Abundance Is Not A Singular Pursuit

Gram’s Wisdom 20: An abundance of the right people

My Gram’s life was filled with an abundance of so many things, not the least her 101 years. Fortunately, for me, she happily shared stories of a life lived abundantly. The lessons she taught me and the example I was shown have allowed me to live my own abundant life.  

Gram told me an abundant life begins with the knowledge that you are worthy and deserving. She also felt you need to see the world as unlimited, believing that abundance is available all around you.

Choose your life

Gram said there are two choices in how you live. You can choose to live with an awareness of all the good in life. Or, you can choose not to. With the latter, you aren’t in control of your thoughts, mind, or circumstances. You are seeing yourself as the victim, even if you don’t mean to.

She knew when you go through difficult times, it can be hard to come out undamaged on the other side. However, you must recognize those difficulties for what they are. Whatever it is, it’s a chance for you to become the best version of yourself.

One of the things I learned from watching my Gram is no one is meant to remain as a single version of themselves. As people, we need to progress, if we expect to grow and evolve. More importantly, why should we come out of difficult times unmarred? We wouldn’t be human if it didn’t influence us in some way. The key is to learn a lesson and use those lessons to improve as a person.

Abundance through personal growth

Personal growth will assist you in your bid to live in awareness. This way of living makes you more in tune with yourself. You are unafraid to ask yourself what you need and want. This is how you put yourself in the best position to manifest abundance. But not just any abundance. No. You want an abundance of what matters most to you.

Think of the people who pursue an abundance of wealth yet seem miserable. It seems as though they don’t know themselves. Think about when you have gone unfulfilled after reaching a goal because you realize after the fact that it wasn’t what you truly wanted. It’s something you have likely done, completely unaware that you aren’t in touch with your inner wants, needs, and desires.

My Gram did not use words like self-growth or mindset, but she was certainly aware of the concepts. From her I learned that in every moment you can choose compassion, you can choose authenticity, you can choose positivity, that you can choose abundance.

Abundance is a mindset, and this mindset can affect your life in all ways. You can’t help but live abundantly when you learn to see life from this perspective.

Here are 5 great ways to lead an abundant life.

Appreciate life right now

Even if you’re still trying to achieve an abundant life, you should never stop practicing gratitude every day. Gratitude turns what we have into more than enough. It unlocks the fullness and access to the abundance of life.

You complete the cycle of abundance through receiving it and giving it back. One day, when you’re where you want to be and have manifested the abundance that you were once attracting and creating for yourself, pay it forward by teaching and guiding others as well. There’s no better proof of abundance than people helping each other out and adding value to lives.

Avoid negative people

You need to identify good people who are positive and open to similar views you hold about life. Abundance makes people happy, relaxed, and puts them at ease. It makes them confident about living life each day. Negative people do not operate on this belief, so limit your time with them if you cannot influence them to make an effort to embrace a better mindset.

If they are always complaining avoid them. They are only trying to make you feel that there is a lack of everything, money, breaks, understanding. They will always be playing the ‘no money card’ if they can’t change your mindset, they will hope you will give them what they need to stop their complaining. In this scenario, someone’s got to give, don’t let it be you.

Giving

When you’re practicing an abundance mentality, it’s impossible not to love the act of giving. When you see life brimming with possibilities and limitless opportunities, you love to give it away to others. You see that so many people can benefit from how you see the world, either through helping them or empowering them to see life the way you do. Learning how to give and loving the act of giving is an inevitable aspect of living an abundant life.

Learn from others

If you want to create abundance, learn from others. Reading success stories is inspiring and motivating. It can help you believe in yourself. You begin to feel that you’re capable of achieving something similar. Once you realize you can do it too, you will.

When you’re guided by someone who has been where you are, it motivates you to achieve the same heights of success. Getting a mentor’s guidance and help will encourage you to live an abundant life by understanding that help is always available when you need it.

Love yourself and accept yourself

To live an abundant life necessitates that you love and accept yourself fully. When you recognize your worth and acknowledge that you are deserving, you will begin to attract more of what you desire.

When you’ve laid the foundation of your beliefs and affirm yourself as worthy, you always become open to receiving the natural abundance that life is ready to give you. The universe is always ready and simply waiting on us to ask for what we want.

My final thought

My childhood was fraught with difficulties. Lovingly, my Gram provided a safe haven for me and supported me in many ways, always making me feel that I mattered. From years of observing her, I learned one of the most significant lessons of life. It is the people who love us who are our most important source of abundance.

I hope if you liked this post, that you will share it with your family and friends.

Invest Time To Receive Abundance

Abundance: What it is

What is an abundance of time? Quite simply, abundance is a large quantity. So, an abundance of time is more than enough time. It’s a tendency that we have as humans to do and be better, become more than we are, and grow as a species. But everything we do requires a time investment. We seldom accept our lot in life without grumbling. Instead, we desire to enjoy more abundance. Life is like that, as is nature. Nature naturally moves to spread its seed, with new trees, plants, and grass cropping up. Just like humanity is innovating constantly and ever-evolving. Just look around, you will see abundance. It’s everywhere. If you allow it to, it will appear in your personal life.

Now, ask yourself this – what do you think of when you hear the word abundance? If you’re being completely honest with yourself, you will admit that you think of abundance as monetary. Most people do. When we think of abundance, we imagine wealth, exotic vacations, and various other material possessions. However, it manifests in a variety of ways, and not all are related to money or possessions. So, let’s look at many other ways that abundance manifests in your life.

• You can have an abundance of love.

• You can have an abundance of friendships.

• You will face an abundance of opportunities.

• You have access to an abundance of food.

• You can have an abundance of fun.

• There is abundance in nature.

• You can create an abundance of time.

• You can embrace an abundance of spirituality.

Make the time if you want the possessions

The world is abundant. Now, you can’t access all of it. That could be through no fault of your own. You may be inadvertently preventing it from manifesting in your life. Do you take the time to welcome abundance or are you alienating yourself from abundance by nurturing a negative mindset instead of being positive and open?

To attract abundance, you should develop a consciousness about abundance. This simply means that you allow yourself time to become more aware of having abundance in general, what it feels like in your life, connecting to it, and welcoming it into your life. It’s all about feeling as though you’re part of it. This consciousness will allow you to seize the opportunities that come your way. 

If right now you feel as though you don’t have access to abundance, it’s because you’ve created an obstacle and limited yourself. It’s your vision or your thoughts, that are limiting you to what exists for you right now. You need to expand your horizons, enhance your vision, and embrace the opportunities that are all around you. We are all part of the abundance within the universe. Take some time, open your mind, feel it, expect it.

There are incredibly efficient ways to manifest abundance in your life. Two of those, are through positive affirmations and visualization. Visualize yourself doing what you want, getting what you want, enjoying what you want, and use positive affirmations to boost your mood and motivation. These two things combined can help you manifest abundance in your life.

Ways you can attract abundance

Abundance isn’t about achieving more it’s about being in harmony with the mindset that life is naturally abundant. It’s getting the most from our experiences that come from a deeper understanding and appreciation of life.

To naturally attract more abundance, we need to understand and appreciate the essence of life. Simply put, placing more focus on having great experiences in our life is abundant. Abundance can be defined in terms of the condition of our relationships, the state of our health, the fulfillment we derive from our work, our capacity to enjoy hobbies, or a sense of altruism and charity to extend to those who need our help.

It’s about focusing on positive experiences that bring us more peace, love, and joy. By carving out time for these, we naturally attract more abundance in our lives.

Here are more ways you can attract abundance into your life. 

Release the negative

Daily life is filled with much negativity. It’s as if being human allows unlimited capacity for worry, anxiety, and fear. Living isn’t always easy, and many days feel like a struggle. While that may be true, we need relief from this level of thinking, and to be able to attune ourselves to the brighter side of life – where abundance lives.

To do that, we need to let go of negativity at any cost and realize that abundance doesn’t thrive in that mode of living or thinking.

Practice appreciation and gratitude

It’s impossible to attract abundance without first recognizing abundance when you see it already in your life. We create more abundance by simply acknowledging the fact that our life is greatly blessed as it is, and by believing that we have the capacity for attracting even more abundance.

Being grateful enables us to experience greater joy, and multiplies our positive experiences and blessings tenfold. This is a natural state of abundance yet, has the capacity for more.

Lose toxic thoughts, perfectionism, and overthinking

It’s so easy to get lost in the web of our thoughts. We tend to overthink our way through life as if the practice of doing so will solve our problems. If anything, overthinking causes us to feel and experience a lack of abundance – by limiting our peace of mind and joy.

The same thing applies to our pursuit of perfection. Striving for perfection seems like a quality to aspire to, but it is essentially futile. Dedicated hard work is valuable, as are the lessons we learn in our pursuit of achievement. But, when something brings you great anxiety, that is not the path towards abundance.

Accept yourself, love yourself

It’s difficult to attract abundance if you do not sincerely, deeply accept yourself. It’s even more difficult to experience abundance when you do not love and believe in yourself enough to accept the person you are. Preparing yourself to receive abundance involves fully accepting yourself. This provides a basis for understanding your capacity for greatness, and the worthiness of all the things you seek.

You are worthy and capable of abundantly attracting more love, success, and happiness than you ever thought possible.

Be fully present in the now

To attract abundance in our lives necessitates we be fully present in the here and now, to witness, experience, and receive. Life is naturally overflowing with abundance, but we cannot align ourselves to that reality unless we are present and open to receive.

Perhaps our focus should shift from “having” to “being” – ultimately becoming what we seek and desire. If we want more love, we embody love and give love away to others. If we want to receive and experience more, then we open ourselves up to more. Through giving, we receive. By being, we experience abundance naturally.

My final thought

I sincerely believe that taking the time to be aware of the abundance you have in your life is the most important thing you can do. From there you only need to make the connection of time to whatever practices of gratitude, visualization, etc. you choose to aid in the increase of your abundance.

I hope you liked this post and choose to share it with your family and friends.

Commit Yourself To Perpetual Joy

Gram’s Wisdom 19: Joy, it isn’t a little thing

My Gram helped me to understand that joy in life is about the little moments, the little things, the little conversations, the little kindnesses. They are mostly seen as minutiae moments, if you’re not looking, they can pass you by without you even noticing. Rather, Gram told me, they are the keys to the kingdom. When you get to experience those moments in all their fullness you will never want to go back to the mundane. It is in those somewhat rare moments when you feel your heart light up, you feel the warmth of your soul set ablaze. That is when joy is almost touchable.

Joy, as l see it, is a condition of your heart. It is an intrinsic feeling, formed and nurtured in you followed by it pouring out of you, it is like a river fed from different sources, it continues overflowing to the outside as long as the source feeds it, but when the source dries up or is restricted the flow ends as well. To keep the flow moving, the source needs to be kept abundant.

Many activities feed your joy, they might differ from person to person, but some are universal. The more you incorporate such things into your day to day living the more those twinkling moments of intensified joy will become an all-day, everyday thing, the joy will just keep gushing out!

What are your sources of joy?

To be able to know your sources it takes mastery of self, when you spend time with yourself digging into your utmost feelings you will learn what feeds your fire. Looking at it this way you become the protagonist of your joy, you decide to be joyful and to do what makes you joyful. You become the artist of your joy.

I am going to relate nine activities that can serve as resources to feed and energize your joy, activities that keep you grounded and in alignment with your inner self and during the process get rid of all mental turmoil thus giving you peace and calm which in turn births joy.

1.      Meditation to calm both mind and body

Joy and mental health cannot be separated, when you have good mental health joy becomes a plus. When your mind is troubled, you are stressed and all anxious you find it hard to relax or to tap into your magic for life, your inspiration.

When you meditate you allow yourself to quiet your mind and access some facets and layers of yourself that you have not discovered yet. It gives you peace of mind, a moment of serenity as you harness your thoughts and focus within, which is where joy is brewed.

2.      An attitude of gratitude

When you are thankful you automatically focus on the positive, you see the bright places even when the whole world seems to be grey. A grateful heart shifts your mind to another perspective of life, you stop judging and complaining at every turn and you open your mind to all the good things happening around you.

Find something to be grateful for each morning, just the fact that you are breathing, seeing the sunrise, hearing the chirping birds, that could be enough to power your spirit of gratitude which will feed your joy for the rest of the day.

In the evening make it a part of your routine to look back on your day and remember what you were grateful for; if possible, make a list or better yet begin a gratitude journal. When you master the art of being grateful even in difficult moments you will always have a source of joy.

3.      Random acts of kindness

The thing with joy is that it has a moral compass, it is not just about the feel-good moments, it goes deeper. When we give joy and love to others it is somehow given back to us, we feel it in our insides. When you help a stranger, volunteer at a shelter, make someone laugh you find yourself more joyful than when you spend the day trying to figure out how to make yourself happy without having shared the gift.

Start a wave of love, of joy-giving everywhere you are by doing a random act of kindness to a stranger; when you start the ripple, it goes on and on from one person to the next. Imagine what a colorful world that would be, one colored with love and joy all over.

4.      Expand your life

As a naturally inquisitive species, we feed on an adventure. Learning something new daily or getting additional information on what you already know and enjoy can be an enormous source of joy. Try new things, travel, and visit new places. Begin a new hobby, monotony dulls your brilliant mind. Increase your involvement in something you love. Leap, l mean what is the worst that could happen, you find out you are not good at painting, well try hiking instead. There is immense joy in learning and trying new things.

5.      Find your purpose

Your purpose is a reason to be, it gives you something to look forward to, something bigger than yourself and we all need to be of use. When responsibility aligns with your passion, the purpose is found. Discover what lights you up, know your passion, that is the primary step. Take responsibility for that passion, daily give yourself tasks to complete. If you love writing, write something daily.

6.      Dance for no reason

There are just those little things that bring an immense feeling of joy when you come across them. We often call them breathtaking. For some, it might be bright colors, sunset pictures, nature. In ways, these things are somehow a representation of the aesthetics of joy- abundance, renewal, and celebration. Incorporate these small effects into your daily living, paint your room a bright color, dance for no reason, or blow bubbles if you want to.

7.      Take action toward a goal, an inspiration, or an epiphany

Commitment gives off a feel-good factor; when you take a step toward your goal you feel good about yourself. Find moments of inspiration from talking to strangers, taking a walk in the park. Leap towards your goal even if you fail you will still find joy in the exercise of trying.

Decide to be joyful, be intentional about your daily activities, and choose those that feed into your joy stream.

8.      Treat yourself with love

Treat yourself right, give yourself a break when it’s needed. Take yourself on a spa date, eat that meal you love. Show yourself the care you would give to others. When you are cared for, you are joyful.

9.      Spend time with the people you love

These people often bring out the best version of us and joy spreads. So, spending time with family and friends is often a reboot to your joy.

My final thought

I truly feel that joy like happiness or optimism can and should be chosen by design. To wait on any of them to occur in a big way by accident is to miss out on all the little moments you can choose to create perpetual joy for yourself and by extension to those around you.  

I hope you liked this post and share it with your family and friends.

Can Mindfulness Improve Chronic Pain?

Mindfulness and chronic pain.

I want to talk about chronic pain. It’s inconvenient, obviously painful, often debilitating, and causes an array of other issues when conventional treatments fail. I have suffered from Migraine headaches for nearly fifty years and I am always grateful that I have days or even as many as three weeks at a pain-free time. Because I have refused to take any kind of medication, I learned early in my life to have a fallback routine for the “lost” days. While this has helped immensely it’s nothing more than a band-aid and I had continued to search for pain relief.

Chronic pain sufferers commonly experience anything from anxiety and depression to pain medication side-effects and addiction. All of this on top of excruciating pain that can’t seem to be controlled. Using the mindfulness approach for chronic pain may be just what the doctor didn’t know to order. I only discovered and began to use this for my migraine pain a couple of months ago.

Mindfulness is, simply put, paying close attention, and maintaining direct focus. Being brave enough to gracefully embrace a moment, good or bad, and know that it’s okay to let it go. Yes, it sounds terrifying to a chronic pain sufferer to pay more attention to the pain. Still, you should continue reading. I intend to make it clear how mindfulness for chronic pain can be highly beneficial and even help eliminate pain almost completely when practiced properly.

Some practical mindfulness techniques.

A common relaxation technique over the years has been to, tense up each part of the body, individually, count to 10, and then release your hold. The object is to notice exactly how tense you were, to begin with, and to physically feel the tension go away. You would typically begin at your head and gradually work your way down each body part until your entire body is completely relaxed.

For instance, you could start with your face by crinkling your forehead, squeezing your eyes together, pursing your lips, and clenching your teeth. Inhale through your nose, hold the tension as tight as you can for 10 seconds and then slowly exhale through your mouth. Feel the muscles relax in your face and head.

Feel the tension and stress leave your body. Notice how you feel the blood start to move again and how invigorated yet relaxed and calm it makes you feel. How completely aware you feel. This is the same premise as mindfulness for chronic pain.

The idea is to get closer to the pain, acknowledge it, assess it, and allow it to go. Accept that the pain is there, without judgment, which is the hardest part. Naturally, chronic pain and all that accompanies it is seen as negative.

Focus on pain relief.

But just for this exercise, try and view it neutrally. Shake hands with the pain as if it’s the first time you’re meeting a new neighbor. Visualize the pain. And when you exhale, let the pain move on.

Substantial pain relief may not be immediate, but if you are mindful and continue practicing mindfulness for chronic pain, the decrease in pain will gradually happen. It takes practice and focus, but it’s well worth the effort considering the damage other treatment measures can potentially cause to your body, mind, and spirit.

It also helps to alter your mindset on the pain itself. Your approach should be to understand your pain, individually describe the sensations you notice with and without the mindfulness exercises, and create a deeper awareness of equanimity.

If you enter this with the idea that your pain needs to be “fixed”, if you aren’t extremely successful on your first shot of meditation, your mind will interpret that as “failure”. And mindfulness for chronic pain is so much more than simple success and/or failure.

Mindfulness will help you achieve a more accurate perception of the pain. You essentially retrain your brain to calculate pain differently. Think about it; your mind doesn’t feel the pain, but it sure lets you know on a scale, how bad it might feel.

For your brain to differentiate the intensity of pain, it first had to send signals down to the core of the pain, which was then interpreted as even greater pain. It’s like poking a really bad bruise. Ouch!

Mindfulness, life, and pain connection.

Mindfulness for chronic pain isn’t about erasing pain. Mindfulness is a phenomenal and powerful method to help you live a full life even with the pain. Your focus is no longer on the outside obstacles but on accepting what’s going on inside your body and having an alternate relationship with it.

You get to choose your reactions, believe it or not, and mindfulness for chronic pain assists in just that. With practice and determination, you can and will change your pain response. Think of all the added benefits like less narcotic pain medication, less chance for addiction to medications, as well as decreased anxiety and depression symptoms.

What about the fact that you can begin again to live a meaningful, active life without spending the majority of your energy on avoiding any pain breakthrough?

Mindfulness for chronic pain has endless potential and the results can affect multiple areas of your life. There’s no reason not to give it a try.

My final thought 

My pain management is admittedly a work in progress. What pleases me is the reduction of the pain and the length of time the migraine lasts when I practice this technique. I attribute this to a lessening of the associated stress and anxiety I feel now that I have taken a more hands-on approach.

I hope you enjoyed this post and will share it with your family and friends.

Mindfulness Relationship Exercises

Gram’s Wisdom 18: Relationships, mindfulness, and couples

My Gram and Grandpa frequently did little things for one another. He always took care of her car. She just had to get in and drive. But what sent Gram over the moon was the fresh oyster stew he would cook for her twice or three times a year. We lived in a small landlocked Indiana town, so he got big brownie points for that. She in turn would shovel snow occasionally from the house to the garage when he had to go to work in the middle of the night.

In the last several weeks, my honey, Michael, and I have been, like so many others, doing home improvement projects. As I wrote in a previous post Gram was not a big advocate of spending vacation time for that. Still, with four dogs and the current situation, vacation seems far off at this time.

None the less a couple of the projects were done with me, specifically in mind. To make me happy and relieve my worry. My Gram would have said this was mindfully done with an open heart.

I will place links at the bottom of this post to both of those previous posts.

 Pay attention to your relationship

It’s no lie that a good relationship is hard work. People are busy with life and simply neglect to nurture their union. Usually, it turns into a conflict for the time between family, work, and self-care. With all that happens in a day or even a week, what’s left-over for maintaining a relationship? Exactly that, leftovers.

Unintentionally, we often overlook giving our partner what is necessary for a healthy relationship. Mindfulness for a couple is used mainly in couples counseling sessions by professionals. But why wait until there’s so much agitation between you that couch time in a therapists’ office becomes necessary? There are plenty of practices you could initiate now!

Let’s take a look at the mindfulness concept. In a nutshell, the practice of mindfulness is being present in the moment. Becoming aware of the situation at hand and accepting, without judgment, what’s happening. It might sound complicated but it’s rather simple, it just takes practice.

How does mindfulness benefit a relationship?

Mindfulness actions for a couple are much the same as for you alone. Only with your partner. No, not necessarily breathing exercises (although a deep breath where you think before you speak is always a good thing) but there are plenty of other exercises you can do with your mate that will help develop a greater understanding of their emotional state.

Waiting until you are in the middle of a screaming match before trying to meaningfully communicate can be less than effective. But by that point, who is willing to listen, when words go flying and feelings get mutilated? Frequently this is followed by regret and hopefully an apology or (shudder) even the silent treatment; neither of which are truly healthy.

“When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another - and ourselves.”

— Jack Kornfield

So, let’s take a look at some specific mindfulness for couple’s techniques that might be useful:

A daily affirmation

It’s one thing to tell your love that you appreciate something they are doing or have done, but when you give them your undivided attention, look them in the eyes and follow the affirmation with how it makes you feel, it is far more appreciatively received, and it sticks.

To go a step further, your partner would effectively reiterate what you’ve just told them in their own words. For example, “I love it when you rub my back after a long day at work; it makes me feel like you’ve seen that I’m tense and want to help.” Your partner would then follow-up with his interpretation of what you’ve just relayed.

A mindful date night

Sounds simple enough right? But there are rules! Put your devices down if you are enjoying a meal together, look one another in the eyes, and engage in meaningful conversation. Avoid topics that would cause critique or conflict. Open your ears and listen to what your partner is saying without thinking of an immediate response while they are still talking. Then acknowledge that you have sincerely heard what was said.

If you go to a movie or a play, hold hands while sitting, share the same popcorn and soda, and then talk about your opinions on the show afterward. Any event will work and if you don’t share the same ideas on what you should do, alternate venues.

He wants to see a movie and you want to have dinner on the beach. Easy. One thing this week, the other next week. Be excited to spend quality time with one another and fully engage, mindfully, and purposefully. Whatever you do, don’t skip out on your mate and reschedule!

Most importantly, if it’s not “your thing”, don’t disassociate. Make an extra effort to consciously focus on your partner and fully participate in the event. Make new memories. That is what mindfulness is and does.

Memories and mindfulness

Sit down with your loved one and create a list of things that make each of you happy and deliriously in love. Remember when you were dating, and he brought you flowers or when she would nibble on your ears? Write. It. Down.

Use a list or even cut these suggestions out on strips of paper and place them in a jar. Each week grab one out and do it. Suggestions? Hold hands while watching TV. Bring a surprise home after work; a candy bar, a new perfume, a flower you picked from the neighbor’s yard… anything, but make sure it’s sincere.

Write a love note to your partner. Be specific about what it is you love about him/her. Cook and serve a favorite meal. Grocery shop together. These things are simple but can mean the world to your lover and your relationship.

Mindfulness for couples doesn’t mean you must gaze into each other’s eyes and affirm your undying affection. There are endless “exercises” you could include in your daily lives that will create mutual love and adoration. And when you are mindful of your love and adoration guess what happens? You are less likely to explode during the difficult conversations inevitable in any relationship.

Engage mindfully with your partner

Engaging your conscious mind to be more mindfully aware of loving and being loved will move your relationship from a should be/could be/would be existence to a “this is” experience.

You both will subconsciously reflect on how loved you are and that you are in this together, thus creating a stronger bond and much greater respect for your mate. It’s a win-win! Don’t stop with these few suggestions though. Find what works best in your relationship and for your given situation.

You wouldn’t neglect to give yourself food or water, right? Relationships take continuous work and nurturing as well. Mindfulness for a couple is work, yes, but it’s so worth it! Give your partnership the fuel it deserves to grow and succeed!

My final thought

I think this all boils down to attention, awareness, and presence. Our lives get busy and it becomes a catch-all excuse. We shouldn’t allow that most important person in our life to feel as if we no longer see them, hear them, or care enough to spend quality time with them.

Here are the links to the posts I mentioned above.

How Mindfulness Helps You Enjoy the Journey 

Simple Love and Care Advice for Couples

Thank You for reading this post and I hope you will share it with your family and friends.

Create Your Intentional Life

Live with intention or by default

There’s much talk about intentional living lately. But what does this mean? Intentional living is consciously living in alignment with your values and beliefs.

It’s opposite to what many people do. They live in default mode, being satisfied to only take action when disasters occur.

Intentional living is about an awareness of who you want to be and how you want to live. Of making that choice and then being disciplined enough to do it consistently.

How to live your life intentionally

Take the time, take control of your life, and make decisions that matter. Not to your Mom or your best friend. Matter to you.  Choose the course for your life or life will make those choices for you. And those choices will likely be haphazard and unpleasant. In other words, take control while you still have time to create an exciting life or one of peace and calm if that is your preference.

Try these 10 tips to help you live with intention:

1 | Your choices matter. An intentional life is all about making choices that make sense for you and your beliefs. Determine the kind of life you want to lead and direction you want to take that will create the results you want. Change as necessary life isn’t static.

But choose. Your past needn’t be an issue. You may have been afraid to make a choice and fail. It’s true, you can’t fail if you never try. You don’t want to make an incorrect choice. However, this thinking is a trap. You should make a reasonable choice and give it your best effort. Without it, you may not experience the success and happiness that you deserve.

Your greatest power is the power of decision.

“It’s not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”

— Roy Disney

2 | Visualize your dream life in detail. Have a target in mind. Think about how you’d like to live. Be bold-spirited and leave your doubts and limitations behind for a moment. Go for broke it’s your life.

Consider your ideal day. How would you like to spend your time? Who else would be there? Where would you live? What would your finances be like? Does it include travel or education? Give it some thought. Write it down in a journal or a piece of paper. Refer back to it often.

3 | Know your values and beliefs. A large part of intentional living is living aligned with your values and your beliefs. It’s not about reacting to everything in the most expedient fashion. It’s about proactively living on your terms. It’s necessary to be intimately familiar with your beliefs and values to accomplish that.

4 |Prioritize the first things first. Money isn’t the main thing, but it’s an important thing. Money is great for solving many of life’s challenges such as food and housing. It’s also a necessary resource that affords you the ability to do the things you want to do like traveling. If you’re having financial struggles, it makes the most sense to work on your finances first.

Make a logical progression for each part of your life you’d like to change. Your health is key to your enjoyment of life. If you need to lose 100 pounds, going for a daily walk and eliminating high-calorie drinks would be a good beginning. After a month of walking, you could add additional exercise and diet changes.

Focus on financial and health issues first. After you’ve gained some momentum, you can address the other parts of your life.

5 | Set goals for the major areas of your life. These typically include your home, career, relationships, and education. Of course, you can add other categories as you need them, depending on your aspirations and values.

6 | Choose or create habits to support those goals. Intentional living is much easier with supportive habits in place. You’ll run out of willpower otherwise. Select simple, but effective habits that will help you to reach your goals and begin implementing them.

7 | Decide how you will spend your time. Most of us don’t give a lot of thought to what we do each day. Keeping your dreams and values in mind, what is the best thing for you to do at this moment? What do you need to accomplish today? Have you made a plan? Make choices and avoid operating on autopilot.

8 | Master your impulses. Most of our impulses lead us down the wrong path. They’re often habitual and related to pleasure or discomfort avoidance. Intentional living is about making rational decisions and exercising consistent follow through regardless of comfort. Following your impulses are the opposite of intentional living.

9 | Reject distractions. This includes all distracting thoughts of the past or future. Intention requires presence. Distractions are things you shouldn’t be doing at that moment. Even paying your bills can be a distraction if you should be doing something more important at that time.

10 | Take stock of your day. How well did you do today at living intentionally? What challenges did you face? Where did you fall short? What can you do tomorrow even better than you did it today? What win did you have that you can build on? Learn something new each day for the future.

 My final thought

Are you choosing and creating your life or just living by default? Having a life, that you love will never happen by accident. Be courageous enough to choose the life you want for yourself. Decide the kind of person you want to be. Make your decisions and choose your actions accordingly. Remember, when you refuse to make a choice, you have made your choice.

Be present in your life. Be in control of your life. Be happy in your life.

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How To End Procrastination

Procrastination perceptions

Procrastination. I am guilty. We are all guilty of doing it, more often than we would like to admit. Procrastination may not be just about turning in your school report/work project at the last minute. You may also be putting off important life decisions like whether or not you should ask your boss for that raise he promised last month, or whether you should join a gym, leave your boyfriend, have a baby - it’s endless.

And if you can’t learn how to stop putting things off, it becomes a bad habit you will have to deal with your whole life. This can hurt your relationships, career, and personal health. Others perceive you as being lazy, unable to meet your time commitments, or incapable of making up your mind.

The thought process behind procrastination is that you believe there is always tomorrow, so why not steer clear of the stress and anxiety and just put it off until later. But guess what? This is the first thing you need to tackle. The stress is not going anywhere and will always be there whenever you get around to doing what you delayed. It will not be easy but try to figure out what the stress factor is behind your procrastination. It could be fear of failure, fear of confrontation, fear of not being perfect.

Don’t be too critical of yourself

Waiting to start a project pushes you to bite off more than you can chew. Partnering that with a leap into the deep end usually results in a finish nowhere near what you had envisioned.

So, you judge your flaws and faults way too harshly. Yet, studies show that when you forgive yourself for putting things off or not getting things done as perfectly as you would have liked, it can help fend off procrastination. Additionally, setting realistic goals and not spreading yourself too thin can also help with a procrastination problem.

“You can’t get much done in life if you only work on the days when you feel good.”

— Jerry West

Following these tips may help you combat procrastination

1. Make tasks into good habits

We all have enough willpower to get about 3 or 4 tasks done each day. Habits use other parts of our brain rather than the prefrontal cortex which is associated with rational thinking. So, when you train yourself to do something out of habit, rather than look at it as a mundane task, you think about it less which means you’re using less willpower and you won’t fall into the procrastination rut.

Things like brushing your teeth or making your bed have all become daily habits that you automatically perform without even considering putting them off. Why not turn healthy eating, daily exercise, or turning in reports ahead of time into daily habits as well?

After, that it becomes easier, but you still must keep yourself motivated and inspired. Procrastination is all about avoiding that dreaded first step. So, why not ease into it with the knowledge that after a certain amount of time, or once I’ve finished X, I can watch videos on YouTube or go get a cup of coffee. Make it pleasant for yourself because the reward is the part that the brain assimilates to gauge your enjoyment level. If it makes you happy, then your brain slowly turns this task into a habit that you look forward to, instead of something you dread each time.

2. Divide work tasks into pieces

Instead of cleaning out the entire garage, do the right side first, take a break, then do the left side, take a break, then finish off the rest. At work, big tasks may seem daunting when you look at them. The answer? Break it down into smaller tasks. Outline the entire project, and then divide it up into smaller tasks.

Working in 30-minute increments also helps break down tasks into smaller chunks that are manageable and not so intimidating. After 30 minutes, take a break and assess your work. Seeing how much you’ve accomplished will give you that boost of confidence you need to keep at it.

3. Eliminate distractions

Checking your email every 5 minutes doesn’t do you any good. So, once you’ve committed to doing the job, limit distractions by putting your phone away. You can find apps that help you stay on track, but some will say that’s completely missing the point.

The important thing is that you set up a certain time for checking emails or your social media, and once you’ve started your task, you should try to avoid the urge to sneak a peek.

Another serious distraction is multi-tasking. Even though it may seem that you’re being productive, the truth is it wastes time and energy. Think about it, it takes your brain about 20 minutes to completely focus on one task and give it 100%, and then you bring in another task which means you decrease your focus level by half, bring in a third task and the focus drops even lower. So even though you’re working more, your results will be below average for those 3 tasks.

4. Work during your optimal hours

We all have certain times during the day when we’re most energetic and alert. Some of us are morning people, some are night owls, and others do best in the late afternoon hours. This is the time you usually find it easiest to accomplish your hardest tasks. But, whenever your peak hours are, that’s the time to tackle your most difficult and demanding tasks. You’ll be a true powerhouse then with your brain working at its maximum capacity.

My final thought

These tips are general and can help to a greater or lesser degree any person who procrastinates. Keeping in mind not all people procrastinate for the same reason it follows that some tips are better than others, but you may need to think outside the box. Tip number 2 works best for me because unfamiliar things make me feel overwhelmed and I need a list of steps to take.

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5 Tips To Improve Your Concentration

Gram’s Wisdom 17: The importance of mindset on your concentration

I would bet that like most of us you normally have no trouble concentrating on the task at hand. It’s easy, right? You have a to-do list or a routine, so you know exactly what to focus on. 

The world for most people is topsy-turvy right now. You don’t know what the other side of tomorrow looks like, let alone next month. The temptation to let things slide rather than plan for that other side is more an inability to concentrate than the lack of desire toward the subject.

As a teen, I remember it being harder and harder to focus on the homework for classes I wasn’t so interested in. When I asked my Gram for advice, I told her I needed more than, “life is full of things we must do like it or not.” You see the problem for me was, I would procrastinate because I couldn’t concentrate on what I thought of as useless subjects.

Fortunately, Gram did have a few simple ideas. First, she said to find a reason to become interested. (In my case I wanted a good grade average.) Second, she said reward yourself when finished. The third thing she said was to change or take control of my mindset. The last tip she said was the most important because it’s always better to do what’s necessary with good grace and acceptance.

“It’s all about reprogramming our minds to focus more on what brings us joy.”

— Alaric Hutchinson

Tips to boost your concentration

The good news is that in the intervening years though we humans have created more distractions for ourselves, you can learn to focus more and focus better. All you need is to alter your mindset, take charge, and apply these tools to boost your attention span.

1.     Get your brain moving

You’re at work; you have deadlines, meetings, projects, tasks - all things that need to get done within the span of a few hours. What to do? You make a list, of course. Many successful people swear by their lists because it has everything on it, from the most important to the things that can wait until later.

Another great tip? Write your list the night before so you’re not bombarded with many things at the start of the day. This is like stretching before a workout - it doesn’t take a lot of time, but you can’t start without it.

2.     Take regular breaks

Francesco Cirillo, the owner of the Cirillo Consulting firm in Berlin, devised an ingenious system that manages time by breaking it down into intervals. For example, once you’ve started on a task, set the timer to, say, 30 minutes.

During that time, focus completely on that task. Once the timer rings, you take a 10-minute break to get some coffee or just walk around your desk for some quick exercise. Then, every 4 30-minute work intervals, you can take a longer break of 20-30 minutes.

The way this technique works is that you have to refrain from picking up your phone to check your email or social media every 5 minutes. Research has proven that it takes us nearly 25 minutes to get back to our original task once we’ve been distracted, which means you’re spending the entire day just on trying to regain your focus but not achieving it.

A smart way to avoid this when it comes to your phone is to put it on silent or stick it in a drawer to ward off temptation. An even better way to do this is to carve out half an hour at the start of the day, or in the afternoon, to get all that out of your system so that you’re not constantly thinking about it.

3.     De-clutter

While it may seem straightforward to everyone that working in a calm, organized environment boosts concentration and, hence, productivity, it may not be as easy as it sounds. Even if your choices are limited or can’t get away with changing too much of your workspace, you can do wonders with a few add-ons here and there.

But all you need are a few basic items:

• a desk organizer to store away whatever you’re not working on at the moment

• a plant or two because it’s been proven that being surrounded by nature magnifies concentration levels and extends your attention span

• a good source of lighting

• a calming piece of artwork or photo

• soft background music or sounds of nature to put you in the mood to concentrate

4.     Make your health a priority

Most people don’t make the connection between eating right and having strong concentration and memory skills. Studies show that foods high in trans fats and processed sugars harm your cognitive abilities.

Enjoying a balanced diet rich in minerals and vitamins, on the other hand, boosts energy levels and gives you the mental stamina you need to concentrate on the task at hand. Water is also very important to prevent dehydration. Staying hydrated throughout the day prevents your mind from slowing down. Exercising regularly also boosts cognitive powers and mental stamina.

5. Play brain games

There has been extensive research that shows just how much how solving crossword puzzles, problem-solving exercises and other types of mental games can improve cognitive abilities, reasoning, memory, and attention spans. It also boosts your skill and speed on tasks that have to do with memory and reasoning.

My final thought

I believe that right now most of us are having some focusing difficulty. I say cut yourself some slack, try and accomplish one small thing each day, and, using Gram’s second tip, reward yourself. You deserve it.

I hope this post helps. Please share it with your family and friends.