3 Steps To Stop Self-Sabotaging Your Career | Mo Faul

We all want to stop the inner self from sabotaging our next steps in our career. Confidence is essential and the number one “make it” or “break it” ingredient. Without it, we stay stuck, miserable and feel worse, which keeps us stuck. Over and over, we feel bad, we get frustrated and we stay stuck. Where is the confidence?

From my years as an executive, I have seen four warning signs that it is time to get unstuck.

Warning signs that you have self-sabotaging or limited thinking

1.    You are forever waiting for the perfect time to….ask for a raise, go on a job interview - since the perfect time is never, it never happens.
2.    Persistently thinking that things will eventually change - waiting “until you turn blue!” or blow up!
3.    Belief that you will never qualify for another job, raise or promotion - negotiating yourself out of the job before you even apply.
4.    Convincing yourself in your mind that you do not deserve or will never receive what you want (even when all signs are pointing your way) If you are blocked, you will miss the signals.

The best way to STOP sabotaging yourself and build your confidence back up is to change what you think on a regular (habitual) basis. I know it sounds obvious, but your thoughts, your mindset and your thought habits are creating your reality and your ability to stand up for yourself.

When our confidence is drained, we begin to look outside ourselves to the external world for validation, recognition, rewards and to feel better inside. But, it is never enough.

Have you ever caught yourself saying or thinking the following?

“No one cares about my project as much as I do!” I steamed after a long, boring (my fault) meeting.  

“Why am I working this much and trying so hard.” This is the classic statement of victimhood and it is the definitive “diagnosis” of confidence depletion.

As I fought harder to get my project advanced at the health system, I allowed the resistance and conflict over it to program my mind, heart and soul that it was NOT going to happen. So, even though I kept pushing, it wasn’t going to happen. I was literally fighting against my own plan.  I was convinced I was defeated even while I worked so hard.

The harder I pushed for it to succeed, the more anxious I became. I became irritable, didn’t know who I could trust. I would ask people after meetings, “are you on my side?”

I became the problem. My eyes were red, my face on fire as my blood pressure shot through the roof. 

Will the meditation tape in my car be able to calm me down? 

Sometimes it did, but I returned the next day to FIGHT all over again! Even though I was depleted and had nothing left, I had to be a good soldier!

Nothing seemed to work, and I couldn’t figure out why. 

I finally learned how to change my thinking to reroute the stuck-ness to success. 

Finally, it dawned on me that my beliefs were causing the problems I was seeing. I was not feeling confident in my plan or actions-- and that was what was keeping me stuck! 

Big time, stuck in mud, going under...

Ultimately, the frustration grew and grew, I saw no way out and soon everyone was an enemy in my eyes.

I needed to be more me from the inside, then I could shine on the outside.

The external world will never give you permission to stand up for yourself!

I needed to change before I self-destructed.

Here is the quick, three (3) step process I used to start rewiring me. Use it now to save your job, career, YOU.

Your 3 STEP Solution:

1.    Imagine the outcome as already happening. 

Most of my coaching process involves working on mindset, working on new mental programming. In order to DO something, you need to imagine that you CAN DO IT. 

You must imagine a good outcome. Even if you don’t believe it at first. Imagining failure makes us so fearful that we project fear and failure!  Our mindset determines what we think is possible. And it determines what does happen.

You will not succeed at asking for a promotion or going on an interview if you think you will fail before you even start.

Imagine the best outcome before you take action.

Take a few minutes to bring into your mind’s eye the best outcome.

Imagine this best outcome in the best light and in vivid colors and get happy internally!! 

Get into the best outcome in your mind, heart and soul! 

Then you can proceed! Next, take action only when you are feeling great.

2.    Focus on your highest self.

How do you feel when you are unstoppable? What were you doing last time you felt awesome inside? Imagine you, in that situation and how you felt. Take a few minutes in your mind’s eye to get back in that feeling state. Be that highest, most awesome self.

3.     Take action!  

Once you have imagined the best outcome by conjuring up your highest self and emotional state TAKE ACTION! Do not take action from weak, depleted you. Practice this process and it will become natural for you.

Step into your full power as the person you want to show up as and ask her (or him)-- 

“What would I do if I wasn’t fearful of rejection?”  

“What would I do if I knew I would succeed?”

DO that! Take action from a place of strength, from a place of knowing you are the highest self you can be.

You see, the illusion that you are not getting what you deserve is what keeps you stuck. So create a different illusion-- one that will propel you to achieve what you want. 

Create the inner circumstances for things to go your way.

Find out more in my Love Yourself, Love Your Career Video Training Series. The perfect merger of inner spiritual evolution and outer career success. 

Let me know what you think below!

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The surprisingly dramatic role of nutrition in mental health | Julia Rucklidge

The power of micronutrients!  

"A well nourished body and brain is better able to withstand ongoing stress and recover from illness. "

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. In this critically important talk, clinical psychologist Julia Rucklidge explores a range of scientific research, including her own, showing the significant role played by nutrition in mental health or illness. 

27 Things You Need To Thank Yourself For Before The Year’s Over | Russell Lacy

In our society, we beat up on ourselves a lot – too much.

For many of us, it’s every minute of every day, all throughout the year. It’s no wonder most of us are too stressed out. We replay negative thoughts about our inadequacies or lack of capabilities over and over again in our minds. At some point, it’s like enough already. Isn’t it about time that we started appreciating ourselves for all of the things that we’ve done? This is especially true for this time of year.
 

Along with some end-of-the-year reflection and goal planning for the new year, don’t forget to thank yourself for all that you have achieved and overcome this year. I’m sure there were moments when it wasn’t easy. You probably had moments when you doubted yourself, struggled in defining the type of life you want to live, and lost sight of your goals. Yet, you pushed through it all.
 

Now, take a moment to be proud of the person who you’ve become. Here are 27 things you need to thank yourself for before 2016 is over:

 1. Following your goals (well, some of them)

 2. Making your priorities clearer and sticking to them

 3. Not putting up with people’s crap

 4. Taking time out for yourself, even if that meant ditching your friends

 5. Working out more/ trying to take care of yourself more

 6. Not settling for things

 7. Developing your skills and passions

 8. Not giving up on your what you want out of your career (even when it got on your nerves)

 9. Finishing things that you started

 10. Having the courage to remove people out of your life who didn’t add to it

 11. Speaking up more when you felt wronged

 12. Going the extra mile (though you didn’t always want to)

 13. Getting more sleep

 14. Following your gut (even if that meant venturing into unfamiliar territory)

 15. Persevering through the unexpected

 16. Not beating up on yourself as much

 17. Accepting your flaws, regardless of what people might think

 18. Deciding not to take life so seriously

 19. Laughing a heck of a lot more

 20. Not doing the same dumb things that you did in 2015

 21. Not reminding yourself of the dumb things you did in 2015

 22. Spending more time with your family

 23. Saving more. Finally.

 24. Planning for the life you want in the future

 25. Being more grateful for the little things.

 26. Making choices that you know your future self would be proud of

 27. Being patient with yourself, knowing through every journey you face you’re becoming wiser

Have a go and let me know what you think!  Would you change any of the items above?

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Six-Step Process to Conducting a Year-End Review of Your Career | Randall S. Hansen, Ph.D.

The end of the year is often a time of many events — wrapping up business for the year while also wrapping holiday presents. This article presents something you can give to yourself — something that you can get done during the holiday lull or over some vacation days — a quick and easy process for examining what you’ve accomplished in your career this year and where you want to go with it next year.

Of course, you may have already done at least some preliminary work on reviewing the year — especially if your employer hands out year-end bonuses or conducts year-end performance reviews — and if so, that’s a good place to start your year-end review.

But unlike your on-the-job performance review, the purpose of this article is to suggest you consider conducting an even more important assessment — taking stock of your career. Now is the perfect time to review where you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to go.

Before you begin your assessment, take a moment to ask yourself the most important question: Am I happy and fulfilled by my job and career? No matter how successful you’ve been in the past 11 months, if you are fundamentally unhappy with your work, spend the vast majority of your year-end review focusing on self-assessment and discovering your career passion. Consider a side-trip from this article to the Quintessential Careers Finding Your Career Passion Tutorial.

Don’t rush your review. Consider using a weekend or one or more of your vacation days to reflect on your career. You don’t need to — and probably shouldn’t — complete all six steps in one sitting. Break it up over several days if you like.

Step One: Review Career Goals.

Did you set any goals for your career this year — formally or informally? Most people have some idea of what they want to accomplish next in their careers, such as getting a promotion and/or raise or perhaps achieving better work/life balance. Setting some goals is an important activity because goals help provide the focus you need to move your career forward — and to avoid distractions or activities that may slow your career progress (or worse, devalue you). So, if you had any goals for this year, answer these questions:

• Did I achieve my career goals?
• Am I satisfied with what I did relative to my goals?
• Did anything happen to change my goals over the course of the year?
• How should I modify my goals for next year?

Step Two: Review Your Career Year.

What have you done this year? This step is about documenting your career progression ad identifying key achievements. Thinking about all you’ve done over the past 11 months or so, ask yourself these questions:

• What have I accomplished?
• What new skills have I acquired?
• What have I learned?
• What opportunities were gained and lost?
• How am I better today than I was at the beginning of the year?

Step Three: Develop Your Career Synopsis.

Where are you in your career? Review all aspects of your career and examine where you stand at this juncture. Some questions to ask yourself:

• Am I where I should be in my career?
• What has helped or hindered my progression?
• Am I happy with my current employer?
• What are my strengths and weakness?

Step Four: Envision Your Future.

What’s your next career step? Take some time to plan for next year (and perhaps beyond), picturing the path you want your career to take. Again, here are some questions to help you:

• What do I want to be doing more of in my career?
• What do I want to be doing less of in my career?
• What’s the next step in my career?
• When should I be taking this next step?
• What’s my ideal/ultimate career dream?

Step Five: Career Action Steps for Your Future.

How will you get to that future career? Make a list of what you need to do — career goals for the coming year — to get to where you want to be next in your career. These might be things such as building your network, gaining additional experiences, changing employers, strengthening your career brand, or pursuing additional training/education/certifications. Questions to ask yourself:

• What do I need to prepare myself for this next step?
• Do I need to find a new employer to make the next step?
• How do I position myself for this next step?

Step Six: Share Your Career Vision.

Are your career goals and action plans feasible? Schedule a meeting with your mentor(s) and to get reactions to your plan, as well as advice for achieving it.

Final Thoughts on Career Year-End Reviews

Once you’ve completed these six steps, you should not only know yourself and your career better, but have some specific goals and action steps to help you progress along a career plan.

Another benefit from completing this year-end review is that the results from part of the analysis should assist you in updating your resume if you have not been keeping it current as the year progressed. Even if you are extremely happy with your employer, it makes sense to have a current resume for that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, or worse, if your employer decides its time to downsize the workforce.

Finally, use these free Quintessential Careers resources to assist you with your career year-end review and plan for your future:

• Using a SWOT Analysis in Your Career Planning
• The Art of Career and Job-Search Networking
• Career Branding Tutorial
• Career Planning Articles
• Your Career Planning and Job-Search Calendar
• Plotting Story of Your Ideal Career
• Moving Up the Ladder: 10 Strategies for Getting Yourself Promoted
• Value of a Mentor: Find Yourself a Mentor
• Workplace Resources for Dealing With Your Current Job/Employer

Questions about some of the terminology used in this article? Get more information (definitions and links) on key college, career, and job-search terms by going to our Job-Seeker’s Glossary of Job-Hunting Terms.

Let me know what you think below.

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What Great Leaders Actually DO | Brendon Burchard

In this 11 minute video Brendan Bruchard sets out the 6 e's of leadership: what great leaders actually do.

Let me know what you think below...

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Overcoming Negative Emotions and Boosting Motivation | Steve Pavlina

A negative emotional state can really ruin your day. Prolonged stress, depression, or anger are clearly not conducive to high levels of performance. And the worst part is that these emotional states tend to be self-perpetuating. Working while overly stressed can lead to even more stress. Depression and worry can cause you to avoid taking the kinds of actions that will help you escape the pit of negativity. And anger can lead you to take unproductive actions you may later regret.

While emotional variety can spice up your life, hopefully you’ll agree that remaining stuck in a prolonged negative emotional state is something to be avoided. So if you find yourself in one of these states, what can you do to boost your motivation and keep it high?

I’ve spent a tremendous amount of time studying emotional states (far more than you’d care to know), and I’ve tried many different strategies for consciously managing my emotions for most of my adult life. I felt this was a worthwhile investment because of how important emotions are in human life. Our feelings largely control how well we utilize our physical and mental resources. Our feelings can literally make or break us. I’m sure you can think of a few people who’ve been ruined by their inability to successfully manage their emotions.

If you’ve followed Tony Robbins’ work, you’ll note that he places a great deal of emphasis on emotional state management. While I tend to favor different techniques than the ones he espouses in his books and seminars, I’ve found that what he teaches works if you practice it enough. The state management strategies he teaches come from neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), and there are other sources for that same material aside from Tony Robbins if you don’t like his particular style.

What I don’t like about most NLP state management techniques though is that they tend to be very short-term in their effect, and they take some serious conscious effort to apply them. If I’m feeling down, I can use a technique like changing my physiology (i.e. body stance) or conditioning an anchor to make myself feel terrific. And it works just fine. But it doesn’t stick, and an hour later I can feel I’m gradually sinking back to my previous emotional state. Given that I eventually need to sit down at my desk and get back to work, giving myself a temporary emotional boost is nice, but it doesn’t do all that much for me over the course of a week unless I’m repeating it every hour. This is my personal experience, so I’m not saying this is true for everyone. There’s tremendous individual variety in the efficacy of NLP techniques.

Similarly, I can watch a comedy or listen to some music to cheer myself up, but the effect is still very temporary. Giving myself some temporary new input to cheer myself up is nice, but usually my previous emotional state will simply reassert itself within an hour or two later.

So what does work? How do I keep my level of motivation perpetually high?

This might sound overly simplistic, but the best strategy I’ve found for staying motivated and positive is to maintain the daily habit of listening to motivational audio programs. I own quite a few of these programs, so I have hundreds of hours of audio at my disposal. Most of it is in audio cassette format, so I just pop a cassette into my tape player and listen. Some of my favorite people to listen to are Earl Nightingale, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, and Denis Waitley.

While these programs are usually packed with great information and ideas, I find that the information itself isn’t what usually provides me with the greatest benefit. It’s the emotional/motivational fact that provides me with the biggest long-term payoff. I’ve listened to some of them dozens of times, so I’m not getting many new ideas out of them. But even though the information doesn’t change, the positive attitude behind the information reinvigorates me every time. I’ll often listen to these audio programs while exercising or while doing other physical tasks like preparing meals or eating, so they don’t even take up any extra time. Most of the time I don’t even concentrate on them — I just listen passively while I focus on something else.

For me the effect is undeniable. After 30-60 minutes of listening to someone like Zig Ziglar talk about goals, I invariably feel very optimistic and focused. And I tend to get a lot of high-priority work done when I’m in that kind of emotional state. But the key was for me was to maintain this as a daily habit.

Just like physical exercise should be a daily habit, I feel daily emotional conditioning is at least as important. Whenever I’ve fallen out of this habit for weeks or months at a time, I’ve invariably gotten sucked down into negative emotional states. Then I remember my solution, plug back in, and my attitude and productivity shoot back up again.

When I went through college in three semesters, I listened to these motivational tapes religiously. My average weekday was about 8 hours of classes, but I remember that in my final semester I had one day each week with 13 hours of classes back to back, from 9:00 AM to 10:00pm with 15-minute breaks between each class. Those days were pretty insane, but in those short breaks as I walked from one class to the next, I put my headphones back on and listen to my cassettes. So no matter how tough things got, I was constantly re-conditioning myself to have a positive, can-do attitude, and this kept me enthusiastic and on top of my workload.

If you can only afford one such audio program, one of my all-time favorites is Lead the Field by Earl Nightingale. This program is fairly old, and Earl is deceased, but in my opinion it’s still one of the best programs of its type and a great one to start with if you’ve never listened to any other motivational audio. You can find a copy at Nightingale Conant — it’s about $40 there for the unabridged version on cassette, CD, or MP3 (Amazon charges $70 for it).

If you don’t want to spend any money, you can probably find a small selection of audio programs at your local public library. Mine has several dozen, and since the library is only a mile from my house, I often check them out and just buy the ones I feel are really outstanding.

I plan to add some of my own audio programs to this site eventually, since I personally find them tremendously beneficial, but I want to finish my book first before I start doing audio recordings.

What I like about listening to audio programs is that it’s easy, mindless, and passive. All I need to do is stick on my head phones, pop in a tape, CD, or MP3, and press play. I generally aim for about 30 minutes per day (usually when I exercise). This is enough to keep me feeling generally positive and optimistic all day long and getting plenty of work done.

I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but there are an awful lot of whiny people on this planet, and their negative emotions will tend to rub off on you and infect you with the whininess disease if you don’t inoculate yourself against it. Daily inoculations of motivational audio programs are the best antidote I’ve found for this ailment. It helps me stay focused on my goals and avoid going to pity parties.

Pick up some kind of motivational audio program, and try listening to it for at least 30-minutes a day for a week, and see what effect it has on your attitude and your actions. I think you’ll find as I do that this habit is one of the best you can develop.

Reading uplifting material is also effective, but I personally prefer audio for my daily emotional conditioning, so I can do other things at the same time. But there are plenty of great books and articles that can help keep your attitude positive as well.

Is it possible to overdo it? Yeah, I think so. I find it best to maintain an even emotional state that falls on the optimistic side. In my experience that’s the best for personal productivity — I don’t work as hard when I’m feeling pessimistic. But I don’t think it’s wise to get yourself so emotionally rah-rah that you lose sight of reality and start making foolish decisions. The goal should be to manage your emotions in such a way that you can best leverage your physical and mental resources. Most people would label this “sweet spot” the state of being passionate about what you do. But don’t push your emotions to such a level of intensity where you’re blocking access to your best thinking. Put yourself in a state where you feel positive and generate positive results; don’t overtrain yourself to the point where you’re feeling great about mediocre results.

What do you think?  

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One of the BEST Motivational Videos I've ever seen! | wecell4you

Great 1 minute motivational video proving that "Failure" is a necessary part of life, and ultimate success!

"If you haven't failed, you haven't lived!"

Let me know what you think below!

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