Mi Hamba Blog

Success requires effort and real, absolute success requires focused energy.  Most of the time, for many many people, focused energy is very difficult because of the level of fear involved.

The Fear of failure, the Fear of success, the Fear of rejection, the Fear of not knowing how, the Fear of feeling like it just can’t happen for you are only some of the fears we hear about and experience on a daily basis. 

The most common definition of Fear that we have heard, most people define it as “False Evidence Appearing Real”.  What I have found is that anything that lies outside of your comfort zone is usually considered to be false evidence that appears real.  Therefore it stands to reason that your comfort zone is a mirror image of your success zone right?  Think about that — your comfort zone is a mirror image of your success zone.

How about we take the definition and both consciously and subconsciously change it to Focused Energy Achieves Results.  Now this is not to suggest that we go blindly forward without performing due diligence into the possible tools that we may use to expand our comfort zone, just to perform the due diligence. 

Think again about your comfort zone being a mirror image of your success zone.  Change that around and look at it like this:  Your success zone is a mirror image of your comfort zone.

Do what it takes to expand your comfort zone.  A life coach has the ability to direct you in the expansion.

“Whoever is happy will make others happy, too.”  ~Mark Twain.

Have you ever noticed that some people are just genuinely happy?  Have you noticed that you’re happier just being around them, almost like it’s contagious?  Well, it is!  This is just one of the many ways that you can put yourself into a happy state - surround yourself with happy people.

We have an epidemic right now in North America.  Did you know that anti-depressants are the most prescribed drug in America?  Not only is that a tragedy, but it’s for the most part, preventable.  If you just take back control of your life, invest in your own personal growth, and decide that you’ll live a life of your choosing, it CAN change.

Here are my top 5 tips on how to be a happier person:

1. Decide to be happy.  We all can choose how we feel, so why not choose to be happy instead of something that will make us feel worse.  This may sound pretty simple and it is.  When you declare you’ll be happy, it’s so much easier to be exactly that - Happy!

2. Go on a media fast.  Yes, you heard right.  There is nothing happy and uplifting in the news.  Make a commitment to not watch any news on TV, read the newspaper or any other source of news for 30 days.  You just might make it a permanent fast when you realize how much happier you are. Oh, and you’ll likely hear of any important news from people in your circle of influence so you’re sure not to “miss” anything.

3. Gratitude.  Keep a gratitude journal and start your day by listing all the things you feel grateful for.  This puts you in a happy and grateful frame of mind first thing in the morning.  If you don’t think you have anything to be grateful for, you do.  Just being alive is something to be grateful for.

4. Get exercise and fresh air.  For some this is a bad word, but really, fresh air and going for a walk (however short it is), will do wonders for your mindset.  It’s also a great opportunity to clear your mind and allow creativity and energy to flow into your life.

5. Laugh and Sing.  Happy people sing - I’ve always believed this. Singing changes your inner vibrations (sounds funky I know - think of that as your mood) and makes you feel good.  Think about it, have you ever seen anyone who’s unhappy singing?  Laughing, well what can I say.  Laughter definitely puts you in a happy frame of mind.  Go watch a funny movie and see how good you feel.

How do you get yourself in a happy mood?

Technology being what it is these days, multi-tasking has become the norm.  We can return our text messages while in line at our favorite coffee shop, or reply to our email while talking on the phone.  It is so easy to be doing two and three things at a time, but are we really being more effective and productive?  Is it really better use of our time?

The answer to these questions is yes and no.  It really depends on the importance of the tasks at hand.  Checking messages while waiting in line, is a great use of your time, because waiting in line really doesn’t require that much focus.  Talking on the phone while replying to email, however, is probably not going to impress the person you are talking to.  You are probably missing out on half on the conversation.  It all comes down to focus. 

When you are engaged in more than one activity at a time, it is impossible to be putting 100% of your focus on each.  So the question then becomes, which is better, doing two things with 50% of your focus or one thing at 100%.  With focus, one can achieve amazing results.  Focused energy is a powerful thing, it really allows us to tap into the potential of our minds power.  You will find an amazing self discovery with focus.  You have more creative ideas, and can accomplish things with greater ease and speed.       

People deserve to believe in themselves don’t you think?  As you answer that question consider another: Do you believe in yourself?  The answer to that question lies very deeply within  your mind, it is a sub-conscious decision to believe in yourself. Your ability to believe in yourself needs to be determined through identifying your limiting beliefs, how you feel about yourself.  You see you can say, consciously, that you do but if your sub-conscious mind is saying different then there is an issue. 

How do you feel when it comes to prosperity?  Do you believe you deserve prosperity in all aspects of your life?  Do you believe that you deserve the perfect relationship?  Do you deserve to be healthy or how about deserving that promotion you are after?

A life coach has the ability to extract those limiting beliefs and bring them to the surface.  The only way to regain control in your life is to take control of your belief structure.  If you are questioning your actions, or question whether or not you deserve the expected result from an action then your ability to perform that action to it’s fullest potential is diminished greatly.

Have you ever played the Kerplunk game?  It is a great tool for realizing the effects of your limiting beliefs on your goals and aspirations.  Kerplunk is a child’s game.  Envision a plastic tube about 4 inches in diameter and around 10 inches in height, standing vertically.  Half way down the cylinder the plastic tube gets intersected with many pixie sticks and marbles get put through a hole in the top.  The end result at the beginning of the game is marbles sitting atop pixie sticks half way down the center of the plasitic cylinder.  The object of the game is to remove the pixie sticks until the marbles fall and the winner achieves the most marbles. ( I hope that paints a good picture for you )

Now let’s consider that the pixie sticks are your limiting beliefs, and the marbles are your goals and aspirations in life.  The more you believe in yourself, the more limiting beliefs (pixie sticks) you remove, allowing your goals and aspirations (the marbles) to flow.

Thanks to Michael Losier of the Law of Attraction Book for this descriptive tool.

Believe and you will achieve.

We have all heard stories of people who have suffered an illness or injury and have used the time they spent in the hospital to pause and reflect on their lives.  Then upon recovery they have gone on to achieve great things in their lives.  Why do we wait until it could potentially be too late before we decide to think about improving our lives?

Is it because we are just too busy, or too preoccupied with our day to day lives?  For many of us, life is just go, go, go from the time we wake up in the morning, unil the time we lay our head on our pillow at night completely exhausted.  Time studying and thinking about our lives is a nice thought, but it just doesn’t fit into our list of priorities until it may be too late.

There are 1,440 minutes in every day.  If you spend just one percent of each day in study, thinking, and planning time with regards to your personal, family, and professional life, you will be amazed with the results..  We can all find fifteen minutes in a day to spend on self discovery and growth.  This precious time you spend on yourself each day will soon become a top priority for you as you begin to live a more rewarding life.  

My Dad was a dreamer.  I say was because I no longer have the gift of his influence in my world.  It’s been 6 years since he moved onto whatever comes next after this human experience.   Dad gave me permission to dream big, to believe that anything is possible if I just put my mind to it. So what went so terribly wrong?  Outside influences - my peer environment of “who do you think you are”, and “that will never happen”, and “do you think you’re better than me”.  I had big dreams that seem to have faded with the years.  Can you relate? 

Something amazing came into my life after I woke up and realized that I just wasn’t going to live that way anymore.  Do you know about the Law of Attraction?  That’s okay because I didn’t either at one time.  I now know that it had been working in my life in a negative way, because now I’m experiencing it as a miracle.   Once I made that declaration to live my life my way and to be happy and fulfilled, the people and resources I needed appeared in my life as if they were crazy coincidences.  One of those people was my life coach.

Personal coaching sounded pretty foreign to me at one time.  “What exactly is it and what could it possibly do for me?” was my first skeptical thought.  My coach helped me focus on what I wanted, set achievable goals, get organized and prioritize my endless “to do list” (don’t we all have those?!) and rediscover what I’m passionate about.  Living a happy life is so important to me now that helping other people find that for themselves is what drives me these days.  It feels so good to be living my dream - it’s not the one from my childhood but it’s evolved and even better!  What’s your dream?  Is it the same from childhood or has it grown into something different?

How many millions of Americans commute 1 hour or more per day to their jobs?  You may be surprised to know that 140 million Americans commute more than 1/2 hour each way, 5 days per week to jobs many of them don’t even enjoy!  That’s a whopping 225 hours per year (less vacation time, sick time, and holidays) of wasted time.  You may even be commuting more than that!

Consider using this wasted time for your own personal growth.  Listen to something inspiring, educational or entertaining.  Learn what it takes to be successful in your industry or profession and accelerate your career.  Many personal growth books now come in audio format that are available at your local library.   You can download podcasts to your iPod, or if you’re adding books to your own library collection, check out Audible.com

You’ll soon find that you actually look forward to your daily commute, arrive at the office with a lower stress level than those listening to the depressing and repetitive news broadcasts, and start your work day with renewed energy.  My greatest inspiration and ideas have come when I’ve been listening to an audio program while driving.  Where do you get your inspiration and ideas from?

The personal development industry is absolutely on fire these days.  People in North America alone are spending in excess of eleven billion dollars a year on books, audio series, personal coaching and personal growth seminars. The quest for personal growth is akin to the quest for fire was.How do you know whether or not personal growth seminars are something that you would benefit from?  Well the reality is they will never hurt you as long as you enter into them with an open mind and an objective of what you want to achieve from them.  There is also the fact that you do not have to spend a ton of money to get started on your personal growth.  Many people decide that in order to get started they have to spend their life savings, which just is not accurate.

There are many teleseminars that are directed to personal growth for very little, if any cost.  As you search out these seminars keep an open mind and the title or topic will let you know if this is an area that will assist you in your personal development.  There is an old saying of “take and chew the meat of the discussion and spit out the bones”.  This simply means that every time you listen to a presentation your objective can be to realize “one golden nugget” that you can implement in your life for change.

Accomplish that and you will be well on your way to massive results in your personal growth.

We all have our strengths and weaknesses, that goes without saying, and as part of our self help we try to improve upon those weaknesses.  If you are like me you have probably been taught that the best way to improve your weaknesses is with continual and consistent practice and effort.  While it is in most cases true that practice makes perfect, is this really the best method for our personal growth? 

You see when your energy is high and you are feeling great, that is when you are most productive.  It is pretty hard to have great, positive, high energy when you are spending so much time working on things that are hard for you or that you are not good at.    If we take the opposite approach and spend most of our time each day on our strengths, we will find ourselves more energetic and productive.  We can then use the spillover effect of this energy towards spending a little bit of time working on our weaknesses.  This becomes a win-win because we are focusing our strengths and at the same time improving our weaknesses in a more effective way. 

Journaling is a key to your personal growth.  This is a Simple statement, but not exactly an easy habit for most of us to get into. Why is it that we can sit and write something on a topic that we absolutely believe in, or that we have researched on?  Yet for some reason or another when it comes time for us to sit and reflect on our feelings and thoughts, our productivity and reactions to our day it becomes difficult and trying?  For this author it took some journaling to figure out the answers for those questions with respect to myself.

My journaling is taking me to places that I was afraid to go but had to get to in order to move forward with my goals and aspirations.  It is through writing in my journal that I learn about my true feelings, my absolute limiting beliefs.  I was in an emotional rut with reference to where I personally wanted to be.  This was something that I was unaware of until I became aware of some things through my new habit of documenting my feelings and thoughts. 

My goals and aspirations feel as if they are within reach again, my sub-conscious mind is saying yes you can achieve that instead of making doubt and fear the front and center.

Journaling is like talking to your best friend, you can say anything and they understand: it just makes sense to them.   There are no expectations, but they are able to help you make sense of the situation without hurting your feelings or having to be careful about what and how they say it.  Take the time, everyday and write in your journal and here are a couple of things to start with:

1.  Write a list of anything and everything that you are grateful for and then

2.  Recognize the abundance all around you.

These 2 things alone will unlock an entire arena within your sub-conscious mind until you develop the habit of journaling: you will be grateful when it is all said and done.