“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” Nelson Mandela
We should all take note of this. Nelson Mandela believes in everything he did. Even all those years in prison could not make him a lesser man. He always stayed positive and some of his positive sayings are frequently quoted.
At the centre of your being you have the answer; you know who you are and you know what you want. Lao Tzu
We all know that perhaps one of the greatest sources of positive sayings and quotes comes from ancient Chinese philosophy, and Western philosophers like Socrates, Epicurus and Senica and Buddhism.
Two Chinese philosophers who were credited with a numerous amount of the positive sayings and quotes were Lao Tzu (or sometimes written as Laozi) and Confucius. There seems to be some confusion about their year of birth but history says they could have lived between 600 BC and 400BC.
Lao Tzu is known as the father of Taoism (pronounced Daoism). Taoism consists of two separate streams – one is the school of philosophy and then there was a system of religious beliefs that arose over 500 years later.
Confucius was the founder of Confucianism and he was a very influential figure in Chinese history. It is an ideology and never really associated with a religion. Confucius was a teacher and many of his sayings became well know proverbs. His teachings were mainly about being a good and virtuous person and improving your own character.
Socrates was virtually a teacher and thinker the same as Confucius. He believed in teaching through dialogue but also espoused goodness and wisdom but considered himself an ignorant man. Because he believed that he was guided by a mystical inner voice, he was charged with neglecting the established gods and deities of his time and was sentenced to death. He died through willing drinking poison.
The Buddha was believed to have been born (as agreed by Western scholars) was born in 563BC and died eighty years later in 483BC. The Buddha was born to a life of wealth and entitlement but he decided to turn away from this and searched for the Path of Enlightment. At the age of 35 he experienced – what became known as the Great Enlightment.
The Buddha became a great teacher but all his teachings were oral teachings there were no written manuscripts. This was the way his teachings were passed down until eventually they were written down and systemized.
So many of the positive sayings and quotes that we now use were from centuries ago.
Well on May 13, I met John at a seminar in Brisbane and now I have booked to go to a seminar in San Diego on the 11/12 June where Frank is a speaker. So it looks like I will be able to meet the second person on my list. When I first decided that these people were on my “to meet list” I really did not know how I was going to achieve this.
This shows you the power of belief. If you practice visualization and affirmation, you are able to achieve what you want. This is proof for me that I am doing what I want to do and achieving the goals I have set for myself.
I am a true believer in Napoleon Hill’s book – “Think and Grow Rich.” There are other similar books available but for me this was and still is one of the best. If you have not read it, it is now out of copyright and is downloadable, for free, on certain sites.
So many people do not have the right mindset for so many things in their lives. They allow doubt and negativity to creep into their thinking, and before they realize it, they have defeated themselves. They fail to achieve the goals they have set for themselves and instead of remaining committed to the task fall into the category of the “interested” and make every excuse why they were not able to attain the goals they had set.
So you can see that I am achieving what I planned and I want you to do the same.
To YOUR success
Sue McDonald
Well yes I did go and hear John Assaraf talk last Friday and I loved it – even managed to get a photo with him.
John’s story is like a lot of other people. He grew up in Canada and was, as a teenager, going down the wrong path. His childhood had been very poor and at 8 years of age promised himself that he would be a wonderful provider to his children and they would not experience lack in their lives as he was. He was not a good student at school but his favorite show on TV, as he was growing up, was “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”
He was 19 when he went to visit his brother in Toronto and he was helped by his brother to turn around his entire life. His brother introduced him to a man named Allan Brown. John credits Allan for changing his entire life. At the age of 19, John sat and passed the real estate examination and became a fully fledged real estate agent. Allan asked John what he wanted in life and his answer was to live like the rich and famous. Then Allan asked him “Are you committed or interested?” Like a lot of people, this had to be explained to John and so that night he went home and wrote down exactly what he wanted to achieve. One thing he wrote was that he wanted to retire at 45 so that gave him 26 years to achieve that goal.
How did John achieve all that he set down to achieve? He did it through visualization and affirmations, the same thing that he is teaching today but he has now studied to prove scientifically that our thought process can be changed. Our behaviour is governed by our belief, values and habits and some of these stem right back to our child hood when we heard such things as – money doesn’t grow on trees, why are you so stupid that you never get things right, or – don’t ask again because we cannot afford it. All these types of statements have been imprinted on our subconscious and these are the things we have to change. With John’s method it means removing these thoughts and planting in the ones we want.
If you have doubts and fears that you cannot change, then this is the belief that you will achieve – no change – but if you believe that by affirmations and visualizations practiced everyday and you believe that you can have the lifestyle you want – you CAN achieve.
This was an exercise that John had us do. You see what you want to see! Can you see the arrow in this logo and also the measuring spoon?
The arrow is between the Ex. If you look at it closely it will appear as a white arrow. Now for the measuring spoon, the spoon is in the first e and is going from left to right.
So you can train your brain to see things differently – so you agree? I have a copy of his book “The Answer” but I need time to read it.
So start writing down your goals in detail, and practicing affirmations and visualizations and make time every day. It is the repetition that will change the pathway to your brain.
To YOUR Success
Sue McDonald
I have just finished a massive clean up of my office. Well what I am saying, I de-cluttered it. There was so much paperwork, that I had printed out over a matter of time that I really had to go through it and I ended up throwing a lot of it out. But while I was doing this I came across the skeleton of a blog that I was going to write and when I looked at it I thought why not write it now.
The thoughts were about what were the qualities you needed to become a success in any endeavor your ever attempted. Believe it or not, it really is your “mindset” but let me expand on that because not everyone understands that.
Your beliefs are the most powerful of forces. Henry David Thoreau puts it so well:
“What lies before us and what lies behind us
Are small matters compared to
What lies within us
And when we bring out what is within
Out into the world
Miracles happen.”
You must be committed – remember be committed not interested. YOU must be prepared to do the hard work. You must take the time to acquire the knowledge to be able to do whatever it is you want to do. Now a word of warning here, knowledge without action is useless. You have to have the inner belief in yourself that what you have conceived in your mind can be achieved. You have to set goals (a goal is only a dream with a definite time line.) If goals are not set down in writing, how do you know you are following the right path? By reviewing your goals, you can see what you have achieved and what the next step is.
What this comes down to that you are persistent and focused and that you do not stumble at any hurdle. If you come to a problem, whatever it may be, find a solution.
I remember as a child (I played the violin) being told – “practice makes perfect”. Sorry, I must not have practiced as well as I should have because I never reached the point of perfection there. But as an adult, this saying takes on a whole new meaning. The people who are successful are the people who will, if necessary, perform the same task over and over till they achieve the results they desire. No one is a success overnight –but we hear that many times, but later we hear the true story of how they have achieved their goals. There has been a lot of hard work before they were a success but one common thread, in every story like this, is they believed that they were going to achieve.
I just had to get better because this Friday 5/13/11 – I have a free ticket to go and listen to John Assaraf. Now if your don’t recognize the name – he was the guy in the movie “The Secret” who created the vision boards, only to discover years later that the house he had put on his vision board, was the exact house he had bought.
He came from a humble background but went onto build the Re-Max Indiana which grew to $ 4.5 billion in sales. John started wondering why and then he realized it was his mindset – he referred to it as his “mindset edge” and this was allowing him to build the business faster and easier.
After he realized this, he decided to study Quantum Physics and find out the scientific reason and prove how it was done. Now John is on a mission to show anyone how you can attain the mindset that will allow you to achieve the goals that you have set for yourself. As he so eloquently puts it “when you re-train your brain” you can achieve all that you want and the best part is he is actually giving away the tickets to go to the seminar.
So on Friday, I will go to the Sofitel in Brisbane and just learn and absorb as much as I can. I have already paid for some of his products that I can collect when I get there. So now I am better, I am really looking forward to the day. I think I will be “buzzing” coming home – will let you know.
Hi Guys ! What a week of disasters! If you are one of my regular followers you will notice that my last post date – before this was January 31,2011. This is technically not correct but this is what happened. I lost 10 blog posts.
I wanted to move servers from a private server over to hostgator. I backed up the blog all 64 posts along with 18 pages of comments. Then using an FTP program uploaded the backup to my Cpanel. Hostgator said it should be ready within 12-24 hours. One hour later hostgator advised me the file was corrupt. Imagine my disappointment! My blog had over 8000 backlinks that had taken me hours to create and it had a PR2.
Well sometimes the gods do smile down on me. My blog (or at least part of it) was there after 2 days. Yes every post had some type of corruption in it and I had lost all the tags, the plugins and the widgets – but at least I could clean them up and get on with my next task.
It is amazing how happy that made me feel even though it will require a lot of work to restore it – it should be worth it.
I planned to write this earlier but unfortunately I have been sick and out of action for the entire week. Just a little unfortunate, but it happens when you least expect it.
So now that I have most of my blogs, I will start and get back to regular updating. In fact, I think I might even do it automatically – write one blog and have it appear on several blogging platforms at once. It will certainly save me a lot of time.
So this is Sue McDonald saying I am happy to be back and I don’t know if I will every find my lost blogs in cyber space.
Hi Guys cannot tell you how glad I am that we have finally started the Advanced Course. I know my fellow students feel the same. Mark actually told us what we are going to learn and explained exactly what we would be doing during the course.
When he was going through everything and explaining that we would be expanding on the previous Newbies Course, it made me remember what my journey into Internet Marketing over the past year has been like. Yes I basically started out as a newbie about 18 months ago and for the first 6 months never really advanced. In fact, my back account was going backwards because I was buying courses, DVDs, CDs and ebook and any other information I thought would help me. There is a term for this – information overload. It was not till I joined Mark’s Newbies Course that I started to move forward. Now the reason for this is very simple.
Mark designed the course for people just like me who have little or no knowledge. It is a structured course each week building from the previous week. You have to learn all the basics before you can move onto more challenging things. By the end of the course what had I achieved?
I started with my blog and driving traffic to it to build my list. Now I had a list of 3 when I started and now I am nearly near 2,000. It is really not about the size of your list it is about the quality of your list. Don’t get disheartened when people unsubscribe from your list because they would never buy from you in the first place. They only joined your list for the free items you were providing.
So as well as building my list (which is always an ongoing proposition) Mark got us all to produce our own ebook and get it up on Clickbank. There was a sense of achievement when I completed that part of the course. During this course, I have even managed some sales of some of the products I have – not a fortune but at least a start so you know that what you are being taught and what you are putting into action really works. Another amazing thing that I have been able to do, is get a PR2 ranking in Google for my blog and it is not even a year old yet.
So I am really looking forward to gaining further knowledge and creating more products and getting further sales. It is certainly going to be a great course – especially the section about creating multiple streams of income.
So this is Sue McDonald saying if you want to learn like I have, just join Mark’s course.
Hi guys – I did say in a previous post that two days after I got home from the US, I was going to start the Advanced Course but unfortunately my Coach/mentor was too ill to teach the course on the nominated start date. However, I have just had a skype conversation with him and we are all set to start this Wednesday, he is much better.
I really can’t wait till it starts. I asked Mark what we are going to learn and he reluctantly leaked some of the subjects that are in the Advanced Course. I don’t know whether I can tell all but I am going to tell you some – because, to be honest, the list he was reading out was massive and there was no way I had time to write it down.
One major lesson we are going to learn (and I know anyone would want to learn this) is how to create multiple streams of income. That is what we all want and to learn the exact method how to do it is super exciting to me. Imaging knowing how to do it and then repeating the process? Yes, we will still be doing some of the basic things that we did in the Newbies Course but this time we will take some things to the next level. There is always driving traffic but there are many ways to do that. Once again, we have product creation and that is always interesting but I know Mark is going to have us making more videos – not my favorite part of the course.
So if you are a constant reader of my blog, and have followed my IM journey with me, you will see where I started and where I am now. I have even managed to make some sales along the way and now have a list approaching 2500. Now considering I started with zero that is not a bad effort even if I say so myself. You can learn how to do it also.
If you want to start making money in the field of Internet Marketing as I have done, you first have to master the basics. There is no easier way to do this than by joining a course that will take you from where you are now to where you want to be. Mark Terrell has written this course to help you achieve results, just sign up for a seven day trial for just $1.00 and get the unlimited access to Week 1 of Coaching Newbies and the member’s area. Then you will start to see that you can be successful and learn exactly how to achieve all the goals that you set yourself.
So this is Sue McDonald saying why not take the first step to learning how to make money online.
Well we arrived back home – going in 30 hours from -14 degrees Celsius to +30 degrees Celsius. Definitely a great difference from our time in the US but we will cope the thing is you just have to adapt. We have come home to a state where our capital city Brisbane has been flooded and the state is trying to get back to normal.
Fortunately for us, we live south of Brisbane and our house was unaffected but this was not the case for some people who have lost everything. For these people, there lives have changed. Everyone in life has at some time to adapt and change and this can be both good and bad. The best way to do this is to have a positive mindset that you will are going to be a winner.
So now I am home, what are my plans? My initial plan is to attend more classes and increase my knowledge in the field of Internet Marketing. I have had to make some crucial decisions regarding a business deal and one decision has been rather difficult for me but I know that whatever happens I have made the right decision.
This is what life is all about really change. If you are not where you want to be or you do not have what you want yet you and you alone have the power to change everything. Now I am not saying that by making the decision to change that things will happen immediately, but if you know what you want from life, it makes it so much easier to work towards attaining your goals. Remember that goals are dreams and desires that have to be completed in a certain time frame.
Affirmation and visualization is one of the easiest ways. Write down your affirmations and repeat them over and over to yourself. This is how you reprogram your brain. When planning for a change, be realistic in the time frame that you are going to allow yourself to reach your goal. If you wanted to travel overseas to work (for example) write out a detailed plan how you are going to achieve it. Note I did not say how you might achieve, I said how you are going to achieve it. So we have our goal in mind and a written plan and now we have to implement the plan. Always be positive with your affirmations never include words that are negative or the word “want” because that means you are lacking something.
So all that is required from us is to follow the plan and along the way celebrate the milestones you achieve. Getting started is the hardest part but remember the Chinese proverb “The longest journey begins with a single step.” This is your year so take that step or should I say leap!
So this is Sue McDonald just saying in another way – “Just do it”.
