Welcome to 2012

Lets begin with remembering that in the Chinese Zodiac, 2012 is the Year of the Dragon.

The Dragon is the mightiest of all signs symbolizing dominance and ambition.

So while we have not yet reached Chinese New Year lets take some direction from this.

When I was planning for 2012 I uncovered these tips, about the whole person – body, mind and spirit, that I want to share with you.

Quick Tips

Body:

Are you making bold resolutions on January 1st to “eat more healthy”?

If so, then stop and think small.

Trying to reach any diet goal does not happen overnight.

Create a weight loss plan and work towards your goals every day.

Before long, any excess weight will be gone.

Mind:

Creating a list to clarify your thoughts, resolve any problems or to generate ideas is good for your mind.

For example, take a blank piece of paper and draw two columns.

In the left column, write down any specific issues or question you have.

Then in the right column beside each issue or question, write your answers.

This not only helps you to become better organized, but provides you with a checklist to hold yourself accountable.

Spirit:

Not everyone finds the holiday season to be a joyous occasion.

In fact, the holidays can be depressing and extremely stressful.

So much so, that you may become irritable and grumpy.

Don’t let this happen to you.

A quick way to improve your mood and to lift your spirits is to surround yourself with people who have a positive attitude.

So now that the planning is out of the way lets start living in 2012ikoni

Are you a creature of habit?

One of the most important things you can do if you want to make this your best year ever, is to identify what new habits you need to develop.

Are you one of those people who focuses most of their energy on old habits they you really want to overcome or eliminate.

I suggest that identifying these nonconstructive habits is important, but focusing your energy this way often results in a surge of negative energy.

You think I won’t… I mustn’t…. I shouldn’t…

How about this you focus instead, on the new constructive habits you want to develop, you will be approaching your challenges from a more positive mindset

- I am… I do… I will… I have…

Ask yourself , “what do I want to do, be or have in my life from tomorrow?”.

Then create new habits that will support you in achieving these goals.

You will find that this positive approach makes it easier to achieve the changes you want to make in your life.

So why not give it a go?

Claim your destiny!

“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it’s a matter of choice!”
Jeremy Kitson

Imagine what your life would be like if you were achieving 100% of your potential?

What would be different about your life and what would need to change?

If you don’t feel you are already living your true potential, don’t panic. Rather than try to change everything overnight, make a plan to move towards your destiny a few steps at a time.

1. Identify three things you would like to achieve / do differently this week that will take you closer to your potential?

2. Identify three things you would like to achieve / do differently this month that will take you closer to your potential?

3. Identify three things you would like to achieve / do differently over the next year that will take you closer to your potential?

Make the commitment to these goals and watch your destiny become your reality.

Why will this happen?

Well because you are worth it

Success is a journey not a destination

“Without deviation, progress is not possible.”
Frank Zappa

Do you want to change the way you live your life.

Do you sometimes find yourself chastising, critiquing or judging yourself for the things you haven’t done.

I’m not talking about the largely inconsequential things that fill up to our huge to-do lists, but the more serious stuff…

So often I hear people beating themselves up because they haven’t achieved this goal, that dream or some other life ambition.

The truth is, life and success, are a journey, not a destination – it’s not a cliché it’s a fact!

As long as your intention is to live your best possible life, this is the life you will be living… regardless of whether it is filled with all the things you thought you would have or have done, by 30, 40, 50 or whenever…

So now I want you to focus on appreciating the life you already have.

BE GRATEFUL

Forget about all the things you haven’t done and instead express your gratitude for all the experiences your life has been filled with so far.

And imagine the experiences yet to come

The Highway of Passion

“When work, commitment, and pleasure all become one and you reach that
deep well where passion lives, nothing is impossible.”

Let me ask you a very personal question – Is this you :

You have :

a 9 to 5 job getting a good pay,

you have a great family and

all’s well with your world [as you see it].

But deep inside, you know and feel like you’re going nowhere.

The job is not going up either.

You are really stagnating in your career both mentally and spiritually.

Something is missing.

Passion.

The one character that textbooks and instruction manuals and company procedures will never talk about.

Everybody is in such a hurry to get you to fit perfectly into the machine like a well oiled gear wheel, that they actually forgot you are a living, feeling human being.

Even you have forgotten this.

Ask yourself this.

What if I had a million bucks in the bank, what kind of work would I be doing?

Would I chuck this humdrum job and move on to something really exciting?

Like something that I have always wanted to do?

Then ask yourself – why am I not doing that right now?

Is it because of peer pressure or because I don’t want to move out of my comfort zone?

Don’t want to rock my boat?

You are half asleep in your boat already and in a few years, you could be put out to pasture! – permanently

If the boat rocks now, you could be jerked awake and come to your senses.

Your passionate senses.

In the aftermath of the Global Financial Crisis, millions of people lost their jobs.

Many of them took up new vocations and suddenly found that they were finally following their dream.

Many of them are now highly successful in their new found professions.

You don’t have to wait for dire straits to rock you out of your present mediocre life.

You can decide right now, that you want to live and work passionately and make your life worthwhile.

The Highway of Passion is an amazing ride.

And Prosperity is just one of the landmarks on this route!

Get ready for the ride of your life!

more to come – check back regularly

Can you say “I love you” any better?

Slow down for a few minutes to read this. It is so worth it.

What Love means to a group of 4-8 year olds . .

Touching words from the mouth of babes.

A group of professional people posed this question to a group of 4 to 8 year-olds, ‘What does love mean?’

The answers they got were broader and deeper than anyone could have imagined. See what you think:

‘Love is what makes you smile when you’re tired…’

Terri – age 4

‘Love is when my mommy makes coffee for my daddy and she takes a sip before giving it to him, to make sure the taste is OK.’

Danny – age 7

‘Love is when you kiss all the time. Then when you get tired of kissing, you still want to be together and you talk more. My Mommy and Daddy are like that. They look gross when they kiss’

Emily – age 8

‘Love is what’s in the room with you at Christmas if you stop opening presents and listen.’

Bobby – age 7 (Wow!)

‘If you want to learn to love better, you should start with a friend who you hate,’

Nikka – age 6 (we need a few million more Nikka’s on this planet)

‘Love is when you tell a guy you like his shirt, then he wears it everyday.’

Noelle – age 7

‘Love is like a little old woman and a little old man who are still friends even after they know each other so well.’

Tommy – age 6

‘My mommy loves me more than anybody You don’t see anyone else kissing me to sleep at night.’

Clare – age 6

‘Love is when Mommy gives Daddy the best piece of chicken.’

Elaine-age 5

‘Love is when Mommy sees Daddy smelly and sweaty and still says he is handsomer than Robert Redford.’

Chris – age 7

‘Love is when your puppy licks your face even after you left him alone all day.’

Mary Ann – age 4

‘I know my older sister loves me because she gives me all her old clothes and has to go out and buy new ones.’

Lauren – age 4

‘When you love somebody, your eyelashes go up and down and little stars come out of you.’ (what an image)

Karen – age 7

‘You really shouldn’t say ‘I love you’ unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.’

Jessica – age 8

So what you think? – did it bring a smile to your face ?

Thoughts and Feelings

Here’s a quick question for you how do you create?

Do you know that it is your thoughts and feelings together that create with the law of attraction, and you cannot separate them.

Also remember that it’s your feelings that are summing up your overall frequency and telling you what you are creating in this moment.

So how are you feeling right now?

Are you in tune with your feelings?

Could you feel better?

Well then, do what it takes right now to feel better.

Do you want to stay poor ?

Well do you?

Heres the thing. It takes a selfish person to stay poor.

Not being poor but staying poor.

Yes, lots of people tend to think of poor people as being kind, and wealthy people as being greedy and selfish, but I believe that the truth of the matter is the longer you stay poor, the more selfish you really are.

Let’s think about this a little before you start throwing things at me for calling poor people selfish.

Is this you? – you run out of money right before payday…

You are only one paycheck from being homeless as they would say…

You think only about yourself and those closest to you…

How will you eat, how will you pay the rent, how will you make the car repayment, how will you get to the next payday?

Now sometimes you show your kindness by helping out one person here or there, as long as it doesn’t stop you from eating.

But really – are you changing the world? NO.

Mostly your everyday actions are pretty selfish; thinking about you and yours.

You aren’t thinking about starving people in Africa – after all there are starving people in your own house!

Yet rich people are selfish and greedy, right?

Some people may give a donation to the causes, but for many people they need a donation themselves.

Now lets look at those folks who have money so they aren’t struggling ? Yeah, rich people.

Have you ever stopped to think how many diseases their money is curing?…

How many people’s lives their money is saving…

Nope, because they are the greedy ones…

My niece asked me about this one day. She said ‘ why do you say that it takes a selfish person to stay poor?’

I said ‘Okay, lets look at it this way.

If you are poor who can you help?

If you cannot buy food for yourself and your family, who can you help?

If you don’t know if you will have a place to live soon, who can you help?

She said ‘no one’. I said ‘exactly’…

We live in America, the land where there are one million new Millionaire households every year…it takes someone who is really all about themselves to stay poor.

After thinking about it for a few minutes her face lit up as she had another question

Well, she said – what about Mother Teresa?

Well Mother Teresa was backed by the Roman Catholic church, and everyone knows it has millions in money and property, so really she helped millions of people through this money from the Roman Catholic church so I’d say she really wasn’t poor…

If all she had to work with was a paycheck could she have made the same impact on the world?

You can say yes, but I believe the real answer is no.

She could only help millions because she could afford to spend her time doing that…she wasn’t worried about the money to help them, or how she would eat.. it was all taken care of for her.

The world is waiting for you to make your unique impact on it.

How can you help anyone if you can’t help yourself, so why don’t you choose today to make a greater contribution to this world and the people around you?

Solving Problems

The way young people solve problems verses how adults solve problems is one a thing that you should really understand.

It is very important because we lose those good problem solving skills as we get older.

Part of the reason for this is that we become more logical.

We no longer want to try to be creative. We want to go straight to what we are sure will work.

We do not give anything else a try and if what we think will work turn out not to work, we get frustrated.

Another thing is we lose our sense of experimentation.

We just do not want to take the time to try different ideas or even come up with different ideas.

We get lazy.

As mentioned children do things much differently.

Here is an illustrated example of how a child and adult would approach the same problem.

Situation: Steve and his son, Brad, are given a video game system to hook up to a television set.

Steve is 28 and Brad is 8.

Neither have directions and neither of them have set up a system like this before.

Steve: Steve’s first instinct is to get out all the cords and pieces and lay them out nicely.

He then examines each piece to see how everything fits together.

He determines that there needs to be a cord running from the television to the game system and he picks up one that looks good.

He then hooks up all the cords to the spots where they appear to go and turns on the system only to find that nothing happens.

He unhooks everything and tries again and again.

Eventually he gets frustrated and asks if the system is broken.

Brad: Brad dives right in just connecting cords.

He ends up with the system hooked to the television, but nothing happens.

He realizes he forgot to plug in the system and does so, but that doesn’t make it show up on the television.

Instead of unhooking everything he starts messing with the television.

He end sup turning the channel and viola the system is working.

Steve was quick to give up and he missed the obvious – plugging the system in.

Steve’s first instinct was to make an excuse and say the system was broken.

Brad kept at it and tried new things until he figured it out.

The difference in how they solved the problem is clear.

Steve probably would have figured it out eventually, but Brad was the one to actually succeed.

He never gave up and he was willing to experiment.

Plus he did not miss the obvious because he was so focused on other things like his dad.

So keep in touch with your creativity and never give up

Life is not meant to be easy…

If life was easy what would the point be of being inside our human skin?

Within every obstacle, every problem and every challenge there is a gift.

What I hear you say – a gift?

Yeah it’s the gift of growth and freedom.

So decide now to meet every challenge with as much wisdom and strength as possible and it’s my belief that from this experience you will become happier, stronger and more free.

OK but why do it?

Because you’re worth it.