Good Morning!

Today is the birthday of a very special person who is dear to me. It is my brother who is big in the honey world. He tends bees and officiates organizations that assist beekeepers. He spends a lot of time and love on the bees he tends and they, in turn, benefit greatly by producing absolutely wonderful nutritious honey. We could also benefit greatly by eating that wonderful honey as we tend to the health of and nutrition for our bodies. Did you know that high-quality honey is RICH in Antioxidants that can help lower blood pressure and improve cholesterol? Honey can actually lower triglycerides!

How noisy is your world, your life? We have traditional noise. We have visual noise (clutter). Now we have lots of digital noise, don’t we?

Do you feel differently when your out in nature as opposed to in your home or office?

Let’s make exercise easy and doable during these difficult times. You don’t need to make it a chore or take a giant chunk out of your day. You just need to make sure you get some sort of exercise 5 to 6 days a week. Here’s an easy way to make that work for you.

During this Pandemic time of our lives, how do we make sure we don’t lose real connection with people? Is zoom enough? Is facetime enough? Is sitting/standing 6 feel apart enough? How can we maintain or even enhance our connection with others? Could it be that this unpleasant global situation might give us the opportunity to go beyond communicating and actually provide the time to have an exchange of our humanity with each other? Could we perhaps go beyond having mere exchanges of information to actually touch each other?

How would it affect you to spend your time being angry and feeling sorry for yourself for having been convicted and sentenced unjustly? Alternatively, how would it affect you to spend your time productively like studying for the bar exam, or writing a best selling book, or becoming amazingly fit? Isn’t it a matter of perspective?

What do you think of when you hear the word, “nutrition?” Stuff that isn’t yummy, right? Well, guess what, that isn’t always true! Better nutrition can start with today’s tip…

GOOD MORNING!

A very senior executive who I coached was always completely scheduled—never time to even think quietly. When I helped him pick up a new lens to see that time for not working was the most important determinant of the quality outcome OF his work, we instituted several blocks of time on his calendar. We called those blocks of time “GreenTime.” In his mind the color green indicated nature, natural, refreshing, spring-like time—renewal time. Actually the use of green in those blocks of time in his calendar became green because green was a color he hadn’t yet used in his color-coded calendar ☺

Here’s what he said about what happened when he instituted GreenTime: “I initially thought that using Green Time would simply return some sanity to my life, with little blocks of time that I was in control of, rather than being driven mad by a never ending string of time filling commitments. But Green Time was much more than that. It underlined what was important and how much of my time was being wasted on phony emergencies. Before long I had more and more green time and more and more productivity and peace. Green time is now the most important time in my calendar.”

GOOD MORNING!

Want to feel really good and be free from aches and pains? Want to be fit, strong and healthy until the day you die? Then EXERCISE!

Here’s my motivation for continuing to exercise and makes me nervous when I can’t.

Exercise builds strength like this: Exercise triggers a chemical called cytokine 6, a decay messenger molecule, which causes inflammation and pain. That reaction causes cytokine 10, a repair messenger molecule to come to the rescue. cytokine 10 combats the inflammation and repairs what exercise does so growth occurs (muscle repair and growth and other great things—like keeping us young and healthy).

Marathon runners have a hundred times normal levels of cytokine 6 by the end of the race. Your level of cytokine 6 is a measure of how much exercise you do, how much inflammation you cause, and how much growth (or decay reversal, age reversal) you will receive from cytokine 10.

Without exercise there is a slow, steady drip in our muscles and bloodstream of cytokine 6 (that’s the chemical process that makes us decay as we age), but not enough to trigger the cytokine 10 response (the chemical that jumps in and reverses the decay).

The only way to trigger cytokine 10 (and stay healthy and young) is EXERCISE. Want to jump up now and exercise hard? I do!

GOOD MORNING!

When you know why you’re alive, and what makes your life meaningful, you will want to be able to look backward at your life from its ending phase and see all those things that have made you smile or cry with joy. That vision of the future will create a new passion to live life with purpose, and it will energize you with daily momentum. That’s the power of working backwards.

That is also what helps you dance in the rain rather than just weather the storms. That’s what gives you the sparkle, the passion, the vibrance that lights you (and a room) up.

GOOD MORNING!

Answer this question: Why should I be productive?

The simple reason to be productive is to create what you desire in life – to realize your chosen outcomes. If you ARE achieving your desired outcomes at the pace you like, then game over. You’re good—you’re GREAT!

On the other hand, if you’re not achieving all your desired outcomes, this week’s tip will take you to the next step toward achieving. But regardless, you’re still GREAT!

As Ari Meisel, productivity genius, says in his latest book, On Productivity, “It comes down to doing the right thing at the right time for the right reason—and nothing else.”

(BTW: In a phone conversation several years ago, it was Ari who gave me the roadmap for launching Live Vibrantly).

GOOD MORNING!

Let’s eliminate aloneness at home and in your work!

Relationships are how we expand as a person, as a business AND how you will get the most out of life. Does that surprise you?

Drs. Arthur and Elain Aron’s Self Expansion model tell us that efficacy–your ability to produce desired results–comes down to obtaining resources that make reaching your goals possible.

Financial resources, yes. Focus & priority setting, yes. But more importantly, human resources (CLOSE RELATIONSHIPS) with people have been found to determine efficacy and getting the most out of our lives as well as business success.

Here is an excerpt from Dan Sullivan’s latest book, Who Not How:

• “As you engage in relationships you expand your abilities.
• Relationships are how you transform as a person.
• Relationships are how you transcend your current limitations.
• Relationships are how you produce results.”

Research shows that relationships, not will power, are what help you overcome life-limiting and success-limiting habits (even addictions).

GOOD MORNING!

Only when I finally listened to that yearning tug to paint again, did my life become excitingly vibrant—in every area of my life. Three years before, I kept having this feeling and vague vision of my arm swooping up very quickly on a very large canvas with a paintbrush in my hand. I wondered what that meant. I hadn’t painted in years and when I had painted with oil and watercolor years before for many years they were all painstaking, careful, strokes achieving representational works. I remembered one of my college art teachers beckoning us to paint rapidly to keep our thoughts from interfering and creating intentional creations instead of painting from our inner being (whatever that meant). I now know what he meant and it is very freeing and life-giving to paint from that place of feeling and passion.

Now I also LIVE from that feeling place that first drew me to painting and art and being my authentic self, the person I was born as. I am using the skills I learned from my teachers and from my experience, but I am regaining the pure joy of being me and using that to paint with all the wonder of exploration and expression. Painting is once again as dear to me as it used to be before I got so dominated and concerned with “doing it right”. I paint from a more authentic and joyful place rather than to satisfy some external standard or gain some outside approval. Remember the movie and song Born Free? We are born free, how great to rekindle that original passion and wonder and put that ahead of technique or rules or the lenses of others.

GOOD MORNING!

In 1923, nutritionist Victor Lindlahr wrote, “Ninety percent of the diseases known to man are caused by cheap foodstuffs. You are what you eat.” Today, we know this phrase simply as, “You are what you eat.”

I will add: You not only are what you eat, you are everything you swallow. That includes what you drink, what supplements you take—everything that goes into our mouth affects our energy levels, our health, our looks and our vitality. It also can affect how much or how little pain we have.

Hummm….does that make you want to take stock of what you’re putting into your mouth on a regular basis? It doesn’t mean you can never again eat and drink those yummy “bad” things, it simply means we all need to eat and drink healthy MOST of the time, not ALL of the time.

GOOD MORNING!

How did you sleep last night? What was your mood when you woke up today?

Huffington Post reports that “mood and perspective play a significant role on our mindsets before bed, which can in turn influence our quality of sleep.” They also affect our mindset when we wake up in the morning. Isn’t it, therefore, important what we watch, listen to, read, talk about and think before we go to sleep? Huffington post also said, “Think about your own experiences — is there a difference in how you sleep when you’re feeling good about things vs. when you’re feeling stressed or down? A lot of that may have to do with what you’re thinking about as you settle into bed.”

The University of Manchester studies found that people with higher levels of gratitude and positive thoughts before bed slept longer and reported better rest quality than those with more negative thoughts.

Want some good news about this?

Rosie Osmun at Amerisleep reports, “You can train yourself to kick negative thoughts and flip the switch from negative to positive. It’s not about suppressing the unwanted thoughts, which often backfires, but changing gears (and dealing with negative thoughts at a more appropriate time).

GOOD MORNING!

Dr. Kypros story on Netflix was entitled, “Saving Lives Before Birth”. The story of this remarkable and compassionate Fetal Surgeon is truly inspiring. I hope you can see it.

The doctor learned deep into his career that he had a type of blood Cancer that would kill him. But he wanted to work until his very last breath. His life’s passion was to save the lives of babies at risk in the womb. He has invented several processes and continues to invent and perform the procedures to save the lives of babies.

What a reminder to us that life is so much more than the breaths we take.  It is about what takes our breath away.  As we live with purpose we feel passionate! Dr. Kypros: “I lived all my life with the feeling that you must not waste time.”