Come to Your Senses: Exercises to Inspire Personal Exploration and Self Discovery

Creative Living in Technicolor Is your life flat or full? Does life seem one-dimensional or multi-faceted? Do you experience life in black and white or in Technicolor? We often race so quickly through our lives that we forget to stop and smell the roses. A wise and inspired man by the name of Leonardo da Vinci once said, "The five senses are the ministers of the soul." One way to enrich our existence is to expand our ability to live through our senses. Once inspired, we literally and figuratively come to our senses and begin to live in a state of gratitude and marvel at the textures, tastes, and sounds that reveal themselves each and every day.

Let Your Senses Show You How To Celebrate Life Think back for a moment and remember a time when you felt truly alive. What comes to mind when you recall that experience? Perhaps the tingling of your skin, brilliant colors or the way light sparkled, a pulsing heart, a delicious smell that curled into your nostrils or a flavor that made your mouth pop! Your senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are portals to rich experiences. Spend time playing and rediscovering the power of your senses and it will transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Exercises to Awaken Your Senses Through Exploration and Self Discovery The key to awakening your senses is to get out of your head and into your body. Although you can read about the power of your senses, your own experience will teach you the benefits of living a more sensory life. Take action! Use exercises like the ones below to intentionally become present in your day-to-day life. Exercise 1: Seeing with Eyes of Love and Wonder Look into the face of someone you cherish. Invite them to share this experience. Spend several minutes in quiet observation and reverence. What can you learn about this beloved? What do you see that you have never seen before? How does your heart feel in response to such an intimate viewing? Exercise 2: Clear Vision Experience with clear vision what you see, instead of interpreting. Once the colors, shapes, and images become good or bad, pretty or ugly, familiar or unfamiliar, you have stepped away from a clear view. Describe in your journal a sunset, an oak tree, or the moment at dusk when all is in shadow. Describe it with your sense of sight in vivid detail. Do not stop until you have captured it all. Once you have set your pen down, read through your description. Notice how many details you would normally miss with a casual glance. What surprises can you find in your observation? Exercise 3: Capture the Music of Your Life Take some time to reflect on your life and discover what sounds still ripple in your memory. A puppy's excited bark, the sound of the 10 PM train, the melody of instruments from the kitchen as your mother prepared Sunday breakfast, a cat's quiet purr, thunder rolling down off the ridge as a storm was approaching, the kettle whistling or the sound of a deep breath. We don't always notice the nuances of sounds, but when we do, the moment is far richer. Master the skill of listening with your whole body. Have an attitude of gratitude and compassion to the story the other person is sharing. This kind of intentional listening is a real gift to give and receive. Exercise 4: Touch Awareness DayThe idea of touch may conjure the obvious: a warm hug, a firm handshake, or a gentle massage; but how many things do you touch each day that you don't even notice? What if you went through one day paying attention to everything you touched and noticed how everything felt? Create your very own Touch Awareness Day and watch for surprises. Expand your touch capacity even further by going through one day consciously touching everything with loving hands. Exercise 5: The Taste and Smell of InspirationPlan a feast for yourself and a few friends. Choose the location, menu and table setting to reflect your personal tastes. Feature your favorite wine, foods, and desserts. Once prepared and ready sit and enjoy each dish with great attention. Describe the smell of each food and take your first bites all together. Savor the flavors and then share with one another how the tastes affect you. Acknowledge the feelings your body is experiencing because of the tastes and smells. Be inspired to embrace how different life is when you come to your senses.

Corrie Woods is a Women's Life Coach and author of The Woman's Field Guide to Exceptional Living. Through coaching, personal growth retreats, teleclasses and writing she supports and inspires women. Explore free resources at http://www.womansfieldguide.com.

Learn How To Activate Your Personal Development To Achieve Your Dreams

Have you lost touch with your dreams? Perhaps as you have gotten older life has slowly made you "realize" that you need to be practical and give up on your dreams. Perhaps all you concentrate on now is your committments and responsibilities. Perhaps you have lost that fire within you that once drove you to imagine wonderful possibilities. Has life left you without dreams?

As we grow older and bigger our dreams and life expectations tend to get smaller. However, if you would still like to achieve your dreams and are willing to take some action to get them then read on!

The key and starting point for achieving anything in life lies in your mind. Before you can have, be or do anything you must first be able to envisage yourself being able to be, do or have the thing you desire. When you get your mind right the rest will fall into place almost effortlessly!

As a child no one could tell you that things were impossible. You believed in wizards, enchanted forests, mythical beats and magical lands. You also believed that anything was possible and that it was possible for you to have anything you wanted. This mental ability to believe in the impossible was slowly trained out of you as you grew older. However, if you want to achieve the things in life that you have always dreamed of achieving then you must regain this child-like faith in achieving the seemingly impossible.

By believing that you can achieve something you have done 90% of the work already! Without going into the quantum physics behind the power of thought just be aware that your thoughts are more powerful than you can comprehend. Science is proving that thoughts have very real creative power in a very tangible and physical way. They have the ability to rebuild your world.

However, on a more practical note, your thoughts are also the things that motivate you to take action. If you believe that you can succeed at something and feel optimistic about a successful outcome then you are much more likely to try it!

The first step is to practise imagining that you already have the things that you want. Close your eyes and visualize yourself in possession of your dreams already. Your ability to imagine and visualize things that do not yet exist is just like any other ability that you possess. Although it is natural and an inherent ability that you have been born with it gets weakened through lack of use. However, it will improve with exercise.

By visualizing, on a daily basis, your dreams as already having been accomplished you will begin to find that your imagined scenes become more vivid and life-like. You will also find yourself able to create mental images of yourself having things that before you didn't even consider. This happens as you start to enjoy the mental "acquisition" of your desires. A symptom of this is that you will begin to aquire faith that your visualized image is actually possible for you to achieve.

So, what are the nuts-and-bolts of exercising your imagination so that it creates unshakable faith in you? Well it is as easy as setting aside 15 minutes in the morning and 15 minutes at night!

Start small. Begin with a goal that is not too big that you will get discouraged but that is not too small to be easily achieved. Choose something that you really want. Then for 15 minutes each morning and 15 minutes each night visualize yourself already having it. Conjure up as much strong positive emotion around your mental image as you - this is important!

Now evoking positive emotions around your mental image should not be hard if your mental scene incorporates something that you really want. When we imagine having things we want we naturally start to feel good.

Soon you will find yourself feeling that you either already have the thing you have been visualizing or you will feel that you are definitely going to have it. When this happens you will begin to take actions, sometimes unconsciously sometimes deliberately however most times it is both. The actions that you begin to take will start to bring you closer to the achievement of your goal. As you take more of these inspired action steps you will find that eventually your imagined scene becomes real!

Once you succeed at small things begin to think bigger until you can imagine yourself living the life that you want on your terms.

When you start to think bigger then you begin to get bigger results!

Read our free reviews of the best personal development products we tested at http://www.angelfire.com/wizard2/release/personaldevelopment/ and find out what really works! . To find out what Self Improvement products work go to http://www.personal-development.info where we find out what works so you don't have to!

Your Wish Is My Command

The fictional story most of us are familiar with had Aladdin’s genie grant three wishes. In “The Secret,” it’s stated the original story has no limit on the number of wishes. It’s easy to accept unlimited wishes; but realizing what the genie’s response means as it applies to the Law of Attraction, may take a bit more thought.

This week I spoke with someone who’s fairly new to this type of information. She accepts it; but as soon as any challenge appears in her life, even a small one, old programs bite her on the bumper sticker…only her bumper sticker doesn’t read, “Shift Happens;” hers is missing a key letter.

She insisted she can’t move forward until she has Every. Last. Detail. Detailed (quoting Mike Litman again, “You don’t have to get it right, you just have to get it going.”). She commented her age is involved (it isn’t), you have to have money (not a lot), have to have flyers (not true); and, her list of have-to-haves went on until I interrupted her.

We discussed how for around $30 she can get business cards printed. Then we discussed the free ways she can advertise her services such as attend networking events, be a guest speaker at local meetings, contact former clients who were highly impressed with her skills and work ethic (all of them), and a few other ideas that came up.

We talked about how every single emotionally-charged thought she has causes her “personal genie,” a.k.a. the quantum field of potential, to respond, “Your wish is my command,” without censoring whatever thought-form she sets into motion. I asked her to write this down and put it where she can easily see it often.

She acknowledged that every time she spins herself into a negative vortex, she gets more of the same. I asked her, if she’s able to do that for experiences she doesn’t desire to have or expand how she would feel about doing it for what she wants to expand more of into her life. And I suggested that instead of focusing on what she feels needs to be changed, she focus on what it feels like to live her dream. It’s interesting that she can accept responsibility for creating negatives in her life, yet assumes responsibility for positives comes from outside her.

When Aladdin tells the genie his wish, he doesn’t ask the genie how it’s going to get accomplished; he knows it will. (If there was anything he needed to do to assist this, I’m pretty sure he’d do it.) It’s the same for us. We muck up the process when we doubt it will happen (nothing good happens to me), doubt how it can happen (I have to control every detail, but I also disclaim my inner power), and doubt we’re worthy to have our wish granted (we place limits on receiving).

When we place limits on what can happen and how it can happen, we simultaneously set limits on allowing it into our lives. It’s a bit like an invited guest arriving, but unable to enter until we grant permission by opening the door.

At one point, the woman said her genie wasn’t doing his job right. “Just remember,” I reminded her, “it’s you who tells your genie what to do.” As you go through the moments of your day, imagine hearing, “Your wish is my command,” after every thought or word from you. Kind of makes you want to pay better attention to this, doesn’t it.

Joyce Shafer is a published author; freelance rewriter, editor, proofreader; and United Press International weekly columnist, also published at various online venues. See the exceptional reviews of her books, “I Don’t Want to be Your Guru, but I Have Something to Say,” at www.lulu.com/content/773467, and “How to Have What You REALLY Want,” at www.lulu.com/content/796351. Contact her at jls1422@yahoo.com.

Anyone Can Do This - It's Easy

Many people want to be successful. They want to have wealth. Or fame. Or acclaim.

How can this be done?

We can start by saying that being successful, having wealth etc is easy. There are many successful famous people who have become that way by doing things that are not especially difficult - singing a song, inventing something, chatting to their friends and family about detergent...

So you say, if it's that easy, why doesn't it happen to me?

Let's look at what often happens. You want to be wealthy and/or successful and/or famous. You've heard that there's a lot of money to be made on the Internet, the so-called "make money online" story. People are becoming overnight millionaires effortlessly. So you go online to see how it's done. You find a whole load of websites telling you all you need to do is this or that Step By Step Technique, making sure you avoid these or those Dumb Mistakes, and thousands of dollars will simply roll into your PayPal account.

So you sign up and you do everything they say. And it doesn't work.

The reasons for this are quite complicated to explain. Some people go into telling you stuff about "vibrations" which can put off the non-New-Agers, or "harmonizing with the source of all things" which can put off agnostics and religious people alike, or Law of Attraction and quantum physics which can baffle the non-scientist. All of these types of explanation are valid enough but they don't necessarily help.

To give a more simple reason why it doesn't work - it's because it just isn't YOU.

I'll give you an example. Some years ago I got a job as a door to door salesman. We had some training, we were told that we weren't selling anything, we were "making a placement", by which they meant we were allowing the customer to have the product at a special, massively reduced, once in a lifetime price, and they would love the product so much they would tell all their friends. We were to tell the customer we were advertising, not selling, not selling, not selling.

Yeah you're right - we were selling.

It was important to get it right because we didn't get paid anything at all unless we "placed" a product. I followed the super salesmen around for a couple of days to learn some of the ropes. It was great to watch these guys "placing" these encyclopedias or whatever it was we were hawking, at every second door they tried, apparently without any effort. They said, anyone can do this, just do exactly what we do. So I learned what they did, and tried to copy it exactly.

Well, it didn't work. I was a lousy salesman. People just didn't want to buy those things from me - even though I followed exactly the patter, movements, facial expressions of the super salesmen in every way. The problem was I didn't believe they were going to want to buy, I didn't believe in what I was doing. It just wasn't ME.

So it's no good people saying about some "make money online" scheme that anyone can do it, because it just isn't true.

Now, here is the way to be successful, this is "the secret", the only way, in my opinion. You need to find first of all something that you really like doing, that you love, that you can feel passionate about, that you believe in. Something that is YOU. Then do that thing whatever it is as much as you can. Don't compromise on it. One test as to whether you chose the right thing will be that it won't feel like hard work. It will be easy. (For those salesmen, it wasn't hard work, because it was the right thing for them.)

But wait a minute, you say, if it's something easy, it won't be worth doing, because anyone could do it? But this is exactly what we've just been talking about. Something that's easy for you might not be so easy for other people. When Marconi invented the radio, he said it was so easy he couldn't understand why no-one else had already done it. Don't think about if it's easy or difficult, just think about, is it YOU?

It's my conviction that everyone has a purpose in life, and our task is to find what that purpose is. So don't copy other people, find your own dream, and follow wherever it leads you.

I'll leave you with the story of Edison, who tried out ten thousand different materials for the filament of the commercial light bulb he was trying to make. Ten thousand! Can you imagine how that feels to try that many, and none of them work? The point is that he believed in what he was doing, he liked it, it was HIM, so he patiently kept going, found one that did work, and the rest is history. When they asked him how he felt about failing ten thousand times, he replied, "I didn't fail, I found ten thousand materials that didn't work."

The author believes that following your own dream will lead to success. See our Self Development Blog at http://positivehighenergy.blogspot.com/ to find out more, and ask a question or make a comment if you want.

Employee Motivation Techniques: How to Fire Up Your Employees' Motivation

If you know how to motivate employees, your company's overall status and profits will improve as a result. Employees are the lifeblood of the company. It's therefore vital to use effective employee motivation techniques so they can stay happy and inspired with their work. This, in turn, will also make them more productive.

Here are 3 employee motivation techniques you can use to arouse their enthusiasm:

1) Be interested in them.

Know their personal background, where they went to school, any job experiences they had, their hobbies, their future plans... even the minor things like what movies or books they prefer.

This shows that you're willing to take the time to know more about them. People like to talk about themselves, so what you're doing is satisfying their ego. In the process, they will get to like you.

2) Give them exciting opportunities and reward them for their accomplishments.

As much as possible, give them job assignments that they're either good at, are interested in, or can have fun with.

Give them every opportunity to prove how good they are. And once they've proven their worth or even exceed your expectations, acknowledge them. Praise them in public; let them and other employees know what exactly made them outstanding.

This employee motivation technique will inspire others to do their best because they want to attain the same recognition!

Aside from thanking them, you can give gifts or awards that they can treasure and show to others. Awards such as certificates, medals or trophies would be a better choice as these items illustrate their achievement.

3) Be trustworthy and respectable.

If you said you're going to do something for them, fulfill it at all cost. Nothing can ruin their trust and respect for you more than broken promises and empty words.

Show them that you're someone who will listen to their concerns, and someone who is trustworthy enough to keep private matters confidential.

Be someone who they can look up to. This means you have to be a good example for them. Strictly follow the company's rules and perform your job in the most ethical manner possible.

Let's recap the 3 employee motivation techniques I've taught. First, be interested in your employees. Second, give them exciting opportunities and reward them for their achievements. Last, be a trustworthy and respectable employer or superior. Apply these employee motivation techniques, and you'll see a tremendous improvement in your company's productivity and work environment.

If you can inspire and influence employees to become madly in love with their work, how much will your profits multiply? Double? Triple? Quadruple? Discover employee motivation and persuasion techniques that can easily get employees to do a fantastic job at http://www.20daypersuasion.com