Tell Me I Was Dreaming

Is this really happening... it has to be a dream; these are words born in the state of confusion that ensues when suddenly we wake up and realize they are gone. Gone is a lonely, desolate word delivering a cold harsh reality with awful finality. Gone carries the sound of the human heart breaking into pieces. It invites us to cover our heads and go back to sleep, back to yesterday when nothing was changed. Regardless of how strong and competent you may be the loss of someone you love is accompanied by a host of fears.

Will you make it through this, will your world ever be the same again, will you ever stop hurting, or how can life ever be the same again? These are the fears that accompany a profound loss. Somehow diving back under the covers to dream time is a natural response. And why not; we heal when we sleep. This kind of traumatic change inflicts deep wounds, the kind we can't see but can never stop feeling. We instinctively run to the place where the pain stops, even momentarily. There is a need to return to sleep where we can once again touch the one who is gone.

For those who have experienced a profound loss, they know this is true. When we sleep those barriers born of 'good common sense' are down. When we dream we touch that which has gone, seeking answers that haunt us. We pray it was just our imagination telling lies, maybe they didn't really say goodbye; we need to ask those haunting questions, 'Can you hear me, are you OK, are you in pain, did you know how much I loved you; do you know how much I hurt?' These are a few of the answers we are seeking; we have to know, seemingly because we cannot go on until we do. And so we sleep until we find the truth, and there where our filters and bias are gone we find our answers. We don't really need an affirmation; we just know we have made the connection and learned the truth. We are fully awake again, wobbly, but able to test the road forward and learn to navigate without them. It really happened, it was not a dream.

There is no painless way to lose a loved one. It is a unique experience for everyone. No one can do more than understand your pain. Everything else is personal, as it should be. It is a broken road to travel yet in some odd way your grief protects you, forcing you to go slowly and see every option before you. This is necessary and helps you to see more clearly as you choose the right turn for you, onto a new path and a new future. It may never be pain free but you will always be more aware of how important today is and how comforting memories will always be. There is a startling clarity in creating new memories because you understand how important it is to capture and hold them close.

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Simple Ways Of Improving And Making Your Life Better

Success brings about happiness and fulfillment. However, this does not mean that you should wait until you have achieved everything you want to in life to be happy. Your attitude towards life is what determines how complete and happy you feel even as you continue to fight your way into success and prosperity. Starting with small changes and improvements today can make your life much better and much more enjoyable. So what exactly should you start doing to make your life better?

1. Start appreciating what you already have. It is human to always concentrate on things you want and things you have not yet achieved but the truth is if you start being grateful for what you have already, you will be a happier person with a positive attitude to life. It saves you from worrying and keeps you focused besides changing your perspective. Make a list of things you already have and are grateful for and go through it once you start feeling down.

2. Plan for your day beforehand. A list of to-do things is commonly overlooked yet it is one of the most workable in making your daily living better. When you plan your next workday the night before, you will wake up ready and excited to get the things you have on your list done. The planning will help you minimize wasting time and achieving very little by the end of the day. Know what tomorrow is all about before you sleep.

3. Keep off the negative thinking. Truth is, sometimes it is inevitable to stop thinking about the possible negatives in different areas of life. This is however something that can really drag you down and you should make a point of keeping off all the negative thinking. Negativity can leave you feeling hopeless and helpless and this can reduce the quality of life. Watch out for negative thinking and negative minded people to make an improvement.

4. Drop all resentments. It is most likely that you have resentment towards peers, colleagues or even family members for one thing or another. The truth is that they take up too much of your mental space and they make it harder for you to function properly. Make a decision to let them go away and forget. Forgive and forget and you will have a much lighter load to deal with in life.

5. Understand the person you are and honor yourself. No one can love you the same you can love yourself. When you know who you are, you will definitely appreciate yourself and keep up with your values. Do not fake to be someone you are not, but instead strive to be a better person every day. When you know your strengths and your weaknesses, making improvements becomes truly easy.

6. Be ready to learn. It is not always that things will work out as you expect them to and even during such times you must find a way of learning and moving on. Do not allow yourself to get stuck in one disappointment, but rather take it as a lesson, learn something and take a different approach to achieve what you want.

Plus-You Can Now Join Our FREE Mastering Success Facebook Community at www.masteringsuccess.group

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Ten Terrific Self Motivating Tips

No one can motivate anyone to do anything. All a person can do for another is provide them with incentives to motivate themselves. Here are ten very effective strategies to help you get up and get moving toward actualizing your enormous, untapped potential.

Be willing to leave your comfort zone. The greatest barrier to achieving your potential is your comfort zone. Great things happen when you make friends with your discomfort zone.

Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Wisdom helps us avoid making mistakes and comes from making a million of them.

Don't indulge in self-limiting thinking. Think empowering, expansive thoughts.

Choose to be happy. Happy people are easily motivated. Happiness is your birthright so don't settle for anything else.

Spend at least one hour a day in self-development. Read good books or listen to inspiring tapes. 

Driving to and from work provides an excellent opportunity to listen to self-improvement tapes.

Train yourself to finish what you start. So many of us become scattered as we try to accomplish a task. Finish one task before you begin another.

Live fully in the present moment. When you live in the past or the future you aren't able to make things happen in the present.

Commit yourself to joy. C.S. Lewis once said, " Joy is the serious business of heaven."

Never quit when you experience a setback or frustration. Success could be just around the corner.

Dare to dream big dreams. If there is anything to the law of expectation then we are moving in the direction of our dreams, goals and expectations.

The real tragedy in life is not in how much we suffer, but rather in how much we miss, so don't miss a thing.

Charles Dubois once said, " We must be prepared, at any moment, to sacrifice who we are for who we are capable of becoming."

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How to Conduct Your Personal Mid-Year Review

How often do you take the time out to really reflect on how you are progressing towards your goals for the year?

Now that we are at the half-way point of the year, it’s the perfect time to conduct your own personal mid-year review!


Why Conduct a Personal Mid-Year Review?

Conducting a mid-year review gives you the time and space necessary to evaluate your progress towards your goals.

Without taking the time out to reflect, how do you know whether your decisions, behaviour and actions for the first 6 months have helped you move towards where you want to go in your life?

Reflection is one of the most fundamental skill-sets of successful people.

If you are serious about creating your best life and making your dreams a reality, then you need to reflect to ensure you are making the right decisions and working towards them in the most effective and efficient way.
Benefits of Conducting a Personal Mid-Year Review

There are a tonne of benefits from conducting your own mid-year review.

Some of the major benefits include:

• Determine if your actions are progressing you towards your goals
• Determine if you are progressing at the right speed (i.e. will you reach your goal on time?)
• Determine if your goals are still relevant
• Understand the challenges you have faced and what learning’s you can make
• Identify more effective or efficient methods of achieving your goal

The more often you can conduct a personal review, the more effective you will become in your life.


I would recommend that you at least do a 6-monthly in-depth review of your goals. In fact, I encourage you to do it as often as you can. When I talk about these reviews, I’m talking about your ‘big life goals’.
Conducting Your Personal Mid-Year Review

Let me guide you through the process that I go through when I conduct my own personal reviews.

It is a process whereby I ask myself specific questions which help me understand exactly what I can do moving forward to work more effectively and efficiently towards my goals.


Get Yourself Setup

Before we get to the questions, the first thing you need to do is get yourself ready for your mid-year review. No, this doesn’t mean you have to dress up nicely and look pretty, it simply means you need to get yourself in an environment that is conducive for reflection.

So, to get setup:

Find yourself a nice, quiet environment
Have your goals and any other supporting materials with you that you can use to look over
Make sure you have something to write with

One piece of advice on the environment… try conducting your mid-year review away from your ‘normal’ working environment. This would mean getting out of the office, or away from your home and out into a park or somewhere where you can think about your life more objectively and freely.

Let’s get into it!

Question 1: Are My Goals Still Relevant?

Goals change over time. Life is full of surprises!

This is not something to be concerned about, but something to be aware of.

The first thing to do when conducting your personal mid-year review is to look over the goals that you have set and ask yourself whether they are still relevant.

How have your goals changed?

Sometimes when you originally set your goals the future is murky. It’s impossible to predict the future and to know with 100% certainty that a set of circumstances will eventuate. In-line with this, you may have had some clarity on the general direction of where you want to go, but now that you are six months into the year you have realised that there is a slight alternative that you are now working towards.

This is fine and goals are to be constantly tweaked and refined… this is all part of the process!

The key is to ensure that your goals are still linked to the things that you are passionate about.Passion creates the drive, energy and enthusiasm necessary for success.

When looking over your goals, it’s also good to remind yourself of WHY you are working towards them. Your goals and your life need meaning. Answering the question of why will reinvigorate the drive for making them a reality.


Question 2: What have I achieved?

Do you fall victim to ‘setting and forgetting’ your goals? Hopefully not now that you’re part of The Start of Happiness!

Now that you have confirmed that your goals are still relevant, the next step in the process is to reflect on what you have actually achieved.

How are you tracking towards your goals? What ‘mini-goals’ have you met or what smaller steps have you done to help you reach where you are?

Taking the time to reflect on what you have achieved will help you to determine whether your actions and progressing you towards your goals and whether you are likely to achieve them on time.

One of the best things about asking yourself this question is that it will highlight the behaviours and actions that have worked. This is super-important to being able to progress further in the back half of the year.


Question 3: What challenges have I faced?

When you are looking back over your progress for the year, it’s important that you also look at the challenges you have faced.

Very rarely can you reach your most important goals without a challenge being thrown your way.

Reflect on what these challenges have been. Why did these obstacles or challenges occur? How did you feel when they were presented? What did you do to overcome these challenges?

Resilience is a key factor in overcoming challenges. Understanding how you have faced these challenges and managed to overcome them helps you to build this resilience. It helps to embed the confidence in yourself that no matter what gets thrown your way you will be able to continue moving towards your goal.

The other thing that this question can raise is what can you do in the future to prevent these challenges from happening again?

Question 4: What have I learned?

Life is one big learning experience.

When you’re making progress towards your life goals you’re going to make a million decisions. Some good and some bad. One of the key ingredients that separates successful people is the ability to learn from their actions.

Looking back over your answers to the previous questions, now is the perfect time to ask yourself what have you learned from these experiences?

That is, what have you learned about your goals in life?

What have you learned from your achievements?

What have you learned from the challenges you have faced?

Taking the time to understand the key things that you have learned will help you get set-up perfectly for answering the next question.


Question 5: What can I do differently?

Now is when your mid-year review has its biggest impact. Your future.

Based on everything you have learned from answering the above questions, it’s time to think about the actions that you will put into place to make sure that the back half of the year is even more effective than the first half.

It’s all about continuous improvement! Never get complacent.

What habits do you need to change?

What extra support do you need?

What processes do you need to put in place to be more effective?

How will you address your next challenge?

This is a perfect opportunity for refining your goal and working on a specific strategy for the next 6 months of the year. You can start to map out the exact things you will do in this time to get you there.


Next Steps

There are 2 things you need to do first and foremost as next steps:
Set yourself a date for your next personal review
Write down 3 things that you can do immediately (or sometime today) to start building momentum in your life…. and go do them!

Your personal review should be a regular thing. If you can make it habitual then you’re well on your way to success.

I know of many people who write down their to-do lists or goals for a specific day, but how many people look at how those specific things on their to-do list help them progress towards their bigger goals in life?

The more regular you can review your progress towards your bigger, life goals, the more effective and the more speedy you will get there.

If you’re yet to create goals or want to go even a step back and start to look at the bigger picture in life (that is, understanding yourself and where exactly you want to go), then I highly recommend you check out our Launch Your Life Academy which guides you the proven process of making positive change in your life.

So, what are you waiting for?

Let’s make the next 6 months a ripper!

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