They say it’s the little things in life that matter, and if you think about your most precious memories, you’ll know it’s true.  You probably can’t remember most of the Christmas gifts you gave in the last few years even though you agonized over the purchases at the time, but you can remember the way your little granddaughter tucked her head against her father’s cheek just as you snapped the picture in front of the Christmas tree.  You probably can’t remember the details of what you learned in your college courses, but you can remember the way a single professor changed your direction with a word, a look, or a powerful story.  You probably can’t remember what order the events took place during your wedding, but you can remember the look on your bride’s face as she said her vows.

Little things add up, day after day, to a wholesome lifestyle of health, happiness and self actualization.

Today we’re going to take a look at how satisfied you are with the health and recreation aspects of your life.  You probably saw this coming, but let’s start with a short quiz.  Respond to each of the following statements with “true” “false” or “sort of.”

1. In the past week, I can think of a couple of times where I just hung out and did something I enjoyed.
2. Overall, I think I take in a pretty good balance of healthy foods.
3. Junk food is a treat for me; not my staple diet.
4. I keep myself toned and fit by exercising regularly.
5. It’s pretty rare for me to be sleep-deprived.
6. I’m a person who knows how to relax.
7. I might not be a super-model or world class athlete, but I’m in pretty good shape.
8. Even though I over-indulge sometimes, overall, I have a pretty healthy lifestyle.
9. I know how to have fun.
10. When I go to my regular check-ups, my doctor seems pretty contented with my overall health profile.

Here are a couple of cliché’s for you:

• All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.
• He who has health has hope, and he who has hope has everything.

The annoying thing about clichés is that they are no less true for being repeated too often.  If you found yourself answering “false” to most of the statements above,  your path to self actualization might be hindered by the fact that you are a “dull boy.”  Part of knowing how to LIVE BIG is knowing how let go of the daily pressures of to-do lists, deadlines, and pressures and just LIVE.  Life’s too short to let it go by in a wave of somber dedication.

“Sounds confusing!”

This line is funny because, of course, the basics of money management aren’t confusing at all.  They can be summarized in a few simple steps:

1. Earn money.
2. Use it to pay for the basics first, like housing and food, and then budget it out to other categories.
3. Prepare for emergencies (and there are always emergencies) by setting aside some of the money you earn.
4. Prepare for larger purchases, like cars and houses, by saving some of the money you earn.
5. Prepare for your future, like college and retirement, by saving some more of the money you earn.
6. And, of course, as the video explains so succinctly:  “Don’t buy things you can’t afford.”

If money management is so simple, why do so many people struggle with it?

Partly because humans want more.  If they live in a cottage, they want more.  If they live in a mansion, they want more.  If they see television commercials, they want more.  If their friends describe their car/vacation/home/life, they want more.  When a new credit card comes in the mail, a  new generation of computers comes out, a new feature is added to your dream car . . .   You get the idea.  We want what we want when we want it.  Mad Magazine put it this way:  “The only reason a great many American families don’t own an elephant is that they have never been offered an elephant for a dollar down and easy weekly payments.”

You don’t need an elephant, but you might just want one.  If you’re finances are out of control, you probably have a few too many elephants in your house.  When you took yesterday’s quiz, did you spot some trouble areas in your finances?  Are you scratching to meet your obligations from month to month?  Are you vulnerable to the first major financial setback that occurs?  Are you prepared for the future?  When you go on vacation, is it with the sick awareness of your increased credit card debt?  The stress and financial chaos that comes from mismanaging your money can dominate your life and halt your progress toward self actualization.

There are thousands of books and websites teaching you the practicalities of managing your money.  CNN has a series of money management lessons on its website that will tell you everything you need to know, starting with setting your priorities and going on to making a budget, banking and saving, investing, and so on.  The US government also offers many informational sites helping consumers to learn the basics of financial management, as well as their rights as credit card users, etc.

But this information won’t help you if you don’t align your behavior and life with your values.  This is the key to finding self actualization in every category.

Money.  We’ve heard all the sayings:  “Money isn’t everything.”  “Money can’t buy happiness.”  “You can’t take it with you.”  We spend an awful lot of time and attention talking about how money doesn’t deserve our time and attention.  But at the end of the month . . . the rent is still due.  Part of reaching your state of self actualization is feeling in control of your finances and happy with your work.

How satisfied are you with your financial life?  Take this quiz to find out.  For each of the following statements, answer True, False, or Sort of:

1. I’m happy with my progress in my career.
2. I feel respected at work.
3. Most months I’m able to meet my bills without worrying about it.
4. If I lost my income tomorrow, my family would be okay for at least six months.
5. I feel like I’m doing the right work for my talents and personality.
6. In my own little way, I make a difference in the world by going to work every day.
7. I’m able to provide my family with everything it needs, plus some of the extras that make life worth living.
8. I’m clear on where I’m headed with my career goals.
9. I’m clear on my financial goals (and in harmony with my partner, if I have one).
10. My partner and I are usually able to come to a peaceful agreement about where our money will go.
11. Every so often, I sit down, consider where I am and where I’m going, and then I adjust my path accordingly.
12. I feel like I have the opportunity to reach my professional potential.
13. People who are much richer than I am may be interesting, but what they do doesn’t affect me particularly.
14. Most days I look forward to going to work.
15. I feel like my work environment promotes professional growth and a good work attitude.
16. If the car breaks down or the washer gives out, it’s a nuisance, but it’s not a financial disaster.
17. I can handle most financial emergencies without using credit cards.
18. I either pay my credit cards off each month or I don’t use them at all.
19. My partner and I are honest with each other about money.
20. I save money for what I want to buy.

The ideal response to all of these statements is “true.”  If you found you had a lot of different answers, that’s an indication that career and finances are an area of your life that could use some work.   We all know that worshipping money is a bad idea, but that isn’t a caution only for wealthy people.  Often the people who are most obsessed with money are the ones who don’t have any – who struggle from month to month and spend undue amounts of time wish for things that they can’t have and making occasional impulsive decisions that cost them long term.  Whether you’re rich or poor or somewhere in between, if you’re worshipping or obsessing about money, you won’t achieve self actualization.  You need to have a mastery over your career and finances.

We’ll talk about how to achieve that mastery tomorrow.

Does the past matter?

No . . . and yes.

No, it doesn’t matter. The past is gone. A memory. Not only a memory, but a flawed memory, stretched and twisted by perception, point of view and the distortion of time. You can’t change it. You can’t fix it. You can’t go back to school and get that degree you wanted, or ask your child one more question about his plans before you handed him the car keys. You can’t unspeak, unneglect, unscar.

If that’s the case, why have I asked you to look backwards in these recent blogs? Why did I ask you to stir up old, in some cases painful, memories?

Because, yes. The past matters. Specifically, what we bring with us from the past matters. The only thing we have is right now – the moment (for me) when I’m typing these words, the moment (for you) when you’re reading them. This is the only moment you have control over. But what you bring from the past will affect how you use this moment, and those moments, cumulatively, will determine whether you’ll achieve the success, abundance and prosperity you dream of, or continue to be frustrated and unfulfilled.

We’re nearly ready to embark on our journey to abundance and prosperity, but we have one more task to complete first. I’d like you to take all of the personal history materials you’ve accumulated, and read them through. By now, they might be taking some kind of shape in your mind. Keep an eye out for:

• Patterns you’ve repeated.
• Situations where you could have acted differently, but it simply didn’t occur to you at the time.
• Revelations you’ve had as you’ve worked – did you unearth any surprises? Did you have more control than you realized?
• Times when you focused on working toward goals, and times when you focused on grasping for immediate comfort.
• A tendency to live in the past or future, rather than using the single moment you’re in.
• “Have to” or “Ought to” motivations in your choices.

It’s time to put these lessons down on paper, in black and white, so you can see what “baggage” you’ve brought with you from the past. Journal one more time, keeping down to around a single sheet, and summarize how you’ve lived your life and what lessons you’ve learned. And then, just to encapsulate it even more, answer this question:

If you were to die today, what might be the inscription on your tombstone?

Great job! You looked backward, and survived it! Not only that, you’ve made intentional choices about the accumulated events in your history – what lessons are worth bringing with you into the next minute, and the next? What false ideas did you bring with you? Now that they’re identified, you can leave them behind.

If you’re ready to transform your life into a celebration of abundance and prosperity, join me for the LIVE BIG seminar on March 12-13 and set free your potential!

Abundance and Prosperity: What Made You . . . You?

“Why,” you might ask. “What made that the most defining moment?”

“When the terrorists took over those planes, it changed our country forever. We look at the whole world differently now.”
People a little older may name other events that were equally stunning, had equally permanent impact:

• Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech
• The day JFK was shot
• The campus riots of the Seventies
• The fall of the Berlin Wall
• The Indian Ocean tsunami in 2004

Children who don’t remember 9/11 might say that the defining moment in history was the election of our first African American president or the devastating earthquake in Haiti last month.

Historians look for defining moments in history, because it helps them to understand our nation and world. For instance, some historians consider the seventies as a defining time for the United States. The nature of our country before that time was innocent, or gullible, or idealistic (depending on the viewpoint of the historian). With the onset of Vietnam, student riots, and the assassinations of MLK, JFK and Robert Kennedy, the nature was changed, became harder, more cynical, more skeptical or realistic (again, depending on the historian).

As you embark on your journey to abundance and prosperity, you will need to apply the same scrutiny to your personal history. What have been the most defining moments in your life? These might not be the obvious things, i.e. graduation, marriage, the death of a loved one. It might be the moment you heard a speech from a person who’d gone down the wrong road and was warning you not to do the same, or the moment a stranger spent four hours helping you dig your car out of a ditch. It might be an event, as in a weeklong mission trip to the Dominican Republic or the completion of your first novel. It might even be a process, as in the five years you cared for your dying father-in-law.

Make a quick list of the defining moments of your life, and then I want you to pick three of them to look at more closely. For each one, look at these two things:

• Impact. What effect did it have on you? Going back to the previous examples, maybe caring for your dying father-in-law forced you to grow up and learn more empathy than you’d ever had before. Maybe as the stranger dug your car out of the ditch, his conversation led you to rethink your divorce plans or your parenting style.

• Response. What did you decide to do, and what were the consequences? Remember our lesson about feelings leading to action? Depending on how you process events, you respond in different ways. Let’s say one of your defining moments was the missions trip to the Dominican Republic. If the impact on you was to make you realizing how steeped in abundance and prosperity Americans really are, then your response might have been to change your whole approach to giving. If the impact on you was to make you terribly uncomfortable, your response might be to withdraw from future mission opportunities.

As you go through this process, it’s really important that you don’t make it an exercise in self-abuse. Yes, you made mistakes. Yes, you might have take the wrong (or at least less beneficial) lesson away from an experience. Being human, you are going to live life imperfectly. But, if you’re willing to challenge the self-limiting perceptions and unquestioning habits that rule your behaviors, you can also live it fully and richly.

Life’s too short to be mediocre or dissatisfied. Break into abundance and prosperity by joining me for the LIVE BIG seminar on March 12-13, and unleash your unlimited potential.

Well, you’ve had some time to think about your lifeline now. Have you made any discoveries, surprised yourself with any patterns or recollections you weren’t expecting? Fantastic!

If you didn’t read my last blog, I encourage you to go back to it by clicking here. We’re embarking on a journey to a new, rich life full of abundance and prosperity. Right now, we’re checking our gear and supplies so we know exactly what we have to get us through the trip. Join us!
Ready to do some work?

The first thing I’d like you to do is make note of your most important “prouds” and “sorries.” As you wrote your lifeline, what memory hit you with a wave of sick regret? (I bet that’s the easy question; we tend to be pretty hard on ourselves). And what memory gave you a thrill, as if you your heart leapt: “Hey! I did well there!”

If you’re having some trouble with this exercise, you might be struggling with opening yourself, making yourself vulnerable to reality in the harsh light of day. Maybe you think your life is such a mess that you can’t think of anything you’ve done right. Maybe you’ve lived so carefully that you have no major regrets at all. Seeing some examples from other people might help you access your own (these are compilations of many stories, of course, to protect privacy):

• Carmon, now in her thirties, has spent half of her life using street drugs. Her failed drug tests cost her the custody of her children and a terrific job opportunity. You can probably guess what she wrote for her “sorries.” But what could she, you might be wondering, possibly be proud of? She came up with several things, actually. “I never, never missed a visit with my kids, and I never left without telling them that I loved them. They knew I was a mess, but they knew it wasn’t their fault, and that I would never stop loving them.” “I went into rehab four times – I never quit trying to quit. And the last time, three years ago, I finally got clean, and I have been since then.” “I’m so crazy-busy now trying to work and go to school, but at least once a month I volunteer at the youth center. I just want to keep kids away from the mistakes I made.”

• Jeff, at forty-two, is a successful mid-level manager at a medical equipment company. He’s managed his money well, so his family is comfortable even while his two kids are in college, and he’s a good citizen, neighbor, husband and father. To many, he would appear to be living the life of abundance and prosperity that most people crave. Does he have regrets? “When I was seventeen years old, my dad told me that I needed to stop drawing and start preparing for the real world. Up until then, I spent at least an hour every afternoon drawing these really detailed pictures of dragons and castles and knights. I know I needed to get ready to be an adult – pay the bills and all that – but ever since I put my pens away I’ve felt like there was a part of myself that had been shut down.”

• “I never really did anything to be proud of,” says Anne, now in her sixties. “I didn’t finish college and I never did anything special. My husband died six years after we got married, so I had to work all the time just to keep a roof over my kids’ heads. I never had time to think about doing anything heroic or anything.” Just worked all the time after my husband died so I could keep a roof over my kids’ heads.” It took the people in the group around her to show her what I’m sure you’ve already realized: She did something to be very proud of, indeed. No doubt her three children, now grown, college-educated and successful in their respective fields, would be the first to agree.

In this exercise, I put the “prouds” and “sorries” together because they are equally important in molding you into who you are. Both your regrets and your triumphs combine to mold you into who you are. The day you did . . . whatever it was that made you proud . . . you became a different person. If you could go back and undo that moment when you . . . whatever . . . you wouldn’t be the complex, capable person you are today. Wisdom is never bought cheaply, but since you paid for it with the choices you regret, you might as well pull it out and use it.

In my next blog, we’re going to pull out another element from your lifeline: your defining moments. In the meantime, if you want to streamline this process of self-discovery and propel yourself into abundance and prosperity, join me for the LIVE BIG Seminar on March 12 and 13.

It takes a certain amount of courage to set aside your defenses and take a long, honest look at yourself. If you’re ready to break free into a life of abundance and prosperity, it’s time to release the justifications, the illusions, the compliments that people have paid you and the insulting labeling they’ve smeared on you. It time to take in the real you, without judgment or fear. Let’s start by looking at your life so far:

• Fold a sheet of paper long ways, then open it and trace the crease with your pencil. Hold the paper horizontally and write “birth” on the left end of the line and “today” on the right end. This is your life line.

• Now I want you to use this graph to tell your life story. Put a date on the line for each significant, life-defining that you’ve experience, and determine whether it was a valley (dropping below the line) or peak (rising above the line). Don’t try to create a coherent fact sheet of the biographically significant dates. On this diagram, you’re making note of the events that changed or defined you, even if they would seem insignificant to someone else (“conned my brother into giving me his caramel apple even though he didn’t want to”).

• Spend some time reflecting on this sheet. If you’d like, redraw it, make it more decorative with colors or pictures, break the line down into meaningful segments of time with vertical lines. Do whatever you need to do to take it in and identify patterns and themes that have made you into the person you see in your mirror today.

“A warrior,” says Nick Nolte, “. . . is about absolute vulnerability. That’s the only true courage.” It’s frighteningly easy to see the weaknesses, vulnerabilities, and negative patterns in others’ lives. It’s shockingly difficult to fact them in ourselves. But if you are genuinely ready to change your life of mediocrity, unfulfilled passions or fizzled dreams into one of abundance and prosperity, then this is the kind of courage you’re going to need. In my next blog, we’re going to work more with this life story graph, so keep it handy, and let it play in your head. As you go about your activities today, you may realize that you’ve overlooked an important defining moment, or that you see a pattern in your relationships that you’d never noticed before.

You may even feel a little dejected at some of the realities that you’ve exposed. Make sure that you don’t do the pendulum swing from complete denial to self-contempt. If you’re being honest in this process, you are going to find the flaws, weaknesses and negative patterns that you were previously only able to see in others. Acknowledge the truth in what you see – you are an amazing creation, born into in imperfect world, and inevitably flawed . . . but still amazing!

Finding the life of abundance and prosperity that you dream of takes courage, determination and a single-minded intensity. Streamline the process by getting the expert assistance of the folks here at the Human Development Institute. Join me for the LIVE BIG seminar on March 12 and 13 and break free of the negatives in your past.

Whether you are in your twenties, forties, or closing in on that “final curtain,” you have a dream for your future (I know this, because you’re reading this blog.  You haven’t given up!).  Is it a relationship you want to repair?  A goal you’ve been afraid to pursue?  A passion that has gone unfulfilled?

At the Human Development Institute, we are committed to helping you create a future that will bring you success, joy and meaning.  So you might be a little confused as I begin this series of blogs about abundance and prosperity by inviting you to look backwards.  But we’re going on a journey, my friend.  And before we start striding off into the Great Unknown, we need to take stock of what tools, strengths, information and – yes, even liabilities – we’re taking on this trip.

Sinatra asks,

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.

What are you?  What have you got?  And what does that mean, anyway, “if not himself”?  Do you have yourself?  I know that you’ve heard this many times, but no matter how many people are born into this world, there is no one else exactly like you.  Even if you have an identical twin who shares the same DNA, you each have your own palate of tastes, talents, quirks, and passions.  You are an incredibly complex and utterly unique creation, and if you are dissatisfied or unimpressed with the person in your mirror, then you’re not looking hard enough.

The greatest resource you have on your journey to abundance and prosperity is yourself, or, should I say, your self. But, like any other tool, the usefulness of your self depends on your skill, knowledge and willingness in employing it.

Join me now in this series of blogs as we begin our journey with an examination of who and what you really are.  If you decide to follow along, you should mentally commit to:

• Allow a little time (five or ten minutes) each day to really concentrate.
• Actually do, not just glance at, the associated activities.
• Commit to being honest with yourself.
• Be as gentle and as loving with yourself as you would with others.  In other words, if you happen across a flaw, weak spot or other embarrassing truth about yourself, put it in the category of “reality.”  Of course you have some less appealing qualities.  Doesn’t everyone?

I once came across this quote (I wish I knew who said it):  “There’s a difference between interest and commitment.  When you’re interested in doing something, you do it only when circumstances permit.  When you’re committed to something, you accept no excuses – only results.”

Are you “interested” in making your dreams of abundance and prosperity come true?  Or are you going to make your dreams come true, but committing yourself to the process and embarking on this journey of self-discovery?  If you’d like to put this process into hyper-drive, turn on the intensity of your quest by joining me for the LIVE BIG seminar on March 12 and 13 . . . and you’ll be able to say, “I faced it all and I stood tall.  And did it my way!”