Simple wisdom from Dr Seuss

“You have brains in your head. You have feet in your shoes. You can steer yourself any direction you choose.” Dr Seuss

One of my great desires in life is to encourage people to teach people the principles of success so they can live the life they choose as early as possible.

Most of us get to middle age before we figure out that most everything we learned about life as a child was potentially wrong.

Dr Seuss manages to get four principles in four lines - the power of thought, the need for action, the power of choice, and no limits! What fantastic advice. Can you imagine the difference it would make to grow up understanding those four lines from an early age?

If you’re like me, you may have had kind and loving parents but they may not have taught you this art of choice as a child. What I often heard was, “We can’t afford that.” For my parents it was all about security and stability not grand adventure or possibility.

But let’s not lament time lost – instead make the most of the time you have from now, today. The quote still remains true about you, regardless of your age and where you are at right now.

So why not visit your local bookstore and get the book the quote is from, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” It’s an epic look at the whole journey of success, the ups and the downs. The kids will love it and so will you.

And pay close attention to the closing…“You’re off to great places! Today is your day! Your mountain is waiting. So…get on your way!”

Love from the Living Leader’s Advocate

Heidi Alexandra Pollard

Have you got goal envy?

Did you spend time on 1 January this year setting goals for the year ahead? Have you reviewed them since then? How well have are you travelling against those goals? Are you happy with your progress or are you watching others zooming past on their trajectory with a tinge of envy?

Isn’t it interesting that we get caught in the habit of thinking everything always needs to move forward in a linear direction, a,b,c, 1,2,3, one step after the other. We fall into the trap of thinking that there is only one way to achieve our goals and therefore if we aren’t heading along a straight path we give up and think we’ve made no progress.

In fact, the goals that you set at the beginning of the year may now be quite different to the goals you want today.Don’t be afraid to make changes to your goals as needed. Being flexible and course correcting is a necessary part of success. Reviewing your goals regularly may be just what you need to move forward.

Imagine what goals you could achieve if you took this compound approach and continued on a steady path taking one small incremental step each day towards your intended outcome.Start today by setting up three new goals for yourself that you want to achieve in the next three months. Then add a diary reminder to review your progress and take one small step each and every day - you’ll be glad that you did!

How often does that happen in real life? When have you ever started out on a path and everything has gone along smoothly in a perfectly straight line?

span style=”font-size: 10pt; font-family: “Arial”,”sans-serif”;”>Isn’t it more likely to go up and down, side to side, weaving in and out? For me things often unfold as one step forward, two steps back and sometimes a sideways step.

You see it’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking ‘it’s halfway through the year, I should be halfway through accomplishing my goals.’

Should you? Really?

Are you comparing your progress against someone else? Just because they appear to be that far ahead doesn’t mean it may be the right path for you.  And what if your progress was compounding steadily like compound interest?

A common example to illustrate this used in many wealth workshops is the example of the $1 million versus $1 cent gift. Would you rather accept Option A - a one off gift today of $1 million or would you rather be given Option B - one cent that is compounded daily for a month?

At the half way point - 15 days if you chose Option B you would have only $163.84, would you be kicking yourself that you should have taken the $1 million?

What about if you hung out until day 25? If you chose Option A you would still have $1 million (or whatever you hadn’t spend already) but if you chose Option B you would have $167,772.16? Would you still cut your losses and take Option A?

By day 30 the end of the month if you chose Option B - you would be very pleased that you were patient and persisted in adding one small compound improvement each day? Why? Because by day 30 your little bonus would be worth a whopping $5,368,709.12 that’s why!

The simple, slow and steady without quitting and without cashing in along the way really can win the race.

So don’t give up on your goals and dreams. Keep on making progress and moving forward, even if it is a sidestep or two steps backwards - that’s just part of the process.

Have fun while boosting your brand

So you’re already well versed with social networking sites - you regularly update your Facebook profile, you have hundreds of professional connections on LinkedIn, and you manage to share most of each day in bite sized a 140 character Tweets.

So what’s next I hear you ask.

While you may be well up to speed with adding value to your business through social media, do you know how to use it as a tool for successfully marketing your personal brand?

no? Well here are some quick easy tips for leveraging your brand on the web:

Utilize services that allow you to post to multiple sites and services with a single post. For this purpose, I highly recommend Posterous.com. It’s a free service that allows you to post to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn by sending a single email.

Trial and error is the best way to learn: try different things to see what people respond to most. This is especially true when you have a diverse audience with varying interests, it’s important to experiment and test to see what works and what people are responding to. Don’t be afraid to experiment and see what gets your audience interacting.  

Join the conversation. Social media is all about online conversations. It’s a place to listen to your users and encourage participation. If you are too heavy handed with your “marketing” you may well run the risk of alienating your community of followers. Respond to other people’s posts, interact, be yourself and join in the conversation. Remember your followers follow you because they believe you are interesting ans share content of value - never ram your stuff down their throats.

Be real. People want to follow someone they can relate to - the real authentic you. Including  photos, quotes, things that have happened to you - let people see who’s behind the brand.

Make it fun!!! Social media is about having fun and interacting. Show your passion, be a little silly, don’t be afraid to show your quirky self.

In light of this last point I have been playing around and having fun with my brand - check out my new animation video here and make your own to boost your brand! http://www.xtranormal.com/watch/6516217/

Yours in prosperity, passion and purpose

Heidi Alexandra Pollard, The Living Leaders Advocate

Are you a living leader?

According to ABS research around a quarter of all employed people go to work feeling unappreciated and considering leaving their employer. Why? Because they feel unappreciated or no longer valued and like they aren’t making a difference. Sobering facts huh. Even more concerning is the fact that depression occurs in 20% of all people over the course of a lifetime.  

Did you go to college or university and learn a profession or a trade? Studied hard, learnt the skills, took the tests and completed the assignments? Did anyone prepare you though for how to deal with overwhelm, how to set goals, how to cope through the rough patches and how to deal with the issues of depression and pressure of modern life? Perhaps, but probably my guess would be probably not.

The trap many people fall into is looking too critically at what they are rather than who they are being and who they are becoming.

What do you answer when you are asked the question “what do you do?” Do you say you are an engineer, a marketer, a physiotherapist, a teacher, an entrepreneur, a writer?

What would you answer if you were asked instead, “who are you being?”

Think about it. Would you say “I don’t know”? Would you say “myself”? Or would you answer without needing to think: a conduit, an enabler, a learner, a millionaire in the making, a storyteller, a delight, a friend, a creative spirit, an experience, a life adventurer, a protagonist, a free spirit, a vessel of information or perhaps a living leader?

If you are anything like many of my clients when they first come to me, you are probably fast approaching meltdown, overwhelmed with the pressures of the job or your business, drowning in the day to day demands of society, of family, of friends, life and commitments in general. You answer may well be “a mess”.

As the Living Leaders Advocate and a coach, my purpose is to be the holder of a space that enables things to come forth out of my clients – things that are far greater than me. My job is to help my client step outside of their overwhelm and step into the possibility of what they truly desire to become. To shine a light internally on their inner being and to investigate what they want to step into.

Like the conductor of an orchestra, as a coach I need not make a sound to help my clients make beautiful music. Like the conductor, my role is not about my ego. It is my job to bring out the best in my clients – a role I relish.

With encouragement my clients become possibility thinkers. With courage they articulate what being a living leader looks like for them. With persistence they plan and take action steps to grow into that vision.

“What’s a living leader?” I hear you ask?

My definition of a living leader is someone who serves a greater purpose than themselves. A living leader doesn’t wait until they are on their death bed to pass on their wisdom. Living leaders have a desire to continually learn and grow, to drink deeply from life and to serve others. The presence of living leaders inspires others to become freer, healthier, wealthier, wiser, more creative and courageous and inspired to pass on their enlightenment to others as well.  Living leaders light their own spark and ignite the spark in others.

Living leaders:

·         Practice gratitude, compassion and positive thinking

·         Invest in social connections

·         Focus on resilience

·         Live in the present

·         Commit to their goals

·         Take good care of themself – spiritually, mentally and physically

·         Identify and maximise their character strengths

·         Focus on being authentically  themselves

·         Practice optimism, compassion and empathy.

As a person growing into becoming a Living Leaders I work harder on myself than I do on my job – I am constantly reinventing myself, continually attending courses and seminars, reading a book a week, working with my coach mentor and  travelling to meet with my mastermind to learn new information, make more connections and discover new ways of being.

What are you doing to grow your knowledge and improve yourself?

What do you do to light the sparkle in your own eyes?

And if not ask yourself “Who am I being that my eyes aren’t sparkling?”

Living leaders enable other people: be the space instead of the hero. Create the conditions instead of controlling the outcome. Once you let go of controlling the outcome you will be amazed by the power and the passion that you ignite in people.

Live with passion

Love Heidi Alexandra Pollard - The Living Leaders Advocate

Stand in your power

“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk - and to act.” Maxwell Maltz

Do you allow your fear to paralyse you and hold you back from achieving all that you desire? Or do you acknowledge and accept your fear and then carry on with it and through it regardless?

One of the biggest mistakes people make is to allow fear to get in the way of their success. Analysis paralysis is the killer of innovation! Just because you are experiencing fear, doesn’t mean that you can’t do something… it just means that doing it is going to feel uncomfortable - so expect to feel that way. 

Take the time to pay attention to all the things that you think you can’t do, be or have. Identify the fear that you are empowering with this assumption and then carry on with and through it regardless.

Ask yourself what’s the worst thing that could happen? And what if in pushing through the fear you achieved what you truly desired? What are you waiting for?

Yours in prosperity, passion and purpose
Heidi Alexandra Pollard

Great Leaders Focus on Solutions

Today’s leaders are faced with problem solving opportunities every day - what sets apart average managers from great leaders is the way that they approach them.
So what are the habits, practices and actions these leaders take to become expert solution finders? The number one powerful habit that leaders have is reading.

Managers generally focus wholeheartedly on the problem, acknowledging, worrying over and discussing the problem to themselves and with others.

Great leaders on the other hand, don’t draw attention to problems. They focus on solutions. They express their trust in a vision or plan and they do all that they can to harness the support of the people around them towards the positive goal.

The ability to lead groups of people through change and challenge is rapidly becoming a core requirement of successful leadership. Research on leadership development has shown that leadership is not simply an innate ability of extraordinary people, but is actually the repeated combination of habits, practices and actions ordinary people take to inspire groups of people to achieve extraordinary things.

Not all readers are leaders, but all leaders must be readers. Harry S Truman

Reading offers the chance to see the world from someone else’s eyes, thus broadening the leader’s mind to other points of view and new possibilities. It is also a great imagination trigger and helps increase creativity.

There is so much knowledge available in the world, why would you try to invent solutions to problems without finding out what others already know? If you ever find yourself stuck for a new idea for a project or have come across a barrier that seems impossible to overcome, all you need to do is read. You may not find the exact answer you are looking for but the very act of reading will open your mind up, improve your concentration and creativity, allows new ideas to come and solutions to show themselves. 

Of all the things we can do to improve ourselves and our leadership, reading would have to be the most powerful and inexpensive. CEOs of Fortune 500 companies read an average of four to five books a month.

The more you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go. Dr. Seuss

Reading for just 15 minutes a day, every day for one year can add up to 20 books a year - enough to become an expert in your field. So what are you waiting for? Turn off the television and go read a book.

To your brilliance

Heidi Alexandra Pollard

Results not resolutions

With the new decade upon us, now is the time to review, renew and reignite your plans for what you want the next year to hold in store.

So how can you create results and not just empty resolutions? Simple. Treat the new year as you would any other project and begin with the end in mind.Take a moment to sit quietly and visualize yourself one year from now. What do you want to have accomplished? Who do you want to have become in the process? What kind of relationships do you want have? What kind of experiences will you have had by the end of 2010? 

Allow your mind to paint the picture as vividly as you can - in words, pictures, sounds or feelings - whatever makes it feel most real for you. This will engage your subconscious mind, which is the best way to achieve successful results. 

Write down your visualisation in the form of a letter or story, as accomplishments that have already happened. Doing so will trick your subconscious mind into believing this to be true and it will work for you day and night to make your vision match your reality. 

Another major step to ensure results is the act of writing your vision down and sharing it with others. Doing so propels your subconscious mind make the commitment to reach them. 

My secret weapon to ensure my goals are powerful is to write them in the form of a gratitude letter. As my coaching clients can attest, a key success principle I teach is ‘ink it, don’t just think it’. As an author and teacher I find the narrative form to be very instructive and inspiring as it makes it feel so tangible.

If you are a practical, list writer then you may prefer to use an action plan approach to defining your year ahead. Use quarterly or six month milestones and dot points outlining what you will be do and have at each project milestone along the way.Either way, what matters is that you engage in the process of projecting your future possibility and capturing it on paper. This will give you clarity and focus. 

Working backwards with the beginning in mind will ensure you don’t set yourself up for failure. Many people overestimate what they can achieve when setting goals and end up with so many that they would have to work 20 hours a day, exercise for five hours a day and save 90 per cent of their earnings. Impossible!

This year instead of worrying about resolutions, focus on the evidence of the results you will have achieved by this time next year. And most of all remember, real success is not about having it all, its about being, doing and having those things that matter!

Yours in prosperity, passion and purpose

Heidi Alexandra Pollard
The Communicator’s Coach

Is your brand as clear as Epsom salts?

My own coach from the US Therese Skelly recently posted the following article and I thought it had some great points of interest relevant to communicating your personal career brand. Enjoy and thanks Therese!

Is your brand as clear as Epsom salts?

This has got to get the award for the WORST marketing ever. Reading a bag of epsom salts (don’t ask!) I was surprised from a marketing perspective at what it said “Epsom Salt – Magnesium Sulfate U.S.P – Natural Mineral” (and here’s where it gets interesting….)

A soaking aid for minor sprains and bruises

A saline laxative for the short term relief of constipation

A plant nutrient for vigorous lawns, flowers, plants, vegetables and trees.

Now I don’t know about you, but I doubt even brilliant marketers like my friend Michele PW or the famous Dan Kennedy could come up with copy for a product that helps with bruises, constipation, and gardening! All the marketing messages I teach about having to have a unified message just get thrown out the window with this thing.

As I re-read this bag of Epsom salts, I had the fantasy that a bunch of marketers were sitting around brainstorming, and finally they said, “What the heck, let’s just throw it all in.  We can’t figure out what to say, so we’ll just list the uses and let it go from there.”

With epsom salts, you pretty much know what you use it for.  And unlike coaching or whatever business you are in, there’s only one variety.  There’s not mint flavored, low fat, west coast, designer salts.  You get one thing.  Where you put it is your own business!  But it makes it easy because there’s only ONE way it’s delivered.

But in your business you don’t have the ability to have a crappy marketing message because you can’t figure out if you work with business owners, or mom’s, or teens, or people in transition.

That’s what this article is about.  Just because Walgreen’s can get away with having a generic product with bad packaging, as a small business owner, you can’t.  Your only choice is to narrow your focus, get crystal clear about who you serve, and what they get, and then go about creating compelling language around that.

So where do you start?

The things you need to be able to clearly articulate are what you do (as in your unique expertise) who you do it for (target market) and what problems you solve for them.  Most people start out as generalists, but the goal is to refine your market, offering and services even tighter as you get more and more sophisticated.  If you are stuck here, grab a mastermind partner or survey some old clients to get more information about how they benefited from working with you.

Why is this important?  Success is about being seen as the foremost expert in your industry. 

Well I hope you enjoyed Therese’s article - something to ponder because unlike Epsom salts, there’s no one else like you!

All the best

Heidi Alexandra Pollard

The Communicator’s Coach

Are Your Fears and Fairytales Holding You Back?

The power of communication is what the listener does with the message, not what the message does to the listener. Messages, stories, speeches, movies and advertisements that move people deeply do not do so because they are powerful in themselves. They do so because they touch the audience’s most desired wants, most cherished values or even the things they dislike most. They evoke responses that are already in the listener, they don’t put them there.

The same can be said about your inner dialogue. What are you doing with the messages and stories you tell yourself? Begin to collect information on your own thoughts, observe your behaviour, responses, doubts and fears. Listen to the fairytales and beliefs you have created for your own life: “I can’t sing”; “I’m too old”; “I’ll never be rich”; “I don’t deserve that”; “I’m not smart enough to do that.”

What is your inner voice telling you and how often? How frequently do you allow those negative beliefs and tales show up? How much emotion is behind them? How do they compare to the frequency and strength of your positive affirmations?

The greatest obstacle to your success is probably you. Too often I find coaching clients hold themselves back due to their personal fears and fairytales.

One such handbrake to success is the fear of failure, probably the single greatest barrier to success in adult life. Taken to its extreme, people are totally pre-occupied with not making a mistake, with seeking approval for security. How do you know when you are coming from a position of fear? When you hear yourself saying the words “I can’t”.

Another major fear that can interfere with performance and inhibit expression, creativity and success, is the fear of rejection. Unfortunately it creates a need in us to do what pleases others because we constantly crave approval.

Be honest with yourself - how have you feeling about yourself lately? About your career or business? About your health, relationships and wellbeing? Who’s approval are you seeking? Who’s permission are you waiting for to make a change now? Are you taking chances to grow… or have you been playing it safe?

I ask because it’s where I have been and I know exactly what it feels like to be trying to move ahead with one foot nailed to the floor. It can creep up on you - starting out small and gradually building, that need for certainty, for risk aversion, the fear of making any bold moves.

For many people, this way of being serves them well most of the time, and the very fact that they are surviving makes them want to do it more. But for those of you, like me, who have a burning passion inside you, a desire to do something grander, to fulfil your entrepreneurial drive, to become someone worth becoming, to leave a legacy…this mode will slowly kill your spirit, your career or business - and your soul.

Dreams that you once had get pushed aside. Bold ideas get filed away into the “someday when the time is right” folder. Your spark of creativity gets muffled as the busyness of life, of caring for others and going through the motions take over. Worse still, your generosity of spirit shrinks as you retreat and wait for things to get better.

So what can you do to stop the downward spiral?

Here’s five actions to help you get your passion back on track…

1.     Feel the fear and do it anyway - if you wait for all the fears to leave you’ll be waiting forever. I know the more risks I take, the more confident I become.

2.     Rediscover the passion you had.- get back to that feeling of having nothing but possibilities in front of you. Build the courage to step out in your highest good and to show up every day in a big way.

3.     Move without all the answers - analysis paralysis is a killer (this was my biggest vice), you may always wonder how you are going to find the time, knowledge, money or support to do what you want to do, but without forward motion you will never find the answers.

4.     Chunk it down - this simple but powerful concept is one that has worked from me since my early 20’s. Take just one step, once a week, towards one of your goals and you will be amazed at what you can achieve in one year. Breaking your goals into week-sized chunks will make it feel much more doable and will help you create the momentum that leads to amazing long term progress and success.

5.     Get an accountability buddy - tell someone you trust about the goal you’re committed to (I tell my coach Therese). It may be scary to talk about it, but the spoken word in itself creates energy and accountability.

Don’t settle for a second rate you - decide today that you deserve better.