The importance of creating boundaries in your life

Setting personal boundaries is a way of protecting and taking care of you. It is important to be able to tell people when they are performing in ways that are not acceptable. It is also important to be able to know that you have the right and duty to protect and defend yourself. It is not only your right to protect and defend yourself; it is your responsibility to be clear on how you want others to treat you.

It is important that you learn how to state your feelings verbally and let people know how you feel in a way that communicates clearly. By stating your feelings verbally you affirm your right to your feelings. By affirming your feelings it allows you to begin taking responsibility for yourself and your life. Owning yourself, your reality and your voice is empowering. The result of self ownership allows other people to hear and understand you clearly.

Setting boundaries is not a more sophisticated way of manipulation. Some people might say that they are setting boundaries when in fact they are attempting to manipulate people and situations. The difference between setting boundaries and manipulation is that boundaries are healthy and it gives people choices. Also setting boundaries allow you the freedom to let go of the outcome. Whereby, manipulation is not a clear form of communication and it exploits people into doing what you want them to do by using methods that cause confusion. This confusion creates outcomes that only the manipulator is clear about.

It is unhealthy to have relationships with people who have no boundaries, who cannot communicate directly, honestly and freely. Learning how to set boundaries is important and necessary for you to be a friend to yourself and others. It is your responsibility to take care of and to protect yourself. It is important to love, honor and respect yourself. You cannot truly love yourself if you do not take responsibility. Loving yourself allows you the opportunity and freedom to be a creator in your life.

Photo Courtesy of SkyWhisper

Below are a few examples of boundaries:

Setting boundaries with people who are upset
Please do not shout at me. Lower, your voice or I will not have this conversation

Setting boundaries when at work
Please do not call me at work to discuss personal issues. I only conduct personal issues at home in the evening.

Setting boundaries for critical people
I thank you for your comment with regard to my personal appearance
It is not okay for you to discuss my hair or weight. I find that it offends me.

Setting boundaries with friends who borrow money
It is important that you pay back money you owe or I will not loan you any money in the future.

There are many kinds of boundaries that you can create. The following is a list of areas that might require setting boundaries:
Boundaries for space
Boundaries for time
Boundaries for money
Boundaries for work
Boundaries for family
Boundaries for adults
Boundaries for sex

I hope that this article gives you some insights into creating boundaries for yourself.

Noreen Sumpter, Personal Life Coach: works with High Achievers who feel trapped in their private life and helps them build up their personal confidence and self-esteem. By helping you clear mental clutter and dissolve limiting beliefs, you can take deliberate steps, own your voice, speak your truth and have the freedom to Live Life Your Way.

   “Live Life Your Way”    www.noreensumptercoach.com 
Call 718-834-9450 or e-mail noreen@noreensumptercoach.com
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Traits of the Successful: Create the Vision of your Ideal Self

As a coach, I have the opportunity to interact with hundreds of individuals. What I have found is that the people who are successful and fulfilled in their lives have a common traits.
– They believe their success has little to do with what they have, and more to do with who they are.
– They are committed to the kind of person they want to be.
– They step into their vision and are accountable for their behavior.

The quality of your life is determined by the way you play. How you play is based on what you believe about yourself. Consider that the beliefs you have, even if you are not conscious about it is the way that you are conducting your life.

Photo Courtesy of momono

It is important that you create an ideal of yourself. First, create a vision of how you would like you and your future to be. Your picture has to be clear, depicting what you want in your life. It has to be so clear that all your senses recognize it as a source of what motivates you. Simply put, it has to be a powerful source that can support you when you feel disempowered and helpless. This vision has to keep your dream self alive and active.

Your ideal self is an attitude, a way of life that is worth going for. Your ideal self is a big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG) bigger than who you are today. Your ideal self has all the traits of self confidence, self esteem, self value, and self reliance. Your ideal self is you at your highest and only point. Finally, you have to practice showing up in your life “as if” you are already this being.

Believe it or not, you possess both positive and negative traits. It is important to identify all your positive traits and expand them. Then in turn do the same with your negative traits and learn how to manage or discard them. Example, most people who consider themselves shy. Admire people who are outgoing and energetic. What they do not realize is that they too have these traits. However, they need to promote these qualities and expand them instead of feeding the negative traits.

It’s time to challenge yourself. Stop being a victim, and create your ideal self. It is time to rise up! Create an ideal powerful self. You’re no longer a child. Life is thrilling. Let’s live it.

– Look at the quality of your life.
– Acknowledge your level of happiness.
– Acknowledge your positive and negative traits.
– Decide what is working or not working.
– Look at what is missing in your life and what you want to keep, add or discard.
– Expand and gain new skills, knowledge and communications.
– Start a daily practice of your new traits.
– Have patience and take baby steps.

Don’t give up and remember Rome was not built in a day!

Making Your New Year’s Resolutions

You can make one of these kinds of resolutions, but I am going to request that as one of my readers you go deeper. If you do, you can achieve all of these resolutions and more, from a place of who you are being, not what you are doing?
Here are some of the usual resolutions:

Spend time with family
Get fit, loose weight and fight the battle of the bulge
Quit Smoking
Get present and enjoy life
Quit Drinking
Get out of debt
Learn something new
Have fun

Photo Courtesy of Isabel Bloedwater

Would you be willing to throw out making a resolution this year and make a commitment? Would you be willing to be honest with yourself? This year would you be willing to try on BEING YOU. Being who you are completely?

Being you is one of the most attractive FULLING presents that you could ever give and be. One where when you make a choice fulfilled from a place of your word and love of yourself? How many of you would be willing to do that? This resolution will be coming from your being. Your human beingness not like the resolutions which comes from doingness.

What would your life look like if you truly made a commitment to just be yourself this year? Suppose you made a resolution to really get real with yourself. It would mean that you would have to get down to the root of you. You would could take on being vulnerable and courageous and living a life were you could have a life that you live, not a the life that you made up to look good and please others. But the life that is truly yours. It would mean looking at the things that you love about yourself. As for the things that you do not love about yourself, you would be committed to learn to accept them for all that they are and all that they are not.

Photo Courtesy of Jeff_Golden

Falling in love with you is the best resolution for 2012

So could you imagine for a moment a part of your body that you are always working on and are just being okay with it? For me it was the band of fat that lives around my stomach. But it just your stomach. When you are ready to release it, you just do. You do not have to make it wrong. I have learned to love that band of fat around my stomach because I have discovered the more I detest or hate it, the more it grows. What we resist, persists. So can you imagine for one second falling in love with your band of fat or those legs or thighs or that nose or whatever it is that you say you hate. What if you just accepted it as a part of you and learned to honor it.

So what if this year you gave yourself the gift of finding out who you really are and bring that you everywhere you went, instead of hiding out and not being yourself. So being who you really are and not who you think that you are supposed to be. Can you imagine the peace you would have knowing what pressure and stress you could release from your life instead of trying to be someone or something different from your true self. What if you just focused on being yourself completely. What if you focused on your life by the contributions that you make from just being you? What does it feel like to be known, heard and understood on a real open level? When you are being you, there is no longer any noise. There is just you being present in the moment and time.

Being yourself takes courage; courage is whole heartedly just being you. When you make a commitment to just being yourself and let go of all the false conversations that disempower you and make you feel bad about yourself. In this kind of commitment, when you are living in the now, there is nothing wrong. You are enough. You don’t have to look good, you can just look. There are no right people, there are just people. You don’t have to be smart. Whatever you say is the right thing. You don’t have to please people or be anything other than who you are. Being yourself is liberating. At first it can be uncomfortable, but once you get the distinguish that there is not right way or wrong way for you to be, life begins to unfold in a very exciting and amazing way, the worries and stress disappear. Life happens.

In 2012 be honest with yourself. Tell the truth to yourself be insightful. Your self worth is not based on what you do or how you look. Your self worth is personal. Having external definitions of who you are keep you trapped and rob you of your peace of mind, freedom and full self expression. It robs you of your God given opportunity of your creative source. When you get straight and honest with yourself, you are giving yourself an opportunity to know yourself for who you really are and then you share that with everyone and you begin to see people as the human that you become. Your life then becomes fuller. The meaning that you will give to your life will have purpose.

This year 2012, go to work on being who you really are. I would say practice but to be honest, your life is not a test drive, you are not practicing life. So this is why I say go to work on being honest with yourself. A lot of people might think that you are crazy. Don’t worry about it. You know you are not crazy. You are having fun with you, showing up being who you really are, bringing you to the party. When you bring you to the party of life, you will have more fun that you can imagine. You will realize that you are the party. You bring the party and the party comes to you. You will never ever again sit around waiting for any party to happen. Because you will bring the party in you. You will never have to censor your thoughts, dreams, and ideas. You will be present. You will be aware of the life that surges through your body. Your confidence will bloom. Your self-esteem will expand. You will be and become attractive- strangers will feel your energy and want to know you. Your friends will notice a difference in your way of being. You will notice a difference in your being. You will learn that there is no doing anything right. You will just let go and just be. How yummy could your life look like?

Being yourself

Be honest, speak your truth.
Fall in love with you.
When your integrity or your promises go out, put that back in.
Forgive yourself and others.
Get present- live in the moment.
You deserve to live the expression of you.
You are amazing.
You’re perfect inside your imperfections.
Be courageous with your choices and decisions.
Appreciate and integrate gratitude in your life.

If you would like help being you and want find out more about being yourself completely without the extraneous internal conversations. Contact me. I would love to speak with you. I am offering all the Readers a 40% of coupon for a Get Acquainted Call. Write to Tanya@NoreenSumpterCoach.com to set up your one on one call with me. HAPPY NEW YEAR. (Offer expires 1/15/2012. Offer transferable.)

Looking Back on Your Past

This morning, I started my Vision for 2012, and I thought about all of you. Do you create a Vision for the new year? And how do you do it?

We often look back on the year and go over all the ways we failed. I wanted to do this but I failed. I was supposed to do this but I’m not good enough. Stop it! Would you put your best friend down like this. No! If you did, what type of friend would you be. Instead, think about what you accomplished in the different areas of your life. Write about it like you are getting an award. The idea is to look at your life as a review that would look like your own life commercial review. To give you an idea of what I mean, here’s mine:

Photo courtesy of motone

Personal Development

I have fully reorganized my business. I have registered into the Landmark Forum and am doing a program called ‘Introduction Leaders Program’. It is a developmental program where I get to develop myself as a leader. In this program I get to look at myself from a place of power and create possibilities that I can live into. I look at what is missing in my life not what is wrong and create a possibility that calls to me into action and has me transform areas of my life that are important to me.

Relationships and Dating

I am seeing a man. After not dating for nearly 2 years unaware of the length of time I had not been intimate. I am seeing an amazing man who is sexy, powerful, open, honest, smart, and generous who has a stand for mankind where fairness on the planet and in his homeland is important. I am having a level of intimacy, I have never known. I am sharing myself openly and honestly.

I am asking for support in my life. Support is full circle for me. I give. Now, I allow others to give to me.

I have allowed my nurturing qualities to unfold and I love it. It is no longer exclusive to children. It is open to everyone.

I am trusting that everything that I choose will and can contribute to my life and there are no accidents on the planet.

I have lost a few friends this year that I love and will always love. However, it was far too much work to continue to play with them. So I released them with love. I have reached out to my brothers, one of which is up to starting a relationship with me where we are family. The other is mad at me and wants nothing to do with me. I will continue to reach out. He is my brother my blood and I love him. I don’t have to agree with anything he does or does not do. I can agree to disagree and not make him wrong.

Photo Courtesy of Jeditrilobite

Business and Career Development

I am growing my business; I have reorganized my business from the inside out and updated and upgraded all my prices. I have upgraded my skills and I am more in love with my business than ever before.
I continue to love the clients I have and I am ready to attract new clients.

Health and Well-Being

I have lost 25 lb.. and lost 2 dress sizes with the help of Gregg Barthelemy AKA Dr. Evil. Dr. Evil is one of the best things that have happened to me in 2011. He has not stood for any of my whining about the pushups that I could not do. I can now do 20 pushups, yes with struggle but I can do them. I am now a size 12. My goal is health and well-being is great and I am working toward being a size 10.

I am in great physical and emotional health. I am happy, I have been eating well. I still need to integrate water into my diet. I juice every day and I love it.

I have chosen vulnerability and I am in love with myself and love every part of who I am. I am looking throughout my life and ridding myself of old stagnant conversations that will be upgraded and ways of being that no longer serve my me or my life.
Looking back at the past year, you will see what you have accomplished and how far you have come.

How to Overcome Fear and Limiting Beliefs

Fear is an emotional response to an impending threat or danger.  It is one of our most basic responses.  Most of the fears that we experience today in our society are imagined. We experience the fear of rejection, fear of failure, fear of success.  All kinds of fears – many of which are attached to our belief systems.   

Photo courtesy of ia7mad

I used to have a fear of going to the movies by myself.  While I longed to go to the movies, I refused to go alone.  I had a fear of being molested by a man wearing a beige raincoat that was cinched at the waist.  This was something that I had heard as a child and added to my belief system.  How ridiculous!  However, as I grew older I realized that I had this fear of going alone, but I could not remember why.  It wasn’t until I accepted that I was afraid that I was able to see what my fear was, where it came from, and how it came to be. My older brother used to take me to the movies when I was younger and in order to keep us in line he would tell us about the old man in the beige coat that would take us away and do awful things to us. What I realized was that I had internalized a lot of that story and it followed me for years.  I was 30 years old when I finally went to the movies by myself.  Yep, 30 years old.  Some people might say that’s crazy. However, in my mind I was still young and very afraid. Consequently, that was what my limiting belief looked like.  It was an old condition that kept me from succeeding and going to the movies by myself.   
 
Limiting beliefs interfere with many aspects of our lives.  There are all kinds of limiting beliefs that stop us from succeeding. Fear of Failure is a huge limiting belief.  I recently had the opportunity to meet a woman who was raised middle class, but because of her experience attending a school with children who were not middle class, she developed the limiting belief of not deserving. Because her friends did not have, she stopped asking her parents for the things she wanted. She did not want to feel like a show off because of her nice clothes and her toys and gadgets.  If she did get something she used it at home and refused to wear clothes that were better than her peers.   

Fast forward into adulthood. Her limiting belief manifested into not having made enough money to live on.  She always squeaked by with just enough money for her basic needs, but never enough for extras.  As a result of her limiting belief, she has never developed the confidence to ask for the salary that she wanted and conditioned herself to not have any idea about the amount money she wants to make.  So she lives in a world of not enough and not deserving.   

Photo courtsey of _Blippo_

Limiting beliefs can show up in lots of different ways and if the limiting belief is something that you developed as a child. It grows up with you into an adult-sized limiting belief system. In order to succeed and clear your limiting beliefs, you have to submerge and focus your mind with positive thoughts.  You have to starting creating the reality you want.  You cannot for one moment allow old limiting beliefs to enter your mind and re-root themselves.  It takes effort, courage and knowing in your gut that limiting beliefs can be overcome. 

How to Stop Fearing Change

Fear of change, keeps you small
So you avoid discomfort by making excuses.
How is that going for you?

I cannot afford it, I have to wait, I don’t know. Oh my God, I have to make that call and I forget. Why don’t they just stop contacting me? Why is she continuing to talk about this again and again? I really want to but… my head, my children, I have to ask my husband. These are some the many excuses we make up in our lives when the change you requested starts to come.

What are the excuses that have you playing small in your life? Above are a myriad of excuses that I have heard and that I have also used in my life. However, I now know when my ego is messing with me. It is working hard on stopping me from doing the things I want to do but I am afraid to do.

My fear shows up around money, I get a triggered. I feel it in my solar plexus and I start the nagging internal dialog. My internal dialog doesn’t have language, it just has feelings. However, what I have found is that if I do not choose that thing that will impact my life positively. I’ll spend the money on something or another that really has no educational or emotional impact on my life and my life stays the same. Whereby, when I think of spending money on a course, seminar, workshop and or coach that would transform my mindset, it causes me emotional upheaval in my subconscious because my ego so big. It is does not like change and responds by making me mad at myself.

I have listened to woman who, like myself, have attended workshops. It is so amazing to hear the conversations and about the way they hear things and interpret them. Be aware it is the ego, it stands in the way of your greatness. It is also has a way of being arrogant. You know that you need help, but you refuse to take it.

In my work, I hear and see a lot of what is happening in the back ground of women’s life. I hear all the little conversations and disguises that are put on when you have not set up strong, personal boundaries in your life. I also hear when you’re trying to manipulate people into doing something that you want without using your verbal skills. I also hear when you are trying to ‘fake’ knowing something when is really okay not to know it. I also hear when you job runs your life and you have no personal activities going on in your life. I hear the bitterness in some that is so bitter it impacts their whole environment. (Not a judgment, just an observation.)

I also have the keen intuition of knowing and recognize when someone else’s anxiety is coming from being overwhelmed, not trusting or being present with your life. When you have all the accoutrements that money can buy, you’re great at your job but you do not your personal life. You’re amazing people, you are strong and many times you are very very afraid of your own personal power. Ask me how I know. I have been there.

It does not work for me that woman do not know their power, they feel something other than their true selves all the time or suffer inside from behaviors that no longer work for them. All because they are afraid of what people are going to say about them. It is important to know that it is none of your business what people say about you. Ladies the fear of change, the lack of confidence and self esteem in your personal life keeps your small in your personal life and to avoid discomfort, you make up excuses.

Hey How is that going for you.

Call me and let me know

How to Stop Feeling Guilty

Guilt leaves you feeling YUCKY. Guilt is a very dis-empowering action. The majority of the women I come in contact with as a Confidence and Self Esteem Expert experience tremendous guilt. They feel guilty around their children, friends, family and the list goes on. However, when you are in love with yourself, you have a strong sense of security and you can step out of the guilty behavior. Letting go of guilt enables you to make deliberate choices allowing you to own the process of loving yourself.

One experiences Guilt when they do not act or behave like the rest of the group or clique. You will often experience ridicule or criticism because they want to you to behave or act in a particular way. So they will try to gain power over you by trying to make you feel guilty. Guilt is used by everyone. However, when you have confidence and a strong self-esteem, this form of behavior has no power over you because you come from your heart as you are courageous. With courage you know that you are in charge of your life.

When you do not have courage, lack confidence, and self-esteem, you come from a place of manipulation. You engage in power struggles to get a desired behavior from another person. Many people use silence coupled with withdrawal of affection/love to dominate their friends, family and children. This kind of behavior just is not loving. You are further endorsing that you are not enough, or that you are not acceptable for other people because you have to engage in power struggles to get what you desire.

If you engage in this kind of manipulative guilt breeding behavior, it is important that you surrender this combative tactic. We all want to experience freedom without guilt but to experience freedom we have to let others experience the freedom we want for ourselves.

Learning to detach ourselves from reactions and our emotions is necessary when the negative takes a hold of you. When we pull ourselves out of center where we lose all sense of who we are because we have become upset, bitter and all manner of things that separate us from others. You have to learn to love yourself with kindness not from a place of judgment; judgment separates you from others and yourselves. It sets you up to fail so you cannot be free. When you judge people for the things they do, what they have, do not have or how they act, you are also setting yourself up in the judgment that you have woven for another. When you set up this kind of web, you have now told yourself that you can only accept yourself under certain circumstances and conditions. If attaining these conditions and circumstance becomes difficult, you have now put yourself in a place where you have no freedom. You have now placed a very harsh way of being on yourself, filled with self-criticism, where you are not good enough. When you give up and love yourself unconditionally, you will experience yourself with naturally experiencing confidence and self-esteem. Confidence and Self-Esteem will naturally attract positivity to you.

Make time for happiness

A good portion of women are too busy making themselves busy so they don’t have a minute to look at the true picture of their life.  They are too busy to call a friend or too busy to return a call.  They are too busy to be the yes that they said they’d be.  What is all this busy-ness?  We have a ton of technology available to us at the drop of a dime.  Literally a drop of a dime and yet we are way too busy.  Now the with cellphones less than half a yard away from your elbow inside your bag or pocket it remains impossible to return a simple call, to a client, a potential suitor, a doctor anybody.

Two happy girls

Well, you don’t understand, I am really busy.  How busy can you be?  Are you running a small country?  What is it that you are doing in your life that has you so busy that nothing has changed in the last 3 years? I have a running conversation with clients that say to me that they are too busy to do something that they say is important to them.  Important things like their friends, their health and wellbeing.  They want to date, fix their finances or change something in their life.  Well, what I say is you are not running a city or a small country.  For instance look at Rudy Guilliani, the mayor of New York City 1994-2001. Here was a man that was busy, running NYC, visiting other states and countries and still he still found time to have a wife and then cheat on her.  Now that’s busy.  If you not running a small city, visiting other countries having a marriage and an extra marital affair, you’re not that busy. Come on!

What’s really going on is that you do not have a system to manage yourself, and you do not have a relationship with your word.  How do I know this?  Well, I know this because when the conversation comes up about you being unavailable, not following up on your promises, and not being your word, then you get triggered.  You shut down become resigned.  Some of you might even become angry.  This is not a judgment; it is something that I have experienced.

If all the things that you say you would love to have or experience are really that important to you, then it is important that you carve out time for yourself.  There is more than enough time in the day to handle what it is that you say that you desire.  The first question to ask yourself is: Am I happy?  What’s happiness got to do with time? What has happiness go to do with anything?  Well, I have come to understand that people that are happy with themselves desire to remain happy.  They share.  They are often times enjoying the work that they have chosen for themselves.  They are busy, but they are organized.  It is this kind of happiness that is important to them.  They do not want anything to interfere with their happiness.  So they make the time to do the things that is important to them and schedule time to handle all the other things.  They are happy and they want to share it with friends so they create time to talk with friends.  They are not interested in getting sick so they will create time to go to the doctor and keep a handle on their wellbeing.  They have created structure to keep on doing the thing that they enjoy doing.

 

 

 

Happiness is something that one can do for oneself. However, it is something that is better shared with another.  When you are happy in your life you become aware of whom you are.  So if you desire a deep relationship with another person, it’s important that you become aware of yourself.

The comments above are not here to make you feel wrong or written as a judgment.  I have written them as a way to have you look inside and understand that sometimes you are not aware of what you’re doing or how it impacts your life and the lives of the people you say are important to you.  It is important to see them so that you can realize how important it is to learn to concentrate and focus your mind where you choose.  You can elevate your thinking and your choices to a higher ideal rather than just merely having a view or no view at all and remain stuck thinking that your business is real and you have no time.   Then when people say that you are not managing your time or you wasted their time being busy, you don’t find yourself feeling attacked or defending yourself.

It is as though you are too afraid to take a minute to just sit down and smell the roses.  Many  women have discovered the age old art of making themselves wrong so they have something to distract them from just taking a minute to sit down and reflect.  Happiness appears as this elusive thing they are searching for.  Some are looking for it in the arms of the next lover before completing with the last one.  Some are looking for it at the end of the credit card in the next pair of designer shoes.  This is not a judgment.

What I do know is that a lot of woman are really craving, desiring and would like to have the kind of happiness that just makes you heart sing.  The kind of happiness that you feel when you are taking time out to do something that you really enjoy doing, that ignites your passion and get your juices flowing.  No ladies, not that kind.  At least not at this moment;  I mean the kind of passion that I experience when I am riding my bike and the wind is whipping around my helmet and I see life’s pleasures like a flower that had just broken through the earth.

 

 

How to Feel More Secure

Security exists internally.  Most people look for security as an external experience.  They think it is either something or someone in the world that can give security to them and that makes them feel secure.  No one or nothing can make you feel secure.  Security is something that you give to yourself first.  Like most things, if you cannot give it to yourself then no one can give it to you.  Nothing or no one can give you the security you are looking for, so if you are seeking it in a boyfriend, girlfriend, marriage, money, none of these things can make you feel secure until you feel internally secure.

 

Image of Woman typing on computer

 

Security, acknowledgement, and praise are all individual personal feelings.  One of the only ways you can ever feel secure is by giving security to yourself. The love that you need, a sense of belonging, a feeling of safety in your world, being able to self-validate, acknowledging yourself and recognizing your own accomplishments are the gifts that you give yourself.  Ultimately only you can fill your needs.

 

Security is a sense of having something in your life that calls you, that is bigger than you are it pulls you, your attracted to it.  When you are secure in your life the petty upsets are small in comparison to what  you’re up to.  When you are secure you have projects, you are growing and you are not looking outside of yourself for love.  You don’t have unattainable rules in place to give you a sense of security.  You are busy loving you and loving another in that order. You are not looking for the person to love you.  You’re not looking for the person to call you to check in, or you are not waiting to hear the words I love you.  You are being I love you- it becomes your natural way of being and your experience of love lives freely.  That kind of love is not a demand that is practiced in a specific way of so many calls a week, so many hugs, keeping score of how many times the person says I love you. The bickering about who always says what first.   That kind of love is not secure and has no space for freedom in it and the joy is sucked out of the love in a way that causes insecurity and you can become shut down or anxiety driven.

 

Woman looking out window

 

When you are secure you have an experience of growth and expansion in your life.  Your view of the world is a bigger place and the feel of the universe is abundant you feel known. When you feel secure you are open, you share yourself abundantly, you are willing to take risks and you experience an opportunity to be who you really are.

 

Many people are on a mission to keep their world safe by not speaking up for themselves, or no speaking at all.  Feeling like they cannot trust anyone and always living in a space of fear.  Consequently, when you live in a space of fear your world gets smaller and you experience even more insecurity.  However, when you face your fears your world expands and you feel stronger and secure in other areas of your life and you discover that you true feeling of security exists when you can meet your own needs without being a demand for security from others.  Give yourself a life filled with happiness where security is your own responsibility and what comes from others is a blessing that is received with gratitude.

 

 

 

What Does Present Mean To You

I would like to you to take a few minutes and really think about the word present and what it means to you.  Present.

Fall leaves

 

Are you being present to everything in your life? I want you to just stop for a moment and watch your thoughts go by as you focus on the word present and how it occurs for you in your life.

 

Watch the feelings that the word present conjurers up or even if you get no feeling at all.   Be present to it.  There is no right or wrong way in your feelings – they are yours and yours alone.
Now I want to do a little experiment, this experiment is a contrast.  I would like you to think of the word past and what it means to you.  Past.  I want you to look at not everything but some thing in your past.   Then take a moment and watch your thoughts about your past.  I want you to watch them go by and look at how it occurs in your life.

 

See where in your past are you stuck and what are the feelings that come up or even if there aren’t any feelings at all. Focus on your past.  Look at what you feel, smell or taste.  Just be with it.

 

Now I would like you to do the same with your future.  I would like you to focus on the future.  Look at it for a moment – how does it make you feel or not feel.  Does it look bright or does it seem scary? Do you have control in your future?  Focus on it.  Watch it go by and how it occurs to you.
What are the images that you create about yourself when you speak to other people? Are their people that you can share yourself with completely ?  Are there things about yourself that you can candidly share that lift you up or pull you down?

 

How do certain images about yourself get played out in your life?  Are they healthy?  What do you do to keep them at bay? Do you have external ways of keeping them at bay?

 

I would like you to create a high image of yourself, seeing the things that you really would like to accomplish.

Exercises

1 – I would like you to create an image of yourself and then ask your friends to hold that specific image for you.  Ask them to picture you succeeding at something that you really want to accomplish.  It does not matter what it is, what matters is that it is important to you.  This is a very confronting exercise.  You have to be willing to hold yourself accountable.

 

2 – What is something that you would like to give up in this present moment? How has that thing impacted your life?  Is it something that belongs to you that have created.  Why did you create it?  What was the purpose – Happiness, Protection, or a Value?  What did you use this for? What would your life look like if you gave it up?

Haters

You know you’re a Hater, just admit you hate on everything about yourself. You hate on others who reflect the things you hate about yourself, whether they are successful or not.  You haters are everywhere.  You hate on yourself and you destroy your dreams, by saying things like: ‘Its too hard.’  ‘I don’t have enough time.’  ‘I don’t have the money.’  You’re a hater and some of you are lazy haters.  You use your hate to sabotage yourself and make yourself wrong.  Get real, you know you do.  As a personal life coach working in Brooklyn, I work with people all over the nation.  I also have clients in France and England.  Hating is not a national practice, it is a universal practice.  As a hater, you are always looking for things to hate on yourself about.  You’ve worked really hard to build your confidence and self-esteem only to smash it across the rocks.  How long you’ll sit on the rocks is entirely up to you.

 

Being a hater impacts your world from the inside out, eroding your confidence and self-esteem.  This has you point the perpetual finger at another person or thing, instead of being responsible for your actions.  Haters, hate themselves, that is what they do.
In order to avoid haters, it is important for you to look inside yourself and realize that you are the one true hater.  You are the saboteur; you are the killer of your dreams and ideas.  You’re the one that does not keep your word to yourself or others.  You are the one that is constantly in fear, hiding your greatness.  Many of you believe that the hater is external, when in fact the hater is with you 100% of the time. The big truth is it’s internal.

 

Start a revolution, stop hating your body

 

Babe, you’re the one that hurts you, fills you up with feelings of rejection, no one can reject you ever.  Rejection is rejection when you see it as so.  Someone says something and you get mentally interrupted, pull yourself off course and hurt yourself.  Rejection is not what you think it is.  A person that is committed to their dream goes out looking for the ‘no’s because they know it brings them closer to their dream.  Some see it as failure.  There is no such thing as failure. Thomas J. Watson is attributed with saying “If you want to succeed, double your failure rate”.  There is no such thing as rejection, and no one ever fails.  No man, woman or child on this planet can reject you.  You reject you and you deem yourself as failure.  People can say what they say, but you are the only person that can take that feeling in and hurt your own feelings.  You have the power and the strength to recognize your own pain or the pain that you inflict on yourself.

 

If there is an image or idea that you are not happy with in yourself recreate it.  Stop deceiving yourself.  Create another truth or reality, then make your own truth of who you are by not seeing yourself as the victim.  You are an incredible human being.  Every time you refuse to accept and acknowledge your power, beauty, truth or wisdom, you’re making yourself a victim.  When you are riding the waves of your own self-pity or are feeling depressed; start by working on recognizing that you’re lying to yourself and not coming from your personal truth.  When you lie to yourself, you carry that feeling around with you and it is replayed back to you in the world by the energy that you are transmitting. Know that energy begets energy.  Believe this, your world begins with your thoughts and words.  You are not a target of some universal lotto that selected your name to be a victim in some universal drama.  It your own personal drama that you created.

Stop Hating Sign

An example is when you traverse, (I like the word traverse) the world thinking you are ‘ugly’, ‘fat’, ‘stupid’, ‘not enough’, then you will begin to set up the resonance in your energy field that you are all those things, the result of this is you will now attract people and events that mirror your thoughts.  You will begin to hear, see and experience those thoughts all around you.  Wah!  As you begin to clean up that energy and shift it to being ‘attractive’, ‘smart’ (you can learn) and ‘enough’, the universe will begin to reflect back at you.  You have recreated and now this becomes your truth.  Whatever you believe be it negative or positive, that is your word and that is what you have now created in your world.

 

Practice holding in your mind and heart a higher vision of yourself, releasing all those things that are negative and shut you down.  Replace them with positive thoughts that open up your heart.  The experience might be scary at first and feel uncomfortable, but the more you practice, like any skill, the better you will become.  Your world will become light, bright and you will be happier.  When you begin to generate higher thoughts about yourself that you are beautiful, powerful and you have enough of what you need, you will see those thoughts reflected back at you. You will see and experience abundance in your world.

 

Consequently, there is no such thing as a hater.  Remember the hater is really you turned in on yourself.

Write a description of your life as you see it and as it is today.

Find two or more qualities that you do not like about yourself and recreate them into something that you do like.

Then create an action that you would like to take to and generate a positive experience.

Finally, dissolve by sharing it with people you love.

Making Time For Friends

Friends are people you connect with.  They are people who make you feel comfortable enough to  fully share your self.  You become involved with these friends because you’re attracted to their characteristics, energy and personality.  You choose to remain friends with them because you enjoy their company and have a mutually honest and respectful relationship. You trust your friend with your secrets, ideas, thoughts and feelings.  You feel secure with these people you call friends.

Friends together
Powerful friendships allow you to give and receive.  They allow you a place to express and share your common interests and find new ones together.  Good friendships allow you to develop your self, obtain new skills and learn to relate.  The power from these kinds of friendships is that they help to meet your needs for acceptance and let you know you belong.

The company of good friends is a beautiful thing.  However, it can be for some people very difficult to cultivate and maintain.  If you remember back when you were young, making friends was easy.  You were exposed to people your own age who had similar interests and life circumstances – who were available to form friendships and whose only responsibilities were generally homework, hobbies and a few chores.  The supply of friendship and time were abundant and not much mattered.  You had plenty of time to have your friendships develop and blossom naturally.

As we grew and left school, adulthood arrived with its many responsibilities of paying bills, developing careers and looking for mating prospects. Friends started to go in various directions.  Creating and developing new friendships does not appear as abundant as they once were.  When you meet new people you’re compatible with, you have to schedule time to develop the relationship.  However, the general truth according to what people say is that they just do not have enough time.  People are constantly complaining about not having enough time.  However, we are are all apportioned the same amount of time-  24 hours per day.  It all depends on what you do with it.  Do you use it or do you waste and lose it?  Are you so booked and scheduled that you can’t muster the energy to make an invitation for lunch?  Are your lunch breaks usually booked?  Do you barely have time to take lunch cause you’re running errands or working at your desk through lunch?

friends arm in arm

Like anything you have to commit.  I have clients who are constantly telling me that they don’t have any friends and they have a hard time making new friends. However, after working with me, you discover that as you begin to align time with your priorities, your opportunities for friendship increase.  You will discover that you are the one who has to decide who you’re going to be friends with.

Trust is one of the issues that people who do not have friends are always concerned about.  However the lack of trust, I have discovered, is internal.  When self trust is developed, you start to give trust differently.  If it is friends and relationship that you want to develop, then you have to start taking risks and being approachable.

Here are some questions that I ask my clients:

What do you want in a friendship?  On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you without friendships?
What do you believe that having friends would add to your life?
What actions do you take that allow you to meet and make new friends?
What do you do that keep friends away?
What do you do that pollutes your friendship?
If you were to transform and deepen your friendships what would that be like?