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Is this really possible?

11/28/2012

Happy day to you!

Imagine the last day you had when you felt really relaxed and happy, like when you were on a vacation. (Hope you didn’t have to go too far back!) Would it be nice to feel that way every day? Okay, maybe every day is a bit too perfectionist. How about most days? And, how about when you’re having a not so great day, you could not be stuck with that, but you could shift it into being a better day?

Is this really possible? The answer is totally YES! We have lots of strategies for this. It’s what New Possibilities Coaching is all about.

I know it feels like what kind of day you’ll have depends on the circumstances of the day. However, let me remind you again of this most important statistic. Only 10% of your happiness is determined by your outer circumstances! The rest is determined by how you think about your circumstances and life. How you feel is really up to you.

That’s a big responsibility! But it’s also great. Because if it weren’t up to you, you’d be a victim to your circumstances, with little choice about how you feel. So the good news with this responsibility is that you have way more control available to you than you might think or might be using!

And, just in case you forgot, or are new to this, let me also remind you again of how important being happy is. Research shows that happiness is the fuel that allows your brain to be more successful at achieving all the goals you desire. It impacts every area of your life. People who are happy:

Work better

Have better brain health and memory
Have 31% more energy
Have up to 30% decrease in heart disease
Get sick less often and are generally healthier
Are more successful at losing weight
Make better decisions
Have better relationships
Are more successful at achieving everything they care about!

Believing in the law of attraction, this makes total sense to me. When you’re happy, you’re aligned with your greater Spirit-Self and the creative energy of the Universe; and when you’ve tuned into this vibrational frequency, it allows the manifestation of what you have asked for.

So here’s my happiness strategy for you today.

New Possibilities for You!

Ever know someone who even gets stressed out on vacation; or maybe you’ve seen them? They definitely exist. This shows you that it’s not the vacation itself, the circumstance, which allows you to be happy and relaxed. It’s the state of mind you automatically put yourself in and the permission you give yourself that allows it.

· If you can, for a moment, recapture how you feel inside when you're on vacation.

· What kinds of thoughts and inner dialogue do you have?

For me, there’s an inner calm and an anticipation of good times and feeling good. I'm less attached to a schedule and "have to's"; and instead am aware of the freedom of choosing moment to moment.

Now, if you were to pick up almost any book on spirituality, I bet you would find suggestions that what I just mentioned is an enlightened state to aim for - an attitude towards life worth trying, to create a life worth living.

When I apply these same attitudes to my normal, non-vacation days, I feel good, and work and the day unfold more easily.

The trick is in finding a way to feel good about your day, to anticipate it, and to feel good about all the choices you’re making. They’re not really “have- to’s”. You’re choosing to do them; so how can you feel good about that?

Do you think maybe sometimes you’re creating struggle rather than joy?

You DO know how to create joy! You did it on those happy, relaxed, vacation days.

What inner narratives, beliefs and choices that you make on vacation can you transfer to your every day?

Real harmony and happiness is created from within. I invite you to play around with this strategy and give it a try.

If you live near Metro West Mass., and you’d like some help with this and to be guided through it by me, join us on Friday evening, Dec. 7th, for our free evening of guided meditations on creating ease and joy.

And if you’d like to learn and embody all of our fundamental strategies and beliefs for living with ease and joy and experiencing greater harmony, happiness and success, I can’t encourage you enough to sign up for one of our New Possibilities Coaching Programs.

Please don’t put off the happiness you deserve any longer. Let your happiness and well-being be a priority, and from that all other good things you desire will flow to you.

E-mail me at [email protected] to arrange for a phone call to see if one of our private or group coaching programs is a fit for you.

Supporting you in greater ease and joy, with a warm heart,

Ann

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The 3 determinants of happiness and 3 really, really simple steps to happiness you can take

11/15/2012

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Smile!

A warm, joy-filled hello to you!

I saw another network TV show recently on the importance of happiness! I’ve been claiming that happiness is the key to everything that’s important to you for a long time, as have many spiritual teachers, including the Dalai Lama. It’s nice to see it getting even more exposure and grounding in research.

In case you didn’t know this, there are supposedly three determinants of your happiness: your genetics, your life circumstances, and how you think, perceive and interpret. The latter is the one most within your control. In fact, the science of epigenetics has now proven that you can even change your genetic tendencies through your thoughts and beliefs, because they affect your biology.

Research shows that only 10% of your long-term happiness is determined by your external world. 90% is determined by your thinking processes and the world you create within. 90%! So learning how to manage your thoughts in a way that positively supports you is pretty important!

Today I want to offer you three really, really simple things within your control that you can do to create and build more happy moments into your life, rather than waiting for them to happen through circumstances. After all, a happy life is just made up of many happy moments.

New Possibilities for You!

Deliberately smile! Your brain actually responds by putting more of the feel-good chemical neurotransmitter dopamine into your system when you smile. It will make you feel even better! Your brain won’t know whether you’re genuinely smiling or faking one! In studies, they had people just bite down on a pencil so the corners of their mouths turned up like in a smile, and it still worked! And, you’ll find that your thoughts will soon begin to match, as well. I tested this the other day. I just sat with my face in the sun, smiling on purpose; and I felt glorious for hours afterwards. How easy is that? Try it and see for yourself.

“Frame it” This is a little game I’ve just naturally played since forever. Make a little frame with your hands and fingers, and look about you like a photographer or artist, and look for something worth framing, as long as it makes you feel good looking at it. You’ll be amazed at all there is that’s special around you.

Deliberately create some pleasure. It can be simple, like sitting with your face in the sun for a few minutes (and remember to smile, too!); or taking your shower or bath with the deliberate intent of it being pleasurable, rather than just doing it to get clean; or instead of just eating your meal, setting the intention to really enjoy it; or setting the intention to enjoy your drive to work. Get the idea?

Pretty much everything I share with you in my writings and in my programs is about how to shift your thinking so you can experience more inner harmony and happiness. We get into this in great detail, with experiential exercises and practices to help you embody them, in our New Possibilities Fundamentals Group Coaching Program. You’ll leave the program with the fundamental mindsets, beliefs and strategies to be your best self and live your best life, one filled with greater ease and joy. Taking this program is an investment in the ability to create and manage your happiness, and thus the future you desire. Priceless. Don’t be at the effect of your life any longer. New Possibilities are possible for you! Read about it here:

http://www.newpossibilitiescoaching.com/the-fundamentals-program.html

Remember, there’s no need to continue with the same struggles in your life. Life can get better and better, filled with new possibilities for greater harmony, happiness and success. It's a joy and honor to serve you along your way!

Supporting you in greater ease and joy, with a warm heart,

Ann

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How to Never Lose Your Power

11/2/2012

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A joy-filled good day to you!

First of all, I hope you’ll join me in sending love and positive thoughts of calm, courage and resourcefulness to anyone still affected by Hurricane Sandy. Let’s all focus on the more positive future that they are now yearning for. My wish is also that very soon they’ll be able to look back and acknowledge the growth that can also occur out of the midst of chaos, if you allow and reflect on it; which brings me to my personal lessons from this stormy week. I’m hoping they’ll serve you, as well.

How to never lose your power

I don’t know if this happened for you, but during the storm on Monday, I couldn’t focus on much of anything other than the storm for the life of me. From what I’ve learned about our brain and biology, this is because my brain was literally focused on the life of me, triggered into survival mode by the threats I perceived and was focused on.

I didn’t actually feel like my life was at risk; but I did feel like my life as I prefer it was at risk; and this triggers the part of your brain that only deals with survival and limits the higher functioning frontal lobe.

Perhaps similar experiences to this happen throughout your day:

You’ve got a work deadline that you worry about meeting and the possible negative consequences (risks) if you don’t.
There’s a lot of traffic, and you might be late, which might mean more possible risks.
You’ve got a never-ending “to-do” list, and it all needs to get done or else…
Someone you care about is having some kind of perceived problem, and you’re concerned about the consequences.

Get the idea of how we create a sense of potential danger? Unfortunately, most often this happens out of your normal awareness. And, when we go into survival mode, we’re less likely to be our best at taking care of what we care about in the first place!

When it’s not really a true life or death situation, triggering your brain into this survival mode does nothing to serve you or anyone else. In fact, it can be unhealthy and even harmful.

So what do you do?

First of all, you need to recognize the signals for when you’re operating out of survival mode. What’s the best clue? Check in with how you feel. If it’s not good, check internally as to what your inner dialogue is like. When I did this during the storm, I noticed I was repeatedly thinking, “I don’t want the power to go out.” And, guess what? It went out! A lot of good that kind of thinking does, right? I tried to be more positive, but unsuccessfully. The howling wind got the best of me.

So then I started repeatedly thinking, “I don’t want my food to go bad.” Aware again of the useless, negative track I was on, and that just trying to change my thinking wasn’t working, I decided to try a different strategy. I shifted my focus to the sense of peace I could feel in my home, and to the positive aspects of the whole experience: more time with my family to relax and have extended, unrushed conversations; the glow of candlelight; that this will only be temporary, and so on. This worked quite well for me! I got bored, but I stayed calm and peaceful; and, as my brain was freed up, I eventually got more resourceful in terms of how to entertain ourselves and to find ways to work around the no power limitations.

New Possibilities for You!

Pay attention to how you feel. If it’s not good, then breathe, center and soothe yourself by shifting your inner dialogue to a more positive one that’s still believable, or experimenting with different strategies that will help you to shift your focus until you feel better. Don’t give up! If one strategy doesn’t work, then try something else!

Let go. Although I was staying fairly calm and positive throughout our power outage, I’m now aware that there was still an undertone of impatience. By Wed. evening, arriving home to cold and dark, I started to really feel it. I’m glad for that increased awareness, because I was then reminded to take care of it. Thursday morning, I brought myself to a place of being prepared and okay with having no electricity through the weekend. I created a scenario that allowed me to feel okay about it again. And then… a couple of hours later, the electricity returned! Letting go of being attached to one outcome not only feels better, it allows what you desire to come to you.

I also became more aware of how entitled we tend to feel about all that we’re used to having. Electricity and everything else is not owed to us. It’s all a gift! Appreciate it all as such and not only will you feel great, you also become more powerful.

Those 3 days without power felt slow and long at times; but within an hour of having it back, I looked back and thought, “Was it only three days?” What a difference perspective can make! When you’re struggling with something, imagine yourself in the future when it’s resolved, and look back. That “problem” may not seem so big, after all.

Lastly, remember, when you have the right strategies available to you and you use them, you may lose your electricity, but you will never lose your power!

An example from one of our past New Possibilities Fundamentals Program members:

“ I was thinking yesterday about how September is usually a very stressful time for me. In fact, in the past this time of year, I have ended up in the ER with chest pains and numbness in my arms for 2 years in a row. After running lots of tests, the doctors found that there was nothing medically wrong. They told me that I was probably stressed. September is the beginning of Fall (which I love), but it's a transitional time -- the kids start school; my work load tends to increase; I'm usually training for a fall marathon or half-marathon, etc, etc.

This year, I haven't even felt "stressed". Sure, I've been busy --with all of those same things and even more. The idea of being "stressed" to me now seems so manufactured. Once I start feeling less connected to my inner-calm, I bring myself back as much as possible. I'm getting better and better at it, and it feels good.

I'm so happy that I joined the New Possibilities program, and I think so many others could benefit from doing the same. Thank you! Thank you!” -April Ropes

If you could use some strategies for improving how you feel and having all that you desire, please read about our upcoming New Possibilities Fundamentals Program scheduled for this coming January! Wahoo! We haven’t had this program in a year, and we can’t wait to do it again and share in everyone’s personal transformations. Click here: http://www.newpossibilitiescoaching.com/the-fundamentals-program.html

Supporting you in greater ease and joy, with a warm heart,

Ann

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Is this really possible?

The 3 determinants of happiness and 3 really, really simple steps to happiness you can take

How to Never Lose Your Power

Hope you enjoy my "Happy Moments" blog; because a happy life is just a series of happy moments. Feeling Good Matters!

Ann Ide

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