What are you going to stop doing in your job?

What are you going to give up?

Yes…you heard me right, what are you going to give up?

What bad habit, crap in your office, clutter at home, food in your cabinet, or unproductive thing in your schedule are you going to either get rid of or stop doing?  Because before you can start doing something good, something right, something that is going to get you what you want, you need to start by giving something up. Not only will it clear room for what you need to do to CRUSH IT, but usually the thing you need to give up is in conflict with your goal.

For example – you want to lose weight, but the cabinets are filled with cookies, Cheetos, crackers and other garbage. You need to get rid of the crap and fill the cabinet with healthy food so you can begin to achieve your desired weight.

You want to get organized and under control with your home life or at work, but when you walk in your house or office it looks like a bomb just went off. Grab a roll of garbage bags and if you don’t absolutely need it either throw it away, sell it on Craigslist, or donate it.

You want to finally start saving some money for the future, but you can’t seem to save a dime because you have NO extra money. But somehow you can find the money to hit Starbucks or Peets once or twice a day. Start with brewing your own cup of coffee instead. It will save you $25 – $50 a week or $1,250 – $2,500 a year depending on how frequently you go. Oh, and don’t forget the taxes you pay on each cup of coffee. So if you combine the cost of the coffee and taxes on each cup, that may be as much as $2,000 -$5,000 a year you could invest in your 401K or IRA instead, tax free! Invest $5,000 a year into your retirement account and if it earns a 10% return, that’s close to $300,000 in 20 years.

You want to get to the gym to get fit and healthy and feel good, but you are spending all of your time on Facebook playing Mafia Wars and Farmville games. Stop the Facebook game addiction and hit the gym instead!

Enough said. To get more of what you want, give it up. Get rid of it. Stop doing it.

Next question: What’s the piece of software with the highest learning curve? Answer again: “PhotoShop.” Odds are, it’d win a third round if I asked about which software was the most expensive.

Sure. PhotoShop is great. But, man! Is it hard to learn. And, unless you’re a graphics professional who’s going to be using it all the time, its hefty pricetag is one that’s difficult to justify.

There are lots of online photo editors out there. Lots of them try to mimic PhotoShop, but with pretty mediocre results. So, when we looked into Aviary, we were expecting more of the same. That was our first mistake, because what we found was an application that not only did a great job of matching PhotoShop’s strengths, it did lots of things that, to our minds, surpassed what Adobe’s photo powerhouse can do. And it does them easily.

For free.

Aviary isn’t just one application. It’s a suite of tools that can be used in conjunction with one another not just to touch up photos and reduce red-eye, but to create mind-blowing graphics that’d raise the eyebrows of Salvador Dali.

The six tools that comprise Aviary are: Phoenix, the image-editing tool that most-closely resembles PhotoShop, but that is far, far easier to use; Toucan, a color editor that will teach you to create color palettes for websites on which you’re working, themes for presentations, or anything for which you want a clean, cohesive color scheme; Raven, a vector editor that will creates fully-scalable art, and is perfect for logo design; Peacock, Aviary’s “visual laboratory”, which uses myriad effects to create graphics that’ll knock your socks off; Falcon (and its Firefox extension, Talon), which allows you to screen-grab images from the Web and edit them in your browser; and Aviary’s latest installment, Myna, an audio editor, which can be used to create sound effects or embed music in your graphic creations (or used on their own).

Pretty impressive, huh? We thought so, too!

Incredibly, you can use all of these tools for the low, low price of … nothing. Yep. It’s free. Not only that, but there is nothing whatsoever to download. The applications launch right from your web browser, so none of your computer’s memory will be eaten up by using Aviary.

Fly on over to Aviary: a killer app without the killer pricetag.

This does not mean you have to always be at full throttle. Being the fastest through the process is not always the answer. When I look at the most successful real estate offices I find that they are managed by good leaders that understand this. A good example is the manager/leader who goes to work everyday thinking, “what can I do to be better.” They are always looking for innovation and ways to improve their skills as leaders and managers. They understand that the process of leading is never complete. Their offices become mirror images of themselves. If the manager is motivated, the office is motivated. If the manager gets to work early each day the agents get to work early.

The legendary Green Bay Packer coach Vince Lombardi embodied this leadership spirit. He took a rag-tag crew of players and within two years molded them into champions. This wasn’t because of wholesale changes on the team. In fact, he only changed one player on the team that won 2 games in 1959 and won the championship in 1961. He did this by starting with himself. He said that, “Only by knowing yourself can you become an effective leader.” His uncanny ability to motivate others along with an insatiable drive to win molded him, but also shaped his charges.”

Many times in my career, I have witnessed agents without any business experience join an office with a great leader and take off because they are able to mold themselves into the image of the manager/leader.  I have also witnessed the effect of bringing new leadership into an office with little life and watching it explode. Bill Walsh had the same effect on his new team as did Vince Lombardi. He immediately created an aura of winning despite a history of losing in the years before he took over. Like Lombardi, he expected success first from himself and then from his players.

You can always improve and get better, and you can do it today, regardless of the market. Great leaders know this. This allows them to navigate through change. The manager/leader that goes to work every day working to improve is ready when a challenge or change presents itself, because they are already in the mindset that you have to adapt to whatever lies in front of you. This creates a focal point in the office that the agents can emulate. They too soon learn to come in every day deciding to be better than they have ever been. When this attitude infects the entire office, suddenly, uncertainty in the market does not present such a challenge.

He was there during the Everest tragedy several years ago, and has witnessed several deaths.  Yet, throughout his quest, he had a motto which he feels kept him alive “Getting to the top is optional, getting down is mandatory!”

He always trusted his gut and never let the excitement of reaching the peak override his sensibility and safety.

Through this 18 year journey, he finally completed the 14th peak, Annapurna (which he had attempted a few time prior during this vigil).  Once he completed his lifetime dream, he questioned what was next.  He had reached his summit so to speak.  He always had a “peak” to achieve and at the time of accomplishment…he no longer had a summit…a goal, a purpose or a lifelong quest!

This got me thinking as to what my summit was (or is).  I always have goals, challenges, monthly routines…but it has been a while since I have set my eyes on a true summit and started the long arduous yet rewarding climb to the top!

We get in to our day to day mindset, day after day year after year and rather than reaching the top of a mountain, we traverse, back and forth, sometimes up a little, sometimes down.  Life, however is a journey as they say, not a destination, but what if during that journey we created a quest that we are always able to keep our sights on even when the mountain seems too stormy to climb?

I challenge you this week, as I challenge myself, to create your own summit to keep your eyes on during life’s daunting moments.  Search out the right route, the one which will get you there with safety (I didn’t say ease) but also the route which will get you back down the mountain…because that is mandatory!

Think about your life for a moment, what do you want and what does it take to get it?  So, why haven’t you been doing what it takes to get it?

Before you start with all of the excuses, ask yourself – if you really had to do it, could you?  Let me make it clear how this is a choice – I don’t even like to think these thoughts, but it will help you understand that you can do it, if you want it bad enough.  If the person or people you care about the most lives depended upon it, could you do it? We both know the answer. Of course you could and would.  Life is a series of choices – I call them the Y’s in the road.  In most cases if you take the easy path – the one most people take – you will experience short term gain and long term pain. On the other hand if you have the courage to take the other path – the one most will not take – you will have some short term pain, but long term gain. So, make the right choice and have a life of pure magic!

Start by making the choice everyday to FEEL GOOD.  Because when you FEEL GOOD you are ATTRACTIVE. When you are ATTRACTIVE, you have AMAZING PRODUCTIVITY. When you have AMAZING PRODUCTIVITY, you have EXTRAORDINARY RESULTS. And when you have EXTRAORDINARY RESULT, you feel even better! It is the circle of success.

Make it a GREAT week and make the right choices.

Let’s face it. Very few of us are good at everything. Oh, sure … there’s that guy with whom you went to college who was great-looking, and the quarterback of the football team, and graduated summa cum laude just after rescuing a troupe of old ladies with puppies while on his way to donate blood to an orphanage, but most of us have to face the fact that we’re just … not that guy.

This means that while we might be great salespeople and that we might be great at taking care of our customers, we mightn’t also be great at blogging, or math, or <gulp> creating presentations.

That last one is something over which I stew all the time.

I have great information to share but I just don’t have that certain … something … that allows me to turn that information into moving, powerful visuals. And for most people, visual representations of information are much more striking than any other form.

So, what’s there to do?

I could hire a graphic designer, but that takes a lot of time, and can also run into a lot of money. Drawing something by hand is out of the question (I can make a mean stick figure, but that’s about it). Even using my mouse to create images on my computer can get frustrating, because as much as I nudge things around, the graphics never look as clean as I’d like.

But there is a solution. And a darned good one, at that.

For the software gods have given us SmartDraw. Unlike most of the applications about which we write, SmartDraw isn’t free. However, it’s less than $200 for the full version, and that’s less than one hour’s time from most graphic designers (the math here should be pretty obvious).

So, what does it do?

Put simply, with just a few clicks, SmartDraw can create more than 70 different sorts of diagrams and presentations, including maps, flowcharts, organizational charts, calendars, graphs … you name it. If it’s a graphic that you need, odds are that SmartDraw can make it. And there’s no dragging and dropping. Just click and type. That’s it. The graphics come out professional-looking each and every time. I don’t know many people who can turn out quality like that without losing lots of sleep, or without ripping out the bulk of their hair.

Want to hear something else that’s really, really cool? SmartDraw works seamlessly with Microsoft Office, so once you create your graphics, you can click once, and have all of them transferred directly into PowerPoint and have your presentation ready to go, and, more importantly, ready to knock the socks off of your clients.

You can check SmartDraw out with their free trial download. Unless you’re a graphic designing, quarterbacking, honors grabbing puppy saver, I promise that you won’t be disappointed.

They lie in the hours, minutes and seconds of our lives.

In his book The Ultimate Sales Machine, Chet Holmes lays out a system for managing our days more effectively. One of his rules is to list the six most important things you need to do each day and, by hook or crook, get these things completed. Every day. No excuses.

To do that, Holmes argues, requires figuring out exactly how much time each thing will take.

Forty Niner coach Bill Walsh was also a master of scripting his way to success. When Walsh coached at Stanford he scripted out the first 15-25 plays of every game. The result? Stanford scored on the first possession 8 times in 11 games – an unheard of rate of success.

I began to understand that this success was not an accident; it was written in a script.

It was with this inspiration that I began create my script – my “Perfect Day.”

Much like a personal playbook, on the surface, this Perfect Day script is little more than a to-do list. Scratch beneath it just a bit, though, and it becomes so much more. Each evening, before going to sleep, I plan out every facet of my upcoming day – from my morning walk to my evening reading.

Each day, I have constants, like going to the gym, eating dinner, and even taking a little free time for myself. Each day has time that’s flexible, but is built in to the same time each day, so that I can tackle important business that mightn’t have been foreseen.

With my script, I know exactly what I need to accomplish each day. I know where I’m going to be and how long I have to meet my goals. This simple plan gives me direction. It gives me focus. It puts me in the mindset to take 100% control of each and every day. In short, it gives me the power to succeed.

You’d be amazed at the power such a simple idea can hold. Take a cue from Coach Walsh and start scripting the plays of your perfect day. Give yourself the power to succeed!

What I personally am most fascinated by is the stories of those athletes who have overcome adversity, specifically serious, if not life threatening injury.

Let’s take  Askel Lund Svidal who sustained intense injury in 2009, now winning the Gold in Vancouver, or Lindsay Vonn, with her shin so injured she couldn’t put on her ski boot without excruciating pain, then went on to win the Gold.  Let’s not forget Chris Del Bosco who overcame drug abuse and a broken neck, to go on and be invited to ski on the Canadian team this year.

Every night I watch the Olympics, I hear of an amazing story about perseverance, dedication, commitment and sheer determination!

How is it that someone can endure such pain and hardship; then muster the courage to go back to the source of the pain?

I have read a few articles about the physiology of overcoming “fear” and I really liked this quote:

“As for the ever-present fear, many have found a way to manage it.  “You never overcome it. The fear factor is always there. I don’t care how good you are at your sport, there’s always a risk of injury, always a risk of crashing, so it’s just a case of risk management. Whoever can manage the risk best, while getting as close to that line as possible, is the fast guy on race day.”

Isn’t this really part of the game of life?  To overcome our fear and BE that person who is close to the line on our own race day?

These Olympic Athletes are special…that’s why they are Olympians!  But I believe the athlete in all of us has encountered our own falls, it’s how we finish the race, or better yet how we proceed IN the race that makes us our own champion!

Here are some great stories I found from athletes, local and worldwide who have created their own destinies through strength and “risk”.

http://matadorsports.com/5-athletes-who-have-overcome-life-threatening-injuries

http://www.trivia-library.com/c/20-athletes-who-overcame-injury-and-handicaps-part-1.htm

Enjoy the Games!

We start our day with the best of intentions to get all those important things done on our list. We plan on doing all the things to get us closer to accomplishing our goals and dreams.  Then, before we know it the day is over and nothing on that list got done, but we are exhausted from a busy day-a busy day of doing the urgent, not the important.

How did that happen?

Because we let others dictate how our day will go instead of taking control. We let other people’s urgent issues, a result of their poor time management, poor planning, their drama, and their procrastination, take priority and control over ours.  Remember, poor planning on THEIR part does NOT constitute an emergency on your part.

Most of us are doing the urgent and that is why we never seem to get closer to our goals and what we want to accomplish.  The key is being disciplined enough to brush off the urgent and do the important. It is probably one of the biggest keys to success.

So, how can we do that when all of our time is spent just dealing with the crap and people coming at us all day – their urgent stuff, you ask?  Learn to say NO! It will be tough in the beginning, but after a while of saying NO and not letting yourself get dragged into other peoples drama, into their urgent and out of control life, eventually they will just stop screwing up your goals and take it to someone else or better yet, figure out how to deal with it on their own.

So, to get your important stuff done, make a conscious decision every day not to get caught up in the drama of everyone one else’s urgent life. Learn to say NO!

Sooo, now what?

You update your website. You write blog posts. You post links to Twitter, to your Facebook page, to ActiveRain, not to mention every other place you can think of. Heck, you might even be paying to run an ad or two. How do you know what’s working? How do you know where to focus your attention?

There are some services out there that can give you some basic information, but to get really in-depth, most analytics companies demand a handsome fee. But there is an option.

Welcome to StatCounter.

If your web page has fewer than 250,000 page views per month (and that’s a pretty significant figure), the service is 100% free. FREE! That’s a good thing. But what does it do? The answer is a lot.

Once you include StatCounter’s code in your webpage, it records valuable information about your site’s visitors and records it in a log for you. It tracks information about the sites from which your visitors came, the keywords they used to find you, how long they spent looking at your site, if they’d visited before, where (geographically) they are located, what kind of browser they’re using … and lots more. Once it collects the data, it organizes it and compiles it into charts and lists, so that your analysis is made easier.

If you’ve got more than one site, StatCounter can be used to track those, as well. Oh, yeah! And it’s still free.

You work hard. You spend lots of time making sure that your websites and blogs give just the right impression. Making sure that the sites are doing their jobs and also knowing where to focus your energies is important. If your site’s visitors come mostly from Google, then you don’t want to channel your efforts somewhere else.

In today’s marketplace, a tool like StatCounter is indispensable. If you want to hang tough with the big boys, StatCounter can help you do it!