Listen to the children

My grandson, who is 8 years old has a passion for skiing and his goal is to be in the Olympics in 2026. He is good at what he does and has no fear, as you can see from the picture below. He placed 18th in his country in his age group which included children from 15 to 8, so he has potential. As I watch him practice and strive for perfection I realized that as a senior I could learn from him. Children can teach us many things if we watch and embrace their ideas and techniques. Here are a few techniques that I learned from watching him that will help you take your game, or your life in retirement, to a whole new level:

1. Once a day playfully imagine that you're already living at that new level. He uses his imagination to see himself doing better, and he listens to others who give him instructions to become better. Finally, he practices what he imagines and what he has been given instruction for. He does this every day, either on the slopes, in the gym, or on the playground. When he fails he does not quit, he tries again and again until he gets it right. 

2. Frequently speak in gratitude as if you've already arrived. When my grandson did not win a recent competition because he was competing with children who were at least 6 years older, he just said, "That's OK, I will win it in two or three years." He sees himself as a winner and acts as if he has already arrived. However, he is still 8 years old and plays with his friends and plays other sports such as Aussie Rules Football, Cricket, swimming and Horseback riding

3. Here is something I wish he did, but he does not, I think that he should occasionally do something he never would have done at the old level. He knows he is good, but he does not brag or self-praise, he does like it when others praise him, and his mom and dad, do not pressure him but do reward him when he does well. When he does well, I sometimes will click a few times with my thumbs under my arms and do the chicken dance, but he never sees me do it.

We can learn from children if we allow them to lead us, one child who is motivating others is Greta Thunberg, who has started an international youth movement against climate change. The Swedish teenager first staged a "School Strike for Climate" in front of the Swedish Parliament in August last year. Her strike has inspired students from around the world, of all ages. As we move on with our lives, we need to listen and learn from the children.

Take the high road!

Ever been angry, don't be!

Not ever. 

It's not worth it. It's not necessary. There is always a higher road. 

Besides, at any given moment, beyond the curtains of time and space, there's a legion of angels within, anxious to do your bidding, who can best reach you when you're not angry. 

So be the coolest and always find a way to take the high road. 

Way back when

When you look at old photos, it's obvious isn't it? You were good-looking back then. Really good-looking. Yet somehow, at the time,you didn't quite believe it.

Try to learn from yesterday, because today you're even better looking than you were then. Way better. You're smarter, too. Funnier. Wiser. More compassionate. Less serious. Life is strange that way. We get older and we get better, believe it!

Singing is a part of everyday life

Once upon a time, wasn't singing a part of everyday life as much as talking, physical exercise, and religion? 

Our distant ancestors, wherever they were in this world, sang while pounding grain, paddling canoes, or walking long journeys. 

Can we begin to make our lives once more all of a piece? Finding the right songs and singing them over and over is a way to start. 

And when one person taps out a beat, while another leads into the melody, or when three people discover a harmony they never knew existed, or a crowd joins in on a chorus as though to raise the ceiling a few feet higher, then they also know there is hope for the world.  Pete Seeger

How does this quote shift the way you perceive your world? 

How does this inspire you?  How does it mentor you? 

Fire plans and being in the lake in a heat wave

One of the interesting things about living in the rolling grasslands of Australia is that you have to have fire plans in place in the summer. The heat can get extreme and one careless act or a lightning strike can cause great damage. When we were there this year, the extreme heat had not yet hit the area we were staying, but my daughter and her partner had set up their fire plans for and had everything packed for a quick getaway if needed (it was not).

So we do made sure that our valuables were ready to go. It is interesting trying to decide what valuables you want to take if you only have a short time to leave. It was important to plan because what you leave behind may be destroyed forever. What are important, items which bring back memories like,  pictures, souvenirs,important papers (passport, birth certificates, wills, mortgage documents, etc) or material things like clothes, TV’s etc. 

After we had taken the time to set up everything by the door, we were able to relax and went off to the lake. Lake Eldon is a beautiful and big lake and we did not have far to go to set up on the beach

It was interesting to me that when we set up we were the only ones at our location. We were close to the road and within about two hours, other people from my daughters’ area came and settled in with us.  

We enjoyed a wonderful afternoon swimming, and enjoying the heat of the day while meeting a number of my daughter’s friends and their children. The next day the fire warning had dropped and the extreme heat had move on, so d we could relax and enjoy the summer sun without the extreme heat.

ZEN AND GARDENING

Many of us find ourselves caught up in the stress of modern life as we struggle to achieve our goals in business, social and emotional lives.  I found this post by  by  Surabhi Johri posted at Friday  On October 7, 2011 and thought as we move closer to Xmas I would share it.

We all crave for time and space where we can shed our guard and just relax in a sanctuary that heals and soothes our senses. Our gardens play a vital supporting role, helping us get some respite from the pressures and chaos of the outside world and bring a sense of personal fulfillment.

Whether they are Zen gardens or Monastic Cloister gardens, throughout history gardens have played important role in healing.
The idea behind healing gardens is to create a therapeutic environment that provides a gentle stimulation of senses and act as a sanctuary. The considerations made while designing a healing garden are the same as any other garden; however these considerations take on a special meaning in healing environments.
Working with nature is central to a healing garden. It is important to keep the design
simple without much going on so that it is easy to understand and maintain. At the same time the garden should be full of sensory experiences. Lot of variety in terms of form, texture, colour, seasonal interest and scent will wake up the senses and create a new appreciation for the garden as well as nature.
Texture and foliage
Plant trees with interesting bark textures, either smooth or self patterned. Choose plants for their interesting foliage, delicate feathery ones like fennel or smooth and bold like magnolia. Ornamental grasses are full of drama specially when light falls on them and their leaves and flowers dance in breeze.
Plant the daintiest of flowers that invoke a feeling to protect or as bold and open as sunflowers. You can’t resist touching the petals of poppy or play with the snapdragons. Let the seasonal changes in the garden bring awareness to the transience in all life forms and awaken the spirit.
Get into the garden at every opportunity, day or night, and look for changes. Notice the effect of light, change in colours, sprouting of seeds, blooming of buds and fading of flowers, unfurling of new leaves and drop of old ones. This dimension of time is unique to the art of garden design and separates it from any other art form.
Sound adds a wonderful aspect. Try to keep intrusive noises to minimal. Use water features or wind chimes for calming effect or to mask the undesirable sounds. Choice of hardscaping should be subtle and not conflict with the needs of the user. Keep a balance so that the space feels stable as a whole. Make the transitions between spaces smooth. Lay out paths clearly. Do not forget to create focal points.
Create various spaces for different activities. Provide areas for varying degree of sun and shade. Make comfortable and suitable seating available.
You may choose to go with the theme of wildlife garden. Plant to attract butterflies or birds - nectar producing flowering plants for butterflies and berry producing fruit trees for birds. Keep birdbaths and bird feeders to encourage winged visitors.
Keep low maintenance fish in a pond. Watching them swim can be very relaxing. Going with edible garden theme can be benefiting in more than one way.
Not only cultivating edibles for the family will bring you satisfaction but also consuming fresh and organically grown produce will taste better. Design plant beds to grow personal favourite varieties surrounded by herb borders, interspersed with splashes of flowering plants.
Colours play a key role
Use colours for healing since they have strong associations with our feelings and memories. Choose red for vitality, orange to bring joy and optimism, yellow for the feelings of self worth and lifting depression, green for harmony, restfulness and relaxation, blue to encourage tranquility and contemplation, and violet to learn to love yourself. Do not neglect the role of aromatic plants in healing gardens. Aromas from carnation, citrus, eucalyptus, jasmine can be stimulating while rose, basil, lavender can be balancing. Cedarwood, juniper, mimosa are relaxing whereas chamomile, jasmine, rose, citrus work as anti-depressants too. Plant combinations can also be made for varying degree of fragrance desired in the garden.
Healing gardens have found special place in hospitals across the developed world. For the old age people, patients of psychiatry, cancer and alzheimer’s, and patients in rehabilitation centers the healing garden also provides horticultural therapy. This therapy may help them regain confidence. It works as a place where they can feel less pain, safe and to some level be healed by nature’s healing process. For old people, patients, physically challenged or people with limited mobility garden made in raised beds at wheelchair height become most functional. Plan to make their participation in garden easier. When living with limitations growing and harvesting bring a sense of fulfillment and achievement. Certain plants may have special meanings to them – use those. Design to engage senses beyond sight. Choose insect and disease resistant varieties to minimize pesticide use and discourage undesirable insects

Crash Course 7-Day Program to Self-Improvement

I seem to lost count on how many times I've read and heard of celebrity marriages failing almost left and right. Not that I care (and personally I don't), it seems strange that we often see movie and TV stars as flawless people, living the fairytale life of riches and glamour. I suppose we all have to stop sticking our heads in the clouds and face reality.

There are many ways to lose your sense of self-esteem despite of how trivial it could get. But whatever happens, we should all try not to lose our own sense of self.

So what does it take to be a cut above the rest? Here are some of the things you can think and improve on that should be enough for a week.

Day 1: Know your purpose.

Are you wandering through life with little direction - hoping that you'll find happiness, health and prosperity? Identify your life purpose or mission statement and you will have your own unique compass that will lead you to your truth north every time.

This may seem tricky at first when you see yourself to be in a tight or even dead end. But there's always that little loophole to turn things around and you can make a big difference to yourself.

Day 2: Know your values.

What do you value most? Make a list of your top 5 values. Some examples are security, freedom, family, spiritual development, learning. As you set your goals for 2005 - check your goals against your values. If the goal doesn't align with any of your top five values - you may want to reconsider it or revise it.

The number shouldn't discourage you, instead it should motivate you to do more than you can ever dreamed of.

Unlocking Your Self Improvement Power

When we look at a certain object, a painting for example – we won’t be able to appreciate what’s in it, what is painted and what else goes with it if the painting is just an inch away from our face. But if we try to take it a little further, we’ll have a clearer vision of the whole artwork.

We reach a point in our life when we are ready for change and a whole bunch of information that will help us unlock our self-improvement power. Until then, something can be staring us right under our nose but we don’t see it. The only time we think of unlocking our self-improvement power is when everything got worst.

Take the frog principle for example.

Try placing Frog A in a pot of boiling water. What happens? He twerps! He jumps off! Why? Because he is not able to tolerate sudden change in his environment – the water’s temperature. Then try Frog B: place him in a lukewarm water, then turn the gas stove on. Wait until the water reaches a certain boiling point. Frog B then thinks “Ooh… it’s a bit warm in here”.

People are like Frog B in general. Today, Anna thinks Carl hates her. Tomorrow, Patrick walks up to her and told her he hates her. Anna stays the same and doesn’t mind her what her friends says. The next day, she learned that Kim and John also abhors her. Anna doesn’t realize at once the importance and the need for self-improvement until the entire community hates her.

We learn our lessons when we experience pain. We finally see the warning signs and signals when things get rough and tough. When do we realize that we need to change diets? When none of our jeans and shirts would fit us. When do we stop eating candies and chocolates? When all of our teeth has fallen off. When do we realize that we need to stop smoking? When our lungs have gone bad. When do we pray and ask for help? When we realize that we’re gonna die tomorrow.

More tips on self motivaton

1. Stop procrastinating!
2. Take control of your life. Discipline or self control jives synonymously with motivation. Both are key factors in self-improvement.
3. Understand others. If you know very well how to talk, you should also learn how to listen. Yearn to understand first, and to be understood the second.
4. Visualize it. Motivation without vision is like a boat on a dry land.
5. Want it more than anything. Dreaming means believing. And to believe is something that is rooted out from the roots of motivation and self-improvement.
6. X Factor is what will make you different from the others. When you are motivated, you tend to put on “extras” on your life like extra time for family, extra help at work, extra care for friends, and so on.
7. You are unique. No one in this world looks, acts, or talks like you. Value your life and existence, because you’re just going to spend it once.
8.     Zero in on your dreams and go for it!!!

Being positive, and staying positive is a choice

Dart Pin #4: Past Experience It’s okay to cry and say “ouch!” when we experience pain. But don’t let pain transform itself into fear. It might grab you by the tail and swing you around. Treat each failure and mistake as a lesson.

Dart Pin #5: Negative World View

Look at what you’re looking at. Don’t wrap yourself up with all the negativities of the world. In building self-esteem, we must learn how to make the best out of worst situations.

Dart Pin #6: Determination Theory

The way you are and your behavioral traits is said to be a mixed end product of your inherited traits (genetics), your upbringing (psychic), and your environmental surroundings such as your spouse, the company, the economy or your circle of friends. You have your own identity. If your father is a failure, it doesn’t mean you have to be a failure too. Learn from other people’s experience, so you’ll never have to encounter the same mistakes.

Sometimes, you may want to wonder if some people are born leaders or positive thinkers. NO. Being positive, and staying positive is a choice. Building self-esteem and drawing lines for self-improvement is a choice, not a rule or a talent. God does not come down from heaven and tell you – “Royce, you may now have the permission to build self-esteem and improve your self.” 

In life, it’s hard to stay tough specially when things and people around you keep pulling you down. When we get to the battlefield, we should choose the right luggage to bring and armors to use, and pick those that are bullet proof. Life’s options give us arrays of more options. Along the battle, we will get hit and bruised. And wearing a bulletproof armor ideally means ‘self change’. The kind of change which comes from within. Voluntarily. Armor or Self Change changes 3 things: our attitude, our behavior and our way of thinking.

Building self-esteem will eventually lead to self-improvement if we start to become responsible for who we are, what we have and what we do. Its like a flame that should gradually spread like a brush fire from inside and out. When we develop self-esteem, we take control of our mission, values and discipline. Self-esteem brings about self-improvement, true assessment, and determination. So how do you start putting up the building blocks of self-esteem? Be positive. Be contented and happy. Be appreciative. Never miss an opportunity to compliment. A positive way of living will help you build self-esteem, your starter guide to self-improvement.

Set meaningful and achievable goals

• When people feel so down and low about themselves, help them move up. Don’t go down with them. They’ll pull you down further and both of you will end up feeling inferior.
• The world is a large room for lessons, not mistakes. Don’t feel stupid and doomed forever just because you failed on a science quiz. There’s always a next time. Make rooms for self-improvement.
• Take things one at a time. You don’t expect black sheep’s to be goody-two-shoes in just a snap of a finger. Self-improvement is a one day at a time process.
• Self-improvement results to inner stability, personality development and SUCCESS. It comes from self-confidence, self appreciation and self-esteem.
• Set meaningful and achievable goals. Self-improvement doesn’t turn you to be the exact replica of Cameron Diaz or Ralph Fiennes. It hopes and aims to result to an improved and better YOU.
• Little things mean BIG to other people. Sometimes, we don’t realize that the little things that we do like a pat on the back, saying “hi” or “hello”, greeting someone “good day” or telling Mr. Smith something like “hey, I love your tie!” are simple things that mean so much to other people. When we’re being appreciative about beautiful things around us and other people, we also become beautiful to them.
• When you’re willing to accept change and go through the process of self-improvement, it doesn’t mean that everyone else is. The world is a place where people of different values and attitude hang out. Sometimes, even if you think you and your best friend always like to do the same thing together at the same time, she would most likely decline an invitation for self-improvement.

We should always remember that there’s no such thing as ‘over night success’. Its always a wonderful feeling to hold on to the things that you already have now, realizing that those are just one of the things you once wished for. A very nice quote says that, “When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.” We are all here to learn our lessons. Our parents, school teachers, friends, colleagues, officemates, neighbors… they are our teachers. When we open our doors for self-improvement, we increase our chances to head to the road of success.

Self-Discipline The control you need to take control

How do you attain self-discipline? A few options could be regular exercise, better, healthier eating, even learning to spend less money. It could be something like deciding to learn something new every single day or just getting up an hour earlier than you normally would.

Having self-discipline will help you to complete the most boring and mundane of the tasks you are focusing on. Should you find yourself sitting and thinking thoughts like “Oh, I’ll just do this instead” or “I can do that some other time” when you are working on your goals then STOP, take a deep breath and remember your self-discipline.

The end of the story? You can do anything you want to do, be anything you want to be and go where you want to go. All you need is confidence in yourself and the ability to focus. I’ve now given you ideas on how to do that so go on;

Get out there and DO it!

25 tips toward boosting your confidence and self esteem.

23. List:

Write a list of every single thing you're good at, anything from clipping the dog’s toenails to putting up a shelf. Take the time to sit and actually think about what you ARE good at and add them all to the list. You'll be surprised at how many things you end up jotting down, no matter how minor or trivial they may seem at the time.

Whenever you have a spare 5 minutes, or if you're feeling a little low, take the list out of your pocket and read it. This is a great little way to give yourself a nice confidence boost.

24: Help out:

There are lots of ways to help others, and feeling useful and helpful are great ways of building your confidence. Just make sure you do things because you WANT to do them. You could call a good friend who may be down at the moment-even take them out for coffee, you will brighten both your days, or you could possibly help out at an old folks home or similar. Knowing that people appreciate your help will boost your confidence for sure.

25: Show the way:

Think of the one thing you do best of all. Think long and hard about this one. Thought of something? Now, find a discussion group or similar related to that topic and spread your wisdom by answering questions, offering advice or help to anybody needing it. If you can’t find a group, you could even start one yourself.

People will look up to you and that will give you all the more reason to feel confident about yourself

Lessons from new life

As I watched my grandson over the last six weeks I was intrigued by the process of how he learned tosit up by himself. As he approached the age where this is part of the normal developmental stage all children go through, I watched as he practiced trying. He did more crunches then I ever could do. Every day he would try harder and longer to get the sitting up by himself correctly. The following is taken from Developmental Milestones

Sitting independently gives your baby a new perspective on the world. Once his back and neck muscles are strong enough to hold him upright and he's figured out where to put his legs so he won't topple over, it's just a matter of time until he moves on to crawling, standing, and walking.

When it develops

About 90 percent of babies can sit well for several minutes without support by the time they're 8 months old. (Even babies who've mastered sitting will topple over eventually, often because they lose interest in being upright.)

How it develops

While you can prop your baby in a sitting position almost from day one, true independent sitting doesn't begin until he has head control. Starting at about 4 months, your baby's neck and head muscles strengthen rapidly, and he'll learn to raise and hold his head up while he's lying on his stomach.

How your baby gets ready to achieve his first big developmental milestone.

Next he'll figure out how to prop himself up on his arms and hold his chest off the ground, sort of a mini-push up. By 5 months he may be able to sit momentarily without assistance, though you should stay nearby to provide support and surround him with pillows to cushion a possible fall.

The above makes the process sound easy, but it is not, and as I watched my grandson, I realized that this small task requires determination, a willingness to fail, the support of others and a belief that one can do this, and desire to take a risk to be successful. I said I am a big believer in the good of humans in an earlier post, but I worry that some of us do not remember that we had courage, determination, a belief in ourselves, a desire to succeed and the willingness to take risks and many of us also had a very strong--but maybe small support group. These were attributes we had when we were young. Some questions:

As adults do you still have these attributes? Do you have the willingness to try something new and fail? Do you have the determination and perseverance to continue to try after you have failed once? Do you have the desire and the need to take risks? Do you have a support group that we can rely on unconditionally?

I suspect that most of us don't have these attributes any more I know that I that I didn't think that I had all of these, but I realized that I do still have them. At one time in our lives I had them all, but I lost some of them as I grew older but perhaps not wiser. When we were learning to sit up, learning to crawl, learning to walk failure was not an option. We just kept trying until we succeeded. I  have talked about the universe and many believe in this power,  however, if the universe is not giving you what you need remember you have the ability within yourself to get what you want, you did when you were a baby and you can again. Just trust yourself to know that you can regain the attributes you had when you were young if you believe in yourself.