The Success Principles Workbook Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Introduction: Best Practices for Using Your Workbook

  I. The Fundamentals of Success

  1.Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life

  2.Be Clear Why You’re Here: Determine Your Life Purpose

  3.Decide What You Want: Envision Your Ideal Life

  4.Use the Power of Goal-Setting to Achieve Your Vision

  5.Use Affirmations and Visualizations

  6.Believe It’s Possible

  7.Take Action!

  8.Everything You Want Is on the Other Side of Fear

  9.Ask Without Fear of Rejection

  10.Ask for Feedback Early and Often

  11.Practice Persistence

  II. Transform Yourself for Success

  12.Practice Meditation

  13.Clean Up Your Messes and Your Incompletes

  III. Build Your Success Team

  14.Surround Yourself with Successful People

  15.Start a Mastermind Group and Work with an Accountability Partner

  IV. Create Successful Relationships

  16.Have a Heart Talk

  V. Success and Money

  17.Develop a Positive Money Mind-set

  Your Life Success Journal

  Suggested Reading and Additional Resources for Success

  About the Authors

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  For journal entries, fill-in-the-blank lines, and fill-in-space sections please use your e-reader’s Notes feature.

  Introduction: Best Practices for Using Your Workbook

  The most difficult part of any endeavor is taking the first step, making the first decision.

  ROBYN DAVIDSON

  Award-Winning Australian Author

  What does it take to become a success at anything you want in life? What do the world’s top achievers do to excel in their careers, finances, philanthropic endeavors, relationships, and more? Is there something special about them—qualities that other people simply don’t have? Or is there a “secret formula” that we can all follow to help us succeed?

  There is.

  And for the past 40 years, I’ve made it my life’s work to research, understand—then teach—these “secret” principles of success.

  Of course, like most people, I was not brought up with any kind of self-help or human-potential concepts. I grew up in Wheeling, West Virginia; my mother was an alcoholic and my father was a workaholic. As a kid, I took summer jobs to make ends meet. And later, while I was fortunate enough to go to college on a scholarship, I paid for my books, clothes, and dates by serving breakfast in the campus dining hall. The money I earned never went very far. In fact, by the end of the month, I was so broke, you’d find me eating my famous “21¢ dinners”—a 10¢ can of tomato paste and garlic salt over an 11¢ bag of spaghetti noodles.

  All that, however, was about to change.

  After graduation, I was teaching high school history in inner-city Chicago when a chance job offer from insurance multimillionaire and personal-growth pioneer W. Clement Stone fostered a brand-new career for me: working for his foundation and teaching others the fundamental principles of success he had identified and written about in his bestselling books.

  I immersed myself in this fascinating work. Not only did I vow to make it my own lifelong pursuit to study what works, I applied these principles to my own life, eventually started my own training company, and started teaching others these principles, too. It’s a career path I’ve followed for more than 40 years.

  Along the way, I discovered there’s a series of principles by which successful people live. They don’t always start with lots of money or high-level connections or other privileged circumstances, but they do take action on goals that matter. They plan and they focus and they persevere. They become constant learners. They keep score on the critical drivers of their success. They believe in themselves. They have a positive money consciousness. And they surround themselves with successful people.

  These are the fundamentals by which I’ve lived my life, and they were the principles I was enthusiastically teaching in the late 1980s when repeated requests from audience members inspired me to collect the stories I told from stage into a book called Chicken Soup for the Soul®. When 144 publishers turned me down for the book, I again applied these principles and persevered until one publisher finally said yes.

  Today, 26 years later—with 230 Chicken Soup titles in the series and more than 550 million books in print—these ground rules are still serving me in my career, relationships, pursuits, and life. My second book series, The Success Principles™, is the compendium of these proven fundamentals of success. It’s now in 36 languages and has readers in 112 countries.*

  But what about you? What can you do to achieve all that you want . . . and more?

  As a follow-up, companion guide to The Success Principles, this workbook is designed to help you get from where you are to where you want to be. Whether you’ve read the original Success Principles book or not, you’re in the right place. This Workbook is designed with both readers in mind.

  If you’re already familiar with the success principles, this Workbook will help you put them into daily practice. And if you’re new to personal-growth work, each chapter will give you the essential information you need to learn, understand, and put into action the individual principles you discover.

  ALL THAT YOU WANT TO BE, DO, AND HAVE IS POSSIBLE BY COMPLETING THE CHAPTERS IN THIS BOOK

  Throughout this book are 17 chapters detailing the most important principles I teach. These are the basics that will help you take control of your outcomes—and take the right actions toward achieving the life of your dreams.

  We’ll start with Chapter 1, the fundamental principle you must follow: Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life.

  One of the most pervasive myths today is that we’re entitled to a great life—that somehow, somewhere, someone (certainly not us) is responsible for filling our lives with continual happiness, exciting career options, nurturing family time, and blissful personal relationships simply because we exist. But the real truth—and the one lesson this entire workbook is based on—is that there’s only one person responsible for the quality of the life you live.

  That person is you.

  When you realize that you—not your circumstances, not other people—are responsible for your success (or lack of it), your life will dramatically shift. When you accept that your actions (or your failure to act), your thoughts, your beliefs, the words you say to yourself, and the pictures you hold in your mind have tremendous sway over your results, then you will have taken the most important step of all toward a life of freedom, abundance and fulfillment. Chapter 1 will teach you that you always have a choice about what you think and how you act. You have a choice in how you respond to life’s events. Once you realize that, you’ll have regained your power—the power to create the life you truly want.

  Other chapters will follow to help you decide what you want, set and achieve goals, ask for what you want, clean up your incompletes, build a support network of smart people . . . and much more.

  And within each chapter, you’ll find a number of tools to help you apply what you learn. I’ll even help you create a new habit around each principle, so you can sustainably implement it day after day. It’s these kind of combined actions that will steadily bring you success.

  So, what can you look forward to as you shortly turn the page and start your journey?

  “Discovering More About You” Exercises & Worksheets

  Within each chapter, exercises of different kinds will help you get into action app
lying The Success Principles to your life. The first of these is called Discovering More About You. For example, in Chapter 14, you’ll learn to surround yourself with successful people. Author Jim Rohn once said, “You are the average of the five adults you spend the most time with.”

  Not only is that a powerful condemnation of the toxic and limiting people in your life, it’s also a compelling wake-up call to surround yourself with solution-oriented, possibility thinkers. That’s what top achievers do. They cultivate relationships with a core group of people who can help them on their path to success.

  To help you apply this principle to your life, I provide an exercise and worksheet called Your Current and Future Groups that asks you to list the people you spend time with—then evaluate whether they’re a benefit or an obstacle to your growth, progress, and success. The worksheet called Your Ideal Mentors asks you to create a list of at least 10 people with specific skills—either by name or description of their job title—from whom you could learn the most. I often ask my national sales audiences how many attendees know the name of the top salesperson in their company. After virtually everyone raises their hand, I ask, “How many of you have approached that person to ask their strategies for success? And how many of you have asked that person to mentor you?” Virtually no one raises their hand. This exercise will help you surround yourself with successful people.

  And other, similar exercises and worksheets are included in every chapter.

  Make-It-a-Habit Worksheets

  Did you know it takes 21 to 30 days of repeated action to create a new habit in your life? Habits are those things we do almost without thinking, and—for better or worse—these habits put our life on autopilot toward success or mediocrity. To help you put your own success on autopilot, I’ve featured Make-It-a-Habit worksheets in each chapter that are designed to help you sustainably practice that principle, every day or every week, for the rest of your life.

  What’s an example of these worksheets? In Chapter 7: Take Action!, I reveal that taking action toward your goals not only skyrockets your confidence, it puts you in the game doing what you need to do instead of keeping you on the sidelines—a spectator who’s only thinking about or talking about what you want. To help you create the daily habit of being in action toward your goals, I feature a worksheet called Practice the Rule of 5—where, every morning, you can record those five tasks you must achieve by the end of the day.

  Your Life Success Journal

  Of course, once you’ve completed the exercises, it’s time to permanently embed these lessons and insights into your consciousness by frequently reviewing what you’ve learned. I’ve included an easy tool for that: at the back of this workbook is Your Life Success Journal—a section where you can record the insights you learned along the way. At the end of each chapter, you’ll be prompted to find the appropriate pages in the Life Success Journal, answer a few questions, and make notes about your newfound knowledge. This way, once you’ve completed the Workbook, you’ll be able to quickly locate what was most important to you.

  Affirmations

  Finally, each chapter contains an affirmation for you to use as you’re assimilating that principle into your life.

  Affirmations are vividly detailed statements of you living, working, and enjoying life as if your goals had already been achieved. Affirmations help the brain focus on bringing about your heartfelt desires. I’m happily depositing my first $100,000 royalty check as a bestselling author, is one example of an affirmation. I’m joyfully receiving the company’s top sales award, is another.

  How Do Affirmations Work?

  As scientists now know, the brain is a goal-seeking organism. If you give it a compelling, colorful, crystal-clear image of what you want—by frequently repeating an affirmation statement that describes that “want”—it will work night and day to create the opportunities, contacts, resources, and circumstances needed to achieve that vision. In fact, the brain has a special part called the reticular activating system that filters through the millions of impressions, images, sensations, messages, and thoughts it processes each day and passes to your conscious mind that specific information which will help you reach your goal.

  I’ll talk more about the power of affirmations in Chapter 5. But before then, you’ll notice an affirmation at the beginning of each chapter. As you’re working on a single chapter, I recommend that you repeat its affirmation several times a day. As you read, feel the positive emotions that arise—joy, pride, confidence, gratitude—as you experience achieving that goal in your mind’s eye.

  OUR ROLES: MINE AND YOURS

  As I share with you the principles and lessons I’ve researched and implemented over a lifetime, you’ll discover that—while you and I are in this process together—practicing what it takes to create success is up to you. Whether it’s having more money, experiencing more fulfilling relationships, enjoying more time off, making a greater difference in the world, or being the person you know you were meant to be, I can only provide you with a practical plan for implementing these principles and making their use a habit—today, tomorrow, and for the rest of your life.

  That’s my role.

  Your Role

  This is where you come in. It’s one thing for me to share this knowledge with you. But it’s something else entirely for you to take action on this newfound knowledge. This is not a book for you simply to read. Rather, it’s a book for you to do. Your doing will make all the difference in getting the life you want.

  HOW TO GET THE MOST FROM THIS BOOK

  What’s the best way to get the most from this workbook? Be willing to take these principles seriously—as though your future depended on it. Catch yourself if you start to think, I already know about this (especially if you’ve already read the original The Success Principles book). Instead, ask yourself, But am I doing this? And then think about how your application of an individual principle can benefit you and bring about the life you want.

  Commit to Studying One Chapter a Week . . . Or More

  Read one chapter a week and complete all of its exercises—a commitment that should take about one to two hours of your time. Then, during the next seven days, allow the ideas you just learned to simmer. Practice the Make-It-a-Habit daily activities from that chapter during the week, too.

  Finally, When You’re Ready, Make “The Decision”

  At some point, as you’re studying and applying these principles—or when you’ve tested enough of these principles for yourself—you might find yourself on the brink of a very important decision: whether or not, once and for all, you’ll take a stand on behalf of your own future.

  After all the books you’ve read and the self-improvement programs you’ve tried, you might realize that what’s really needed now is your commitment to stick with this Workbook to the very end and practice these success principles in earnest—perhaps for the rest of your life.

  Remember, the principles always work, if you always work the principles.

  It might be difficult. It might be uncomfortable. It might require you to do things you never believed you could do before. But your newly focused and success-oriented life can only begin when you make the decision to stick with the process, follow the directions, take one step at a time, and complete the chapters in this Workbook week after week. Along the way, you may also decide that you’ll fully adopt these principles and make them an ongoing part of your life—not just for the rest of your life, but for the best of your life.

  Your Option: Find a Success Partner and Make This Journey Together

  While there’s great value in going through this Workbook on your own, you’ll experience even more impact if you find a partner and go through the Workbook together. Just like having a yoga buddy or a running partner, you can encourage and support each other through the process, have fun together, and increase the likelihood of staying on track with your progress.

  MY PROMISE TO YOU

  Here’s my pledge to you: By learning these princ
iples and following their guidelines, your life will never be the same. You’ll not only experience the freedom of knowing you’re in charge of your own destiny, you’ll have the knowledge and power you need to take the action required to create the success you long for.

  Yes. It is possible.

  You have what you need in your head . . . and in your hands. Be assured that hundreds of thousands have come before you—learning and applying these principles with great success. It is truly possible for you to experience profound, rapid, and lifelong change, too. These principles work. Learn them and apply them.

  FINALLY, STAY IN TOUCH!

  We’d love to stay connected with you on your journey. Engaging, asking questions, and celebrating your wins is proven to further your success even more, so make a commitment to stay connected!

  We look forward to hearing about your breakthroughs and successes.

  Please send us your thoughts at [email protected] or tag us on social media!

  @jackcanfield_official

  @jackcanfieldfan

  @jackcanfield

  @canfieldjack

  Part One

  The Fundamentals of Success

  Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals.

  JIM ROHN

  Motivational Philosopher

  Chapter

  1

  Take 100% Responsibility for Your Life

  The moment I take responsibility for everything in my life is the moment I gain power to change anything in my life.