Financial freedom is one of the major goals of most of the people. Why? Because, money may not be everything, it is as important as Oxygen to the body. We can not lack money in order to live our normal life in this society. We may not like the ways that many people employ to earn the money. But we sure enjoy things that money can buy. We enjoy good food, nice cloth, decent house, big car…etc. All these things will not come to us if we do not have money. It is one of the factors that are the definition of success. The major concern to the people is how we can be financial free. Seven techniques here will be the guideline to your financial freedom if you constantly practice it. The techniques include:

1. Pay yourself first. Once you get any form of your income. No matter what the amount is. Set aside part of it to be yours first. Do not care what expenses you have to pay because this is the key that most financial-free people do. This is one of the mistakes that many do not know. They mostly pay their bills and use up all they earn and finally they do not have anything left. Do not let this happen to you. In order to be successful financially, you need to conduct this method strictly. As mentioned in the classic book “The richest man in Babylon”, this method alone will change your life.

2. Save ten per cent of your income. Make it a must that you need to save ten per cent of your income no matter what. Make sure that it is a saving not an emergency fund. Do not spend this amount even you have the urgency to use the money. If you are afraid or want to prepare for that situation, set up a separate account for that purpose. If you want to save the money to buy a house, cars, or your kid’s education, do not use this fund. Set up a separate account for each one of them. Although the amount may not seem significant in the beginning, but it can be great enough for you later on.

3. Invest wisely. After your ten per cent is big enough, now it’s time to invest this saving into a safe account. Check out all the ways how to get the most interest out of this and make sure that it is the safest way. Since the accumulation of this fund is where your future depends on, do not take any risk out of this fund. There is an evident that if a person save ten per cent of his income and invest it wisely, he will be financial free at the age of forty. Or forty five maximum. This is the exponential power of compounding. Compounding effect is the method that all millionaire use to accumulate their wealth.

4. Pay your tax. One of the most serious issues is that the tax you pay may be too high or you may not want to pay. The fact is tax problem is one of the most common problems that most people fall into. And you normally will lose if you need to stand against it. Therefore do not let this happens to you. Pay your government and do not complain what they do with your money. If you do not like what they do with it, vote for a different people next time you have a chance. That’s all you can do. You can not design your way of using tax fund unless you want to go into politics. Make sure that you do not go into tax trap. Have a good accountant to prepare your tax payment or make sure that you have enough knowledge for handling that.

5. Set up your donation fund. People can not live alone in the society. We live with other people. And almost all the time, we can easily find less fortunate people around. Set up a certain percentage of your money for donation purpose. Accumulate it so that it can make more meaning for a larger group of people. Make wise use of it since there may be a lot of deception in the area. If you are known is a giving person, many people may come to you and request the money to save them out. A lot of their story may not be true. Do not give it away aimlessly. Do it prudently and you will enjoy giving your money for this purpose.

6. Pay for your education. Rich people need to be rich inside. You will need to learn all of your life in order to keep your momentum and your passion going. It may come from books, CDs, Tapes, learning courses or even a meal with an expert. All this will help us grow and be richer both mentally and financially.

7. Visualize as you are already rich. Visualization is one of the key methods to attract wealth into your life. According to the law of attraction, what you concentrate upon, you will attract the situation and attributes favorable to your goals. Make use of visualization will help you get what you want. Visualization can also be enhanced by some accelerator. There are a few products in the market that you can make use of so that your visualization will attract wealth faster.

Financial freedom is one of the most common goals in this modern society. Seven techniques will help you understand money concept and be your path to your financial success.

Jim Somchai
June 10  2007

Goal is important. Goal is like the destination on your journey. We need the destination so that we can look into the map. See where we want to go. Look at the direction we need to go. Estimate our time spent until we reach that destination. Check the compass to see where we should really head and start walking until we are there. The steps are not much different from what we normally do in everyday life. We need to know the destination before we get into our car and drive.

The chance that we bump into what we want is less than none. We will not get what we want if we do not have clear and precise goal. Here are the five qualities of the goal to be considered before the goal setting process. These qualities are mentioned long time ago in the management classes in the MBA-hit era. This is called S.M.A.R.T goal setting process. S.M.A.R.T. is an acronym for the real qualities we need have in our goals. The S.M.A.R.T. goals are:

1. Specific: We need to set the goal that is specific and clear. Our goals have to be specific enough that we really know where the direction we need to go. The clarity of the goal is as important as the destination in the map when we are lost in the dessert. The chance that we will lose our life in the dessert is very high if we do not know exactly where we should go in order to get out. The expert said that without the direction in the dessert and you are lost. If you keep walking, you will finally come back to where you start. This is caused by only that either you are a left handed or right handed. Your leg usage will be in the same pattern. You will be better in one leg than the other. That will lead to only a few degree of deviation in your walking. And if you walk long enough, the deviation will make you come back to the starting point. Therefore, every time you decide to set up your goal, think of the picture of yourself lost in the dessert. You will not treat goal setting lightly if you see that picture. You must be clear enough to your goal so that you will not end up sadly.

2. Measurable: The goal has to be able to be measured. In order to evaluate our progress, we need some number to compare with what we plan for. If you want some money, don’t just write a goal that you need some money. Specify the amount of money you want and the time frame. Make your goal quantifiable. You will know if you need to adjust anything on your actions during your journey.

3. Achievable: The goal that is not achievable does not lead the person to their motivated state. A lot of people set up a goal and think that the higher the goal is, the more they achieve. This is not true if the goals are not achievable. Your brain will immediately reject the goal once it appears since you will not believe that you can make it through.

4. Realistic: We need to be honest to ourselves on goal setting. Wanting double or triple income while you want to spend most of your time playing golf may not be realistic. If the goal is not realistic, the brain will immediately reject it again. Make sure that your goal is reasonable to yourself and your action.

5. Time bound: Time is the only resource that everybody has equally. This valuable resource will signify your success or failure. The plan that has no time frame will not be achieved since people tend to procrastinate. If you do not have your deadline, the chance that you postpone your activity until further time is very high. Once the time is bound, you know that you will need to commit on your activities. You will not overlook your action since you know that the time matters on your goal achievement.

Goal setting is a valuable process for your success. We need to understand the nature of good goal so that we can effectively draw up our goal. The five qualities of the goal here will create your understand on the importance on the clarity of your goal and speed up your success process.

Jim Somchai
June 8 2007

If you are reading this article, you see success as an important target. You decide to not settle for less. You are now the person of mission. You make you life more worthwhile. In order to have all those quality, you need to have goals of your own. They will be in al areas in your life. They can be your career goal, your financial goal, your health goal, your relationship goal, your spiritual goal and so on. You can have goals on anything that matters in your life. Once we have goals, it’s time that you have plans to achieve those goals. This is similar to the plan that you need to give to your boss if you work for a company. It will not let you work aimlessly since that will damage the company in the long run. This is the same as in life. We need to also have a life plan if we want to succeed. This is to make sure that the actions we take have some meanings to our goals. In this article, we will talk about action plan toward our goals. The six tips in planning will help enable you to systematically understand the steps of writing plan. They will increase your effectiveness in planning.
The tips include

1. Know your goals very well. If you have a well written goal, you can draw up your plan easily. Writing an action plan is like painting a picture. Once you have raw material for example the good color, good environment, good model. You will be able to produce good piece of work. It’s the same as writing a plan only that the plan does not need crayon or oil colors or canvas. It needs the clarity of your destination. This is the area why most people fail in planning. They are not sure on what they want. The good goal should consist of SMART move. This is mentioned in many text book already. We will just touch the surface here. The SMART is an acronym for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound. I will not go into the details but I am sure that you get the picture. The clarity in your goals will be the first element of your success in the planning.

2. Know why you need to achieve this goal. You might question why we have yet go into planning activities. Although the emphasis of the first two points is on mind preparation, they are very important. They are also part of the planning process. Knowing why you need to achieve your goals will send the signal to your brain on the importance of your goals. It will give strength when you face tough situation. In the process, you most likely will. It will also create your emotion to your goals. Human mostly is influenced by his own emotion. Your success depends much on this point. Then, be sure that you know why you want this goal achieved.

3. Break down your goals into small pieces. You can not achieve all in a very short time. Neither will you be able to conduct the actions for a long time without having the sense of fulfillment. In order to acquire that quality, you need to break down your goal into small goals. And you can achieve them in a shorter period of time. In this case, to achieve these small goals will already be a success to you. You will feel fulfilled along the way of your actions. You will be able to pursue your activities for long term success.

4. Write down your plan to achieve those small goals. Here comes the real planning step. Know your outcome. Know your situation. Know your competency. Know you competitor. You should write down all the analysis so that you know what you can do and what you can not. If not, how you are going to acquire those skills. Write down all the activities you need to do in days, weeks and months.

5. Have evaluation sheet to control your actions. Make sure that you know your progress. You must do what you are supposed to do regularly. Set up the criteria that you need to evaluate yourself. Evaluate yourself monthly, weekly and daily. Adjust your activities if you do not yet achieve. Regular appraisal will help you to be closer to your goals.

6. Do not give up. Make sure that you always have this motto in your brain. You will not give up no matter what! Say it out loud in your mind and outside if you can. This is the utmost quality that all successful people have and you also do.

Writing a plan can be a challenge for some people. The six tips here will help ease the steps and path the way to your success.

Jim Somchai

June 8  2007

Recently, I watched this movie and was impressed by the storyline an performances. I therefore look for a good synopsis and put here for you to enjoy.

“Set in San Francisco in 1981, the film centers around Chris Gardner (Will Smith), a 30-year old, clever, yet unsuccessful, salesman of expensive bone-density scanners. Chris invested most of his and his wife’s money into the scanners, which he eventually finds extremely difficult to sell (and difficult to keep from being stolen by hippies and bums). He refers to this period of his life as “Being Stupid,” in that he wrongly trusted a hippie with watching one of them while going for a job interview. Despite Christopher’s valiant attempts to help keep the family afloat, he is faltering; the rent on their apartment is far past due, and his car is towed after Chris defaults on paying over a dozen parking tickets. His wife Linda (Thandie Newton) is unhappy and buckling under the constant strain of financial pressure, as her paychecks are the family’s primary source of income. The only thing keeping the couple’s marriage together is their five-year-old son Christopher (Jaden Smith).

One day, Chris meets a well off man (Geoff Callan) who reveals himself to be a stock broker for the Dean Witter brokerage firm. Impressed, Gardner seeks an interview with Dean Witter as an intern. Although he has no college training (Chris entered the US Navy after high school), his high-level math skills allow him to solve a Rubik’s Cube puzzle in an impressively short amount of time, impressing Jay Twistle (Brian Howe), the person in charge of the intern hiring process, to the point that he arranges Chris an interview. Upon hearing that her husband is going “From salesman to intern – backwards”, Linda is no longer able to cope with her unhappiness and their poor financial situation. She walks out on Chris, taking Christopher with her.

Unwilling to be separated from his son, Chris picks Christopher up from his daycare in Chinatown before Linda can. Chris complains about a sign outside the daycare center misspelling “happiness” as “happyness”, hence the spelling of the film’s title. Linda is going to move to New York and wants to take Christopher with her. However, Chris insists that he wants to keep the boy, and Linda accepts his offer. Just before his Dean Witter interview, however, Chris is hit with two setbacks: he is being evicted from his apartment in a week unless he comes up with the rent, and he ends up spending a night in jail for failure to pay his parking tickets. After being released the next morning, Chris runs from the courthouse to his interview at Dean Witter’s offices, unshaven, unkempt and dressed in painter’s clothes. Nevertheless, he gets the internship, although he is chagrined to learn that it is unpaid.

Periodically able to sell all of the half-dozen remaining bone density scanners for quick money, Chris and young Christopher move into a low-rent motel, although Chris is still unable to pay his rent on time due to a notice about Chris’ unpaid taxes and that the government took his last six hundred dollars from his bank account leaving only twenty-one dollars left. Undaunted, Chris pursues his Dean Witter internship as a way out of financial struggle: at the end of the six-month internship program, only one intern out of the twenty in the program will be chosen to become a full-time paid employee, and Chris is determined to be that one. Chris eventually finds one of his scanners in the hands of a bum who stole it. Chris tries to sell it to one last doctor to get some money, but he is upset to learn it has been broken. The Gardners are evicted from the motel, and they are forced to spend the night in a BART station public restroom.

The next morning, Chris and Christopher attempt to find themselves a shelter, eventually happening upon the Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. The shelter operates on a first-come-first-serve basis, so every evening after work, Chris is forced to race across town to pick Christopher up, take the bus across town, and run to catch a place in line with the other homeless people. Chris continues to fix the scanner sacrificing time and sleep. Christopher of course does not like the situation (and on one occasion they lose one of his few toys; the Captain America doll on the film poster) but he is understanding, and still loves his father.

Chris places added energy into going out of his way to attract potential Dean Witter clients (including joining a potential customer at a football game; Chris and Christopher have a break by being invited in the customer’s box). Chris finally fixes the scanner and sells it for two hundred dollars. In the end, Gardner’s hard work pays off: he is awarded a full-time job with Dean Witter which causes him to choke up and hold back his tears. As he leaves the office after hearing the good news, he starts crying as he walks into a crowd of people. Chris runs to his son’s daycare center and embraces him. The film ends with Chris and his son telling jokes to one another as they start walking down a street. This is when the actual Chris Gardner makes a cameo appearance. The film then explains that Chris went on to become a highly successful stock broker, eventually starting his own firm.”

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pursuit_of_Happyness

Jim Somchai
June 7  2007

I thought that the law of attraction was discovered a few years back. May be it was found a few decades ago. I was deadly wrong. According to Brian Tracy’s book “The 100 Absolutely unbreakable laws of business success”, this law was discovered since the old Egyptian era. That was 3,000 years before Christ. In this article, we will talk directly toward money. Although many people do not want to emphasize on money since many relate money with evil mind. The evil mind does not come from money. Instead, evil mind came from the infatuation of money. Here are the seven steps to make money including:

1. Know how much money you want and at the certain point of time. Although most people want money, not many people gladly accept that they do things for money and one of their most aspirations is becoming a rich person. If you do not accept that, you will not have a chance to earn the money you want. Make decision to accept that you want money and specify how much money you want. Once the number is up, you will now have the target to achieve.
2. Evaluate your current status. You need to appraise on yourself before you decide to go for a plan for attracting money. You should do the appraisal on not only how much money you have at the moment but also on your ability to make the money. Do you need to acquire any additional skills? At the current status, what you need to learn more so that you can qualify earning such amount of money. How long do you need to prepare yourself to this? Write down your status quo so that you know your starting point.
3. Know how you would acquire that amount of money. You certainly have certain skill to earn money. However, we need know in what will be the most possible way to work for until you get that amount you want. Most of the people do not see in what way they are going to make it. You may not know it now but it’s your job to find it out. Once you find out, you will stick to it until you achieve your goal.
4. Create your future plan. Draw up your plan. The result comes from the action. All you need is the activity plan so that you can do something. Write down your plan and pursue it. Make plan to earn, to save, and to invest properly during the assigned period.
5. Fill in the blanks. Along the way of your money making plan, we may not have full information on what the circumstance will be. You may need to add that by yourself when time comes. Fill in the blanks in your plan. Adjust the method according to the situation. Once you get more information, come back to your plan and make sure that you have the right puzzle for your game plan.
6. Visualize yourself in Success. See yourself as already a successful person. Visualize what you will be like if you have achieved the amount of money you want. What you are going to buy? What you are going to give out? What you can contribute to others. See the pictures as if it is real. Regular visualization will help you achieve results faster according to the law of attraction.
7. Review your plan every month. Revision is a very important step to follow since you will not be successful on everything you do. There must be some area that you are not excel in and you may fail in some steps. You must know your progress so that you can decide if you should continue or you should change your approach. Being flexible on your approaches will help enable you to finally get the money you want to make.

Making money may require a lot of work and discipline. Seven steps here will help you understand the systematic way to get money by the time you want.

Jim Somchai

June 6 2007

If you are reading this article, you are a person who is interested in making more of yourself. You want to develop your ability and expand yourself to the greatest extent you can be. If that is who you are, you may want to be fulfilled along the way of your journey. You may want to enjoy the process no matter how tough the situation is. This may not happen unless you feel good on yourself. In this article, we are going to talk about the reasons that you should be proud of yourself so that you appreciate how valuable you are in your personal development process. The four reasons include:

1. You are the most unique person in this world. Do you know who is the only person in this world that can use the pronoun “I” and it refers to you? Only you can be the one who are close to you and understand what you have been through so well. Some time you may not get why you did that and those, but when you look close to it, you understand them all. Subjectively, you are the most important person in your entire life not your family, not your parents, not your spouse, not your children, not your boss and not your friends. You need to understand this before you go into any personal development steps since it is crucial to feel good on yourself before succeeding in doing anything.

2. You were sent here with some purpose. Every single one of us was born with some purpose. We can not say that our creator just made us in order to flow with the tide and be whatever we will be under the circumstance. Of course not! We all have a mission of our own although some may not know what it is. It is our task to find out and finally accomplish what we are meant to do. Seek and you will find, according to the bible. You must be certain on this statement that you are here with the purpose and you will get that and make it through. Once you understand your mission, your life will never be the same again and you will be proud of yourself more than anything in this world.

3. You have determination to succeed in your own way. Once you understand that you have a mission. You want to be successful in what you do. Everybody wants success and it can happen. Everybody have determination but you have the most determination according to your point of view. You may say “I have not achieved much so far, how I can say I am a determined person.” You are if you still read this message. Everybody already owns the determination and he can use them whenever he wants to. This is the secret. You have enough determination in yourself to do all the possibilities. Don’t forget this and make full use of it.

4. You love yourself. This is crucial feeling for you to have for yourself. Not many people accept this since they refer the love of oneself to selfishness. This is a total difference. You are selfish when you do thing for yourself at the cost of damaging others. The love of yourself will not harm others but it will give you the understanding of others that they too love themselves. You are here today because you shape yourself into this and you should cherish what you are having. You may not be aware but inside you do deeply love in yourself and want to achieve more to be a gift to the love you have. Every time you see the mirror, you see the most lovable face in the world and you should do anything to keep this feeling. To admit that you love yourself will definitely change your attitude towards life and everything involves.

To be successful is to understand the success process. And one of them is to feel good along the way of your journey. To be proud of your good self is the ingredient to add juice into your life and success strategy.

Jim Somchai

June 5 2007

As we know, success is led by the activities we do. Without actions, we just only wish for our goals to be materialized. And they will never be. However, what controls our actions is still need to be analyzed. Many people say plan controls actions. Some say discipline controls actions. Some say emotions control actions. Some even say environment control actions. Here we are going to talk about one of the most important elements that control your actions to get the result you want. It is the borderline that we all need to cross in order to be successful.

One of my hobbies is running. If I want to join the mini-marathon and want to win, what do you think I need to know before going into the competition? Of course, I will need to know the rule of the race and how fast I need to run in order to win. Suppose I know that the winner last year won with the record of 28 minutes for running 6.5 kilometers. Since I run almost every day, I run at the same distance by spending approximately 38 minutes. And I am comfortable to practice by running at 38 minutes. Although I have enough discipline to run everyday, because I enjoy it of course, do you think that I stand a chance to win this competition? Certainly not! This is one of the reasons that many do not succeed in what they plan for. They do not have the borderline to cross. And if they have set up their borderline, they gave up before they can get to something because there is pain in the process especially in the beginning.

A lot of people write down their goals. They also write down their plan. However, they do not have clear borderline in their plan. The borderline is the quantifiable results of their activities that determine the progress of your actions toward achieving your goals. The plan need sto have the numbers that can be evaluated along the process. Here are the five tips that we can employ in order to successfully cross borderline.

1. Know your borderline. You need to know what determine your progress. If you don’t know, you need to find out. This step is important before you can proceed. If your borderline is not correct, the chance that you waste your time is very high. Learn from the one who has already got the results you want is a clever way to act. Learn from books, class, or only a mere discussion.

2. Know that skill need to be developed: When you write your plan, do not expect overnight success. It takes time to mould a character that deserves the good results. Be patient to the process and understand that your time will come if you continue your journey.

3. Do not stop evaluating your action: Although you should not beat yourself down once you have not enjoyed the fast progress, you can not be complacent if your results are far below the borderline that you give to yourself during a certain period of time. Continuous evaluation id the key to the process of success.

4. Gradually increase your borderline along the way: We should not give high target at the beginning of the activities. Increase it along the way will be wiser since we will feel achievement even in the short period of time. We know that in the certain time of the plan we will achieve our main target or cross our borderline.

5. Write down your borderline and review in everyday: This will help stimulate your subconscious mind and attract what you want. Also, you will be excited along the way when you see the chance of achieving your ultimate goals is coming closer.

Everybody has his borderline to cross once he set up his goals. Five tips here will help path your way to success.

Jim Somchai

June 4 2007

When you decide to do something new, have you ever experience the fear of not achieving what you want? What did you do when you feel uncertain on your actions? You wonder if you are going to get the results you want from what you have done. You are afraid of the negative consequence that may come if things go wrong. If you encounter these similar challenges, you may want to practice a way to organize your thought in this article.

We all have a certain pattern of thinking process when it comes to certain situation. Each individual has programmed himself how to feel and what to react when a circumstance occurs. In order to make use of the thinking process and turn it around into our favor, we need to understand the thinking principle. Human is implanted with fear for his survival. Ancient man could not protect himself against fierce and dangerous animals due to his inferior body structure. Therefore, nature gave him fear so that he knew it’s time to escape if he faced such animals. Not only the animals that caused fear to ancient man. All other nature dangers and even the danger from the fellow human were also the threat that caused fear. We inherit fear and become acquaint with it in our modern lives. But instead of fear of danger, now we fear of failure. Fear of mental danger is more severe than the fear of physical dangers in modern day human. In addition, we have been taught to have fear since our childhood. Some of our parents were afraid that we might get ourselves into danger and threaten us on danger of doing something that we were not used to. The word “No” is so common to us because of this. We can hear our parents’ voices saying no even nowadays. When we have fear as our asset, we can not go across the barrier to our success. However, there are five tips that we can use to overcome fear and turn it around to be our power. The steps include:

1 Know what you want from the action: Set your goal up on the action you decide to do. You need to know the reason of doing it so that you have enough motivation to overcome the fear. If you have no strong enough reason, you will not follow through the action and failure will be unavoidable.

2 Understand the nature of fear: Fear will come if we are not certain what will happen. In order to reduce the severity of fear, we need to make the action purpose as clear as we can. Also, we need to see through the whole process of our actions whether there is some risk on anything. There are some people suggesting that for example if you are afraid of ghost in the closet, you must really go and take a look at the closet that there is no ghost inside. It is the same here. Fear is just created in our mind according to our natural instinct. Without fear our race may not have come this far. In our modern time era, we may need to make full analysis of the situation to the extent that we feel more comfortable. This will help us to minimize the fear as we go along. Success people are not the ones who do not have fear, but the one who know who to deal with it. You also can be successful if you understand its nature.

3 Change the focus: Do not focus on what you fear but instead focus on what you want. This is what most human has missed. Instead of thinking about what he wants, average human tends to focus on what he doesn’t want. Train yourself on thinking about good things in your life.

4 Have a positive visualization: Know how to visualize will help you enable to dramatically reduce your fear. Regular visualization will also attract favorable situation and attributes into your life according to the law of attraction. There are also some attraction accelerator tools in the market. You may want to utilize in to help you get your result faster.

5 Have a feeling of gratitude: Feel gratitude on what has brought you here. Gratitude is one of the secrets on eliminating fear. Once you feel really grateful, you will not have fear. Make sure that you have the right focus when you have fear.

Everybody has fear. However, not many people know how to deal with it when they are in this intense situation. The five steps here will help anybody on minimizing fear and get closer to their success.

Jim Somchai
June 3  2007

When we decide to want something and decide to go for it. The first question that comes into our mind is that “Can I do it?” Right, this happens to everybody. In this article, we will bring you to the five steps to competency. We will see the development how human can change from not be able to do what we want into be able to do without even think about it.

Before we go into those stages, let’s talk about why we need to understand this. In order to be more successful, people need more skills. No matter they are financial skill, career skill, relationship skill etc. We go through this so that we can acquire as many of the skills as we need to succeed. We will understand that what is worth learning or doing, it worth doing badly at first. All learning processes start from exactly the same point. Have you ever notice that most of the skills we start from knowing nothing at all? Let’s say reading. When we were children, we do not know how to read. We started learning to read step by step. Then we started to notice that we can read some of the easy words. After practicing for a long while, we can read for just a glance. Here are the exact the same stages that we need to go through once we decide to acquire a new skill.

1. Unconscious incompetence: In this stage, we have ignorance. We do not know what to do and how to do it. We have no discipline and no skill. People in this stage can not deliver any result in the area. We do not even know that we need that skill in order to perform what we want.

2. Conscious incompetence: We start to notice that we lack the skill on the area. We feel painful and feel that to do the thing is difficult. This is when people start to give up because they know that they can not do it at that moment and they don’t know how. Answer, learn it. Unfortunately, just a handful of people are willing to take a learning step. Not many people have enough discipline to train themselves until they get into the next stage.

3. Conscious competence: After the learning phase, we start to know that we are able to perform. We are not any more afraid of doing it. The things we do are easy now and we have confidence in the area. We have discipline on the skill and our skill grows significantly. We can now be in the mastery mode of the skill.

4. Unconscious competence: Once the skill has been practiced regularly. It becomes your asset. It dwells inside you. You are programmed now to make use of it any time you want to. Discipline is now not a major concerned since it is already there. The good example to this is the musician skill. A musician can stop play his talented instrument for decades. Once he comes back to it, he can still play it fluently. Or driving skill is another unconscious competence. Once you master it, it is now yours.

5. Conscious competence of conscious incompetence: This is the level of the teachers or master trainers. We have higher knowledge of the skills. We realize the area of the skill so well that we can train other people to practice the skill. We understand every aspect and are able to see the weak points of the incompetent people.

The five stages of learning will help us understand the learning process of any skill we require for our success. We can apply and be patient when we are in the lower stage and understand that to move up into the next level require time and efforts. But once you master it, it will be with you forever.

Jim Somchai
June 2  2007

Success is not an overnight story. It is a long list of events and attempts until the objectives are achieved. Yet most of the people forget about this and concentrate on the current results the achiever enjoys. They look at him and say “I wish I could be like him. How luck he is to get such a wonderful reward.” Actually, he is not lucky. He did a series of certain things continuously until he gets those results. He commits himself to the actions that lead him to the status he is having right now. What the achiever has is called “discipline”. We are going to focus on it in this article and learn how to make full use of it in everyday life.

Jim Rohn, a master in personal development science, gives the definition of discipline in his book “Leading an Inspired Life”. He said “Discipline is a constant awareness of the need for action paired with a conscious act to implement that action. If our awareness and our implementation occur at the same time, then we begin a valued sequence of disciplined activity.” What a precise meaning! Discipline again starts in our mind. If we see the need of doing it constantly, we will perform actions. Simple as it is, not many people practice the right discipline. Why not, because doing something means you have to sacrifice doing many other things. This is according to the law of exclusion. We can do only one thing at a time. Besides, practicing discipline means that we need to step out of our comfort zone. We have to risk the uncomfortable state and the failure to immediately get the right results. People can not stand that consequence and therefore unconsciously avoid and cease discipline after doing it for a couple of times. This is normal to the average people. Top achiever, however see discipline as one of the mechanic to lead him to success. There is no shortcut. You may learn some techniques but you still need to apply those techniques into your daily activities. In order to make our discipline last until we achieve what we want. I have laid out five steps in practicing discipline including:

1. Make decision that you are going to be successful. Decide no matter what happens you will not stop. Decision is a father of all actions. Once you make a real decision, you will continue your actions constantly.

2. Have your goals. Know what your major goals are. See the reasons why you want to achieve it. See how happy you are going to be if you achieve your goals. See what you are going to give to your family and your love ones. With strong enough reasons, you will proceed to your goals. Break down your major goals into minor goals. Set up the time for those minor goals. Achieving minor goals will reward you with self fulfillment. You will not stop doing if you feel good during the process. Your discipline will automatically be created along the way.

3. Have your concrete plan of action. Write it in paper. Schedule the activities in details. Do as you plan. Take actions incessantly. Acknowledge that the results may not come easily. Understand that no matter how hard you try, you may stumble once in awhile especially in the beginning of the discipline. Once you start to be able to do it continuously, you will get momentum. You will not want to stop when you start to form a habit on your discipline.

4. Review your performance regularly. See what your weaknesses are during your process and correct them along the way. Do not go blindly without knowing your status.

5. Visualize yourself be successful in achieving your goals. Regular visualization will attract situation and attribute favorable to your goals achievement according to the law of attraction.

Discipline is one of the major tools to everyone success. Five steps to make full use of discipline will help enable us to perform our best to achieve what we want.

Jim Somchai

June 1 2007