Just watched a great video from Stephen Pierce this morning. He talks about a process called ITJAR (Identity, Thoughts, Judgements, Actions, Results). There’s a link at the end of this post.

If you’ve ever tried to make a change in your life (like changing career for example, or starting a business) and it didn’t work out, the reason will ultimately come back to the actions you took. Those actions will in turn have been driven by the decisions (or judgements) you made along the way, and those decisions will have been based on the way you think about things. Ultimately, the way you think about things is governed by how you see yourself, in other words by your ‘personal identity’. So a great question to ask yourself is: ‘who am I?’ There is no right or wrong answer answer but whatever you come up with will give you lots of clues about how you see and react to the world around you. If you want to make changes in your life, you first need  to figure out what sort of person you need to become in order to have the mindset that will support that change.

For example, let’s say you want to start a business. Start by figuring out what you want to do based on your strengths and passions and then find a market you can serve. Once you are clear about those things, find out from others what it takes to succeed (pick people who have done something similar: read their books, magazines, blogs etc. and talk to people). Once you know this you can take a look at ‘who you are’ vs ‘who you need to be’ and start working on the skills, habits and mindset that will get you to where you want to go. Final point: It’s very hard to do this all by yourself. You need support from people who can positively influence your journey. Do whatever it takes to find them if you are serious about making a change.

See the video on Stephen’s blog: http://www.dtalpha.com/success.html

If you are thinking of starting your own online business, this area of the blog can save you a huge amount of time, money and hassle! I’ll be highlighting some resources that can dramatically shorten the time it takes to get a successful online business up and running. (Click on Categories in the sidebar and select Resources to see all relevant posts.)

I’ve spent hundreds of hours over many years going down all sorts of blind alleys that you can avoid. The resources I’ll be covering are all high quality products and services that I have either used myself or have been recommended by people I know and trust. If there’s one thing I’ve learned, good quality help and the right tools are the best investments you can make when starting up; they will repay themselves many times over.