Start Your New Year In The Best Direction

I know, I’m 7 days late. Remember that rough patch I was telling you about? I’m still roughing it out, but I’m feeling better and better as time goes by. Some of you already know – I broke up with my girlfriend. Maybe one day I’ll share the lessons I learnt from that, but not yet.

Today, we kick-start your new year in the best direction forward – because it’s never too late to start a new year 😀 And I won’t be doing it alone, I’m bringing along luminaries like Steve Pavlina, Christine Kane, Senia and Tony Robbins to help you along.

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The Monk Talks: How Understanding Death Teaches Us To Care

(Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraordinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3 month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email sharing the conversations he’s had with his teacher. The words are his, the grammar tweaking is mine 😉 Enjoy!)

The death of a friend or of a loved one changes our life forever. Even the deaths of those we don’t know, such as the thousands who died in the Tsunami at the end of last year, alters the way we think. Death is a fact of life and, when understood, teaches us how to care.

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What Would A Modern-Day Magician Say About God?

As a student of the esoteric science, specifically the western mysteries, I come across interesting questions from close friends regarding what I do and what I believe in.

One of the most recent questions posed to me was an age-old popular one: do I believe in God and is there a ˜divine plan™? It™s a loaded question that requires some clarification instead of a œyes or œno answer. (more…)

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Why Go On When Life Is Meaningless?

I was re-watching The Matrix Revolutions the other day during a nice little party with my friends.

We were just finishing the chicken wings when we got to this scene near the end of the movie (spoiler alert if you haven’t already seen it!). I loved it because it highlights the key to the question; why go on if you feel life is meaningless?

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why, why do you do it? Why, why get up? Why keep fighting?

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The Monk Talks: How To Have A Harmonious Marriage

(Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraordinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3 month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email sharing the conversations he’s had with his teacher. The words are his, the grammar tweaking is mine 😉 Enjoy!)

It is said that there are three rings to a marriage: the engagement ring, the wedding ring, and the suffer-ring!

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Igniting The Fire Within

How do you lead a life of fulfillment instead of disappointment?

By focusing on your human needs. Not human wants, like a brand new iPod, but human needs, and here is a method that helps you live a life of fulfillment and ignite the fire within.

Here Is A Powerful Method To Direct The Time Of Your Life

A time-tested way to manage the time of our lives is to compartmentalize the different areas of our lives into easy-to-manage, bite-sized pieces. You can think about these areas like career, family, health, finance, studies, relationships, the list is endless. (more…)

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The Monk Talks: What Would Buddha Do When Bored?

(Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraodinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3 month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email sharing the conversations he’s had with his teacher. The words are his, the grammer tweaking is mine 😉 Enjoy!)

If you find one thing boring,

You’ll find everything boring.

Dogen, ‘Guidelines for Studying the Way’

Boredom lies in our character, not in the world. “If you’re bored,” I’ve heard it said “you’re boring”. Think about this. (more…)

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The Monk Talks: What Would Buddha Do When A Loved One Dies?

(Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraordinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3 month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email sharing the conversations he’s had with his teacher. The words are his, the grammar tweaking is mine 😉 Enjoy!)

What Would Buddha Do When A Loved One Dies?

Not through weeping and grief do we obtain peace of mind. We increase misery; we increase misery; we harm our bodies. We become thin and pale, destroying ourselves by our own power:

Sutta Nipata 584

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For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also

This is weird. I went to a friend’s beautiful wedding last Saturday, and first heard the proverb “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” (Mathew 6:21)

On Friday night, I saw it in big bold letters on the building across from the seat I’d randomly managed to secure in the food-court, plastered in shining letters as part of Christmas decorations (CK Tangs, for those of you in Singapore. You can’t miss it on the front of the building).

Now, just reading through my RSS feed, I saw it mentioned in the comments of The Happiness Project’s post on a major epiphany about the nature of happiness.

Maybe there’s a message in all of this.

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.“

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The Monk Talks: What Would Buddha Do If Someone Hated Him?

Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraordinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3-month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email sharing the conversations he’s had with his teacher. The words are his, the grammar tweaking is mine 😉 Enjoy!)

What would Buddha do if someone hated him?

Not by hate is hate defeated;
Hate is quenched by love.
This is the eternal law.

Dhammapada 5

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Pay Yourself First

If you won a million dollars today, would you spend it all immediately buying loads of stuff so that by this time tomorrow, it’d be all gone?

I’d bet you wouldn’t, but that’s what a lot of people are doing; not with the money they win, but the money they make. (more…)

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How To Deal With Someone’s Anger

(Alvin’s Note: Our dear fellow Life Coach, and passionate personal development extraordinaire, Paiboon Busayarak, has embarked on a 3 month initiation into Buddhist monkhood in his native Thailand. He just sent me this post via email to share the insights he’s gleaming from this unique experience. The words are his, the grammar tweaking is mine 😉 Enjoy!)

Other people will sometimes get angry with you, even your loved ones. It happens to all of us. Some people even got angry with the Buddha!

So what can you do when you are on the receiving end of someone else’s anger? The answer can be found in the following story: (more…)

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What Are You Grateful For Today?

After watching The Pianist, the true story of how Vladislav Spelman survived the Holocaust as a Jew living in occupied Poland, I wasn’t only struck by the horrors he endured, but also by how privileged I was living my own life.

One of the most effective ways to stop worrying and boost your personal power is to simply focus on what you can, right now, with what you have.

Another way is to acknowledge what you already have in your life right now that you’re grateful for. The little things that you take for granted in the hustle and bustle of everyday life, that already make your life sparkle if you’d only see them with renewed eyes.

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What To Do When You Make Mistakes

Taking a leaf from Senia’s wonderful quotes posts, and because I seem to have made a few this past week (ouch!), here’s what greatness has had to say about what to do when you make mistakes.

Cicero:

We must not say every mistake is a foolish one.

George Bernard Shaw:

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.

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Who Binds You?

This Zen parable is for someone for whom I’ve been talking for a while.

A man once went to a Zen master and asked; ‘Master, I must seek liberation.’

The teacher asked, ‘Who binds you?’

The student answered; ‘I do not know. Perhaps I bind myself.’

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9 Steps to Transform Stress into Strength

If you’ve noticed I didn’t write much the previous week, it’s because work has been crazy and I’ve been under a lot of stress.

I’m sure you’ve been there too, haven’t you?

So how do we thrive in the midst of stress? How do we transform stress into strength so that when the going gets tough, the tough get going?

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NLP 101: 10 Plus 3 Beliefs That Create Wild Success

What is the Structure of Magic?

In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder set out to answer the questions: ‘how do wildly successful people create their success?’ and ‘can these methods of success be replicated?’.‘can these methods of success be replicated?’.
They studied the best therapists of their time, and through observation, testing and trail and error, codified what they found into sets of prinicples and techniques. When they taught and used these strategies and found that they could reproduce the success these therapists had, they knew they were on to something.

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NLP 101: So Dark The Con Of NLP

Throughout history, NLPers have been hunted down by the Evil League of Anti-NLPers, who have waved the Torches of deBunk (+2 agility) at us and angrily shouted big, big words like ‘pesudo-science’, ‘quackery’ and ‘you’re too hot for NLP’ (I get this one all the time).

For every claim for NLP, you can find one against. What’s going on?

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NLP 101: Life Is A Series of Systems

It was confusing; here was this bright, strong young woman who clearly had goals she passionately wanted, but somehow something held her back from going after them.

As I worked with her through the roots of her beliefs, I thought we were almost on the way to breaking her limiting patterns and on to action, when her face fell and she said she couldn’t continue.

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NLP 101: Everyone Already Has All The Resources They Need

Had enough rolling your mind over the Pygmalion effect? Because the next NLP presupposition ties in nicely with it:

Everyone already has all the resources they need or the ability to get them

which also complements nicely the presupposition that people are not broken.

Neuro-Linguistic Programming believes that experience has a structure, and that structure is composed out of 5 senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory or gustatory. And if every experience is composed out of these same building blocks, so is every state or resource.

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NLP 101: Experience Has A Structure

The next NLP presupposition is a pretty integral one to making things work with Neuro-Linguistic Programming:

Experience has a structure

Neuro-Linguistic Programming believes that experience has a structure, and that structure is composed out of 5 senses: visual, auditory, kinesthetic, olfactory or gustatory. And because every experience is composed out of these same building blocks, so is every state, habit, skill or resource.

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NLP 101: You Cannot Not Communicate: The Pygmalion Effect

Something came to me so obviously connected with the NLP 101: You Cannot Not Communicate post that I regret not putting it up.

Have you ever heard of the Pygmalion effect? It refers to situations in which people perform better than other people simply because they are expected to do so.

In a study conducted by Robert Rosenthal, teachers of students were told that certain students were more gifted than others, when in fact, they were just students that were randomly selected. The amazing thing is, compared to an IQ test they took at the beginning of the year, and the same test at the end of the year, those randomly selected students showed more improvement than the other students!

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Struggle

There’s been a slight leave of absence here at Life Coaches Blog, not mainly because I’ve been so busy, but also because I’ve been feeling burnt out lately. I’m sure some of you know the feeling.

At the same time, a book I bought and began reading, Coaching Into Greatness, challenged me with a few new and interesting ideas through the week. (more…)

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