Focal Point: A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals
224
Focal Point: A Proven System to Simplify Your Life, Double Your Productivity, and Achieve All Your Goals
224eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Overview
The true secret of high achievers is that they know how to find their "focal point" - the one thing they should do, at any given moment, to get the best possible results in each area of their lives.
Bestselling author and motivational speaker Brian Tracy brings together the very best ideas on personal management into a simple, easy-to-use plan. Focal Point helps readers analyze their lives in seven key areas and shows them how to develop focused goals and plans in each.
This best-selling guide provides timeless truths that have been discovered by the most effective people throughout the ages, answering questions like:
In Focal Point, Tracy provides timeless truths that answers questions such as:
- How can I get control of my time and my life?
- How can I achieve maximum career success and still balance my personal life?
- How can I accelerate the achievement of all my goals?
Focal Point shows you how to develop absolute clarity about what they want, and how they can achieve supreme satisfaction, both personally and professionally.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780814426258 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | AMACOM |
| Publication date: | 10/26/2001 |
| Sold by: | HarperCollins Publishing |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 636 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Focal Point
By Brian Tracy
American Management Association
Copyright © 2002 Brian TracyAll right reserved.
ISBN: 0-8144-7278-8
Chapter One
Supercharge Your Business and CareerYou can do anything you wish to do, have anything you wish to have, be anything you wish to be. -Robert Collier
Once upon a time, people grew up, got a job, and worked at it for the rest of their lives with little variation. But those days are gone forever.
According to the experts, a person starting work today will have, on average, fourteen full-time jobs lasting two years or more and five careers in completely different fields or industries. According to a study cited in Fortune magazine not too long ago, 42 percent of the workforce is made up of "free agents." These are contingency workers who will move from company to company throughout their careers.
Each year, more than 1 million new businesses start up in the United States. These are in addition to the more than 20 million businesses that already exist. On top of that, hundreds of thousands of new partnerships, joint ventures, and sole proprietorships are formed each year. Tens of thousands of new products, processes, and services are introduced into an already crowded marketplace. Millions of people move up, down, or sideways in their jobs, companies, or careers. The rate of change, growth, and expanding opportunity has never been greater and, if anything, it isgetting better every year.
Here are three predictions for you: First, there will be more changes in your field, whatever it is, in the year ahead than ever before. Second, there will be more competition in your field than ever before. And third, there will be more opportunities in your field than ever before, but they will be different from those of today and in different areas than you expect or anticipate.
As many as 72 percent of people working today will be in a different job within the next two years as a result of the incredible speed of change, increase in competition, and explosion of opportunity. As many as 50 percent of working people today are in the first year of their current jobs. Whatever you are doing, your job responsibilities and outputs probably have changed dramatically in the last few months, and they will continue to change.
Andrew Grove, chairman of Intel Corporation, wrote recently that one of the most profound changes of the last decade is that each person today is now the architect of his or her own career. You can no longer rely on a corporation to take care of you and accept responsibility for your long-term success in your work life. You must think and act for yourself.
As mentioned in Chapter One, you are the president of your own personal services corporation. You are always self-employed, no matter who signs your paycheck. The biggest mistake you can ever make is to ever think that you work for anyone but yourself. The key to your success in whatever you do is to see yourself as an independent agent. You must continually look for ways to add value, every single day. You are responsible.
A sense of control is the key to a positive mental attitude and a feeling of personal power. When you accept complete responsibility for your life, you take control of your destiny and you feel terrific about yourself. You feel stronger, more confident, and more powerful. You become a master of circumstances rather than merely a victim of circumstances.
Your primary responsibility to yourself is to design your future the way you want it to be. Clarity is essential. The very act of becoming clear about what you want and what you have to do to get it dramatically increases the likelihood that you will realize your goals exactly as you imagined and on schedule.
The Focal Point Process helps you to identify exactly what is most important to you. It helps you identify what you need to do to achieve your most important goals. It enables you to determine the steps you have to take to get from wherever you are to wherever you want to go.
Determine Your Business and Career Values
The starting point of business success for both individuals and organizations lies in value clarification. Value clarification is an exercise that enables you to determine what principles are important to you and in what order. You then build your career on the foundation of these values.
People are happiest and most fulfilled when their lives are consistent with their highest values and their innermost convictions. High-performing people are clear about what they believe and stand for, and they don't deviate from these values.
Unhappy, underachieving people are often fuzzy or confused about their values, and they compromise them regularly.
You live from the inside out. The core of your being is composed of your deepest beliefs about what is right and good in the human condition. Your values determine your emotions, your motivations, and your responses to the world around you. Your values determine the kind of people you like, love, are attracted to, and enjoy working and living with. Your values determine the activities you most enjoy and what sort of work you will excel at.
You identify most strongly with people whose values are consistent with your own. You fall in love with a person who has the same values you do. You enjoy working for a company and with people who share your values. When you see your values upheld in the world around you, you feel happy and satisfied. When your values are violated, you feel angry and frustrated.
Stress and unhappiness arise when you compromise your values in some part of your life. Most relationship problems revolve around a conflict of values. Happiness in relationships is the result of two or more people sharing the same values in the same order of importance. You can resolve most of your problems by returning to the values that are most important to you.
Your values are organized in a hierarchy. You have values that are higher than some and lower than others. You have a primary value, a secondary value, a tertiary value, and so on.
You demonstrate your values in your behaviors. It is not what you say but what you do that shows you and the world around you what you truly believe. A person cannot do one thing on the outside and be someone else on the inside.
You will always sacrifice a lower-order value in favor of a higher-order value when you are forced to choose between them. When you are under pressure, you reveal your true character. When you are under pressure, you will choose the value that is dearest to you. You demonstrate who you are on the inside when you are forced to make a choice on the outside.
For example, imagine two people with the same three values. These values are family, health, and career success. However, John's order of values is different from Jim's. John's primary value is his family. After his family comes his health, and after his health comes career success.
Jim has the same three values but in a different order. Jim values career success first, family second, and health third.
Is there a difference between John and Jim? Is there a small difference or a large difference? Which of the two people would you prefer to have as a friend? If you met the two people at a social occasion, would you be able to tell which person was which on the basis of their conversation and behavior?
The answer is clear. A person's choice of values determines his or her character and personality. In general, it determines his or her priorities and choices. It dictates his or her conversation and interests. A person's values determine what he or she will do and won't do. The order of a person's values is the critical factor in shaping his or her destiny.
Values are reflected in how people behave when they are forced to choose. Anyone can express high and noble values when nothing is at stake. But when there is a price to pay, a sacrifice to make, a discipline to adhere to, people reveal their true selves and their true beliefs.
Of course, as discussed in Chapter Two, tasks that are both urgent and important take highest priority. For example, a man who values his family above his career might choose to miss a family dinner if a very important meeting comes up; a woman who values her career above her health might take time off to deal with a pressing medical problem. Their values have not changed, but their actions reflect both the urgency and the importance of events in their lives.
You develop your values early in life as the result of the influences around you. If you grow up with good role models, you will develop life-enhancing values that help you to become a successful, happy person. If you grow up with no role models or receive no guidance in values, you can reach maturity and have little or nothing that you believe in or stand for.
Sometimes your values are called your organizing principles. These are the standards you use to judge your behavior and the behavior of others. These are the rules you follow when you make decisions. When you are clear about your values and their order of priority, you find it much easier to make decisions in the critical moments of your life.
One of my clients was a large conglomerate that was developing a telecommunications division. The first thing they did was to spend several weeks discussing their values and developing their mission statement for this new division. Once they had defined their values, they agreed on the meaning of those values and how those values would be used to guide behavior.
Whenever the managers or executives of the company had a question or a problem, they took out a laminated card describing their values and discussed the problem with the card in hand. They asked each other, "Based on this value, how should we handle this situation?" They then went through their values, using these definitions as the basis for discussion and decision making.
Interestingly enough, the company started with an idea and some seed capital in a highly competitive industry and became a great commercial success. The company continues to grow and is highly profitable. Everyone in the company knows and lives by the values. Everyone who works in the company is happy, enthusiastic, and highly motivated. Values make the difference.
* * *
What are your values? What do you believe in? What do you stand for? What will you not stand for? What are your innermost convictions and your organizing principles? The accuracy with which you answer these questions will largely determine your happiness and your career success.
Review the list of values in the Appendix of this book and select the three to five values that best represent what you believe to be right and good and true about your work and your business. Some values you might choose for your career could be integrity, dependability, quality, excellence, hard work, and customer service. Examine your current behavior to determine how consistent it is with the values you espouse. Decide how you will behave in the future to ensure that your actions are consistent with the values you consider to be the most important.
Select one value that you feel is more important than any other value in your work life. Make this your focal point for your behavior and decision making. Resolve to be consistent with this value in everything you say or do. Never allow an exception. Let this value be your guiding light so that, years from now, people will still speak about you and this value in the same sentence.
Clarify Your Business and Career Vision
The second part of the Focal Point Process is to project forward and develop a clear vision of your ideal work life five years in the future. Imagine that, five years from now, everything is perfect and your work life is ideal in every way. Your vision must be consistent with your values. Answer these questions:
What would your ideal job or position look like? What would you be doing most of the time? How much would you be earning? What kind of people would you be working with? What level of responsibility would you have? What kind of company or industry would you be working in? How would your colleagues and coworkers think and talk about you?
Practice back-from-the-future thinking. Project forward five years and then look back mentally to where you are today. Imagine the steps you would have had to take to make your future vision a reality. This exercise of projecting forward and then looking back to the present is extremely powerful in clarifying what you want and what you will have to do to achieve it.
What Is Your Mission?
Once you have a vision, the next step is to develop a mission for your career. A mission is an ideal description of what you want to accomplish in your career in the years ahead. A mission is something that is both achievable and measurable. A clear mission statement, revolving around your values, is such that an objective third party can tell you whether you have achieved the mission.
A mission statement can be very short and to the point. The mission statement for AT&T for many years was "Bring telephone access to every American." The mission statement for the Coca-Cola Company is "Beat Pepsi!" The mission statement for the Pepsi-Cola Company is "Beat Coke!"
Perhaps the most famous mission statement of the twentieth century was contained in the orders given by General George C. Marshall to General Dwight D. Eisenhower when he took command of the allied forces in World War II: "Proceed to London. Invade Europe. Defeat the Germans."
Your personal career mission statement might be something like this: "Based on my values of integrity, quality, and customer service, my mission is to take care of my customers better than anyone else. As a result, I will earn more than $100,000 per year and score consistently in the top 10 percent of people in my field."
What Is Your Purpose?
Your purpose for your career flows from your values, vision, and mission. Your purpose is the reason why you do what you do. It is the reason why you get up in the morning. Your purpose is the reason why you work at this particular job or in this particular industry in the first place. Your purpose is what gives meaning to your work and your life.
Both a mission and a purpose in your work are always defined in terms of improving and enhancing the life and work of other people in some way. Your mission and purpose are always defined in terms of external contribution. Your mission and purpose describe the difference you intend to make in the world as a result of who you are and what you do. They explain your value offering, both personally and as a business.
Once you have determined your values, vision, mission, and purpose, you organize your work life so that you live consistently with them every hour of every day.
Continues...
Excerpted from Focal Point by Brian Tracy Copyright © 2002 by Brian Tracy. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
| Introduction | 1 | |
| Chapter 1 | Unlock Your Full Potential | 7 |
| Chapter 2 | Double Your Productivity | 29 |
| Chapter 3 | Simplify Your Life | 43 |
| Chapter 4 | Tap Your Most Precious Resource | 57 |
| Chapter 5 | Practice Personal Strategic Planning | 83 |
| Chapter 6 | Supercharge Your Business and Career | 101 |
| Chapter 7 | Improve Your Family and Personal Life | 117 |
| Chapter 8 | Achieve Financial Independence | 133 |
| Chapter 9 | Enjoy Superb Health and Fitness | 147 |
| Chapter 10 | Become Everything You Are Capable of Becoming | 159 |
| Chapter 11 | Make a Difference in Your Community | 175 |
| Chapter 12 | Spiritual Development and Inner Peace | 187 |
| Seven Lessons for the Twenty-First Century | 199 | |
| Focal Point Advanced Coaching and Mentoring Program | 203 | |
| Appendix | List of Values | 205 |
| Recommended Reading | 209 | |
| Index | 213 | |
| About the Author | 221 |
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