The Wisdom of Platitudes

You have probably heard, “Do what you love and the money will come”, “No matter what your plan is, the right people show up at the right time”, and “When the student is ready, the teacher appears.”

And you have heard me say, “Blah, blah, blah….”

I am writing because I was proven wrong this past weekend.  I will get to that in a moment.

First, I want to share how I laughed when the August issue ofO arrived a week or two ago.  As is my custom, I read What I Know for Sure first.  It was a piece on how Oprah has always followed her gut on her biggest life decisions.  I knew as I was reading the piece Oprah was speaking in part about the current tenuous nature of her creation of the OWN network. Currently, it does not have the best ratings, press or a very complete offering.  I can say the same thing about my Don’t Die™ brand.

I created and began marketing the first Don’t Die With Your Book Inside You workshop on June 14.  I had a modest goal of 30 participants.  That goal was set for two main reasons:  1)I wanted enough diversity in the room to make the workshop stimulating for the attendees and 2) I wanted it to be economically beneficial for me.  I chose Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development as the location as much for convenience as I did for any business reason. 

What happened was the following:

Ten participants signed up.  Their hair was blond, their skin was brown, they represented countries near and far, there was no central spiritual or religious denomination.  Yet there was one thing they all had in common:   they came in for individual reasons and left 10 hours later knowing they shared more in common than any of them could have ever anticipated. 

After the first night of working together, one of the participants arrived with a gift for me.  In the gift bag I found two things:  a beautiful Thank You note to me for arriving as her teacher and a little bowl with the message To Teach Is to Touch a Life Forever.
Sometimes the business of personal development makes no economic ‘cents’ and yet investing in my passion to share the Don’t Die Spirit continues to make all the sense in the world.  Go figure!

Thank you Rose Pinard for seeing that before I did!

A forever Hero

Why do books matter?  Because they continue to impact the reader long after the book is read!

August 2009 Be The Hero was released.  January 30, 2010 master coach and author Noah Blumenthal presented his book at a fundraising event for Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development.  October 2010 -- ten months later -- someone who attended the presentation and read the book commented that book and presentation marked a positive turning point in their personal development. 

The same week I sat in a board meeting for Stillpoint.  Board members asked if the author we had the year before Noah -- Steve Donahue of Shifting Sands -- had another book out yet.  They wanted him to come back!
AM AZ Shifting Sands
Time passes but good books live on in the hearts of their readers.  Read on. 

Thank you,
Andrea Goeglein, PhD
866 975 3777
DrSuccess@ServingSuccess.com

Practice, Practice, Practice

If you want to build muscle, you must do physical exercise.
If you want to be healthy, you must eat a balanced diet.
If you want to enjoy your retirement, you must save so your money will be there when you retire. Okay, scratch that one, some facts are momentary fictions!

But….

I don’t mean, nor want to, sound like your Mother, yet there is a human development fact of life I want to share. You must, not maybe should, or would be nice to, but MUST, develop a daily practice. I will explain more in a moment.

Dr. Success™ Challenge: Do you have a daily practice? A given time and/or activity that allows you to reflect and contemplate where you are, where you want to go, and who you have for support? It can look like writing in a journal each day at a specific time, reading spiritually uplifting material, walking in silence, prayer and/or meditation (or any one of a host of other activities). So here is the challenge: For one week – 7 days – pick a reflective activity and do it at the same time each day. Let me know your thoughts after you have completed the experiment DrSuccess@ServingSuccess.com

There is no getting around this growth activity. It has been recommended by sages throughout the millenniums. I will narrow my focus to one of the ways being reflective made its way into Positive Psychology. Long before the umbrella field of Positive Psychology was established, a behavioral researcher by the name of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi focused his life work on studying and understanding what allows humans to enter a state of “flow” or optimal experience. “Flow” is that place where you are enjoying something so much you lose track of the amount of time you are engaged in the activity.

One of Csikszentmihalyi findings was to get into a state of flow and creativity, you must devote time to some form of reflection.

This weekend I – and a group of about 20 – did just that. Members of the Stillpoint Center for Spiritual Development went on their annual retreat to Zion National Park. We met as a group and shared prayers about nature, what it means to be in the wilderness of life, how many have had a tough “winter” and the recognition that “spring” follows winter. (By the way, for those lucky enough to live in Las Vegas, Stillpoint has a class on Journaling coming up.)

From that retreat I came away with a renewed sense of where I am for now, and what I might want to commit to – for now. For me that looks like knowing I want to commit one hour a day to reading and researching in my field of expertise, Positive Psychology AND writing about resilience in business and in life.

Do you feel like you are in the wilderness of your life? Do you feel like you are on a journey with no compass? Start a daily practice. If you want some specific ideas drop me a note at DrSuccess@ServingSuccess.com

With appreciation for the Zion flow of life,