Joseph Bernard is a friend of mine. He is a life coach – and a talented one at that. The other day, Joseph sent me an email listing 21 Audacious and Mind Expanding Personal Development Ideas. These ideas are different from the kind of information I usually post here. For that reason alone, that makes them worth posting. I urge you to check out these 21 ideas. Try a few of these ideas that appeal to you. They will help you to focus on what you are becoming.

Successful people are self-confident. Self-confident people face their fears and act. They follow the advice in Tweet 36 in Success Tweets. “Don’t be afraid to fail. You fail only if you don’t learn something from the experience. Treat every failure as an opportunity to grow.” If you don’t like my advice, how about some career advice from Pope John XXIII: “Consult not your fears but your hopes and dreams. Think not about your frustrations, but about your unfulfilled potential. Concern yourself not with what you tried and failed in, but with what is still possible for you to do.” Our most common fears are failure, criticism, and rejection. Follow this career advice. Choose to find – and use – the learning opportunity in your failures and you will become more self-confident and successful. It’s sad but true – failure, criticism and rejection are often the price you pay for becoming a career success. Facing your fear of failure, criticism and rejection, and acting will pay big dividends when it comes to your life and career success.

Last week, Jason Sadler of IWearYourShirt.com wore my shirt. He was promoting my book Success Tweets which you can download for free at http://budurl.com/STExp, or on my website/blog www.BudBilanich.com. Jason compared my common sense tweets in Success Tweets with some tweets Kanye West has posted on Twitter. The result is a pretty funny little video. Check it out. And, if you like it, forward it to your friends. http://youtu.be/-UFQDjShDrQ/

Follow the common sense career advice in Tweet 61 in Success Tweets. “Create and nurture your unique personal brand. Stand, and be known for, something. Make sure that everything you do is on brand.” Once you build your personal brand do whatever it takes to make sure that people think of you in the way you want them to. Don’t make the mistake of thinking “I have a strong personal brand, I can slack off a bit.” That doesn’t work, just ask the executives at Netflix and the guys who were running Winchester in the early 60’s. Your brand is important to your career success. Polish it regularly. Keep it bright and shiny.

From a time perspective, you get the biggest bang for the buck from the activities that are important to your success, but are not urgent. Unfortunately, important but not urgent tasks often don’t get done because of all of the urgent tasks that come up during any given day. Tweet 13 in Success Tweets says, “Your vivid mental image is a blueprint. It is a plan for success, but you still have to do the work to make it a reality.” One way to get started doing the work is to schedule time to work on the important but not urgent tasks that will result in achieving your vivid mental image of your career success. My best career success coach advice is to keep your commitment to yourself and your career success by planning your work and working your plan.

Successful people define what success means to them. Then they develop a compelling and clear mental image of their success. They heed the advice in Tweet 11 in Success Tweets: “Create a vivid mental image of yourself as a success. This vivid mental image will keep you motivated and moving forward when things get tough.” Visualization is powerful. The more vivid the image you have of your success, the more likely you are to succeed. Use your vivid mental image to help keep your career success dreams alive and to keep moving forward to what you want in your life and career. Creating a vivid mental image of your career success is not day-dreaming. It’s real work – it’s the work of designing your future.

We all have our problems and challenges. The difference between successful people and unsuccessful people is simple. Successful people choose to respond to problems in a positive manner. They choose a positive, proactive approach. They choose to take personal responsibility for themselves, their actions and their life and career success. They choose to see problems as challenges – and they meet the challenges they encounter. Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio State and Louisville did. That’s why they’re in the Final Four.