positively present

embracing excellence to live your best life

 

[Note: This is Positively Present's very first guest post. I'm honored to have Celestine Chua, author of the very popular The Personal Excellence Blog, as my first guest blogger. Thank you, Celes, for taking the time to write this fabulous post!]

When Dani asked me to guest post at Positively Present, I was excited. I've been reading Positively Present since a few months back and have been fascinated by the consistent quality of her writing. So I began looking through the archives at Positively Present as I thought about what to write. As all of you readers already know by heart, Positively Present is all about optimism, happiness, and living life to the fullest now. I wondered what I could write to add value to the mix, especially since Dani is already doing such an excellent job writing. Then I suddenly thought of a perfect topic, one which resonates with my core value as a person and the theme of happiness. I have several core values, but if anyone is to ask me to just name one, I'd say it's excellence. Excellence is the centerpiece of me. This extends itself in everything I do -- my blog centers on theme of personal excellence. I coach people to become better as they achieve their goals and dreams. I'm starting a school of personal excellence later this year for people passionate about achieving personal excellence.

Why am I so passionate about excellence? Because I see excellence as the path towards living your best life. To strive for anything less is to deny ourselves of living the life we are meant to live. Deep in my heart, I truly believe every single one of us is born to achieve greatness. We have unlimited potential which is waiting to be unleashed. As we pursue excellence, we grow and become better. We become wiser, more knowledgeable, and more conscious. We connect more and more with our higher selves -- our true selves. As long as we keep being the best we can be, we will be living our best possible life at every moment.

However, in my journey towards excellence, it has not been uncommon to see people adverse toward the whole notion. Some see excellence to be the path towards unhappiness, because it's just "stressful" and "taking things too hard." Some become intimidated by the thought of excellence, saying they'd rather lead a simple and worry-free life. On the whole, they see excellence to be a polarizing quality that denies them of happiness. These aversions come really from a misunderstanding of what excellence entails. What does excellence really mean?

• Excellence means recognizing the unlimited potential in you. This means knowing that you are capable of anything in the world. This means going full out on your goals and dreams, simply because you can.
• Excellence means embracing adversity as a part of growth and living. The word "adversity" has been too overrated. People have come to associate adversity with negativity and they get paralyzed in the face of it. If you recognize you have unlimited potential in you (see #1), you'll understand that adversity is nothing but just something that exists to let you grow and become better. Adversity is merely a challenge for you to overcome. It's part and parcel in life. It definitely isn't synonymous with negativity. The only reason why it's negative to people is because they chose to associate it as such.
• Excellence means loving yourself and taking good care of yourself. Some look at cases of people burning out and nearly killing themselves in pursuit of excellence and form a negative mental image of "excellence." The thing is, the people who abuse themselves aren't being true to what excellence really is. They don't recognize that to be able to truly pursue excellence one must first properly take care of oneself to successfully achieve excellence. We are the ones who will be going through the whole journey of life, so if we're not even in the right shape, how can we then achieve excellence?
• Excellence means to live your best life. As I mentioned above, as you pursue excellence, you literally become better and wiser. Living life as a better and wiser you translates into a better life compared to if you were living without growing.

As you can see, excellence isn't mutually exclusive with happiness. It's really synonymous. To be excellent is to live a life of fulfillment and of happiness. As long as you embrace and pursue excellence, you are living your best life. Here are some of my personal adages in pursuing personal excellence:

• Go for BHAGs: Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals. Don't settle for small, moderate, or safe goals. Go for your wildest imaginations -- the kind of dreams you can only dream about. These are the goals that will truly make you come alive. Just to share one of my BHAGs -- my long-term vision for my personal excellence school is to achieve an international scale and magnitude like that of Xavier's school (anyone watches X-Men here?). A good counterpart will be Hogwart's School from Harry Potter :D
• Surround yourself with the best. The people around you play a significant role in shaping who you become. I've written an article on my blog before on how you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Consciously select who you want to be around. Limit the time spent around energy vampires (also known as negative people).
• Learn from the best. There's no way to jumpstart your learning curve than to learn directly from the best in the field. Seek them out fervently and be like a sponge -- absorbing all the knowledge they have to offer.
• Never stop improving. The journey of excellence never ends -- it's a constant path of learning, growing, and being better. Always keep your eyes peeled for how you can be better. Keep looking inward to uncover blind spots and work on them. This has become something ingrained in me. I'm a very introspective person by default and being a coach reinforces the importance of introspecting and self-improving even more, since there are more lives than just mine in question.

Do try them out for yourself -- I'd love to know how they work out for you :). I'll end off this article with one of my favorite quotes by Teddy Roosevelt: "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."


Celestine Chua writes at her popular The Personal Excellence Blog for people who are passionate about achieving excellence. She has been featured frequently in press and is a highly sought-after excellence coach, helping others achieve their goals and dreams. Some of her top articles among readers are: 50 Ways to Boost Your Productivity, 101 Most Inspiring Quotes of All Time, and Cultivate Good Habits in 21 Days.

happy anniversary, positively present!

   

"That first peak is the best place to pause and look back,
to see if you took the easiest route, to learn the lessons from the first climb.
It is the best place to examine the terrain ahead to change your plans and goals,
to take a deep breath and begin climbing again."

Michael Johnson

 

Today is the six month anniversary of Positively Present. It was only six short months ago that I was sitting up in bed in the middle of the night on Valentine's Day, creating my very first blog post. Every post I've written since then has taught me so much about myself and about the world and I couldn't be happier that Positively Present has made it this far. I love writing and sharing my thoughts with you and it means so, so much to me that you actually read what I write and that so many of you contribute via your comments and emails. Thank you for being such a big part of my journey towards positivity and happiness. I know I wouldn't be where I am today without all of the amazing support of readers like you.

While I'm off in England vacationing and celebrating, I'd love it if you could take a moment to give me your feedback on Positively Present. I've created a brief, 10 question survey for my readers and it would mean a lot to me if you could take a few minutes and let me know what you think about Positively Present. The blog has been an amazing experience for me and I want it to be an amazing experience for you too. I can't wait to return and hear what all of you have to say about the blog. If you can think of any other issues you'd like to talk about that aren't brought up in the survey, please feel free to leave me comments in the comments section.

Click here to take survey!

a positive present just for you

 

 
 
"I love quotations because it is a joy to find thoughts one might have,
beautifully expressed with much authority by someone recognizably wiser than oneself."

Marlene Dietrich

When I fall in love with a quote, I fall hard. When I read something wonderful, powerful, or moving, I want to scribble hearts all over my notebook like a little school girl. I want to tell everyone about it and spend time writing about what I think about it  (as I often do here on Positively Present). Reading a great quote makes me -- oddly enough -- happy beyond words. Reading a great quote is like a gift -- the kind of gift I can accept and then share with others. And today I'm going to share some of my very favorite quotes with you.

Not only will you be able to read 40 of my favorite quotes, but, at the bottom of this post, you'll find a present waiting for you. It's a perfectly positive PDF that contains 6 of my favorite quotes about happiness. When you click to download, you'll have the most inspiring quotes right at your fingertips. You can print 'em, cut 'em out, and post 'em anywhere you'd like. It's my little way of saying thank you. Thanks for reading the blog. Thanks for listening to me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts and inspiration. Thank you for being you!

Those of you who have stopped by this site before are probably very aware that I love quotes. As I've written in previous posts, words are my happy sounds. I just adore words and the way that some people can put them together, leaving the reader with such powerful emotions, leaving the reader with new and exciting ways of seeing the world. It amazes me and fascinates me how a single sentence, a perfect pairing of words, can change everything for me. Lately I've been doing a lot of changing and the 40 quotes below are some of the most influential words, some of the words that have impacted me in ways that I cannot really express. In some way, every single one of these quotes has made my life different, better, and I hope you enjoy them as much as I have.

  
40 Life-Changing Positive Quotations

1. There can be no happiness if the things we believe in are different from the things we do. (Freya Stark)
   
   
2. The true way to render ourselves happy is to love our work and find it in our pleasure. (Francoise de Mottville)
   
   
3. Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude. (Denis Waitley)
   
   
4. Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves. (Helen Keller)
   
   
5. We tend to forget that happiness isn't a result of getting something we don't have, but rather of recognizing and appreciating what we do have. (Frederick Keonig)
   
   
6. Happiness is like a kiss. You must share it to enjoy it. (Bernard Meltzer)
   
   
7. If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people. (Virginia Woolf)
   
   

8. The only way to find true happiness is to risk being completely cut open. (Chuck Palahniuk)
   
   

9. People tend to think that happiness is a stroke of luck, something that will descent like fine weather if you're fortunate. But happiness is a result of personal effort. You fight for it, strive for, insist upon it, and sometimes even travel around the world looking for it. You have to participate relentlessly. (Elizabeth Gilbert)
   
   

10. Most people would rather be certain they're miserable, than risk being happy. (Robert Anthony)
    
    

11. Action may not always bring happiness, but there is no happiness without action. (William James)
    
    

12. Nothing is miserable unless you think it so; on the other hand, nothing brings happiness unless you are content with it. (Boethius)
    
    

13. The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be. (Marcel Pagnol)
    
    

14. Happiness is not the absence of problems but the ability to deal with them. (Jack Brown)
    
    

15. Remember, happiness doesn't depend on who you are or what you have; it depends solely on what you think. (Dale Carnegie)
    
    

16. Whoever is happy will make others happy too. (Mark Twain)
    
    

17. Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to a better understanding of ourselves. (Carl Jung)
    
    

18. No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. (Eleanor Roosevelt)
    
    

19. Your time is limited. Don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living the result of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drowned your own inner voice. And, most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. (Steve Jobs)
    
    

20. The question is not what you look at, but what you see. (Henry David Thoreau)
    
    

21. Everything matters. Nothing's important. (Frederick Nietzsche) 
    
    

22. What you think, you create. What you feel, you attract. What you imagine, you become. (Adele Basheer)
    
    

23. You can wait a long time anticipating the arrival of what you've had all along, like sitting and waiting for a FedEx delivery while the package sits patiently unopened outside the door. (L. Shriver)
    
    

24. Once you replace negative thoughts with positive ones, you'll start seeing positive results. (William Nelson)
    
    

25. You can destroy your now by worrying about your tomorrow. (Janis Joplin)
    
    

26. There is only one person that can make you happy and that person is you. (David Burns)
    
    

27. Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing you will be successful. (Albert Schweitzer)
    
    

28. There is only one cause of unhappiness: the beliefs you hold in your own head, beliefs so widespread, so commonly held, that it never occurs to you to question them. (Anthony de Mello)
    
    

29. Most people ask for happiness on condition. Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition. (Arthur Rubinstein)
    
    

30. Happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it is complaining that leads people to becoming unhappy. (Dennis Prager)
    
    

31. There is a serious corruption in the idea sold through advertising that you can attain spiritual peace through lifestyle and the notion of building your happiness from the outside in by acquiring things. (Edward Norton)
    
    

32. Be happy. It's one way of being wise. (Colette)
    
    

33. The person who seeks their applause from the outside has their happiness in another's keeping. (Unknown)
    
    

34. There is no duty we so underrate as the duty of being happy. By being happy we sow anonymous benefits upon the world. (Robert Louis Stevenson)
    
    

35. Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it.(Groucho Marx)
    
    

36. When I was in grade school, they told me to write down what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down "happy." They told me I didn't understand the assignment; I told them they didn't understand life. (Unknown)
    
    

37. Being happy doesn't mean you're perfect. It just means you've decided to look beyond the imperfections. (K.B. Indiana)
    
    

38. Not only are you responsible for your life, but doing your best in this moment puts you in the best place for the next moment. (Oprah Winfrey)
    
    

39.  Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be. (Abraham Lincoln)
    
    

40. Life is now. There was never a time when your life was not now, nor will there ever be. (Echkart Tolle)

So, what did you think? Did any of these really stand out to you and spark inspiration in your mind? I know that they all have done that for me and I hope that at least one of them resonated with you. What about you? You might not be as quote-obsessed as I am, but I bet you have a favorite one that sticks with you. If you have a favorite quote, I'd love to hear about it. Feel free to write your favorites in the comments section!

Click this link to Download Positively Happy Quotes. I'd love to spread this happy download around to all of those interested in living positive, present lives, but since I'm on vacation, I'm giving you a job. Ready for it? Spread the word. Yep, that's it. If you have a moment or two, tweet this post, put up a link to it on Facebook, give it a Stumble or Digg, and share it with your friends and family. Everyone out there needs a little happiness -- even just a simple PDF document -- in their lives so, go on, spread the word. Shoot out an email, type out a 140 character tweet on Twitter, or maybe even mention in on your own blog. Remember that happiness is contagious and it can spread like wildfire as long as we push it along and share it with others. Share your favorite quotes in the comments section below and then pass the download along to anyone who needs a boost of happiness.

CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD POSITIVELY HAPPY QUOTES!

a vacation state of mind

 

 

“One’s destination is never a place,
but a new way of seeing things.”

Henry Miller

 

Today I'm heading off to England for a week. For a whole week! A week away from work. A week away from America. A week away from life. I'm quite excited for the adventures that I know I will have, but I'm sad to be leaving the blogs for a week. I'm sure I could blog from there, but I've decided that after six months of blogging, I deserve a little time off. I have scheduled posts throughout the week to keep you all entertained in my absence and I will be leaving the comments open. However, I will not be responding to the comments individually for the next week so please don't be offended if you don't see a prompt reply from Dani.

Vacations are supposed to be positive experiences, experiences during which you're living in the moment, but are they always? Not for me. In the past, vacations have been fun but have also been filled with stress. When preparing for a vacation, I'm always wondering, "What will be there for me at work when I return? What if someone needs me when I'm gone? What am I going to pack?" (among many other questions!) After stressing about vacation prep, I'm often out of sorts while away. I'm a big fan of routines so when I get away from my everyday routines I feel disoriented and, in the past, I've often been unhappy and eager to return to my familiar patterns.

Now that I'm working hard to embrace living in the now, it doesn't make much sense to stress about preparing for a vacation, nor does it make much sense to be disrupted by the lack of routines in my life for a week or so. Living in the now means living in the now, not living with a head filled with thoughts like "what-should-I-pack" and "how-many-emails-will-be-there-when-I-get-back." My mind sometimes gets the better of me and the worrywart sets in. But this time -- this vacation -- I'm going to try my hardest to do things differently. I left packing to the last minute (which, in Dani-terms is two days -- not two weeks -- before the trip). I didn't plan out a day-by-day agenda of what I wanted to do. I've prepared a few blog posts for the week but I'm not going to check my stats or the comments frequently. I'll have access to work email, but I plan to check it once or twice a day at the most. I want to unplug, I want to relax, I want to enjoy a vacation -- and for the first time in my life I think it might actually be possible.  

Now that I'm doing what I can to live a more positive and more present lifestyle, I really do believe that it will be possible for me to grab my bags later today and head out to the airport without worrying about what I am leaving behind, without worrying about what lies ahead. Traveling is an adventure and traveling abroad is an even bigger adventure for someone like me who has never been outside of the good ol' USA before. In everything I do, I try to look for the positive and I try to remind myself to be present, to live in the moment. This vacation will be a test for me, I know. I will be out of my comfort zone. I will be in situations where I have very little control. But you know what I can be comfortable with and in control of? My state of mind. Today I'm choosing to let go -- to put worries away -- and embrace a vacation state of mind.

You don't have to travel to be on vacation!
How do you access a vacation state of mind?

go on, admit you're happy

 

 

"Most people ask for happiness on condition.
Happiness can only be felt if you don't set any condition."

Arthur Rubinstein

Today used to be "Admit You're Happy Day" (which has now become Happiness Happens Month) and this morning I woke thinking about the idea of being happy. For me, it used to be a pretty hard thing to admit. Reading through my childhood journals, I read things like: "I'm so happy right now, but I know that will end soon" or "It's been a good day, which only means a bad one will be coming up." I would have days of happiness but I would always have this "I'm happy, but..." attitude. As I got older I found it was easier to embrace the happiness when it came. I still believed that bad things were just around the corner, but I was so thrilled whenever I experienced any true happiness that I was more than happy to sit with it, to bask in it, and not worry as much about the future. Happy was like this thing -- a distant relative perhaps -- that visited me every once and awhile. It was wonderful when it stopped by, but it wasn't there for long. I learned to accept its visits with utter elation and joy (and, also, disbelief most of the time), and I thought that was enough. Until recently. Now I realize that happiness isn't something that visits. It's not something that happens to you.

If someone had asked me years ago to admit I was happy, I would have laughed in his or her face. Happy? Me?? While of course I'd had plenty of happy moments, I would never have said I was a happy person. If someone had asked me (and people often did), "Why aren't you happy?" I probably would have fumbled about, stuttering and ultimately coming up with an answer like, "I'm just not, that's all." (Yes, quite the convincing argument!) Today when I woke and remember that it's the former Admit You're Happy Day, I thought to myself, "Wow. I can actually sit here and admit that I'm happy." It was a real eye-opener for me, a really great example of how far I've come in in the past year or so.

Of course, I won't sit here and write that I'm always happy. Anyone who works with me, is related to me, or is friends with me knows that's not the case. I'm never going to be one of those sun-shining-blue-skies-everywhere-she-goes kind of girls. But, as I've realized for sure this morning, that doesn't mean I'm not happy. I woke up feeling slightly stressed, my mind running through the list of things I have to do today and this weekend before I leave for vacation on Monday. I woke up after having had a strange dream that left me feeling oddly sad. I woke up to a cloud-filled sky and fun-filled trip to Jiffy Lube on the horizon. And yet...when I remembered it was Admit You're Happy Day, I realized that I was happy. Deep down, in the core of my existence, I was happy.

Even though I write about this kind of thing all the time, it was refreshing to think of it in the context of admission. I was admitting it (sure, it was only to myself, but I knew it would probably come out in a post somehow). I was admitting that I was happy -- miraculously, steadfastly, honestly happy. Even though this happiness has been around for awhile, it was still so refreshing to wake up and realize that this is me now -- a person with a lot to do, waking too early on a Saturday to a cloudy day, who is still happy. Wow. How life has changed for me!

But enough about me! I want to hear about YOU. I'd like to know what you thinking about happiness and actually admitting it. Do you feel guilty admitting you're happy? Do you feel like you have a case of the same "I'm happy, but..." syndrome that I used to suffer from? Do you even want to admit your happy? Or, better yet, do you need to admit you're happy? If happiness is a state of mind, a choice, (which it is!), why would we need to admit it to anyone? And aren't we, in a way, admitting it by our thoughts and words and actions? C'mon, let me know what you think about admitting to happiness!