The Three Keys to Success in Anything You Want to Be, Do or Have!
- Decide what you want and focus on it! Let’s start with decision making. Now this might sound like the easy part, but how many times have you decided on one course of action, and then just as quickly decided on another? Sometimes we change our minds for good reasons and sometimes we change our minds because we are uncertain of our real desire or even if we can achieve it! This makes it even more difficult to keep our focus on what we want! Given that we create our experiences with our thoughts, feelings and actions, imagine this scenario. You woke up this morning feeling refreshed and wonderful. You did your exercise and said your affirmation about living an abundant life 20 times. Feeling great, you fix breakfast. By the time you have downed your coffee, chased out the door because you are now late, run into a maze of snail-pace traffic, arrive at the office and realize you have left your laptop, you are DEFINITELY NOT feeling very abundant!! Let me hasten to say that it’s not just about being ‘positive’’ even in difficult periods; it’s about ensuring that your thoughts, feelings and actions are always aligned to your outcome! In this case, planning your time carefully would have certainly led to feelings of being in control and creating your future how you want it! Understanding how you store time and the best ways to manage it are some of the things we teach in NLP. Achieving congruence amongst thoughts, feelings and actions is another key feature of my training and coaching activities.
- Get rid of negative emotions and limiting beliefs that hold you back! Many of us have big dreams and visions of what we would like to be, do or have in our lives. The only problem is that the proportion of people that actually end up living fulfilled lives is relatively small. Think of how many people you know who are consumed with stress, frustration, anxiety and even depression and leave this world with their songs unsung. Often we are not even aware of the ‘programming’ we have been downloading from even before we exited the womb. Those crucial years of 1-7 can help set us up for a life of limitation or opportunity. The good thing is that once we become aware of our negative emotions and limiting beliefs that are holding us back, we can do something about it. Unfortunately, more often than not, just saying or writing positive statements is insufficient. Yes, this is good to engage the conscious mind in the direction you want to go, however, if the unconscious mind (the seat of your feelings) is murmuring something else, you have little chance of really materializing your goal. This is what accounts for the see-saw experience that so many of us have – up one minute and down the next! The ability to discover negative patterns in our unconscious mind and eliminate them is the best route to clearing the way for those long-awaited opportunities to start coming your way and for you to achieve the success you want!
- Take Action! Consider how many plans have been made that sit on a shelf and never get implemented! You probably have a number of your own, some of which you may look back on now and think, ‘If only I had done that’! So what stopped us? You may have done wise decision-making, set your goals, established your plan, even eliminated some pesky things that were holding you back, but somehow, time dragged on, and you didn’t get around to taking those first steps. One reason that this occurs is that you don’t have a sense of urgency about executing your plan. Perhaps you are comfortable and although the plan ‘would be a nice idea’ there isn’t sufficient push for you to do it NOW! Here is where a coach can come in very handy – to assist you in designing congruent plans that you are not likely to self-sabotage; to facilitate additional behaviour change, where required, to keep you aligned to where you want to go; to give you ‘tasking’ to ensure you are putting these new behaviours into practice and developing new skills; to keep you accountable for the things you said you were going to do! The coach holds your ‘feet to the fire’, so to speak, and provides you with the support necessary to ensure that you achieve what you set out to do!