Cancer and concern are cares that often come together. The cancer patient is concerned for their situation and their family, friends and caregivers show concern for the patient. Hard times and challenges can bring pity for self and others.

It is just so hard. They don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve this. How can this be happening? Concerns over physical health and emotional well being cause us all to feel for those in this situation.

Today I learned of Devin, a 15 year old cancer patient who was not doing well. He had every right to be discouraged and depressed. So did his visitors, family and friends. He could have looked into his heart and focused on his sad position.

For some like Devin the seeking sorrow in self-pity just is not in their language or life. Sure the struggle was tough but Devin had a perspective worthy of us all.

He asked for a small refrigerator for his 15th birthday, his last. In the refrigerator he stored sodas for his visitors. He made a sign for the refrigerator door:

“The Soda Factory — come depressed and leave refreshed.”

He then helped his visitors to find “refreshment” in their interactions with him and their shared soda.

The simple truth is that Devin was living the solution to self-pity. He was teaching lessons on how to face personal sorrow.

The principle of life is this: simple sincere service is the stuff that takes our minds off our own situation.  Sypathetic words spoken softly, a listening ear, and shared feelings from the heart just may be enough to move yourself and others off the path of self-pity.

This is a simple service with deep power to the people involved. Listen from the heart.  Speak from the heart.  Share a heartfelt story.  Carry on a conversation.  Share in their concerns.  Understand their situation.  See in your troubles the situations of those around you.  As you are talking about solutions to THEIR situation your own answers may surface.

Simple acts of concern can take us on a journey of service and understanding which reveal to our heart and minds solutions for our own situation.  Self-pity is overcome by service.  Sometimes this service is simple.  It may be nothing more than a radiant smile but it just may be enough to keep you and I on the positive path of personal progress.

Resolve with me to share in someone’s struggles. See if the service doesn’t lighten the burdens you bare.

Learning, Is It Really?

Are you the child of 3? Are you the youth of 17? Are you still your mother’s child or her caregiver? When did YOU change? If you have changed which you is you? Maybe it is time to start learning about you!

Today is the first day of the rest of your life… Who are you and what will you do with that today?

Learning Is Changing

Each “New” Day, Month, Year, event or activitiy gives you and I the chance to change. When you learn something about yourself and the world around you, you change.  Because of the change you are not the you, you were a while ago.

Does Your Personal Learning Lab Leverage Learning About You

Look at the first day of a New Year.  Is it really different than the day before?  The sun will rise and set the same as everyday here on planet Earth.  The difference is your attitude and your hope of a life improved and  greater satisfaction carries the day.  You have a new hope generated through the possibilities of changes in your choices.

You can actually speed up the entire process by learning more about yourself.  Not the ever changing you, but the you who is doing the learning.  You and I need to become learners about ourselves as learners.  This brings ourDoes Your Personal Learning Lab Leverage Learning About You hopes and dreams into the realm of reality.

Learning About You

Sure you are changing each and every day.  You are not the same any day of the week because what you learn changes who you are.

Your core elements reveal your preferences for learning.  How does your mind work?  Are you a “visual” learner or do you prefer to hear the lesson?  Are you person of action?  Do you learn by doing more than seeing or listenting?

When you learn how you learn you are prepared to know what you can do to learn more quickly each day!  Learning about you, your preferences and dreams makes your ability to change expand quickly.

There are so many barriers to becoming all we want to become.  What is stopping you or I from becoming exactly what we want to be? Is this why we are continually experiencing challenges as we change?

1. 1. We beleive we know who we are.
2. 2. We are kidding ourselves.
3. 3. We do not want to face the reality of who we are.
4. 4.  We don’t know enough about ourselves to properly plan our own learning expereinces.

Plan now to get to know yourself.  Trust you have it in you to become your best self.  Know there are those of us around you cheering on your change.  Learning about you may just be the fastest breakthorough to the new you you desire.

Your Hope of a New You in the New Year

Isn’t this really what gives us the light in the dawn of the new year?  Hope for a bright future. Hope for a dream come true. Hope for learning the best stuff for us so we can be changed by what we learn.  Will you indeed leverage you and learning about you into the new you?  You are changing.  You are learning.

Why not learn about you and how you learn so you can become the new you faster.  Learn about you so you can learn more around you and change for the better?

I hope you have the time of your life learning to change by learning about how you learn and change.

Best of success,

Leveraging Learning into Significant Solutions

 

 

 

 

Feel free to contact me about your own personal learning sytle assessment.
Accelerated learning is enabled when you the learner are learning about you!

George Fourie, ThatMLMBeat founder and Top 50 MLM Blogs competition creator shares the excitement behind the scenes of this year’s Top 50 MLM Blogs competition on The Teach Jim Show

Listen as You Read:

George shares his story of overcoming bankruptcy, an automobile accident and a brush with death. Questioning what his life is about he got kicked into gear again and jumped into life more fully. (See Ears to Hear Life Lessons? opens in new window)

He  shares powerful stories behind the best MLM Blogs on the Internet and the workings behind the Top 50 MLM Blogs competition.  He even reveals the key to Kimberly Castleberry’s win in the 2010 competition.  You will learn tricks he has to help you learn how to drive traffic through your effort in the competition.

Check out ThatMLMBeat.com and the Top 50 MLM Blogs for 2011 competition. Vote for your favorite blogs and be a part of some of the best informal learning you can find on Network Marketing.

Are you seeing the world through the eyes of a new reality?

Convergence is changing the world.

Social Media has its part. Transparency.

Demographics.  Mobile apps and more.

More changes. Employment stats.  Are you Ready?

What are you doing about all this change? Is your business adjusting to these changes? We are making some changes too.  Are you?

A group of us are adjusting to these change at revvquest.com.

What would you say if someone came along and stuck a camera in your face and said.. “What is your dream?”

That is what happened to me when I met Edward Elliot in person. He took me in that instance into a world of possibilities and reality all in the same moment.

I’ve reflected on what I told him that day. Maybe I should have been bolder and said a billion or a million. Maybe I should have been more specific with what I would teach or what these people would learn. No, I stand by what I said that day. Anything else would limit the possibilities. Here it is:

Since then you and I have been busy. Maybe you didn’t notice the beginnings of this self-directed learning community in the Order of Profitable Producers. Maybe you don’t see it now in Do What You Love For Your Living. It is there. Each of these projects are potential community efforts but entry begins with a specific end results in mind for the learners who enter.

Today, we are building that community of learners.  Learners who want to learn to master directing their own learning by doing. This dream is only a dream come true with YOU!  We have added to the dream  synergyquest.us. SynergyQuest.us provides a place for us to all learn from learning and from life.

This last week I had the good privilege of connecting again with “The GREAT Edward Elliot” on The Teach Jim Show.  It was great to thank him for that day and the way it caused something I’d thought about for years to come spilling out.

It was a delight to clarify how he helps people see their dreams and put into place their action plan for getting it done.  Some of the stories he shares are inspiring.  Moreover they give hope to dreamers like you and I the world over.

I hope you will take a few minutes to enjoy Edward Elliot on The Teach Jim Show.  It may just inspire you to take on your dreams and make them a reality.

Thanks Edward for the camera in the face!  It was good for me!

Sometimes the things that make us most uncomfortable reveal to us the truths deep inside.  I hope you each will consider dreaming a little more.  Day Dreaming just might not be such a bad thing…

Personal & Business Development  ABC’s

Where Are you? …ask yourself probing questions until it is clear you understand where you really are. What have you GOT?

Where do you want to Be?  …follow up with more demanding questions to clarify and solidify your WHY! What do you WANT?

What will be your Course of Action? What do you NEED to DO?

• Solid 4×4 Core Commitment
• I am here
• Developing Personally
• Plugged-in
• Working Consistently
  
• Strong Start (first phase 30 – 90 days)*
  
• Sustained Service (Phase 2 usually 90 days – 180 days or more)*
• Strategic Leadership (Maturing phase more than 180 days)*
  

* Days are just suggestions.  Actual progression through the phases depends on personal development and business development.

Walking to work the other day I ran into a crane fully extended over the City and County building here in Salt Lake City Utah.  Full of curiosity I wondered what in the world they were doing.

The workers revealed they were “evaluating the stone”.   I thought that was strange.  Don’t they know it is made of stone?  Can’t they see from the ground with binoculours that the stone is in place on the walls?

The next day I asked for a few more details.  They informed me they were looking for ways to improve the worn or broken stone so the building would last for another 100 – 200 years.

When asked how, they informed me they would replace badly damaged stones and repair those they could.  For now they were just conducting the assessment.  The information they provide would allow the city/county to make decisions on what they would do next to prepare the building for the next hundred years.

This got me to thinking about the money, time and effort they were expending to get a clear point of view.  They examined the entire building up close and personal so they could gain the exact details they needed.

This demonstrates for each of us the need to stretch beyond our current frame of reference.  We each need to “see” our place in life with greater clarity and clear focus.  We need that “better reality” I often talk about.  What will you do to get a better point of view for you?

Enjoy this very short reflective video and the longer radio show episodes as I examine what the changed point of view might do for you.

Radio show broadcasts related to a new point of view:

So much on your to do list and so little time. It does not have to be that way.

Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits brought us the Urgent vs Important matrix. David Allen’s Getting Things Done gave us the liberating in-box management tactics.

Today, I bring you the breakthrough techniques of clearing your mind and clearing your list based on context to target your next action for results.

Master To Do List

David Allen and Stephen Covey and many others advocate a master to do list. A single location for keeping all your to do items. This master to do list is to help you keep your mind clear to focus on the important tasks of each day. There is no reason to clutter your mind or your life with all the stuff you need to do. The answer is to put it on to the master to do list in your system. Once on your master list you don’t need to think about it and it can appear when you need it. (That is if your system is working- more on that in a bit.)

Like many of you, I use technology tools to keep my master list. Tools like Toodledo, Nozebe and Remember the Milk let us maintain our master list and filter it into manageable subsists. You and I keep our master to do list, our life’s to do list with everything we need on it. This list is on our phones. It is available to us at any time. I pull up my list where I am in my current context. At my fingertips is the list of prioritized tasks I need to get to. The system works. For many of us, our master list has became a monster!

Master Your To Do List

Are you scared? Maybe you should be! You have invited a monster into your house. Your master to do list is that monster and you should be frightened. I know, I’ve been worried for weeks. Yes… My monster is smothering me. I’m Buried. You? Yes? When your master to do list hovers between 2 and 3 hundred tasks you’ll wake up one day realizing there is no way it will ever get “finished”. You may feel like you are sitting in the shadow of an ominous monster. Smothered, comes to mind.

I’ve been doing what I was taught. I’ve done it religiously for years. Keep a master list. Clear your mind. Don’t loose a thing. Well, maybe it is time I lost something. Maybe I’ll accidentally delete my entire list! What will you do?

Yes, what we’ve been taught has worked. Capture the to do items. Put them on the list. Conquer each item at the most appropriate time and place. Urgent – do it now! Important? Give it a place to go and go on. Take care of it in context. Really?

Next Actionable To Do List Item

I’m suggesting two ways to manage the pressures presented by your monster master to do list.

• Do as you are taught. (David and Stephen would be proud.)
• Ignore the master to do list with a simple single sheet system.
• Maybe a combination of both.

Do as we are taught but you and I may have ignored. At any given moment in time there is really only one thing you can do. ONE. David Allen suggest it is the “Next Actionable” item on your list for your current context and energy. This is great. My tool lets me identify that item. So off to work I go. There is no overwhelm. Just strategic efforts at getting done what matters most and pruning away what really does not matter.

Here is how I do it in ToodleDo. (You’ll want a tool that can do this if you subscribe to the mind dump to a master list concept.) I use Status: Next Action, Priority: High, Starred, Important tags and Context to keep the most relevant items of my massive master list before me in the moment I need it.

For me, my list only consists of the things I am working on that matter most and/or are doable where I sit in the world at that moment. Pretty easy. It usually comes down to a single item or two at any given moment. So it is a huge list with focused attention on a single item doable at that time. Feels pretty good.

To Do List Mastery

Amazing how the books we read a youngsters stay with us. Today I could just hear Chick Little and Lucy Goosey and others exclaiming, “The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!”

Today, the Amazon EC2 infrastructure is down. The cloud has fallen from the sky! This EC2 is the “elastic” infrastructure designed to scale up automatically to handle giant traffic spikes common to Amazon during the holidays. They have sold this service to many websites for “cloud” reliability. These websites relied on this part of the “cloud” to remain in the sky.

They expect the cloud to stay in the sky. Today they are wondering if the “cloud” is vapor ware. What happened to reliability?

I’ve been affected directly by outages or disruptions in service at My Lead Systems Pro and Spring Pad It. Each of these services were affected negatively by this outage.

You and I need to remember this day. It is a day to give reason for your weekly backup patterns. Reason to spread some of your online business to a variety of servers and services so failures like this only affect a portion of your business.

It is ironic I was lamenting the loss of some other web based services a week or so ago on The Teach Jim Show. Then I suggested there are times and ways to remain flexible even in light of possible loss or service outages. Maybe, today is a good time to remind ourselves how we can deal with loss and outages.

Maybe the sky is falling. It is OK. Embrace the unexpected. Rain is a natural phenomenon. Maybe we should go dance in it!

Leveraging Learning into Significant Solutions

I am amazed with the many high caliber, quality people who are frustrated in their dreams of establishing an online enterprise. Maybe you are among them. Your success formula is simple. You just need to provide products and services people need. They, like you, will gladly invest in solutions their problems. How do you provide solutions when you are struggling yourself? Simple. Stop struggling! You and I struggle because of two questions.

1. What must I do next?
2. Where do I get the real answers to my first question?

All this means is somehow you need know the most direct and clear path to a profitable enterprise BEFORE you can learn the straight path to profits.

That all changes today.

You and I do not need to go through all the pains of learning all the steps before we can start. All of us together know enough to help each of us. That is right. YOU or I do not need to know the entire answer ourselves. Each of us needs to know a little bit. Together all of us have all the knowledge we individual need.

Teach Jim’s Order of  Profitable Producers is a close knit group of concerned individuals willing to give to each other support in each step to success. Together, we identify needs and solutions. We then work individually and/or together to produce the solution. We then help each other market the finished product toward profits.

You and I overcome the challenges of establishing an online enterprise by pooling our knowledge and skills into the immediate solutions we each need now! You and I grow our online enterprise by providing real solutions to people very real problems. You are not alone in this process.

Teach Jim’s Order of Profitable Producers focus on creating solutions for others while we learn and master the essential skills for establishing an online enterprise.

Please visit http://profitableproducers.com for more information on how to join Teach Jim’s Order of Profitable Producers. You don’t need to go it alone anymore.