How to Teach to Help Others and Yourself

Last week I talked about the epiphany I had as I was doing my daily walk (a day I put in 10 miles of walking!)  As you may remember my breakthrough epiphany was that when we start teaching and preaching helpful ideas and  life enhancing goals with  other people , our very own progress and development is inevitably pushed faster toward achieving the very goals the ideas support.  It’s a pretty neat deal–as we help others we help ourselves!

At the end of last week’s blog I promised I would give you ideas to “jump start” your preaching and teaching plans. It isn’t necessary that you be a teaching type or that you have experience in helping to lead others toward achieving goals. You simply need the desire to help and see others succeed.

So here you go. Read these, follow the suggested steps and see what happens! When you’ve seen the effect you can have on other’s progress as well as your own, expand your influence to compound your success and the positive changes you’ve helped make in other people’s lives.

1. Pick a part of your life you want to greatly improve upon.

2. Write it down.

3. Make a list of comments and talking points that will help you present the benefits of the particular goal that you are going to share with relatives, friends and maybe even strangers.

4. Make a list of those relatives, friends, business associates and acquaintances you’d like to help. The best place to start is with your spouse or partner, so you may want to put them on the top of your list.

5. Now go out there and start teaching and preaching. It doesn’t matter how you do it. It could be face to face, by phone, or through email or texting. The only real rule is to share what you know with openness and caring. Understand that some people won’t be ready for the ideas you have to share. Don’t push it on them; just let them know you’re there to help when they are ready.

6. When you feel you have had significant experience and success, you can also teach more broadly through a blog, guest posting on other people’s blogs and websites or volunteering through mentoring programs for kids, college students, small businesses or whatever matches the kind of knowledge you have to share.

Improve From Your Own Teachings

As I was doing my daily walk, I was struck big time by a profound thought! The thought has huge life enhancing potential for everyone on the planet. It has already been changing and helping my life because I have been using it for a long time only I have never really identified it enough to put into words until now.

I’m going to share this with you but, please, think deeply and intently about this and then put it into practice. See if it doesn’t profoundly enhance any part of your life that you choose to drastically improve. Whether you want to get in super great shape or become a much better parent or partner, or even make a few million dollars, you can do it if you follow these ideas.

Any goal, habit, human quality or desire that I start preaching, teaching or pontificating about automatically and almost without effort pushes me to do more of it myself. Those spoken and written pontifications are like a truth drug for my mind which pushes me to do what I have encouraged and taught others to do.  I am totally convinced it will and does work that way for everyone.

If you have been reading my past blogs you might remember me setting some pretty tough and overly ambitious work out, weight loss, and healthy eating goals for myself as I count down to my big 70th birthday.  As of the blog posting this week, I am only 4 days away from 70. As I look back on the last 86 days I’ve been doing this, I must say that not one day has passed without my mind fixating on those self-promises and the advice I gave to myself as well as to all my readers. I can now see that it’s been my inner brain keeping me on track rather silently and automatically.

I guess you could say that my brain pushed me to remain “true to myself” and to my readers.  You see, if you teach and preach to others what they could and should do for self-improvement, or just about any subject, your inner self gives you the message that you must live up to what you put out there.  We all know the saying “practice what you preach” and our inner most brain and soul does not want us to be a hypocrite, therefore our subconscious pushes us to be true to our words.  I am pretty darn convinced that is how we automatically become better at whatever subject, goal or life enhancing ideal we talk about and teach to others.

I challenge you to start teaching a preaching something that you want to improve in your life (be sure to write down you goals and objectives so you can stay on track) and then in a few months take a look back and see what it has done for you and how it has improved other people’s lives.

Next week I will give you a few great ideas to “jump start” your preaching and teaching plan.  Get ready to make things happen!

Beware of the Con

So what would you do if you had a pretty good nest egg saved up but your bank was paying you a lousy 1/2% a year and a good friend just told you about how he is getting an 18% annual return, is getting paid out monthly and was on money invested with a guy he knew and trusted? Your first reaction might be, “Wow! That’s a great return.”  But then you might ask “Tell me more about this friend and the investment, cause it sounds too good to be true.”

What if he gives you an answer like this? “I’ve known this guy for several years and he’s a good guy that I have great confidence in and trust.  I invested some of my cash with him a year ago and since then he hasn’t ever missed a monthly interest payment. I just recently put all the rest of my savings into his deal a couple months ago and I even helped my poor mother out and talked her into putting most of her savings with him. She was getting screwed by the bank’s low interest rate and she desperately needed more income to supplement her social security check just to scrape by.

So, the bottom line of what you would be hearing from this friend is that he’s put virtually all his cash and savings into this “safe investment” and the return is guaranteed because he has so much trust in the deal. For all you know he may even have put a second mortgage on his house at a low interest rate so he could make the difference in the spread. I don’t know what you’d do but I know I would hold onto my wallet and run like hell.

Sadly, this kind of scenario happens almost every day. It has been particularly bad during our recent recession and now in our very slow economic recovery. I personally know 4 people that have lost almost every penny to their name because they bought into situations very similar to the one described above and these people are really quite smart and educated. You wouldn’t think they would be susceptible.

There is a very old saying that goes back to the 16th century: “Tis the part of wise men to keep himself today for tomorrow and not venture all his eggs in one basket.”  The other saying that we’ve all heard that we need to drum into our heads is “If it seems too good to be true it probably is.” One of my policies that has driven my investment life is “If I do choose to put all of my eggs or a substantial part of my eggs in one basket I must have total control over that basket and I must watch that basket very, very closely”.

One last thought.  In the example above and with the four people I know, they all had “confidence and trust” in their friend.  Guess where the origin of the term “con man” comes from?  You see these “con men” always take time to build up your confidence and trust in them before they strike.

This is not to say that there are not very good investments out there but always check them out thoroughly and make sure your investment is backed by solid, verifiable assets. Remember, don’t put all your financial eggs in one basket unless you control those eggs and watch that basket very closely!

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The Missing 777 and Overcoming Fear

Have you heard anyone say recently that they are not going to take any trips by airplane, because of fear since the 777 Jet went missing?  I’ve only heard one person allude to that, but I’ll be watching to see if airline ticket sales drop because of the fear factor since the Malaysian jet disappeared.

Fear is a very interesting human reaction hooked to so many things in our lives.  Much of the time it has little or no basis to reality or logic.  As you may know the fear of flying is one of the more common human fears although it is statistically extremely safe.  If you were to choose, at random, a commercial flight every single day for the rest of your life, guess how long it would be (statistically) before you got on an airplane that crashed? And, drum roll …would you believe it would take 19,000 years? Yes, that’s right, nearly 7 million flights/days until your statistical chance would be up!  I’ve talked to many people and gave them these numbers and they are STILL afraid of flying.  They know the numbers but their fear trumps the facts.

Fear holds so many people back from fulfilling their big dreams and goals for what are often illogical reasons. Many years ago I wrote a book titled The Courage to be Rich. In my book I talk a great deal about using “courage” to overcome fear.  Building up your courage to be rich, to give a speech to 1000 people, to write a book, to travel to a distant and strange new country or to be super successful in anything  requires you to identify what fears are holding you back and replacing those fears with positive thoughts and actions.

One of my favorite tricks or ways I overcome fear is to use the IGDS philosophy.  Quoting from my Courage to be Rich book, “What is IGDS?  It is accepting the truth that “I’m Going to Die Someday”……so why not really live life now?  Why not really go for it? What have you got to lose?”   I am not saying you should take wild crazy, life threatening risks but I am saying to face your fears and go after what you want with all you energy, zest and strength. Take some calculated risks realizing that you’re going to die some day and you don’t want  to have to say to yourself what Henry David Thoreau said many years ago, “Oh God, to have reached the point of death, only to find that you have never lived at all.”

 

Revisiting the Super Brain

The last couple days I followed my own advice and re-read a great book that I hadn’t picked up for about a year. The book is by the brilliant Deepak Chopra and Rudolph E. Tanzi and is titled Super Brain. I saw the book on my bedside shelf and it grabbed my attention–probably because my experience the night before.

Kimberly and I attended a gala fund raiser for the National Ability Center and listened to a short speech by Anna Beninati where she talked about her experience as a skier. She’s very talented and has Olympic gold medal dreams. But what makes her story so special and unusual is the stupid decision she made as a teenager. She was running alongside a moving train trying to jump on it only she didn’t quite make it. She fell beneath the train cutting off both her legs. However, she considers herself very lucky. Wow!

Why does she consider herself lucky? Well, first of all she is grateful to be alive but it doesn’t stop there. She’s lucky because that terrible accident changed her brain. Accepting that she had no legs, she decided she would make her life count for something and I don’t think if she wins gold at the winter Para Olympics in Korea in a few years that she will stop at that point. That will probably just be the beginning of using her “Super Brain”. I think she already deserves a gold medal for using her brain to push it to that level.

Our brains, as Chopra’s book explains can make us or break us. It all depends on how we use them. We have a choice to either control and program our brains to serve us or we can sit back, do nothing and let our brains control us.

On that note, let me share some of my “margin notes” from Super Brain.

P. 40 Whatever you pay attention to grows.

P. 42 Expect past memories, as well as the things we’ve learned, to come to us and they almost always do.

P. 16 You train your brain to do what you want it to and it will do it.

P. 31 You can choose to follow the upward learning curve no matter how old you are! (Creates new dendrites, synapses and neural pathways.)

P. 63 If you actively act as the leader of your brain you can reprogram your own neurochemistry.

P. 70 Inertia is depression’s best friend.

P. 71 Depression creates an illusion that all my power is stripped away.

P. 72 The brain is transformed by meditation.

P. 40 Don’t ever say to yourself or others “my memory is going”. If you say that your inner brain will prove you right.

P. 230 You need to motivate self –especially as you age.

And as an overall summary of this great book –the theme could simply be….Use Your Brain–Don’t Let It Use You!!

A Great Evening with Richard Paul Evans

My good friend and fellow author Richard Paul Evans (who, having sold over 17 million of his 31 great books, is a bit more successful as an author than I am) invited me to join him as he made a great presentation to about 150 people last week.  His subject was based on his book The 5 Lessons a Millionaire Taught Me.  My wife Kimberly and I very much enjoyed both Rick’s motivating and informative remarks and the wonderful people we met afterwards.  I totally agreed with Rick’s view on money, on what it is and what it is not.

Among other things he said, “Life isn’t about money.”  He explained that life is about love and family but without money “life is thrown out of balance. To the financially enslaved, life becomes all about money; too many are missing the opportunities and abundance life has to offer”.

Of Ricks’ 5 Lessons, the first two I find to be so very important: that you must decide that you are going to become wealthy and that wealth is about saving money through either earning more or spending less.   I certainly agreed with those two first lessons, in part because that’s exactly what I’ve been preaching for many years and it certainly has served me well. It transformed a poor, struggling guy into a multi-millionaire. And my path didn’t come from being brilliant, as my C- grade average can attest.

Many years ago I noticed that most people’s spending rises at the same rate as their income when it increases. Too often it rises even faster, creating a debt loaded and stressed out person.  So if that sounds familiar and you want to be wealthy, or at least be way ahead in the money game, set a goal right now to start spending less than you are earning. Without any savings it will obviously be hard to proceed with the next step of investing wisely.

It really is up to you to either allow yourself to be controlled by money or be the one in control of it.  But always remember, life isn’t about money but with enough of it your life can be filled with abundance and opportunity.

Spending the winters in Kauai and being able to do things like take my kids and grand-kids to Europe for a Disney cruise to celebrate my 70th birthday certainly doesn’t make my life perfect. However, giving others those types of grand experiences that stick with them for life certainly does incredible and wondrous things to my brain and my level of satisfaction, and without money I couldn’t do these things.  So I encourage you to set the goals, follow the formulas for wealth and use that wealth wisely to enhance your life and those around you. You won’t be sorry that you did it.

If you need more information on a good financial formula go to my book, The Next Step of Waking the Financial Genius Inside You. I also strongly urge you to go to Rick’s website and sign up for his notices, giveaways and special offers atwww.richardpaulevans.com.

 

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