Hello

Happy Easter to all who celebrate this day!

This is Joe Rubino and appropriately enough, today's topic is The Healing Power of Forgiveness...

There is no more effective way to heal your past and support your relationships to thrive than by forgiving.

It is critical that you begin this healing process by forgiving yourself. All human beings make mistakes and the tragedy is not in making the mistake but in not having learned from it. And it’s never too late to do so.

Part of the challenge is how most people relate to mistakes and problems. In our culture, we have determined that challenges of any nature are bad and that we shouldn’t make mistakes. With this limiting paradigm, we have very little room to risk, take chances and aggressively pursue our dreams and honor our values.

The concern of avoiding mistakes at all cost has us needlessly resign ourselves to a life that is less than ideal. If you can’t afford to make a mistake, you won’t have the freedom to grow, expand out of your comfort zone and achieve greatness. Consider adopting the perspective that everyone who lives makes mistakes and that the greatest mistake you can make is to have mistakes crush your spirit and steal your fervor for accessing the best that life has to offer. If you view mistakes as an essential component of your evolution, you will see that they actually support you to see things differently. As you continue to learn from your mistakes, your awareness will increase and you will be less likely to repeat these same mistakes.

Powerful people focus not on avoiding mistakes but on living their commitments instead. Embrace mistakes, learn from each one and look forward to the insights and gifts that are sure to come from experiencing future mistakes. By shifting your relationship to mistakes and overcoming your fear of making them, you can move on with your life in a powerful manner. You can expect to make more mistakes, encounter many more challenges and grow from each enriching experience. So, acknowledge yourself for having learned some extremely valuable lessons from your mistakes.

We all do the best we can to not only survive but to actually thrive as we go about our daily lives. We all instinctively seek pleasure and avoid pain. Based upon the limited perspective people have as imperfect creatures, we will err from time to time. So have compassion for your human weaknesses and adopt this same attitude toward others. Everything is important and nothing matters so much that you should choose the alternative to risking intelligently. Avoiding growth and risk would mean the death of your spirit and result in the resignation that comes with living in fear and playing not to lose instead of to win. Know that you are often your own harshest critic. When you judge yourself to be bad and unworthy of love and life’s greatest pleasures, you will manifest a negative, destructive energy that ensures this be so. Your self-esteem will suffer to the extent you maintain your right to punish yourself for past weaknesses and mistakes. You will tend to attract the negative energy you put out into the world. By failing to forgive yourself, you will block the loving energy that cleanses your soul and allows you to share your greatest gift with others, the gift of being the best you can be.

By stubbornly keeping your critical self-judgments and the self-anger that accompanies these in place, you will avoid responsibility for making your relationships stronger and your life work most advantageously. Doing so allows you to shirk liability for your communication. When you stay angry with yourself and keep active an unhealthy level of self-pity for your faults, this distracts you from getting on with your life and cleaning up your mess!

It’s a lot more difficult to forgive and give up being a victim. Forgiving enables you to proactively get about the business of making your life and relationships flourish rather than keep the downward spiral of self-incrimination and blaming others alive.

Making mistakes is part of the human condition. It has nothing to do with the worthiness of you as a person. It also has no bearing on the healthy unconditional self-acceptance essential to high self-esteem. Taking responsibility for your excellence means committing to no longer act in a manner consistent with your past mistakes, but to learn from them instead.

You’ll find that you hate those things about others that you hate most about yourself. Forgiving yourself is the first step in clearing the way to forgive others. By forgiving yourself, the toxic resentment that consumes your spirit and destroys self-esteem will give way to the self-love that precedes forgiving and loving others.

Waiting for others to initiate reconciliation will not support your relationships, health or self-image. Healing your troubled past will come from the empathy you get by putting yourself in the other person’s world and understanding why that person may have acted as he did.

By being the first to forgive others, you can pave a new road to a future based upon love rather than anger. Anger results from your interpretations about what was done, not the actions themselves. Forgiving will make you the champion and designer of your future self...in a way you can feel good about who you are. Likewise, there may be some people who you have wronged. See if there is anything you can do to make amends for hurting others with your past behavior. Clean up misspoken words and acknowledge mistakes. Acknowledge the casual promises that you blew off as being unimportant. Offer a sincere apology if you have erred and commit to make things right and repair the damaged relationship, if possible.

Your reparation should be appropriate for the damage you caused and directed at the person harmed. When you actively accept responsibility for your part in failed communication or a wounded relationship, you will act with the courage to make things right. This commitment blazes a trail to a new way of being. When you apologize for past mistakes and take appropriate action to clean up the mess created, you’ll take responsibility for your part by giving a 100 percent effort toward healing the relationship. No matter how the other person chooses to respond, take comfort in knowing that you have done whatever you could to repair the harm. It will support you to be committed to healing the relationship without an attachment to having the other person respond in kind. By showing a willingness to repair the situation to the best of your ability, you will have done your part to initiate a healing of the relationship. Keep the door open to communication, congratulate yourself for courageously taking action in the direction of completion and get on with your life. When you have done everything you can to right a past indiscretion, it will not support you to continue to berate yourself about what was done. We all make mistakes. All we can ask of ourselves is to continue to learn from our actions, commit to honoring others and take responsibility for being the person we declare ourselves to be.

Again, this does not excuse hurtful or wrongful action. It simply means acting from love upon realizing one has caused another pain or loss. With this foundation of love, you are now free to declare who you are to the world rather than have resentment dictate your reactions.

Your attachment to making yourself and others wrong will fade and a commitment to deliberately designing the person you have decided to be will be possible. Miracles will manifest and your self-image and personal power will soar.

Let’s now look at some exercises you can do to practice forgiveness...
 

1. List all the items for which you have not yet forgiven yourself and others. 

      2. Create a plan to clean up any misspoken words, acknowledge mistakes and apologize for any errors you may have made.
          For those deceased or those you cannot or choose not to achieve completion with in person, write a letter expressing your thoughts, emotions and forgiveness. Mailing the letter is optional.

      3. Please check out our life-changing programs and join our team of light-bearers:

High Self Esteem Adults
High Self Esteem Kids
Life Optimization Coaching
Master Life Optimization Coaching
Self-Confidence Coaching
Certified Relationship Coaching
Certified Business Coaching
Live Your Dream Life Video Course
Journey of the Soul Brain Wave Program
  

To Your Best Life,
Joe

Dr. Joe Rubino
 

Please note: For those who may be unaware of my story, our commitment to others and the reason behind the personal development work we do, I have decided to share it below in all the emails we send out. If you are already familiar with this, please feel free to ignore it or forward it to someone you love.
 
To Your Best Life,
Joe Rubino
The Center for Personal Reinvention


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This is Joe Rubino. Thank you for being a valued member of our online community. We at The Center for Personal Reinvention are committed to supporting you with a wide range of personal development, health and other gifts and programs to assist you in living your very best life.

I have personally been involved in championing people to elevate their self-esteem, be happy, fulfilled, and empowered to believe in themselves and achieve their fullest potential since 1991. My vision is to impact the lives of 20 million adults and 20 million children to live their best lives by following the same life-impacting principles that I, myself, followed to reinvent myself at the age of 35.

Many have asked me to share my story with you in the hope that it may inspire you to realize that if I was able to embrace personal development and change my own life which was far from rewarding as you will soon lean, then you can as well. So, please allow me to share a bit about my story with this intention…

My earliest memory of an upsetting event happened at the age of 5 when I was playing at the house of a teen-aged neighbor. My parents trusted this group of teen-agers who had a long history of playing football with us little kids. Well, on this particular day, perhaps, they forgot their football at home, so they decided to use me as their football. One kid tossed me to another who tossed me to another who dropped me. I hit my head on a rock and went home crying at the age of 5 with a big egg on my head and likely a concussion.

As a result of this episode, I decided that I was small, insignificant, and too weak to defend myself. I further made up that there was something significantly defective about me that would cause a group of much older kids that I admired and looked up to, to want to treat me with such rough disrespect. I further interpreted that these teenagers and people in general were careless, heartless, mean and cruel. And this is when I decided that the world was a dangerous place and that if I were to survive in such a place, I would need to find a strategy to protect myself from further harm.

The survival formula that I created involved avoiding people whenever possible. I became an extremely introverted kid, having few friends and avoiding most events and interactions with others. For example, if I was walking down the street on my way home from school and I saw someone I knew approaching, I’d put my head down, make off I did not see them and cross the street. As you can guess, I soon worsened my situation and became known as a big snob and a target for bullies. The greater the number of bad experiences I encountered, the more my self-talk reinforced the need to hide and protect myself. And, of course, the worse my experiences became. This vicious cycle continued throughout my high-school and college years.

My addictive background emotional mood or reactive state was “indignant anger.” I unconsciously looked for reasons to be angry with the mantra that guided my life being “How dare you!” It took very little to tick me off. If someone might cut in front of me while driving, I would react with anger and indignation – swearing at them and gesturing to them to show my upset. If I smelled smoke in a restaurant or public place, it would likewise tick me off and I would react thinking “How dare they! Don’t they know that second- hand smoke kills!” In short, I was a walking upset waiting to happen.

While living in this perpetual state of anger and indignation allowed me to justify my bad behavior, dominate others and avoid being controlled by them, it cost me my happiness, my personal effectiveness with people, destroyed many relationships and diminished the quality of my life.

While contemplating which path to take regarding my career, I decided to pursue a career in dentistry. I unconsciously choose a profession where people would be unable to talk back to me and I could dominate them. Now, there is nothing wrong with being a dentist – it is an honorable and noble profession. But I had chosen it unconsciously for the wrong reasons. Again, I was unaware of the many ways that I sought both consciously and unconsciously to protect myself from getting hurt.

So, at the age of 35, I had been in practice for 11 years. Although I was successful by many of society’s standards – I owned two large practices that employed 7 full time doctors and 8 additional employees, made a significant income, had the respect of my peers and patients, I intuitively felt that I was playing small but like the proverbial frog who sits in a pan on the stove and fails to jump out of the pot as the heat under it is slowly increased, my life was mired in deep resignation. I incorrectly assumed that I was who I was and there was little I could do about my unhappiness and disappointments in life.

Well, there are no accidents as I was soon to learn. The Universe presents us all with unending opportunities for growth and expansion. We always have the choice of seizing any of these opportunities or we can maintain the status quo and continue along our familiar paths of convenience, protection, and resignation… or we can decide to risk boldly and take a new path that better honors our values and supports our inherent greatness.  

When I was 35 years old, my dental business partner who was also an extreme introvert like me, was invited to attend a personal development weekend seminar.  Although neither of us felt comfortable attending an event that was way outside our comfort zones, we both took comfort in going with someone else. So reluctantly we booked a spot at the course, knowing that we sorely needed to break free from the many limitations and negative self-talk that had ruled our lives.

To make a long story shorter, that 4-day course changed my life! I learned that my life was being run by decisions made by a 5-year-old and that I possessed the ability to break out of the self-imposed prison that I had created for myself. I discovered that I could identify my life purpose and step into that purpose while developing the many gifts that lay dormant inside me. I learned that I had the power to transform into a person that I could be proud of by taking my focus off of the many petty concerns that had run my life to this day and focus instead on something that would make life an exciting adventure by committing to devote my life to contributing to others!

By the end of the seminar, I decided to take the plunge and enroll in a 1-year rigorous program that involved being coached for 30 minutes daily, 5 days each week for a year and attending four 4-day intensives over that time span. During that year, not only did I learn the principles that would transform my life in every area but I decided that to fully honor my core values, to fully develop and share my gifts with others and to live my best life would require that I totally reinvent myself… So I committed to another 10 years of immersing myself into personal development. That 10-year commitment would soon be replaced with a lifelong commitment to learning daily the distinctions that would empower my own life and allow me to best serve others.

With this commitment to playing what I now recognize as “The Master Game” of impacting the lives of others by transferring “the power to succeed” I founded The Center for Personal Reinvention and began the process of creating structures to champion people to live their very best lives.
Over the course of the past three decades, I have created courses in self-esteem elevation for adults and children, life-optimization coaching and advanced life-optimization coaching, relationship coaching, self-confidence coaching, business coaching and abundance coaching – all with the intention to support anyone willing to see life differently by accessing the areas of what they don’t know that they don’t know, and learn the tools that have the awesome power to transform lives. Although I have personally paid tens of thousands of dollars to learn and develop these principles, my commitment has always been to make them ultra-affordable so that anyone willing to move their lives forward would have the knowledge of exactly how to do so.

As part of this commitment to champion people to be their best, we are now in the process of turning the three personal development fables that I wrote (The Magic Lantern, The Legend of the Light-Bearers and The Seven Blessings) into feature films that will share love, self-esteem and empowerment with the world thereby changing the state of our world which I fear is filled with hatred, violence, scarcity thinking, and despair.

As I approach my seventh decade on this planet, I decided to include my story in every email that I send out in hopes of inspiring like-minded people interested in either transforming their own lives or in sharing my vision of impacting the lives of at least 20 million adults and 20 million children with others.
It is only with your support that I will have the ability to impact the lives of this many people by sharing the principles that champion people to believe in themselves. The future of our world can indeed be marked by the soaring self-esteem principles that spread love to others, help them realize that scarcity is an illusion, and that the more we do to contribute to others, the more we will receive in return.

Thank you for allowing me to share my story with you.

I wish you peace, love, happiness and every blessing!

Joe Rubino
CenterForPersonalReinvention.com