This 3 minute MP3 is a wonderful message and metaphor having to do with self-worth and your value. It’s by a high-energy keynote speaker and seminar leader, Joel Weldon. His motto is, “Success comes in cans, not in cannots.” For more information about Joel, his services, or to read his articles, please visit SuccessComesInCans.com.

Please click on JoelWeldon$100message.mp3 and it will open in a new window.

self improvement, self help, personal growth, personal development, motivation, productivity, inspiration

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When you have a setback, it can actually be beneficial. It may be that you’ve gone too far or fast for your skills, knowledge or resources. This can be a time for you to reassess, and discover what else you need to move ahead. It can also give you the space to strengthen your current position, to allow it to support you in a better way as you begin to progress, again. So, instead of focusing on what you’ve lost or lost out on, use the experience for information and insight.

self improvement, self help, personal growth, personal development, motivation, productivity, inspiration

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“How to Gain Control of Your Emotions” from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit.

Controlling your emotions doesn’t mean ignoring them. It means you recognize them and act on them when you deem it appropriate, not randomly and uncontrollably.

Steps

1.    Know your emotions. There are a million different ways you can feel, but scientists have classified human emotions into a few basics that everyone can recognize: joy, acceptance, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, and anticipation. Jealousy, for example, is a manifestation of anger – anger that you’re not “as good” as something else, fear of being abandoned because you’re not “perfect” or “the best”.

2.    Observe your emotions. Many times, we’re at the mercy of our emotions on a subconscious level. By recognizing your emotions on a conscious level, you’re better able to control them. The last thing you want to do is ignore or repress your feelings, because if you’re reading this, you probably know that when you do that, they tend to get worse and erupt later. Ask yourself throughout the day: “How am I feeling right now?” If you can, keep a journal.

3.    Consider your options. Once you recognize an emotion, think of at least two different ways you can respond. Your emotions control you when you assume there’s only one way to react. You always have a choice. For example, if someone insults you, and you experience anger, your immediate response might be to insult them back. But no matter what the emotion, there are always at least two alternatives:

• Don’t react. Do nothing. If you do this, however, it’s important to continue acknowledging the emotion. Just because you’re not reacting to an emotion doesn’t mean that emotion doesn’t exist. If you choose not to respond, it should be for a reason (as discussed in the next step) not because of a competing emotion (fear of confrontation).
• Do the opposite of what you would normally do. The “turn the other cheek” philosophy would fall under this category.

4.    Make a choice. Now that you’ve got several options, act on:

• Principles – Who do you want to be? What are your moral principles? What do you want the outcome of this situation to be? Ultimately, which is the decision you’d be most proud of? This is where religious guidance comes into play for many people.
• Logic – Which course of action is the most likely to result in the outcome you desire? For example, if you’re being confronted with a street fight, and you want to take the pacifist route, you can walk away–but, there’s a good chance that burly drunk will be insulted if you turn your back. Maybe it’s better to apologize and keep him talking until he calms down.

5.    Change your perspective. The above steps show how to not let your emotions control your behavior, but not how to change the emotions themselves. If you want to nip your emotions in the bud, change the way you see the world. If you learn how to be optimistic and laid back, you’ll find that negative emotions make fewer appearances to be reckoned with.

Tips

• Learn to recognize and anticipate “triggers” that set you off.
• If you wish to live with a more “uplifting” attitude, a good idea is to stay away from tv or music that has a negative style to it (e.g really depressing songs), it’s proven that being around a lot of music or movies that have a negative view on the world can actually change the chemical balances in your brain that can even change the way you see things or the way you act in a negative way.
• Watch for “all or nothing” thinking. Most of life is a gradient or gray scale, rather than a set of absolutes or extremes. Many situations and events may seem as if they are black/white, good/bad, yes/no; but reacting as if they are can easily lead to irrational and unhelpful attitudes, emotions, and behaviors.
• Some experiences like watching a film, hearing a sound or tasting a food (sensory input) can trigger or bring about good emotions. The more good ones you can recognize, pay attention to and be aware of, the easier it is to put your self in that kind of a recognizable mood. It’s far easier to get out of an angry or sad state of mind when you can know what happy or joyful state of mind is like.

Warnings

• It is important to control your emotions, but suppressing them is something different entirely. Suppressing your emotions can cause psychological disorders and depression.

Sources and Citations

http://www.fractal.org/Bewustzijns-Besturings-Model/Nature-of-emotions.htm

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Gain Control of Your Emotions. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

inspiration, self improvement, self help, personal growth, personal development

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Question: Can I affirm for a particular person, job, or residence to come into my life?

Answer: It’s not a good idea to affirm for a specific thing. When you do, you actually get in the way of your own good. Who
knows? There may be something better than you could envision waiting for you to recognize it. But if you’re keeping your
vision on a specific item, the better one can’t come into your experience.

If you decide that you want a particular person, place or job, you might also be interfering with another person’s karma. If
you dictate to the Universe that you want “that one,” it might actually have been better for someone else have it. And there would have been a much greater good for you.

Interfering with another’s free choice, or their karma, isn’t pretty. If that happens, and you take someone’s choice away from them, you’ll reap the consequences eventually. I knew someone who affirmed to buy a specific car. They got the car, but they also got all the problems the car had that they didn’t know about. They regretted their decision very quickly.

In spiritual circles, it’s called “outlining” when you try to tell the Universe “how” or “who” your good has to be. And when you outline how it has to happen, you get in the way of the Power. It’s not up to you to determine “how” something will manifest. That’s the job for the Infinite, and your creative mind. They know what would suit you best.

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The Ultimate Secrets of Total Self-Confidence
by Robert Anthony

I was introduced to this book over thirty years ago, when I heard the author speak. It’s a wonderful book that covers many basic tenets of how the conscious/subconscious/superconscious minds work.

One of the chapters is titled, “Dehypnotizing Yourself.” As a hypnotherapist, I tell people that my job isn’t so much to hypnotize them, as to de-hypnotize them of their outdated beliefs. Dr. Anthony explains that very clearly in this book.

Other areas he covers are letting go of the need to conform, self-acceptance, how to treat yourself gently, how to get over feeling guilty, loving yourself, and THEN he begins to address the deep stuff. He explains about the subconscious, how to program it, setting goals, meditation, affirmations, and much more.

If you’re ready to really begin to transform your life, and want great, easy to read guidebook, check this one out.

beliefs · empowerment · personal development · personal growth · positive thinking · self-esteem · self-improvement · self-worth · subconscious

by Senia Maymin at Positive Psychology News Daily, NY – May 25, 2007
Senia Maymin, MBA, MAPP is an Executive Coach, and presents workshops to corporations about Positive Psychology.  Senia is the Editor of Positive Psychology News Daily, and posts her latest ideas about positive psychology, business, and coaching at Senia.com.

Jennifer Aniston will be starring in a movie about Positive Psychology. The movie is expected to be called “Counter Clockwise,” and Aniston will play Harvard Professor Ellen Langer studying how to turn back the clock on aging.  In 1979, Ellen Langer undertook a study in which she put elderly men into a setting that made them think that the year was 1959.  According to the Harvard Crimson, “The magazines, newspapers, hand music the men saw and heard were all 20 years old and the men themselves were told to behave and talk as if it were 1959. … Over the course of a week, signs of aging appeared to reverse and the men looked visibly younger. The subjects’ joints became more flexible, their posture straightened, and the lengths of their fingers, which typically shorten with age, actually increased.”

What were the stories that the men were telling themselves?  How did their physiology become so changed by their thoughts?

Ellen Langer Makes the Old Young Again and Makes the Unexercising Fit

In the February, 2007 issue of Psychological Science, Langer and colleague Alia Crum reported that they took 84 hotel workers and told one group that “the work they do (cleaning hotel rooms) is good exercise and satisfies the Surgeon General’s recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided.”  Langer and Crum told the control group nothing.  Four weeks later, Langer and Crum returned to find some measurements of both groups: the control group hadn’t changed physically, but the test group had decreased all of the following: weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index.

Langer and Crum describe this study as supporting the theory that exercise affects health at least partly due to the placebo effect.  Furthermore, we can ask, what are the stories that these hotel workers are telling themselves? Why do the hotel workers suddenly believe that they actively affect their exercise regiment?

Martin Seligman and Explanatory Style

Martin Seligman has long studied that explanatory style is the intermediate variable in whether a person has an optimistic or pessimistic outlook on life.  In his book Learned Optimism, Seligman outlines that HOW a person tells a story can be an indicator of physical health and mental health.  The “nun study” outlined on the first page of Seligman’s book Authentic Happiness describes how different nuns of a sample of 180 told their life stories: those that described the world in optimistic terms and using positive emotions tended to live longer.  Furthermore, in Learned Optimism, Seligman describes that he and colleague Christopher Peterson had access to a large body of data about men from a young age to an older age (the Grant Study of George Vaillant). Seligman and Peterson looked at the words that the men used at age twenty-five and determined how optimistic or pessimistic the men sounded.  Seligman and Peterson found that the degree of optimism at age twenty-five predicted health at age sixty!

What are the stories the men in the study must have been telling themselves?

“I overcame the black dog”

This week, the New York Times reports on how people tell the stories of their lives in “This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It).” At Northwestern University, Jonathan Adler, a doctoral candidate and Dan McAdams, a professor, study how people describe their problems in therapy (whether a fear of flying or depression or relationship issues).  Adler describes that some people tell a story of “victorious battle: ‘I ended therapy because I could overcome this on my own.’”  McAdams sees the relevance of stories in all parts of a person’s life: “We find that when it comes to the big choices people make — should I marry this person? should I take this job? should I move across the country? — they draw on these stories implicitly, whether they know they are working from them or not.”

One key to overcoming a problem, explains Adler, may be seeing the issue as an outside enemy, often even giving it a name like “the black dog.”  Another key to leaving an issue behind, states the article, may be whether a person recounts a story in the first person (”I, me”) or in the third person (”her, Senia”).

“SHE overcame the black dog”

In an entirely different study, college students were asked to recall one of their most embarrassing moments in high school.  Half the students were asked to recall the story in the first-person and half were told to imagine it in the third-person.  Those who recalled it in the third-person then rated themselves as having become less socially awkward since high school.  Furthermore, both sets of students then had to wait in a room with a researcher posed as a waiting student, but the researcher was really taking notes on the sociability of the research students.  The result?  The third-person imaginers started up a conversation much more frequently than the first-person imaginers.

This study by Lisa Libby of Ohio University, Richard Eibach of Yale University, and Thomas Gilovich of Cornell University reflects how people see change.  Lisa Libby says of the research, “People who are looking for change in themselves don’t sense that they’ve made as much progress when they look back in first-person, and that could be discouraging. … Using the third-person is a good technique to see the positive changes you’ve made in your life, and that is likely to lead to greater satisfaction with your efforts. That, in turn, should make it easier to continue with your efforts to reach your goals.”

From the New York Times article:

Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence; it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.

An Exercise: Claude Steiner and the Mythology of Your Story

Claude Steiner, author of Scripts People Live, suggests that there are simple ways to find out what stories people make up for themselves.  Even for a child, you can ask specific questions to learn about identification with a character:

• What is your favorite fairy tale?
• Who is your favorite cartoon character?
• What movie most represents your life?
• Who is your favorite person?
• Whom would you be like if you could be like anyone?

Could there be a useful positive psychology exercise to work out from this research?  Could there be an exercise along the lines of the following: “Imagine a difficult time in your childhood.  See the little boy or girl who was you, and forgive that little person.  See all the details and all the injustices.  And then let them all go.  And think about how you have changed from that person.”  This sounds remarkably similar to an exercise I was once asked to do in a health psychology class.

In summary, if we speak about those events that we want to distance ourselves from in the third-person and in the past and as temporary and narrow (as Doug Turner describes here), and if we speak about ourselves in the mythology that we want to grow towards and using positive role models (as Kathryn Britton describes here), we may start to tell the life story that we want to be telling.

When They Tell the Story of My Life

It is only fitting to close with the farcical lyrics of a song by Susan Werner:

When they make the movie of my life
I hope they get somebody beautiful to play me
Somebody eloquent and beautiful to play me
When they make the movie of my life
And when they make the movie of my life
I hope they get somebody famous to direct it
Somebody famous and a genius to direct it
When they make the movie of my life
And everyone will see
How hard it’s been for me
How much I’ve overcome
To be someone
Deserving of a motion picture  [...]

Thanks to NTMarket: New Thought Sales and Marketing for letting me know about this story.

This article is © 2009 PositivePsychologyNews.com. The original article was authored by Senia Maymin on May 25, 2007, and can be seen here. To see the references and join the discussion about this article, click here.

self improvement, self help, personal growth, personal development, motivation

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I’ve been hard at work making some plans of changes to the newsletter and new things I can offer. I’ll be sending out extra emails in the near future announcing some of these.

Jeff and I spent a lovely afternoon visiting with my youngest cousin, his wife and three girls. It’s been several years since I’ve seen him (and much more than that for any of my other relatives). We got caught up on family news, and just plain reconnected. I didn’t want the afternoon to end, but time does march on.

Jeff and I also spent a nice, spring day in Prescott, AZ, wandering around their annual Highland Games. In the herding dogs exhibition, we laughed as the sheep escaped the ring and it took three dogs to round them up. It’s fascinating to watch the herding dogs at work.

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by Linda-Ann Stewart

Today, I watched another video of some marketing hotshot disparaging the Law of Attraction as pie-in-the-sky dreaming. The people dismissing the Law of Attraction are ignoring the fact that action without belief or confidence will fail. A salesman trying to get an order will be rejected more often if he doubts he’ll get it. If a person goes for a job interview, but doesn’t feel qualified, probably won’t get the job. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

However, I understand why many people are dismissing the Law of Attraction. Some folks who have seen “The Secret” are under the impression that all they need to do to manifest their desire is to meditate and focus on it and that will draw it to them. Unfortunately, that’s not the full story. If the Law of Attraction hasn’t been working for you, here are four reasons why it hasn’t and what to do about them.

1. You’re actually focusing on your goal not being in your life.

When you’re thinking of your desire, you’re really feeling the lack of it. By continuing to concentrate on it, you’re not believing that it’s on its way. As an example, if you’re in a restaurant, and order a meal, you forget about it, having faith that the kitchen is already at work on it. You don’t keep asking your waitress when your food will arrive (unless it’s been a ridiculously long time). Once you’ve visualized and focused on your desire, you need to let it go and allow your subconscious, and the Universe, work out how it will be brought to you.

2. You’re hiding your light under a bushel.

If people are necessary to achieve your goal, you have to get out among people. You can’t manifest in a vacuum. You need to get out and about and let people know what you’re offering. If you want more business, get out and market. The same is true if you want a relationship. Go where there are people of like mind. Join an organization or take classes in a subject you’re interested in. I know that many people say, “Build it and they will come,” but that won’t happen if your market or ideal person doesn’t know about you. Let your light shine by getting visible.

3. You haven’t convinced your subconscious you actually want your goal.

Newton’s First Law says, ” A body at rest tends to stay at rest. A body in motion tends to stay in motion.” Your subconscious isn’t going to take the Universe’s energy to create something new if you’re immobile. It won’t see any reason to make a change in the current situation. To get its attention and accept that you want something new, you need to be taking some action. Even if you don’t know which direction to go, pick something to do that will get the energy moving. As long as the energy is beginning to move, you can be Divinely guided.

4. You’re not acting as if you are on the way to having your goal.

I don’t mean for you to go out and spend money you don’t have. But when you believe your desire is on the way, you’ll begin acting in ways that will put you in places where it can find you. Someone who wants to reduce weight will begin eating smaller portions and exercising, because that is what a thinner person does. If you want more income, you seek channels that will bring money to you. Behave as if your goal is looking for you and meet it halfway.

Focusing on your goal, and belief that it can be and is yours, are key elements to The Law of Attraction. But within those aspects there are a lot of facets that need to be addressed to be able to consciously manifest. The Law of Attraction is always operating. Use these ideas and work with them to bring you what you want.

Affirmation:

The Universe has already approved of and granted me my desire. All I need to do is focus on it, believe and accept it. I take any action I can to bring it into reality, knowing that I am guided in the right directions. What I am seeking is seeking me. I act as if it is already mine, and move forward to welcome it gratefully.

Copyright 2009 Linda-Ann Stewart
All Rights Reserved

self improvement, self help, personal growth, personal development, motivation

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Question:
If I say an affirmation a few times a week, will it turn my life around?

Answer:
Saying an affirmation a few times a week won’t undo decades of programming. Change won’t happen overnight. It takes about 30-40 days (and sometimes a few months depending on the difficulty of the issue) of CONCENTRATED focus and affirmations to turn things around. By concentrated, I mean you can’t do the affirmations, then during the day, counteract them with old, negative beliefs. This gives the subconscious mixed messages. You have to catch those automatic, negative thoughts and turn them around to be consistent with the goal of your affirmation.

self improvement, self help, personal growth, personal development, motivation

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I’ve finally dipped my toe into the social networking phenomena. Although I’m still exploring and working on them, I’ve signed up with LinkedIn and FaceBook. If you’d like to join me on them, you can find me at LinkedIn.com/in/lindaannstewart and Facebook.com/p/Linda-AnnStewart/1635612434.

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