Integrity is the bedrock of a successful life, however, integrity does not look the same to everyone. Each of us has our own view of what integrity means to us and the role it plays in our lives. When I speak of integrity, I speak not of moral or ethical integrity, but of personal integrity. The primary difference is that moral and ethical integrity involves the external world and personal integrity relates only internally. It is, simply defined, our internal practices of keeping promises made to ourselves and living our lives in accordance with what we hold to be true for ourselves.
When we step outside of our own personal integrity, we practice self-deception and self-sabbotage. The result of this is usually experienced as a feeling of loss and depression that we may not actively link back to the fact that we broke our own personal integrity. As you might guess, each of us reacts differently when this happens, but most often it ignites a period of a downward emotional spiral. When I get out of alignment with my personal integrity, I usually feel depressed and want to isolate myself for a while. The temptation is to make myself wrong or do something punishing, like eating a quart of vanilla peanut butter cup ice-cream at midnight. The punishment comes in two ways. First, I am not keeping my promise to myself to live a healthy life-style and I indulge as an act of defience to my own standards. Secondly, I now have a great excuse to make myself wrong and to beat myself up. It sounds counter-intuitive, but it is a pattern that all of us have from one extent to the other. Not only is it counter-intuitive, it is counter-productive.

Personal integrity is a choice that we make and so is beating ourselves up because we are not perfect. We are much less likely to spiral out of control if we just acknowledge that, as in my case, I ate the ice-cream and enjoyed it. It does not have to mean anything more than that. If it bothers me that much, I can choose to add some extra cardio to my workout this week and I’m balanced in the calorie spreadsheet in the sky. It does not make me a bad person because I ate the ice-cream. I makes me human.

It takes making an active choice to accept our humanity in order to live a successful life. When we stop making ourselves wrong, we stop judging everyone else around us and heaping condemnation on them. I know that when I am really picking on my husband, It is a sign that I need to practice some self-examination. We always project onto those whom we love the most.

When we develop the courage it can take to accept ourselves for who we are, life begins to change for us and everyone with whom we come in contact. Self-acceptance has a ripple effect that reaches far beyond that which we can see or understand.  When we set aside our shame of being human, we can feel empowered to clean up our unfinished business from the past and stop withholding the love, success, abundance and happiness we desire. Bringing resolution and acceptance to our personal integrity issues allows us to feel worthy of reaching out for and obtaining our dreams.

This week, think back over the last year or so of your life and consider ways that you may have acted outside of your own personal integrity and what the cost was to yourself or others. Be honest with yourself as you write it down. Then close your eyes, and envision a different outcome, one that would be made possible through forgiving yourself or another, or righting a wrong that lingers behind. Make an intention to take some type of action this week around this. If you need to forgive someone, do it now. If you need to ask for forgiveness from yourself or another, do it now.  The object of this week’s action step is to resore your integrity within yourself, So really go for it!

We have all done it. We’ve all held onto things long after their expiration date.

My weakness is books and magazines. I think some of the most difficult magazines for me to let go of were O magazines (ironic for me since the first TV program on hoarding that I saw was on Oprah). There is some alluring quality about magazines that are chock full of brilliant images and bright content, the glossy, satiny paper and the carnival of inky colored words! Be still, my heart. Before I knew what hit me, two years passed and 24 issues of O Magazines had piled up next to my book case in my home office. Rationally, I knew they needed to go, that I was never going to look at those back issues and the clutter was seriously getting on my nerves. I gathered my O mags and my courage and took them to work and left them on the break room table. What was left at the end of the day went to the recycling bin with a little piece of my heart.

Just this past summer, I finally parted with a very large collection of LIFE magazines from the 1960s. I inherited them from my now deceased husband. They had been stored in my basement for decades. When I sold the house about five years ago, I moved every last one of them to a storage building I own, where they collected dust for five more years.

The LIFE magazine collection was ripe with potential for one reason why people become what has now become known famously as hoarders. This collection had deep sentimental value to me because they belonged to my husband when he was alive. It was somehow comforting to have his things around me and it felt almost sacrilegious to discard things that he had spent his life collecting.

Sentimentality is one of the leading rationalizations of hoarding behavior. It is a feeling we can all understand, but rationally, we know we cannot hold on to everything that once belonged to a deceased loved one. Those with a tendency to hoard get into trouble when this line becomes blurred and they just can’t let go of most of the thingsleft behind after a death.

The proclivity to hoard is deep within a person and skews an otherwise rational person’s ability to separate people and things. This confusion is not limited to lost loved ones, but to the way hoarders views their worth. Many times the need to acquire things offers a certain level of validation.

There is a projection of self-worth onto things such as the kind of house we live in or the kind of car we drive, even our wardrobe and the food we eat. We not only judge a book by its cover, we judge ourselves and everyone else by the cover of things, nicely called assets. Clearly, buying a nice home that we can afford is not a hoarding issue, although it is arguable that it is one of personal identity. For the hoarder, the more stuff they acquire, the more comforted they feel. Unlike love and friendship, things are tangible and serve to fill a hurting heart.

Another theory is that hoarding is somehow a search for significance. Under the guise of a ‘collection,’ the acquisition of things offers a borrowed significance. But, just because the ‘collection’ holds some sort of significance, the significance does not actually transfer to the collector. Significance is not something one can collect or stock pile.

Unfortunately, what we see on television as a curiosity at best and voyeurism at worst is a sad extreme of a quiet obsession inside most of us. That is why we watch. Like the car wreck as we drive past it, that could be us if our circumstances were different.

A hollow heart is a sad thing, and how we try to fill it externally quickly becomes a slippery slope of self-sabotaging behaviors. Hoarding calories that we do not need to survive is no different than hoarding stuff that has no useful purpose and complicates life. The parallels are endless.

There is only one way to validate ourselves and fill our hearts and that is through an internal relationship with our spiritual selves. We are free in this country to define that for ourselves. The answers lie within each of us and there is never a need to hoard the love of the universe because there is a never ending abundance of love in the world.

Will there ever be a popular reality show about that?

If one completes the journey to one’s own heart,

one will find oneself in the heart of everyone else

-Father Thomas Keating

As a coach, I am blessed to work with many wonderful people, each on his or her personal journey to cultivate their life. Often, the catalyst for seeking my services is a sense or feeling of being stuck and unable to move forward. This feeling of being stuck often emerges from a lack or misunderstanding of compassion. The word, compassion,  comes from the Middle English via Old French and ecclesiastical Latin. Its core meaning is to have a sympathetic pity and concern for the sufferings or misfortunes of others.

At first consideration, most of my clients tell me that they are very compassionate people, and they usually are. However, compassion is an individual quality and is always defined by the false self, the wounded ego. It is from the heart not the head that true compassion can be defined.

Many times, instead of relating to another person with a sense of sameness, we unconsciously strip them of their true identity and objectify them. We don’t see them as fellow human beings, we see them as the object or cause of our pain, our disappointment or the denial of something we want. This is the only way in which we can direct blame outward. This is the process of becoming someone’s victim.

There is no compassion in this process because we must distance ourselves from who we really are in order to deny who the other person really is. This process is the definition of the  absence of compassion for ourselves and others. When we stop to consider this for a moment, we know in our hearts that this is true.

Compassion is not limited, as the definition above implies, to the misfortune of others in  a physical sense, but is more about our connection with the brotherhood of man. Compassion means to be in touch with our own heart and to see another’s heart within us.  The recognition that we are not separated by what we can see, but are untied by that which remains unseen lies within the heart of compassion and the journey within is always the point of life on earth.

A restless heart is an elusive condition because we feel it from within, but often have difficulty understanding its source or describing our feelings to someone else. It is not rational. Everything can be going well in our lives and we can have much for which to be grateful, but somehow, somewhere, there is a nagging feeling that something is missing.

In my own life as well as with my experience with numerous coaching clients, this sense of restlessnes can be our inner-self urging us to move forward, to challenge ourselves to take the next step in our lives, whatever that may be. Our intellect or ego/personality/external self tends to want to hold us back, keep us in the same space because it is safe and familiar, regardless of how boring and unchallenging that may be.

Of course, we all know that to stay idle is to not grow as a human being and so, this restless heart is activated within, pulling at our mind and emotions as it tries to get our attention. Just like we have physical symptoms when something is wrong with our bodies, our restless heart cries out to be heard. Unfortunately, most of us were not raised to listen to our own internal voices. We were hushed by the external forces of family, friends and foes. In an astonishingly short period of time, we grow a hard shell around the messages of our hearts and although we can no longer hear its message, we can feel it, however unfamiliar or peculiar.

There is only one way to calm your restless heart, and that is to stop and listen to it, feel it and know that it comes from a part of you that has always been with you and always will be. We can deny who we really are, but who we really are can never deny us. Your restless heart will continue to call you at times that you least expect it until it is heard, even if that is never. Your restless heart will continue to stir within you until the day you die, perhaps even longer, but I am not an expert in such matters so you will have to contemplate that on your own.

Your restless heart can speak to you in a number of ways, all unique to you. I have often found that the simple observation of the wonderous world in which we live opens my restless heart and allows me to hear its tender words. There is nothing so moving as a beautiful sunset or purple mountain majesty against a serene sky. The natural world moves me like nothing else can. Writing also opens me to my restless heart and that has always been so. Even as I write now, this is a spontaneous blog as I am in this moment of my life. Cooking for my family and friends or baking bread can become a meditation for me. Music stirs my restless heart to the surface and suddenly, with its urging, I can dream large and find the path to be large and bold with my actions.

Without our restless hearts, mankind may have never accomplished very much,but our hearts urged us on across oceans in wooden boats to the unknown, to worlds beyond our atmosphere in vehicles that have broken down only to be fixed with a ball-point pen. Even the technology that allows me to express my thoughts to a worldwide audience is a product of a restless heart somewhere in time.

What would be possible for you if you were to listen to your own restless heart? What bold and defiant thing might you achieve if you could hear the longing of your own heart? Anything. Yes, anything is possible, the unthinkable becomes thinkable from within our restless hearts. What will you do today to calm your restless heart?

What happens when a hot headed manager fires an employee on the spot, without taking the time to consider any future ramifications for the company? If you are an HR professional, the file probably ends up on your desk and it’s up to you to perform damage control for the sake of both the company and the individual employee who was let go.

While it is not uncommon for outplacement services to be offered in a standard personnel outplacement, it can be a very important tool in your tool box to consider in other cases as well. Out placement services are often composed of support processes that will assist the outplaced employee in finding new employment. Resume’ writing, interview tips and money management between jobs are just a few of the more common offerings.

It is also fair to consider the emotional impact that outplacement has on the employee. It can be extremely demoralizing to be let go or laid off for any reason. The affected employee can understand cognitavely that the action is tied to a legitimate business decision, but emotionally, it is very painful and cultivates a type of fear that we can all relate to.

Fear is the number one stumbling block for out of work employees and fear along with feelings of self-doubt is an emotional response that can be supported through an outplacement resource offering you may not have considered, life coaching.

Life coaching is a great resource for you to consider and it offers real value to an outplaced employee because they have many emotions and are not sure what to do with them. After fear and self-doubt, anger is the second most powerful response that leads to bad will toward the company. Anger and blame directed toward the company ultimately becomes a great excuse for the employee to stay stuck. They feel somehow victimized and justified emotionally for not moving on. It is arguable that focused life coaching can serve as a highly successful strategy to calm the waters under tense circumstances.

Coaching with a professional who is focused on working with outplaced employees can be a very successful endeavor that is a win-win in an otherwise sticky situation. When an outplaced employee has resources to help them find what is good in themselves at a time when they might be feeling worthless is the most powerful support that an organization can offer. It offers true support for where the employee is now and helps them look to the future with a sense of self-worth that will actually make a difference.

Offering life coaching to outplaced employees also sends a powerful message to the work force. That message is that the company cares about its employees and sees them a people in whom they want to invest, even if it is an outplaced employee. It can be viewed as a pay it forward action from an employer that is a good corporate citizen. It can serve to reinforce the company’s ranking among best places to work.

Creating the best possible opportunity for employees that must be outplaced is a valuable thing to do and is on the cutting edge of best HR practices.

Are you a Human Resources professional who could use a few new tools you your tool-kit? Mary Tucker is a professional life coach with 20 years of management experience in the corporate world and has managed numerous employees. She has a practice that is focused to support and champion the HR Profession.

Have you been laid off from you job recently? You are not alone, but the statistics are not useful when you are left without a job. Fear and self-doubt can creep in. Even if you can comprehend that the decision was based on business or the bottom line, being laid off can feel very personal. Here are a few things to consider that will help you build up your self-esteem and get you headed in the right direction after being laid off.

You’ve got to please yourself

One of the traps that is easy to fall into is that of self-doubt. We are all programmed from an early age to look for validation outside of ourselves. This fosters an underlying belief that the opinion of other people has the power to determine our worth, so when we get laid off or otherwise let go from a position, our sense of self-worth can take a dive. The operative in the term is the “self” in self-worth. The term itself implies that it is how much we value ourselves that matters the most.

This is especially true when we have been laid off. How much we value ourselves and our skills and abilities has a direct correlation to how we will approach getting back on our feet. If we listen to our negative internal dialog, we’re likely to fall into a dark hole of depression and desperation and that is not going to support you in moving forward. In fact, that is a recipe for getting and staying stuck.

Look for the gift

A great place to begin to shift your perspective after being laid off is to make a list of the possibilities that are before you. Freed from your highly demanding job, you have the opportunity of time to consider all of your options. You can begin with a clean slate and consider all the things you liked about your former job and all of the things that you were not fond of. This is information you can use, so collect it all in one place so you can review it as you move forward.

After you have your list of what qualities in your career you’d like to pursue, do a web search for jobs or opportunities that have those qualities or the potential to develop them. You know what you are looking for, so don’t waste time on low outcome activities. You’ll find that by taking this proactive approach, you will feel much more empowered and marketable.

To Thine Own Self be True

It cannot be said often enough that we must be true to who we really. That said, we have to be willing to take a long, hard and honest look at how we performed at our last position. We have to be honest enough to admit areas where we performed below our ability or where we failed to be a good employee or a good example of one. Your ability to be honest with yourself here will affect your job search in a positive way.

Be proactive

How we choose to show up at work can have a lasting impact. The savvy employee will always be proactive and find a way to do things just a little better than someone else and anticipate what issues are likely to become problematic in the future. Look ahead and develop a solution before there is an obvious problem. Take the time to shine and it will pay huge dividends in many ways. Who knows, that little something extra you bring to the table may be the difference between advancing in your career or losing it to a lay-off.

Mary Tucker is the owner and founder of the Coaching firm, Cultivate Your Life. She teaches executives and professionals how to create wealth for their company without losing themselves in the process. She is a the author of numerous newspaper and magazine articles on personal growth, conscious leadership and successful living. Mary is known for her “no excuses” approach to coaching for a sustainable transformation.

Want more? Go to http://www.cultivateyourlife.com.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Mary_Tucker

As human beings, we all desire to establish, develop and maintain loving relationship with those whom we care about. Most of us especially desire a love relationship, someone with whom to share our lives and grow old. It is arguable that on one really wants to die alone. But if this is so, then why are U.S divorce rates so high?

Many factors can account for why people split up such as early marriage, financial problems, infidelity, drug and alcohol addiction and abuse just to name a few. But, no one enters into a marriage with the intention of divorce so what goes wrong?

In order to maintain a love relationship over time, the bottom line is that each person in the marriage has a certain obligation and responsibility to practice emotional maturity and personal responsibility for their feelings, dreams and aspirations. Here are five key things to keep in mind if you want to keep that love relationship alive and well for decades.

Five ways to improve your love relationship

1. Be honest

Be honest with yourself about who you really are, not who you think you should be or your spouse wants you to be. We can all only keep up a charade for so long, and then the dark side of us exposes itself at the worst possible moment.

Most of the time we deny to our conscious self that we do have a dark side in which we don’t always act in way we’d like. We confuse who we think we are with who we really are, a living human being with a complete range of powerful emotions that we’ve learned are not safe to express, especially the vulnerable or dark ones.

If we can’t accept that we are humans and are imperfect, how can we expect our spouse to do so? As long as we wear the mask of happy at the expense of embracing our pain and fear, an underlying anger and resentment will grow and grow until it finally rears its ugly head or we stuff it inside and become a victim. We begin the death march of projection of our anger, disappointment and depression onto our spouse. Somehow it makes sense to blame them. The result of this is an emotional distancing that is unhealthy and painful for both partners.

Understanding our own responsibility to be honest with who we are, what our aspirations are, what our fears are and what our joys are gives us permission and courage to ask for what we need it the love relationship.

2. Make time for the love relationship

This has been said many times, many ways and it bears repeating here. As time goes by and real life begins to creep into your loving world, it is important to remember why you got married in the first place and it is equally important to remember why you were attracted to your lover in the first place. All of the qualities that put butterflies in you stomach and passion in your heart in the early days of the relationship, still exist. However, life doesn’t stand still just because we are in love. No, the sun still rises every morning, the darkness comes and the bills have to be paid.

The importance of scheduled time together cannot be overstated. As you and your spouse grow, so too, will your love relationship. It will grow and change as you do and if you do not establish a deep respect and friendship with each other, your love relationship will suffer. Be creative about together time. Take turns planning your special time together, surprise each other, have fun, create adventures and make a point to create memorable moments. This is as easy as consciously being present in the simplest of moments. When you are fully present to your love, the meaning will be memorable.

3. Be compassionate

Over time, it become very easy to take our love relationship and our partner for granted, in actuality, we begin to consider them as an extension or ourselves and this, too, is a deadly mistake. While the two of you may have joined together as “one” in marriage, there are still two distinct personalities that have dreams and goals. Eventually the day will come when we find ourselves being harsh and judgemental toward the one we love the most. Other times we find ourselves speaking to our love in a way in which we would never speak to another person. At times like these, remember that how we speak to our spouse or others who are close to us, is actually a reflection of how we speak to ourselves in our minds through a process of negative internal dialog. This is a reminder to us to stop and show compassion both to ourselves and to our love and our loving relationship.

4. Be committed

A love relationship is above all a commitment that we make not only to our lover, but to ourselves. We are best served by understanding that a commitment is not just a promise and a powerful intention, it is our integrity. Personal integrity is separate from moral or ethical integrity an responsibility. It is a promise we make to ourselves, an internal standard of the way we will live our lives. Many moments will come and go that will test the integrity of both partners, but an acknowledgment of our own code of conduct and what is in our own integrity can serve as a powerful anchor to steady us to our commitment when challenging times befall us.

5.Be Positive

It’s human nature, for some unknown reason, to look for what is wrong instead of looking for what is right. This is a habit that is a must in a loving relationship. We find what we look for, so if we look for what is going wrong, or what we think is wrong about our spouse, we are sure to find it. On the other hand, if we look for what is right, we will surely find that as well.

In moments of frustration, asking this question, am I looking for what is right or what is wrong, can bring some much needed positive energy to any situation. There is no flaw in another that we can recognize that does not, in fact, dwell within us. The old saying “You spot it, you got it” is trite but true. We cannot identify what is wrong with someone else if it didn’t exist is us. If not, how would we know it exists? How would be be able to spot it in another? And likewise with looking for what is right. We possess those qualities too, for again, if not, we would never be able to recognize them in our lover or the loving relationship.

There is nothing like being in love, but nothing endures like a truly loving relationship that is built on honesty, integrity, compassion, commitment and a true respect for the greater support structure being built. These qualities are the bedrock of any loving relationship that will be with you for the rest of your life, in good times and bad, in sickness and health until death parts you briefly.

Need a little support in your life? Sign up for free reports, information, e-courses and more.

Mary is a life coach is a the author of numerous newspaper and magazine articles on personal growth and conscious and successful living. Mary is known for her “no excuses” approach to coaching for a sustainable transformation.

Take Wrong Out of the Equation

Have you ever considered what the world would look like if we were able to take wrong out of the equation? What would be possible if there were no right or wrong ways to live, do or be? What if there was no wrong, just different?

While it is arguable that some things are just plain wrong in the world of morality and ethics, on a more individual level, taking wrong out of any scenario can offer some unexpected possibilities. Our sense of judgement about people, places, things or opportunities is not a matter of chance as much as it is a matter of unconscious choice and unexamined beliefs. This is not “wrong,” but it is limiting. Bringing awareness to what or whom we make wrong is enlightening, expansive and energizing. Being willing to suspend judgement even for a moment allows us to create the space to consider something old in a new way.

What situation, relationship or activity are you involved with because you feel it’s the right thing to do, or what is expected of you? Where are your actions and commitments performed out of guilt or because you just can’t bring yourself to say no? This is often a clear example of some way that we are making ourselves or others wrong. But what if we substituted interesting where wrong once dwelled? Would that create a little opening to see things differently?

What if we replaced should with could? The difference is subtle, but powerful. Should implies a sense of righteousness and guilt and wrongness, as in “I should do this” or “They shouldn’t feel that way!” Could, on the other hand, is neutral. Saying or thinking, “I could do this,” is void of judgement and pregnant with possibility. It carves the path to choice, and the power of choice is limitless. Should is a dead end.

Consider this. Once, it was wrong to believe the earth was anything but flat. People have lost their lives because of a static belief of what is right or wrong, possible or impossible. It was once wrong, arrogant and blasphemous to even contemplate that the earth was not the center of our universe. Again, people died over this rigid righteousness.

Until we are willing to consider the possibilities outside of wrong and should, we perpetuate the smallness of our limited knowledge and embedded beliefs. Try it. Practice a willingness to take wrong out of some equation and see what remains. I think you’ll find that you have created choice.