Keep It SIMPLE

Are you afraid of some condition in your life? Here's a life-transforming secret: that seemingly scary condition, whatever it may be, is not the problem. It is your reaction that is fearful. This is why if you will become conscious of your condition instead of afraid of it, you will change forever your relationship with fear.

It is only within this special kind of inner-relationship that there is real safety, because now you are interacting with fear in an entirely new way. You are no longer letting it dictate to you how to act or what to do. Instead, you are aware of the fear. You are learning to quietly observe and study it. And, each day, as you discover something new about the strange and shaky nature of your own fearful reactions, they begin to lose their power over you.

Why? Because you are at last seeing them for what they have always been: unintelligent mechanical forces. You are slowly becoming stronger than they are because by seeing them as they are -- not as they would have you see them -- you have helped yourself to climb above and outside of their influence. This self-insight is the difference between trembling through your life and being in command of it.

To be consciously afraid means that you know you are frightened, but at the same time you know that these very fears, as real as they may seem, are not you. And no wrong reaction can keep you captive once you begin to see it for what it is.

Fear is, and has always been, nothing but a self-limiting reaction that we cling to in the darkness of our present life-level, having mistaken it for a shield of self-protection. But, just as the faintest of early morning sunlight can dispel the night-long darkness, so does the smallest of insights into a persistent fear lead to letting it go.

You can prove this powerful principle to yourself anytime you want. Just dare to proceed even while being afraid. But remember, your new aim isn't to be courageous or to try and act strong in the face of fear. No. We've seen that this won't work. You simply want to be more curious about your frightened thoughts and feelings than you want to believe in them.

If you will follow this simple but higher instruction, not only will you start to see these habitual reactions that have been keeping you scared and running, you'll actually start seeing through them. This is where the real miracle occurs.

Each new insight into the actual nature of these negative reactions removes some of their power over you. And their loss is your gain. You are stronger now and you know it. You also know this new strength will never fail you because it isn't just the temporary appearance of a bold opposite. This new strength of yours is the absence of an old weakness.

Let's look at just one of the ways in which this principle of putting self-illumination before psychological self-protection can turn fear into fearlessness.

Do you know someone who you would rather run from than run into? Most of us do! Nevertheless, starting right now, resolve never again to avoid any person that scares you.

In fact, go ahead and walk right up to that critical man or aggressive woman and say or do exactly what you want instead of letting the fear tell you to do what it wants. Have no ideas at all about the way things should or shouldn't go. You are there to watch and learn about yourself, not to win an ego victory. Let that person see you shake if that is what starts to happen. What do you care? Besides, it is only temporary. That unpleasant person before you can't know it, but you are shaking yourself awake.

For the first time, you are letting your reactions roll by instead of letting them carry you away. As you stand there, momentarily apart from your usual self and working hard to remain as inwardly watchful as you know how, you can see that this flood of previously unconscious reactions has its own life story -- a shaky sort of story that up until now you had embraced as your own. But now you are beginning to see the whole story. The fears do not belong to you. Here is the explanation:

You have never been afraid of another person. The only thing you have ever been frightened by is your own thoughts about that person. Yes, you did feel fear, but it wasn't yours and it wasn't toward someone stronger than you. The fear you felt was in what you thought he or she was thinking about you.

Amazing, isn't it? You have been afraid of your own thoughts! And seeing this ends this. Now you can let this thought-self go, because no one holds onto terror.

By Guy Finley

The importance of time and time management -- how rich people and poor people both have the same amount of time every day - 24 hours.

Four great time management ideas excerpted from our Leadership Event Speaker Roundtable Session - Enjoy!

From Brian Tracy:
I always give the principle of: Begin the day by "Eating That Frog." It basically says that if the first thing you do in the morning is eat a live frog, then you will have the satisfaction of knowing it is probably the worst thing that is going to happen to you all day long. And your "live frog" is your most important task. Now there's two corollaries to that. The first one is if you have two frogs to eat, eat the ugliest one first and the second corollary to that is if you have to eat a frog at all, it doesn't pay to sit and look at it too long.

So the key to high performance is to plan every day the night before, in advance, and set priorities for it. And then say, "If I can only complete one task on this list before I was to be called out of town for a month, which one task would it be?" And whatever that is, it becomes your frog and the next morning discipline yourself to start in on that task, the most important thing on your list, and do only that until it is complete.

If you can develop that habit, you can double and triple your productivity, you'll take full control of your life, you'll eventually become wealthy, and the personal feeling of pride, accomplishment, discipline and achievement you get will be absolutely extraordinary. It is one of the most important of all lessons to learn, and one of the hardest things to implement if anybody has tried to do it.

From Denis Waitley:
Stop watching in prime time and start living in prime time. Prime time is 7-11 p.m. EST, when all of America is watching other people making money and having fun in their professions. So if you want to watch other people making money, having fun in their professions, which gets their ratings up so they make more money, go ahead and do things that are tension relieving, instead of goal achieving. But if you truly want to live YOUR life in prime time, then write in prime time, have intimacy in prime time, talk with your children in prime time, live and do in prime time instead of unhooking and engaging in tension relieving activities. Every book I've written has been written 7-11 p.m. weekly and on Saturdays. And why? Because I am earning money the rest of the time, and I don't have time to write a book except in prime time.

So stop watching and use the television set as an appliance. It has doors on it. Close the doors and use it like an iron. When you need to iron your clothes, bring out the TV set.

From Jim Rohn:
Regarding the television, I knew a guy who wasn't doing too well and he wanted some advice from me. I knew he had a television set and knew he watched a lot of television, so I asked, "How much did that television cost you?"
He said, "About $400."
I said, "No, you're mistaken."
He said, "No, this television set cost me $400."
I said, "Well, that's to buy it. To watch it, I am sure it is costing you about $40,000 a year to watch."
He finally got the message and he called his brother-in-law, who had a pickup, and he and his brother-in-law hauled his television out of the house. His brother-in-law did say, "Well, you can just shut it off."
And he said, "No, for now I don't trust myself, Jim Rohn is right. I'm not going to let this television set cost me $40,000 a year anymore."

From Vic Johnson:
My biggest tip would be in an area in which I struggle a lot. About 15 years ago, I heard someone say to never handle the items in your inbox more than one time. So I adopted that for email. Now I get over 300 emails every day, even though I have all kinds of filters, some of them going to other people, etc. My biggest challenge is to touch that email only one time. Either I forward the email, I return the email and delete it or drag it to a folder for action by someone else or delete it. If you continue to have to go back and revisit that email over and over trying to make a decision, that's time -- that's wasted time -- plus it's on your mind until you get rid of it. So if you are in a profession and you handle a lot of emails and you're still getting a lot of items in your inbox, only touch them one time.

One day Mr. Shoaff said, "Jim, if you want to be wealthy and happy, learn this lesson well:

"Learn to work harder on yourself than you do on your job."

Since that time I've been working on my own personal development. And I must admit that this has been the most challenging assignment of all. This business of personal development lasts a lifetime.

You see, what you become is far more important than what you get. The important question to ask on the job is not, "What am I getting?" Instead, you should ask, "What am I becoming?" Getting and becoming are like Siamese twins: What you become directly influences what you get. Think of it this way: Most of what you have today you have attracted by becoming the person you are today.

I've also found that income rarely exceeds personal development. Sometimes income takes a lucky jump, but unless you learn to handle the responsibilities that come with it, it will usually shrink back to the amount you can handle.

If someone hands you a million dollars, you'd better hurry up and become a millionaire. A very rich man once said, "If you took all the money in the world and divided it equally among everybody, it would soon be back in the same pockets it was before."

It is hard to keep that which has not been obtained through personal development.

So here's the great axiom of life:

TO HAVE MORE THAN YOU'VE GOT, BECOME MORE THAN YOU ARE

This is where you should focus most of your attention. Otherwise, you just might have to contend with the axiom of not changing, which is:

UNLESS YOU CHANGE HOW YOU ARE, YOU'LL ALWAYS HAVE WHAT YOU'VE GOT

by Jim Rohn

Have you ever said "yes" when you meant "no"? Agreed to do something you really didn't want to do? Given in to someone's demands because you didn't want to make them angry or hurt their feelings? If so, then you have used a passive communication style.

The Passive Personality - Path of Least Resistance

Indeed, there are some times when you will decide it is not worth the hassle, anguish, frustration, time or energy to deal assertively with a person or situation. Instead, you choose to ignore or avoid the problem, often hoping it will just go away. These are your passive times.

Passive personalities are intimidated when faced with manipulative anger and feel guilty when faced with manipulative hurt. Passives may avoid a confrontation, but in so doing they create a great deal of unhappiness for themselves. Most stress is caused by avoiding problems and people rather than dealing with them.

No more excuses, please.

People with passive personalities love to tell themselves that their input does not matter. They even make excuses when someone is treating them badly. Rather than place the blame on the manipulator, they often blame themselves saying, "It must be me. Something I did caused this to happen." The passive plays right into the hand of the aggressive personality.

It's easy to see why aggressives love to work with, be friends with and marry passive people. Aggressives like to push others to the limit to see just how much they can get away with. Passives often fail to set any limits at all. They would rather let others make the decisions so they do not have to be responsible if things do not work out.

You must decide to take control.

We all have the power to make our own choices as adults and we have the obligation to assume responsibility for those choices. No one will treat us any better than we expect to be treated. You may have experienced things in your life over which you had no control, but you can control how you allow those experiences to define you as a person.

There are two main reasons passives have a hard time with confrontation. Many simply hate the physiological changes that take place in their bodies when they are in a tense situation. The fear of what might happen if you take a stand combined with the anger and frustration of not speaking up is enough to make anyone ill. Many more learned at a young age that in order to stay out of trouble they needed to keep their heads down and their mouths shut.

Assertive is about taking control of your life. Passive is about letting go of control and handing it to others. Setting boundaries means identifying healthy and ethical principles upon which to base your life and making sure that how you treat others and are treated by others is within the framework of those principles.

How do passives get their way?

They seldom do. Passives generally have low esteem as a result of making unhealthy, even self-destructive, choices. Passive people usually avoid saying "no" in order to be nice. They think the only alternative to being nice is to be mean or selfish. Aggressives enjoy being around passive people because passives allow them to do their own thing, in their own time, in their own way, even if it involves manipulation and/or abuse.

Passives are generally intuitive people who play a game called "let's see if you can guess what I want". The problem is that they expect others to do the same for them. This "testing" usually leads to their disappointment.

Surprisingly, the passive person values healthy, assertive principles for everyone but themselves. They do not believe they deserve what they work so hard to give to everyone else. In the passive person's futile attempt to be all things to all people, they often fail to live up to the very principles they work so diligently to model.

When passivity becomes our default response, then we have a problem because not only do we continue to "compromise" with nothing gained, but our ethics and values are inevitably compromised as well. As a result, our self-esteem is diminished. Compromising with another person is one thing. Compromising ourselves is quite another. It is nearly impossible to maintain a healthy sense of self-respect when passive is the communication style of choice.

Take Action!

Think about a time when you chose to be passive.

Why did you choose to be passive? Were you afraid of hurting someone's feelings? Were you afraid of making someone angry?

Do you often wish you had said or done something instead of remaining silent? If so, think about communicating more assertively in the future.

by Connie Podesta