How Prone To gossip Are You?

My early Sunday morning reading lead me to the information I am about to share with you today. It is an excerpt from a book called The Magic Of Thinking Big written by David J. Schwartz, which I highly recommend if:

• You want to learn to believe in yourself
• You want to develop the Action habit
• You want to build confidence and destroy fear
• You want to think and dream creatively
• You want to turn defeat into victory
• You want to think like a leader

Cutting a long story short the chapter I was reading this morning was on how to manage your environment, precisely how to avoid Thought Poison. I will leave the concept of thought poison for another day and just focus on "The Gossip Test".

OK do not get me wrong here, I am not saying all conversations is indeed gossip. Shop talk, the occasional rant are necessary at times and even better when they are constructive. Below are the questions to the gossip proneness test, tell me how you do by posting some comments when you have taken the test:

1. Do I spread rumors about other people?
2. Do I enjoy hearing reports about a scandal?
3. Do I always have a good word to say about others?
4. Do I encourage others to bring their rumors to me? Am I rumor receptive?
5. Do I judge others based solely on facts?
6. Do I keep confidential information, well, confidential?
7. Do I precede my conversations with "Don't tell anybody"?
8. Do I feel guilty about what I say concerning other people?

Just consider this for a moment; Taking a hammer and bashing your neighbor's shiny new car to a pulp is not going to make your car look one bit better. Rather spend your time studying what your neighbor is doing right to be able to afford such a nice car.

Think about these questions next time someone comes to you with some "hot gossip" and make sure you keep yourself safe from "Thought Poison".

Read, Enjoy and share, until next time Peace and Love.

20 Steps To Writing A Book Part 2

The past week has been quite hectic, with the day job calling as well as a reggae concert I attended towards the end of last week. It was an exciting and yet surreal experience being at the show, I grew up listening to these two big reggae artists and never at that time did I think I would get to see them perform live on stage. 

I have deliberately withheld details of who the artists are as I have a review of the concert and some photos coming shortly so you do not have long to wait to find who the mystery gig was.

OK apologies you had to wait this long for part 2 of my How To Write A Book Article, but I am sure you have been busy going through the first 10 parts. Now lets go on to the next one...

11. Once you have finished dictating your entire book, have someone type it out for you and give it back so you can move to the next step.

12. This next step is the beginning of some long hard hours. Set up a strict work schedule and block off two, three or four hours at a time. Discipline yourself to sit down and edit during this time, always remember to take regular breaks to refresh yourself.

13. Edit the entire book from front to back the first time. Correct the grammar and typing mistakes. Create the necessary paragraphing. This has to be the longest job of editing in the whole book creation process.

14. Write your Introduction, a Preface and Acknowledgements if necessary. I am sure you are wondering why this only gets mentioned now? Well, you now more or less have a "book" and you know exactly what it is about and its better to write the Introduction now.

15. The second edit provides structure to your book. Break up the text with a heading every 2, 3, 4 paragraphs, making it “bite-sized” and easy to read.

16. Place a quote at the beginning of each chapter in your Third edit. Create three, five or seven action steps at the end of each chapter if it is a self-improvement or educational book.

17. Your fourth edit allows you to polish the sentences, delete unnecessary material, and make final corrections.

18. Completely reread the entire book in your fifth and final edit, from cover to cover. This should take you the least amount of time of all since you are now very familiar with your book.

19. Writing a book is a time consuming process that requires 50-100 hours of work, once you have gathered all your material and carried out all your research

20. Gentle classical background music is highly recommended when you are working. It improves alertness, creativity and fluency.

I hope to one day apply all these steps in writing my own book. In the meantime I hope I have given you the starting point you have been looking for. You may have been entertaining the idea for a long time and never got to act on it. My message for you today is "there is never a better moment to start than the present moment". Grab the initiative, stop thinking and start working on your book today. 

Your support and feedback is immensely appreciated, and please feel free to send your work for proof reading or share your concepts with me so we can work together to get your book ready.

Until the next post Read, Enjoy and Share. Peace and Love

20 Steps To Writing A Book Part 1 - Inspired By Brian Tracy

At some point in your life you may come to the realization you want to put your life story in writing, it may follow a life changing event like the birth of your first child, getting married or losing someone you hold dear. Whatever the motivation I believe that following the 20 steps laid out below will ensure you have a product that you will be proud of. I am yet to put these steps in practice but I just had to share them as I believe we are all at different stages in our lives. Please share your success stories when you finally get published, now that it is even easier with the advent of eBooks, Amazon and the Kindle.

1. Begin with a message, an idea, or story that you feel passionately about and would like to share

2. You must be an expert on your subject. You must know 10 words for every word you write. If you write on success, you must already be successful. If you write on money, you must already be rich. If you write on relationships, you must already

be happily married. I beg to differ with Brian here, depending on whether your story is fact or fiction you do not really need to have prior experience, just a healthy dose of creativity will do

3. Target audience definition is a very important consideration, who is going to read your book? Define them and you will find it easier as you will be writing “for them”.

4. Write it and they will read it, if money is not your motivation and you are sharing a special message, and then your book is a success if only one person reads it. If however, it is meant to be a best seller then make sure you have a large target audience.

5. Research, research and research some more. Buy everything that has ever been written about the subject and read it, then read it again. This step makes sure you are able to set your book apart from everything else that has been written on the subject, it creates your unique selling point.

6. Remember the research phase is very important, collect all the information required before you start writing.

7. Organization is key; arrange your material into seven or as many chapters as you think will be required to tell your story, each flowing in a logical order, from beginning to end.

8. Outline the key-point in each chapter on the front of an A4 sized writing pad.

9. Arrange the key points in each chapter from No.1 through to the end until you have all the key ideas for the chapter on paper.

10. Now the fun begins, make sure you have a decent dictation machine because you will need it. Start from the beginning and dictate your story supported by the materials you have put together.