Last week was epic. I finally made it to the Date with Destiny event in Florida. Last year I got sick and I couldn’t travel but this time I was determined to have an amazing finish to 2016. There was no room for excuses.
I had a lot of insights during the event. Here I would like to share my 10 top takeaways:
1. Scale It Up to Make the Biggest Impact. Entering the room with 3000 people from 69 countries, who were ready to transform themselves, had an immediate impact on me. Having been to the Unleash the Power Within Event in London 5 years ago and having watched ‘I’m not Your Guru’, I already knew about Tony’s skill of working with a large group of people but I was still wondering how it was possible to go so in-depth and keep people focused for 14 hours with almost no breaks, for 6 consecutive days. The group effect gave me more strength to plunge into exercises, to listen with my full attention, taken by the powerful flow of positive energy.
2. Staying Positive for extra Motivation. Travelling from all around the world and jet-lagged, we were put into a cold room to keep us from sleeping on our chairs. No wonder, as some days we finished at 2-3am. To warm up and keep us focused, we were encouraged to dance and get into a ‘beautiful state’ using motivational music and changing our body posture to feel more powerful: standing up, loud voice, jumping, stretching arms, hugging, clapping hands, powerful moves. It was intense and ecstatic. The feeling could be compared to a week-long rock concert. Full on energy.
3. Clarity of the Primary Question. One of the big aha-moments for myself was a question that we all have in our heads, the question that we keep asking ourselves unconsciously and live by. Most people realised that our life had been a journey to answer that question. My question was ‘How quickly can I achieve to move to the next project?’ Although on one hand, it was a great question that I used to push myself to achieve so much in my life, there was the other side of the coin: quantity over quality. Having a conscious opportunity to change the question to a better one like ‘How can I enjoy every moment of my life even more?’, created more opportunities to stay joyful while slowing down and spending quality time with my family and work projects.
4. The Power of Morning Priming. After my first Tony’s event in London, I made a conscious decision to do morning exercises. We got a small trampoline for 10 minute-jumping to boost the immune lymphatic system. My husband and I committed to support each other and introduced a mandatory morning routine at 5:30am together with aerobic workouts. We juiced and had a healthy start to the day for at least 6 months. Then the mundane life took over, lots of work, travel, I got pregnant with the second child and the routine went off the rails. For the last two years, I did it on and off and felt I wanted to re-establish the routine again. That was one of the reasons why I came to the Date with Destiny event. I loved the priming part and here is what I decided to do every day moving on (let’s see how long it lasts this time!): 10 minutes of breathing with power moves, 30 minutes aerobics/dancing, 10 minutes of meditation, gratitude journal and setting the day in the calendar.
5. Changing from feeling Negative into Positive. Stretch. Smile. Exercise. Open your arms. Hug someone. In order to change emotions, we need to change the way we feel in our body. The way we feel in our body is connected to how our body is positioned. For example, we cannot feel sad when we smile and look up to the skies. We cannot feel angry, when we hug heart to heart. We cannot feel frustrated when we bow humbly.
6. Change What you Say to Yourself. Notice throughout the day what you say. Words we use influence the way we feel. Even when we exaggerate and use metaphors, they affect us. For women, this is especially true as we tend to connect sharing the negative and we treat the positive sharing as bragging. Being mindful of this impact, we can start sharing more positive thoughts and connect to inspire others.
7. The Mind vs. The Essence. When it comes to relationships, we have our core energy: masculine or feminine. For many partnerships, passion evaporates when there is no polarity between the two. This happens when we are in the Mind, vs. our Essence. For example, when a feminine woman starts behaving in a masculine way, i.e. demanding and trying to control her partner. When a masculine man moves into being more feminine and tries to please his woman. Two masculine energies in the house compete and two feminine get frustrated and lack focus. In both cases, relationships suffer.
8. We Feel What we Tell our Mind to Feel. Our mind is the perfect helper but it doesn’t understand how relationships work. The mind tries to protect us, it helps us to survive but it doesn’t know how to feel passion, nor how to feel love. The heart does. That’s why expressing feelings, not thoughts are so important. Start with ‘I feel …’ rather than ‘why don’t you’ or ‘I think…’ . Say how you want to feel. What helps you feel better. This is a different level of conversation. With an open and connected heart. That is what we need for enriching relationships.
9. Change the Story. We can change relationships by changing the story about what kind of relationships we should have. Think of it as a genre of a film. Is your relationship a romantic comedy, a drama, a thriller, classic or a documentary? What kind of a narrative would you like to have in your relationships? What role would you like to play instead? Look at your current or past relationship as a story of a book and write a new one. We are all authors of our life stories and it’s never too late to re-write them.
10. Order of Values. First we need to know our values and more importantly, we need to understand and be conscious of which ones we have chosen to rule our life. My previous order of values was Growth, Happiness, Acceptance and Love. I wanted to experiment and changed the order, I put Love to be the first one and got rid of Acceptance. Wrote them down, woke up the following morning and realised I was falling in love with people around me rather than focusing on the content of the training. It took me the whole day to realise that something was not right. I shuffled the values again and put Growth, Balance, then Contribution and Love. In this very order. I wrote them down and had a shift in intentions, thoughts and behaviour pretty much straight away. I felt more grounded, focused on learning, supporting my family and contributing for the better good in a loving state. That felt more of a congruent approach. The surprising part was that just changing the order of my values made a lot of difference in the way I behaved.
11. Relationships Magnify our Emotions. I was so pleased to find Tony spending the whole day on the topic of relationships, the topic that is mostly important for being happy (check the Harvard Grant Study). What I liked was that the purpose of relationships is to magnify emotions, confirming that being in relationships is one of the hardest paths and one of the most beautiful ones. We don’t walk the path with obstacles. Obstacles are the Path. A relationship is a dance between fear and desire. We are destined to be affected by proximity, so choosing carefully who surrounds us, is a big deal. We are an indirect product of our environment. The key to relationship success is to keep attraction through polarity, creating space between the couple and living our own destiny from our Essence.
People who came to the event, were already successful in what they do, but most of them were still searching for happiness and fulfilment. I was also one of those people at some point in my life and to help similar souls, I have put together a FREE series on how to be Successful and Happy.
With love and gratitude,
Darya
About the Author
Apart from being a psychologist and a relationship coach, I’m also a mother of two and an enthusiastic traveller. Having lived in different countries and cultures, being a Siberian and married to a Greek, I know something about polarity of weather and emotions. I love learning about people especially what makes them change their behaviour and transform themselves to be more loving and find their destiny.
I have a special gift of helping couples and individuals create love-rich and blame-free families and passionate relationships. Check my website for more information www.daryahaitoglou.com