Tag Archives: Success

Failures are openings to our Greatest Creations

Many times throughout our lives we try to create an opportunity, an idea, a dream but end up without a ‘positive’ result. We look at the outcome as a failure either on our own part or that of the external world. But, what if this was not a failure but an opening? What if you actually believed whole heartedly that everything you experienced was your own creation and that embedded in the outcomes that you think are “bad” are actually such greater gems of wisdom that you could have only gained by not having a dream realized.

In this world we are taught to win and have more, have the most. However, do you really think your highest purpose, the meaning of your life, is to accumulate physical wealth and leisure or do you think that there is something far greater in store for you that you are unconsciously working toward. Do you think you would have greater life satisfaction with truly loving and knowing your life purpose or being able to afford a trip to Hawaii? I’m not saying that this definitely exists in your experience, but I am saying that if you spend the time to look at your life mishaps you may find understandings that are far more valuable than the trip itself.

I like to think about it like this, if a toddler was given everything they asked for would they gain all the lessons they needed in life? Or do you think the fact that they learnt about things like delayed gratification, about being thankful for what they have, that then they will have a far more balanced look on life.

If you have become discouraged, that is fine, but the very fact that you have become discouraged means that you didn’t truly believe. You may be able to visualize Hawaii but that doesn’t mean that you have a knowing that you are going there. We most powerfully create our lives when we have a true belief that we are not attached to the outcome. When we know something is going to happen that we don’t even question what the outcome will be.

The same way a pen falls to the ground we know that we can pick it up. We don’t even question that the pen can’t be picked up. And even if we had a sore back, something that limited our progress and couldn’t quite reach it we still trust completely in ourselves that the pen will be picked up. We understand that despite our limitation of not being able to pick it up now that once moving through the limitations we are experiencing we will again be able to complete the task we began earlier. Remember we have the soreness in our back to protect us from further injuring ourselves. Our limitations are often our greatest teachers. Love the lessons and you will gain the greatest knowing.

Hold more than a belief, hold a knowing within yourself and trust in your dreams, as if they are as possible as picking up a fallen pen. Look for the truth in the ‘limitations’ that we create that temporarily stop the reaching of our dreams because with the greater understanding of ourselves comes the greatest experience of life and the richest expression of our dreams.

So please KNOW this despite the long journey ahead: Dreams Come True! They really do!!!

[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/40000072 w=400&h=225]

Caine’s Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.

This impressive 9 year old boy followed his dream fearlessly with a true knowing, and undoubtedly with life’s help, he made his dreams come true!

“What is” is the way to easy creating

When we end with someone in our lives we often worry about what they are doing? Why are they doing these things? What does it mean to us? It gives us an excuse to talk about it and think about them, but does that really serve us to think on all these things? Why do we need the stories that we make up in order to fill the spaces in our lives we don’t know anything about? And most importantly are these stories real and do they really matter?

What matters is that you move your focus away from your partner and all the ‘What if’s’ and simply focus on the ‘What is’. What is happening in your life now? What is right in front of you? What is it that you are working on now? What is inspiring you in life now? The ‘what if’s’ don’t matter.

‘What if vs what is’ is applicable to all things that matter in our lives. It doesn’t just have to be your partner: It can be a job loss. It can be any pending decision for your career, for you health for a competition. It is anything that you are or have worked at to create, any project, any relationship, any dream. Keep your focus on the ‘what is’ because all the stories of what if’s often don’t serve us. It reminds me of the old Cherokee wisdom story of the two wolves that rage within us. When asked upon which wolf wins, the good or the bad, we learn it is the one that we feed. What we give our energy too we feed.

All those thoughts you have about the ‘what if’s’… they don’t exist except in your mind and imagination. People think every thought is real, well they aren’t! They are seeds of change. They are moments of creation that you can latch onto or choose to focus on something else that better serves what you really want. What you really want to create.

It is the emotion and action that we give those thoughts, which materializes one thought over another. If I am sitting here hungry but I want to finish this piece of writing. I will think to myself, “I want to go get food” but I also think “I want to finish this piece while I am in the flow”. Both thoughts are there but which do I choose to give my energy to, I choose the one that best serves me. Which thought do I feed to give energy to? In this situation, it is finishing the piece. So that’s what I choose for my reality by giving emotion and excitement for the finished piece of writing that lies before me. And in doing so, now I will not need to think on food until after I have finished this piece because my emotion and action has allowed me to give solely to this piece of writing.

So acknowledge that you are having a thought but is it a ‘what if’ or a ‘what is’? Your power of creation lies in the ‘what is’. Your actions are more clear and directed when you focus on the ‘what is’. You are more motivated to create the ‘what is’. You are less overwhelmed by the singular ‘what is’ than the multitude of ‘what if’s’. Get present and focus on your ‘what is’ and your journey will be a lot smoother and you will create a lot easier and a lot faster.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1Mb9tsnYLU]

Dream Bigger than the End

So often we do things so that we can be the best at something, just for the sake of being the best, but very soon on we lose our motivation and commitment to the cause, finding it very boring. Why do we reach for these goals of being the best at something? So we can think of ourselves as better than other people? So we can think we are a “good” or “smart” person? These lofty ideas can really be thought of elements of our personality. No matter what you do, whenever you compare yourself to someone else you are always afflicted with personality. The personality builds itself on experience relative to the world. You know yourself relative to the world and therefore if you can only know yourself in reference to something you are limiting yourself. You are limiting yourself because you can only grow as big as the person or thing you are comparing yourself to and that is a limiting mind frame that you are holding. Sometimes you reach that goal and you sit around feeling good about yourself until you realize that there is someone else bigger or better and so now you compete with them. Forever competition. Never satisfaction.

By only trying to be the best, not only are you trying to climb to the top of an unreachable mountain, you are stealing the joy from your experience. To truly excel you have to do something, or look at something, in a way that has you do it for the joy of doing it. For instance, if you are doing something just to get good grades or you are working just so you can get money, you are naturally sucking the joy from what you are doing. It is a limited reference frame and won’t inspire you beyond what you are doing, so then why do it?

It is important to look at the thing you are doing from different angles and different perspectives. A good way of doing this is through gratitude for the opportunity to be following this path, for what it involves and for what got you there. You think that what you are doing isn’t relevant now but how do you know in the future it won’t be one of the most relevant things that you did. Find a way to identify with what you are doing. Recontextualize it. What is the relevance of what you are doing to the world? To the rest of your life? Find a way that it is relevant to you so that you can connect with it as something outside of the moment – rather than as a means to an end.

How could anyone be inspired by reaching the end?

It is our reference points that bring us down. I had a friend who grew up in the fields of Mexico. He didn’t know what rich and poor was because there was no one around to compare himself to, so in those days he was blissfully happy. But then he came to America and he saw the difference of his situation, to all the wealth around and how different he was from them. With this new reference frame he felt limited and sad. One day he realized something that lead him to reframe his situation. Instead of focusing on himself in relation to the people above him, he focused himself to his dream which in his mind was well beyond and much more relevant to what he wanted for himself.

In this day and age people will often change with the wind their career, their directions and their idea on who they think they should be and what they should be doing. People soon become lost in the hurricane of choices trying to grab on to as many things as they can whilst they find themselves swirling around in the frenetic digital trends of the day. We often become fixated on these ideas like a rabbit in headlights, copying paths that people have already begun to cut, leaving us more often than not overwhelmed and stuck in the rut. People typically prefer to walk a well-worn road where they will find safety and certainty but they may not find purpose. This may very well be because we are travelling the road well travelled rather than the world less travelled.

So spend the time to work out your big dream. Plan the path ahead. The only reason we choose to focus on other things and people is because we don’t take the time or don’t know what dream we want for ourselves. When you try to reach another persons dream you won’t have the same passion about it; to reach where they did. You won’t be able to muster the same level of enthusiasm needed to go the long haul, and thus everything you do becomes boring and tedious. If you want adventure, if you want excitement, if you want inspiration you may need to do something inspired. If anybody could have done it, it most probably would have been done. Some times all that takes though is simply getting down to business on your dream and believing in it and yourself.

Take the time to work out what your dream is. If you don’t know yet, then find gratitude for the things that you are doing, because in positivity and your higher frames of mind you are opening your frame of reference to a place of greater possibility and opportunity than if you have a closed and resistant mind. Give thanks for the dreams that you do have even if they are modeled after someone else’s and be open and aware for the moment when you realize what you really want to do. So dream big and get exited about your dream. Because when you find your dream, when you find your purpose you wont be doing things for a limited reason, a momentary accolade, a meaningless end, you will be doing things for the joy of the rest of your life.

Seek happiness and success will find you – 21 days to retrain your brain

We are constantly seeing, hearing and reading about people having break downs, how our friends are feeling sad, celebrity couples ending their relationships and the world generally dissatisfied with their lives. Even Heidi Klum and Seal broke up. Seal ended it with a woman who has been consistently thought of as the most beautiful women in the world. How can someone not be happy with the most beautiful woman in the world you may ask?
We know what happiness feels like, because we have all had it but then it just seems to slip away and we are left dealing instead with stresses and pressures rather than basking in the glow of the glory of our happiness. So what is it that constantly leads us to our state of disillusionment with the world? The answer is… The view!

We keep on looking outside ourselves for happiness. Jobs, partners, possessions. However our external world only has about 10% to do with our happiness. Where we need to be looking is at the 90%. This is where the real view is: our inner world. We spend all our time trying to fix up what we see in that outside 10% and leaving the large majority of how we see the world from the inside as unkempt and in disarray. How do we beautify and create an amazing internal landscape? How do you change your thinking?

Oddly enough your happiness and success doesn’t really have anything to do with your head, it has to do with your heart. Back in medieval times the heart was considered the center of consciousness and there may be good reason to start giving some thought to that again. 75% of personal success and happiness has been shown to be accounted for by three things: 1) Optimism, 2) Social Support and 3) Your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of a threat. These three things are what you need to be looking at rather than your bank account and the car you have or the job title or partner that you are showing off currently. This is where our focus is backwards.

Every time we reach a success, we are aware of an even better goal that we want to reach. Got a job, want a better job. Got a car, want a better car. Got a trophy, want a bigger one. The end points are constantly shifting, like trying to catch a rainbow. Happiness seems to be sitting on the other side of that rainbow but this is really a hamster wheel that leaves you eternally chasing. The real truth about happiness is the exact opposite to what we think it is. We have to reach happiness first in order to find success. And lucky for us psychologists and scientists have found some simple exercises that utilize those three elements of optimism, social support and reframing stressors in order to retrain our brains to be able to look at the world and change the view to leave us happy and in control of our lives.

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. Albert Schweitzer (1875 –1965) Nobel Peace Prize Winning Medical Missionary

Change you brain in 21 days

Every evening, for the next 21 days:

• Write down 3 things you were grateful for. This starts to retrain your brain to begin to look for those things that leave you feeling good.

Every morning for the next 21 days, rotate each day between these following 3 things:

1) Write a journal entry recalling something good that happened the day before.
• This allows you to relive and remember that your life is filled with good experiences.
2) Meditate – Sit cross-legged with your back against the wall for 15 minutes and only focus on your breath going in and out your nose. Notice as your mind gets caught on a thought and then bring your mind back to your breath.
• This allows to teach your body that behavior matters and helps train your mind to focus on one thing rather than your mind bouncing around.
3) Perform a random/ conscious act of kindness – Send a friend in your social circle a thank you note. Buy someone you don’t know a coffee. Invite a friend out to lunch.
• This will remind you that you are not alone in this world, but that you are loved and you are a relevant member of society. By giving you will open yourself up to receive and you will gain much greater insights into your life and your happiness

Spawning creativity. Borrowing genius

A busy morning, a gaggle of gentlemen, the sound of traffic loudly impresses its presence as each person struggles to hear one another over the ambient sounds. There is one difference today to their meeting… they talk as if they were back in the French Salons of the early 18th century. Amongst them are the great minds of the enlightenment who together in a soup of genius spawned many of the fundamental ideas that built the foundation of today’s society. We call these ideas inspired, and the men, genius for they certainly were, but there was something else that they often don’t talk about and we are rarely aware of it.

As we look back at these men and their creations, many of these inspired ideas did not come from a single source, but in fact from a plethora of ideas spun together over countless hours of idea pondering with their peers, past and present. We often find ourselves ruminating over a thought and then we speak to someone about something unrelated and we creak open another moment closer to realizing the truth of our insight. We read or hear something and our minds open themselves again to it even more. The idea is like Michelangelo’s David, Mike always saw him there in the stone but instead of the hand of the great maestro our ideas come from a thousand hands chipping away at revealing the idea until finally it is revealed by the one man who laid the seed.

Your creativity is literally mental intercourse. It is bringing together two separate ideas from different sources and having them intermingle and spawn a new modified version of the idea. Then from another source an idea comes along and again infuses and impregnates to create another and even more unique form. This may go on and on over time, you are constantly nurturing an idea, this time instead of in a belly, it is inside your mind. It changes form, becoming completely unrecognizable from when you first had the seed of the thought, but you love it even more. Finally without even realizing it, you feel something snap, it comes rushing like water but its something else. It comes unexpectedly but you knew it lay on the horizons… The idea you’d been waiting for!!! How wonderful.

A feeling of elation comes over you and you are filled with such hope and excitement for what lies before this new thing that you have birthed. And so we must give thanks as we remember that it is through our mental intercourse and our mutual respect and love for our peers, past, present and future that they too are the shared progenitors of the ideas that we spawn.

And by the way, once we birth the idea then we have to give to get it up on its feet…………………………… But that’s a whole other story!

One step backwards at a time

We as humans are forever growing. We are constantly looking at who we are, ever trying to better create ourselves. To have control of our finances, of our emotions, of our relationships… of life!!! We reach crises points in our lives and then try to break out of the mold we have created by reinventing ourselves. We buy the latest do it yourself book, get the latest fashions, the latest gizmo, try the latest fad or just join the gym. We immediately feel proud of ourselves, optimistic about the future and capable of being agents of change and growth in our lives.

So often though, when we make changes we feel great at first but then that feeling of elation slowly dissipates. To make a true and permanent change in your life requires more than a one-day commitment. The wisdom that you gain about yourself is not something that you just learn in one moment and then it stays forever. We have a lifetime of thought and living patterns that are deeply embedded in our subconscious as life programs. So that whenever we are required to act more often than not we are reacting to something that has happened. It is when we react that we immediately move into our old behaviour programs.

We see this behaviour most often when we are avoiding an emotion that doesn’t make us feel good. We therefore employ a program that has, in the past, helped us alleviate the problem before. But this only works for the short-term. Sure enough, in a day, a month, a year, the problems always inevitably creep back. Often we know what we need to do for long-term change, which is the reason why we started the new program in the first place. However, this long-term option is often thwarted because we react to a bump or distraction and move more easily back to the known short-term program that only acts as a momentary band-aid. We can see this as examples when we aren’t feeling good about ourselves instead of exercising, we will eat some ice cream in front of the TV. Or we follow a dream but because it doesn’t manifest immediately we simply give up early on in the journey.

We must be more aware of who we are and what we want. Whatever you choose to bring into your life, you must choose it as a daily practice, as a new way of life. Something you felt motivated you to the point where you were actually driven to enact this idea for the betterment of your self and your life. So now that you were given a revelation about how to change old patterns, you must act on it as a commitment to yourself and the practice itself.

To better understand this we can think of it the same way as when you first get into a hot bath. At first the temperature is hot, but then you acclimatize to the new heat. This is fine at first, you can handle the slight drop but then slowly the heat will dissipate and ultimately you drop down to the old temperature. This is the same as taking on a new program in that you start off cooking but slowly you get cold on the idea. You feel uncomfortable and uninspired having gone back to the old world. It is up to you to lift yourself, keep providing action and re-stoke the fires every day, every moment in order to keep yourself cooking in this new space. Keep yourself elevated and inspired by the actions.

To do this you need to choose reachable goals. Don’t pick something that you just know is impossible. 100 push ups a day. Write an entire business and marketing plan in a day. If your goals are unreachable you will become overwhelmed by the enormity of the task and immediately deflate. If you feel overwhelmed by the size of a task – cut in half. If that begins to feel like too much then… cut that in half. Keep moving forward. Keep providing energy to the engine of your idea so that it continues to chug along. Sooner or later you will build some momentum and then you will be cooking with gas.

To help you with your goals get clear on your values. What type of person do you want to be? How do you want to see yourself? If you want to know yourself as someone who has control of their lives and dreams then keep this at the forethought of your mind when you start to want to just go and sit on the couch. When you want to give up. Sometimes it helps to have a friend to stoke the fires, get a buddy or a mentor someone who you want to work with and commit to bringing about change in your life. Obligations and commitments you make to your friends and community is one of the biggest motivators. That’s why we have gym buddies. Soldiers have been recorded as saying they no longer are risking their lives for their country or ideals but for the person next to them. Use whatever and whoever you can to help bring about change and deeply root these new behaviour patterns.

Something to remember about learning new ways to be in life is that eventually you will make new programs, and these behaviors, that were so hard at first, will become second nature to you and you wont have to try anymore. This then allows you to create more space to learn even more powerful behaviors about your life and how to master it even more.

Exercise 1

GOALS

– Get clear on your goal and write it down
– Work backwards step by step from the end to where you are now.
– Map out what you need to do to reach the goal
– If a step is too big – cut it in half

Exercise 2
VALUES
– Imagine you are at your funeral. Write down a short paragraph about how you would want to be remembered and How you want to think about yourself?
– Take these positive characteristics about yourself and when you feel your motivation waning. Take a breath and remember how you want to be remembered and what you will need to do at the moment to make that happen

AND REMEMBER FROM THE GREAT WORDS OF THE LITTLE ENGINE THAT COULD —

“I THINK”….”I CAN!!!!!”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yx9xO98kcBU&feature=related]

Calculating the Love Connection

Isn’t it wonderful that there is someone in life to think sweet thoughts about, whether or not you are in a relationship with them. I was at my best-friend’s wedding, and in his speech I gained an amazing insight into what the feeling of love really is. He helped me understand that this person you are focussed on is a person that inspires you to want to be the best person that you see yourself becoming. It is that feeling of inspiration, of wanting to be the best that you can be for this person and the world that we call “In-Love”. But it is equally important for you to realize that it is not the person themselves, it is the connection between the two of you. You are the person that feels the love “IN” you. Love is not given to you, it is conjured within, and is up to you to accept and acknowledge that experience of it within. You recognize love from your connection with another person. This is because whatever you put out you always get back.

The Love Equation
Newton’s third law of motion and force states “Every action always has an opposite and equal reaction”. Love is an e-motion or a force that motivates us. This means that the only way you can experience love is by giving love. It is reflected back to you. Therefore the more love you give, the more it will reflect back.

The Love Mirror
The amount reflected back to you depends on the reflective surface onto which you are shining. The person that you are sending your love to needs to be able to accept the love within themselves in order to be able to reflect it back. You will only be able to receive the amount of love reflected back to you as the person is able to absorb. It is the same as saying “you can only love another as much as you love yourself”. For example, let us say that you are providing a stadium light worth of love but the person only has a mirror the size of you palm. You wont actually receive that much back. Furthermore their mirror might actually be directed at someone else so that even more will be lost. Therefore it is important to make sure you are always giving to yourself as much as you are giving to your partner.

Give without Expectation
Here is one trick to ensuring you will get love back though. Give without expectation. If you give love without expectation of receiving back, you will always walk away with a smile in your heart because you have not limited yourself to the single connection but given for the sake of the whole universe, of something much bigger than the both of you. When you give for something bigger than yourself you will always and truly receive that which is equal to that which you have given” You can use this love equation for anything, for a connection with a person, for a connection with a thing, for a connection with an action, for a connection with a thought, for a connection with anything and everything. Lets say you love playing guitar. By giving to the action of playing you are getting a much richer love for yourself and the music than if you merely listened to it on the radio. You will find new understandings about where the music can go and where it can take you. This is all because of the millions of different variables that exist between the player and the music: The tone, the pitch, the timbre, the rhythm, your emotion, your content. So many different ways that these variables can come together that you will be able to create such a rich and fulfilling experience. Now think about this connection and all the variables that exist between two people and you can times the richness of connection by infinity. Which is why I might add it is so difficult to define “Love”, because there are literally infinite ways for it to be experienced and it is the same for wisdom.

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3gMgK7h-BA&w=420&h=315]

The Love Connection
When we think of romantic love between partners, we can see how the love connection is developed from your experiences and interactions, your support and intimacy, your absorption and your teachings, from anything and everything that bounces between you two between each of you individually and the outside world and between both of you together and the outside world around you. All these things add up and build the love connection. I like to think of it like an internet connection. The more experiences you share, the more intimately you get to learn about yourself, your partner, what they want and what you want. And as we know more information you have access to, the more bandwidth you have built into that connection. The greater the connection the richer the experience and the more mature the love that you will feel.

Equating your Love Connection
Upon deciding on our partner, we take into considerations the things that have worked for us in the past that we have built and we ask for those things to be equally present. We also acknowledge those things that haven’t worked for us and it is when we have shone the light on these things that we can then better help understand what we need to build a connection this next time to better serve us in creating a richer love connection. Sometimes we aren’t always aware of what does and doesn’t serve us and other times we believe we want things built from a reactive state. The only place you create your life from is your present not your past. Therefore build your love connection from this moment. (For more on this see Shifting paths – Shifting lives). When you have found this someone that your unconscious has calculated as matching the requirements that you need to satisfy the building of the love connection you are looking for, you will begin to feel stirrings of wanting to connect with this person. This feeling is so exhilarating and profound that we naturally feel it is the person that is causing such feelings. Please remember, that they are merely the conduit, the mediator the mirror. Treat it kindly and shine the light of love on it and you will feel the experience of love. Build the connection by learning about each other and you will have ever-richer experiences of love.

The Love Connector
The best way to create and connect to an experience of finding the person that can satisfy the personality variables you are looking for is through a love poem. Write a love poem about the perfect partner. Imagine this perfect partner is on their way over to your house and you want to give it to them as a sign of love and gratitude. Do not have any one person in mind but simply write about how grateful you are for them. Write about the way they make you feel. Write about what things you adore about them. Write about the things you do, say and share with each other. Write about how you communicate and how you support each other. Write it so that you feel it as the Truth within you. When you have finished writing you will be one step closer to your partner. Whether it is a person you have your heart set on or another unknown in the Universe that you know you will attract, because you will be clear in what you want. Your subconscious will have revealed to you what is meaningful and what makes up your current love connection. When you are clear on what you want, you won’t fall into pitfalls of connecting with people that don’t make up the values you are looking for and so you will save yourself time and heartache. When you finally connect with your partner it doesn’t hurt to rewrite the poem of what new love connections you are building at the moment so that you are clear within yourself as to how you want it to grow. The fun part here is that you actually get to give it to the person that you love!

So remember your love exists within you. You build a love connection between you but the love always exists within. The trick is to build a big enough connection that the sharing is quick, easy and inspiring. Give and be open to receive. This goes for anything you do. Walk into any situation by giving without expectation to receive and you will always walk out with a mile on your face. Live from a force of love and you can create anything. Just write exactly what you want and why as if it’s on its way to your door and you will open up to your dream life.

How to Make a Mistake

Often we feel overwhelmed by a situation. We have done everything right but still our plans go awry. We look around us and blame it on the world. This person screwed me; the conditions were not right; etc. And saying this is fine. Sometimes it might be smarter to drop something and forget about it. But sometimes it may be worth stopping for a moment and looking at the situation, and asking yourself whether you can take responsibility for what happened?

Taking responsibility reveals the lesson

It is only when we take responsibility for something do we provide ourselves the opportunity to change the outcome. If you refuse to look at the outcome and say it was someone else’s fault you will never be able to properly see what went wrong and understand how to solve the problem and learn the lesson. It has been said that “What we resist persists, and what we look at goes away”. So maybe you can see that as you open yourself to something rather resisting it, the problem might fall away when you realize that maybe it wasn’t a problem. Maybe what happened was exactly what needed to occur in order for you to move forward and grow into the person that you dreamed of becoming. We live in a society where we have been taught that to make a mistake is “bad”. We spend our whole lives trying to be right but here is something we all need to learn, being right all the time is actually “bad” and learning how to make a mistake in a constructive way is actually so right you wouldn’t believe.

Mistakes you want to make

It has been shown that taking yourself to the limit where you make mistakes is the greatest way to learn, if you deal with the lesson appropriately. Instead of reacting, slow down. Don’t take the mistake as a failure, as a personal attack on your sense of self-worth, but realize that this is one step closer to reaching your goal. This mistake is not an error but instead an opportunity to learn. The more our minds and bodies create impulses that experience and overcome difficulties, the better we will be able to handle these problems in the future. The better we handle problems, the faster we can deal with them to the point where they are no longer problems but a momentary challenge, just like the way a baby learnt to walk. At first even crawling was a serious problem but eventually the baby learnt how to crawl, and then how to steps. Walking suddenly became only a challenge and ultimately it was so automatic that not only did the baby not have to even think about walking, but as the child grew up it could do things like running and surfing as easily as breathing. Without these mistakes the baby would have never made it past the first step.

Outside of now

So ask yourself could this problem be a part of your lesson in order to reach your goals. Try looking at the situation from a higher perspective, one that is outside of only the present moment. Instead think about what this experience means to you in a year’s time or five years time. Now look back and look at how relevant this problem in the scheme of your life that has been. By looking at the problem at hand as a lesson to learn rather than a mistake, you create your space as the actor not the reactor of your life.

Acting or reacting

When you react, you are reacting from an emotional space. There is a difference between feelings and emotions. You actively generate your feelings. Feelings guide your actions powerfully and are the best space to make decisions from as they come from a place of control and clarity. Feelings can take form when you practice gratitude. Give thanks for what you have and where you are in your life and give thanks for your dream and what you are trying to create. Even try and appreciate yourself. Name five things you are thankful for about yourself. (Learn more about gratitude in “Gratitude gets you Zen Continue reading How to Make a Mistake

Success lies beyond what you can see

If you want to truly attract money. Dont focus on the how. Trying to attract money is a ‘HOW’. Instead focus on your joy. Focussing on the money is telling the universe how you want to reach your passion. We look for money because that brings us control. Control over our lives, over problems, over the external world. But control is not happiness and neither is money. Even with the control from money, you will still attract problems into your life.

People often say when things are looking up, “something outside of my control comes in and knocks it all down again”. That ‘outside of your control’ is actually the very thing that is in your control. You are inviting that into your life because that is your belief structure: Every time you set something up it will be taken from you. Because that is your chaos, to see for yourself whether you believe in yourself and your dreams. Because that is your lesson, to believe in your dream beyond what you can see.

Try finding humility in the good in your life and don’t resist or resent the changes that inevitably come. You will find your peace, you will find your stability and you will find your growth. I always find it interesting that there for some people when things go wrong suddenly there’s always a silver lining and for other people when things go right there’s always a storm cloud around the corner. I don’t believe these people are cursed but instead they curse themselves. Follow your joy, trust the universe and have the faith to keep striving when storm clouds gather.

“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965) Nobel Peace Prize Laureate

When you follow your passion, when you follow your joy, you will find that life is effortless and you will not need to try to protect yourself as much because you can trust that life and the universe is actually a friendly place. So please know this, the universe does not need to be told “How”. It can see much further in the future than you. So let go of your need for control and money, instead focus on your passion and have faith in yourself and trust that the Universe will know how to get you there.