So, are you satisfied with your life.

Hi, I'm back again. It is Xmax time and I have been thinking again. I was thinking about my life and the lives's of others and tried to group some things to create some clarity. This follows the previous theme of my blog (yes! I said I was into personal development). So I got to thinking and felt the need to express my thoughts to the world at large. So here it goes. What do people do that leads to a great life or a horrible one? So that is what I want to write about today. Some people try hard, put in loads of effort and get nowhere and others seem to try hard, put in loads of effort and get where they want to go. I think the difference is knowing what you want and in the goal setting. Efforts well placed will usually achieve the goals, but efforts poorly placed will wear you out with disappointment and set you up for failure. So I figured it out like this. How To Have A Horrible Life.

1. Ruin your health through diet, first of all make sure you eat lots of unhealthy food. Don't even look at fruit or vegetables cos sometimes they can be tempting. Eat high kilojoules low nutrient foods, like fried chips, meat pies, anything highly processed. Make sure that the food you buy has got lots of preservatives, colouring and other additives. This will set you up for all the talked about diseases that are so popular right now. Its important to develop a 'closed mind' so that you wont be tempted to change your life.
2. Develop a strong addiction to something, always is a winner. It does not have to be illegal substances, although these will achieve your goal, but they can be gambling, sex, cigarettes, food, alcohol and more. Having a strong addiction will help achieve point one, and also helps with point 3. Your health and finances will be decimated by raging addictions.
3. Ruin your finances will help a lot. Get as many credit cards as you can and max them out and don't pay the monthly installment, default on your fines, establish a bad credit rating. Don't save any money, spend every cent.
4. Work in a job you hate and are not suited to. This is a sure fire way to have a horrible life. You need a job to get the credit cards, right, so make sure it is terrible in some way and you slave your guts out to make someone else rich. You can get the sack later on and this is beneficial point 3.
5. Have an abusing relationship with someone at least once in a lifetime but preferably several. You want to damage your self-esteem, your desire to succeed, your love of life. The more you are abused, emotionally, the more you will accept being abused, physically, sexually and financially.

You see it all ties in. These five steps will be lead to a horrible life, for sure, and all or efforts will be poorly placed.

If that is not what you intend to achieve in life, then I offer the following suggestions.

How to have a great life.

1. Take responsibility for your life. I can' emphasise this enough. Only you are responsible for your life, where you are, where you want to be, your success and failures. It is you that directs your life, consciously or unconsciously. When you take responsibly for your life you do not blame, or give up excuses because you realise that you are where you got to day (good or bad) because of the decisions you made (good or bad) yesterday. Only you are responsible for your choices. So this point will cover everything including your financial state and everything you do, say and think. You are responsible for your thoughts, so make sure they are positive and supportive.
2. Respect yourself highly. When you respect your life, wholeheartedly, you will not do any of the previous 5 suggestions, it just wont be in your life. When you respect yourself you grow in self-love and would not do anything to harm yourself. You know that you have unique talents that need to be expressed and shared with the world. Success comes in many ways and not just money. Remember that a mother who raises a child to enjoy high respect and self-esteem is as successful as a millionaire as she has done her job well. Don't limit your thinking and respect your mind. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.
3. Develop loving and caring relationships. The relationship you have with yourself (one that is supportive and loving) is the key to having a great life. Make that relationship the best you can make it. This will bring you enormous joy and you will give joy to others. The people that you choose to have in your life will support you and share in your triumphs, help you, and have fun with you. They are a vital part of a great live.
4. Look after your health. I had to include this. Your health is so important. A healthy body and mind is so helpful to achieving a great life. Take good care of your body and eat well, lots of fresh fruit and vegetables. To all the people who are not healthy for some reason, just do the best you can with what you have to work with. Some people do have illness, but that does not mean they should give up on looking after their health. It's all about how you think about yourself. Which brings me to my last point.
5. Think you your way to a great life. It is what you think that determines you actions. Thoughts + Actions = Results. What are your results? If you don't like them, change your thoughts about how to achieve your goal. If you think you can't do something, you are right. If there is a glimmer of 'maybe I can' work with that, until you are sure you can and have solid self-belief. What you think determines your reality.

So, there you go, you have all the info you need. I hope my writing starts you thinking about what you really want in life and provides some ideas about how to achieve a GREAT life. I have joined an organisation/business group that is helping me reach my personal and financial goals. Liberty League and Beyond Freedom has opened up my thinking and my life. If you want some info please email me movement4improvement at bidpond.com.au or visit www.libertyleague.com/janeseward

Very kind regards to you all from Jane

you can contact me for more info at movement4improvement at bigpond.com.au

Life's opportunities

Now that I am home and back into my routine of uni assignments etc and engaging in my 'usual' life, I am wondering how I can do the 'usual' in an 'unusual' way that brings even more satisfaction to me. I am considering how some of my human needs can be used to play with life a bit more. You will notice from my previous blog that I advocate that life should be easy. To succeed in life (whatever you do that means success to you) and to achieve in business (whatever business you choose to do, or vocation) there are some common themes and concepts. There are 5 basic ideas to success that have been around for a long time. I share them with you now. 1. Fall in love: that is fall in love with your life, what you are doing, who you share your life with, and how you go about living and working. To love your vocation makes life much easier because work is not 'hard work' but another way of enjoying you life. Fall in love with you life and treat your life as valuable, nurture and support it in every way. Fall in love with a partner is also quite nice. 2. Understand what is possible: if you believe that you can achieve just about anything you choose to do, then the possibilities really open up. It was the big thinkers that dreamed up fabulous things we enjoy today (that were previously thought of as 'too far out there' to succeed) eg the car, Internet, iPhone etc. So if you understand that limiting your thinking is actually dishonouring your life potential, you can more easily choose what you really want to do and then proceed to fall in live with it and your life, even more. 3. Why am I here: to have fun, to love, to grow, to invent, to enjoy etc etc. Ask yourself that question and decide on an answer that is positive, fun and satisfying. Then make it a life goal. Remember that it is never about the destination, but always about the journey. Make your journey as enjoyable and positive as possible. If you don't know why you are here, then just have fun, finding out, while you are living a great life filled with all the positives. 4. Action: do what is necessary to achieve your goals. Do the study, do the housework, learn the dance, etc. Choose a life path, love it, then take the actions that are required to achieve it. Well placed efforts are rewarded with feelings of achievement (you cant' buy a feeling of achievement, you have to live it). Taking the action can be difficult sometimes when adversity comes to visit. But like most unwelcome visitors, they go away when you ask them to leave. So when adversity arrives, face it, work through it and stay committed to your goal, and adversity will just drift off somewhere else. When adversity drifts off a sense of accomplishment drifts in. 5. Gratitude: wow, if you are not grateful for your life you are missing the point. Where there is life there is hope; an old saying but true. If you don't like how your life is at present, you can change it to what you do like. Just follow the 4 previous steps to get you started. Gratitude is pervasive in that it soaks into all parts of your life. And there's more, check this out. 6 basic human needs (no not Maslows hierarchy) 1. Certainty: people like familiarity and some degree of certainty that brings security 2. Uncertainty: people like to be surprised and just a bit unsure of the future. This helps to provide opportunities for striving, and being in the flow of things. 3. Significance: people like to relate to something special in life, what is significant to them. 4. Love: people like to love something or someone. Choose what/who to love and proceed in a respectful, positive and unlimited manner. Love your life, your vocation, your business, your partner, your children etc. Unlimited. 5. Growth: people like to be in a state of 'flow', to be striving for some important goal. If you are not providing opportunities for yourself to grow you are stagnating in life. Make sure you grow in some way, eg, spiritual, financial, emotional, physical, intellectual. Just keep progressing. 6. Contribution: people like to feel they are contributing in some way to the betterment of others or themselves. To make a contribution to the community or individual life's, helps to create a feeling of connection and satisfaction. So there you have it. Easy peasy! Simple really, anyone can do it, even me. I advocate, 'make life easy' and stop struggling. When you choose to love what you do, struggling and adverstiy become challenges to enjoy overcoming. I have joined a business group that is helping me reach my goals. If you want some info email me movement4improvement at bigpond.com.au or visit www.libertyleague.com/janeseward Cool, c ya.

Life WAS meant to be easy!

I believe that the famous quote by Malcolm Frazer (former Prime Minister of Australia) “life was not meant to be easy” has become a ‘mindset’ for many Australians. There seems to be an acceptance that life is a struggle and that this is the way it has always been. The young Malcolm was quoting from his memory of a line in George Bernard Shaw’s book Methuselah but did not state the whole line of 'Life's not meant to be easy, but take courage child for it can be delightful.' Unfortunately the media pounced on it and the quote stands today as one of Malcolm Frazer’s most famous sayings.

I think, also unfortunate for the Australian public, because the meaning of that line is portrayed that life is not meant to be easy, never was easy, never will be easy. Over time (just a few decades) I get the impression that many people believe this. They struggle in their daily lives. There is never enough money, time, happiness, whatever, and they are constantly struggling in some way. I also don’t like ‘no pain, no gain’. That means that if I want to progress, I MUST create some pain or else I won’t make any gains. Well I think that is just crazy.

What if life WAS meant to be easy and the media beat up and Malcolm, got it all wrong. What would life and our community, be like if we just gave up the struggle and began to enjoy our lives? Can we progress personally and financially without making life hard for ourselves? I think we can. It’s all in the mindset, your perception or what you THINK. What you ‘think’ affects your bodily functions (stress) and your psychological well being (happiness). If you were to adopt the mindset and belief that ‘life was meant to be easy’, perhaps the daily struggling would cease to exist. Daily tasks and chores would be just that, a task to do, not a personal struggle. It’s all about the journey, not the destination. I don’t know who first made that statement but it seems true to me.

If you are not enjoying the journey of this life, just stop, re-evaluate, adjust and move forward in a more positive and loving mindset. Love and appreciate yourself; make life easy, make your achievements easy. Don’t stress out, just do the work and enjoy the process. There is work to be done and efforts to be made and you will gain a lot of excitement from achieving your goals. You won’t get anywhere sitting on you bum doing nothing and expecting money to just appear in you bank account, but you can do the work in a positive mindset without the struggling. If you are struggling a lot, you are probably doing the wrong work for your personality or life interests.

It’s all about how you feel and think about the situation. If you think ‘life was not meant to be easy’, you will probably prove yourself right by some self-fulfilling prophecy, or something. Some people love to be right, no matter what the personal cost. If you learn how to adopt the positive approach (it’s a skill), I am guessing that you can just as easily prove yourself right, that ‘life is meant to be easy’. The effort expanded will be the same but the outcome will be different. The choice is yours, and only yours, because only you, think your thoughts.

I believed in these ideas so strongly that I started a business called The Movement For Improvement. The idea is that you can move your mindset to make improvements to your life. I invite you to start ‘a movement’ in you life towards making improvements, using the ideas stated above. The topic provides a good starting point for you to explore your thinking process. Do you often relate through the negative or positive mindset category. Have some fun with it and see what you think. You might surprise yourself.

very kind regards from Jane

You can contact me for more info at movement4improvement at bigpond.com.au and have a look at www.libertyleague.com/janeseward

So pleased

I just visited the PositiveBlogger.com site and was so very pleased to see positive psychology explained so well. I downloaded 'How to Become a Positive Blogger' and I loved his article 'Studying the brain from the inside out' and the movie about Jill Taylor and her book 'My Stroke of Insight'. So good! Check it out. http://positiveblogger.com/2008/05/30/studying-the-brain-from-the-inside-out/ (still don't know how to paste the link properly). So, how do I put that nice link in documents? and how do I put in a video (like Jill Taylor's). So, writing an interesting blog is an art form (for sure). Well done to Clarke, and thanks for your thoughts on paper. I aspire to do something similar. (but, I still have this really annoying habit of talking about myself, must stop that some day). So, my aim is to write my first short, but, interesting article. OOPS, Can't think. I guess I will read 'How to become a positive blogger' again. I just know I have an interesting article in me, somewhere. (ooops, talking about myself again). Perhaps it would be better to copy someone else's work and offer that (while I learn not to talk about myself). Yeah, that would be OK, for sure! No, No, No! OK, my next blog entry will be my first short but interesting article. Soon to be written! Watch this space! Well done to all the people so far, who have got the message that: life is about the journey not the destination. What sort of a journey are you planning to have? Please spend a few moments considering what your positive and negative personal qualities are and how you can best use them to have a safe and enjoyable journey. You will use these personal qualities throughout your life; as trusted tools to success, or they may become your road blocks. So it is important to know yourself well, plan for success and enjoy the ride. I have discovered Beyond Freedom and Liberty League and my life has really opened up as a result of the program. I have learned that success can be achieved and knowing myself well really helps a great deal to build an enjoyable life. Kind regards, Jane you can contact me at movement4improvement at bigpond.com.au and visit www.libertyleague.com/janeseward

Just the beginning

This is my FIRST blog ever. I have so much to say and ask, I am a little overwhelmed at the opportunity. I invite other experienced bloggers to offer tried and tested tips and I welcome suggestions. The idea of contacting people on a global level really appeals to me. I have some environmental interests as well as personal development and business interests. I have been studying a bachelor of psychology at James Cook University and am about half way through. I decided to change degrees this semester as I could see that this disciple was not going to contribute to my HAPPINESS in life long-term. I have jumped ship and am now doing a Arts degree majoring in psychology (that uses up all those completed subjects). This allows me freedom to do any subject that interests me, so I am now doing a mix of community work, indigenous studies, business and marketing . I am really looking forward to the diversity and I think this will complement my already large skill base in counselling, case management, and interest in community development, etc. I think I need to learn a whole lot of Internet marking skills to make this work for me. Help would be appreciated. There are many parts to my life, family etc, interests etc and they all contribute to my 'wisdom' base. I am delighted to be a mature women of 55 years with the opportunities available to me in this country (Australia). It is such a fantastic time in life to have children independent, happy grandchildren, and reasonable good health to be able to do lots of interesting things. I wish to promote respect, positive thinking, and happiness as a way of life. It is my intention to post up my e-book (soon to be completed as I am working on it often) which describes a useful psychological tool to promote a happier state of mind and relieve anxiety. So look out for that. Another thing that I am working on is the 30 Day Challenge. I have requested for this challenge to learn about Internet marketing. Considering that I know very little at present, I intend to know a whole lot by the end of the challenge. I will be using this blog for communication on that. It's all exciting. Back to promoting respect and happiness. What do you think of the idea that 'people' don't understand what respect means. There appears to be a lot of disrespect going on that affects whole communities eg violence, theft, rubbish, land clearing, pollution etc. They all stem from a lack of respect in some way. I have half written a second book on Respect and Responsibility and will finish it soon. Yes, I have been very busy lately. It appears to me to be a global phenomenon. There are organisations that promote world peace, well I advocate promoting world respect and we would all benefit. Take a look at climate change. To me this stems from disrespect for the environment/earth by land clearing, unrestricted pollution, mindless consumerism and over use of resources. A respectful person would not pollute the planet that we depend upon but would take care of our resources. Australia leaves a big carbon footprint and so does China and USA etc. This global practice starts with each individual. They are choosing to disrespect the planet by their choices of purchases and practices and behaviours. It's just the same principle as disrespecting a person. People don't like it and neither does the planet and both will react negatively in some way, eg violence or climate change. We don't have to 'love' everyone, but I think we do have to 'respect' everyone and not harm them. The same applies to the planet. It is not just the governments of the world who have to make positive adjustments. It is the individual that has to get the message. I like the saying 'be the change you want to see'. My grandchildren need a healthy family and a healthy planet. I don't see that there is a difference (no healthy planet, no healthy life, no healthy families, no healthy people). We are part of the planet and we 'depend' on the planet for our survival, not the other way round. Pew! there I go again getting all heated up. The point is 'just be respectful' and try and do that in 'everything you do, say and think'. That ought to sort it all out nicely. What do you think of my ideas? Well as I said before, I have lots to talk about, so I look forward to conversing with you all. Kind regards from Jane. you can contact me for more info at movement4improvement at bigpond.com.au and visit www.libertyleague.com/janeseward