Welcome to Surpass Your Dreams. The goal of this newsletter is to help you recognize your potential and surpass your dreams. This month's issue will focus on acknowledging your strengths and accepting your weaknesses.

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1. Acceptance Is The Pathway To Living Your Dreams
2. Top Ways To Accept Your Weaknesses
3. Are You Ready To Live Your Dreams?
4. Last Month
5. Great Resources

I. ACCEPTANCE IS THE PATHWAY TO LIVING YOUR DREAMS

Why can’t we accept ourselves as we are; accept both our strengths and our weaknesses? We are great people. We have jobs, accomplished lives, people who love us, and people we love. So then, why can’t we focus on the things that we have, rather than focus on what’s missing?

Maybe you focus on what’s missing because you are an easy target. You’ve been with yourself for every minute of your life, and you know every mistake that you’ve made. You even the know the mistakes that you almost made before you came to your senses.

So, how do you accept yourself? First, take a quick inventory of yourself. Over the years, you have done wonderful things for many people. You have also made some mistakes. Next, put your accomplishments and mistakes in perspective. Have you ever let an accomplishment become tainted by proud or selfish thoughts? Have you ever used a mistake to learn an important lesson that enabled later accomplishments? Sometimes our greatest accomplishments can expose our weaknesses, and our greatest mistakes can expose our strengths. The key is to recognize your strengths and weaknesses and keep them in perspective.

What do you do with this information? Use it. Make a list and carry it every day. Use your new perspective to remind yourself that you are an awesome person.

The truth is that it doesn’t matter how many mistakes you’ve made in your lifetime. What matters is that you’ve tried. You’ve tried and you’ve learned. And this is how you grew. You are a better person today because of all of the things that you have learned along the way.

So don’t resist yourself anymore. Love yourself for who you are, because you are the best you that you’ve got.

II. TOP WAYS TO ACCEPT YOUR WEAKNESSES

The human tendency is to either ignore, hide, deny, compensate for a weaknesses. After all they are weaknesses, right? And weaknesses aren't good. Well, until now. The following list makes the case for getting to love and honor your weaknesses instead of trying to improve them.

1. Your weakness may be the fastest way to accessing the best parts of yourself.

What are your weaknesses? Are you a wimp? A liar? Insensitive? Impatient? Selfish? Or worse? Just for now, pick one. If you get to the bottom of your weakness, you will find something of incredible value. Your weakness can point you to the next opportunity in your life. Weaknesses can be great for telling you where to go next.

2. What if you began feeling proud of your weaknesses?

What if you began to accept your weaknesses? It's better than self-criticizing yourself, or blaming others. How about going further than acceptance? Because acceptance could imply giving up or giving in. Endorsing means being grateful and proud of your weaknesses. Wouldn't that be an amazing step for you to feel great about your weaknesses?

3. Focus on your strengths, include your weaknesses, then delegate them.

I've met a lot of clients who get some sort of satisfaction from improving their weaknesses. For example, if they are really bad paper filers, they take pride in setting up the world's best filing system, only to have it dismantle itself within a month. I myself am really bad with paperwork, follow up phone calls, and paying bills, so my Virtual Assistant does all of that for me. Sure, I could make myself do all these things, but at what cost? I'm proud of the fact that I'm lousy with paperwork. I used to be embarrassed by this. Make that leap.

4. Educate people on what you don't do well, until they fully understand.

Part of the process of converting your weaknesses into strengths is to let other people know that you have weaknesses. In other words, be human. A great quote is: "I'd rather be hated for who I am than be adored for who I'm pretending to be." If you are not good at housecleaning, admit it, and offer a solution: Maybe you could vacuum instead. Your weaknesses are strengths if they help you tell the truth.

5. By knowing what you cannot do and cannot change, you are free to enjoy what you have that does work well.

By knowing what you cannot do and cannot change, you are free to enjoy what you have that does work well. Use your energy where it flows and pulls you forward naturally instead of getting your self esteem and motivation solely by overcoming limits. Sure it’s great to overcome obstacles, but when do you let yourself enjoy your accomplishments?

6. When you can endorse your weakness, you can accept the humanness of others.

This is key. When you get to the place where you see your weakness as a strength, you'll be able to respond to others in a similar way. You'll take things less personally, and be less affected by the humanness of others. This is a goal worth working towards.

7. Your weakness can bring others closer to you.

How are you dealing with your weaknesses? What have you learned as a result of having them? Who else is in the same boat as you? The point is that you are probably not the only person in the world with this weakness. There are others out there who are just like you. Knowing this gives you the strength to ask for the support you need to turn your weaknesses into strengths.

8. Accept/endorse your weakness by realizing how it's gotten you to this place in your life --- and being grateful for that.

Give credit to your weaknesses for how they’ve helped you get to where you are today. Create a list of 10 ways they have helped you whether these were positive or negative at the time. I think you'll find a great list, one that may surprise you. And, you get to congratulate yourself for how far you’ve come in your life. (If you let it in.)

9. Link your worst weakness to your biggest strength -- see the relationship between them.

My biggest weakness is I am sensitive to other people's energy, criticism, even their praise. This upsets me. In addition, I feel that I have no control over it. Yet, it's also become my biggest strength: To honor this weakness, I've had to change my life, my priorities and how I work. I've become even more sensitive in the process, but now I use this to create rather than trying to overcome. What you might call your biggest weakness is really your spirit's way of saying, "Hey, there's something really great down here, but you'd better make some changes before I'll let you see what it is!"

10. Endorsing your worst weakness is just the beginning; not the end.

This is not permission to say to someone, "Hey, this is my weakness; get over it!" This is not a license to be a jerk, nor is it an excuse not to evolve through your weakness. Because to truly endorse your weakness, you will need to become 100% responsible for how it affects you, your life and others. You will naturally want to evolve through your weaknesses instead of
wearing it like a badge of honor. That's why the process of endorsing your weaknesses is just the beginning, not the final destination.

This piece was based on a list created by Thomas Leonard, Popular Author, who can be reached at thomas@thomasleonard.com, or visited at http://www.thomasleonard.com.

III. ARE YOU READY TO LIVE YOUR DREAMS?

Living your dreams takes courage and a belief in yourself. It also means acknowledging your strengths and accepting your weaknesses. If you are ready to learn how to accept yourself for you who are, then Personal Coaching may be right for you.

For a Free 30-minute Telephone Coaching Session, call me at (516) 432-2440, or send an e-mail to info@surpassyourdreams.com. This session will give you the opportunity to see first hand if a personal coach is right for you. My web-site is at http://www.surpassyourdreams.com

Last month’s newsletter focused on acknowledging my readers. It was the 1st anniversary of this newsletter, and I can’t believe how fast the time went. Every month I take in your comments, and I write each issue for you. You are my inspiration, and I am grateful for that.

Because I write each month about taking chances and living your dreams, I shared one of my dreams. I’ve always wanted to write something inspirational, but was afraid to do so. It seemed like a lot of work, and I didn’t think anyone would be interested anyway.

Then the popularity of e-mail grew. I knew there were no more excuses. How much easier could it get. I could send my message electronically.

I started this newsletter with 18 subscribers, all people that I knew personally. I asked them to read it, tell me what they thought, and pass it on to someone else if they felt it was worthwhile. I also posted it to the Internet, so the people who visited my site could decide for themselves if this was something they wanted to read. Last month, we reached our 300th subscriber. This is your win, because I could not have done it without you.

So keep sending in your incredible e-mail’s and keep sharing your dreams. I look forward to another awesome year together.

To read this issue, as well as other past issues, check the newsletter archive list at the top of the page.

Would you like to have your newsletter, e-zine or resource listed here? Please send your name, e-mail address and 1-2 sentence description of your resource to info@surpassyourdreams.com. If I feel it will benefit my readers, I will be happy to list it here.

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Have a great month!

Deborah Brown-Volkman, Author and Writer
Brian Volkman, Editor

Copyright © 2000, all rights reserved. Permission is granted to reproduce, copy or distribute text from the newsletter or the content in its entirety so long as this copyright notice and full information about contacting the author (Deborah J. Brown) is attached.

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