What's YOUR Definition of Success?

What is success? What is the measuring stick? In our culture and probably many others, we seem to have a general idea that includes a job that pays a lot of money ( this is the biggie), having a nice house, a spouse and at least a couple of kids. For some of us, this may be exactly what we want and that is great.; nothing wrong with wanting any of these things and being happy if you get them. For some people, however, we may strive for these types of things because we feel this is what we should want, that these things are what define success in life and lacking them, we are not a success.

This leads many of us to do things we may not want to do. We push our passions to the side and pursue a high-paying career that we cannot stand. We marry people who help us uphold a certain image, though we may not love them. Some of us may feel pressure to have children because it is still largely viewed as a woman’s ultimate achievement and the whole family man image is advantageous in many respects . We care so much about what other people think and about getting their approval. We want people to view us in a certain way. We do all these things that make us a ‘’success’’, but we may feel deeply unfulfilled or downright unhappy. I do not know about you, but living my life for other people and striving to meet their expectations so I can be viewed a certain way, all the while being miserable , does not sound like much of a success to me.

To me, success is a very individualized thing and it should depend on what a particular person desires for his life. I think the greatest success any of us can achieve is finding happiness through being true to ourselves and doing what makes us happy. Maybe it will involve a lot of money, maybe not. Maybe it will involve an impressive job, maybe not. It really does not matter, as long as it makes YOU happy. That is all that matters. If you are in the process of making major life decisions or are feeling unhappy with any aspect of your life, it is important to assess the things YOU want . Do not make any judgments about these things or compare them against what is conventionally considered successful or appropriate. None of that matters. You need to determine YOUR definition of success and go after those things that fit the bill. It may involve criticism or making uncomfortable decisions, but on the other side of all of that will be the life that you actually want to live.

Ideally, we should not care about what other people think of us and our choices, but sometimes we might. Most of us are not so spiritually advanced that we can simply brush this stuff off and have zero emotional reaction. If you find yourself caring, then the important thing to do is proceed anyway despite the discomfort. Any negative feedback you receive on your life choices has nothing to do with you, it is all about the other person’s stuff, whether it be jealousy, a distorted belief system, limited thinking or different life experience. Do not live based on other people’s definitions of what life should be about and what constitutes being successful. Do what makes you happy, not what you think should make you happy.


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Don't Give Away Your Power

There is no doubt that things that happen outside of us have the potential to impact us in a negative way, whether it is a government policy, unforeseen weather event, or dishonest person who screws us over in some way to name a few. Things can result that we surely did not ask for and that seem unfair. We are the victim and some force outside of us is responsible for the bad thing that happened. This stuff can shake us up, leave us in a bad place. We are only human after all and we will surely be upset, we will feel cheated, we will feel like life is unfair. But, after all of this, the important question is ‘’What are you going to do about it?’’

I am not trying to be harsh or show lack of compassion, I am encouraging you not to give away your power, a power that will allow you to pick up the pieces, that allows you to direct the course of your life into any direction you want it to go, a power that will help create ideal circumstances and prevent you from becoming a victim to everything outside of yourself. So many of us give up this power and lament about all the ways things outside of us are screwing up our lives or are holding us back. We falsely convince ourselves that we have been dealt some sort of bad hand in life and that we will never be able to change our circumstances.

This line of thinking is so ingrained and it is easy to keep thinking this way because there are few people who will dispute it. You will find plenty of people to feed into this way of thinking, who will empathize with your problems. This will further cement this disempowering victim mentality where we have no control over what happens to us and that we are at the hands of various nefarious forces lurking around us.

Yeah, bad things happen and it sucks. We have been wronged. But, what is more empowering – believing that we can take full responsibility for our lives and create better circumstances or believing that we are always subject to everything outside of ourselves and that these things will determine our lots in life? The latter way of thinking is poisonous but the one many of us opt for because in many ways, it is easier to think that way. Life may not be great, but it allows us to skip over the hard work of bettering ourselves and our lives. Us humans are a funny bunch, are we not?

No matter what has happened, you have the power to turn it around. You have the wonderful choice to shift perspective and see the problems in your life as an opportunity to create a better existence. Do not ever think for one minute that things outside of you dictate what is possible for your life. You hear stories all the time about people who have created amazing lives from the most dire of circumstances. They were not some special breed of human, they were merely people who adopted a different set of beliefs, which included a belief in the personal power they had to direct the course of their lives. Use this power.


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Are You Actually Afraid of Getting What You Want?

Everything starts within. If we are missing something in our lives that we desire, it is stemming from us, our mental state, our beliefs. It is easy to look to point the finger at things outside of ourselves, such as other people, and conclude these things are responsible. The true culprit is us and us alone.

This is hard for us to accept sometimes because on a conscious level, we are very clear about what we want and we think there is no way that we could be the ones standing in the way of it coming to us. Unfortunately, for many of us, what our conscious mind is thinking is very different from the deeper part of our mind, the part we are not always aware of. This part plays a much bigger influence in the actual results you manifest in your reality. If there is something you have yet to manifest and your affirmations, visualizations, thoughts and feelings do not seem to be producing your desired experiences, I ask you to honestly ask yourself if you are actually afraid of getting what you want.

Again, on a conscious level, this will sound ridiculous. Why would we be afraid of getting the things we want? But, again, if these things are still missing, it is because of something going on inside of us. Something in us is blocking this thing from materializing in our outside experience.

A great way to figure out your blocks is to take some time to think about what you want and list all of the negative things that could possibly result from this. You may need to think about it for a bit because at first glance, you will likely think nothing, but there is at least one thing there, I assure you. In some instances, it might come a bit easier because these fears are right below the surface and you are somewhat aware of them but have yet to give them full attention.

You really want a successful career, but you also want to get married and have kids someday. Maybe you are afraid the successful career will interfere with accomplishing these other goals. You really want to have a lot of money but on a deeper level, you may be afraid of how this would change your relationship with your less affluent friends and family members or that these people would begin to think bad things about you or judge you. You want to be a life coach or do some other job where you help people but maybe you are afraid of being responsible for these people’s lives and you are worried you will not live up to task and be able to help them. You want to become more prominent in your field, but putting yourself and your ideas out there increases your chances of criticism of your work or it will causes rifts with other people who have a different view. You want to make serious changes in your life but you are afraid that the new you will not longer be compatible with your partner and you might have to end the relationship.

When we make big changes in our lives, more often than not, it is going to cause a ripple effect that impacts all areas of your life. Sometimes, it might be more like a tidal wave. Getting certain good things in our lives may cause issues that are viewed as not-so-good from our perspective and fear of these changes keeps us where we are, even though we may not always be conscious of this fear. Honestly figure out if you are afraid of getting what you want. Examining these fears will help eliminate them and you will dissolve the blocks standing in the way of getting what you truly want.


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Feeling Good Before You Have a Reason To

Certain experiences are certainly less pleasant than others, that is no doubt. It is better to have a job than to be out of one, unsuccessfully trying to find new employment. It is better to be flush with cash than ducking calls from the credit card company. It is better to be in a happy relationship than going through a nasty break-up. It is easier to feel good when we already have what we want and it is in our nature to feel badly when we do not. We feel justified in having these negative emotions because we are experiencing undesirable situations. You will have no trouble finding people to agree with your feeling bad and support it. This is because most of us naturally react this way. We are only human after all and it is understandable why we behave in this manner. We have been programmed with a lot of junk that keeps us from handling these situations in a way that is more beneficial and will help resolve them much more quickly.

I have amassed a lot of experience in this arena and I can give one piece of advice confidently: Start feeling good before you have a reason to. Trust me on this one. Our thoughts and feelings are very powerful and once I started using this power to my benefit, amazing things started to happen. Things I could have never logically figured out, things that I could not have seen coming. I worked on feeling good even when outside appearances were less than anything to feel good about. Now, I did not feel good every single moment as I am prone to the foibles of our human minds just like anyone else, but when I started feeling good more than I was feeling badly, that is when I started to see results in the outside world. Inspiration struck to do certain things, I was presented with certain opportunities. Things turned around.

This is counterintuitive to many people. We often wait for something to change on the outside before we can start feeling better and until then, we go to the default feelings of worry, fear, doubt and anxiety. We look at what is happening around us and we tell ourselves, of course we feel badly, look at my life! But, we always have a choice on how we perceive situations. Like I mentioned before, because some situations are clearly less desirable, we think we should feel badly about them when they occur. To feel any other way would be stupid, to deny the reality of our situation. I am not saying to put your head in the sand and just wait for your problems to go away;if there is any logical steps you can take to address them, please do so. My main point is that you can choose to view the situation differently, to gain faith that it will resolve itself. Instead of spending your mental energy worrying about all the things you do not want to happen, spend it thinking about the ideal result and that it will be taken care of. Try to release any attachments to certain avenues or trying to figure out how the problem will be resolved. You cannot possibly anticipate all the different ways it might so do not even try.

When trying to feel better before you have a reason to, reach for feelings and thoughts that you can believe, that feel real to you. This is not to say you should limit your thinking or that you can only go so far, but if you are dealing with serious blocks and negative energy, you will only be able to move so far up the energy ladder. If you are drowning in debt, affirming you are a millionaire will probably not do much good as you probably do not truly believe that for a second. Try neutral statements that your conscious mind cannot contradict, such as ‘’my finances improve everyday’’ or ‘’The Universe provides me with the solutions I need.’’

If you can even start feeling a little better than you are now, even when nothing on the outside lends itself to good feelings, I promise you that your situation will improve. It may not change tomorrow as you are still playing out your previous energy, but keep at it. When you have your moments of bad thoughts, do the best you can to neutralize them. Do not worry if you are not feeling happy every second, just work on making those high energy feelings predominant, that is all you need to create the shifts that will help you.


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Happiness: Choice or Chance?

Happiness, a state of being we all long for, even those of us who seriously doubt the possibility of attaining it. Many people falsely believe that whether we are happy depends on the circumstances of our life. This is clearly not true as people who have had bad things happen to appear to be happy people and people who have all the reason in the world to be happy are miserable.

Happiness is a choice. It does not result from living some charmed existence where you have never been touched by difficulty or problems. If we so strongly crave happiness and it is our choice to have it or not, the choice to have it seems obvious, but many of us are not choosing in favor of this desired emotion. Sure, there are plenty of things that can happen in our lives that can produce lots of crappy feelings that are the polar opposite of happiness. We are only human after all, and some things can really shake us to our core and put us in a bad space. But, we have the choice to leave that space and enter a new one. We have the choice on how to view the circumstances of our life. We can always choose the perspective we take on things that happen, both the big things and the little things that touch our lives every day.

Our poor conditioning to think negatively and to focus on our troubles leaves us with a strong tendency to argue for our limitations and all of our crappy feelings and why we are entitled to them. Us humans are a funny bunch. You may look at certain things that are happening in your life or have happened and think, ‘’Why in the hell would I be happy, look at all of these problems, look at all of these terrible things. I have every right to be miserable.’’

Technically I guess this is true as it is understandable how certain things evoke negative feelings. But, you can transcend these things if you make a choice to. It may be difficult and the crappy stuff still may surface sometimes, but that is okay. Being happy is not about feeling great every second of the day. It is not about never dealing with the pain and other negative emotions that surface from the painful things we have experienced in our lives. My father died almost four years ago and I still feel sadness about it almost every single day. Some days I feel sadder about it than when it first happened. That is something I will always carry with me.

Choosing happiness even when it seems like there is nothing to feel happy about will also cause some amazing things to happen. Your life will start to improve and more things to be happy about will start happening. Not just because you are making different choices, but because you will be creating a different energy, an energy that will help draw great things to you without any effort on your part. Circumstances do not dictate our feelings and lot in life, our choices do and you can choose happiness.

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What's RIGHT In Your Life?

When things are not going the way we want in some aspect of our life, we tend to put all of our focus on that. It may be the lack of money, having a job you dislike or no job at all or being single to name a few. It is like we have blinders on and this is the only thing in our sight, the only thing we can think about. We feel angry and frustrated.

It is unpleasant to experience lack in our life and it is understandable we are less than thrilled about it. But, we always have the power of choice, the ability to shift our perspective. There is another way, a way that is a lot more pleasant and will rectify your problem a lot sooner. Instead of focusing on what is going wrong in your life, focus on what is going right.

It is really hard to do this sometimes because we are conditioned to focus on negativity. This makes it easy to hone in on all the crap because you will have plenty of people to commiserate with you, to feed into the negativity. Very few people will tell you to snap out of it. I am one of those people and I hope you will heed my advice because I have applied it in my own life and it has worked. I have gone through situations where it would have been very easy to tailspin into panic and hopelessness, but I chose to shift my focus and it changed my circumstances in ways I never could have anticipated. Trust me on this one.

When you focus on what is right in your life, you begin to feel better and how you feel is integral to the experiences you create in your life. You will have your moments when you drift back to the problems you are facing, but making your best effort to focus on the good will pay off. The energy builds and your predominant state of being will pay off, so do not worry too much about the slip-ups. Just work on feeling better more than you are feeling badly.

It is easy to argue this stuff. We believe that we must give these problems our attention, like it is some sort of law. I get where you are coming from, I have suffered through that same limited thinking. Again, it is understandable why you gravitate towards the negativity, but that does not mean it is okay or it is the best course of action.

If you are facing some sort of problem right now and it is dominating your thoughts and energy, think of all the things that are right in your life right now, that you are grateful for. Shifting your attention here, to the good feeling things, will help create good in all areas of your life, including the one you are struggling with right now.

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Feeling the Result Before You See It

One of the keys to getting what you want in life is feeling the result before you see it. Believing what you want is yours before it actually materializes. Our thoughts and feelings are extremely powerful entities and when I started paying attention to them and focusing them towards what I want and less towards what I do not, I fully grasped the truth of this. In theory sounds easy -- but it is often hard to apply in real life for a variety of reasons.

First, we look to current outside circumstances and base what we believe is possible on them. This is a very bad thing to do because whatever happening now is a result of past thinking and past beliefs, it has no bearing on what is possible for the future. Block out what is around you to the best of your ability, none of it matters. What you can create is limitless and it does not matter what your starting point is. It does not matter what is happening now or what has been happening the last 5, 10 or 20 years. Every moment is a fresh start.

Secondly, when things are not going so great or we are facing a particular problem, it is very hard for us to feel good at that moment. We think we cannot feel better until something on the outside changes and until then, we feel entitled to hold onto our worry, fear and negativity. These feelings are understandable, we are only human after all and most of us do not have a level of faith that equates with never letting these emotions in. But, they are not serving us and they are only keeping us in our present undesirable circumstances. You may not be able to make a quantum leap in your energy level, but reach for better feeling thoughts, thoughts that are positive and will help you shift your mindset, but are not so out of reach that your conscious mind and ego totally reject them. Ultimately, you are entitled to feel however you feel, but really think about how all of the negativity and worry is serving you. Be open to the idea that if you shifted perspective, you can shift the course of events in your life.

The third and probably the biggest block to feeling and believing our desired result before we see it is our tendency to rely on logical thinking, our desire to plan and figure stuff out. This mode of thought surely has its place, but it is not welcome in creating happiness and circumstances you desire in your life. Do not try to logically work out how you will get the things you want….if you do this, you will create huge barriers, you will give up hope, you will sabotage yourself.

This third barrier is something you will have to suffer through on your own before you really grasp it as that was the case with me and many other people I know. It is hard to take me or anyone else at their word, but please know the truth of this. You have no way of knowing the million ways you could get the thing you want. It is not your business to figure that out, your only business is focusing on what you want and knowing you will get it in some way. Once your mode of thinking shifts to this gear, wonderful things happen, such as getting intuitive nudges to do certain things and these things somehow help you get what you want or randomly meeting people who can somehow help you.

If there is something you want in your life now, start believing you will get it, start cultivating the feelings you would have if it actually materialize before it does. Even if it is just short bouts, the good energy adds up. Do your best to shift your thoughts when they go down the path of worry, fear and doubt. When you start logically trying to figure things out, STOP! Daydream more, it is not a waste of time, it is integral to the creation process. Your logical mind will tell you that this is lazy, but it is not. Everything starts in the mind.


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Law of Attraction and Inspired Action

This whole law of attraction thing surely has its detractors, it is just something our logical minds cannot fully accept. The idea that we can think our way to what we want just seems too simple, naïve or just dumb, but my personal experience begs to differ and that is all the proof I need. If you are working with these principles or are more interested in exploring them, inspired action is a major tenet of this whole thing.

When it comes to getting what we want, we are taught we need to take action, we need to work hard. In some respects, this is true. In others, not so much. Of course we need to take certain actions to accomplish certain goals, but the type of action we take makes all the difference in how fast we get what we want and how easily it comes to us.

Inspired action is wonderful. It carves a path to what you want with minimal effort. It strikes through inspiration and whatever you end up doing as a result will end up prospering you in some way or moving you closer to your goals. Inspired action comes from quiet time, from focusing on what you want with positive energy that you will get it.

Let’s say you are looking for a job. For many of us, that may involve hours and hours poring over online job sites, newspaper classifieds. We feel stressed and anxious as we send out our resume to any employer we can. The process makes us miserable and we feel horrible the whole time. Now, many people may eventually end up finding a job in this way, but it usually takes a lot longer and it is a lot more unpleasant. What if there was another way? A way that made you feel a whole lot better and took a lot less time.

If you developed a different energy around the job search process, an energy oozing with confidence you will get what you want and that all will be taken care of, something magical begins to happen. You may get a nudge to visit a certain company’s website and they happen to have an opening for the exact position you seek – you get an interview and get the offer. You may get a nudge to go to a certain location or attend a certain event and there you come across a person who tells you about a great job opening or a piece of information that helps you in your job search.

When you start to tune into this awesome power and your inner guidance system, which always pushes us in the right direction, you will be taking inspired action that is meant to advance you towards what you want. There will be a lightness around everything you do, nothing will feel forced. You will just know you need to do certain things and you will feel good doing them and it is this feeling that helps draw good stuff to you.


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Dissolving Attachments to Emotional Highs

This subject is something I have been thinking a lot about lately and have been having a lot of personal experience with in a very specific kind of way. I am sure this is something familiar to a lot of us on the personal development journey.

We are having some issue we are working on. Maybe we are worried about money or some other situation. It gets us all tied up in knots and we work really hard on trying to shift our feelings to ones that will serve us better, that will help us attract better circumstances and resolve the issue. We affirm, we meditate, or engage in some other exercise to help us feel better.

In these moments, the true us shines through, we connect with the truth that everything is well and will be taken care of provided we believe it is so. We feel amazing. Our worry has melted away and all feels right. We wonder why we ever felt differently. We feel light, like a huge weight has been lifted off.

Then, the next day you wake up, right back in the ‘’bad’’ place. The anxiety is creeping in. Your mind is drifting to what you do not want to happen, the worse possible scenarios. Logic rears its ugly head. Your moment of faith and clarity is no longer. These states are unpleasant enough but our longing for the good feeling state where everything was fine intensifies this greatly. You get mad at yourself for not feeling that way. Naturally, we develop an attachment to that good state because, well, it feels good. Having experienced that, the bad times seem much worse. We do not want to get off that cloud, it is really nice there. There we feel good, we know our problems are going to get taken care of, our perspective on matters is much more palatable.

Simply understanding attraction and the powers of intention is often not enough to allow us to get into ideal states all of the time. We are constantly battling our logical conscious mind and crappy programming. As we move along our journey, these states tend to reduce and we spend more time in the light, fluffy state of allowing good stuff to come to us.

The key in all of this is dissolving our attachments to these states and being more forgiving of ourselves when we are experiencing thoughts and feelings are less than ideal. The less we are attached to the good times, the easier it is to deal with the not so good ones. We may not be able to snap out of it totally, but we will not get as caught up in them. We will have an easier time observing these moments from a more neutral standpoint and prevent them from totally overpowering us. Handling these bad times in this manner will shorten their duration and help us get back to the good feeling place sooner and more often. Accept what happens in the moment and do your best to reduce its intensity.


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Never Look to Present Circumstances to Determine Future Possibilities

When a current situation looks bleak or you have been living a certain way your whole life, it can be really hard to imagine things getting better or that you can make a drastic departure from your current experience. This is due to a number of factors, such as a limited view of ourselves, limiting beliefs about money, success or happiness and believing that we cannot change certain things about ourselves.

If no one in your family has ever been successful and has always barely made ends meet, you probably think the same fate is meant to befall you, that you are just not the type that can have success and money. If you have a bad temper ‘’just like your father,’’ you probably believe that is how you are and that you cannot learn to control your anger or become a more peaceful person. If you have spent your whole life working for someone else, you probably cannot fathom the idea of starting your own business – you are just an office worker and that is all you are good at or are capable of achieving. We look at people whose lives we envy and think it is just not possible for us.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The only difference between you and these people is their mindset. They adopted more empowering beliefs about what is possible in life. They made the uncomfortable decisions that are often required to really step it up in life. They changed things about themselves that were holding them back. They did not look at their current circumstances as a framework to determine what is possible about the future.

The situation you find yourself in today is a result of your thinking, your beliefs, not outside forces. Most of us tend to think the exact opposite and I was one of those people for a long time. All the tools to change our lives lie within ourselves and it does not matter what type of person you are now or what type of life you are leading, there is always a way to change it, to make it better.

How we think and feel is so unbelievably powerful and all too often, we use this power against ourselves and it has given us a false sense that we are powerless, that we must accept our current state of affairs. Anything happening now and that has happened in the past is in no way an indicator of what is possible for the future. Doing the inner work of changing your thoughts and how you view yourself will produce amazing changes on the outside, changes you probably do not see as possible from your current viewpoint. Forget everything that has happened up until this point. Get clear on what you want and who you want to be and start moving towards it today. You will have your moments when you will falter as we have a lot of negative junk to root out of our minds, but forgive yourself in these moments and do your best to get back to the good stuff.


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