As you begin to achieve your dreams, you will feel a deeper sense of confidence begin to materialize and these sensations may feel a little overwhelming initially but learn to embrace them. Positive feelings will start to become the norm as you progress on your transformational pathway to success. Believe in it, feel it, live it.

Support this belief with the powerful visualization available to you at any time and start manifesting it all into your life. Remember that every time you visualize your goals, you will feel an increased motivation and be one step nearer to finally achieving total transformation and success.

Another example would be someone who is heavily overweight and who just can not lose weight no matter how hard she tries or how hard she visualizes being slim. Now suppose she had suffered a sexually related attack when she was quite young, and one day her doctor suggests that she is maintaining her present weight as she subconsciously feels that by being heavy she will not attract unwanted attention from men, which will save her from further potential abuse. Now that she understands this, she may choose to undergo a course of counseling to remove this belief from her subconscious and then go on to attain her ideal weight.

Some beliefs, such as the first example, are overcome by use of affirmations, whereas beliefs such as those in the second example may require outside assistance, such as counseling.

Try this exercise; for all areas of your life you want to change, read your intentions and note any resistance you feel. For example, when reading out your intention to earn more money, do you feel anxious or apprehensive in any way? If your intention doesn’t make you feel 100% great and excited then chances are you have a limiting belief that is going to get in the way- if you let it!

Write down any beliefs that you feel you hold or anything you can remember your family telling you. For example, did they say things like rich people are all a bunch of crooks’, we don’t have money but at least we are happy’, you’re meant to be big, the whole family’s big so it’s in your genes’? Write down whatever comes into your head- many people have been surprised by what they have discovered when doing this exercise.

Now, look at any belief statements you have written, and write down their exact opposite; for example, the belief rich people are all a bunch of crooks’ could become rich people are mostly very honest and generous people who contribute to society’ (this is true by the way!) You’re meant to be big’ can become I am meant to be the correct weight for my height and build and to be very healthy’.

Here are some more examples of limiting beliefs turned around;

I am not meant to be wealthy’ I am destined for great wealth’.

I am not smart enough to change my job’ I am smart enough to do any job I choose and to do it well’.

I will never lose weight’ I am choosing better habits and losing weight every day’.

I hate exercise’ I love exercising and how good it makes me feel’.

Once you have rewritten all of your limiting beliefs, you now have a new set of affirmations. Read these through at least twice daily, aloud if you can. As you read, really feel the meaning behind the words. This will help to replace those old limiting beliefs with new positive beliefs which will help you to manifest your desires.

Jo had a happy childhood. Her great passion was singing.

But her parents cautioned her. “Be realistic. Get a proper job,” her father said. Her mother thought that finding a nice man might be better. Because Jo loved and respected her parents, she thought they might have a point. She began to doubt her dream of singing, and thought it might be a childish whim.

When Jo was eighteen she left school and decided she should at least have a go achieving her goal of becoming a professional singer.

Three years went by, but her big break never came. One evening, at a party, she got chatting to a woman in her forties.

She told Jo that she once wanted to be a singing star too. She told her how she had tried everything to break into the big time – even once sleeping with her agent. “Get real, honey,” the woman cooed. “You won’t achieve your goal. It’s a dream. Forget about it. We all do.” Jo could feel her heart sinking.

She met more people over the coming months like the woman at the party. Soon, it seemed that everyone she met had once had a dream and had given up on it. Achieving goals, she concluded, was mostly a matter of luck that happened to a very few people. She didn’t feel lucky any more.

Jo married a dull but nice man, and within a couple of years they had children. When her daughter was ten she said to Jo, “Mommy, when I grow up, I want to be a singer.” That’s when Jo cried.

How many Jo’s do you know? She’s fictitious, but there are millions like her who gave up on their dreams because they believed achieving their goals were out of reach.

What is missing from this story is the one vital fact that Jo overlooked. She forgot to notice that in every walk of life people succeed! There is a tendency to think that “being realistic” means noticing what happens to the majority and giving up just like they did.

Your focus is what matters. Look or listen to those who gave up and you’ll likely join them and the burgeoning army of those who say that life is a struggle. Those people are not happy. They are in jobs they dislike or loathe, drive cars that bore them and often they are stuck in relationships with people they no longer like, love or respect. That’s because they no longer like, love or respect themselves! How could they? And more to the point, why would you want them as role models? Join them, and your goal becomes getting others to join them too. It’s how misery spreads!

But focus on the successes and you’ll see that, by and large, they’re not only happy at the top, but they enjoyed (most of) the journey to get there. Enjoying each day is surely what life is about! That, above all else, should surely be your goal!

It’s not too late for you. If you still have a dream in your heart you can achieve it. The only thing that holds you back is your belief that you can’t.

Almost every person who has ever achieved their dream or a major life goal has, at some point, had to face fear. Fear is an inevitable component of personal growth. What’s most important to understand is that fear does not have to paralyze you or prevent you from experiencing the fullness of life.

Why must we face our fears?

In order to achieve anything new in life, we must be willing to change our actions so that we can produce new and improved results. But any time we introduce change into our life, we move out of our comfort zone and the by-product is typically some form of fear.

If we do not understand what fear is and why we experience it, our natural reaction would be to retreat from the new, uncomfortable change and revert back to our comfort zone. When this happens, many people become stuck.

If you want to liberate yourself from the shackles of fear and step into new and exciting places in your life, your journey must begin with awareness. You must become aware of what fear truly is so that you can identify it and ultimately move through it.

The first thing you should take into account is that fear is a reaction that the brain produces when it senses pending danger. It is actually a very beneficial emotion because it keeps us alive in a potentially dangerous situation. Unfortunately, over the years, we have been conditioned to associate fear with other, non-life threatening events.

For example, you may be driving along the highway when someone swerves and cuts you off. You quickly hit the brakes and avoid a collision. At the time of the incident, the physical sensations in your body could be extremely powerful (pounding heart, shaky hands, knees knocking, etc…). When it comes to personal fears, if you are afraid of public speaking, you may experience the exact same physical effects when you walk to the front of a board room to deliver a presentation.

What’s the difference? One situation could mean physical harm or even death. The other situation, at the VERY worst, would result in some short-lived embarrassment. While the two situations are poles apart in terms of consequence severity, our body reaction is almost identical!

So when you really boil it down, it is not so much the fear that stops people, it is the physical feelings produced by fear.

With this new awareness, you are now in a position to take bigger actions and play full out, in any area of your life. As Susan Jeffers points out in her best seller, you can “Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway.” Why? Because you understand exactly what is happening and you ACCEPT that is a completely normal reaction!

Don’t worry about eliminating fear, just focus on taking necessary actions towards your goals and dreams in SPITE of fear.

If you are working on big plans for your life, there is a very good chance that you are going to face obstacle after obstacle.

Life IS persistence and your ability to persist will ultimately define who you are.

Use today to think about your life in ways that will only strengthen your persistence muscles and drive you forward.

There is no magic pill that you can take to suddenly become confident but you can certainly make a habit of practicing your confidence.

Think about all of the wins you have experienced in your life. Big or small it doesn’t matter. Feed your mind with “confidence fuel”.

Convince yourself that you are DAMN good and experience the true feelings of confidence as it permeates through you.

BE YOURSELF. This means showing your true colors in all situations. It means acting wild and crazy even when others look at you funny.

There is no truer sense of freedom then when you can 100% express yourself, your opinions and your true feelings.

People fall into one of two categories when it comes to fear. They either know and face their fears or they deny and hide from their fears.

Make today all about committing to the breakthrough DESPITE any level of fear. Focus on the gain and the positive outcome.

My challenge to you is simple. Before you go to bed tonight, take 1 bold action in the direction of your major passions.

Every successful person that you can find has overcome enormous odds and obstacles.

New challenges show their faces almost daily. The obstacles tend to grow in proportion to the size of your goals.

If you have a massive life goal you are working towards then you are likely facing massive obstacles.

It’s lovely to blame luck because then we can absolve ourselves of responsibility for not achieving our goals. Unfortunately, “responsibility” has become synonymous with “blame” and they are not the same at all! “Response-ability” is our ability to respond, as you can now see from my deliberate mis-spelling of the word, and that response is our ability to shift our focus.

Do not underestimate the power of focus. The human facility for being able to consider things from many different angles can and will shape your destiny. Your entire life will be shaped by how you choose to look at things. I seriously urge you to take responsibility for what happens to you, and your goal achievement prowess will be instantly magnified a thousand fold!

Focus has two meanings in this context. It means being clear – really clear – about what you actually want. Clarity in the same sense that you might focus a camera lens. It may sound daft to talk about being clear on what you want, but if you want to achieve your goals, take heed! In my experience most people do two things that are significantly different from that. First, they harp on endlessly about what they don’t want. They will tell you how situation X or circumstance Y is no longer going to be there when they get such-and-such a goal. What are they focussing on? Like an endless loop tape, they are focussed on all the negatives in their life all of the time.

The second meaning of focus has to do with where you “shine the spotlight.” When things don’t work out as planned, many people have a tendency to talk and think it terms of their “failure.” Then, before long, they give up on the goal. What makes this worse is that they can easily and quickly find a couple of dozen drinking buddies who will clap them on the back and yell, “Join the club! Now you know it doesn’t work too! Another beer?”

It is imperative that you focus on the fact that success is possible. Barriers have been broken throughout history. Roger Bannister’s four minute mile – considered impossible until he did it, is now a relatively common achievement. Edison’s electric light bulb, which, according to legend, had Edison discovering almost a thousand substances that would not produce a light bulb, provoked someone to ask him how he felt about having so many failures. Edison’s now famous, and we presume, slightly astonished reply was:

“I didn’t have any failures. I simply found nine hundred and ninety nine ways that didn’t work.”

Edison never focussed on anything other than his successful outcome. Now you can decide which is his greater legacy: the light by which you may well be reading this, or the lesson he taught us that can change your life now.

It happens in the dating world all the time when you see someone who is desperate to find a partner or long term relationship. The new “prospect” immediately feels the neediness from this person and it often turns them off once and for all.

Going back to my consulting example, As I changed my approach and took the “take it or leave it” attitude where I literally separated myself from caring whether I got the deal or not, business started to flow. In fact, the less I cared about landing the deal, the easier it was to close.

This is what I call the goal striving paradox. The more you want something, the more it feels like a real need for your life. And the more you need it, the more you focus on its absence… or a sense of lack. A perpetual state of striving is really what it is.

In many cases, you may actually start feeling terrible about the goal because your happiness is now contingent on you achieving this thing… and the longer it takes, the more concerned you become.

The trick for brining your goals into reality is to remove this “striving” factor.

Instead of setting a goal with the “if… then” mentality of “If I achieve this thing… then I’ll be happy”. You set your goals from a place of detachment. If you reach the goal, great. And if not, that’s cool too.

I’m not saying you remove your desire to improve the results in your life. What I am saying is that you set your goals, and then you focus on your goals daily from the perspective of already being happy, appreciative and content with where you are today.

This is quite easy to do. Look at your life right now and take note of all the good things you have going on. It could be your happy family, supportive friends, the recent recovery from illness of a loved one, the healthy meals you are able to eat on a daily basis, your own health.

You might also want to make a list of all of your previous accomplishments. What are some things you have already achieved that you can dwell on and feel awesome about.

Staying in that zone, you can then work passionately towards your new goals. Instead of needing this goal like a pushy sales rep needs your deal, you simply focus on your new goal… It will arrive in due time to reinforce the feeling of success that you have already created in your own mind.