“The future is something, which everyone reaches at the rate of sixty minutes an hour, whatever he does, whoever he is.” – C.S. Lewis

We have a choice in whatever we do in life.  We can choose to have a life by default or we can choose to design a life that we want to live.  If we live another year we will all get 365 days to give our life for. Why not do something that empowers you with energy as you follow your passion and live those days by design!  Who knows what the future will feel like as you fuel your body with positive energy. Of course we can talk about the future but in reality we never experience it as the future – only as the now, in every second of the day.

And who knows how many more minutes we have left in our lives. I have a friend who had a hip replacement and there were a list of things she was told she couldn’t do again. Initially she became a bit depressed to think about changing her whole lifestyle, but once her hip was healed she decided to defy the surgeon. As she said, “why not enjoy it now? I could go under a bus tomorrow.” That hip has stood the test of time & when she needed the other hip done several years later, they had changed the instructions & she was told she could do what she wanted on it. As I said at the start we all have that choice to fill up those sixty minutes each hour with positive choices, or not. And for those of you reading this with physical conditions that do restrict what you can do physically, I would like to think you have made choices to fill up the sixty minutes like the rest of us with things that you can & you want to do.

Enjoy your life of design!

“Don’t look where you fall, but where you slipped.”  African proverb

In the past I have talked about the influence our thoughts can have on the outcome of our lives.  So often we look at the results we get and think that we need to look at the action that caused those results.  This is because this is all we see.  It’s that cause and effect scientific relationship we are looking at. However we need to go back to the thought level, to the unseen, to make the necessary changes to influence our results.  We can look at it like a chain reaction.  Our thoughts cause us to feel a certain way – negative thoughts are constricting or disempowering, positive thoughts are expansive or empowering. In the new understanding of the energetic world we vibrate differently when we are constricted and negative than we do when we are expansive and positive.

That vibration or those feelings then cause us to act in a certain way.  The low energy thoughts and feelings cause us to move more slowly and attach an outcome of more negativity.  Whereas those high energy thoughts and feelings cause us to feel like we can take on the world.  Those actions are what we see and therefore believe are responsible for the results in our lives.  Where you ‘slipped’ is probably at the level of thought, which created a different feeling, emotion or vibration, and not in the action itself. Unfortunately we can perpetuate this cycle to continue into a spiral in a downward direction if we are not happy with the results and don’t really know how to break it. Starting to be aware of the feelings and emotions that are coming up, may give you a clue as to what you are thinking, and if you don’t like what you are feeling and thinking then you know what you have to change.

Enjoy choosing a thought that prevents you from ‘falling.’

“Don’t worry about failures, worry about the chances you miss when you don’t even try.”  Jack Canfield

We are being told over and over that there is no such thing as failure. When we feel like we haven’t achieved what we want, it should be considered as feedback, as a way something shouldn’t be done, as a way to put down as experience as we find a way that it can work. Most of the things we take for granted in life, someone has had to go through several attempts to get the finished product. So putting that worry energy into, ‘how else can I do it’ energy is going to be more productive in the long term. Worry itself, whatever it is about, can be a waste of energy as it’s usually about the future, so you could be spoiling today ruminating over something that might not even happen tomorrow.

I think this is where the terminology of pessimist or optimist comes in. If we are a ‘glass half empty’ person, we are more likely to be thinking about what could go wrong, than the optimist who could be excitedly looking at the future where most things are going to plan. It’s not that they have rose tinted glasses and believe that nothing is going to go wrong, it’s more that they know they can handle the setbacks and that they will get there if they stick at it long enough. I’m not sure that I want to worry about the chances I’ll miss when I don’t even try. It’s energy that I would prefer to put into looking out for the opportunities to try. In fact I think sometimes I do too much of that, balancing too many spinning tops. Instead of thinking “What if,” in a negative sense, start thinking “What if,” in a positive sense. You will find your energy lifting and when it does, you will attract more things into your life that have a higher energy as well.

Enjoy changing your level of energy vibration!

“The first step to getting anywhere is deciding you’re not willing to stay where you are”

The word decision is a huge one. Whether we know it or not we are making decisions every minute of the day. We are choosing whether to stay lying in bed for another 15 minutes after the alarm, or whether we get up. So sometimes decisions don’t seem that big, but if we continually make these sorts of decisions, mostly by default, we get results that may be mediocre at best. Just think if you got up 15 minutes earlier every morning of your life, how many hours extra you would be adding, so that you can achieve something you have been trying to find time for. You may not be enjoying where your life is at, in this present moment, but until the pain of staying there is worse than the fear to move forward, you won’t be motivated to go anywhere else.

Sometimes we can just make that decision on our own because it isn’t going to impact others on a daily basis. It might impact them for the better long term and that might be the reason we have chosen to get off our butts and make some changes. However there may be bigger changes like changing careers or taking a rise that might impact other family members because you’ll be away from home more or your hours of work may be longer. We may have to consult someone else with knowledge we don’t have as to whether our next decision is wise in light of some new information. But if you want to move because you are unhappy where you are, it is ultimately up to you to make the decision to the best of your ability in light of all the facts. And as John Assaraf says, “Don’t just be interested, be committed.”

Enjoy making conscious decisions!

“My circumstances do not make me what I am, they reveal who I have chosen to be.”  Wayne Dyer

Did you realise that you can choose to be someone different than you are today. And no you don’t have to be inauthentic. We are changing all the time to talk and interact with different people in a different way. We are doing that by default and we may sometimes behave in a way that we are not proud of because we have been triggered another person or circumstance. We all see life through a set of filters that have built up over the years through all our different experiences. Things that happen look like a past experience that wasn’t happy or didn’t have a good outcome and our subconscious responds to protect us so we don’t feel the pain of that situation again.

But we can learn to respond differently, we can choose to behave in a way that we feel better as a result. We all know people and circumstances that cause us to feel an emotion that we don’t like or we allow it to disempower us. We may respond in a heated way, we may shrink into ourselves as a victim might, but if we recognise that the situation is upsetting us or triggering us to remember old situations and the response we had back then, we can choose to do it differently this time. We all know the family members or old friends who know us so well, that they are able to push our buttons by reminding us of things that have happened in the past, things that we would rather forget. Unfortunately we never really forget them, they get stored in a part of the brain that stores all experiences we have ever had. If we can learn to listen or feel into what the body is trying to tell us, we can learn to do it differently. Tell the subconscious that it is quite safe to make the changes, and then our behaviour will reflect that to reveal who we have chosen to become.

Enjoy learning a more empowering way to respond to life!

“Success is not to be pursued; it is to be attracted by the person you become.”   Jim Rohn

And maybe we should be thinking about what success means to each and every one of us. It can depend on our age, how we were brought up, cultural expectations and our own inner drive of what we want to do with our lives – in other words our purpose. Sometimes it can be that we are successful at certain things and get recognition for it, but in our ‘heart of hearts,’ that really doesn’t match our inner sense of what success is, so we don’t feel successful. What we have just achieved is a hollow result. Along the way of course we have had failures and it can be hard not to focus on that and judge ourselves because of it. But those failures might become your biggest successes. In this context, because Jim Rohn was a motivational personal development speaker, I will keep my thoughts to this arena.

I have CDs and even audio tapes of Jim Rohn talking about his ideas, and this idea that you have to grow yourself into a position can sound a bit idealistic in the context in which he worked. But if you were to think about your passage through the schooling system, you could not have coped with the work presented to you in your final year if you hadn’t gone through the preceding years to give you the foundation for the new material. When you take on a new job, you have to learn, not only about the work itself but also the culture of the organisation and make your way up the pecking order and the experience that gives you, before you can become the CEO. What Jim Rohn is talking about here, is no different. If we don’t have a good awareness of who we need to be to handle the success, then we’re not ready to take it on. Have we got a big enough belief in ourselves? Are we comfortable with criticism or constructive advice from those around us? Do we think we deserve to be successful? If not then we may procrastinate, we may do things that block our success. Are you aware of what your success goals are and who you need to be to achieve them?

Enjoy celebrating success!

“When people are determined they can overcome anything.”   Nelson Mandala

And he should know, one would think. He certainly overcame a lot of political resistance in South Africa to become the first black President. He spent 27 years in prison for his beliefs around non-apartheid and political offences. That shows pretty strong determination to ‘stick to his guns.’ Are you aware of times when your own determination has got you what you wanted, maybe not straight away but definitely worked at some point? There is a Universal Law called the ‘Law of Gender,’ which states that everything that comes into existence has a timeline. For example we all know roughly how long a baby seed takes to grow in the womb until birth. We know how long a carrot seed takes but we don’t always know how long our ideas, seeds, take to come to fruition. We can get impatient and stop having faith in our idea to work out.

I have talked regularly about having gratitude for things and people in our lives on a daily basis. Have I also impressed on you that having gratitude for something that hasn’t materialized yet is showing faith that we know it will, it is just a matter of time. Does that sound like something you are familiar with? Do you think that if you stayed determined in your belief, that what you wanted was going to happen, it would manifest when the time is right? The fact that it hasn’t manifested yet does not mean it isn’t going to, but yes you do have to play your part, be determined, have faith and believe that you can overcome any obstacles.

Enjoy overcoming anything with determination!

“You cannot always control what goes on outside. But you can always control what goes on inside.”  Wayne Dyer

Right from the first time I heard about personal development, whoever was speaking would say the same thing in a different way. What it all boiled down to was, our thoughts create our feelings which then create our actions and our results. If we then let those results affect what we are thinking then we just perpetuate that cycle of the same thoughts over and over. Most of us have been brought up to believe that we can’t make changes, but the new information that is coming out all the time, is telling us that our brains are plastic – able to be moulded, moulded to whatever idea we want, that connects strongly with our feelings and creates a high vibration. Wayne Dyer has repeated this message from all sorts of people who have written books or other texts that have influenced him to put his stamp on this belief about how the universe operates in all of us with that concept.

I recently pulled out an old set of CDs of his where he was doing a stage show with Byron Katie who has her process called, ‘The Work.’ If you are interested in seeing her operate with people, asking them the 4 questions and then the ‘turn around,’ put her name into the ‘you tube’ search bar. This process she does, helps people make huge transformations in their lives. But none of it has anything to do with the outside, it is all about what is going on inside of us. There may well be things going on outside of us that we don’t like, but we can change how we see them and their effect on us. We can change our thoughts about them and notice how we are affected when we believe our thoughts and how we are affected when we can reframe, refocus and redirect those thoughts. We can stop feeling like a victim and move on to a more fulfilling life.

Enjoy controlling what’s going on in the inside.

“Forgiveness is not always easy.  At times, it feels more painful than the wound we suffered, to forgive the one that inflicted it.  And yet, there is no peace without forgiveness.”  Marianne Williamson

I belong to a group of senior entrepreneurs. Last week we were talking about this very thing. One of our members had been biking some years ago when some little old lady drove into him. He was pretty badly beaten up and as he was headed to the hospital in the ambulance he had a choice to harbor a grudge or forgive her. Sometimes I think we can forgive after some time has passed and we’re tired of the pain we are suffering from holding on to the negative thoughts. But this guy made the decision to forgive her then and there, let go of the blame for causing all his fractures and concussion.

He still has one leg that doesn’t work that well but in making the decision to forgive her, he allowed the maximum healing to take place with the highest vibration he had. He had to change his career and what has developed has given him his raison d’etre. He is enjoying his change in direction. As Marianne Williamson says in this quote, if we don’t forgive, we continue to feel a vibration that doesn’t feel good, so there is no peace. Looking at this I immediately thought of the forgiveness for others, but sometimes we do something that we have trouble forgiving ourselves. So this rule applies to the person inside your earth suit. Until we can forgive ourselves for something we have been conditioned to believe is not OK, there can be a lot of negative emotions like blame and shame. While in this state our hearts are not beating with coherence and we open ourselves up to disease.

Enjoy forgiving yourself and others!!

“Life has its seasons…..and regardless of the season, the sun always shines.”  Melissa Malueg

I know this could sound a bit like Polyanna and for some reason she seems to have a bad rap these days. Somehow it’s not seen as though it’s authentic if you are always putting a brave face on everything. Some of this could be because so many of us grumble & moan about our lot in life. Although we don’t like the word ‘victim,’ when we are allowing things outside of us to take the blame for what is going wrong in our life, we are effectively putting on the victim’s hat. We can all feel this from time to time, but to live from that perspective means that we very rarely see the sun shine. We don’t see the good things that are happening in our lives.

Any of us who have been up in a plane know that once we get above the clouds the sun is indeed shining up there (as long as it is daylight). I have a couple of smiley sun images around me at home to remind me of just this very fact. To remind me to have faith that just because I can’t see something with my physical sight doesn’t mean that it isn’t there. I need to remind myself of this when I’m going after a goal, to remind myself that just because I thought I should have achieved my result by NOW, doesn’t mean it isn’t going to happen. I need to remind myself that even grumbling to myself, is not going to open me up to the opportunities that are there all the time like the sun. I just have to be open to the possibilities and I’ll see the sun wherever I look. The part of the brain that is looking for these opportunities to prove I’m right will find them, so the more belief I have that the good things will happen, the more they do.

Enjoy being open to the good!