Just Know Your Own Life Path And Get On With Creating It
I can not speak strongly enough about the personal development process of knowing your life path; knowing what you want and how you will get it. Well knowing anything really since that is one of the absolute basics. Just know for yourself, be well learned, well read and open to new and exciting information and then make up your own mind about what you believe in and which to make a part of your life. The process of life is all about this; deciding on your beliefs and not just taking on beliefs because they are available.
To give you an example, for years I have held on to the belief that my life is somewhat mapped out, a course over which I have some but not all control and that there is an inevitability to life. Over the later years of my life I have read enough, watched enough and heard enough to form the new belief that I am the master of my destiny. I now decide what I will and will not do and how I will create my life to my personal desires and within my own integrity. Well, that is what the life path is all about – deciding how you will live your life, what fits with what you want and knowing the action you will take to get what you desire. Action is everything – see my blog of simple tips for more on taking action.
Sounds easy when I say it like that and I know from personal experience that getting in touch with your own beliefs, personal integrity and passions can take some time and can need some help. You can get started on your own goal setting using my following tips:-
- Reflect on your childhood dreams (hopefully they are not that long ago that you can not remember), recall what you always thought as a child that you would be, do, have.
- Reflect over all of your previous work, jobs, businesses. Which did you enjoy the most and what was it that you enjoyed?
- Ask your family and friends what they see as your special talents and write your own list of things that you like about yourself and what you do.
- Read the business opportunities and jobs section of your newspaper – watch yourself carefully to see if there is any positive emotion attached to anything that you read. That might give you a hint about what you would like to try.
- Talk with lots of people about what they are doing and see if anything appeals to you.
- Think about all areas of your life; employment, family, living, travel, loving, money, happiness, prosperity and ask yourself what you would like to have in each of those areas.
- Explore yourself as a person. Are you the kind of person you can like, be friends with, trust. Is there some area that you would like to improve.
Use these ideas to guide you to a place where you start to just know yourself and your desires a little better and then start a list of what life success you want to achieve in this lifetime. And be prepared to change those goals because the more that you think about it the more you will get clear. The more you have what you desire on your mind, the more opportunities you will see as they present themselves. The more things that you try out, the clearer that you will be about what you do want and what you do not.
It is really helpful to be clear on what you do not want because the opposite to that is likely to be what you want. Start to focus on what you do want now that you have an idea. And wait to see the passion. Oh, and visit my Hot Tips For Success page to see the advice of other smart, sassy Australian women. And if you like, talk to me about how you are going.
Use the Law of Attraction to attract success towards those things that you now know that you desire.
When The Going Gets Tough Use Your Daily Journal
I am a great fan and advocate for the daily journal as a part of the personal development and self awareness journey. I have cultivated journaling each day as a habit and over time have developed an array of very useful tips for assisting to keep the daily journal interesting and stimulating. There could be nothing worse for me than to have a habit which is mundane and boring. And I coach people using the daily journal as a key element to attract and maintain life success. I am even in development phase for a commercial product around a daily journal.
So it came as a great surprise to me this week to discover that 6 days had passed since I had made an entry in my daily journal and 10 days had passed since I had written about my thankfulness, gratitude and appreciation for life. It happens that I had been feeling a bit low in mood and unmotivated over the last three days and yesterday I decided to explore that in my journal. I opened up and noticed how many days since I had made an entry. Well, I thought to myself, be your own coach!!
So I went through my daily habit, entering in my journal what was happening and working through how to move forward, going over my years goals and writing about how I was working towards them, listing my gratitude for what I have right now and what is coming to me in the future. Lo and behold, it worked, got me back on track and I decided on a couple of processes to help me through this low motivation phase. My mood lifted almost immediately.
For the moment, my daily journal will consist of decisions on the actions that I am taking towards my life goals and I will check back over that each day to see my progress. With that inspiration, I completed 2 of my 3 tasks yesterday and one that was not on the list but the time was right. Today I am well on the way with the 4 that I committed to for this day.
Learning? Sometimes it helps to just go back to the basics and I know that the daily journal is one of those basic but essential habits. Oh and just for a bit of fun I had a look back to where I was this time last year. Happily, much progress has been made and some of my big life decisions are coming to fruition right now. Attract success – you betcha!!
Turn Your Worst Problem Into Your Best Opportunity
Many people have the aim in life to attract success like a magnet, however everyone has their share of problems that move into and out of life. What havoc or beauty they bring with them is really up to the individual. It is possible to choose your action or reaction to obstacles and adversity and determine how you will approach each situation. Take the negative view and see each as a problem, sometimes insurmountable, or the positive view that each is an opportunity that has a solution. It is all a matter of perspective.
First, try to understand how you normally react when you experience hardship. You must know whether you fall back and stay back and therefore see the situation as negative or whether you quickly recover, take a positive perspective and look immediately at solutions. The one thing that is definite is that overcoming hardship is a skill that you need to get through life. Positive or negative, you decide.
If you have taken note of how you react and know that you get up quickly and start looking at the situation as an opportunity and find solutions, then you are functioning from a positive perspective. Well done, stay on that path. You have probably also found how much easier it is to get around barriers when you are thinking about solutions and what it is that you want to happen.
If, however, you have identified that you fall away and stay away, reacting to adversity as if it is a problem then you hold yourself in a negative state and it is unlikely from this point that you are going to easily find ways to get on with what it is you want to do. No doubt you spend a lot of time thinking about what you don’t want, how hard life is and wishing that it could be a lot simpler. Well it can be and it is all up to you and how your choose to act.
Having identified that you see problems and not solutions or opportunities, take a little time now to start to work on changing that habit. First, make a pact with yourself to stop talking about problems and start talking about solutions. Language makes a big difference as does your silent mind chatter. If all that your mind hears is how impossible the situation is, then that is being reinforced continuously. If all that your mind hears is what you do not want, then that is what you will get. Remember, the powerful Law of Attraction says that you get what you focus on.
Additionally, the people around you will hear how hard it is and will reinforce that to you and to themselves and possibly even to your customers. Almost everyone these days is looking for what can be done, not what can not be done and quite frankly, if they are paying, then that is reasonable. So stop with the talk about problems and start with the talk about solutions.
Then, sit for a moment and write down a list of all of your problems. Alongside that, list all of the possible solutions, even if they seem a little crazy. Go over those solutions and see what you need to have at your disposal to make it work. Ask your self a few questions such as – can I get those things? What do I need to know to do this? How can I get that knowledge? Who do I know who has it?
Right now you are in solutions mode and doesn’t it feel great?
When you are swamped by a problem, seeing only the negative, you can bet it feels pretty bad. As soon as you move to solutions, you mood will lift, your brain will fire off ideas and you will start to get motivated. Great, stay with that.
Last, and most important, take action. It is not enough to see a way around a problem or to see any event as an opportunity. The next and sometimes most difficult is to get active. Go and get those things that you need to make something start to happen, persist, do not give up, every day decide what you will do towards your solutions and just keep on it.
Stay with the basics – decide what you are going to do, take action every day, persist and keep an eye out for when you have succeeded. Celebrate that moment.
