How canoeing can improve your communication skills?

I was canoiing with all the leaders of TA (Team Academy) for two days at Vaikkojoki organized by www.viitakko.com 

I had the best time ever. What an amazing experience! Recommend for everyone!

We had around fourteen indian canoes and survived totally eight cascades in a period of two days. 

We had two-seated canoes. One sat in the front and other at the back (naturally). Even the cascades weren´t so tough (level 1 mostly), we still needed a lot of communication with another companion in the canoe to survive all the cascades without getting wet and swallowed by the river. 

We realized that canooing was a great metaphor for communcation in organizations. If we wanted to keep our canoe up, we had to communicate a lot especially in the cascades. Person sitting in the front saw better all the rocks ahead and person behind had the best ability on guiding canoes direction. Everything had to happen fast and no mistakes were allowed because we didn´t want to crash.

In real life there´s a lot of "stones" ahead you, but through good and frequent communication you can go around any obstacles together and without crashing. It´s like marketing department communicating all the little signals they´re getting from the field to their leader who then decides to move the course and choose the right direction. 

/Davis

Do not give discounts for your clients!

Unlike the most of the salesmen think, there´s rarely any good outcome in giving discounts for clients.

Why?

1. When you´re giving discounts, your clients can never be sure if they got the best possible price.

2. When you give discount once, it is very likely that your customers will bargain with you for prices till your retirement and you don´t want that, do you?

3. Discounts attract customers that usually are not the most profitable in the long run.

4. Reckless discounts will bury your company faster than you could imagine.

5. People associate low price with low quality.

In a perspective of a buying client: Do I really think that a plumber will be really motivated to fix my pipes with the half of the price he usually fixes pipes? I don´t think so.

/Davis

How to set up goals effectively?

With our goals we design our future. Your life isn´t random unless you let it to be. You must take control of your destiny by designing your future. You must plan your goals at least two times a year, but I suggest four!

1. STEP: Write down all goals you want to achieve within 20 years: 1. personal development goals (relationships, health, growth ect.), 2. material goals, 3. economic goals. You have one minute for each area and write as many goals as you can in this time.

2. STEP: When you´ve wrote down goals in all three areas then mark after each goal, in how many years you´ve committed to achieve this specific goal: 1, 5, 10, 15, or 20.

3. STEP: Now circle the three most important goals in all three areas that you´ve committed to achieve in one year or less: personal development, material and economic. So, you should have nine goals for upcoming year. Are your goals compelling? If not then come up with new, more stirring goals.

4. STEP: Write down after each goal, WHY you must absolutely accomplish this goal. Remember: PURPOSE IS STRONGER THAN OUTCOME! You have to know why you want this specific goals: how it will make me feel.

5. STEP: Work on strategy and take the first step!

/Davis

How to change your mental state now!

Did u know you can change how you feel in a heartbeat, no matter what!

Is it important to take control of your state? You bet! It affects your whole life... finances, relationships, career, health ect. 

To take complete control of your state you must be aware of the three elements which affects your state!

FIRST: Physiology: How do depressed people look like? How do you know? Is their shoulders down or up? Is their voice loud or quiet? Do they speak fast or slow? Are they breathing deep or shallow? You see, our physiology affects our biochemistry. In order to feel in specific way, we need to use our body in specific way. Our physical body is sending signals to our brains constantly about how we should feel. Great thing is that we can "manipulate" our brain..  Now try this: Stand up straight and push your shoulders back, breath deep and lift your chin up towards ceiling and put a big big smile on your face and hold it for 30 sec. Now at the same time try to feel depressed without changing anything! Can you do it? Why not? Because your physical body is sending certain message to your brain about how you should feel right now and that state is happy and certain according to your body.

SECONDLY: Language: What kind of language I´m using in my head? What do I say to myself? Do the language I use support me or disempower me? "Im not enough" or "She cannot be attracted to me" or "I don´t have enough money".. this kind of language puts us in very uncertain and sad even depressed state and that´s why we often sabotage our possibilities to success in any area in life. This has nothing to do with reality and how things really are. We can choose to empower ourselves by using language like "How can I attract this specific girl" or "I don´t have the money now, but how could I get it?". Using right questions we can literally change our lives.

THIRDLY: Focus: What do you focus on, absolutely determine how you are feeling. This should be obvious for everyone. We can choose to focus for example on all great things that has happened to us today or we can focus on negative things like "Im so sweaty, neighbour is a prick, I didn´t like the food I ate at the restaurant, I´m too fat, I don´t like my shoes, WHY NOBODY LIKES ME???????????" Hmmm.. I wonder why :)

So these three elements determine how you feel. Very simple way to change our feelings.. still most of the people change their states my using drugs, drinking alcohol or smoking cigarettes. It´s up to you are you in control of your life or are you controlled by your circumstances around you :)

/Davis

How to literally change anything in within a few hours!

I´ve been listening Tony Robbins Personal Power II - program for almost a two weeks now. I have learned to change anything in a matter of a hours and I want to share the same knowledge with you today so you can take first step in making your life better.

Robbins has consulted the top psychiatrists and therapists in the world and has discovered why all of the different types of therapies work some of the time and what are the key elements when therapies are successful. So he combined the major things that play major role in a change of human behaviour.

1. STEP: Get leverage! You need enough and strong reasons WHY a change for you is a must right now! If you don´t make it must, you won´t do anything. So write down at least 10 reasons what it will cost you not to change your actions in a long run! What it will cost you financially, in a relationships, in health?

2 STEP: Interrupt your limiting pattern! This may feel a bit strange for most of the people, but it´s essential. When you´ve got enough leverage on whatever it is you´ve chosen to change, you have to ask yourself: "what kind of feelings did I got from doing this specific (unwanted) thing previously?" Immediately when you´re going back to this old pattern (it can be that your shoulders drop and you start to feel sad or whatever it is to you), do something unexpected like slap yourself to your cheek. Then repeat this... start feeling sad and dissatisfied and then slap your cheek! You may be thinking "why the heck I have to do this??". Answer is that when you interrupt your old patterns enough times, your brain can´t find a way/link to the old association and your behaviour starts to change.

3 STEP: Create new, empowering behaviour! Link massive amount of pleasure and great feeling to new behaviour. Write down 10 things what you will achieve by this new empowering action.

Example case:

1. STEP: I want to stop drinking alcohol

WHY?

1. My energy level is low

2. It costs lot of money

3. I have massive hang overs next morning

4. If I continue this way then it may cost my relationships

5. When I´m drunk I lose my social skills

ECT......

2. STEP: I start to think about drinking and I get in that "drinking- mode". Immediately i starting to clap and i get off the mode. I start to think again about drinking and then start again to clap my hands so I repeat this as long as it gets hard to associate any good feelings to drinking.

3. STEP: I make a list of all great things that not using alcohol will give me

1. I will be more social

2. No more hang overs

3. More money

ECT..

/Davis

How to achieve mastery?

I don´t know yet!! I found though simple and pretty logical formula for achieving mastery in any area. Wanna know what it is? It´s simple!! (I just don´t know if it´s as easy to execute ;) )

1. You have to model someone who is outstanding and already achieved what you want.

2. You must learn by total immersion. Emphatise in the situation as you model someone successful.

3. Continuous repetition.

So, let´s try this together and we´ll see if we get results out of this.

REMEMBER: 80% of success is psychology and just 20% mechanics (how to)!!

/Davis

Few tips to think about

I want to share two essential tips with you for your business.

"Listen to the rhetoric of corporate value: Companies own customers, control distribution, make exclusi

ve deals, lock out competitors, keep trade secrets. The internet explodes all those points of control."

1.Think distributed: Every click you make on the internet it is a connection, and with every connection a network is born or grows stronger. That´s what Google does. Google sends traffic to millions sites with it´s ads and the more money it makes, the more money makes also the owners of the sites. You cannot expect for clients to come to you. You have to go there where your clients are. "Companies should view themselves: on the outside, asking to come in."

2. Consider being a platform: Google has many different platforms like google maps, google analytics, youtube for videos, blogger ect. Platform enables users to create businesses, communities, products and of course networks. Platforms gives a huge traffic to your sites. In a Googles case, tens of millions of users a month. For example Facebook did not charge developers of applications nor did it take a cut of the advertising revenue developers earned. It was Facebook´s interest to help these developers succeed because they helped the company to grow in value.

/Davis

How social pressure can affect on us?

Why do we fall in front of social pressure? You maybe know that it would be better to just stay home and to do some reading or whatever it is you want to do, but your friends persuade you to go nuts with them by drinking a lot of beer... why is that? I wanted to open up this for myself.

There is most definitely a plenty of reasons, but I´ve come up with one:

First i thought that it´s just because it´s nice to go with the guys and have some fun. (yeah, it´s possible, but why to drink?) What happens when you tell your friends that you´re not partying (drinking) with them? They call you boring and asks "what´s wrong with you?" and that´s most likely to turn us around and go get wasted with them. I most definitely think it´s fear of not being accepted by them if you´re bailing out of the party. You believe that they will start to ignore you because of that and you will lose somekind of connection with them and feel alone.



Nonsense! Actually you will proof your strength over them. They will most likely appreciate it, if not.. change your friends.

/Davis

Are you right or just afraid?

Unwillingness to give up about some obsession is based on fear that there won´t be anything left.
What do i mean by this?

Most of the people hold on to their beliefs because sticking to the belief is guarding them from loosing base of everything.


This is mostly the reason when we´re arguing about some issue and not letting go of our opinion.

"Nobody is afraid of the unknown. What you really fear is loss of the known." -A. DeMello

/Davis

Do i have to concentrate on my strengths or weaknesses?

We attempt in every possible way to improve our weaknesses, when at the very same moment we forget about our strengths.

When we´re complying to these myths, improving our weaknesses we get average results. Excellence is possible only when attention is focused on our strengths.



Have you heard about Beckhams left-right leg dilemma? Do you want to improve your better leg to be excellent or even the best or "worse" leg to be just good or great so totally you´re "okey"?

/Davis