I discussed the importance of living an authentic life in a recent interview Dr Tony Alessandra (pictured left), a business professor, author 27 books and a hall-of-fame keynote speaker. He stated that it was only when he chose to allow his true self to emerge when speaking, that his speaking career and business really took off.

It’s only by discovering our real passions in life and by expressing our message authentically, that we are able to leave an empowering legacy. However, finding your passions in life is not always easy. It is not an area of life that is taught about at school, or in the workplace and yet it is crucial to true success and happiness.

One could argue that success without passion is a hollow victory. What is the point of being great at something if you don’t care about it? That’s a big question that a lot of people face in many areas of life.

In order to address this fear, here is a quick 3 step process that you can go through to find your passions and add more activities in your life that will cater to your passions so that you can live more authentically.

Pursuing Passions Exercise: Use this simple 3 step process to uncover your passions and find ways to enjoy more of them in your daily life.

1. Write down everything that you are passionate about. Also write what you could be passionate about (activities you would like to try but are not sure about) and everything that you used to be passionate about when younger.

   Example – Art, history, music, dancing, interior design, cooking.

2. Write down what qualities need to be within you in order to excel in each area.

   E.g. Dancing requires rhythm, ability to follow procedures and rules but still find emotional flair within it, patience, love of movement etc.

   Interior design in this example probably requires almost all of the same qualities. So could art, music and cooking.

3. The final step is then either schedule more time to do one of the activities that you love or look into finding a new activity that requires similar skills to begin indulging in.

If at any point you are struggling to rank which of your passions are most important to begin with, here are:

5 key questions to ask yourself to know if you are likely to pursue a passion.

1. Would I do this activity happily for free and even pay to regularly do it and/or get training in it?
2. Would I want to do activity even if none of my friends or family were interested in it?
3. Can I envision myself having moments of great pleasure and/or satisfaction when doing this activity?
4. Do I feel confident that with the right training and/or effort that I can excel in this activity?
5. Would I be proud to be known for participating in and possibly excelling at this activity?

Use the 3 step process outlined and the 5 key questions if needed to uncover your passions so that you can begin to live an authentic life and leave a legacy worth remembering.
To listen to my interview with Dr Tony Alessandra, where he reveals his business and life success tips and learn more about the passions discovery processes outlined above, click here.

He then uses the information gathered to tailor positive, simple, focused and fast professional development solutions for his high level clients. Often people are confused about how to give feedback. Most would agree that offering positive feedback is important, but an easy to administer process is often missing.

Through my consulting work, clients often have working relationship challenges and would frequently request simple ways to offer feedback when coaching, mentoring or assisting others. Through those experiences I developed a simple 5 step ‘Positive Appraisal Process’.

The Positive Appraisal Process

1. List positive events: List at least 3, preferably 4-5 praiseworthy things that you or others have seen them do well.

2. Give Examples: Make sure you are genuine with your praise and give specific (and detailed if possible) examples of when they have performed each praiseworthy task.

3. Always Use Empowering Language: Phrase areas of potential improvement positively. Use terms like ‘what can be further enhanced, improved, tweaked, modified and so on.

4. Find Agreement: Discuss what has been said and look for which of your suggestions the other person resonates with most and is most likely to implement.

   Advanced Additional Element for Coaches: Have the client rank the order of personal relevance and importance of suggestions given and scale (between 1-10, where 1 = minimal confidence and 10 = maximum confidence) the liklihood of implementation of higher ranked suggestions. Higher ranked suggestions with the greatest implementation confidence scores are the ones to focus on.

5. Future Focused Integration: Re-iterate what they are doing well, praise them again, and have them imagine and feel the benefits of even more improvement by practicing and incorporating the new skills they have chosen to begin developing.

   Advanced Additional Element for Coaches: This is where a range of meditative/hypnotic and positive outcome visualization coaching techiques can be used.

After completing the feedback process outlined, the final step is to coach the client in building the new skills required. It is also important that when offering feedback, that the giver of feedback is also in the right emotional and mental frame of mind.

For more detailed information on how to prepare yourself to be a great feedback giver, live examples of how to use the Positive Appraisal Process effectively and to listen to my interview with Dr Marshall Goldsmith where he reveals his highly effective coaching philosphy and methods, click here.

However, the use of power is a very poor method of persuasion, as I discovered in my recent interview with Stuart Diamond (pictured left). A Wharton Business School Professor, best-selling author and Pulitzer Prize winner who has taught negotiation to over 30,000 people in 45 countries, he reported how power does not work at any level of negotiation.

Whether it’s with children, friends, spouses, business or politics, attempting to assert power over someone always leads to resistance to you and your message. Instead of using power and logic, a much better approach is to seek collaboration by understanding the other person’s perceptions and emotions and using that knowledge to move towards a win-win situation.

I believe that is highly important, however, I also believe that it’s just as important that you also are comfortable with your own perceptions and emotions before entering into a negotiation. To find out how you can best prepare yourself psychologically for a negotiation, I created the 4 C’s of persuasive communication. Once understand this process, it will allow you to become a much better collaborator and perceiver of perceptions and emotions.

The 4 C’s are…

• Clarity
• Consistency
• Congruence
• Commitment

Clarity

First, you want to be crystal clear about the outcome you want to have and how you are going to go about getting it. Depending on the situation, you want to have done your preparation if appropriate and be clear on what your message is about and how to cater it to the situation. The more clear you are on what you want to present and how, the more decisively you will be able to speak about what you have to offer. By having greater clarity, you will also be able to easily adapt your message to make it a win-win for everyone involved.

Consistency

Second is consistency. Because you are clear on what you want, and open to what they want, this part of the process is about continually generating benefits for working together. The more often you present benefits that will serve the needs of the other person (as well as your own), the more valid your message will become to them.

Congruence

Next is congruence. As you continue to find benefits, at the same time, you should be looking at which benefits in particular they seem to resonate with. What ideas and possibilities are they most passionate about? This is going to lead to revealing what the person’s values are. Just as your message, should be fully aligned and congruent with your values, you will also start to discover their values too. The more you can align your message or offer to their values, the more persuasive you will become.

Commitment

Last is commitment. You need to be fully committed to what you are presenting. You need to be prepared for any possible objections or changes that may need to be made. You have to believe that what you have to offer is of great value, and be politely tenacious in your discussions.
If your offer is aligned with your greater purpose, and you can see how it could also be aligned to their greater purpose, this will help you remain committed to the creation of a mutually beneficial outcome.

Use the 4 C’s as a guide to get you prepared before a negotiation and as signposts during discussions. Always remember focus on collaboration through the understanding of another person’s emotions and perceptions, rather than trying to force your point of view through logic, threats, leverage and other power plays.

To listen to my interview with Professor Diamond, where he reveals his top negotiation tips and learn more about the 4 C’s and the 3 questions you can ask to discover someone’s deepest desires and values, click here.

I recently conducted a fascinating interview with Delivering Happiness CEO Jenn Lim, as part of my ‘The Fulfilling Happiness Edge’ radio show.  In our extensive interview, she reported how the company values were created through the input of every person on staff and this is one of the main reasons why their staff retention, customer service and productivity are so impressive. She also spoke candidly about how these values went on to create a sense of social capital and spawn the massive Delivering Happiness social movement.

After having already spent thousands on training people, you would only ever voluntarily pay someone $2,000 to leave your company if you truly believed that better people, greater opportunities and higher profitability were still available to you. Your personal life is no different. Assuming there are no issues around personal safety, the only reason you would ever end a personal relationship is because you believe there are greater opportunities for fun and fulfillment with someone else.

As a success and happiness coaching psychologist, I have always promoted the importance of living by your core values as one of the biggest secrets to personal and professional success. After the interview, I asked myself what kind of a mindset is required in order for us to connect to our deepest and most inspiring values?

Difficult questions often lead to simple answers. The answer lies in the difference between abundance versus scarcity based thinking. Life is filled with contrasts. Thinking styles are no different. Some are optimists, and other pessimists. Some people have an open, expressive and abundance-focused style of thinking, but unfortunately, most people are trained to be scarcity-focused.

The question then becomes: how do you access the emotional state and mindset of abundance? Here is a simple 3 step procedure to assist you in opening up your mind to abundance and positive values based thinking.

1. Shift your physiology.

Sit tall with your shoulders back, have your head up, eyes forward and begin breathing deeply. Spend 20-60 seconds just focusing on your breathing and imagine simply letting go of all of your thoughts. (Mindfulness practitioners should be able to do this quite easily).

2. Find a relevant memory.

With a clear mind, choose a memory where you were feeling and acting in a confident, successful and abundance/opportunity focused way. If you can’t think of such a time, imagine how you would be feeling and acting if you were confident, successful and abundance/opportunity focused.

3. Ask empowering questions.

Maintaining your physiology and keeping those images in mind, ask yourself empowering abundance focused questions. Here are 5 for you to write down your answers to:

What is it that I stand for?

How do I want people to know and describe me?

What am I going to create and give?

Who shares and supports my values and would brainstorm ideas with me?

What do I need to do right now, and continue doing in the future to start turning these ideas into reality?

The only thing to do now of course, is put your answers into action. The first two steps of the above process can be done in a couple of minutes or less, and will easily lead you into  the third step of asking empowering questions. This exercise should be practiced regularly in order to keep you aligned with your deeper values and develop your abundance focus.

Living by your own values is essential for true personal and professional success. Fortunately, you will not need to pay those who do not share your values to leave your presence. The more attuned you are to your own values and sense of abundance, the more likely it is that you will naturally gravitate towards people who share similar styles of thinking and feeling.

To listen to Aleks’ interview with Jenn Lim, click here .

Ask yourself how many times have you failed in your life? I’m sure the answer is more than you care to remember. Then think of someone you admire, a role-model who you believe is very successful.

Now ask yourself how many times have they failed? I guarantee the answer is many more times than you have. It is a natural law of life, we learn through trial and error. Just look at Edison and the thousands of attempts he made before he created the light bulb.

However, how often do people only give something a few trials? How long did it take you to learn how to walk? The answer is at least several months. Now I’m going to assume you have good parents, in fact even really bad parents still tend to get this right. After your first attempt, did they give up on you? After your 50th attempt, did they give up, what about the 100th?

No, unless you are reading this right now on a floor computer, I can safely assume you moved out of crawling at some stage.

The problem with seeking success, is many people expect it to be instant, and when it is not, they give up. It seems that today more than ever, people expect instant gratification and when they don’t get it they usually go through a process of being annoyed, then angry and then disappointed.

The other issue is people complicate things way to much. All processes require simple step-by-step instructions. Success is a simple process, its just that it is also a frustrating and repetitive process. You have to do it again and again and again. And even when you do something successfully, to make sure you can continue doing it successfully, you need to do it again and again and again.

If you want to learn how to box, you can’t just learn the basic jab and then have it mastered instantly. Even the best, have to keep practicing it. It is a simple thing to be able to do, but it takes many, many repetitions to master. And even then, you can still improve on it.

So you need to fail. You need to crawl before you can walk and you need to throw hundreds of horrible jabs before they start to become reasonable.

However, here is the secret, if you want to create motivation and inspiration in yourself, don’t call your mistakes failures. You are going to eliminate failure from your vocabulary.

What you will call them is ‘sleight errors’, or ‘initial miscalculations’, or ‘adjustments to make’ or simply ‘feedback’. We all need to make adjustments, and we all need to take in feedback. Notice how those kind of words are so much more motivating and inspiring.

You need to make feedback your friend. The more feedback you receive, learn from and use to recalculate, the more you will succeed.

To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,

Aleks Srbinoski

These are all labels we put on ourselves and others. The labels you use consistently shape the way you see yourself and the world. You need to be incredibly careful of the labels you use because you learn to live towards such labels. They become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The labels we use become our triggers. If you are always calling yourself or someone you have a strong influence over stupid, then you or they will start to believe it. Even if you say you don’t really mean it, words are powerful and we will unconsciously act in a way that is congruent with its meaning. It might be a subtle drop of the head, a change in breath, but it will have an effect.

Then your unconscious mind, will access old memories of when you felt stupid and then interpret this event like the ones before it. What makes people happy is often related to the selection of words they consistently use. This is because whatever you look for, you will find.

What if you used the word smart, would that have an effect? Absolutely, it will affect you in proportion to how much you believe it. You believe it a little, your body will change a little and you will feel a little better. If you believe it a lot, then you will have bigger effects. What if you’re stuck in a particular mood and you really don’t believe you are very smart at that point in time? Well, there are much better options then believing you are stupid.

It may be that you are a ‘learner’, or a ‘novice’ or ‘human’, or you may challenge with a phrase like ‘a step closer to success’, or even a sentence like ‘just because I make mistakes some of the time, it does not mean that I am completely stupid’. You see our labels often distort and influence too much of our reality. Stupid is a generalizing word, you look through it as if it applies to everything. But no-one could possibly be stupid or bad or a failure at everything that they do all of the time. Developing a positive vocabulary is what makes people happy.

Your labels need to be kind. What makes people happy are empowering labels that are still realistic. Beating yourself or other people down just sets everyone back several steps. They must be kind because your labels become part of your identity. Be very careful of the labels you accept, the labels you reject and your definition behind the labels you use.

To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,

Aleks Srbinoski

Therefore, in a two person interaction, if one person is showing deep sadness and the other person is moderately joyful, the sad person will have greater influence over the interaction at least in the beginning and will bring the emotion of the joyful person down towards sadness. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing if the joyful person understands that he or she can still positively influence the emotions and motivation of the other person.

By coming down to that person’s emotion, the joyful person has a better opportunity to understand and empathize with that person’s emotion. As a result of this, the sad person may begin to feel better and as the sad person begins to feel better the joyful person may then begin to take the lead and bring the emotion and motivation of the sad person up towards a more positive feeling.

Humans are social creatures and the more positive our social interactions the better we feel. In our brain we have what neuroscientists call mirror neurons, and basically what they are there to do is help us tune into and copy the emotion of someone else so we can better understand them. As we do that, we loop with each other’s emotion and the emotion builds in intensity. We also often then speak of similar ideas and concepts.

People often unconsciously reduce the intensity of their positive emotion and motivation in order to attune with the negative emotions of someone who has a higher status. However, it is not your status but the strength of the emotion you choose to generate that will determine your own moods and how you influence others.

Even if have a supervisor who is often angry or stressed, it does not have to influence your mood. In an interaction with him or her, if you displayed an even stronger level of calm or excitement for example, you would be likely to influence them and reduce the intensity of their emotion even though they have the higher status.

Unfortunately though, this is rare, as most people unconsciously attune to the emotion and motivational states of the person with the higher status, rather than deciding to empathize with the person if it is possible and then lead them to a more positive emotion. At any point in an interaction, you are either leading or being led. If you are being led, make sure it is towards an emotional place you are willing to go.

To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,

Aleks Srbinoski

If there is a fire, naturally because there is danger, everyone is going to feel fear. If one person begins to panic, everyone else’s level of fear is going to increase as the panicking person is leading the group with the strongest emotion. In this situation, panic is going to equal disaster as when you are gripped with a negative emotion you can not think clearly.

In order to avert disaster, a member of the group needs to generate an even more intense positive emotion such as confidence or determination and lead the group. The new emotional leader would need to show the panicking person and the rest of the group that they are intensely confident and will now be leading the group. This will then reduce the level of fear in the group and increase confidence as the group attunes to the new leader.

This of course will not eliminate the fear, as fear is an appropriate emotion in this situation. The confident leader will also still be afraid, it is just that they have decided to become even more intensely confident and determined to find safety. That is why, in order to lead others, the higher-status fire-fighter must manage his or her own fear and maintain confidence.

If the fire-fighter begins to panic, unless someone else is somehow able to generate an even stronger level of a positive emotion, the group is likely to have no chance of averting disaster.

So if the stronger emotion leads the interaction, the emotions you consistently and intensely generate is going to influence how others perceive and respond to you. If you are happy, other people around you will become happier. If you are generous, other people around you will become more generous, and if you are irritable other people around you will become more irritable as they naturally attune to your emotional leadership.

That is why in the long term, consistently happy people begin to maintain relationships with other consistently happy people and consistently sad people maintain relationships with other consistently sad people, or not at all because others are finding it hard to relate to them. I’m sure at some point in your life you have been to a party. Who is more influential, who do you want to speak to more, the smiling bubbly person at the centre of it all, or the angry person in the corner. From those two people, who would you rather be?

To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,

Aleks Srbinoski

The only real difference between eustress and distress is the psychological interpretation you give to the feelings and sensations that you have.

Let me explain, the level of stress you feel is basically related to the level of physiological arousal you have, or in more simple terms, the intensity of the sensations that you feel in your body.

When you feel stress, some of the common symptoms are as follows:

Increased heart rate
Shorter breaths
Hot or cold flushes
Sweatiness
Churning in the stomach

Now this is the interesting part, it is not the feeling of these sensations that is the problem, but the interpretation you give to these sensations. In other words, when you feel these sensations, what does it mean to you?

Commonly, people interpret these sensations in a way to make them feel distressed. They start thinking things along the line of ‘these feelings are making me nervous, and I’m going to fail, I can’t cope, I wish they would just go away’.

But, what if you knew the reason for these sensations and gave them a different interpretation?

What if you realized that these sensations are part of your bodies natural mechanism to prepare you for action? What if instead of trying to get rid of these sensations, you accepted them and interpreted them as preparation signals. What if you could actually got excited about feeling these sensations?

Well, you can, and the best part is, when you accept them and even get excited about having them, then the whole game changes.

Let’s use an example.

Public Speaking: Many people get all those sensations and failure thoughts when they know they have to speak.

But everyone gets those feelings, it’s completely normal and natural. So what makes the difference between a successful and unsuccessful speaker.

Acceptance and an interpretation of preparedness.

The more successful people when it comes to performing, accept those feelings and interpret them as their bodies natural preparation response.

The kind of thoughts this person may have are ‘my heart is beating faster that means I’m getting ready, and that feeling in my stomach is that of excitement, and the sweat I feel is my natural response to keep me at the right temperature so I can perform at my absolute best’. When you interpret in this manner, the arousal you feel becomes positive eustress and this is what leads to peak performance and stress management.

To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,

Aleks Srbinoski

So what does changing the environment mean? Think of it this way, all your habits are more likely to occur in some environments and less likely to occur in others. Let’s use an example, drinking alcohol.

For most people, they are highly unlikely to drink alcohol at work, and are even less likely to drink alcohol at the gym. People are generally more likely to drink alcohol at a bar or after dinner at home.

The reason for this is because of your previous experiences. Unless you are doing something very new, your patterns of behavior will be based on how you have acted in similar environments in the past. If every time you go to a bar, you have a drink, then you are very likely to keep doing that, and if every time you go to the gym you don’t have a drink, then you are likely to keep doing that too.

Understanding this very simple principle, let’s assume that you want reduce or eliminate your drinking. Examining when you drink, you find out that you most often drink after dinner on work nights.

The question is how do you change this habit from an environmental perspective? First of all, you need to figure out in as much detail as possible the pattern that you have. You start observing yourself for a week and this is what you find.

You usually eat dinner between 7:30 to 8:00pm and at dinner you sit at the left side of the table. Once you finish you open the wine, pour it, take the glass and bottle and go to a particular arm chair to watch TV and drink.

So what you can do now is make as many changes to this procedure as possible. First of all, you may want to change the time you have dinner. You may also want to sit at a different spot at the table. Instead of wine, you place on the table a different drink and after dinner either sit in a different chair to watch tv or better yet, you do something completely different, like reading in a different room, or even better than that, go somewhere where you are very unlikely to drink like the gym.

The more you change the procedure the less triggers to drink you will feel and the easier it is to do something else. After a while, this becomes a new habit, one that is set up to be completely different to the old habit.

Let’s do another very quick example. In this example you want to stop procrastinating in the first hour of work each morning. Normally you go in, have a chat with a couple of people, make a coffee, have a quick look at the paper and then check your emails. Before you know it, 90 minutes have passed and you haven’t done anything useful.

The new procedure could be, come into work from a different entrance and only say hello to the people you come across. Have a piece of fruit to snack on in the morning at your desk, avoid looking at the paper and start your day with priority work that does not require the internet.

The more you change the environmental procedure, the better chance you have of crafting better habits and eliminating negative habits.

To your Success and Fulfilling Happiness,

Aleks Srbinoski