How to Motivate a Group

I like to focus on receptive and expressive intelligence, which I call CQ. A healthy dose of CQ is essential when being in charge of a group or team because the task of motivating them often falls to you. This may seem unfair. After all, isn’t everybody responsible for their own performance? Yes, but being a team leader means leaving your unawake ego at the door and leading your empowered ego to join your team. If you have the opportunity to help move a project along, you do it; you don’t worry about whose responsibility it is. Your role is to monitor the well being of the entire group and help whenever possible. Read the Rest of This Article »

If You’ve Never Failed, You’ve Never Lived

While it’s fine to build your skills on failures, it’s also important to enhance your soul through accepting your emotions as you have them. Avoid letting the ego take over to make them any more than they were supposed to be.  Experiences breed growth and we crave them bring us joy at a soul level.

When you are on the field of life and you get knocked down pay attention to your next move because for the most part you have three basic choices.

1. Grab your bat and glove and go home.

2. Lay on the field in the fetal position.

3. Get back up to bat.

No matter what you choose, the only outcome I can GUARANTEE from going home or doing nothing is you will never hit that ball out of the park. And life will hunt you down like a dog and find new and better ways to “teach” you what you are avoiding, so best to accept and stop resisting so you can move through it easily.

If you face and embrace the situation, pick yourself up off the ground and get back up to bat you guaranteed one thing: Another chance to swing for the fences to get what you really want. And like my mamma always told me, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” (pretty sure she borrowed that – ha!)

Watch this inspiring video and tell me, where would we be today if these people had chosen to quit?

Better Because…

Image courtesy of t_a_g @flickr

Better Because…You Choose

For over 25 years, we climbed the corporate ladder in Fortune 100 companies like Best Buy and General Electric and were fortunate to attend top-rated training and executive leadership programs.  After leaving behind our corporate lives, we realized that these same tools we used to achieve success in business also worked just as well for life in general.

So we’ve picked the best of what we learned along the way – from executive coaches, close friends and family – and are happy to share it with the PickTheBrain audience.

THREE CORE BELIEFS

FIRST. Life Is What You Think.

Consider this saying from the Mahatma Ghandi:

Let your thoughts be positive

For they will become your words.

Let your words be positive

For they will become your actions.

Let your actions be positive

For they will become your values.

Let your values be positive

For they will become your destiny.

Our thoughts influence our actions, which determines results.   As we’ve learned from our parents, positive thoughts lead to inspired actions, which can lead to better results.

So, remember this:  Thoughts + Actions = Quality of Life

You’ve probably heard this before, but it’s a good reminder. If we are to make the world better, it begins with how we think. Read the Rest of This Article »

6 Traits that Separate Winners from Whiners

Have you ever been blind sided by an unexpected event that threatened to throw your dreams, hopes, and life plans off-course? If nothing that grandiose has happened (lucky you!), how about just being surprised by small obstacles that threaten to ruin your day?

Big or small, unexpected events will happen. You can not avoid them, you can only control how you respond to them. It is in those critical moments after the unexpected occurs that ultimately determine your long term success. Think about it: anyone can do well when everything is going great. What separates people who succeed (the Winners) from those who don’t and just complain about it (the Whiners) is how well they respond to life’s inevitable curveballs.

How can you make sure you respond to the unexpected like a Winner and not a Whiner? Here are six traits that separate the two:

1) Whiners Focus on the Past, Winners Focus on the Present and Future

Whiners love to dwell on the past. “I wish this never happened!” or, “if you had just done what I said we wouldn’t have this problem,” or everyone’s favorite, “I told you this would happen!”  The past is done and over and can not be changed. For some reason this simple concept eludes Whiners.

Winners understand that we live in the here and now. Rather than dwelling on the past, Winners focus on the future they want to create and think of actions they can take in the present to make that future happen. Read the Rest of This Article »

Motivation Is All That Matters In Language Learning

When we talk about learning a foreign language, we often talk about different methods, if you should go to school or not and how much time is ideal to spend on the target language each day. Of course, those are  interesting questions to ask, but I think they’re not as important as one thing: motivation.

We all look for ways to improve our language learning, but often forget that all important thing called motivation. We try to motivate ourselves for many things, but somehow we only look at methods when learning a foreign language.

Woody Allen once said:

“80% of success is showing up.”

Now, that is an interesting quote, but what do I want to tell with it? It’s really simple actually.

When you’re not motivated, you won’t show up to learn your target language (or anything else in fact). Unfortunately, it’s not possible to learn a language through osmosis, you need to work, you need to show up.

That’s why I think being motivated is the most important thing in language learning. It’s possible to learn many things in a short amount of time, but to truly learn a language to fluency you need years of input, study and practice.

Ask yourself: Why do I want to learn this language? Can I actually use it? Are there enough materials to learn it from? Am I sure I still want to be learning this language three years from now? If your answer to those questions is yes, you’re probably enough motivated to go on and learn that language you want to learn. Read the Rest of This Article »

How To Develop Motivation in Your Everyday Life

Personal development, maximizing your potential, goals setting, motivating yourself for the better – these are some of the inter-related things that you need to work on as an individual. Here, we will set our sights on the many ways that you can develop motivation in life.

The Importance of Finding Out what Motivates You

First, let’s find out what the importance of motivation exactly is. Simply put, motivation is that driving force which allows you to achieve your goals and go after what you want in life. If you want to change your personality for the better, get a promotion at work, start a new habit, be a better person who is part of the community, become a better parent for your kid – all of these things would be easier accomplished if you are properly motivated.

As long as you have a strong personal motivation, you can achieve almost anything that you want from life. However, remember not to fall into the trap of looking for short-cuts to achieve your goals. It’s perfectly fine if you have to take a long and winding road to achieve your goal. It will be an even sweeter victory when you finally achieve your goal, knowing that you have had to go through several hurdles to attain it. Read the Rest of This Article »