Have you ever tried to climb a mountain by yourself? I remember one time I was in the mountains, not even by myself but with a couple of friends and we decided to climb up a pretty steep cliff with no gear. I still remember this experience 12 years later because it was pretty scary, and can say I have not done anything like that again. Climbing the mountain of success in any area of our life – can really feel like climbing that steep mountain except its more like climbing the face of a sheer cliff— of ice. You start off at the bottom full of excitement. You are ready for the adventure of a life time. You may have even motivational books and feel amped up and excited to begin that climb. You feel like you have the right tools in your hand. You have your spikey shoes, your climbing rope and your little pick axes or whatever they call those things — You can obviously tell I am an expert climber! You begin this climb one step at a time, and since you are new at it, there is a good chance that after just a few steps up you strike your axe and hit the wrong part of the ice and come crashing down in the snow, which hopefully is soft, but sometimes is hard and really hurts. You keep trying over and over and over but you just keep falling over and over and feel like you are not getting any where. Most people at this point of crashing and burning over and over will give up. They say, “Forget this, this is way too hard.” They cop out in that moment and give up on their goal or dream and go back to something …

How many times have you heard someone say, “if you would just control your thoughts then you wouldn’t be in (insert whatever crummy situation you are struggling with right now)?” If your like me, I’m guessing you have heard it plenty of times. I don’t know about you but when people tell me that if I would just control my thoughts I would be better off, I kind of get annoyed and think to myself, “Thank you captain obvious.” However, sometimes that’s easier said than done. Have you ever taken a minute to think about the thoughts that you have? What are they and where do they come from? Often times our thoughts are just random ideas passing through our mind. They often come as a result of circumstances. Example: If I’m hungry and watching a commercial with a hamburger, there’s a good chance my thoughts may be drawn towards eating a hamburger. However, often times our thoughts aren’t even ours, they are a result of our programming or conditioning from our past. So needless to say often times our thoughts can be sneaky little liars. We have so many thoughts flying through our head all the time, that our mind filters them. It generally entertains thoughts that we attach negative or positive emotion to. Imagine that you were reading an article that said “A Freeze Has Caused Brussel Sprouts to increase 100x in price”; Unless you love brussel sprouts, you may quickly move to another article. The reason being you don’t really care about this news so it doesn’t really affect you. It is the only the things care about or are trying to avoid that will really affect our thought. If we don’t attach to our thoughts negatively or positively, they will just keep passing through. I also …

Recently, while I was at a party my friend introduced me to a guy whose just a few years older than me that owns a Yacht Company. We talked a while and in the course of our conversation, one thing that he said stuck out. He shared with me he in his life that he focused on completion instead of working hard. He went on to be a bit more specific and said he would rather have employees that completed projects than that merely said they were hard workers. The world doesn’t need any more hard workers. What does that even mean anymore? If someone walks up to you and tells you they are a hard worker are you going to hand them a badge or a sticker that says hard worker. Of course not, you are probably going to say, “that’s nice.” and then not really know what to say next, so you will quietly walk away. However, if someone walks up to you and says , “hey check out this book that I wrote.” You may think to your self, “wow that is pretty cool, this person finished something that took quite a bit of effort.” Unless we finish what we start, we have nothing to show for our labors. To put it even more bluntly if we don’t finish what we start it’s just wasted time. There’s a great verse in the bible in Luke 14:28 that says, “For which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it?” We all have great intentions. We intend to lose weight. We intend to start writing a book. We intend to start a business. We intend to find the person of our dreams. We intend to pursue our dream life. In short we …

The average weight of an African bush elephant is about 13,000 pounds. They are beautiful powerful creatures.   If they are so powerful, how is it possible that they can be trained for war, travel, circuses and for many other purposes.   The truth is it would be nearly impossible to train a powerful adult elephant to do what you wanted him to do.   However, they do not train giant adult elephants. No, they start long before they are big and powerful feats of nature. They begin when they are just baby elephants. They place a rope on the elephants leg and tether it to a stake. They get used to being tethered to this tiny stake and remain in  in the middle that holds them captive, and they are much easier to train.   However, as the elephant grows bigger and stronger it certainly has the strength to pull the stake out of the ground…but it doesn’t. More importantly – he doesn’t even try to do it.   Why is that? The elephant has been trained for so long that he doesn’t believe he has the power to break free from the stake, and that simple belief keeps him from ripping that stake up from the ground and dragging it around wherever he desires to go and blazing trails as opposed to being used for everyone else’s desires.   In the same way, you were born amazing and powerful. However, as we go through life, we allow ourselves to get tethered to stakes and believe that we are limited. We allow others to use us for their own selfish purposes because we are tethered to the beliefs that others have instilled in us.   What beliefs or thoughts are you allowing to hold you back?   What if …

There is a song called “Bring Me to Life” by the Band Evanescence. Throughout the song there is a girl pleading to have someone bring her to life. Are we really any different? Doesn’t every one of us want someone that brings us to life – help us to come alive, be happy and live our best life? As a success coach, on almost a daily basis I have the privilege to help bring others to life. When I first begin working with a client often times they are anxious, quiet and frustrated and there isn’t that much light or excitement in their eyes. However, after working with them even some in just the first coaching session, they begin to wake up to their light and who they really are. Once they are awakened, the real magic begins and they begin to create miracles. However, Guess what? Every single day you ALSO have the opportunity to help answer others pleas to “Bring them to life” Maybe you have noticed especially these days how everyone is just trying to escape their life for a few seconds of peace. You may see the business professional walking down the street looking down at their cell phone with their ear buds in their ears to block out all the challenges of the world.  They are attempting in that brief moment walking from one challenge to another to escape for a few moments from all the challenges they are facing.    “If you treat people like they are dealing with a massive challenge you will be right 50% of the time.” – Henry B. Eyring   So when everyone is walking around with challenges, what can we do? How can we bring them to life? It doesn’t have to be something huge – It is …

When our founding fathers came here to the Americas it was to experience freedom. This included religious freedom, social freedom, political freedom, and other freedoms. America was the place were people from all over the world could come to get away from everyone telling them what they could and couldn’t do. It was this freedom that allowed many of the greatest creative minds to develop some of our most useful inventions, and propel society forward. They were able to experience a creative freedom that was unheard of elsewhere. Where is that creative freedom today? Many people are so naturally talented and gifted in different areas. If they gave themselves the chance to create, they would greatly impress people. However, they have stifled their juices of creativity. They chose a career that didn’t demand much out of them. They preferred stability as opposed to working hard , and being creative. They chose a life of comfort and ease as oppose to a life of making a difference and being paid well for it. Being comfortable is the quick sand of success. There are far too many people out there working jobs that they hate for much less money than they could be making if they really applied themselves. Some would use the argument that it is much harder to create your own life, business or anything else of importance. I would agree that it can be more challenging to create your own life. It will require more discipline, creative thinking and taking action. However, the opposite of that is waking up in 30 years realizing that you lived some one else’s life. Do you really want to wake up in 30 years and wonder “What if I would have gone after what I loved to do? What if I would have …

  How many times have you arrived at the office and had a million things to do? You were exhausted from the day’s work before and even the day before that. You spend 30 minutes psyching yourself up, only to realize that an hour later you are exhausted and need another break. When you come back from the break, you psych yourself up again, just to repeat this process continuously throughout the day. Finally, you become relieved when the clock strikes 5 and you get to leave. This is what I call the burnout cycle and it is the quickest way for you to feel burned out the entire day, and eventually burned out of your career. Imagine taking an F12 Berlinetta Ferrari and doing burnouts with it the entire day, your beautiful sports car would not last very long. At the rate you are going neither will you. How do we avoid the burnout cycle? The same way there is an optimal speed that the Ferrari runs at, you have an optimal speed. This optimal speed is where you can be productive and get everything done that you need to at work and still have energy when you leave the office. Discover your own optimal speed where you can work productively throughout the entire day. It’s probably right around 70-80% of your capacity. By working at this optimal speed you will find the following benefits: You will be happier – While working at your optimal speed, you will not be frantically trying to get things done. This reduces the stress that you feel when you are forcing yourself to do a million things. When you reduce this stress, it actually gives you more energy to apply to your daily tasks and helps you enjoy the process You will be creative …

Everything that we want is on the other side of our fear and often requires doing what is uncomfortable. Using an example of this, when you are at a party and you start eyeing a beautiful tall brunette in the corner sitting on the couch alone. What do you do? Do you go over and talk to her? Do you try to get her to come and talk to you? Do you stay within your comfort zone and leave the party without even saying hi? If you answered the latter, you are not alone. Many know what they want in a relationship; however, they wont take the action necessary in order to get it. They would if they understood that it only takes 30 second to change your life. 20 Seconds of Insane Courage In the movie, We Bought a Zoo, Benjamin Mee, played by Matt Damon turns to his son and says: “You know, sometimes all you need is twenty seconds of insane courage. Just literally twenty seconds of just embarrassing bravery. And I promise you, something great will come of it.” It literally takes less than 20 seconds to initiate a conversation with a girl. It takes 20 seconds for her to say yes or no. However, It takes a lifetime to get over never taking the chance. Show some courage and take a chance! A few months ago I met a man in a little deli by my house. For his privacy we will call him Jack. As I spoke with Jack he told me he was a musician, and a music teacher. He is 40 years old and has never been married. As we talked, he told me about this great girl he had met at a party. She was by far the cutest girl at the …

  People are capable of extraordinary things. However, most people do enough just to get by. They essentially learn the easiest way to keep every area of their life just OK, whether it be in work, relationships or any other life category. They feel that average is where everyone else is, so there is nothing wrong with them being average. Some would argue that this is just human nature and that most people prefer the path of least resistance. However, we were not sent here to be average, we were sent here to be great. It sometimes takes someone else believing in us before we raise our expectations and start seeking to be at our best. I learned this first hand, and I hope that you can all learn from my experience. Throughout a lot of my college education I did just enough to get the grades that I wanted. It was about getting good grades, instead of focusing on what I could learn. This system worked well enough to keep a pretty high GPA at Brigham Young University. However, in this process of doing just enough to get by, I made the mistake of trying to use this system on the wrong person. It was my last semester of college and I was taking a sales course. We were about to take our first oral test, which was actually selling one of my fellow students a product. Ironically, I was selling him a coaching product, as I have always known I wanted to be a coach. We were able to have notes, and I had taken full advantage of this. I had the entire presentation written down and just used my notes very well. Most people would have called this great preparation. My professor did not. He actually pulled …

It’s Friday night and you are sitting home all alone watching The Notebook for the 4th time this month. You slowly  and sadly dig into your bowl of Rocky Road ice cream, as the tissues lay near by. You imagine what it would be like to be in the arms of either Ryan Gosling or Rachel McAdams. As they make out in the rain; you begin to wonder,” why don’t I have someone like that in my life? Why can’t someone come and sweep me off of my feet?”  Quite simply, you’ve got to get off your butt and onto your feet, before someone can sweep you off of them! Stop waiting around and start taking action! Are you seriously sitting around waiting for the person of your dreams to knock on your door? Stop waiting around and start creating your own dreams. I have clients come to me all the time and tell me that they want to find the person of their dreams. The first thing I help them understand is that the only thing they can focus on is themselves. The truth is that we cannot change other people, the dating game, or anything else. We can only change ourselves. So its time to make some changes in order to attract the person of your dreams into your life. Here are 7 ways to become the best person that you can be and attract the person of your dreams: Decide What You Want in a Mate If you don’t know what you want, how in the world are you going to know when you find it? Have you ever gone to the grocery store without a list? Generally it takes far more time to shop without a list. The same way if you don’t have a list …