We don’t really judge people by what they say but rather by what they do. We judge people by their behaviour and by their actions. The reason for this is that deep down inside we all know that words have no real power to create anything in itself. It is only when the words are backed up by action that you have the power to create any real results. The ironic thing is that although most of us know this we get caught up in accumulating knowledge. We learn something and get really interested in the results we think the information can produce for us. In pursuing the results, we often confuse it with getting more information so we end up gathering and accumulation tons of information and knowledge without producing the result we wanted in the first place.

The proper fruit of knowledge is action. It is true that gaining knowledge can make us feel more capable but knowledge in itself will not produce the results we really desire. One of the biggest myths that is prevalent in the information age is the notion that knowledge is power. Knowledge is not power. It is only potential power. What you do with what you know is where the real power is. The difference in people comes in what they have done differently from someone else with the same information. The reality of the world we live in is that information on almost anything is freely available to anyone, quite literally at the push of a button.

Even though you have all the information at your fingertips, still, the most valuable resource you have to create results in your life is your ability to take action. An action always produces a result. When you take action you bring an idea into effect and you use your will to do something to achieve a specific purpose. When you do this you actually create in the true sense of the word as you turn an idea into reality; you express something that was internal on the outside. Every action is a cause set in motion and for every cause there is an effect and it is the effects or results that we are all really interested in. You don’t want to know that you can be wealthy. You want to experience it by seeing and touching it and the real satisfaction comes from turning your ideas into reality.

There is a big difference between knowing what to do and doing what you know. Most people know what to do to be able to make their lives work but knowing just isn’t enough – we must act and use what we know. Something intangible happens when you take action on an idea. You set in motion a series of events, events that you don’t always know the full consequences of. Like throwing a stone in a pond, the ripple effect of the water affects the whole pond and moves everything that is in or on the pond. This illustrates how a single action can have a significant impact even if you aren’t always aware of it. On a more practical and tangible level you start getting feedback from your actions and you learn things that you can only learn as a result of your actions. These are things you simply cannot learn from merely listening to others or reading books.

Think of your knowledge and ideas as an elastic band. It has the ability to be stretched, but until and unless you stretch it you are not using it for its real purpose. Information is usually something external. When you learn it you transform it into knowledge and when you act on it, it becomes part of your life. To truly experience anything in life you must take action. Knowing simply isn’t enough. We all want to feel and this only comes from engaging “all of you” – by engaging all of your senses to experience the fullness of life in all its abundance.

It doesn’t take many ideas to change something in your life. Neither does it take a complicated idea. It takes ideas that you can use and act upon to give you what you really want. Rarely is it the information or ideas that you really want as it is almost always only the means to an end. What you truly want is results and this will only come from using what you know. Don’t get caught in the flood of information and knowledge. Start to focus your mind on action and on applying ideas instead of accumulating them. Slowly feed yourself more information and knowledge, but let your actions be your ultimate guide. After all it is not what you say you will do but what you actually do that will determine the quality of your life and what you achieve or fail to achieve.

“Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage, but simply because they have never organized their energies around a goal.” –Elbert Hubbard

Millions of words have been written about goal setting. Millions of people set goals. Yet, most goals set by most people remain unfulfilled. I have distilled (from experience and education) the eleven essentials of successful goal setting here for you. Follow these and you will accomplish your goals. Fail to follow these and you probably will not. No hype. No rah-rah encouragement. No fluff. Just the simple explanation of how and why to set and ACCOMPLISH goals.

Your goals must be:

1. Original
2. Inspirational
3. Harmonious
4. Realistic
5. Idealistic
6. Specific
7. Adaptable
8. Visualized
9. Affirmed
10. Time related
11. Written down

1. Goals must be original. That does not mean that they cannot be the same or similar to the goals that others may have; it means that they must be yours, not secondhand. Many people set goals according to the hopes and expectations that they have been programmed to have by parents, teachers, society or cultural norms.

As a consequence they do not own these goals. You cannot generally have or hold what is not yours or even if you do manage to keep it, it will not have any value or meaning to you. What’s the point then of having it? The real reason you set and hope to achieve goals is not just to have the thing, it is to be happy and fulfilled in the accomplishment.

Set goals that are yours; not inherited or assumed. If they are not your own original goals, even if you manage to accomplish them, it will mean very little to you. Why waste your life pursuing something that will end up as meaningless?

2. Goals must be inspirational. They must arouse your passion. This must be a consuming passion, not some whim or ‘someday I’d like to’ feeling. You must desire passionately to achieve what you set as a goal. It must drive you to action and you must feel fulfilled in that action because you know that it is leading to the fulfillment of your goal.

It is passion that drives you to move continuously toward your goal. It is passion that keeps you from getting distracted. It is passion that keeps you from getting discouraged. It is passion that fuels your motivation. It is passion that draws others to you to assist in your goals. It is passion that inspires you and others. It is passion that lights your way through the darkness that you will find along the way.

Get passionate about your goals or get passionate about someone else’s. Life without passion is not a life; it is merely an existence.

3. Goals must be harmonious. Obviously, you cannot have conflicting goals in life or you will be conflicted. That’s the easy part. Your goals, however, must also be in harmony with your core beliefs and your self-assigned purpose in life.

It is easy to understand that to having conflicting goals will raise your stress levels and frustrate you. Yet, people do that to themselves all the time.

It is not so easy to understand that you may have some deep set unconscious game plan for your life (whether from some basic spiritual urge or from some sense of undefined purpose) and the goals you set may actually be in conflict with that real, but hidden, game plan.

First, decide who you are and what you are here to do and then set your goals in alignment with that; or you, yourself, on a subconscious or super conscious level will continually be sabotaging your goals.

4. Goals must be realistic. There is not much point in setting a goal to personally live on Mars, if you are today over 95. The goals you set for yourself must be achievable within the framework of what is humanly possible.

But (and this is important) realistic does not mean what the majority commonly accepts as realistic. Most people did not think that it was realistic to attempt to fly a bicycle with wings and a motor attached, but two brothers named Wright did. Most people did not think it was realistic to build a personal computer for people to use in their home, but two guys named Steve did.

These 4 guys changed reality for all of us. Their goals were obviously, in retrospect, quite realistic. Don’t let your imagination be hemmed in by the crowd.

5. Goals must be idealistic. In two ways-they must involve your personal ideals in the five mentioned areas of your life and they must be progressively higher or further ahead than you are at now.

If your goals are not in tune with your ideals, you will be conflicted. Most people are, in some way, in conflict with the different aspects of self: Material and Financial ($$$ & Things); Physical and Environmental (Health of body, home and world); Emotional and Relationship (Happiness, Love, Social contact); Mental and Educational (Learning, Awareness, Self-knowledge); Spiritual and Ethical (Unity, Life purpose, Values, Sacredness). This is why they are unhappy and why they do not achieve their highest potential. Set your goals in harmony with your ideals.

If your goals are not idealistic (in the sense that they are progressive), you will get bored and unsatisfied. People (those who don’t understand) often wonder why those who are already extremely wealthy continue to pursue more wealth. It is because the ideal is always being extended or raised. Great achievers don’t rest on their laurels. Each goal achieved is merely a stepping-stone to more and greater achievement. It is not the end in itself.

6. Goals must be specific. Goals like “I want to be rich” are not worth the paper they are printed on. Rich must be defined. $1 million in the bank might mean rich to most people but it means poor to many others. It is the same for more ethereal goals. I want to be happy means nothing. Happy must be defined just as rich must be defined. I want to be spiritually fulfilled is the same…meaningless, unless defined.

What does rich mean to you? Exactly. What does happy mean to you? Don’t know exactly? Then how on earth will you ever even know if you get there? I have met a lot of people who say that they are on a spiritual path. I like to ask where that path is leading. Most can’t say anything specific. It is all very nebulous. If your destination is not defined, how in heaven’s name will you know if and when you get there?

7. Goals must be adaptable. One of my favorite jokes (which would offend some readers so I will not quote it here) involves a guy who had set a specific goal but when a gal came along to offer a much better fulfillment, he asked her to help him to accomplish his original one. Many people miss the better fulfillment of a goal because their focus on the one they had originally visualized is too intense and narrow to recognize the better one when it shows up.

Be sure that you are focused on the best possible fulfillment of your goal, not just on the method that you foresaw that goal fulfillment happening.

8. Goals must be visualized. If you cannot see it as real and as true and as a part of the way you live your life…it will not happen.

Many folks, when confronted with some seemingly outrageous possibility or goal, will comment, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it made real, not just some imaginary ideal.’ The dreamers, schemers and achievers of history all had a different approach…’I see it. I believe it. It is real if it exists in my imagination.’ Tiger Woods ‘sees’ his shots landing on the green a few feet from the cup before he takes the shot. The average golfer looks up (usually too soon) from his shot to see where it went. Guess whose shots end up where most often. Visualize the reality in your imagination and it will become real in your manifestation.

9. Goals must be affirmed. You must tell yourself all day, every day, in your constant conscious and subconscious self-talk that your goal is real and achievable. AND, you must tell others what your goal is so that they can ‘buy into it’ and contribute to it. If you don’t believe in it enough to make it a part of your daily conversation and are not passionate enough about it to be compelled to talk about it to yourself and others, it is NOT real for you and it will NOT become real.

You will be surrounded by naysayers. Someone must speak the truth of the reality of your goal. That is your 24/7 job. Constantly affirm where you are headed and why. You’ll end up not only convincing yourself but the world as well.

10. Goals must be time related. Everything exists in space and time. If something is not defined precisely in space and time, it does not exist. A goal of someday, I’d like to be financially secure, or someday, I’d like to climb that mountain does not, and it is highly likely that it WILL NOT ever, exist as anything other than nebulous wishful thinking. You must set specific times for your goals to be made manifest OR you will be forever going towards you goals and never quite reaching them.

Almost everyone in developed countries sets the goal of retirement in financial security, but the overwhelming do NOT achieve that. Why? One of the reasons is that it is always a ‘someday’ goal not a ‘by June 21st 2008′ goal. Of course, it is also likely that these people are also not applying the other 10 rules of effective goal setting.

11. Goals must be written down. If it exists only in your head, it is only wishful thinking. This is the basic, proven by experience, truth of the matter…95% of people who have specific written goals, accomplish them; and 95% of people who have unwritten goals (specific or not) do not. If you can read that sentence and not begin immediately to write down your goals, you might as well resign yourself to the fact that you will not accomplish what you imagine you want to be, do and have in life.

Yes, there are those few high achievers who manage to set clear distinct goals without writing them down and also manage to stay focused on them for their entire lives. Don’t kid yourself…you are not one of those people. I’ll prove it to you. Tell me (or anyone) right now exactly, specifically and in full detail what goals you held 1,000 days ago.

Write them down. Period. Now.

Whatever it is scientist are in the process of proving that internal change is the only thing that can give you health and happiness. Everything else is an illusion.

What does this mean?

Your brain is the only thing that can keep you healthy and happy.

Richard Davidson, a neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin and Jon Kabat-Zinn from the University of Massachusetts Medical Centre have just completed some interesting research that can actually be of benefit to you and me and the way we run our lives.

They took a group of 41 stressed, but otherwise healthy, individuals working in a biotechnology firm in Wisconsin. 25 were taught meditation. In this case: mindfulness meditation. The group met for a 2.5 to 3 hour meditation class each week. After six weeks they all attended a seven hour meditation retreat. In addition each member was asked to meditate, at home, for one hour a day using a guided meditation tape.

The other 16 were held as a control group and did not receive meditation training until the study was completed.

At the end of the eight week programme, in November, they also gave all the participants a flu jab. And guess what. “The members of the meditation group had a significant increase in antibody titers” in other words they have less chance of catching flu.

The bottom line appears to be. If you want to have good health and overcome the day by day blues and maintain happiness learn to meditate. When you meditate you change the way your brain operates.

In addition, they found, the more you practice meditation the better your daily performance.

”What we found is that the long time practitioners showed brain activation
on a scale we have never seen before. ‘Their mental practice is having
an effect on the brain in the same way golf or tennis practice will enhance performance.” It demonstrates, that the brain is capable of being
trained and physically modified in ways few people can imagine.
(Richard Davidson)

So give yourself the space each day to train your brain.

Why, then, would someone be afraid of intimacy?

It is not actually the intimacy itself that people fear. If people could be guaranteed that intimacy would continue to be a positive experience, they would have no fear of it. What they fear is the possibility of getting hurt as a result of being intimate with another.

Many people have two major fears that may cause them to avoid intimacy: the fear of rejection – of losing the other person, and the fear of engulfment – of being invaded, of being controlled and losing oneself.

Because we have all learned to react to conflict with various controlling behaviors – from anger and blame to compliance, withdrawal, and resistance – every relationship presents us with these issues of rejection and engulfment. If one person gets angry, the other may feel rejected or controlled and get angry back, give themselves up, withdraw or resist. If one person shuts down, the other may feel rejected and become judgmental, which may trigger the other’s fears of engulfment, and so on. These protective circles exist in one form or another in every relationship. When the fears of rejection and engulfment become too great, a person may decide that it is just painful to be in a relationship and they avoid intimacy altogether.

Yet avoiding relationships leads to loneliness and lack of emotional and spiritual growth. Relationships offer us the most powerful arena for personal growth, if we accept this challenge. So what moves us beyond the fear of intimacy?

The fear exists, not because of the experience itself, but because a person doesn’t know how to handle the situations of being rejected or controlled. The secret of moving beyond the fear of intimacy lies in developing a powerful loving adult part of us that learns how to not take rejection personally, and learns to set appropriate limits against engulfment.

When we learn how to take personal responsibility for defining our own worth instead of making others’ love and approval responsible for our feelings of worth, we will no longer take rejection personally. This does not mean that we will like rejection – it means we will no longer be afraid of it and have a need to avoid it.

When we learn how to speak up for ourselves and not allow others to invade, smother, dominate and control us, we will no longer fear losing ourselves in a relationship. Many people, terrified of losing the other person, will give themselves up in the hope of controlling how the other person feels about them. They believe that if they comply with another’s demands, the other will love them. Yet losing oneself is terrifying, so many people stay out of relationships due to this fear. If they were to learn to define their own worth and stand up for themselves, the fear would disappear.

The Inner Bonding process we teach is a process designed to create a powerful inner adult self capable of not taking rejection personally and of setting limits against loss of self. Anyone can learn this six-step process and, with practice, heal fears of intimacy. Through practicing the Inner Bonding process, you learn to value and cherish who you really are and take full responsibility for your own feelings of worth, lovability, safety, security, pain and joy. When you deeply value yourself, you do not take rejection personally and become non-reactive to rejection. When you value yourself, you will not give yourself up to try to control another’s feelings about you. When you value yourself, you are willing to lose another rather than lose yourself.

You can start to learn the powerful Inner Bonding process now by downloading our Free Inner Bonding Course. Moving beyond your fears of intimacy will open you to the deep personal and spiritual growth that relationships can provide and the profound fulfillment and joy that loving relationships can offer.