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52 Week Challenge

Jul 06

Week Twenty-Eight: Define What Drives You: Beliefs

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Today, we’re going to move past what you need and talk about what you believe and how that can affect your life. A belief is a firmly held opinion. While your needs drive your behavior, your beliefs color your world. They dictate how you assign meaning and govern your expectations, either limiting or expanding your life possibilities. Ultimately, they define what you hold as truth, which significantly impacts your behavior and your emotional wellness.

There are five belief categories that factor into life satisfaction that we will discuss over the next few weeks: life, self, people, love, and abundance. I invite you to consider each of these areas and identify places where your beliefs could become more powerful.

One Thing To Think About

Like the strategies you use to satisfy your needs, your beliefs form throughout your life. You learn from every interaction with family, authority figures, classmates, co-workers, and society. Once the seed of a belief is planted, your brain collects life experiences to back it up, forming an intellectual repository of proof. This cycle is critical to evaluate. What you hold as true becomes your reality. Empowering beliefs support your ability to create and appreciate a high quality of life. They help you see possibility and cause you to expect good things to happen. Their negative counterparts, on the other hand, will almost assuredly limit your life experience, causing you to expect the worst and invest your energy in fear.

One Question To Answer

Your beliefs are firmly held opinions that dictate how you assign meaning to your life experiences. Beliefs about life, self, people, love, and abundance color your day-to-day reality, either limiting or expanding your world.

Where have you found beliefs limiting you in the past? Where have beliefs empowered you? What strategies have you used previously to strengthen positive beliefs and diminish negative ones?

One Challenge To Take

Over the next week, take a few moments from time to time to step back from whatever you’re doing and think about the beliefs that are involved in this situation.

  1. Think about the situation at hand – what are you doing? Why are you doing it? Who else is involved?
  2. Ask, “What beliefs do I have about the situation in general? What do I believe about myself and others in this situation?”
  3. See if you can determine where those beliefs came from, and whether they are positive (empowering), negative (disempowering) or neutral.

What you hold as truth becomes your reality. Don’t place limits on your success or hold yourself back from your dreams. Instead, use the power of your beliefs to support you in the pursuit of fulfilling work and a happy life.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Jun 01

Week Twenty-Seven: Need to Feel Worthy

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! There are five primary needs that everyone has in common: The need for security, the need for connection, the need to be autonomous, the need to feel competent, and the need to feel worthy. Each of these needs is a core part of human nature. Today we will address the final need, the need to feel worthy.

I believe the need to feel worthy is the most predominantly debilitating requirement in today’s society. It is also the desire that is least often addressed or satisfied.

One Thing To Think About

It’s probable you encountered conditional acceptance as a child. As you matured, you learned that you would be accepted if you followed the rules of those you sought acceptance from. When you were accepted by the people in each of these environments, you learned that you were okay. Each time you experienced rejection or were punished, you learned that a part of you was not acceptable. This process taught you that you were only conditionally worthy. If you received enough of these messages throughout your life, which is quite common, your belief in your deservingness likely needs to be improved upon.

In reality, you are perfect, just as you are. Every situation you’ve lived through has made you the person you are today, and there is purpose to your experience. While it’s true there is room for improvement in all of our lives, the most damaging thoughts you can buy into are those that tell you that you’re broken and must fix yourself. That’s just not true. You are not broken and, while we can all benefit from self-improvement and self-care, there is nothing about you that needs to be fixed.

One Question To Answer

I repeat, You are perfect, just as you are. Are you able to accept that statement, or do you resist it? How do you rate your effectiveness at the following worth-building activities?

  • Invest in Self-Care. The best thing you can do for your family, friends, colleagues, and community is take great care of you. When you are at your best, you can give your best. When you invest in taking great care of yourself, you show your mind, body, heart, and soul how valuable you are. This directly meets your need to feel worthy.
  • Live Up to Your Potential. Your potential is limitless. You can make contributions to this world that no one else can make. If you don’t make them, the world will never see them. The more fully you allow yourself to come into your own, the more fully your need to feel worthy will be met.
  • Speak Up for Yourself. The manner in which you allow others to interact with you directly impacts your feelings of worth and deservingness. Require that others speak to you with respect. In instances when you encounter someone who is not treating you appropriately, let him or her know that you’re not okay with his or her behavior. Every time you stand up for yourself, you’re meeting your need for worthiness.
  • Keep the Commitments You Make to Yourself. Your feelings of worth are directly affected by your level of self-trust. You must have the ability to rely on your own word, or you will constantly question your own value and deservingness. Every time you meet a commitment to yourself, you increase your feelings of worth and deservingness. Every time you fail to meet a commitment, you undermine these very needs.

One Challenge To Take

  1. Define the method you’ve adopted to satisfy your need for competence.
  2. Identify at least one empowering and one disempowering behavior related to this need.
  3. Consider how you might make the disempowering strategy more positive. How could you shift your approach while still meeting your need?
  4. Commit to integrating this improvement into your life.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

May 26

Week Twenty-Six: Need to Feel Competent

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! There are five primary needs that everyone has in common: The need for security, the need for connection, the need to be autonomous, the need to feel competent, and the need to feel worthy. Each of these needs is a core part of human nature. Today we’re talking about the need to feel competent.

The requirement of competence combines the need to believe in yourself with the desire to have others believe in you. You must believe that you are capable of producing the results you want in your life and work, and it’s important that you feel those around you share your belief.

One Thing To Think About

Your ability to feel personally competent is impacted by the knowledge you possess and the success you’ve experienced. Knowing how to do something provides you with a sense of certainty about the process you must follow to accomplish the task at hand. This allows you to feel confident.

It is natural to seek external validation from those around you. In fact, your need to receive recognition from others can be a powerfully motivating factor that contributes to your success in life. Typically, the strategies you’ve developed to meet your need for this external validation will be closely (if not directly) related to the behaviors you’ve been repeatedly acknowledged for throughout your life. For example, if you’ve been given attention for your intellect, it is likely you’ll work very hard to learn and demonstrate what you know. If you were reinforced for your attractiveness, you’ll focus on your beauty. If others recognized you for your humor, you will move heaven and earth to be funny.

As you can imagine, the need to be competent has a profound effect on your personality and your quality of life. It’s important to consciously connect with the tactics you use to meet this need, and even more imperative that you ensure they are empowering you.

One Question To Answer

Ask yourself, how am I furthering my need for competence in the following areas?

  • Embracing Knowledge. The more you know about the topic at hand, the more confident you will feel. Invest yourself in learning. Commit yourself to continually expanding your knowledge in areas that interest you and be willing to do some research before you go into new situations.
  • Actively Accomplishing. You have a lot to contribute to this world. You possess talents and strengths that are unique to you. Nurture and apply these attributes! Shrinking from hard work, hesitating to make a focused effort, and failing to apply yourself breed self-contempt. When you clearly decide what you want to accomplish and you begin to take action toward the achievement of those goals, your self-confidence will go up exponentially.
  • Focusing on Progress. Keep your eye on the progress ball. Give yourself credit for the steps you’re taking and the progress you’re making. Don’t beat yourself up when a bump in the road knocks you down. The habit of focusing on progress will continually fill your experience bank with positive references, which will support your need to feel competent.
  • Embracing Recognition. It is natural to crave acknowledgement, appreciation, and validation. We all want to be noticed for our accomplishments and contributions. When someone gives you a compliment, don’t just accept it—take it to heart! Allow the full weight of the person’s praise to permeate your head and your heart. Then smile, and say thank you.

One Challenge To Take

  1. Define the method you’ve adopted to satisfy your need for competence.
  2. Identify at least one empowering and one disempowering behavior related to this need.
  3. Consider how you might make the disempowering strategy more positive. How could you shift your approach while still meeting your need?
  4. Commit to integrating this improvement into your life.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

May 18

Week Twenty-Five: Need to be Autonomous

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! There are five primary needs that everyone has in common: The need for security, the need for connection, the need to be autonomous, the need to feel competent, and the need to feel worthy. Each of these needs is a core part of human nature. Today, let’s talk about the need to be autonomous.

One Thing To Think About

Your need for autonomy requires that you feel free to self-govern. When you have the power to act and speak freely, your sense of independence and spontaneity increases. Essentially, you must feel that your life is one of your choosing. You must believe that you have the ability to make decisions for yourself, to make your own plans, and to adjust your life direction should you decide to.

The need for autonomy can be satisfied in a number of highly productive ways. Invariably, small business owners have a strong need for autonomy. They address this desire by moving in an entrepreneurial direction and create a great deal of value in the process. Conversely, a less productive strategy for meeting this need could involve a resistance to commitment, which greatly hinders life and work progression.

Here are three ways in which you meet your need for autonomy.

  • Own the Truth of Choice. You are always free to choose. You have to do very little in your life. Granted, there may be repercussions associated with not taking certain actions, such as going to work or paying your bills, and it’s a fact of life that things may happen to you that you have no control over. Still, you choose how you’ll deal with whatever situation you find yourself in.
  • Maintain Independence. When you are independent, you are self-governing. You assume responsibility for your life and your choices. This doesn’t mean that you won’t develop interdependent relationships with others. But it does mean that you will assume responsibility to manage your life and work and that you will engage with others out of a genuine desire to connect versus a desperation to be rescued.
  • Commit Consciously. Many of your most amazing life experiences will come about as a result of your willingness to make a commitment. Carefully considered and consciously made commitments will support you in living your best life. Conversely, hastily made commitments can significantly diminish your ability to feel free.

One Question To Answer

In which of these ways are you meeting your need for autonomy, and in which of these ways are you not meeting your needs or meeting them through unproductive or negative strategies?

One Challenge To Take

  1. Define the method you’ve adopted to satisfy your need for autonomy.
  2. Identify at least one empowering and one disempowering behavior related to this need.
  3. Consider how you might make the disempowering strategy more positive. How could you shift your approach while still meeting your need?
  4. Commit to integrating this improvement into your life.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

May 04

Week Twenty-Four: Need for Connection

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! There are five primary needs that everyone has in common: The need for security, the need for connection, the need to be autonomous, the need to feel competent, and the need to feel worthy. Each of these needs is a core part of human nature. Today’s post is going to focus on the need for connection.

Your need for connection manifests itself as a need to experience a sense of relatedness, to belong to a community, or to experience intimacy with another person. At its root, this drive dates back to our tribal ancestors. In tribal terms, your very survival depended upon your inclusion in the group. Tribal members ate, slept, and received protection as a result of being part of a unified structure. Rejection by the clan was equivalent to death.

One Thing To Think About

The need for connection can manifest in a number of different ways, including the need to include and be included, the need to love and be loved, the need to accept and be accepted, and the need to create a sense of community. When your need for belonging and connection is satisfied, you will feel an incredible sense of well-being.

One Question To Answer

What makes you feel connected? How are you currently meeting that need? Is there room for you to improve upon your current methods? Consider how you might enhance your current approach and enjoy an even greater sense of relatedness.

One Challenge To Take

  1. Define the method you’ve adopted to satisfy your need for connectedness.
  2. Identify at least one empowering and one disempowering behavior related to this need.
  3. Consider how you might make the disempowering strategy more positive. How could you shift your approach while still meeting your need?
  4. Commit to integrating this improvement into your life.

Until next time, take care!

Kim
@kimfulcher
facebook.com/kim.fulcher1

Apr 26

Week Twenty-Three: The Need for Security

By 52 Week Challenge No Comments

Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! There are five primary needs that everyone has in common: The need for security, the need for connection, the need to be autonomous, the need to feel competent, and the need to feel worthy. Each of these needs is a core part of human nature. Today, we will address the need for security.

Your need for security is based on survival and is your most primal requirement. This category includes both the need to meet your physiological requirements and the desire to preserve your safety.

Physiological needs include food, shelter, water, elimination, and sleep. These are the inherent requirements of biological survival. You must nourish and hydrate yourself, you need housing, you must make time for sleep, and your body must remove waste from your system. In essence, you must address the needs of your body before you’re able to address the needs of your emotion or intellect.

Related to your need to take care of your body is your need to protect it. While fundamentally rooted in your desire to protect your physical safety, this requirement also includes the need to preserve your emotional, intellectual, and material safety.

One Thing To Think About

If your need for safety is not satisfied, whether the threat you perceive is real or imagined, you will live in dedication to creating the security you seek. Your energy will be invested in protecting yourself. You will not seek out new opportunity, you will not engage with activities you associate with risk, you will avoid change, and you will live in a defensive state. This is not the way to live into your capacity, yet it’s how many people live.

If you don’t consciously decide how you’re going to meet your need for safety, your unconscious patterns will do the job for you. More often than not, this will result in a life of limitation, fear, and worry. You deserve better than that!

One Question To Answer

Did you know that your brain cannot distinguish between real and imagined threats? When you focus on what you fear might happen, your brain deals with the scenario you’re worried about as if it is actually happening. Your body moves into fight-or-flight mode and you have difficulty focusing on anything other than the perceived threat.

Where is this happening in your life? Are you worried about money? Your own physical safety or health? What about your kids? Anywhere you feel insecure or worried is a target for the following exercise.

One Challenge To Take

  1. Define the method you’ve adopted to satisfy your need for security.
  2. Identify at least one empowering and one disempowering behavior related to this need.
  3. Consider how you might make the disempowering strategy more positive. How could you shift your approach while still meeting your need
  4. Commit to integrating this improvement into your life.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Mar 30

Week Twenty-One: Establish Powerful Habits

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Today, we are going to look at the final aspect of time management, establishing powerful habits. The quality of your daily experience is directly impacted by your habits. A habit is a conditioned pattern of behavior. In many instances, habits become conditioned to the point of automation. Under these circumstances, it’s not uncommon for you to engage in habituated behavior without even thinking about what you’re doing.

One Thing To Think About

Your habits shape your life. To improve the quality of your life, improve the quality of your habits by replacing poor habits with more empowering alternatives. Shifting your behavior to a new pattern allows you to condition your new habit, instead of resisting your old one.

For example, replace the habit of cynicism and seeing what’s broke with a habit of noticing and acknowledging the abundance in your life. Or replace the habit of pessimism with the habit of possibility – of looking for ways to make your situation work, searching out resources, and owning the personal actions you can take to contribute to the situation. Or replace the habit of staid seriousness with the habit of lighthearted playfulness.

One Question To Answer

To identify your habits and evaluate where you might want to shift your behavior, answer the following questions for both your habits of thought and your habits of action.

  • What habits hold you back or decrease the quality of your life?
  • What do you say to yourself when you indulge these patterns?
  • What kind of situations trigger them?
  • What habits would serve you better?

One Challenge To Take

Draw a line down the center of a sheet of paper or an index card. Write each of your old habits on the left side of the page or card. On the right side, write the new habit you want to shift to, next to the old habit you want it to replace.

Select one habit to start with. For the next four weeks, catch yourself each time you begin to move into your old pattern and immediately replace it with the new one. A new habit can be conditioned in as little as twenty-one days. Make your commitment, and vigilantly hold yourself to it. Not only will you experience a surge of confidence as a result of your dedication, you’ll also begin to enjoy happier days. Shifting your behavior to your new pattern allows you to condition your new habit, instead of resisting your old one.

The quality of your life increases when your habits improve. Be willing to take a good look at your patterns. We all have habits that need to shift. Don’t beat yourself up about where you are. Instead, look forward. Start small and make your changes one habit at a time. Our greatest journeys begin with one single step, and the most amazing lives are built one habit at a time.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Mar 23

Week Twenty: Evaluate Opportunities

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! A key part of time and schedule management is the clear-minded evaluation of the opportunities that come your way. Ideally, your priorities will help you make decisions about what to commit your time to. When considering a new opportunity, evaluate whether or not the invitation sounds interesting to you. If it doesn’t, reserve the right to say no!

One Thing To Think About

There are two keys to keeping your opportunity load on track and reflecting your priorities:

Reserve the Right to Think About It – Instead of immediately agreeing or saying no to any type of invitation you receive, decide that you will not commit to anything on the spot. Instead, when you receive a request or invitation, let the requestor know that you’ll need to check your schedule and get back to him or her. This allows you to thoughtfully evaluate the situation and provides you with a buffer in the event that you decide to decline.

Do Away with Elaborate Excuses – Remember this maxim from the Oprah Winfrey show: “No is a complete sentence.” The next time someone asks you to take on a project or attend an event that doesn’t support your priorities, simply respond with “No, I can’t do that, but thank you for thinking of me.” Breathe deeply to quiet your thundering heart and move on to another topic of conversation.

One Question To Answer

When considering a commitment or opportunity, ask yourself these questions: Does this opportunity fit in with my priorities? If not, does it detract from them? If you feel that the opportunity fits within your priorities, and it’s interesting, consider committing yourself. Make sure to understand why you find the opportunity exciting, and clarify any expectations the inviting party will have of you once you throw your hat into the ring.

One Challenge To Take

Pledge yourself from a clear and positive place. If you feel any misgivings about saying yes, stop! From this point on, decide that you will only make commitments that compliment your priorities and feel good to you.

  • Identify at least five commitments or scheduled activities that are wasting your valuable time. Examples could include volunteering for an organization you no longer enjoy, running errands for others, attending social events with people you don’t care for, participating in water cooler gossip, or failing to commit your day to activities that are important to you.
  • Name your alternative. Could one of your priority areas move into the timeslot that one of your time wasters currently occupies? List the five commitments you would prefer to make in place of your current time wasters.
  • Conclude your commitment to non-priority activities. If the item is a one-time engagement, contact the host or requestor and let him or her know you have a conflict. If your commitment is ongoing in nature, let your contact person know you cannot participate any longer.
  • Schedule something from your priority list into the open time that appears as a result of allowing yourself to say no.

Every time you make a decision to say yes to one thing, you are saying no to multiple others simultaneously. You may not be aware of this, but it is fact. Until you are able to say no to the demands and requests of others, you will never be able to say yes to you.

Ultimately, it is better to disappoint the requestor whom you will not remember forty years from now, than to look back at your life and realize that the person you disappointed was yourself.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Mar 16

Week Nineteen: Rules of Time Management

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Time management is a subject that many women struggle with. In the Remodel Your Reality program, there are four rules to effective and empowering time management: Be Authentic, Place Yourself on Your List, Know Your Own Worth, and Say Goodbye to Takers.

One Thing To Think About

You will succeed or fail at time management based on your willingness to consistently invest your time in support of the priorities you’ve established. This becomes possible when you remove requests and commitments that fall outside of your priority structure. In short, this means you’re going to have to get very good at saying the dreaded “n” word—no.

One Question To Answer

Do you have trouble saying no to others? Due to the desire to avoid disappointing others and their aversion to feeling uncomfortable, many women do. To preserve your time for things that matter to you, you must be willing to experience temporary discomfort. This requires dedication to the focused management of your schedule and calls for you to develop the courage to risk upsetting or disappointing others.

One Challenge To Take

Integrate the Four Rules of Time Management into your daily life. Use them as a guide star to give you direction and keep you on the track you want to take.

  • Be Authentic – Your priority list must reflect what you authentically hold in esteem versus what you believe should be important to you. Be honest when creating your priority blueprint. It can serve you, acting as a compass to support you in making decisions about where to invest your time and energy. If you don’t define your list based on your truth, you will be living someone else’s. I know you don’t want that reality or you wouldn’t be reading this book. Creating a list based on what you believe is expected of you, or out of fear about what others might think of you, is a recipe for stress and failure.
  • Place Yourself on Your List – When you commit to taking care of yourself, you become more powerfully able to take care of everyone else in your life. While you may feel an initial resistance to placing yourself on your own list, believing it would be selfish to do so, I strongly encourage you to invest in taking care of you. When you do, you will be able to give more to every area of your life. I challenge you to take care of yourself at least as well as you take care of everyone else!
  • Know Your Own Worth – If you don’t believe you’re worthy of acceptance and friendship, you will try to earn your way into both. The fear of unworthiness is at the root of many unproductive behaviors, such as accepting invitations you aren’t interested in, agreeing to requests that don’t compliment your priorities, and taking on responsibilities that detract from your own well-being. The disease to please may not kill you, but it will significantly detract from the quality of your life.
  • Say Goodbye to Takers – If you’ve been living as a pleaser, there are undoubtedly takers around you. A taker is a person who uses your time, energy, money, and resources without giving anything back in return. I liken these individuals to parasites, and they will begin to disappear when you start saying no. Make a commitment to stand your ground and invest yourself in only those requests that meet your priorities or interest you. Prepare yourself in advance to decline invitations or requests that don’t. Anticipate the inevitable shedding of the takers in your life and celebrate the opening you’re creating for a higher quality of person to enter in their place.

Until next time, take care!

Kim

Mar 09

Week Eighteen: Manage Your Calendar

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Welcome back to the Remodel Your Reality Challenge! Now that you’ve identified the priorities you’d like to invest in, it’s important to evaluate how you’re currently spending your time.

One Thing To Think About

The potential to experience joy, satisfaction, and happiness lives in your calendar. If your calendar does not reflect the priorities you’ve defined for yourself, it will be necessary for you to make some changes in order to create room in your schedule. In doing so, you will begin to experience more of what matters to you when you schedule less of what doesn’t.

One Question To Answer

Open your calendar and look at the commitments you’ve made for the next two weeks. How many of your commitments support the priorities you just established? How many do not?

If you’re spending more than half of your time catering to the demands of others, doing things because you think you should do them, or making commitments because you aren’t comfortable declining, it’s quite likely you’re unbalanced, overwhelmed, resentful, and unfulfilled at the end of most days.

It’s time to change that! You can support the people in your life, fulfill your responsibilities, make time for things that are important to you, and create a sense of balance in your life.

One Challenge To Take

  1. Track your activities for one week. Compared your personal and professional priorities against your activities. How many of your priorities have made it onto your schedule? How many items on your schedule have nothing to do with your priorities? How many activities actually serve to defeat or oppose your priorities?
  2. Make a list of all of your current commitments and evaluate how they either support or detract from your ability to live within your priority framework. (We’ll talk more about evaluating opportunities in another post.)
  3. Make a commitment to get free of commitments and activities that do not support your priorities. Decide what activities and commitments you’re going to remove, then create a plan to move them out of your calendar. Create a script for talking to other people around these issues, if it helps. Chose the first item to go and TAKE ACTION!

Until next time, take care!

Kim