Reporter Kathy Engle recently interviewed Byron and reviewed “Build Your Dream” for the Green Valley News & Sun newspaper. Thank you, Kathy!
"Build Your Dream: 12 Essential Tools for Successful Living”
By Byron E. Thompson
175 pages
Wheatmark
"Build Your Dream," by Tubac author Byron E. Thompson, offers not only help for overcoming obstacles in your life, but also a step-by-step plan.
Thompson has impressive credentials as the author of a self-improvement book. For many years he ran a Dale Carnegie franchise in Portland, Ore., a territory that also covered adjoining states. Now 75, he devotes his time to writing, consulting and training in businesses throughout Southern Arizona.
All proceeds from his self-published book will be donated to Rotary International, to fulfill his goal of donating $1 million to that organization.
"Build Your Dream" is inspirational and realistic about the barriers, bad habits and excuses many of us acknowledge that block fulfillment of dreams for a happy, productive, balanced existence, goals that include achieving financial security, and success in career, family and community life.
What is different about his book is that it will inspire many readers to identify their goals and then take action to achieve them in a real and practical way, a way that doesn’t have to involve years of effort.
Age is not a barrier, Thompson writes, as he quotes philosopher Kalhil Gibran in noting that "To understand the heart and mind of man, look not at what he’s done but what he aspires to be."
Practical steps Thompson suggests involve setting objectives and deadlines, defining your vision and purpose for the rest of your life, keeping a journal, taking time to think about what you really want to accomplish and how, defining your priorities, describing your ideal self, coping with barriers and change, affirming your goals, motivating and managing yourself, and measuring your progress.
The book can be ordered from www.wheatmark.com. For more information, contact the author at www.byronethompson.com
- Kathy Engle
Green Valley News & Sun
No tags
You are already a success and may not fully appreciate it.
British comedian Ricky Gervais said in a recent interview:
“If you get up in the morning and go to bed at night and have done exactly what you wanted to do in between, you are a success.”
I want this year, 2012, to be an outstanding success for you and me. I want us both to go to bed at night having done exactly what we wanted to do each day this year.
To make sure that I do go to bed each night with that sense of accomplishment each day, I created a Vision and shared it in a previous post. That vision is ideally the way I’d like my life to look at the end of the year. I challenged you to create your own Vision in that blog post. Today I want to add the additional element of Purpose. It is our way of ensuring that this year, more than ever, our living will have mattered.
To make our lives matter we need to be guided by a purpose. These two essential building blocks, vision and purpose, will serve you in designing your life for this next year. I like to think that by my having a vision and a purpose, I pass the test for fit, living daily in my design for 2012 and hope you will too, in order to achieve the maximum amount of happiness and satisfaction for you.
I’ve identified my purpose: “To assist the maximum number of people in achieving their full potential.” That purpose gives my life meaning. It is the reason I am here on this earth for this short time. There are as many different purposes as there are people on earth. Each person’s purpose is, as each person is, unique and perfect.
You too have your purpose and I’d be willing to bet that you are already being true to it. Whatever you are doing that makes your home, your neighborhood, your city, state, country and the world a better place for yourself and others is you, in action, fulfilling your purpose in life. That is the reason God put you here. You might not be fully recognizing that what you are doing is what you should be doing. It might be recycling or saying a kind word to another when they need it. It might be serving on a neighborhood or church committee. It might be demonstrating when your voice needs to be heard. The point is we are all perfect in who and what we are. We’re even perfect when we are searching for our purpose.
Here’s an exercise to help you be sure that you are identifying and being true to your purpose.
1.) Go back over your activities in 2011 and make a list of those things that you would label, “I’m glad I did.” They are the things you feel good about.
2.) Make a list of those things you wish you hadn’t done or wish you had done more of, less of, or not at all.
3.) Next, do more of the things that bring you joy and eliminate the activities that are not serving you.
4.) Seek out and associate with people who have similar purposes to yours. You’ll support one another and assist one another in achieving happiness. Finding groups such as these are why we join the clubs and associations we do. It’s why we attend the churches that we do and support the political candidates that we do.
TA DA! Now you are a success.
That becomes the template for planning a successful 2012.
Good luck.
Success thought for today:
“The final test of a plan is its execution.”
United States Army. PM 100-5 Field Service Regulations-Operations.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Happy New Year
This is always an exciting time of the year for me and I suspect for you. It can be a clean slate, a tabula rasa for us if we erase the unneeded, no longer relevant memories of the past and plot the direction for our future.
The always-inspirational spiritual leader of the Sonoran Desert Center For Spiritual Living gave a wonderful message on New Year’s Day as she challenged her congregation to prepare for the new year with a great 
analogy. It was especially meaningful for me because I’m leaving for a ski trip to New Hampshire this Wednesday.
Reverend Maurer said, “If you were planning a ski trip to Vermont and hadn’t unpacked your suitcases from your last trip to Hawaii, you’d have to sort through your mask, fins, bathing suit, shorts and tee shirts an maybe some dirty underwear etc before you could get to the things you need when skiing.”
It is the same way for us in planning our journey for 2012. We must discard the baggage from the past that no longer serves us in order to move forward.
To assist you in your planning I am sharing with you my Vision for the New Year. I do this each year. It is a word picture of an ideal. It is a form of goal setting, planning and affirming the good life I aspire for myself and others. I don’t always attain 100% of the vision but it makes my life exciting and worthwhile. It works for me and I’ll bet it will for you as well.
DECEMBER 26, 2011
VISION 2012
- Sell as many copies of my book “Build Your Dream: 12 Essential Tools for Successful Living” as possible to assist the maximum number of people to achieve their full potential.
- Conduct a sufficient number of workshops, programs and talks, pro bono, in order to make significant charitable contributions.
- Donate a minimum of $20,000 to Rotary International from the profits of ‘Build Your Dream’ sales to Rotarians.
- Complete “Fulfillment After 50: Building Your Dream in the 2nd Half of Your Life” and publish it by May 1st, 2012.
- Complete comprehensive marketing plan for all programs and activities by January 31.
- Get in top physical condition — reduce weight and body fat by August 28.
- *Take ski vacation to Connecticut in January.
- *Take cruise vacation to France in August and rent villa in September.
- *Take June vacation to southern Colorado or some other cool weather climate.
- *Attend the Dale Carnegie Training international convention in Hawaii in December and stay for 2 week vacation.
- Increase net worth by 10%
- Deepen and enrich my relationships with Patricia, Michelle and Ana. (my family)
- Play more golf and reduce handicap.
- Increase membership & contribute more to CSL (my church)
- Increase membership in the Tubac Rotary Club.
*note to CPA: these are all tax deductable necessary trips in order to research my next book. 
My challenge to you for 2012 is to make this the most rewarding year of your life—so far. Take the month of January to carve out a sculpture that represents your highest and best self.
Success thought for today:
“The idea is to seek a vision that gives you a purpose in life and then to implement that vision. The vision is by itself is one half, one part of a process. It implies the necessity of living that vision; otherwise the vision will sink back into itself.”
Lewis P. Johnson
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Byron will take the rest of 2011 off from blogging. Please scan back and review some of your favorite posts. Byron would be thrilled to hear from you which one had special meaning or impact.
Until then, he asks you to consider this as your Success Thought for the Day:
“I consider no man a free man who does not occasionally do nothing”
-Cicero
admin
byronethompson.com
No tags
Fulfillment After 50:
Build Your Dream in the Second Half of Life
Self Management
A few weeks ago I had a very interesting lunch with a top quality guy. Don recently retired at age 57 after a 27-year career in the insurance business. As I interviewed him for this book, I expected him to tell me he was looking forward to kicking back and enjoying retirement.
That, however, was not the case. It took him very little time, two months, to feel a sense of “constructive discontent” a common retirement phenomenon.
Most everyone else, I’ve been interviewing took more time, as I did, to start to feel as though there was something “not quite right,” something missing.
Don is already looking at his options. He is not a malcontent or a griper. He likes his former company. He doesn’t want the management responsibility he had in his old job but he would consider going back to work for them in a different capacity. He couldn’t say enough about the quality and integrity of his former employer. He is also looking at the ways in which he can be
more involved with his church, to make a greater contribution there. Another option that he is considering is to buy a buy a motor home, tour the country and visit all those places that he always wanted to see.
Don’s restlessness and search for the next chapter in his life comes from experiencing a void that needs to be filled.
We are all looking to fill that void in our lives with the substance or activity, which will make us the happiest.
I contend that that can best be achieved by truly knowing ourselves thus giving us mastery over the management of ourselves.
For a further explanation of this, read my first book “Build Your Dream: 12 Essential Tools For Successful Living.”
Success thought for today:
“This is…self-knowledge—for a man to know what he knows, and what he does not know.”
-Socrates
* Note to regular readers of this blog. For the next several months I’ll be sharing my progress on my new book. Please feel free to offer suggestions as we progress.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Fulfillment After 50:
Build Your Dream in the Second Half of Life
Self Management
Consciousness: A sense of personal or collective identity including attitudes and beliefs. Awareness or alertness.
-American Heritage Dictionary
Let’s explore the ways in which our relationship with consciousness
determines the quality of our lives in this second chapter of our lives. We know that our beliefs affect our behavior. What we don’t always recognize is the source of those beliefs and the role that consciousness plays in them.
For many years of my life I associated consciousness with being conscious or awake. Today, new developments and discoveries are being made in quantum physics giving us an increased understanding of what consciousness is and the ways in which it affects every area of our lives.
Dr. John Hagelin, Director of the Institute of Science, Technology and Public Policy and of the Doctoral Program in Physics at Maharishi University of Management is a quantum physicist and leading researcher on higher states of consciousness.
Dr. Hagelin provides some of the clearest explanations of the interconnection of the physical and the metaphysical worlds, which he calls the unified field. (www.istpp.org and www.hagelin.org)
The implications of his research, which is supported by a host of other respected people doing similar studies (see "The Field” by Lynn McTaggert ) is that all the conditions of our lives including our mental, emotional and physical health is influenced by our understanding and cooperation with this unified field.
Success thought for today:
“The unified field is aware of its own existence; it responds dynamically to its own presence. So what do we have? We have a field of concentrated, infinitely dynamic, self-aware intelligence. And that my friends, is consciousness.”
-Dr. John Hagelin, Ph.D
* Note to regular readers of this blog. For the next several months I’ll be sharing my progress on my new book. Please feel free to offer suggestions as we progress.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Fulfillment After 50:
Build Your Dream in the Second Half of Life
Self Management
Throughout this book-in-progress we’ve been discussing the elements of thought as it influence our lives at the level of creation, bringing into play the components of intuition, inspiration and intelligence.
It is the goal of this book to provide you with practical inspirational ideas to contribute to you living this second chapter of your life even more
successfully in the areas of wealth, health, happiness, balance and love.
Side bar: You will notice that I frequently use WE when I’m discussing areas of benefit from my writings. I am exploring these, in some cases uncharted, areas of success in my own life as I write.
Let’s look briefly at each of those aspects of our lives to see what the potential benefits of our thinking on our fulfilled living.
Wealth: I recently participated in a workshop entitled Financial Freedom. The focus was not on money management. As I said in my first book, “Build Your Dream: 12 Essential Tools for Successful Living”, there are only a few fundamentals that any of us need to pay attention to become wealthy. The emphasis of this workshop was what we’ve been talking about this book: our thinking. (I suggest you reread Napoleon Hill’s “Think and Grow Rich” or George S. Clason’s “The Richest Man in Babylon”.)
The way we think about money in this stage of our lives is vital.
Health: Get a visual image of yourself as the person you want to be physically and hold that thought in you mind until it comes to pass. We are all living longer and potentially, healthier lives, if wee do it right.
Happiness, Balance and Love: These are the by-products of the quality of our thinking in these areas. Let’s use our thinking to paint a picture of ourselves being our best selves and experience the emotions we will feel when they become our reality.
Success thought for today:
“As a man thinketh in his heart so is he.”
-James Allen
* Note to regular readers of this blog. For the next several months I’ll be sharing my progress on my new book. Please feel free to offer suggestions as we progress.
PS: Happy Birthday to my favorite youngest daughter today!
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Fulfillment After 50:
Build Your Dream in the Second Half of Life
Self Management
At this second chapter of our lives we have the opportunity to truly know and be ourselves. We can write a new script for our lives and not have it be dictated by others and thus be fulfilled and happy.
My friend, Dom and I were shopping for a car at the BMW dealership in Tucson recently. Why Dom? He’d been a BMW dealer service manager in New York before coming to Tubac to open an Italian pizzeria. We (I) found the one that I’d seen online and took it for a test drive. After the obligatory haggling, which I’m pretty sure, I lost. (I wish I’d had Scott Davis with me at this point instead of Dom. Dom and I ended up playing Good Cop, Good Cop: “What should we do Dom?” “Whatever you think Byron.” Scott would have ground them into the dirt until they would have paid us to take the car.)
I ended up buying the car and since it took some time to complete the
paperwork and I waited while Dom paced around the car lot.
When we wrapped it all up Dom drove my old Volvo while I drove my new, used, car back to Tubac to The Italian Peasant Restaurant. (This is a shameless plug for Dom’s restaurant in exchange for his helping buying the car.)
That’s when he told me "It was like being back in Vietnam.” He never told me that he’d been in Vietnam so I think he meant it as a metaphor. He said, “All the while we were there at the dealership, memories of working for BMW came back to me and I kept waiting for customers to come out to attack me. That was an unpleasant part of my job that I left behind when I retired." Being back in that environment, those memories came to the surface and made him uncomfortable.
He told me he had never wanted to get into management with BMW in the first place but his company wanted him to do it. He liked being a service technician and working with the guys he ended up having to manage. Dom is one of the “good guys” who likes people, wants to be liked, and everybody likes. He doesn’t, by his own admission, like confrontation. In his old job he had to deal with demanding customers and a demanding boss and it created a lot of stress and took the enjoyment out of the job.
He managed to extricate himself from that situation and is now using his love of food, people, and his natural customer relations skills to “Build his Dream”. (Note: Another shameless plug, this time for my book.)
Dom lost his personal power over that situation which greatly inhibited his progress.
What can we learn from Dom?
1. Know our strengths. Dom is great with people and Italian food.
2. Use our strengths. Do what we are good at.
3. Have the courage to follow our dreams.
4. Don’t allow other people to dictate your future.
Success thought for today:
“To change your life: start immediately; do it flamboyantly; no exceptions.”
-William James
* Note to regular readers of this blog. For the next several months I’ll be sharing my progress on my new book. Please feel free to offer suggestions as we progress.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Fulfillment After 50:
Build Your Dream in the Second Half of Life
Self Management
It’s perhaps more important to manage ourselves in the second chapter of our lives than it was in the first. There seems to be less urgency to get things done now that we don’t have the pressure of going to work or at least not having to meet deadlines. The truth is however, that issues such as care of our health are imperative and demands that we manage it.
I walked again this morning. I’ve been doing this fairly regularly as a part of a 90-day goal to become healthier and more physically fit. I like walking first thing in the morning. it gets my day off to a good start. I immediately tell Patricia what my results were and put it on my “I’m Glad I Did” list and feel good about myself.
One of the most important tools I use enables me to monitor my results. I
wear a Polar heart monitor which records not only how many minutes I walk but also the intensity of the walk by measuring my heart rate. I know that by walking briskly enough to get myself into my aerobic zone, I’m getting the maximum value from the exercise. I know it is working; I’ve lost weight since I started and feel more energetic.
You may have a different goal but the techniques I am using here will help you manage yourself, stay on track and ensure you’re keeping your commitment to yourself.
5 Techniques for Self Management
1. Ask yourself “How can I measure my progress toward my goal?” Be specific. How many? How long? By When? What percentage? etc. Don’t try to do it all at once. Remember the answer to the riddle “How do you eat an elephant?” “One bite at a time.”
2. Record your progress daily. Weight loss experts tell us to weigh ourselves daily. Performance that is recorded tends to improve.
3. Report to someone you respect, i.e. a mentor, a boss, a friend or a spouse. Performance that is reported and recorded tends to improve more.
4. Remind yourself how your progress relates to attaining your goal.
5. Celebrate your success. I reward myself by sitting for 30 minutes before I start the day’s work, relaxing with a cup of coffee and enjoying the morning.
Success thought for today:
“If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.”
-L.G. “Boo” Bue
Note to regular readers of this blog. For the next several months I’ll be sharing my progress on my new book. Please feel free to offer suggestions as we progress.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
Fulfillment After 50:
Build Your Dream in the Second Half of Life
Motivation
I called my mentor, Boo, this morning and got my usual shot of inspiration and enthusiasm from him. He is in the second chapter of his life; he’ll be 90 on his next birthday.
Among other things we talked about the application of Masow’s hierarchy of needs after age 50. His take on it is that it is just as applicable in the second chapter of life as it was previously but the emphasis is more on observing and encouraging others to apply the philosophy in their lives. I told him that the central message in this book is for us to keep involved and keep our minds active by engaging in what we consider to be meaningful activity. 
I told him, “As an example I’m working on finishing this book, conducting a meeting for a friend’s company tomorrow morning and I’m speaking to our local Rotary club on Friday and will speak to other Rotary clubs as my schedule permits. I said, “I believe these kinds of activities are forcing me to use my highest skills and abilities and are keeping me involved and stimulated,”
He said; “You are absolutely right.” (I love hearing that.)
There is no question that the satisfaction that I derive from doing these things provides me with enough psychic income to get me up in the morning and to continue to assist the maximum number of people in using their full potential.
The bottom line, let’s stay busy doing what we consider to be valuable and worthwhile.
Success thought for today:
“A swinging gate never gets rusty.”
-Zen saying
* Note to regular readers of this blog. For the next several months I’ll be sharing my progress on my new book. Please feel free to offer suggestions as we progress.
Byron
www.byronethompson.com
No tags
