Successful Blog

Is Success on Your Mental Playlist?

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by Sean Glaze

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You Control the iPod in Your Head

Your self-talk has a huge impact on your performance, and inside your mind is a mental playlist of phrases and thoughts that will either help ensure your success or sabotage your every effort.

Each of us has an internal iPod, and it is the mental playlist that we choose to replay to ourselves over and over throughout each day that influences our actions and ultimately the outcomes and results we experience. Many of us have simply carried around these sayings, assumptions, and phrases since early childhood. This self-talk has a tremendous power over our performance.

The truth is that people walk around listening to negative messages that keep them from achieving the success they desire.
Sometimes it is parents who shared criticism or negative comment.
Sometimes it is peers.

But the criticism and comments keep replaying on our mental playlists. If you think defeat and expect failure, if you are constantly reminding yourself of past mistakes, your mental playlist may actually be more responsible for your poor performance than your opponent or circumstances.

As Norman Vincent Peale writes, “Change your thoughts, and you change your world.”

Recognize that YOU control what gets added, what gets deleted, and what gets played when you listen to the voices and ideas inside your mind. By replacing those negative messages with positive affirmations and reminders of your successes, you greatly increase your chances of future success!

One of the best examples of how self talk has influenced performance can be found in the Hall of Fame career of pitcher Gaylord Perry.

Gaylord Perry began his Major League career in 1962, and soon became successful 9and famous) for his “spitball.” He was a five-time all-star, and played a total of 22 years – recording over 3500 strike outs over that time period and finished with a lifetime era of 3.11. But as strong as his pitching performances were, he was often dejected about his hitting.

Just over a year into his career, in 1963, he reportedly told a teammate “They’ll put a man on the moon before I hit a home run.” Not surprisingly, in 1969 he had compiled a horrible .141 career batting average. And his self talk proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

On the evening of July 20, 1969, a few hours after Neil Armstrong first stepped foot onto the surface of the moon, Gaylord Perry hit the first home run of his career.

He finished with six before he retired, but the impact of his self talk – the story he told himself internally and the mental playlist of assumptions about his own abilities – cannot be over emphasized. What he said is what happened.

What you say to yourself — and what you say to others — has a profound influence on their perceptions and performances.

Is Success On Your Mental Playlist?

Team development begins with individual improvement … and the most important conversations you have in life are with yourself. Are you talking to yourself about failure or success? Confidence cannot be bought. It is built – by replaying your past performances and filling up your mental playlist with positive affirmations.

So, what is on your mental playlist? Is your self talk positive and contributing to your success. Or are you allowing negative thoughts and expectations of failure sabotaging your attempts?

To be a better team builder, replace those negative messages on your mental playlist with positive thoughts and reminders of past success. Build and improve your own and your team’s confidence, self-perception, and performance by changing how you think.

Take a moment to review what you have on your mental playlist – and consider replacing those negative messages and thoughts with the positive videos and affirmations that will help everyone perform at their best!

Don’t wait. Start now.
Think one positive thought about yourself or your team’s performance.
Write it in the comment box right now.

Author’s Bio:
Sean Glaze is a Team Building Speaker who writes about teamwork and leadership at his Team Building Blog. He is also author of Fistitude. You can find him on Twitter as @leadyourteam.

5 Rules to Live By and 5 Rules for Living Life

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How to Happiness

Do You Rule Out Living Part of Your Life?

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She showed me her blog post about how she wasn’t doing enough. It listed out all of the things she was inspired to do now. Wow. She said she was going to read so many books; write so many blog posts, go to so many events; meet up with so many friends and family members; and excel at work.

So much commitment … I was wondering where the time was be alive.

Commitments are good things, especially those commitments we finally learn to make to ourselves. Yet, we can throw ourselves off course with commitments and rules until we lose sight of the spontaneous, growing, learning and living human beings we are.

5 Rules to Live By

Can we really make rules to live by? We need the right navigational skills, knowledge, and tools true enough, but making rules for life … Isn’t that sort of like making definitive rules about how to paddle the rapids or drive the back roads? Don’t we have to let the conditions of the rapids and the roads figure in on our choices?

Now, I’m not saying it’s not a good idea to have a few “rules of the road” to guide us. I’m saying we could do a lot fewer of them …
Of course, we need a few stretchable boundaries. A little definition gives us purpose and raises our expectations.
I’d never say take off without any idea of a destination. Gotta know where we’re going.
I’m not even thinking that we should disregard our method of transportation.
It’s even probably a good idea to choose the general route we might be taking …

But, we don’t need to determine how many miles that we’ll be moving while the sun shines, where we’ll be stopping to take a photo, or how long we’ll be swerving to miss an unfilled pothole. We don’t need to be portioning out the hours, minutes, and seconds we’ll be talking to, listening to, or sharing silence with people we love. To do that we need to know what we value and who we care about.

    Rule 1: Choose what you value and your values. Like it or not, what you value will define you and attract people who value the same stuff.

    Rule 2: Have time and energy for the people who are important to you. Enjoy their successes. Never let them fail. You’ll never fear them when you feel most lost.

    Rule 3: Have a destination in mind. It’s okay to change it a few times.

    Rule 4: Pick a suitable method of transportation. Don’t try to walk to an island or swim to the moon.

    Rule 5: Sketch out a logical starting route that suits you and takes you in the right direction. Often taking the first step is the hardest, so get started soon as you can. Every step takes you closer to where you’re going.

But … remember that humans don’t come with an instruction manual or a rule book for life.
We learn who we are by living our lives.
We’re each a one-of-a-kind experiment.
We all need a few rules of our own.

5 Rules for Living Life

As kids, we all looked forward to growing up for the chance to decide when to eat ice-cream for breakfast and other such stuff. Then we found out those decisions aren’t the ones that count. Even worse, we found out that the rules we thought were guides of our lives aren’t the same for everyone in this bigger universe.

The entire world population can’t meet to decide what makes a life worth living. Who’d be in charge? How would we pick?

Deciding the rules that make your life worth living is really up to you.

For the sake of conversation, here are a few rules you might try out. I think of them of as rules for living life. They’re all adaptable to any size, temperament, time line, location, or living conditions you might design.


    Rule 6: Permit yourself to leave space, time, energy, consciousness for unexpected new stuff.

    Rule 7: Learn new things from people who’ve been where you’re going, from people who’ve been places you’ve never imagined, from people who are like you and from people who are not.

    Rule 8: Find out as much as you can about what you’re good at and figure out how not to care about what you’re not.

    Rule 9: Remember old things that you thought you’d forgotten, especially what made you laugh when you were young.

    Rule 10: See, smell, hear, taste, and touch what the world has to offer — surprise yourself.

Be open to the opportunity that serendipity serves up. Experience ideas that grab your attention. Realize what challenges you and discover what problems you can solve. Choose a few rules for living that make this life your own.

Knowing where you’re going is irresistible.
Being alive while you go is even more irresistible than that.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Don’t Own the Problem. Own the Solution.

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If You Argue FOR Your Problems …

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At least twice a week, I have a conversation with a person or a team about a problem they’ve discovered with their business. Soon as I can I start asking questions about what makes the problem a problem and how we might unravel that knot to get things moving smoothly again.

What’s interesting is that most folks first want to convince me how terrible, awful, horribly huge and unsolvable the problem is. They want to dig deep into the details and issue and vent the emotions they’ve carried while the problem was tying itself up.

If you argue for your problems, they’ll be yours.

Do You Argue FOR Your Problems?

Don’t confuse identifying the problem with communicating how you feel about the problem. The two are just not the same thing. In the same vein, focusing on the cause of the problem is rarely a solution.

  • If he hadn’t … but he did.
  • If they had just … but they didn’t.
  • If this was built this boat right … but it wasn’t and if we keep talking about it, we’re ALL going to drown. We need a way to keep from sinking or a way to get to the shore.

Talking about how we feel about the problem and its cause, doesn’t do much to change the situation NOW. In fact, staying focused on those points is arguing to keep the problem a problem.

Some problems do better if we solve them first and discuss how to avoid them later.
Some problems – like a dropped glass spilling liquid all over the floor — may be just be an accident and not discussion at all
Some problems — like a detour — aren’t problems at all simply a shift in what we were expecting to occur.

Change Your Mind

The way we see a problem is what keeps is a problem. Stop seeing an obstacle. Look for the opportunity.
Inside every situation that seems to be a problem is a chance to learn a new way of doing things. Along with that comes a challenge to show our courage, grace, flexibility, competence, and confidence when faced with the need to find new solutions.

Truth is if we give up the payoff in dissecting the problem we’ll move more quickly to solution.
Let’s just agree that we have one and get on with solving it. We can address the problem after we’ve achieved the solution. We’ll save urgent time and be more rational then anyway.

Don’t Own the Problem, Own the Solution.

New solutions are what lead to innovation.
Necessity (problems to solve) is the mother and father that gives birth to revelation.
Keeping our eyes on each other and our hearts on open communication can bring us to a solution that was better than what we ever thought we wanted.

And being the one who can positively identify opportunity when the situation has been shaken raises influence and gains esteem from the folks who are stuck and frozen. Being able to keep the focus on the direction that moves us forward is a trait of a leader. It’s irresistible to be ready to keep winning when the day is raining.

Don’t own the problem.
Own the quest to find the solution.
Don’t argue for convincing folks how bad it is that it happened.
Argue for how good it is that we’ve got an opportunity to make something great happen.
Don’t parse apart the people and the pieces to find what was broken.
Do all our can to make things whole and moving things whole again.
That’s winning.
And winning is irresistible.

How do you catch yourself when you’re arguing for the problem?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

Energize! Act like a startup

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Rosemary O’Neill

Energize! Act like a startup

You don’t have to work in a high-ceilinged loft in San Francisco to take advantage of startup wisdom. The energy, passion, and fast pace of startup culture has a lot to offer almost any business.

It’s not all about the perks

We did have a foosball table in the early days of our company, but what we discovered is that everyone appreciates less tangible perks. A collegial atmosphere, where everyone is respected for their ideas, is much more important than Aeron chairs.

Lessons you can take from startup culture

  • Go all in. Sleep under your desk if you have to.
  • Appreciate your colleagues.
  • Don’t build any internal silos; everyone pitches in.
  • Maintain your hunger for the mission; gather true believers around you.
  • Get all excited over every new customer.
  • Take advantage of guerrilla (free) PR and marketing opportunities.

Even if you’ve been in business for a long time, you can incorporate some of the ideas that make startups successful. But you don’t have to eat Ramen noodles.

What can you do this week to inject some startup energy and passion into your business?

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Why Work? Don’t Just Labor, Labor for Love

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Focusing on the Work Won’t Work

Change the World!

The biggest mistake I made in my working life was that I thought work was about working and life was about life. My view artificial in much the same way that school was about getting homework done so that I could get on with with life.

I would focus on the work and making it outstanding, a cut above. I suspect I thought I’d leave a legacy — that the work would be changed, different, and dare I say better, because I had been a part. I lost sight of, maybe I never truly saw, the people I relied upon. At best, I left a shallow, crumbling legacy — easy surpassed, and best forgotten, fueled by transactions more than relationships.

No one changes the world focusing on the work.

Why Work?

We can’t separate the work we do from our lives. It’s not a case of balance — we can’t separate out the time that we work from the time we’re alive. I won’t give up my right to breathe and be on the planet for my right to work. Work fills my need to be fully safe and human, but I is not my life.

Why work? Maslow described how our human needs are met by work. Despite limitations of the hierarchy it makes a nice framework for building a world-changing team..

  1. Work for life. We work because we have needs. We expend energy to sustain life with food, clothing, shelter, and sex, which will ensure the existence of the species.
  2. Work for security and safety. We do things to alleviate our fear of loss from real and imagined dangers.
  3. Work for social interaction. We find our place in society by building things with others. by feeling we fit as part of our group.
  4. Work for a sense of personal value – respect for ourselves and respect from others. We build out our confidence, competence, self esteem, and sense of status from the recognition, reputation, and appreciation of others as well.
  5. Work to reach our potential. In other words, we expend energy to accomplish things so that we can use what we’ve got, become what we could be, change the world for the better.

Why work? If we look at it right, work — not just earnings — but the act of work can offer us a better life.

Don’t Just Labor, Labor for Love

We all know that we work for life, security and safety, social interaction and respect. Leaders realize the potential we could reach if we channel that energy in the same positive direction, if we put labor into a labor of love to raise up the people who help us thrive.

By supporting those same human needs in all of the people who build our businesses — employees, vendors, managers, partners, customers, families, friends — we can make our work better our lives. The very act of our work can satisfy our human needs, our soulful yearning, and our deep and immediate need to offer a legacy to those who come behind.

All we have to do is be and allow it.
Be a person who lives life and who lets others live life too.
Be a person who knows security and who lets others be secure too.
Be a person who decides to belong and who lets others know they belong too.
Be a person who respects yourself and others and who lets others know that same round respect too.
Be a person who lives up to your potential and lets others see and live up their own.

In other words, don’t just labor, labor for love.
We can change the world, just like that.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss