Creating My Ideal Life: An Abundance of Trees!
Posted by Louise on Mar 1, 2010
Creating my Ideal Life is so exciting. This is a time where I really sit in the driving seat. I get to choose my goals, what’s important to me, what to do and when I do it. And the really exciting thing is this: it’s working. I am actively creating my Ideal Life and abundance is raining down on me absolutely effortlessly.
I want to share this latest windfall of dazzling abundance with you. Just over a year ago my family and I moved to a new life in France. This was a planned step in creating my Ideal Life. We just love it here. The food, the weather, the people, the culture, the language. We love everything about it.
We live in a wonderful village with medieval houses (great for my husband who is a stone-carver!). Anyway, the villages here are totally self-sufficient as regards the production of wood for home-heating. Every year the glorious deciduous forests surrounding the village are scanned for trees which need to be harvested as they are either of commercial value or cut down because they are sub-standard. The resulting timber is divided out amongst the households who wish to use a renewable, sustainable source of fuel to heat their homes.
Just guess what our timber allocation for 2010 was? We were given 26 mature trees, including oak and beech plus 16 crowns (what remains after they cut and sell the valuable trunk of the tree). Such an abundance of timber. We will be able to heat our home for free for years to come AND we will season and dry the better logs to make authentic beams and flooring. All this absolutely for free. For nothing.
Of course we are going to have to do the felling and harvesting ourselves according to very strict conservation guidelines. Yet again, the goddess of Abundance smiled upon us. We have been befriended by a single man with a passion for forestry. He will fell the trees and use his tractor to transport the heavy timber down to our yard for seasoning. All this in exchange for a shared meal and a few of my famous fruit pies. He likes my cooking and we enjoy his company. Now we will learn how the French make their forests sustainable from a genuine expert.
We were expecting perhaps three trees at most. But 26. Now that is abundance indeed. A wealth of timber and a guarantee of many evenings sitting in front of a cozy log fire.
Just in case you think these trees are small, the photo above shows my daughter standing in front of a beech tree and gives you an idea of just how tall these trees are. This timber is an unplanned bonus for having the courage to create my Ideal Life.
Do you have an Abundance Story to share with me and everyone who so faithfully reads this blog? What riches are coming your way as a result of Creating your Ideal Life?
Creating My Ideal Life: When to Complain and When to Shut Up
Posted by Louise on Feb 21, 2010
Yoo-hoo, I’m immersed in the most exciting adventure of my life to date: that of creating my Ideal Life. I have very precise goals and progress markers so I know exactly what I want to achieve. Some days I make great strides in the creation of my Ideal Life and sometimes progress is limited to just one small step or two.
Interestingly this past week has been an uncomfortable one. Then one of those ‘coincidences’ occurred. The cat knocked a borrowed – and as yet unread – book off the window sill with an almighty clatter. The book fell open and my attention was drawn to a short text about complaining.
The gist of the message was it is pointless to complain about things to the world in general. If you have something to complain about, then take the complaint to someone who can do something about the situation. By taking one’s complaint to someone with the power to change things for the better, there is some possibility of effecting positive change. Complaining to those who are powerless to effect change is merely self-indulgece, moaning and whinging.
The moral of my story is:
If you feel you must complain, bring your complaint to someone capable of redressing the cause of the complaint. Otherwise spare innocent bystanders and never, ever complain to those who are not in a position to effect positive change.
“It is impossible to suffer without making someone pay for it; every complaint already contains revenge.”
Friedrich Nietzsche (born near Lutzen, Prussia in 1844, died in Weimar, Saxony in 1900). A most influential philosopher, his notable contributions included the death of God, herd-instinct, perspectivism and will to power.
In creating my Ideal Life, I am constantly seeking ways of disciplining my unproductive thoughts. The Law of Attraction suggests we attract what we occupy our minds with. Who wants to attract cause for complaint? It seems like my new ‘complaints policy’ might be very simple to effect. Only complain to those who can help if there is a good chance of changing the situation. Otherwise zip it and drop it from my mental horizon too.
“Mrs Woolf’s complaint should be addressed to her creator, who made her, rather than me.”
Cecil Beaton (1904 – 1980), a self-taught fashion and high-society photographer. He photographed for ‘Vanity Fair’, ‘Vogue’ and is famous for his iconic photographs of “young England” of 1920 – 1930. He became official photographer to the Royal Family and received a knighthood in 1972.
Creating my Ideal Life One Day at a Time
Posted by Louise on Feb 15, 2010
I’ve had a few emotionally draining days and today I’m back on track. Hurrah! Nothing beats feeling positive! My mentor usually ends his emails with the motivational words “Onwards and Upwards”. And really there is no other choice…… I am creating my Ideal Life, so my main focus has to be on taking steps in that direction.
I have been asked by a national newspaper to contribute two lead articles per month. I have yet to deliver on that. Part of me is concerned about adding yet another string to my bow – I know all about the importance of sharp focus as a means of hitting targets. Part of me is tempted to snap up the offer and take another step towards reaching my €15,000-per-month income goal.
This is a constant dilemma for those of us on the path to creating our Ideal Life. Do I take every opportunity to get closer to my financial goal and achieve financial freedom? Or do I listen to my intuition, and avoid taking on new projects, thus keeping my focus on important targets?
It is time for a good session with my BrainWave Entrainment (BWE) program. It puts me in the perfect meditative state to calm my mind and reach clarity. I know there is nothing worse than a chaotic mind. 20 minutes of BWE will generate the brainwave patterns conducive to attaining my most productive, creative and inspirational state.
These two inspirational phrases by Carl Gustav Jung (1875 – 1961), influential Swiss psychiatrist and founder of analytical psychology, are worth reflecting on:
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
“The artful denial of a problem will not produce conviction: on the contrary, a wider and higher consciousness is required to give us the certainty and clarity we need.”
And these motivational words by Heywood Hale Broun point to the risk of using energy as a means of achieving a goal rather than gaining clarity first. Like time, my personal energy is a limited resource!
” They often made up in energy what they lacked in clarity [on baseball manager Leo Durocher's lectures]“
Now it’s time to focus on taking persistent action steps towards creating my Ideal Life.
Creating My Ideal Life: How to counteract negative self-talk
Posted by Louise on Feb 12, 2010
As a regular reader of Motivational Words, you already know that I am on a direct path to creating my Ideal Life. I know the ingredients needed to create the life of my dreams and I am weaving each element of this Ideal Life tapestry into place.
It is quite simple really. I know what I want, and all I need to do is keep my focus on creating each of my Ideal Life targets. On good days it is almost a box-ticking exercise: take a good look at my current target and take as many steps towards it as I can.
But what about the bad days? Yesterday was a bad day for me. My external world threw up so much chaos that I didn’t get time to progress my Ideal Life until late in the evening. When I finally settled down to achieve my next target, a ten minute task became exponentially complicated and took hours and hours. My inner voices started to undermine my motivation and damage my resolve: “If you continue at this rate, you’ll never finish”, “You’ve been struggling for hours now, there has to be a better way”.
To counteract the negative self-talk, I spent 20 minutes immersing myself in a Thomas A. Edison* mindset. For Edison progress always involved toil, labour, trial and error, persistence, massive effort, repeated and sustained effort.
Here are four of Thomas Edison’s famous inspirational quotes, motivational words aimed at making us recognise that achieving anything really worthwhile is also going to entail sustained effort.
“The first requisite for success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem incessantly without growing weary.’
“Genius is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration. Accordingly, a ‘genius’ is often merely a talented person who has done all of his or her homework.”
“Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.”
“The three great essentials to achieve anything worth while are: Hard work, Stick-to-itiveness, and Common sense.”
So, to anyone intent on creating your Ideal Life, let’s join forces. Here’s to creating my Ideal Life, and you creating your Ideal Life. Onward and Upwards!
* Thomas Alva Edison (1847 – 1931.) American inventor (he held a world record 1,093 patents) and researcher (he created a 22 acre industrial research laboratory). Edison played a key role in advancing the era of electricity, including the incandescent light bulb, phonograph, advances in motion pictures. A hearing problem shaped and motivated his choice of inventions.
Creating My Ideal Life
Posted by Louise on Feb 1, 2010
This is the real life adventure of how I create my Ideal Life. You are now reading the first installment of my official online progress report. Why do this in a public arena? Because both research and personal experience tells me that making my intentions and actions public exponentially increase my probability of success.
The benefit to you, dear reader, is to provide a steady stream of motivational words, by drip-feeding ideas, techniques and expertise to inspire you to achieve your greatest potential also. If I can do it, so can you.
My current personal goals are:
1) financial freedom: earning €15,000 per month by Dec. 2010 working from home;
2) having my best-possible body by the end of 2010.
If my motivational words encourage and inspire you, you can log in any time to monitor my progress. Basically you get to cherry-pick: use the motivational techniques that work best for you and leave the rest. Furthermore, you can contribute to the pursuit of excellence by adding your own motivational comments, just by hitting the Contact Us button.
I have some strategies that are already delivering results and accelerating my successes. More about those in the next days.
First a sobering fact. Success experts agree that 97% of individuals FAIL to reach their targets. Will you be included in the 97%? Are you working ceaselessly but going precisely nowhere? Well, I am on the direct route to guaranteed success. I will be one of the 3% of super-achievers. Bear with me on this, and I’ll reveal all over the next installments of my Motivational Words blog.
My first step to my Ideal Life began two years ago when I stumbled upon a brainwave entrainment program. What’s that? I’ll explain tomorrow.
