Disney Leadership Keynote Speaker
Five daily blogs about life's 5 big choices on five interconnected sites.
Ever wonder when the time will be right?
For what?
For the time to be right for you to do the thing you always wanted to do, but never gave it enough time and attention and now the clocking is ticking more noticeably, and you wish you would have started long ago.
Ever wonder?
Mid Life Celebration’s catalyst is to help us answer the wake up calls we get, as we journey through life.
These midlife wake up calls can happen at any time, but tend to be in the middle part of our life.
It’s possible you can experience more than one wake up call in your lifetime, and sometimes, you may have more than one at a time.
As Lorie Sheffer described yesterday, an untimely death of a loved one, or the sudden health crisis of a loved one (or even ourselves), can all lead to a reevaluation of our path.
Do you have an example of your mid life celebration (or crisis)?
There’s a midlife stereotype of the middle-aged man getting a red, convertible sports car and a younger woman.
Mid Life Celebration isn’t traveling that path.
Mid Life Celebration is for those that experience this – you spend your life pursuing your big, important goals, only to reach them.
And the first thing that comes to mind?
“This isn’t what I wanted!”
“Now what do I do?”
By now, you know that Lorie Sheffer is Mid Life Celebration’s Sunday Guest Blogger. Here she is again with intriguing insight from her own experience and research:
What makes you happy? I often hear people say that they are looking for someone/ a job/ a home/ a new car to make them happy. In the past few weeks there have been announcements of celebrity divorces as well as that shocker about the Gore’s. Apparently they no longer made one another happy. Because of the loss of my dear friend, who had a very severe hoarding problem, I have been reading as much on the subject of acquisition as I can get my hands on. Several of the books deal not only with pathological hoarding, but also with this country’s seemingly endless need for things bigger and better. It seems no matter how much we have, we always want more. Perhaps this is an effort to acquire enough material possessions so that we finally feel happy and fulfilled. The constant pursuit of happiness brought to you by Visa. If only I can lose ten pounds. If only I get some Botox. If only my kids make the Dean’s list. If only.
Have you ever noticed that there are people in this world who are generally happy in spite of their seemingly bad situations? On the flip side, there are people who appear to have it all, and yet they are miserable? Unless there is some organic reason for this seeming inability to feel happy, why are they not? I have read The Art of Happiness by The Dalai Lama and several other books on happiness as well as having spoken to a few mental health professionals and a neuropsychologist. The general consensus may surprise you. It seems that happiness is a choice. We CHOOSE to be happy.
While I have never suffered from depression there are times that I, like all of us, am not feeling happy. Grouchy days, bad days, crabby days, call them what you will, we all have them from time to time. That is normal. However, they can become ingrained and the negative thinking can become habitual. We have the power to rewire our brains for good or for bad. It’s called forming a habit. Neuroscientists are studying the brains of Buddhist monks and how, through meditation, they can actually change the way their brains respond to stressful stimuli. It seems we have more control over our emotions than we realize. Try it for just one day and you will be amazed. Choose not to be unhappy with a situation. Every time you are tempted to respond in a negative way, find a more positive way. Choose to act like you are in a good mood, and you eventually will BE in a good mood.
I am not for one second trying to say that someone who is truly, clinically depressed can think his or her way out of the darkness. For that, they will need professional assistance. With the help of appropriate medication and cognitive behavioral therapy, they can hopefully find relief. What is cogitative behavioral therapy? Rewiring your brain, with the help of a therapist. For the rest of us who have no organic reason to feel unhappy but instead are just Debbie Downers, we really do have the ability to start thinking like a happy person.
The next time you are looking for that special someone who can make you happy, go stand in front of a mirror and take a good long look. Nobody can MAKE you happy. You have to ALLOW yourself to be happy. Choose it. Act it. Pretty soon it will become second nature.
Good Thursday morning everyone. Sitting here in the office with a neighbor friend who’s interested in social media. We’ve been talking for an hour now, and it’s very different for me to begin the daily writing process with “an audience”.
You may be asking, “So?”
So, all this means is that it feels really good to find a unique way to illustrate the whole concept of waking up and writing five blogs each morning. I mean, there’s a Pastor here validating this. It’s simply an unexpected opportunity to illustrate the way this blog is different from the other 80-million blogs.
Nothing phony here. Real life in real time.
As you think about your challenges at whatever life-stage you’re in, do you like your level of motivation, or do you feel like giving up? It’s your choice. Always has been, always will be.