Life stages

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

My daily exercise routine has revealed to me several stages of life. While I was growing, very young and vibrant, my daily work out included several activities such as running at a high pace. This period, I see other adult within my community working  out as well and I do encourage them to  run or walk faster.  Five to ten years later, I found myself walking at the pace  they were walking then.

 Life is like the four cyclic seasons, the spring, summer, fall, and winter. These

seasons in some way represent different stages of our human life.

These stages emerges when due irrespective of our preferences, however, these seasons are a phase, they don’t last forever. For the most part, there are very important lesson that these seasons teach us, and there are very important things that should be done at every stage to get the best outcome and to enjoy every experience.

You get an umbrella during rainy season, you wear thick clothes in winter and lighter clothes in summer, you gather flowers in spring, in order words, there are preparations to be made to get the best outcome at different seasons.

So, let’s look at these four seasons and how they can be maximised:

Spring: The spring time represent the time of new birth. Spring is characterised by growth, it is a season full of transformation. It is an early or flourishing stage of development. The spring time of new life.

During this stage, there’s lots of enthusiasm and excitement.  Children take in the life around them, they learn, they grow.

Summer: This is the period of adolescence through early adulthood. It is the

period of personal development, the time to chart the direction you desire to

follow, the time to pay attention to knowledge and values. The summer period is also  a period of self-awareness. Summer is characterised by brightness, in the same way, this stage of life is full of bright ideas and concepts. This stage is also the stage to develop stamina for future responsibilities and opportunities that awaits us as we grow older. The summer is a time to work!

Winter: This stage is the stage of review, it is a time to reflect upon our achievements. To consider how far we wanted to come versus how far we have come. Winter is a cold season, as we age, it is a period of reflection.

Fall: This is the period of old age. The period where family becomes priority, it is period of preparation for the next season, impacting the generations coming after with more emphasis than before. It is also the period of death. At this point, there is no review, no feelings, and no achievement.

The leaves fall, the tree becomes bare. The only important thing at the point is how well you have lived, it will be the legacy you have laid down.  Professional

Perspectives.

                                                                                                   

·        Spring is the time to plant a seed in the ground, to begin a new project, to start a new idea. It is the time to grow your professional connection, to meet people and gain new grounds. It is also a time of preparation.

•         Summer is the time of expansion, to nurture our dreams and ideas and carefully guide it to success using every available resources.

•         Winter is also a time of further change, to conduct a SWOT analysis. A time to reassess your priorities, to read wide and find out what needs to go for new growth to occur.

•         Fall represents a time to evaluate and enjoy the results of what of hard work.

At every stage of life, we are expected to identify each stage, be observant of the possible opportunities and engagements we can get involved in and maximize those opportunities.

For more details, you can contact the BPE team @ www.solomonempire.com or download BPE tool app on google play store.

PLACE VALUE ON YOUR SKILLS

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

Talents are natural abilities of an individual while skills are abilities earned through continuous practice and improvement. The first step in doing anything significant with your abilities is to identify them. Apart from paying attention to yourself to pinpoint what excites you and where your interest lies, there are also many online tool, questionnaires and interviews that can help you better understand your personality and what interest aligns with the kind of person you are. You may want to explore that option or ask friends and families, people who have been with you over a period of time and can answer a few honest questions about you.

Let’s assume it’s not an ability that you have but a skill you are interested in learning. Perhaps you have an interest in Graphics, then you must find the best training school in Graphics and learn from the best guys. It’s not enough to do a crash course in Graphics and believe you know all there is to it. No, if you want to do anything significant, you must learn from the best and continually practice till you can take on tough projects and complete them to the praise of your teachers.

So, in identifying your skills, here a few points to note:

• ·         Ask yourself tough questions that can help you shape your thoughts about your interest and goals
• Practice online assessments and questionnaires and watch out consistent terms and feedback

• ·         The information you gather must align with your passion and or life goals.

Identifying your skills will help you:

• ·         Decide the areas to improve on
• ·         Decides the areas to profit with

Monetize your skills

Once you have identified your talents and skills, it is time to monetize it. Nearly anybody can make money from what they love doing best. People have become billionaires from simple natural abilities such as singing dancing and writing. The world in its present state revolve around soft skills, as soon as you put yourself out to the world to be great at what you do, you’ll find people come around who are interested in giving you platforms.

The question is how? The ‘How to monetize your skills’ revolve around three key principles that is a common factor to everyone who has ever gotten paid for what they love to do. If you pay attention to these principles, you are on your way to financial freedom.

1.    Rebrand your skills to find solutions to needs: needs doesn’t have to be physical, such as the need of food or clothing. Many people need affirmation, encouragement and entertainment. Once you find a common need that you can find solutions to, you are good to go. You don’t need to be here and there, jack of all trade. Let people be able to know you as the provider of one thing that meets their needs.

2.    Market yourself to the world:  Tell everyone about your skills with passion and much enthusiasm. you can’t stay in a local place and expect to get global affirmation. Put yourself out in the face of the world. Create a YouTube account, Build a functional website, network with people and always leave them with a feeling of how great you are at what you do. But don’t be mediocre and find cheap alternatives to doing business. Let everything you do have a touch of excellence.

After a while of continuous marketing of your product, it will get to a point where your product begins to market itself. At this point, further elevate your brand by connecting with human emotion. Whatever it is you do, once you disconnect from the people you sell to, you lose your market.

3.    Consistency is the key to success: One of the errors of talented start-ups is to think that because they are absolutely good at what they do, the money should starts rolling out in no time. Yes, the money will roll in but not as quickly as you expect it to. It’s difficult to be successful at anything, whatever it may be, if you don’t persist in it. Often the beginning doesn’t seem smooth and interesting because of the competition your business may face, but once you carve a niche for yourself, you have separated yourself from the rest of the competition.

People will pay for the quality your product brings no matter how much it is. And sometimes, people will pay for your brand regardless of the product. So, in monetizing your skills, you need to bring yourself up to speed, to the point where your product can always be expected to deliver a certain result without fail.

The place of confidence

Confidence is very importance, it is what gives you the enablement to dream, to dare and be different. Once you are confident in the result you can generate, it is easier to place a price on your skills.

You can get more BPE tips @ www.solomonempire.com or download the BPE tool app on google play store.

Identifying Opportunities

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

Opportunities can be difficult to recognise, especially if our minds are not open to it. Many people fail to look around for opportunities or even dig into pressing issues to find the opportunities, instead they wait for it, expecting the opportunities to parade itself to us.

Adequate information and knowledge is crucial in identifying opportunities so is the ability to know what and where to look.

Tips to start

1. ·         Increase knowledge and be informed
2. ·         Eliminate limiting beliefs
3. ·         Correct wrong mind-set
4. ·         Develop great attitude
5. ·         Connect with people

Categories to consider when looking for opportunities

Market changes: changes in demand and supply is a great way to identify the opportunities that exist in the market.

Economic trends: issues such as scarcity or abundance of resources can be harnessed to give maximum output. If people can trust the output that you deliver, regardless of the economic situations, they’ll find you.

Existing idea: this is perhaps one of the easiest way to find an idea and turn it around. Opportunities lies in existing ideas, you can change the model of operation of an existing business, you can infuse new creative ideas into an already existing idea.

Personal and professional relationships: the people in our lives come with their own networks and ideas. By harnessing this properly, you have a ready market based on referrals. Another great way is to combine your ideas with someone else’s and build a great enterprise together. Doing this reduces the financial and corporate burden of doing business.

Financial market: there are many donations, grants and funding available for different businesses and there are endless opportunities that can be maximised from them.

Keys to identifying opportunities

Find the problem: problems are not necessarily a menace, below the surface is the opportunity of a lifetime. The question we should ask ourselves when faced with a challenging issue is, what is the cause root of this? By answering this, we are able to point out what went wrong and how it can be fixed.

Create a solution model: you have studied the problem and you understand it, the next thing is to create a solution that meets the needs identified in 1 above. If it’s possible to put your solution model to work, then by all means do.

Infuse your creativity set the enterprise apart: it doesn’t matter what it is you venture into, infuse your creativity into it. Once you are known as a reliable producer of a product, it opens the door for bigger opportunities, wider networks and more businesses.

Stay updated: market trends is constantly evolving so should be your ability to research and learn. New ideas that can revolutionize your business is available on the internet, on the TV screen and on the pages of books and magazines. The question is, are you aware?   

 You can get more BPE tips @ www.solomonempire.com or download the BPE tool app on google play store.

How do you react to Criticism?

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

As a member of the high school football team, when we go for  matches in other schools, one of the factors that determines winning or losing was the crowd support. We hear the cheers from the crowd, some motivating us which usually is from our small team of supporters and there’s a larger noise booing us, mostly from the opponent’s side. 

Along with our own preparedness, whichever one we choose to react to mostly determines the outcome of the game. When we listened to the ‘boos’ and reacted to it, we started to have poor outcome, but when we listened to the small voices of cheers in the crowd, we were motivated and encouraged to do better. 

Even when we made mistakes and our team of supporters started to boo us, reacting to that too also altered the level of confidence we might have had to win the game.

Moving on in my career path, I have realized how the experience of the football team translate into every other aspect of our lives especially at work. I have seen employee performance decline greatly because of criticism and negative feedback, and I have also seen employee output increased greatly in spite of criticism and negative feedback. 

This brought me finally to one conclusion, that it was not merely the criticism and or praises that affects your performance, it is how you respond to it that does.

Your response can change everything. It can mean worrying less about negative feedback and critics, it can mean integrating yourself to receiving praises/critics and filtering it through the eyes of your expectations and preferences. It can mean greater productivity because you see the areas you need to improve on through the eyes of other people, but just waiting on the praises and criticism as a way forward is not a good sign of emotional intelligence.

Balancing Criticism and Praise

It is expected that when an employer constantly praise and commend his/her employee’s work, output should increase, however, latest research indicates that “Rewarding people with praise isn't going to make them perform any better…” Charles S. Jacobs (Management Rewired). 

Neither will criticism, as a matter of fact, criticism results in a much stronger emotion than praises, that is, continuous criticism will produce unmotivated staffs and a higher turnover. However the timeliness of the feedback is very important, when you learn to give praises at appropriate times and often, it encourages a better reaction to criticism as there is a better understanding of such criticism.

More often than not, our society makes us dependent on praise and avoidance of criticism. It’s seen as though the praise in itself is an approval and a sign that whatever it is you’re up to is absolutely wonderful. In reality, this is not the case. Feedback have their place in the professional scene, whether it’s praise or reproach.

Praises makes us see how good we have done, criticism makes us see how good we need to do, it all depends on how you look at it.

The receiving end: how you chose to respond affects everything

It can be difficult receiving negative feedback, it doesn’t matter who is now giving it, there is a strong tendency to think of the person as the enemy and take the feedback as an attack on our personality, and that is why emotional intelligence is very importance.

Here are some of the best tips to responding differently:

Think before you say anything: Our first response is to be defensive and find an excuse when it comes to criticism or to be easily entreated when we are being praised. In both situations, think and evaluate what is being said before reacting.

Focus on the message and not the messenger: When we recognize that we can learn from that feedback and focus on the message, it changes our perspective of the feedback as a means of improvement and not as a personal attack

Determine the motive: Some people want to give feedbacks without your best interest. They do so either to receive favours or as a result of deception. Sit back and analyse the feedback you just got, what is it saying? How is it being said? Some feedback are merely opinions and is not worth another minute, some feedbacks are aimed at your improvement and some feedbacks are said to spite you.  Determine the motive and respond appropriately but with courtesy.

You can get more BPE tips @ www.solomonempire.com or download the BPE tool app on google play store.

What Keeps You Going?

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

In today’s write up, we’ll examine the different things that keeps a man striving towards his goals when everything around him says Quit. We’ll look at several reasons people are committed  to their goals, and what the ultimate motivator should be.

To keep going is to make (someone) able to continue doing something at a difficult time. In life, I have personally realised that when you don’t have a strong reason to stand for a goal, you’ll quit on everything. You’ll never have a stable job, stable finances, a stable family or stable relationships, because you haven’t grasped a strong motivator to want more out of life.

Where are you going?

We can’t begin to talk about what keeps you going when you haven’t answered the question, where are you going? What is your goal? What do you want to achieve out of life? What legacy do you want to lay down? It is when you begin to ask these questions and find genuine answers to them that we can actually begin to understand purpose.

Unfortunately, many have regimented their life based on other people’s opinion. They are going where other people think or expect them to go. They build their goals, their family, their vision based on what the society says or what the people around them think.

Your success is entirely dependent on you and the future can only be great for people who have first created it in their minds, as a result, the question of where you are going is one that only you can find answer to.

Your motivator

Your motivator is that one thing, such that, in the face of struggle and difficulty, when you think about it, it renews your determination to achieve your goals. Some of us need to take out time and just think for a moment, what is my motivator? Why have I come this far? What fuels my passion?

The answer to that question will no doubt vary for many people. Many people’s ideal list will look like this:

1.     Family background: I need to make my parents proud

2.     To prove other people wrong and show people that I can make it

3.     I want to be a young millionaire

4.     Poverty: I want to be richer than my father and etcetera

These motivators are good reasons and in some cases important but they are not enough to keep you moving towards your goal. In time, your family will be proud and then you’re not fulfilled, other people will forget that they even challenged you once and the society will evolve into other trends.

The greatest motivator is Purpose. Purpose is defined as the reason for which something is done or created or for which something exists. It is also defined as a person’s sense of resolve or determination.

People like Albert Einstein, Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney, Steve Jobs, Obafemi Awolowo and the likes had their goals and ambitions and when the difficulty arose, they were able to persevere and keep going on regardless because they understood purpose.

When your destination is motivated by purpose, it doesn’t matter how difficult it may be, you won’t quit until you achieve it. Purpose is an underlying magnet that keeps our life in order, it gives us focus.

Today’s Activity.

Examine and decide what motivates you and keeps you going. Make this motivator a tool to your short term goals

Define your purpose ( you can contact the BPE team for help) then make this your long term/life motivator.

Have a brilliant week.

Feedback

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

Today, I will share a thought on the need for feedback.

I had an experience one time in which I bought an expensive shirt. The shirt was not just expensive but very fashionable. I wore this shirt from time to time as it was one of my very best.  Of course, the regular washing of the shirt made it faded and I had no idea until one day, I wore this shirt to a friend’s place. He observed it and said to me, ‘why are you wearing an “expensive faded shirt”?’

As usual, we joked about it and laughed it off. But when I returning home, I gave it a thought and decided to give the shirt to my guard. When my guard wore the shirt the next day, I suddenly realise that the joke was true.

What was interesting was that I didn’t realise this for so long until it was out of my space.

Lesson Learnt?

First, we need to give people the opportunity to give feedback on us. Just by ourselves, we don’t see the shortcomings we need to work on.

In this experience I gave, it is a shirt, other times, it is our performance that is faded, our character strength, our work performance and in some cases our relationships.

Think about it, what is the single most important thing in life closely linked to personal development? Feedback. Yes, feedback. Feedback is critical to improving performance and increasing productivity. Within our space many times, we don’t see the corrections that needs to be made. I often proofread documents and sometimes I still read over the simple errors again and again because I projected my mind into it.

Effective and timely feedback is very important to growth. Timely because some errors cannot be undone. Imagining having to re-write several pages of an article or re-do a presentation because of what was or wasn’t omitted. Imagining losing a contract for simple errors that can be avoided, Imagining projecting yourself poorly for a faded character strength that needs to be updated. For many reasons we need feedback and we need to give people the opportunity to give us feedback.

It is true that it matters who is giving the feedback. Human impression is mostly based on perception, experience or exposure and as a result can be biased. You don’t expect your junior colleagues to give you the same appraisal as your professional colleagues, in some cases, even your friends won’t give objective feedback.

The person who gives you feedback must be objective and sincere with his thoughts no matter how bad or good you may feel. The feedback must be aimed towards your development and not some get back word antics. It’s not a game of words or a competition of who does better or worse. It is an appraisal of strength and weaknesses, what has been observed, what can be done differently, what is working and what is not.

The second moral of the story is never to get attached to a phase in one’s life. In the experience I gave above, the shirt represented a phase in which everything was good and so good that you don’t want to let go. By phase, I mean a present condition in a person’s life. Often, we don’t realise how hanging on to something, no matter what it is, ruins us. We hang on to positions, to money, to prestige, to knowledge sometimes, to personal items, to a one time experience and refuse to let go and move ahead.  By refusing to let go, we close our eyes to the opportunities and better days that lies ahead.

The two lessons to take to heart in today’s write up is to learn to receive feedback and never get attached to a phase in which all you can see is yourself and nothing else. To increase your performance, you should take these things to heart.

Have a lovely week.

Identifying and Maximizing Opportunities- 2018

Good Morning Brilliant and Excellent People,

I look forward to sharing with you Brilliant and Excellent tips for attaining your goals and fulfilling your Purpose.

 The privilege of life

Whether we like it or not, every single one of us has been born with certain privileges that would make our lives somewhat easier to begin. The problem is, we haven’t identified these privileges as what they are but as potential problems and a curse to be rid of.

A privilege is a special advantage or immunity or benefit not enjoyed by all, it is an advantage that you have no control over but fell into your laps nonetheless. If we agree that this definition is true, it is true then that life itself is a privilege for we had no control over when or how or even where we were to be born.

As basic as it seems, life is a privilege and it is the foundation upon which everything else is built, your dreams, visions, aspirations and ambitions.

But you’ll agree that just being born and alive is not enough to guarantee success of any kind, if that were so, we all will be successful and very well acclaimed. A privilege is supposed to be a sling, a leverage to reach your goal faster and move ahead but what life gives us, like every other person, is the beginning line and nothing more.

 The privilege of life is that we are all at the beginning line.

What puts some people ahead than others?

In a few years’ time, if you happen to look back, you’ll realise one of these truths,

·         You have moved ahead of the crew you started with,

·         The crew you started with have moved ahead and left you behind.

So, if we all had the same beginning line, what puts some people ahead of others? We have to really admit that there are “other things” aside just being born that puts some ahead, in some cases, these “other things” may not be something they have done or willed to existence.

Though not obvious as it seem, the kinds of parents you have, the choices they made, the opportunities they maximised in their days, the decisions they risked, the genes you were born with, these are the kind of things that represent the “other things”.

What choices do you have?

Against the face of the “other things” that you see in people, what choices do you have?

Just because you aren’t born with what seem like the catapulting privilege doesn’t mean you should resent those born with them. The “other things” may be a leverage to reach our goals faster than others, it is not an assurance that you’ll be happier or more fulfilled or satisfied with the results of life. As I said earlier, we all have been born with privileges one way or another but what is most important thing is what you do to set the pace of your life. Do you take charge of your life or stand back and grumble about what others have.

Understand that this write up is not to encourage supremacy in any way but to recognise our differences and the ways we can maximise the opportunities that abound around us, if and when we open our eyes and minds to them.

Acknowledging our privileges is a way to appreciate the opportunity you’ve been given and run your race from there.

Resources:

Outliers, The Story Of Success by Malcolm Gladwell