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.

Leadership Development For Sales Success

Posted on November 22, 2011 by Bob Lancer

Professional sales people are among those who can benefit the most from leadership development and team building training.

For who more than sales professionals need to develop a loyal following?

Before you can successfully sell to someone, that person needs to feel that you are both on the same team.

Your sales strategy needs to feel like teamwork, or the prospect will view you as an adversary.

At the sale closing, you want the customer to feel that he or she won, and that you celebrate his or her victory.

Let’s look at one of the leadership skills that translate into team building for selling success.

Leaders lead with the power of vision. There are many useful ways that the sales professional can use the power of vision for sales success.

Here is one example: Envision yourself as successful and as worthy of success.

Motivational seminars on leadership development and team building - as well as sales training courses – ought to spend a good portion of the time on how to harness the power of vision, particularly the power of SELF-Vision, because how you see yourself leads to high or to low results.

When we do not pay adequate attention to our thinking, we THINK that we become discouraged because of our circumstances – like a low sales-performance record for the second or third month in a row.

But if you look more closely at your mind, you will see how your self-image determines your self-confidence, your drive, your enthusiasm… or the lack thereof.

Effective leadership development training includes developing a vision of yourself AS A SUCCESS.

You have to practice envisioning yourself as successful to express the self-confidence that inspires others to feel confident enough in you to follow you.

For selling success, see yourself as a success. Imagine yourself accomplishing the goals you need to accomplish to feel successful.

Pay close attention to your thinking in order to notice when your thoughts slip into tragic ideas of who you are.

When you recognize that happening, immediately work on envisioning a totally successful you.

You achieve results that are consistent with your thoughts about yourself.

By working at visionary leadership development for sales success, you will raise your self-confidence, which builds prospects’ confidence in you, which motivates them to follow your lead… all the way to the sale closing.

Leadership Accountability Thinking

Posted on November 11, 2011 by Bob Lancer

True leadership and accountability go together.

When you hold yourself at least partially accountable for what happens, you empower yourself to lead your people in a better direction.

Being accountable, in a CONSTRUCTIVE way, turns every disappointing turn of events into a lesson for your greater leadership development.

CONSTRUCTIVE personal accountability has nothing to do with beating yourself up over mishaps that come up.

If there is a problem with, say, interpersonal conflict within the team, that simply means that you are being called upon to make an adjustment in your leadership to improve teamwork.

And leadership accountability does NOT mean that you need to handle everything yourself.

To boost the morale of your team you might bring in motivational speakers to help you.

One of the great things that happen as team leadership accepts accountability is that the attitude of accountability “radiates” throughout the workforce, based on the leadership power of MODELING.

Within any large organization there is virtually always more than one individual responsible for what goes “right” and for what goes “wrong”.

But it is most essential team leaders do not attempt to duck or deny their role in whatever happens in the workplace.

At the same time, though the leader needs to hold others accountable as well.

You can instill a culture of accountability within your team through teambuilding activities like the following:

At a team meeting, discuss a problem or challenge, like employees griping about the organization in a secretive fashion.
Then assign every member of the team to come up with one thing that he or she can do to remedy the problem.
Next, discuss one success or praiseworthy accomplishment of the organization.
Then assign every member of the team to come with one way that he or she contributed in some way to that accomplishment.

Teambuilding activities like this one train every member of the team in “Leadership Accountability Thinking”, resulting in a higher level of SELF-leadership and performance throughout the team.

Motivational Speaking & Positive Thinking

Posted on November 4, 2011 by Bob Lancer

To be an effective motivational speaker, you need to be an effective “motivational thinker”.

Your ability to uplift an audience can really only come from the uplifting quality of your own spirit.

If you dwell on thoughts that cause you to feel discouraged, insecure or frustrated, you lose your motivation.

When you engage in real positive thinking, you feel inspired, and your inspiration radiates.

To present a powerfully motivating speech or a dynamic motivational seminar for team building is a natural extension of the empowering nature of your consistent mental focus.

At my Motivational Speaking events,one of the motivational exercises I have presented to boost morale in the workplace involves training the mind in positive thinking.

Here is how it works:

1. List ten things going “right” in your life – ten things that you currently appreciate.

2. Describe one change in your life that you would love to be happening right now.

3. List 3 signs that indicate or suggest to you that your life is headed in the direction that you really want it to go in.

4. Describe how you would feel if the 3 most pressing problems in your life were currently solved.

This exercise helps to train the mind in focusing on positive directions. Shifting the mental focus from a negative to a positive direction is one way to boost morale.

If your goal is to be an effective professional motivational speaker, I suggest that you use the above motivational exercise yourself every week (every day would be better) to develop your positive mental focus.

Whether you want to present an inspiring keynote or motivational seminar for teambuilding, being an effective motivational speaker is rooted in being a motivational thinker.

Want To Be A Motivational Speaker Star?

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Bob Lancer

Do you want to be a professional motivational speaker?

Here are some of the benefits of inspirational speaking:

You tap into your own inspiration, which uplifts you.
As you connect with the inspiration of your audience,you experience the delight of seeing THEM uplifted.
If you are an effective motivational speaker for team building, you get to experience the pleasure of seeing you audience unite in a higher spirit of team bonding.

You will notice that there are no promises here like:

Make fast, easy, viagra money
Get to be the center of attention
Hear the sound of applause for your work.

Those really have nothing to do with what REAL motivational speaking is really all about.

If you are looking for fast money, good luck.

If you are looking for easy money, the closest you can come to that is doing work for pay that you deeply enjoy doing. (If that work is motivational speaking, then motivational speaking can be your right path.)

If you are looking for big money, you are going to have to dedicate yourself to being among the very best in your field.

If you crave applause, consider that to be a superficial craving destined to let you down.

Counting on the approval of others is never worthwhile.

You are far better off focusing on doing what you believe is right.

How others feel about your work IS important, but only to the extent that it helps you follow the path that expresses your inspiration.

If you long to be the center of attention, of course you get that as a professional inspirational speaker … once you have been hired, and presuming folks show up.

But you need to examine yourself pretty well to understand your motivation behind the quest for approval.

You would be far better off devoting yourself to serving people in the most powerful, meaningful way that you can. This makes you a REAL star.

As you devote yourself to being the very best and brightest version of yourself, you shine more brilliantly wherever you are.

You don’t have to be a professional motivational speaker to be a star. Like a star in the heavens, you radiate who you are throughout time and space.

Team Building For Life

Posted on October 21, 2011 by Bob Lancer

A successful, happy life is about team building.

No one succeeds entirely alone.

Success is based on relationships.

Every person in your life is a team mate.

Individuals who do not support you need to be avoided.

The most important kind of support we need to be as successful as we can be is the support of a positive energy connection with the other person.

You experience a positive energy connection with another when you feel uplifted during your interaction. You feel motivated when you are together.

We experience interpersonal relationships in our mind.

Haven’t you had the experience of arguing with someone in your head?

When you think of someone and feel stress, strain or a loss of motivation, you are experiencing a negative energy connection with that “team mate”.

The purpose of a team is building the power of each individual involved.

So it is better to avoid even thinking of someone when the thought of that person causes you to lose inspiration, feel more emotionally taxed or burdened.

Set goals for yourself and then maintain relationships with individuals who help you to feel encouraged about your ability to reach those goals.

And strive to be a great team player in other people’s lives.

Be a motivational speaker in your relationships – in other words, avoid speaking in ways that cause people to lose confidence in themselves or in their dreams.

Those people will want to include YOU in THEIR team building.

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