How to create joy each day?

I was in a meeting last night and we were talking about what we know and don't know. While it seems easier for some people to smile and always seem happy, I got thinking that people who might not smile as often and seem distracted may not have had the time to look at how to bring joy into their l;ives each day. “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, and honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo F. Buscaglia Actually, there isn’t any art behind it. Just that you were born to be happy, and you can show this happiness with that beautiful smile of yours. C’mon! Let’s see it. Okay, good. To some extent, we all know how to spot a genuine smile, basically this formula: Genuine Smile = Crinkly Eyes We are all sensitive to this genuine scale, so why then is it that when we cross paths with a stranger or casual acquaintance in the elevator, we give them a fake smile? That ‘polite smile’. You know what I’m talking about (don’t get me wrong, I do this too, unconscious at grocery stores, on streets, while waiting for something.). The lesson? Smile with your eyes! Feel it genuinely and it will come out naturally. Extras: check out this quick interactive quiz from BBC to test out your ability to spot the difference between a real smile and a fake one. Note: I am now smiling as I write this article. I love it! Thank you for reading and allowing me to express myself creatively. A smile is so simple, yet so powerful. Some noticeable effects of externalizing your internal joy are: People will be attracted to you – I don’t mean sexually (well, maybe that too), but people will feel drawn to your energy. When you smile more, you will carry an aura and poise that will draw people to you. People will look forward to being around you, knowing only that they feel great around you. People on the street, at work, your friends etc. We all like and want to be around happy and cheerful people, right? Optimistic – You’ll feel more positive about yourself and the world. Happiness & Joy – A smile is an expression of happiness and joy in you. Like an upward spiral, a smile will boost the happiness you feel. Healthy – A smile can affect your internal state, which can have physiological impact on your physical and mental health. Approachable – A smile is so welcoming and will make people feel more at ease. Making Other People Happy – A smile has the power to make other people feel good about themselves. It’s heart-warming and has the power to cheer up others instantly. Smiles Are Contagious – Others can quickly and easily catch it and will experience the above ‘side effects’. Take The Smiling Challenge! Smile at Strangers -You know those times when we cross paths with a stranger or accidentally catch someone’s gaze, and we (both) would suddenly look away in awkwardness or pretend we are looking at something else? Well, the challenge is to give them a big smile. A genuine smile, showing teeth and everything. Deepak Chopra talks about giving each person you encounter a small gift. I do this with a smile. Why not? It doesn’t cost us anything. Plus, it’s a lot more fun than feeling awkward and pretending you’re not there.I also love to see people’s reactions when you smile at them, and they aren’t expecting it. Some blush, and others are surprised and smile back, which makes me feel all warm inside. Smile at Work -Living under a routine, we can easily be in a zombie-like state when coming into work. We zip into work quickly following the same routines we’ve habituated. Our target is to get to work, and we can sometimes forget about the people around us, in other cubes/offices/departments. So, the challenge is to practice beaming with smile as you come into work. Smile genuinely with people you meet. Be completely pleased to see them. Make it a focus for the day, to bring more happiness into the lives of others. Ask them genuinely and infused with energy, “How are ya?” “How was your weekend?” Watch the smiles surface on their face. A Small Compliment with Your Smile -When meeting or encountering people. Look for things you admire or like about them, however small, let them know. A small genuine compliment can go a long way to lift people’s spirits. I’ve found it useful to be conscious of things that make me smile. You might want to spend a few minutes making a list of things that brings a smile to your face. Some Moments That Make Me Smile are: When Zippy (my 10 week Jack Russel) growls me for not getting her into the room (She's only 10-12 cm tall and I am 6foot). When I practice gratitude ‘sessions’ When I reach mini goals throughout the day. When I read comments left by readers. More Tips To Bring Smiles into Your Life Smiling Journal – For two weeks, record the moments that brought out your wonderful smile. If you are ever feel down, flip through this book to be reminded of things that make you smile. Experience those moments and notice your state shift to a positive one. You cannot be both angry and smiling at the same time. I learned in physiological psychology that if the physical action conflicts with that of your feeling, the feeling inside will shift to match that of your outer sensation. One way to shift your emotion is to change your physiology.A journal will bring smiles through noticing the good things as well. Appreciation – Identify things that you are grateful for. Then focus on those things as much as possible. Humor – Make a point to watch a comedy movie. To go a comedy club. Hang out with people who make you laugh. Go On a Self Date – When we feel more connected with ourselves, we feel more joy and tend to naturally smile more. Find Innocence - Observe a small child or a pet at play with total ease and freedom. Watch their innocence, enjoy their presence and yours. Are you smiling? Do you feel happy for them? That’s because you are connecting with the same innocence within yourself. What makes you smile? Who made you smile today? Share your joy and happiness in a comment! See you there. *smiles* Ignite the fire within. www.fraserstirling.co.nz

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I MUCK UP?

The other day I spoke about making mistakes. While making a mistake isn't bad, repeating the same one over and over is. We must learn from the things we do. Your failure may prove to be an asset, provided you know why you failed. There are a few occasions during our brief time on earth when most of us experience great flashes of insight, great moments of truth that forever change the course of our lives. Most of those experiences result from spectacular failures, not from outstanding successes. It is from the failures that so tested and dismayed us that we learn the most lasting lessons. When you are the unwilling recipient of a great moment of truth, extract the useful lessons and then put the entire episode behind you. Learn from your failures, forget about them, and move on to better things. Take time today to think over what you have done throughout he day. SAsk yourself what worked and what could I have done better. Igniting the fire within. www.fraserstirling.co.nz

Learn from your mistakes

If you don’t know why you failed, you are no wiser than when you began. There’s an old saying that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it. So it is with our failures. Unless we learn from our mistakes, we are likely to repeat them until we learn from such experiences and correct our course-or give up and accept temporary defeat as permanent failure. Every setback you encounter in life contains valuable information that, if you study it carefully, will eventually lead you to success. Without adversity, you would never develop wisdom, and without wisdom, success would be short lived indeed. When you make a mistake, say, “That’s good! I’ve gotten that out of the way. I will never do that again.” You will no doubt make other mistakes, but they won’t bother you nearly as much when you treat them as learning experiences. By learning from our mistakes we are one step closer to knowing what ignites our fire. www.fraserstirling.co.nz

Develop A Prosperity Consciousness!!!

For a long long time I have heard people comment about how they are stuck in a rut and ask me why they are in the place they are now. If they were to take note of the words they were using they would have answered their own concerns. They were creating their own state of feeling stuck and or feeling of helplessness due to the things they were thinking and or saying. The starting point of all riches is the development of a prosperity consciousness. You must become a financial success in your thinking long before you achieve it in your reality. Both poverty and riches are the result of a state of mind, and the most important single step you ever take on the road to wealth and financial independence is the decision to change your thinking, to impress into your mind an unshakable belief that you can and will achieve your financial goals. This must happen before anything else happens. When I was growing up, I was fascinated by stories of successful men and women and how they made and lost their fortunes, and then made them over again. I read about the importance of a prosperity consciousness in the book, Think And Grow Rich, by Napoleon Hill, several times. But I never fully understood what it meant until a few years ago. Then it hit me and I've never been quite the same since. Every aspect of my life has improved dramatically, especially in the area of accumulating my desires, since I finally understood what is meant by a prosperity consciousness. Remember the first step is to identify your own passion and make progress towards what is important to you. Ignite the fire within. www.fraserstirling.co.nz

FINDING YOUR PASSION

In my time studying leadership and evaluating effective leaders, I have stumbled across a leadership shortcoming that amazes me. Leaders will manage a team, work with the same individuals every day, yet hardly know anything about their people! These leaders have never prioritized acquainting themselves with the dreams, thoughts, hopes, opinions, and values of those they lead. How powerful it is to know what makes our fellow workers tick. The best leaders are readers of people. They have the intuitive ability to understand others by discerning how they feel and recognizing what they sense. I have found that leaders overestimate the amount of time and effort needed to get to know someone. In fact, in only one hour with you in private conversation, I could, probably by asking three questions, find the passion of your life: What do you dream about? A person’s dreams are powerful revealers of passion. When a person starts to talk about their dreams, it’s as if something bubbles up from within. Their eyes brighten, their face glows, and you can feel the excitement in their words. What do you cry about? Passion can be uncovered by peering into the hurts deep inside a human soul. The experience of pain or loss can be a formidably motivating force. When listening to a story of grief, you hear a voice thick with emotion, you see watery eyes flooded with feeling, and in that moment you glimpse the intense connections between a person’s deepest pain and their greatest passion. What makes you happy? I have fun hearing what makes people tick and seeing the smile that comes when they talk about where they find joy. Enjoyment is an incredible energizer to the human spirit. When a person operates in an area of pleasure, they are apt to be brimming with life and exuding passion. If you can uncover a person’s dreams, hurts, and joys, you’ve discovered the central dimensions of their life. Igniting the fire within www.fraserstirling.co.nz

PATIENCE!!!

The other day I spoke about some opportunities that have become evident in my life. While it is tempting to jump at every opportunity, there is still a place for patience. Patience is a virtue I admire so much. It says a lot about a person’s character. I’m very fortunate to have known inspiring role models who displayed patience, grace and class under pressure. Even when Life seems to throw them curve ball after curve ball, they remain standing tall and proud. Their mindset declares to the world, “I’m not going to let another temporary setback define who I am. I will keep going until I succeed!” In this age of instant everything – instant noodles, instant messaging, instant…you get the picture – it’s hard for people to cultivate patience. We’ve become so used to instant gratification that the idea of waiting has become somewhat alien. Do you know the old saying “Rome wasn’t built in a day?” This means great things take time to achieve. It took the people of the Roman Empire years to establish themselves as a world power. But with patience, perseverance, guts and political maneuverings (this one wasn’t pretty though!), their conquests spanned several nations. Art and philosophy flourished in that period. Their cities were the most beautiful in the world. We can take the Roman Empire analogy and apply it to ourselves. All of us want to succeed, but sometimes we are either too impatient or pessimistic that we end up negating all the hard work we’ve done so far. Speed and pessimism are success killers, and here’s why: Faster may be better, but not always. Completing tasks ahead of schedule is always a plus. You save time and money. But when you’re in too much of a hurry, the quality of your work may suffer. On the personal front, if you’re working towards achieving inner peace, you need to allow yourself time to reach your goal. We have to remember that certain things happen according to their own timetable. Professional success coach Jim M. Allen shares the same pragmatic view in his article “Success Coaching: Instant Success” published in Healthy Wealthy nWise: “(Success) comes to you on its own schedule as the result of consistent, persistent action.” My personal favorite line in his article is “Do what needs doing and let life take its own course.” I couldn’t agree more. Do what you have to do, and do them well. You might get results right away or you might not at all. But rather than panic, you need to sit back and wait. Do other things besides waiting. Ever heard of the expression “a watched pot never boils?” As funny as it sounds, things manifest themselves when we’re not focused on them. Pessimism attracts negative results. When you focus on what you don’t or can’t have, you build barriers that repel success. Your thoughts shape your subconscious. They determine results. Easther Sudharta echoed this in his Healthy Wealthy nWise article “How to Cultivate a Mindset of Abundance”: “For (people), unfortunately, especially with a mind focused on what they can’t have, this will likely always be true.” So how does one cultivate a mindset of abundance? Embrace the possibilities in this world, ignore the limitations and work on what you can do to start improving your life. There is no point on dwelling on the stumbling blocks. Focus on what you actually have and can do. Sometimes we need a boost to help us manage the more challenging aspects in our life. This is where coaching comes in. If you’re having performance issues at work, for instance, a good coach can really do wonders for your development. In his article “Coaching Vs. Managing”, also from Healthy Wealthy nWise, Craig Nathanson says, “Coaching helps to unlock a person’s potential to maximize their own performance and help them to learn vs. teaching them.” It helps him weigh the pros and cons of a situation, his own strengths and weaknesses, and map out solutions. Like the Roman general who led his troops to victory and rewrote history, a coach can help you rewrite your own life by boosting your critical thinking, giving you feedback when necessary and guiding you to attain results while respecting your need to be independent. The ancient Romans did not stop believing in their own abilities. They worked incessantly and did not let setbacks in battles stop them from winning the war. They patiently built their empire, and their persistence paid off. Modern age individuals like us certainly could take a page from history’s movers and thinkers on how to be on top of the world! Igniting the fire within. www.fraserstirling.co.nz

WHAT IS MY REWARD?

I have recently been preparing an application for a new opportunity that has opened before me. As I have been updating my details, I was reminded of the keys in creating what I want, rather than chasing someones ideal. It takes a bigger person to make $20,000 in a month than it does to make $20,000 in a year. Not a better person, but a bigger one: a bigger risk taker, a bigger thinker, someone with bigger willingness and creativity. In the same way that creating any kind of measurable success requires more from us—as in a long, happy marriage or a satisfying and meaningful career or a fit and healthy body—earning the bigger dollar amount requires a bigger person. And many of us want to be that bigger version of ourselves, to expand our consciousness to include all the riches life has to offer, including money. Yet many of us are held back.If I didn't submit my interest I would still be in the same place. We have to do different things to get different results. Before we go any further, let me be clear: I don’t believe money solves all of life’s woes. On the contrary, I see money as a magnifier, both in lack and abundance. Any time you move outside your comfort zones with money, it magnifies the circumstances of your life. If you have a great relationship, if you’re spiritually connected and you’re healthy, then an abundance or shortfall of money will make that seem even greater. (The high life with extra cash will be fun and joyful; the tough times will make you appreciate what you have in other areas of your life.) If you’re in the converse, money will magnify that, as well. (Life will seem bleaker and more lonely at the top and more impossible and desperate at the bottom.) A Couple of Bad Ideas The most common problem in this area of wealth is based on two beliefs: I’m not worthy or Money is bad (or will make me bad). People may not articulate those two beliefs so clearly, either to themselves or to others, but of the unconscious limitations that hold people back from the wealth they consciously desire, these two are the most likely psychological roadblocks. Where do these ideas come from? They are usually the result of early conditioning. I’m not worthy can stem from any number of childhood events or issues that wind up leaving us feeling as if we don’t deserve more than anybody else. As an adult, it looks something like this: I’m not good enough to earn that much money, or I’m not any better than anyone else, so why should I expect to earn more money? But who among us would say to a friend, “You know, you’re smart enough. Stop learning because you’re bound to make someone else feel stupid,” or “You’re already very healthy. Don’t you feel bad that you can bench press 220 pounds when there are those who can’t do 40?” or “Your daughter is quite well adjusted. Maybe you should back off on encouraging her self-esteem or she will be more confident than her peers”? The I’m not worthy idea about money is on pretty shaky ground when you put it in the context of other accomplishments, isn’t it? How about the other one, Money is bad? More often than not, this equally insidious idea comes from a misinterpretation of religious principles about wealth. Although according to John 10:10, Jesus Christ announced he had come to earth to give us life more abundant, many of his followers today have somehow decided that lack was Christ’s legacy, that abundance of any kind, and particularly monetary wealth, is sinful. So many of the scriptures have been misquoted or taken out of context to support this idea. For example, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God,” (Matthew 19:24). The point here was not that there’s something wrong with being rich, as it’s often interpreted. Instead, according to Paul Pilzer, economist, biblical scholar, and author of God Wants You to Be Rich, Jesus was explaining what God expects of us if we are to go to heaven, and pointing out that for those of us who acquire material wealth, we are called to do even more. We bump up against some interesting beliefs when we start talking about giving, too. What most of us need to remember is that giving is an integral part of receiving. Wealth is something like a teeter-totter, requiring balance on many levels. One of those levels is giving-receiving. Many of us say, “Oh, I’ll give money away when . . .”. When we make “enough.” Or when we make “extra.” But giving is a habit that’s easiest developed with less money instead of more. Do you think it’s easier to give $1 out of $10, or $100 out of $1,000, or $10,000 out of $1 million? A great example of this is income, which has two balancing elements: psychic rewards and monetary rewards. Monetary rewards are the paycheck; that’s obvious. The psychic rewards come from doing something in alignment with your purpose, from doing something that meaning for you. In any profession or career, the ideal is to balance both types of rewards. If one is insufficient for you—either your pay is great but the job stinks, or you love the job but can barely cover the mortgage—then you will ultimately be unhappy in that role. The mistake most of us make is thinking that if we just hang on long enough, the income will balance itself: in time, the sacrifices we make will be noticed by management and compensated, or the money will come to be fulfilling in and of itself. Sorry, it just doesn’t work that way. Then how can we increase our income, both in terms of psychic and material rewards? It all comes down to mindset. Remember these keys: You are compensated based on three factors: 1) perceived value, 2) the actual value you deliver, and 3) the ease with which you can be replaced. Improve one or all of these areas to increase your income. Remember, money is a magnifier, both in your life in general and in the workplace in particular. What you do well will be magnified with an increase in pay, and what you need to improve will also come into sharper focus. Be the first one to notice and take action. So as I continue to refine my application I am keeping those key ideas of the reward in the fore front of my mind... What about you? What are you doing to ignite the fire within you? Are you taking steps to make the most of this day? Ignite the fire within. www.fraserstirling.co.nz