Reflecting on my past 10 years of coaching experience, I can see the similarities in both the problems and the solutions as people strive to become their best selves and live life to the full. Accepting the following bits of wisdom can create significant change in your life!
- attitude of gratitude
- A key attribute of people living their best lives is gratitude. They are grateful for all the good in their lives (people, things, experiences) as well as the opportunity to learn valuable life lessons when negative or uncomfortable situations arise.
- 3 minute miracle
- This is a tool that I use all the time, both personally and with all of my clients. BREATHE! This does not mean the type of unconscious breathing that we spend most of the day doing, but a very focused awareness of the breathing process. And it’s easy! Just pay attention to the physical act of breathing. Notice how it feels to breathe in, allowing it to fill your lungs and spread throughout your body. Hold it for as long as you can, keeping the focus on the physical act. Then exhale, hard and slow. (I usually ask clients to make sure I hear them exhale on the phone.) Do this 3 times, slower each time. In the end, you will be clear and focused, in your “wisdom center.” Now is the time to ask questions like “What is the most important thing to do right now?”
- don’t take it personally
- In my opinion, The Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is one of the most brilliant guidelines for being your best self. Especially, the agreement not to take anything personally. “Nothing that others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality, their own dream. When you are immune to the opinions and actions of others, you will not be the victim of unnecessary suffering” .
- Fundamental Human Needs
- In the early days, I used an assessment created by Thomas Leonard to determine what unmet needs a person had. Time and time again, it all came down to feeling accepted, valued, and/or recognized. We need to know what we count. Hearing it from others is good, but we also need to hear it from ourselves. In fact, I would recommend acknowledging yourself (and others) first, and then letting the acknowledgment reflect back to you.
- Ministry of Presence
- Some time ago I attended a funeral where the priest spoke about “the ministry of the presence.” He encouraged each of us to be truly present in each moment and with each person with whom we come in contact. Give them the gift of your 100% attention. This is especially important with family members, as this undivided attention from them is vital to their emotional well-being (see last point!). By the way, since quality is often more important than quantity, you will probably find (as many of my clients do) that when you give 100% attention to the important people in your life, they will ask for it less often, since they discover they don’t need constant “proof” of your affection.
- Give what you want to receive
- When there is something we want from others (emotional or physical, not items), the best way to get it is to start giving it to others. The more you give it, the more you will feel it yourself and the more people will start to give it back. Incredibly simple, yet very effective!
- Get you deserve what you want
- No matter what you want, you DESERVE to have it! It’s just a fact. Many of us feel the need to be punished for something (often something trivial that no one else remembers) and therefore feel like joy is out of reach. A vital belief to be your best self is “I’m good enough just the way I am.”
- Take ownership and reject victimhood
- It is part of human nature to want to escape responsibility, so it is very easy to blame others for everything in your life. However, ‘eternal’ victims do NOT become their best selves or live their lives to the fullest. To claim the power to change your life, you MUST accept responsibility for everything in it today. All those ‘people’ are just helping you learn a valuable life lesson. However, accepting responsibility for what happened does NOT change your responsibility. Taking ownership does not relieve them of the predicament; sets you free!
- Continue to improve 1% per day until Full
- Very often, we try to change too much and feel overwhelmed at the prospect, leading to not changing at all! The best antidote to this is to focus on small improvements each day. While it’s important to identify a ‘SMART’ end goal, we can’t focus on that every day. Turn that big goal into small ones. For example, if you want to exercise 30 minutes 3 days a week, do it in small percentages at a time. 1% of 30 minutes is 0.3 minutes, but 3 minutes is 10%. So the first week, exercise 3 minutes for 3 days. The second week, double that to 6 minutes. Keep your focus on increasing that amount of time and before you know it, you’ll have reached your goal!
- Focus on being the best me
- Being is more important than doing or having. It’s so simple and elegant that I don’t think I can add anything to it!
- Self Talk shapes our lives
- The constant chatter in our minds shapes our lives more than all other experiences and events combined. It is not the teacher who made fun of us, but the daily reminder of it that makes us vulnerable and protective. Turns us off… or lifts us up! That is why it is so important to break such negative thoughts, changing them at least to neutral thoughts if you cannot get to happy ones right away.
- beliefs can be changed
- All our beliefs are learned. That’s good news because it means they can be changed. However, there is no on/off switch. The process of changing a belief is just that, a process, something you must choose and commit to. (If you’re interested in learning more about this, consider a free session, your free test drive.)
- Every emotional response means SOMETHING
- When we have some emotional response to a person, thing, experience, event, movie, book, anything, there is a reason for that response on our part. While we may not need to separate happy or joyful responses, it’s always worth looking at why you shut down, get angry, want to cry, or feel some uncomfortable feeling, particularly when other people aren’t responding to the stimulus in the same way.
- Being our best selves requires courage and strength.
- To achieve fulfillment in our lives, we must accept that we have the courage to face the worst and the strength to hope and allow the best. Sometimes our fear of the “worst” happening makes us so paralyzed that we don’t even know what the worst is. Recognizing what the worst is (and identifying some ways we could deal with it if it did happen), allows us to overcome fear. Once we have overcome fear, we must work to hope for and allow for the best. For some, this is even scarier than facing the worst.
