Asking the Right Questions

Are you asking the right questions?  Perhaps more basically, are you asking ANY questions? Asking the right questions is critical for success in work, life and spiritual growth. As coach and holistic practitioners, it is central to our work as well.

Let’s explore why questions are so essential to living fully.

We often discuss ways to be more hopeful and live a grounded life,  one filled with joy and fulfillment.  Let’s start with a useful question: What gets in the way?

One of the signs that a person is off-course is living too much on autopilot.  That means letting the unconscious and others direct your life. It means being run by habits and routines, continually putting out fires in order to complete to-do lists ─ and starting all over again tomorrow.

Here’s another question then: How do you get out of this Groundhog Day kind of existence? How do you stop the momentum of hurry and worry and break the cycle?

In order to bring in more hope, aliveness and wisdom, pause and start to question. In other words, be aware of whether you’re just reacting and continuing on uninterrupted.

Take a breath… Explore what’s in this moment, as well as take in the big picture.

Here then are three ways to start asking good questions:

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5 Lessons from the Pandemic

The pandemic is changing our way of life. Part of this change includes experiencing multiple losses (such as health, income, freedom, emotional stability and more).

All of which is teaching us that less can be more.

Shifting more inward, the essence of things is emerging. Coming into view are five key lessons that are up for learning.  Let’s look at them now in brief.

How to Have a Fulfilling Life

To be successful is wonderful. That includes being abundant. Ultimately, you need fulfillment to be deeply satisfied, continually renewed and enriched.

Let’s examine what is fulfillment and how to “have” it. (Hint: it’s not something you can possess, and the more you try to grasp it, the more elusive it becomes.)

Fulfillment is a process, a journey. It’s finding more meaning, purpose and positive feedback in your life. It brings you to a deeper, more ever present place.

To be fulfilled, you draw from your past, hope toward the future and ground it all here right now. Let’s look at keys to your fulfillment.

Your Power

As Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius said, “The happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” We can make those thoughts soul-infused with our presence.

By monitoring your thoughts and feelings, you can create a higher set point, the internal reference on how you view the world.

The old default set point is …

The Holistic Life Coach & Healer Success & Prosperity Quiz

If you are interested in Life Coaching and Holistic Healing, learning the keys to success and prosperity is an absolute must. It’s also important to be aware of the price of missing out. As entrepreneur Chris Grosser suggests:

"Opportunities don't happen. You create them."

This is important. In our own training and work with clients and students over the last three decades, we’ve seen how easy it is to get lost in the muck of a person’s situation. This isn't a pleasant place to be. And It’s completely unnecessary.

For this, we created the Holistic Life Coach and Healer Success and Prosperity Quiz. It's an opportunity to learn 12 keys for transforming your life and realizing your true potential.

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Finding Life Purpose: How to Get On Track

How do you find your life purpose and stay on track?

At a certain point, your life calls out to you to become more. This is a deeper call, beyond self-improvement or doing more of the same just better.

How then do you get to this higher octave, where you hear and play the wonderful music in your everyday life?

Our Life Purpose Story

In his forties, Phillip started to feel a growing dissatisfaction with being an educator. He felt good about helping children in the classroom, but somehow he was missing the boat, staying in the harbor of his life.

Jane had a more severe wake-up call. She burned-out at her high-stress architect job, finally getting chronic fatigue and was unable to work full time. She felt her soul was dying.

Eventually, we both found our truer callings as healers, coaches and energy pioneers, and were fortunate enough to stay together and become stronger in the process.

At First

To get an overview, let’s briefly track the path to realizing your life purpose. At first life is about growing up into adulthood. By early adulthood you can probably take care of your own needs and maybe support a partner and family.

Going Deeper into Life’s Mysteries

When we pause a moment, look up and wake up, we realize something…  We are surrounded in a mystery, a mystery play we call “life” in general, and specifically our own life.

So first, what does it mean that life is a mystery or “life’s mysteries”? A mystery is by definition “something difficult or impossible to understand or explain.” Can we “solve” life’s mystery or is something else going on here?

For example: just 4 percent of the universe (stars, planets and galaxies) are visible. The other 96 percent hides in mysterious dark matter.  And we are only talking about the physical world, not the internal, subjective parts of ourselves. How much do we know of our own thoughts, feelings and states? How much are we aware of in any given moment?

Yes, much to consider and explore here…

Though much of the light spectrum and physical world is unknown, and much of our own internal world is also hidden, we still have clues via outcomes. What is happening externally, and what are the results, however mysteriously created. We can take stock of our mood and mindset, even if we are not sure how we arrived there. We can certainly set the stage for favorable results and get insights from the outcomes we experience.

So here are four keys to exploring the mystery of life:

Gamechanger: Living with More Joy and Ease

How do you see your life? Joyous or stressful, easy or hard; creative or monotonous? Of course life is not black and white, either/or. Yet we can choose to live more joyously and easily, as a conscious decision.

We often default into hurry and worry as a result of life’s challenges. This lends itself to a negative focus, something inherent in us, a primitive protective measure to keep us safe.

But unless we are in a truly dangerous situation, it’s not worth being on guard continuously, for that only creates undue tension and stress.

So how do you inject more joy and ease into your life? It will bring more light and lightheartedness into your life. Let us describe four keys, which – if you follow them – can be a gamechanger for the quality of your everyday life.

How to Manifest Your Dreams and Desires

All of us have dreams and desires – it’s part of being human. Our dreams and desires make us feel alive. They inspire us to grow and awaken our creative spirit. This highlights the importance of learning how to manifest your dreams and desires.

Our dreams give life meaning and provide focus for life’s journey. Oprah Winfrey put it this way:

The biggest adventure you can take is to live the life of your dreams.

What do you want? What makes your heart soar? Maybe you want more abundance, a fulfilling career, better health, supportive relationships, and more.

All of these desires are healthy. Your dreams and desires also highlight the importance of learning how to manifest. And for this, you need a plan.

Imagine …

Life: The Ultimate Stress Test

Life comes with stress, some necessary and some not. Life is the ultimate stress test. So what can you do about it?

We want to help you develop a game plan for dealing with life’s tensions. In other words, ways to pass the ultimate stress test – your life.

Ordinarily, a stress test means finding out your heart’s health by going on a treadmill or other monitoring programs. For banks, a stress test determines how well they can withstand an economic crisis.

How to Handle Stress

Are You an Introvert or Extrovert: Inner and Outer Balance

Are you an introvert or extrovert? Here are a few important questions that can reveal a lot about yourself:

Do you tend to be outgoing?

Do you feel at ease socializing and networking?

Or do you prefer study, research and productive time by yourself, interacting with small groups and one-on-one?

Or do you fall somewhere in between on the spectrum, from gregarious to private?

WHY YOUR INTROVERT OR EXTROVERT TRAIT MATTERS

Here at Awakenings Institute, we help people live fully, which includes realizing their life purpose. Part of finding out who you are and what you here to do with your life is to know yourself. As Socrates said,

“An unexamined life is not worth living.”

Social scientists consider this inner-outer balance to be a primary personality trait. You self-actualize with gaining key self-knowledge, which includes knowing how introverted or extroverted you are.

Once you know your innate tendencies, you can use them more intelligently and leverage them for your full potential.