Clare Josa | Author And Keynote Speaker
UK's Foremost Imposter Syndrome Expert, International Keynote Speaker & 8x Author
Soul Nudge:You are always enough, just as you are. And you always will be.
xxClare #SoulNudge
You are enough, just as you are.
And you always will be.
No one can make you feel less than enough without your consent.
What might happen if you gave yourself permission to be good enough today?I hope you have a wonderful day.
With love, Namaste,
We were chatting over on Facebook this week about the difference between instinct, intuition and good old-fashioned common sense.
And despite having been an NLP Trainer for over a decade now, it never ceases to amaze me how a simple word can create such different meanings in everyone’s heads.
I have been amazed by the variety of answers we have had on this topic – and by the level of emotions that it evokes for people.
It all came up because I’m part of an International Summit this month where I’ll be interviewed about how I use ‘instinct’ for my business – and I realised, when preparing for this, that I don’t actually use my instinct, I use my intuition!And this got me thinking about how I have used instinct or intuition on the EU VAT campaign we have been running since November. The breakthroughs we have achieved (even though there’s still a long way to go!) have been described by those ‘in the know’ as ‘impossible’ and ‘unprecedented’ – and we have had feedback that the way we have approached the campaign has been unique.
But we didn’t do fancy strategy work or play games or second-guess people’s motivations – all of which would have been typical in the business world, especially with my NLP and Engineering background.
For me (and I’m not saying I’m right!), ‘instinct’ is something primal that comes from the animal part of my brain. It’s that sense you get, for example, when you meet someone that tells you whether or not you can trust them – instantly. And it might get over-ruled by later logic and data, but it is a subconscious message to your thinking mind – especially when you are in danger.
The primal, animal part of your brain is specially designed to keep you safe from sabre toothed tigers and their friends, so it is brilliant at what I call ‘snap decision making’, here in the present moment, where thinking and rationalising could lead to the Permanent Exit Door.
After all, when you’re sprinting from a life-limiting carnivore, you don’t want to be fussing about next week’s ‘to do’ list. So the primal part of your brain is designed to handle immediate, short-term decision-making. And, for me, that’s my ‘instincts’.
But if you’re in business, short-term decision-making is unlikely to be a successful long-term growth strategy. It’s what I have seen leading to near-permanent chaos and fire-fighting, back in my corporate days.Instead, I prefer to rely on my ‘intuition’:
For me, intuition is something that feels like deeper wisdom and insight. It comes from outside of my ‘thinking’ brain. It’s something I just ‘know’ – and it always brings with it a wave of clarity, Truth and, often, relief.
It comes up when you get a sense of what is really needed in a situation – of what is ‘deeper Truth’, where the masks of ‘ego’ have fallen away and that intuition is something that just ‘is’, rather than something you ‘figured out’.
That is what has kept me going throughout the EU VAT campaign – often defying what my Inner Engineer’s rational common sense was recommending – and even what international lobbying and campaign experts were recommending.
And I was hugely blessed to be supported by thousands of businesses who were ok with going with what might not have seemed immediately logical, but which somehow we all knew ‘felt’ right.
As I said, there are other techniques I have used, too, and I’ll be sharing the step by step ‘how to’ of my personal insider secrets with my Mastermind Members in an 8 week programme over May and June, but intuition is where it always starts.
But most of us are disconnected from our intuition, having been trained instead to put our faith in our Monkey Mind and its logical stories.
Yet, as Einstein said, a problem cannot be solved with the same level of thinking that created it.
True breakthroughs happen when you shift to your intuition – that level of ‘being’ that the Ancients call the Vignanamaya Kosha – the ‘wisdom body’ where you connect with the aspects of your Being that the conscious mind cannot understand.
That might sound a bit ‘woo woo’, but we’ve all had the experience of it. It’s the times when you wake up in the middle of the night and suddenly know the solution to a knotty problem. It’s when you’re in the shower and suddenly see the next step you need to take to leap to the outcome you were dreaming of. It’s when you somehow just ‘know’ who you need to phone – and when – only to find out that the person was about to call you, too.
And if you’d like to discover how connecting with your Intuition could transform your life – and business – then make sure you join me for the 7 day Intuition Breakthrough Blueprint programme – and experience for yourself why over 300 people have already fallen in love with it.
In just 10 minutes a day over the seven days, you’ll discover how to clear out the blocks to be able to access your intuition more reliably, when you need it most.
Here’s where you can grab your place now – and please share this link with anyone you know who would love to be part of this.
I’d LOVE to see you there! Click here to register now.
And I’d also love to hear from you, via the comments:
With love, Namaste,
P.S. The Intuition Breakthrough Blueprint programme also covers how to handle your Inner Critic! Here’s where you can grab your place.
I often get people looking at me in disbelief when I tell them they can change their life in under a minute.
So I figured I owe you an explanation about how it all works.
It all starts with the fact that the thoughts you think create the emotions you feel, which impact which thoughts you choose to feed. It’s a cycle. Your mind and your body are linked.
If you create a shift in one, you’ll create a shift in another.
You see, your body doesn’t care whether you’re actually experiencing something, say, scary or just imagining it. It will fire off the same stress hormones and chemical reactions either way. And those hormones and chemicals help you to keep feeding the thoughts you need to be thinking in a survival situation.
Similarly, whether you are in the middle of something happy or just imagining or remembering it, your body fires off the endorphins that make you feel good. And those endorphins help you to think happier thoughts.It takes about sixty seconds for the thoughts you’re thinking to impact and shift the chemistry in your body. That’s why, when I ask you to spend a minute thinking about gratitude, it’s a minute, and not just one thought. It has to be long enough to actually create those chemical reaction shifts – then it becomes more sustainable.Perhaps you feel it for yourself? There’s often a point during the minute of gratitude when something shifts – almost like a switch being flicked – that sometimes feels like a sigh of relief as you let go of the stress and tension and surrender to feelings and thoughts that lift your spirits. That’s when you know you’ve done it! And have you noticed how that feeling lasts much longer than the minute you were thinking about gratitude?Looking at this from another angle, I was once taught by a Buddhist monk that any thought, left to its own devices, will pass through in under sixty seconds. He knew that the emotions that went with that thought could be equally transient.
The reason why we end up feeling miserable for hours or even days is because we feed the thoughts and keep telling ourselves the stories about ‘miserable’, which keeps feeding the corresponding chemical reactions in your body – so it can go on and on and on.
If you want to retrain your brain’s auto-pilot habits to feed happier thoughts, then you need to get past that sixty second mark little and often.
For those of you taking part in the Great Gratitude Challenge, by the end of week two you’ll find that you get much better results by doing your gratitude minute, say, five times a day than a one-off ten minute block.
So you get better results for half the effort.
The more often you practise focussing on feeling grateful, opening your heart and mind to see what’s going well, rather than just what’s going wrong, the more it will shift your general thoughts throughout your day.
So I’ve got two questions for you – and I’d love to hear from you via the comments:
How will you remind yourself to spend a minute, several times a day, focussing on gratitude?
and
What does a gratitude minute feel like for you?
With love, Namaste,
When was the last time your got your spirituality out and plonked it on your desk at work?
Or do you hide it in a secret inside filing cabinet, dutifully unpacking it when you get home?
It’s a challenge that so many of us face when we’re on a spiritual path: at some level we are scared of appearing to be ‘spiritual’ at work.
Maybe people will judge us. Maybe they’ll laugh at us. Maybe they won’t take us seriously. Maybe they’ll avoid us. Maybe they’ll write us off as ‘woo woo’. Maybe you’ll miss that promotion. Maybe you’ll scare off that dream client and lose the contract.
So instead we pretend to be the person we used to be, before we fell in love with meditation or yoga or mindfulness or whatever other practices keep us going when it’s dark and rainy. And that ‘pretending’, even if it’s not conscious, sets up an inner conflict where you are judging and rejecting yourself for wanting to live consciously, from your heart.
Whether you’re running a mega-empire or working a check-out till in a store, your business, your customers and your colleagues all secretly need you to be a shining light, to be living from your heart and to be clearing out your personal ‘stuff’ – just the kind of thing that falls into place when you’re aligned, consciously, with your spiritual path – your dharma.
Business success is about relationships, clear-thinking, a good dollop of intuition, passion, inner calm and the dedication to keep going, even when you’re not in the mood (called ‘abhyasa’ in Ancient times!). And you know that your spiritual practices can sky-rocket all of those qualities.
So here are seven ways you could effortlessly weave your favourite spiritual techniques into a busy work-day – and they’ll actually increase your likelihood of being productive, calm, intuitive, fun to be around and getting that promotion or contract.
“What is REAL here, right now?”
When you focus on what is real, truth, fact, rather than what is drama, story and assumption, it realigns you with your deeper wisdom. And it can be a rocket booster for your problem solving ability and negotiating skills at work, as well as cutting your stress levels.
I hope those ideas have inspired you – and I’ve got a bonus technique for you, too:
Smile
Smiling releases tension. Jaw-clenching is a classic problem at work and it is unconsciously perceived as a sign of aggression by others in meetings, even if you don’t mean it that way and smiling fixes this. It floods your system with endorphins, lifts your mood and is usually contagious.
If you’re worried about your colleagues thinking you’re a Loony Tunes character or have popped one too many happy pills, smile with your eyes and your heart instead. It might sound silly, but it works – it’s your intention that your body reads, not what you do with your mouth.
That’s it for today! I’d love to hear your top tips for being spiritual at work. Is it something you have had a problem with? What might you do differently now? And if you’re an old pro, how about sharing your top advice via the comments?
And if you’d love to connect with like-minded souls who are into Soul-Sizing their lives, wherever and whenever, then join us today for Dancing In Your Soul-Shoes – you get regular members-only ‘how to’ videos and articles, as well as membership of our gorgeous private FB group. And it’s free – my gift to you!
With love, Namaste,
P.S. I’ll be doing an article soon about 10 great yoga poses you can do at your desk or in the bathroom at work, to refresh your mind and recharge your soul. If you’d like to make sure you get it, please grab your copy of my weekly newsletter.
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Woo hoo! Just launched the class dates for Autumn 2014. If you’d like to grab your place, here’s when, where and how!
These classes will fill up fast, so it’s worth grabbing your space now, even though September still feels like a way away.
[Read more…] about Yoga, Meditation & Relaxation Class Dates For Forest Row Autumn 2014
Welcome to the March edition of Soul-Sized Living Magazine!
Apologies that things have been a bit quiet since November – I’ve been taking a semi-sabbatical, focusing on laying foundations and getting clarity about future plans, so some of my ‘doing’ had to go on hold for a while.
And, as a result, I’ve got plenty of exciting news for this issue of Soul-Sized Living.
This month we’re talking about gratitude, authenticity and even falling in love with life.
Plus there’s the usual “What’s on?” and news about our two key retreats for 2014.
I hope you enjoy this edition. As always, I’d love to hear from you – either by replying to this email, or by commenting on articles and joining us on Facebook and on the forum.
With love, Namaste,
Clare
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