The Great Deceiver of Fulfilment

What percentage of your energy do you commit to happiness or fulfillment of your personal dreams and goals in life? If you imagined it to be somewhere in the 60% range you have joined that wonderful category of 'average.' How does anyone arrive at the correct answer to this question, how does one assess the percentages? It's not as difficult as you think.

What percentage of your life energy is committed to fear or anger at another person or situation that causes you to feel helpless? Eighteen present is the typical answer! How much of your energy is allocated to envy or resentment? Twelve is the average number. How much energy is expended in your efforts to fit in or be accepted by a partner, friend or co-workers? Eight percent is the average number. All the other things like worry and everyday stressors fall into the two percent range.

Why does it even matter; why spend valuable time determining where your energy is committed? Your physical body, the container that encompasses all that is you in this lifetime is capable of holding 100 percent of your life energy. This includes all the possibilities and probabilities of who you can become and what you are capable of achieving. If being average is good with you, it may not matter. You can simply go along to get along and coast through life, taking detours at will and attracting drama for entertainment. If you expect far more, this is important.

Whatever your personal percentages are, you are committing that percentage of your best efforts to things that can never help you be the best you can become. Your efforts to hold onto painful memories and seek revenge behave like an infection in the physical body. It drains your physical energy and redirects all your creativity to ideas intended to repay those who have hurt you. It only makes you sicker and sicker until your own hopes and dreams are buried under the debris of your life plans. Feeling guilty has the same effect on the human body. There are no winners, but you are the loser.

When you are caught in these emotional traps you are far better served to treat your life energy like a budget. Look closely at the numbers and the costs of every emotional drain. Make a clear and conscious decision about the benefits and the costs before you commit any of your personal energy to a cause that cannot benefit you. Then take the time to empty your life of all the negative things you do have control of; dump them; never again allow them to command your life or your potential.

You are the only captain on board; the decision about how you command your ship is reflected in your choices. You become the great deceiver of your life when you ignore the costs and continue on a course that can never take you to your highest and best good.

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Great-Deceiver-of-Fulfillment&id=9699774

The #1 Secret To Realizing Your Biggest Dreams

For years I was convinced I knew what kept people from achieving their goals in life: determination and persistence. But now, my opinion has changed. I think accountability is the key to success.

Persistence and determination are nearly impossible to sustain in a vacuum — accountability is the missing ingredient necessary for major achievement. Marketers know this and often use our lack of accountability to increase profits.

The gym industry’s business model, for example, is to vastly oversell memberships, knowing that a huge percentage of newly recruited clients will visit once or twice at most. In fact, Planet Fitness gyms average 6,500 members each but can hold a maximum of 300 people.

They’re quite confident that only the tiniest fraction of members will ever show up. Your lack of accountability is how they make a profit.

When we’re pursuing our creative or personal dreams, however, we’re usually totally on our own.

On the flip side, as both a yoga teacher and a writing coach, I know how powerful accountability really is.

Having taught hundreds of yoga clients one-on-one, it’s extremely rare that someone writes me a large check for a package of 10 private lessons and then vanishes into the woodwork.

Yes, paying the larger cash investment helps guarantee a commitment, but even greater than that is the accountability to me as their trainer. Unlike hitting the snooze alarm for an hour and blowing off a morning spin class, if we’ve made a 7 a.m. appointment I will definitely be knocking on their door at 6:59 a.m. That accountability makes all the difference in the world.

I’ve observed similar phenomena with my writing clients. I can always tell when someone is actually going to achieve his or her goals or whether when I circle back to them in two or three years, they will be in the exact same situation. I wish it were a testament to my psychic abilities, but it’s not. It’s entirely to do with the accountability they’ve created (or not).

In “real life,” we’re often held accountable by pure economic necessity (i.e., if we don’t show up for our nine-to-five, we'll become homeless) or an observant partner, roommate, or cable company (“I’m sorry, but why don’t you have your share of this month’s electric bill?”).

When we’re pursuing our creative or personal dreams, however, we’re usually totally on our own. No one’s prodding us to write the screenplay or novel we’ve been dreaming about, perhaps have even started, making sure we fill up the blank page.

Even worse, sometimes key people in our lives may be unknowingly sabotaging our success.

Rather than affirming your fitness goals, all your friends might, in a spirit of loving support, tell you not to worry about those 15 pounds you know you desperately want to lose. They mean well, but they’re agents of destruction for your workouts.

Someone might just be too close to really be objective or unabashedly honest. Worse still, an inappropriate accountability partner might have conflicts with your success, secretly hoping that you maintain the status quo rather than achieving your full potential.

If you really want to achieve your goals, it’s vital that you have an accountability structure.

One potential creative client of mine reconsidered at the last minute, saying that her husband volunteered to be her free accountability partner on her writing project. They may have an awesome relationship but there’s no way he can be both supportive AND objective. Of course, and not surprisingly, over the last three years, not one word of that book has been written.

I’m definitely not suggesting that appropriate accountability can only be had with paid coaches or trainers like myself.

What I am saying is that if you really want to achieve your goals, it’s vital that you not only have an accountability structure but also that it’s supportive, meaningful, and objective.

Credit card companies have this down to a science (except the supportive part). If you miss a payment, they’ve no problem quite literally calling you out on it. They are completely objective about the fact that you missed a deadline. The accountability becomes meaningful because they’re happy to remind you that there are consequences to your lapses: late fees and credit reporting.

A trained coach in your industry might be best, but how else might you find a solid accountability partner?

Perhaps you can find a gym buddy equally committed to his or her fitness goals who won’t tolerate even your best excuses.

On a creative level, you might find kindred spirits in a writers group, a theater company, or a shared studio space where a healthy, supportive spirit exists — perhaps even one with a dose of competition.

What’s most vital is that you realize that no matter how talented, how ambitious, how committed or tenacious you are, that you cannot do it alone.

No one can.

And that's the final bonus of accountability. Having someone in your corner who is cheerleader, champion, and a bit of a taskmaster not only makes you more effective — it’s also a lot less lonely.

Making sure that accountability is part of your support system will not only make all your 2016 goals infinitely more achievable; it will also make the journey vastly more satisfying.

http://www.mindbodygreen.com/0-23164/the-1-secret-to-realizing-your-biggest-dreams.html