Stories

11 Incredibly Simple Ways to Infuse Your Life with Bliss, Happiness, and Joy

What do you really want from life?

I mean really, really want. If you sit down and think about why you want anything, you can almost always discover that the main reason is because you want to feel a certain way.

It could be to feel peace of mind, fulfillment, purpose, or even freedom.

You may think you want money, but what does money give you? Freedom? And what does freedom give you?

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Clearing Clutter Opens the Mind

By Jakob Barry / 12 Comments

I do a lot of writing about home improvement and environmental issues and one of the most important topics I find everyone can relate to is clutter.

Clutter can be a heavy burden that confines and suffocates. Like the interesting phenomenon of a pet taking on characteristics of its owner when they’re out for a walk, we often take on elements of the mess around us without even knowing it.

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Seven Creative Ways to Change Your Perspective

By Ali Luke / 13 Comments

Do little things make you unnecessarily stressed?

Do you feel a nagging sense of dissatisfaction with your life?

Do you struggle to see other people’s point of view?

It’s often hard to keep a sense of perspective in our lives. We’re constantly bombarded with urgent-seeming stimuli – like texts, phone calls, instant messages, tweets and emails. We live each day in a rush, fighting our way through an endless to-do list.

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Changing Direction Later in Life

By Wendy Thomas / 20 Comments

Here’s the paradox: over the age of 50, change gets harder, and yet it can also seem more urgent.

For most of us, life is settled and patterns of behaviour firmly engrained. We may have lived in the same house or town for many years, been together with same partner for just as long and worked in the same field all that time. But just as the notion of retirement begins to loom up ahead on the mental horizon, circumstances or natural processes often conspire to throw us off the track.

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Why Failure is a Part of Success

By Deborah Fike / 31 Comments

As long as I can remember, I’ve wanted to be a writer. I kept a journal faithfully throughout my school years and entered every story writing competition I could. I’d write short poems in the margins of my science lecture notes and even penned comic book stories about all my friends being superheroes. With good grades and stacks of finished stories, I felt like nothing could stand between me and a promising career as a writer.

Except that life interfered. Despite my best intentions, I ended up curtailing my dream once I hit college. Studies overrode novel writing. I picked up a boyfriend, who took up most of my time. I did try to keep writing by submitting short stories every now and again to collegiate magazines, but none of them were accepted. After several rejection letters, I shelved my writing dream in lieu of other pursuits. Once in a while I would find an old 3.5” floppy filled with story ideas and imagine “what if,” but things didn’t get much farther than that. I was unhappy about it, but I felt I should spend my time doing “adult things.” At the tender age of 23, I felt I had failed at writing.

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How to Find Your Passion in the Next 5 Minutes

By Jillian Davis / 20 Comments

I read a wonderful post on this blog recently about we don’t FIND our passions, they come THROUGH us: Our passions are already there. This is very, very true.

I was reminded of this over the weekend while teaching a workshop on finding your passion and creating income from it. We were in the portion of the class in which I did some *laser consults* from the front of the auditorium. I was helping one man come to understand his true *Passion*. In fact, he was close, because he already knew that he wanted to be a Professional Speaker. However, he couldn’t choose WHICH of many topics he wanted to speak on.

I put it to him square: “What would you do with your life’s work, if you were going to die tomorrow?”

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Are You Letting People Help You?

By Ali Luke / 4 Comments

How often have you tried to change something, only to give up a few weeks later?

I know my list of failed changes is pretty long. I often have great intentions (about getting up earlier, or eating more healthily, or taking more exercise) – but I don’t always manage to follow through.

If it’s the same for you, perhaps you’re lacking one crucial component of change: other people.

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Turning Shyness into a Strength

By Mark Harrison / 11 Comments

Does the thought of doing certain things hold you back, be it in social situations, work, public performances, or relationships? Like most things, a little shyness is normal and even helpful in small doses – it can be quite an endearing trait – but shyness can also be debilitating. But, as with many things, a little refocusing can turn things around. If shyness is more your enemy than your friend, here are some ideas on how to turn your shyness into a strength.

Sometimes, we may be ashamed of shyness – we might think it is a sign that something is wrong with us. Despite what culture dictates, being a little shy and a little self conscious is normal, natural, and nothing to be ashamed of. Start making shyness work for you by taking responsibility for yours.

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Change Is A Mental Game

By Tom Meitner / 9 Comments

Have you ever made a beef roast? I’m a foodie, and I love to cook, so I’ve taken a crack at cooking a beef roast several times now. For those who don’t know how to cook one, you basically take a giant slab of meat and throw it in the oven for a really long time.

But if you toss it in the oven and cook it until it looks brown, you may think that it’s done and ready to eat. After you cut into it to try to eat it, you find that it’s raw on the inside and completely un-eatable. This can be really confusing the first time you cook one, because on the outside, it looks ready to go, but on the inside, a lot of work still has to be done.

So why do we approach change with the same philosophy? We are constantly looking for outward signs of change – we want to see that debt disappear, we want to see those muscles pop or that number on the scale go down, we want to see all those new clients come rolling in. But change starts on the inside first, and that’s where we need to be patient.

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6 Must-Read Lessons in Success

By Mr. Self Development / 19 Comments

Robert Collier said, “Success is the sum of small efforts repeated, day in and day out.” In order to succeed, you must form the habit of following the principles that cause success.

Today I want to talk about six of those principles that will position you to succeed. Without further ado…. here are six must-read lessons in success:

1. Dare: “The person who gets the farthest is generally the one who is willing to do and dare. The sure-thing boat never gets far from shore.” – Dale Carnegie

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How to Change the World

By Mark Harrison / 4 Comments

In a previous post, I alluded to the idea that what we experience is a kind of echo of our inner world. In this post, I would like to explore this idea a little further.

Those who act on the world never, I notice, succeed. The world is a strange instrument, not meant to be handled.

This stanza from the Tao Te Ching suggests that to attempt to change the world is never a wise thing to do. Of course, people try to control the world all the time – we try to control our kids, our parents, our spouses, our careers, our health … this list goes on.

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