So often we hear people say, "Just trust me," and in response we feel the hairs on the back of our neck vibrate. How can we know who and what to trust? What research are you willing to do to make sure that expectation and promises will be fulfilled? How can you get the track record on the person you are evaluating?

Some reminders:

1. Before you assess the integrity of another, be honest with yourself about the quality and level of your own integrity. How truthful and authentic are you with people? Can they trust you to keep your word and to provide a quality and promised product or result? Do you make promises -- results that are produced by X time -- or do you communicate the "I'll try" statement? Are you clear with others about the expectations you have of them that are required for you to fulfill your promise? (A mutual expectation and delineation of results that each of you must produce put in writing is powerful.) Do you keep your word with yourself? Do you exaggerate your stories or tell half truths supposedly to protect others?

2. Do not jump at time-bound sales promises. Usually those deals are available again later if someone really wants your business or is truly interested in providing a good service. The "deal" is based on a bottom line that will still produce income to the seller. If someone can do the deal for less, then the real price is probably exaggerated to begin with.

3. Check the history and service/product of the person on the internet, others who have worked with them in the past, and ask for some names of people who were unhappy with the work. If someone is willing to give you the name of someone who cancelled the contract or who communicated their displeasure, the integrity meter goes up a notch.

4. Decisions made in emergencies are often made without effective research. The product, the provider of the service and the cost are likely to be inflated.

5. Evaluate the product and person as to whether their values and principles are in alignment with yours. They may be able to do and provide what they say, but if the values communicated in the results are not consistent with yours, what would it matter.

6. Communicate at the earliest possible moment any breakdowns in the project. If there is not resolution to the breakdown, withdraw from the contract and the provider. Put your complaints in writing and submit to the service provider, the Better Business Bureau, and be sure to tell anyone that either referred you to this business or to anyone you might have referred.

7. Your name and reputation is significant in the commitment to have a long-standing and competent business. If you are dealing with someone who does not share that commitment, refrain from doing business with them. Remember that the business that you hire to do something for you is representing you and your name and your business. It is your name that is on the line.

8. Be willing to check deeper when your gut whispers that something is wrong, even if it happens with friends and family members. Trust you listening and it will be more and more helpful to you over the years. If anyone is offended about your investigation, there may be more reason to research even deeper.

Researchers are now saying laughter can do a lot more than they ever thought. It can basically bring balance to all the components of the immune system, which helps us fight off diseases. Laughter reduces levels of certain stress hormones. In doing this, laughter provides a safety valve that shuts off the flow of stress hormones and the fight-or-flight compounds that swing into action in our bodies when we experience stress, anger or hostility. These stress hormones suppress the immune system and raise blood pressure among other things.

Laughter provides psychological benefits. People often store negative emotions, such as anger, sadness and fear, rather than expressing them. When held inside these emotions can cause biochemical changes that can affect our bodies. Laughter provides a way for these emotions to be harmlessly released and thus, is cathartic.

What may surprise you even more is the fact that researchers estimate that laughing 100 times is equal to 10 minutes on the rowing machine or 15 minutes on an exercise bike. Laughing can be a total body workout! Blood pressure is lowered, and there is an increase in vascular blood flow and in oxygenation of the blood, which further assists healing. Laughter also gives your diaphragm and abdominal, respiratory, facial, leg and back muscles a workout. That's why you often feel exhausted after a long bout of laughter -- you've just had an aerobic workout!

Increasingly, mental health professionals are suggesting "laughter therapy," which teaches people how to laugh -- openly -- at things that aren't usually funny and to cope in difficult situations by using humor. Did you know that there is now an International Society for Humor Studies?

Put more laughter in your life:

• Figure out what makes you laugh and do it (or read it or watch it) more often.
• Surround yourself with funny people -- be with them every chance you get.
• Develop your own sense of humor. Maybe even take a class to learn how to be a better comic -- or at least a better joke-teller at that next party. Be funny every chance you get -- as long as it's not at someone else's expense!
• Laugh even when you don’t have a good reason to laugh. A good belly laugh will trigger the endorphins and soon you will be feeling the shift in your body and your psyche.
• Begin to see the joke of life and let go of all the significance and heaviness we place on it.
  

1. Are you happy and satisfied with what you are already doing? Satisfaction is a choice to live consistent with your purpose and sense of destiny, that you bringing that commitment to everything you are and do. Then, look and see what you might do that would expand that sense of well-being.

2. Define the qualities and activities that have you feel good about yourself. If you are doing something simply to become financially wealthy, you will most likely fail. Most people are working for pay at jobs they hate. Enjoying something about what you do and the contribution you are making is foundational in feeling and having true wealth. You are a magnet for pulling in the energy to you that you put out.

3. If you are truly committed to the result you say you are, you will bring your focus and actions in alignment with what it will take to have the results. If you are afraid of change, life will become the quick sand that engulfs you. We are always changing – expanding or contracting. What will you choose?

4. Allow yourself to be “different”, to think and create differently from others. Appreciate and claim your uniqueness and make it work for you.

5. Choose how you will interact and respond to events and situations in your life. Sometimes things really do just happen. You can choose to create your response consistent with your values or to react impulsively based on a triggered emotion and belief.

6. Engage the Law of Equal Energy, giving and receiving in balance in significant relationships. If you feel that you are giving more than you are receiving, the burdened martyr energy will close off your success. If you feel dependent on someone else without engaging in a mutual return, you will begin to feel resentful and trapped dependent on the other’s good will.

7. Produce a quality of Self, an identity that other’s count on that is filled with character and compassion, and a predictable quality of work and product and wealth will surely follow. If you have money without personal wealth of being, the money will never be enough.

8. Positive affirmations can become sugar-coated negative beliefs. Listen for the “Ya-but’s”, the “if only’s”, and the “should’ve’s” to reveal the true beliefs that will govern your mind and actions. Healing and transforming these beliefs with new actions that bring new evidence for possibility is important.

Here are some "Keep it Simple Coaching" elements for motivating yourself to success:

1. Create a vision for something that matters to you, that matters enough for you to put your time, energy and resources toward making it happen.

2. Design a plan of action with broad goals and actions with a time schedule to guide you forward.

3. Design your resource and support team of people that can share your vision and are willing to support you in achieving it. (Often these are not family members or friends.)

4. Admit what you don’t know and ask for coaching from someone who has success. (You don’t know what you don’t know.)

5. Make a promise to yourself and to someone else about a result you are committed to achieving and state the “by when” time agreement. Then assess and report the action taken and the result.

6. Assess and evaluate the effectiveness and accuracy of your plan in producing the intended results according to schedule.

7. Build in rewards for yourself and your team along the way. (All work and no play makes for a lot of suffering and martyring.)

Left on our own without any outside stimulation, coaching or guidance, we can readily find ourselves feeling glum, undirected, and without a clear purpose. Just imagine how many mornings you wake up ready and excited to leap into you day.

So how do we take ourselves from the mundane, “I don’t want to day,” to being a conscious, focused, in-action and results oriented person. First, notice that seldom do you wake up energized and motivated. Second, recognize that we all need a little help from our friends and can not do it all alone. And third, identify the particular activities and resources that stimulate you to think positively, be results-oriented rather than engaging in petty, addictive, “stinking thinking” that lives in reasons rather than results.

Motivate yourself with:
1. Motivational reading, audio conversations, quotes, and visual cues.

2. Create vision posters or a simple statement or picture that reminds you of your target and place them in a prominent place that you will see every day. (Your bathroom is a wonderful place for listening to messages and seeing visuals that give continual subliminal messages to your brain.)

3. Say “No” to negativity in your own thoughts and speaking as well as that of others. Refuse the negative language and separate yourself from people who take you down the path of the “reasons why” something can’t work. Notice who you have in your energy field. Remember success breeds success.

4. Be interested and empowering of others dreams and they will want to support you and yours.

5. Keep your word with yourself and others will know you as a person they can trust.

6. Acknowledge and celebrate your accomplishments each day before you jump to the “what’s next.”

7. Design your own declaration of who you are and speak it often every day. What you believe and think about becomes reality.

8. Laugh and relax. All work and no freedom to play makes for a driven, dry and humorless

People are now frequently declaring themselves as depressed. Depression has become the most overused diagnostic term by the general public. We have been educated to be depressed and to medicate away the symptoms by commercials and advertising. Take your self-diagnosis to your doctor and you will most likely walk out with a prescription for an antidepressant. Many times people simply feel sad and anxious and are uncomfortable feeling those emotions or think there must be something seriously wrong with them when in fact, feeling sad or anxious can be quite normal and even appropriate.

Situational responses of sadness occur after a significant personal loss of a loved one, of a job, a dream, or a move. Any change or loss or anticipated loss can generate feelings of sadness, anger and fear.

An opening of an old wound or trauma can trigger sadness and anxiety. If there was a traumatized loss as a child that was never resolved of released, a current upset can stimulate more feelings than expected. A mental health professional may be very helpful in helping you to define the source of the upset and healing it.

If as a child and adolescent, you experienced a parent who withdrew emotionally or “went to the bed” for days, or was hospitalized because of a “mental breakdown”, you may have learned to cope in the same way. Perhaps, the patterns have biogenetic components. Learning new coping behaviors is important. Sometimes medications are necessary in the re-learning of new behaviors.


Rather than treating “depression” first with medication, explore these options.
1. Allow yourself to become more comfortable with feelings. Welcome to humanity! You will have feelings of sadness and anxiety.
2. Seek guidance and support from a mental health professional, spiritual mentor or sometimes, a good friend who can allow you to talk you through your feelings.
3. Get in action! It is the enemy of negative thinking. Simple exercise and getting out in public with people who are supportive and positive can change the chemistry in the body that brings on depression.
4. Structure your day with a simple schedule that decreases the amount of time spent in bed, watching TV and being on the computer.
5. Eat simple and healthy food. Decrease the eating of junk food, or not eating at all.
6. Do something for someone else (i.e., deliver meals on wheels, build a Habitat house, mow someone’s lawn, etc.).
7. Do the things that work for you to keep you in action and in relationship even, and especially when, you don’t want to.

Blessings,
Sylvia

Participating in a program titled Success Summit provided me with fascinating research. I will summarize some of the most revealing elements. Speakers challenged us to stay positive, to say "no" to negativity, and to design the vision of our dreams and then, to do those things that can bring the vision into reality. The inspirational words were not new, just powerful in reminding us to be conscious about the impact of our thought, feelings and actions in creating our reality. These are just a few of the comments that I took home to chew on.

Take the time to design the "Why" of you; your mission and purpose and reason for doing what you do, for being who you are. Read that "Why" description for 7 minutes each morning affirming your commitments and your visions. These statements give direction and energy to your day's activities.

Brand yourself, your work and your website in a way that is consistent with your integrity and commitments. It is critical in creating an identity of which you can be proud. If you don't define yourself, others will. Speak your purpose and values and allow your imagination to reveal the unique you.

Creating a Dream Team, a Mastermind Group can support you through the challenges of the dream stealers and killers. The Group supports your vision and adds dimension, expanded ideas and possibilities to your action plan and resources. Choose people who are smarter than you, have different knowledge bases and skills, and who can say "no" to you.

Target your goals and identify measurable results. Measure your results on a regular and consistent basis to evaluate whether the action plan is working or needs tweaking, re-adjustment, or alteration.

I had the wonderful opportunity to meet dozens of people and engage them about their desires as well as share my book, The Joy of Adulthood. Many books and CDs were sold and opportunities for future work together were opened. I put my book and media materials into the hands of Stedman Graham and Les Brown, inspirational and educational speakers. I only wish that more of my dream team had been present to absorb the exciting energy of this powerful experience.

Blessings.
Sylvia

Design a simple 3 point system that you can maintain easily and that you can do easily. Continue that program for 30 days and then add something new or challenge yourself to expand the current activities. If you don’t help yourself, how can you be open to receiving the help that may be available to you if you only noticed it, could hear it or ask for it.

Include some of these commitments in your self help program.

1. Quiet time without stimulation of TV, radio, phone or other stimulation.

2. Physical activity that is beyond your current practice; (i.e., walk the stairs, park your car away from the front door of the office or shopping mall, stretch your limbs before getting out of bed, all the way to walking 2 miles a day or working out and hour a day.

3. Read or listen to something inspirational as the first thing in the morning and the last thing at night. Give your mind positive stimulation.

4. Eat a big salad or green vegetable once a day. Decrease the intake of white carbohydrates and sweets.

5. Complete something on your “to do” list. Choose something that could take you under 15 minutes to accomplish. Make a 15 minute contribution to your day.

6. Have fun, laugh often, engage with positive thinking people and be one yourself.

7. Before going to sleep, review your day and identify at least one thing that you are grateful for and one gift or miracle that happened that day.

Blessings,
Sylvia