Why is everyone else having fun

The other day I looked on Facebook to see if I could find some inspiration for a great blog post. As I scrolled down the newsfeed, a sudden thought flashed across my mind. Why is everyone else having fun? I saw former colleagues on a night out, having a great time. Then I saw an old school friend on a great looking adventure. Another old school friend looking like he is doing really well financially. Then there was a good friend doing really well in his career. Happy smiley faces – why they are all having fun … and not me?
“… and not me?”

Halt.
Rewind.

My psychological training and self-hypnosis kicks in and I catch myself. I mentally rewind. I replay the mental movie again. This time I mentally congratulate each of my friends. Then I Like, Like, Like.

What Happened There?

For a moment I let the immature part of my psyche take over and instead of seeing joy and abundance out there in the world, I focused on scarcity.
You see it’s not Facebook’s fault. It was mine. People only put their highlights up. They don’t put the mundane stuff up. Imagine if they did, it would be boring.

It’s the same with Celebrities, when we compare ourselves to them. We don’t see the years of practice they put in behind the scenes to hone their skills. Also, we don’t see the hours they spend in makeup. We don’t see the monotonous work they put in at the gym. When they are at their worst we definitely don’t see them. We only see the results and only the results they want us to see.
Just as your life is not all boring, they aren’t having fun all the time. In fact, I’ll let you into a secret, towards the end of this section.

How to be happy and successful.

Have faith and hope

Affirmations and visualisation can help. Sometimes you may need to change your beliefs. This can take time, but is well worth it. Hypnosis can also help.

Action towards a goal – consistency

Having some sort of goal to work towards helps in happiness. Humans are goal-seeking creatures; we need something to aim for.

Enjoy the process

As I said, it’s important to have a worthy goal to aim for. However, it’s important to enjoy the process of moving towards that goal. Fall in love with the process and you will move effortlessly towards the goal.
Get out of your head and live in the now. If you try to live in the now, you automatically focus on what is around you now this moment.

Congratulate other people.

Going back to our Facebook friends. How about sincerely congratulating them on their successes? Will this make you have more fun or be successful? Maybe, maybe not, but it will make you happier.

Gratitude

Finally have gratitude. I strongly recommend keeping a morning gratitude journal. I have some set questions that I write at least two answers to, every single day. This forces me to focus on what’s good in my life. This then sets the tone for the day. Here are some of the questions I ask myself every morning:

1. What was great about yesterday?
2. What am I grateful for in my life right now?
3. I Think about what am I really excited about today and in the future?
4. What do I appreciate about the people I love?

How could doing all this make you more happy and successful?
First, it changes your immediate mood. Then as you repeat it and it becomes a habit, your outlook on life will start to change. As your outlook changes, you become more positive and confident. You try things you might not have done. You make braver decisions. This is when you start to see tangible results in your life.

Then you might find that people look at you and say how lucky you are.
So getting back to that little secret I mentioned before, your friends on Facebook are jealous of you. Think about that. Have you ever put up a post with pictures of your life highlights, like the Night out with friends or the family reunion? Someone somewhere will look at that and envy you.

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My Prospecting Process

Get Contact Names

Once you have identified your list of viable suspects, you will need to uncover a contact name of the decision maker. Social media and the internet are useful, but they best way is to call up the company and ask them. Now, your company may have already given you a database to work on. I wouldn’t trust that the information is correct and so I would advise you still call them up anyway. If you are introducing your product or service by using some kind of marketing material, this can be a gentle way to kick off the relationship.

For instance, you could say to the person who answers the phone: “Hello, I wonder if you could help me. I am looking to send some information to the person responsible for XXX, about XXX and I am just wondering who I need to send it to.” If you stop there, one of three things will happen:

They give you the name – make a note of it, thank them and hang up. (They may even put you straight through).

They don’t know who you should send it to – in this case send it through to the most likely Job Title or department.

They have a no-name policy – see point 2.

Letters

Once you have your contact name, post off your literature or brochure along with a covering letter. If you would like a MS Word copy of a prospecting letter template, contact me and I will send you the one I use.

Telephone Prospecting

Give the prospect about 2 or 3 days to receive the letter before you call them up. Telephone prospecting is the first stage of selling process, proper. It’s not for the faint hearted, but if you get good at it, it can pay handsomely. Remember where the prospect might be in their buying cycle. If they call you, you are more likely to have competition.

Before making the calls, get yourself into the right frame of mind. If you work from home, get ready as if you were going to the office: showered, suited and booted. Organise your environment accordingly, with everything you need. Remove all possible distractions. Standing up is a great idea, it gives dynamism to your voice. Smile while you dial. The prospect will hear it in your voice. Be polite and thank them for their time.

Scripts

If you would like a copy of a telephone prospecting template, contact me.

Cold Call Reluctance

A final word about cold call reluctance. There is a saying from where I come from – “Shy kids get nowt”. Otherwise translated as if you don’t ask you don’t get. If the thought of cold telephone calling fills you with dread, you are not alone. You have to get over it though. There are many ways to overcome cold call reluctance. One trick is to translate each phone call into a £ amount. For instance lets say you get 1.5% commission for each sale. Using our figures from the post on sales targets, each telephone call earns you £2.50, that’s £62.50 a day.

Another trick is to reframe it. Instead of ringing for a yes, you are collecting nos. How many no’s can you get today. This is a trick I learnt in a book called Go for No! Remember the more no’s you get the more yeses you will get.

The best cure for cold call reluctance, though, is to just do it and do it repeatedly. Do a little and often every day. Soon enough your mantra will be 25 calls a day, that’s just what I do. Twenty five calls a day that’s my job. Twenty five calls a day. If you would like coaching in prospecting or overcoming cold call reluctance, please do get in touch .

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Rituals

It is important to have a set time for a new habit. Linked to that is the practice of rituals. These can be regular little actions that you repeat every day. On their own they are probably insignificant but taken together they can be very powerful.

Collection of habits

They are really a collection of small habits. The beauty of rituals is that you can add to them and adjust them. The ritual itself remains intact, but he actual activities in it change.

Morning Ritual

One powerful ritual I have, which I recommend, is the morning ritual. In fact I would go so far as to say that this should be a person’s first new habit when they get into personal development and growth.
My morning ritual is sacrosanct. No matter what time I awake, I always perform my morning ritual. It sets me up for the day. Over the years I have changed my ritual but it always remains in place. As I write this today, my morning ritual is as follows:

1. Breathing exercises – yogic breathing
2. Chanting
3. Meditation – about 20 minutes
4. Write in my journal
5. Last night dreams
6. My current state of mind
7. Notes from my meditation
8. Gratitude list
9. Read aloud my affirmations
10. Look over my goals and vision.

This whole process takes about an hour. When I started doing a morning ritual it was only a 20-minute meditation, but I have slowly added to it. If you don’t have any of these habits in your routine yourself, you might not appreciate the benefits. All I can say is that if you get yourself a morning ritual, your life will change. The changes will be small and subtle at first. Over time, though, the changes will be dramatic.

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Mental simulation and focus are usually what most pop psychology and Law of Attraction books focus on. They are an important first step in the process of getting what you want out of life.

Visualisation

Mental simulation is make believe. Make Believe. Its a funny old saying isn’t it. You don’t hear that saying much these days. It has negative connotations to it, like describing something that is somehow childish. But there is a profound truth in those two words. When you are simulating your desired result before it actually happens, you are making yourself believe something, that has n’t happened yet. And that is the trick.

Auditory and Kinaesthetic Simulation

Our sense of sight is not the only one we can simulate. You can also simulate the sounds and feelings associated with a desired goal. If you can see, hear and feel all the senses (even smell and taste), you provide such a rich sensory movie that your mind will believe that the result and already taken place.

End Result or Process

Through my years of research and Hypnotherapy and NLP training, I have broken down goals and outcomes into two. Outcomes are either the result or the process of achieving the result.
Recent psychology studies have shown that you get better results by simulating the process of achieving a goal, rather than just the visualising the result.
This information is critical for you to take into account. It is one of the reasons why people fail with the Law of Attraction. Let’s say your goal is to lose weight. If you just visualise yourself being your ideal weight, you are less likely to reach your goal, compared with if you visualise yourself actually eating the healthy food, taking the exercise and generally doing what slim people do.

By the way if you are looking to lose weight contact me and I will show you how I did it.

So if you know your desired outcome and the habits you need to adopt to achieve it – visualise yourself adopting the habits.
That means visualise yourself doing the work. The results will be quicker and better.

What if you don’t know how to achieve your goal?

If you know what the goal is but don’t know how to achieve it, then you can’t focus on the process. Perhaps it’s a long-term business or financial goal, that is years off in the future.
In these cases, you should only focus on the end result and don’t try to think of all the steps to reach it. This is where the vision boards and mind movies come in to play. You set in to action the Reticular Activating System (RAS) part of the brain. The RAS regulates sleep and waking, but it also have an important function in acting as a gateway between the conscious and subconscious mind. I will go into more detail on this in a later post.

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