More of Me

This time of year seems to breed the idea that we need to change as people in order to be happy. We need to be thinner, get a better job, have more friends, eat healthier, watch less tv, you name it someone wants to change to do it. Not that there’s anything wrong with a little change, it’s the idea that we “need” to change. That in 2009 we were so much the person that we didn’t want to be that this year, in 2010 we have to be a new one.

I changed once, I was in a relationship that encouraged me to be someone who I wasn’t, pushed their ideals and agendas on me to the point where the only conclusion I could make was that I wasn’t good enough. After 5 very long and frustrating years of trying so hard to be that other person, to change, it finally dawned on me that I didn’t actually need to change. There was nothing wrong with me! I was perfect exactly the way I was, even with my extra cushion and love of vanilla lattes.

The one thing I heard over and over again after the breakup was that I was “more myself than I’d ever been”. People reconnected with me in a big way, they felt like the me who was once lost, was now found. But not only was “I” back, I was more of me than I had been before. How does that work? How does someone actually become more of themselves?

Rather than change to become the person you see on tv, the co-worker that you think has it all, the fitness guru at your gym, find the You that’s waiting to get out. In 2010, find the You that’s on a mission to deliver your divine service, look it’s best, be it’s healthiest. We want to get thinner because we’re told it’s healthier, personally I’m a pretty healthy person normally but I do want to be more fit. Going to the gym because someone told me I’ll be healthier if I do isn’t going to be enough of a motivation to me to last, however as a mother getting more fit because it means I’ll have more energy to chase my toddler around, now that might just work. It’s about finding what You really want for yourself.

Don’t take someone else’s word for it. Find that niche place in your heart for you in 2010. Look at where you were inspired when you were a youngster, what your goals and aspirations were in your 20’s. They weren’t pipe dreams, they were most likely squashed because reality of the 9-5 or obligations to others became more important than your obligations to yourself.

You don’t have to change, you are perfect the way you are. However, we all have goals, places we want to be in life that we don’t feel we are at now. Here are my top 5 suggestions to achieving the best You, you can be in 2010:

1. Check to see if the goals you have are really your goals first.
2. Look at the areas in your life that you are passionate about now.
3. See how your goals line up with those passions.
4. Work with a Transformation Consultant, they are specialists in the area of finding you and achieving your mission in life.
5. Be grateful for who you are and what you have every day.

In 2010, resist the urge and the pressure to change for the sake of changing. Take the time to rediscover your mission and vision for your life. Love you, and be You!

Be inspired in 2010!

 

Living the Entrepreneurial Spirit

Whenever I’m reading a book I like to share insights that I’m receiving from it. Right now I’m reading “Female Entrepreneurs, Leading Australian Businesswomen” by Leiza Clark. It’s a series of interviews with some of the most powerful women financially and in business in Australia. I bought this book over two years ago, but let it sit on my bookshelf in my office. See at the time when I bought the book I had just started a new business, and thought that it could be really handy…if I would have read it.

Two years goes by and I closed the business down after the birth of my son, so I could focus on raising him, but also because simultaneous to his birth I found that my passion no longer sat in the area that I was working and trying to create income. I picked the book up again just a couple of weeks ago, hence the no post in a few weeks. What I found was an incredible tool for anyone wanting to have their own business, man or woman.

Just today I’m going to share one piece of advice/information that I received and later I will go through more. The biggest thing that stood out when reading this book is the ideas that got these entrepreneurs started in their businesses. Each of them found a hole in the world of commerce that they were inspired to fill, whether it was healthy cleaning products because their child had allergies; a business person needing to find a place to live for a few months without hassle; fun, inspiring and exciting clothes to work out in; cute, quirky stationary for the office and more. Each of these powerful women got inspired about something that meant something to them and then brought it out to the world.

See, I think that the biggest reason why we fail in business, or don’t try at all is because we want to do something that has been done before, or it’s something we think we can make money from. But if, at the end of the day, doing taxes for someone else doesn’t get you jiggied up then it’s probably not a great idea to start your tax-consulting firm. However if the idea of helping people understand their finances and get control over their spending does excite you, then bam you have a product!

For me, I had been working in full time employment for 10 years in one industry and decided I could do that business on my own. Afterwards, I realized that it was great getting the pay cheque because the actual work that I was doing wasn’t inspiring enough on its own. What I really love doing is teaching, mentoring, coaching and Reconnective Healing and ever since I made that switch mentally to doing something that inspires me, it’s all just started to flow.

So here’s my advice for the day if you have your own business, you’re thinking about starting a business or you’d love to have one some day:

1) Look within yourself, what gets you excited?

2) If you had $10 million dollars in the bank which earned enough interest to support your lifestyle and didn’t have to work…what would you do with your time?

3) Is there a void in the marketplace that you’ve seen that you’d love to fill by adding in your two cents to it?

It may be hard to admit to your friends and family that there’s nothing you’d like better to do than open up an ice cream shop, but after watching Masterchef Australia this week I think it goes to show, if you do what you love then what you love will support you.

Be true to yourself, look for opportunities and let it happen.

 

Protection or Growth?

Anytime I read a book and it stays with me long past the day I finished the last page, I know that there is still more to learn from it. Just this morning I was thinking again about Dr. Bruce Lipton’s book Biology of Belief (referred to in Blogs below). One of his stipulations about the human body is that we cannot choose to be in a protection and a growth mode at the same time. As the immune system is being utilized for fighting off a disease, those same cells cannot simultaneously be in a growth mode. What that says is that if we are in a protection phase, we cannot also be growing, or as I like to think of it, evolving.

Getting back to my original reason for writing this article is that I was thinking about what we say to protect ourselves from being hurt and wondered whether or not that has the same affect. Think of it like this…you start dating someone and your instinct may be to really like them, the problem is you’ve been hurt in the past by an unhealthy relationship. Rather than commit to liking them you start nit-picking and saying things like “I’m not sure that we totally mesh”, “I’m not crazy about the way they wear their hair” or “I’m not going to get my hopes up, he could by like all the other guys”. On the one hand that is all successful dating strategies for someone who doesn’t want to get hurt, but on the other hand by focusing on protecting ourselves are we actually holding ourselves back from getting what we really want, which may be in fact a relationship with that person?

What if what you’re doing by protecting your emotions from being hurt by this person rejecting you, you’re actually stopping yourself from evolving naturally into a relationship with that same person? Rather than allow the relationship to take it’s natural course, we hinder, slow it down or change it’s course altogether, just by protecting ourselves, which in effect makes us right! If every time we go into a self protection mode, we slow down or stop our evolution, think of how many times we may have held ourselves back?

From personal example, I have been doing Reconnective Healing for five and a half years, always part time or on the side of my other more corporate (and socially accepted) careers which have been recruiting and training. This healing work is amazing, inspiring and allows people freedom from their physical, emotional, spiritual and other binds. I love to think about it, talk about it, and do it. So why haven’t I committed to it as a full time career rather than my part time hobby? Have I been trying to protect myself from failure just because I didn’t trust that I could make it a full time career? Have I been holding myself back from evolving because I’ve been so busy protecting myself? I think the answer, now after reading that book is finally, yes.

What this means is that any time we’re in the mode of protection, whether it be from a flu or from emotions, we’re holding ourselves back from doing what we really want to be doing, which is growing and evolving. Although it’s essential for our cells to focus on our immune systems, I’ve seen through example with Reconnective Healing that anything can be healed in an instant. Maybe what this work gives us is the chance to let go of protection, if only for a moment and that’s all our bodies really need to evolve and move past our illness/disease rather than grow through the extraordinary process of standard healing which can be anything from days to years depending on the illness. Similarly on an emotional level, if we can stop trying to protect our little children inside our hearts, we may just start living the life we’ve always wanted to live.

Here are a few pieces of advice for today with this in mind:

1. The next time you hold yourself back from saying something so that you can protect yourself or someone else from being hurt, ask yourself the question “What would happen if I just said exactly what I was thinking?”

2. Write a list of everything you can remember doing for the last couple of years that you did purely from a self-protection standpoint and ask yourself the question “What would have happened if I let it run its course without worry about being hurt?”

3. Write a list of things you would love to do and all the reasons why you deserve to do them, then then next time you start to downplay something on that list remind yourself that by doing that you may be stopping it from manifesting altogether!

Thanks for reading this article, I’d love to hear how these exercises work for you, what awakenings have you had by asking yourself the questions?

 

Evolution or just a drive to town?

I’m driving home after dropping the kids off at school this morning, and there is a ridiculous amount of traffic going my direction. Everyone is driving slowly because it rained earlier, so I get to “patiently” wait until I reach my exit. During that time I thought about all the cars with the people inside them, and how we rarely go anywhere without them. I live about five blocks from my local grocery shop, and yet drive there 95% of the time. Now this is not a tirade against driving, but rather asking myself the question, is transportation via vehicle such as car, bike, bus or train our next phase of evolution and we didn’t even know it?

What I mean is that in each phase of evolution it’s like we gain a new layer. We started out many billions of years ago as single celled organisms. According to Bruce Lipton (Biology of Belief quoted in an earlier article) the cells membrane acts as the brain and once they could not survive on their own, they developed communities of cells which eventually became multi-celled organisms, and TA-DA us! Each cell taking on a task or function for the community in order to protect it’s survival.

Now you may think, what does having a car have to do with evolution and survival? Stay with me for a minute and I hope to figure it out. By the way, I’m thinking and writing at the same time, so it could turn out to be complete nonsense.

Yes there are cultures that do not have vehicles, but if those communities had a choice, with affordability and accessibility, don’t you think they’d prefer to have a zippy little car to get them from town to town?

Here’s the thought behind my theory…if as a single celled organism, we joined forces with other cells to create a body, wouldn’t it make sense that now we are joining forces with other cells (of the vehicle variety) to continue our growth?

In another 7 billion years, maybe will we be compared to a hermit crab when our culture is analyzed, anthropologists will ask themselves whether or not the vehicle is part of our bone structure. Maybe that’s far fetched, but just think about it next time you go somewhere, have you already evolved and didn’t even realise it?

 

Biology of Belief

In reading Bruce Lipton’s book Biology of Belief I have really started thinking about the beliefs I have about myself and where they came from. Who taught me that strangers were bad and does that old belief still work now that I’m not a child. How can strangers help me along my path?

Strangers were once deemed evil but now I’m encouraging them to read my blogs and contact me, hoping they’ll call to have a healing or utilize my skills and experience for mentoring. So how does that work? Can both be true beliefs or neither?

According to Bruce Lipton our beliefs are truly just our perceptions handed down to us by others. It’s time to start thinking for ourselves. Live our own lives and make decisions based on our own values rather than living in the shadows of our past.

I encourage you today to try to do one thing that you previously believed to be ‘wrong’ and see what happens. Start up a chat with a stranger, buy something you think is ugly and wear it with pride, let your child throw his spaghetti on the wall and laugh it off!

Live your own life by your own rules and begin to love yourself for who you are at heart.