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.

Bee positive! You'll grow!

Today’s power affirmation is all about increasing abundance in your life. You want more abundance in your life, right? We all do. It’s only natural. Feeling abundant is a major part of feeling happy or peaceful, and happiness and peacefulness are two of the most sought after prizes in life. The key to unlocking your happiness or your inner peace is to learn to feel the abundance in your life.

How do you do that? How do you learn to ‘feel’ the abundance in your life?

By using power affirmations. Power affirmations can help you create the changes that you want to make within yourself.

By affirming and reaffirming your beliefs about abundance and about the inner qualities that you want to develop, you will see your life start to change.

Developing the qualities of an abundant person should be your first priority if you are serious about creating more abundance. Some of those qualities are:

• Gratitude – Abundant people are grateful for what they have now and for what they will have in the future. (I’ve written several posts about the things that I’m grateful for. What are you grateful for?)
• Open Mind – Abundant people are open to opportunity. They are willing to accept their desires when those desires appear from unexpected directions.
• Giving – Abundant people live right smack dab in the middle of the river of life and they allow abundance to flow through themselves rather than trying to contain it and hold it all in.
• Positive Thinker – Abundant people see the upside of every situation. They know that life is dualistic and that every negative event has a positive aspect to it.

Those are just a few of the qualities of an abundant mindset that you might want to work into your own power affirmation to help you create your ultimate life.

Here is today’s power affirmation:

I am abundant. I am grateful for all of the abundance in my life right now and for all the wonderful ways that my life is becoming more and more abundant every day. I am always open to receiving more into my life and I look for, and expect, my desires to manifest into my reality. I am abundant in thought, word, and deed. I choose to always focus on the positive side of any situation, and I look for ways to allow more abundance into my life. I am a giver. I give what I can freely and without  hesitation. I am abundant!

Use this power affirmation on a consistent basis and you will begin changing not just the way you look at abundance, but the very levels of abundance in your life will increase as well!

Peace,

p.s. Learning to affirm your success is just one of the skills we cover in the Inner Circle of Success.  The Inner Circle is my members-only self improvement study group and we’d love to have you join us!

p.p.s. Are you using positive daily affirmations, or power affirmations as part of your routine? Why not share your efforts with your fellow readers by leaving a comment below? Thanks!

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

———————————————
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?