Goals worthwhile achieving take time patience and commitment
So its 7 days into the New Year and I am well on way to achieving my goals. How about you, did you start working towards yours?
In my last post It’s a Brand New Year I listed 4 goals I will be working towards this year. Actually, one of them – Finish Book, has been an ongoing goal for the past 5 years. I tried to write it a number of times but failed every time. Okay, maybe I didn’t fail. Let me rephrase that. I did not have all the components to finish writing it – not until this past summer. So every time I tried to put it together in the past it never made sense. After reading each version I’d ask myself if I would buy the book and my answer was “No.”
This past summer while working with a colleague on a docu-series I was asked to describe the system I use to help clients to overcome self-defeating and negative behavior. I began explaining the process to him assuming he already had an understanding of awareness. He’s a filmmaker whose attention to detail is incredible and reminded me that people don’t know what I know about awareness and I shouldn’t assume they do, and asked me to explain the process in detail. I proceeded to illustrate the process, how I take clients through the journey of self-discovery. The tools I use to uncover root causes to negative behavior. How I unlock their true identity and natural strengths and use those to plan for the future. Being able to spit out those words and illustrating the process for somebody else to visualize in detail was the inspiration I needed for the book and for the birth of Tri-Commitment to Success, my workshop. This was the meeting that needed to happen for me to finish putting the book together.
Sometimes ideas take a long time to come to fruition. Some people have a dream and get all the inspiration they need to produce something amazing the morning after, while other people get inspired by experiences but need several of them over a period of time to produce something amazing. Everyone is different. Personally, it takes me a long time to produce something. It has taken 5 years and counting to write the book and 1 year to produce the workshop
A tip I often leave clients is that nothing worthwhile is easy to achieve nor does it happen overnight. Just think back to when you got your driver’s license. You had to go through a process to get it – drivers permit and then take drivers ed perhaps a had to go through a graduated licensing program. But when you finally did get your full license you were free and independent and unless you break the law or have health issues, it’s yours for life.
Now I am months away from the final manuscript. And less than 2 months to the launch of Tri-Commitment to Success. Both were goals worthwhile pursuing and well worth the journey.
Did you carry over a goal from last year?
Is False Information Instilling Fear In Your Mind?
Negativity is a limiting behavior. It prevents you from achieving your goals and living life to the fullest. It instills doubt in your mind and can destroy your confidence. It will create fear and false beliefs – roadblocks and obstacles that really don’t exist. It will limit your chance at succeeding at the very things you want to do.
Creating a negative mindset is easy. All it takes is one negative force within your environment; friend, family, teacher, anybody you spend time with, and you will easily adopt their negative views. Unfortunately, if you already are a negative person you will easily identify to the negativity and adopt it into your own internal belief system.
Negativity is often spoken with authority, it fools you into believing it is true. A naysayer could impart his or her wisdom, and if you have no prior experience with the subject matter, you may take it on as your own. With no supporting facts, you adopt their perspective – right or wrong, and begin to operate according to the naysayer when discussing that subject matter.
After your first, non-attempt, and perceived failure, you will have your own negative experience to contribute to the negativity within your environment. And without a doubt, you will believe something did not happen that you wanted, although you never tried, and you will impart your wisdom on to others. This is how negative behavior perpetuates throughout your environment.
- Take inventory of everything you want to accomplish in your life.
- Next to each one write what is holding you back from accomplishing it.
- For each fear, write the worst-case scenario, the one holing you back from tacking it.
- Ask yourself if the fear is based on fact or something you learned from someone.
- Take inventory of all the negative people in your life (Friends/Family/Teachers).
- Next to each person write his or her worst complaint/fear.
- Review your list of fears and verify if the fear is your own or a fear that belongs to someone on your list of negative people.
Chocolate Chocolate Read All About – Worthless Nothing Becomes Something After learning The Affects of Environmental Noise.
Environmental noise is what I refer to as anything that connects with any of our five senses – touch, taste, smell, sound and sight. Pretty much everything that comes into our sight or something we hear, taste, smell or touch can influence our judgment and alter our ability to make sound decisions. All it takes is a lack of confidence in one major aspect of life and we will be off validating whatever thought we hear including the negative self-talk in our head.
Negative self-talk is easily validated in an environment governed by people that thrive off of negative self-talk. Someone whom feels they are worthless and can articulate his or her thoughts and emotions could influence someone within the environment into believing they too are worthless. Misery enjoys company. How sweet is it to share worthless experiences and to commiserate? It really doesn’t take much to influence someone that is feeling down and blue. Just speak to their emotions and you will quickly win them over.
A single taste of decadent chocolate has the potential to influence someone whose dream is to open a lollipop shop into believing that decadent chocolate is a better way to go. When the decadence of the chocolate awakes his taste buds it also awakens and heighten the remaining four senses to be on the lookout for anything to validate the reason why decadent chocolate is the better way to go. The people within the environment can be used to calculate potential revenue to compare against any existing financials to further validate the thought. See for yourself, all you have to do is walk into a shoe store and observe women justifying why they need to buy their 20th pair this month.
Noise is everywhere and everything and anybody can be easily sucked into it. Chance is, you are already in it and might not even be aware of it. Only a small percentage of people have the natural ability to steer through noise and not let it influence their decisions. The good news is those whom are not naturally able to steer through noise can learn how to with awareness.
Even the person who was down and blue that lacked confidence and self-esteem and believed he was nothing, was able to see the amount of influence he was under because of his environment and the level of noise. It took five years for him to see what he could not see – The power and the influence the noise did have on him. Today he lives his true intention, free from environmental noise doing the things he could only dream of one year ago.
Now you can answer your own question: Am I really as fucked up as I think I am
Bruno LoGreco Life Coach & Mentor
Loved, Safe and Secure -A Place of Belonging
Love is a strong affection towards a person, place or thing. It generates a variety of different feelings. Love is a euphoric state of being. It is a simple pleasure such as a meal or something decadent. It is also an intense attraction to a person. Love is an extremely powerful emotion with diverse meaning that makes it difficult to define. When combined with the variety of complex feelings involved, everyone will have a different definition and expectation of love.
At the core of every human being is love. Everyone has love in them, but not everyone knows how to receive or express love. Everyone seeks and needs love from the moment their born up until their final moment, and yet it is the one emotion people will also run from.
Children require unconditional love. They must always feel that they are loved and safe no matter what. They need to feel confident with their looks and secure with their feelings. They need to receive encouragement and praise for their accomplishments. They need to know everything will be okay even when they make a mistake. But most of all, children need to feel like they belong even if how they appear form the outside is not how they feel from the inside.
Children know deep within their soul when something doesn’t feel right. When everything is obscure and confusing – when nothing fits the feelings. They question their feelings with confusion and will feel like they don’t belong if they do not feel loved, safe and secure. And those that don’t feel like they belong will seek someone that does fit the feelings in hopes of receiving the love they long for.
Children who develop into adults that never accept how they feel from the inside and never learned what love, safe and secure means will continue to seek love until they find it. In the name of love converting into someone they’re not is effortless, but living it day and night is. So it is just a matter of time before the feelings don’t fit anymore and the search for love continues.
Michael Jackson – Man In The Mirror
A colleague asked for my thoughts about Michael Jackson. I said I’m not surprised But I haven’t given it much thought either. They thought MJ is interesting blog material for me. Image writing about Michael Jackson, how long do you think that would take me? Too long to try and keep my thoughts together. But I did give it more thought and here I am writing about Michael Jackson.
I grew up with Michael Jackson. It was hard not to. Everyone listened to his music. The girls screamed and shouted his name and lined their bedroom walls with his poster. It was hard to miss the craze. I was never a big fan of his. Although, I do appreciate his music and his extraordinary talent, back then I didn’t have any interest in any artist.
It is no secret that Michael Jackson’s childhood was everything but a childhood. He openly admitted his father physically and mentally abused him on Oprah. He was whipped, beaten and traumatized throughout his childhood. His father sat on a chair with a belt during rehearsals – there were consequences to pay if it was not rehearsed the right way. Rehearsals were ridiculously incessant with no time for MJ to go outside and play with the other young boys. MJ often cried from loneliness and would sometime get sick and start to vomit upon seeing his father.
Who Michael Jackson became as an adult was due largely because of his childhood. I’m no psychologist but I do know if any child were traumatized to the extent that he was they would require extensive therapy to heal the wounds within the soul. And if they could never get to that place of total acceptance and forgiveness, their body would be riddled with extreme levels of anxiety for almost every scenario dealing with human interaction. However in today’s society, we have a pill for every ailment including mental and behavioral illnesses.
Not to get off topics but something to consider. If we are only learning today the capacity of the brain, how it functions and how it is put together, then how is it possible to already have developed and manufactured medicine to control the brain? Too many unanswered questions in my world to pop pills effecting brain control. It’s out of my realm of comprehension.
Unfortunately, as many already suspect, Michael Jackson was taking a lot of medication to cope with his anxiety among other mental illnesses because of his sever childhood trauma caused by physical and mental abuse. MJ had to become Michael Jackson to protect himself from further abuse. He had no choice but to become him. He took on his identity because his life relied upon it at a very young age.
I’m not surprised it ended the way it did for Michael Jackson. It saddens me that in this day in age we resort to pills that evidentially do not work. Some pills are to suppress emotions stemming from thoughts that cannot be forgotten, some are for performance anxiety and sleeping, and some pills are to make you feel happy and alert. And then there is the pill to fix the damage caused by all the other pills. And by the way, they don’t know the long term affects of damage control pill either.
I could only begin to imagine what Michael Jackson went through throughout his life. The detachment and conflict he felt each time he looked in the mirror. He had everything but happiness. He even believed he was being selfish for being unhappy with all that he had and punished himself more. His inner child wanted to play but playing is forbidden at his age. Michael Jackson had everything and was being selfish –or that is what he believed. Instead of looking in the mirror and loving himself, validating the little boy the one he felt lived inside of him, all he saw was Michael Jackson, the man he had to become.
RIP Michael Jackson 1958 to 2009
Negative Self-Talk
95% of people’s actions are automatic and only 5% of the actions come from conscious thinking. Negative self-talk comes from the subconscious, which is the 95% of the automatic actions. But why would the subconscious put negative thoughts into our thought process? Because people unknowingly have been collecting self-imposing limitation their entire lives, creating barriers, negative self-talk, that only they can tear down.
A person will recognize when negative self-talk takes over their thoughts. It sounds like this:
• I can’t do this
• I’m not good enough
• I don’t deserve this
• I’ve never done this before
• I’m going to fail
• They are all better than I am
• Somebody else could do this better than me
How does a person learn to break the negative self-talk?
1. First you must become aware of your negative self-talk. When you become aware of your negative self-talk, in a journal or a secure online journal write what the situation is.
2. Write whatever self-imposed limitation you are putting on yourself.
3. Ask yourself the following questions for each negative self-talk you write:
a. What am I telling myself?
b. What facts do I have that support my self-imposed limitation?
c. Why do I believe what it is I think about myself?
d. Are my thoughts a result of me trying to maintain control?
e. Are my thoughts a result of me being afraid of judgment?
4. Read back what you wrote and repeat the process for each negative self-imposing limitation you’ve put on yourself.
5. Practice becoming aware of your negative self-talk
Master Life Coach, Toronto Native Bruno LoGreco
