WINNING PRINCIPLES
By William Cottringer, Ph.D.
Our main challenge in life is to pass these seven tough tests:
PLANNING YOU LIFE Winning and being successful in life requires us to live life from some sort of thoughtful plan. Such a plan can answer 5 questions we all have:
- Why am I here?
- What am I supposed to be doing?
- How do I know if I am doing it right?
- What’s in it for me?
- Where do I go when I need help?
GETTING THE RIGHT PERSPECTIVE
What matters most is leaning in the direction of having a positive attitude about life. It is easy to get discouraged and negative when things go sideways; adversity is a real test of your character and your best response is to step up to the plate and hit a home run. Here’s the real value of such a viewpoint: Optimistic people live longer, are happier, make more money, have fewer physical complaints and stay married longer. Aren’t those the things that matter most?
TOPPLING THE TOWER OF BABEL
I am sure you have noticed that we are way too wordy, that the volume and velocity of information is overwhelming and that good communication is a rare commodity. Since talking and writing are our main ways of dealing with each other, it does matter to fix our communication skills and topple down this Tower of Babel we have all helped create. Keep it simple though: Talk once and listen twice with both ears, and think about what you want to say, say what you mean, and say it clearly and simply. Then listen again.
BUILDING BETTER RELATIONSHIPS
One of the most difficult tests life throws at us is the challenge of how to have good relationships. Relationships offer many character-building lessons. Relationships are deteriorating today because we aren’t focusing on doing what matters most—doing the simple things that build good relationships like listening better, accepting more, giving, loving, including and being assertive when something offends your soul.
REPAIRING REALITIES
All throughout life we are confronted with realities we don’t like and feel compelled to change. But this can be frustrating until we learn the lesson of slowing down and rethinking our priority reversal habit—always starting out doing things bass-ackwards. Eventually we see the wisdom of things like fitting in first and then changing what we are fitting into, from inside out. It is easier and quicker and gets better results. This is a good start to reconciling all the “halves” of life that our dualistic minds have divided into this and that. You really can’t change something when you only see half the picture.
MANAGING TIME AND MONEY
These two things are life’s greatest challenges that result in the most failures. The solutions for both are quite simple. With time you switch from the conventional, mechanical-sequential perception, to a more fluid, psychological one and then stop doing what doesn’t matter and start doing what does matter most. With money, you can’t have more going out then coming in, you must honor the reverence of your job and give your best attention and effort to earn your pay at work, and follow the wisdom of giving more to get more.
FINDING SUCCESS
The best success clues are all hidden behind three doors: Successful thinking, passionate determination and social skills. Successful thinking is using your mind to do anything to help you get from where you are to where you want to be. You can get the best results by mixing logic, creativity and practical common sense, Passionate determination is doing what you like to do because it feels good to do it and keeping this all in sharp focus. Social skills are simple too. They are being likeable, communicating well and doing the few things that matter most in building good relationships.
Read more winning articles at winspirations.gather.com.
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Comments: 36
vote for my photo, help my dreams come true!
1. Totally and utterly believing in one's unlimitted potential, without hesitation or partial embracing or getting ready to get ready.
2. Having the right perspective of a situation that helps you see the whole picture and make you choice wisely and lthen learning from both a success or failure in doing so.
Of course even below that is one very basic principle is to start noticing what you have been failing to notice all along...this is a huge door to creative infinity. Thanks for your positive comments. Please speak up if I am saying something that needs clarification or more details...I am in a mode to try and cut my wordiness (maybe for the wrong reasons--to attend to marketing research?)
Not easy at all because finding the answers and living them is what the journey of life is all about.
Let's take the first one b ecause it is the most critical one--Why am I here? It is always critical to know your purpose in order to be successful in anything. Why I think all human beings are here is to learn, grow and improve because that is what I see as a common purpose with everything I see including nature. And I guess the answer you find determines what success is for you. The principle behind all this is that I think we are told the "what" of life (the wisdom is planted on our unconscious minds) and we have to figure out the "how" of it by trial and error, noticing the connection between what we do and what we get, learning and applying success clues from others traveling the same path ahead of us, and learning important lessons from our failures. Remember the main regret of the 95 year olds--not contemplating their lives enough. Bill C.
How about:
"...adversity is a real test of your character and your best response is to step up to the plate and hit a home run."
Sure, but isn't that not saying anything? To be a winner go out and win.
"switch from the conventional, mechanical-sequential perception, to a more fluid, psychological one."
I'm sorry, I don't understand.
"stop doing what doesn't matter and start doing what does matter most"
Again, sure, but do you think this is helpful? It's pretty obvious.
"you must honor the reverence of your job"
And again, I don't understand.
"follow the wisdom of giving more to get more."
And what goes around comes around. This isn't wisdom, Bill.
"Successful thinking is using your mind to do anything to help you get from where you are to where you want to be."
Okay. But I already knew that: success means succeeding.
"mixing logic, creativity and practical common sense"
Sounds good. Could you be more specific?
Look, I'm not saying that what you write here isn't true, just that it's not really all that deep. And it's not expressed very well. I'd recommend that you spend some time learning how to write. You may have very deep insights, but if you do, you don't articulate them very well.
Or have I been led up the garden path? Is this really satire? I'm sorry. It that's the case, I'm in awe. It's brilliant.
A whole lot of people are doing a whole lot of what doesn't matter most...because they have managed to plow through the overload to see what does matter--work, play, friends, rest, fun, love, unselfish service, learning new things...
RE the criticism of deepness...please refer to my six (6) books that go very deep because the page limit of 500 pages and word count of 150,000 words allow this...I was only allowed 700 words here man, lighten up.
And what goes around comes around isn't wisdom? Why do so many people not understand it? I got fired by a guy 10 years ago that I fired a few years ago. It just didn't happen quick enough for me to feel good about it, which I didn't anyway. That's wisdom!
Taking the logic of something A + B = C, and adding a new creative part C = B + C, and considering the practical cosnequence of both formulas are different sides of the same coin.
In the end one cannot tell someone else much about success, except the abstract principles that can be translated and applied in a problem at hand--just like leanring how to get kids to do what you want them to do by using the psychological principle of intermittent reinforcement.
You ask good questions that can only be addressed in books...but the true test of the writing is in prompting good questions not providing the detail of answers that won't get applied anyway.
I certainly do not try to write to all audiences because of the diverse needs--the best writing I can do is include basic principles for all, solutions for most annoyning problems occuring with the masses, and a few personal failures and what I did to overcome them as indiividual examples that may strike a nerve in one, like a recent realtionship article I just posted at a much better site for this sort of thing--www.selfgrowth.com
For your information, the majority of self help readers are looking for simple solutions they can understand and massage into their own...and sometimes the truths of these things are very common and even boring...but they work to get results.
And sometimes I know I am successful when someone says, "well yes of course that is true and dah" and then the unanswered part is why are you not living it consistently and persistently?
Here's something about the 'truth"--I could just make a very simple statement that could cure the world of some very big problems and be 100% correct and still get oposition. division and fault-finding--the current toxic polution in the air and all the global warming problems are more do to angry, opinionated, toxic bullies wanting to impose their piece of being right onto the whole world with their irresponsbile, reckless consciousness of superiority (Our own country in Iraq)...but who doesn't already know that..but why can't we seem to be doing something about it...because we are too busy examining the thoughts and ideas and words that repreasent taht truth instead of acting...I am now acting and going home to a really neat living environment...Later...Bill C.
"Look, I'm not saying that what you write here isn't true, just that it's not really all that deep. And it's not expressed very well. I'd recommend that you spend some time learning how to write. You may have very deep insights, but if you do, you don't articulate them very well." (but well enough to get your agreement!!)
My take on this paragraph is that the same words can describe you and what you are writing here. A self-projection? When simple truths are appearing as not deep enough, I see a criss-cross beteen someone who is too busy trying to create more needless chaos and overload and some one who realizes that the number one problem today is chaos and information overload and trying to do a small part in restoring some sane order and getting misjudged because he is not saying something in a chaotic ten-mile deep manner.
Maybe if we stopped the 'shouting' here, we might be able to begin to make some useful sense of the ideas one at a time. But I suspect you really don't have any questions and that you really agree with the ideas, which incidently would be quite an accomplishment and very good communciation...because a lot of the time I am attempting to talk about the untalkable--the basic truths that can't be added to, subtracted from or changed in any way.
What more is important in understanding the inter-relationship between things--like the insane complexity of thoughts, feelings, behaviors and words and the realities they create and get created from.
Bill C.
I'm wondering how you might know that he, (or anyone else) is not living sucessfullly, much less whether they are doing it consistently and persistently? I guess I wouldn't consider it a winning principle to assume that those you are speaking to couldn't possibly be successful, simply because you haven't been there yet to show them how.
Not sure what this communication is all about. I am asking questions and trying to define what is successful for me, not others. Bill C.
Your last sentence doesn't make any sense to me at all...kind of like throwing a few words up in the air and seeing where they land.
These conversations don't seem to have the deep intent of understanding at all, more unsubstantiated judgments.
Believe me I love constructive ctiticism aimed at improving inderstanding but I think words are now clouding any good communication. Underlying feelings getting in the way.
Oh well...
Any really good article is only the small beginning of understanding and communicating because your one question here would really take a book to answer adequately. If your question is legitimate and you really do want to know something about the complex interactive entanglement of words, thoughts, feelings, behaviors and realities, and don't already have your own answer, then I would be glad to spend some time doing this. Actually this is what I get paid for; I can't afford to do everything for free.
And I also have much better luck expressing my most basic truths in poetry, where words don't have to get in the way. Bill C.
Bill C.