Tag Archives: Goals

Are Perks Enough?

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I’ve been traveling the later part of this week and today I was able to get my work done before noon and since a lot of our offices are in places there are ski resorts, I decided to head up to Kickinghorse Ski Resort.  Now if you’ve never skied a weekday, you are missing out! There was practically nobody on the hill today and as I completed a run I could head right up the lift again without any waiting.  Now that is the way to ski!  I was able to cut fresh powder tracks ALL day long, drop into chutes and that’s something that rarely happens on a weekend as the resorts balloon up with thousands of skiers and it’s harder to get into the good spots.

As I was skiing today I got to reflecting on the perks of my job and jobs in general, are they enough to keep someone at a job?  For some maybe, but not for me.  While I get the ability to take time off for OT worked and go skiing during the day it’s definitely not enough for me.  I want the ability to go skiing during the week for a full week and stay in a beautiful lodge right on the mountain.  I want the ability to bring my kids and wife with me and make a great family trip out of it.  Some may say well why don’t you just take holidays.  Yeah that three weeks that I have to ASK to get off, yeah that doesn’t cut it either.  North American’s are one of the hardest worked people on this planet and we don’t get nearly compensated enough for the amount we work.  (I was able to find this pretty cool graphic of what countries work. Here is another one for 2004)

We have the ability though this pretty amazing opportunity to reach those goals of getting more time and money so that we can for example ski during the weekday.  For us, we are utilizing this opportunity so that we can create our own perks and not some forced on us perks that really are there to just keep us at our job.  I’m looking forward to getting out of my job and semi-retiring so that I can spend the better part of the days with my family.  Now this may not be everyone’s dream and that’s fine figure out what it is you want to achieve.

Anyway as nice as it was to ski in the middle of the day, those kinds of perks are not good enough, we need to create our own!

Stay tuned for a video blog entry tomorrow. I can’t upload due to the slow internet connection in my hotel room

Dream Night Reflections

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Finally taking the time to sit down and reflect a bit on last week/weekend’s Dream Night.  We were very fortunate to have some pretty amazing speakers for Edmonton’s first Dream Night.  Leslie Wolgamont, Brad & Julie Duncan, and Samir & Theresa Attalah.  I’ll remind you despite some scepticism on a previous post the very first Edmonton Dream Night sold out in 60 minutes, not bad for a first time event. That’s because Edmonton is G R O W I N G.

Anyway the night was hosted at the Edmonton Westin and the food was pretty darn good, better than last year in Calgary that’s for sure.  The cheesecake, no word of a lie was the best darn cheesecake I’ve ever had and I don’t often like cheesecake.  After the main course some leaders were chosen to share who they were, what they did and what they are excited about for 2011.  We were fortunate to speak at the Calgary Dream Night and I was a bit nervous speaking in front of around 1100 or so people.  Edmonton didn’t quite have that many due to the size of the venue however a second Dream Night was opened up two days earlier to accommodate the extra people.

There were lifestyle video’s shown as they’ve done in pervious years with some updated videos however as cool as that is I was more impacted by the speakers and especially listening to Leslie’s heart.  That is one amazing woman I tell you and now that she has moved on from her past she is fired up and you can hear it in her voice.  That woman is also an amazing server as she ended up staying late until 1:30am to talk about whatever people had on their minds and any questions they had.  When it was all said and done the people that were left around her were our upline sponsors and most of their team, and that’s why this team is moving on.

Brad and Julie sharing as phenomenally as they always do is always a blessing to any organization that gets to hear them.  Samir and Theresa had some very heartfelt stories to share which had a lot of people in tears and you can hear the fight in his voice.  Its funny how you can tell where people are in life by how they speak and Samir is one fired up dude.  The unification I’ve seen since attending Moving Up is pretty powerful, if you have unity and everyone is all playing on the same team, amazing things can happen.

Lastly while reflecting in the last few days about where Lindsay and I are in this business and as we look forward to the rest of 2011 it’s amazing how sometimes the things you get in this business are not what you expect.  Sure there is a business opportunity attached to what we do where you can make some income, however the biggest things that have happened in our life to date are not because of Amway.  They are the intangible things that most people who read this blog will never understand or choose not to understand.  It’s things like how unified I am with my wife and how much better our marriage is and how much more I love my wife each and every day.  It’s not being full of status buying things we cannot afford to impress the people we don’t even like.  It’s getting smarter about finances and stop living a debt lifestyle like most Canadians do and getting real about it.  It’s about having a cash Christmas like we did this past Christmas and not having those bills most of you are worried about in the coming weeks.  Its about building strong friendships and relationships with people that are excited about life.

If we were to quit now and just walk away from what we are doing now, our lives have been impacted in such a positive way that we’d be forever indebted to our coaches and mentors.  That is something I cannot say about my job.

So for 2011, find a dream, set some goals and then put an action plan to achieve them because you can if you want to!

Happy New Year–Time For Goal Setting

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GoalsI love the start of a new year because it gives one time to reflect on the previous year and see how they measured up to goals that were previous set.  It also allows one to start fresh, set new goals and or readjust previous goals that were set in years previous. 

Later this afternoon Lindsay and I setup our goals for 2011 and I think it’s the first time we really sat down together and planned our goals as a couple instead of just sorta setting goals in passing or doing it separately.  We made it fun and instead of doing it at the house we headed out to our favourite Starbucks with the iPad and brainstormed all the goals we wanted to accomplish this year.  We had personal goals, marriage goals, financial goals, and business goals.  I actually really enjoyed it because it helped set our goals together and helped envision what the next 12 months will be for us.

Most success books you read will suggest that you create goals for yourself and not only just setting goals but setting SMART goals:SmartGoals

I highly suggest this year if you’ve not done this before to take out an hour of your weekend, head to your favourite coffee house and set some goals for the year.  I think you’ll be quite surprised at where you end up in obtaining those goals.  Lastly to help you stay on track and make it easier to obtain your goals keep them up on the fridge or in your office.  They need to be kept visible so that you know what your shooting for, otherwise life will get in the way and you’ll stand the chance of forgetting them.

May 2011 be a very successful year for you

You Need to Start!

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This morning I read a great blog entry by John Maxwell on Starting: The Great Separator and I thought back to all aspects of my life and just how true his words were.  This article can apply to any aspect in your life where you are trying to achieve a goal, dream, activity, vision, pretty much anything in your life. 

There were 5 main points in this article:

  1. Start with Yourself
  2. Start Early
  3. Start Small
  4. Start with The End in View
  5. Start Now

The two main things I got from this article however were start small and start with the end in view.  Starting small is probably the biggest thing I’ve always struggled with in my life because I’ve always taken on more then I can chew on many occasions and because of that failed.  However what sets successful people apart are the ones who get back up and keep trying and making changes along the way to reach that end goal.  It’s like what Albert Einstein says “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results”.  So start small, start with something manageable so that you can at least get going.  Its better to start with something little than nothing at all, at least your doing something and working towards momentum.

Start with the end in view is also huge because if you don’t know what your working towards then why are you working?  Get a passion, find a vision so that you can work towards it bit by bit.  Don’t get me wrong your passion and vision don’t need to be some grand scale larger than life goals, they can be small, they can be whatever you want them to be.  Just make sure you have that in view and go out and achieve it.

This blog post is a perfect way to start this week off, I hope it uplifts and inspires you as well.

http://johnmaxwellonleadership.com/

Dream Building

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This afternoon I spent some time on the internet dream building on various things we plan to achieve in our lifetime, things we plan on doing for our parents, and things we plan on doing for others.  I find sometimes we get so caught up in our day to day that we forget the little things like spending some time to dream build.  I’ve blogged on this a few times however it’s always good to bring it up once in awhile.

So do you dream build?  Do you have pictures up about whatever it is your dreaming about?  Have you set goals for when your going to achieve them?  Do you believe you’ll achieve them?  You NEED to keep whatever it is you want to achieve at the forefront of your mind, if you don’t, it just gets lost in the day to day and sooner or later you’ll wake up 5-10-15 years down the road and go, what the heck was that?  Where did the time go? Why am I stuck with the same dreams and goals I set out before but never moved ahead in achieving them.

I know we’ve impacted a few people that read this blog and are not in our business or in this business and that’s awesome.  I wish all of you who read this blog great success in whatever it is you have set out for your goals. 

Dream