Southwestern Advantage Blog

What value have you been placing on negative thoughts? What great thing has ever been accomplished by someone who believed it couldn't be done? How much mental energy do you waste on anger, resentment, or envy? What value will these thoughts ever add to your own life or the life of another? 

 We are creatures of emotion. Learning to control our emotions is a life-long practice. Negative thoughts will always come to mind. When we choose to allow those negative thoughts to remain in our minds, and to influence our words and actions, we selfishly turn our focus toward ourselves instead of toward the betterment of others.  What is gained by letting someone or something get you down?  Is the satisfaction of harboring dark emotions worth the happiness and meaning that it robs from your life?  We cannot control what life brings our way, but we  can control how we respond. We can always control our actions and attitude. Negatives will always be easy to find, bu...

One of the most sobering thoughts I have been confronted with is, "What you are someday going to be, you are now becoming." You are now, this moment, exactly what you have been in the process of becoming all your life. Are you now the person you dreamed about becoming? If you had written down several years ago exactly the type of person you wanted to be today, what kind of person would you have described? How close are you to being that person now? What kind of person do you want to be a year from now? Or two years from now? Or five years from now? 10? 20? Right now you are in the process of becoming the person you will be a year, or two, or five, or 10 or 20 years from now.  The habits you have now will determine the kind of person you will become unless you change those habits now. What attitude would you like to have someday? The attitude you have now is a good indication of the attitude you will have someday, unless right now you begin to develop a new ...

one of the best pieces of advice i’ve ever received was given by a sales manager back in my book-selling days with southwestern advantage . i was at one of our sales conferences, and we’d been listening to session after session of all of the most successful salespeople, dishing their scoop on their techniques and strategies, and how they became so successful at it. i was feeling slightly overwhelmed by all of the advice and pulled my manager aside to ask for a bit of guidance on how to figure out exactly how i should best apply all of this new advice to follow. i wanted to improve my schedule, my presentations, my referrals, my this, my that. everything! i wanted to be just like these super-successful people! and he said, “lexi, slow down. try to  emulate, not replicate . start first by   picking an attitude and an action  you could best apply to your life and your situation today .  trust that these people are indeed telling you the methods and the strate...

value (val-yoo) noun 1. a fair or proper equivalent in money, commodities, etc, for something sold or exchanged, for a fair price in return 2. worth, or degree of worth 3. that which is desirable or worthy of esteem for its own sake; thing or quality having intrinsic worth value, by definition,  requires  sacrifice. you give me money. i give you milk. you wouldn’t buy the milk if you didn’t think you would derive at least the same  value  in drinking the milk that you are paying me for it. and so it is with our work. and our lives, for that matter. the things worth having (or achieving) are not the easy things to achieve. that’s why they’re  worth  achieving in the first place. they must be sought after. they must be  earned.  you’ve got to be willing to give something of yourself in order to get them. life doesn’t go around just  giving  away success to people who are not working for it. you’ve got to shel...