Body image ladies

Oprah is banging on about body image,    her stats say:

Do You Like Your Appearance?
60s: 64%
Teens 69.3%

Do You Look Good for Your Age?

60s: 88.3%
Teens 80.2%

There are more on the site - go visit - mostly it's healthy stuff to hear, and may help anyone on a day of crisis.

And there's also an ace  article from Amy Bloom also on Oprah - thank you Amy,

"... Stop criticizing other women's bodies for sport or to soothe yourself. 

And start. Start admiring aloud the things you really do admire. Show what you love and value. If you think Marta of Brazil is fantastic, put up her poster and get a group together to watch women's soccer. If Ruth Bader Ginsburg or Hillary Clinton or Aung San Suu Kyi is your hero, say so. "

The holistic nature of being self-assured

I saw this on fb "A boy makes a girl jealous of other women. A gentleman makes other women jealous of his girl."


and wondered whether it  could also apply to purposeful life.


"A life without purpose is jealous of those who have meaning. A life with purpose life effortlessly shares meaning with the world."


Ja, needs work.

In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself," I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Thomas Merton "Day of a Stranger," Thomas Merton Reader, p. 431

"and i urge you to please notice when you are happy, and exclaim or murmur or think at some point, 'if this isn't nice, i don't know what is.'" - kurt vonnegut

pre-requisites for creating success in life

I'm refreshing my coaching mind (with Coachville) and have been thinking  v.much about what makes a great coach and what coaches do that help people get to the moves that they want - coaches are not about maintaining the just OK status quo, they are about co-creating easy opportunities for positive changes as each unique individual/coachee/ player/ client sees it.


Then I found in my email a reminder to listen to a talk by Brian Tracy. It said:


"Brian [Tracy] has discovered two things about successful people: 
1) they know more things than others about their craft and 
2) they think in a different way than average people."


This pretty much sums up what  coaching toward success is all about - coaches help  people think different about themselves and their actions so they can jump into that success.

Chinese Bamboo

I'm listening to Aleph - Paulo Coelho on CD from the library - a wonderful way to make the driving fun, enjoyable and useful. It's great on many fronts and I'm sure they'll be more nuggets but today the nuggets is all about Chinese bamboo.

Paulo says he read a throwaway article about Chinese bamboo taking 5 years to establish it's roots with no apparent growth or activity and then boom it storms ahead making huge changes growing up to 25 metres in the next can't remember months or years. Wonderful metaphor for introverts and the idea of mastery.

Connect with the world to get creative

Excellent article on Oprah.con Tom Kelley talks to Jancee Dunn (from O I guess) on getting creativity flowing.
http://www.oprah.com/spirit/6-Steps-to-Get-Unstuck-and-Get-Your-Creativity-Flowing

This web article (http://www.realage.com/health-tips/eat-at-home-to-lose-weight?eid=1010648418&memberid=32373514) seems to be suggesting that'd women when happy  makes the healthiest eating choices when at home. Doing some additional things that make dinner time beautiful (soft, light , cadres, gentle music) will have a positive emotional effect too.

Unfortunately for most mums dinner is a totally stressful time of balancing the fussy food ideas of their kids and the rush of after school and early evening activities.  Could a message here be make sure you have time to eat in a relaxed atmosphere as many times as possible. If this means preparing food in advance (moving the stress to another past of the day) and sometimes feeding your kids at a separate meal time so that you can meet their often very restricted needs and then get some kick back time to yourself. For some mums that's going to be dinner for one!

use the facts not your interpretation of them

Love this article in Scientific American by psychology doctoral candidate who finds of interest in the Sherlock Holmes stories. Maria has written  number of articles, I like this one on how our interpretation of a situation changes it.  http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/10/04/lessons-from-sherlock-holmes-trust-in-the-facts-not-your-version-of-them/

"Often, our mind conflates the world and our own interpretation of it without much thought. We simply assume that the way we see is the way it is."