Principle One – Become Connected With Your Truth
The hardest thing to do is to be honest with yourself. We lie more to ourselves than to anyone else. You need to always tell the truth to yourself even when it hurts. Truth congruency comes from matching who you are on the inside with who you are on the outside. Only when this happens are we truly aligned and in flow.
Principle Two – Judging Yourself
In my experience we are our own harshest critic. Many of us talk to ourselves in a way that we would never tolerate from a stranger, a friend or a loved one. Why is this? Well for many of us it is our inner critic talking to us. They think their job is to keep us safe and yet time and time again all they actually do is to limit our opportunities. You need to stop the negative conversations you are having with yourself immediately. For one week carry around a notepad and jot down every time that you notice your inner critic talking to you and instilling negative thoughts. When the inner critic knows they are caught out they will curtail their activities. Better still give your inner critic or critics (17 archetypes have been identified by the Inner Mean Girl Reform School!) a name. Mine are called Sabotaging Susie, Comparison Claire and then my old favourite Chatterbox Charlie.
Principle Three – Stop Judging Others
It is hard to be joyful when you are judging others. Judging others creates a huge amount of stress in our lives. It affects all our relationships – personal and business. Judging is often an unconscious habit that has developed over time, so much so that often we don’t even realise that we are doing it. Let go of judgement and every time you find yourself judging others stop. Just making this small change can have a massive difference on your life and help keep you in flow.
Principle Four – Pursue Fun with a Vengeance
It’s okay to have fun. Children have fun all the time and yet as we become adults we somehow forget to have fun? Fun shouldn’t have to be squeezed into a few weeks of vacation a year, or indeed the last chapter of your life when supposedly you will have enough money to retire. Fun deserves to be part of your life right now. You need to prioritize fun into your life right now or else it will go missing and life is too short not to have fun.
If you want to find out how to discover when you are in flow and living life with passion and purpose then just think about a time when everything you did seem effortless. It was fun, you were motivated and super productive. Then think about a time when the task you had to undertake was boring, monotonous and seemed to take all day. Maybe you were even stressed. This is a time you were not in flow.
To find out what roles speak to your natural talents and keep you in flow I recommend that you take a Talent Dynamics Test and see how your life can shift from living in flow. Enjoy.
Julia Felton (aka The Business Wrangler) is the founder of Business HorsePower. Business leaders, entrepreneurs and executives hire her to accelerate their business performance by harnessing the energy of their people to work more collaboratively together. By aligning purpose with actions the team achieves exponential results as everyone starts pulling in the same direction.
Julia believes that business is a force for good and through designing purpose-driven businesses that leverage the laws of nature, and the herd, you can create businesses founded on the principles of connection, collaboration and community that make a significant impact in the world.
