Scuffling with Physical Success

'Tis the holiday season, and it's a season of shopping, eating and celebrating. Most of us are taking advantage of the year-end discounts wherein stores are doing their best to lure us into their establishments with the hopes of dropping a few of our hard-earned dollars. We are celebrating the end of the year, which has hopefully been filled with great memories, wonderful successes and goal achievements.

The additional piece we are inundated with is eating. The holidays mean a time of splurging on the excess of sweets, cakes, home-cooked meals and beverages. If you're like me, then splurging means an extra visit to the gym or longer walks with dogs. I will admit that I do envy those fortunate individuals who are able to eat whatever they want, when they want, without adding on any or very little weight this season!

What keeps you motivated to stay healthy, eat and exercise during the holiday season? As you age your metabolism slows down, which means the level of calories we can consume is lower as you age—so you need to seriously increase you level of activity to offset the imbalance.

Have you formulated your list of motivators for what is going to keep you physically healthy this season? How about being able to achieve your business or career goals easier? Would becoming more financially abundant be a motivator?

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Steering Yourself to Victory

The end of another year is just about to arrive, and you are most likely caught up with the excitement of the holidays, shopping and spending time with those you love. It's around now that you begin to set intentions and goals for the upcoming year.

In business you are establishing budgets, identifying sales goals, and trying to locate potential expenditures on which to cut back. In your personal life you're looking at your level of happiness with your work, where you are in life, what you might like to change about where you live, or (if you're like the majority of us) identifying personal health goals.

When we establish goals for ourselves personally or professionally, it can be overwhelming at times since we think we know ourselves and like to believe we can do more than what's realistic. This results in your being overconfident or unrealistically confident. When you become overconfident, as bold and brazen as it sounds, you're actually lacking a certain amount of confidence of a particular kind. I'm sure you're wondering what I mean when I refer to "kind of confidence."

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Holiday Mindset Melt-Down

We're just a week away from the busiest shopping day of the year – Black Friday – and it's also the beginning of the most stressful time of year: the days between Thanksgiving and the kick off of the next year.

For most it means a time of family, friends and great fun, but for others it could mean something quite entirely different. Stress does funny things, but this time of year we're emotionally triggered by numerous types of events and easily fall into the pit of allowing ourselves to become victims.

Victim mentality is a common and hot topic these days, and it bodes well to play the victim role when we need an excuse for certain types of behavior, or we feel we need to be right and validated. Take a minute and think back over the last several months to see if any of these statements have been true for you:

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Confidence + Goodwill = Success

Asking current clients for referrals can be difficult, but for moving forward it is an absolute necessity. What holds you back from asking? Your confidence: that's what! So how do you move through this confidence challenge? By looking back and identifying which of your clients had the greatest success. These individuals will be (and will continue to be) walking testimonials and advertisements for you and your business. Here are three tips to improve your business confidence and savvy while increasing your client base!

Take Stock & Boost Confidence
Your first priority is to gather all the positive feedback, comments and notes from current and previous clients you can find. Next, make a list and read through it a few times. Reading over your list of positive feedback will allow you to establish a mental and emotional connection based on positive thoughts and experiences. This allows you to reach out to each of these individuals more confidently. Asking for help is never easy, but when we make a positive emotional connection with those to whom we are reaching out, we can design a new thought pattern. With a new pattern in place, you create new beliefs—and your new beliefs increase your confidence level!

Using the positive comments from your clients in your communication, remind your clients of how much they appreciated what you have done for them. Then ask them for referrals to associates, family and friends who could use your services.

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Women, Business and Confidence

Recently there has been quite a bit chatter in the news regarding women, business and women's inability to move ahead. A report recently on MSNBC cited the following two key elements for the reason:  "Glass Walls" and confidence (specifically, a lack of confidence).

When I was watching these news broadcasts, the lack of confidence resonated with me, as I believe we've all had our confidence shaken and challenged more than once as well. Similarly, I connected with the reference to the Glass Walls. I never personally believed in the Glass Ceiling excuse, but I do see the truth within these newly identified walls.

What confines us behind these walls are the following three parts, as set out in the news broadcast:

• Doing everything
• Lack of network support
• Thinking small

But I would like to add a fourth part: emotional trust.

The first three are obvious in their definitions, but the fourth—emotional trust—may not be so obvious since it also contains a few elements of its own. Being part of the human race means we're emotional beings; we use our emotions to learn, experience and grow. As women we embrace our emotions on an even greater and deeper level, resulting in our having a larger emotional investment in all that we do. When our emotional investment causes us pain or we experience negative backlash, our emotional trust is challenged and we become more cautious regarding where we place this trust in the future.

All our decisions are based on where we stand emotionally with regard to...

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Postivity Tools for Your Business

Separating what is happening in your personal life from your business life and vise-versa is difficult during the best of times. Working through times of challenge or crisis can make keeping the two separate nearly impossible. We all agree that your outlook in life doesn't need to be positive 100% of the time, nor do any of your family, business associates and friends expect you to be "up" all the time. When you're confronted with challenges that look bigger than life itself, having a few tools in your emotional balancing kit will allow you to dance through the challenge with a feeling of balance and grace instead of stumbling.

Several reports show meditation supports a healthy standard of living, and it's considered one of the best habits to decrease stress. When our worry is reduced or handled effectively, our outlook on life improves. This, in turn, results in an upward spiral in all areas of your life. Individuals practicing meditation on a recurring basis understand how meditation directly supports their ability to improve their mind's tricks, resulting in a more peaceful, calm and focused point of view.

Basically, the human mind is the key to reducing pressure. With the aid of meditation we're able to feel calmer and more relaxed while experiencing increased clarity, better mental focus and a boost in a sense of harmony. As we meditate our amount of random feelings diminishes, as will our attachment to those feelings and identification with them. This is because we're generally not conscious of all the mental goings-on in which we're engaged. Like with any inspiring method in which we engage ourselves, our ability to allow ourselves to "just be" emerges when our inner artist flourishes. Our ability to create from nothing is a knack with which we're all born but only a few permit themselves to embrace. When we allow our authentic selves to step ahead and bask in the glow, our outlook effortlessly improves. With an optimistic outlook we're able to step into action through the most complicated of times and crisis situations.

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Where Your Truth Goes, Your Confidence Follows

So you now know how confident you are, right? I mean, when ranking yourself regarding your confidence level, you were truthful, right? Oh, you mean you stretched the truth a little? Oh well, that’s okay because we all do it: stretch the truth, I mean. But if you can’t be honest with yourself, then with whom can you be honest? Knowing your truth is the second critical piece to being confident. The first was realizing that all your actions and reactions to life's events and decisions impacted your confidence level. Truth is what empowers you to step out of your comfort zone confidently and take the actions or steps necessary in life.

In the first part of this three-part series you were introduced to your two main life accounts into which all your actions, decisions and experiences are either made deposits into or taken from as withdrawals from your integrity and confidence accounts. Remember that both these accounts affect your level of success in your career, your relationships, and your overall personal wellness.

Your confidence level will dictate how you handle and manage your stress. Some stress is important in life, but extreme stress can be hazardous. Your goal is to be able to handle yourself regarding decision-making during times of crisis as well as you do during normal circumstances. With a lower confidence level it becomes more difficult for you to make effective decisions.

Examples of normal stress or daily triggers of your stress might be balancing your checkbook, creating employee schedules at work, or arranging a food drive for the local food bank. While moving through these situations, your physical, emotional and mental bodies are working according to plan. There may be emotions you experience such as frustration due to trying to coordinate others' schedules and availability, but these frustrations are easily worked through and released. There are no residual emotions floating around; in other words, you've let them go and moved on.

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Emotional Crisis? Emotional Infidelity

When we hear the expression "infidelity" in reference to a relationship, we frequently don't even think about anything outside of a physical interaction. But emotional cheating can be as damaging to a relationship as unfaithfulness. The difficulty, though, is that unlike infidelity, emotional infidelity isn't simple to catch, confirm or even admit! Very often the majority of people aren't even conscious of the fact that they are cheating on their partner emotionally.

Emotional cheating typically starts when one develops an emotional bond with a person of the opposite sex and begins sharing more with that person then with his or her partner. These relationships may or may not lead to physical intimacy; in either of the two cases, the existing relationship of the cheater suffers.

In the majority of cases, emotional cheating begins as an innocent friendship but develops into a "more than friends" relationship without the physical intimacy. It therefore results in being simple for people to convince themselves and others that they only share a special friendship and nothing else. A person might even equate it to the sharing of information or time with that of two best friends.

With the age of technology and the ease of "meeting" new people and connecting with "old friends," it's easy to figure how sometimes people develop meaningful emotional bonds with their online acquaintances. It's this kind of emotional infidelity that's even more difficult to identify and admit. The clandestine nature of these relationships, along with the benefit of mystery the World Wide Web provides, makes the dynamic of emotional infidelity even more complex.

So how do you know whether you're cheating on your companion emotionally? The following are a few of the biggest tell-tale signs:

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