5 Principles for Achieving Your Goals

Creating a sustainable, integrated system of health, fitness and stress management is the necessary foundation for maintaining your edge in all that you do. The ancient Chinese looked at ways to achieve their goals and, after thousands of years of experimentation, discovered some pretty interesting facts that are still relevant to our lives today

Remarkably, none of them have to do with a rigid regime asking you to follow a set protocol that promises to work for everyone. All the principles take into account that you are a unique individual—one in about 7 billion!

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Principle #1. Relaxation Can Boost Your Effectiveness

Tension inhibits relaxation. Relaxed, fully concentrated attention yields refined results—whether physical, energetic, emotional, mental or spiritual.

Tension drains our energy and diverts it to keep the body functioning while in overdrive. It's the body's survival mechanism to keep us alive in times of danger. However, the body is not particularly adept at distinguishing between real life-or-death scenarios and daily frustrations that upset or inconvenience us.

If we don't release these accumulated tensions, they have a way of compounding and, in time, can downgrade our ability to pay attention and perform tasks optimally. Conversely, when you relax, the body feels at ease and nothing stands between you and that which you wish to accomplish in your practice, work or passion.

People are not tired and stressed in the modern age because of physical exhaustion, as was the case in previous eras. Today, stress is caused by nervous exhaustion. Your nervous system is a sensory organ—picking up, interpreting and responding to the constant assault of billions upon billions of bits and bytes of information.

After years of repeated, unrelenting stimulation, some people describe the equivalent of entering a fog and feel as though they're carrying out routine tasks as though they’re in some sort of trance. They simply tap out and no longer feel the force of life inside them.

Even when sleeping, many people don’t fully relax. It can take hours for the body to release accumulated tension from the day, such as with shakes and twitches initiated by the nervious system when a person finally becomes still. Sleep can be so healing, but you can boost that healing power by letting go of stress and tension before you hop into bed.

During the day, when you feel the drama building up, you can take a five- or ten-minute break to interrupt the stress swell. The mind can run around the world five times while you’re still putting on your shoes!

From the perspective of Chinese medicine, qigong exercises are designed to start by relaxing your mind and body. One of the most renowned practices is tai chi, which has been used by hundreds of millions of Chinese peope throughout the ages to maintain health and longevity as well as to achieve seamingly super-human results.

Most people visibly tense and strain even when they think they’re chilled out. Once you can relax and feel your life-force energy, you can learn how to tap into that endless reservoir of energy anytime you need it. Techniques to take your mind off autopilot and train yourself to live in the present moment start with simple breathing exercises and progress to include gentle, slow and repetitive movement that lulls the nervous system into a state of let go.

Principle #2. The Slow Road Yields Fastest Results

It’s the slow road—not the road less traveled—that yields the fastest results because operating at 100% of your capacity is not sustainable. Pushing to 100% creates a glass ceiling (i.e. internal strain) and thereby inhibits your future development.

People need regular periods of rest and activity. Every culture since the dawn of time has acknowledged this simple fact. However, in the modern age, many people don’t make time and space for integrating the experiences of their lives, which from the perspective of Chinese medicine, leads to trouble sleeping, emotional outbursts, diminished libido and health problems from minor aches and pains to potentially serious diseases.

Think 70%. Safeguarding against too much or too little effort prevents injury and burnout. You not only maximise your vitality in the short-term, but also keep yourself going long-term by keeping a 30% reserve. Instead of being limited by a glass ceiling, your nerves release and can therefore facilitate your growth to the next milestone. Before you know it, you’ll overtake your initial 100% capacity.

The number one reason top athletes don’t play professional sports is because of injury. They push too hard and snap, crackle, pop! The same goes for businesspeople who consistently use force—they get desperate, greedy, overwhelmed by their emotions or simply burn out before they achieve their goals. A smooth and steady flow can help you keep it together for the long haul and make your work, passion or sport more enjoyable for you and others.

Principle #3. Contact + More Effectively Communicate with Your Body

According to psychological research studies, communication is primarily non-verbal. It’s not what you say, but what you do and how you do it. Exuding confidence, easiness, power and self-satisfaction is not the same as talking about it.

You must be grounded and calm within yourself before you can bring that energy into your communications and, eventually, your relationships. Many people don’t even really “see” the person in front of them and instead react to words and gestures as if the traumas of their past are happening all over again.

As a human being, you’ll be hard-pressed to get through life without a load of bad experiences—some are really horrific and it’s no wonder people become stuck. However, more terrible than anything that could happen to you, is reliving your traumas over and over again, day after day. The fear, anger, frustration, disappointment—whatever you felt—can linger for years afterwards and weaken your core energy. Other people can sense that weakness just as easily as you can identify a scared animal versus one that is at ease with no more than a glance. People communicate with their bodies without a word spoken too.

Techniques designed to help you release bound places in your body, boost the flow of energy throughout your body and become more at ease with yourself will facilitate your communication—verbal and non-verbal—whether with peers, family members, teammates, co-workers or authority figures.

Principle #4. Be Here + Be Clear

Clarity involves wisdom—the wisdom to see things as they are without all the unnecessary mumbo jumbo that clouds your vision and taints reality.

How do you become clear? Welcome to the present moment. Clarity involves training your mind to stick with the here and now.

The hurry-up mentality causes a lot of ambiguity. The mind jumps from one thing to the next, to the next, to the next and the confusion often leads to mistakes. Time is money in the modern world, and mistakes cost you time and money.

You must become capable of concentrating for sustained periods of time if you want to achieve any goal in the external world. Gapping out—your mind slipping into a memory, visual or emotional space—may only happen for a few seconds, but it’s enough to shake you or at least present vulnerability. In martial arts, it is the opponent who remains calm and aware under pressure that often wins the fight, not necessarily the physically stronger person.

If you’re an athlete, you must harness the power of your mind and your emotions on the field, but it’s no different for a businessperson at the office or any social interaction. Suppressing your feelings only leaves them to fester and, eventually, you are likely to either implode or explode.

Qigong exercise therapy and simple breathing techniques can be used for many purposes, but in the modern age the most practical applications are slowing down, focusing for prolonged periods of time and staying in the present moment.

The process starts by learning form exercises—such as qigong set, bagua or tai chi—that eventually become internal and therefore increase energy flow throughout your body. With practice, you release blockages and eventually balance your system. In time, the patience, relaxation and skill you develop can be metaphorically applied to yout approach to healthy living. At some point, you may make it a living reality: peace of mind, a healthy body and a stable foundation from which to operate in life.

Principle #5. Find Your Ever-lasting Point of Stability

If you want to be stable from deep inside yourself, you must deal with any unresolved emotions. Otherwise, they seem to crop up at the worst times and sabotage your efforts towards agreeable relationships.

Qigong exercises were deigned by the Chinese thousands of years ago to release stored emotions lodged within the body.

There is a permanent state inside all of us that it absolutely stable and perfect as it is—right now and always. When you find some level of clarity, you will see that there is only one truth in the universe at all times: Change. Everything is in flux and if you can’t tap into the ever-changing tides of change, you definitely can’t figure out how to flow with those changes.

Sitting and meditating has been used in every genuine tradition since the dawn of time to help you find that stability point deep inside yourself while the world around you changes—sometimes extremely fast and other times excruciatingly slow.

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Integration

Once you can integrate the five principles, you could focus your attention on releasing everything inside of you that keeps you from experiencing the joy inherent in living. Your misconceptions, stories, excuses and identities prevent you from feeling and engaging with the force of life. Once you let go of your attachments to these falsehoods, all you will be left with is that which is true.

Regardless of the methodology, when you naturally become more at ease and engaged with life, you can begin to wake up and experience the force of life within you. You don’t have to fake strength, happiness or wear whatever mask you could conceive, but you can actually exude—from the inside out—the peace of mind, stability and happiness you have uncovered.

Isn’t happiness, stability and peace of mind what it’s all about? At the end of the day, don’t we pursue passions because they make us happy? Don’t we pursue money because it gives us the means to pursue our passions? Why would anyone care to be rich if the money could never be enjoyed or provide security?

Formulating Success

The process for creating your own personal formula for success will be completely unique unto you. Together meditation for stress relief, learning to breathe well and simple energy exercises is one approach to identify blockages in your body and increase your energy flow, so that later you might deal with any stuck spaces you find—whether in your body, mind or energy.

In the process of trying to be successful in one external form or another, you might just become a healthy, mature individual. That is more than good enough because if you don’t have your health, you don’t have anything.

Learn More

Paul offers one-on-one training, teaching strategies for:

• Making the body healthy and strong
• More effective communication
• Heading off stress spikes
• Defining clear objectives and increasing concentration
• Establishing flow in your body, mind and energy

Learn more about the three levels of personal training that Paul offers by clicking here.