Rebel Women Cafe » Inspiration

Lunchbreak Inspiration – Brene Brown

Emma-Louise — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 22:18:43 +0000

If you haven’t checked out TED for some intelligent inspiration and entertainment I cannot recommend TED.com enough. TED is full of 5-20 minute informative talks on a huge range of subjects from many inspiring people of today.

So, I enjoyed this recently by Brene Brown - The Power of Vulnerability. It really gets you thinking about what being truly courageous is all about.

And it’s not about being strong and brave and controlling everything – it might just be about letting people see who you really are…

So, watch this awesome TED talk by Brene Brown, The Power of Vulnerability and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below!

How to Create a Vision Board!

Emma-Louise — Thu, 03 Feb 2011 00:58:05 +0000

Example Vision Board

Have you created a Vision Board lately?

February can be a great month to get focused on what you want from the year ahead – or even your life!

Would you like some to clarify who you are, what you want or where you’re going?
Would you like some personal inspiration to get you through the murky days of winter?
Would you like to tap into your inner wisdom and create some focus for yourself?

If so, creating a personal Vision Board can help you! And if we get what we focus on – we need to make sure we’re focusing on the right things!

What is a Vision Board anyway? A Vision Board is simply a collective name for a wide variety of inspirational maps (a collage) that we create from pictures. This map can be WHO we want to be or HOW we want our lives to be. It’s a visual representation of your goals and dreams—a powerful way to make your aspirations more tangible and attainable.

You can use it to focus on tangible areas – like work, home-life, relationships, goals. Or perhaps you’d like to work on less tangible areas like your physical, emotional, social or spiritual desires. You choose!

How they work: Our minds can only hold about 7 pieces of information at any one time. And yet there are millions of pieces of information available to us all the time (look around you and think about everything you can see/hear/feel for starters). So, to ensure we do not get overwhelmed, our mind learns to filter information and to only show you pieces of information it thinks is RELEVANT. That’s why when you get a new car or find out you’re pregnant you suddenly notice little red Chevrolets everywhere or see pregnant women and moms all around you.

THIS is one of the key ways that Vision Boards work. The very act of CREATING the vision board tells our mind what’s important – and it may just draw your attention to something you might not otherwise have noticed. It’s a way of teaching our mind to focus on things that are important to us!

How to create a Vision Board: Simply cut out and collect pictures, words, quotes that inspire you or that simply catch your eye. DO NOT ANALYSE! If it grabs you, tear it out! Then paste and organize onto a big piece of paper, giving it a title and date.

You’ll need: A piece of bristol board or cardboard, scissors, coloured pens, glue, any pictures you already have and a supply of inspirational magazines to cut out pictures from (eg. Oprah, home magazines, spiritual magazines, National Geographic – anything with pictures).

Top Tips:

The idea is to create a collage of the life or ‘you’ you want. You can either start with a blank piece of paper and go totally freeform or you could create a “Goal Tree”, “Dream Book” or “Destiny Star”.
Your Vision Board MUST HAVE PICTURES – even if they are just line drawings and stick men/women. You can even draw your own pictures if you like.
While you look for pictures, allow your mind to run free and dream. INCLUDE ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING that appeals or speaks to you!
Include PERSONAL AFFIRMATIONS or inspiring quotes to nurture and cherish your inner self.
Use COLOUR! Coloured felt-tip pens, colour post-it notes, colour pictures, make it VIBRANT and exciting.
Don’t try to understand WHY it appeals, get OUT of THINKING and turn up your CREATIVE right brain!
Remember that when creating a Vision Board, HOW YOU FEEL is more important that what you think!
You may like to actively look for the UNFAMILIAR – see outside your ‘normal’ box…
This is not about creating an artistic masterpiece but creating something that visually inspires and excites you!

Struggling?

Try answering these questions; 1) “What do you REALLY want from life?”, 2) “What is the life you REALLY want to live?” or 3) “WHO do I really want to be?” If it helps you remember, jot down a few notes as you go along.
Or imagine you have a magic wand or a ‘dream machine’ that can magically create whatever you wish.
If you have NO IDEA where to start – LUCKY YOU! Simply start flicking through magazines, newspapers, the internet and cut out anything that inspires or grabs your attention until you have a pile of pictures to work with!

Finished? Well, there are two main schools of thought out there.

SCHOOL 1) Says FORGET about your vision board: Put it in a closet. You’ll find it in 5 years and things will magically have happened.

The reason some people like to forget about the vision board is to remove any attachment to it – so we don’t FORCE things or try too hard. And also, this school says that when we put something somewhere obvious, after a while we tend to stop seeing it anyway.

SCHOOL 2) Put it somewhere you will see it everyday – to remind, inspire and focus you: So, my personal preference is to keep your Vision Board somewhere you will see it regularly. And then every once in a while, just sit down and REALLY LOOK AT IT. Think about what is on there. Review it, allow yourself to feel it and get excited by it. JUST BEFORE you go to sleep is a great time to do this as it allows our mind to work on it and absorb it over night!

Because while you may achieve your vision WITHOUT taking deliberate action, if you take some action and get things moving – it’s MUCH more likely.

But it’s really up to you. I have had clients who have had great success with both methods. So, check in with yourself and see which you think will work for you.

MAKE IT EVEN MORE FUN: Why not get a few good friends together and spend an evening over a bottle of wine creating your own Vision Boards?

Why not use the Share This button below and let your friends know
you’d like to spend an evening Vision Boarding with them…

Letting Go – What does it really mean?

Emma-Louise — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 18:38:41 +0000

Letting go is something that coaches and spiritual teachers often talk about – but what does it mean? How can we actually do it?

Another word used to mean the same thing is surrender. People say we should surrender to what is, stop resisting reality, let go of trying to control everything. It’s about moving from a space of fear – to one of love. But in this masculine patriarchal world that many of us live in – love is not taken seriously. What can ‘love’ have to do with business – and most importantly – successful business?

Well, I think love is the KEY to successful business. If you love your customers, if you love your staff, if you love your shareholders – how could you be unsuccessful?

Holding this kind of contrary viewpoint takes courage – it goes against what we are taught. And I believe that by letting go – we learn to love ourselves, to love what is and to love others without trying to fix them or their problems for them.

So, if you are one of my many readers who are “Type A” personalities – and like myself you need to LET GO more – you may like this poem written by Louise Hay herself. I was inspired when I received it in my email this morning (I’m a member of the Hay House Wisdom Community) and I hope it helps and inspires you too. Thanks Louise!

Letting Go

To “let go” does not mean to stop caring, it means I can’t do it for someone else.

To “let go” is not to cut myself off, it’s the realization I can’t control another.

To “let go” is not to enable, but to allow learning from natural consequences.

To “let go” is to admit powerlessness, which means the outcome is not in my hands.

To “let go” is not to try to change or blame another, it is to make the most of myself.

To “let go” is not to care for, but to care about.

To “let go” is not to fix, but to be supportive.

To “let go” is not to judge, but to allow another to be a human being.

To “let go” is not to be in the middle arranging all the outcomes, but to allow others to affect their own destinies.

To “let go” is not to be protective, it is to permit another to face reality.

To “let go” is not to deny, but to accept.

To “let go” is not to nag, scold or argue, but instead to search out my own shortcomings and correct them.

To “let go” is not to adjust everything to my desires, but to take each day as it comes and cherish myself in it.

To “let go” is not to regret the past, but to grow and live for the future.

To “let go” is to fear less and love more.

GUEST POST: Courage from Within

Emma-Louise — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 17:03:58 +0000

Our second article on Courage from Christina Sestan follows beautifully from her previous post on Fear. Read on!

Courage is the currency of growth and change. If you want to pursue a new goal or stimulate more personal development in your life, you can always use more courage in your bank.

We won’t journey far without courage. We need it to change, to stand up for what we believe in, to push through our fears and to go for our dreams. It takes courage to pursue the life we passionately want to be living. Why are so many of us standing on the riverbank gazing longingly across at the other side? Maybe it’s because we’re still trying to find the courage to jump in.

Remember the cowardly lion in the Wizard of Oz? He tearfully acknowledges his cowardice and shame to Dorothy and the others, “Wouldn’t you feel degraded to be seen in the company of a cowardly lion? My life has been simply unbearable.” Life would be fulfilled, he thinks, “If I only had the nerve!” He joins the group destined for Emerald City, hoping that the great and powerful Oz will give him what he’s looking for.

But rather than receiving courage, the lion learns that he has possessed courage all along—it was simply a matter of perception. “As for you my fine friend,” the wizard says to him, “you are a victim of disorganized thinking. You are under the unfortunate delusion that simply because you run away from danger, you have no courage. You’re confusing courage with wisdom.”

What the lion had spent his life searching for was his all along. Are we holding on to a limiting belief about our own lack of courage?

Ask a Courage Expert

Q: What is courage? What builds it and what prevents it?
A: Courage is the capacity to both experience fear and to carry on in the face of that fear (see Mark Twain quotation). Our fears often seem unceasing and insurmountable; courage is essential if we don’t want to stay stuck.

The root of courage varies. It may be born from survival through extraordinary circumstances – like war or disaster. Or it may emerge when there’s no burning building in sight. Some people describe their courageous responses as instinctive; they don’t stop to think. Other people believe their courage comes from a non-negotiable commitment to a value or belief – like freedom, equality or truth.

What is clear is that in order to draw on courage, we need to practice it. We need to face the challenges and adversity of our lives and place ourselves in situations where we have responsibility, some fear, and a need to extend ourselves.

Nothing will undermine courage more effectively than someone else bulldozing all hazards out of our path. Parents take note. Adversity and mistakes are essential for developing courage.

Ordinary Acts of Courage

We easily recognize courage when it takes form as heroic action: firefighters rush into a burning building, a lone protester blocks a column of tanks, a black woman refuses to move to the back of the bus.

Extraordinary acts of courage like these may be difficult to imagine in your own lives. But what about the everyday courage needed to live an authentic life? If burning buildings aren’t your thing, try some of these on for size:

Take a stand against the dominant thinking of your friends and family when your heart-felt beliefs differ from theirs.
Dare to forgive even when everyone around you believes you were wronged and are justified in your anger.
Take a moment of “quiet time” to ground and reflect on what is important even when your phone is ringing off the hook and everyone needs something from you RIGHT NOW!
Risk becoming a target of criticism by speaking up against racist or sexist jokes around the water cooler.

“When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.” Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Courage is not the lack of fear. It is acting in spite of it.” Mark Twain

Article courtesy of the awesome Christina Sestan. (c) Citrus Coaching Solutions 2010. Please do not duplicate this article without the author’s permission.

Lunchbreak Inspiration – Eve Ensler

Emma-Louise — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:27:56 +0000

If you ever need some intelligent inspiration or entertainment on your lunchbreak I cannot recommend TED.com enough. Mostly 20 minute informative talks on a huge range of subjects from many inspiring people of today.

So, I found this recently by Eve Ensler - Embrace Your Inner Girl. It’s a great fit with what I would love to achieve with RebelWomen: Strong, powerful, sensitive women – who aren’t afraid to base decisions and their lives on intuition and feelings and take this energy into the world!

I think we need more feminine energy in government, corporations, society, the world. We need more compassion, more long-term/far-sighted thinking and more seeing options and shades of grey. Both men AND women have been taught that our feelings and compassion are weak, whereas it’s precisely these qualities that empower us to be PASSIONATE, STRONG and SUCCESSFUL…

So, watch this TED talk by Eve Ensler – famous for her Vagina Monologues Embrace Your Inner Girl and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below!

PS. I wonder what Ms Ensler would think of the “Muff Maintenance Products” I posted about recently…