Forbidden love hovers over the City,
a pink cloud of cherry-kissed sunshine
warming faces who dare glance up
setting themselves free of doom, gloom
dictated lives
lived in dismal corners.
The speaker of this poem clearly understands that dictated lives carried out in fear make people live in a very dark place, a place absent of happiness, love, sunshine and positivity.
I believe freedom is essential to our lives, it may even be the key to happiness, and is surely the shortcut to success for any individual willing to take the risk for freedom. But what is freedom? Freedom is the ability to give your love to anything. The ability to see shapes in the clouds and notice the underside of leaves in the wind. The realization of your chance to not be anyone else but yourself. Freedom is the act of becoming more of your self. It is a flexible mind and a heart that never sleeps. Although, to our own demise, there are three things in life holding us back from entering a state of freedom: Traditions, fear, and love. All play large roles holding us back in our individual paths to sovereignty.
Traditions: They dictate the majority of young people and encompass completely the lives of the elderly. Such as the live to work ethic, ones father worked to live, so he expects that to be passed down his generation. Families seem to force their children into taking their traditions and their lives instead of creating their own path. The other form of the live to work ethic is when ones parents force the life you should live based off the lessons they have learned. In reality, this action is only 5% beneficial because it is vital to take knowledge from those who have more experience but not when it revokes ones ability to choose. The third type of tradition that plays a harsh role in the containment of freedom is religious traditions. They create strict guidelines for the supposedly “proper way of living” which, ironically, are also passed down from parents. It seems that every form of so-called “togetherness” has been in place to force upon traditions that are destroying art, soul, peace and happiness.
Fear: We grow up fearing things, resenting them, avoiding opportunities, avoiding people, and social events. We lose sight of life and at times missing out on it completely. Although it is a long thought on subject, fear often shuts the brain down, turns your shoulder to the best in life and makes you forget why your heart is beating. Everything in life that you do, think, and say, can be narrowed down to either love or fear. Of course, you know which is more common – nearly everything you do is derived from fear. Think about it the next time you do anything in the middle of the day. Ask yourself why you are doing it and continue asking why until you either end up saying that you love it or that you fear something else. After doing this, you will then have a new goal and challenge in life – more love, less fear.
Love: There is a lack of love in everything we do and to who we hold dear. It’s clear by now that it is love that will give you freedom and with freedom, you will be brought happiness through every experience and interaction in life. However, it takes a special minded person to find love in their job and even a more special minded person to find a job they love. Unless you can overcome tradition and fear, you will never find your passion or your freedom. The other form of love that is lacking is the love we have for one another. For example, I was in Barnes & Noble one evening during the winter season. While searching for a book, I heard a mother tell a child to wear his jacket as they were about to leave. The young boy, probably the age of 5 or 6, said he did not want to wear it. “Put your jacket on!” the mother had screamed at him. After further yelling, she forced it on him. There are two options of love and care she could have taken rather than expressing all the negative emotion and resentment towards her son. First, she could have helped the kid into his jacket or could have told him to wear it just until they got to the car. She could have given him options to choose from and build his decision-making skills. The other option was to let a kid be a kid; young and free-spirited. If he doesn’t want to wear it then let him experience the cold. Once he is cold enough he will try to put it on and he will be successful. Of course, this way you will laugh at him because it is inside out and then help him. Isn’t that a greater experience then to just yell at him and chastise him for not doing it right? Pity. The world is deprived of unconditional love, in family, in work and in our selves.
Releasing oneself from tradition, letting go of fear, and creating a flow of unconditional love is the set course for true freedom, and takes us one step closer to world happiness.
Stay Positive & Ah Kuta Matata
Garth E. Beyer
To read the full poem of “Breaking Tradition”, click here
But fulfilling the wrong ones (also known as easy ones) can lead you astray, taking you off the course of fluidity and least resistance. For example, if you get woken up at 4:30am by someone being loud and insincere, it’s so easy to yell at the person who woke you. Why? The person expects you to. For some reason it’s been engrained in your mind that if you get woken up early, you have the right to be mad.
But are you really upset? Is it the end of the world? Did anyone die? Was it a life altering event? Could it have been worse? Maybe the person was in a rush to get to work on time? Maybe something woke them up early so they were aggravated?
Instead of listing more examples, discover your own. For one day, write down all the problems you have with people throughout the day. After you write them or at the end of the day, reflect on the experience and cross it off IF after you think about it, it really didn’t make you upset, but it was only how society expected you to feel. You will find that most of the problems will get crossed off.
If people expect us to act a certain way (typically negative types of feelings: sad, angry, upset, stressed, frustrated, injured), were going to feel that way and fulfill their expectations. Sure because it’s easy but also because you unintentionally don’t want to let other people experience the dissatisfaction of being wrong in expecting you to act a certain way.
Why?
It seems silly but the reason for it is that you feel that since they assumed you’re going to react a certain way- that they are prepared for it, that they deserve it, that everything is set in motion for you to react by fulfilling the expectation. (Status-quo is hard to break!)
The last attribute to fulfilling expectations is instinct. With instinct every person will act selfishly. When you do the experiment above and take that moment to write down the problem and reflect, you will see that you may be putting more trouble and stress on the other person than what troubled you to begin with.
It is damn hard to live in Zen and to prevent yourself from fulfilling the expectations of negative reactions. It’s difficult to remain relaxed, stay centered, and to be focused on the “why” of your reaction.
Stay Positive & It Doesn’t Do Good To Either Party When You Fulfill An Expectation Of A Negative Reaction
I am all about designating a theme for each year. In 2010 it was “my” year, simple as that. 2011 was “our” year because during “my” year I found a girlfriend. In 2011, her and I traveled to Canada and took other road trips together and moved in together. Now 2012, we have made it the year of career advancement. I had started to truly pour my passion into my website, I also got another ghost writing job and a huge promotion at work (making almost twice as much as I made before the promotion). She will be getting a promotion at Starbucks and has recently gotten a personal training job at Anytime Fitness. And we are only four months into the year! If you are not one to write new years goals, or like so many others, have relinquished your 2012 goals from your mind, it’s not too late to declare this year yours!
If you can even remember where you put your new years resolutions, if you even wrote them down, toss’em. Many don’t really stuck to them anyway. Even me, as a big goal achiever, I sometimes stray away from some goals that I made at the beginning of the year. Maybe your goals have changed and some goals no longer seem reasonable to keep. Maybe you didn’t’ even make any. That’s okay, you don’t have to. This isn’t a post about making goals for this year, its bout taking the 12 tips I am going to give you to still make this “your” year. You don’t need determining goals to make it your year. While I had goals (over 250 currently), I never had specific goals that would make 2010 my year, or specific goals for 2011 or 2012, yet I accomplished so much and my life improved drastically. I learned that to live the life you want, you just have to evaluate how you live now and begin implementing the following 12 tips to make this “your” year.
1. Beginning now and at the start of each month for 30 days in a row, commit to doing something new that you have thought about doing, but have not done.
If you wait until the first of the next month or the first of the week or if you wait until you finish something else before you do something new, you will never get anything done.
I suggest reading Zig Ziglar’s affirmation sheet or make your own. Wake up each morning and create the habit of complimenting yourself and reminding yourself of all your strengths. What I have learned about doing this is that it is not necessarily the affirmations that changes your world (though they play a large part), it is the development of a habit. It is the feeling that “hey, I did it today.” It makes each day complete. It makes you feel like you can stick to your word. It creates the image of reliability and persistence. Anyone can say they are improving every day in every way, but very few have the skill and talent to do it everyday.
Pick a habit to develop each month, whatever you like, just pick and follow through.
2. Write emails/letters to three people in life to let them know what they mean to me.
Sure gratitude is great (we will get to that) but no type of gratitude is stronger than “thanks” being given to people who have touched your life. This may require you to think back and check who has affected your life. Try to find all the people who have and simply thank them; send them a friendly message or write a paragraph to them explaining your thanks. Since snail mail is nearly obsolete, I encourage you to either send emails or Facebook comments (not messages, you want other people to see how grateful you are and that the person your commenting on means a lot to you). You can even send a random txt message, just make sure you make it personal, meaningful and from your heart. Who knows, you may even get one back!
3. Start a business plan regardless if you have a business idea
It doesn’t matter what it is. Some ideas are dumb… think back to my post about my two business ideas. First, you never know. As you work on the business plan ideas might be created to improve your original concept or you may think of one entirely different. Either way, get in the habit of creating and making a plan to follow through. A small plan or a big plan, a plan is a plan. If you don’t have any business ideas, that doesn’t mean you get to skip this tip. Get creative and think of one, what product or service could you do or create to serve others and make people happy? By all means, have fun with this.
4. Schedule family time
I’m human. I’m guilty of not doing this, but when I do, my world changes: stress is relieved and the weights I carry feel lighter. Not only that, but when I talk to family members, I often talk about things that I normally wouldn’t have thought of. It takes you out of the moment and brings you to a place you can feel comfortable. As you know, making a year YOUR year really means you have to step out of your comfort zone and shake and move your brain. Always schedule family time to center yourself and make sure those who know you best see that you are on the right path. Tell those who matter most about your goals and aspirations because they will be able to hold you accountable and by saying it with confidence, you are one very large step closer to achieving your success. Warning: The trouble with family time is deciding what to listen to and what not to since they want to put all their evaluations on what you are doing. Some family members may not support your ideas and may talk you down. Take it as a challenge. Prove them wrong. Take what they say and find a way to prove them wrong. By doing so you are not only showing them you know what you are doing, but you are creating a way around any future skepticism.
5. Record what I say
Every day is a constant flow of information. You receive input and provide output constantly through reading, listening, speaking and thinking. Begin recording your thoughts and what you say to evaluate the language you are using. By doing so, you can find where you need to begin making improvements. Are you thinking negatively about work each day? Do you look into a mirror unable to see your beauty? Do you speak before you think to your friends and family? You need to start recording what you say and think and feel so that you have a better understanding of what effects you negatively and what you are negatively affecting. No improvements and changes can be made until you know what needs to be improved and changed.
After gaining a deeper insight into what you output, begin evaluating what is input through your daily routine. Are you reading the news (95% negative information) every morning or do you view blogs such as mine or others to keep learning new information on the topic of your interest? Do you surround yourself by negative people? Or worse, do you enable them? Pay close attention to what is taken in throughout the day and begin to set aside and walk past those things in which are detrimental to your daily positive attitude.
6. Find a mentor
I know how difficult it is to get a mentor that you really want. I understand the difficulty to capture the attention of great and widely known people and have them act as a mentor toward you. That does not mean you cannot connect with them and learn what they have to teach through the information they provide whether it is in books, blogs or audio presentations. Think of what you really want this year and begin following those who are most well known for teaching that. In doing so, you will discover under-noticed and under-deserving people who know just as much and are more willing to assist you. In essence, begin connecting with those that you have related interests with. It is also key to note that mentors come and go. Accept this transitional flow and keep seeking authoritative figures that you can learn from.
In addition, I need to add that becoming a mentor is far greater than having one. If you go out searching for friends, you will find very few. If you go out searching to be a friend, you will find a countless number of takers. As you learn from mentors and begin changing the information you digest each day, share it with others. Rather than complaining that Seth Godin won’t take you up as an apprentice (guilty), become like that idol and turn into a mentor for others who want the same as you.
7. Discover the 20% of work
You may know about an app for the Droid phone called “task killer” that kills processes that are running but are not being used and are depleting the energy (battery life) of the phone in order to maximize performance for what you are using. The first step to discovering the 20% of work is to kill the 80% of apps that are consuming your brain and your life but are not priorities. This also includes cutting out any of the negativity in your life. Begin un-friending people who complain and spam your social networking profiles. Begin cutting out the bad eating habits. Begin cutting out the people you meet each day that upon seeing them, bring you down. A person doesn’t need to be holding a thousand balloons to float, they only need to stop the gravity that is holding them down.
Once everything that is holding you back is let go, you don’t even have to search for the 20% of work, it finds you. Your thinking and focusing abilities will be 10x stronger which will produce 10x better results. You will be able to manage your time better to complete a task further than its potential in 20% of the time. By eliminating the 80% of “apps” holding you back from your potential, it will allow you to have 10x more success because you have discovered the 20% of energy needed to succeed in each task. In simple terms, devote yourself to something completely by getting rid of everything else that is not worthy of your attention and you will be able to create miracles.
8. Gratitude
Start a gratitude journal. It doesn’t matter if you write one thing in a book or you list things throughout the day on your phone or on sticky notes. Personally, I type 5 things I am grateful for in a notes app on my phone each night before sleep. By writing in a gratitude journal of everything you are thankful for, you are putting power in the present which sets the stage for the future. It keeps you consistently happy, gives you peace of mind and allows you to go to sleep with a smile on your face. There are absolutely zero negative side effects to being thankful.
But don’t stop there. Also aim to be the one other people are grateful for. How did you help someone today? How did you serve? Did you give everyone you saw today a smile? Maybe you were the jokester at work and made everyone laugh? Constantly work to be what others are grateful for. Not only will it make their day, and you’re name will go on their gratitude list, but you are giving yourself a distinguished type of respect seldom held. In addition to positively impacting the people you meet each day, find an organization to volunteer at. My current volunteering consists of running races where the funds go towards a specific charity. I am also looking into Habitat for Humanity and Big Brothers Big Sisters to continue my volunteerism. The general rule of volunteering is at least two hours a week. The benefits of volunteering are so incredible that they deserve a blog post to themselves. Look at all the benefits by giving it a Google if you’re interested.
Come to think of it, it may not be a bad idea to also list the contributions and volunteering you’ve done along side your list of things you are grateful for each day.
9. Plan a trip for 4 months from now.
Figure out where you want to go and start looking into it now. Whenever you seem to have some free time, begin searching on the internet for things you can do at the destination you chose and start planning for it. Think how you are going to save for the next four months or how you will use the money you already have to take the trip. It does not have to be anything huge but don’t let it be too little either. Having something major to look forward to as it is necessary to maintain a continuous positive attitude and outlook. If anything goes wrong through the week, just remember that you are taking a trip soon and will be able to get away from everything and enjoy yourself. The point of this is to stop putting celebration off, enjoy life, YOLO and always have something big to look forward to in the long run.
10. Say yes
Simple. Start saying yes to everything (with thorough judgement of course). Take every opportunity and option and work with it, create something productive and positive with every choice you make. In essence, try new things. Begin to experiment and experience everything you can. Heck, go sky diving. If you see a flier for a free event, go to it. If someone asks you to join them for an activity, do it. If the Botanical gardens or some other place is free on Wednesday, give it a visit. Saying yes is about you agreeing to living your life to its fullest potential by exposing yourself to all the world offers.
11. Schedule a date night
With yourself, with your life partner or with the girl/guy you met because you said “Yes” to an invitation to an event. Adding the previous 10 tips to your life on top of all your responsibilities and duties already, you deserve a night of pure enjoyment. Use this time to do everything, do nothing, or only do what you want to. She and I have Origami nights and other nights we stay in and play Farkle and Scrabble. (I’m unbeatable at Scrabble). Other times we go out to dinner and a movie. The options are endless but the point is purely to enjoy yourself. Relax, meditate, reminisce on the highlights of the past week, think about all you have to look forward to and practice living in the moment. Forget all tasks, all obstacles and all affairs that are up in the air. Schedule a date night where you stop time and live.
12. Complete the following: Stay ________
Just do it. If you are only going to do one tip to make this “your” year, let this be it. Get optimistic, improve your attitude, change the outcomes and Stay Positive. Nothing will make “your” year greater than if you Stay Positive. The reason I end every post with this reminder is because it is the most important trait to living the successful life you want. Staying Positive is the basis of everything that has made you happy, everything that is making you happy and everything that will make you happy. By all means, devote all you have into Staying Positive.
If I asked you who taught you to speak English, you would say your parents.
If I asked you who taught you how to think, you would say your parents.
Am I wrong when I say that people who teach you language, teach you how to think?
I doubt the educational system realizes the greatness they are producing by requiring the youth to take language classes. I even more so doubt that YOU realize the greatness.
Learning a different language than your native tongue opens your mind to the possibilities of exploring the world.
Hearing a language makes you feel connected with the world even in your home town.
I love Improv, so knowing another language allows me to really work new personalities and different cultures into an Improv show. I can imitate Hitler in a humorous way, I can reenact the German language parts of movies, I can create any type of German person I want, all because I learned another language.
With another language, you rarely learn negative vocabulary, so you do not know how to produce negative feelings – Stay Positive
As a more fun reason to learn another language, you get to become someone else. You have just opened another path that you can walk while you walk your current path. A double life of excellence. You can make up a common German or Italian name (Mine is Gregor, in German).
While language gives you a new way of thinking by having you analyze, articulate, write, and explore a certain language, it does something far greater for you.
On the base level, you open your mind to growth, the more you understand about language, the more you can comprehend about life. Yet there is something even greater… not only does it expand your mind for greater understanding, but it expands it to “Not understand” — Not understand why so many people limit themselves in their learning. It compels you to “not understand” why people can think they can be one of the most successful people on the planet without being able to talk and understand the lifestyles of people on the other side of the planet. The reason I am writing this post is because I do not understand why anyone is content with knowing one language. Language allows you to connect.
If you talk to a woman in a language she understands, that goes to her head.
If you talk to her in her language, that goes to her heart.
Which person do you think learns more and is more successful? The person who only knows english and can only connect with less than 3 billion people? Or the person who knows two, three, four, five languages that can connect with 6+ billion people. Twice as many as the single language speaker. The ability to speak and connect with 1 billion more people than you can now, would dramatically improve your life. Traveling would not be a dream, it would become a reality. Job opportunities would open across the globe. You would be exposed to millions of more women and men to find your true love. (Maybe you wont find someone in a foreign territory, but when you find one near your home place, you can serenade her with the language you now know!)
A Manual Aptitude For An Einstein
With language, you are not only open to connecting with billions of people, but also billions of books and information. With a better understanding of the world and the endless amount of knowledge it provides, you can become a genius.
Language is the archives of history. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
In the world of learning a language and how to think, it does not matter what “success” is to you. The fact is, that no matter what success means to you, learning another language will get you there 3+ billion times faster with 3+ billion times greater of an experience, a journey.
Learning a language is like being born again. You are now able to make all the decisions you made in your native language. But this time, you can make the right ones.
Stay Positive, and 3+ Billion Times More Positive Than Before
Garth E. Beyer – Like Confucius, “In his speech, he wishes to be sincere”
If you are reading this, then you know how important it is to have activities to do with your life partner. “Bonding now, is what makes you bound for life.” I suggest reading that every day otherwise you won’t have a very long relationship. No relationship should be held together by going to the movies once a week or having a date night every Saturday. Relationships need to have constant activities or ones that last for a longer duration than a day.
Other than the general benefits to participating in bonding strategies, here are 6.5 benefits you may not have captured.
1 It becomes a filler for those moments when there is nothing else to talk about
2 It feeds the relationship a constant positive energy that prevents fights from occurring
3 It produces an “inner”-bonding form rather than an outer
4 It provides a constant stream of memories that are much less forgotten than “that one movie we saw two years ago”
5 It serenades the primary-self out and holds the disowned-self back – More on this at Understanding Relationships
6 It is far greater for your psychological health than you already know
6.5 It increases not only the quality of your life and relationship, but also your longevity
Affection is responsible for nine-tenths of whatever solid and durable happiness there is in our lives. – C.S. Lewis
And when is the most affection shown? When there are bonding experiences taking place. Something funny I came across while I was researching for this post was that I had to go through dozens of articles about the importance of bonding with your newborns and the importance of touch, communication and constant attention. At first I ignored it but then I thought I could use it as an analogy. — No matter how mature and long a relationship has been, it must be treated as a baby. You have to rock it to sleep every night, you have to feed it and clean up its messes, you have to set it as your top priority and keep it there, and you have to constantly play with it and make it entertaining.
Now, for you, here are the Out-Of-The-Box relationship bonding activities for you and your love to do together.
Print out a map of the U.S that only shows the states. Now, when driving to places together, keep an eye out for state license plates and highlight each state which license plate you have seen. (I have seen 39 out of all the states) If you can, throw in the Canadian Provinces too! Now this is something you can do every time you are out together and it offers a burst of excitement each time one of you see it. It also encourages the two of you to travel! Note: Both must see it together. This will keep the other from sleeping during the road trip or it will give you a reason to wake the other up. – I’m experienced with this.
Each of you choose a relatively short book you want to read. Give it to the other and have them read it. Instead of designating a certain time each week to sit down like a book club, just share what you have learned and what the other might have wanted to known about the book you are reading. Be their brain and get involved in their interests. Both need to take part to make it work.
A picture a day will make it okay when nostalgia comes your way. I have experienced, as well as heard others talk about their feelings when nostalgia hits in the relationship. After a duration of time, one’s memory can only collect the most special moments of the beginning of the relationship. I encourage you to take a picture of your partner each day so that you can see how they change and it helps with remembering the smaller moments. It does not have to be a professional picture, just snap a picture and keep it in a file on your computer. Do it even if your love doesn’t want you to, they will eventually just go with it. They don’t have a choice and they will understand why you did what you did when you show them two years from now.
The note. Have a long piece of paper that you tape up to a cabinet or the fridge for you and your partner to write on each morning. Whoever wakes up first, writes in it first. Let it be the first thing you do in the morning to start the relationship off on a positive note. The second person will write a response and compliment the other on what they love about them. Keep them short, to the point and sweeter than chocolate. Once a week you should have to replace the paper and start fresh. Keep this up and make it a ritual. Save the pages, they are perfect remedies to nurture each other after a fight.
The above is primarily focused on the gratitude of each other, but now it’s time to be grateful for something in your life unrelated to the relationship. Each day make it a goal to share with each other one thing you are grateful for that day. It can be having a powerful vacuum, Starbucks, comfy pants, caring parents, food in the fridge – anything. Let it come to you as the day goes on, catch yourself thinking “Wow I’m happy for this” and share it with your partner. If it doesn’t happen during the day, search for the one grateful thing before sleep and tell your partner. I am sure you have heard that you can’t love another until you learn to love yourself. The same goes with gratitude. You cannot be truly grateful for the actions your partner takes to improve the relationship if you can’t first be grateful for the positive occurrences in your daily life. Not only will this boost your individual optimistic energy, but you are now connecting and sharing that energy with your loved one.
Lastly, be weird. This one truly is out-of-the-box. In every relationship one forgets how they acquired the attention of the other in the beginning. Generally, the lady loved the man’s humor. But as the relationship extends, men become less humorous. We get comfortable and forget that we have to constantly “keep the baby entertained”. Be weird, be crazy, be different and make your life partner laugh. If you don’t do any of the other bonding activities, do this and do it constantly.
Have you heard of the magic relationship ratio of 5:1?
Bonding is central to relationship success. Let these activities be your strategy to maintain the strength of your union. You now have your constant 5 positive daily interactions (Plus One For Continuous Improvement), the rest is up to you.
Stay Positive and Well, Stay Positive With Your Ratio Too
The price you pay in a relationship that grows stronger and stronger is that you become more vulnerable. Both in the sense of getting hurt and of hurting the other emotionally. Before a relationship deepens you are extremely sweet and kind. When you do say something mean or rude it is said and taken as a joke. You end up having a silly argument together out of it for fun.
But once deep into a relationship, jokes get taken seriously, even though there is no way in heaven that you would ever mean it. What was once perceived as helping the other out is now taken as criticism. In addition there is less patience, the other will be more inclined to snap at you when aggravated and it becomes more difficult to help the aggravated other feel unstressed.
More attitude is given and when aggravated, the emotion is directed at you and there is nothing you can do.
A simple example is that in the beginning my relationship I could tell that her hair looked like a hurricane had struck recently. We would have laughed and carried on with the day. I might slip in another joke in about her hair after we ran in gym class. Now that we are nearly two years into our relationship, I can’t joke about her hair. She will pout and run off to fix it rather than laughing about it and possibly extending the joke herself.
The answer to solve all of this… is to be figured out.
Is there no cure for it? Is the fact that you are in a deep relationship mean that you are more credible for everything you say, that every word that comes out of your mouth is taken in the most honest and whole-hearted-whole-minded way? Then whose fault is it one when gets hurt? Is it the person who says something as a joke? Or the person who takes the joke seriously and reacts as if they really meant it?
Stay Positive and More Sincere As Your Relationship Strengthens
