Just had one fantastic motivational day!

This year, I have set myself some targets to achieve in one of my business ventures. It is a business I joined a few years ago, but I have never treated it seriously enough. I have always lacked the motivation to put in the effort to build the business rapidly, as others have done since I joined.

I have noticed that I am more focused and enthusiastic after I have attended one of the company meetings, as I get to meet so many positive, happy people. Some of it rubs off on me!

Today was the second major meeting I have gone to this year. The seminar was an all day event, but what really made me sit up and think that I make too many excuses why I fail was this video clip that was shown at the end :-



Nick Vujicic, Inspirational - The most amazing bloopers are here

I have been given a whole raft of ideas and skills to develop my abilities, to push forward my business at a far greater rate than I have ever done before.

There was one section of the seminar that made me smile. It was because it is also used in my main employment for London Underground.

In both aspects they use a mnemonic (S.M.A.R.T.) which stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Tangible. This is the benchmark to assess your progress.

I now have to put an enormous amount of effort to build up a daily habit of working consistently on freedom from the Rat Race ticket! It is this part time business venture that will eventually give me the financial security and time freedom that all of us wish we had long before we become aware that that is what we subconsciously have craved all our working lives.

As one speaker said today - "Don't wait to dig your well until you are thirsty!" And as his wife chipped in "He dug the well, but I drink from it!"

All you need is to focus on your destination, the journey will take care of itself! I hope 2010 will be a more fulfilling and profitable year for you than last year. I know it will be for me!

It's a learning curve.

This afternoon, my wife has just enrolled for another term at the local college to study her ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) course starting in September. While we were going through the process of registering, my wife was told she had passed her level 1 exam and would start her level 2 course in September! I am thrilled to bits that she has done so well!

Also today, I set in motion a training course for myself of a very different nature. In two weeks time I will be attending a "Trial and Error" course in bathroom plumbing!

About 3 years ago I purchased a new shower unit. This unit also has extra jets for a body massage incorporated into it. It has been sitting in my garage patiently waiting for me to decide to do something about it. Every time I start thinking about doing this project, the more difficult I seem to make it for myself!

If I replace the shower, I will need to replace the tiles in the shower cubicle, as I will need to get to the pipes hidden behind them. To remove the tiles, I will have to remove the shower cubicle. That is why we chose a nice curved shower cubicle to replace the old one today.

Now the next item on the agenda is to choose a new design of bathroom tiles, to replace the old ones. Finally, comes the hardest task of all. I have to try and locate the piping hidden in the walls from the hot and cold tanks to the shower head. Then I have to find a way to stop the water going through these pipes without having to switch off the water supply to the rest of the house! Also I have to find a suitable point to install a power pump to increase the water pressure. It is this part of the project that has always been the reason I have delayed attempting this task. All my previous attempts to follow the piping around the house has been extremely frustrating due to my lack of any real progress in solving the puzzle.

So in a couple of weeks time it will either be do or drown! I will have a two week window of opportunity to complete the task whilst my wife and daughter are away on holiday.

Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device

Teenagers! Who needs them?

Although I recently got married, and I now have a teenage stepdaughter, I have also had another teenager living here for just over a year. I have discovered the dubious distinction of what it is like to have someone who thinks they can do as little as possible within the house, and treat us as if we were a free hotel!

Basically, I was railroaded into providing accommodation for the grandson of my ex partner. Last year he was in the middle of his GCSE exams when his mother decided to move out of our village and relocate to Chesterfield (about 100 miles away, or 2 hours driving). As it was too far to commute to and from his school, I was asked if I could allow him to stay at my house for 2 months while he completed his exams. I discussed this with my wife and daughter, and we all agreed to let him stay until he finished his exams.

Once we had made this agreement, one month later we were dropped another bombshell. The boy had just been accepted into the Motor sport College at Silverstone Race Circuit, to train as a Race Mechanic. This College course was for one year! As we live only 10 miles away from Silverstone, the boys mother basically told us that if he could stay with us he could go to college. If we refused, then he would lose the opportunity for a career in motor sport.

Now, for the month that he had been with us, he had been very helpful, cooking the odd meal, cleaning the house, cutting the lawn. He was also very polite to all of us. After discussing the situation with my wife and daughter, we all agreed to let him stay for one year to give him a chance at a lucrative career.

When we asked his mother to provide some payment towards the cost of supporting her son, she told us that she would transfer the child benefit over to us, and that her son would have to provide the difference himself!!! So far, in the 60 weeks he has been with us, he has only paid us the difference for one week!!! We deliberately set the amount that he should pay very low, so that he could easily pay the amount if he wanted to. Now he seems to think he can help himself to anything in the house, without asking first!

Within a few weeks of him starting College, his character started to change. He became very moody, and stopped being helpful around the house. My wife and daughter used to prepare sandwiches for him to take to his part time work, or College. At first he used to say "thank you" to them. Then he wouldn't say anything. The final straw came when the girls had prepared some sandwiches for him, he took them with him, but returned home without eating them and promptly threw them into the bin! Since that day, the girls no longer make any sandwiches for him anymore!

Another thing that has me extremely puzzled, is how items within the house strangely disappear. I have no proof of any individual person taking them, and when I have asked all members of the household, no one admits to being responsible. The most expensive item to disappear has been the webcam from my computer room. I still harbour a faint hope that perhaps it will miraculously reappear one day.

As the year progressed, he started missing lessons at college, because he stayed out well into the night with his friends. Many weekends, he was too lazy to go to his part time work, and consequently, when his employer was looking to reduce the number of staff, he was dismissed because of his poor timekeeping. Even now, with his present part time work, he thinks nothing of turning up for work at 10 O'clock when he should be there at 9!

The only light at the end of the tunnel for us is that the boy has been offered a trial as a race mechanic in Brighton. He tells us that the trial is for 2 weeks, and is supposed to be happening immanently. He has been telling us this for the past month now!! If he does go for this trial period, I hope that it proves successful, then he will have to find somewhere of his own to live.

One thing is absolutely certain though. His college course finishes in July. He will then have two choices to make. Either he moves to Brighton and commences his career as a Race Mechanic, or he goes home to his mother. He will NOT be staying with us any longer!

Not so much Tortoise pace, more like snail pace!

Back in January, I went to 2 seminars for the business I am slowly building up. I decided to take my camcorder with me to film the events, with the view to creating a DVD to pass on to my active team members.

The first Seminar was nearly 5 hours long, and I made the mistake of not bringing enough spare tapes with me, so consequently I didn't capture the last hour of the seminar! The second seminar, I took enough tapes, but forgot the mains lead! So again, I missed the last hour of the seminar. Next year I will do much better!

The videos were successfully transferred onto my computer using Pinnacle Studio. When I tried to edit the footage within the program, I kept losing the audio which makes the editing process impossible! No matter what I tried, I constantly lost the audio, and could not edit it.

Every few weeks I would go back to it and try something different, hoping I would discover a solution. Earlier this week, I suddenly began to make progress at last!

First I had to combine all the video clips to make one movie of 3 hours. Then I had to convert it from an AVI file to an MPEG file, this time there was audio in the converted product. Next I had to the 45GB file through DivX into a 1.5GB file. Finally, yesterday, I loaded this file into Roxio Easy Media Creator, and started to edit the movie, creating a menu, and adding chapters. This last process requires me to actually watch the footage in real time to place and name the chapter headings. I hope that in a few days time I will have managed to complete the task, and have a fully functioning DVD of the event, that will be fully accessible to any particular bit of the seminar for someone to watch and learn from!

Flushed with success!

The reason I chose the title above is that two things of interest happened to me yesterday.

The first was, I listened to the Jeremy Vine show on Radio 2 that had the subject of toilets, more specifically, how to clean yourself after you have finished. The old addage "The jobs never completed until the paperwork is done!" certainly fits this subject perfectly.

I discovered that it is mainly British and American people who use toilet paper to clean themselves. Muslims, and a large proportion of the rest of the world, tend to wash themselves afterwards! In France, the Bidet is commonplace on most dwellings, but in the UK with very little space allocated to bathrooms, there is seldom enough space to have both a toilet and a Bidet.

I decided to investigate a little bit further, and discovered a company that provides a custom built toilet that washes and dries you after you've done the business. It is even self cleaning, as it has a reservoir of disinfectant too! I then looked to see how much one of these super dooper toilets would cost.... that's when my excitement got flushed down the pan, you have to stump up over £2000 for this toilet! I am not even going to attempt to try and work out how many toilet rolls £2000 would buy, or how long it would take to use them all! So I think it will take a long time before the UK wakes up to the more hygenic and comfortable way of going to the toilet.

The other success I had yesterday, was successfully persuading my wife to play a new board game. The game we played was called Cashflow. It was a very close game, and ultimately it was simply a throw of the dice which determined who won the game (me this time)! Hopefully we will be playing this game a few more times over the next few months.

My head is buzzing

Today I had to go to Walsall to attend a Goal Setting Workshop. For 6 hours I was bombarded with ideas and techniques to help me plan and prioritise my life. The beauty of this workshop is that it is meant for every aspect of my life, not just for the business I am involved in, although it is because of the business that I attended the course in the first place!

A couple of things that have stuck in my mind so far was to write a daily list of my successes, as a way of drowning out negative thoughts and failures. I also learned that on average it takes 21 days to create a habit, so if I write my list for the next 21 days, it will become a natural part of my daily life!

Also that successful people read, or listen to audio books that help them learn new skills and techniques to help them grow in confidence and ability. Reading fiction is not very productive of your time. Although I personally believe that if you have been working towards your goals, there is nothing wrong in rewarding yourself with the luxury of reading a fictional book every now and then.

Finally, when you write down all your dreams, you need to try cover the 6 main categories of everyones life, as this will make you into a more fulfilled and happy person in all areas of your life. I would write more about this, but I am not too sure if what I am writing about is copywrited, and providing information here might be construed as a breach of copywrite.