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Have you ever seen rich people or high ranked people in companies? You will notice that most of them are not only in good mood, but they are smiling, full of energy and always positive. Now you might argue that these people are in this state because of their status, but I’m pretty sure that there is a good portion of these people who were able to be where they are at now because of all these elements, and not vice-versa.

Positive people see life differently. They not only see the glass half full than half empty, but during bad situations they manage to stay up and find solutions, compared to someone who would feel devastated with the same kind of news. For example, let’s say a high executive in a company just heard a loss of $10,000 this week, when they usually make a profit of $30,000. A regular person would start panicking and think that something went very wrong and that it may be the beginning of the end. From there, he would proceed to irrational behaviors and start taking all kind of bad decisions. A positive person, on the other hand, would maybe not start jumping of joy, but may think that this kind of thing was meant to happen sooner or later and that it happens to everyone; time will tell this was just a fluke or the beginning of something else. In the meantime, he revises what happened to understand better. With all this, the positive person still is in a good mood, while our regular guy is stressing and panicking. The positive person will have a good day, will go home, have a good evening and sleep good, while the stressed guy’s day is ruined along with his sleep. The following days are crucial as the guy with the positive attitude is still happy and smiling and has tons of ideas rolling. The main difference between the 2 here is that one of them lives it almost as nothing happened and is advancing in the business with all new ideas, while the other one is still stuck at point A.

It is this lack of positive attitude in people’s lives that hold them back. A lot of us have good ideas and good plans, but never have this positive attitude with optimistic outcomes to deliver the great potential. Many experts agree saying positive attitude is the basic foundation of success. With our hectic and busy lives, there are constant problems that are there to distract us, you must absolutely maintain a positive attitude; ideas and plans are not enough.

Confidence is a personality trait that is very useful in life and manifests in many ways. Your confidence will affect almost everything you do. Think about it, every decision you make requires a thought, and it is this specific thought that will guide you through action. Now if your confidence is weak, your action will be weak.

Think about the first time your drove a car. You weren’t sure how it worked or how fast it goes. So you started going at it gently and delicately in fear of making mistakes. After a while, you got used to it and started going at it more comfortably. There are however people who never get past that stage of lack of confidence. They are still and always scared they will do something wrong.

The lack of confidence of these people does not limit to driving. Having lack of confidence in anything at the early stages is normal, but when confidence never develops with time, there is a problem. This will manifest in your life, at your job, when you’re with friends, when you take financial decisions, etc…

Trying to build confidence when you never had any is hard, but not impossible. You need to remember to love yourself and make yourself feel good. Being in a bad mood never helps and we’re always more energetic when we are in good moods. Any negativity must be left away.

Think and visualize yourself winning and being right. During a conversation, there is often someone who is taking the lead and doing all the talking and the other one who just listens and makes few interventions. This is because one believes in himself and the other one is shy and scared of saying something in fear of being wrong. The fear is not justified, but is merely a lack of confidence. Unless the conversation is about skills such at math or science, there is no reason to think that the person in front of you is better. There is no right or wrong opinions, and for this reason you should not be scared of stating yours.

Facing your fears is the best way to build your confidence. Do what scares you. Most the time people know that there is no real danger in doing what they fear, but they are scared anyways. Try to make your logic overcome your fear by taking action. So if you’re wondering how to build confidence, be active!

Far too many times we start with a specific goal only to find out later on that our end result is not anywhere near what we had originally planned to achieve. Somewhere along the lines our focus was lost and there was some sort of deviation.

This might happen because of distraction or other plans that are not priorities. In every plan, there is one major objective, but to arrive to that objective, it takes several sub-objectives. You need to be careful not to spend too much time with these sub-objectives if you see they are taking too much of your time and is not as important as it appeared like.

For example, let’s say you have managed to get your business started. In your ideas of promotion, you thought of talking to several potential prospects as well as spending money on your usual promotion like banner events or newspaper advertisements. Along the line, you have had a problem with one of your prospects; he maybe changed his mind or is no longer interested. What you do now is put all you energy on getting that prospect back and wonder what happened since all communication were leading one step closer to success. Suddenly, it looks like you lost track of your main objective, and have now changed focus on making your new main objective of getting that prospect back. This results in a waste of serious time and energy.

This kind of situation happen all the time. A way to avoid losing track and always keep focus is to give some of your work to other people. Stop thinking that you can do everything by yourself, you can’t! You must also stop thinking that others can not do the job, they can! Think of delegating your work as a sub objective. Even if they do not do the job as good as you can, at least you will find gain in more focus in your plan, which will ultimately have more benefits.

Another good way of keeping focus is to visualize your success. By doing so, you remind your brain of what it is really you are looking for and will be less likely to lose focus. You will soon find out many things which look like challenges that are in reality meaningless little details.

There are millions of stories on the internet, millions. There are always new trends, new events that are happening and new promises. With millions of stories, there are millions of people reading it and shaping their opinions. Reading everything brings confusion, and this is especially true when the story concerns you and you have to make a decision.

What you have to do is to simply keep and objective view, and read the opinions simply as “potentially relevant” information. The ways most internet users treat information is like adding blocks that just stack up one on top of the other, and they let opinions shape their own view.
Even the most credible experts are biased. Have you ever watched a sports event and hear commentators talk and analyze the game, or pay attention during big events such as the SuperBowl, the World Soccer Cup or Grand Slams. After 10 minutes, I can clearly tell which team or player the commentator is siding for. Just the way he or she is describing the game, or the things and the tone they are commenting on such things like referee decisions or opponents plays are big tip offs, they are very subtle, but the supposed neutrality isn’t there. We’re all humans and we are driven by emotion, it is only normal that we are so easily influenced.

Keeping an objective view on anything gives you a leading step. When money is in play like in the stock market, this becomes crucial. One way you can easily tell if the tone is biased or not is to see if the author himself has any connection with the story. We are all inclined to defend what we have, even if we know that sometimes we are in the wrong.
Just think of consoles, PS3 and XBOX 360. Both are great in my opinion, and I would personally get both of them and play both of them if I had time. But no one can deny the lack of interesting games for the PS3 at the moment compared to the XBOX360, and at the same time, no one can also deny the power of the PS3 with the folding at home experiment. On the other side, when you read articles and user comments, how many users do you see pointing the downsides of the consoles they own? Very few.

Always remember, in whatever field you are in, there will always be people driven by emotion who do not clearly show all the aspects. Don’t be a sheep and do not follow before understanding how the game you are in works.

Making more money is the desire of most people, and these days, there are many different paths to achieve this. You can be a webmaster, a businessman, an investor, a skilled artist, a hard worker, etc… If you do any of these for a living, one of the main goals is to make money, and after all, we all need money to live. One thing you must ask yourself however is, what is the main reason behind your actions? What is the primary reason you went into that field?

If you want to make money, that’s fine, but is that what really drives you? Was that the only thing you had in mind when you went in head first in your projects? If your answer is a definite “YES”, then I am sorry to tell you that you might not go very far. You will of course achieve some sort of success anyways if you work at it and put in the efforts, but ultimately, you will never be as successful as someone who does this with strong passion.

As in any venture, there are many ups and downs no matter how good you are. If you are practice sports, you will win some tournaments, and then lose some. You will be rewarded when you win them, be it with a trophy, money or pride, but what will happen when you lose? Or worse, what will happen when you lose several of them consecutively? If your only drive is the prize at the end, how will you react when you won’t win? And if you’re still only at the beginning of your career or just started playing, it might take a while before you see any solid reward.

This is exactly where passion comes in.

Passion is what keeps you alive in periods where things aren’t going well. You will lose, but you will say to yourself, “So what, I enjoy doing this, so I’ll keep doing it because I like it!” Then sure enough, your skills will sharpen and you will be back on track.

You might think this kind of example does not work in the field of business or investments, because for many, these are only related to money. But again, if you go there only for the money, chances are you will quit faster than anyone else. Take someone who invests in stocks, but someone who does it as a full time, not just anyone who picks stocks or has a few shares here and there. If this person took this path of career just to rake in the money, sooner or later, our investor will reach a point where this will all become a regular routine, something he does because ‘he is used to doing it’. Now take someone else who took the same direction in his life, but did it because of his love to analyze. Someone who enjoys analyzing stocks every minute of the day, reading reports of companies, analyzing charts, etc… This person just likes to know how the companies work, how the people will react to news, has the need to understand the movements on the graph…This person likes to dig deeper and wants to understand the inner mechanisms of everything simply because it brings him satisfaction. And when things won’t be going so well, because let’s face it, even the best investor have losing streaks, this person will just keep analyzing and wondering and reading everything he can, not only because he has too, but because it’s his passion, ‘he just loves it’. This is the reason he will be better, he will work more and harder, but he does not consider it work, so he’ll keep going at it no matter what happens.