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Here I am at my local shopping centre, and guess what? I made a radical decision, I’m having a Mocka instead of my normal flat white coffee. Millie did a double take as she took my order. Until I thought about it, I didn’t think how much of a habit, firstly, my almost daily sojourn to the coffee shop is, and secondly, how ridged I am when I order my mug of flat white coffee.

Is coffee a habit?

And this got me thinking about our habits (again).

I’ve always been amazed with how powerful our habits are and how hard it can be to break ourselves out of addictive poisonous habits. We can change a habit, do it for that 21 days it takes for a habit to be imprinted into our brain, think we have it and then wake up one morning to find that we’ve reverted. Our mind is a powerful thing and to use that power to change a habit takes vigilance.

A few weeks ago I spent a couple of days in the Sunshine Coast in SE Queensland. I went there to stay with a friend and hang out with my coach and some coaching friends. We stayed in a really nice apartment right on the coast, so swimming, eating, reading and generally being lazy were the orders of the day. This meant that I found it very easy to sleep in each day, something I don’t normally do. The sleeping in became so easy, it was as if it was more ‘normal’ habit or order. But clearly it’s not normal daily order for me, I’ve been getting up really early for about three years. So when I got back home to Canberra I had to be very vigilant and strict with myself to get back into my 4:00 am habit.

Continuing on with this theme, a few days ago I drove past a friends’s place and picked him up for a lunch appointment. As we drove off, I asked if he had a chance to download a small application that would allow him to open video files on his Apple computer. He swore about it a few times mentioning how it was all too hard and how he hated computers and blah blah blah. I just shriugged and let this go, if he wanted to use the application or not it was his deal.

An hour later on the way home this same friend told me about how he bought a compressed air push bike puncture kit for his girl friend. She apparently complained that she didn’t know how to use it and that it was all too hard and that she wouldn’t use it. My friend complained about how hopeless his girlfriend was in that she didn’t even try to learn how to use the kit. Interesting parable comparison, don’t you think?

These are all habits we live by and they manifest themselves in many ways. I have a habit of drinking a mug of flat white coffee, getting up at 4:00 am, holding the tooth brush in my left hand, and sucking air through my teeth. My friend has many habits too, from unashamably being addicted to alcohol, swearing, and not shaving for three days to telling double standard stories, like the one above.

This is not about judgement, it’s to illustrate that we all have habits and that, firstly, they manifest themselves in many ways, and secondly, we can change them if we are aware of them and actually want to spend the time to change them. The choice is ours.

Call to Action

Monitor yourself, watch what you do and say. What do you do that you would like to change? Nothing? Cool. Maybe something big, like losing weight, like quitting smoking or reducing alcohol consumption? You’re going to have to work hard on those because they are difficult. What I’m talking about are the simple one. You see if we monitor and change the simple habits, you keep tabs on what your changing, later the biggies become easy.

Oh, and by the way, a double standard habit like my friend’s computer problem and his girl friend’s gift? They’re tough, they take time and work and you’ll need to consistently check in with yourself about what you’re telling yourself and others.

So there you have it.

And that’s it for me for 2011.

I’m going to take a newsletter break for a few weeks. I’ll be back early January.

Take Care and Have an Awesome Christmas.

Andrew

Today, I want to get serious.

It’s important, it could save a life.

Unusual for me, I know, because normally I’m not a serious type of person. And there is no specific Call to Action because the whole thing is a Call to Action

Today I want to talk about tough love.

Tough love what is it? Tough love is that responsibility we take for our actions no matter the consequences knowing that we could help or protect someone else in the process and also knowing that it could greatly inconvenience us. Its being responsible to yourself for the protection of or to help others move forward in their life. Or if you’d like the Wikipedia definition it’s when:

“someone treats another person harshly or sternly with the intent to help them in the long run”.

Perhaps the best example is the parent with a drug addicted teenager taking very strong measures to help that child overcome their habit. This could include, locking the child out of home and not giving them any money for their habit. As you can see tough love is not only tough for the ‘other’ person, it’s also tough for you as the care giver as well.

Some months ago I had to be tough to my daughter with some emotional things she had going on, I found it just as hard (if not harder) than she did and I knew the emotional things she was going through were things she had to deal with and that when she did she would be stronger as a result of it.

Now I’ve explained what I mean by tough love, I want to talk about a particular instance which is very applicable to this festive time of the year.

I’m talking of drink driving.

And this is where I got the idea for this week’s newsletter from. Further down the page you’ll see a link which I want you to click on. It’s a graphic reminder of what can happen on our roads particularly at this time of the year.

What has this to do with tough love?

Everything.

Click here to watch the video.

Because a great example of tough love is not allowing your friend to drive home when he or she has had too much alcohol or is affected by drugs.

Tough love is when you crash tackle your mate to take his keys off him, you call him a taxi, give the taxi driver some money to take your friend home. Yes, your friend will abuse and curse you!

Tough love is when you do this anyway because you love this person and you don’t want them harmed and more importantly, you don’t want your friend to harm anyone else. This is what real friends do.

And what if that ‘friend’ continues to abuse you afterward. After they have sobered up? Are they really a loving friend? Are they worth having as a friend? Clearly, they wouldn’t return the favour if you had drunk a bit too much.

You see, we spend all our time saying to ourselves and others, “There was nothing I could do”, when in fact there was something you could do, you could take responsibility to protect others.

Click here to watch the video.

And that’s tough love.

Please, take a look at the video clip. You never know, it may help you save a life.

And this is my tough love to you because I care for you.

Have the best outstanding day,

Andrew

PS If I’m out with you over the festive season and I think you’ve had too much to drink, expect me to ask for your keys, and if you don’t give them to me, expect to be crash tackled.

This week we’re going to formalise what we talked about a few weeks ago into something you can take with you and use on a daily basis. It’s a strategy I was taught a couple of years ago by my coach and it has helped me immensely and it’s something I consistently share with my clients. So if we’ve had a session together what we’re talking about today may well have a déjà vu feeling about it.

In fact I really got me to think about this strategy a couple of years ago during a period when I was emotionally tested by events in my life. I dropped in to see a friend and was telling him about the crap that was going on and he very quickly held me accountable to myself by popping the questions to me. And that was a great way for me to file the questions into my memory back.

You see, what we often do when we’re feeling crappy is to look for sympathy and that’s because we’re living the drama of the emotion we’re in at the time. What Gav did for me that day was not let me stay in my drama glue and I learnt very quickly that being in that space was not helping me or others around me. Suffice to say, I use this strategy a lot—-every day.

So what do we do?

Call to Action

What you need to do is ask the following questions (Oh, and when you do, keep in mind what we talked about in last week’s newsletter).

The first question to ask is:

“Knowing the way I am feeling, what’s great about that?”

This is the reframing question and the idea is to recognise that no matter how bad anything that’s going on in your world is, you can always find something good out of it. You can imagine the spirited responses I’ve had in discussions about this. You might ask about the violence in the Middle East or the Japan earthquake. Well I can think of great things coming out of those events, even though in some world tragedies, I may be drawing a very long bow. The point I want to make is, if you think of world wide events, where does that put you and your emotional stuff? Insignificant? Probably.

There’s also a short sub-set question you may want to follow up the above question with and it goes like this:

“How can I make this situation better?”

This is the question to ask if you’re having a few challenges finding that positive answer that doesn’t seem to come to the surface.

Let’s move onto the next question, and it is:

“When is NOW a great time for me to move out of the way I am feeling?”

You see we have a choice. We can stay in our drama, feeling crappy, getting sick, dragging others down with us, feeling sorry for ourselves or we can change. It’s our choice. Just because you’re feeling down doesn’t mean that a rose’s scent is any different, that stunning sunset is not fantastic, or the sound of a child’s voice and laughter is not beautiful. It’s all to do with your perception and the choices you make in life.

So if you have a choice in how you feel, you also have a choice in how long your going to feel down and crappy, don’t you. If someone says something to you which upsets you, are you going to feel crappy and angry for 5 minutes, 2 days, or 3 months (or maybe for ever)? The choice is yours. By asking “When is NOW a great time……” means that you can set a time limit on yourself.

You know, I have rule for myself. If something goes wrong I allow myself to be in my crappy mood for 10 seconds. Yep. 10 seconds, that’s all, if someone says or does something to me that upsets me (we all like to indulge ourselves a little bit!)’ I count to ten, ask the questions, then it’s gone. It works, traffic doesn’t worry me, bothersome telephone calls don’t worry me, nor do long supermarket queues.

And now we’re onto the final question, and it goes like this:

“What is the first thing I can do to help myself with that?”

Okay someone’s said something to me that’s upset me, or triggered some response in me. I ask my “Knowing the way I’m feeling …..” question, Then I ask the “NOW” question, then a whole ten seconds later, I ask this last question “What’s the first step I can take to hlep myself with that?”.

So what do I do?

I look for my number one step that will move me out of the way I’m feeling. For example, I might go for a coffee, a walk around the block, see a movie, call a friend, read a book, go somewhere quiet to contemplate what’s just happened, anything to get me away from that drama I’ve been in. This is all it takes and it works.

That’s the strategy. Easy isn’t it?

By all means, write these questions down, plaster them around the house, at work, put them into your wallet or hand bag, hire a pilot to sky-write them. Do with them whatever you want.

Can I give you a little sub-set?

If you do print them off and post them around the house and/or at work, don’t be surprised if you detect attitude changes from others who inadvertently read them. Words and sentences have power.

It’s all so easy isn’t it.

Have the best outstanding day.

Today I need to thank one of my special clients and friend Julie for prompting todays topic.

Be responsible with your relationships

You see after last week’s newsletter Julie contacted me, as she often does, for a suggestion as to how she might manage a situation at her work. I didn’t really need to answer her because she knew what to do. However, I did make a couple of suggestions and I told her that her challenge is something we need to cover more deeply.

Julie’s challenge was with a work colleague, someone she has regular contact with and who is generally a pain in the butt. These types of people are in every work place, aren’t they. They are the types that are always cranky, short with people, always right, you know the type I mean…….

Well, I’m here to tell you that person doesn’t have a problem, you do. You’re the one who finds them the pain in the butt. You can bet that if you were to ask them they would tell you they’re just going about their business. People often call these conflicts in a relationship a personality clash; interesting term, seeing the personalities of the two people are usually so very different. And I think the term is a cop-out. How often do you hear “I don’t like working with so-and-so because we have a personality clash!”

 What to do?

Let’s put the solution into your Call to Action and we’ll spread this over the next couple of weeks because it’s important.

 Call to Action

1.  First, you have to acknowledge that it’s your responsibility to do something. Leaving the relationship the way it is now and hoping it will get better is not being responsible. Yes, this other person may be higher up the promotional ladder, on the same rung or lower down, it doesn’t matter, you have to do something. Remember, you’re the one with the problem. It could be that the other person is not even aware that there is a problem.

   Have you got that? Be responsible.

2. Next, you have to look at the situation as a challenge that has a solution. Everything has a solution, we just need to change our perspective slightly and believe the change of perspective will work.
3. As you change your perspective by looking for a solution, you can help yourself further by looking at the challenge with your colleague through one or a number of different lenses. Let’s take a quick look at those lenses.

Reverse lens:

This is the lens where you put yourself into the shoes of the other person. Just as you have stresses and challenges in your life, so does that other person and you haven’t a clue what those stresses may be. He or she may have family problems, a sick child or parent, may be stressed with something happening at work, or any number of things that happen to us in out daily life. Once we’ve thought about what the other person may be going through, that’s all we do, we don’t take it on, we accept that person with their problems and then step back into our own life.

Long Distance Lens:

This is where we think about the problem for what it is now and then project ourselves a day, a week, a month or even a couple of years into,the future. How do you think Julie will think of her challenges in six months time? Trivial, minute, off the radar? I would think so. You have the same capacity to do this. You would agree that next week you’ll have other more pressing challenges to think about and today’s problem with your work colleague will have paled into insignificance by then.

Wide Angle Lens:

This is the lens we use to get what we are about into true perspective. Think about your problem with this person, then think about your home, family, friends, where you live, your city, and your country. You’re pretty lucky aren’t you? You live in a beautiful home or unit in one of the best countries in the world don’t you. You don’t have a famine like the people in the Horn of Africa, nor do you live with earthquakes, or floods that wipe out thousands of people. And even if something does happen you live with an infrastructure that helps you.

It all makes your challenge with your colleague pretty insignificant, doesn’t it?

Follow these suggestions for that relationship. You can even extend them to other emotional things that are going on in you life. So work on this and next week we’ll formalize it with a more structured strategy.

Have the best outstanding day,

Andrew

Give to receive

Over the last few weeks I’ve been in a bit of an ‘examining-myself’ space, and no, that doesn’t mean today’s newsletter is all about me. Today I’m talking about giving and receiving and from holistic perspective, not the normal business focus.

Let me explain.

If you have an internet business, or any other business for that matter, the experts tell you that in order to sell you need to give value. For web businesses, it’s often in the form of free stuff that’s given out to obtain your email address. Most web businesses do this and it’s quite legitimate.

Other businesses do the same thing, and their ‘free stuff’ may be extra special service or offering a product or service at a greatly reduced price.

The thing businesses are trying to do is to give something so that in your eyes you will trust and like them and generally you make a purchases based on those criteria. It’s a sound formula because emotion plays a part in just about every purchase we make.

In my business I’ve always tried to give away as much as I can (i.e. this newsletter) and, to take it a step further, I’ve always tried to give the best value I can during my coaching and intuitive sessions. In other words, I try to give more than is expected. That might be in the form of spending that extra 15 minutes with the client, suggesting someone else who could help, and sending the recorded version of the session to the client free of charge.

So over the last couple of weeks I’ve become conscious of noticing this trait in others in everyday life, in my friends, clients and colleagues. Of course, once you get used to noticing these traits, you also notice when they are missing.

I’ll set you a typical scene.

Earlier this II was in a coffee shop and I placed an order. A very abrupt woman takes the order; no smile and hardly a thanks; then the coffee is delivered by a dis-interested a young man; then to top it off the same woman who took my order took my money with the same attitude. Am I happy? Yes, because these people won’t ruin my day. Will I go back to that coffee shop? No, because I love good service.

On the other hand and from a different quarter. One of my very special mastermind group members has had unbelievable growth within herself lately. She has a dream and she’s articulating that dream into a spectacular grand dream goal. In the meantime she realises she has to fund this goal and has started her own business, which is now rapidly expanding. I hear, week after week, the little extra things she does, most of them unconsciously, to value-add to give her family and her clients that little extra. What my friend has realised, is that untimately, the world will treat her more or less the way she expects to be treated. Consequently, by giving that little bit more she receives that special something back in return.

I mentioned earlier that in business we hear how people will do business with and refer business to those people they know, like and trust. Now, I find this limiting because I believe it’s not only in business this rule applies, I think it’s in all our life experiences. One of the really lovely aspects of my mastermind friend’s story is that it’s not only her business that’s doing well, it’s her whole life as well. It’s her relationship with her husband, children and friends. And it’s because she decided that she needed to give that bit more of herself.

Call to Action

Over the next few days and weeks consider how much you give and how much you expect to receive in return. Do you always expect to receive? And if so, do you find you don’t receive as much as you would like?

“Your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you receive in payment.”

So, ask yourself, “Does what I am doing serve or add value to others?” In other words, “Am I exceeding people’s expectations of what they expect from me?”.

It may take a few days or even weeks to move into this mindset and when you do, you will see spectacular results.

Remember, the sky is the limit. Then above that, the universe starts.

Have the best outstanding day,

Andrew

Doesn’t the year flow by, it’s nearing the end of the year and what have we achieved? Lots? Maybe.

Now they had gratitude for the did bits they received.

I know one thing I achieved and it’s this I want to revisit.

Gratitude.

You probably remember when we talked about this back in September. I mentioned how I’d expanded my gratitude which I work on each day to include a written copy and it includes negative issues as well. What I’d like to do is check in on what we talked about and reinforce a couple of things.

You see, we underestimate what we are and who we are, we underestimate just what we can achieve. What I’ve discovered over the month or so since we talked about gratitude is how far I’ve moved and what I’ve discovered about myself since I expanded my gratitude list.

The challenge is noticing the change. Small things like changes within ourselves are difficult to monitor, so you have to be fairly aware of where you’re at.

Let me give you an example.

One of the things I did in expanding my gratitude list was to use someone else as a boost to hold me accountable. I have an agreement with a friend and we exchange our lists with one another every morning. There are a couple of important rules we adhere to, one being that we will never disclose what we read to anyone else and a second is we don’t talk about issues in the email unless invited to do so. So it’s a bit of closed book.

The other thing I did was to have gratitude for negative crappy things in my life as well as the good things.

This is where my real growth has come from. For instance, I used to get anxious about being lazy or idle through the day. So I worked on this in my gratitude list and I now find myself being grateful for just, well, ‘being’, whether I’m reading book, listening to music, going for a coffee (which I’m doing as I write this) or hanging out with a friend for that bit too long.

Well guess what? My anxiety disappeared, it’s gone and I seem to be getting more done in my day. Weird stuff this, and it all came about through concentrating on and looking at the good stuff associated with my anxiety.

What I found interesting in the process was that I didn’t actually need to examine the anxiety in any depth at all. I just accepted that it was there, had gratitude for what that anxiety was doing to me and let my subconscious do the rest.

Call to Action.

Revisit what you have gratitude for. Check it out every day. Make it simple, like the sounds of the birds, the beautiful day, your comfortable bed, your great job or business, your family etc.

Then think about something not so positive. Perhaps it’s those harsh words your partner said to you, (or you said to your partner); that you are anxious about getting everything done today; that you were late picking up your friend or child; anything that challenges you. You might find yourself revisiting it every day for a few days or week and that’s okay, stay with it. Most importantly, just accept that it’s something that will disappear.

Sounds too easy doesn’t it? That’s because it is easy, most of this stuff is. We humans have a great habit of making things too hard.

Have the best outstanding day without anxiety.

I am.

Cheers

Andrew

Yes, we’re still talking goals and goal setting, only this time we’re moving right up to the sharp practical end of the process.

Use your goals for that spectacular life.

I am moving my business into a new and exciting area. Yes, I’ll still be doing Intuitive Relationship Readings and yes, I’ll still be coaching clients to reach for their piece of sky. What I am doing is getting out into the workshop circuit and I’ll be starting in a few weeks. I’ll give you more info on this as it comes to hand.

You see, I worked my workshop idea into a Grand Dream Goal months ago and it took me a while to take action. My first action was to book and attend a workshop in Sydney. My next step, was to work on the material I learnt in Sydney and determine what my next step would be. This led to another two-day workshop with Shaune Clarke (www.shauneclarke.com) and he helped me, and a great bunch of others, find our full potential as speakers. It was an awesome experience and I would thoroughly recommend Shaune if you’re interested in public speaking.

How is this connected to goal setting? Well, you can see the steps I took, and there’s more because I ran into trouble……

The other night I met with my amazing MasterMind group and we talked about what we had achieved last week (and I was particularly pleased that I met my weekly goal) and we discussed what we would achieve this following week.

As I was talking about one of my goals, one of the MM members stopped me and asked me if I had posted a date for my first workshop. I found myself talking about what I had to achieve first and she stopped me in my tracks. She pointed out to me that I was procrastinating on setting the date and the ‘other’ stuff I was doing was just a distraction from me moving forward. In one sentence, she nailed it, she nailed me to the cross.

By our next meeting, I will have a date.

This is the power of our MasterMind group. We hold each other accountable and that action helps us move through our resistance. It’s painful and it’s what we are about. There is a word for this pain, it’s called perturbation.

This is why all those new goals we we try to complete are often put to one side or even lost. Perturbation causes us pain and once we recognise it, it can be a great thing because this is when we’re just about to break through and complete the goal. Perturbation prepares us for the new level we are about to operate at. For example, think about last week’s Lotto winner. Lucky bugger. Maybe, but I bet all that person’s financial troubles are just about to begin, because he/she doesn’t know how to handle that much money.

Back to perturbation. It doesn’t matter what the goal is, when you’re close to the actually doing that goal, perturbation will set in. Whether, it’s that fitness or weight loss program, finding the new partner, or that new job, there will always be pain associated with it.

Call to Action

Look at your goals and see if your being resistant to completing any of them. What’s causing you to be resistant? Do you need someone to hold you accountable? Maybe you need to find someone to help you be accountable, someone who you respect, who won’t judge you and will pull you up and tell you to pull your socks up.

That person could be tough find, and are you up to that type of scrutiny?

If you really want to succeed will you do it?

I did.

Until next time,

Have the best outstanding day,

Andrew

Why?

 Because we have more goal setting to talk about.

Our goals bring peace to our lives

You know, I have a rule. I never use the word ‘why’ when I ask a question which involves other people or emotional issues. I will, of course, use ‘why’ for something technical like “Why won’t the microwave oven work?” (Because it stuffed out over the weekend, it’s true, it really did.) Or “Why did I sleep in yesterday? (Forgot to set the alarm)”. The answer you get from these ‘why’ questions is obvious. When you ask an emotional ‘why’ question, one that involves you and another person, you’re likely to get a story and if it’s a negative story about an issue with someone else that story will always be inaccurate.

There is another ‘why’ question I do ask. Its a goal related question and it’s probably the most important question you can ask when you set your goals and it goes like this…….

“Why do you want to achieve those goals?” or better still, “Why do I want to achieve my goals?”.

Got you thinking didn’t I? Wait, there’s more, steak knives are included……

Why do you want to achieve those goals? What’s the purpose of them? Is it to make money for the sake of making money, to get a partner because you are lonely, or maybe to live in a bigger and better house because you want to raise your status.

It’s interesting when you ask about purpose like this isn’t it? To me, it immediately puts a negative or disempowering take on the goal. There’s a shallowness to it. Don’t get me wrong, if you want to set a goal to purchase and drive that new Ferrari because it will make you feel successful, go for it.

When I asked myself about why I wanted my goals, I found myself reframing the question just a little to “Why do I want to achieve that (or those) goal(s)?”. It put a different emphasis on the purpose, and the purpose became more holistic.

Let me give you and example.

The other evening a client friend was around at my place and she asked me “Andrew, what are you doing all this for, what part of ‘you’ are you doing it for?” (thank you K…..). I had an answer for her, but she got me thinking, and it made me reflect and revisit my goals to check I’m on track.

Call to Action

Spend time thinking about your goals, why you want to achieve them and, when you do, try think holistically. Try to think like my fantastic client, in Brisbane, who wants to help people on a Pacific Island educate their children or my amazing coach, Kurek, who helps people all over the world live abundant, loving empowering lives.

A technique you may want to use to help yourself is to remove all boundaries when thinking about what your goals mean to you. Consider yourself in a life with the perfect partner, no money or wealth challenges, perfectly behaved and educated children and family. What would you wish for then? What would you offer your community, your country or the world.

It’s a tantalising question to ask yourself, isn’t it?

Until next time,

Have the best outstanding day.

Cheers

Andrew