Personal Growth

Monday Mountain
5/30/2016

You view yourself more than anyone else. You look at yourself every time you're in front of a mirror, anytime you consider your past, present, future actions, and when you process your feelings and emotions. It's important to view yourself positively and with balance. Avoid being too hard on yourself for what you may or may not have done.

Look at your day and evaluate how your actions and what you've done (if it is morning then you should look at yesterday). Hindsight is 20/20 after all...

Evaluate what you did previously with fairness and objectivity. Have you gotten everything compiled and rated and reviewed in your mind? Are you ready for the next step? Are you sure? Don't continue unless you have done so already.

Now take a look at a couple of my favorite quotes:

1. Each and every day you either get better or you get worse, you never stay the same. 
2. If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got. 

So looking at those quotes, now measure your actions and decide if you've become better or worse at then end of each and every day. But there's a balance required to progress, there will be tried and true actions that benefit you and there will be a need for new approaches to development. 

Here's the moral of the story: grow consistently and with good intention, you can and will do so much more alone than you believe is possible before you started. 

Untitled.

Friday Freestyle
Poetry
5/27/2016

It's the opening of something sweet,
Each word escaping your mind leaves with a flutter,
Excitingly sharing facts and anecdotes to a new unfamiliar person,
Eagerly listening to their statements of experiences,
Each pause allows coursing electricity between two bodies,
Cravings linger on the tip of your tongue in that silence,
Engaging conversation with someone very fresh but oddly familiar.

Dialogue takes leaps of faith onto a new topic,
Sharply turning down a side road from the highway,
The high speed of lighthearted stories shifts,
New trajectory to something very personal,
A dark unpaved road proves eerily calming,
Revisiting each childhood and those dreams imagined in such a time,
Youth inspired such hope and poisoned with honesty through experience.

As the story is told the puzzle pieces are placed,
An image of who this stranger is develops before you,
Road map of their life becomes published,
Take it one step, one mile at a time,
Hold back from guessing where they've been,
Hesitate before you envision all of who they are,
No person can be measured in weight, distance, or mass.

Envision who they are as they allow you to,
Lead each other on your blind journey,
Should they are a good companion for you and vice versa,
Predictions remain untold, each day unfolds differently,
Embrace these new feelings of attraction,
Rejoice that they reside somewhere deeper than animal desires,
Celebrate the wounds and wins that brought them to you as they are.

You too have bumps and bruises and brilliance from life,
Allow them to take a glimpse inside of you,
At the world that is tremendous and immense,
There exists first in your heart that waits for release,
Beware that sharing this flame can be disastrous,
Prepare the kindling and the fuel precisely,
Once ready, carefully ignite that bonfire of love.

Hold back from sharing that burning signal through speech,
Its flickering light will travel far beyond you believe it will,
Stand in patience and watch the far horizon,
Flames from ignition will travel unbelievable distances,
Tremendous heat and light seems so close and comforting,
Although separately held flames the celebrations burn as one,
Within those two beings there is such catastrophe that the world rejoices in its chaos.

Hunting Happiness, Part 3

Thursday Thought
5/26/2016

Part 1
Part 2

Two weeks ago, I started this series by discussing how happiness is a moving target, how hitting that target shifts over time and therefore your approach to achieving it should change over time as well.

Last week, the primary message was based on not allowing one loss or one bad day deter you from pursuing, achieving, or residing in happiness.

This week, it's time to discuss the sources of happiness and how you should diversify where you acquire those positive vibes and feelings. It's quite a simple concept really, it's similar to a balanced diet.

Remember the old school food pyramid from the 90s? The base was grains and bread, then above that was split between fruits and vegetables, on the third level lived the animal products of meat and dairy, finally up on the top there was sweets and fatty foods to be consumed sparingly. The sources of happiness is very similar to that idea. Let's break them down for their equivalents in sources:

• Grains and breads - personal goals and development
• Fruits and vegetables - mutually beneficial relationships with friends and family members
• Meat and dairy - professional achievement and progression
• Sweets and fats - vices and less-than-healthy activities (consume very rarely or never)

What does this mean for you? 

Your greatest source of happiness should be from you and helping yourself. Create and pursue your own goals. Those tasks can be for physical development such as strength training or endurance challenges, they could be for intellectual enrichment like reading a book, or even it could be based out of small daily tasks like making your bed, cleaning dishes, or putting laundry away. 

Your secondary source of nutritional happiness is encouraged to come from your loved ones. The presence and support of friends and family produces great sources for happiness, positive energy and enables you for self-love. How can you not feel happiness when you cultivate positive relationships with people you love?

As your tertiary happiness producer, it's your professional and career investments. Happiness has been proven to build the basis for career success. When you are able to find happiness elsewhere, finding happiness at work all of a sudden becomes a hell of a lot easier than solely working to achieve goals for happiness. 

Go forth and collect a bounty for your table and dine upon the happiness you find around you. This happiness propels you through the dark days and starry nights, over peaks and through valleys. Happiness is everywhere to be found, all you need to do is reach out for it. 

Romance is Relative

Wednesday Word
5/25/2016

Merriam-Webster: 

a feeling of excitement and mystery associated with love; a quality of feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life.

Quintessential Voyage: 

a heartwarming feeling brought about through the discovery of a new sensation of burning love; the emotional experience of someone new as though you two were meant to collide in a beautiful coincidence.

Here's a kicker... I'm a romantic, but not the hopeless-kind. I still keep my rationale about myself.

I believe in true, mad, genuine love. It's rooted in this belief of destiny and fate that I hold on to. Your course is charted out for you and the currents do what they can to help you, but the responsibility is on you to take to the wheel, the sails, the oars, and the rudder. By investing in your journey and adjusting the course as necessary, 

Love is finicky. When you're young there is someone who is right for who are you and where you are at that specific time in your life, but you grow and change so drastically and dynamically over time. That's not saying you could meet your lifelong partner at an early age, there is just a low probability of long-term survival. Strong faith is placed in the thriving existence of an honest love, one that cares compassionately and deeply. 

As life goes on, I continue to believe love is real and not dead. I've been hurt and damaged, but it's not up to my companion to fix me, it's up to them to love me for me and to nurture my heart as it heals. I could lead a college lecture about what I believe and how I feel in regards to love and romance. At this point, I will tip my hat and acknowledge life is a wild turbulent experience and I'm here for the ride, smiling the whole time.