Category: Personal Development

Build Self-Esteem: Your Key to Success Part 2

As I ended part 1 of this article on March 26th, I said that high self-esteem is a gift you can only give to yourself. It’s a very valuable gift.

I’ve had some time to reflect on how this is showing up in my life lately and I realize that I have very little negativity in my life at all. That’s a conscious decision I’ve made and the way I’ve structured my life. I’ve instituted a zero tolerance policy of negative people, which does not mean I’m not allowed to whine, and so are my friends. We all get a little cranky once in a while.

On the other hand, any little compliment that has to do with the core of who I am just lifts me right up. It’s not in a needing validation kind of way, but in the appreciation that someone else is reconginzes me at a soul level.

That’s how I choose to connect with people and trivial compliments about how I look or what I’m wearing don’t mean as much as they did when I was younger. Although I still like to hear it, so feel free to compliment away. Seriously,I’m at an age or maybe it’s a point in my own personal development where I’d much rather have someone attracted to my brain or my soul than my face or my body.

I’d like you to share your feelings on what you like to be acknowledged for. Also, what are the best ways you’ve found to keep yourself at a high level of self-esteem?

People who build self-esteem are in charge of their world, have work/life balance the way they want it to look, and refrain from blaming past or present outside circumstances. They know it is up to them to take what happens in life and give it as much or little meaning as they choose.

Raise your self-esteem by becoming a master of a particular area of your life. Master one aspect of your job or a hobby. For example, start small by taking one aspect of your job that could use improvement, or develop a skill that would get you a raise or recognition.

Just making the commitment to master something will raise your self-confidence in that area. How do you feel about yourself when you do something really well?

The more things you can learn to do well, the higher your self-esteem. Take this key to success and start to build your self-esteem now.

If you have a challenge with any part of raising your self-esteem share that and we’ll give you some feedback.

The Day My Life Changed

I don’t quite know where to begin this one, especially to keep it
short enough that you’ll read it. And I think this is important to read.

So here we go:

It was a day much like today, warm and sunny.  Just another
beautiful day like all the others in Cabo San Lucas. I’d been
living there for almost 6 years and today I was going for my
first mammogram.

Because I thought it would be no big deal, hey I was only 43,
I decided to go to a local doctor rather than my regular one
two and a half hours away.

Well, it did turn out to be a big deal as I was diagnosed with
breast cancer.  But as I quickly realized I didn’t react in the
way that the majority of women I’ve known in the same situation
have.

I didn’t cry, I panicked just a little bit, mostly about how I was going
to break the news to my husband.

But for me, the moment that’s burned into my mind isn’t the one
where they said those dreaded words, it’s the one where I came
out into the light of day into a completely different world than I
had left a little over an hour before.

It was surreal to say the least, but the most important point that
I wanted to clearly get across to my husband was that I was pretty
sure this was an awakening, not a death sentence.  There was
something big that had been building inside me for quite a while.

I knew there was a shift coming.  A spiritual friend of mine told me
months before that she saw a big test coming for me.  I figured this
must be it and I was going to do whatever I needed to do to get the
message I was being sent and do what I was to do as quickly as
possible.

How I become cancer free in a short period of time without surgery
is a whole other story. But what made me think of this experience on
this particular morning was that I have that feeling again.

I have that feeling of being on the brink of a major shift in my life.
For some people who don’t embrace change, it’s terrifying.  For me
it’s electrifying.

When this happened 9 years ago it meant ending a 25 year career,
leaving the place I thought I was going to stay forever and moving to
a city in the desert when I’m an ocean resort person.

But I went on faith where I felt directed to go.  And this life that I
have now being able to communicate like this with you and helping
thousands of others to change their lives came out of that moment
when I walked out of the doctors office and chose a different path.

It makes me want to cry just thinking of the magnificence of how life
unfolds in ways that are wonderful and yet unpredictable.

That shifted every part of my life.  And it was all good.  No I didn’t have
a clue what I was going to be doing for a living.  I didn’t have any idea
what any part of my life was going to look like, and thank God I had a
husband at the time that trusted my intuition and didn’t fight me on this
ambiguous picture.

And now it’s happening again. Not the cancer, the feeling.  So watch
over the next few weeks, because I’m sure I’ll be sharing things with
you as they show up. I’m excited to see where my life will go.

But today, I really want you to look at your life and ask yourself if there’s
something that could shift for you that potentially could make a huge
positive difference, but you’re too afraid to take the chance.  And why?

You have to take the leap of faith because if you wait to see for sure,
most likely the opportunity will have already gone to someone who
wasn’t afraid to act.

Build Self-Esteem: Your Key to Success

Fear, along with low self-esteem, eventually leads to self-sabotage. I know. For years I was the queen of self-sabotage. My self-image was not consistent with how the world saw me. I achieved a great deal of business success selling real estate when I was in my early 20s.

I would literally look in the mirror trying to find the strong assertive person the outside world was seeing. All I could see was someone who was putting up a big front to appear cool. I was confused by my personal success when I was young because I had nothing nurturing or positive in my life to which I could relate the personal growth.

At the time, I wasn’t sure why I was getting all this money and acclaim. I didn’t think I was worthy of it, and believed that I didn’t deserve success or happiness. I achieved the level of business success because I was highly skilled, but my low self-esteem drove me to throw it all away.

The consequences of my low self-esteem and self-sabotage were many. If I can, I’d like to save you from the same fate by parting the curtain.

First, my personal life: I felt unworthy of my first husband, but you wouldn’t have known it by the way I treated him. My self-sabotaging brain decided the way to keep him was to tear him down to my level so he would feel lucky to have anyone, even me. Then he wouldn’t leave me.

I still get a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach thinking about how I hurt myself, my personal development and other people with my low self-esteem. Don’t ever kid yourself into thinking your level of self-esteem isn’t influencing the quality of life for people around you.

In my business life, the self-sabotage was straightforward. I would achieve a great deal of business success until it got too uncomfortable for my self-image to handle, and then I would destroy my achievement and my work/life balance.

I’d make my job undesirable by having a conflict or a philosophical difference where I would have to leave to maintain my ‘higher ground’. Some of these were pretty elaborate, so I could feel superior when I left.

Similar circumstances happen more often than you’d think. I see them played out by friends and co-workers over and over throughout the years. They’re easy to spot for someone like me, a former self-saboteur.

Self-sabotage is a self-fulfilling prophecy that puts people back in their comfort zone of “I knew it would all go away sooner or later. Nothing good ever lasts.”

See, I grew up in the land of “Who do you think you are?” This is still a common message kids receive today. It can be difficult reconciling personal success with that message. Without a strong positive self-image, all success is temporary.

On the positive side, another self-fulfilling prophecy is that if you “act as if” you are self-assured, knowledgeable and have work/life balance, you will become exactly that.

You’ve heard the saying, “Fake it until you make it.” This is not being phony. To become more positive, you have to start somewhere, and this is the first step towards personal growth.

The key to building self-esteem is to know that your opinion is the only one that counts. Others just influence your opinions. You can accept or reject what they say about your personal development.

High self-esteem is a gift you can only give to yourself. It’s a very valuable gift.

How is Reality TV Affecting Our Self-Esteem?

When I was thinking about what to write for this article on self -esteem what showed up wasn’t just a question of whether you have low or high self-esteem. The subject of unrealistic self-esteem just kept showing up everywhere I looked. It made me ask myself a few questions.

TV is full of reality shows and even if you say you never watch any of them, for the most part, they get very high ratings-even the bad ones. Is this affecting how people look at themselves?

Are people sitting in their living rooms comparing themselves to the people who are singing or dancing or losing weight or modeling or cooking or decorating and now even telling the truth is a reality show!

Why is it that some people with so much going for them don’t recognize it and have low self-esteem while others think they have much more on the ball than they really do? I’m sure you can identify people you know that fit in each of these categories. On reality TV it’s not just in areas where they are competing on talent, it’s also shows where they try to outsmart each other like Survivor and Big Brother.

How do these perceptions aid your self-esteem in some areas and make it even lower in others? Where does an unrealistic view of yourself really come from,
especially if we are talking about a particular talent?

I find talents such as ability to play sports or do something creative like singing, painting or acting to be very interesting. People considered experts in the field and millions of people in the general public judge these activities every day.

Of course, sometimes they are wrong. But what makes somebody keep going when they’ve been told repeatedly they aren’t good at something? Remember Sanjaya on
American Idol last year? Or how about William Hung?Hey, who says you can’t make money following your passion?

I’ve had my own personal experiences with being in denial about my abilities.

I grew up believing I wasn’t good at sports; I thought I wasn’t coordinated. The first time I was told I had a natural ability to play golf it was by a boyfriend that I assumed had an ulterior motive. The second time was by a golf pro that I rationalized wanted to sell me more lessons.

I always had an explanation to discount what they were saying. I didn’t think, “Hey, how about that! I can be good at golf.”

Why not? Even though I now believe I do have the ability, I still feel pressured and uncomfortable when I go out and play. I’m always sure that no matter who I play with, they will be much better than I am and I will be holding them up. Consequently, I don’t play much and it’s not really fun, yet.

I say yet because I am determined not to let this episode of unrealistically low self-esteem go on forever. I refuse to let it control me to the point that I never play golf again. I will overcome this and learn to play confidently and comfortably so I can have an enjoyable day on the golf course.

Anybody want to play with me?

Ask yourself, “What’s the one thing I can change about how I view myself and my talents that will realistically increase my self-esteem?”

So how have you experienced this in your life? Have you let it keep you down? If not, how did you overcome it? I would love to have you share your opinions and personal insights here on my blog.

Why Fear of Success Is Blocking You More Than Fear of Failure

After reading Amy’s comment on the post about banishing fear from your life, I realized that it’s been a while since I’ve directly addressed the topic of “fear of success”. I believe it’s a much bigger roadblock to your success than fear of failure. It’s not like we haven’t all failed many times before and we know what that feels like and we have a mechanism in place for what we do when it happens. It may be unpleasant but at the same time it’s comfortable to a degree.

Some of our coping mechanisms are healthier than others, but that’s another topic.

Amy’s point, and mine, is that you have to be diligent at recognizing when it’s really fear of success that’s stopping you in you tracks.

Dr. Maxwell Maltz, Author of “Psycho-Cybernetics”, is quoted as saying, “Often the difference between a successful person and a failure is not the one that has better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on one’s ideas, to take a calculated risk – and to act.”

So if that’s what fear of failure looks like, what does fear of success look like?

Are you playing it safe or going for it 100%? Are you really afraid that what you have to offer is so big that if you played full out you would scare people and they wouldn’t know how to respond to that powerful person you’ve become? Or is it that the picture of you being who you truly are is so foreign to you that you’re the one who doesn’t know what to do with that?

Creating a vision board of what you want your successful life to look like is a non-threatening “dreamy” way of getting started if you’re really blocked. But I believe that having a clear vision of what you want your life to look like and creating a blueprint of what that life will be and how you’re going to get there takes all the fear away because now you’re just taking one step at a time.

That’s what I do for my clients. I take them down that path of discovering what they want, creating the blueprint for how they will get there and holding their hand through the process. Bottom line, let someone else hold that vision for you until you can hold it for yourself.

Just remember, it can be done, if you don’t think you can do it alone, get a mentor like me to help you. You can reach me at Lynn at LynnPierce.com

P.S. If you’re reading this post somewhere other than my actual blog, please click on the blog link to comment so we can all continue this discussion together.

Women’s Empowerment Tip: Banish Fear from Your Life

Overcoming your fears creates a powerfully exhilarating feeling. It builds self-esteem by changing your self-concept. It allows you to confidently take on new challenges. On the other hand, there is nothing more debilitating than letting your fears stop you from living the life you are meant to live.

Fear is an acronym for False Evidence Appearing Real. There is no greater loss to the world than missing out on your unique contribution because you’re afraid to fail or afraid you don’t have anything worth contributing.

We all have special gifts and talents. Only one thing separates most people from those who experience woman empowerment; it’s looking at your fears and making the decision that your goals are bigger than your fears. Don’t let your fears keep you stuck where you are.

Are fear-based beliefs running your life?

Do this personal growth exercise. Make three columns on a piece of paper. List all your fears in the first column. In the next column write down what’s the worst thing that could happen if they came true. In the third column, write down a solution to the problem.

If you feel the need to discuss your limiting beliefs with someone, take just the first five minutes to describe the problem and the rest of the time brainstorming a solution.

The reality is that 95 percent of your fears will never be realized. And now that you know the worst thing that can happen, and how you’re going to resolve it, there’s no reason to live with fear any longer.

Everybody fails at something, even the most successful women entrepreneurs. But successful women in business have learned to treat failure differently than ordinary people. They see failures or setbacks as guideposts change that which will bring them one step closer to success.

Successful women entrepreneurs have no shame in failure; they celebrate it as personal growth and move on. Every day ordinary people realize their dreams because they took action in the face of their fears. They didn’t wait for all the right contacts or every piece of information. They went for it, and so can you.

One powerful way I’ve found to overcome my fears I found by accident. It just dawned on me one day that this process is how I frequently overcome deep-seated fears. Let me share it with you.

When you are involved in a project that is bigger than yourself, a project that will help others, you forget about your own fears.

When it’s not about you, it’s much easier to move through your fears towards personal growth. It doesn’t have to be as big as ending hunger or creating world peace, just something big enough to pull you out of your comfort zone.

Here’s how I overcame a fear that was very real to me the whole time I was growing up. It may seem silly to you, but I had the fear of being noticed.

I tried to be invisible. I grew up with low self-esteem and was incredibly self-conscious. To avoid drawing attention to myself, I dressed very conservatively.

So how did I start modeling and in a short amount of time, begin modeling bathing suits?

I modeled because a friend asked for my help. It wasn’t about me, it was about helping another.

I shopped at my friend’s boutique and loved the clothes she carried. She asked me to help out when she lost her regular model for a weekly hotel fashion show. I was scared to death, but I told myself I only had to do it once.

Incredibly, sales from the show increased and she asked me to replace the other model. Since I was helping her build her business, and I liked being helpful, and I said yes.

It became clear to me that my mousy self-concept was the opposite of how other women in business saw me. I started modeling for other stores, doing runway shows in my local area and posing for print ads. I loved it.

The biggest benefit was not that I changed my wardrobe, but that I changed my self-concept. I had overcome a major fear that had stopped me from saying yes to many opportunities.

All it took was saying yes one time to something that was scary and outside my comfort zone. What would happen if you gave it a try?

Women’s Empowerment Action Step: What would you be doing if you knew you couldn’t fail?

What’s the first thing that pops into your head? There’s a picture that immediately flashed into your brain when you read the question. What is it?

I encourage you to write that question on several cards and post them in different places around your home. Take this first step, and it will remind you that you’re on the path to personal growth and banishing fear from your life.

Lynn Pierce is the founder of one of the most exciting annual events for women entrepreneurs, “Women’s Business Empowerment Summit”. For more than 25 years she’s taught people how to combine business and personal development to reach the pinnacle of success and live the life of their dreams. Now she shares her keys to success and life mastery with you. Lynn’s commitment to your success continues online at www.LynnPierce.com www.YourBreakthroughToSuccess.com, www.WomensBusinessEmpowermentSummit.com

How to Stop Micro-Managing the Way Your Life Shows Up

Let’s follow through with the flower seed analogy from yesterday’s post.

Decide what it is you want to manifest in your life/business (type of flower).

Your seed will not turn into a flower if you dig it up every day to check and see if it’s really growing. Just give it the water and sun it needs and it takes care of the rest.

Are you capable of releasing and letting go, realizing all that is needed to create your flower is in the seed?

Have you ever had a flower show up all by itself outside the pot you have been watering and fertilizing? How is that possible? A flower (abundance- more money, a new car, new relationship, weight loss, etc.) just showed up without any participation being required of you. All you need to do is get out of the way and let it do what it does. Where do you need to do this in your life now?

Create a Personal Manifesto for Personal Growth and Professional Development

A manifesto is a series of statements clarifying what you stand for in your life as well as what you won’t stand for.

Having a personal manifesto helps keep your focus on who you are and your purpose in life. I created my personal manifesto as a certificate with a personalized logo and it’s up on the wall in front of my desk.

You may be wondering why it’s so important for women in business to have some kind of measuring stick, such as a personal manifesto, to use in your decision making process for personal growth and professional development. At a conference I met a man who was extremely successful at predicting the futures market, which is a part of the stock market.

He felt he was really successful in just about every area of his life except for his weight. He was extremely overweight. He had gone to see his mentor in person, and they had a conversation where his mentor asked him, “What are your rules about your weight?”

He thought about it, and he realized, “Okay. I’ve been so successful at my work because I have clear-cut rules on how I do everything in my business.”

He also quickly realized that he had never set up any personal development rules about what his health was supposed to look like. He had a vision and an action plan in every other area of his life, and, surprise, the one area of his life that wasn’t working was his health and his weight.

So he went home from that meeting and spent several hours writing out what he wanted his health to look like; much like a personal health manifesto.

He decided he was going to lose 70 pounds in 70 weeks, without starving himself or being on a diet. Then he planned to make millions by telling other people how to do it.

This is only possible because he established a plan, an outline of what health looked like to him, and what he would and wouldn’t have in his life pertaining to his health.

That’s what your personal manifesto is. It’s the rules you’ve set for yourself to be who you are. It is an easy reference for women in business. When something comes up and you aren’t sure what to do, you can look at your personal manifesto and see if it fits with what you wrote. It won’t be long before you don’t have to look at your manifesto at all. It will become a natural part of your internal decision making process for personal growth and professional development.

One multi-millionaire friend of mine mentioned she was setting up a new real estate investing partnership. She talked about the rules they set for how they were going to find properties, who the partnership would acquire them with, and how they would sell them.

Everything you want to be successful at needs a set of rules or guidelines that you follow so you have a way to determine your level of success and a way to judge opportunities as being a good fit or not for personal growth and professional development.

You don’t have to call it rules. If you have a problem with the word rules, which most women in business do, you can use guidelines, blueprint, roadmap, or whatever you want to call it.

Creating a personal manifesto is the first step in deciding what’s most important to you.

Rave Reviews for Interview with Dr. Deborah King, author of “Truth Heals”

The thank you’s for Dr. King have been pouring in as 100’s of listeners found answers to their questions on an array of topics.

If you missed this interview last week, you can still listen by clicking here now.

Here’s a recap of what we covered:

Do you use these excuses?

* I can’t…
* I won’t…
* I don’t know how….
* I don’t know why this keeps happening…
* It’s not my fault…
* I’m right…
* I’ll do it tomorrow…

OR

* Are you losing the battle with your weight?
* Is youth slipping by at an uncomfortable pace?
* Is your love life on the skids?
* Worried sick about cancer or disease?
* Do you feel crazy/rushed?
* Are you fighting the glass ceiling in your career or finances?

Dr. King answered questions about career advancement, self-esteem, finding
passion, relationships, goal setting, illness, or even recovering from pain.

We also discussed the secret of dismantling the lies we tell ourselves that hold us back from achieving true potential and healing the mind and body.

Dr. King is a frequent guest on Fox News and CNN; her reputation for healing
and empowering others is unprecedented. She has survived sexual abuse,
financial woes, addiction, and cancer. Through her search for answers, she
eventually determined that anyone can release deep-seated layers of denial,
avoidance, fear, doubt and anger in order to find healing and promote personal
and professional growth.

Personal Development Key: Take Responsibility for Your Life

Taking responsibility makes it possible for you to experience the total pleasure of the success you achieve. What? Read that again. I have a feeling that you didn’t give that thought time to sink in.

To fully be responsible, you must take responsibility for the good and the seemingly bad in your life—for your positive habits as well as your negative habits.

It reminds me of how parents will jokingly or not so jokingly say when a child does something good, “That’s my boy.” And when he does something wrong, “He’s your son.”

Taking responsibility comes with big benefits. You assess the situation and then take steps to change what doesn’t contribute to your personal success. When you take responsibility you experience the accomplishment of your personal success goals at a much higher level than if you only take credit for the good that comes into your life and blame someone else for the rest.

I admit that it took me quite a while to come to terms with cutting off the excess baggage I was carrying around. I seemed quite comfortable accepting responsibility in all areas of my life except for one.

I spent almost 10 years in an abusive relationship. I thought I was well along my path of personal success and spiritual growth at that time. I only read motivational and self-help books. I listened to personal growth tapes in my car. I lived and breathed the personal development principles I learned, or so I thought.

Despite all that positive reinforcement, I was wearing blinders to this horrible situation. But it wasn’t my fault, or so I told myself confidently. Obviously it had to be his fault because look at all the evidence of how empowered I was.

And yet, there I stayed. Being beaten up physically and verbally on a regular basis. If I had told anyone, they would have been shocked.

Looking back all these years later, I have a completely different perspective. I wasn’t so innocent in all this. I played some part or it couldn’t have happened.

If I were going to take responsibility, which means having the ability to respond and adapt rather than react to situations, I would have to give myself a serious reality check.

As painful as it may be to let go of the convenience of blaming someone else for what happens in your life, it’s necessary for you to move forward and be successful.

Because while you are still blaming or holding a grudge, like I was in that situation, a lot of energy that could be used for personal development is fueling anger, resentment and fear.

Think of this excess baggage from your past as a virus on your computer. On the surface everything looks like it’s running normally, but behind the scenes something is using up energy that slows down the progress of what you’re trying to create.

You have to look deep inside your computer to find that virus. You may have to engage the services of an expert to help you work it out. It’s inconvenient, but once done, you feel much better, your computer is back to full potential and you can work quickly with results showing up faster than before.

In that abusive relationship I had to look at the fact that I allowed myself to be manipulated. I handed over my power to someone else. No matter how persuasive his verbal abuse to break down my self-confidence, in the end he couldn’t be successful without my help.

Once I became responsible, I came up with a plan. And because I was now responding and adapting to situations rather than reacting like a victim, my plan got implemented, I created the desired result and extracted myself from that relationship.

I believe I could have ended up dead if I had allowed the violence to continue. It happens to women every day and I could have been one of them.

That’s why it’s so important for you to take back your power from partners, family, friends, and the media. You may not have ever been in a situation like I was and I hope you never are.

But…

You are the only one who should be in charge of your life.

You bear the sole responsibility for who you are today and who you will become in the future— no one else is responsible for your personal growth and success.