A Cup of Caroll

September 26, 2021

I had planned to write a new blog this week, but it turns out my weekend will be extra busy with cleaning out the LAST items from the garage at our old house (Christmas decorations – almost time for those!) and moving them to our new garage, so I decided to re-post a lightly-edited blog I enjoyed writing this time last year.

It’s timely, too, because Survivor just launched its 41^st season this week, after a year’s hiatus due to COVID. Whether you are a fan or have never watched, I think the game provides us with useful lessons on how to not just survive in life, but to triumph. I hope you enjoy it (again)!

September 19, 2020

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” – Theodore Roosevelt

“Believe you can and your halfway there.” – Theodore Roosevelt

This summer, without Disneyland or our “dinner and a movie” date nights out to entertain us, Rick and I enjoyed our own film and television festival at home.  My ultimate escape show is Survivor and all 40 seasons are available for streaming on CBS! Over the years, I’ve seen about half of the 13-show seasons, but it was a whole NEW experience consuming a whole season every couple of weeks.

I enjoyed the mental and emotional escape of living (virtually) on a literal “desert island” with some of my fan favorite “Castaways,” (Boston Rob, Tyson, Cochran and Sandra, to name a few). But I was surprised to discover that by watching a whole season unfold quickly, and then watching some of the same players compete in multiple seasons, I could discern patterns in the game that taught me some valuable lessons about what makes someone a “Winner” in pursuing any Big Goal. (The goal of the show contestants, of course, is to be voted the Sole Survivor and awarded $1 million dollars at the end by those who had been their opponents, acknowledging that they were the BEST at “Outwitting, Outplaying and Outlasting” 19 other competitors.)

Here are five major Success Lessons I gleaned from watching Survivor. I think you, too, will find them useful to remember as you pursue any Big Goal you REALLY want to achieve — particularly if your goal seems daunting or far-fetched.

LESSON #1: Do You.

Be yourself.  Don’t play someone else’s game.  Use your own unique strengths and passions to excel.  The challenges that all 20 Survivors must compete in are purposely varied, so that nobody has an advantage in every one.  Some challenges call for physical strength, some call for persistence and physical endurance. Some require balance and dexterity. And some call on mental acuity (like solving puzzles – NOT my strength!) In some seasons, the smaller, less-coordinated and downright “geeky” players have triumphed, both through the challenges and through playing a great “Social Game.”  You don’t have to match someone else’s strengths to win; you just have to play to your own.  

LESSON #2: Build Alliances

The game of Survivor mirrors real life in the sense that nobody wins the game all by themselves.  The only way to make it to the end is to team up with other players in “alliances,” supporting and protecting each other and banding together to vote other people off.  Survivor proves that multiple heads ARE better than one and someone needs to have your back if you want to reach the top.  Winners in the game and in life seek out people they trust, and they nurture those relationships built on mutual respect and reward. In Survivor “trust” is never absolute, but that also highlights the fact that you can’t get what you REALLY want in life without taking some RISKS.  You have to go out on a limb and trust others and your own gut in order to succeed.

LESSON #3: Maintain Your Integrity

Even though some deception is required to win Survivor (like keeping your Hidden Immunity Idol to yourself), those players who regularly backstab and betray the trust of their alliances almost never win the game.  They may get to the “final three,” but the jury of their peers who became collateral damage along the way invariably award the $1 Million prize to a competitor who played smart, but with a decent amount of integrity and no personal vindictiveness.  Fans may find evil-doers entertaining, but they rarely win the game of Survivor or life. (Just ask Russell Hantz, one of the Survivor “Villains” who played three times, each time, lying, conniving and betraying others — and lost each time. He ended up divorced and with a mess of personal problems later, too.)  Win-At-All-Costs is not a formula for success in life OR showbusiness.

LESSON #4: Be flexible

As you begin pursuing your Big Goal, you will rarely know the “How” that will eventually lead you to success. Life takes twists and turns along the way and you must be flexible and always ready to seize serendipitous opportunities when they appear.  Survivor winners are all great at pivoting. Sometimes they must switch alliances in mid-stream when their allies are voted off.  They don’t fight reality; they go with the flow and deal with what’s so, not what they wish  were true.  You can’t be attached to your Ego’s plan when God/The Universe suddenly presents you with a “Hidden Immunity Idol” or chance to make a “Big Move.”  You have to just grab a bat and swing for the fences.

LESSON #5: Believe in yourself and commit to your dream

I think this is far and away the MOST important attribute for anyone competing on Survivor or pursuing a Big Goal in life, especially if the odds seem stacked against them.  After spending a grueling 39 days with little food, lots of physical challenges and exposure to the elements, you would expect everyone to be mentally, emotionally and physically depleted and ready to quit. But the winners NEVER give in to fatigue or give up when the odds seem stacked against them. 

At that point, their competition realizes they are a threat and are looking for an opportunity to vote them out. The future winners know that, but they don’t let it rattle them.  They focus on the final Immunity Challenge like it is the ONLY thing that matters, and they usually win it. They dig down deep, believe in themselves and never, ever consider quitting.  When you have obstacles in your path and not a lot of support from the outside world, you have to decide if you are going to stay 100% committed to your Big Goal or are going to fold.  Winners play to the very end.

P.S. Don’t think that failure never happens to Survivor winners. It absolutely does…just like it does for all of us in real life.  Many of the Fan Favorites play the grueling game two or three different seasons, often years apart, before they ultimately win. But they learn something about themselves and how to play the game each time. Then they regroup and start fresh, applying that hard-won knowledge until they reach their Ultimate Goal of becoming the Sole Survivor.  And how super-sweet that triumph is!

COACHING SUCCESS

“Just like a runner trains for a marathon, leaders need training, as well as an outlet and ability to clear their struggles, work through challenges, create solutions, practice ideas and be reminded what their passion and reason to be leading are.  Caroll does all this for me. Her coaching is marathon training for the brain.” – Charity A., accounting firm owner

How are you doing on manifesting YOUR Big Goals?  Are you going slower than you would like and unsure of just what is holding you back from the success you deserve? For expert help clarifying your personal and professional goals and some actionable advice for reaching them with speed and ease, please request a F*R*E*E*, no-obligation hour of Success Breakthrough Coaching!  Slots are limited, so please grab one while they last: www.calendly.com/carollschwartz/60min Or contact me with any questions and/or sign up to receive the blog directly at: caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com

September 19, 2021

“Our resistance to feeling good is what blocks the good that we want to attract.  The moment we release that resistance and let ourselves feel good, then everything we truly desire begins to come to us naturally.” – Gabrielle Bernstein

I don’t know how I previously overlooked the work of Gabrielle Bernstein, because she has been a powerful and influential spiritual teacher of the Law of Attraction for many years. Fortunately, one of my coaching clients told me about her newest book, Super Attractor, and I am so glad I read it!  Whether you are already familiar with her or not, I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Perhaps the Master Manifester Gabby has been most influenced by is the work of Abraham Hicks, whom I have studied for years.  Super Attractor is brilliant because it makes the Abraham Hicks teachings very clear and accessible for those of us who may not be believers in non-physical spiritual entities, which is what Abraham supposedly is, “channeling” their thoughts through Esther Hicks, who voices them for us. (Jerry and Esther Hicks originated the term “Law of Attraction” that was widely popularized by Rhonda Byrne’s DVD of The Secret to describe how “energy attracts like energy.”)

The central point of the Abraham Hicks teachings that changed everything for Gabby Bernstein in her own life is very simple: In order to attract the people, resources and prosperity you desire, you first must get your thoughts and especially your FEELINGS into vibrational alignment with the loving, positive energy of the Source of everything, God/The Universe.

Unfortunately, as Gabby’s book teaches us, we often allow our fear energy to interfere with this simple need to feel GOOD.  Feeling good is truly ALL that  we need to “attract” everything we want.  But our human Egos are so used to trying to force and control outcomes, and so fearful and worried when they can’t, it’s often hard to simply allow ourselves to trust that God/the Universe is actually the one in control, and ALLOW our desires to be answered in divinely perfect ways and timing.

The book gives a number of pleasant, simple and effective tools to help us overcome our fears and worries and instead feel only love, trust, joy, appreciation – all the positive emotions that are in energetic harmony with God/The Universe’s good.  As Abraham Hicks teaches, how we FEEL is key.  It’s not enough to just hold the right thoughts…We must truly feel good too.  I am sure you know that is a challenging state to maintain, when we are faced with all the negative news and many challenges life throws at us daily.

Gabby is a realist who acknowledges that we are inevitably going to feel negative feelings and simply shows us how to climb back out of the pit, one gentle step at a time, using a variety of simple tools. 

I found one of her tools for developing a trusting, positive energy particularly effective for myself.  I now use it on a daily basis and find it really works to quickly shift me into feeling GOOD and expecting the BEST outcomes whenever I am in a negative emotional space.

As I have said before in this blog, I am a recovering life-long Worrier. When faced with a potential problem, my Ego’s habit is to conjure up ALL the possible negative scenarios, in hopes that I can figure out a way to head off the negative “what if” outcomes.   Sometimes my Ego can figure out a viable solution, but when there are too many unknowns, I can go into frantic worry mode. I know that if I allow myself to focus on a possible BAD outcome and FEEL that negative emotion, the bad outcome I am fearing is exactly what I am likely to attract. So, I have learned to work to shift my thoughts and my energy, but it takes effort.  I am always looking for a simpler, faster way to transform fear into positive expectation.

The exercise in Gabby’s book that has been a gateway to doing just that for me is using a positive affirmation. But not just any positive affirmation that someone else came up with. No matter how much someone else’s positive expectations might inspire me, unless I have personally experienced it myself, my Ego isn’t convinced it can work for ME, too. 

In the book, she gives a simple method for creating your OWN personal affirmation that will quickly shift you into a POSITIVE emotional state. She calls it “The Think it to Feel it Method.”  It starts with thinking of any area of your life where you’re struggling and want to feel better. Gabby says, “We can’t wait for our circumstances to change to feel good. The more good-feeling emotions you bring to your current circumstances, the faster things begin to work out the way you want, and the faster you feel better.”

To get started, she says to “conjure up an area of your life where your desired emotion has shown up.  It could be in a situation from your past or even an image you have of your future self.  You can also think of someone in your life you displays that characteristic you would like for yourself.”

As a self-employed Personal Success Coach, married to a self-employed Realtor, the area of life that my own Ego worries about the most is financial security. Will there be enough when I need it?  If I receive a lot of money, will I use it wisely or will it slip away?  Where will the next infusion of capital come from if I can’t see the source right now? ETC. ETC. ETC.

Following Gabby’s instruction, I thought back and came up with a great recent example of “miracle” money coming to me in exactly the right amount exactly when I needed it, which made me feel GREAT and GRATEFUL. 

I was facing a tax bill that was due soon and I knew I didn’t have that much available in my bank account. Still, I kept coaching myself to release my worry thoughts and TRUST that God had a perfect plan to answer my need. One day, about two weeks before the tax bill was due, I went to the mailbox and discovered the exact amount I needed in a check from a friend who was repaying what she considered an unpaid debt from years before.  

Now, Gabby says, take that specific event where you triumphed in an area of life you habitually struggle to feel good in, and create your own PERSONAL affirmation to remind you that the same triumph can continue to happen CONSISTENTLY whenever you need it, just as it did then.

I instantly came up with a personal affirmation that applies not only to money but to EVERY resource I need for EVERY situation I may face: “Everything I need comes to me easily exactly when I need it, in God’s perfect ways and timing.”

My Ego cannot argue with that because it knows it really happened!  I could have picked a dozen other examples out of my past, which means that everything I need has been coming to me all along, even though my protective Ego continues to still be nervous that it may not the next time.  I declare this personal affirmation at the beginning of each day and whenever I find myself worrying about whether I will have whatever I need when I need it.  It immediately calms me and gets me back into a POSITIVE feel-good emotional state.

Since I have been declaring this regularly, money has been flowing to me almost effortlessly from some really unexpected places, always in the perfect timing.  Today, I was able to pay a large credit card bill from our moving expenses with a surprise COVID stimulus payment deposited by my state directly into my bank account that I didn’t even know we qualified for.  I could give you MANY other examples, but you get the idea.

I hope you will try creating your own personal affirmation for putting the power of The Law of Attraction to work effortlessly for you and see what miracles start showing up. I promise that you will begin to feel less stressed, less anxious and have lots more GOOD in your life to feel GRATEFUL for! 

COACHING SUCCESS

My coaching with Caroll made me change the way I am thinking about my work, my abilities in my work, and these carry over into personal areas of my life too.  I am now more positive in my thinking about my work goals, personal relationships and my behaviors in both.” – L.H., yoga studio owner

How are you doing on manifesting YOUR Big Goals?  Are you going slower than you would like and unsure of just what is holding you back from the success you deserve? For expert help clarifying your personal and professional goals and some actionable advice for reaching them with speed and ease, please request a F*R*E*E*, no-obligation hour of Success Breakthrough Coaching!  Slots are limited, so please grab one while they last: http://www.calendly.com/carollschwartz/60min Or contact me with any questions: caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com

If you would like your own F*R*E*E* subscription to this blog, just go to my website and sign up for the Prosperity Tips at the top.

 

“So be truly glad.  There is wonderful joy ahead, even though you must endure many trials for a little while. These trials will show that your faith is genuine.  It is being tested as fire tests and purifies gold…”(1 Peter 1: 6-7)

“My strength grows out of my weakness.  If I lose any good, I gain some other.  Things refuse to be mismanaged for long. For every apparent failure, there is an equal success.” – Catherine Ponder

Welcome back!  I have missed writing the blog for you these past few weeks, but it was wise to take a break while we were busy with our move to a new home.  Everything is (mostly) unpacked and the house is in order, and it feels great to be settling into our new routine in a new environment.

If you read the July 17 post (Open for Miracles 2 — Blog 410), you got the background on the reason for our move.  It wasn’t by choice.  For nine years, my wonderful husband and I had been happily living in a house we thought was “ideal” for us and our two dogs, in a great neighborhood with nice neighbors and all our favorite stores and restaurants nearby.  The last thing on our minds on Memorial Day Weekend was having to move this summer.  But that’s when our landlord called and gave us the news that he needed to sell the property for financial reasons.

After the initial shock and denial wore off – quickly, thankfully – we sprang into action looking for a new place.  It was an especially tough time to be moving, since the rental market is very hot — rents are high and vacancy rates are low. I did a lot of mindset and prayer work to focus my mind only on the positive, because I know that the Law of Attraction (“energy attracts like energy”) ensures that if we harbor negative thoughts and energy for too long, it will impede our ability to attract what we desire.

One of the advantages of being a mature adult is that we have been through MANY ups and downs in life.  And one thing I often remind myself and my coaching clients is that when something apparently “bad” appears to happen to us, it may NOT actually turn out to be something negative.  Very often, we discover in hindsight that it was a necessary step to open the way for something GOOD to come to us. 

If you believe, as I do, that each of us has a unique life purpose and that nothing in the universe happens by “chance,” you also should believe that everything eventually comes together for our Highest Good.  Most human beings naturally resist any change to our comfortable routine, but change is what keeps us moving along our purposeful paths, allowing the Divine Plan for our lives to unfold that will take us from Good to GREAT.  If we didn’t get unwelcome change thrown at us from time to time, we would forever live a life of “good enough” and never fulfill our destiny.

Whatever we focus on expands, so every single day after we got the “bad” news that we were going to have to move, I made it a point to write in my Daily Gratitude Journal how grateful I was for the nine wonderful years we had spent in our rental home and the miraculous way God had guided us to it, just when I thought we were going to be homeless after losing a beautiful home to foreclosure during the Great Recession. Reminding myself of that past triumph over unwelcome change allowed me to believe that some similar good was about to unfold for us with the next move.  

In my journal, I also expressed faith and felt gratitude IN ADVANCE that this was all part of a Divine Plan to lead us to something EVEN better.  The more I wrote about that and visualized it, the more I believed it, and my energy soon shifted from dread to excitement about where God might be taking us next.

As I wrote in the earlier blog, we were guided very quickly and easily to our perfect NEW rental home in a fabulous guard-gated 55+ community just about five miles from our old home. Every day, we discover new ways that it really IS even better than our previous home.

The size is perfect for us — less to take care of, but spacious feeling.  The move forced us to purge a whole lot of stuff that was no longer serving us but was cluttering up our cupboards and garage.  It feels so much lighter now to just have the things that are really meaningful to us. 

My home office is even bigger than before, with more storage, and Rick has a real office now, instead of a corner of the living room, with lots of built-in shelving to display his beloved southwest artifacts and photos. 

The kitchen is much bigger than our old one, and since Rick loves to cook, it’s nice for us to both be able to be in there at the same time, without bumping into each other.

Our house is up on a ridge and the back patio and living room have incredible views of lush greenery and huge trees, through two big sliding doors. 

Our two dogs love the house and patio, and we enjoy taking our morning walk down the quiet streets to a green little park with a fountain.  No traffic, no stoplights, no stores, no kids whizzing by on bikes and skateboards.  Just peace and quiet and beauty, like living in a resort.

When I get around to it, I will also take advantage of the neighborhood recreation center with a pool, library and workout gym, all a short walk from our house.

It definitely was a lot of physical work, but everything about the actual move went amazingly smoothly and quickly, just as I expressed gratitude for in advance. And our new landlady is just as wonderful as our previous landlord was.

Are you perhaps facing your own daunting challenge or unwelcome change right now? If so, I hope you will learn from my experience and save yourself needless worry and anxiety. Allow the apparent “bad news” to become “good news” by choosing to believe that whatever ultimately comes from it will be EVEN better than what you had to give up to make room for it.  

COACHING SUCCESS

While I initially started working with Caroll to grow my MLM business, her coaching also has helped me to develop success strategies for what is most important, such as family, health, relationships and career. She has taught me that empowering belief is limitless and that kind of investment in yourself is priceless.” – Kathleen C. direct seller and entrepreneur

How are you doing on manifesting YOUR Big Goals?  Are you going slower than you would like and unsure of just what is holding you back from the success you deserve? For expert help clarifying your personal and professional goals and some actionable advice for reaching them with speed and ease, please request a F*R*E*E*, no-obligation hour of Success Breakthrough Coaching!  Slots are limited, so please grab one while they last: www.calendly.com/carollschwartz/60min Or contact me with any questions: caroll@practicalprosperitycoach.com