How to Accept Where You Are and Move to the next Level

                           

After witnessing so many (including yours truly) on the path of transformation, I have noticed there are developmental phases to personal growth. It’s important to know where we are in the process so we can:

1. Not have expectations to be further along and move into acceptance of where we are in our journey.

2. Understand the phase that is ahead of us so we have direction in terms of where we are headed.

3. Accept where other people are in their journey with more compassion and understanding.

**Note: every person is different, this is not a one-size-fits-all model but one I find fits many. You also may go back and repeat the phases when an expectation hangover triggers new awareness or new insights inspire new learning.**

Phase One: Asleep

Most of you reading this are either past or at the end of this phase because if you were asleep, you would not resonate with my work. So, yay! You are awake!! But I bet you remember being asleep when your old story, conditioning and fears ruled you. In this phase it is common for us to play the victim and believe we do not have the power or ability to change our own life. Blame, over-responsibility, fear, and lack of fulfillment are common when we are asleep. Then something happens and we move to stage two….

Terrible Loans You Should Avoid

      

We’ve all been taught that most types of debt are bad news. But some loans are such egregiously awful financial instruments, we think they deserve special mention.


There are some types of Loan one should avoid.  You’ll find they feature many things in common, such as exorbitant interest rates or various enticements to make you spend and borrow more. These loans so bad, you should only consider them as an absolute last resort.

1. The Payday Loan

Payday lenders present themselves as a friendly, helpful, and practical solution to running out of money before the end of the month. You’ve seen the claims on storefronts, and you’ve probably heard the commercials by now: “Money as soon as tomorrow!”

What payday lenders really are, according to Senator Elizabeth Warren, are “a credit product that can impose substantial costs on imperfectly informed and imperfectly rational borrowers.”

Warren decried payday lenders or cash advance companies in a paper “Making Credit Safer,” which noted that a typical $30 fee on a $200 loan amounted to a nearly 400% annual interest rate. These companies make 90% of their profit on customers who roll their loans over, paying again and again for the money they’ve borrowed.

Skills You Need to Thrive in Life

What does it take to thrive? A positive attitude? Well, sure, but that’s hardly enough. The Law of Attraction? The Secret? These ideas might act as spurs to action, but without the action itself, they don’t do much.

Success, however it’s defined, takes action, and taking good and appropriate action takes skills. Some of these skills (not enough, though) are taught in school (not well enough, either), others are taught on the job, and still others we learn from general life experience.

Below is a list of general skills that will help anyone get ahead in practically any field, from running a company to running a gardening club. Of course, there are skills specific to each field as well – but my concern here is with the skills that translate across disciplines, the ones that can be learned by anyone in any position.

1. Public Speaking

The ability to speak clearly, persuasively, and forcefully in front of an audience – whether an audience of 1 or of thousands – is one of the most important skills anyone can develop. People who are effective speakers come across as more comfortable with themselves, more confident, and more attractive to be around. Being able to speak effectively means you can sell anything – products, of course, but also ideas, ideologies, worldviews. And yourself – which means more opportunities for career advancement, bigger clients, or business funding.

2. Writing

Writing well offers many of the same advantages that speaking well offers: good writers are better at selling products, ideas, and themselves than poor writers. Learning to write well involves not just mastery of grammar but the development of the ability to organize one’s thoughts into a coherent form and target it to an audience in the most effective way possible. Given the huge amount of text generated by almost every transaction – from court briefs and legislation running into the thousands of pages to those foot-long receipts you get when you buy gum these days – a person who is a master of the written word can expect doors to open in just about every field.