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A few years ago my entire life changed, and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I decided that I had reached a point in my life where I wasn?t happy and needed to make massive changes. I began a long process of understanding what it would take to experience massive success and become a magnet for all things good in life. Addicted2Success was part of that journey, and so were a number of other great resources.
Below are my fourteen quick tips for turning your life around
1. Do a clean out of all your friends
I went through all my friends and asked myself one question, is this person helping me to succeed or bringing me down? If the answer was the latter, I deleted them from my social media and my address book, and moved on. This might seem drastic but sometimes it?s the tough decisions that will help you achieve massive success. The only exception to this was that if someone proved that they were going to change, then I allowed them back in again. Doing this made me feel like I had control over my life again.
2. Listen to audiobooks every single day
The one habit that started this whole transformation for me was listening to my very first audiobook, which happened to be ?Tony Robbins Get The Edge.? I started by deciding that I needed to do some exercise and that walking around my neighbourhood would be a good start. I could often be seen walking on the main roads of Melbourne, in the middle of the night, listening to these audiobooks and looking very animated because they were literally addictive. These tapes taught me the information that school did not; they taught me the basic success principles that I was now going to live my life by.
3. Start a LinkedIn page
For a long time, I avoided LinkedIn because I thought that people might bother me or that my privacy would be breached. I have now learnt that if you are authentic and genuine online and have nothing to hide, tools like LinkedIn can become very powerful.
?LinkedIn is for your network what venture capital is for startups. It allows you to scale at a rate that you never thought was possible.?
4. Remove negative media from your life
One of the best things I did was get back time in my day by not watching anymore TV and ditching the habit of watching or consuming any mainstream news. I replaced this wasted time with my new favourite hobby: reading Kindle books on my iPad. For many years, I was unable to read a lot of books because my eyes got tired from reading. Then I started reading on an iPad screen, which was much brighter and easier on my eyes. It was like discovering reading for the first time, and I begun to read anything from ?Think and Grow Rich,? to amazing entrepreneur books like Lisa Messenger?s ?Daring & Disruptive,? to books about Wall Street.
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5. Start juicing and rebounding now
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After attending a Tony Robbins seminar, I learned about the alkaline diet and took up drinking cold press, green juice every morning. Never have I felt so good and I now have all the energy to get me through the day. Gone are the headaches and rumbling stomachs because my body is finally nourished and alive again. If I suggest that you do one thing to turn your life around, it would be to take up the habit of juicing.
I also started using my net time (no extra time) by combining important mobile phone conversations with walks in the park. I found this to be relaxing, and it made me productive. I then added watching my favourite ?Ted Talks? while rebounding on a mini trampoline. This practice helps clear my lymphatic system and is a great way to get me started in the morning.
6. Walk away from conversations that involve negative people
When I decided to go and work for a corporate organisation, I started my career in a very negative team. I would often come to work and hear my fellow teammates talking about how much they hated life and the company we all worked for. They could often be seen planning coups and talking about various conspiracies. This was the best lesson of my life! I got to see exactly how I didn?t want to be and why I would never settle for less again. Even now, if I am part of a conversation and it goes down a road that is not congruent with my beliefs, I remove myself. Doing this is such a blessing in disguise because I feel like I am in control and not like life is in control of me, or worse yet, somebody else.
7. Don?t worry about the outcome of everything
Before I underwent this change is psychology, I used to try and worry about the outcome of everything. I use to think that I could always control the outcome. When I learnt that it was better just to have faith and know that every outcome happens for a reason, I had completely transformed for the better. When things that most people would consider to be major failures in life occurred to me, I would just shake it off and learn the lesson from it, knowing that every lesson was making me stronger and stronger ? I adopted the phrase, ?Fail Fast.?
8. Have faith in yourself
Something that rejuvenated me was learning to have faith in myself. I began to play a game with myself and tried to be in situations where I had completely no idea. I remember being asked to look after a billion dollar relationship with a client and having absolutely no idea. I said yes because I knew this was a chance to learn. From there, I always said yes to things that I thought I was not ready for. I knew that when I wasn?t ready, it was time to grow. Tony Robbins? seminar taught me that my strongest human need was growth, so I tried to feed this need as much as possible. Sure enough, the more growth I experienced, the more confidence I gained. This confidence led me to have faith in myself even when nobody else did.
9. Travel the world more
For a long time, I believed that working myself to death was what was required to achieve massive success. While hard work is definitely required, working yourself to the bone will not do you any favours. I began to start travelling more and before I knew it, I had flown to more than eight destinations in the space of 6 months. I found that this travelling helped put my life in perspective and gave me new ideas. Whenever a new thought occurred about something I should be doing in business, I realised that it had come from when I was travelling. It?s easy to get lost in your own community, so get out there and see the world because one day you might not be around to see it.
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10. Change your career
Most people fear change and the thought of trying another career is daunting to them. I began studying people?s LinkedIn profiles and looking at their various career paths. I saw one common pattern: almost none of the people I studied had actually done the same thing for their whole life. In fact, the ones that had reached the most success had usually taken a massive change in direction at some point in their life. I started to do the same with my own career and try new things out. I discovered that my network grew, and my inner circle of influence became stronger and stronger. Don?t be afraid of change ever!
I later started to play a game with job interviews. I purposely went and interviewed for jobs that were way out of my league that my education wouldn?t normally qualify me for. To my surprise, all the personal development and change of character became like a magnet. Everyone was offering me jobs that I could only dream of. When I asked them why the offered me the opportunity they told me that it was the confidence, attitude and way I went about things ? who knew this was the most important thing.
Want to know something even more strange? One of the jobs I applied for I was unsuccessful at getting. About 12 months later one of my work colleagues was successful at getting the same role. I asked her to ask the manager why I didn?t get it, and she did. The answer they gave? ?We thought you were overqualified and would get bored easily.? I was convinced that the reason I didn?t get it was experience, yet I was totally wrong. Always back yourself 1000% !
11. Reach out to successful people
As a joke, one of my closest friends dared me to try and contact people within my organisation that most would consider to be unreachable. I began ringing CEO?s, Heads of, General Managers ? anyone that I thought would see me as the lowest person in the organisation. To my surprise, I was able to get a meeting with every single one of them and talk to them about whatever I wanted. Never underestimate how much other people want to help you and share their advice. The act of doing this taught me about my beliefs and about people, which changed my perception of life.
12. Give as much as you can
Giving was something that I was always told was important but I didn?t really know the power of. In the early days of business, I thought it was all about protecting your intellectual property and not telling anyone about your ideas. What I now know is that ideas are not worth anything unless you do something with them. Even if you have a great idea, most people are too lazy or too negative to bother trying to steal it from you. I now tell everybody about all my ideas, and I often find that it opens doors I never knew existed. People now see me as an ideas man because I share everything I know. You will never have all the information about a particular subject no matter how hard you try.
Information is so easy to find thanks to the Internet so share away. I even share my address book because everyone is searchable thanks to LinkedIn and Facebook.
13. Attend more networking events
An easy way to expand your influence is to expand your network. I remember hearing a few weeks ago ?your network equals your net-worth.? A lot of people ask me where I get all my opportunities. My answer? They come from my network. I hear about things before anyone else because my network tells me about them. I do the same so now I have a mini ?Pay It Forward? game occurring within my network. Some of the best people I have connected with in the last few years I have met at networking events. No matter how exhausted I might be after work, I always try and attend events because it lifts my energy and opens my mind to ideas I haven?t thought of before.
14. Give everybody a second chance
Last but not least, I learnt to give everybody a second chance no matter what they had done. This forgiveness allowed me to see people?s weaknesses and understand that nobody is perfect. Giving in to accepting that no one is perfect has made others not expect me to be perfect. Nobody does anything to upset you on purpose; it?s how you?re interpreting it that is the issue.
So there you have it ? my top tips on how I turned my life around. So many people have asked me, and now you have all the knowledge that I had, to do the same. Even if you only do 3 of these tips, I promise you, you will experience a change in your life for the good.
GET OUT THERE, GET AMONGST IT AND GET EXCITED!
