Today is my birthday! This is not a post about celebrating that, however. It IS a post about celebrating. Once, listening to a talk by Michael Beckwith, I heard him suggest asking yourself 3 questions a day. I dive deeper into this in my second book, Living the Dream, but one of those questions is “What can I celebrate?”
Today, for my birthday, that’s what I’m asking all of you to do. Today, ask yourself what you can celebrate. There is always something. Do you have people in your life you love? People you can learn from? Do you have a way to make a living? Do you have something that can motivate and inspire you?
I certainly wouldn’t mind you celebrating the birth of a charming author and blog writer. Better still, I would like you to find and celebrate something in your own life. Don’t just acknowledge it, celebrate it! Please share what you are celebrating and how you are doing it! Add to my reasons for celebrating today.
Here is a great question to ask yourself daily – what can I celebrate? Living life in a constant state of celebration can certainly make it amazing. Truth is, there is always something to celebrate!
You can celebrate the birth of your favorite author (mine is next Friday) you can celebrate one of the odd holidays that they come up with. Just Google “what holiday is today” it will be national chilli dog day or some other celebration you can join.
These are all great ideas. (I especially enjoy the author birthday one) In my humble opinion, the best way to find something to celebrate is to ask the question, “what am I grateful for today?” Whatever answer you come up with, celebrate that. One thing you are grateful for a day and just find ways to celebrate. I would LOVE to hear what you are going to celebrate today!
I know, I know. Nobody wants to work on the weekend. You at probably thinking, “Neil, I just put in 40+ hours this week. I deserve a break. ” This is certainly true. What else you deserve is an amazing life. That is why I created this site, secret2anamazinglife.com, to share what I have learned in my 20+ years of research on the subject.
One of the best ways to start enjoying your life more is to stop and appreciate all the little things, as we refer to them. They are actually not little at all. You see the picture of a sunset i took while leaving the movies with Margie the other night. A sunset, a little thing. Yet, we could not recreate it with all the money in the world. It only lasted a few minutes, but is a memory that will last forever. So is the picture below of a wall I was on with my mom.
This weekend, your job is to stop and really appreciate one of the little Miracles in your life. If you would like, share with us what that might be, as I have shared my two with you.
If there is one trait that you should work on develop, it is gratitude. It is important to remember the greatest gift we receive is the opportunity to wake up another day. We may not have everything we want, but if we wake up, we have the potential to create it.
Today, as often as you can, take a moment and be grateful you are here. You have the gift of opportunity!
Middle of the week! In the middle of all our hard work, let us take a second, catch our breath and refocus. Most of us, myself included, do very well at focusing on what needs fixing and what needs to get accomplished. It should be apparent why this would be helpful.
Today, however, let us take just a few minutes for ourselves. Stop whatever we are doing (don’t worry this will be over quickly) and focus on what is going right in our lives. Maybe we are grateful we do not live in a place where there is a war going on. Maybe we are grateful to be healthy. How about the wonderful people in our lives that we love and care about?
Just do this for 2 or 3 minutes. Really do it. Stop whatever else you are doing and just think about everything that is going well and does not need fixing. Can you see how powerful this would be to do on your lunch break? Maybe even while you use the restroom? How about while you wait in line? A quick change in focus can refresh our attitude and our spirit!
This post could have been titled many different things. “My secret to happiness” and “23 years of training” were other considerations. Let’s talk about the title i did choose. “Everyone should do this once in their life. ” What should everyone do once in their life? I think everyone should work a job in retail at least once in their life. You should do this for several reasons.
The first reason is that you will have a lot more compassion for people who work in retail. When you may feel tempted to yell at a store clerk during the holidays or demand the coffee shop employee creates your beverage with a certain amount of ice cubes or anything that involves fractions, you will reconsider. You will personally know how it feels to be on the receiving end of that.
The other reason to work a job in retail is to expose yourself to as many different people and ideas as you can. Like anything in life, this can either drive you crazy or make you more open-minded and compassionate. It may be one of the best ways that I know to meet people in many different fields and with many different beliefs. You may discover things that you never knew you enjoyed about some of your fellow human beings. It is good training on managing your emotions when it comes to these same fellow human beings. It will also train you, if you use it for this purpose, on managing your own emotional well-being.
I was a bartender for 23 years. My next book will be my journey from that profession to self-improvement author, speaker and blog writer. In this profession, and just in life in general, one of the questions I get a lot is, “How can you be happy all of the time.” The short answer is that I am not. Margie can certainly attest to that. It also would make life pretty boring. We learn most when we go through challenges. That is where the growth comes from. The goal in life should not be to be happy 100% of the time. You will never achieve that and it may even increase the feelings of failure you have. The goal should be to reduce the frequency and intensity of the times you are not. You should also endeavor to learn from every situation you experience in life.
Learning from everything in life is what I do my best to do. I am always trying to figure out what works and what doesn’t. When I think about what allows me to feel upbeat most of the time, a lot of things come to mind. First is gratitude. Developing a attitude of gratitude is one of the most powerful things you can do for yourself. Surrounding yourself with what Les Brown calls OQP, or only quality people. These are the ones who will both encourage you and hold you accountable. Developing a routine of self-care is another thing that will pay dividends in the long run. I recommend all of these steps to each and every one of you reading this, but it was something I learned on my first day of bartending that made a huge difference.
Jimmy G was the man who trained me. He was one of the most respected bartenders in the city and taught me many things that I will never forget. I had the good fortune to work with and under several amazing men. One of the things Jimmy told me was “Nobody cares about your problems.” He went on to explain that you never want to walk into a bar with a depressed or even indifferent bartender. Whatever is happening in your life, for the time you are behind the bar you must put it behind you. “When you are done working you can go back to being sad, mad or whatever else you are dealing with. When you are behind the bar, you must act as if it is the greatest day of your life.” I used this same manner of thinking when it came to working the window area of the post office. Even if people dealt with me for a mere 60 seconds, I wanted it to be the best 60 seconds of their day.
What I learned by being ‘happy’ for an eight hour bartending shift, is that you can emotionally compartmentalize many emotions. I was forced to learn many methods and find the ones that worked for me. Doing this for the time I was working taught me that I could still have things crumbling down in my life and manage a positive outlook. In doing so, it allowed me to see opportunities and solutions I may have missed if I was in the whirlwind of negative emotion focused on what is wrong. This is a skill that has stuck with me. I am grateful for the chance to learn it. Having a positive outlook, even one that may be just ‘show’ for the public, can help us see ways in which to do so authentically.
Only seconds ago, I just completed my third book. My hope us to have it edited and in your hands by my birthday on July 29th. We will do our best to make sure that happens.
In the closing chapter, I came across this quote from Albert Einstein. Nothing could be more true. It is a shame most of us never realize this until we are facing a severe health challenge, or worse yet, facing the end of our life. We do not have to let it come to that. There are so many Miracles that come into our lives we have become desensitized to them. Merely breathing and how our bodies transform the air we breathe into a source to keep us alive. Don’t even get me started on changing food to energy and raw material. As an author, my body can change caffeine into words on paper or a keyboard! Trust me when I tell you that is a miracle.
Many people journal. I think it is one of the most powerful tools to positively transform your life. People do everything from gratitude journals, to just keeping a diary. What if we kept a miracle journal? Just record everything we considered a miracle in our lives? It would not only help us better notice the Miracles, but be able to feel the joy in realizing they are there.
I would LOVE to hear what miracle you have experienced or noticed today? Feel free to share with everyone in the comments below. My miracle is that I can turn my recent open heart surgery into a book that will hopefully positively impact the lives of countless people!
GOING INTO THE WEEKEND, LET’S TELL AT LEAST ONE PERSON HOW MUCH THEY HAVE POSITIVELY AFFECTED OUR LIFE. I WOULD LOVE TO HEAR WHO YOU CHOOSE AND HOW THEY HAVE POSITIVELY AFFECTED YOU.
We can get so busy in our everyday lives that we miss a lot of the amazing beauty that surrounds us. The above picture is one I took while I was waiting at a red light returning from work on my off day. I was lost in my thoughts of everything that I wanted to get done when I got home along with a host of other thoughts. There are some moments I am even surprised I noticed the light is red. I do not know what prompted me to look over to my left, but I saw this face staring at me. There is something about a look that a dog can give you that can cause you to question your own behavior. This is just another reason there are days when I like animals better than a lot of people. I respected this dog’s ability to take in the world around him. Sadly, there are times when I drive to work and when I arrive I wonder who drove. This is made even scarier by the fact that I am the only one in the car.
Here is another example. This photo was taken of a goose waiting to enter the post office where I work. Just the silly nature of the moment was something that very well could have passed me by. In fact, I am sure there are a million of these moments that do pass me by that I fail to notice. We live in a world filled with distraction. If you are stuck in line at the grocery store behind the lady that has not one, but two carts filled to the top (this actually happened this past weekend) instead of taking in the moment, we pull out our phones. When we are driving we have music or an audiobook playing and seldom notice the people, or dogs, around us. In the case of this photo, I was busy doing a little landscaping and may have not even noticed this goose. I just happened to look up at the right time.
One last example. My drive to work now happens somewhere between 5 and 6 am. There is not a lot of traffic and I usually have time to think. I am working on making my thoughts far more positive and productive. Still, there are days when they are filled with thoughts of not wanting to go to work. Most days it also includes how little sleep I received the night before. This is where I was on this particular morning. Lost in thoughts that were not serving me. Suddenly, I stop at a red light on a bridge overlooking a freeway and glance this sunrise. Instead of focusing on all of the things that were not exactly as I wished them to be, I realized how much better my day would start if I focused on all of the things I had to be grateful for. I had a job to go to. There is usually very little stressful traffic at this hour. There was a beautiful sunrise to be seen. I had vision to take in this sunrise. I was driving a car I owned to take me to work. I had a home to return to. The list could have been endless, yet I had already wasted 3/4 of the journey focusing on what I was lacking.
We all know better. We know the quality of our feelings and consequently our life, would be better if only we were to focus on that which we have to be grateful for. We would enjoy and savor life if we were better able to be present and see the beauty and humor like in the first two photos above. If we were to focus on what IS working in our lives and not what is lacking we would feel so much more fulfilled and blessed. If we were to be more present and make an effort to look for the beauty and humor in life, we would enjoy our life so much more. Why don’t we? We are too busy distracting ourselves. We need to take some time to sit with ourselves in silence. We need to block out some time and write down a list of things we are grateful for in our life. We need to read and add to that list daily. We need to say to ourselves, “I am going to look for what is beautiful today.” The distractions we fall victim too not only take us away from doing this, but they often fill our time with negativity. News you receive on your phone, posts you can see on social media and many other distractions can be a terrible disservice to our attempts at living a positive and rewarding life. There is a place and time for these items (although I debate how necessary the news is) let us not let them distract us from living our lives.
I ended last week with a post about the local coffee shop and how they helped my spirit through these challenging times. I would be remiss if I did not mention my personal angel, my own little miracle, my beautiful Margie. There have been so many little things she has done throughout my healing journey I am forever grateful for. It actually started even before my surgery when she gifted me a journal and helped me on my journey to create a book about this entire journey. It will be out by July I promise you. This will not only be a benefit to you, the reader, but it helped me capture my emotions and to deal with them in a far healthier way that had I not been writing. She also gave me a shirt that said, “Never thought I would be this good looking after open heart surgery, but here I am killing it”. That is my baby, always making me smile.
She also had some very unenviable tasks. Can you imagine what it is like to live with someone who is used to working at an active job and going to the gym 5 days a week and now has to just relax for 3 months? Can you imagine how much that person may try to sneak and do things that they probably should not? How about how much you would have to cheer this person up when they feel like their healing is not moving along fast enough for their impatient liking. Having to watch the person recovering go through many different episodes of pain and telling them to go back to the hospital when the pain became too much? Especially when you consider that was the last place they wanted to go back to?
During my surgery, I was wrapped up in how scary it was to be in that situation and not be able to have any visitors. It could not have been any easier to know the person you love is going through it and not being able to visit them. Margie handled it all with grace like only she can do. When I returned she made sure I had food to feed my stomach, and provided me love to feed my soul. When we both got the coronavirus shortly after I came home from the hospital, she managed to continue this amazing streak of behavior despite coughing and not feeling well herself.
Even today, four months after the surgery, she continues doing things that really help. She has started exploring healthier ways to cook so we can make sure my heart does last as long as it can. She has been working on rearranging the house to make it more relaxing and pleasing for both of us. She continues to make me laugh and show me affection. She has been doing all of this while she goes to school two days and week and spends a good deal of time on the other days creating unbelievable cake creations.
You may not believe a person like this really exists. What would you call someone who can pull all of this off? I call her many things. I call her Margie (Margaret when she lets me get away with it), my love, my little miracle. The greatest thing and the thing I am most grateful to call her is – mine. I am so thankful that I have a woman like this to share my life with.
SECRET 2 AN AMAZING LIFE 