10 Ideas About Life

If I had ten minutes to introduce someone to my work, what would I want them to hear?

That question led me to these ten ideas.

I had realized I was spending much of my thinking time on people who already knew the work. I wanted to consider the people who had never encountered life coaching or the Model.

These ideas are an introduction for them and a reminder for anyone who has been studying with me for years.

You do not have to agree before exploring them. Try them on. Ask questions. Notice what changes when you use them.

1. Your feelings are created by your thoughts

I define feelings as vibrations in your body. We describe them with words such as sad, happy, frustrated, and excited.

The thoughts in your mind create those feelings.

This matters because it gives you a place to understand your emotional experience instead of only feeling tossed around by life.

Life coaching helps you notice what you are thinking, connect those thoughts with feelings, and decide what to think deliberately.

The goal is not happiness all the time. When something negative happens, you may want to feel negatively about it.

The goal is consciousness about the thoughts and feelings you choose.

2. Money is created with value, not time

If you want to create more money, understand the value you are offering.

You cannot add hours to the day.

Working more and harder is not the secret I teach for increasing money. Creating more value is.

Even when pay is expressed in hours, look at what someone is paying for: the value of the work.

That gives you a different question to explore than how much more time you can spend.

3. Life is 50:50

I teach that life includes a balance of positive and negative.

Sometimes I describe it as half great and half terrible, on purpose.

The goal is not a perfect world, constant happiness, or being good one hundred percent of the time.

Accepting that balance helps us stop treating every negative experience as something that should never have happened.

We can recognize it in ourselves, other people, and the situations we encounter.

There is room to embrace the human experience rather than argue with its existence.

4. Supervise your primitive brain

I teach the motivational triad as reducing pain, increasing comfort, and avoiding effort.

That survival motivation can lead us toward immediate gratification rather than the life we consciously want to create.

If avoiding discomfort runs your decisions, setting big goals and exploring capacity becomes harder.

We need to supervise those impulses rather than assume every urge should lead us.

A more conscious life involves deciding when to do something uncomfortable instead of only choosing what feels easiest now.

5. It takes one person to improve a relationship

That person can be you.

You do not need to wait until the other person changes before you examine your part.

Ask whether you are being the person you want to be in every aspect of the relationship.

If you are not, that is work available to you.

Often the work is changing your own thoughts, feelings, and actions within it. Sometimes improving your experience may mean leaving.

Your work is not to make another person become someone else.

6. Explore capacity, not only current ability

We are often given options based on someone else's view of our past or present ability.

That view can become a prediction of our future.

I want you to question it.

Your current ability matters, but it is not the limit of what you could develop.

Capacity asks what you are capable of exploring and becoming beyond what you already know how to do.

Do not use the skills you have today as the final boundary of your future.

7. Your wants matter more than other people's expectations

We spend a great deal of time trying to meet expectations and gain approval.

You may be doing it without noticing.

But your parents', friends', customers', or children's expectations are about them. Living only from those expectations can become living someone else's life.

I believe your desires are the map to your destiny.

Find out what you want and live into it authentically rather than only ask what everyone else expects.

8. Emotional maturity helps you move faster

Emotional maturity means taking responsibility for your emotions and being willing to feel and process them.

You can acknowledge what you feel without being afraid of it.

You can also choose discomfort when it helps you pursue a dream.

I have seen this skill help clients progress dramatically faster. In this episode, I described it as moving twice as fast.

Blaming other people for your emotions or avoiding feelings through buffering slows your progress.

Learning to work with emotion lets you put more of your capacity into action.

9. How you think to and about yourself shapes your life

Your house, car, money, friends, and family are not what I teach as the source of your life's quality.

Your thoughts about those things—and your thoughts about and to yourself—create your experience of them.

Notice the way you speak to yourself in your own mind.

Developing awareness and choosing thoughts deliberately is how you create a more conscious life.

This is a skill you can practice rather than wait for your circumstances to produce the experience you want.

10. You are already one hundred percent worthy

You always have been.

Nothing that has happened to you, and nothing you have done or failed to do, has reduced your worthiness.

I teach that this is true of every human.

You do not need to achieve something, become better, or erase your past to qualify.

When you believe your worthiness is intact, you can show up differently. You have more room to be who you genuinely are.

Try the ideas in your own life

These are ideas that have changed my life and the lives of my students.

I want you to explore them rather than only read the list.

Share them, debate them, and test them. If you disagree, consider trying an idea for five minutes or a day.

It may not become what you believe. But giving yourself the experience lets you see what is available.

Which of these ideas is active in your life already? Which one do you want to examine more closely?

Let that be the beginning of a more conscious relationship with your own mind.