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It’s easy to get discouraged. Here’s how to not let it happen to you.

Courage and perseverance are traits you can actually nurture and develop. From the financial advisors’ advisor Horsesmouth.com, here are 29 tips they compiled from top achievers. Try one today.

1. Remember something a friend said when I suggested I couldn’t handle a particular mechanical task: “How do you know that you can’t?”
2. Compile a list of things that you had never done before but succeeded at doing once you tried.
3. When you show courage, even in something small, record the date and the action.
4. When you tackle and succeed at something that seemed overly complicated to begin with, make a record of it.
5. Keep the previous three lists in a tabbed notebook and read that notebook daily in order to remind yourself of your capabilities.
6. Write up affirmations for yourself and read them out loud three times daily until your subconscious has absorbed them and they have replaced the “can’ts” that undermine you.
7. Practice being ridiculous. Eric Saperston graduated from college and camped around the country in a VW van interviewing famous people about their lives. Many people thought he was crazy, but in the end, he not only interviewed 300 successful people (actor Henry Winkler and the chairman of Coca-Cola, to name but two), but now runs a film production company with millions of dollars in contracts. Eric says, “When people think you’re nuts, it gives you a wide range of behavior to take advantage of.”
8. Develop and use an end-of-day ritual. That way, you will be able to close the book on each day, with all of its successes and failures, and you won’t carry it with you.
9. Develop deeper relationships with your spouse, kids, and friends, so that you’re cushioned against even massive failure. Have many fulfilling aspects to your life so that business is not everything.
10. Determine how much each of your actions or deals is worth to you (regardless of the outcome), and keep that figure written on a card in front of you.
11. Stop imagining other people are so together. They aren’t! And we all should have stopped comparing ourselves with other people a long time ago, about the time we graduated from high school.
12. Create excellent habits, because then the daily decisions no longer have to be made. (Read or reread “The Common Denominator of Success (PDF, 6 pages),” a 60-year-old speech that speaks as directly to us now as if it had been written yesterday).
13. Read or reread “The Greatest Salesman in the World,” by Og Mandino.
14. When you face something that seems so complicated that you just can’t get a handle on it, set a kitchen timer for 45 minutes and work on it for only that amount of time, then stop. You can do anything for 45 minutes. And you’ll be surprised at how many of these monsters take only about 10 minutes once you get started.
15. Get a friend or two to work on the project with you. The Bible says that although one string can be broken, even a strong man can’t break a rope with three strands.
16. Encourage someone else. Take the focus off yourself. As the saying goes, when a person is all wrapped up in himself, he makes a pretty small package.
17. Memorize motivational poems such as “Don’t Quit,” author unknown, and “If,” by Rudyard Kipling
18. Be audacious!
19. Do 10 things in the time others would procrastinate over one.
20. Put it all in perspective. What’s the big deal?
21. Read or reread the great Nick Murray’s description of putting quarters into a slot machine, knowing that they will pay off one day. It’s in “The Excellent Investment Advisor.”
22. Be willing to take the time to solve any problem. Given enough time, an ant can carry away an elephant.
23. Develop consistent processes and write them down so that the anxiety of “how to do it” is no longer there after the first time.
24. If you have to eat a live toad, don’t sit staring at it too long! Call those difficult clients or handle those difficult problems early in the day. Own up to your mistakes early.
25. Adjust to changes, such as needing glasses or learning new software. Life changes. You change. Get over it!
26. Turn it all into a game. Keep score of the activities you do, which, along with your attitude, is really all you can control.
27. Collect a list of your favorite inspirational sayings, such as “The journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step” and “He who is outside his door is halfway there.”
28. Read biographies of people who have weathered many failures on their way to success. Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Marie Curie, even Teddy Roosevelt. He didn’t make that speech just because he was a witty writer. He said those things because he had lived them!
29. Have fun!

Posted October 24, 2009
Related Topics: career, success