Here’s my latest column on life purpose in the recent issue of Exceptional Life Magazine…. Look for it on pages 10 and 11. Enjoy!

Since we’re now officially into the last 120 days 2008 (and they’re going to go fast), I thought it might be helpful for you to have a way to give yourself a reality check on where you are vs. where you wanted to be at the end of this year. That way, you still have time to accomplish what you wanted for your soul-driven business this year. With realization, you can have actualization… :+)

So take a moment to consider the following questions… and if you discover that you’ve got something left undone yet, now is the time to make a plan and get moving!

1. What do you feel are your most significant achievements since January 1, 2008? And have you celebrated them to give your spirit the joy, satisfaction and incentive to keep you moving toward other achievements in the future?

2. What goals did you set for yourself in the beginning of the year that you have not yet achieved? How about the ones you haven’t even started yet?

3. Does your business / life look and feel different than it did on January 1, 2008? If yes, in what ways? If not, is there anything that needs to be changed or are you completely happy?

4. What regrets do you have about anything that has occurred this year? If any, what can you do to either release or reframe them?

5. What is the source of your greatest joy? Have you given that enough time this year?

6. What does your morning feel like consistently? Are you ready to jump out of bed to take on the day? If not, what needs to change for you to be excited about your day?

7. Does your world reflect who you are now? Consider your environment, relationships, habits… anything that makes up your world is a reflection of you, and if it’S the ‘old’ you, it’s time to let that go because it’s now officially become ‘clutter’.

8. Who isn’t being helped by what you do because you aren’t visible enough yet? And what do you need to do to become seen by them?

9. Do you feel spirit moving through you on a daily basis? If not, where have you become disconnected from your source energy?

10. Are you spending your life force energy for your best and highest good? Are you focusing on the best use of your time, energy and resources for what you want to achieve on a regular basis?

Bonus Question: What three things will you do in the next nine days to get you closer toward your goals for 2008?

My intention is that this has helped you get some significant clarity so you can close out the year in celebration of your achievements. (And if you need catalystic back-up, I’m on stand-by to support you!) :+)

Here’s to a Productive, Amazing and Abundant Last 120 Days!!!

“You and I are essentially infinite choice makers. In every moment of our existence we are in that field of all possibilities where we have access to an infinity of choices.” ~ Deepak Chopra

I believe that we are spirit traveling incognito as humans; in fact, I wrote a movie about that. The key concept to us, as spirit, is that we are swimming in infinite possibilities on a daily basis (not that time has the same meaning to spirit), and we have to make choices in order to “tangible-ize” our possibilities. Every day, we choose little things, whether to work out, what to eat, who to spend time with and what to work on throughout the day, and big things, like our interpretation of the meaning of life and how we want to show up in the world.

Our job is not necessarily to create opportunities but to decide which ones to pursue. And the hardest part about it is that there are no guarantees – there are only choices.

So how do we know what choices are best for us? A positive choice just feels good. Some part of us knows that it is the right thing to do. It opens up our lives and creates new momentum for the best of us to shine and be recognized, even if only by our own inner fan club. And we know when it’s time to make a new choice when we feel: stuck, tired, sick, confused, negative, fearful, bored, safe, comfortable… and more. We know when it’s time to make a new choice. The question really becomes: are we ready to have something new?

A positive choice moves us forward in some sense (even if it’s hard to do or against the well-intentioned advice of others) because it helps us become more aligned with our true purpose. It’s a choice that is about us, not about anybody else or their wishes or what they can gain by it – it’s truly in our best interest and we have the domain to make the choice at hand. A positive choice sets us up to win – we will gain something, whether it be knowledge, skills or experience, by pushing our growing edge.

3 Things You Can Do:

1. Look at where your growing edge is hiding. Consider where you are too comfy, or anxious, stuck, bored, fearful, negative… any feeling that isn’t absolutely free and flowing is a place where your growing edge for new choices is revealing itself.

2. Look at the results you’ve gotten / are getting. If don’t like the results of your life, which is shown through everything around you, it’s time to be accountable to yourself in a new way. New choices will require you to show up more clearly, in a more focused and powerful way. And how you show up by making new choices will generate new results – it is simple cause and effect. Change the cause (choice), and you change the effect (result).

3. Make a list of all your possibilities. Consider new directions you could be pursuing in the following areas: career/vocation, self-knowledge, family, wealth, reputation, marriage/relationships, communications, creativity, community, health. These possibilities might come from ideas, inspiration, new associations, doing something you’ve been putting off, advice from other people, enjoying a wish list thing… it’s pretty much endless. If you can list at least 3 new directions in these areas off the top of your head, you’ve got some choices to make – or you have to answer to yourself why you’re not decided to make new choices after making that list!

May you enjoy both the swim in infinite possibilities and the results from making positive choices!

“Children should be seen and not heard.”

“Who do you think you are?”

“You’re bigger than your britches.”

We are often unknowingly conditioned to think we are meant to live small. For many of us, the growing up process is predicated on all the influences around us – our families, friends, peers. Our influencers want us to learn how to live in a society, the rules that keep us in line and blend in, which often means limiting who we are, making our dreams attainable (a dichotomy, don’t you think?) or even being invisible. In working with clients recently, this theme has shown up in numerous ways in their environments and, obviously, behavior. Are you showing up the way you want in your life? Are you living in and from your own power? Are you getting the results you want?

One of my clients struggles with being visible – she has had difficulty losing weight (an obvious buffer that so many of us use unconsciously!) and was late to her own celebration party, not realizing that her lateness was resistance to being center-stage. Her time of arrival actually made her even more visible (but in a different way!). Another client has been stabilizing her life but not making real progress – it’s no wonder that her car died and her email suddenly stopped working. She was going nowhere and ignoring the messages she was getting. (I’m happy to report that both of these clients are now moving forward again…)

To support you in living your life bigger, here are seven tips to use in your environment to get new results.

1. Clear space, clear mind. The de-cluttering process can be emotional, but it is guaranteed to make you feel stronger when it’s done. One’s home or office is a reflection of one’s mind – it should be current and clear. You’ll give yourself the space to expand into on many levels (physical, emotional, mental, etc.).

2. Check your “center”. The center of your space is health – yours, and of everything else in your life. It holds the essence of clarity and distilled decisions. Take a look at the physical center of your space – if it feels “off”, messy, over-full, unbalanced, these are the red flags of your life center. Once you recognize them, you are responsible for changing them.

3. Be in the command position in every room. This means that you can see what is coming in the door, with a wall behind you for support and confidence, and not directly in the doorway (or the mouth of chi). The wider your view, the more certainty you will feel and the more options will be visible to you.

4. Create the conditions for nurturing relationships. Look at furniture placement to ensure that it supports conversations and be sure that you have a supremely comfortable place to sit. (One of my clients actually told me that she doesn’t have one piece of comfortable furniture for herself anywhere in her house – for years! And then she wondered why she could never relax at home…) When you – and your guests – are comfortable, communications and relationships flourish.

5. Use symbols consciously. Anything in your space holds the energy of the person who created it or gave it to you and sends messages to your subconscious regularly. If you don’t love it, or get a positive feeling from it, it is not serving you. Be very aware of the symbols and messages you allow your environment to reflect and reinforce to you – place only objects with positive association and meaning.

6. See your bigger life picture. Use your front door daily – it is the main entryway for the universe to bring you abundance, opportunities, prosperity and more. It is the transition from the outer world to your personal sanctuary. You will see the big picture of your home (and, therefore, life) – and it won’t be the garage, kitchen or laundry, which generally mean work. If you don’t like what you see, change it – it can be as simple as adding a plushy throw pillow or a fresh coat of paint.

7. Use color to maximize your energy. Infusing your environment with color has a tremendous impact on how you feel in the space. For example, earth tones are nurturing while bright colors give you “zing”. Red is transformational energy and passion, green is growth and healthy life force energy, yellow is health and trust, blue is wisdom and self-knowledge, and purple is abundance and royalty. A bouquet of flowers can shift the whole space.

Remember, the world is not served by you playing small – your real contribution comes from being all of who you are!

“Only let the moving waters calm down; and the sun and moon will be reflected on the surface of your being.” ~ Rumi

What’s a stillpoint you ask? A stillpoint is the place where movement ceases and everything becomes clear as a result. Think of a rollercoaster – the kind that loops around first one way, then backwards through the loop, getting ever higher in its circle until the cars are at the top of the circle, hanging upside down – just hanging. THAT is a stillpoint. The object in motion has come to rest, balancing on its’ stillpoint. The same can be true for us even in the midst of our lives.

Our stillpoint is revealed to us when we can see through our conditioning, bring conscious compassion to all that we know and discover about ourselves, embrace all of who we are (warts and all), and find the freedom in the newness of life experiences. Some people would define it as the ageless connection with source energy, of merging with your divine for even just a moment… before the busy-ness of your linear mind, the connections of your relationships and the activities of your life come in and take over (which, as an entrepreneur, is exponentially more when the business-mind kicks in!). However, when we can attain our stillpoint, we have the opportunity to breathe with our entire being. We can stop the resistance, the struggle with what IS in appreciation of simply being.

One of my recent clients experienced her stillpoint for the first time. She hired me because her business wasn’t working. There weren’t enough clients, not enough money, too much to do, and a feeling of “not being enough”. Of course, when that starts, that message becomes internalized and becomes magnified as a vicious circle. She’s been going at a frenetic pace on all levels for nearly a year – she was worn down, fried out, and frustrated by other solutions she had tried but that didn’t make a difference. She’d tried time management, hiring a professional organizer, working with a marketing firm to handle her promotions, working with a life coach, and more – but each was a band-aid that addressed symptoms temporarily but didn’t last.

The reason was that she hadn’t met herself in the space of her stillpoint to remember her power, her true purpose, and the abundance of time to get what was truly important done – she not only had more than enough but she now knows that she IS more than enough in her stillpoint being. By taking a “break” to reconnect with her personal stillpoint, even though the first experience of it lasted less than a minute, she began to go beyond her current state to relate to a much bigger picture of herself. She no longer views her past, or even her current state, as a predictor of what can be… and when she needs to fill up again on that level, now she can always access her stillpoint to feel the expansive focus of who she IS to align her world with that.

Take a minute to think about that… the expansive focus of your personal stillpoint…What would that feel like? How do you get there?

Three Things You Can Do Today:

1. Stop and be still. Give yourself permission to just stop. Close your eyes and imagine yourself as a blender that you turn off, or of being on a rollercoaster that just stops, or as a pebble that stops tumbling in the water to simply reflect the sun’s light. Be still. Breathe. Turn your conscious attention inward to find what your stillpoint looks like – it might look like you are a circle of light balanced at the top of a pyramid. It might be a feeling of the universe coming to a point in your center or a feeling of non-sensation in your body, as though you are free to do anything and gravity isn’t holding you. The most important thing is that you stop and be still – even if it’s less than a minute, it will help you to connect to your source energy, to that place where no one else can go but you.

2.Pay attention to your near-wake or near-sleep state. In the few moments that dance between being asleep and waking up, or just before you fall asleep, the “veil” is thin for us because our conscious mind has already started to disengage or hasn’t quite engaged yet. In those “limbo” places, you can access your stillpoint more easily – the place where you are completely content and have no need to do anything other than be in that moment. If your conscious mind tries to horn in, you can sometimes push it back; over time, you will be able to prolong that in-between state to the extent that you might feel like you were there for a really long time (even if in chronological time it only lasted 30 seconds). It doesn’t take much to feel your stillpoint if you are attuned to doing so.

3. Feel your feelings fully. When we are disconnected from, or don’t allow ourselves to feel, our feelings completely, they will find a way somehow to be acknowledged. Just like a child that demands to be heard, our feelings will find a way to get noticed. And “old” or “stuck” feelings can clog up our stillpoint because it becomes “noise” over time instead of a valid messenger in the moment. When you can be internally still enough to feel your feelings, and act accordingly, your internal world is in flow and you can more easily access your stillpoint.

And one last thought – taking the time to create a personal ritual for yourself can be a powerful way to access your stillpoint (see my New Year’s Eve ritual above).

At the risk of using “woo-woo” language, connect with your stillpoint to be in who you are in the largest sense, and then bring that back into your everyday world for faster results on your priorities. It’s about vibrational creation from who you are in your most pure form to make manifest your gifts and desires in a tangible way. Imagine if everyone created their lives from the purity of their essential being… gives me the chills just thinkin’ about it!

“You will become as small as your controlling desire; as great as your dominant aspiration.”
~ James Allen

Imagine that you’ve gotten everything you ever wanted… the life partner, the house, the car, the clothes, the physique, the friends, the money, the lifestyle…

Now what?

If you’re like most humans, it’s likely that you’ll sabotage yourself in “having it all”. We here in the Western world are actually socialized to be in continuous striving; that is, we don’t know how to have and enjoy everything we’ve worked for and received because if we have it, our culture says we’re not working hard enough, or infers that we don’t know what to do if we don’t have tangible goals.

Imagine a train chugging up a steep incline, with its engine working hard… when it gets to the top, what does it do? It goes down – logic says that there’s no other way to go. But what if there WAS another way? What if when the train got to the top, it got to cruise along a plateau rather than drop down? If you can now put yourself in that picture as the train, you’ll see that you naturally keep working hard (going up) or know how to cope with not having the top (going down); however, you likely don’t know how to cruise the topmost plateau you’ve attained. I call this the “Havingness Quotient”. It doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but it is descriptive.

The higher your “Havingness Quotient”, the easier it will be for you to hold on to and enjoy your achievements – and vice-versa. You might even think of this as “abundance self-esteem”. If you have a low “Havingness Quotient”, you will proportionately experience the “downside” of what you want and work toward. In that case, you will find yourself comfortably in discomfort as you “re-tread” what you’ve always done. So how do you increase your “Havingness Quotient”?

Three Things You Can Do Today:

1. Ask for more than enough. Often people don’t think big enough in terms of their own abundance (including fees for their services!). Our limited thinking and expectations will keep us in the work hard mode, chugging up our personal hills. Ask for the most you think you can have – and then double it! The first time you do that, it can be mind-blowing… one of my clients asked for $4000 in income monthly, which when doubled, became $8000. This was inconceivable to her, until she reconciled her books the next month – she discovered she actually generated $9000 that month for the first time in her life!

2. Watch where you are giving. We cannot enjoy our own “Havingness Quotient” if we give away all the good stuff. Part of the reason that we are here is to ENJOY what we are creating. Now, that’s not to say you shouldn’t share – I’m all about that! However, if you are a chronic over-giver (and I know that one personally!), you need to consider where you are leaking what you have because it could be draining your “Havingness”, which keeps you in overwork and less joyful for your own benefit.

3. Look at your self-sabotage patterns. The good news about being human is that we can be our own observers. We can actually see where we are tripping ourselves up if we look close enough, because it’s a familiar pattern. I see clients who go into “drama” or focus on external “noise” because they don’t know how to handle abundance. Others will go 90% of the way and then quit on a nearly successful project, and I’ve seen others yet who stay in the preparation for the preparation of the preparation… you get the idea. They’re not moving forward. It could be that people don’t know how to be if they’re not striving anymore – they just don’t know what to expect if they have it all. Look at where you are potentially sabotaging your own “Havingness”.

My intention is that you receive and enjoy all that you want and more… because if you increase your “Havingness Quotient”, you are living on purpose and you’re setting a positive example which will ultimately benefit everyone around you.

“Nothing will work unless you do.” ~ Maya Angelou

When I first read the quote above from Maya Angelou, I naturally interpreted it to mean that work was the key to getting what I want. Upon re-reading it, I realized that it was actually about the inner self working seamlessly with my world in all ways that is the real crux in creating what I want.

My personal discoveries in the last few weeks have revolved around how important it is to take care of me. Sounds basic, but what’s challenging about that is that it feels funny to put myself first. And I know that’s exactly what I need to do in order to get to my next level of being.

It’s important for me to get there because there are people waiting for me to support them in leveraging who they are and what they know into the new, tangible, real world results they want. So it’s actually more selfish of me to NOT take care of myself, which is counter-intuitive for me on soooooo many levels.

I also know that this is what every master teacher does… they put themselves first in order to lead the way. While every master teacher says they are not yet a master and that becoming a master teacher is a continuous work in progress, it is something I focus on and am growing into every day.

Are you putting yourself first? Are you growing on purpose? Are you doing what you need to do to have your inner self working seamlessly with your world? If you feel stuck or out of balance, or feel like you keep hitting life’s “speed bumps”, or things aren’t turning out the way you want, it may be because you haven’t had the knowledge or the support to make the changes you need to be in alignment with your true self. And it’s time to consider taking a new direction for your personal best next step.

Three Things You Can Do for Inner Growth:

1. Look at your life. Right now – look around you and see your life. Everything in your life is a manifestation of past choices, decisions and commitments. Celebrate what you have, because it’s what got you to this moment. Now decide and write down what you want to do next, in the next 90 days, and really make the commitment to get them done.

2. If you find that you need some extra “oomph” to get something done, set yourself up to win. Put some structure around your goals by breaking them into bite-size pieces. Schedule them for consistent action, and honor them like you would any other appointment or project.

3. Lastly, it’s all about your environment. Look around and see who is really supporting you in being your best. If it seems that either people are holding you back or you are holding yourself back so you can keep them in your life, it’s time to consider if there is a way to restructure that. If restructuring, or renegotiating, that relationship isn’t possible, it could be time to release it. Get support for what you want to do (either from people around you or hire a professional).

Remember, any new “anything” (habit, goal, routine, relationship, etc.) takes time and focus to grow. The real, most important work you can do is what nobody else can see you doing – they only see your results. Make sure that you are working on all levels AND that you like what you see in your life. Do the real work.

One doesn’t discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. ~ Andre Gide

To reference another nautical proverb, strong ships were not built to sit in the harbor. Each of us has strengths that we don’t even know because we haven’t tested them. By putting ourselves in situations that require more of us than we think we have, we stretch our own knowledge, our capabilities and demonstrate that we can handle whatever we set up for ourselves.

However, to do that means being willing to endure times of self-doubt, when loved ones give well-intentioned advice about what to do (which, quite often, they’ve never done themselves and can only come from what they know to be true in their world). It means being willing to know your destination, without necessarily knowing exactly how you’re going to get there. It means intense personal development to expose and foster those inner connections, capabilities, and dreams.

What do we need to let go of in order to get completely different results from what we’ve always gotten in our lives? The following might surprise you.

Our Being

The way we’ve always been won’t take us to where we want to go, if where we want to go is a new place. That is, if we want to move to the tropics, but we’ve always lived in the frozen tundra, we will have to make adjustments in how we think, dress, behave, eat, etc. Energetically, we will relate to a new environment through a new way of being. This is what is required to activate the universal law of attraction; which basically states that “like attracts like”. If we continue to be as we’ve always been, we’ll continue to get what we’ve always had. In order to create new success, we have to grow and express our inner Being.

Our Knowing

We accumulate knowledge throughout our life, through education and experiences. That knowledge may or may not be relevant anymore to where you want to go. However, it was essential that you have it at the time in order to get to where you are now. It is most helpful to have a beginner’s mind, a blank slate, so that you release preconceived ideas and are open to the opportunities that present to you along the way. The most important thing to “know” is that you are living on purpose, and if that doesn’t feel right, it’s time to make a change.

Our Doing

We need to do things differently in order to get new results. That applies to people, to expectations, to prioritizing our time and energy, and more. In relationships, we may find that we are showing up in a new way, and our “people” may not know what to make of us. This is a natural reaction, in a way, because if we are doing different, they also have to change. If we decide to not do something different, we are limiting our self-expression to keep the peace. In other areas, we must actively release our attachments to our history, because we are no longer that person – it is a new day. We must release our expectations to a particular outcome; that is, we know we want to get from San Diego to New York, but if we are too attached to it being via an airplane, we will miss the scenic route where we could meet the exact right opportunity. Our Doing needs to trust and be in flow with our new states of Being and Knowing.

Moving out of the comfort zone into the vitality of new life is exciting and dynamic – and can bring up our innermost fears. However, by being willing to experience the letting go of what we know in exchange for what we can have is the only way we will achieve the greatness of success already waiting inside us.

“Don’t be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment. The more experiments you make the better.”
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

When you stop to think about it, everything in life is experimental. We learn by trying things. Sometimes we learn from other people trying things, but that doesn’t mean it will work the same for us.

Looking at your life thus far, it’s likely that you can see where you experimented and where you didn’t – and chances are, where you didn’t was where you felt restricted, inhibited or constricted by something outside of yourself. If you have a feeling of not having a choice, it’s hard to imagine doing anything other than what you feel compelled to do. And yet, that is EXACTLY when you must!

In order to remember that you are creating your life as you go, especially in those seemingly choice-less moments, it’s important to let yourself get a little crazy with something new. An experiment means that you don’t know exactly how it will turn out – that’s why you do it!

When you can release your attachment to a particular outcome, or more, a perfect outcome by what you already know and expect when there’s probably a bigger/better outcome waiting for you, you will find that your world becomes a bigger place because you are showing up in a bigger way. There are some masters who teach that when it feels uncomfortable, you’re to the point of true transformation. True transformation doesn’t happen passively nor by staying small.

We are not our experiment – we are the creators exploring the edges of what could happen when trying something different. And we can do something different whenever we want – even in the middle! If you want to make the perfect dessert, you can put the ingredients in a different order, with varying quantities, adding new ingredients as you go, making it pretty – or not. You probably can’t reproduce the exact same thing again, and, however it turns out, it’s all good. What you have is a successful (and delicious) experiment!

Some educated types call experiments “calculated risks”. A calculated risk means that you are taking informed action so that it turns out approximately close to what you think you want. It’s a fancy way of saying it’s an experiment. If you assess where you are starting from, quantify what you want to have happen, consider all the possibilities you know about, act on one (or more), see what happens, evaluate it and make changes – you have the framework for an experiment!

Admittedly, it’s a lot easier to play when there’s supposedly nothing “at stake”. However, if we aren’t experimenting on a regular basis, and if we stay in our comfort zone, we are constricting ourselves (think rootbound plant). We effectively limit our own life force energy. Our life here is all about taking chances, figuring out what we need to know, and living all the way.

Three things you can do today to start experimenting:

1. Imagine yourself putting on and wearing a virtual lab coat. If you were actually wearing your life lab coat, what would you do differently in your life right now?

2. Consider a current situation from “beginner’s creative mind”. That is, if you didn’t know you, and you were peeking on someone else’s experiment, what would you understand / learn from your observations? What would you think would be the probable outcomes? And what would you change?

3. Look at a past situation seemingly “gone wrong” and reframe it as a necessary experiment to get you where you are now. There were important lessons that helped you get where you are – what were they? How was that situation really a successful experiment?

Your life IS a grand experiment – grab your virtual labcoat and get ready to create some change!

“If we want to manifest something in our reality – whether it’s our career, finances, health, relationships, or physical body – we must first transform how we think. It may be a challenging concept to wrap the mind around, but like it or not, we are all the authors and architects of the results we experience in our own life.” ~ Niruka

The really interesting thing about getting fast results is that it takes a shift to get them. As Niruka says in the quote (up top), the results start with our thoughts. And the pace of our life is generally such that we have a lot going all the time, which doesn’t leave much “new thinking” time.

When we are thinking the same things in the same way as we always have, it stands to reason that we get the same results we always have. In order to create new results, we need fresh input from other sources or we need to challenge ourselves to think in new ways. And we need to take the time to do it; note by the way, the use of the word “take”. Time moves on, and it’s up to us to get what we want from each and every moment. A life time can get away from us unless we seize the moment to take a moment, as it were.

It’s important to remember that in taking a “new thinking moment”, we’re doing something somewhat, well, new for ourselves. It’s not going to feel quite normal to be stopping the flow of your life to do some new thinking. In fact, you might find that it’s exactly then that the phone rings, or you find the “to do list” that you’ve had for the last year – that’s called unconscious resistance. Resistance is anything that keeps from a new goal or activity, but it can be overcome with focus and persistence.

Here’s an example of a “new thinking moment” in action: I offer complimentary 20-minute sessions to prospective clients for two reasons. One, so that we can get to know each other and decide if it’s a fit to work together, and two, to fulfill part of my life purpose to infuse new energy into that person’s situation. You’d be amazed at what can happen in just 20 minutes.. one woman realized she was potentially being conned out of her life savings, a man realized that his life was out of control as measured by his personal feng shui (and got it rolling in a big way in just 3 days afterward), a woman realized that she could start a new business with fewer challenges than she had feared, and yet another decided it was time for her to move forward with her new career as an artist without holding back on receiving her value financially. These are just a few of the shifts that I’ve been able to support in working with people (actually, that’s BEFORE we begin working together – it only grows from there!). The difference a moment can make…

Three Things You Can Do Today:

1. Look at your chosen situation in opposites. That is, do the opposite of what you’ve always done to get new results. I think there was a Seinfeld episode where George did this and had new George adventures. If you don’t know what you want, look at what you don’t want for the mirror; for example, if you don’t want to be lazy, you want to be active. So, what would it look like if something in your life were the opposite of what it is?

2. Suppose what a respected mentor, colleague or even celebrity would do with your life. If you can’t think of where you can start in your life, think about what someone else would see, suggest or do. If you’re like the rest of us in the human race, you’ll likely discover that you have a lot of resources that you are either taking for granted or not recognizing. So what would someone else do with what you have in your life?

3. Take 11 minutes first thing in the morning to lay out your day, your life or consider a particular situation or relationship so that you have dedicated time to what really matters before everything else starts up. This one practice can shift your life completely. And it doesn’t mean that you have to sit in lotus position and “om”; you can take a walk for 11 minutes and just be with yourself and nature. The important part is giving yourself that time to slow down and focus on you.

Here’s the big question: are you ready to slow down to speed up?