I have a feeling this post will get some responses, so by all means, if you have something to say, post a comment below.
As a life coach, my role is to empower people. From my point of view, every person has all the power in the world to achieve great and wonderful things, but that’s not the way most people are brought up, so I help my clients find the power inside them and become independent in their thinking, feelings and actions.
Now, if you’re living in suburbia like me, and especially if you’re working from home like me, you have heard the knock on the door, gone to see who it was and found someone collecting donations for charity. They range from extremely nice to disabled (and sometimes both), and use their charm and rehearsed pitch to get you to part with some money. Sometimes it’s a raffle ticket, sometimes it’s a poor child in some third world country and sometimes it’s a local community organization. All good and noble causes.
Call me cruel, but I always feel that charity money ends up prolonging the problems it is collected for. For instance, children in third world countries are poor because their parents feel helpless and cannot see a way out of their situation. Another example is a person with some disability, who comes up to my door and asks for my donation, because they cannot go to work, which makes me thing they could actually work as a door-to-door salesperson just as well.
When a person is given handouts, they build an identity of need. When the handouts stop, the person cannot survive without them. The alternative is to support organizations that develop infrastructure and teach people how to take care of themselves. There are such organizations, but they seem to be few and far between.
A very big issue in Australia is the money given to Aboriginal people, which they end up using to buy beer and get drunk. This is also the case with many Native American in reservations. Both of these situations arise from giving money to people who want something else - the feeling that they have power over their own life. These examples are extreme, but they illustrate the issue well.
Don’t get me wrong, from the point of view of the person donating, this is great. It’s an act of kindness and sharing and it feels really good. However, from the point of view of the recipient, more often than not it develops a dependence on others and takes their power away.
I would like to encourage you to donate to organizations that build and empower individuals and communities, rather than giving money to people. If you can, instead of giving money, volunteer your time and support the needy by teaching them skills and encouraging them to be self-sufficient as much as possible.
In recent years, there is a booming industry of self-proclaimed personal growth gurus, who claim to be able to unparalleled impart wisdom on the masses without leaving the comfort of their home, through the Internet or the telephone or maybe from the stage. To a certain extent, this works, because many more people get information and knowledge they could not afford or technically access otherwise.
But here’s the problem: much of what we need to discover in life is PERSONAL, and no matter how good a public program is, personal growth is, well, personal. So these programs do a great job of awakening people and giving them a taste of something good. You don’t know what you don’t know, right? So sampling some personal growth goodies, getting an overview of this, that and the other, and even spending some serious time following somebody’s program are all good things, but they are only the beginning.
To really get your life in gear, you have to deal with your own baggage and make sense of it - remove limiting beliefs, change focus, set goals, build relationship skills - based on who you are and what YOU want.
To do this, I highly recommend working with a life coach.
A life coach is a professional friend. It’s someone who cares for you and guides you with a method. It’s someone who has collected ideas and possible solutions from working with many people and can gently direct you towards finding your own best way forward.
I’ve personally been coached 3 times already. Each time, I grew tremendously as a person. Each time, I opened up and became happier than ever before. Each time, I learned new things and acquired new skills to handle my time, my business, my relationships and my emotions. It was brilliant!
The nicest thing for me about coaching was that it transferred the power in my life into my hands. I had not realized how powerful I was until I sat down and faced my mental blocks head on, took ownership of my feelings and let go of what other people felt and did. Many of the concepts were strange to me at first, but ultimately, I learned to focus on what works.
In the past, people wanted to be respected, to be wealthy, to be famous or to have “a good job”. Nowadays, most people just want to be happy. In essence, life coaching is an excellent way to work on a personal level with another human being and learn how to be happy YOUR WAY.
For more on life coaching, see this life coaching page.
Our modern culture is full of “get <something> quick” books, seminars, presentations, advertising and so on - get rich quick, get personal growth quick, get instant cash, get instant hair growth - we’ve all seen them everywhere. In many of them, the source presents the argument “If I can do it, so can you!”Moreover, the presenter, author or advertiser tells us “I will show you how to do it step by step”.
So a lot of people attend the seminars, buy the books or audio visual programs and do their best to follow the advice of the mostly-self-proclaimed “guru”. However, only few succeed.
Why is this? Why do so many people fail to get the money, the personal growth or the fitness, even when presented with a bullet-proof, step-by-step method, coming from a live example of success?
Good question. I’m glad you asked.
In all the personal growth and wealth creation material I’ve heard and read, invariably there is the bit where you must let go of your current thinking and adopt the thinking proposed by the new system. “All you have to do is buy <this, that and the other>, learn <some skills>, spend some time every day <doing what I tell you to do> and voilà, your life will change forever”, says your guide-of-the-day, but, try as you might, you cannot see yourself spending that initial amount of money or that initial amount of time.
Another recommendation we find hard to follow is “Delegate. Don’t do everything yourself. Pay others to do the routine tasks for you and focus on strategy”. This means (oh, my God) having to spend money on an ongoing basis, which is even harder than a one-time amount.
“Well, that’s natural”, you say, “How do I know I won’t just lose that money and time I’ve spent and get nothing in return?” In fact, that’s what most people say, and it’s exactly why they don’t make it big like their mentors say they can.
The missing ingredient is a leap of faith. If you got anything out of “What the Bleep Do We Know” and “The Secret”, it should have been that our beliefs and focus change our universe. The people who fail or get limited success do not have the belief that THEY can do it. Their focus is therefore on justifying this belief by finding reasons for their lack of success and then ways to actually not succeed. They subconsciously ask the question “Why can I not do this?”.
The successful people, on the other hand, have faith in their ability to follow through and in their ability to judge good advice. They immediately start focusing on “How will I do this?”
My life coaching instructor told us time and time again “‘Why’ is a past-facing question. If you ask your coaching clients ‘why’, they will look to their past for the answers. ‘How’ is a future-facing question. This question you should ask your coaching clients often”.
So here’s your chance to coach yourself to riches, fitness or personal growth success. Find a quiet place to sit, close your eyes, take a deep breath and relax. First, imagine your mentor’s success and see yourself with them, having achieved your goals and succeeded. Then, go over all the successes you’ve had in the past, reliving the awesome feeling of completion and achievement. Finally, walk yourself through how YOU will carry out each of the steps in the new method. As you do this, make a note of the challenges you may face along the way, and recall how you’ve overcome similar challenges in your life.
When you open your eyes, for each of the remaining challenges, write down the question “How will I <get the desired result>?” and keep the list in your pocket. Your subconscious will know it’s there and will keep finding solutions for you until it finds them all.
[Solution ideas: save, borrow, plan, network, ask, partner, use the Internet, use the 80/20 rule, breathe deeply, smile]
Repeat this self-coaching session with yourself daily (oh, yes you can!) , until you get all the answers and achieve success, because YOU CAN.
Let’s face it, most of the people we know measure themselves and others by the perception of their “net worth”. They may not know what others are “worth”, but that doesn’t stop them from making wild guesses, based on external appearances, like clothes, cars and house, and decide whether a person is successful in life or not.
This influence gets many people stuck in life. They look at their own bank account and think “Oh, my God, I am such a failure”, while there is much in their life they could see as success. There are others who sacrifice many important things in their life, but their bank balance is large, so they think “Gee, I am so successful, why am I so miserable?”.
Now, I don’t contest the importance of financial comfort, because our world is a lot nicer when we have money. What I am saying is that the link between the amount of money you have and how successful in life is not 1:1. In fact, anyone can see themselves as a success in some areas, sometimes even more so than compared with “the rich people”.
Here are some “personal growth” things that will get you feeling successful in no time:
- No matter what decision you ever make, it always has a down side. The decision only has to do with what is more important to you. This means that you are always more successful than you could be, had you chosen differently, according to your own priorities. Whenever you make a decision, you choose the most successful option by your definition.
So when you evaluate your life, remember that by your standards, you are as successful as you could be.
- The flip side, of course, is to look at what other people sacrifice in order to gain their financial success - time with their kids, broken marriage, lost friends, stress-induced medical conditions and lots more. When you look at their decisions, their down side may be your up side, and your time with your kids, your loving relationships and your health are your successes, even if you’ve had to give up money to have them.
When you die, seeing the face of people who love you is a lot more comforting than knowing you have money in the bank…
- Brian Tracey, a truly remarkable man, says that success is a matter of focus and that one should focus on learning and growth, instead of achievements. It may take some time to hit a goal, so keeping motivated can be a challenge on days when nothing is finished. Brian Tracey suggests to focus on improvements instead. Every day, you can be successful at being a bit better than yesterday at something.
Measure you skill levels at various things and set daily goals to improve them. The compounding of these improvements will take you a long way, but more importantly, you will feel like a success all the time.
[Just to be absolutely clear, many rich people also have friends and lead a good life outside of work. I sincerely hope no rich people have been hurt in the process of creating this post 
]
What I’m saying is that the starting point of each one of us is different, so comparing people based on any single factor is ridiculous, let alone a perceived factor. Broaden your definition of success and make it your own. Decide what’s important for YOU, break it down to little bits, conquer them daily and feel successful all the time.
That should put a big smile on your face!
