Watching two great athletes this weekend, Peyton Manning and Andy Murray reminded me how wonderful the human spirit can be. To overcome adversity, fear, doubts, even history, and emerge triumphant is what it’s all about. Sure they have the help of personal coaches, and yes, they play on a very visible stage, but we can all transcend our own challenges, find our own coaches and mentors to help us overcome our fears, doubts and history, and emerge victorious, living our lives to the utmost, the way we wish to live them.

We tend to easily become entrained with the energy of negativity and limiting beliefs; it’s part of the fabric of modern Western culture to focus on lack, insufficiency and negativity. “I’m not enough, I don’t deserve, I can’t…” become the mantra of so many of us. What a shame that we forget there is another side to that coin. One of the first things I always do with a new client who feels this way—and that’s most of them—is to point out that other side, where we find the energy of abundance, sufficiency, optimism and triumph.

When they learn how to focus on that energy, and release the limiting beliefs that cause them to think that they can’t do or have what they want—it’s never true by the way, we all deserve to have what we want, and we all can have it—they suddenly begin to live the way they wish; they discover their power and learn how to use it— and like Peyton and Andy, they transcend adversity, fear, doubts, and especially their history of lack and “I can’t.” As Christopher Morley said, “There is only one success— to be able to spend your life in your own way.” And therein lays the joy of being a personal coach and therapist, helping people achieve that success. It never gets old.

Peyton Manning photo credit: Askmen.com