Something i came across today:

Taken directly from RichardBrooke.com

Being The Best You Can Be
Richard Brooke

One of the most unique and powerful gifts we all have is the
ability to improve ourselves every day, in every way. It is the
ultimate opportunity to have the emotional, intellectual, and
physical faculties to identify and execute change. We can study a
little every day, either by reading or listening or watching
something that will support us to make shifts in how we take care
of ourselves and our future. Even the smallest steps can quickly
compound into vast improvements in who we are, how we act, how we
react, and how we attract.

The Japanese call it Kaizen ... or constant improvement.
Let's look at some areas of our lives where small daily
improvements can add up to huge differences over time:

Health

What could be more important? Take care of your body; it is the
only one you get. It could last well past 100 years of vitality and
wellness. Here are a few things we can do every day:

Make one better decision about what you eat. Drop the sugar or salt
you usually add to your food. Enjoy one less beer, or one more
helping of fiber or greens. Move away from white flour. Drink more
water. Put a gallon of water in the refrigerator and make it your
goal to consume it every day. Rethink how you look at food: from a
source of pleasure to a source of necessary fuel. Food is fuel. Bad
fuel causes engine failure. Good fuel wins races.

Stop buying the things at the grocery store that do not support
your health. If they are not in the kitchen, you are likely to NOT
eat them.

Add one more physical activity. Walk the stairs instead of taking
the elevator. Walk to the mailbox. Hire a personal trainer.
Stretch. Do something fun and physical.

Take time to relax ... even 20 minutes can make a difference. Give
yourself permission to lie in the hammock or take a quiet bath.

Wealth

It is our ticket to freedom, fun, adventure and contribution.
Anyone can become wealthy. The level you need for freedom is
different from others. Find your number. How much in assets and
income do you want in order to live life to the fullest? Then do
these things every day:

Add value to YOU as a professional. It does not matter if you are a
chicken chopper or a rocket scientist ... add value to your
income-earning self. Learn something new that has value to your
clients or employer. Add a new skill. Develop a new distinction.
Form a new habit. Offer more of your professional self than you
have before. You will earn more every year.

Save more. Save more of the money you spend now. Look for ways to
get the same value for less money. Buy a three-year-old car versus
brand new. Eat out once less each month. Exchange full cable
services for the basic. Anyone can figure out how to save $100 a
month off just his or her existing expenses. One hundred dollars
saved and invested over 30 years equals hundreds of thousands in
wealth. Just $100 a month!

Invest more in appreciating assets and less in depreciating assets.
More appreciating assets like real estate, home improvements, your
professional value, stocks and bonds. Less depreciating assets like
autos, entertainment, gifts and impulse purchases. Just by shifting
a few hundred dollars you will add hundreds of thousands to your
net worth.

Building a residual income, even part time, adds significant
wealth. Five hundred dollars a month in residual income is, in
itself, "worth" $50,000. The added $500 a month you invest in real
estate or stocks can be worth hundreds of thousands over time.
Residual income can come from a solid Network Marketing business,
an online business, or writing a book about something for which you
have a passion.

How You Act

Are you kind? Are you compassionate? Are you generous? Do you take
or give credit to others? Do you speak encouraging words? Do you
speak about people's strengths to others? Do you work
enthusiastically? Do you do what you say you will do? Do you tell
your truth when it could be a contribution? Do you listen to
empower others?

How you and I act creates our value in the world ... to the people
around us like family, friends, coworkers and clients. When we act
with excellence, speak with excellence, listen with excellence, and
behave as excellent a person as we can in the moment, we are
valued, we are attractive, we are trusted and we are loved.

Do these things every day to improve how you act:
Make a commitment to say something kind every day ... then increase
it to every hour.

Make the same commitment to do something kind every day. "Pay it
Forward."

Make the same commitment to listen to someone ... really listen to
what they are saying, what they are not saying, what they really
want to say, and how they feel. Listen to someone at the
therapeutic level once a day.

Audit your conversations. Develop the habit of asking yourself
after each statement, "What was my motive in saying what I said and
how I said it? Was it to contribute to the person, or to make
myself look good?" Then ask yourself how you feel about someone who
speaks to make themselves look good, more important than you, or
more "right" than you.

Make a bold request every day that will improve a relationship,
business productivity, or will improve another person. For example,
make a bold request that a friend or loved one stop speaking
negatively about him or herself - battering their own poor self
esteem. Or make a request that your spouse do something that you
know will improve your love and relationship. When bold requests
are made out of the context of support and improvement, they are
often the tipping point that leads a person to act with excellence.

How You React

If actions are those things we think about (however briefly) before
doing them, then reactions are those things we do without thinking.
They are our built-in boomerang over which we may feel we have no
control or personal responsibility. Most people react in negative
and destructive ways.

We can develop new "reactions" by developing new interpretations
and habits. Here are some examples:

When someone speaks down to you, what do you think and how do you
feel about it? What is your reaction? Do you think they think you
are smaller and less than them? Do you think they may be right? Do
you react with anger and retaliation, or do you shut down? What if
when someone spoke down to you, you "interpreted" that they,
themselves, feel small and could really use a lift up. This new
interpretation gives you a perfect opportunity to engage yourself
in improving how you act (See steps 1-5 above).

When someone is late do you think they disrespected you? How do you
retaliate? What if you interpreted the lateness was due to a life
in overwhelm, a sick child, or someone being late for them? Do you
see another opportunity for steps 1-5 above?

When someone in authority tells you "no" or tells you to do
something versus asks, how do you react? What if you interpreted
that this leader is working on their path of compassionate
leadership; that they have more responsibilities than they can
often handle and they need support. Again, see steps 1-5 above.

How You Attract

Attraction is that mysterious energy that brings us the lucky
outcomes ... the client or order we needed just in time, or the idea
that breaks the log jam into massive productivity, or the person
that just popped into our life that filled a void either
romantically or personally. We all know people who seem to hit the
jackpots of life over and over again. We all know people who always
seem to land on their feet and are always running with the wind
towards their goals.

The lucky ones are those who were gifted by their parents with
belief in themselves, such that they see every opportunity as a
probability and inevitability. Everything can get done and should
get done. No obstacle is too high or too wide. They deserve - not
from and egotistical viewpoint, but from a spiritual abundance
viewpoint - everything they choose to earn. They are the lucky
ones. They are the one percent. About one out of 100 of us had
parents that lucky or wise enough to pass it on.

Now For the Rest of Us...

There is a path, proven a billion times, which will bring anyone
one of us the luck in life we so richly deserve. It is a simple
path of Vision and Self-Motivation. It goes like this...

Authentic Core Values

We each have a set of rules that make us uniquely who we are. These
rules define what is most important to us in life ... what gives us
life. To us, these rules are as essential as air and water. We must
have them to be all we can be. Values are just labels for these
rules ... labels of the things we hold dear to us. There are no
limits to the labels you can place on what you consider to be your
authentic core values. Here are just a few examples:

Love ... Fun ... Adventure ... Family ... Spirituality ...
Leadership ...
Success ... Discovery ... Friendship

The first step in the path is to learn through self-discovery,
self-listening and asking the right questions. What are your
authentic core values? You will want to list them, keep them
visually present, and refer to them as often as possible.

Imposed Values

We each also have a set of rules or imposed values. These are rules
to live by handed down by authority figures in our lives, most of
which occurred in our formative years (ages 1-5). Imposed values
are not our authentic rules, but usually our parents' rules either
authentic for them or imposed by their parents (our grandparents).
Here are some examples:

Hard Work ... Education ... Responsibility ... Cleanliness ...
Success ...
Family ... Leadership

As you will notice, imposed values can also be authentic core
values. What is authentic for one person may be imposed for
another. And just because your parents "insisted" that you live by
a rule does not mean it is not authentic for you. But you do need
to sort these out for yourself. To capitalize on the laws of
attraction, move away from living your life by any imposed rules.
For when we live by imposed rules, you and I are always in
conflict, always fighting, always resisting ... and this is not the
energy that attracts anything good.

Learn your imposed values, write them down and create a life plan
to move away from them. This is not easy, nor will it usually
happen quickly. And, it must happen for the real power you possess
in your life to show up for you.

Gifts

Each of us has also been fortunate to be given gifts. Gifts are
those attributes that come naturally to us and contribute to other
people. Gifts are not gifts if they cannot be contributed to the
benefit of others. Examples of gifts are:

Love ... Friendship ... Leadership ...
Creativity ... Safety ... Joy

Learn your gift (or gifts) and again, write them down and keep them
close to your daily living.

Once you know who you are (authentic rules and gifts) you are ready
to imagine what you want to do with your life, what you want to
have in your life and, most importantly, who you want to be. This
is as simple as writing a story ... a story of how your life would
be, could be and will be if you could have it all. Writing this
story is like writing the screenplay of your life. It can be one
page long or 100 pages long. It does not really matter, because for
those diligent, deserving souls that get this far in knowing
themselves, the rest is easy. The rest, as they say, is almost out
of your hands.

Write Your Story

As you write it, embrace the authentic YOU that has been uncovered.
Write it with all the imagination of Walt Disney and then ...

Learn to Believe It

Most people in the world "believe" that beliefs are inherited, or
are solely based on what has already occurred in one's life. The
truth is that all beliefs are learned, and most become
self-fulfilling prophecies ... meaning they became the truth because
someone believed in them enough to make them true.

There are three ways to learn to believe. Either by studying
evidence of the intended belief, believing what an authority figure
tells us, or just imagining it (affirm it) over and over and over
again. Most of what you and I believe today - about life, people,
religion and even about politics - we learn from the repeated
affirmation by those we trust. We can have the same imprinting
process on ourselves by imagining our own story.

When you have done this so often that you are starting to believe
your imagined story, you will have created a vision. By definition,
a vision is a story in which we believe totally and which we expect
to materialize. Visions, by definition, are inevitable.

A vision attracts its components to it like a magnet. A vision
creates the motivation to bring it about. Motivation is that
mysterious, powerful concoction of enthusiasm, courage, physical
energy and creativity that makes things happen. Visions are lucky.
Visionaries are the luckiest.

Find the true-blue you. Write the story of your future abundance.
Learn to believe it is true for you. And then all you have to do is
hold on to being the best you can be.

Another jargon tutorial:

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign saying, "Circus Coming to the Fairgrounds on Saturday," that's advertising.

If you put the sign on the back of an elephant and walk it into town, that's promotion.

If the elephant walks through the mayor's flower bed, that's publicity.

If the town's citizens go to the circus, you show them the many entertainment booths, explain how much fun they'll have spending money at the booths, answer their questions and ultimately, they spend a lot at the circus, that's sales.

It has been scientifically proven that if we drink 1 litre of water each day, at the end of the year we would have absorbed more than 1 kilo of Escherichia coli bacteria found in faeces. In short, we are consuming 1 kilo of poop!

However, we do not run that risk when drinking wine, rum, whiskey, vodka, beer or other liquors because alcohol has to go through a distillation process of boiling, filtering and fermenting. Moreover, alcohol is an antiseptic which actually kills most bacteria.

It is better, therefore, to drink wine and talk shit than to drink water and be full of shit.


There is no need to thank me for this valuable information, I am doing it as a public service in the hope that you will have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year