Motivational Quote of the Day from Nightingale.com
"A goal should scare you a little, and excite you a lot."
— Dr. Joe Vitale: Motivational author and speaker
Abraham-Hicks Publications
"Do I have a responsibility to make the whole world beat to my drum?" No, nor could you. You beat your drum, and the Universe will respond to the drum that you are beating… There are as many different worlds being lived by as many different perceivers of the world as there are perceivers of the worlds. --- Abraham
Excerpted from the workshop in Phoenix , AZ
When you say "Yes" to something, you include something you do want in your experience. When you say "No" to something, you include something you don't want in your experience. --- Abraham
Excerpted from the workshop in Orlando , FL
Even in your rightness about a subject, when you try to push your rightness toward another who disagrees, no matter how right you are, it causes more pushing against. In other words, it isn't until you stop pushing that any real allowing of what you want can take place. --- Abraham
Excerpted from the workshop in Boston , MA
Our Love, Jerry and Esther
From Astrology.com
Daily Feng Shui Tip
Today's energies ask us to celebrate whatever we'd like on 'Make Up Your Own Holiday Day,' so I'm going to declare this 'Readers of Ellen Whitehurst's Daily Feng Shui Tip of the Day Day' and share with you a secret recipe that brings big fortune and lots of luck! It will be essential that you invite some magical oils to the party as well. You'll need twelve drops each of sandalwood essential oil, bay laurel oil, frankincense and vetiver oils. Blend these oils with a quarter-cup of any base oil such as jojoba, almond, grapeseed or olive oil and wear as a moisturizer or cologne. A little dab of this 'Crown Of Success' oil will have both abundance and prosperity stopping by to party with you! Woo hoo -- let's make this holiday a staple on our own yearly calendars!
Daily Dream Decoder
Nurse
The nurse is a unique figure in medical personnel dreams because of the romance attached to the helping professions.
Sometimes nurses are even portrayed as angels. Aside from the romantic component, nurses often functions as extras in other medical or sickness dreams.
Searching
Hunting for a misplaced item is frustrating. However, discovery can be a pleasant reward. In dreams about searching, whether the dream ends with or without finding the object is important to its meaning.
If the dream resolves itself, it is important to note what or who you were looking for, and how those things were found. Think about the relationship that exists between the object and who (if anyone) helped you find it. Many times, the thing that is lost in the dream reflects an area of life where we are feeling incomplete or ineffective. Finding it in partnership with others may be a cue to seek outside wisdom in the resolution of the circumstances.
A 48-year-old man reports dreaming: I am looking for my car keys. They are nowhere to be found. I am turning the house upside down, yelling at my wife, and generally coming unglued. My daughter is out, and I begin to blame her. A friend of hers comes in and says I should look in the front door. I do. My keys are there.
This searching dream is interesting because the man reported throughout counseling how anxious he was concerning his daughter's driving. The loss of control he was feeling in his daughter's life consumed much of his emotional energy. After this dream, he realized that much of the home conflict he was experiencing came from his own anxiety more than actual defiance on the part of his daughter. The insight produced from the dream resulted in a much more peaceable home life for everyone involved.
In an unresolved dream of searching, the dream often illustrates the need to find resolution of an emotional trauma. The unresolved search can be for an object or a person.
Some common versions of the person dream include the crying baby that cannot be found, chasing a runaway whom you cannot locate, or receiving a message that cannot be returned. These dreams may occur in periods of extended grieving, such as the death of a loved one.
Another unresolved search scenario is the unfound place or item. For example, you may have a map in a dream that leads to no where. Or perhaps you simply lose an object by setting it on the table. Dreams of this nature can give tremendous insight into the goals of your life and how effectively you are actualizing them. If you are having a lot of these types of dreams, it may be that you need to examine whether your goals and your behavior are consistent or mutually exclusive.
Disfigured Objects or People
We are used to the modern proverb it's all screwed up as a metaphor for situations and relationships that fail to meet our expectations. Dreams of this nature often reflect our verbalization of people or things that fail to fulfill our needs. How many disfigured people or objects you encounter in your dream is an indication of what facets of your life are not meeting your expectations. Can you ascertain how the object or person came to be disfigured?
Does the disfigured object continue to work, or does the disfigured person seem unaware of what you are seeing?
Conquering the Barriers to Asking for What You Want
By Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen
© 2012 Nightingale-Conant Corporation
One of the major reasons we don't ask for what we want or need is the barrier called fear. And its roots can run deep. Sometimes where it all comes from is that we were shamed as children. We asked for something, and we got, "Don't you care about this family? How could you possibly ask for that? Don't you see how much we're struggling?" It goes on. Or we got laughed at or we asked for something in class, and the teacher put us down, and then we thought to ourselves. "I'll never let that happen to me again." "It's not safe." "I'll be hurt." So we stayed inside, and didn't ask.
The biggest fear is the fear of rejection. You can all remember perhaps if you were the boy or the girl in school, and there was a big dance, and you saw this boy walk across the dance floor, and he asked this really beautiful girl to dance. And all of a sudden, she shook her head no, and he walked all the way back across the dance floor. And everyone was kind of laughing at the guy. Boy, he really blew it. Well, how often are you going to do that? Pretty soon you give up. Or asking a girl out on a date. I can remember in college asking a girl out in front of a couple of my friends, and she almost laughed. To this day, I'm not really sure what that was about. But it was a long time before I asked anyone out again, especially in front of others.
There's a research study that was done by Mutual of Omaha in which they sent leads to salespeople. They were actually bogus leads that were prepared by the company to find out whether or not these people would ask for the order. Now some of these people would drive an hour across Iowa
So they brought in all these great sales trainers that taught them all the 35 ways to close the sale. Then they sent them back out. And what happened was the number of people who actually asked for the order, you'd think it would go up to something like 99%! But it stayed relatively low. They realized it wasn't because people didn't know how to ask for the order, rather people are afraid to hear the word "no."
I was working at a company that makes half of the world's eyeglass lenses. And that was the first time they had ever brought in an outside trainer. I got there a day early, and I started hanging out with the salespeople at this conference, golfing, and so forth. I kept asking them, "How many of you know who the top three or four salespeople in the company are?" They knew and said, "Oh, yeah, Joe, Margie, Bob," etc. I asked everybody, and it was the same three people over and over.
So when I gave my speech that night, I went up and I said, "How many of you know who the top three salespeople are?" Almost everyone raised his or her hand. Then I said, "How many of you have ever gone up to them and said, 'Hey, can I take you to lunch or dinner? Would you teach me some of the things you do that are different, because obviously you're doing it better than I'm doing it and you've got something you can teach me.' " Out of 300 salespeople — now this is a very successful company — only three people raised their hands. Three! And I said, "Well, why don't you do that?" And everyone said, "Well, why would they want to talk to me? They'd probably say no. Maybe they wouldn't share their secrets with me."
Then I asked the three salespeople, I said, "How many of you would be willing to share what you do?" And they all said something like, "We'd be absolutely willing to share it. I mean, we love to talk about our success. In a way it's kind of bragging, but it's teaching, and we like to do that." We are killing ourselves because we won't ask, because we're so afraid we're going to get rejected.
Another barrier to asking for what we want is low self-esteem. Most people don't know this, but two out of three American's have low self-esteem; only one out of three have high self-esteem. We often say at our seminars, "Look to your right; look to your left. One of you is okay; two of you are in trouble." When you think about that, it's pretty amazing. And what happens when you have low self-esteem is you don't feel worthy of asking; you don't feel worthy of receiving.
I remember doing a workshop in Florida
Turns out during World War II he had taken a whole troop up the Rhine River Miami
Many of us are running that same game. I don't deserve, and therefore, why would I ask for something I don't believe I deserve? A lot of people believe their needs aren't important. Never got what they wanted; therefore, they never felt that they were validated in their importance.
Another aspect of that is having the sense of "I'm not worth it." I remember when my son came to me, and he wanted to be in the Boy Scouts' Pinewood Derby. It's a race where you have to carve pieces of wood for racers, and that is not my thing. I am not good with my hands; I'm mostly good with my mouth and my head. And so I'm sitting there and I'm working with him on this thing, and I spent a couple nights with it and I thought I've been a really good father.
Then I got this story that we included in one of our Chicken Soup for the Soul books, in which it says that as a parent you're supposed to create great memories for your child. Do something that they'll look back on and never forget. I remember one of our authors from a Chicken Soup book, Hanoch McCarty, took his children and drove them all across the country, and they stopped at every body of water from Cleveland to the Pacific Ocean . Any body of water they saw, they swam in it, if it was a lake, a pond, a river, whatever it was. Now these children will surely remember that for life.
So the story that we put in the book was about this father who spent the entire summer, every free moment, every night, every weekend, helping his child build a race car that they would then have in one of these derby races. And later the child said, "Knowing that my dad would do that made me realize that I was important enough to spend time with. Therefore, I realized I was important to have anything I wanted in life. I was worthy of it."
And I sat there thinking about the two evenings I had spent on our Pinewood Derby car, and I started to feel, oh, a little bit guilty that maybe I hadn't done that. Here I was perhaps passing on my own neurosis to my own kids. As a result, I spent a whole lot more time with him. But I think it's important that we realize many of us are walking around with low self-esteem because we never got what we wanted; therefore, we don't think we deserve what we want.
Another barrier to asking for what you want is pride, and it's that we're afraid that we're going to appear helpless, weak, needy. And our friend Marty Jeffers says there's a threefold model of most people's evolution. We start a need, "I need this. I need that." Then you go into greed, and you start getting it, and you become a little avaricious. And one of the wealthiest men in Australia
But the third thing that Marty Jefferies taught me is that when you get your consciousness right, when you really know how to ask for yourself and you really know how to balance your life, then you're freed. And the whole goal here is to go from being needy, greedy, to being freed. Because once you're freed, you can go out and free other people.
I can give an example of where pride in my own life stopped me and how I really began to see it. When I went to a 10-day meditation retreat up in Barre , Massachusetts
And I went to see the instructor of the course — they have an interview halfway through, and I think it's to make sure you're not flipping out, which I felt I was. So I went in to see the instructor, and he said, "Are you okay?" And I said, "No, I don't think so. I think everything I ever believed in is dissolving." He said, "Oh, that's good." I thought he was going to say eat more meat, leave the seminar, do something, yet he didn't. So I walked out of there and began to cry. I realized I was just scared.
So I went outside and saw a big Georgian mansion, and I started hugging a big pillar. I was holding on to it as if I were trying to hold on to some kind of reality. And I started to realize that for my whole life I felt that it wasn't okay not to know. I had to know everything perfectly. As my dad would say, "Where's the hammer?" that I had had an hour earlier. I didn't know. And I should know because I had taken it. Then I would be teaching school, and someone would say, "You know, Mr. Canfield, what are the five causes of this? Or, what about this?" And I couldn't say "I don't know," because it wasn't okay to admit it. And so I'd say, "Well, I think that's a really good question. Why don't you read chapter five and report back to us tomorrow?" A nice little teacher trick. But the truth was I started to realize all these things I didn't know, and I started to get in touch with why it was never okay for me to ask.
And I was sitting there — I was probably about 38 years old — and I was just hugging this thing, crying away. And I started to realize all of my defenses were dissolving, all of my fears were letting go. So I could start to ask for what I wanted. Because I had that male macho thing that we all have: Men don't ask. We're supposed to know.
We saw a cartoon recently. It showed a man, and his wife asked him the question, "Why don't you stop and ask for directions?" And he says, "Because my genetic program prevents me from stopping to ask for directions, that's why." We men have to look as if we have it all together. We have to look as if we're totally self-sufficient at all times.
And so the reality is there's a whole deal of programming for men that it's not okay, so our pride as men is at stake; it stops us from asking.
Our friend Jane Bluestein is not only an extraordinary speaker but a terrific writer. She says, "I remember the first time I asked for $500 as my speaking fee. I literally had to take a drink of water because I couldn't get the words out of my mouth. The woman who hired me said, 'Yeah, that's fine.' I just stared at her and she said, 'You didn't think we were going to say okay, did you?' I was thinking, Am I that transparent? She said, 'You're worth $500' " It seems as if every one of us has an issue asking for money.
When I decided to become a public speaker, I was a high school teacher. And I was extremely shy. The reason I became a speaker was not because I had this love for the platform but because I felt a need to share something I thought was very important that I'd been learning about self-esteem. I remember the big problem was trying to figure out what my fee was going to be. So I looked around, and most people back then were doing it for very little. Because if you were in education, my belief was if you cared about children, you couldn't possibly ask for a lot of money because that would mean you were only in it for the money and not for the children's benefit.
So my first talk was for $25. I drove through a huge snowstorm. I got into Connecticut from Massachusetts
Well, over the years, my fee went up to $300. I mentioned Hanoch McCarty before. Hanoch was in graduate school with me, and we've been lifelong friends. So I asked him, "Hanoch, what do you charge for a speech?" He said, "I get $800." I said, "$800! How do you get $800?" Because here I'm getting $300, and I think I'm equally as good as he is, and he's getting more than twice what I make. He said, "I ask for it."
Now this was a revelation to me. How could you ask for that much money? And he said, "Well, I just do because it's available." Well, I couldn't believe it. So I said, "Okay, I'm certainly worth it. I'm going to ask for that."
So I practiced for a whole week, $800, $800. What's your fee? $800. And I was totally nervous to ask for this, because I thought that they were just going to think I'm a rip-off capitalist person who doesn't care about kids. But I practiced.
So now I got a call from Cedar Rapids , Iowa
Now the next guy who called me, he said, "What's your fee?" And I went, "$1,200." And he said, "Well, that's a little steep. We only have $800 in our budget." And I said, "Well, for you, special deal. We'll work it out."
But it was amazing. I was so afraid to ask for that kind of money because I was afraid of how I'd look. I was afraid of this image that I was trying to maintain for the public. And I figured it was costing me, let's say, if I gave 100 talks, it would be $30,000 versus $80,000 if I was charging $800. It's amazing to me how we stop ourselves because we simply don't ask.
My pride was kind of a false humility-type pride, where I was trying to look as if I were more caring of people than perhaps I really felt inside. Even though I was doing it for the children, I was more wrapped up in my image of looking good.
Remember — all you have to do is ask!
No comments:
Post a Comment