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Relieving Anxiety, Stress and Worry
(From the keen mind and gentle spirit of my friend and colleague Mel Kaufmann, who gives me permission to share his thinking with you so you can be even more on-purpose.)
Relieving Anxiety, Stress and Worry
I do not know how you can relieve stress, anxiety and worry. I can only explain how I have relieved them. Each morning I get up thirty minutes before anyone gets out of bed and say my prayers. My prayer is a radical departure from my teaching as a child. I was taught to ask God to do stuff for me. I flip the coin. I clear my mind so God can tell me what He wants me to do. The most difficult part of this type of prayer is to still the mind. Without a stilled mind when God calls He gets a busy signal. I have lifted a sentence from Eva Bell Werber’s book, Quiet Talks With the Master; be still, put aside all thoughts of your own and let the leaven of My Spirit work through you. Quieting the mind is not a quick fix. I have been practicing this form of prayer since 1977. I still have difficulty ridding my mind of external affairs. Each year I am better and better at quieting my mind. At this moment in time, I no longer have anxiety, stress or worry. When I do quiet my mind I discover that God replaces my thoughts with rich gifts of the Spirit. So many beautiful people say to me, “I don’t have the time.” What they are really saying to me, “I don’t take the time.” For those who do not take the time, someday they will realize that tomorrow will the same as yesterday.
Mel Kaufmann
melvinkaufmann@gmail.com
Is Your Life Getting Better?
Note: The video mentions an upcoming On-Purpose Leader Teleseminar. For this updated On-Purpose Minute, I instead want to refer you to the Power of Your 2-Word Purpose Statement webcast, linked below.
Are you or is someone dear to you the proverbial “victim of circumstances”? Don’t Be! A victim of circumstances is a person in an unfortunate position, but those circumstances need not dictate your future.
You may not be able to control your circumstances, but you can manage your responses. Resigning to your current set of circumstances can be negatively habit-forming and send you in a downward spiral. This response means that you’re on the fast track to becoming a victim, no longer of circumstances, but of self-inflicted circumstances.
Choose a better option. In this On-Purpose Minute, we’ll be looking at how you can order your life around a different, healthier perspective of managing your life.
Are you ready to finally know your purpose in life — in two words! Yes, your life will get a whole lot better by being on-purpose.
The Power of Your 2-Word Purpose Statement may be just the introduction for you to order your life, define what’s most important, and begin living as an on-purpose person in creation.
Are You Setting Goals?
This is a classic On-Purpose Minute that first aired in August 2010 so the September offer regarding The On-Purpose Leader Experience is out of date. Alternatively, consider reading The On-Purpose Person and downloading the free preview to The Discovery Guide.
Another option is On-Purpose Peace, a six-session, small group study for Christians reading The On-Purpose Person.
Goal setting is really the poor man’s way of doing strategic planning. Guess what? For about 95% of what you want to accomplish, writing out your goals will get the job done. If you want to take something to the next level, however, you’ll need to invest in strategic thought and planning. Otherwise, you’ll remain mired in mediocrity.
Research shows that as few as 1% to as many as 10% of all people write down their goals. Why not more people? Here are some of the excuses I’ve come up with. What’s your reason for not setting goals?
- I don’t have time to write goals.
- I’m not really sure that’s where I’m supposed to focus my effort and energy.
Image via Wikipedia - If it is meant to be, then it will happen.
- Goal setting is a waste because my goals never come into being.
- Who am I to set goals?
- No one else I know sets goals.
- I don’t know how to write a goal.
- What if I don’t reach my goal?
- What will other people think? They might think I’m crazy.
- I have too many goals to write them down.
- I don’t believe my goals can be realized or are realistic.
- Goals don’t motivate me.
- Goals are too basic for what I need to get accomplished.
Behind every rationale for not setting a goal is a tragic assault on hope and possibilities fed by irrational thought. OK, so maybe you don’t have Killer Goals; that’s still no reason for not learning the process and getting started. In fact, set that as your first goal.
Lose the Excuses, Gain Your Sanity.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
4 Sales and Business Growth Strategies
Guest Star Today!
Sometimes advice is just so good that I just have to share it! With the permission of my colleague, Meridith Elliott Powell, I am delighted to both introduce you to her as well as share her wonderful insights on strategies for building relationships, business, and revenues.
Please post your comments below. Also, Meridith’s email is below; connect with her directly. She would be delighted to hear from you.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
Take a moment to assess the current sales and business growth strategies you have in place, then watch this video to get the 4 new business strategies I have outlined. You can email me with any questions or comments. I’m always happy to help! Have a successful week,
Meridith
Ready to get more from Meridith? Download her free copy of
6 Key Strategies for Connecting With Clients!
God’s Proposal. Your Post.
Readers of God’s Proposal requested a webpage for comments. Here it is! This is a moderated page so your comments may not appear immediately. In posting, you’re also granting us the right to make edits to typos and grammar or to shorten text when appropriate. You are posting your comments in the public domain for others and us to see and quote. Spam will be deleted.
You may remain anonymous or share as much or as little of your personal information as you like by the way you sign in below.
Purchase God’s Proposal on an 11″ x 17″ durable paper, full color poster.
Is your life a question mark, period, or exclamation point?
Disclaimer: This On-Purpose Minute is nearly 10 minutes long because it is an excerpt from a keynote address. I apologize that the video quality is less than ideal, but the message still comes across.
The Back Story:
This month, I’m celebrating my 7th anniversary of reclaiming my health and creating a lifelong healthy lifestyle. In March 2008, I was tipping the scales at over 240 pounds on my 5′ 9″ frame. While I’ve always had an athletic, muscular build, I was wearing what I jokingly called “My fat suit.” Somewhere within the bundled layers of my fat suit was a trim Kevin W. McCarthy seeking liberation. Perhaps you relate.
Over the years my weight had been steadily increasing with more work, less exercise, and poor eating habits. I would skip breakfast, often skip lunch, and then eat dinner and have desserts the rest of the evening. I’ve since learned that this is how Sumo wrestlers get so big. I did not have a healthy lifestyle by any stretch of the imagination.
About a year earlier I took on a business client project of co-authoring a business book on a very tight timetable. This resulted in even more rapid weight gain as I was sitting for days on end researching and writing. The good news is that when my client sold his business, the book created an extra $15 million in company value. The bad news is the book resulted in me gaining an extra 25 or more pounds over my existing steady weight gain.
In March 2008, Dr. Wayne Scott Andersen booked me (sight unseen) as the keynote speaker for the July Take Shape For Life Annual Convention in Orlando. I asked about the program and got on it. I figured someone had to have figured out this weight thing because my feeble attempts at getting healthy weren’t working.
Three months later I stood on that stage a changed man from the inside out. Yes, I had lost 50 pounds but that wasn’t the half of it. I had learned to better understand my relationship with food and sweets, adopted a number of healthy habits, and discovered the power of using a systematic approach or program to health rather than using a diet.
As importantly, my weight loss inspired several of my friends, my business associates, and my wife to follow my lead. Within months ten people close to me were on the TSFL Program and also experiencing health gains. One friend, a Type 2 diabetic, was able to lose over 100 pounds and get off his medications. He tells me often that introducing him to Take Shape for Life probably saved his life. (Results vary by person so no medical claims are made here.)
Questions To Ask Yourself
1. How can we be on-purpose when we’re packing extra pounds and are unhealthy?
This typically self-inflicted health condition is within our control once we have a proven system to join with our decision to be healthy and apply our existing discipline that carries us well through life. This was much easier than I ever imagined! Over seven years later there’s still so much less of me to carry around since I lost my fat suit thanks to the power of making more informed and mindful decisions about living a healthier life.
The above 10-minute video excerpt is from my keynote address in July 2008. There’s a central question that I pose to the health coaches in attendance that is relevant to any of us about our life and work and being on-purpose:
2. Am I living my life with a question mark, period, or exclamation point?
To set up this video clip, I’m referring to the TSFL logo and referencing the “green dot” in the middle of the graphic to the right.
Enjoy this vignette and take it to heart. We only get one body to care for so get it right because getting it wrong is so costly. I hope this message catches the heartbeat of where you are in your life and inspires you to live boldly by beginning the process of being an on-purpose person in creation.
3. So What About Your Health?
Like I was, are you tired of wearing your fat suit?
If you already have a health coach, then press more deeply into the relationship to get the most benefit you can from the TSFL offerings.
If you don’t have a health coach and are ready to make a weighty lifestyle change to transform your life for the better, then let us help you. My wife Judith became a Certified Health Coach with TSFL as have I! Today, we help clients add health to their overall program of being on-purpose. Email me to set up a phone call. I’ll ask questions and help you determine if TSFL is right for you so you too can be on-purpose and live boldly into your life with an exclamation mark.
Be On-Purpose!
Kevin
P.S. This weekend Judith and I will be at the Take Shape For Life National Convention. Coincidentally it is in Orlando again and seven years later we’re living a healthy lifestyle as part of being on-purpose persons in creation.
Frances Hesselbein on Serving
This quote relates directly to being on-purpose. Your 2-Word purpose statement begins with, “I exist to serve by…” Being on-purpose, therefore, is a lifetime and attitude of being in service without regard to your current condition or place of employment.
I saw this quote today and took the liberty of setting it up with the image.
If you don’t know who Frances Hesselbein is then dig into her story and life. She’s a remarkable woman
Read about the Frances Hesselbein Leadership Institute
Watch her at West Point where she serves. At this time she was in her early 90s and is now in her late 90s. Her spirit and pine box are both still open.
Frances Hesselbein, To Serve Is To Live. from Hesselbein Institute Videos on Vimeo.