Personal “P” Points
by

Bill Cottringer


Being successful and winning in life takes much talent, effort, determination, cleverness, good timing, and patience. However you can shorten the learning curve by understanding and practicing certain “P” points. These psychological power points are the little things you can do, with strategic timing and placement, to get the biggest gains with the least side effects. Here are seven such “P” Points which will give you a jump start on being successful.

PURPOSE

It is very difficult to be successful if you don’t know your purpose in doing something—why you are doing it and what you hope to achieve. Here are four good tips about the importance of having and knowing your purpose in the success quest:

• If you don’t have a particular purpose how will you ever know if you’ve been successful?

• When you get confused about what you are doing and get similar non-results, stop. Ask yourself what you want until you can’t ask ‘what for’ anymore with the answers you come up with.

• Sometimes finding the right purpose is not easy, but if you stop and take inventory your will see that you are already three-fourths of the way there—how do you spend most of your time, what do you enjoy doing most and what do people most admire about you?

• A clear purpose helps identify the few things you need to focus on doing, from the overload of the many. You will be working less and getting more.

PERSPECTIVE

Having the right perspective is high on my list of success clues. I have learned four sure things about the important relationship between perspective and success:

• What you see and think to be true is very much a part of where you are doing the looking from in time and space; if you don’t like what you see, change viewpoints.

• To be successful you have to see reality clearly and you obviously need to get to the best vantage point to do that.

•Having an positive outlook and optimistic expectations is always best.

• The only way to see the relationship between your perspective and the results you are getting, in order to get to the right perspective, is to slow down and notice the existing connection.

PERSEVERANCE

I don’t know of anyone who doesn’t believe in the direct connection between perseverance and success. The main thing I’ve learned of value to share about this is that the bigger the goal, the more the need for perseverance. In other words real success is not for the faint of heart and early quitters. Some other lessons learned about perseverance:

• No matter how much adversity I think I have weathered with my own tenacity, it is a small measure in comparison to some others I know.

• Success is often just around the next corner that I am most inclined to want to give up on getting to, if I hang in there.

• Quitting becomes un-quitable habit very easily.

• The more the perseverance, the more the contentment upon achievement of success.

PROBLEM-SOLVING

This is a skill that I wish teachers would teach more of in school. And maybe if we taught more about how to deal with the problem of school bullying, we wouldn’t have so much school violence. Here are a few important things I’ve learned about successful problem-solving:

• The more flexible you can be in trying different solutions without pre-set outcomes or expectations for success, the better.

• It is usually a good start to find out what the real problem is behind the noisy symptoms that usually occupy our attention most.

• Some problems can’t be cured or permanently fixed, just temporarily better managed.

• Big problems need to be broken down into more manageable parts or they are not too overwhelming.

PERCEPTIONS

Right or wrong, people’s perceptions are the realities they act on. Here are a few important things I’ve learned about improving the accuracy of my own perceptions of others and their perceptions of me:

• It’s a real good start to find out reality instead of assuming you know how things are.

• It’s much easier to give a good impression that results in a favorable perception in the beginning, than to try and correct a harmful, faulty one later on.

• Never waste your time trying to argue another person out of their wrong perception of you; you can only show them over time.

• Once you begin to see how the brain tricks you into forming inaccurate and incomplete perceptions of people and situations, those faulty perceptions have less hold over you.

PRIORITIES

We are living in times of total overload and meltdown. Too much to do and not enough time to do it in. Time to prioritize with these tips:

• If you are not living your life around the values you hold dearest, what are you waiting for?

• Working hard, eating well, having fun, loving unconditionally, relating well with others, volunteering, serving, relaxing, helping family—what other priorities do you need?

• Sometimes you are forced to get in touch with your priorities the hard way and that is never comfortable, but it is still beneficial.

• Real progress comes from questioning the typical order in which we approach our priorities; we usually have the sequence flip-flopped and reversed like the tail wagging the dog.

POLARIZATIONS

Our dualistic minds which divide everything up into opposites are both a curse and a gift. The gift part is how we learn the difference between things like comfort and discomfort, peace and turmoil or aloneness and togetherness; the curse part is that it tends to artificially flavor wrong opinions and judgments, often cutting happiness in half. Some good advice on putting things back together after we take them apart:

• A big part of creativity is seeing how opposite things can work together to be more successful than alone.

• Conflicts usually involve the position “I am right and therefore you have to be wrong.” This either-or scarcity mentality results in failure; success involves a win-win of and-and abundance mentality.

• Let’s get honest here, things are rarely all good or all bad, right or wrong, or useful and useless. Truth always seems to be somewhere in the middle right?

• The biggest polarization we need to reconcile is the illusion we have of being separate from the rest of life. That isn’t true and genuine success requires truth.

“P” Point your way to success!

William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security in Bellevue, WA., along with being a Sport Psychologist, Business Success Coach, Photographer and Writer living in the mountains of North Bend. He is author of several business and self-development books, including, “You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too” (Executive Excellence), “The Bow-Wow Secrets” (Wisdom Tree), and “Do What Matters Most” and “P” Point Management” (Atlantic Book Publishers). This article is a brief summary of his new book “Reality Repair Rx.” Bill can be reached for comments or questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net