A to Z of Success

Joyful

August 15, 2008 Joyful No Comments

I got on a plane once returning from Cebu to Manila and sat two seats away from me was a man I had never seen before. As I sat talking to my friend, he leaned over and said:

“Excuse me, but how can you be so happy with all the shit in the world going on?”

I replied “Easy…It’s not my shit!”

He looked at me like I was an idiot and then burst out laughing and said “That’s brilliant - that’s just brilliant.”

We talked for the rest of the journey and four years later we are still friends.

Have you ever woken up in the morning and for some reason that you can’t put your finger on, you just know it is going to be a great day and of you go happy and full of joy!

What a difference you bring to the world by just being joyful. A smile, a thank you. a hello or just the bounce in your step. The world loves joyful people and you know what all the problems in the world…

Well it just isn’t your shit. So don’t worry about it and just smile.

Easy to say no, but then your house is being taken away from you because you haven’t paid and the price of everything is going up so much and how will you cope.

You know what, no matter how much you complain about it, there is nothing you can do about it. So live with it and be happy or complain. It’s up to you.

And you know what else, no matter what they do, you will still go on every day. Day in day out so at least just be happy that you can go on.

Here are 5 tips to be joyful in the face of everything that is happening around you:

1. Put the humor in Life.
2. Practice Gratitude
3. Choose to be a giver than a taker
4. Live in the moment
5. Find the “bless in the mess”

The secret to finding joy is by being satisfied with what we have and instead aspiring to be better. It is the person that you become that will bring the joy rather than the things that you have. Joy is not the same as pleasure. Pleasure is a feeling that is normally followed by disappointment as we come down from the high, but joy is deeper than that. Joy is a spiritual feeling.

In a Christian world, we strive to surrender ourselves to “thy will be done.” Equally you have a purpose on life and your own personal will must be done also. When you are achieving your will that is when you become joyful. As long as you are within the feeling of your will, you will experience joy.

To conquer a mountain must be incredible. What more to accomplish an almost seemingly impossible task of conquering something as complex as you. Conquering yourself brings about self discovery and you will experience a joy like never before as you meet yourself for the first time.

There is really only one way to obtain joy and that is through love. Love for the world, love for your fellow man and love for yourself.

A man is paid in direct proportion to the service he renders mankind. The love that you get is dependent of the service you render. The money you have, is dependent on the service you render mankind. It has nothing to do with putting yourself first. It’s all about service.

I believe that this is a step to success. My life started to really gel when I stopped thinking of me all the time and started thinking about what I could contribute to others. I found that i actually liked helping others and as a result I became happy.

I found that all the help I gave to others came back to me multiplied by massive amounts and most of my problems started to float away. Oh how joyful!

Integrity

August 11, 2008 Integrity No Comments

Everyone in prison probably regrets (for the most part) what they did and wish that they could go back to the time of their crime and do it again, but this time don’t do the crime. Accountability for their crime is their’s and if they had made better decisions and stuck to their integrity they wouldn’t be eating prison food.

Integrity is defined as “basing one’s actions on internally consistent framework of principles.” In other words it is a code of honor. Depth of principles and adherence of each level to the next are key factors. One is said to have integrity to the extent that everything one does is derived from the same core set of values. While those values may change, their consistency with each other and with the one’s actions determine the degree of integrity.

Most of the principles on which we base integrity are spiritual in essence and words that spring to mind are commitment, honor, courage, loyalty love, trust and perseverance to name just a few, but they are mainly based on religious concepts. no matter what your religion these qualities are promoted.

We live in a world where integrity seems to be ignored. Integrity suggests going past “what’s in it for me,” but rather “what’s the right thing to do?”

Too often we here of people claiming to be “Christians” (or other religions) and then acting in a manner which clearly shows they are not. The news is full of people claiming to be living in integrity to these principles, and then going out to be thieves, robbers, prostitutes, corrupt and all the other evils of the world we see.

We are tempted with many things to steer us away from the life of integrity, but this is just a test to see if we really are in integrity or merely giving it lip service. Man pretends to be honest, yet he hides his income from the authorities and tries to cheat. Man asks his customers to trust him and then shows that they cannot be trusted by producing false invoices to hide money.

I have lost money because I would not “forget” the VAT content on projects when asked by my customers to do so. I work on this theory - If my customer does not respect my honest, then he will not respect my dishonesty and when it all goes wrong it will come back to you.

You should not have to think about your integrity. It should be a subconscious operation. People should know that when they deal with you - they can trust you.

Personal integrity is a major part of business and lack of integrity is a major part of failure. Your customers, friends and even family will leave you if you speak with forked tongue. If you know of the story of “the boy that cried wolf” you will know what I mean.

There will be times every day when your integrity is called to test and you can either do what you should do or do what you want to. You are in control.