Are You Prepared For Success? (Introduction)

So you want success, financial independence, freedom from worry and the ability to live your life the way you have always dreamed of.

Well, congratulations! You've come to the right place. Here you will learn about success and what it takes to achieve it. You will not only learn what it takes to be successful, but also learn a step-by-step process designed specifically to give you the POWER to be successful. This process works, so I suggest that you take it very seriously! You will find it to be enlightening and a lot of fun.

"Expect to win!"

It is one of the most beautiful compensations of this life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

-Emerson

"Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world."

-Arthur Schopenhauer

The Empowerment Process, when completed, can enable you to:

• Build a strong, unshakable, foundation
• Understand what power is
• Understand where the power is
• Harness the power and most importantly
• Use the power to:
• See the possibilities
• Gain financial independence
• Succeed at whatever you desire
• Achieve and Surpass your goals
• Realize freedom from worry
• Attain serenity
• Live your dreams and
• Soar

If you have built castles in the sky, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put foundations under them.

-Henry David Thoreau

"Every man is the architect of his own fortune."

-Appius Claudius Caecus

Don't let life discourage you; everyone who got where he is had to begin where he was.

-Richard L. Evans

...The problem of life is to change worry into thinking and anxiety into creative action.

-Harold B. Walker

Before we start, relax and take a few deep breaths. You may be at a low point in your life, emotionally drained and/or financially challenged. On the other hand, you may be in the best place you've ever been in and feel that you are very successful, emotionally healthy, and/or financially secure.

Where the determination is, the way can be found.

-George S. Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon

I've never been poor, only broke. Being poor is a frame of mind. Being broke is only a temporary situation.

-Mike Todd, theatrical entrepreneur

In either case, this program has much to offer. If you are currently discouraged, dejected, depressed, etc., The Empowerment Process will allow you to see beyond your current situation; the power to see the possibilities and the opportunities, and enable you to have the confidence necessary to act upon them. If you feel successful, this program can serve as an energizer and a source of continuous motivation. It will allow you to look at success in a way that you may never have looked at it before. It may even give you some insights into yourself and your real motivations. (If you are one who feels guilty about your success, perhaps this program can help you avoid apologizing for it, or even sabotaging, your success.) The Empowerment Process can add new dimensions to your success.

The world is round and the place which may seem like the end may also be only the beginning

-Ivy Baker Priest

Become a possibilitarian. No matter how dark things seem to be or actually are, raise your sights and see possibilities - always see them, for they're always there.

-Norman Vincent Peale

Before you can be successful you need to know what success means and prepare for it. You also need to know the ramifications of not understanding success and not preparing for it. The following analogy best illustrates the importance of being prepared for success.

Think of the desire for success as wanting to swim so badly that you jump in the water head first, without any preparation. After you hit the cold water, you realize that you have never taken the time to learn how to swim; you don't know how cold the water is and you don't know how deep it is. You, therefore, will either learn how to swim very quickly (very rare) or you will drown (most likely.)

Success, in many ways, is the same as this swimming analogy. You may not drown, but without the necessary understanding and preparation you probably won't be able to attain success, or if you do, you will not be able to sustain it!

...Getting ready is the secret of success.

-Henry Ford

The Empowerment Process will give you the tools you need to succeed. You will not only be able to recognize success, you will be able to pursue and achieve it.

The pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; The optimist, the opportunity in every difficulty.

-L. P. Jacks

Most people don't understand where the real power lies. They think it lies with money and/or controlling others. That is not the definition of power, as defined by The Empowerment Process. That is simply wealth and manipulation. Once you have completed The Empowerment Process, you will know that the real power lies within you. You will have awakened the sleeping giant that is within you…..that is you. You will have the power. You will feel enlightened and charged as you gain more and more power and more and more control over your life.

Let a man radically alter his thoughts, and he will be astonished at the rapid transformation it will effect in the material condition of his life.

-James Allen

As you feel your power growing from within, you will start thinking more about your future success and less about your past failures. You will be able to actively follow your dreams. Keep in mind that your dreams should be within the laws of morality, man and physical reality. Beyond that the world is your oyster.

We should all be concerned about the future because we will have to spend the rest of our lives there.

-Charles F. Kettering

Man is as full of potentiality as he is of impotence.

-George Santayana

The Empowerment Process is divided into three Sections:

• "Section I" -Preparation & Explanation
• "Section II" -Understanding & Acceptance
• "Section III"-Ownership & Becoming

Active participation in this process is critical to achieving successful results. Jot down your feelings, impressions, desires, wants, needs, dreams, fears, thoughts, etc.

Some people make things happen,

Some people watch things happen,

And some people say "What Happened."

…Be in the first category

-Casey Stengel

It is also important that you re-read each quote very carefully to make sure you understand it; read it in conjunction with the narrative on the left side of the page. The quotes will help you to remember what you have read, giving emphasis to the right concepts which will help you to obtain the desired results from this program.

I quote others only in order the better to express myself.

-Michel De Montaigne

You may feel some resistance and possibly feel defensive as you continue. This is an expected reaction, since the process will be asking you to re-think some of your basic attitudes. However, please keep an open mind. If you can accept, and commit to, the premise that you deserve the best that life has to offer and that change is critical to the process, success will surely be yours.

There is nothing noble in being superior to some other man. The true nobility is in being superior to your previous self.

-Hindustani proverb

God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish one from the other.

-Reinhold Niebuhr

For the rest of The Empowerment Process I will be referring to it as “The Process.”

By Mel Kaye

Copyright © MondayMorningPower, All rights Reserved

Go to Installment #1

The Optimism Revolution

Following is an interesting article from Psychology Today in regards to the health benefits of being optimistic. I have only reprinted a portion of the article. Because of Copyright protection you will have to follow the link to get the complete article, directly from Psychology Today.

Optimism as you know it isn't always the best medicine. In the new view, behavior trumps positive outlook. Why a healthy mentality paints the world in light and shadow.

By:Jill Neimark

The pain was blinding," recalls Larry Dossey of the afternoon last August when he was thrown by two different horses—within a mere two hours. Dossey, his wife, and another married couple had just spent two weeks camping and fly-fishing in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming—a place so beautiful, he says, that it makes him feel like he's "in touch with the gods."

Dossey, a doctor as well as an early champion of mind-body medicine, cracked his ribs when the first horse spooked; but he allowed the wranglers to mount him on a second horse—their most experienced one—with the hopes of reaching civilization soon. The second horse bolted up the mountain, lunged over an embankment, and sent Dossey flying. He fractured his spine, though he didn't know that at the time.

After testing his ability to wiggle his toes and turn his head, Dossey concluded his best chance for survival was to walk out of the wilderness. "I realized that this was an extraordinarily serious situation with no good solution that I nonetheless had to overcome," he recalls. "And somehow I knew I could overcome it with sufficient courage and resolve." So he suggested that the women, wranglers, and pack horses ride ahead, and that his friend accompany him by foot. Night fell. For 10 hours he walked, in pain "with every step, one flashlight between us, across some of the most rugged territory I've ever seen," says Dossey. "How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. I focused on the act of putting one foot in front of the other. I put my consciousness down in my feet. I stopped every 15 minutes to get on top of the pain."

At about 4 in the morning, they reached the wranglers' base camp, and from there his wife drove him to the small town of Lander, Wyoming, an hour away. But his back pain only worsened, so that he could hardly stand. Two days later they located a spinal specialist in Bozeman, Montana, who diagnosed the fractured vertebra and hospitalized Dossey, putting him on intravenous morphine. For months he wore a body brace , encased in plastic from chin to hips. He now wears a lighter brace and suffers from daily back pain. His conclusion: "I'm absolutely grateful I didn't land on my head or neck. I came within just a whisper of being a quadriplegic. I reflect on this every day."

That's an optimistic appraisal if there ever was one, but Dossey's background as an experienced physician—he's knowledgeable about both trauma and the impact of attitude on health—helped prepare him for what he calls "grounded optimism." So did his experience as a seasoned outdoorsman who'd made annual treks into wild country for three decades, and the fact that he'd served as a battalion surgeon in Vietnam, where he'd often observed the limits of human endurance. As he puts it: "Characterizing optimists as smiley-faced romantics is unfair. Optimists are actually realists who take steps to solve problems"—for instance, the literal steps Dossey took for 10 hours. According to this definition, Dossey and other true optimists are flexible, and anchored in reality. And most important, they get things done.

Optimism: The New View

Optimism has long been considered a straightforward asset when battling illness or adversity. And, broadly speaking, it is. Harvard graduates who were optimists at age 25 had better health outcomes for the next three decades. As Dossey explains, "Optimists have more stable cardiovascular systems, more responsive immune systems, and less of a hormonal response to stress compared to pessimists. They have a stronger sense of self-efficacy, so they're more likely to invoke healthier behaviors because they think it can make a difference."

Of course, to be considered optimistic you have to have a positive long-term outlook and some degree of hope for the future. But a new view of optimism holds that to have a real impact on health, outlook is less important than behavior. By this definition, it is the act of engaging with the world, of taking concrete steps toward goals, that improves health. But there's a wrinkle: Under trying circumstances, optimism can actually lead to fatigue and temporary immune suppression. That finding has helped researchers rethink optimism and how it really works.

It turns out that our standard view of optimism is simplistic, and it is only by observing the nuanced impact of "optimistic" behaviors on the immune system that we can get a more complete picture of this coping style. Grounded optimism gives the brain a built-in action potential: It replaces emotion with motion.

In the end, the hidden key to optimists' better health outcomes may be their propensity to engage with the world and to persist in the face of difficulty, whether it's a night of agonized walking through the wilderness or the willingness to seek out second and third opinions for a medical condition. "Here's the really important piece to understand," says Suzanne Segerstrom, a University of Kentucky psychologist and author of Breaking Murphy's Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life—and Pessimists Can Too. "If you're an optimist and working harder at a task, your stress hormones may go up. Your immune function may dip a bit. But it's like doing crunches at the gym. Short-term, more crunches hurt. Long-term, you get a big payback in terms of health and fitness. Optimism leads to increased well-being because it leads you to engage actively in life, not because of a miracle happy juice that optimists have and pessimists don't."

Segerstrom herself embodies this principle: She recently suffered an injury (also involving a horse) that led to unexpected complications, including bursitis and sciatica. "My attitude was, well, somebody has to fix this. So when one doctor couldn't help me, I found another. And I made progress."

Her conclusion? "The more I work on optimism, pessimism, and health, the more I believe optimism's benefits have less to do with mood and much more to do with persistence. The kind of optimism I study is based on a very simple concept: Do you think the future will be mostly good or mostly bad?" If you believe it will be mostly good, says Segerstrom, you'll be motivated to persist through tough times, whether you are naturally cheerful, a worrier, a grump, easygoing, or a bit neurotic.

Optimists' persistence is evident in a study conducted by Lise Solberg Nes, one of Segerstrom's graduate students. Subjects were given a series of anagrams to unscramble. One was impossible and the other 10 were difficult. Pessimists worked on the difficult anagrams an average of 9½ minutes, while optimists worked for an average of 11½ minutes. For the impossible anagram, pessimists worked an average of one minute, while optimists worked twice as long—two minutes.

Faced with a health challenge instead of an anagram, the active, problem-solving approach stands people in good stead. Carol Farran, a professor of nursing at Rush University Medical Center and author of Hope and Hopelessness, was diagnosed with breast cancer 20 years ago at age 42, when her children were in junior high school. Farran had already been conscientious in dealing with two other chronic health problems: endometriosis and fibromyalgia. "For fibromyalgia, I use low doses of antidepressants, massage, and yoga, and I say to myself each day, 'Well, Carol, you can choose to sit around and mope or you can live an active life anyway.' To me, that decision is the axis around which optimism truly turns."

Farran's proactive outlook may have saved her life—it was she who discovered a lentil-size node in her breast. When it turned out to be breast cancer, Farran first suffered crying jags and panic attacks. Shortly after surgery, "I was out with my kids and panicking. We went to a music store, and I got a metronome. Symbolically it was very important. I could set the metronome to whatever speed I wanted, and it reminded me that I could set my life to my own time, fast or slow." Whenever she listened to the metronome, she remembered that it was her choice to reframe and reappraise her life. "It gave a certain meaning to my struggle," she concludes, and it is meaning that helps us regain a sense of control and mastery over our own lives. "You make new choices in life," says Farran. When one goal becomes impossible, the dispositional optimist will find another goal to work toward and bring satisfaction instead.

That ability to reframe life, to find new meaning, is part of an optimistic strategy. "When a crisis strikes," says University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt, author of The Happiness Hypothesis, "optimists tend to alternate between active coping and reappraisal. If active coping fails to fix the problem, they reappraise the situation, looking for hidden benefits, and, invested with flexibility, write a new chapter for their life." For instance, optimistic patients who received bone-marrow transplants for cancer were able to sustain relationships and re-enter the world more readily than their pessimistic counterparts, largely because they used emotional coping and tried to gain something positive from a generally negative experience. Optimism also predicts whether people will remain actively engaged with life after falling ill. In a study of 250 adults with chronic illnesses such as arthritis and cancer, Farran found that 85 percent had to give up meaningful activities (exercise, gardening, traveling). But the hopeful among them replaced lost activities with new and meaningful ones (playing music, writing, socializing) to remain fulfilled.

The rest of this article

A Fly In My What?

A Fly in My What??

Keep Scrolling all the way to the end.

When I went to the men's room in the Schiphol Airport when we got to Amsterdam , I saw the fly and didn't think much about it.

Now I know why it was there.

Who says you can't potty train a man?