CREATING WEALTH 4 SUCCESS

The Power Of Gratitude

So far on my journey, gratitude has played an important role in helping me to achieve some of my goals. Gratitude is something we should all adopt to enrich our lives. To be successful, you need to be grateful first. As the saying goes; “Before you can accept more of what you want into your life, you need to be grateful for what you already have.”

It is human nature to want more, to strive for something better. This is good in that we should grow and develop just like any living creature if we are to create the life we want. A tree cannot produce fruit without first starting out as a seed and growing into a fruit-bearing tree. We need to constantly push ourselves, to step out of our comfort zones, in order to grow and achieve our goals.

Gratitude costs nothing, yet it can make a big difference in our lives. When we include gratitude in our journey of growth and development, it is inevitable that this growth will come more easily. The basis of this is the law of attraction, where, if we vibrate an energy of gratitude, more good things come our way.

Gratitude In Action

I mentioned in one of my previous posts on Mindset, that our results come from our thoughts. If we think negatively, we put all our energy into thinking about the things we lack in our lives. If we think positively, we put that energy into thinking about the things we have instead. If we then take action based on this mindset, we will create positive results. So how does being grateful and thinking positively make such a difference in your life?

• Being grateful makes you happy and content about the things you have. It reminds you of what’s important. It’s difficult to complain about minor things when you’re grateful that, for example, you and your family are healthy and have a roof over your head.

• Being grateful and thinking positively, motivates us to take action to create more of what makes us grateful in the first place. With this positive action comes positive results and with these results, we create faith in our abilities which further fuels our desire to take more action. We condition our minds to expect good things.

• Being grateful for the challenges we encounter and the mistakes we make daily is also important. Without these challenges we cannot grow and without these mistakes we cannot learn from them and move forward.

Developing Gratitude

So how can you become more grateful? Well it is important to make being grateful into a habit. Get into the habit of making a list of at least 5 things you are grateful for on a daily basis. By writing these things down on a regular basis and reading them to yourself, you will start to re-condition your mind with positive thoughts.

Some of the things I’m constantly grateful for are:

• My health
• My family
• My freedom
• My security
• The opportunities I have
• The things I’ve learned which are helping me to advance in my life.

What are you grateful for in your life? I’m keen to hear in the comments how gratitude has influenced your journey to creating wealth for success.

Colin Schedler © 2010

On my journey so far I have introduced you to some inspirational people and some of the books they have written. However, as this journey is about creating wealth for success, I think it is important to tell you what wealth and success means to me on my journey to financial freedom.

Defining Wealth and Success

To me, wealth is about more than just material possessions and money. It is about having an abundance of good things in all aspects of life – physical and mental health, relationships, spirituality and how you spend your time.

Without wanting to sound like a clichéd mantra, I am wealthy because I am loved. I am wealthy because I live in a country of opportunity, which has a stable economy and government. I am wealthy because I have a healthy and able body and mind.

Without these key things, for me, any great financial wealth would lose meaning and reason.

One of my favourite quotes for defining success is; “The achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted”, from the free dictionary.  As with wealth, my own personal definition does not relate solely to financial success, although one would hope that achieving this would greatly enhance the feeling of success in other areas.

One of my great successes this year (2010) has been to start my own blog and, at the time of writing this post, seeing it ranked at 661,000 in the world in just 10 weeks. Success, to me, is about achievements with personal value and meaning and not just grand achievements such as scaling Everest or becoming famous.

Measuring Wealth and Success

History measures people’s achievements in retrospect and provides us with figures to aspire to and study, but your own personal reality, the people you choose to surround yourself with and the choices you make in your everyday life, are a far more immediate measure of your own wealth and success.

History also has a habit of leaving out the mundane and ordinary and propelling a person’s notoriety to a far greater level than the people in that person’s life may have seen them. By being aware of ourselves, our actions and who we spend time with, we can see where we are in our lives, and perhaps where we can make changes in order to improve ourselves.

A light-bulb moment in my course with 21st Century Academy was when it was suggested that if you add up the net wealth of the 5 people you spend the most time with and divide it by 5, then you are likely to come out with the figure that represents your own net wealth.

It is not a case of dumping old friends and looking for new ones, but opening yourself up to the possibility of spending time with wealthier people (and I don’t just mean financially wealthier) and learning from them. Having a mentor to look up to and to learn from is a great step to achieving a wealthy and successful life.

I believe that if other aspects of wealth and success were as measurable as money then we could probably do the same calculation in terms of someone’s moral standing, happiness or health. It could be an interesting experiment.

Wealth and Success in Motion

I think it is a valuable exercise to consider your own definitions of wealth and success. These are aspirations that many of us strive for, but without a clear understanding of exactly what it is we want to achieve, it is hard to know which direction to take. What does wealth and success mean to you?

If personal fulfillment, health and happiness are top of your list, rather than just money, it becomes easier to set out on your journey to creating wealth for success.

In my next post I will continue this theme of self awareness and discuss gratitude and how becoming grateful for all the things, people and experiences I have in my life has helped me on my journey so far.

Colin Schedler © 2010

In my last post I talked about people who discourage us, as this is a problem I have encountered many times on my journey so far. In this post I wish to return to telling you about inspirational people I have discovered and studied. Sir Richard Branson is a British entrepreneur best known for his Virgin brand of businesses.

Richard Branson

If there’s one thing I really like about Richard Branson, it’s the fact that he seems to be a really happy guy. Maybe it’s a clever public display he puts on when the media’s eyes are on him or maybe he is genuinely happy.  I like to think it’s the latter.

Here’s a man who seems to have an unwavering desire to succeed in everything he does whether it be attempting to circumnavigate the globe in a hot air balloon, start up a new business venture or put the first tourists into space. His energy and charisma are infectious yet his business acumen is what has made him the successful businessman he is today.

Richard Branson – Business Achievements

To really appreciate what this man has achieved over the years, one only needs to look to his Virgin brand. Here is a brand that is almost as recognisable as Coca Cola, yet he has managed to expand it into various sub-brands including Virgin Atlantic Airways, Virgin Mobile and Virgin Records. Richard’s decision to start an airline from scratch whilst competing with bigger, more established airlines, can be best summed up in his own words;

“My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them…from the perspective of wanting to live life to the full, I felt that I had to attempt it.”

It was with this determination and desire to achieve what he believed in, that he managed to succeed in setting up one of the world’s most successful airlines. It is this mindset too that has led him to become successful at his other ventures.

Richard Branson on Youtube

Books By Richard Branson

Despite having dyslexia, Richard Branson has written several best selling books about his success and philosophies. They are interesting, informative and very inspirational and as a huge fan of his, I highly recommend them;

Richard Branson – Giving Back

Richard Branson is a firm believer in the concept of giving and this is evident not only in his charitable work, but in the way he treats his employees. He understands that without his employees, his ideas and visions would remain just that  and by treating his employees with respect and generosity, he has made the Virgin empire an exciting family to be a part of.

His successful legal case against BA in 1993 is a prime example of his generosity, where after successfully winning the case, he distributed his compensation among Virgin employees.

For me, one of the most exciting things that Richard Branson is currently involved in is the search for green fuel and combating of global warming with his Virgin Green Fund. He has also set up the Virgin Earth Challenge, a competition which, according to it’s website; will award “a prize of $25m for whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of Earth’s climate.”

What We Can Learn From Richard Branson

There are numerous traits that have attributed to Richard Branson’s success and although many of us may never become as successful as him, we can at least, adopt a few of his beliefs and principles in order to make a success of our own lives.

So what makes him the successful person he has become?

• Well first of all, here is a man with genuine passion for what he does.
• He takes enormous risks, albeit calculated ones.
• He thinks big – nothing seems to be unachievable in his eyes.
• He has a network of people who have similar beliefs to him that contribute to the success of his businesses and ventures.

Richard Branson attributes a lot of his success to his ability to connect with others which is something we can all learn from. In today’s world of social media it is this trait of connecting with like-minded people that we can use to our advantage in creating wealth for success.

Colin Schedler © 2010

In previous posts, I have introduced you to people who have inspired my journey with their positive mindsets and simple, yet effective approaches to life with it’s ups and downs. The focus has, largely, been on wealth creation because this is the aim of my journey and my blog.

However, it is worth noting that not all the people who inspire us on our journeys are already successful or wealthy or possessing a positive mindset. They may, in fact be, people who discourage us.

People Who Discourage Us

I would hope that we all have members of our family, past or present, who have been excellent role models for us. They may have achieved great things in the face of adversity or followed their dreams to become someone we wish to emulate. Most of us will at least be able to find positive elements and characteristics from someone we know that we wish to learn from or model ourselves on and it is important to find such people and learn from them whenever we can.

The reality for many of us is that despite our loved ones possessing many great qualities, they may want us to follow a traditional path in life. So they do not encourage or support us if we deviate from the ‘norm’ and take a different path.

They tell us, for example, that we are taking too big a risk, that what we plan to do cannot be done, or that in business the competition is too fierce. They may not have any knowledge about the ventures we are undertaking, so they somehow assume that we don’t either. They don’t understand why we would take a ‘risk’ and that even if we don’t succeed the way we plan, we will still have learned more from the experience than any money can buy and we will simply try again another way.

They are people who discourage us, but they believe that they are doing so for our own good.

Inspiration From People Who Discourage Us

However, the same people who discourage us by trying to undermine our ambitions are still people who should inspire us, obviously not by their example, but by the indignant fire they stoke up in our bellies. When we hear negative words come from them we must turn it around to fuel this fire;

They say; “it’s risky.”

We say; “I acknowledge what the risks are and I can do it.”

They say; “it’s too competitive.”

We say; “I have something more to offer than the competition, I can do it.”

They ask; how much do we know about what we are doing?

We say; “I am well prepared and will continue to learn along the way as new challenges arise. I CAN DO IT.”

By having a growth mindset (more on this in an upcoming post) we can see obstacles as opportunities and difficulties as learning experiences.

With a positive mindset it is vital to focus on what we do want rather than what we don’t and it’s the same in the case of nay-sayers who try to put us off taking action. The truth is that if we have come this far, we already know that we don’t think like them. We already have a passion fueling our plans and we already believe that we can do it. We have to believe we can do it, but in the words of Henry Ford;

“Whether you think that you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.”

Avoid Becoming Like People Who Discourage Us

In order to avoid being swayed by the people who discourage us, we need to be single minded in our approach and overcome any negativity we feel by remembering why we are doing what we are doing. For me it is like this:

I believe that financial wealth equals choice. Choice in how you live your life, how you spend your time and, for me, the luxury of time is the greatest wealth we can have. We sell our time and efforts to our jobs. We earn a salary for the work we do, but also for the time we spend doing it.

If we no longer have to spend this time going to a job, but we have the same or even more money to do what we want with, think what we can achieve? Think how we can help our loved ones or those less fortunate than ourselves with our money and time.

Sometimes we can be our own biggest critics or our own loudest cheer squad. The same responses to our would-be detractors are the ones we must use with our own negative self-talk if and when it arises.

We need to inspire ourselves with how far we have already come. Even if we have not yet achieved the financial or other goals we have set, the inevitable change in our thinking and resulting actions are worthy of a pat on the back and are a great start in our journey to creating wealth for success.

Colin Schedler © 2010

In my last post on inspirational people I introduced you to Robert Kiyosaki and how his books have influenced me. This post is about another very inspirational person who has had a profound effect on my journey so far.

Anthony Robbins

Anthony “Tony” Robbins is probably one of the world’s best known motivational speakers of our time. This 50 year old American is known by many as a self-help guru and has helped countless people including many famous sports stars, actors, politicians and even royalty.

His life coaching and motivational seminars are held all over the world and despite 30 or so years of involvement in motivational speaking, his seminars continue to sell out, with over 3 million people worldwide having attended them.

He has several best selling books focusing on motivation and self help in many aspects of life including career, relationships, wealth creation, health and weight-loss.

Anthony Robbins and My Journey

Listening to his “Awaken the Giant Within” and “Unlimited Power” mp3s over and over were some of the best mindset and motivational tools I had in the beginning of my journey and even now, if I feel my momentum waning or my thoughts becoming negative, it is often his recordings that I reach for.

Anthony Robbins has many detractors who complain about the evangelistic approach to his speaking and that his advice is purely age old wisdom recycled. I have to say I don’t disagree with either of these statements, except to say that his words make real sense and his delivery is infectious, so I say “so what” to these criticisms.

Whatever your personal opinion of Anthony Robbins, it is hard to deny his charisma. He has also influenced many of the other people I consider inspirational on my journey so I believe I am in good company in admiring him and his work.

Anthony Robbins on Youtube

Here is a very short clip of Anthony on Youtube. There are many more to be found, but this will give you an idea of his style and passion.

Anthony Robbins is passionate about what he does and this passion shines through. He helps people find purpose in their lives, improve relationships, and best of all, has proven strategies that help in creating wealth for success.

In my next post I will temporarily move away from these famous inspirational people and suggest how you may find “inspiration” from some of the people closest to you.

Colin Schedler © 2010