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Take control of your time and your life
Posted Feb 20th, 2011 By Andrew Horder in Loving your Work, Time Management With | No Comments

Loving Work: Fulfilment from taking control

This came through on an e-mail from my friend Laith Hofayz, successful corporate trainer and MD of ImpactSkills Training:

A very quick tip for you… I think this beautifully articulates what we know we should be doing, but don’t necessarily do. By one of my favourite speakers / authors Dr. John Demartini.

Any area of your life that is not empowered will be overpowered. If you don’t fill each day with high priority actions, your day will fill up with low priorities. If you don’t clearly define, plan and pursue your highest aspirations in your career you will keep being positioned in low priority positions that are unfulfilling.
Loving work: Are you a joy-stealer?
Posted Feb 9th, 2011 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Loving your Work With | No Comments

Loving work: there’s someone for every task

Some of us love spreadsheets and analysis. Some folks love going out networking and talking to loads of people. Some like working one-to-one with people in coaching, counselling or consulting. Some love messing about with computers, keeping them running and defending them against hacking and virus attacks. And some are happy working outdoors in all weathers. I firmly believe that for every task that needs doing, there’s a person who will find joy in doing it. And it’s different for everyone.

So why do people insist on dragging down what someone else does? You’ve heard them in the pub, at parties, in the supermarket: “You do that?
What’s your higher purpose?
Posted Jan 21st, 2011 By Andrew Horder in A Better World, Clarity & Focus, Loving your Work, Motivation & Management With | 1 Comment

Loving Your Work: Motivation

Many people think that they will be happy in their job if they can just get paid a bit more. In my experience, and from what clients and colleagues tell me, that’s rarely the case. The whole point of my mission to help you to do what you love for a living is that it’s something that you’d do even if you weren’t getting paid at all!

Where people have most success in turning what they love into a living, is where they’re doing it for some higher purpose, something bigger than themselves. That can range from all-encompassing goals like ending hunger or creating world peace to projects that just affect your local community or your spiritual group, your church synagogue, temple or mosque. Or it may be as simple and powerful as wanting your family to have everything they need. Quite why this greater purpose makes people better at sticking at it until they can make a living doing what they love is open to debate, but I have my own theories.

Most of us have been brought up to think of work as something to be endured, something you do under duress, something done out of some kind of duty. So to spend your working life doing something you actually love seems kind of cheeky, something to be a bit guilty about. After all, who do we think we are, having fun in our work for goodness sake! And that slight feeling of guilt makes us just a little bit less certain of our decision to create a work we can love. In turn, that uncertainty makes us less prepared to fight for our inalienable right to pursue happiness in our work.

But when you have a higher purpose, it’s no longer just about having fun, it’s all about your family, your spiritual group, it’s all about saving the world! And now you’re proud to stand up and stand out and say, “I love my work”. Just don’t forget, you have to love the work itself. A chore being done for a grand purpose is still a chore, and will not be done with joy if the task itself isn’t something you can love. So by all means have a higher purpose that makes your work even more fulfilling – and serve that purpose doing work you love.

As an aside, as I was re-reading this post, I thought of this …

To Build Your Inspired Business – Start With 'Why?'

You might want to listen to this recording of one of Nick William’s talks recently – To Build Your Inspired Business – Start With ‘Why?’ (click on the image to buy it). Nick runs the Inspired Entrepreneurs community based in London and with members across the world. The recording costs £14.99 to get, but here’s a tip – it’s available free to members, and Nick offers a 30-day trial membership for just £1! That not only includes access to all the talk recordings (there’s dozens of them!), it also gives entry to the London meetings each month – they cost £20, and there’s usually a book that Nick’s bought as a gift for us (I used to think Nick blagged them from the speakers, until an author friend of mine told me Nick had actually shelled out for 80-odd copies of her book when she spoke!) That’s the sort of chap he is.
7 Truths of Wealth Dynamics
Posted Nov 4th, 2010 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus With | No Comments

Interesting video here by Roger Hamilton, creator of Wealth Dynamics, the entrepreneur profiling system I use to understand and guide in creating effective teams:

For more info see the WealthDynamicsCentral site, or
Take the Wealth Dynamics Test
No Regrets!
Posted Sep 26th, 2010 By Andrew Horder in A Better World, Clarity & Focus With | No Comments

I seem to be in mismatching* mode these last few days – here’s another old saw I don’t agree with.

I guess it depends what you understand by “regret”. I define it as wishing I hadn’t done something, or had done something differently. So it seems rather foolish not to regret some of the stuff I’ve done in the past – coasting my way to a 3rd class degree, thinking I could get past the muppet turning right against my motorbike, taking that job … the list is endless! Did I learn stuff from those mistakes? Absolutely! Which is why I now wish I hadn’t done them. To me, refusing to regret things that I’ve done implies refusing to get the learnings from them.

There’s a big difference between regretting stuff I did (or didn’t do for that matter) and worrying about stuff that others did that harmed or hurt me. I rather wish certain women had treated me differently. It would have been nice if certain bosses had recognised my enormous talents. And it sure would have been nice if the muppet in the Citroen hadn’t decided to turn right across my path that December evening in 1978. But I can’t regret any of that – you can only regret your own actions. The equivalent to regret when it concerns other people’s actions is resentment. That doesn’t help me grow like the learning experiences I regret, it eats me up by placing the cause of my success or failure outside of myself.

And the biggest danger of all is if I start to beat myself up about the things I did to myself. That serves no purpose at all – if resentment against others poisons the heart, resentment against oneself is corrosive to the very soul.

So yes, I regret loads of stuff – but I resent nothing.

*Mismatching is a concept used in NLP, to indicate someone who automatically disagrees with whatever you tell them. Mismatchers can have great value if they are conscious they are doing it, because they challenge assumptions that others may simply accept. Where it has become automatic, personally I just find them annoying.
Values to Value
Posted Nov 13th, 2009 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Motivation & Management, Sales and adding value With | 2 Comments

If you thought from the title that I’m about to tell you what your values should be, you’re going to be disappointed. I can’t tell you what you ought to value, that’s something entirely personal. Each of us has different priorities, different things that drive us to do what we do. And even if I was arrogant enough to attempt to impose my values on you, the meaning I attach to the words would be subtly different to yours.
We each have a unique experience of the world.

What the title of this blog means, is that it’s only by understanding someone’s values, what’s truly important to them, can we really add value for them. So if we’re offering business services, we need to find out what’s important to them in the context of their business. For example, is it all about money, or lifestyle, or even contribution? (see my poll on this subject here) . Or if we want to offer them products to improve their health, we need to know what’s important to them in that context – big muscles, good sleep, clear skin, balanced diet etc.

We may have the best widget in the world, something truly exceptional, but if it doesn’t provide what our clients and customers value, it won’t add value for them. And it’s only by adding more value to our clients than they pay that we can justify charging them money. There are a number of ways to elicit someone’s values in a sales context, ranging from asking them straight out, to listening to their language and playing it back to them, watching for the tiny giveaways that indicate their deepest values. And then you can show how what you offer will fulfill those values. Sales trainer & coach Dan Storey taught me about that recently.

At Chris Howard’s seminars I’ve learned a good method of eliciting my own values , and if you follow the link below, you can download an audio I’ve recorded, guiding you through it. It takes 10-15 mins, and you need to be in a quiet place where you won’t be disturbed.

Click here to access the Values Elicitation download.
Be a “con-artist”: get paid for doing what you love!
Posted Jul 29th, 2009 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Motivation & Management With | 1 Comment

I read somewhere a while back (my notes say it was in a Dan Sullivan article, but I didn’t note the title) that all successful entrepreneurs are essentially con artists – because they get other people to pay them for doing what they love, and would happily do for nothing. Now I’m a great advocate of spending your days doing what makes your heart sing,
Only lazy people work !!
Posted Jul 19th, 2009 By Andrew Horder in Clarity & Focus, Motivation & Management With | 1 Comment

That was a statement made at Chris Howard‘s Billionaire Bootcamp last week by “Lifestyle Trader” Aussie Rob – and it really struck a chord with me.
This downturn will be a blessing in disguise for some
Posted Dec 19th, 2008 By Andrew Horder in A Better World, Clarity & Focus With | No Comments

Opportunity Matrix™ – how NOT to be a Busy Fool

As we hear about more and more big corporates shedding workers, I find myself wondering whether some – possibly most – of those who find themselves surplus to requirements will find redundancy is a fantastic opportunity masquerading as a catastrophe. It may be my jaundiced view of the corporate life, but in my experience the majority of those working in the big corporates are not really passionate about their work – they just trundle along to the office each day to earn a crust, doing work they kind of drifted into.

In my last blog I explained Enjoyment-Performance Theory – the fact that we do better at things we enjoy. And that’s where I think those facing redundancy may actually have a great opportunity to take stock and work out what they really want to do with their time at work (and for most that’s over half of their free time, by the time you take travel into account). And then go out and make it happen – actually spend their waking lives doing something they enjoy and are good at. If we were all doing work we enjoy, and therefore performing really well at it, productivity would go through the roof – and so would individual fulfillment.

I’m not saying it’ll be easy. For most there’ll be a time of horrendous anxiety as their once-comfortable lives are turned upside down and they wonder how they’re going to pay the bills on their house that’s now worth less than the mortgage. But with the right guidance to help them work out what really gives them a buzz, and what they need to do to make money at it, we could see a surprisingly large number of them jumping out of bed at first light, eager to get on with yet another great day.

One tool I use to help people work out what’s important to them in their lives is a values elicitation audio. Although it’s part of my paid-for programme, I often get people to do it anyway, even if they aren’t yet ready to do the full programme. People seem to get value from it, even as a standalone activity – though I think most people need to do something more with what they find out about themselves while doing it. If you want to give it a go, you can sign up to try it here: www.opportunity-matrix.com/values_blog

But why will this downturn be different to those that have gone before? One reason is that we were seeing the start of portfolio careers even before sub-prime came along, and what Zopa (http://uk.zopa.com/ZopaWeb/) calls “Freeformers” – people ready to make up their life structure as they go along. So this time round, people have become more tolerant of risk in their income streams (or perhaps just more aware that the risk profile of the old paradigm has changed), and I believe more will be prepared to take that jump away from the traditional corporate career, if the payoff is living their life with spirit and passion.