Positive Thinking - Bev James interviews Mark Rhodes; Coach, Author, Speaker and Entrepreneur

MD of The Coaching Academy Bev James interviews Mark Rhodes, Coach, Author, Speaker and Entrepreneur. In this 30 minute interview they discuss ways for developing a winning mind-set and achieve amazing results. Mark's book, "Think Your Way To Success", shows you how to build the mind-set you need to achieve your goals and dreams and start to notice more opportunities. It encourages the reader to stop being their own biggest obstacle to success & start taking action to achieving success. Bev and Mark explore the idea behind thinking about things differently, changing your mind-set over a period of time to transform your end result. To listen to the entire interview click on the button at the bottom of the short transcription.

What we are here to talk about today is your book ‘think your way to success’. Fantastic title! A lot of promises behind the title. If I could just ask you first of all why did you write the book?

Well there have been a couple of things going on for a few years. I was going around like most speakers do, with the dream of writing a book, getting it published and seeing in the shops and all that sort of thing. But really the real big driver for me was when I finished speaking on stage, audience members used to come up to me and say they “just can’t get this down we need a book”. In fact I remember one lady saying to me I’ve wrote 14 sides of A4. So really a couple of driving things there - my own goal and desire to write a book and the fact people asking for it, and actually wondering where it was.

So Mark who is the book for?

You know in business we try to get everyone to niche down. You can’t possibly target everyone, but I’m so tempted to say everyone simply because I do believe it can be applied to anyone who wants to get to somewhere different that where they currently are. The profile of my Facebook page is reasonably split between the age range of between 25 – 55. The book isn’t based around any specific career path or goal path or anything like that. It’s really based around how we work as human beings, what makes us tick and why we can’t do things we want to do, but continually do things we don’t want to. We need to know how we can stop being our own biggest obstacle, to our own success. We need to start taking our own actions to achieve our own success, whatever that means. It doesn’t have to be becoming a multi-millionaire it could just be that we want to be doing something a little bit different to what we are currently doing, and get to the next stage. So I think I’m going to be really naughty and say it’s for everyone, and break every rule that I teach all of my clients on a daily basis.

But I think with something like this, to be able to achieve your own personal best, to evolve and be the person you are born to be, or can be is really for anyone. You don’t really want to exclude anyone from success. So was this people realising that perhaps they might be in their own way? Is there a number one thing that you come across more than others that really is the brick wall in front of people?

I think probably the biggest point initially that is for people to realise that it is themselves in their own way. Once they’ve realised that, they can then get to the next level of discovering it is that’s in the way. More and more it seems like they are all fitting in to two categories it is the fear of failure and the ‘what will other people think’ syndrome.  That is strongly linked rejection and criticism but failure is the most common. People say to me, “I don’t like making cold calls” and “I don’t like talking to people that I don’t know”.  I simply ask them what are they worried about, and the answer is always “I don’t know”. But of course they know. They’re worried it’s not going to work out. They’re certainly not worried that it’s going to go well. If they knew it was going to go well they would be taking immediate action. More and more often I find people don’t want to do things if they feel they may not work out. People seem to forget that we are all on this learning curve. We are supposed to play around with things. do more of what works and less of what doesn’t work until we get the results we are looking for. It’s like getting back to the 4 year old child mentality. When we were 4 years old we weren’t hung up on what other people thought - we kept going until we got the result we wanted. We didn’t have one or two attempts at something and say “I’m not doing that, I’m obviously not good at it”. So I would have to say fear of failure is the primary reason.

It does make sense, because if the result was guaranteed why wouldn’t you have a go. But again knowing it isn’t guaranteed can make it more of a challenge. To buy Mark's book 'Think Your Way to Success' from Amazon, click here.