Today’s success tip comes from Chris Rewell.

Chris Rewell is Australia’s leading image professional with 24 years experience in the business of image. She has over 20,000 corporate, community and individual clients and has featured in the media numerous times.

What are your top eight image tips for women?

1. Wear your ‘best colours’. You’ll look healthier and younger and feel fabulous rather than looking tired and old. The compliments you will receive will pep you up, especially if you are having one of those ‘tired and old’ days.

2. Wear clothing lines congruent with your bodyline. Your clothing will look like a natural extension of you rather than something a friend passed on.

3. Buy the best quality clothing you can afford in neutral tones that suit you. Then acquire appropriate fashion colours to update your wardrobe seasonally.

4. Buy ‘quality’ costume jewellery (if you are not able to purchase the real thing) and quality accessories seasonally to update your outfits.

5. Keep seasonal stories consistent. Cords and tweeds don’t generally mix with dressy fabrics such as satin and silk. However, if you choose to follow mixed stories, think the outfit through, from your hairstyle to your shoes, so that you pull it together to achieve the real thing and not a terrible faux pas.

6. Grooming is essential. Hair, hands, skin and make-up all need to be appropriately considered.

7. Your body is the basis of your physical presence. Take care of it, respect it and dress it as if you love it, especially when you are ‘between weights’ and biding time for your ‘real weight’ to arrive.

8. Get to know your body and love it. You have to live in it for a long time.

What are your top eight image tips for men?

1. Wear your ‘best colours’. You’ll look healthy and strong rather than burnt out and over-worked.

2. Wear clothing lines congruent with your bodyline. Your clothing should look like a natural extension of you. Clothing appropriate to your bodyline will compliment your presence rather than being a distraction or sabotaging your appearance.

3. Buy the best ‘quality’ clothing you can afford in neutral tones that suit you. Seasonally acquire shirts, ties and accessories to update your wardrobe.

4. Know your body. Are you long in the torso and short in the legs, or vice versa, or is your body balanced? Are you high waisted? Are your arms short and your neck long? Are your shoulders tapered or square? In order to buy the right shirts, jackets or suits you need to know your body.

5. Buy ‘quality’ clothing. Quality is an investment in the future and the result of intelligent effort. Find a quality menswear store and create a relationship with the staff. Quality stores generally have experienced and well-trained people to assist you.

6. The objective is to project an image of substance and presence without others realising the impact that your clothes are contributing. The man should be seen, not the clothing.

7. Immaculate grooming is essential and should be complemented with a strong, straight posture.

8. Have a plan - build a wardrobe, not a collection of individual outfits.

For more great tips, check in next week.

Until then,

Allan Poole

Today’s success tip comes from Andrew May.

After he founded Good Health Solutions, which is now Australia’s largest corporate health and wellbeing consultancy, Andrew continued to work with professional athletes and is now considered one of Australia’s leading experts on performance.

What are your seven steps for successful goal-setting?

1. Ask yourself the right questions - what do you want and why do you want to achieve it? How much does it really mean to you? What are the benefits of achieving the goal? Who will be affected? Are you prepared to do whatever it takes to achieve the goal?

2. Involve significant others - don’t keep your goals to yourself. Enlist the support of your partner, family, friends and colleagues. This keeps you accountable, while at the same time forming a support group to keep you on track.

3. Get anchored - write your goals down on a sheet of paper, simplify them into point form and then display them somewhere you can view them regularly - your diary, office, car, even on the back of the toilet door.

4. Small bites - George Miller, a 1950s psychologist, believed that we can only deal with seven bits of information at any one time. Any more than this and we need to group things into more memorable, manageable chunks. So when you create your master plan for the New Year, keep goals to a manageable number and group similar areas.

5. Set a plan - after you have written down your specific goals, the next step is to work out a specific plan. Identify the key steps you need to take toward accomplishing your goals and assign specific dates for their achievement.

6. Project the future - review your goals at least every seven days (every day is ideal) - and don’t leave it for another year. This helps activate the Reticular Activating System (RAS). The RAS is an inbuilt goal-setting device that tracks us toward our target and filters the type of information we let into our internal system. Spend time thinking about what it will be like once you have successfully achieved your goals. How are you going to feel? We really do become what we think!

7. Be realistic and reward yourself along the way - it is important to reward yourself along the way as you tick off your achievements. Give yourself a pat on the back for sticking to the process.

And remember, humans make mistakes, so don’t beat yourself up if you lose focus. If you find yourself breaking resolutions or experiencing distractions, sit down and go through the goal-setting process again, starting from step one.

If you enjoyed this week’s success tip, make sure to check back for next week’s installment.

Until then,

Allan Poole

Today’s success tip comes from Michelle Bowden.

At 28, with a baby and a huge mortgage, Michelle opened her training business, with AMP as her first client. She is an accredited NLP practitioner and master trainer in presentation and influencing skills. She works with CEOs and their teams to help prepare them for presentations at company meetings, conferences and sales pitches.

What are your top tips for influencing others in a positive and empowering way?

Rapport, rapport, rapport! Before you can influence others you must build rapport with them. My advice is to:

* Understand the person’s personality filters - the way they experience, respond to and manage their environment.

* Make a plan - what do you want to achieve?

* Use pacing and leading - pacing involves being like your audience in your dress, body language, eye contact, vocal variety, style, language, interests and attitudes. Some people call this matching or mirroring. Leading is taking the audience where you want them to go. Your audience won’t follow you or give you permission to lead them unless they feel an affiliation with you. You really can’t ask for anything until you have first built rapport.

* Show them what’s in it for them to change - we know this as the WIIFM or ‘what’s in it for me’.

* Cialdini’s influence patterns help you identify the other strategies to use - for more information I recommend you read Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini.

For more great tips and advice stay tuned for next week’s success tip.

Until then,

Allan Poole

After much coaxing from my beloved wife Leanne, I have promised her to write a blog by the end of the day, so here it is. Not sure what I’ll write about yet but I’m sure I’ll get inspiration as I go along.

iLifestyleClub - The early days

First of all, I want to address the progress of iLifestyleClub over the last few months. Thank you, Leanne, Allan, Tehillah and Josh for the Blogs you have contributed since we launched in July. With such diverse topics as photography, cooking, investment etc, we certainly are covering a wide range of lifestyle issues in our Blogs, to complement the in-depth resources available to subscribers from the iLifestyleClub “library” through the website.

Thanks also to our subscribers for supporting us in supplying the wealth creation,
personal development health and lifestyle resources you are currently enjoying.

iLifestyleClub - Where are we heading?

As we enter the 3rd month of iLifestyleClub, it is appropriate that we ask the question, where are we heading, in other words what are we aiming to achieve with iLifestyleClub?

I can’t answer for all our subscribers, but I CAN put out there, some ideas, aims and
objectives that I have myself, and hopefully some of these will resonate with some of
you too.

First of all, lifestyle for me is about quality of life. Sometimes you have to sit back
and evaluate where you have been in life, and I can say for myself that over the years,
although I have not had a rough life, the quality has not always been there.

I am not talking about material values, but purpose of life. How many of us, as we get
older and look back on our lives, will be proud of the number of hours of overtime we
did, or the number of sales pegged up as we worked away, cogs in the machine of the
economy, which we all, let’s be honest, have to do our time in as we go through life.

No, the things that will bring us contentment are based more on spiritual values, like how our lives impacted those around us, family, friends, church, and the world out there, which we all know has a lot of issues, people hurting, mostly from poverty
- material and spiritual. Making a difference in the world requires resources - again
some material and some spiritual. Giving into other people’s lives and addressing
these issues is paramount to maintaining a sense of purpose as we go through life.

So what does all this have to do with iLifestyleClub? Well, to me, iLifestyleClub
represents an opportunity to tap into resources that we can use in life as we strive to give into the lives of others around us, and beyond us, in the wider community and the world outside our national borders. There are financial opportunities, strategies which, if implemented correctly, will free up our time to enable us to give more effectively, materially and spiritually, into the lives of others. That is what I mean by quality of life, making a difference.

And as a man said a couple of millennia back, give and it will be given to you,
pressed down, shaken together and running over. That idea in itself is a spiritual
value which if it permeates communities, has been proven to change lives profoundly
where it has been put into practice. Some call it abundance thinking, others call it
generosity, goodwill, or charity. Whatever you care to call it, we all know it works.

Today’s success tip comes from Jeremy Lim.

Young Ambassador of the Children’s Medical Fund and freelance writer, Jeremy Lim, is a 16-year-old boy who has ‘Brittle-bones’ Disease. His numerous achievements and positive attitude despite his daily challenges has attracted media attention all over the world.

What do you do to pick yourself up when you are feeling down?

Feeling down is as natural as feeling pain when you are hit with an object. How much pain you feel depends on the degree of impact. Sometimes, I feel miserable. I think it is perfectly fine to feel that way, after all I am only human. However, I know I don’t have to stay down forever and the quicker I let it go, the better it is for me.

What do I do to pick myself up? I don’t make a big deal of what has passed because I cannot do anything to change it. Instead, I use my time and energy to think of solutions that will bring back my smiles. I also remind myself that spring would not be so pleasant if there was no winter.

Of course, there will be times when I feel sad because of reasons beyond my control. One of the things I do to feel better is to write about it. I write my column for Today newspaper and this feels great because it gets the negative feelings out of my system.

In challenging times, I pick myself up by looking at funny pictures or comics and reading jokes to have a good laugh. I will also turn to my books for inspiration and words of wisdom.

That’s all for this week.

Until next time,

Allan Poole

Today’s success tip comes from Pip McKay.

Pip became a trainer of NLP, running programs through her company Evolve Now! Mind Institute. From her years of experience coaching and training Pip pioneered a new technique called Matrix Therapies that has gained widespread popularity.

What have you found to be the best methods or strategies for keeping motivated and focused?

* I believe that doing what you love is the key to staying motivated. When you love something you don’t have to motivate yourself because you simply want to do it. If you have found your purpose and don’t feel motivated, then there is some kind of block that needs to be cleared. I don’t even like the idea of having to ‘get motivated’, it seems like too much hard work. I’d rather do what I love or clear a block to what I want.

* Having said that, in every business there are certain tasks that although boring, are important. In these situations I always break the task down into smaller sections so I can get a sense of closure for each. This also allows me to complete more interesting tasks in between. Or I will give myself a short timeframe to complete it in so that I am racing the clock and getting it out of the way more quickly. Inertia is always greatest at the beginning of a task, so starting with small, easy steps helps overcome that initial inertia and the rest of the task takes on a momentum of its own.

* Sometimes a lack of motivation is simply exhaustion. To remain motivated I think it is important to balance your lifestyle, take breaks, eat well and have holidays. People often use the term, ‘mind over matter’ to bully themselves into becoming a workaholic. When we work in cooperation with our body and emotions we create balance and wellbeing and in these circumstances motivation is natural.

Until next time.

Allan Poole

Welcome to my blog. Today I would like to share with you some tips that I learned from Jamie McIntyre at the 21st Century Academy Lifestyle Conference.

* “Lifestyle has more to do with Planning than it does with money.”
I am sure that you have heard it said before that those who fail to plan plan to fail. This is true in every area of our lives!
In regards to the life that we choose, we must realise that we need to plan ahead. For instance, plan that weekend away with the family. Plan a date-night each week with the one you love. Plan to have a family picnic on the weekend. Plan to spend time with the kids. Plan time to relax!

There are so many things we can do in life that involve little or no money. So remember to not stress if money is tight. Make the most of what you have and plan activities that do not need a lot of money!
If we fail to plan then each week will fly by and before we know it another month is ending … then another year!
So remember that planning is important in every area of our lives!

* “The sign of Intelligence is the ability to entertain a new idea.”
It is easy sometimes to go through life with my own preconceived ideas and not being willing to listen to others, but I am learning, as the years go by, that if I can listen to other people’s opinions and learn from them, then I continue to grow as a person and begin to see outside the box of my own life. I am enjoying expanding my thoughts and learning to look for other ways to do things.

* “The most powerful way to learn is to teach.”
I have found personally that once I learn a new concept or idea that if I am able to share this with others and teach them, then I myself learn the concept more deeply also.

Here is a photo of Greg and I with Jamie at the conference.

Until next time.

To your success and fulfilment in life!

Leanne Annett