Live Your Own Dreams

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." ~ Steve Jobs

Your dreams are yours. Your life is yours. Only you can live it. And it is up to you to make the choices that will create the life you desire.

Just for today, make wise choices about your present and your future will become a lot brighter.

Making Conscious Choices

“Our choices affect our mood and the way we feel about ourselves. They influence the quality of our relationships with ourselves, others, and the world. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction; this is the law of cause and effect. No action goes unnoticed. We may fool ourselves into believing that our actions do not matter, particularly if we think no one will know or that no one is watching. But all of our choices impact our futures.” ~ Debbie Ford, The Right Questions

There is never an effect without a cause and there is never a cause without an effect. Every decision you make, there is a consequence. Even if you do not make a decision, that is a decision and will result in an effect.

Just for today, think about the choices you are making. This means making conscious choices, not choices made by default. Every choice you make leads to the results in your life.

To BE in 2011!

This is an exercise my coach does with me each year and I also do with my coaching clients. As you move forward to 2011, think of three BE words you wish to embody for the new year. Do you wish to be peaceful, compassionate, empathetic, courageous, prosperous, the list goes on. From the three BE words you choose for the year, all of the choices you make and the actions you take will evolve from your BE words. Your choices and actions will be congruent to who you are choosing to BE.

So, think about the characteristics you want to embody, and start being. Doing this will move your life in the direction of your highest ideals.

Stop Judging and Start Choosing

No matter what happens in your life, in your external circumstances, you always have the power to choose how you respond in those circumstances. Many times, we feel we are a victim of our circumstances because we had no say or control in creating them. And yes, that may be the case, but you do have a say in how you think and behave in those circumstances. You can see those situations as increasing life or decreasing life; and whatever you think, you are right!

Your external circumstances have no inherent meaning, they just are. Those events that happen in your life have no meaning until you assign it one. It is when you judge the event then assign it a label of positive or negative that you will have corresponding feelings about it. From those feelings, you will then take action that will result in the outcome you see in your life. 

Remember, life does not happen to you; it happens for you, so see each and every event as a gift for your growth and well being.

Vitamin D is for Decisive

“But the cure for most obstacles is, Be decisive.” ~ George Weinberg

Sometimes it is difficult to make a decision. But not making a decision is also a decision. When you do not make a deliberate decision, then life throws you whatever it wants. Once again, you end up in victim mode.

Just for today, be decisive!

Coach Carolyn

The Fear of Decision

"People who make decisions go to the top. Those who fail to make decisions go nowhere." ~ Bob Proctor

Most people fail to make decisions out of fear. Fear of failure, fear of success, fear of the unknown. When we make the decision, it is coming out of a place of inspiration, in Spirit. In the spirit realm, there is no failure, no limitations, no fear. So, where is the fear really coming from? Perhaps we will succeed beyond our wildest dreams. And yes, we may just get the fill-in-the-blank that we have been desiring.

Remember what Marianne Williamson said? That our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate, but that we are powerful beyond measure. Yes, this is a bit scary to wrap our brains around, especially if we have had years and years of someone telling us that we weren’t good enough, smart enough, pretty enough, this, that, and the other thing enough.

I have a question for you. Let’s suppose it was, or is, your mother who told you, or continues to tell you, these limiting beliefs about yourself. Now, remember back. Your mother told you lots of things; especially what not to do and who not to hang around with. Are you remembering? Good. Some of what she told you, you bought into and some you didn’t. Some you believed and some you didn’t. Some you chose to make your story and some you chose to ignore. What was the difference?

Just for today, ponder the difference. Make the decision. Take a leap of faith and do it afraid.

Coach Carolyn

The Power of Decision

"Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen." ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide." ~ Napoleon Bonaparte

From Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionary: a decision is a determination arrived at after consideration.

We have been given the incredible power to choose, to make a decision. The main reason we are living lives that are not satisfactory, is because we have not decided what kind of lives we desire.

Don't focus on "how" is this going to happen. Just do your part: make the decision. Once you make the decision as to what you want to be, do and have, the "how" will show up. Like Emerson said, once you make the decision, the universe will conspire to make it happen.

"A decision is what a man makes when he can't find anybody to serve on a committee." ~ Fletcher Knebel

Learn to Pick Your Battles

Several years ago an amazing little book exploded on the scene and caused people to rethink what they were thinking about. It was Don't Sweat the Small Stuff by Dr. Richard Carlson. It is a book of meditations on keeping the proper perspective. Dr. Carlson reminded us that it's all small stuff in the bigger picture and not to let those little things become big things.

One of my daily axioms is another reminder from Dr. Carlson: Learn to pick your battles. There is the opportunity several times a day for each of us to have some sort of altercation. Someone will offend us; something will make us angry; someone else will say something stupid. Yes, this is all true. But what else is true is that we have the power to choose. We have choice.

We take for granted this amazing ability that we have been given. The ability to make the choice to not get caught up in someone else's drama. We can choose not to attend every argument we have been invited to. We can choose to step away when someone else is having a pity party. We can choose to say that is unacceptable to me. We can choose.

The problem isn't that we don't choose. The problem is we do choose, but we choose to join the party, the drama, someone else's battle. When someone directs an offensive comment your way, it's like them handing you a bottle of poison. Now when you enter into the battle, you have just made the choice to ingest their bottle of poison. So you have chosen to slowly kill yourself.

This is a harsh image, but sadly a very real one. In my practice, I have seen far too many women slowly dying because they have chosen to take the poison of some other hurting human being. Hurting people hurt people and are hurt by them. I try to instill and teach this principle of learning to pick your battles; and there are many battles to choose from.

I am an advocate for peace and social justice. In my "other" life, I do work around HIV/AIDS awareness, hunger and poverty in America, and non-violent living. These are the battles I consciously choose to fight. And I don't think in terms of winning or losing. We all lose when people are dying -- physically, emotionally, or spiritually. But I choose to exert my energies on the battles of injustice and social responsibility. I leave alone the petty differences because in the end, they will amount to nothing. I choose the battles of social injustice. But I also choose to let go of the battles of ego-building and proving I am right.

We all have the amazing gift of choice. But remember, not making a choice, is still a choice. So, what will you choose?

Live passionately by choice,

Coach Carolyn

Choosing Excellence

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

I love this quote because this can be applied to all of the areas of our lives. Everything that we repeatedly do, we become masters at. This includes the constructive as well as the destructive behaviors and habits. When we repeatedly do things of excellence, then we become excellent people. Yet, when we repeatedly talk negatively about ourselves and others, this also becomes our reality.

It is said that it takes 21 days to break a habit. I personally don’t believe in breaking habits. I believe in replacing a destructive behavior with a positive, more constructive one. For example, if I am prone to speaking negatively about myself when I have made a mistake, instead of trying to refrain from saying anything negative, I can try a visualization exercise where I imagine the outcome I would have liked. I don’t beat myself up, I just imagine. And if I choose to beat myself up, I will use a feather.

As Aristotle says, excellence is not an act, but a habit. Perhaps we have been beating ourselves up for the last twenty years. It will take time to reverse the habit and replace it with a new behavior. The trick is not to give up when we fall short of the mark. We tend to give up way too easily. This is why diets fail to work. We try one diet, then if it doesn’t work within the first three weeks, we think well, it just doesn’t work. So we move on to another, then another, then another.

Imagine your inner child. She is learning to walk. She will stand up, take a few steps, and then fall. She will do this over and over and over again. Yet, you don’t condemn her, stop her progress or yell at her because she isn’t doing it perfectly. You allow the process. You allow the chance to make the mistakes because only in this will she learn. And you allow the learning and growing. It is a process. It is not about perfection. Life is not about perfection. Life is about the journey, not the destination. During the journey, there will be bumps, bruises, stumbles and falls.

Take the time to stop. Stopping is a spiritual action. When we take the time to stop, we can make the proper decisions. We have this incredible power, it is the power to choose. We can choose to take the next right action. We can choose excellence, if we will repeatedly do excellent things. Or, we can choose negativity by focusing on the negative.

The power is ours. The choice is ours. Choose wisely.

Live powerfully on purpose,

Coach Carolyn

The Third Option

"If you limit your choices only to what seems possible or reasonable, you disconnect yourself from what you truly want, and all that is left is a compromise." ~ Robert Fritz

A life lived on purpose is a life free of compromise. One thing we all have is the gift of choice. It is a gift because think of a time when you were not allowed to exercise your free choice. Or, thing of people in oppressive situations who are not able to choice a different or better option.

We tend to take this gift for granted. We tend to allow our circumstances to dictate our decisions. We allow whatever happens to us to determine our day to day choices. But this isn't choice at all; it is compromise. We are settling for the least painful, least demanding option. We also tend not to exercise our creativity when it comes to making choices. We go with the safest choice, or the choice that is right before us, instead of thinking about the third option.

I heard a lovely saying: When there are two options to choose from, always choose the third option. I absolutely love that! That means that we definitely have the right and gift to look beyond what is there before us. I have always lived my life as an extremist. I would either choose A or Z, black or white, cold or hot, day or night; there was never a middle ground for me. I only saw the two extremes.

Until tragedy struck, then I was forced to see what was in the middle of the road, not just on the extreme edges. I still tend toward extreme thinking, but now I have the awareness that this is a leaning of mine, so I can back up and re-think the situation, knowing I have a third option.

Live passionately, choose the third option!

Coach Carolyn