Do you react to the external stimulus of the world without pause for thought? This invites the world to essentially control you! This is a static behavior that prevents creativity and fosters a stagnant existence. The world happens FOR us, not TO us! We are supposed to see the obstacles of life as lessons, face the inherent fears of failure, exercise our power of choice, and grow into our next greatest self. We MUST CHOOSE to pause, comprehend, and CREATE the best results with awareness and patience. Embrace every challenge as a precious lesson provided just for you as another stepping stone to your greatest potential! It IS that simple!

Start Creating Your Reality! Beginning with the end in mind means being clear about who you desire to be and where you desire to go! And then, travel that path with zeal and clarity. This habit is based on imagination and the fact that two different forms of creation exist: mental creation and physical creation. The mental creation comes first when you have a thought that leads to an idea! The physical creation begins when you take action to manifest that idea into reality. If you are not totally clear about the mental creation, and where you want to be, you are at the mercy of randomness and circumstances. You will have zero input on the output! You are already doing it, you just don’t know how you are doing it, or how to choose the end result!

Time Management is Life Management: Put Your Life Priorities First. Habit three is all about prioritization. If you LIVE the steps of habits 1 and 2, then you have your values and life goal very clear. This means you know what your priorities are… AND are not… All of your prioritization is done through the filter of your life goals. Now that you know what you need and desire, and have a burning motivation to do and be that, your YES’s and NO’s will become perfectly clear. That’s the bedrock of prioritization. Now that we know the WHAT, we need to manage the WHEN. Introducing The Time Quadrant. To be truly productive, we must spend most of our time on non-urgent and important tasks and activities. This way, we will rarely have to deal with urgent and important tasks, which heighten our stress, delivers sub-par results, and leads to negative self-talk! Choosing how, when, and for how long to ALLOW yourself to engage in the “NOT important” tasks and activities is also key to maintaining a powerful level of High-Performance productivity, minimal stress, and optimal results! It’s not difficult, it’s discipline!

Win – Win – Win is a character based approach to human interactions. We achieve this level after we acquire three essential character traits:
1. Integrity (sticking with who you are: feelings, values & actions)
2. Maturity (expressing your ideas and feelings with a balance of courage, humility, responsibility and consideration)
3. Abundance mentality (life contains no zero sum, there’s complete abundance & plenty for all)
The importance of integrity rests in the sense of aligning your true self with your public actions. Most people think in terms of either/or; Either you’re nice (and a push over)/or you’re tough (and a bully). This is called Victim or Viking mentality. Maturity, on the other hand, is that happy balance in between, that requires you to be empathetic and confident, considerate and brave, all at the same time. Therein lies the key! A Social Bank Account talks about human relationships in terms of emotional and human balance. When you approach life with a win-win-win mindset, you always treat people well and you make deposits in your emotional, Social Bank Account. If one day something goes wrong and you need a withdrawal, you can count on years of systematic balance surpluses, and people will be more than happy to help you. All of the other Human Interaction Scenarios are sub-par and only have merit in specific circumstances that are better suited for those approaches.
A. You Win / They Lose (egotistical and authoritarian with no sense of humility or ultimate responsibility)
B. You Lose / They Win (too nice and a pushover, with weak levels of awareness and character)
C. You Lose / They Lose (when two Win/Lose people butt heads with zero humility or integrity).
D. You Win only. (when you are in a competition or sport) ALL of these scenarios are 100% subject to AWARENESS and CHOICE!

Communication is the most important skill in our societal AND internal life, and most of us are poorly trained in basic listening, let alone empathetic listening. Indeed, in today’s society, very few people even listen at all. This should be a pivotal moment, because the foundation of influencing people, comes from first understanding them AND yourself. Understanding people requires the choice of skilled listening, which leads to that understanding. Then, and only then, to the necessary next level of clear communication! There are four levels of listening to ourselves AND others;
1. Ignoring,
2. Pretending to listen,
3. Attentive listening,
4. Empathetic listening.
Even most good listeners stop at the third level of attentive listening without even realizing it. This applies to listening to ourselves AND others. The TRUTH is the key! Attentive listening follows this pattern; Evaluate: Assess from your own frame of reference, and then agree or disagree. Probe: ask questions, from your own frame of reference. Advise: give advice based on your own frame of reference. Interpret: interpret their actions and feelings, based on your own frame of reference. EVERY time we use our own frame of reference, we project our own paradigms into the situation. this ignores the frame of reference from the other person/people, our spiritual awareness, skews the results, and often turns a win into a lose! Empathetic listening, on the other hand, removes your own frame of reference as much as possible. It looks at body language, tone of voice, emotional responses, spiritual signals and nonverbal gestures in a pure effort to understand the foundational TRUTH, and their/your frame of reference! I know, THIS IS DEEP! Let’s just focus on the non-spiritual aspect for now! I will teach you the “spiritual” aspect in your coaching program! Ultimately, empathetic listening means putting yourself in their shoes, feeling what they’re feeling, listening for their TRUTH! This is key because before people can move to solutions, they need to feel that you understand them. To be understood clearly, do not start with just logic but explain where you’re coming from emotionally, and THEN, start to communicate!

A Team is Stronger Than an Individual The idea of synergy is that the whole of a well functioning team or group is greater than the mere sum of its parts. The key to effective synergy is to really value the differences among us, and use each of our strengths to improve all the crucial aspects, and, ultimately, the end result of any given situation. So ask yourself: Do you want to be right, or do you want everyone to agree? Learn to embrace differences as a strength instead. Synergy also entails “flow” and perfect group automation as if the group was functioning as one. That’s when you achieve top results. This does not delve into the spiritual aspect of “SYNERGY” at this time! That part is inside my coaching program!

This is all about enhancing yourself through the four dimensions of renewal: Physical: Exercise, nutrition, and stress management. This means caring for your physical body, eating right, getting enough sleep, and exercising regularly. Social/emotional: Service, empathy, synergy, and intrinsic security. This provides you with a feeling of security and meaning. Spiritual: Value clarification and commitment, study, and meditation. In focusing on this area of your life, you get closer to your center and your inner value system. Mental: Reading, visualizing, planning, and writing. To continually educate yourself means expanding your mind. This is essential for effectiveness. To “sharpen the saw” means to express and exercise all four of these motivations regularly, congruently and consistently. This is the most important investment you can make in your life, as you are the instrument of your performance. It’s essential to tend to each area with balance, as to overindulge in one area means to neglect another. However, a positive effect of sharpening your saw in one dimension is that it has a knock-on positive effect in another, due to them being interrelated. For instance, by focusing on your physical health, you inadvertently improve your mental health, too. This, in turn, creates an upward spiral of growth and change that helps you to become increasingly self-aware. Moving up the spiral means you must learn, commit, and do increasingly more as you move upwards and progressively become a more efficient individual.