Self Improvement

Get Psyched!

Garth Beyer

I have a Get Psyched playlist for my workouts.

Barney has a Get Psyched mix for, well, getting psyched.

What about a Get Psyched mix for overall work, life, and self-improvement?

 

I’ll be going on a trip this Friday and will be #unplugged for 14 days. (Don’t worry, I’ve written like crazy to schedule posts for the days I will be unplugged.) While I get everything in order for my time away, I will be listening to a countless number of motivational speeches and discussions.

I remember the first Zig Ziglar talk I listened to on a Podcast at work two years ago. Heck, he’s still there on the front page! It changed my life for the better the best.

After I listened to all the Zig Ziglar that I could freely get my hands on, I bought a couple of discs. Then I listened to those until I knew what word he would say next. After nearly memorizing the seminars, naturally, I stopped listening to them. That’s when my life rocketed toward everything I wished it would be. It still amazes me just thinking about it.

Now I’m shooting to do the same with this trip. Loading up with motivational fuel, getting psyched, then cutting myself off. We’ll see what happens.

—

Without the need to be unplugged, I encourage you to do that same. You can download Spotify (much like Pandora, sure you’ve heard of that) and search for Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and all the other great motivational speakers. From there, it’s simple: listen.

You don’t need to spend hundreds, or in the case of some of Brian Tracy’s work, thousands, to Get Psyched for personal growth. Yes, Spotify is free.

What makes me happy is knowing how little Zig would care that we can now listen to him talk for free. Let’s show him what we got.

 

Stay Positive & Get Psyched

Garth E. Beyer

You’re Inadequate

Garth Beyer

Cool. Me too. Friends?

First of all, what right does anyone have to call you inadequate? I suppose that doesn’t matter though, once we feel it, we feel it.

Secondly, if you’re into all the motivational pish-posh (Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, and about a billion bloggers), than you’re guilty of feeling inadequate. How can you not when you hear of stories about people doing more than you can ever dream of? How can you not when you catch yourself wasting time away on the couch or falling victim to the worst time-killer at large, waiting.

A lot of people can’t handle feeling inadequate, so they don’t listen to any inspirational tapes, read any encouraging novels, or watch any motivational speeches. The bad isn’t on their end, it’s on the motivators end because the goal of motivation is to making someone feel inadequate enough to improve.

It’s that nudge your coach gives you when he says, “Good job, but you can hit harder next time. I want to see that,” or when you finally read something in a magazine that you actually do, whether it’s making a holiday cupcake or creating a gratitude journal. The success of motivation is action, but you can’t just tell someone to hit harder, make a cupcake, or write in a journal.

Next time you listen/read/watch a motivational person, try not to focus so much on how they make you feel inadequate. Focus more on the how of it all, the actions you can make, the steps to take.

 

Stay Positive & Then Take Them

Garth E. Beyer

This Week’s To-Do List

Garth Beyer
  • Never stop improving
  • Learn the power of participative leadership
  • Share better choices
  • Have a position and support it
  • Anticipate counterarguments
  • Play the game differently
  • Motivate yourself with competition
  • Command the lectern
  • Collect feedback on your current project
  • If you don’t have a project, start one
  • Shine under scrutiny
  • Practice civility
  • Isolate your problems
  • Formulate workable solutions
  • Speak to the heart, with logic, with authority
  • Connect the audience with each other
  • Create prior credibility
  • Forget the “next big thing”
  • Adapt your story to the listener
  • Make buying less risky
  • Create momentum
  • Prepare dynamic meetings
  • Speak to outside groups
  • Value you
  • Keep your edge
  • Express your inner entrepreneur early
  • Embrace problems creatively
  • Pursue passion
  • Face the fear
  • Conquer hopelessness
  • Make a small difference
  • Determine your best time of day
  • List a handful of goals
  • Commit to a peak performance partner
  • Journal
  • Take a time out and get grounded
  • Narrow your focus
  • Take personal responsibility for everything
  • Remember your “why”
  • Outsource
  • Ask questions
  • Ask more questions
  • Autograph your excellence
  • Manifest several new ideas to keep the big idea going
  • Perform twenty mental push ups
  • Free your imagination
  • Find enthusiastic support
  • Don’t expect anything in return
  • Remember all the basics apply
  • Laugh a bit louder
  • Be human
  • Workout/Exercise
  • Practice prepared cleverness and unprepared cleverness
  • Keep being yourself
  • Punctuate and pause
  • Remain humble and teachable
  • Delegate
  • Create room at the top for other potential leaders
  • Accept, overcome, and adapt
  • Track time or find a way to make sleepless nights worth staying awake for
  • Do a vice check
  • Pump up the visuals
  • Focus on what you have, not on what you’ve lost
  • Keep moving – it’s harder to hit a moving target
  • Take breaks to do some cost cutting
  • Get ready to be wrong
  • Try

 

Stay Positive & Now You Have A To-Do List For Life

(It’s long, I know. But so is life)

Garth E. Beyer

Constant Adaptation

Garth Beyer

Humans in their entirety are under constant adaptation. It’s in our nature. We adapt in every form – mentally, physically, ideally, and in our hearts to the environment we are subject to.

The gold medalist outliers in athletics, in business, and in life, they got there through adaptation.

  • Most marathon runners have burned themselves out in at least 10 races or practice races before they successfully completed their first marathon.
  • The published writer, went through having 5 migraines and 20 different occasions of muscle spasms in her eyes and hands because she kept upping the dose of writing she did on the computer each day.
  • Almost all millionaire entrepreneurs, have had at least 30 overnighters and more than a third of their nights severely sleep deprived.

Reach

It’s impossible to bend and reach your toes if you have never stretched before. It’s impossible to write 60 hours a week while carrying a full-time job if you haven’t even wrote for 20 hours a week. It’s impossible to stay up two nights in a  row working on a business plan if you have never had less than 7 hours a sleep in a night. As much as you want to fight it, life has its limits and becoming a gold medalist, becoming indispensable, becoming an artist, and becoming successful is not an overnight occurrence. It’s not something that can be reached the first try, the second try, or even after 50 tries.

The successful become the successful because they bounced back from injuries, headaches and sleepless nights the quickest. They stretched. They crashed. They adapted to it. They (now, like you) understood that their body is in a constant state of adaptation whether you want it to be or not. It tries to adjust to the moment – every moment.

Plateau

If you are not constantly improving with your muse, you are plateauing. If you are plateauing, you are getting worse, because everyone else, they are getting better, thus raising what the average is and putting you below the line. (Not where you want to be)

However, plateauing is key. Again, you can’t reach your toes the first try, even if you stay reaching for them for 5 hours straight. When you plateau, you allow adaptation to catch up and make the improvement you made the average so you can once again go after improvement. A person can reach their toes with 5 hours of effort, but only if they stretch, relax, adapt, and stretch again.

There are two variables of plateauing

1. How many times you plateau determines how excellent you will be. The more times you give yourself time to relax and adapt, the quicker you can accelerate becoming an expert at what you are doing. Who knew the amount of success is based on the number of times you actually don’t work for it?

2. How long you plateau for is the essential factor resulting in either progress or decline. If a weightlifter curls 50lb dumbbells, and then plateaus for  two weeks, he is certainly not going to be lifting 50lb’s again right away. His plateau made his abilities decrease. Then again, he won’t get anywhere if he curls every single day, twice a day, leaving no time for adaptation (or improvement).

Stay Positive & Reach, Plateau, Adapt, Repeat

Garth E. Beyer

In Range Job Change

Garth Beyer
Where do you fit in?

 

Brian Tracy said in Global Competition, “A recent study said more than 90% of everything you know about your job or field today will be obsolete in 5 years. It will be irrelevant and have nothing to do with your work. It will have to all be replaced with new information, ideas and understanding.”

That was said more than 13 years ago.

In 2010, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median number of years that wage and salary workers had been with their current employer was 4.4. To apply it differently, the average number of workers would change jobs before their fifth year in the same position. The most obvious explanation is that the job changed, not them. After more than a year, very few workers do the same thing as they did the day they began the position. The rate at which a job changes by means of information replacement, idea improvement and administrative direction is so high that the job you entered will be completely different a year from now.

It is now 2012, would you agree with me that this information still stands true, but the number of years until the information you know about your field becomes obsolete is now only two to three years? Four years tops.

The answer behind it is that only a select few go into a position with the hope to climb the success totem pole. Not to mention, the average number of jobs that allow position advancement (promotions) with reasonable ease is 4/10. The reason for the number being so low is that those who continue to gobble up new information, form the improvement concepts and devote themselves to further understanding of the occupation, not only take the higher positions in the workplace, but they keep them.

If you’re not constantly devouring new information, if you’re not consistently getting better, you are getting worse. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, people die standing still.

For me, I would prefer that instead of changing jobs nearly every other year, we incorporate an aggressive “success” mindset. It’s also wise to consider the fact that when you start a new job, you have to learn all new information anyway. New information and the same low wage and respect? Or new information and a higher wage and more respect? Both of which require the same amount of effort.

 

Stay Positive & Keep In Mind That Changing Jobs To Keep Yourself Low On The Totem Pole Is The Same As Standing Still

Garth E. Beyer