What’s Your Inner Game?

Accomplishing what we desire for ourselves or our lives is sometimes or often a struggle. Strategy is important, but your inner game has all to do with it, as well. Maybe it’s time to review yours.

Coach Jeanna Gabellini offered a free e-book with the intriguing title, “10-Minute Money Makers.” So of course I wanted to see what she had to say about this. It was not exactly what I expected—it was better. She addressed practical matters in her usual excellent fashion, but Jeanna reminded readers of something vital in order to create desired life experiences: your inner game is more powerful than any strategy.

As I read through her e-book, I made notes and added my own thoughts. In particular, I made notes to read each morning to get my inner mental and emotional game going. I’d like to share some of my notes with you, because although they can apply to business and finances, as Jeanna addressed in her material, they absolutely can apply to everything.

• Mindset matters. It creates a smooth path or detours and bumpy roads.
• If what you’re doing feels ploddingly hard or difficult, STOP. This means that timing is off, or your strategy is not aligned with your values, or you’ve got to shift a belief so you can move forward.
• The best results happen when you’re grounded and confident.
• No looking at your past “reality” as though it is likely to or will repeat. You’re creating your present and future right now, perhaps based in part on what you learned from past experiences, but mostly from the vision of your desired now and future.
• No beating yourself up about the current state of any area of your life you intend to improve. Just start taking steps to improve it.
• Let go of “trying hard” to find a miracle solution for any issue that has your attention. Tune in to your inner guide AND tell Source you ask for and allow yourself to receive the right solution.
• Never sell your soul to create or receive anything you desire. Work with and trust Source to assist you in appropriate ways.
• Attach your energy to providing service, making a difference, and prosperity and abundance.
• Do what you can, and feel good about it.
• Don’t diminish yourself in any way, for any reason, especially not out of desperation.
• Baby steps create momentum. Once you take a first or next step, trust the momentum, without any attachment to results. Attachment to results pulls you out of creative power. Your happiness does not depend on results.
• If you constantly worry, about anything, you’ll create behaviors based in and on fear. You’ll establish neural pathways in your brain that take you down paths (or ruts) that lead to more of the same. Create better pathways for your brain to follow. Working with and trusting Source helps to do this, as well as letting go of old stories and envisioning new, desired ones.
• Decide to receive what you desire. You don’t have to know the how for this decision to be effective and to attract what you desire to you. The how will reveal itself to you or surprise you, at the right time.
• Check on your relationship with, rather than to, life. What is your vibe about life: fear or enthusiasm?
• Stop trying so darn hard and have fun!
• Identify and assess anything and anyone misusing and or depleting your resources of time, energy, or money, as well as what kind of ending may be needed.

That last bulleted item is a big one. Dr. Henry Cloud reaches into the heart of it in his book Necessary Endings: The Employees, Businesses, and Relationships That All of Us Have to Give Up in Order to Move Forward. And he gets to the crux of the matter right at the start of the Preface when he states this: “In your business and perhaps your life, the tomorrow that you desire and envision may never come to pass if you do not end some things you are doing today.”

The good cannot begin until the bad ends, as Dr. Cloud clarifies. This includes pruning whatever it is in your inner game that holds you back, as well as any outside influences having a negative effect on you and your life; though, he recommends that sometimes even the good has to be pruned to make way for the best. This may feel like one of those “easier said than done” bits of advice for anyone who has not learned how to do this pruning in the right way, perhaps fears it, or has yet to realize how significant pruning can be to any form of sustainability of your time, energy, and money—your three top resources. Your inner game needs to include necessary endings, which are a natural part of life, as well as whatever supports and strengthens your mindset. It’s a good practice, one you’ll appreciate.          

           

Practice makes progress.

© Joyce L. Shafer