Advertising guru turned motivational speaker, Siimon Reynolds gives his top 11 tips to become a high achiever and help you reach your full potential.
Siimon gave these tips in a recently released book called Authentic Power and Greatness A Practical Guide To Living An Enlightened Life by Joseph Roddarick Law (Published By New Holland).
1# Decide what your purpose in life
There’s no point sitting around and waiting for things to happen. Many people spend years trying to find their purpose but never do. Reynolds suggests you set a deadline. Give yourself a week, a month or a year to choose your purpose.
“Once you commit fully to any goal, your passion for it will massively increase.”
Once you’ve found your purpose, stick to it and look at it long-term instead of incrementally. Looking at the bigger picture gives drives us more and leaves no room for indecision.
2# Be self-aware
Reynolds places importance on self-awareness. When you’re mindful of your inner balance throughout the day, you will start seeing ways of maintaining it. Whether it be through exercise, meditation or reading, inner balance helps with performance and confidence.
3# Set achievable goals
As Reynolds said before, we do need to reach for the star, if you will, but equally as important is making sure it’s possible to reach them. Your goals must be exciting otherwise you won’t want to achieve them, but they must also be reachable and manageable. Reynolds suggests setting no more than three goals at a time to ensure that you aren’t overwhelmed or discouraged.
4# Keep stress in check
Reynolds proposes two methods for managing stress: the Sedona Method and Transcendental Meditation.
The Sedona Method involves thinking about the things that are stressing you out, accepting them and simply choosing to let them go. The other is Transcendental Meditation which essentially puts you in an altered state of relaxation. Combining these two methods throughout the day and you’ll be sure to experience more bliss in your life.
5# Get your energy levels up
Energy levels can be boosted in a variety of ways. Firstly, you need to be excited about the work that you’re doing. When you look forward to going into work, you’ll notice that extra bounce in your step. Reynolds also suggests having small, but regular meals packed with fresh fruit and veg throughout the day so as to keep your energy levels balanced on a consistent basis. Another way, and arguably the most important, is to get enough quality sleep. Too many people push this one aside when in fact it can determine our moods and energy levels. Try and get at least 7-8 hours per night.
6# Manage your time
Reynolds has a few ways to best manage time:
- Rush or delegate unimportant jobs
- Do two daily lists. One with the tasks you need to do and the other with a time that you’d like to complete them.
- Complete the most important tasks at the beginning of the day.
- Have an agenda for meetings
- Work with urgency
7# Enhance creativity
Take time in the day to come up with new ideas. This on its own will boost creativity and get the juices flowing.
Stimulating creativity is a whole other task. Reynolds suggests using Edward de Bono’s technique of choosing a random word in the dictionary and attempting to relate it to your situation. For example:
“If you were designing chairs and the word you chose was ‘octopus’, you might decide to look at creating a chair with 8 legs, like octopus tentacles.”
Another way is setting yourself a time limit of ten minutes with the goals of conjuring one idea a minute. You’d be surprised how many creative breakthroughs you can make when you put yourself under pressure, after all, that’s how diamonds are made.
8# Increase productivity
Outline what your top three tasks for the day are and then dedicated 50% of your day doing them. You can also make a list of your top three time-wasters so you can work on ridding them from your day.
9# Push away self-doubt
The interesting thing about the mind is that it can only think one thought at a time. This means that if you’re ever feeling unconfident or thinking negatively, make the conscious effort to replace that thought with a positive one. This will be difficult at first, but the more you practice it, the more automatic it’ll be in the future.
10# Stay positive
So we’ve removed self-doubt, but how do we maintain positivity? Think about the problems in your life for a second. Most likely you’ll feel as if they’re very personal, quite big and long-lasting. Reynolds says that you need to combat those feeling and remind yourself of the opposite.
Tell yourself that your problems are not personal, short-term, and not as huge as you think. Your mood will instantly be lifted.
11# READ!
Reynolds cannot stress this enough. Becoming wiser takes two things: experience or learning from others. The truth is, meeting people who can teach you these valuable lessons is extremely difficult, instead Reynolds encourages you to read about them.
“By simply reading their pages, you can get centuries of wisdom in just a few minutes. That’s why books are so magical.”
Siimon Reynolds’ top three books are:
- Maximum Achievement by Brian Tracy
- Think and Grow Rich
- Buzan’s Book of Genius by Tony Buzan and Raymond Keane
