August 27th

Goals and Affirmations

My coaching has always started first by getting into relationship with the client and then looking at the client’s goals.

I generally like to look at 3-month goals, sometimes 4 months – long enough to be worthwhile and short enough so you can build on results – Obviously, some goals are really milestones on the road toward bigger goals.

I’ve been leading a workshop based on Jack Canfield’s Success Principles – a different approach. We have written 21 goals, three in each of the seven slices of life: Finances, Career, Health & Well-Being, Personal, Recreational, Relationships and Community/Contribution/Spiritual. And these are one-year goals.

Here’s the part that has had a dramatic effect on my coaching and on my life. We have turned each goal into an affirmation. And I never truly understood affirmations before (frankly, I considered them woo woo.). But I say these affirmations with emotion twice a day. And I got it. Speaking these affirmations pulls the goal toward me. It makes me work harder toward the goal and it attracts the goal, fills the space with my absolute commitments.

Useful Quotations

Look on the new day as another special gift from your Creator, another golden opportunity to complete what you were unable to finish yesterday. Be a self-starter.
Og Mandingo

 I believe that just being conscious of our ability to shift our rhythms within the fabric of a frenetic society will make our hours less anxious, our days less stressful, and our lives more complete.  It will, simply enough, make us happier. Happiness has a rhythm, too.  Happy people seem to live less frenetically.  They have more time in their lives.  They are more in the moment.  This happiness is available to all of us.
Stephan Rechtschaffen, M.D .
(from Levey –wisdom at work)

The little dissatisfaction which every artist feels at the completion of a work forms the germ of a new work.
Berthold Auerbach

Habits - the only reason they persist is that they are offering some satisfaction. You allow them to persist by not seeking any other, better form of satisfying the same needs. Every habit, good or bad, is acquired and learned in the same way - by finding that it is a means of satisfaction.
Juliene Berk

There are always flowers for those who want to see them.
Henri Matisse

Creative Corner

To be complete in every one of life’s ports of call is to know love and satisfaction.

When I Was The Stream

When I was the stream, when I was the forest,
when I was still the field, when I was every hoof,
foot, fin, and wing, when I was the sky itself;

No one ever asked me did I have a purpose,
no one ever wondered was there anything I might need . . .
for there was nothing I could not love.

It was when I left all we once were that the agony began,
that the fear and questions came and I wept.
I wept tears I had never known before.

So I returned to the river.  I returned to the mountains.
I asked for their hand in marriage again.  I begged—
I begged to wed every object and creature.
And when they accepted,
God was ever present in my arms.
Meister Eckhart  (1260-1328)

 I have four blogs:

Creating Today - A daily journal on creativity
Contributing Coaching - Creating New Futures
Blogging for the Reading - Making a Difference in how we Create
Michael's Articles - articles that don't fit anywhere else.