Good. Better. Best. Which self do you want to be?

January 28, 2010 - Issue #92
The 5 Stages of Understanding

Welcome to The 3-Minute Coach

Somehow we're reached the end of January! I have no idea how that happened, but here we are! Even though it's going by very fast, I hope you've already begun to start enjoying your new year!

In peace, love and gratitude.
Louise

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Food for Thought

"As long as you derive inner help and comfort from anything, keep it." --- Mahatma Gandhi

Keep It Simple

The 4 Quadrants for Prioritizing Activities

In his book First Things First, Stephen Covey created a 2x2 matrix for prioritizing work. The framework breaks down the grid with important/non-important on one axis and urgent/non-urgent on the other. The goal is to work on those tasks which are important, but non-urgent.

The quadrants are defined as follows:

Important and Urgent
These are the fires that need to be put out almost daily. They sap your energy and make you feel productive, however, it's a pure adrenaline rush. And, at the end of the day, you realize that you haven't really accomplished anything towards your goals. Unfortunately, many jobs seem like they should include firefighting in the experience necessary to fulfill their job responsibilities.

Important and Non-Urgent
Ideally, this is where we want to spend our time. Quadrant 2 activities are those that bring us further towards the completion of our goals. Into this quadrant go pursuits such as exercise, planning, visualizing, and preparation. Very often, these are the activities that keep getting put on the back burner, which is sad, because they help us create the success we want in our life.

Non-Important and Urgent
Day by day, the non-important but seemingly urgent activities take our focus away from taking action on our goals. These are the distractions, whether in-person or on the phone, that drive us crazy as they are usually tied to other people's fires. These include some meetings, email and phone calls.

Non-Important and Non-Urgent
The simplest way to describe these activities is sheer time-wasters. They are activities that have no payoff whatsoever. The rest of our meetings, email and phone calls probably fall into this category. It also includes dealing with junk mail, spam and any escapist activities. Stay far, far away from these.

A great exercise to do is to take all the activities on your to-do list and label them according to their appropriate quadrant. As quickly as possible, eliminate those in quadrant 4, cut down quadrant 3 activities, spend as much time in quadrant 2 as possible and that should eliminate or at least cut down your quadrant 1 activities.

Feature Article

The 5 Stages of Understanding

As we begin to change our thoughts and beliefs in the process of becoming our best self, there is a continuum that we all follow as we synthesize a new concept or action into our life. To be truly successful in incorporating a new thought pattern into our life, we must allow both the head and the heart to get involved. Without both emotional and intellectual understanding, most new ideas fall by the roadside.

The stages of understanding can best be described as follows.

This sounds interesting.
We move along through life and somewhere in our travels, we run into a thought or concept that we hadn't encountered before. We find it intriguing, although it also hurts our head a little bit. Once something catches our attention like that, there is an unspoken (and un-named, as far as I know) law of the universe that keeps bringing that idea or thought into our life. It's the very same as buying a new car and suddenly noticing that every other car on the road is the same brand and model as the one we just purchased. It's not that there were not that many before we purchased, it's just that now our focus is on that car.
I'm beginning to understand this concept.
The more we run into the concept, the more we are able to wrap our brain around this new thought. Each time we encounter it, the wider and more accepting our brain becomes. After a while, we can think about it without our head hurting, and we can begin to see how it might apply to our life. We become open to the idea that this new idea or belief can fit into our life without jeopardizing who we are.
I'm starting to change what I do in accordance with this new concept.
We start noticing that this new thought or belief is having an impact on our life, as we start taking action based on this thought. It may be fast or slow, but each action we take in harmony with that new idea makes it a stronger part of our essence.
I feel like I'm about 50% of the way to incorporating this concept into my life.
We go along with our lives and one day we notice that the actions we have been taking have brought us just about halfway towards making this idea part of our belief system. We find that interesting and start to see the benefits of incorporating that concept into our life, making us want to pursue it even more.
This new belief is now part of my life 100%.
We totally embrace the new belief and find it amazing that we ever thought or believed differently. It is now just part of who we are and we rarely give it a second thought. It constitutes true growth and development.

Related Quotes

"“Life is the first gift, love is the second, and understanding the third” " -- Madge Piercy

"Wisdom is a blessing only to those prepared to absorb it." -- Unknown

"Wisdom is a blessing only to those prepared to absorb it." -- D.H. Lawrence

"To understand is to perceive patterns. " -- Sir Isaiah Berlin

"Understanding brings control." -- Bonewitz

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding. ." -- Leonardo da Vinci

Recent Blog Posts

Ode to Habit
3 Ways to Relax (#5)
The 4 Essential Steps of Creating Habit
Thoughts on Principles
Self Evaluation Questions for Goal Setting

The Welcome Mat Guest Column:

Four Steps to Bring Abundance Into Your Life
By Val Dawson

1) Start Where You Are
A strong focus on trying to attract more abundance can often cause us to lose sight of the things that really matter in life. It is certainly natural and understandable to have a strong desire to create a more stable financial picture - and never is this more urgent than when we are in the midst of financial struggle. However, the more we remove our focus from what we already have and place it on what we are trying to gain, the less wealthy we feel.

If we instead make it a habit to appreciate what we already have while also working to create more things to appreciate, we can literally have the best of both worlds. Believe it or not, there are people who have far more money than they will ever need but feel like the poorest people on the planet. Focusing on our existing blessings will always help us avoid that trap.

2) Take Responsibility
We are anything but helpless victims of a harsh universe. The problem is that we often can't see any way we could have attracted something unpleasant into our lives. Financial hardship, job loss, recession; who in their right mind would want to attract these things?

Most often we aren't even consciously focusing on these things so they seem like complete surprises, but what is actually happening is that we are forgetting to focus on the opposite conditions we do want to create. Learning to control and direct our thoughts toward better circumstances can go a long way in minimizing unpleasant surprises.

3) Stay Open to New Ideas
Have you ever had a great idea and then immediately felt like you would just be mimicking people who have already accomplished similar works? Not only are there endless new ideas waiting to be conceived by all of us, it is also possible to keep improving upon and expanding the things that already exist in our world. The greatest part about this is that anything YOU create will have your own energy woven through it, and it would be completely unique from the same thing created by someone else.

4) Dare to Be Different
Have you ever heard it said that progressive thinkers are always ahead of their time? In our younger years most of us expend a fair amount of energy trying to fit in with our peers, but as we get older we begin to see the benefits of thinking for ourselves, even if it makes us seem different than the majority.

Being different is a good thing because it shows that we are not simply adopting other people's beliefs and limitations for ourselves. We are creating the life that is best for us, regardless of what others may think about it. While this may not always be a comfortable position to be in, it is infinitely more comfortable than hiding our light under a bushel and denying our true nature.

Can it be this easy? Is this all it takes to create wealth in your life? The answer will surprise you. Grab your complimentary "The 7 Biggest Mistakes People Make with the Law of Attraction and Money and How YOU Can Avoid Them" http://www.thinkrichclub.com.

Valerie Dawson is the Founder of TheDawsonMethod. Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Val_Dawson

http://EzineArticles.com/?Four-Steps-to-Bring-Abundance-Into-Your-Life&id=3597955

Working Towards Wholeness: Action Step

[For me, wholeness represents being my best self living my best life. I believe there are 13 keys to living in wholeness (5 Steps, 8 Elements). Each newsletter, I will look at one action step you can take so that you may get one step closer to wholeness]

WHOLENESS KEY: Complete the Past
ACTION STEP: Top 3 Reasons to Complete the Past

The process of becoming your best self is a journey towards wholeness. Only when we are whole do we move through life with ease, purpose and success. I believe there are five steps towards wholeness.

Accept Responsibility for Your Life.
Focus on the Elements. [Another way to say this is "Work through your Barriers"].
Complete the Past.
Plan for the Future.
Live in the Present.

While most of us see the value in working towards wholeness, sometimes we get stuck in accepting, or practicing, an individual step.

As if wholeness was not enough, here are the top 3 reasons to Plan for the Future:

If you do not know where you are going, you will not know when you get there. Getting clarity about what you want to create in your life is the first step in achieving it. Even before you deal with the obstacles that get in the way of your manifesting what you want, it is critical that you define what it is you do want. While it is easy to drift through life taking this road and then that one, flowing aimlessly from one destination to another, those pleasurable meanderings are just that: meanderings. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon, but not too helpful for achieving success in life.
You can celebrate every "win" along the way. Part of the process for planning for the future is identifying the intermediate milestones along the way. As we break down the steps needed to create the future, we can also see which stages can be classified as mini-wins. These need to be celebrated. The recognition of completed steps and mini-rewards keeps us motivated for the long haul.
By paying attention to the journey, you will know when it is time to go back to the drawing board. As we move forward towards our stated goals, we keep getting more information and having more experiences. The information picked up along the way, and our responses to that information gives us valuable clues about the path and journey we are on. It ma confirm that what we want and our action plan to achieve it is right on target. It may also point out that either the goal or our path to the goal needs to be reworked. Either way, we get to go back to the drawing board as often as we like. It is never a bad plan, it is just that we do not always have all the information needed to finish the journey.

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All That BIZ

Louise Morganti Kaelin is a Life Success Coach who partners with others to help them turn their dreams into reality.
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Louise is a Life Success Coach who partners with individuals who are READY (to live their best life), WILLING (to explore all options) and ABLE (to accept total support). She specializes in helping those who know what they want to do and how to do it but still can't seem to get it done by breaking through the blocks and barriers to their success. For many free resources, including Louise's free newsletter of insightful, practical suggestions for creating your best life, visit her website at

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January 28, 2010 - Issue #92 The 5 Stages of Understanding