Your Successful, Happy Future - Straight Talk From a Personal Growth Expert

As a personal growth and emotional healing expert, I understand that the path to creating a life of greater joy is a mysterious process. Each individual person will walk their own individual journey to healing, inner peace, and empowerment. A few people walk a fairly straightforward path toward their desired outcome. However, most of us loop around a curved path, taking many side roads. By doing so, we gain an understanding of our life situation and ourselves from many diverse angles.

If you fall into this common second group, you will undoubtedly experience numerous frustrations, dead ends, and setbacks in your attempts to gain a healthy, happy future. However, remember that no matter how many times you fall, get back up, and then fall again, the most important aspect to recognize is your determination to have what you want. Gaining a life of success and joy requires taking risks and having the courage to continue onward despite unforeseen challenges. Moving forward despite difficult setbacks is exactly what allows you to release previous life scripts and limiting beliefs, and put into practice new ways living.

Read on to discover some empowering "hints" which can help you tap into your true inner power and reach the success and inner peace you are looking for:

1. Practice Acceptance

Self-acceptance is a desire to see what is going on, a willingness to know, a curiosity to know what is. Self-acceptance is about facing reality head-on without judgment. It is the ability to see things as they are right now, right this moment. Acceptance is simply compassionate recognition. It is the truth that states, "This is the way things are right now. I feel frustrated in this moment." However, acceptance is also the truth that states, "Just because things are this way right now, doesn't mean that they will always be this way. I have hope and fortitude to begin again." Acceptance allows you to stop fighting with reality and instead call truce. With truce, you can reach more deeply into your inner strengths, and creatively design a new approach to build the future you desire.

2. Gain Empowerment

The reason you want to create change in your life is because you have outgrown certain beliefs, thoughts, and behaviors that once served you. You are ready to move into new experiences. Even though you might wish you could magically jump to the end of your journey and be instantly thinner, happier, or successful, your journey serves an important purpose. The path you walk from where you are now to where you want to be, including all the challenges and obstacles, is necessary for you to change your ideas about who you are and what you are capable of achieving. Through your experiences, successes, and failures, you will discover that you have the ability to grow new ideas, new beliefs, and new ways of viewing yourself and the world.

3. Develop Self-Leadership

Do you believe you can achieve success? I mean really, really, completely, with every fiber of your being, believe that you can accomplish your dream? Do you hold the vision that you can permanently achieve and maintain a successful outcome to your goal? When we begin a goal, most of us hope we can reach a positive outcome. Yet, when the first difficulty shows up, we quickly discover that deep down we don't believe that we can make our dreams come true. All kinds of internal negative beliefs rise up suggesting that you are not good enough to have what you want, or that your goal is too big, too hard, or too elusive. That is ultimately the larger purpose of your goal: to wipe out some of your painful limiting beliefs. When you reach a moment of defeat or overwhelm, take a deep breath, find your center, and then ask yourself, "What can I do right now to increase my belief in my ability to have what I want?" Once you know what that action is, follow through and allow yourself to have an immediate success.

4. Opportunity in Disguise

Recognize your challenge, obstacle, or addiction as your attempt to redirect your life in a positive direction. Challenges invite you to advance beyond what you believe yourself to be. By capturing your attention, they speak of old energies, antiquated beliefs, and outgrown realities. They show you falsely held assumptions about your abilities, worth, and things you believe to be true about the world. At your deepest core level, you want the ability to make new decisions, have freedom of response, and create a new reality that is not based on past assumptions. Facing challenges, although difficult, allows you to confront self-limiting truths. Moving through difficult challenges is how you release and clear out old issues.

5. Evaluate with Love

We all want to become more than we are. Our inborn desire is to evolve into open, self-assured, and joyful human beings. Life is a continuing process of expanding wisdom, love, and spiritual aspects of ourselves through self-awareness. We evaluate our actions, emotions, and thoughts to become aware of our current limitations and to adventure into entertaining possibilities that we might be capable of having higher thoughts, feelings, and life experiences. Learn to evaluate your actions and outcomes so that you can be free to choose differently in the future. Without looking at your actions and thoughts, you just keep repeating yourself. However, it serves no purpose to look at your life choices if you are only going to condemn yourself with the information. In order to evolve to a place where you enjoy your life, evaluation must be infused with self-love.

6. Allow Failure

There really is no such thing as failure, just as there is no such thing as being lost when driving. Sure, you may not know what street you are on; you may temporarily not know in which direction you are going, but you are not lost. Even if you end up in another state, you can still find your way back to your intended destination. If you drive long enough, you will look at the signs and figure out where you are, or you will ask for directions. There is a resource available somewhere that can tell you where you are and how to get to where you want to be. The only things you have to do are to remember where it was you were heading, maybe get a little support, and then realign yourself with the destination. Then you can drive happy again.

Failure is like being lost. Currently, in this moment, you have not yet achieved what you wanted. You get worried about the little picture, the temporary frustration, and forget to stop, get a little support, and realign with outcomes. A temporary failure doesn't mean anything other than the meaning you assign to it. In truth, it means that you now have some important information about what doesn't work. With that feedback, you can remember your destination and adjust your plan of action. Sometimes you just need to tweak your action steps, while other times you may need to completely revise your strategy. When you redefine failure as information, and you use that information to strengthen your commitment to your goal, you can relax as you set out once more to achieve your dreams.

If you're not living the life of your dreams, or getting the results you want, it's probably your beliefs holding you back. Inspirational author and personal growth expert Dr. Annette Colby, RD can help. Whether you are trying to take the pain out of life, turn difficult emotions into joy, release stress, end emotional eating, or move beyond depression, you can achieve success. Annette breaks it down step-by-step so anyone can achieve the life they are wanting to live, no matter how tough life was before. To access hundreds of content filled articles and sign up for an inspirational Loving Miracles newsletter visit www.annettecolby.com.

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