One of my podcast heroes is Dan Miller. Every Friday, I look forward to the latest installment of his 48 Days podcast. I met Dan a couple years ago at Kent Julian’s Speak It Forward boot camp, and was more than a little star struck!
Dan tells a story about a time in his life following a business failure, decades ago. As he struggled to bounce back, he force-fed his mind with inspirational audio from authors like Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy.
I recently listened to Matt Theriault’s New Year’s podcast. He also talked about monitoring his thoughts and belief – the same message from Dan. It reinforced my intention to do the same.
As the New Year got under way, I found myself reading material from two different authors: Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever program and Pamela Slim’s new book, Body of Work. The two dovetailed nicely, with Hyatt offering a well-thought-out process for achieving goals in 2014. Slim’s book made me think about how seemingly disparate threads in a life or career actually connect – although it takes some conscious effort to make those connections!
Why am I writing about this on a “financial” blog? Because so many of our life decisions are intertwined money decisions – and vice versa.
“Your body of work is everything you create, contribute, affect, and impact. For individuals, it is the personal legacy you leave at the end of your life, including all the tangible and intangible things you have created. Individuals who structure their careers around autonomy, mastery, and purpose will have a powerful body of work.”
That’s both wide and deep. It would be silly to boil it down to some trite financial tip.
But it’s pretty obvious that money problems have the potential torpedo the best of personal-development intentions fairly quickly. That brings us back to Dan Miller’s practice, during those lean times many years ago, of driving around on sales calls, with a little cassette player beside him (that tells you how long ago it was!), listening to motivational speakers.
But he combined the inspiration with some practical action: For example, he wouldn’t eat lunch before he got at least one sale. So it was a little more than “The Secret” style of manifesting a Ferrari by just hoping and wishing!
Dan understood that he had very specific financial goals to fulfill. Yes, he had to pay off his debt (and he eventually did), but he also had a young family to feed. He didn’t have the option of sitting around and dreaming about manifesting wealth!
Have you successfully monitored your thoughts and beliefs, and implemented action steps at the same time? What has worked for you?
