But sometimes quiet can be nice.

I finally had to bring in our latest and oldest cat, Mickey, to the vet. Mickey had been living under the false pretenses that litter boxes are for other cats.  I explained that our peaceful home had become a battlefield (and bathroom) due to a few personality clashes. $300 later they agreed with me. Could have saved a lot of money (translation- more shoes) if they listened to me in the first place. We both coughed up a fur ball but not before getting prozac for Mickey. Tuna flavored.  Was told it goes well with red wine.

It is amazing what we will do to get some peace and quiet. All those products from ear plugs to 3 months on an ashram. I couldn’t do the latter without a razor and gum. And red wine. With a side of tuna prozac.

FYI – both Duncan and Mickey are on prozac but the fighting goes on. I find it does take the edge off for me.  Walter, the quiet man, is getting used to my tuna flavored prozac breath.  

        

I am lucky to say that I live with a wonderful ex-chef who makes fabulous meals.  He has agreed to help me out (after about 6 days of begging but whatever works!). I bought the Flat Belly cookbook and he even “post-it” a few recipes but said most of them are about portion control.

I realized sadly that I normally eat twice my weight when my chef takes a night off and we order take out. So I told him no more take out and on the evenings that he deserves a night off, I will find myself in the kitchen and putting together something that resembles food. So this was good news. Today is Day One. Yesterday was Moe’s Mexican food.                      

The other thing I realized that is has to taste so bloody good for me to go off this new way of eating – my new lifestyle. If I am going to have the best Mexican food again it will be from the Mexican deli on Valencia in San Francisco. It will also be a very expensive meal since I live in NY. So I will let you know when hell freezes over.

I did more work on the coaches on the edge’s book proposal and got some of it back from my copyeditor friend. Once these sections are done – we will be that much closer to getting it out to overly eager literary agents who will get us a great publisher who will give us anything we want. That’s legal.

I am keeping this short and I hope you will join in and let us know how you are doing and how we can help keep you on track. One of the things I want to do is take better care of me. So I did 2.14 miles on the treadmill and now I am off to have a HOT, smoothing bath. Here is NY the wind is whipping and the temps are really dipping below zero.   

So do tell!

        

Step Two was about writing your own affirmations to help you stay positive.

Step Three got you off the sofa and exercising your right to be fit and trim.

Step Four was all about taking the time to meditate and getting centered in your universe.

Step Five found you getting silly and feeling better for letting your hair way down.

Step Six: You know what it is. No, well then get quiet ask your Intuition.

Step Seven could be one of the most valuable steps around. Because it can (and will) impact your life, but it can make all the difference in your neighborhood, home state, country and if we think global – then you can help change the world.

Volunteer, my friends. Volunteer. Nothing makes you feel more alive then helping someone else feel that way, too.

Look at some of the  things one can volunteer for…from working for peace, building homes, to planting gardens or reading to a child to teaching an adult to read their first book can make a change that is immeasurable. And it is sorely needed today. With life going by at a break-neck pace, taking the time to care for a complete stranger in a strange land or around the block can empower people and empowerment is contagious. Pass it on. My hope is that you will catch the volunteer fever.                                                  Go to the internet and start looking around. There are so many organizations that deal with causes affecting women and children here and aboard that could use your help. Can you spare and hour or two a week? Could you TiVo Oprah and go out and help an elderly or sick neighbor? Could you baby-sit for a single mother so she could go out to the movies without feeling mounds of guilt? Could a few of you find a cause close to all your hearts and walk for a cure?  You bet you can.

Do it today because tomorrow needs all of us.

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Step Two was about writing affirmations to help you stay positive.

Step Three got you off the sofa and exercising your right to be fit and trim.

Step Four was all about taking the time to meditate and getting centered in your universe.

Wonder what Step 5 can be about? I would like you to throw your own party. The theme? What’s a party nowadays without a theme?  Let’s try Celebrate Me party! Throw it for 100 or just light a few candles and treat yourself to a lovely repast. Maybe dessert by candlelight. I can make that one. Make fun invitations and send them out to your family and friends who already know how fabulous you are! Tell them on the appointed date that they are invited to come and celebrate you. Feeling generous? How about telling everyone attending to bring a list of the 100 best things they have ever done in their lives? Okay, make that 10.

The world can be an unforgiving place to live in and some days the moods of our loved ones are more down than up. You have the power to lift your spirits and those around you and you don’t need fairy dust. It gets into my hair. Do something silly. One of my favorites is having everyone show up wearing a feather and rhinestone encrusted chapeau. Not your style? Well have everyone show up in any hat as long as it’s not a baseball cap (or football or basketball). Help people stretch beyond their everyday lives and watch them become the creative souls they have yet to discover.

And don’t forget to invite me. I can party with the best of them. I have had a little practice. 

federico stevanin / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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So Step One found you moving on up to the place where we all belong – the top of our list!

And Step Two found you scribbling little love notes to yourself. Keep them coming. And maybe write one for your partner, spouse, child, friend, co-worker, neighbor, etc. You get the idea. Expand the love out to the universe. Write it down and let the love continue to flow. Who knows the Nobel Prize for Love could be yours one day! Right after I receive mine.

Step Three will get you off the furniture and exercising your right to be fit and trim.  

Step Three: Shake it. Move it. Walk it off. Work up a sweat. Get your body moving and grooving.  The reports just came out we as a nation are becoming heavier and less fit. Colorado was the only state to have the least number of obese people but it is an alarming 18.9%.  In 1991 not one state had an obsess rate higher than 20 %.( Trust for America’s Health Report). Yikes!

I have a confession to make. I have been a bit of a slacker in the area of Step Three. But I promise to do better.  I do. I promise.

Start slow, but get off that sofa and put the Ding Dong down.  It all comes down to loving yourself enough to gift yourself with some extra years to be with your loved ones. So join a gym, get a buddy to go walking and lift some weights. Put the fork down after one serving and drink your water. If it doesn’t make a difference in your life, don’t eat it. If you would kill for it then I would say have two spoonfuls and then put it away. A little more savoring means a little less laboring at the gym.

I got a pedometer strapped to me and from the looks of it, my yellow lab and I have a date to walk another 2,000 steps right after dinner. Of course, we will have to stop every two feet. I have no idea what she is sniffing at (yes, I do) and I really don’t ask too many questions. I’m just gonna walk.  My butt off.

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Step Two: We are still working on you. Becoming first does not happen overnight, but practice becomes reality with a little more work.  We are coming to the part of the dreaded homework assignment. I am out of school, you are thinking, and my diploma is hanging on the wall. We are never too old to learn something new. Your family and coworkers will admire and respect you even more. If that is possible.

Get a pen (pencils are still for sissies) and a journal, or a bunch of index cards or use the backside of your grocery bill and…write every day.  Find five minutes and write positive affirmations. Index cards are great because you can put them everywhere. Grocery bill receipts may not be pretty, but put your affirmations on the fridge or any place else where you know you will be visiting more than once a day. And read them. And say them out loud with conviction. No positive thought is too small or too big. Open up that journal and repeat after me, “I deserve all the best that life has to offer. I know by loving myself first that I can love my family and friends and dare I say it, myself, more everyday.” Nice plug for me, eh?

My affirmation this week is “I am prefect today. And tomorrow is looking even better.”  And I raise my voice with one brown and one black shoe on. Note to self:  Turn on a light in the morning, would ya?

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Once upon a time, people wrote letters, peeled a stamp off their tongues and recited a silent prayer that their words would make it across the world or across town. While man wrote on cave walls and woman doused their love letters in cheap perfume, it was inevitable that one day all that would come to pass.  In its wake would arise communicating in a nanosecond with your friends, family and the world at large. I don’t know if you got the announcement but your computer gave birth to a weblog in 1998.   They call it blog for short. It’s a family name. 

Now for those of you (and you know who you are) who think blogging is for everyone else – think again. It used to be that Facebook was for 20 somethings, but now their parents and grandparents are taking over. There is power in numbers and in our words.  We’ve got to get hip and we’ve got to get on the wave of the future.

Below are some of the reasons why you should be blogging. Read them now.  You’ll blog us later.

From Annie:

1. First of all, we ole’ folks need to get on the wave.  We don’t want to be out of it or left back in the dust with the dinosaurs right? If you’re over forty or fifty in my case and you feel freaked out by blogging then I suggest you take a class, read a book, take a course or call me or Elizabeth. We’ll convince you that you can do it.  Blogging and social media are the hip tools of today.  Ok, so I know the word hip is dating me but how about this – it’s cool to be a blogger.  Listen if we can do it, so can you.  While you’re at it get rid of the out-of-date platform shoes in your closet (for women) and (for men) dump the old leisure suit that you’re never going to wear.  If you’re going to blog, you at least need to look decent.

2. You want to get your message out to the world right?  Well then this is simply the best way to do it.  Enough said.

2 ½. It’s fun.  Believe it or not, once you get over the hump, it’s actually enjoyable  :>)

From elizabeth:

3. We all have thoughts and opinions on what is going on in our lives, our neighbor’s   lives and the world at large. So let us know how global warming, mixing plaids with stripes or how the political scene is shaping up or destroying your world. Pick a subject that keeps you up at night and blog about it. When you write with passion, the world will beat a path to your door. Okay, they may knock at first, but people will come back for more when you tell us what you think, why you think it and how you plan on enlightening us in the future. Not a heavy  thinker and  have been known to crack a joke or two at the wrong time – like science class or in the middle of performing an emergency appendectomy? Then write a blog that will make people laugh and let your readers stumble upon it, follow or share it, tweet it with everyone they know.  Just write your blog as if the world depended on your voice getting out there.  And some days, you never know, it just might.

4. You are blogging up a storm and you are getting a following without starting a cult.  It feels great to have people clinging to your every word and your mother is thrilled to see how many people are leaving comments. But you just keep blogging and you forget to respond to the people who take the time to praise or scorn you. You remind us of those guys who promised to call but never did. After a while, you just start to fade from their collective memories and you are blogging to yourself. Do take the time to respond to those who take the time to let you know that you impacted their lives. Start a conversation and give people a platform to be heard.  More than likely someone will say something brilliant and viola’ – you got yourself a new blog.

Annie Hart, NLP Trainer, Ericksonian Hypnotherapist and Storyteller Extraordinaire, helps individuals and businesses to harness the power of change through story. She is fun, funny, fiery and out of the box. Annie believes that Stories Change the World and she can be found wildly and passionately blogging at: www.anniehart.com.

elizabeth cassidy, certified life and career coach for women who are looking to reach and surpass their dreams, is the founder of Branching Out Life Coaching. She is the Co-Creator/Founder of Coaches on the Edge – a blog that mixes wit and wisdom with life coaching. Along with her blogging partner, Laurie Lawson, they are national bloggers for Skirt! and their blogs have been featured on USA Today.com, Daylife.com, Treehugger.com and The India Times. You can read elizabeth’s own thought provoking and amusing blogs at Branchingoutlifecoaching

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I was listening to “The Second Half of Life” in my car last week. The author, Angeles Arrien, PH.D, talked about how Storytelling can trigger memories, associations and one’s imagination

She went on to recount a true story by Dr. Charles Garfield who has written about high performance people

It unfolded something like this:

Back in 1984, Dr. Garfield encountered a toll booth employee on the Oakland/San Francisco Bridge who was dancing to loud music that was blasting from his toll booth. The doctor asked what was going on. The dancing man in the booth said that he was having a party. What about the other people working in the other booths? Oh, they were not invited to his party.  Loud horns blasted from impatient drivers (don’t you just love them) and ended the conversation abruptly but the doctor made a note to find the dancing man again.

And he did.

The dance party was still going on. The Dancing man remembered the doctor and asked him what the other 16 booths looked like to him.  The doctor had no clue. “No imagination, no imagination” was the reply that came from the toll booth.  “Look again, look again.”

The doctor was stumped, gave up and asked for an answer from the dancing man.

“Vertical Coffins.  These 16 people come to work everyday at 8:30 and die in their booths and then at 4:30 they come back to life just in time to go home. They look like Vertical Coffins.”

“What makes it different for you?” The doctor needed to know why this one man was so happy.

“I have a corner office with glass on all sides. I can see the Golden Gate Bridge, Berkley Heights, and San Francisco and while thousands of people travel everyday to visit, I get to live it. I get to dance. I get to do what I love.”

So many of us don’t get to live the lives we are entitled to. We go by someone else’s rules and expectations and we forget that we even had dreams that were so full of hope and adventure. We find ourselves getting by on “no imagination, no imagination” and we struggle in our own vertical coffins.

How would it feel to dismantle one or two of those vertical coffins that keep you from what you really want to do? It could be as simple as saying “No” to some of the requests that others pour on you (and not feeling guilty!) so that you can have 30 minutes to read, take a walk or just sit and listen to your own heart beat.  It can be as grand as reexamining where your life is going: does the job do it for me, would going back to school open me up again or would Jimmy Choo’s heels really make me feel better?  The latter was what Gwyneth Paltrow asked me….in a dream.  I assured her that they would.

So it might be a little stretch but how about taking a look at one of your vertical coffins and screaming “boo” at it and making it go back under your brother’s bed?

Your brother will get over it. Eventually.

        

How many of you slipped in behind the steering wheel of your parents’ car for the first time and just drove away? Okay, maybe a few of you. But how many of you ended up denting a fender and then had a lot of explaining to do? How many of you sat down in the first grade and wrote a best selling novel? I’d like to say that I did, but back then I didn’t know a B from a Q.

So how do you get there – from driving cross country to dipping your big toe into the Pacific or autographing copies of your first book for a long line of adoring book enthusiasts?

With all you have to do on a daily basis, you need to be inventive and steal a few minutes each day that you can claim for your very own. Seems like not enough time to even bother working towards a new goal or fulfilling a long held dream? Well, I beg to differ.

Start small. Finish big. That’s it.

Since I am obligated to finish this article, I will continue.

When you think about what would make your life have more meaning, does the big picture make you shake uncontrollably? Are you working or still raising a family or both, but would love to take that dream about becoming a portrait photographer, a potter or a politician and bring it closer to a reality? Would you love to have more room in your life by removing years of junk that is taking over your closets and drawers and driving you to distraction? Start small. Finish big.

1) Give yourself a deadline. I had a client who wanted to clear out years of papers that had been making her bedroom a fire hazard. I asked her if she could devote 5 minutes over the weekend to go thru some of the papers. She made a face at me when I suggested only 5 minutes, but agreed to it. We spoke the following week and she ending up giving herself 15 minutes and threw out 3 bags of items that no longer had room in her life. She started small and exceeded her goal. And she decided to keep giving herself permission to allow more into her life by getting rid of things that were taking up her space. Start small. Finish big.

2) Take 15 minutes for yourself. Yes, you can. Your dreams are calling and they would like an answer. In fifteen minutes, you could Google art schools in your area that offer photography course. Ask them for the names of advisors that you could talk to. You could call local art galleries and find out how to put together a show of your pottery. Start making it real. You could look up politicians in your area and call them about how you could volunteer in the community. Get that momentum going. Start small. Finish big.

3) Give your goals a safety net and watch what happens. Don’t abandon what you love to do or need to do because of time. So many other people found the time and achieved their goals. So why not you? You deserve it. Look for supportive people who will encourage you to move ahead. Steer clear of the negative people – they are the dream killers. Actually, they are scared to shake things up, but are probably envious of your spirit. We need dreamers who reach their goals to inspire us all. Do it for us. Start small. Finish big, It’s that simple. Now get out there and give me 15!

If you have tried the, “Start Small. Finish Big” theory, please leave a comment and let us know about your successes and challenges. You could be someone’s inspiration. Imagine that.

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I decided to take this 12 week blogging teleclass – what’s wrong with a little more info? In my world – that word is “plenty.” OMG- I feel my tiny little brain cells begging for mercy, asking for forgiveness if they think they trespassed against me and sleep becomes something my neighbors only do.

The first class I knew I was in trouble. Terms I have never heard before. Writing code and all this crap that you do behind the scenes. Plus, the class is 2 hours long on a Monday afternoon. Makes me wish for my old job at Doubleday. Hmmm..note to self: last boss was and still is a psycho that would scare the hell out of Norman Bates.

Does anyone ever feel like they can’t possibly take in any more info less their brains explode? I actually feel my temperature go up, my eyes dry up, my hair becomes dry and brittle and breaks off, I can’t lift my legs and I think my body weight goes up at least 10% – all for more info on blogging?

My teacher is brilliant, but I fear she may have me killed. Not like I would fault her for putting a contract out on me. I would. But, she is also so patient and does not talk down and actually does cheer you on- that you will get it. Yeah, right. Have you seen inside my brain lately? A sidebar- you know when your doctor is examining your eyes and he or she is not an eye doctor – well, ask them what they are looking at. Answer – it’s your brain.

My teacher is also from the south and my voice must crackle into her ear canal. This New Yorker, whose organs are sweating profusely, finds the soft tones almost soothing until I can’t add or delete some thing I cannot identify or what theme will work best for me. I told her bright red. I picked a peaceful, “zen” green and realized that I will more than likely change it again. There is a knock at my front door – it’s the hit man. Oh, he’s very polite. Must be those southern manners I hear about.

I did mention to her that I do blog for skirt! and she knows skirt!. she can go down the block and pick up a copy. I have mine flown in and delivered to my doorstep.

I have no idea where I am going with this blog, but maybe to say, “Thanks, Teach.” One day this stuff will make sense and then I will pass it on to someone else. Because my brain just can’t hold all this stuff.