mindset:
Posted by Amy Hale on December 26, 2011 at 7:13 am
Who wants to be happy? Most of us, of course. However, chasing happiness will always leave you chasing happiness. When people pursue success, aren’t they really pursuing happiness?
Think about this…
When you’re unhappy, you want to be happy. When you are, you want what you want and go get it.
This weeks experiment/exercise:
Imagine that you are happy already (because you choose to be). What do you still want? Your answer might be surprising. Write/type at least a page on what you would do if you were already happy and you’ll know your next steps.
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on December 19, 2011 at 7:15 am
Do you push and push, day after day, not taking a break? Not even for a moment? I’m not talking about all of the work that you do. I’m talking about the self-bullying you do to yourself. Do you ever get tired of telling yourself that you “should” have done something different, or “If I hadn’t said that?”
You can take a vacation from your inner bully. Imagine what it might be like to not have that negative voice going on and on in your head. Think about how peaceful you could be. Think about all the things you could get done or even explore, if you’re inner bully wasn’t telling you no in some way.
You can write that summary. You can ride that bike, even if you haven’t rode in 20 years. Yeah, maybe your boss is a jerk- you don’t have to let that negative energy wrap you up for the rest of the day. (Yes, that’s negative self-talk, too.) What happens when you give permission for that negative voice to subside for just one day?
This week’s experiment:
Pick a day, not too far in the future – like today, for instance. Tell the negative inner voice that you’re leaving it for a vacation. This vacation can be for as long as you want, but it cannot be less than one day. Make a commitment to yourself to not be hard on yourself for at least one day.
Let me know how you do. What kinds of adventures did you allow your mind to take without that negative bully around?
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on November 28, 2011 at 7:10 am
Written by Steve Chandler
Professional people fall into two categories. There are doers and there are feelers.
Doers do what needs to be done to reach a goal that they themselves have set. They come to work having planned out what needs to be done.
Feelers, on the other hand, do what they feel like doing. Feelers take their emotional temperature throughout the day, checking in on themselves, figuring out what they feel like doing right now. Their lives, their outcomes, their financial security are all dictated by the fluctuation of their feelings. Their feelings will change constantly, of course, so it’s hard for a Feeler to follow anything through to a successful conclusion. Feelings are changed by many things……..biorhythms, gastric upset, too strong a cup of coffee, an annoying call from home, a rude waitress at lunch, a cold, a bit of constipation. Those are the dictating forces, the commanders, of a Feeler’s life.
A Doer already knows in advance how much time will be spent on the phone, how much in the field, what clients will be cultivated today, what relationships will be strengthened, what communications need to be made. A Doer uses a three-step system to guaranteed success: 1) They figure out what they want to achieve. 2) They figure out what needs to be done to achieve it. And, 3) They just do it. This is not a theory, this is the actual measured and observed system used by all super achievers without fail.
Whether you are a Doer or a Feeler has nothing to do with your character or personality. It has everything to do with choice. Choice is the key to it. You can choose either one, at any time, in any situation. So today, as you are challenged by situations, be sure to ask yourself, “What can I do about this?” instead of “How do I feel about this?” You’ll be very pleased with the day you have.
Nice job Steve Chandler. I highly recommend Steve’s work and he has written several books that you can find on Amazon.com. Just type in his name and there’s a nice list of them. He also has built a wonderful club called Club Fearless which can be found at http://www.clubfearless.net
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on November 7, 2011 at 7:30 am
Do you have a goal that seems to just stay out there in front of you? One that you just can’t seem to wrap your mind around it. Maybe even a small goal seem huge for whatever reason. Just like many of you, I let goals get the best of me until I really learned to annihilate them.
If you have one or more goals getting the best of you, what could you do to make it smaller than you? Alicia works in sales and most of her sales begin with speaking with a potential client by phone. She always had trouble with making these calls. She would put them off and put them off, finding other tasks to keep her busy. Her initial goal was to call four people per day to invite them to review what she had to offer.
Sure this could be deduced to fear of rejection, this or that, however, we decided to try an experiment to help her crush that goal. Instead of letting that goal control her, she became bigger than that goal and began imagining her success as having made the calls and feeling the freedom of being successful.
To her surprise, she began making her calls earlier and earlier in the day and she was calling approximately nine people per day. She told me that her goal was something that she didn’t want to do, however when she decided to beat it down and use her mind to accept no as a no instead of no meaning she wasn’t enough, she was able to make more calls than she anticipated. To her further surprise, she 2/3 of the people she spoke with were interested in speaking with her further.
This weeks experiment:
Do you have a goal that seems to always be there or you have trouble maintaining certain tasks (such as calling customers on the phone)? How is it controlling you? How can you make yourself larger than it?
Make the decision to annihilate that goal. Laugh at it, stomp on it. Imagine having accomplished it and how you feel with it behind you. Use that as your motivation to follow through with it.
Then notice how easy it really is to blast your goals because you’re bigger than they are and you’re in control.
Let me know how you do.
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on January 25, 2011 at 10:45 pm
If your favorite team is playing this season, do you want a tense, stressed-out person shooting a free throw, or kicking a long field goal in the last moments of the game? Or would you rather see a confident, calm, rested player step up to the challenge?
Most people stress themselves out believing it’s as a form of caring. But it’s not caring, it’s just stressing out. Stressing out makes one do worse. True caring makes one do better. That’s why it’s vital to know the difference. The two couldn’t be more different.
Caring is relaxing, focusing and calling on all of my resources, all of that relaxed magic, that “lazy dynamite” that I bring to bear when I pay full attention with peace of mind. No one performs better than when they are relaxed and focused.
“Stress is basically a disconnection from the earth,” says the great creativity teacher Natalie Goldberg. “It’s a forgetting of the breath. Stress is an ignorant state. It believes that everything is an emergency. Nothing is that important. Just lie down.”
A successful person knows when to lie down. And when to stand up.
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on August 27, 2010 at 8:33 pm
I recently had a heart-wide-open conversation with a client who was confronting her money demons. You know the ones, the self-limiting beliefs that don’t allow you to ask boss or client for what you are worth. You might be a person who prowls the internet or office looking to see what your “competitors” are doing and then you flog yourself with the heavy whip of self-doubt, the little gnawing reminders that you’re supposed to be doing “SOMETHING”, but you are not quite clear on what it is and expect some guru out there to sell you a clue.
It breaks my heart that brilliant, talented, purpose-driven entrepreneurs and people sometimes drown in the choppy seas of doubt and uncertainty. I do know that going through it can be part of the process. But don’t linger there. You gotta get back in the game. Here are five quick action steps you can take to get yourself out of your own stuckness, and into your brilliance.
1) Own it. No use in resisting it, pretending it’s not there, or that it doesn’t matter as much as it really does. The sooner you acknowledge to yourself that you’re scared you are small, or that you are a fraud, or that you don’t know what you’re doing, or whatever the fear is, the sooner you can get over it.
2) Share it. The sweetest irony about the fear that you are inadequate is how committed you are sometimes to prove what a piece of crap you are. So you might go into hiding, thinking you’re the only one going through it. But guess what, almost everyone has a secret “you’re a fraud” conversation. And they are so consumed with their own fraud conversation that they don’t even notice yours. It’s only big and insurmountable to YOU 
And when you share it with another, not only do you create permission and space for her to release her own fear, but you will discover a safe and courageous space to release your own.
3) Choose it. Sometimes we play around with our fears, and they adorn every sabotaging pattern, every half-baked effort to “move forward, but not really”. Listen, if you’re going to be mediocre, be the BEST mediocre you possible can. Live into it. Stop lolly-gagging about it. You’re already afraid. You’re already not producing results. Do it deliberately and honestly so that you won’t have to be mediocre AND feel guilty or ashamed about it
4) Move with it. Sometimes your fear is a friend in disguise, offering you a kind warning in the most diplomatic way you know how to communicate with yourself. Ask it what lesson it is here to teach you. What are you being protected from? What are you being right about? If this were not the truth about you, what would you have to accept about yourself that you’ve been unwilling to step into?
5) Transcend it. Once you are finished, you are finished. Have you ever been sick and tired of being sick and tired? No matter how strong the “habit” or “pattern” you’ve been practicing for years, eventually you reach a point when you just look at yourself in the mirror, smirk at yourself and say, “Oh PUHH-LEEZE! Let’s move on!” Embrace that too. Reconnect with the vision you’ve dreamed about for your life, your business, and your relationships. Get clear on what actions and ways of being you’ll have to access in order to make it happen, and then…
You guessed it…
Get back in the game.
It is your game, after all!
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on April 28, 2010 at 5:42 am
The great myth out there in the world is that people never change. That myth is even the culprit behind people treating people badly: they think the person they are talking to is the same person they have always known and they treat them accordingly. Without giving them half a chance.
One of the many benefits I have of coaching people for a living is seeing them transform. Watching them change so dramatically. Many of them learning to use more of their right brains.
“In fact,” writes Colin Wilson, “we can learn to live on a far, far higher level of power. And that is what the right brain was intended for. Its farsightedness gives it the ability to summon power. Yet it hardly makes use of this ability. It could be compared to a man who possesses a magic machine that will create gold coins; so that he could, if he wanted, pay off the national debt and abolish poverty. But he is so lazy and stupid that he never bothers to make more than a couple of coins every day-just enough to see him through until the evening…or perhaps he is not lazy: only afraid of emptying the machine. If so, the fear is unnecessary. It is magical, and cannot be emptied.”
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on April 23, 2010 at 6:00 am
“Wishing is a way to remove oneself from what is going on now. Hope is how most of us avoid growing up.” – Dr. Brad Blanton
I love that quotation from Dr. Blanton. It really puts wishing and hoping in their proper infantile place.
I was having lunch with a friend who is writing a book and as we reviewed the remarkable successes in his life coming from nothing, no advantages, an underdog, how he succeeded academically and in business and in many other ways. I asked him his secret and he said, “Action. Nothing beats action.”
One of the reasons I believe the Owner versus Victim distinction connects with people so quickly and deeply is because ownership is all about action. Taking creative action in the face of challenges and opportunities. Instead of complaining.
Victims spend their days and nights complaining. About how they were not “GIVEN” what they thought they deserved. They are out of action. And I love it when the news delivers a story like the one about the college student who is SUING HER COLLEGE for a full refund of her four year tuition because she “can’t find a job.”
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on April 19, 2010 at 6:00 am
“Infatuation is when you think he’s as sexy as Robert Redford, as smart as Henry Kissinger, as noble as Ralph Nader, and as athletic as Jimmy Connors. Love is when you realise that he’s as sexy as Woody Allen, as funny as Ralph Nader, as athletic as Henry Kissinger, and nothing like Robert Redford – but you’ll take him anyway.”
-Judith Viorst
People are continually being told to “do what they love and love what they do” in order to be successful. However, even with the multitude of books and audios on the market, many people still find themselves wondering what they love to do and inevitable wind up as desperate and unhappy in pursuit of doing what they love as much so as they are in the pursuit of who they love!
Are you in love with your visions of prosperity and abundance, or is it just infatuation? Here’s the simple test -
If it hurts, it isn’t love.
This Week’s Experiment:
(Based on Dr. John F. DeMartini’s book, Count Your Blessings: The Healing Power of Gratitude and Love)
Write down your vision of prosperity and abundance.
Imagine that vision is now a reality. List ten reasons or ways your abundant life is wonderful.
Now list ten problems or challenges that will still be in your life even when your vision is your reality.
Review the ten reasons or ways that your new life will be wonderful. Circle the one you believe you lack most now.
List at least three times when you have already experienced aspect you think you lack.
Finally, review the ten aspects of your vision you don’t yet like. Circle one aspect you think you could either accept or change.
May you fall in love with your life!
Continue Reading
Posted by Amy Hale on April 12, 2010 at 5:58 am
Recently I took on a new client who is clearly a genius. Unfortunately, he refused to take an IQ test just in case he turned out not to be an “official” genius.
For years, I refused to read any books about relationships or do any exercises on building awareness because I feared that deep down, my relationship might be doomed. (For the record, 6 years and still going strong at this time of writing!)
In both cases the fear is clouding our perceptions. The reality is that until we are honest with ourselves, we are living a lie!
This Week’s Experiment:
Get a notebook to write in. (Don’t use your journal, if you have one. You’re going to destroy the pages)
Now, write for at least 5 minutes what you really think about the following topics:
a. Your partner
b. Money
c. Sex
d. The Government
e. The opposite sex
Be sure to write the stuff you would never say because it’s too rude, naughty, freaky, or just plain terrifying!
Decide whether you are going to burn, shred, or keep your work!
Please share your comments below.
Continue Reading
Twitter
LinkedIn
Facebook