Environment Week: Your World

Good Monday morning to you. We are starting the last full week of January. Next week our first month of 2012 will be over. I have taken the subjects little by little in our themes this year to help keep regular readers on track with making this year the best one yet.

After a week of habits and a week about going the extra mile, I wanted to have a theme about building the environment that brings you success and keeps you working towards your goals. It’s like setting life up to be in forward movement towards your goals and dreams. To keep you focused on building your dream and living an ideal life

I feel that my life is ideal and I live the way I want to live. This does not mean that I do not work. As a matter of fact, right now I put in more hours doing what I do now than I did at my prior jobs but now I love everything about my life. When I have to work at those projects that I do really like to do, it no longer brings me down, as I know exactly what I’m working towards when I’m doing them.

Last week I wrote one day about needing a massage and, thanks to a referral from a friend, I found a new massage therapist. I was very inspired about her story of how she is working towards her future. She immigrated to the US as a young adult and worked a food service job, saving her money to go through massage school. She now works massaging clients while she is little by little saving to get through law school and paying cash for it. There are three important things I learned when talking to her and hearing her story.

1.  Set your world up for success. Know that life is going to have a few challenges. You are going to have to work; if you are starting over with nothing, you are probably going to have to work at some places you don’t like. While you are doing that, plan the next move and start saving towards it. This lady set herself up so she now only works about three hours a day on average to bring an income that is four times what others make working a good job. She set herself up to work fewer hours with maximum pay so she could fit in schooling. She also did not take on a large amount of debt to buy toys that were not needed. She does not live in luxury while I know others who make the same amount of money and have a new car, bigger TVs, a high mortgage and fancy furniture. But she is looking at the long-term goals.

2.  Learn those things that will trip you up. In life we have things that could tempt us to not keep towards the goals. If you know that you will have the problem of spending money on the big TV, learn ways to delay the gratification towards those real goals you want. For us it was holding off things for our Harleys because we want to save small amounts so we can take a week-long honeymoon riding trip and really enjoy ourselves.  If our money is not right we will camp instead of staying in hotels. The point is we keep our life focused on long term goals and we know the temptation that our bikes can be. So we set ourselves up to not buy those things that aren’t needed and put money aside for the things we will need, like tires, brakes, oil changes.

3.  Bounce back from failure. We are going to fail at some things in our lives. I had to learn how to use my failures to work for me and stop letting them end the process I was seeking. So the third thing was learning to come back from failure. Let’s think of it as coming back from a tough time. If you do not have the income you want, then you must be willing to go the extra mile to get the success. If you want to succeed, be willing to maybe work that extra job to keep the money coming in while you build your dream.

So this week is going to focus on a few areas where we set ourselves up for success, building a complete environment that keeps us in a successful mind frame. When you build each one of these areas, you will find that you will be building a success environment to keep you walking in success.

I’m Tim Gillette, the Rocker Life Coach; it’s time to live your dream, to love what you do and those you share life with. Build an environment of success and become the RockStar in your world.