Re-set boundaries

At different times in your life, people will cross your personal boundaries.  You will sense this as you grow uncomfortable and trigger an emotional reaction from inside you.  Marshall Rosenberg's insightful book, Non-Violent Communication offers four ideas to assist you to avoid becoming overly emotional and defensive.  Do you know where your feelings originate and why?

1) Separate Observation from Evaluation.  Underneath all that is happening, to what are you actually responding?  You may be upset about something completely different or unrelated to the person who has somehow pushed you 'over the edge.' Refrain from scapegoating and letting off steam in inappropriate ways, such as lashing out.

2) Identify how you feel.  Isolate the feelings that stem only from you and grasp the choices of words that you may use to victimize yourself.  Learn not to give other people power over your emotions, to make you feel things.  Be accountable and work through all your discomfort.

3) Pinpoint your needs.  What do you aim or hope to get out of this set of conditions?  What is realistic versus desirable?  Start with intuition and then list what you seek from this person or relationship. What will you do so not to go too far in expecting too much. Where would this be?

4) Formulate a request.  How you approach a person influences the reaction you'll get.  If you demand, people don't often react well.  If you say nothing, people will assume you don't desire anything.  Figure out what you seek and formulate it in a way to show how it would benefit the other person to give you what you seek.  Kosher strategies wouldn't involve threats or blackmail.

You know how to do it

People will complain about what they can't do, and aren't doing, and yet, we already have access to solutions.  Why is it people don't desire to share information they have to help themselves and others? Effort leads to outcomes. Perhaps you're afraid? What prevents you from reviewing and re-evaluating your existence and outcomes?

Consider different understandings of existence.  What you see and feel are linked to the kind of solutions you perceive through your senses. Yet, only dwelling on this level of understanding prevents you from seeing the whole picture and your potential. You have access to wider views. 

Another view of existence consists of intangible things such as your mind and ego, invisible information and different forms of energy.  You know water takes on different forms.  You know life forms vary widely.  Your energy takes on different emotions that you feel even though you don't necessarily see them.   You can tap into them and learn how inter-relationships can evolve to be mutually-beneficial. 

Awareness and what you think you know, is a separate sense of existence again.  Looking around, you can grasp occurrences that define their own sense of time and space unrelated to you.  You can change yourself with respect to your surroundings or with respect to your own impulses.

Speculate how your emotions are recycled energy that you choose to package based on your relationships with people and situations. This tells you that you have the tools you need to react differently next time, and you can recall what worked or didn't work for you before.  Accept the value to be found in each learning process.

Digest the possibilities

What does the desire to goal-set mean about you? This concept has different meanings for each of us. Some people feel the need to identify a target to self-motivate or make anything happen. Other people recognize value in committing to a series of goals that are supposedly leading to longer-term conditions.

Whatever your mindset, goal-setting can play a beneficial role in your life, if you choose to evaluate what courses of action would suit you, and what you will have to contribute to the process to get something desirable back. Consider these aspects of the process:

1)How would you like your life to change? Goals can be like the signposts you outline to guide you through your own evolution. You may not realize your attitude, mindset and thought process all influence how you think you would like your life to change and also what you really want. Reflecting on why you desire to aim to create certain experiences will help you understand this. This phase is the time to self-examine, determine wht may be missing and what you could do to fill a void in your life. Only after you discern something is missing might you act to change that.

2)What will be possible implications for whom?Its easy enough to voice a desire to create change in your life, but you may not be used to recognizing how change will affect other areas of your life. Your commitment to one thing may require sacrifices and compromises elsewhere.  Are you ready to deal with the reactions of people in your life to yoru desired changes? What if they disagree with your priorities? Communication with people oustide of yourself may be a beneficial part of the goal-setting process. Who will your new goals affect and how? Would you be willing to spend less time with loved ones? Are you ready to sacrifice part of your life or disrupt family routines to care for sick friends or relatives? If so, for how long?

3) Are you aware of possible physical tolls? When you claim a desire to accomplish something, you may not factor in the physical exertion it will require to reach your goal, and also what you will have to manage afterwards. These are not matters meant to scare or deter you, but rather, to remind you that goal-setting is more than an emotional planning exercise. If physical training will be required, do you plan to keep this up as part of a long-term change in lifestyle? Would gaining weight as the result of having children be something you would later take steps to lose?

4)Where will new responsibilities lie? You may come to associate a level of responsibility with the process of goal-setting as well as following through. To devote yourself to a cause or dream is not something you desire to abandon during growing phases. Acquiring a pet, seeking a new job, developing new relations, having children, working on your self-image, health, fitness or entrepreneurial skills, are but some of the goals that involve an ongoing learning process. Your existence may be set to connect with other people, creatures and circumstances. To step back and recognize the profound terms will contribute to new fulfillment.

"We have more possibilities available in each moment than we realize." -Thich Nhat Hanh

Identity crisis

How often have you met people who equate self-worth with their sense of success in career and school? These people define themselves only in those spheres, and they have never learned to identify with anything else. Do you know anyone like this? Have you ever felt like this? If so, what have you done? What would you like to do?

Conditioning yourself in some ways and then, feeling unprepared for other life changes, has been known to leave some people disturbed and disoriented about what their lives are supposed to mean. Yet, self-confidence doesn't only have to come from what you do and what other people assume you should do. Begin to realize you aren't missing what you're no longer doing, but you may be missing out on great things about where your life is at right now.

If you haven't experienced such an identity crisis before, consider what you would feel like if you devoted yourself to work and school and it became all-consuming. If your life basically revolved around how you spent your time and you suddenly stopped doing these things, or were prevented from continuing because of health reasons, job loss or other changes beyond your control, then your intimate bond with yourself and life might seem abruptly cut. You may wonder where you're supposed to belong and whether things could be as they were before. How would fear or regret help you?

An identity crisis may set in because your life is evolving in new directions and you resist change. Ask yourself what these experiences are teaching you? Getting worked up about where you're not is failing to see the significance of where you are and why you feel as you do.

For now, learn to be where you are and see blessings in your conditions. You can find things to appreciate about new places, jobs, perspectives, relationships, parenthood or other changes. Reflection will help you better understand why you desire to return to the phases of you're life you've already passed even if you aren't sure exactly where this is. You'll get your bearings. Believe that you can and you will.

It may be hard to grasp initially, but you don't always succeed at certain things because you decide not to inside. You may consciously decide to pursue one direction and find your life circumstances evolve in completely different ways. Take this as a sign. You may not know yourself as well as you think you did.You're always learning.

Sarina Russo & 5 Reflections to prepare for peak performance

Sarina Russo is the daughter of an Italian immigrant farmer in Australia who built a business empire based on her desire to empower young people to gain confidence and enter the workforce.  She didn't initially know exactly what she wanted to do.  She figured it out by realizing what she didn't.  She wasn't always the assertive go-getter that led her to dine with the U.S. president and other influential leaders.  In fact, there was a time when it looked like she was destined to stay home and work for her family until the best suitor was chosen for her.

To read her autobiography, "Meet Me At the Top" inspires us to reach inside ourselves to tap into our own hidden talents.  Are you aware of your potential? She reveals her perception of success in business: how to launch and market yourself, how to recruit for a business, how to enhance  your performance, how to negotiate effectively with clients, how to build a brand how to develop qualities in yourself that will inspire other people to have faith in your potential. Consider these ideas derived from Sarina's life which could help us all see our lives differently:  

1) The pain associated with struggle is preferable to the pain of regret.  You're better off taking steps to put an idea into action than wonder if it would ever have worked.  After disillusions by school and dissatisfied with her life as it was, Sarina left home with a dream to create a new life.   She had little money and admittedly struggled to 'get on her feet,' but she never has to look back on her life and wonder what would happen if she didn't try.

2) Be grateful to former bosses who fire you.  Without being thrown out on your figurative rear, how else would you learn to stand up on your own two feet? Think of animals that are born learning to stand up already and how humans are coddled in some places for so long, they would never choose to leave! To fall into a state of complaency wouldn't enable you to grow.  Sarina had a variety of secretarial and stenographer jobs and her personality wasn't always compatible with employers and co-workers. More than once she tried to get an old job back and was refused because former employers thought she needed to move forward not backward.

3) Appreciate every experience for the stepping stone it is.   You will have your ups and downs but every experience offers wisdom if you choose to see it.  You can learn more about your strengths and weaknesses, what kinds of risks you're willing to take and what you're willing to lose in light of the bigger picture. 

4) The best revenge is to define & experience your own success.  People will always judge and disagree with your views and aspirations.  You're better off not wasting your energy in fights with naysayers. Channel it instead to create a life that makes you feel good about yourself.  You have no reason not to take advantage of the time you're given. Create your own opportunities.

5) Don't hold back.  In pursuit of your dreams, you'll realize it would benefit you to appraoch people who know more than you do.  You'll realize you'll have to learn to stick up for who you are and the value in what you aim to do.  Develop self-confidence and express yourself in ways that convince other people that you're a force to reckon with. First, you must convince yourself.