Are you prepared? Here are a few posts related to preparation you may have missed. Click to read the full message.
“I will prepare and someday, my chance will come.”
“You can’t reach for anything new if your hands are still full of yesterday’s junk.”
“If there is a single lesson that life teaches us, it’s that wishing doesn’t make it so.”
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An important aspect of the coaching process is to significantly increase the self awareness and mindfulness capacities of our clients. With this in mind, listening and paying attention to our inner voices and words before they are put out into the world seems to be wise counsel.
Consider just how much negativity, judgement, and criticism you hear throughout your days. How much do you find yourself contributing to this in your personal or professional communities?
Where would biting your tongue and taking an “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all” approach prevent you from eating your words?
Try using the acronym W.A.I.T.: Why. Am. I. Talking. – as a technique to keep your negative inner voice on mute more often.
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I am an Amazon Prime subscriber. One of my most common purchases, as you may know from reading The Quotable Coach blog, is books.
One of the criteria I use to confirm my instincts about a purchase is the number of high review scores on Amazon.
To receive over one hundred is respectable; over 500 is quite significant. To have over 1,000 is remarkable given the abundance of books and our reasonably short span of interest.
The book, “The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing” has over 13,000 reviews. Over 80% of them are four or five star ratings. They must be on to something!
Where and in what ways could bringing a bit more order into your world increase your life satisfaction and happiness? Of course, please investigate the excellent work by Gretchen Rubin, including The Happiness Project, which has over 1,600 reviews, of which 79% are four or five stars.
For most of my life, I have been fascinated by the subject of personal and professional success.
I’ve read hundreds of books, attended dozens of seminars and conferences, and can hardly count the number of blog posts, podcasts, and TED talks I’ve explored.
In his book, Barking Up the Wrong Tree, Eric Barker digs into the science of success, to mess a bit with the conventional and unconventional wisdom on this subject.
One seemingly universal tenet of success does, however, point to the idea of taking massive action and trying many things along the way to stir up far more possibilities and opportunities to pursue.
To what degree are you waiting or being too passive, hoping for an opportunity to reveal itself?
Where would taking far more action and trying many more things help you bark up and climb the right trees for you?
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One of the most interesting and valuable books I have read this year is “Whole” by T. Collin Campbell. His notoriety in the field of whole food nutrition was advanced significantly through the famous China Study. In this research, he demonstrate dramatically lower incidences of significant disease states such as cancer, heart disease, and diabetes.
A key from his more recent studies is that selecting individual or small groups of food components such as individual vitamins as a magic bullet to health is inappropriate and can even be dangerous. Optimal health, he strongly suggests, depends on a symphony of food elements interacting with our own symphony of bodily processes.
Unfortunately, telling someone to eat fruits and veggies doesn’t feed the economic engines of our medical, pharmaceutical, and food manufacturing industries.
Beyond my suggestion to read this important book how can you incorporate far more whole foods as an army to fight disease and support a longer and healthier life?
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Elementary school, middle school, high school, and college are what we call traditional education. If you were lucky, perhaps your upbringing included books, encyclopedias, and of course, highly committed parents who emphasized education as a key doorway to a bright future.
For many, once we complete our traditional education, we slow down or even stop our efforts for continuous learning. Somehow that song, “No more teachers, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks” was ingrained in us, and we decided we were finished.
Consider yourself as your own home-schooling professor, creating the perfect curriculum just for you. The topics you choose are both important and relevant to a fully engaged and happy life. What could this self-driven education include that would result in a PhD in Thee?
How would you describe most of your relationships? Here are a few relationship-related posts you may have missed. Click to read the full message.
“You can’t help someone get up a hill without getting closer to the top yourself.”
“Examine the contents, not the bottle.”
“You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear.”
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What comes to mind when you consider the word dance? For me, it’s playful, fun-loving, and self-expressed.
Now what about the word march? Perhaps thoughts of the military, or simply disciplined work not necessarily of your choice come to mind.
As a young boy in grade school, the though that I could or should not play until all the work was done was prominent.
Given that for most of us the work never seems to be done, where would tweaking your own dance/march ratios make the biggest difference?
How might you bring more play to your work, or dance into a more enjoyable and productive life?
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Perhaps no single person since Carl Sagan has excited the public more about the wonders of science than Neil deGrasse Tyson. His recent work as host of Cosmos: A Space-Time Odyssey goes steps beyond Sagan’s 1980 version, Cosmos: a Personal Voyage.
Learning about how our universe works and taking a cosmic perspective has me appreciate equally my smallness and my connection to the whole of everything. This perspective has given me a passion for learning and self-development. That, in turn, has provided me much joy and satisfaction, and permits me to embrace the impermanence and the miracle of being alive.
How would taking a far more cosmic perspective of your life provide you access to living an even more extraordinary one?
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Through my mindfulness efforts over the past few years, I realize that I live in three different time zones. At certain times, I reflect on the past and hold on or grasp for what seems like “the good one days.”
The bulk of my days, I try my best to remain present, in the moment, so that I can make the most of the here and now, and be grateful for all I have.
Of course, we would not be human if we did not demonstrate a healthy curiosity about the years ahead, knowing that our actions today can manifest our visions for the future.
How and in what ways can you increase your own happiness and life satisfaction by letting go of what’s gone, being grateful for what remains, and looking forward to what is coming?