Climbing to success requires plan of action

Knowing you can change your life is one thing, actually doing something about it is another says motivational speaker Rowdy McLean. Photo / Supplied

Knowing how to improve your life or career is one thing. Actually doing it is something altogether more difficult. As motivational speaker Rowdy McLean says: "You can Google action, but you can't download it. And you can't get someone else to take it for you."

McLean is a master at getting things done and visits New Zealand next month to deliver a Get Real seminar. He called in at a Thought Leaders event in Auckland last month where he gave a taster of his seminar.

McLean's message is that all individuals should take the journey from ordinary to awesome - a process involving the "five A's":

* Alignment
* Ambition
* Attitude
* Awareness
* Action

The first four are easy. Alignment is about understanding your strengths and abilities, ambition is wanting to do something so badly you won't give up, attitude is about having the right attitude to win, and awareness is knowing what's out there.

Action is where many people trip up and McLean has a trick up his sleeve for people who can see the light, but then fall into the same old patterns.

At his seminars he doesn't just get people to promise to take action on certain issues that are holding them back. Knowing that virtually everyone carries a mobile phone these days, he gets them to make that important call or email in the room.

"We get people to make the phone calls, have the conversations, and send the emails in the room."

Most motivational speakers get people to write down goals or blockages. Another of McLean's tricks is to get attendees to write down their goals for the next 12 months in a very detailed way. They don't get to take them away.

McLean collects them up and gets people to name someone to send them to - asking that person to hold them to account. "We add a beginning to the letter, which says: 'Hi, I have chosen to send this to you because we have been friends for the last 15 years (for example) and if anybody can keep me committed to this goal you can.'

"It is a really powerful gifting of the accountability," says McLean. His aim is to take people out of their boxes, put them in the real world and expose them to their talents. "I have spent years and years and years researching what makes people successful and makes some people achieve so much with so little, yet others have all the resources in the world and don't achieve anything at all in their lives."

McLean gets hot under the collar about the "cotton wool society" we live in and how it holds people back from success. People also handicap themselves by listening to the "dream stealers". These are the people that say: 'it can't be done'. They're the people that said Mt Everest could never be climbed. Then they said it couldn't be done without oxygen. And when that failed a woman couldn't do it, and nor could a blind person. If everyone had listened to this defeatism talk, Everest would never have been climbed.

He's full of good practical advice for people who find themselves held back in their career or life.

For example, procrastination and perfectionism are poison in Rowdy-speak. "People say 'I can't do it today', 'I will do it when I get time', or 'it has to be perfect'. The trouble is we live in the fastest generation ever." McLean believes instead in going ahead and testing ideas.

Another Rowdy-ism is to ditch your labels. Just because you have a label for not being dedicated or even being a whinger, it doesn't mean you can't ditch them, by either moving on to a new workplace and starting afresh, or simply reinventing yourself in the existing one. "We go through a process with people of unpacking their backpacks and repacking them and getting rid of all the stuff they are carrying around, which is not useful."

McLean was brought to New Zealand by the relatively fledgling local branch of Thought Leaders - a community of people who exist to 'inspire thinking and facilitate conversations that shift thinking on the planet'.

The theory of Thought Leaders is that there are few platforms where talented individuals can develop or share their great ideas. "Original thinking rarely comes from collectives. And, although inspired thinking often happens in isolation, it rarely happens in a vacuum. An idea needs an audience, like fire needs air," the organisation says in its marketing material.

McLean, who has been a member of Thought Leaders in Australia for six years says he finds the members a great network of people to brain storm with. "The reason I am part of Thought Leaders is it stretches my mind and keeps me growing and developing. The Thought Leaders mindset looks at something and says: "yes and ..."

It's not a touchy feely organisation, says McLean. Rather "being clever and commercially smart as well". "It's about the motivation and inspiration of people in business to raise the bar."

Members come typically from two areas:

* Individuals who want to develop their intellect - most likely in a commercial area
* People in industry who are looking to position themselves with a unique point of difference.

www.thoughtleaders.com.au
www.getrealseminar.com