Sweet Friend,

I invite you to join me for a birthday celebration retreat in Maui!!! Apr 3-9, 2011

In February 2011 I’ll be turning 62 and decided to do something special as a gift to myself and to you. I’m inviting 24 women to join me for a Peaceful Woman retreat to delight in Maui’s magic and feminine beauty. For a whole week we get to play in nature, share deeply with each other and have lots of fun!!!

Celebration and self-care are just so vital, now more than ever. With this in mind I’m choosing to celebrate with my girlfriends in a way that’s fulfilling and building yet deeper community. What’s special about this retreat as it’s a No-Lecture Retreat™ where nature is the teacher, so we get to integrate, digest and explore our own truth and our own femininity in a whole new way.

Let’s model nurturing ourselves, celebrating our WINs (!!) so we can be of even more service to others. I’ll be available for individual coaching also on this retreat.

As WIN members we get a special 10% discount price.
Book by Nov 30th and receive an additional 10% discount. Read more ...

 This is the seventh blog in series of twelve called “How To Create Positive Change in Your Life”.

One of the things I’m discussing in this Blog Series is How to Create
Your Own Joy and Confidence. The first critical key is gratitude. We discussed gratitude in Blog #6 of this series.

The second way to create your own joy is to offer love and kindness to others.
Be others-centered.

Mother Teresa said, “Spread love wherever you go. First of all in your own home. Give love to your husband, your wife, your children, your next door neighbor. Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God’s kindness. Kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile, kindness in your warm greeting.”

The third way to create your own happiness is to be flexible and cheerful. Our ability to adapt well and be cheerful is an indicator of our strength of character.

For several years, on our refrigerator at home was this saying: “Be pretty if you are. Be witty if you can. But be cheerful if it kills you!”

Usually, if our face smiles (even when we’re not 100% happy) our heart will follow.

The fourth key is happiness is to be passionate about something. People who open their eyes each morning and immediately look forward to something that they’re passionate about are usually interesting folks who focus on the positive. Read more ...

 This is the sixth blog in series of twelve called “How To Create Positive Change in Your Life”.

My fifth book is titled “Believe It! Become It!” One of the beliefs I teach is this: Speaking Positively is the Key to Joy and Confidence. Let’s talk about it.

Who do you admire most in your life? Who are you drawn to? Usually it’s the joyful ones who smile, laugh, compliment others and radiate happiness.

“I create my own happiness” is part of this belief. Do you believe this?

Happiness is all about focus. Whatever you focus on pulls you in that direction, either negative or positive. So the secret to happiness is to choose to focus on the positive, no matter what. Abraham Lincoln reminded us, “Folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”

There’s a vast amount of research on this.

An experiment conducted at Stanford University by S. Lyubomirsky, in 1994, concluded that: “Happy people do not experience one success after another and unhappy people, one failure after another. Instead, surveys show that happy and unhappy people tend to have had very similar life experiences. The difference is that the average unhappy person spends more than twice as much time thinking about unpleasant events in their lives, while happy people tend to seek and rely upon information that brightens their personal outlook.”
My friends, we should stop seeking out the storms in our lives and enjoy more fully the sunlight. Yes, as we go through life let’s focus on what we have, not on what we don’t have. Accentuate the positive. And when we do, we’ll receive more. This is the Law of Attraction, and it’s been in place since time began.
How can we accentuate the positive? Exactly how do we create happiness? How do we create joy and confidence? Read more ...

 Here’s the fifth blog in series of twelve called “How To Create Positive Change in Your Life”.

We’re going to go straight to learning a key skill. This may be the most important thing you learn today. I’ll teach you how to control your thoughts.

There are three steps: label; replace; focus forward.

LABEL
Label your negative thoughts the moment they enter your mind. Like this:

“That was negative.”
“That was unkind.” (critical)
“That wasn’t like me…I usually don’t think negative thoughts.”

REPLACE
Replace your negative thoughts:

Replacing negative thoughts is best done by trying to ‘be’ the person you’re thinking about, with his life experiences, needs and desires. This requires you to put yourself in the other person’s position and consider why he’s speaking or acting as he is.

“I can understand why she’s doing that...it’s because she...”
“If I understood her better, I’d probably like her more. I’ll get to know her.”
“Hey - different strokes for different folks!”

FOCUS FORWARD
Focus Your Thinking Forward

“I usually don’t think unkind thoughts like that. I’ll do better next time.”
“I might not have all the facts. I’ll learn more and then it’ll probably make sense.”
(For adults who regret their past actions)
“I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time. Now I have more information, and I’ll do better in the future.” Read more ...

Today’s blog is the fourth in series of twelve called “How To Create Positive Change in Your Life”.

Let’s talk about our self-beliefs.

We each carry with us mental pictures of ourselves; our self beliefs. These beliefs may be unclear to our conscious mind, but they are there, down to the last detail. They’re our ideas about who we are, formed from past experiences, successes and failures, embarrassing moments, and the way people have treated us, especially during childhood. From all these experiences we mentally create a picture of ourselves. Once a belief goes into this picture it becomes fact to us and we don’t question its validity, but act upon it as if it were true.

Your self beliefs form the foundation for your personality and your behavior. Therefore, these self beliefs are the key to change because your actions are always consistent with your beliefs and your beliefs can be changed.

Because our actions are always in harmony with our beliefs, when we believe we’re successful we usually are – when we believe we’ll fail we find ways to validate that belief.

How about the child who’s told she’s no good in math? Parents say things like, “None of our family is good in math. We just don’t understand it!” Other parents make similar comments about music or athletics.

Did anyone ever tell you that you weren’t a good singer, or that you were clumsy? Most adults can easily remember stinging comments like these.

Raise your hands if you ever heard a negative comment about your abilities when you were growing up. Read more ...

 This is the second in a series of blogs about “How To Create Positive Change in Your Life”. I’m excited about sharing this powerful story because although it’s familiar to many, the lesson to be learned is truly life-changing.

The year is 1945...you are in Auschwitz, Germany imprisoned in a concentration camp whose horror defies description. Your entire family has been killed. You’re a Jewish psychiatrist named Viktor Frankl.

The guards have stripped you, beaten you, starved you and deprived you of sleep. And yet, you live on, determined to somehow create meaning out of this horror.

As you are experiencing this hell on earth you come to this incredible understanding:

The guards can torture you, but you have the power to respond to them however you CHOOSE. They can beat you, but they can’t take away your will to live. They can strip you, but you can clothe yourself with mental power beyond their reach. They can starve you, but you can feast on your dreams of the future.

You see, Victor Frankl imagined himself at a university pulpit, teaching the future generation about the ultimate freedom - the freedom to choose how you respond to life. He was passionate about living to tell his story so that never again would a human being be allowed to cause such suffering as he had endured. Read more ...

 In response to many of the questions I receive I put together a series of blogs about “How To Create Positive Change in Your Life”. This blog is the first in a series of twelve.

Creating positive change in our lives begins with understanding the principle of choice ~ of agency. The principle of choice makes change possible.

I remember the very moment it happened for me. I was sitting on the front row of a seminar when the speaker quoted Eleanor Roosevelt. That great lady said, “No one can make me feel inferior without my consent.” I remember thinking, Wow! That means that we allow people to offend us. We allow people to make us angry. Our reaction to people and our circumstances is our choice! And then my mind took it a step further and I thought, That means that if we can allow people to make us angry, we can refuse to be offended, or angry…

Time actually seemed to stand still as I pondered, then understood, this incredible concept: We can respond to others and to our circumstances however we choose. And I realized that the time had come to take control of my life. I’ve been working on perfecting this principle in my personal life for three decades now. Read more ...

 In my blogs I often address the most frequently-asked questions I receive at seminars and in emails. Here’s one:

Question: What can parents do to help children like each other - let alone love each other?
Here’s the scenario: Siblings twelve-year-old Janet and ten-year-old Mark were at it again. Mom could hear them fighting outside. “You always have to have your own way, don’t you?” Mark yelled. Janet screamed back, “Yeah, I do because you’re so stupid you can’t even do it!” Mom didn’t have any idea what they were quarreling about, she just felt heartsick when she heard them going at it, again.

Answer:
As children grow up, the people they have the most slumber parties with, share vacations with, and spend the most time with are their siblings... and they don’t even choose them! It’s true that sometimes brothers and sisters have very different personalities. They don’t like the same things and they think very differently. But they’re in the same family, and often their differences, and the way they handle their differences, causes challenges and creates contention. Here are 3 solutions:

1.      Since we love the people we serve, create many opportunities in the home where children serve one another. For example, when my four daughters were growing up I didn’t ever learn how to French braid their hair... on purpose. Of course I could have figured it out, but my daughters knew how to French braid, so they went to one another to have their hair done. They were dependent on one another. It was during the hair-fixing time each morning that they had some of their best ‘sister’ discussions. There are myriads of opportunities to create situations where children serve one another. Read more ...

 In an effort to share life-changing principles that help people live more joyfully, today I’d like to offer TEN PRICELESS FINANCIAL PRINCIPLES created by my dear friend and author, Dr. Bernard Poduska. You can find these in his excellent book For Love or Money.

Principle 1: Financial problems are usually behavior problems rather than money problems.

Principle 2: If you continue doing what you have been doing, you’ll continue getting what you have been getting.

Principle 3: Nothing (no thing) is worth risking the loss of a relationship.

Principle 4: Money spent on things you value usually leads to a feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment. Money spent on things you don’t value usually leads to a feeling of frustration and futility.

Principle 5: We know the price of everything and the value of nothing.

Principle 6: You can never get enough of what you don’t need, because what you don’t need can never satisfy you.

Principle 7: Financial freedom is more often the result of decreased spending than of increased income.

Principle 8: Be grateful for what you have.

Principle 9: The best things in life are free.

Principle 10: The value of an individual should never be equated with the worth of an individual.

Email paula@theWINonline.com

In 1911 “International Women’s Day” was created. The WIN and women
across America will celebrate, commit, and connect on March 8, 2011.

http://thewinonline.com/celebrating-100-years-woman

 Today I’d like to share one of my favorite stories. I use this story to teach people of their priceless worth:

The story is told of an Indian farmer named Ali Hafid who could neither read nor write, but who was fortunate enough to have his own farm, a fine wife, and a good family.

One day a traveling monk came to Hafid and told him about a marvelous discovery recently made of a jewel called a diamond.

The story so caught the imagination of Ali Hafid that he sold his farm and house and left his wife and family to search for diamonds. He traveled far and wide searching, but never found the precious stones. Finally, broken in body and spirit, having exhausted his funds in his fruitless search, he cast himself into the sea, and drowned.

About that time the monk came through the village again and stopped at the farm formerly owned by Hafid. There on the mantel he saw a lovely diamond.

“I see Ali found his diamond,” he said, pointing to the stone.

“Oh, Ali sold me his farm,” said the new owner, “and that stone is just a pretty rock I found down in the streambed as I watered my sheep.”

“Show me the place,” said the monk, and the man led him to the stream.

There, in the gravel bottom of the streambed, they found one diamond after another. A further search showed the whole farm contained diamonds, even in the dirt floor in the cellar of the house. The story claims that thus the rich Golconda diamond field was discovered. There beneath his very feet was the fortune for which Ali Hafid gave his life in a fruitless search.

The lesson?

The greatest treasure you’ll ever find lies within you. Don’t fall into the trap of neglecting to discover that life’s greatest prize is within.

Email paula@theWINonline.com