A Stress Free You
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This weekend is Superbowl XLIV. I’m sure that many of you are disappointed that your favorite team isn’t one of the teams competing in one of the most watched events of the year. I have to admit that I am a little disappointed that the Chargers aren’t competing. But that’s a completely different story.

I love sports stories and since the Superbowl is upon us I’d like to share one of my favorite football stories. It’s about the Green Bay Packers Coach, Vince Lombardi and a very famous lineman that played for him. It illustrates how helping others succeed can help us in ways that we don’t even expect.

During a practice session that wasn’t going very well Coach Lombardi singled out a guard and belittled him for his failure to “put out”. It was a typical hot, humid late summer day when Coach Lombardi called the big guard over and opened up on him with both barrels of his vocal guns. Read the rest of this article…

“The state of your life is nothing more than a reflection of your state of mind.” - Dr. Wayne W. Dyer

Have you watched the movie “Yes Man”? If you haven’t I highly recommend it. It’s about a guy named Carl, (Jim Carey) who is stuck in a really bad place in life. In fact he’s so badly stuck that he almost drives away all his friends. After having an epiphany, Karl decides to attend a seminar that is built around saying “Yes” to everything. The first thing he says yes to is a homeless man that wants a ride to a city park on the other side of town. After allowing him to make phone calls on his cell phone and running down his battery he ends up out of gas and without a way to contact anybody in the middle of a far away park. He walks to the gas station and then his new life begins.

Now I don’t want to spoil the movie for you, and although it’s not for everyone, I do recommend that you watch it. It goes through Karl’s transformation by saying yes to life’s opportunities. By saying yes his whole attitude toward life changes, which in turn changes his life. Read the rest of this article…

“Do not fear the winds of adversity. Remember: A kite rises against the wind rather than with it.” – Unknown

A man found a cocoon of a butterfly. One day a small opening appeared; he sat and watched the butterfly for several hours as it struggled to force its body through that little hole. Then it seemed to stop making any progress. It appeared as if it had gotten as far as it could and it could go no farther.

The man decided to help the butterfly, so he took a pair of scissors and snipped off the remaining bit of the cocoon. The butterfly then emerged easily. But it had a swollen body and small, shriveled wings.

As the man continued to watch he expected that the butterfly’s wings would enlarge at any moment and expand to be able to support the body, which would contract in time. Read the rest of this article…

“Our minds are as different as our faces. We are all traveling to one destination – happiness – but few are going by the same road.” – Charles C Colton

In the March 1997 edition of Bits & Pieces there is story about Economics Press Novelist Sinclair Lewis who was supposed to deliver an hour-long lecture to a group of college students who planned to be writers.

Lewis opened his talk with a question:

“How many of you really intend to be writers?”

All hands went up.

“In that case,” said Lewis, “my advice to you is to go home and write.”

With that, he left.

Are you living life to the fullest? Are you living life with a purpose or are you still looking for ideas on what your life’s purpose is? Read the rest of this article…

“We are what we do repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.” – Will Durant

A while ago I read about a New York social psychologist who was studying rat behavior. He was trying to discover a way to more accurately determine social behavior. He took a rat, put it on one end of a maze and put cheese at the other end. Fairly quickly the rat found the cheese. The psychologist then changed the maze; put the rat and the cheese back in and to no one’s amazement the rat found the cheese.

Then the psychologist changed the game. He put the rat back in but didn’t replace the cheese. Being conditioned to find the cheese, the rat went looking for it and looked disappointed when he didn’t find it. The psychologist repeated putting the rat in the maze with no cheese a few more times and within a short while the rat would no longer look for the cheese.

With this information the psychologist made this observation. The difference between rats and man is that rats, when given different information, will give up. They take what happens to them and use it to give themselves a way to evaluate what they want to do in the future. Read the rest of this article…

“It is not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is: what are we busy about?” -Henry David Thoreau

A couple of decades ago, a movie titled “Short Time” played in the movie theaters. It wasn’t a big box office hit, but it was amusing and it did make a point about living life to the fullest.

The movie was about a 50 year-old detective who was about to retire from the New York police force in eight days. Like most detectives, he worked all the time and definitely wasn’t living his life to the fullest. As a result of his dedication to his work he’s divorced and his ten year-old son, who he really wants to be a part of his life, lives with his ex-wife. He wants to retire to have more time to spend with his son. As you can probably imagine, this man doesn’t have the most positive mental attitude and, with eight days left on the force, he just wants to finish his time and play it safe. Read the rest of this article…

Do you have difficulty sleeping? Are you one of those people that have trouble falling asleep and go to bed every night wondering how long you’ll toss and turn without sleeping? Are you one of those people that find falling asleep at night is a chore, a time that you dread? Are you one of those people who are looking for a cure for insomnia?

Throughout most of my life I could fall asleep quickly and easily. After I’d fall asleep I’d usually stay asleep throughout the night. That was until a few years ago when I had the call. The call was from the hospital telling me that both of my parents were very sick. That’s when I really started to have difficulty sleeping.

The voice on the other end of the phone informed me that my parents were both in the hospital. Both my parents had come down with the flu. As a result, my father was dying from pneumonia. My mother would recover but since she had dementia she would need me to make some decisions about where she would stay. Read the rest of this article…

There are many reasons for insomnia but nearly all of them are a product of your mind. Although there are times when physical injuries and sickness can keep you awake, and the use or abuse of substances can affect your sleep, 95% of the people I see for insomnia can’t sleep because their mind just won’t “shut off”. They are just too stressed out by life. They are thinking about their job, their kids, their taxes, you name it and they are thinking about it. As a result they have trouble sleeping.

They stay awake and think about how ad their job is, or how their child is not doing as well in school as they would like or how their good friend is suffering from sickness and depression. They continue to spin these things over and over in their heads until their minds go out of control! They have trouble sleeping night after night. As a result their whole life suffers.

About a year or so ago, a lady came to me because she was having difficulty sleeping. She hadn’t slept more than two or three hours at a time in nearly six months. Now there were a lot of things going on in her life. She had a teenager that was acting out. Her father had cancer. As a result of thinking about these things she was losing sleep. The effects of insomnia on her life were she was missing work, her relationship with her husband was strained and she was exhausted. Read the rest of this article…

“Your life is what your thoughts make it.” – Marcus Aurelius

Life is about making choices. Making healthy choices for your mind as well as your body is one of the best things you can do for yourself and your loved ones. Making healthy choices involves making decisions about the direction you want your life to go. Making a decision is also one of the best ways to relieve stress. Not making decisions or putting them off adds stress to your life. Making a decision is a great way of relieving stress and might be the positive motivation you need for getting unstuck and making this your best year ever.

In his Book, “The Psychology of Winning” Dr. Denis Waitley, a widely respected Sports Psychologist and an ex-Navy fighter pilot, talks about how humans are a goals seeking mechanism. He points out that the brain works similarly to a cruise missile. When programmed correctly the cruise missile makes course corrections and adjusts its directions to strike its target. If aimed incorrectly or at a target too far out of range the cruise missile will wander around aimlessly and then finally crash at an unknown destination. Read the rest of this article…

“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.” – Confucius

Have you ever felt stuck?  I mean have you ever felt that your life is taking you nowhere?  You want to make a change in your life, maybe start a business, lose weight, quit smoking, get a date or just feel like you’re going somewhere in life? How can you get the positive motivation to move you from where you are to where you want to be? How do you go about getting unstuck? I believe it all starts with taking it one step at a time.

When I was in basic training, known as boot camp in the Navy, we had to do a qualifying swim. What we had to do was go on the diving board, take a step off and swim to the side. Once we did this we were considered to be able to swim and therefore could become sailors in the United States Navy. Read the rest of this article…