Another toolkit for success
Published:Wednesday | September 15, 2010 | 12:00 AM
Glenford Smith, Career Writer
7 key HABITS to give you an edge:
One of the most important discoveries of the past decade in the fields of psychology and success is that 95 per cent of everything that we think, feel, do and achieve is the result of habit.
Give yourself an edge in drastically increasing your productivity, making more money, and enjoying your life and work more, therefore, by adopting these seven success habits.
1. Self-discipline
The number one habit for extraordinary success is self-discipline. It is also the basis for consciously developing all other success habits.
Self-discipline is the ability to do what you must do, when you're scheduled to do it, whether you feel like doing it or not. This ability is crucial in consistently saving money, exercising, eating healthy, and in concentrating fully on a given task or goal until it is achieved.
2. Excellence
Few things will give you an edge in life like being a person of excellence. Consistently achieving peak performance is hard and demanding. Consequently, most people settle for average. Being average however, simply means you're the best of the worst, and the worst of the best.
Remember: "If you don't seek perfection, you can never reach excellence," says American football coach Don Shula. And Greek philosopher Aristotle noted, "We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then is not an act, but a habit."
3. Lifelong learning
We live in a rapidly changing world. Organisations today need more and more intelligent people to meet the demands of the knowledge economy. These people will have to be more self-sufficient, adaptable, accountable, and innovative than ever before.
This requires lifelong reading, studying, and self-initiated training.
4. Optimism
Optimism marks you as a person on the path to great things. Optimism is the habit of courageously confronting hardships and adversities with the attitude that things will work out well.
It is a choice we make repeatedly until it becomes habit, rather than something we're born with.
5. Time management
You must have clear, written goals to focus your efforts. Form the habit of planning and scheduling your priorities monthly, weekly and daily.
Concentrate on your most important activity first, then the next without getting distracted. Don't waste time on activities that don't support your critical goals.
6. Integrity
Honesty is still the best policy. By consistently making promises and keeping them, we distinguish ourselves from the masses of people who routinely don't.
They don't, not because they're bad people, but because telling the truth and keeping promises are sometimes hard and inconvenient.
Integrity requires that we set and keep ourselves to high ethical and moral standards. It's the courage to practice doing the right things because they're the right things to do.
7. Relationship mastery
According to psychologist Sidney Jourard, fully 85 per cent of our happiness will be determined by the quality of our relationships. Learn how to get along well with people-especially difficult ones.
People who like, love and respect you are the ultimate edge for achieving exceptional success at work and in life.
Glenford Smith is a motivational speaker and personal achievement strategist. He can be reached at: glenfordsmith@yahoo.com