Self Improvement Tips

Let’s assume that you are out and about and networking regularly.  What that means is that you consistently attend the same meetings.  That is good.  It is not possible to build deeper relationships without being consistent in your networking. Yet, things aren’t coming together.  You are spending the time, but you are not getting to have deeper relationships.  As a business coach in Houston and The Woodlands I have had clients who get frustrated.  In fact, over my career I have become frustrated, too.  I join a group and believe that good things are going to happen, and they don’t. The first thing you may do is start questioning yourself.  This starts to bring in doubt.  Doubt, if you are broadcasting it, is not fertile ground for building deeper relationships.  Looking at yourself is a good idea, but over the years as a personal development business coach in The Woodlands and as a personal development business coach in Houston, I ...

“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand brake on.” — Maxwell Malt Do people possessing high self-esteem achieve greater success in life? You may have heard from many people that they want to increase their self esteem. They believe that once their confidence and self esteem is high, they’ll be able to achieve more and greater successes. While that’s a valid fact that high self esteem assists you in achieve all you want in your life, the mistake most of the people make is how they think about self-esteem. It’s not a thing to be increased or decreased! Instead, self esteem is the process of esteeming yourself. In other words, the process of boosting your self esteem starts with thinking of how valuable you are and treating yourself the same. Self Confidence is closely related to self esteem. It is an external behavior that stems from a high self esteem. Self confidence means believing in yourself that you can be effective in the world, feeling able to han...

Change, in most instances, is not easy. Why? It presents a whole new set of challenges to the people who have to learn to master it, not to mention, the other who work with them who can be directly or indirectly in the performance of their work be affected by the change. As we know when we throw a stone in the middle of a calm pond, the waves it creates will wash up on the shore in ways that we cannot see. To increase the odds of successful change we must simplify it to help those who are going to apply it. To simplify change we must make it something that people can remember and recall how to do it. When change can be remembered and recalled it can be applied. Simplification is important in another critical way. Simplification can allow us to achieve 80% of the desired results rapidly. Individuals love results. How do we do that? We focus on the 20% of all factors that are the key in allowing us to reach 80%. Moving rapidly to 80% keeps momentum and still is much better than ne...

Both success and failure involve future consequences, namely inevitable rewards or unavoidable regrets resulting from past activities. So what do we need to do daily to be on the path to success? We must develop the discipline to look down the road every day. Why are new disciplines so important? They cause us to amend our thinking to keep us on track to creating the successful future we desire. Also, disciplines tend to multiply. We start with one new successful discipline and we build momentum and self-confidence to develop others. Success is about paying attention to what we are doing each day to move us to the future we desire. Failure, on the other hand, is largely a function of neglect. And, not doing the things we know we should leads to guilt and an erosion of self-confidence. When our self-confidence diminishes, so does our activity. We must stay focused on our vision of a successful future. The journey toward the good life begins with a serious commitment to chan...

If you are looking for the magical concept, the short course that will turn your life around or, to create in a few short days or weeks your escalator to success then this is not the place for you. Self improvement takes the creation of a vision. And, it takes time. With your vision you how have a map for your journey of self improvement. The journey of self improvement demands that you develop new skills and disciplines. If we keep the same skills and disciplines, nothing changes. Self improvement takes time. Thankfully, all of us have 24 hours in a day. Rich, poor, happy or unhappy all of us have 24 hours in our day. The choices we make will either move us forward in our self improvement or hold us back. Self improvement takes effort. There is a story of a man sitting in a small cabin on a cold night. He has a wood stove that is not giving him any heat. He looks at the stove and finally shouts at it, “Give me the heat. Then I’ll give you the wood.” Like the wood stove, in...

At twelve years old I didn’t have a good attitude. I didn’t understand input, output and reward. On this particular day I had a bad attitude. It was normal for this day every year. As a young boy who loved to play there were other things I would rather be doing. Work around the house was not for me. Every Spring my Dad and I would go out on our half acre and clean up the property after the Winter storms. There were always many tree limbs and sometimes fallen trees. We did not have a chain saw and I had to chop all the limbs and trees with an axe. It was very hard work. And here was the worst part. My Dad always picked the first nice weekend day in Spring when all of my other friends were out playing. Oh, did I mention, I hated chopping wood. And once we finished chopping and stacking the wood we had to rake the yard. This particular Spring day was no different than in past years. I wanted to play with my friends and here I was in work prison. This particular morning the more I t...

As we saw in the previous post, the word “network” was first used in England in the 1550’s to describe a finished product, a fish net.  A fish net was a piece of network. When you think about it, a nice piece of network is about catching more fish, and as time went on, bigger fish.  In personal business coaching in The Woodlands and in personal business coaching in Houston , I collaborate with many different business owners and types of businesses.  They are all casting their nets to market their business, and in many cases, to expand it. Some small businesses do not need or want to grow.  Even the owners of these businesses still network.  Yet, instead of doing it to bring in more business, they are doing their networking with their professional contacts, the salespeople and suppliers they deal with, to be able to be on the cutting edge of introducing new products at competitive prices as well as keeping a cost advantage and even supply of the foundational...