Mi Hamba Blog

Golf — Now there is a way to spend a couple of hours excercising your ability to pay attention to and control  your feelings.  Especially the ones that produce those nasty limiting beliefs we keep writing about.

I am not a golfer — not by even a stretch of anybody’s imagination.  As a matter of fact I usually call it “Swish — Darn — Drag Your Bag”.  On Sunday however, I was invited for a round of golf by a good friend that I used to work with and had been missing for a while now.  He is a good golfer, retired and when we worked together was really a surrogate Father for me.  You know what I mean I hope, he was someone I could depend on for advice in life situations and he never hesitated to give it — just like Dad.

When we got to the golf course it was really busy and because it was just the 2 of us, we were asked to be accompanied by another couple of people.  Wonderful people and again pretty good golfers.  Enter my first Limiting Feeling of the day:ought:

I can’t golf with these people — I will just delay and hold them up — which I was able to relpace with:

Even though I am unable to golf as well, I am so grateful that they will be able to give me some great tips and that they are so understanding.

What is amazing is that they were very understanding and they did offer some great tips.  As a matter of fact for every ball I hit over the fence they found 2 for me as they assisted me in looking for mine.  That in itself empowered me to develop an allowing statement of:

Many people are hitting golf balls out of bounds, just like me!

I wasn’t the only one hitting them over the fence and out of bounds and I knew it because I had the proof — there were a ton of lost balls in those woods.

As you can imagine, there were a ton and I mean a ton of limiting beliefs and feelings about my golf game as I progressed through the day.  Because of my experience with being a student of personal development, I was able to recognize them and re-phrase them as a positive statement instead of a negative statement.

To the unseasoned person of Personal Development the first 9 holes were disastrous and a non-believer would think — there I told you — that stuff doesn’t work.  The second 9 holes however proved my knowingness that controlling your feelings and your limiting beliefs is absolutely transformational.  All of a sudden I was hitting my drives straight, or at least straighter, I wasn’t losing my ball anymore and I was able to at least keep up.  I actually shaved over 10 strokes from the front nine — now that felt good!

Had I not been able to control my feelings I would have been an emotional wreck by the 6th or 7th hole and not enjoyed a single minute of the game.  The folks I golfed with all mentioned what a great attitude I had about being so bad at the game.  I think that was a compliment.

 Just like the age old discussion of which came first the chicken or the egg, there has been a similar discussion about thoughts and feelings.  Many believe that your thoughts come first and determine your feelings, while many others believe that you can first decide how you are going to feel and then let your thoughts come from your feelings.  Where do you stand on this?

According to the movie “The Secret” you have over 60,000 thoughts in a single day.  How could you ever possibly hope to have control over that many thoughts?  Even if you made the conscious effort to control a fraction of these thoughts, how do you turn those thoughts into feelings?  You would be extremely susceptible to your other uncontrolled thoughts to take over your feelings at any given moment.

In my opinion the only way you can use the law of attraction to bring you what you want, is to start with your feelings.  Your feelings are so much easier to be conscious of and therefore to control.  If you decide you want to be happy, you get to just be happy.  You can then bring happy thoughts into your mind to support this feeling.

Many great arguments have been made for both sides of this discussion.  I would love to hear some of your opinions.  Feel free to share your comments with us.

This is a question that, when answered honestly, will let you know whether life coaching and becoming a student of personal development is for you.  This all equates to your mindset and the ability to really apply the principles of Personal Development to you. 

So what is Mindset?

Mindset is defined as a set of beliefs that affect somebody’s attitude, their way of thinking which determines their behavior and outlook.

So where do our beliefs come from?  We are not born with them, we attain them as Life Happens.  Our beliefs are instilled upon us by our parents, society, our circle of influence and the Media.  Here are some of the Limiting beliefs that come up the most when I am presenting the Law of Attraction either live or on a teleseminar:

Money is hard to come by

The rich are all greedy

I don’t deserve that

I will have to work really hard

I am not smart enough to do that and

I cannot afford that

Realizing of course that these are all learned beliefs we can also realize that we can un-learn them and replace them with postive beliefs instead.  The simplest way to do that is to become a student of Personal Development and to use the services of a Life Coach.

Remember the old saying of Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t — either way you are right.  This is a very true saying and proves that if you choose to believe then you will be choosing to achieve.  Change your limiting beliefs through studying Personal Development and the use of a Life Coach.  The results will be astonishing for you.  After all Personal Development is simply a process:  A process of causing yourself to change for the better, become stronger, more impressive and successful in all aspects.

How do you live your life?  Do outside circumstances determine how you feel inside?  It is so easy to get caught up in reaction mode.  You simply respond to every negative or positive person or situation with an equally negative or positve feeling.  By doing this on a consistent basis, you are giving up control over your feelings and therefore your life.  It doesn’t have to be that way. 

You can decide to live life from the inside out.  The way you feel each and every minute is up to you.  Let’s explore this further with an example.

If you are driving down the road and another driver cuts you off, you have two choices.  You can decide to get angry and express your anger with some colorful words and a flip of your finger.  This option will in turn cause you to possibly drive more aggressively yourself and therefore become a danger to yourself and others on the road.  The second option you have is to respond with a feeling of gratitude.  Yes, you got cut off, but you are so fortunate that the other driver did not hit you.  

Remember the law of attraction brings back to you whatever you give your attention, energy and focus to whether positive or negative.  By being in control of your feelings, you are enabling yourself to live a more positive life.

Do you really know what you want?  This may sound like a stupid question, but let’s explore it for a minute. 

Take one of your goals and ask yourself why you really want to achieve it.  When armed with your answer, ask yourself again why that is importatnt to you.  If you continue this process you will eventually get to your core values and reasons for wanting what you want.  Your final answer will most likely be a feeling that you will receive once you achieve that goal.

The question then becomes “What can I do right now that will enable me to feel that same positive feeling?”  One of two things can happen when you allow yourself to feel these feelings now.  Either the law of attraction will guide you towards the achievement of your goal by bringing you more of the same feeling, or you may discover you don’t need to achieve that goal because you are perfectly happy now.

This is an important exercise to take with each one of your goals.  Not only does it confirm what you really want, but it uses the law of attraction to help you achieve it.  Upon repeated practice, this self discovery process will allow you to know what your core beliefs and values are, and help you to live a purpose driven life.

What are your limiting beliefs telling you?  What are your goals and aspirations today, in comparison to 5, 10 or even 20 or more years ago?  Your belief system is the foundation of your achievement levels and as we all know you cannot build a strong building without a good strong foundation.

Today as I walked through a grocery store I was fortunate enough to run into some Clergy that reminded me of my childhood.  I was raised in a very spiritual and religious family, which I am eternally grateful for.  I was able to witness my parents and their circle of influence do great things for so many people in need.  It was also, however, from this very up bringing that I developed my limiting beliefs such as:

You only need enough to survive

Money is the root of all evil

Any more than survival and comfort is a waste

and so on and so on!!

Many times when I wanted something extravagent or outside of our normal day to day existence, my Dad, in his own way, would teach me that you should not want to have more than you absolutely need by saying — Just a second and I will go out to the shed and open another barrel of money.  Now I am not even remotely suggesting that I blame my parents or my up bringing for my inherent issue of just surviving — I just realize where I learnt it and now I know how to address it.

For that I thank myself.  I am so grateful that I realized that I must become a student of personal development and most importantly the principles that make up the Law of Attraction.  It is because of my studies with this law that I now realize that my survival is not the important thing.  The important thing is that I become affluent enough to help as many people as possibe and the only way to do that is to change my limiting belief from survival to affluence.  I know now that I do not want to be wealthy, I owe it to society to be wealthy because as I simply survive I cannot build a hospital wing or feed a family, other than my own and that is just not good enough.

If you have watched the movie “The Secret” or you are familiar with the law of attraction, then you know that the universe responds to your feelings and gives you more of the same.  This is good news for you, as it is alot easier to control your feelings than it is to control your thoughts. 

It may seem difficult sometimes to have positive feelings when outside circumstances, situations, and even other people around you are not exactly very positive.   You may find yourself saying to a loved one “You make me really angry when you do that”.  The reality is that you alone control your feelings, another person does not make you feel anything.  You decide at every given moment how you are going to feel, inspite of what is going on in your life.

The first step in taking control of your feelings is simply knowing that you have that control, just be conscious of it.  You will then begin to notice the next time you are having negative feelings, and be aware that you need to turn those feelings upside down. 

Removing yourself from the negativity around you is imperative to a positive mental attitude.  If you are unable to physically remove yourself, take a few moments to remove yourself emotionally.  You can use this time to go within, quiet your mind and find your inner peace.  Think of all the positive abundance in your life and how truly blessed you are.  You will soon start to notice the shift in your feelings from negative to positive. 

Can you remember back to the good old days when you were a child, young and carefree?  You had big dreams of being a ballerina or an astronaut or a doctor.  You knew what you wanted and you couldn’t imagine any reason why you wouldn’t achieve it.  So, what happened? 

Unless you are one of the precious few that actually became what they always wanted to be, it is safe to assume that at some point you were given a reality check.  Can you remember the exact moment?  I can.

I was about ten years old and I told my Grandmother that when I grew up I was going to be a figure skater.  She promptly informed me that I was too old.  I should have started to train at the ages of four to six, so now it was too late for me. 

I remember the way I felt just as clearly as if it were five minutes ago.  I was completely devastated and shocked, not so much because I couldn’t be a figure skater, but more because of the realization that I had limitations placed on me.  I could not be anything I wanted to be, the world was not my oyster.  I was too old at the age of ten.

I loved my Grandmother dearly and I know that she didn’t mean to upset me, but rather to guide me and teach me. 

Looking back on the situation knowing what I know now, I realize that it was a limiting belief that I took on as a child and carried with me through adulthood.  Many of us have these limiting beliefs that we inherited as a child which are still stunting our personal growth.

Just because these beliefs were right for our parents or grandparents or teachers in their day, it does not make them right for us now.  It is time to take inventory on these limiting beliefs and replace them with positive supportive beliefs that will lead us to our dreams.