Blooming Life Coaching
An Empowering Partnership Aiming at YOUR SUCCESS!Archive for RELATIONSHIPS
Do You Want to be Successful? Be curious!
Do you want your life to bloom and expand? Do you want your relationships to be deep and rewarding? Do you want your give your body the best chances to be fit and healthy? Do you want to be joyful and feel excited about life? Do you want your business to flourish and grow? Do you want your finances to flow?
Be Curious!
This is the key for discovery, self-growth, gaining self-awareness and overcoming one´s limits
This is the key to active listening skills and successful relationships
This is the key for learning and expanding skills
This is the key for effective reality checks and creating opportunities for improvement
This is the key to being more open-minded and tolerant
This is the key for keeping focused attention in meetings and social events
This is the key to a more successful and fulfilling life!
Caution!
First all, be careful! Acquiring this capacity may cause you to enter new levels of satisfaction and grant you the access to abounding resources. It may be a point of no return: once you will have started, you may never want to go back to the comfortable zone of the “well-known” and feel bound to doing something to move forward.
Discover About Yourself: Empower Yourself for Effective Actions
Draw an arrow on a big sheet of paper, and make marks for every 5 years of your life. And then, be curious: ask questions to each period. What happened in those 5 years? What and who has influenced you the most? What did you learn? What did you do? What supported you? What led you astray? What made you happy? What made you sad? What made you angry? What do you regret? What did people tell you? What did/do you wish? What were/are your goals? What are the common threads between all those points? Answering these questions will help you discover about your strengths and weaknesses, about what empowers/disempowers you, and about your values.
Once you know what “works” out well for you, the next step will be about deciding on taking action towards using your strengths towards realising your goals.
Discover About Your Opportunities: Regain Control Over Your Life
In the information collected with the exercise cited above, where do you see opportunities you have not yet tapped into? What are you good at? What did people say you were good at? What have others tried, but you have not out of fear?
Be curious about what you have been doing the last three months, and about what you are doing now. How do you spend your money? How do you spend your time? How do you spend your energy? What do you think of most of the time? Who do you spend your time/life with? Have you paid attention to your body? To your spirit? To your mind? To your soul? To your heart?
What could you do to start or re-start paying attention to each of these essential components of your being?
Discover About Others: Bring Your Important Relationship to the Next Level
Genuinely listen and ask open questions to the people around you. Observe what they do and say with the desire to understand what makes them move. Be attentive to what they say, and what they do not say, ask about their thoughts and feelings about what they tell you and notice what happens. While you do that, make sure that you suspend judgment, that your motives are pure, and you do not try to draw personal benefit from the information they give to you in a dishonest way. And keep what you heard for yourself. Genuine interest and curiosity for people will turn you into a wonderful communication partner, what is difficult to find in a world where we are all busier than ever.
Commit to experiment with focused attention and genuine interest for people at work and at home. Try to look at things with fresh eyes, and listen to the people who are talking to you, as if you did not know them, and really wanted to understand what is going on in their life. Do not try to solve their problem, do not try to find a similar anecdote to tell at the same time, do not try to decide if they are right or wrong, just pay attention , listen and try to reformulate in your own words what you understood from what they said. It does not matter if you have been married to this person for 15 years or if you have worked with this colleague for 5 years, ask them what is going on in their life/business right now, about what they want or what they wish, about what they think or feel. Genuine curiosity and interest for people can be one of your greatest assets for successful relationships and support you in making the best of every networking opportunity.
Discover About Your Business: Seize Opportunities to Grow
It does not matter whether you have been working in your field for 40 years or just 3, try to look at your industry, your company, your employers, your employees, your colleagues, products and skills with new eyes. What are people saying about your company, what does a child/a stay-at-home mum think you are doing from the outside? Ask questions to people outside from your field and ask them what they think what your work is about? Ask open-ended questions to your clients or prospects, what do they expect from you, what would serve them the best, what would you need to do for them to be totally satisfied with the products you sell to them?
Pay attention, it all comes down through which glasses you will choose to look at things around you: what are your employees good at? What are your colleagues good at? Could you trade tasks to make both of you be more satisfied at work doing something you both enjoy doing? Do you see opportunities arising through paying more attention to what happens in you and around you?
Regaining interest and curiosity about work, people and life will lead you to being more productive and creative, what will create amazing opportunities for success and development.
Discover MORE Empowering Truths: Be Enthused to Create Positive Change
Pay attention to the big picture and the details, pay attention to appearance and reality, check the difference between what is said and done, be curious about contradictions and paradoxes happening around you, they will teach you a lot about what you could do to turn things around. Learn about what lies between your goals and your present reality. Learning about ourselves and others helps us regain control over our feeling and give us chances to be more positive. The better we understand what causes or caused us to act or react the way we do helps us be kinder to ourselves and regain self-esteem, and what causes us to be more positive supports us in creating a virtuous circle in our lives.
Research in psychology and human sciences has shown that he more we understand about issues, ourselves or others, the more emotional distance we can take from painful or negative experiences, what helps us regain our ability to choose how we want to respond to what happens in our lives. Being curious, learning and understanding things better, thus acts as a stepping stone for us to leave negative cycles behind, change bad habits and become empowered to live the life we want.
Discover and Tap into Your Creative Power: Be a Catalyst for the Creation of Synergy
Being curious will lead you to being more open. Being more open will allow you to hear different opinions, and learn about things that you have yet never heard of. Who knows where a genuine curiosity may lead you? I was bored and frustrated and started writing a journal again, gaining awareness about myself, who I was and what I really wanted. Along with it, I started looking around, reading everything I could, from every source I found, and discovered about coaching. I started a training, and begun doing what I believe is the perfect job for me making me feel balanced and fulfilled through living according to my values. Everything begun with a spark of curiosity, I listened to my heart again, and open my eyes and I begun to see opportunities and live and work with passion again… what a wonderful feeling…
Who knows where it could lead you? Maybe to the realization of your dreams? Maybe to finding the passion of your life? Maybe to meeting your soul mate, or a good friend, or a future business partner? Maybe you will hear about something that will help you solve your business problem or bring it to the next level. Try it out, it is one of the most powerful things on earth: be attentive! We all had this drive as children, and sometimes happened to let it rust, while it is one of the most empowering tools we have. Children become wonderful builders through curiosity, and invent and create new worlds. Children do it spontaneously and benefit greatly from it, growing their abilities and intelligence naturally. What if we did it with the intent of realizing ourselves, moving forward or reaching our goals? I believe it can make us move mountains! You first need to know what is your dream, your “promised land”, what “success” means for you and where is “your mountain” to have the chance to work at starting climbing it day after day to reach it.
What do you think? Are you up to the challenge? Are you willing to commit to a “Curiosity Quest” for 3 weeks? This would be the perfect start for building this empowering capacity. This will give you the chance to experiment and derive your own benefits from personal experiences. What do you have to lose? Believe me, you have everything to win!
After you have gathered started gathering information here is the last step to consider:
Be Curious AND Step in: Experience Momentum
Being curious can be your stepping stone, you will have the raw material, but knowing where the stepping stone is, and knowing how to step on it is not enough! You will then have to COMMIT to realizing your vision and make STEPS! We have often heard, knowledge is power, but it is in the APPLICATION of Knowledge that lies Power! How will you do that? After you have begun gathering useful knowledge after reaping the rewards of your “curiosity quest”, commit to choosing 3 things you have gained knowledge about during the discovery process, and do something concrete about it. You will be amazed at what the simple act of being curious will have changed your life for the better! This can be for example noticing that your work colleague does a certain task you hate very gladly, well and quickly, and that you do another task better than him: you may want to switch tasks for optimal results for the department.
You may have noticed your friend/wife/husband/sister/father is particularly joyful and happy when he/she meets that other person/friend, or does this activity: you may want to ask about it, or look at what really makes them that happy about it. Knowing about what the deeper needs of the significant people in our lives are gives us opportunities to find ways to meet them to enjoy successful relationships.
TIPS for Your “CURIOSITY QUEST”:
- When you search about something, enrich your perspective through exploring into a thesaurus for synonyms and antonyms ask people around what they think about that topic.
- Take a magazine at the store you would never have bought, and see what you can learn from it. Pick a museum you do not know, and go for a visit. Switch on a tv program you would normally not be interested in.
- When you want something, do not settle for the first attractive offer: compare.
- When you listen to something, suspend judgment first.
- Ask people “what are you passionate about?”, “what do you like the most about your job?” or “what do you enjoy the most?” and enjoy learning about what makes them come alive.
- What would people from different origins/age/business fields think about that issue? think about it as if you were in their shoes, or ask them if you get a chance for it.
- Ask yourself “why?” or “how?” it could be the way it is.
- Ask “what if everything was possible?” and see where it leads you.
- Ask around what people think about the issues you are interested in, and do not say your opinion first to allow them free space for expression.
- Take one thing you are good at. Could you use it in another sector of your life?
The Power of Gratitude
Today I read an article about the power of Celebrating, and it just made me realize that the times I have been grateful more than other times, I’ve actually been happier, and feeling more fulfilled no matter how difficult the circumstances were.
What about you? What are the things you are thankful for? What are your thoughts when you get up? Do you start your day feeling blessed with another day, excited about what is going to happen? or do you have the impression you’ve grown kind of “indifferent”, having the feeling that “it is just another day to go through”?
Be inspired again, Be grateful!
Sometimes, it may happen to us that we let ourselves be trapped into a routine of “sleeping-eating-working” and sometimes “complaining” on top of that, that our life does not measures up to our childhood dreams. It actually happens that we kind of “give up” and let ourselves go with the flow, or keep wishing we had this or achieved that, without even taking the time for celebrating what we have already achieved, or pausing a minute or two to appreciate those people and things we already have, that in spite of certain insatisfaction punctuate our life with moments of joy and happiness.
Pausing to celebrate and being grateful for what we already have achieved and for the strengths and talents we have already been developing actually enables us to fuel up our energy and gives us more power for the things on which we still need to work.
You may agree with me, that when we engage ourselves towards reaching some specific goals, we need to concentrate on them and gather all the motivation, strengths, and power available to support us until we reach our objectives. And, as many of us may have already experienced, there may be some harder times along the way towards our success; and there may even be times in which we question ourselves and are not sure if we will manage to achieve what we want. In the particular moments when we lack motivation, and in which our energy goes low, a great tool is to realize and seize the power of Gratitude. Whether in inspiring, and especially in less inspired times, it is really powerful to take a pause and fuel up our motivation and enthusiasm again by considering how many steps forward we have already made. Reflecting on our past and present achievements so far, and thinking about what enabled us to achieve these goals can actually transform our perspective of our present situation and enables us to identify or even create even more resources that will enable us to achieve our goals.
Be grateful: Discover your Untapped Potential !
Let me give you an example. I have recently heard the story of a very successful man, who is facing business troubles due to a change in the industry in which he is working. As I was talking to him, he was sharing his desires to go to the next level, and perfect some of his strengths so that he may be even more efficient, since he had the desire to move forward into building a successful new business and get the chance to achieve one of his long-term goals.
As this person was talking, his perspective was that of a winner, as his goals appeared completely achievable to him, yet, he still recognized keeping on working overtimes, neglecting his health and life balance, and sometimes feeling overstressed and strained from energy because he was having this little voice inside telling him that reaching his goals would probably take him more time that he would want to, because “that’s always how it had taken place before” as he faced challenges. This man actually had grown into feeding the belief in himself, that he would always have to do “more and more” and that he was never doing enough; what actually did not really contribute to support him through times of high stress or when he had to find solutions to problematic issues quickly.
I then asked this person what were the achievements he was proud of, and for each of them, to share with me what were the strengths and “winning factors” he already had as he achieved these goals, and what were the lessons he learnt as he overcame obstacles on the way. Eventually, he started seeing the power of looking with a grateful mind at the things that whether positive or not, contributed to making him the person that he was: a Successful Businessman, ready to put all his efforts and take risks to meet up challenges in front of which most people would take a step back. This man started seeing how powerful it was to pause, review and be grateful for the most helpful sides of his personality and also those that demanded more focus; to be grateful for the easy reached goals, and those more difficult to reach, because all these factors contributed to providing him with the chance to develop other strengths that proved necessary to help him get his way through the highly demanding business world.
In fact, by thinking about being grateful for the fact that it took him long years before reaching some of his most envied goals, and seeing all the creative potential it contributed to release from him, he could derive a feeling of joy from what he first thought was a cause of worry. When he started realizing this potential, he then begun to develop a more trusting perspective that enables him now to feel safe and ressourceful, and to believe that in the same way that his talents and strengths showed up “just in time” when he most needed them in the past, he is now able to let go of fears, worries or un-constructive concerns.
Shift Perspectives and be a Winner over Trying Times!
You may have noticed through this example, how powerful shifting perspectives can be, in the way that when we look at our life and experiences through a perspective of learning and training, we actually manage not to look at our limits, weaknesses or past failures as disadvantages, but actually as constructive advantages. Trying to look at these things that may have been, or may be a burden on our shoulders through different lenses, through the filter of gratitude, learning and as opportunities for getting stronger and better at what we do actually has the power to transform our mood, the atmosphere in our house, it has the power to reduce our level of stress and increase our level of satisfaction in life. When we look at the circumstances that are troubling us as constructive challengers that provide us with a positive opportunities, we are empowered to take action, and free ourselves and talents up to overcome what may have made us fall.
I really want to encourage you to try exploring different perspectives that are empowering to you? what about trying to see your limits as guards? what about seeing this person that is annoying you so much as a challenger who actually helps you fight against your own inner blocades of fear of rejection or failure? what about seeing life as “full of surprises and as an adventure when your plans may be coming short of your expectations? what about being grateful for being aware of your feeling of insatisfaction, in the way that it means you are alive, in the way it means you are still “in the race” desiring to achieve your goals, in the way it means you have not given up, and you can draw even more motivation from it to be a catalyst for change and provide you with the energy to want to “make things move”?
I wish you all the best through your journey, and hope that these reflections about being grateful trigger some constructive and empowering thoughts in your mind! I would love to hear about you and what what your objectives are, and if you think i may be able to support you through your journey, do not hesitate to contact me!
Warm greetings, naomi
You have the Passport to HappinessLand!!!
What are you waiting for people to show to you? Interest? Care? Love? Affection? Does it happen that you are waiting them to meet your every need? Are you awaiting that they motivate you, that they help you discover and grow your potential? Would you like them to be attentive to you emotions? Reactions? Feelings? Would you be happier if you felt considered or if somebody would ask you about your sentimental, emotional, spiritual, or professional life? If somebody would check up with you if everything is ok?
How would it feel like to have people like this in your life?
Would you enjoy having people like this around you?
Do you want to have somebody like this in your life?
The answer is simple: it is POSSIBLE and it all depends on YOU!
You know what? You have the ability and everything you need more than anybody else to be that person for yourself who cares about your every single need. You have the keys to the doors that lie in yourself, in your thoughts, in your heart, in your life!! The first advantage is that you are entitled with all the access, you have the “passport” to enter the country that you are, and if you start wanting to enter and discover that land of yours, you have the privilege of being able to access all the regions that you want to learn about, that you want to develop, and whose well-being you want.
Did you realize that? All the privileges that you may sometimes be willing to hand in other people, you have!
The only thing that goes with it, is RESPONSIBILITY.
As a matter of fact, you want people to take you into consideration: take yourself into consideration!
You would like people to love you: love yourself!
You would like people to understand you: try to understand yourself!
You would like to feel in tune with people: try to be in tune with yourself!
You would like people to meet your every need: how can people really know about your needs if you yourself don’t pay attention and dont do anything to care for your needs??
I know you may say… this all so easy to say, this is all so theoretical, this is all motivational thinking!
But, if you may give these ideas a few minutes of thought, don’t you think, that if you would start thinking about your needs, and really try doing something about these, your situation would improve? Don’t you think that if you would start loving yourself the way you would like people to love you, you would give yourself the opportunity to move forward to new levels of satisfaction? — I mean, believing in yourself, trusting yourself to make the best out of your abilities, encouraging yourself that “you have what it takes”, that it is possible for you to go forward and feel better, and reach new grounds of fulfillment?
It all starts with you! And, the truth of the matter is, that if you start loving yourself, trying to do more of what makes you happy, and to do less of what makes you feel confused, you will see that not only you will feel better in tune with yourself, day after day, you will like better the face, the smile, the sparkling eyes you see in the mirror in the morning, but people around you will feel good in your presence.
Not only you will feel better about yourself, but people will be attracted to you, you will build bridges, you will give people signals that you are a great person to be with, and this light around you that you will be creating will provide you with even more opportunities to make friends, to have great conversations, to enrich your relationships, and maybe restore some disconnected or difficult relationships that you may have. This will be a natural consequence of your being your own friend, of your taking care of yourself. People will feel less pressured by a possible demanding attitude, they wont feel pressed away by the fear that somebody may grow dependent on them.
Start paying attention and caring about yourself, and others will also be attracted to you, meet you own needs, and they may want to consider helping you through it, but starting doing that yourself, you wont be depending on them and their approbation, help or acceptation. Your personal value will not depend on people’s perception of you and you will feel free. Wouldn’t that be a great feeling to have? To feel free to be yourself? to feel free to be the best you can be? to start taking action to reach your potential and feel really free and happy starting NOW, no matter the circumstances!?!!
If you think about wanting to change something and start taking care of yourself, I wish you all the best on your journey!! I’d be happy to hear about your development, and the increase of happiness you will feel, step by step…and if you feel that you may need help through that process of self-discovery and journey towards fulfillment, just contact me, i ll be happy to support you through this amazing adventure!!
i wish you a wonderful day, Naomi
