Entries from September 2007 ↓

Do what you love and find a way to share it with others.

That’s my motto, and I’m pleased to find myself in illustrious company. People as diverse as Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett and Wayne Dyer all agree…it’s the secret to a successful and fulfilled life.

Why is love so important? Because it’s empowering. Jim Buckmaster, CEO of Craigslist, says if you’re in a job you don’t like, obstacles seeming overwhelming. If it’s something you love, then the obstacles look small. When Steve Jobs was fired from Apple the thing that kept him going was realizing that even though he had been rejected, he loved what he did. And being fired let him start over again. It was the beginning of one of the most creative periods of his life.

So if you want to be happy and successful, fall in love.

Picture by Hoover Family Photos via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

This video clip from Facing the Giants encourages us to push ourselves, to do more with our lives…to stop cheating ourselves by setting our sights too low. That’s probably true for a lot of people.

But it’s also true that some people are ruining their lives by pushing too hard. A large fraction of automobile deaths in this country are caused by sleep-deprivation, by people attempting more than they can handle.

Another example of overdoing it was shown on the national news the other night. The program showed two videos of a harassed woman. The first video was taken in the morning, by a surveillance camera at a convenience store. The woman had just bought something and was rushing off to work. The second video of her was at a police station that evening. She was devastated, dissolved in tears, saying she had tried so hard to be everything to everyone. She was the assistant vice principal at a school, and when she got back to her car that afternoon she found her baby…carefully fastened in his car seat…and thoroughly dead from the heat. Apparently this was only one of 19 such incidents this year.

We can do more. We can achieve more. Those words are inspiring… they can motivate us to improve our lives and the lives of our loved ones. But because they are so powerful, we should use them with care.

What do you think? This site is about sharing, so please tell us your thoughts in the comment box below.

Thanks to Kim at Escape Adulthood for pointing me to the video clip.

The news program about the mother pointed out the unintended consequence of putting children in the back seat… it’s easy to forget them when people are overly stressed.

This post is stored under Optimizing Stress.

Where do you find your inspiration…new ideas…new ways of looking at things? Tony D. Clark at Success From the Nest has just asked this question. It made me more aware of how I go about writing these posts. I look at pictures, and I read other blogs and favorite quotes to see what lights a fire inside me.

I spent the weekend writing my About This Site page, and I started by looking through photos of my daughter when she was a baby. Once I found the three photos that resonated, I just added a few lines and I was done. The page will no doubt change with time, but for now it stirs my soul and makes me want to write more. It works for me. And becoming aware of the process will make writing easier in the future.

What works for you? Where do you find your inspiration? Please let me know what you think in the comment box below.

Photo by Sam and Ian via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

Jenny and Erin at a tongue-in-cheek quest for understanding have started a discussion/contest on the subject of habits. More specifically:

How big of a role do habits play in your daily life? Do your habits typically form intentionally or unconsciously? What approaches have you found successful in shaping them?

Behavior modification is one of my favorite hobbies, so I can’t resist joining in. As I mentioned in A Habit Is Just a Habit, we couldn’t operate without our automatic patterns. We’d be worse than a centipede trying to walk by consciously moving each of its legs separately. Most of our habits are completely subconscious…we can perform them without bothering our already over-burdened conscious minds. (Speaking for myself, of course.)

So in answer to Jenny and Erin, habits play an enormous role in my daily life. Most of them form unconsciously and, on the whole, work just fine. But since they’re so important, it pays to evaluate them from time to time and see which ones can be improved. My background is in science and computer programming, so I like to think of my habitual patterns as my “robot mind.” It’s a complicated system and there’s no way I can completely understand it. But that doesn’t mean I can’t tinker and reprogram parts of it to get it to work better for me.

Some of the tools I use are

• affirmations,
• visualization techniques,
• self-hypnosis,
• psychosynthesis, and
• neurolinguistic programming (NLP) techniques such as anchoring, the swish pattern, reframing, parts integration and the six-step reframe.

What about you? How would you answer those questions? Please join us in the discussion…we would love to have you.

Picture by greefus groinks via Flickr. Creative Commons license.

A friend is someone who brings out the best in you.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson

It’s the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter. —Marlene Dietrich

Who can you call on at 4 o’clock in the morning? For me it would be my husband for practical matters–like a trip to the emergency room if that were somehow necessary. We work well as a team.

But for dark nights of the soul, would I call him or anyone else? Not on your life. I’m happy to listen to people if they need it, but for me talking doesn’t work in a situation like that. If I’m feeling deeply lonely, writing in my journal is the one thing guaranteed to help. As a matter of fact, I get lonely when I don’t write about things I care about. That’s why I started blogging.

So even though they’re not people, I would count my journal and my blogs among my best friends. They’re always there when I need them, day or night, and they bring out the best in me.

What about you? Who can you rely on when you need support? When you just want to share the joys of life? They can be people, but they don’t have to be. They can be pets, books, tapes, music, favorite walks, blogging, etc. Whatever form your friends take, friendships do take time if they’re to thrive. And I, personally, think nurturing friendships is one of the most important things I can do in life.

Picture by samdiablo666 via Flickr. Creative Commons license.