It is important that you develop the habit of taking weekends away with your spouse, and vacations away with your family. The key is to book the vacations in
advance and pay for them on a non-refundable basis. Many people wait until very
close to the date before they begin thinking about booking a vacation. At that time,
it is very easy to put it off or delay it because of pressing responsibilities. Often, it
is hard to find a place to go to. It becomes very easy not to go at all.
But if you buy and pay for a vacation, including airfares, hotels, rental cars, and
everything else, in advance, you will almost always take that vacation.
Our family has been going to Hawaii in the winter every year for 18 years. We
have never missed a vacation. One of the reasons for this is that the Hawaiian
resorts are so popular that you have to pay for your vacation in full by April if you
want it to be confirmed for December. This pre-payment serves as a wonderful
discipline and assures that we never miss a family vacation together. These family
vacations together have been some of the richest and most rewarding times of our
lives.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
Even in dealing with scientific subjects, which have not a quality of appeal to high emotion, the same operation appears. Many of the greatest discoveries in science have come in moments of inspiration, when their authors have thought long and deeply on the subject and then given up the effort as a failure, at least for the time being.
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The rule is that spouses should spend at least one full hour each day talking
together about subjects that have nothing to do with their work or business. If you
are not careful, you will slip into the habit of talking about your work as soon as
you get home. Once you begin, like starting an engine, you will end up talking about your work throughout the entire evening. As a result, there will never be any talk about the family or other matters.
Children need at least 10 minutes of face-to-face contact with their parents each
day. Take the time to sit and talk with them. Ask them questions and practice your
listening skills. Children have a deep need to communicate with their parents, but
they will only do this if they feel their parents are open to them, and interested in
hearing what they have to say. This is one of your prime jobs, and a habit you need
to develop.
Develop the habit of making time every day with the important people in your life,
preferably one to one, or on the telephone if necessary. The biggest regret people
have at the end of their lives is that they did not spend enough time with their
children when they were young, or with their spouses when they were working.
Don’t let this happen to you.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
Work all the time you work. Start earlier, put your head down and work the entire
time throughout the day. If you are spending more than 10% of your time
interacting with your coworkers, it is too much. Keep repeating to yourself, “Back
to work! Back to work! Back to work!”
When you go home, resolve to be there with your family 100% of the time. The
most important part of personal relationships is face-to-face contact and communication. Nothing can replace this. Your goal should be to increase the
amount of face-to-face communication time you have with your spouse and
children each day. This will improve your family life more than anything else you
can do, and it doesn’t cost a cent.
When you go home at night, resist the temptation to turn on the television and fight
for the remote control. Instead, leave things off. Leave the television off, Leave the
radio off. Leave the computer off. Turn off your cell phone and your pager.
Instead, spend the first hour when you get home building the bridges of
communication between yourself and the most important people in your life.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
To be truly happy, you must make a habit of maintaining balance between your
work and your personal life. The first step in achieving this balance is for you to
resolve to “work all the time you work.” The reason that most people feel that they
are under so much pressure from their work is because they waste most of the
working day. But unfortunately, even if you waste time, the work does not go away. It still has to be done sometime, and often it has to go home and get done in the evenings and on the weekends.
There is the story of the little girl who goes to her mother and says, “Mommy, why
is it that daddy brings a briefcase full of work home every night and never spends
time with the family anymore?”
The mother tries to explain. “Honey, you have to understand. Daddy can’t get all
of his work done at work, so he has to bring it home in the evenings.”
The little girl looks up at her mother and says, “If he can’t get all his work done,
why don’t they put him in a slower class?”
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
The fourth person you have to forgive is yourself. It is absolutely amazing how
many people are still sitting in negative judgment on themselves because of some
wicked, senseless, brainless, foolish or cruel thing they did in the past.
The fact is that your life is a continuous process of growth and evolution. When you did something in the past that you now disapprove of, you were a different person. You are not the person you are today. You are a new person with greater wisdom and experience who would never think of doing what you might have done when you were younger. Let yourself off the hook. Forgive yourself and let yourself go.
There is nothing wrong with making a mistake, or hundreds of mistakes, as you
grow and mature. It is virtually inevitable. But it is ridiculous for you not to forgive
yourself for those mistakes and get on with the rest of your life.
Set Everyone Free
The wonderful thing about the habit of forgiveness is that it sets you free. It also
sets everyone that you forgive free as well. Forgiveness is one of the most uplifting
and liberating habits that you can develop in all human relationships.
Your goal is to reach the point where there is not a single person or event in your
life toward which you feel any anger or resentment. Whenever you think of a person that may have hurt you, you immediately cancel the thought by saying, “God bless him/her; I forgive him/her for everything.” And then get your mind busy with what you want, and start thinking about how the specific actions you can take to achieve it. Get so busy working toward the things that are important to you that you don’t have time to think or worry about the things that happened in the past that you cannot change in any case.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
The second person you have to forgive is any individual from a previous relationship, especially a romantic relationship, or a bad marriage, that you still
feel angry about.
Begin by accepting that you were at least 50% responsible for what happened. You
got yourself into the situation and you kept yourself in it, long after you began to
feel unhappy. Make a decision today to forgive the other person, no matter what he
or she did or said, and just let it go. Think about who you are, what you want and
where you want to go in the future, and let the past go. “When you turn toward the
sun, the shadows fall behind you.”
It takes two people to keep someone in jail, the prisoner and the jailer. When you
let the “prisoner” out of the mental jail you have been holding him or her in, you
set yourself free as well. As Buddy Hackett, the humorist, once said, “I never hold
grudges; while you’re holding grudges, they’re out dancing!”
Issue A Blanket Amnesty
The third person you have to forgive is everyone else who has ever hurt you in any
way. Forgive your siblings and people from your childhood. Forgive your teachers
and early relationships, your bad bosses and dishonest business partners. Sweep
them all together and issue a “blanket amnesty.” Forgive every person who has
ever caused you any unhappiness in the past. Resolve today to let them go forever.
Like dropping a rock into a bottomless pit, open your hand and let those negative
experiences disappear. Don’t talk about them, think about them or review them
ever again. As far as you are concerned, they are dead issues.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
Some years ago, I bought a new Mercedes and left it with my wife when I went off
on a business trip. When I called home the following day, she asked, “Are you
sitting down? I have something I have to tell you.” (By the way, these are not
words that you want to hear on the phone when you are away.)
I said, “Yes, I’m sitting down, go ahead.”
She said “I was taking the children to school this morning and one of them left the
door open when he got into the back seat. I backed out and hit the garage with your
door and smashed it up.”
I asked her, “Are you all right? Are the children all right?”
She said, “Yes, we are all fine. The car wasn’t moving that fast. But it is going to
cost almost $2000 to fix the door.” I said, “Well, that’s too bad, but life goes on.”
She said, “Aren’t you mad?” I said, “Did you do it on purpose?” She said, “Of course not.” “Well then,” I said. “Why should I be mad? Wives are more important than cars or back doors.”
I never commented, criticized or complained about the accident again. As far as I
was concerned, it was a fact. It was a part of the past and could not be changed. It
was not worth a single moment of negative emotion or concern. The point is this: things that have happened in your past are facts that cannot be changed. The desire to have something in your past be different than it actually was is a major reason for negative emotions, anger, resentment and blame. The cure for these is for you to develop the habit of forgiveness, and to let go of every negative emotion and experience that has ever happened to you.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
The second key to effective listening is for you to develop the habit of pausing
before replying. Instead of jumping in with your own comments when the other
person takes a breath, pause for three to five seconds, or even longer. Allow a
silence in the conversation. This habit of pausing before speaking has three
advantages.
First, you avoid the possibility of interrupting the other person if he is just stopping
to gather his thoughts before continuing.
Second, when you pause, you demonstrate clearly to the other person that what he
has just said is important and you are giving it careful consideration before
replying. On the other hand, where the listener immediately jumps in with his own
comment or observation, it is clear that he was not really listening at all. He was
just waiting for his chance to talk.
Third, and most important, when you pause after a person finishes speaking, you
actually hear them at a deeper level of mind. Their words, like water soaking into
the earth, soak deeper into your mind and you actually understand what they really
mean with greater clarity.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
There are four keys to effective listening. You can read every book and article,
listen to every audio program and take every course on the subject, but they will all
boil down to the four keys behaviors of an excellent listener. Here they are:
First, listen attentively. Lean forward. Listen without interruptions. Focus intently
on the mouth and eyes of the person who is speaking. Imagine that your eyes are
sunlamps and you want to give the other person’s face a tan.
It has been said that, “Rapt attention is the highest form of flattery.” Whenever a
person is intensely listened to by another, their self-esteem goes up. They feel more important and more valuable. They feel happy inside. As a result, they feel better toward the person who is making them feel this way by listening to them so
attentively.
One of the ways to listen more attentively is to eliminate all distractions when a
person wants to talk to you. If you are in your office, put down all paper, have your
secretary hold your calls and eliminate all distractions. If possible, move away
from your desk and sit with the person where you can face them directly with no
interruptions or anything in the way.
If you are at home and a member of your family wants to talk to you, make a habit of turning off the television, folding up the newspaper and putting aside anything that could draw your attention away while the other person is speaking. Turn and face them directly. Lean forward. Imagine that listening to this person is the most important thing that you could possibly do all day long. Eventually this will
become a habit.
Taken from : Million Dollar Habits
