Attitude for Greatness

What is attitude? It is what you think, believe, feel, expect, act, in relation to yourself, life, people, and your goals. Attitude can be positive or it can be negative; it can be limiting or it can be expanding; if you have a positive attitude, you feel alive, well, loved, happy, liked, confident,...you feel good; if you have a negative attitude, you feel angry, resentful, fearful, depressed, anxious, hopeless,... you feel bad. Your feelings are your thermometer to your attitude and, as we will see below, your life is the mirror to your attitude. 

Now, how is your attitude, how is your dominant attitude? Is it positive, and expanding, or is it negative and limiting? What do you think you can achieve? Who do you think you are? What do you think about yourself? What do you think about other people? Do you think they are out there to get you or to help you? Do you expect to be liked by people or do you expect to be 'judged'? Do you expect to be lucky? Do you expect to achieve your goals? Do you expect that life is going to be difficult, that you will have to struggle to make money, or do you expect life is wonderful and enjoyable? 

Your expectations determine what will happen in your life, as very simply, what you expect, you get. So, if you are not sure of what your expectations really are, take a look at your life: whatever you have in your life right now is a reflection of who you are inside and the vibrations you send out. If you are struggling with money, with your health, with a relationship, with your job, with people, it means that somewhere your attitude is not healthy. So, if you want to change your life, you need to change yourself, you need to change your attitude. 

In fact, a healthy attitude is when you feel good about yourself, when you know that you will achieve your goals, when you know people will like and love you, when you know that things will work out, when you know you are precious and the Universe is conspiring to your happiness. A healthy attitude is when you love people, when you love yourself, when you thank God for who you are and for all the wonderful gifts you have, for all the people you have in your life, for all that has happened to you, because that has made you the person you are today. 

So, your attitude towards yourself has a strong impact on your self-love, on the way you treat yourself, and so, on your health- mental, emotional, and physical. Your attitude towards people will have a strong impact on the response you will get from them, because if you love them, if you are grateful, if you appreciate them, if you are kind, they will love you back. So, three emotions are a key to great relationships: gratitude, kindness and love. In fact, as the most important needs of any human being are the need for connection, the need to feel appreciated and the need to feel loved, and everything that happens in your life happens through people, whether is in your personal or professional life, you need to have a very positive attitude here. And this means always, really always, look at the positive and best in people, you included. Look at the positive in people and circumstances, and they will become that, you will take out the best from them, and you will attract more of that. And look at the best in you, in how extraordinary and unique you truly are, look at your gifts, qualities and strengths, and you will develop a healthy esteem and love for yourself.

And your attitude towards life will determine your success or failure, whether you will achieve your goals and be the best you can be, or whether you are going to struggle. Now, your attitude towards your goals is also something more than that, because the expectation of achievement whether is the person you want to become or a goal you want to achieve, makes you become that person and achieve what you want before you actually have done it. It is the Law of Attraction. And the more you have expectations and you take actions to achieve your goals, the faster you are going to achieve them. So, let us suppose you want to be confident or you want to be successful, if you have the attitude and the expectations of being confident and successful, you are going to feel confident and successful already now. It is simply a shift in your consciousness.

Now, let us suppose you have developed a healthy attitude towards yourself, life, people, and your goals. What do you do when you encounter negative people or negative circumstances? What do you do when somebody gets angry at you? What do you do when you are driving and someone cuts in your way? Well, we need to develop an immune attitude, learn to be immune to negativity. You need to learn not to let anything disturb your peace of mind. You can simply ignore it and smile it away. And think that things are temporary, that if you have a great attitude, you will create a life where you have all that you desire and deserve, a wonderful life, guaranteed.

So, what is the attitude you are going to choose?

How Do You Set and Achieve Life Goals?

Gurus tell us to get on in life you must set goals. Mark Twain said, 'I could show the whole world how to get what they want in life, trouble is very few people know what they want.' 

So how do you set a goal? How do you plan to reach that goal? I agree with Mark Twain but I believe that people can set goals when shown how to discover what they really want. 

You may say that it is OK for me to say this when I have my new seven series BMW outside my four-bed roomed detached villa, but where do you start? Where did the really successful people start from?

I get a bit tired of the 'I started in a caravan with walls and roof like a colander and shoes to match, now I drive an S class Mercedes, live in a six-bed roomed house right on the beach and work 15 minutes a day' type stories. Don't these individuals ever stop to think that they may turn off more people with these stories? In my opinion they do not motivate us they simply massage the over inflated ego of the story teller.

Going to a seminar can be an invigorating experience. People leave the auditorium determined to get to grips with life. Then by Monday morning after a weekend of dealing with shopping, the kids, spending time with the in-laws, suddenly the words seem a little remote and have lost most of their meaning. 

A survey tells us that 98% of the population never set their goals in writing, and the 2% who do earn more than the collective efforts of the other 98%. The reason that we do not set goals could be simply down to habit? We fly by the seat of our pants, doing the best we can day by day just getting by, usually in a job we hate.

These ingrained habits can be defeated. After all 2% actually do write out their goals AND reach them. Some 'Gurus' say just write your goals on a piece of paper; put it in your pocket or a drawer and sometime in the future BINGO! You will magically achieve your goals. 

How easy! I, and no doubt you fancy the multi-millionaire lifestyle working 15 minutes a day from our six-bed roomed house by the beach, but that is just a dream. 

So what makes it so difficult for us? 

Habits destroy our dreams, and the only thing that can really break a habit is supreme motivation. So how do you not only become motivated but stay motivated.

In the process of setting, chasing, and achieving a goal, you change, grow, and improve your quality of life. Reach a challenging goal and you might just change your life forever. In the process, you will gain insight into your own mind. You'll also discover ways to motivate and inspire yourself. Learning to find your own inner motivation may be the most important skill you can acquire. 

So, what do you need to do this? Lot's of things, actually, but it's easier than you might think.

Let me give you a clue at the expense of alienating hundreds of 'motivational speakers' do not spend your hard earned cash by attending motivational seminars in the hope of changing your life. My opinion - seminars deliver outside not inner motivation. I do not know about you but although I promised myself to follow a course of action after the seminar, a few days later, somehow life gets in the way and in a short time I could not even understand my own notes.

So what made the difference to me? I was fortunate enough to meet a person who showed me HOW to set a real goal that generated enough inner motivation to make the achievement of the goal guaranteed. 

Once you set a real goal, personal to you, not one that you think others would like you to achieve or one that is set by your boss, (they are not goals), you will develop the inner motivation to keep you going until you achieve success, whatever success means to you. 

A simple method to do all this and unlike external motivation it will sustain you until you reach your goal, no matter how many obstacles you find placed in your way you will achieve what you want to achieve.

How? Inner motivation, the one thing that separates the very successful from the rest, it will place you head and shoulders above any of your competitors. I will tell you something else, you do not need to develop a hail fellow well met back slapping, happy-clappy type of personality to experience inner motivation.

The title of this post is - How do you set and achieve life goals? Simply know what you want, know when you want it by. Develop the inner motivation to get you there by using the simple technique my mentor taught me and I will teach you if you want. 

You do not need the whole route to your goal planned meticulously out before you, as Martin Luther King said, 'All you need do - take the first step. You do not need to see the whole staircase, just take the first step in faith.'

Success is not something you become. It is something you continue being.

Finding Your True Purpose

From the time I was eight years old, and wrote my first poem, I knew I wanted to be a writer. It felt right, heart and soul. With a burning desire and one-pointed focus, I followed all the right courses through high school and college in a straight path to fulfill my life's purpose.

Then, boom!

I started meditating, and my life opened up to new possibilities. I took advanced courses, became a meditation teacher and set out to help the world. Though my spiritual side continued to actively grow, I married, had babies, but then turned my attention back to writing. I worked for years, writing ten books that my critique group loved, but publishers didn't. As much as I wanted it to, my career as a writer wasn't working.

Then, again, boom!

It was as if that lifetime ended. The desire to write left. Completely. I hadn't a clue about what to do. I'd thought I knew my purpose in life, but suddenly I was searching, like millions of others in the world.

How is your search coming? What is your purpose? You do have a design for your life. It's not working/sleeping/eating/paying bills/working. It's joy and love and fulfillment. It's doing what you - and you alone - were born to do. Do you know what you are here for?

In the Vedas, ancient Indian texts, this is the principle known as "dharma" -- your own true work that nourishes you and society on every level.

Few people know there is such a thing as dharma, settling for whatever is available. Of those who do have an inkling about it, only a handful have the least clue of how to discover what it is.

Do you know your purpose in life? Or care? Most of us do. Many of us have a gut feeling that there must be more to life than meets the casual glance, and that we each have an important role to fulfill. Pay attention to those feelings. That's your intuition at work. It's easy to ignore and easier still to slide past those inward thoughts and get caught up in your normal routine.

We have each created our own pattern. As in clockworks where interlocking gears form set patterns that do not deviate (at least in a well-run clock), most people choose an established path, get on the wheel, and start running in circles for the rest of their lives. These paths could be anything from doctor to lumberjack to executive or anything else.

Some people choose the nearest, easiest path - whatever job is available to earn money to pay the bills. Others go to great lengths to find what they do best, soul searching, taking aptitude tests, going to career counselors, etc. And some people choose well. The ones who are in touch with themselves.

I had prided myself on knowing who I was, After all, I'd been teaching meditation for, by that time, 30+ years and already had a strong inner sense of Self. Still, connecting it to daily activity and finding out what I wanted to do was not easy. And as connected, as in tune as any of us are, we can always connect and refine more. My work had only just begun. I asked myself some hard questions, got some unexpected answers from unexpected sources, and my life has soared. Yours can, too.

What did I do?

I looked at a few self-help books, such as What Color is Your Parachute and Do What You Love, the Money Will Follow. These are classics. There are many other, newer books on the market that can help, too. Among other things, I was advised to make lists of things I like to do, and of talents, skills and interests, along with work experience I'd accumulated. I covered several sheets of paper, then studied the results. 

Though I could no longer write them, I still loved books. I'd also had retail experience. Putting that together, I thought I could own a used book store. I moved in that direction, getting more experience by working in a book store, but it was slow.

Then - guess what? Boom! Deja vu!

What I'd thought was a minor interest in my life -- alternative healing systems --paired up with my eternal interest in the development of consciousness, and I was offered the opportunity to co-create, with the Divine, an amazing line of Divine Therapies that work on the most subtle level possible in relative existence. One of them is called "Purpose." It's designed to help you connect all the dots inside you, to bring you more in tune with nature's creative design, and help you not only discover what your true life's purpose is, but to achieve it.

I did not actively look in this area. This idea came unexpectedly, but I was alert and intuitive enough to recognize it when it came. Once you start searching for your purpose, be alert to all tidbits of ideas that come. They just might nudge you in a new, perfect direction.

I found my dharma, and discovered that living life in dharma is far from a rooted, unchanging existence. It moves as you grow, ever widening, ever deepening. It's like catching the right boat moving down the river. Hang on, and help steer! We all do have a purpose. I learned to uncover mine, take steps to achieve it, and I learned how to help steer others to their right path.

Don't give up. Your purpose is waiting for you. The way may be winding, smooth, or rough, but if you're on the right boat on the right river, with the rudder in hand, your boat will take you where you want to go.