Develop A Vision And Create The Best Year Of Your Life

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Most people have bigger TV screens than their vision. They never develop a vision for their life, let alone for the year. There’s a reason why only 3% to 5% of a population ever achieve any real level of freedom or fulfillment, creative, financial, or otherwise. It’s only because 3% to 5% of people ever get clear on highest leverage goals, uncover the unconscious patterns sabotaging them, and have a principle-centered system to achieve them. You don’t have to be like most people. That’s not your destiny if you decide. Grab this very special opportunity to turn this path around once and for all and discover how you can start creating the best year of your life year after year.

 

Develop A Vision And Create The Best Year Of Your Life

Best Year of Your Life

Are you wary of New Year’s resolution and you’re disillusioned by the struggle to get clear on what you want and actually achieve it? Do all the possibilities and parts to achieving them overwhelm you so much that you often don’t accomplish what you set out to do? Is reading this making you feel tired and yearn for some Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey Ice Cream? Then maybe that’s just me. First of all, I want to release you from any guilt or shame around the struggle to get clear and your growth and actually achieve them. It’s not your fault. You’re not to blame. It’s so common, it’s almost epidemic. The reason is we aren’t really taught how to do this and a lot of us out there just met and follow someone else that did it and it doesn’t work for many others. I realized after a while the standard approaches did not work for me or my clients. This was my struggle for years. I keep fine-tuning the model until I broke down most of the success stories and discovered something. Most people never develop a vision for their life, let alone for the year. Most people have bigger TV screens than their vision.

There’s a reason why only 3% to 5% of a population ever achieve any real level of freedom or fulfillment, creative, financial or otherwise. It’s only because 3% to 5% of people ever get clear on the highest leverage goals, uncover the unconscious patterns, sabotaging them, and have a principle-centered system to achieve them. You don’t have to be like most people, that’s not your destiny if you decide. That’s why I’m giving you a very special opportunity to turn this path around once and for all and start creating the best year of your life year after year. This is exactly how I do it, this is how I created a life I have. I helped many people around the world do the same. This is not like any other goal-creating planning or success system out there. In fact, it’s almost exactly opposite to what most people teach.

The ego does anything it can to prevent you from truly changing because, for the ego, change is scary and painful.

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One of the biggest mistakes people make when creating a plan for the New Year is that they don’t take the time to complete the last year. The result is that they lose many of the lessons and blessings and carry a lot of unfinished business into the New Year resulting in stagnation, limitation, and becoming stuck. How do you do this the right way? I will show you step by step in Life by Design Podcast. If you feel any anxiety as you hear this, recognize it as resistance or your ego trying to keep you safe and keep things the same. I know how the ego works and it’s probably giving you all reasons and excuses to stall, wait and think about it. That’s what the ego does. Anything it can to prevent you from truly changing because, for the ego, change is scary and painful.

Are day-to-day stresses taking over your life from work, your family, to taking care of your health and everything else? It seems that life can be overwhelming and leave us feeling drained and empty. This is due to a lack of clarity and priorities. When we are unclear about what matters we lose our way in our lives. Clarity about where we are and where we are going to determines the quality of our lives. It governs the feeling and expression of emotions, and that’s what ultimately enables us to be successful in life. When your priorities are misplaced, they can cause stress and illness and negatively impact the healthy management of our daily tasks and stresses. Most people, however, don’t know how to get clear about what matters.

Once you get the power of priorities in your life and how managing priorities can help us become balanced healthy and de-stressed, you can begin to move towards designing your life. It’s the beginning of a perfect opportunity for you to take charge of your life. The Design Your Life model has three stages to be effective. In fact, the first stage is the most important stage. The first one of the three stages is to evaluate. The second one is to start. The third one is to implement. Many times, both setting and time management fail to bring about long-term results. This is because the first stage, evaluate, is overlooked. Many typically rushing to the third stage which to implement, assuming that they already got all the ducks in a row.

LBD 2 | Develop A Vision
Develop A Vision: How often have you updated yourself on where you are in your life and where you are heading?

 

For all the years that I’ve personally designed and implemented plans, when something I thought worked as planned, it’s because I overlooked stage one, evaluate. I did not do it thoroughly. How do you go about evaluating something? How do you go about evaluating your life? This was a process I created for myself about 35 years ago and I kept refining it. For the last 25 years, graduates of my successful mission program have been using a more advanced version of this process to develop a deeper awareness of their life. I used to call it an updating process for them. Some people update their computers every day, others may do it once a week, a month or a couple of times a year. How often have you updated yourself on where you are in your life and where you are heading?

Divide your life into the following categories. I would give you the simple version first. We will look at your relationships, emotional and we look at your health and then we look at your wealth or your business and your spiritual life. For those of you who want to make greater distinctions, we have the more detailed version. We have the emotional, being aware, self-modulation, relationship, family, work, friends and community. We have physical nutrition, diet, weight, exercise, routine and health habits. We focus on your mind, your mental mindset, thinking patterns, and ability to innovate. Then you have your career pathway, progression, satisfaction, financial, current ability to manage midterm and long-term and your living environment. Is your work and living environment supporting you?

Spiritual, are you part of an established church, temple or institution or do you have a broad-ranging humanitarian perspective? In each category, you give it a score from one to ten, one being the least and ten being the most. You also write a one-line statement about that area of your life. Then you assess your life in each category five years ago and now. This gives you a trajectory of where your life is heading. There are other models that focus on giving you a score of where you are in your life. However, the Life By Design model gives you a perspective unlike just doing a snapshot of only where you are right now. For example, let’s take a category like physical. This is the example I often use in my seminars, health. Five years ago, the statement, “Very unfit, exercise, channel surfing on the plasma screen.” Five years ago, James was unfit. The only exercise that he did was going to the table from work, he walked to the fridge, took out his packet of potato chips, and sat down in front of a plasma screen. James let his fingers do the walking as he channel surf. One day, he saw a fitness guru on the screen. James got inspired. The very next day, he went out and bought track pants and track shoes.

James started walking five days out of seven. Six months later, he graduated to running. One year later, he joined the gym. Within six months, he was a part-time gym instructor after work. His statement, he is very fit. James exercises six days a week. He was so enthusiastic about fitness that when his friends see him coming, they get tired. I thought that unless you have a current map or where you came from the way you are right now in its context. If you never had problems with your health and you suddenly develop the health problem three years ago, when they look at your past five years and where you are, you will recognize the changing nature of your health status as you start to age. However, you always are relatively unfit with poor health habits, like James and the example and you start to develop healthier habits, then that too will show up.

He said, “Project what happened,” and is happening in the future. If you had poor health habits and the lack of vitality, doing nothing means it will only get worse. I could use the same argument for your financial status as well. This is how I work with my current clients and patients. By having them do the exercise and overview of future outcomes, I have a pretty good idea of where they’re heading and moving towards and if it’s in the right direction. One lucky audience that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on Discovering Your Soul’s Purpose. I will lead you on a unique personal journey to discover your mind, body and psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and the personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

When you do the above exercise, I assume you were as honest as you could be with yourself. Second, you write in one sentence in that category some of my seminar participants group others could not. The more you can write, the more distinctions you can make. The more precise is your evaluation of your current status. The more precise is your evaluation, the more variables you can choose to change. The more choices you have, the greater the capacity for change and growth. In case the above remains unclear to you, I will repeat the example of James outlined above.

If you had poor health habits and the lack of vitality, doing nothing means it will only get worse.

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Suppose under the health category, James had written, “Very unfit,” and leaves everything to the imagination and very little actionable items. Instead, James had written, “Very unfit. Point one, poor nutritional habits. Point two, do not exercise. Point three, overweight by ten kilograms. Point four sleeps at 2 AM and wakes up exhausted.” Comparing A, which is only very unfit and B, meet all the four points in describing the problem with greater precision. James has actually come up with several actionable items. They see the trajectory of where they’re going and decide they want a different path. They’re motivated by the amazing changes. Others see the trajectory and either remain blind to the implications or do too little, too late.

It saddens me when I see this. I pointed out to some of my clients about an impending physical, emotional, or financial disaster based on what happens. After the disaster has occurred, either a stroke, heart failure or bankruptcy, they come back to me and we work with the physical and the emotional rehabilitation. I deeply respect the power of personal choice. Sometimes people only learn from life experience. This can be bitter. I do hope that it’s not you. This next year could be your year. Let me help you make it the very best year of your life. You and only you can decide to make it so. That is the very first step to your brilliant future waiting for you. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what methods and join me each week as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.

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The Freedom Formula: Mastering Energy, Money, and Leverage

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The urgent is something we evolve and have grown to despise. It distracts and interrupts you and somehow finds a way to take priority over the things that matter in your life. It doesn’t care about your intention for meaningful progress. It doesn’t care about what you want. It’s selfish; it wants what it wants when it wants it. It’s always challenging across to you and those around you. It means that book you’ve always wanted to write doesn’t get written. It means that friend you have been meaning to call doesn’t get called. One day, you wake up asking yourself, “Why am I finding it difficult to love my spouse? Where does this extra ten or twenty kilos come from? Why am I living here or in this job? Why do I feel like something is missing?” If you can relate to all of this or any of it, you’re normal. It doesn’t have to be this way. Discover the Freedom Formula and three powerful questions to conquer the urgent and make meaningful progress to what important things you’re holding near and dear to your heart.

 

The Freedom Formula: Mastering Energy, Money, and Leverage

Freedom Formula

In this podcast, you’re going to discover three powerful questions that will set you up to have the most extraordinary year of your life. We urge you in something we have all grown to despise and distracts you and interrupts you and somehow finds a way to take priority over the most things that matter in your life. It doesn’t care about your intention for meaningful progress. It doesn’t care what you want. It’s selfish. It wants what it wants when it wants it and it always comes across to you and those around you. It means that book you’ve always wanted to write doesn’t get written. It means that friend you have been meaning to call doesn’t get called. Then one day you wake up asking yourself, “Why am I finding it difficult to love my spouse? Where does this extra ten or twenty kilos come from? Why am I living here or in this job? Why do I feel like something is missing? If you can relate to all of this or any of it, I have good news. You’re normal, but it doesn’t have to be this way.

I mentioned what happened when my mother died when I was fourteen. Stay with me because I want you to walk you through three questions when a potential to change the course of your life. These three questions are the core foundation of a bigger system I developed called the Freedom Formula: Mastering Energy, Money, and Leverage in Nine Steps, which has been designed to help you finally conquer the urgent and make meaningful progress to what’s important things you’re holding near and dear to your heart. I developed this process because as you’ll see, when I started using this process year-after-year, my life in all areas completely took a turn for the better.

My career, my relationships and my health, I was more alive mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. I was having a far greater impact than I ever was before. People around me saw the change and asked what I was doing. In the beginning, I shared it with just a few people and what I found is that they are looking for the same thing, too, clarity. Clarity on what they needed to do to get themselves in the right direction and most importantly how to stay on track. That is why I created this podcast to ensure more people would benefit after I saw the amazing results people were getting in my program. Coming up, three powerful questions that you need if you want to have an amazing year.

You can do anything you want. You just can’t do everything you want at the same time.

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The first question is this, “What would your ideal life five years in the future look like?” Most people live their lives as if they are going to live forever. There’s this belief that that will be all the time to change. Life will carry on pretty much the way it always has. There will be lots of times to adjust to the changes that will occur in the course of your lives. In the right time, pieces will just fall magically in place and will all be as right as rain. They may not say it, but this is pretty much how they’re living. They often give no thought to how the future will change and if they will be ready for it.

I met this gentleman and became one of my business partners. He was incredibly a focused and driven person about his future while being very careful to maintain all these relationships with people. When he first graduated as an engineer, he had worked for an engineering company and he decided he wanted to focus on being a management consultant. After he completed his MBA, he tries to get a job. He figures he would have no problem with this double degrees and years of working experience. To his horror, he went through 26 interviews before he got a job. This gave him a foul taste on the probable future.

When he finally got a job, he made a resolution. Never be at the mercy of another interviewer. Eventually, he left to set up his own company investing in other businesses. Fast forward five years later, he has invested in 30 companies in six countries in multiple industries. He got married to a very special lady who was starting to become a doctor and has a beautiful son. His major concern is how could he give his son a great life in the future? What would your ideal future look like? What gets you excited and motivated about it?

The second question is this, “If you continue what you’re doing now, will you feel fulfilled five years in the future?” One of the illusions of our culture is that you can do it all and I just don’t buy it. I believe you can do anything you want. You just can’t do everything you want at the same time. If you are going to live a designed life it has to be based on priorities and intentionally choosing the priorities that will guide your life. You probably know what’s important to your husband or your wife or your partner and you certainly know what is important to your boss. You may know what’s important to your parents or your kids, but who is setting the priorities of your life? What’s important to you? Are you being honest with yourself?

I had a close friend and client. We had gone to school together. He’s also done my personal development programs. He consistently put other people in his life first. His ex-wife, his children, and his brother, he puts himself last. I finally told my friend that he needed to do a significant emotional work about his relationships with people, then it would take one year. If he chose not to do this, it would have serious repercussions in his future. He told me that it sounded too painful to do that type of emotional work. Fast forward five years later, his brother defaulted on his bank loan. The bank forecloses on the loan. Since my friend was the guarantor of the loan, they went after him.

Freedom Formula 2
Freedom Formula: You need a rapid reality check on where you’re going in your life.

 

In one year’s time, he would have achieved financial freedom for life. Instead, one year from that, he was declared bankrupt. He then came in to do some emotional healing, too little too late. He got very stressed and then later a heart problem activated and became life-threatening. He needed surgery to carry on. Fortunately, he survived the surgery. If you continue to like what you are doing now, will you feel fulfilled five years in the future or do you need a rapid reality check on where you’re going in your life?

Here’s the third question, “What commitment will you now make for your ideal future?” We had you identify the core priority in the previous podcast. If you did the exercise in the previous podcast, you know the trajectory or what you need to do. The question right now is, “What will you commit to this future? Are you going to be lukewarm and say, ‘Let me think about it,’ or are you going to come into it all in?” Let me give you an example of my own priorities. My first priority is me now. It didn’t use to be. Even though I exercise appropriate self-care, you’re not going to be of any use to anybody else. For example, if you’re going to lead with your emotional baggage, then you’re going to drag that into any relationship you may have. If you don’t take care of yourself physically, which was me at one point, it can lead to something serious like a heart attack or some other health crisis.

Somehow issues can’t be avoided, I get that. You’re going to get increasingly less productive at work or in your business as you age. Years ago, when I was living the compulsive life, my priorities weren’t in this order and you could tell by my daily actions. Going through this process, starting with these questions, I made an important discovery. It contradicts a lot of people who are saying, “You can win at business and you can win at life, but you can’t win at both.” Here’s my experience, you can’t win at one without winning at the other. Success takes both.

Don’t let the urgent take precedence over the important. Don’t convince yourself that the situation you’re now in is temporary. Why? Those temporary things have a way of becoming prominent and then becoming a lifestyle. Don’t just drift or drive along. Ask the third question. Ask yourself what commitment will you make now for your ideal future? A few years ago before I formalized the Freedom Formula, I was working on my schedule for the forthcoming year. I thought I had a good plan. I remember than one year earlier in the same thought, but I grossly over-committed. I looked at my plan again and broke it down into the number of hours and realized that I underestimated how much time and resources I needed. I needed another 500 hours that year. That was a major wake up call.

I felt desperate because there were so many things riding on me: the current businesses, the future projects and my staff. I felt exhausted. I thought there has to be a better way. It took me three months to reconfigure everything. It took another six months to implement and change all the ways of thinking about managing time, energy, and resources that I had been doing for the last fourteen years. Once I did and I got everyone in my company on board, everything changed. Suddenly, I had time to exercise, go on movie dates with my wife once a month instead of twice a year. I could exercise nearly every day. That’s how our company became more profitable. So often we build up things in our mind and it comes down to making that one single commitment.

Let me ask you this, as we have been talking about this, you probably thought of a commitment you needed to make. Maybe it’s a tough conversation you need to have. Maybe it’s an action you need to take. What is it for you? What’s the thing that’s going to move the needle? It may push you outside your comfort zone, but all the important stuff happens outside your comfort zone. If you feel uncomfortable just thinking about what I said, fantastic. Embrace it. You are where you should be. Nothing good happens inside the comfort zone.

Don’t let the urgent take precedence over the important.

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What is the next single commitment that you need to make? If you want to live a life by design, if you want to be courageous and not live by default and not be in overdrive, these are the three questions you need to answer. Number one, what would your ideal life five years into the future look like? Number two, if you continue what you are doing now, will you feel fulfilled five years in the future? Number three, what commitment will you make for your ideal future? Now you are clear about the questions you need to answer to live a life by design. The next obvious step in the practicality of implementing this on a daily basis.

For example, how will your everyday life change from what you are currently doing? How are the daily decisions being different based on the answers to the questions we discussed? How will you manage your time so you are giving attention to the things that matter most? It’s all just dreams and wishes unless we take our 30,000-foot view of our ideal life and bring it down to the practical daily actions. This is practical because I’m sure you want to make a big decision or change in some area of your life before now, but for whatever reason, you didn’t. We’ve all been there, so what is it going to be different for you this time? For most people, nothing unless the reason most people will never get what you truly want in life. To succeed, we’ve got to break this old habit. I had to be ultra-driven about my businesses. I need a serious wake-up call to realize I have to do something dramatically different from the way I approached my day. If I didn’t, I get sucked in the same old, same old me. Your habits determine your character and that determines your future or your destiny.

One lucky listener that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering their soul’s purposes. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover the unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands.

On this podcast, I’m going to help you design the life that works so you’re able to say yes in the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the bigger your true potential can ascend to and you can accomplish all the things you set out to do and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what matters and join me as we get close to designing the life of your dreams.

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Time Management: How To Be More Productive With Less Time

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As the world moves in a speed that seems to be going faster than ever, what we find wanting more of is time. Evolving with the world means developing new life goals and habits. Unfortunately, the constraints with time have made it harder for us to create new habits to support the things we now want. Though we work hard, we seem to be less and less productive. Discover a groundbreaking research around time management and its three core elements: evaluate, discard, and implement.

 

Time Management: How To Be More Productive With Less Time

Time Management

Let’s have a look at your life by design model. We all have things to do, people to see and targets to hit. Many of us either run our own businesses or work for others. If there’s one thing that we could have more of, apart from money, is time. Since the advent of the industrial revolution, as access to information and ease of communication started speeding up, we have found ourselves with less and less time. The neurosis of modern civilization is blocked time. We are seeing more people getting sick and dying, more divorces and failed relationships, more alienation of the young because we have lost control of time. Many of my clients and patients have struggles involving relationships, achieving targets and even being able to sleep. Others struggle to develop new habits to support new life goals and ambitions. At the heart of all these struggles is an easy relationship with priorities and resource allocation.

I’ve long been fascinated by how people use their energy. I’ve always looked at cutting-edge ways to do things more easily. My calendar has been chocked full of things to do and targets to hit. I thought I worked out a very good energy management system. However, as time went on, I began to realize I was working harder and harder but feeling less and less effective. Many of my strategies and methods were becoming less productive. I wonder if you have felt this way too. This led me to review some groundbreaking research around time management and what neuroscience has to say about how our brain processes time as we grow older and how we processed time as we become more stressed.

In order to understand what matters to you, you need to explore and evaluate the possibilities around you.

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After almost 30 years of feeling I had an effective time management system, I reached the limits of what I knew. As the number of companies I was running and the complexity of the projects I was involved in grew, I realized that a brand-new approach was called for. I could no longer repeat the same old strategies. I became aware that most people did not value their time enough. They often did not use their time in fruitful and effective ways. Also at different times in our lives, as we go through life cycle changes, our priorities and values change as well. This would dramatically impact our relationship with time and productivity. Simply trying to squeeze more into the day will no longer work or be effective. We have to learn to focus on higher ticket items in our lives and businesses. From all of these perceptions and the experience of working with more than 15,000 individuals, a new model of time management was born. This model includes the latest findings in neuroscience, concepts and systems thinking and meditative practices, as well as concepts familiar to energy management. The graduates of my programs have asked me to formally put all these concepts together.

With this model of time management, you will begin to understand your personal day-to-day time rhythms as well as the life cycles you move through. You will learn about the value of your time and what you can do to increase this value. As you do so, you will find you’re doing more and more and less and less time easily and effortlessly. There are three core elements of this process. They are evaluate, discard and implement. The first process, evaluate, is to identify the difference that makes the difference. One of my seminar participants once accused me of making life boring by insisting on prioritizing and planning. She felt she wanted to be in the moment and be spontaneous. It took a few years before she realized that she could only be truly spontaneous when she had a disciplined approach, develop core skills and then set aside time for spontaneity.

In order to understand what matters to you, you need to explore and evaluate. Those who eventually became crystal clear about what methods do so because they had the benefit of hindsight, experience and evidence that something worked for them. To explore all that is relevant and possible, you need a base from which you can narrow down what is clearly the call for you, the crucial difference that makes the difference. You have to explore and evaluate a broad range of possibilities in depth before you can conclude about what works. Should you need to test things out in small ways before commenting in a big way, do what matters to you. Contrast this approach. With many Singaporeans who finished school and go to college, then polytechnic or a university, they then go out into the workforce. They know nothing about what truly matters in their personal, emotional and professional lives.

Time Management 2

 

They accept conventional perspectives about what is important. Then in their late 30s or 40s, they start struggling with overwhelming doubt. In private conversations in my office, they often plentifully ask me, “What is my life purpose?” If you believe as I did when I was living a compulsive life, that being driven and being overly busy was a sign of productivity, you also would have believed that creating the space and time to think, explore and reflect is a luxury. Yet these very activities are the cure to the curse of focusing on trivialities while missing the core issues in your life yet crucial for identifying the difference that makes the difference. Dedicate that life to silence. Spend significant chunks of time exploring, questioning, arguing, and thinking. The purpose of the exploration is to hone on what truly matters. To focus on the difference that makes the difference.

The second one is to discard the irrelevant. However, are you ready to get rid of what you should throw away? It is not enough to identify what activities and commitment do not work for you. You have to actively discard them. I will show you more in the episodes how to discard the clutter in your life so that you can have a well-designed and meaningful life and make vital contributions to what matters. You will also do so in such a way that you become more respected, acknowledged and valued in your home, workplace, community and society at large.

Getting rid of things and projects in your life and business will not be easy. There will be that nagging fear that you gave away something that you would desperately need later on in your life. This feeling is perfectly normal. Research has shown that when we don’t own something, we value it less. Those that we own, we assign a higher value to and so find it harder to dispose of. The critical question when deciding what to declutter is if I did not have this opportunity, what would I be prepared to sacrifice to get access to it? However, remember that in the life design model, whenever you’re going to say no to something, you’re agreeing by default. It’s easier to become clear by asking yourself. Instead of saying yes to every opportunity and activity, what would I say no to? This question will clear the cobwebs and give you a greater clarity for you and your team. It is the core questions that will allow you to make breakthroughs in your life, your career, and your business.

Last but not least is effortless implementation. Whether our plan is to plan a birthday party for our child, climb up the ladder at work or complete a project at work, we tend to think of implementation as hard work, something we need to force and make happen. However, the life design model is very different. We don’t need to force implementation because the prior stages to evaluate and discard our system has been created for removing obstacles and making implementation effortless. These three elements evaluate, discard and implement are part of an iterative cyclical process that moves you towards higher levels of performance and personal satisfaction.

The clearer you are about your life, the more you step into your potential.

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To achieve this effortless state, all the elements are required. The previous two stages have been well explored in the necessary steps clearly delineated. Appropriate resources have been acquired, timelines have taken into consideration, the flow of energy and resources and how people operate. While effortlessness comes easy, you need to plan for it to happen. While compulsive types force execution of plans, those who understand the design life implement effortlessly. When all unnecessary details have been eliminated, habits automated and sequences streamlined, implementation becomes a seamless piece of the whole. We naturally want to do things the easy way.

One lucky audience that poses a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover the unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands. On this podcast, I’m going to help you design a life that works so you are able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential. Stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what matters and join me as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.

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Pain Perception Between Men And Women

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Have you ever wondered why women tend to live longer than men? Dr. Sundradas puts two and two together by comparing what has been missed by the Western medicine model that the wellness medicine model have. Situating emotions at the heart of it, what differs is the pain perception between men and women. Learn about their different coping mechanisms and how it affects their health.

 

Pain Perception Between Men And Women

Pain Perception

Have you ever wondered why women outlive men and how does this relate to your life by design model? In Western medicine, the whole concept of wellness is overlooked. Western medicine, practitioners and scientists have made great advances in the management of pathology by studying the disease. When they study physiology, they do so to better understand abnormal physiology or disease. They do not study physiology in the hope they can better understand how to optimize physiology. There has been a great deal of skepticism about wellness-creating devices and healing technologies because of the above perspective.

The fundamental challenge in the model can be stated in the following ways. Subtle energy changes predate biochemical dysfunctions and medical conditions. Western medical professionals will typically ignore these changes because they will maintain these changes have no relation to any changes in physiology. Wellness medicine practitioners who habitually look for these changes and successfully help to optimize the patient’s condition will avert the eventual development of these conditions. The Western medical professional will then claim subtle changes have no relationship to pathology because the patient never went on to develop the alleged biochemical dysfunction medical condition. The medical model basically applies the so-called lock and key paradigm of biochemistry, causing to which any biochemical reaction needs a specific arrangement of the reacting molecules.

We cope in ways that mirror the level of our pain.

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Meanwhile, a living organism and its functions cannot be reduced to a set of chemical reactions, even if it were possible to account for all of them. This constitutes a serious problem of any acute treatment, any illness. Illness in general generates a communication gap between the organism’s functional network. Since living beings are highly-integrated open dynamic systems, all health in general and supported by permanent mass-energy and information exchange. The dynamics of communication thus is vital for organisms. One of the fundamental communication processes our body uses to communicate with us when we’re approaching this ease is our emotions. Our emotions are our primary mechanisms that our body-mind uses to communicate how well our lives, physical, mental or emotional are working.

In the Western medicine model, when you’re feeling emotionally unwell like depression, they were prescribed with Prozac. In the wellness medicine model, when you feel unwell, you’re getting a signal about some state of disharmony, whether physical, mental or emotional. Do you want to pay attention to your body-mind or do you wish to drag yourself so that you feel nothing? This is the real difference between Western medicine and wellness medicine. Over the last years that I have been in practice, I have noticed that I have consistently seen more women than men. I used to wonder about it. I used to believe this was because women were more in touch with their emotions and so they knew far earlier that something was not quite right. There is this quite common misperception that women often imagine their pain and it is often part of an attention-seeking mechanism.

In my experience, I’ve yet to meet a female hypochondriac even after more than 15,000 clients. When a woman says she feels something is not quite right, that often is the only real hypochondriac that I ever met with a male. He kept asking me to check him for cancer because his sister had cancer. Eventually, I told him to go and do medical scans to convince himself that he had no cancer because all my testing did not show up any early warning markers of cancer. It was fairly controversial to suggest there were any differences between males and females in the perception and experience of pain. “That is no longer the case,” says Dr. Ed Keogh, a psychologist from the Pain Management Unit at the University of Bath. In male-female differences in pain perception, research has shown while sensory focus strategies used by men helped increase their pain threshold and tolerance of pain. It was unlikely to have any benefit for women according to Dr. Ed. Other research by the Pain Management Unit has looked at the relationship between gender differences and anxiety, sensitivity and pain.

Anxiety sensitivity is the tendency to be fearful of anxiety-related sensations. For example, a rapidly beating heart seems to be important in the experience of pain sensations. In a study of 50 patients referred to a hospital clinic with chest pain, researchers discovered that the factors that predicted pain in men and women were different. Researchers believe it is the fear of anxiety-related sensations and an increased tendency to negatively interpret such sensations more of which are more predominant in women than men that influences women’s experiences of pain.

Pain Perception 2
Pain Perception: Men wait until everything that can go wrong has gone wrong or broken down.

When do men and women seek help? Prompted by one’s cognitive appraisal of a stressor like pain, individuals respond using various coping mechanisms. Researchers found that men and women differ in the mechanisms of coping with stress, particularly coping with pain. Some researches citing other studies reported that women will frequently use coping strategies that include active behavioral and cognitive coping, avoidance, emotion-focused coping, eating, social support, relaxation and distraction. Men rely on direct action, problem-focused coping, talking problems down, denial, looking at the bright side of life and tension-reducing activities such as alcohol consumption, smoking and drug abuse.

Research has found that women’s ways of coping involved more expressions of feelings and seeking social support. Whereas men’s way of coping was more rational and stoic, accepting the situation, engaging in exercise. Other research has found that in response to pain, women reported significantly more problem solving, social support, positive self-statements and palliative behaviors than men. Other researchers found that among individuals, that long-term intractable pain in the neck, shoulders or back, woman increased their behavioral activity, household chores and social activities as a coping strategy more than men.

Other studies suggest that coping strategies are influenced more by the type and duration of pain, not by whether the person is a male or a woman. Research has also shown that men and women are quite different because women respond more aggressively to pain through health-related activities like taking medication and consulting a health care provider. This is consistent with studies that have shown that women tend to report more healthcare utilization for treatment of pain than do men. I once saw this lady who was worried about the health of her children. Reports suggested significant metal toxicities and they were doing poorly health-wise. I also suggested that she check herself out.

Eventually, she came in with her husband and I suggested what tests they should do. They had to leave on a holiday. When they came back, the lady sent me an email asking me about what testings she should do. I gave her a more elaborate list. Then she asked me about her husband and I gave him a simpler list of tests to do. She later queried me about the difference. I replied that unless men cannot work, are disabled by pain and cannot move or they are so sick and have a nervous breakdown, they maintain this veneer of stoic stolidity and attitude that says, “I’m fine.” I told her I was being respectful of this. Whereas women tend to be more proactive and prefer to pre-empt trouble. She was very amused by my response. Men wait until what happens to them creates an impasse and the ability to work or be effective.

Unless you recognize the pain, you’ll never know how to treat yourself.

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They wait until the last minute and until everything that can go wrong has gone wrong or broken down. My personal opinion is that women are more proactive, more sensitive to pain and seek early intervention. They evaluate and assess their life quality on a regular basis. They practice life by design on a more regular basis. They often discard what does not work earlier than men. They are more interested in the intervention before the quality of life is compromised. They are more interested in prevention. Their focus is on evaluating a problem, discarding what didn’t work and implementing solutions before it erupts into something serious, a serious issue they discovered earlier. This may be one factor why women outlive men.

One lucky audience that posts us a review on iTunes will win the private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover the unique mind-body psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and a personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands. On this podcast, I’m going to help you design a life that works so you’re able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down. The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potentials, stay on track and accomplish all that you want and deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me to ask your questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift. Design it. Do what matters. Join me as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.

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Breaking Down The Stages Of Change

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Change never comes easy. There is no one-size-fits-all model. However, we can always try to pin down the things we tend to go through when we finally decide to take that step out of our old ways and into something new. The stages of change that one goes through is broken down into pre-contemplation, contemplation, preparation, action, maintenance, and sometimes relapse. While change can be scary, we can always do something about it. Learning the stages makes the journey more manageable.

 

Breaking Down The Stages Of Change

Stages of Change

Are you ready for change? The following are the stages that people go through on the journey of change. The first one is pre-contemplation. The second is contemplation, then comes preparation, action, maintenance and sometimes relapse. It’s important to understand when approaching an intervention or change that one size does not fit all. You go through different stages and being aware of the stages of change model by researchers and appreciating that there is a specific transition at every point makes the journey more manageable. It’s important to recognize that your aspirations are worthwhile and meaningful. You also need to practice patience.

It’s necessary to recognize that it often takes a while to let go of old behavior patterns. It often takes 21 to 30 days before new habits are second nature to you. You should continue to resist the temptation of stopping your new habits and to stay on track. You should look at your positive gains and give yourself credit for what you’ve accomplished as you go through the roller coaster of change. This is a normal part of making changes in your behavior in that you occasionally maintain one stage only to fall back and regress to a previous stage.

The more hasty the decision, the higher the chances of a relapse.

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The first stage is the pre-contemplation stage. There is no consideration of change. The person is often in denial. They will say, “It doesn’t apply to me.” There is a feeling of immunity that bad things happen to other people. There are consequences and they will be very serious. There is maybe a history of having given up before, of having tried something and being unsuccessful in the past. There’s a belief that there is no capacity to control your behavior. They also may have challenges about even thinking about change.

In the contemplation stage, they’re undecided about change. They view the change as a loss in spite of possible gain. They recognize the need for change but maybe evaluating the barrier. They may need change, but they say they will think of the time, the expense and the hassle. They may spend time considering options. They may have to recognize barriers to change and the benefits of making a change. Getting through the contemplation stage may take anything from a few weeks to a lifetime. In the preparation stage, there is a commitment to change. People prepare or make small experiments to test what it’s like. They may do sampling changes, dive through recommendations, exercise or decreasing bad habits.

Then comes the action stage. They take definite action to change. This is often the shortest of all stages. It can take anything from an hour to six months. Next is maintenance, maintaining the behavioral change long-term. They may need to constantly reformulate the rules of their life and acquire new skills in order to avoid a relapse. The relapse occurs to those who fail to adequately prepare. They aren’t prepared for the trials and tribulations of change. The hastier the decision, the higher the chances of a relapse. They may need support with maintaining the change. They may need encouragement through admiration and praise.

There are a few stages of learning. The first stage is that of unconscious incompetence. They don’t know what they don’t know and they don’t care to know. There may be a belief that the subject matter is too trivial and not important enough to warrant time and energy. It’s so easy. Any idiot can do it. Then comes the state of conscious incompetence. Increasing awareness of ignorance, increasing awareness of the potential benefits of wanting to know more about the subject matter and learn some of the skills involved. This is an essential stage necessary to trigger the next stage of learning. How does anyone ever learn this?

When the answers seem so obvious, we tend to not believe them.

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Conscious competence, conscious awareness of theory, framework, skill sets and the ability to use the appropriate skills. All of the above in problem-solving, this is the beginning of expertise. I can do this. Unconscious competence, this is the stage where observation, theory, analysis, perspective and discovering a solution are so seamless and automatic that it shapes the flow and meld together. The answer seems so obvious that it seems hard to believe that no one else can see it. It seems so obvious. How come no one else sees this? This is a domain of an expert on the level of a habit.

Next is reflective competence. In order to reach the stage of reflective competence, the master requires a beginner’s mind, which refers to an attitude of openness, eagerness and lack of preconceptions when studying a subject. Even when studying at an advanced level, just as a beginner in that subject would. In the beginner’s mind, there are many possibilities but in the experts, there are only a few. When deliberately assuming the attitude of a beginner’s mind, the master or reflect on the field of study, and intend to break every concept down to its simplest form. Attempting to do this will be counterproductive at earlier stages. It will interfere with the process of developing superior automated skill sets.

Stages of Change 2
The Stages Of Change: Momentum encourages confidence and clarity, and the confidence aligns your subconscious mind to start working for you rather than against you.

 

Only when the superior skill sets are automated will the inquiry for first principles be useful. Only when you instruct enough will you build up a sample base sufficient to identify patterns of development and progress. Only when you can accurately assess an individual’s progress and specific skill attainments can you help them achieve the next level of development and growth. In this schema, you have reached the grand master’s stage when you can do the following. As soon as you meet someone for the first time, you are able to identify the current stage of development. You also know what it would take for them to move to the next level of attainment.

I’ve reviewed my personal diaries. Let’s start that when I was about fourteen years old. I reviewed my life from ages four to about the early 50s. I’ve had the opportunity to measure how when new automated programs or habits are in place that were built over 21 days, only then could I truly exercise choice. My time with my wife and my time for my own health and fitness were crucial for building my emotional, physical and mental things. When things got out of balance, it impacted everything else. We all want to do well in our work life, I get it but you can’t compromise your commitment to self-care or the relationships that matter most. The tradeoff is never worth it. When we try doing one at the expense of the other, we eventually fail at both.

Every new project I initiated was conceptualized ten to twenty years ago. There was nothing inherently new and simply because I noted this. I’ve observed this is true for all my clients as well, even though they may not be aware of it. This means that you want to keep considering the questions that I’m asking you now for the rest of the other podcasts that you’re listening to. What areas of your life do you want to simplify and make new choices? What do you have to give up to become more efficient? What are you prepared to omit to build relevant automated programs or habits? Not every automated habit or program must be chunked down for fifteen minutes or less. A detailed program on how to do this is on my online Freedom Formula – Mastering Time, Energy and Leverage in Nine Steps. What do you have to cut out to have sufficient resources to design what you want? How will you execute it so when you get clear like this, it can be incredibly empowering and the clarity will build momentum? Momentum encourages confidence and clarity and the confidence aligns your subconscious mind to start working for you, rather than against you.

Only when we accurately assess our progress will we be able to take the next step forward.

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The new big thing in your world is you must protect your confidence. You’ve got to equip yourself with every possible advantage. This exercise will jumpstart the process for you. Ask yourself as you move forward, “How will I maintain momentum throughout the entire year? How would I build on the foundation that I’ve started here?” We’ve all been excited for short bursts of time. We have come this far and I know you’re not someone who’s interested in a short burst of success. We are playing the long game. We want the life that continues to get better and better every week, every month, and every year. We want to look back twelve months from now with a deep sense of satisfaction knowing that we’ve just had the best day of our lives. That means we’ve got to put things in place that builds on the momentum of now. We’ve got to break out all habits and safeguard our success. Does that make sense?

One lucky audience that posts a review on iTunes will win a private confidential consultation and coaching with me on discovering your soul’s purpose. I will lead you on a personal journey to discover your unique mind, body, psychosomatic map of your life. You will get a detailed report and the personal 45-minute consultation with me that is worth thousands. On this blog, I’m going to help you design a life that works so you’ll able to say yes to the things that matter and eliminate everything else that slows you down.

The clearer you can be about how to organize your daily life to support your bigger vision, the more you step into your true potential, stay on track and accomplish all that you want to deserve. Are you ready to make that happen? Feel free to reach out to me and ask the questions at AskDrSun.com. Your life is a gift, design it. Do what matters and join me as we get closer to designing the life of your dreams.

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