Resilience Tip: Know your own "standards"

Here's an easy way to organize your own thinking in life.  It's a way of thinking to give you more clarity and make you more resilient faster.

Standards: 

In every area of your life - health, fitness, relationships, spiritual life, career, finances - what do you want to do, have or be?  Or, to put it another way, what do you expect of yourself?  Define those now in each area, using no more than a few points for each.

Protocols:

What do you plan to do in order to achieve those standards?  What actions will you commit to?  How will you train yourself, develop the resilience, the mental, physical and emotional toughness to carry you through?  What specific actions will you take?

Best Practices:

Now that you've figured that out, what tools already exist to help you get there faster?  What are the best methods to use and the best mentors to learn from?  Who has already paid part of the price for you and figured this out?  Seek out those people and tools and write them down!  

If you want an example of a program that helps you set standards, give you protocols to follow and some of the best practices in the world, examine this:

http://bit.ly/6zEWFU

So remember, if you want to develop great clarity now and start making progress soon, always think about your standards, protocols and best practices.  Follow the blueprint...


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Resilience Tip: Two Kinds of Goals

In any area of your life, you have a choice between two different kinds of goals, of targets to aim for.  

To illustrate this, let's look at fitness:

One kind of goal is the "results" goal - that's when you're aiming at losing X number of pounds / kilograms, fitting into last year's clothes or adding X inches / centimeters to those muscles. 

The second kind is a "performance" goal, when you commit yourself to taking specific actions at specific times over a certain, usually short, period of time.  You might commit to running 5 km twice a week or doing 100 push-ups a day or doing your yoga routine every morning without fail, for instance.  

And remember, in every area of your life you have a choice between these two kinds of goals.  Wisdom is knowing which to select when.  Fortunately, experience will teach you that.

In general, performance goals are the place to start, because if you don't learn to keep your commitments no matter what the obstacles, it's not much use to chase after results goals!  You just won't have what it takes to get there.  That's why every ancient tradition for training people physically and spiritually favored performance goals, knowing that performance automatically brings results.


This is also important because you don't always control the outcome - in relationships, for example, you don't control the other person's perceptions and reactions.  All you can do is act with integrity and let the chips fall where they may.  So in situations like that, a results goal is dangerous, because it makes you responsible for things you don't control - so beware.


So concentrate on your performance goals and the results will almost always follow.  They'll usually follow in the short term and will always follow in the long term.


Do you know YOUR performance goals for the week?  If not, pull out a pen and paper...


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Resilience Tip: Dare to Believe in Yourself

Isn’t "believing in yourself" it just plain arrogance?  Doesn’t it make you sick when you see someone who is so arrogant and self-assured that he or she won't listen to anyone?

Sure it does, but there's a huge difference between healthy self-confidence and the arrogance of the ego.  The arrogant believe in their egos.  Those with a healthy belief in themselves believe in a power greater than themselves.  The arrogant flaunt their opinions, talents and accomplishments.  The wise do something far different...

The wise first empty themselves out to make room for this Greater Power.  They allow themselves to become painfully aware of all their failings and mistakes.  They put aside all their own opinions.  Then they become what the great Sioux medicine man, Frank Fools Crow, called "little hollow bones" - they wait for the Greater Power to enter them, fill them, guide them and make the right path obvious. 

This is why the wise appear to have extraordinary self-confidence without a trace of arrogance.  To watch them, you would say they're actually humble in their self-confidence.

The arrogant can't do this, because this Greater Power cannot teach the know-it-all, guide the egotist or perfect the one who thinks himself already perfect. 

When this greater power finds an empty vessel, though, it speedily rushes in.  And then miracles ensue…

Do as the wise do, and you will never lack confidence again.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Resilience Tip: Guard This Above All Else...

If you want to become truly resilient, to discover your true potential and rise victoriously no matter what life throws at you, then you must guard one thing above all others...


You must guard your inspiration. 

It doesn't matter what good purpose that inspiration is for, since your ability to follow through, your persistence and determination ultimately come from the power of inspiration.


Without constant inspiration, your daily activities will seem more and more mundane  in your eyes.  In reality nothing is mundane, but without inspiration you will be dragged down to the point where it all seems like meaningless toil.

Without inspiration, you’ll never find within yourself the power to persevere.  Determination will be nowhere found and will lack the power to change your life. 

So if maintaining an inspired state is so critical, how do you do it, especially when the outside world seems to conspire against you?  You change your "diet"...

Build yourself a steady diet of inspiration - read inspiring books, watch inspiring films and videos, listen to speakers who give you courage, determination and confidence.  Consider great spiritual principles and dedicate yourself now to living by them.  Think about great leaders and decide now that you’ll start to think like them.

You weren’t born with the emotional bedrock of inspiration; you have to build that for yourself.  That's part of having free will and enjoying this human adventure. 


~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

A Feast for the Soul

Welcome to the feast.  I'm not the chef for this feast; in fact I'm really nothing more than the doorman.

It's all about an extraordinary speech given by an incredible man shortly before his premature but not unexpected death from bone cancer.  You can find the key parts of his speech in this video, starting at 4:14 (the rest of the video is outside our scope here).

http://bit.ly/7oBssb

Or you can find the whole speech here:

http://bit.ly/5fhw7M

I'll leave you to find out more about the speaker on your own - it's well worth your time and very inspiring - but for now I just wanted to highlight one of the things he says:

"To me, there are three things we all should do every day. We should do this every day of our lives. Number one is laugh. You should laugh every day. Number two is think. You should spend some time in thought. And number three is, you should have your emotions moved to tears, could be happiness or joy. But think about it. If you laugh, you think, and you cry, that's a full day. That's a heck of a day. You do that seven days a week, you're going to have something special."

I'm a bit reluctant to add anything to this, of course, and I feel unworthy even to open my mouth about it.   Nevertheless, I'll give it a try.

Laughing is tremendously important.  I've met holy people living in remote places and every time I'm struck by their sense of humor.  Laughter - the ability to see the ridiculous in ourselves and around us - is vital to your well-being on every level.

When something moves you to tears, you get in touch with the deeper layers of your being and feel a renewed sense of purpose.

And so few people take the time to think.  Not "think" as in the obsessive, neurotic thinking that hits when we're stressed out, but real thinking - using our cognitive abilities to learn something new or to reevaluate our old opinions.  Clear and accurate thinking is highly under-rated in our culture.

I hope you enjoy this speech as much as I did.  May we all learn from it.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

Resilience Tip: Simplify

Over two and a half millennia ago, Confucius noted one feature of our flawed approach to life -  we love to complicate things.

All genuine spiritual traditions, interestingly enough, are based on simplification.  That is, when they start training you methodically, simplification is at the heart of the exercise.  So not surprisingly, we humans aren't at ease unless our life is simplicity itself.  We seem to forget this in our pursuit of happiness, since we tend to think our happiness exists in the opposite direction.

Consequently, if you want RESILIENCE, you need to start simplifying your life.  How?  Start with this exercise right here:


Take out a piece of paper or open a new document - you have to write this down...

1. Think about the life of someone you know really well and write down everything that makes their life complex and burdensome
2. Next, pretend they've hired you as a consultant to simplify their life. Find 3 ways to radically simplify that person’s life – simplify the processes, reduce the steps, save them time and energy, etc.
3. Great! Now that you've finished, take a few minutes to imagine yourself presenting your findings to your friend (whatever you do, don't call them and start lecturing them - people don't react too well to unsolicited advice!  Your outline is for you, not them.)
4. Tomorrow, come back and pretend you're the consultant for someone whose obstacles just happen to be identical to your own!
5. This time, you put your recommendations into practice ;-)
   

The gateway to all great success in life is not the accumulation of wealth, power or status, but rather the ability to keep everything so simple that you could draw it on one side of a piece of paper if you had to.  It’s about freeing your time and energy from low value activities so you can invest  them in activities that are much more important. 

In the words of Leonardo daVinci, "Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication."

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger

If you've got a story of how you simplified YOUR life, feel free to share!

Until You Feel This Emotion, You'll Get NOWHERE...

Did you know... that I can predict how 2010 will turn out for you by asking you one single question?  That question is this:

"When you think about your life, about what you want to change and about your resolutions to make those changes, what emotion dominates your thoughts?"

Answer me that and I'll predict YOUR success this year with as much certainty as the rising sun.

So go ahead and ask yourself that question.  Take a moment and REALLY DO IT [Stop reading here until you've done that]

Now what was that emotion?  Was it a "wouldn't it be nice if I could do X" kind of emotion?  Was it a sense of hopelessness, of "here we go again" and "I know this won't work"?  Or was it something else?  Was it, just perhaps, that ONE emotion you absolutely MUST have if you want to change?

THE ONE EMOTION YOU REALLY NEED:

So what emotion do you really need if you want to make real changes in your life?

You're probably waiting for me to say, "love"  or "gratitude" or "forgiveness".  Well, you're in for a shock then...

You need to get angry.  That's right, really ANGRY.  Angry about the way your health challenges are running your life, angry about your financial dilemmas, angry about that job you can't wait to quit, angry about the way your key relationships are going or angry about whatever you need to change in your life!

Because until you're REALLY angry, you won't get fed up with the status quo, and until you get angry enough to HATE the status quo, you won't find within yourself the unstoppable DETERMINATION to CHANGE your life.

Unless you have the emotional core of relentless determination to change things, to build the health, finances, relationships or spiritual life you really want, it just won't happen.  Sure, you'll try out a couple of new things, read a book here and there and maybe go to the gym from January to early March to "get in shape".  If you don't have that "violent" determination within you, though, you'll be back to square one within 3 months - guaranteed. 

The one defining trait of people who step up to the plate and change their lives and teach others to do the same is their willingness to stop at nothing to see their vision through.

So if you're really FED UP with the way things are going for you, if you're beginning to feel a BURNING RESOLVE welling up within you, leave a comment below and tell me what you're going to do about it.  That's right.  Put it out there for everyone.  Commit to taking action today.

Remember this... although you can be destroyed, you can NEVER be defeated if you have this resolve.  All who attain this level of internal resolve in their lives eventually WIN.  Without exception. 

Have you got that determined resolve yet?  If you do, please share it below, and not just for your sake; for everyone's.

~ Dr. Symeon Rodger