.
Read to make a decision to be confident?
Monday, 9 April 2018
Sunday, 8 April 2018
Set the Mood For Your Week With the Law of Attraction
I used to hate when a new week arrived. The pressure of new responsibilities piling up on top of last week’s clutter always made me anxious. I would walk into the week frustrated because I didn’t know how to stop the cycle of stress that rolled in every Monday.
To be honest, I didn’t believe it was possible to have a good day. So, I kept reliving the same drama, which included: arguments with family members, petty water-cooler beefs, an overworked mind, and unfulfilled goals.
But after hundreds of affirmations and tons of guided meditations, I finally found a way to overcome that negative energy. It all stems from the Law of Attraction.
Law of Attraction teachers like Abraham Hicks, Ralph Smart, and Rhonda Byrne teach that you must believe, ask, and receive what you want in life. They teach that like attracts like, and that the energy we put out—whether it's positive, negative, anxious, and so on—will always be returned to us. I realized I had to become conscious of the energy I put out if I wanted to enjoy my life.
Through trial and error, I learned that the real magic happens when you align what you want with what you’re putting out into the world. You have to exude how you want to feel, and trust that the energy is going to work in your favor. You have to do your part in co-creating what you want. So often we forget that we play a huge role in the manifesting process. If you want to live your best life, you must become what you are seeking.
The real magic happens when you align what you want with what you’re putting out into the world.I now take small actions to create and attract the energy I want from my week—and my Monday scaries have all but disappeared. Here’s how you can use the Law of Attraction and set the tone for your week:
1. Believe In What You Want
If you set the intention to have an awesome day, you must believe you deserve it.On Sunday evenings, try writing out your weekly intentions—the “what” you want from the week and the “why.” Maybe it's a sense of peace, or feeling in control of your schedule.
Whatever your intentions, try reading them every morning when you wake up. Focus on what you're trying to attract, and know that you deserve it.
2. Ask For What You Want
This is your chance to be honest about what's keeping you from your intentions. Start by asking yourself the “not-so-cute questions” like: What is blocking me from living my best life? What steps could I take to experience more happiness each day?Once you're clear about what’s blocking you, try creating a Magic To-Do List. Every morning, write a list of everything you want out of the week. Maybe you’re working on a project at work and you feel stumped. Write it down on your to-do list as if you're asking for it to happen rather than telling yourself to do it.
Then, instead of worrying about not achieving that goal, pretend you've already finished it. Picture yourself tackling the project and proudly finishing it. We spend a lot of time imaginging our failure, but imaginging your own success can help you figure out the plan to get there.
3. Get Grateful For What You Receive
There are a lot of things to be grateful for in life, but we get so caught up obsessing over everything that is going wrong that we forget to simply say: Thank You. Gratitude is a great way to increase the positive thoughts running through your head. When you show gratitude for what you already have, more will come into your life.When you show gratitude for what you already have, more will come into your life.
If you really want to experience the magic of Monday and the power of a great week, then say “thank you” every chance that you get. Every morning, write down 10 things you’re grateful for and why you are grateful for them. Try this practice before bed as well, and you’ll wake up ready to conquer your day.
After I implemented these practices into my daily routine, I experienced so much joy and began to attract all the things that I needed to find happiness. Of course, I still had to take action to make things happen, but these practices kept my energy and focus right where I needed them.
Try it this week, and watch what happens when you take control of your vibe.
Source
When Grace and Gratitude Come First
It’s interesting how we have to be intentional about practicing grace and gratitude, but stress, busyness and frustration are second nature. We are pros at reacting to all the things life throws at us, drilling through our never-ending to-do lists, skipping lunch, sacrificing sleep and taking care of ourselves in the pursuit of more. But more of what? And to what end?
What would happen if grace and gratitude came first?
What if we felt …
- grace when dealing with uncertainty
- gratitude before we were stressed or frustrated
- hopeful while dealing with loss
- loved before judged
- loving before judging
Everything I read suggests grace and gratitude as a solution to stress, frustration and overwhelm but if grace and gratitude come first, we can avoid some of the stress or at least navigate it in a healthier way. Instead of using grace and gratitude as tools to solve problems, let’s start from a place of grace and gratitude.
If you want to see if grace and gratitude can soften or eliminate some of the craziness of your life, try it.
Here are a few ways to put grace and gratitude first …
Say thank you first.
Let your first thought of the day be one of gratitude. What are you grateful for when you open your eyes? Think about it for 30 seconds before jumping out of bed. Write it down or say it out loud.
Stop measuring who you are by what you accomplish.
Grace measures more by what’s on your heart than what’s on your list. When you are stressing over your calendar or to-do list and telling yourself you are falling behind, remember who you are and what you mean to the people around you. Remember what really matters to you. Trust what’s in your heart.
Laugh more.
Laughing is grace and gratitude all wrapped into one joyful expression. Laugh more. Life is serious enough without us trying to keep it all together all day long.
Start with you.
The more loving you are with yourself, the more loving you can be with everyone around you. The more grateful you are for who you are, what’s on the inside and what you have to offer, the more grateful you can be for the stuff on the outside. The more grace you extend to yourself, the more you’ll have to extend to others.
Let go. Let go. Let go.
All of this holding on to stuff that doesn’t really matter gets in the way of grace and gratitude. From physical clutter and stuff, to things we think we should believe or should do, to what we think others think – it’s all messy. Keep letting go of anything standing in the way of more grace and gratitude in your life.
Here’s the thing … we can work to simplify our lives, take better care of ourselves, and reduce stress but some things are not in our control. There will always be surprises, uncertainty, difficult people, loss, and failure. With a reserve of grace and gratitude, we’ll get through the hard stuff and come out stronger on the other side.
And the good stuff will be even sweeter.
Source
Saturday, 7 April 2018
Friday, 6 April 2018
How to Make Good Luck From Bad Moments
Random bad stuff happens to people. You can recognize possibilities and grab at opportunities, you can work hard and proceed with passion and optimism, you can show unusual talent and even zig when others zag. But when illness strikes, a tragic accident occurs, or life takes any unexpected and unwelcome turn, you can be buffeted by forces you can’t control.
That’s the view I’ve always held of “bad luck,” until I spoke with my friend, Barnaby Marsh, Ph.D., an expert on risk taking who’s studied luck extensively. He offered a slightly different perspective on life’s unluckiest moments.
“Sometimes you need to have a bigger view to know what’s good luck or bad luck,” Marsh told me. He believes that what looks like terrible luck today could always turn out to be great luck tomorrow.
Luck—Good or Bad—Isn’t Fixed
Marsh’s perspective reminded me of the 1998 movie Sliding Doors, in which Gwyneth Paltrow plays a British woman named Helen who gets fired from her PR job one morning and rushes home. Going to the subway, she reaches the train just as the doors close in her face. The next train is delayed (more bad luck), so she leaves the station to hail a cab, and standing outside, she gets mugged (even more bad luck). With a slash on her head, she rushes to the hospital.Not a lucky day, right? You might say that everything that could go wrong did. But then the movie backs up and shows another possibility for the day. In this case, the train doors are still open when Helen arrives and she gets on the train. Much better luck! Except when she arrives at her apartment, she finds her live‑in boyfriend in bed with another woman.
In the rest of the movie, both scenarios continue to unfold. And beneath the romantic plotting is the bigger message that we never quite know how life will play out. Good luck can turn into bad—and vice versa. We can’t always predict how events will unfold, and if parallel universes exist, we don’t yet have access to them. So all you can do is take the current event that has been handed to you and try to turn it into good luck rather than bad.
All you can do is take the current event that has been handed to you and try to turn it into good luck rather than bad.
I’ve met extraordinary people who live by this perspective. A few years ago, I traveled around the country giving talks about my book on gratitude, The Gratitude Diaries. I was struck by how many people reached out to tell me about bad luck they had experienced—an illness, a tragedy, a death in the family. Over and over I heard how the difficult circumstance had made them pause to be more grateful and appreciate the good things that happened every day.
One young woman came up to me before a talk with a warm smile and a cheerful demeanor—and told me that she had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer a year earlier.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, grabbing her hand in sympathy.
“Thanks. This should have been the worst year of my life, but there are so many moments where I feel very lucky.”
Her eyes were shining, and she didn’t let go of my hand. The treatments had been awful, she said, but she was now in remission. She went for a scan every two weeks and her sister always accompanied her, and they would go out for lunch and celebrate each time there was another good report. She also had a wonderful husband, always at her side.
“My children are only four and seven, and I want to be here for them. But right now I love them and we have fun every day—and I feel lucky for every moment we are together,” she said.
Wow. I felt my eyes filling with tears. Being diagnosed with ovarian cancer had to count as one of the unluckiest events that could strike a young mom. But she counted herself lucky that it brought happy times with her sister, a deeper connection to her husband, and memory‑making moments with her children.
I told her how much I admired her ability to find the bright side of a very dark story.
“It’s the only way to get through,” she said.
Luck, like gratitude, isn’t dependent on events. It’s what you do with the events and the perspective you take that matters.
Luck, like gratitude, isn’t dependent on events. It’s what you do with the events and the perspective you take that matters.
How to Visualize Good Luck
Marsh walked me through a visualization that you can do to shift your luck perspective. Recently at his Luck Lab—where he’s developing a new science of luck—he discussed “bad luck” with the renowned astrophysicist Piet Hut. Hut suggested that you can make good luck from bad moments by trying to step out of yourself and see the situation more broadly.You can make good luck from bad moments by trying to step out of yourself and see the situation more broadly.
Barnaby compared it to walking alone in the woods. Picture this: The forest is thick all around you, so you can’t see anything, and maybe it’s scary. “But if you could pull back and have a big view from above, you’d feel differently. You’d see where you’ve come from and the many directions you can go. You wouldn’t feel stuck and abandoned in that one spot. Seeing more will give you a greater sense of control.”
The next time you hit a spell—or a season—of bad luck, try to imagine the positive outcomes that might yet be. Or, at least realize that they may be there even if you can’t imagine them. Bad luck isn’t always what it seems. Sometimes, it’s just the impetus you need to make the good luck happen.
Source
Thursday, 5 April 2018
The Key to Getting All You Want? Discipline
For every disciplined effort, there are multiple rewards. That’s one of life’s great arrangements. If you sow well, you will reap well. Life is full of laws that both govern and explain behaviors, but the law of sowing and reaping may well be the major law we need to understand: For every disciplined effort, there are multiple rewards.
What a concept! If you render unique service, your reward will be multiplied. If you’re fair and honest and patient with others, your reward will be multiplied. If you give more than you expect to receive, your reward is more than you expect. But remember: The key word here—as you might well imagine—is discipline.
Remember the law: For every disciplined effort, there are multiple rewards. Learn the discipline of writing a card or a letter to a friend. Learn the discipline of paying your bills on time, or arriving to appointments on time, or using your time more effectively. Learn the discipline of paying attention, or paying your taxes, or paying yourself. Learn the discipline of having regular meetings with your associates, or your spouse, or your child, or your parent. Learn the discipline of learning all you can learn, of teaching all you can teach, of reading all you can read.
For each discipline, multiple rewards; for each book, new knowledge; for each success, new ambition;
for each challenge, new understanding; for each failure, new
determination. Life is like that. Even the bad experiences of life
provide their own special contribution. But a word of caution here for
those who neglect the need for care and attention to life’s disciplines:
everything has its price. Everything affects everything else. Neglect
discipline, and there will be a price to pay. All things of value can be
taken for granted with the passing of time.
That’s what we call the Law of Familiarity. Without the discipline of paying constant, daily attention, we take things for granted. Be serious. Life is not a practice session.
Think about your life at this moment. What areas need attention right now? Perhaps you’ve had a disagreement with someone you love or someone who loves you, and your anger won’t allow you to speak to that person. Wouldn’t this be an ideal time to examine your need for a new discipline? Perhaps you’re on the brink of giving up, or starting over, or starting out. And the only missing ingredient to your incredible success story in the future is a new and self-imposed discipline that will make you try harder and work more intensely than you ever thought you could.
The most valuable form of discipline is the one that you impose upon yourself. Don’t wait for things to deteriorate so drastically that someone else must impose discipline in your life. Wouldn’t that be tragic? How could you possibly explain the fact that someone else thought more of you than you thought of yourself? That they forced you to get up early and get out into the marketplace when you would have been content to let success go to someone else who cared more about themselves.
Your life, my life, the life of each one of us is going to serve as either a warning or an example. A warning of the consequences of neglect, self-pity, lack of direction and ambition… or an example of talent put to use, of discipline self-imposed, and of objectives clearly perceived and intensely pursued.
Source
Wednesday, 4 April 2018
How to Turn Fear Into Fuel
How is fear holding you back?
When I ask this question at my seminars or in my consulting work, common answers I get are “lack of funding”, “I don’t have the education”, “my background”, or even “I’m not sure of the next step to take.” What I’ve discovered, however, is that while all of these may be factors that can impact success, they are not the deciding or underlying factor.
Do you know what is shackling people and depriving them of the success they desire and deserve?
It is fear.
You may say to yourself, “Not me, I am fearless” but the reality is fear is innate in human beings. It is there for our protection. There are, after all, some things we should be fearful of. Playing golf in lighting for example or literally swimming with the sharks.
But what about success? We should be embracing success, enjoying toppling goals and accomplishing newer, better, and greater things. Yet fear is a dangerous obstacle, in part, because we may fail to admit its existence.
How to Recognize Fear
Fear needs to be recognized and managed properly or it becomes an anchor. We can become indecisive, have self-doubt, fear rejection, and simply fail to act. Fear may have us sitting on a great concept or idea or it may restrict us from using our true talents.But what if there was a way to turn fear into fuel?
First, you must realize the role negative thinking plays in feeding your fears. The thoughts may already be there, suggesting “You can’t.”, “You shouldn’t”, and “Yeah, but what if?”
Before you know it, negative thoughts have piled upon one another and have become a seemingly insurmountable mountain to climb. I’m not saying you should ignore reality but most often these negative thoughts are just a boogie man under the bed. When you look closer, there’s nothing there.
Eliminate Your Negative Thoughts
I believe it is much more productive to be proactive in managing these negative thoughts. Instead of allowing negative thoughts to affect you emotionally to the point of indecision or inaction, put your logical brain to work in your favor. Rather than listening to “You can’t”, ask yourself “How can I?”.Ask yourself “What’s the best way to…” as opposed to “You shouldn’t.”
Change “What if it doesn’t work?” to “Imagine how terrific it will be.”
It can help to be even more specific about this. “What are the eight best ways to raise funding for my project?” or “Who are the five people I know best qualified to help me with this?”. Force your brain into helping you by stretching its thoughts, imagination, and focus. “What are 35 ways my life will be better when I do this?” When you put your brain to work on a positive task, there is little room for negative thinking.
This is turning fear into fuel.
Get Out of Your Comfort Zone
Many of us strive to be comfortable. Letting go of that comfort zone can create real fear. You may worry that by stepping out and doing something you always wanted to do or reaching for more may put your comfort in jeopardy. You may risk your steady income or lifestyle or (gasp) you may not be able to get that 65” flat screen TV with surround sound. If you allow your comfort zone to become a prison, you must recognize it is working against you, not for you.So how do you get out of it?
Think about the times when you took a chance and were successful. Remember how victory felt and how rewarding it was to achieve a goal. Odds are, it was a time when you stepped out of your comfort zone. Please remember that taking risks and being bold doesn’t necessarily equate to being reckless. I would never suggest being reckless. But I do know that life is often best lived out of your comfort zone. Turning fear into excitement and anticipation is another way to use it as fuel towards your success.
Face Your Fears Head On
One of the best ways to use fear as a fuel is to face it head-on. It’s not embarrassing to fear change or to enjoy your comfort zone.But, if you don’t recognize its presence, fear can hold you back without you even knowing it. Turn those fears into empowering positive questions your logical brain can work upon. Practice on reaching out from your comfort zone and recognize and face your fears. It very well could fuel you to the next level.
Source
Tuesday, 3 April 2018
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)