For most of my life I have tried to do less and achieve more. For the most part this has been in vain! However it has always been in my mind that the belief, “you have to work hard to get anywhere in life”, really doesn’t fit for me. I appreciate that the people who might be considered successful actually seem to work hard, however there is much more to the story than simply putting in the hours and watching the success and money roll in.

You have to do something that you love. Something that you love to do is never a chore; it never seems like hard work and it always leaves you feeling energised. The belief that you have to work hard to get anywhere in life, on the surface seems true. All the evidence of successful people points to working hard, for long hours and normally struggling to make ends meet in the beginning.

However, if it is something you love to do, it will never feel like hard work, the hours will never seem long and the struggle is all part of the fun of the journey. So many people have said that the joy is in the journey, not the destination. Of course, without a destination there can be no journey.

The bottom line is that you are the one who says what is hard work for you. If you feel as though you are working hard and struggling all the time with it, the chances are that you do not love what you do and there may be a better choice for you. Now before you go and quit your job and live out your lifelong dream… get some help and support - friends, family, maybe even a coach (of course I’d love to help you!) and make sensible plans to create the changes you wish to see.

If you already do what you love to do, then I expect you feel the way that I do, that work doesn’t feel like work! If not, find what you love to do and join the rising number of people who are creating their life purpose on their own terms.

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Technorati Tags: Change, Choice, coach, Creating, family, friends family, how, journey, joy, Life Purpose, lifelong dream, money, Plan, purpose, success, support friends, work

One of the most important components of dreams, goals and the Law of Attraction is visualisation. Most people understand the basic concept of picturing that which they want in their mind. It is not a new concept, but it has certainly reached more people since the release of the film The Secret. It’s well discussed there and in numerous other books, articles, dvds etc. More information and resources can be found by clicking this link to Amazon - The Secret at Amazon

The thing to remember is that in order to take this tool to its fullest potential in your life, you need to create not only images in your mind. The extra ingredients of feelings, emotions, sounds and any other senses you can include, creates a more powerful visualisation and with it a more powerful link between you and that which you want. The more real the reality in your head, the more real the reality in your life will become.

This is not a tool simply to create money or objects in your life, you can use this to define who you are. For instance, if you lack confidence, then visualising yourself as confident, picturing what you are doing, how you look, how you sound, how you feel and as much detail as possible, is a fantastic way to increase your confidence. Spend time every day thinking about this and including these extra details into your mental images. In fact for some people, they find mental images challenging, but can easily create a sense or a feeling in their minds - for these people, work on your mental images. It is important to practice and above all, have fun with this. Once you believe it in your mind, you can see, feel, hear, smell and even taste it, you will know deep down that this will be your reality. You are on the road to success in whatever you want - enjoy the journey!

Technorati Tags: Attraction, confidence, dreams, feelings, Goals, how, journey, joy, lack, law of attraction, mental images, money, success, visualisation, work

I don’t know if you’ve ever felt like this: you feel unshakable and if things get in the way, you shrug them off or deal with them fast. It’s like being in flow, in the moment or in the zone. In my experience it’s a wonderful place to be and for me it comes about when I am really excited about and totally focused on something.

The real thing here is to establish how you get into that place and then how do you maintain it? To me it boils down to having a purpose or meaning that you are single-mindedly committed to. In that place you are full of confidence (even if a little nervous excitement is present) and great things seem to happen. I think I’ve mentioned before that an old mentor of mine had an expression “Moments of Intensity” and certainly these feel like them.

So how do you find your purpose or meaning? Well, that’s a tough one. I’ve recommended Viktor Frankl’s book, “Man’s Search For Meaning” which will undoubtedly help. I believe that the first place to start is to consider the roles that you have in your life, such as parent, partner, child, sibling, employee, boss, business owner etc and find things in there that you can begin to define your meaning. The bottom line is to find what your life is all about, which is as simple as you stating what that is. As Neale Donald Walsch says in The Secret, there is no blackboard in the sky with your purpose written on it that you have to find. It is your responsibility to define it for yourself and then live your life to the full, expressing yourself through that purpose. There certainly can be more than one, of course one is a good place to start.

Technorati Tags: Beliefs, confidence, focus, how, meaning, neale donald walsch, Plan, purpose, responsibility

I once learned from a colleague a very useful and very powerful idea regarding empowering yourself by choosing the right questions. I’m really not sure where the idea originally came from, however it has been a very useful one for me over the years and I’d love to share it here.

Let me start by asking a question of you… If something that you do not like has happened, what is the first question that pops into your head? For most people, the answer is “Why did that happen?” or “Why does this keep happening to me?”, right before they set about answering the question and going around in circles trying to understand it.

If your goal is self-improvement or to learn from such experiences then this question of “Why?” is very unlikely to provide you with opportunities to learn anything about yourself. The answers are likely to lie in the areas where you have no responsibility, such as other people, objects, or simply the whole concept of “fate” or “destiny”.

My colleague presented me with the word “How” and invited me to question such events by asking things like, “How can I learn from this?” or “How can I create a more positive outcome in the future?”. In these types of questions, your answers are likely to fall into the areas where you have all the responsibility - your thoughts, choices, behaviours and actions. Ok, so it is possible to ask the question “How can they improve?” etc, but this hardly serves to empower you.

So to be truly empowering these “How?” questions need to focus on your role in the event or experience and how you can move forward for now or for next time. This has been quite transformational for me and a great way for me to create myself and shape my experiences in the world.

In coaching, the “How?” questions can really help to move a client forward and create awareness - in this case the questions focus on the client’s thoughts, choices, behaviours and actions.

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