7 Ways to Experience True Success – # 5 Partner Well

By John Resilience, Self-improvement, The No Fear Entrepreneur.

Partner Well
“Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success.”

Proverbs 15.22

In a few days, many of my friends will be traveling to Franklin, Tennessee to attend The Tribe Conference, 2018 hosted by Best Selling Author and Entrepreneur, Jeff Goins. This conference is somewhat unique in that it is a gathering for writers, artists, and creative entrepreneurs to grow their craft, share their work, and get the attention their work deserves.

Unlike a traditional writer’s conference, this outstanding gathering brings together a wide variety of people of different ages, disciplines, worldviews, and skill levels who share a shared vision of impacting the world with their message. Besides, to great speakers and helpful workshops, the Tribe Conference is an outstanding place to network, partner, share ideas, and seek wisdom.

You may be asking: Why are you telling me about this John?

I am glad you asked.

The fifth component of True Success is to partner well.

Think about this poignant thought from Andy Andrew book, The Seven Decisions.
“God moves mountains to create the opportunity of his choosing. It is up to you to move yourself.”

You and I do not have the power to change our past, but we have the grace and the ability to change our present and our future by making the necessary choice today. One of the keys ways to do this is by seeking the wisdom of others.

You see there are two ways to learn in life, the first is knowledge which comes from my own self-study like reading books, attending classes, listening to podcasts and making my own pig-headed mistakes. Wisdom, on the other hand, is learning from others who know things and have learned the lesson that I might not have discovered.

Seeking wisdom helps us craft lives of extraordinary achievement. Change is inevitable, so we might as well accept the power and responsibility for making choices and partnering well.

So, how can we do this? Apart from being a life-long learner, attending conferences, reading and all of the other things one can do in the area of self-improvement you must choose your companions carefully. In other words, you must partner effectively.

There is a powerful proverb that speaks to this, “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisers, they succeed.” Proverbs 15:22

A partner is a wise person, advisor, or counselor (not in the traditional way) who can provide needed insight, wisdom, or any practical help to help you achieve a specific goal, successfully complete a project, or fulfill a dream.

Unfortunately, most folks only seek a counselor or input from others when there are either “up to their eyeballs” with trouble or when they have a need that they cannot handle by themselves.

By having people in our lives who can provide insight, counsel, and advice we can receive numerous benefits.

Benefit # 1
You will have a much better chance of accomplishing your dreams, plans, goals, and objectives.

Benefit # 2
By getting honest input from others, you actually lower your risk.
I personally love the way the Amplified Bible describes this principle from Proverbs 11:14

Where there is no [wise, intelligent] guidance, the people fail [and go off course like a ship without steering]. But in the abundance of [wise and godly] counselors there is victory.” While this was a passage aimed primarily for the military, its implications are much broader.

Benefit # 3
Lessons learned in the school of wisdom have a lifelong impact.

Benefit #4
When you go through tough times, and you will, then you will have someone to help you get through it. Someone will have your back.

Once again, the ancient advice from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, Chapter 4, verses 9&10, “Two people are better off than one, for they can help each other succeed. If one person falls, the other can reach out and help. But someone who falls alone is in real trouble.”

Benefit # 5
By having other people as counselors and advisors, you will be able to have victories and accomplish things that would otherwise be lost.

The old advice once again validates this principle. Once again from the 4th chapter of the book of Ecclesiastes verse 12, “A person standing alone can be attacked and defeated, but two can stand back-to-back and conquer. Three are even better, for a triple-braided cord is not easily broken.”

Five pretty significant benefits of having a team of people to act as your counselors, advisors, or as your board of directors.

By a board of directors, I am talking about a small informal group of men and women who have skills, expertise, connections, and understanding that you do not have. They are out there, I promise you. Some are people that you know right now and others you will meet down the road.

On a personal note I have a great team, some I spend a lot of time with some I stay in touch with. This team is made up of family members, accountants, my publisher, who was previously an old friend, a couple of best-selling authors, a couple of minister friends, and a young friend who is a marketing master.

How about you? Do you have a board of directors, a team of people who you run ideas by? I hope you do, and if you currently do not have such a group, begin to think and pray about forming one, sooner than later.

Failure to do so has some pretty dire consequences.

Consequence # 1
Your plans and purpose could do a face plant and fail.

Consequence # 2
You have a higher risk of financial loss and possible humiliation.
Proverbs 13:18 puts it this way in the New Living Translation, “If you ignore criticism, you will end in poverty and disgrace; if you accept correction, you will be honored.”

Action Plan
If you are needing to begin building your own personal board of directors/advisors, make it your goal to seek wisdom.

Choose your partners, your advisors with care.

Right now, in your journal or on a piece of paper do these three things.

1. List those people in your inner circle, those who have or have had a positive influenced your life, including family members, friends, colleagues, and others.

2. This next part will be tough. By each name put an arrow to indicate the direction the person is leading you. The up arrow means they challenge, encourage, energize, and set a pace for you. The down arrow means they do not challenge, inspire and drag you down, are consume too much energy, and keep you off course.

3. Do you notice any particular patterns? With whom do you spend time with, the ones who energize or the energy vampires? You will become who you hang with.

Hey, I would love to hear your thoughts! Feel free to leave me a comment.

Blessings,
John

PS
I will miss my friends and partners at Tribe 2018. This week I will be headed downrange to the Florida Panhandle and to a couple of places I spent a lot of time at in my youth, namely Mexico Beach and Panama City Beach. Part of my mission, my manifesto is to equip people to manage stress in extreme environments, and I will be performing my mission as a Stress Counselor for the FEMA Staff. I covet your prayers for this deployment.

By the way, I have a special price on my book The No Fear Entrepreneur, it is available in paperback, Kindle, and audiobooks.

7 Ways to Experience True Success – # 4 Make a Decision

By John Resilience, Self-improvement, Surviving Hard Times

Make a Decision

“Life is managed, not cured.” Dr. Phil

To get where you want to go in life, you have to make a decision. That decision will be something like, if I want to improve my situation I must change ___________.

You and I are our own life managers, and hopefully, your long-term objective is to actively manage your life in such a way that it brings about great results. You, apart from your relationship to God, are the most essential resource for making your life work. You and you alone are responsible for running your own race.

The Buck Stops Here

One of the most important things that you can do to reach your goals in life is to adopt President Harry Truman’s famous line, “The Buck Stops Here!” Truman was a no-nonsense man, when he made up his mind on something, there was no turning back. He refused to gaze into the mirror of self-doubt or second-guessing. He was a leader who made tough decisions and stuck by them.

One of his toughest decisions was to use the Atomic Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end the Second World War. By his own admission, this was the most difficult decision of his life. Truman had served as a Battery Commander in the Field Artillery in WWI and understood the devastation that artillery could cause.
When he made the decision to drop the most destructive weapon ever unleashed on mankind, he weighed the cost of continuing a long and costly war with Japan or using overwhelming force to bring about the end of WWII.

He counted the cost, made the decision and never went back on his decision.
Agree or disagree with Truman’s decision, his “The buck stops here,” is an attitude you and I have to have to experience the life we want to experience.

This attitude means that I am accepting responsibility for my past. It also says that I am taking responsibility for my future, my success in life.

After spending much of my adult life as a professional counselor, I know that some you reading this have experienced horrible traumas such as sexual abuse, accidents, and war. And while many of these traumas have a life-long impact, you can still have significant choices in the outcomes.

We cannot always control what other’s do to us, but we can control how we will deal with it. You can choose to be a life-long victim, and that will be your life story. Or, you can choose to move from being a victim to becoming a survivor to ultimately becoming an overcomer. Being an overcomer does not imply that you will never have any more issue to deal with as a result of some of the trauma in your life, it means that you refuse to let them control your life. It says you refused to be defined by your diagnosis.

Jerry’s PTSD Story

Last year, while I was deployed to Puerto Rico and a Stress Counselor for FEMA employees, I met Jerry (not his real name). Jerry was working as a truck driver delivering commodities to some of the hardest hit communities in Puerto Rico after the hurricanes of 2017.

I first heard about Jerry from come colleagues who work for an agency that was also deployed to Puerto Rico, and the hearsay was that there was a Viet Nam Vet who had PTSD and was probably out of control, or close to it. They wanted to know if I could check on him.

My third night, in Puerto Rico, I hung around the dining room of T.S. Kennedy and met up with Jerry and his driving buddy Tom. I introduced myself as the Stress Counselor for FEMA Employees, and he asked if I was there to check him out. I said yes I was.

He was a little guarded at first, but after noticing some familiar jargon, he asked if I was a vet and if I was what branch and what did I do. I told him that I was a retired Army Chaplain and immediately his guard went down.

After a few minutes of sharing some stories, I asked how his “pop-ups” were doing. “Pop-ups” is a term some vets use for flashbacks. He responded, “I feel like I am playing “Whack a Mole,” but thanks to medication, prayer, Bible reading, God’s grace, and other tools in my toolbox, I am winning the game.”

Needless to say, as a people helper, I was relieved to hear those words.
Over the next couple of meals that we shared he told me a little more about some of the experiences that were at the root of his PTSD, and while he is drawing 100% disability from the VA, he is able to work.

Without going into any detail, Jerry’s story was not unlike some of the horror stories that I have heard from fellow vets, law enforcement and other men and women who have experienced the moral injury of some type of personal trauma. The incredible thing about Jerry is that he has refused to be sidelined by this diagnosis.

One night over some pretty stout coffee he told me something like this. “For years I choose to live a disordered life, I played the hand that I was 100% service connected Disabled Vet, which I am. As a result, I became lazy and more depressed then one day it hit me. I do have PTSD, but that diagnosis does not determine how I will live my life.

Something happened when I made that decision. All of a sudden, therapy and the other treatments that I was receiving from the Veteran’s Administration began to work; also, the doctors changed my medication, and I went into a Vocational Rehabilitation program and eventually got my CDL (Commercial Driver’s License).”

I asked him about what life was like before he made the decision to move on to manage his PTSD. He chuckled and said before I started making arrangements to get better I just slept, stayed legally drugged up and didn’t do a whole lot of anything. But look at me today, I still have PTSD, but I am managing it. Because I am handling it, I am spending my time in Puerto Rico getting things like water, food, medicine, and supplies to our friends and fellow Americans in Puerto Rico.

We had a couple of more opportunities to visit before I headed back to the Mainland.

What was my take away from Jerry?

I think my best take away from my time with Jerry was the fact that along the way he’d learned the truth: I am responsible for my past and my future.

You see, while Jerry had little or no control over what happened in Viet Nam all those many years ago, he came to the realization that if he didn’t engage in life, he would spend his life on the sideline.

In my final conversation with him, he told me with a great deal of appropriate pride that he was helping save lives by delivering life-sustaining goods to the survivors of the Hurricane Maria, he went on to say something like, “I am glad I made a choice to learn how to manage myself so that I could help others.

Jerry, through his own, personal choices, plus his faith in God helped him move out of self-pity into a person whose vocation and life purpose is to help others.
What about you?

Moving Forward

If you are not where you want to be in life, it is entirely on you. Why our culture likes to play the blame game, people who are actively engaging in life, and are overcoming past setbacks are those who realize that I am the one responsible for where I am and where I am headed while on this earth.

Until we choose to make that decision that we are going to embrace the journey that God has for us, there will be no power to move forward.

By taking responsibility for our life, we have hope.

Here is an excellent thought from Andy Andrews book: The Seven Decisions (which I highly recommend).

From this moment forward, I will accept responsibility for my past. I understand the beginning of wisdom is to take responsibility for my own problems and that by taking responsibility for my history, I free myself to move into a bigger, brighter future of my own choosing.

Never again will blame my parents, spouse, boss, employees, or team members for my present situation. Neither my education nor lack of one, my genetics, past traumas, or circumstantial ebbs and flows of everyday life will negatively impact my future. If I allow myself to blame these uncontrollable forces for my lack of success, I will be forever caught in a web of the past. I will look toward the future.

The buck stops here. I accept responsibility for my past. I am responsible for my future, my success, and my legacy.

You are where you are today-mentally, spiritually, emotionally, financially and physically because of the decisions you have made. If you are unsatisfied with where you are you have two things going for you. The first is you can choose to change your thinking, and you will change your life. Second, you can ask the Lord to lead you into this exciting phase of your life. It all boils down to managing your thought life.

Here are some things to consider:

To begin with, you need to take a personal inventory of your life.

On a scale of 1 – 10, 1 being utterly miserable and ten being Awesome-rate how you feel you are doing in each of the following categories; physically, spiritually, emotionally, financially, professionally, and with your family.

At this point, you might go to a default feeling of being a failure, but don’t let that happen. Instead shift your thoughts to something like this, which comes from Andy Andrews book, The Seven Decisions.

“My mind will not dwell on the problems of the past-
It will live in the solutions of the future!”
When you begin to see your failures as opportunities, you start to free yourself from the fear of failure.

Here is a helpful excerpt from my book The No Fear Entrepreneur.

1. Clarify and Focus on your Why. Why are you on this Earth? What is your mission? What does God want to accomplish in and through your life?

2. Know your dream and trust it!

3. Break your dream, your mission into bite-size portions.

4. Share your dreams and fears with people you trust and love. Patience, Faith, and Friends are our best allies when we choose to follow God’s plan.

5. Move forward.

A Point to Ponder.

“God did not put in me the ability to always make right decisions. He did, however, put in me the ability to make a decision and then make it right.”
Andy Andrews

Hey, I would love to hear your thoughts about this article. Be sure to leave a message on the blog post.

7 Ways to Experience Success Part 2 – FOCUS

By John Resilience, The No Fear Entrepreneur.

Albert Einstein said, “Genius is the ability to focus on one particular thing for a long time without losing concentration.”

Excerpt From The No Fear Entrepreneur

So many entrepreneurs and ministry leader fail to build their business/ministry because they are trying to do too much. The primary reason they experience frustration, as opposed to feeling a sense of accomplishment is a lack of focus.

Dr. Tom Barrett
“Focus is the birth canal through which dreams become a reality.”

While many people tell me they are multi-taskers, the clinical research suggests the opposite. As a business person or ministry leader, your success or failure will be a direct result of how well you maximize your strengths, your passion and how precise you are on your “Why.” Your strengths are those activities you naturally enjoy doing and would do them for free your entire life if neces-sary. This is how every great entrepreneur in history made their success: doing what they loved and loving what they do.

One of the most significant focus stealers is what James Clear calls half work.

“We live in the age of distraction. It is idiotically easy to become distracted between what we should be doing and the choices that society and social media bombard us with.”

Here is a classic example:

You begin working on a project, with the intention of knocking it out of the park before the close of business. After about fifteen to twenty minutes for some completely irrational reason, you random-ly check your phone. For no apparent reason, just like the flashing brain stealing tool in Incredibles 2, you surrender your conscious mind and before you know it you are checking your FB likes, see-ing if anyone has uploaded come cool Pinterest pics, or if you Snapchat or Instagram account has had any hits. Since you are already there, you might as well check you Messenger Inbox, and text a friend.

So, how can we become more focused?

I think the first thing to do is rot be honest and start today. Anthony Robbins says, “One of the reasons so few of us achieve what we truly want it that we never direct our focus, we never concen-trate our power.

Check out this hilarious video on the power of focus, and this kid is a blast to watch.

Chris Guillebeau has a great line, “The best time to start was last year. Failing that, today is an out-standing day to start!

One of my favorite authors, Simone Sinek, says, “Optimism is the ability to focus on where we’re going, not where we’re coming from. If you are looking for an exceptional resource to help clarify your why I wholeheartedly recommend his book, Start with Why? While you are at it, check out this TED talk he gave a few years ago concerning the importance of knowing your why.

In my work as a management coach, I like to ask my clients five simple questions.
1. What makes you come alive?
2. What are your core strengths?
3. Where do you add the most significant value?
4. What is your mission, your why?
5. How will you measure your life?
6. What is holding you back?
I hope you will take a moment and reflect on these questions.

Drop me a comment, I’d love to hear from you?

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Partner Well “Plans go wrong for lack of advice; many advisers bring success.”