Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

People with a high level of personal mastery share several basic characteristics. They have developed several key habits that lead to their success. In this month’s featured article, master coach Steve Mitten shares ten habits that can contribute to higher levels of happiness, flow, effectiveness and meaning in people’s personal lives, careers and businesses.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

The 10 Habits of Highly Successful (and Deeply Happy) People by Steve Mitten
  
Master Coach Steve Mitten's Web Site

Highlights from the article:

In personally coaching over a thousand clients, Steve Mitten has identified some key habits that are common to the most successful and happy people:

1. Competence - Successful people get really good at what they do. They choose paths that engage and challenge them and leverage their natural strengths. They get the best training and experience they can, and typically find teachers or mentors that can support their ongoing development and shortcut their journey.
    

2. Clarity - Successful people generally have a good sense of who they are, and where they are heading. In a professional context this means knowing where their strengths, skills and knowledge can make the most differences.
    

3. Courage - To be human is to have fears and doubts. Anyone who has met with any measure of success has found a way to move past their existing limitations – to move forward even though they are scared and don’t have all the answers.
    

4. Commitment - Even though they may often get distracted or discouraged, they have high levels of determination that allow them to take consistent action to put in the critical mass of effort required for any measure of success.
    

5. Calendar Mastery - Very successful and happy people learn how to manage their time well. They pay attention to the best use of their time and consistently get the most important things done. This includes learning how to plan, and delegate, learning how to leverage themselves and most importantly learning how to take care of their health and mental and emotional well-being in a sustainable way.
    

6. Change Mastery - Nothing is static in life or business. Things are always changing. Successful people have a higher tolerance of uncertainty and learn to master the process of change. In addition successful people are very good at managing the stress that is inherent in any dynamic situation and managing their own energy levels around it – so they can respond to opportunity with creativity and wisdom.

On the more personal level, highly successful and happy people have certain common habits of thought including:

7. Compassion - Really happy and successful people genuinely care about others. They have a “win - win”, “give to get” mentality. They have a view of life that assumes we are all connected, so they treat the people around them as they would like to be treated. They usually derive a lot of meaning and satisfaction from seeing others succeed.
    

8. Connections - Most of the successful and happy people I have ever worked with put a high value on the important relationship in their lives. They make these relationships a priority and consciously cultivate intimacy, patience, forgiveness, reciprocity and fun with the key people in their lives. Some of the happiest people I know have also developed their own deep connection, (often refined to a daily routine or practice), to the larger currents and forces in life itself - God, The Universe, Nature, etc. This provides them with higher levels of meaning, a greater sense of belonging, and often far more gratitude, joy, peace, and sense of purpose in their life.
    

9. Candor - Successful and happy people practice high levels of honesty and integrity in everything they do. They are particularly good at observing and testing their own thoughts, assumptions and behaviors to ensure they are based on reality and exhibit high integrity.
    

10. Calling - Once our basic needs are met, much of the richness and meaning in our lives comes from having some cause, calling or greater purpose that we are in service of. Really successful people find a way to weave more service and meaning into their life and work.

If you look behind any very successful person, there is almost always some form of support team (spouse, coach, mentor, colleague, organization, etc.) that is instrumental in assisting the individual to learn what they need to learn, be their very best, and do what they need to do to achieve extraordinary results.

For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.acoach4u.com/Success_Habits.pdf

   
5 Tips to Increase Your Life's Happiness

1. Take a break from the material world.

Psychological research suggests that money won't buy you happiness. Once you obtain enough money to pay your bills, afford some shelter and transportation, you're pretty much set. The only two exceptions is if you give money away, or if it significantly improves your social rank. People who give money away appear to sustain greater levels of happiness over time than those who don't.

2. Your relationships go a long way to helping you be happy.

Research has shown that strong social connections with others are important to our own happiness -- the more of these you have, the happier you will be. And while marriage is significantly correlated with increased happiness, it has to be a strong, healthy marriage in order for that to be true.

3. Trying to enjoy yourself will result in your least amount of enjoyment.

According to research carried out by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and colleagues, you're least likely to be happy when you're working at trying to be happy. Happiness occurs naturally, usually without much conscious effort. It's a side effect of living a balanced life - giving time to your home life, your work or school life, and your hobbies and activities you enjoy doing. One of the other interesting findings from this research is that watching TV is one of the most soul-sucking and depressing activities most of us engage in. Goal-focused activities tend to increase our enjoyment levels of life.

4. Being a giving person and having gratitude matter.

Selfless people tend to be happier people. This is partially because of tip No. 1, but also because when you're focused on helping out others, you don't spend as much time evaluating and criticizing your own life or circumstances. Research has also shown that being grateful for everything you have in your life - whether it be your health, your friends, your family, your significant other, a job, really just about anything - helps you become a happier person. It may be because gratitude reminds us of all the things that are good about our lives (since we too often only focus on what's wrong).

5. Focus on experiences, not stuff.

People who spend their time and money on doing things together - whether it be taking a vacation to someplace other than home or going on an all-day outing to the local zoo - report higher levels of happiness than those who buy a bigger house, a more expensive car, or more stuff. That's likely because our memories keep an emotional photograph of the experience, whereas the material things don't make as big an emotional imprint in our brains. So ditch buying so much stuff for yourself or your kids - you're only buying artificial, temporary happiness.

Source: Dr. John Grohol, Founder PyschCentral.com

Need help learning how to be more happy and successful? Consider hiring a coach to help accelerate your personal and professional development. Click here for more information on Gifted Leaders’ individual leadership coaching.

Next Month

As a business culture, we’ve made the lure of leadership (i.e. being “large and in charge”) hard to resist – and the job of leadership virtually impossible to do. Many leaders have minimal “white space” on their calendars, even on weekends. The more leaders work and the more responsibilities they take on, the more isolated they become. So what’s the answer to this dilemma?  There’s a not so simple answer to this simple question.

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