Be, or become, proud of You

Did the last post encourage you to put yourself in a more positive place? Know that often we can do little to change much of what surrounds us. Know that it is nobody's fault you are where you are. Know that if you want to change things around you, you can. If you were born into circumstance that makes most days a struggle for even the most basic comforts of life, do not commit to an entire existence in that position. Work to change it, even in the smallest amounts, over time. Keep your mind focused on where you want to get to in life. Put a small note on your bed, desk, mirror; somewhere you will see it often. Only small reminders that change often or they will be too constant and be either ignored or annoying. Refresh often. If you have a success, put that there too.

Putting it all in perspective makes the realisation of plans possible. Last summer it rained; a lot. On Facebook I posted that my boardshorts still had the tag on, my sunscreen bottle was still full. The status was a bit tongue in cheek, not really a complaint. Putting that in perspective made me flinch. The same rain that had kept me from the beach had sadly washed away homes, livelihoods and lives in some of the worst ever flooding in the area. Ouch! That's nature's perspective in action. Brutal. What do you need to put into perspective? How are your grades? Are they showing any signs of improvement? If they are stable, what sort of comments are you getting? Remember teachers and high schools are very cautious in writing comments because they do not want any comeback from the community. How much have you joined in this year? I do not mean compulsory stuff. What you should find is something you can do that would help out.

Make this year the year of consolidating a better future for you.

Begin the changes that will make you hold your head high and be super proud of what you have done and what you have become.

This is a great video called Success Achievement -- Your Guide for Moving Forward Daily

It is a top start the year and your advancement. Grow to who you really are.

Best of wishes for 2012.
Advancement plus for you

Be who you are

'I wish I was smarter, luckier, taller, more athletic, had straight hair, had curly hair, had black hair, had red hair.' Heard any of these? Oh yes. Haven't we all?

To be truly successful, you should accept yourself and your situation for who you are and what it is. It is the best thing to do. No good wishing for something that only a real miracle can change. The body type, brain power, color hair, location we start our lives with are all out of our control. At school, you are stuck with the teachers you get, good or ordinary, inspirational or boring; there they are right in front of you.

A short time ago I was feeling low. Heading downwards quickly. Yes, there's always someone worse off but I think that is one of the lousiest 'cheer up' statements ever invented. Who cares when you feel so low? Retail therapy? Crap. Things are not what buoys your spirit. Things wear out. Things go out of fashion. Things become dreary, waiting to be replaced by other things. No, when you are down, you need to drill into your spirit to find the required boost. What jolted me in this instance, more than anything, was a trip to the beach. The water was clear, warm; the day sunny. It dawned on me that I was so fortunate to be able to play in the surf; jump under waves; glide into the beach; throw the refreshing water into my face. It was an awesome jump start. How lucky to be able to do something so enjoyable. My spirit's energy grew; my thinking became more positive; I felt restored, renovated, more immune from the crap of life. I realised I am who I am. After all these years.

My problem had been that I had let business become an excuse for putting off all, and I mean all, that I enjoy. I had stopped doing the things that built my spirit, made me feel energised. Many of these were small but their omission had compounded to make a huge and negative impact on what I was able to accomplish mainstream. So, absolutely definitely, do not give up your joys in life in order to get more busy. You will have things that make your spirit stronger and you must retain their presence in your world. Learn to recognise them. Write them down and the feeling you encounter that makes them so good. From personal experience, it is vital that you avoid any excuses to put off these interludes, or worse still, forgo them.

What's that? Oh yes, I agree this blog is all about change. So what am I going on about here? Have I gone nuts and now say you cannot change grades, comments, stress? No, now I say if I am nuts, I must always have been and the 'nutty' was just waiting for a trigger to make it emerge. :) What I am saying is that you must be comfortable that you can recognise your current situation for what it is. Right now you are stuck with it. I do not mean comfortable in the sense that it feels good but in the sense that you can define it and tell us what is wrong with it. You can write down clues to you. House, family, school, success, your potential, things you have, things you need but do not have, the frills of life things like fashion label stuff. You know you. You can write you down. Best of all because you can document you now, you will be able to document changes. That will be powerful.

Define everything you can about yourself and what happens around you. Keep it in a special place where you will not lose it. Leave it flexible enough to change because you do. Start on a fresh piece of paper and write down the things you would most like to change about your situation. Not hair color, brainpower and so on. I ask you to do this because in our society education is the key to change. Better education means more opportunity. If you are feeling that you want change, look to Success at School to help you. That is what we are all about here. Do you have a career plan? What grades do you need to get started? Write it down.

Finally, think about your school results and comments. Think about the stress that study, assessment and assignment causes. Are they all good? Many students think not. There are of course other stresses in high school that we will also deal with so if you have these too, add them here. Write down all you can that is good and all the things you would like to change. Again, it cannot be the teachers, school and so on because we are usually stuck with these.

End up with three lists. You and your environment; things you want to change and aspire to; you and your schooling. Keep all this information in a safe spot. We will be going back to it often.

Have a great 2012
Hope this is a turn around year at school, especially if you have struggled

Measuring your success. School report suck? Really?

Can you run 100m in under 10 seconds, swim 100m in less than 50 seconds, jump higher than 2.4 meters? Me neither. Most of the world cannot even achieve one of these, certainly not all three. So why at school do we insist on similar comparisons? We are not all world record holders, we are not all 'A' students in every subject we study. Should we be? Can we be? No. How we reflect on our success at school should be an internal measurement. Measured against our own potential, how well are we doing? If we are really honest with ourselves, how well does our school report really reflect how well we have done? Does it represent me working at or near my potential? This is what you think about to discover your real measure of success.

Some subjects just click, some never do. Some students are devastated if their usual A+ appears as an 'A', others celebrate with all the bells and whistles when they earn a barely passing grade. So reading a 'C' in History next to your name can be an event worth celebrating and making public or one that requires significant disaster control. Being honest with yourself is one of the keys to your Success at School. Don't kid yourself that you have worked hard or studied adequately when, in fact, you have clearly missed your targets. Study needs a structure to support it. It is not something you just pile on right before exams and hope for the best. Some sort of plan becomes more and more necessary the further you are through your education. Establish good habits early in life, the earlier the better.

Be kind to yourself, as well as a little strict. More importantly be determined, backed up by your vision to be a Success at School as part of a better future. Do not excuse your poor work habits by blaming anyone else or your environment, do not accept marks below your potential either; pointing at teachers, the school, facilities, resources and so on. Take your success seriously and tackle it with energy. We do live in tough times and sometimes we have to suffer less than ideal conditions; conditions which influence and, in some way, direct our learning. If you listen, dozens of people, texts and videos will bore (inspire?) you with stories of hardship overcome. Heard a few of those? Hmmm.

You do not have to leap tall buildings or commit to the training regime of a world record-holding athlete. You do have to set up a scheme that both suits you and works for you. One that gradually improves your current grades, one that gradually makes your future a better place to be. Hold those thoughts as your results turn upwards, as comments improve, as study and exams become more doable, as homework is done well within time as your Success at School becomes more certain.

Good luck with your high school studies. Have a great day

Someone is stealing your future

While you sit in class and daydream or chat to the student near you; as you wander through the mall looking at potential partners, new electronics; as you watch a movie for the zillionth time, saying the words as the actors do; think. Someone is stealing your future. It may be the good looking shop assistant you fancied, or the most valued player in the game you watch, or the surfer at the beach. You will never know. Not just one, but many people will be stealing your future in your idle time. The future you have laid out as a result of planning and commitment to do well is being eroded by people your age all over the country; probably the world these days.

OMG

Who are these people and what can you do about it? These people are students just like you. They listen to the same music, wear the same clothes and sit on the same beach. You cannot pick them out. In the future, you will be able to find them easily. Go to the top of a company; find leading entrepreneurs; look for champions of just causes; watch the news and hear inspirational politicians and researchers announcing cures for endemic diseases. You will find their names attached to fabulous artworks, literature and architecture. Didn't you want your name in there somewhere? Can't happen. Can't happen unless you act now to stop it.

While you goof off, there are students everywhere reading, listening, analysing, drawing, organising notes. They have their gameplan and are sticking to it. You are losing the race if you do not do the same. While we are young, even when older but less so, we are in a series of queues. Queues for jobs, training, University or College entrance, fast food. For most young people your position in each queue is determined by your Success at School. You are not competing with just the others you see in your classes at school. Every student across the State/Country in similar classrooms, gazing out from similar windows, is competing for the same things.

This is where you now have the advantage. For every one person you get ahead of in your classes, there may be thousands you get ahead of in the life queues; those really important queues you plan to be near the front of after you leave school and enter your future as a successful applicant to all you set your mind to. So listen to what is going on. Apply yourself at every opportunity. Relax and enjoy your youth, but beware of the challenge. Everyone you pass in the results of your classes is equivalent to hundreds, even thousands, of places in those important post-school queues.

Good luck with your studies
Have a great day

Time management I

Time management systems, workshops and advice earns millions of dollars for consultants. Time management applies to all activity associated with your endeavours to find Success At School. There are possibly hundreds of books printed every year on ways to manage your time. That means that it is an important topic for all of us to consider. There is an expert on every corner. We all need guidance as we go through life, especially when we have a myriad of tasks to be worked on simultaneously with due dates stacked one on top of the other as they are in school. The day to day requirements of school forms some of the most complex demands we will ever face. School life is very busy. We really do need help to cope.

How do you begin to model all that needs to be done so it is done in time, on time and represents your best quality of production? Math, English, History, Art, part time work, family commitments, sport, occasional entertainment and breaks, friends, sleep ... arrrrgggh. How will it all fit? Does fitting it all in just seem like a dream, something that has always been in the 'too hard box'? What if you heard that only a few hours of planning and preparation is all you needed to put everything into place so you knew from the outset that it all pieced neatly together? Well, it's true.

The first thing you must do is begin to record all you do outside school; include anything that uses up time, including recovery time for things like sport and late night entertainment. Try to find the key things that are repeated regularly and those that come up frequently. These can be catalogued a long time before they occur and will form a skeleton for your time management exercise. Leave out nothing. If you insist on watching television, put it down, especially if there are set times.

As you record the outside of school time eaters, start to outline the demands that school places on your time. Gradually a detailed picture of your life's time demands will emerge. Now you have some really valuable information that will help you with study, work and play. Think about its significance. It will actually help you find more time in your life because time management is not about filling your time up, it is about freeing up time. The time is freed up as you get used to prioritising what devours and wastes time. Can you give up some TV time? Do you have other flexitime which can be moved to another time slot or even used for something more pressing? Do not forget our aim. Success At School that leads to success in life; to give ourselves more opportunity to get a firm foundation for a better future. That's what we want.

If you can, keep all this information in a notebook. You can then track time wasters and time savers over a long period and make this notebook a great tool. Take it seriously, it has grand repercussions. We will explore the next part, once you have some data to work with. Go on, get going.

Good luck. Have a great day

Make exams easy. Better brain links for Better School Marks

During tests your brain needs to work quickly and efficiently. Experts tell us that our brain works best when it is uncluttered, relaxed and when the channels we need to use to solve the particular problems in front of us are well ingrained in our brain.

Let's deal with the last of these. It seems to be the most difficult. In practice, you can ensure that you are always at this vital stage. The channels you use to solve particular problems are just like channels used to carry water. With a regular flow of water and maintenance of the edges, these channels are efficient and do their job well. Treat learning any new skill or theory at school just like an athlete trains a skill. How many times do pros swing a bat, kick a ball, pass, punt, run, jump, swim lengths? They may be among the best in the world but they still must work on the most basic of skills, as well as those that most of us will never master. That's why they are the best.

As kids they probably spent hours on a new trick, throw or stroke that most of us would have given up on. They would definitely have made many mistakes. Nobody gets better by staying safe and making no mistakes. Learn from them and steadily improve. Do a couple extra practise sessions. You won't need as much effort or repetition as our world class athletes but you will be well rewarded.

So back to those channels. Imagine when you first come across something you have to learn that you have to dig a channel to join up the right parts in your brain so you can absorb it into your mental capability. On the first go, the message goes over unfamiliar ground looking for the right links. On the second it may recognise that it has seen this before and remember most of where to go, starting to dig out a channel for future information of this sort to go through. The next time the channel is dug out further and information begins to flow quickly and freely. The more you repeat the better the information flows, the more quickly and readily problems are solved.

Just like the water carrying channels that will fall into disrepair if they are not used and well maintained so too these mental channels will become less efficient with lack of use. The good news is that if you set up good channels at the beginning with a lot of early practise, your small bits of revision and review is all that is needed for maintenance to keep them in first class condition.

During exams you will have a network of open channels that link together in many ways and are ready to pump information that will be retrieved, assembled and laid out as a solution. And good job to you for making that happen.