by Janelle Legge | Oct 17, 2017 | Podcasts
Are you wanting to find your own success and have more wellbeing, calm and zen in your life? Maybe you’re feeling that you’ve stagnated and are stuck because you just can’t seem to crack the code for your own success and inner peace? Or you find that each time you reach a certain level of change and success that life seems to throw up obstacles and situations that send you back to your old comfort zone where you’re soon feeling frustrated and disappointed with yourself because you know you’ve slipped back into old habits and negative thought patterns?
If this is something you’ve been struggling with and you’re wanting to break this repetitive cycle and get some insights into why it occurs, then listen to my conversation with Chris Shea at Lifesjourney Life Coaching in the USA. Chris recently invited me to be a guest on his Podcast “On Finding Peace” to talk about “Success is an Inside Job”, which is central to how I’ve helped my clients achieve consistent, lasting positive results and life-changing outcomes as a Psychotherapist, Business Leadership Coach and Transformational Change Consultant for the last 20 years.
Chris and I go deeply into what needs to happen for REAL change to occur, where you’re able to find your own, more satisfying version of success because you’re no longer being controlled by negative subconscious beliefs and thinking habits – many of which you don’t even know are there.
I also uncover why so many people just aren’t getting the results and transformations they’d hoped for from self-study and do-it-yourself style online personal change programs.
In this special Podcast you’ll also find out :
- Why some people struggle with MINDFULNESS and/or self-reflective style homework [which doesn’t mean that you’re a failure] and what’s needed instead.
- Why particular kinds of FOCUSED conversations are the most powerful way to rewire your brain, improve your self worth and start thinking in a SUCCESS way.
- What negative self talk REALLY is (you might be surprised) and why you need to stop listening to it for real change to occur.
And there’s much more where Chris and I share over 20 years experience of helping our clients find their own version of success and have more meaningful and fulfilling lives.
Listen to the full interview here.
by Janelle Legge | Apr 30, 2016 | Wellbeing |
One of the trickiest things in life can be finding ways to stay motivated when you haven’t been investing in your wellbeing. Focusing on your wellbeing is a mindset and lifestyle choice. Looking after yourself in a conscious and mindful way.
Choosing to invest in your mindset and wellbeing is probably one of the most empowering and potent decisions you’ll ever make. Because staying positive and on track has a ripple effect. How much you focus on and invest in your mindset and wellbeing not only impacts the quality of your present, it powerfully impacts your entire future life.
It’s when you don’t commit to regularly investing in yourself and your wellbeing that it can be hard to stay motivated. It’s easier to lose your mojo and optimism. Negatively impacting your business, your results, your career, your relationships and your ability to handle the ups and downs of life. Particularly when things don’t go your way and it can seem like an impossible task to feel positive and optimistic about yourself and your future. And when you continuously neglect your wellbeing, you get disconnected from your true self, your body and your feelings – and what they are trying to tell you. Negative moods just seem to spring out of nowhere. You’re more easily discouraged and pushed around by your emotions and other people’s negative vibes.
Taking your mindset and wellbeing seriously changes your life in positive and powerful ways. It makes you mentally and physically stronger and naturally more optimistic. You stay motivated. You’re more resourceful and tenacious. Things that used to make you feel frustrated and powerless just don’t have the same impact. Sure, you still feel life’s challenges and setbacks, but when you’ve invested in yourself, your mindset and your wellbeing, you have far more self-confidence and inner reserves to deal with whatever life throws your way.
If you’ve been neglecting your wellbeing and stuck in a bit of a funk, here’s how you can set yourself up for better health, mental resilience and success in the areas of life that matter the most to you:
5 Ways To Stay Motivated And Invest In Your Wellbeing
1# Think outside the status quo of your subconscious mind
One of the quickest ways to get out of your own way and get re-inspired is to connect with positive people who get you and support you. You know, the types of people who are able to snap you out of any ‘glass-half-empty’ style thinking and offer helpful solutions and ideas around whatever it is that you’re dealing with. You walk away from these types of conversations energized, with fresh perspectives, feeling more positive about what’s possible. When you invest in good quality relationships it’s a sure-fire way to not get seduced into thinking you can sort things out on your own. Only to find months, sometimes years down the track, nothing has really changed and that you’re still stuck in the same old patterns. Our minds are very convincing. We can talk ourselves into ridiculously negative and self-defeating things, because of faulty subconscious beliefs that we’ve absorbed from other people growing up.
Powerful conversations have been shown to be instrumental in rewiring your brain and thinking. They literally build in new neural pathways. So be selective with who you interact with.
#2 Get Fit And Grounded
It’s well researched that physical fitness and wellbeing have a direct impact on the strength and flexibility of your mind. Exercise gets those valuable endorphins kicking in, lifting your mood and in turn making you feel more positive and self-confident. Things like going to the gym, exercising outside in nature, swimming, yoga, tai chi are all great ways to get you out of over-thinking and analysis paralysis. They ground your energy and stop you from getting stuck in your head. Find something you genuinely enjoy and do it regularly. It’s important that you find a style that works for you so that you stick with it. Rhythms are good for your brain. They also make you feel grounded and secure on a deep level. Committing to regular fitness and spiritual practices changes your life in amazing ways. Particularly if you’re feeling anxious, depressed or insecure. They are game-changers. Clear thinking and optimism become your new norm when you’re active and fit.
#3 Listen To Your Intuition
How many times have you found that the little voice deep inside of you that said “No”, but you went ahead and did it anyway, was RIGHT? Just about everyone can relate to this. It’s time to view your intuition as a valuable data source that you need to stop and listen to. When you’re grounded and feeling strongly connected with your centre, your intuition or gut feel on things becomes much clearer. And when you learn how to respond to what it is telling you, your inner certainty around decision making and life increases.
#4 Take Responsibility For Charting Your Own Course In Life
When you take full ownership for your life and the choices you’ve made to date it’s one of the most empowering and freeing things you’ll ever do. It promotes high-end self acceptance. And it’s from this stance that you can re-ignite your self-confidence and self-belief. It’s about accepting that you’re not perfect, and nor is anyone else. Committing to learning from failures and setbacks and doing things differently next time. When you’re not constantly judging and criticising yourself, beating yourself up on the inside, your wellbeing thrives. You’re more relaxed and open to try new things. And that’s when life opens up new possibilities that you couldn’t have even imaged when you were stuck in negative thinking loops. You also start to have more fun.
#5 Know Your Big Why
This is one of the most effective techniques for being able to do sustainable endurance. Which is what in reality is required for going for something that really matters to you. Being really clear on WHY you’re doing something is what keeps you motivated and optimistic, even when just about everything seems to be going wrong, or just not happening when you want it to. Nature has seasons and cycles and we’re part of the same ecological system. It’s learning to recognize where you’re at in these different cycles. Sometimes you’re required to just focus on preparing the soil, doing the necessary ground work. Not always exciting, right. Then when the soil is rich and full of nutrients, putting in the seeds. Then you have to wait. There’s a PAUSE. It’s the incubation phase where it looks like absolutely nothing is happening, but that’s not the case at all. And sometimes the crop fails so you learn from this and do things differently next time. That’s just life. But when you know your big why, you just keep going, fine-tuning and course correcting where necessary.
People with the most resilience and mental agility are the ones that get the best outcomes and results, again and again. Particularly when it comes to leadership and business. Some people view this as “luck”. It’s not as simple or random as that. It’s about consistently committing to up-levelling your thoughts and your daily self care. Being aware of what choices you’re making every single day. When you become more mindful of what you think and how you do life, you start to enjoy optimum levels of thinking, mental health and wellbeing. Qualities that are becoming increasingly essential for thriving and succeeding in a world of over-stimulation, uncertainty and where more and more people are feeling less-than and insecure.
by Janelle Legge | Jan 11, 2016 | Self Actualization |
Happy New Moon in Aquarius! This morning I read an article on hiding, something most of us have done at some stage in our lives. Usually because of negative experiences we’ve had in childhood around being criticised or maybe even ostracised or persecuted for exuberantly and innocently expressing our true self. Maybe you can relate?
You could say hiding is pretty much part of the human condition. But by a certain age and stage in our lives we need to send this avoidant style of being-in-the world packing. Because ultimately we’re embracing faulty thinking habits to avoid change or potential criticism and failure. So we hold back from revealing and expressing more of our true self.
Sometimes hiding’s also about avoiding taking responsibility for a particular area of your life.
Hiding and fear does weird things to your mind.
Each time we seduce ourselves into hiding, we lose out on the immense value we can get from stretching and growing by expressing our true self.
3 Self-Discovery Questions To Unlock Your True Self
1. What areas of your life have you been hiding, or avoiding taking decisive action or responsibility?
2. How has this been serving you?
3. What’s the long-term cost to you?
Remember, structured clear thinking leads to structured, tangible results. Change is not always exciting, magical, or amazing. It can be about just knuckling down and taking care of the mundane necessities of ordinary everyday living. Yet when we commit to this, we actually buy ourselves more freedom and options further down the track.
It’s about embracing at specific times in our lives good old discipline. If your preference and strengths are around generating ideas and big picture thinking, you need to also be able to ground your ideas via clear structures, discipline and getting down to the nitty gritty day to day details.
Some of us literally run at the mere mention of setting limits and embracing boring structures and daily disciplines. We misinterpret it as having to be, dare I say it, ordinary. Yet thousands of hours of daily practice and having good structures in place in reality is what’s required to master anything worthwhile. To become extra-ordinary. So if this ‘anti-structure’ part speaks to you, now is the time to fall in love with your nemeses – structure, discipline and commitment – so that you can come out of hiding and make your true self more visible to the world.
Now is the time to take control of the quality of your thinking, stop buying into out-dated fears that no longer apply and adhere to structure. Do this and your results will grow and your true self will thank you.
Always DO YOU.
by Janelle Legge | Jan 8, 2016 | Mindfulness for Success |
Are you refreshed and ready to embrace the New Year with a positive success mindset and the self-belief that whatever it is that you truly want, you’ll be able to make it happen?
January is the perfect month to detox and realign your thinking. Make the decision right now that you will let go of faulty thinking patterns that try and convince you that you can’t get what you want in your life, relationships, career, or business. Send these thoughts packing.
I believe in you and you need to believe in you too! You have all of the resources you need to achieve whatever it is that you want. It’s about adopting and sustaining a positive, optimistic, and proactive mindset to keep you moving towards your goals.
Why It’s Important To Master A Positive Success Mindset
People who make the most money and have the most success in life, have mastered the ability to structure their mind and thinking. They are vigilant about only investing in thoughts that 100% support where they want to go in life, what they want to attract, and what they want to achieve. A structured mind leads to organised, strategic and structured action. So if it’s more love and prosperity you’re wanting, then this needs to be the daily focus of your thinking. Right.
Your mind IS powerful. Whether you like it or not, your mind magnetizes your results. Being constantly mindful of this universal law is a total game changer.
Image by Greg Rakozy
by Janelle Legge | Sep 24, 2015 | Wellbeing |
Are you sick and tired of negative self talk that at times just seems to go on and on relentlessly inside your head? You know, the critical and dismissive negative voice that picks everything (including you) apart, and is never satisfied. Ever.
If you’re ready to send your negative self talk off on a permanent vacation, then you’re in the right place. Because I’m going to share with you one of my most deft manoeuvres for outsmarting and defeating negative self talk once and for all. Mastering this skill is a total game-changer.
But first of all let’s look at what absolutely doesn’t work when you’re wanting to break free from negative self talk:
1. Trying to debate your negative self talk – and win
This is a common tactic. But trying to debate and argue back with negative self talk to show it who’s really the boss is an ineffective and pointless exercise. It’s a bit like trying to win an argument with a highly opinionated, “know it all”. And when you fall into this trap, the arguments become circular, more and more irrational and ridiculous, and go no where.
2. The “I’m not listening to you” approach
Image by Jan Vašek
Trying to ignore negative self talk and replace it with sweet positive thoughts instead doesn’t work for very long either. As just about everyone who’s tried this finds out. Negative thoughts are simply more powerful and usually win in the end. Often doing this just makes them come back even stronger. And they’ll totally shoot down and crush the positive thoughts you’ve tried to embrace instead.
So why don’t these tactics work?
Because negative self talk is driven in part by your lizard brain that’s been primed to only see danger and threat. It’s primary job is to keep you alive and safe. But it hates change and especially risks, no matter how well calculated – seeing them as potential threats. And it’s this part of your brain that totally backs and supports all of those subconscious self-limiting, negative beliefs you’ve absorbed from other people and your tribe as a child.
In fact around 90% of your negative self talk doesn’t even belong to you, or the reality you’re in. It’s been shaped and formed in a different time and place. So if your ancestors lived through difficult times, negative self talk, and a lack of optimism, can become a way of coping with life. It helps justify how bad and disappointing life and other people can be. Negative self talk usually masks feelings of powerlessness to be able to change the course of your life.
But that’s not you. Right. You’re living in different times.
Defeating Negative Self Talk – Fast
Image by Anthony Delanoix
Okay, so let’s get to the fun part. We’re going to send your negative self talk on a long, well deserved vacation. After all, it’s been working day and night, often going all out to keep you stuck in exactly the same place.
Because this is your time, your life, and it’s time to leave the old version of your inherited ‘negative self talk’ behind.
Now this is going to sound counterintuitive, but hang in there because it works.
The fastest and most effective way to outsmart negative self talk and send it on it’s way is to “thank it” for it’s input. You need to imagine that the part of you that’s driving your negative self talk, actually thinks it’s being helpful and keeping you safe. It doesn’t want you to make any kind of change that will take you beyond where you’re at now – which is the only reality that it knows. And optimistic, expansive thinking leading to a bigger, more exciting version of your life is its nemesis.
So you need to give this part of you some recognition and validation. That’s right. The next time your negative self talk chimes in, you need to dialogue internally with it as if you’re talking to a well-meaning relative or friend. Graciously and politely thank it for all of it’s opinions, and negative cynical advice. After all, it’s just doing it’s job, right.
Then watch what happens next. Silence. Pause. There’s no back-chat, or counter arguments with the usual circular and repetitive scripts going on inside your head. Your negative self talk has suddenly gone all quiet. You can think clearly again, and move forward.
So start thanking your negative self talk and then just feel it melt away. Doing this consistently will bring you more freedom, wellbeing, and optimism, and change your life in powerful ways.
© 2015 Janelle Legge
Title image by Luis Llerena
