Family Health By Design

To learn step five is on how to eliminate negativity and recapture the magic in your marriage

This week will focus on the letter N

N stands for negativity. We must eliminate negative thoughts about our partner in order to restore the magic we once had in our relationship.

The best example or lesson I learned was in a booklet called the Seven Day Mental Diet.

Imagine you are sitting around a campfire with some friends one evening telling funny stories about your past and about life in general and a spark flies out of the fire and lands on your jacket you immediately brush the spark off your jacket before it can do any damage but if you let it stay there it will burn a hole in the jacket. In the same way, when we entertain negative thoughts and do not eliminate them quickly they do damage to the relationships of the ones we love. I will share how you can get a copy of the Seven Day Mental Diet That will give you the process to follow later on in this post.

If you are in a relationship with someone you love and you find yourself constantly struggling with negative thoughts about yourself or your partner you are not alone and I can truthfully tell you it is not your fault. Do you ever think about how many times we are bombarded with negative news on social media or in the mainstream news media every day? A perfect was a study that was conducted by Robert Schrauf and Julia Sanchez titled Negative Words Dominate Language

The study showed that as a culture we focus more on negative words than positive words because negative words stir up emotions cause us to use more energy to process them. The study also showed that out of the 70,000 thoughts we have per day 50 percent are negative.

What does this have to do with my marriage relationship? It has everything to do with it because if you recall when you were dating your partner you didn’t fall in love with what you didn’t like about them you fell in love with what you loved about them, maybe her smile, his body, how they made you feel. But after you were married or decided to live together you slowly started to notice things you didn’t like about your partner and as you continued to entertain those negative thoughts over and over again it has now become your automatic response.

Take a moment to ponder that thought.  Do you struggle with constantly battling negative thoughts about your partner, about life, about yourself?

Do you find yourself noticing positive qualities about other people or negative qualities?

Would it be valuable to you to learn how to substitute negative thoughts and turn them into positive thoughts? I have found the only way to do that is with practice. To learn how to eliminate negativity?

In my experience as a weight loss coach from 2008 to 2012, I discovered a bad habit I picked up where found myself judging every person I met or saw in public on their weight or their health. My thoughts were always negative like “that guy is really overweight why doesn’t he do something about it?”

As I began to learn more about why I discovered that it was because I viewed myself the same way. If I didn’t eat right or exercise when I had scheduled myself to do so and didn’t follow through my self-esteem was in the toilet. But what I learned just a couple of years later is the reason I was unaware I was doing it was that I had repeated the behavior so many times it had become a habit, it became my automatic response.

When I learned that I was the cause I was determined to change my behavior but I knew it was going to take work, hard mental labor to reprogram my thoughts to be positive. I had to train my conscience to be a guard against any negative thoughts and to substitute them for positive thoughts. This was the catalyst that empowered me to recapture the magic in my marriage.

One example ill share is when I see an overweight person exercising I used to think “What’s the use unless they control they’re eating they will always be overweight”, Now I am able to substitute that negative thought for ” “I am glad they are committed to working on their health it will save them years of pain down the road”. I am so glad for them!

I told you early how you could get a copy of the Seven Day Mental Diet and you can request a copy from my website http://familyhealthbydesign.org

It wasn’t easy and the negative thoughts may never go away but I now have the power to change them, and you can too. There is a course called the Master Key Experience. The Masterkey Experience starts the last week in September. If you would like to be notified of the exact date please reach out to me at one of the platforms listed here. Talk to Mike

L-E-A-R-N Step Four of How to Recapture The Magic In Your Marriage

To help you learn the fourth step to recapture the magic in your marriage we will focus on the letter R

R stands for Remember. Remembering why you fell in love, what attracted you to your partner, and all the special times you spent together with each other, and as a family.

Think back to when you first saw him or her what did you feel? Do you remember when you talked on the phone for hours and when you were together your heart ached to be together again?

I remember the first time I saw my wife Valerie was when I watched a VHS video 37 years ago. We met through a matchmaking service called American Millionaires in San Jose California. I went to a matchmaker because I was unable to find the type of girl I was looking for at nightclubs or bars. I was looking for a woman of virtue, someone who had the same values as me and I found her at American Millionaires. What made them unique was that they had each member create an extensive profile that includes a video of each member sharing what they were looking for in a partner. What made Valerie stand out to me was her smile and her vision of what she was looking for. Although we did not see eye to eye on our hobbies our profiles were virtually identical. We when on a couple of dates and after a couple of months of attending weddings and parties of each other’s friends we decided to pursue marriage around two years later. I remember our wedding day as if it was yesterday and I make it a point to watch our wedding video a couple of times a year so that I never forget why I married Valerie and how much I love her.

On Valentine’s day, I created a montage of all the places we lived and all the special memories we shared together.

Your story is different from mine but there is still that moment when you saw something and pursued it, you fell in love and decided to get married. It doesn’t matter what has happened in the past if you still love one another it is possible to recapture the magic in your marriage. It all starts with each partner taking responsibility for the behavior that caused the separation in your relationship. It only takes one person to start the process. For me, it started when my wife came to me and shared how she felt more like my roommate than my wife. Her words caused me to examine my past, feelings, thoughts, and actions that caused me to emotionally distance myself from her.

As I examined the past years I could see how many times I placed other things like money, my career, debts, and household clutter above love and unity. I became so blind that in 2012 when Valerie was struggling with blood clots, arthritis, and her condition became so bad that I could not touch her without her screaming in pain. Her arthritis became so bad her hands functioned more like claws than hands because she could not bend her fingers. When we were finally able to get her the medical care she needed I was so worried about how much everything was going to cost. I learned that behavior because we lost our business in 2012 after only being open for 2 years and losing a quarter-million dollars we later learned that was the cause of Valerie’s condition.

I remember when the doctor telling us that if Valerie does not have a blood transfusion her organs will start to shut down and she will die. At that point I came to the realization I might lose Valerie that day and that was something I was not going to accept no matter how much it cost. After two blood transfusions, her condition became somewhat stable but the next day the doctor informed us that she could no longer give Valerie the care she needed because they could not get tests back fast enough to determine the cause of the disease and that our only hope was to send her case to two hospitals UCLA in Los Angeles, CA. or Stanford in Palo Alto CA. We chose Palo Alto because we had family that lived close by. The hard part was the waiting because the doctor told us that after we submit the request it could take two hours, to days, or two weeks for them to respond to the request but we were fortunate we received an answer within one hour.

After a week at Stanford hospital receiving around-the-clock care, Valerie’s condition became stable and she was able to return to our local hospital for monitoring and she was finally able to go home on July 5th, 2013. While at home caring for Valerie I was so fortunate that my boss gave me the flexibility to work when I could around Valerie’s needs. Today Valerie is healthy and she only has to see her doctors every three months but I will always remember that moment in the hospital when the reality of those words I vowed ion June 4th, 1988 I will love honor, and cherish Valerie until death till we part. Once Valerie was well enough we were able to fulfill a dream of hers when she was in the ICU which was to return to Disneyland and buy an Alice In Wonderland teapot.

Remember the precious moments and setup reminders all through your home that will inspire you to keep the love alive. It takes time but your marriage is worth it, your kids are worth it and you are worth it.

No matter what you have been through you can still create a loving magical future together by replacing any negative thoughts and feelings with thoughts of those magical moments when love was in the air and both felt the magic alive in your hearts.

I would be happy to meet with you if you would like to schedule a time please connect with me at the following link.  Meet with Mike Stewart  I look forward to hearing from you.

L-E-A-R-N Step 3 Awareness is How We Recapture The Magic In Marriage

Awareness

Step three to recapturing the magic in your marriage has to do with creating a new awareness. A new awareness about yourself and about your spouse. 

Let’s start by taking a look at the meaning  of awareness:

Webster’s Definition of awareness

: the quality or state of being aware: knowledge and understanding that something is happening or exists

promoting a heightened awareness of the problem seemed to have only a slight awareness of what was going on

an acute awareness of subtle differences

Let’s take the first definition and break it down:

• The quality or state of being aware. Knowledge and understanding that something is happening.

Creating a new awareness in our relationship means that in order to change the way we relate to our spouse we must become aware of the thoughts feelings and actions that lead us to push away from our partner begin to not trust them and to keep our feelings to ourselves because we don’t feel it is safe anymore to share them without being ridiculed or made wrong to feel that way.

We repeat the same scenario so many times it has become the new normal.

You may be hearing yourself say I don’t do those things, I am aware of my partner’s feelings and I’m not afraid to share them but we are more willing to share our thoughts and feelings with our friends but not our partner because our friends won’t respond the same way.

The best way I know how to explain is by sharing my own story.

Six years ago my wife Valerie came to me and told me she felt more like my roommate than My wife because we stopped dating, and doing fun things together, and even just cuddling. My first response was to become defensive, my second response was I began to make a list of all the things she did or did not do which only made things worse. 

What changed for me that allowed me to become more aware of Valerie’s needs and the negative thoughts, feelings and actions were when I started a course called the Master Key Experience in 2016.

The course consisted of daily homework which included a 15-minute meditation and the introduction to the course in week one revealed how our mind works and the effects our thoughts have on our feelings and actions. It revealed that by consistently thing and feeling a certain way they became so automatic and that is how our habits are formed. Those two things revealed to me how many times a day I had negative thoughts towards Valerie, how those thoughts created negative feelings and were followed by negative actions. 

It revealed how I created a negative persona of Valerie that propelled me to constantly collect evidence to prove my point.  Thought like “she doesn’t care”, But the most damaging part was that it was the persona that I created that caused the separation between us and it drowned out all the years of love and good times we have spent together.

Each day during the meditation as I analyzed the thoughts that ran through my mind I learned little by little how to substitute the negative thoughts for positive thoughts from our wedding, the adoption of our son Lonnie, and when we bought our first home my heart became so full of love again and as I continued to practice I became addicted to the positive feelings which lead me to take positive actions to show Valerie I loved her various ways, it gave me back the marriage I always wanted, the marriage I committed to 33 years ago and it inspired me to create a practice of watching our wedding video a couple of times a year to never forget why we fell love.  

Awareness breathes new life into a relationship, it allows you to remember why you fell in love with your partner. It reignites love and inspires you to keep entertaining the positive emotions and moves you to create traditions that keep the love alive.

For the last 50 years, researchers have used varying definitions of self-awareness. For example, some see it as the ability to monitor our inner world, whereas others label it as a temporary state of self-consciousness. Still others describe it as the difference between how we see ourselves and how others see us.  What self-awareness really is and how to cultivate it

Never forget what attracted you to your partner, the good times you had together, and the good time that you will create in the future.

If you would like to discuss this topic more with me please set up a 30-minute call at the following link. Meet with Mike

L-E-A-R-N Step Two of How to Recapture The Magic In Your Marriage

To learn the second step to recapture the magic in your marriage we will focus on the letter E.

E is for educate. You need to educate yourself, who you really are what it means to be alive and why you do the things you do.

Look at your own body, have you ever wondered what powers the cells in your body to heal? What powers your brain to keep thinking, your heart to beat and pump blood, your lungs to breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide?

Have you ever considered how you came to be born? 

Scientists estimate the probability of anyone being born at about ONE IN 400 TRILLION! How are these numbers calculated?

1-Probability of your parent’s meeting: 1 in 20,000.

2-Probability of the same boy knowing this one girl: ONE IN 2,000.

3-Probability of right sperm meeting the right egg: ONE IN 400 QUADRILLION.

4-Probability of every one of your ancestors reproducing successfully: ONE IN TEN, 1:10

5-Probability of your being born: ONE IN 10.   From the article Are Your A Miracle?

Do you know what this means? It means are a living breathing miracle and you were equipped with everything you need to succeed in life at birth, you have just never been shown how to access it.

The best explanation for our existence I read in the bible. Whether you believe in God or not does matter it’s this passage that I found the evidence for my existence so please listen with an open mind.

Psalms 139:13-18

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be. How precious to me are your thoughts, God! How vast is the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the grains of sand when I awake, I am still with you.

The moment in time I started to educate myself was when I was 45 years old. I had worked all night on a project, I got 5 hours of sleep that night and was back on the job at 8 am. I had an epiphany that the work I had been doing for 25 years did not have a lasting impact on people’s lives. At the end of the day the woman whose phone I installed that day did not change her life. This caused me to go on a search for a new career and after starting my own business and failing miserably I found myself broke, on food stamps, and struggling to find a way to regain the confidence I once had and to my surprise, I found the answers were there all along.

You may be asking yourself what does this have to do with me recapturing the magic in my marriage?

It had everything to do with recapturing the magic in my marriage because for years I lived a life of insecurity, always seeking the approval of others and it created a barrier between myself and everyone else because I believed if people knew the real me they would reject me.

After years of struggling to make sense of my life and searching for happiness in material things and other people, I finally found the answer through a course called the Master Key Experience. The Master Key Experience is a six-month self-discovery course that revealed to me how my mind and body work together in concert and how my life is interconnected with the lives of others. It also gave me the tools to accept myself for who I am and create and live into the person I want to become. 

How did this affect my relationship with other people?

It gave me insight into how much of my life was lived unconsciously.

It gave me an awareness of the patterns I created that sabotaged my relationship with my wife whom I dearly love.

It opened my eyes to see that each person is on their own journey of discovering who they really are and the deep desires they have to live their best and contribute to the well-being of others.

It is my greatest desire that you don’t just take my word, but that you become a student and take what I have shared and research it for yourself.

I would be happy to meet with you if you would like to schedule a time please connect with me at the following link.  Meet with Mike Stewart  I look forward to hearing from you.

If you missed reading the first step you can find it here https://familyhealthbydesign.org/wp-admin/post.php?post=727&action=edit

Step One of Five to Recapture the Magic in Your Marriage

L is for Let Go

Let go of what you think you know about your relationship with your spouse, be open to learning a new way to create more awareness in how you relate and respond to one another.  Your marriage relationship has become what it is today because of the thoughts and actions you have allowed to drown out the unconditional love you once had for one another. To say it another way, when you were dating there was nothing between you that caused stress in your relationships like bills, kids, disagreements with family members that came between you, and your love for one another.

That love grew stronger because you spent time together doing things you both loved to do. Those things kept the magic alive, the relationship fresh, the love flowing, and the romantic feelings you felt.

You may be in a place of confusion, desperation, feeling trapped, and wanting a divorce and I’m not here to say it is an easy road back but if you want a marriage relationship based on faith, love, and trust you are going to have to think and act differently to make it happen.

I had to let go of the past and focus on the future I wanted

The healing started for me when I forgave my wife for all her past mistakes, flaws, negative words, and actions. Letting go of all the negative stuff I had let build-up for years and I began to train my mind to focus on the magic and love we started with on our wedding day. I started watching my wedding video and feeling the feeling I felt that day, seeing all the faces of the family and friends that were there to support us on that day.

You may be thinking by letting go you are being weak but in reality, when you let go you are freeing yourself from the prison that you unknowingly created for yourself in your mind, a place of focusing on everything your spouse does wrong and continuously gathering evidence that he doesn’t love you anymore because he says and does things that upset you but IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. We have been taught all our lives to focus on what is wrong. It is time to free yourself because you had the keys all along but were never shown how to use them.

What I found out when I started doing more research on this topic, I realized how much the relationship between our parents influences the way we view and relate to the opposite sex, and what is even crazier is it was being programmed into us unconsciously. Think about it you were around your parents for 18 years and observed the way they related to one another and if we don’t wake up we unknowingly repeat the behaviors of parents both negative and positive.

Now is the time to set yourself free. Repeat the following words and read them as many times as it takes to let go of your past and start new or make up your own words.

Source of all good, God, source universe, or creator of all that is good please forgive me for all of the past hurts I have caused my spouse and myself, my friends, and my family. I choose now to start a fresh new relationship with you and my husband or wife. I choose to focus on the good in my relationship and ask my spouse to forgive me for my negative thoughts, words, and actions that have caused pain in our relationship. I want to create something new that is built on a foundation of love and trust, give me the strength and allow me to have a brand-new start. Thank you for empowering me to be the best version of myself. Amen

Go to your partner and ask them for forgiveness for the things you did, said, and thought that caused separation in our relationship and how you want to create a new relationship that will live long into the future and allow us both to grow old together. If your partner doesn’t respond well don’t get alarmed it will take time for him to process what you shared. It will take time for your new ways of thinking to take root and become a habit, but I can promise you as you practice substituting the negative feelings and thoughts for feelings and thoughts of love you will begin to see each other again as that beautiful person you vowed to love honor and cherish til death do you part.

I will be sharing steps two through six of how to recapture the magic in your marriage in my next 5 posts.

If you need any support, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me. You can contact me through this link. https://linktr.ee/SaveMarriage

Where you are right now doesn’t define who you are. You may feel like everything you have been through in your life up to this point has been a negative experience and even overwhelming.

Have you considered that everything you have experienced up to this point has been preparing you to become your best self?

Last year when Covid-19 hit and shut down our cities I was gripped with the fear of not being able to pay my rent and I wondered what the future held for me and my family. What changed my direction was an event I attended where the host encouraged me to take all of my experiences good and bad and examine which ones I could use to help other people. They called the process “How to turn your mess into your message”.

Grab a piece of paper and make two columns, on the left-hand side label it Bad and on the right-hand side label it Good. Of all the good and bad things, you listed write down the lessons learned.

The most powerful lessons I learned were from the bad things that happened to me, like when I lost my business I realized how many years I wasted looking for the answers to my life problems.

One of my biggest breakthroughs was when I took a course called the Master Key Mastermind Alliance. This course gave me the tools to create an inward environment or mindset that my life, the beating of my heart, and my brain functions are powered by a greater source. Call it God, call it the universe but more than anything I now know that I am connected to a source that has created the trees, and every human being on the planet. This is called the Hero’s Journey.

The Master Key Mastermind Alliance is a movement of people that have discovered their life’s purpose and are committed that each person is given the opportunity to do the same.

Another big breakthrough I experienced is I realized how much I am just like everyone else, each person grows up living their life based on the model our parents set for us. One of the models I grew up with I received from my mom. My mom was not one to talk or share what was going on emotionally with her nor did she teach me how to tap into my emotions.

I just recently took a class that has enabled me to embrace the negative emotions instead of running from them and it has really helped me.

If you would like more information I’d be happy to talk about this topic more at a later time. You can find out more about me on my website at https://mentalktoyourwoman.com/

Are you someone who has gone through a painful divorce? Maybe you have been through more than one divorce and feel like a failure because you and your beautiful bride couldn’t make your marriage work.

You may feel that you did everything you could to make things work only to have your love for one another fade and one or both of you call it quits.

You may have been married and raised children together and now you find yourself separated from both your wife and your children and you feel like a future happy marriage is not possible for you.

If you find yourself listed in one of the above categories you are not alone. 50% of all marriages end in divorce and the most commonly reported major contributors to divorce were lack of commitment, infidelity, and conflict or arguing. More participants blamed their partners than themselves for the divorce.

What is even more astonishing is that the real cause of your divorce is not you or your spouse’s fault.

Now I’m not talking about situations where you or your spouse made the choice to have an affair, If you had an affair your spouse has every right to make the decision to end your marriage because you broke your wedding vows.

I am talking about two people who still deeply love each other, have said hurtful things to one another, don’t know how to share their true feelings for one another, and believe it is impossible to ever recapture the love they so powerfully vowed to have for one another on their wedding day until death parts them.

It’s not your fault you were never taught the skills to communicate in a way that displays and nurtures love and respect for each other. The only skills and examples we were given were the ones that were modeled to us by our parents. It’s not your fault you were taught how to read write, spell, arithmetic, and learn history in school but were never taught how to communicate effectively. It’s not your fault your parents were not taught communication and relationship skills by their parents.

This subject matter never crossed my mind until I experienced it for myself. My wife and I had been married for over twenty years and we still loved each other very much but we both felt like we were relating to one another more like roommates than a married couple. I remember my wife Valerie telling me how she felt one night as we were getting ready to go to bed that evening.

We were in the bathroom brushing our teeth and she turned to me and said I feel more like your roommate than your wife, we don’t do the things we used to do like cuddle together, go on dates, we don’t connect like we used to. My immediate response was I felt frustrated and caught off guard, I wanted to avoid the topic altogether because I did not know how to talk about how I felt or change our situation.

After a lot of prayers, I began to search for some answers, and what I discovered surprised me. A friend of mine invited me to an introduction to learn about a weekend seminar that really made a difference in her life. I attended the event and when I heard the results the speaker shared of people who had attended I was intrigued me and I told my wife about what I learned. We both attended the next introduction Hosted by the same friend and signed up for the next event in February hosted in San Jose called the Landmark Forum. By the end of the five-day seminar, we not only discovered some really cool tools to help communicate powerfully, but we also learned how the beliefs and patterns of communication that we adopted from our parents were some of the reasons we did not know how to talk about our feelings and listen to what was been said with judgment or a prepared rebuttal.

Our marriage relationship did not change overnight it took practice and time to break the old habits of hiding, defending, and blaming in order to create a foundation of love and respect. I feel closer to my wife today because we applied these practices to our relationship and I would like to share them with you.

The practices we used to open up new ways to communicate.

1. Choose to forgive yourself for relating to your spouse in a way that was modeled for you. You are only able to relate to your spouse given the skills that were taught to you knowingly or unknowingly by your parents.
2. Live a life of integrity. Do what you say you are going to do. When you can’t keep your word notify your spouse as soon as you can. If you say you will be home by 6 pm, be home by 6 pm or call and give them the new time you will be home.
3. What stories have you created about your spouse, other people and, continue to collect evidence around that cause you to withdraw? Choose to share with your spouse any or a person the negative thoughts or beliefs you have toward them right away don’t live in your head. Reaffirm your intention for your relationship.
4. Share with your spouse that you love them every day just the way they are and show it in practical ways. If you are making breakfast or a cup of coffee ask your spouse if they would like something.
5. Remember for things to change you have to change, by changing your actions your spouse will react differently also. Take personal responsibility for you and your progress and encourage your spouse to do the same. Don’t pressure on another but respectfully encourage each other, we each have our own baggage due to the challenges we have experienced, overcome, or are still processing.

I would love to hear your thoughts on what I shared by leaving a comment I what your experience is in your relationship or you can connect with me through my website http://mentalktoyurwoman.com

Last month I gave couples some simple ways to keep the magic alive in their marriage. This week I thought I would breakdown for couples the process that causes the magic to erode and how to keep it from happening in the first place.

In my experience, the process starts with some very innocent habits that we begin to notice about our spouse that annoy us. We talk to our spouse about the habits that bother us but after two or three times we stop saying anything to our spouse but we complain to our guy or girlfriends about their bad habits all the time. We don’t offer a solution or come to a different agreement that would appease both parties.

Some people tell me every that couple argues about each other bad habits and they don’t see a problem with that, it becomes a problem when we do it over and over again the whole process becomes automatic. We come home complaining about the issue to our spouse and because our spouse has heard the complaint many times before they respond in the usual way and immediately there is tension between you and the process was completed all on automatic pilot. I call it the Negative Progression Syndrome

I found a solution to our problem

In 2014 I attended a seminar that caused me to see the Negative Progression Syndrome process broken down into phases and when I saw how destructive it was at destroying the love and respect I committed to having for my wife on the day we were married I quickly realized we had to create alarms or signals that would alert us that we were on the Negative Progression Syndrome again. Looking back on my relationship with my wife of 32 years and seeing how many times we experienced NPS was mind-blowing.

Example of how to address a bad habit your husband has of leaving his dirty underwear on the bathroom floor. 

There was a time when I forgot to pick my dirty underwear up off the bathroom floor and put them in the hamper after I took a shower in the morning. That night when I arrived home from work my wife asked me if I could remember to pick up my underwear after I take a shower.  She suggested If I needed a reminder to put a note on the bathroom mirror and you know what it worked. She did not complain about it to me in front of my friends or complain to her girlfriends, she just addressed the issue respectively without a lot of drama. This is a simple example but if you apply the principle to your situation it can really save you a lot of time and stress in your relationship.

Remember Communication is the key to a long-lasting relationship and empowers you to keep the magic alive in your marriage.

What is a complaint that you have about your partner that you have experienced NPS? I would be happy to help guide you to a solution.

Have you ever asked yourself how you could make the world a better place?

When was the last time you expressed kindness to another person or performed random acts of kindness?

With all the turmoil in our world today I began to ask myself the same questions and what I found is that 99.5 percent of the time I am solely focused on what I need to do to be my best self each day and accomplish the tasks I assign myself each day. What I noticed is when I get caught up in my own little world my flow of creativity shuts down and the flow of giving and receiving fades away. In contrast, when I am focused on giving value to each person I meet I feel alive and the flow of giving and receiving is magical.

When was the last time you felt like you made another person’s day? Maybe you bought the person’s coffee in the car behind you while going through the local Starbucks drive-thru. Swept up your neighbor’s leaves. I find doing random acts of kindness is fun and exciting and the more you practice doing kind acts it becomes a natural habit and it creates a cycle of both giving and receiving and everyone is blessed.

I was very privileged to attend a Kindness Summit in October and join a group of people that host monthly meetings challenging its members to be kind to the people they run into while going about their day and blessing them in a practical way. I found a really simple way to be kind when I am out shopping. When I see a car that is trying to back out of a parking space I wait and let them have the right of way and let them back out safely.  I love helping peole in this simple way because I know how frustrated I get when I am trying to back out of a parking space and people walk directly behind my car totally ignoring my backup lights and my moving car.

There are many ways to be kind to someone. Another kindness practice I adopted is to give out ribbons that say “Who I Am Makes A Difference”  I bought 100 of these ribbons from a group called http://blueribbons.org. What I like about this project I get to nominate and acknowledge people for the wonderful work they do and what I found is that most people are very modest about their work

My challenge for the next week is to give out at least 3 ribbons a day and continue to look for other small ways I can help people get through this very trying time.

Leave a comment of some ways you will be kind to others this week.