Monday, August 31, 2009
How To Build Resiliency in your life:
1. Maintain a variety of projects, interests and work. If things aren’t working out in one area or project, have another one that you can turn to.
2. Choose friends wisely. Have people around you that will LISTEN to you and support you. No one should accept a person in their life who shames, belittles or criticizes them.
3. Embrace your errors and see what you can learn from them.
4. Invest yourself in your vision.
5. Focus on the process or road.
6. Accept the rhythms of life, there is pain and pleasure.
7. See the advantages in your hardships.
8. Develop a philosophy that will allow you to accept defeat on the same terms as you would welcome a victory.
9. Get to know yourself; determine what works for you, what your best work habits are, when you are most creative or alert.
10. Forget your mistakes, move on and love what you are doing.
Self- Esteem
A guide to developing more esteem for yourself:
Compassion: Honour all of your feelings, and listen with empathy to others.
Clear Communication: Express your emotions simply, and speak from the heart.
Creativity: Try new things, be playful, and invite the unexpected.
Consistency: Do what you say, and say what you mean each day.
Challenge: Approach problems with positive expectancy, and learn from the challenges.
Cheerfulness: Embrace the day with lightheartedness, and learn to enjoy life.
Confidence: Trust and believe in your own talents and abilities.
Calmness: Breathe and live from a calm centre within yourself each day.
Clear Agreements: Create clear agreements and rules that everyone understands.
Commitment: Be committed to being true to yourself and honest with others each day.
Steps to self-esteem:
1. Identify and fulfill your needs.
2. YOU approve of yourself.
3. Share experiences with supportative friends.
4. Review your successes and practice self-encouragement.
5. Get in touch with feelings and express them.
The Six Tools for well being:
1. Appreciation: This is an antidote to fear. You can’t be in appreciation and fear at the same time.
2. Choice: This is the voice of the heart and freedom. Thinking you have no choice leads to learned helplessness and causes you to give in to automatic fear reaction and blinds you from making choices.
3. Personal Power: This is taking responsibility for your life, feelings and taking action.
4. Leading with your Strengths: When you go into fear, you focus on your weaknesses. When you focus on your strengths you think clearer and keep your body from going into high arousal.
5. The power of Language and Story: Language has the power to alter perception. The words you use can free you, limit you, frighten you or strengthen you.
6. Multidimensional Living: There are three primary components of life; relationships, health, and purpose [work].
Happiness Questionnaire:
1. What makes you happiest? What brings vitality to your life?
2. When were you happiest? In what situations do you feel most alive?
3. What do you like most about yourself?
4. What creates that quality? How do you make that quality last?
5. When did you have the quality the most? How could you create more of it?
6. What gives you peace of mind?
7. What brings out the best in you?
8. Who appreciates you the most? Why?
9. What are your primary strengths?
10. What are your core beliefs?
11. Who is your emotional support network?
12. What best helps you feel creative?
Sunday, August 16, 2009
Contemplating Objects
"When we look at any beautiful object (natural or artistic), we suspend all other activity, and we are simply aware, we only want to contemplate the object. While we are in this contemplative state, we do not want anything from the object; we just want to contemplative it. . . We rest with the world as it is, not as we wish it would be." Ken Wilber
Friday, August 14, 2009
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Reflecting on Creativity
“Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their own right time, and over and over again.” - C.P.Estés
- We each have our own creative clock and periods of inactivity are necessary to fill the well.
- Obstacles are a necessary part of the process and they can become the gold for creative expression.
- Every piece of art has its cycle of birth, maturation, and death.
- Becoming one with the process is feeling alive through creative act.
- Creative insights can appear when we are occupied with something else.
- Listening to the guidance of the creative process, it will reveal where you need to go.
- To create is to be in touch with your spirit, it is a meditative practice.
“ Creation is forever individual and it always involves an accumulation of small acts as well as decisive strokes and sweeping integrations.” S.McNiff