I Can Play

It’s simple, it really is!  Believe in yourself, in your success, and in your ability to get there.  Sure it helps you but it can also influence others.  The individuals you target along with everyone else you encounter!

OK, you’ve heard it before.  But have you started working on it, the self-belief part?  Let me give you a formula for this self-belief.

1)   Vision.  See it of course, but go beyond seeing your success to feeling it.  Goal setting is necessary in this development.  Writing out goals is a challenging process for many.  So challenging that few do it.  Have you done it?  Put on paper what you want to achieve.  Be specific about what it is you want.  Be exact about what day you want it to happen and most importantly create the feeling you will  have as you live your goals.  Some call it dreaming… but do it while you are awake.  Decide what it will feel like, decide how you will act, decide what you will say.  It will help you in your visioning, your goal-setting. Become what you want to be.  Act the way you want to act.  Think the way you will think when you become what you want to be.  See it happening!  You are transforming yourself into what you want to be.   And here’s a key word for the journey — FOCUS!  Focus on the goal (that’s visioning) and the picture will trigger the goal reaching process inside you, and what is inside causes you to take the actions necessary for you to become what you want to be.  It starts when you make your dreams real in your mind so you can call on them at any time.  You can feel it –Focus!  That’s Vision!

2) Positive Atmosphere.  Positive people see success, negative people see obstacles.  Do you believe dthat?  Individuals in my audiences say they do.  In fact I’ve never had an argument about it.  Now I do know negative individuals who have success but they fight it more because they focus on the “I Can’t” before deciding on the “I Can.”  Why not focus on the positive?  The path to achievement, to success, is quicker.  Will you have to overcome obstacles?  Probably.  But if you travel with a positive atmosphere you create a positive environment.  It’s what you bring to the issues, to the meeting, to the committee, to the challenge;  you bring a positive approach to the issue and make it easier to see and create success.  What do you see when you view your success?  Do you see why you can’t achieve or do you see the prize.  Do you focus on your talents and what you can do or the obstacles and the difficultly in thinking differently?  It’s up to you, no one else.  Do you focus on creating a positive atmosphere — and then living in it — and sharing it?  It’s a choice.  Get positive about how you think, how you act, and how you talk to yourself.  Start now to live in a positive atmosphere.  It’s your choice!

3) Risk.  The truth is we must take risk as we travel to success.  If we stay where we are, do not risk, then we stay where we are.  It’s safe but there’s no development or growth.  It’s easy to pick out the individuals who have failed to risk in their lives.  They are all around you.  Doing what they have always done and remaining where they have always been.  Sometimes they might tell you what they could have been or what they could have done.  Ask they why they didn’t reach what they could have done.  In some way they will get to the fact that they didn’t go after it.  Perhaps they had a challenge, or a tragedy, or perhaps they were just comfortable.  The reason is not important but the fact is they didn’t risk something new, something different.  To go somewhere you’ve never been you have to do something you’ve never done.   We need to attempt new feats to reach new heights!  And the exciting part of being a risk taker is that we learn and climb as we discover new processes and ideas.  Risk-taking becomes a way of life and moves us forward, we become comfortable taking risk.  When we become risk takers we grow.  Focus on growing, getting better- become a risk taker.

When we combine Vision, with Positive Atmosphere and Risk taking we start to trust ourselves and we start to believe in our talents, possibilities, opportunities, goals, and actions.  We believe in our selves and what we can accomplish.   We become comfortable reaching out and trying new things.  Failure does not scare us.  We understand we will stumble at times but we believe enough in ourselves not to worry about a temporary setback.   That’s living life with an I CAN PLAY attitude.  When you get there your Focus will change.  You will stay focused on success.  It’s a way of life.

Once you get this I CAN PLAY attitude, you will give it to others.  You can’t help it.  Your actions will influence others — the ones you target and the individuals you will never know that you’ve helped.  You can change the way people think about themselves and success!

Goal Visioning

When preparing and presenting goal setting seminars I discover many individuals  believe in the goal-setting process but they do not discipline themselves to practice it.  I understand.  It does take time initially to establish the method of success but the simple phrase ‘practice makes perfect’ has credibility. (Or some might inject  “perfect practice makes perfect.”  Yes I think we should do it the right way.)

The first step to develop the path to goal success is to vision, or dream, about the outcome you want to obtain.  The more you focus on the goal the more you reach.  The more you reach, the easier to discover the path … and once you see the path the goal is easier to obtain.  One of the key elements of motivation is to see the path but before the ‘how’ is established we need the ‘what’ to be established.  ‘The what!” is the vision of the outcome, the goal.  So the first step is to see the dream, the vision, the outcome, see success and make it real in our mind!  That will push us to the action needed to make it come alive.

Consider this formula or process for steps to success.  The first process to consider is to practice but not all practice the same way, so not just practice is important but effort is a key consideration.  This is where most goal setting goes wrong.  Little effort – little success.  The next is to dream about the possibilities.  Dream what it will be like to obtain the goal.  How will I feel about myself?  How will I act?   Will I accomplish more?  The dreaming leads to excitement and you grow passionate about the possibilities.  The passion causes you to perform at a higher level.  You begin to expect more out of yourself.  Little victories promote improved practice, effort and performace.  You begin to expand your dreams because you see you can accomplish more.  Success breeds success.

Finally the process promotes intention.  You wake up each day with a renewed idea of what you can accomplish.  Your purpose has been altered.  You step beyond what you were and now reach for higher goals.  Your intention is now to reach beyond comfortable to risk to improve.  The process has disciplined you to  expand your thinking about yourself and what you can accomplish.  You no longer reach for success but have made the choice to live successfully.  It’s what Gandhi said “We have to become the change we want to see.”

You have become a lifetime goal-setter.

Get Passionate about presenting

While we were working on presentation and leadership skills with the AgLead group with Texas Farm Bureau the issue of getting passionate about what you believe popped up.

I teach that passion and excitement are key ingredients in goal setting and in trusting ourselves.  In fact goal setting is pretty simple.  We don’t just jump from where we are to “success,”  we do so in steps… we learn in increments …there are steps to success.  If you are going to be an engineer, first you learn math, second step you study chemistry, then science and so on.  You travel the steps to success!

Now let’s get to the passion and excitement!  As you travel the steps to your goal, or success, you practice what you do.  For instance to learn algebra you work at it, you practice.  Then you put in the effort to learn.  This is where we seperate the individuals who don’t really want to be successful,  not everyone puts in the same effort.

The next key ingredient to reaching success is to dream.  People who dream can see the end result before they get there.  They can see themselves transformed.  They can feel what it will feel like to obtain the goal, they can feel success so they begin acting successful.  That is what dreaming is all about.  You start to become what you want to be.  That is exciting!

Next we address passion and excitement.  Once you begin dreaming you get excited about the success you see and you start acting successfully and you begin to share the transformation and what you can accomplish.  You become passionate about what you believe and you are excited about sharing it with others.

The final ingredient on the way to success is that your life changes.  You have a new intention.  You are re-focused on something that you discovered that you didn’t know before.  Often times it is something you discovered about yourself.  You trust yourself more, you have more confidence and you believe in yourself.  This is the key to success, what I call the ‘I CAN PLAY’ attitude.  If you don’t believe you can do it, you probably can’t.  But if you believe, if you are passionate, if you have self-trust, you have the best opportunity at success.

Back to the AgLead group with the Texas Farm Bureau.  After presenting my “steps” complete with the 1)practice-2) effort-3) dream -4) passion & excitement 5) intention, an individual in the class  had a troubled look.  I asked him to share his thoughts.

“Gary,” he said, “passion and excitement is not our problem.  We are passionate about agriculture and what we do.  It truly is our way of life, but we just aren’t comfortable telling other people about it.”

I understood what he was saying.  Many times I have been passionate and excited aobut something until I ran into someone who believed differently than me.  Then I discovered I was not as passionate and didn’t beleive in that issue as much as I thought I did.  Think about it … if you let someone else tell you what you think about something, you must not be very passionate about it.  The young farmers and ranchers need to deepen their passion, deepen their self-trust and shore up their confidence so that they become what what they believe.  Once they become and live what they believe at all times, that becomes their intention, their purpose.  And they will share their story where ever they go.  With friends, with family, in front of an audience and with people they have never met before.  They will live and act what they believe.

What are you passionate about?