"Keep away from small people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great." – Mark Twain Sometimes our to do list becomes more like a clogged drain than a list of goals! We work around items that fill us with dread, make us anxious, …
Practicing Gratitude For Happiness…
Quite frequently gratitude is touted as the magic elixir, the invisible force field that will keep all of life's ills away. There's an entire industry built on — "If you were more grateful, you wouldn't be poor!" (By the way, the same goes for being positive.) But since I've met a number of people who have been quite wealthy and …
Walking into the desert…
My thought yesterday was that we all are making the journey of life like settlers crossing the nation with a wagon train filled with what we think we need — friends, family, relatives, past, present, future, memories, angers, pains, scars, physical stuff, etc. And at every step of the journey — about every 20 minutes — we come into a …
Seeing when you are disempowering yourself…
The biggest drawback to accomplishing your goals is to discover your default emotional reactions to external stimuli. We all have them and — unfortunately — we usually recognize other people's before we see our own. We say, "He always becomes angry when that happens, you'd think he would know better by now." Or, "She did the same exact thing she …
Spring Forward, Fall Back
To me a lush carpet of pine needles or spongy grass is more welcome than the most luxurious Persian rug. ~ Helen Keller With Daylight Savings Time approaching, I've become aware of how quickly seemingly "slow" changes can actually occur. It's kind of a paradox, but the seasons point it out to us each year. For instance, we tend to …
500 Items…
It seemed like a simple idea, create more space in my home by getting rid of some unneeded items. But then the whole thing became a game and suddenly "a few things" became 100 and then 200 and then 300 and now the goal is to get rid of 500 items by August's end. As I say so often, "If …
Do Expectations Equal Suffering?
I was chatting about hopeful expectations and it hit me how the majority of the time our hopeful expectations only lead to our own disappointment. LOL! Perhaps that sounds cynical or negative. But it isn't, because our expectations can in any direction. From the overly optimistic to the overly pessimistic. Either direction is going to bring us some form of …
Using stress as a motivator…
Raise your sail one foot and you get ten feet of wind. — Chinese proverb I was taking The Living to 100 Healthspan Calculator the other day and a question on stress had me take a moment and reflect. The question was, "How do you usually cope with your stress?" The selections proceeded, but the answer that had me transfixed …