Live Your Best Life

PART ONE

YOUR AWAKENING

"Why are you knocking at every other door? Go

knock at the door of your own heart."

— Rumi

During the course of a normal day, we have about sixty-thousand thoughts, many of which come and go so quickly that we are not even aware of them. Some of these thoughts may set us up to ‘win’ in life. Yet how many of our thoughts keep us from engaging with our actual potential?

That is a question only you can answer, and each non-productive or unresourceful thought is an impediment to your personal fulfilment that only you can change.

I had never placed much value or authenticity in those motivational people who spruik positive thinking. Yet I learnt the value of their message as soon as I felt I had no other choice in my life but to change what I was thinking, one thought at a time, one old strategy at a time, in order to turn my life around. And it did, and that is something for which I most certainly give thanks to my Dad for exposing me to that from an early age.

Even today, I still get a little irritated at people who sound overly positive, because I know real life has its inevitable ebbs and flows, its ups and downs and I have learnt this through the greatest of my life’s experiences. In my view it’s a sign of maturity when a person can admit to having all the shades of emotions of human experience and be okay with that. There is something truly powerful when people truly own where they are at because it is only in that moment that we can face true acceptance of ourselves. Anything brushed aside or under the carpet will always re-appear.

With this in mind, and even though I can definitely see and understand the benefits, I am not going to throw the-power-of-positive-thinking rhetoric your way as I have since learnt better. What I will do however in the following chapters is walk you through very practical ways in which you can use your mind to access your best life blueprint more quickly in order to then lead you to your best life. I believe this to be more truthful and more sustainable for there is so much to be said for the power of vulnerability.

‘Your Awakening’ is the first stage in starting your dig, along with the reconstruction of some of your life’s blueprint. To live up to the life you were meant to lead, you must begin by looking at what has blocked you, what has held you back and prevented you from hearing your own inner voice of wisdom. When you begin to awaken you are able to understand why you may be seeing the world in a less productive or less conducive way.

The main task of this stage is not to understand the influence the past has had on your life, but to give you the tools you need to move forward. The purpose of ‘Your Awakening’ is to assist you to ‘get over yourself’: You have to accept that you have what you have, you are what you are, your parents did what they did, and that you still deserve to lead and have an extraordinary life - to live your best life.

As you work through this first stage of uncovering your life’s plan, you are making a commitment to overcoming the biggest obstacle to most people’s attainment of satisfaction with their lives - themselves.

You are committing to overcoming negative self-concepts, limiting beliefs and habits that aren’t serving you and that can get in the way of the wisdom and learnings that are trying to lead you to your best life.

In the next three chapters, you will learn how to get over these hurdles by asking better questions in order to get better answers to your life’s queries, reframing beliefs that stunt your ability to have what you want and gaining the perspective to allow your life’s desires to take flight.

There are many ways in which ‘Your Awakening’ will arrive. Let’s take a look at a client of mine named Christopher, and as we do, it will assist you to gain an understanding as to how ‘Your Awakening’ is an essential part of your journey.

Christopher desperately wanted for his company to reach the top of its game within is chosen market of recruitment in the mining industry.

His naturally volatile temperament, combined with his fierce determination to make this happen, was working against him.

When we began to work together, I told him that if success was indeed part of his ultimate life plan, some awakening was needed. He needed to get out of his own way and change the questions he posed.

Instead of Who is responsible for this?, How dare you speak to me that way, or Who does he think he is?, he needed to be asking, What do I want from this situation?, What would be the best outcome?, What would be fair to everyone? and What will make the difference for us to be the most respected in our field?

Christopher had to gain perspective and realise that not everything that was happening around him was actually about him. He needed to adjust some of his beliefs that he held about his own self worth and the value he can add and how to prove it.

Once he did this, he was free of the struggle. He decided to create a way forward for his entire company that did not compromise his newfound clarity.

What moved Christopher from being purely reactive to his work to being on track with his best life blueprint is what we will explore for you in ‘Your Awakening’.

Even if you don’t think you have any awakening to do, it is even more essential for you to work through this part. The exercises in the three chapters that follow will benefit you regardless of whether you think you need them.

So, let’s get started :)

CHAPTER 1

KNOW YOUR ‘WHY’ & THEN

ASK YOURSELF ‘WHAT’?

Now is the time to connect with your mind.

Time to free up your capacity for new learnings, and allow this chapter to deliver them to you in the most efficient way.

This chapter is all about connecting you to the first powerful tool that you need in order to access the inner wisdom I speak of, because as you do so, this new learning will quite literally change your life.

Now, don’t go freaking out on me in this first chapter, when I share with you this everyday, very ordinary, yet very powerful tool.

Do you promise? Are we all cool?

The most powerful tool you have, you already know.

It is the power of the common question.

And I am sure you would agree with me, when I say, that one of the most common questions we ask is ‘WHY?’ ‘Why’ it would seem is the language we all use when we are seeking to understand.

When we were young children, we used to ask this question to figure out how the world works: Why is the sky blue?, Why did Lamby (my pet lamb) run away? And as we get older, we still use ‘why’ to bring our circumstances into alignment within our ability to understand our world.

‘Why’ definitely has its powerful place in our lives, because without understanding the purpose behind why we should do something we may as well not do it at all.

However, I have found that ‘why’ can eventually lose its power to move us forward. Instead of using it in its most powerful form, we tend to get ‘stuck’ by obsessing over questions like, Why did that happen?, Why am I this way?, Why did this happen to me?, Why aren’t I better-thinner-smarter?

Even if you’re not in the pits of despair or survival, you might still be stuck using victim or despair questions. When you use ‘Why’ to ask a question, you are struggling to come up with the information to help you understand a situation or a circumstance and in most circumstances even the information presented can be flawed as it will always relate to your perception of your own reality and not necessarily what took place.

I call this asking an ‘information question’. Information questions will give you answers that explain the past. They present answers that fill the corners of your mind with details, as well as emotion, blame, and perhaps even more problems.

While you can assume that obtaining more information will enable you to be released from your problems, an information question does little to move you forward in life. In fact, sometimes they can’t even be answered.

In working with clients, now for just over three decades, I’ve seen them endure more frustration than necessary because they asked too many information questions and I have since learnt that there is actually such a thing as a bad question contrary to all the sayings out there.

Now, don’t go getting me all wrong here, when it comes to connecting us to our overarching life’s purpose we definitely need to understand the big ‘WHY’ behind it, because if we don’t then we quite simply won’t be linking any action we take towards the outcome we truly desire. Asking ‘WHY’ has definitely been the key to many a brilliant self-discovery story, however, when it comes to creating and making the change you need to make, ‘why’ is not an effective short-term tool. You need to understand ‘why’, but also understand that it is not going to be the answer towards what happens next.

The way to your best life blueprint requires asking deeper, more useful questions in order to get better answers and more effective action. The questions that will help you do that are what I call ‘access questions’, which I also like to call ‘LYBL QUESTIONS’.

‘LYBL QUESTIONS’ access your innate wisdom, the wisdom with which you were born, to create positive forward motion, reminding all of us how resourceful we are and that we already have all we need within us. We simply forget it at times. So this is here to serve as a reminder and to put you back in the driver’s seat.

LYBL QUESTIONS

Imagine your brain as one big ‘Google Machine’. It is a search engine tapping into a database of information just like the World Wide Web that you already have available to you and that is made up of acquired experience, knowledge and intuition. When you need answers in life, you form questions that serve as your key words. Your brain then searches its resources and gives out all the possible answers. The more specific your keyword entry, the more specific your answers - that’s the wisdom of your very own internal built computer. How did it know what you needed exactly? You told it your question and it found the answer for you. With that point alone, I need you to stop and take notice.

This is what ‘LYBL QUESTIONS’ will do - assist you to be specific in your information gathering so you can come up with the answers that have the power to move you forward.

Nearly all the questions we are used to begin with one of five words: ‘who’, ‘what’, ‘why’, ‘when’ or ‘how’. And although these words assist us to gather facts and understand each other in conversation, not all of them exude wisdom. Since we’ve already eliminated ‘why’ as a viable ‘LYBL QUESTION’, ‘Who’, ‘When’ and ‘How’ fall into the information question category.

Therefore we are left with using ‘what’ which aids the brain to behave as a more efficient search engine. ‘What’ questions force you to be specific in your query and being specific leads to solution and awareness; on the other hand, asking Why? leaves you with only the question.

For example, if I asked you, Why are you reading this book? you might tell me a story about some things you are wondering about. Maybe you’d go on to provide a few details about what brought you to this moment of information seeking. Your responses would probably have something to do with your past. But if I asked, What outcome do you want to reach by reading this book? the answer you give would be future-oriented. It would also be much more specific, since you would be forced to look forward, rather than backward. This releases energy and moves you from feeling stuck to living in possibility - you can see opportunities out into the horizon and into the future.

This is where the path to your best life commences. As you start to move toward what it is you do want, everything you are running from will lose its power.

So let me ask you that again: What outcome are you looking for by reading this book? Answers like To live my best life, To feel and be much happier in all that I do or To find the guts and courage to take a leap of faith would be more like it -regardless of what the final result ends up being, these types of responses get you moving toward your desired outcome. And the best part is that they set the person up to feel empowered to achieve that momentum on their own.

The search engine in our brains is highly sophisticated and just like Google, it requires a well-phrased question to take advantage of it. When a question is phrased well, it gets us closer to the outcome, so when we take the time to consider what the ‘Google Machine’ needs, we have more opportunity to land more precisely with what it was we desired. So start Googling I say! Google yourself as much as you possibly can, by asking yourself the right questions in which to find the answers.

This is exactly why I use ‘LYBL QUESTIONS’, because they are designed to do just that. By using ‘what’ questions, you start accessing your own inner wisdom that you were born with, that already knows what it needs to know to guide you through.

The list below is a collection of powerful questions that are used by many coaches all around the world.

Take a look at the list of questions below and see how you can make any question an ‘LYBL QUESTION’ by using ‘what’.

HOW & WHEN TO USE ‘LYBL QUESTIONS’?

Imagine 2 friends conversing and empathising over a problem.

One is expressing a complaint and the other is taking the supportive role.

If the supporter was to ask information questions – Where were you?, Who started it?, Why?, they would be treated to details about who did what to whom in a blow-by-blow re-enactment of the