We want an answer to a question, we jump online and have it within seconds.

We want to buy something, we don't have to wait any longer than it takes to find the website and place our order – shipping is often next-day

So when it comes to achievement – our expectations are so high that it makes dealing with steady progress nearly impossible. 

If we don't see improvement the first or second time we try something, we move on to something else, never giving time to cultivate success.

Yet, success is NEVER an overnight achievement, no matter what you are trying to accomplish.

You didn't learn to walk or talk in one day, didn't learn to ride a bike the first time you hopped on, and surely did not learn to be social human beings in the first week you were around others…

Here are 5 tips to help you cultivate breakthroughs in your life:

1. Make sure you are driven by a  BIG why in your life. There must be a deeply held, profound WHY that drives your goals and actions

2. Work out from that BIG why to establish goals in line with your purpose and then, in turn, steps toward achieving your goals so you are in total alignment with your bigger purpose.

3. Recognize and manage insecurities, fears and pain in your life to keep them from preventing you continually working toward your goals

4. Review daily the purpose for which you act and the outcome of living in alignment with your purpose…know that daily review will help drive toward major breakthroughs

Finally – another thing I found very useful is that I made SURE to make progress each day (even if it was the smallest thing) toward the important things to achieving my goals. No cop-outs and no substituting meaningless things for meaningful actions….by and large this means every day I make progress. Some days it doesn't feel like as much, there you need to have faith that these "low" days will add up to big breakthroughs – which they always do.

Now I've never been one to lament about the past, always look ahead to tomorrow and forget about yesterday, but his comment made me think that I do have one regret.

In fact, this one change in attitude that took me nearly 25-years to learn can actually be applied in one instant and lead to near immediate transformation in your life.

By embracing this one change, instantly you can…

• Dramatically reduce the frustration and stress in your life
• Ensure you make daily progress toward achieving incredible goals and desires
• Attract energetic, positive and proactive people toward you
• Feel a level of peace and fulfillment that most people can barely dream about
• Immediately boost your immune system and turn around health problems that may have been with you for years
• Finally understand what it takes to be a winner…what it feels like and how you can replicate it across the different areas of your life
• Be more positive, motivated and enthusastic without having to even try
• Finally get unstuck and be in a perpetual forward motion leaving the "rut" that has been holding you back behind

In fact, there is a complete, simple -yet highly effective – system for achieving these things and more over at Attracting Greatness…but by far, the most important catalyst that gets the ball rolling is learning to embrace failure and setbacks. 

When we are young we are driven by our parents and education to NOT fail…to play it safe, avoid conflict and always take the safe way out.  That creates the very dangerous condition of paralysis where we always seek the simple route and learn to be severly impacted by the smallest setback when the exact opposite is far more powerful.

Again and again it has become more apparent than ever that people who embrace setbacks, learn to expect and even set out to fail fast also learn how to succeed incredibly quickly AND learn to manage their fear and stress associated with failing. 

I know through my twenties playing it safe was my main focus and sure enough, I ended up making very little progress, becoming more and more miserable, feeling both trapped and frustrated with impacts on my health and relationships…it took me 25-years to learn that it was not only OK to experience setbacks, but it was actually the SECRET to both succeeding at a rapid pace and to live a happier, more stress-free life. 

So certainly, changing your mindset to a success-mindset as taught in Attracting Greatness is based largely on becoming comfortable with systematically overcoming challenges on the way to achieving ultimate success and happiness…once you learn this system, you become positively unstoppable and you will begin to instantly change your life for the better.

When something happens in life where I must prepare to do something I don't want to do, no matter how hard I try, my mind seems to shut down and I find it hard to stay motivated or take action.

It's like your mind just shuts down and you become a useless blob for a period of time. 

For example, I've recently been on an excellent roll building my businesses – as productive and motivated as I have ever been – but all of that seemed to come to a screaching halt this past few days, and I didn't even really notice until I had to help someone else go through a similar situation.

I've had a pretty tough go of it with a tooth infection, rounds of antibiotics and some other challenges this week that have led to more visits to my dentist than I've experienced in the last 3-years combined…and for me, because I had an absolutely brutal dentist as a kid, the dentist causes higher levels of anxiety for me than it would for most people.

But what is interesting is that I found I couldn't function properly leading up to the various dentist appointments.  It wasn't that I was thinking of this the entire time, but I found myself taking comfort with food, television, reading magazines and other activities that ended up to be quite unproductive. 

Does the same thing happen to you when you are leading up to an event, meeting or challenge that causes you anxiety, fear or uncertainty?

PREVENTING THE 'SHUT DOWN' EFFECT

Depending on your level of stress, anxiety, fear and uncertainty – losing productivity could become chronic if we can't figure out a way to get around this 'SHUT DOWN' effect our body uses to deal with our emotional challenges. 

Here is what I've been doing lately to make sure I can defeat this 'Shut Down' effect – see if it works for you too…

Try and get to the root of the problem. 

Why have you fallen into this pattern now – for most of us, this happens when we are overwhelmed or suffer anxiety over something in our lives.   I gave the example of pending dentist appointments as one source of anxiety. 

Often if we fear something coming – either a major change, major event,  our mind goes into defensive mode and pretty much shuts down.  After a few days of feeling like this, suddenly we have created a new learned habit – the bad habits become the norm. 

We can't typically break out of that norm until one of two things happen:

1. We recognize and deal with the root cause – either by standing up to our fear and anxiety or getting past the event (you know how sometimes you get more energy after something you weren't looking forward to is over) — OR –

2. Something major happens that jolts us out of our current situation…say a health challenge, major embarassment or some other life altering event that suddenly breaks you out of your current pattern. 

Counting on #2 is not exactly the best scenario – it may take a lifetime for such a 'JOLT' situation to occur, and nothing says that the major life change will be positive – so let's try and figure another way out of this unproductive mindset.

We really must work on understanding, admitting and then dealing with those situations that cause us anxiety.  Sometimes these are very obvious – as were my dental challenges this past week – other times these are buried deeply and can be quite painful – as in the case of child abuse for example. 

Whatever the case, you need to find out what is getting you down?  What is causing your mind to 'Shut Down'

What is making you feel somewhat out of control?

Once you have the factor, then you need to reframe your response to that feeling so that it is no longer causing you to shut down.   In my case, I like to do a few things to help put that fear or anxiety into perspective:

1. Write it out 20 or more times – studies have shown that just getting out the frustration or anxiety is thereputic in itself and can help ease the burden on your mind
2. I'm a big fan of meditation (don't worry, if you haven't been able to get meditation to work for you, check out Attracting Greatness which has many techniques, but also a kick-butt section on how to quickly & effectively master meditation).  Why will meditation help?  Meditation is wonderful for helping your mind NOT overreact to life's challenges.  When meditation works, you can visualize the most anxiety-ridden situations in your life without the slightest overreaction or discomfort – in short – you learn to go with the flow and not be impacted so much by stress and anxiety. 
3. Prepare…anxiety, stress and fear go down if we better prepare ourselves for upcoming situations.  Our typical response is to ignore the event or situation, but by dealing with it and preparing in advance, we can substantially reduce the impact that upcoming situation can have on our life. 

Let's hear from you if you have experienced this 'Shut Down' effect in your life?  What makes you 'Shut Down?" 

What sorts of things in your life cause you enough anxiety or fear to make you less effective….we all have them, leave a comment if you would like to share yours.

Make sense?

Change Your Life Now!

After living through an immense health challenge in my early 20's that fundamentally altered my life forever, and experiencing an incredible ability break through limitations, fears and that horrible feeling of just being stuck in life, we decided to put our experiences together with years of research from others who have been able to excel into Greatness in their lives – all with an aim to putting together the absolute best, fastest and most effective plan to help you change your life, realize true happiness and prosperity…a blueprint we call – Attracting Greatness!

Attracting Greatness is changing lives, helping people who have been stuck in a rut for decades to finally breakthrough and experience fundamental, extraordinary change.

Whether you are searching for that deeply held purpose you know you need to find, but can't quite seem to put your finger on, or that you are trying to push past the daily bad habits that are keeping you from realizing your dreams, Attracting Greatness has the blueprint that really works.

We outline the 5-Pillars of Greatness…the 5 most important aspects of our lives that require mastery.  Without understanding and then aligning each of these 5 Pillars, progress will be nearly impossible.  Some of those pillars include Finding Your Ultimate Purpose, Overcoming Fear & Anxiety and Boosting Self-Confidence Once And For All!

What is truly amazing about this system is the incredible power we have when understanding how each of the 5-Pillars of Greatness impact one another – suddenly it becomes clear why when we work on just one, we may not see the results we expect…yet when we work just a little on all 5 we see amazing results with less effort – after all, they are intertwined and to make progress we must understand how each works for or against the other.

Another powerful aspect of this blueprint are the techniques, tips and strategies outlined helping us to tap into our internal values, beliefs and inner compass — with these quick techniques and practices we can not only bring immediate calmness to anxiety ridden lives, we can truly figure out who we are and how we can best improve our own lives and the lives of those around us.

As one example, we show you how to mix simple, effective meditation techniques (we used to be terrible at meditating, but found a way to really make it work) to guide the deepest, most important realizations from within us suddenly lighting up our brains with the most profound realizations of who we are, what we want and what is holding us back.

Over and over again we are getting heart-warming and sometimes positively shocking stories of how people are finally getting unstuck and are finally able to move past limitations they have had in their lives for decades.

If you are at a point in your life where you are stuck in a rut, where you suffer from low self-confidence, can't figure out how to change your daily routine to be happier, more satisfied and fulfilled or simply want to step up your results…then I highly recommend you head over and learn more about Attracting Greatness – it really works!

What Makes You Happy?

We all keep this thought in the back of our minds don't we – "Are we really happy?"

Yet, for how much that questions tugs at us every minute of every day we often tend to avoid bringing it to the forefront and really do some thinking about finding happiness or what it is that does not make us happy.

After all, this is a rather complex question – confusing the issue of how to find happiness is:

• Does my happiness have to be linked with making other people happy?
• Is the key to happiness short term satisfaction, or is true happiness and contentment based on adherence to longer term satisfaction?
• Is it ok if being with someone else makes me happy or do I need to have inner happiness?
• And of course the really big one…is it ok if money makes me happy?

No wonder we have such a hard time getting a handle on this happiness question – as our lives grow more complicated sometimes we lose total perspective on what being happy even means or feels like.

Inner Happiness Key To Outer Contentment

A lesson we learn as life goes on (if we are lucky) is that relying on other people, situations or factors to find happiness often ends up leaving us empty in the end.

It's not that other people or things shouldn't make us happy – it is more around how those factors need to accent our inner happiness to really be effective.

We must start with an inner core of happiness that then guides us (attracts us if you will) to people,  situations and factors that enhance (not conflict) with our inner happiness.

For instance, starting from a point of inner confidence where we live our lives in harmony with our internal purpose (refer to the very effective Attract Greatness on this topic), means that we attract those who help bring out this inner confidence rather than shoot in down.

Similarly, if we are clear on our purpose and direction in life, then possessing money or particular material things can be used to enhance our life purpose (helping others, learn more, etc..) rather than conflict with this life purpose (gamble it away, spend it on destructive practices that make us unhappy in the end).

What Makes You Happy?

So, that brings us to the FUN part – what makes you happy?

Let me kick things off, but I want to hear from you – hit the comment button (top right of this post) and let us know what really makes you happy?

Here are some things that make me happy:

- Being able to use my full creative energy (music, writing, leading people)
- Spending at least half of my day (more if possible) learning new things
- Sharing what I can with those around me (customers, family, friends)
- Silence – having time each day for meditation and introspection

What has the opposite affect, stifles my happiness:

- Getting too far into a pattern of doing without having time to reflect
- Having other people control my time & impact my energy, I have chosen to make this a major focus area in my life
- Wasting time with people who get in the way of those things that make me happy
- Fear, frustration or other negative mindsets that stifle natural curiosity, learning, free expression and growth

Ultimately, this comes down to knowing if I focus on inner happiness and stay aligned with that state, my outward behavior and impact on the world will be much more positive reinforcing the happiness and fulfillment we all seek.  Of course, we are human and none of us are perfect, but this is a journey and hopefully we can continue to make progress.

So let's hear from you – what makes you happy?

Jeff

Fast forward 10-years and things were not so clear.  As we discuss, the health breakdown that occurred leading to the Attract Greatness Blueprint System was major and surely was the bottom leading to a recovery system and a renewal of a purpose driven life. 

What about you?  Do you feel stuck in a rut?  Unable to get motivated?  Are you stuck in a mode of negative thinking – and you just know that's not you?

For me, the worst point was the year following university when I had a job I hated, struggled in relationships, smacked in the chops by the cruel realities of life – or so I thought. 

Emotional negativity translated into health challenges which then fed a vicious spiral downward until I was able to break the circle by uncovering the common health challenges (outlined in Attracting Greatness) and working on overcoming fear, stress and improving self-esteem – all fueled by allowing my life purpose to guide daily behavior. 

Since then we have helped hundreds of others overcome health challenges, overcome fear and phobia, realize dramatic improvements in their self-confidence – but the question we get asked the most is "how do I find my life purpose?"

Here are 3 methods that will help you to recognize and live in concert with your inner life purpose:

1. Realization:  The first step is to realize that your life purpose is within you right now…not something that someone can teach you, tell you or give you.  So many of us look outside ourselves for a life purpose and end up living someone else's purpose.  I suppose there is a slim chance that by some amazing odds your life purpose may correspond to someone else, but the chances are so small that you MUST learn to look inward and discover your own purpose driven life. 

2. Introspection – getting to know you.  It is so true that many of us know those around us far better than we know ourselves.  Take a best friend, family member or spouse/date – think of the questions you ask over the course of your relationship.  Often these relationships are a river of learning about the other person, yet how many questions do we ask ourselves?  Really…how many times have you come up with questions about your happiness, fulfillment, and yes, life purpose and asked yourself in a moment where you really get a chance to think? 

One of the keys to incredible achievement in many lives I've studied (and indeed my own) involves techniques that let you become more in tune with your own beliefs, and life purpose.  Meditation is a critical method to use and by far the best way to access your life purpose.  Yoga, left-brain activities such as art or music also work very well.  Learning to block out things around you, put fear, stress and events around us into the proper perspective all play an important role letting your true purpose in life to come through naturally. 

3. Tend to your garden.  To discover your purpose in life it inovlves more about controlling the negative influences in your life than active discovery.  For many of us we live in a constant state of stress, fear, and toxicity which all serve to block us from finding your purpose in life.  We spend so much time on diversions (TV, video games, alcohol, and yes, the internet), in a state of fear (which puts us on the defensive and prevents us from living our true intentions), and under constant health toxicity (which leads to surviving instead of prospering) that there is no way our true life purpose can come through. 

By realizing that our life purpose exists within us to be discovered, and knowing that we must get our life in order to let that purpose come out naturally we can often completely alter our life in a matter of weeks – are you up the challenge?

Stress sets in when we cannot spend time on the things that give us short term satisfaction – so that must be the key to happiness right?

But what about meaning?

What about having longer-term goals?  Dreams that you want to see come true?

Inside Attracting Greatness 5 major factors are highlighted as essential pieces to living a complete, happy, exciting and rich life – certainly living in tune with your passions is one of them – but another is knowing your purpose.  Being driven by meaning in your life is one of the most important aspects to happiness.

Research has borne this out, here is a recent study reported in Business Week that found adults required both short-term satisfaction and longer-term meaning in their lives to be truly happy.

Another aspect of this recent study is that meaning in your professional life and meaning in your personal life are correlated.

What that really says to us is that we must be driven by either one major purpose in our lives or multiple purposes that are congruent (don't contradict) one another.

Could it be that the real secret to happiness is not short term satisfaction, but is long term introspection – finding the ultimate purpose that can turn our lives into incredible adventures filled with excitement, self-confidence, enjoyment, peace and a level of fulfillment we may never have thought possible.

Having studied the highest achievers in society along with some of the tragic figures who have not been able to realize their ultimate dreams of happiness – you will find the 5 Pillars of Greatness at Attracting Greatness, get ready to realize TRUE happiness.

The 5 Pillars of Greatness outlined in Attracting Greatness are certainly the keys to quickly transforming your life and really taking control of the ship, directing it into safe waters.

Give Yourself 30 Days

One technique that can make a massive difference in your life and get you unstuck is to follow this 3 point plan for finally developing goals and sticking with them long enough to see results:

1. What helps me apply the proper discipline is first developing a big WHY that motivates me to stick with a practice for 30-days

2. After you have the big WHY – create a set of visualizations that will help you to picture the ultimate outcome and benefit of sticking with the tactic.  If your goal is to start a new business, imagine what it will look, feel and be like 1-year from now, after you have put in significant effort and work.  What will your social life be like?  Who will you do business with?  What will your income level be?  Or, if your goal is to lose 10-pounds – visualize what you will look and feel like after 30-days?  How will your friends look at you?  What will they say when they see the "new" you?

3. Finally – make sure you stick with your practice for at least 30-days.  Set a goal to practice actions toward your goal each day – create a checklist and mark it off each day that you successfully take action toward achieving your desired outcome.

This is a terrific exercise – the discipline to maintain consistency, focus and ongoing action is exactly what it takes to turn a tactic or practice into a learned behavior.

Think of Tiger Woods – immensely self-disciplined with practicing golf, working out, nutrition – all of this is backed by huge WHY (be the absolute best EVER in golf) and lots of visualization.

Just watch each time he goes out to warm up, practice or take a shot – the first thing he does is visualizes the shot as being a total success – no matter how badly the last shot went, every future shot he sees as a success.

Imagine what will happen in your life once you have a plan like the one in Attract Greatness and apply the self-discipline of Tiger Woods to attract success and happiness in your direction.

Without a purpose in life we tend to float aimlessly from activity to activity – always feeling like we are missing out on the joy and key aspects of life. 

In fact, finding your life purpose and eliminiting obstacles to achievement in your life is the key focus of Achieving Greatness - and here we are going to help make this process so much easier and quicker. 

We tend to get bored easily, seek meaning in many of the tasks and activities in our life, have long periods of feeling down and even experience depression when we lack a life purpose. 

Then, when we are successful, we finally discover the holy grail and know what it is in life we are really after – at our core being – we discover that we need energy and may have other things in our life preventing us from living in line with our purpose in life. 

So, here are some suggestions on finding your purpose and living in congruency with our life purpose…

1. Set time aside in your busy life dedicated to ONLY finding your purpose in life – no interruptions, making it a priority
2. Allow yourself a free brainstorming session where you will list dozens and dozens of potential idea on what your life purpose is…it will take this long for you to find something that has the emotional meaning that indicates you have discovered your life purpose.
3. Think of your life purpose in terms of what you will contribute to society in return for feelings of immense satisfaction, financial return and positivity across the universe
4. A great way to accelerate the process is to meditate on finding your life purpose.  Instead of a general meditation session, focus instead on the singular task of finding the purpose that will most directly align with your inner core – and you will find that your subconscious will deliver you the answer
5. When you reach the optimal life purpose you will have an intense emotional experience – some people laugh incontrollably, others jump up and down while still others become overcome with emotion. 

So, once you have nailed down your purpose in life, in order to keep focus and turn this newfound discovery into incredible achievement in your life…you do need to improve your energy by:

1. Feeding your mind and body by eating more vegetables and fibre so that your system begins to detoxify itself
2. Check yourself for evidence of an overgrowth of yeast or parasites in your system – some studies have demonstrated that the average person in North America is suffering from imbalances in one of these two areas that lower energy considerably and lead to additional emotional conditions and diseases
3. Exercise more to feed clarity of mind, natural cleansing of the body and ramping up energy.

By combining a powerful life purpose with energy renewal you can turn any condition into a powerful, joyful, peaceful and incredibly rewarding life situation – all started within just a few weeks. 

For more on aligning yourself with Achieving Greatness, see the compelling life purpose and attracting greatness system outlined here.

Sometimes we reach a point where we feel stuck in a rut, where one day seems to flow into the next and we question the meaning of our daily activity. 

Other times we experience a major life challenge such as the death of a loved one, a health challenge or financial challenges that makes us ask questions about our time here on Earth.

Often, we look for short-term direction by aligning our "new" direction in life with someone we know or admire, but that doesn't typically lead to dramatic life change or lasting change does it?

To make sure we experience meaningful change and enhance our health, wellness, peace of mind and earning potential, thankfully there is guideance in the form of The 5 Pillars of Greatness outlined in the "Achieving Greatness" life improvement program.

To change your life, we must begin with finding our life purpose.  To do that, we must look within rather than around us for the answer.  Using techniques that promote introspection, we can identify our inner purpose and values that shine like a beacon in the fog to direct us to more stable, solid ground in our lives.

Next, dramatic life change requires a set of tools and methods for dealing with the negative stress in our lives.  To push forth in alignment with our life purpose it is important to be able to resist the constant winds that fight meaningful change – namely negative stress

In addition to our ability to ward off stress, we must also improve our resistance to fear instead replacing it with steadfast courage – this will lead to momentum, empowerment and the results that give us the confidence and strength to maintain our alignment with our life purpose.

To accomplish all of this, happily there are specialized techniques of yoga and meditation that can be directed to help us specifically help in each of these areas – that is the focus of the Achieving Greatness program – you'll want to see more here.

Finally, even harnessing the incredible inner power of our life purpose, learning to look within and follow our inner voice, resist stress and fear there can still be one factor that prevents us from our desired change of life - it has to do with our system toxicity.  Most of us (very young and older) have reached such a stage of toxicity in our bodies that energy is not permitted to flow to the areas we need most.  Even if we improve everything from this point on, we must go back, take care of business and clean our systems out to start anew. 

This 5-step system to change your life is extremely powerful, highly effective and long-lasting – try applying it to your life now.