If we try to go after love by taking care of everyone else but ourselves, we ultimately will not even be as effective in caring for those we love. We as women are also setting an example for our daughters. I have a 17 year-old daughter, and I have seen how the impact of media and peer pressure can cause wear and tear on the psych.

It has been my awareness of the importance of making it a point to develop self-esteem and keep a positive self-image that has spared my daughter all types of emotional drama that I see some of her peers going through. In fact my daughter is often mentoring her friends on getting through their challenges on self-esteem issues and on more than one occasion has told me how grateful she is for the information that I share with her.

We live in a community that has recognized that there is a problem with competition, materialism, and perfectionism. All three of these issues are directly related to an issue with low self-esteem and trying to hide feelings of insecurity. Often trying to find security, love and self-esteem creates that type of messy experience in not only teen-aged girls, but also throughout the lives of grown women.

I see these challenges in my peers all the time. So, what is a major source of this low self-esteem? It’s actually negative self-talk. That’s right, we have found the “enemy” and that enemy is the “Mental Me”. It is the voice in our head that is critical and always comparing and judging.

It is also the voice that may have come from external “mean girls” that we encountered early in life. I managed to avoid a lot of external mean girl voices, as I grew up in an environment that cultivated my aggressive side, so most girls did not mess with me. However, I was my worse critic.

My “Mental Me”, the story of who I thought I was, worked overtime. It was a mean girl voice from my childhood still haunting me, one that came from my perception of the rejection I felt from home, standards of those around me, or from comparing myself to others and playing small.

You see we store memories at the cellular level – this is scientific fact. It was really cruel, and ironically, the thing is, I was not particularly mean to other girls. You see at heart, I’m very sensitive about not overtly hurting others. Yes, I have clear boundaries and will say no when I want to, but bullying was never a weakness of mine.

Yet, I “bullied” myself often with “not good enough, not worthy or not pretty enough” all the time. Well, thank goodness for my determined spirit and the realization that the true essence of me, is not the same as what I “think” about me. I learned that I was not my thought and now neuroscience supports that fact that we can stop negative self-talk as we learn how to recognize these stories for what they are – FEAR; Fictitious Evidence Affecting Reality is my acronym for it.

We are able to release this cellular memory and I’m so grateful to know how to do this for myself and to be able to teach my clients how to do the same. Having weaknesses and making mistakes is a part of the human experience. Weakness is just a challenge for you to evolve and grow stronger through.

What you do is not the same as who you are. It’s time to stop beating ourselves up and just see life as a process of unfolding. I’m like a beautiful garden, growing my various flowers of gifts and talents. This is just a new way for many to start to view the process of growth and development instead of judging self and others by some self-defeating paradigm. This paradigm’s time has come to be evolved into extinction. “Survival of the fittest and lack” from a competitive, judging, lack conscious way, is outdated and is being replaced by “survival by adaptability” and abundance.

Nurturing your Self and getting clear about a strong, powerful self-image and self-esteem, can give you the peace of mind, and ultimately health, happy relationships and business success that is at the heart of a life well lived. What do you think?

“I can’t hear what you say because what you do speaks so loudly”

If someone is playing the lottery or working multiple jobs, they have a value placed on obtaining more money for whatever the reason. Considering the level of consumerism and debt in this country, for many people, it is not just to survive that they are working and getting in debt.

Now here is the conflict. Whatever the dominant belief or “vibe” that you put out to the universe will be reflected back to you. The stronger vibration wins. What I mean is, once you realize that your situation and circumstances are reflecting what you feel or believe instead of what you “think” you want, you can begin to see what is really going on. It all boils down again to learning how to manage your own thoughts and feelings, which like anything else, becomes easier once you take the time to learn how to do it.

Now take for example, this issue of focus. You may be an entrepreneur or professional and you want financial success. If you keep talking about how bad things are, or regretting previous decisions, or focusing on your debt, you are giving your energy and attention to this and this will stick like glue to you until you stop it.

Or, if you think that money is bad, or rich people are evil, or that money and spirituality don’t mix and you consider yourself “spiritual”, then you will have inner turmoil over having money. Then there are beliefs such as what could have been passed down through religion or those around you.

For example, I had a friend who said that she use to hear from one of her relatives “I may not have a lot of money, but I can sleep at night”, which implied that money and sleep were mutually exclusive. I don’t know about you, but I have met people who don’t have money and they REALLY can’t sleep at night for fear of losing the shirt off their back.

So, where are you putting your focus, on lack or wealth? If you have debt, are you focusing on it, or what you want, which is to be financially free? In this case, get clear about what financial freedom looks and feels like and get clarity in your mind’s eye. Stop talking about the debt and just ignore it as much as possible.

Yes, pay the payment and give gratitude to be able to have the money to keep up with it, but start expecting for the way to show up for increasing income or changing your situation. Keep your attention on where you want to go, not on yesterday’s choices. Affirm that you have plenty of money, or are open to receive new ideas and opportunities to maintain a zero balance on your credit cards every month.

Do you have business goals? What do they look like in your imagination? If you are not clear about where you are going, you will easily be distracted by whatever has already taken form and shown up in your life. As Einstein said:

“Your imagination is the preview to your life’s coming attractions”

Use your imagination consciously and on purpose to see what you want and stop filling your mind and heart with the current drama. Only use words and mental pictures based on what you want. Period. You will either ignore what is, or your focus will help to continue to create, “what is”.

Mindset rules, so why not learn how to set your mind to a place that helps you to win at life, from the inside out. What do you think about the idea that thought and feelings create action, and ultimately the outcome that you find yourself in?

However, when we try to hold onto ideas that do not progress us, don’t we surprise if we join those dinosaurs either individual or collectively. Mother Nature does not play when the interest of Life is on the table. What I mean by this is, all of life is connected whether you are walking around in a physical body or not.

Your physical body is a an expression of the role you are playing now, however, when you live against life giving principles, don’t be surprised if the consequences start to catch up with you. I am referring to our emotions and feelings.

Empowerment is about seeing clearly, embracing the totality of who you are with love and acceptance, then being able to have the personal power to update those things within you that need to evolve. It may have worked for you at one point in your journey, but the environment has changed, so you will evolve or make life really tough for yourself.

The earth and civilization changed and the dinosaurs, with their destructive dispositions and oversized bodies, could not adapt, so they are no longer in the game. We are at a time of change on our planet, this is obvious. Yet, many people want to ignore this change and pretend like its business as usual.

You can feel it in the air. The energy has shifted. This is one reason why things seem to move so fast and furious – unless you have learned to live in the present moment and make friends with change and your emotions. For me, it is getting easier, not more difficult. And I am happier now than I have ever been in my life. Why?

Because I finally stopped pretending that I did not see the “elephant in the room”, I stopped repressing old emotional baggage and saw them for what they were. Emotion is the perception, either based in fear or love. It is energy at its most basic definition.  I, like most people were conditioned to live in fear – focusing on what we don’t want, like or prefer to avoid.

And this is dangerous to your mental, emotional, physical and spiritual health.

Emotions are just our guidance system as to whether or not we perceive with eyes of love or fear. They show us if we are aware in the present moment that we are love, loved and centered in love, or whether we are giving our power away to some illusion outside of ourselves. Now, there is one good reason for paying attention to fear and that is when our life or physical threat is facing us.

This is so that we can run or fight to survive; other than this, it is psychological. And psychological stress is chronic and deadly. It has now been associated with 75-90% of chronic disease, including, cancer, autoimmune issues and heart disease. Yikes!

And stress – is an EMOTIONAL DIS-Ease! Stress is about HOW, we are perceiving. When we are focusing on what we don’t want or feel overwhelmed, or beat ourselves up, we stimulate the stress response, as we are viewing life as threatening. The way I began to get out of the horrendous pattern first began as follows:

1. I stopped rejecting myself and went a mission to start liking, and then loving myself. Contrary to popular belief, this is NOT the same as narcissism

2. I started meditating to slow down my thoughts which were in over-drive as I had turned into a workaholic doing machine

3. Once I started slowing my mind/brain waves down, I could actually tell when I was beating myself up and I began to realize that I could “see” or hear these thoughts as separate from my awareness (my Being, who I really am).

4. Combining these three things, then adding conscious positive things about myself to focus on, or things to be grateful for, began to break the habit of negative self-talk.

Now there are other tools and processes you can use to speed this up. I’m talking about quantum evolution. Who wants to take the next decade to change?

Once you began to truly understand how to deconstruct the key nonsense beliefs that are wired into our bodies at an early age, you can began to more easily expand your vision for your life and make it happen. There is a process to making friends with emotions that makes all this even easier, but the very first step is to begin to acknowledge the big elephant in the room and stop pretending that you don’t feel.

Also, make friends with change; it’s the one thing in life you can truly count on! Empowerment is an inside job, dependent upon how you think, feel and ultimately act!

I figured out a long time ago that if I have to wait for someone else or some circumstance to make me happy, I would probably live and die first. So, I decided, to turn my focus, a long time ago, to finding the path that could take me to my destiny. I think that there is fate, and then there is destiny.

Our destiny is paved with love, joy and peace – regardless of outer circumstances. Our fate is what gets played out based on genetics, karma, childhood experiences and the hand-me-down knowledge that we use in our life without questioning it. My fate was not getting me what I wanted, in fact I did not feel very empowered to go in the directions of my dreams and certainly I did not see then how to make it a reality.

One thing I have discovered is that when there are blind spots in the way, even if someone hands you the treasure map, you still will fall into a ditch and not find the goods. This is what a WHOLE lot of people (I know from my own past personal experience as well), do every single day. Instead of using wisdom and courage to eliminate these blind spots, we somehow think that we can live on a whole new higher level and still keep our bad habits and low self-images running rampant through our minds.

I saw again a movie called “The Kid” with Bruce Willis. I first saw this movie ten years ago and I rented it to watch with my husband last week. This is a great movie to give you an example of how our wounded “inner child” can run our lives in so many ways.

Using this inner child example, let’s see how ignoring this inner pain can mess you up in business:

1. When you form a limiting belief about yourself in early childhood that you “can’t do anything right”(VERY easy to do), it will play out NOW, in how you see yourself and can paralyze you from taking action on everything from having the nerve to leave your boring job to finding the courage to act on your new business idea.

2. If you heard as a kid that you were a “bad girl” or that you don’t deserve this or that, and you don’t release this nonsense, you will self-sabotage your prosperity

3. Or what about, how you must work “really hard” for everything you get? You will make running your business, and your life unnecessarily challenging.

For one thing, our brains want to make us right, so you only notice and take action based on what you have wired into your nervous system in general – unless you learn how to take conscious control through awareness and eliminate these blind spots that hinder your empowerment.

You really can re-train your brain. As long as you believe that the next “magic bullet” marketing kit will make your business a success and you ignore opening your mind to new information that can help you to simply shift the inner turmoil that was never dealt with, you will not be able to experience the abundant life.

There are other ways that we limit ourselves besides these early childhood experiences, but there are not  many.

It is empowering to realize that emotions are not to be feared and that belief is something that can be shifted relatively easily when we learn how to release these blind spots that hold us back from living a life we love and see more clearly where we want to go, knowing that prosperity truly is our birthright – if we can only see a more expanded vision for our life and dump the blinders!  What is your experience or example?