“Be More & Achieve More!”

Hi,

Every bit of planning, prioritizing, and organizing comes down to this simple concept.

Every great achievement of humankind has usually been preceded by a long period of hard, concentrated work until the job was complete.  Your ability to select your most important task, to begin it, and then to concentrate on it until it is finished is the key to high levels of performance and personal productivity.

By concentrating on your most important task, you can reduce the time required to complete it by 50% or more.

It has been estimated that the tendency to start and stop a task - to pick it up, put it down, and come back to it - can increase the time necessary to complete the task by as much as 500%.  This is not productive!

But when you prepare thoroughly and then begin, refusing to stop or turn aside until the job is done, you develop energy, enthusiasm, and motivation.  You get better and better and more productive.  You work faster and more effectively.

The starting point of great success and achievement has always been the same. It is for you to dream big dreams. There is nothing more important, and nothing that works faster than for you to cast off your own limitations than for you to begin dreaming and fantasizing about the wonderful things that you can become, have, and do.

As a wise man once said, “You must dream big dreams, for only big dreams have the power to move the minds of men.” When you begin to dream big dreams, your levels of self-esteem and self-confidence will go up immediately. You will feel more powerful about yourself and your ability to deal with what happens to you. The reason so many people accomplish so little is because they never allow themselves to lean back and imagine the kind of life that is possible for them.

Theory of Constraints

A powerful principle that you can use to dream big dreams and live without limits is contained in what Elihu Goldratt calls the “Theory of Constraints.” This is one of the greatest breakthroughs in modern thinking. What Goldratt has found is that in every process, in accomplishing any goal, there is a bottleneck or choke cord that serves as a constraint on the process. This constraint then sets the speed at which you achieve any particular goal.

What Goldratt found is that if you concentrate all of your creative energies and attention on alleviating the constraint, you can speed up the process faster than by doing any other single thing.

Let me give you an example. Let us say that you want to double your income. What is the critical constraint or the limiting factor that holds you back? Well, you know that your income is a direct reward for the quality and quantity of the services you render to your world. Whatever field you are in, if you want to double your income, you simply have to double the quality and quantity of what you do for that income. Or you have to change activities and occupations so that what you are doing is worth twice as much. But you must always ask yourself, “What is the critical constraint that holds me back or sets the speed on how fast I double my income?”

The 80/20 Rule in Action

A famous author and speaker tell me that: “A friend of mine is one of the highest-paid commission professionals in the United States. One of his goals was to double his income over the next three to five years. He applied the 80/20 rule to his client base. He found that 20 percent of his clients contributed 80 percent of his profits, and that the amount of time spent on a high-profit client was pretty much the same amount of time spent on a low-profit client. In other words, he was dividing his time equally over the number of tasks that he does while only 20 percent of those items contributes 80 percent of his results.

So he drew a line on his list of clients under those who represented the top 20 percent and then called in other professionals in his industry and very carefully, politely, and strategically handed off the 80 percent of his clients that only represented 20 percent of his business. He then put together a profile of his top clients and began looking in the marketplace exclusively for the type of client who fit the profile; in other words, one who could become a major profit contributor to his organization, and whom he in turn could serve with the level of excellence that his clients were accustomed to. And instead of doubling his income in three to five years, he doubled it in the first year!”

What Are Your Constraints?

So what is holding you back? Is it your level of education or skill? Is it your current occupation or job? Is it your current environment or level of health? Is it the situations that you are in today? What is setting the speed for you achieving your goal?

Remember, whatever you have learned, you can unlearn. Whatever situation you have gotten yourself into, you can probably get yourself out of. If your real goal is to dream big dreams and to live without limits, you can set this as your standard and compare everything that you do against it.

Three Keys

The three keys to living without limits have always been the same. They are clarity, competence, and concentration.

#1: Clarity

Clarity means that you are absolutely clear about who you are, what you want, and where you’re going. You write down your goals and you make plans to accomplish them. You set very careful priorities and you do something every day to move you toward your goals. And the more progress you make toward accomplishing things that are important to you, the greater self-confidence and self-belief you have, and the more convinced you become that there are no limits on what you can achieve.

# 2: Competence

Competence means that you begin to become very, very good in the key result areas of your chosen field. You apply the 80/20 rule to everything you do and you focus on becoming outstanding in the 20 percent of tasks that contribute to 80 percent of your results. You dedicate yourself to continuous learning. You never stop growing. You realize that excellence is a moving target. And you commit yourself to doing something every day that enables you to become better and better at doing the most important things in your field.

# 3: Concentration

Concentration is having the self-discipline to force yourself to concentrate in a single-minded way on one thing, the most important thing, and stay with it until it’s complete.

The two key words for success have always been focus and concentration.

Focus is knowing exactly what you want to be, have, and do. Concentration is persevering, without diversion or distraction, in a straight line toward accomplishing the things that can make a real difference in your life.

When you allow yourself to begin to dream big dreams, creatively abandon the activities that are taking up too much of your time, and focus your inward energies on alleviating your main constraints, you start to feel an incredible sense of power and confidence. As you focus on doing what you love to do and becoming excellent in those few areas that can make a real difference in your life, you begin to think in terms of possibilities rather than impossibilities, and you move ever closer toward the realisation of your full potential.

For Success & Contentment,
Asad Khan

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Hi there,

The Magic of Relationships seminar is coming up on the 18th December. To get us started, allow me to share with you some ideas that will help foster better understandings towards one another.

Men are Like Rubber Bands:

Which means they like to pull away, they like to stretch out to create distance, but then they have to return - often springing back. Its the male intimacy cycle that involves getting close, pulling away, and then getting close again. Women don’t tend to realise this rhythm and feel distressed when the deep romance surrounding a relationship abruptly ends and when the man wishes to focus on something else. It’s a common misinterpretation because women tend to pull away for different reasons: when she doesn’t trust him to understand her feelings, when she has been hurt and fears being hurt again, or when he has done something wrong and disappointed her.

Of course a man can pull away for the same reasons, but he will also pull away even if the lady has done nothing wrong. It could purely be a male thing - the need to have space - even though he loves and trusts her. But like the stretched rubber band, he’ll come back. This need for space is like the man going into his cave: its a place of solitude, independence and autonomy. He’ll soon feel the need to spring back and automatically pick up the intimacy at whatever levels required, even just before he pulled away, without the having to go through a period of getting reacquainted again.

If properly understood, this male intimacy cycle enriches a relationship, but can cause havoc when misread and misjudged, or even mis-timed. Usually, the man can give and take less readily than the woman, so the women thinks that her man is not reciprocating her love. Women naturally give and take more readily and can easily express their sentiments. But when they don’t see this happening with the man, they misjudge him and think that there’s something wrong with him. Anxiety builds up when she tries to ‘fix’ him - that’s not what he needs…rather he wants to simply pull away to have his own breathing space: whether its in the shed, out with friends, strolling, watching a movie or reading. She continues to get frustrated when he wants to ignore her and she develops ideas that he doesn’t love her, or worse still, think that he has got someone else! A confused state of affairs soon arises.

Women should understand the need for a man to pull away. Its good for him and her (and any children). He’ll spring back with power and enthusiasm. Men however need to remember that it may be easy for them to get to intense levels of intimacy as he was before pulling back, but the woman may need to time to catch-up and re-familiarise - particularly if she’s been through a state of confusion or panic (she doesn’t know what she did to switch you off)!

It is very confusing for a woman when a man pulls away because something she says or does often triggers his departure - usually when she begins to talk about feelings. The talk of feelings creates intimacy and the man can be defensive and not open-up, hence begin to pull away. It’s not that he doesn’t care about her feelings as at another point in the intimacy cycle those same feelings will draw him closer. So its not just what she says but rather when.

When a man gets too close and doesn’t pull away, common symptoms are increased passiveness, moodiness, irritability and defensiveness. And the women builds a huge amount of dependency on the man that can lead to a high degree of unwarranted trust, such that if he does pull away, she feels totally dejected for ‘doing something wrong’ or misappropriating the trust. She may begin to resent him and hold bitter feelings towards him unjustifiably. When women don’t understand the male intimacy cycle, they can unknowingly obstruct it in two ways: they are (1) chasing him when he pulls away; (2) punishing him for pulling away.

Men must be sensitive to the needs of women (I’ll come on to that later) but also understand the requirement of pulling away. If timed, done well and worked with, a high degree of satisfaction can be engendered in the relationship such that the natural rhythms of both the man and woman are held to a better standard. There’s no need for guilt or blame on either side. The man needs to go to the cave every now and again, grow and become wiser….he’ll return to with a freshness that the women has longed for and will be better prepared to hear her share her feelings. The patient woman who understands this will love and trust her man, share with him as needed, and allow him to open-up in his own time without demanding it to be so.

This single insight into the male cycle that has been represented as mimicking a rubber band can replace so much confusion and unnecessary pain with that of care and understanding.

Soon we’ll take a look at how women act as waves….

For Success and Contentment,

Asad Khan

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Hi there,

In my previous blog just below I referred to case of Provision and how the the Sustainer provides from above for us all - unconditionally. And if you really think about, and link this with my earlier blog dated October 15th (2008), it’s all a lesson for those of us who will, for a moment, just stop, pay attention to Higher Order, and let feelings of gratefulness emit for what there is, rather than worrying about what there isn’t.

Yesterday I was feeling totally out of it (because of cold syptoms) and was considering flying off to an exotic place in the sun for a change. What, with the idea of sun, sea, sand and palm trees, it was a tempting image not easy to remove from my minds eye. And I might ask a friend or two to join me on the excursion so we could enjoy some good times, laughter and perhaps adventure. It was a plausible idea and it swept me from my work the instant it penetrated my head. Wow! I could escape away from this grey and rather murky weather and go to swim in warm waters, walk along soft sand and take in some deeps breaths of fresh air and look up to a blue spotless sky. I haven’t done this in a while and it may be just what my physiology needs. Then, as always, I snapped out of it; “not yet as I’ve got quit a bit on” I thought and the former picture soon faded away. Instead, I tidied my desk, left the office and drove home through the rain to have a lemsip prepared for me by my wife.

This was something I was very grateful for and as much as I’d like to have escaped, I was deeply comforted by the care offered to me. In fact, it removed any former notion of getting away for a fortnight as I knew this kind of care wouldn’t necesarily be on hand - unless I took her with me…

But this is the point I wanted to bring forward as news continues to get hurled at us about the global financial crisis amongst other things: that despite the various kinds of issues and challenges that we may be facing, let’s not forget the crucial element of appreciating the ‘finer’ things in life. You know, the ability to communicate, engage, relate, connect, think, imagine, feed, clothe, travel and all such beautiful things. The list is literally endless as we can highlight so many aspects that we can, if we decide to pay heed to them, begin to count as blessings and become more certain about how we decide to live our life.

When we develop our spiritual ken, we begin to understand the inter-relatedness of many things. Sure life can get awkward from time to time, as I’ve said before, but its not what’s out there that’s going to increase the quality of our lives, it’s what’s within. Have you ever considered that in a moment your eyesight may be removed, you may have a tragic accident, you may lose someone you feel deeply connected to, or you may not enjoy the level of creature comforts that you once had? But whatever the uncontrollable changes that life teases us with, the better, stronger and wiser amongst realise that the causes and effects that we are all part of are just a means of testing our inner worth and the sense of choice.

Of course we have to make adjustments to cater for the extraordinary circumstances, but how do we keep ourselves from despairing, ‘losing the rag’ (so to speak) or simply wanting to escape? We need to develop our personal mission and remain true to it. What’s more, we need to give ourselves the time to reflect and cultivate an eye of veneration in order to understand the timeless truths of life and the boundless beauty of the universe around us. We then need to connect back to the basics of relationships and appreciate the often neglected aspects of friendship and companionship and fulfil the rights towards to one another.

We can help ourselves to get grounded and reach the inner core of our existence and shift to place of surity. Remember the following taken from page 63 of the MPPPL workbook:-

“Behold! In the creation of the heavens and the earth; in the alteration of the night and day; in the sailing of the ships across the ocean for the profit of mankind; in the rain which God sends down form the skies, and the life which gives therewith to an earth that is dead; in the beasts of all kinds that He scatters through the earth; in the change of the winds, and the clouds that are trailed between the sky and the earth - there are indeed signs for the wise” (2:164)

From the difficulties surrounding us at various levels, the sure reality is that we have more going for us than we tend to appreciate. This is how can shift the pattern of self-detriment to fulfilment and contentment. Inevitably, we have to do more to fine tune the inner vision. How can you do this you ask? Don’t delay and get the MPPPL Workbook from the Ark2Ark site.

Also, don’t forget the next seminar on the 18th December, The Magic of Relationships. More on that a little later, but book early to avoid disappointment.

For Success and Contentment

Asad Khan

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Hi folks,

Just a quick one for you, as it’s almost the end of the day on a Friday evening, and I’ve got my nieces wedding to attend in 1-1/2 hours time…

One of the key area’s of concern and challenge for most of us is our health & wellbeing, so rather than go into info-overflow, which I’d rather save for the 1-day Health Seminar on the 20th November in any case, here’s a brief run-down of somethings that you can begin impelementing right away (for general diets).

1. Have a hearty breakfast - porridge-based & wholegrain cereals is generally good
2. Eat wholemeal and cut-out the processed carb’s - sweets, biscuits, cakes, white sugar/flour, polished rice etc.
3. Eat some fresh fruit regularly (not processed or tinned)
4. Drink water - filtered is better - and a 1/3 of your meal should be water (the other 1/3 food; and last 1/3 air - you have to have air for combustion! No combustion, no easy digestion/metabolism)
5. Snack on pulses, nuts, seeds, been sprouts (cooked/uncooked depending on type)
6. Don’t consume drink with your meal - take 1/2 prior / after for effective metabolism
7. Take a brisk walk and..
8. Breathe deeply and deliberately - whilst you think of the air circulating around your body
9. Remember to give time to eating your meals - with good, full intention and an attitude of gratitude for the opportunity of intaking goodness to nourish your body
10. Don’t eat late - especially fatty stuff (pizza’s with coke..!); Give your digestive system a break - and then have beak-fast!

Hope this help along the way and take note that we’ll have Abdul Kareem, Former Practioner in Tradional Herbal Medicine turned Health Coach (thanks to Ark2Ark who’ll be presenting on the day.

But stick to some of the key principles outlined above and I can assure you’ll be on the way to feeling energised, focussed and in control. Do it for 10 days so you can challenge the urges…

For Success, Contenement & Good Health,

Asad Khan

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..then this is the time to take stock of some of the most important things in life, such as your:

• time and energy;
• talent and creativity;
• intellectual and rational abilities;
• health - sight, hearing, sensing, feelings;
• relationships with family, friends, neighbours and colleagues;
• opportunities to contribute back to others and the greater good.

We can choose to between doom and gloom or live by a sense of certainty that we are created for a purpose - a purpose that extends way beyond credit crunches, looming threats of recession and talks of depression. I know that it may be difficult for some of us to come to terms with, especially if we consider that collectively we’ve probably had one of the most prosperous times in history. Suddenly we are faced with prospects of losing our life savings, the quality of life we’ve built over the years, the business plans we intended to conduct and carry through, and possibly the roof over our heads. This is bad news at any rate.

But if we always fell foul of external pressures without relying on inner conviction that things would turn around for the better then anyone could easily fall prey to depression. Apart from some of the practical measures that need to be taken in such times like cost-reduction programmes, re-cycling and waste-control, energy-saving action and programmes, mutual co-operation (financially and otherwise), we also need to remember the things (listed above) that we would normally take for granted.

This helps to get a grounding on the essentials of life: what can be more important than your time, health and the ability to reason so that you can cancel the negative vibes around you, as well as those inside of you, and then focus your energies on being innovative, caring, daring and productive?

We all know that the mind can play tricks with us - making us shape a perception of circumstances that are not true. This can happen through exaggerations, distortions, deletions and negations. Similarly, our emotions can work us up no end too: hopelessness, anger, humiliation, frustration, anxiety, stress etc. One can see how fear and panic can quickly set-in leading one to live a life of denial, laziness, blame and regret.

Amongst the best ways to combat this is to ‘rebuild your plane’ so you can fly high. For this you’ll need two special wings (a) The Wing of Gratitude: be grateful for all the things that you have accomplished to date. Be grateful for all the things that you have acquired: knowledge, insights, relationships, inner and outer resources, skills, experiences and values. Being grateful is a huge resource any person can have and deploy in a moment to give an instant boost to the morale and general well-being. Negative vibes and thinking can easily be swept away when we concentrate on things that have gone right in our lives and being thankful for having life, time and energy to do more good. Being grateful helps you add colour to issues and events, it changes the emotional state and grants you greater power and resources to face the future: in short, it helps you to create a totally different experience and grasp a greater meaning of life.

But once you are attempting to get things back on track be sure that life has a tendency to throw things at you again only to try you, to tease you and ultimately, to test you. Here’s when you’ll need (b) The Wing of Patience: - there’s no point in trying to rush the ascent if you’re only going to topple over and fall down - head first, nose diving. We know how gratifying it can be when we demonstrate patience and not allow pettiness or frustrations to rule us. Being patient can afford us enormous advantage that cannot be bought at any price. It is like the master key to all doors - it will lend itself to helping you get pass any challenging door that seems to block your way to peace, security and success.

Remeber also the 3 keys that successful leaders deploy in times of hardship and crisis:

1. Don’t see things worse than they are;
2. See them as they are and the advantages within them;
3. Do somethings purposeful: be pro-active and take positive, purposeful action

Wrenching-up the nuts and bolts to fit these two wings onto to your plane requires careful, deliberate and step-wise action. And so Ark2Ark is here to help you through with the tailored Training Seminars and the Personal Coaching service.

I can say without question that these two elements of Patience and Gratitude, if practiced well, are a panacea: a universal remedy for almost all mental, emotional and spiritual dis-eases - and dare I say, probably certain physical ones too!

Well, till next time take care and look forward to a brighter future.

For Success and Contentment,

Asad Khan

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Hi & welcome to Ark2Ark

Today, I am keen on not only making you aware of the new site - but the forthcoming Seminar on the 20^th August 2008, which will be held in Manchester, UK. The Seminar is titled Personal & Social Effectiveness and its breakdown can be seen by clicking on the free Seminar Guide link under Events Subscription. There you will see a full list of aspects that will be covered, but to give you a flavour here are some:

• The Psychology of Peak Performance
• Top 10 Ways to Build Personal Power
• Championing Ideas and Winning People Over
• Defining Charisma, E-Intelligence & S-Intelligence
• Selecting Places & People: Cutting out the Baggage
• Understanding What Motivates You: Drivers & Preferences
• Shifting Gears, Changing Policies, Reframing & Stratagems
• Educating the Heart & Mind: The Inner Forces of Soul & Spirit
• Picking the Right Lane: Leaving the Good and Going for the Great!
• Creating a Solid Social Armour: Solutions for Beating Negativity, Rancour and Ways of Combating Personal Mistakes

The Training Day will be both challenging and exciting for 2 reasons: (1) I expect a whole host of people to attend – a real cross-section of our societies – and that really fuels me to deliver to those who really desire to reach the next levels! (2) This topic is one of my favourites and there is so much that needs to be shared: some of the material is really amazing and anyone who is coming into contact with it for the first time will realise how effective the strategies and solutions are.

Even those who may have heard/seen/read some of the material elsewhere will find the Training Day exhilarating and refreshing, as the purpose of Ark2Ark is to ensure that each and every individual is empowered to perform at their very best capacity armed with the cutting-edge tools and resources.

There will be plenty of forthcoming training event and activities, including tele-classes – this will be really useful for those who find it difficult to travel, but still want to relish the opportunity of personal development in a group atmosphere.

For a taster of some the information and material that will be shared, take a look at the free sample chapter of the workbook – How to Maximise Peace and Power through Pure Leadership. Better still, if you really want to benefit from the overall material, then go ahead and order your own copy.

So keep browsing the site and we’ll be in touch!

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