What words can tell us

life visual juliet read beauty
excuses growth feed excuse book
project motivation required posts bravery
green tidbits art adventurer entertainment
stairs happiness labels alone new
subscribe journal isn april september
meditation amazon it’s archives doing
juliet’s books fun attachment bookshelf
love journey resources august boundless
personal meditate becoming work imperfections

It’s not some new form of poetry or stream of consciousness rambling.  The list above are the top 50 words Google’s crawler says are on this site.

Earlier today I was doing some tweaking and reviewing of various reports with some occassional ‘oops, I messed that up six months ago’ here and there. It’s good to realize how much you’ve learned by catching yourself in mistakes every so often. Although it doesn’t hold a great deal of meaning in terms of web traffic the list of top 200 keywords in the Google Webmaster Tools fascinated me.  7 Green Stairs is the blog where I talk most about myself and what I’m doing, so once the site structure words like Juliet’s and October are subtracted these are the keywords that sum up “me”. Words like:  books, projects, adventurer, journey, love, romance, etc. It’s a very curious thing to see yourself in a spreadsheet of single words.

The words we use most often truly do describe who we are in thought as well as personality.  But it’s hard to be conscious of those words while actually using them. While it might be a lot of work to start blogging just to see this list, if you already have one I’d recommend taking a look from the personal perspective as opposed to your site’s performance.  What do those words say about who you are and who you want to be?  Are you surprised by them?

Technorati Tags: self discovery

Waiting

I haven’t had a terribly productive week with a lot of phone calls to the East Coast and waiting for news, but I’ve managed to get more done than I might have expected.  I’m caught up on my volunteer work and the bills are paid for the month. Most importantly I have a plan in place for dealing with my plumbing, learning to pan gold, and keep up with all the writing I’m trying to do.  Mind you, those are just plans at this point but that feels much more productive than chaos!

I’ve also been reading Wayne Dyer’s new book on getting rid of excuses (more on this later) and and feeling a little embarrassed by how many I’ve been using over the years without evening knowing they were excuses.  But that’s what growth and change are all about, right? I’m impatient to see what changes this might bring. I’ve been feeling that I’ve been creating my own barriers but not sure what or how to dismantle them.  This just may be the key.

I’m hoping to get back on track with my beach glass jewelry this coming week; unless I have to attend to a family emergency there’s no reason for this not to happen.  Summer is in full swing and I’m hoping to make some time to enjoy it. I hope you are too!

Technorati Tags: dealing with distractions, Personal Growth, self discovery, solopreneur, the way to happiness

Are we hard wired to be followers?

There’s some irony in the fact that some of the most interesting news on TV these days is only on early Sunday morning, far earlier than I normally am voluntarily conscious on a weekend -CBS’ Sunday Morning starts at 7am in my neck of the woods.  I was however, glad I caught it this week as there was an interesting story on how brain scans show that when we are given advice by an ‘expert’ such as  TV pundit, our decision making centers shut down.  A similar story citing the same study is online at Wired.com. This explains a few things about the economy and politics, but only starts more questions about why the heck we’re wired this way.  And what do we do about it?

I’m sure I’m not the only one that would prefer to keep any and all experts in the advisory capacity rather than delegate my decisions. But I have to acknowledge that I often find myself wanting advice that provides a clear road map rather than just concepts on how to accomplish something. I’ve noticed others yearning for this as well so  I’m guessing the two are related. That makes it all the more important to be able to integrate advice without blindly following.

Years ago I went to a David Copperfield performance in a small town. My friend and I got there early and saw three or four people approached by staff and led away, only to see them return to their seats before the performance started.  Sure enough, these were the ‘random’ people brought up on stage for various magic tricks.  Even though I didn’t know exactly what had happened backstage, I wasn’t nearly as in awe as I would have been otherwise.  I already knew that something had happened to make the magic possible. Just a little bit of forewarning can dispell much of the illusion.  So maybe if we all observe ourselves observing the experts and the pundits some of that intellectual paralysis the scientists observed will also begin to dissipate.  I wonder what different choices we all might make?

Technorati Tags: self discovery

How to use psychics and horoscopes as ‘mirrors’ for clarity

As strange as it sounds, the paranormal end of things can be a readily accessible and useful tool.  Not because they can or can not predict the future (I’m not going there!)  but because how you react to the prediction can you tell you a great deal about yourself.  Humans do a great deal of subconscious analysis based on comparison. When there is nothing to compare it to then we may not give much thought to how we feel about a particular topic.

Horoscopes can randomly throw all kinds of  predictions our way.  For example, a typical daily horoscope might say – ‘tonight you’ll be out dancing ’til dawn and be the light of the party’ or something to that effect.  If your reaction is along the lines of ‘heck no, I’m going to bed right after watching Survivor’  AND you feel more pleased with the evening you’ve planned for yourself, then you know you’re following your heart.  On the other hand if you react with ‘I wish – I’d love to do that but I’m stuck at home like Cinderella’ then maybe you need to do something to spice up your social life and figure out how to get out of the house a little more often.

Even the more subtle ones like the one I read this morning that promised financial worries would end this week can still give you insights.  I wish I could say that finances aren’t even a minor concern!  What I can say, is that what flitted across my mind’s eye was the projects I needed to get done this week to make that happen.  What registered is that I know what’s important and what I need to do. The horoscope just served as a mirror to reflect my thoughts back at me with a little more focus and clarity.

If you’ve no idea where to read your horoscope, there’s a variety at  www.tarot.com.

Technorati Tags: self discovery

How to broaden your perspective by changing just one word

I can’t take any credit for this one; I recently read it in The Art of Possibility and didn’t think much about it at first.  The simple concept suggested using ‘and’ instead of ‘but’ when joining two clauses.  It was a brief section in the book and I noted it mildly as I read on.  A few days later I started to realize just how often I use the word ‘but’ in a conjunctive sense.  For example:

• I want to drive to Alaska, but I also want to see the Greek islands
• I want to make money blogging, but I need to pay the bills now
• I want a loving relationship, but I appreciate some of the things that go with being single

These sound innocent enough except that I really use the word ‘but’ frequently. Ouch.  At first I didn’t even think that I’m limiting my options by doing this; more of setting a priority or qualifying the desire until I sat with these sentences having rephrased them with ‘and’ instead:

• I want to drive to Alaska, and I also want to see the Greek islands
• I want to make money blogging, and I need to pay the bills now
• I want a loving relationship, and I appreciate some of the things that go with being single

It doesn’t imply that I can do anything simultaneously or suggest anything impossible. Yet there’s a  subtle difference between the two sets of sentences. Maybe there’s a solution out there that involves both Alaska and the Greek islands that I wouldn’t find if I were only looking for one side of the equation. I don’t know yet.  What I do know is that the second set seems infinitely more open to possibility and the potential for abundance.  It doesn’t deny one thought or desire in favor of the other; it makes them more equal. So while I work on reducing my use of the ‘b’ word, try it for yourself and let me know if it makes a difference for you.

Technorati Tags: abundance, life design, removing limits, self discovery, self-talk

Mystery

Fog makes everything a little softer and more mysterious.  It’s harder to see the edges that separates one thing from another.  That in turn creates more possibilities.

In your quest for knowledge and improvement, have you left room for mystery?

Wallace Falls State Park, Juliet Chase, all rights reserved

Technorati Tags: self discovery, visual meditation

Create an abundance allowance to change your relationship with money

I don’t know about you, but the Puritans seemed to have had an undue influence on my childhood. I was raised never to pay full price and that anything not practical was well, frivolous.  Deciding to leave behind a focus on paucity for one of abundance wasn’t difficult at all, but doing it seemed nearly impossible. It was such a well worn groove that I knew it couldn’t happen over night so I gave myself an abundance allowance; a weekly amount of money that I had to spend by the end of the month on ‘frivolous’ things. Just like a monetary allowance helps kids learn about saving, budgeting, and responsibility an abundance allowance helps adults learn about letting go, playing, and loving yourself by not putting you last on the list of too many things.

Finding a sense of abundance can be a challenge made worse when the news, your checkbook, and neighbors are all reiterating that there is now less to go around.  That only makes it more important to feel a sense of possibility and prosperity in your daily life.  Have you noticed that when you worry about money, you seem to have less of it? Even if it’s just from subtracting it so many times in your mind that you simply feel poorer.

When I set out to overcome  this I determined to run the experiment for a full year. My inner Scrooge was able to  mostly let go because I set the money aside at the beginning of the year in a fixed amount so that it wasn’t interfering with other parts of my budget.  The amount of money doesn’t really matter, so even if all you can justify to yourself is $1 a week that can still be very effective (and that’s only $52 for a full year).

What you spend it on is really what appeals to you – even the shopping trips can turn into an adventure although if you’re like me you may have to be firm with yourself to actually spend it and spend it on something you really want rather than just getting it over with.  The rule is that you budget the money evenly for each week. It can accumulate for a few weeks but no longer than the given calendar month (so the money needs to be gone for March before the allowance for the first week of April starts.) If you start feeling like you need to save for longer than that then either readjust the amount down (it may be taking too much from your household budget) or consider that what you’re saving for is really a necessity and not an abundance item.

Try for things that make you feel happy when you see it or use it: a perfect coffee cup, glitter crayons, a book on a topic you’ve wanted to learn about, snazzy gold paperclips, a movie you want to see that’s not part of your regular entertainment budget. If you have a little more cash to spare consider a class at the community college or dance studio, an item that you formerly would never spend that much on that you really love or an luxury upgrade to something practical like a fountain pen for your journal instead of the usual office-supply variety.

If you find yourself feeling really guilty over spending just on yourself, give a matching amount to charity.  But I think you’ll find that you are more generous with others both in time and money if you know how to be generous with yourself without guilt or expectations.

Technorati Tags: abundance, abundance allowance, loving yourself, Personal Growth, self discovery, self-indulgence, simple joys