Filed under: Creating Your Dream, Uncategorized | Tags: bliss, Chris Dorris, Christopher Dorris, Clarity, coaching, community, courage, creativity, discipline, dream life, dreams, Dynamics, emotion control, Fun, gymnastics, intelligence, Keynote Speaker, meditation, mental toughness, Michael Allen, Networked Blogs, passion, Personal Coaching, personal growth, PGA Tour, psychological strength, Tiger Woods, toughness
THE OUTER WORLD IS A REFLECTION OF THE INNER WORLD
Regardless of who you are or what you’re doing with your life, what’s going on around you is a product of what’s going IN you. More specifically, in your mind.
A few weeks ago I did an interview with Michael Allen (http://wp.me/psrwD-1C) in which we discuss the value of Mental Conditioning as it applies to success on the PGA Tour. Last week I recorded another video with my dear friend and mentor, Jim Myers, who has coached hundreds of CEOs on business, leadership and personal development. (That video was audibly challenged, so we’re doing it over – look for it next time.)
It might seem obvious to most people how Mental Toughness is essential to success in professional sports or big business. Every once in a while, if I’m in conversation with someone and happen to mention that I am coaching a youngster, they might say, “For what?! What could a 13-year-old possibly need Mental Toughness Training for?”
The simple answer: for LIFE!
THE OUTER WORLD IS A REFLECTION OF THE INNER WORLD
I often tell folks that I went through graduate school in Psychology and never once had a course – ever – that taught me the fundamentals of mastering my thoughts and emotions. I never had a class that taught me how to strengthen my inner world. It’s not in the curriculum. And yet it’s the most important variable in creating success on any and every possible level!
A strong inner world can effortlessly create confidence, competence, enthusiasm, focus, determination, perseverance, patience, peace and all the psychological states that lead to masterful decision-making, skillful action and phenomenal results.
Someone with all the traditional training, education or physical talent in the world, who doesn’t also have Emotional Intelligence as the foundation, will never sniff true success. They may figure out how to make boatloads of money, or how to accumulate lots of wins on the playing field, but they’ll never be able to enjoy that money or those wins, or what come of them. These folks wait for joy to come from some external source, like wealth, or a certain lifestyle, or a certain degree of recognition or fame, for example. And that cycle of waiting will NEVER end, because the programming of the untrained mind is that there’s never enough. And to make it even worse, they have to work 10 times harder to get there!
Someone with a strong inner world, on the other hand – a trained mind – knows how to create fulfillment, bliss, reward and complete happiness from nothing but the decision to do so, and then prioritizes that choice, makes that decision every day, creates those masterful psychological states, and genuinely and fully enjoys the best results with the least effort. And then people call that person “lucky”. Because they seem to get all the breaks, or life seems to “come easy to them”. And, in a way, they’re right. Success does come easy to the mentally tough. But only after the diligent and consistent hard work of training the mind.
THE OUTER WORLD IS A REFLECTION OF THE INNER WORLD
I applaud people like Debbie Farrelly, the owner of Arizona Dynamics Gymnastics (http://www.azdynamics.com/index.htm) and her staff of coaches. These are people who are committed to teaching young children the importance and value of a disciplined mind.
Our school systems need to follow that lead and integrate formalized Emotional Mastery courses and classes into the curricula. These Mental Mastery tools, when learned at an early age, will beautifully and profoundly alter the way a child’s life unfolds. Because it will profoundly alter the way that child views life – from the place of a creator.
Here’s a profound exercise that we can all benefit from:
Start catching yourself complaining, and replace those complaints with expressions of gratitude. Literally turn the language around 180 degrees. Complaining is one of the weakest practices ever. It propagates the victim mentality. So start stopping. And switch into the high vibrational state of gratitude and appreciation. From that state, we activate creativity. We strengthen the inner world. Mastery ensues. And then the results. And it feels a hell of a lot better.
Filed under: Creating Your Dream, Uncategorized | Tags: bliss, Chris Dorris, Christopher Dorris, Clarity, coaching, community, courage, creativity, discipline, dream life, dreams, emotion control, Freddy Couples, Fun, intelligence, Keynote Speaker, meditation, mental toughness, Michael Allen, Networked Blogs, passion, Personal Coaching, personal growth, PGA Tour, psychological strength, The Gap, Tiger Woods, toughness, Waste Management Phoenix Open
BECAUSE IT’S FUN!
One of the most profound observations that I’ve made over the years in my work as a Coach, Mental Toughness Trainer, and even way back in the day as a Social Worker, is that humans are at their best when they feel their best.
Which means we all have tremendous incentive to become more masterful at creating the high vibe moods – feeling great.
The biggest mistake that I observe people making in the pursuit of excellence and their dreams is WAITING. We’ve been conditioned to wait for some set of circumstances to be different in order to feel the moods or emotional states that catapult us into creativity, greatness, success and the results we desire. We wait for a promotion or a stellar performance review before we feel competent. We wait for a victory before we feel athletic. We wait for the report card that shows a high GPA before we feel intelligent. And that’s a huge waste of time!
Ask the champions of the world, like Michael Allen, what the psychological key to their success is and they’ll tell you that it’s to reverse the equation. Instead of RESULTS –> FEELING GOOD, switch it around to FEELING GOOD –> RESULTS.
Often when people first hear this they say, “Yeah but doesn’t preparedness and talent have something to with success as well?” And the obvious answer is of course it does! But all that talent and preparedness goes right out the window when it isn’t supported by a disciplined mind – one that is willing to choose to start with the masterful moods.
I’ve come across some exceptionally skilled folks in my life that have never achieved or experienced greatness because they paralyze their talents with doubt, and by waiting for results – proof. And, I’ve met some remarkably successful folks who self-admittedly have very little raw talent who get much more out of the little skill that they have by prioritizing belief, and by not waiting for results to feel great.
So the bottom line here is simple: let yourself feel great first! NOW! Don’t wait. How? Like anything else that involves mastery – with practice.
If you’d like a suggestion for a specific Mental Toughness Tool that’ll help you out with this, click here http://bit.ly/cyHT3m to check out a recent Miraculous Life email bulletin I wrote on how to put your Game Face on.
When I ask Michael Allen these days why he plays golf, his answer is, “Because it’s fun.” When I ask him why he wants to be the first ever human to win his first event on the Champions Tour and then win a PGA Tour event he says, “Because it’s fun.” When I ask him why he puts so much effort into his preparation and physical training, “Fun.”
Let the intelligence of light-heartedness do its magic for you. Because it’s fun!
p.s. The video ends abruptly because the camera was full and it shut itself off during the recording. But what was missed in the video was captured in the writing.
p.p.s. I really welcome your comments and suggestions for content for future posts, so don’t hesitate to submit any thoughts you might have.
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T.G.I.F.?!
What do you call a life that reserves joy for maybe 2 of the 7 days of every week? I call it hell. The hell that we experience as a result of the conditioning that led us to choosing to create a life that leaves us longing for Friday afternoons and vacations.
“Thank God It’s Friday.” That this saying has become popular enough to result in a super successful restaurant chain is a clear indication that we have permitted ourselves to settle for a life far less rewarding, exciting, invigorating, stimulating, magical and desirable than each of us deserves. We’ve been programmed to reserve our most pleasant psychological states for such a small percentage of our waking existence. We reserve joy for the weekend, or for vacation.
Let’s consider that word “vacation” for a moment. This is another interesting indicator of how we’ve come to settle for mediocre (or worse) lives. Most people work hard all year and accumulate vacation time. This vacation time is the time they spend the rest of the year looking forward to, because it’s the only extended time of the year when they’re going actually enjoy themselves the way they wished they could all the time. So they go on “vacation”. That word actually means the act of vacating. To vacate. We vacate our every day hellish lives in order to escape them and go experience the bliss we wish we could have instead every day. And toward the end of the “vacation”, most people start feeling depressed again because they’re preparing to “go back to reality”, or “go back to the grind”. How depressing is this?
If you use the phrase, “Thank God it’s Friday” or if at the end of your weekends and vacations you loathe “going back to reality”, then change that reality! And you can do that in at least one of the following two ways:
1. Create a new life. Every one of us is a creative genius, and we can all create the lives we want regardless of how overwhelmingly unlikely that may seem at times. Change your life, do whatever it takes to fill your life with the reward and the joy and the light-heartedness that you feel when you’re on a dream vacation. Literally make the changes in your outer world that will result in it being easy for you to wake up and say, “Thank God it’s Monday, because today I GET TO…” The only thing stopping anyone from making these changes is the belief that it’s not possible, so if that’s your story, change that first.
2. Change the way you’re thinking. As one of my favorite teachers, Wayne Dyer, always says, “When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change.” Say right now you’re choosing to be the caretaker of your elderly mother who has Alzheimer’s and consequently you don’t have the freedom right now to move to Belize to open your dream wellness center. If you’re feeling burdened by your situation, change the way you’re viewing it. Find the beauty in that. Find the meaning and the reward in that, because it’s there. In any situation where you are making the choice, for whatever reason, to postpone a desire in order to attend to a greater need of your own or someone else’s, love that choice and permit yourself to experience the bliss within that. If Viktor Frankl (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Frankl) can accomplish that in the concentration camp, then we can do the same in our lives.
ON PERMANENT HOLIDAY
The reason I’ve entitled this post “ON PERMANENT HOLIDAY” is that, first, I really love the term “Holiday” over “vacation” and second, we have the ability, every one of us, to live as if we were on permanent holiday. Because, in fact, we are. One way of defining heaven is: THIS. One way of defining hell is: not believing this is heaven. The likelihood of any one of us ever being born is incomprehensibly small. We got into the big party called life. We won the biggest lottery in the history of existence. We’re on permanent holiday, and we get to act that way, and get to feel that way, every day.
Imagine the best moods you have ever felt on your best ever holidays (vacations). Recreate that mood now. See if you can feel it. Go back to those places in your mind and see if you can, right now, remember those moods or states of being – those infinitely light, joyous, celebratory, free feelings. If you can’t, keep trying until you can. If you can, you’ve just demonstrated your ability to choose that mood at any given moment in your life. We don’t need to be on Holiday in oder to feel those great feelings. We don’t need anything to be different in order to experience those high vibrational states – that total joy and bliss. Except our thinking.
Never go on vacation again. You don’t need to. When you take a trip somewhere, consider it an outing on your bigger permanent holiday. And stop reserving those amazing moods for such a small percentage of your life. And when you do, you’ll benefit in two ways:
1. You’ll simply feel better more. Much better.
2. When we feel better, we ARE better – at everything. One of the most magical elements of our human experience is that the better we feel the better we are in every possibly discipline. The better we feel, the better our health, the better our memories, creativity, athleticism and coordination, capacity for compassion, social skills, emotional strength, and the list goes on.
Enjoy the Holiday!
Filed under: Creating Your Dream, Uncategorized | Tags: bliss, Chris Dorris, Christopher Dorris, Clarity, coaching, community, courage, creativity, discipline, dream life, dreams, emotion control, Freddy Couples, Fun, intelligence, Keynote Speaker, meditation, mental toughness, Michael Allen, Networked Blogs, passion, Personal Coaching, personal growth, PGA Tour, psychological strength, surrender, The Gap, Tiger Woods, toughness, uncertainty, Waste Management Phoenix Open
CHOOSING PEACE AMIDST CHAOS
One of my favorite definitions of enlightenment : “The ability to embrace paradox, contradiction and uncertainty.” Another: “The ability to choose peace in every moment of your life.”
So if we marry those two definitions, then we can surmise that in order to be able to choose peace, we also need to be able to embrace uncertainty. Not just deal with uncertainty, but embrace it. Love it. Genuinely feel gratitude for the unpredictable nature of life.
We have challenges right now. Times are tough. Everyone’s feeling it somehow. Some more than others. Some are feeling inconvenienced by the economy while others are feeling pure panic. Some are finding this time to be an unprecedented opportunity for investment. Others have lost everything that could be invested and are in survival mode.
What I find remarkably interesting, however, is that there are extremely wealthy people who are in panic mode and extremely poor people who are in peace. Which supports the fact that the variable of how financially set you are is totally irrelevant to your ability to choose peace, embrace uncertainty or activate creative genius. The only variable that matters now, or ever, is your EQ, or Emotional Quotient – your ability to choose how you view the world and its current state.
Uncertainty is the design of the universe in which we exist, from which we emerged. It’s the nature of our universe, and is also therefore our very own nature.
We’ve been taught to fear that uncertainty. And that’s bad teaching. Because of the conditioning we have experienced in our lifetimes, as well as our thousands of years old conditioning that we’ve inherited from the collective human experience, we have been taught to pay great attention to what could potentially go wrong as an effort to avoid it. We’ve been conditioned to selectively attend to the fact that, under certain circumstances, if certain things do or don’t happen, we’re not going to be OK. In fact, we very well may be screwed. And we’ve become very sophisticated at creating supportive arguments for that notion. For example, I could effortlessly argue that if this economy doesn’t turn around soon, I’ll lose everything and could go homeless. I could make that argument. Convincingly. If I had to argue that in a debate, I could do it, and win. But WHY would I ever want to do that?! That thinking doesn’t serve me. It leads to fear, and fear disables creativity which is the failure of intelligence. And I need my creativity and all forms of intelligence to create wealth, or anything else that I wish to manifest now or ever. So my convincing argument is unintelligent. And that argument is the product of my conditioning. I’ve been taught to think that way.
WHAT I THINK ABOUT, I BRING ABOUT
The great irony within this is that where I put my attention, I also put my energy and what I think about, I bring about. So, is it potentially true that if the economy doesn’t recover soon, and then this thing happens, and then that doesn’t and then this and that…then I could end up homeless? The best answer? Who cares? That’s a waste of my time. It leads to nothing creative or solution focused. It’s also the kind of thinking that creates heart failure. It’s infinitely unintelligent.
THRIVING vs. SURVIVING
So then what IS intelligent? It’s wise to feel good. And how then do I feel good? By thinking well. By choosing to change the internal dialog that I am having with myself all day every day. To make the content of that inner conversation one that is inspiring. To talk to myself in a way that leaves me feeling excited about thriving, not worried about surviving. I want to focus on my desires as opposed to my fears. Again, whichever one I choose to give attention to, is the one that I’ll give life to.
This kind of disciplined thinking is easy when things are going our way. But despite the fact that it’s tougher to think well under challenge, it’s more critical than ever to be a great thinker under duress. This time is one that I refer to as a collective critical moment. It’s popular these days to be worried and to complain. But that kind of thinking is actually, if anything, prolonging the struggle and return to abundance.
As Gandhi said, be the change you want to see in the world. Don’t contribute to the fear consciousness. Practice activating your creative genius by feeling gratitude for the challenges that we are experiencing right now, and choose enthusiasm. Choose creativity, innovation. Choose peace. Choose to embrace the uncertainty of all of this. That’ll never go away. Once the economy recovers, the uncertainty will still be there. So why wait? Practice starting to love it now.
SOME MANTRAS TO REPEAT A HUNDRED TIMES A DAY:
“EVERYTHING IS UNFOLDING AS IT SHOULD.”
“THERE’S NOTHING WRONG WITH THE WORLD; WHAT’S WRONG IS THE WAY I VIEW IT.”
“I CAN CHOOSE PEACE RATHER THAN THIS.”
“I AM THE SOURCE OF INFINITE CREATIVITY.”
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