Strategize Your Success

Jos 1:7 Give it everything you have, heart and soul. Make sure you carry out The Revelation that Moses commanded you, every bit of it. Don't get off track, either left or right, so as to make sure you get to where you're going. 8 And don't for a minute let this Book of The Revelation be out of mind. Ponder and meditate on it day and night, making sure you practice everything written in it. Then you'll get where you're going; then you'll succeed. 9 Haven't I commanded you? Strength! Courage! Don't be timid; don't get discouraged. GOD, your God, is with you every step you take."

An internet dictionary defines success as ‘an event that accomplishes its intended purpose’ and ‘a state of prosperity or fame’. What is your definition of success? Do you measure your success by your bank balance or the size of your house, or perhaps by the status you have managed to achieve?

Passion

The truth is that, even if you have all the material possessions anyone could possibly want but you are not a happy person, you have some more work to do. Life is too short to spend it merely going through the motions of making a living. You need to find a way of making enough money from doing what you love best—your passion. The resulting happiness, joy and boundless energy will affect every aspect of your life in a positive way.

Do you know what your passion is?
Passion is the limitless enthusiasm and profound excitement you feel when you ‘just know’ intuitively that you simply have to do a particular activity for the rest of your life because it was ‘meant for you’! Successful people are driven by the overwhelming flow of energy they get from living and experiencing their passion.

Mat 5:5 "You're blessed when you're content with just who you are--no more, no less. That's the moment you find yourselves proud owners of everything that can't be bought.

Many successful people are successful because they found ways to turn their much-loved hobbies into highly successful businesses. Maybe you can turn your hobby into a business! When you do something that you are totally passionate about, you don’t need self-discipline to do it—you just want to spend most of your time doing it—and you want do it to the best of your ability. What an amazing recipe for success!

Plan your success

Successful people write their strategies down. Unless you have clearly defined long- and short-term goals, your efforts will be aimless. In fact, you may end up with dozens of uncompleted projects and feelings of total frustration. Writing your goals down helps you to organize your thoughts, and puts things in perspective. Once you have all the steps worked out and written down in the correct order, with diarised deadlines for each step, your plan will come together.

Hab 2:2 And then GOD answered: "Write this. Write what you see. Write it out in big block letters so that it can be read on the run. 3 This vision-message is a witness pointing to what's coming. It aches for the coming--it can hardly wait! And it doesn't lie. If it seems slow in coming, wait. It's on its way. It will come right on time.

It is very important to remember that without diarised deadlines your strategy will forever remain just a strategy—a strategy which will have no results unless you take action. Taking action is the most important step of any strategy!

You need to identify and acknowledge all possible obstacles, in order to find the best way to overcome each of them. These obstacles may be internal or external: internal obstacles may be your own prejudices, your fears, a lack of support, low self-esteem, and so on, and external obstacles may be things like lack of resources, or training, or space.

Successful people align their words, thoughts and actions by picturing and experiencing their success through positive affirmation (see a following section for more detail on this), ‘self-talk’ (thoughts), and visualization techniques (imagining). You need to speak, think and act in unity to achieve your goals. If you say you want to lose weight but your self-talk is: ‘This is too hard’, and the picture you see in your mind is of a ‘fat failure’, you will not take the necessary action to lose weight. What you concentrate on you draw to you.

Successful people don’t just talk—they do. They take risks, and they don’t give up when they make mistakes—they simply do it better the next time. It is also true that most successful people have excellent time-management skills, which helps them prioritize all their activities, tasks, projects, meetings and events—whether planned or unplanned.

To ensure the successful accomplishment of your strategy and goals, follow these easy steps:

Decide what you want. Start with the end in mind—your ultimate goal.

Write down each goal as a significant future event or behavior. Be very specific about what you want. Say, for example: ‘I want a highly successful gardening service business (significant future event) that will provide me with an income of R60 000.00 per month by December 2011, so that in 2020 we will be able to afford to live comfortably and retire well.’

Your goals must be measurable. Be very specific. For instance, instead of: ‘I want to earn more money’, say: ‘I want to earn R80 000 per month by November 2007.’ This will help you to keep track of your progress.

Set deadlines for achieving your goals. Set deadlines for achieving your goals. Commit to specific dates. This way you will act with more urgency—and remember that the dates must be written down.

Always have a written-down strategy. Consider all the possible obstacles and write down steps for overcoming each one.

Plan your goals—step by step. Consider what, how, when, where, with whom and why, and write down your answers.

Create goals which you can control. Own your goals—they are yours.

Find the right support. Associate with other successful people.

Hire the services of a personal coach to whom you can be accountable.

Reward yourself. Write down rewards for yourself for every achieved step. It will inspire you to keep going and, besides, you will deserve it!

Missed deadlines

If a deadline comes and you haven’t reached your goal yet, you need to re?assess the situation. Sometimes things out of your control will happen and prevent you from moving forward, but usually you can see such a problem coming and can take timely action to prevent it from derailing your plans completely.

If you have not achieved your goal—or some step towards your goal—because you procrastinated, you need to examine your reasons for procrastinating (see Procrastination elsewhere in this book). Be completely honest with yourself and re?examine your desire to achieve the goal. Sometimes you will simply have changed your mind—and that is not a problem if you genuinely no longer want to achieve the goal.

If you changed your mind for any of the reasons mentioned in the Procrastination section of this book, then you need to treat it as an obstacle, and work out what steps to take in order to overcome it. This will help you to get the energy flowing again and get you back on track. Speak to someone you trust, or hire their services