Chart Your Course

Several years ago, my husband and I took our daughter to celebrate her  birthday at an Alan Jackson concert. She wanted to bring her friend to make it a mini birthday party.

On the way out of the concert her little friend said, “Wasn’t that the greatest night ever?” It was my daughters first concert and she seemed to agree that it was a fantastic time. I’m not a huge country fan myself but I thoroughly enjoyed the concert as well. Alan Jackson is a great entertainer and I know he gained several new fans in our party.

As he was singing the song Drive I thought about my own dad teaching me to drive. He let me drive (steer is more like it) the car on the dirt roads in and around our mountain property. My thoughts traveled to other childhood memories.

I had a happy childhood and what I remember most about my childhood is the experiences; the traditions, the trips we took, and the time we spent together as a family. Yet I remember very few of the Christmas presents I received.

Some of my favorite childhood memories are: Read the rest of this entry »

Image Compliments of Paul Dex

Dream building is vitally important to your personal development.  Without a dream you can’t imagine an existence any greater than the one you are living right now!

Dreams are a tool to help us navigate through life.  They are that lighthouse upon the distant shore that we seek in the sometimes dark times of life.

As that famous Bible saying goes, “Without a dream people perish.”  As they crash their ship upon the rocky storms in life their dreams of a better future perish.

They float through life letting one wave push them here and another wave push them there.

Common phrases said by people without a dream or vision to guide them through life’s rough seas are, “such is my lot in life.” “That’s just the way I am.” or “Why try?  Things will never change.”

I dare say that most of the people who visit us here at Wealth, Wisdom and Success don’t fall into that category.  After all, people who decide to live the life of personal development have already bought into the dream that their life can and will be better.

However… Read the rest of this entry »

Unhappy By Default

Have you ever bought into the  “I’ll be happy when…” attitude?  Sadly, I have far to often in my life.  You see, I was unhappy by default.

Image Courtesy of James Jordan

• I had failed to act more on the things in life that made me happy and defaulted to the every day and mundane.
• I neglected to notice the blessings in my life, but rather, I paid more attention to the negatives and the things my life lacked.
• I failed to act in ways that generated happiness.   Sure I was very active in life, and I was doing a lot of things I love. But I failed to play an “active role” in creating happiness.  I failed to deliberately look for happiness.

“It requires some effort to achieve a happy outlook on life, and most people don’t make it.”
— Gregg Easterbrook

Happy on Purpose

Thankfully I decided to be Happy On Purpose! I realized that happiness wasn’t something that could only be attained only after I achieved “this” or I achieved “that.”   Rather… Read the rest of this entry »

Image Courtesy of StuffEyeSee

Thankfully life brings us plenty of experiences that we can use to grow from.

We grow as our experiences expand and eventually everything works out in it’s own perfect way.

However, usually, we fail to see the benefit of our hardships until years later when we look back at our life with a different perspective.  But it doesn’t have to be that way…

Our perspective, the way we choose to view things, makes all the difference in our enjoyment level, our happiness, and our success right now.

I believe strongly that our thoughts attract our life’s experiences to us. I also believe that we select (subconsciously) things that we want to learn in this life and that we attract circumstances to us that will help us learn and grow. Once the lesson is learned those type of experiences are no longer needed and therefore they stop showing up in our life.

Not so ironically, I learned this life lesson through my life experiences.

You’ll see a perfect example of how this works as I continue on with my life story. You’ll see that once I learned the lesson I was meant to learn the negative experiences, that I needed to learn from stopped.

So how do people get from a point of experiencing the same things over and over again to a new existence with greater speed?

They change their perspective. They change how they choose to look at their past experiences. They change it by “simply choosing.”

So choose.

Simply choose… Read the rest of this entry »

How often do you make a conscious effort to uplift and validate another human being?  Likely, not often enough.

I really liked how this video demonstrates how easy it is to validate others and help them to feel better about themselves and their world.

My challenge to you is this… Read the rest of this entry »