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!