Releasing Limiting Beliefs Archives

What Rules Do You Live By?

Rules aren’t necessarily a bad thing.  We all have certain rules we live by – whether the rule is eating a healthy breakfast or starting the day with coffee, not doing business with our friends, sending out Christmas cards the day after Thanksgiving, or not bothering with Christmas cards at all … we all have rules we live by.

Some of these rules were created by us consciously, based on our own experience.

Unfortunately, most of the rules we live by are the ones we have unconsciously adopted from our environment – from our family, the school system, a favorite teacher, our industry, and the media.

There’s nothing wrong with any rule, consciously chosen or unconsciously adopted … unless, of course, the rule is in direct opposition to what we want to create!

If you have an unconscious rule that you can only make money when you work hard, for example, you will always limit your income … because there are limits to the amount of “hard” work you can tolerate.

If you have an unconscious rule about how much income is acceptable, possible, or even appropriate … then that’s the income level you’ll get stuck at.  Frequently, it’s the highest income level our parents ever achieved.

If you have an unconscious rule that you can only focus on love OR money, your income will suffer whenever you engage in a romantic relationship, but will go up when you’re single and focused on your business.

Because you unconsciously resonate to these rules, you attract situations that affirm them over and over again, thus strengthening the rule.

Of course, you may also have some fabulously helpful unconscious rules playing out in the background of your subconscious mind.  Maybe you expect help and support from others.  Maybe you expect to be smart enough to figure out anything.

Rules are actually a good thing, when they are not in conflict to what we want.  Rules allow us to manage a great deal of our lives on auto-pilot.  We don’t have to think about every little decision in every situation.  We say “please” and “thank you” automatically.  We brush our teeth every morning.  We drive our car without having to invest much thought into the process.

Of course, when our rules state the opposite of our Soul’s Divine self-expression and our conscious creative desire, we immediately experience conflict.  The conflict actually begins within us.  Vibrationally, our unconscious and conscious mind are in dissonance.  Conflicting vibrational qualities of thought may create a big mess, or cancel each other out completely.  The end result is that we can’t conceive of the thoughts that would become the actions that will create our desires.  We just go blank.  Externally, we manifest not much of anything at all.

Of course, the first step to repatterning the rules of our unconscious mind is to become aware of them.  It’s not hard to do, if we’re willing to look at the results we consistently create in our own lives.

Our rules are actually written, clear as day, in our circumstances.  Our rules are obvious within the areas in which we’re stuck, or unwilling to change, or have surrendered into tolerance.

But we MUST be willing to open our eyes and look!

What do you keep creating, over and over?

What’s not changing?

Blessings,
Andrrea

How To Acquire Discipline

A small miracle happened while I was on vacation.  I worked out, all by myself.  And I don’t mean a leisurely stroll on the treadmill … I mean I worked out HARD.  Two hours later, and my arms still had that deliciously tired feeling that mean I did some good.

Now, why is this a miracle?  Because I used to be terrible at working out!  For years, I went to the gym, spent about twenty minutes on a treadmill, and called it a day.  I did not push myself.  I barely broke a sweat.

The truth is, I lacked discipline.

Last December, I decided I had neglected my body enough, and hired a personal trainer.  I actually have her listed in my phone as the “Queen of Pain.”  After my first workout with her, I had trouble walking for a full three days.  The only reason I stuck with it is that she insists on first-time clients making a financial commitment to twelve sessions. (Entrepreneurs take notice … she’s VERY smart to do this!)

Now that it’s March, I’ve spent twenty-five hours with my trainer.  I just re-upped to my third twelve-session series.  But while on vacation, I discovered the real gift (besides WAY more upper-body strength).

I have discipline.

I pushed myself past my comfort zone.  I stuck to my own workout plan, even when it was painful. And I didn’t need someone standing over me, telling me what to do.

Discipline is not something we’re born with.  It’s not something we either have or don’t have.  It’s something we ACQUIRE.  And the process of acquiring discipline usually sucks.

Whether we are starting a business or starting a new workout regimen … we start by doing something completely outside of our comfort zone.  It’s painful.  It’s labor-intensive.  It’s mentally, emotionally, physically fatiguing.  We don’t enjoy it … not at all.  The rewards come later – much later, when we realize that what once required a herculean amount of willpower has become second-nature.

We expect this when we start working out.

Why is it that when we embark on stepping further into our Divine Soul Purpose, we expect it to feel good?  Why is it, for example, that when we take our business to the next level, we want to feel motivated, inspired?  And why is it that we insist that, when things get hard and uncomfortable, we’re on the wrong path?

It’s like doing ten crunches and, when it starts to burn, we announce that core strength is just not “our thing.”  It’s not aligned to who we “truly” are.  Or we rationalize that we accept our abs the way they are.

Take sales, for example.  NOTHING makes highly conscious entrepreneurs squirmier and more uncomfortable.  Nothing is more difficult than showing up to a prospect on the phone and asking them for their hard-earned cash, up close, one-on-one, facing the possible burn of rejection, the soreness of a “no.”

You’d be stunned how many entrepreneurs are willing to insist that one-on-one sales conversations are not “their thing” when they’ve talked to less than ten or twenty prospects.

Last year, I did three live events.  Before the first one, I honestly hated my life.  The second one took a lot out of me.  The third was still pretty stressful and consumed my attention for most of two months.  It was last month, when I hosted a retreat for about forty people in Dallas, that I realized organizing live events had become easy.  It’s not that they are less labor-intensive.  But my mind has learned the discipline of this level of organization and planning.

If you want new results in ANY area of your life … you’re going to have to acquire discipline.  Because new results require new actions.

It’s going to be very, very, very uncomfortable.

It’s also going to be very, very worth it.

To your infinite abundance,
Andrrea

The WORST Question To Ask When You Are Stuck

There is a truly terrible, completely self-defeating question that we often ask ourselves when we are stuck.

And that question is “Why?”

This question can take a few different forms:

“Why am I stuck?”
“Why am I not taking action?”
“What’s in my way?”
“Why can’t I see my path clearly before me?”
“What’s stopping me from doing this?”

These questions inevitably focus us on THE PROBLEM.  And since, through the very nature of this question, we’ve told ourselves that there IS, indeed, a problem, our mind will now take it upon itself to go and find us the problem.

Even if there was no problem at all.

If you ask yourself “why” you’re stuck, then your mind is hard-wired to come up with a “reason” for the stuck-ness.  And because your mind is also very invested in being right, your reason for being stuck will sound extremely valid and important.

We might come up with issues from our childhood.
We might come up with past-life events that are blocking us today.
We might come up with problems in our relationships, our business, our health.

Whatever we come up with … we will invariably now address the problem, since it is obviously keeping us stuck.

The thing is … now we’re still stuck, but feeling productive because we’ve given ourselves a problem to solve.

In other words, we’ve given ourselves the best, most reasonable excuse in the world to stay exactly where we are.  We’ve given ourselves a problem to solve before we can move forward.  Convenient, right?

All because we asked ourselves “why.”

The real answer is actually always the same.

We’re stuck because we are not congruent to what we really want.  If we’re doing what we really want (vs. what we think we should want, or what we think we can have, or what we think would please others, etc.) we don’t have issues with stuckness or indecision or inaction.

What do you really want?  What do you want so badly that it will get you off the couch, out of your comfort zone, and into the unknown?

To your infinite abundance,
Andrrea Hess

If You Dream It, Can You REALLY Do It?

Our culture has become very attached to the idea that our dreams will come true, if we’re willing to work hard and pursue them.  But obviously not everyone is going to become the next Britney Spears, Angelina Jolie, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Anthony Robbins, Deepak Chopra, or Oprah.

You may have heard that if you dream it, you can do it.

Then why does the pursuit of their dreams leave so many people struggling?  Is it just a matter or perseverance, of working harder, or putting in even more time, more effort?

I’ve frequently said that when our Soul inspires us with a desire, that this desire MUST be achievable.  Our Soul will NOT dangle an unattainable carrot in front of us!

But that doesn’t mean that all of our desires are attainable!  A great many of our desires have a very different origin, and they are not MEANT for us to attain.  They are most definitely of value … but not the way we think.

Many of our desires are not Soul-inspired at all.  Many of our desires are inspired by a deep egoic need, arising from old wounds held at the level of the subconscious.  Our desires may come from a need for recognition, a need for love, a need for acknowledgement, a need for security, a need to be deserving.

There IS value in these desires.  These desires don’t show us our Soul’s purpose or Divine self-expression.  Desires that arise from a wounded ego show us where we need to HEAL.

A desire that arises out of need can only reinforce that need.  A desire that comes from a wounded ego will forever have us chasing after that elusive SOMEthing that we, deep down, feel that we are lacking.  Of course, this process serves us.  Eventually, this need and lack within us becomes so reinforced that we MUST address it, and work on our self-healing.

Desire inspired by the Soul, on the other hand, is simply about our Soul wanting to experience itself.  Our Soul doesn’t want to be more than it is, or be different, or be special.  Our Soul already knows that it is complete and perfect.  Our Soul isn’t needy.  It is simply showing us what it would mean to be our Selves, what it would mean for our Divinity to be expressed into our humanity.

Serious problems arise when we take desire based on egoic need and wounding, and confuse them with our Soul Purpose.  If we’re lucky, we eventually figure out the difference … but often not until we’ve spent years of effort and money chasing our healing, and thinking we were trying to express our Divine Gifts.

BOTH paths are intertwined – doing our Soul Purpose is not possible without also engaging in our self-healing.  But the two paths can also become hopelessly muddy in their enmeshment.  We can end up so confused between these two types of desires that we stall our progress.  We don’t heal, and we don’t do our Purpose, and we experience nothing but lack.

Knowing the difference between which desire is inspired by the ego’s need for healing, and which desire is inspired by the Soul’s authentic self-expression is KEY to creating BOTH wholeness and abundance.

So join me for my new training on Wednesday, January 30th at 4 p.m. Pacific / 7 p.m. Eastern called “Self-Healing On Your Path Into Purpose.”  You can register here.

To your infinite, Soul-inspired abundance,
Andrrea Hess

How To Eradicate Financial Insecurity …

There’s an alarming pattern I’ve recently noticed amongst highly conscious service providers.  It’s a pattern that forever leaves us feeling financially insecure AND seriously limits our ability to expand our income.

Here’s how it all unfolds.

We start doing the work we love by telling a few friends and acquaintances about what we do.  Friends and acquaintances start referring people THEY know to us – for healing, for coaching, for readings, for professional services.

And hurray – we have clients!!!

Our clients refer more clients.

Sounds great, right?  A referral-based business  with no real marketing or – God forbid! – selling required.  Dreamy, isn’t it?

Wait, there’s more.

We don’t really know why these referral clients come to us.  In fact, THEY often don’t even know!  They just came because so-and-so told them they had a great experience.  “You have GOT to see this lady – I felt great.”

Over time, our clients ask us for new services – classes, perhaps, or workshops, or group experiences.  As best we can, we give them what they want.

Still sounds great, right?

Except we still don’t know how to explain what we do.  We don’t know why our clients come to us.  And we hesitate to define ourselves more clearly at this point – because we’re sure we’re going to lose at least some clients, since they’re all coming to us for mysterious and varied reasons.

So while we’d love to increase our business, we don’t know how.  Heck, we don’t even know how our clients are finding us now … so how can we go about expanding a non-existent marketing funnel?

No, instead we cross our fingers every month and hope that the referrals continue.  We increase our rates a bit, hoping that the referrals continue.  We might offer a new program or service, hoping that it appeals to enough of our existing clientele.

That’s an awful lot of HOPE that we’re basing our income on!

It’s an income stream that is RUN BY OUR CLIENTS, not by us.

I call this a reactive business – we react to what other people want, or seem to want, from us.  It is a business based on our perception of other people’s wants and needs.

It makes us terribly insecure, because we are forever in our client’s business!!!  We wonder what THEY want, what THEY need, whether THEY will buy.  And we can’t know for sure, can we?

Meanwhile, the entire process through which clients come to us in the first place remains mysterious.  We can’t expand it, because we didn’t create a real process to begin with.

We find ourselves at the mercy of a business that seems to be happening to us – because we never consciously decided what to sell, we never consciously created a method that converts prospects into paying clients, and we haven’t identified our ideal client – which means we don’t know where to even find prospects!

Sure, we can do okay in this business for a while.

But we will never feel financially safe and abundant, because we are limited until we step into our role as conscious CREATOR.

If you don’t know where your clients are coming from, or why they’re buying what you offer, then you can’t make money at will.  Money happens to you, in some months more than others.  You aren’t defining yourself or your work at all, because each single referral will position you based on THEIR experience of you.  And so each client comes to you with a different idea of what you do.

Financial freedom isn’t in having money.  Financial freedom is knowing that you can MAKE money at WILL.

I know that is seems so lovely and spiritual – effortlessly “attracting” clients who come to you for their own unique reasons.  Marketing and selling, in contrast, seems so … mundane, right?  So much “less spiritual?”

A business that is created by your clients can work … for a while.  But even while it’s working, you will feel financially insecure.  And that will limit you, and you will make choices from that place of limitation, which creates more limitation.

I’m not against referrals by any means! Referrals are awesome – but YOU still have to determine who you serve, and what you offer.  When you’ve clearly defined yourself, the clients that refer to you actually do so more powerfully, specifically, and effectively … because THEY can express who you are – not how THEY experienced you.

CREATE your income stream consciously.  This is how we eradicate financial insecurity … by knowing exactly HOW we create our income.  Don’t just let it happen to you – because not taking responsibility for how you generate income now will lead to disempowerment down the road.

Blessings,
Andrrea

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