Tag: personal growth

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.

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

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.

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.

Daily Spiritual Practice: The Foundation for Your Breakthrough to Personal and Professional Development

Down through the ages, great thinkers, inventors, artists, statesman and philosophers have credited their spiritual connections for their successes.

If this seems like a strange place to begin, you may be wondering what this has to do with our topic of success and life mastery.

Daily spiritual practice is the foundation everything else builds upon to create an abundant life.

In studying the professional development of many of the wealthiest and most empowered millionaires, I found the majority of them start their day with an hour of spiritually oriented reading and meditation. Yes, I said an hour.

It seems like a lot of time for a busy successful person, but the consensus of the truly successful is that taking this time is what sets the tone for the day and gives them the energy they need for an incredibly busy life.

By the way, they also tend to go to bed later and get up earlier than the rest of the population.

How different would your life be a year from now if you added 365 more hours of positively invested time to your year?

If you normally work a 40-hour week, you’ve just added the equivalent of nine weeks to your year, devoted totally to your personal and professional development. And you thought you didn’t have time for personal growth or professional development in your life!

Let me explain what I, as a personal development mentor, term an empowered millionaire. They are different from other millionaires whose main focus may be on accumulating money. Empowered millionaires are what I consider to be truly successful people.

Empowered millionaires have a life purpose that serves others. This purpose is bigger than they are. Oprah is a great example of an empowered millionaire, as is Bill Gates.

Both of these incredibly wealthy people could be living a life of luxury, hording all their money and never working another day in their lives. Yet they are working overtime as philanthropists, helping to make the world a better place.

They go above and beyond simply writing a fat check to a cause, although I appreciate all the people who do that as well. My point is, that despite their busy schedules, they research and travel and work personally to improve the lives of as many people as possible.

That, to me, makes both Bill Gates and Oprah great examples of empowered, spiritually motivated super successful people.

Through their service to the world, spiritually based successful people have become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. These multi-millionaires and billionaires work harder than most people I know, when they really don’t need to work at all.

Think about all the other examples of people you know who demonstrate their spirituality by freely sharing their knowledge, their money, or both with the world to make it a better place for everyone.  These are the people who are truly making a difference in the world.

We all owe them a debt of gratitude for their willingness to come forward and lead. They make things happen not just for profit, but because it’s the right thing to do. The energy to take on the work they do comes from the foundation of their daily spiritual practice.

Would you like to be incredibly wealthy, full of energy and purpose, living a life that makes you outrageously happy?

Would it be worth getting up a little earlier or missing the first half hour of the news in the morning?

If you don’t already have everything you want, I challenge you as your personal development mentor, to ask yourself …“How much effort is the life of my dreams worth to me?”

You may not see the full connections yet, but daily spiritual practice is the foundation for your breakthrough personal and professional development.

You can start with something as simple as being grateful for the opportunity of another day. Years ago in Las Vegas I met hypnotist Marshall Sylver, who suggests jumping out of bed every morning and saying what a beautiful day it is, filled with love, opportunity and abundance.

Any type of daily spiritual practice will keep you uplifted while you achieve personal and professional development and life mastery. It will also keep you grounded in the truth of who you are. As you implement daily spiritual practice, you will learn that it is the foundation to your personal growth, your professional development and your abundant life!