motivational

This website is about motivational speakers, and also contains resources about motivational poster , motivational techniques , and motivational systems .

Title : Goals! How to Get Everything You Want - Faster Than You Ever Thought Possible
Author : Brian Tracy
Rating : 4 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Insightful!

The author grins, distinguished, gray-haired, gray-suited, from the dust jacket of this book, looking like everything a hokey, hustling confidence man should be. The book's subtitle, promising "everything you want," seems designed to provoke skepticism. But, hey, it's the new age: give this the benefit of the doubt - the confidence at stake here is yours. The core recommendation is simple and undeniably effective: define your goals, write them down, make a plan to achieve them and work on the plan every day. How could you fail if you really did this? Whether you would achieve "everything you want" is another matter, but you can't fault the method. Putting it to work is the hard part. To preview the gist of the book or review the meat of it, we recommend the convenient bullet charts that concisely repeat: take charge of your life, set goals, plan, implement and progress. If the message is repeated often enough, you might even write something down and just do it.

Title : Quantum Success: The Astounding Science of Wealth and Happiness
Author : Sandra Anne Taylor
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Scientifically verifiable

Quantum Success is all about personal life transformation and empowerment based on the latest scientifically verifiable findings of quantum physics.

Sandra Taylor clearly explains how to tap into the power that can manifest your dreams so that you can live a more authentic, totally self-expressed and joyous life. The strategies are simple,practical and sure to create amazing results.

Some further reading that I'm sure you will find of interest is a recently released new age novel, a psychological/spiritual adventure about compassion, life transformation, and self-empowerment "Nexus: A Neo Novel" and "The Saint, the Surfer, and the CEO" - remarkable stories about life transformation.

Title : The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness
Author : Stephen R. Covey
Rating : 3 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Interesting and Inspiring Summary of the Book

Stephen Covey's book "The 8th Habit" contains a lot of very good ideas but is rather padded. This audio CD provides a very useful summary of the key points in the book. Although it is still a bit preachy at times, it does avoid most of the homely self-indulgent anecdotes of the book. The audio CD though, has one major weakness in my view - it doesn't spend enough time on what I feel is the most important feature of the book - the 4 Roles of Leadership. Barely 10 minutes of the CD covers this vital development plan for 21st century leaders(and that coverage is fairly poor). So read the book, reinforce the key points with the CD, and skim the book again focussing on the leadership aspects. That should help you get to grips with the material.

Title : The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness
Author : Stephen R. Covey
Rating : 3 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Valuable Synthesis Presented Abstractly and Ponderously

If you haven't read The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, I suggest you read that one before this book.

Dr. Covey obviously pulled out all of the stops in trying to make this book as helpful as possible to his readers. The book contains summaries of the material in his other books, repeats many stories from those books, reconciles the material with most of the business book best sellers in recent years, contains a DVD full of inspiring videos, provides references to many free materials on his web site, has extensive appendices and contains many thoughtful sections on questions and answers. As a result, the book comes across like an encyclopedia of his teachings . . . rather than as the simple communication that is so delightful in his other books. I suspect that Dr. Covey changed ghostwriters for this one (at least I assume that the other books were ghostwritten because they avoid the ponderous communications style that Dr. Covey uses in person).

So what is the 8th habit? Allow me to paraphrase. It'll be quicker that way. You act with integrity as an individual and help others to do the same.

In Covey-speak, it's the overlap of personal greatness (applying the 7 habits in the forms of vision, discipline, passion and conscience), leadership greatness (applying the 4 roles of leadership (modeling the 7 habits, path finding, aligning and Empowering), and organizational greatness (turned into a vision, mission and values that bring clarity, commitment, translation, synergy, enabling and accountability). See Figure 14.3 on page 280 for the simplest expression of the 8th habit in Covey-speak.

Can you make a book out of that point? Well, if you put in lots of examples, you can . . . which Dr. Covey did. But the basic point is about a magazine article's worth. Most people will come to that realization when they see the entire book's concepts summarized in chapters 14 and 15. If you want to check this book out, read those two chapters and see if you need more at that point.

Why do millions of people read his books? Well, the earlier ones were beautifully written. This one isn't. All of his books show unadulterated respect for the reader and a belief in the reader's unlimited potential to improve. So it's inspiring to read someone's high opinion of you. Dr. Covey obviously cares that we live moral and positive lives. He's a sort of secular priest expressing moral values that most will agree with. Would we all like to work for Dr. Covey? Sure!

How well will this book translate in the workplace? It'll be a tough row. You can have a company that's good at the 8th habit, but doesn't build the necessary skills to succeed with using the 8th habit. That's because this book is heavy on concepts . . . and light on the practical details. Dr. Covey starts up at about 100,000 feet in the air with his abstract thinking and discussions, and rarely gets any closer. So think of the 8th habit book as helpful . . . but not sufficient in and of itself . . . for creating superior performance. Perhaps it will work better if you employ Dr. Covey's firm to help you (which is abundantly pitched in the book).

Dr. Covey humbly points out that his conclusions are aimed at dealing with the problems of poor communication, lousy alignment, misunderstandings about what to do next, lacks of tools and training, and dumbed-down workplaces . . . but is not supported by research (other than anecdotes from his clients) to support that this actually works better. But you'll agree, I'm sure, that even failure would feel a lot better in such an organization. So it's very humanistic, which is a good thing.

Few will disagree with the point of this book, and most wonder what this adds to Dr. Covey's work on Principle-Centered Leadership. "Not very much" is my impression.

I suspect that this book would have worked a lot better if the material had been simplified and added to the 7 habits book . . . and renamed as "The 8 Habits of Highly Effective People."

May God bless you, Dr. Covey! Keep inspiring us to be our best!

Title : Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion
Author : Robert Cialdini
Rating : 3 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Good, but not totally convincing or that useful

I bought this book for two reasons - one to make myself more alert to sales techniques, and two to see if there are any useful insights to glean that could be applied to other areas of life.

On both counts the book delivers. Having recently been pitched to at work by a media tracking agency and nearly taken the bait (didn't in the end) I immediately recognised the use of reciprocity and scarcity to try and harry me into signing up. That alone was worth buying the book for, and I will definitely use that insight in future.

In addition, the chapter on consistency is also very useful. I've been involved in trying (and failing) to get people behind certain campaigns in the past. As such the discussion about getting people to make small commitments to establish a self image which they then feel the need to act consistently with both rang true on a personal level, and seems like something worth trying out in future.

So why only three stars? For one I did not find elements of the book convincing. The section dealing with newspaper coverage of suicides is the bit that really troubles me. Some of the data seems both to be limited and have been interpreted quite loosely. I would need a lot more convincing that the stats are being interpreted reasonably, it looks far too rough and ready. Given that this book is really about behavioural biases surely it should be extra careful about interpretaion of data as this is something we humans tend to be very bad at, always looking for patterns that aren't there and so on. That then leads me to query the hypothesis built on top of the data and to be honest I find myself not buying it. That also makes me query whether other chapters suffer from similar flaws.

Secondly, the book isn't actually that useful once you get your head around the key techniques because, as a previous reviewer says, simply having the knowledge that you have biases doesn't make them go away. To be really useful the book should have spent as much time reinforcing ways to resist the influence of biases as it does explaining what they are.

That said it is very readable, and I got what I wanted from it, but it could have been better.

Title : It's Not How Good You Are, It's How Good You Want To Be
Author : Paul Arden
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : It's not how good it is, but how good you want it to be!

This is a very witty, imaginative and thought-provoking read! It will push you to go that extra-mile and to aim high. And as a bonus, you get some savvy business and career advice! Highly recommended!

Title : Psycho-cybernetics
Author : Maxwell Maltz
Rating : 5 Stars out of 5.
Summary : Astonishingly practical and enlightening

This book is profoundly good. Do not let the artificial sounding title put you off - it contains chapter after chapter of elegantly written guidance for living. It is evident in the writing that this is the result of not years but decades of observation by Maltz. The chapter on negative emotional habits is in itself worth the money. I bought the book to try to resolve 11 years of tension headaches. After reading teh first chapter, I stopped reading in order to try out some ideas. The headaches are improving, but almost as importantly, I have learnt so much more about myself. Not speculative, extrapolated ideas of the author, but the result of close observations of patients who were councelled before cosmetic surgery. In many cases, the intended facial surgery was canceled, to be replaced by surgery of attitude.
I cannot recommend it highly enough.