Personal Confidence.....Remove the Gremlins

How confident are you in the business, financial and life decisions you are making? Do you have times of doubt? Have you ever created thoughts in your mind that are not reality, or what can be called gremlins? These questions are equally valid whether you are an investor, executive or advisor.

When you have confidence almost anything can be achieved, adversity can be handled, your mind opens up to new possibilities, you get unstuck, relationships can get built, people are attracted to you. Personal confidence is an energy force that sustains you. With plenty of confidence, there can be never ending growth in ALL areas of your life.

So, reflect on what you are currently confident about and what may be undermining your confidence.

The degree to which you have personal confidence actually gets down to personal trust. How much do you trust yourself? We all have gremlins floating around in our heads that were falsely created somewhere and they are generally there because we are not so trusting of ourselves. The key to change is building a positive way of thinking to remove the gremlins.

At the top level, this starts with discovering who you are, defining what you exist for and gaining clarity of what is important. Put another way, it is to define what a quality life is for you and then stick to it. Your definition of what is a quality life, which includes your life purpose, will put the framework in place for making confident decisions and cutting out a lot of clutter that may get in the way of your confidence. After all, it is critical you live your unique design.

Nevertheless, there is the day-to-day issue of self-management. Keeping the gremlins out of your head EVERY day is not easy. You can do it by focusing on the questions you ask yourself when key issues or questions come up during the day. Learn to ask yourself positive questions rather than negative, judgemental or critical questions. Go to work knowing you will approach your day this way and then at night question yourself, did I approach everything with a positive mind-set? Then, what can I do tomorrow to build my confidence further? The other aspect is to review your activities and see what is both building and sapping your confidence. This is part of being well prepared, which of itself is a confidence booster.

I would also say you should consider having a coach to be firstly a guide, then encourager and accountability partner in building your confidence. Constructive feedback and powerful questions from a coach who is independent of your life but "with you" will really help.

Once the trust comes, personal confidence accelerates and amazing results can be achieved with harmonious relationships.

Your Likeability Factor

Do you know what your likeability factor is? What do others say about you? What do you say about yourself?

I recently read a book called "The Likeability Factor" by Tim Sanders. The message of the book was to focus and continually reinforce all of those aspects about you that are likeable and further, to encourage you to be doing more of what is likeable about you. The other side of the message is not to continuously look at the negatives.

In a number of group sessions I run, whether it be a team, family or business discussion group I often conduct an "icebreaker" exercise by going around the room and having each person say what they like about each other. From such an apparently simple exercise, I have always found the outcome amazing. Everyone is usually highly liberated in some positive way by being told something they had not realized others saw in them. Just imagine the positive life development that will come from living that "likeability factor" more.

Interestingly, the likeability factor is often related to the person's greatest behavioral strengths from their Financial DNA profile, e.g. for me people have always liked my approach to continuous development or being straight forward or pioneering. For others, it may be their compassion or ability to think out of the box.

The power of the exercise is that it allows people to be vulnerable in a very safe way. The camaraderie and bonds get tightened. This then helps in making the platform for developing relationships more sound, which we know is critical to team or family prosperity.

Try focusing on your likeability factor and see what changes it makes to your own life, family and teams you are in.

The Definition of Retirement is Changing

What is your definition of retirement? It might be good to think about that a bit. Do not just listen to the "noise" out there about what it means or what others are doing. Focus on you and who you are. You may just be surprised what retirement really means in the context of your life. The key point is that the definition of retirement will depend on your unique financial personality - how you are uniquely wired to make life and financial decisions. In effect, your financial personality will shape how you see life and deal with the retirement question. Whatever stage of your career or life you are at, addressing this question will be very liberating.

In recent times we have started to do a lot more work with the executives of corporations. In particular, we are delivering Quality Life Programs to executives participating in 401k plans. An interesting trend emerging is more and more executives are starting to realize that retirement does not necessarily mean they have to stop work. The point is, the definition of retirement is changing. A friend of mine who is a senior executive with a large fund manager providing retirement services and products to executives, said he is seeing the same trend of people including work in their definition of retirement. In fact, the discussion that their company has with executives is now becoming much more focused on getting each person to define what retirement means for them. Our focus is similar, bundling the question of retirement up with what is a "Quality Life" for you, again recognizing that this is different for everyone.

Another person recently said to me that their definition of retirement is "Doing what you want, when you want and with whom you want". I thought that was a great one and truly resonated. How much freedom can you get from this type of thinking? Frankly, it is a lot. The person who said this was actually still working, the point being he is now in a role he loves to do every day. When you get this pinpointed it is amazing how you then find yourself around the people you enjoy being with, and managing your working schedule becomes easier. Again, the key is getting centered on who you are by addressing the retirement question from the inside out.

Even if you are a long way from the traditional retiring age of 60 or more, you can still address the question because the answer will shape a lot of career and life choices and hence your financial planning.