Get Ready For 2010

With Christmas upon us and the New Year fast approaching, are you stuck in the same old rut? New Year’s resolutions made and broken, job changed and yet still life is not what you want.   Not enough of anything; time, friends, money, love.  Well, get ready for 2010 and change all of that.  Create the life that you have always wanted, take charge and cause things to happen and don’t let life happen to you while you were busy making other plans.

In the lead up to Christmas, do everything possible to experience enjoyment and happiness, no matter who you are with, what you are doing or where you are. Make your experience pleasurable rather than a grind.  Life is meant to be fun, watch out for fun and just enjoy each moment.

Start to think about what you want from life next year. Seriously, think about what you want, not what you have and get ready for 2010 with that in mind.  Ponder the prosperity that you want to achieve in your finances, relationships, physically, emotionally, lifestyle and time.  Prosperity is about more than money, it is about every part of your life.

And while you are having fun and shamelessly enjoying yourself, dream a little about what life could be like and get ready to make it happen.

Turn Your Worst Problem Into Your Best Opportunity

Many people have the aim in life to attract success like a magnet, however everyone has their share of problems that move into and out of life. What havoc or beauty they bring with them is really up to the individual.  It is possible to choose your  action or reaction to obstacles and adversity and determine how you will approach each situation.  Take the negative view and see each as a problem, sometimes insurmountable, or  the positive view that each is an opportunity that has a solution.  It is all a matter of perspective.

First, try  to understand how you normally react when you experience hardship. You must know whether you fall back and stay back and therefore see the situation as negative or whether you quickly recover, take a positive perspective and look immediately at solutions.  The one thing that is definite is that overcoming hardship is a skill that you need to get through life.  Positive or negative, you decide.

If you have taken note of how you react and know that you get up quickly and start looking at the situation as an opportunity and find solutions, then you are functioning from a positive perspective. Well done, stay on that path.  You have probably also found how much easier it is to get around barriers when you are thinking about solutions and what it is that you want to happen.

If, however,  you have identified that you fall away and stay away, reacting to adversity as if it is a problem then you hold yourself in a negative state and it is unlikely from this point that you are going to easily find ways to get on with what it is you want to do. No doubt you spend a lot of time thinking about what you don’t want, how hard life is and wishing that it could be a lot simpler.  Well it can be and it is all up to you and how your choose to act.

Having identified that you see problems and not solutions or opportunities, take a little time now to start to work on changing that habit. First, make a pact with yourself to stop talking about problems and start talking about solutions.  Language makes a big difference as does your silent mind chatter.  If all that your mind hears is how impossible the situation is, then that is being reinforced continuously.  If all that your mind hears is what you do not want, then that is what you will get.  Remember, the powerful Law of Attraction says that you get what you focus on.

Additionally, the people around you will hear how hard it is and will reinforce that to you and to themselves and possibly even to your customers. Almost everyone these days is looking for what can be done, not what can not be done and quite frankly, if they are paying, then that is reasonable.  So stop with the talk about problems and start with the talk about solutions.

Then, sit for a moment and write down a list of all of your problems. Alongside that, list all of the possible solutions, even if they seem a little crazy.  Go over those solutions and see what you need to have at your disposal to make it work.  Ask your self a few questions such as – can I get those things?  What do I need to know to do this?  How can I get that knowledge?  Who do I know who has it?

Right now you are in solutions mode and doesn’t it feel great?

When you are swamped by a problem, seeing only the negative, you can bet it feels pretty bad. As soon as you move to solutions, you mood will lift, your brain will fire off ideas and you will start to get motivated.  Great, stay with that.

Last, and most important, take action. It is not enough to see a way around a problem or to see any event as an opportunity.  The next and sometimes most difficult is to get active.  Go and get those things that you need to make something start to happen, persist, do not give up, every day decide what you will do towards your solutions and just keep on it.

Stay with the basics – decide what you are going to do, take action every day, persist and keep an eye out for when you have succeeded. Celebrate that moment.

Act Or React – Decide For Yourself

The Global Financial Crisis is just one of a plethora of challenges to come along and put pressure on how people plan their lives and careers. There have been many such events including Swine Flu, Bird Flu, droughts and climate change and if you dropped your bundle with each of these your life would be wrecked.  What I am getting to is about acting with intent to succeed rather than reacting each time just in case you are affected.

I am not suggesting that anyone should completely discount world events that cross our paths but we do all know that such things are likely to occur. When considering your life path, it is possible to take into account that major world events will occur and decide how you will cope with them.  If you have a business that can be impacted, have some idea what you need to take into account.  If your work takes you around the world or through airports, have something in mind for how you will manage that.

The thing is that reacting all of the time is not good in many ways. It is not good for your health and well-being; it is stressful and unpleasant for all around you.  It is not good for business and it is not good for the whole Universe.  Take the GFC in particular.  Much has been said about how bad it is for businesses, how businesses are likely to go under and not recover, how high unemployment is and so on.

Now all of this is true for those affected but it is not true for everyone and all business. In fact, I am hearing from more and more business people that they have had the best turnover in this year to date that they have ever had!  If those same people had listened to all of the doom and gloom, reacted to it and done things differently they may have had a very different outcome.  It all comes back to making your own decisions about what you will so and when you will do it.  Decide for yourself how you will engage with the information that comes via the media.

Act or react; it is up to you. Keep your eye on what it is that you want in your life and put your attention there rather than on any number of things that will occur regardless.

I Love Backyard Birdwatching!

There really is something about birds for me. I have no idea what it is but I find it incredibly enjoyable and satisfying to watch birds go about their daily lives.  Expand that, I actually also love watching nature at work.  I love to watch the trees flower and fruit in the season, I love to watch how animals and birds interact with their environment and I love to watch the effects of the things that I do on it all.  You see, I have grown a garden that is intended to bring the wildlife to me.  A backyard birdwatching haven.  And since the law of attraction is all about enjoying your self, having fun and being who you really are, I get to do all of those things every day, right from my home office here in Cairns, courtesy of my garden!

I have planted trees specifically for the purpose of feeding birds and butterflies and providing a bird friendly habitat. In the main these are native trees, however I have found through my reading that citrus trees and many non-natives work wonderfully as well.  I now tailor my gardening life to the birds that are resident or visitors.  For example I would never prune or trim the Justica’s during spring because all of the honey-eaters that are growing up their young and need as much food as possible.  My garden is a food factory for them.

You will also find in my garden, a couple of watering holes for the birds. Even though it took them a while, they eventually got used to them and now bathe and drink there throughout the day.  This makes it possible for me to be working in my home office and watching the birds come and go as they do.

The habitat it very important because all types of birds seek refuge for nesting and each seems to need something a little different. The sunbird pair need a sheltered place and a rope; the finches need a dense tree with a lookout nearby, the doves need a dense tree with peace and quiet and so on.  Over time, we have created two secret gardens to serve all of these purposes.  Additionally, our elderly terrier does her best to see any marauding cats off the premises!  Even so, cats managed to destroy the nest of a willy wagtail which was a sad loss to all of us here.  We were very excited to have this sweet little bird nesting on our deck.

So if you also love all things nature, and you live in town on an ordinary sized piece of land, you too can do your bit for the various species and create a wildlife refuge and habitat. Next time I will write about our animals and I am very happy to answer questions about how to create you own piece of heaven in your backyard.  In the meantime I am off to feel the joy – happiness really is birdwatching in my backyard.

Get a Good Night Sleep!

One of the aims of personal development is to achieve elite performance; to be the very best that you can be and to do that, a good night sleep is essential. Sleep deprivation has many effects including lowered immunity, loss of control over emotions, inability to think straight and decreasing stress tolerance.  It is hard to imagine an elite performance with all of that going on.  In fact, the inability to sleep well would be enough, on its own, to create the desire to start a personal development program!  Sleep is just critical and if you are not sleeping well, how do you get a good night sleep?

I suggest that you start your journey back to sleep by purchasing a small, simple but wonderful book called “Tired of Not Sleeping” by Dr Sandra Cabot. It is a short but excellent read and was the beginning of my own getting back to a good night sleep.  The second thing to do is to visit your doctor and ensure that you have a simple problem that will respond to simple measures.  Serious stress reactions and depression need to be ruled out and or treated before you begin to manage your own sleep disturbances yourself and sleep better forever.

My success factors for a good night sleep included:-

1. Exercise in the morning and not the evening.
2. Manage the stress.
3. Go to sleep and awake at the same time every day and do not nap during the day.
4. No caffeine after 2pm – in fact I gave it up altogether.
5. A small amount of carbohydrate shortly before bedtime.
6. When I started, I used a natural sleep medication and got 6 hours straight sleep from that.
7. Have a massage occasionally, as late in the day as possible.
8. When I woke during the night, I got up, went to another room and listened to relaxation cd’s until I fell asleep.
9. Start yoga and or meditation and persist until you see results.
10. Reduce television watching in the evening and go to bed when you feel tired.  Do not wait as you might miss the sleep cycle and have to wait for the next one – maybe up to an hour.
11. Do everything possible to keep on having fun.  I love the bush and spent as much time there as possible which helped greatly.

Finally, do not keep reinforcing to yourself that you have a sleep problem by constantly thinking or talking about how hard it is to sleep.  Do everything that you can to apply the Law of Attraction and think about the good sleep that you do get, think about how lovely it will be when you sleep a full night, imagine yourself in a year sleeping soundly every night and celebrate every little achievement on the path back to a good night sleep.  Most importantly, take charge of your own issue and create the solutions.

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