Lessons From The Great Jim Rohn

Jim Rohn is one of the most well known personal development authors and public speakers.  He mentored Tony Robbins and also influenced Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield (Author of Chicken Soup for The Soul). While I had heard about his work for a while I only got the opportunity to start listening to some of his audiotapes tonight and I am quite impressed. Here are some of my favorite parts so far.....

1.            Financial Planning: The poor spend what they have and invest what is left. The rich invest what they have and spend what is left. It’s not the amount of money you have but what you plan to do with it that counts!  It is vitally important to have a financial plan for your future to ensure you are comfortable. Jim suggests something called the 70,10,10,10 rule. For every $1 that comes into your hand that is earned or gifted to you, only spend .70 cents of that. Then spend .10 cents for charity, .10 cents to invest in your own business or savings (active capital) and .10 cents that you let someone else use to make money off it (passive capital - i.e stocks, shares, investments into other businesses that you are not involved with).  If you are in really bad shape then don't spend any more than .97cents of every $1 and use the same formula as above.  Over time this will guarantee financial independence for anyone. Don't forget the reason to make a living is to make a fortune. Have an "investment account" not a "savings account" because if you start picturing yourself making money from what you put aside you might actually do it!

2.            Personal Development: Simply making consistent investments in our self-education and knowledge banks pays major dividends throughout our lives. I suggest having a minimum amount of time set aside for reading books, listening to audiocassettes, attending seminars, keeping a journal and spending time with other successful people. Charlie Tremendous Jones says you will be in five years the sum total of the books you read and the people you are around.  Investing in your own self development is the best gift you can give your kids, your parents, your friends, your partner, your employer etc. The better person you are the more you have to offer other people in your life.  Chances are if the parents are ok, then the kids are ok.  Put your mask on first!  Just like they instruct you to put your oxygen mask on first on a airplane, you should do the same in life.

3.            Time Management: How much money does your TV cost?  No its not $400-500 or whatever you paid for it.  Really it has cost you all the money you could have made as a result of watching it.  So if you could have invested that time in learning a new skill, developing your self so you can do better in your current career etc....  It may cost the average person $40,000 a year.  It is also easy to be online and off-track.  So much valuable time is spent wasted surfing the Internet and not getting anything valuable done!

4.            Goal Setting: if you don't have a list of goals for your life, you will tend to have a very low bank balance.  We are primarily affected by our environment (physical, social, political etc..), Events, Knowledge, results, dreams.  Make sure the future is pulling you forward and not the past pulling you back.  Dreams and goals can become magnets and the stronger the goal, the higher the purpose the more powerful the objective, the stronger the magnet that pulls you in that direction.  It will help you get through the dark times.

This is just a brief summary of my favorite bits but if you want to listen to the whole thing yourself, here is the audio, which I highly recommend.  What a great Christmas present to yourself or someone else that loves personal development!

The Power of Visualization - My Experiment

One of my most strongly held beliefs is that if you can visualize something, then you can make it happen.  Ever since I was a little, I remember determining whether something would happen on whether I could see it play out in my mind.  For example, when I was 10, my family was supposed to go on a trip to Florida. For some reason I just couldn't picture it happening as I had with other vacations.  In the end, I ended up getting sick and not going with them.  

I did not realize as a child that what I was actually dealing with was the Law of Universal Attraction.  It was not until I was an adult and I read the book "The Secret" that I realized how my thoughts become things. The Law of Universal Attraction states that:“like attracts like”.  This law suggests that you should think of yourself as a living magnet because you get what you think about whether you want to or not. Thoughts have a frequency and send out a magnetic signal that is drawing the parallel back to you. I will go into this topic more deeply in future blogs but if you want to find out more about the book The Secret and the law of universal attraction here is a great video that I watch all the time:

So if your thoughts can create your life then we should all get really good at visualizing what we want. When I say visualize, I mean close your eyes and imagine yourself in whatever situation you are trying to bring into your life.  Whether it is securing a new job, finding your soul mate, moving to a new location, or being at your ideal body weight.  Whatever it is that you want, you need to vividly picture it in your mind. The key is to visualize what you want all of the time.

Personally I like to spend five minutes painting a picture in my mind of what I want every night before I fall asleep.  As an added bonus this usually puts me in a really good mood.  In the past I attracted my soul mate into my life with this technique.  I also found a new career with this technique. 

I want to do a bit of an experiment with this.  So I am selecting my next visualization project to be one material thing so it will be easy to show that this works.  So I am going to start visualizing that I will own a silver Nissan Qashqai by the beginning of 2011.  I will keep you updated as to when I buy this car.  Wish me luck!

Evaluating Your Life With Success Boxes

Recently I was having a chat with my Mother while she was visiting from America. I started telling her about this little mental exercise I do from time to time to evaluate how my life is going. She thought it was a very interesting way to look at things, so I thought I would share it with you.

Since I was in college I started to think about what were the most important aspects of my life. I selected the following in no particular order:

1. My Love Life
2. My Family and Friends
3. My Career
4. My Finances
5. My Health

For some reason I pictured these in 5 colored boxes. I began to tick the boxes that I felt satisfied in. At the time, I was in a long-term relationship so I could tick the love box. My family and friends were all healthy and happy so I was able to tick that one too. My career had not started yet but I was able to tick that box since I was doing a course in college that I had always wanted to. My finances were not great as a student, so I left that one blank. Finally, at the age of 19 my health was good so that was another box I could tick. Life was going pretty well for me at that time in my life.  I had 4 out of 5 boxes ticked. Every six months or so I would revisit these "Success Boxes" to evaluate how my life was going.

Throughout my twenties I often had only one box ticked. It is no surprise that whenever I had only one box ticked, I was going through a dark time in my life. What I did notice though, was that for every box I ticked, one would suddenly become un-ticked. For example, if I had just gotten that dream job, my relationship suddenly ended. Then another time, I was in a good romantic relationship and had a good career, but my health began to trouble me. More recently, my career hit a hard spot and  my health  got better! No matter what I do, these boxes just keep bouncing back and fourth. 

What I like to take from this exercise is that even in times of despair ,it can cheer me up. As long as there is at least one box ticked, I feel grateful for that. It also highlights what areas I need to focus on and it motivates me to get working on them. Of course there will always be elements to this that you will have little or no control over. These are the areas you can ask for a bit of help from wherever you get your own spiritual guidance.

So I hope for anyone reading this that they will try out this exercise. It has always proved to be very helpful in my life. I look forward to the times when I will have all 5 of my boxes ticked as I know those will be some of the happiest times in my life.