Success

Master these Five Areas and You will Achieve Overall Success in Your Life:

1. Language: become an expert speaking your language. If you don’t you make a bad impression on people who area really sharp. In the key moments, it matters.

2. Communication: language is a type of communication, but its bigger then that. In life you have to work with other people, and that requires communication. Learn body language, persuasion, influence.

3. Sales: when you become good at sales, you learn it not sales techniques. Its about understanding where the other person is at and getting them what they need. The best sales people ask really good questions, qualify prospects quickly, build trust very fast, and offer the prospect what they need. Bad sales people don’t do that, they sell features and benefits and get lots of objections.

4. Marketing: marketing and sales is similar and different. It allows you to take sales and replicate it. Specifically direct response marketing

5. Public Speaking: take a public speaking course, or join toastmasters. Social rejection triggers the same part of the brain, the same part that physical pain is connected to. Poked in the eye gives same displeasure as being socially rejected. In front of a group is rejection times 100 or 1000.

This is some solid advice from the David DeAngelo Mastery program.

Tonight I won two awards at my local Toastmasters meeting. Toastmasters International is a non-profit organisation that helps individuals improve their public speakings. My club is has meetings twice a month at Old Ed’s (next to the Virgin Active) in Houghton, Johannesburg. And tonight I did my 3rd speech. The basic Communications & Leadership program has 10 speeches that teach you the fundamentals of public speaking. I was hoping by now to be on my 5th speech but frequent travels had forced me to postpone some of my speeches.

Anyway I’m going to kill those remaining ones as quickly as possible to move onto advanced topics. Public speaking is considered by many as one of the greatest fears people have. And if you can overcome public speaking you will conquer you inner fear and as Dr Paul Dobransky says that when you do courage you build confidence. In fact he says its scientifically measurable, so if for every 100 points of courage, you actually gain 100 points of confidence which you can use in other areas of your life e.g. approaching women.

This is from the Napoleon Hill Foundation’s Thought of the Day, “Margaret Thatcher once observed that being powerful is like being a lady: If you have to tell others you are, you aren’t. Truly great leaders gain respect by the way they conduct themselves, not by the loudness of their orders. You gain respect by respecting others”

Now what I  about this is it talks about how important you have to BE for success in dating and life in general. You have to BE CONFIDENT to approach a woman. You have to BE ARTICULATE when doing a business presentation, etc. There’s no way to fake till you make it. The Universe will only allow it for so long and you have to get your shit together sooner or later.

Stephen Covey is back in South Africa on 14 March 2006 and the seminar will be hosted at Gallagher Estate Conference Centre.

He is the author of the very successful and absolutely amazing book, the 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. And I recently listened to a terrific interview with him by Tony Robbins. Having read the book a while ago I never really appreciated its impact as much as I do now. And I am intergrating the principles into my life. You may also want to checkout his new book, The 8th Habit.

I got this from the Napoleon Hill Foundation, “Without a plan for your life, it is easier to follow the course of least resistance, to go with the flow, to drift with the current with no particular destination in mind. Having a definite plan for your life greatly simplifies the process of making hundreds of daily decisions that affect your ultimate success. When you know where you want to go, you can quickly decide if your actions are moving you toward your goal or away from it. Without definite, precise goals and a plan for their achievement, each decision must be considered in a vacuum. Definiteness of purpose provides context and allows you to relate specific actions to your overall plan.”

Clearly this applies to Dating as well because most people DO NOT know what it is they want and what they don’t want. A woman will typically believe in a romantic fantasy of meeting “the man of her dreams” by accident. And if its meant to be she will meet him this way. She will believe things like “you can’t find the one you’re looking for, you have to let him find you…” And with men its almost the same. They don’t know what they want, so now they meet a physically attractive woman and they completely forget about the things they don’t like in her ’till its to late. What I mean is they become almost blind as in “love is blind” or rather “lust is blind” and therefore they put up with what Stephane calls “pussy power” and this ultimately destroys their masculinity.

When I was growing up I always dreamed of designing and building my own house. Maybe in some ways deep down inside me I knew I could become and architect if I wanted to. There’s a great quote I once heard by Frank Lloyd Wright, “The human race built most nobly when limitations were greatest and therefore when most was required of imagination to build at all.” Happy Birthday Frank, the most brilliant architect ever to come from America. He’s most famous legacy is the New York’s Guggenheim Museum.