I’m so excited to be working with these amazing women.  We’re already developing new programs and we’ve just gotten started.  There is a magic and a synergy that happens when things are right and this is an example of that magic and synergy.

I also decided I would commit to walking in the mornings and that I would look for someone who wanted to walk with me.  One of the ideas our team came up with was to have our master mind meetings while walking or jogging together 3 mornings a week.  That way we get to exercise our mind and our body.  We’ll keep you posted on our progress.

2011 is off to a great start for me and I hope for you as well.

This has proven to me again how important it is to hold on to your vision.  If you really want something, have patience and trust that it will happen.  Don’t let anything stop you from dreaming.  One day when you least expect it, it will happen.  And trust me, it’s worth the wait.

Overwhelm is something that many of us are faced with.  There seems to be more and more we’re required to do.  Between our personal life, family, and work, it’s becoming very challenging to fit everything in and maintain our sanity.  We’re also being bombarded constantly with information overload.  I was reminded of this when I was working with a client yesterday who is understaffed and overworked which resulted in complete overwhelm.

Action:

The first thing we did was get focused.  We took all the projects running around in his head and wrote them down. Remove the clutter from your mind. The second step was to organize and prioritize the tasks, the third step was to assign the tasks.  The last step was to compose emails to each person listing the task and the due date.  He was then free to work on his responsibilities feeling more focused and in control.

Tip:

Sometimes we don’t stop long enough to get focused and nothing gets completed.  If you find yourself talking about the same problems weeks or months on end, it’s time to take charge, make a plan and take action.  Often we think it takes too much time to delegate and it’s just as easy to do it yourself.  That is not true.  If you take the time to clarify your expectation with others and then diarize the follow-up if necessary, eventually with your consistent actions, you’ll instill consistency in others.  It may take more time in the beginning, and ultimately you’ll save time and will be much more efficient. And then you can get on with what you do best as a leader.

That’s true leadership.

Steps to alleviate overwhelm:

1. Get focused
2. Write down projects and tasks
3. Organize and prioritize your list
4. Assign responsibility to each item on your list
5. Contact each person giving specific responsibilities and assign a completion date and/or time.
6. Diarize and follow-up

Communication is the most overlooked reason for failing to achieve our outcomes and goals. Rapport is a word which is often misused and seldom given the respect it deserves. It is one of the most important elements in successful communication. Our ability to connect with people, to inspire, motive or influence people is based on our ability to build rapport. When people have trouble communicating, they most often struggle for more words to prove their point or stand their ground. The words won’t help if rapport is missing.

What is rapport? Rapport is an unconscious process which at times happens naturally and at other times must be skillfully established.

When we have rapport, we have trust, acceptance of ideas and openness and receptivity to our ideas.

People often think that they can build rapport by chatting about common experiences. This is only one small element. Your tone of voice and your physiology are the major components of rapport.

In our NLP Practitioner training we have participants do an exercise which is in 2 parts. The first part is sitting with someone and discussing a topic which you both agree on and as you discuss this topic, you pay no attention to the person you’re speaking to. You deliberately look around the room, check your phone, tie your shoe any number of distracting things. We call this mismatching your physiology. The second part of of the exercise is finding a topic you both disagree on and during this discussion, you match the body posture of each other. At the end of the exercise we ask participants which one did they feel most comfortable and connected in. In every instance it was the second part. Even though their opinion differed, they felt connected and were interested in the other person’s opinion. Matching physiology is very powerful.

The reason for this is that a large part of building rapport is matching our body posture and the second part is matching our tone of voice and the least important part is the words you speak.

Whether you want to sell yourself, your ideas, or your product, you will only be successful if you have established rapport first. It is also important to be aware that , just because you establish rapport initially, doesn’t mean it’s there for the duration of the conversation. Not only do you have to establish it, you have to maintain it throughout the conversation. Agreement presupposes rapport. The moment you disagree, rapport has been lost and you’ll find that your physiology and tonality are no longer aligned with that person. It’s a natural result. Before going any farther, you must stop promoting your idea, go back in the conversation to the point you had agreement, reestablish rapport and then you can continue moving forward and be in a position of influence.

By developing skills that build rapport, you’ll be amazed at how much this will positively impact the bottom line of your business. If you’re serious about your business, get serious about building rapport.

The only thing between you and your desires is your beliefs. Your beliefs determine your success in all areas of your life because they drive your behavior. Beliefs are the thoughts we have about ourselves, other people and the world, that fuel our actions.

The thing about beliefs is that we live our life as if they’re true and yet we’ve just made them up. The good news is that we can change them.

Our core beliefs are formed at a very early age. It is believed they are formed between 0 and 7 years of age. The is a time when we are like sponges, taking everything we hear as true with no ability to logically challenge anything. That’s how we learn and how we form our core beliefs and values.

Other beliefs are added as we live our life.

There comes a time in your life when it is important to challenge some of the things you hold true. Based on what you want to achieve in your life, do your beliefs serve to move you closer to your goals or farther away? Do they support you or limit you?

The first step to achieving a goal is a deep desire to achieve it. When it’s a true desire you can feel it as if you already have it. You can see what it’s like, hear what’s going on around you, you are so emotionally attached to achieving your desire that you can almost taste it.

The second step is to discover if you have any beliefs that are going to stop you from achieving your goal. When you believe you can do it or have it you’ll find a way. When you don’t have that strong belief, you’ll be stopped by challenges or obstacles.

Often the beliefs that elude you the most are the ones that are having the most impact on your life. They are so deeply ingrained that you don’t recognize them as beliefs.

There are 3 ways to identify your limiting beliefs.

1. How you respond to others

Pay attention to how you respond to others. When you have a negative emotional response to another person or situation, notice what you’re saying to yourself when you get the feeling or what you’re thinking to yourself. Are you judging them or yourself? Are you negating what they say? Are you defending yourself in some way? The words that come to you are your beliefs.

Often we get so caught up in our emotion that we miss the important message. It’s never about the other person, it’s always about ourselves. What does this tell you about yourself and your limitations?

2. Reflection

What is your life reflecting back to you? What are your results showing or telling you? The question to ask yourself is “what must I believe in order to have these results in my life?”

Look at all areas of your life. Do you have the relationship you want? Do you have the career you want? Do you have the friends and support you want in your life? Do you have the money you want in your life? If not, my question to you is “what’s stopping you from having it now?”.

For example if you don’t have enough money there will be any number of underlying belief that supports you, such as, this is a slow economy, nobody is making money, times are tough, it’s hard to make good money, I don’t have enough education, I don’t have enough time, I’m not lucky………..and the list goes on.

The problem with these beliefs is that when you hold them, you act as if they are true which means you accept the consequences of them and don’t look to overcome your situation.

3. Continuing Life Patterns

Notice if you have any patterns that you seem to repeat in your life. Do you always end relationships? Do you spend more money then you make? Do pay off your bills only to stack the up again? Do you reach a level of success and then something happens so you have to start over again? Do you continually attract people into your life who aren’t trustworthy? Are you constantly struggling to get ahead?

In order to recognize the patterns, you have to be willing to see them without judgement. Some of the patterns may permeate more than one area of your life. Often there are clusters of beliefs that are linked together, so it’s important to get to the clusters.

Once you recognize your limiting beliefs and how they’ve limited you in your life, it’s time to change them. When I work with a client to change those limiting beliefs the transformation is remarkable. Once they’ve eliminated those elusive, invisible barriers, they are able to move forward to live the lifestyle they desire.

In the last while I’ve had an opportunity to explore the structure of our beliefs more fully. In particular, how our beliefs impact our business success and our leadership abilities. The subject has fascinated me for a very long time. I’ve watched how beliefs can make or break a person. I’ve watched people who from my perspective are amazing and accomplished and yet they believe the exact opposite of themselves. And it’s not what I believe that counts, it’s what they believe. I’ve seen how this limits them in their life. Not necessarily with what they accomplish, but in how they feel about what they’ve accomplished.

Often the people who have achieved the most feel they’ve achieved the least.

Self-worth and self-esteem are also tied to our beliefs about ourselves. Your self esteem is based on how you think and feel about yourself based on our self concept. Your self-worth is based on your evaluation of your self-concept. And your self concept is what you believe about yourself . This is very powerful since your beliefs shape your destiny and guide your behaviour.

I met an amazing young woman in Hawaii a number of years ago. She was 29 at the time. She was an artist. I met her at the Kona Art Center in Holualoa. She was very successful with her paintings. Her originals were so much in demand that they limited the sale of them to only once a year.

She was very excited about her art and very goal oriented. She was always striving to learn more and achieve more. Beyond her art, she won 23 medals swimming, performed in the local theatre and had a desire to go to college and become a playwright.

What makes her even more amazing is that she was born with what is commonly known as Downs Syndrome. She believed that she could overcome this and didn’t want to use it as a crutch in her life.

Are you using any crutches in your life that are stopping you from living life to the fullest? Do you have beliefs that are sabotaging your success? Do you want to want to break free from the beliefs that are holding you back?

Imagine what your life could be like if you did.

I started to really think about creativity and how it impacts our success. Creativity is a part of every new idea, and moves us from problem to solution. Because creativity is a natural process, for most people it comes on it’s own and leaves on it’s own, which can be frustrating when you’re faced with a project that you have to complete and creativity is no where to be found. The interesting thing about creativity is that it is stimulated by a specific brain speed. Even though it is something that is naturally occurring the exciting thing is that we can learn to control and shift our brain state to access specific states of mind.

I stumbled upon this years ago when I was creating a script for one of my CD’s. Up until that point, I felt I was only creative in the early morning. I would wake up and immediately go down to my office, half asleep and sit in front of my computer and begin typing. This worked well, except, for the fact that it limited me in my ability to create my script at any time of day. When you’re working to a deadline and are only able to produce at a certain time of day, it can be stressful.

One day I decided if I could do this early in the morning, I could do it at any time. I just had to figure out how. All I needed to do was reproduce the same mindset at will.

I noticed how relaxed I was and that I was still almost in that waking/sleeping state when things just flowed for me.

All I had to do was recreate that state and I would be able to access my creative juices on command. I began to play with this and sure enough, whenever I wanted to do some writing, or develop a new course, I would put myself in that deep relaxed state and I was able to access my creative flow. Believe it or not, when I worked in this state, rarely were there any edits.

From a scientific perspective, what I was actually doing was changing the speed of my brain waves. Our mind is so amazing and when we learn how to harness the power of our mind, we open ourselves up to a whole new world of possibility.

Changing our brain speed is a naturally occurring process. The lowest level of brain activity we encounter is Delta. We access Delta during sleep. As our brain speed increases, we access Theta. Theta is that special time between waking and sleeping, that time when we receive flashes of inspiration just before waking fully or just before falling asleep. Theta is an ideal state for some types of accelerated learning, positive suggestions, and self-healing. The next level is Alpha. This is where creativity and relaxation reside. By learning how to access the Alpha state purposefully, you are able to tap into your creativity at any time you choose. It is also used in accelerated learning. Training yourself to access Alpha is very useful as it greatly reduces stress. For most people, it is physiologically challenging to experience stress in Alpha and also Theta. The last level of brain speed I would like to share with you is Beta. Beta is our normal waking state. At this level, we often function in a more competitive state.

The most powerful aspect of this is that we can learn to change our brain speed. Some of the ways we can do that is through meditation, relaxation techniques, guided visualization, focused breathing techniques and for some people prayer.

Another very effective way to shift your brain speed is with essential oil blends. Based on the synergistic effect of the blends, we’re able to shift our brain state by stimulating the brain to naturally secrete the appropriate chemical response.

For me it all goes back to the power of the mind and a reminder that the more we learn to take control of our mind and our responses, the more we’re able to create what we want in our business and our life.