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[Personal Development]

Five Tips to Achieve Your Goals with Ease 

How Achieving Your Goals Doesn't Have to Mean Stress 

Can success and ease co-exist?  Surely success means that you’re going to have push yourself to the limits to get there? 

What if it could be easier? What if there was a way that once you know it you could navigate a path to success just as a river flows around the bends and around the rocks with complete ease and flow.  Life Ladder’s founder, Natalie Rea, is passionate about the concept of ‘ease’, in every meeting and every to-do list she’s speaking of and looking for, ease.   

Natalie says:  

“The more you look for ease, the more it appears.”  

But how could that be so?  How could success be easy?  The reality is, many of us (because we haven’t experienced any other pattern) make our progress hard and rocky when we could simply flow with the babbling river around the rocks. 

How You Can Make Success Easier & Reach Your Goals with Ease

Things are hard in life when there is resistance, aren’t they? Resistance causes stress. To use another analogy, engines seize when there is resistance when the components can’t move because things are too tight or furred up with rust or dirt; it’s one of the reasons we use oil, to smooth and ‘ease’ all the workings so they can work more efficiently.  Imagine the mind in a similar way.  Inner resistance can come from a few sources within our mind, one of the common sources of resistance is in our values system. This is where we store information on what’s important to us.  

If we are working on a goal that truly matters to us, chances are we have values operating underneath the surface driving how we feel about our success or failure.  

The amount of ease we experience on the journey depends on if we are moving towards what we want or away from what we don’t want.  

Back to the ocean now.  When water is in pursuit of finding the ocean, it flows in one consistent direction, flexibly moving around the twists and turns and the more it flows in one consistent direction, it picks up speed and flows with ease.  

If you have conflicting directions, or dams, your success cannot be in full flow and pick up speed.  

Follow This Coaching Process To Boost Your Success Flow  

Because the deeper, subconscious mind works very well with symbols, analogies and pictures, this coaching tool, guides you to follow the analogy of the river to guide your mind to insights which support your success.  

So let’s say the water is your ‘Success Energy’, the riverbanks are the ‘support mechanisms’ which direct and allow your success energy to flow. The river bends represent the ‘learnings’ you discover on your way to the goal and the rocks are your ‘perceived obstacles.’  

 Maybe you like to draw, or doodle and you can use a pen and paper for this, or maybe you’d like to simply imagine it in your mind, whichever you prefer is great.  

This personal development coaching exercise will help you understand how your ‘success energy’ is flowing, identify where you might be blocking the flow of the water or perhaps allowing it to leak out in different directions because the river banks aren’t strong enough. Remember, the riverbanks are your structure.  

To have success without stress, you need both structure and flow. The flow won’t happen without the structure to support it, structure helps it flows in the right direction. Make sense?  

There is much for us to learn from water, how it starts gently in the mountains and flows downwards, it is because it flows down that it picks up speed and momentum, downstream not upstream, we can find more ease in our own lives when we adopt this principle too.   

Have you ever had an experience when you’ve been sure there is a set way to do something, you’ve tried to push upstream but it's felt like the current is against you, no matter what you do?  The alternative is that if you were to soften (a bit like water) and surrender a little, speed and momentum can be gained enabling you to move around the rocks in your way.  

 “Water is The Softest Thing Yet It Can Penetrate Mountains and Earth. This Shows Clearly the Principle of Softness Overcoming Hardness.”  

Lao Tzu 

Embody the Spirit of Water to Create More Ease, Greater Success & Less Stress

Knowing that water is flexible, soft and adaptive, let’s now look at your success energy river with the following coaching questions. 

  • What are your riverbanks (support mechanisms)?  
  • Where is there an opportunity to create an easy downward flow, which enables an increase in speed and momentum?  
  • Notice where you get tight and resistant about your goals (for example, what has felt like it’s set in stone?) 
  • If this resistance was different rocks with labels, what would the rocks represent? Fear of failure? Time pressure? Notice what’s in your way.  
  • How could you soften like water to navigate around the rocks?  

5 Personal Development Tips for Softening Your Resistance & Enjoying Success Without Stress While You Reach Your Goals

  1. Discover your resistance 
    You've done it already, use the coaching process above to help you reveal where your 
    resistances and blocks lie with your current goals. 
  2. Breathe into the resistance 
    Rocks are part of nature and they play their part, so relax about them, embrace them and  take a breath. You’ll find a way forward, just like water finds its way around rocks. Trust in  your inner nature.   
  3. You can’t always wear the rock down in the moment 
    Only with time and consistency does water wear down the rock. There are always ways  around, even if you can’t see them, so ask for ways around, turn your attention to ways  around the rock, rather than focusing on the rock itself. This is important, where your  attention goes, energy flows.  Make a habit of asking yourself the question (at every  opportunity) ‘how can I/we make this easier?’
  4. You have resources beyond what you realise 
    When you soften enough, resources can come to you. Many people can help you if you  allow them to, there is support and resources all around us, we don't have to do it alone.  Someone else may have the experience of navigating around a rock that you’re struggling  with. Trust that help is around you and allow support.   
  5. Take a pause 
    If you’re looking for the keys, sometimes you end up looking so hard that you don’t see what  is right in front of you, but when you take it easy and pause for a few moments to just  breathe and ‘be’ rather than ‘do’, they appear in front of your eyes.  

 You can achieve magnificent things when you are in flow and not blocking yourself with frustration, disappointment, pressure. Just acknowledge it when it's there, and let it go. Imagine yourself free flowing, leaving it behind as a river flows on. It doesn’t get attached, it keeps flowing and some people or things move in flow with the river, other times the river leaves them behind. It knows where it’s going, and it keeps its flow; and so can you.  

Photo by kazuend on Unsplash