6 May 2008

  

Good day!
Another new Tuesday is here, so it's time for another e-zine!
We thank you for being here with us, and we hope that you
find something in this issue that makes a bit of a difference in
your day today or in your life in general.  Have a great day!

The Five Barriers to Asking (an excerpt)
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

Ten Signals You're Not Living to Your Fullest Potential     Louise Morganti Kaelin

Your Own Path
tom walsh

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I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world.  This makes it hard to plan the day.

Elwyn Brooks White

  

Life loves to be taken by the lapel and told:  "I am with you kid.  Let's go."

Maya Angelou

  

Don't go around saying the world owes you a living.  The world owes you nothing.  It was here first.

Mark Twain

   
The Five Barriers to Asking (an excerpt)
Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen

1.  Ignorance

Many of us don't know what to ask for.  Either we don't know what is available to us because we have never been exposed to it, or we are so out of touch with ourselves that we no longer are able to perceive our real needs and wants.  Some of us have become so numbed out that we are simply unaware of our natural yearnings and desires.  We no longer know what we really want.

Most of us don't know how to ask.  We have never learned the technology of making an effective request.  We have not seen these effective communication skills modeled in our homes and we were not taught them in our schools or at work.

Many of us don't know whom to ask and when to ask.  We have not learned how to identify likely prospects who can deliver what we ask for whether it be a hug, sage advice, or an order for something we are selling.  And many of us have never learned to read the nonverbal cues that people send us that tell us "I'm with you" or "not now."

2.  Limiting and Inaccurate Beliefs

The second barrier to asking for what we want are the limiting and negative beliefs that have been programmed into our subconscious and which now silently control all of our actions.

We are born with an empty data bank that has to be programmed.  Many of us are hindered in our asking for and getting what we want by the negative and limiting beliefs we have taken on from our parents, teachers, churches, peers, and the media.  We can become constricted and even paralyzed by this parental and cultural conditioning.

We are taught that it is better to give than to receive; that if he really loved me, I wouldn't have to ask; and that being needy is a weakness.  We have learned from our failures and our traumatic experiences in life that if you don't want too much, then you won't be disappointed; don't expect too much from men like your father; and it is safer to keep your mouth shut and appear the fool, than to open it and remove all doubt.

3.  Fear

As a result of the negative, painful, and shameful experiences of our childhood, we become afraid to participate, afraid to go after those things we truly want and desire.  We become afraid of rejection, looking foolish, losing face and being vulnerable and hurt by others.  As a result of those fears, we become passive.  We settle for less than we really want and we sit in judgment of others who are getting what we want.  We don't have the courage to ask for or the self-discipline to create.  We end up using all of our energy to protect ourselves against boogey men we have created in our minds instead of using those energies to create what we want.

We face fears such as the fear of rejection, the fear of looking stupid, the fear of being powerless, the fear of humiliation, the fear of punishment, the fear of abandonment, and the fear of endless obligation.

4.  Low Self-Esteem

According to several recent studies, only one out of three of us has high self-esteem.  "Look to your right and look to your left.  Only one of you is okay!" is the standard line we use in our seminars.  One out of three!  We are suffering from a national epidemic of low self-esteem.

Most of us feel unworthy of love, happiness and fulfillment and inadequate to create the kind of life we want.  We suffer from inferiority complexes, neurotic guilt, and a lack of self-confidence.  As a result, we don't believe our needs and wants are important and worthy of pursuing.  We become codependent from our belief that other people's needs are more important than our own--especially the needs of men, our children, our aging parents, our boss, the homeless, and the needy.  We sacrifice our own fulfillment on the altar of taking care of others.

5.  Pride

Many of us, especially men, get stuck in our pride.  We become too arrogant to admit we need anyone or anything.  We will not stop to ask for directions, advice, or help.  We are convinced we need to do everything ourselves--usually perfectly and usually on the first try--or we risk the loss of respect, friendship, and our own sense of adequacy.

~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Think of the benefits of knowing how, when, and whom to ask for everything you want:  fewer disappointments in relationships, more effective team efforts at work, cleaner negotiations at the bargaining table, the money you need to start a business, fewer fights with your parents and children, the extra instruction and support you need, less suffering in the silent despair of loneliness, and the causes you support receiving funding they need to continue their good works.  Literally a whole new world can open up to you and everyone you care about.

You can ask for a hug, comfort, listening, forgiveness, attention, time, intimacy, caring, respect, love, nurturing, a massage, healing energy, prayers, an explanation, loyalty, sexual fidelity and a 100 percent commitment.

You can ask for a helping hand around the house, a favor, someone to keep a secret, help with your homework, the loan of a sweater or jacket, private tutoring, information, help with a project, your kids' cooperation, someone to baby-sit, swimming lessons, money for the movies, participation in a car pool, help with a flat tire, the loan of the family car or compliance with rules.

Don't wait until everything is just right.  It will never be perfect.  There will always be challenges, obstacles, and less-than-perfect conditions.  So what?  Get started now.  With each step you take, you will grow stronger and stronger, more and more skilled, more and more self-confident and more and more successful.

Everything you want is out there waiting for you to ask.  Everything you want also wants you.  But you have to take action to get it.  The time for dreaming is over.  It is time to get up and start asking for what you want.  Start slowly and build up; jump right in and start with bold and outrageous requests.  Either way is fine.  Do what feels right for you.  Just get started.


      

Personal happiness.  Creative fulfillment.  Professional success.  Freedom from fear--and a new promise of joy that's yours for the asking.  We have the ability at our fingertips to achieve these things.  It's the Aladdin Factor:  the magical wellspring of confidence, desire--and the willingness to ask--that allows us to make our wishes come true.  The Aladdin Factor helps us by pinpointing the major stumbling blocks to asking--and teaching simple techniques to overcome them.  With inspirational stories about people who have succeeded by asking for what they want, this book shows us how to turn our lives around--no matter what kinds of obstacles we face. 

  
  

  

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When we are alone on a starlit night, when by chance we see the migrating birds in autumn descending on a grove of junipers to rest and eat; when we see children in a moment when they are really children, when we know love in our own hearts; or when, like the Japanese poet, Basho, we hear an old frog land in a quiet pond with a solitary splash - at such times the awakening, the turning inside out of all values, the "newness," the emptiness and the purity of vision that make themselves evident, all these provide a glimpse of the cosmic dance.

Thomas Merton

  

10 Signals You're Not Living to Your Fullest Potential
Louise Morganti Kaelin

We talk a lot about living life to our fullest potential, about being our best self.  For many of us, it's the primary goal and focus of our life, to be the absolute best we can be, right here, right now. The most intriguing part of the process to me is that it is a moving target.  As good as I am right now, and in fact, I am the best I've ever been, I know I can continue to evolve and be even better.

Sometimes in the journey, we get stuck at a particular place.  Here are 10 signals you're not living to your fullest potential right now and some ideas for moving out of these "stuck" places.

1.  You find yourself using phrases such as "I wish I could," "If only," "I really ought to," "I should do," "As soon as (I lose weight, find another job, find a mate)."  If thoughts control who we are, then words are the primary tool we have to redefine ourselves. The more you repeat the phrases above, the less energetic and more powerless you feel.

Antidote:  Find new, powerful words to replace the ones that are bringing you down.  A very powerful phrase is "For whatever reason, I am currently choosing to (or not to) xxx."  No matter what the action you are doing or not doing, the moment you acknowledge it's a choice, you put yourself in a position of power. You also put yourself in a position to make a new choice.

2.  You feel overwhelmed, overworked, undervalued and under-appreciated.  In fact, you feel like a victim.  It seems like things are being done "to" you (or a group of people you belong to) and  nobody appreciates you.

Antidote:  These feelings springs from a sense of scarcity, so the best antidote is to start feeling grateful.  Once you begin to feel truly, sincerely grateful for all the gifts you do have in your life (and everything in your life is a gift), your energy levels increase and you start enjoying your life again.  Don't forget to feel grateful for yourself, your strengths and abilities, what makes you uniquely you.

3.  You need to buy a new bookshelf just for your self-help books.  I smile as I write this, since I probably have one of the best collections around.  It's not so much that you have a large library, but that you are constantly seeking for a magic answer, for the one single piece of information that is going to lift you up and put you back on the road to being your best self.

Antidote:  Go within.  Use meditation, journal work and prayer to seek the answers that are already within you.  Use the writings of others as starting points if you will, but recognize that their writings are the answers they came up with when they went inside themselves.  Start with five minutes twice a day if that's all you have, but the peace you are looking for already exists within you.  Become friends with it once again.  The easiest tool I can recommend for this is the 3-Breath Miracle.  Engage your mind in following your breath for three long, deep, slow breaths, holding them as long as possible and expelling air when you exhale.  Pay attention to how you feel once you do this completely.  This is the energy you are going for.

4.  The only reason you go to work is to keep a roof over your head and food on the table.  This has nothing to do with the nature of the work you do, but with how you feel about how you are using your gifts and talents, and whether or not you feel you are doing the best job you possibly can.  Do you feel respected at work?  Do you respect the work that others do around you?

Antidote:  Remember that people around you primarily serve as mirrors for how you feel about yourself.  When you start giving 100% of yourself at work, when you strive for excellence in all you do, and when you value your contribution to the team/effort, others will start reflecting that back.  You cannot find work that you love if you can't find the joy in the work that you currently do.  Again, it starts from within.

5.  You don't have a clear sense of who you are or what you stand for.  You find it difficult to make choices and you feel like you are drifting from one life situation to another.  What seems important one day seems inconsequential the next.

Antidote:  Identify your values.  When you know what you truly hold important in this life and allow yourself to make choices in alignment with those values, you gain tremendous freedom in your life.  Being true to what you believe in is very liberating.  A simple way to get some clarity is to ask yourself "What do I want to role-model for others?"

If this confuses you because you thought you were clear about your values and what is important to you, you may be in a transitional mode where the priorities of your values are shifting. This happens at different times in our lives as we mature, get older and experience different life events.  For example, having children is a time that many of us experience a shift in our priorities, as is getting older and experiencing health problems.  As a rule, allowing yourself to be "in the present" and seeing that you are not giving up on a value, but reassigning it a number will do much to let go of the confusion.

6.  You are more worried about being right than about being happy.  This is an easy game to get caught up in.  We often look for life experiences that vindicate our opinions, and not the other way around.  The lure of being "right" is very seductive and it is very easy to sabotage yourself with this game.

Antidote:  Ask yourself "Where in my life am I letting my need to be right to take over?  Am I willing to let go of being right?  Am I willing to be happy?  What would it look like to be happy instead of being right?"  The key point here is being willing to choose being happy over being right.  Once you make that choice, you will start to notice where your need to be right is getting in the way.

7.  Before you go to sleep at night, you find yourself wishing you had spent your day doing something other than what you did.  If you find yourself doing this on a consistent basis, it's time to look at the choices you are making.  Also, this is different from not getting to something you meant to do because something else required your attention.  This is about doing non-productive things on a regular basis, then wishing we'd done something else.

Antidote:  There are two suggestions for this item.  The first is to not wait until you go to bed to review how you spent your time. Look at what you are doing on an hourly basis.  The other suggestion is, once you are looking at this hour, make a conscious choice about what you want to be doing.  You can choose to watch TV or play on the computer, but at the end of the day you will be able to honestly say you did what you wanted to do.  You can also try to spend five or ten minutes of each hour doing something that will make you feel good to get done.  Allow yourself to build on small successes.

8.  You spend a lot of time doing things that keep your mind occupied (so you don't have to think about you).  While related to number seven, this is the actual activity that keeps you from producing your best effort.  When we are really determined to sit on our greatness, we usually don't get to the point of wishing we'd done something different.  The primary focus of this activity is to not think about you or your life.  Therefore, it must engage our mind and keep it occupied.  It might be TV, the computer, the news, what the neighbors are doing, anything that can grab us and keep us.

Antidote:  Many of these activities are designed to deaden the thoughts that make you uncomfortable (see number one).  Often, when we get tired of the negative messages, our first response is to try to stop thinking.  The more we don't think, the more energy we need to spend on not thinking.  Some down-time is good, even essential.  The key here is when big chunks of time are lost to these activities.  The first thing to do is to give yourself permission to do the activity you are doing.  Again, it's bringing it into the realm of choice.  Then, let yourself make different choices from time to time.

9.  You feel an underlying sense of sadness (when you let yourself feel).  Part of the reason we don't want to let ourselves think or feel is that we are afraid we will be overwhelmed by the sadness. We are petrified to go down that road.

Antidote:  If you feel sadness, something is going on and it is critical to release the tears.  Give yourself an opportunity to cry in a safe environment.  For example, although we may not be able to give ourselves permission to cry about what we need to cry about, we can cry while watching a sad movie.  One of my favorite movies to use for this purpose is "Pay it Forward," but you probably have your own favorite.  It's really important to free yourself from this emotion, and allowing it out is actually the way to not being overwhelmed by it.  Once you allow the tears, don't be surprised if you have a real burst of energy.

10. You keep all conversations at a superficial level.  Safe topics are the weather, the news, TV and movies.  If you find yourself steering all conversations away from you, you may be in emotional hiding.

Antidote:  Find an outlet so that you can allow yourself to go inwards safely.  Try journal writing, writing a letter to God, or some other format for getting in touch with what's going on.
  


Louise Morganti Kaelin is a Life Success Coach who partners with others to help them turn their dreams into reality.  Phone: 1-617-984-2868 or 1-866-COACH-99  (continental USA)
Email: louise@touchpointcoaching.com
Web: http://touchpointcoaching.com

  
  
Eyes Wide Open
tom walsh

Your Own Path

Paths in life are sometimes difficult to get a grasp of.  I think that we all often get the idea that life is a journey and that we're traveling on some sort of path to get where we're going, but do we really know what that path is like?  Do we really know if the path that we're on is one of our own choosing, or one that someone else has somehow pushed us down, one way or another?  It's a fascinating question, and one with potentially a very important answer.

Since we get on most of our paths from other paths originally, perhaps the best thing that we can do for ourselves is to ask, "How did I get on the path I'm on?  Did I choose to take this path, or did someone or something else push me onto it?"

I knew a man once who wanted to be a teacher.  While he was in college, he took some classes on administration.  He was hired at a pretty small school, and within a couple of years he was encouraged to apply for the assistant principal position.  Then he was hired for it.  So before he even got the chance to develop his skills as a teacher fully, he was doing a completely different job, one that he wasn't truly prepared for.  Because of the job, he had to start taking graduate classes, working towards his degree in Educational Administration.  He had little free time, and he was working harder than ever.

And he missed teaching.  He missed working with the students in his classroom.  He missed the free time with his family that was being eaten up by the extra classes he had to take.  And all because he went along when he was "encouraged" to apply for a position that he hadn't really considered to be something he really wanted to do.  He often wondered why he felt so frustrated and unfulfilled with what he was doing.  Eventually, he gave up his position and returned to teaching, which was probably the best thing he could have done for himself-- putting himself back on the road of his own choice.

There are many movies and books that have characters who are pushed to live out the dreams of their fathers and/or mothers--young people who are expected to become doctors or lawyers, so that's just what they do with their lives.  While this sometimes works out okay--such careers aren't necessarily awful, are they--it often turns the young person into an unhappy and cynical person who isn't able to show real love for life because of built-up resentment and regret.

I have a friend who met a woman a few years ago and is still going out with her.  He's doing so not because he thinks that she's the love of his life, but because as time goes on he feels more of a sense of obligation to her.  After all, she's a great person.  They'll probably end up getting married, even though he doesn't have extremely strong feelings for her, and he often wonders if there might be someone else who might make him feel more love and desire and passion.  His is one of the more difficult paths to choose, and there are no clear answers for him.  And he knows that.

What kinds of paths are you traveling right now?  Career, friendships, romantic relationships, family, hobbies, travel, being homeowners. . . there are many different paths for us all to choose, and not each one is right for each of us.  Because of this fact, it's important that we make an active choice about these paths--and in order to do that, it's important that we be aware of things such as what the path entails, what it will ask of me, how it will make me feel, and most importantly is it a path that I freely choose to go down?

Only when we can answer yes to the last question will we find that we're ready for all the obstacles and trials that each path in life will offer to us.

  
  

  

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Throw back the shoulders, let the heart sing, let the eyes flash, let the mind be lifted up, look upward and say to
yourself. . . Nothing is impossible!

Norman Vincent Peale

Those who are fired with an enthusiastic
idea and who allow it to take hold and dominate their thoughts find that new
worlds open for them.  As long as
enthusiasm holds out, so will
new opportunities.

   

The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.

Henry David Thoreau

  
The Power of Attitude
  

Promise Yourself
(The Optimist Creed)

Promise yourself to be so strong that
nothing can disturb your peace of mind.

To talk health, happiness, and
prosperity to every person you meet.

To make all your friends feel
like there is something in them.

To look at the sunny side of everything
and make your optimism come true.

To think only of the best, to work
only for the best, and expect only the best.

To be just as enthusiastic about the
success of others as you are about your own.

To forget the mistakes of the past and press
on the greater achievements of the future.

To wear a cheerful countenance at all times
and give every living person you meet a smile.

To give so much time to the improvement of
yourself that you have no time to criticize others.

To be too large for worry, too noble for
anger, and too strong for fear, and to happy
to permit the presence of trouble.

   

   

What is life?  It is the flash of a firefly in the night.  It is the breath
of a buffalo in the wintertime.  It is the little shadow which runs across
the grass and loses itself in the sunset.

Crowfoot, 1890

   

   

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