December 15th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
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There’s an old saying, Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish ; and you have fed him for a lifetime.
With the holiday’s upon us we have an opportunity to put this idea into practice.
I’m not suggesting you not give gifts, just that you consider including the type of gifts that can “Teach a person to fish.”
Along with the usual gifts, why not include the kinds of items that can have a real and lasting impact on someone’s life?
Books, audio programs, videos, seminars, coaching programs and the like are gifts that can have a positive impact a person’s life forever.
I know how important this is.
Reading self-help and listening to personal development audio programs transformed my life from one of desperation to a life beyond anything I ever expected. And they continue to do so today.
One of the major contributors to the achievements and successes I enjoy today is the fact that I have developed the habit of reading inspiring books and listening to personal development programs regularly.
With so many people uncertain about the economy, job losses mounting and financial news worsening each day, I want to make a special offer on what I believe is an ideal Holiday gift.
I have 14 copies of the CD version of my Stop Living Paycheck to Paycheck audio program remaining. These are the one’s in the big vinyl binder.
When they’re gone, I will be changing the packaging to something smaller.
Since they make an impressive looking gift, not to mention the life changing information they contain, I want to offer you the chance to order one or more at a special “clearance” price.
If you want to give the gift that will keep on giving, long after the tree is taken down, go here.
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November 10th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
Writing a post for my friend, Kevin Puls, site “For-the-Troops,” got me thinking about my time in the Army.
As I stepped off the plane in Seoul, Korea I experienced an immediate culture shock. Prior to landing in Korea, my world travel consisted of a trip to South Carolina, Fort Jackson to be exact, and passing through Seattle on my way to report in at Ft. Lewis, Washington for my flight to Seoul.
Up until that point, most of my life had been spent in New York City and nearby New Jersey. Having spent most of my enlistment at Fort Monmouth, I was quite content to stay there so being sent to Korea was unsettling, to say the least.
You can read more of my views of being stationed in Korea and witnessing the historic release of the crew of the USS Pueblo here.
Below are some photos - then and now.
Please take a minute to think of all the men and women serving in our military and all those who have given their life for their country. Perhaps, one day, we will move past killing one another and their sacrifice will not be necessary.
American Forces Korea Network (AFKN TV), Seoul, Korea
Radio control room at AFKN (American Forces Korea Network), Seoul. Yes, I was that young once:-)
It was not the 4 Seasons but it was home for 12 months. This is where me and 11 others called home, heated by a kerosine stove that went out about 3 AM. Made for chilly mornings. Of course, going outside to the latrine to shower didn’t help either:-)
Riding north over the Imjin River bridge on our way to cover the release of the crew of the USS Pueblo. A few days I’ll never forget.
Now, back to the present. It’s nice to be able to look back and only remember the good times.
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October 21st, 2008 by Jim Donovan
The field of personal development and lost one of our true greats last week, with the passing of my friend, Charlie “Tremendous” Jones on October 16th.
He was, in my opinion, a truly amazing man who contributed greatly to the betterment of humanity and he will be missed by anyone who had the pleasure to know him.
Several years ago, I had the distinct pleasure of spending an evening with Charlie, near his home in Mechanicsburg, PA. At the time, his company, Executive Books, had sold a significant number of copies of my book, This is Your life, Not a Dress Rehearsal and, during a phone call, I mentioned it would be great to meet him “some day.”
He responded by inviting me to come out there to have dinner with him the following week. After talking over dinner for a while, he invited me to come back to his home with him where I was to spend a remarkable evening with an even more remarkable man.
Once I had seen his vast collection of books, some of which dated back to Revolutionary times and many signed first editions of self-help classics, we walked around his property. Charlie dedicated his life to, in his words, “Changing the world, one book at a time,” and his collection of books would have filled a small library.
On his country property is part of a carnival and a building that is decorated for Christmas all year round. As we sat, singing Christmas Carols in July, he explained the reason for the decorations. On weekends he would invite children from the orphanage in nearby Reading, Pa. to come and spend time there.
When I asked why, he replied, “So that they will remember that there was one day in their life that someone loved them.” That, in my opinion, is the essence of Charlie Tremendous Jones. He was a man whose heart was bigger than even his towering stature and I, for one, will miss him.
As the hour started to become late, this amazing man, at the time near 80 years of age, said to me, “I’d love to keep taking, Jim, but it’s getting late and I have to fly to Romania tomorrow to give a seminar.”
His selfless dedication to his life’s purpose and the magnificant contribution he made to the world is why I am honored to call Charles Edward Jones my friend. May he rest in peace.
Information about his Homecoming Celebration and ongoing details can be found here.
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September 27th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
My good friend, Ken McArthur is standing in a circus tent today
asking 2,000 people to spread a message of hope to teenagers who
don’t think that life is worth living.
I think it’s a great message of hope for anyone and would love to
see all of my readers think about spreading it today.
Here’s Ken’s simple message for for giving hope (and maybe saving
someone’s life!):
G - Greet and meet: talk to others, smile, say hello, ask
someone how they are doing
I - Involve yourself and others: find a cause you can support,
volunteer, pledge resources. Get the people around you
involved, especially if you see someone beginning to
withdraw. Invite them to participate in some activity, to
“get out” of their comfort zone
V - Validate others: tell others that they matter - especially
family members and friends that you tend to see daily but
may take for granted, give genuine complements
E - Empathize: be a listening ear, take time to be fully
present, don’t try to solve - just acknowledge someone’s
feeling/hurt
You can find out more about Ken’s wonderful project with his
Impact Action Team at:
http://peek.snipurl.com/3vauy
Please spread this message today!
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September 4th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
I know you have dreams. There are things you want. Things you dream about. But . . . then the little voice in your head comes in and . . well . . . you know the rest.
Take a few moments and listen to this short - 32 minute - recording of one of my live seminars and see if you can start getting rid of the “demons of doubt” that are in your way.
Yes You Can Seminar Recording
You see, I know you can be, do and have whatever it is you want in life.
If you need help, check out my audio home study course, based on my bestselling book, This is Your Life, Not a Dress Rehearsal.
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August 27th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
Labor Day has always been one of my favorite holidays. Actually, I like all holidays:-)
However, Labor Day is special because it celebrates the American worker who, lest we forget, is responsible for having helped build the quality of life available to us here in the United States.
Unfortunately, too many hard working American’s are struggling these days. Many have seen their jobs vanish to the global economy while others, still working, are struggling just to keep up with rising prices.
Back in 1974, I made a personal decision to take control over my destiny and started my own business. This came after seeing my boss, a man in his 50’s with a sick child and a wife in the hospital, fired at midnight on a Friday. I vowed then that I would not let that ever happen to me. People being treated poorly by some employers is nothing new.
While in my case, things did not go as planned, due mainly to a lack of knowledge and my destructive habits, I survived and, in the years since, have managed to remain self-employed in one fashion or another. While there have been (many) up’s and down’s, I would not trade it for anything.
Today, more than ever, it’s important that you take more control over your financial destiny. Whether you have a job or own your own business, chances are you rely on a single stream of income for your financial security. This can, as many have learned, be devastating.
Whether you, like millions of others, are supplementing your income with a network marketing or ebay business or are a blogger or affiliate marketer, it’s important for you to be doing something to add income streams.
What business could you start or join, part-time, that would give you personal satisfaction, be enjoyable (it has to be fun) and provide you with additional income?
If you’re not sure or would like to learn more about the ways you can increase your income and lower your expenses, take advantage of my Labor Day special offer for my debt reduction income producing home study course.
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August 25th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
In today’s business environment with increases in staff reductions and rapidly changing roles and responsibilities, it is crucial that all of your team members be fully engaged in the tasks at hand. According to a Gallup survey, 350 billion dollars are lost each year in American companies due to disengaged employees. How then do you minimize the impact of this costly problem within your organization? Below are 4 key strategies to help you grow your people toward peak performance and enable you to produce quantum results with your team.
Own your outcome
All to often employees are quick to blame circumstances the economy or a host of other causes for their less than stellar outcomes in a given situation. Only by taking personal responsibility for our outcomes and performance can we take back our power and create the results we desire. It’s quit simple, if the problem is being caused by the economy; I am powerless to effect it. If, on the other hand, I am willing to take personal responsibility for it, I have reclaimed my power and am in a position to impact change.
Make integrity a must
This is not an option. The only way companies will survive and thrive into the future is by making integrity an absolute must throughout the organization. No longer can people skate by with questionable behavior and slippery deals. The time has come for each person to be honest and truthful in all situations regardless of the outcome. The cliché “honesty is the best policy” became a cliché for a good reason, it works! However, in order to create this environment of absolute honesty and integrity, you as an owner or manager must be willing to allow people to make mistakes and it must be okay to mess-up once in a while without fear of repercussion.
Challenge people’s limiting beliefs
It is important for your people to understand the role their conscious and unconscious beliefs play in their ability to produce desirable outcomes. They must understand how every thought, action, and result is directly linked to their beliefs. By first identifying people’s limiting beliefs, a person can begin to replace them with more resourceful empowering beliefs, which will then enable them to create the results they desire.
For example, a belief that “I am not comfortable calling on ‘C’ level executives” can be shifted to one that feels better and is more empowering, like “While I am not totally at ease, I have a strong support team backing me up.” While this is not a fully empowering belief, it is a small step in the right direction. These “bridge beliefs” shift the person’s beliefs more toward the desired, empowered belief.
Link Values to Behaviors
Identifying a person’s high driving values and helping them understand the role these values play in their productivity and satisfaction can go a long way toward achieving peak performance. A simple question like, “What’s most important to you in your work?,” will generally elicit the person’s number one driving value. Continuing with questions like, “What else is important?” etc., will enable you to uncover the person’s high driving four or five values. Knowing this will help you better match specific assignments to individuals, understand how to better motivate people, and result in more harmony among your team members.
For example, a team member who lists “freedom” as a high driving value will be the ideal person to assign a task that can be done from a home office, while the person with “contribution” as a high driver will be well suited for a team project. Understanding your teams values will help you determine assignments and enable you to get the most productivity from team members while maintaining harmony throughout the organization.
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August 11th, 2008 by Jim Donovan
Now is the perfect time to think about your future and begin to design the kind of life you’d like to be living. Unfortunately, too many people leave their lives to chance and happenstance, not taking the time to write down their goals and create plans to achieve them. This can be a huge mistake. Not having written goals would be like going on vacation without a destination, something most people would never consider doing. Yet, those same people will leave their futures in the hands of circumstance.
Having written goals will change your life. Spend some time thinking about what you’d like your life to be like. For the sake of this exercise, let’s set goals you’d like to have accomplished one year from now. Of course, you can set shorter and longer goals as well.
What would you like for your relationships? How about your health, career, and finances? How about your mind and emotions? What would you like to experience? What would you like to do, be, or have? Invest some time now to identify these things and write them down. This will greatly increase the likelihood of your accomplishing them. If you want to know more about this, there are lots of books, including mine, to help you. That’s not really the topic of this story, however, I’m asking you now to revisit your goals, particularly your short-term ones.
Do they make you want to jump out of bed each day eager to get going? Recently, I was feeling “less than great.” I was even bordering on becoming depressed, something I rarely experience. I felt unmotivated, and wound up being pretty sick for several weeks. Upon closer examination, and because I agree with Socrates that, “An unexamined life is not worth living,” I realized one of the things that I had done was to reset some of my short-term goals to be “more realistic.”
What I had noticed about myself was that in the interest of being realistic, I had lowered my expectations. While this may seem like a reasonable thing to do, in reality, it left me totally uninspired and feeling pretty unmotivated about my goals. For example, if you have a goal of making enough money to “pay the bills” how exciting is that?
Is that going to make you jump out of bed in the morning saying, “oh wow, I can’t wait to get going, so I can make money and pay the bills!” I doubt it.
When I understood what I was doing, I immediately set new goals. I set goals that were way beyond my reach. Goals that were huge enough to really get my juices going. Now, when I think about my new, bigger goals, I get excited just imaging what it would feel like reaching them and what my life would be like having accomplished them.
Now, let’s start setting some new goals for the coming year. Following is a simple exercise to help you become clear about your goals and begin creating the life you’ve always wanted.
1. Write what you do want. Be specific. List everything you want to do, be, have, and share for the upcoming year and beyond. Rather than writing “be thinner,” for example, write “I feel & look great weighing 175 pounds.” Instead of writing, “More money,” be specific. How much more per month?
2. Write each goal in the form of a positive affirmation, in the present tense (I am, I have, etc). Set goals in the key areas of your life - spirituality, health, relationships, social, career, things, and money.
3. Next to each one, write why you want this and how you will feel when you have accomplished it.
4. Write at least one small action you can take right now to move toward your goal.
Each day, read your list of goals, concentrating on the feelings associated with having them. The more you can feel the feelings your goal will produce, the faster you can draw it to you. Your sub-conscious mind does not know the difference between that which is real and that which is vividly imagined. Fake it until you make it.
After you reread your goals, seeing yourself as having achieved them, and are feeling the good feelings associated with having them, ask yourself, “What is the next action I can take to move toward this?” Do this daily and watch your life change.
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July 31st, 2008 by Jim Donovan
Life happens. It doesn’t matter how positive an attitude you have or how balanced and centered you are, there are going to be times when you are knocked down. Ties when your carefully organized life is turned upside down and you get knocked on your rear end. Life happens.
You will no doubt experience serious illness in either yourself or someone close to you. You may be challenged with the loss of a loved one, a divorce or perhaps the loss of a job or any number of situations that will leave you feeling like you were kicked in the stomach.
Let’s face it. These things will happen. They’re part of life and no matter how you try to explain them away with the idea that, “everything happens for a reason,” they hurt. A lot! They hurt at the very core of your being. The pain begins in your heart and radiates throughout your entire being. Repeating positive phrases does not make it stop hurting.
At times like these, you’re going to feel down, even depressed. You probably feel anger or some other manifestation of your pain. Whatever you’re feeling, it’s ok. It’s ok to feel hurt, sad, angry or whatever your true feelings are. You cannot deny pain any more than can deny fear. The only way through either of them is to give yourself permission to feel the feeling.
The question is not whether or not you will feel down. The question is for how ling will you stay in this state?
The difference between people who get through life’s challenging moments, regardless of the seriousness, and those who are immobilized by the events is what I call the “Bounce factor.”
How quickly can you bounce back? Of course, the severity of the event will have a lot to do with the time it will take you to get past the pain and on with your life.
Take the example of two people being downsized from their high technology jobs, something that is becoming a natural occurrence these days. One, whom we’ll call John, is floored by the news of his dismissal. He expresses his pain by becoming angry at the company, his co-workers and the system in general. He spends his days telling anyone who’ll listen, about his “problem.” Usually from a bar stool.
As he sees it, his life is ruined and he’s blaming everyone for his troubles. People who react like John spend weeks, even months, wallowing in despair until, if they’re fortunate, someone close to them convinces them to seek professional help.
Mary, on the other hand, reacts much differently. Although she has gone through the same experience as John and has pretty much the same issues like living expenses, etc., she chooses to react differently.
After a brief period of feeling a loss of self-esteem, self-pity and anger, Mary decides to get back in the game. She begins contacting her network of colleagues and co-workers, avails herself of the outplacement services her former employer offered everyone and starts actively looking for a new position. In a short time, Mary finds her “dream job” with an exciting new company.
While both people in our hypothetical example Had the same experience and both went through a period of hurting, the time each allowed themselves to remain in that dis-empowering state was vastly different. While John remained “stuck” in his problem, Mary handled her loss and moved on with her life.
This is the key. It’s not whether life occasionally puts you into a tailspin, it’s how long you remain there.
When something devastating happens to you, allow yourself some time to grieve your loss, however, don’t allow yourself to get stuck there. Take some action. Join a support group, talk about your feelings with a trusted friend or your spiritual advisor. If necessary, seek professional help.
In the case of a job loss, perhaps you want to take some time to re-evaluate your career goals. You may even consider a change in fields. When you’re ready, you can begin networking and making new contacts. Attend social or church events. Call people you know. Do something!
One of the most important things to remember in high stress situations is not to allow yourself to isolate. While spending some time alone is normal, even necessary, isolation can be dangerous and should be avoided at all costs. Get out and be with people as soon as possible. As a friend recently reminded me, “life is for the living.” It’s important to get back to your life. In time, the pain will pass.
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