Suffering Comes From YOUR Perception (Yep, it’s your fault!)

Which one of these statements do you believe in?

“An eye for an eye” or “Live and let live”?

No matter how you answered, your response was based on your belief system. Yet, if I asked 20 people, they wouldn’t all answer the same because they have different beliefs and filters through which they see things.

Your biggest source of pain comes from not seeing how limiting your beliefs can be. Believing what you feel to be based on “facts,” is a lie.  What you feel is based on your perception of the facts.

Suffering never comes from the facts themselves, it comes from your perception of the facts; it’s the meaning you place on what YOU are processing in that moment. Read the Rest of This Article »

The Power Of Forgiving YOU

This video has a beautiful message of the power of Forgiveness.

Watch it and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you!

Yet it’s focus is on forgiving others. It inspires you to forgive others. You WANT to forgive others.

Imagine that! Forgiving your worst enemy.

But what if I told you that YOU were your biggest foe?

Because you are.

Now watch this video and only focus on forgiving you. Grab a kleenex – let it out. Because you’ve been living a BIG lie.

Who are YOU to forgive anyone but yourself? Do that and you just might find the need to forgive anyone else dissipates. You’ll take back your power and live in truth where you see no one hurts you unless you choose to let them.

3 Reasons Why You Should Promise Yourself You Won’t Set Goals

“Goals” are like “New Year’s resolutions”…frequently made but rarely accomplished.

If you struggle to achieve your goals, my good friend Bill Bartmann, the author of “Bailout Riches” and once named by Inc. magazine as “The Billionaire Nobody Knows” gave me an awesome tip to trick your mind into accomplishing exactly what you want to, every single time.

“Don’t think of your goals as goals.”

Are you scratching your head right now?  I know I sure was. Until I saw the white elephant sitting in the room…

In our society most people describe a goal as “a lofty ambition,” something to “shoot for,” something to “strive for,” or something to “work towards”…

Nothing wrong with with any of that is there?

As long as you don’t care about your goal that much, it’s perfectly fine…

You see the descriptions we give the the word “goal”  implies your objective will be difficult to achieve. There is a subtle undertone crafted by the implicit meaning of your words telling you it’s just as likely you won’t achieve your ultimate goal, as it is that you will make it happen.

Too often this gives you an excuse making it okay (or at least forgivable) if you fail meaning the word “goal” by popular definition actually conditions you for failure.

Here’s how it works.

You start out “shooting for a goal,” wanting to hit it, but you also know by the sheer definition of the word it probably isn’t going to happen. Unfortunately opening this door to the possibility it might not be achieved, works against you, weakening your power to manifest the “impossible”.

But that’s not the worst part…

Even if you hit your goals 90 percent or more of the time (which would be incredible), you’d still be failing 10% of the time, right?

(By the way if you said a number anywhere near this high, you are one extraordinary human being, and you shouldn’t be reading this blog post, you should write a best selling book with me).

Even if you gave a more realistic reply, you’d only probably say you hit your goals 60-70% of the time, which means you’re failing 30-40% of the time!

How confident of success or how much momentum do you think you can give when you’re “trying” to do something you’ve previously failed at a rate of 30 – 40% of the time?

Not very.

But what is the success rate for keeping a promise when you “promise” to do something?

I bet it’s a higher percentage than the “goals” you’ve set to achieve because promises are protected by your morals, beliefs and overall value system.  Even at a subconscious level, this system to honor promises makes them much more important in our minds than a goal for three basic reasons.

Three very distinct reasons why a promise means more to YOU than a goal:

#1 A Promise Has Emotional Attachment

A promise carries a much deeper sense of responsibility to the person to whom it is made—whether to yourself or someone else. With these feelings, a promise also carries a higher emotional attachment.

When you make a promise, your emotions are involved. Because of the emotional attachment, the file clerk in our mind will now give this promise an immediate priority filing in the filing cabinet.

2. A Promise Has A History Of Success

Our mind recognizes that you have a history of success when it comes to making promises. It knows you’ve historically achieved an exceptionally high success rate of nearly 100 percent in many cases and strives to maintain this momentum.

Based on this history your subconscious assumes you can and will keep this promise. Rather than being preconditioned for failure based on past performance, your mind is preconditioned for success because it knows it’s more than capable of keeping a promise.

These prior successes carry a positive emotional attachment from how it felt when you did what you promised you were going to do. Your file clerk recorded this data in your file cabinet as a positive emotional reaction, working hard to keep your promises so you can feel “good”.

3. A Promise Triggers Your Subconscious Mind To Set You Up For Success

By limiting your level of achievement to just Goal setting you are turning your subconscious into an “overprotective parent”.  A parent who is contstantly attempting to talk you out of taking any risk, for fear you might fail.

It actually works against your goals convincing you that you don’t have time for lofty dreams, quietly making it ok to “forget” about them.

But when you set a promise, the opposite happens.

Your subconscious mind switches from the role of “overprotective parent”, attempting to talk you out of your goal to the role of “helpful parent” who is going to clear the path and make it easy to achieve success!

Think of the difference between setting a “goal” to quit smoking and “promising” someone you love you’ll quit smoking.

If you’ve set a “goal” to quit smoking, it’s of little consequence to anyone but yourself you failed to achieve this “goal.” However, if you have “promised” someone you love you were going to quit and then later resumed smoking, you’d be afraid or embarrassed to admit you failed to keep your promise to your loved one, wouldn’t you?

Why?

Failing to keep a promise leads to an emotional reaction of shame, embarrassment, or disappointment. Your subconscious mind avoids these feelings of failure or suffering at all costs because its job is to keep you from suffering any of those things.

In fact, its sole purpose is self-preservation.

This subconscious need for “self-survival” is exactly what forces it to helps you keep your promise like a “helpful parent”. The part of you feeling almost as if you’ll die if you don’t keep your word is comforted as you move towards keeping your promise.

By changing the way you think about the process, you’ve just increased your likelihood of success by a huge margin. You’ll still have some work to do, but now you’re positioned for success. And most importantly we now you have an easy way get your subconscious work for you, not against you.

If you are ready to change your goals into promises, take the first step by leaving a comment and making a public commitment to yourself – TODAY, first list a goal you have now and then change it into a promise.  How did that feel?

 

Goal:___________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Promise:_________________________________________________________________________________________________

 

Greg S. Reid is a #1 best-selling author, entrepreneur, and the CEO of several successful corporations, who has dedicated his life to helping others achieve the ultimate fulfillment of finding and living a life of purpose. Greg will personally share with you everything he knows about how to have a life of Sustained Abundance and Financial Freedom by discovering Your Personal Success Equation as you’ll learn in his program The Pathways To Greatness.

 

 

 

The Art Of Mind Control

If I handed you a 10,000-piece puzzle and asked you to put it together in two hours or less – and oh by the way – you don’t get to see the picture before hand, would you do it?

Probably not before asking yourself two critical questions:

1. Why?
2. What’s in it for me?

Maybe not even in that order, right?

This is what your mind does for every hope and dream of yours in LIFE.  It’s fear based thinking is holding you as a prisoner “for your own good”.

Why?

It doesn’t LIKE puzzles without end games; your mind needs to see how hard the puzzle is going to be before it decides if it can obtain “success”. 

Your mind avoids failure at all costs.

Now let’s pretend I was your boss and said you had to do the puzzle or you’d lose your job. Would you do it then?

Probably.

But then again it would depend on how important your mind felt the job was and if the reward was worth the risk. In this case keeping the job might feel like the “safer” option so it would deem it as something worth doing to try to avoid the “pain” of the job loss; it would be doing it out of “fear”?

How do you think it would it feel to do a meaningless task out of fear?

Is it really that big of a stretch for you to imagine? I doubt it. 

In fact, if you’re like I was, you probably waste most of your time doing something for nothing every day. Having no clear picture of what you want or moving tasks around randomly to feel productive is no different than putting together this 10,000 piece pointless puzzle.

But what if it wasn’t “pointless”…

What if I told you there was a secret message on the puzzle that was going to change your life and make all your dreams come true?

Assuming you believed me… you’d jump at the chance to give it a shot – what would you have to lose? And I bet you’d find a way to actually complete that puzzle, too.

Why? Because you knew there was a real reason to.

Yet, you struggle to treat your LIFE like you would a puzzle, in this paradigm.

What if you KNEW, all you had to do was trust you had the right pieces, knowing everything you did was worth it.  What if you could believe all you had to do was put it together carefully to have everything you ever wanted.

How outrageous would that feel?

Even without the picture to “guide you” it might seem harder or maybe take longer, just believing the end result was going to be worth it would make all the difference in the world.

You would no longer pontificate on your purpose, you’d evaluate each moment on its own merit knowing it was all coming together.

Can you imagine how easy it would be for you to be present in each moment, knowing every piece you found was putting you one more step closer to having everything you ever wanted?

Wouldn’t it feel outrageous?

Pay attention and be aware to keep YOU from getting in YOUR way. 

Know all the pieces of the puzzle are right there and you have everything you need to put it together.  Then tap into your internal power source as a more effortless way to live and enjoy your life.

It feels outrageous when you can finally see the opportunities all around you and begin accepting them with your heart, mind and soul – trust me – I was blind, but now I see and so can you – if you think you can.

The Power Of Words

If you think your words don’t matter, you’re wrong.

And it’s not just what you say to others, it’s what you are saying to yourself that sometimes hurts the most.

Check out this inspiring video which clearly illustrates the power of words.

What do you think? What’s the most powerful thing (good or bad) someone told you?

What do you tell yourself? Leave a comment or ask a question – I’d love to help.

The Seven Stages Of Failing At Self Improvement

Self Improvement is a lot like riding a horse (or a bike).

Sometimes you go too fast and you fall off.

Or you go too slowly and you fall off.

And you might do everything right, and still fall off.

Don’t hate the player hate the game right?

Bottom line is you must stop yourself from freaking out as you fight to stay on.  Just accept you’re going to fall off every now and then. It’s fine because you’re supposed to fall down – it’s part of the journey.  (But no one said you had to lay there in the fetal position.)

When you find yourself face down in the mud, your growth comes from how fast you get up,

There are many stages of failing at self-improvement and I thought I’d share a few (I’m not making light of your challenges, I’m trying to make you see – it’s part of the process – you’re doing just fine!)…

Stage 1: Fall off pony. Bounce. Laugh. Climb back on. Repeat.

This usually happens before the effects of drinking the kool-aid wear off. The sun is still shining, you got too excited and might have bit off more than you could chew, but you aren’t ready to quit yet!

Stage 2: Fall off horse. Run after horse, cussing. Climb back on by shimmying up horse’s neck. Ride until sundown.

At this point in the self-improvement game, you’ve dig your heals in yelling “I’m a soldier!”. You’re going to MAKE it happen or die trying – damnit!  With grit and determination you launch yourself back into your routine, family and friends be damned!  (Until the next tumble anyway).

Stage 3: Fall off horse. Use sleeve of shirt to stanch bleeding. Have friend help you get back on horse. Take two Advil and apply ice packs when you get home. Ride next day.

This is where doubt creeps in and you start secretly wondering what you’re doing wrong.  It didn’t sound this hard at the time, right?  And now, well maybe you aren’t meant to be a better person anyway. You sleep on it, wake up, shake off the cobwebs of questions and talk yourself into giving it another try – today’s a new day!

State 4: Fall off horse. Refuse advice to call ambulance; drive self to urgent care clinic. Entertain nursing staff with tales of previous daredevil stunts on horseback. Back to riding before cast comes off.

This is where you begin crafting an internal story of how hard or impossible it is to make this change.  You might’ve found a way to drop the old story at the seminar, but now your mind is thrilled because it gets to craft a brand new one! So it begins yammering,   “See I told you old dogs can’t learn new tricks.  Why are you even bothering with this nonsense?” (You’ve now forgotten 50% of the course and are fearful you might revert back to your old habits.)

Stage 5: Fall off horse. Temporarily forget name of horse and name of husband. Flirt shamelessly with paramedics when they arrive. Spend week in hospital while titanium pins are screwed in place. Start riding again before doctor gives official okay.

At this point, you’re starting to wonder if everyone who said this was a load of crap was right. You question why you can’t get it right, becoming frustrated with yourself for “not getting” it. Depression or anger steps in to replace fear, as you begin to get angry at the world.  “It’s pointless”, you mumble to yourself over and over, “no one cares any way – just a bunch of selfless jerks.”

Stage 6: Fall off horse. Fail to see any humor when hunky paramedic says, “You again?” Gain firsthand knowledge of advances in medical technology thanks to stint in ICU. Convince self that permanent limp isn’t that noticeable. Promise husband you’ll give up riding. One week later purchase older, slower, shorter horse.

Your own friends are beginning to mock you.  You feel worse than you did when you didn’t know any better.  In fact, if you’d known it was going to be this hard, you would’ve just stayed “asleep”.  When does  it get easier?  Maybe your goals shouldn’t be so “lofty….

Stage 7: Slip off horse. Relieved when artificial joints and implanted medical devices seem unaffected. Tell husband that scrapes and bruises are due to gardening accident. Pretend you don’t see husband roll his eyes and mutter as he walks away. Give apple to horse.

This is where you just give up.  At best you try something new again, later.  Worse case scenario?  You do nothing – you quit on YOU.

Unfortunately at this point, many people get addicted to looking for solutions and turn into a seminar junkie; always looking for a quick fix by trying to find an answer of what they need to DO to become the person they KNOW they can BE.

My point? It’s a bunch of crap (but funny).

I’m not sure what stage of self-improvement you’re in, but I know this.  It doesn’t matter. And there is no where to “be”.

Your evolution is an organic process; the point of ALL of it is the JOURNEY.

When you resist the journey or try to short-cut the process to get their faster, you end up mostly spinning your wheels.

Frustration comes into the picture because you’re trying too hard to change your movie from Forrest Gump to Top Gun, instead of just making Forrest Gump the best darn movie it can be.

You are who you are and most of the time you miss the point of YOU.

So while you can mix it up, maybe Tom Cruise or Val Kilmer will walk onto your set,  but until they do?

Try just loving the one your with…

YOU.

The Answer To The Happiness Quiz

Four Steps To Tap Into The Power Of Fear

Fear is something you probably avoid at all costs.

If you’re nervous in elevators, you might take the stairs.

If you’re afraid of heights, you probably wouldn’t go on a skiing vacation.

And if you’re scared of the ocean, the beach is most likely not on your list of hot spots is it?

What does it really cost you to try to live without fear?

If you’re afraid of being hurt or taken advantage of in a relationship, if you’re terrified to leave your dead-end job or if you simply try to keep yourself busy to avoid worry about money and other day to day things…

It’s official. Fear is taking over your life and you’re letting it happen.

Even if you’ve “figured” out how to push it away , you’re still giving a tremendous amount of energy to fear by trying to avoid it.

If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em is, a fun way to say – just accept what you can’t change, which is an outrageous way to think about fear.

You can’t get angry to avoid fear, you can’t ignore it for long, and you can’t let it swallow you whole…

Or can you?

What if you could find a way to look at your fear, high five it, and surrender to its power and ride that bitch straight to freedom of your soul, just like a champion surfer greets and rides gigantic 10-20 foot wave ?

What if you could see waves of fear as a sign that you’re present?

What if every time you got scared, you felt joy at the fact you’re present – right here and now in the middle of it?

What if fear was your invitation to raise your hand saying you’re ready, able and willing to take the hint and move forward once and for all?

How outrageous would that feel?

Fear is your FRIEND.

It’s your greatest tool – a super charged magnifying glass to your biggest blocks of what’s holding you back, with the power to start turning your perceived barriers into stepping stones.

If you could LOOK for the fear hidden beneath almost every single “negative”  emotion you have  such as anger, sadness, depression or frustration,  do you truly understand how outrageous you would feel??

When you get mad at someone for rejecting your idea, isn’t there some fear based belief tucked away quietly reminding you that no one will ever understand or appreciate you?

If fear became your door to the next level of you, would you ever run from it again?

Once you see fear is just the child in you grasping at some unknown limiting belief you’ll be able to use the power of fear for good- YOUR good.  And here is my 4 step process for tapping it the power of fear any time you want to:

1.  Face it.

Just say hello and sit with it instead of pushing it away or resisting it.  If you kept  hearing a strange noise in the middle of the night, it’s not until you turn on the light to see what it is,   that you can relax right? It’s the same with fear. Facing fear just simply means flipping on your internal light switch by acknowledging it.

2. Embrace It.

Feel the fear and let is course through you. Mentally say, “I’m feeling fearful about being good enough at my job for my boss. If I’m not good enough he’ll fire me.  If he fires me I can’t pay my rent and it also will mean I’m a bad person and might never find another job.”  Just embrace how that feels knowing it is only an illusion conjured up to point you in a a better direction.

3. Accept It.

Once you’ve said hello to your fear, welcome it tand accept how angry, sad or depressed it makes you feel. Accept the limitations of your processing unit and stop resisting the reality you’ve got a fear inside of you limiting the power of your belief system.  Acceptance is your key to dropping your resistance and therefore reducing the amount of suffering you are experiencing.

4. Rejoice.

Now it’s time to use fear as the catalyst to get deep inside and fix what is broken because fear is the squeaky wheel that says, “Hey something isn’t working over here.” Each pain point in your life is the symptom of a greater root cause.  By facing, embracing and accepting your fears you can leverage fear to  blow through the illusions and roadblocks keeping you from tapping into your true potential.  Watch pure joy and gratitude come when you learn to celebrate the insight you just had and comfort yourself with words of encouragement every time you face, embrace and accept your fears – they rejoice at how free you feel!

This is the greatest gift you can give yourself!

Allowing fear to fester lowers your frequency and ability to focus on attracting opportunities to move your forward. Even if your heart just got broken and your fear is driving you to believe you’ll never be loved – it’s an amazing vehicle for your immediate transformation.

Fear can get you back on track to loving you, raising your vibration to send out signals to other people who are also in a state of self-love to start coming your way.  The same goes for abundance and other desires you might have.

Being aware of your fear and accepting the limitations of your processing unit (your personality and image) will guide you to the path of least resistance to outrageously growing yourself once and for all.

 

If You’ve Never Failed, You’ve Never Lived

While it’s fine to build your skills on failures, it’s also important to enhance your soul through accepting your emotions as you have them. Avoid letting the ego take over to make them any more than they were supposed to be.  Experiences breed growth and we crave them bring us joy at a soul level.

When you are on the field of life and you get knocked down pay attention to your next move because for the most part you have three basic choices.

1. Grab your bat and glove and go home.

2. Lay on the field in the fetal position.

3. Get back up to bat.

No matter what you choose, the only outcome I can GUARANTEE from going home or doing nothing is you will never hit that ball out of the park. And life will hunt you down like a dog and find new and better ways to “teach” you what you are avoiding, so best to accept and stop resisting so you can move through it easily.

If you face and embrace the situation, pick yourself up off the ground and get back up to bat you guaranteed one thing: Another chance to swing for the fences to get what you really want. And like my mamma always told me, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” (pretty sure she borrowed that – ha!)

Watch this inspiring video and tell me, where would we be today if these people had chosen to quit?

How Your Anger Can Actually Heal You

Anger.  It’s hard to live with, harder to live without, right?

I agree.

Whether you are confrontational or passive aggressive, no matter how you handle anger, you and everyone around you is affected by your anger.

Some people will give you techniques to “manage” it. Others will teach you how to “get rid” of it. I’m sure you’ve even adopted a few homegrown ways to “avoid” it.

I don’t know about you, but none one of those approaches worked well for me.

The more I avoided anger, the more it showed up like a bad cold.  It never seemed to never go away and there was no vaccine in sight. In between dreading it and trying to outrun it, I tried talking  me “off the angry ledge”, as if I could reason with it – that was a joke.

At one point I even tried analyzing it, believing if I could know WHY it was there, it would dissipate.  But that failed too.

The more I focused on anger the more it seemed to come.

Is anger a driving force in your life?

To find out, answer these 8 statements from Mental Health to see if any ring true for you.

1. I don’t show my anger about everything that makes me mad, but when I do – look out.

2. I still get angry when I think of the bad things people did to me in the past.

3. I sometimes lie awake at night and think about the things that upset me during the day.

4. I find it very hard to forgive someone who has done me wrong.

5. I get angry with myself when I lose control of my emotions.

6. After arguing with someone, I hate myself.

7. People really irritate me when they don’t behave the way they should, or when they act like they don’t have the good sense of a head of lettuce.

8. When I get angry, frustrated or hurt, I comfort myself by eating or using alcohol or other drugs.

If you answered “true” to any of them – congrats – you’re human!

If you found #1, #5, #6 or #8 to be true, you tend to like to make YOU wrong when you get angry. If any of the rest were true for you, you’re making EVERYONE ELSE wrong when you get angry.

Regardless who takes the beating for your temper tantrum, you should know it’s all normal - you’re alive!

What isn’t normal is letting anger take over your life.  No matter how good it feels at the time, even if you’ve been really “wronged”, it isn’t serving you.

But it could…

What if you became aware of your anger and didn’t resist it?

Trying to suppress your anger, or push it under the carpet to “keep the peace” is just delaying the inevitable. If you do react, and end up feeling guilty or even worse angry with yourself, you’re telling YOU your feelings don’t matter. (You might even be telling yourself it’s not ok to be angry.)

How are these techniques working out for you?

How would you feel if I met you, shook your hand, looked you in the eye and simply said, “Let’s get one thing straight, we can only hang out if your emotions never impact my day because I don’t have time for hurt feelings and drama on either side.” (Not good, I bet)

The sad thing is, I don’t need to tell you anything, because you’re doing enough damage on your own!

Every time you ignore your emotions, YOU’RE the one confirming YOU don’t matter.

Even if someone comes out and says, “You don’t matter”, it means nothing unless you believe them. No one can steal your power – you choose to give it away; even trying to ignore it or resist it is futile – it’s just a matter of time until it surfaces.

Trying to resist anger by ignoring it is like starving and not eating despite the fact there’s a plate of food right in front of you. The more you focus on your hunger, the hungrier you usually get. Even if you’re able to ignore you’re hunger for a while, it will still be there later. (You might even be even hungrier, right??)

Why would being angry be any different than being hungry?

You can use anger to see what is really happening, acknowledge it, and be grateful for the opportunity to clear the block you already had. Accepting the situation “as is” and finding the common trigger for the situations you’re holding onto will give you clarity to see the lesson you keep bringing to yourself.

Put a different meaning to this “lesson” anger is bringing to you.  It’s just doing its job – trying to get you to pay attention!

Any person who evokes any emotion, “good” or “bad”, should be seen as an angel who is trying to help you see the truth.  Your alleged enemies, the job you hate, or the verbally abusive relationship you might be in are just your way of bringing to you the emotions you require to experience in order to grow.

You are powerful.

You are loved.

And no one has the power to make you feel or be anything you don’t want to experience.

Stop resisting emotions like anger or sadness and accept you need them to experience growth.  Through a higher sense of awareness you can give them the space to come and go which will give you a feeling of incredible freedom – finally knowing there is nothing for you to “do” or “change” or “solve”!

Implement this one tiny shift towards the meaning you place on your emotions to start feeling OUTRAGEOUSLY delicious!

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