Neen James is the author of Folding Time™ and Attention Pays™. In 2017, she was named one of the top 30 Leadership Speakers by Global Guru because of her work with companies like Viacom, Comcast, and Abbot Pharmaceuticals among others. Neen has boundless energy, is quick-witted and always offers powerful strategies for paying attention to what matters so you can […]
There’s something surprising about confidence that I wanted to share with you. Believe it or not, but I struggled with confidence in my life in different ways. I didn’t really understand confidence, so because of that misunderstanding, there were times in my life when I was under-confident. There are other times when I might have had too much confidence, again […]
How do you make self-discipline easier? Imagine if it was easy. You could get yourself to do all the things you should be doing, even when you don’t feel like doing them. You could accomplish anything in your life. The challenge is that to get to where we want to go usually requires us to do things we don’t like […]
How do you create exponential growth in your business? How do you accomplish massive things in a short period of time? People always want to know if they should work harder or smarter. The ultra-successful people I talk to say they do both. If you want to create exponential results in your life, you can’t put in an average […]
“My family will never be the reason why I can’t succeed. Rather, they’re the reason I must succeed.” Wow, what a powerful idea and a powerful thought, courtesy of Tracy Christman, one of our Southwestern Consulting clients, and one of the multipliers profiled in Procrastinate on Purpose. I’m back home, after traveling, and was thinking about what Tracy shared. We’ve […]
This is an important question: What should you do on your very first day in sales? It’s a question we hear at Southwestern Consulting a lot, because we’re growing very fast. Every single day, we’re bringing on new sales and leadership clients who’ve hired new salespeople. And they’re all asking this question. Let’s just pretend for a second you’ve started […]
We all want happiness. We want that secure feeling of real, sustainable joy. All of us – me, our family and friends, our coaching clients – are trying to find happiness. And we all ask, “Where do you find happiness? Where does it come from?” When you look online, you see memes with quotes like, “Don’t worry, be happy” or […]
Struggles, struggles, struggles – that’s what life is all about, right? We all experience pain, setbacks and hard times. We all have goals we want to achieve, but haven’t yet. We have big dreams we hope will become real, but aren’t sure if they will. Sometimes, you have to ask, “Why do we struggle?” Right? We all ask these questions: […]
Highlights: A person who is confident in who they are is never compelled to attack other people. Those who are confident and secure are not concerned with fighting others. We only attack when we are trying to feel better about ourselves. If you are angry at someone, maybe it has more to do with you then them. Extend grace to […]
Highlights: There is one essential, universal ingredient to any success formula. No matter what the formula is, it always requires discipline. Take any formula and just add discipline. Take pride in taking the stairs. Do you have the discipline? What does it take to be disciplined? Every success formula must have the addition of discipline. Do the things you know […]
Entitlement is a disgusting disease that destroys our ability to reach our dreams. You may not even realize it. None of us like to think of ourselves as entitled. Yet, we see all the time that when people don’t achieve their dreams it has nothing to do with not being smart enough or not having access to information or tools. […]
None of us like to think that we make excuses, but we do. One of my business partners, Dustin Hillis, defines excuses in this way: “Any reason you didn’t do what you said you would do.” I love that definition because it’s transparent, powerful, and most important of all, it’s inescapable. It’s inescapable from accountability. There’s no way to dodge […]
After delivering a keynote speaking presentation last week a man comes up to me and asks, “Rory what could I do immediately to increase my self-discipline?” It’s a good question, and the best answer is pretty simple but before I share the answer with you it’s valuable to understand the context of the answer. I think this particular man, and most […]
If you’ve never heard of the marshmallow test, it’s worth knowing about. From Wikipedia: The Stanford marshmallow experiment was a series of studies on delayed gratification in the late 1960s and early 1970s led by psychologist Walter Mischel, then a professor at Stanford University. In these studies, a child was offered a choice between one small reward (a marshmallow) provided […]
Hard work is not the key to success; it’s merely the price of admission. For the ultra successful, hard work is a given. Hard work is the expectation. Hard work is a mandatory pre requisite for success. But hard work alone doesn’t guarantee success. Because you can be working hard at the wrong things and it won’t produce the fruit […]
One of the most important habits of developing consistent high performance in your life is to put your self-esteem into your work habits rather than your production. The reason is because we want our confidence tied to things that we can control rather than things we can’t. Production often fluctuates up and down but our effort, work ethic, and intensity […]
“Cheat days” don’t work. Because “cheat days” fly directly in the face of what actually creates sustainable behavior change. The concept of a “cheat day” is that you “reward” yourself for one day as the result of “depriving” yourself for all the other days. But cheat days don’t reward you; they ruin you. Not only is it just a waste […]
“I’m SO busy.” You hear it all the time. In fact we hear it so much, we should all just assume that everyone is that way and we can all stop saying it. Because there is a maximum level of busy. There are only 168 hours in a week, and if every single hour is planned and occupied, then you’ve […]
People say all the time “I never gossip” but unfortunately many of them are mistaken. They do participate in gossip, they just don’t realize it. Because we think of gossiping as “telling” secrets we’ve heard; but there’s more to it than that. To listen to gossip is to participate in gossip. Why? Because when you listen to gossip you create […]
There are a lot of factors to consider when it comes to deciding what our next career move is going to be. Things like: How much money will I make? Will my job be safe and steady? Is there opportunity for advancement? Over the years I’ve begun to notice a theme and difference in those who end up both happy […]
Stephen Hanselman began his career as a bookseller 30 years ago and refined his passion for publishing at Harvard Divinity School, where he served as director of the bookstore. After graduating Harvard in 1986 with a Master of Theological Studies degree, he founded Divinitas Books, a specialty chain and direct-mail operation. After selling his business in 1991, he joined HarperSanFrancisco. […]
