Stressless Success: The Surprising Secrets to a Life of Passion, Purpose, and Prosperity

By Janet McKee

Are you feeling overwhelmed and burned out from working harder than ever and striving to achieve goals in various areas of your life but not seeing results? 

Have you tried everything and are feeling like the pot of gold at the end of the long-curved rainbow will never be within your grasp?

Are you giving up hope that you can ac

• Language: English
• Publisher: SanaView
• Release date: Feb 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781734521818

Janet McKee

Janet McKee is a speaker, bestselling author, wellness expert and CEO of SanaView who is on a mission to help people lead a stress-free successful life, both professionally and personally. After obtaining her MBA and climbing the corporate ladder in several Fortune 500 companies, Janet pursued a wellness degree at Columbia University. She was chosen as one of only 200 elite Certified High Performance Coaches™ in the world and inducted as a member of the National Association of Experts, Writers and Speakers. The author of the new book Stressless Success, Janet created the acclaimed Accelerated High Performance Program and the emPower3 Leadership + Lifestyle Retreats where she shares her Stressless Success Shift™ to empower others to break negative patterns and achieve greater success. For more information or to contact Janet , please visit www.janetmckee.com.

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Introduction

Would you like to live a more prosperous life of passion, positivity, and purpose but have been struggling to find out how? Most likely the answer is yes, which is why you are here. Well, the surprising secrets to living a more successful life are written for you in this book and I am passionate about sharing these incredible discoveries with you. Thank you for being here.

What you’re about to read is going to change your life forever—for the better that is, far better. Are you ready? The very smart and proven ideas and strategies that are in this book will only work if you put them to use, however. These ideas are incredibly simple yet powerful and presented in a way that I have never found anywhere before. You are being presented with solutions for your life that are meaningful and useful so that you can apply them and begin to get results starting today.

Take everything you’ve heard about achieving success or about dealing with stress and set that all aside. As a former Fortune 500 executive who experienced massive burnout and hit rock bottom in every area of my life but then rose from the ashes to discover the truth about success, achievement, fulfillment, and prosperity, I know I can help you.

Have you tried every great suggestion but still haven’t reached the level of life you long for? Are you tired of everyone saying the same old things about success and how to have a positive mindset and how to go after your goals? Good. Because I am about to destroy all those old, worn-out ideas that simply aren’t working or are not enabling you to go as far as you actually can in your life. What is possible for you is greater than you ever imagined, but the true secret to a life of success is to pursue your dreams with ease instead of stress, and you’re about to learn why and how.

This book contains the keys to living a successful life. These ideas are very different and often even the opposite of what you’ve been told before. This message is not to be taken lightly. Please take this book seriously so you can absorb these concepts and ideas and put them to use in your life today and every day from this point forward. This book will empower you with the secrets to a life of passion, purpose, and prosperity. Have faith in your ability to allow this book to change your life for the better forever.

I’m thinking of you as I sit here writing the first words of this book on my son’s twenty-first birthday. It’s snowing outside and I have a fire going in the fireplace and our two dogs are sleeping next to me on the floor by the sofa, where I’m propped up on pillows so that I can type. My heart is overflowing with such an abundance of joy and gratitude; I can hardly even contain it. I’m almost afraid of what would happen if I allow the dam to break and my entire heart and soul pour out all over this home, this city, this state, this country, and the rest of the world. How weird and wonderful (as described by one of our recent empowerment retreat attendees as she spoke of the personal breakthrough she experienced) that I would feel this way when just a short while ago I was so depressed and had lost all hope.

Looking up, I laugh and cry at the same time as I see a toy dart stuck to the ceiling fan twenty feet above my head at the peak of the vaulted ceiling of the family room, where I sit to write the first words of this book for you. The toy dart is from my son, who was shooting at the fan when he was just a few years old and now today, the very day that he turns twenty-one and is a junior in college and a partner in my business, I see the dart and smile with tears of joy. The very day that I gave birth to the best thing that ever happened to me in not only this lifetime, but all of eternity, was a day of meeting my son for what did not feel like the first time but as if we were seeing each other again after many lifetimes together.

Today, I give birth to this book for you which is the culmination of my life’s lessons and my life’s teachings that have enabled me to become an expert in living a successful life and experience such unbridled joy that I can hardly contain myself. It is time that you too experience these secrets to a successful life, which is why I’m writing my book on life for you. This book gives clear expressions of these powerful teachings so that you too can reach a point in your life where joy gushes from your heart and your soul out into your own work, your friends and family, and to the world at large.

Take a deep breath and breathe in the teachings of this book, refer to it often, until the teachings here become as easy and natural as taking every breath for the rest of your life. I love you more than you will ever know and want the best for you.

Love, Janet

I

The Sky Is Not Your Limit

Winter Sky at SanaView Farms

Winter Sky at SanaView Farms

1

The Keys To Your Kingdom

You are the heir to the kingdom. Prosperity is your birthright and you hold the key to more abundance in every area of your life than you could possibly imagine.

—Henri J. M. Nouwen

Are you feeling burned out from working harder than ever and striving to achieve goals in various areas of your life but not seeing results?

Have you tried everything and are feeling like the pot of gold at the end of the long-curved rainbow will never be within your grasp?

Are you giving up hope that you can achieve certain goals and therefore feel that happiness and fulfillment will never be your reality?

Or, have you achieved some level of success but you paid a steep price for it and are now afraid to reach further?

I’m here to tell you not to give up. Instead I will share with you a more effective way to strive toward your goals and increase the probability that you’ll achieve them, and achieve them more easily. You’ve just been missing some key pieces to achieving success, and I’m about to hand you back the keys to your kingdom, so get ready to unlock the door to your dreams of a dramatically better life.

Do you know that you have the strength and power within you to overcome all limitations, fears, and obstacles and uncover the positivity and passion you need to create a successful life? You have the power to create the destiny that you desire. Actually, everyone does.

But, are you willing to do what it takes? Are you willing to do what it takes to create the life of your dreams? You probably aren’t sure how to answer this question because most of you fear that it will take too much. It will be too difficult and too stressful or even too risky to truly go after your dreams. You believe that you must stress and struggle to achieve success, and most of you are just too overwhelmed already or so burned out and anxious to take on any more pressure. Life is stressful enough, many of you feel, so why would you need to take on more? Or maybe you’ve tried things already and it has all been such a struggle and perhaps things did not work out as you had wished.

I’m here to tell you that your thinking is the opposite of the truth. What you were taught in the past about how to achieve success was actually wrong, and it is these very beliefs that are holding you back. When you stress and struggle, you actually block success. Struggle is a form of resistance that builds walls, thereby stopping solutions, opportunities, and possibilities from coming to you. This resistance is exhausting, which is why you may feel burned out. Simply, when you release all stress and struggle, you live a life of ease, and with ease, success flows to you like a river.

You have goals and desires such as a new job, more money, a bigger home, a fancy car, and a new relationship and you believe that you’ll be happy once you meet these goals. We set goals and develop dreams because we believe that achieving them will bring us some level of joy and fulfillment. I certainly don’t want to dissuade you from setting goals and striving for success, but I am here to tell you that you have the order of things backward, and once you adjust your thinking, you’ll achieve happiness more quickly and easily. Yes, you will. And this is what we think of as stress-free or Stressless Success.

The problem is that if you are miserable while you strive and struggle to achieve these things that you want, you block them from actually happening. You get stressed out by working so hard that you not only impact your emotional well-being but you wreck your physical health and often your relationships too. Bruce Lipton, author of Biology of Belief, states that 90 percent of illness on this planet is due to lifestyle choices and stress, not on genetics. Will you be able to enjoy your new home, job, or relationship if you are sick and tired? No. But the real truth is that your dreams will not become your reality or will take much longer to be achieved through stress and struggle. Longing comes from a sense of lack, and stress and struggle come from not trusting and not believing that what you want can be yours easily and with inspired action.

When you are stressed, you are in fight or flight mode. In this mode, you are focused on what is happening in your outer world instead of focusing on your inner world, such as your thoughts, attitudes, feelings, and emotions. It is your inner world that has all of the power, which you will learn in this book.

When you are experiencing negative stress, the stress hormones that are released restrict the blood vessels in your brain and you become less creative and less able to think clearly, so you are less able to solve the very problems that are causing you to feel stress. We live in such states of resistance (or stress) that we create mental and emotional walls in an attempt to protect ourselves. By doing this, we deprive ourselves of solutions that would otherwise flow to us. We focus on the problems instead of the solutions because we believe this is how it works. We believe that the more we stress, the more we will achieve success. But that’s all wrong! The key is improving not just your state of mind, but the state of your energy for where you are now first, and then things that you want to accomplish (and more) will come to you more easily.

The cornerstone of achieving your goals and, consequently, a successful life is based on your level of feeling joy and fulfillment now, not the other way around. You must develop skills at maintaining a sense of mental, emotional, and physical well-being and positive energy while you work toward your goals, no matter what. You think that you can’t control what others do or say or the things that happen around you, and so you allow your thoughts and emotions to be dictated by others. You may believe that you can’t control what is happening around you, but you do have complete control over what is happening inside of you, your reactions, and attitudes, which have a direct impact on what actually does happen around you. And, when you shift what is happening inside of you, the things around you begin to shift. Now this is very empowering.

The problem is that happiness is elusive for many. In today’s world, everyone lives at a level of stress, fear, and anxiety that destroys the quality of their work, their relationships, and their health. People keep striving and struggling only to be left feeling stuck and frustrated because they can’t seem to figure out how to reach the levels in life they long for. Many justify their existence through hard work. They believe that stress and struggle are prerequisites for success, or they equate struggle with striving and they sometimes wear these like badges of honor.

Struggle and hard work will get you somewhere, but it will actually be very hard and probably not where you truly want to be. When you stress and struggle, you block solutions and even greater opportunities from coming your way. To achieve true and lasting success, you must lighten up on the inside so that the weight on your shoulders lightens too. How can you spread your wings and fly if you are weighted down by fear and worry? Begin to have more fun and laugh at life more. Life can be so much fun and certainly worth living.

Experts often tell you that you must manage stress and think more positively, but they never really tell you how to do it when life is challenging. They don’t tell you because most people do not know how; they don’t know that positive thinking alone is not the answer and when you struggle to think positively, it is even sometimes harmful. They also don’t teach you the science behind what is being generated from your thoughts and feelings. Prior advice is far too limited and unattainable, leaving many feeling frustrated and more negative than before they began. There is a deeper truth beyond just having a positive mindset that is critical to inspire you to finally take control. It is the new way of looking at life that I share in this book, which is going to change everything for you. I’m going to teach you the truth and precisely how to make a lasting change for your life, starting now.

I often speak about how to combat today’s pervasive negativity and develop an energy of consistent and sustainable passion and positivity. When you learn to live at an uplifted level of hope and positive anticipation, not only does this feel better and make life more enjoyable, but more good things flow into your life that help you to move more quickly along your path to success. Did you ever notice that when you’re in the zone, helpful people and hopeful opportunities seem to appear in your life? This is no coincidence. Winning athletes and highly creative people do this all the time, and the research has shown that so do the world’s most accomplished people. When you’re in a high-energy positive zone, you’re more open to letting positive people and things into your life.

To do this, it is important to have practices and habits in place to continuously nurture positive energy and enthusiasm. People who live the most successful lives don’t wait until trouble hits to try to reach for better thoughts. They practice with deliberate intent to pave a clear path to positivity no matter what is happening around them. You will learn that the power lies not in the thought itself, but in the power of the energy that lies behind the thought. This is part of the surprising truth.

What are some things that you do that take you to your place of positivity? Do you love to go to bed early so that you wake up feeling rested and peaceful? Do you love to say a few prayers or meditate in the morning and then set good intentions for a great and productive day? Do you love to sing your favorite tune in the shower and dance your way through the kitchen while making breakfast for you and the kids? Does this all sound too outrageous? Well, I think living a life of exhaustion, boredom, and misery is what is truly outrageous when it is actually simple to choose otherwise.

All right, I’m having some fun with you here, but doesn’t it feel good to smile? The truth is I’m not really joking at all and what I described is exactly how I choose to