OTHER E-BOOKS IN THIS SERIES
‘How to achieve what you want, when you want’
7 powerful principles of successful thinking for work, life and everything
by Andy Gilbert, this FREE 33 page e-book is packed with ideas and tips on the 7 principles of successful thinking. It contains 8 top tips to help you define your goals, 5 steps to help you plan your priorities and yet more tips on strengthening your self-belief, how to involve others more successfully and how to make choices. Put into action immediately these ideas will greatly increase your probability of achieving what you want, when you want.
Each of our powerful principles of successful thinking is also the subject of a separate e-book, giving more detail and more tips to help you.
To obtain your copy of this FREE e-book simply visit www.gomadthinking.com
THINKING PRINCIPLE ONE
‘How to develop a personal passion’
Practical tips to increase your motivation to achieve
by Andy Gilbert & Annagail Davies, explains thinking principle one of our Solution Focused Thinking System in greater depth. As well as discovering how to avoid blaming others, you’ll also get great tips on how to increase your motivation to achieve and save yourself masses of time in the process!
THINKING PRINCIPLE TWO
‘How to determine what you want and when you want it’
Pragmatic steps to leaping into the top 5% of goal definers
by Andy Gilbert & Rob Smith, gives you tips on defining exactly what it is you want to achieve, as well as helping to increase your self-belief that you can achieve it. It will make your task of deciding priorities, which we cover in this e-book, really easy!
THINKING PRINCIPLE THREE
‘How to produce plentiful possibilities, pressing priorities and perfect plans’
Quick and easy tips to plan your success and get you started
by Andy Gilbert & Ken Hudson, gives you some quick and easy steps to plan your success and get you started. With tips to eliminate time wasting, generate loads of ideas and produce a plan that will work for you, it will help you make your goal come to life and stay alive!
THINKING PRINCIPLE FOUR
‘How to create a self-belief that you can and will achieve’
Powerful insights into building the confidence to succeed
by Andy Gilbert & Graham Field, expands on Henry Ford’s famous quote “Whether you believe you can do a thing or not, you are right." It gives a powerful insight into just how much we are governed by limiting beliefs, and how we can harness the power of our minds to achieve so much more than we ever dreamed possible.
THINKING PRINCIPLE FIVE
‘How to get others on your side’
Definitive guidelines on involving others to
achieve what you want
by Andy Gilbert & Caron Lindley, gives an explanation of the five types of people that you can involve to help you achieve your goal. Research has shown that the bigger your goal, the better your chances of success if you involve others to help. If you only ever involve the people closest to you, then this e-book is for you!
THINKING PRINCIPLE SIX
‘How to make personal choices and take responsibility’
Insightful ideas to help you own your thoughts and actions
by Andy Gilbert & Ken Hudson, takes a hard look at responsibility and its consequences. Personal Responsibility lies at the heart of our Solution Focused Thinking System. Without it the system collapses. Without it, you are missing out on success, respect and leadership. It even promises to be liberating!
‘The Making A Difference Workbook’
30 activities and exercises for successful thinking about work, life and everything
by the Go MAD Team, is an essential guide to help you put into practice successful thinking. The workbook is structured to allow you to think through key issues and turn them into practical applications that you can put to use immediately. It will help you take a step closer to what you want to achieve.
To order any of the above e-books, simply visit www.gomadthinking.com
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction 5
3 ways that this e-book will help you
1. Leap into the light! 6
Being solution focused
2. Learn how to make a start 7
14 minutes a day to make a difference
3. Act with integrity 8
4. Obstacles or challenges? 9
5. Recognise the difference between perseverance 10
and stubbornness
6. Measure the difference 10
The link to well defined goals
7. How to measure confidence 11
Defining goals for things that are hard to measure
8. Be sure you can measure 13
9. And before you tick off the last sub-goal… 13
How to maintain momentum
10. Enjoy the journey 14
11. It’s party time! 15
Celebrate your success
12. Are you ordinary or extraordinary? 15
What will you choose to do next?
13. An invitation for the next 90 days 15
What difference will you make?
14. Revision without the exam 16
A reminder of solution focused thinking
15. Remember the whining dog? 17
How strong is your reason why?
16. Learning summary 18
17. Where to go from here 18
Liability disclaimer
The material contained in this report is general and is not intended as advice on any particular matter. Go MAD Thinking Research & Consulting Group and the author expressly disclaim all and any liability to any person whatsoever in respect of anything done by any person in reliance, whether in whole or in part, on this report. Please take appropriate legal advice before acting on any information in this book.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to the last staging post to your success! Thinking principle seven of Solution Focused Thinking lies at the pinnacle of the system. If you’re reading this then congratulations! You’ve probably done a lot of thinking and a lot of planning. You have your actions planned and it’s time to start!
Plan Priorities Involve
Others Define
Goal Reason
Why Self
Belief Take
Action Personal Responsibility
Go MAD Framework
This e-book follows on from other e-books in this series but if you haven’t read any of the others – don’t worry! This book will still give you a review of the fundamentals and some great tips. If you want a quick overview, then download our FREE e-book, ‘How to achieve what you want, when you want!’
Solution Focused Thinking is the result of over 4000 hours of research into how people make a difference in their lives. It is a success system. Each time you read a bit more about one of the principles in Solution Focused Thinking, then not only are you helping yourself think more clearly, more effectively and more quickly, but you are also helping yourself become more successful.
This e-book will help you:
Link all the principles of Solution Focused Thinking into a useful system
Act as a reminder of important points
Move forward into the future with confidence.
Taking action is the easy bit of this system. Measuring the results of our efforts is the important bit, since then we will know the scale of our success!
Leaping into the light is what solution focused thinkers do! They know where they are going, what they are doing, when they are doing it and why they are doing it. A leap in the dark is for someone who doesn’t really know what he is doing and hasn’t considered any of the previous six principles of successful thinking.
If you have read some or all of the previous e-books in this series, here are 6 very good reasons why you will be on the way to achieving what you want.
You will have thought carefully about ‘why’ you want to make this difference. You will have established how strong your reason why or motivation is, and if necessary, you will have increased that motivation. You will have determined whether the force of that motivation is pushing you away from something you don’t want to happen, or towards something that you do want to happen. If the only motivation was pushing you away from the fear of the consequences, then most probably you will have thought about turning that around into working towards something you do want to happen. If you were to imagine a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is low and 10 is high and were to rate the strength of your ‘reason why’, it would have a rating of at least 6 or above.
You will have defined what you want very precisely. You will know what it will look like when you get there, and you will know how you are going to measure it. You will have cut out all the vague words like ‘understand’, ‘improve’ and ‘more’. You will have a time-scale by when you are set to achieve your goal.
You will have generated at least 30 different possibilities around your goal concerning how to achieve it. These will include not only tasks and resources, but also potential obstacles and how to get round them. You will have sorted out the priorities, such as the most important actions to take to achieve your goal or the ones that are most likely to get you the biggest difference in the shortest amount of time. You will have given time-scales to each of these priorities and then built them into an action plan. Each priority will be like a SMART sub-goal (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant and with a Time-scale). Your action plan will be written down and will be well-used.
You will have thought about your self-belief in achieving your goal. You will have identified all the hindering things you say to yourself that may be holding you back. You will have changed these into more helpful things, and you will be getting yourself into a very positive frame of mind through your new set of beliefs about yourself.
You will have thought laterally about whom you want to involve in achieving your goal. Not just the people closest to you but people that you perhaps don’t yet know, or perhaps that don’t even exist! Also, you will have thought about how you might involve them and how you might possibly get their buy-in to your goal.
You will have considered five sets of choices that are your responsibility. These are:
whether you will choose to make a difference
what precisely that difference will be
what priorities you will go for together with what time you will allocate to them
whom you will actually involve
what personal development you may have to do to make sure your skills and knowledge are sufficient.
So now it’s time for you to take action and measure your results!
Now that it’s time for you to take action, you’ve got to make a start. Taking that initial plunge can be quite a challenge for some people, so here’s a method you might like to use.
Each day has 1440 minutes; start by allocating just 1% – 14 minutes – on the difference you have chosen to make. If you choose not to even do this, you’re probably not serious about making a difference and need to check your application of the other key thinking principles. Never confuse intention, with action. As with many things in life, it never seems quite the right time, but if we always waited for the perfect time to arrive, we would probably never achieve anything.
“Vision without action remains a dream.
Action without vision just passes the time.
Vision with action can change the world.”
Joel Arthur Barker
So start to achieve what you want now. 14 minutes a day is not a lot. Not later, next month or someday – these words often mean never. The Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, wrote the following words over 2,500 years ago: “The journey of a thousand miles, starts with a single step”. Their relevance is obvious: take a single step today, however small, and start to achieve what you want.
You may like to bolster the start by reinforcing your reason why. Even if you are working towards something, imagine now the consequences of never doing anything. What will that be like in one week? Two weeks? A month? A year? Or even at the end of your life, will you look back and say “If only I had…”
Another method of pushing yourself into action is to tell other people what you intend to do. Talk about it to the extent that if you then don’t do anything, it will cause you mighty embarrassment with the people you have shared your goal with. There is of course a risk associated with this course of action! If you consistently talk about things you never actually do, then people will not take you seriously any more.
However, the likelihood is that you have done so much thinking, planning and preparation, the step to start action will be easy. You will know exactly what you will be starting with, when and how.
The difference you choose to make is your decision. How you choose to act and apply the Solution Focused Thinking Principles is up to you. I hope you apply them to make a difference that benefits yourself and others, without harm to any other person.
You can’t have, or act with, a bit of integrity; you either have it, or you don’t! Acting without integrity usually backfires on people sooner or later. People will look good for a while, until others begin to understand what is going on. Credibility and trust will go, and the person will no longer be taken seriously. So if you haven’t done so before, start acting with integrity in everything you undertake. You will gain much more respect from everyone around you.
“What you do speaks so loudly that
I cannot hear what you say.”
If you haven’t already done so, it’s time to alter your mindset! What is your view on failure? My belief is that there is no failure, only opportunities to learn. It’s a useful belief to have in terms of how you approach your goal. It makes it easier to view setbacks with an open and more positive mind. The good news is, that you can have this belief too and we looked at how we can alter beliefs in our previous e-book on thinking principle four (‘How to create a self-belief that you can and will achieve’). If you haven’t read this one, then do take the opportunity to read it.
In a nutshell, start to give yourself a positive message that you are comfortable with (e.g. ‘If anything goes wrong, then it’s a challenge and an opportunity to learn’). Say this to yourself several times a day for at least a month, and you will find that you will start to believe it. Put little messages to yourself in appropriate places to remind you.
Whilst doing leadership work in schools, I came across teachers and pupils with very closed minds. It was difficult not to make instant judgments and brand them as completely lacking in leadership. So I started to say to myself “Everyone has leadership potential and it’s my job to find out what that is”. Now I passionately believe this statement, and it gives me an extraordinarily different approach to people when I meet them. Instead of branding people and looking for the negative aspects of their character, I look for the positive aspects.
“Failures are divided into two classes – those who thought and never did, and those who did and never thought.”
John Charles Salak
This is an interesting quote, and ties in very well with the whole concept of Solution Focused Thinking. If you have followed through all the thinking principles I know that you will not fall into either of the ‘failure’ classes that John Charles Salak talks about.
However, even with the best plans in the world, you are still unlikely to identify, or eliminate, all obstacles. Instead see them as challenges, as this will help you to accept them as part of achieving success. Being solution focused, you will take responsibility for dealing with them as they crop up, rather than seeing them as an excuse to quit. It helps if you keep focused on your goal and reason why.
“People who produce good results feel good about themselves.”
Ken Blanchard
If you keep on applying the first six Solution Focused Thinking Principles, dealing with whatever challenges you face, you will succeed. Challenges can often be broken down into smaller parts – like goals and sub-goals. Tackle each of the smaller parts and they won’t seem so big or difficult. Remember that the greatest challenges are those that exist in your mind!
Winston Churchill, the former British Prime Minster, once gave a speech in a university debate that lasted only a few seconds. He stood up and said, “Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never”, and then sat down again. Perseverance is never giving up in going after your goal, but also being flexible in the way that you do it. On the other hand, stubbornness is ignoring the facts and being unreasonably obstinate about making a difference that cannot be made.
It’s a bit like going on a car journey to meet a friend for lunch when you get stuck in a traffic jam. You really do want to get there, so you are flexible and take a different route down some side roads and are determined to persevere. However, everyone else seems to have the same idea, and you end up just as stuck on the side roads. Flexibility with the route has gone, and time is ticking away. You realise that given the current state of things you probably wouldn’t arrive until 4pm, far too late for lunch. Stubbornness would mean carrying on come what may, only having to set out to come back as soon as you have arrived. A more reasoned course of action would be to turn round and offer profuse apologies for not being able to get there.
Keep track of how you are doing and plan in reviews to ensure this happens. Look back at your goal, and sub-goals, to make sure you are measuring the specific things you wanted to achieve. How you measure the goals is up to you. Some things are obviously easier to measure than others, e.g. have certain events happened or not? Measurements of time, cost and quantity are also relatively easy to measure.
We looked at this in some detail in thinking principle two: ‘How to determine what you want and when you want it’. So for example, if you wanted to ‘improve sales’ the questions are ‘how much by?’ and ‘when by’. If the ‘how much’ question results in a percentage, then convert that into a fixed number. If this becomes an end of year sales target, then you will probably have sub-goals of monthly sales targets. These will make it easy to see if you are on track to achieve your overall goal.
Sometimes you might have to be a little more creative in how you define what it is you want to achieve, so that you can measure it. I often have people stating at the beginning of a programme that their goal is to come away with some new ideas relating to a particular topic. My first question always asks them how many ideas they specifically want. This surprises them, as they hadn’t really thought about it. I probe as to whether if they went away with just one really good idea they would be happy, or whether they would need, say, 10 ideas to make their time feel worthwhile. This causes them to stop and think, and then define the exact number. At least now I have something to work to!