Blame doesn’t really get us anywhere. What does is taking responsibility for our lives.
The key: it is not the difficult situation or the roadblocks that must be changed but the way we view the roadblocks.
The point is not to find who is at fault but rather to find out one thing I can do to make something work. Taking 100% responsibility for our lives.
“People usually want the results guaranteed before they make the commitment. But unless you make the commitment to get the goal you’ll always be stuck with the roadblocks and impossibilities…so what you do is listen to all the impossibilities play through in your head and when they start to diminish a bit you get on with finding ways of making it happen. I still don’t believe I can do it, but that has nothing to do with it. I’m making every effort.” (Martin Rutte, lifestyle management consultant)
The difference with this approach and positive thinking is the way we approach a negative belief. With positive thinking, you try to ignore it.
But that’s an impossible task when you make big goals beyond reasonable expectations. The roadblocks and barriers are larger than the individual.
“The key is to acknowledge these barriers, our beliefs, and move around them or shift the emphasis.” (M.R.)
You have your negative beliefs and you also are responsible for getting the results because you are committed to attaining them!
This is a very powerful force and a whole new way of thinking and living. Taking responsibility is tremendously empowering.

Want to make a change in your career? Dick Bolles, author of What Colour is your Parachute, suggests using your gifts. They have an energy that needs expression. In other words, it comes down to finding expression for things that matter to you. “Each of us has talents of which we may be unaware which enable us to do certain things. One person might be a whiz at saving money while another exhibits great listening skills…You may have a gift that other people have but you also have other gifts and it’s the way you string those gifts together, much like the beads on a necklace that makes you the person you are.”

Bolles’ key message is to get to know yourself before you figure out where you fit in the world. Experienced job search coaches such as  Donald Smith (Montreal, Quebec)  know that it is essential to take the time to create a clear, detailed picture of your key talents and your life then to go find it. “What you decide you want has to really matter to you.”  It is much easier to hit a target when you have one. When you know your destination, it is a hundred times easier to find it.

Finally, it takes time to understand what really matters to you and to know what your essential natural talents are. The effort is well worth the price to pay!Working with a coach will help you reach your goal faster and more effectively!

Now that we’ve all decided that this is as good a time as any for a recession (‘What you focus on is what you get’), here are some tips for transforming our old way of life:

• Cut back on useless expensive items and cook dinner for your friends, get them a nice bottle of wine or beautiful flowers
• Spend more time with family and friends. Go for a walk, spend some time catching up or writing to old acquaintances. Rekindle friendships.
• Take the time to live in the moment. Contemplate a sunset; go to a botanical gardens and smell the flowers; make the best of those moments; savor time and the people around you; volunteer at a hospital or go spend time with individuals who need attention and affection. Get a dog or cat and learn from them.
• Join a group; a dance class; get involved helping others. Helping others, dixit the science of positive psychology is THE answer to everything and a shortcut to happiness.
• Now is a good time to do something different or new. When is the last time you’ve done something for the VERY FIRST TIME? Now, is the time to do it again and reap the joy. Leave your comfort zone behind…Create that new vision for yourself and your environment.
• Focus on prosperity and wealth…and encourage others to do the same thing. You’ll soon see the recession recede. I promise.

It is said that more than 40% of the people in the workforce fear retirement.

The principal challlenge for individuals considering retirement is to look at the things they identify with. A person’s ego can be totally identified with a role or a position in society. People connect achievements with who they are. Indeed, the challenge of retirement is to find a sense of purpose beyond the job or social context of a career. When I once asked one of my colleagues if he had ever considered retiring, he looked at me and said: “But who would phone me if I retired?” Much of his identity was dependent on his colleagues and network at work.

The retirement process is especially difficult for individuals who have put all their eggs in the ‘career basket’. These people have not developed relationships outside of work and once they leave the nest, they find themselves isolated and lonely. Not having dedicated time to developing new interests and relationships, retirement is experienced as a stressful time. Combine this with the lose of status, attachment to a job title or a perceived important position in a hierarchy, an individual will have many new challenges to confront when considering retirement.

Finally, many people associate retirement with preparing to die! Their perception is that this stage of life means poor health and sickness which is far from reality.

The answer: create a vision, find a sense of inner purpose and make objectives and a plan for the next 3 years. Phasing into retirement is commonplace nowadays and offers a soft landing, a positive transitional period and time to refine the plan.  Consider retirement as just another type of lifestyle the same way individuals do when they get married and have children and find a new job. The best time to prepare for retirement is when you still have a job. Sit down with a life coach and begin making a plan!

“The alternative to accepting change is terrible indeed. We all know people caught in this no-win situation, holding on for dear life to things they cannot control…Without remaining open to change, we cannot remain open to life; this is the sometimes-frightening truth which we must confront as we get older. The desire to control change is our greatest obstacle to wisdom.”

Ram Dass in Still Here; ISBN 1-57322-049-3

You are happy and successful. But you want more in your life. You want better relationships, a more satisfying professional life, more money; you want to do what you really want with your life and more…

You would like to be able to leap out of bed each morning, attack the day with purpose and joy. You want more fun and pleasure. More fulfilment. In a nutshell, you want real and lasting change…this is going to require a whole new way of thinking and acting. As Napoleon Hill states in his book Think and Grow Rich, for any new result you aspire to, whether internal or external, there is a certain ‘way of thinking and acting’ that will get it for you. You just have to find it (easier done than you may think) and be willing to adopt it.

If you really want to improve things in your life, you have to be willing to change your way of thinking and acting. To get better results than you presently have, you may have to give up your old ways of thinking and acting and be willing to adopt a new one! Because if you keep doing what you are presently doing, you will continue to get the same results. People don’t realize that they are responsible for creating what they want in their lives. Our brains are powerful instruments. What you focus on…you create. “You are creating, right at this moment, what’s happening in your life!” This isn’t about blame. Nobody consciously creates a lousy life for themselves. But, what happens does come from inside of us. “Your own unconscious internal processes generate how you feel, how you behave, what things mean to you, what and who you attract and what you become attracted to.” (Bill Harris). The key is to become conscious, aware of what we are creating inside of ourselves that ends up manifesting outside of ourselves. Figure that out and you will gain full control of your life. Working with a professional certified life and business coach is an excellent way of finding out what you are dong inside that is creating your life. Then watch these internal processes until you figure out how you’re doing it. The coach can work with you to explore your beliefs, what is important to you (values), what you focus your attention on, and what meaning you place on things. There is a price to pay for all this of course…a true willingness to look at yourself in order to create a new awareness…That is the beginning of a process of transformation…the adventure is worth it! I promise.

A success formula!
1- Know where you are. Evaluate your circumstances honestly and become clear about exactly where you are. You can’t start a journey until you know where you are.

2- Know where you want to go. You have to know what you want. The more specific you are, the more you’ll know what to do, how to start, and how to know when you get there.

3- Take action. Even successful people didn’t always know what to do in the beginning. “The successful person doesn’t know what to do any more than you do, unless he or she is doing something for the second time. So, when you don’t know what to do, just DO SOMETHING! Just take the first step and then look around for more information that will indicate to you what the second step might be.

4- Evaluate the results of your action. Ask yourself: “How is my action working for me?” Check to see what has happened. If you made some progress, you might want to do some more of the same action. If not, you ask yourself how to improve the action in order to make it better.

5- Improve the action, based on the evaluation you just made. Then take action again. This idea of taking action is the key.Do something, no matter what it is. You learn a lot more from a incorrect action than you do from waiting until you think you have everything figured out. When you act, you find out what works and what doesn’t.

6- Keep repeating steps 3, 4, and 5, to continue acting, evaluating the results, and refining your action until you get to where you want to be.

Accomplish these actions and you’ll get what you want to attain in life.

“You become what you think about whether you like it or not, so change the way that you think. One little thought can create a complete transformation”

Louise Hay

What is your relationship with money and prosperity? Is it healthy and positive?

Or, do you believe that most (all) wealthy people are crooks,dishonest and frauds? Is being rich and possessing much wealth and material goods have a positive or negative connotation for you?

Want to create wealth for yourself? This requires positive beliefs about possession and wealth. You need to become receptive and to open yourself to the possibility of wealth if that’s what you want. So, start by turning up your ‘wealth thermostat’. You’ll suddenly create new possibilities for yourself.
Change negative beliefs and inherited attitudes and begin turning your life around…unless you believe been poor and unsuccessful is a virtue.

Change just one belief and you can turn your life around!

“We live in a society in which the pursuit of comfort–and the avoidance of discomfort–is deemed a most valuable goal. But is comfort really what we want? One of the most meaningful things that my mother ever said to me was ‘I don’t want to be comfortable, I want to be fully alive.” She was seventy years old when she said that.

Comfort and complete aliveness don’t always go together. Learning and growth require a willingness to explore and take risks, which often leads to an initial feeling of discomfort and confusion. We are conditioned to label feelings of discomfort as undesirable, yet the best things in life always make us feel somewhat uncomfortable at first…a new relationship, a new job, a new child. Completely comfortable at the beginning? Of course not. By labeling these sensations as fearful and undesirable, we begin to narrow our lives. Fear limits our possibilities. The Art of the Possible consists of recognizing fear and not being stopped by it.”

from Extraordinary Golf, the art of the possible; Fred and Pete Shoemaker; 1996; ISBN. 0-399-52276-X