rainbowsoverruins

NOW ABOUT THOSE RESOLUTIONS

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It’s that time of the year and my email inbox is filled with messages from folks in the self-improvement field telling me how to keep to my resolutions or choose another word like “commit” or a word other than resolutions. They are hitting a nerve. We want to do whatever we can to avoid what we believe is the inevitable sense of failure when we do not keep our resolutions.

If you’ve been following my posts throughout December, I think you’ll agree that I’ve been suggesting something similar all month: Pre-pave the New Year by determining your goals before the holiday rush.

With the holiday weekend here, now is a great time to settle down in front of the TV with movies or sports on the tube as background noise. No, that’s not my recommendation because it’s distracting, however, what I’m about to describe could take a while and I want you to enjoy it.

I want you to take those notes you made about your dreams and goals for 2015, put them in front of you and start to make a plan for how you are going to achieve them. Most of us are really good at making the first list of resolutions. We may even add extra language – I intend to lose 40 pounds; I intend to work out every day. However, we fail to provide some really critical information.

Why do you want to lose weight? Why do you want to work out? Do you have a result like a promotion you want to receive? Do you have a targeted event to attend? Goals are easier to achieve when you have a date in mind to achieve your goal – such as losing weight before your high school reunion or your big family wedding. It is also easier to evaluate if your goals are realistic when you attach a date to it. If you feel overwhelmed when you add a target time frame to your resolution, chances are that you need to break your resolution into smaller steps.

Are you being specific enough? Can I measure signs of my success? I may say that I want to make 2015 the best year ever, but what would have to happen for me to recognize that I have reached that goal by December 31st?

Are you overwhelmed just looking at your list? Which of your goals/resolutions are really important? There may be a few on your master list of goals that would be nice, but you don’t have a great deal of passion about them. So go ahead, take your list and reorder it according to your priorities.

Are you ready? Go make, edit and prioritize your list now before you get distracted.

Clue to potential failure number 1: If you find your head filling with negative self-talk, write down what you are telling yourself on a separate piece of paper. Mark Waldman calls it your C.R.A.P. sheet. You are acknowledging the negative while honoring your brain’s concern for your well-being. That seems to satisfy the sense of self-preservation, allowing you to explore possibilities instead of stopping you.

When we continue, we’ll identify the next steps to take your goals to the next level.

To Your Success,

Susan

The Key to Developing Persistance

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Tenacity. It is a quality that develops when you are fixed upon your purpose. It’s a necessary quality to have when you are trying something challenging or that will take considerable time to achieve. Tenacity implies that you will do whatever it takes to accomplish your vision and reach your goals.   It involves persistence, determination and perseverance, all strong words that support the theories of success.

Regular students of success philosophies are familiar with the writings and stories about persistence. Napoleon Hill gave us the often used quote: Anything the human mind can conceive and believe, when organized around a purpose and a plan, can be achieved. All too often, the organization phrase is left out in common usage, yet it is the key to achievement. Knowing your purpose and developing a plan that you can follow with persistence yields the prize.

Bob Proctor, the success coach commonly known from his appearance in the movie The Secret, began his successful pursuits when he studied the words of Napoleon Hill and owned them through his actions.   He went from $4,000 a year income as a fireman to over $100,000 within a year. He built multiple, highly successful janitorial services using the principles of success before moving into the personal development field. To this day, Proctor devotes one month a year re-reading one specific chapter every day. It is the chapter on persistence.

Hill’s classic Think and Grow Rich is filled with stories of perseverance. An entire chapter is devoted to persistence. Greg Reid and Sharon Lechter picked up on one of those stories as they wrote Three Feet from Gold, the tale of a young man who gave up his pursuit of a vein of gold, only to have the new owner find it three feet from where he had stopped. Greg has gone on to write extensively on this quality of persistence – stickiness.

Hill is clear on one point. The ability to develop determination and the self-discipline to pursue our goals begins with purpose. A couple weeks ago, I suggested that you might find this a great time to plan for your New Year’s resolutions so that you could build them around your goals. Such planning constitutes a great strategy session that improves your chance of achieving goals because you attach them to your purpose and the big “Why” behind the actions you choose to take.

If you are going through this process, you may want to ask a few questions of yourself. What is it about your goal that resonates deep within you? Call it passion. Call it purpose. Why does it fill you with enthusiasm and drive? Why does it stick with you even when you experience obstacles? The answer is extremely important to your ability to maintain the pressure that moves you along the path to your greatest desires.

And if you are unclear about your purpose, one of your resolutions may be to identify your purpose this year. A good place to start might be to observe yourself. What are you drawn to? What do you study or watch? Who are your friends? Who are your heroes and heroines? Where do you like to go? What things do you want? If money is your big goal, ask yourself why? What does money mean to you? What feelings come up when you think about having money? How will you use it? If you had all the money you currently dream about having, what would your life look like? As you go through these questions, a pattern of feelings will emerge around the things you have in your current lifestyle and the ones you would like to have.   How will you feel when you have them?

Purpose brings a sense of direction. Purpose brings passion. Passion brings tenacity and the ability to stick to it. The emotions you feel when you sense movement toward that which you desire brings such joy and well-being. Take the time this season to align with how you envision your dreams and draw the road map that appears to take you to them. With this in hand, may you find all the tenacity you require to not only keep your New Year’s resolutions, but also move steadily toward your goals.

To Your Success,

Susan

5 STEPS TO PLAN YOUR NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS NOW

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No doubt about it, the holidays are in full swing in my life. Home and Family has just taped the Holiday Special which will air on Hallmark Channel Monday evening, November 24th at 8:00pm E/7p Central. We had over 40 guests on the show ranging from our daily hosts and family members to stars from Hallmark movies and American Idol, Acro Army and Aria. We cook and DIY, sing and break bread with one another in a wonderful celebration. Tune in if you can. We had a great deal of fun pulling this together for you.

On a more personal note, the holidays remind me to take a fresh look at my personal goals for the coming season and my New Year’s resolutions. It’s been a fabulous year and I am extremely grateful for the sense of joy and accomplishment I feel. If I were to create a blessings tree, I’d weave in thoughts of my book Rainbows Over Ruins, the foreword so generously written by Noah St. John, Noah’s live conferences, our appearance on the show to discuss the power of afformations, Home and Family’s second Daytime Emmy nomination, a most wonderful birthday celebration with good friends, family visits, hiring assistants, my virtual blog tour and being asked to be a guest blogger on CoffeyTalk.com.

Ironically, in the midst of all this, I felt a sense of completion. The activities that filled my spring and summer continue, however, the milestone map I had originally created to guide me along the path to publish had done its job. The next steps on the map were too vague and all encompassing. The result was that I felt a lack of forward momentum. I was confused about the specific actions that needed to be taken.

When this happens after an intense flurry of activity, we need to do some strategic planning on inner levels and work from the inside out. What’s that entail?

  1. Sit down and think about your vision of your dream project. Appreciate anything in your daily life that supports your vision. Challenge yourself to find 10 examples each day.
  2. Holding your vision, allow a movie to play across your mind. Ask yourself questions. If you achieve your dreams, what will it look and feel like? Why is it important to you? What are some potential strategies you might pursue? What could the next steps and levels be?
  3. Choosing from a variety of techniques, allow yourself to be guided to deeper subconscious levels. These techniques can range from contemplation, meditation, sitting for ideas, centered prayer, hypnosis, guided imagery, to quantum jumps. The technique is less important than the result – achieving a deeper state where your conscious mind is more still.
  4. Once you return to normal consciousness, be sure to write down any ideas you received. They may be clues to your options, specific ways to find resources and research, as well as descriptions of how to “chunk down” or “step out” a specific milestone you are seeking to achieve. Start to take these actions as soon as you can.
  5. As you go back to regular activity, be mindful about what is showing up around you. Next steps tend to emerge out of your daily activities or, as Thomas Troward suggested, they proceed in an orderly fashion from that which has gone before.

Things do show up around you, often from unexpected places. For instance, the other day I had a conversation with a friend who has been working with me on the show since it began. He revealed that it was not easy to grasp my grand dream, because he could not see how to receive any potential return on investment. I would have to be able to communicate that before he would consider taking action.

Wow! What a wakeup call! My ability to communicate my vision held a key to my success. My idea could be inspiring, however, it would be important to demonstrate to others how they get their money back (i.e., return on investment) or see a different return that helps them achieve their personal goals (such as seeing potential improvement in their own lives or the lives of others). This perspective shared by a friend raised my awareness that whether we are marketing to a client, pitching to a buyer or a financier, we need to know enough to tailor our presentation to their Why before they can see its value to them and take the action we are requesting.

This insight from a random conversation contributes to my strategic planning as I pursue my next steps to create presentations and content. I firmly believe that no matter the circumstances in which we find ourselves, we can use the power of our minds to improve them. My task is to get the message out. This year’s New Year’s resolutions will reflect these next steps that support my goals.

If you can make the time to do some inner strategic planning around your goals, by the time New Year’s rolls around, you may have created resolutions that support them as well. They are the kind of resolutions we are all more likely to pursue until they are achieved, no matter what.

I hope you will take some time to define your strategic New Year’s resolutions. If so, we’re going to have another fabulous year, all together.

To Your Success,

Susan

The Secret to Achieving Success is Simply SHOWING UP

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This morning as I perused my email inbox, I noticed a theme to the subject lines. There were several about persistence. John Maxwell had sent a daily message to “keep on keeping on…Those who quit never succeed…never make it to the top.”

And yesterday, while showing a colleague around the ranch, the topic turned to the importance of continuing to “apply pressure.” Keith had read Rainbows Over Ruins and it was his way of explaining what Peter and I have done to accomplish our goals. It was a good way to put it. I call it focus.

In the book, I apply this pressure in a number of ways daily. Gentle or intense, the point is to keep the vision in mind and do at least one thing every day that can help move you toward achieving that goal.

Sounds simple, right? It is. As Jim Rohn would say, “simple to do, simple not to do.”

One of the things that I have discovered through my personal journey is that as a result of consistent focus, many opportunities appear. I may be going along nicely and then begin to notice points of strain, a feeling of completion of one goal while still unclear about the next step. It makes me uneasy. In fact, it is as if my focus is being pulled off course – which it is. For example, Rainbows Over Ruins has just been published. The next progressive step is to promote the book, letting people know about it and, in the process, my work on the subject. However, publication has created a void. The energy I had focused on publication needs to be redirected and I am aware of a flood of projects vying for my attention.

For a time, this makes it challenging to maintain your focus while you go through a process of discernment. You need to ask yourself which action or choice feels most likely to bring you the results that best match your long term vision or short term goal. It is not unusual for the best choice to also include an aspect of personal growth that will require you to reach outside your comfort zone. All of which can be very uncomfortable.

Why is it important to develop your personal process of discernment? You can save yourself a great deal of suffering if you recognize the source of agitation or contrast when it comes up and immediately begin to ask positive, open questions. Why? What if? The answers are often in the questions.

I now pay attention to those feelings. I remember Bob Proctor telling us that we aren’t living close enough to the edge of possibilities unless we feel that way. The discomfort comes from not having made the choice. Once you make it, once you decide the best course of action, you move into action mode and dive right in. The stress reduces and you know where to place your immediate focus once again.

If you are feeling this way, I challenge you to carve out some quiet time to look at your discomforts today and ask what you would prefer. Ask yourself why this preference makes you feel better as you go about your business, doing the next presented thing, maintaining the pressure right where you are while you wait for the answer to come.

To Your Success,

Susan

Reporting in: I am where I am and it’s okay

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I am surprised to see how long it has been since I last posted here. Life has taken me off on a creative journey that has consumed every waking moment – and probably quite a few sleeping moments as well. I am happy to report that I am pleased with where I am now. It has taken several years to move from the night of the landslide through the rebuilding process, yet today, I stand at a place of infinite possibility.

You would think it would be enough to have found a ranch to replace the one we lost or to be part of a daily morning show like “Home and Family” that airs on Hallmark Channel. But that was only a piece of the puzzle.

Along the way, I became fascinated with the creative process. What did we do to make the ranch a reality? How could I learn to do that consciously? How could I help others do it too? I had studied to become a life coach, then refined my studies to understand the power of the mind and success principles as one of Bob Proctor’s LifeSuccess Consultants. Bob encouraged each of his students to write a book, but who was I to write? What could I write that would have meaning for anyone else?

In the end, I decided to translate an outline of the creative process into real life experience. The old adage held true – if you really want to know a subject, teach others about it. I set out to live what I was learning and share that journey. It was painful at times as I wrestled with the application of new ideas on old paradigms. Whenever I hit a roadblock in my understanding that interfered with the writing, new experiences would crop up to help me learn what was needed to move forward.

It took time to write, but after working with the editors at Balboa Press, I expect to place the resulting book titled “Rainbows Over Ruins” in physical production shortly. There will also be a free e-workbook available for anyone who would like to be mentored on their own creative journey while reading my story.

“Rainbows Over Ruins” is what one of my colleagues calls a Siddhartha journey. Along the way, I learned that the creative process embodies success principles. Creativity is an intimate dance with quantum consciousness, the interplay of conscious ideas, questions, and feelings with the power of the subconscious mind to take action and get results.

As I prepare to update listings to reflect my new status as author, I feel a bit like Indiana Jones, about to step off at a leap of faith location. I am so grateful for the support of my many mentors and colleagues. We have to do things on our own, but we do not do them alone. In that spirit, I offer the following question to get your juices flowing. Why do you want to create what you want today?

To Your Success,

Susan

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