More on money...

How much closer would you feel to the life of your dreams if you had:

1. enough savings to cover your living expenses for a year in case you were unable to work.

2. you had no debt at all of any kind.

3 if you owned your home and your car free and clear.

4. a will plus all the other "end of life" documents so that if you become critically ill or when you die, your family and friends will find everything in order and will know what to do.

5. a balanced checkbook every month.

6. all your bills paid on time.

7. adequate insurance on your house, car and your life (so that anyone who depends on you financially would have replacement income). Disability insurance if you work in an occupation where you would be unable to continue to work if you were disabled.

8. a retirement plan you understood and that you knew was fully funded so that you could do as you pleased when you retired.

9. an investment plan that you understood and that met your needs and wants.

10. the ability to make all the above happen without winning the lottery or some other "pie in the sky" way.

What are you saying to yourself right now? Maybe you're like a lot of other people and are saying that none of those 10 things are possible in your current situation. Well, what's really true is that you and a lot of other people don't even like to think about those things, let alone try to make them happen. My suggestion is to think about those things in terms of how much less stress you would have on a daily basis if you had accomplished all those things AND how many opportunities for creating the life of your dreams you would have as well. Maybe then you would be motivated to get started on making them happen. Taking small steps every day toward these goals will eventually get you there. There are an amazing number of books out in the world that will give you the information to get there. Suze Orman has written a lot of them and there are plenty of others. My advice? Get going!!!

Money

I'm always amazed when I talk with the people I'm coaching about their goals, how many of them are struggling with money issues. The sad thing is that all of them are smart, capable, and seemingly well-balanced. However, they don't know the basics of money and their finances are in disarray. I've come to believe - based on my own experience and what other people tell me - that money holds so many emotional aspects for us that we avoid dealing with it. The basics of personal finance are actually pretty simple, but our emotional baggage keeps us from doing what we need to do.

Doing the things we need to do with our finances is vital to having the life of our dreams. One would think that that fact is obvious since if we're living in poverty we don't have the resources to develop the life of our dreams. But many of us have our heads in the sand and then wonder why we're not moving forward.

Truth

The truth is we don't tell ourselves the truth on a consistent basis. When we don't, our lives go off in a direction we really don't like. One of the most amazing things we can do is stop for a few minutes every day, get quiet and tell ourselves the truth.

How do I really feel? What's really going on in my life? What do I really want? Who am I blaming for not having what I really want? What could I do differently that would get me where I want to go?

The importance of this daily practice comes into clear focus when I remind myself that my time on the earth is short. The odds are that I won't die today or even tomorrow. But I could. And the day will come when I do. Telling myself the truth is vital for not wasting what time I have left.

The TRUTH

"There is no such thing as an evil or stupid feeling, though we sometimes do evil and stupid things in response to our feelings. We're in far more danger of doing this when we deny or minimize our darker impulses than wen we accept them honestly and fully." Martha Beck. The Joy Diet. Little kids usually know the truth. So do cameras. The rest of us tend to lie to ourselves. If we're going to have the life of our dreams, we will need to sit quietly every day, and ask ourselves what the truth is - about ourselves, about our lives and about how we really feel. By doing this we will find our real selves. You know - the ones that know that love is the most important thing there is.

New Research on Procrastination!

"Short-term gain; long-term pain" is how Psychology Today magazine terms procrastination. Piers Steel at the University of Calgary reviewed 553 studies on procrastination. He concluded that procrastination stems from four variables: 1) The person's expectation of succeeding at the task 2) The value of the task 3) The person's need for immediate gratification 4) The person's impulsiveness.

Steele says the most powerful one of these variables is the person's impulsiveness. He thinks that we are dealing with modern life with hunter/gatherer brains. Our forebears needed food right now. Delayed gratification was not part of their lives. So, our brains are hard-wired toward immediate gratification. A third piece of chocolate cake trumps looking good in our swim suits next summer. Add to that all the modern distractions - email, facebook and the like - and you have a perfect environment for procrastination.

Now that we know more about what causes it, what are we going to do about it? For starters, we will need to learn to manage our emotions so that the anxiety we feel when confronting a task that is no fun and is hard, etc. doesn't derail our intention to do it because it will benefit us in the future. Using visual imagery of what we will gain at that future time from doing this task now will help bring the future into the present. Then, we will need to learn to ride out the difficult feelings we have about the task and not give in to feeling more like it tomorrow. Start anyway. Once we've started, we'll gain momentum. After that, be sure to isolate yourself from distractions plus get the information you need to do the task. Finally, research shows that willpower is like a muscle - the more you use it, the more powerful it becomes. Conversely, the more you give in to procrastination, the weaker your ability to regulate your behavior becomes. Mindful meditation helps too - learning to focus also strengthens your ability to regulate your behavior.

Overcoming procrastination - guess what?- brings you more and more quickly to the life of your dreams.

Having the life of your dreams seems to imply that you need to have luck, doesn't it? That would be a terrific excuse for not having the life of your dreams, wouldn't it? "Oh poor me, I've just had such a horribly hard life!!!" If you're sitting here reading this, you are probably not living in a refugee camp fighting against starvation. You've got a really big head start toward having the life of your dreams compared to many people in the rest of the world. Luck is made by exercising gratitude - or at least that's what I believe and it's what works for me. It involves focusing on what I have, rather than what I don't have. And then focusing on how I can build on what I have to make more good things happen. Life is just life. In case you think you're the only one who has suffered tragedy, set backs, and tough times - look around. You are not alone and it certainly isn't necessary to suffer forever. I believe we were created to enjoy life, so let's get busy with joy!

THE Rules

It's a sad and frightening thing: We all have "rules." Quite a few of us believe that our rules are the only right ones and when other people don't follow them, we become self-righteously angry and outraged. Talk about barriers to having the life of our dreams!!! This is one is way bigger than the Great Wall of China. Sometimes I think that each person's rules are as individual as fingerprints. Then I think that surely there must be some that we all have in common. Maybe so, but they are very hard to find.

In the life of my dreams, I have joyful relationships with the people in my life. This is not going to happen if I try to impose my "rules" on them or if I assume I know what their rules are. It would make sense to ask people what their rules are, but often they think you are being obnoxious if you ask, because they assume their rules are the only right ones. It makes it tough to get along with them for sure. And, of course, I'm going to be tough to get along with if I think my rules are the only right ones.

We all seem to have rules about things from the little things of life to the huge things of life, but we rarely think about where our rules come from and whether we really believe in them. There are rules about how to hang the toilet paper, how to fold towels, how to manage a checking account, how money should be spent, how to divide money in a marriage, how to discipline children, how friends are supposed to treat each other, how much time should elapse before calling someone back, what should be posted on Twitter, how often we should have sex, who should do household chores, when kids should be allowed to date, if it's permissible to have 11 items in the line for 10 or less items at the grocery store. Then there are the nationwide and worldwide rules about how nations should treat each other, whether it's okay to lie about a product you're trying to sell, if it's okay to slant the truth about something to get votes, who you should and shouldn't have sex with and under what circumstances, and on and on.

Most of us seem to get pretty worked up about this stuff. Sometimes we get as worked up about how to hang the toilet paper as we do about how nations should treat each other. Divorces, getting fired from jobs, ending of friendships, and nasty wars could be traced back to conflicts in rules. In the life of my dreams finding some peace with all this is vital. So... What to do?

I believe the best place to start is to examine our own rules and ask ourselves where they came from and why we have them. We may want to modify them to suit our real values and cause them to conform with love and peace. Then we may want to tactfully and subtly find out what the people in our lives believe the rules are. As I said before, it would be wise to be extremely cautious since outright asking them may hit a nerve if they believe their's are the only right ones.

When I was going to college I had a business where I provided household chores for people who were unable or did not have time to do them themselves. Boy, did I ever find out about rules. Most people did not want to tell me specifically what they wanted done. They said things like, "Just do what you would do for yourself." Following those directions got me in a lot of trouble, because the way I did things was nothing like how they thought they should be done. But they thought everybody did things their way they did because - well, they thought their rules were the only right ones.

One guy became a customer when he bought a house from some people I had worked for for many years. He became angry with me because I did not use furniture polish on all the wood cabinets in the home. He said everybody knew that you should use furniture polish on wood cabinets. Well, the previous owners absolutely forbade me to use furniture polish on them because they were afraid it would get on the floor and make it slippery. Hmmm. And there was no way the guy ever believed that I was doing anything except trying to get out of doing what I should know to do without being told. So, I fired myself. People like that are just too hard to work for. Sometimes that's the best solution. As I gained more experience, I sometimes decided not to try to work for people who couldn't/wouldn't tell me what they wanted me to do.

Personal relationships are even more tricky. I was married for over 20 years to my soul mate. I can't even think of a way to explain how much we loved each other, admired each other and how much fun we had. I married him knowing he had traditional rules about the roles of men and women in marriage. Which I don't. We came to an uneasy truce before we were married with his agreement to do some (not very many, in my opinion) household chores. But he did my laundry as well as his own for the whole 20 plus years we were together. I think that in his heart he really thought he shouldn't have to be doing laundry - it was really my job - but he did it to humor me because he loved me. The fact that housework and cooking were never shared - well, I humored him in that because I loved him. We never did agree about how to handle money and the only way we survived that was to keep our money separate. But at least we did know what each other's rules were and learned to live with and compromise our differences. I don't think there are any other ways to deal with each other's rules. Changing the other person's mind is just not likely. I often wonder if this method would help in politics and in conflict among nations.