When you talk you aren’t just communicating with your words.

In fact, you are communicating with your whole body.

According to research done by Albert Mehrabian, currently Professor Emeritus of psychology at UCLA, words are only 7 percent of your communication.

The rest is your voice tonality (38 percent) and your body language at 55 percent.

These numbers may vary depending upon the topic, situation and how something is communicated (for instance, talking over the phone is obviously different from talking face to face) but body language is still a very important part of communication.

Three good reasons to improve your body language:

• Improve your communication skills. If you improve your body language you can get your thoughts across in a more effective way. You can create a connection to another person more easily. When using more powerful and appropriately balanced body language your communication skills become better and more focused.
• Emotions are linked to your body language. Emotions work backwards too. If you feel good you’ll smile. If you force yourself to smile you’ll feel good too. If you feel tired or down you might sit slumped down. If you sit slumped down you’ll feel more tired and negative. Just try to sit straight up for 5 minutes and feel the difference in energy from half-lying in your chair.
• Increase your attractiveness. It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. A better posture and a more enthusiastic and focused body language will make anyone more attractive. And not just in a sexual way but also when talking to new friends or in job interviews and business meetings.

These 7 common body language mistakes is a mix of deeper things that control our body language. And a few tips where you manually correct and stop reinforcing certain old habits.

1. Not keeping your emotions and focus in the right place.

It seems to me like the biggest part of your body language is how you feel. When you feel open, positive and confident that will come through in your body language. You’ll smile and laugh more and gesture confidently and openly.

So to improve your body language in a consistent way in your day to day life the major part consists of improving your life. For example to sleep enough, to eat right, to work out and to get the things you want to get done handled. When you live the life you want to live, when are going about your daily life being your “best self” then you tend to feel good or great. And that comes through in your body language.

As expected, no quick fixes will solve your problem. They can help though.

You can for instance change how you feel temporarily and then build on that feeling by acting as you would like to feel. Once example would be to take kind actions towards someone even though you might feel envious. And then build on that kind feeling your kind action generates. Here are few more ways to quickly change how you feel and a few tips on how to turn a bad day around to a good one.

2. Becoming too self-conscious.

To keep your feelings, thoughts and body language in the right place or to make a change you need to monitor yourself. However, over-doing it will quickly turn your ambitions into feeling self-conscious and nervous. If your inner dialogue goes “Am I doing it right? Am I sitting right? Am I walking too slow? Or too fast?” then you are feeling worried and anxious. That comes through in your body language.

So you need to learn to check your feelings/thoughts or the part of your body language you want to change once in a while. And learn to not let this desire to change spiral out of control into babbling thought patterns in your head that just go around and around and make you feel bad. More on this in the next section.

3. Taking yourself or life too seriously.

Generally, taking yourself or things too seriously isn’t a great idea for several reasons. It can cause you to get offended and angry or resentful for the smallest negative thing someone says or does. It can make it hard for you to let things go and instead you let them fester. It can make tasks a whole lot harder to get done as you might see everyday life as a bitter struggle. It can help you reinforce and strengthen victim thinking.

This isn’t good for your interactions. And it isn’t good for your body language as your negative feelings will come through to others.

It’s also not a helpful attitude to have if you want to change your body language as it can make you take this challenge all too seriously. That can cause you to get upset with yourself when you make a mistake. And make you think so much about the challenge that your thoughts get stuck in self-conscious loops.

A few tips for adopting a lighter attitude towards yourself and life are to not identify so much with your thoughts and emotions, to realize that you are not you ego and to develop an abundance mentality.

4. Moving too fast and fidgety.

If you move too fast you can feel stressed. The stress can then reinforce how fast you move. Or make you more fidgety. Moving fast and fidgeting around can make people around you feel stressed, nervous, distracted and uncomfortable.

Shaking your leg while seated or tapping your fingers against the table rapidly are two fidgety habits. Touching your face a lot is another one.

Instead of fidgeting with your hands and scratching your face you can use them to communicate what you are trying to say. Use your hands to describe something or to add weight to a point you are trying to make. But don’t use them to much or it might become distracting. And don’t let your hands flail around, use them with some control.

If you have a tick or feel fidgety then learning to relax more can help you out. You can, for instance, become more relaxed by just moving slower. This will also make you seem more calm and confident.

Or you can weed out your habit of touching your face simply by keeping it in mind and avoiding it. There might also be larger issues in your life that you need to resolve to decrease or remove your bad habit.

5. Not keeping your posture in mind.

From time to time that is. You shouldn’t make mistake #2 and getting obsessed with it. Sitting or standing up straight in a relaxed manner with your head up has a few benefits:

It creates positive emotions such as alertness and feeling focused.
It can help you with first impressions as it makes you seem more interesting/attractive.
It can sometimes help you avoid pain in your back, shoulders etc.

6. Closing up.

Being open and conveying that you are open is one of the most important parts of communication. If you start to close up or walk into an interaction closed up then it will be hard to establish a genuine connection. If you feel a bit wary and closed up inside then it will not only stop you from being open. It will also keep you from relaxing, smiling and laughing and having fun.

A few common ways to close up is to:

• Cross your arms and/or legs. You have probably already heard you shouldn’t cross your arms as it might make you seem defensive or guarded. This goes for your legs too. Keep your arms and legs open. Taking up space by for example sitting or standing with your legs apart a bit signals self-confidence and that you are comfortable in your own skin.
• Not keeping eye contact. If there are several people you are talking to, give them all some eye contact to create a better connection and see if they are listening. Keeping too much eye-contact might creep people out. Giving no eye-contact might make you seem insecure. If you are not used to keeping eye-contact it might feel a little hard or scary in the beginning but keep working on it and you’ll get used to it.
• Hold your drink at your chest. Don’t hold your drink in front of your chest. In fact, don’t hold anything in front of your heart as it will make you seem guarded and distant. Lower it and hold it beside your leg instead.

Closing up often comes from feeling nervous or insecure. You may in some way perceive the people you are meeting as a threat.

Perhaps you’re afraid that they will mock you, not like you or that you will make a fool of yourself in some way. A few tips to a shake these thoughts and feelings out of yourself is to:

Belly breathe.

This is one of my favourite tips to make myself feel more relaxed and calm in just a minute or two.

Assume rapport.

Just before a meeting, you just think that you’ll be meeting a good friend. Then you’ll naturally slip into a more comfortable, confident and enjoyable emotional state and frame of mind.

This also helps you and the other people to set a good frame for the interaction. A frame is always set at the start of an interaction. It might be a nervous and stiff frame, a formal and let’s-get-to-the-point kind of frame or perhaps a super relaxed one. The thing is that the frame that is set in the beginning of the conversation is often one that may stay on for a while. First impressions last. With some practise – to remove inner resistance towards this idea and get you to feel more like you know what you’re doing – you may become pretty surprised at how effective assuming rapport is. I was.

Experiment.

Have a look at a few more ways to handle nervousness. And a few tips for putting a stop to anxiety. Try a few of them plus the ones above to find which one(s) fit you the best.

7. Holding yourself back.

So, let’s say you know most of the things above already. It isn’t exactly rocket science. So why are you still not using those tips – or tips from somewhere else – to change and experiment with how you communicate?

One big reason may be that you are holding yourself back.

You may hold yourself back from becoming more expressive over all or, for instance, with your hands. Or you may hold yourself back completely from taking up more space or making more eye-contact.

Holding yourself back may be because of a few different reasons. The most common one is probably the one already described in the previous mistake: a fear of what others may think, say or do.

Yes, people may react negatively. And yes, you might exaggerate your body language a bit too much at first by for instance sitting with your legs almost ridiculously far apart.

However, people aren’t looking at you as much as you may think. They are like you. They have their own stuff to think and worry about. If you experiment with your body language, then sure, you might seem a little strange sometimes. But most of the time people will probably not even notice that you have changed something. They aren’t standing around watching your every move all day long.

Also, keep in mind that if you for example are normally not that expressive then what might feel weird to you isn’t necessarily that weird to others. It’s just you comparing the old way to the new way in your own head. It’s just you getting used to being more expressive.

If you change your body language for the better, most people will only react in a more positive way towards you. Because as mentioned in mistake #1, how you live your life and how you feel comes through in your body language. And if you feel great then that comes through. And emotions are contagious. So now, people you interact with feel better too. And just about everyone wants to feel positive emotions.

So, yeah, you may look like fool a few times if want to change. But that’s OK. It’s a lot better than going around all of your life and holding yourself back. And if you don’t take yourself and life too seriously – mistake #3 – then your fear of looking like a fool and being rejected in some way will decrease.

“Forgiveness is the answer to the child’s dream of a miracle by which what is broken is made whole again, what is soiled is made clean again.”
Dag Hammarskjold

“To forgive is the highest, most beautiful form of love. In return, you will receive untold peace and happiness.”
Robert Muller

Forgiveness. One of those things many of us struggle with from time to time. But why should we forgive? And how can we go about it?

Here are a few timeless thoughts on forgiveness. I hope you’ll find something useful.

1. Forgiveness sets you free.

“When you hold resentment toward another, you are bound to that person or condition by an emotional link that is stronger than steel. Forgiveness is the only way to dissolve that link and get free.”
Catherine Ponder

I think this is a great point and one of the best reasons I have found to forgive. It’s easy to get wrapped up in thinking that forgiveness is just about something you “should do”. But forgiving can in a practical way be extremely beneficial for you.

As long as you don’t forgive someone you are linked to that person. Your thoughts will return to the person who wronged you and what s/he did over and over again. The emotional link between the two of you is so strong and inflicts much suffering in you and – as a result of your inner turmoil – most often in other people around you too.

When you forgive you do not only release the other person. You set yourself free too from all of that agony.

2. Forgive yourself.

“The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbour as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.”
Eric Hoffer

What you think and feel about other people is pretty much what you think and feel about yourself. This is not something that may always be obvious. But we do tend to judge and think about people as we think about ourselves. A person who, for instance, is very critical of others tends to, deep down, be very critical of him/herself.

So how do you get better at forgiving others? You can start by forgiving yourself. Because when you start to forgive yourself you get some practise with forgiveness and you also realise how good it feels. You open up to how forgiveness can improve your life and lives of the people around you.

By forgiving yourself – instead of resenting yourself for something you did a week or 10 years ago – you make this habit more and more of a natural part of you. And so forgiving others becomes easier too.

Also, what you think is a question of forgiving others you may sometimes – after some time and inner struggle – discover is just as much, if not more, about forgiving yourself rather than the other person.

3. Remember to forgive everyone.

“We read that we ought to forgive our enemies; but we do not read that we ought to forgive our friends.”
Sir. Francis Bacon

It’s often pretty easy to see the obvious people to forgive. People who have done something terrible or someone you don’t get along with at all.

It’s sometimes hard to see that you should forgive yourself for something. It can also be hard to remember to forgive people close to you. There might be relationships where forgiveness could resolve some vague resentment or other negativity that sometimes arises between you and another person.

When you feel such emotions is can be useful to ask yourself questions like: what is unresolved here? Or just: why do I feel this way towards this person? You may get some revealing answers. They might not come the first time you ask yourself though. So keep asking a bit more.

4. When you forgive, really forgive.

“Once a woman has forgiven her man, she must not reheat his sins for breakfast.”
Marlene Dietrich

“Most of us can forgive and forget; we just don’t want the other person to forget that we forgave.”
Ivern Ball

When you forgive, you have to really forgive. Or you will continue to wreck the relationship again and again. And yourself too.

You can view forgiveness as a way to feel like you are the better person of the two of you and then hold you forgiveness over the other person whenever you feel like it to show your superiority.

But it might be more helpful to view forgiveness as a way to release yourself and the other person from being trapped in the past. As a way to throw a big piece of self-inflicted suffering out the window and get on with the rest of your life in a more open and positive way.

5. Forgiveness is not a weakness.

“The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
Mahatma Gandhi

It may sound like forgiveness is a way of giving up or giving in. As a way to be a weak person. While the ones not forgiving are angry, powerful and strong. Such ideas may float around in various parts of your world and society.

But reality is a bit different. Not forgiving just seems to mostly eat you up inside. Your feel angry and may even wish for revenge. You replay arguments and memories over and over. While the person you are resentful of or angry at may often not even be aware of all your thoughts and feelings. And so you go on, creating suffering for yourself.

Forgiving releases you from that suffering. It can also make you feel good about yourself. Doing difficult things you know deep down that you want to do tend to have that effect.

6. With forgiveness the future may become brighter than in your dreams.

“Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom.”
Hannah Arendt

“Let us forgive each other – only then will we live in peace.”
Leo Nikolaevich Tolstoy

“Forgiveness does not change the past, but it does enlarge the future.”
Paul Boose

If you look at from a very practical perspective then forgiveness is the smart thing to do. It saves you a lot of painful expenses. It makes you clearheaded again.

Forgiveness centres you in the now and in yourself once again. You stop regretting what is already in the past. You stop feeding your thought loops of negativity with more energy. And now you can use that energy and focus that was previously spent strengthening those loops to start moving forward again.

Forgiveness might not be pleasant or something you necessarily want to do. You might think the other person is wrong and that you are right. But sometimes you have to do it anyway.

Without really forgiving moving on will be impossible.

So everyone has to choose for themselves.

Do you want to stay in this protected position of feeling right and superior?
Do you want feel like the victim who has been wronged for the rest of your life?

Or do you want make a real change in your life and world?

You will have a hard time getting them both.

It might not always be easy to forgive. But it has many big benefits. And personally I would be a bit wary of playing up forgiveness and what happened more than necessary. Many of our challenges – not all, of course – become so large and complicated in our heads that we build huge, monumental problems.

Making mountains out of molehills is a good way to strengthen a victim mentality or feeling even more right than you did before. It’s an effective way to paralyze yourself.

It’s not a pleasurable or an effective way to live your life and to explore your true potential.

Note: This is a guest post by Michael Miles of EffortlessAbundance.com.

We live in a competitive society and are often told that to get ahead we require drive, commitment and determination, that we must expend a great amount of energy and, if necessary, use force to get what we want. A survival of the fittest mentality is deeply entrenched in our culture.

Much of this thinking comes from Darwin’s Origin of the Species, a work which has influenced us in the most profound and subtle ways, not least of all because it advanced the idea that competition was a natural and normal part of life, that nature was ‘red in tooth and claw.’ Whatever we might think about Darwin, we do tend to see the world in these competitive terms.

But there is another way of thinking. There is another way of getting things done, a way which sees nature differently and recognizes the importance of harmony, balance and living peacefully.

Taoism is a philosophy which seeks to achieve great things by going with the flow. The semi-mythical figure Lao Tzu is said to have written the classic Taoist text, the Tao Te Ching. Here are six short quotations from the text which give us advice on the best way to get things done. Much is lost in translation, of course, but you will have some sense of the original.

In the beginning.

To see things in the seed, that is genius.

If I held in my hand a collection of seeds, I would have little idea what potential lay in each one, but to a botanist, that potential would be clear – she might see an oak tree, a sycamore, an apple tree or a rose bush.

We cannot know the future, but we can, with experience, see that our present actions have consequences that ripple out into time and space and shape our lives well into the future. We can see, for example, that habitual negative thinking leads to pain, failure and frustration, whereas a clear vision of where we want to go usually leads to a better life.

When I look back over my life, I can see a chain of causes and effects – the actions I took had certain results which have changed my life, sometimes forever. So be careful what you think and what you do – everything has a consequence and, like the botanist looking at her seeds, seeing the potential in nascent things is an important skill to acquire.

Taking your time.

Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

Can you make grass grow by pulling it? Can you bake a cake faster by turning up the temperature in the oven? Can a boy make himself grow any faster? In nature, things happen in their own way and at their own pace. Trying to make things happen faster than they do naturally often leads to disaster – the grass gets pulled out and dies, the cake gets burnt and has to be thrown away.

A river rarely takes a straight course, meandering instead through the natural shape of the landscape, keeping to the lowest points, moving around mountains and hills. But the water keeps flowing powerfully and eventually reaches the sea.

Like nature, our own achievements can take time, and this is no bad thing. I work in education and I have seen for myself the results of fast tracking’ students through the grades and promoting them to university courses at a young age. The adults they become are often socially underdeveloped and less able to function skillfully in the complex real world: they have, in a sense, been ruined by speed. Let’s learn a lesson from nature, and do things well, in their own time.

The path of least resistance.

By letting it go it all gets done. The world is won by those who let it go. But when you try and try, the world is beyond winning.

In the world there is nothing more submissive than water. It seeks the low ground and always yields to resistance. Yet water can, over many years, wear down sharp rocks into small, smooth pebbles and carve wide, deep channels through a landscape. Electricity always takes the path of least resistance,’ finding the earth as easily as possible, yet the power of electricity has transformed our lives.

Like a reed in the wind, if we can bend down low and yield to the pressures of life, letting go and allowing the natural course of events to shape us, we can survive and prosper. But if we refuse to yield and remain firm and upright, the world can break us. We are like a ship on the ocean: rowing against the wind is difficult and pointless. Let go and let the wind do all the work. It may take you to wondrous new shores.

The only thing you can be sure of.

Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.

Whatever you are experiencing in life, it will disappear and something else will come along to replace it. Only one thing is certain in life – that everything changes. People who know this and tap into it, moving peacefully with the natural course of change can be very successful.

Clinging to the past can be a great source of misery. The future has always been a mystery, an adventure, and always will be. But to resist it is madness – a futile exercise and an enormous waste of energy. Some things are worth fighting for of course but, like King Canut, we cannot stop the tide from coming in. Embrace change, honor and welcome it, make it your friend, and success will come near.

The outcome.

Those who have knowledge, don’t predict. Those who predict, don’t have knowledge.

In the end, life is unpredictable. The wind blows as it will, and life takes us in its own direction. Despite our search for certainty and a clear vision of the future, we cannot know what the future holds for us, what new lands we shall discover when our ship has been blown across the sea. All we can do is lay the groundwork, keep a vigilant eye for danger or opportunity, and relax.

When I look back on my life, one thing is clear – I could never have predicated how things have unfolded over the years; I could never have dreamed I would be in my current situation. Things have worked out well and I could not have orchestrated them any better – nature has taken care of everything. I cannot pretend to know the future, but I am sure that it won’t be what I expect.

The end game.

People in their handlings of affairs often fail when they are about to succeed. If one remains as careful at the end as he was at the beginning, there will be no failure.

In our rush to achieve something, we can sometimes ruin it right at the end. We have laid good foundations, patiently worked for success and we are almost finished when, instead of letting things run through to their natural conclusion, we rush in and spoil everything. Have you ever opened the oven door before a souffle is quite ready? It just sinks and is ruined.

Sometimes we need to act quickly and decisively to avoid disaster – those who held on to their tech stocks after absurdly high prices had been reached at the peak of the dot com bubble soon discovered that waiting too long can be a bad thing. But acting too soon can be just as disastrous. When the prize is just within your grasp, be vigilant and be patient, waiting for jut the right moment to act.

Abundance is our natural state of being. Taoism is not a mystical or religious teaching; it is a practical philosophy for achieving great things in the most natural way and with the least amount of effort. It is a way of making life work – this, truly, is effortless abundance!

Michael Miles runs EffortlessAbundance.com. You can download his new book Thirty Days to change Your Life, for free, by visiting http://effortlessabundance.com/newsletter/

Note: This is a guest post by Christopher R. Edgar of Purpose Power Coaching.

Many of us have a habit of repeatedly replaying arguments we’ve had with people in our minds.

Our memories of past disputes never seem to fade, and we can often rerun them from beginning to end with perfect accuracy.

Sometimes, we fantasize about saying different things in the argument, imagining how the other person might have responded and pondering whether different strategies might have helped us win.

Usually, while rerunning these mental movies, we’re either feeling angry at the person we argued with, or guilty about the incident the conflict was about.  

Whatever feelings we associate with the old arguments, they usually aren’t particularly pleasant.   Our bodies become tense and uncomfortable, responding to the mental movies as if they were present reality.

Worse still, our tendency to replay old conflicts in our minds can poison our current relationships.   When we’re unable to stop watching mental movies of past arguments, we end up behaving in our present relationships as if those past conflicts were still happening today, and treating the people we’re relating with as if they were our old opponents.

This is common in intimate relationships, where we pick fights with our partners in the unconscious, irrational hope that it will help us win our old disputes against loved ones who hurt us in the past.   As psychologists James M. Honeycutt and Michael E. Eidenmuller write in Attribution, Communication Behavior And Close Relationships, conflict is kept alive by reliving old arguments and imagining the next interaction such that the next encounter may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Why We’re Hooked On Mental Reruns

It seems we believe, consciously or otherwise, that mentally rehashing these old disputes somehow benefits us.   Perhaps, if we reexperience our anger at our old antagonist frequently and intensely enough, or come up with the right arguments to make against them, we’ll somehow make them admit we were right.   Or, if we’re punishing ourselves for what happened, maybe if we torment ourselves enough the other person will forgive us.

Of course, this makes no sense.   No amount of replaying an old conflict in our heads will accomplish anything.   However, that doesn’t seem to stop us from doing it.   In fact, although many of us realize that it doesn’t help anyone to constantly relive our painful memories, we can’t seem to switch the mental movies off.   Some part of our minds seems dead set on winning that old argument, and convinced that running through it over and over will eventually bring it victory.

How do we overcome this habit of reliving old conflicts?   I’ll share three techniques here that have been helpful both to me and people I’ve worked with.

1. Bring Your Attention Into Your Body.

If you pay attention to your thoughts when you’re rehashing an old argument, you’ll likely notice that you aren’t very conscious of how your body is feeling when the mental movie is playing.   Sensations like inhaling and exhaling, the circulation of your blood and the pressure of your feet against the ground fade out of your awareness when your mind is fantasizing about past disputes.

The good news is that, if you focus your attention on how your body feels, you’ll draw your attention away from your painful memories and into the present.   As Drs. Aggie Casey and Herbert Benson put it in Mind Your Heart: A Mind/Body Approach To Stress Management, Exercise And Nutrition For Heart Health, your mind quiets and negative thoughts fade as you focus on your body, and if you quiet the body, you can calm the mind. €

I’ve found this works particularly well if you specifically concentrate on the feeling of your feet on the floor.   While focusing your attention in this way, it may help you to visualize your thoughts about the past dispute flowing down your body, all the way from the top of your head into the ground.   The thoughts then absorb into the floor and cease to trouble you.   As with an electric charge, this helps you ground out the emotional energy of the old argument.

As you repeat this practice, you’ll begin to find it becoming automatic.   Each time you find yourself about to replay an old argument, you’ll find your attention immediately shifting to the solid, empowering feeling of your feet on the ground, and you’ll find the noxious energy of the painful memory quickly flowing out of your body.

2. Envision Victory.

It can also help you kick the habit of replaying mental movies for you to imagine what would happen if you actually won the argument you’ve been rehashing.   Imagine you really had the opportunity to have your old antagonist in front of you again, and they admitted they were wrong and apologized for what they did or said.   Or, if the incident you’re rerunning is something you feel guilty about, suppose the other person completely forgave you.

Now consider this question:   what would that really do for you?   Would it make you a wiser or stronger person?   Would it make you feel more loved or accepted?   As psychologists Erik A. Fisher and Steven W. Sharp aptly put this question in The Art Of Managing Everyday Conflict: Understanding Emotions And Power Struggles, What does it really mean to win?   Is it . . . making the most biting comments during an argument?   What have we gained from this?   Recognition?   Power?   Respect?   Who judges or decides who the winners are?

If you give this question serious thought, you’ll see that the other person wouldn’t really do anything for you by conceding defeat.   An admission of guilt by this person simply wouldn’t make any lasting improvement in your life.   When you recognize this, you’ll likely find your mind’s urge to seek victory fading away.

Another illuminating question you can ask yourself is whether your opponent would make you any safer, or remove some sort of danger from your life, by admitting defeat.   In my experience, many people find themselves reliving old arguments because, on some level, the idea that someone else might dislike them or think they were wrong scares them.   They believe, consciously or otherwise, that if someone else is angry at them they’re in danger.   They fantasize about winning the argument or being forgiven, because they believe doing either might dispel the other person’s anger and make them safe again.

Rationally, of course, the mere fact that someone feels upset at us doesn’t usually put us in danger, and thus even if they let go of their anger it wouldn’t make us any safer.   When we keep ourselves conscious of this, our efforts to protect ourselves by replaying our mental movies tend to subside.

3. Observe Yourself In The Scene.

In an earlier article, I discussed a strategy for taking the sting out of painful memories involving adjusting the camera angle, if you will, in the mental movies you find yourself rerunning.   This technique works just as well for overcoming the habit of mentally replaying old disputes.

To do this exercise, start by noticing that, in the mental movie you keep watching, the camera is focused on a specific part of the scene.   You may find that the camera is trained entirely on the person you were arguing with, and what they’re doing, thinking and feeling.   It’s almost as if you aren’t present in the scene at all.

When your attention isn’t focused on what you were thinking and feeling during the dispute, you start forgetting that your own feelings, opinions and dignity matter, and thus you start accepting wholesale what the other person said to you.   When you buy into every insult, sarcastic remark or jab the other person hurled your way, the mental movie can create great pain and discomfort.

You can help relieve this suffering by remembering, each time you find yourself replaying the argument, to focus the camera on you and what you’re doing, thinking and feeling.   Don’t judge, defend or criticize yourself or anyone else who played a role in the event just give yourself your complete, compassionate attention.

Turning the camera toward yourself helps you keep in mind that, no matter what happened in the incident you keep recalling, you’re a human being worthy of love and respect.   This helps you put what the other person did or said in perspective, and makes the argument no longer seem so threatening to your safety and sense of self.

Christopher R. Edgar is a success coach certified in hypnotherapy and neuro-linguistic programming. He helps professionals transition to careers aligned with their true callings. He may be reached at Purpose Power Coaching.

“I won’t predict anything historic. But nothing is impossible.”

The Olympic Games are almost over and if there was one king at these games then that has to be Michael Phelps. He set one world record after another. He took home the most Gold Medals (8!) that anyone ever has at one Olympic Game. And he also has the most Olympic Gold Medals that anyone has ever won in the history of the games.

Phelps has some genetic advantages, like unusual long arms plus very flexible ankles, but the mental part is still crucial. So what can we learn from Michael Phelps and his mindset? Here are five fundamentals.

1. It starts with your thoughts.

“I think that everything is possible as long as you put your mind to it and you put the work and time into it. I think your mind really controls everything.”

It all starts with your thoughts. They and your emotions get you to do – or not to do – things. And how you think and feel about your results and the work you have to put in determines who you are becoming and you what are achieving.

How you act does also to a pretty large degree determine what you get from other people in your life. Emotions and thoughts are contagious. And you tend to get what you give, at least over time.

A brilliant and beautiful expansion on this very basic idea can be found in James Allen’s “As a man thinketh”.

2. Keep a steady and consistent focus.

“If I want to be as successful as I want to be, I have to be thinking about it all the time.”

Thinking about what you want is of course extremely important. But you also need to keep your focus there. Because you are and are becoming what you think about most of the time. If your focus starts to waver all over the place and you forget what you really want to focus on half the time or get caught up in other thoughts or emotions then things will be difficult.

Much of this comes down to how reactive you are to other people and events. If you are constantly in reaction to what happens around you, you let the outside world control what you focus on. So how can you get your focus to become more like an arrow that is moving forward rather than a boat where the guy at the rudder has fallen asleep?

How to train your mind to keep the focus on what you want:

• Practise. This gets the mind used to this new way of keeping your focus. The mind will slowly start to accept this way, inner resistance will lessen and keeping the focus where you want it becomes easier.
• Use your physiology and phraseology. You can use these two things to keep your emotions where you want them to be. Your emotions work backwards too. So by changing your physiology – how you sit, stand and move – to a more confident one you can feel more confident. And by using more positive words you can have a more positive frame of mind. So even if you don’t feel confident or positive right now you can quickly change that by changing your movement and words.
• Reframing. You can use reframing – to see things in a different light – to help yourself. How do you do it? One way is to ask yourself some good questions. If you are in a “negative” situation you can reframe it by asking yourself: what is awesome about this? Or “what can I learn from this?”
• Use an external reminder. Written notes in highly visible places or a bracelet with an inscription can help you to keep your focus in the right place throughout your normal day.

3. Dream without limits.

“You can’t put a limit on anything. The more you dream, the farther you get.”

Sure, there might be some genetic advantages that some have that you don’t. Time can also be a factor. You may not be able to lose those 30 pounds within a month, but you can do it over a longer time span.

You can – to a large degree – dream without limits and also use your own natural advantages to your benefit.

Now, dreaming without limits may sound like empty self-help mumbo-jumbo. But your dreams and beliefs do to a large degree determine what you can and will allow yourself to do. As Henry Ford said in his famous quote:

“If you think you can do a thing or think you can’t do a thing, you’re right.”

In my experience this is very much true. And it comes down to if you can see what you want in your reality as something realistic and if you will allow it to be there. If you don’t then you’ll work against yourself. You’ll feel a lot of inner resistance that manifests in different ways such as self-sabotage in subtle and not so subtle ways.

4. Accept what happens and learn from it.

“A lot of new obstacles are coming, a lot of new feelings are coming, … I’m just taking it for what it is and learning from the mistakes I had this year.”

Resistance is fatal to get a good performance out of yourself. And as I mentioned last Friday, acceptance can help you to remove inner resistance and get things not only done but done in a better fashion than if you are resisting and working against yourself.

Acceptance is also very helpful when you make a mistake or fail. You can resist the failure/mistake and beat yourself up. This creates a lot of inner suffering and new resistance. And that makes it emotionally harder to keep going and trying since you associate mistakes and failure with so much pain.

Acceptance is a more useful approach. It can help you to release yourself from slipping into old, conditioned patterns of self-hurting behaviour when something “negative” happens.You can instead see a situation such as a failure with fresh eyes.

And instead of beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself you can see the situation in a more positive and constructive way. Like for instance by looking for the lessons or the positive stuff in your failure. One of the greatest things about acceptance is that it can give you freedom from your old behaviour patterns and “you acting as you have always done”.

Failure and mistakes can – in combination with acceptance – be very helpful. Here are four reasons why:

• You learn. Instead of seeing failure as something horrible you can start to view it more as a learning experience. When standing in the middle of a failure, you can ask yourself questions like the ones I mentioned above in the reframing section of tip #2. Questions like: What’s awesome about this situation? What can I learn from this situation? There is always one lesson or many more in what you may see as a failure.
  You gain experiences you could not get any other way. Ideally, you probably want to learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s not always easy to do though. Sometimes you just have to fail on your own to learn a lesson and to gain an experience no one can relate to you in mere words.
• You become stronger. Every time you fail you become more accustomed to it. You get desensitized. You realize more and more that it’s not the end of the world. Failing may in fact become a bit anticlimactic – just like when successfully reaching a goal – after you have spent much time building a grandiose image of it in your head. Failing can also a have an exhilarating component because even though you failed you at least took a chance. You didn’t just sit on you hands doing nothing. And that took quite a bit of courage and determination.
• Your chances of succeeding increases. Every time you fail you can learn and increase your inner strength. So every failure can make you more and more likely to succeed. And there is probably no other way to the success you dream of without a whole bunch of failures along the way.

5. Be careful with inflating your ego or identifying too strongly with your success.

“I’m the same kind of guy before all this happened.”

If you let the success go to your head then it can, for one, make you an arrogant jerk. It can also make you more emotionally reactive as you inflate your ego and strongly identify with your achievements.

This will feel awesome at first. But soon you may start to doubt that you are still as good as your last achievement and as awesome as everyone said you were. And so you become more reactive to criticism or having a bad day. This affects the steadiness of your focus, thoughts and emotions. And so your inner life becomes more of a rollercoaster. All of this can not only affect your relationships with other people but also your performance.

This doesn’t mean that you don’t have a high level of confidence in yourself and your abilities. It just means that you should be careful with getting completely wrapped up in your past achievements and letting you ego inflate too a harmful size.