Denis Waitley: The 90-Day Cycle That Will Completely Transform Your Life

You have exactly the same amount of hours in a week as everyone else. You cannot invent more minutes or buy more time with wealth. Your main problem is not a lack of time, but an inability to separate urgent tasks from important ones. You must focus on your health and your family because those priorities will shatter if you drop them. A special thanks to the Whateley family for partnering with us to release this video exclusively on my YouTube channel. To check out more about Dennis Whateley Global, Click the first link in the description below.

Confucius gave us sage advice many centuries ago, which is as relevant today as it was in antiquity. They must often change who would be content in happiness and wisdom. The secret to enjoying the greatest benefits of life is to smell the roses through the journey and not wait for the destination. The consensus is that the 2 greatest tragedies in life Or never to have had a great dream to strive for and ever to have fully reached it. You see, happiness seems to be associated more with the daily experience of the journey rather than the fleeting moment of the recognition of having arrived. Success, then, is the process of learning, sharing, growing, and welcoming change. Of all the wisdom that I've gained, the most important is the knowledge that time and health are 2 precious assets that we rarely recognize or appreciate until they have been depleted. As with health, time is the raw material of life. You can use it wisely or waste it or even kill it. To accomplish all that we are capable of, we would need 100 lifetimes. If we had forever, there would be no need to set goals or plan effectively or set priorities. Yet in reality, we're given only this one lifespan on earth to do our earthly best. Each human being now living has exactly 168 hours per week. Scientists can't invent more minutes, and even the super-rich can't buy more hours. Queen Elizabeth I of England, the richest, most powerful woman on earth of her era, whispered these final words: on her deathbed, all of my possessions for a moment of time. You see, we worry about the things we want to do but can't instead of doing the things we can do but don't. How often have you said to yourself, where did the day go? I accomplished nothing, or I can't even remember what I did yesterday? Well, that time is gone, and you never get it back. Staring at the compelling distractions on a television screen or your computer or your tablet screen is one of the major consumers of time. You can enjoy and benefit from the very best it has to offer in about 7 total hours of viewing per week. The irony is that the entertainers and athletes that we're watching are having fun achieving their own goals, making money, having us look at them enjoying their careers. Even so, Time is amazingly fair and forgiving. No matter how much time you've wasted in the past, you still have an entire today. Time management contains one great paradox: no one has enough time, and yet everyone alive has all there is. You see, time is not the problem. The problem is separating the urgent from the important. Every decision we make has an opportunity cost. Every decision forfeits all other opportunities that we had before we made it. We can't be 2 places at the same time. We all face tradeoffs. You know, there's a true example I like to quote called Bicycle versus Mother. Lee is a precocious 8-year-old boy, and both his parents work. His mother is a management consultant, and she travels frequently. After being away for several days in a row, she arrived home late one night and hugged her son. He said, Mom, I missed you. Why were you away for so long? And she smiled and replied, Well, one of the reasons I was away was to make enough money to buy you the bicycle you wanted. And young Lee looked at her reflectively and stated, Mom, I really did want the bicycle, but mothers are more important than bicycles. So please stay home more. Even though we all are aware of the tradeoffs of quality time versus quantity time, in our relationships. We're not used to thinking specifically about how our decisions cost us other opportunities, and without this understanding, our decisions will often be unfocused and unrelated to helping us achieve our most important goals. You may have heard the story about the analogy of the circus juggler to each of us as we try to balance our personal and professional priorities. When the circus juggler drops a ball, he lets it bounce and picks it up on the next bounce without losing his rhythm or concentration. He keeps right on juggling. Many times we do the same thing. We lose our jobs but get another one on the first or second bounce. We may drop the ball on a sale or an opportunity to move ahead or in a relationship, and we either pick it up on the next bounce or get a new one thrown in to replace what we just dropped. However, some of the balls or priorities that we juggle don't bounce. The more urgent priorities associated with self-imposed deadlines and workloads have more elasticity than the precious, delicate relationships, which are as fragile as fine crystal. Balance involves distinguishing between the priorities we juggle that bounce from the ones labeled loved ones, health, and moral character that may shatter if we drop them. The reason we always ask our seminar attendees to engage in the Wheel of Life exercise involving 8 important aspects of your life is so you can arrange them in the true order of importance to you and give them a sufficient amount of attention as you juggle them within their time constraints. Handle your priorities with care. Some of them just don't bounce. We've found that a 90-day cycle of success to be a wonderful unit of time. It's a time period that's long enough to plan for, begin, work hard at, and accomplish certain objectives. And at the same time, it isn't a year from now or forever. It is a short enough time to generate real motivation and results. Freedom from urgency—that's what will allow us to live a rich and rewarding life. You may have thought that your problem was time starvation when, in truth, it was in the way you assigned your priorities in your decision-making process. Have you allowed the urgent to crowd out the important? Each day we'll continue to encounter deadlines that we need to meet and fires not necessarily of our own making, that we must put out. Endless urgent details will always beg for attention, time, and energy. What we seldom realize is that the really important things in our life don't make such strict demands on us, and therefore we usually assign them a lower priority. Our loved ones understand when we're preoccupied with our urgent business, but it's hard for us to understand many years later why they appear preoccupied when we finally find some time for them. All the important arenas in our life are there awaiting our decisions, but they don't beg us to give them our time. The local university doesn't call us to advance our education and improve our life skills. I've never received a call or email from the health club that I joined insisting that I show up and work out for 30 minutes a day. And my bathroom scale has never insisted that I lose 30 pounds. The grocery clerks have never made me put back on the shelves the junk food that I put in the cart, nor has a fast-food restaurant ever refused me a double cheeseburger and large fries because of my high cholesterol. Nor have I ever been subpoenaed by the ocean or the mountains to appear for relaxation or solitude. Yet I receive hundreds of urgent texts, voicemails, Other messages, emails each week from people with deadlines. You see, it's the easiest thing in the world to neglect the important and give in to the urgent. One of the greatest skills that you can ever develop in your life is not only to tell the two apart but to be able to assign the correct amount of time to each. Beginning tomorrow, throughout the day and every day thereafter, stop and ask yourself this question: Is what I'm doing right now important to my health, well-being, and mission in life and for my loved ones? Your affirmative answer will free you forever from the tyranny of the urgent. Change masters live in harmony and balance. They learn from the past, but they don't live there anymore. And they set goals in the specific foreseeable future, which gives their everyday activities richness and purpose. And then they live and love and respond and enjoy the present, that only moment of time over which we have any control. Now, and it's gone. Now, and it's history. Success is how you collect your minutes. You spend millions of minutes to reach one triumph and then a few hundred minutes enjoying it. If you're unhappy through the millions of minutes, what good are the hundreds of minutes in triumph? The true change masters in life see their total person in such a fully formed perspective that they literally become part of the big picture of life and it in them. They've learned to know themselves intimately. They learn to see themselves through the eyes of others. Becoming a true change master in life is to look in the mirror and to see the person you want. wanted you to be. From this moment on, when you talk to yourself, talk with all due respect. If you want respect, set a respectable example. And if you want to be loved, be lovable. Ralph Waldo Emerson, a revered American philosopher, captured the essence of fulfillment, which I have above my desk to remind me of my additional mission beyond financial profit. Emerson says, how do you measure success? To laugh often and much, to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children, to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends, to appreciate beauty, to find the best in others, to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, a redeemed social condition, or a job well done. To know that even one other life has breathed easier because you lived. This is to have succeeded, and this is the real measure of inner wealth. So you and I live every minute as if it were our last, and we look for the good. We help to create change masters among the others that we touch within it. For each of us, a clock is always running. There are no timeouts, no substitutions, but there is still time to win. We've got to remember to step back from the canvas of life and gain perspective like an artist constantly shading a painting that's being improved every day. Look at the total person and ask yourself, how do I fit into my family, my company, my profession, my community? The nation, the world, its creation, and consider the ecological cycle, the double win. If I help you win, I win. If nature wins, then we all win. Since change is the rule, why not become its ruler? The future is in your hands. Now that you've become a member of that special top 1% in the world, Who are known as the change masters.

And congratulations, you're one video closer to who you're meant to be. Believe. For some more incredible Denis Waitley motivation, check the video right there next to me. I think you'll love it. Continue to believe, and I'll see you there.

A good way to think of leadership is the process of freeing your team members to do the best work they possibly can. Today's business team members say they want more than anything else