"Winners take time to relish their work, knowing that scaling the mountain is what makes the view from the top so exhilarating."

Denis Waitley
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ACCEPTING REJECTION

Lloyd J. Thomas, Ph.D.

Most people tend to wilt when they are confronted with rejection. Rejection makes them feel afraid or angry, worthless or shameful, self-critical or self-deprecating. People who experience accepting rejection often remain shy, withdrawn in social situations, and feeling inferior (or "less than") to other people.

Most of us learn how to cope with rejection when we are very young. At that time we are still dependent on others for our survival and for fulfilling most of our needs. We are dependent on others whenever we are unable to cope with life on our own, unable to adequately meet our own needs, unable to solve problems effectively, and unable to protect ourselves from threats. When we are dependent, rejection is a genuine threat to our well-being. Under those conditions of dependency, it is very appropriate to feel afraid, angry, or helpless when rejected.

Having assumed enough responsibility for their self-care and self-protection to adequately function independently, adults may still experience those same old feelings when other people reject them. When others tell them "no," remove themselves from the relationship, tell them they're fired, or otherwise reject them, they still feel those archaic emotions they felt as a child.

Learning to accept rejection may be a difficult process. It is a skill most of us must relearn after we are adults. Like all new skills, it requires new definitions, new ways of thinking about events and new behaviors to practice.

One hint about learning to accept rejection is: acknowledge that rejection is a natural part of the human decision-making process. When someone wants to make a decision of importance, s/he would do well to seek out many possible solutions and reject most of them; seek out lots of advice and reject most of it; or learn many points of view and reject most of them. Rejecting alternatives narrows the field of possibilities to one or two options. It makes decisions more accurate and less cumbersome.

Rejection increases the value of any given accepted alternative. When car-shopping, if you buy the first one you see, you value it less than if you have looked over 30 different automobiles and rejected 29 of them, and purchased the one for you. After you have rejected the 29, you will value more highly the one you finally buy.

When you remember the above processes, creatively coping with rejection becomes easier. If you realize that when most people say "no" to you, they are actually in the decision-making mode, and they are attempting to narrow the field. Their decision-making process is not under your control. They have free choice the same as you. Some sales people think that many decision makers feel compelled to say "no" at least eight times before they feel comfortable saying "yes." The sooner they get past the first eight "no's" the sooner they will feel free to say "yes."

In order to learn to accept rejection more easily, the most crucial distinctions you can make are between "rejection" and "refusal" and between rejecting of the person vs. rejecting their behavior. You need to be clear about interpreting as personal rejection merely the refusal of what you may be offering or wanting. You may need to realize that when others say "no" to you in some manner, they may be rejecting your current behavior and not you as a person. Most often others reject what we want from them or what we are doing, rather than rejecting us...the persons we are.

Not taking rejection personally is the key element in learning how to accept rejection. Certainly that is easier said than done, but with practice, we can all learn it.
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"Too many people spend money they haven't earned, to buy things they don't want, to impress people they don't like."

Will Smith
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Confidence

Confidence comes easily and naturally for some, for many others it seems impossible. The good news is that it is a habit that can be learned by anyone. It will take some degree of training, and practice, but who would deny it's worth?

"The control of the thinking machine is perfectly possible. And since nothing whatever happens to us outside our own brain; since nothing hurts us or gives us pleasure except within the brain, the supreme importance of being able to control what goes on in that mysterious brain is patent. Without the power to dictate to the brain its task and to ensure obedience - true life is impossible." - Arnold Bennett (1867-1931)

Using autosuggestion, by repeatedly filling the mind with positive and pleasant thoughts, can result in a profound positive outcome. Picture in your mind, as vividly as possible, a scene in which you are performing very successfully. Picture this again and again so that your mind is totally occupied with confidence. This will push out the doubt, as there is no room for both. Every time a negative thought pops up, immediately replace it with the pleasant success thought.

Affirmations are a similar technique that can work wonders. This is the repeating of positive words about yourself, concerning what you wish to do. The words cram the mind with confident thoughts that have a direct effect on how you act. As an example, if you have to make a presentation - "I am doing everything slowly, calmly, surely. I am relaxed and breathing deeply and easily. I feel confident about this. I am in control. I have nothing to lose. They like me. I feel good and I am comfortable with these people. I am concentrating on them, not on myself. They are here because they want to be."

"They can because they think they can."

- Vergil (BC)Ken McIsaac
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"That man is richest whose pleasures are the cheapest."

Henry David Thoreau

"The substance of your communication is the response it generates."
Tony Jeary
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The Lessons of 100

This is the 100th Vantagepoints essay I will write and publish. It is also the last essay that will be included in my first book. In preparing to write this essay and in preparing the book for publication, I have read the other 99 essays in a relatively short period of time. One would hope that this 100th essay would be significantly better than the first one I wrote.

I mean, if I shoot 100 free throws, or repeat the Gettysburg Address 100 times, or practice saying Happy Birthday in French 100 times, I would expect to be better at those things at the end of those repetitions than when I started.

I believe that this is true of my writing. I am a better writer now than when I started (whew!).

Beyond the individual lessons I have written about in each essay, there are other things I have learned through this writing journey, and it seems fitting to share them with you. I don't share them to gloat, as in "see what I've learned." I share them because I believe you can learn from my lessons (which is part of what Vantagepoints is about) and I share them because in reflecting on and writing about them, the lessons become more a part of me (which is another part of what Vantagepoints is about).

Everyday

The subtitle of the book is "Finding Learning Opportunities in Everyday Life Situations." I have learned that there are lessons for us everyday. In order to find those lessons, we must expect them, which demands that we keep our eyes, ears and minds open for them. Too many of us on too many days, move from morning to night, from meeting to meeting or task to task, completing the routine of life as if it is only that; a routine.

Like the parent who asks their children at the end of a school day, "What did you learn today?", we must ask ourselves this question. We expect learning opportunities for the kids each day - that is why they are in school after all. It is the same for us. As human learning beings, the reason we live each day is in part to learn.

I have found that the opportunities for us to learn are all around us in both the unique experiences, and in the normal route we drive each morning or the way we make our coffee.

The lessons are waiting for us around every corner and in every conversation. Everyday.

Reflection

While looking for the lessons is a necessary first step, it isn't enough. We must take time to reflect on those experiences. Without open eyes and ears we don't have experiences to reflect on, but without time to analyze and think about those experiences, we won't harvest the rich lessons available to us.

A military unit debriefs events after a mission. A sports team watches the game film. A skilled trainer asks people a well developed series of questions after any learning experience. Why? Because they know that by reviewing the experience, there is a chance to learn from that experience, gain more knowledge from it, and be more successful or productive in the future.

This is what we must do. We must reflect on our experiences in order to gain the most from them.

Writing 100 of these essays has forced me to reflect - after all, I needed to find something to write about each month. What I have learned over the years though is that reflection, like any other skill, develops with practice.

In the quiet moments of your day, think about your recent experiences. Ask yourself what went well, how you were surprised, and what was different. Ask yourself how those experiences relate to other recent experiences and what you can learn from the combinations. Then ask the most important question - what will you do differently, with your new knowledge and understanding.

Retelling Stories

Stories are powerful ways to share a message. That is why we watch movies and read novels. That is why the stories I tell during a speech are among the most powerful things I can do. Hearing or reading someone else's story can be very useful. It can engage us, prompt us, and teach us.

But this isn't my lesson.

Yes, stories are powerful. But the most powerful stories are the stories we tell. In telling our stories we are reflecting on our lessons. By telling our stories we understand them better than we did before we told them.

It is what I have now done 100 times. Experienced something(s), reflected on the experience, found some lessons, and told the story. Each link in this learning chain is helpful, but the telling of the story completes the loop. They typically make a lot of sense in my head, but until I tell them (in my case write them) the lessons often are vague and disconnected.

Something magical happens when we talk about a concept - we begin to solidify our understanding and truly make sense of what has been in our heads.

I have learned that stories aren't just powerful to read or hear, they are powerful to tell.

Action

The theme and lesson that comes through most of these essays is "take action." Nothing happens until we take action.

I have ended each essay by encouraging you to do something. Through my example, I hope you have taken my advice (more than once). But I can't take the action for you.

There are two things I know for sure. You maximize the value of what you learn by putting it into action. And no one can do that for you.

Your lessons await you, and I urge you to discover them. Take the time to think through your experiences and create stories to help you make the learning more concrete and real. Most of all, take what you have learned and put it into action.

When I do those things I am most successful.

When you do those things you will be most successful too.

Life is happening all around you. The learning awaits.

Yours in Learning,

Kevin Eikenberry
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"Today's audiences are stimulation junkies with short attention spans."

Patricia Fripp
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The Touchstone

When the great library of Alexandria burned, the story goes, one book was saved. But it was not a valuable book; and so a poor man, who could read a little, bought it for a few coppers. The book wasn't very interesting, but between its pages there was something very interesting indeed. It was a thin strip of vellum on which was written the secret of the "Touchstone"!

The touchstone was a small pebble that could turn any common metal into pure gold. The writing explained that it was lying among thousands and thousands of other pebbles that looked exactly like it. But the secret was this: The real stone would feel warm, while ordinary pebbles are cold.

So the man sold his few belongings, bought some simple supplies, camped on the seashore, and began testing pebbles.

He knew that if he picked up ordinary pebbles and threw them down again because they were cold, he might pick up the same pebble hundreds of times. So, when he felt one that was cold, he threw it into the sea. He spent a whole day doing this but none of them was the touchstone. Yet he went on and on this way. Pick up a pebble. Cold - throw it into the sea. Pick up another. Throw it into the sea.

The days stretched into weeks and the weeks into months. One day, however, about midafternoon, he picked up a pebble and it was warm. He threw it into the sea before he realized what he had done. He had formed such a strong habit of throwing each pebble into the sea that when the one he wanted came along, he still threw it away.

So it is with opportunity. Unless we are vigilant, it's asy to fail to recognize an opportunity when it is in hand and it's just as easy to throw it away.

Author Unknown
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"Accept complete responsibility both for understanding and for being understood."

Brian Tracy

"Example has more followers than reason. We unconsciously imitate what pleases us, and approximate to the characters we most admire."

Christian Nevell Bovee
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TEN ATTITUDES OF TOP-ACHIEVERS

by Brian Tracy

If you think the same way as the top achievers think, you can begin to get the same results they do. Here are ten psychological and practical ways to mirror the attitudes of top-achievers.

1. See yourself as a consultant rather than a salesperson. Believe that you are a problem-solver with regard to your product and how the client can best use it.

2. Become a doctor of selling. Act in the best interests of your "patients" and have a high code of ethics.

3. See yourself as the president of your own sales corporation. Accept 100 percent responsibility for your results.

4. Commit yourself to being the best in your field. Dedicate yourself to lifelong learning.

5. Be ambitious, hungry, and determined to use selling as a stepping-stone to the success you want in life.

6. Have integrity. Be honest with yourself and others.

7. Engage in thorough preparation prior to every call.

8. Be an excellent listener; be extremely customer-focused.

9. Have tremendous courage. Be willing to face your fears of rejection and failure, and overcome them.

10. Be highly persistent. Start your workday earlier, work harder, and stay longer. To make these changes work you must walk, talk, and behave consistently with them every hour of every day.
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"If you want to be successful, find someone who has achieved the results you want and copy what they do and you'll achieve the same results."

Anthony Robbins
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Responsibility

"I am the master of my fate. I am the captain of my soul." - William Henley (1849-1903)

Our lives are only as good as we decide to make them. We should make short and long range plans and then follow them through, reviewing them as we go. It is our design and determination that decide our destiny, and this is our responsibility. When things are not right, we should blame nobody, for that only dodges the problems that lie within us and causes us to fail again next time. Examine your own actions and decide how things will be.

"Let him who would move the world, first move himself." - Socrates (BC)

"Be not angry that you cannot make others as you wish them to be, since you cannot make yourself as you wish to be." - Thomas Kempis (1380-1471)

We should make a special effort to be that which we want others to think we are. We must do our duties, complete our tasks, be kind and honest. "It is not alone what we do, but also what we do not do, for which we are accountable." - Moliere (1622-1673)

Be an individual and do what you believe in. Take responsibility for your actions. Take a good look at yourself as if you were someone else conducting a review. Anything you want to change?

"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Not in the clamor of the crowded street, Not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, But in ourselves, are triumph and defeat. - Henry Longfellow (1807-1882)

Ken N McIsaac
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"The more you teach positive ideas to others, the better you learn them yourself."

Brian Tracy

As we grow as unique persons, we learn to respect the uniqueness of others.

Rober Schuller
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Processing Negative Emotions - Emotional Intelligence

While we all, at some level, understand that we're motivated by pain and pleasure, it's amazing how we can learn, especially in our Western culture, to ignore the concomitant fact that moving toward pleasure makes us feel good, and is good for our health, while moving toward pain does the opposite.

Yes, "no pain no gain" has its place. It fits for cognitive learning experiences, like struggling to learn a new language, or new theory; and physical endeavors, like weight lifting and increasing your ability to jog, but when it comes to emotional experiences, we don't benefit from the negative. It takes a tremendous toll.

One of the immediate goals of emotional intelligence is to increase your self-awareness. Not to the point where you spend all your time analyzing yourself and looking inward, but enough so you can assess quickly your emotional states, and, more importantly, the cost they have for you.

WHAT DO YOU FEEL?

At the rudimentary level, you can learn by asking yourself several times a day, "How am I feeling?" Don't answer it superficially, but rather at the level of how you're feeling physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually.

In this way, you can learn the physiological signals to your own emotions. For instance, I have talked with people who didn't realize their stomach was "in knots" because it always had been, and that's the way they thought it should be. Or you may not connect that sudden pain in your neck with the proper antecedent. I remember driving back to town with a friend after a weekend away, and as we got closer to home, she started talking about her boyfriend, and not in very positive ways. As she did, she started stroking, twisting and 'cracking' her neck, which was evidently getting tighter due to the fact that her boyfriend was sounding to me, at any rate, like the proverbial "pain in the neck," though she wasn't aware of it until I put the two together for her. Up to that point in the trip she had been pain-free. This is not a good sign re: the relationship!

WHERE DO YOU FEEL IT?

When you begin to recognize the physical signs quickly, you can do what it takes to protect yourself. We say that certain people "drain us," and this means drain important energy we could be using elsewhere to better advantage.

WHY DO YOU FEEL IT?

The next step is to ask yourself WHY you feel that way. Emotions are often complex and when you learn to sort through them, you find that some variables that contribute to them can be changed or avoided, such as being too hot, or too lonely; but that in other cases, there's nothing you can change, such as a person or situation that continually drains your energy. No matter how else you're feeling, even if you're completely rested and feeling great, you find this person or situation always has the same result. In that case, if the toll is high, and you pay the price every time, the wise choice would be to eliminate this situation or person.

In this way you can identify which situation and people bring you pleasure, and which bring you pain, and make wise decisions.

In the case of my friend in the car, she might have had that experience also if her boyfriend were currently facing a bypass or cataract surgery. You need to be able to sort out what's causing what. Is it pain about someone you love, or is someone you love causing you pain?

WHAT TO DO ABOUT IT.

This is important because being able to experience and process a negative emotion gives you more confidence in your ability to manage them. The better you understand what's going on, the more you realize you have a choice. If you study how to process a certain negative emotion, such as anger, you'll come to know your trigger-points, and your patterns of response that aren't productive. These you can always change. You can also choose which things are worth the energy it takes, and the physical stress toll it takes, to get angry.

Understanding your ability to change things gives you personal power. You always have a choice. You have the option to avoid things that make you angry, to avoid criticizing yourself when you do feel angry, to learn how to calm yourself more quickly, to change how you respond when you get angry - both internally and externally - and to eliminate people who constantly make you angry.

The more you learn about emotions in general, and yours in particular, the more options you have. You will become less puzzled in the grip of an emotion, less rigid in your responses, and better able to think and respond (or not) rather than feel and react mindlessly. This makes you a full and complex human being, not an input-opereation-output machine.

We generally acquire more emotional intelligence throughout our lifetime, but it's not a given if you aren't processing and becoming aware. If you find yourself swamped by the same things over and over, take a look at what's going on, do some reading, and work with a coach.

If a certain situation always triggers a reaction from you that gets you in trouble, understand this is something you can change. You can learn to bring about a different outcome. After all, not everyone who gets angry hits someone, gets hot under the collar, shouts, becomes passively defiant, or sings a happy tune. Of all the responses out there that are possible, you can learn to choose the best one for you at the time.

© Copyright Susan Dunn All rights reserved.
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It's great to work with somebody who wants to do things differently.

Keith Bellows
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DISCIPLINE AND LOYALTY ARE TREMENDOUS

by Charlie "Tremendous" Jones

We live in a world where these two great words -- discipline and loyalty are becoming meaningless. Does this mean that they are worthless? On the contrary, they are becoming priceless qualities because they are so hard to develop in the first place. And should you be one of the fortunate few who by God's grace has caught the vision. Your battle has just begun because the greatest battle is to keep what you've learned through these two priceless qualities.

Discipline is that great quality few people use that enables them to be constructively busy all the time. Even in discouragement and defeat, discipline will rescue you and usher you to a new place to keep constructively busy while you forget about doubt, worry and self-pity. Oh, that more in this day would realize the absolute necessity of discipline and the degree of growth and happiness to be attained from it.

Most people think that loyalty is to a thing or to a person when actually it is really to one's own self. Some think that it is to a goal or an objective, but again it is to one's own convictions. If loyalty has to be earned then it is deserved and is hardy, more than devoted emotion based on a temporary feeling. No, loyalty is the character of a person who has given himself the task before him and he will always realize that out of a loyal heart will spring all the other virtues that make life one of depth and growth.

Tremendously, Charles "T" Jones
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"No man is capable of self-improvement if he sees no other model but himself."
Conrado I. Generoso