When I speak to audiences about success, I usually start by asking a lot of questions and then answering them myself.

The funny thing is, this so-called “introduction” can last for half an hour. What the audience don’t realize is that a lot of the principles, learning and tips that follow are embedded in this opening exchange.

You see, we are learning all the time, whether we realize it or not. In fact, if you don’t take more control over what you learn you can learn some pretty unhelpful things.

None of us are strangers to this. From a young age we become experts at learning things that are no use to us – and in some instances things that can seriously affect our future success.

Take school, for instance. One bad experience reading aloud in class can live with you forever. The emotions attached to your experience teach you that speaking out loud is a scary thing to do. Many years later and guess what? You’re still scared of doing it and now it has a name; “fear of public speaking”.

The first question I put to my audience is:

“How did I get to be where I am today?”

Well, every time I thought about doing something different in my career, it happened – even totally changing careers a number of times.

After about four or five years in accounting, and that many jobs later, I started to think about how great it would be to work in computers. By then I was well into my twenties, and didn’t know how I’d achieve this; I just knew how good it would be to be living that life. I basically started to daydream like a four year old.

Four year olds live in the moment, don’t care what others might think, or that things may not work out, and they keep at something until they master it. If you think about it, how much more successful and happy would we be in our lives if we lived in the moment, didn’t worry about the past or the future, didn’t get worried about what other people might think and kept going at things until we could master them? Just like a four year old.

So, throughout this book, I have not really asked you to learn anything new. In fact, I’ve asked you to unlearn all the rubbish and limitations that stop you being the best you can be, that you too have most likely picked up since you were four years old. You see, you were also that four year old once.

Anyway, as I was well into my twenties by now, I didn’t know how I’d achieve this; I just knew how good it would be to be living that life. In the daytime I was physically working in accounting, but in my head I was constantly thinking how my life would be if I was working in computers. I would imagine myself meeting new people, travelling the world, earning lots more money and buying all the cars I’d dreamed of. I would imagine what I would feel like, the things I would do, the types of people I would meet and how my friends and family would talk to me about my new career in computers.

A period of probably six months passed, and I was in another accounting role, when an opportunity came up to get involved in an IT project.

After about a year, I started to daydream again and think about how great it would be to work freelance and visit different clients during the course of a week. So, again I would constantly daydream about what my life would be like once I was working freelance. I’d take days off when I wanted, go on holiday when I wanted and have a great variety in my working week looking after all my clients.

A little while later, I got made redundant and was then given the opportunity to work on a project on a temporary basis. “Right”, I thought, “this isn’t a temporary job; this is my first client as a freelancer.”

At this point in time, I thought I was just lucky in bringing to life all my dreams. But, I’d just accidentally, without realizing it, discovered how to use my brain to guide me towards opportunities and ideas I wouldn’t normally notice, and then enabled me to take advantage of them. I learnt that the way you look at things greatly affects your ongoing experience, where you can start getting even better results in your own life. When I say your “own life” this is true – this doesn’t have to just be about business or financial success, the same process and technique works for any aspect of your life. About five years ago I was asked to speak at a conference about success. I didn’t tell the audience this was for business success – and, therefore, what happened actually surprised me. The audience consisted of 250 people, 246 were women and as a result of that talk three women decided to leave their husbands! All the time I was teaching the audience how to imagine their ideal life, and for these three women, it meant their husband wasn’t in them!

Anyway, back to the point where I had become freelance. I loved being freelance, never in the same place for very long, the occasional project working from home, travel, not tied to the same office building day in and day out. I was earning more money in a month than most of my friends earned in a year. But then it happened again – I started to think how great it would be to own my own company with staff, a software product and all that goes with owning my own business. Yes, I was back to those very detailed daydreams picturing what my life would be like on a daily basis, the sorts of things I’d do – I’d even imagine being on holiday and how I would be thinking back to the previous few years with a booming software business.

You can guess by now what I’m going to write next; yes, an opportunity came along. I had been working freelance with this company for about eighteen months, when I was asked by the financial director to put a proposal together and attend a meeting with himself and the managing director. In the meeting the managing director took the proposal document from me, and just put it to one side. “I have three questions for you Mark” he said:

“Will this do what we want?”
“Yes”, I said.
“Are you confident you can do this?”
“Yes”, I said.
“How much will it cost?”
“£150,000 but you need to give me £35,000 to get started”, I said.
The managing director said, “Let’s do it.”

Those three questions have always stuck in my mind:

This is not just because it led to my first order as a software company owner. A little while later, I realized the true significance and meaning of those three questions and the order they were asked.

Price was the last thing they were interested in. First, they wanted to know if it would do what they wanted, and whether I could deliver it. Only then were they interested in the price. So many times I have mentored businesses that get so hung up on price. If sales are down, they assume that their prices are too high. The biggest issue though, I find, with businesses and price is they don’t aim their product or service at a specific market or market segment. Nor do they market with an appropriate message to that segment. So, price often isn’t the issue; it is usually that the business isn’t demonstrating the value of their offering correctly.

For example, take a ball point pen. You can buy one in a regular office supplies store for about £1 or you could buy one in a Jewellery shop in Bond Street, London for £10,000 or more. They both do the same thing, but they are aimed at different markets and marketed in different ways.

So there I was, running my own software company, now working on some very big projects with some very large companies. Things couldn’t get any better so you’d have thought by now that that would be enough for me.

However, that’s the funny thing with us humans; we need to keep growing, moving forwards and progressing if we thrive on that feeling of success and of achieving something at one time we couldn’t do.

So yes, I started to think and dream again, this time about how great it would be to sell my business and achieve that common significant title given to people who have a certain value of assets. Two years later, I achieved this, and it was at this point that I really started to think, “Wow, how did all that happen?”

I couldn’t believe all this had happened to me, and started to become curious about success. I wanted to find out what makes a person successful, and more importantly what had made me successful.

I started doing a lot of research and began a quest to understand the “success mindset”.

I signed up for a three-month course in a hypnotherapy clinic to see at source how the brain works, why we behave differently from each other, and answer many other unsolved questions. I wanted to understand how I had made these massive changes myself, because if I understood how, perhaps I could then make more use of this ability.

I remember thinking how fantastic the course was within the first twenty minutes on the first day. I loved what I had heard already, had a genuine interest in the subject and, as you now know, having genuine enthusiasm and passion are things that make us perform to our best and love every minute of it.

Every week at the clinic we had to work with real live clients that came in – and they’d come in with everything under the sun. There were people who wanted to stop smoking, a fear of motorway driving, spider phobias, fear of heights, a lady who couldn’t stop eating toilet rolls and even a woman with a fear of wooden floors!

After a while, I came across another technology, or way of looking at things, called NLP – Neuro Linguistic Programming – which I now call “Common Sense Written Down”.

I went to study with Richard Bandler, who, along with John Grinder, “formulated” the ideas behind NLP.

In the early seventies, Richard Bandler and John Grinder realized that some therapists were actually getting amazing results just by talking to people and bringing about rapid change. They wondered how this was being done, so they started to study and breakdown everything these therapists were doing.

A lot of it was to do with the actual language the therapists were using, and as NLP stands for “Neuro Linguistic Programming”, it stood to reason.

By studying and modelling these expert therapists, they worked out how the brain works in terms of thoughts, feelings, things we say to ourselves, pictures we make in our heads and all those sort of things.

Following this, I decided to go on a “licensed trainer” course to get some more exposure to the ideas and learn some advanced aspects of personal development. However, going on this course meant I’d have to deal with one of my own fears in the process – speaking in public! Now my fear about speaking in public was something that had stayed with me all through owning my own business and beyond. When you own your own business, no one else can tell you what to do, and so if there was ever an opportunity to speak, I could always get out of it.

However, there was no getting out of it on this course – I was now going to have to speak for a minute in front of 100 people every day. What made it seem worse was that you’d be speaking to your peers, those who were also learning to be trainers. This was a big step so I employed a “coping process” to make it happen.

Firstly, I told myself that I would book the course, but I didn’t have to go – I could choose to pull out if I wanted to.

When it got to the first day, I told myself I would drive there but I didn’t have to go in – I could turn round and come home at any point. Then once there I told myself I could go in and register, but if I didn’t like anything I could just go home. I went into the first session knowing if anything started to happen I didn’t like I could slip out to the toilet and run home! I stayed and pushed through each of those stages.

Following this, I then judged my progress on the nine-day course, by whether I had breakfast or not. On the first day, I had no breakfast, on the second day, no breakfast, on the third day, I had a bit of toast, and by the end of the course, I was eating a full English breakfast! That’s how I measured my progress.

One of the problems most people seem to have when attempting new things is they don’t have a measure to track their progress. I tracked mine in stages, I’d booked, I’d left home to get there, I’d gone in, I’d stayed the first day and then I went into the breakfast analysis I have just mentioned.

Even if I had simply got to the venue on the first day, and then turned around and gone straight home, I would still have counted this as progress. Previously I would never have even got to the stage of booking on such a course, let alone turn up! So progress, no matter how small, was celebrated every small step along the way.

Not long after the courses one of my previous clients asked what I’d been up to. They then invited me to speak at their conference and that was the start of many talks for them and other companies who wanted their people to adopt a success mindset.

After a while, I decided I wanted to do my own events where there would be less restriction on time. Doing my own events also gave me the opportunity to start developing my own products, one of which includes this book. Think Your Way to Success came about because after a three-hour “Success Mindset” talk, many members of the audience had asked if there was anything more to take away than just the notes they managed to jot down.

After my talks, which became more and more popular, the audience members started to ask me to go into their businesses and work with them and their staff. This led to me becoming a mentor as well as a speaker, helping those businesses to have more success in all areas.

For more information, go to my website at www.rhodes2success.com where you can find out about the events I’m speaking at and sign up for my regular newsletter of Success and Personal Development.

There are also details on my website about my work as a speaker and business mentor around the world and how to get in touch with me, or you can find me on Twitter: @rhodes2success and Facebook: www.facebook.com/markrhodes2success. There is also a Facebook page at www.facebook.com/thinkyourwaytosuccess.

I wish you every success for the future.

Mark.

[email protected]