Straight Up Mindset

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

I Can Series: Week 1 - Face Your Fears

Don't Let the Things You Cant Do Overshadow The Things You Can.

Welcome to the November edition of the Straight Up Mindset Blog. This months series is the I Can Series. Week One's topic is called Face Your Fears.

Fear is the number one killer of dreams. Fear of not meeting expectations, fear of failure and even fear of Success. The fear of success is just as big as the fear of failure. Some feel that succeeding is the overwhelming feeling of responsibility and the high standards that come with it can makes a person feel uncomfortable. Don't allow these feelings to hold you back from your greatness. Don't minimize your greatness because of fear. I say that because I have lived through it. You've heard me say this before, I have missed out on a lot of opportunities because I had a very deep rooted fear of failure.

I was not willing to face my fears and rise to the challenge. My mindset was "What if it doesn't work!?" instead of saying "What if it does work?" A lot of times the path to your Destiny is laid out in front of you, but you have to have the courage to take that first step. Be bold enough to take the challenges head on and not give up. Its not easy and it will never get easier but, you will get stronger. You will be able to endure more and push farther. When you reach the end, you will not be the same person as when you started. From this day forward do not let fear keep you tied down. Free yourself by taking that leap of faith and go after whatever it is you want. If it doesn't work out so what, at the end of it all at least you wont look back on your life and say to yourself "What If".

Remember, everything you ever dreamed of being, everything you ever wanted to do and be is right there in front of you. You have to go out there and take it, no one is going to hand you anything. Fear is a mindset just like anything else. You have the ability to control your mindset and dictate your outcome. Don't let fear keep you from achieving your dreams anymore. Stand tall and conquer whatever it is that has been holding you back. This is your day and your time, seize this moment as it can be the turning point that takes your life to another level.

Straight Up!!

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Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Improvement Series: Week 4 - 30 Day Challenge

"Improvement Begins With I."
-Arnold H. Glasgow

Welcome to the Straight Up Mindset Blog!!

What's up Straight Up Nation! Thank you for returning to the blog. This week we are finishing the Improvement Series. If you want to improve anything in your life, it has to start with you first. You must work from the inside out in order for any change to be permanent.

Week 1 the topic was Self Awareness. Having self-awareness is key when trying to improve everyday. It's having the understanding of your strengths, weakness and your overall personality. It allows you to understand other people and how they look at you, how you react and your attitude in that particular moment. Its a major component in self-control of your emotions and your ability to evaluate certain situations.

Week 2 we talked about Breaking Bad Habits. This topic is something that we all have difficulties with. Even the best out there still deal with certain habits that are tough to break. They also understand these habits need to be broken if they are hindering you from reaching your goals.
Self-Awareness is key to finding these bad habits and starting the process in changing them.

Week 3 the discussion was about being Changing Your Mindset. This is the most over looked area when it comes to self improvement. Whether a person wants to improve their health, career, relationships....etc, you have to change your mind first. If you want to make a change you got to start with yourself. You heard us say this on our last 30 Day Challenge Video, "You Win Some, You Learn Some". Meaning you will fail but the lessons that you get out of those failures will make you a stronger and wiser person.

This week and as we do at the end of every series, we challenge you to take all we discussed in the previous weeks and start applying them to your life. We don't want you to read the blogs and just feel motivated. Motivation is not an impulse of the body or a personality trait. Motivation is
an intention and a will of a mind that wants more than to just be average. If you apply what we give you then you start to change your mindset. When your mindset changes then you start to see your life change for the better

Straight Up!!

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Monday, October 23, 2017

Improvement Series: Week 2 - Breaking Bad Habits

"Chains Of Habits Are Too Light To Be Felt Until They Are Too Heavy To Be Broken"

-Warren Buffet

Welcome to the October edition of the Straight Up Mindset Blog. This months series is the Improvement Series. Last weeks topic was over Self-Awareness. This week we will be talking about Breaking Bad Habits

This topic is something that we all have difficulties with. Even the best out there still deal with certain habits that are tough to break. They also understand these habits need to be broken if they are hindering you from reaching your goals. Everyone's habits are different, some are very negative when it comes to resolving issues. Others like to avoid issues and challenges all together. Myself for example, I have a bad habit of procrastinating and then scramble to get things done in the llth hr. Now I am not proud of that, but it is something that I am constantly working on everyday. This bad habit of mine has prevented me from taking advantage of a lot of great opportunities. Instead of doing what`s needed to be done, I was not prepared when an opportunity presented itself.

Understand that breaking bad habits is not an easy task. As mentioned in our previous blog, you have to be aware of these bad habits. Self-Awareness is key to finding these bad habits and starting the process in changing them. You have to be honest with yourself. Many times we don't want to admit we have an issue in the first place. The first and biggest step is to realize and admit what ever bad habits you have is a big problem. Once you've done that you are already half way there. The next step is to come up with a plan on how you are going to break this habit. For instance, one of the things I made sure to do to break my habit of procrastinating was to be conscious when that feeling came up. Once I recognized that feeling, I acknowledge it, had a very positive and motivational internal conversation with myself. Then I proceeded to doing and accomplishing my task at hand.

Another key component to breaking and building better habits is consistency. Its not something that is just going to work after one try. Think about it, you developed these habits over time and repetitive execution. It becomes apart of your daily life and routine. It is now second nature to you, which is why you don't even realize you are doing it. In order to break that cycle and develop a new routine you have to do it consistently. This is why when we present the 30 Day Challenge to you guys we give you 30 days to apply the principles we provide in the blogs. You've heard us say it, “It takes 21 days to build a habit”, we give you 30.

Listen, its going to be an uphill battle, you are going to have successes and failures in this process. Just remember to keep pressing forward, be consistent and eventually you will break those bad habits and probably won’t even realize it because it will then have become second nature to you.

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Wednesday, October 18, 2017

Improvement Series: Week 3 - Changing Your Mindset

Whether You Think You Can Or You Cant, You're Right

-Henry Ford

Welcome to the October edition of the Straight Up Mindset Blog. This months series is the Improvement Series. Week one's topic was over Self-Awareness. Week two we talked about Breaking Bad Habits. This weeks topic is over Changing Your Mindset

This is the most over looked area when it comes to self improvement. Whether a person wants to improve their health, career, relationships....etc. Everyone seems to start on the outer stuff and neglect their mindset. The body does what the mind tells it to do, this applies to all areas in life. The quote above by Henry Ford is so true. However you look at a situation good or bad, what you think is what the outcome will be. It's that simple and it comes down to whether or not you believe in your abilities.

I was listening to a Michael Jackson song "Man In The Mirror" and to be honest I have never really paid attention to the lyrics until one day in my car I happen to catch what he was saying. The main part of the chorus is "I'm starting with the Man In The Mirror. I'm asking him to change his ways. If you want to make the world a better place, take a look at yourself and make that change." I have been listening to that song for years and for some reason those lyrics are just now getting to me. The point of the song is if you want to make a change in the first place you need to start with yourself. You have to completely reprogram your mind to start thinking in a different way. A perfect example is when I was younger I didn't like the thought of change and having to adapt to whatever the situation required. I liked to stay in my little bubble and just be safe and comfortable with the known. Being uncomfortable and not knowing what's up ahead scared me down to the bone.

I even contemplated on quitting a job because they were going to promote me and I didn't think I would be able to do the job and succeed. Can you believe that?? Who have you ever heard quitting a job because they were scared of success? I doubt many if at all any, but that was my mindset at the time. So scared of change, I found a million and one excuses of why I shouldn't take it. I approached a lot of situations like this because my mindset was in a bad place. It was at the point I knew I needed to do something about it and I did. What I did was I flipped the situation around and instead of thinking what if I fail, What if I completely just fall on my face and let everyone down. I started to ask myself, What if I succeed? What if I knocked this thing out of the park and take the bull by the horns. Now my whole outlook changed, my demeanor changed, my approach changed and the result was I did succeed.

I started to take that approach towards everything I came face to face with. I'm not saying that I won every single battle. Trust me I have the scars to prove that but the percentage of the battles that I did win increased and my progressions always moved upwards. All it took was for me to think differently and approach things differently. I didn't always know what I was doing, I didn't always have it together. Many times I'm scared out of my mind and don't have a clue as to how I'm going to make it through but eventually I figure it out and majority of the time it works out.

So to make a long story short just remember, "If you want to make a change you got to start with yourself." You have to have a different mindset. You will not always have the answers upfront, you wont always win every challenge but you will prevail. You have to believe you can and the outcome will work in your favor. You heard us say this on our last 30 Day Challenge Video, "You Win Some, You Learn Some". Meaning you will fail but the lessons that you get out of those failures will make you a stronger and wiser person.

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Wednesday, October 4, 2017

Improvement Series: Week 1 - Self-Awareness

"Being Self-Aware Is Not The Absence Of Mistakes, But The Ability To Learn And Correct Them"

-Daniel Chidiac

Welcome to the October edition of the Straight Up Mindset Blog. This months series is the Improvement Series. Week One's topic is called Self-Awareness.

Having self-awareness is key when trying to improve everyday. It's having the understanding of your strengths, weakness and your overall personality. It allows you to understand other people and how they look at you, how you react and your attitude in that particular moment. Its a major component in self-control of your emotions and your ability to evaluate certain situations.

Self Awareness allows you to stay true to your internal values and not make harsh decisions, which we are all guilty of doing when things get chaotic or change in an instant. You might have also heard the term "Emotional Intelligence" used in its place. Having self-awareness or emotional intelligence gives you the ability to understand and accept the things that makes us human. This means that when you make a mistake or miss on a opportunity instead of getting down and beating yourself up about it, you are able to understand what happened. Ask yourself, "why you made that choice," Correcting your mistakes and learning from them is what growth is about and is the very essence of how you grow mentally and emotionally.

In order to get past certain obstacles in life you have to be extremely honest with yourself and figure out why you are not getting to where you want to be. Whether its because you are bad with money, you procrastinate, or if you like to displace anger on someone else for your actions. Whatever your obstacle is for you, truly accept that it's problem and address it the right way. The more you know about yourself, the better you will get at adapting to the ups and downs and constant changes of life.

At the end of the day, you can go do a million conferences and mimic your routine after the most successful people out there, but none of that matters if you don't deeply understand yourself and know how you tick. Knowing this will allow you properly apply them to your life. So, before you move forward with trying to fix the external issues you're facing, take a look inside of yourself and learn everything about you. So that moving forward, you will have a better understanding of how you got yourself in your current situation. Make the best decisions to correct it and avoid making the wrong choice in the first place.

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Wednesday, September 27, 2017

Execute Series: Week 4 - 30 Day Challenge!!

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Execute Series: Week 3 - Execute

"I Dream, I Test My Dreams Against My Beliefs, I Take Risks, And I Execute My Vision To Make Those Dreams Come True"

-Walt Disney

Welcome back everyone to the September edition of the Straight Up Mindset Blog. This month’s series is Execute. The first week we talked about "Know What You Want". Second weeks topic was called "Write It Down". This weeks topic will be over "Execute"

This is it, this is what it all comes down to. As mentioned in the first weeks blog, you have given some serious thought into what it is you really want in life. You've talked about it, you've visualized it and now you are absolutely certain what it is you are after. Next step, we asked you to take that information and write it all down. Write it down anywhere, a notepad, diary, in your phone or a sheet of paper. Where ever you can write it down, go ahead and put it all there. Remember, when you write it down the percentage of achieving those goals increases.

Now here comes the crucial part. It's time to take those plans, ideas, goals and make them come to life. IT'S TIME TO EXECUTE!! In order for any plan or idea to work you must execute those plans. The one area that a lot of us fail in is the execution. We feel that because we did everything prior, all the other stuff should just magically happen. No, you need to follow through all the way to the end and that means putting things into action and making moves. Example: You want to lose weight, ok, you have planned out your diet. You have scheduled your time for your workouts and the only thing left to do is to just do it. No more talking, no more fantasizing, WORK!

What are you waiting for?? Don't let all that time and effort you put into planning go to waste. You are right there. All you have to do is just execute, its that simple. People tend to not reach their goals because they fear when they try to execute that they will fail. Let me tell you something and I want you to pay close attention to what I'm about to say. I guarantee you are going to fail, there is a high probability that failure is going to happen to you and you will have to start all over. Here is the kicker though, Its OK. Failure is part of the process, its what builds you up and makes you better. You have heard us say this many, many times before. Do you think every successful person that you look up to and admire hit success on the first try every time? Absolutely not, they failed over and over and over. What they got out of it each time was how to do it better and then boom, they hit their mark. Its part of the process and it takes time. The more you do it, the better you get at executing and your success rate increases each time.

We can't stress this enough, Execute, Execute, Execute! Its very important that you let this one marinate in your brain for a while. Without the work, without the execution, all those things you thought about, talked about and wrote down, will only be thoughts. Words with no weight and letters on a piece of paper

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