Tuesday, November 23, 2010

Learn to Love Yourself and Eliminate Anxiety - By Sandra Dawson

Anxious
When you feel anxious, you may not have a way to calm down, and you may be terrified that your anxiety will also trigger a panic attack. An overactive nervous system is causing your anxiety and panic attacks if you are experiencing them when you are truly safe.

The reason you feel anxiety in safe situations, is because something you are seeing, hearing, smelling, or feeling in that moment reminds you of a past abuse, loss or trauma. You are actually reliving that past abuse, loss or trauma, even though it feels like it is being caused in the present moment by the situation you are in.

Panic Attack
The solution to anxiety and panic attacks is learning to release the energy causing your overactive nervous system. Your life will no longer be full of stress and anxiety when you release this stuck energy in your body and you learn how to love yourself! Your body will be calm and your mind will be alert.

Here's a technique you can practice to feel calm and relaxed in a minute. I call it "The Slow Scan Technique"(tm): Turn your head from left to right, making a 180-degree turn. While you turn your head, look at objects in the space you're in. Notice everything. And as you observe details, say to yourself or out loud, "I'm safe" once for each turn of your head. Next, turn your head from right to left. Observe your surroundings again, and say, "I'm safe." Repeat the turning of your head and saying you're safe as many times as it takes you to feel calm. You'll be pleasantly surprised how you feel. This technique can calm your body and mind, if you are truly safe in the moment you are using it.

When you have calmed your nervous system down, you are in a great state of mind to learn how to love yourself. The secret to truly loving yourself is meeting all of your needs. This is a very tangible definition, so you will now want to assess what your needs truly are. Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs is a great place to start analyzing what you need to focus on to truly love yourself. Are you meeting your physical needs? Are you meeting your safety and security needs? Are you meeting your belonging and acceptance needs? Are you meeting your self-esteem needs and are your meeting your self-actualization needs?

If you are not meeting your needs on a daily basis, then you can be sure that limiting beliefs, negative behaviors and trauma of some kind are blocking you. You were born with 100% self-love and you had high expectations of having your needs met.

You can regain your self-love by changing your negative programming.

Changing your negative beliefs and behaviors requires you to be aware of the wounding interactions that have taken place in your past. You need to re-experience the feelings that those interactions caused for you with loving support from another person, so you can re-decide that you are unconditionally ok.

To change beliefs and behaviors or to increase your self-esteem and self-love, most of your efforts will focus inward. The best place to start is to give yourself permission to love yourself 100%. Make this an important goal for yourself, and then identify the specific negative beliefs and behaviors in your life that are blocking you from the success you desire.

Don't let yourself be stuck any more. When you love yourself, you let your real self shine: Who are you? What is your purpose? What do you love to do? What are your talents? What do you admire and respect about yourself? Nothing should be blocking you from shinning in your true light.

There is no reason, other than the negative beliefs you have, that could be blocking you now from loving yourself 100%. Write down any negative beliefs or behaviors you have in a journal if you have one. Analyze them until you understand how you arrived at your negative conclusions about yourself or your negative behaviors. Then please forgive yourself. Recognize that you were taught to not value yourself and to behave in unloving ways by parents or caregivers who also didn't know how to love themselves.

Take your power back. Say "no thank you" to your negative beliefs and behaviors, and decide that you are ok, lovable, special, unique, creative, brilliant, competent, witty, wise, and beautiful or handsome. Love yourself 100 percent, unconditionally. You can have true love and success in life when you give yourself the gift of self-love and eliminate your anxiety one belief, one behavior and one energy releasing technique at a time.



About the Author:

Sandra Dawson, MA, the SelfGrowth.com Official Guide to Intimacy, is a Love and Relationship Coach, a Trauma practititoner, and a Certified Couples Communication Trainer. Sandra's mission is to increase love on our planet one coaching session, one teleseminar, one eBook, one workshop or one home study course at a time. Contact Sandra for loving support and guidance to learn to love yourself and to eliminate anxiety.


 Anxiety Cure
The Anxiety CureThe Anxiety Cure: An Eight-Step Program for Getting WellTelling Yourself the Truth: Find Your Way Out of Depression, Anxiety, Fear, Anger, and Other Common Problems by Applying the Principles of Misbelief TherapyHow to Cure Anxiety and Panic AttacksBeyond Anxiety Change Your Brain, Change Your Life Coping With Anxiety Naturally With Ambient Sound 

Friday, November 19, 2010

Commitment and Consistency

Nothing happens overnight, and success doesn’t generally arrive overnight unless you are a prodigy, or it is, in fact, the result of many years of working towards your success (or you’ve won the lottery… but don’t hold your breath, just in case).

When problems arise and difficulties set us back, it is essential to keep sight of the long term goal, and not to become disillusioned.

Part of a good self development plan is building in a commitment to pick ourselves up and start again, should set back or disaster strike. In fact, it is really a question of learning from any mistakes we make, analyzing how and why things didn’t work out as planned, and making sure lessons are learned for the future.

Learning can, and should be continuous. None of us ever know everything, and all of us can learn from other people, from their experience, and from their achievements or setbacks, as well as our own.


So learning not to fall into a stale routine when things don’t go right is really important.  Your self esteem is not directly linked to any one project, any one target, or any one goal. Your self respect and self esteem is linked to your ability to deal with things as they occur in life. Finding solutions to problems is important, but the process is also important.

Someone once explained to me the difference between being problem centered and solution oriented. If all you can do is think about the problem, you are not really working your way to a solution. If you are determined to find the right outcome, you will be able to see the problem clearly and what is possible to rectify the situation.

Most management training courses will recommend not being problem centered, or ‘stuck in the cornflakes’, as one manager described it. For many people, the path to self improvement can only really begin when we learn to stop feeling guilty, or worried about past events and actions. In other words, allowing our life chances to be held back by
being stuck on old problems. Going forward and developing your future in a positive and healthy way almost certainly means that you need to shed some of the angst of the past.


If you are still worrying about something you did or didn’t do in the past, or a have a feeling of failure or inadequacy that just hangs around you, you really need to let it go. You can’t go back and undo anything that you did. Nor can you go back and do something that you didn’t. If you live in the past, this is only in your mind.

You can’t go back to the time of the event that keeps nagging you. You can only decide either to allow it to continue to torment you and hold you back, or decide that its time to let go, put whatever it is in the past, and move forward.

What is also important is that you also deal with any unhealthy attitudes; attitudes that you know are damaging and that only you can deal with. For example, how can you move forward, with a positive attitude that enables you to see clearly and rationally how to act and behave to achieve your best, if you know you have, for example, an emotional leg iron that leads to drinking too much alcohol or dependency on nicotine, or poor eating habits?

Addictions can be broken. There are millions of people who will attest to the fact that you can break the habit, and you can train your body not to crave addictive substances like alcohol or nicotine.

More often than not, there are emotional reasons why people become addicted. So we need to consider what emotional debris we are carrying around with us, and then shed it and move on.

Eating disorders can be just as damaging as any other. Again, there are generally emotional reasons why we may need to concentrate on controlling what we eat and eating too little, or binge eating.

It is imperative that we become emotionally adult, i.e. we take responsibility for our health and behavior that affects our health. This applies to all sorts of things too. Understanding that our emotional reaction to things can lead to child like responses is a key to taking rational control of our lives. It is more and more commonplace to read that we are what we eat (or take in to our bodies), and that having a good healthy and balanced
diet will make a big difference not only to our physical and mental  health, but also to our ability to function effectively.

Use brain training to stop eating unhealthy sugary foods that give you an energy rush one minute, and leaves you feeling depleted half an hour later, try to learn how to change your diet. Plan it, and give yourself a reasonable timescale.

They call it called cognitive dissonance or neuro linguistic programming, or self hypnosis, but it doesn’t really matter what its technical term is. It is about re-educating your brain.
You can find all sorts of techniques to do this. You can make tapes and play them at night as you are going off to sleep, or you can self hypnotize yourself to be receptive to self instruction.

You believe what your brain has been trained to believe. Lots of this training comes from you. Some of it from other people and what you hear. However, it is how you program the information that goes into the brain that matters.

If you have always believed that you are worthless and incapable of doing anything worth while, you have to train your brain to accept new information. Tell your brain that you are clever, and perfectly capable, and can achieve great things. Believe me, your brain will believe it if you keep telling it that this is the case. If you keep telling yourself that you don’t like cakes, each time you have the urge to get to the fridge for a nice piece of chocolate cake, tell yourself ‘no! I don’t like cake’. Keep on doing this every time, every day, and after a week you will be surprised. Your brain will have ‘remembered’ that you don’t like cake, and your urges will go away.

Similarly, we need to ensure that we drink lots of water, and get regular exercise. This way we are showing our commitment to our health, our potential and our well being.

One other thing, and sometimes difficult to address, is the need to ensure we are not being held back or damaged by relationships or friendships that are just not right for us. This doesn’t mean that you need to just ditch your partner, and ‘lose’ your family. It does, however, mean that damaging relationships need to be addressed, carefully, and if necessary, changes need to happen. You need to have support, just as your family and friends will need your support. Balance is important here, as in all things.

So your commitment to your self development is very important. If success doesn’t come as you expect it to, don’t give in. Keep going, keep working at it.

Hand in hand with this commitment is consistency. Like all things, it is quite possible to train yourself to be consistent in your attitudes and behavior. It’s important to not only believe, but to put in the effort in a consistent manner. Doing your best for one day a week isn’t really going to do it for you.

It’s very important to develop the right attitude, which means really that you have to ‘live’ your plan. Living your plan means taking everything you do seriously, and ensuring that you are doing your best.

This doesn’t mean you don’t get to have time off - far from it. Some of the most successful people are successful in different areas of their lives. The trick is not to waste time or opportunity. When it’s time for recreation, make the most of that time by ensuring you really do enjoy this time and the activities you choose.

When it’s time to spend together with family or friends, make the most of that time, and ensure your concentration is on the interaction with them, and not on something else. So living an authentic life, i.e., making decisions about how you live, how you spend your time, and how you behave with others are major steps towards ensuring you reach your potential. It is a foundation stone for your self development journey.


Neuro Linguistic Programming

Neuro-Linguistic Programming for DummiesThe Big Book Of NLP Techniques: 200+ Patterns & Strategies of Neuro Linguistic ProgrammingFrogs into Princes : Neuro Linguistic ProgrammingThe Big Book of NLP, Expanded: 350+ Techniques, Patterns & Strategies of Neuro Linguistic Programming


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Sunday, November 14, 2010

Opening the Lines of Communication

Communication is a key for the success of any sales person or leader. How you keep your customers, colleagues and staff informed will determine how easily you get things done. Communication comes in many ways. 

I just had a call with a colleague and he said: It was interesting what was said at our meeting and more interesting what wasn't said. We communicate by what we say (or don't say), the way we say things, the body language displayed, and how we communicate the written word.

How do you communicate?

How you communicate tells a lot about how you treat people and the expectation you have. As a leader you need to create a well thought out strategy and then tell your team on a regular and consistent basis what is happening and what you expect. You send e-mails, you communicate in person in meetings, one-on-one and on your intranet. 

My experience is that you can't communicate too often. Also your actions communicate a whole other set of messages. So make sure your actions align with your written and verbal messages.

As a rep how are you communicating with your customers? What information do you send them? How do you let them know when something is wrong and how do you communicate successes. 

Do you send thank you cards; do you keep your customer aware of all the issues going on? When was the last time you had a formal review with your top customers to share what has happened in the last six months and what is expected to happen in the next six months? 

When there is a change in delivery or fulfillment of the deal how do you communicate this to the customer? How does your organization connect with customers? While you don't control this you need to understand what it means to your customers.

How do you communicate with your team? Do you keep everyone connected and up to date. When there is an issue to be dealt with -- where are you? How do people know what is expected of them. Do you have regular and productive meetings with your team to update and make sure you have created the appropriate message? Do you take responsibility for your results and interpretation of your messages? When you take responsibility your communication and insights become clear and focused.

What is your communication strategy?

You need to have a strategy that is formal and informal and communicates what you need to have heard, read and understood. Human beings need to hear a new message as many as six or seven times before they "get" it. So if you communicate a new idea or concept once -- good luck at getting buy in and understanding. This can be frustrating, however, the aggravation from not communicating will be far more frustrating and divisive with your team.

So if you need to communicate a new message six or seven times how do you propose to make that happen. You can send a written document, an e-mail, marketing materials, verbal communication in speeches and meetings. How do you mix it up and keep the message the same and focused on what you want to accomplish.

One of the reasons customers and team members get confused is that your communication is non-existent, is inconsistent or the message changes each month to what staff fondly refer to as "the flavor of the month"! You want to be consistently consistent.

Your communication must be honest, truthful and communicated by you. It must sound like you and be believable. So write it, review it, think about and then say it out loud. Do you believe what you are saying? If you have someone else writing and communicating for you your team and customers will not get behind the message -- they won't trust you.

What works for you?

We all communicate differently and in different manners. Know what works for you. Barrack Obama is a great orator -- George Bush, not so much. How is your written word? Is your written message efficient and to the point -- or is it all over the place. 

Are you best in one-to-one meetings? When you are in a meeting - what is the goal of your communications? If you are consistent and communicate the same message over and over again, people begin to get behind you and your mission.

Remember -- Be careful what you ask for, you just might get it.

Sayers Says...

What is your communication style? Are you being consistently consistent? Are your team and customers behind your message? What is your communication strategy? What are you saying and not saying? Do you believe what you are communicating?
Share with me what communication format works best for you.
Open the lines of communication...


** To comment on this article or to read comments about this article, go here.

About the Author:
Bill Sayers speaks, coaches, leads education sessions and provides management consulting services to a variety of companies. Bill has been praised for his leadership, common-sense approach and ability to inspire sales people to new levels of success. His easy manner and strong public-speaking skills make him an engaging facilitator. Bill connects with senior executives and sales professionals alike, as he shares his real-life experiences and provides the appropriate tools and strategies for success in today's business world.
Bill's book Funnels & Forecasts -- The Great Game of Sales is available on Amazon. 

Funnels & Forecasts: The Great Game of SalesHe has been a professor at George Brown College teaching Personal Selling Skills to the Sports and Event Marketing Graduate Program, and is on the faculty of Canadian Professional Sales Association and Canadian Management Centre.

To receive our free "How are you Playing The Game" Scorecard and a 45 minute one-on-one session with Bill Sayers, email: info@TheSayersGroup.com or visit: http://www.TheSayersGroup.com.

 

Monday, November 08, 2010

The Key to Preparing for Competition

The Key to Preparing for Competition by Denis Waitley

Self-knowledge has always been the key to preparing for competition. Knowledge of your attributes, abilities, interests, strengths, weaknesses and traits is essential to riding the front end of the wave of change into the new century. To fully assess your own talents, realize that studies confirm that what we love and do well as children continues as our latent or manifest talent as adults.

Examination of your weekend or evening interests might reveal a gem of potential you can apply to your vocation. I strongly suggest you don’t unthinkingly relegate what you love to do for yourself solely to hobbies. You might make it, or at least integrate it into, your life’s work.

The acquisition of knowledge, which is the new global power, is a lifelong experience, not a collection of facts or skills. Not long ago, what you learned in school was largely all you needed to learn to secure a career. With knowledge expanding exponentially, this is no longer true. Hundreds of scientific papers are published daily.

Every 30 seconds, some new technological company produces yet another innovation. Your formal education has a very short shelf life. Lifelong learning, once a luxury for the few, has become absolutely vital to continued success. Continue gaining expertise and avoid thinking like an expert.

Action Idea: An excellent benchmarking exercise is to spend a weekend with key associates or family members and dust off your childhood memories. Remember what you really enjoyed and wanted to do most as a child. The next activity in assessing your interests is considering your current ones. What do you most enjoy after work? What do you most want to do on weekends and vacations? What are your hobbies? Can you bring more of what you enjoy into your business life?

Action Step: Increase your reading, writing and vocabulary proficiency. One of the most important qualities of successful leaders is an ability to express thoughts and knowledge. Research by management and human resource experts confirms that no matter what the field of employment, people with large vocabularies – those able to speak clearly and concisely, using simple as well as descriptive words – are best at accomplishing their goals. Well chosen, carefully considered words can close the sale, negotiate the raise, enhance relationships and change destinies.

In a world of e-mail, fax dispersal, voice mail, sound bites, concise reports, business plans and meeting briefs, the individuals who can articulate their goals, substantiate their claims and support their visions will own the future. In the 21st century, literacy will be the major difference between the haves and have-nots.

Why do fewer than 10 percent of the public buy and read nonfiction books? One reason is that many would rather get home than get ahead. They are motivated to get by and get pulled along by the company, the economy or the government.

Another reason is that many individuals believe that information found in books, computer programs and training sessions has no value in the business world. How self-deluding!

As the new tools of productivity become the Internet, the DVD, direct digital download of text, audio and video, and the combination of the interactive computer with telecommunications, the people who know how to control the new technologies will acquire power, while those who thought that education ends with the diploma are destined for low-paying, low-satisfaction jobs. In almost the blink of an eye, our society has passed from the industrial age to the knowledge era.

Increase your reading by 100 percent. Decrease your television watching, and that of any children in your family, by 50 percent. Surf the Internet and subscribe to book summaries, or download free chapters from different sources. By reading book summaries, you can gain the essence of all the top business books in a very brief period of time.

Action Idea: Read at least one book each month, and listen to at least one additional audio book or education series during your commute or downtime.

-- Denis Waitley


Communication On The Internet 
Web Advertising: New Forms Of Communication On The Internet (Pragmatics and Beyond. New Series)PRSA Professional "On-Demand" PresentationsInternet Politics: States, Citizens, and New Communication TechnologiesInternet Multimedia Communications Using SIP: A Modern Approach Including Java® Practice (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)Computer Mediated CommunicationData, Network, & Internet Communications Technology