Hoooeee! MotivAsia 2003 held at The Rock Auditorium, Suntec City Mall on 18 November was a real blast!

I shared the stage with Ron Kaufman, Dr David Fremantle, Paul Stefansson, and Roger Konopasek. My good friend and fellow trainer Shirley Taylor vibrantly compered the day. The audience received more than enough rocket fuel to finish off the year, and to blast off into 2004!

Thanks to all the many hundreds of motivated people who attended, and special thanks to Delphine and Rona of
Partners Conference & Event Management for putting together this major event of the year and making it all happen!

For 2003, it's been a tougher year than usual. The SARS outbreak, the tougher economic conditions, the layoffs, the down-sizing, right-sizing and capsizing of many small and medium enterprises causes us concern.

Many companies are cutting back, there are fewer jobs available, and pressures to perform are greater than ever.

It's easy to lose our motivation under duress. Yet, Goethe's writing still stands true.

Here are some fundamental motivation principles that I particularly like:

• You must believe that you can do better than you are now doing
• You must take personal responsibility to do so
• Staying motivated means that you must take charge of your thoughts and act upon them
• You must energise yourself
• You must have a compelling purpose and stay on track
• If you fall off the track, work out why you fell off, fix it, and then get back on immediately

And most importantly, although we stay motivated to achieve all our dreams, remember not to take ourselves too seriously.

Yes, take what we're doing seriously, but do take it easy on ourselves. We tend to judge ourselves too harshly when we make mistakes. Don't be too hard on youself, but do learn from the mistakes. Don't be too uptight about life - let's enjoy our life journey along the way too!

Born to Win -
Championing the Inner Child

And if this happens, what would happen to our profitability, effectiveness and social contribution? The results would be excellent!

Did you realise that many of our current beliefs come from our pre-pubertal self? One of the main problems that most people have is a lack of self-esteem or self-worth. We spend so much time in trying to either get approval from others or we manipulate others by belittling them or putting them down.

You might recognise some managers around who swagger about, but who really have low self-esteem and don't like themselves very much. So they don't seem to give too much information about when some work must be completed and presented.

Then when the work is not completed, say by 5.00pm on the day, they take it out on their subordinates and literally punish them by giving them a tongue lashing for not completing the work on time!

It's time we changed this negative view of ourselves into a more positive one. Our major priority in life is to fulfill our dreams and vision, whatever that may be. We are adults now, no longer children, but the problem is that our inner child (metaphorically speaking) may not have grown up yet!

Often the inner child is scarred (emotional baggage) and fragmented, and thus makes for less- than-effective performance in our professional and private lives.

To realise our full potential, one of the routes is to go back to our very roots of the inner child to 'unblock' and to champion it, and to bring out the wonder child that we were always meant to be. In the new year, watch out for my new programme called Born to Win - Championing the Inner Child.

In closing ...

I hope you've enjoyed this issue of Ricky's Review. I would love some feedback from readers, so please
email me with your comments and ideas for future issues.

See you in 2004!

Ricky