For Entrepreneurs: More Income + Life Satisfaction from Strategic Self-Care

Hey, I'M super-busy.  I barely stop on a daily basis.  

Except that I know that stopping for strategic self-care IS my road to income and to life satisfaction, which is why I started the business in the first place, right?

You don't need hours.  With 5 carefully chosen minutes a day - 5 MINUTES daily - you can have a tremendous impact on your income and your overall happiness.

I've researched and chosen the 5 elements with the most powerful and reliable ROI (return on investment) for your time.  Focus on them, make a commitment to every day - and watch your life blossom like all the spring flowers all around us.


https://blastthruthosebarriers.thinkific.com/courses/strategic-self-care-for-entrepreneurs-the-5-daily-tools-proven-to-lead-to-lots-more-income-and-life-satisfaction

Harness the Energy of Nature for Your Own Transformation!

The sun is just starting to climb over the horizon.  Dawn is here.  In the same way, Spring is the season for beginnings.  As the Light begins to return, more and more each day, our human bodies get more serotonin, and more dopamine.  We have a surge of energy.  We are throwing off the lethargy of winter.  Harness this natural biological surge and move forward.  Do the 5 Breaths meditation listed earlier, or another free guided journey from my website www.soaringdragon.biz/classes, and when you are deeply relaxed, softly and gently ask your deep unconscious what it really wants.  This is the part of you that always knows what you really want the meaning of your life to be.

Pick one small change - perhaps in your health or how you spend your life - and make a commitment to yourself.  Start walking every day for 20 minutes.  Check out my recipes and ideas for healthier eating.  Read my blog for steps to take for more self-love and self-respect.  Start Dumping the Garbage every night (see 101 Stress Busters).  Just one small thing, not a major make-over, because that can scare your unhealed inner child so much she starts sabotaging - and it scares other people into sabotage as well.  Just one small thing.  Commit to it utterly.

Set up rewards for yourself (not food-related, please; meditate until you know what you really want and aren't giving yourself permission to have), when you do your one small thing every day for a week.  And keep your word to yourself. You're a person of integrity.  You deserve to be able to rely on your word.  Give yourself that reward - perhaps time to yourself.  I have a client who went to her sister's house for 90 minutes every Saturday, just for Me Time, because she could not trust her family to respect her boundaries.  Eventually, she was able to have Me Time at home, and also Creative Time when the whole family did various art projects together - bliss!  Whatever your rewards are, know that you CAN brainstorm the rewards that are small in cost but huge in meaning and personal value.

Everywhere, plant life is coming into exuberant form, pushing up through the earth, bursting into colorful bloom or lush foliage.  You are part of this ageless rhythm as well.  Let the energy of spring flow through your veins and answer the call with a clear and exultant YES!  The journey of a lifetime is accomplished step by step.  Take a step and commit to another one every day....

Why Care About a Math Holiday??

Math is beauty, it is poetry, it is love made manifest in equations. It is relationships of area, of motion, acceleration. It brings moving heavenly bodies together and might even do the same for human beings. When I see all these interdependencies in a an almost-infinite cosmic web, I think "what could be more glorious or more spiritual than math?"

Happy Pi Day! (3.14 every year!)

Reframing Insults Puts Power Where It Belongs - In YOUR Pocket

Sometimes it's the small things that count.  I have a client who recently transferred to a new group with a "mentor" who was making him miserable.  In listening to him, the causes and solutions became clear.

The cause?  She raced along at breakneck speed, such that Michaelangelo or Einstein couldn't have kept up - and used an exasperated tone of voice when anyone asked a question or even asked her to slow down.  You can understand his pissossity at the meta-communication that he was an idiot.  You can understand why he wanted the basic respect that he deserved as a highly-regarded professional.

I started by getting him to reframe the situation from anger to an understanding that this young thing just didn't know how to teach.  When he was sure that no sane person would actually think he's an idiot, he was able to hear that, and shift his energy from defense to commiseration.  Who doesn't remember what a jerk they were when they were 20-something?  

Getting angry at a jerk is usually a "weak" response.  Realizing that your respect and integrity will never be diminished, in discerning eyes, by the actions of a jerk gives you the emotional space to take a breath and make a non-attacking response.  Truly, emotionally realizing that the jerk is incompetent, not powerful, defangs the attacker in the eyes of your reactive limbic system.  This is easier with a hypnotherapy journey, which my client used, but if you devote time to it, you can reprogram your deep heart and soul on your own. [Call me.  It's shorter, more fun and more comprehensive if a pro does it with you.]

Then I got him to manage her - with praise. The first time he thanked her and praised her for her knowledge and thanked her again for her efforts (all very sincerely), he saw the first smile he'd ever seen on her face.  "She walked away with a spring in her step," he marveled.  A month later, he has no trouble interacting with her.  She will probably continue to not know how to teach anything – and not be motivated to learn! - but the exasperated bad manners are gone.  In any case, my client knows how to interpret her bad manners.  Reframing it as her incompetence at teaching [“these young folks,” he tells himself] allows him to genuinely praise the things she does well and ignore her incompetence.  

His stress level (and all the bad effects that brings) is way down, so it’s another example of how healing minds heals bodies as well.  Call me for a free Getting Unstuck session.

You Don't Need a Date for Valentine's Day!

The Best Business Advice Anyone Ever Gave Me

New businesses take time to build and setting an expectation that it will all be effortless and happen immediately just sets you up to drive yourself relentlessly, and always feel like a failure.  Immediate, effortless success does happen occasionally, and the whole world can hear about these outliers thanks to the Internet,  a mental bias that psychology is very familiar with [hearing about crimes constantly convinces you that the crime rate is high, even though stats say that it has actually been dropping].  That constant repetition of outlier after outlier is enough to keep everyone invested in the idea that this outlier of immediate, effortless success is the outcome that they can force, if they just use the right Secret or the right vision board or incantation.  This is the way our brains work.  Rational statistical reasoning doesn’t come naturally.  We are worried about a terrorist attack – not the million times more likely danger of a car wreck, or even an earthquake or a volcanic eruption if you live where I do in the Pacific Northwest of the USA.

So we worry about terrorists and we think we’re failures because dreaming and visioning doesn’t bring us what we want in 3 weeks.  Even hard work plus visioning doesn’t always get us what we want.   We don’t consider market forces or just plain bad luck.  But they are the real reason why one heck of a lot of stuff happens or doesn’t happen.  Analyze your marketing.  See what tweeks you need. 

Spend more time doing Reiki or exercising or taking walks in the park with your dog – all those “not trying to force or control things” actions that lower your stress levels and allow you to look at yourself with eyes of love and appreciation.  It is only Truth that sets us free.  Consider the potential truth that you can’t vision yourself out of what God, your karma, or global business forces want for you.  Consider taking your stress down a notch by letting it all be enough – you are enough, your effort was enough, your faith in yourself was enough – everything that you are is just enough. 

And if what you are so determined to have isn’t happening, maybe you need to give it more time.  Or maybe, if it’s been two years and the business still isn’t giving you a livable income, the truth is that you need to do something else.  Not in a spirit or belief that you are a failure, just in a belief that it’s time to get new guidance.   Take a long, slow deep breath and widen your vision.  [When you want something desperately, you get tunnel-vision with your intensity.  Read Scarcity.]  Ask the universe where it wants you, without the deep emotional agenda of what you want poisoning the quiet voice of the eternal.  Listen.  Quietly. 

And remember – all the world’s spiritual traditions have some version of “Be of good heart.”  Ask yourself why that is.  You might conclude that it’s because being happy and at peace with What Is, is the real road that you are on.  Paradoxically, the more content you are on the What Is road, the more your vision can expand to see other roads that intersect with What Is.  You find it when you’re not looking for it.  [Byron Katie’s books are a big help in making this make sense.]

Come for a free Getting Unstuck session!  www.soaringdragon.biz

5 Top Reasons Why You Need to Focus on THIS Form of ME Time

Some of us don’t give ourselves any Me Time at all, because we’re convinced, for family, gender or cultural reasons, that taking time for ourselves is selfish.  Some of us take our relaxation primarily with evening television or by physical pampering like mani-pedis.

I’ve shown you how having Me Time is the least selfish thing you can do for your family and career in another post.  For now, assume that you’re  convinced that you need Me Time and are ready to consider spending anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour on most days, entirely engrossed in your most creative, fun activities with absolutely NO guilt!  How does this sound?  Look what joys await you when you get up from the zoning-out-with-TV habit:

Ø  Diving into library books and magazines on crochet [come sit down next to me!]

Ø  Watching videos, and YouTube – humor, how-tos, history, science, drama, cute kittens.

Ø  Chatting with friends

Ø  Reading, especially about hobbies or interests that engross you (deep-ending in histories of Elizabethan England, Ancient Scythia or WWI)

Ø  Picture-intensive books about travel, garden makeovers or visual hobbies (art, crafts)

Ø  Listening to catchy, upbeat music.

Ø  Listening to audiobooks and podcasts.

Ø  Building or making physical objects, from bat houses and cat houses to human furniture.

Ø  As well as more specialized joys, like feeling the joy of warm water all around you, or taking a virtual bike-ride along the wine valleys of the Loire.

Now THAT’S what I call Me Time!   Are you ready to plunge into all this fun?  Good, because I want to give you the 5 powerful reasons why you want this particular form of Me Time:

Reason #1: Your chances of developing 14 different forms of cancer, plus diabetes, Alzheimer’s and heart disease plummet.  Your blood pressure and blood cholesterol plummet.  You add an average of 7 healthy years to your lifespan!

Reason #2: Your enthusiasm for life and your positive energy will soar, without you having to recite affirmations or engage in any other life changes!

Reason #3:  You’ll get fewer colds, you’ll be less liable to depression even when the days are cold, cloudy or rainy, your sleep will be easier and sounder and you’ll be able to successfully race for the express commute bus.

Reason #4:  Your career will improve because your mind will be calmer, your confidence will skyrocket, your ideas will be more creative and clever, and your increased energy as evidenced in your sparkling eyes and easy smile will convince management that you are overdue for a promotion to more responsibility.  If you own a business, people will be drawn to become customers because of the magnetism of increased confidence, which also manifests in smarter business decisions.

Reason #5:  You will be a kinder, more patient and understanding parent (with less effort), and all your personal relationships, including your marriage, will be happier and calmer.

So HOW do you get all these benefits and enjoy all that Me Time?

Are you ready for the Secret?  Take a deep breath, because it’s really, really powerful

Here it is: Go to the gym, or community center, at least three days/week, and engage in vigorous movement on the other days.

That’s right, it’s exercise! 

I go to the gym to get Me Time to deep-end in imagining new crochet projects while I walk on the treadmill or use a stationary bike.  My clients revel in the guilt-free joys of reading and taking vicarious trips, including the creative lady who bike-trips along the Loire.  She bikes in place and can taste all that lovely wine in her imagination!  Others enjoy guilt-free video or Facebook time as they bicycle or treadmill.  Gyms always pipe in catchy, upbeat music to help keep you moving as long as possible.  Home shops can be hives of vigorous movement as you build and create.  Once a week, hubby and I take a water aerobics class and laugh and giggle together as we leap, jump, and practice-box in the soothing warm water; after class we laugh and catch up with our friends. 

And it’s all guilt-free fun, because you are doing the #1 thing that you need for optimal physical and mental health, a happy life and successful career. 

Are you convinced that you hate exercise?  Want to bet I can’t change your mind?  OK, the deal is on!

Step #1: Sign up for my transformative, fun class here: https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/.   This class focuses on the most powerful organ in your body – your mind.  It is in your concepts and beliefs that you turn away from the most powerful Me Time on the planet, with all the amazing benefits it brings you.  Exercise literally puts money in your pocket as it adds years to your lifespan.  For $19.95, it’s priced to be super-easy for everyone.  So go ahead, sign up!

Step #2: When you have completed the class, call or email me and book a FREE Getting Unstuck appointment.  If you complete my class, I will DOUBLE your free session to a full hour, and we will get to work demolishing the barriers that are holding you back from all the fun of the most powerful Me Time ever.  That’s my gift  and it’s worth a whole lot more than $19.95.  Maybe we can solve your time problem or blast away your other barriers and hand you your heart’s desire on a plate in one session.  Maybe we will only get part-way there.  The important thing is – you get a $70 value for only $19.95, even if my class doesn’t do for you what it has done for everyone else who’s ever taken it.

Are you willing to bet that I can’t make a Me Time addict out of you?  Sign up now at https://zparkl.com/course/about/transform-your-relationship-with-exercise/.

253-203-6676

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6 Tools and Techniques to Make Healthy Self-Love a Reality

For some people, brought up by caring parents who wanted us to be generous and humble adults, the difference between healthy self-love and unhealthy selfishness, arrogance and narcissism, was not made clear to us.

In consequence, we grew to adulthood happily prepared to take care of everyone around us, be a rock of care and concern for all our loved ones, while relying on the attention of others to see to it that our own nurturing - emotional feeding - gets done.

That's not the way things are supposed to roll.  With due respect to our well-intentioned parents, hoping to steer us away from self-absorption, they missed the healthy balance point.

Self-love, so far from being a character flaw, is the foundation upon which every other healthy ediface of adult love and character is built.

Let me explain what healthy self-love is, and give you some specific techniques and tools that you can use to build this capacity within yourself.  It's never too late!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKQe5VFm0gc