Change your life by loving your life... Right now!

Do you love your life right now? Or are there parts of your life that you want to change? Creating change, learning how to change your life in empowering ways, is the common thread that ties all of our goals and desires together. Yours, mine, everyone’s. We all want things to get better… we all want our lives to be full and happy.

But we also all share another common thread, one that holds us back, one that keeps us from realizing our dreams and goals. That thread is called discontent. Now at first you might think that discontent would be a motivator, that being unhappy with the way things are would drive you to make the changes you want in your life.

But that is not true at all! In order to change your life, you must love your life the way it is right now – challenges and all. Being discontent, unhappy, dissatisfied, or mad at the world for handing you such a crummy life only keeps you stuck in that frame of mind. When you experience life as a victim, you give away your power to control your own life. The same thing happens when you blame life or your boss or anything else outside of yourself for your problems. You give away your power.

But that all changes when you love your life the way it is right now. The good, the bad, the ugly, all of it. How do you do this? By deciding to. You can make a conscious decision to love your life right now – in spite of your problems, in spite of all your challenges, and in spite of whatever negativity you see in your life right now!

You see, when you come from a place of love, you are free to focus on the important things, you are free to focus on solutions rather than being stuck on the problems in your life. Unlike being unhappy with your life, being loving toward yourself is empowering and lets you move forward.

This is because we all have the tendency to continue being whatever we are being right now. If you are being unhappy with your life right now, you will probably continue being unhappy with your life for the foreseeable future… unless you change your outlook and start showing up in your life with an attitude of love and gratitude.

Loving your life the way it is now, doesn’t mean ignoring your problems, it means looking at them from a new perspective. Anything that you look at with love will look dramatically different from something that you look at with discontent or unhappiness.

Try this in your own life and see if it doesn’t make a huge difference in the way you see things. Not only will you find it easier to reach your goals when you are loving life, you will have a much clearer vision of exactly what you want your life to be like!

Happy Fathers Day!

Happy Father’s Day, Dad!

That’s what I would say if my Dad was still here. I say it anyway, knowing that somehow, somewhere, his spirit hears me and knows how grateful I am for all he gave me and everything he taught me.

Dads are a special kind of man. I didn’t really understand this until my daughter was born, but it’s true. Something happens inside a man when he becomes a father. His perspective, in fact his whole world changes.

I learned a lot from my Dad. Some of those lessons were intentional, and some were absorbed simply by watching his life.

The biggest and most important thing that my Dad taught me, was to respect women. Not just some women, like my mother and sister, but all women. Dad was a gentleman at heart – and I learned from him that you always hold the door open, that you always let them go first, and that you never, ever, ever hit girls.

It’s obvious that not all fathers taught their sons these things. I wish they did.

I’m grateful that mine did.

Like all good lessons, this one matured within me over time, and when I met Donna almost 12 years ago I did something I had never done before. I opened her car door for her.  I know, it sounds like a little thing, but I had never done it. Sure, I always opened and held the door for her and for others when going into buildings and the such, but I had never even thought about opening her car door for her.

So out of the blue, in the very beginning of our relationship, I decided to open her car door for her.

Yes, it’s a small thing, but its a courtesy, an act of kindness. And I’ve done it every day for the last 12 years. It has become a habit, something that I do without even thinking about it.

It is something that makes me feel good and I think it helps define me as a man.

So thanks Dad, happy Father’s Day!

How to feel happy now! 3 instant ways to improve your mood!

Do you want to feel happy? Right now? Then read on and I’ll share 3 instant ways to feel happy, quickly and easily.

There is no crime in needing a little attitude boost every now and then, especially when you’re having one of those days. We’ve all had one of those days, right? You may wonder why some people seem to have fewer of them?

Well, those people know a secret. A secret based in the law of attraction. They know that every situation in life can be looked at in many, many different ways.  Quite often it is your perspective of a situation that is really the cause of your unhappiness, not the situation itself.

If you want to feel happy now, you simply need to alter how you are looking at the challenges of your life. To attract happiness you have to focus on happiness.

Here are three simple ways to feel happy right now. Try these amazingly powerful little techniques anytime that you need a pick-me-up and you’ll soon find yourself grinning and back on track!

Happiness Exercise #1

Stop and smell the flowers. No, really!  If the hectic pace of the world around you is getting to be too much, take a moment to appreciate some of nature’s beauty.  You probably don’t have to look too far to find something wondrous to appreciate in your environment.   Smell the flowers, look at the clouds, search for the rainbow after a storm.  Nature has a way of allowing the beauty to shine through!

Happiness Exercise #2

I’m grateful for…? Yes, you’ve heard it before, but taking a few minutes to jot down a few things that you are grateful for can turn a bad mood upside down in a heartbeat!  The more you are thankful for, the more the universe will give you to BE thankful for.  Exercise your gratitude muscles and you’ll soon become a grateful achiever!

Happiness Exercise #3

Do something nice for someone. We all like it when someone goes out of their way to do something for us, so why not share the love and do something unexpected or unusual for someone else.  They will feel great, and so will you!

It is easy to let things get you down. But it is just as easy to bounce right back up again.  These exercises will help you see that life is seldom the way it seems and that if you shift your perspective you unlock a whole new world around you.

One of the most extraordinary gifts that you have is your ability to choose the way you look at your life.  If you choose to view your life with peace and happiness,  you will attract peace and happiness into your life.

Peace,

Bob Crawford
Your Success Coach,
and creator of Growing Your SELF!

p.s. True happiness comes from living a life of purpose and pursuing your passions. Don’t let yourself get down because of some silly thing that happens during the course of your day!

God never gives us more than we can handle!

I’m sure you’ve heard this expression before. God never gives us more than we can handle. It’s a comforting thought, and one that popped into my mind last night sitting in the emergency room with my daughter after one of her seizures.

I was feeling pretty overwhelmed by the challenges that God keeps throwing my way. My Mom was recently diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, and she is struggling through chemotherapy in the hopes of adding a few extra months to her life. My daughter, 19, developed Epilepsy in her senior year of high school, and we’re trying to get a handle on that, working with her neurologist to get her seizures under control.

This on top of some health problems that my wife and I are going through… not to mention some financial problems, car problems, challenges with our neighbors…

Whew!

I know, you have your own list of problems and yours may be bigger and worse than mine!

But I wanted to share with you my experiences, because what I’ve learned may help you.

I speak and write about dealing with these types of challenges all the time, and going through them has opened my eyes to what really goes on inside of us as we grow and experience life’s many challenges. You see, I know on an intellectual level that my perception colors my reality, but being in the middle of things it is easy to get caught up in your emotions and forget that you have any control at all. It takes a conscious effort, a decision, to step back and see things as they really are.

It is easy to feel like things are out of control, to feel like you are a victim, I have been there. In fact, I don’t mind admitting that I still find myself in that place from time to time. I end up there each time I forget that I can choose a better reaction to the situation around me.

God never gives us more than we can handle.

I believe that.

I believe it because every situation always has a choice attached to it. That choice is how we are going to react. We can allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by life’s problems, or we can choose to face them head on and seek the path that empowers us.

Yes, my Mom’s coming death will be a hard thing for me and for our entire family, and I’ve run the gamut of emotional responses myself. But the one thing that I keep coming back to is this thought that God doesn’t give us more than we can handle.

The late Jim Rohn said something similar. He said, “Don’t wish for less problems, wish for more skills.”

Life is full of things that we call problems. It is how we face them and how we live our lives in spite of them that defines us and empowers us.

You can handle whatever situation you may find yourself in right now. There is always a way out. There is always a way to lessen the pain.

It starts with your belief.

Peace,

Bob Crawford
Your Success Coach,
and creator of Growing Your SELF!

p.s. What in your life are you having trouble handling? Is there something that seems too big or too scary to deal with? How can I help? Go here: http://www.bobcrawfordonline.com/coaching right now and take action. It’s never too late to start living your best life!

Speaking of gratitude...

It’s that time of year again. It’s… gratitude time!

Thanksgiving is past, which means the official start of the ‘holiday season’ is almost here. (Never mind that the stores were putting out Christmas merchandise before Halloween!)

This is a time of year when you are expected to think about the idea of gratitude. Sure, you might be a grateful person all year round, but now is when you are expected to express and live that gratitude. After all, much of the world around you is focused on giving thanks – you are blasted by reminders of it on all of the television shows and magazines. You are reminded every time you walk into the store…

This is the time. Time to give thanks. Time to celebrate with your loved ones and give thanks for the blessings and joys of the year.

And for many people it IS a wonderful time of year. A time to gather with friends and family. A time to share your love and your joys with those you care about…

But not for everyone.

For some, it is hard to find anything to feel grateful for.

I’ve been there. You probably have been too.

Crisis, turmoil, struggle… it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel when you are in the middle of a disaster. Sometimes you get so caught up in your situation that you forget to even look for the light! It can seem impossible to find a single thing to be grateful for.

But it’s there, just waiting for you.

So, how do you find gratitude? Especially when you are in those hopeless feeling situations?

You know the answer.

It comes from within your SELF.

It comes by making a decision within yourself to be grateful for your life.

Sometimes that all you have to start with. But that is all you need!

You can turn things around with that single decision. From there you can move forward and decide to be grateful for other things in your life.

By deciding to be grateful for the opportunities that you’ve had in the past… (whether you took advantage of those opportunities or not.)

… and more importantly, to be grateful for the opportunities that you have right now!

Right now you have the opportunity to move forward – you might resist that opportunity, but it is there, just waiting for you to step up and take advantage of it.

Finding gratitude isn’t hard.

You just have to decide to look!

Peace,

Bob Crawford
Success Coach, Speaker,
Creator of Growing Your SELF!

p.s. Thank you to the many who responded to my mini-survey about the Growing Your SELF! course. There were some excellent comments and I’ll try to answer some of the questions in an email going out to the list in the next couple of days. If you haven’t done so yet you can help me out by answering two quick questions by clicking here: www.bobcrawfordonline.com/question.html

p.p.s. See what the buzz is about by going to www.GrowingYourSelfCourse.com and getting in on the fun. There are some cool free gifts and other bonuses waiting for you.

Bob and Donna

10 years ago last Saturday I went on a date that changed my life.

It was Sunday, July 18, 1999.

Donna and I had met online and after only a few emails we discovered that we had known each other in the past.

Actually, there is a little more to the story than that… Donna, it turned out, was a bridesmaid in my first wedding! She had grown up living next door to my first wife and they were best friends. Even though she was a bridesmaid in our wedding, I didn’t know Donna that well, and after the wedding, life carried us separate ways.

It wasn’t until many years later that we met again online. In the meantime, I had been married again… and divorced again. I was raising my eight year old daughter and pretty much enjoying life, when Donna came into my life… and suddenly what was good before, was now GREAT!

Now, I’ll tell you, I certainly wasn’t looking for love… lust maybe, but I’m pretty sure I wasn’t looking for love. But that’s exactly what I found. Or maybe it found me.

LOVE

Once we discovered that we knew each other, we made a date to meet. After a couple of drinks, a lot of catching up, and a late night snack at Denny’s, we sat in her car talking for hours… until the parking lot security guard decided to park and watch us. Not that we were doing anything (too) inappropriate! I assure you that Donna was a lady. Probably more of a lady than I would have liked right then, but…

I don’t know if it was one more date or two that sealed the deal, but we’ve been together ever since. We’ve had our ups and downs, to be sure, but through it all our love for each other has grown. She is an amazing woman who is passionate about helping others, about animals, and about the people she loves.

She supports me in everything I do, and I am so grateful and so appreciative of her love. I wouldn’t be half the man that I am today without her love and support. We ‘fit’ together in all the important areas and we work out the rest as it comes.

So, I wanted to use my blog today to shout to the world that I love this woman with all my heart. I love the way we still hold hands. I love the way we laugh together and the way we love together. . I love knowing that she is there for me, and I love being there for her.

Ten years ago last Saturday I went on a date that changed my life, and nothing has been the same since. The past ten years together have been wonderful, they’ve been exciting, but the best part is knowing that the next ten are going to be absolutely incredible!

Together, we are living and working on our dreams. Her dreams, my dreams, our dreams.

Thanks for letting me share this with you today.

Peace,

p.s.: I’d love to hear from you. Why not leave a comment below about how love has impacted your life?

2009 Grad!

Cindy,

It really doesn’t seem all that long ago that I held you in my arms and looked down with wonder at your happy, smiling face. Through the years I’ve watched with pride as you’ve grown from a child into a woman. It’s a journey that I’m honored to have been a part of, a journey that showed me as much about myself as it did about you.

And what a journey! You and I have had some wonderful times together. There has been laughter and tears, joy and sadness, hope and pain, but through it all you have kept moving forward with a smile on your face.

Well, today marks the close of another part of that journey, as you graduate from high school and get ready to start college in the fall, and like all endings it leaves me with mixed emotions. Just as you are both happy and sad that high school is ending, I find myself feeling both happy and sad that my little girl is growing up.

It doesn’t seem that long ago that I walked you into the first day of kindergarten, holding your hand, not wanting to let you go. Then rushing home to watch the clock, anxious to get back to school and pick you up, worrying needlessly about you.

There have been many different phases that we’ve gone through together, and I was sitting here this morning thinking about some of them.

• There was the ‘send Cindy in through the window because Dad locked us out of the apartment again’ phase… (which popped up again several years later when I sent you in through the sunroof because I locked the keys in our car!)
• There was the ‘eagle eye’ phase…
• There was the ‘bring Cindy to work because I couldn’t find a babysitter’ phase…
• There was the ‘make Cindy bring a walkie-talkie with her when she rides her bike down the street because I’m nervous when she’s out of my sight’ phase…
• There have been girlfriends, boyfriends, new friends, old friends, and the ‘no longer friends’… Things are ‘hot’ one minute and ‘not’ the next… Sometimes it is hard to keep up!

Oh, there have been some challenges too, and I know that you will face many more challenges as you move forward and begin creating a life of your own, but I also know that if you approach those challenges with the same love and courage that you have now, that you will find your way in life and you will be happy.

Cindy, I’m so proud of all that you have accomplished, all that you have created, and all that you have done with your life so far… I can’t wait to see what the future will hold for you!

Love,

Dad

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Learn how to write powerful personal letters – Click Here!

Us in Washington D.C.

Gratitude.

No fancy subtitles, no play on words, no keyword-stuffed headline for the search engines to latch onto…

Just a feeling of gratefulness, nothing more. s9wft5nyb3

A moment ago I sat down at my computer to do some work, and as I was settling into my chair I was overcome by a sensation of gratefulness, a gratefulness that I could literally feel flowing through my body like a soft, gentle ocean wave.  I closed my eyes and allowed myself to sink into the emotion that I was feeling. As I surrendered to this blissful experience, an image of my wife asleep in the other room appeared in my mind’s eye.

YES! I thought, I am so grateful for the love and support of my wife. I cherish her, and the truth is that her love is a huge part of the abundance that I am grateful for each and every day. She encourages me, she lifts me up, and she is pretty good at giving me a kick in the rear when I need it.

This got me to thinking about some of the other things that I’m grateful for, and I have to tell you, that between my wife and my daughter I have been blessed with more love than I sometimes feel I deserve.

But, and this is what I wanted to share with you, as I was sitting there letting my thoughts go from one thing to the next, I realized that I was grateful for feeling grateful. That’s right, I was grateful for feeling grateful.

Let me explain. When I allow myself to truly appreciate the good things in my life it is easy to move into that abundance mindset that energizes me and keeps me focused on creating the life that I desire. It is easier to avoid the distractions and temptations that could keep me from doing the important things that I have already decided are important. When I am feeling appreciative and grateful I feel abundant. I feel alive. I feel connected to my purpose and to my intentions.

As I was experiencing this wonderful feeling I knew that I had to share this important idea with you here. I know that you have probably read about gratitude before, but do you truly understand the importance it plays in your ability to create changes in your life? (By the way, click here and you can read some posts about gratitude on my old blog.)

Being grateful allows you to feel the abundance that you have in your life right now.

You might be like me and sometimes have a hard time constantly living in a mindset of abundance, especially if you are in the middle of trying to change or improve your life. The problem, and it is a common problem, is that you are approaching the process of change from a mindset of lack, rather than one of abundance. If you focus on the lack in your life, that will be all you see. If, instead, you choose to focus on those things that you are grateful for you will find yourself seeing all kinds of abundance in your life right now. Not only that, you will also begin seeing more opportunities for abundance to come into your life.

Why? Because that is what you focused on. Whether you ‘believe’ in the principles behind the law of attraction or not, I think you can see that unless you are focused on something that it won’t come into your life, right? I mean, you aren’t going to lose thirty pounds by accident, you aren’t going to get a big fat raise by accident, no one is going to leave a brand new sports car in your driveway by accident.

Focus on abundance and you will subconsciously be looking for more ways to bring the abundance you desire into your life. Focus on lack and you will subconsciously be looking for more ways to acknowledge the areas of your life that you feel are lacking in something. Which is a better way to spend your time and energy?

Expressing your gratitude is an excellent way to get in touch with your sense of abundance, and spending a moment or two each day writing down those things you are grateful for right now is a simple way to do just that. It’s an exercise I use in most of my workshops and is great for helping you focus on what is really important to you.

So today I thought I would use my blog to jot down a few things that I’m grateful and thankful for right now.

• My wife, Donna. I already mentioned how much her love and support mean to me.
• My daughter.  She brings a lot of joy into my life
• Princess, our cocker spaniel. I don’t have to look far to see an example of total and unconditional love.
• Finally, I am grateful for all of my new friends that I met this past weekend at jvAlert in Washington D.C.  Donna and I drove down for the weekend event and had a wonderful time and met some incredibly warm and giving people. It was our first time attending an internet marketing seminar and we had a lot of fun.

You see? Making a gratitude list is easy. In fact, you can do it right now! Just leave a comment below and share a couple of things that you are grateful for right now. Go ahead. It’s painless and it will help you get in touch with your true sense of abundance!

Peace,

p.s. Don’t forget to make gratitude a daily activity. Posting a comment here is great, but your real power comes from writing down those things you are grateful for on a regular basis.

p.p.s I’ll be talking about gratitude on this week’s radio show. You can listen to Growing Your SELF live Wednesday evening at 8pm eastern. Won’t you join me?