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Since this week is Halloween, I wanted to give you a little scare.  

Last Saturday morning at 6 a.m., my brother started the Javelina Jundred, which is a 100-mile race through the Arizona desert.  He ran all day and finished the race just after midnight at 12:22.  When he finished, he had run for over eighteen hours straight.

Pretty scary, right?

The whole reason he signed up and trained and raced was because he wanted to. He wanted to see what he was capable of.  He wanted to see how much pain he could endure.  He wanted to see where his limits were.  (He hasn't found them yet.)

I coach a lot of people who want things in their lives.  But then they come up against the universal reality...it's hard.  It's always hard.  

We want to get up early.  And it's hard.

We want to eat right.  And it's hard.

We want to love difficult people.  And it's hard.

We want to live our dreams.  And it's hard.

What if you didn't...

As you probably know, I was trained as a life coach at The Life Coach School.  The founder of the school, Brooke Castillo, developed a way of explaining how the world works and how we get all the results in our lives.  She called it, "The Model."

In a nutshell, the model says:

     > we have thoughts that create our feelings

     > these feelings fuel our actions

     > our actions accumulate to give us a result.

The model allows you to see that you are never at the unwitting effect of your life or the people in it.  You are actually creating your life with the thoughts you think.  And every result in your life is there because you first had a thought.

Last weekend I went to the "Modelthon" in Dallas.  I got to see Brooke coaching real people with real problems.  She's beautiful and funny and smart.  

But what I really got to see was the model in action—applied over and over...

Did you see over the weekend that Eliud Kipchoge broke the 2-hour marathon barrier?  That means he ran 4:34 minute-miles for 26.2 miles to become the very first human to run the distance under two hours.

Before the race he said, "I don't know where the limits are, but I would like to go there."

I think, for each of us, there is a desire to push past our current limits—we'd all like to see what's really possible for us.

The trouble is, out where the edge of our limits are, it is scary and painful.  And we each come equipped with a human brain that naturally avoids anything scary and painful. 

What Kipchoge did on Friday was uncomfortable, it was demanding, it was even probably excruciating.  And I am certain that his brain vehemently resisted both the pace and the length of what he asked his body to do, all the way through.

But he did it anyway.

And that is the secret for anyone who wants "to go there."

See, the key to reaching past your personal limits...

Traditionally when we think about our goals, we think about the end.  We imagine the achievement and how incredible we will feel when we get there.

The beginning is also fun.  When we set the goal, we are often excited, motivated, and energized.

Setting the goal and reaching the goal both feel pretty awesome.

But in the middle of the goal, it doesn't feel exciting.  It doesn't feel incredible. It actually feels kind of terrible. 

And most of the time, we think that something has gone wrong.

We think, "I didn't know it was going to be like this.  I didn't know it was going to feel this bad along the way."  From the excitement of the beginning and our idealized view of the end, it's easy to gloss over that long, painful middle part.

This happened to me this week.  I finished my coach training ("Yea! This feels so good!") only to realize that I'm only halfway to my goal.  The entrepreneurial part of my program begins...

My daughter has been in China for the last month, teaching English to school children.  On Saturday morning she called us saying that she had been at the police station all day, being interrogated for hours.

Yesterday, she spent 19 hours there again.

They told her that she can't teach any more and she may need to come home.

She was heartbroken.

To be clear, she is feeling heartbroken, and disappointed, and sad, because of her thoughts.  

And that's okay.  That's exactly as it should be.  She needs to be sad right now.  We are sad for her as well.

When we understand that our thoughts are creating all our feelings, we often think that this means we don't ever have to be sad.  We can just choose different thoughts and feel happy all the time.

But this isn't what we really want.  There are times when we want to be sad and think thoughts that create disappointment and heartbreak.

Our power comes from knowing that we created the sad—not the...

When the people in our lives are suffering, we want to fix things.  We want to control their experiences, change their circumstances, and help them find different thoughts and feelings so they can feel better.

However, this is only because we suffer when we see others suffer.  In many ways we want them to feel better so that we can feel better.

As humans, we think we know what's best for others.  We think if we can change the way they are thinking and feeling, they can have less suffering.

But while this may feel compassionate, it isn't.  And it doesn't allow us to access the power of divine love.

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about what to do when others are suffering and how to find compassion and peace and love without wanting to get in and change other people’s models or circumstances—even when they include pain and suffering.

These ideas can transform the way we love and the way we show up around the other people in our lives when they...

Our brains are programmed to notice problems in order to ensure our survival.  So they are always on the lookout for the ways we don't have enough—sometimes all we can see is our lack and deficiency.

It seems like there is never enough time or money or energy or resources.  We think our lives are less somehow and we know that we will never personally measure up and be "enough."

It turns out that lack and deficiency in any area of our lives is only a thought. It's only an opinion and it's just one way of seeing the world.  We just happen to think these thoughts are true!  This is because our brain believes two things:

1.  Resources are finite and there is never enough

2.  More is always better

But what if we're wrong about both of these things?  What if we've always had more than enough, an abundance of everything we need and we just haven't recognized this truth?  

Abundance is totally available to every one of us, no matter our...

When we learn that our thoughts are creating our feelings and giving us all the results in our lives, we sometimes use this new awareness against ourselves.

While thought work is awesome and powerful and life-changing, there are several things to keep in mind when you do the work to change your thoughts and create what you want in your life:

1. Thought work is not there to stop us from having thoughts.

2. Thought work is not there to use against yourself.

3. Thought work is not always comfortable.

4. Thought work is not there so we can feel happy all the time.

5. Thought work is not for other people—it's just for us.

6. Thought work will not make you a better person.

The greatest gift we have been given is the chance to create anything we want in our life by choosing our thoughts…and that, my friends, is 100% awesome.

 For a transcript of this episode, please click this link.

Well, actually, to be fair, you are.

At some point.

But it's probably not going to happen today and it's definitely not going to happen because you have decided to put your work out into the world.  

Let me explain.

Last week my daughter had an art project that she had to do for one of her classes.  She decided to an interactive exhibit where she was the art.  She dressed in a white paint suit and as she walked around campus, she gave people the opportunity to "make their mark" with paint or marker on her "canvas."

I got a text from her that morning.  It read:  I have knots in my stomach..is this a dumb idea?

I assured it her it was a brilliant idea.  I reminded her that her brain was just freaking out because it thought it was going to die.  

Later in the week, I published my first Facebook ad campaign.  I had knots in my stomach and I told myself that this was a very dumb idea.

Then I remembered what I told my daughter.

Everything...

Every one of us has limiting beliefs—these are thoughts that hold us back from living the life we want to live.  However, in most cases we don't know that they are holding us back or stopping us from proceeding.  

This is because each of us sees our own limiting beliefs as facts, as just "the way things are."  We have had our thoughts for so long, that they just appear to be true.

When we learn to question these long-held beliefs it allows us to take different action and get completely different results in our life.

So how do we do this?   How do we find and question the beliefs that seem true, but are really only holding us back?

These three questions can help you:

1. What would I do if I didn’t believe this?
2. What if I’m wrong about that?
3. What if this is just a story my brain made up and what if I just "forgot this" about myself?

Join me on this episode of the podcast where we talk about how to question your limiting beliefs and get the life...