“Pretend that every single person you meet has a sign around his or her neck that says, ‘Make me feel important.’ Not only will you succeed in sales, you will succeed in life.” – Mary Kay Ash

That’s all anyone wants; to feel important, to feel loved, to feel wanted and needed, it’s a natural feeling we all share. Well if we all know that we all want the same thing, why don’t we just do it, make each other feel important. It’s really not that difficult. I think it involves 2 simple things: listening and acknowledging.

We all want to be heard and to feel recognized. Remember that when you are interacting with people, make an effort to generally care about what they have to say, respond accordingly and have compassion and understanding when necessary. As this quote says, it will help you out in all areas of your life. We trust and build relationships with the people who make us feel understood, recognized and respected. I know that recently someone I do business with remembered Bailey’s name  and it meant the world to me. I was important enough for someone to remember my dog’s name. Someone listened to me, cared enough to make a mental note and then went out of their way to ask how she was doing since she was sick the last time we spoke.  That is how you build personal and professional relationships!

I heard Mary J. Blige sing a song last night that literally had me mezmorized, click the image below to hear it.

“The first problem for all of us, men and women, is not to learn, but to unlearn.” – Gloria Steinem

I think  that this is one of the hardest things for people to do, yet one of the most important things that they MUST do. What you have learned from your experiences begins to change your behavior and your views, but not always in a positive way. Many times, we learn things through experiences that were false yet they stay engraved in our minds and change us for the worse. We need to unlearn these things.

I grabbed this quote today from an AMAZING article posted on HuffingtonPost yesterday. PLEASE read it!!! It is linked to the image below. ESPECIALLY YOU LADIES!!!  What an awesome article written by a man. Actually, I will rephrase, ESPECIALLY YOU MEN!!! I think you need to read this more than we do. It was liberating for me just to read it so I hope you enjoy.

Here’s a taste:

“And this is the sort of emotional manipulation that feeds an epidemic in our country, an epidemic that defines women as crazy, irrational, overly sensitive, unhinged. This epidemic helps fuel the idea that women need only the slightest provocation to unleash their (crazy) emotions. It’s patently false and unfair.”

“What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul.” – Yiddish Proverb

I have a piece of art hanging in my hallway with this quote on it. This morning, when I was walking back to my room from the shower, my eyes were drawn to it for some reason and I stopped and read it over a few times. Funny enough, it made me laugh. Just having gotten out of the shower, using soap to cleanse my body, it really resonated in me. How true are these words? Everyone feels great after a good laugh. I think it really does cleanse the soul.

I know that recently, for example, I was really stressed out and it was draining the daylights out of me. I needed something to get it all out of my head so I asked a friend, “Please make me laugh, a joke, anything! I’m about to flip out and I just need to laugh.” Problem solved, it was a success!

Sometimes that’s all you need, just to laugh, let go and relieve stress in a way that feels good all the way down to your soul. I can’t think of any better medicine than laughter. Just look at this baby below! I don’t even know who he is but dang do I feel better just seeing his sweet face laughing. All my troubles go away when I look at him.

You WILL laugh if you watch the video linked to this precious laughing baby!  I can PROMISE you that, this one NEVER fails!

“It takes more than good memory to have good memories.” – Unknown

I have a pretty dang good memory, and I hope that never changes, but that doesn’t mean all of my memories are good ones and I don’t  have as many good memories as I do because I have a good memory. The good come with the bad, the bad I try not to think about for what they were but for what they’ve taught me. I have so many good memories because I have been surrounded by amazing people my entire life. I truly believe that I’ve been one of the luckiest girls in the world to have met and know all the people that I do.

It’s the good memories with all of my friends and family that help me to get through some days or to help make the good days ever better. I love getting together with my friends and laughing for hours about the memories we have made. I could go on for pages right with the ones that just popped in my mind this second but I won’t.

Today, think of 5 of your favorite memories, write them down, so that on a rainy day, when you are feeling a little down, you can read about them and be reminded how truly special life really is. Thank you, friends and family, for helping to create the good memories that have helped to create who I am, that have taught me so much and that make my dark days brighter!

This picture is from one of my favorite memories and, the song it’s linked to, another! (Right UT friends?)

“The eyes believe themselves; the ears believe other people.” – German Proverb

This is a great quote to consider every time people are gossiping. I try so hard to not believe things I hear unless I witness them first hand. If not, it turns into a bad game of telephone, someone always gets hurt, people may fight over nothing ruining trust in their relationships and it is a downward spiral from there.

Not much feels worse than spreading wrong information and being confronted for doing so. UGH what a NASTY feeling of guilt! I would give specific examples but I don’t want to relive that feeling, we can all relate to this without sharing concrete situations. Believe what you see, not what you hear. Save yourself the trouble of false information. The only person you can truly trust is yourself.

Like Marvin Gaye said MANY years ago when he “Heard it Through the Grape Vine”…’People say believe half of what you see, Son, and none of what you hear.’ (Linked Below)

“How beautiful it is to do nothing, and then to rest afterward.” – Spanish proverb

The first time I read this quote, I laughed, thinking back on my time in Spain and the phrase, “Mañana.” As many people know, and maybe some of you don’t, the Spanish aren’t in a big hurry. They start work a little later than most (a lot later than Americans), take a mid-day siesta, stay up late and have a holiday for EVERY Saint where they don’t work or go to school and spend the day with family and friends, dancing, eating and enjoying life. When you ask a landlord when something can be fixed or when the internet will get hooked up, the response is usually, “Mañana.” HAHA There is no hurry.

At first I found this a bit frustrating, but things eventually changed. This slowed down way of life made me slow down. For the first time in my life I wasn’t in such a rush, I wasn’t trying to fill every minute of every day with something. I started to enjoy the simple things: walking through the city, lying in the grass at the park, enjoying a cafe con leche at a cafe on the sidewalk, listening to the locals speak and laugh and taking in everything the Catalan culture had to offer me….every.last.drop!

I learned so much about myself by just doing nothing, enjoying the moment and then resting afterwards, in my head going through all that I learned during the silence of “nothing.” But, what I always thought was nothing, was everything! It was the most beautiful time of my life, when I did nothing and then rested afterwards. Slow down, what are you in such a hurry for? Enjoy your life, nature, the silence, the sound and feeling of laughter and, remember, we don’t come out of this life alive, so live it! Take time to RELAX and take it all in…every.last.drop!

If you’ve never mediated, try it. Click the picture below (courtesy of Melissa Amason taken while visiting Barcelona) sit back, close your eyes and clear your mind while listening to my favorite song to meditate to. I promise, you won’t miss ANYTHING and you will gain EVERYTHING!

“We are only human after all.” – Sierra Noble

So I sit here in tears, for no particular reason at all. Nothing happened to me or to anyone else that I care about. I didn’t hurt myself or anyone else. I just got done watching my DVR of Parenthood from last week and this song “Human after all” by Sierra Noble featuring Martin Rivas played the final 4 minutes of the show and it just got to me. I have no idea what chord it hit, but it hit it pretty hard.

I’ll keep this one short, because I think you should just listen to it yourself. Maybe you will feel the same thing I did, maybe you won’t even like it, but I just wanted to share it with whomever wants to listen. Bottom line: We all make mistakes, none of us live forever and we shouldn’t take anyone or anything for granted. Don’t hold grudges, no one is perfect. I promise, one day, you’ll want the same forgiveness and understanding from someone else. Stop thinking about the coulda wouldas and the why and why nots, and just keep moving! That’s what this song made me feel at least. And it felt REALLY good to feel this realization like I just did and to release the emotion it brought out of me. No one is perfect, I’m not perfect, and it feels really good to be reminded of that 🙂

You can find the song below….Enjoy!

“The positive always outweighs the negative.” – Anne Brannen’s paper weight

Sitting here tonight with my dear, dear friend Anne Brannen “working on” our graduate projects, she helped me to realize the above quote. Yes, the truth comes out, I haven’t finished my thesis, there is not a diploma in my beautiful frame my mother got me (Thanks again, Mom, it’s BEAUTIFUL, and it’s just getting comfortable in its own skin before I fill it. That’s all.)

Many of you might be thinking, WHY NOT!?!  Get it done!  Well, you’re not necessarily just thinking that, I’ve heard you say it too. If you’d like to to know the truth, I just don’t feel like it. There it is, that’s it. At the end of a long day of work and working out and trying to be social after two years of non-social grad school, finishing a 60+ page paper isn’t at the top of my want to-do list when I get home. It’s not that we haven’t TRIED to finish it. Anne and I have actually tried very hard. We have put dates on the calendar to meet more times than I can count. These graduate paper meetings turn into venting sessions about how tired we are or catching up on each other’s lives. Well, tonight, once we realized that we would be pushing this back just one more time since it’s too late to turn in a few drafts in time before the deadline this semester, I asked Anne to pick my quote for the night. Her response? “The positive always outweighs the negative. It’s on my paper weight.”

Well, short story long, she’s right. Things have been really busy lately, life has been a little stressful, but, just yesterday, one of our training clients took a cab to our office to bring me fresh baked cookies…just because! That thoughtful act of kindness and appreciation, which was so simple, made the rest of my life disappear for a bit. This just proves that even a small positive can outweigh a mound of negatives. Thanks Anne Brannen for helping me to realize how the random act of kindness behind the freshly baked chocolate chip cookies I was given yesterday outweighed everything else!

Need a good idea for a random act of kindness? The cookies have the answer…go ahead, have one!

“You teach people how to treat you.” – Phil McGraw

Not many truer words have been spoken in my opinion. This quote is so short and seems so simple but speaks volumes. Repeat it to yourself a few times, “You teach people how to treat you…you teach people how to treat you…you teach people how to treat you.” Does it make sense? In other words, RESPECT YOURSELF! That’s what this quote means to me.

If you don’t respect yourself, love yourself and take care of yourself why should anyone else? If you don’t think you are important enough to treat yourself right, no one else will see a reason to either. So, next time you call yourself fat, or stupid or put yourself on the back burner, remember that others view how you treat yourself and will follow your lead. Think back of all the people you have treated with the utmost respect, that you would never disrespect or speak a bad word about, someone that you would defend to the grave and never imagine harming. Why did you do that? Because they treated themselves with respect and loved themselves, you were just following their lead.

It’s funny, it reminds me of when I give friends dating advice and say, “Why do you put up with that?” Well, the answer is, because they have taught them to. By allowing someone to disrespect you, you are disrespecting yourself and letting them know that it’s ok. The saying says, treat others like you want to be treated. But I think it can go the other way around too, treat yourself how you want to be treated. Your actions towards yourself will be mirrored by those around you. Teach others to respect you and give them a reason to!

Get it Aretha….Click below for a reminder!

“I believe that everything happens for a reason. People change so that you can learn to let go, things go wrong so that you appreciate them when they’re right, you believe lies so you eventually learn to trust no one but yourself, and sometimes good things fall apart so better things can fall together.” – Marilyn Monroe 

I have honestly hated the saying “Everything happens for a reason” for most of my life. I never really got it and you tend to only hear it when things are going terrible for you. I think, for that reason, it always angered me because when you are going through tough times, you don’t want to hear that they are happening for good reason.

Well, my thoughts changed when I read this quote by Marilyn Monroe. I just needed some clarification. Things don’t necessarily happen because of any fault of your own or to purposely teach you a lesson, like you’ve done something wrong, but they happen and then we learn from them in the process. Asking the question, ‘Why did that happen and what can I learn from it?” helps us to really dissect and understand a situation. From this analysis of every day occurences and experiences we can continue on in life without repeating our mistakes. If something was wrong, you’ll be able to truly appreciate when it’s right; being lied to really makes you start to trust your instincts and what you know to be true about yourself; and when good things come to end, you have the time and space to move on and begin something better. I truly believe this!

Instead of feeling sorry for ourselves and always wondering, “Why me?” I think we need to use every experience as a text book and learn how to focus on what’s good and how to make it better, rather than focusing on the negative side of things and who was at fault, placing useless blame. LISTEN to what can be taught when you aren’t paying attention!

Just found out about the book: Everything Happens for a Reason: Finding the True Meaning of the Events in Our Lives by Mira Kirshenbaum. (Linked to the picture below.) May have to ask Santa for this for Christmas 😉