Your beliefs can sabotage your business. Especially when you have hidden beliefs that you’re not fully conscious of. As billionaire investor George Soros says about people and finances:

“People keep on misreading events and influencing events to mirror their beliefs.”And that can kill or severely slow down your business.The key is to be more aware of your sabotaging beliefs and let go of them.

Have you ever done something counterproductive in your business? And then you asked yourself why you did that? It didn’t make sense.

What usually happens is that we came to a conclusion that created a belief a long time ago. Only we don’t remember it because so much has happened since then. Let’s say it’s your belief that you have to work hard to make money. If that’s your belief hidden or unhidden, then if an opportunity comes along where you can make money without working hard, you won’t take it. You’ll feel like it’s wrong. When it actually may be a great opportunity.

When you compound all the opportunities you miss and all the dangers you don’t deal with, it’s no wonder so few businesses succeed. You either have to have only supportive beliefs all the time, or you have to get rid of your negative beliefs.

When you release beliefs that are sabotaging your business, you regain your personal power. You can see events and people for what they really are and take appropriate action.

There are many techniques of releasing false beliefs. Over the years I’ve used several different ones to help clients. For the past eight years I’ve found the most powerful way to clear away limiting beliefs is by using clearing statements to transform the energy. More on that next time.

“Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstances” ~ Bruce Barton

I was talking with a client of mine who lives in San Diego. She said that she could have started a business doing what she loves, but now with the economy the way it is, it’s just too hard. There aren’t as many opportunities as there once were.
“Really? Is that true?” I asked? “Maybe not, but it just feels hopeless.” She said.
After talking with her for a while I was able to help her see that it wasn’t hopeless and that she could change things.

Unfortunately there are a lot of people out there who think that it’s hopeless to pursue their dreams. They may not even be fully aware that that’s what they fundamentally believe. Have you come to a conclusion about what’s not possible for you to accomplish with your life?

Like it’s the human condition and it’s too hard to change things. Our grievance or our story can become too valuable. We hold onto it to explain why we avoid the full pain of dealing with whatever we feel is stopping us.

We’re so used to talking about things that we don’t seem to be able to change; we even think about them in humorous ways. Like Sisyphus laughing at his fate. Is that a way of distracting yourself. Coping with life. It’s better than being serious all the time and sunk in depression. But are you fundamentally changing anything or are you just making do and getting by?

You may even view your life like it’s a parody of what you’re capable of and what little is actually showing up. And that gets reinforced by so many melodramas, sit-coms and reality shows in the movies and on TV.

Are you the one who’s given the rose or is that somebody else?

What if you didn’t have to wait to be chosen? What if you chose you and chose to have all of your power and potency come alive by demanding it. And the world showed up at your doorstep? What would that be like?

What would inspire you, stir you, allow you step up and demand change for yourself? What are you already choosing in small tiny amounts that you could choose a whole lot more of ? And free yourself from the tyranny of lies and limitations you’re placing over your life?

Just on the other side of your despair is your brilliance. What if you could walk over the white hot coals of your greatest fear or despair fully open and willing to be present? And find yourself on the other side whole and unharmed. Knowing that you were always untouched and pure in your being. And shine in your brilliance without the impinging self doubt and wrongness that shadows so much of your existing limited life. Would you be willing to choose that?

And it’s not just a big breakthrough a huge pile of shit and then you can coast on your own momentum. It’s an ongoing demand to live on the generative edge of a monster wave of your greatness that moves throughout your life. And you gleefully living each moment.

Yes it’s demanding but it’s also fun. Because when you fully participate in transformational change, it’s exciting and exhilarating. You have more of you to be and enjoy even as you face people and events that are challenging.

You will not finally reach some enligtenment that you don’t have to be aware of other people’s suffering. But you don’t have to be diminished or impacted by them. And if you are being the brilliance you truly are, you will naturally contribute to changing people’s lives for the better.

What would you like your life and your contribution to the world to be in the next six months, year or two years?

And what will your life look like if you don’t make a demand for things to change.

If you are ready to make a change, I’d be happy to give you a free half hour coaching session to support you.

Change can come much more easily than you think. It doesn’t have to be hard or heavy. It can come light as a feather. I know many people think otherwise. Like some prominent internet marketing bloggers. Just last week I read in some new blog posts statements like:

“Positive change never comes easy.”

And here’s another great one:

“Nobody gets to reinvent the rules.”

Excuse me! NO. I’m not choosing that! Sure there are things in this reality, some rules and regulations, like paying taxes, that will probably be easier for you to deal with than to try to avoid. But that does not mean that you have to follow every rule and regulation to the T.

Especially when it comes to choosing personal growth versus entraining with the crazy limitations people believe are a natural part of living. What if change could be easy? What if giving up cigarettes or some other substance that’s not good for your body was easy?

I have had periods of time when I’ve had to have a cup of coffee, or two or three, in order to get through the day. I’ve done it even though my body doesn’t handle coffee well.

So recently when my body was telling me it really was not feeling good because I was drinking so much coffee, I asked a simple question “What if I stopped drinking coffee and didn’t need it to get through the day? What if stopping drinking coffee could be easy? What would that take?”

So the next morning I was sitting at my computer and happened to glance up at the bookshelf above me. A book was pulling me to it. When I say pulling, it was more like a brush of a feather. The book was by Gary Douglas about healing animals. Now I’ve hardly read the book at all, I don’t have a pet and I don’t work with animals. But the book was holding my attention, so I took it down and I flipped to a page that felt like the right page.

Gary was talking about how horses are often given pain and tranquilizer drugs. It may help the horses somewhat, but it leaves a chemical imprint which makes their body need more of that substance.

So I destroyed and uncreated all the chemical imprinting of coffee in my body and anything that made me believe that I needed coffee to have enough energy to get through the day. I felt an immediate increase in energy and greater space for me to be at ease with my body.

And you know what? It was totally easy to stop drinking coffee. I felt no cravings and had plenty of energy. And I didn’t get a headache withdrawal like I have in the past. I was happy and grateful! Thank you Gary! And how does it get even better than that?

Now this was a relatively small miracle. But it was magical. Bigger changes can come just as easily. They may take longer for the universe to arrange for you. But the size and degree of the magic depends more on your willingness to receive it than on how possible it appears to be.

So if you really would like to have greater possibiliites show up for you, ask an empowering question. Like “What would it take for this to change?”
And “What if it were easy?”

Let go of any judgments and expectations about what’s possible or not possible.
Ask for help. And be open to receive messages and support from the universe to help you.

And have fun with it! The lighter you ask for something and the less you think about it, the faster it can show up.

“Here’s to the crazy one, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… they’re not fond of rules… they push the human rase forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who think they can change the world are the ones who do.” ~ Steve Jobs

Crazies change things. They ask “What else is possible?”

There has never been a greater need for ‘crazy’ inventors to solve the serious problems facing us like global warming, the Gulf Oil Spill, clean energy and enough drinking water for all the people in the world.

One of the greatest ‘crazies’ who changed just about anything to do with electricity and made modern life possible was Nikola Tesla. His first major contribution was alternating current. In 1885 Tesla was digging ditches in New York city to make a living and kept seeing the hundreds of electrical wires hanging above the streets  that were necessary to provide electricity with direct current.

He knew there had to be a better way. He invented alternating current which required a tenth the wiring that direct current did. Without direct current we would have had to have a transmitting station every two miles to carry a strong enough current. Alternating current could travel much further without so many costly transmission stations. He made the modern world possible with dozens of inventions like the  induction motor, remote control and the radio.

Yet for all his amazing genius, Tesla had many phobias of women with pierced ears and  he had a fear of germs and a fear of being touched. Was being phobic an inescapable part of being a genius. Maybe, or maybe he was so sensitive to energy of all kinds that he couldn’t handle ‘normal’ living.

What is crazy? Crazy is seeing differently from the way most people see things in this reality. The difference between people who are commited to Psychiatirc wards and those aren’t is that they can function in the world, appear to be somewhat ‘normal’, and keep your clothes on in public.

If you ask me most people who are ‘leading normal lives’ are crazy. Anyone who doesn’t question the wy things are and isn’t willing to change things to me is crazy.

Really, I think everyone is crazy in some way. ‘Normal’ people are just better at hiding it.

Are you crazy? Do you think you can really change this world for the better? You might make a difference in a few people’s lives, but

What really changes people’s lives?

Do you find yourself longing to do something, but you can’t quite get there?

Don’t be afraid of being who you are. Free yourself from the tyranny of other people’s limited reality.It doesn’t matter what the status quo currently is. If you see a better way of doing something, try it out!

Are you thirsty for life? Do you wake up in the morning wondering what else you can explore? What else you can find out about? What new and interesting aliveness you can be and explore?

No matter how mundane your life or your business is, you can always discover new and exciting ways to be alive each day. Even if it’s something simple like seeing in a new way how the light comes in your office window. You can be the child of wonder you really are inside. And that can keep everything alive and interesting.

Recognize that your aliveness is the true source for creating. You don’t have to act like a child if the situation calls for a more sober appearance, but you can always have that joy and excitement inside you fueling your fire for more aliveness to come to everything you do.

I had a client who felt like he couldn’t get past the heaviness of his past mistakes and failures. It weighed down his contracting business so that he was hardly making enough to get by. I was able to help him break free of that heaviness and start generating more business. What heaviness is holding you back? Is slowing down your business and not allowing you to make more sales?

How You Feel Affects Your Business

You may think that there’s no heaviness in your life, but it can still affect the way your business shows up for you. Here’s a tip: Connect with when you were most alive and excited about life. When you were most optimistic about your business. Get the energy of that and ask for more of that to show up for you. If you feel more heaviness show up, just ask it to leave.

You Have a Choice You have a choice. You can always choose to have a more fun and rewarding life, no matter what’s going on currently. And you can choose to have a more fun and rewarding business. Some new business system or some new marketing technique may bring you more success, but it’s unlikely it will give you the full results possible without you being light and energized with it. Like a kid again. Excited at just being alive and exploring some new and promising adventure!

When you come from that place of joyful exuberance and curiosity, it feeds your endeavors with audacity and brings you far greater results.

Pamela Slim talked in an article a while back about how to choose a business to start. While she gives some excellent logical guidelines to choose a business, I’ve seen how intuition has helped me and my clients make speed up and support logical choices. When I talk about intuition, to be more precise I’m talking about reading energy. What exactly is reading energy? Everything has an energy to it. We’re all aware of energy in social situations, but most people don’t know how to talk about it or use energetic awareness to make choices. I’ll give you a quick introduction.

The simplest way to read energy is to ask a couple simple questions:

“Would this be expansive for me? Would this add to my life?”

What does that mean? Somewhere you’ve experienced when some choice you made turned out well. That turning out well, if you looked at what it felt like energetically, was expansive. It made you and your life greater. You felt bigger and you had more space.

On the other hand,  when a choice didn’t turn out well for you, aside from all the mental and emotional disicomfort and distress, if you had checked in with how the energy felt, you would have noticed that you felt heavier, more contracted and your life was smaller and more contracted.

The secret is that you are much more intuitive than you’re probably willing to admit. You can know whether a choice will be expansive and rewarding, or whether it will be contractive and unrewarding. Just by asking. That simple. But not necessarily easy for everyone. You can practice on your own and see how small choices turn out. You’re also welcome to attend free intuition training teleclasses that I have frequently. If you would like to learn how to ask questions and get clear answers for business choices, sign up for my email notifications in the yellow box up in the right hand side of this page.

Have a great intuitive day!

In a recent post I talked about how your creative edge grows your business. One way to foster that is to go to edge places to unlock your hidden business potential. As author John Hagel describes in his book The Power of Pull – places where creative people are willing to take risks to challenge the status quo and create better ways to  serve people’s needs.

Your performance improves in edge places because you’re stimulated and informed by other creative people. There’s a synergy of knowledge and talent as well as an environment where you can grow.

What is your hidden business potential? Would you be willing to get out of your comfort zone in order to unlock it?

The way to get a really powerful business vision is to open your heart and mind to see and receive what you’d really like to have. If you know the energy of what you’re looking for, what matches that energy will stand out.

If you have a sense in your heart of what you’d really like. Something will show up that really matches that energy. That really speaks to that longing in you.

First of all, it’s important to not just get the concept, the idea of what you’d like in the future. Get the feeling of it – the energy of it. Energy is much more juicy and fun than ideas. And you can create much more dynamically with the whole energy of you.

Energy wakes you up and makes you come alive! You need that aliveness and sense of fun to move you where you want to go. And instead of a static picture of the results you want, you get the intelligence of the energy letting you know where to go and what to do next.

Getting the energy of what you would like for your business connects you with it. You start to have a dialog based on awareness. Instead of just thinking. You start to know what you can be that will create that and attract that to your busness. Here are some of the steps:

1. Ask yourself a question like: “What would I really like my business to be? What would that look like? What would that feel like?”
2. Be with the question. Don’t try to  figure it out with your mind. Your mind can only show you what you already know.
3. Be open and receive a greater sense of what you’d like and would be expansive your business and your customers.
4. Once you know what you’d like, get the energy of each of those things and put them in an energy bubble and bring in energy from all over the universe to strengthen the energy bubble of your desired business.
5. Once you feel like the energy bubble is full and rich with the kind of possibilities that will attract who you’re looking for, then send trickles of that energy out to all the people who are looking for that energy but don’t know it.

Check in with your business’s energy bubble every day. Feed it with your energy and attention and ask for the universe to bring even more energy and support to spread your vision and attract more people.

You can ask: “What would expand the energy and attractiveness of my business today?”

Why do you need a business vision? You probably know that it’s a good idea to have some kind of plan and goals to reach. But do you really know in your heart what you’d like  to create?

Do you know what will excite you and energize you everyday? What will bring you closer to your customers and fulfill some deeper need they have?

Without a clear heart felt vision, it will be like working for a boss who withholds information from you and who doesn’t bother to inspire you with a bigger picture.

Have you lost a clear sense of why you got into business in the first place? Are you actually bored and resentful of your business; discouraged and uncertain about your future?

Check in with what you’d really like to have your life and business to look like. Are you completely willing to receive that? And do whatever it takes to have it? If you are, then the vision of that will guide you to have it. With a clear business vision you’ll be able to wake up each morning excited and energized, ready to start a new day growing your business. You’ll know what to do next and you’ll enjoy yourself a whole lot more.

I’ve worked with many clients who weren’t clear about what they wanted for themselves, their business or their customers. They had lost touch with what excited them and made them want to go into business in the first place. They’d lost touch with what nourished them and expanded their business.

I helped them get past the judgments and limiting beliefs that weren’t allowing them to see their business clearly. As a result they felt much more confident and ready to make things happen. They got energized to follow through with effective action and really grow their business.

In my next post I’ll show you how you can start letting go of your limitations and get a clear business vision. In the meantime, you can ask yourself: “What would I like my business to be? What business vision would inspire me and energize me and my business everyday?”

When Chicago Tribune photographer Chris Sweda  set out to photograph the new Trump Tower in Chicago on June 24th, he got lucky. He was able to capture this rare double lightning strike. It’s a ‘striking’ example, hehe, of being ready when a great opportunity comes your way. But he wasn’t only lucky, he had the skill and experience to get the most out of the shot.

What lucky breaks are coming your way that you aren’t seeing or aren’t ready for? As Jay Abraham says:

“You are surrounded by simple obvious solutions that can dramatically increase your income, power, influence and success. The problem is, you just don’t see them.”

So what would it take for you to be tuned in to opportunities so they catch your attention so clearly it’s as clear as lightning striking twice?