mindset

Life Changing Things to Make you Successful

October 14, 2018 By Joni Kinney 2 Comments

It’s effortless to point fingers at other people or things for our lack of success. Frequently I hear things said about why we are not as successful as we think we should be. However, there are very few people who are making purposeful life changes to be successful. Do not be one of those people. Making small changes can change your life. Here are some things you can do today to set yourself up for life-changing success.

5 Easy things to change your life

Stop Complaining

Everyone seems to complain about other people and yet I rarely hear people complain about their actions. Merely stop complaining about others will be life-changing. Now if you are reading this and you are saying, but I complain about myself all the time. Ask yourself are you complaining about your actions or your self-worth?

So to get the best out of our new life-changing behavior, you need to stop complaining about other people. You don’t control them. What do you control? YOU, you control yourself. Your reactions, your thoughts, your feelings about others.

Let go of Negative Energy

Negativity is everywhere. You need to learn the power of Positivity: How it can change your life! So you need to let go of all the Negativity we see and feel from ourselves and other people.

If someone in your life is not providing a positive influence in your life, let them go. You do NOT want or need that to be around you everyday.

I know this can be hard… but no one ever said doing the right things were going to be easy.

Look for Gratitude

Do not say there is nothing to be happy/grateful for in your life. Even in the very worst of times, there is happiness. Find it.

Write down at least ten things you are grateful for that happened today. Not stuff like I’m so grateful for my kids. Yep, we know that. But what did they do today that made you happy today.

Maybe you are happy the sun came up today. Did your spouse tell you they love you? Maybe you got 5 minutes in the bathroom without interruption. Whatever it is, no matter how small or seemingly insignificant write it down. Aim to get at least ten items of gratitude wrote down every single day.

If you do nothing else to change your life, do this. Find the positive appreciation in every single day. Life is short people, don’t use your time concentrating on anything but the good.

Fail Forward

Have you ever made a mistake? Ok good, so have I. We all do, we are human after all. Making mistakes is good, it gives us an opportunity to learn something new.

Do not allow yourself to wallow in the self pity of the mistake you made. Instead, fail forward by learning something from it and moving on.

Determine your vision

Determine what you want to do with your life. Are you living as the best person you can be? If you are not, what would it look like if you were? What would you be doing? Think about your career, family.

Once you have a picture of your best self, write down what that picture looks like. You have just determined your goals. Next, you need an action plan on how to make those goals a reality.

Small changes can be life changing. Be the best person possible by finding your vision, positivity and creating a life that is all about:

Positivity: How it can change your life!

June 29, 2018 By Joni Kinney 3 Comments

Have you ever had a moment of clarity? Something that happens that reveals something to your very soul that you knew and yet could never find a way to articulate? I had one of those moments this week. You see, this past week I’ve spent a ton of time talking to people both in person and on conference calls. During one of these conference calls, I had an epiphany. Now keep in mind this was at about 1 Am after not getting any real sleep for a couple of days straight. So I wasn’t sure at first if I was delirious or if I indeed had found one of those clarifying moments.

Moment of Clarity

So during this call, I was surfing the local news and came across an article about addiction. The article itself was nothing earth-shattering, but I realized something important. We have a horrible addiction running rampant through our lives. So what is this addiction? This atrocious habit is the need to tell and talk to anyone who will listen; all about our problems. It’s like we are drawn to the negative things all around us. The positives in the day seem to be too hard to find.

Positivity

So how do we get past this horrible condition? We start to focus on the positives all around us. I know some of you reading are probably thinking I have nothing positive in my life. That is such a horrible thing to say to yourself. Find something, anything that makes getting up each day bearable.

If you literally can not think of a single thing, then you need to seek medical attention. For those of you at that point in your life, please seek out the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-8255.

Benefits of Positive Thinking

Why thing positive? Positivity has so many benefits, such as helping you to be kinder. In my opinion, the most significant advantage is that you will find yourself happier and more productive. Having a positive mindset can cascade into benefits at home, work, relationships, and in seeing and appreciating your self worth. Positivity will allow you to have greater resiliency when things change and help you achieve success. I believe this is why Vision boards are so powerful.

How to Break the Habit

The first Key to breaking a bad habit is going through some Self Reflection on what is causing the habit.
Next decide that you are no longer going to let your had habit get in the way, and convince yourself that you want to change. I can’t change this for you; you MUST decide this for yourself.
Set some goals. If you haven’t yet grabbed my FREE ebook: Beyond Chaos – A guide to setting goals you can stick to! Right now would be a great time to do that.
Make sure you stay on track. Something that can help with this is using a Daily Reflection sheet to keep track of what is going on and making sure you recognize if you don’t see the positivity all around you.
Tell someone what you are doing even if that means you contact me. It’s important that someone knows and helps to hold you accountable.

Having a positive attitude doesn’t automatically guarantee that you will find success. Additionally, nothing provides instant success, you have to work towards it. However, having a negative attitude, focusing on all the problems, and concentrating effort into negativity almost always guarantees failure.

Self-Reflection: Why do I need it?

June 20, 2018 By Joni Kinney Leave a Comment

It is so easy to come up with a list of reasons we aren’t successful or doing the things we want in life. We have all done this, some do this all the time. We say to ourselves things such as:

They or this thing prevented me from being successful
If only they would have hired me, helped me or did this thing for me
No one cares; I’m all alone, I’m only one person

People are continually trying to find reasons about why their lives are the way they are. We look for others to solve our issues, give us validation and justify why what we have is enough. But… what if the problem isn’t with other people? What if our dilemas are because of our own internal dialogues? We need to find a way to change our internal justification to be about things we control. We need help determining what is truly important to us, and guiding our lives to be fulfilling. To do this we need to know, understand and realize that we are working for the things that are most important. Take control of your life and your situation by asking yourself, what is my role in my current situation and what could I control that might change the outcome. One way we do this is through Self Reflection.

What is Self Reflection?

Self Reflection is the process of looking deep into yourself to understand your fundamental values. You need to dive into your thoughts, feelings and personal goals to understand your core visions and values. Often we hear these terms thrown around at work or in business settings, but they are equally important in your personal life. Self Reflection is something I’ve come to realize we don’t perform often enough. Not knowing your goals and setting time aside for self reflection can have a negative impact on your mindset.

Time Commitment

Self reflection doesn’t need to be big and scary. People are always using the excuse that they don’t have time to do things. Like with most things if you find it important enough you will make the time. With that said, this process does not need to take up a bunch of time, be a burden or seem daunting. The easiest way to start this process is to take 5-10 minutes to write down some daily thoughts. As you let your mind wander, ask a few directed questions your goals and core values should become apparent. If you struggle with this, I’ve created a quick and easy Daily Reflection Journal template for you to use if you need help getting started.

Eliminate the Blame Game

You can only control so many things in your life. Making excuses and blaming others doesn’t get you results. For you to be successful in setting your goals and visions, you need to eliminate the blame game. Stop wasting your time, setting yourself up for failure, and blaming others and external factors on why you can’t be successful, positive, etc. Take the time you need to determine what is important to you.

Determine your sphere of influence

Many things are outside of our control. Stop focusing your energy on those things. It’s draining and makes you mentally and physically tired. Your sphere of influence, those things you directly control are the things you need to focus all your effort. These should be the areas of highest concentration as you look deep into yourself and indeed put your self reflections efforts into. If you look into a goal or a vision and you don’t feel as if you can have any direct control over it or the outcome you want. Then you need to change your sphere of influence, make that one of your goals if you feel that strongly about a particular topic. Seek new opportunities, meet new people or join new organizations so you can be in control again.

Do some self reflection and determine what is really important to you. Something else that may help you achieve your goals and finalize your vision is creating a Vision board. Additionally, grab our FREE ebook Beyond Chaos: A guide to setting goals you can stick to.

Vision Board: What is it?

June 13, 2018 By Joni Kinney 2 Comments

If you have found this board, you might have some idea of what a vision board is. At the very least you’ve heard about the concept, whether you believe in it or not is a different discussion. So what is a vision board and how can it help you?

What is a Vision Board?

At its very core a vision board is a tool used to declare what you want to the universe. This belief is based on the Law of Attraction and that what you claim to the universe will be delivered to you. Those who believe this practice believe that if you put positive mental visualization and attention into your goals, you will attract what you want. Therefore, providing your visions to you. If you think this sounds great and that you can just tape or glue a few pictures to a poster board and suddenly gain success you are kind of missing the point.

How do I create a Vision Board?

Creating your vision board can be as easy or as complicated as you make it. However, at the very core of a Vision Board, you need to be clear about what you want and put it where you can see it. This will remind you to put your positive energy into the goals you want to achieve. As you go through the process of creating your vision board, don’t just think about objects. Think about your mindset, business goals, self-development. What do you want to achieve? The images, quotes, objects or reminders of what you want should be the things you want to spend time working on.

You do not have to have a big giant piece of cardboard covered in magazine clippings. (Although you can if you want.) Personally, I love my vision board, and for me, it’s an app on my phone. Find what will work for you, you can do something super simple such as creating a picture collage. Do what works for you!

What if something happens and my goals change?

Honestly in all likelihood at some point in your life, this will happen. You will decide on something great, and then some other external factor will change your perspective, outlook or current situation. At that point your goals change, and so should your vision board. If you haven’t reviewed and updated your vision board in more than six months it’s time to reassess if those goals and visions are still accurate.

Will it work?

I can’t answer this for you. It isn’t enough to visualize the outcome; you have to WANT to work towards the end result. Keeping focus helps me work towards the things I want to achieve.

Other things to consider

We can only control ourselves. Our thoughts, our actions, our dreams. Set them and see what happens.
Occasionally review your visions, your priorities may have changed.
You must be willing to put in the work.
Mindset is a real thing. If you don’t believe you can achieve – you won’t.

Don’t forget to grab our free ebook about setting goals!

The Ultimate Guide of things to Teach your Daughter

March 13, 2018 By Joni Kinney Leave a Comment

As most moms I try to do my best to instill some basic principals of life to my everyday interactions with my daughter. She’s at an age where she’s had to deal with mean kids, and yet isn’t old enough to really understand how some of these interactions will truly shape who she will become as an adult. So I made a list of things that I want her to know and learn about herself and life in general. This is my ultimate guide of things to teach your daughter. I mean really it’s the same for all kids… but I only have a daughter. 🙂

Ultimate Guide of things to teach your daughter

Do not ask questions if you are not ready to hear the real answers. If you don’t really want to know the answer to “Do you Love me?” if the answer is NO. Then you should not ask the question. Sometimes we think we are ready for those answers but we really are not.
A Few best friends are better than lots of friends. Knowing who your friends are when you are going through your worst moments is so much more important than having a lot of friends who won’t truly support you when the going gets tough.
Basic Budgeting – and sticking to it even when it sucks. Budgeting can suck, because I really WANT this thing I haven’t finished saving for… but in a year you will thank me for having self discipline when your car breaks down or your tv goes out and you have money set aside to fix it or repair it.
Fighting is ok, it’s how you resolve it that determines how good of friends you are. If you’ve never had a fight with your boyfriend, or a girlfriend then you aren’t really as good of friends as you thought. Now obviously this doesn’t apply if you just met or just started dating, but at some point you are going to disagree. Disagreements are ok, and normal. How you resolve them and that you can resolve them determines what happens next.
No one else is you… don’t let their opinions decide what you like. If you love to sit around and watch cartoons on Saturday or you love to watch that tv show from 3 years ago no one else liked. Those are totally ok things and you should do them. Don’t let others decide how you feel about something. Own your feelings, they are yours!
There is always something new to learn. Even when you are 90 you will not know everything. Technology changes, people change, our world is ever evolving. Learn that you will never know everything.
Don’t judge others, you don’t know what they have endured. It’s so easy to say – oh that person stinks or why don’t they just wash their hair, clothes, etc. BUT… you don’t know if they are going through a bad spot in life or if they are truly choosing to be or act that way. They may have a medical condition or they may need help.
Your choices today may determine your future. Posting pictures, picking on others or just anything will stick around forever. If you post it, think it or say it assume everyone will forever be able to retrieve it.
Being kind and respectful is more important than being popular. As the saying goes, stay humble and kind and help those behind you on the line. There is always someone who knows less than you, and if you see them struggling stop and help. You never know when someone will repay your kindness.
Being beautiful on the outside may bring people to you, but being beautiful on the inside is what keeps them coming back to you.

Please feel free to contact me and if you agree with all or some of these please share!

Growth Mindset Quotes

January 20, 2018 By Joni Kinney 2 Comments

What is a Growth Mindset?

A growth mindset allows you to believe in yourself. It allows you to believe that even if you don’t know something right now, you can learn it. That you are not simply smart or intelligent, but instead that you must learn things to be smart. This mindset teaches each of us not to give up and to believe in ourselves. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, or that it comes naturally. Simply that you can control how you feel about yourself and your abilities.

No matter where you are in life it’s important to remember you were born with a growth mindset. Children don’t learn to walk because they gave up. As we move forward in business it’s important to know what goals you are working on, continue your personal development and learn how to talk positively to ourselves.

Everyone is born with a growth mindset. It's up to us as adults to remember to use it and not to let our inner negativity get in the way. Click To Tweet

Quotes

We can’t undo an action, but we can redo or change our perception. – Debasish Mridha
There is no truth. There is only perception. – Gustave Flaubert
Great works are performed, not by strength, but by perseverance. – Samuel Johnson
It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop. – Confucious
Life isn’t about finding yourself. It’s about creating yourself. – George Bernard Shaw
Most people never run far enough on the first wind to find out they’ve got a second. Give your dreams all you’ve got, and you’ll be amazed at the energy that comes out of you. – William James
When it’s obvious the goals can not be reached, don’t adjust the goals. Adjust the action steps. – Confucious
When the world says “give up,” Hope whispers, “Try one more time.” – Unknown
Failure is a success if we learn from it. – Malcolm Forbes
Nothing will work unless you do. – John Wooden
Allow your passion to become your purpose, and it will one day become your profession. – Gabrielle Bertstein
Your attitude determines your direction. – Unknown
You can’t be a smart cookie with a crumbly attitude. – John Maxwell
You learn something every day if you pay attention. – Ray LeBlond
It’s okay not to know, it’s not okay not to try. – Unknown

And always remember… your happiness is a choice… you choose your attitude and your mindset! I would love to have you hop on over to my business page, give it a like and check out our tips for helping you with mindset, positivity, and business promotion tips!