They say Bill has a £40 million fortune.

As he sat in front of me he said, “Habits. Daily habits, that’s the key.”

Key to Success: Do what you know needs to be done until you succeed.

It’s widely stated that a key to success in any endeavour is the ability to “do what you know needs to be done until you succeed”. The trick is staying focused enough to do them.

Course, not everyone wants £40 million, but we all have something we’d like, be it a physical object or a way we’d like to be.

And everyone leads a busy life these days. Our work life is busier and more pressured than ever before. We have a host of personal projects and things to fix and do in our leisure time. There’s also a multitude of distractions: mobile phones, email, TV and family and friends to help out, to name a few.

Working with a single purpose is the ability to deal with one thing at a time and give it 100%.

When our mind is fragmented it’s hard to focus and get things done. When I write newsletters like this, I close out everything else. I close the room door, (sometimes the curtains), put on music that supports the mood of the message. I pop on the headphones, close down my email and completely immerse myself in the writing.

I know I can’t give work 100% on a Sunday morning at home. First, I want to be with the family. Second I feel immense guilt if I have to. Third, I know my attention is wanted and needed elsewhere.

If I even think about work on a Sunday morning I have 3 other desires and feelings immediately clogging me up emotionally and mentally. I know can’t give it 100%.

And working weekends isn’t in my plans either. So, there’s no point even thinking about it now.

Similarly, I know I can’t focus on a speaking project if my in-box is open and pinging with incoming email. I also can’t sleep if there is an important letter I need to write and I run it through my mind at midnight. I have to make notes, so I can give 100% to sleep.

When I start a day with a clear intention, I am more satisfied and the day goes better. Plus at the end of the day I feel I’ve accomplished something.

I always allow time when it’s done to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction, before anything else happens. Self-appreciation is healthy, especially when, once you’ve done something, you notice how much more “head-space” you have now that task isn’t gnawing away at you.

Best wishes
Neil

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Trying to Get on Track & Stay on Track? I can help.

Visit my website: http://communitysoul.co.uk/

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I’ve seen people struggling for no good reason, yet when we dig a little we discover they haven’t yet made the decision that they “can” and “will” succeed.

Have you made the choice to succeed?

You may have heard people say that when they made their mind up to do it, everything fell into place. Sometimes we can take forever to make a choice, going backwards and forwards, before making a choice about something. And yet when we make a choice to succeed, everything somehow begins to fit.

Going back a few years I saw personal development guru, Tony Robbins demonstrate this during a game of “Simon says”. He simply whittled the audience down from 9000 to 1, then asked the winner about his strategy. He said, “I decided I was going to win and I just did what it took.”

In sport you can usually see a champion before they raise the trophy. There is a  hunger to win. There’s an air of expectancy. There’s frustration when it doesn’t go well, elation when it does. The moment they sniff victory they seek to kill a game off. If they go behind you’ll see them rise up and throw everything they have at the opponent.

And this is what someone does when they decide they “can” and “will” succeed. Suddenly everything begins to slip into place and pretty soon more and more things start to work in harmony.

And this happens because in making the decision to succeed you create the  time to succeed. The energy then flows because you actually realise that nothing else is more important. You simply make a decision.

Sometimes when we make the choice to succeed we seem to meet everything that’s not what we want. It’s like going on a diet and having people suddenly start offering you chocolate.

In business when you decide to succeed you start to notice your attitude, your professionalism and maybe where you come up short. That’s something I’ve certainly noticed in me at times. You notice where your knowledge is lacking and where you’re a bit naïve, and where there are gaping holes that need filling in service and delivery.

I was standing on a hilltop a while back with a couple of guys who are marketing experts. These guys are at the top of their game, working with corporations and top celebrities. As we were talking, I noticed there were things I needed to do in my business. All these guys were doing was shining a torchlight. And in moments like that you can either shrink or shine.

Mentoring business owners down the years I’ve seen things gelling with people. They morph as their ideas come together, as they pull fragments of their full-self together and their dreams gel and they start to materialise to the point where they change from hoping they can actually sense the victories arriving.

And I can tell you the moment where I see people change. I see them change at the point where their optimism changes to “expectation” and then goes up to knowing and seeing the results.

It’s an exciting time. It’s a very exciting time!

With Good wishes
Neil

Want to Create Exciting Times? I can help.

Visit my website: http://communitysoul.co.uk/

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And while you’re here, leave a comment below and share your thoughts on this blog.

Inspiration always comes…

We just have to be still enough to notice it.

In August 2005, just after the train bombings in London, amongst the fear and the negativity, I heard people say: “I want to change the world”. Then they shrugged and added, “But I can’t do it alone.”

I disagreed.

You see, a fundamental belief behind CommunitySoul is that you can change the world.

How?

I won’t happen if we trying to tackle the whole problem. That’s just too much of a big bite. The way to change the world is through changing the part of the world you influence and control.

Let me put it like this…

You will probably agree… that while you may know life isn’t perfect ( i.e. you may have some debt; kids you love, but can’t relate to; a spouse who you love, but lost the spark with) you may not be wandering around 24/7 trying to fix it all.

The truth is the problems most people face are “back of mind” issues rather than “front of mind”. What this means is that we go from day to day coping and getting by, but perhaps never really standing up for our highest truth.

Some spiritual teachers claim everything is a reflection. Others say, “As within, so without”. So this morning as I’m writing this to you, I’m thinking about changing the world and what the riots in major UK cities reflect that we have going on inside us. I’m also wondering about what our Prime Minister calls a, “Sick Society.”

My question is this…

When shops get looted, when cars get burned and people act violently against each other, what is it that is going on inside each of us  that is being reflected on a national scale?

For days I’ve been asking people if they know what the riots are about.

I asked my parents. I asked my children. I posted on Facebook. I read countless articles on-line. What became apparent is that the reasons are varied.

MendLondon website put it in a nutshell: “There was quite clearly a spectrum of reasons people got involved ranging from ego, boredom, peer pressure, anger, sheer bloody-mindedness, greed, territoriality, hatred and for a sense of thrill.”

Martin Luther King in Birmingham Jail

So, what are the riots reflecting in each of us?

For me, all this has happened at a time when I’ve just finished reviewing the life of Martin Luther King for my Life Purpose Group.

Let me share an insight from the great man…

King said (when talking about the Vietnam war and the death of John F. Kennedy) that through our silence and willingness to compromise our highest principles we construct an atmosphere where events materialise.

He says: “By allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is the one who masters the art of shooting and techniques of killing, we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred become popular pastimes.”

Of course, since King spoke those words back in the 1960’s, so in addition to TV and movies we can add a whole host of violent video games.

As parents… business owners… as human beings… we all have choices and responsibilities about what to buy, what to create, what to sell, what to allow into our homes and what to allow into our minds.

For example, if we want the world to become a more peaceful less violent angry place we have to exert influence over the part of the world we control. That means we turn the TV over when we notice violence. We skip the movie with needless bloodshed. We don’t buy the game. We send a message to the creators, do make this. When profits are hit, they will stop making the movies and people who do not have your ability to switch off from violence will see less of it.

When I started to do this, I found it hard to begin with, as I broke old habits.

Andey, playing guitar

Is it possible that as you make that choice your children will see less violence and be less aggressive?

When my son was 13 years old his behaviour became uncharacteristically aggressive. I noticed this coincided with him playing on the Playstation.  We spoke about it and regulated his time with it. Coinciding with other changes in his life (we took him out of school) he sometimes complained of  boredom.  Boredom, with some parental love, allowed him space to experience who he really is and discover a purpose and one day he picked up a guitar. Four years later he began teaching music, enrolled in a music course at college, played in a various band, regularly gets on the stage at open mic nights and records his music in a studio.

As I said, inspiration always comes. Can you see how that materilised from noticing what came out of the boredom which not playing a Playstation allowed?

Can you see how it created opportunity?

Would you agree he discovered something worthwhile and purposeful?

Here’s another example…

My 11 year old daughter watches almost no TV. As a result, her mind is not swamped by – and therefore not programmed by – the adverts or images we have not chosen for her to see.

In our home DVD’s and game stations are mostly for weekends, and only after working together as a family. My daughter contributes to the household. She has taken on a role as a team-player in the home. We pay her for chores and she learns the cause and effect of effort and reward, and financial responsibility.

Father and daughter ready for a dinner party

We also speak about games she plays and who she plays with and how they add meaning to her life. We talk every day about life in general and work with her to resolve issues.

Her is a recent one…

A teacher had been shouting at her and this upsetting her. After speaking with me she went to the teacher. She promised to give respect to the teacher and asked for respect in return (i.e. not being shouted at). The teacher responded positively and now has an excellent relationship with my daughter.

Do you believe she is learning to respect our home?

Do you believe she is learning a healthy respect for money?

Do you believe she has an understanding of her importance to the family unit?

Can you see how she is learning about having a healthy self-respect and how to communicate her needs?

Contrast that with a child left to watch TV or play video games all day long, who is given “hand-outs” like pocket money, allowed to leave their dirty undies on the floor and their plate by the sink after dinner and whose parents are both run ragged. Think about what that teaches a child.

Following King’s suggestion we create an atmosphere where events materialise. And what materialises if we love our children so much that we do everything for them?

Dependency?

State hand-outs?

An inability to contribute?

Failure to understand worth as a human being place and value in society?

Lack of care for society?

Frustration?

Anger?

A generation who covet nice things, but lack the knowledge to lawfully create having it.

My commitment, back in 2005, was to do what I could to change the world through changing the part of the world I influence and control. I aim to do this in my finances and in my relationship with my wife. I do this through my business. I encourage everyone who takes part in my Life Purpose programme to try what I suggest and then use the programme material to lead by example and inspire their children.

How we raise our children is just one of the ways we can influence and control world change.

As we change, the world around us changes. The example you create has a ripple effect on others beside our children. It ripples out to their friends and teachers, our partners, the people we work with, our friends and neighbours.

Most of us don’t need a government to create new laws to make the world a better place. Most of us know that governments are big machines that take years to bring about changes. Experience shows that commercial interests and economic growth is often a higher value than moral rightness.

So the decisions we make as mother’s father’s and business owners and human beings about what we watch, what we buy, what we sell, what we allow into our homes and into our minds will determined the pace with which consciousness shifts in our country.

As we make better decisions, the decisions made by those around us become better.

Take the green issues for example. Whether you believe in global warming or not does not matter. The fact is we are polluting the air and raping the resources of the world by the way we live. Governments have been talking about the problems for years, but have solved it yet?

But you and I both know the solution isn’t new laws. It’s about us doing what we have always known to be the right thing to do.

Some of my choices (and yours may be different) are to grow some fruit and veg at home, walk when I don;t need to drive, stop buying things that I don’t need and that have little or no real purpose, recycle, reuse, refuse (and more often than not borrow from a friend or family member).

In this article I have only scratched the surface of a much bigger debate, but…

Are you starting to see how much power you really have to influence changes in the world?

Are you seeing how much more control you really have over your life and the issues that face you?

Can you see how world change ripples outwards from the choices you make?

If we can define our purpose… what’s most important to us… we can start to change the world.

As Ghandi said, “Be the change you want to see in the world.”

CommunitySoul is all about helping people improve their everyday experience in life. You can sign up for a FREE hour exploring Life Purpose with me at www.communitysoullife.co.uk

Good wishes
Neil

Neil Fellowes
Director
CommunitySoul

I don’t know if this happens to you, but it certainly happens to me.

Life is going along – happy, wonderful, good things happening – then suddenly it can all change and you can’t figure out why.

A couple of years ago I remember it was all good fun, everything was just going magically, then in the space of 15 minutes  it transformed.  It stayed that way for two glum weeks.

While, of course, this felt horrible there is a silver lining. And it’s that silver lining that I want to share with you today.

While trying to find my way out of all this nasty negative stuff, I had a profound moment. It allowed me to flip negativity in general on it’s head.

I’d just had a long day – sixteen hours to be more or less precise, several of which had been splattered with unpleasantness. I had just flicked the kettle on and was just considering comfort eating anything that looked like food while running through the worst of the day.

Now I don’t know about you, but I have this little voice in the back of my mind that sometimes whispers a gem of wisdom – it also whispers quite a bit of old tosh too – but I like to think I have a talent for filtering that out!

So, there I was, looking at the light of my life – the glow of the refrigerator at this moment – when the gem of wisdom came out of the blue.

“What if all this negative stuff isn’t negative?”

Strange?

I thought for a moment. Can negative really be positive?

That’s when the little voice said, “It’s not positive or negative. It just is.”

“Marvelous”, I thought, “A Zen Buddhist has hijacked my grey matter”. I shut the fridge door, poured my drink and pondered…

True enough when things happen, they are what they are. We know this because, you and I could be in the same room, experience the same thing, and interpret it in completely different ways. What makes one person sad or angry can make another laugh or smile.

But when you’re in this negative pool, how do you get out of it? How can you just see it for the positive?

I believe it begins just there (with your awareness open) – at the moment where you realise you don’t have to react (re-act) to the situation in a conditioned way; at the moment you know you don’t have to look at the situation as negative. If your not attached to your feeling you can let it go. If you don’t want to feel that way, you can release it.

When you lose the attachment to the feeling it begins to lose power. When you start to look for the good in the experience you start to increase your energy and resourcefulness in handling it. As a result answers come.

In coaching this happens time and again. A client recently told me they had lost a contract. They also had a legal issue on the go and it was draining the business finances.

When we reframed the experience the legal matter no longer presented as a problem – in fact it resolved quickly. The lost contract presented an opportunity to look for new business. As a result the client found four new contracts that now pay him more than the one he lost.

In a family situation, when children (or partners) feel tired they tend to take it out on the closest person to them. You could take this on as being negativity or you could see it for what it is – they feel under the weather. To heal the situation they may need some help. If you feel resourceful and able you can help them – return them to the love they feel disconnected from. The negativity will then evaporate sooner rather than later.

Easier said than done? Maybe.

But it’s far more rewarding than getting sucked in to the negative.

Why not give it a go?

Love and best wishes

Neil

If you need more help try our Life Purpose Programme – www.communitysoul.co.uk/lifepurpose.htm

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And while you’re here, leave a comment below and share your thoughts on this blog.

At any point you decide you don’t like what’s happening in your life, you can begin to create something different.

It works like this…

We have a thought and suddenly it is now forming in consciousness. That thought will become reality in the next few seconds, minutes, hours, days, months or years. How long it will take to come into being will be dependent upon how much energy is required.

By energy I mean your conscious and subconscious energy, the urgency of your physical energy and actions, the amount of emotional energy and the amount of energy joining from other people. A rider here is also how much baggage you are dragging that might stop you from making necessary mental and physical changes.

Your energy combines with other energy forms outside of you. Like attracting like, joining together – thoughts externalising themselves and becoming physical.

What I failed to understand many years ago was that in struggling to survive day after day in a reality that didn’t work for me, I had chosen to forgo a reality that did work, that supported and strengthened me and led to bigger and better things manifesting in my life.

How we focus our minds for extended periods determines our outcomes. If we focus on things that we don’t enjoy, we compromise other things we could be enjoying.

When we say “Yes” to something we don’t want. We say “No” to something we do want.

When I focussed on getting through a day without abuse, I compromised living a life of freedom and happiness where people were kind to me all day long.

When I focussed on food to provide me with emotional – internal pleasures, I failed to externalise my desire to find a way to find a relationship that could meet my emotional needs and help me become healthier, more confident and more self-motivated.

When I focussed on being broke and worrying about money, I compromised getting out there and finding something that brought me an income.

What I’m talking about here is consciously taking back the control of your life. Finding integrity. Finding the fragments of your life that have become splintered, drawing them back to you, learning from your experiences and then recreating life in a way that is full of purpose, ful-filling (filling up the full) in every way.

A big juicy hug,
Neil

What can you do to take back control of your life? Leave a comment below…

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Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

Are you connected with your world?

Are you fully engaged with life?

It’s true. Many of us aren’t as fully engaged in life as we would wish.

Many live begrudgingly…

It’s easy to pinch a bit off here and there from life – taking the kids to school and dashing out the playground to work; getting stuck in traffic and cursing; trying not to share too many lunch breaks with colleagues; shutting ourselves away for nights on end to watch TV.

We separate ourselves from people. We see ourselves as separate to events.

Many blame outside forces… a government, a council, the banks, a colleague and often say: why is this happening to me?!

And it’s not happening to you… It’s happening with you… It’s happening for your benefit.

And you and “it” are one…

We are not separate from everything that’s happening. When we accept this… we recollect the control of our life from outside and bring it back inside.

When we accept the control of our lives we can accept that everything is happening ‘with us,’ is happen for us. We will see no separation between us and the never ending stream of events occurring in our life for our benefit.

It seemed odd to me that one day, out of the blue, two friends I’d not seen for months visited unexpectedly. Yet it happened for my benefit, because it helped me define qualities I wanted to give in friendships – generosity and spontaneity.

I hurt my neck and, while this could have been a bad thing, it made me think about life and where I may be a pain in the neck or who might be a pain in my neck.

If we slow life down a bit… if we engage more fully… we can notice the events stacking up to aid us in the moment towards a better, more fulfilling life.

Stop and notice.

With Loadsa Good Wishes
Neil

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Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

I’d like to hear from you – leave a comment below.

In this article I’m going to lay things on the line concerning a couple of phrases you may have heard being banded around spirituality circles. I’m doing this because I think we all owe it to ourselves to develop a fuller relationship with certain areas of our lives. Through the experience of doing this, we can grow.

One of the favourite phrases I hear in New Age spirituality is: ‘Give what you want to get.’ If you want money, you give money and money comes back to you. Another quote I hear in spirituality is the old Gandhi quote, ‘Be the change you want to see’ or its sister, ‘Act as if.’

Spirituality and Money
For many people The idea of ‘Giving money to get money’ hasn’t worked. And why should it? If you’re only going to give in the hope or expectation of getting, there is something wrong with the transaction – it’s being done with a motive.

Since many people involved in spirituality have money issues, let’s apply this ‘Give what you want to get,’ phrase to money. When people hear this idea their response is most often: ‘But how can I give when I have nothing to give?’ or ‘I can hardly afford my bills!’

In this sense the ‘Give what you want to get’ ideal may as well be substituted for ‘Let’s hit and hope.’ I suggest this because the phrase in itself usually only brings up desperation. For me, this type of quip, offered within spirituality concerning money, is nothing more than a cop-out comment offered by people who don’t have any practical knowledge of how to make money, respect it and nurture its growth so we can effect change in the world.

Spirituality and The Practical
In the ‘Act as if’ suggestion we do have a little more practical opportunity. Speaking from experience (having been obese once upon a time) how can you be twenty stone and ‘act as if’ you were the person who is one hundred and four pounds lighter than you. He could run without his inner thighs catching fire. He could tie his shoe laces without his belly getting in the way and do the downward dog in yoga without being choked by the double chin.

So what do we do with these phrases?
I admit, I have wanted to gather up all the people who proffered such airy-fairy advice and lead them all to the tallest tower in far far away land (I did think I might put pink fluffy stuff on the prison bars). I’ve come out the other side of that thinking now and hope I can offer you something of substance.

Money and Spirituality
Let’s go back to ‘Give what you want to get’ and money. For a moment just think of the possibility that you don’t actually have to give money to get it – I know you suddenly feel relieved, don’t you? Good. And what if it’s not about giving money per se? What if all you have to do is give yourself to the experience and relationship you have with money?

I didn’t like my financial situation and wanted to change it forever. During a twelve-month period I immersed myself in understanding my experience and relationship with money. I read books. I met millionaires. I got in conversation with people who were wealthier than me and examined my own attitude and habits towards spending, budgeting, savings, longer-term investments.

Quite literally I gave myself to the experience and relationship of money. I learned a greater respect and appreciation for money. I came to understand money. I nurtured my relationship with money. I cared for money. I cared how I spent it. I cared about the people I spent it with. I grew to love it and accept it as part of my experience and came to really honour it for the choices it gave me.

The Act of Spirituality
With ‘Act as if’ we may have to chunk it down (forgive the pun). If you are twenty stone and want to get to twelve, start by aiming for nineteen stone. Get to understand that the best way to eat a lot of food is to live a long time! Start to swim or walk once a day and build up your endurance over the course of time. Start your food education. Investigate what goes into your mouth and the effects it has on your body. Read. Research the Internet and speak to people who enjoy the kind of health and vitality you’d like to have. Get to understand your relationship with food, exercise and health. Notice how food affects your spirituality. Pay attention to when you’re really tired or just being lazy – yes there is a difference! You may also want to consider my Special Offer on coaching.

A Task for You to Consider This Week:
Where in your life do you use or subscribe to superficial metaphors or thinking? How can you develop your experience and relationship with it?

To those of you who know us – may I express my deep appreciation for your interest in CommunitySoul. You inspire me to continue writing and finding new ways to teach people how to live consciously and work together for a better Community.

I hope that today’s article will be of help to you or someone you know. I hope I have not offended your religion or spirituality and wish you a wonderful week!

Neil

Leave a comment: Do you live consciously and work for a better Community? What are your thoughts about this article?

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

There are three factors that propel you towards better and better things. Trouble is, it’s one thing knowing them and quite another to act them out in day-to-day life.

Put into action these three key factors and propel yourself to success!

I know how life challenges can knock your confidence and impact your overall will-power. This is why you must have a dream backed up by a real purpose to pull you through.

But is that enough?

Below I’ve listed the three key factors that will propel anyone to success. I’ve then broken them down into bite-sized pieces to give you a taster of what is in store for you, if you’re looking to make some changes.

Here are the 3 vital factors:
1. Purpose
2. Will-power
3. Confidence

How do they propel you?

Purpose
If you don’t have a purpose behind a dream you might give up at the first challenge. If I didn’t want to take my most painful experiences and turn them into successes that others might find inspirational enough to pull themselves from heartache, I’d have given up years ago. In many ways I think I’ve decided to use myself as an experiment for others, picking some pretty major challenges. I’m not suggesting for a moment that you do the same, but if you’re not clear on your purpose, especially if you feel stuck in a rut at work, then please start to think about changing things. Life is too precious.

Will-power
A principle of success has to be will-power. When you have purpose you want to see something through. You become persistent and more consistent. Things that used to hurt or bother you no longer get in the way and often become the very reason for change. Last week I was writing a scene for a novel and needed inspiration. I looked up Martin Luther King. Now there’s a man who took more than his own pain and turned the pain into victory. His I Have a Dream speech is legend and clearly shows that King had enough will-power to move things, not just for himself, but for all of the downtrodden in his era.

Confidence
When you apply will-power consistently you push aside obstacles more often. When this happens your confidence naturally builds. When this happens it adds more to your original purpose. Your vision strengthens and you come alive with other ways to achieve the your outcome. The challenges get greater, confidence higher.

Can you Be Stopped?

Purpose, will-power and confidence are tools to use on your way to self-mastery. In pursuing any goal your going to have to develop self-control and self-discipline. You have to be resilient to the outside factors that stop you. Then you have to stop them.

How?

First, become vigilant to what you do and begin to master your mind – rather than have it master you!

If it’s your weight you have to remove the temptations from your home. Stop buying food that hurts your body and begin the education process to a better way of eating – such as reading books or going to lectures by experts.

If it’s business success you’re after, maybe your failure to-date may be to do with something you don’t know enough about. Decide if your path is your purpose, have the will-power to educate yourself in the areas of business that can propel you forward and grow in confidence along the way.

Whether it’s money, romance, family or just plain fun, start to explore and you’ll find yourself propelled to better and better beginnings to the day.

Greet tomorrow with Relish. Wake up to your dream.

Best
Neil

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

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Leave a comment: Do you practice the three vital factors?  What do you think could propel you to success?

Free-will is important to us all. Wars have been fought for it and we’d fight them again if we realised someone was trying to take our free will away from us. But have you considered that your free- will is being eroded in such a subtle way that, before you know it, you’ve lost it?

Our will-power is best considered when looking at what we eat. Eating well is vital to our well being – you don’t have to be Einstein to know that. Yet many of us have given little consideration to what we put in our mouths, other than to think about the explosion of flavour.

I’m going to go on here and talk about food, but you could just as easily substitute what I say about food to what happens with your TV set, your cigarette smoking, drinking, newspapers and the negative stories and the business of life and do-do-doing.

For around the first twenty-two years of my life I ate what my mother cooked for me.  Beyond that I ate what my wife cooked for me, plus what the advertisers told me was good for me. By the time I reached the age of twenty-five I was eighty pounds overweight. By the time I reached thirty, I’d ballooned by another seventy pounds.

Looking at the statistics of obesity, I’d say my experience is quite typical. It all happens because we fail to take responsibility for what goes into our mouths and because advertisers know how to get us in a buying trance where we ignore everything else except the feeling of their product in our stomach. This failure to take responsibility is what determines that we live our lives according to someone else’s will.

Is it any different in other areas of life: sitting mesmerised, channel hopping – nothing’s on but you can’t turn it off; you know smoking is bad for you, but it makes you feel a little happier with life; the news is disheartening, but you read it anyway, with a morbid hope that by somehow reading it, everything will get better.

And what can you do when TV advertisers make pizza look mouth-watering, chocolate look sexy, they tell us milk has calcium that’s good for our bones and that wine is good for the heart. And we believe what they tell us… usually without question.

Why?

Over a year we’re bombarded with this image or that. They come via our TV, on billboards, in magazines, via the Internet. It is little wonder that if we don’t have a strong will and line drawn in the sand, that we will eventually succumb to the power of the advertiser.

When we think of their product, we remember how delicious it looked. When we taste it, we know it will taste fantastic – because the advertiser told us it would – when we smell it we remember it for next time.

And we then get bombarded with more adverts telling us this or that is for us. Our will weakens and once again we succumb to the advertiser.

It’s little wonder the nation is gaining weight, under stress, fed up and feeling like identity with our selves has been lost.  It’s like we’re in a trance drifting along a pavement, remembering the tasty images we’ve seen on TV; remembering the feeling in our mouth; remembering the experience of eating; remembering the smelling the bread or the coffee as the waft of crispy chicken wings drifts along the high street as a call to you, to stop in, fill up and feel good.

It’s like we can’t help but smoke, or drink, or work because we know we’ll get sacked if we don’t.

But do the processed foods that look good on TV and taste sensational in our mouths sustain us? Do our habits or addictions or our lifestyle make us feel good day-to-day. Are we functioning at maximum output or left with the sense that there must be more to life.

Reclaim your free-will. Don’t just eat things because you have always eaten them or because the TV says you should -  don’t trust anyone who has a vested interest in the product. If they are advertising the product, they’re making money on it and might not have given your overall health much thought.

And why should they?

A food manufacturing company makes food. It’s your responsibility to choose if you want to eat it or not. If you want to feel great and look good then choose the food that goes with that. If you want to feel sluggish and enjoy having rolls of fat hanging over your belt then buy the food that goes with that. It’s your right to have bad breath and have smelly clothes as much as your right to have perfect health; it’s your right to do what you’re told at work as it is to have respect for your personal life.

How do you make these informed choices?

Remember every decision you make is like putting fuel inside you. It ignites your passion or douses the fire. You wouldn’t put diesel in your unleaded fuel tank would you? Don’t risk putting fuel in your engine that might cause you to lose power. Reclaiming your will power put the right fuel in your tank, every time.

Best Wishes
Neil
What do you think? Do you have control of your willpower and free will? Would love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to leave a comment.

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Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk

By the time any of us reach 30 years of age, we’ve probably been through some “stuff”.

In life that might be something like a divorce, or in business it might be as big as a bankruptcy.

So a typo on your website or a broken link in an email or fluffing your words in a talk is nothing, really, in the scheme of things.

Imagine you’re a footballer in a cup final with five minutes to play, and you just made the mistake that could cost your team the cup. What are you going to do, cry about it and wallow in self-pity for a decade afterwards or pull yourself together and bust a gut to lay on or score the goal that makes amends?

You may remember David Beckham in 1998, kicking the Argentinian and getting sent off. He had people hanging effigies of him from lamp posts and others sending him hate mail. But he came back strong. Almost single handedly, he qualified England two years later for the Euros.

You look at the German and Japanese economies. Decimated during the war, but by the 70-80′s they had the most productive economies in the world.

So what I’m saying is don’t sink when things don’t go quite right. Feel the pain or the frustration and then work with the blessing of gratitude that you noticed that at some point in the past you didn’t do things quite right and now you’re noticing the detail. Accept the change to get it right and make it happen.

An area I had to work through in my business life was walking away from opportunities on the point of breakthrough.

To me, this felt like boredom. I’d taken something and moulded it, then wanted to move on to the next thing. The results of what I did in business echoed through my life – lots of nearly moments.

What I needed to look at was what I needed to do to break this habit, so I could actually mould my business into what I wanted it to be.

The thing to remember is: just because you didn’t succeed the first time or even the second time, it doesn’t mean you can’t ever achieve what you want in business.

Like David Beckham, or like the German or Japanese economies or like I did, you can always come back from a so-called “failure” and succeed.

But in truth, we never fail, we just find another way not to do something.

Happy successes
Neil

Would love to hear from you — leave a comment and tell me how you’ve overcome failures.

Neil Fellowes shows conscious entrepreneurs, coaches, consultants and complementary therapists how to make a difference AND a profit. Visit his website at http://www.communitysoul.co.uk