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Beach Notes: Do You Follow One Course?

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 2 Comments

by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh



When I saw this watercourse this week at the beach it made me think of the quote:

Follow One Course Until Successful- anon

Are you a follow one course type or do you follow many courses?
What is successful for you?

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Why you should just give up

Filed Under Guest Writer, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog, leadership | Leave a Comment

Not gonna lie – a teeny portion of my Ego flinched a little, just typing the title to this post. The hesitation is a sign to me that I’m not completely as untethered from this world as I would like to be, but awareness of my hesitation is leagues ahead of where I’ve been.

As I’ve admitted in previous posts, I’m a reforming Control Freak and time was the idea of surrendering anything to anyone was repugnant to me and an insult to my own competence. With poet William Ernest Henley’s voice echoing in my head, I, and I alone was the captain of my soul.

When you figure in the fact that the majority of my professional life is in sales and marketing, I’ve got so many “in it win it” and “if it’s to be it’s up to me” rah rah tapes running in my head, it’s a wonder I still have friends. :) I’m Stuart Smalley on steriods.

Here’s the kicker. You can be those things, as long as you understand the difference between with taking ownership of your actions and demanding a specific, pre-ordained outcome that happens as a result of them.

“A wise unselfishness is not a surrender of yourself to the wishes of anyone, but only to the best discoverable course of action.” ~ David Seabury

You absolutely owe it to yourself to identify, harvest, employ and in all other ways nurture your own development. The surrender portion comes when you realize the extent of your part of the equation and the beginning of The Other.

Sometimes the Other is a person. Or it can be an entity, an organization, a process. But  you have to trust that you have done the work. Then surrender the outcome.

“I can tell you that it takes great strength to surrender. You have to know that you are not going to collapse. Instead, you are going to open to a power that you don’t even know, and it is going to come to meet you. In the process of healing, this is one of the huge things that I have discovered. People recognized the energy coming to meet them. When they opened to another energy, a love, a divine love, came through to meet them. That is what is known as grace. We all sing about amazing grace. It is a gift.” ~  Marion Woodman

We are smart. Each of us. We really are. But did you know that there are a few billion of us walking the planet? So much of our reality is predicated upon our awareness of our immediate surroundings and the resultant combinations of those variables. However, there are billions upon billions of iterations of possibilities that exist outside our awareness. Just because we don’t know of something’s existence doesn’t mean that it doesn’t. Exist, that is.

“Change is the essence of life. Be willing to surrender what you are for what you could become.” ~ Unknown

This reminds me again of Melissa Pierce and her film Life in Perpetual Beta. I’m not sure why people have the perception that stasis is the goal. Logic would dictate that every day of our existence brings new experiences, new individuals and new perspectives. Based purely on a mathematical sensibility, it would be as if each day you were handed two different numbers and expect to come up with the same total each day, regardless of the integers you receive. How can you expect to always arrive at “six,” when on Monday you were given 5+1 and on Tuesday, 6+9? Can’t happen, even using high math.

We are always evolving, always surrendering our current reality for another.  By embracing the paradox of surrendering in order to gain, we are able to move forward. The Borg were right: “Resistance is futile.” Life goes on and stagnation leads to atrophy and death in both a figurative and literal sense.

So…why give up? Because you have so much to get.

——-

Molly Cantrell-Kraig is a woman with drive. Possessing an innate sense of purpose and a pragmatic, solution-based approach to empowering people, she fused these two traits in order to establish Women With Drive Foundation. Based upon its founder’s personal history, Women With Drive Foundation is a means through which Cantrell-Kraig may effect change on both a micro and macro level. By providing women with something as essential as personal transportation in order to transition them from poverty to prosperity, she, through Women With Drive Foundation, seeks to empower women to help them help themselves. Through this action, the individual applicant benefits, as does society as a whole. Follow Molly on twitter as @mckra1g or @WWDr1ve (Women With Drive Foundation) or “Like” them on facebook.

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Be Effortlessly Cool in Your Red Shoes and Own Your Own Life

Filed Under Branding, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 1 Comment

The Red Shoe Tragedy

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The rules, values, and ideas we learned growing up served us in those situations and settings. Some of those rules, values and ideas are universal to humanity, but others were built from the goals people who . Yet we often keep living by those rules long after we’ve left the group, society, or culture from which they came. We still use rules from grade school peer groups to define ourselves and make decisions as adults. The values, rules, and ideas imprint deeper and last longer than the channels for which they were developed to build, serve, and protect.

In my high school, it was a social and a fashion faux pas to EVER wear red shoes. Yet my friends who went to a Chicago high school had never heard of that “law.” It was stunning and amazing that these attractive, fun, funny, intelligent kids could live so effortlessly cool wearing red shoes whenever they wanted. It took outright clear thinking on my part to choose to set aside that rule — The tragedy was that it didn’t occur to me to stop following the red shoe rules until long after high school, long after it was even a remotely useful rule.

In every group, society, and culture that we belong, we use rules, values, and ideas to identify ourselves as members of the group, align our goals and define our roles. We use those rules, values, and ideas to attract like-minded thinkers and to channel our energy in the useful directions. But no single set of rules, values and ideas carries over completely to the next universe of people.

In increments we’ve learned to look outside us — to our parents, teachers, friends, bosses — for answers for the keys to navigate those elusive rules, values, and ideas that define good behavior and outline the clearest path to our success. What meet instead is other people who have also learned to look outside themselves.

The rules, values and ideas we collect over time grow and gather. Each one we add comes from someone else. We keep adding in more to those we’ve picked up and combine them in our own ways to make our own sense. The rules, values and ideas don’t leave our minds when we move on with our lives.

Rules, values, and ideas are like people in the way that few will fit us well-enough to earn the place of a life-long friend.

Who built the rules, values, and ideas that fuel the decisions you make?
If you haven’t named the values, rules, and ideas that are your friends for life, fair chance the answer is: not you.

Every new teacher, location, clan, situation, culture, corporation, church, organization, school, or troop offers new rules, ideas, and values slightly different from the last. Yet no person, group, or association has to live one moment of your life.

Think about that.

It’s your life.
No one has walked a mile in your shoes.
No one knows what you wish in the middle of the night.

Choose your values.
Make your rules.
Have your own ideas.
Be effortlessly cool in your red shoes.
Be your own unique value proposition.
Live your own life.

Are you ready to move the useless rules out of your head and get to a new sort of productive?

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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Every moment is January 1.

Filed Under Business Life, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | Leave a Comment

A Guest Post by
Rosemary O’Neill

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It’s the end of the first week of January. Did you already start slipping on some of those resolutions? Well quit beating yourself up, you’re not alone. The mystical pull of January 1 gets us every year. We take deep breaths, ponder the future, and muster up the guts to make some decisions about our lives and our businesses. And then….life happens.

Here’s the most important trick: Every morning is January 1. Every moment is January 1. You can make a decision right this very second to take action on one of your primary goals. In fact, stop reading this right now and go do one thing that will get you closer. Send that email, follow up with that customer, finish that report, call your grandmother. We’ll wait.

……….if you’re back, then you did your one action, right? If you didn’t, go away and do it now!

…and…see how easy that was? Now keep the momentum going by allowing yourself to have space in the day (or evening) to proactively plan the next day, week, month, in increments you can handle. If you want to wake up on December 31, 2012, having accomplished something big, then you need to chip away at it all year long. And you need to have periodic check-ins with yourself so that you can course-correct if necessary.

I’ll share my check-in secret sauce. It’s a hot pink Moleskine that goes everywhere with me. In the front are the big goals for the year, and then broken-down goals for each month that will draw me closer and closer throughout the year. There is no one-size-fits-all method, but the key is to avoid drifting.

Now go and take the second step. And write down what the third, fourth, and fifth steps will look like.

Feel free to brag about your audacious action in the comments. We’ll do this together.

_____

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Twitter as @rhogroupee
_____

Thank you, Rosemary!

You’re irresistible!

ME “Liz” Strauss

Empower Yourself!

Filed Under Business Life, Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog | 6 Comments

by LaRae Quy

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It’s an Inside Job

Someone needs to tell the political candidates that personal empowerment is not about power over others. Rather, it is understanding that you are in charge of your own life.

People who are personally empowered know that happiness is an inside job. They don’t wait for someone else to make them happy and they can take care of their own needs for affection.

You Are Responsible For Your Own Actions

In other words, there is no finger pointing and blaming others for your lack of performance. You are willing to take responsibility for your actions. OK, so now it’s very obvious that most political candidates have no personal empowerment—they are just power hungry.

I make this distinction between power and personal empowerment because they are two very different things and people often assume that to be empowered is to be powerful.

Wrong.

Empowerment is a process where you do something, reflect on your actions, assess whether you made the right choice—and why—and continue on. This progression is a very important piece of the puzzle because personal empowerment acknowledges complete responsibility for self and the choices that are made. It is strong enough to look at itself and say, “Badly done, Emma. Badly done,” and then move on, taking with it lessons learned from the experience.

Personal empowerment is not for wimps. It takes a strong character to look at oneself with honesty and decide what to keep and what to throw out.

Where To Begin?

Life unfolds in phases. As we look back over time, we can see when we felt empowered and when we did not. Each time period has it’s own characteristics.

We all spent time as students when our lives revolved around classes, teachers, and other students. The academic calendar was central to all of our planning. Life as a student is a unique time.

Similarly, we are always in different phases of life as we mature and circumstances change. Life is a series of interconnecting phases. So when we stop to take that honest look at ourselves, we will be empowered only to the degree to which we understand what phase of life we’re in.

Our life is bigger than a single moment. The things that we cherish, the goals that motivate us, and the issues we wrestle with are connected to the period in which we currently find ourselves.

We feel lack of personal empowerment when we are unable to make choices that are always in our own best interest. Indeed, it is impossible to feel empowered if we cannot identify the issues that hold us back. We feel out of control when we try to live up to the expectations of others. We give power over our life to others when we allow them to define success or achievement.

But when we let others generate ideas and solutions for our issues, we are no longer taking the lead.

We become the ultimate follower when we are no longer the leader of our own life.

Dig Deeper Into the Now

As an FBI counterintelligence agent, the first phase of a recruitment operation was to identify the target. This meant collecting as much information as possible about the target’s past and current situation, as well as aspirations for the future. Every investigation starts with understanding the nature and character of the NOW phase.

Here is a list of typical questions used in FBI recruitment operations to help agents get clarity about the issues and specific needs of the person we’re investigating. These same questions may also help you define the phase of life you are now living in. It is impossible to attain personal empowerment without understanding the nature and character of your current phase of life:

  1. When did this current phase begin? Identify the boundary that separates this phase from previous phases. The boundary may be a transition (a new job, relationship, or a new city), an event (marriage, divorce, death, children), a discovery, or a decision (a different career or going back to school).
  2. Who are the key people in your life during this period? What role does each play? Which relationships are satisfying? Disappointing? Why?
  3. What events characterize this phase? They may be personal or professional events.
  4. What are the major opportunities and responsibilities that characterize this phase? How do you spend your time? What interests you most? Least? What is most creative about your life during this phase? Most demanding?
  5. What characterizes your inner state during this phase? How would you describe your spirituality? Reflections? Feelings? Do you journal?
  6. What is your physical state during this phase? Are you healthy? What are your health challenges?

To attain personal empowerment, it’s important to understand the key issues in your life and decisions you are being asked to make during this phase.

What kinds of thoughts, impressions, experiences, etc. came to you during this exercise? What are some key insights in this phase of your life? How do these empower you?

—-
Author’s Bio:

Larae Quy

LaRae Quy was an FBI agent, both a counterintelligence and undercover agent, for 25 years. She exposed foreign spies and recruited them to work for the U.S. Government. Now she explores the unknown and discovers the hidden truth via her blog Your Best Adventure. You can find her on Twitter as @LaRaeQuy

Thanks, Larae!

—-

Be irresistible.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!

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