That alone can be difficult to interpret but the meaning is as simple as the words. You just start right now, from where you are, from what you are doing and who you are being and take a step to where you would like to be.  Just do one thing that will help you on that path and you can be sure that taking one step after another will open up a whole new world to you.

It does not matter what it is about self development that you would like to achieve. It may be that you want to have more money, get that amazing promotion that you have been after for so long or become a better person giving back as well as taking.  You will not make an almighty leap without making a start and that start comes right now from this place that you are in.

Lets say that one of your aims in life is to have money and the freedom to travel anywhere that you want to. Right now, you are surrounded by small children and a mortgage is big as the ocean.  How can you possibly see a time when you will have excess money and freedom.  So you pick up the latest best seller on making a million dollars and read it avidly but it does not give you any clear idea on how to get started.  My advice is to do something.  If you loved the book, read it again or go and get another by the same author or another author who takes your fancy.

Keep going, start to talk to people about what you want in life, listen to what they are saying about their dreams and before you know it, you will be thinking more about what you want than what you have. Now is the time to get really active about the Law of Attraction and I recommend “Law of Attraction – The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t Want” by Michael Losier.  It is a small and easy read filled with exercises that you can really use.  And it helps you to start from where you are at just as you would for any journey.

Key to getting started is to take action in the direction that you want to go.  So apart from learning more about how to get onto a self development plan of your own, you must also be prepared to do something yourself to get you there.  Dreaming helps and action is the vehicle for having the dream in your hands.  For more on getting started see my blog about working out your life path.

So just for fun, last night I commenced Ukulele lessons because in July this year the Uke Festival – an International Event is to be held right here in Cairns where I live. Wow, what fun that was, learning to play with around 30 other keen Uke fans.  Best play time that I have had in ages and I will be going back for more.

So, laugh, play, and enjoy your life my friends, I highly recommend it.

“When you are seeing the grand scheme,
the bigger picture of it all, you understand that
life is the funnest game you’ll ever get to play!
Seriousness is a disease to your soul.
Your overly serious self wants to be free,
so give yourself permission to have a big belly laugh today.
Let a little more lightness into your heart and drop whatever
weight you’ve been carrying on your shoulders right now.
Just take a glimpse of this infinite path your soul is on
and remember your only job is to enjoy your life.

A relaxed playful heart always serves as the best guide…”

reprinted from Enlightened Messages.

For those of you who would love to join us all here in Cairns for the Ukulele Festival, please get yourself a Uke and take some lessons because there is going to be a Guiness Book of Records attempt made for the largest group of Uke players. What a great time for laughing and playing that is going to be.

To give you an example, for years I have held on to the belief that my life is somewhat mapped out, a course over which I have some but not all control and that there is an inevitability to life. Over the later years of my life I have read enough, watched enough and heard enough to form the new belief that I am the master of my destiny.  I now decide what I will and will not do and how I will create my life to my personal desires and within my own integrity.  Well, that is what the life path is all about – deciding how you will live your life, what fits with what you want and knowing the action you will take to get what you desire.  Action is everything – see my blog of simple tips for more on taking action.

Sounds easy when I say it like that and I know from personal experience that getting in touch with your own beliefs, personal integrity and passions can take some time and can need some help. You can get started on your own goal setting using my following tips:-

1. Reflect on your childhood dreams (hopefully they are not that long ago that you can not remember), recall what you always thought as a child that you would be, do, have.
2. Reflect over all of your previous work, jobs, businesses.  Which did you enjoy the most and what was it that you enjoyed?
3. Ask your family and friends what they see as your special talents and write your own list of things that you like about yourself and what you do.
4. Read the business opportunities and jobs section of your newspaper – watch yourself carefully to see if there is any positive emotion attached to anything that you read.  That might give you a hint about what you would like to try.
5. Talk with lots of people about what they are doing and see if anything appeals to you.
6. Think about all areas of your life; employment, family, living, travel, loving, money, happiness, prosperity and ask yourself what you would like to have in each of those areas.
7. Explore yourself as a person.  Are you the kind of person you can like, be friends with, trust.  Is there some area that you would like to improve.

Use these ideas to guide you to a place where you start to just know yourself and your desires a little better and then start a list of what life success you want to achieve in this lifetime. And be prepared to change those goals because the more that you think about it the more you will get clear.  The more you have what you desire on your mind, the more opportunities you will see as they present themselves.  The more things that you try out, the clearer that you will be about what you do want and what you do not.

It is really helpful to be clear on what you do not want because the opposite to that is likely to be what you want. Start to focus on what you do want now that you have an idea.  And wait to see the passion.  Oh, and visit my Hot Tips For Success page to see the advice of other smart, sassy Australian women.  And if you like, talk to me about how you are going.

Use the Law of Attraction to attract success towards those things that you now know that you desire.

“There is in each of us so much goodness that if we could see it glow, it would light the world.”

Those words got me thinking about the path to enlightenment and the journey to becoming a better person. Often we take for granted the goodness that we have within and seek and seek for more and more.  Which is a good thing, I know, to be constantly learning and bettering ourselves.  And yet if we do not pause for a moment or two and celebrate the goodness that we already have within, let others see that and let our light shine, we lose the everyday opportunity to be the role model and teachers that we truly can be.  Every one of us has the capacity for that.

So take this moment to reflect on your own goodness within and let your light shine for all of those around you so that they too can be inspired.

So it came as a great surprise to me this week to discover that 6 days had passed since I had made an entry in my daily journal and 10 days had passed since I had written about my thankfulness, gratitude and appreciation for life. It happens that I had been feeling a bit low in mood and unmotivated over the last three days and yesterday I decided to explore that in my journal.  I opened up and noticed how many days since I had made an entry.  Well, I thought to myself, be your own coach!!

So I went through my daily habit, entering in my journal what was happening and working through how to move forward, going over my years goals and writing about how I was working towards them, listing my gratitude for what I have right now and what is coming to me in the future. Lo and behold, it worked, got me back on track and I decided on a couple of processes to help me through this low motivation phase.  My mood lifted almost immediately.

For the moment, my daily journal will consist of decisions on the actions that I am taking towards my life goals and I will check back over that each day to see my progress. With that inspiration, I completed 2 of my 3 tasks yesterday and one that was not on the list but the time was right.  Today I am well on the way with the 4 that I committed to for this day.

Learning? Sometimes it helps to just go back to the basics and I know that the daily journal is one of those basic but essential habits.  Oh and just for a bit of fun I had a look back to where I was this time last year.  Happily, much progress has been made and some of my big life decisions are coming to fruition right now.  Attract success – you betcha!!

So here are my ten reasons why I love blogging:-

1. It keeps me on my toes with what is currently of interest.
2. It is an opportunity for me to explore my own issues around the subject matter that I choose.
3. Researching the articles is great – I learn something every time.  How does it get any better than that?
4. My blog creates a link to others who offer comments and I find that very interesting.
5. Having a blog has caused me to be a blog surfer and I have all but given up TV watching in favour of all of the amazing things that I find on blogs.
6. I continue to have to learn about SEO and other interesting marketing strategies and that has only occurred because of my blog.
7. It is really nice to be part of a worldwide community of bloggers.
8. Old friends have found me and contacted me via my blog.
9. Blogs are more fun than facebook.
10. I get to keep polishing my writing skills in preparation for the book that I have in me.

So there you have it, ten reasons why I love blogging. What do you love so much that you can write ten reasons really easily?  Go on, have a go, have some fun and a positive experience.

Sure, it can be a confronting process at times as you may start to explore some parts of yourself that you prefer not to face but that is where the real value if this lovely process comes in. You are exploring these things just with yourself!!  No-one else unless you chose to.  And then you can look at them in wonder, at a later date, and laugh about your fears.  Some of the things that I have been afraid of in the past have proven to be just nothing later, because I took charge of them.

How does it get any better than that?

So recently, in my quest for more content to help people to work with their daily journal, I was delighted to read “Your Pocket Life Coach” – seriously recommend that you get this one. Carole Gaskell, Author, outlines some of her ideas for the daily “inspirational” journal.  So test these out and see a previous blog of mine, 10 Ideas To Get You Started With A Daily Journal,  for even more ideas.

From Carole Gaskell:-

• Use your daily inspirational journal to record your thoughts, insights, intuitive ideas and actions
• Write about things that make you happy, confident, excited
• Record your achievements and what you are committed to doing next
• Note the people you love and why
• Outline your plans for the next day, week, month etc
• Put down what you have learned that day or things that have helped you in your development.

Oh, and have fun!!  And my congratulations to Carole for such a smashing little book.

Some months ago I was reading a “Business Bullet” written by Andrew Griffiths and he said that we all need to get a daily fix of inspiration just as be do exercise and good nutrition. Well, I took his words to heart and started to be active about my daily fix.  And here it is, just arriving in my life.  Inspiration in the air, inspiration everywhere.

So here are 5 quick tips on how to get your daily dose of inspiration!!

• Keep your mind, ears and eyes tuned for it; look for it in the people you talk to, the mountains and plains around you, the birds and animals and your own thoughts.
• Read poetry again.  It is just amazing what poets write.
• Stop tuning in to the mainstream media and do something different like read blogs, get self improvement books out of the library, beg or borrow some cd’s and listen while you drive to work.  I just love “Conversations With God” and “Beyond Freedom“.
• Google some of your favourite gurus and read some of their web page or watch some of their YouTube.  Try the Dalai Lama, Deepak Chopra or Brian Tracy.
• Listen to some different music and step out of your comfort zone there.  Try some music from a different country or cultural group.  I am loving Geoffrey Gurrumul Yunupingu right now; it just touches my soul.

No doubt you will come up with a list of 5 for yourself as well, just do it, because life is so much more exciting when you are getting your daily dose of inspiration!!

This example is the article that I read called “Join the Million” just before I went on holidays four weeks ago. Now I have to say that I did not forget this one; it touched a cord for me and got into my mind and heart.  So here it is.

The Australian Women’s Weekly published this article in the January 2010 edition and invited 1 million women – daughters, mothers, sisters and grandmothers to inspire climate change action. The idea is to make small differences to the way that we live and to individually save 1 tonne of greenhouse gas each per year.  The target is very straightforward – reduce carbon dioxide pollution, the main greenhouse gas causing global warming, by a minimum 1 tonne each per year.

The website, 1millionwomen.com.au provides you with all of the help that you need to work out how to save your CO2 and even calculates your savings!! So what are you waiting for?  Are you up for the challenge?  Sign up, learn more ways to cut CO2 and help make the world a better place.  And I am sure that it is not necessary to be an Australian woman.  How does it get any better than that?

Oh, and just for the record, I did not fail to take action on this one. I signed up and got started just this week and will report on my progress via this blog.

The try-hards at Roger David are promoting two new t-shirts for the boys, featuring women who are gagged, with strips across their eyes and semi-naked, as the latest fashion statement.

The woman in the ‘Annie Hollywood’ t-shirt  (produced by ‘Blood Is The New Black’) looks as though she has been roughed up. She appears disheveled and exhausted, her image reminiscent of a crime scenes photo. The other two women have a strip across their eyes, suggesting a loss of identity and dehumanisation. Their semi-naked bodies are pimped through a t-shirt.

The designs are not iconic. They’re not retro (even if adapting a Roxy Music album cover). They’re not art.

What we are seeing here is the glamourising of abuse, the suggestion of sexual aggression, a hint that women want to be treated roughly.

The abuse is glamourised not just for the perpetrator, but for the victim too. As though it’s not only hot to be the pimp, but it’s sexy to be dominated, coerced, submissive, abused – possibly even raped.

It’s as though a little bit of the pimp cool that’s pushed by Hollywood, MTV, in hip hop and rap (see earlier post ) will rub off on the wearer, just like the wearer of a global brand hopes that some of the brand’s ‘personality’ and ‘cool’ will rub off on them.

Roger David really like their domination and abuse tees. They feature as first items on their home page and on their Facebook.

But it’s not just Roger David mainstreaming contempt for women wrapped up in a tee.
A mate came across this at the Birkenhead point Authentic outlet store in Sydney the other day.

What is this? A plug for trafficking? Bring ‘em over, the more exotic and servile the better!

Then there’s others available from online stores , treating rape as a joke and portraying little girls as little sluts.

“It’s not rape if you yell Surprise!”

• “It’s not rape it’s surprise sex” 
• “Sometimes no means yes”
• “Your little princess is my little slut”

…to name but a few.

A sexual assault survivor told me that for her, the t-shirts are highly triggering of assault memories and she suspects that other survivors will find them so too. So as well as putting women and girls in physical danger, t-shirts like this serve as a form of mental torture too.

Women gagged, women who can’t see, women transported away from their homes to service men elsewhere. We have to ask why the demand for these shirts and why men’s stores are pimping these porn-industry inspired messages about what women are good for.

Let Roger David know what you think.