Empowered to Succeed

Track 1– Breaking Success Barriers

Empowerment is our ability to improve results by customizing personal attributes that directly relate to our effectiveness, the art of synchronizing our dreams and goals with the strength of our character.
I’m Mario Pinardo and I’m the founder of the achievement dynamics institute. I have had the honor and privilege of working with 1000s of clients assisting them in the process of their own personal success journeys since 1985.
This is an audio account of the methods, perspectives, and techniques I have come to realize and document for the sole purpose of creating a powerful and duplicate able program that enables both individuals and work teams to have and utilize the tools needed to travel well on the road success journeys.
Time and time again I’ve had the pleasure of witnessing ordinary people achieve extraordinary results. To better maximize your talents and abilities by realizing and most often surpassing their dreams, goals, and objectives.
This audio program is accompanied by a series of handouts that can be acquired at your convenience through the Achievement Dynamics website. It’s not necessary to have these handouts in front of you as you listen to the program the first time, but they will be helpful to you when you do get the opportunity to print them out for yourself. The website is AchievementDynamics.com, and the link identified as audio handouts will get you there.
To make it easier to internalize each segment, this audio has been separated into seventeen different tracks. After each track you will have the option to continue, reflect, or repeat the information you have just heard.
If you choose to reflect on the material pause or stop the audio. Then think of how well you make be currently implicating the methodology of perspective presented on both a personal and/or professional basis in your life. How valuable the principle may be if you were to put it to use and how you may be able to implement these ideas in your life now or in the future.
Keep an open mind. You have been able to achieve your current level of success by the thoughts and behavior patterns you have acquired throughout your life. To move forward from here we not only need to draw upon our past training, education, and experiences, but also establish future standards and circumstances to identify the characteristics required in supporting those goals, dreams, and desires.
If you feel at all dissatisfied with any results, situations, or circumstances in any component or area of your life, both personally or professionally, the first step to greater levels of success and happiness is to let go of the misconception of thinking, it can’t be changed, or the luxury of thinking is no use even trying.
We learn back in grade school that everything is in a constant state of change, well that also includes us. We are in a constant state of change. Progress and growth are only achieved through change. So why not develop and change into the person that brings into your life maximum satisfaction, and self-fulfillment.
If you only draw upon your past, you will only get as far as your present. When you think about your future you can then develop the skills needed to attract those circumstances into your life.
We will always move into the direction of our thoughts, habits, and beliefs, all of which we have the God-given ability to control and change.
Track 2– The Goal Setting Myth
My original vision back in 1985 was to develop a company that helped people set and achieve their goals. As I developed my clientele it didn’t take long to realize that setting goals was the easy part, it was achieving those goals that ended up being the hard part.
We’ve been told time and time again; “If you want to be successful goal setting was the way to get there, and if you are not making the progress that you would like to make or are capable of making it is because your goals are not clearly defined.” That statement was usually backed up by the fact that if you take the time to survey the people that are successful and ask each one how they did it, the common denominator would be that they had written down their goals along the way.
You think there you have it, the secret to success must be goal setting. Instead approach the survey in a different order. Ask people who have set meaningful and specific goals at certain times in their life how many they actually had accomplished. You are sure to find that a very small percentage of written goals are achieved.
Now where we get into trouble is when we begin to think that this goal setting stuff is working for everyone else but us. You can’t help but feel you must be the problem. It affects our belief system, our self-esteem, which can prevent us from going after more rewarding but challenging personal achievements.
Don’t get me wrong, goal setting is part of the answer, but it is far from the total solution. Most of the people who sincerely take the time to formulate their plans never follow through or bring them to completion.
Many of us have a sincere desire to achieve new levels of improved results, whether those goals lie in our careers, finances, health, fitness, or even personal relationships. It’s heartbreaking when people take the time to put together a plan but keep coming back to square one when it comes to actually experiencing breakthroughs, reaching those new heights of success, and having the staying power to keep on going.
There’s on old Chinese proverb that says a man can stare at a map for several years but gets no closer to his destination until he starts walking in that direction.
Everyone seems to be looking for the secret to success. I don’t know if it’s really a secret, it’s more like having a working system of applications that you coordinate together to progress along the way.
The methods and techniques of personal empowerment were developed by working with clients who sincerely care about making things happen for themselves. When you have had the opportunity, like I have, to travel with over 3,000 people along their personal success journeys, it becomes easier to separate the achievement myths from sound principles.
The purpose of our efforts is to create progress and momentum needed to create our goals. To truly make that happen we need a system to stretch ourselves into the person that can support our most important goals and objectives.
Along with goal setting you may have tried other applications that are helpful, like motivational books, tapes, and seminars, maybe even a few extensive and informative training programs. Most have very good information, unfortunately most often they fall short from being the Holy Grail we’re looking for.
You see, motivation is inspiration; training is information, but empowerment is transformation. It involves all the motivation and information you need, but also it gives you the tools and perspectives to create and transform yourself into the person that makes it all happen.
What’s important to understand and realize is that you’re not the only person who is struggling to put it all together for yourself. All the frustration you encountered when trying to achieve the expectations promised by motivation and training programs happen to most people. You need to understand that reality, so we don’t damage our self-esteem and give up on our most important dreams or possibly abandon the most important missions in life.
Track3– Developing Personal Characteristics
What is different about empowerment is that it is a self-perpetuating system. It includes goal setting and all the other success vehicles, but it also gives us the ability to identify and modify any personal characteristics needed to become more effective and ultimately improve the quality of your life.
To give an example of how we can have sincere desire, the right motives, and clear understanding of the actions we need to take and want to take and yet remain in mediocrity. Look at our society when it comes to personal fitness. If you were to ask yourself these three questions… Do you sincerely want to improve the quality of your life? Do you believe exercise improves the quality of your life? Do you currently know enough about exercise to start on an exercise program that improves your current physical condition? Most people would say yes to all three of those questions, but the most important question is Do you exercise? Nine out of ten people will admit that they believe in and know more about exercise than what their current behavior indicates.
So, getting more information about why you should exercise or how you exercise is not going to make any kind of permanent impact on the current level of exercise you’re currently doing. Poor physical conditioning is the number one cause of life-threatening diseases. All that knowledge and all of those good intentions get buried with all those poor souls who sincerely wanted to look good and feel their best.
Now taking the same scenario, how many of us believe in and no more about personal time management that our behavior currently indicates? Goal setting, communication skills; if you’re in sales how many salespeople know more about what they must do to multiply their new business leads and make more sales than what they do daily? Most salespeople adjust to making a mediocre living because they lack the tools and techniques to stretch themselves into making a better one. Most often the last thing we need is for someone else to tell us, one more time, why we should do something and how to do something.
Now don’t get me wrong, gathering ideas is always going to be helpful and informative. But it doesn’t give us the ability to transform ourselves into the person who will achieve success by using those ideas. Empowerment is the transformational link that connects dreams to reality.
Your dreams and life goals are kind of like a fitness program for your mind. You’re working on progressing, stretching, and becoming who you need to be to complete and perpetuate a natural and successful lifestyle. Knowing how to create progress, growth and change when it is necessary to do so becomes an important part of your character, so you are becoming more effective as a person.
By aggressively achieving your goals you are progressively becoming the person you need to be. As you build your dreams your dreams build you. The end truly justifies the means.
The biggest breakthroughs come by learning how to master the process, knowing how to coordinate the methods and techniques to a level where it becomes an internal part of your character. By practicing the fundamentals of empowerment, you are applying and slowly internalizing the characteristics to achieving your goals.
We simply become the person that will eventually achieve our hearts desires. To borrow a metaphor: while you are busy feathering your nest with a few golden eggs, you are becoming the goose that lays the golden eggs.
Now these fundamentals work in every aspect of your life. They can be easily applied on both a personal and professional basis. They can supercharge a work team and have a major impact when applied to professional selling. In fact, it is not unusual for a salesperson to actually double their productivity in a period of three months or less.
Let’s look at the top ten empowerment principles.
Track 4 – Conscious Awareness through Crystallized Thinking
We need to take the time to crystallize our thinking, which means writing down our thoughts and intentions. It raises the level of awareness in our life and enables us to become more productive and make more productive choices.
Here is an example; if you were to be asked do you have dreams, goals, values, priorities, strengths, and weaknesses, most everyone would say yes. But then if you were asked what are your top five most important goals you would like to accomplish in the next year, in their priority? What values do they reflect? What strengths can you capitalize on and what weaknesses must you overcome to bring you close to completion? But keep it simple, just the top five single most important goals your current day-to-day efforts and intentions are supposed to achieve.
We are each responsible for choosing the standards and direction for our own life. No one knows what you want better than you and no one is going to be sorrier than you if you don’t get it.
We get the term “crystallized thinking” by looking at the properties of water. The thought in our mind is like a fog, it’s easily dissipated. A thought that is verbalized is like water and once dumped over it spreads itself out and is vaporized. But a thought that is written is like a crystallized block of ice with three dimensions that can be shaped and viewed from all angles. Crystallized thinking gives us the capacity to think and reflect on our own thoughts.
To put the value of written thought into perspective here is a question that most third graders can answer. What is 627 plus 749?
Now very few people can answer that question off the top of their head and before you even attempt it, here’s the point. It’s a simple, basic arithmetic function, adding two three-digit numbers if we write it down. It becomes much more difficult to do it in our head.
But yet, most people are trying to do their entire life in their head; sorting out their finances, career opportunities, health issues, fitness, family, and home and for each of those areas becoming consciously aware of our long- and short-term objectives to have missions identified, values clarified, and priorities justified.
It’s not unusual to see people spend more time planning a two-week vacation that you do the rest of the year, and sometimes even the rest of their life and you wonder why they’re having a difficult time breaking success barriers or struggling to become the person they feel they need to be or are being called to be so they can achieve their personal life objectives.
Lilly Tomlyn jokingly once said, “I’ve always wanted to be somebody, but I should have been more specific”. Whether it be a sales career, managing others to greater achievement or improving the quality of our family life, it’s only through crystallized thinking that we can break through that ceiling of complexity that encompasses our lives and impedes our progress.
As we crystallize our thoughts, it challenges us to draw upon our lifetime of education and training experience and setting new standards and creating the best outcomes in our life.
Their value multiplies if you need to coordinate the ideas and actions of a work team. Even with the best intentions they rarely move in the same direction because of the different levels of expectation.
There is an abundance of wasted opportunity when even small teams of people are trying to move forward without a crystallized process to coordinate their efforts.
Track 5 – Creativity
Crystallized thought leads us to the next empowerment fundamental is creativity!
Knowing how to create opportunity in our life before it exists and then creating ways to make it exist in a certain period. Einstein was quoted as saying “Imagination is the cornerstone of human endeavor”.
If you think about it, the great geniuses of our time were people who were known to be highly creative. It’s been said “imagination creates visualized goals, and no person can be any greater than their own personal vision”. Within that statement there are three aspects or creativity: there is vision, imagination, and visualization. Vision is where we are going, imagination is how to get there, and visualization is a mental rehearsal of being there.
Here’s an example of how we might vacillate between the three. If you are thinking of building an addition onto your house, that’s vision, when you start thinking about how you will come up with the money to pay for it, that’s imagination, when you picture how you will enjoy it, that’s visualization. We use all three when it comes to capturing and creating opportunity in our life.
Also, imagination is a muscle that atrophies through lack of use. By finding ways to stretch the imagination it allows us to keep multiplying options and opportunities.
A few of the handouts on the Achievement Dynamics website help you by stretching the imagination.
Worksheet 1 is called “Create the Opportunities” which offers a series of different questions to identify a broad spectrum of dreams and desires.
Worksheet 2 is called “The Personal Goals Profile”, where you crystallize the most important opportunities you want to create in your life right at the present moment.
Worksheet 3 is called “Strengths and Weaknesses”; this one has you focus on more specific needs as you prioritize your action steps.
Worksheet 4 is called “Characteristics of a Winner”, which is a list of characteristics many achievers seem to have in common.
There may be many you already possess, but a few you personally would like to strive for.
Sometimes opportunity comes from a set of problems that need to be solved. We need to approach problems as opportunities for growth. You solve the problem, you get growth. It becomes exciting to see what happens next.
One of the best quotes I’ve ever heard addressing imagination and problem solving is “No problem can withstand the assault of sustained thinking”. I encourage you to print out the handouts on the website and take the time to reflect upon what answers to what question would have the greatest impact on your life.
Track 6 – Attitude Modification
We need to get our thought life in order through emotion management and attitude modification. Our thought life needs to be synchronized with our life goals and personal intentions.
There are two myths concerning attitude, the first is attitude is everything. Well, attitude is not everything, it’s only one of empowerment fundamentals. People have filed for bankruptcy with a positive attitude, have gotten divorced with a positive attitude, have not spoken to their adult children in five years, but they have a positive attitude about it. You can have a positive attitude and still not get positive results. So obviously attitude is not everything, but it is important. A few of the benefits of having a positive attitude are
1 It reduces stress
2 It improves our creativity
3 A positive attitude attracts positive people.
A negative attitude deflects people, except others with a negative attitude. There is something to that misery loves company theory. It’s important to obtain and maintain the right attitude.
How do you know when it is necessary to modify an attitude? That relates back to crystallized thinking. Our priorities and personal values work as channel makers for our life. Being clear of what they are offers the opportunity to reflect on them against desired action steps. Having conscious awareness of personal values and priorities makes sure the choices you make compliments who you are and what you are intending on achieving. After careful consideration, if a positive action step is met with a negative attitude, then it’s time to seriously reconsider readjusting the attitude.
Now there’s a second myth concerning attitudes and that is the expectation of just having a positive attitude. There are plenty of circumstances where the actions we need to take complement our priorities. They complement our value system, but they are at first uncomfortable to do. Cold calling would be an example for salespeople. When some people say, “just get a positive attitude” somehow, we are to magically transform our whole demeanor from “I can’t stand doing this” to “I can’t wait to get started”. This is another time when you may possibly feel everyone else can make that proverbial leap or transition but you.
There is a much more realistic steppingstone to adjusting attitudes, it’s a halfway point, that in most cases will get the job done. It’s called an attitude of expectance. When the action step that needs to be taken compliments our priorities and values, but the thought of doing it makes you irritable or uncomfortable it is time to deal with it professionally. It’s been said, “In life we can’t avoid pain, but misery is a personal choice”.
The secret of having an attitude of acceptance is to remove the misery. Remove the part that is keeping you from performing the task. A good example is shaving; most people shave something, yet, to my knowledge, I haven’t yet met anyone that looks forward to the process. Why we do it is because the benefits outweigh the inconvenience or the discomfort. We get over it and just do it. We don’t need to love it, but if we can accept it, we can get over it with very little stress.
It’s the ability to overcome negative feelings we sometimes possess towards positive actions, by doing that you remove the barrier to taking the action. Learning to accept what needs to be done enables us to do it more effectively and consistently.
We can also use affirmations, also called positive self-talk. They help us with the development of new thought power and create more positive beliefs. We become what we think about. These are positive statements that create positive images in our mind.
Our subconscious mind can’t take a joke, whatever statement, and pictures we feed it most often it believes. Our mind, also, can’t hold two opposite thoughts at the same time. Through the repetition of new, personal images and expectations our mind will start to perpetuate them on its own until they are the dominant belief. The old saying “I’ll believe it when ill see it” is in many ways the opposite of what is true. The reality is you will see it when you believe it.
Another aspect of getting our thought life in order is called Effective Thinking. Psychologists have an equation that says, Event + Perception = Reality. As events happen in our life it’s our responsibility to create the right mental framework or perceptions so we can move forward to positive results.
Producing the right mental framework creates a movement of heading towards a solution rather than being stuck in the problem. Studies have shown that effective thinkers stop themselves at least seven times a day to check to make sure the way they are framing their thoughts is synchronized with their best intentions.
For example, if you are going to take time out of your day to attend a business-to-business networking event and when you arrive you find that it is poorly attended a reactive attitude may be, “I know this is going to be a big waste of my time”. A proactive, much more effective attitude would be “I’m disappointed, but sometimes the best business contacts happen at more intimate events”.
This activates a mental process called perceptual set. In perceptual set, we magnetize to ourselves the things we see for ourselves. An example would be buying a new car; it could be a five-year-old model, but the day we get that car we start to notice all the other cars that look just like the one we just purchased. They were there the whole time, but once your mind wraps around and frames an idea it thinks its job is to attract that idea into your life.
Now the opposite of a perceptual set is called a paradoxical intention. Now, a paradoxical intention is where we mentally frame the event or situation we are looking to avoid. An example would be a baseball player hoping not to strike out, is picturing himself striking out, and therefore sabotaging his actions.
The solution is to concentrate on hitting a homerun. Keep in mind we think in pictures. Go for the visual solution, not avoiding the visual problem. The mind will look to attract what picture it is given. So going back to my original example; if you are thinking this networking event is going to be a big waste of my time, rather than consciously choosing to approach the meeting with positive expectations, you may actually create blind spots to any opportunity that may present itself. To reiterate a previous statement, we move in the direction of our thoughts.
Track 7 – Habit Formation – Habituation
Another empowerment fundamental is the art of habituation. It may sound like a big word, but it is the art of recalibrating our habits.
Consider the reality that you have what you have today because of who you are, and the fact that you have developed a habit of being that person. Every qualification for success is supported by habit.
Habits are to progress as machines are to momentum. The danger lies in not deliberately forming good habits; we sometimes unconsciously develop habits that limit our effectiveness and productivity.
People who only follow their natural likes and dislikes and natural tendencies only get so far. When people learn to master their habits, they master themselves. It stands to reason when people form successful habits, those habits form successful people.
Once we understand the process of habituation, we can apply it to form habits that pay big dividends. When we learn how to develop positive and productive habits like becoming more organized, always finishing what we start, and the habit of keeping commitments to our personal goals, we can make significant progress and have a positive impact on any area of our life.
Track 8 – Having a Strong Self-Concept
The greater belief you have in yourself and your intentions, the less things are likely to bother you. When you are confident in who you are and what you are all about, the more people will naturally want to help you with your ideas and the more likely they are to believe in you.
A big contributor to a positive self-image is to understand and appreciate the difference between progress and perfection. A sense of achievement builds self-esteem, and self-esteem gives us confidence for greater achievement.
We need to live a life of progress. When we look for progress, we always feel encouraged; when we look for perfection, we always feel discouraged. Living a life of progress gives us the opportunity to feel good about ourselves during the climb.
You may not have reached the top of your mountain, but it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the view along the way. If you are going to look for perfection you are going to feel unsatisfied and unfulfilled no matter how well, you are doing.
Whenever you can associate yourself with progress you realize it is okay to feel some dissatisfaction because you appreciate the reality that you are still growing and there is room for improvement. Being dissatisfied encourages us to keep on going, while being unsatisfied keeps us from enjoying where we are and what we are accomplishing.
As we learn to recognize progressive achievement it builds our confidence, strengthens our belief system, and continues to reinforce our self-concept along the way; a strong self-concept in our journey in setting and achieving goals.
We need to develop the habit of recognizing progressive achievements; it strengthens us, develops our character, and continues to reinforce the belief that we have what it takes to bring our dreams to reality.
Track 9 – Revising Comfort Zones
It is important to understand the power of comfort of comfort zones and how to alter them. It’s funny we even call them comfort zones; they really should be called what we are willing to accept zones.
Comfort zones start to appear as far back as grade school. For example, in fourth grade the teacher may assign a composition on the flag, due Friday. The first question we know to ask was “How many words does it have to be”? As we get older, they become more customized depending on the expectations of yourself that develop. You may walk into the first day of ninth grade history class and ask yourself, “I wonder what it takes to get a C in this class”.
We learn at a very young age to calculate what our minimum requirements are to complete a task at the lowest level we are willing to accept. Now, as we get older it becomes politically incorrect to verbally ask minimum requirement questions, but we have minimum requirements calculated in our mind. By the time that we become adults, we have jobs, we have families, we have health issues, and we have a lot of responsibilities.
We have both consciously and unconsciously figured out in every area in our lives what the minimum amount is to keep the kids happy, to keep your spouse happy, to keep the boss happy, and to keep the sales at a certain level.
A lot of folks may think that’s just human nature, but there is a clear underlying danger in following this so-called natural path. When the minimum you must do becomes the maximum that you are willing to do, the sum of your life is mediocre. That’s how we lose a great portion of our personal potential. We end up underutilizing our talents and abilities and miss the opportunity to develop more affective personal attributes.
Once we maximize our time and effort, we tend to develop routines that keep us producing results at the same level and drastically slow down continuous improvement in achievements and accomplishments.
When we max out how much time and effort, we can afford to invest in a particular area of our life we need to be able to move our comfort zones to the next level. That will enable us to adjust techniques, attitudes and habits that contribute to things like our time effectiveness, organizational skills, design ideas and creativity.
The ability to move comfort zones forward will direct us to what attributes that need to be recalibrated to eventually synchronize ourselves and our activities to the new level of achievement.
Another natural occurrence in productivity is that we have stronger times and weaker times. We have successful weeks, followed by not so successful weeks. We have good months followed by not so good months. But over a period, we tend to keep the same average. This is how we become stuck in productivity limbo.
A good metaphor to visualize as the way comfort zones are revised is a person walking up a flight of stairs, working a yo-yo. The yo-yo represents the natural tendency we have to have more effective times than others. The height of the yo-yo represents the actual overall quality of our results. Where halfway up the steps, the low point of the yo-yo was actually a high point a few steps back.
To put it into perspective, a good sales month in February may be a mediocre month in July, and that same level of productivity may feel very uncomfortable in November. When we understand how to continue this progressive path we can, at will, improve our productivity and the quality of our life.
Track 10 – Effective Time Management
When Benjamin Franklin said, “time is money”, he was only half right. Time is so much more valuable than that. The reason being is that it comes down to supply and demand. If we lose or waste our money, we can make that again; if we lose or waste our time, it’s gone forever.
To put this into perspective, there’s a product recently available called the life clock. It’s more like a computer than a clock. When you turn it on it starts by asking questions about yourself, the day you were born, and health questions concerning you and your family history, when you hit enter the left side of the clock tells you exactly how many days you have lived, the right side of the clock estimates how many days you may have left. You could say it’s a clock with a real wake up call.
It’s important to understand that time is a shrinking commodity. We need to appreciate a sense of urgency that time is constantly ticking away. Business and sales professionals that quantify results on a monthly basis usually are most productive during the last five days of the month because a sense of urgency will always create energy, creativity, and focus, both personally and professionally.
In addition to needing a sense of urgency, the biggest challenge in time management is good ideas have nowhere to go. Our lives are already filled to the brim with activity. The more we try to add good ideas into our life, no matter how important, the more frustrated we get. We need to be aware of what is called the time benefit ratio. We need to ask ourselves “Is the time in putting into this equal or greater to the benefits I’m getting out of it.
The Five Ds of Time Management Design, Disregard, Diminish, Delegate, and Do it!
First D- Design, make a list of your activities that would have the greatest impact on your productivity and the quality of your life.
Second D- Disregard, start identifying those activities that you could disregard, that is, if you stopped it completely it would not have any significant impact on the quality of your life.
Third D- Delegate, if someone else was able to do it for you, the cost of the delegation could offer the ability to reinvest that time elsewhere.
Fourth D- Diminish, if you did it less would it give you the luxury of reinvesting that time into more meaningful activities. For instance, the average person watches 5-6 hours of T.V. a day. If they cut back T.V. watching by two hours, just Monday through Friday, they have ten hours per week to reinvest that time into something more meaningful. Now this adds up, in a month’s time, that’s 40 hrs., an entire work week. In a year’s time, that’s 12 work weeks, three months of what would be considered the time it takes to work a full-time job!
Once we take an activity inventory, the total amount of hours that can be reinvested over a week multiplies throughout the year it could realistically be more than what is needed to complete many of your most important goals and objectives. We have an abundance of time if we use it appropriately. From the time we are born to the time we die it doesn’t stop. It replenishes itself every day. It’s our responsibility to use it wisely. A person that says “I don’t have enough time” is like a fish saying “I don’t have enough water” while it’s swimming through it. Stop at the cemetery those people ran out of time.
D number Five- Do it, taking the designs, you created and integrating them into your life while you have the time. Another aspect of time management is called multi shifting. Most people are aware that the term multi-tasking means doing more than one thing at a time.
Multi shifting means accomplishing many important things over a predetermined time by coordinating and focusing on accomplishing one thing at a time. We wear many hats in our life that makes us responsible for many things. We may be caring for surviving parents, sharing your life with a spouse or life partner, or maybe you have one or more children. We also need to take care of our health and all the responsibilities of being an effective provider. In addition, if you work for yourself or in sales you must constantly juggle client service, new business development, and coordinating operations, just to name a few.
To best explain multi-shifting all you need to do is look at a professional football team. At first glance you see one team, however if you look more closely you will see three distinct teams that make up the one, offense, defense, and special teams. You are not running your offense, defense, or special teams at the same time – that would be multitasking.
You are shifting the entire focus on the field on an as need basis one aspect of the team at a time throughout the game. At the drop of the ball the next team takes the field. At any given moment the needs of the needs in the field may completely change into a totally different set of objectives.
When we go to work on Monday morning you can’t just tell our families “I’ll see you on Friday afternoon”. Throughout the week we need to keep shifting into our different responsibilities. The best approach is to have an overall effective plan that we can coordinate and execute throughout the week that needs to be accomplished. It is the art of designing and knowing how to shift focus and shift again.
We need to understand how to integrate several productive activities over a period of time so we can be effective in all the areas we need to get positive results. Multi shifting allows you to work in your effective zone. That is when we are shifting smoothly from one need to another. The most effective action items are being addressed and acted upon in some sort of systematic fashion. You are confidently shifting from focus area to focus area.
We also need to know what it feels like to be operating in our effective zone and when to recognize when we have fallen out of it. The goal isn’t to be in the zone 100% of the time but to know when and how to turn it on, to be operating there most of the time when it is necessary to be as effective as possible.
Moving out of your effective zone is mostly caused by disorganization, unclear priorities, or self-sabotaging thoughts. Mastering the art of multi shifting and working in your effective zone is the point of impact that enables you to turn your dreams to reality.
Track11 – Continued Focus and Concentration
They say that 90% of failure is caused by incompletion. We are on the right track, but somehow, we got off track and never got back again to complete the goal.
A client once said no matter how hard she tried; she was constantly getting interrupted and derailed throughout the day. You can count on the fact that on a long road to good intention there will be roadblocks, setbacks, and unexpected detours.
We certainly need to work on minimizing the disruptions, but the real question lies in how long it takes to get back on track again when it does happen. Some people get off track at 10 o clock in the morning and are off track for the rest of the day. Some people get off track Tuesday morning and are off track for the rest of the week, and I think we all know someone who got off track around age 23 and has yet to recover.
If we are going to bring our goals to completion that means being able to refocus on what we are doing and get back to what needs to be done.
We also need to fight against the law of diminishing intentions, when we come up with these wonderful ideas and sincere intentions on how to improve results, like exercise, asking for more referrals, getting more organized. After we have missed the mark a few times, we mentally lower the bar. When we miss the mark a few more times we finally keep lowering the bar until it brings us back to square one.
The real danger again lies in damaging your confidence in yourself, your ideas and your ability to execute them effectively. We need to learn how to evaluate our actions, look for progress, then refocus and recommit to our intentions on a regular basis until we are consistently getting the results we want.
That is the only way we are going to perpetuate positive change. Living a life of progress will ensure that what is at first extraordinary in time becomes ordinary.
Track 12– Your Adversity IQ
What is your adversity IQ – your bounce back ability, knowing how to deal with setbacks, mistakes and disappointments.
You’ve got to be able to emotionally take a punch, shake it off in a reasonable period of time, and keep fighting.
1. It’s knowing how to let go of disappointments and to focus on what you need to keep doing to keep your goals and future in mind.
2. Knowing how to work side by side with your fear and not to be afraid to be afraid. If you need to work outside your comfort zone for a while, so be it.
3. It’s knowing how to use your problems as steppingstones for progress. Problems give us the need to create solutions, and those solutions are often the breakthroughs we need to get us to the next level of our success.
Building our adversity IQ is similar to building other types of muscle. Every time we work outside our comfort zone and through our pain zone to achieve our goals, we add another layer of emotional muscle.
As our confidence grows, we gain mental assurance and stamina to know how we can fight back from adversity again and again if necessary. The more confidence we have the more risk we are willing to take because we better believe in our ability to recover from setbacks and learn from them. Goals automatically create.
1. A set of problems that need to be solved.
2. Weaknesses that need to be fixed
3. Setbacks that need to be dealt with come with the territory of progress, growth, and change. If we never learn how to work through these types of circumstances constructively, we’re dead in the water.
Having a strong adversity IQ allows us to keep doing the right things in the heat of battle instead of throwing in the towel.
In 1982, I was watching an interview on the Today Show with Willa Shoemaker, one of the world’s greatest jockeys. After he had broken another record, he was being interviewed by Jane Paulie and she posed this question, “If you had one jewel advice to all young jockeys just starting out in their career what would that be?” He paused, looked into the camera and said, “When you lose your head your ass will follow”. That sums it up precisely.
Track 13 – Balanced Effectiveness
Creating balanced success is achieved by possessing the willingness and know-how to identify and modify our weaknesses.
Keep in mind the word potential means it hasn’t happened yet. The quickest and most effective path to improved results isn’t in increasing the time and effort already spent on the same old activities. The fastest way to move forward is through finding and fixing the weaknesses that have the highest payoff returns.
For instance, a person in sales may be an expert at explaining his product but really limps along in creating new opportunities for business. Over the years I’ve met a lot of self-proclaimed, great salespeople who are starving. They can tell you all about their product and their competition, but they can’t tell you where their next five sales are coming from.
To put this need for balance into perspective I’ll share with you a personal story. I’m at the gym, in the weight room and I hear this moaning coming from down the hall. The best way I can describe it is…it sounded like a man giving birth. There was a number attached to each moan four, five, it seemed like the walls were reverberating with every numeral. I couldn’t resist but walk out of the room I was in, walk several feet down the hall, and there I was standing in the doorway of a room I’ve never been in. This was the heavyweight room. I was standing about ten feet away from a man on a bench press. Now this guy had a barrel chest. He had a neck the size of my waist, in fact…he had no neck, it was just two ears attached to shoulders. He had a bar with weights that looked like manhole covers against his chest with two guys the size of Kodiak bears spotting him. Now he would vocalize this long-drawn-out moan with ever life “eight, nine” all the way to fifteen.
By the time he was finished he was dripping sweat and totally exhausted. After a few minutes he catches his breath, gathers his strength, and slowly stands up. He has this large upper body mass of muscle. He looked like a hairy Michelin man with one exception, he had these bird legs, which were possibly regular sized man legs, but they were totally out of proportion with the rest of his body. I was waiting for him to start to lean to one side and not be able to catch himself and just topple over. I wondered when he got home, if he posed in front of a mirror that only reflected his body from the waist up.
The point I’d like to make is this, with all the time and effort he was putting out at the gym, was it helping him improve his health or total body appearance? In the world of body building, he could never be Mr. Universe. No matter how much effort he puts forth improving the areas that were already developed.
How many of us put vast amounts of time and energy into talents and abilities that we are already doing well and ignoring the areas that would make the biggest difference in our progress and our life.
Sometimes we have these mental mirrors that keep us from seeing the total picture. We need to have the courage and the ability to see the picture as clearly as possible and address the weaker parts of our talents, abilities and character. Or the weaker parts of the plan we are hoping to succeed with.
Whether it is the design of the plan, personal habits, attitudes, or areas of a work team, to identify and modify weaknesses gives us the biggest breakthroughs and captures the most opportunities. Most often it’s not necessary to have big fixes. Keep in mind the truth that big doors swing on small hinges.
Those small changes very often possess the difference between being stuck or making progress, success, or failure. We don’t have to be great at everything, there are many things we are much better off delegating, we can’t ignore doing the important things well. We need to keep finding ways to get the high payoff activities done effectively. You can only drop so many balls before it costs you the game.
Track 14 – Inventory Surveys (Powerlines)
The worksheets and the audio handouts titled “Inventory Surveys” (now called Powerlines) are designed to identify strengths and weaknesses in specific areas.
Column 1 represents the many components of that particular focus area. Make any adjustments that will customize it to your specific needs. An example would be the career wheel. To achieve the greatest level of success in this area we need to be able to do many things effectively, things like personal time management, being well organized, having clear goals and objectives just to name a few. If you’re in sales, some of the things you need to be good at are prospecting for new business, presentation and communication skills.
Column 2 is where you will evaluate from 1-10 the level of importance this component has to the overall success in this area of your life, ten being of high importance.
Column 3 is where you will evaluate your current conditions as it relates to your effectiveness, 10 being completely satisfied with your current condition.
The inventory surveys will give you a good reading of where improvements would have the greatest impact. Identify the areas where the high priority items are matched with low level of effectiveness. In your personal quest to break success barriers, these are sign posts that say, “Start here”.
Track 15 – Team Empowerment
I mentioned earlier that empowerment had a major impact on work team applications.
Those who had the responsibility of managing a team of people in the work environment understand the challenge of getting everyone on the same page in a supportive, positive, and creative workflow.
Team empowerment offers the opportunity to develop and cross train individual’s strengths and experiences. It also supercharges the creative process because you have a built-in master mind group and support team.
Keep in mind as the team works on the group approach each team member is applying personal empowerment to their skills and effectiveness. You have each cog of the wheel becoming more personally effective as you have the greater team mechanism turning and moving more productively.
The team approach is slightly different from the personal applications. In the individual approach values and habits are identified. As it relates to team empowerment this translates to operating policies and procedures.
There is also a strong emphasis on communication and positive team support for individual growth as well as the growth and effectiveness of the team. All of the empowerment fundamentals still apply, but the energy of the group perpetuates much faster progress than an individual working on their own.
As part of the empowerment system, all are encouraged and directed on how to develop and maintain a power team of either other Achievement Dynamics clients or your own work, home, or social circles.
Support and accountability are major ingredients to perpetuating change. A work team wheel usually possesses the following spokes: team communication, team and individual goals and objectives, organized processes, attitude and morale, training and education.
You can customize it from there.
Track 16 – Isolate, Design and Modify
We need to isolate and design our life areas independently, but we need to learn how to execute our life activities interdependently. We need to methodically synchronize our activities together with our attitudes and habits to keep things rolling in the right direction.
At first, this process may seem complex or overwhelming. The reason is because life is complex. We need to work through that ceiling of complexity so we can assess our need and drive change in the right direction. Not choosing to employ the empowerment process doesn’t make the complexity disappear.
The truth is you either pay now or pay later. It is that ounce of prevention verses pound of cure reality. If we neglect areas of our life that are our own personal responsibility to nourish, develop, and advance things eventually begin to break down. Once things begin to break down then it really does become overwhelming to put back the pieces together again in a healthy working order.
Keep in mind we are goal seekers by nature; we feel most enthusiastic about our life when we are stretching ourselves and our capabilities in a meaningful series of goals that relate to who we are. It’s about moving through a sequence of one positive achievement after another as we expand and experience our life.
It is more fun to experience change by your own design than it is to be at the mercy of adjusting and accepting what changes happen through lack of focus and maintenance.
Too many times, people just adjust to lower standards simply because they don’t know what else to do as their life evolves. Becoming more proactive in our life’s evolution prevents many problems and presents an abundance of opportunities to experience and enjoy life.
Most of our life goals give us a brief window of time to capture the results and happiness we want to experience and then the opportunity is gone forever.
Some examples would be.
 • Only having so many years to effectively enjoy and raise our children.
• Making a success of our careers
• Planning for retirement
• Taking care of our health now, so as we get older it takes care of us.
• Having a positive impact on other people in society
What is your PNL for your life? In business we know that PNL represents profit and loss, on the personal side PNL stands for purpose and legacy.
Would you be satisfied knowing the greatest thing you ever achieved in your life has already happened?
Life itself presents the ultimate window of opportunity. Maybe we need to reassess our purpose from this point in time as we move forward in our lives. Your life is yours to use and enjoy and if possible, leave your mark. Some people leave shiny imprints; others leave dark impressions; some people leave no mark at all.
We need to cut through the wall of complexity that consumes our life and keeps us from breaking through success barriers. To be more effective we need to approach empowerment in three stages.
• First, we need to isolate areas of desired change.
• Second, we need to take the time to design our needs, and
• Third we need to apply and recommit to the fundamentals that create positive growth and transformation. As you get better at the applied principles you are also progressively achieving results in the most important areas of your life.
It’s the progression of our goals that eventually leads to the achievement of them. With the focus on progress, the extraordinary eventually will become ordinary.
Every time you recommit to your objectives it becomes easier to produce momentum in your personal development and your professional results.
Until we know how to isolate and organize our needs on all three levels design, attitude, and habit, it’s only one big guessing game on what to work on next.
Sometimes we take a lot of shots in the dark that only produce a minimum amount of success and sometimes we never address the real issues that would have the most positive impact on our life.
Thank you for listening.
Travel well, in your life journey!
Mario Pinardo
Founder and CEO
Achievement Dynamics Institute