In order to stand out, one must be different
In order to stand out, one must be different. I have always loved the saying “why fit in when you were born to stand out?” by Dr. Seuss. For me it was really hard to make this change, as I had spent most of my life being invisible. I love the analogy of a rainbow. It isn’t just made up of red, yellow, blue, green, pink, and purple. It is made up of 100 of shades of every color, and every mix of color imaginable. Take just the 1,000’s of shade combinations of purple in the rainbow. While you might think that no one will notice if one shade is not shining brightly, the rainbow is diminished in its beauty when that happens. It requires every single shade to be there, in order to be the beautiful promise of God. We require every one of you to shine brightly to deliver the promise of God, which he made when he sent you to this earth. Being a leader is an interesting subject for women. I was listening to a part of Sheryl Sandberg’s Ted Talk today, and she was talking about how when she was in school she was told to not raise her hand so much. I remember the same thing happening to me. That I was bossy, a know-it-all, too smart for myself. So I shut down and started being even more invisible. I started waiting for someone to pick me instead of volunteering, and this carried over into my adult life. I turned down promotions saying that I didn’t want the responsibility, when what I really wanted to say was I didn’t want to risk being told to once again become invisible. I continually pushed down the answers I had for senior management and let others steal the ideas and promote themselves. I finally had enough and became what I called an agent of change for my own self. I started listening and following my intuition. I stepped out of my comfort zone, stood up and voiced my opinions. And I have kept expanding my comfort zone. Every mistake I have made is like compost in the garden. It may feel and smell like manure when it happens, but if I compost those failures into my life, I can learn and grow from them. I learned that I can fail and my life isn’t over. I learned that the person who judges me the most has been me, and so I gave the judge permission to cheer me on instead. I love this quote I found today, “when you dance to your own rhythm, people may not understand you; they may even hate you. But mostly they’ll wish they had the courage to do the same.” I am going to hang it over my desk. I have spent too much of my life wishing I had the courage to do what I see others doing. Instead I am going to “dance to my own rhythm” and let someone else be inspired to do the same. The Lion is released from the cage, and ready for the grand adventure!
Rescue Dogs
Wilma Melville is a retired PE Teacher. When she retired, she decided to reinvent herself with a 2nd career. She learned how to train rescue dogs. When she was called to help with the bombing in Oklahoma, she discovered that there was a shortage of rescue dogs.
She said, “I can do something about this.” So she started adopting abandoned shelter dogs and training them to have a second career as rescue dogs. In her 80’s now, she has trained over 100 dogs that were abandoned by their owners to be rescue dogs. Just imagine how many lives she has changed by giving these dogs a second chance and training them to search and rescue.
I love what she says, “there is no end to what a dog can teach you.”
New Year always brings the thoughts of a new you.
New Year always brings the thoughts of a new you.
Transformation gives you the chance to rewrite the story of who you are and who you are capable of being. There are many things in our life that we give negative meanings to. But what if you gave pain the definition that it shows you that which is not for you? This would be a positive thing to know – what doesn’t belong to me or my life. Envy is another word that has a bad rap. What if envy simply shows you things which you may wish to empower in your life? That would be a great thing to know – things I want in my life and can empower myself to obtain.
The being that is forming in the cocoon is no longer a caterpillar. For the caterpillar the past is truly a place of reference. It can no longer live there, because that body is gone. Within the cocoon the caterpillars body literally melted into goo, and then formed a totally new body. As the butterfly’s body grows into its new shape, it becomes cramped as the wings want to expand out. It isn’t a place of residence for the butterfly, so it has to break loose and spread it’s wings and find a new home.
Mary Oliver said, “I tell you this to break your heart, by which I mean only that it break open and never close again to the rest of the world.” The butterfly had to break out of the old place of residence and begin a brand new journey, where everything is experienced for the first time. It must break open its heart to begin this journey, because it has to trust its intuition for flying, for finding food, for making a new home. Literally everything for the butterfly is a brand new experience.
Transformation is a scary business. Because I am a perfectionist, I hate doing something new for the first time. I am doing the best I can with my posts, knowing that I will have spelling errors or grammar mistakes in my writing. I can proofread this a dozen times and the minute I publish I find something I missed. When I sponsor the post, I can’t make any changes, so anything I missed becomes a permanent part of the post. I am living with being imperfect in order to just get the post out there.
Steve Jobs said, “You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life. “
Giving Back
Mandie Barnes organized an amazing event to give back to the homeless. She had heard about someone in NY doing something similar and reached out to every stylist she could find to come help her.
They had Chic Fil A, Texas Road House, and Great Harvest donate food, they had hats and socks, and all supplies were donated to the hairstylist who were donating their time.
One man said it made him feel human again – Thanks to everyone who tries to make people feel good about themselves!
These hair stylists know that a haircut is a powerful thing
These hair stylists know that a haircut is a powerful thing. It inspires confidence in men and women alike. On Saturday, they volunteered their time and talents at the Ogden Rescue Mission to give haircuts to homeless members of the Ogden community. Along with support and donations from many other local businesses and friends, the results of that afternoon were incredible.
Watch the Video Here: Haircuts for the Homeless
Hope is perching in our souls and singing to us everyday
I love the Emily Dickinson poem in which she says, “hope is the thing with feathers – that perches in the soul – and sings the tune without the words – and never stops – at all”.
Hope is perching in our souls and singing to us everyday. It tells us these wonderful stories of what we can accomplish in our lives. Visualization is critical to this hope, as it helps to bring in everything we want in our lives.
I think that is why I love to read from real books, and not on a computer screen. I order the fictional books on my kindle now, but for those books that I know that I want to underline and really think about – those books have to be paper.
In the movie “The Secret” and the book that followed it, they talked about visualization. Many people will tell you that they have a hard time with it, but if you tell your mind not to picture “your kitchen”, 99% of us immediately see our kitchen in our minds eye. It is a little harder to build a visualization of something that you have never seen, but block by block, with practice it can be done.
When I learned how to do it, I started with visualizing an orange. First I would see a circle, then I added color (orange), then texture (the dimples, feeling the smooth bumps), then I would see it squirting juice down the side of the orange, feeling the spray on my face. When I reached that point of seeing the juice, I could actually taste orange juice in my mouth as I watched the juice run down the side of the orange. I just practiced every day for several weeks, until one day I didn’t need to do it step by step, it just instantly popped into my head. Then I moved on to other things. They seem real, because I put all of my senses into the visualization.
This really helped me to connect deeper to my imagination. When I read books, I now see the story in my mind. The sun shining on the ocean as it flashes bright lights along the cresting waves, hear the waves crashing on the shoreline, feel the wind blowing and digging my toes down into the cool part of the sand, smelling the salt air, – I can totally enter the world being created by the author. When I am in this space, I see connections and possibilities that I have never thought of before.
This is how I learn from everything that I read, because I enter into worlds I have no experience of. I love it when a really good movie brings you totally into the world they have created. You forget you are even watching a movie.
I am sure that you heard the joke of the man who was on his rooftop, the water in flood stage cresting higher and higher towards him. He prays for help and God sends him some people with a canoe and he says “no thanks, God is sending me help”. He prays for help and God sends him some people with a motor boat and he says “no thanks, God is sending me help”. Then a helicopter comes and he says, “no thanks, God is sending me help”. Then the flood waters come higher and he drowns. Upon entering heaven he asks God, “why didn’t you save me?” God says, I sent a canoe, a motor boat and a helicopter, but you wouldn’t get in.
This kind of visualization is how we can attract into our lives, the things we need, to bring to us the goals and dreams we want. We have to remember that part of the journey, is the lessons we learn and how we grow and change, as we go towards our destination. By visualizing into the space the gratitude of already having it, by using all of the senses, we make it so real, that the divine is busy seeing what doors of opportunity it can open for us. What kinds of synchronicity it can bring into our lives. But we have to get into the boat.
The most important thing for us is to be looking for the doors and opportunities as they pass by us and grab them. Go through them, no matter how scared we are. Take the leap of faith that this is your answer, and climb up the ladder being presented and get into the helicopter.
Thankful Service
1,000 people attend funeral for Billy Aldridge, a US Marine Corp veteran with no family.
Billy died at the age of 80 in an Indianapolis nursing home last month and the company handling his arrangements posted his story on Facebook. They asked the public to help give this man a dignified funeral service.
I think they did a good job!
I Get Around
Ok for all of you dog lovers out there, this is just so cool! Tumbles is his name and he was born with only two rear legs – no front legs. What is so cool is that with a harness attachment of a 3-D sled, they are making him two legs for this two missing front legs.
He is just 6 weeks old and just wants to be a normal puppy. The 3-D lab at Ohio University is making his new legs. It is actually a sled that it attached with a harness, and it will allow him to eat and walk just like he has legs. They have a cool video showing the process and the prototype of Tumbles new wheels.
see more: http://www.kctv5.com/…/2-legged-dog-gets-3-d-printed-harness
Shine On
Shine with all you have. When someone tries to blow you out, just take their oxygen and burn brighter.” ― Katelyn S. Irons
It is really the best revenge over who or whatever caused the storm – to still shine bright as a diamond. Use that storm to simply wash off the dust and grime that had dulled your shine and sparkle even brighter.
Be a shooting star lighting up the night sky with your brilliance.
As you shoot across the sky, find the rainbow and swallow the colors. Explode across the darkness like fireworks with all of the colors sparkling inside of you, releasing into showers of brilliance falling back to earth.
The Greatest Gift
“If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” ~Mary Engelbreit
It is really all about the words and the meanings that we assign to them. That is because words tell the story, and the story is what is perceived to be the truth. When in fact the truth is always just your perspective, “your” side of the story. The only way to have the “whole truth”, is to be able to tell the story from all points of view. The marriage of those points of view is probably the closest that we can ever come to the “whole truth”.
Perspective is from Latin perspectus “clearly perceived,” and is a way of regarding situations, facts, etc… and judging their relative importance.
I read a story of a mom that lost her daughter to sudden infant death syndrome and she was working with her third therapist in seven months.
She wanted to know what was wrong with her, that even though she was wearing a mask to the outside world that she was moving on in her life, she felt that she must be doing the “grief” wrong because inside she was hurting so much.
The therapist used words that transformed how she was viewing her grief. She said you are just very sad, and the depth of your sadness is simply a measure of how much you loved your daughter. This viewpoint of “how deeply she loved her daughter” allowed her to express the overwhelming grief, instead of bottling it all up because “seven months” had passed.
Stories allow us the space to heal the pain, and once we have healed the pain, perspective helps us to stop being a victim. Life isn’t always fair, and no one should lose a child, no matter their age. But it happens.
Every day if we look for it we can see evidence of injustice happening all around us. It is easy to get lost in the emotions created when it happens to us or someone we love. We see evidence of it in the news when the world erupts in moral outrage over things like the Paris bombing, or the kidnapping of the school girls in Nigeria, that still over one year later haven’t been found.
We have large and small things that happen to us, our friends and family that have an impact on our life. But hidden in the heartache and challenges are golden nuggets that are the gift of the trials and tribulations that we experience. It is all about perspective.
It is about not only what you look at with the experience, but also where you are looking from, a point of view. Every experience has something to offer us. When my nephew was murdered, and my sisters nonprofit that she started failed, that could have been the end of it.
But I didn’t want that to be the end of my nephews story. So I created LemonadeMakers to help the small community nonprofits be more successful. So that others like my sister can make a difference in this world. I believe with all of my heart that this is what my life has been leading me to. To this moment, to create this business to help all of the nonprofits that I can reach. Out of the pain of injustice, loss, and deep mourning came something good.
The smallest change in perspective can change a life. See life with new eyes and look for the gift. Pull out the telescope or binoculars and peer deep inside yourself. Dig deep and find the gold of the experience. Change the story, and realize just how blessed you are.
Asha Tyson said, “Don’t think that you’ve lost time. It took each and every situation you have encountered to bring you to the now. And now is the right time.” Now is the right time to let go of what can’t be changed, and live the life that the divine has put before us, with happiness, gratitude and grace.
A Wish Your Heart Makes
Dreamers make wishes when they blow out the birthday candles with complete confidence they will come true. They blow on the dandelions seeds and spread their wishes all over the world. They wish on the first star they see each night. The secret they know is — we are all just dreamers in an endless universe.
Judith Thurman said, “Every dreamer knows that it is entirely possible to be homesick for a place you’ve never been to, perhaps more homesick than familiar ground.”
Doers take the dreamers up a notch. They believe in the magic, but they also know that it takes a little bit of elbow grease to make the machines run. They know that to take the dream into reality we must put it in writing. We must plant the seeds, water and fertilize them, weed when needed and watch in amazement as the miracle of growth happens. Doers know that the energy goes when the attention flows, so rather than giving their energy to their fears, they focus their energy on their dreams. They know that action needs to follow the dream.
Sarah Ban Breathnach said, “The world needs dreamers and the world needs doers. But above all, the world needs dreamers who do.”
Thinkers know that they can put the dream on steroids because they realize the power of thought and attitude. It is like strapping a rocket onto the doers goals, when the doer has the right thinking to get the dream off the doers paper and into reality. The trick is the right amount of thinking in combination with action.
Creative thinking outside the box produces inspiring ideas that can change the world. Plato said, “Thinking: the talking of the soul with itself.” When we go deep inside ourselves and draw up the dream, enhance it by stripping away all of the negativity about the dream that we have, we become free thinkers who can see without prejudice what the destiny of the dream is. We talk with our souls and see possibilities for the dream everywhere we look. This helps the doer to pick the best door to open to the best opportunities.
That brings us to possibilities. Thomas Edison said, “When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this: you haven’t.” Since his most famous quote is “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”, I think that this quote is certainly made by someone who knows it to be absolutely true. If he had not continued his work, then his numerous inventions, most famous being the light bulb would not have been invented. He founded General Electric, had a motion picture and record company in addition to others. All because failure to him was just more information to think about. A part of the process, and not something to be avoided.
I also love the quote by Audrey Hepburn “I M Possible” instead of impossible. Inside each of us is the space where we know. We know, that we know, that we know, that anything that comes into our heart and soul for us to do, is for us to do. And most important, that it is completely possible for us to do.
So greet your dream with open arms, know that the doer and the thinker will show you the endless possibilities for you to bring that dream into reality – then go do it.
True Friendship
Meet Pattie Pig and her canine best friends Pickles and Paprika. One morning the animal shelter employees came to work to find them and a turtle left for the shelter. The turtle who was not bonded to the trio was quickly adopted. Pattie, Pickles and Paprika are having a harder time, as they really need to go to one home.
“They sleep together. They do everything together, go for walks together. The littlest one rides the pig’s back, and they’re like a real family,” Sarah McKillip, manager of the Animal Rescue League of Berks County, recently told WFMZ-TV.
The only thing they can’t do together is eat, and that’s because Pattie is too much of a — well, you know. “Pattie will eat their food. She’s a pig,” McKillip tells The Huffington Post.
“The staff, we cry about it when we think about separating them, and I’m getting emotional right now. I don’t want to separate them, so please come help,” McKillip said to WFMZ-TV.
So here’s what you need to know, to get these three special critters: The dogs are small, playful and easygoing. The pig is 120-pounds, is an indoor pet and — clearly — has a lot of character.
Their adoption fees are covered. If you’re out of state and interested — or even just want to talk about fostering before committing to a permanent adoption — still, give the shelter a ring.
see more: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/…/pig-and-2-dogs_564cefd7e4b0…