8 Tips for a Successful and Prosperous You in 2017
I compiled a list of the most powerful things I learnt in 2016 and am presenting them to you hoping they will contribute to your successes this year. Love you much and hope you enjoy!
1. Embrace challenges
The fastest way into sure progress is recognizing that every struggle has its purpose. If there is an area of your life in which you find yourself continually coming up against limitation after limitation, start to examine it. Stop looking outside yourself for the reason that this may be happening and realize that it is within your thoughts, beliefs and behaviours that the limitation lies. Allow yourself to nurture and accept your difficulties and look to them for personal growth, as they will provide you with a key to your future self.
2. Focus
It is easy to become overwhelmed in our cultural milieu. You may find yourself getting pulled in a million directions, not only by your surroundings but also by your own desire to experience many aspects of life. As invigorating as this constant exploration may be, you end up coming short of true progress and results if your energy is given to too many directions at once. You do not have to partake in every social gathering and you do not need to participate in every creative means of expression. Identify what you are best at and focus on that. What sets you apart from the rest is the mastery of your output, not its mass. Quality overtakes quantity when it comes to developing useful skill sets that can generate impact.
3. Be grateful
Motivational speaker and author Louise Hay always says the universe loves grateful people, and she is right. You cannot expect to receive abundance, love and happiness from a life that you are not appreciating in the first place. Scarcity mindset, whether it comes to finances, relationships or personal successes will only generate more scarcity. The only way to raise your vibration in order to attract what you desire into your life is by finding gratitude in what is already yours and learning how to openly accept new opportunities that come your way. Before visualizing whatever it is that you desire to manifest, always communicate gratitude for where you are at.
4. Stop making negative assumptions
Negative assumptions are toxic baggage left over from old and outworn belief systems that are not serving your greatest good. If you make an assumption about a person or situation, you set an intention for your interaction with that person or situation and end up manifesting your negative assumption. Reality is in flux all the time; people are always growing and changing and no day is alike. How, then, could you participate in assumption without violating this basic framework of reality? Leave what you do not know to the divine intelligence that organizes the life around you. Replace your negative assumptions with curiosity.
5. Start before you're ready
This goes hand in hand with living out your purpose. You know what it is that you want to do and it has been inside you since childhood. Honour it and explore it without putting limitations on what you can do with it. If you wait until everything is perfectly in place before embarking on your personal becoming, you'll be waiting forever. You will grow into what you want to do and who you want to be by acting in alignment with those desires. The universe will support you in your decisions only if you are clear in what you want. Every action, thought and word is a message that shapes your relationship to reality. Be mindful and act in a way that reflects who you really are and what you really want.
6. Believe in yourself and expect your dreams to come true
Positive expectancy is the key to living fearlessly inside your dream life. No great human feat is accomplished through rational thought alone. The nature of reality is part rational and part magic. Your deeper needs and desires speak this magical language and will encourage leaps of faith, leading you to take risks and make decisions that aren't always pragmatic and practical because you have to honour the messages of your soul. Put in the work that is required of you and let the universe take care of the rest. You don't need to know exactly how it's going to happen, only believe steadfastly that it will.
7. Practice unconditional love
One surefire way into speaking the language of true reality and vibrating to its magic is by practicing unconditional love. This is not the selfless affection of a martyr or victim but the empowered approach of an individual who is grounded in self-love. Treat people kindly and with compassion. Everyone is doing the best they can given their level of awareness and personal circumstance. Be loving towards people without expecting anything in return and the universe will reward you in unexpected ways.
8. Be vulnerable
How do you enter the sphere of compassionate love? By finding strength in vulnerability. Understand that living in the open exchange of love means you feel it all- good and bad. Learn how to stay open instead of shutting down when you enter painful emotional territory. Suppressing negative feelings does not make them go away, instead it actually allows them to stick around. Try to process your pain and release it as emotion instead of intellectualizing it or allowing it to densify and be stored in your physical body where it creates dis-ease.
Be well, be prosperous, be you.