Matthew Ferry's Blog » Peace of Mind

Let’s Get Inspired and Energized Today

Matthew — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 13:00:28 +0000

At 12pm Pacific I am hosting a live webcast that will get you pumped up, energized and excited about 2012.

YOU SHOULD DEFINITELY JOIN ME FOR THIS.

What: Life changing webinar

Title: Power Profit and Peace of Mind

When: TODAY 12pm Pacific / 1pm Mountain / 2pm Central / 3pm Eastern

Length: 90 minutes

Cost: None. This is my gift to you.

%%%% CHECK THIS OUT %%%%

One lucky person is going to win a free 30 min private coaching call with me just by attending this months webcast. So be sure to register to win.

Here are a few of the benefits I’m promising…

Learn how to become the powerful creator of your experience
Determine what you truly want to accomplish
Begin to free yourself from doubt, worry, stress and overwhelm
Stop grinding, pushing and forcing, and start getting results with ease

See you in a couple of hours.

Matthew

P.S. DO NOT MISS THIS WEBCAST!

Let’s Get Inspired Together for 2012 – Next Webcast on Wednesday

Matthew — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 13:00:21 +0000

I want to get pumped up about 2012, don’t you?

I have a cool talk that always gets me turned on, motivated and inspired, and I want to share it with you.

It’s called Power, Profit and Peace of Mind and I’m going to present it on my February webcast.

***************************************

What: Life changing webinar

Title: Power Profit and Peace of Mind

When: 2/1/2012 12pm Pacific / 1pm Mountain / 2pm Central / 3pm Eastern

Length: 90 minutes

Cost: None. This is my gift to you.

***************************************

%%%% CHECK THIS OUT %%%%
One lucky person is going to win a free 30 min private coaching call with me just by attending this months webcast. So be sure to register to win.

Here are a few of the benefits I’m promising…

Learn how to become the powerful creator of your experience
Determine what you truly want to accomplish
Begin to rid yourself of doubt, worry, stress and overwhelm
Stop grinding, pushing and forcing, and start getting results with ease

And most of all… GET EXCITED ABOUT 2012!

Join me, get pumped up, win, and be inspired.

Matthew

P.S. If you had more power, profit and peace of mind in 2012, then life would be really really good, right? So join me and let me help you get on the road to making that happen.

Happiness is a Skill Worth Developing

Matthew — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 17:54:52 +0000

Happiness is not only good for your health, according to a study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences but apparently it’s good for business too. In his Harvard Business Review article, Shawn Achor sites that happy doctors diagnose 19% faster and happy sales people increase sales by 37%. He goes on to say, “Happiness is the single greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy.”Over the last 17 years, I’ve seen dramatic business turn-around’s occur in as little as a week. The only change being an increase in a persons happiness. The results I’ve witnessed have been dramatic. My clients on Wall Street made better trades, CEO’s made more profitable decisions and sales people made more sales all with a shift in their mindset, which lead to greater well-being. Having been trained that correct business systems trumped all human factors, the outcomes that occurred from “enhancing one’s mood” were shocking.As a result, in the late 90s I decided to focus my career on the pursuit of happiness and fully investigate its impact on the success process. Over a ten year period I found that happiness was a skill that anyone could learn and that happiness was a hidden determinant in success. Bottom line; when entrepreneurs learn the skills to be happy, they have unexplainable increases in their results.

4 Happiness Skills Anyone Can Learn

There are a set of specific, actionable skills & tools that will cause a person to be happy regardless of the circumstances they find themselves in. The following is the short list that I suggest to all new clients.

1. Give up being right.

Most people are addicted to being right and they don’t even know it. This leads to endless amounts of argument and strife. To be happy, you must let go of this ineffective habit of thought.

Try this: Notice that The Drunk Monkey(my nickname for the chatter in your mind) has an opinion on everything including things it knows nothing about. Opinions are vanities and are always from your perspective. Your perspective my be right for you, but certainly not for everyone and everything. And yet, when you pay attention to The Drunk Monkey you see that it actually believes that it is right about almost everything.The desire to be right often puts you into a resistant state which does not lead to happiness. When you are in a resistant state of mind – trying to prove your opinion is right – you will not be as effective as when you are open to all possibilities.To give up being right, put yourself in the other persons shoes. Look at the world from their perspective and acknowledge that there are multiple ways to view the situation. In short, have compassion for others.

2. Accept the situation as it is and then take action.

A client of mine found himself in an unpleasant situation. His company was merging with another company and he was informed that he would be losing his coveted office with the sun shining into the windows that he was accustomed to. This may sound trivial. For him, this was the end of a 10 year era and he was very attached to what the office represented in his life. He had been angry for a week when we finally spoke. The merger had not yet happened. Yet, his anger was creating dysfunction in has ability to produce sales results today. He was suddenly procrastinating on things that were important. His sales were suffering.In a short period of time I helped him to realize that he was moving no matter how angry he got. Ultimately he accepted this as the case and promised to stop complaining simply because it was not making him feel good. Next I asked him a question I want you to ask yourself when faced with adversity, “What are you committed to?” We shifted his focus to defining what he wanted to create out of the merger. He described his best case scenario. As he did, new options began to be illuminated, his mood changed and his energy went up. Getting happy allowed him to get out of his resentment, see new possibilities and get creative.In the following weeks his sales results returned and he discovered a compromise that would work for his new working environment. If you don’t accept the situation as it is, you become frustrated, and unhappy, which makes you feel stuck and you can’t move forward. You literally get blinded to all your available options.

3. Quit pretending you are a psychic who can tell the future.

Just the idea of a change to his office environment caused him to hallucinate about a future he didn’t like. Problem is, he’s not psychic so he doesn’t know what the future will hold. Yet he was suffering, right now, as if the negative future hadalready occurred. This is a trick The Drunk Monkey plays on people to strip them of their happiness.The Drunk Monkey in your head is not your friend. As a biological survival mechanism one of its functions is to predict potentially negative situations and then mobilize the body to avoid them. Problem is, most of your life is not dangerous. The salesman moving into a new office is not dangerous and yet, The Drunk Monkey invented futures that caused his body to be filled with chemicals that created great stress. Nothing had happened and yet his life experience had been degraded by a figment of his imagination.Today just remind yourself that you are not psychic and that you can not predict the future. Work to see the situation with exacting clarity by removing your fear and your opinions. Next identify what you want to have happen. Only then will new and interesting possibilities arise.

4. Stop protecting yourself from people who aren’t attacking you.

A Wall Street executive was managing billions of dollars in assets and yet he felt like nobody listened to him and that he wasn’t important. This perspective had him feel repressed and defeated. His positive results didn’t seem to match his

Monkey's got your back

unhappy mindset. He was making money for his firm and the firm was doing well as a whole. With further investigation it turns out that he felt like other people in the firm didn’t think what he had to say was important and therefore he was an outsider and not involved in making critical decisions. He realized that taking on more responsibility was important but felt powerless to do so.

I asked him how he knew this was true. He told me about incidents that had occurred the year before. I asked him to give me something that happened this week. He couldn’t even think of something that had happened in the last six months. The Drunk Monkey was at it again.

The Drunk Monkey creates generalizations. Example; you walk over, pet a dog and it bites you. The next time you see a dog, it shoots your body full of chemicals that put you on the alert. Do all dogs bite? No! But the survival mechanism will steer you clear of anything today that might have seemed dangerous in the past.

This system is great for making sure kids don’t touch the hot stove more then once but it’s terrible for everyday life. A couple incidents that occurred a year ago that made him feel angry and unappreciated. Since then, he’s been protecting himself against a whole bunch of people who aren’t attacking him and frankly, don’t even remember what happened.

I asked him to consider that he had changed, they had changed, times had changed, and the world had changed since then. I asked him if he would be willing to run an experiment to put The Drunk Monkey into place so he could return to happy, fulfilled and satisfied with work. He agreed. Here’s what I told him to do.

Instead of trying to keep his ideas safe, instead of wondering how he could move his objectives forward; for the next week, find out what other people were committed to. See what the other people in the company were working on and discover ways to contribute to each of the people in the company. Make it a game. See if you can contribute something to someone everyday for the next seven days. An idea, a contact, a resource or even just an encouraging word.

Through this process, he shifted from protecting himself from all the people who weren’t attacking him, to being supportive and giving. Within the year he became one of the most celebrated people in his company. Everyone wanted to get him involved in their projects. He was suddenly important. The next year he was recruited away by a superstar in his industry and made a partner in the firm. This was a five year dream that came true in one. The trick was simple, he needed to be the change he wanted to see in the world, just like Gandhi said.

When you are happy, you are creative, approachable, flexible and easy to be with. Add those characteristics to your skill set and you will see an immediate positive benefit.

Most people believe that happiness is something that occurs when the conditions of life are favorable. But the truth is, happiness is the skill navigating challenging situations without getting reactive. If you wait for happiness to find you, you’ll be waiting a long time. Happiness is an inside job.

3 Simple Actions That Make You Happy

Matthew — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 20:36:04 +0000

There are three actions that guarantee to your happiness. Happiness is a skill that anybody can learn. So most people believe that happiness is some kind of circumference that is outside of yourself. For example, “When I have the perfect, then I’ll be happier.” In other words, If this thing outside of myself happens, then I’ll be happy. A lot of people think happiness is formula. If I am watching the Super Bowl, having a cigar, drinking a drink with a hot girl on my side, then I’m happy.And those formulas certainly have their momentary hit, but long-term happiness is really just a skill. It’s really a shift in the way that you’re thinking about yourself and about your circumstances in life. Nothing needs to change to make you happy.

You Can Choose Happiness by Changing How You Take Action

1. Devotion. It’s a way of being. Do what you do in the moment to the very best of your ability. When your operating from that standpoint of really focusing in and doing your best, your mood elevates dramatically. Even if you aren’t doing it exactly right. Being intensely focused on doing your best feels good. If you’re doing the dishes, if you’re walking the dog, if you’re playing with the kids, if you are hanging out with your spouse, if you’re with your friends, do your best and you will get positive feelings. When you take the same actions you always take with devotion, the same action feels great!

2. Acts of Service. Helping others, contributing, making a difference, and supporting other people in a selfless way will make you happy. Anytime that you take your attention off of yourself, your happiness rises. When you get out of your head and be of service to others, you get a boost to your happiness. Consider this. Your unhappiness is just a self-centered focus. By focusing your attention on the service of others, you take your attention off of your problems and your happiness increases.

3. Appreciation. What do you like about people? What do you like about the situations you find yourself in? Looking for what you like about yourself. Active appreciation is anti-mind. The mind, The Drunk Monkey, all that talking in your head, it’s not focused on what’s right, what’s working, what you like, what you’re happy about. It’s focused on what’s wrong, what might be wrong, & what needs to be improved. It’s a survival mechanism, so its job is to look for what doesn’t work and then focus on those things, and, of course, that makes you unhappy.Devotion, service and appreciation, those three actions will get you happy. Try them today!

3 Spiritual Perspectives That Accelerate Your Life

Matthew — Wed, 30 Mar 2011 13:00:16 +0000

When you apply spiritual perspectives to your life, everything accelerates. Your life gets way better, very fast. Here are 3 words to focus on this week.

Willingness: Can you find the joy in what you do? Let go of anything you are resisting. Be willing to do what you are doing 100%. All in. No holding back. It feels amazing when you do. When you feel like that, you are magnetic and attractive to what you want. What you want will come to you very fast. But you have to let go of the resistance. Which leads me to the second word.

Acceptance: Acceptance means you admit that you are not the ruler of the universe. Acceptance means that you allow people and situations to be the way that they are. Practicing acceptance gives you incredible freedom and flexibility. When you are not accepting, you are in resistance. What you resist will persist. This will increase your frustration which is a repelling state. What you want will not come to you when you are resisting. Acceptance transforms and allows you to move something from its current state to something better. The third word is…

Non-attachment: This means that you don’t get involved with other peoples drama. Non-attachment is not being passive, its actually fully participating without being reactive. You don’t allow yourself to get emotionally entangled in other peoples bull shit. It’s not being aloof. It’s not apathy. With willingness and acceptance you are fully engaged but unaffected by the drama.

Very powerful way to operate in the world. Try it today.

Is Spirituality Your Excuse for Poverty?

Matthew — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:55:51 +0000

It is interesting how The Drunk Monkey takes over your spirituality and tells you that not making money is somehow righteous and spiritual.

Its a double-edged sword. When you don’t make any money, life is a lot more difficult and you must use your spiritual principles just to maintain basic happiness in the middle of unworkability.

Consider: The Drunk Monkey takes over your spirituality and uses it as your reason for not confronting your fears and manifesting your desires. Instead of reaching your full potential, full creation as a human being, you cower and hide behind a mask of righteous spirituality.

What’s your opinion on this?

The World as You Know It Doesn’t Exist

Matthew — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:26:24 +0000

There is no world out there.

Not at least the world you experience. Yes, there is something out there, but what you are experiencing isn’t it. What you are experiencing is your opinion, your perception and your conditioning. How you relate to the world is what the world is for you. Two people can be in the exact same situation and have completely different experiences.

Are there atoms, electrons and such out there in the world? Apparently science is getting a better grasp on that. But it takes multimillion dollar machines to see what is really going on in the world. So the actual reality is not something humans have day-to-day access to. You and I have access to the information our senses bring in to our consciousness.

Why is this relevant?

Your husband isn’t really a jerk. That’s just your opinion. Not the truth.

The president isn’t actually doing anything you say he is. That’s just your perception of the situation.

The world isn’t all screwed up. That’s just the way you see it.

There is nothing to fear. That’s just a biological reaction to the stimulus in the environment. Other people aren’t afraid of the same things you are. Therefore you fear is not real or the truth.

Today see the world for what it really is, just your opinion. Notice how much more relaxed and enjoyable life is.

Inspiration Versus Force

Matthew — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 21:05:57 +0000

Inspiration is far more powerful and productive then force and manipulation. When you are inspired, you are naturally in action, which produces exponential results. When you are afraid that what you want is not coming, you become forceful and that makes everything you try more difficult. All fear is an illusion. There is very little in your life that is actually dangerous.

Awareness makes you flexible which reveals new options and leads to power. I call this The Game Changer. Using The Game Changer process, you will get into a clear-minded place. You will realize that all is well, everything you want is coming and there is no need to push or force. One of the master skills in life is to relax and let it flow. From this naturally blissful place, inspiration arises and you find yourself in massive action towards your most cherished dreams. Goals that you had put off in the “someday” category suddenly become today’s priorities.

Recovering Success-aholic

Matthew — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 17:17:51 +0000

As the economy squeezes most people today, many are rethinking their lives. Many of my clients are discovering that they are success-aholics. Addicted to the success that was so easy to achieve during the boom times. Yet, now that things are different, life isn’t so easy and many are reconsidering their priorities.

Many success addicts find themselves working twice as hard for half the results today. If that’s you, then it’s time to channel some of that energy into other areas of your life that will bear more fruit.

In my Inspired Action Coaching process, I ask people to prioritize the following 10 categories:

Physical Body
Spiritual Relationship
Mindset
Family
Primary Relationship (spouse/partner)
Business
Personal Finances
Social Life
Contributions
Recreation

Then I ask you to rate your level of satisfaction in each category on a scale from 1-10. One being not satisfied and ten being totally satisfied. Finally I ask you to create two or three objectives in each category that, if they were achieved, would make that category a 10.

Doing this exercise on a quarterly basis creates creates more balance, peace and satisfaction. A little side note: After doing this exercise with more then 8000 people for over 16 years I can tell you that most people achieve 70% of what they write. Isn’t that encouraging?

Difficult or Easy… Is it a Choice?

Matthew — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 16:02:17 +0000

Seems easy enough. Choose to make life easy, right? Wrong! Be honest. How many times have you chosen something knowing it would make your life difficult later? Consider that action is hardly ever a choice.

Notice today how your reactions to life’s situations are automatic. Most of the time you can not choose to make life easy because you are unconscious of what is running your life… The Drunk Monkey!

The Drunk Monkey, which is also called the personality, the ego or your unconscious mind is an unexamined set of habitual ways of viewing the world. These various points of view are the source of your action.

The only way out of this automatic reaction mode is what I call, “The Game Changer Process”:

You need to become aware of your reactions.
Once you become aware of what doesn’t serve you, you naturally become more flexible.
Your flexibility opens up a whole new set of options.
Options give you power.

Try it today. Notice how your behavior is automatic. See the source of your action as “the way you are seeing the situation”. Begin to see your life’s situations in new and interesting ways. Feel your new power to choose a life that is easy.