Music Changed My Mind

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During my childhood, I always kept a few albums and a record player in my bedroom. I even sang in choir during grade school and junior high. Still, music never really played a fundamental role in my life. In fact, it took decades before music changed my mind.

Looking back, I realize that I kept letting one thing – a guitar – escape my grasp. On some long-ago Christmas, one before I was even 10-years-old, my parents gave me a kid’s cowboy guitar. I can still see the orange-like color of that guitar’s body, with a rope painted along the edges. I strummed it some, made some awful sounds, and soon stopped even reaching for it.

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5 Ways to Change Your Mind About Change

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Change is inevitable. No matter what you do, you will, at some point (and probably at many points) experience change. Whether it’s good or bad, you will have to deal with it and, even when change is a good thing, you might find it difficult to accept it.

Personally, I struggle with change. Even good change can be tricky for me to deal with. For example, about six months ago I left my job to focus on my site, PositivelyPresent.com, full time. I initiated this change—and was thrilled about it—but it was still a struggle to get used to the idea that I would be in control of my own business.

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How to Stop Worrying Now

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how to stop worrying

Do you often find yourself worrying a lot? If so, you are not alone. I used to be a big time worrier.

I would worry constantly about things that would usually never happen. Time and time again it has happened to me. For example, here are some of the things I would worry about: How a visit would go before my company arrived; If I would get into a car accident before entering into rush hour traffic; If I would run into someone that I wasn’t on good terms with. I would also worry about “bigger” things like:

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Welcoming Change

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welcoming change

Monique sent us a kaleidoscope. But it wasn’t the beautiful, smoothly-sanded wood or the delicate glass end piece that moved us. It was the note in the box.

Dear Ruth and Bobbi, Looking through a kaleidoscope, I find that I love the scene in front of me. It’s so intricate and beautiful, I just want to look at it forever. But eventually, I have to turn the glass. The tiny pieces inside jumble around and, for an instant, there is chaos. Yet soon a new, even more exquisite pattern emerges. One I would not have seen if I had not turned the kaleidoscope. I send you this to remind you that your current journey is much like the turning of the glass: A new, beautiful picture is coming into view.

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How to Improve Your Self-Esteem

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how to improve your self-esteem

I struggled with low self esteem for most of my life. When I was young, most of the feedback I got from my mother was “You could do better”. If I got a ‘B’ on my report card I was told “You could do better”. It didn’t matter what household chore: dusting, washing dishes, cleaning my room. It was always “You could do better” followed by a series of corrections. Sometimes her reaction was “Can’t you do anything right?”

The meaning I gave to these events was that “I’m not good enough”, “I can never be good enough”, “I’m stupid”, “I’m incompetent”. No wonder I had low self-esteem! It took me years to realize that the negative meanings I gave things were wrong.

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6 Things I Learned From Quitting My Job

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quitting my job

About a year and a half ago, I had an epiphany. I was in a job I enjoyed. The prospects were great. But I decided that I didn’t want it any more. I needed change. I seemingly became unemployable overnight. Not one to do things by halves, I quickly set myself a goal of quitting my job by 23rd May 2012 (exactly one year after I launched my first website). I knew at the time that the goal was not rooted in any logic – I had no firm plan that would get me to where I wanted to be. But I felt that any goal was better than no goal at all.

To be perfectly honest, whilst I was determined to achieve my goal, I had absolutely no idea whether or not I would. And as it turned out, what I thought I needed to achieve in order to quit my job wasn’t what I ended up doing at all.

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Who’s Cooking Dinner? (The Changing Female Brain)

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the changing female brain

‘What’s for dinner?’ asked my youngest son. ‘I have no idea’, I replied. ‘I’m not that kind of Mum anymore’. Before you castigate me for being a bad mother, this youngest son is actually aged 19 and for a year lived away from home at College on another continent before he flew back to the nest!

Still, it did seem a bit strange even to me. Why had I gone from a stay-at-home Mom who played nurse, taxi, housekeeper, cook and Counsellor to ‘feeling’ almost completely disinterested in these roles?

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Perception of a Changing World. My Journey to a Better Life.

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I was twenty-seven years old when I saw a glimpse of how I would perceive the world in the future. Of course I didn’t realize it at the time, but the events that would follow from that time in my life, would alter my views and beliefs forever.

I went on an inner journey to discover what it was that I should do with my life. I had felt lost most of my life. I never really wanted a regular job. I didn’t like the idea of working until I was 70 so I could “retire”. Heck, I didn’t like the idea of working period. I wanted something more with my life. I wanted meaning. To do something that aligned with my non-conformist ways of how I perceived the world.

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