5 words you hate, which you really should love if you want to create massive success in life

Aren’t there some normal every day words we use that when you hear them they tend to send this little shiver down your spine or bring up these thoughts that you just know feels bad?

0’m talking every day words which at some point in our lives they were just words, but now they have this meaning and anchor attached to them which kind of makes you wish they would disappear from the English language altogether. This is what happens right? At one point these words simply had a definition attached to them, but over time through our own experiences whether it be the experiences from your own life or hearing about the experiences from other people’s lives we then start to attach an emotion or a meaning to the words and they become a negative force in your life and can become potentially harmful for your future success.

I’ve earmarked 5 of these words which I know to have a major impact on peoples psyche when they hear them or read them or even just imagine them and it might be time to re-think the impact they have on you and change exactly what you associate to them. When you empower these words with another meaning altogether you will find that they are words you can fall in love with.

5 Words you hate, which you really should love if you want to create massive success in life.

What does this one bring up for you? For many it might bring up the notion of having to do something that they really don’t feel like doing and are forcing themselves to do it and there is nothing worse than feeling like we are being forced to do something even if the feeling is coming from the pressure from ourselves.

But we all know how powerful discipline actually can be for our lives.

• Discipline to interrupt your own patterns of following just the default way of life.
• Discipline to do what others won’t do. Ultimately you can have what others can’t.
• Discipline to do the things you know you should be doing when you should be doing them.
• Discipline in managing your time and priorities and to pull yourself up when you are procrastinating and to stop checking emails constantly and those types of things.
• Discipline to rest and recover when you need to.

Discipline is a beautiful word and is an absolute path to freedom and success in your life, as most people don’t practice it at all and simply do what is comfortable in their lives rather than what is necessary to create the results they actually desire.

There is one sure fire way to change your association to this word for your life. From this day on, anytime you feel like you ‘have’ to do something you don’t want to or is not comfortable for you or you feel like you are having to force yourself to do it, what that really means is that you haven’t really connected with yourself ‘why’ the action or behaviour or thought process is actually so important to you achieving something you strongly desire.

In short, you need to understand your strong ‘why’ behind what you are doing and understand how this action is going to bring you a much greater pleasure or result down the track.

For example, you might be in sales and really, really don’t want to make those sales calls that you know you have to do and perhaps you procrastinate on it or you approach it with really low energy or you only make half of them or somehow you find something else so much more ‘important’ to do. But if you stop to think about all of the reasons how making these calls are going to help you reach a specific outcome in your life in the future and write them down and have them in front of you as you are making them and if you really connect with those reasons and outcomes then you will enjoy making these calls as they become a pleasurable process.

2. Sacrifice

The word sacrifice brings up the idea of loss for most people. The feeling that they have to give something up, whether it be a possession or part of yourself or an old belief system or whatever it is and that it is going to bring pain in some way. Sure some sacrifices are painful in the moment, but some sacrifices now can truly put you on the path to gain something much greater in the future. Think of it as strategic sacrifice for a much greater reward in the future.

“Do what others won’t do now,
so in the future you can do what others can’t”

Some things to think about:

Sometimes you may need to sacrifice some friends who are holding you back in life – this sounds kind of mean to be honest but I always remember a quote by Jim Rohn who said “you become the average of the 5 people you spend most time with”. The people you choose to surround yourself with are integral for your success.

You want to be surrounded by people who help lift you up instead of pulling you down; people who won’t criticize you for going after bigger things in life, people who are playing bigger games in life themselves and who hold a higher standard for themselves also. When you are around these types of people, your success can be turbo charged and at times it may mean letting go of people in your life who are playing at a lower standard and are negative and are kind of energy vampires.

You may need to sacrifice some aspects of your identity and belief systems which if you were honest are no longer serving you in life. This can be hard to do, letting parts of ourselves and old habits go that we’ve been living as for potentially decades and having the courage to really look at ourselves at the deeper level and admitting to ourselves that there are parts of us that are less than perfect and are getting in the way of the results you want to create in life.

This is something that modern day society is addicted to. ‘I want it and I want it now’ is a very strong catch cry and in the pursuit of getting things instantly, it can often cut down your opportunity to build the future you truly desire. This could be things like going shopping all the time to buy things to make yourself feel good in the moment instead of saving that money to invest towards your financial future.

It could be reaching for that bit of chocolate or cake because you know the pleasure the taste of it gives you in the moment, knowing that indulging in it could be taking you away from your physical and health goals, but that pleasure in the moment just seems too much to resist.

Sacrifice can be a great thing if it is directed and if you have a strong enough reason why. Perhaps stop thinking of it as a sacrifice and instead think of it as an investment. You are investing your time and energy towards creating something greater in the future.

I sacrificed a number of things in my early 20’s so I can build my investment portfolio, not going out as much, not buying lots of things I would’ve liked at the time, not travelling as much as I would’ve liked, but do you think the investment was worth it? You betchya.

3. Confrontation

Many will go to lengths to avoid confrontation out of fear of being hurt, or not being liked or upsetting other people or any other myriad of potential consequences we imagine could occur. However, confrontation is going to be a part of your journey if you are going for something big in life. There are always obstacles that stand in our way at times and we need to be able to confidently move past them despite how scary they may seem to be.

Sometimes confrontation is about confronting your own fears.

Sometimes it is about confronting people who try to hold you back.

Sometimes it is about confronting others who are treating you poorly.

But what happens when you do once and for all stop getting walked over and stand up for yourself? What is the sense of confidence and pride you feel? What is the new level of respect you receive from others? What have you moved through in your life which is now allowing you to press the accelerator down on a certain area of your life?

Of course confrontation can be a messy experience if you approach it the wrong way. If your intent is to bully another person or to be vicious or rude or whatever it may be, then don’t expect a great outcome from it, or respect or anything else. Instead practice positive confrontation rather than negative confrontation. Where your intent is for resolution and if none is possible with the other person, then respecting the other person through the process while still proceeding down your path knowing that you can hold your head high and are in complete integrity within yourself.

The key to positive confrontation is about communication; communicating your desires and challenges you are facing in a clear, direct, but respectful way.

4. Failure

Well here is one of the great fears of mankind…failure. I’m certain you have been there in your life at some point; feeling like you’ve failed at something and experiencing the feelings of unworthiness or guilt or loss or shame that may come with it. Not a nice feeling at all and a feeling that everyone tends to try and avoid at all costs and therefore simply ‘play it safe’ in life. Controlling everything we can, doing what we know and doing what we feel completely competent in so we can predict the outcome and avoid even the possibility of failing at anything.

But here is something important to know, that the real results in life are created in the unknown, where we step out of our comfort zones of what we’ve always done and embark on a new venture. It is new and it is different and it puts us in a position where we have the opportunity to fail, simply because we haven’t done it before and it also puts us in the position to succeed greatly at tasks that can actually propel the results in your life forward.

Every master was once a beginner. Every black belt once wore white. Every great person once started as a novice.

Think about it, how did you learn to walk? How did you learn to ride a bike, speak, read, write? We don’t nail these things first time around, but when we are a kid we just get up and try again, but as adults we are taught that failing is a bad, bad thing – where it truly is our way of growing as people, stretching our comfort zones and becoming more than what we were previously. Failing is just part of progress and at times we need to put ourselves in the position of the unknown where we could stuff things up, but then be prepared to pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and go again.

Henry Ford, the great American Industrialist and founder of Ford motor company, once said that ‘Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently’. As an inventor, Thomas Edison made 1,000 unsuccessful attempts at inventing the light bulb. When a reporter asked, “How did it feel to fail 1,000 times?” Edison replied, “I didn’t fail 1,000 times. The light bulb was an invention with 1,000 steps”. Legend has it that Colonel Sanders heard 1009 “no’s” before he heard his first “yes” when trying to sell his now famed KFC chicken recipe. I could go on and on about similar stories of people we now know as great and as icons who failed many times over before truly succeeding. Failing is part of your road to greatness in your life, think of it as a stepping stone towards where you want to go and who you want to become.

5. Uncomfortable

Oh aren’t we creatures of habit who just love to be comfortable in life? In situations where we feel like we can control things, predict things, understand things and stay totally safe. It’s a nice feeling. But ask yourself, what tends to happen in that little zone of comfort you feel safe to exist in? The answer, more of the same things. This is where that old definition of insanity comes into play – where we do the same things day after day and expecting different results. But if you are one of those people who wants to live an extraordinary life, then you are going to have to consistently take steps outside of what you’ve always been doing and where you feel comfortable, because that is where progress is made.

Most people get this dread feeling even when they think about stepping outside of their comfort zones, thinking that it is going to be scary and be dangerous, it doesn’t have to be though. Like all success in life, it is created not by the big giant leaps outside of your comfort zone where you have to throw all caution to the wind and pack a spare pair of underwear with you just in case; success is created by the small stuff, the small seemingly insignificant actions you take on a daily basis are what makes the real difference in the quality of the life you are living now. So just think about stepping outside of your comfort zone as just another one of your life success habits.

One of the missions I give my students to take on in their lives is what I call the “do something different night”, now I don’t like to complicate things, so the name is as it suggests. Once a week, consciously plan to do something different than what you would normally do. It could be as simple as taking a different route home from work or going on a mini adventure or going to watch a foreign film or taking a dancing or singing lesson, or strapping on the roller skates potentially for the first time in decades, or going to talk to some people who might have a different perspective to life than you. It doesn’t matter what you do, what matters is that you are practicing taking small steps outside of your comfort zone on a consistent basis and it is simply becoming a part of who you are to actually take those steps. So when a bigger step comes along which is required, you just glide past it because you are well practiced at it.

People in life tend to avoid doing the tough things in life and instead settle for the easy path; now that might seem like the thing to do, but unfortunately the easy path doesn’t necessarily lead to the results you may want to be living. Your most extraordinary life is waiting for you when all of a sudden you make a decision to have the DISCIPLINE to do what you know you should do when you should do it and be willing to SACRIFICE this modern day addiction to instant gratification and do now what others won’t do. So, in the future you can do what others can’t do and once and for all CONFRONT your fears and face the fact that FAILURE is simply a stepping stone in life towards becoming who you need to be in order to create the level of results you want in life and become comfortable with being UNCOMFORTABLE in life knowing that the results you want to create exist beyond your current comfort zone.

When we come to grips with the fact that this is the path towards living your ultimate dream life, then we can learn to embrace these words and character traits as your differentiating factor setting you apart from 99.9% of the rest of the population who spend their lives talking about changing their lives but never seem to get around to. Instead go and join your fellow extraordinary brothers and sisters in the top 0.1% of the population who take life by the hands and make the most of this gift of life and commit to the only standard which is right for you, EPIC!