Attend my upcoming program at half price, really!
September 25, 2008
I heard from a number of you this week that you know the value of my program far exceeds its cost, but given recent economic events it is out of your reach. There is still a seat left in the program. So here is my offer:
If you can:
1) attend the program (8 Wednesdays starting October 1, except the week of the Jewish Holidays) and
2) invest your half ($650), then I will take care of the rest for you.
All you have to do is enter a contest in which you write up how you have applied what you learned in my free seminar on September 15th. It can be any skill or any concept I taught. (e.g., Captain’s Orders, Go Direct, etc.) I will choose the person who has the best story to attend my program for half price!
Hint: Be as specific as possible in detailing how you made use of something you learned, and how it has helped you to be at your Horizon Point.
You must include your name in your blog comment (and either include your telephone number in the blog post, or else send me an email with it so I have a tel no at which to contact you).
One winner will be chosen from entries submitted by Tuesday at 7pm.
I can’t wait to have you in my Confidence Zone course!
The Real Reason You Dwell on Your What-Ifs
September 3, 2008
When you are thinking of taking a step out into your next career move, or leaving a current relationship situation for one that is more right, you may dwell on “but what if ” “What ifs” keep you held back in your comfort zone. You probably experience this as feeling fear, but I think what stops you is not so much fear per se, but what is ‘underneath’ the fear.
Fear is a natural, evolutionary based response to new situations, but “what ifs” come from your lack of confidence and lack of self trust. “What ifs” come from your lack of confidence and lack of self trust. If you don’t trust yourself to be able to learn and course correct from any mistakes, if you don’t have a secure feeling that ‘no matter what happens, I will make a good situation out of it”, and if you don’t have a strong and accurate appreciation of your own value, then you will feel a need to maintain tight control over and pre-forecast the outcomes of any new step. Your worrying serves this purpose. When you have a concern about whether you are ‘enough’ or ‘have what it takes’, it will cause you to put a lot of pressure on any next step, i.e., you will give the decision an extra charge because it ‘has to’ succeed in order for you to prove yourself, redeem yourself, or finally find success and security, etc.
The most successful people, to use the cliché, “feel the fear and do it anyway”, because they have core confidence underneath their fear.
What wish do you have for a next step - but keep your wheels spinning by generating lots of “what ifs”?
Use these 5 powerful tips to move past your “what ifs” and start having a career with more passion or a relationship with more happiness
Here is how successful people who are not getting in their own way do it. Each of these effective approaches stem from their core confidence in their own competence and value:
- They don’t tie their self worth to the up and down results that ensue from their decision each day. Rather, they are ‘objective’ not ’subjective’ about the results that happen, and see each misstep as an opportunity to improve.
- They too put their attention on ‘what other people think” - but on a different aspect. Their focus is on articulating other’s challenges and finding improved solutions to them, not on what other people will think about them in terms of their personal worthiness, value, or competence. Their focus is not self absorbed on ‘how others will think about me so I can feel ok in myself,’ instead their motivation is intrinsic and their focus is on how can I make my best contribution in their world and feel proud of myself for that.
- They follow the motto: “Ready, fire, aim!” Its better to put out a first iteration and constantly improve it with feedback from the marketplace then to not leave the gate at all.
- They have a big picture and a longer term perspective. While appreciative of the small wins along the way, they don’t necessarily need to have the big hit results within the first few days or months - they have self trust and faith in their long term ability to succeed and a sense of deserving success.
- They use their obsessing about “what ifs” to put any helpful contingency plans into place, not to stop them in their tracks.
If you are holding yourself back from a career with more passion or a relationship with more happiness, you could have the core confidence necessary to ‘go for it’ in 8 weeks from now.
“Her approach vacuumed my brain of a lot of cobwebs and I left full of new perspectives and tools for the life I never thought I could have… My kind of stuck was that I knew I had great talents that I could be using better, but I didn’t know how to do it. I was standing at the edge of the pool, thinking “what is my talent, how do I do it, should I” But now I’M IN! I’ve left my job and I’m Unleashed! I now have an utter confidence that I can pull anything off!”
Lynette Benton
Join other New York area professionals who have had unimagined life improvements in my From Comfort Zone to Confidence Zone program. Seating is limited for personalized attention. Register and learn more here.
How Your Confidence Level Affects Your Health
May 29, 2008
If a good number of your 60,000 thoughts a day are spent in emotional states that are stressful, it can tilt your physiology towards stress related symptoms and disease.
When you have a doubt about yourself, it sets you up to seek other people’s approval and care more about whether they give you validation or not . It will make you feel less in control of your own destiny and feel disappointed or angry at how other people treat you. It also sets you up to look for information that will help you determine whether you are good enough or not. That’s why you take things personally and may end up feeling bad about yourself.
These kinds of emotional states of shame, fear, and guilt are associated with low levels of energetic vibration in your body.Emotions have a physiological pattern to them. We even talk about some of the outward consequences of them - e.g.,blood flow makes you you go “white as a sheet” or “turn beet red”.Energy medicine practitioners educate us that emotions are associated with excesses or blockages of certain body organs, e.g., anger affects the liver,grief issues can be expressed through problems in the kidneys.
People who are confident and empowered more often feel blessed with what they have, and they have constructive responses to problems that circumvent the negative emotions. To work on stress related symptoms and prevent or empower yourself to deal with chronic health conditions,you can be more intentional about making your thoughts more confident.
1) Engage in Intentional Relaxation exercises. Do things that bring you more in touch with the sensations in your body (e.g., aromatherapy with essential oils; stretching; exercise; yoga or martial arts; playing a musical instrument; etc,)
2) Be Playful and Engage in play (whether you have children or not) as an antidote to difficult emotional reactions.
3) Use the resources of your body such as deeper and longer breathing and sound vibrations (healing chants) to make a harmonizing and counteracting physiological response to stress related emotions.
4) Take steps to empower yourself vis a vis other people. Look for constructive solutions to situations rather than taking the blame yourself. Try giving the ‘benefit of the doubt rather than viewing others’ behavior as ‘out to get you’. Put your energy into improving your life rather than into worrying about how other people are thinking and acting.
5) See Monday’s NYTimes article on meditation as a ‘catch and release’ form of dealing with negative emotions. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/27/health/research/27budd.html?ref=health
I will be speaking in depth on this topic at the Power to Heal Conference on June 14th. Its a one-day event providing hands on practical tools for self healing of chronic and acute conditions and strategies that prevent them. Please pass this info along to people you know would benefit.
Why You Work Really Hard But Still Aren’t Happy
May 8, 2008
How To Stop Being Your Own Harshest Critic
May 1, 2008
How to Get Over Being Angry
April 17, 2008
One of the things I’ve been hearing in my recent Comfort Zone to Confidence Zone programs is that participants have gotten stuck feeling angry – angry at a frustrating boss, anger at an ‘ex’, frustrated with a difficult family member, etc.
When you are angry it creates a negative energy in you and takes your focus away from what you want to accomplish. In the program we went over 10 strategies to turn around your anger on a dime. To give you a taste of what we discussed, here are 3 tips you can start using today:
1. Shift your “inner voice” - When you are angry or frustrated with someone you tend to ‘talk to them”, or “talk about them” in your own mind. You might say variations on a theme of “Why does she do that?”; “Stop treating me that way”, “He shouldn’t have done that, it was unfair”, “You are so selfish”, etc. As long as you are talking “to” or “about” the other person in your own mind (and not doing anything in the world of reality), you are perpetuating your experience of not having any control over the situation.
You can change that in an instance if you stop talking “to” or “about” the other person, and start talking “to yourself.” Use “I” statements and focus on what you can control within the situation. Examples might include: make a game plan about what you CAN do, talk to yourself in a less harsh tone, focus on how you can trust yourself to handle whatever is thrown at you, etc.
2. “Cool down” your physiology -Anger and frustration “heat up” your physiology so you want to do something that ‘cools’ you down. Try doing a breathing technique in which you breathe in slowly through your mouth, and exhale slowly through your nose. After a few breathes, you will notice a cooling effect on your tongue and a slowing down of your breathe. (You can do this even in the middle of a heated meeting or argument with a partner – it will have the effect of cooling down everyone in the situation).
For much more information on this and other breathing techniques to help you get back to a focused and confident attitude, sign up for Kelley Black’s newsletter at www.balancingexec.com.
3. Change your perspective -When you are angry at someone else, you tend to think they are doing their behavior “on purpose”, or in some way “to get you”. Try explaining the person’s behavior in a different way, i.e., “tell a different story” about why they are doing what they are doing. What would you think about them if you gave them the ‘benefit of the doubt?’
Generally people do what they do ‘for a good reason’. It’ their best,even if ineffective, ffort to achieve the same things you want, i.e., to feel good about themselves and accomplish their goals. If a person is doing something so hurtful , so annoying, or so ineffective it is an opportunity for you to have compassion that if this is the best they can do it won’t ever add up to a happy life for them.
The participants in my programs learn how to be effective at getting other people to do what they want and to feel confident in themselves so others’ behavior doesn’t bother them anymore. They master the idea in one of my favorite quotes:
“The best revenge is a good life” — Gertrude Stein
If you or someone you know could use skills to get over being angry, join my upcoming 7 week program starting in May. I’m offering it again because I received so many requests to do so, and I don’t have any plans to offer it again this year. Sign up now, early registration fee ends April 25th.
Please forward to a friend who needs to get over being angry, and post your comments below.
When You Feel Stuck Because You Don’t Trust Your Intuition
April 10, 2008
Join in the discussion, leave your comments below.
How to ‘let go’ of a situation you obsess about in your mind
March 13, 2008
Most people I talk to have at least one situation in their life that they ‘hold onto’, and can’t seem to let it go. Sometimes it’s a recent event, like how a meeting or a conversation went; sometimes it’s an event in the past like the breakup of a business partnership (or a personal relationship), or being let go from a job.
When you start to notice how you talk to yourself about it, you will likely notice unconstructive thoughts, such as “you should have done it differently!” or “they should have done it differently”.
If your reaction is one in which you blame the other person when you replay the situation in your mind, it may very well be the case that the other person was doing the best they could but didn’t live up to your expectation or your preference for how you would have liked the situation to go. Maybe, objectively speaking, what the other person did was inappropriate. However, even though it seems like you are angry at the other person, that is often not what is REALLY causing you to stay hooked on thinking about it.
Here is the REAL reason why you are obsessing about it: The situation unfolded the way it did. That’s now a fact. But when you explain to yourself why it happened that way, you have made the situation to be a confirmation of a long held belief you have about yourself (e.g. I am not good enough; I’ll always be a “B+” kind of player; I’m a loser”, etc.)
To start moving forward, what you want to do is start to trace “what it means about YOU” that the situation happened the way it did. Write down on a piece of paper the explanation(s) you tell yourself for why the situation happened this way. With each answer you give, dig a little deeper to answer the question “and what does that mean about me?” This analysis will lead you to the root of what is making you ‘hold onto’ the situation. You want to see if you can come up with a personalized meaning that confirms your deepest fear or doubt about yourself.
For example if you are still upset about a business partnership breaking up, see if you can identify the deepest concern you have about why it didn’t work out. If your answer is “I think ultimately the business partnership broke up because I wasn’t smart enough”, notice how you have condemned yourself. It’s kind of hard to move forward when you think you have confirmed that you don’t have what it takes to succeed. That’s why you obsess about it – you keep thinking about it to make it different in your mind, or to debate the merits of whether that belief about yourself is true or not.
The key, of course, is to look at the situation more objectively and come up with a thorough analysis of all the factors that went into the situation not working out – factors that had to do with you, the other person, the systems between you that broke down, the aspects of your business skills you can make a plan to improve, etc. This detailed analysis will give you lots of information that you can use to stop blaming the other person, to stop condemning yourself by confirming your worst doubt and fear about yourself – and most importantly, to learn lessons you can start using in your business life today!
Questions:
1) What is a situation that you are having a hard time letting go of?
2) How have you been dealing with it? (i.e., Do you try to just ‘tuck it away’, i.e., “I’m not going to think about it anymore”. Notice that strategy probably works ok until… the very next time the memory comes up again in your mind. Or do you try to distract yourself from thinking about it (although that can sometimes lead to unconstructive diversions such as surfing the internet, eating, or working yourself to the bone.)
3) What are the explanations are you giving for why the situation happened?
4) When you dig deeper, what belief about yourself have you been confirming that has been making you ‘hold onto’ and obsess about this situation, rather than understanding it and moving on?
Join the conversation and post your comments about this blog below.