Archives for March 2016

9 Toxic Behaviors Holding Good People Back

03.30.2016 by Marc Chernoff // 35 Comments

9 Behaviors You Never See in Happy, Successful People

The quality of your behavior drives the quality of your life.

When you spend a decade working with and coaching thousands of people from around the world, you really can’t help but observe what works and doesn’t work over the long haul. One thing I’ve learned: It’s not intrinsic characteristics or good fortunes that have the greatest influence on whether or not you’re happy and successful in the end. It’s your behavior.

What do I mean by “behavior?” How you react under stress. Whether you decide to meet your commitments or not. How you communicate and interact with loved ones. Your attitude toward bosses, colleagues, employees and customers. How hard you’re willing to work to do a job right. Whether you’re focused and disciplined or scattered-brained and distracted. And the list goes on.

Now, I admit to having known some pretty dysfunctional people who did well for themselves for a little while. But sooner or later, usually when the pressure is mounting and things aren’t going so well, they exhibit self-destructive, toxic behaviors that bite them in the rear. And sadly, they often take others down with them.

If you want to thrive in life, you might want to take a good, hard look in the mirror and see if any of these behaviors describe you, and then take small, consistent steps to self-correct if necessary…

Believing and insisting that life is simply too hard and too unfair. – The truth is, it’s just as easy to create positive habits as it is to create negative ones. It’s just a matter of how you spend your time. You can spend it doing things that bring you closer to your goals, or you can spend it seeking immediate comfort. People complain, “It’s too hard to exercise every day!” But exercise and movement are joyful, natural conditions that make us feel incredible. It’s not hard – it’s just that people get in the habit of not exercising. If this sounds like you, break the habit. Realize that you are where you are because of the choices you’ve made in the past, and your future depends on the choices you make today. You can choose to sit, or you can choose to run. You can choose to watch another sitcom, or you can choose to read another chapter in a great book. You can choose to act on opportunity, or you can choose to sleep in. There’s nothing hard or complicated about it, other than the way you’re thinking about it. [Read more…]

7 Timeless Strategies for Finding Inner Strength (When You Need it Most)

03.20.2016 by Marc Chernoff // 44 Comments

7 Timeless Strategies for Finding Inner Strength When You Need it Most

I’ve been volunteering as a counselor for underprivileged kids for the better part of my adulthood. One of the very first kids I worked with, nearly 17 years ago, was a boy who came to see me on an afternoon when he was extremely upset. After sitting with him and listening to his story, I drew him a sketch of a superhero on the front of an index card and wrote a note beside the sketch about how he is a superhero and that superheroes always rise up and win in the end. Then on the back of the index card, in the simplest words I could think of, I listed seven timeless strategies that would help him regroup and activate his super powers when he needed them most.

I randomly ran into this same boy again this morning as I walked past the local fire station. He’s now a 28-year-old fire fighter. He recognized me and ran up to me to say hello. We chatted for a half hour about everything under the sun, and then before we parted ways he took his wallet out of his pocket and pulled out the superhero index card I made for him when he was a kid. He held it up so I could see it, smiled from ear to ear and said, “Thank you.”

Today, in slightly more mature words, I want to revisit the seven strategies I wrote down on the back of that index card. Because these are healthy reminders, for all of us:

NOTE: The 7 points in this article have been updated and moved to HERE:

Choose Yourself Today: 7 Hard Choices that Will Make You Happier

Photo by: Nathalia

How To Build Solid Relationships (With Enormously Successful People)

03.16.2016 by Marc Chernoff // 27 Comments

How to Build Powerful Relationships with Enormously Successful People

“You are the average of the people you spend the most time with.”
? Jim Rohn

Over the years Angel and I have written a lot about our personal struggles on this blog. But a related topic we haven’t addressed nearly as often is our professional struggles. We help our course students with various aspects of career and business strategy every day, and yet we rarely write about it publicly. This morning, however, Angel and I received three emails from blog readers that all proposed the same fundamental question:

How do I find successful mentors who will help me reach my professional/business goals?

This is a great question – one that I feel warrants a public response, because we once struggled with the same predicament, and the specific solution we discovered continues to have a profound effect on our professional lives.

So, it’s time for a quick story about life and business…

Many moons ago, when Angel and I were young twenty-something entrepreneurs who were struggling to get our business off the ground (with little money and basically no connections), we realized that if we ever intended to achieve our dreams we needed guidance and mentorship from some successful people who had already walked the path we were embarking on.

So we did the most naive thing [Read more…]

18 Quotes that Will Change the Way You Treat Yourself

03.13.2016 by Angel Chernoff // 58 Comments

18 Quotes that Will Change the Way You Treat Yourself

“You were born with wings, why prefer to crawl through life?”
? Rumi

It’s not the face, but the expressions you make. It’s not the voice, but what you say. It’s not exactly how you look in that body, but the things you do with it. You are incredible! Give yourself a chance to be your best, by caring for yourself accordingly.

Nourishing yourself in a way that helps you blossom in the direction you want to go in life is achievable, and you are worth the effort.

Self-care, as Marc and I define it to our course students, includes any intentional actions you take to care for your physical, mental and emotional health. Maintaining a healthy self-care routine is a challenge for many of us, and it can be especially challenging when life gets busy.

There are three physical-health-related aspects of self-care that get talked about a lot:

Eating right
Sleeping well
Exercising regularly

And then there are many intricate mental and emotional aspects of self-care that we often forget about. This is the aspect of self-care I want to touch upon in this post. Below you will find 18 handpicked quotes from our book and blog archive that I often reference for my own mental and emotional self-care. I hope you find them as helpful as I do…

It’s not what you say to everybody else that determines your life – it’s what you whisper to yourself every day that has the greatest power.
Don’t look for others to give you permission to be yourself. You don’t need anyone’s validation to be “good enough” or to have a great day. [Read more…]

An Open Letter to Those Who Have Lost Their Motivation

03.05.2016 by Marc Chernoff // 79 Comments

An Open Letter to Those Who Don’t Feel Good Enough

“Head up, heart open. To better days!”
— T.F. Hodge

This article was inspired by a short email we received this morning from a new course student:

Dear Marc and Angel,

There’s so much I still want to create and foster in my life, and yet I feel utterly beaten down. I feel like I have nothing left to work with. I’ve been through a lot on my journey thus far, and I’m now at a point where I’ve lost all my motivation – I just can’t seem to find the external and internal sources of motivation I used to have. Do you have any wisdom you could share?

Sincerely,
A Discouraged Student

Our reply (an open reply to all who have lost their motivation):

Dear Discouraged Student,

It’s time for a quick story about life…

Once upon a time there was a woman in her mid sixties who noticed that she had lived her entire life in [Read more…]