Lori is a homeopathic veterinarian.  She is a true animal lover and understands more than the average person her capacity to communicate with animals.  The other day, she also learned the amazing power of using her thoughts to impact the animals she lives with.

Naturally, Lori shares her home with animals.  She lives with 4 cats – two of which are restricted to two rooms because they don’t play well with the others.  They are the upstairs cats.

During a recent Get Clarity™ retreat, Lori learned that in order to live a fully energized and enlivened life, her job number one is to monitor and control her own thoughts and energy.  And, job number two is to create space for the people she lives and works with to also live energized lives.

The other day, Lori entered a room where the upstairs cats lived to what she defined as a “furball of two cats engaged in screaming and hissing ferocity with clumps of hair all over.”  Normally, she would have injected into this ferocity furball her anxiety and fear that one of them would be hurt.  However, being conscious of effectively holding her own thoughts and actions, she calmly looked at the cats and said “My intention is that this family will live here in complete harmony. So, the two of you need to work it out.”  Ferocity immediately turned to calmness.

Lori said the astounding part of this experience was the real, tangible, visible effect that controlling her own energetic thoughts and stating her intention had on the cats.

The energy you send out to the world is the energy you will attract from those closest to you.  The thoughts, actions and behaviors of those people closest to you (family, co-workers) are mirrors of your own.  Like attracts like.  What we’ve learned from Lori’s great story is that sending out positive thoughts and energy also works on the animals in our lives.

We think that’s the cat’s meow.

During these separate experiences, we each pondered on the same idea – the power of our thoughts to create our own reality.  Not unusual, of course, since that’s what we primarily teach and live every day.

Lights-on and arm-driven hiking
My pondering began when I met a couple on the hiking trail.  The man apparently didn’t have use of his legs as he was using an arm-powered bicycle.  And, he was obviously very lights-on and delighted to be on that path.  Seeing him so vibrantly engaged with his life, reminded me of a recent discussion we had with a group of people responsible for helping soldiers and airmen returning from war zones mentally and physically damaged.

Our discussion was around the question: “what has one person depressed and retreating because of his or her injuries; and others not only accept their new reality but actually become energized and focused on staying vibrantly alive, following their passions – skiing on special skies; running marathons on prosthetic legs; “hiking” in Sedona on an arm-powered bike?”

Cathy’s pondering experience came during a workshop led by Dr. Joe Dispenza.  In his new book, Breaking The Habit of Being Yourself, he talks of the science behind our ability to create new neural pathways – new thought patterns that energetically create the life we want; that we can “craft the specific future events we want to experience”.

Vibrant, aliveness energy comes from focusing your thoughts on a lights-on vision you want to create and live.  It is that aliveness energy that will attract your vision to you.
Whatever our situation in life, we all have our current reality. It’s how we energetically view that reality, where we focus our thoughts that is critical. “Woe is me” thoughts are energy draining and the more we think those thoughts, the more we build a brain pattern that keeps us from designing a vibrant life.

Sustained thought changing enlivens us
When we look at our current reality and feel a lights-on desire to create something different, we bring energy into our system.  Just the mere fact of focusing our thoughts on something in the future that lights us up, we feel energized.  The more we focus our thoughts on this vision, we begin to build a different brain pattern – one that enlivens and keeps us in effective action.

If you are interested in a tool that can help you control changing your thoughts, take a look at SHIFT, A Guidebook to Positive Thinking.

Live lights-on

Cathy & Gary Hawk

We want to restate our belief that if you want peak performances from your employees, you first need to create peak experiences for each and every employee.  Everyone does their job better if they are lights-on and enjoying their work.  Our 20 Ways to Inspire Employees will help you create that experience.

11.  Use coach-able moments to improve the performance of employees.  Watch for both the good work people are doing as well as the areas where they can improve.  Coaching’s purpose is to improve an individual’s performance. Good     coaches make sure to acknowledge when the work is done well while also guiding the employee on how to improve the performance.  When you see an opportunity to improve performance take that moment to do it.

12.  Remember that a big part of your responsibility as a leader is to develop other leaders.  Every good employee wants to grow and become better at what they do. Train them often.  Provide opportunities and encouragement for them to learn new things, better methods, and their own deeper self understanding.

13.  Always direct your thoughts and your expression of them to the positive. Your primary focus should be on what is working, rather than what is not working.  Do not spend all your time, energy and conversations on all that’s wrong.  This does not mean you don’t need to solve the problems. It’s how your energy is focused on solving them that’s important.

14.  Focus on developing each individual’s strengths; don’t keep expending all your managing efforts on trying to fix that person’s weaknesses. When every employee is primarily using their strengths every day, it creates energy in the workplace that is very palpable and powerful.

15.  Remove judgment and criticism from your actions and your conversations.Direct everyone’s focus to what worked or what did not work – what was effective or ineffective.  Judgment and criticism creates drama and negative  energy throughout an organization.  Assigning blame and making personal attack will only have people get defensive and resistive.

16.  Keep total faith that you will achieve the shared vision while remaining fully aware of the current reality.  It is your unwavering faith in the vision that will spark the productive energy in your employees.  This is very critical when the current reality becomes challenging and difficult. Designing strategies and solutions to handle current realities are much easier to see and do when guided by the light of the shared vision.

17.  Let go.  Don’t hold on to past mistakes – yours or your employees. Bringing the past  into the future has everyone looking to the past for justification or excuses.  It is just not effective.  Focus instead on where you are now and where you want to go. Remember the lines from Willie Nelson.  “I know just what I’d change if I went back in time somehow.  But there is nothing I can do about it now.”

18.  Be grateful for the opportunities offered by the work you do together.  This is related to focusing on the positive.  When you take time each day to recognize what you are grateful for, you create an energetic opening that generates more positive energy.  Expressing gratitude helps you keep your focus on the right things to be productive and effective.

19.  Celebrate wins often.  Nothing is emotionally more energizing then celebrating work well done. Taking the time for company or team high fives will energize everyone.  Remembering the satisfaction of accomplishment feeds the desire to do it again and again.

20.  And, to help make this list similar to other lists you may have read on how to motivate employees, take everyone out to a ball game once in a while.

You will see that number 3 on our list is that you quit motivating and start inspiring people.  When you substitute the work inspire for motivate, you will ask different questions.

We also believe that if you want peak performances from your employees, you first need to create peak experiences for each and every employee.  Everyone does their job better if they are lights-on and enjoying their work.  Our 20 Ways to Inspire Employees will help you create that experience.

1. Be the leader they want to follow.  Never lose sight of the fact that good employees follow good leaders.
2. Lead with a passionate vision of what you want for your business.  If your vision is not clear and not connected to your heart, then do whatever is necessary to discover that vision.  If you do not have a clear, heart-connected vision, it is impossible to connect with the passion and spirit of your employees.
3. Quit trying to motivate them.  Put all your time and effort into inspiring them.  Tap into their spirit and they will be inspired to do their best work.
4. Create and inspire a shared vision with every single employee.  The employees you want need to know that their work has a purpose and makes a difference in the world.  Let them be part of creating a shared vision that incorporates your vision as leader.  It’s basic human emotion to want to belong to a community that they believe in and connect with.
5. Talk about the shared vision often – everyday.  Connect the actions taken by everyone to the vision by telling stories about how individuals, project teams and the company are delivering products and services that support the common vision.
6. Be relentless in hiring the right people and placing them in jobs where their skills and talents can have the most impact.  Extensive research has proven that every person, including you, wants to do work they are best at; work that is the highest and best use of their time, talent and energy.
7. Be ruthless about protecting the culture and shared vision.  Be quick to fire the employee who doesn’t fit or whose skills cannot deliver what’s needed.  It is very de-motivating to your best people to work with someone who isn’t productive.   It’s even more de-motivating if the leader doesn’t lead and do what’s necessary to move that person out of the company.
8. Be authentic, self-confident (and modest) in everything that you do every day.   Lead by example.  Do the personal growth work required to become more self aware.   In many ways you are the lead product or service in your business.  As a leader you are always looking for ways to improve your company’s services.  It is just as important to seek out ways to improve you.  Find training, books, coaches, mentors who can help you grow as a person. Then bring that more evolved person to work every day.
9. Stay present – stay conscious.  You can’t lead at your full capacity if you go through your day on automatic and being unconscious.  Take many moments throughout the day to stop and become fully present.  Staying present will enable you be more observant of your impact on others.
10. Create an environment of trust and open communication.  Trust primarily comes from living and working from a set of core values.  Develop and instill company core values and a set of guidelines on how each employee will work within those values.   Continue doing all that is necessary to teach and practice honest, open and direct communication.

Recently we posted a question in a Linkedin group – “When you find yourself in a wave of negative thought, how do you shift back to positive thinking?”  It struck a chord and several people responded with some great ideas.

Isn’t this the underlying quest for many of us – keeping our thoughts, which drive our actions and behaviors, on a more effective, more positive level?  With this in mind, below are many different methods others use to sustain positive thinking.

The first step is to have a strategy in mind ahead of time.  When you realize your thoughts and actions are negative (ineffective), what are the tools or actions you will immediately use to shift your thinking?

You have the power to choose your thoughts.  The more you use this power of choice, you can rewire the way your brain thinks – permanently.  Neuroscience has established that you can create new neural pathways in your brain.  Do you choose to trod down that well worn, energy draining pathway you have already created, or do you use your power of choice to create a new, higher energy highway.  It only takes 90 to 120 days of following a daily, shift your thoughts strategy to develop this new super highway.  Here are some great ideas you can incorporate:

Make a list of “to-do” items to follow when you fight the depression – inclusions for the list include: call my spouse and talk, run, workout, play tennis, take photos, paint, listen to comedians on YouTube, smile, take a hot bath, listen to music, get into the sunlight, do deep breathing, focus on the present moment, be of service to someone.

Realize quickly when you are beginning on a negative track before it fully takes over; then notice if it’s a negative recording from the past – create a new positive recording. Recognize the negative thoughts and reframe to positive; create affirmations.

Get moving – hike, yoga, dance; reading, meditation, exercise and going to church. Read an uplifting book. Definitely do not watch the news.  Take a deep cleansing breath and exhale, release and let go

Act your way into right thinking, don’t think your way into acting; Stay focused on the tasks at hand and know if you keep moving your energy will return.  Positive actions will bring your thoughts with them.  Do something out of the ordinary; gives you a new focus.

Embrace all the successes of the day – applaud even the simple ones throughout your day.  Keep a gratitude journal that acknowledges all the positive things in your life. Give and feel gratitude for all the wonderful things around you

Surround yourself with family and friends that positively recognize you and the good you bring to them.

Keep a journal of inspirational quotes; during the down moments find more quotes to add to the journal. Listen to uplifting people; watch positive videos.  Subscribe to a free email service that sends inspirational sayings.  Turn on Pandora and skip all the way to the store – observe how others look at you.  Laughter will break the blahs – read joke books.

Two experiences in the past year have been great reminders of how I can allow things I have no control over to impact my thoughts, health and energy.  We have all experienced large company customer service (a true misnomer).  For me it was two separate occasions with phone companies.  I won’t mention their names because the lack of true customer service is apparently not limited to these two (go to Google and type in “I hate (pick a company)” and you will see what I mean.)  It does make me wonder what would happen if senior executives multi-million dollar bonuses were based on evaluation of their commitment to customer service rather than their stock play.  However, that is a subject for someone else’s blog.

The last event forced me to ponder my inability to control my thoughts, behaviors and energy when faced with six calls to six separate 800 numbers, seven different people in three different states (and maybe two countries) and then having the one who could help me drop the call with no way to get back to him.  I went ballistic…several times.  Embarrassing, screaming of obscenities, testing the durability of plastic phones when being slammed into their base, scaring the dogs and Cathy… Of course, we all know that served no one, most of all me.  Most importantly, I didn’t walk my talk.

We are in total control of our thoughts.  To live a healthy, vibrant, passionate, purpose driven life, our job number one is to hold our own energy by controlling our own thoughts – no matter what.  I re-learned the cost of not paying attention to this.

My physical health was affected.  The adrenaline overload made me tired, drained and a little ill for two days.  My relationship was impacted – Cathy had to listen to my colorful, high volume tirades; worry about my health and hold her own energy field at the same time. And, I certainly didn’t use intentional, attraction energy to influence the near field person on the phone who claimed they wanted to help.

We do not have control over large, monolithic organizations or anyone else we interact with daily. The only thing we have control over is how our thoughts about them impact our own personal energy.

What can we do to be more energetically effective in situations like this?

Set our intention:  Would the result of all these conversations been different if before the call I had set my intention to stay calm no matter what the service person said or did?  Would the service have been different if I had expected and trusted that they would take care of me?  Certainly, I would have been more present and effective in my own communication with them.  And, whatever happened on the call would not have negatively impacted my energy, my health or capacity to think effectively.

Delegate:  If we know an activity is going to drain our energy, then delegate it to someone who will be energized by it. Rather than test my dedication to walking my talk, I now delegate to our assistant, Kim, all conversations with monolithic corporate service departments.  Her only attachment is to making it happen and she remains calm throughout the process.

Gary Hawk

]]> http://www.livelightson.com/the-personal-energy-cost-of-bad-customer-service/feed/ 0 http://www.livelightson.com/yes/ http://www.livelightson.com/yes/#comments Wed, 07 Mar 2012 14:43:43 +0000 admin http://www.livelightson.com/?p=639

Say yes to living a full vibrant life; say yes to the field of all possibilities; give yourself permission to live every day with vitality, purpose and passion. One of the primary secrets to a purpose driven life is to give yourself permission to live it.  It is important to have the trust that you can manifest what you desire.  When you do this, your focus immediately begins to shift to the field of all possibilities where your most expansive visions can come alive. This shift of focus to trust and permission creates an energy flow within you that sends out the high vibrational energy necessary to attract what you want.

How do you give yourself permission and develop trust in your dream?  What we have found to work is to keep your focus on a heart connected, energizing vision.  It is important that your vision be more than a great idea.  It must connect to your passion and energize your system.  Great ideas that are not heart connected will in fact reduce your energy and create confusion, and will not support living a purpose driven life.

Holding a high vibrational energy is the only way the Divine can enter.  It can only enter by opening a door called flow.  It cannot enter through a closed door called effort.  The key to the flow door is in your heart.  Following a heart connected vision is energizing.

Those who truly manifest what they desire and live passionately with purpose are people who stick to their dream, no matter what stumbling blocks they encounter. They listen respectfully to advice; gather information and facts; and never lose sight of their dream.

Say “Yes!” to living lights-on every day!

Your thoughts create your reality; when you stay aware of and shift your thoughts effectively you create the life you want. You know how important it is to think positively, however, when you are swirling in the eddy of negativity, it is hard enough to keep your head above water, let alone switch to a positive thought. Although you are well acquainted with the “change your thinking, change your life” philosophy, in the moment that you are stuck, it is frustrating!

And, that is the precise time you need to take a time out and get conscious about finding any tool to help you shift your thoughts to more effective ones.  Ask yourself, Where are my thoughts right now? If they are coming from fear, doubt, or some other negative energy, immediately turn your attention to something positive. To find something positive to focus on, think of someone or something for which you are grateful.  Feeling and expressing gratitude always brings lights-on energy into your system.

Here’s how it works: you pick a positive thought and your attention follows. As your attention follows this new thought, your focus sharpens. Then with your attention focused on a positive thought, your whole body responds and you go from being stuck to being in flow. And, it feels great!

You are now in charge of your inner operating system – your internal GPS – an energetic operating system which functions much like a computer operating system – like a DOS. So, Clarity uses a play on words, and calls it a HOS – a human operating system. As with all operating systems which run continuously behind the scenes, the application for positive thought changing is easily accessed once you know the correct command – like a mental Ctrl+A on your keyboard.  It’s acquired by tuning-in to your own energetic signals and then choosing the direction that will have the most positive result.

When you intentionally shift to a positive thought, (like joy, appreciation, and kindness) the body responds by immediately releasing a favorable cascade of neural, hormonal and biochemical events that benefit the entire body, an endorphin release. It is energizing and called lights-on. The effects are both immediate and long lasting.

Likewise when you intentionally or habitually shift to negative thoughts (like anger, anxiety, and worry) the body responds by immediately going out of sync creating a disharmony in the nervous system (adrenaline release). That stresses the entire body, lowers mental clarity resulting in less than optimal choices, is draining and called lights-off.

Waves of thought energy create flow patterns.  These patterns can be observed as behaviors and engaged with to produce preferred outcomes, because all wave patterns are subject to interference. Wave patterns in phase are constructive and out of phase are disruptive. When a constructive wave and a disruptive wave coincide, interference occurs which can “cancel” the pattern. So, a negative thought can be cancelled and replaced by a positive thought.

Simply put, the direction of your thoughts creates a feedback loop which signals your body to respond and produce results, either positive or negative. These choices are all self-directed. You are in charge.

To manifest the life you want or to create any experience you want requires that you set your clear intention before you begin.  There is a formula to follow for getting what you want and manifesting your dream.  It involves using all the tools you have learned on your Clarity journey:  Intention + Attention + Action + Release the Outcome = Manifestation of Your Vision.

Intention: You set your intention having a clear, lights-on vision for what you want.  You write down your vision, stating fully what you want—not what you don’t want.  It is also important to have a visual representation of your vision to remind you often of what you want: vision maps, lists of lights-on clues, and bridge plans are all part of setting your intention.

It’s always helpful to use a map or a guide to help you reach your destination.  As with any long journey you undertake, it helps to know what’s up ahead and around the curve.  The same is true for any life journey.

One of the cool things about following a map is that someone has been there before you to highlight the places you will visit on your journey; helping you to understand not only the challenges but also the places that will provide the wisdom to help you move with more flow.  Knowing what’s around the bend and what you need to do to prepare, deepens your power and purpose.

To assist our clients on their journey to a life of peak experiences, we provide the Get Clarity Journey Map.  You can review the map here – http://www.getclarity.com/clarity_books_dvds/get-clarity-journey-map/