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Are you the CEO of your organization or is someone else running the show? How well do you know Your Board of Directors? How many sit at the table?

I know it was the term CEO that threw you, but stay with me here a moment longer because you ARE running a company! Just look at the company you keep. Look in a mirror, who do you see? The CEO? Good. Confused? Ok, I will stop with the riddles.

The company you run is You, and believe it or not, some of you even come with a complete Board of Directors that sit full time, while others have found them derelict in their duties and have fired them.

I know, you are sitting there with your eyebrows scrunched and asking yourself what the heck is this lady talking about. Well this should clarify things for you.

Have you ever wanted to achieve something so badly that you could taste it? This ’something’ was something that you promised yourself that “this time” you would follow through and Win! Then the unthinkable happened, you failed to deliver. It was just one more time that you didn’t get the job, or you froze when it was time to get up and speak, or the diet you began in the morning was history by lunch. More proof now that you are once and for all, truly a loser. Another notch on the belt of failure. Let me ask you something, do you really believe you are a loser? If you answered Yes, then you are WRONG and I am going to prove it.

Do you feel like your best efforts are sabotaged all the time? Well you are correct, they are. That is the job of one of your Board Members; to make sure you fail. Why? Because its part of the story that you either wrote for yourself or others helped write over and over again. It is a core belief in your subconscious, and what you ‘BELIEVE’ of yourself will always be made to come true.

It’s like this. If you ’see’ yourself as fat then Every time you begin your new diet, you are destined to fail. It has to be that way, because your subconscious is there to make SURE that the story of who you are remains true to the tale. If you hate Exercising, then every time you commit to exercising daily, you will quit shortly within, and if you say you are a messy person, then every time you clean up your room, it will be messy in no time. It is your Subconscious that is really directing the events, not your Conscious voice.

Do you ever call yourself names like you ugly fat piece of garbage? Your subconscious does not judge whether this is good or bad, true or not true. It hears the same story over and over and it eventually becomes truth. Your Truth! It will stay this way until you do something to change it.

I am sure that you have heard a familiar voice inside your head say “you know you deserve a good meal after losing out like that”, ‘ You can take today off from exercising, look how hard you worked yesterday”, Why bother when you know you are too fat, too ugly, too dumb, too whatever”, in fact, after about 10 minutes of this disparagement you agree with the voice, and now believe you will never be able to accomplish anything of note.

Do you know the voice or voices I am talking about? I am sure at one time or another you have met one or two of them. They are the members of your board, and they govern your actions when you give them free rein.

Meet your subconscious mind and the folks who sit at the Round table of Self Concept. Their joy in life is to hand out healthy doses of self doubt.

Sometimes it’s the same guy- I call him Monsieur Saboteur, and sometimes they change up, and it’s a very nasty woman, but their message usually carry the same theme, “You will fail, don’t bother trying,” etc. The voices get so loud that they override your own wishes and desires until you say “Why bother”. You stop what you were intending to do, they stand up and cheer, another job well done for them, and another failure for you.. Surprise, surprise.

There is good news. It doesn’t have to end this way anymore. I can show you how to rid yourself of this self defeating monster, fire the members of your board, and put you back in charge. Interested?

In Tim Gallwey’s book, The Inner Game, he calls the message from the board members interference. Interference may consist of obstacles such as fear, self doubt, self limiting concepts and assumptions that decide to come out and play when we are faced with challenges and change.

I have found through my experience as business and life coach, that people fear 3 things, Fear of Success, Fear of Failure and Fear of Change.

In order to be successful, we must play our inner game if we want to overcome the self-imposed obstacles that prevent us from accessing our full potential”. Tim’s formula for success looks like this: Performance = potential-interference, P=p-i. According to this formula, performance can be enhanced either by growing “p” potential or by decreasing “i,” interference.

Make sense to me, but how do you go about increasing potential or decrease interference?

The first thing we need to do is to go inside and find out which member of your board is resisting the desired outcome. What is their objection to the goal at hand? What is their fear and how can we overcome it? This is called Awareness.

Once we know the problem at hand we can address it.

As a change agent and coach, I have worked with many individuals and organizations to help ease the transition of change and demonstrate how embracing ‘change’ can be an exciting opportunity and something to look forward too.

If Awareness is stage one, what is Stage 2? Well, Gallwey says in order to play the inner game, choice and trust are the next two necessary ingredients to beat interference and increase potential.

I too believe that the answers are inside.

One of the lines I am famous for is “choose the life you want to live, instead of living by default”. This means don’t just let life happen to you. Be in charge of who you are and where you want to go.

You can choose to be afraid or not to be. You can choose to love or not. You can choose to be successful or not and you can choose to increase your potential and trust in yourself and your abilities. Honestly all it takes is trust.

Are you ready to trust in your abilities, choose the life you want and watch that Potential Skyrocket as you become aware of your Inner Game and play to win?

Gallwey’s Inner Game formula is excellent and a great place to start, but in my opinion there is still one STEP missing. That is reprogramming your hard drive (your subconscious mind) so that it stops blocking your choices and actually insists you go where you want. It is just as easy to programme “I am a winner” in as it is to be a loser.

This takes a bit of effort on your part, but not as much as you might think and the outcome FAR outweighs any input of time. Once you engage the power of your subconscious mind, you have the power of a homing missile working for you. NOTHING can get in the way and take it off course.

How can this be accomplished? Quite simply in fact, however, this is one of those things that are simple, but not easy.

First, you need to go back inside and re visit your beliefs. You need to examine where each and every one of them came from, and find the “story” behind them. Ask yourself, how do I know this? Who told it to me or did I learn this on my own. Who first told you that you were fat? Was it your grandparents? Your Parents? A boyfriend. At sometime in your life, this image got stuck in your subconscious and you have been repeating the story over and over until it became your truth.

They way we act often is not of our own accord. Our beliefs come from the stories that we have been told over and over again as a child. In fact, your fears may not even be your own but your mothers or grandfathers. It’s true. Think about it for a moment.

Why are you afraid of spiders? Are other people in your family afraid? Have you ever examined where your fears come from? Well what we need to do is change the stories.

Our subconscious does NOT know the difference between truth and make-believe, so your job now is to re write your personal history. If you are overweight, then you will write down in a book that your perfect weight is 135 pounds (be realistic). Envision yourself at that weight, and hold that vision in your mind everyday for several minutes several times a day, especially when you are in a relaxed state, just upon waking and when you go to bed. See yourself winning. BE THAT WINNER!

Keep writing in your journal over and over again what your perfect weight is. Do this often. It takes approximately 12 weeks to break a habit but you will notice in about a week (it took me 3 days) that you will not be tempted by fattening foods. In fact, don’t be surprised if you don’t want to eat at all. You will not be fighting yourself anymore, but rather you have just engaged a formidable ally who will be doing all the hard work for you. Its Easy Breezy as Covergirl likes to say from now on.

This works for ANYTHING you want to change, be it smoking, self esteem issues, even relationships.

As CEO, you have the right and the position to rewrite your own personal story and now you understand where your true power lies. You will be delighted at the ease with which your life will change. Soon you will be the person you have always wanted to be, but didn’t know how.