Business Coaching Tip: Be a Well-Informed and Intelligent Risk Taker

To be a well-informed and intelligent risk taker, you must learn from your mistakes. It may not be the most fun way to learn, but people who achieve personal success turn lemons into lemonade by finding the positive lesson in everything that happens.

Always put yourself in a position of learning. The more you continue your personal success education, the fewer mistakes you’ll make and the quicker you’ll know how to correct them.

Read at least one book a month on a subject about which you want to learn more. Read one magazine or newsletter a month to stay on the cutting edge of your profession.

Just imagine how different your life will be a year from now when you have read and implemented this additional information for your professional development. What would that level of information do for your ability to be an intelligent risk taker?

Action Step for your Professional Development: Start reading the classics from this 'Business Coaching, Personal Success Reading List':

Magic of Believing by Claude Bristol

Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill

Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz

Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell

As a Man Thinketh by James Allen

The Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason

Find these personal success classics on http://www.half.com/ or http://www.amazon.com/; they should be part of your permanent library. These professional development books work on your mindset, so it’s fitting that you start reading them now.

Implementing is the key. Reading professional development books may be intellectually stimulating, but you’re wasting your time if no practical application follows.

A good business coaching tip for getting more out of your reading is to take notes as if you had to teach the professional development material when you finish. You’ll learn on a much deeper level every time you do.

Part of being an intelligent risk taker is learning to be flexible, resourceful and resilient. To achieve a breakthrough to success you’ll need to learn to respond creatively and imaginatively by seeing the big picture. Intelligent risk takers bounce back from resistance. Think outside the box by being flexible enough to look at other perspectives and options.

Personal success comes from continuing to the finish in the face of resistance. Flexibility gives you the power to return to your center. Get expert advice and then follow your own intuition. Let me tell you what happened to me when I didn’t follow this advice.

Twenty years ago a respected person in my community was involved in gold mining investments. He said he had received a lot of money from gold mining investments the previous year. I had a gut feeling that something wasn’t right, but I dismissed my intuition because he ‘knew more about this kind of thing than I did’.

It was my first investment and it was substantial. I trusted this person and felt even better about it when I found out a couple of my coworkers were investing, as well.

Based solely on this guy’s recommendation, and doing no research on my own, I invested. Long story short, about a year later, I received a letter from a government agency telling me the whole thing was a scam. I was so embarrassed and felt so stupid, I never told anyone (except for you).

These days I have a different investment strategy. Instead, I recommend that you spend your money on being mentored by an expert. Every new thing I’ve learned in the last few years has been through the time and money invested in an expert mentor. In the end I have saved immeasurable time and tons of money! Now I have profits instead of losses because of advice from mentors.

Mentors are invaluable. There’s no such thing as a self-made millionaire. Everyone has help. You can go a long way toward life mastery and personal success with books and tapes. Eventually you want to have mentors with whom you communicate and interact on a regular basis. There are great mentors to be found right in your own hometown.