“They didn’t tell me it was like this”, “I didn’t know”, “He deliberately deceived me”, “They made it look so simple”, “It’s his fault”, “It’s her fault”. There are many shades of excuses people give as the reasons for their failure. They all have one thing in common – they give the responsibility for their predicament(s) to others. These conversations ooze out effortlessly from the mouths of victims. A victim is appropriately defined as one that is acted on and usually adversely affected by a force or agent. Nobody desires to be a victim, we think erroneously that our circumstances are imposed on us by life. This is wrong!
Victors on the other hand, are people who somehow have learnt to arrogate the responsibility for their success or failure only to themselves. They see themselves as on the winning side, as happening to the world and not the world shoving things at them. They see themselves as key influencers, not merely concerned citizens. They seek out their lot in life and take it! The world watches and calls them lucky, but they know that everything they have achieved in their life has been their fault or making. They know that by thinking like a victor, they have somehow managed to attract wealth, the opportunities and the lifestyles that attends victory.
I have been a victim before, and currently operate victoriously, so I can enlighten you a bit on this. I know the factors that make us stuck into the victim mentality and the thoughts that can free us up.
I remember my first attempt at an Online Network Marketing company. I paid the equivalent of over $500 back then in 2006, I was very excited about the opportunity and decided to sign up to it after much thought. It was quite an amount of money for me back then, but the prospects and possibilities outweighed the cost and my DREAM was big enough. I paid, and I hoped for great things. I told my upline I was ready to work, but that I was busy with other things, and as such will be sending my prospects over to him to sign up for me and train for me. He also being a naive upline, decided to oblige me and accept my offer. While I made absolutely no money from this venture, I must tell you that I learnt lessons that have helped to make my future pursuits successful. Today, I’m involved in Avenues to Wealth (formerly known as Holidays and Cash) and all the failures I have experienced in the past have provided a solid foundation for my current success and for the success of my team.
1. Fail or Succeed, it’s my fault!
Never put yourself into a position where your success depends entirely on someone else. In life we must learn to be interdependent, but that’s no excuse for blaming anyone else for your ill fortune. Learn to master and use the most powerful 10 word, 2 letter phase -” if it is to be, it is up to me!” Learn to take responsibility. Learn to understand that your future is what you made of it, from this very moment! From now into your future, there is nothing impossible, there is nothing too late, and there is nothing absolutely nothing that you cannot make happen for yourself.
2. Thought precedes action!
In the creative process, we think first before we act. This means for example that we are first victims or victors in our mind before they become our reality. The Galatea effect says that life is actually a self-fulfilling prophecy of our expectations while the pygmalion effect says that our lives gravitate towards the expectations of our teacher, coach, supervisor, manager or any other authoritative figure that sets expectations for her. Our lives ultimately confirm to our thoughts or put in the same phrasing as the good books, “as a man thinks in his heart, so is he”
In a 1968 study, researcher Dr. Robert Rosenthal and an elementary school principal met with teachers and shared a list of students who had fictitiously scored exceptionally high on their IQ test. With this “knowledge” the teachers’ expectations of the students were set higher. After eight months, this list of “smarter” students had, in fact, scored higher than the other students.
In another study, a Big Five accounting firm hired a consultant to improve staff’s confidence and performance. The consultant met with a select group of staff, and told them that they were the company’s top performers, and that they had the full confidence of the partners. These employees were also given special monthly communication from their managers congratulating them on a job well done and reaffirming expectations. After three months, these employees had high self-confidence. More than half of them were now outperforming the rest of the team.
3. Make up your mind ahead not to quit!
Many times, we do not really fail, we quit! Many times we become victims not because we could never have succeed, but because we lost steam somewhere along the line and are unable to sustain the tempo we started with. Failure is not failure until we stop. In the match between success and failure, the winner is not who scores the highest goals, it’s the person that scores the last goal. Sometimes we embark on things without appropriate knowledge or information and once we have these, it makes sense to quit. The key thought is evaluate what you want quickly enough, and once you commit, back it up with a commitment to not quitting.Đ¸ĐºĐ¾Đ½Đ¸
