Motivational Leadership Speaker, Bestselling Oprah Author

Archive for July, 2008

You don’t lose fifty pounds in two weeks. You lose them one pound at a time. You don’t begin a fitness regiment by running  a marathon. You run a mile or two. counteracts lipitor

So don’t stare at the prospect of de-stressing and re-building your life by expecting to change everything by midnight tonight. It’s too intimidating. You are who you are. You may want changes, but those changes can’t – and won’t – happen in an instant.

The one thing I have seen repeatedly in people who face daunting challenges is that they often won’t try because the situation seems to big and hard to conquer. They think they must do it all and fix it all – at once, and that’s too hard so they just don’t bother and settle for the status quo.

I know a very bright young woman who had a child when she was 17 and wound up cleaning houses. By the time she hit her 30s, she was convinced that she could have nothing more for her life. She blamed it on foolish choices in her youth, but I told her that the foolish choices continued every time she chose inaction over action. She wanted to be a nurse, but the prospect of going to nursing school was too overwhelming, especially since she’d be doing it while dealing with life as a single parent with very little income.

I told her about a man I interviewed at a college graduation. He started his studies as a young father and it took him ten years to get that bachelor’s degree. He did it one class at a time. It didn’t matter what was going on in his life, he always had one class in progress to move him forward toward his ultimate goal. And, he achieved it.

You don’t have to fix everything in one day. If you think you do, you will be tempted not to fix anything. Just take small steps.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

The tapes inside your head are powerful. If you repeat a negative remark enough times, it will load itself into the permanent memory on your personal internal hard drive. I don’t believe you have the power to completely erase those tapes because it does seem like they are ready to play themselves again, as soon as you stop repeating your revised versions through affirmations. But, you have great control over the tapes and possess the ability to write over the bad ones, recording positive, constructive and productive affirmations that your psyche will absorb and use if you repeat them enough.

Like I said, I am no different from anyone else. I have had good times and bad in this life. When I am in a bad spell, I have to remind myself how easy it is to fix things by saying the right words to myself. It’s so easy, but it can be so hard to get started.

So, make up your mind. You want an easier way? You can have it.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

Don’t be so skeptical of the value of positive self-talk until you really look at the wonders of all the negative self-talk with which you’ve filled your brain. Yes, isn’t it a wonder how some of us voluntarily build ourselves up to be worthless, unattractive failures?

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If you look in the mirror and see “fat,” you will be fat. If you look at your career track and think “average,” you will be average. If you look at possibility and see impossibility, you will encounter impossibility. You know it’s true that when you say you can’t, you can’t.

So this blog will, in part, teach you how to believe you can, because you can.

The beauty of it is, it is not hard at all to erase those negative tapes and overwrite them with positive ones that will drive you to a less stressful, more productive and happier life.

And when it comes to body image? Hey, in my books, I interviewed world renown leaders who acknowledged their horrible self-esteem problems that were rooted in what they weighed or how they looked. Few even pretended their self-esteem was rock solid because this is the disease of our generation: We beat ourselves up.

If we’ve failed at something, we remind ourselves of it long after we should have moved on. We tell ourselves we aren’t smart enough or fast enough or credentialed enough to try something especially hard or new.

This is how we have programmed nonoxinol 9 our thinking. We have put all those dark thoughts in our head and repeated them so many times that they are the first thoughts we have when it comes to our performance, our place in the world and our self-worth. Write down ten negative things you have told yourself this week, and really look at them. Are they grounded in reality? Would other people say those things – to that degree? Besides, you are a flawed individual – just like everybody else. Why harp on gloomy and pessimistic views of yourself?

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Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies. marijuana geodon

If you have your doubts about positive self-talk programming, take a minute to examine what your negative self-talk has accomplished. I am sure it is significant.

Unfortunately, we humans are really mean to ourselves. We berate ourselves for gaining weight, failing in relationships, struggling at work, getting into tussles with family, not doing enough for the kids. We fail to let go of the inevitable criticism that comes our way through the years, remembering a kind word of praise for five minutes and a passing swipe until we die. We fixate on the few people who don’t like us, rather than the many who do. The list of sour thoughts that we put in our head and keep there goes on and on and on.

And, since we are sensitive beings, we don’t just acknowledge our shortcomings, we revisit them again and again and again. We remind ourselves how we fall short – and we aren’t even consciously doing it. We cling to nasty remarks that may have been said about us years ago – even decades ago – as though they were true and permanent. We joke about ourselves to others, but while those self-deprecating put-downs may be humorous, they serve to re-enforce our negative self-image. cymbalta and migraine

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

Countless studies have proven the connection between positive affirmations (either through self-talk or hypnosis) and positive results. The concept is this: If you tell yourself you are attractive and fun to be around enough times, your brain will overwrite your negative tapes that say you are ugly and unpopular. You will actually believe it if you say it enough times.

It works. Let’s just say I am in one of my disorganized spells. I might say to myself, “I’m a mess. I can’t get anything done, my desk is out of control and I can’t focus.” Well, what is the result? I can’t get anything done and I can’t focus. But, I launch into affirmation where I repeat, “I am more organized every minute. I am on task and producing better than ever.” I might say it fifty times the first day, thirty times the second day, and so on. It doesn’t take long for me to shift into high gear and start focusing hard and doing my work. If you want proof that it works, you’re reading it. I had to get this blog going, and I talked my way into it.

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Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

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It’s time for an intervention with yourself. If you want a better life, you must take the easiest of baby steps to make it happen. All you have to do is figure out a few good things to say to yourself in order to get your mind to let go of the negativity.

If you are going to have continued sessions of self-talk, why not make sure the message you are reinforcing is the message you want to reinforce?

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I always offer a huge disclaimer about my being a recovered cynic. I’m going to talk about self-talk and affirmations, and it is very easy to poke fun at the concept. Saturday Night Live had a standard feature mocking them, with the character of Stuart Smalley being played by Al Franken. The segment featured “Daily Affirmations With Stuart Smalley.” Franken would say, “I’m Good Enough, I’m Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like Me!

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What I know is this: Some of you are going to just roll your eyes and walk away at the mere suggestion of using affirmations to refocus and re-energize your life. That is your right. Then again, if you think like that, it is because you have programmed yourself to think like that.

Time for a change.

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Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

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We are always talking to ourselves. We wake up in the morning and get ready for the day and decide quickly if it is a good hair day or a bad hair day. If we look fat or thin. For some reason, we are very eager and receptive to self-criticism. We do it all the time. Why? What possible good can come from that? Yet, we invite self-negativity and give it unlimited air time in our brains. We will freely subject ourselves to a powerful barrage of nastiness, yet we’d never be so cruel to a stranger — or someone we don’t like. We are mean to ourselves, and we don’t even see it for what it is.

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Think about the negative things you have said to yourself in the last 24 hours. Just think of them! If someone said those things to your child, you’d want to rip that person apart. Yet, you find viagra free sites edinburgh computer cymbalta and fibromyalgia are saying these things to yourself, the one person you must love before all others! Why do you stand for it? Do you realize that the tapes are rolling when you do this? That those negative thoughts and feelings get stored on your internal hard drive?

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

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When I got my first full-time job as a journalist, I sat catty-corner from a woman who seemed eons older than I was. She was thirty at the time – think of it, thirty! And, I looked up to her because she was savvy, quick-witted and unbelievably sarcastic about the ways of the world. She always had some sort of smart-mouthed take on whatever the subject of the day.

Like an idiot, I consulted her the day before I was to interview Abigail Van Buren (the original Dear Abby) on the telephone. I asked my co-worker to help me come up with some questions Abby had never been asked before.

“Why not ask her how many suicides have happed because of her advice? And, ask about the number of divorces, too.”

That was life in the newsroom. There was always a nasty remark about everything. We knew that when someone gave us a tip, there was always a secret agenda. That people who held themselves up as the most prominent or upright citizens would too often wound up being convicted of fraud or theft or sexual assault on a child. That the world was filled with lies and liars. That there was always a humorous, negative take on everything, because good news really wasn’t news, and we didn’t run into all that many “good” people anyhow.

We’d go to events and never clap for the speakers. We’d be irreverent, and sometimes, disrespectful to people in positions of authority. We always assumed dark, not light. The worst, not the best. endoscopic breast augmentation texas

I tell you all of this so you understand that I had to leap from the negative plane where so many of us linger, and venture into the realm of light and possibility, where our true success awaits.

I can’t believe I just wrote that sentence. Seriously, because before I made that leap, I would have scoffed at a column like this, then sneered, “What a bunch of bull….” I hate those books that seem like they were written by used car salesmen who have the secret formula for magic self esteem, and unbridled success and wealth. This is not that kind of blog. I am a recovered cynic, but because of my background, you can trust that I’m not saying anything that wasn’t scrutinized and challenged a great deal.

After I left journalism and decompressed a few years, I encountered others who manifested unthinkable success with an attitude shift that could only have been made because of their self confidence and fearlessness. They believed they could achieve greatness, so they did.

I remember asking Nobel Peace Prize winner Jody Williams what separates someone who is ordinary from someone who is extraordinary. “The belief that she’s ordinary,” said Williams, who won the Nobel for leading the crusade against land mines. There is so much power and truth in that concept. You are what your mind says you are. Your mind says what you tell it to say.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.

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If you are going to do something hard, you will encounter moments when you wonder why you are bothering. Why choose a difficult path when you can choose an easier route? That less stressful approach will always call to you if you haven’t truly made up your mind, committed and continued to recommit on a daily basis.

Every day, remind yourself of what you are after and why you want it. Write these reasons down so that you can refer to them whenever you start thinking about letting go of your dream. It is so hard to maintain momentum when you encounter hurdles that you must get past, or even when you become bored. happens what when snort lexapro you

There are often moments when we encounter shortcuts as we try to accomplish our goals. I have learned the hard way that shortcuts often prove to be the long way around an obstacle.

When I wrote my first book profiling great women trailblazers, I gave each woman her own chapter, which meant doing the interview, writing it up and moving on to the next person. It was a format that was very comfortable to me, and it was faster than a traditional journalistic approach. A few agents asked me to integrate the quotes from those great women into thematic chapters, but I knew that would be five times the work. I’d have to come up with common themes from the interviews, then pull together ten or more women’s comments into each chapter. So, instead of committing to do that extra work, I just chose an agent who liked it the easy way.

It was my vision, right?

Well, that vision didn’t sell. I lost a year to trying to pitch what I’d written the easy way. At the end of that year, I had a book that wouldn’t sell and was way deep in a financial hole.

I turned to a friend of mine, whose son was an editor for a major publisher in New York. I asked if he could review the proposal and tell me what I needed to do to sell the book.

“The women you have interviewed are spectacular,” he told me. “But, you have to rewrite your book. It has to be thematic if you are going to get a major publisher to buy it because, as it is, it is an anthology. Anthologies don’t make money.”

So there I was, having lost a year and facing the same daunting writing challenge I’d been asked to confront in the first place. If only I’d chosen the hard path!

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I dove into that rewrite and soon had my choice of publishers. The book was a best-seller. But, I have to admit that my search for ease had been costly to me on so many levels.

After that, I started noticing situations where I had an easy or a hard choice. Every time I chose easy, I wasted time and effort. Every time I chose hard, I just had to buck up, be tough and get it done.

The only way to get through those tough moments is to continually remind yourself of what you are trying to accomplish – and why. It takes a firm commitment bolstered by a consistent recommitment.

Fawn Germer is the best-selling author of four books and speaks to corporations and organizations about courages and creative leadership strategies.