Ok, maybe you can tell a few people.

After 37 years of age, I think I’ve finally found the key to life.

I’m sorry to say it’s not rocket science. It’s not real sexy or glamorous. It’s not that magic little pill you’ve been searching for that causes you to instantly drop 20 pounds overnight. (Wouldn’t that be sweet!)

It comes down to one question:

Are you choosing your Greatness or your fear?

There have been several times in my life when I’ve been at that crossroads, trying to decide what to do, feeling the weight of making a decision. Six years ago, I was contemplating leaving my career in the long term care industry to start my coaching practice. It was a big idea. It was downright scary.

Sometimes, even now, when I look back, I can’t believe I actually did it.

But the point is, I did. Even though it was scary, uncertain, unpredictable, and risky, I did it. I started my business, leaving the “security and comfort” of a regular paycheck. What I gained has been immeasurable.

It would have been so easy to do the "safe" thing--to stay at my burned out job, settling for what was known because the unknown was too big and unwieldy. That would have meant choosing my fear. Instead, I chose my Greatness, and I am so greatful that I did. It has made all the difference in the world.

People with high Abundance Intelligence practice what I call Courageous Abundance – they have the ability to choose their Greatness over their fear, especially when it is uncertain, scary, inconvenient, or difficult.

What’s the one thing you’ve been avoiding? Denying? Negating?

What’s the one thing you want to breathe life into this year?

How do you want to be seen?

It’s all about choosing how you show up in the world. Someone said once that 95% of life is just about showing up. The key to life isn’t in acquiring possessions or titles.

It’s about choosing in the moment.

How do we choose our Greatness in the moment? The next time you think of doing something you CAN do, pay attention to what pops up in your head. Is it doubt? Disbelief? The Illusion of Not Enough? These are all old patterns of fear – fear that’s been conditioned into from years and years of inherited beliefs and assumptions.

But this time it’s different, because you are choosing in the moment. You have given up choosing by default. You are aware. And you choose Greatness.

Once you’ve isolated the fear that grips you, ask yourself two questions:

What evidence do I have that this is true for me TODAY?

And

How does thinking this way serve me?

When you honestly ask yourself these questions, and answer them authentically, you will discover an amazing thing. You have no true evidence for your fear – fear is false expectations appearing real. Your fear is grounded in the past, which is no longer true for you because you can choose differently today.

Life is all in the choosing.

It’s that simple.

And it’s up to you.

Are you choosing your Greatness or your fear?

Greatful people don’t see the cup as just half full or overflowing. They are “the cup”. They understand that they already have everything they need, want and choose to be who they are. Their purpose is to reconnect with what makes them vibrantly alive and to bring that out into the world. Each day, then, becomes an exploration and a celebration of who they are.

Oh, how we have blinders to our greatness! So often the beauty of who we are is veiled by our conditioning, by what we should do, by what we think others are thinking – as if any of this really ever matters! What makes it matter is the importance we give to it. And often we deny our freedom to think anything different.

So how do you integrate this new pattern of Greatfulness into your daily life?

Here are 3 quick tips for increasing your Greatfulness on a daily basis:

1. Explore what keeps you from appreciating your Greatness. This is a great opportunity to utilize the Truth or Dare test from Coaching Into Greatness. Are you someone that has a hard time acknowledging your strengths and unique abilities? You may very well have some fear associated with appreciating your gifts. When you think of embracing your greatness, what comes up for you? What fear comes to mind? Is it a fear of raising the bar, being judged by others, loved ones not understanding or accepting who you are? Once you’ve identified this core fear, ask yourself 2 questions:

a. What evidence do I have that this fear is true for me TODAY? (The focus here is on what evidence do you have today, not yesterday, not 5 years ago)

b. How does thinking this way serve me? (our thinking always serves us, just not always in a healthy way.)

2. Share your Greatness with others. Volunteer. Give of your time, your energy, your heart. You may not fully realize something that comes naturally to you could be invaluable to someone else. Connect with something you care about. Now, more than ever, the world needs who you are. The beautiful thing about volunteering is that as you give of yourself to another, the rewards you receive are priceless.

3. Keep a Greatfulness journal. Capture what you become aware of. Focus on observing, not judging yourself. This is another way of replicating simplicity. When we get in the routine of seeing our greatness and appreciation the abundance in our lives, we are building our gratitude muscles. We are strengthening who we are. Over time, practicing Greatfulness becomes routine. Soon enough we are focused on what we have and what we want, vs. what we don’t have and what we don’t want.

Greatful people are people with a high AQ. They know that life is not a zero sum game, that by embracing their greatness, they add to the world because there is more than enough to go around. It is by being ourselves fully and completely that we create the world we want – for ourselves and for others.

There's nothing wrong with goals, per se. I just don't believe in taking goals at face value. Through my experience coaching hundreds of business people, there is a tipping point when goals become a source of scarcity.

You know. You’ve been there.

Maybe it was a job or a promotion. Maybe it was a person or a car or looking a certain way. Maybe it was that gazillion dollar lottery ticket – haven’t we all fantasized about that one?

You know, holding onto something so bad that you can’t see yourself living without it.

The bottom line is that we all want things. We even want life to be a certain way. Often we know what it takes to get what we want. But knowing and wanting it really bad aren’t enough.

So why don’t we get what we want? Why don’t we do what we can do to get what we want? Goals can quickly become a ball and chain instead of the catalyst we long for them to be.

In my work, I began to notice patterns that kept showing up in my client’s lives and businesses. I call these patterns “illusions” and I have found them to be the primary sources of scarcity thinking in our culture today. To me, the ultimate scarcity is resisting who you are. Each of the illusions, then, becomes a specific expression of resistance.

Take the Illusion of Certainty, for example. This illusion occurs when the need to know an outcome keeps us from being who we naturally are. Abundance is more than the belief that there’s enough to go around. True abundance is exercising the freedom to be who you are. Certainty is a funny thing. It's an illusion most of the time because there are very few things in life we can actually be certain of. (Yup, I know, death and taxes.) And yet we thirst for it.

Certainty impacts our goals when our need to know the outcome of something keeps us from doing what we can do. Take Josie, for example. Her goal was to start her own floral shop, but she kept procrastinating and adding to her to do list, never actually taking any of the steps to make her floral business a reality. She couldn't sleep at night, her mind reeling with fears about the risks involved. The Illusion of Certainty is at play here. Josie loved the familiarity of her boring, unfulfilling job. She loved the "security" of a weekly paycheck.

And yet, slowly, surely, that satin lined coffin of certainty was suffocating her.

Josie couldn't get past the need to know, to have proof that her floral business would succeed. And nobody could give that to her. As a result, her goal slowly died on the vine.

Take a look at your own goals. Are you comfortable? Have you furnished a satin lined coffin?

How many of you have at least one goal you've not met for at least 2 years? (It's ok, you can raise your hand - this is a newsletter and no one can see you.) Having an ongoing goal is not necessarily a bad thing - it's when we keep recycling the same old goals year after year, with no focused, intentional action to go along with it that we run into problems.

When Goal Recycling happens, it can quickly become a sign that the Illusion of Hope is at play. One of the sources of scarcity thinking, the Illusion of Hope is what causes us to put our greatness on hold by waiting for someone or something else to solve our uneasiness of who we are.

The Illusion of Hope is characterized by expectation, powerlessness, and assumption. How do these conditioned patterns keep us from reaching our goals? When we expect life (and people) to be a certain way, we make assumptions about what will happen. If I assume that I will train 100 people this year because I believe I have such a great program, I may expect that I will make over 6 figures as my goal. However, if underneath this goal, I have a deep rooted fear that I'm really not that great of a trainer, or my program has a lot of kinks in it, or I hate flying (and my training success requires a lot of travel) any one of these fears can be a sign of powerlessness. And if that keeps me from doing what I can do - marketing my program, networking with prospects, I'm stuck in the Illusion of Hope and recycling my goals.

What goals have you been recycling?

I've seen a lot of unrealistic goal setting in business people. It's great to dream big and everyone can benefit by creating a big vision, but if that vision is not grounded in practical, tangible ways, it is unrealistic. So why do so many people recycle unrealistic goals year after year? I believe it's related to the Illusion of Struggle and the Illusion of Control. A lot of us have a love affair with struggle, don't we? We identify with struggle. We think it shows us the boundaries of who we are. When things are hard, they may be more familiar. By always striving, we negate who we are by buying into the idea that we're incomplete, less than, not enough. When we create goals that are ungrounded and always out of our reach, it's a way to keep things safe and predictable. We can stay in control of our lives, because we can predict how it's going to turn out.

Unrealistic goals are like the tug of war you played at those family picnics as a kid. There's a lot of effort back and forth, struggling to win, but in the end, there's only one winner. The loser usually ends up in the mud. When a person creates unrealistic goals, they're not the winner - complacency is. Unrealistic goals set us up for failure and more struggle. They're mighty convenient that way. They keep us playing small. They keep us from living into our greatness and being abundant.

Could you benefit from a little reality in your goal setting?

Truly abundant goals are realistic goals. What does that mean? To implement goals and get the results we want, we have to first carefully consider what we want. A realistic goal is based on who we are -- not who our boss, parents, spouse or any other external driver thinks we are. The most successful goals are based on intentions that are in alignment with our values, our vision, and our capacity. I may have a big audacious goal to be a millionaire by the end of 2006. However, if I am not even making $20,000 and I'm not taking specific, actionable steps to change my reality, this is an unrealistic goal.

Perhaps the single biggest gift you can give yourself is permission to let go. Let go of all the goals you should have. Let go of who people think you should be and what you should do. As Loretta Larouche says, “stop shoulding on yourself”. Struggling to make an old, outdated goal work is like jumping on a Slip ‘n Slide without the water.

Begin living who you are.

In the moment.

Right now.

Abundantly.

Kim George is the founder of The AQ Institute and the author of Coaching Into Greatness: 4 Steps to Success in Business and Life. For more information, visit www.CoachingIntoGreatness.com.

Perhaps the bigger question is why don't people do the things they can do?

The answer begins with exploring what keeps people stuck. The first place we commonly go to is that we're missing something, we don't have what we need. We need more of everything – you name it, we need it: more time, money, energy, information, certainty, resources. Without these, we tell ourselves, we can't do what we want to do.

That, my friends, is the greatest lie of our times – this underlying assumption that we don't have what we need. This perception of lack is the biggest source of unhappiness and dissatisfaction in the world today. It causes us to dream about "becoming” something, to hold out for doing that one big, audacious thing that is so big and audacious that we can't see a way to do it!

We have fallen in love with the idea of becoming and it is keeping us small. We are on an endless search for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, all the while not realizing that we are standing on the pot of gold. Many people travel their entire lives on this journey, longing to find themselves out there, when, in fact where they've really lost themselves is in here.

You are the Significance you've been waiting for.

Nobody's going to bring it to you, solve it for you, or make it all better. Ultimately, we are the ones we have been waiting for. It is up to us to be who we are.

And the art of being who you are is what Abundance Intelligence™, or AQ, is all about. People with a high AQ are able to do what they can do, authentically and consistently, when it matters most.

And when is there ever a time when being yourself doesn't matter? The reason people find themselves getting stuck is because they don't think who they are is enough – enough to get that promotion, enough to close that next big account, enough to be financially independent. This scarcity causes resistance and any time we are stuck, we are resisting the way things are in one way or another.

When I talk about doing what we can do, I don't mean rolling out of bed in the morning and making that pot of coffee. I'm talking about living into our greatness -- being fully, completely, vibrantly alive. I'm talking about doing the thing you were born to do. Being your greatest self is the gift you give to the world. Not being your greatest self deprives the world of what you are here to give. There's nothing sexy or glamorous about that.

How do you know if you have Abundance Intelligence? AQ is made up of aptitudes, conscious patterns and beliefs. We can see evidence of these patterns and beliefs showing up in people's behaviors, actions (or lack of actions) and attitudes.

Possessing AQ is more than believing that there is enough to go around. Here is an analogy:

People living in scarcity see the cup as half empty.
People who are positive thinkers see the cup as half full.
People living abundantly see the cup as overflowing.
But people Living into their Greatness ARE the cup.

What's keeping you from seeing yourself as "The Cup”?

Download a PDF of this article, AQ – The Art of Doing What You Can Do.

Written by Kimberly George, author of Coaching Into Greatness: 4 Steps to Success in Business and Life (Wiley, 2006). To get a snapshot of your AQ score, visit www.CoachingIntoGreatness.com.