Hard Work is a Given

Right?

If you want to be successful at anything then hard work is a given right?

Of course it is, I’m sorry but sitting in a field and wishing for success will just leave you sitting in a field wishing for success.

I’ve never met a successful person who hasn’t at some point worked damn hard to get there and I would put money on it that you haven’t either and yet if it was just about working harder or longer then most of the business owners and entrepreneurs I meet on a daily basis would already be billionaires and they are not and I guess most of you aren’t either.

So, it simply cannot be, and nor has it ever been about hard work alone and that is a fact.

You will never be able to work hard enough or long enough to achieve massive success through your own efforts, just working harder will not beat the competition, they work hard too, just working harder will not grow your business to a point that it doesn’t need you anymore and just working harder is unlikely to make you financially secure let alone financially free.

There is some really good news for you though because working hard on the right things can and indeed will mean you can achieve all you could ever want.

The trick is getting clarity on what you need to work hard on right? Right?

I mean based on the fact that very few of you can work much harder or longer than you are right now then you need to know what to stop doing as much as knowing what you need to start doing, and that is what I do for the business owners and senior leaders I work with on a 121 basis

I help them get clarity on they need to work hard on and what they need to learn to get to the next level of success and then I damn well make sure they get there.

My hope is that after reading this you will have more clarity on how to make your hard work count as much as it should.

I am going to give you some simple rules you can use to make the most of you.

So, get yourself some paper and a pen and take as many notes as you can.

I am not pretending for one minute that this is a quick fix, in fact there are as far as I’m aware no quick fixes for achieving success and the quicker you accept that ironically the quicker you will achieve the next level of success, what I can promise you is this is the start of a long hard journey and that’s good because until now you’ve been working really hard anyway you’ve just been pushing a merry go round trying to make it go from one end of the country to the other and that really is just hard work.

Like most things in this universe success has a process to follow and it works if you stick to the process if you skip bits or try to short cut it you end up working even harder for the same results as your already getting.

The process has been identified and written about by many very smart people over the years and the granddaddy of these authors is probably Napoleon Hill and his book Think and Grow Rich.

A while back I decided I wanted to make this process very simple for me to implement it in my own life and so I wrote my own Book to lay out this process in a way that made sense for me and hopefully it will for you too, its called Get a Grip.

The book is really just a process you can follow and if you want to read it there’s a link below to Amazon, unfortunately it’s not as easy as just reading a book, it is though, a brilliant place to start.

Before we get to that, I want to tell you a part of my story, I was very fortunate to have parents who not only love me, they always told me I could achieve anything I wanted to as long as I worked hard and studied, and the key there, I found out later was study. I was fortunate to have some good teachers, I also had some pretty bad ones. My approach maybe subconsciously, was to always latch on to those that supported me, not necessarily the ones who were nice to me, the ones who told the truth and yet still believed in me and encouraged me to be better, to achieve more. The unreasonable friends the people when I look back were the coaches in my life.

I continued this when I was training to be an engineer and then on into sales, sales managment,  sales training, corporate leadership and now coaching, I have and still do surround myself with people who want me to succeed, those that support me, encourage me and teach me to be better.

And that’s Rule number 1 get yourself a support structure.

There are very few people on this planet that can take enough knocks and keep going long enough without any support to make true success happen, a great support structure is more than just having friends or family in your corner, it’s about having access to people who are where or are on their way to where you want to be as well having the support of the people you care about most. It’s not that you won’t make money if you don’t have this, success though is way more than simply making money, its being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it with the people that you want to do it and not having the right support structure in place simply makes this very, very hard.

As a rule of thumb you are the average of the 5 people, you spend the most amount of time with, trust me being the smartest person in the room just means you’re not learning anything and that means you’re stuck, so find people smarter than you and seek out those that are achieving more than you. If you want to have a multimillion-pound business surround yourself with people who have one, if you want to be a great writer surround yourself with great writers.

So, use LinkedIn, search locally for people that you admire, get yourself booked onto local networking groups, not necessarily to join them, to seek out those local people that can and will support you, start building your contacts to create a support structure that will help get you to the next level, seek out a local Mastermind group, for those of you local enough to me I run my own simply message me and we can have a conversation about whether it’s for you or not.

Whatever step you decide is the right step for you like my page, because I make a lot of effort to support and encourage the people who take the time to follow me.

Please, please, please don’t ignore this rule, I put it first not because it needs to happen first, just that with the right support in place everything else becomes easier, not easy just easier and you’re already working hard right?

I developed something that I covered in my book called the wheel of success and the hub of that wheel, the focus, the starting point of all success if you like, starts with what does success look like for you, I called it your statement of intent in my book, because essentially you need to know what it is you intend to achieve.

Now something I have learnt since writing that book is that this can be a really tricky thing for people and I’m aware you may have no idea what it is you want to achieve other than of more money to pay the bills or less worry, anxiety or stress, it may be that you want more certainty in your life, excitement or just some time to spend with your friends and family and honestly that’s as good a place as any to start.

As I promised a the start there is a process for this and like every process it can be broken down into steps, the next step is what is it that you want to achieve, what do you want, not what you think your business can do or what looks Realistic, what do you, the human being want your life to look like, 20, 10, 5 years from today what do you want your life to be like, what would be your ideal day, week, month or year?

That’s Rule number two, know with clarity what outcome is that you are seeking.

Easier said than done right?

As I’ve said you may well not know what your outcome is or what it is you want to Have

I’m making an educated guess that you will be able to tell me what you don’t want though right?

You don’t want to work so hard; you don’t want to be broke; you don’t want to worry about cashflow, team, bills, family, leads, sales or a hundred other things. You don’t want to feel anxious or overly stressed, you don’t want to let your family, friends and yourself down and you know there is definitely something deep down that you want to achieve whether that’s status, recognition, security or maybe to change the world.

So your second step get some paper and draw a line down the centre and on the left side write a list of things you don’t want in your life, everything you can think of no matter how negative or depressing, get everything you most definitely do not want in your life down on paper.

It may well be what we already mentioned that it really is don’t want to work so hard; you don’t want to be broke; you don’t want to worry about cashflow, team, bills, family, leads, sales or a hundred other things. You don’t want to feel anxious or overly stressed, you don’t want to let your family, friends and yourself down, get it written down.

Once you have done that, on the other side of the line simply list what the opposite of that would be for you so how much of your time that you’re working hard now would you like back for friends and family, what level of income means you’re wealthy, how much cash flowing into the business reduces your stress , anxiety and worry to acceptable levels what does a team to be proud of look like, how many leads would be too many.

Most of us were brought up, unintentionally by the way, to focus on what we don’t want, to focus on improving our weaknesses which makes us focus on our weaknesses and we have been told since starting school that we must work harder, so for the most part we are very good at knowing what we don’t want, like most things though you can turn this into an advantage if you just turn what you don’t want into what you want to have.

It’s great that you’re still reading and hopefully following these steps, because you’re already taking more action on delivering your goals than 95% of the world are.

Knowing what you want to have though is for me only the start and it’s where I differ from most other coaches and mentors out there, have is the material things, the goals are the logic behind our dreams. Millions of people create smart goals every day, and millions of those goals are big and audacious, millions of those goals have a set of plans to deliver them and yet most people never realise them, like hard work if it was a simple as a bucket list there would be many more billionaires in the world.

Having a list of things you want is a great start though.

So, the next step is one missed by very nearly every book and course I have come across and is the reason for this article. 

This step is the difference that makes the difference.

What would have to happen for all of the things you have written down that you want to have or all of the things on your bucket list to have been achieved, would be being achieved or can now be achieved because that event, came to pass.

If this sounds a little abstract its because it is, that’s how your brain works it works and yes I know it’s a hard thing to come up with and yes it takes time to sit without distraction and picture what you need to happen and yet it is worth every single second that you spend on it.

This is success for you, this is your intended outcome this is the start of knowing what to work hard on because newsflash, you need to work hard on what you want to achieve, the outcome is our dreams of a better life x our goals which are usually the things we want to have

Ok, there is a little more to it than that, yet this is the start, if we know what would need to happen for us to have the life we want we can start planning to achieve it, without this knowledge we will find it near impossible to know what we need to work hard on and so will just work hard on everything and that’s exactly where we started.

Once we know what it is we need to focus on, we can start to think about what we need to learn in to be able to do it, this is where the support comes in, no one is an island and to quote Tiger Woods, “no one is strong enough to do this on their own” without the support you will find it very hard indeed to become who you need to be in order to do what you need to do in order to achieve the outcome you want.

Epictetus a Greek Philosopher from 2000 years ago said “first say to yourself what you would be, and then do what you have to do”.

And that’s the next Step know who you need to be

Who do you need to be in order for the event you need to happen to happen? What do you need to learn and what changes do you need to make to your thinking and your habits so that you can do the things you need to do to achieve what you want to achieve.

So lets take an example, let’s say I want an extra million in income and for that to happen I need to get out there in front of more people, a possible event that would mean I had achieved that could be speaking on stage to more people at a time say 2000 people at a single event, because if that was true then I would get to speak at a lot of events of at least 1000 – 1500 people at a time and that because of the nature of my business would mean an extra million in revenue would already be in or would be well on the way to being in my bank.

Ok that works so, if that’s the way I can achieve my goal and it’s the way I want to achieve my goal then who do I need to be?

Well I would definitely have to be a world class speak and presenter, right? I wouldn’t get invited to speak at that event otherwise, So, what might be a good book for me to read, a good course to go on, what videos should I be watching?

Oh Wait that’s what I should be learning right? read a book, go on a course and watch videos on being a world class speaker? And massively important this what should I be telling myself I am? Spoiler alert it’s not better at speaking – I would need to be telling myself I am a world class speaker and presenter or at the very least I am becoming a world class speaker and presenter.

So if that’s who I need to be and that’s what I need to learn to have what I want this will be easy right?

Well no, it’s not quite as simple as just knowing who you need to be.

Without it though the chances of succeeding dwindle to almost imperceptible levels.

You need a process that takes who you become and then uses that to deliver what you want to achieve.

So, if your outcome can be defined as your Dreams x your Goals then who you will become can be defined as what you learn x the support you have. So, the more you learn and the better the support you have the more you become.

So now we get onto the bit you are all pretty damn good at, the hard work part, this is Epictues’s do what you have to do. He didn’t say do all you can do he said do what you have to do, if you have clarity on what you want to achieve, what success looks like for you, you know what you need to learn and what support you need to get there you can now create a plan of what you need to do, what you should be working hard doing. If your outcome is 20 years away or 5,3 or 1 year away doesn’t matter start there, start with the outcome and work backwards to today Plan what 5 years, 3 and 1 year looks like, plan 90 days 1 month, 1 week and then decide what you will do today.

Without this you will slip back into just working hard, I said right at the beginning that if you miss steps of the process or you try to fast track it, the process fails and unfortunately so do most of the people who don’t follow it.

Everything I have told you is simple, don’t for one minute confuse simple with easy, they are not the same thing, everyday I help very driven, very smart and already successful people get to the next level by following this and other simple yet not easy processes that deliver on their dreams and aspirations.

If you want to go this alone, I can only advise you to connect with me on LinkedIn because I offer as much support as I can there without charge.

If you want to get serious about getting the life you want and the business you need to support it send me a message, or book a call directly into my diary and we can have a conversation about what the right support is for you. I don’t charge to see if I can help so take advantage of that offer if you’re ready for the next level.

For now though have an awesome day and until next time goodbye for now.