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Successful people use empowering beliefs all the time and their beliefs carry something in common, even though some may seem flawed at times. (I know someone who says this to himself every day, ‘Man! I’m so sexy, I’ll attract men and women both the same’)

However, if you look carefully at their beliefs, you will realise that all of them use words that put them in control. Most importantly, they are specific.

Conversely, you can derive a pattern from not-so-successful people’s daily dosage of self-affirmed beliefs. You can identify them quite easily. Let us take a look at the tell-tale features of those not-so-useful beliefs:

For example, ‘my manager does not do his job’ and ‘Mr Johnson’s classes are a waste of time’ or ‘I can never understand that’. Pretty depressing statements, don’t you think?

The above examples contain three big ‘No-No’s’ for any beliefs, like all limiting beliefs.

These beliefs leave you feeling powerless and without control. Notice how the manager and Mr Johnson are made to seem that they are in control of the situation instead of the protagonist. Notice the absence of words such as ‘I am’, ‘I can’ or ‘I must’? Use these powerful words more often to take control of your life.

Those beliefs are too brief. Can you tell what is the manager doing wrong or how is Mr Johnson conducting his class? Be specific! If those beliefs are more specific, it is easier to identify any flaws and correct them.

Those beliefs are self-limiting and these are the worst of their kind! By putting yourself down with words such as ‘I can never understand that’, you are not just surrendering your control, but also sabotaging your potential for improvement. You will resign to your fate and shut your mind towards better opportunities for growth.

Now let us examine some of the top ten most common limiting beliefs and how to counter them. If you realise you have more than two of them, perhaps it is time to re-examine your life.

1. I am too young/old now.
- I’m young and vigorous. This is my advantage and I can do everything in the world.
- I’ve seen the world and possess invaluable experiences. This is my advantage and I can handle whatever comes my way.

2. Work will always be there, I’ll start on it tomorrow. (Procrastination)
- I must set aside a specified amount of time every day and focus 100% within that specified amount of time.

3. I’ll probably just fail anyway, why waste my effort?
- I am capable of learning everything about this new field. I must ask the relevant people and consult the relevant sources when in doubt and always stay focused on what works!

4. If my idea is so fantastic, someone else has probably thought about it and used it.
- Speed is the only protection for my ideas, I must act on it quickly and fully before anyone else does it better than me.

5. My family/friends have invested too much in me; I should not change my decisions now, it will disappoint them too much.
- I am blessed to have supportive family/friends, but I must let them understand my stand and do my best to prove to them that I’m right.

6. My schoolmate/colleague is a genius, there is no way I can ever surpass them. Since I can’t, I might as well give up now.
- I am lucky to have someone to show the standard. I will learn from her and persevere.

7. If life is so fair, why do roses have thorns? I am utterly worthless.
- I have my own undiscovered potential and I must try out everything life has to offer. I will find my innate strength!

8. My preparation is not perfect, the timing is wrong; I should wait a little longer before I start.
- I must start today to work towards being successful, and not wait till I’m successful to start (waiting to be successful to start is a catch-22 anyway).

9. Paris Hilton should be jailed for two months and Beckham should venture into table tennis!
- I must mind my own business and focus on my priorities.

10. I am unworthy of owning/doing/undertaking/being this.
- I have all it takes to own/do/undertake/be this and others recognize it. I will prove that their trust is placed in the right person.

Remember the following words of wisdom:
If life gives you durians, make durian cakes! If your boss gives you headaches, take aspirin (or some alternative ‘organic’ treatment of choice) and then sell your supply of aspirin to your similarly headache-ridden colleagues. If you give yourself poor beliefs, change them, one at a time.

Mohamad Latiff is the Author of Ultimate Secrets of Success
, where you can access 5 secret technologies that will radically alter your life, boost your intelligence, expand your creativity, improve your personal effectiveness and possibly multiply your income for only 10 minutes a day! Ultimate Secrets of
Success

Have you ever had the experience where you felt that the voice in your mind was playing tricks on you, as if it was controlling your every move or action? Did you ever wish that there was some way to regain control of your mind and not let that ‘chatterbox’ in your head completely control you?

This voice, internal editor or chatterbox in your mind is actually an accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of programming, upbringing, memories, experiences and beliefs. Physically, it is a mass of neuronal connections in your brain, a pattern that has already been there for a very long time only because you had allowed it to be so.

Fortunately, you can learn to re-program your mind and there are many ways to do so. The simplest first step you can take is to simply decide to do so. Here are just 7 out of the many ways:

1) Keep recalling and reminding yourself of the people, things and situations that you are truly and completely appreciative and grateful for. You will find yourself calmer and more composed and obstacles and challenges will seem easier to overcome.

2) Keep away and protect yourself from self-affirmed negative thoughts. Negative thoughts have a huge tendency of messing up the way you think and in turn your actions. Identify the various negative thoughts that you have and counter them by:

3) Maintaining positive thoughts in your mind. Think of ways you can channel your negative thoughts into positive ones and reinforce these positive thoughts by self talk. Self talk simply means talking either aloud or mentally to yourself and reminding yourself of positive things.

4) Discard negative thoughts you think people may have of you. It doesn’t matter what other people think of you so as long as you know and feel that what you are doing is correct and proper. Always remember that it is your life and you have the choice to do things your way without letting other people’s thoughts and views affect you.

5) Regard every achievement - no matter how small it may be - as a great achievement. Recall and recap about all the achievements you have achieved in your life and congratulate and reward yourself (if you haven’t done so).

6) Take the effort to comprehend and reinforce your beliefs with proof or evidence. Review your current beliefs and thoughts about various issues and ask yourself if you need to alter them if they are found to be wrong or unsubstantiated.

7) Generate an influx of ideas in your mind. Get inspiration from numerous sources such as your surroundings, books, pictures, newspapers and the internet. Constantly build up your flow of mind-blowing ideas and think of ways you can put them to practical use.

Always keep in mind that you are the ultimate controller, you are truly in command of everything that occurs in your head and it is up to you to tap on this rightful ability of yours to achieve better degrees of success.

Mohamad Latiff is the Author of Ultimate Secrets of Success, where you can access 5 secret technologies that will radically alter your life, boost your intelligence, expand your creativity, improve your personal effectiveness and possibly multiply your income for only 10 minutes a day! Ultimate Secrets of Success

‘No two minds ever come together without,
thereby, creating a third, invisible, intangible
force which may be likened to a third mind.’

This is the basis of MasterMind, a concept created by author Napoleon Hill, who studied the success stories of several wealthy people, among them Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Charles M. Schwab, and numerous other well-known names.

A MasterMind group is a collection of people putting their heads together, much like an ongoing brainstorming session or a think tank geared toward a specific purpose.

The thoughts, energies, and passions of the individuals unite into one larger organism, which comes alive as the individual members of the group bounce ideas off each other.

Gradually the ideas collect into one large, moving mass, much like a small snowball rolling down a mountain and becoming larger and larger the further it rolls.

So what can MasterMind do for you and your business? Not only will you end up with a network of peers you can rely on, but you will likely find many key ideas that will turn your business into the success you always knew it could be.

MasterMind groups help you see things from other points of view. Don’t block yourself in by thinking in only three dimensions. Add a fourth dimension by bouncing your ideas off your MasterMind group.

Also, who doesn’t like a challenge? As you see your peers succeeding in their business endeavors, you’ll be even more driven to go out and make your ideas an even bigger success.

Additionally, your confidence will go up as you enjoy these brainstorming sessions with other people who think like you. As your confidence level increases, so will your positive results.

Before you embark on your MasterMind journey, it’s a good idea to mentally condition yourself. Much of society is governed by messages of negativity, from the bad news that dominates the media, to movies full of murder and awful things happening to the characters.

Spend some time flushing these negative messages from your mind and focus on more positive things, like your family, or anything else that takes you to that special place in your mind where everything is golden.

Now that the thought of joining a MasterMind group is percolating in your mind, you may be wondering how to go about finding a group that meets your needs.

The first question you must ask yourself is: What are my personal goals? Once you’ve answered that, you’ll have an idea what sort of group you should seek out. The individual members of the group should have similar goals, although hey likely will not be facing the exact same challenges to their individual goals.

Keep in mind that the some of the other members of your prospective MasterMind group may have already overcome some of the specific challenges you are facing now. By the same token, you may have already overcome the very barriers the members of your group are facing at this present moment.

Now that you’ve established your goals, you’re ready to find a MasterMind group, but many such groups aren’t actually called by this name. Study groups in college, Parent Teacher Associations (PTA), Bible study groups, boards of directors can all be considered MasterMind groups.

Another great mastermind example is Toastmasters. If you’re not familiar with this group, its members meet on a regular basis to work on their speechmaking skills. There are Toastmaster groups in many cities and are a great place for you to gain experience with masterminding.

Actually, any group with a ‘meeting of the minds’ focus to it would be considered a MasterMind group. Look around, ask questions, watch the ‘coming events’ sections in your local media and you will find some excellent opportunities for you to start with.

The next question to ask yourself is whether a group fitting to your needs already exists, or if you should form your own. It’s relatively easy to do that yourself. There are also a number of agencies that will set up a MasterMind group for a fee. The internet is also an important resource to use when searching for a group suited to your needs.

If you wish to form your own group, you need to consider a number of things before you get started. It’s a good idea to start by setting up some guidelines for members of your group. A great starting point for those guidelines is your personal goal.

Think about what you want to gain from the group. Then decide if you know anyone else who would benefit from your group. You may already have a close circle of associates who would be a perfect fit for your MasterMind group.

If you’ve felt more like a lone wolf in your field, and you don’t know others with similar business goals, then you’ll need to market your group. There are many ways to do that. The easiest is to begin with who you know, associations you have a connection to and your local media.

You should decide ahead of time how many people to allow into your group. A good number is between five and eight people. As few as two and as many as twelve are good guidelines for the minimums and maximums.

Before anyone is allowed into the group, you should screen the applicants, making sure their goals are similar to yours. Diversity of occupation, culture, education, etc. is good. Choose people that have a positive attitude and have a desire to be good contributors.

The most important part of the process of setting up a group is making sure you have the right people. But once those people have been selected, how do you go about making the most of your time?

Start with the basics, like location, meeting length, and frequency. From there you can establish the ground rules, including things like attendance and a general format for your meetings. Many successful groups start each meeting with gratitude and praise.

Most meetings will start with a set amount of time for each group member to give an update on their business, and then another set amount of time for each member to set goals, an important part of the MasterMind process.

Accountability is very important to your success. Your group members will help keep you accountable to yourself and your goals as you reach for the stars together, giving each other a boost along the way.

Our suggestion to you is to get started today! You can have a mini-mastermind with a friend to get the beginnings in motion and grow from there. Mastermind is a proven success principle and can be a marvelous way to help you realize your dreams and reach your goals!

John Carpenter Dealey started his first business at age nine and became a “self-made millionaire” by the age of 27. If you would like to learn how to apply these powerful Mastermind principles in your own life, sign up for a free subscription to MasterMind Tips ezine at: http://www.dr-mastermind.com/

Keeping a journal isn’t just for teenage girls. The benefits of writing in a journal on a daily basis are various and great. You can get true insights into hidden parts of yourself, look back and notice patterns or habits, and receive wonderful therapeutic benefits. It’s a wonderful way to release anger, or other emotions that you need an outlet for. Let’s take a look at some information about self discovery through journal writing.

What is Journal Writing?

Journal writing is when an individual keeps a log of his daily or weekly activities, thoughts, feelings, emotions, and dreams. This can be done in a fancy leather bound journal, or an ordinary spiral notebook. The result is the same whether you use expensive writing tools or cheap pens and a notebook. You don’t have to write everyday, although it is an excellent thing to do. You could write every few days or every week.

You simply write as if you were unloading your troubles or thoughts to your best friend, except you have the added benefit of your journal not being able to squeal to anyone you write about! Need to blow off some steam about your boss? Is your spouse driving you up the wall and back again? Get those feelings out, without compromising wonderful relationships. Writing about your problems is therapeutic, and can become one of the highlights of your day.

How Journal Writing can help with Self Discovery.

Writing in your journal will help you express wonderful emotions of happiness, love, fulfillment, and peace. It can also help you to shed your feelings of anger, hate, depression, anxiety or stress. It’s a great way to let go of things that are bugging you, or driving you nuts! After writing for a while, you will begin to notice patterns within yourself.

You can track the things that make you feel a certain way. For example, reading your journal, you’ve noticed that you usually become really upset and depressed around a certain time each year. Further reading has helped you to realize that you get upset and depressed around the anniversary of your job. Why are you becoming upset around this time? Are you subconsciously thinking, ‘Another year in the same dead end job.” Do you have unresolved issues about your job, or are you unhappy in your job?

Another example could be that on some days you seem to be absolutely elated for no reason. Reading further, you realize that you’re always happy and ecstatic the day you’ve seen a certain ’someone.’ Uh oh. What’s going on there? Writing in your journal can truly help you discover things about yourself that you never would have known otherwise.

What Process Should One Use?

Simply write about your most prevalent feelings in a day, what your thoughts were, any important events, things that you thought were interesting. Just write what you feel is relevant or that deserves to be noted. You are your own guide, and it doesn’t matter what you write, because no one else is reading it. Most importantly, try to write at a certain time, like once every day or at least once a week. This will help you discover things about yourself more easily.

The Benefits one can Experience.

There are so many great benefits of journal writing. You can really use writing as an outlet to let go of anger, depression and anxiety. Don’t let anger build up inside of you until you blow up and create a potentially terrible situation. Write about it. You can let go of stress about certain things, and we all know how damaging stress can be. Use journal writing to discover things about yourself that you never knew. You can learn so many things from writing in a journal. The benefits are wonderful, and there’s really no reason not to do it.

You can write in a journal even if you’re not gifted as a writer. You don’t have to make the words pretty or descriptive, because you will automatically feel the feelings associated with the writing. No one else will be reading it, so you don’t have to write a certain way, just write what you want. Good Luck!

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of My-Personal-Growth.com, a site that provides information and articles for self improvement and personal growth and development.

Your self belief directly influences your destiny and success in life. The beliefs that matter most in life are those that are deeply and often unconsciously held. On the surface, you may think that you believe you deserve the best in life but if your deeply and unconsciously held belief is that you are unloved, unworthy, and incapable of achieving the success you desire, then you will find success and happiness difficult to attain.

Success is a gift you give yourself as a direct result of the beliefs you hold about yourself. Therefore, it is extremely important to evaluate your beliefs and become aware of any that are holding you back or even worse, bringing the very things that you don’t want into your life.

Success is the result of choosing the right goals for your life and taking the most effective steps to achieve them. Our ability to do both these things is directly affected by the beliefs we hold about ourselves. Do we believe we are capable of achieving our goals? And if so, are those goals truly our own? Being true to yourself is an integral part of genuine success and it is impossible to be faithful to your own needs and purpose in life unless you understand what they are.

This means you need to be consciously aware of your deepest beliefs about life. The starting place of this consciousness is to ask yourself questions and then examine your responses. What is most important to you? For example, if your family is more important to you than your career, then in order to be successful you need to create a lifestyle that supports your family values while pursuing your career goals. If you do not do this, your true beliefs will cause you to sabotage your success.

If you are lonely and would like to experience love and romance in your life but you feel unattractive and expect rejection, you will probably not even try to meet people or will drive people away because of your lack of confidence.

The good news is that when you change your beliefs you change your destiny. Thus, your beliefs directly determine the success you achieve in life. Our beliefs influence our thoughts, feelings, words and actions, all of which paint the canvas of our lives with relationships, experiences, successes and failures. Therefore, if you are not successful in any area of your life, consider your habitual thinking about that area, the words you speak about it and the deeply held beliefs these may reflect.

Repetitive experiences in any area such as job loss, insufficient income and relationship break ups are also an indication of deeply held but often unacknowledged beliefs that can rob you of happiness. Alternatively, your successes also reflect your beliefs. For example, those of you who have overcome difficulties to achieve a goal such as a college degree, promotion or other personal goals have been able to do so because of beliefs that support you.

The obvious and most important belief you can have is that you can actually do the thing you desire to do. If you believe you can’t do something then that will be true for you. Fortunately, your self beliefs can be changed and so too can your life.

The first step to changing limiting beliefs is to understand what they are. You can do this by monitoring your self talk. Do you put yourself down a lot? Do you feel like a failure and tell yourself so? Keep a record of what you are telling yourself for a couple of weeks. You are looking for those thoughts that repeat regularly because they will have the strongest impact on your life. Once you have identified them you need to spend some time considering how they may have affected specific areas of your life.

What are the deeper beliefs about yourself that they reflect? Once you have identified the most powerful beliefs that are negatively affecting your life you need to develop strategies to change them. The most effective way to change beliefs is to attack them from multiple angles.

If you believe you cannot accomplish something then you need to begin to do things that will build your confidence in yourself by doing difficult things. Powerful changes can be made to your beliefs about yourself by doing dramatic and frightening things successfully such as sky diving, bungee jumping or learning to do something you have been afraid of such as flying a plane.

Longer term changes to beliefs can be accomplished by rewriting the negative beliefs positively and using them as affirmations. However, the more evidence you can find to prove the truth of these new beliefs the more effective they will be.

Finally, stay away from people who discourage you and try to set in place your old negative self beliefs. Unfortunately, you may need to cut some people out of your life altogether. You need to have people in your life who support your positive new beliefs.

Your beliefs determine your future; they are life and death to you. Therefore whatever undermines your future happiness must be discarded. Your life is a gift to you. Do not let anyone or anything rob you of your best possible destiny.

Discover Kevin Sinclair’s system for making profits regardless of whether anyone joins your network marketing business.

Before you see where this article is heading, maybe you would like to take a short quiz on Harry Potter.

To all Harry Potter’s fans and foes out there, please give your best shot at answering the following question. What would you call Harry Potter’s grandfather? Any success yet, no? Come on, surely you can think harder than that? You’ve read it at least three times in the books before! Ok, here’s the answer, Harry Potter’s grandpa is’ Mr Potter!

Isn’t it funny? I apologize if the answer has left any unforeseen mental traumas or bodily bruises from falling off the seats. But the question that I really want to ask is more important than Harry Potter’s ancestry. The question is: what were you doing, when you were reading the joke?

Were you glancing through the words to get the answer straight away, just like what the other 90% of the people did and react with indifference? Or did you contemplate about the answer while looking for it, and welcome it with a smile or a look of disbelief? Truth be told, as long as you smile or jest at the joke, you are showing appreciation for the joke, you are showing gratitude for it. Do you want to know why?

Because you are living in the moment, that’s why. You are paying attention to life’s mini surprises and you are showing gratitude for them by responding accordingly. Only by ‘living in the moment’, you can find yourself giving the most sincere gratitude. In fact, showing gratitude should be a way of life!

‘So, if I am still alive and kicking, doesn’t it mean I’m living in the moment?’ And thus you are showing gratitude 24/7? Nope, most people never did live in the moment. A Zen parable illustrates this point perfectly:

Young Monk: Master, how do I practise The Way?
Old Master: When hungry, eat; when tired, sleep.
Young monk: Is it not what most people do?
Old Master: (Shaking his head in disapproval) No, no, no. Most people are not like this. Most people, when eating, are full of thoughts and desire, and when sleeping, are full of cares.
-AsiaPac, The book of Zen

Attention deficit is no longer an ingrained disorder; it can be picked up and learnt as we follow the pace of the society, the result is what the parable mentioned; core activities such as eating and sleeping are now congruent with the TV or work desk. One can’t help but wonder, is it really vital to work while eating? Multitasking is meant for tasks only, if eating has become a ‘task’ for you, you have lost a gift, the gift of appreciation and showing gratitude for the simple things in life.

It would be pointless if I had told you a step-by-step process for showing gratitude or living in the moment. I strongly believe in the maxim that; when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Once you understood the significance of bringing gratitude into your life, you will have no problems understanding gratitude itself.

I’ll end with a quote, ‘Yesterday is gone, that’s why it is called the past. Tomorrow never comes, that’s why it’s called the future. Today is a gift, and that’s why it’s called the present’

Amazing! FREE e-Book Reveals How You Can Wipe Out All Your Limits & Achieve Your Inherent Unlimited Potential For Wealth, Success & Happiness In Only 30 to 60 Seconds From Now! Only @ Ultimate Secrets of Success

Have you ever watched or heard about a person’s success story and believed that you could never do what he/she has done? Or have you seen someone come up with a revolutionary idea and thought to yourself that you can never accomplish such a feat?

If your answer is yes to either one or both of my questions, you probably have self-limiting beliefs and negative thoughts about yourself. These are what I would term as a person’s inner ‘monsters’ and these ‘monsters’ are very common in most people.

These ‘monsters’, if not dealt with, will be the main reasons that will cause you to not show yourself enough gratitude for all the accomplishments you have obtained.

Conversely when you do not acknowledge your accomplishments enough, you will feel as though you have failed in life and ultimately this will really lead to your failure.

Now then, what are some of the most common inner ‘monsters’ that are hindering you from showering yourself with gratitude? There are probably truckloads of inner ‘monsters’ that everybody possesses but I will only cover the few that I feel are most detrimental to one’s success if not identified early and dealt with.

In my opinion, the single most common and detrimental inner ‘monster’ that is hindering you from showing gratitude to yourself is that you feel you are unworthy of being shown gratitude at all. This alone could have stemmed from many internal or external factors. Some common internal factors possibly include inferiority complex, thinking or feeling that you are useless and can never achieve anything great or be successful.

External factors, on the other hand, can come in the form of the people around you telling and taunting you that you are hopeless and can never achieve anything great in life. These internal and external factors, when coupled together, will lead you to think that you have nothing worthy of being appreciative about.

While you may argue that you do feel that you are worthy of being shown gratitude and do not fall under the category of people I have mentioned above, perhaps you are plagued with the mentality that you have not done enough to be able to show yourself more gratitude.

You must understand that you do not have to do all the things required before you can start showing yourself more gratitude. As long as you have done what is sufficiently required and accomplished the task, goal or objective you have initially set out to do, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t be giving heaps of credit to yourself.

Now, you will probably be asking ‘what if I have been doing enough but I feel as though I have not given my best, then should I still show gratitude to myself?’ Many people believe and constantly think that they have not given their best in everything that they pursue or hope to accomplish.

They keep thinking that they can do a particular task much better and go on to think of ways to improve or perfect their methods without actually considering showing themselves gratitude for the task they have completed.

While it is definitely good, and I recommend that you do it too, to constantly upgrade yourself and the methods you employ in completing a task, it is also prudent to note that you must first reflect on your current completed tasks at hand and take the time to congratulate or compliment yourself for completing them before moving on.

So far, I have covered three inner ‘monsters’ that have prevented you from showing gratitude to yourself. The next one I will be covering is just as important as the other three but personally, I feel that this inner ‘monster’ is the most overlooked one. This inner ‘monster’ is thinking and believing that your achievement is too small or not important enough for you to show gratitude to yourself.

In fact, this inner ‘monster’ is rather contradicting in the sense that you acknowledge that you have achieved something (which is great) yet you feel that it is too small to be appreciative about. We all have definitely achieved much success in our lives, be it learning how to speak when we were young to passing an exam with flying colours.

It does not matter how ’small’ or how ‘big’ our successes are (depending on our individual definitions of ’small’ and ‘big’) if we do not actually take the time and effort to actually ponder over them and congratulate or show gratitude to ourselves for achieving them.

By now, you would have probably realised the inner ‘monsters’ that are preventing you from showing gratitude to yourself and how it can affect your success. If you are interested to find out more about how you can overcome and suppress these ‘monsters’, take a look at the resource box below. And always remember that showing gratitude to yourself can go a very long way to ensuring your continual success.

Amazing! FREE e-Book Reveals How You Can Wipe Out All Your Limits & Achieve Your Inherent Unlimited Potential For Wealth, Success & Happiness In Only 30 to 60 Seconds From Now! Only @ Ultimate Secrets of Success

Truly I tell you, gratitude is the key to abundance. For if you are grateful, surely you will experience an increase in all the good things you feel you are deserving in life.

Gratitude does not come from a ‘this is too good to be true’ feeling. Nor does it come from feelings of lack and desperation, such that you are dependent upon external factors as if the world owes you anything. Gratitude comes from a realisation, a proper understanding of things, that goes as deep and as true as that of a mother’s love for her child.

Thankfulness cannot be faked or forced. You can train a child to say ‘thank you’ when he is given something good, but you cannot cause him to truly experience deep feelings of gratitude and appreciation in his heart.

Perhaps this is why grateful people have always been in short supply. I am referring to the truly grateful, not the masses that only profess gratefulness by the tongue but do not possess it in the depths of their hearts. However, like any other tendencies, true gratefulness can be slowly and steadily instilled in one’s being by consistent and diligent observation and practice.

How does abundance come into the picture of gratitude?

To give a weird but vivid analogy, imagine a person living in a dark, claustrophobic and almost airtight pod. Let’s say, for the sake of this analogy, she is able to live solely on air. Her only supply of air streams in from tiny almost imperceptible holes puncturing the surface of the pod. These holes also happen to bring in a little light into her pod.

Abundance is the virtually infinite supply of air that exists as a plenum outside her pod.

Gratitude is the hole that punctures the pod, allowing some air and some light to enter it.

As she lives and breathes in the pod, she is able to notice the tiny holes that have been sustaining her throughout her life. As she has been paying attention to only a fixed area of tiny holes, she thinks those are the only holes that exist to nourish her with much needed air, when in truth, tiny holes dot the entire surface area of the pod.

Every day, she lives a life of struggle, constantly panting and heaving and gasping for air, punctuated only occasionally when she musters the courage and effort to place herself close to an area of holes and really suck in the air from outside the pod.

Let’s say she is not likely to suffer from asphyxiation because she is able to survive on very minimal amounts of air.

One day, she experiences a breakthrough. During one of those rare moments in which she gets the strength to really suck in air from one of the holes on the pod, she notices that her suction had caused the hole to expand in size, thus, the amount of air that streams in increases.

At first, she ignores this phenomenon. But when the effect happens for a second, and a third time, she sets out to turn her hypothesis into a fact. Soon she discovers that there are actually more holes dotting the surface of the pod than she had realised, because of the increased amount of light that enters due to the increasing size of the hole. So she experiments with the other holes dotting the pod, sucking in the outside air with all her might, until eventually, she has a couple of big holes on her pod that bring in really huge amounts of air and light.

Day by day, she continues this new hole-expanding effort of hers. One day, because of the increasing sizes of the holes and the number of holes that have expanded, the structural integrity of the once solid pod diminishes, and she finds that she can easily, almost effortlessly, rip apart the pod as if it were made of paper - hence, finally liberating herself and transcending into a whole new world of abundance.

Bizarre as this analogy might seem, most of us live like the girl in the pod. There are tiny streams of abundance entering our self-imposed imprisoned life. All it takes is our awareness of these sources of sustenance and abundance and to expand our awareness of them, thus increasing our prosperity in all areas of life.

Everything is an asset. Are you sitting on them or are you finding ways and means of fashioning those assets into materials that you would use to design the life of your dreams?

Amazing! FREE e-Book Reveals How You Can Wipe Out All Your Limits & Achieve Your Inherent Unlimited Potential For Wealth, Success & Happiness In Only 30 to 60 Seconds From Now! Only @ Ultimate Secrets of Success

Communication problems are one of the biggest sources of relationship conflict and they can become so serious that complete relationship breakdown results. Often people don’t listen attentively to one another. Active listening is not about agreeing with someone, it is simply about understanding what the other person is trying to say.

It is a structured approach to establishing true understanding in communication yet it can be conducted in a relaxed and informal way so that it flows naturally from the conversation itself. It involves listening, questioning and rephrasing to ensure that the message received is the same as the one intended to be given.

The most important aspect of communication lies not in the speaking, but surprisingly in the listening. This is because that all perception is subjective and every word that we hear is filtered through our personal beliefs and values. Consequently, we can place an emotional meaning on an exchange that is unintended by the speaker.

When we decide to listen actively to someone’s words, we are choosing to be objective and distance ourselves from our own automatic responses. The way we hear someone, can have more to do with us than with the other person. Active listening, therefore, promotes both focused attention and objectivity.

Communication is a two-way process. However, whereas the speaker assumes that the listener is hearing what he intends to say, the listener has the power to clarify meaning and control the exchange. Unfortunately, people often are only half listening to a conversation and are distracted by other things. When they are listening carefully, they are biased in how they hear. No wonder, then, that interpersonal communication is a major problem area for people. We all have different ways of looking at the world and different experiences which can interfere with how we “read” another person and interpret what is being said.

Active listening is the process of focusing on what the speaker is saying and then saying it back in one’s own words to ensure that accurate communication has occurred, i.e. “This is what I heard you say, is this correct?” Active listening encourages mutual understanding. A listener who is practicing active listening can also mirror back to the speaker the emotions that they think he or she is conveying by their words, attitude and body language.

For example, an active listener might say to a speaker “I get the sense that you felt humiliated when …” This allows the speaker to either confirm or deny this or clarify their position further. By mirroring emotions as well as rephrasing the words, the listener can create a strong sense of rapport with the other person by demonstrating empathy and a genuine desire to understand.

There are clear benefits to using active listening skills to enhance interpersonal communication and minimize conflict. Firstly, active listening requires that you actually pay close attention to what the other person is saying. You cannot half listen to someone and at the same time be thinking of something else and expect to understand the other person’s intentions.

So by practicing active listening you choose to deliberately focus your attention on what someone is saying and how they are saying it. Secondly, active listening helps to avoid misunderstandings. The very practice of expressing back to someone what you believe they have said and even how you believe they are feeling about the topic can prevent misinterpretation. Finally, active listening encourages openness and trust because the genuine intention of the hearer is to actually understand the intention of the speaker.

Interpersonal conflict involves a great deal of miscommunication. Each party can contradict the other person’s interpretation of words and events while being equally confident that they are right and the other person is at the least mistaken, and at the most a liar. It is no wonder that such attitudes trigger defensiveness in the other person causing them to either fight back or stop trying.

The way that we perceive other people and what they are attempting to communicate to us is central to the success of our relationships. Once we understand that as listeners we have a large part to play in the success of the communication process, we realize the power of active listening to improve our relationships and change our lives. When both parties to a conversation commit themselves to the process of active listening, conflicts can be resolved and relationships can be strengthened.

Active listening can be used for all forms of interpersonal communication. It can improve communication in the workplace and thus enhance your career. It can also be used to enhance personal relationships at all levels. You can learn active listening skills easily and improve them by practicing. The benefits of doing so will be enormous.

Kevin Sinclair is the publisher and editor of My-Personal-Growth.com, a site that provides information and articles for self improvement and personal growth and development.

As we all know, by now, hopefully, obstacles, setbacks, blocks, negative feedback and over-estimated performance expectations are a natural part of any enterprise or undertaking we have in life. The key, then, which separates the best from the rest, the no-quitter from the quitters, is how to view these initial setbacks and failures. They have different words in their vocabulary to describe these situations.

And more importantly, they have different questions in their mind - whether they’re aware of it or not - which are being asked by themselves whenever they’d encounter these instances.

You see, I’ve encountered a fascinating realisation, an observation of natural phenomena, of the patterns of all things - those which happened in my life, and those which I’ve noted from the lives of others in the past, or even those I’ve observed from fiction.

And what is that?

Truth #1:

There are infinite variables, possibilities and probabilities. Every point in time, every point where we are about to make a decision, and even every significant plot point in a story has a virtually unlimited number of alternative turn-outs.

The pattern of cause & effect is not a linear chain; as in cause leading to effect.

It is more like a web. One cause can possibly produce many effects, or vice-versa, an effect can be the product of a combined number of causes.

That much is obvious.

By the way, I didn’t come to realise this fact from watching a certain pretentiously philosophizing action film currently playing this summer. Please.

Truth #2:

By now, we should all know, hopefully, that there are both objective and subjective levels to every experience we embrace. To be prudent, one must have a balance of placing both objective and subjective labels to their experiences.

Which leads me to tell you to regard an initial setback which you encounter as objectively as possible.

No. Wrong. You should both experience it subjectively, feel the failure, the weight of it pulling you down.

This is good for you to learn from it. The negative experience of encountering a small failure serves to strengthen your memory to not repeat it again. So make use of it.

Then, after you’ve had enough of it, begin to take it objectively. The key is knowing how much and when to feel it subjectively and then objectively.

And when we are viewing this situation in as an objective manner as possible, we see it as merely feedback, a reaction to our actions, an effect of the cause which we trigger.

We find that it is also natural, it is almost supposed to be, but just not what we had intended it to be.

From here, we can jump straight to action, feeling light and free, not shackled by the subjective experience of failure which shines upon it in a negative light.

We can begin to take remedial action to fix, restart, traverse, get over or get around this failure.

How?

Back to Truth #1 concerning the pattern of cause & effect being a web rather than a linear chain.

What did I say? That a cause can have multiple effects. And an effect can have multiple causes.

Your intended result, your goal, your desire, your performance target, is an effect.

If you did not get the effect which you had intended for, then the cause with which you’ve produced that effect is not effective in the sense that you want it to match your initially intended result. However, it is still effective in the sense that it does produce a result, an effect, a reaction.

Therefore, if an effect which you’ve elicited is not the effect that you want, then you need to change the cause!

In simple terms: If at first you fail, try, try, and then try again.

Other words: Never, never, never give up!

Here are some tips and some effective questions to go along with them:

- At every point along the path of your enterprise/undertaking/project, constanstly ask yourself how this can be better. Ask what other options have you. How can this turn out a better or worse way.

Other words: Be open and flexible to other options.

- In the initial planning stage, plot all the steps and all the alternative steps you can take. Make a plan B. A plan C and a contingency plan. Complexity of plan depends upon the complexity of your undertaking and the value of your end reward. Though this may not always be true.

- Ask some effective meta-questions to aid you in learning from mistakes and setbacks and applying the proposed improvements and modifications to previously lacking performance standards.

Ask these questions to help you learn how to apply the answers and ideas you may get about how to improve the way you work so that you can bounce back up from your failure and continue.

The questions are:

What is really going on here? What is the truth behind this situation?

What do people tell me is wrong? What do people tell me is the cause of this problem? Are they correct? Are they 100% accurate?

What do I think? Is my view 100% accurate? How do I know?

Am I looking at it subjectively or objectively? How can I view it more objectively? Have I felt enough of a subjective emotional experience to this setback? Why must I now view it more objectively? What if I am viewing it objectively already?

What are the alternative ways to achieve my target? How else can I do/be/have (state your intended goal here)?

What will each alternative way lead to?

What are the positive and negative points about each path?

What will I gain and lose if I go a certain way?

How can I maintain an open mind to alternative methods which are in line with my principles?

Why must I maintain an open mind to alternative methods which are in line with my principles?

What would it be like if I am already maintaining an open mind to alternative methods which are in line with my principles?

You can think of some more questions for yourself, can you?

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