Thursday, August 18, 2016
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
All the advantages of living in cities..... really aren't! Fascinating stats!
You know that urban neighborhoods are more ethnically
diverse than small surrounding cities (aka suburbs), right? With a more diverse political spectrum,
right? And big cities are where more and
more people are congregating for better quality of life, right?
Turns out all of that is wrong. Central cities are full of singles, urban
neighborhoods are more uniform with respect to ethnicity AND political
philosophy, and have the highest levels of economic inequality in the
nation. They are also lonely places where
no one except the hipster singles interact outside of their immediate circle of
friends.
It all makes sense.
What pulls people outside their homes isn’t just the mating game of the affluent
Young Urban Singles that Microsofties are the poster boys/girls for. There is much more ethnic diversity,
political diversity and meeting-your-neighbors in surrounding small cities,
because that’s where the child-raising is happening and kids pull you into
church and PTA activities.
One of the stats that runs particularly counter to popular assumptions
is that high-density megacity neighborhoods that are multi-cultural are NOT
highly interactive. It turns out that
having to navigate a half-dozen different social and cultural norms, and people
whose goals, needs and preferred living style are at odds with yours (seniors
who want quiet at night and parents of babies who are anything but, comes to
mind), along of whom are right on top of you, without adequate soundproofing or
privacy, does NOT cause neighbors to reach out and connect, kumbaya. It
creates the stereotypical city culture of everyone living parallel lives. Parallel lines never cross, you’ll recall. As someone who has lived in moderate to
megacities, yes, indeed.
So what on Earth am I talking about? A fascinating library read by Joel Kotkin
[The Human City], focused on the kinds of human environments cities and small
surrounding cities create. It turns out
that it’s not what I – or maybe you – thought it was.
Let me explode more barriers that are holding you back from living the life that you want to live! www.soaringdragon.biz. Email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session today. victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com
Wednesday, August 10, 2016
Are you laughing yet? No? It's OK, I'll come back in 5 minutes......
Online personal ads consistently say “Sense of humor,” and
some studies of who gets called and responded to suggest that we do, indeed,
care about this characteristic in our potential mates.
Makes sense, too. Try
this logic chain:
·
Someone with a sense of humor is likely to take
the small things lightly. A genuine
sense of humor is inconsistent with dramatics, and
·
Laughing is good for your health and
·
Laughing makes you attractive.
We
are biologically programmed, from earliest neonate to elder, to respond to a
smiling face with an answering smile. If
I can get myself honestly laughing on the date, it not only means that I am
having a good time, it also means that I will appear more attractive to
you. [Chimpanzees and gorillas know
that a human smile means positive intentions, so it must go back at least 15
million years.]
Humor is a real asset in life as well as
dating, for all three reasons. Call up
funny videos on You Tube or Facebook.
Flush the cortisol out of your body with short breaks to laugh. Allow those tense muscles to naturally
relax. Your brain will clear, solutions
will pop into consciousness and you’ll actually notice that the sun is shining,
or you’ve got some blessed rain, and you’re alive. You’ll take a deep breath and remember that
it is very, very good to be alive, and loved by the universe and probably quite
a few people and other animals. You’ll
take another breath and the whole day has shifted on its axis.
Pretty good ROI on 2 minutes of laughing,
wouldn’t you say?
Want High Income, Recession-Proof Career, Deep Soul Clearing + Huge Positive Impact on Your Health?
And it all comes from the same FUN activity!
Whatever your career or business and your satisfaction level with it, I am sure that you remember your parents and high school guidance counselors pounding the "You have to go to college" message into you. You might also recall the disdain all these fine folk expressed, overtly or merely through tone of voice, for the blue-collar workers. Their jobs, because they work with their hands, were being offshored, but you - with your shiny new BA (or MA) - were a knowledge worker. YOU were golden.
Fast forward some decades. Sure enough, the good-paying blue collar jobs of the Midwest were offshored and the sorta-good-paying factory jobs of the South were taken over by illegal immigrants. Huge transition from fathers being able to support their families to fathers stuck in permanent unemployment, with no unemployment help, or re-employed at much less $, no benefits. A world of constant anxiety, no security and no self-esteem.
Sounds like your guidance counselors, parents, pundits, everyone really, was right. If you want money, security and good health (from lack of stress and from access to medical care and quality food), then you need to go to college. Case closed.
But...... what about the people who listened to that advice more recently, with college costs having skyrocketed? Huge education debt that is acting as an economic and personal sea anchor, preventing young people from buying homes, starting families or even moving away from their parents.
Compounded, of course, by the end of that lovely fantasy that knowledge work can't be offshored. It was always logically true that knowledge work is the easiest to offshore. No new factories to build. All you need is a cheap call-center or a wired world where everyone from accountants to radiologists can do their work with a Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese or Mexican accent. Not to mention Hungarian. My own work of deep transformational healing can be done from anywhere on Earth with a high-speed Internet link. And not just by highly-skilled and experienced healers like me. There are companies in the Puget Sound area who are hiring minimally-trained health coaches and hypnotists to work in crowded call-center environments at minimum wage! Obviously, the quality isn't going to be as high as what I do with my academic degrees, certifications and years of experience, but this is exactly what has been happening to most of the knowledge-worker occupations.
So here is the actual reality: A college degree is no longer the passport to the middle class, a road out of poverty and a road out of just-getting-by, that it used to be. That equation is dead. Unless you have a college degree in something immensely crucially essential and in demand, and which pays well, you may be feeding your mind, but you are wasting your money if you go anywhere other than the least expensive public college you can find. [American Public University, entirely online, is very cost-effective, and I recommend it as one of a handful of quality for-profit colleges.]
Guidance counselors are still playing the "college for all" song. So are all the "mean well" politicians. But that is not the road to follow. If you have someone in your family who is wondering how to get:
* Solid, steady income that cannot be offshored, ever, and which no recession will ever make a dent in AND
* a huge positive impact on your health because you have that steady security, and you can choose to either run your own business or work for a company AND
* the satisfaction of creation with your own two hands,
.... then, my friend, you need to get them an apprenticeship in one of the eternal trades: plumbing, auto tech, electrician. There are a few others, like chef and HVAC, that I can highly recommend, as well as craftsman carpentry.
Don't recoil in horror.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Enquiry Into the Value of Work (Matthew Crawford) sounded this alarm some years ago. In my work with clients, I sound off on the value of creating things with your own two hands, as much as possible throughout the day, as the road to better physical health and to peace of mind. The anxiety-stilling impact of doing creative work - anything from building a bird house to painting, coloring or crocheting - has been documented in medical studies as well as psychological. The more you can create over the course of a day, the less tempting baby-back ribs are, the less self-control you have to exert to not eat dessert, the less onerous and more joyful exercise and movement becomes, the less interesting alcohol and tobacco addictions are, and the more "Damn, I'm GOOD!!!!" experiences you have in the course of a day.
Because I will assert to you with no equivocation whatsoever that the clothing you make yourself makes you feel like a queen, the doghouse you create yourself makes you feel as powerful as the Emperor Akbar and the book you write from the heart, or the paint you swirl on a paper or canvas is as sweet to your eyes as a priceless Turner.
It's as close to the godly act of creation as we mere mortals ever get. You need that fabulous feeling. You DESERVE that fabulous feeling. You can get that fabulous feeling.
And when your grandkid the plumber arranges for you to never have a 4 hour wait for a stopped drain again, that feeling is priceless, too!
Start today!
_______________________________________________________________________
Know what else you deserve? You deserve to have all that procrastinating that you just can't figure out end too. Every single time you waste time on Facebook instead of making progress toward your deeply felt dreams, you deserve better! Every single time you decide that you will never succeed at what you want, you deserve better!
Accept my gift of a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch), and discover exactly what has really been holding you back or stopping you from achieving the life you really want. Visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz, and we'll schedule your free session. You need more than just "motivation" and inspiration. You are plenty motivated to get what you want! You just lack the specific tools to get back the barrier. And I am very, very good at blockage-demolition! www.soaringdragon.biz victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com
Whatever your career or business and your satisfaction level with it, I am sure that you remember your parents and high school guidance counselors pounding the "You have to go to college" message into you. You might also recall the disdain all these fine folk expressed, overtly or merely through tone of voice, for the blue-collar workers. Their jobs, because they work with their hands, were being offshored, but you - with your shiny new BA (or MA) - were a knowledge worker. YOU were golden.
Fast forward some decades. Sure enough, the good-paying blue collar jobs of the Midwest were offshored and the sorta-good-paying factory jobs of the South were taken over by illegal immigrants. Huge transition from fathers being able to support their families to fathers stuck in permanent unemployment, with no unemployment help, or re-employed at much less $, no benefits. A world of constant anxiety, no security and no self-esteem.
Sounds like your guidance counselors, parents, pundits, everyone really, was right. If you want money, security and good health (from lack of stress and from access to medical care and quality food), then you need to go to college. Case closed.
But...... what about the people who listened to that advice more recently, with college costs having skyrocketed? Huge education debt that is acting as an economic and personal sea anchor, preventing young people from buying homes, starting families or even moving away from their parents.
Compounded, of course, by the end of that lovely fantasy that knowledge work can't be offshored. It was always logically true that knowledge work is the easiest to offshore. No new factories to build. All you need is a cheap call-center or a wired world where everyone from accountants to radiologists can do their work with a Hindi, Chinese, Vietnamese or Mexican accent. Not to mention Hungarian. My own work of deep transformational healing can be done from anywhere on Earth with a high-speed Internet link. And not just by highly-skilled and experienced healers like me. There are companies in the Puget Sound area who are hiring minimally-trained health coaches and hypnotists to work in crowded call-center environments at minimum wage! Obviously, the quality isn't going to be as high as what I do with my academic degrees, certifications and years of experience, but this is exactly what has been happening to most of the knowledge-worker occupations.
So here is the actual reality: A college degree is no longer the passport to the middle class, a road out of poverty and a road out of just-getting-by, that it used to be. That equation is dead. Unless you have a college degree in something immensely crucially essential and in demand, and which pays well, you may be feeding your mind, but you are wasting your money if you go anywhere other than the least expensive public college you can find. [American Public University, entirely online, is very cost-effective, and I recommend it as one of a handful of quality for-profit colleges.]
Guidance counselors are still playing the "college for all" song. So are all the "mean well" politicians. But that is not the road to follow. If you have someone in your family who is wondering how to get:
* Solid, steady income that cannot be offshored, ever, and which no recession will ever make a dent in AND
* a huge positive impact on your health because you have that steady security, and you can choose to either run your own business or work for a company AND
* the satisfaction of creation with your own two hands,
.... then, my friend, you need to get them an apprenticeship in one of the eternal trades: plumbing, auto tech, electrician. There are a few others, like chef and HVAC, that I can highly recommend, as well as craftsman carpentry.
Don't recoil in horror.
Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Enquiry Into the Value of Work (Matthew Crawford) sounded this alarm some years ago. In my work with clients, I sound off on the value of creating things with your own two hands, as much as possible throughout the day, as the road to better physical health and to peace of mind. The anxiety-stilling impact of doing creative work - anything from building a bird house to painting, coloring or crocheting - has been documented in medical studies as well as psychological. The more you can create over the course of a day, the less tempting baby-back ribs are, the less self-control you have to exert to not eat dessert, the less onerous and more joyful exercise and movement becomes, the less interesting alcohol and tobacco addictions are, and the more "Damn, I'm GOOD!!!!" experiences you have in the course of a day.
Because I will assert to you with no equivocation whatsoever that the clothing you make yourself makes you feel like a queen, the doghouse you create yourself makes you feel as powerful as the Emperor Akbar and the book you write from the heart, or the paint you swirl on a paper or canvas is as sweet to your eyes as a priceless Turner.
It's as close to the godly act of creation as we mere mortals ever get. You need that fabulous feeling. You DESERVE that fabulous feeling. You can get that fabulous feeling.
And when your grandkid the plumber arranges for you to never have a 4 hour wait for a stopped drain again, that feeling is priceless, too!
Start today!
_______________________________________________________________________
Know what else you deserve? You deserve to have all that procrastinating that you just can't figure out end too. Every single time you waste time on Facebook instead of making progress toward your deeply felt dreams, you deserve better! Every single time you decide that you will never succeed at what you want, you deserve better!
Accept my gift of a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch), and discover exactly what has really been holding you back or stopping you from achieving the life you really want. Visit me at www.soaringdragon.biz, and we'll schedule your free session. You need more than just "motivation" and inspiration. You are plenty motivated to get what you want! You just lack the specific tools to get back the barrier. And I am very, very good at blockage-demolition! www.soaringdragon.biz victoria.leo.reiki@gmail.com
Monday, August 1, 2016
Step Forward from Intention to Action!
I just finished an interview on sharewisdom.tv, on Marianne Marlow's show Conscious Conversations. Marianne was my mentor when I was learning hypnotherapy, and now she is starting a new TV show!
My segment (from 20 minutes to 40 minutes of the hour) continued her theme of taking action. We have to step away from the thinking about it phase to the taking action. You don't want to race off a cliff in an excess of enthusiasm, but after you have done serious and analytical as well as intuitive searching for info, you need to put steps in your calendar and start SOMETHING.
[Or call me for a FREE Getting Unstuck session. This is not an offer for a sales pitch. I will get you through your first, starting step - the hardest - on your road to your goal!]
If you enjoy Marianne's content, some more wonderful free content on the same subject of taking action in my YouTube channel humanbio4everyone. Lots of encouragement as well as specific steps! Go for it!
And the funniest part of it is that until 30 minutes before airtime, I thought that it was a radio interview! [I was a last minute addition to the show, so some details fell through the communications cracks.] When I got a checksheet telling me about lighting, backgrounds, etc., several very genteel and ladylike expression fell dulcetly from my lip as I dashed into action. How appropriate for the theme of the show!
Earrings and lipstick, because my mum always said you can walk out the door for a meeting with the Queen with just those two. Eyeshadow because I didn't have time for makeup. No time for my truly spectacular, gorgeous wardrobe. So I had my tv debut in a denim dress and fabulous earrings. A tan in place of professional skin products. My hair all which way from a hair-wash 30 minutes earlier. If my philosophical framework is wrong and there is a humanistic deity in charge of events, all I can is that he, she or it was splitting their sides laughing.
How do you take action?
1) Start with the overall goal and break it down into specific, small, discrete tasks to get you to the first milestone. Forget about the rest, just focus on the first milepost.
2) Choose the easiest task on the list that doesn't depend on an earlier step and do that. Feel yourself moving! Cheer when you get it done!
3) Pick another easy step. Don't agonize over which one. Just one easy one. See you your muscles are unknotting as you are in Action?
Keep moving until you get to the milepost. Celebrate.
Name the next milepost and create steps. You're in motion. Just keep going.
The minute you feel resistance, stop. Meditate and ask your unconscious mind to tell you what it's really about. If the answer doesn't come, call me for your Free Getting Unstuck session and I'll get you moving again. [Not a sales pitch, remember.]
www.soaringdragon.biz 253-203-6676
Saturday, July 23, 2016
5 Ways to Boost Your Energy, Boost Your Joy, Lose Weight AND Much More!
So here's my suggestion: trust me enough to try it. Options are
endless. There are practical classes (what to do when the next disaster
strikes; how to fly-fish, etc), and there are fascinating,
intellectually-stimulating classes (how did the early Christians evolve their
idea that Jesus was god; how did dinosaurs evolve into birds; how to write
engaging travel stories for your family to enjoy).
What they
all have in common is that they are engaging (you are thinking about them, not
politics, the bills, your teenagers, your boss or the job market), and they are
FUN. When you spend time having fun and
learning, as opposed to fun that you’ve done many times before (watch football
on TV), you make more areas in your brain work. You particularly make your hippocampus, where
memory is stored, work hard. The harder
it works, the larger it gets. New
neurons emerge from neuronal stem cells if you work your hippocampus
enough. [Stress kills neurons and
shrinks your hippocampus.]
As you move through life, you tend to get into habits and routines, so
your brain starts to “coast.” When you
are not learning new things, you invite cognitive decline to make a home, a
process that doesn’t wait until you are in your 60s, please note! I totally get why most of us don’t want to go
into Learner Mode. A Learner, by definition, hasn’t got a clue what’s going on. Do you
enjoy that lost and clueless feeling?
No, course, not. THAT, dear
friends, more than the “I don’t have time to have fun” is the real reason why
Learning isn’t compelling. If we’re honest,
those of us who “don’t have time” do make time for sitcoms and sports.
Do you have any idea how many dinosaur species you get to
learn about and try to remember in the Paleontology: How Therapod Dinosaurs
Became Birds class from U of Alberta on Coursera? A lot. I wasn’t taking it for a grade, so who
cares how many times I take the tests before I get it? Just trying to remember as much as possible
was enough of a workout to kick my hippocampus’ butt. Man, was that fascinating! Hubby and I couldn’t tear ourselves away,
every evening for a week. And it was
FREE.
You want your hippocampus as robust as possible if you are
going to avoid Alzheimer’s, and besides, learning is FUN.
So here’s my challenge to you all: One night this week, turn the TV off, get the kids to do their chores, and sit down at your Internet and research:
So here’s my challenge to you all: One night this week, turn the TV off, get the kids to do their chores, and sit down at your Internet and research:
· ** Coursera – where I do my dinosaur study, and
many others learn history, language, writing, and on and on. Most classes are FREE. I've learned from Laura.com, but that's mostly work-related, not fun. I have heard good things about Udemy, but haven't taken anything there.
· ** The Great Courses – which aren’t free, but are
regularly discounted, and many libraries carry some of them. I bought How Jesus Became God and was
amazingly enlightened at hundreds of years of conceptual evolution on just
exactly who Jesus was, and if he was god, when he became god. Whatever your actual beliefs, the history is
can’t-stop-listening engrossing.
· ** Local community centers – where you can try something entirely
different to give your hippocampus a real workout. How about art? [Can’t do it?
Great. Skilled is what you are
when you FINISH, not before you start!]
You can sign up for exercise classes while you’re at it. My community center has a water slide that is
open on Saturday mornings. Just try to
convince me that’s not fun. You can’t. Your head is shaking but your lips are
curving up in an unconscious smile. You know how much fun it
is.
· ** Local community colleges will let you attend
some classes without a grade. If you
want to attend Over 55/Senior college, you can, even if you’re not quite that
experienced with life. You don’t have to
dye your hair grey and the yearly fee is only $125 in my town.
The key is to set aside your performance anxiety and your reluctance
to be clumsy and dopey (as one of my clients put it). Not knowing what you’re doing is the fog that
clears as you work at it. Working your
brain and having fun doing it is the greatest rejuvenator of tired minds,
hearts and souls, second only to physical exercise. I combine the two by looking through
crochet-pattern and art-instruction books while I fast-walk on a treadmill, 4
days a week. [The other three I splash
and laugh in water aerobics classes. Not
too much learning, but lots of movement; laughter reduces my cortisol load as
well.] When I emerge from my dinosaurs,
or my crochet-treadmill, or my splashing, I have such a surge of energy, the “lost
time” is more than made up in increased cleverness in solving problems and
getting tasks done, and the enthusiasm to embrace all the boring and/or scary
parts. It’s easy to plunge in and just
git ‘er done, when you have so much fun to get back to!
Next week: pick something to learn.
Week after: start it. Get through the initial discomfort to break through to the “wow, that’s cool.” The discomfort that has been scaring you for years might only last a minute!
Want to discover more ways to have fun with the same 24 hours you have now? Call for a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch). www.soaringdragon.biz
Stress and the Joys of Dessert - and Pasta
Stress releases what we popularly refer to as adrenalin, and cortisol. Wonder why you can't lose weight? Too little sleep and too much cortisol. That is why a primary component of my Weight Loss packages (www.soaringdragon.biz) is attention to methods of FAST, EFFECTIVE providing comfort and relief from whatever is driving that flood of cortisol. As the Dalai Lama and others point out, when you are calmer you can determine if it is something you can do something about - and most of the time you can do SOMEthing. So go do it. Or it's something beyond your powers. Then really, truly let go of being upset about it. Move on. Focus on what you can gain in the future, not what you lost in the past.
And sometimes it just means that you have to hang on, and try again, in a different way. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, a hero is no braver than an ordinary person, they are just braver for 5 minutes longer. Amen.
So when you tell me that you are "too busy" for an inexpensive Reiki class, or tapping training, that you can't take time to exercise or learn breathing exercises, and I know that you are choosing instead to give yourself comfort in the way you always have - with food - think about this: You can learn nearly all of the above in an 8 hour day with me. And the only effect will be longer life, stronger body, heart and soul - and effortless relief from the effects of stress for the rest of your life. What POWER in your hands. Continuing to medicate your feelings with sugar, dessert and pasta shortens your life, weakens your heart and soul, and comforts you for at most an hour.
You deserve more than that!
Don't you? When getting real power is so easy?
Call or email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch) and see what power you can put into YOUR hands!
And sometimes it just means that you have to hang on, and try again, in a different way. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, a hero is no braver than an ordinary person, they are just braver for 5 minutes longer. Amen.
So when you tell me that you are "too busy" for an inexpensive Reiki class, or tapping training, that you can't take time to exercise or learn breathing exercises, and I know that you are choosing instead to give yourself comfort in the way you always have - with food - think about this: You can learn nearly all of the above in an 8 hour day with me. And the only effect will be longer life, stronger body, heart and soul - and effortless relief from the effects of stress for the rest of your life. What POWER in your hands. Continuing to medicate your feelings with sugar, dessert and pasta shortens your life, weakens your heart and soul, and comforts you for at most an hour.
You deserve more than that!
Don't you? When getting real power is so easy?
Call or email for a FREE Getting Unstuck session (not a sales pitch) and see what power you can put into YOUR hands!
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