Permission to Dream

Are you one of the billions of people who feel there is more to life than this?  There is a common dialogue I hear about why people feel off track and stuck in a life.  It goes a little something like this:

How can we live into our fullest potential when we are living in a world that measures, judges and punishes everything we do? Of course we find ourselves and others living a mediocre life.  We are merely surviving from a place of fear, doing what our fears say.  Fear is running our lives.  Fear is what holds us back from being who we are meant to be.  In turn, we have created a society of fearful robots and treat them as if they are incompetent to keep them fearful and feeling inadequate.  A never-ending cycle of people moving through this world as untapped potential, never growing and therefore miserable with their lives.

Yet we continually search for who we are, but too fearful to step into just that: who we are.

How can we step into who we are and who we want to be when we are scared? When we fear we may not thrive or worse we fear there is nothing out there for us if we do.  We were made to grow.  We are designed to dream, to tap into what lights us up and to uncover our potentials. You know this because you search, you experience moments of feeling totally aligned, you know in every cell of your body there is a whole ocean of this life to dive into.

What if you gave yourself permission to focus on what it is you want?  Allow yourself to day dream about who you are when you experience the feeling of being in alignment and in flow with this life. Focus on what it would be like to become that person.  What would it be like to show up in this world as who you are in every moment?  What would you feel, what would you experience, what does that look like?

 

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Where are the Answers?

What if you already have the answer in you?  What if you are just looking in the wrong places? What if there was a way to find the answers that are tailor made for you?

We all have the answers we need somewhere inside of us.  We each have an internal guidance system, we just don’t use it. This system is just buried underneath stress, the expectations of others and society, pressures we put on ourselves, not to mention the feelings of guilt and shame we hang onto.  All of those things interfere with our internal system and cloud our vision, muffle our hearing and ultimately take us off our path.

So, how do we go beyond the chatter and stories of the mind?  Pause and ask questions.  Questions act to disrupt the chatter and pull you out of states of worry, frustration and confusion. They shift you into a place of pure curiosity, honesty and discovery.  This shift places us beyond the mind and into a space where we find all of the answers that line up with who we are and inspire us into action.

Next time you find yourself stuck, stressed or just a little frustrated, just pause for a moment.  Take yourself away from the situation by taking a short walk, go to the bathroom or turn on some music.  A change in environment helps to accelerate the shift and creates space for the honest answers to come through.  Once you feel calmer, you can begin to ask questions. You will find your answers coming from a different place.  If the situation has been going on for a long time a brief walk or pause may not give enough space.  You may need a day or two before the space is there for you to uncover the answers.  It is important that you not force the answer.  Trust the answer is there and it will reveal itself.

As you practice pausing then asking, you will find it easier and easier to access your internal guidance system.  You will find your life in flow and see life is truly beyond the thoughts and stories of your mind.

 

 

One Question for Big Changes

The New Year confetti has settled and the momentum has fizzled out on your resolution.  Now that we are 2 weeks into the year, it’s time to get real and honest with ourselves.  Look around and you see life somehow returned to the way it was last year.  The resolution you declared with so much passion, the one you swore up and down you were going to stick to no matter what, has been thrown aside like that unwanted Christmas gift.  Every year we make these resolutions, yet they don’t seem to work.  They come in as boldly as the New Year with promise of instant change but somehow they fade away as if they never happened.

There is a reason resolution fade away as soon as the New Year confetti settles.  It is simple when you think about it.  Big, sudden, forced changes do not last.  Just like the big sudden change of your in-laws coming into town and staying with you for the holidays, it’s simply too much stress to last forever.  Another way to look at big changes is to imagine stretching out a rubber band. A rubber band cannot stay stretched unless you continue to put stress on it or that forced stretch will either break the rubber band or frees itself by snapping far away from your fingers.  Resolutions are big dramatic changes and shocks to your reality that cause a great amount of stress.  You didn’t train, lay some groundwork or prepare yourself before the big day.

However, what if there was a way to make big, bold changes in your life this year?  The change you have been promising yourself but always seem to slip out of your grasp.  You can have that kind of change and at the end of the year you will look back to see and celebrate how far you have come.

How?

By taking small, purposeful steps every day.  Small incremental shifts make sustainable changes possible.  One small shift every day, from now until the end of the year will multiply your chances of making your dreams come true.  Think about that for a moment – 1 small shift.  A small step every day to get you from here to the end of the year is easier than attempting to jump from January to December in one giant leap!  Imagine how awesome your life will be after 365 small shift.

If you aren’t sure where to start or what small step to take, allow me to share my secret with you.  This changed everything for me a few years ago.  It is simple and you will get better and faster results than you imagined.  All you need to do is ask yourself a simple question:  What is the next right action I can take? Simple questions produce powerful results.  You do not need to know all the steps or have all the pieces figured out – just do the next right action.  What a relief! I find this especially powerful when I notice I have gone off track.  Instead of beating myself up and stressing myself out, I simply stop, take a deep breath and lovingly ask myself; what is the next right action I can take?  Works like a charm.  Added all up, those little steps build up a ton of unstoppable momentum.

Here is a bonus secret for even faster results.  Every time you do that next right action, celebrate. I like to do a little happy dance when no one is watching (ok I do happy dances even when people are looking)!  Even a smile to yourself is a private celebration.  Whatever makes you feel all warm and fuzzy or excited do it!  Also keeping a daily or weekly journal of all your wins is a great way to celebrate.  Journaling is an awesome practice and you will be able to look back over the year at all the little steps you took that added up to your big change.  Then you will really want to do that Happy Dance.

This year, once the confetti has settled, you have your plan to stay on track.  You are prepared.  You are ready to take on that big, bold resolution: One small, next right step at a time.

 

It’s a Simple Matter of Perspective

Every one of us is unique. Our fingerprints are unique, our family and set of friends are unique combinations. Even the experiences we have and the order of those experiences in this life are unique to us. Yet, as unique as we are as individuals, we all desire to feel the same positive feelings and want similar things from life.  I’ve had the opportunity to work with many people from all over the world and have seen this first hand.  We all experience problems or things that upset us. Each of these with different chains of events, players and circumstances, but there is one thing each of these unique problems has in common.  We are upset because of how we perceive, or interpret, the experience.  It is our perception that says we don’t like it and we aren’t experiencing the feeling we desire.

We go through life presented with many of the same situations. One person is effected by the situation one way while the person right next to them can go through the exact same situation and experience it completely different.  How is that even possible?  Perception is how that is possible.  We each see the situation from a slightly different angle and that shifts the perspective.

Here is an example of this perception shift.  Two people driving down the road suddenly come up on an injured dog.  One person drives around the dog and keeps going about their day.  The second person slams on their brakes, gets out of the car in tears, kneels down next to the dog, and pleads for the dog to be all right.  It is the same situation, yet we have two completely different responses because they each see the dog from a different perspective.

Hmmm. What happened?

The first person was in a hurry to get home to the kids.  The babysitter called saying one of the children was badly hurt because they fell out of a tree.  When the first person comes up on the hurt dog they don’t see that injured dog as important in that moment.  They drive around the dog to get to what is most important to them in that moment, their hurting child.

You can probably guess the second person was the owner of the injured dog.  WOW, that is a completely different perspective or angle to see the situation. That shift in perspective created a deep emotional reaction.

This shift in perspective applies to any situation.  There are as many perspectives and angles to see a situation as there are people on the planet.  From the dog example each perspective was what is was.  Neither perspective was the absolute right or absolute wrong.  Knowing this, you can start to feel relief and begin to see it is possible to see situations, people and even the world differently.  All you have to do is shift your perspective.

Imagine that, a simple shift in how you decide to see a situation can change how you react, change the emotions you feel and can change your life.

I want to share a powerful perspective shift experiment with you.  This experiment is so much fun.  The next time you find yourself thinking or saying, “I don’t want to…” just pause and notice for a few seconds.  Then take a moment and ask yourself, “Alright, if I don’t what that, what do I want?”  Allow your mind to focus on the feeling of what it is you want.  This simple and subtle shift will start to change your perceptions and create a radical difference in your life.  Commit to this for the next 7 days and see what positive shifts happen to your thoughts, emotions, perspectives and in your life.

Everyone I have talked to about the shift loves how it creates positive shift in their relationships, work and even in how they see themselves.  I would love to hear your stories of how this experiment I playing out in your life.   Share this article with your friends, using the links below, so you can have fun with this experiment together.