I have often wondered if it is possible to experience leaps of personal growth while highly engaged with a job or other activity. Yet now, after 18 months of very intense personal development and having the time to put to that, I have taken over a business and am once again immersed in things other than concentrating being the highest being that I can be.  Is it possible to do both?

Yes and yes. Delightfully, excitingly and energetically I now believe that anything is possible.  I can have my business and personal development too.

This is a pleasing concept for me as I came to my new life 18 months ago after many years of demanding work during which I rarely had time to sleep let alone read Deepak Chopra or watch The Secret. For years the joy of such pastimes slipped right be my.  Sure I was aware of the brouhaha surrounding The Secret and somewhere in the depths of my memory I recalled something about thought control and The Silva Method.  But to actively pursue such concepts was beyond me at the time.

Now, though, it is the nectar of life to me. It is that which is the source of my energy and personal strength.  I found that you simply take the time for what you want.  If you want it enough you will choose to find the time.  And I choose to extend my spiritual growth, every minute of every day.  To create my path and to reach for my higher self.

And now for the tip, link up with like minded people, source the connections around you so that you place yourself with others who will support, encourage and nurture you. And enjoy the path to a life that you have made for yourself because the journey is not about the destination.  It is about all of the fun along the way.  And here is an online community that will do all of the things that I have just mentioned - iamconnected.com – go ahead and take a look.  It just might be the community of support that you are looking for.

“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!!

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!!

A daily entry to your journal can be a simple account of the events that have had an impact or it can be a complex entry of self-discovery. To help you get started, if you have not already done so, try the following tips:-

1. Record 6 things for which you are grateful, appreciative or thankful that are occurring right now.
2. Record another 6 that are coming to you in the future.
3. Keep a daily list of the prosperity or abundance in your life.  This might be a simple as having a friend shout you a coffee or another driver graciously letting you change lanes.  Keep tabs on them all and let your abundance grow before your eyes.
4. Write about what you have done over the day, action that you have taken towards your life goal.
5. List what you intend to do the next day, week or month and check back later to see how you went.
6. Spend some time writing what you believe are your strengths and weaknesses and then write about how you intend to grow your strengths to outweigh your weaknesses.
7. Record the occasions during the day when you have successfully shifted your feelings from not so good to better by recognising your not so good feelings and changing your thoughts at that time.
8. Work out a set of questions that will help you to challenge yourself around your limiting beliefs.  For example – “What am I doing when I find myself having an argument with my partner?”  “How do I get into the argument in the first place?”  “How can I avoid it?”  This is just an example; you can use anything that you like.  Just make sure that you do not let yourself off the hook.
9. Use your journal to help you to visualise where you intend to be in life, in the next year, next five years, next ten years.  Write in detail about how your life will be, how that will benefit you and the community and why you need to have this life.  Regularly check back to see how you are going on your journey.
10. List the random acts of kindness that you intend to perform in the next 24 hours and then check back each day to see if you did them.

Above all, have fun with this wonderful daily habit.

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.

It was not until recently that my attention shifted outside of myself to wonder what might have been happening for them to behave in that way and in that moment, I put myself into their shoes. I gave some thought to their lives at that time and came to understand that a particular set of circumstances that they were experiencing would have been very difficult and who could guess how anyone might behave given the same thing happening.  This exercise just let me have a little bit of empathy for those people and I found at that point, that it was easy to move on and accept what had happened.

It is a part of the personal growth experience to accept things as they are and move towards what you want for yourself. I now know that one of the things that I want for myself is to have empathy and concern for others, regardless of how I am affected by their actions.  This was just another opportunity to move closer to who I really want to be.

So I am writing on Facebook about what I am grateful for every day until Christmas Day. And I would love it if you would join me and add your own gratitude list.  Lets create a few great vibrations for peace and goodwill on earth.

My thanks to whoever owns the blog, who had the good idea.