Do you yearn to build a life you truly want and reach the quality of life you feel you deserve? How do you build the life you want?
It can be a simple process that follows this structure:
High-quality decisions lead to high-quality actions that generate high-quality results, which bring a high quality of life.
In other words, you must learn to make decisions, act, and create business outcomes that will help you to build an extraordinary life.
So, where do you start? How do you learn and develop the skills necessary to make these decisions?
Coaches vs Mentors vs Teachers
As you can imagine, you may need some guidance to help you work on yourself, to create the building blocks for constructing the life you want. Start by finding coaches, mentors, and teachers you can learn from. The quality of your life can begin with the quality of the people you follow and the quality of guidance you receive.
Here’s how it works: the quality of your mentor or teacher determines the quality of knowledge, which further influences the quality of your goals, dreams, and beliefs. So, you want to ensure you surround yourself with the right people to facilitate your personal development and growth.
Let’s break down the differences between coaches, mentors and teachers.
Working with A Coach
When you work with a coach, you increase the quality of your decisions by asking yourself better questions. It is your coach’s job to ask you the questions you didn’t think to ask yourself.
You can work with a good coach to push you outside of your comfort zone — and your comfort zone is often just an excuse not to do the work you must do to reach your goals. With a coach, you can identify the things you need to learn to become more comfortable with change and growth.
A coach can help you become comfortable with your success by asking you questions designed to challenge you and promote growth.
Finding A Mentor
A mentor isn’t someone you pay for help. When you look for a mentor, you want someone who has already reached where you want to be, and is willing to help you to get there. You can have several mentors to cover different areas of your life.
Your task is to find the right mentors, and learn from them how to build a successful business, consolidate your relationships, or even how to live a fulfilled life.
Where in your life do you need help? Identify the right people you can learn from. When looking to establish a relationship with such a person, the trick is often not to ask them directly to become your mentor. Instead, get in touch, ask for permission to call them from time to time. Often, people who become mentors are in positions where they want to give advice, so they’re likely to agree to have conversations with you about your subjects of interest.
Identifying the Right Teachers
In this context, think of teachers outside of schools and colleges. This is not about going back to school, you can learn from multiple alternative sources. You have access to knowledge in various forms, from books to videos, from blogs to magazines.
People you ‘meet’ only through books and online learning can become your teachers if you wish. The only thing to consider is the quality of person you choose to learn from.
Another way to find teachers is by joining mastermind groups. They can be a vast pool of success and knowledge, and a powerful way for you to have people around you who are successful in the areas where you wish to improve. At the same time, you may be stronger in some areas, which means that you too can become a teacher to others.
Brad Sugars, ActionCOACH founder and CEO, is a big fan of mastermind groups. He’s been teaching his clients to start such groups if they can’t join existing ones. It is in your best interests to stay close to people who care about you and with whose help you can improve.
Learn to Handle Advice
Once you’ve found some coaches, mentors, or teachers you want to work with, you have to “get over” your ego. If you want to work, learn and grow with these people, you must be willing to take advice and accept criticism. If all you want is to be right, you won’t be able to take on knowledge and ideas from your mentors and teachers. You need to develop your ability to handle advice and suggestions coming from other people.
This process becomes more comfortable when you know where you’re going and what you need to do to reach your destination. In this case, you’re willing to accept information from other people, because you understand that better knowledge can help you arrive at your destination faster and with better results.
Stretching Your Thinking
Another crucial element when seeking advice is your ability to think ahead and push yourself to stretch your learning.
If you want to reach the quality of life you dream of, you must do more than simply learn to become better at your current job. You want career progression, and the only way to get that is by learning and striving for the next stage, and the stage above that. Push beyond your current concept of what you should be learning – go for where you want to be two or three levels up from where you are now.
Sometimes it’s hard to see ahead and work out what you should be learning; it’s hard to see around the corner until you’re at the corner. Dare to set bigger goals: as you know more, you will grow more. With more knowledge under your belt, it gets easier to believe the change can happen to you.
Learn to build momentum in your goals so that the level of believing in yourself gets more powerful. Dream big.
A Word on Doubters and Haters
As you learn to handle advice and gain more knowledge, you’ll get better at asking the right questions. When you increase the quality of your questions, you set new, more substantial, higher-reaching goals.
As you improve the quality of your questions, you improve the quality of your decisions. Following the structure outlined in the opening paragraph, better decisions lead to better actions, improved results and, overall, a better life for you.
What happens when you start being successful? Haters show up.
In the beginning, when you start a business, you can generally handle doubters. They’re a sign that your goals and dreams are big enough — as Brad Sugars says, “Massive goals scare small-minded people.”
On the other hand, haters are the sign you’re achieving something. Social media makes it easy for thousands of people to know what’s going on in your life. Online interactions can bring haters who will never take the risks you take or reach the results you do, but want to say something about them – something nasty or critical or snide.
The best way to handle doubters and haters is by thanking them for their comments and thoughts. One side of the coin is for doubters and haters. The other side of the coin is for gratefulness and celebration.
Treat haters as fuel to your fire, so that you have even more passion for what you’re going to do. Where you show gratitude, you get more results. If you show thankfulness, you’ll get even better results.
What’s Next?
Practise gratitude as a sign of respect. If you’re not respectful with money, don’t expect more money. So, do more than thinking about gratitude. Show and express gratitude, share it with people. Send a thank you note, celebrate success, life, and what you achieve in life.
Allow the people around you to know you’re successful without worrying about what others will think. Some people will always judge you – whether it’s for doing what you want or judging you for not doing what you want. Nothing changes.
The next thing is to start changing the way you think, approach life, and manage relationships. Think of what you need to do, how to do it and, most importantly, why you are the one doing everything!
View life as something you are designing, and do more than simply live the life you were given. Work to increase your knowledge and, ultimately, start thinking bigger.
Have a proactive approach. Ask yourself where you would benefit from mentors and teachers. Step outside the comfort zone and get rid of your ego.
Last but not least, celebrate. Remember that a rich life is not just financially rich. You have family and friends, you get to experience things: eat well, spend time with the people you like, and live a rich life. Celebrate it.
