Category Archives: Inner Mastery

7 Signs You Could Be Under-Earning

 

Are you Under-Earning?

Weighing Options-FreeDigitalPhotosNet-David Castillo Dominici-ID-10077789

You might be under earning – earning less than your worth – even if you make over six figures!

How do you know if you are?  There are several signs of under-earning, some common and some not so common.

Barbara Stanny defines an Under-Earner as “someone who makes less than she needs or desires despite efforts to do otherwise.”

Red Alert! Before you read further, I want you to stop. Even if you already recognize yourself here, be kind to yourself. Do not label yourself as an “under-earner”. Focus instead on the signs of under-earning behaviours. Because you can shift and even swap them out for more self-affirming behaviours that will move you closer to earning your true worth.

I collected quite a list of signs of under-earning behaviour from what I hear from my clients, in my speaking engagements and through informal surveys – and I’m going to share the Top Signs of Under-Earning with you over the next few weeks. I’m also going to share some tips that will empower you to overcome these signs of under-earning.

Empowerment begins with Awareness. Awareness of both your strengths and blind spots – where you may not be experiencing the results you could.

Let’s begin raising that awareness today.

Notice which of these signs show up in your life. You might be surprised!

7 Signs You Could Be Under-Earning:

Checkmark greenYou KNOW you are worth more than you are being paid. You’re just not sure how to prove that. You find it difficult to articulate what your worth is exactly, and are baffled how others seem to do it.

Checkmark greenYour strengths, talents or genius are your “best kept secret”. You often hear others say, “I didn’t know you could do that!” or, “I didn’t know you were an expert in that!”

Checkmark greenYou keep getting passed over for promotions or business opportunities. You see others getting ahead who are less qualified than you.

Checkmark greenYou are not working in your “Genius Zone” 80% of the time. Most of the time you do work that you could delegate or stop doing altogether. You could be leveraging your time doing what you are really good at, that comes easy for you, and has the biggest impact.

Checkmark greenYou sit on the outside ring at important meetings, gravitating to the social crowd rather than the influencer crowd. It’s easier to sit at the back and socialize with your peers, than to put yourself “out there”, sit in the hot seat at the Big Table. You shy away from standing out.

Checkmark greenYou stay in your “comfort zone” and don’t take any risks. You’ve been hurt or penalized before, and you don’t want to experience that again.

Each of these signs of under-earning is a symptom of the #1 Sign of Under-Earning on today’s list:

Checkmark greenYou are not Shining Your Light.

Rather than getting help (coaching, mentoring, training) to boost your capacity to handle difficult of situations that challenge you (having a difficult conversation, standing up for yourself, asking or negotiating for something), you hang back where it’s comfortable and stay small.

By being the Shrinking Violet rather than risking being cut down as a Tall Poppy, you are also shrinking from opportunities for others to SEE you, to see what you are capable of, to see your Genius.

If you are waiting for them to notice you…well if you are playing small, how can they? Find a way to let them know what you are up to.

If you think this is bragging, and you don’t want to “brag”, then re-think. Re-frame it as “sharing”. You’re already good at sharing right? Share what you are doing, what you are capable of, what you have achieved. HELP them to notice YOU.

Shining your light is not about being alone in the spotlight (although that’s okay too!). It’s about allowing your true self, your authentic self, your one wild and precious* self to shine. It’s about not dimming your own light.

Isn’t it time?

It is.

It’s time to stop under-earning. To start doing something that you CAN do right now.

What is one step you could take this week that would shine your light, just a little bit more?

Share your plans in the comments box below.

If you resonate with one or more of these signs of under-earning or struggle with negotiating for your worth, I’m offering one of my E.A.R.N. Your Worth™ Breakthrough Session right now, on a first come, first served basis. With Gender Pay Day approaching in April, I’d like to help some people who know they’re in this situation and are up for shining their light, asking for or negotiating their true worth.

If you want one of these sessions, shoot me an email and let me know what you’re struggling with. Tell me a little bit about your situation, why you should get one of these sessions and we’ll book it.

 

*Acknowledgement to the delightful Mary Oliver and her poem Summer: “What will you do with your one wild and precious life?”

Mindful Leadership

The Power of Mindful Leadership

June 24 @ 9:30 am – 5:00 pm

Carrie and CricketWhat do Emotional Intelligence guru Daniel Goleman, New York designer Eileen Fisher, and the Dali Lama have in common with corporate giants like Google, General Foods, Goldman Sachs, and Apple?

They are all committed to incorporating mindfulness practice and techniques into their lives and corporate culture in order to improve their bottom line by making better decisions, reducing stress, and living with more joy and creativity.

Focus, clarity, creativity, compassion, and courage.

These are the five qualities Harvard Business School professor Bill George believes create the right chemistry for today’s best leaders to succeed, the resilience to cope with the many challenges coming their way and the resolve to sustain long­-term success.

If you think about it, it just makes sense.

The foundation of real and powerful leadership is the ability to clear one’s mind, focus on what is important, and release the clutter borne of too much information and multi­-tasking.

Which of these leadership qualities and strengths do you bring to your team? How are you at self-­leading and moving through challenges? What gaps in your leadership are apparent to others that may not be apparent to you?

The Power of Mindful Leadership Intensive

Horses as prey animals live naturally in a constant state of mindful awareness. They spend most of their time playing awareness and leadership games with each other in order to hone their survival and leadership skills. As SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) in leadership and mindfulness, horses can teach us a lot about our own leadership and mindfulness skills.

This experiential workshop will immerse you in the qualities and competencies of mindful leadership through engagement with the horses in simple ground exercises, as well as group discussions and debriefs. We will explore what mindful leadership means to us, how we are as leaders, what is working for us as leaders, and what the gaps are in awareness and how to resolve them.

What can I expect? 

You will:

  • Have a deeply personal and insightful experience with the horses as well as with the other workshop participants
  • Expand your awareness of your strengths and areas of growth as a Mindful Leader, including your impact on others and your relationships
  • Align your vision of yourself as leader with your actions and behaviour
  • Learn how to move through the states of awareness to resolve challenges
  • Apply what you learn to gain a better understanding of your presence as a leader and to fully embody and sustain the improvement to your mindful leadership.

Who is this for?

Professional women who want to up their game and expand their leadership skillset and emotional intelligence through mindful awareness.

Enrolment is limited so book early! Click here to register 

The fee for the day includes catered lunch and refreshment breaks. Please wear comfortable layered clothing suitable for the outdoors as we will spend some of the time outside with the horses. Boots or sturdy footwear is required. Non-refundable deposit: $150

Relevant Reading:

Developing Mindful Leaders for the C-Suite, Harvard Business Review, Bill George, http://bit.ly/1g2Q0lg

The Focused Leader, Harvard Business Review, Daniel Goleman, http://bit.ly/1EHUPMR

Future of Work: Mindfulness as a Leadership Practice, Forbes, http://onforb.es/1ipkM9T

EQ = ML + (A+C) + CC, Blog post, Evelyn McKelvie, http://bit.ly/1EeDQPX

 

Choose Registration Type


Details

Date: June 24
Time: 9:30 am – 5:00 pm

Venue

Wisteria Acres
8648 Armstrong Road
Langley, British ColumbiaV1M 2R3 Canada
+ Google Map
 
Questions? Let us know…

3 Ways Your Mindset is Holding Your Success Hostage

Guest Post by Melanie Benson Strick

 

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Even though you are doing everything right – you have your plan, schedule your day with activities designed to move you closer to your goal, hire the best coach to motivate and inspire you – you just can’t seem to get into focused action.

A gremlin has been activated and is feeding your mind all kinds of crazy thoughts about your goal.

Maybe you recognize this gremlin’s message? It often sounds something like:

“This is going to be WAY too hard! Are you frickin crazy? You are already way too busy how can you possibly think about pursuing that goal!”

“There is no way this is going to work. Who am I to think that I could ever be that successful? That kind of money/success is for other people, not me!”

“I’d lose my friends/family/lover/self-respect if I made that kind of money. It’s not worth it.”

“What if it doesn’t work? What will people think? What if I lose everything I have now and I’m a complete failure?”

Ah the gremlin voice in our head has taken over and that goal has become enemy #1. Your go-getter (that part of you that really wants to achieve your goal) isn’t willing to give up that easily though and goes to war with your gremlin. The go-getter can see all the cool stuff that will happen when you achieve the goal. “We’ll have more money to enjoy life and expand our impact!” “Won’t it be nice when we have more credibility in the marketplace?” Because these two parts of you are at war you feel stuck. You are officially in a holding pattern and it feels miserable.

Here’s what’s going on at a deeper level. Either you:

1) Have a limiting belief about what’s possible for yourself, or
2) Are avoiding a fear of “what might happen”, or
3) There are two desires that seem to be in conflict with each other.

Amazingly, that gremlin gets activated every time you try to move forward until you learn how to make peace between these two parts of your mind.

Depending on which one of these three issues is the culprit, you’d use a different techniques to eradicate the war inside. Most people have heard a lot of about dealing with fears and limiting but most people don’t know much about conflicting desires.

If the pursuit of one goal feels in conflict with another desire, need or goal, we have to find the win-win where both can be achieved peacefully.

You have to train your mind to seek out the bigger opportunity where BOTH desires can be met. Our fears and limitations tend to guide our thoughts towards a safe place where one of the desires (usually the one that feels safer) is met.

Think: Is there an outcome where I can have both desires met?

When you find that picture in your mind, you’ll uncover a level of motivation where you feel and become unstoppable!

About the Author: Melanie Benson Strick, America’s Leading Small Business Optimizer, guides thought leaders and creative entrepreneurs to achieve optimum success by eliminating unconscious barriers.

Rewired Book

Grab a free copy of Melanie’s money mindset book, Rewired for Wealth, today at bitly.com/R4Wealth.

Take a Holiday From Your Inner Critic

Delighted to share this Guest Post from my friend and colleague, Tana Heminsley, over at Authentic Leadership Global.

This Holiday season, we invite you to step back from the sometimes frenetic pace of the visiting, the baking, the cooking, the shopping, and invite a little more ease and compassion into your space, into your inner world, into your relationship – with YourSELF.

One of the most insidious aspects of personality or ego that I’ve come across in my career as a coach, is the critical inner voice that hides deep within each of us. As distinct from our intuition, which is helpful in it’s guidance in our lives, Sarita Chawla, in this video shares how the inner critic can misguide us by keeping us small or holding us back.

It’s the inner voice that goes beyond constructive to be cruel and mean. It says “You’re not good enough”, “That was stupid”, “No one will like you” or “Work harder – you’re lazy”.

I think about the effects it’s having – on individuals, their families, their teams and organizations. And I imagine the possibility of a world where the mind naturally is kind in its orientation, rather than being naturally negatively oriented, as the author of Buddha’s Brain, Rick Hansen Ph.D., reminds us.

The inner critic, or the superego as described by A.H. Almaas in the workbook called “Working on the SuperEgo”, is a psychological construct – merely a thought.

It develops in our mind when we, as children, get a reaction where we feel shut down or shamed. It’s too painful for us to experience this reaction coming from others who love us, so we create a critical voice internally, “doing it” to ourselves first, which is less painful.

The Inner Critic feeds the individual and collective painbody and thus perpetuates negative energy in the world.  Eckhart Tolle talks about the unresolved, unhealed energy as the pain body in his blogpost in the Huffington Post (Eckhart Tolle, “Living in Presence with your emotional painbody”, Huffington Post, 10/6/2010.)

“There is such a thing as old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a “painbody,” an energy entity consisting of old emotion.”

What can you do about it?  How can you take a holiday from your Inner Critic?

It’s totally possible and worth the investment of your time.

I’ve been aware of and actively engaging with my Inner Critic for the past 10 years and here are a few things I’ve found that help:

  1. Cultivate resiliency – it will help to keep your inner critic at bay. On the days I have had a good sleep, eaten the right foods to build my energy rather than drain it, done a short meditation practice to quiet my mind, I notice I have much more perspective and can notice and more easily let go of the critical voice.
  2. Stop the cycle – as quickly as you become aware of the messages when they arise, become aware of what it’s saying, how it feels, and then see it for what it is. It’s just a thought – one you can choose in the moment to let go of.
  3. Self-manage to choose a different thought – Byron Katie’s groundbreaking work on the inner critic, focuses on reframing in the moment using 4 simple questions:
    • Is it true?
    • Can you absolutely know it’s true?
    • How do you react, what happens, when you believe that thought?
    • Who would you be without that thought?
  4. Find your own way to take a holiday from your inner critic – for some, it’s helpful to be compassionate with the voice, once they become aware of where it came from (well-meaning parents, teachers or others who influenced us). For others they need to scream at it inside their mind (and sometimes out loud if they are in a place where they can yell), for others it’s about laughing at it as they realize how it no longer fits with their quest to be their authentic or best self.
  5. Imagine what your life would be like without it – reflect on how much energy you spend on managing your inner critic currently. How different would your life be if you spent just 10% less time on it. What would you do (or not do) with that unleashed energy and time?
  6. Practice daily – talk to yourself like you talk to your best friend. It says it all. Be kinder to you and you’ll be kinder to others.

Imagine a world where we all let go of our inner critics more of the time – that’s the world I’m striving for.

Tana Heminsley

Tana is an executive and entrepreneur with a passion for building businesses and developing leaders. As the founder of Authentic Leadership Global, Inc. she supports authenticity and emotional intelligence as business differentiators for 21st century leaders. Tana is also the author of the recently published book “Awaken your Authentic Leadership – Lead with Inner Clarity and Purpose