This article offers some proven practices to enhance your life and career results. Following these practices will expand your current reality. They will activate new learning and move you to elevate to your next level of success.

1.	I invite you to look back five years ago. Notice where you were and what you were doing. What had you accomplished and what did you want to accomplish? Now look to today and compare what exists in your life to now to what existed in your life then. Acknowledge how far you have come and all you have learned. Notice how you have changed or not. Notice your new levels of awareness and your personal growth or not. Stop to celebrate yourself, your failures and breakthroughs. Each has provided fuel and taught you to expand and elevate your life or has kept you stuck. Each experience presented you with a choice that brought you along the path you walk today. You have the ability to source your life. You have power beyond your awareness. You are capable of creating whatever you desire. It is only a choice away.
2.	Discover where you want to be in the next one, three years and five years. Believe that anything is possible for you. It only waits to be identified and created. Empower yourself to start knocking on this door to your intentions. Knock loudly! Knock with gusto! And, knock with the intention you will get the answers. You have the ability to put your intentions into action. Intentions are the stars that guide your ship through the night to your desired destination. Name your intentions and be as specific as possible.
3.	Imagine how you are going to get to the intended creation. See yourself manifesting your desires, vision, purpose, and goals. The HOW of getting to your intention is minor compared to your true desire for the intention. The HOW begins to happen automatically once your intention has been recognized and identified. However, action is the cause of all creation. You must identify a course of action and begin. If you don’t know exactly how you will get there, don’t let that stop you. It doesn’t have to be the exact course that will get you there. You just need an idea.
4.	Identify obstacles that may be getting in the way of manifesting your intentions. This is a tricky step because many obstacles are perceptions not founded in reality. The reality is they are only habits, fears, rules and beliefs that exist in your mind to hold you back. Fear is a biological mechanism for preventing us from being hurt. Most of the time when we experience fear, the only hurt comes from the meaning we may attach to an outcome. Unless you are shackled, no one is holding you back but you. Make a list of perceived obstacles. A good coaching alliance will help further your agenda by achieving clarity and stepping out of your fears and into action. A professional coach will support you and your vision while you change, grow, transform, breakdown and breakthrough.
5.	Begin to act deliberately from a deep sense of inner calm. So calm that, to those around you, you may seem slow to react. In fact, you won’t react. You will respond from authentic, desired intentions within. You will not be reacting with emotions triggered by a situation or person. You will respond on a moment by moment basis from your desired intentions, values, and vision. You will respond in truth from inside, from the internal authentic YOU! Be committed to your highest good. Deliberately practice extreme self-care so you can effortlessly manifest your intentional goals.
6.	Develop a pace that works for you. Periodically withdraw and recharge. Take steps to eliminate clutter, noise, distractions, and people from your life who drain your energy. Commit to gauging your success, not by how much you get done, but by how much you give in a day. Over-respond to every event and tolerate nothing that interferes with you operating at your highest good. Remember, to love thy neighbor as thyself, you must first love and care for yourself. Then service is effortless. It is a flow of love, time, and spirit so powerful within yourself that it naturally spills over onto others. You will grow when you can serve others effortlessly. First, get in relationship with yourself.
7.	Embrace structure in your life as the foundation of freedom. It is through our actions and choices that our destiny is shaped. Sitting on a lotus blossom and contemplating action is different from embracing action from a state of practiced present. Live in the moment. Practice calm response to people, places and things. Live with intention. Remember that consistent, focused action is the cause of creation.
8.	Remember that effective, intention based businesses and lives are not lived necessarily by “smarter” or more “talented” people. They are lived by disciplined, centered, choice making people who overcome apathy, doubt, or fear through their will to live their desired intentions and to persist in their dream to create what they believe. They are courageous people who embrace change even when there is great emotional and physical pain with it. They get the assistance and support they need to find their focus, set their intentions, know their capacities and stretch their limits.
9.	Let go of your attachments to all outcomes. Just HOLD your intentions; know the outcomes will be exactly as they should be. Stay in the moment. Stay on purpose, by doing what you know is in alignment with your intended desires. You will move freely onto the freeway of exciting surprises, abundant outcomes, happier working relationships and more faith in your abilities to manifest your intentions. Make “letting go” a joyous act, not a personal sacrifice. Like wildflower seeds thrown from your hand, into the wind, to take down root and sprout into beautiful results.... So you will lay down your goals and then throw them like wild flowers into the wind.
10.	Know that coaching works! It empowers new thinking, new relationships, and new business practices. Coaching helps people discover new opportunities to grow and change with the times. Coaches help clients get on a fast track to success by encouraging clients to expand, grow, transform and to live a richer, well-intended life. And, as you become a great leader in your life, you influence others. Everything is possible for you. All you have to do is show up for yourself, practice the steps above and when your days are complete you will feel a sense of a life well lived. You will have emerged and created a business and a life that is an example to mankind. An example of authentic, integrity based leadership of yourself, your family, and your business. And, you will leave a contribution to mankind through your willingness to be what you say you believe!!!

Warm wishes, Kathleen Spike

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Kathleen Spike is a Master Certified Personal and Professional Coach and the founder of Coaching Works, Inc., a driving force building the confidence, business and profit of determined individuals and businesses. You can learn more about Coaching Works, Inc. at: www.spikebizcoach.com

© 1999, 2000 Kathleen Spike and Coaching Works, Inc.

Kathleen Spike, CEO, MCC
Coaching Works, Inc.
www.spikebizcoach.com
[email protected]
503-417-1895