Learn how the words you use affect the results you're going to get! As an amazingly intricate piece of work, our mind is constantly filtering and sorting for evidence that the world around us matches how we think it should be. We are constantly evaluating...thinking and analysing people, circumstances, words, actions, our environment, today, yesterday, tomorrow, and in particular what these all mean to us. If you stop to think about it long enough, we are constantly evaluating. So, since we spend most of our day doing it, should we get clearer on exactly what an evaluation is? I tried to evaluate what an evaluation is and then I realised I was asking myself a series of questions. Is it possible that evaluations are questions? Of course, that in itself is a question is it not? Can it be that thinking itself is nothing but the process of asking and answering questions? Are you familiar with that little voice that pops up from time to time, that little fella that sits on your shoulder a...

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WHAT DOES MAKING A MISTAKE MEAN TO YOU? Success doesn’t mean you always succeed and never fail. It means you learn from every experience and make every experience work for you in some way. Give yourself permission to make mistakes. If we attempt to avoid mistakes we avoid what we need to learn, if we avoid what we need to learn we avoid personal growth. If you have the belief that you cannot experience failure, it gives you much more freedom to be willing to play, explore, learn and grow. Everything that happens is simply feedback, it’s a means of monitoring our behaviour, attitude, actions, to make finer distinctions and do it differently next time. Most of us see an error, every mistake as emotional baggage, a failure. It reflects badly on us. Are you beating yourself up with negative self talk - I am hopeless, why me, I cant do it – can you begin to imagine what that does to your confidence? How about more supportive questions, ones that are really going to stretch you and give y...

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At an altitude of 37,000 feet, I watched with concern as the burly woman emerged from the lavatory, she was distressed and in great pain. Inching forward slowly, gripping the hand rail, her patient husband waited to support and escort her to her seat. Noticing the state she was in, I asked if there was anything I could do to assist her….’Oh my dear’, she retorted ‘I just want to get on the ground, I am absolutely terrified of flying’. As we chatted further, I took note of the language she used, what she focused on and the physical signs of the debilitating state she was in. ‘I wish I could get over it - Now that the kids are grown, I really want to travel with my husband and see all the places we had planned to see’. About a month before this, I attended a launch party for a successful Australian business magazine. The magazines’ young founder was asked how fear obstructed his progress in getting the magazine up and running. With ease and certainty he answered ‘The more I stumbled, th...

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I was enjoying a soy latte at my favourite cafe last week, trying hard to manouevre my already sunburned face out of the hot aussie sun. From the table next to me, I overheard the cute gingerhead girl ask her mum as she pointed to the billboard opposite: 'Hes just not that into you' – Must see, newly released blockbuster movie. 'Mum', she asked, 'What does that mean?' 'Oh honey, its about love' 'Looove - what is love?' she quizzed her mum with that childlike real curiosity. Cute, I thought... Funnily, the Howard Jones lyrics instantly popped into my head – 'what is love anyway, does anybody love anybody anyway .....' Kids have a knack for asking darn great questions dont they?. As I started to think about it more and more I wondered about my own experiences of love, that of my close friends, my parents, remembered what it meant growing up and what it means now as a woman in her 40's. Growing up I remember love being painted magically in endless fairytales, poems, songs, romance ...

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