The Power of Enthusiasm

Have you ever noticed how contagious enthusiasm is? When someone is doing something that reveals excitement and joy, other people want to participate with them.

Enthusiasm is an energy that attracts others by sheer magnetism and draws them closer. Enthusiasm is a vibrant display of life affirming activity.

So how can you get more enthusiasm in your life? It would be worth it, wouldn't it, to feel that level of support or attraction working for you?

How many times have you wanted to try something new but hesitated because you didn't want to go by yourself?

But sometimes, that beginning of the new journey is all about you deciding to get up and go, and in so doing, finding others who enjoy the same things as you do.

Part of the adventure is simply being willing to get started and trust that you will meet others who share your enthusiasm.

How many of the things in life that give you pleasure and satisfaction are things that you simply had to learn by doing? Yes, most of them. Of course, at times we need teachers to show us the way to do things and give us knowledge about subjects we want to learn more about. But in the end, it is still all about getting up and putting one foot in front of the other.

It has been said that to be a good swing dancer only requires enthusiasm and a ready partner. How many things can you do that only require joyful enthusiasm and a ready partner?

Now, I know that not everyone wants to be a swing dancer, but the same principles apply to other things. When I used to lead drumming circles, once someone got a rhythm started other people were eager to join in until everyone was playing or dancing. When I was teaching creative writing, once one person told a good story, others were eager to share a favorite story too. How many times have you been chatting with a group of people and once one person tells a joke that makes everyone laugh, other people suddenly have one to tell too? How many times have you bought something because the salesperson was enthusiastic? How many times has someone else showed you something they made and your response is that you would like to make something like that too? When we see street performers, isn't it their enthusiasm that draws us to them?

If we remove all the other considerations from the picture and just get going, how much more joy would there be in our life? How many times have you wanted to try something new but hesitated because you didn't want to go by yourself?

But sometimes, that beginning of the new journey is all about you deciding to get up and go, and in so doing, finding others who enjoy the same things as you do.

Part of the adventure is simply being willing to get started and trust that you will meet others who share your enthusiasm.

How many of the things in life that give you pleasure and satisfaction are things that you simply had to learn by doing? Yes, most of them. Of course, at times we need teachers to show us the way to do things and give us knowledge about subjects we want to learn more about. But in the end, it is still all about getting up and putting one foot in front of the other.

If we remove all the other considerations from the picture and just get going, how much more joy would there be in our life?

Optimism is at the root of getting more of what we want

In order to attract the kinds of change you want into your life, a
person must be an optimist. The common thread in positive thinking, The
Law of Attraction, manifesting sympathetic magic or whatever other
terms you are comfortable using, optimism is an essential ingredient in
positive thinking. It makes sense, doesn't it? And that is all the more
reason why it is important to shift our way of thinking in order to
create more of what we want in our life.

By restating our goals
in positive ways and keeping them in the present tense, we are creating a
structure to our efforts that is strong from every angle, and thus,
engineered to work.

Once a person's hopes and dreams are
awakened, that person must be able to visualize their life becoming
populated by positive developments. A crucial ingredient must be added
to the optimism, and that is will, or the actions a person takes to make
their dreams real. The third crucial ingredient is the desire a person
has to bring about change.

A person who is cynical or negative in
their outlook can not be a successful person, because in order to
desire a change in their life, they must believe that such things are
not only possible, but that they have the power to influence or create
such changes.

Someone might say that a person who is constantly
cynical or pessimistic in their outlook is also drawing more of those
influences, energies and results into their life, and this is true.

However,
my focus is on creating a better life. Those who are interested in a
worse, more negative or more depressing life will not get any help from
me. These ideas are being presented for the benefit of those people who
want to move forward in their life and may have had doubts about their
own abilities to make things happen.

Have you ever noticed that
when you focus on looking for opportunities, you find opportunities?
Have you noticed that when you are happy you attract other happy people?
Have you noticed that when you focus on doing something well that you
get better at it?

Practice, it is all about practice. The person
who wants to become a good musician practices every day. The person who
wants to be an artist is always making art. The person who writes every
day gets better at writing. The person who wants to be a successful
engineer studies the ways of engineering and keeps practicing. The
person wants to be a better gardener keeps practicing it. The person who
wants to be the better realtor, salesperson or anything else, keeps
practicing until they get better. The person who plays a sport every day
gets better at that sport. The same is true for all our endeavors.

Making
real change in our life is about focusing on a goal and going for it,
with full consciousness and confidence that we can do it. In the process
of driving toward our goals, we make discoveries and find out about
things we did not know before. We may not know exactly how we will
achieve our success, but if we proceed in that direction with our eyes
and ears open for opportunities, then we are always moving toward making
our dreams real.

We have to be optimistic enough to believe that
our life will get better, then we have to really desire it, and finally
take action on it.

Optimism is an important ingredient because
it always involves positive thinking and creativity. A person can do
make change much more effectively when they are optimistic. Does it
bring a smile to your face when you think of what you really want? See?

 

Does life have a meaning? Or a purpose?

 

 

Often, I hear people asking about finding their purpose in life. It's almost as if they are looking for a ledger or a box where these things are kept and as soon as they can find it and open it up, they will find theirs there, right next to their name. But there is no purpose that someone else assigns us. We choose our own purposes. I have used the plural because we can have more than one, same as we have more than one career or more than one relationship, or more than one cause we believe in. 

It is almost the same question when people are asking about what the meaning to life is. There is no meaning. Life just is.

We have the delicious opportunity to make up that answer and live with it, and if we change our minds, we can do it again. When we have choices, we often need clarity to help us see our best path. This is something I have helped people to do many times.

What do we do with our lives? The two biggest choices we ever get to make are the questions about who we are going to love and what we are going to do to make a living. Those are the two biggest questions on everyone's mind and the two most popular areas of concern among people who get readings.

There are other spiritual concerns and people who request personal clearings, house blessings or reiki healings are often seeking rebalancing and peace from upsets that have caused them grief all the way to the spirit level, even though those may have originated from problems with relationships and work.

We do not find purposes or meanings. We create them.

Think about this for a moment. People often say that they have found a sign or an omen that helped them make a choice or answer a question. How exactly does that happen? A person may have as their totem a red fox, and as they are driving out one evening, a red fox crosses the road in front of them. What does that mean? Or perhaps a person is simply out for a walk and suddenly a robin is flying near them, singing. What does that mean?

Ultimately, if two different people are seeing these same things and have different problems or questions on their minds, then they get two different answers to what does it mean to see a fox cross my path or have a robin fly around me and sing.

Look at art in a museum. Some of it you love and some of it you don't care for at all. However, as we walk through the museum, certain pictures, carvings, sculptures, photos or artifacts grab our attention and we stand there looking at them for a while, with all kinds of thoughts running through our heads. These are the ones that mean something to us. We assign meanings to things. Sometimes we do not know what was on the artist's mind when they created those things, we only know if we like them or not. Do they speak to us?

Think about some of the noble causes that some people work hard to achieve. They want to help the injured veterans who have returned from war. They want to clean up the environment. They want to help house homeless people or find cures for diseases. They want to feed starving people or rescue stray animals. These are things that people choose to focus on.

There is no meaning to life. The choices we make form the direction our life takes and the path we follow. There is a cause and effect relationship between choices we make and what happens next.

I wonder if some people think that there is a little gnome sitting somewhere with a ledger who will look up their account for them and tell them what they are supposed to be doing.

What we do is the result of our free will. Let's agree that a person is born with a talent for musical ability or is keenly interested in art or science or baseball.

What a person does with those talent potentials and preferences is to refine them into skills. If you ended up doing art, it is because you like it and you spent more time learning how to do it well. Same for everyone else. Whatever it is that they enjoy doing they took the time to learn about it and apply it.

You find a common thread when you read the biographies of successful people. The person who became a great athlete practiced a lot. The person who became a great musician practiced a lot. The person who invented new computers spent enormous amounts of time working at inventing new computers. The person who becomes a successful realtor, home builder, hairdresser, massage therapist, auto mechanic, comedian or chef spends a lot of time developing their skills and building their business.

That then, is a product of using our free will to make a decision and the persistence to follow through with the necessary actions.

Even in the more playful part of our lives, where we choose to become a dancer, a drummer, a singer, a skiier, a skater, a potter, a knitter, a beader, a writer, or anything else, we discover that we become good at it with lessons and practice, and those who invest more time in practice get better and better.

My reference to a gnome with a ledger was intended to use a little humor to make my point. To me, the notion that there is a meaning to anyone's life implies that someone is assigning meanings to each individual, such as "You will be a plumber, you will be a doctor, you will be a pottery maker, you will be a musician, you will be a whatever."

Clearly, that is not true. How many people, for instance, were encouraged to be in a particular business or profession, but they choose to do something different? How many people were perfectly content doing their job until their company shut down or got taken over, reorganized and they got laid off and now they have to do something else?

Aside from work, is our meaning determined by whether we have children? Some people choose to have several, some choose to have one. Some people choose not to have any. What does that mean? It doesn't mean anything. It is simply their choice.

And of course, our choice of people we have relationships with. We seek to form relationships that we feel fit us well, that the people we are connecting with are those with whom we feel a special bond. But who decides which one we have a special bond with? We do. And for many of us, there is more than one instance like this in life, and more than one relationship. Some last for less than a year, and some last for many years. Looking for that person that we feel really special with is a factor that we decide. We decide what sorts of qualities and characteristics are important in the other person. Once again, we are making up the meaning, the purpose.

Is meaning related to a choice of religion? Obviously many people choose to change religions or not to belong to any. Is meaning related to our choice of hobbies or the charities we support? People change these during the course of a lifetime too. All of these are free will choices too.

In each case, free will choice determines the outcome. So, no, there is no purpose or meaning to life. We are born and then we decide what to do with that life. Life just is, it does not mean anything. We assign meanings to things.

I don't know if this will come as a shock to anyone who gives it a little thought, but I notice that some people like to start discussions in forums about such questions.

Viewing meaning and purpose as a matter of choice really makes it much more powerful. We can state our preference to the world and then get busy with it and suddenly we are in charge of our life and going full speed ahead. Yes, I know, some people will choose to go slow speed ahead, and that is simply their choice too. 

If you are sorting out your choices and can use a little help, just ask me. I do these kinds of sessions for people all the time. It is amazing how light and energized you feel when you have a clear sense of direction, isn't it?