaches page on my website: www.achievementspecialists.co.uk.

Finally, for the team at Crown House who work hard to support their authors and who had faith in my first book, The Life Coaching Handbook, and again for my second book, The Business CoachingHandbook.

Introduction

Some personal notes from Curly Martin

This introduction is a vital part of the book.

Even if you typicallyskippages like this,now is a great time tochange the habits of a lifetime,because you are about to discoverstrategies that can deliver success in any area of your life.Thisintroduction will help you to get the optimum benefits from theideas and concepts that follow,so stay with it for a few momentslonger.

The fun begins

This book is for you if you are ready to make changes in your life, to define success on your own terms, and to take the actions that can bring it about. You deserve the life that you desire rather than the life that you have been given.

Your focus and needs will change as you change and evolve, so remember to revisit the chapter summaries from time to time as some ideas will become more meaningful to you when you begin to create positive results.

It can be infuriating to read about a good idea and then be unable to find it again later, so I invite you to personalise your book by making margin notes that apply to your life. Put a date on each note so that you can monitor how your thoughts change. Keep a pen handy as you read so that you can circle your significant page numbers as an additional rapid reference guide.

Ideas for success will come to you as you read and may well be forgotten by the time you turn the page. Ideas are as fragile as wispy white clouds which can appear on a beautiful summer day, and vanish almost as soon as you can say ‘look at that beautiful cloud’. Any one of your ideas could be a breakthrough moment of ‘Aha!’ brilliance that can ignite your imagination. Use a small notebook to capture key word reminders of your ideas as they come to you and then refer to them later when you have more time to develop them into actions.

You will find several text boxes that are designed to make you think about your personal success and prompt you to consider how you will improve it. Spend time with the questions and write down your answers as you go along.

The boxes are deliberately small because they should work as reminders and motivators. Make more detailed observations in your notebook as soon as ideas are generated, as this will strengthen your commitments and act as your silent coach. There, I have said it, that magic word ‘coach’. Coaching may not be magic, but the outcomes it can create may seem nothing less than magical.

You will probably have come across coaching in a sporting context. Success coaching works just as effectively in every area of your life. Self-analysis without a support system can be difficult and demoralising. You can only start on a journey from where you are now and your journey to personal success follows this rule. Similarly, you must have a defined destination in mind otherwise you will drift off course and, even worse, will not know when you have arrived!

Whether you opt for self-coaching or invite external help, it is all about knowing where you are, where you are going and the actions that you will take to get there. Coaching is not a quick fix; it is a process that provides a constant and continuous drip-feeding of information to fuel your motivation, to plan and make any changes that are needed, and to keep you on track by making the most of what you have.

Please set aside at least five minutes each day to spend time with this book, your notebook and pen. Plan and write down the actions you will take—no matter how small the steps may seem, they will lead you towards your goals, aims and success objectives.

If you keep doing the same things in the same ways, you will always achieve the same results. If those results correspond exactly to your definition of success, then congratulations. If not, then the following chapters offer you a series of signposts to point you in the right direction of change.

Effective coaching uses metaphors, examples and analogies to deliver results. That is why you will find a brief real-life story to launch each chapter. As they say in some movies, ‘The stories are true, only the identities have been changed to protect the innocent.’

Are you ready to start writing and living your own story? It has a three-word title: My Successful Life. I want you to share a system that I have been using for a long time and which I created as a quick reminder/reference guide to inspire me to greater achievements.

Each time I unearth a new or unexplored area I apply a system I call the RAWPOWER model to accelerate my development in that area. As you check it out now, and when you use it later, consider how it applies to your own current success and future success progress.

R – Read as much as I can on the subject

A – Attend seminars, courses, talks, demonstrations etc.

W – Watch audio visual materials on the area

P – Personal insights that apply to me

O – Open my mind when I approach the topic

W – Work on my weaknesses in this and related areas

E – Enjoy what I am doing

R – Reproduce consistently high results

Due diligence

You will probably come across ‘due diligence’ sooner rather than later in your life. It is often stated as the slightly odd sounding, ‘doing due diligence’.

This is what all buyers should do before agreeing to any transaction, whether they are buying a book, a car or even a company. In plain language, you ‘do due diligence’ when you flick through the pages in a bookstore, when you take a test drive or when you examine a company’s financial records. What you are doing is satisfying yourself that the objects of your desire meet your needs, are fit for the purpose and represent good value.

Guess who this responsibility is down to? You may seek the advice of people who should know, you may include personal recommendations in your decision, but ultimately the buck stops with you. You take responsibility for your actions, fully and totally.

It is sometimes claimed that we live in a society of blame culture. As far as your success is concerned, forget about blame. Your life is down to you alone. All the decisions you make are down to you alone. And guess who is going to apply the principles, tips and hints in this book?

Remember this saying: ‘If it is to be, it is up to me!’ This is especially true about creating your personal success. This book will help you, and if you support your efforts using my RAWPOWER model your success will arrive more quickly than you could have imagined.

All this information is based on my own 20-plus years of practical experience as a coach and is presented with tremendous goodwill. I am the founder of a very successful coaching and coach-training business, which has been operating successfully for over ten years. I am not a lawyer, an accountant or a medical person. You need to know this because in legal, financial and health matters you must always seek the services of appropriately trained and qualified professionals as part of your personal due diligence. Because I have no control over the way that you use the information in these pages, your due diligence must also recognise that you alone are responsible for compliance with local rules and regulations, with governmental obligations and, equally importantly, for the outcomes of any actions that you take. This book is a valuable guide, and remember, the responsibility for the way that you apply its ideas to achieve success is yours!

A special bonus

When you have read this book and applied the ideas and suggestions in each chapter, you may still feel that your circumstances could benefit from the personal input of a professional coach working with you in a one-on-one session. As a special bonus, you can email your contact details (in absolute commercial confidence) to Achievement Specialists and a member of our coaching team will reply with a time and date for an introductory chat, which will be free of cost or obligation. This added benefit alone could be worth far more than the cover price of your book!

You will find our e-mail address at the end of the book. After all, you really should read everything else first!

You are about to be reminded of things that you already know and also some things that are new to you. Just because we know how to do something, it does not follow that we do it.So ask yourself regularly:‘Am I doing what I know I need to do today?’

Disclaimer Notice

This book offers personal development information and guidance only and is not intended as direct advice. I have no control over the way that you use the information contained within these pages–you alone are responsible for the outcomes of any actions that you take.

This book is a valuable guide; however, I recommend that you always employ qualified professional specialist advice. Remember, the responsibility for the way that you apply the information contained in this book is yours.

Chapter One

Success Defined

Success means different things to different people.

Synopsis

This chapter invites you to define what success means to you, looks at some of the ingredients for success in any arena and offers valuable tools for refining your own definition.

Anthony and Dominic had been friends for almost as long as they could remember. They met when they sat together on their first day at infants’ school. Each was made welcome as part of the family in the other’s house. They played together and studied together and later went out with girls together. Then, as is the way of the world, their paths diverged in adulthood although they remained best friends.

Anthony was always the more adventurous of the two so, when he left school and became, in the words of a tutor, a ‘perpetual trainee’, his peers were not surprised. He trained as a rubber planter in Malaysia, as a fisherman in Trinidad, as a tour guide in Marrakech and as a management consultant in Slough. When a shotgun wedding was announced, and when his son was born six months later, it was not a shock. He started his own consultancy practice from a spare bedroom and appeared to have achieved success. He just said that each of his trainee days had been a success too—‘the most valuable universities ever,’ he claimed.

Dominic was more studious and reserved. He did a degree course and was accepted as a junior in the civil service. His dedication and strong work ethic were eventually recognised and rewarded with progressive promotions although these did not happen as quickly as he would have liked. He never married because his few girlfriends found him a bit of a geek who had no interests outside work but still, he was happy and diligently recorded each promotion in his diary as another success step. Eventually, he inherited his parents’ house, the one where he had been born and where he lived until his death.

At Dominic’s packed funeral, Anthony was the obvious candidate to deliver the eulogy. He listed Dom’s attributes and achievements, which Dominic’s many friends had supplied him with, sincerely and with true praise as he revealed that his friend had achieved a truly enviable success because, ‘He was a good man who made a positive impact on the lives of all who knew him.’

By this time, Anthony had formed his fifth company having sold two at a profit, run two into the ground and gone bankrupt with the other. He and his third wife, an eye-candy trophy, left the church together in his black-and-chromed Chrysler convertible. They set off to look for a new house. It would be the tenth that he had lived in.

Dominic, the plodder, had achieved success in his own terms and in the eyes of his employers who sent along the pension-fund manager to pay their respects. Anthony freely admitted to anyone who would listen that his life had been a roller-coaster ride of extreme highs and lows. He had impacted on many people in his turbulent wake. He was a self-made man and led a successful life of a very different kind. As he told his latest wife when they first met, ‘My life has been fun and that, to me, is the ultimate definition of success.’

Seven billion definitions, but only one for you

It should be easy to define success. All you have to do is look it up in a dictionary. But this book is not just about success, it is about personal success, which makes the task slightly more complicated.

As I write these words it is estimated that the total population of the world is around 6.7 billion souls—and increasing year on year. It thus follows that there are potentially almost 7 billion definitions of personal success, simply because each individual will have their own idea of what it means to them.

As this is a ‘handbook’, we need to discover ways of cutting that enormous wealth of definitions down to a manageable level. From my dimly remembered physics lessons, if you repeat a distillation process you will finally be left with a concentrated version of whatever you started with. So that is what we will do in this chapter; we will end up with a powerful essence of success definitions which will contain all the elements but is still uniquely and personally yours.

About now you may be wondering why we would want to bother. Well, I am assuming that you want or desire success which is why you chose this book in the first place. The very first step in acquiring what you want is to know what you want. That one word, ‘success’, is too vague as an answer. To set out on a non-specific quest is like a child who says, ‘I want to be famous’ but who has no answer about how or why they could achieve fame. Neither success nor fame is found in vagueness.

Here you will be shown how to flesh out your notion of personal success and I will offer you a generic definition of my own. But first, supposing I told you that there is no such thing as success or its equal and opposite force, failure?

What I mean is that these do not exist in the sense that you can buy them in a shop, pick up armfuls of them or take them to your bank. They exist only as concepts and ideas, and even that is stretching the point. Success and failure are just opinions and nothing more.

Everything that you say, think or do produces an outcome or result. If that result is equal to, or greater than, what you aimed for and expected then you will label it as a success. If the result is totally different from your expectations it may still be a success but, in your opinion, you will probably tie the ‘failure’ label on to it.

Perhaps you have heard of Thomas Edison and his quest to create an electric light bulb. None of his experiments produced the result that he sought, but he did not give up and, as we now know, he eventually succeeded. Edison refused to label all these experiments as failures. Instead, he is reported to have announced that he had discovered 7,000 ways not to make a light bulb. This outlook speaks volumes for his positive way of thinking and his persistent pursuit of success.

Before we get to your personal definition, let’s consider persistence a little further, along with some different aspects of success.

As a child you learned to crawl, to walk, to talk, to use a toilet, to tell the time, to tie shoelaces, to read and to write. For each of these endeavours you failed more than once. Your parents didn’t say, ‘Never mind, give up’; instead they encouraged you to keep on keeping on and heaped praise on you when you achieved your objective. By the age of four or five you already had a highly developed sense of success and its associated pleasure or reward, and equally of failure and its sometimes painful or messy consequences. Still, you did not give up. You mastered something and then moved on to acquiring the next level of skill in socially acceptable behaviours.

You repeated similar sequences throughout your education and then into adulthood where, although your criteria may have been more ambitious, you still strived for the pleasure of success and the avoidance of the pain of failure. The difference is that as an adult, you possibly gave up too soon. The only point of hitting your head against a brick wall is that it is a great relief when you stop, so the wisdom of maturity will tell you when it is time to change something.

As I mentioned in my first book, The Life Coaching Handbook:Everything You Need To Be An Effective Life Coach, to remain within an imagined prison, to retain beliefs and to repeat behaviours, while expecting a different outcome, can be compared to a trapped wasp. It will continue to fly into the windowpane, time and time again, until it dies. It never looks for alternative escape routes. It just keeps flying at the glass. Performing the same task, in the same way, and expecting different results has been offered as a definition of madness. With total self-honesty, you have probably done just this and you are still getting the same results.

Please note that I said ‘change’ and not ‘quit’. If your actions do not produce the results that you want, then change one thing at a time. If you change too much in one go, you will not know which change worked for you.

An outcome may be construed as a success by one person and a failure by another. That is why it is essential to construct your very own description of personal success. A burglar who robs a stately home, gets away with his haul and then sells it for an ill gotten gain will think he has had a successful mission. The home owner and his or her insurance company will see the event as a failure of their security systems and routines.

I recently saw a young couple leaving a building society. They scarcely looked old enough to be married let alone have a babe in arms and they were bright eyed and excited. It was obvious from their conversation that they had just been approved for their first mortgage on a dream house. To them, it was a success. To my companion, who was old enough to have been around the block several dozen times and who had a somewhat pragmatic view of life, it was failure because, in his words, ‘They have just tied a millstone of debt around their necks, yet in their innocence they see it as a milestone of achievement.’

That is probably more than enough philosophising and theory for now, so let’s get down and dirty with your own definition of personal success.

So what is success to you?

As you work and play your way through this book you will find a regular sprinkling of ‘Self Diagnostic Boxes’ along with a few charts and tables for you to pause, think and then act by writing in whatever answers seem right to you at the time. Don’t ponder too long as the answer that immediately springs to mind is usually the truest.

Here is the first one and I warn you now that although the question is easy, the answer may not be.

Write down your answer (preferably in a notebook) in no more than 20 or so words before you carry on reading.

Now check what you have just written and select one of the categories below:

A. Did you write about a success that you have achieved in the past?

B. Did you write about a success that has been achieved by someone else whom you admire?

C. Did you write about some success that you would like to achieve in the future?

If your answer was A, then you have at least taken the first step in identifying what success meant to you once upon a time. As someone famous once said (it may even have been me!): ‘Your past does not equal your future.’ So, from this point on, promise yourself that your answers will always be in the ‘now’ or ‘future’. Your past is only useful for the experience that you gained and the lessons that you learned.

If your answer was B, then please note and remember that your personal success is about you and not about someone else. Their success, like their opinion, is theirs not yours and, as your parents probably taught you, it is wrong to take what isn’t yours. By all means use the examples of your heroes to inspire you and to motivate you towards your own success; however, this handbook is about personal success, and that means YOU!

A ‘C’ answer is the best, so well done if you chose that one. You can move on to the next part. For A and B categories, start again and this time, write about your future success.

When I have used this exercise in my seminars and training sessions, there is often a sticking point because the global concept of future and personal success is something that is new to many. The answer is to chunk it down into smaller components and to focus on each one in turn.

The chapter headings in this handbook will give you some good ideas of areas to consider and you will come up with ideas of your own. These will usually be in the areas of your life where you currently feel a degree of concern, stress or dissatisfaction.

So now, consider as many elements as you can think of. I have added some ideas in the table below to get you started and there are spaces for your own additions. Ready? Go!

List the areas of your life where you seek success:

Personal relationshipsWork relationshipsEmotional happinessBusinessInterviewsCareer/WorkEntrepreneurial activityFinances/WealthQualificationsSales/Marketing/InfluencingSpiritualGoalsHealthLeadership

Select your top three elements from the above list, then identify just one of them as your prime success goal right now. You can change your mind later and flip back and forth but, for now, please focus your thoughts on just that one.

Collecting your ingredients

Moving on, you are invited to think of your personal success as a recipe made up of various ingredients in specific measures or volumes. You have selected just one of the areas of your life from the last activity and now I want you to select the most important ingredients for success in that area.

Here is another list for you; which of these 31 keywords do you believe is most directly related to your ability to achieve that success? I have presented them alphabetically, but I want you to mark them in your personal order, with 1 being the most important to you achieving success in that area of your life and 31 the least important.

Alphabetic orderYour orderAcademic qualificationsAgeAssetsChanceCreativityDetermination/DriveEconomic backgroundEmotional intelligenceEnthusiasmEntrepreneurial skillsEthnicityExperienceFinancial skillsGenderInfluencing skillsIntelligenceInterpersonal skillsLeadershipLocationLuckMotivationNetworkingOpportunityPassionPersistencePersonalityPhysical attributesSelf-confidenceSpiritualityStatusTalents

If you placed Passion, Determination and Motivation somewhere in your top five, then as long as the other two were not Luck or Chance, you are well on your route to personal success.

We’ll consider the power of those top three attributes shortly, but first, a few lines on the possible relevance of each of the others in your success quest. You might have identified other keywords as you worked down the list; if so, put them in your list and mark them.

Academic qualifications

Academic qualifications are essential for some vocations, professions and careers. To study for examinations and pass them satisfactorily is indeed a success but for most of you it will be a past success that we discussed earlier in this chapter. There are countless examples of people who achieved outstanding success in their chosen fields and who had no academic qualifications and only the most basic education. Their lack can be a red herring of an excuse. If you have qualifications, then that’s great. If you don’t, then unless you are 100 per cent certain that they are essential for your future success, to chase them for their own sake is at best a waste of time and, at worst, an ego trip. Academia for its own sake is not an ingredient that you need to succeed, so use it as a hobby. Embarking on a study course rather than contributing directly to your success can distract your focus from your main outcome.

Age

Age is immaterial. Some entrepreneurs achieve great success in their teens or early twenties. Other successes come much later in life, even at retirement age and beyond. Discount your age as an ingredient and never, ever use it as an excuse.

Assets

Assets can be as much of a hindrance as a help. If you start with nothing you have nowhere to go but up and your success potential will not be hampered by any doubts or fears that you might lose everything. If you have assets, then do as much as you can to ring-fence them and never ‘bet the farm’, but use them wisely.

Chance

Chance is an absolute non-starter. If you trust to chance, then you will fail. Chance is essentially placing your fate in the lap of the gods. All successful people take control of their own destiny by taking positive actions that leave nothing to chance and they create their own results.

Creativity

Creativity can be the fundamental ingredient of success or a small factor depending on what you want to achieve. Finding creative solutions to accomplishing your goals could be the difference between success and failure.

Drive

Drive is a close relative of determination. A word of caution is needed here. Most of us have, at sometime or other, missed the slip road off a motorway and had to drive many miles to get back on course. You could drive all day, week, month or year but, unless you are heading in the right direction, you will never reach that destination marked success. Drive with care.

Economic background

Economic background is another excuse rather than being an ingredient. I am sure you can think of successful individuals in almost every sphere of human activity who came from impoverished or humble backgrounds. Some claim that it was a determination never to return to those beginnings that fuelled their success.

Emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence is based on your ability to observe emotions and feelings whilst being able to differentiate them when considering your own and other people’s ways of thinking and behaving to achieve your desired outcomes in a congenial manner.

Enthusiasm

Enthusiasm should be in your top five. It is as contagious as a smile and will encourage people to help you when you need it. It is what will keep you going when the going gets tough.

Entrepreneurial skills

If you know or suspect that you have an entrepreneurial flair, you will probably find your success by doing your own thing. If you lack these skills and the motivation to learn them, your path should follow a more structured career progression.

Ethnicity

Ethnicity is immaterial. Every race, creed and colour has its examples of successful people. It is true that some ethnic backgrounds will find it more difficult than others to succeed in certain locations in the world, but think of the diversity of cultures in Britain’s annual ‘Rich List’ published by the Sunday Times. Of course, this list only measures success in financial terms but all ethnicities are represented in most other lists of successful people too.

Experience

Experience is a difficult one to qualify because, although it is obviously based in your past, it may have an impact on your future success. Bad experience should be left behind as long as you learned the lessons that it taught. Good experience can be useful as long as it has breadth and depth. Too many people claim great experience when all they have in reality is small experience constantly repeated. Experience may be useful; it is not essential.

Financial skills

Financial skills will be important when you are considering goals which require some funding or financial management to be successful or for wealth generation, and to ensure that you maintain the discipline of financial control.

Gender

Gender may have been an impediment to success in the past. It is now a neutral ingredient for success, as people of both sexes find success every day.

Influencing skills

Influencing skills can give you the outcomes you are looking for by influencing others to your way of thinking and, coupled with enthusiasm, passion or motivation, can be a very powerful mix.

Intelligence

Intelligence is relative and another neutral ingredient. You can achieve some success without it, as many television reality shows have demonstrated. You can also achieve success with it.

Interpersonal skills

Interpersonal skills will be important where interaction with other people is important to your goal achievement and can be a means towards the end result, but are often not the most important factor.

Leadership

Leadership skills will be important if you are working on a goal which requires these specific skills and can be very important for promotion into managerial roles.

Location

Location can be changed. Depending on the fields of your planned success it may be important. However, you should not allow where you live to be an excuse for lack of success. Successful people never make excuses. They take action instead.

Luck

Yes, the more you act the luckier you will become but, for the purposes of this book, consider luck in the same category as every other fairy story you were told as a child. Successful people create their own luck.

Networking

Networking is another way of suggesting that ‘who you know is more important than what you know’. It is obvious that the more people you know, the more nuances of opinion, attitude and talent you will be exposed to, so that you can learn from them. Beware of fair weather friends and those who would seek to rain on your parade. Your network is only as strong as its weakest link.

Opportunity

Opportunity comes into the same category as chance and luck. Your success skill comes in recognising the potential in any opportunity, in assessing its true value and then taking appropriate action. Successful people do not wait for opportunity to knock at their door. They go out and make their own opportunities.

Persistence

Persistence is a useful quality as long as you know when to change direction to achieve the results that you desire.

Personality

Personality is something that everyone has. It can be developed to enhance your expectation of success but there are as many successful people with truly odious personalities as there are with delightful personalities.

Physical attributes

Physical attributes are important as they may limit the areas where you seek success. You truly can be, do or have whatever you want as long as your goals are within your physical abilities. If you have a fear of flying you would not find success as a pilot until you addressed your phobia. If you are short, obese and elderly you will find it almost impossible to achieve success as a sprint athlete. Know your physical limitations and consider ways to develop them if they are at odds with your desires.

Self-confidence

Self-confidence matters only if you lack it. People who have self-confidence do not consider it to be important because they have it and that is as it should be. If you are lacking in self-confidence you will need to pay attention to addressing this as it could reduce your success rates.

Spirituality

Spiritual consciousness will be important if you are seeking spiritual growth and/or are impacted by people who are spiritually aware and it is a requirement to interact with them.

Status

Status only matters to shallow people who measure success against false yardsticks. A low financial or social status can be a great spur to move you towards success but, in every case and without exception, you can only begin to build success from where you are now.

Talents

Talents are natural gifts. Know what yours are and develop them constantly. Look beyond the obvious for talents that you may have yet to discover. They are useful ingredients but they are not essential for success.

Which leaves us with the top three attributes: Passion, Determination and Motivation.

Passion, determination and motivation are inseparable and essential ingredients in your recipe for success. They are the fuel that will power your journey; that will keep you going when you hit a snag. They will enable you to turn stumbling blocks into stepping stones.

Passion, determination and motivation are what get you out of bed in the morning, keen to get on with the day ahead. They give you the certain knowledge that you will cope with whatever the day may bring. If you do not like what it delivers, it is within your power to change your attitude and thus your feelings.

With these three attributes alone, you will succeed even if you lack all the other ingredients. Without them, you will fail. It is as simple as that!

Bearing in mind all that you have read so far—for the third time of asking—how do you define your personal success right now?

Having established these ground rule aspects of your definition, in the rest of this handbook we will look at specific areas of success. But first, all successful people honour their promises and earlier I promised you my generic definition of success.

Personal success is when your thoughts, words and actions deliver the results or outcomes that you desire and expect.

Success Box

Create your own definition of successIdentify a prime area of your lifeWork on your passionDevelop determinationSustain your motivation

Chapter Two