I Thrive Here

Be thine own palace, or the world's thy jail.~John Donne

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Getting A Late Start This Year? Here Are The Top 5 Things You Can Do To Make 2018 YOUR YEAR And Finish Strong!

Wow! It is hard to believe that we are already three and a half months into 2018. Are you wondering how the time has passed so quickly? How far are you into accomplishing your goals for this year? Have you even started working on them? Before you rush off into a panic of trying to catch up on the things you wanted to get done this year, think about this. Have you clearly defined them? Have you set measurable steps to reach your goals and have you set defined deadlines for getting them done? Well, if you are in a bit of a rush now, I would believe that you haven’t and let me be the first to tell you, you are not alone. In fact, the majority of people do not have defined and detailed goals much less having them written them out. Instead most people have somewhat vague and general ideas of the things they want to do in life, their careers, and/or businesses. While some people can “get lucky” and experience a moderate level of success, most do not.

Without having a vivid and detailed plan it can be hard to stay motivated and focused on achieving your goals. It can be a bit like trying to hit a moving target in the dark. Your chance of hitting the mark is not good. But do not fear, because even though you may be starting late, if you know what to do and how to do it you can finish strong and enjoy many amazing accomplishments this year. So how do you do it? Here are 5 things you can do to make a real difference in this year over the last one.

 

I.  Take the time to visualize, to meditate, and to affirm what is important to you WITH FEELING! – You have to be clear on what you are trying to do. You need details and clarity when it comes to your goals. Generalizations do not provoke the emotion and feeling that makes up strong beliefs when it comes to your dreams of what is to be in your life. If your goal is to help others, you must be able to see in your mind the results of your efforts. You must see the smiling faces of those you wish to help. You must feel the warmth that comes from the gratitude of those you have assisted.

If it is material objects that you desire such as an exotic automobile. You must imagine slipping into the driver’s seat, the feel of the steering wheel as your hands clasps around it. You must hear the roar of the engine as you glide down the road, feel the pull of the inertia on your body as you cling to the curves in the road. Feel the contour of the seat against your back and hear your favorite music blaring from the speakers as the wind is whipping through your hair.

If it is a magnificent home, you must experience it fully as you walk down its halls and through each of its rooms. You must notice the smallest details such as your personal pictures hanging on the wall and your possessions throughout its interior. Feel your bed as you sink into utter comfort the moment you lie down. Picture yourself, your friends and family as you have dinner together; socializing in the kitchen as the meal is being prepared. Seeing them around the table engaged in conversation with one another as each in turn flashes a knowing and appreciative smile to you for bringing them together on this enjoyable evening.

Meditate on these thoughts, feel the emotion of the experiences, feel the gratitude of this being yours as if it already is. Take a few moments several times a day including when you first wake up and right before you go to sleep to see these visions of your life to be. Know that it is already yours and know that you are simply waiting for the here and now to catch up with your reality as you know it. Live it, breathe it, believe it, and FEEL it, and then you will live it. Believing IS seeing.

 

II.  Write It Down – One habit of the most successful and happy people on this planet is that they write everything down they desire to do, by hand! Today, we plan our lives by using online tools such as digital calendars, task planners, mind map apps, or a variety of other digital tools. While these are great tools for keeping us on track and accountable, they lack one significant factor in helping us to achieve our goals. That is the physical impact that handwriting your goals has on your subconscious mind. By hand writing what you most desire to achieve, it is made real to your subconscious mind. The subconscious mind cannot discern what is real from what your conscious mind believes is real, whether true or not. The act of hand writing what you want in such a way that it is written as if it already exists has a powerful effect on the subconscious mind. By doing this consistently, your subconscious mind will direct you to work towards manifesting your goals into your real life. The same way it works behind the scenes to control your autonomic bodily functions and your movements to complete any variety of tasks. It will move you towards the situations and circumstances that you desire in your life.

The bottom line is this, if you want to reach your desired goals in life, you must have a map to get you from where you currently are to where you wish to be. Without having a means to view your progress, how far you have come and how far you have left to go, you will become lost upon your way and never reach your destination.

 

III.  Be Consistent – Consistency is the one thing that you must master if you wish to reach your goals in a timely fashion and be successful in your endeavors. Being consistent has the power of establishing credibility and reliability. Nothing you do will have more of an impact on those you wish to reach as being the voice that they hear, the face they see, and the person they trust on a regular basis to bring them what they want. Consistency, along with providing value, creates familiarity which, in turn, fosters trust. In, short, a person’s trust cannot be bought, it must be earned. Through your commitment to quality and consistency, you will earn the greatest asset to your success, another’s trust in you.

 

IV.  Change Your Programming/Habits – Your mind is very much like a computer but vastly faster and it has the potential of being immensely more powerful. But, as computers rely on their programing to carry out tasks, your mind relies on your own “database” of knowledge, instincts, skills, and experiences to navigate our way through your life. How well you manage your finances, career, business, personal life, relationships, and every other aspect of your life depends on your own “programming” and your habits. This very same “programming”, in turn, is responsible for how successful and happy you are in life, or not. Many times the greatest challenge that you will deal with is created by your lack of flexibility in your beliefs or your lack of perspective. Also, whether you are able to overcome these same challenges is very much dependent on the same. The problem you face is whether you are willing to allow your “programming” to be updated as needed. Habits that have developed over time, that may have worked early on in your life, does not continue to work as you are faced with changing times, situations, and opportunities.

You can only change the way you live when you open your mind to discarding habits and ways of thinking that no longer serve you in achieving your goals. Remember, all it takes is an average of 21 days to “unlearn”, or learn a habit and make a commitment to being greater than the sum of your parts.

 

V.  Invest In Yourself/Engage In Purposeful and Continuing Learning – Top performing athletes must engage in consistent & focused physical training to achieve peak performance. This is no secret, but it is what they do behind the scenes that gives them the competitive edge. Hours upon hours of grueling physical and strength training. The investment they must make in the proper food and nutritional supplements to fuel their body, and enduring the discomfort that they experience to become the best that they can be. If you want a successful, happy, and fulfilling life, it really is no different in that you have to build your “success” muscles. This also takes time, effort, money, and commitment to uncomfortable and sometimes painful change. Living the life you have lived that has brought you to where you are is not enough to get you to where you want to be. How many times have you heard someone say that they have had enough of school or college and have no desire to go back to “hitting the books”?

The fact is that if you wish to live a better, more fulfilling and successful life, you have to invest. Like your parents invested in your primary, secondary, and possibly your college education. You must realize that you must also consistently invest in yourself and your continuing education. Does this mean going back to school? Sometimes, depending on the skills that you need. But, your investment in further educating yourself in the skills and knowledge necessary to build success in life may not be in the structured courses offered in universities. But rather in the books, audio, and video content created by those who have achieved what you desire to have in your life.

Often people say that they cannot afford the cost of investing in courses, books and other content that can move them forward in life. Yet, those same people spend thousands of dollars per year on expensive clothing, entertainment, flashy automobiles, the latest “have-to-have” gadgets, extravagant homes… you get the picture. In reality if you are living the average paycheck to paycheck lifestyle you cannot afford NOT to invest in YOU.

If you truly want happiness and success in life, try not to spend any more than you have to on things that deteriorate, depreciate, and retain no value over time. Instead, choose to make a long term investment with the best potential in returns. Invest your time, your effort, and your money into the one thing that you will have for as long as you live and will never lose any value for you…Your mind, your body, and your spirit.

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12 Steps To Leaving Your Comfort Zone Behind Forever – Part 8 – Manifesting Change Through Visualization And Action

I am now back from my late summer break. I have been working on some great projects, products and resources that I will be releasing periodically through the end of this year for you! Both, my wife, Ana and I also attended Podcast Movement 2017 (IT WAS AWESOME!) and will be bringing out our new podcasts, The Conformity Hazard and The Daily Thrive starting in Mid-October 2017! With that being said, I would like to move on to our next part in our series and talk about Visualization.

 

Vision is a powerful thing. Often it serves as the main motivation to achieve goals in our lives. The bigger the vision, the bigger the goals, and the more powerful the motivation to pursue our goals until we achieve success. It pushes us to move mountains and to reach for the stars to make our dreams a reality. Unfortunately on the flip side, there are those who have a lack of vision. They only put stock in what they can see and touch. They only believe in the “what already is”, and not the “what can be”. Nevermind that the “what already is” was once the “what can be, but what wasn’t yet”. They are not interested in the imagination and the visualization that it takes to create something new or make something that already exists better. Not only that, but they often revel in crushing the spirit, inspiration, and motivation of those that see impossible as I’mPossible.


That is why if you are one of those creative souls that want to do what you set out to do, you have to have a powerful support system in place to keep you on track when others who intentionally or not, try to derail you. One of the most powerful tools in doing this comes in the form of visualization. Visualization helps in making the intangible feel tangible and within your reach. While there are many ways to visualize your dreams and goals we will discuss three of them in this article.


The first is the easiest and does not take much skill to master and that is creating a vision board for yourself. A vision board is essentially a board that you can hang on your wall that contains visual stimuli such a pictures of items that you want to have or do when you reach your ideal level of success in life to afford those things that you now only dream about. It does not matter what those items are because each person has a different idea of what success looks like to them. For some it can be financial wealth, luxury homes and vehicles. For others it can be having the ability to travel and see the world with or without wealth. Some may choose to travel to help others or experience their way of life, you know, it doesn’t take lots of money to travel. For others it may be moving to another area to live or doing work that they love. Vision boards can be as simple as pictures stuck to your walls, cork boards, magnetic boards, or a piece of cardboard. They come in all shapes and sizes. They can be elaborate or the simplest of creations. The important thing is that whatever they are they need to do two things. They need to motivate and inspire you to turn whatever is on that board (or something even better) into your reality. Bear in mind also that the items on your vision board will change as you continue to pursue your goals and you need to be open to that change. As you grow and change in your pursuit of success, so will your ideas of what is important to you. What you started with in the beginning that was motivating you may not appeal to you in the same way as you grow nearer to having the life that you want to live. Remember that your faith in achieving what is on your board is relative to what you have invested in it. The more care and effort you take in crafting it the more you have invested in it, and that in itself will make it more real for you!

*** HERE’S A COUPLE OF BONUS TIPS!!***

It doesn’t hurt to place individual photos and or quotes at different points around your house where you will see them on a daily basis. A couple good places for these is on your bathroom mirror and your refrigerator door.

Also, if you want to keep your vision board handy to look at various times during the day, take a picture of it with your smartphone. That way you can pull it up at a instantly in your gallery and even zoom it to see whatever it is that inspires you at that moment.

The second tool that will help inspire you and lift you up when you are going through the trying times is your very own “Future Reality Catalog”. This will take more time than creating your vision board and will be an ongoing project. This is a much more extensive tool that you can refer to when you need that boost to keep you moving forward. Think of it as a scrapbook of the things that you are working to achieve in the place of memories past. Unlike your vision board, instead of being a collage of the things that you want in life, this tool is more organized as you can index it into sections. You can refer to in a specific manner to provide motivation on demand.  Just like looking through your favorite catalog and browsing through the things you like to have, think of this as your own customized catalog. It will contain every single thing that you want in every area of your life and nothing that you don’t. This catalog is all about you, and if you wish, your spouse or special someone. This catalog can contain anything that you want. You don’t have to feel guilty about it because it is for your eyes only unless, that is, you want to share it with someone.


Again, you can make this as fancy or simple as you want but like your vision board, it has to move you towards taking action to turn those pictures into your reality. For an example, I will tell you how I created my personal Future Reality Catalog. I made a trip to the local office supply store and purchased a 4 inch metal ring binder with internal pockets and transparent sleeves on the outer covers. I also purchased a pack of 200 8.5” x 11” transparent sleeves with holes for the binder rings, and index pages with colored tabs that came with insertable tabs that you can write on for indexing your catalog with the types of things it will contain. Lastly, I bought a box of 8.5” x 11” thick stock paper, a couple rolls of transparent tape and some paste to glue pictures to the thick stock paper. I brought it home and spent a couple of hours setting it up. I used Adobe Photoshop to create a cover page of me and my wife well dressed for a night on the town and a few pictures of some of the big ticket things that we wanted to have in our lives after we had achieved our ideal level of success. On the top of the page across our picture I wrote in fancy script “The Fairchild Catalog Of Our Future Reality”. I even created a nice little end insert for it so we could see it when tucked in on our bookshelf.


We then spent the next few days as we had time cutting out picture from magazines and printing pictures from the web of the things we wanted in our lives. These ranged from material possessions to travel, spirituality, health, pictures of homes with interior and exterior shots that we loved. They didn’t have to be all a part of the same house, we created the home we wanted from a hodgepodge of different photos. I put pictures of cars I have had in the past and some that I always wanted (including a red 1987 Lamborghini Countach). We still to this day add and remove pictures as we grow to have a clearer vision of the life we desire to live. I have referred back to this catalog time and again as I have encountered bumps in the road and major obstacles in working towards achieving what we want to have. It has been invaluable. Again, this catalog, like your vision board is only worth to you what you put into it. Make it something that sets you on fire everytime you pick it up!


The last thing that I would like to talk to you about in this article is the art of visualization itself. This can be, and is for me, the most influential and motivating technique that I  know of to help you engage in making your dreams a reality. This is also the hardest skill to master if you want to maximize it’s effectiveness in changing your way of thinking and it’s effect on your actions to move you farther than anything else in creating the life you desire to live. To prepare and initiate your visualization of your life as you would have it is imperative. For maximum effectiveness when you visualize, you need to clear your mind and your space of all distractions. You need to be in a state of quiet calmness akin to the state you want to be in when you meditate. A state where you can direct your sole focus on creating the pictures and “mind movies” if you will, of your life as you wish it to be, in the here and now. You can’t provide this kind of focus in an environment that is noisy, cluttered, or distracting. You need to create a personal sanctuary, be it big or small, where you can do this for a few minutes everyday, uninterrupted. Do not bring your electronics anywhere near this area when you are ready to visualize. Don’t turn them down or put them on vibrate, turn them off and leave them in another room. Remember that despite what you may think people survived on this planet for uncounted centuries without cell phones, TURN IT OFF! It will be there when you finish.

 

For this exercise in visualization you don’t have to bend yourself into a uncomfortable yoga position or sit indian-style in front of a candle. You need a quiet, comfortable place where you feel safe and at ease. Sit with your eyes closed and breathe deep while clearing your mind of all the things that will happen or have happened today, depending on what time you choose to visualize. Once you are in a state of calm, create a picture in your mind of you in the here and now, already living the life of your dreams. You, happy, healthy, smiling, well-dressed, looking and feeling great. You have all you need and want in abundance. You love others and they love you! Watch yourself as if you were immersed in a movie about your life being filmed in real time. If you desire money, you have lots of it – more than you’ll ever need. If you desire a beautiful home, imagine yourself walking through its halls and rooms. Imagine yourself walking barefoot in the grass and the grounds that surrounds it. Take a swim in the pool, fall back into your dreamy soft bed with big cushy pillows that you just sink into. Cook in your kitchen that is every chef’s dream. Sit in your favorite seat in your vast living room or shoot pool and play video games in your decked out game room. Slip into the seat behind the wheel of the vehicle that you always dreamed of but thought you could never have. Feel and smell the scent of the leather seats, hear the engine rev as you put your foot on the accelerator. Feel the sand and the sun on your face and body as you lay on your favorite beach as you hear the surf roll in and smell the fresh salty air that surrounds you. See the palm trees sway in the breeze overhead as you sip your delicious drink without a care in the world and with no sense of time because you have no other place to have to be at this moment.

 

The goal of your visualization is that you need to immerse yourself completely in the experience, feel it, smell it, see it as though you are there now, at this moment. You want to pick one thing to visualize at a time and only spend a few minutes to clear your mind and then only five to ten minutes visualizing. Any more that this and you will become distracted as you mind moves on to other thoughts. If you allow this to happen your visualization will not have the same impact on your subconscious mind. This is what you want to do by visualizing is impact your subconscious mind. Your subconscious mind cannot differentiate what is real from what is imagined if you believe it. After doing this exercise over and over you will soon find that your subconscious mind will begin directing you towards taking certain actions. It will guide you into situations and experiences that are conducive to moving you in the direction of the life you want to be living.

 

Then, before you realize what is happening, you will actually be living the life that you only dreamed about before. Ask any successful person about visualization and most will tell you that they always visualize any goal that they want to achieve as having already achieved it before ever actually doing it. Of course you will always have to follow up visualization with action to get to where you want to be. Only thinking about something alone will never make it happen without action BUT visualization is a HUGE part of it! Make it happen.  


Thank you for joining us for this article on Manifesting Change Through Visualization And Action. Please join us for the next article in our series on 12 Steps To Leaving Your Comfort Zone Behind Forever when we will talk about Risk Is Part Of The Game.

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