Several of my clients have found new career opportunities in the past year after long periods of struggle. Others have reconnected with their spouses or life partners and others have rekindled long lost dreams. I thought I would share three lessons they learned along the way.
- We can create our own circumstances:
We hear all the time how bleak the economy is and how scarce jobs are. If we’re not careful, we can get hypnotized by our circumstances: “I don’t have an M.B.A (or college degree) “I am too old,” “It’s tough getting a job when you don’t have one” or “I can’t find another job that will pay me what I’m making now–I should stay where I am.”
If we don’t have a clear and magnetic vision for what we want, it’s easy to be hypnotized by our outer circumstances and to believe what we see to be “rock solid reality.” The late Stephen Covey reminds us to “Begin With the End,” the second “habit of highly effective people.” Want your circumstances to change? Begin by changing where you focus your attention–shift it from your current circumstances to a vision of the best reality you can imagine for now.
- As within, so without:
Our outer circumstances reflect our inner world. If we want something better, we must first imagine what that would be like and nurture that vision. Covey taught that all things are created twice. First there is the mental creation and then there is the physical creation. Does that sound a little “woo woo” to you?
If so, let’s keep this simple. If a sales professional has five sales calls in a row that end up with a “No” and the sales rep expects the same thing to happen on his or her next sales call, do you think that will impact how they relate to and communicate with their prospect? If so, does our thinking, our beliefs, our expectations and our mental movies impact our ability to create the circumstances we want in life?
- The bleaker the circumstance, the more need to let the “light” in:
In life, we can either focus on the darkness or the light. The tougher your challenges, the more light you need to shine on them. We can’t do that perfectly and we can’t do it all the time. There will be moments, sometimes days that we get lost in the darkness of certain beliefs and emotions. We’ve all been there and know what that’s like. That’s when our vision seems distant and far away and just unbelievable.
How do we let the light in? By becoming aware of the light within. We have to choose to do that and then we have to practice “letting the light in.” There were times in my life when I didn’t want to do that. If you are there now, that’s okay. Accept yourself without judgement for being where you are.
Be honest with how you are feeling and what you are thinking. Open up and share it with someone who can listen, empathize–without trying to “fix” you. That let’s the light in. It’s a beginning. From there, you will begin to see other ways to let more light in. What light? Love. Faith. Vision.
Categorized in: Articles, Career Success, Life, Mastering Emotions
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