Step 3: SUCCESS UNEXPECTED IN COMMON HOURS

52 STEPS; Step 3: SUCCESS UNEXPECTED IN COMMON HOURS

If one advances confidently in the direction of their dreams and endeavors to lead a life which they have imagined, they will meet with success unexpected in common hours” –

Henry David Thoreau

READ IT:

Success seems to be a constant struggle in every endeavor we take up. I was with a friend the other day who, in frustration said “Why is it that I have to work so hard just to stay even, it seems like I can never get ahead!” I’ve asked myself that question often, “why can’t things be easy – just once”. We sometimes get the feeling that the more effort we put into an important task, the rougher and tougher it is.

We often look at others who have had great success, and it seems so easy for them. In Step 1, you set up an appointment, (I KNOW YOU DID THIS – RIGHT!), to meet with such a person. After the meeting I hope you walked away and realized that those people that are doing what you want to do, or are in a position or place in life that you want to be at, had trials and tribulation just like you have experienced. The difference is they kept working through the hard times until the effort led them to success. Maybe they found a better way to do something, a more efficient way to get a task done, were able to delegate to others those things they didn’t do well or give tasks to others that were willing to help and could do them at a high level, allowing them to focus hard on what they excelled at.

Michelangelo, the great Italian painter and sculptor, said if people knew how hard he had to work to gain his mastery, it wouldn’t seem wonderful at all. Experts say to become a “master” at something, to be the elite in your field, you need to put in 10,000 hours of time in that endeavor. How fast and the length of effort it takes you to put in those hours is up to you – you might put in an hour a week for 10,000 weeks (in which you would need to live to be over 177 years old to become a master!). Even putting in 40 hours a week, 52 weeks every year, never taking a day off for vacation or because of sickness, it would take close to 5 years to be one of the top experts in your field!!

These numbers frighten a few of us. We find it hard to imagine working 5 years straight with no time off, no holidays, no time for “other things”. It would be hard. My question to you is, how much time would you be willing to give to yourself to accomplish that dream, that goal you set for yourself in Step 1? 1 hour a week, 5hours a week, 10 hours a week, maybe more! Even if you put in just a extra 1 hour a week (that’s less than 10 minutes a day!), where would you be a year from now?

We need to "take time to make time" to gain and master that which we desire. We might be surprised at the Performance Edge we’ve obtained in what we thought were everyday, common moments. We might even meet with success unexpected in those common hours!

DO IT

This week, start to add to your area of Performance Improvement. Sit down and write out your weekly calendar. Put down everything; sleep, eating, time with the kids, work, watching TV, doing nothing. Maybe you even have on your schedule time to deal with your area of Performance Improvement; what I want you to do is put down EXTRA time that you can spend in your area. For instance, with the physical component, maybe it’s not more time at the gym, but reading information on diet or programs that will help you out when you get to the gym. In the social organization, it might not be going to another meeting, but finding out if donating a few minutes a week to make a few calls to others would help out, helping with organizing an upcoming activity in the future would benefit the group. Find your extra time and use that time to better yourself in your Performance Improvement area.

It might also be getting rid of some of the items on your calendar that frees you up to focus on your main area that you want to excel at. Just today, I had lunch with the most amazing woman in the world! The lunch turned into a few hours of talking and sharing ideas and dreams. One of the things that she mentioned was that she needed to take a commitment off her plate that would allow her to achieve her goals in the area that was most important at this time. It didn't mean that the other area wasn't something she didn't want to be involved with or part of. But what makes her remarkable is that she is able to realize that to be successful in her key area, for now she would need to not commit so much time and energy to that other activity.

Mark the time on your calendar and/or schedule and follow through during this next week. At the end of the week, go back and review your week. Did something not get done that you normally do? In one of those other areas, was your performance hindered or your effort less than what you normally did? My guess is that it wasn’t. You were able to use this “found time”, get more accomplished in the area you WANT to work in and still met the challenges of in the areas you NEEDED to work at! Keep this up for the rest of the year (you might even find more time to do those WANT TO’s) and you’ll be amazed at the level of success you achieved!

IT’S THE BASE THAT’S IMPORTANT

Step 1: IT’S THE BASE THAT’S IMPORTANT

Somewhere here is a map of how it can be done – Ben Stein

READ IT:

I grew up in a small town in SouthDakota. When I say small, it’s a place that when I did something wrong at 10:00 pm – my folks knew about it before I got home at 10:15 pm! It was known as the “Hay Capital of the World”. To this day it still is. We even have a “Hay Day’s” to celebrate the distinguished title. In a town of 400 folks, we didn’t have a McDonalds or Burger King to get summer jobs or part time work after school. To make money in our town, you did what you did if you were a young man growing up in the “Hay Capital of the World” – you piled hay.

I don’t know if you are familiar with piling hay or stacking hay. We would pile, stack, or load hay on trucks, in barns, in fields, on trailers, in enclosed furniture semi-trucks…you name it
and we put hay on it, in it, under it, and on top of it! The hay we handled and loaded were small
bales, called square bales; even though they weren’t square and at 80-100 pounds per bale, at times they didn’t seem small! The name locals fondly labeled those wire bundles were “Idiot Blocks”. (Years later, my brothers and cousins wondered, if they were called idiot blocks, what
did the people in town call the folks that carried them around??)

No matter where we stacked the bales, the early lesson taught was that the most important thing to stacking bales was to make sure the base was right. My dad use to say “It’s the bottom tier (base or bales at the bottom) that’s important. If that’s off, when you get to the top you’ll have problems.” He was right. If we took the time and effort to make sure the bales were started
correctly, the whole process was easier and we had fewer problems as we worked. If we hurried, and we just set the bales down and didn’t make a good base – as the stack went up, it would be a struggle to make the bales fit in place, and at times, even have the stack stay up.

Performance is a lot like stacking hay! It’s the base that’s important. If you start off on the right foot, get some help and have an understanding of your program, what you’re doing, why you’re doing what you’re doing and how doing it will benefit you – you’ll have greater success as you “stack things up” and add more to the program. Just as it took time to build the base and then put tier after tier and tier to build the hay stack, with performance it’s about taking small steps, seeing small gains until you’ve constructed the components that make up a better you! You can’t rush the process and be in a hurry, or the whole thing my tumble. Just like a hay stack, the different parts of your performance are under construction and the bigger and more stable the base, the more stable the structure will be and the higher the peak you’ll achieve! It takes time, dedication and some work, as it did putting up those bales, but what we found was the more hay we stacked, the easier it became. We learned how to handle the bales, how to use our bodies to move around the stack and how to do things the best and quickest way possible. You can do the
same with your performance program – if you stick with it over the long haul.

DO IT

This week, start to learn to build a base on your area of Performance Improvement.

1. Pick an area you want to make a change in, get better at, or work on. Maybe it’s in the
physical realm and you want to start to workout or get back to working out. Maybe you need to change up your workout. In the social realm, maybe you’ve wanted to join a certain group or get more involved with an organization. You might be looking to develop from the emotional standpoint and want to find someone to share your ideas with.

2. Find an expert in the area you are looking to make a change or work toward improving. Look
for a mentor that has taken the steps before you and can show you how to build the bottom tier of your success stack.

Contact them and set up a meeting THIS WEEK. Maybe it’s a personal trainer, maybe it’s the
president of a club, maybe it’s a councilor who can give insight on your situation and will give true and correct feedback. Make an appointment and get with them NOW.

3. At the meeting, tell them exactly what you want to do, what you want to accomplish. Lay out
what you want – know and see your future vision. This may take some time, but you taking some
time now will mean a lot to the person that is taking their time to help you out – and it will help during your other 51 Steps! Plan for the meeting and put your dream on paper – they will help you build the first tier to your base of success. ALSO – MAKE A VIDEO OF YOURSELF (get a video camera or find a friend that has one!) SAYING YOUR GOALS!

Wishing you the best of success and taking one step closer to reaching your PEAK PERFORMANCE.

Rock n Rout -

Mark "Rozy" Roozen

PS - for the worksheet with Step 1 - don't forget to email and request it at rozyroozen@gmail.com

52 Steps to Reaching Your Performance Edge in Life

52 Steps to Reaching Your
Performance Edge in Life

Any act often repeated soon forms a habit; and habit allowed, steadily gains in strength. At first it may be but a spider’s web, easily broken through, but if not resisted it soon binds us with chains of steel.

Tryon Edwards

I wish I could tell you that making a change is easy. It isn’t.

UNLESS! There is always a catch isn’t there! Unless you decide to can make a change and you keep your eye on the reward and not on the rough road to get there. The change won’t be easy – but the final destination will be sweet! Take working out. Ever NOT want to go to the gym to
workout. You have to “prime the pump”, give yourself a pep talk, just to get up and get going to do something that is good for you – AND YOU KNOW IT! When you finally do get the energy to go workout, put yourself through the paces, at the end of the session, you are glad you did your workout for the day. It wasn’t easy, it maybe wasn’t convenient, but you have a sense of joy and accomplishment that you took a step to make yourself better!

I wish I could tell you that making a change takes 21 days. It doesn’t.

You can work hard and make a huge effort do things different over the next 21 days than what you did in the past, but if the habit that has you, and has been part of you for 10, 15 or 20 years,
doing something different and out of your norm for three weeks might not be long enough to make a lasting change. You might have to work longer and harder to knock that monkey, which is now a full size gorilla, off your back.

I’m an eater! Come from a family of eaters. We would determine how the success of an event was, if it was a good or great vacation, and if a family get-together ended on a positive note by how good the food was. Sometimes the food didn’t even have to be great if there was a lot of it. More meant better in my book. To this day, I have to fight the “Volume Monster” when I eat.
I’ve gone 21 days eating right, I’ve gone months eating right, and when I see a buffet, get the kids back, make sure there are no limbs hanging over the buffet table and please observe the 15 foot safety barrier, because it’s on baby!! The use a small plate, eat small portions, eat slowly are out the window. Using a small plate and eating small portions only means I need to go back more times (maybe the extra walking back and forth to the buffet line helps burn calories – guess not!). My point is, even after weeks and weeks of making positive changes, when I’m back
in old surroundings I revert back to old ways.

Change for me is a lifetime event – but that’s ok with me, because I plan to live my whole life, and not be dead before they bury me (but that’s a different topic for another blog or a whole book!).

I wish I could tell you that once you make a change it will last forever. It won’t.

The saying “Old habits die hard” is really true. There are reasons we do what we do, how we do them, when we do them, where we do them. It makes up our inner self, what we are and who we are. Changing that make-up is continually a work in progress. If once people made a change and it stuck – there would be a whole lot of people out of work! Just take dieting. The numbers are amazing of the people that lose weight, put it back on and lose it again. Just think how the world would be if once we lost the weight it would stay off and the change was permanent. When we worked out, long and hard for months and months, the physique we had worked to develop stayed in place! WOW – wouldn’t that be heaven! Sad to say it doesn’t work that way.

Progress begins by taking one step and then following with another. Working toward your Performance Edge isn’t a jump, it’s taking small steps to the ledge and seeing what is in front of you – and then gaining the knowledge, the courage and the determination to take one more step!

Our success in every endeavor; spiritual, physical, emotional, social and mental, lies in us doing something day by day. In the book “The Best of Success” by Wynn Davis, he says that “Good work done little by little becomes a great work. The house of success is built brick by brick.”

In this blog, over this year, 52 Steps to Reaching Your Performance Edge in Life, Mark Roozen’s Performance Edge Training Systems looks to give you little bits and pieces to help you become a great work. We’re giving you bricks – what you do with the bricks is up to you. Our hope is that you take each “brick” and put it down as your base to help you on your path to achieving more in your life than you ever thought possible. A new step will be sent out each Sunday night with this blog for you to follow.

The blog is set up to read “One Step” at a time each week over the next 52 weeks. With each step, there will be an idea and thought section (READ IT) and then an action section (DO IT)
with a task to accomplish for the week.

They say an idea with no action is a dream. At Mark Roozen’s Performance Edge Training
Systems, we are dreamers – but we also are, and believe, in DOING! Some of you might just sit and read the weekly thoughts, which is ok. Our goal is that the thought moves you to action, the action will lead to progress and progress help you reach new roads, new adventures and a new you that is inside of you and ready to get out.

We look forward to being part of the 52 Steps to Reaching Your Performance Edge in Life! I would love to hear from you. I also have a "Work Sheet" that I'll be glad to send you for FREE - each week that matches the weekly action plan. A easy to follow sheet that gives you step by step plans of how to make your action easy to accomplish. Just email me at rozyroozen@gmail.com and I'll make sure to send you the work sheet each week. I also look forward to your feedback and comments along the way. Look forward to taking the journey with you!

Taking you to the Edge and a Step Beyond!

Happy New Year!

Mark "Rozy" Rozy