Shaping Your Future

Become the Brand Everyone Wants

Rita Rocker-Craft

• Publisher: Business Expert Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781953349590
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Etiquette
• Index: Business

This book is a powerful combination of transforming tools related to our three-part being: spirit, soul (will, intellect and emotions), and our body (what people observe, hear and the perceptions they form).

What happens on the inside impacts every part of life on the outside. These exercises, stories, examples, and educational components are filled with techniques and inspiration designed to guide you into how to successfully advance your personal and professional life simultaneously. You will be empowered to learn how to turn both personal and professional challenges into success. These techniques can be implemented immediately and experienced for a lifetime.

Beginning with the very first chapter, you will launch into transforming exercises that dig deep to accelerate maximum growth. Become proficient as a routinely sought-after friend and business associate using this self-esteem, professional image, and business etiquette guidebook. Attract the most positive relationships by developing a success-driven default mindset through autosuggestion techniques. Confidently communicate with all socio-economic, educational and age groups. Learn powerful and effective communication skills to engage one or 1, 000.

When you finish this book, you will revel in your new life and career reinvention, strength, reputation, persona and mind set. You will be empowered to radiate indispensable characteristics to those you meet every day. Start now!

Shaping Your Future Study Guide is highly recommended.

CHAPTER 1

Self-Assessment: Where You Are and Where Your Future Intentions Lie

You are the developer and designer of your life.

Where Your Life Is Now

The thoughts you entertain, words you speak, and the issues you write about are the major factors in where your life and career are today. Everything you think and do from this day forward will greatly affect where you will arrive in one year, five years, and for the rest of your life. Our belief system either helps us remove hindrances and prepare for success ahead or it keeps us down and defeated. The views and opinions we hold of ourselves (self-perception) and of the world around us create the way we experience reality. We devise in our minds, then follow through with our actions, whether we become successful in our own right or live with continuous disappointments.

We actively choose whether we have uplifting or degrading relationships, a career we enjoy, or mainly just have a job to survive. Even in the most devastating of times, we can seek and call forth peace, new associations, new opportunities, and the necessary support to make it to the other side. These thoughts and habits are critical to overcome on an almost daily basis. The characteristics we exhibit will, in turn, influence others to hire us for a new and better position, build community, and foster healthy relationships. When we replace the negative words we think, write, and speak, science has proven that we literally change how our brain functions and the kind of outcome our thoughts, words, and actions manifest.

A major shift in life’s circumstances takes concentrating more on who you want to become and who you want to be with on a regular basis rather than what you actually do for a living or who currently surrounds you.

• What thoughts take up most of your time? Happy? Determined? Afraid of someone or something? Wishing for someone else’s life or career, and how you can or cannot achieve it? Write them in a notebook.

• What do you believe will happen versus what can happen with clearer focus and more determination? Defeat? Gaining or losing something or someone very important to you? Taking classes or being mentored so that you can go after the kind of work you love?

• How long do you allow yourself to feel down or defeated? We all have bad days and hurtful thorns in life that stick us hard. These include all of the words we hear and read, disrespect from others, or perhaps a car that breaks down and no money to fix it.

Remember, how long you allow certain people, places, and things to affect your emotions is up to you. Have you ever taken a tough situation and said, “We’re done here. No more. I now disconnect from this person, place, or thing. I am enrolling in a new class (for fun or career development), joining an organization where my talents can be used, or heading online to check out new cities?” Dream, take what action is needed in your life, one step at a time. Start feeling the exhilaration of moving forward. You can literally get that feeling by sitting quietly, closing your eyes, and visualizing how your mental video looks (place, people, activities, and so on), sounds, and makes you feel.

How Do You Speak to Yourself, See Yourself and Allow Yourself to Be Treated?

Write down what makes you feel:

• Confident and powerful: attention, appearance, health and vitality, relationships, finances, home, positive conversations

• Weak and ineffective: being dismissed by others, lack of finances or the education you believe you need for your area of interest, poor health or appearance, uncomfortable talking with others, and so on

Now you have the start of a bucket list of areas to begin changing. What you focus on you empower—you become! Center your thoughts on arriving at your thriving new destination, not on where you may be currently. As you concentrate on the new, you will be amazed how the old habits fade farther back until one day—they are no longer a detrimental part of your life!

No one can make you feel inferior without your permission.

—Eleanor Roosevelt

When thinking about where you currently are in life, if you feel reaching your goals is not really an option, check out these true life examples to stimulate your move forward. You can design your future just like these amazing individuals did:

Famous Failures

• The Beatles were rejected by Decca Records who said, “We don’t like their sound” and “They have no future in show business.”

• Albert Einstein was not able to speak until he was almost four years old and his teachers said he would “never amount to much.”

• Oprah Winfrey was demoted from her job as a news anchor because she “wasn’t fit for television.”

• Michael Jordan, after being cut from his high-school basketball team, went home, locked himself in his room and cried.

• Walt Disney was fired from a newspaper for “lacking imagination” and “having no original ideas.” He and his brother grew up very poor on a dairy farm, laboring from very early in the morning until late at night, leaving no time to study, play, or rest. His father abused them if they did not get enough done. Walt wanted to create a place for people to have fun. He did!

Figure 1.1 Disney Photo and Speaker

Source: SOARINGHIGHER.ROCKS

• Steve Jobs, at age 30, was left devastated and defeated after being abruptly removed from the company he started. He rose again and became one of the most successful men in the world.

• Grandma Moses began painting at the age of 76 because her arthritis prevented her from using a needle for her embroidery! Life magazine put her on its cover to celebrate her 100th birthday. Her first painting that sold for three U.S. dollars later sold for 10,000 U.S. dollars.

• Colonel Sanders was in his 60s and on Social Security when he had to close his service station, but then set out to promote his secret chicken recipe after numerous devastating personal and business setbacks.

• Barbara Hillary became the first black woman to reach the North Pole at the age of 75.

• Harry Bernstein published his first book, The Invisible Wall, at age 96 in 2007.

• Mary Hardison became the oldest woman to do a tandem paraglide at 101. Now, that is determination at its best!

• A former Miss Teen USA was living with a foster mother and had no money for beautiful clothes or impressive finery and yet won the title with a 39 U.S. dollars gown and the belief that she was a strong, talented, and worthy young lady. She is an excellent role model for not letting her circumstances keep her from her dream.

• A teenager living in poverty received a scholarship to Harvard after living through her junior high and high-school days in shelters with her mother.

How is this for unfettered determination? A California man who missed his 1942 graduation because he was locked in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during the Second World War finally fulfilled his dream. The L.A. Times reported that 89-year-old Don Miyada walked with the Class of 2014 at Newport Harbor High School 72 years after he was denied his own cap and gown. Talk about life’s circumstances getting in the way!!! He never let go until his dream came to pass!

Old ways of doing things will not open new, diffe...