SO much of how we feel about our lives has to do with our daily interactions with others - from the folks we see every day, to the seemingly "unimportant" little things. I am thinking about two very different travel incidents....

Amtrak: for sit-down meals, you are seated family-style. So I was traveling alone and the server directed a group of three to my table. But they took a look at me and then swerved to quickly sit down at the next completely-unoccupied table (which boogered up the overall seating plan for the servers). The server had pointed them where to go, and had to take a deep breath to not let the exasperation show. Their explanation was that they "Didn't want to split up." Obviously, since they would still be all together at the table in any case, they wanted to keep the conversation within the group and not have to meet someone new. We Amtrak-lovers enjoy the fun people you meet at meals, and I missed the positive energy that mealtimes always have.

But I remembered it a week later when I was on Alaska Air, on a 1/3 filled flight where I had the aisle and a quiet young gent was blissing out on his ipod in the window seat. The flight attendant came thru the cabin and told us that we could move anywhere we wanted. "Meh," sez me. "Do you want to move? I'll get up, no problem." He didn't care to move either. very little chatting but a comfortable energy for the flight.

Such a difference. Lots more room at table on Amtrak, but it felt, in its own little way, lonelier. Even when we don't say it in words, there is a comfort in being welcomed, in having one's presence valued.

As we approach the holiday of Thanksgiving, let's look for ways to be welcoming, to be grateful for the little acts of "yes" that we can incorporate into every day. There are NO little human acts.

_____________________________

Looking for some great holiday gifts? BOOKS! Help your loved ones get healthier and happier with the 2nd edition of 101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less - on Amazon for Nov 25th! In bookstores by mid-December.

https://www.amazon.com/Red-State-Blue-Heart-Victoria/dp/1974032272/ A funny memoir!

https://www.amazon.com/Busters-Healthy-Longevity-Through-Barriers-ebook/dp/B01MZ4HNRZ 101 Stress Busters - really 87 ways to have great fun AND lengthen your life!

https://www.amazon.com/Journey-Out-SAD-Seasonal-Expanded-ebook/dp/B01KN72IT0/ The best guide to avoiding winter depression, and help year-round depression!

Clean Eating and Having Fun!

Chop and then  saute - nearly anything.  My cookbook 101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less has the recipes, but this shows how easy it is, and how much fun!

FREE: Extended deadline: Kick Dieting to the Curb: Get and Stay at your Healthy Weight Forever!

Extending my FREE beta class!

Losing weight and staying healthy has never been harder - and you know this.  Junk food is everywhere, employers want us to overwork and never exercise, have hobbies or any fun, and we have kids, cats and parents - not to mention cell phones - that need attending to.

But the reason we don't have what we want is only because we aren't going about it in a comprehensive way.  We CAN make time for the healthy habits that we need to have a joyful and vibrant life, with peace of mind and clothes that fit the healthy size we want to be.  Willpower won't do it, but having a touchstone will.  Buying a bike and not riding it won't, but a movement plan that fits your life as it really exists.  Sleeping for 8 hours and reclaiming your birthright of clear thinking and energy can be yours.  The deep psychic surgery that excises the voices that are keeping you stuck is hard work but you have courage, and you WILL succeed - because you have the best guide in the world, right here, working to make it happen.  It will!

https://my.leadpages.net/page/5720929187397632/

I need Beta testers for my new online class.  You get everything in the actual class - all the videos, links to inexpensive books of tools, all the support that will MAKE IT HAPPEN!

YOU CAN!  

The "fine print" is that if I let you have a $100 class for FREE, you have to make a commitment to FINISH it - no "I'm too busy" stuff.  If you aren't willing to clear your calendar for 2 hours/week to make massive changes in your "problems list" - if you don't really want to let go of the pain and disappointment that you are currently living with, then let me be blunt: don't waste my time.  I will be giving 100% to you and I need a commitment back from you.  Come back when your level of pain has reached the unbearable point and you are ready to commit.  Even though it will be $97 or more by then, if you are willing to commit, then it will work for you.  If you aren't ready to let go of what isn't working, then you aren't ready.  All is well.  You'll know when it's time, because the pain will propel you to the comprehensive solution of never having to diet again. 

https://my.leadpages.net/page/5720929187397632/

6 Key Principles for SUCCESSFUL, Permanent Health Changes

If you want to make changes in your life - and who doesn't, in January? - keep some principles in mind:

**  Choose small, reasonable goals that you

** Commit to - with your whole body and sou.

** Have a deep and compelling reason, and keep that reason at the front of your mind.

** Have a Commitment Buddy, and choose that one carefully.  Use your journal as your commitment buddy if the perfect person isn't available.  Check in every day for the first 21 days.

** Embrace deep surgery to replace internal resistance,through hypnotherapy.

And #6:  Take a no-nonsense, aggressive stance on eliminating the health impact of stress.  This will give you better sleep, weight loss, less internal resistance and higher income, especially in the small business world.  If you want more money, you want more sleep and you want de-stressing.  Full stop, no excuses.  You aren't more important because you are busy,busy.  It's not a badge of honor.  It's a badge of Dumb Choice.  Make a different one - with my help.

Here is the expanded video version.   www.soaringdragon.biz

10 Keys to Transform Your Life Right Now!

Some great webinars to start your year off well – the inexpensive 4-6 week very powerful programs:

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9895/Meet-Your-Biological-Ancestors

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9896/30-Days-Create-Your-Way-to-Health-and-Joy

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9873/6-Week-Stress-Busters-for-People-Who-Don-t-Have-Time-to-Waste

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9879/Goddess-Connection-to-Drive-Weight-Loss-6-Weeks-to-Happy-and-Healthy

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/10091/Become-the-Shaman-of-Your-Own-Life

Free:

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/9897/FREE-Transforming-My-Beliefs-About-Myself-The-Creator

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8842/Retrain-Your-Immune-System-Smarter-Cells-Healthier-Life

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8844/The-Spiritual-Path-to-LOVING-Exercise-Veggies-Yes-you-will

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8839/Harness-Your-Goddess-Energy-to-Stop-Self-Sabotage

https://www.learnitlive.com/class/8843/5-Magic-Components-of-Your-Successful-Self-Care-Program-Starting-with-Self-Love

Stress Busting - and Having FUN!

I’ve never done this before in my life: 240 pages, written, rewritten, edited and polished in a little over 6 weeks.  Georg F. Handel did his Messiah in about that long, but he was a genius.  Oh. My. God.  The newborn 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity is on its way now to bookstores, Amazon and me.  As I contemplate this blank page, I feel like a battery that is completely devoid of charge.  Yet, thinking about this amazing experience, I can feel psychic energy sparkling through my exhausted soul, and suddenly I’m a bit less exhausted.  Just enough to pick up my fingers and pour my soul out on the page.

Two hundred and forty pages, most of which is about creativity.  There are preliminary chapters about fun ways to breathe and meditate and walk and exercise, and there is a chapter on making plans and making sure that you execute on them – so important! - but the bulk of the tome is page after page, tool after tool, that takes you out of your worry mind, away from the tunnel-vision that stress creates and into the realms of divinity.  After all, in the beliefs of most faith traditions, there is a deity who creates the world from the raw materials at hand.   The Bible creation story, and the Babylonian Tiamat story that it cribbed from, involves breath and clay soil and the transformation of dead nothingness into glorious somethingness.  God is God because he, she or it brings forth life.  God is the Creator in Judaism, Islam, Christianity, Hinduism, the Norse pantheon and most animisms.  [Buddhism is the only major faith that doesn’t have a creator being.]  There is nothing that so closely mimics the divine as this simple path of creating something with your own hands and your own soul.

What flows through your mind and what frisson of excitement flows through your body when you first behold the works of YOUR hand?  Regardless of how imperfect it may be – and when you do anything for the first time, it won’t be the Pieta, so if you are perennially in the humor to tear yourself down, plenty of scope for it – it is creation.  It is beautiful in the same way that all newborn babies are beautiful.  The awe that overcomes you when you see the results of your work, the vision and the execution of your heart, your soul and your spirit resembles nothing else on Earth.  Even the transcendence you experience on the mountain top, or sitting on the rim of the Grand Canyon, or driving down a road three feet away from a live bison isn’t the same awe as the awe of true creation.

Creation of any kind, whether it is a vegetable bed or an oil painting, puts you in a mental and emotional place that transforms your physical body as well.  The adrenal stress cascade stops or slows.  Your heart stops laboring.  Neurons remain intact and new ones are created from neural stem cells; your memory improves and the clarity of logic sharpens.  Your kidneys stop laboring; your immune system, especially the T-attack cells and the Natural Killer cells that go after cancer as well as outside invaders, generates its full complement of soldiers, ready to protect you from killers within and without.  Chronic inflammation quietens.   The chemicals that scratch the walls of your arteries and allow plaque to attach become fewer and far between.  All over your body, from your skin to your bones and everywhere in between, the deadly effects of stress are muted.

Time spent in a creative fog is time that exists outside of the normal minute-by-minute “real time” that we are all used to.  The first time you can put aside your OMG, I’m Doing It Wrong, I Know I’m Doing It Wrong thoughts and really deep-end in the process, narrow your thoughts and focus to simply what you are doing, you will sink deep into the Time Without Time.  Time simply ceases to exist as a reality. 

And the act of creation doesn’t seem to even involve you.  People have reported feeling as if a power took control of their voice, their typing hands or the hand holding the brush or the glue pot while the Real Me just watched.  They are absolutely right, if the Real You is your thinking, planning, analyzing Pre-Frontal Cortex, the part of you most active when you are consciously, logically trying to “figure something out.”  In order to create, you need to let your PFC step back [“take a nap,” in a hypnotherapy journey] and let the part of you that knows how to play and that knows the real agendas and the real goals of your heart take over.  This is the part of you that passionately wants to express those agendas and goals – dreams – in whatever medium you allow.  Let the real Real You come out to play, and to express to you what is truly Real, and you will have a gold mine of Truth about yourself and how you truly perceive your world and your life.

I’m not immune from the glorious results of allowing Truth to flow.  I thought my new book 101 Stress Busters for Energy, Joy and Healthy Longevity was about health through blunting the deadly ravages of stress, and it is.  But if you look at the page count, and at the chapters that flowed out of me like a mighty stream, it is the power and glory of a life spent creating that the book is really about.  My subconscious was so insistent on this book that I bumped my planned 2017 releases to accommodate it, and I worked at a fever pitch to finish it, rewrite it, polish it, edit it and produce it in 6 exhausted weeks.  I mean, stress causes a lot of the problems that my work erases, but still – why?  Now, looking at the finished product in printed form, I know why.  My soul wanted your soul to create, and it produced a 240-page how-to guide to all the forms of joy that would fit into 101 tools, and still leave some space for breathing, meditation and the importance of moving. 

Want to learn more?  Come visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz or check out my Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies and join my monthly (or whenever I get around to it) newsletter.  I offer free and low-cost classes on Learnitlive.com as well as a free Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch) for entrepreneurs who want to wake up every morning, do their self-care and then execute, execute, execute all day long, no wasted time, for the maximum income and greatest joy.  I also invite anyone who thinks they’re “not creative” to call me or buy 101 Stress Busters, and I invite people who’ve had traumas in their lives, to know that the impact on their lives today can be ended - permanently.

When Do You Drive Ahead Regardless - Mind over Matter - and When Not To...

We've all heard the joke about the efficiency expert who thinks waiting 9 months for a woman to produce a child is a process that can be improved; just get 9 women to work at it for a month!

 Doesn't work that way.

 So watch out for how you implement the new craze for short, intense gym workouts.  The reasoning goes that we are all stressed for time, so why waste time?  So far, so good.  But you have to understand that some truths are Truths; they are not a matter of personal opinion, and you cannot use willpower, vision boards or any other mechanism to overcome them.  

 Good:  Warm up with a treadmill or other slow, rhythmic, aerobic moves for at least 10 minutes.  Then do your shorter, more intense workout, realizing that intense HAS to use perfect form and correct placement of limbs and weights, because if you are too heavy or too intense and you make even a small mistake in placement, you are going to get injured.  Injured removes you from workouts anywhere from two days to the rest of your life. 

 Bad: Jump right in and start pushing and pulling at high intensity.  Muscles and fascia that have been over-stretched or over-tense during hours of work and worry, usually in the same position, are really ripe for a major injury.

 So - impatience can kill you, just like your parents told you oh so long ago.

 Take your impatience and treat it like the problem that it is.  Breathe deeply for a full minute.  Allow your muscles and connective tissue to relax a bit.  Pray.  Reiki.  Meditate.  Stare into the abyss until the urge to think that you can overrule the physical laws of nature, what your physical self needs, dissipates and you are returned to sane, rational humanity.  

 If you only have 10 minutes, don't go to a gym.  Walk up and down the stairs at your job or home, at a walking pace.  Don't run.  You only have 10 minutes and you're not loosened up yet.  Or do yoga.  Cats and cows, boys and girls.  You can do it in a dress, in a cubicle, so you can surely do it at home. 

 If you only have 20 minutes, walk on a treadmill to warm up for ten, then do intervals of rapid or hard work, with a slower pace. for another 10.  Cool down by walking for a few minutes.  

Any strategy is better than going from overstretched and over-tense straight into an intense, especially weights, workout. 

ANY time you feel "I have to" preceding something that violates the laws of physics or biology, know that as a signal to change your faulty thinking. A law that is equally true on Earth, Ganymede and all the planets and moons of the Andromeda Galaxy is not going to bow down to your demands.   

Two plus two will always, always equal four, not twenty four, no matter how busy or important you are, or think you are.  I permanently crippled my hands by exactly this kind of crazy decision-making, and it took me five years of rehab and you don't want to know how much pain and suffering to regain most of my function (and life), but the life lesson has left me with a permanent twerk toward a sane approach to facts. Truth exists, apart from opinion.  Much of what we think of as fact, is truly opinion - but not everything.  

Slow down.  Breathe.  Make a sane assessment of what is truly possible (Truth) and commit to that.  Let go of everything else. 

www.soaringdragon.biz

3 Powerful Reasons Why CSI-Type Shows are the Road to Career & Business Success

 All right, so if you’re not already addicted, you don’t have to start.  But if are already a heavy consumer of modern who-dunnits, you also don’t have to stop.  [If you are living a high-stress life situation, you do need to limit your viewing.  Too much violence and mayhem, even if most of the focus is on intellectual cleverness, has a well-studied negative impact on your longevity and health.]

So what do these puzzler shows do to you, that has a positive impact on your life and career:

1)      You get into the habit of not jumping to conclusions.  In real-life crime, the most obvious suspect usually did do it.  Spouses, gangs, drugs and alcohol: that’s where real detectives look.  But in the puzzler shows, your brain gets programmed to stop and do 360 interviews, digging for what’s hidden, before you come to any conclusion. 

Think about what this would be like as it plays out in your career and personal life.  Stop, breathe, get your pre-frontal cortex involved before you let your limbic system lock on to  the first (stupid) thing that occurs to it.  What would your life and career be like if all your ideas were fully vetted by your thinking brain before it gets cast in mental concrete? What if everyone around you, especially management, did this? Oh. My. God.

2)      You collect actual physical evidence before you believe anything.  You collect evidence that could potentially contradict the first batch of physical evidence.  No stone is left unturned.  Real law enforcement doesn’t have this kind of budget.  But our fictional detective processes, where science is the real hero of the show, are thorough, meticulous and don’t believe anything unless there is lots and lots of irrefutable evidence for the conclusion. 

Translate this into your own career life.  I’ve watched shoot-from-the-lip jerks be admired and promoted, more times than I can count.  But I also have lived the corporate life long enough to have seen what happens when managers realize, a year too late, that they bought the sizzle and ignored the steak.  The sizzler is sent packing.  Listing the possible options with pros and cons out loud, while your thinking brain is doing its diamond-sharp analysis as a background process, allows you to, at worst, promise a data-driven robust conclusion later in the day, and at best, end the oration with your really wise, “steak” conclusion.  Nice place to be, either way.

3)      You get shot, stabbed or conked on the head regularly, but very rarely die, unless you were hoping to leave the series for a new job anyway.  If we could deeply believe the maxim of all the wisdom tradition – “It’s going to be all right, long-term.” – we would be more willing to try things.  Some new ideas fail.  Most are so-so.  Some are spectacular.  All of them reward your courage and vision with growth. 

If you watch enough cliffhangers that turn into recoveries, you might start believing that you are bullet-proof as well – not enough to get you stupid, but enough to give you courage to jump off a mountain with a skilled tandem hang-gliding partner.  For a millisecond or so, before the lift grabs you and saves you, you are dropping through the air, with no force but gravity working on you.  The more times you drop and are saved, the more certain you become that, whatever happens in your career, you will walk away alive, with lessons and knowledge that no one can ever take away from you. 

If we all did this in our non-TV lives, human history would take a dramatic turn for the better, as would your career or small business.  Try it and see!

Victoria C. Leo creates blast-through-barriers programs for career professional and entrepreneurs.  Visit www.soaringdragon.biz, http://soaringdragoninjapan.blogspot.com, Facebook group Healing Minds, Healing Bodies or email victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com.

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

Avoid the Short Cuts that Don't Work. Sometimes Truth is just Truth.

We've all heard the joke about the efficiency expert who thinks waiting 9 months for a woman to produce a child is a process that can be improved; just get 9 women to work at it for a month!

Doesn't work that way.

Neither does the new craze for shorter, more intense gym (especially weights) workouts.  The reasoning goes that we are all stressed for time, why waste time?  So far, so good.  But you have to understand that some truths are Truths; they are not a matter of personal opinion, and you cannot use willpower, vision boards or any other mechanism to overcome them.  

Good:  Warm up with a treadmill or other slow, rhythmic, aerobic moves for at least 10 minutes.  Then do your shorter, more intense workout, realizing that intense HAS to use perfect form and correct placement of limbs and weights, because if you are too heavy or too intense and you make even a small mistake in placement, you are going to get injured.  Injured removes you from workouts anywhere from two days to the rest of your life. 

Bad: Jump right in and start pushing and pulling at high intensity.  Muscles and fascia that have been over-stretched or over-tense during hours of work and worry, usually in the same position, are really ripe for a major injury.

So - impatience can kill you, just like your parents told you oh so long ago.

Take your impatience and treat it like the problem that it is.  Breathe deeply for a full minute.  Allow your muscles and connective tissue to relax a bit.  Pray.  Reiki.  Meditate.  State into the abyss until the urge to think that you can overrule the physical rules of nature, what your physical self needs, dissipates and you are returned to sane, rational humanity.  

If you only have 10 minutes, don't go to a gym.  Walk up and down the stairs at your job or home, at a walking pace.  Don't run.  You only have 10 minutes and you're not loosened up yet.  Or do yoga.  Cats and cows, boys and girls.  You can do it in a dress, in a cubicle, so you can surely do it at home. 

If you only have 20 minutes, walk on a treadmill to warm up for ten, then do intervals of rapid or hard work, with a slower pace. for another 10.  Cool down by walking for a few minutes.  

Any strategy is better than going from overstretched and over-tense straight into an intense, especially weights, workout. 

ANY time you feel "I have to" preceding something that violates the laws of physics or biology, know that as a signal to change your faulty thinking, not those natural laws.  

Two plus two will always, always equal four, not twenty four, no matter how busy or important you are, or think you are.  I permanently crippled my hands by exactly this kind of crazy decision-making, and it took me five years of rehab and you don't want to know how much pain and suffering to regain most of my function (and life), but the life lesson has left me with a permanent twerk toward a sane approach to facts.  Truth exists, apart from opinion.  Much of what we think of as fact, is truly opinion - but not everything.  

Slow down.  Breathe.  Make a sane assessment of what is truly possible (Truth) and commit to that.  Let go of everything else

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

www.soaringdragon.biz     

http://soaringdragoninjapan.blogspot.com/

www.linkedin.com/in/victoriacleo     

www.youtube.com/user/humanbio4everyone/videos

www.facebook.com/pages/Soaring-Dragon

www.facebook.com/groups/healingminds
https://www.pinterest.com/victorialeoreik/
https://plus.google.com/+VictoriaLeo/posts

1 Simple Step to Improve Your Home Life in 2016

Even the most career-obsessed person knows that an unhappy home life sucks the energy and joy from your life.  And most of us are more balanced than that. So here is one simple step to make a big difference in your personal happiness for 2016 – and you’ll make your spouse or partner much happier as well.

Here’s the scenario that most of us live with:

Ø  There is no demarcation in communication between the tactical (kids’ dental appointments, other calendaring, the bill that needs paying) and the strategic (where are we going on vacation next year, what % of our time are we spending on kids, parents, hobbies, our spiritual growth, an irritation I have with you, an important way in which you are disrespecting me, my time or my importance in your life).  The tactical gets sandwiched into whatever snippets of time are available.  The most important strategic questions – the primary relationship and its emotions, meaning the meaning that the relationship has in our lives, how valued we are, how trusted you are – require undivided attention and a calm interior, so they never get aired until the bucket overflows on a particularly stressful day.

Ø  Important conversations (both tactical and strategic) about finances, vacations, problems or opportunities with the kids, problems and opportunities with in-laws, ourselves, our careers, our <fill in the blanks> gets sandwiched in to a brain that is tunneled on the stress of the moment.  A tunneled brain cannot even absorb all the details and nuances of the issue, much less process it with both analytic and intuitive wisdom. 

Ø  Because we cannot absorb the full reality that is being presented to our tunneled brain, we lose most of the context and half the content.  Our spouse correctly concludes that we aren’t listening and (possibly incorrectly) that we really don’t value them. 

Ø  Whoever is paying the bills, dealing with the teacher or the nasty neighbor, or mediating the in-laws knows what’s going on, but the other partner really doesn’t, so that miscommunications with the external world occur, wasting everyone’s already scanty free time. [The time you should be spending at the gym, right?]

Some people have a weekly What’s Going On? Meeting in which they coordinate the tactical.  It’s a step toward wisdom, certainly.  It’s a rare family that sets aside well-rested, unpressured time to tackle the strategic.  You need to.

To the rescue – the mandatory weekly Family Meeting!  Have a scribe, either the person with the best handwriting, or the person who really loves to take notes or who is the most comprehensive note-taker [that would be my partner], or both/all parties on a rotating basis.  Start with the tactical stuff.  Write everything down!  This ensures that whoever dealt with the problem, challenge or opportunity isn’t the only adult who knows who said what and what was done.  

So far, so tactical.

Then start on the strategic, specifically the non-relationship-oriented events, plans, goals.  Brainstorm.  Talk about retirement, or your career plans, or the possibility of relocation, or what kinds of investments you both really care about.  Focus on listening twice as much as you talk.  Take three long, deep breaths and don’t respond to any idea that upsets, scares or enrages you until you are calm again.  Have a Time Out process.  Stand up and stretch.  Talk about reducing expenses on things you want but don’t need, so that the longer-term strategic needs can be met – or even the strategic wants, like a life-altering trip to India or above the Arctic Circle, can come true without incurring debt.  You can forego the $5 cup of coffee if you know what you are getting instead.  Keep your eyes on the prize!

The last element of the Family Meeting is the relationship.  Keep reminding yourself that no human being is going to support you in your life goals, including your business and career goals, if they are disrespected themselves.  Cheer when your spouse trusts you enough to bring up something that s/he wishes you’d do or not do, or do differently.  You are finding out about it while s/he still loves and trusts you.  If I had a dollar for every male friend, colleague, relative or client who has told me in bewilderment that he has no idea why his wife is divorcing him, I would have a fully-paid condo in Lahaina.  With the exception of the 3% of humanity who are sociopaths, people are only mysterious when we aren’t listening.  Coaxing problems out of hiding when they are still small and fixable keep the garden of love well-weeded.

And that is the most effective, most powerful boost you can give your career and your life for 2016.

Fun Food!

A new recipe!

I decided to try some new things for my new cookbook (following up 101 Healthy Meals in 5 Minutes or Less!) and this one is going to a potluck tomorrow.

I start with a reasonably healthy commercial cornbread mix, add 2 eggs or egg white, some applesauce, lots of cinnamon.

The applesauce adds nice natural sugar and enough water that I can skip the usual milk. It's great, low cal too, well as a dessert, LOL.