Create momentum & achieve your goals

'Success is often the result of taking a misstep in the right direction.' Al Bernstein

Have you ever stayed in your comfort zone and thought that eventually something exciting would happen to you and life would get more interesting and you would eventually start living your goals? How much are you sacrificing by waiting around for that special something or someone to whip you off your feet?

Well, I hate to break it to you, 9 times out of 10 this doesn't happen. You need to create it and make your dreams come true! People often worry about making mistakes. Yet, mistakes are merely learning opportunity and teach us which things work. The higher your number of mistakes, the higher your chances of success.

Do you think Edison gave up after his first failed attempt to make the light bulb? Do you think he gave up after his second attempt? No! It took thousands of failed attempts. Edison didn't see these attempts as failures, but rather thousands of ways how NOT to create the light bulb!

Create momentum and achieve your goals, by taking action.

The secret to getting what you want - focus!

How many times have you woken up, stubbed your toe, and the day has gone down hill from there? You miss the bus, are late for work, miss out on sales opportunities and then get "plopped" on by a bird?

Other days, you are walking on sunshine. Everything you touch turns to gold, you convert every sales call you make, you open the post to find a cheque you'd forgotten about. Life's Great.

Well how can you always be like the second example? The answer is simple, focus on what you want. As we've talked about before, our brain sorts all the stimulus that is coming to our nervous system. So choose what you want to focus on.

If you want to be happy, start acting happy. If you want to convert sales calls, be professional and act like nothing is going to knock you down.

"That's great Jen, but it's not that easy" I hear you saying. If you need a helping hand, put you favourite song on, do some exercise or just start laughing. The endorphins in your body, will make it impossible for you to be anything but happy. Do all three, and you'll have a spring in your step in seconds!

Try it and see.

Accepting mediocrity - Why 70% of people are unfufilled at work

We spend 80% of our waking hours at work, or worrying about work related issues according to UK author, John Lees. Yet, research shows that only 30% of us have the job of our dreams or really love our work. In an age where there is more choice and more new types of positions being created each year, why is this so? Why is it that more of us are getting burnt out and that stress levels are going through the roof?

"It's a bad time in the market!" "I'm lucky to have a job," "I'm too old," "I haven't got the education"...the list goes on, do these comments sound familiar at all?

Most of us are allowing these beliefs to hold us back from finding the role we really want and are instead, accepting mediocrity. Yes, the market is more competitive than it was 9 months ago, however, we must remember that at that time we were experiencing the highest growth in business activity and the lowest unemployment rates for decades.

To get the job you really want, you will have to be realistic and understand that there may be more competition in the market right now. With the right commitment, motivation and preparation you can overcome this. Two of my clients have secured their ideal jobs in the last week AND got pay rises.

Want to know HOW you can do this too? Keep logging on to find out more about my upcoming tele-seminar 'How to get your dream job.'

Oztag - A metaphor for life

I was playing Oztag last night (mixed, touch rugby league for all you non-Aussies) and it dawned on me, that it was a great metaphor for life.

The tactics are pretty simple. You create momentum in attack, take the first 2 tackles and then try something new and you stay strong in defense and don't let anyone through the gaps.

Creating momentum is just like taking action. If we stand still in life nothing will change and things tend to happen to us. If we take action, we can experience new things and then change our course if it didn't provide the outcome we expected. Create momentum and attack your defenders!

This also leads nicely into taking the first couple of tackles. The reason for this in any rugby game is to gain metres. In life, if you hit a road block or obstacle take it and instead of beating yourself up for taking a "wrong turn" ask yourself, "what can I learn from this?" Remember there is no such thing as a bad decision, just one you can learn from. If it doesn't work, try something new. If we try as many options available to us, we are more likely to get to where we want to be....it's the law of averages. As Einstein said 'The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and again and expecting a different results'

In defense, be strong and don't let anyone through the gaps. This relates to our commitment in life to achieve our goals. Once you have decided on where you want to go, do everything you can to get there. Spend time with the people who will help you and support you in your pursuit, give yourself a support network and make it so that you simple can't not achieve your goal. Allowing people through the gaps who zap your energy or are extremely negative will break your defensive line if you listen to and take onboard their negative talk. I hear you saying, 'but I thought you said we need to try different things?' Yes, we do need to demonstrate behavioural flexibility when it comes to trying different ways of getting to our goal, we also need to keep our eye on the goal and our commitment high.

Enjoy your game of life, after all it is a game!

Eat Your Frog!

Do you procrastinate over things you know you really ought to do?

After days of "meaning" to do your task, do you ever say, "today is definitely the day" only to check the clock later that evening and realise you haven't done your task, again?

Eat your frog!

I found out about this concept about a month ago, and now I can't believe I hadn't thought of this sooner. Mark Twain said that suppose tomorrow morning, the first that you do, is catch a live frog, stuff it into your mouth, munch it down and swallow it all up. That is pretty much as bad as the day can get, isn't it? Therefore every morning, find the ugliest most repulsive task that you have on your to-do list (i.e. your frog) and knock that off before getting on to doing anything else. Once you’ve got that done, the rest of the day seems so easy.

Eat your frog before you do anything. If it's exercise, do it in the morning before work. If it's a work task, do it before you even check emails!

For a more in depth read on this, I would highly recommend Brian Tracy's - Eat That Frog.

Survive Redundancy

With redundancies on the rise due to the global financial crisis, we have already seen mass redundancies across many Australian industries. The Reserve Bank of Australia is predicting that as a result of the economic slowdown, 100,000 people will lose their jobs in the next 12 months – pushing the unemployment rate to five per cent. As of November 2008, unemployment sits at 4.4%. Now is a crucial time to start practising techniques that will increase your chances of keeping your job.

Firstly, as with any goal it is important to know your outcome so that you can work towards it. Make sure that both you and your bosses expectations of your work align.

Be productive! How many hours a week do you waste going for a coffee? Talking to colleagues? Busying yourself with admin? A study conducted in 2005 by Microsoft found that Australian employees are unproductive for 2 out of 5 days a week. Other studies have found that workers are unproductive for 90 days a year due to lack of planning or poor management.
Continue with this behaviour and you are in the firing line for redundancy! Be productive and work for 8 hours a day. Leave 5 minutes earlier and get your coffee on the way to work. Write a to do list for the following day before you leave the night before to stop time wasting in the morning.

Give up the email addiction. When the email alarm goes off, do you quickly jump onto your email screen? You are not alone, the eRoi Email Addiction Survey found that 66% of people read email seven days a week and expect to receive a response the same day. If you are addicted to email you are severely wasting your time. Every time you are distracted, it takes approximately 20 minutes to get back to where you were prior to the distraction. In 2005, a psychiatrist at King’s College in London administered IQ tests to three groups: the first did nothing but perform the IQ test, the second was distracted by e-mail and ringing phones, and the third were stoned on marijuana. Not surprisingly, the first group did better than the other two by an average of 10 points. The e-mailers, on the other hands, did worse than those on marijuana by an average of 6 points!

I challenge you to try these three simple steps over the coming 2 weeks and see how much more praise you get from your manager. If you have any comments, questions or would like more techniques, I'd love to hear from you.

Look Daddy, I can fly!

As a young child we believe we can do and be anything we want, we literally believe we can fly. We live in the moment and struggle to differentiate between reality and make believe. This beautiful period is called the Imprint Period and lasts until the age of about 7-8. Throughout this period we are absorbing information around us like a sponge and storing it at an unconscious level where it later influences our beliefs and values. We also develop what is termed a critical faculty. The critical faculty separates the conscious and unconscious minds and acts as a reality checker based on the information we have absorbed during the Imprint Period (explaining why children tend to stop having imaginary friends around age 7 or 8).

Our senses are constantly bombarded with approximately 2 million bits of information, such as sights, noise, tastes and background noise. If we took notice of all this information, we would go insane. Our brain therefore sorts through this information based on our experiences, values, beliefs etc to provide us with our own perception of the world. Have you ever bought a new car and then suddenly seen the same make or colour of car on EVERY street corner after that? Your unconscious is sorting for it!

As the Imprint Period influences our values and beliefs and then our critical faculty uses these as a point of reference for future decisions and beliefs, as adults we can be held back be our beliefs and decisions made as a young child.

For example, a mother tells a young child "you will never be a Doctor as we can't afford the University fees" the child may store this information unconsciously, as "you will never be a doctor." Over time this could develop to be "you will never have what you want in life." and influence future decisions and behaviours. The mother in this example was not meaning to be malicious and made the remark quite flippantly.

Are you making decisions based on long standing beliefs from childhood? Just think of what you can achieve if you blast through these limiting beliefs and decisions, change your focus and open yourself up to new possibilities and opportunities.

Unlock your true potential.

Spring Clean your life – Unlock your true potential!


I made a decision today to spring clean my flat and as it became tidier, it dawned on me that it had really been bothering me. We'd had family here all over Christmas and everything was out of place, untidy and dusty. Once it was cleaned, I began to look at everything in a new light. Instead of feeling anxious about my home environment, I was able to focus that energy on how we could spend our day in a more positive frame of mind and focus on more important things to do.

This really got me thinking, how often do we get held back by things that we do not even realise are doing it? The vast majority of us are carrying around excess baggage which is stopping us achieve our goals. It could be limiting decisions and beliefs, friends and family which zap our energy, stressful jobs and over commitment.

If you want to achieve your goals and really unlock your true potential then there's no better time to clear out this excess baggage than now. Just see what happens