Your profitable quote: Napoleon Hill on self-discipline

"Self-discipline begins with the mastery of your thoughts. If you don't control what you think, you can't control what you do. Simply, self-discipline enables you to think first and act afterward."

-- Napoleon Hill

Yes, You Deserve It - Five Tips to Strengthen Your Deservability Muscle

Why is it that even though your potential client may seem eager to do business with you when they first meet you, their interest seems to fade off as they start talking to you?

I've always believed that "business is personal". A successful business relationship is all about building a bridge of confidence and trust between you and your prospect.

Your prospect wants to trust you, but how can they trust you if you do not trust yourself?

I believe this is a major problem with many solopreneurs: deep down, they don't think they "deserve" the prospect's business. Undeservability is a corrosive energy that becomes apparent to people who get to know you.

This was a major problem with me when I first started my technology consulting business in the mid-90s. I had all of the technical knowledge, but I felt all alone, with no backup, no support, and unsure of why I was even in business in the first place. It took sinking this first business to the tune of over a hundred thousand dollars before I woke up to the need to strengthen my own feelings of deservability, and from that develop the self-confidence to take bold action.

Here are five strategies I constantly use to flex my deservability muscle:

1. Go back to the three "W"s.

Business is personal, people want to connect with the real you. Go back to basics, get clear on your three "W"s:

- "Who am I?" (your personal mission),

- "What do I want?" (your personal vision),

- "Why is this important to me now?" (your personal motivation).

Even though I had read lots of books on personal development, it was only when I focused on creating a one sentence response (ten words or less) for each question, that I developed more confidence in my venture. The clarity I gained from these answers gave me the energy to meet new people, attract more clients, improve my business and increase my income. The lesson I learned is that clarity about who you are and what you want is vital to build your feelings of deservability.

2. Create an environment that supports your three "W"s.

Deservability thrives in healthy surroundings. Clean up, lighten up and air out your living space - even if it means renovating or moving. Eat right and exercise strenuously - even if it means changing your lifestyle. Get rid of whatever you're tolerating - even if it means breaking "commitments" that no longer work for you. Surround yourself with people who believe in you and emphasize your strengths - even if it means letting go of certain "friends". Let go of everything that reminds you of what you don't want, and adopt everything that reinforces your Three "W"s - even if it means completely changing how you live your life. Your environment strengthens your feelings of deservability.

3. Send the "monkey mind" packing.

The monkey mind is that constant self-loathing chatter that saps your confidence and your energy. You can recognize the monkey mind whenever you have a thought that causes you to doubt or hesitate. Find a way to interrupt these thoughts as they occur. A favorite strategy of mine is to wear an elastic band around the wrist. Every time you hear that monkey mind chattering, snap the elastic and say to yourself STOP! Then say to yourself, clearly and consciously, your one-sentence answers to the Three "W"s: "Who am I?" "What do I want?" "Why is this important now?". You will find that, with time, these three sentences will become an empowering mantra that displaces the monkey mind and reinforces your feelings of deservability.

4. Break habits and nurture rituals.

Habits are unconscious actions that serve to soothe a fear. Rituals are conscious actions, made automatic, that build towards a desired, positive state. Habits are easy to identify - they will pop up whenever the monkey mind is at work. Pick a negative habit that you want to let go of this month, and replace it with a conscious ritual. Write down the symptoms of the negative habit and when you recognize them, snap that elastic band around your wrist and switch right away to the conscious action you want to make automatic. Connect with a coach who can help you design positive, conscious actions that will create the results you want, and your deservability muscle will get stronger fast.

5. Fake it 'till you make it.

Huh? What this oft-misused adage really means is to move forward with a deep faith in your deservability. Faith is about believing without necessarily fully understanding how you are going to get there. Take actions "as if" you were confident in yourself. Ask yourself: "If I were ten times bolder, what action would I take in this moment?". Pretend that you are ten times bolder, and take the step. Use your positive thinking and conscious, positive rituals to help you focus on your positive results. You will find in time that you will develop a boldness that will turbocharge your deservability.

Before others can trust you, you have to trust yourself. By reinforcing your self-confidence, you strengthen your deservability muscle and provide the essential foundation to build a bridge of trust between you and your prospect.

Flex your deservability muscle, and you will power your way to creating the future you really want!

Davender Gupta is a business leadership coach and Certified "Book Yourself Solid" Coach whose mission is to guide passion-driven solopreneurs and beginning network marketers to accelerate their Vision from Passion to Profit. Join the discussion on his blog frompassiontoprofit.com and his main site coachdavender.com He welcomes your questions by e-mail at coach@davender.com or by phone, toll-free, at 1-888-788-8844.

Article posted on EzineArticles.com http://ezinearticles.com/?id=1662452

A thought about self-discipline

“Self-discipline is a form of freedom. Freedom from laziness and lethargy, freedom from expectations and demands of others, freedom from weakness and fear — and doubt.”
-- Harvey A. Dorfman

David Brooks, in today's New York Times, penned an interesting column about self-discipline :

[...Harvey A. Dorfman's] assumption seems to be that you can’t just urge someone to be disciplined; you have to build a structure of behavior and attitude. Behavior shapes thought. If a player disciplines his behavior, then he will also discipline his mind.

[...] It’s commonly said that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master any craft — three hours of practice every day for 10 years. Dorfman assumes that players would have already put in those hours doing drills and repetitions.


[...] As a pitcher enters a game, Dorfman continues, he should bring a relentlessly assertive mind-set. He should plan on attacking the strike zone early in the count, and never letting up. He will not nibble at the strike zone or try to throw the ball around hitters. He will invite contact. Even when the count is zero balls and two strikes, he will not alter his emotional tone by wasting a pitch out of the strike zone.

Just as a bike is better balanced when it is going forward, a pitcher’s mind is better balanced when it is unceasingly aggressive. If a pitcher doesn’t actually feel this way when he enters a game, Dorfman asks him to pretend. If your body impersonates an attitude long enough, then the mind begins to adopt it.

Dorfman then structures the geography of the workplace. There are two locales in a pitcher’s universe — on the mound and off the mound. Off the mound is for thinking about the past and future, on the mound is for thinking about the present. When a pitcher is on the pitching rubber, Dorfman writes, he should only think about three things: pitch selection, pitch location and the catcher’s glove, his target. If he finds himself thinking about something else, he should step off the rubber.

Dorfman has various breathing rituals he endorses, but his main focus during competition is to get his pitchers thinking simple and small. A pitcher is defined, he writes, “by the way the ball leaves his hand.” Everything else is extraneous.

In Dorfman’s description of pitching, batters barely exist. They are vague, generic abstractions that hover out there in the land beyond the pitcher’s control. A pitcher shouldn’t judge himself by how the batters hit his pitches, but instead by whether he threw the pitch he wanted to throw.

Dorfman once approached Greg Maddux after a game and asked him how it went. Maddux said simply: “Fifty out of 73.” He’d thrown 73 pitches and executed 50. Nothing else was relevant.

A baseball game is a spectacle, with a thousand points of interest. But Dorfman reduces it all to a series of simple tasks. The pitcher’s personality isn’t at the center. His talent isn’t at the center. The task is at the center.

By putting the task at the center, Dorfman illuminates the way the body and the mind communicate with each other. Once there were intellectuals who thought the mind existed above the body, but that’s been blown away by evidence. In fact, it’s easiest to change the mind by changing behavior, and that’s probably as true in the office as on the mound.

And by putting the task at the center, Dorfman helps the pitcher quiet the self. He pushes the pitcher’s thoughts away from his own qualities — his expectations, his nerve, his ego — and helps the pitcher lose himself in the job.[...]"

To get what you want, to paraphrase the famous Law of Attraction as proposed in "The Secret", it's not that "thoughts create things"... it's MINDSET that creates results.

Read the full article here