One of the reasons why I suggest that clients keep track of anything that goes well, no matter how small, is because the mind tends to minimize the good and focus on the bad.

Actually I've been surprised to learn that this tendency is not a function of a nay-saying personality or a mis-firing brain.  It is a derivative of our primitive brain that looks for lions everywhere.  Well, after all, that is what you needed when you were a neanderthal and you were glad to have this brain function keeping you from danger.(I talk more about this on the radio and in my blog here)

Today we are rarely in the same kind of physical danger, but the reptilian part of your brain (yes, you have one) still looks for lions.  The end result of this 'alertedness' in our modern world is that there is a part of you programmed to notice the danger and ignore the non-danger.

That can also mean, in a world where there are rarely lions around, you are looking for what's wrong and ignoring what's going right.

The recipe to counter this - I know only one.  Focus on the Rightness. 

You can use anything you like to do this. Here are my favorite methods:

1.  keep a gratitude journal (every night write 10 things that you are grateful for)
2. keep a Rightness log (every day write down at least 3 things that went well or that you did well)
3. keep an eye out (just notice how many things actually go well for you compared to how many things actually go wrong)

If you are doing any of these with diligence, you'll find that you are firing off alarm bells a lot less frequently - and it gets a whole lot calmer inside.

The show Hot Pursuit of Happiness had so much material in it that you can use to be happier, I wanted to share it here. 

First, the idea is that Happiness is A Muscle.  You get better at being happy as you use that muscle. Which doesn't mean you walk around in bliss all the time, but it does mean that you meet life's challenges with greater clarity of mind and have a lot better time of living in general. 

Here's four non-painful ways to start pumping that muscle... (click 'Read More')

This week I put into practice what I'll call the 'three fingers' principle.  It stems from that oft-repeated saying that anytime you point the finger at other people there are three pointing back.

Anyway, I was just trying this on this week - uncomfortable as this can be - and it reminded me how freeing it  is.

Here's how it goes: You use your judgement of another to see something about yourself. Check to see if that thing which you are accusing isn't also you and if you can't find it in you, check for the shadow (the opposite) of that thing. Now in order to make '3 fingers' work for you,  be willing to use the information as revelatory, not accusatory.  In short - no beating yourself up!  It's all about understanding that we are all a little bit of everything, which allows you to get off of other people's backs, release you both from all the hellish things that you think (projections) and give yourself half a chance of actually seeing them for who they are.

When you see that the ammunition you are using against a person is actually part of you too it helps you soften to them and to yourself and sometimes even let go and connect more.

Here's my example: 

My swift judgement was that someone was "confused and not together".     As soon as I turned this back to me,  it immediately occured to me: "I'm a know-it -all'."   I often think that I am supposed to have all the answers and have it all together ALL the time.  Of course I would pick on someone I think doesn't!  What a classic projection.  Of course,  this is also a very painful way to live because it allows me no mistakes.  Imagine, it doesn't work all that well for me, but I want her to 'get it together'.  Wouldn't we both be better off if we just lightened up?

Seeing this has allowed me to let go completely of my judgement of this person and just be ok with who we both are.

What a relief.

i'm in New York.  It's another Supercoach Academy weekend, I'm looking forward to being with the students again, and I am  greeted by beautiful sunshine and a warm spring day.  I have every reason to feel good.

As I walked around just enjoying being here, I suddenly became aware of what was going on in my head. My mind was bopping around like little bunny foo-foo scooping up everything it saw and judging, evaluating and labeling.  People got tagged anything from "weirdo" to "oh, they must be very sad..."

As I listen to my internal narration I realize ...  Simon Cowell lives in my head.  And the deeper truth is, in fact, I'm no better, kinder or more loving to people than he is. We are the same.   We are all Simon in little and big ways.  We take what we see, we decide what it means.  And we are pretty happy living like this.

As I caught myself, I marveled at this automatic impulse to interpret everything.  How my mind appears to just wander around and automatically use my eyes as the interpreters of who someone is.  Biologically speaking I suppose some impulse has taken over and it's looking for lions everywhere.  And although that might be understandable as a reason why this impulse is there - it is ridiculous. NY is a strange place and I do need to pay attention but when there is no imminent danger to me, my mind just slips into the Cowell function:  the judge.  And in this case, even on the basis of no information whatsoever - to decide who people are.

This behavior is no different when it comes love.  It wreaks intimacy, it makes assumptions about what people want and what they should do and totally kills our ability to be loved for who we are.  And even if people do love us, we can hardly let it in.  We don't know Love.  We don't know Real Love, that is, the kind without judgement or conditions, and although we are all trying to get that love from everyone all the time - we have almost no experience of offering it to others. 

So just think...everyone else is just like us.  They too have a mini-Simon Cowell, or the very least an undisciplined bunny foo-foo pulling the internal levers.  So let me get this straight: on the basis of basically zero experience of giving love in a pure form,  we want others so somehow know how to 'love us just as we are'?

I can hardly spend a few hours on the streets of NY without judging every moving creature. 

No wonder we all need love so badly.  And with so little practice at giving love, isn't it understandable why we can't find it anywhere we look?

For more on the key to unlocking real love in your life listen to my show with Greg Baer  or search by topic on the right. 

I turn my attention to the topic of love and human connection just as San Diegans are struggling with a heart-wrenching murder case. The predominant feeling is deepest sadness but in equal measure there has also been a burst of hatred and outrage. A friend of mine described how some men had gathered in what he could only find words to describe as a 'lynch mob'.

It is mind-boggling to try to make sense of why anyone would want to hurt anyone else. It's not OK. So we get angry. But as we consider this and other crimes, (including things like global warming) is that what we should get? Can you separate what needs to be done from what needs to be considered? What do you consider worthy of living and breathing space in your heart? Do I remember someone saying we should love, but ... only as long as x, y, z, ... and not 'those sinners' who are really bad?

But even considering that us normal folk who don't have the breadth of spirit or divine love required to rise above the transgressions and love regardless, as humans, do we really need to hate in order to take the action necessary to keep someone from hurting another? If someone needs to be put in prison to protect children, let's do that. The effect of letting our hearts fill with hatred as we shut the prison cell door, may be creating more than one prisoner. And more than one killer.

At the same time, I'm reminded of the students in SuperCoach Academy who, in their first weekend of training got the challenge of lifetime. To love unconditionally. One person.  Or all of New York. Whatever you could hold in your heart.

It sounds so lovely, doesn't it?  We want to think we are (and we also truly want to be) 'loving people'.  We have great investment in that idea. We like that as an image of ourselves.  But we've put less investment into the mental and heart shifts that are demanded of us when we try to open up to loving without conditions.

Friday at 10 am Pacific, is the Power of Human Connection with Jason Lee Mitchell as we explore the benefits and challenges of approaching life, ourselves and others without conditions. Unconditional love for all? If you've tried to practice it, you know it isn't easy. Most of us have never experienced it - making it all the harder to even identify what it feels like to both give and receive.

(gosh, could all of this be, perhaps, connected?)

The next week, March 19th, I talk to Greg Baer about Real Love. Don't miss this rare opportunity to experience someone who really lives what he teaches.

Loving people is not an idea, it's a verb.

And you have to conjugate it.

Death is not a topic we have comfortably integrated. It is shrouded in superstition, and fear of it underpins so much of our thinking and it plays out in the way we speak about stopping aging, how we treat 'older' people and the things we tell  ourselves about our own bodies. 

A large plastic surgery industry feeds off a simple fear, that others will not approve of us, although that is not entirely the fault of surgeons. They are only responding to the ways we ourselves are choosing to deal with becoming older.  

Would we really treat people the way we do, would we ignore our children, would we not go to dinner with Mom this week, again, if we had a healthy sense of our own mortality? Wouldn't knowing we do not have a guarantee of tomorrow in the least, shuffle our priorities so radically that we might be unrecognizable?   If we really knew tomorrow we'd be lucky to wake up, would we be making any of our same choices today?

Despite all our daily worries about the future, the future in fact does not exist.   (Nor does the past, for that matter, but that's another topic). When we live in worry about what isn't real, we suffer, we lose all our joy and we try run around creating  solutions for a problem that is does not exist.  We waste so much energy and time and love.  You don't have to look further than Chile and Haiti to know there is no tomorrow.  Let's be something more than just occupied.  Let's stop being busy and consider what's meaningful to us.

There really is only one moment.  The one you and I are living now. 

if you are interested in this topic, listen to the show with Stan Goldberg, Lessons For Living Without Regret

"Thinking makes it so"

I know this is only part of Shakespeare's famous quote, but I'm just coming to see how important this part is.  Now I'm not talking about how to 'manifest' a parking space, because I just don't know how to do that, but I'm coming to understand a principle behind life that is so core that it shocks me to I realize I have to learn it. We all do.  Surely we should have been given this particular manual at birth!  Instead we go the "How Not To" manual and we've been living out of that ever since.

What I mean is, no one ever told me about the power of the mind.  I understood that I have a brain, that I don't use all my brain, and that my brain is powerful.  But there is an essentially crossed wire here that never got untangled - until now.  It's not my brain that is all-powerful it is my mind.  My brain is an order-executing machine.  My brain doesn't care what I tell it to do, it has no sense of right or wrong, it will execute  self-harming behavior just as faithfully as it will self-loving behavior.  Because it doesn't care.

It doesn't even care what I say to it, if the words I'm speaking are contrary to the main orders it recieves from my mind, it will pay no attention to them.

How do I know that my mind is actually in charge?   Precisely because my body is following orders that have nothing to do with what I think I'm telling it to do.  I tell it I want to lose weight, quit smoking, stop dating unavailable men, or get up at 5 am and write my book and it will quite happily ignore all those instructions.  Haven't you ever wondered why?  Do you really think it's just about motivation? It doesn't. 

It's like this...

It's like the computer. (Actually remember how they loaded in the programs in the Matrix?) If I want to lose weight, I need to load the "I am a healthy person who lives at their ideal weight" program. I easily "go to the gym" and "eat healthy foods" in that program and my brain will happily execute those orders (desires).  In fact it does so without much fuss, because it follows orders very well. 

Think about what it means if you install the "I need to lose weight program". What does that imply? I need correcting. I need fixing. In the "I need to lose weight program" who am I?  I am not a person who lives at their ideal weight.  Think about it.   I'm a person who needs to lose weight.  That's my self-definition.  That's my program.  A person who needs to lose weight is what?  A too large person. An overweight person.  I just loaded the "I'm an overweight person" software into my obedient computer brain. All signals (behavioral, emotional, phsyical) are now faithfully executed.

My computer does not care that I have loaded the "I'm an overweight person" person.  It happily runs that program.  It does what falls in line with that program.  When I reach for 10 Mars bars and 3 chocolate shakes, that is totally in line with my program.

Now take that program and just try inserting the command "eat healthy foods" and "go to the gym".  How far are you going to get? It doesn't compute.  You can't ask a program to do what goes against the program.  Which is why you say you'll quit smoking and then you don't.  You want to stop eating unhealthy foods but you  don't.  Your "program" does not care what you want and what's more it doesn't even care what you say.  It is there to execute what you perceive.  That's it. And the "program' we are talking about is nothing more than what you perceive about you. 

That happens in the mind.

Perception in this sense is:
-how you think about yourself and picture yourself in your now
-who you believe you are right now
-how you imagine yourself in your mind right now
-what you say next after the words "I am"

What I learned from Lindsay Brady, author of As The Pendulum Swings is that the brain automatically produces the behavior that our mind instructs it to produce. 

So, how do you change?

You instigate a change in perception, not a change in behavior.

Your self perception determines who you are, how you behave and what you believe, not the other way around.
That means the power of the brain is the power of the computer.  The power of the mind is the power of the programmer. 

You respond physically and emotionally to what you perceive with the mind (in other words, how you direct the mind, not the looking with the eyes) because the brain cannot tell the difference between what is 'real' and what is 'not real' - when it comes to taking instructions from the mind - it will do whatever it is told and instruct the body accordingly.

In this sense the brain is just another miraculously dutiful part of our highly complex body machine, a regulator and an efficient multiplier of cells and a dutiful and effective clean up artist. 

But the mind is the 'real brains' behind the whole operation.  Where you direct your perception will determine physical outcomes.

After talking to Lindsay, I have no doubt of this.

Hear Lindsay and I on the show archive here

What you talk about builds the house you live in.
Having said that, we are just talking about a belief, and a belief, no matter how complex or practiced it is, is no more than a lie that is not made true just because lots of people agree with it.  We can challenge these beliefs and on the show I talk about how that doesn't need to be a long, difficult process either. (Good news, for us 'strivers'!)

Books that will help you challenge your stories that I read from on the show on January 27  are:
Steve Chandler, The Story of You (and how to create a new one)
Howard Falco, I AM (due out in 2010, Penguin) in the interim you can find Howard on Facebook in the Group Master Your Reality
Debbie Ford, readings from The Secret of The Shadow

and extracted from her same book,
The healing action steps:

1. Take a journal and go somewhere quiet
2. Write your response to
Who would I be without my story?
What I am afraid I will lose if I give up my story?
3. Write down the ways you've tried to fix, or get rid of your story
4. Look at the behaviors and beliefs you hold that prevent you from accepting what is
5. List the ways you hope to avoid dealing with reality.
What changes would you make if there were no hope of a miracle happening to change things?

"If you think you can, or if you think you can't, either way, you're right." Henry Ford

We all experience the world, not as it is, but through the filter of our thoughts about it. No matter how you think of yourself, or how you have judged yourself - good news. 

Not everything you tell yourself is true.

We can stop because we started it
On the show today, It Is What You Say It is, (Jan 27) I talked about what builds the house you live in. Ever catch yourself saying "Oh, I'm not good at that"? Our opinions and beliefs build our limiting walls. I've had many clients tell me they can't manage this or that based on having never really tried it. We bust right through those to incredible new places. How? Because they are just lies.

They are lies that we install not just as our walls but also as the windows in our house. Through these lies we view the world outside: a limited place of ever decreasing possibility. It doesn't have to be this way. No matter how long ago you started, or how well practiced you are, or how scary the lie.

Luckily, you can't make a lie true, just by believing it for a long time

Love is one of the big, big areas where we make a lot of decisions about how limited our lives - and our chances! - are: there are only so many single people, only so many healthy single people, only so many not-entirely-insane single people.

Oh, we have so many fixed ideas!

But love isn't limited at all. Love is who you are and it doesn't arrive when your life partner does, or when your child hugs you, or when you complete a successful project. It is always there for you to have and depends on nothing at all. (see the show Jan 29 All You Need Is Love when I talk to John Welshons, author of One Soul, One Love, One Heart )

Greg Baer illustrated this so well in his Master Class with SuperCoach Academy this week. This is roughly the story:

So there you are sitting by the pool, enjoying the sun on your dream vacation. And someone from the pool is splashing you and splashing you, and you are getting wetter and wetter and angrier and angrier.

Then you finally move enough to look into the pool and give this person a piece of your mind, when you realize they are drowning. What would have to "happen" for you to lose you anger and get in touch with caring about them?

Nothing. Your anger is just gone in a poof, you become instantly overcome with a deep desire to help.

Love is just there, in every moment. It's a decision.

Love is just there in every moment. OK, I just said that. But...

Does that sound possible? Does that sound true? Why would you even care?
I'm reminded of an extraordinary day, a day when everyone in New York - and then around the world - suddenly became aware of the presence, the importance and the interconnectedness of us all. We were deeply moved by the preciousness of life.

What I notice when I think about 9/11 is, that day people made a choice to love, to care, to feel connected. You didn't have to. You just did. That choice is available always. Why is it important to know this? 

So you can.

Listen to the show here

There is something about saying "Go For Your Dream" that just bugs.  I think it's my project experience clashing with my woo-woo side.  Or maybe it's just there's so much about 'just going for it' that just doesn't work.  My dilemma? Dreams are really important things, important enough to do and not just talk about.  At the same time, a dream without any action is just a nice fantasy escape - a vacation in your mind. 

To take them from thought to animated life form you have to start the engine, act, move and sometimes that involves failing.  Ah.  That's risky.   So dreams are delicate balances of visioning and doing.  Too much doing and it's exhausting and frustrating, too much dreaming and it disappointing and saddening,  which is why I imagine most dreams end up untested, much less unfulfilled.

What makes dreams both important and amazing is not just 'getting them' but being involved in their gestation, having fun, watching something get born. And who you become in the process of their birth. Now that is beautiful. Something comes to life that never existed before except in your mind.  That is truly awesome.

OK, so maybe it's not so 'awesome' to you if it's an IP network installation.  But it would be if it were something that mattered to you.  It would be if it were something you could see for yourself in your mind and you liked the look of  (and that IP network matters to someone too...)

I've been involved in the "30-days to Create the Impossible" program with Michael Neill in the month of January, coaching those in the program, and I'm so in the center of this topic, I can't tell you how moving it is to watch dreams be born (more about the program on http://geniuscatalyst.com, though, it's closed now).  We are just finishing the second program and again, it's incredible the beauty, the relief, the joy of finally experiencing what's actually possible to create.   To witness dreams grow their wings in front of your eyes.

Of course that's nothing compared to what the person feels as it's happening.  They get reborn too.

What I keep thinking about as this particular program comes to a close, is that for some, 30 days won't be quite enough to complete a big project.

What to do when you have "that thing you can see in you mind" but it's a big goal and requires a bit of sticking power?

In longer term projects, how do you keep up the commitment?

I was in Project Management for 10 years, so I have some notions about this. What surprised me, when I left the corporate world, was to discover that just because it's a pet project and life dream, doesn't mean people achieve it! They drop their dreams into the toilet all the time.  This sounds crazy, but it's not impossible to imagine when you think what little we really know about making our dreams come true.

Our preferred methods are:

1. lottery
2. rich partner
3. inheritance
4. luck

Any or all of the above.

Apart from these, the only other recipe out there seems to be EFFORT.  But it's rubbish to think you can "g-up" every day and expect to keep doing that over months and months. There are days when you're in a crappy mood.  Then it feels like the wind has gone flat.  If you've ever given up on something you wanted, you'll know what I mean.  And you will perhaps have been looking for the answer too.

But the only way I know to take a pipe dream and create a living thing is inspired action.  To enjoy the genesis. 

How do you get that?  You blend a bit of dream making and a bit of project management, but you are careful with the doses.

Like I said, too much dream and it's star gazing... too much action and it's burn-out city.

So you do both and mix it up.

That is why Michael's 30-days to Create The Impossible is so brilliant and works so well.  (Keep an eye out for when he runs it next time and get on board).  Until then, I'd use his book, "You Can Have What You Want" as a great guide to sustained release success.

In my next post I'll continue with this and talk about ways to keep going in big projects.  If you have a big project and you want to chat about it, feel free to contact me.

Meanwhile, if you want to start up something and join me for a year in my ProjectDream group, I do have some spaces.  Here's more info.