Success or Failure, your CHOICE!

Your Success and Failure in Your Business and Personal Life is Up To You.

This is absolutely correct. The burden is yours and yours alone. From the mid 1990’s until about the mid 2000’s, there were a series of books written named Chicken Soup for the Soul. The series was co-authored by Jim Canfield. One of Mr. Canfield's books, The Success Principles: How to Get from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be gives us the secrets to success in all forms of life, including how to achieve the highest goals possible in your career.
Canfield says that “If you want to be successful you have to take 100% responsibility for everything that you experience in your life.” “This includes:

* The level of your achievements
* The results you produce
* The quality of your relationships

You have to be brutally honest with yourself about yourself. To accomplish this you have to give yourself a reality check. For some, like me, it might be a bitter pill to swallow; for others, maybe not so much. It just depends on you, your expectations and where you are in life when you enact this reality check. However, if you do this then the outcome may just be the results you have been looking for and striving toward, but you certainly won’t ever know if you don’t take the time to do it in the first place.

Here are Canfield's fundamentals for success on the job and in life.
 
1) Take 100% responsibility for everything. The biggest myth in today’s society is that we are entitled to a great life, that somehow, somewhere, someone is responsible for filling our lives with continual happiness, exciting career options, nurturing family time and wonderful personal relationships just because we simply exist. I feel that today’s younger generation seems to fall into this category the more I interact with them. Unfortunately for them, the real truth is that you alone are the person responsible for how you live your life.
 
2) You have to give up all your excuses, blaming, and complaining. Blaming is something we all do at some point in our lives. We can’t help ourselves. We are conditioned this way even though the real problem is always ourselves. You have to stop doing this if you are going to change your life pattern to be more positive. Forget the victim stories, the reasons you can’t and won’t and your blaming of outside circumstances. Instead, you have to ask yourself “How did I create that?” or “What did I say or not say?” and “What do I have to do differently the next time to get the result I want?
 
3) If you don’t like your outcomes, change your responses. If you keep on doing things the way you have always done them, you’ll keep on getting the same responses. In one of my previous articles I quoted an old mentor of mine who used to say “there are both stupid and dumb people in life. The stupid person makes mistakes; the dumb one makes the same ones over and over again.” If you use a particular form of marketing to gain new clients, and you don’t gain any, then you have to re-examine your methodology and try something different. Otherwise, you won’t get the new clients you are targeting.
 
4) Everything you are experiencing today is a direct result of choices you made in the past. Every experience in your life is a direct result of how you responded to a previous situation. After all, you only have control over THREE (3) things in your life: your thoughts, images you visualize, and your actions. How you use these determines your experience (So much for “controlling” our candidates. This is why recruiters need to learn to manage the process)
 
5) You either “create” or “allow” everything that happens to you. Some might disagree with this statement but according to Canfield, when he says create he means directly causing something to happen by your actions or inactions. An example might be that as a Recruiter, you have an opportunity to add an alternative income stream to your business model but you decide you don’t want the extra workload at this time. A few weeks down the road, you find out your major competitor in your geographic territory added the business you decided against and now he/she is doing an extra $5,000 a month in business.
 
6) Pay attention to “yellow alerts.” These are caution signals or advance warnings; telltale signs. comments from others, gut instinct and personal intuition, These include external, an example might be, your clients dropping like flies because they tell you they no longer like the service you offer them, to internal, that gut feeling that you had when the very last client you spoke with called and you just knew it was going to be bad news as soon as you picked up the phone.
 
7) Results don’t lie. The easiest way to determine what is and isn’t working in your life, both business and personal, is to examine the results you are producing. You are getting the clients or you’re not! You are closing deals or you’re not. You’re making new friends or you can’t seem to meet anyone.  

Bottom line here! The only way to change your results is to change your behavior.