Defying the laws of gravity, they rise up to reach beyond everything they have ever known. Over and over they fall. They rise up again. Eventually they conquer a brave new world.

They set no goals. They require no discipline, adhere to no schedule. Fear of failure, regret, guilt for not practicing enough-these strategies play no part in their game plan or ultimate success.

They are babies. Using the strongest motivation known to human kind, they master the art of walking. How? Why? With what motivation? The answer to all 3 questions is the same. Desire-because they want to.

You want a master class in motivation? Watch babies. Every day they achieve something that was impossible the day before.

Yet all day every day intelligent, well educated people use everything but their natural desire to lead them to what they want. They use misery motivators instead. They withhold happiness from themselves, promising they will never feel good until they get that car or that job, or that first million dollars. They use guilt, regret, shame, anger, punishment, worry, fear and self-loathing to bash, beat and prod themselves and other people through life. Why? In order to achieve goals they hope will make them happy.

Misery motivators achieve miserable results. If that’s not self-defeating, please tell me what is?

Desire is an important element in my books “Emotional Options” and “Travelling Free: How to Recover From the Past by Changing Your Beliefs.” Desire is a strong focus of the “BREAKOUT!” workshop. I even taught a five day seminar, “Desire Marks the Path” in Holland and in Fairfield, IA. The results people get when they turn their attention away from what they are upset about toward what they would like to welcome into their lives thrill me-and them.

Add some might and joy to your motivation. Visit www.mandyevans.com for courses, free belief quizzes and the free article “A Kinder from of Motivation” by Jeffrey Pease.

Here is an excerpt about motivation from “Emotional Options: A Handbook for Happiness.” Use it to motivate yourself like a big baby.

“We can divide the ways to motivate yourself and others into two basic categories:

Desire and Happiness Need and Un-happiness Motivation with desire and happiness moves things about so quickly that you may not notice it happening.

When we use desire for our motivation, the difference between wanting and attachment becomes clear. Wanting is moving toward and can include happiness. Attachment is often static and requires the feelings of need and sometimes fear, for our very survival. Attachment appears to connect us to the object of our need-as if our fear, our sorrow, our guilt, our experience of need, will bring it to us or keep it escaping. But this does not work very well.

To believe that you need something requires, by definition, that you also believe that you cannot be okay without that something. It may be an experience that you believe you need to have or a material object or goal to achieve.

In this need filled view of reality, if you do not get what you want or reach your goal, that very not getting threatens your well-being, your hopes for happiness, and your ability to be okay. When you use “Need and Un-happiness” in order to help yourself to get what you want, you live in that need and un-happiness. That experience is life extinguishing. The very thing you do to help yourself cripples you. It chokes your life force and creativity.

In contrast, the experience of “Happiness and Desire” is life enhancing. It allows happiness now. It fosters a sense of being okay and feeling good. It simply acknowledges that something more or something different would be welcome.

Years ago, I visited a garden with a statue of a particularly jolly Buddha. Inscribed beneath it were the words, “Misunderstood desire is the cause of all suffering.” Misunderstood desire. At last it made sense!

We have all heard the familiar quote, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.” I had often wondered how someone as wise as Buddha could have thought that. How could desire ever cause suffering? Attachment and “misunderstood desire” do that. Perhaps some Puritan ethics got mixed up with Buddha’s wisdom.

Wanting something, coupled with the belief that you cannot have it, or that you are foolish to want it, can cause some powerful suffering. But not desire alone. Desire, imagination, creation, anticipation-that stuff is all fun.

Desire functions as an inner sense of direction. It may be all we will ever need to know to guide us through life-to learn all that we need to know, to show up where we need to be. At least I cannot think of a more reliable guide. What else is there-someone else’s desire? Somebody else’s idea about what you should do? Your desire, your awareness of what you welcome offers the best compass for finding your way through the mystery of life that I have found so far. This system of navigation pretty much eliminates regret and guilt. It also banishes the temptation to try to make anyone else suffer.

When you follow your conscious desire as an inner sense of direction, correcting your course as you go, all you have to do when you want a change is ask yourself, “What do I welcome now? Where shall I go from here?”

You can skip that part about feeling bad, worrying that you will never change, blaming someone else for your predicament. You can bypass the frantic search for a new game plan before you even know what game you want to play.”

From “Emotional Options” by Mandy Evans

As my friend success coach, Michael Neill says in his happily helpful book, “You Can Have What You Want” **Happiness Leads to Success more often that success leads to happiness.**

Wishing you mighty motivation, love, happiness and many blessings.

www.mandyevans.com

By Mandy Evans

“It’s like you’re swinging through the jungle,” she said. “You swing along from vine to vine and then you can’t reach the next one.” You have to swing out farther than you ever have and let go or just hang on, swinging back and forth, back and forth until you’re exhausted.

One of the exquisite benefits of my work is sharing people’s beliefs, hopes, dreams, wisdom and insight in such profoundly intimate ways. The quote above came from someone in a private session.

When you let go of the vine, sometimes you cannot even see the next one. You face the empty place.

When a relationship ends, a loved one dies, a job is lost, a game plan heads south, a dream turn to dust — it’s easy to grab on to something, anything, to avoid facing the empty place.

If a fine new vine presents itself, hooray! Grab on and keep swinging through this beautiful jungle called life.

But what about when you can’t see a new opportunity yet? Or you reach for a new vine and miss? Like a student in a workshop who told us that she had expended vast amounts of energy and money in endeavors that were doomed to fail, over and over again.

She became aware that she had believed she could not endure living without a game plan. So she never assessed her chances for success. She never even thought about it. For her any game plan, even one that had no chance had seemed better than none at all. She had not know how to find or challenge that limiting belief.

Who, for example, has not watched with concern as a loved one clutches at the slimmest hope of a relationship to avoid being alone? Have you done that too? I sure have.

How many of us have faced the prospect of a job ending before another materializes with fear and dread?

All you see, all you feel is the empty place.

The sages, through the ages tell us to be still and wait.

Everything else (the media, our friends, the popular values in society) tells us that we are in big trouble!

You know that saying that nature abhors a vacuum? The last time I entered the empty space to see what nature had to offer, within a week I can felt a new sense of freedom, space and possibility — a sweet free-floating sensation. I began to feel a new sense of direction.  Then I began to create again.

If you are between vines, I’d love to hear from you. We can be still and wait together, though sometimes it only takes a few minutes!

As you wait, you can focus on what you know you welcome, what you would like to attract to you or move toward.

For me it is:

* Opportunities beyond my wildest imaginings to love, and be useful in ways that in utilize my skills, talents and insights well.

* I want to have a lot of fun and be very happy.

* I would like to connect with amazing people who also want to fill the world with love, joy, generosity of spirit and abundance for all.

Wishing you great happiness, success and wonderful new opportunities to fill your empty places.

www.mandyevans.com

We’ve probably all heard the saying “it’s better to be lucky than good” as if these two words are mutually exclusive. Can someone be both?

Serendipity, chance, synchronicity, timing: words which are often associated with “luck.”

Do we create our own luck or do things just randomly occur and we “happen” to be in the right place at the right time? Perhaps the answer is somewhere in the middle and luck resides at the intersection between preparation and opportunity.

In many ways then, we are active participants in our on-going dance with “Lady Luck.” Sometimes we lead and sometimes we follow.

By incorporating and applying tools such as EFT, visualization, NLP, hypnosis and time line therapy to our daily routine, we can greatly increase the amount of “luck” we experience in our lives.

Step 1: Select an area of your life that is not working or not working as well as you would like.

Step 2: Write down any limiting beliefs you have about this area. (Note: there are many sample beliefs about money, relationsips, health, career, etc. available in the Beyond Belief Membership for your reference)

Step 3: Reduce your resistence by applying a technique such as EFT, NLP, hypnosis or Timeline therapy to this area.

Step 4: Find pictures, words, etc. which represent how you want this area to be.

Step 5: Create a collage or vision board. Feel and visualize the outcome(s) you desire on a daily basis.

Apply these steps at least twice a day and watch how you will begin to manifest your own “luck.”

Good luck! Or should I say “Be GOOD AND LUCKY!”

What are the Top Ten New Years Resolutions for 2012?

Here is the Beyond Belief Run Down:

10. Get organized.
9. Set aside at least one hour each week to do something you enjoy.
8.  Practice spontaneous acts of gratitude.
7.  Help others, volunteer, connect with people.
6.  Lose weight.
5. Create a weekly action plan (Word Version) (PDF Version) and transfer those actions to your scheduling system!
4. Stop Smoking or Drinking.
3. Get out of debt.
2. Get the Beyond Belief DVD and change your life! (Save 50% now)
1.  Become a Beyond Belief Member and ACHIEVE your intentions in 2012 and beyond!

Happy New Year!

Going Beyond What You Think is Possible

By Jim Holzknecht

If you would have told me over two years ago that I would accomplish a record setting yoga streak of over eight hundred and fifty consecutive days of Bikram heated yoga, I would have told you there was no way. Yet, somehow I did, one day and one posture at a time.

Similarly, if you would have told me that I’d co-interview many of the stars from the movies The Secret and What the Bleep Do We Know including Jack Canfield, Marci Shimoff, Bob Doyle, Joe Vitale, Amit Goswami and many others, I would not have believed you. But I did.

Co-producing the movie Beyond Belief (www.beyondbeliefthemovie.com) with Becky Hays, was a great opportunity for me to go beyond what I previously believed was possible. In fact, co-producing the movie was the main reason I initiated my consecutive day yoga streak. I wanted to challenge my perception of where I thought my limits were.

How often do we limit our potential by creating self-imposed ceilings on what’s possible? If you are like me, these limits can be found in every significant area of life such as relationships, money, career, health and creativity. These limits are made by a well-intending, reasonable mind which is hard wired for our safety, security and protection.

Millions of years of genetic coding pull for us to remain within the confines of a self-perceived veil of safety and to not venture beyond it. This is the machinery we’re born into. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, after all it helped get us here. The problem is that often the cost of playing it safe, and not challenging these comfort-zone limits, is we end up suppressing our vitality, and potential.

I invite you to take some action today that challenges a limitation you’ve created for yourself in an area of your life that is important to you. If you hear the cautionary voice in your head warning you to not start or pursue this activity, notice and be with it, without having to fix or change it.

Take the action anyway. Commit yourself to taking this action now, no matter how small you think it might be. You never know where it will lead you. Go beyond what you currently think is possible, go beyond who you currently know yourself to be.

By Darren Weissman

Good to Great! Why Settle for Less

History teaches us that unless we’re challenged, human nature has a tendency to settle for good. Good jobs, good relationships, good health, and simply a good time. However, as Jim Collins stated quite succinctly in his New York Times best-selling book, Good to Great, “Good is the enemy of great.” And on a certain level, just below the surface of the experience of good, exists a churning feeling of being unfulfilled and a mysterious longing for something more. Yes it’s nice to feel good, however there’s a part of you that knows that greatness exists in the very same moment.

Why is it then that so many people settle for jobs, partners, health, and the status quo of life’s circumstances? Some people use excuses of not having enough money, family support, or social privileges to explain or justify living in the mediocrity of good. Yes, there can be blessings of being born into money that holds the potential to have a wider range of opportunities, however as the Beatles sang in the year 1964 and still rings true today: Money can’t buy me love. Fulfillment and owning one’s power is an inside job and is the tethering vibration between good and great.

Within each and every one of us exists the same opportunity and potential for self-realization. Helen Keller is an extraordinary example of this. Helen Keller was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. Anne Sullivan – Helen Keller’s teacher – helped Helen bridge the gap and sprout her seed of greatness. Helen Keller is quoted saying, “Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature.” Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than exposure. The transformation from good to greatness is a journey whose power is discovered along the way.

In my experience the perspective you have about your present, past, or future holds the key to awakening your inner greatness. As Wayne Dyer so eloquently says, “When you change the way you view things, the things that you view change.”

So what is it that keeps people viewing through the same lens of good again and again rather than upgrading and changing their perceptual prescription to greatness? The answer resides within the subconscious mind.

In 1999 – all within a month’s time – my grandmother died in my arms, my fiancé chose to end our relationship and get engaged right after ending ours, my business almost went completely bankrupt, and I ruptured my left Achilles tendon twice. Little did I know that at the moment of complete darkness my light was just beginning to shine. These experiences were priming my spiritual engine to upgrade from living a good life to living a great life.

Fast forward two years to 2001 and I’m at the tipping point between faith and fear. I could settle and continue to live in fear – reacting to reactions – or awaken with faith to possibilities that only my imagination could conjure up. The shift for me occurred in an instant like a scene from Star Trek. One moment I’m pacing the floor in my home with fearful hamster wheel—like thoughts looping through my mind and in the next second I’m beamed up into a space of clarity and Divine vision. In a single moment – actually a swing from good to great – I was now able to perceive the blueprint or roadmap to helping others awaken to their own power.

Here’s a powerful exercise to begin your journey of transforming your perception of good into great!

1. Connect to something or someone that causes you to feel stress. Regardless of what or who it is, simply observe where your mind and heart takes you. Acknowledge the stress by appreciating the emotion that it brings up in you. Write this emotion down on a piece of paper.
2. Rating this emotion on a scale of 0 to 10 with 0 being nothing at all and 10 being off the charts will help you to appreciate the level of stress you’re currently under. Now ask yourself this question pertaining to the stressful circumstance. Given the opportunity would you ever choose to create your life, a day, or a single moment feeling or attracting this emotional stress? (The answer to this question is universally and discernibly no!)
3. Knowing you would never consciously choose this stress helps you to appreciate that the source of its origination is reactive in nature. Only the conscious mind chooses and if you wouldn’t choose the stress then its source is the subconscious mind.
4. Now we’re going to guide and influence your subconscious mind into the land of greatness by focusing on what you do choose. From a place of love and the desire of your heart, imagine that you have a menu of infinite possibilities to choose from. What do you choose to feel? Remember, we’re going for greatness! Write this feeling down on a piece of paper.
5. Now put the words I Am _______ in front of this feeling and say it out loud 3 times. Put a smile on your face for extra credit and feel it send ripples all through your body as you declare it to the world!
6. I encourage you to make a daily commitment to yourself by looking in the mirror deeply into your beautiful eyes while declaring your I Am ______ statement. Perform this exercise 10 times in the morning and 10 times in the evening. Writing your statement on a sticky note and placing it on the mirror will help you to remember this important act of self-love each and every day. Go for it NOW, your destiny of greatness awaits you!

 Check out Darren Weissman’s new online course called The Now Program
  The NOW Program: A Professional Certification Course by Darren Weissman

Dr. Darren R. Weissman is the developer of The LifeLine Technique, an advanced holistic system that discovers, releases, and interprets the root cause of physical symptoms and stress—emotions trapped within the subconscious mind. His mission is world peace through inner peace. Darren is an internationally renowned lecturer and has helped thousands of people awaken to their infinite potential and The Power of Infinite Love & Gratitude. Website: www.infiniteloveandgratitude.com

This does not mean you immediately drop all your friends or leave your spouse!  But simply making small changes around you can have a huge impact on your life.   Everything you see, hear, feel, the books you read, what you listen to, and yes, the people you hang out with, all have an influence on you.

So the more you can surround yourself with positive, uplifting, supportive messages, the faster you will change your subconscious beliefs about what is possible in your life.

You may want to visit the link to the right, “Links of Interest” for the latest and greatest self empowerment media, books, CDs, to inspire you with new ideas, as you begin to surround yourself  with the positive aspects of what you want to draw into your life.

And right now, if you have not watched this movie yet, go see Louise Hay’s inspiring movie, You Can Heal Your Life.  It will inspire you with a story of a woman who lived through dramatic changes in her own life, and give you another example of what is possible.

Go see:
Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life: The Movie – Buy now and save 20%!

Listen to the amazing story of how one woman started with a simple idea, working from her small bedroom, and expanded that idea into a successful organization that now promotes and distributes bestselling authors, offers workshops, seminars, transformational events and cruises!

Go see:

Louise L. Hay’s You Can Heal Your Life: The Movie – Buy now and save 20%!

The movie Beyond Belief only shares a fraction of this fascinating journey.  To hear the full story, get Darren’s book, The Power of Infinite Love & Gratitude: An Evolutionary Journey to Awakening Your Spirit.  This book will not only explain the ‘how’ behind why gratitude is beneficial for you to practice, but it will also inspire you to make this practice a daily part of your life.

Enjoy the book!

The movie Beyond Belief only shares a fraction of this fascinating journey.  To hear the full story, get Darren’s book, The Power of Infinite Love & Gratitude: An Evolutionary Journey to Awakening Your Spirit.  This book will not only explain the ‘how’ behind why gratitude is beneficial for you to practice, but it will also inspire you to make this practice a daily part of your life.

Enjoy the book!