Elaine Grundy: looking for Urban Enlightenment

Training for Success - Deliberately Creating Success Makes It Inevitable!

Society measures success in terms of tangibles: cash, career, condo, car. The outward trappings of ‘wealth’. But how would YOU define success? Lets say you had all the riches in the worlds, then what?

• how would you spend your time?
• what would fulfill you?
• how would you want to feel on a constant basis?

Before you can achieve BIG dreams, you need to be who you want to be already. A top athlete wins races through already being a winner. Before he gets onto the starting block, he already has the ability, strength, agility, fitness and speed to win. Our dreams are the same, yet we approach them with the intention of 'seeing what happens'. We set goals and sort of haphazardly wind our way towards them thinking that once we reach the finish line - then we will be successful, or not. With this sort of mentality, no wonder most of us fall short!

Think like an athlete. In order to reach your goals and be fulfilled, what do you need to be training for now? Only when you have mastered the running can you truly win a race.

What sort of training am I referring to? What is your measurement of success? What would you need in your life to be 100% fulfilled? Think carefully about this. We usually knee jerk with 'more money', or 'more love' but quantify it. How much money, how much love will make you 100% fulfilled? We normally want money to DO something else. Perhaps we dream of being financially independent so that we can chase another dream - imagine someone gives you 1 billion dollars, what would you do with it? Perhaps you'd blow it on the condo and car and holidays...but then what? Deep down, we are not lazy people. Sitting around on holiday for the rest of our lives would kill us with boredom! We are, I think, all striving for something else, some inner journey.

For example, I measure my success by:

• How much joy I feel from my work – I want to spend my time only on things that I am passionate about, that means my family, my coaching, my community website, so I measure my success on how much time I spend doing solely those sort of activities.

• How much love I can give to others – this fulfills me, how much I can give relates to how in balance and how in tune I am with my own needs, when I am run down or doing things I am not passionate about I feel drained and I have little to give others, so it’s a pretty easy measurement of success!

• How content I am feeling on a minute to minute basis – I love feeling content! I want to achieve this on a constant basis, so I measure my success on how consistently I feel this during my day.

Training for success means you need to know your success criteria, and then spending a good part of each day doing just that.

Daily I think about these criteria, and daily I am tested. I have days when I feel terrible, or days when I yell at others instead of love them, or days when I can't wait to finish my days work and get some respite. Every one of these days prompts me to ask myself how I can get back to my training regiment, tomorrow is another day. I DON'T ask myself "why did I fail", or "why am I so hopeless", or "why can't I do this". Eliminate 'why' from your questioning if you can. Stick to 'how' questions, they are much more empowering. Ask yourself "how can I increase my 'success' score every day?", or "how can I do things differently to increase the amount of success I feel in my life?"

The way I see it, if I keep training and focusing on my 3 success criteria, I will become more and more proficient. Imagine the space I will be in when I am 100% content, loving, and joyful. WOW! And as I progress, I am increasing that percentage every day, every year. So even now, I am already content, loving and joyful- not 100 percent but some percent, and I am consciously aware of the days and moments, so that brings me even more joy! Day by day, week by week.

Think of the alternative. Just say I had some goals (some races I wanted to win) - I wanted to become financially independent so I worked hard at a well paid job (that I didn't really like, but hey! It pays the bills!) And decided to retire at 60 and then follow my real passion of coaching. I decided that all good things come to those who wait, so every day I went to work and did a job I didn't like -justifying to myself that “when I'm 60, I'll be happy”. It’s a scary thought that instead of having all these many years of growing success (contentment, loving others, joyful work), I could be waiting until I hit 60.

Some of the training will require big changes - perhaps you need to change your job, your relationships, your way of relating with others, your habits, your decisions. Sometimes you'll simply need to be aware of your success criteria and make small changes. During one of my workshops, one of my participants shared that she loved watching sunsets, but never had the time. She reasoned that if she could watch just one or two beautiful sunsets a week - it would dramatically increase her level of success. What a fantastic realization, and so easy to do! Of course she would need to be firm - walk out the house and go to a place to rest and watch, perhaps face an annoyed and hungry family later etc. But it is barriers like this that cause us to wait for success in the first place - other people take over our lives, and we wait until we are 60 to reclaim what is rightfully ours.

Do the training, define your success criteria and just start doing it, little by little, day by day…you’ll be amazed at the results!

Reiki and Burns

I have had some great experiences of how Reiki can rapidly heal burns.  I burnt myself on both forearms whilst taking out a hot tray of sausage rolls from the oven.  As it was my 30th birthday at the time I wanted to continue to enjoy my Party, so I only gave myself Reiki on one arm (the other arm clutching my glass of Champagne!).  I had a wonderful opportunity to witness the healing of both arms...the one with Reiki did not blister at all and healed twice as fast as the one with no Reiki.  The following day the non-Reiki arm came up in a big water blister which continued to cause me pain for several days.

My Reiki Master colleague Waiman Chia in Malaysia has this to share about burns:

"While frying, hot oil splashed on both my hands. I place my hand over the scald part of the hand that appeared to be more injured. I checked my hands the following day. The part treated with Reiki did not show any indication of a burn whereas the untreated burnt mark on the other hand had a burn mark which took a week to heal, leaving a scar mark.

My friend's maid scalded her hand in hot steam. I gave her a Reiki treatment immediately and she complained of extreme pain*. I encourage her to continue with the treatment for another 15 minutes. On examining the hand the next day, there was no sign of any skin damage. There was no pain also."

* When treating burns it is common for that pain to intensify before subsiding, almost as if the healing is accelerating through the pain and into healing.

Reiki with Kids

I'm a big fan of Reiki with kids, it is just brilliant on their little, but frequent, mishaps - my eldest daughter Ella will be the first to attest to this, any problem and she comes running crying 'Mummy, Reiki!  Reiki!'

About a month ago she had a bad fall and scrapped her knee and elbow - it must have hurt as she cried hard and wouldn't let me stop placing my hand on her knee for about 30 minutes.  Usually it's a quick 5 minutes and she's done.  This time she cried everytime I removed my hand saying that it still hurt.  Eventually she said 'Ok Mummy, you can go now.'

The next day I was totally amazed at the rate of healing (and this is coming from a Reiki Master!  Reiki's abilities continue to astound and humble me.).  Where Ella had badly grazed her knee was already healing as if it was several days old.  Where she had grazed her elbow was still red and angry.  Ironically I had not bothered with her elbow as it seemed such a small graze as compared with her knee.  I did not Reiki her knee again but over the following few days it healed at a far faster rate than her elbow.  It was incredible to see the difference and for once having a good gauge of the different healing rates as her elbow was, in effect, the 'control' in this little experiment.  I only wish I had taken photos!

Being True to YOU

If someone is rude to you, are you rude in return?  Do you believe in an eye for an eye, or do you believe in following your own inner guidance system?  We all have different values and following other peoples’ beliefs instead of your own can cause considerable pain and unhappiness.

I recently gave a talk on Reiki and Stress and an encounter with a lady in the audience gave me food for thought. During my talk I was explaining the difference between our internal values and vision, and our limiting beliefs. She provided me with a brilliant example. Here is her story:

She is a Singaporean but spent much of her life abroad. When she came back several years ago, she experienced a big culture shock. She decided that the only way to really live happily is to try to 'fit in', when in Rome..... Her examples were mainly to do with courtesy, she seemed to feel that people here are not very courteous - they don't acknowledge you, say thank you, say sorry when they bump into you etc. This perplexed her, but her reaction was to follow the crowd. So now she also does not acknowledge, does not say sorry, does not give thanks.

What was interesting about her story is that while she was telling it, she was obviously not very happy about who she had become. In order to become what she viewed as Singapore behavior' she had lost sight of who she wanted to be. As you can imagine, her comments erupted a lot of heated discussion - not least from those who disagreed with her view of Singapore! My point here is not her actual belief, but how damaging that belief is to her happiness.

If we look at her internal values - she probably feels that being courteous, kind, giving thanks, and acknowledging people is very important. Certainly she feels that being acknowledged by others herself is very important.

Yet her limiting beliefs are:
1) Singaporeans are not courteous
2) People only deserve my acknowledgement if they acknowledge me first
3) In order to be happy I have to act like other people

In my eyes, and in yours I'm sure, all these beliefs are limiting because they are all inaccurate!

In being true to yourself, you need to decide how you are going to behave in this world - then behave like that, no matter what. We need to figure out our values, what is important to us and then make sure all our beliefs align up with that.

So if we were to review her beliefs, and align them with her values (to be courteous, to acknowledge others, to be kind), we could say:

1) people have their own ways of behaving
2) people deserve my acknowledgement
3) I am responsible for my own happiness

Notice that values are things that come from deep inside, they are not 'needs' from other people. They are ways we want to behave - no matter what others are doing. If you think your value is based on what others think about you, or how others behave around you, then you are muddling up values with needs. I might need people to approve of me, I might need people to acknowledge me - but that is not the same as how I will value and behave towards them, at all times.

Being true to yourself requires courage, and it may require letting go of people who disapprove. Asking them politely to let you do what you feel is right for you, and acknowledging that they would do it differently. Asking them to respect your values, and respecting theirs in return.

I still smile at people when they look grouchy - and 7out of 10 they smile back. 3 out of 10 they do not. Are those 3 people going to dictate the way I feel, and how I behave next time?