3 Steps To Be Ambitious & Still Have Inner Peace

I’m really not allowed to talk about anything anymore, am I?

[Music]

Hey, it’s Marie Forleo and you’re watching MarieTV, the place to be to create a business and life you love. You know, if you ever wonder if you can be both ambitious and have inner peace, today’s episode is for you. This question comes from Daniel and he writes:

“Hi Marie, thank you for your shows. They’re truly inspiring and helpful. My Q for you is this: how can a business owner, especially a startup owner like myself, be in harmony with the universe and have inner peace, but still maintain that focus, drive, and somewhat aggressiveness required to thrive in today’s economic environment? Best regards from sunny Romania, Daniel.”

Daniel, my man, this is a great question. I think many of us have this mistaken notion that being spiritually conscious is somehow in conflict with being driven and ambitious and fiercely committed to our future dreams. For me, I see no conflict. I know from my own experience that you can be deeply joyful and satisfied and be super excited about what you’re working to bring to life too.

So, Daniel, you asked for the how and I am happy to share a few of my own personal practices, but do keep investigating and experimenting with different methods for yourself because I know in my bones that, yes, you certainly can live your life with a sense of inner peace and presence and be wildly ambitious about your future too. So here are 3 practices that I think can help.

Number one, commit to creating joyfully, not stressfully. So realize that in each moment you get to choose how you do your life. You get to decide what state of consciousness that you’re bringing to your work. So you want to ask yourself, are you going to make the act of creating your dreams a joyful enterprise or a stressful enterprise? If you want to make this practice a habit, try this for a week. Set a recurring alarm on your phone every hour or two throughout your day as a little self check in. And each time the alarm goes off, just ask yourself this: in this moment am I creating from a state of joy or stress? Am I connected to my heart and my intuition and the present moment or am I letting my fear filled mind just run the show and stress me out about things that I have absolutely no control over?

Any time that you notice that you’re creating from this state of stress, don’t make yourself wrong. Just use that as an opportunity to get yourself realigned. I mean, maybe you need to take a break and go exercise and get back in your body, but no matter what you do, whenever you catch yourself creating from that state of stress, stop and recommit to create from a place of joy.

Number two, train yourself to resist nothing. Ok, so this one, way easier said than done, but as much as you can practice it, you will see it works like magic. So when I say resist nothing, what I mean is that you release your inner resistance, that internal, “No!” that pipes up the instant things don’t go as planned. And when you’re building a business, things don’t go as planned a lot. Now, the reason that this works in terms of experiencing a sense of calm is because all forms of stress and aggravation and freak outs are byproducts of resisting how things are in this moment.

Now, to be clear, resist nothing does not mean you’re not going to take action or work to improve things. I mean, quite the contrary. It just means that you’re going to sidestep a ton of useless negativity and frustration and you’re really gonna help yourself take wiser and more effective action. The interesting thing that most people don’t realize is that the faster you stop wishing things were different than they are and you start dealing with things the way they actually are, you win. That’s because you get into alignment with the flow of life rather than working against it.

Here’s an example. So we used to run this sold out conference here in New York City. Hundreds of people would fly in from all over the world and we had incredible speakers, we had dance parties, it was awesome. Now, our film crew, who was taping the entire event, was actually leaving right after to go to Europe to film some of our B-School grads for what has become our Live Your Dream campaign. Now, I gotta tell you, the amount of planning that it takes to professionally record an event and then travel to multiple countries and coordinate multiple video interviews is staggering. Not to mention the time and the money. So all of this was happening in November right before the holidays and a lot of the footage that we were shooting was set to be used in January when we get ready to open the doors to B-School. Here’s what happened.

On the very last leg of the trip, our film crew was passing through Rome and, get this, all of their video equipment, that includes all of the footage from both our live event and all the interviews they had just conducted, was stolen. Gone forever. Like, no possible way to get any of it back. Now, the second I heard this news, not gonna lie, my heart sank. I felt this enormous pit in my stomach. But for some odd reason, within a few seconds, after that initial shock and sadness I said, “You know what? It’s ok. It’s nobody’s fault. Let’s not spend any time or energy or stress being upset about this. This is figureoutable. Let’s get back to work and get ourselves right back on track,” and that’s exactly what we did.

Now, I’m not gonna lie, I am not always able to be that zen when things go wrong, but I’m 100% certain that the fact that I did not waste time resisting something that was already done was a key factor in helping us be able to move ahead and reshoot all of those interviews.

Number three, #hugthemoment. Daniel, I really need you to hear this one and love it up. The only place that you can be in harmony with the universe is the present moment of now. The past is done, the future, that is just a figment of your imagination. And when your future does show up, it can only show up as a moment of now. So look, if you get damn good at learning how to #hugthemoment, you will always be in harmony with the universe. And to be crystal clear, hugging the moment does not mean being passive. It does not mean resignation.

Marie, you’re on fire!

I know, right?

No, you’re literally on fire right now.

I’m hugging it.

So hugging the moment doesn’t mean sitting there blissfully when everything goes to hell in a handbasket. What hugging the moment does mean, however, is that you largely eliminate the mental and emotional negativity that automatically creates stress when you #hatethemoment. So when you embrace what is, you just bring a different energy, a different quality of consciousness to the actions you take from that moment on. And, honestly, this is just a different way of articulating what I just shared a minute ago when I said resist nothing. Some people just might find the framework of hugging it a lot easier to swallow than the idea of resist nothing, which can be super hard for action-oriented folks like you and me to even wrap our heads around.

Bottom line is this, when you embrace the current moment of now, no matter how it shows up, you will instantly feel a sense of flow and peace and power. So remember D, when in doubt, #hugit. Now, let’s put a cherry on top of this current moment with a tweetable.

You can be completely at harmony with the universe and hustle for what you want.

Daniel, my friend, that was my A to your Q. Please do let me know how it goes. And now I would love to hear from you. Which of these three practices might help you the most as you continue to build your dreams and, really important here, what’s one action you can take right now to put this into practice? Leave a comment below and let us know.

Now, I’ve gotta say, the best conversations happen over at MarieForleo.com, so get over there and leave a comment now. And once you’re there, do not leave before you subscribe. I want you to become an MF insider. You’re gonna get instant access to a powerful training I created called How to Get Anything You Want and you’ll get some exclusive content, special giveaways, and personal updates from me that I just don’t share anywhere else.

Stay on your game and keep going for your dreams because the world needs that special gift that only you have. Thank you so much for watching and I’ll catch you next time on MarieTV.

Hello class and welcome.

Let’s just give it a whirl.

You guys, thanks for watching. Thank you for coming to our channel. Thank you.
We can cut!

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