Today’s happiness tip comes from Brendon Burchard, author of The Charge: Activating the 10 Human Drives That Make You Feel Alive.
I have the audio version in my car at the moment and it’s brilliant. I keep replaying this particular part.
Our happiness depends on how in control we feel of our own lives. Yet most of the misery we feel comes from trying to take control – of the wrong things!
Things that either can’t be controlled or aren’t relevant.
We can’t control external events or other people but we can control ourselves:
our character, our attitude, our self concept, our interpretation/meaning and where we put our energy or focus.

So what to do?
To put the spark back in your eyes Brendon says just control 3 things:
1. control your outlook and character
2. control for new
3. control your workflow

Controlling your outlook and character
Besides choosing positive thoughts over negative expectations
we can change the meaning we give to anything. How we interpret what happens to us.
This is really the crux of everything and you are 100% in control of this.
Burchard’s words remind me of the 1946 classic on this topic by Holocaust survivor Victor Frankl: Man’s Search for Meaning.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing; the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” – Dr. Viktor Frankl
The meaning we give to our lives, to whatever happens, makes or breaks us.
The other thing that makes or breaks us is our self concept.
And we can learn to safeguard and be a guardian of our self concept (to catch ourselves in the act of eroding our own self perception and to stop doing this to ourselves.)
Keeping track of our negative self talk in a journal is the first step to changing this self talk to a kinder more supportive voice.
On making moment to moment choices about how we meet the world, Brendon suggests continually asking oneself: “Do my actions reflect the quality of person I want to be?”
In any moment or situation we can purposefully choose to act as our highest self would act.

Control for new
Our brains are hardwired for novelty and challenge. We need to build this into our lives.
Brendon suggests get away completely every 90 days, expand your peer circle through networking, go to shows and events and have fun learning new skills.
Control your workflow
Manage what you invest your energy in and try to take full ownership of tasks.
Except for an initial check for awaited work or responses don’t look at your email except during the last hour of the day.
I highly recommend this book or the audio series for your car.
How does the need to be in control of your environment show up in your hands?

Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Your life: is there a map?

By Jena Griffiths | March 3, 2013

We’re starting a new topic series this Tuesday in Earth School.
Exploring 10 Life lessons that show up in your fingerprints with Richard Unger, author of LifePrints: deciphering your life purpose from your fingerprints.
Each month we’ll explore a different life lesson, what are the different variations of this theme, if this is your pattern, what to do?
Our first call starts this Tuesday, March 5, 2013. We’ll be diving deep into the world of inner power, blocked passions, boundary issues, violations.
How can you turn this around and live the exalted version of your life?
How can you turn your lesson into your gift?
You can register for this series of calls here.

This entitles you to participate in one call a month. Ask questions in the live call, get all the reference documents and replays and access to the Earth School Inner Circle Membership zone.
For hand analysts there are additional calls each month looking at hand prints related to the monthly theme.
Register here.

Topics: Hand Analysis | No Comments »

Interview with Edson Williams
The importance of knowing who you are

By Jena Griffiths | February 25, 2013

Next up in the free auditorium is London based performance coach Edson Williams.
Topic: The importance of knowing who you are
Thursday February 28, 2013

Edson Williams is the founder, leading coach and keynote speaker at Lead by Example, a coaching company based in London with clients from all over the world.

Edson has corporate as well as entrepreneurial experience working at Nike European Headquarters for several years, co-founding the image design department and later establishing the internationally renowned artist agency EW Agency.

Edson has over 10 years of personal development knowledge and experience and is also an NLP master practitioner.
Attend this call /replay here.

Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »

Happiness tip 3: self forgiveness and willpower

By Jena Griffiths | February 20, 2013

“Please don’t be too hard on yourself!”
Most of us think that letting yourself off the hook is a recipe for disaster but fascinating new research from Standford University shows that actually the opposite is true.
Kelly McGonigal, author of the Willpower Instinct, says, “The harder you are on yourself when you have a willpower failure the more likely you are to have the same failure again and the bigger its going to be when you do.”
Your two minds

“Even though we have one brain we actually have two minds. We are completely different people depending on which mind is active. A willpower challenge is anything where those two versions of yourself have completing goals.” For example, an impulsive side and a goal setting side. Depending on your mindset, energy or stress levels you’ll make very different choices.
And all these variables can be changed. Mindset is largely due to self talk and self perception. Which version of yourself do you identify with? The weak or the strong? This can be changed with dramatic results, simply by being more kind to yourself.
Can you be gentler on yourself when you make mistakes? Rather than give up on yourself entirely.
Here’s an awesome lecture by Kelly McGonigal on self forgiveness and willpower.

This video is really worth watching but it’s nearly an hour long. Here’s what McGonigal covered:
(Click the image above if you want to watch the full video.)
Willpower Rules
The 5 keys to improving your willpower:
1. Train your willpower physiology (exercise, sleep, good food, meditation.)
2. Forgive yourself
3. Make friends with your future self
4. Predict your failure
5. Surf the urge

1. Training your physiology:
Willpower can be dramatically increased by doing one or more of the following:
– getting an hour more sleep a day
– meditating 10 minutes a day
– daily exercise and
– eating better (more fresh plants)

After a few months of doing any one of these activities your brain looks totally different. Also theses activities impact on each other.

2. Self forgiveness
This sounds counter-intuitive but research proves time and again that responding to setbacks with forgiveness or self compassion is far more effective than criticism.
During the research, the women who were given the self forgiveness message ate half as much candy as the women who were not given this message. The same applied to smoking, gambling and procrastination.
Shame and guilt drives people back to repeating the very behavior they feel guilty about.
Why is this?
Because the more you feel guilty the more comforting you need.
1. Choose encouragement over criticism.
Usually we are far harder on ourselves than even our worst enemy would be.
2. Be mindful of what you are thinking about yourself.
If you are feeling self critical note this.

3. This is all about mindset and self perception.
Reminds me of those tribes one reads about who heal antisocial behavior by changing the person’s self perception.
How do they do this? Everyone from the village gathers around the guilty person and they all take turns remembering all the good things that person did in the past. Over and over the person is reaffirmed for being good rather than bad. They may have made a mistake but they themselves are not their mistake.
It’s human to make mistakes or be imperfect and what matters is we don’t identify with the behavior so that we can make different choices next time.
4. McGonigal says guilt is stress and is therefore an enemy of self control. She recommends giving yourself instead a “self compassion message” such as:
“don’t be too hard on yourself”
“remember everyone does it”
“don’t worry about it, it’s not a big deal”

3. Make friends with your future self
This is fascinating. “The more you see your future self as different to who you are today the less likely you are to do things to protect the health and happiness of your future self. Why would you bother spending money on some stranger when you could spend it today on someone you know and love!” asks McGonigal.

4. Predict your failure
More counter-intuitive advice!
🙂
Everyone tells us to focus only on the positive outcome but research shows that people who look at both possibilities take far more action to make sure the worst possibility doesn’t occur.

5. Surf the urge
I love this concept – “Surf the urge”
This is a highly effective 4 step strategy taught by McGonigal for overcoming craving.
Here’s what to do:
1. Notice the craving, thought or feeling
2. Accept the inner experience
3. Breathe. Give yourself a chance to pause and plan.
4. Look for an action that will help you achieve your goal.
Turns out craving comes in waves. If you know this you can ride out these waves.
Just by pausing and waiting you surf the urge. The feeling washes over you and you come out the other side.
Self control is a muscle that can be trained.
Brilliant stuff!
How do addiction show up in your hands?Here’s an example

Topics: Can't say no, Dealing with the inner critic | 1 Comment »

Master of my Domain
– 2 Free calls on Advanced hand Shapes

By Jena Griffiths | February 18, 2013

Understanding advanced hand shapes is possibly the quickest way to get to the core understanding of your or another person’s personality type.
Over the next two weeks we’ll be discussing the “Master of my Domain” hand shape in great detail with Richard Unger. (February 19 and 26, 2013.)

What are the strengths and weaknesses of this type?
What’s the positive psychology?
Red flags to look out for?
Delicious Dilemmas?
How to help this kind of person live their type?
How to help them integrate their opposite?

If you would like to know about this hand shape type or more about understanding hand shape in general, log into Earth School or register as a free member to access two complimentary calls on Master of My Domain and on 5 other advanced hand shape archetypes.

Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced hand analyst, knowing and understanding advanced hand shapes will not only shave years off your learning curve. It will put you ahead of the professional hand analysts who haven’t yet taken the time to familiarize themselves with this new material from Richard Unger. By the end of this course you’ll be able to help your clients align themselves with an authentic career or fine tune their life purpose far more precisely than before.

Listen to the free call here

Topics: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Are you suffering from writer’s block?

By Jena Griffiths | February 15, 2013

“Is it rational that anyone should be afraid of the work they were put on this earth to do?” Elizabeth Gilbert
Here’s a wonderful revelation by Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat Pray Love) on misplaced ownership of genius, why writers struggle and become “undone” by their work and what to do.
Watch her Ted talk below or keep reading for my summary and perspective.

Gilbert says the trouble is caused by trying to own genius or creative spark rather than recognizing it as a force outside of yourself that you can tap into or call upon. She says, to save artists and writers from self destructing, we need to go back to a more ancient understanding of the creative mystery. The recognition that it’s a collaboration rather than a solitary act.
You “have” (access to) a daemon or a disembodied genius rather than you “are” one.

Interestingly Gilbert’s solutions to writer’s block are similar to Steven King’s. Just show up on the page at the same time every day.
In his book (On writing) King likens writing to archeology. He says the story is already there you just have to dig it out with as little damage as possible.

Here’s what poet Ruth Stone told Elizabeth Gilbert about the creative process:
“As she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out, working in the fields and she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. It was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And when she felt it coming…cause it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew she had only one thing to do at that point. That was to, in her words, “run like hell” to the house as she would be chased by this poem.

The whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. Other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she would be running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house, and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it, and it would “continue on across the landscape looking for another poet”.

I think that’s motivation in itself to show up on the page! The thought that if you don’t take the creative spark when given it’ll simply go off and find someone else more worthy.

Back to feeling stuck or blocked due to putting undue pressure on yourself to perform:

Gilbert ideas are similar to Polly Young-Eisendrath’s (author of The Self Esteem Trap: raising confident and compassionate kids in an age of self-importance).

Young-Eisendrath argues that teaching kids that they are “special” or extraordinary sets them up for failure because they then fear trying anything in case they don’t live up to these high expectations. Gilbert’s suggestion – to see genius as a force outside of yourself that you can call on or learn to tap into, rather than as a quality within – is a healthy solution for anyone engaged in the creative process.

Here’s an article I wrote on my hand analysis site about how tapping into one’s genius could show up in one’s hands?

Topics: self esteem, suicide, super talented | 1 Comment »

Happiness tip 2: vulnerability

By Jena Griffiths | February 5, 2013

“Vulnerability is the core of shame and fear and our struggle for worthiness
but it’s also the birthplace of joy, of creativity, of belonging, of love” – Brene Brown

I don’t know about you, but I really suck when it comes to asking for help or showing my vulnerable side.
Yet it turns out that having the courage to be vulnerable – to risk being hurt, or getting it wrong or showing up – is the key to just about everything in life.

Here’s a great TEDX video worth watching: Brene Brown on the power of vulnerability