7 Powerful Questions That Will Help You Get Exactly What You Want

If I could show you how to get crystal clear about your goals and effortlessly start taking action in the right direction, would you be interested?
In this article we’re going to go through seven powerful questions that will not only help you get clear about what you want, but also identify the obstacles and eliminate them.
These are some of the questions I use in my coaching sessions to help you get clear about what you want and make it so effortless for you that you can’t not take action.
What you’ll really love about these questions is how simple they are. I recommend you grab a pen and a piece of paper and follow along with the questions.
This will help you integrate them and really make progress in your life, which is what you want, right?
For the purposes of this article, I’m going to travel back in time to when I wanted to start Wake Up Cloud, so you can get a concrete example of how these questions are used.

1. What do you want?

What is it that you truly want? If you were a client, I’d dive into this question more deeply because there are always multiple layers, but for the sake of this article, I’ll keep it brief.
Before I started Wake Up Cloud, my heart was telling me to just go ahead and start. I wanted to help people, share what I knew, and also make a living doing what I love.
I had a yearning to do something else than be a professional poker player. Looking back now I see that I’ve always wanted to do this, but I just wasn’t ready, until now.

2. Why do you want that?

The next question focuses on the purpose. Why do you want what you want?
You’re writing all this down, aren’t you?
I wanted to start Wake Up Cloud because I wanted to feel fulfilled. I wanted to feel good about myself, and I felt like it was something that I was drawn to do.
That is the simplest way I can put it.

3. What stops you?

Next we come to a really interesting question, which helps you identify the obstacles that stop you from taking action right away.
What stopped me was that I didn’t believe I had anything to share with the world. I looked at other personal development bloggers, authors and speakers, and they seemed to know so much and I so little.
It took me a few years to finally reach the point where I got mad at myself and took action even though I wasn’t sure I had anything to contribute.
And I’m glad I did.

4. Why is it like that?

Once you’ve identified what stops you, it’s time to look at why you have the obstacles in the first place. Where have they come from?
My obstacle was that I didn’t believe I knew enough. I wish I had known what I know now, because it would’ve helped me tremendously in getting started faster and with more confidence.
Why did I believe that I didn’t have enough to share? How did I know that was the case? This is where it gets tricky for me. Many of these questions really make you think.
We often take our beliefs and thoughts for granted. Once you start really looking at them, they start breaking down if they aren’t useful, and you become free from the shackles of your mind.
I believed that I wasn’t enough because I went inside and tried to compare myself to people that had been doing this for years. It didn’t match, which “told” me that I wasn’t good enough.
These kinds of limiting beliefs are what usually stop people from going after what they truly want.

5. How have you been perceiving this as a problem until now?

How have you perceived this to be a problem in your life? I mean, I could’ve just decided to not start Wake Up Cloud and the problem would’ve been solved, right?
The problem was that I wanted to do something that I knew I could do, but I was comparing myself to other people and stopping myself from taking action.
Funny how that works, isn’t it?
One part of me was saying, “Go for it!” while the other was saying “Wait a minute, you don’t know enough. What if you fail?”
The funny thing about a split like this is that usually both parts want the same thing. They want what is best for me.

6. What would you like to believe?

What would you like to believe instead of the limiting belief? This is an interesting question, because it lets you discover that you have choice, and that you’ve always had choice.
In my case, what I would’ve wanted to believe at that point is that I do know enough, and that I can learn whatever I need to know as I am taking action.
This question helps you imagine what you want and look at the future differently. We can often get stuck in one way of thinking, so jumping out of that can begin to break the spell of the old belief.
So imagine, what would you like to believe instead? How would it feel if you believed something more positive and empowering?
And how would your future look different if you did that now?

7. What would happen if you could?

Last, but not least, what would happen if you could? This is an eye-opener for many, because it may open your eyes to something scary.
What I mean by that is that you may be afraid of success in some way.
For example, what would happen if I did start Wake Up Cloud? My thoughts at the time would’ve probably been that I then would have to put myself out there.
I might have to do interviews, create products, and learn all kinds of new stuff. This is all unknown territory which had the potential to evoke a lot of old fears.
So in some way, my limiting beliefs were helping me stay away from this. Once you’ve identified what’s going on, you can deal with it and starting flying toward what you truly want from life.

By: Henri
Source: Wake Up Cloud

3 Simple Ways to Start Raising Your Self-Esteem Today

Image by ·Insomnia·

“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on.”
Unknown

Your self-esteem is one of the most important things in life. It is one of those things that will make a huge difference for you if you work on it.

As you raise your self-esteem you will for instance:

• Feel more deserving and trusting in yourself. This will allow you to more fully explore your own potential and start going for your dreams and happiness. Instead of holding yourself back in life because you do not think you deserve good things or because of fear of failure, rejection etc.
• Live as you want. Not just when it comes to your goals and dreams. But also in the way that you will be better at standing up for yourself, asking for what you really want, saying no and to not feel pressured by shoulds or perfectionism.
• Stop feeling lousy about yourself and start feeling that you are OK and good. Sure, life still has its ups and downs with better self-esteem but those ups and downs also become easier to handle. And if you become more understanding, accepting and loving of yourself then just about any day in life will become better and happier than it used to be.

Those are a couple of reasons why I have created my brand new course, the Self-Esteem Course. It will launch on Tuesday as the headline mentions.

But that is not the only thing about self-esteem that I wanted to share today. I also wanted to share three simple ways that you can start using today to start raising or to better maintain your own self-esteem.

1. The daily self-appreciation journal.
It is easy to get lost in basing your self-esteem on just what you accomplish, on what you get done in a day or week. But basing your self-esteem on just that makes it pretty unstable.
One way help yourself out with that and with appreciating what is good and awesome about you is to use a self-appreciation journal.

You can do that by taking out a pen and notepad (or use a word processor on your computer or cell phone) every evening for a week. There you write down 5 things you appreciate about yourself. But make sure that you do not only write down accomplishments. Also write down good stuff related to your core-self esteem. By that I mean things that always there no matter how you perform at work or in school. It could be things/traits like your sense of humor, your kindness, your honesty, wisdom, creativity and so on.

If you like, continue to make this kind of journaling a habit of yours after the first week is up.

2. The stop word or stop-phrase.
We all have an inner critic. The critic can spur you on to get things done and to behave in way that gains acceptance from the people around you. But it can also drag you and your self-esteem down.
The inner critic whispers or shouts thoughts in your mind. It could be thoughts like:

• You are lazy and sloppy too, now get to work.
• No one really likes you for who you are.
• You always fail in relationships.
• You aren’t good at your job at all and someone will figure that out and throw you out.
• You are worse or uglier than someone else.

Now, the inner critic can as I mentioned help you to be productive and so on. But there are alternatives that are better. If you want to become more effective then it will for example be healthier and more productive to remind yourself of your major reasons for doing what you do each day. You could write down the most important reasons why you are focusing on this project, on these classes in school and so on and put that note where you will see it every day.

But, as you start going on that other, healthier path, you also have to stop the critic so it does not start to drag you down. You have to talk back to it.

You can do so by simply creating a stop word or stop-phrase that you say or shout in your mind whenever your critic pipes up with a distorted and self-esteem hurting thought.
Simply say: Stop!

Or use something else. I like these two phrases:

• No, no, no, we are not going there!
• No, that is just stupid.

They have worked well for me to get the inner critic to shut up. Try these ones out or create one that feels good and works for you.

Then use it to not get dragged down by your own inner critic when it may get triggered by for example criticism or a mistake in everyday life. And as you use the word or phrase and it becomes a habit and as you find healthier paths towards what you want your critic will pop up up less and less.

3. Be kind and understanding towards others (and yourself).
By being kinder towards and more understanding of others if becomes easier to do the same to yourself. One simple way to focus on being more understanding and kind when you feel the need to judge someone is to use helpful questions. One I find to be really effective is:
What parts of this person can I see in myself? How is he or she like me?

This one helps me to shift my perspective from what is different and what I feel the need to judge to what we have in common instead. This tears down the mental barriers between us and I can feel closer to and more understanding of this person.

Try it out whenever you feel the need to judge someone, no matter if it is someone close to you or someone you don’t even know.

By doing so it becomes more natural to extend and use this more understanding and kind frame of mind when you view yourself too. And by behaving in this way towards others you will feel better about yourself and in that way raise your self-esteem too.

By: Henrik Edberg
Source: The Positivity Blog

How to Greatly Improve Your Results

If you want to greatly improve your results in whatever goal you are trying to obtain, there is one thing you can do to make this happen. Before I get into that though, let's take a look at how most people try to achieve their goals. By understanding this, you will see just why the method I am going to tell will work so well. Normally when people set a goal, the excitement is high and the energy level is plentiful. So they go out and start taking massive amounts of action. This is great, but what normally happens after a few weeks or months is that they start going into a passive state of mind. Basically, their intensity level plummets and they find themselves less passionate about obtaining their goals and struggle to continue taking action at the level they were before. So to greatly improve your results, you must increase your intensity. Let's look at an example of this in the world of sports. If you've ever played a sport where you compete head on with your opponent, you will notice that often times you can defeat a person with more skill than you by simply playing at a higher intensity level than they are playing. When I say high intensity level, what I mean is that you are not holding anything back. You are going full out during the duration of the match. I have experienced this myself many times playing various sports. For some reason, whenever I compete with someone who I know is better than me, my intensity level goes through the roof. I will go all out just to be able to keep up with their level of play. The odd thing is that even if they are more skilled than me, I sometimes find myself being able to beat them or at least come very close. In contrast, when I compete with someone who I know I can beat, my intensity level is usually a lot lower. Here's what I am getting at. If you want to greatly improve your results in achieving your goals, you need to increase your intensity, and the way you do that is by seeing yourself as the underdog. Now, as a side note, this won't work for everyone. People who are not competitive by nature, will normally shy away and back down when the odds are stacked against them. So if this is you, this probably won't work. However, you can still increase your intensity simply by revisiting your reasons to achieve your goals in the first place. Those of you who are used to competition and usually play at a much higher level when coming up against someone who is more skilled than you, seeing yourself as the underdog can help you increase your intensity. This is a way to bring out that warrior within you, that winning spirit. It's the voice inside of you that screams, "I will not back down!" When you pursue your goals with that kind of mentality and intensity compared to going at it in a passive manner, you will greatly increase your odds of obtaining your goals. Until next time... Love Life. Do Good. Live Well. By: Kevin Ngo Source: Motivation Well Being