Career Success — Go For It!

I received my copy of the Go For It! Family Program when I returned home last Friday.  I got it through Amazon.com.

http://amzn.to/kjA1X0

This great little book by Judy Zerafa is based on the Seven Keys to Success Life Program she developed for use in schools.  As the cover suggests, The Seven Keys to Success are helpful when it comes to school, relationships, life and career success.

Judy Zerafa is a latter day Napoleon Hill.  She interviewed successful people in an attempt at developing a model for life and career success.  She developed the Seven Keys to Success after interviewing 35 Horatio Alger Award Winners asking them one question:

“What do you think you know that you think no one else knows that has allowed you to succeed to the degree for which you’ve been honored?”

She parsed their responses into The Seven Keys to Success…

• A Positive Attitude
• Belief in One’s Self
• Positive Habits
• Wise Choices
• Setting and Achieving Goals
• Using Creative Imagination
• Persistence

She took these seven principles and developed specific guidelines for applying each of them in daily life, calling it the Go For It! program.  Schools and school districts began teaching the seven keys to success and the Go For It! Institute was born.

Judy realizes that schools cannot and should not do it all.  She believes that families play an important role in the development of children.  In the introduction to the Go For It! Family Program she says, “The family has always been – and always will be – the cornerstone of society.”  She wrote the Go For It! Family Program to help parents apply the seven keys to success in their own lives and to help their children use them to create their own bright futures.

The first key to success – a positive attitude – was mentioned by all 35 of the Horatio Alger winners who Judy interviewed.  My career success coach work and study of successful people confirms this.  Tweet 39 in my career advice book Success Tweets says…

“While other people and events have an impact on your life, they don’t shape it.  You get to choose how you react to people and events.”

If you want to create the career success you deserve, you have to have a positive attitude and make positive choices.  Don’t be afraid to fail.  You fail only if you don’t learn something from the experience.  Treat failures as opportunities to grow — the tuition you pay for career success.  Choose to react positively to failures and learn something.  Keep going in the face of difficulties.  Use problems, setbacks and failures as springboards to action and creativity.  Don’t let slow days get you down.  Get up the next day and keep working.

People with a positive attitude have a habit of focusing on the positive and putting the negative out of their minds.  As Judy Zerafa points out, positive habits like this are an important key to your career success.  Habits are like muscles.  The science of cognitive restructuring shows us how to identify our personal cycle of negative thoughts, habits, and routines and replace them with positive thoughts, habits, and routines that will provide have lifelong benefits.

When I was a kid about a million years ago, there was a popular song.  I believe it was a show tune.  A couple of the lines went like this…

You’ve got to ac – cen – tu – ate the positive, and
e — lim — in – ate the negative

I don’t know the show.  If you do, please leave a comment letting us know.  I’ll give a free copy of the eBook version of Straight Talk for Success to everybody who knows the name of the show and shares it in a comment.

Recently I read a book by Evelyn Brooks which included an acronym (S.M.A.R.T.) for managing stress — but I think it also applies to developing a positive attitude.

• S Smash the negative.
• M Maximize the positive.
• A Act.
• R Relax.
• T Target your next action.

In the Go For It! Family Program, Judy Zerafa suggests four strategies for developing a positive attitude…

1. Look for the good in any situation.
2. Make a change; find the courage to make your situation better.
3. Find a benefit in difficult situations.
4. Find your own feeling switch – a memory, phrase, image that puts an instant smile on your face.

As a career success coach, I believe that it doesn’t matter if you “accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative,” “smash the negative and maximize the positive,” or “find your personal feeling switch.”  What is important is to realize that you are in charge of your attitude; you control how you respond to people and events.  Choose to react positively to whatever life throws at you and you’ll be on your way to becoming the life and career success you deserve to be.

The career success coach point here is simple common sense.  A positive attitude will help you create the life and career success you want and deserve.  A positive attitude is the first key in Judy Zerafa’s new book the Go For It! Family Program.  This is an important book.  It can help you create the life and career success you want and deserve.  It can also help you help your children create their life success.  You can pick up a copy at Amazon.com.  Go to http://amzn.to/kjA1X0/ Get this book.  Read it.  Use it to help you create your life and career success and to help your kids create their success.

That’s the career advice I took from reading Judy Zerafa’s new book.  What do you think?  Please take a minute to share your thoughts with us in a comment.  As always, thanks for reading my daily thoughts on life and career success.

Bud

PS: If you haven’t already done so, you can download a free copy of my latest career success book Success Tweets Explained.  It’s a whopping 390 + pages of career advice explaining each of the common sense tweets in Success Tweets in detail.  Go to http://budurl.com/STExp to claim your free copy.  You’ll also start receiving my daily life and career success quotes.