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

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