As you’ve suspected for a long time, success in anything – consistent success, at least – requires a certain few skills. Fortunately, they’re not all that hard to learn.

What is hard – what gets in the way for most people – is a reluctance to see oneself having those skills (sounds quirky, I know, but we’re going to look at how to get around this too-common trait).

You’ve probably heard me say before that skills and habits are essentially the same thing. They’re semi-automatic behavior patterns that are built up through repetition. But many of these skills are learned by imitating the behavior of others, so at the time, we may never have even realized what we were learning. This is especially true of the skills we call habits.

Let’s say you’ve got a “bad” habit (such as procrastination). Maybe you’ve struggled against it for years, with little success, and you’d like to get rid of it. If so, then I have some good news for you. You can stop trying to get rid of that habit. You’re about to learn an entirely different strategy that’s based on the psychology of how minds work in the real world.

To give you an idea of what you’re going to see, let’s take an example. Little Joanie is 12 years old and she’s very good at talking. She’s had several years’ experience talking, so she can do it at a moment’s notice – and without having to consciously think about it: she has an idea, she opens her mouth, she speaks.

Remember, Skills and Habits are Basically the Same

So what would you think if someone said, “Joanie has a habit of talking, and since you can’t have two conflicting habits, she’ll never learn how to type.” … Hanh?

I don’t know about you, but I figure just about anybody can learn both. Some of my best friends can do both. And yet, aren’t we doing the same thing when we say, “I’m an awful procrastinator, so I’ll never learn to be a fast starter.”

Just for the sake of argument, let’s assume for a moment that the two “skills” of procrastination and fast-starting are not opposites, that they are completely independent skills and could actually exist side-by-side in the same person, so that they could choose to do either one or the other, depending on the situation.

After all, talking and typing can co-exist. When it’s appropriate to talk, you do, and when it’s appropriate to type, you do that. You can choose between them.

Or let’s say you can fluently speak both English and Italian. When in Rome, you speak as the Romans do, and when in New York, you keep your mouth shut and don’t antagonize anybody. Again, it’s your choice.

So what if you could choose between jumping on that new project right away… or you could alternatively choose to put it off. The problem with most procrastinators is that they don’t get a choice. They have built only one skill, and that’s the one they’re stuck with, whether it’s appropriate to the situation or not.

Learning new skills is always about having more choices available.

What kind of skills (habits) are you currently using? Answering that one is easy. Just look at your behavior patterns. Do you…
……… * put things off a lot?
……… * feel powerless or hopeless much of the time?
……… * avoid any challenging new experiences?
……… * get jealous at others’ successes?
……… * often wave your bird finger when driving?
……… * put others down?
……… * grow angry when someone offers a suggestion?
……… * reject offers of promotion at work?
……… * assume successful people got it dishonestly?

All of these are habits. But you don’t need to “get rid of” any of them.

What’s far, far easier is to create some new habits to co-exist alongside these old patterns. This way, you’re not having to fight yourself. Instead, you’re simply expanding the choices you have available for meeting any given situation.

So what kind of new skills would you benefit from acquiring?

I’ve come up with a list of seven. There are many more possibilities, but these seven hit the main pressure points in a success personality.

The 7 Skills You Will Build

In the BullsEye Club, we’ll concentrate on these:

Skill 1. Raise Your Average Vibration Rate

Norman Vincent Peale called it positive thinking, and Napoleon Hill termed it a positive mental attitude. One commonly used way to raise your frequency is affirmations. They’ve worked for many, many people. And they’ve failed to work for many millions more.

Where there have been failures (and they have almost always outnumbered the successes), it’s because a person’s basic personality is still founded on negative expectations. Until this is remedied, no successes CAN come. But once expectations are lifted and overall mental processes are turned more positive, success becomes simple, almost trivial.

Today exciting new techniques have been developed that can affect psychological change (change in vibration rate) with breathtaking speed, sometimes literally within minutes.

So changing the basic frequency of your mental processes is the first task. It’s not hard to do, but most people, in their eagerness to get on to the “good stuff,” like money and romance and health, skip over this first essential step. We won’t do that.

Skill 2. Raise Your Sights

The minute you settle for less than you deserve, you get even less than you settled for.
~ Maureen Dowd

The other day, a few friends were talking about their latest vacation trips. One lady said she’d gone to a “snake” zoo and even petted a big constrictor. A man in the group nearly went into convulsions of loathing, just hearing her talk about it. This is a classic phobia reaction.

When I offered to show him how to get rid of that phobic reaction, he refused. “Why would I want to stop hating snakes?” he asked, almost indignantly.

When you’re sunk into low-level thinking, you can’t even imagine wanting to raise your sights to something more empowered. Have you ever caught yourself thinking any of these?
……… * That’s just too hard
……… * I’d never want to own a business
……… * Managing people would be a nightmare
……… * I don’t want to do the things marketers have to do
……… * Talking with all those people would be too stressful
……… * What if I write a book and then somebody hates it
……… * Learning all that stuff would be too boring

If there’s something in you that drags its feet at the very thought of raising your sights, then you’re a prime candidate for this process. There is nothing inherently wrong or terrible or scary about expanding your abilities… the fear is something you’re supplying on your own, out of habit.

This too can be adjusted.

Skill 3. Learn to Choose and Shape Your Beliefs and Desires at Will

Beliefs – those are the things you think are bedrock truths about your self, your life, your universe and your entire reality.

Let me say that again. Beliefs are the things you believe are truths.

Oh yeah, Burke? Is the earth flat? Well, a few hundred years ago, an awful lot of very smart people just KNEW this fact was true. And it IS true if you take a small enough sample of data (which is what the ancients were doing… judging the entire world by what little they could see locally).

What’s exciting is, there are now rapid-change techniques we can use to change the things you believe about yourself.
……… * I’m too shy for that
……… * I’m not a salesy type
……… * I’m not smart enough
……… * I wouldn’t really like _____
……… * I have fat (or skinny) genes
……… * I could never learn to…

Changing some of these could greatly expand the life you live. A very good friend of mine was painfully shy when he was young. He was smart as all get-out, but when it came time to meet new people or to speak up in a group, he’d freeze.

But with some effort (and some of the new techniques available) he became a star salesman in every company he worked for. Now he thinks nothing of picking up the phone and calling anybody at anytime. He’s lost all fear of public speaking. And he’s running a successful Internet business that lets him live anywhere in the world he’d like – and this changes every few months.

So what are the things you can’t do? And how are they limiting the life you should be living right now?

In the BullsEye Club, we’ll work on these beliefs of yours, and end up giving you a whole range of new choices.

Skill 4. Eliminate Indecision

“Oh what should I do? Is this choice better, or is that one?”

Ever been there? Ever waffled and wavered over the simplest of decisions. Even when you knew deep down inside that you wanted to just move forward?

Well, you’re going to learn some new ways to look at decisions. And you’ll lose the fear of making the wrong choice.

This skill comes after number three, learning to control your own beliefs, because one of the main causes of indecision is the belief that you’re going to screw things up and get it all wrong. Once you start believing that you can make good, strong, accurate decisions – and make them quickly – the waffling evaporates.

You become so eager to reach what’s on the other side of the next impending decision, that you leap forward eagerly to get at it. The decision stops looking like a huge, towering test to “pass” and changes into just a minor little detail between you and what you want to do. Soon, you won’t even break stride when it’s time to decide something.

Skill 5. Learn to MAKE Your Decisions Work

This skill is a twin to decisiveness. Once you lose your fear of making decisions, you tend also to lose your fear of doing whatever it takes to make that decision come out all right.

Lingering over options and choices until you’re not sure what to do about them – that behavior is directly caused by a morbid fear of failure. Lose that fear, and everything becomes an opportunity. Here’s how you do that.

Let’s say you’ve been trying to invent an electric light bulb, and the first two or three hundred substances you’ve tried didn’t work. So what? This trial and error process gives you more ideas even while it’s removing other ideas from your list of possible options to try. When Edison decided to invent an electric light, all those failures were NOT failures – they were just tests along the way.

When Henry Ford decided that he wanted his engineers to design a V8 engine all cast in one block, it took those engineers months and months. They were convinced that his decision was a bad one – that it’d all end in failure. Not Ford. He pushed them on and on, well past their own limits of belief. And eventually they did what they’d proclaimed was impossible. And Ford gave the world a single-block V8 engine.

Both Edison and Ford MADE their decisions work.

To put it another way, success and failure are not really either success or failure. They are simply steps in the process of exploration and discovery. No single experience will ever again look like a failure to you as long as there is another step you can take.

This skill – doesn’t it seem like a useful one to develop?

Skill 6. Swear Off Excuses Forever

Success requires no excuses; failure permits no alibis.
~ Anonymous

I’ve written about excuses before (The Real Magic Behind Achievement, as well as several others.

In How to End Addiction to Stinkin’ Thinkin’, I wrote in part:

A few years back, I ran an article on gratitude, and challenged readers to find ten things each day to be thankful for. Many readers sent wonderful responses, telling how, overnight, their lives had become much happier and more fulfilling. But I still remember Gladys (not her real name).

Gladys wrote me back an email enumerating a long, long list of complaints and problems she was NOT thankful for, so therefore, she couldn’t be happy. I responded that she’d gotten the assignment quite backwards and should try again. I even suggested a few ways to look at her situation differently.

Back came more complaints – this time more forceful, more insistent, more angry. Without saying it in so many words, Gladys was insisting on her RIGHT to be pissed off at the world. It was treating her roughly, and she by-gawd wasn’t going to let it pass. Clearly, she had plenty of excuses not to feel gratitude.

After a few more emails, I realized – all over again – that all self help is SELF help, that it must come from within. And some folks, like Gladys, simply are not ready to change their minds about life or anything else. They’re too busy enjoying their anger and self pity. They’ve practiced it for years, and they’re GOOD at it.

If you’re also doggedly hanging on to your anger, resentment and hate, no website is going to help you. It’s only when you start turning loose of all that STUFF – all those excuses – that you’ll begin to find some joy in life.

Gladys had every reason, every excuse, to be angry at the world. But anger is not the only thing we excuse.

Late to work? Trot out an excuse. Ditto for failure to do the job you said you would. Anything is fodder for excuses… if that’s the way you want to live your life. But frankly, that’s a hell of a way to live.

Especially when getting rid of excuses just isn’t that hard to do. If you’re ready to make some changes and leave your excuses – and Gladys – behind, the BullsEye Club may be the exact thing you’re looking for.

Skill 7. Learn to Really Care What Happens

This skill is the mirror image of Skill number six. Once you stop allowing yourself to make excuses, you have only two alternatives (actually only one, but they come out to the same thing).

You can either bear down and do whatever it is that you promised you’d do (which everyone around you will appreciate more than you can imagine). Or you will start being a lot more judicious about what you promise to do.

In practical terms, you’ll find yourself practicing both of these things, so as I said, they come out to the same in the end.

But far more important than either of these is the fact that you’ll take every task you tackle much more seriously. This is because you’ll no longer allow yourself to just throw it down and walk away. You’ll be much more emotionally and intellectually invested in every single thing you do.

In a word, you’ll care.

Life is full of excuses to feel pain, excuses not to live, excuses, excuses, excuses.
~ Erica Jong.

No one ever excused his way to success.
~ Dave Del Dotto …

An excuse is worse and more terrible than a lie; for an excuse is a lie guarded.
~ Alexander Pope

Nothing is impossible; there are ways that lead to everything, and if we had sufficient will we should always have sufficient means. It is often merely for an excuse that we say things are impossible.
~ Francois La Rochefoucauld

For many people, an excuse is better than an achievement because an achievement, no matter how great, leaves you having to prove yourself again in the future but an excuse can last for life.
~ Eric Hoffer

I attribute my success to this – I never gave or took any excuse.
~ Florence Nightingale

We have forty million reasons for failure, but not a single excuse.
~ Rudyard Kipling

He who excuses himself, accuses himself.
~ Gabriel Meurier

Uncalled for excuses are practical confessions.
~ Charles Simmons

There’s a difference between interest and commitment. When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstance permit. When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses, only results.
~ Art Turock

Never do anything you’ll have to find an excuse for later.
~ Old proverb

Now, as I stated previously, you could take this list of seven skills and, working alone, build your own toolkit of success habits.

But most folks simply don’t have the foundational skills they need to persist through all that personal growth all by themselves. To put it simply, IF you could do it that way, you already would have, and you wouldn’t be reading this…

Most of us need a support team of some kind. That’s what the BullsEye Club will be about.

More coming next week.

Cheers from warm and smiling Thailand,
Charles

Related Posts:

1. BullsEye Club – Bad Habits are a Good Start
2. BullsEye Club Benefits – Part 1
3. What’s in the BullsEye Club for You
4. Walking Over Hot Burning Goals – BullsEye Club Part 2
5. Self Help Is Not Mysterious
6. Success – 9 Common Wrong Turns
7. What Makes You a Success
8. Success – a Story that Opens Minds