9.Do what you feel in your heart to be right, for you’ll be criticized anyway. ~Eleanor Roosevelt.

10.Do your thing and don’t care if they like it. ~Tina Fey

11.“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”~Steve Jobs

12.It all goes away. Eventually, everything goes away. ~Elizabeth Gilbert

13.Every time you are tempted to react in the same old way, ask if you want to be a prisoner of the past or a pioneer of the future. ~Deepak Chopra

14.“Until you value yourself, you won’t value your time. Until you value your time, you will not do anything with it.”~M. Scott Peck

15.Remember that wherever your heart is, there you will find your treasure. ~Paulo Coelho

16.Life is a shipwreck, but we must not forget to sing in the lifeboats. ~Voltaire

17.Listen to the mustn’ts, child. Listen to the don’ts. Listen to the shouldn’ts, the impossibles, the won’ts. Listen to the never haves, then listen close to me… Anything can happen, child. Anything can be. ~Shel Silverstein

18.“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”~Joseph Campbell

19.You must find the place inside yourself where nothing is impossible. ~Deepak Chopra

20. “Don’t let the noise of others opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.” ~Steve Jobs

21. “Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.”~Dalai Lama

22.“When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but creatures of emotion.”~Dale Carnegie

23.The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has been before. ~Albert Einstein

24. “Don’t worry about the future or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.”~Baz Luhrmann

25.“When I’m not feeling my best I ask myself, “What are you gonna do about it?” I use the negativity to fuel the transformation into a better me.”~Beyonce

26.“My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.”~Dalai Lama

27.It is only because of problems that we grow mentally and spiritually.”~M.Scott Peck

28.Do not apologize for crying. Without this emotion, we are only robots. ~Elizabeth Gilbert

29.“You’ll have bad times, but it’ll always wake you up to the good stuff you weren’t paying attention to.”~Robin Williams

30.Life does not have to be perfect to be wonderful. ~Annette Funicello.

1.You’re choosing acceptance instead of growth.

The movement towards self-love and self-acceptance has been a phenomenal thing; we’re all learning to accept ourselves as we are and move forward with confidence and awareness.

But some of us are taking it too far. Instead of pushing ourselves to grow in new ways, we’re affirming ourselves that we don’t need to change at all. And this is a dangerous affirmation. Your life only grows, expands and moves forward if you’re able to recognize where your opportunities for personal development lie. And if you aren’t acting on those opportunities for growth, you’re choosing to remain stagnant and stuck.

2.You’re only associating with like-minded people.

The cool thing about adulthood is that you get to choose your community. You are rarely forced to socialize with people who don’t share your political, spiritual or alternate beliefs. And while this can be fantastically soothing for the ego, it is detrimental to your personal development.

By making a point to socialize with people whose views challenge yours, you’re deliberately forcing yourself to expand your thinking and consider your beliefs from new angles.

When you entrench yourself in a community of like-minded people, you’re keeping yourself comfortable and affirmed but you’re also limiting your opportunities for growth.

3.You’re weighing the risks instead of the rewards.

Too many of our decisions get made by considering the worst-case scenarios instead of the best-case scenarios. While security is certainly something to keep in mind, it shouldn’t be the main guiding principle in your life.

In the words of Nelson Mandela, May your choices reflect your hopes, not your fears. Because your hopes are going to lead you somewhere a whole lot more incredible, if you’ll let them.

4.You’re refusing to give up control.

There is a tiny, type-A control freak that lives inside of all of us even in the most laid-back of people. We want to be wholly in charge of our destinies, our decisions, our outcomes and our rewards.

And so we close ourselves off from other people. We close ourselves off from external influences. We close ourselves off from living our lives in any way other than the one we have determined is the absolute most optimal fashion.

And we forget to make room for growth. We forget to make room to open ourselves up to external influences, because that would mean giving up control. But it would also mean welcoming in some absolutely beautiful changes.

5.You’re pigeonholing yourself.

The brilliance of growing up is that we establish a sense of confidence and competency along the way. We hone in on the skills that we can profit from and do them to absolute death showing the world that we are worthy of something.

But we too often forget that we are worthy of so much more than the one or two things that we have chosen. That being the best in our field doesn’t mean we couldn’t thrive in and excel in other areas. That mastering one skill or career choice doesn’t mean our talents are limited to that field.

We forget that we are still capable of growing, expanding and developing ourselves outside of the realms that weve entrenched ourselves in. And as such, we limit our opportunities for exploration.

6.You’re pointing fingers instead of solving problems.

It’s easy to blame anyone and anything out there for the problems that we are going through. Our partner left us. Our boss is an asshole. We’re saddled with student loans. We have a family to take care of.

But if we took a brief moment to step outside of the finger-pointing charade, we’d realize that an infinite number of people find themselves in our exact same situation and handle it wildly differently.

More often than not, the problems we’re facing are exaggerated and perpetuated by our attitude toward them. And if we could turn our attention away from our limitations and focus them on the possibilities at hand, we’d find ourselves significantly less entrenched in our problems and significantly more capable of moving beyond them.

7.You’re refusing to trust your own abilities.

Its easy to listen to what everyone else wants to tell us.

What’s a little trickier is trusting our own intuition. It’s hard to turn down naysayers and choose to be the bold and optimistic, but it’s also the fastest path to personal growth.

When we trust in our own abilities to make the lives that we want happen for ourselves, incredible things start to happen. We are able to transform our own realities in ways that we never thought possible and in ways that the naysayers will never see happen for themselves.

8.You’re failing to challenge your assumptions.

You aren’t qualified for that job so you don’t apply for it. You don’t know any people at the party so you don’t go to it. You think that the person you like or the opportunity you’d kill for wouldn’t ever give you a second glance and so you write yourself off before ever trying for it in the first place.

The more you refuse to challenge your negative thinking, the more it perpetuates itself. You tell yourself you’re a loser and so you keep losing. You lose by default. You lose by omission.

But it doesn’t take much to break the cycle. Because regardless of which ways you’re keeping yourself stuck, one fact remains: You are the only person who has the power to turn it all around for yourself.

And the only question left is whether or not you’re going to choose to do so.

Who would you be if you trusted in your capacity to prevail, to triumph through and through? Who could you be if you believed that no challenge could ever ruin you, could never not be confronted and eclipsed? What could become of you if your life wasn’t what you were constantly pinning yourself against but rather was what you found yourself forever being invited into? Yes, what if the world was on your side? How might you handle your days now, what would you allow for yourself if you were trusting in the state of all things, trusting that, in fact, the world has always and will always be on your side, bidding in your favour?

Imagine the chances you would take then. The chances you would take if conspiracy didn’t threaten your faith and future any longer, if you realized and acknowledged with both humble appreciation and absolute clarity that your world, and all the hearts and faces who’ve ever come and gone from it have, in the big picture, never been less than life’s great effort conspiring to distinguish you, to brilliantly define you in all your legacy.

Let me ask you, what if the point of everything, every little gain and every little loss of ours, what if it happens because the experience of it can help us become more substantial, more meaningful, when showing up as either a gain or a loss in someone else’s life?

We can leave others hoping that eventually something good will come for them, leave them hoping for that one person who will see that they, too, deserve to be treated like someone worth holding on to.

Wherever you are on that spectrum right now, that spectrum of being a gain or a loss in other peoples’ lives, what if life has always been about getting you to this point where you understand you have a choice in how and what and who and why you are, you have a choice in whether you live off hope or live through belief, a choice in which you inspire others to live with too?

How might your life take shape then, how might you begin looking to the world if you saw it as a realm which forever openly supports you, your healing, your growth, if you lived like everything is a choice, a choice to be or not to be meaningful, to be great? Would you let love in, would you allow yourself to love openly, boldly, or at least with more ease? How could you begin to, how much aliveness do you need, how much aliveness do you want, how much aliveness does it take to become all you feel an urge to be, all you feel you are called to be, all you’ve ever hoped and all you’ve ever quietly believed you really can be, how can you begin today to live as if you already are every bit of that dream?

Listen to your heart, to your roar, feel your momentum rise within you, hold on with the greatest and deepest breath you have and hear what is being asked of you, what you are asking of you. Don’t react.

Right now just listen to what your heart is after, believe that you are alive on purpose, that you have been made to create an answer for this single calling, this single roar, this single yearning of your heart.

Then, choose to believe, choose to promise yourself that you will keep your quest and question alive within you, promise yourself that you will add to everyone’s life and not just take from it. Now, step out into your life, into your promise, in a new way. The world will help you but, for it to, you must believe and live like you have what it takes to help yourself too.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me on 01202 743961 or 07957 672335 or visit my Contact Vanessa Page to book your complimentary True Worth Strategy Session.

Rejection happens because it just does.

It happens because your values are not aligned with someone else’s. It happens because the timing is hopelessly wrong. It happens because all the intricacies of someone else’s lives don’t always line up with the intricacies of ours and to be honest, life would be boring if they did.

If we didn’t occasionally fail miserably at what we wanted, success would become commonplace and dull. Its the trying that ends up mattering most. It’s the trying that pushes us in directions we’d have never expected.

But this is what we so often forget when we have been rejected: that we did not show up in a bad place. Sure, none of us wants to be milling around in the Rejects Hall. We want to be living it up in the Winners’ Corner, popping champagne and triumphantly updating our Facebook statuses. But the truth is, there’s a worse place you could be and that is the pathetic no-mans land of People Who Never Try For Anything.

The only thing worse than being a rejected person is being a person who’s never had to face rejection because they’ve never actually gone for something. Because they’ve played it small and safe their entire lives and now have no story to tell for themselves.

You see, as much as it hurts to be you in this exact moment, it hurts to be the other kind of person all of the time.

The pain of rejection is sharp but short-lived. The pain of playing it safe your whole life is a dull, throbbing ache that will eventually swallow you whole.

And so you see, it is good that you’ve arrived here. The Rejection Place is not somewhere that you’re going to stay long. Because people like you know better.

People like you know that when you’re feeling unwanted and let down, you have to act counter-intuitively. Instead of secluding yourself further and leaning away from your life, you have to get back up and try again. Take risks again. Put yourself out there again, even if it means chancing further rejection and disappointment.

People like you don’t let a singular rejection turn you into a timid, tired version of yourself who stays indoors and refuses to go after what he or she wants in life. Because at the end of the day, that’s the only real way to lose out. That’s the only true failure that exists.

So now that you’ve realized the reality about the position you’re in, I think it’s time you moved away from the Pile of Irrational Thoughts. There’s another pile of thoughts, in a better-lit room that I want you to check out. I call it the ‘Pile Of Things That Are Probably True,’ and it includes little reminders like this:

The rejection itself was not personal, it was the result of someone living a complex and nuanced life, which just happens to not revolve around you.

You got rejected because you tried at something, and in the long run, being the kind of person who tries at things is going to take you infinitely further than any individual opportunity ever could have.

Literally everyone you know has been rejected, at least once, in a way that really got to them.

This is also true of everyone you don’t know.

Your self worth is not contingent on this rejection. You are just as self-worthy as before, possibly even more so, because you pulled the rare and badass move of actually going for something.

In fact, if you are not getting rejected every now and then, you are definitely playing it too safe in life.

Trying for something plants a seed. Putting yourself out there plants a seed. Making your plans and intentions public makes them more likely to come to fruition, often when you expect it the absolute least.

If you hadn’t tried for the thing, you would have driven yourself mad wondering whether or not it would have worked out, which is ultimately worse than a one-time rejection.

You now have the opportunity to put this whole thing behind you and move the hell on with your life.

You’re still a sexy, charming, confident, badass motherfucker. Yes you are. This is a fact. I know because you pulled it from the Things That Are Probably True pile myself.

Alright now that you’ve sorted out your thoughts, it’s time for everyone to slap on their nametags and discover who else is in the rejection club.

Oh wow, would you look at that it’s everyone!

No, literally. .

It’s that celebrity you admire. It’s that guy you had a crush on in eighth grade. It’s the person you admire most on earth and oh hey, check this out it’s the person who did your rejecting!

It turns out nobody is immune from the odd rejection. No matter how hard you try, no matter how right you play it, no matter how qualified you are for whatever it is that you’re going for, you’re going to get turned down now and then. That’s just how things happen. That’s life.

I’d say that I hope not to see you in the rejects corner again soon. But to be honest, I’d be lying to both of us.

The most successful people end up here the most often, after all.

And I have a good feeling about someone like you.