Success, Happiness, Progress and your conscious mind, and your unconscious or subconscious mind

Success, Happiness, Progress and your conscious mind, and your unconscious or subconscious mind

Do you ever return to your business after attending a seminar, reading a book, listening to a CD, or  pumped up full with fresh information and inspiration, only to never apply it?  You may have blamed yourself for the lack of follow through.  In fact, the part of your brain that GATHERS information is different from the part that APPLIES new knowledge and the two were not working together.  In fact, they are often at cross-purposes to each other and you may be entirely unaware of this.  They may be at total loggerheads.  There may be intense internal conflicts hampering your progress and thwarting your success.  It’s all too common!

Your conscious mind is responsible for choosing what you want. Your subconscious mind is responsible for your perceptions and behavior. You may need to reprogram your subconscious to think and behave in ways that support what you want, believe in those things, and be willing and able to work toward what you want.  Without this reprogramming, your forward progress, about which you were so inspired, will be hampered by internal conflicts between what your subconscious believes is possible and what your conscious mind wants to happen.

Here are three things you can do to start reconditioning your subconscious:

1. Take action every morning. Start your day with FEELING how you want your life and your business to be- how will it feel when it’s the way you want it to be?  Allow yourself to remain in that feeling. Meditate on your visions and goals for your business and life.  This is a first step in The Law of Attraction.

2. Focus on what you’re grateful for. By combining your feelings of gratitude along with visualizations in the morning, your brain will release chemicals which will begin to retrain your subconscious mind to think differently.

3. Emotionalize your success. Act as if you are already at the level of success that you want to achieve. By putting yourself in those shoes, you will think and behave differently… which will lead to changes in your perception ad in your behavior… and more importantly… will lead to action.

These are just the beginning steps to change from the inside out in order for your  world to change. It is actually a slow process to change the subconscious in this way so don’t expect it to happen fast.  Your neurology has to change; new neural pathways in the brain must be forged and deepened by repetition or intensity.  If you want fast, you’ll need the help of a professional. My clients shift rapidly with the help of  tools for accelerated transformation.  Read About Me page for more info.

Create Time Abundance in your business and in your life

Create Time Abundance in your business and in your life

I write about our relationship with money, Money Mastery, and how it interrelates with our life purpose, our happiness, fulfillment, and enjoyment of life as well as our success and self-expression.
I believe our relationship with time is at the core of what allows us to be successful, fulfilled and living our deepest purpose. Many of us get stuck in time-related traps. We struggle with too many things on our to-do list. We get overwhelmed in our work. And we can’t find time for our most important priorities and for living our purpose.

When we are able to be fully present and engaged with what moves our lives and businesses towards our desired destination, magic happens:

· We feel alive
· We create unimaginable prosperity
· We feel open to possibility
· Even effort feels effortless

There is one person that really fully embodies this way of being: Satyen Raja.

So I want to share with you an opportunity to learn from Satyen Raja about Time Mastery and Time Abundance. It won’t cost you a cent! That’s right; it’s free! And it’s at lunchtime…..does that make it a free lunch? And you don’t have to go anywhere; it’s a teleclass offered by Bill Baren. You may recall that I recommended his Time Mastery Telesummit last year.
You’ll walk away from this call having a deep knowing of what Time Abundance truly is – as simple and powerful as that.

So, are you ready to create Time Abundance in your business and in your life? If so, Register for this rare interview with Satyen Raja on being a master of your time here: http://www.billbaren.com/interview/satyen.html
It will not cost you anything to participate. Your only investment is your time.

This ONE-TIME FREE TeleExperience takes place on Thursday, April 2nd at 12 noon Pacific Time/3:00pm Eastern Time.

I hope you can make it live on the call. If not, they’ll be sending out the recording to all who registered.

The Difference by Jean Chatzky

The Difference by Jean Chatzky,

I normally post to this blog twice each week, but today here’s an extra post with a special limited-time offer:
Download Jean Chatzky’s new financial book, The Difference, for free until 10:59 a.m. ET Saturday, March 14, 2009!

We’re offering this as a free download for Oprah.com members. If you are an Oprah.com member, you’ll be prompted to log in first. If you are not already a member, you will be prompted to become a member. It’s free! Go to oprah.com

What can The Difference teach you?
The top five things you can do to not just survive but thrive during tough times
The eight things that make The Difference (i.e., the key traits and abilities of people who describe themselves as financially free)
Advice for those having job insecurity as well as strategies for finding a job
Why money doesn’t breed happiness—but happiness can breed money
The direct connection between The Difference and your health
How people who know The Difference make a difference for others
Myths and facts about the wealthy

More from Jean Chatzky
A step-by-step action plan to help you get out of debt
Have the retirement talk and try our free calculator
Become your own financial planner
4 ways to stop fighting about money
The layoff survival guide
Make money, not excuses

The Science of Getting Rich, Part 3

The Science of Getting Rich

The Law of Gratitude

Gratitude is so important and powerful for myriad reasons; here are a few:
Gratitude allows you to relate to Source, Spirit, God, Universe, whatever term you use for this, in a harmonious way and puts you in unity with the mind of god. This has enormously powerful repercussions. Your mind will be in closer alignment with the mind of god, with Creative Thought, and with the flow of abundance.
Gratitude keeps us from falling prey to competitive thought or thoughts of scarcity.
Gratitude attracts.
You cannot exercise much power without gratitude because gratitude keeps you connected with power. Ditto for happiness.
A grateful mind expects good things, has faith, attracts and receives good things. This serves to increase faith which increases attraction and receiving. You get the idea? Faith is another KEY.

Be grateful for whatever life presents you with. You may not be able to see or appreciate the perfection when what life presents you with appears negative, but it’s all part of your growth if you use it as such. Realize that you have received already; be grateful. Practice saying or writing ” I’m so happy and grateful now that ________”. Fill in the blank as many times as you can. Do this before you go to bed. Do it with your kids. Do it with your partner or spouse. Have a notebook or journal just for this. See how fast you can fill it up. Create a contest in your family or household to see who can fill theirs first. If you have difficulty getting started, go see Slumdog Millionaire. You may feel more grateful for what you have after seeing this film.

Do your best. Each of us will do our best when we are doing our Purpose.

The Law of Attraction, Success, Satisfaction, Purpose, and Effectiveness in this Digital Age

The Law of Attraction, Success, Satisfaction, Purpose, and Effectiveness in this Digital Age

We live in digital time. Culturally, our pace is rushed, rapid fire and relentless. Facing crushing workloads, we try to cram as much as possible into every day. We’re wired up, but we’re melting down. Time management alone is insufficient as a solution.

The number of hours in a day is fixed, but the quantity and quality of energy available to us is not. This fundamental insight has the power to revolutionize the way you live your life.

This is something I’ve been thinking about and addressing in my own life and in the way I do business. In order to practice what I preach and be a living example of my work, I am always on the lookout for ways to increase my effectiveness, my satisfaction, and my success as a person, as a parent, and as a professional. I’ve been “attending” Bill Baren’s Time Experts TeleSummit to learn from the experts. Today, we heard from Jim Loehr, author of The Power of Full Engagement and head of HumanPerformanceInstitute.com.

In this bestseller, co-author and Chairman, CEO and Co-Founder of the Institute, Jim Loehr, Ed.D., demonstrates in this groundbreaking book, managing energy, not time, is the key to enduring high performance as well as to health, happiness and life balance.

By full engagement we mean physically energized, emotionally connected, mentally focused and spiritually aligned. Full engagement requires each of these four sources of energy. All of them are necessary, none is sufficient by itself and each influences the others. These ideas are perfectly aligned with my work and my ultimate objectives for my clients.

His major premise is that if we are to live satisfying successful lives, we need to:
- know what defines a successful life for ourselves
-commit to applying the bulk of our energy to creating/furthering this
-craft the rules of engagement for doing this
-align all of our energies (physical, mental, spiritual, emotional) to this purpose
-summon the emotions that support the process
-cultivate the physical and mental energy needed to execute the mission with full engagement (he goes into how to maximize your physiology in order to have maximum aliveness and energy)
-commit to engaging fully, managing our energy and our attention and our time (in that order of priority), and thus feeding that which we want to expand (essentially The Law of Attraction).

He feels very strongly that we are simply not designed to multi-task and that we grossly reduce our effectiveness and satisfaction in every area of our lives that we allow multi-tasking to affect. He spoke about marriage, children, jobs, personal life wrt this. He also spoke of the enormous risk we take when we multi-task because humans simply cannot split their focus.

There are resources on this site, some of them are free including a quiz/profile.
By completing 26 questions, you will receive the Free Profile. It will give you an initial sense of your engagement in each of the four dimensions. I found it to be quite accurate. Give it a whirl; takes only a few minutes.

http://www.humanperformanceinstitute.com/

How HAPPY are you?

I have been reading Marci Shimoff’s newest book: Happy for No Reason and I cannot recommend it highly enough- even if you’re already happy. I heard about this book and thought I’d skip it because I’m pretty happy and didn’t think I needed to read a book about being happy. I was so wrong. I have learned so much reading this book, it has inspired me, reminded me of many things that are good to be reminded of, and I’m becoming happier by the week. I’m reading the book in 50 days with 50 other people and we’re going to see how happy we can become.

How happy are you, really? Care to find out? Try this.

The Happy for No Reason Questionnaire

Rate each statement on a scale of 1 to 5:
1 = Not at all true 2 = Slightly True 3 = Moderately True 4 = Mostly True 5 = Absolutely True
1. I often feel happy and satisfied for no particular reason.
1 2 3 4 5
2. I live in the moment.
1 2 3 4 5
3. I feel alive, vital and energetic.
1 2 3 4 5
4. I experience a deep sense of inner peace and well-being.
1 2 3 4 5
5. Life is a great adventure for me.
1 2 3 4 5
6. I don’t let bad situations keep me down.
1 2 3 4 5
7. I am enthusiastic about the things I do.
1 2 3 4 5
8. Most days I have an experience of laughter or joy.
1 2 3 4 5
9. I trust this is a friendly universe.
1 2 3 4 5
10. I look for the gift or the lesson in everything that happens.
1 2 3 4 5
11. I am able to let go and forgive.
1 2 3 4 5
12. I feel love for myself.
1 2 3 4 5
13. I look for the good in every person.
1 2 3 4 5
14. I change the things I can and accept the things I can’t change.
1 2 3 4 5
15. I surround myself with people who support me.
1 2 3 4 5
16. I don’t blame others or complain.
1 2 3 4 5
17. My negative thoughts don’t overshadow me.
1 2 3 4 5
18. I feel a general sense of gratitude.
1 2 3 4 5
19. I feel connected to something bigger than myself.
1 2 3 4 5
20. I feel inspired by a sense of purpose in my life.
1 2 3 4 5
Scoring section:
If your score is 80 – 100: To a great degree, you are Happy for No Reason.
If your score is 60 – 79: You have a good measure of being Happy for No Reason.
If your score is 40 – 59: You have glimpses of being Happy for No Reason.
If your score is under 40: You have little experience of being Happy for No Reason.
Whatever your score, you can always move toward being more Happy for No Reason. The book is full of simple quick things to move you in this direction.  Decide to do one or two exercises each week; it’ll feel less daunting.   After you buy the book, there are online resources you can use on the book’s website.

How to be Happy in the Current Economic Circumstances

How to be Happy in the Current Economic Circumstances

Being happy is not a matter of chance. People who are happy have certain things in common; much of this involves the choices that they make. Much research has been done to ascertain this and make it accessible to those of us who’d like to be a little or a lot happier.

9 Choices of Extremely Happy People

• an active intention to be happy (this may cause many people to say/think “DUH!” however, although most folks want to be happy, they don’t set an active intention to BE happy.)
• accountable for one’s thoughts, actions, feelings (having set that intention, take note of your thoughts and your actions for a month and see how many of them are actually not supporting you becoming happy/happier).
• identify what makes you happy and make that central in your life (most folks don’t actually prioritize these things to the extent that they schedule them into their lives, make them a regular part of their lives. Regard this as you would any other new habit that you want to establish for yourself: practice it daily for a month, get an accountability buddy to check-in with about whether you’re doing it, get a buddy to do it with on a regular schedule).
• find meaning in the face of tragedy or adversity (happy people, without being pollyannas, look for the lesson or the gift in difficult circumstances. This often leads them to greater self-knowledge, greater sense of family or community, greater sense of their own values and priorities.)
• be flexible and open to life’s many options (you may’ve noticed that life rarely goes according to our plans yet, to the extent that we can roll with it, it works out ok- sometimes better than our plans. This attitude is key to discovering and fulfilling one’s life purpose. I’ve written some posts about this and the connection to happiness and making more money.)
• appreciate one’s life and the people in it (this is another one that may prompt the “DUH!” response because it’s so obvious, yet, people do not do this to the degree that they could)
• give unceasingly without expectation of a return (research shows that people who have and practice a generosity of spirit have a much greater level of satisfaction and fulfillment in their lives. Volunteerism is actually on the rise in our culture.)
• be truthful with yourself and with others (it’d be pretty difficult to be happy if you’re deceiving yourself or others. It just feels so awful. The truth, however painful initially, always feels better and affords the opportunity to connect with yourself and others that wouldn’t exist otherwise.)

Given the extreme degree of stress and suffering over current economic conditions, I will write more on this topic because we can always choose our response to circumstances that seem out of our control. As Swami Satchidananda said “You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf.” How many unhappy surfers have you seen?

What are the qualities of happiness that don’t depend on changing circumstances?  You, knowing yourself, enjoying your Self, enjoying being alive, being as alive as possible, appreciating what is, acceptance, self-acceptance,….. keep the list going.

Money and Happiness

Money and Happiness

Our culture holds a belief that more money is better and also that more will make you happy. Is it true? Here are a few statistics:

Americans’ average personal income has increased more than two and a half times over the past 50 years, but their happiness level has remained the same. However, rates of depression grew 10 fold!

Nearly 40% of the people on the Forbes list of wealthiest Americans are less happy than the average American.

Once personal wealth exceeds $12,000 a year, more money produces virtually no increase in happiness. Income also does not noticeably influence satisfaction with marriage, family, relationships, or ourselves. Furthermore, research has shown that while you can motivate people in the short term with external rewards, it is short-lived and people feel more passion for and derive more pleasure from doing what they freely choose and most enjoy and these will decrease when external rewards remain in effect.

A recent survey showed that, at all income levels, people think more money will definitely make them happier.

Billions of dollars are spent by advertisers each year to convince you that you’re not ok the way you are and that you need things- lots and lots of them- to make you happy. 3 hours of television will expose you to roughly 68 messages of this sort.

All of this plays into the myth of “I’ll be happy when……” Ask yourself if you find yourself saying or thinking any of these:

I’ll be happy when I have the perfect job.

I’ll be happy when I have the perfect mate.

I’ll be happy when I have the home of my dreams (or owning my home at all).

I’ll be happy when I have a baby, a family.

I’ll be happy when I have more free time.

I’ll be happy when I get recognition or acknowledgement or appreciation.

I’ll be happy when I can retire.

I’ll be happy when I lose weight.

In fact, you can be happy right now even if none of those things has or will happen<ed>.

It’s simply a matter of choice and mindset. Your choice and your mindset.

Money and the Pursuit of Happiness

Money and the Pursuit of Happiness

Thomas Jefferson spoke of the inalienable right to the Pursuit of Happiness, but he used the term pursuit in a different way than it is commonly used.  Many have interpreted this literally that happiness is something to pursue, chase or hunt down.  Approached this way, it remains elusive.  Particularly so when this is combined with the belief that money, more money, stuff and more stuff will make us happy, even more will make us happier and insure that we remain happy.  Most folks who’ve tried this will attest that it didn’t yield this outcome for them.  Those who used credit cards or other forms of credit to finance their experiment will attest that the resultant stress from the debt accrued in the process made them even less happy than where they began.

In 1776, the word pursuit referred to practicing something regularly, to make a habit of it. Pursuit, in this context, actually works for happiness.  Happiness practiced becomes less elusive, more normal and regular.

I’m playing a game with 50 other people.  We’re reading the book Happy For No Reason, doing the exercises in the book, and discussing the ideas in the book and whatever arises for us in the process.  We’re taking 50 days to play this game.  The game allows everyone to win.  Winners will be Happy For No Reason- meaning they’re happy regardless of circumstances.  They’re intrinsically happy and know that their happiness isn’t tied to what happens or doesn’t happen, having or not having anything in particular.  The book has far exceeded my expectations and I’m enjoying the interaction with the group.  I’ll keep you posted.

THE SECRET TO INCREASING YOUR INCOME MORE EASILY, Part 3B

I’d say that there are different layers of purpose just as there are different layers of experience, different layers of Being, etc….
When I was quite young- maybe 10 or 12, I remember pondering my purpose and thinking that it had to do with freedom. I didn’t have the vocabulary then to articulate it as well as I can now, but I knew it had to do with finding the way to be the fullest manifestation of myself…….self-actualized, free to Be.
Now, that sense of my purpose is unchanged; I still perceive that to be my purpose, and I look for work and other opportunities in life to manifest myself and utilize my gifts as fully as possible. So, while purpose need not have a Doing layer, if it does, that layer will have to do with doing the things that cause us to feel most alive, most useful, most excited, most giving, most open to magnificence.

I think this is why career counselors and books on career/changing careers suggest that people sense back to what they enjoyed and made them feel alive and happy when they were 10. It often provides some clues or reminders about feeling alive, doing what we love, while being unencumbered by adult realities and constraints that people can then extrapolate from to find their purpose or work that they enjoy. I’ve heard and read delightful stories of people discovering their passion in this way and creating work that they love. When our work comes from this place, it doesn’t feel so much like work, there’s less struggle and frustration, and it’s much easier to be motivated, excited, creative, and inspired. As a result, this is likely to lead to us being more successful and making more money.