Create a Life Story the Way You Want It

By Miami Phillips

If you could start your life all over what would be different? What would you change now if you were able to wave a magic wand and start from a scratch? Just imagine you have no ties, no burdens, no limits, no memories, and no past.

What would your life look like? If the answer that comes to your mind is different than what you are doing, why is that? Is it because of someone else’s opinion? A spouse, a parent or maybe your children?

The ultimate test of your life is to close your eyes and think of yourself on your deathbed. Lying there, preparing yourself to leave, look back at your life as you are currently living it. How do you feel? Are you satisfied you lived completely? Or do you wish you had done differently? Very few of our senior citizens look back on their life and say, “I sure wish I had spent more time at the office!” Nobody says, “I wish I had watched more TV!”

This is what they say, “I wish I had been bolder. I wish I had given more. I wish I had tried harder to see more, do more and feel more.” People wish that they had lived more. I, for one, have to admit to a certain amount of holding back on dreams and goals because of our two boys. As my life progresses I realise there is no reason to hold back.

We have not been exactly standing still either. We have done our best to live our dreams. We built a sailboat and sailed for seven years travelling on the open ocean. We lived in the snow in Aspen Colorado, and on the beach in South Carolina. An old brick mill was our home in Long Island, versus a boat dock in Palm Beach Florida. We are writers of books and music, actors in the theatre, and we have built a horse farm, and businesses! Yet, there is so much more we want to do!

It is a balancing act. We all must have sufficient finances to support a comfortable lifestyle (although most of us tend to spend excessively much on that)! Part of this balancing act is understanding what we are passionate about doing so that work becomes a joy instead of a job.

Is this not a major reason of lost dreams and goals? Many people find work, call it a job and make a living at it. But they begrudge every minute of it, going as far as using the job as a reason for playing the martyr. Find something else!

There are many, many teachers of the attraction philosophies of ‘making a life’. With as many opportunities today in every field imaginable, somewhere, something is calling to you. Another part of the balancing act is to include those around you in frank and open discussions in what it is you want. I find some of my coaching clients have kept their wants and needs bottled up inside them forever! They had already decided for the other person in their lives there was no interest in whatever it was they themselves wanted to do! How absurd! How can we possibly know what someone else wants!

Would it not be tragic to spend your life in a big city for 40 years, working at a job you despise because you thought your spouse liked it, even though you wanted to live in the country and be a farmer? Then one day you overhear your spouse tell her best friend all she ever wanted to do was live in the country? 40 years! Sure this is a bit far fetched — but you would be amazed at what I hear!

Make an attempt today to start with a brand new page of your life. Create your life story how you want it. If there are others in your life to be involved, have them do the same exercise. Then compare with your notes. If this matches your current life, congratulations! You are one of the few. Now make it better. However, if your written life stories sound like someone completely different, then you are living a life of conflict.

Here is the good news. Your life is your life. No one can take that away from you. You are not indentured. You are not a slave. You are free to go, do, and be whomever you wish. It might not be easy, but it sure might be worth it.

Be a Successful Juggler

Life is like a game in which you are juggling five balls in the air. One ball is work, one family, one health, one friendship, and one spirit. It is surely no easy task to keep them all in the air.

Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. But the other four balls — family, health, friends and spirit are made of glass. If you drop one of these, they may be scuffed, marked, nicked, damaged or even shattered. They may never be the same.

In order to be successful as a juggler, it is important to strive for balance in life. Remember your unique value and celebrate it by not comparing yourself with others. It is because we are different that each of us is special.

Set your goal by what you know is best for you and not by what other people deem is important. Hold dear the things closest to your heart. Cling to them as you would your life, for without them, life is meaningless.

Live life fully in this moment, it can slip through your fingers by living in the past or for the future. By living your life one day at a time, you live all the days of your life. Keep going, you will always have something to give. Nothing is really over until the moment you stop trying.

Be yourself, even if you are less than perfect. Imperfection is a fragile thread that binds us together. Be courageous, it may be necessary to encounter risks. It is by taking chances that we learn how to be brave.

Have faith, find love by believing it is possible to find. The quickest way to receive love is to give it; the fastest way to lose love is to hold it too tightly; and the best way to keep love is to give the freedom to be generously shared. Slow down, walk peacefully through life so as not to forget where you’ve been, and also where you are going.

Be grateful, forget not that a person’s greatest emotional need is to feel appreciated. Love to learn. Knowledge is weightless, a treasure you can always carry easily. Use time and words wisely. Neither can be retrieved. Cherish life, for it is not a race, but a journey to be savoured each step of the way.

Image: Simons Foundation

Believe in Yourself

By Eduardo Dominguez

You are super special! Believe in yourself! Certainly you can take action to acquire the necessary knowledge and skills and therefore to produce the desired results. You certainly can produce all the necessary results to reach your full potential, to fulfil your goals, and to build foundations under your dreams to make them a concrete reality.

Believe in yourself. Definitively, you can take actions and produce results. You can do it! Don ’t worry about being successful. Just do it! You are already a star since the day you were born. The real success is experienced during the process of doing, with passion and love, the task you commit to achieve. The rest is arrogance and vanity — don ’t play this game; it is not real and causes unhappiness and insecurity.

Do your best, with passion and love. Put your heart in everything you do, but don ’t ever worry if you make mistakes, miss, fail or fall on the road. No problem. That ’s OK! You are not better or worse than the rest of the people in the world, in reality nobody is!

In the beginning, no challenge is easy to cope with or else anybody would do it. If worthwhile things were easy to do, life would be meaningless and senseless. Mistakes or failures are there, and ever will be, to teach us, make us stronger, and help us to mature even more. Nobody is perfect. Mistakes or failures are part of the many teachers we will have during our short journey in the ‘university of life ’.

Have a blind faith and never, ever lose your hope because faith and hope are the energies that move our souls. Without faith and hope our lives are meaningless, gloomy, and painful. Inspire yourself by knowing, recognising, valuing, and embrancing your own greatness. You are special as you are, and you don ’t need to be like, or compare yourself with anybody else since you are perfectly unique.

You are super special! Yes you! Believe in yourself, Everybody has his or her own opinion about you and the world, but the most important opinion that you have of yourself. Nothing else matters but how you see yourself. The image you have about yourself is the image you are going to acquire and the life you will live; nothing more, nothing else.

If you don ’t believe how special, capable, intelligent, valuable, and blessed you are nobody else will. Love yourself and believe in yourself without being consumed by arrogance and greed because who ever is full of himself or herself leaves no room for anybody else in his or her heart.

Don ’t let anybody decide who you are and how far you can get by taking full control and responsibility of your life. Live your life with integrity — be honest and responsible for absolutely all your thoughts, all your actions, and all the consequences of such actions.

Do only what is right and fair. Take action based on your integrity because nothing tells more about who we are and what moves us inside but our daily actions. Our real personality is not expressed in words but in the quality of the actions we take and decisions we make. And only when we face difficulties is when we expose who we really are — our true personality.

It is a fact that nobody can change anybody. Our freedom, happiness, and peace depend on accepting people and life as they are, as well as accepting everything that expresses in life itself. Being honest and responsible gives us freedom, happiness, and peace; being honest provides us with emotional fulfilment and stability.

Instead of choosing to be right, choose to be happy, free, and peaceful. Freedom is being able to choose to do exactly what you want to do, without thinking what the rest of the world will think about us. A human being will only be able to make the right choice when he is in control of himself.

Remember that the quality of your thought determines the quality of your life — that the correct attitude is everything, and that love is the answer.

Image: The Life Fit

For Happy, Content Life

While thinking about life there are some things we should take into accounts. Here are sayings by Dalai Lama on what one should do for happy and content life.

• Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

• When you lose, don’t lose the lesson.

• Follow the three R’s: Respect for self, Respect for others and Responsibility for all your actions.

• Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

• Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

• Don’t let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

• When you realise you’ve made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

• Spend some time alone every day.

• Open your arms to change, but don’t let go of your values.

• Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

• Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you’ll be able to enjoy it a second time.

• A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

• In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don’t bring up the past.

• Share your knowledge. It’s a way to achieve immortality.

• Be gentle with the earth.

• Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.

• Remember that the best relationship is one in which you love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

• Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

• Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

Let It Be

One day, Buddha was walking from one town to another with a few of his followers. While they were travelling, they happened to pass by a lake. They stopped to rest there and Buddha asked one of his disciples to get him some water from the lake.

A disciple walked up to the lake. When he reached it, he noticed some people were washing clothes in the water and, right at that moment, a bullock cart started crossing through the lake. As a result, the water became very muddy. The disciple though, “How can I give this muddy water to Buddha to drink?”

So he came back and told Buddha, “The water in the lake is very muddy. I don’t think it is suitable to drink.”

After a while, Buddha again asked the same disciple again to go the lake and get him some water. The disciple went back to the lake. This time he found that the mud had settled down and the water was clean so he collected some in a pot and bought it to Buddha. Buddha then looked up at the disciple and said, “See what you did to make the water clean. You let it be and the mud settled down on its own. It is also the same with your mind. When it is disturbed, just let it be. Give it little time and it will settle down on its own.”

Planting Positive Thoughts

By Rajyogi Brahmakumar Nikunj ji

In school we all studied in Physics about ‘Newton’s Third Law Of Motion’ which states — For Every Action, There Is An Equal And Opposite Reaction. This principle is very important in humans as well, as it affects every area of our lives. It’s a natural thing that one can get back only those things s/he gives out. For example, if we plant mangoes we can’t expect oranges! If one reaches a level of success in his/her career, it’s because of years of hard work and continuous effort. It means whatever we are experiencing today in our life is the consequence of our previous actions.

The most important thing about this law from human point of view is — it is about choosing to create a brighter future since the ‘seeds’ are in our hands. The law is fair and just, it only requires that we pay in advance to the mother nature because one cannot reap the fruit if one has not sown the seeds in right way. We first have to give to the nature, only then it would reward us with a bounty as mother nature is very generous. The practical proof of it is that when we plant one seed of pumpkin, in return, we get many pumpkins over several years.

Hence, the need of the hour is to till the soil of our minds, to remove the weeds of unwanted feelings and undesired outsomes, because we are the masters of our minds and thus we can choose to create the results we seek.

So, let us all plant seeds of positive and powerful thoughts to reap fresh fruits of peace and happiness.

The author is a writer at www.brahmakumaris.com. He can be reached at nikunjji@brahmakumaris.in.

Image: Web, BrowardPrevention

The Psychology of Entrepreneurship

Being an entrepreneur can feel like a rollercoaster ride. One with steep highs and lows, moments of intense adrenaline, exposure, and occasionally the sense that you have somehow arrived back where you started.

If your experience of being an entrepreneur includes moments of vulnerability, doubt, guilt, fear, and anxiety, the good news is — you are doing it right. It should feel like this. Why? Because many of the challenges that entrepreneurs face tap into some of the core psychological challenges that we all face.

Take identity, a person in employment is given a job specification, a piece of paper that says: “This is who we would like you to be.” In contrast, the entrepreneur gets a blank piece of paper. They need to operate without boundaries, guidance, or feedback on progress. They need to choose and create their business and themselves as business owners. That kind of choice comes with inevitable doubt, responsibility, guilt, and a strong desire for someone to reassure you that you are “Doing the right thing”.

These are challenges that all of us face in life. We can choose to create ourselves by making conscious choices about the kind of person we want to be. Or we can avoid the discomfort of making those kinds of choices by letting someone else tell us who we are. Identity is just part of the story; there is also vulnerability, risk, passion, failure — all human challenges and all part of the process of being an entrepreneur.

The ride that the entrepreneur is on feels intense because it is harder to avoid these human challenges when you choose to set up your own business. How can entrepreneurs survive the ride? The difference between someone who loves rollercoasters and someone who hates rollercoasters is their relationship with the experience. The very thing that one person doesn’t enjoy — a lack of control, the speed, the height, the disorientation — is exactly what the other person loves. It is the reason they queued up to go on the ride in the first place. — The Guardian