Opportunity

“What you focus on expands, and when you focus on the goodness in your life, you create more of it. Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life.”  Oprah Winfrey

What do you think of when you see or hear the word opportunity?    Opportunity for you.   What feelings are generated when you hear that word?

Opportunity is a word that generally elevates optimism and produces a sense of anticipatory positive outcomes.   Opportunity for something better to happen in the near future.   For some people it is like buying a lottery ticket with the hope that they will win the big prize and all their troubles will be over.

What opportunities are you seeking?   What do you hope those opportunities will do for you?

Opportunity is all around us if we take the time to look.   First we have to look within and find out what it is that will satisfy us and then look for opportunities that will accomplish that goal.   For some people their career is virtually meaningless.   Sure there is a paycheck but there is no meaning to the work they do and they stay there because of one thing a paycheck.    There are many opportunities to do something that is meaningful and still have a paycheck.

How do you get more opportunity in  your life?

1. Keep learning

2. Manage your emotions well

3. Listen more – talk less

4. Experiment – try new things (everywhere – choose something different from the menu of life).

5. Know your strengths

What can you today to create more opportunity in your life?

Joy – The responsibility equation

“The best years of your life are the ones in which you decide your problems are your own. You do not blame them on your mother, the ecology, or the president. You realize that you control your own destiny.”   Albert Ellis

Joy, what is it?

Is joy happiness?   Is joy the sustained sense of well-being that we experience when our needs are met and some of our wants are met?   Is joy a sense of contentment in the midst of all of life’s circumstances?

Some people would say that joy has no definition, it is a state of mind that defies description.   It is a feeling that is different for every person.    Let’s look at an example, two stewardesses on a plane with basically the same job, the same pay, the same circumstances and yet one is happy and the other is grumpy.    The conditions on the plane are the same for both stewardesses, yet one is happy and the other isn’t.   What is the difference?

Where does joy come from?    Does joy come from things outside of you?    Joy seems to be manufactured by the interpretation of the situation you  see yourself in right now.   If you find yourself being anxious, upset, worried, fretting, angry, or depressed about how things are in your life there will be little space for joy.   If you find yourself at peace with what you have and where you are in life right now then you’ll probably sense some joy and happiness.

The difference it seems between feeling joy and not having joy is about taking responsibility for joy.   If you take 100% responsibility for your life then you will start experiencing more joy in your life.   Responsibility means that you are doing all that you can to create the outcomes you want in life for you.   It means that you are giving more, you are more concerned with others than yourself.  It means that you give with the expectation of getting nothing in return.

For many people getting more stuff provides some level of increased happiness yet that only lasts a short amount of time.   Hedonic adaptation takes over and that new car, new home, new bike, new clothes, or new something only has a short impact on happiness.      So while new things provide momentary happiness that happiness dissolves within a relatively short amount of time and as a result there is an increased sense of dissatisfaction which increases the pressure to get a happiness fix.

The responsibility equation replaces those momentary happiness fixes with a sense of long-lasting joy.   That is taking 100% responsibility for all things, giving more and doing more.   Think about it, what would living the 100/0 equation do for you?

Take a look:

triangle

“Learn from the past, set vivid, detailed goals for the future, and live in the only moment of time over which you have any control: now. “
Denis Waitley

“Learn from the past” …. wisdom

“detailed goals for the future” … intention

“live in the moment” … action

Use the past to learn, understand and grow.  Let the past be the soil for growth.   Use the future to dream, to  hope,  to plan and to aspire to.   Let the future be the energy for success.   Use the present to gain strength, confidence and a sure footing.   Let the present be the moment you act.

So often the past is only filled with regret and anger.   Take a few minutes and listen to the words others speak.   What are they really saying?   What are you hearing, listen closely and don’t speak, just listen.    What do you hear?   “If I”, “I could have …”, “I should have …. “, “I would have …”, those are the words of dreams that were put in a box and never allowed to live.    The words “if”, “could”, “should”, “would” leave a person powerless to change the present to live in a better future.

The future is filled with hope, with dreams and with desire.   The future is also filled with unkempt promises and commitment.    The future is a place called “tomorrow” and while it holds the dreams of every man it also holds captive the action required to make those dreams alive.

Now, this very moment,  is a time for action.   It is a place where dreams unfold and color takes the place of black and white.   It is a place where magic can happen if action is taken.   Now is a point in time where dreams unfold and become real.    The present is a time of movement, a time of choice, and a time of responsibility, it is a place where a person isn’t held captive.

What are you doing now to pursue your dreams and goals?   If you are holding on to the pain of the past you aren’t growing.   If you are tied to the  hope of the future you aren’t moving.     Only in the present can we adjust the sails of the ship.  Only in the present can we experience the wind in our face.  Only in the present can we take steps to live the life we want to live.

What are you doing right now, right now, to live the life you desire to live?   What choices are you making that will allow you to live that life you hold captive in your dreams?    What is stopping you if you aren’t taking the steps that lead you closer to living a full life?

on this fateful day …

The day the world changed.

It was a moment in time when people’s hearts started beating differently.  It was a moment in time when your world shifted.

It might have been a moment when it crystallized in your thoughts how fragile life is.   What changed in you?   What new realizations did you have?  What new actions were you going to take?

Sometimes people change the direction of their lives when tragedy strikes, for others it is a blip in the trajectory of their existence.   For some people it meant ensuring that those closest to them knew that they mattered.  It may have been a time to ask forgiveness or share their true feelings or to recommit to a relationship that had gone sour.   What changed for you?

What moves you to take action?  Does it take a massive and violent attack on your way of life or do you see what is best for you and then take action?

Everyone experiences some type of 9/11 experience in their life.  Some use that experience as a wake up call, a time to start taking action.  For others it means withdrawal and moving backwards and becoming a victim of the event rather than making a choice to take action.   Fear drives withdrawal, opportunity causes action.   What do you do when faced with great challenges?

Take this chance to evaluate where you are today:

Use a scale of 1-10, 1 = Not at all, 10 = Very much so

1. My life is close to my ideal

2. The conditions in my life are very satisfying

3. I am satisfied with my life

4. I have most of what I want out of life

5. I have no regrets about my life so far

Add up the score.

My life is very good – ( 40 or above)

My life has opportunities –  (30 – 39)

My life could use improvement  (20 – 29)

My life needs a lot of work   (  less than 20)

Make today the day you start working on your life.   Don’t wait for something tragic to motivate you.

 

 

 

 

be resilient

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” Steve Jobs

Many people feel like they are at the end of their rope.     Life has dealt them a hard blow and they have fallen from their perch that once was high and lofty.  Not long ago a business person thought that the best path to the future was getting out of the business he had been in for over 30 years.   The business was no longer satisfying, the hours were long and the work was hard.    Finding people to work in the business wasn’t easy either, turn-over was high and the work was hard.    His choice to quit, to give it up and turn to something else.  Even though the business was working,  the heart to keep the business running wasn’t.    So, what do you do?

After a long, long time at one occupation, one career, one way of work it takes a lot of energy to change and start doing something else.   It takes resilience, the same properties as a rubber ball, to bounce back and find meaning and passion in life again.

Resilience is an important property to have.   Resilience is the ability to recover from defeat and come back again.   There are many, many stories of people who started a business and did everything they could to keep it going and it still didn’t  survive.    Sometimes people are able to make a comfortable living doing something and then the whole market changes leaving them with one choice, to close the doors.   It takes resilience to come back from small defeats and the even larger defeats.

Most people have experienced some type of event that took the air right out of them.   There are people who have had major medical issues and had to fight back for years to regain their strength.   There are people who are still looking for a good job and are finding that there aren’t any that fit who they are.   It takes resilience to reinvent oneself.

Confucius spoke encouraging words when he said, “Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”   Resilience is the positive force that allows one to spring back, to have the ability to grow and to build and to succeed where you haven’t succeeded before.

No defeat is ever final unless you let it be.   Bounce back and move to a height higher than you were before you felt the pressure to change.  Be resilient.

Taking control of fear

“I have learned over the years that when one’s mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing what must be done does away with fear.”  Rosa Parks

Fear can either paralyze or motivate a person.    In the face of danger some people are unable to make a move and others of course run and run fast.  Why is that?   Why do people choke when the pressure of the moment suddenly increases?

Small business owners can be paralyzed by the lack of orders and business.   What once worked no longer works and instead of breaking through and developing some new ideas they freeze up and wonder what is happening.  Analysis paralysis is often the term used for wallowing in indecision and inaction.

For many people and businesses when the pressure is ratcheted up there is a tendency to pull back and withdraw which is just opposite of what should take place.     When you are facing some difficulty in your life the experts recommend:

1. Work with someone, find someone who you can partner with and share your difficulties with.   For businesses or individuals  it might mean getting a coach so that there is a new viewpoint to consider.

2. Focus – as the pressure increases it is easy to try to do too many different things.    Regain focus on the desired outcome.   What will get you there?  Staying focused on “the” goal and choosing actions that will get you to the goal is certainly one of the keys for success.

3. Be optimistic – it is too easy to slip into pessimism, worry and self-doubt and those three words, pessimism, worry and self-doubt can take your from the edge of success to the brink of defeat.   Those who are able to push forward and stay optimistic have a better chance of achieving the goal.

4. Cultivate new ideas – Use your imagination to find new ways to solve the difficult problems.  The old way of doing things may just be that, “the old way” and today it takes out of the box thinking.

In the September issue of Success Magazine a quick poll revealed that when people are challenged they tend to do these things:

38% develop an action plan
23% handle it on their own
17% Seek expert advice,  finding a coach or mentor
16% Ask help from friends
6% Avoid the issue (this is running away)

What do you do when you face fear?   Run or take action.

“You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited.  More strength than has ever been tested.  And more to give than you have ever been given.”   John Gardener

the tipping point … predecessor for change

“There is no passion to be found playing small – in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.” Nelson Mandela
 Are you living the life you really want to live?   What creates that urge to become fully real and alive?

What does it take to go beyond those excuses and reasons for not achieving your goals to realize your dreams?

What are you passionate about?

What do you love to learn?

Take a moment and write the things you love to learn.

What do you love to do?

Take a moment and write down the things you love to do.

How do you want serve others?

Take a few seconds and write down, how you can serve others.

Ask yourself “Why” these things are important to you.   Understanding what makes you come alive will allow you to start moving towards a life that you want to really be a part of.

So, what is your “Why”?

Now what is stopping you from living your “why”?

If you wrote down a list of things that are stopping you from achieving your goal then look at that list.  What on that list is really stopping you?   Is it really that list of things?   That list is your “why not” list.     It is the list of reasons you aren’t reaching your goals, but that isn’t all of it.

Are you clear on what your purpose is?    What is the reason you wake up in the morning and get out of bed?   It is to do something isn’t it?   Then what is it that make you feel totally alive, that is your tipping point.  That is your tipping into taking action and living the life you were meant to live.

Why not take that step today.  Take the action you need to take to start living a life in which you are feeling totally alive.

Now, say out loud, “I AM ALIVE“, say it again “I AM ALIVE“.  Start living today.

“I don’t believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive.”   Joseph Campbell

“It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.”  Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

face the enemy within

“Keep my word positive. Words become my behaviors. Keep my behaviors positive. Behaviors become my habits. Keep my habits positive. Habits become my values. Keep my values positive. Values become my destiny.”
Mahatma Gandhi

Good habits are hard to keep, bad habits are hard to lose.    Why is that?  Why is it so difficult to do what you don’t want to do and so hard to do what you do want to do?

Our habits stop us from being the person we could be.     It is easy to be tempted by “habit” to do something we know isn’t in our own best interest.   Take smokers for example.  Many of them would love to quit but they don’t feel they can.   There are people who would dearly love to quit drinking but don’t.

At some point it is as if our emotions are hijacking our lives.    Where do you feel like you’d love to make a change but your emotions say, “don’t do it”.   It is almost like saying if you help yourself you won’t be safe.   The amygdala (that small part of the brain that controls how we react) loves crying out, “Don’t change … don’t change”, because it is afraid of what might happen.   The “what if” is the fear is holding back the change that could be made when dealing with a destructive habit.   “What if I fail, then what do I do?” , well if you hear that often enough how inclined would you be to making the changes your want to make?  Most people aren’t very likely to make a change if they think it won’t stick or happen.

There are a lot of people working in a toxic environment and by toxic I mean environments that are disempowering, demeaning and have bullies managing the organization.   I am sure you have seen some bad environments in which to work.   While the pain of working there is high there is a thought that says, “Stay here because you don’t know what is out THERE”.   That is fear and habit that is holding you back from making a needed change.

Our lives are largely run by habit, a programmed set of rules that we live our lives by.     Think about the habits in your life.   Which ones have you tried to change and how successful were you at creating that change?

What is the enemy within?  It is the habit that still has a place in your life and one that isn’t making your life better.   What do you want to do about it?  What is it costing you to keep the bad habit?

“Power is the faculty or capacity to act, the strength and potency to accomplish something. It is the vital energy to make choices and decisions. It also includes the capacity to overcome deeply embedded habits and to cultivate higher, more effective ones.”   Stephen R. Covey

to live means to ….

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive. And then go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” Harold Whitman

One of the phrases I hear quite often is “If I”.   If I had more money my life would be better.  If I had a better job my life would be better.  ”If I”.   It’s a slow death sentence to an unlived life.

What would happen if you replaced “If I” with “When I”.   Not “if I” could do this or that, but rather “When I”.   Take control of your life.  Instead of living life as if each moment were a mystery start creating a vision statement.    Take that vision statement and translate that into a set of goals that extent out 5 to 10 years.   Write down the goals in “BIG”  letters, yes big letters.   Make it visible to you and to others.  Let them know you are going to go “BIG” and start living your life as you really want to.

Living BIG doesn’t mean living foolishly it means creating a set of plans that are achievable, doable and lead towards your vision.   It means living with constancy of purpose and having the ability to work through the hard times.  It means celebrating success along the way even if it is only a small, small step.   Moving forward is not always easy so be patient and keep pushing forward.    It is those who break through those barriers and hurdle the trials that reach their vision.

When a vision, a compelling vision is reached it doesn’t mean that it is the end.  It really is just a new beginning.  When the vision is realized a new vision, a new mission is created that will raise you to a new level of living.

How do you start living?  (If you need a clue watch the video)

1. Make a commitment to yourself that you will define your purpose.

2. Create that purpose for your life.
- Take a walk and bring with you a pad of paper.  Find a place where you can be alone and in the quiet, in the serenity of the moment think about what you really want to do and be.   Write down your thoughts and observe trends, patterns and ideas.   What is the same about them and what is unique?   Star the ones that make your heart beat a bit faster.
- Refine the list, get the key things from your list.  Put the  ”doables” in one column and put the “reach for the stars” in another and put the routine items in a third column.
- What made it into the “reach for the stars column”.?
- Choose the most compelling, most awesome, most powerful ideas and write a goal statement.

-   I am going to ________________________ in 5 years.
- Write a story that describes this ultimate dream of yours.   What does it really look like to you.   What will it take to make it real?   What new skills will you need?  What risks will you take?   What will require change?
-  Be clear about what you want.   Be crystal clear.

3. Tell others what you are going to do or change.  Make it BIG.

4. Make it real  (start doing)

5.  Give of yourself to others.

When you create your “Start Living Plan” you may notice that you pull back from it believing it isn’t possible or it is foolish to believe in such great things.   Work towards the goal, even if it is only for 15 minutes a day.  Take a few minutes each day and work on the goal.   Turn off the distractions, the TV or whatever pushes you away from the pursuit of the dream.   If you want the dream to be realized sooner put more effort into it.

If you aren’t sure which way to go, enlist a coach to work with you.   A coach can hold you accountable and keep those commitments in the forefront of your mind.  Fighting the battle alone is one of the reasons so many people give up on their dreams before they start.   Be one of the ones that makes your dream come real.

“All successful people men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their future could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work every day toward their distant vision, that goal or purpose.”  Brian Tracy

awareness

“Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive. “
Howard Thurman

Awareness.   When did you become aware that you weren’t happy?   When did you become aware that your job wasn’t as good as you hoped it would be?   When did you become aware that your significant relationship wasn’t going where you had desired it would go?   When did you become aware that your finances weren’t going to be enough?   When did you first become aware?

Many people aren’t aware that they want to make a change or what to change.    It isn’t as though they aren’t feeling comfortable with the way things are going, they aren’t comfortable but they aren’t aware of what they really want either.

You can be aware of pain but not aware of the source of pain and being aware allows you to look beyond the pain to the source of the pain.

There are two domains of awareness, your personal awareness or being self-aware and then external awareness which is knowing what is happening around you.    When we are aware we see things differently.  We pay more attention to the things in our environment.   We notice noises, temperature, food, music, what we touch and more.   We become more alive when we are aware.   Sometimes that awareness is also frightening.   We can also ignore what we don’t want to experience and that deadens our lives or pushes us into darkness.

Here’s a question you can answer to begin testing your awareness.

When you are at your best you are __________________________________ ?

Fill in the story.   What did you notice?  What did you feel or sense when you described your best?

Increase you awareness of the world around you by noticing the beauty that is nearby.

Write down 5 things that you see that are beautiful.

Now, write down 5 things about yourself that you appreciate.

What did you realize or learn as a result of becoming aware of you and your surroundings?

 If you can control a mans thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine what a man thinks you do not have worry about what he will do. If you can make a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of the man will demand that you build one.  Carter G. Woodson