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The way you see the world, is the way you see yourself.

The story you tell yourself about yourself, is a self-fulfilling prophesy.

If you think life is hard, good stuff happens to bad people and you constantly have to prove yourself in order to “achieve happiness”, then that will always be true for you.

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In order to create change in your life, in order to allow things to be “easy”, you need to review your own story. You need to look at the facts and see if you really interpreted them correctly all this time. What else could those facts mean?

The events and experiences in your life shape your character, beliefs and attitude. If the meaning you have attached to them holds you back in your life, then it’s worth re-interpreting them with a more beneficial meaning and re-telling your story in a way that makes sense and is believable to you.

That takes some work, yes. It means taking off layers of limiting beliefs. It means questioning rules that you have made up for yourself and lived by all your life. It means questioning who you think you really are!

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The outcome, though, is so worth it. The true story that you will uncover is always more beautiful than the one you’ve been telling yourself so far.

When you connect with your true essence – confidence, creativity, inspiration and meaning just offer themselves to you. Magic happens and your next step suddenly becomes very clear.

There’ll be no need to look in all the wrong places anymore.

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Last week, two of my clients told me they quit their jobs and will go travelling for a few months. One doesn’t know if she’ll ever come back.

I admire the courage and confidence they have developed in less than a year and I love hanging out with women who don’t accept “semi-happiness”! I’m amazed how they took responsibility and turned “reacting to circumstances” into “creating the life they want”.

You can do it, too.

Don’t settle for less!

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Contact Anja if you want to change your story, too.

1. Open your diary, filofax, Outlook, phone, or whatever else you use to keep track of your schedule.

2. Pick any random day next week or next month to be “Good News Day”. Write it into your diary in bold!

3. On the day, pay attention! Make a note of every piece of good news that comes your way on that day.

Don’t plan it, don’t force it…

It’s important to make it a random day. It doesn’t matter if it’s a weekend or a weekday, it doesn’t matter where you’re going to be that day.
Make it a random day and let the universe surprise you! Just keep your eyes open and pay attention on that day – the good news can be big or small.

Don’t fall into to the trap of “willing” a certain day to be a good news day, (for example when you expect a pay rise or the day of the lottery draw). That will make you focus only on that one thing and you won’t pay attention to any other direction the good news might come from.

Just get excited and be curious that day…

4. Come back here and leave a comment below or on the Virtual Anja Facebook page and tell us what good news you received on your good news day!

5. Put another good news day in your calendar.

What you’ll notice…

…is that over time, you’re going to have more and more good news days in your life, even though you didn’t mark them “good news day” beforehand…

I already linked to this article on my Facebook page, however I think this one is so important that I’m going to post the 7 steps here on the blog as well. Pleas read the full article of Tara Sophia Mohr here.

Seven Qualities of A Calling

1. You feel an unusually vivid pain or frustration around the status quo of a particular issue or topic. You feel or see what’s lacking. Maybe there’s a particular problem in the world — climate change, homelessness in your own, or the lack of arts education for kids, that keeps tugging at your heart, popping up in your mind. What need or problem in the world — or as close as on your own neighborhood block — is whispering to you?

2. You see a powerful vision — vague or clear — about what could be. One of my clients has a long-held vision for a community garden in her city. Another has a strong vision — and insight — about how parents can more effectively deal with troubled teens. What vision keeps showing up in your mind’s eye? What future possibility do you see? What if you could put aside the voices of self-doubt, of judging that vision, and trust that it is your work to bring it into the world?

3. You feel as if you’ve received an assignment, rather than that you chose the particular task or cause. Callings are “assignments to bring a particular kind of light into the world.” You feel called, pulled. You have a mysterious sense of “this work is mine to do.” Read the rest of this entry »

Do you keep a “done-list”?

I do!

I’ve made it a habit to make a note of all the good things I created (or you might say “that happened to me”) every day. I collect them all in a recurring reminder in my calendar, every Sunday.

I’ve noticed how fast we forget. I’ve noticed that we remember bad stuff longer than good stuff. And sometimes we get frustrated because things don’t seem to move forward as fast as we would like them to.

But then Sunday comes around and I look at my “Done-List” for the week and go, wow, I totally forgot about this great meeting I had, which could create Read the rest of this entry »

What you focus on expands.

Energy flows where attention goes.

If all your attention and focus goes into your work, that’s what grows. But what if the job alone doesn’t make you happy anymore? What if it actually took a turn and begins to make you unhappy? What if there are suddenly different ideas about life, work and your future knocking on the surface of your consciousness? What if you suddenly begin to question your decisions that led you here?

The women I work with often carry those questions around with them. On one hand they rationalize with themselves and go, “Hey, I should be happy with what I have! I have nothing to complain about.”

When that doesn’t make the funny feeling go away, though, they feel something’s wrong with them. Because they’re not 100% happy where they are in life right now, it must mean they have taken wrong decisions at some point in the past. And then they “take responsibility” and beat themselves up about it: “How stupid! It’s all my fault! I should have known! I have no-one else to blame but me!”

Newsflash. It’s not stupid to make a wrong decision. Decisions move us forward in life. We’ll never know if they’re right or wrong until later. Most successes are the result of many failures. We can always correct our course along the way – provided we know where we want to go.

The decisions we made in the past made sense at the time. They were the right decisions to make with the information we had back then and for the person we were back then.

Nobody every says, “I’m going to make a wrong decision now!”

What if you’re right were you’re supposed to be? And if it doesn’t feel like that and you think, “What am I doing here? How did I end up here?” Then there’s a lesson waiting to be learned. And resulting from that, there’s probably a new decision to be made – with the new information and the new learnings and for the new person that you are now. …To create the person you want to be.

Making a wrong decision is not a bad thing. Sticking with a wrong decision is.

I noticed this week how the common challenge of my clients seems to be “making space” for themselves at the moment.

Some of them are so caught up with “putting out fires” and covering for other people at work, that it overshadows their whole life and it stops them from moving forward in their own growth. After a 12-hour work day they have neither time nor energy left to pay attention to their own needs.

All of these women have a huge sense of responsibility and loyalty to their employers. They haven’t arrived in their management positions by chance. They are smart decision makers, caring, driven, and very successful.

At least at work.

The surprising truth however is that few of them consider themselves truly successful. Because despite their success at work, they don’t feel they have achieved the same success “in life”. Too much energy goes into work and too little into any other area of their lives – whether that is relationships, family, health, recreation, finances, spiritual growth or simply the relationship with themselves. There just seems to be too little time to remember themselves.

It’s hard to show loyalty to yourself, when you don’t know who you are. It’s hard to take responsibility and action, when you don’t know where you’re going.

It’s so much easier and safe to exert your strengths at work, the only place where things are clearly defined and where all the targets are known. You know when and where to show up everyday, you know what to do, you get rewarded with a paycheck at the end of the month, you get promoted and bit by bit you get pulled in more and more…

Have you every noticed that you can have strengths that you actually don’t enjoy doing? Some of us are required to use those strengths every single day at work! Yes, it’s possible to be drained by our own strengths!

“You can have anything you want in life, but you do have to pay… attention!”

So, what can you do? Make space!

Create mental space that allows you to take stock and see where you are now, how you got here and where you want to go from here. Start paying attention to yourself. Whether that is by talking with friends, hiring a coach or by contemplating the question “What do I really want?” for 5min every morning or night in bed.

Make a start. Find out your “What” and then your “Why”. Don’t worry about the “How” just yet. It will reveal itself once you’ve defined your direction.

To your holistic success!

PS:

The Special Coaching Package I created at the beginning of this year will be discontinued by the end of February. If you do want to work with a coach to learn from your past, take stock where you are now, and make a concise plan for your year ahead, sign up before February 28!

At last night’s New Year’s party, a friend of mine asked me what my priority for 2011 was, and after a short think, I said “Me!” She nodded and said, “Yes, same here!”

Sometimes, we get so distracted by our daily lives – reacting and responding to other people’s demands (be it our boss at work or people in our private lives who need our attention or help) that we forget to take a step back and think, ‘What do I want? What is important to me? What do I want to create in my life?’

So, let’s first get you into the mood of starting to pay attention to yourself. Let’s call this the “Ode to Me”.

Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine yourself one year from now, thinking, “Wow! What a ride 2011 has been! I wanna go again!”

Is it easy to imagine that? Or is the sarcastic part of you jumping in right away, snorting, “Well, if it’s anything like 2010…”

How has the past year treated you? Did good stuff happen to you? Or not so good stuff?

Notice how above questions address you like “a victim”. Someone, who things happen to. Someone who can only react to what life offers him or her.

Would you like to keep reacting in the new year, or would you like to take ownership of your life and just scramble up the very word “reacting” by simply moving the “c” to the beginning of the word…

What would you like to create for yourself in 2011? Read the rest of this entry »

I recently posted on the Virtual Anja Facebook page how a client went from “F%$& 2010! Bring on 2011!” to “Thank you, 2010. Welcome 2011.” in one of our sessions.

I was taking her through a process of reviewing the past year and making inspired plans for the next one.

Normally I only do coaching programs with a minimum of 6 sessions, but seeing how fast valuable insights and positive change can happen sometimes, I decided to offer a special package of only 3 sessions just for this purpose – to help you make the coming year your best one ever and to kick start it with a positive outlook and bucketloads of inspiration!

No, I will not call this package The Bucket List

What will our three sessions be about? Read the rest of this entry »

Don’t you just love it when you learn something new about yourself? When you get a new insight and suddenly everything makes sense?

Well, today I found out I’m an Audi. Yes. An Audi.

Yesterday I got a great exercise from Marie Forleo and Laura Roeder, which asks you to think of 2 or 3 brands that you admire. This helps you to determine which values are important for you in business and to check if in fact you are incorporating them in your own business. Read the rest of this entry »