Do You Invest in Yourself?

Why do so few people invest in their education?

How much do you invest in your education?

When was the last time you spent actual cash to further your education?

I have crafted 7 Strategies for Passionate Performance in Your Life, that are available from my website. One of those Strategies is this:

‘Invest 5% of your time and your money in your education and ongoing learning’

This means 8 hours a week plus a 5% portion of your income. Imagine if you are earning $75000 pa, you would invest $3750 pa in courses and learning.

The best available evidence shows that less than one in 10 people invest money in their education after they have finished their secondary or tertiary education, this is the best way to invest money. Many universities and Technical Colleges are struggling financially because they cannot get enough students.

This is a ridiculous state of affairs, and must change for the sake of each individual’s future, and for the future of your country. In a rapidly-changing world with dramatic technology advances, together with global economic challenges and changes, how can any person hope to stay current and valuable with ongoing learning and development?

Such a hope is ridiculous, as I said.

Do not be one of these people.

Why do so few people invest in their education? Here are some reasons that I believe to be the cause:

· They hated their importance of education when they were at school
· They got little value from their past education
· They do not want to learn something new, because they may have to do something new, leading to increased risk of failure
· They do not understand the value of learning something new
· They are lazy, unmotivated, unhealthy, worn-out by the existing demands of life
· They are broke, and cannot afford to spend any money on it
· They have lost their passion
· They prefer to blame others for their existing predicaments, rather than taking responsibility.
· They do not have the time because of too much happening in their lives at present.

Do you know of other reasons? Please send them to me.

When you understand the value and clear imperative of continuing your learning and development, you will wake up and invest.

You are your most valuable resource!

Go for it, with passion!

Charles B Kovess LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., MAICD, MAITD

Australasia’s Passion Provocateur

Certified Speaking Professional

www.kovess.com

Speak the Truth. Others know.

Shannon Panzo 11 comments

Speak the Truth

The need to speak the truth and the role of your passion in doing so

I am a huge fan of Buckminster Fuller, a man who died in 1983 but who was awarded 47 Honorary Doctorates from Universities around the world. He was a genius, and his work lives on.

In the introduction to his last book, Critical Path, published just before he died, he said:

“…All of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell only the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly – right now.”

I invite you to contemplate what would make such a wise man, a true genius, to say such a thing. In this blog, I will share some thoughts I have on the topic, and the role that your passion plays in whether or not you do tell the truth.

I believe that truth is enormously powerful. When you speak your truth, you are powerful. There is a useful distinction on this point. I have learned to ‘speak the truth with compassion’, or express ‘honesty without malice’. There is usually no need to intentionally hurt people by expressing your truth in brutal ways!

Truth is…

There are two types of truth.

Truth that is objectively true, commonly called a ‘fact’, such as “I drove the car into the other car”; or, subjective truth, a matter that you believe or consider to be true: “I consider that my colleagues are not committed to their work.” This may or not be objectively true, or it may not even be able to be finally determined.

When you are passionate, you will be courageous. It requires courage to speak the truth. When you express what is true, you are often taking a big risk. Yet, Fuller says the humanity is in danger of extinction if we don’t take this risk. It seems to me, that avoiding extinction is a great reason to speak more truth.

In your organization, particularly if it is large, there will always be politics at work. I have thought long and hard about why this is so, and I believe it is ubiquitous due to the complexity of human beings and their behaviors and motivations.

What is politics at work? I say that the volume of politics is inversely proportional to the volume of truth. In other words, the more truth that is spoken, the less politics there will be.

Politics at work leads to people being favored and promoted over others for the wrong reasons. It means people losing their jobs for the wrong reasons. It means lies and untruths that hurt and upset people, and kill passion.

Here are some of the advantages to you of accessing your passion and your courage to speak what is true, either objectively or subjectively:

You will feel liberated
You will help to reduce politics in your workplace
You will help your workplace become more successful
You will help your workplace become more productive and profitable
You will improve your relationships
You will have better relationships
You will lose relationships that are built on falsehoods
You will become more powerful
You will gain a reputation for speaking the truth
You will gain a reputation for being courageous
You will help to reduce the risk that humanity will become extinct!

Let me know if you can see additional advantages for speaking the truth.

Charles B Kovess LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., MAICD, MAITD

Australasia’s Passion Provocateur

Certified Speaking Professional

www.kovess.com

Handle Bad Employment News

Shannon Panzo 4 comments

Bad Employment News …

Why your passion helps you to handle the negative news on unemployment

Everywhere I look, there is bad news on jobs.

Major corporations all around the world, including Australia where I am based, and in the USA, are making frequent
announcements about job losses.

At the same time, the news media is regularly publishing survey results on the current levels of ‘business confidence‘.

How can business confidence be up when negative news keeps hitting the airwaves and your mindset? How can you best handle all this negative news, so that your confidence remains intact?

My strong and clear advice to you is to tap into your passion.

Tap into Your Passion

And I will tell you why.

Firstly, who has ‘job security’? I believe that the CEO’s of the world’s major corporations certainly do not have it. Even though they
have contracts for long periods of time, you can often see Boards of Directors ‘lose faith’ in their CEO, and they get their marching orders. Of
course, their contract is paid out, but that is not job security.

The only true job security is the security that you feel within yourself. So, learn to let go of your need for this illusion of job security. When you let the illusion go, you will stop regretting that you don’t have it, that the only way you get it is to create it.

Secondly, your true job security lies in your ability and capability to add value, to solve problems, to help other
people and organizations to achieve what they want. When you are passionate about these matters, you soon start to realize that it
doesn’t matter what is happening to others about their jobs, you will also be ’employable’, because you can solve problems, and you love doing so!

When you are passionate, you will be courageous. You will take the risks to offer your services to those people and organizations who
need your services.

When you are passionate, you will be happy to face the rejection while you are searching for the people and organizations who will happily pay you
money because of the problems that you solve in an added-value process.

Your clients and customers need to be educated, through your marketing and business-generation, about the value you
can add to their lives and to their businesses.

It’s a great way to live.

When you live this way, all the negative news simply runs off your mindset like water down the windscreen of your car. You do not buy
into it because you feel powerful and confident through the passionate energy coursing through your mind, body and soul.

ZOX Pro Training is an added-value resource that can help you live in this way. It is added-value because the small cost of the training is a tiny
fraction of the rewards you can earn by living your life in a passionate, motivated, enthusiastic, positive and high-energy way!

Go for it! Do not waste your time looking for answers outside yourself. Your passion has the answers of bad news.

Charles B Kovess LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., MAICD, MAITD

Australasia’s Passion Provocateur

Certified Speaking Professional

www.kovess.com

The Word of the Day is Support, S U P P O R T

Shannon Panzo 2 comments

The Word of the Day – Support

How to achieve your change: designing your Support

As I said before in my previous article,s changing behavior is usually most difficult.

The two key factors that you need are Stimuli to change, and then Support. That earlier blog discussed your Stimuli.

This article will deal with the value of designing the necessary Support that will lead you to successfully changing your behavior.

I will continue by exploring two examples of desired changes that we seem to have the greatest difficulties in: weight loss and attitude.

After you have answered the first question of why you want to lose weight or have a different attitude, you then need Support if you are amongst 90% of the population to help you achieve this change. I acknowledge that 10% of the population can change as soon as they realize the stimuli for the change: they don’t need Support!

There are two types of Support: Internal Support and External Support.

The first is entirely you.

The second is external to you.

Here are some examples. More are available from my website and my books.

Internal Support

• Read your goals of weight loss or attitude change aloud morning, noon and night
• Visualize with emotion daily how you will feel when you succeed in losing weight or changing your attitude
• Make your affirmations daily that you have designed
• Reward yourself when you have taken a successful step along the way of weight loss or attitude change.
• Impose a penalty on yourself when you have failed to do what you committed to do.
• And so on….

External Support

• Hire a personal trainer
• Hire an executive coach
• Use a counselor, psychologist or psychiatrist
• Join a gym
• Do ZOX Pro Training
• Have a wager with another friend who also wants to lose weight or change attitude. Bet that you will do better than they will!
• Get one or more friends to join you in a group to achieve similar changes.
• Create or join a master mind group
• And so on….

Successful people learn that most of us need Support. They are willing to be held accountable by ‘external’ forces that help them change in the ways that they want to change but are likely to fail.

Now, write down your own possible Internal and External Support Mechanisms, and the longer the list, the better! Use your imagination and remind yourself of all the possible resources you have been exposed to that will support you.

As I said, ZOX Pro Training is one of these resources.

My various blog articles on the Mind to Mind website will be helpful in provoking some ideas in designing your Support.

Charles B Kovess LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., MAICD, MAITD

Australasia’s Passion Provocateur

Certified Speaking Professional

www.kovess.com

You are so Amazingly Powerful!

Shannon Panzo 3 comments

Do you experience enough passionate and powerful moments?

You and I are Amazingly Powerful.

When you are passionate about achieving an outcome, when you are motivated and enthusiastic about doing so, when you deeply want to achieve something, history shows that you can be amazingly effective.

In these moments, you commit huge amounts of time, energy, money, and any other resources that will help you achieve that outcome.

Now spend some time contemplating the times in your life when you have felt and acted in this way.

And then contemplate how you felt after you achieved such an outcome, about which you cared so deeply: I suggest you felt powerful, excited, exhilarated, and even unstoppable.

Now contemplate what you learned from the harnessing of your passion and the pursuit of that outcome. I suggest you learned very valuable lessons, experienced life in a deep and meaningful way, and that you became a more capable and competent human being.

Passionate and Powerful Moments

Do you experience such passionate and powerful moments in your life often enough? What is the price you pay when you miss out on these moments?

Life can be hard, but it is through facing the hardships that we grow. Children whose parents protect them from hardship are less than competent. Adults who avoid hardship basically cease to grow.

Experienced business people with 30 years’ business experience in the same job, who do not impress others with their abilities, are often accurately (and unkindly) described as having only one year of business experience repeated 30 times!

Now spend some time contemplating your greatest achievements in your life; I am quite sure that you would identify experiences that were difficult and time-consuming and energy-sapping! You are ‘proud’ of your achievements because they were difficult, not because they were easy. You have become who you are through your many achievements, big and small.

It is not an achievement for most people:

To eat their meals
To tie their shoelaces
To travel to their workplaces
To handle a mobile phone
To go to the movies
To spend money
To do what they habitually do.

My challenge to you now is to ask: are you avoiding the difficult issues and challenges in your life? Are you living your life in a way that seeks ease and comfort, rather than attempting the tasks and roles that are difficult, challenging, exhilarating and educational?

Time to Change

If your answer to either or both of these questions is yes, then now is the time to change your mindset. Now is the time to understand deeply that you are meant to experience passionate powerful moments that expand your capabilities and your competencies, so that you develop into the amazingly powerful person that universe, or God, has designed you to be.

When you are developing into such a person, you can make the contribution to this beautiful planet on which we live that you are meant to be making.

Remember: everything is difficult before it is easy.

Go for it, with Passion!

Charles B Kovess LL.B. (Hons), LL.M., MAICD, MAITD

Australasia’s Passion Provocateur

Certified Speaking Professional

www.kovess.com

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