In my last blog post, I discussed how meditation impacts your brain, and ways long-term meditation can strengthen the brain against aging. Mental awareness impacts the brain and physical performance. The thoughts we tell ourselves can become reality, a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Take for example, the L.A. Clippers. They have been plagued by what has been dubbed “bad luck.” According to Shaun Powell, the Clippers NBA team is often plagued by bad luck; however, some of the team’s woes have roots in poor management. The L.A. Clippers aren’t reaching their peak performance due to embracing a negative mindset. They’re prone to injuries, setbacks, and failure. When those occur, they blame the team’s bad luck history, a mindset that is self-fulfilling.
Professional athletes aren’t the only ones who suffer from the lack of mental discipline and blockages to success. Meditation and mindset are important to overcome these blocks to self-fulfillment and success. Self awareness will help you to understand how to work out environmental factors that might be impeding your performance. Investment in yoga and meditation can improve mental fortitude and focus.
Many CEOs and entrepreneurs also utilize meditation in their business practices as well as personal lives. According to Business Insider, Panda Express Founder, Andrew Cherng, said of meditation, “I want to fix my people from the inside.” He once stopped a business meeting to encourage an upset manager to meditate. Entrepreneur and Def Jam Founder, Russell Simmons, credits transcendental meditation with changing his life. He said, “It has changed my experiences in meditation and therefore my life.” Another example, Green Mountain Coffee Roaster founder, Robert Stiller, brought in meditation instructors for his employees. He said, “Meditation helps develop your abilities to focus better and to accomplish your tasks.” For these individuals, their success is connected to meditation and positive mindset.
With so many successful individuals using meditation to stay focused and move beyond unproductive situations, bad luck, and inherited mindsets, it seems a no-brainer to implement. The lyrics “if it weren’t for bad luck, I’d have no luck at all” have been sung by the likes of Ray Charles, BB King and on a regular clip from HeeHaw, a 1970s variety show. As in the case with the Clippers, some simply buy-in to the prevailing mindset of bad luck. It then becomes all too easy to validate. What you believe is what you look to validate.
If you’re in a career that requires you to be on top of your game, at all times and all places, meditation and mental conditioning is what puts you at a competitive advantage. Ask me about Peak Performance Mentoring that can catapult you to a place among the elites. Visit my contact page or email me at [email protected]. I look forward to hearing from you!
Our shadow, like our light, are the things we embrace, love and enjoy. It contains all the things we don’t like about ourselves. It is everything we don’t want people to find out about us, and everything we don’t want to see. Sometimes, our shadow is not so pretty to look at. We try to keep it buried deep inside our psyche.
If left ignored, our shadow can find a way to come to the surface. It can destroy relationships as it shows itself like a faux reflection of others. Yet, our shadow is all about us. It can crush our dreams and spirits or sabotage our life when not listened to or examined.
This same shadow also has the ability to be our greatest teacher. If we can learn to fully embrace it, it can teach us kindness, forgiveness, strength, joy and ultimately our innate beauty. It shows us the beauty and power that each of us hold.
Our shadow only has power over us if we keep it in the dark, ignore it, and use it to blame others for our shortcomings. Continued suppression of our dark shadow will leak out into our lives with a slow seeping poison. Instead examine what we don’t like about ourselves and stop suppressing it. Once we acknowledge these aspects of the self, we become free. Free of fear and pain. We can now live our life with greatness and compassion, love openly in our relationships, and learn how to reach our full potential.
My Shadow Work
While working on my shadow, my mentor gave me a very large rock to carry all day. While holding this rock, all I could concentrate on was the vast weight of it. It felt almost impossible to get out of that situation. I felt stuck and scared, tired and annoyed by it. Once I started to reflect on the weight, I could see how that represented all my fears, worries, doubts, and burdens. Not only just mine, but those of the world.
Then, I started to look at the rock for what it was. It was smooth, had multiple layers of intricate colors and lines to admire. As I looked closer the rock had more beauty, colors and intricacy than I had originally noticed. It was strong and unbreakable. I then began to appreciate the rock for its value, fall in love with it and everything it represented. I was no longer concentrating on the weight and the burden of this large rock, but the beauty of it. The weight of the rock represented the beauty of my pain.
My mentor then gave me a pebble to hold in the other hand, and funny enough, it felt like the same weight. I no longer felt the heaviness as they both were just representations of what I was holding onto and the story I made up about both of these rocks. I ran with both, played with both and found balance between these two sizably different rocks with comfort and ease.
In this work, I discovered how grateful I was for the burden, or my shadow. It allowed me to transmute my beliefs of pain and burdens by breaking through the limitations I had unknowingly set within myself. And, with time, I was able to break through to the next level of consciousness. The weight of my beliefs had been shed allowing me to move forward. Once you can find balance and make peace with the light and the darkness that we all hold, your perceptions shift and your understanding heightens in a cosmic way lifting us out of the constraints that our own limitations had set.
To find out more about breaking through your limitations, beliefs, and situations that can seem painful and heavy, reach out to me. I can show you how shadow work can help you become the best version of yourself. Schedule a confidential discussion to see how this process works. Contact me via email at [email protected] or schedule a call directly on my calendar .
“Leadership is unlocking people’s potential to become better.” – Bill Bradley
Have you ever considered the way leadership has shaped your life? The words and ideas placed in your mind by individuals you look to for guidance and support can have a profound impact on your everyday life and overall success.
Consider the Chicago Cubs’ World Series win in 2016. When Joe Maddon became the team’s manager in 2015, he approached the players with positivity opposed to the negative remarks many other managers and coaches offer players. Because Maddon pushed positivity and encouraged his players to have the “I am a winner” mindset, they had the most successful season they’d seen in more than a century.
Maddon did this with the help of Mental Training Coach Josh Liftrak, who joined the Cubs leadership in 2014. Liftrak created a mindset training program for the team to help push through barriers. He and Maddon focused on emphasizing that each player has a choice. Each day you choose to be the human being that you want to be. You also choose to stay awake and find a way to be aware and be the very best you can be.
Liftrak’s mindset coaching has three parts: Courage, Urgency, and Belief. By this, Liftrak means players have been mentally trained to have the courage to do the right thing at the right time. Urgency refers to the desire to get better right now and not put it off until tomorrow, or the next day. The biggest part of the Cubs’ mental training is the Belief portion of the training. Liftrak and Maddon both pushed their player to believe in themselves, their teammates, and their training.
The leadership team helped implant the “I am a winner” mindset into the players with this approach. The payoff was the Cubs at the World Series for the first time in 108 years.
By using their positions of power to spread positive energy, they were successful in reaching their goals. While you don’t need positive energy to be a leader, you do need it to lead successfully. The energy of the entire business or team you lead is impacted by the type of energy you are bringing to the table. If you are constantly negative, your employees and players will be too. They won’t likely believe in themselves, their work, or the goals of the team if you don’t depict positive energy surrounding the team’s goals.
Maddon will likely be seen as one of the best sports leaders of all time when his career is over. By leading with a positive energy, Maddon led the team to what seemed unimaginable prior to his arrival – a World Series victory. He plans to continue this method of managing the team entering the 2018 season. Maddon has been awarded MLB Manager of the Year three times. It has been predicted that he will be named to the MLB Manager Hall of Fame as well, especially if he leads the Cubs into another successful season. The Cubs manager said they are going into spring training and beyond with “energy and enthusiasm.”
All in all, successful leaders constantly emanate voices of positivity and perseverance. Whether you are on the field, on the court, or in the office leading with good energy can make all the difference in the world. If your goal is to be a constructive and successful leader, schedule an exploratory consultation with me today.
About AmyD
Amy D is the President of AmyD.Me, CEO of Choose Evolution Coaching Solutions, INC, and Founder of Follow the Leader Movement. As a master of many modalities, she’s combined IPEC Coaching and Energy Leadership with practices in meditation and spirituality for a unique approach to obtaining results. Am is also a Bio-Energetic Practitioner with 20 years in energy medicine. She holds a Masters Degree in Education and Bachelors in Psychology, Behavioral Modification and is an Ordained Minister of Kingdom Communications. Amy with Professional Athletes, CEOs, High Achievers to remove all limitations that get in their way to ultimate success.
It is estimated that only 8% of the people who set resolutions at the beginning of the new year reach their goal. And, as you’ve probably heard dozens of times, most people have abandoned their resolutions by the end of February. While that may seem disheartening for many, most of these individuals may be able to receive better results with a slight change in the way they think and the way they speak to themselves.
What is Self-Talk?
Self-talk is exactly what it sounds like: talking to yourself. It may sound crazy but speaking to yourself, either aloud or mentally, in a positive way can have a significant impact on your everyday life.
Dr. Masaru Emoto conducted a study that can provide evidence of how positive self-talk can increase your overall quality of life. To perform the study, Dr. Emoto placed equal amounts of rice and water into two jars. One jar was marked happy, while the other is sad. Each day, he opened the happy jar and said: “thank you.” Then he would close the jar and open the sad container to which he yelled, “You idiot!”
Emoto did this over the span of 30 days. At the end of the month, what Emoto found was that the negative energy caused the rice water to become black and moldy. The water Emoto spoke to kindly, however, showed no signs of fermentation or mold.
Of course, your body is quite different from a jar of rice water, but the same is true. If you speak to yourself negatively day after day, your body will fill up with toxins that will prohibit you from living a happy, healthy life. On the other hand, speaking to yourself in a positive manner can do just the opposite. It can fill you with optimism, hope, and lead to better overall health.
You can use self-talk in many other areas of life as well, including those pesky resolutions. Using positive self-talk to reach your goals is simply about changing your mindset around a topic or goal. See how positive self-talk and changing the way you think can impact these common resolutions:
Lose Weight
Twenty-one percent of those who set resolutions settle on the overall goal of losing weight. When you think about the idea of shedding some pounds, you don’t necessarily feel great about yourself. Most people are focusing on numbers like pounds, measurements, and even cardio times.
Instead of focusing on losing weight, consider switching your mental focus to getting healthy. Resolving to get healthy in the new year is more positive than simply losing weight. Instead of focusing on your weight, think about reaching a healthier you. Ask yourself how many times throughout the day you thought about yourself in a positive light, opposed to thinking about your weight or health negatively. Training your mind to think positively can make all the difference in your overall success.
Get Out of Debt
About 12% of those making resolutions in 2018 are making financial goals for the year. For many, this includes attempting to pay off massive amounts of debt. While being in debt may be overwhelming, using positive self-talk and changing your mindset can help reach your goals related to debt.
Instead of saying you want to get out of debt in 2018, consider telling yourself that you are striving to increase your cash flow throughout the year. Earning more cash will undoubtedly help you pay off the debt you have. You should also celebrate your progress. Don’t focus on thoughts like “I still have $20,000 to pay off.” Instead, switch your focus to your successes, like “I’ve paid off $500 of my debt.”
De-Clutter
Fewer than 10% of resolution-makers resolve to de-clutter but many of them are likely thwarted because of the negativity their minds associated with the word this word and concept.
The prefix de means privation, removal, separation, negation, detract, descent and degrade. Clutter means a collection of things lying about in an untidy mass. Not exactly positive phraseology with the combination of the two.
If you have ever to clean a closet, garage, attic, the junk drawer…, it is easy to focus on the huge task at hand, become overwhelmed, and quit or procrastinate. Instead of focusing on the clutter, place your focus on getting more organized. When you are working on your things, celebrate small successes. For instance, many people would focus on how much work they have left to do. Change the way you think about it by placing your focus on what you have accomplished. “I have cleared almost half of the garage!” vs. “I still have half of the garage left to de-clutter.”
To change the way you think about yourself, your goals, and your abundance, you’ll need to address your current patterns. I can help! Schedule a confidential discussion to see how this process works. Contact me via email at [email protected] or schedule a call directly on my calendar.
Consider the Chicago Cubs’ World Series win in 2016. When Joe Maddon became the team’s manager in 2015, he approached the players with positivity opposed to the negative remarks many other managers and coaches offer players. Because Maddon pushed positivity and encouraged his players to have the “I am a winner” mindset, they had the most successful season they’d seen in more than a century. 