Your Power To Decide

by Asoka Selvarajah, Ph.D

In his classic work, "Think & Grow Rich", Napoleon Hill stated that 98% of people are in the jobs they have through INDECISION, i.e. because they never made the decision about what they wanted to do in their lives in the first place. Sadly, nearly a century later, we can say exactly the same thing.

Decision is the key to transformation. Yet, most of us never learn this from our parents, from school, or indeed from anywhere else. It is one of the key character traits distinguishing high performers from the vast ranks of the mediocre. Can you DECIDE upon anything? If you can, almost anything you want in life can be yours.

If you think back in your life to some of your greatest achievements, those things you are most proud of, you will see that behind it all there was a decision you made at some point, and persisted with against all opposition, right through to the successful conclusion.

For me, it was the three tortuous years I spent laboring away on my Ph.D, doing a subject that was so complex that after a while, all I had left was persistence and determination to see the decision I had made through to its final conclusion.

Indecision explains why many people feel that they have a life purpose, but have no idea what it is. We have lost the use of the decision muscles that should normally enable us to manifest into our reality what we decide upon, and persistently hold in our minds. Ask a child what it wants to have and you'll get a long list. Ask an adult the same question and you may well be greeted with silence.

The problem is that all too often that people hunger for instant gratification. The ability to engage in delayed gratification, i.e. working hard for a goal NOW in order to see it realized at some point in the future, seems to be a dying art. Hence our ability to make decisions and see them through to a fruitful end has grown very weak. For many people, the biggest decisions they ever make in a year is where to go on vacation, how to get there, and where to stay! Sad but true.

Decision is, by definition, behind every truly great achievement anyone ever makes. Most of the people who live to be a hundred actually DECIDED at some point in their life that they wished to live to a hundred. Most millionaires, at some earlier point in their life (often when they were heavily in debt), DECIDED that they were going to be millionaires. The Buddha's enlightenment came only after he DECIDED to seek Enlightenment and persisted for six long hard years until the achieved it. Edison DECIDED to invent an electric light bulb and persisted despite 10,000 failed attempts.

Decision coupled with Persistence is unstoppable. Napoleon Hill also commented that, in examining the lives of Thomas Edison and Henry Ford, the only quality he found in them that remotely accounted for their success, i.e. was NOT common in ordinary people, was that of Persistence.

Interestingly, the most successful people make decisions quickly and change them slowly. They persist with the decisions they have made. However, failures are very slow to make any decision at all (most never make any), and they change the ones they have made very rapidly indeed. Which description applies to you?....

It's not about making the "right" decision in the first place, but rather about making the decision you have made "right". If you wait to make the "right" decision, you could wait forever. If you make your decisions "right", this means that you work with the decisions you have made, adapting them as necessary to the situation at hand.

Yes, of course it helps to make the best decision possible in the first place. This is where excellent research and accurate thinking come into play. You should do your best in this respect. However, you also need to set some sort of deadline or limit to this to be prevented from engaging in "paralysis through analysis". At some point, you have to DO. Thereafter, you adapt your thinking to actual circumstances, in order to ultimately bring about what you have decided upon.

For instance, you may decide to live to be a hundred. However, you then work with the existing health systems available to reach that goal, adapting and choosing what is available to your personal needs. You may decide to earn a certain sum of money, e.g. a million dollars. From then on, you adapt your thinking to the many means available.

You don't give up on the decision itself, although you may give up on a specific means of achieving it, and instead move towards another. Flexibility in the means of obtaining the outcome of your decision is okay. Flexibility in dumping your decisions the whole time is NOT.

The Latin root of the word decision means "to cut off from all alternatives". This is what you should do when you decide. Don't leave yourself a life-raft so that you can give up later. A famous example of this kind of decision is Hernan Cortez, in his conquest of Mexico. When the Conquistadors first arrived in Mexico, Cortez literally DID burn their boats. There was no way back home. They could literally only go forward and conquer. That is how just a few hundred Spaniards, thousands of miles from home, took on, and triumphed over, the power of the Aztec and Mayan Empires. Decision!

Decide, and then act as if you could not fail. Interestingly, this attitude of mind attracts to you forces from the universe that are fully capable of supporting you and bringing your decision into manifestation. If you ask a lot from life, you will receive a lot. If you ask a little, that is what you will get. Interestingly, the universe has no favorites and does not care either way how much or how little you ask for. As and you shall receive, is the way it was once expressed.

The key is to KNOW what you want, DECIDE to get it, and then PERSIST until you have done so.

Copyright Asoka Selvarajah 2004. All Rights Reserved.
adapted from : http://getmotivation.com/articlelib/articles/asoka_decide_power.htm
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Procastination : The Results Killer ! By Tony Jeary

Anyone interested in getting better results, becoming more productive and ultimately more successful should probably take an honest look at the problem of procrastination.

Most people think procrastination is just an issue that involves putting things off that can be done later without much of a penalty. That idea just scratches the surface of the procrastination issue and is indicative of the denial people have about it.

Truthfully, procrastination is like an addiction because it is the symptom of a thinking problem and like any other addiction, its difficult to break!

The reality is this: Nothing marginalizes results more than procrastination because being productive and getting superior results is about completing tasks and projects in reduced time frames.

Obviously, if you can get more work done in less time, you will see results much faster. We are all guilty of procrastination to some extent, and there are two kinds:

1. Positive Procrastination. This is when you legitimately need some “mental percolation” time to gather your thoughts and get clear on what you need to do.

2. Negative Procrastination. This is based on some pretty flimsy excuses to avoid doing something, which will ultimately affect your results in negative ways.

Whereas Positive Procrastination can be beneficial, Negative Procrastination is something you need to overcome in order to be more effective and finish things faster. You can’t produce results until you start doing something. If you do nothing, that is exactly what you will get — nothing!

If you want to accelerate results, there is no room in your life or your business for Negative Procrastination. Show me a person who consistently gets less than stellar results, and I’ll show you a person who procrastinates. However, they probably won’t think of themselves as procrastinators because they have lots of seemingly good reasons for not doing things today.

You may find some of the following statements familiar. You have probably either heard them from other people, or you may have even believed one or more of them yourself. If you feel a personal kinship with these statements, I suggest that you give serious thought to the possibility that there might be a touch of procrastination in your own life. Consider the following statements:

1. “I can do it tomorrow.” This may be the most popular and frequently used justification for procrastination. The reason it’s so popular is because tomorrow sounds so close to today.

Waiting until tomorrow just doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Just waiting one more day won’t upset too many people, and there are surely many good reasons that can be created to justify the delay.

2. “I don’t have everything I need, so I’ll wait.” This is a very popular statement used to justify inaction and waiting. It is most often an excuse that salespeople use to avoid making telephone calls to prospects.

The truth is that you can always take some kind of action, regardless of the list of the things you think you need before you can start. All you have to do is be honest about it and look for what is possible to do today. Do not wait until you have everything you think you need before you start doing things.

3. “I can’t do it perfectly, so I’ll wait.” This excuse doesn’t make much sense if you ask yourself the question: Can we ever do anything perfectly? I think not.

How do you feel about this statement? Do you feel as though you have to be able to perform perfectly before you can be willing to act? If you do have this attitude, you are in serious trouble, because you will never be able to do anything perfectly.

4. “I don’t have time right now.” Why and how do we get the idea that we have to be able to finish something before we can work on it? Let me use a book-writing example to show you what I mean by this.

A non-fiction book is a collection of chapters. Each chapter is a collection of ideas about a specific topic. Each idea may have many sub-points. When I begin a book project, how many books would I complete if I believed I had to finish the entire book in one, continuous work session?

The answer is that I would never complete any book project if I believed this was necessary. The correct approach is to do what you can, when you can!

5. “Someone else can do it better.” This excuse is a silent one that people make to themselves privately. Some authors and psychologists say that procrastination is rooted in the fear of success. I’m not a psychologist, but I think it’s more likely people fear failure more than they fear success.

Let’s face it — people don’t want to look bad, and they are hesitant to put themselves in position where they might fail.


Procrastination is a tool that many people use because they falsely believe it will save them from failure. The truth is that procrastination usually guarantees failure.

Procrastination may be many things, but mostly it’s a bad habit. Someone once said, “Repetition strengthens and confirms.” Simply put, this means that the more you do something, the easier it gets!

I believe people learn how to procrastinate over a long period of time, and the more they do it, the easier it becomes. So, if you want better results and greater success, take a look at the issue of procrastination in your life.

Sit down today and make a list of all the things you need to do that you have not completed. How many are the result of procrastination? You might be surprised.

(c)2008 Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life
adaptes from :http://www.getmotivation.com/motivationblog/

GENERAL PRINCIPLES OF MOTIVATION

by Matthew Weller, Los Angeles Business Journal, March 14, 2005


Basic principles of motivation exist that are applicable to learning in any situation.

1. The environment can be used to focus the student's attention on what needs to be learned.

Teachers who create warm and accepting yet business-like atmospheres will promote persistent effort and favorable attitudes toward learning. This strategy will be successful in children and in adults. Interesting visual aids, such as booklets, posters, or practice equipment, motivate learners by capturing their attention and curiosity.

2. Incentives motivate learning.

Incentives include privileges and receiving praise from the instructor. The instructor determines an incentive that is likely to motivate an individual at a particular time. In a general learning situation, self-motivation without rewards will not succeed. Students must find satisfaction in learning based on the understanding that the goals are useful to them or, less commonly, based on the pure enjoyment of exploring new things.

3. Internal motivation is longer lasting and more self-directive than is external motivation, which must be repeatedly reinforced by praise or concrete rewards.

Some individuals -- particularly children of certain ages and some adults -- have little capacity for internal motivation and must be guided and reinforced constantly. The use of incentives is based on the principle that learning occurs more effectively when the student experiences feelings of satisfaction. Caution should be exercised in using external rewards when they are not absolutely necessary. Their use may be followed by a decline in internal motivation.

4. Learning is most effective when an individual is ready to learn, that is, when one wants to know something.

Sometimes the student's readiness to learn comes with time, and the instructor's role is to encourage its development. If a desired change in behavior is urgent, the instructor may need to supervised directly to ensure that the desired behavior occurs. If a student is not ready to learn, he or she may not be reliable in following instructions and therefore must be supervised and have the instructions repeated again and again.

5. Motivation is enhanced by the way in which the instructional material is organized.

In general, the best organized material makes the information meaningful to the individual. One method of organization includes relating new tasks to those already known. Other ways to relay meaning are to determine whether the persons being taught understand the final outcome desired and instruct them to compare and contrast ideas.

None of the techniques will produce sustained motivation unless the goals are realistic for the learner. The basic learning principle involved is that success is more predictably motivating than is failure. Ordinarily, people will choose activities of intermediate uncertainty rather than those that are difficult (little likelihood of success) or easy (high probability of success). For goals of high value there is less tendency to choose more difficult conditions. Having learners assist in defining goals increases the probability that they will understand them and want to reach them. However, students sometimes have unrealistic notions about what they can accomplish. Possibly they do not understand the precision with which a skill must be carried out or have the depth of knowledge to master some material. To identify realistic goals, instructors must be skilled in assessing a student's readiness or a student's progress toward goals.

1. Because learning requires changed in beliefs and behavior, it normally produces a mild level of anxiety.

This is useful in motivating the individual. However, severe anxiety is incapacitating. A high degree of stress is inherent in some educational situations. If anxiety is severe, the individual's perception of what is going on around him or her is limited. Instructors must be able to identify anxiety and understand its effect on learning. They also have a responsibility to avoid causing severe anxiety in learners by setting ambiguous of unrealistically high goals for them.

2. It is important to help each student set goals and to provide informative feedback regarding progress toward the goals.

Setting a goal demonstrates an intention to achieve and activates learning from one day to the next. It also directs the student's activities toward the goal and offers an opportunity to experience success.

3. Both affiliation and approval are strong motivators.

People seek others with whom to compare their abilities, opinions, and emotions. Affiliation can also result in direct anxiety reduction by the social acceptance and the mere presence of others. However, these motivators can also lead to conformity, competition, and other behaviors that may seem as negative.

4. Many behaviors result from a combination of motives.

It is recognized that no grand theory of motivation exists. However, motivation is so necessary for learning that strategies should be planned to organize a continuous and interactive motivational dynamic for maximum effectiveness. The general principles of motivation are interrelated. A single teaching action can use many of them simultaneously.

Finally, it should be said that an enormous gap exists between knowing that learning must be motivated and identifying the specific motivational components of any particular act. Instructors must focus on learning patterns of motivation for an individual or group, with the realization that errors will be common.

adapted from :http://honolulu.hawaii.edu/intranet/committees/FacDevCom/guidebk/teachtip/motivate.htm

10 Rules For A Good Day

TODAY I WILL NOT STRIKE BACK:
If someone is rude, if someone is impatient, if someone is unkind...I will not respond in a like manner.


TODAY I WILL ASK GOD TO BLESS MY "ENEMY":
If I come across someone who treats me harshly or unfairly, I will quietly ask God to bless that individual. I understand the "enemy" could be a family member, neighbor, co-worker, or a stranger.


TODAY I WILL BE CAREFUL ABOUT WHAT I SAY:
I will carefully choose and guard my words being certain that I do not spread gossip.


TODAY I WILL GO THE EXTRA MILE:
I will find ways to help share the burden of another person.


TODAY I WILL FORGIVE:
I will forgive any hurts or injuries that come my way. TODAY I WILL DO SOMETHING NICE FOR SOMEONE, BUT I WILL DO IT SECRETLY: I will reach out anonymously and bless the life of another.


TODAY I WILL TREAT OTHERS THE WAY I WISH TO BE TREATED:
I will practice the golden rule - "Do unto others as I would have them do unto me" - with everyone I encounter.


TODAY I WILL RAISE THE SPIRITS OF SOMEONE I DISCOURAGED:
My smile, my words, my expression of support, can make the difference to someone who is wrestling life.


TODAY I WILL NURTURE MY BODY:
I will eat less; I will eat only healthy foods. I will thank God for my body.


TODAY I WILL GROW SPIRITUALLY:
I will spend a little more time in prayer today: I will begin reading something spiritual or inspirational today; I will find a quiet place and listen to God's voice !


--- Author Unknown --- Submitted by Lauren C. --- New Jersey
asapted from :http://www.motivateus.com/stories/good-day-rules.htm

The Dream Always Comes First

The dream always comes first. It existed before time.
God first had a dream and then made the sun to shine.

The dream always comes first, not the chicken or the egg.
The brewer had a recipe before the brew had a keg.

The dream always comes first; the clap before the sound,
the dream before the doing, not the other way around.

The dream always comes first. Ask Orville and Wilbur Wright.
Watching eagles soaring helped them form their dreams of flight.

The dream always comes first, even though it can't be seen.
It's just a mental picture that effort brings to being.

The dream always comes first. We must hold it with all our might.
It could be the one thing we hold unto when we face our toughest fight.

The dream always comes first. It's not a matter of keeping score.
It's running for it with all your might that makes life so much more.

The dream always comes first. Some are abandoned: Some are caught.
All of man's masterpieces were birthed from a single thought.

The dream always comes first. Search them through and through.
If you can't see them, they probably can't see you.

The dream always comes first. Always keep it in your view.
Ask God if he will help you. He likes dreams. He has them too.

adapted from :-- Copyright © 2008 Ray Owen
http://www.motivateus.com/stories/the-dream-comes-first.htm