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21 August 2009, 13:07
The 23 Most Powerful Secrets toBe Happy Now by B. Vaszily
To be happy now... to achieve success and really enjoy life too... to be who you know you're really meant to be... answer these 3 quick questions:.
1) Do you feel there are internal barriers making you less happy than you want to be - and know you can be - such as stress, depression, worry, low self-esteem, lack of energy, and feeling overwhelmed?.
2) Are you honestly ready to be happy and achieve the success you know you're meant to have in your relationships, finances, career, health and other areas of life?.
3) Would you like to experience the most powerful, rapid and enjoyable secrets to achieve the success and to be happy ...
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A Simple but Startling Secret to Being Happier: Stop Being Right.
by Brian Vaszily, Founder of IntenseExperiences.com &
Creator of The 9 Intense Experiences.
Which do you want: to be right, or to be happy?.
Far more often than most people realize – to their great detriment – it really is an either/or proposition. Do you typically choose being right or being happy?.
Which of these values do your actions typically show that you hold higher?.
Most people, without even being aware of it, choose being right at the expense of their happiness. And by the end of this piece you may be surprised to see how much you do, too..
People fight, stress themselves out, make themselves and those around them miserable with their ego’s need to be right. It cuts life short and destroys relationships, businesses, and nations..
Nothing is more deadly to happiness than the pursuit of being seen as right. For personal proof of this, consider the people you know who are most insistent on their politics, their patterns, their viewpoint, their way… they tend to judge the most, insult the most, complain the most, and suffer the most. They reek of misery. This is often also reflected in their physical health..
Nothing is more deadly to being happy than the pursuit of being right..
Yet most people aren’t even aware that the choice between these two values – being right or being happy – is present in most of life’s key situations. And being unconscious of it, as usual their egos instead make the choice for them. And being the ego doing the choosing, as usual the choice is shortsighted, fear-based, defensive and unhealthy to the Self’s greater good..
Further, the more intimate the situation – the closer to home -- the less likely most people are to recognize and remember the choice between these two values of being right or being happy. And the more damage making the wrong choice does..
The need to be seen as right is enemy #1 to love and marriage. A parent’s need to be seen as right severs ties to their children like nothing else can.
So Which Value Do You Really Hold Higher?.
To “be” right implies a need for others to recognize you as such … to be proven right, seen as right. Again, it emanates from the ego and is vastly different than doing right, which has no need for external recognition. Doing right has no need for others to know you are right..
So to what extent would you choose not being seen as right if you could be happier for it?.
Could you choose not to prove your point if you were all the happier for not doing so?.
Of course there are many situations where differences need to be sorted out, and where your particular and opposing viewpoint may in fact make an important impact on a given situation. There are many situations where in fact others see black where you see white, and by helping them to see white you achieve some important benefit like saving money or preventing accidents or the like.
Dealing with disagreements is standard fare in life..
Dealing with them harshly – that is, with the ego, as if every opposing viewpoint is a personal insult to your rightness – does not have to be. There is a world of difference between contributing to the greater good (between a couple, in a family, a business, a nation, etc.) versus needing to be seen as right..
And all that said, in MOST situations where people claw, struggle and crack away at their happiness to be proven right, it means little to nothing to less than nothing anyway..
Is it really right if you ARE right about putting the toilet seat up or down but it ruins your morning, and chips away at the health of your relationship, to prove it?.
Is it really right if you ARE right about religion, the economy, and your politics but you end up angry and despising large segments of the population to prove it?.
An Intense, Transformative Experience for You to Try.
The next time you KNOW you are right about something with a spouse, significant other or anyone close to you whose viewpoint opposes yours, consciously back off the need to BE right..
Even as that “I’m right about this!” feeling wells up inside your chest, catch it and stop yourself from reacting this time..
Instead, consider if there is truly a reason to even pursue the issue at all: will resolving the difference really lead to an important benefit, such as preventing accidents, improving health, making or saving money or the like? If so, consciously remind yourself to proceed softly and kindly this time … remind yourself (and tell the other person!) that you are pursuing this discussion gently to achieve the desired benefit, not to have to be seen as right..
Chances are, though, that like most such situations, your need to be right is mostly an ego thing. The potential benefits of the other person seeing you as right don’t equal the stress, the erosion of peace and happiness, that can occur to demonstrate you are right..
In which case, just back off your ego’s desire to prove you are right at all. This time. Let it go with your spouse, significant other or whoever you are in disagreement with..
Let them believe they are right..
And watch and evaluate your own reactions to letting them believe they are right..
Most people are astonished at how difficult this actually is for them. Through this experience most people are startled at the chokehold their ego actually has on them. Even though knowing that you having to be seen as right can harm the peace and happiness, letting someone (especially someone close to you) believe they are right to avoid the harm is a mighty hard thing to do..
“But they’re going to THINK they are right!” your ego may shout. “They’re ALWAYS going to think they’re right!” you may hear your ego insisting..
Recognizing your ego’s chokehold on your happiness in this manner is the first step in removing that chokehold..
After this first time of letting go of the need to be right -- even and especially if it means your opposition will think they’re right – watch what happens. Likely, here is what will happen: your world won’t collapse. Things won’t fall to pieces because you didn’t demonstrate you were right.
Likely, here is what will also happen: there will be no arguments. No clashes between your ego and someone else’s. Nothing cracking away at your greater peace and happiness..
So then, if you want to move toward being happier, try the experience again when the opportunity arises. Consciously back off the need to be right again. Watch how your ego responds this time, so you know where you need to work on being in control of it versus it being in control of you..
And watch how your world doesn’t cave in even if you aren’t seen as being right … how quite the contrary occurs, in fact..
Approaching it like this – consciously backing off the need to be right one situation at a time, versus trying to commit to doing it for good – makes your success and happiness much more likely..
Another thing that tends to happen is that, over time, those close to you see and feel the example you are living and they end up following suite. Though not necessarily at the pace you might prefer, but they end up backing off the need to be right, too, making life all the more pleasant..
Our greatest right of all is our gift, our blessing, our ability to pursue our happiness. But most people are their own biggest barriers in that pursuit. Is your need to be right preventing you from achieving this greatest right?.
Enjoy.
From http://www.intenseexperiences.com/being-happier.html
Margarita Nomeikiene
Which would you prefer? To be right, or to be happy?.
Content
08 August 2009, 23:49
Life Cycles of a Business! by Jim White, PhD
Dear Reader,
Company's, like people, go through a natural evolution from their entrepreneurial beginnings or embryonic phase, through the growth phase into maturity, and if they are not careful they can age prematurely and eventually die. The individual products that make up the company sales have their own product lifecycles as well.
The problem is that many CEOs and Business Owners do not know where their company lies on the lifecycle curve. Nor do they seem to know where their products fit in the natural evolution of product lifecycles. As a result they are frequently surprised when they realize that it is often too late to reverse their situation.
The scenario is familiar to anyone during the course of one's life when one realizes that he has no career plan when one loses a job, and discovers it's too late to do anything about it at their age. Likewise, when one becomes ill because one did not take care of himself, it comes as a shock when few medical remedies are left to arrest life threatening ills.
I've said many times before that "nobody plans to fail...they just fail to plan".
Planning anticipates the inevitable, but if you do not know what the inevitable is then you obviously can't plan for it!
We all start out small wrinkled up little people, and we all wind up small wrinkled up little people, 70, 80 or even 90 years later these days. The path we take from one wrinkled up little person at birth to another at the end of our life is quite predictable given certain sets of circumstances.
The lifecycle of a business mirrors the biological cycle of humans. The stages of the business/product lifecycle have been well documented and are played out in the marketplace every day. The question is - where is your business in this age old evolution? Do you know?
If you don't, I would be worried. You are not alone, I visit with many CEOs and Business Owners who don't know either. Recently, for example I spent a day with the CEO of a company who has been in business for about 20 years. I was there because he did not know what to do as his business was going nowhere, and as a matter of fact declining for reasons not explained solely by the current economic recession.
After asking several simple questions about the business it was clear that he did know where his company was in its lifecycle. It was obviously not a good, healthy, growing, or profitable enterprise. There was no business plan and very little useable information about the business. I asked "what are the key performance indicators that you look at religiously"? There were none!
There was the typical mound of data about how much was sold to which customers in sales dollars, but in no organized format; nor by product. There was no way to easily determine what has been sold by different sizes and configurations of each individual product type. As a result profitability by product or by customer could not be readily determined.
There were many other unanswered questions. Here was a business that was going nowhere but down. And, the CEO and management team had no idea of where the business was in its lifecycle, nor what to do about it.
Every company generates immense amounts of data. However, all that data has to be converted into information and that information used to develop insights to determine where the company and its products are in their natural lifecycles. Without an accurate profile of where the company is, it is impossible to make assumptions about where one wants it to be. Nor can one determine the strategies to get there.
Each stage of the lifecycle of a business has natural strategies that can be implemented successfully to continue the profitable evolution of the company. However, if you don't know where you are you certainly cannot contemplate the inevitable and develop the proper strategies to deal with it. The inevitable may already be underway and arrive sooner than you realize.
If you are concerned about the evolution of your business let's start a dialogue.
jim@jlwhiteinternational.com
Enjoy!
Margarita Nomeikiene
Content
05 August 2009, 03:34
Self-Honesty by Brian Vaszily
Perhaps the Most Challenging Thing You’ll Ever Read About Self-Honesty (But It's Worth It!)
by Brian Vaszily, founder of IntenseExperiences.com
My head has been bumped and bruised, and I am thankful for it. I offer the following in the hope that maybe you can avoid a few bumps and bruises of your own.
Like you, I have heard the advice ten thousand different times in my life, delivered five thousand different ways: honesty is the best policy.
But ideas like this that seem to make perfect sense when we hear them, that seem like givens when we are reminded of them, well … it’s precisely because they are so obvious, as obvious as our own beating heart, that we so often stop recognizing them.
And therefore stop respecting them.
Then we end up spending so much time, energy and money – for many, a lifetime’s worth -- battling the destructive symptoms of this unrecognized cause: this forgetting of our own “obvious” truths.
By way of quick example, consider your own body. When you hear, for the zillionth time, how important it is to eat right, exercise and achieve emotional health to avoid heart disease, cancer and to live a long, vibrant life, it just seems obvious. Yeah, you already “know” that.
But if you’re like most people in the Western world today, you’re overweight. Or you’re battling some health issue, some symptom, based at least in part on lifestyle choices such as not exercising enough, not addressing emotional blocks, or drinking too many Carmel Macchiatos and eating too many Doritos.
So is that really knowing? Does knowing mean understanding and even agreeing with the information, or does knowing actually imply doing it?
What is obvious rarely remains apparent.
What seems sensible is rarely followed through.
And so it is with honesty.
My Headfirst Bumps
When asked, most people tend to say yes, except perhaps for the little white lie here or there, they believe they’re an honest person.
And fortunately, most people are honest on the highest level in that they don’t intentionally set out to prey on and deceive others … to intentionally con and manipulate others out of their money, business, time, knowledge and all the rest for greed, power and other perceived personal gain.
But it is the subtler form of honesty – self-honesty – that can so often be lost on those with even the biggest hearts. And it’s a particularly funny thing about this honesty: though we would all like to believe we’re being honest with ourselves, one day you inevitably bump headfirst into your own actions and realize it isn’t exactly so.
In my own case, my head has been knobbed and bruised multiple times in the last couple years.
In a certain business relationship I had invested a lot of myself in, for example, I finally realized that I had long been ignoring signals that I should’ve run the other way from the start. My heart was in the business, but so much so that it blinded me to the honesty of my own intuition.
In certain personal relationships, meanwhile, I realized that I still had a habit of concealing that which I thought would hurt or burden the other person. My intuition again knew better, but my thoughts – set in a pattern from long ago – insisted that I was better off not unsettling their emotions and instead solving the issues myself … even when the issues directly involved the other person.
Of course, though the other person’s ego may not immediately enjoy it, their spirit, and the relationship itself, deserves the truth. Real trust. Any concealment may “protect” the status quo in the short run, but it can destroy happiness in the long run. Including the things that are hard to say. Especially the things that are hard to say.
There are many reasons, perhaps infinite reasons, that we can lose touch with being honest. Most of these are not sinister – not greed, not the hunger for power – but instead understandable and even well-intentioned reasons, such as a wish to avoid confrontation and maintain calm, or a desire to keep someone safe and content.
But as Aristotle noted, “The least initial deviation from the truth is multiplied later a thousandfold.”
As author Tad Williams put it, “Every time we tell a lie, the thing we fear grows stronger.”
And as author Ambrose Pierce cautioned, “The hardest tumble a person can take is to fall over his own bluff.”
Not being honest always has a way of bruising us, if not downright slaughtering us, even when we aren’t aware of the dishonesty.
The Self-Scan
It is not an easy thing, keeping the obvious apparent. Eat right and exercise. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another. Honesty is the best policy. These take vigilant effort.
I have learned, or rather, I now strive harder than ever to practice, what I call the self-scan. Whenever I feel the slightest unease, whenever I feel my emotions trembling in any way, and whenever I sense my intuition calling out in any way, I try to step off somewhere in solitude. There I try to assess what the truth of the situation is, and what the honest course I should take is – regardless of whether it is difficult or not.
It is often difficult, and being human I am often struggling with it and forever learning how to do it better, but it has made all the difference in the world to my deep inner-peace and happiness.
Should you want to attempt this experience, and perhaps avoid some of those bumps, bruises and worse in your own life, what follows are some key questions I ask in this self-scan. You will likely want to modify and create some of your own:
# What is the truth here?
# Am I avoiding the truth here?
# Is a desire for money, power, respect, or acceptance, clouding my truth?
# Is a fear of confrontation, pain, loneliness, death or the unknown clouding my truth?
# Am I honestly scanning myself to recognize the truth here, am I honestly listening to it even if I don’t like what it says? Or is my pride, or my fear, or other ego and emotional blocks in the way?
All honesty starts and ends with self-honesty. The benefits of this honesty seem obvious, but making them apparent takes vigilant effort. Do you also believe though that it’s worth it?
Want more ? go for http://www.intenseexperiences.com/self-honesty.html
ENJOY !
Sincerely,
Margarita Nomeikiene
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