Imagine Your Reality

Each day, in many different ways, we communicate. Sometimes we know we are doing it and other times we might be surprised at what we’re communicating. Communication is about more than word or even body language. It’s also about your emotions and your attitude. If you go into a communication situation with a poor attitude or a scarcity mentality then that is exactly what you will manifest in your situation. The reason for that is because the scarcity mentality is brought into the conversation and all it looks for or manifests is what the person doesn’t have. A person with a scarcity mentality will generally have a negative outlook about life and miss the opportunities that are available or drive them away with the negativity they exude.

Approaching a situation with a positive attitude or abundance mentality will inevitably influence the communication toward producing more abundance. You can tell when a person has an abundance mentality by the way the person acts in a conversation. S/he is asking good questions, is generally upbeat and is somebody you want to be around. This person definitely wants to manifest abundance and doesn’t let anyone get in his or her way.

I believe in the axiom that where the attention goes is where the energy flows. Where you put your attention is where your energy goes. If you put your attention into a scarcity mentality then that is what you get. If you put your attention to an abundance mentality then that is what you will get…Mind you, just having a good attitude won’t cut it. You have to be willing to go out there and look for opportunities and do the work, but if you have an abundance mentality about, you will find that opportunities come to you easier than if you approach a situation with a scarcity mentality.

The saying that you can win more bees with honey then vinegar also applies. What is it you are communicating to people? Are you communicating your scarcity, what you don’t have, or why a situation doesn’t work out, or are you communicating your abundance, appreciating what you have and also being open to letting more manifest into your life?

Remember that how you approach a situation determines what you get out of that situation…will it be abundance or scarcity?

Last night I went to a networking event and passed out my cards. I found it fascinating to talk to such a variety of people, from a variety of pursuits. I’ll be going back each month.

Something I’ve learned about life coaching, which is really important is the value of putting yourself out there. Last night, I didn’t really want to go out, but I reminded myself that if I didn’t go out, I couldn’t grow my business or meet people. I could stay at home, but nothing would occur. Putting myself out there is important if I really want a business to grow.

Thsi is true in general when you’re trying to start up or continue a business. The networking you do is an essential part of reaching your audience. It tells them you exist and hopefully persuades them that you can help them achieve their goals. I always try to find networking opportunities that let me meet people that I could life coach. That way I meet people and I learn about opportunities. I also get to polish my social skills with peopel from a variety of backgrounds.

What’s something you could do to help you network?

Sometimes, in a client situation, it’s really important to just listen and not say anything. Once in a while, I’ll get a situation where a client comes in and just needs to talk, and talk, and talk, and get some ideas out on the floor. I’ll ask occasional questions, but I’ll also just let the client talk. Now if the client is ranting about a bad day, I might acknowledge that s/he had a bad day and then ask what the client wants to focus on…but if a client comes in and has a focus on what s/he wants, even if it’s vague, it’s good to let the client get it out on the table, with occasional questions asked, to clarify direction and points being made.

Sometimes no matter how unfocused a person seems, that person is actually more focused than you think, but just needs someone to bounce the ideas off. I keep realizing that the fine art of not knowing really involves also knowing when to be quiet and just listen…the client has more knowledge about what s/he wants than I do…I’m a sounding board, a questioner sometimes, but I don’t have the answers…I might have observations, but all the answers lie within the client.

If life coaching is about helping a person recognize that s/he has resources available to hir that weren’t recognized before, I also think that sometimes it’s about recognizing what you are really attached to, resources as it were that others have shown you that aren’t always as useful because they represent the “shoulds”…what other people feel you should be as opposed to who you really want to show up as.

What I’m getting at is that a life coaching relationship involves not just helping a client realize what s/he wants, but also helping a client recognize what s/he does not want in hir life. I use help, because it’s not for the life coach to tell the client what doesn’t work…The client has to figure out what resources aren’t useful, or what patterns of behavior hinder the realization of a success. The coach asks questions, helps the client realize well-formed outcomes and effects that changes will have on the client and other people, but the client, in the end, has to choose to act. The coach can help the client realize steps, even set up an acocuntability structure, but the client has to make the ultimate choice and follow through on what s/he wants to do, but also recognize what s/he does not need to accomplish those goals.

When I show a client a process, and we do the steps in the process, what is really happening is that the client is using the process to identify both the useful and not useful resources and then making a choice about what to do with those resources. Once the client knows what resources to use, then the client can make effective changes.

It’s an important distinction to remember. I’m not ust helping the client access resources, but also providing the client an opportunity to choose the resources that will help hir manifest hir imagination into reality.

“Love is the truth of who you really are” Ptaah

 I came across this quote on Sunday night. I was meeting up with some of the people from the Baraka institute, and I’d gotten some constructive feedback for my future website. I hit the home button and was directed to a page where this quote was displayed.

Right now I’m doing a year long dedication to the value or element of love in my life, so finding this quote was indicative of a lesson to be learned from it. I’ve been learning a lot of lessons about love, since I started my year long dedication in October 2007, but there’s still a lot to learn, and the lessons are…quite challenging. 

I hadn’t exactly been in touch with the truth of who I really am. Over the last few years, I’ve been doing a fairly intense regime of meditations, which has helped me uncover a lot of who I am, but really being in touch with the truth of who I am…that’s something I’ve only really begun doing recently, both in terms of pursuing life coaching as a career path and in terms of starting to honestly communicate with myself about what my values are, what I want, and whether I’ve really been living a life aligned with my values. 

The truth of who you really are. When I think of that, I think of a book I’ve been reading lately, Finding your own North Star. In it the author discusses the social and essential self. The social self is the self who lives according to what society wants. It’s the self, which is concerned with social consensus, and everyone being happy and agreeing with what you do. The essential self, on the other hand, is your values, your desires, what sings when your following your calling. It’s the self that you really are, the self that provides you a sense of mission.

These two selves are important. The essential self is important because it provides your values, your calling, your sense of identity as it applies to fulfilling those values. For instance, my pursuit of life coaching is a recognition that as a career it is much closer to my essential self, than say a career as a fast food worker or a corporate lawyer. Neither of those jobs would bring any sense of fulfillment to my innermost values, though those jobs might do that for other people. The social self is important because it helps you navigate the social realities you are in, finds people who can be important to you, and provides a sense of belonging. The two can be successfully balanced, though to do so, you really need to listen to your essential self, and help your social self find the people who are in alignment with your values and can be supportive, as well as sometimes constructively critical, albeit with an open mind, and no assumptions made in offering the criticisms (This ties into an essential skill of life coaching, which is the skill of not knowing, more on that in a bit).

If love is being in touch with the truth of you who really are, then to me it seems that love, at least as it involves self-love, is recognizing what your values are and how they inform your actions, both towards yourself and others. While love is an emotion, it’s the action one takes that really defines the truth of that emotion, or rather what it means to feel that emotion. It’s not enough to say you feel an emotion, because anyone can say it. It’s the actions that occur, which really determine if the emotion is felt. Until you can demonstrate these actions towards yourself, it’s likely you won’t feel self-love and there’s some truth to the concept that if you don’t love yourself, it’s hard to love another or be loved by another.

When I think about love, and being in touch with it, I think of my choice to pursue certification of life coaching as an example of taking action to get in touch with my essential self. Instead of continuing to pursue a career I don’t feel very enthused about, I’m choosing to get in touch with my inner values, and find out how I can manifest those in my life. I’m choosing to engage in a genuine relationship with myself and find out what actions I need to take to really manifest that love in my life that shows me I’m in touch with who I really am.

But I think this principle of action as it applies to emotions is also integral to relationships you have with other people. If I feel love for someone else, am I automatically in touch with who that person really is? Not necessarily. I could have an idealized perspective about that person.

And this is where we come back to the art of not knowing. It’s very easy to make judgements about people or situations, especially if you only have partial information. Those judgements can also lead to assumptions, to thinking you know more about a situation or a person than you do. And sometimes because you do love someone, you might expect that person to be in touch with you, to know how you feel or think about a situation. In the end, however, those assumptions can lead to problems, because chances are the person isn’t as in touch as you think, not because s/he doesn’t love you, but because s/he simply isn’t you and if most of us have trouble being in touch with ourselves, just imagine how much more trouble we have being in touch with each other.

The art of not knowing is the recognition that you can never know everything about a situation and the only way you can get more information is by asking with an open mind, instead of making assumptions. This asking of questions is an action. It is an action that shows a curious, open mind, but also a desire to understand what the other person is feeling and thinking. Further actions can follow, in a manner that allows each person to demonstrate the emotions felt, and more importantly get in touch with the truth of the self and the truth of the other person.

Are you in touch with the truth of who you really are? If so what actions are you taking to demonstrate that truth?