Category Archive:
Posted by Amy Hale on March 19, 2010 at 2:01 pm
If you’re on the right path, you’ll get to where you want to go. Consistent commitment keeps you on the path.
The hardest thing for people to unlearn is the short attention span that’s been shaped by television, entertainment, letting the kids rule the roost, and by letting pernicious, untrue self-victimizing thoughts snuggle up into our belief systems. And this inability to be flowingly calm and ‘real’ is really just the inability to return the mind to the most important thing it can be thinking about in the present moment. It leads to a lot of much unfinished business. The unfinished business then leads to drama. The drama leads to self-dramatization including wild stories about how other people make us unhappy or destroy our dreams. This self-dramatization replaces the committed life.
As Steven Pressfield writes in, “The War of Art,” “Sometimes entire families participate unconsciously in a culture of self-dramatization. The kids fuel the tanks, the grown-ups arm the phasers, the whole starship lurches from one spine-tingling episode to another. And the crew knows how to keep it going. If the level of drama drops below a certain threshold, someone jumps in to amp it up. Dad gets drunk, Mom gets sick, Jenny shows up for church with a tattoo. It’s more fun than a movie. And it works: nobody gets a darn thing done.”
Please share your thoughts & converse with me.
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Posted by Amy Hale on March 4, 2010 at 2:10 pm
Excerpt from Steve Chandler, Club Fearless:
This habit of reacting can go on all day, every day. We become like goalies in the hockey game of life, with pucks flying at us incessantly. It is time to play another position. It is time to fly across the ice with the puck on your own stick ready to shoot at another goal.
Robert Fritz, who has written some of the most profound and useful books on the differences between creating and reacting, says, “When your life itself becomes the subject matter of the creative process, a very different experience of life opens to you–one in which you are involved with life at its very essence.
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Posted by Amy Hale on February 11, 2010 at 5:48 pm
I talk out loud when I drive. I don’t worry about what I look like or who might notice. I don’t care if they think I’m on the phone or not. When I talk in the car, I talk to my inner team or to a customer who I want to make sure gets what I am wanting to convey. I might even sing a tune.
I learned to do this when I recognized how much I beat myself up while driving. Have you ever looked around and noticed that most people who are driving, if they’re not on their cell phones, their faces appear worried or angry. Or maybe their listening to all of the bad things in the new on the radio.
How do you want to feel when you’re driving to your destination? Do you want to bully yourself, hear more about a crummy economy or would you rather engage in a conversation with your team to make it the best day you’ve ever had?
Personally, I find that using my driving time to build myself up instead of using ways that break down my mindset is far more useful to me. When you hold worries and anger inside your head, it brings on headaches, ulcers and more worry and anger. Your whole nervous system goes wild.
Plus, if you’re not use to hearing your own voice or you want to practice moving toward fearless public speaking, the car is the perfect place to speak out.
Just think, your competitors don’t do this. They’re listening to their negative self-talk, terrible news or swearing at traffic. So speak to your inner team and step out from the crowd and make success happen – one drive at a time.
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 31, 2010 at 11:27 am
Adapted from Wayne Dyer
- Have a mind that is open to everything
- Practice non-attachment.
- You cannot give what you don’t have. (e.g. love) If you are in the habit of saying “gimme”, the universe will say the same thing. If you are in the habit of saying “what can I do for you”, the universe will say the same thing.
- There are no justifiable resentments.
- Don’t Die with your music still in you. All of you have a heroic mission. There is a purpose to everyone.
- Embrace silence. (Here you will connect with God.)
- Give up your personal history.
- You can’t solve a problem with the same mind that created it. (Literally rewrite your agreement with your reality. Admit you were wrong and you’re not going to make those choices anymore. It didn’t work. Now I realize that it didn’t work, I will change my mind.)
- Treat yourself as if you already were what you would like to become.
- Wisdom is avoiding all thoughts which weaken you.
9GCC5FKENWW2
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 21, 2010 at 10:35 am
I was thinking this morning how beneficial setting goals and visions for our lives can be. It’s great, we know where we’re going, we can make better plans and the Universe knows where to meet us. But what about those people with procrastination challenges? People who procrastinate have a tendency to not make it to their goals and they sit around frustrated or doing something to escape the reality of self-imposed failure.
Earlier last year, I wrote about using a “have done” list, rather than using a “to do” list. There are many benefits to using this method to achieve short and long term goals. (You’ll need to subscribe to my ezine for the archived newsletter if you want to know the other great benefits of a “have don” list can bring.)
I’ve been thinking about subconscious goals vs. conscious goals lately. Subconscious goals usually override conscious goals. They are at the backbone of sabotaging the conscious agenda. If you have a subconscious goal or belief that doesn’t coincide with something that you consciously want to accomplish, you find it extremely hard or impossible to achieve what you want to achieve.
How many of us have ever made a list of goals or even just a “to do” list of the day. We get going and then stall out, never reaching the goal or it takes years longer to get to. If you’ve been a procrastinator and/or have had this experience over and over, you’ve trained your subconscious mind to react to goal setting as a goal failure. The subconscious habit/belief system sets in that when you write down the goal, you won’t achieve it.
So, for procrastination clients, I’m beginning to ask them what they want to accomplish but don’t write it down. Pick one or two goals, get a good picture or movie going in your head about how life will look when the goal is accomplished. It’s easy to remember what one or two goals are without writing them down. Then before going to bed, play the movie again and again until you fall asleep.
When you tell your subconscious mind what you want, during sleep it will figure out how to get it. Often you’ll wake up with what you can do first. But don’t write it down if you’re a procrastinator or if you often fail at achieving steps toward your goals.
Make the mental decision that you are going to take at step toward your goal that day. Then as you go about your day, write down what you’ve accomplished. You’ll also be including things that don’t appear to be related to the goal set in mind.
My clients have been finding this powerfully motivating. When they see everything that they accomplished, their confidence builds and their procrastination dissolves. Plus the subconscious begins to work with your conscious desires.
It’s been pretty cool. Coming from the standpoint of previously being a procrastinator, I get so much more done and it feels empowering.
I’d love to know if you experiment with this and the results or just leave a comment. Maybe you’ve used this or other methods. Please share. I look forward to commenting with you.
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 14, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Once in a while there’s a goal I set and for one reason or another I don’t reach it. I either change my mind or I don’t actively move toward it at all. When I don’t reach a goal, I take a few moments to review that goal once again. Usually I’ll find that the goal was just a middle of the road goal or mediocre goal that was similar to a lot of other goals out there.
A friend once told me that realistic goals are often mediocre goals and it’s actually easier to reach goals that at first seem unrealistic. He mentioned that’s how he made his first $500,000. You see, since most people set realistic goals, they find a lot of people making similar goals and it then appears to be a competitive goal. If many people are attempting to make ends meet and the average income is, let’s say, $60,000, why not shoot for more? There are far fewer millionaires than there are people making $60,000. It can be lonely at the top.
Another reason for setting unrealistic goals is that having a powerful goal and vision is far more motivating than having a mediocre goal. When you have a mediocre goal, the effort toward that goal is often also mediocre. This was my problem, I would set mediocre goals and give mediocre effort, but now I’m much more motivated by making the big ones.
Can you review your goals and make them bigger and easier to achieve?
Once in a while there’s a goal I set and for one reason or another I don’t reach it. I either change my mind or I don’t actively move toward it at all. When I don’t reach a goal, I take a few moments to review that goal once again. Usually I’ll find that the goal was just a middle of the road goal or mediocre goal that was similar to a lot of other goals out there.
A friend of mind once told me that realistic goals are often mediocre goals and it’s actually easier to reach goals that at first seem unrealistic. He mentioned that’s how he made his first $500,000. You see, since most people set realistic goals, they find a lot of people making similar goals and it then appears to be a competitive goal. If many people are attempting to make ends meet and the average income is, let’s say, $60,000, why not shoot for more? There are far fewer millionaires than there are people making $60,000. It can be lonely at the top.
Another reason for setting unrealistic goals is that having a powerful goal and vision is far more motivating than having a mediocre goal. When you have a mediocre goal, the effort toward that goal is often also mediocre. This was my problem, I would set mediocre goals and give mediocre effort, but now I’m much more motivated by making the big ones.
Can you review your goals and make them bigger and easier to achieve?
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Posted by Amy Hale on January 4, 2010 at 10:36 am
Fear comes in many forms. It’s hypnotic and no one entirely escapes its grasp. People rationalize their fears which helps them excuse themselves from moving forward with their goals and visions for themselves.
Hate is a form of fear. Where there is one, there is often the other. “I hate meetings” could mean for some, “I’m afraid of speaking up in front of my boss because he is mean.” It turns into, “I’ll speak up next time,” but that next time doesn’t seem to ever come.
Some people tend to look at some of their fear on the bright side. “At least I won’t look foolish” or “if I say that, then I open myself up for being put down.”
But then a week goes by and everything is still the same. The person hasn’t spoken up in order to be noticed enough to be a credible part of the team. So s/he stays in the same old cubicle.
Are things better off than a year ago?
If not, things aren’t going to improve by themselves. It’s time to stop putting on the brake and really take some initiative to move ahead? Do you want to spend the next 40 years of your life feeling the same way? How many years are you going to let yourself just hang there in the same place in the hellish dungeon of rationalization?
If you want your life to move, you’re going to have to move it. No one is going to save you. If they were going to, they already would have. So, what are you waiting for?
Un-optimistic fear tends to get people moving forward. I can’t believe how many people come to see me when they find out they might be cut from their job or their doctor just diagnosed them with diabetes. They didn’t move until they were afraid.
So here’s an idea, define the worst thing that could happen if you didn’t accomplished what you want to accomplish? What are you putting off because of fear and what is it really costing you – financially, emotionally, and physically – by postponing taking action?
What are you waiting for? If you say you don’t have time or the time is not right, I can almost guarantee that fear is standing in your way and your rationalizing it so that you stay in the same place.
This post is intended to be a wake-up call for you and the wonderful life that awaits you. By thinking about the worst thing that could possible happen by not taking action – like being miserable or bored in the same job, not being able to make ends meet and feeling like a worthless pile or even living with someone you just don’t even like anymore – you can motivate yourself to take action.
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Posted by Amy Hale on December 1, 2009 at 2:59 pm
As we’ve crept closer and closer to 2009, I have been asked the ultimate question for my business and personal life, “What does success mean to you?” In the past month, I have heard, seen and participated in more contemplation than previous years. Hmmm, going through the
se challenging times – has it helped us become more thankful for what we have?
When asked what success is to me, I usually sum it up as “getting up in the morning and looking forward to the day.” It’s absolutely fantastic to feel the energy every morning knowing that I can conquer challenges, fulfill another goal and help other people feel more confident win life and business.
But it doesn’t really stop there. I love being able to spend quality time with my family and friends, go places whenever I want to and choose the projects I want to work on. That’s real wealth.
In business, the biggest success for me is to be able to choose which clients to work with. I realize I cannot help everyone and being able to choose allows me to help people even better. It’s incredibly rewarding when I read and hear the triumphs of people who came to me to help them overcome a challenge or move past an obstacle. I love hearing their reports on how much happier and free they feel.
My work gives me a sense of achievement and when a client tells me of their success, I feel successful, too. It feels so good to be able to help others succeed, that I just couldn’t not do it.
What does it take to succeed in life? It takes prioritization. I prioritize each day what it is I want to accomplish, as well as, help other to accomplish – whether it’s family, friends, or clients. I have found my own road, now make sure you make “real” success a priority for you.
Asking yourself, “what does success mean to you?” is a great place to start. I’d love to hear what success means to you.
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Posted by Amy Hale on November 11, 2009 at 1:19 pm
This week has been a whirlwind for a client of mine – a good one. Historically, this person has been so
meone who reacts to events in her life instead of taking ownership for her situations and creating solutions. However, she has recently discovered something completely different. Over-responding is much more desirable, healthy and emotionally profitable than over-reacting.
Last week, her landlord sold the building she had been renting in since the inception of her business and gave her 30 days to move. Even though that event was a huge shock, she decided not to over-react but over-respond. I reminded her that she is an entrepreneur who knows what she wants and goes for it. In fact, this past week when we set our minds to moving her into a new space, everything fell into place quite effortlessly. We expected to have to wait for movers to move her, however, when she called them, they said the only time they had available in the next few weeks was Saturday (four days after her call to them.) It seemed like magic.
The best part is before she even moved in, she was meeting new people and finding joint ventures with her office neighbors – something she was still challenged with at her previous space.
I truly believe in over-responding. As my good, late friend Thomas Leonard would say, “Anytime something big happens, whether it’s good or bad, do something bigger and you’ll continue to reach success.”
This week has been a whirlwind for a client of mine – a good one. Historically, this person has been someone who reacts to events in her life instead of taking ownership for her situations and creating solutions. However, she has recently discovered something completely different. Over-responding is much more desirable, healthy and emotionally profitable than over-reacting.
Last week, her landlord sold the building she had been renting in since the inception of her business and gave her 30 days to move. Even though that event was a huge shock, she decided not to over-react but over-respond. I reminded her that she is an entrepreneur who knows what she wants and goes for it. In fact, this past week when we set our minds to moving her into a new space, everything fell into place quite effortlessly. We expected to have to wait for movers to move her, however, when she called them, they said the only time they had available in the next few weeks was Saturday (four days after her call to them.) It seemed like magic.
The best part is before she even moved in, she was meeting new people and finding joint ventures with her office neighbors – something she was still challenged with at her previous space.
I truly believe in over-responding. As my good, late friend Thomas Leonard would say, “Anytime something big happens, whether it’s good or bad, do something bigger and you’ll continue to reach success.”
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Posted by Amy Hale on October 3, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Are you doing what you incarnated to do? Do you love how you spend your days, every day Monday thru Friday?
If you’re like thousands and more thousands of people, these questions may hit a sore spot or even seem ridiculous. ‘I can’t afford to ask myself things like that,’ one man said to me. ‘I’ve got a family to take care of and a mortgage to pay.
But just because it’s a difficult question doesn’t mean it’s not worth answering. And the question becomes more and more important as you get older.
Trying to ‘make yourself’ do what feels wrong to you is like walking in whatever direction you are facing and forcing the needle in your compass towards north. While it may work for a while, as soon as you let up the pressure for even a moment, the compass will begin to self-correct and you’ll find yourself in the wrong direction. You might be lost and don’t know how to come back to full reality and sanity. Uninspiring and treacherous stress comes from forcing yourself to do what you don’t want to do each day only leads to strain, tension and potential illness.
If you’ve spent a lifetime ignoring your feelings and quite literally ‘making the best of a bad job’, it may seem like it’s too late (or too scary) to do anything about it. But chances are that the changes you need to make are nowhere near as dramatic as you think. So don’t go quitting your job, selling your things and joining the convent. Even if big changes are called for, you don’t have to make them in a dramatic way.
Here are three simple changes, as described by Michael Neill – Super Coach, you can make that will make a major change in how you feel about your working life:
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1. Become self-employed while you’re still at your job.
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If you’ve begun saving money for your retirement, chances are you’ve done it by withholding money from your paycheck each month. A more effective strategy is to have all your money paid into a central ‘reservoir’ account. This can be a savings or even a home equity account. Then ‘deduct’ the money for your monthly expenses into a checking account.
Now instead of taking money away from yourself in order to save, you are having to take money away from yourself in order to spend. And for most people, when you see your reservoir of cash begin to grow, you will become less interested in spending and more interested in the freedom that comes with not being dependent on your job for your income.
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2. Get noticeably better at whatever it is you do.
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Extensive research into optimal experience at work shows that people who challenge themselves to continually improve at what they do not only increase their value in the marketplace, they enjoy their jobs considerably more than those who just do the minimum required to get by. While further training may or may not be a practical option for you, there are always ways to enhance your skills on the job.
One simple trick is to imagine you are training your replacement – if you had to teach someone to do what you do, how would you do it? In thinking about how to teach someone else to do your job, you will invariably find little improvements you can make that not only make you better, they make the job more enjoyable.
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3. Begin exploring new possibilities
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Many people fear that if they begin exploring other options, they will become more and more discontented and miserable about what they are currently doing. But only one of two things can really happen. Either you will find out that what you’re doing isn’t as bad as you thought when you compare it to what else is out there, in which case you’ll begin to appreciate and enjoy it more, or you’ll find out that there really is a job or career path that’s calling to you.
And if you are fortunate enough to find a job that’s also a calling, you will never have to work another day in your life!
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