This post has been moved to Reeta Luthra’s site about Stress and Your Health. You can find the post here.

My friend Teresa (not her real name) has been a bit upset this week. She came across her 2008 New Year Resolutions list and found that she’s not able to tick a single item off it.

With just a few weeks remaining before the new New Year, she’s glum that she’s “still a fat, shy, frumpy wino with an ex-boyfriend tied to her with elastic, stressing about a job she has been dying to leave since she started it 6 years ago.” Her words, not mine!

Teresa has been making resolutions each year to lose weight, drink less, get a new job and go out more. But these resolutions do not see the light of day because in her mind they are simply hopeful wishes – ones that she feels would be “nice to have” but they’re not really for “someone like her“.

So she doesn’t take them seriously. And when we don’t take something seriously, we can’t commit to it. And when we can’t commit to it, we become unable to identify with it in a way that brings about the right mental energy to make it happen.

If this doesn’t make sense, think about what happens in your mind when you want something easy – like a cup of tea. You might say “Mmmm, I don’t half fancy a nice cup of tea” and picture a nice hot brew. Perhaps you feel its comforting warmth on your tongue. Maybe you hear the comforting boil of the kettle. Without even knowing it, you’ve put a lot of energy and commitment into this simple thought about wanting a cup of tea. This energy and commitment is what allowed you to do what it took to make that cup of tea happen.

How can you allow yourself to think about your goals with the same level of familiarity and ease with which you think about a cup of tea?

1) Envision Success.
See yourself achieving your goal on the TV screen of your mind. Have this on constant replay, even if you have to set reminders on your mobile phone to do it.

2) Address the emotional conflict underlying your goal.
Many goals involve a loss (lose weight, lose the drink, lose a habit, quit smoking). Loss brings apathy, grief, abandonment and insecurity. If you find these emotions casting a subconscious veil around your goal, a solutions-orientated therapist can help you with this.

3) Take committed action.
Goals without action are daydreams. Daydreams have a beauty that gives your life hope. But daydreams rooted in fear take the hope away and you get distorted self-limiting and self-depreciating beliefs forming in their place instead. Action with commitment addresses fear and gives legs to your daydreams.

Teresa’s decided she won’t be starting 2009 with her same old dog-eared list of guilt-ridden resolutions. Teresa started working on her confidence and self-esteem today. She’s not that bothered about her weight really but she is ever-so-tired of being socially shy and awkward.

If you have overdue resolutions hanging around from 1st Jan 2008, dust them off and bring them into your daily awareness. What can you do to make a start on them today?

1st January 2009, Teresa is going to be brimming and sparkling with inner confidence, enjoying a day full of hope, joy and enthusiasm.

How about you?

Through accident or some strange quirk of fate, I’ve met several people (not clients) this last week who all happened to mention that they had a lot of “baggage” they were carrying.

The interesting thing is that only one them actually believes that the baggage they are carrying is disposable. The others are all holding on tight to theirs, knowing it is doing them no favours, but treating it as precious cargo regardless. Some of them are holding tight because they genuinely believe that there is no way out for them.

I think we’ve all done this from time to time. Sometimes, we need to keep this baggage with us. We went through a lot to “earn” it and we can’t just drop it, because surely that would mean trivialising what happened. And who wants to trivialise something that important?

The great thing to realise when we say we are carrying baggage is that we only start calling it Baggage when a part of us is ready to move on from it. Until this point, we don’t really think of it in that way. Until this point, it’s still something we are very much a part of.

So, when you’ve given that pain the B name, remind yourself that if it was precious cargo, it wouldn’t be hurting.

What is Baggage?

Baggage is a collection of a whole load of different things and emotions.  They get in the mind and all they want is to be acknowledged. We don’t always acknowledge things when we should so they fester and poke and prod.  They weigh heavy in our soul and taint the way we view our current opportunities. Left too long, the body joins in with aches, pains and even illness.

Facing and acknowledging the pieces of the baggage in the way that they deserve, allows us to understand the message they contain. It allows us to appreciate our true depth. It also allows us to kind of pay it its last respects so that it can move on… so that you can move on.

Integrity & Honour

There’s a way of letting go of baggage. If it’s done with integrity and honour to your inner self, you feel lighter and you notice that old and unhelpful patterns are broken.

The process involves understanding that the part of you that is feeling the emotional pain is hurting because of an underlying need. Empowering yourself through identifying and addressing this underlying need is going to play a major part in helping you to release this baggage with integrity.

A fundamental principle of NLP states that “A person is not their behaviour”. Appreciating this principle as fully as possible is going to play a major part in helping you to honour both yourself and anyone else involved as you release your baggage. This becomes incredibly important where your baggage involves other people (especially family members, past relationships and people who have died).

The Paradox of Reality is that the precious cargo was indeed there all along. It reveals itself once you have taken the letting-go process through to completion. The precious cargo is a profound freedom and strength.