A Great Success Secret: The Wisdom of The Open Door of Opportunity

Posted on February 13, 2012 by Bob Lancer

You’ve heard the success-wisdom expression, “When one door of opportunity closes, another door of opportunity opens”?

Here is one way that this empowering wisdom works.

When you feel frustrated by your effoprts to accomplish a goal, this does not have to cause you to feel stuck.

If you seem blocked from accomplishing something you want, look at the reasons why you want it.

Although you may not be able to achieve your goal right now, you CAN do things to experience more of the success and satisfaction you want FROM that goal.

For instance, if you want to make more money, but you have not been able to do that, think about the reasons WHY you want more money.

Let’s say one reason is so you can feel free of economic worries. To apply a wise strategy for success, focus DIRECTLY on gaining your freedom from economic worry.

How can you do this? By doing internal self-work for emotional liberation from dependency upon external circumstances to feel internally secure and confident.

So one open door to more success in this situation is to do the self-help work of strengthening your emotional security, trust and confidence without waiting for your economical condition to change.

The great success secret being presented here is simply this: Whatever it is that you want, when the way to it seems blocked, step back and clarify the most important reasons WHY you want it.

Then look for creative, alternative ways to satisfy those WHY’S and you will experience more success and satisfaction.

Don’t get caught up in a fretful, futile power-struggle with your life. Look for alternative ways to experience more of what you want right without having to manifest that goal first. This simple practice will reveal to you your open path to more accomplishment and fulfillment.

The more you practice this approach to succeeding in life, the more you develop the habitual success mindset of looking for and taking full advantage of your open doors instead of wasting your life on worrying about the closed doors.

A common mistake people make is to put off their satisfaction and success until they achieve some big, over-arching goal.

When a door of opportunity seems closed it is often because we are placing the cart before the horse. We think we need something to happen BEFORE we can have a particular experience, when that is not indeed the case.

Remember this creative success secret of the open door: you can always find alternative, creative ways to experience or accomplish more of what you expect to get from any goal presently beyond your reach.

Increase Employee Motivation For A Great Team

Posted on February 6, 2012 by Bob Lancer

Your attitude impacts your performance and relationships.

For a high level of individual and team performance, you need a highly motivated team.

Performing well and maintaining positive, productive relationships demands that you feel energized.

Your level of motivation is an expression the degree to which you feel energized.

When a high degree of motivation is sustained, individual performance and teamwork can skyrocket.

When workers feel highly motivated, they exude a positive attitude, creating an inspiring workplace atmosphere.

An environment that is positively charged with the attitude of motivated people is a healthier and more productive environment than one in which workers feel disgruntled or the staff feels bored.

Motivational Tip for Team Building: Great teamwork requires a serious commitment on the part of leadership to provide to the employees with regular, consistent motivational team building.

Think of motivation as the “juice” in your “internal power-battery”. we deplete the positive energy in our battery.

When motivation is low, the positive energy in our “internal power-battery” has been depleted.

This can occur for any number of reasons, including due to

Overly demanding workloads
Uninspiring leadership
Demoralizing micro-management
The natural ebb-and-flow pattern of motivation levels

Whatever the cause of the decline in worker motivation, performance declines co-measuredly.

Among the workforce problems that typically arise as motivation levels fall include:

A lack of full workforce engagement
Interpersonal strife between co-workers
Lower customer satisfaction
An increase in the number and seriousness of workplace accidents
Poor decision-making that may have costly consequences

As an organization takes effective steps to improve motivation among its members, individuals and teams of professionals tend to work at a higher level, including improved:

Problem Solving
Decision-Making
Goal Achievement
Team Bonding and Cohesiveness

5 Motivational Team Building Tips:

Regard the level of employee motivation as a true “energy resource” that is essential for the success of your organization.
Motivators are contagious. To produce or to be part of a more motivated team, be self-motivated.
DE-motivation is ALSO contagious. Spend no more time than you must with someone expressing low morale, or that person’s negativity can drag your down.
When YOU feel unmotivated, take a break from your work (or take it easy at your work) and try to spend time on your own, to avoid being a drag on others and to avoid being further dragged down by others.
Since your attitude impacts your performance and your relationships, as you preserve, nurture, and protect your own power of motivation, you will enjoy the greater rewards of higher performance and more supportive relationships.

Routine team building trainings and events aimed at supporting and recharging team spirit are essential for the highest level of workforce performance and productivity.

Effectively Communicating With Difficult People – How To Win Even When You Lose

Posted on January 23, 2012 by Bob Lancer

Effective communication skills in the workplace, as well as in our personal lives, need to include how to effectively communicate with difficult people.

We can define a difficult person as someone who seems unable or unwilling to cooperate with you in a way that you regard as reasonable.

From your perspective, this other person seems walled-off to your rational argument, unreasonably inflexible and pointlessly unreachable. It is not uncommon for the person who refuses to listen in a meaningful way to slip into a defense mechanism as a response to what he or she PERCEIVES as you personal attack.

Some people are so insecure because of their painful personal history that they interpret your attempt to influence them as an expression of negative personal judgement aimed at intentionally discrediting them.

So what you are often dealing with, when you encounter a person who is hard to get along with, is a wall of personal insecurity that blocks reason.

Some insecure people feel threatened and attacked if you recommend a way of doing something that differs from how they are operating.

They interpret your well-meaning attempt to help as a negative commentary intended to leave their self-confidence undermined and their self-worth demolished.

While you may try using more emotional intensity to break through the “wall” of the difficult, or even impossible person, you need recognize when you are wasting your effort and causing yourself more hardship and pain by struggling to win a no-win situation.

Once you realize you are being sucked into a petty personal power-struggle sparked insecure ego-domination, it’s time to change your tactics.

Engaging in a more aggressive communicating style will most likely serve to accomplish nothing more than to intensify the confronting defensiveness.

Take a few moments to calm down so you can get clear about exactly what it is that you want to communicate to the unreasonable person, and why.

The more emotional intensity you feel, the more impossible it will be for you to gather your thoughts and come up with a clear intention.

You need to be calm to be clear.

Once you know what you want to convey as your message, consider alternative communication strategies.

It might be best to wait and speak about it later, when you feel less threatened by the resistance posed by the “difficult individual” or when that other person can feel less threatened by you.

It might be best to compose a note and deliver it by hand, via e-mail or even via conventional post.

Think outside the box! I know one couple who found that writing down what they wanted to say, and letting the other person read it, right there in the midst of the conflict, would resolve the conflict and allowed both to calm down.

It may be that there is an unconscious hostility or antagonism conveyed by your tone of voice that is triggering the insecurity and defensiveness of the other person.

It may be that you are dealing with such a negative individual that he or she is intentionally resisting your point of view with an aim of “getting your goat” and making you feel dominated, feel powerless, feel out-of-control.

Whatever the other person’s hidden agenda though (which no doubt has it’s roots in early childhood), to the degree that a difficult mate, an unreasonable customer service rep, an excessively adamant boss, an insecure coworker, etc. can “get to you”, to that degree you have self-work to do.

If you feel frustration, if you feel insecure, if you feel powerless, YOUR REACTION IS YOUR FIRST COMMUNICATION PROBLEM. When you lose your peace and poise, you lose your power of persuasion - when the person you are facing is being defensive and insecure.

To communicate for success, you need to feel calm, feel confident, and feel secure. Then you are in the “right state” to come up with a strategic response, and your secure attitude and calm voice tone will help the other person to feel more secure – maybe secure enough to let down his or her guard against your rationale.

Make it part of your purpose to develop the self-confidence and develop the composure to calmly and securely face another’s resistance to your will.

And when NO communication course you can think of seems to work, take that as your cue that it is time to form a success strategy that does NOT depend upon effectively communicating with this unreachable human being.

Relate with another’s difficult personal behavior as your opportunity to recognize how YOU need to grow for less interpersonal conflict and more personal success and fulfillment.

The Life-Mastery Success Strategy

Posted on January 16, 2012 by Bob Lancer

Here is a success strategy to keep in mind: Every time you do something for what you want to bring about, you progress a step closer to the goal-achievement you are after.

Whatever it is that you want to happen in your life, as you take action for what you want, you advance toward your success.

Just thinking about your goal, envisioning yourself in the conditions you want in your life, is a form of taking action for it – it represents MENTAL action.

Anyone who feels stuck in procrastination, try spending time envisioning yourself taking the action you want to take. This will build your motivation to actually take that action.

Of course, fantasizing yourself accomplishing a goal may not be enough to instantly materialize that goal.

Imagineering, or imagining yourself experiencing what you want, represents just one thing that you can do for for achieving success.

Team building is another thing you can do. As you build relationships with people who can help you, you increase your power by having more supportive people backing you.

Forming strategic alliances is a way to be more successful.

But to harness mind-power is a perhaps the most important thing to do because it gives your life direction.

Envisioning what you want to accomplish directs your subconscious programming, causing you to make choices – often without realizing it – in line with what you want to achieve as your goal.

The moment you visualize in your mind what you want in your life, you head there.

Envisioning what you want also helps you to feel more self-confident, to feel more motivated, to feel more determined.

All of this helps you to take more powerful, positive action for what you want.

When you practice remaining aware of the now, by intentionally paying attention to the present moment, you can do even more for what you want.

You can more quickly notice when your thoughts, attitude, speech or actions are straying into a self-sabatoging pattern, including anxiousness and worry, getting distracted by petty rivalries, emotionally reacting to things that have nothing to do with your goal achievement process.

All of this wastes energy and time, diverting your power and thereby sabotaging the success that you want most.

The power in your thoughts, feelings, speech and actions is creative in nature.

Approach life with the pro-active mindset that you bring about what you think for, what you feel for, what you speak for, and what you take action for.

When you think of the success you want you draw it to you.

When you allow yourself to feel like the success you want to feel like, you attract that success to yourself.

When you apply the power of speech to help you to achieve what you want, the creative power of your speech helps you to achieve it.

And when you take action for what you want, when you work for it in any way, you are creating the condition you work for, just as a sculptor creates a sculpture by applying the hammer and chisel to carve out his dream.

Whatever mishap, loss, set-back, disappointment, delay or opposition you encounter along the way is nothing but another opportunity to make the best use of your power in line with what you want to accomplish.

As you make that “best use” you are growing in mastery – the mastery required for manifesting the most beautiful life that you can imagine.

As you exercise your power to think, feel, speak and take action for what you want under all conditions, you grow in mastery and apply a success strategy that turns every moment into a golden opportunity .

Team Building To Enhance Teacher Motivation For Student Success

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Bob Lancer

One way to boost student performance and lower the school drop out rate is to offer regular team building programs for school staff, aimed at enhancing teacher motivation.

It’s obvious that student motivation is essential for the student’s academic success.

It should be just as obvious that one of the primary sources of student motivation is teacher motivation.

Highly motivated teachers exude enthusiasm, a love of learning and teaching, a love for their students and a commitment to student success.

This highly charged state of motivation radiates from the teacher into the classroom.

So one key to raise the level of motivation in students is to nurture, foster, support and even ignite the motivation in teachers.

One cause for a drooping level of school faculty morale is a communication problem with administration.

If administration communicates with teachers in a way that makes the teachers feel under-valued, those teachers may lose some self-esteem, and a loss of self-esteem translates into a lack of motivation.

Administration can cause this to happen through both verbal and non-verbal messages.

School principals may undermine faculty motivation and performance verbally by:

Verbally harping what teachers do wrong and expressing too little appreciation for what they do right
Telling teachers outright that you regard them quite replaceable
Verbally castigating a teacher in front of his or her students
Being verbally defensive about your position when questioned instead of being open to integrating the teachers’ perspective into your understanding

A school administrator can drain teachers of self-respect and motivation through non-verbal forms of communication as well, like:

Excluding faculty from decision-making processes that directly impact their jobs.
Being gruff or non-responsive to pleasantries or polite greetings offered by teachers when they encounter you in the hall
Expressing an attitude of annoyance, impatience or even disdain when teachers come to administrators for support.
Talking down to teachers, as if they are unruly and undependable children. (It may not be the words that convey this, but the unspoken attitude.)

As a general principle, administration fails faculty by relating from a personally insecure stance.

By cultivating more self-confidence and developing the motivational skills of administrators through school team building trainings, we can help faculty to be more motivated, which translates into more motivation and success for students.

By helping teachers to develop more self-confidence and self-esteem, and teaching them additional skills for getting and staying motivated through motivational school team building trainings, they can overcome at least some of the limits of administration, and soar higher through administrator support, for higher student performance and improved graduation rates.

How To Set Goals To Achieve Goals

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Bob Lancer

You would think it to be pretty obvious that you need to set goals in order to achieve goals.

There is probably not a single professional motivational speaker who has not addressed the motivational power of visualizing what you want to accomplish.

Knowing what you want to accomplish will boost your motivation.

Probably the best reason for setting a personal or professional goal is simple: Once you know what you want to accomplish, your life automatically moves in the direction of that accomplishment.

Setting a goal sets the goal accomplishment process into motion.

Then why do so few people get around to goal setting?

One reason might be because they do not realize that setting goals boosts their chances of achieving what they want in life.

Another reason might be that they do not know HOW to set a goal.

Setting goals appears to be easier than it really is.

One common blockages to achieving personal success through goal setting has to do with living in a habitual negative mindset.

We live in a negative mindset by worrying about the future, thinking about what is wrong, focusing on what we dislike, dwelling in thoughts about what we regret or whom we resent.

Filling the mind with darkness leaves it with insufficient mental “space” to receive a bright idea of what we want to accomplish

At a recent team building and leadership development training that I presented, I asked team members to list their goals. But all they came up with were problems. They listed things like:

• No more unfair distribution of work-projects

• An end to management “revenge tactics”

• Discarding time-wasting rules

While these may look like goals, they are really a list of problems.

Setting a goal is like asking someone for what you want. When you ask a person to NOT do something, you are not being clear about what you want instead.

To set a goal effectively, state what you want, not what you want to avoid or to end.

A goal is a positive statement
describing what you want.

It took a while in that team building and leadership development training to help the participants formulate what they actually wanted. The changes looked like this:

• Fair distribution of work-projects

• Management employing only forthright, direct and “up-front” strategies

• A review of rules that work-teams assert to be time-wasters

To prepare your mind to set goals successfully, practice shifting your attention OFF of what
you do NOT want, and onto what you
DO want instead.

Motivational Speaking To Yourself For Wisdom

Posted on December 27, 2011 by Bob Lancer

Just about everyone has heard of motivational speaking, but how many really understand the power of motivational THINKING, and how to access it?

While developing communication skills for our interpersonal relationships is an essential part of personal development for team building and leadership, success and great family relationships, the most important dimension of successful communication goes on between you and yourself!

How you think is how you communicate with yourself.

You speak to yourself with mental words and pictures.

To solve your problems and come up strategies for success, you basically consult with yourself.

You formulate a problem or a goal and then you ask yourself, “Now, what can I do about this?”

But, the way you feel impacts the way you think.

The time to engage in strategic thinking about your life is when you feel truly emotionally balanced, in a calm state of harmonious feeling.

Then you can think clearly, accurately and constructively.

When you think in a state of emotional balance you can use your power of thought to direct your life.

You can think about what you want to accomplish and come up with ideas of how to accomplish it.

We can define emotional balance as the foundation for an authentic, positive attitude, turning you into a motivational speaker for yourself: one who can tune into positive thinking for problem-solving, goal-setting and goal achievement.

If you feel blocked or unable to solve your problems or arrive at strategies for success, check on how you are feeling at the time.

Your attitude, mood or emotional state represents the key that either locks or unlocks the mind’s potential for accessing positive solutions and successful strategies.

As long as you feel nervous, uptight, impatient, frustrated, insecure or disappointed, your thinking can do no more than reinforce those disturbed emotional states.

By letting go of your tensions and intensity and simply trusting that everything is going to work out fine, you render accessible the creative ideas that can show you the way.

Developing the SELF-communication skills of thinking from calm instead of from stress is a way of applying team building and leadership in your relationship with yourself.

When you feel calm, secure and trusting, your state of inner harmony and balance will open your mind to positive thinking for problem-solving, goal setting and goal achievement.

By following this self-help wisdom you will receive motivational speaking from your mind, bolstering your spirit with real solutions and strategies.

Stress Management For Team Building

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Bob Lancer

Team building is undermined by anger and stress in the workplace.

As anger and stress levels rise, interpersonal conflict increases.

I dealt with this recently in my work with a team leader in a construction firm. His team was in dire need of anger management and stress management training.

Workers were arguing, finding passive aggressive ways to sabotage one another, and they even had a violent outbreak. Petty theft seemed on the rise as well.

I was originally brought in as a motivational speaker to boost worker attitude to improve teamwork.

But it became glaringly obvious that these workers were having a hard time coping with change and coping with uncertainty, as their team leadership had gone through 3 transitions in the past 9 months.

I helped this relatively inexperienced, new team leader understand that worker motivation and stress do not go together.

I helped him understand how teams lose motivation as anger rises.

There was a tremendous amount of griping going on throughout the workforce, severely damaging team morale.

So the team training that I presented began with a short session to management, focusing on the relationship between communication and stress.

Because this workforce had gone through so much change in such a short span of time, they needed to be communicated with in ways that would reduce their stress.

Communicating in a way that suggests a sufficient amount of transparency is a way that leadership can manage stress in the workplace.

As leadership clearly explained, in team meetings, why team leadership had to change, and what team members can expect going forward, they helped team members better manage emotion.

The next stage of the team building training I presented directly to the work teams. This included anger management tips to improve their attitude.

One tip helped them see the difference between what happens and how they react to what happens.

They got this lesson on anger and stress management for team building by simply writing down something that occurred, and then describing their angry or stressful reaction to that.

I had them draw a circle around the event. Then they drew a circle around their description of their reaction.

We did this over and over, and each time it became clearer to those workers how their anger and stress was NOT caused by the changes and uncertainty they were facing at work.

They really SAW that how they responded to what happened was how they made themselves feel in response to what happened. This simple shift helped them to respond more positively.

We also focused on how maintaining a confident attitude translates into more positive relationships, a happier workday, improved worker safety and higher productivity.

The end-result was that we solved the problem of a grumbling workplace with a two-pronged assault:

First, I worked with the corporate team of leaders on increasing transparency in communication for employee stress reduction.
I then presented 2 consecutive days of team building seminars on anger and stress management to the construction work-teams.

As a result, the workplace atmosphere changed. Interpersonal relations improved. The griping greatly diminished and the negative impact of the residue was largely neutralized.

And this, in turn, led to improved team building through a reduction of anger and stress.

Improve Effective Communication In The Workplace

Posted on December 12, 2011 by Bob Lancer

Effective communication does NOT happen automatically.

Communication in the workplace demands the development and application of essential communication skills.

Constructive professional communication requires, for instance, the skill of professionalism in communication.

Professionalism in communication means NOT taking what comes up during the communication process personally.

It means relating PROFESSIONALLY, which means responding in ways that advance accomplishment.

Taking communication personally means reacting emotionally in ways that undermine, rather than support, one’s professional objectives.

One of the biggest blockages to effective communication in the workplace is the fact that many of us seem to believe that HOW to communicate well means simply speaking your mind.

For the best team building results, though, it requires ongoing communication skills training.

One important skill to develop for communication success has to do with emotional reactions.

First, to improve communication, work on developing your ability to NOT react emotionally to the words that you hear.

Practice deliberately remaining calm, emotionally neutral, in response to the words you hear.

In emotional balance, you can think clearly and strategize your response in line with your objectives.

In one of my recent motivational speaking events on team building, one of the communication skills exercises I suggested was this:

Spend one week working on being more aware of your emotional reaction to words that you hear or read, and to practice remaining calm, relaxed and emotionally neutral to help you to formulate a response-strategy that will further your real objectives.

For effective communication in the workplace, try out this communication skills exercise and please feel welcome to share your results, and any questions you might have, about this exercise and other ways to improve communication.

Mental Sales Team Training

Posted on December 5, 2011 by Bob Lancer

There may be no more important KEY to effective sales team trainings than the MENTAL key.

You give yourself an invaluable HEAD START (no pun intended) for sales success by first envisioning yourself (in your head) as a successful sales professional.

Look for how you are already a sales success and you will see the ways that you are already achieving success in sales.

A MAJOR mistake made by struggling sales teams is depending upon circumstances to shape their professional self-concept.

This demonstrates a level of ignorance regarding how the mind works, and how to put YOUR mind to work for YOU.

Look for how you are failing at sales and
you will see how you are failing.

Look for how you are succeeding in selling and
you will see how you are succeeding.

The principal of mental mechanics that we are looking at here is simply this: You find what you look for.

It doesn’t matter AT ALL how much sales success you have achieved, because even the most successful salesperson in the world can feel inadequate, inferior and UN-successful if he or she looks for reasons to feel that way.

Envision yourself as a successful salesman or successful saleswoman.

Envision yourself with all of the satisfied clients or customers you want.

Routinely contemplate all that is great about what you are selling and why you are selling it.

Discipline your mind to stay out of thought-lines that undermine your belief in yourself or in what you sell.

When you don’t achieve a sale-closing, or even when a gate-keeper blocks your way, trust that you are still on a TOTALLY SUCCESSFUL sales course and you will find your trust justified.

If you worry about your sales career or any particular sales process “going south” you deliver to yourself the demoralizing experience of that happening.

Sales professionals need regular sales trainings that help them to:

1. Identify and reject negative thinking habits

2. Cultivate ever-deeper belief in who they are and in what they are selling.

Success in ANY field, including selling, demands mental mastery.

And the mastery that produces sales team success is ongoing MENTAL Sales Team Training that reinforces a focus on selling success.

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