Reclaim your personal power

Your sense of personal power hinges on your self-worth and whether you believe your life is at the mercy of others. Your personal power is also affected by fear-based beliefs, how you view yourself, and whether you permit emotion and drama to control you.

To reclaim your personal power, its helpful to review and reframe life experiences. If you are truly honest, you will admit occasions where your reactions stem from pride, personal importance or, your refusal to take responsibility for your actions. Denial drains power.

Your self-awareness grows as you evolve to stop explaining, rationalizing, defending or justifying situations and choices. Such thought processes drain your energy. As you move to the mental place where you no longer compare and judge, you stop viewing opposites. It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, prove you're right or wrong, or feel superior or inferior.  New priorities transcend all that.  You move to become more objective. 

And so, why detach? This isn't a way to become aloof or disconnected. Its a process of choosing to no longer permit ego to control your thoughts and perspective. As you learn to step outside your typical thought processes, you strengthen a sense of connection with everything. You gain deeper insight into yourself, dreams and you open your heart.

To be free of attachment means you sense you can deflect words and actions of other people. You begin to sense a mindset that drives them, and recognize it differs from your own. You move beyond conditions, limits, boundaries and self-doubt. You choose with what or whom to connect. You move beyond conditioned interpretations of the mind. Expectations need not drain your personal power. Take it back, whenever you're ready.

Interpret tough experience as an exercise in compassion

You may already be thinking, "that's all well and good, but to find the positive isn't always a piece of cake."  Do you really listen to yourself? When will you focus on who you are?

Its common to encounter people who seem negative, undiplomatic, critical or even downright nasty.  Your impulse may be anger and a desire to retaliate, to show them some of their own medicine.  Other options exist. What about showing some compassion?

How easy it seems to forget reasons explain why people are as they are.  Once a thief, always a thief?  Not necessarily.  Recall the story of Jean Valjean in Les Miserables by Victor Hugo? As a child, he stole bread to eat and was sent to prison. When he got out, people wouldn't hire him as he had a record.  So, he stole again.  It was all he knew to survive.  When a clergyman forgave him and generously gave him the silver he had stolen, this man encouraged Valjean to use it to become honest.  He did and it changed his life.

No doubt you think of people you know who have been very judgmental of your life or behavior.  They may disagree with your views on what is moral, legal, appropriate, justfiable or fair.  Maybe you are also very critical of yourself. How often do you chastise your own choices or results? Do you ever hear yourself echo sarcastically, "I told you so?"

You might ask yourself the purpose of passing encounters with difficult people.  How do they serve you?  What if they invite you to gain new insight into your own reasons for sensitivity or defensiveness?  What if they are a valuable tool to expand your self-awareness and open yourself to new ways of expressing and experiencing love?

Next time your reflex is to show someone 'the cold shoulder' or, avoid them as their behavior repulses or annoys you, reframe opportunity.  Rethink what makes you who you are.  You react as you do for hidden reasons.  How well do you truly know yourself? 

It may be easy enough to avoid people who 'press your buttons.'  You may have alternative places you could go rather than face repeated forms of discomfort. Yet, learning to interpret a tough experience as an exercise in positive thinking and compassion teaches you more than you realize.  Why not discern situations as teachers?

Some people have never been shown love or compassion or, don't have any memory of what this means.  Imagine the feeling of how your life would change if you knew different.  To express love and compassion to other people, to remind them of the power in positive thinking, you must start by reminding yourself its the core of who you are.

10 Tips to clarify your future

People often seek clarity about their future.  You don't need a fortune teller.  Who you are is not who you seem to be.  Clarity requires heightening your awareness and opening your senses to what you've always known but consciously deny.  Why is that?

You sense more about your future than you have been willing to admit.  To seek greater certainty is like a journey to unveil hidden confidence.  As you move beyond your patterns and routines, you will uncover bursts of energy. Consider these ten tips;

1) Lose your expectations.

2) Accept destiny is unalterable.

3) Learn the value of detachment.

4) Develop versatility and improvise.

5) Be content as an astute observer.

6) Use time wisely.

7) Dissolve your self-importance.

8) Take responsibility for your thoughts, words and action.

9) Channel energy with intent.

10) Grasping clarity will escape you so long as your beliefs are mistaken for reality.

Is perfection really unattainable?

From a very young age, we each begin accepting messages that reinforce we're anything but perfect.  Society bombards us with reasons to question our self-image, our comfort zone, and our overall self-view.  What are your early memories of not being good enough? 

You may reflect on school, athletics, creative endeavors, physical growth where you compared yourself to other people.  Maybe they seemed to receive more praise or encouragement.  Each person who seemed better than you reinforced your deficiencies.

You may have developed ways to measure yourself against levels and standards set by other people.  Why do you exert effort in an attempt to live as other people believe you should? How can you expect to live up to changing ideals over which you exert no control?

As you evolve inside yourself, you begin to grasp how standards of perfection set by other human beings could be ever-shifting, increasing, decreasing and hard to follow.  Its unrealistic to believe you can shapeshift at the same pace and evolve into what someone else wants.  What you can do is reframe your sense of happiness to measure perfection.

Obscure notions of perfection stem from other people. These ideas are hard to pin down.  From a spiritual point of view, being connected to forces beyond you remind you that you are a sentient being of perfection.  You are perfect as you are.  This means you need not exert effort to please others or take steps to evolve into something you're not. 

What if the love inside you is a sign of your innate perfection?  What if you need not struggle?  What if happiness is not a carrot at the end of a stick you must pursue?  If your understanding of perfection is based on temporary, changing, and external conditions, it may seem unattainable.  Yet, if you sense that perfection is a synonym for infinite love energy inside and around you, then you realize its static and accessible always. 

Curiously, you may evolve to think the concept of self-improvement is problematic.  If you sense this implies things are wrong with you that require fixing, then you begin to see how the fallacy is perpetuated in culture and your mind. You live the life you believe.  You dream about what you don't have or experience or, you dream about all the wonderful things you already are.  Some people fluctuate in-between.  Where do you stand now?

Follow the clues to rediscover yourself

Each of us go through a process to figure out who we really are.  Some people do not figure it out during this lifetime.  That doesn't have to include you.  Decide you will go the distance to tap into your soul.  Your choice of mentors makes it easier than you think!

1) Notice how your mentors change.  Through the process of researching and writing a manuscript, I have read hundreds of stories of people who have influenced my thoughts and behaviors at different life phases. Some people left a lasting impression in person. Others captured my attention with action and what I sensed to be their appealing qualities. Aspects that stand out encourage me to realize I can tap into my hidden self.

2) Discern why you label mentors.  I unconsciously put each of my mentors into categories, from nationality, to gender, profession or contribution to society, and based on my upbringing, morals and values. I intially felt this simply helped me to organize my ideas, then concluded a significant, underlying message. My feelings about different labels became a gauge. Recognizing why I judge empowers me to transcend destructive labels I had adopted myself. We may project and attract what we don't want or what we're not.

3) Identify traits of your mentors. How you judge others reveals how you secretly view yourself and the world. If you commend or admire other people in ways that reinforce what you lack, wish you had or could do, you may be highlighting weaknesses, self-doubt and things that distract you from your truth. Your mindset, priorities and principles are highlighted by certain traits and views of success.

4) Discern value in undesirable mentors.  Even people you find annoying offer you valuable wisdom about yourself.  You can see these irritants as teachers and a means for overcoming facits of ego.  This clouds your authentic self-view and blocks you from recognizing what is truly important to your innermost soul. 

5) Look beyond the obvious. Underneath it all, you don't desire to mimic or shapeshift into your inspirational mentors. You are actually creating an inventory of the skills related to your own transformation. Your mentors enable you to pinpoint not only the emotions you feel about what they do, but also your inner beliefs that caused those emotions. These clues reveal the path to reclaim your authentic self.