Keep Your Head in the Clouds & Your Feet On the Ground

A few weeks ago while I was on a run, the saying "keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground" popped into my head.  I'm not sure why I thought of this, but once I did I couldn't get it out of my mind.  And while I've heard this saying many times (and actually have always thought it was pretty corny and cheesy), I started to think about it more deeply and realized the true wisdom of this idea. >>

The Power of Desire Without Attachment

The more passionate, bold, clear, and free we become with our desires - knowing them, feeling them, seeing them, and expressing them - the more likely we are to not only manifest them specifically into our lives, but to live with an authentic sense of passion, purpose, and power.


Here are a few things you can think about and do to expand your capacity for passionate desire, without attachment... >>

The Power of No

How do you feel about saying "no?"  I notice that saying "no" to certain people and in some situations can be challenging for me.  What is it about saying "no" that many of us have a hard time with? >>

Who Do You Think You Are?

Drop the self judgment and authentically pursue your dreams. Your true life is waiting for you! >>
1)  Notice when your feelings of not good enough or unworthy show up 
2)  Ask yourself more deeply, Who do you think you are? 
3)  Upgrade your story about yourself 

The Magic of the Olympics

There’s something truly magical that happens during the Olympics. While many of us are enjoying rooting for our country and we’ve seen some remarkable performances in Vancouver from people like Lindsey Vonn, Shaun White, Evan Lysacek, Bode Miller, and many others – the real magic of the Olympics is way bigger than any individual athlete or even any country. And, if we look deeper, there are so many aspects of the Olympics that can teach us, remind us, and inspire us on our own personal journey.  Mike Robbins highlights important elements and lessons of the Olympics>>

How to Be Your Love's Biggest Fan & Best Critic

Learning how to simultaneously show love and offer constructive criticism is crucial to developing and maintaining a healthy and authentic relationship. Personal growth expert Mike Robbins offers tips on how to successfully achieve both. Find out how to balance the equation in connect.

Love Ourselves, and the Rest Will Follow

How do you feel about self love?  More importantly, how well do you love yourself?  For most of us, loving ourselves is something we may know is important (yet at the same time think is arrogant or narcissistic), but often have difficulty actually feeling, expressing, and embodying. As we lead up to Valentine’s Day this weekend and think about the important people in our lives whom we love (or the fact that we wish we had more love in our lives, especially right now), much of our focus tends to be outward and not inward. The ultimate goal of being ourselves in an authentic way is actually about loving ourselves in a generous way. If we truly love ourselves, most of what we worry about and even much of what we strive for in life (and even in our relationships) becomes meaningless. We may still have some worries, and we’ll definitely continue to have dreams and desires. However, from a place of true self love, the fear behind our worries and the motivation for our desires dramatically changes from something we have to avoid or produce in order to be accepted and valued, to something we we’re genuinely concerned about or really want to experience. On the flip side, if we don’t love ourselves, nothing much really matters. No matter what we create or experience we’re never able to appreciate it, ourselves, or to be fulfilled in the process, because we’re constantly striving to be validated in an insatiable way. Self love is what we’re all searching for.  Sadly, we spend most of our lives thinking that someone or something else can give us what only we can give ourselves. To be truly fulfilled in life and relationships, we have to find the love within us and give it to ourselves. No other person, material possession, or accomplishment can do it. It’s up to us. Especially when it comes to relationships, self love is essential.  One of the best gifts we can give to the people around us is to love ourselves in a genuine way.  As my mom used to say to me when I was young, “You can’t love anyone else, until you love yourself.” Read the rest of Mike Robbins article. For this week’s audio message, click here.

We Don't Solve Our Problems, We Outgrow Them

I was recently reminded of a great quote from psychologist Carl Jung, he said, We don t solve our problems, we outgrow them.   As I've been thinking about this the past few days, I realize how often my attention is actually on solving my problems, not outgrowing them.  No wonder the ones I obsess about the most seem to linger. However, we ve all experienced this outgrowing process many times.  Think back to some of the biggest problems in your life when you were a child or an adolescent (or even just a few years or months ago) that are no longer issues for you anymore.  In most cases, you simply outgrew these things.

How can we make this awareness process more conscious and deliberate, and not simply happen by accident?  It's important that we shift our focus, as Jung reminds us, from solving to growing.   As we try to solve the biggest problems in our lives related to relationships, career, health, effectiveness, money, awareness, and more maybe we can stop trying so hard to fix these things and look more deeply at the feedback we're getting and where we can enhance our own growth.

Here are a few things we can think about as we look to deepen our growth and shift away from the obsessive problem solving mode many of us find ourselves in:

1)  Confront your biggest problems.   Tell the truth about the biggest issues in your life and look at what you ve been doing to either avoid or solve them neither of which will ultimately give you what you want.

2)  Look for the growth opportunity.  With authenticity and compassion, see if you can look beneath your avoidance or even your intended solutions, and find the beautiful feedback life is giving you right now about where you can grow.

3)  Reach out for support.  Getting support, feedback, and guidance is an essential aspect of our life and growth, especially when we want to change, transform, and grow into new and deeper places.  When we re looking at outgrowing some of the most challenging aspects of our life and transcending certain "problems" (some of which we may have been dealing with for quite some time), it's fundamentally important we reach out for help from people in our lives friends, family members, co-workers, counselors, coaches, teachers, and others.

As we do these three things, with a sense of kindness and appreciation towards ourselves, we can expand our growth, which will ultimately lead us to where we want to be in our lives.  Remember, there is no specific destination we're after in this process growth is really about deepening our experience of life and enhancing our capacity for joy, fulfillment, and love.

(For this week s audio message, click here.)

Forget About Creating a New You: Just Be Yourself

There's lots of focus on the annual "new year, new you" phenomenon in the advertising, media and self-help worlds. And while this time of year can be a great catalyst for positive change in your life, what if you made a commitment to live your life in 2010 focused on who you are, and not so much on what you do, what you've accomplished, what you look like, what you're striving for and more? One of best things you can do in this new year is to focus on who you really are, instead of who you think you're supposed to be. 

Who would you be without your accomplishments (or failures), your degrees (or lack thereof), your bank accounts, your experiences, your title, your home, your status? As simple a concept as this is to think about and discuss, at least on the surface, it's actually quite difficult for many people—myself included—to genuinely separate who they are from what they do (or have done or not done). This past year has shown, in some cases quite painfully, how quickly the external circumstances of your life can change and things can be taken away.

The deeper question to ponder here is really one of the big philosophical questions of life, "What makes you a valuable person?" While this is something everyone has thought about to some degree, most people don't really engage in this inquiry on a regular basis. And, when you do, you often think that if you just got more done, lost some weight, made more money, took a vacation, accomplished a goal, had more meaningful work, made it to retirement or whatever, then you'd be happier or feel more valuable. Sadly, this is not usually the case and is why most of your New Year's resolutions don't really last.

What if, in addition to having resolutions, you could expand your capacity for appreciating yourself for who you really are in a genuine way, having nothing to do with your external self? What if just being yourself, the way you are right now, is good enough?

Being yourself takes courage, commitment and faith. It's a process of letting go of many false beliefs you've picked up from the collective consciousness: that you have to look good, be smart, know the right people, say the right things, have the proper experience, in order to be happy and successful in life. Being yourself can be scary and counterintuitive, difficult and even off-putting and, at times, lonely. However, being your authentic self is liberating, exciting and fulfilling. When you have the courage to just be who you are, without apology or pretense, so much of the suffering, stress and worry in life simply disappears.

3 ways to truly be yourself 

It’s Not the Circumstances, It’s Us - Mike Robbins

I recently read a great quote from Ben Franklin that I hadn’t seen before.  He said, “Joy doesn’t exist in the world, it exists in us.”  While the quote was new to me, the concept wasn’t.  However, as I began to think it more, I realized that even though I “understand” this wisdom and do my best to live by it and remind others of it, more often than I’d like to admit, I find myself living as though I’m simply a victim of the “things” that go on around me and in the world – especially the stuff I don’t particularly like, agree with, understand, feel like I’m on top of, or enjoy. 

The circumstances of our lives, especially when they seem stressful or intense (as is the case for many people I know and work with these days) do have an impact on us, for sure.  However, all too often we give away our power to these circumstances and situations.  We act as though it’s a foregone conclusion that we will feel a certain way based on specific circumstances (i.e. the economy, the weather, our health, our level of activity, the state of our romantic relationship or lack thereof, the behavior of our children, our families, the state of our career or business, our environment at work, and more).

Our experience of life (grateful, worried, peaceful, angry, excited, sad, alive, depressed, joyous, or anything else) is much more of a reflection of us and what’s going on within us, not a reaction to what’s going on around us.  We’ve all had many examples of times in our lives when things were going “great” on the surface or we accomplished or experienced some “wonderful” external success, only to feel a sense of disappointment or sadness underneath because whatever it was didn’t satisfy us at a deep level.  And, on the flip side, most of us have had moments of incredible joy, excitement, and bliss that weren’t directly connected to anything “worthy” of these feelings externally.

Even though we know this dynamic to be true, we still seem to get caught in the hypnotic, erroneous notion that if we just got rid of some issues, altered some circumstances, manifested some increased success, or changed some specific situations in our lives – then, we’d be happy, peaceful, and relaxed (or whatever it is we say we want to experience). 

Author and teacher Byron Katie says, “The definition of insanity is thinking that you need something you don’t have.  The mere fact that you exist right now without that which you think you need is proof that you don’t need it.”
What if we lived our lives with a deeper and more conscious awareness of the fact that we get to create our experience of life at any moment?  Imagine what our lives, our careers, and our relationships would look like if we stopped blaming our experience on other people or on external circumstances.  We would free up so much positive energy and take back so much of our personal power.

Here are a few things you can do to enhance your capacity to own your experience of life in an empowering way:

1)  Admit where you play victim and give away your power. As is always the case, “the truth will set you free.”  Take a look into your life, especially in the areas where you find the most pain, suffering, and struggle right now.  Without judging yourself, can you find places where you’re acting like a victim of your current circumstances (as though it is simply “happening to you”)? The more honest and specific you can be about this, the more freedom it will provide for you.

2)  Acknowledge, own, and express your underlying emotions. Whenever we go into victimhood there is something we don’t want to deal with, take responsibility for, experience, or express emotionally.  Even thought it can be a little painful and scary initially, by dealing directly with the emotions we’re avoiding, we go to the source of the issue and address it at the root.  Ironically, once we’re able to acknowledge, own, and express the emotion(s) involved, much of the suffering and struggling go away – but only if we’re willing to really take responsibility for it and express it fully.

3)  Make a commitment to fully own your experience. Declare to yourself and others in your life that you’re willing to take 100% responsibility for your experience of life.  This doesn’t mean that “stuff” won’t happen, but it does mean that you make a commitment to live your life by design, not default.  It’s also likely that you’ll forget, slip up, and fall back into victimhood from time to time (or often).  However, making a commitment to yourself and to others – and also asking them to hold you accountable with honesty and kindness, can create an environment (within you and around you) conducive for you to enhance your capacity to live your life with power and responsibility.

Give yourself some space and have a lot of compassion with yourself and others on this; most of us have been trained, educated, and encouraged to live in “victim consciousness” – even though it doesn’t work or give us what we want ultimately.  When we’re willing to tell the truth, express our real emotions, and make a commitment to living as designers of our experience – we can literally transform our lives in miraculous ways.


(For this week's audio message, click here.) 

How can you take back your power from your circumstances and remember that your experience of life is up to you?   Share your thoughts, action ideas, insights, and more below.  

Forget About Creating a New You: Just Be Yourself

Here are a few things to consider and practice as you deepen your awareness of and capacity for being who you truly are in this New Year:

• Tell the truth to yourself. Think about how much of your self-worth is based on what you do, how you look, who you know, what you've accomplished (i.e., the external stuff). The more you let go of being defined by the external, the more freedom, peace and power you can experience. And, as you really get honest with yourself, you may realize that outside of these external things, you don't really know who you are. As scary as this may seem on the surface, it's actually great news and can give you access to a deeper and more meaningful experience of who you are.
• Appreciate who you really are. What do you appreciate about yourself that has nothing to do with anything external? In other words, what personal qualities (of being, not doing) do you value about yourself? The more you're able to tap into what you appreciate about who you are (not what we do), the more capacity you have for real confidence, peace and self-love.
• Practice just being you. As silly as it may sound, you have a great deal of experience being phony or being how you think you're supposed to be. It actually takes conscious practice to be able to just show up and be who you are. Practice alone, with people you know, and with total strangers. This is all about awareness: paying attention to how you feel, what you're thinking, what you say and how you show up. It's not about getting it right or doing anything specific; it's about letting go of our erroneous notions of how you think you're supposed to be and just allowing yourself to be who you are in the moment.
  

Have fun with this, talk to others about it and have a lot of compassion with yourself as you practice—this is big stuff for most of us. This year, instead of trying to be a new you, just be yourself.