Happy Friday Everyone

Happy Friday, Everyone!

Why wait for Friday? Exercise your Emotional Options! Be happy now. Read "Emotional Options: A Handbook for Happiness" today. 

For reviews or orders:

http://amzn.com/B008RBUC4S

To Your Happiness!

Happy Friday photo thanks to a post from https://www.facebook.com/#!/Love.org.

How Will We Find You?

If there are people who would love to know about you and all you have to offer, how will they find you?

That question rocked the room at the Breakout Coach Training in Palm Springs last year. It dredges up beliefs that keep us from connecting with the very person or people we dream of. It opens doors for me and my coaching students so I recommend it to you.

Today I asked, "If there are people who would benefit from your work, how will they know? How will they find you?" My answer prompted me to write this. There's some more at the end.

Why is it such a big deal? Why are we reluctant to let others know about the richness of our experience, our wisdom, what we have created and what we dream of creating? The desire to be discovered battles the desire to hide our uniqueness, the spark that might not fit the established norm. It keeps us hungry but quiet. We may minimize our gifts and resent not being recognized.

Talk about driving with one foot on the gas and the other on the brake.

What blocks you from telling us who you are? Do you ever hide or down-play your gifts, what you can do, and the value it has for us? What are you concerned will happen if you communicate honestly, clearly and powerfully about who you are and what you have to offer?

Here are some of the beliefs people discovered and shared with me most often:

• I'll seem like I'm bragging
• If I get too big, the fall will really hurt
• I don't want to be like those big blow-hard people who hype everything
• I don't want to define myself
• I'm not good enough
• I'm not into selling
• Marketing is not for me
• I'm not one of those people who talk about themselves easily
• I'm not good enough
• I don't deserve it (attention, success, being known)
• People will think that I think I'm all that
• People will attack me

In my many years helping people to break out from beliefs that block happiness and success, I've never found it useful to lecture or find fault. Questions open these doors better than battering rams.

Discovering a limiting belief is the first giant step. Unraveling it comes next. Do any of these beliefs  hold you back? Did you find some different ones of your own?

Here are some questions to ask about them:

• Do you believe that?
• What seems true about it?
• What are you concerned would happen if you did not believe that?

There is a lot of space and energy on the far side of a limiting belief. Someone I worked with recently declared, "I'm taking off my minimizer bra!" She has a new slogan, "Thou shalt not self-deprecate."

Cheering you on to magical connections and great adventures.

Mandy

Here's the answer I got when I asked,  How will they find me?" I put the best of how you can break out from limiting beliefs to happiness, success, and miracles into the books, audios, and videos in the Breakout Store
 http://mandyevans.com/the-breakout-store/

People tell me the content is profoundly useful. Every time someone buys something in the Breakout Store I get excited like a kid at Christmas because I know there is a good chance someone will really benefit from my life's work. Thanks!

Memorial Day Memory

Memorial: anything meant to help people remember

In the US we celebrate Memorial Day, set aside for the dead from all of our wars, with remembrance and barbecues. I will enjoy both and envision a world at peace.

On Memorial Day my grandmother cut all the flowers in the yard behind our house. Here is a painting done long after all moved away.

She filled the back of the car with them and the scent of peonies and lilacs. We’d drive out of town, down the country road, past the country club and into the Rockville Cemetery.

We left bouquets on the graves of generations of Bouics, Peters, Vinsons and Evans’s while she told me things about them I’ve long forgotten.

Headstones for my father, aunts, uncles, cousins and some of my mothers ashes mark their lives and their passing there now too.

I remember my grandmother’s love. How hard her life was. How she worked to make things better for everyone she knew. I honor her and thank her for raising me, though I did not then.

My father was a gentle sober man and a violent alcoholic. He lived most of his life alone, especially after he finally stayed sober for a few years before he died. I hardly knew him.

In the only real conversation we had as adults I learned he had been a Dachau Liberator in WWII. He told me about prisoners killing guards and his fellow GI’s laughing and cheering. He understood the prisoners, he said, but not his buddies. He worked on Eisenhower's campaign, telling me, "He'll keep us out of war; he knows what war is." I remember and honor him and his service, thankful for that story. It helped me to understand him and something about myself. 

I remember the smell of peonies and lilacs, a reminder to be happy and to thank the people whose contributions fill our lives with love—while they are still alive.

The flowers are different here in the desert but the love, gratitude and memories are the same.

May peace prevail.

Love,

Mandy

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A Little Goose for You

Sometimes you need a little goose to get you going. Here are several. They showed up by my patio. We have two regular geese who show up every year after all of the others leave. Ms. Goose sits on her eggs while they bake in 105 degree weather. Two years ago we had a very late spring and two eggs hatched.

This year four geese came back. Two made their regular nest but nobody knows where these guys came from.

You just never know when you're going to get a little goose. Thought they might brighten your day and get you going.

Happy Mother's Day

Happy Mother's Day!  In the USA it's a special time to celebrate the nurturing, mothering spirit in us all. You are welcome to join us from anywhere!

As you ponder (and maybe worry about) so many choices this weekend, how about choosing to nurture the life-giving spirit inside you? Look for opportunities to bring lit-up-life to a moment.

You could:

·         Acknowledge your mother and everyone who has nurtured you. Who helped you to become the wondrous being that you are? Do they know what they mean to you?

·         Bestow patience, kindness, generosity, a sudden smile, silence, a hug, advice, a phone call or an expression of gratitude.

·         Sit quietly and send love and blessings to people you care about – and those you find it challenging to care about too!

My heart is full of gratitude for the nurturing kindness that gives us life.
Thank you for sharing these thoughts and feelings with me. I would love to hear about yours.

To the life-giving nurturing spirit in you!
Love,
Mandy

Your comments are always welcome.  

Beyond Regret

Regret gone wrong! It probably takes about 3 minutes of feeling troubled by something that happened in order to gain whatever you need to know from regret. Along about minute 4, you begin to pour salt on a wound. After a few days, it begins to fester and after years, repetitive, ongoing regret wounds to the bone -- and heart. It blocks happiness and creativity.

Ongoing regret, the kind people replay as they go to sleep (or, more likely lie awake yearning for rest and release) serves no healthy purpose, unless it motivates you to learn from experience. Only you do not have to feel bad in order to learn. Desire to learn works much better. Desire also feels good while you absorb life's many mysterious lessons.

Re-played regret is based on a lie we believe with all our hearts: If only I hadn't done that, everything in my life that I like would stay the same, but the things I don't like would be different.

For example:
I would not be so alone
I would not struggle with money
I would be rich
I would be famous
I would be healthy

In the throes of regret we believe all of the puzzle pieces would remain the same, except for the ones we don't like. That belief, causing so much pain, I would be me, with my life, only so much better, is not true! You can’t change one puzzle piece in real life and come up with the same picture, only prettier. The whole thing changes. Your life would be completely different. We have no idea what it would be like.


You would meet different people, think different thoughts, learn different lessons, pass different tests, step up to a different obstacle -- or in front of a different bus! You would find a different way through, learn a different skill-set, be exposed to different temptations -- an infinity of difference.


Every step you take leads down a unique road to a different, ever-changing destination, filled with experiences only you will have. "If you want to change your life,  all you have to do, is turn, perhaps ever so slightly, and take the very next step in a new direction." -- "Travelling Free: How to Recover from the Past by Changing Your Beliefs." (Available in print, for Kindle and PDF Download at http://mandyevans.com/archives/travelling-free/ )

It's your time and you can choose how to spend it. If recurrent regret eats up too much of your precious life check to see if you have fallen for the one puzzle piece myth. Notice if there is something you want to learn from a past experience. How can you learn it? Would it be OK with you if the rest of your life fill fills up with happiness, success, love and miracles?!


Cheering you on with love, 
Mandy

Unloading Burdens from the Past

There is no greater burden than a tool that is no longer useful. Yet most of us carry obsolete tools that served us in the past, all through our lives. They weigh us down. Every time we reach for a heavy, worn-out tool that worked long ago we rule out one that would work. We limit our chances for success today. It's kind of like trying to use smoke signals to get on the internet. You drag the wood in. You light the fire. You send the puffs up, just the way you learned, but nothing comes back and nobody clicks "like".

What keeps us reaching for something that hasn't worked for ages?

·         It's familiar. We know where to find it and what to do with it.

·         It worked before.  

·         It keeps us from having to face the unknown.

Unfortunately, many of the tools and strategies that saved us as children only hurt us as adults. Just like the proverbial trash, one person's burdensome tool can be someone else's treasured key to success.

Here are some examples of old tools and new possibilities

Defending your fears.

Explore them; perhaps they do not protect you from danger.

Getting  angry when you do not like what happens.

Focus on what you want instead. Ask for it. Reach for it.

Pleasing people you do not really enjoy being with.

Wish them well and release them to find someone who welcomes their company.

Holding a grudge.

If you can see that we are all doing the best we can with what we believe, it's easier to move on.

Feeling ashamed of failure.

Wear it as a bright badge of courage and learn from the research lab of life.

Doing everything yourself.

Ask for help when it enhances your project or your experience.

Always asking for help.

See if you can figure some of this out yourself; you'll be so proud!

Enduring pain you still feel from the past.

Ask what the experience means to you and uncover the beliefs you adopted that may not be true, even though you have lived by them as if they are real. Freedom from the pain of the past is possible!

Lighten up! When you unload burdens from your past, you open doors you may not know you closed. You can see opportunities and adventures where before there was only the gray fog of frustration, resignation or even despair. Miracles can come in if you let them.

What are some old beat-up, battered, heavy tools you carry around? Can you think of a replacement? Remember, any new tool may take some practice to master.

For more ways to breakout from the past, you can read my book, "Travelling Free: How to Recover from the Past by Changing Your Beliefs" now available in print, for Kindle and as a downloadable PDF e-book at http://mandyevans.com/archives/travelling-free/

To your en-lightened happiness and success!

Love,

Mandy