How to Move Past the Frustration of Personal Growth

As an Inspired Action life coach, I help people grow, evolve, and implement new productive habits into their life. Learning new productive habits is frustrating. Since you don’t know exactly how to be this new person, there is a bit of trial and error involved. Personal growth strategies also confront the status quo and your natural pull towards the path of least resistance. New habits are destructive to your old life.

To move past the pain and frustration of personal growth and achieve the desired changes in your life, I recommend two simultaneous approaches.

1. Create structure. Personal growth is not easy to do. Everything in your life resists the changes you want to make. In order to deal with the pain of personal growth, you must set up systems that pull you forward regardless of your resistance.

Setting up accountability is a powerful structure that provides you with the power to choose your behaviors versus getting pulled into the habitual path of least resistance. When you set benchmarks for yourself that are beyond your current capabilities and then create accountability with someone, you create a situation conducive to change. What you monitor you can improve. As you see the improvement you get encouraged which creates the energy of inspiration within you and pulls you forward into action in spite of the pain growth creates. As an Inspired Action life coach this is one of my primary tools to move you past the pain of personal growth.

2. Surrender. The biggest element that stops you from developing better habits is the pain and the suffering that occurs when we are doing this growing. I teach my clients to surrender to the pain of this growth. It’s similar to a bodybuilder who is using the mantra, “No Pain, No Gain”. You must begin to look at the pain of growth in an entirely new way.

Begin to see the frustration, doubt and uncertainty in this way.
Breakdown is the beginning breakthrough. In the Indian culture, they have a saying that destruction and creation are two sides of the same coin. You cannot create your new life without destroying your old life. So, you must begin to embrace this destruction. You must begin to disengage from your drunk monkey’s natural tendency to move away from the destruction and the pain that you create as you are achieving your new goals. You must begin to look at it like this is part of the process.

Breakdown is the beginning of breakthrough. I like to say it in this way; Success is nothing more than a series of well-managed breakdowns. You must be able to skip from breakdown to breakdown to breakdown to breakdown without losing your enthusiasm, which means you have to begin to think about your breakdowns, the destruction and the chaos that your goals create in your life in a completely new and different way. You must begin to celebrate the breakdown, get excited when the breakdown happens. This is not easy to do. That’s why most people use a coach to go through that process. If left to our own devices, we have a tendency to go into fear, get scared, retract, pull back, and go right back to normal again.

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Power and Force

When you get the vital difference between power and force, you will engage in a process that will assist you in releasing fear and unlocking unexplainable joy.

As you let go of forcing your life, living with “have to do” and “need to do” you suddenly discover that living a fulfilled life is not about doing things. It’s about being someone. Being someone who can attract what you want. Doing is an illusion. Doing happens naturally. You don’t need to get motivated to do things, get into action or make things happen.

As you shift out of force, you shift into power. Your own inspired power. My purpose in creating the Inspired Action Coaching program is to lead people into their own inspired way of being. This sense of incredible power.

Suddenly, you step into synchronistic and magical experiences that uplift you. Gone are the mornings when you wake up dreading everything on your plate. As you shift out of force, people start to like being around you. Step into allowing and let go of force.

Force looks like sets of goals that you must achieve to get happy. The only problem is that the mind won’t actually let that happen. You’ll just set more goals. Still thinking that some day you will get happy. When you let go of force, happiness happens naturally. And you can live in peace, fulfilled, manifesting all of your dreams. That’s what power is, if you can let go of force.

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The ‘Date Night Questions’

I have found one of the most powerful ways to keep relationships working is to use what I call “the Date Night Questions.” Don’t let the name fool you. These questions can be used for all your relationships: spouses, business partners, colleagues, kids… you name it.

I invite you to give them a try. All you have to do is schedule time once a week (or a month) and ask these questions to one another. Then, watch how your relationship becomes more trusting, open, and honest.

Here they are:

>Do you have any expectations that are being broken?
>Is there anything that I’ve promised that I didn’t deliver on?
>Do you have any concerns?
>What do you wish was different?
>What have you not had an opportunity to say to me?
>Do you have any needs that aren’t being met?
>What is one thing on your wish list?
>What do you want to be acknowledged for?
>What are you happy about?
>What do you feel like you have to conceal from me?
>What are you committed to in this partnership this week?
>Is there anything you have to give up in order to be that?
>What are you most excited about in the next week?

The key is to listen, acknowledge and appreciate the other person during the entire process.

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3 Steps to True Happiness; The Next Frontier of Success

Successful people realize that success does not bring happiness. Happiness is the next journey for most successful people. Early on, most top performers equate that success will fill the void within them and show the world that they are valuable. Sorry to say, it doesn’t happen. Happiness takes a different set of skills, disciplines, systems and procedures.

Here are the first three steps to getting on the path of true happiness:

Step One: You must see the mind, which I call The Drunk Monkey, for what it really is. The Drunk Monkey, all that talking in your head, is just biology. It’s energy moving through fields of neurons in your brain. It’s job is the same as all the other cells in your body… Keep you alive longer!

Here’s the big problem; you are not in a dangerous situation. If you are reading this article, you are seeking happiness. People seeking happiness are not trying to survive. Yet, I would be willing to bet, you feel emotions like frustration, anger, doubt and fear pretty frequently. Those emotions are chemicals used by the brain to move you away from danger. Hello! Your life is not dangerous and yet, you let The Drunk Monkey trick you into thinking that it is. Awareness is a skill that must be developed if happiness is your goal.

Step Two: With awareness comes flexibility. Being flexible means you start to use some discernment. You no longer take The Drunk Monkey’s statements about reality as truth. You start to see that the talking in your head is just one particular point of view. As soon as you see that the thoughts in your head are not “the truth,” you become more flexible. When you are more flexible, you are less reactive. To be less reactive gives you more choices. More choices represent more power over the situation. In other words, awareness makes you flexible, which makes new options available and those options give you power. Empowerment is one of the ten forms of happiness.

Step Three: Practice accepting things as they are. This is a discipline. It’s the exact opposite of your normal mental functioning. When you pay attention to The Drunk Monkey, you see that it has an opinion on everything; including things it knows nothing about. The Drunk Monkey says, “He shouldn’t be that way!” or “This is not right!” To create true happiness, you must recognize that these are just opinions. Even more important, is to realize that opinions are the source of your suffering. Life is just “life-ing” along and your opinion about it won’t change it. To accept the situation as it is, gives you the emotional well being you need to focus on what really matters to you. To allow The Drunk Monkey to ramble endlessly about how things should be different, is a waste of time and energy. Ultimately it degrades your experience of life.

There are ten forms of happiness and each will lead you to a life of ridiculous bliss. Start practicing the three steps today and you will notice an immediate difference.

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How Happy People Deal with Anger

As an Inspired Action life coach, I support people with the process of transmuting their anger and moving back towards being happy, positive, fulfilled, and satisfied. This is not always easy to do, but many successfully happy people have created strategies that assist them in moving out of the anger and back to happiness again. Here are three of those strategies.

1. Change the context – One of the most successful methods for moving out of anger and back to happiness again is to change the context of the situation.  Change the meaning that you have given this situation that makes you angry.

This is not easy to do because you naturally default to the automatic meaning you have been conditioned to attach to things. Like a dog, each of us was domesticated by the people who raised us to view the world in a particular way. With practice you will begin to see that no such world exists.  The world you see is defined by the context you view it in.  Happy people understand this and practice stepping back and looking at the situation from other people’s shoes.

Try it today.  Look at whatever is upsetting you from different angles, from different points of view. How would the Pope see it?  How would a street person see it?  How would a starving child in Africa see it?  Keep changing the point of view until the anger begins to dissipate.

You will notice, with practice, you can very, very quickly get yourself right out of the emotional fury that occurs from the ‘one perspective’ you are conditioned to have.

2. Recognize The Drunk Monkey and its antics. Anger is just your body’s response to potential danger. Yet, think about how often you get angry, frustrated, upset, and hostile in situations that are not actually dangerous.

We have, in our society, created a very effective survival strategy. If you live in a first world country, the odds of you being in serious danger are very, very small. Yet, we still have this animal part of our brain, which I like to call The Drunk Monkey, which is looking out for danger and avoiding it.

When you get angry, consider the idea that you are The Drunk Monkey’s puppet.  See the strings as anger, frustration, anxiety, fear or doubt.  Visualize The Drunk Monkey pulling the strings to steer you away from danger.  Notice that it does this without your permission. Realize that The Drunk Monkey is a bit dim witted and can’t tell the difference between real danger and imaginary danger. Once you begin to see that happening and observe it, suddenly it doesn’t have a grip on you any longer and you can move right out of the anger back into happiness, by conscious choice.

3. Choose gratitude. Happy people have developed habits, rituals and disciplines that keep them happy. One of those disciplines is asking effective questions.

Happy people have the discipline to be in a hostile, angry situation and suddenly ask themselves a question such as “Why is this good?” “What am I learning from this?” “How will I be a better person because of this?” “How will this situation benefit me?”

By moving from a position of “I’m powerless and I’m going to get hurt or am in danger,” the happy person shifts the context through questioning, back to a place where they feel gratitude. “How is this going to benefit me?” By taking on these techniques, you will find that you can very quickly move yourself from anger back to happiness again.
 

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Feeling Negative Emotions Is Optional, Part III

In Part II, I mentioned a client I was coaching who was bewildered, frantic, upset, angry, and scared.  Because I’ve coached thousands of people through these kinds of situations before, I knew this would turn out to be the best thing that ever happened to him.  This is an example of the process that I took him through so he could begin to create solutions from an empowered mental state. Take yourself through the process as you read.

A. When you feel yourself having the symptoms of negative emotions, say to yourself, “I’m choosing this negative feeling by focusing on what dissatisfies me. Now I’m going to choose something that feels good and be the creator of my circumstances.”

B. Ask yourself, “Is there anything in life that I am happy about right now?”

C. Think about a hobby you love.

D. Think about good times you’ve had with your loved ones that were really special.

E. Think about a song that you love. Sing it to yourself or hum it out loud.

(Remember, I’m not asking you to ignore what’s upsetting you or to stick your head in the sand. I’m asking you to get yourself in a more resourceful and empowered state of mind before you act. Dealing with circumstances from a negative state will just attract more of what you don’t want. If you are going to solve problems or situations with negative feelings in the background, you will only be creating more of what made you feel that way. That’s the way the universe works! If you solve issues using negative emotions, you’ll get more of what you don’t want. Okay, back to the process.)

F. Now that you have yourself feeling good again, let’s go in a new direction. Ask yourself, “If there was anything good about this situation, what would it be?”

G. If you’re still resisting, ask, “If I made up something good about this situation, what could I make up that would make me laugh and feel good?”

H. Ask yourself, “If I was someone else looking at this situation, what could I learn from this that would be valuable?”

That should get you moving in the right direction. Remember, you are the creator of your life experience, so make up stuff that empowers you and stop making up things that are disempowering you.

Be cautious about inventing righteous and cynical lessons from your experience like, “I would learn to not deal with such a @%#$ like that ever again!” Remember to check in with your body. How does it feel when you say it?

In less then 30 minutes, my client was seeing himself for who he really was: powerful, resourceful, creative, flexible, and certainly a great asset to any organization he chose to work with. You’ll be happy to know that today he is happier then ever before and his career is more promising then he ever could have imagined!

Remember, your experience of life is how you are feeling. When you feel good, you’ll find yourself saying, “Life is good.” When you feel bad, the opposite is true. Do you want to have an amazing life? Keep changing your perspective until you do. Keep these questions in your wallet or in your purse. When you are gripped by negative emotions, run yourself through the process, get yourself back to feeling good and take effective action to have your life be what you desire! It is your life–no one else is going to make you feel good. It is up to you to be the creator of your experience.

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