You Are NOT Your Thoughts… and yes, you are good enough

You can open the window to your thoughts, and think outside YOUR box.

Soulgoal Missive, Year 1, No. 15, originally published in 2001

It was my first singing class. After performing my rendition of a song, my voice coach didn’t comment on my presentation but simply suggested that I approach it using different emotions. Although it was a reasonable request, a sinking feeling came over me and began to take me down with it.

I got through the evening but went home devastated as anguish overtook me far beyond what happened in the class. Three days later I still felt this sickening feeling within and knew that it was totally out of proportion from the event.

Then it hit me.

My (unconscious) interpretation of the comment triggered a belief that when I’m myself, I’m not good enough.

“Why can’t you be more like your cousins Kathy and Sharon?” was one of my mother’s mantras I grew up with — to be good enough I had to be like someone else.

My feelings turned from sadness to freedom as the light shined on this hidden side of me.

The casual remark served as an alarm clock to wake up an old pain after years of sleep. Unconsciously, it directed my actions and responses causing me to feel “I’m not good enough” although there was nothing in the present moment to validate it. After discovering the truth, my life changed.

I hadn’t seen one of my cousins for 18 years, even though she lives just a few hours from me. Yet two weeks after my discovery, I found myself visiting my aunt and her daughter.

Within minutes of our time together, I shared my story with her, and she replied, “Why would you ever want to be like us? The insinuation in our home was that you were special, and we wanted to be like you!”

How often do we create a false sense of reality accompanied by unnecessary limitations and anxiety?

There are so many reasons to experience fear these days, but how many of them are based on reality?

Fear arises from an obscure feeling that something will happen to us in the future that we won’t be able to handle. Then we attach a significance and interpretation that create pain.

The psychological condition of fear is divorced from any concrete and true immediate danger. It comes in many forms: unease, worry, anxiety, nervousness, tension, dread, phobia, and so on. This kind of psychological fear is always of something that might happen, not of something that is happening now.

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“You can always cope with the present moment, but you cannot cope with something that is only a mind projection – you cannot cope with the future.”

Eckhart Tolle,
Power of Now

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What’s the antidote? Get free from allowing your thoughts to rule and instead be the master of what you think and feel.

How do we reclaim our dominion? Focus on the Now instead of some imagined future.

Truly be present and live in this moment in time. This means not obsessing over what happened in the past and not projecting in the future some theorized threat. We learn from the past and plan for the future. We are best equipped to deal with life situations when we are fully present.

Life is what it is. “Resistance is futile” and creates more pain.

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We always have the ability to deal with whatever hand we are dealt, although as Mother Teresa said, “I know God won’t give me anything I can’t handle. I just wish He didn’t trust me so much.”  

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Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to disidentify with your thoughts, as if they are you and always the truth.  Instead, be the observer of them. Experiment with the following exercise entitled “You Are NOT Your Thoughts.”

1. Do you imagine that your future will be better or worse than it is now?
2. Observe yourself focusing your attention into the future. Now shift your attention back to reading in this moment. Notice your ability to shift consciously between the future and present.
3. The part of you that observes this shift is the real you. You can detach from your identification with your thinking at any moment by going into the observer state – the real you is doing the watching. You experience the real you only in the present moment.
4. Whenever fear, anxiety, or other such emotion arises, switch to being the watcher of your thoughts and feelings. Even if you still feel trapped by them or feel stuck, you are on your road to freedom, gaining greater self-mastery with every step.

Observation of your thoughts breaks identification with them. You take control of your life instead of being led by fear and limitation. It’s a powerful tool.

With a zest for Life,

Virginia

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Success Thought

“Getting there is half the fun; being there is all of it!”

Chauncey Gardner, in the movie Being There

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Ready for more freedom?

You are more than enough!

Contact me for a free consultation at:
virginia@soulgoals.com

I work with people who choose to share
their gifts or business in a BIGGER way
but don’t know how, feel stuck or could 
use new tools or support.

I help them ignite their Soul’s goals
and be richly compensated doing what
they love.

Copyright © 2021 Soulgoals, All rights reserved.

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15 Ways to Be a Person of Value

This Soulgoal Missive was sent to my mailing list in September 2002.

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“Try not to become a person of success, but a person of value.”

Albert Einstein

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What makes someone great in your eyes? Footprints are etched on the sand of time through action. Preceding this comes a person of value.

We are works in progress. Step by step our lives become more real and meaningful. As we live our truth, we provide greater service to others. As Jesus said, “He that will be great among you let him serve.”

Being great is not just about what we do; it’s who we are and the choices we make. Following are some that are important to me. Few live all of them fully at any one time. They are wonderful to aspire to if we choose and when the timing is right. 

1. Live authentically. Ring like a whole bell (ring true) vs. a cracked bell (looks like it should ring purely, but if you really listen, it’s off). Do not live an act because of a title or a role played in society or home or work or church. Be yourself. Follow the drumbeat of life you hear. 
2. Follow your heart’s desire in everyday life. Everyday do something you love to do. Do what you were born to do, your mission, your calling – regardless how small the action. Live your dharma.

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“To live is so startling that it leaves little time for anything else.”
 
Emily Dickinson

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3. Courageously face and release core emotional baggage so you can live a life with freedom and maturity. Unmask and be true to your emotions and feelings, for keys to YOUR truth lie here. You are having a human experience: emotions and feelings are part of this and tools to discover who you are, what you are doing here, and how you are to serve.

4. Be a friend to yourself and others. Hold space for others to be and discover themselves and grow. Be non-judgmental and detached, yet present, caring, and supportive for others’ and your own life processes.

5. Be willing to explore intimacy with yourself, others, and the world rather than avoid relationships or just share the same space. Our greatest challenges and rewards come from relationship with others.

6. Keep your mind open, flexible, deep, and growing. Be an outside-the-box thinker. Allow new ideas to be possible so your life can grow.

7. Be financially mature and stable. Monetary difficulties may be caused from having an eight-year old make your financial decisions. The significance of addressing this issue means you have come to peace with some child part of yourself as well as claiming your place in the world.

8. Be spiritually awake and grow in YOUR truth, not a dogma you’re taught or what others have said about you. YOU matter because you value you. It doesn’t matter what others think. Ask yourself what you really know that’s true and positive; live your answer fully. Take time regularly to commune with the Highest aspect of Life.

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Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sand of time.
 
Longfellow

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9. Know how to have fun, and take time to enjoy yourself. Humor and enjoyment are keys to life.

10. Practice physical health awareness and take care of your body. Adopt a youthful attitude toward your mind and body, regardless of your age or health; be young at heart. Respect and treat yourself well.

11. Live a balanced life. Too much work or play or any one thing creates a weak foundation. You may keep your balance for a while, but eventually your life may start to fall apart.

12. Live in the present moment. Now is all that exists. To live regretting the past or worrying about the future creates needless fear and stress. Yesterday and tomorrow are simply another Now. Now is the only moment to live, heal, and create the life you choose. Use time wisely rather than be controlled by it.

13. Say Yes to life in all its forms. Acknowledge you and others have a physical body in a third dimensional world that has joys and sorrows, pain and happiness, good and bad. Embrace it all. Each is an aspect of the bigger picture. Be sure to include the beauty.

14. Live life to its fullest. Don’t shy away from living. Have the courage to be who you are and enjoy life. Live passionately and creatively. Do your best.

15. Be love. Live with a grateful heart.

Your challenge, if you choose to accept it, is to choose three areas you’d like to focus on for the remainer of the year. Write them somewhere special, and review them periodically as a reminder.

With a zest for Life, 
Virginia   

If you’d like help to change
the way you see yourself,
contact me for a free consultation at:
virginia@soulgoals.com

I work with people who choose to share
their gifts or business in a BIGGER way
but don’t know how, feel stuck or could 
use new tools or support.

I help them ignite their Soul’s goals
and be richly compensated doing what
they love.

Copyright © 2021 Soulgoals, All rights reserved.

Are We There Yet? Are You Waiting for Things to Be Better?

Think about little kids who can’t wait to get to their destination and miss most everything that’s happening on the ride.

We can be like those children, too.

Lately, I’ve been observing people who are in the middle of transitions – starting new businesses; hoping to get work; ready for change; trying to heal faster; wanting more; needing different; can’t take living with tormenting thoughts any longer.

It can be challenging and discouraging, especially when there’s no going back and the future calls.

But how does one get there?  There’s a need to get there because that’s where survival and happiness seem to be.

And the present… well, this is the painful part. Because the perception is that success and well-being appear to live in the future or in a memory of the past when everything will be or was better. Now is full of worry, anxiety, stress and suffering.

Actually, the miserable feelings come from living in the future or past: being here and wishing we were there. It’s an inner battle with time and a (mis)perception of how things are supposed to be.

We often get frustrated because we want everything to be the way we want it now, but it isn’t.

It’s okay. Just take things a step at a time. With each step, you’ll be closer to your destination. It helps a lot if you stop judging yourself and your situation with disapproval… and you’ll feel much better, too!

If we’re waiting for better days, we’re missing the only place they exist – in the present moment.

Your past and future only consist of other moments. If you’re not happy in this moment, you’ll repeat the patterns of stress and dissatisfaction in your future or your reflections of the past.

Furthermore, you’ll attract more experiences that will give you more of the same feelings you have now, regardless of how much you hate them. Like attracts like.

Here are some quotes that may help you take your power back or realize that you always had it but gave it away to ill-conceived perceptions of time.

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“Waiting is a state of mind. Basically, it means that you want the future; you don’t want the present. You don’t want what you’ve got, and you want what you haven’t got. With every kind of waiting, you unconsciously create inner conflict between your here and now, where you don’t want to be, and the projected future, where you want to be. This greatly reduces the quality of your life by making you lose the present.”

“Waiting is a state of mind that says we want what we don’t have…  Are you a ‘habitual waiter’?”

“It is not uncommon for people to spend their whole life waiting to start living.”

Eckhart Tolle

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Are you there yet?

Or are you here?

“Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We only have today. Let us begin.”

Mother Teresa

If you’d like to 
live life more fully NOW,
contact me for a a compliementary session:
virginia@soulgoals.com

I work with people
who choose to enjoy life more,
share their gifts
or business in a BIGGER way
but don’t know how, feel stuck
or would benefit from new tools
or support.

I help them be richly compensated
doing what they love by aligning
with their Soul’s goals. 

Reposted from Soulgoals’ blog May 14, 2018

Copyright © 2021 Soulgoals, All rights reserved.

Stop Shoulding on Yourself

Have you ever had a deadline or goal but felt stuck and simply couldn’t take action? Maybe you were “shoulding” on yourself and immobilized from your mental tyranny.

In August 2001, every day for two weeks, I sat in front of my computer to write a seminar…and not one word came. Nothing.

I put so much pressure on myself that I stifled any creativity to write.

Eventually, I listened to what I was telling myself: I should’ve already done this, and I should’ve done it years ago.

I made peace with the situation by shifting my perspective from feeling “resistance is futile” to: I am where I am, and from here I will start.

Over the next four months I wrote a 60-page workbook… and then, because it became so big, I didn’t know what to do with it. After all of that work, it sat on a pile.

Fast forward seven years. I remembered the workbook when I discovered I didn’t like a manual for a four-day retreat I was to facilitate. Oh, did I mention it was less than a week away?

The workbook was a key for breakthroughs and fun throughout the event and saved me from being in another writing rut.

Retreat Workbook

TIP: Stop shoulding on yourself. Self-judgment holds you back. Like it or not, this is where you are, so make peace within by allowing you to be in the present moment.

When you accept yourself and your circumstance, you let go of the shoulds, pressure and negative self-talk.  Then any small step will get you started. When this happens, you get out of your rut and pave the way for momentum.

This is a reprint from July 2010

If you’d like support
to stop judging,
contact me
for a complimentary
Do What You Love Break Free Session.

If it’s been a while since you’ve had one,
you’re welcome to contact me again.

Email me at:
virginia@soulgoals.com

I work with people
who choose to share their gifts
or business in a BIGGER way
but don’t know how, feel stuck
or would benefit from new tools
or support.

I help them be richly compensated
doing what they love.

 

Copyright © 2019 Soulgoals, All rights reserved.

Life or Biz Up and Down? Waiting for a Change? Plus Quotes by ECKHART TOLLE

 

A woman’s business had been in desperate straits for several months. Immediately after coaching with me, her phone rang with new clients, deals closed in avalanches of abundance and her sales far surpassed her goal of $1 million a month.

However, in the subsequent month, her active deals dropped again to zero. This was an old pattern of hers – the roller coaster of feast or famine – and it always led to her feeling exhausted.

When I asked about clients in her pipeline, she described how she was frustrated by waiting for them to complete their preparation before they could actively move forward.

Her focus was on waiting to see what they were going to do. Emotionally, the waiting weighed heavily on her. As she had difficulty thinking of anything else, she felt dispirited and immobilized.

Why, when she was doing so well, was this happening… again?

Just like infection-fighting, white blood cells attack germs that have gotten into a wound, your spirit comes to your aid by highlighting germ-like, limiting beliefs you harbor.

How? By surfacing your issues, you have an opportunity to see them more clearly or repeat the typical way you respond. When you see them, you can release patterns that don’t serve you and do things differently.

We frequently are staunch defenders of why we must believe the way we do and stubbornly hold on to the way we look at things. This is why the same limiting circumstances recur repeatedly. 

Her inner spirit, once again, revealed the domino effect of her self-sabotage:

• She was waiting for something outside herself to dictate her focus, and it froze her into inaction. 
• Her thoughts made her feel bad.
• Thinking about it from this perspective exhausted her.
• She felt so deflated that she wasn’t inspired to do anything else.
• Then she attracted little business, which matched her deflated feelings. 

A more powerful approach was to do everything she could to help her current deals. We talked about new strategies she could implement. Then move on. It’s called NEXT!

She let go of waiting and replaced it with a new action plan. By the end of her session, she felt lighter and energized to move forward.

Here’s how she changed to activate a more empowering domino effect:

• Her old habit, mentally and physically, was to wait for things to fall into place the way she thought they should before taking action.
• This time, she realized she’d do what she could now, and let the rest unfold in divine right timing.
• This opened up mental space to let go of her fixation and instead redirect her focus to other activities.
• The heaviness she usually felt shifted to the excitement of possibilities.
• She became inspired with ideas to take effective action.
• Having created a more powerful, energetic center of influence, she magnetized herself to attract more and better business.

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Here’s what Eckhart Tolle says about waiting:

“You don’t have to wait for something ‘meaningful’ to come into your life so that you can finally enjoy what you do. There is more meaning in joy than you will ever need. The ‘waiting to start living’ syndrome is one of the most common delusions of the unconscious state.”

“Don’t wait to be successful at some future point; have a successful relationship with the present moment and be fully present in whatever you are doing. That is success.”

“Give up waiting as a state of mind. When you catch yourself slipping into waiting…snap out of it. Come into the present moment. Just be and enjoy being.”

“Waiting is a state of mind that says we want what we don’t have. Therefore, with every kind of waiting we produce an inner conflict between now and the projected future. This greatly reduces the quality of our life. Are you a ‘habitual waiter’?”

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Are you a habitual waiter? If so, you can change, instead of waiting for change, by making new choices!

 

P.S. Know someone who might enjoy this post? Please share.

Tired of waiting to live your dream?
Contact me for a complimentary
Do What You Love Break Free Session.

Email me at:

virginia@soulgoals.com

I work with people
who choose to share their gifts
or business in a BIGGER way
but don’t know how, feel stuck
or would benefit from new tools
or support.

I help them be richly compensated
doing what they love by discovering
their Soul’s goals.