May I share my three biggest ideas for 2010 with you? I’ll take that as a ‘yes.’ 

First is to promote my book *Depression Freedom* which will be in print within the next 4 to 6 weeks. I know the book is about depression, but it is uplifting and inspiring. The book was born from love and the ability to see the larger picture is the gift of this book. It’s different than anything else on depression that you may have seen or experienced. And it’s not just for people who are depressed; it’s also for people who are on a path of personal growth. 

Second is to write a series of daily pocket-book sized inspiration books around the topics of depression, divorce, grieving, facing challenges, and increasing joy, motivation, intuition, and creating a more harmonious relationship with the body. 

Finally, I’m also wishing to create a deck of 50 daily inspirational cards. I have always loved using these cards. I have them in my bathroom and scattered throughout the house. There’s just something exciting about seeing the beautiful card deck, taking an introspective breath, and then seeing what card comes up. It’s just one of those little things that adds an extra spark to the day. 

Those are my top creative ideas that I’ve been putting my energy into. What about you? What are your three biggest ideas for 2010? Share your comments below. This is your opportunity to express your ideas out loud and expand your inspiration! 

The world needs your joy sooner rather than later. Do whatever you have to do to make your dreams a priority. 

It’s your turn to be alive and joyful!

For the past several weeks, I’ve been experiencing writers block. Previously, inspiration had been flowing. It was a beautiful experience. Ideas fell neatly into place, difficult concepts were easily expressed, and I had words! I was living in the land of milk and honey. 

Then one day I woke up and the creative juices had stopped flowing. I’ve been writing long enough to know that creative blocks can be due to a variety of issues. Some blocks are due to anxiety, a lack of focus, time constraints, writing about what you “should” instead of what you love, perfectionism, or needing to resolve an inner fear before moving forward. Other blocks are simply due to the natural ebb and flow in the creative process.
 
After assessing the nature of my block, I knew this time I was simply in the natural cycle of writing and not writing. This too would pass. As of this week, my writing ability has returned!
 
You may not be a writer, but creative blocks are common to all. Perhaps there are areas in your life where you want to move forward, but just can’t get over the hump? If so, it’s easy to get disillusioned and push your dreams and goals to the back burner. However, just because things aren’t moving forward at the speed you had intended, you don’t have to give up.

If you’re suffering from a creative block, you’re not alone. It’s typical to experience creative highs and dry spells. Sometimes the cycle is long while other times it can pass quickly. What’s most important to remember is that this creative block will pass. It’s up to you to keep your creative project in the forefront until you bounce back.
 
Here are five tips to get through your block and back into the flow once again.

1. Keep on working. You may not be producing your best work, but keep yourself actively engaged with your project.
2. Don’t give up and throw your project away. It was meaningful when you started and it’s still meaningful. Believe in your ability to express yourself even when the going is difficulty.
3. Relax. Creativity cannot be controlled or forced. Take the necessary action steps that help you alleviate stress, relax, and think self-supporting thoughts.
4. Something bigger is coming. Creative blocks are frustrating when they occur, but they often lead to greater inspiration once they have passed. Often a block occurs because a bigger “wow” idea is trying to get through. Accept that there is value in your down time, take care of yourself, and breathe often.  
5. Change a habit. When you’re stuck in a rut, change something habitual or routine in your life. Make it easy but different. For example, get up earlier than usual, wear clothing you don’t normally wear, eat a new food, or take a new route to work. Breaking old habits can lead to feelings of renewed possibilities and excitement.

The next time you hit a creative block, remember that’s all it is. Your creativity hasn’t run out, it’s just temporarily blocked by something. You have infinite creativity within you. Use these simple yet profound tips to overcome to get your creative juices running again!

About the Author: You do not need to go through life exhausted, depressed, stressed, or overweight! Imagine waking up each morning with joy and positive energy that lasts throughout the day! Subscribe to our wonderful free weekly Loving Miracles newsletter at http://www.AnnetteColby.com

Did you know that you can increase your ability to be successful by consciously choosing the right words? It’s true! Let

How? All your best efforts instantly go downhill when you say, “I’ll try.”

What does, AI’ll try@ mean? It means you’ve given yourself an out. If some obstacle should surface, you now have a built in escape route that gets you off the hook. The word presupposes failure. It lacks intention and confidence. When you say, “I’ll try” you are sowing the seeds of doubt in your own mind. “I’ll try” says, AAlright, I’ll give it a go, but I can=t really see it working out.@ 

What’s the answer? A very simple change in how you word things. Instead of “I’ll try” tell yourself “I am.”

For example, instead of saying, “I’ll try” to meet my goal tomorrow, tell yourself, “I am now committed to feeling good by honoring my decision to action on my goal tomorrow.”

Take a moment and feel into your words. If it doesn’t feel right, then perhaps you’ve selected a goal that is something other than your natural first step. Back up and find the action step you are ready to undertake. It doesn’t matter how small or insignificant it may seem at the time. You’re better off starting with a small step and achieving success, than starting with something you already know you’re not ready for. 

The wise Lao-Tzu once stated, “A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.” And Confucius pronounced, “It does not matter how slowly you go so long as you do not stop.” Use your words wisely to make sure you are able to complete your first step.

Using empowering words allows you to harness your energy. Solid statements reinforce that you believe in what you are saying and you will absolutely find a way to make your action step happen. You’ve made a commitment to yourself and you choose to honor your word. You will find a way to take action even if things get in the way. 

Once you find a plan of action that seems doable, forget trying to do it. Instead, declare whole-heartedly, “I am now taking action!”

About the Author: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Dr. Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

Are you a foodie?

Foodie Qualities. Below are 14 questions that can help confirm if you are a true lover of food:

1. Do you love to explore new recipes?
2. Do you have a passion for the taste of food?
3. Do you appreciate the wonders of fresh food?
4. Do you smell food, inhaling the aromas, and filling up with the joy of scent?
5. Do you shop for the perfect culinary tools?
6. Do you know the difference between Wusthof and Kershaw Shun knives?
7. Do you eagerly await the newest Sur La Table or Williams Sonoma monthly mailing catalog?
8. Is the Food Network your obsession?
9. Do you love finding new recipes to test?
10. Do you savor food, but stop when your taste buds or body tells you the experience is no longer satisfying?
11. Do you choose the very best food available to you?
12. Do you eat food that your body, senses, and intuition guides you toward?
13. Do you eat the types of food that make you more alive and invigorated?
14. Do you eat food that supports your health and vitality?

If these questions already have you dreaming about gourmet eating experiences, then you just might be a true lover of food!

Are You An Emotional Eater? Many emotional eaters don’t know they are eating for emotional reasons. They will say, “I don’t eat because I’m bored or sad. I just eat because I really love food.” However, if you look closely, an emotional eater doesn’t enjoy the entire process of eating at all.

Emotional eaters often have “forbidden” or “bad” foods. They feel guilty about eating certain food. This have lists of what they should eat and what they shouldn’t eat. And they often obsess about when to eat or when not to eat. Overall, there are many rules and restrictions around food.

Do you really love food as much as you imagine? One way to easily tell if you love food as much as you say you do, or if you’re eating to cope with life is to notice your style of eating. Below are 14 questions you can use to easily identify when eating is something other than just a love of food.

Do you inhale your food, eating in a hurry?

1. Do you wolf down your food because you’re starving?
2. Do you heap mounds of food on your plate?
3. Do you put another bite into your mouth before finishing the last one?
4. Do you shove food in quickly, often using your fingers and often standing up?
5. Do you often have an urgent, panicky need to eat something right away?
6. Are an unconscious eater (eating while doing something else and unaware of eating)?
7. Are you a chaotic eater (over-scheduled life, haphazard eating, or eating whatever food is available)?
8. Are you a free food eater (eat in the presence of free food such as buffets, candy jars, office food, candy bowls, etc.)?
9. Are you a waste not eater, or a member of the clean plate club?
10. Are you a careful eater, analyzing every morsel for calories, weight, and   health?
11. Do you skip breakfast and other meals, and then eat all night?
12. Are you a professional dieter?
13. Do you forbid sweets, but then eat them with a vengeance? 

If you recognized yourself in one or more of the eating styles listed above, you might be surprised to notice that enjoying your food isn’t the motivating factor for your eating. You don’t need to become a food connoisseur, but an easy way to add more joy to your life is to take action and make your individual eating experiences more enjoyable. The more you enjoy your food experiences (cooking, shopping, creating, eating, and digesting), the more you enjoy life. And you just might lose weight in the process!

Discover the secrets to losing weight, staying slim, and falling in love with your life all over again! Body Redesign: Goal Setting Secrets for a Thinner, Happier You will teach you how to make meaningful and thoughtful decisions that feel right—in your heart and in your bones!

When it comes to enjoying a healthy, happy life, it all starts with dreams, desires, and goals. They represent your choice to have something more than you currently have. Yet good intentions will get you just so far. You also need a solid foundation on which to grow your new life.

To get your goal started and to keep your positive momentum going strong, here are six easy steps you can take to increase your success:

1. Choose a goal that enlivens you!

Pick something that you know, deep within your heart and soul, will make you more than you were before – more solid within yourself, more self-assured, or more of the man or woman you want to be. The point of any goal is to bring a new expression of yourself into the world.

2.  Be Willing to Live Your Goal Each Day

Follow your heart and imagine yourself filled with the freedom to live your dream in a way that feels really, really good inside your spirit and body. Are you willing, no matter what, to give yourself the life you want to be living?

3.  Love Your Goal

Reaching any goal is often far more challenging than we anticipate at the beginning of the journey. Let your goal begin and continue as a decision to give yourself something new in life. That way, when you’re asking yourself to step into unknown territory, facing a difficult obstacle, or having to master a new skill, you won’t end up punishing yourself with your goal. Instead, you will realize – every step of the way – that your goal was always about allowing yourself to nurture and bring to life a hidden characteristic of yourself (i.e. determination, trust in self, self-respect, etc.).

4.  Apply Action to Decisions

First make a choice about what you want and then apply an action step to that choice. For example, if you decide to lose weight, instead of rewarding yourself for losing five pounds, acknowledge and respect yourself for taking action each day. Weight loss is variable and dependent on many factors. However, choosing an action step such as walking two miles every day for two weeks is finite and tangible. At the end of each day, you know whether you followed through with your word to yourself or not. Take time every day to recognize that you made a choice. Then apply an action to that choice and follow through.

5. Learn From Your Mistakes, Setbacks, and Challenges

Mistakes contain valuable information about what isn’t working. Take a step back and examine what just happened. With your newfound insight, take a breath, fill yourself with new inspiration, and begin again.

6.  Be Flexible and Have Fun!

Reward yourself for your efforts. Feel good in the process – not only once the goal is attained. The underlying purpose of your goal is to cultivate more of a specific characteristic. What you are looking for won’t show up on its own at the end of your journey. Rather, each day, each challenge, each failure, and each success is you giving yourself another opportunity to have more faith, trust, self-respect, or other characteristic no matter what circumstance you find yourself facing. Lighten up, learn to laugh through some of the tough times, and truly acknowledge your effort and success.

Discover the secrets to losing weight, staying slim, and falling in love with your life all over again! Body Redesign: Goal Setting Secrets for a Thinner, Happier You will teach you how to make meaningful and thoughtful decisions that feel right—in your heart and in your bones!

“Every New Year’s Day, I start a new diet. What suggestions do you have for helping me stick to the diet this year?”

Congratulations on your persistence to achieve a goal that is important to you. Resolutions are a noble effort to begin the New Year with your most important goals on the front burner.

However, as you have noticed in the past, the journey toward a healthier, more balanced lifestyle is not known for its easy terrain. Despite our best intentions, it is common to never make it past January with our declarations. With each challenge we get disappointed in ourselves, beat ourselves up for failing, and eventually quit our positive efforts. Our failure reinforces the belief that we can’t have what we most want.

This year, instead of a simple resolution, take some time to set yourself up for positive outcomes. Success doesn’t just happen; it requires forethought and planning. Here are five positive ways to set yourself up for weight loss success:  

1. Make a Commitment

True change is never effortless! Before moving forward on your decision, make sure you really want to commit to your goal. This may seem basic but many people never decide and commit fully to their dream. Make a commitment to your goal and choose to honor and stand behind it 100 percent. No matter how challenging, how fearful, or overwhelming it may seem, decide you are going for it! Why? For no other reason than because you want it. Let go of any thoughts of you “should” be doing this, or you “have” to be doing this. Your choice to create a new weight is a choice that you can make, honor, and support.

2. Rely on Inner Wisdom

Eating and weight loss success depend on far more than calorie counting and the perfect diet. Long-term weight achievement involves developing an intimate relationship with food and your body. Move beyond your mind and touch base with your physical self. Before eating, ask yourself, “Is this  really what I want?” Inhale the aroma of your food, see what you are about to put in your mouth, and taste the food as you chew. Are you enjoying the experience of this eating episode? Do you like this feeling? Change the process of losing weight from an intellectual pursuit of thinness, to an experience that builds self-respect and a joyful physical experience. Your feeling good – before, during, and after eating – is an important key to your overall success.

3. Give Up Guilt

Give up using guilt as a motivator. It just doesn’t work to achieve a positive outcome. Believing you cheated on your diet and completely ruined any chance of succeeding produces guilt and feelings of failure. What does work is your ability to acknowledge the action taken, accept the choice you made, and then recognize you are capable of making new choices right now. Don’t wait until Monday to begin again. Be assertive, immediately make a new choice that reinforces your overall direction, and take an action step right now.

4. Think “Management” Instead of “Control”

Control implies an adversarial relationship with food. It becomes a constant battle to control weight, eating, or your body. Management is more loving. When you manage something, you work with food or with your body to create a positive win-win situation. Unite with your desire and choose actions that create more of the feeling you want. Control often creates feelings of deprivation, however management creates feelings of success, accomplishment, empowerment, and self-worth.

5. Put Your Mind In Touch With Your Body

Regular physical movement – whether gardening, walking, lifting weights, or practicing playing ball – helps connect you with your body. Physical movement shouldn’t be punishment because you are overweight, but an opportunity to develop a new connection with your physical self. Movement provides new occasions to develop and deepen a sense of well-being, confidence and body awareness. Include regular movement in a way that feels positive and adds vitality.

If you have set weight loss as your goal once again, congratulate yourself for holding tight to your dream! Start fresh, focus on the positive aspects of your courage, and give yourself credit for your determination. In your journey of successful weight loss, consider utilizing the tips above to build enthusiasm, confidence, and steady momentum. Never give up on your dream!

Wishing you confidence, pleasure, success, and good health. Happy New Year!

Discover the secrets to losing weight, staying slim, and falling in love with your life all over again! Body Redesign: Goal Setting Secrets for a Thinner, Happier You will teach you how to make meaningful and thoughtful decisions that feel right—in your heart and in your bones!

Motivation is a mysterious process. It involves the ability to link a desire to begin a new adventure with the energy needed to take the first step. Then it involves the ability to keep the flames of determination kindled throughout the entire journey.

Maintaining motivation doesn’t mean that every moment of the journey from start to finish is exciting. It’s common to find yourself…

• Lacking motivation to continue forward with your goal
• Bored with the everyday responsibilities required to achieve success
• Tired and dulled by the unanticipated length of time it is taking to achieve your goal
• Sluggish, uninspired, and overwhelmed to complete the job

How do you regain that inner spark to continue moving forward even when the required tasks are difficult, tedious, or tiresome?

Below are four practical strategies to overcome feeling lethargic, bored stiff, or distracted and regain the necessary motivational juice needed to focus on achieving success.

1. Take Ten

Feeling tired and unmotivated? Give yourself a ten-minute energy break by moving your body. Light exercise fights fatigue and boosts energy. Often, when we’re feeling lethargic, exercise is the last thing we want to do. But if you’ve been inactive, sitting all day, or solely focused on your goal, a little activity will provide renewed spark. Movement will enhance your blood flow, bringing more oxygen to your body which will increase your energy. Exercise also enhances the endorphins that make you feel great and help you relieve stress. Next time you’re feeling sluggishly unmotivated, go for a brisk walk in the fresh air, get on your treadmill, or just do some jumping jacks. Often, a little bit of movement can leave you revived, refreshed, and ready to refocus on your most important goals.

2. The Reward System

What enhances motivation? Being able to focus on success and acknowledge success leads to more success. Make sure to acknowledge and reward all your positive behaviors and efforts soon after you notice them. Without recognition and reward, it is easy to become frustrated and even cynical about your ability to effectively reach your goal. Find rewards that ignite an inner sense of satisfaction, enthusiasm, competence, and empowerment. Then use that positive energy to keep going!

3. Surround yourself with Support

Motivation comes from within – but often books, tapes, CD’s, and accomplished people can help uncover factors that are holding you back. When you’re feeling bored and uninspired, the right message at the right time can help boost your motivation momentum. However, don’t spend all your time learning. As soon as you notice your motivational energy is flowing again, shift your attention back to your goal and take the right action for the amount of energy that is present.

4. Manage Stress

It’s a common myth that fear is a great motivator. While it is true worry, self-criticism, yelling at yourself, or pushing yourself to succeed can get you started on your journey, it is also true that fear is only useful in the short term. Over the long haul, those behaviors generate stress. Stress creates confusion, a feeling of a lack of control, a loss of focus, and feelings of overwhelm. Excess stress exhausts your mind and body, and it’s difficult to have high levels of motivation if you’re exhausted. The bottom line – stress works against motivation. To beat stress get enough rest, drink plenty of water all day long, take breathing breaks, and get some physical activity.

If your goals have turned dull and monotonous, used these four powerful strategies to regain your motivation. Once your motivation is fired up again, you’ll have renewed drive to complete your project!

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.

Life feels good when you take charge of deciding what you want, particularly when you take the steps to accomplish it. This does not mean pushing at goals or whipping yourself into action. On the contrary, it means deciding what you want, becoming excited about the possibility of it becoming reality, and using a combination of heart, imagination, and logic to create motivation for action.

The rewards of creating change are great. As you move through the process of transforming your world, you will uncover lightness and love you did not know you had. You will experience a level of freedom you did not know was possible.

However, there is an often unspoken truth…

Creating lasting and rewarding change involves a journey. “Instant” manifestation, “immediate” success, and “quick” change often occurs after years of self-introspection and much trial and error. For example, the enduring myth of the “overnight” success is as old as the hills. Although there are always a fortunate few that manage to be the exception to the rule, for most people the road to success is long and often arduous.

To find your happiness, your purpose, and to live a different life requires exploring unfamiliar territory. Quite often, newness is frightening and uncomfortable. You open yourself to new challenges. Painful beliefs will surface and make themselves apparent in your thoughts and emotions. You will find yourself facing the need to take risks and make unfamiliar decisions. The entire process of creating a new future is really an adventure in which you invite yourself to discover if you can become more than you currently believe yourself capable of becoming.

If you are struggling with your goals, frustrated by your current inability to overcome your challenges, or unable to create the type of success you often dream about, hang in there, okay?

Overnight success? Not exactly. More like a little everyday. Stay true to your dreams, work your butt off, don’t give up, and you can be an overnight success too!

Author Resource: Want to learn more about how to live consciously, love deeply, and laugh often? Come along with Annette Colby and learn the secrets to creating the life you’ve always wanted to live! Subscribe to her blog Divine Self! today.