Direction; whose direction!?

One thing that I’ve learned out of life is to never plan 5 years ahead! My plans and God’s plans never seemed to be the same, and thank goodness for that because His plan for me has turned out far better than my own plan!

But I guess there’s the key…it’s His direction and not my own anymore! We all get to a point in every situation where we need to choose, sometimes it’s a choice that has no significance and other times it’s life changing decisions that need to be made!

I’ve learned that following my own head is usually not what’s best for me but through following God’s ideas for my life it’s turned out best! We as humans can only dream so far…where as God created dreams! We as humans can only plan up to an extent in advance…God knows everything that will happen even before it has happened!

So with all of this said…it’s just much easier and more fun when God plans your life and helps you with all your decisions!

Letting Go!

What a statement! Letting go always sounds so much easier than actually doing the letting go part! We’ve all got things in our lives which we’ve been hanging on to, even though we know we need to let go! Even if you’re still in denial, we all have something to let go of! Life gives us an amazing opportunity to fully live out our potential but we have to let go of the things we need to let go of whether it be letting go of friends, or forgiving someone or letting go of the fear of doing something. To fully rise to our potential we need to let go of the excess baggage and grab hold of our future….hold of who we want to be!

Even with all the ups and downs of life we’re still going to have to live life…the only difference in how we live our lives is how we approach life!

Are you saving someone’s life!?

It amazes me everyday how selfish people are! Do they not get what life is all about….NOT them!! We weren’t born to think ‘Me, myself and I’ but we were born to think ‘How can I help you’…this world has completely turned our whole way of thinking upside down!

Our focus isn’t on helping the old lady cross the street, our focus is on getting to our next meeting! Our focus isn’t on listening to a friend share her heart, our focus is on what’s the reply I want to give! Our focus isn’t on cheering someone up, our focus is on ‘we’ve all got problems deal with your own’. Our focus isn’t on sharing our gifting, our focus is on the attention we get from sharing our gifting! Our focus isn’t on making a difference, our focus is on how can you make a difference in my life!

What has happened! How can you be so naive to think that’s not you….that is you…or at least it has been you even if for just a second in your life some or other day! We have the opportunity to make someone smile, to make someone’s day, to comfort someone, to make a difference…we have the opportunity to save a life!

If you serve people instead of waiting for them to serve you then life will be worth living! By one act of kindness you can save someone’s life!

I hope you decide to do your part in saving someone’s life!

 

The RIGHT friends make all the difference!

As we grow older we tend to become wiser, and thank goodness for wisdom!!! The factors on what we base our friendships change each year. As we get older, we slowly but surely become more of who we are as well as who we want to be and because of this growth in ourselves we slowly but surely also grow in how we choose our friends, our support system.

The friends you choose can make all the difference in who you are! The saying goes you must become what you want to attract! So if you become a person with value x, y and z you’ll also attract friends with value x, y and z. And because your friends have the same values as you they’ll motivate you towards your goals and help you in your growth process of becoming the complete you! They’ll give you honest feedback, so it might not always be what you want to hear, but it’ll definitely be what you need to hear! A true friend will support you in the hard decisions and will challenge you to become a better you!

You will become exactly like your friends; so choose them wisely because they will rub off on you! Do your friends portrait the qualities and values you want to have? This question can sometimes lead to tough decisions but at the end of the day growth doesn’t come easily. The people who are willing to make the tough decisions will end up being the happiest!

Without a valuable support system, life will be much more difficult than needs be! With each tough decision you’ll become a tiny bit happier and then in a few years time you’ll look back and be grateful that you had the courage to make those tough decisions!

Choose the characters in your story very carefully because they all have a part in how the story ends!

 

Be YOU!

I think we all at least once in our life struggle to be who we really are! There are so many other things our parents, friends, the church and the media want us to be! I’m not saying they always want us to be something else then who we we’re born to be but it’s definitely happened to me more than once where people tried to put me in this box of who and what they think I should be! I’m all for listening to advice and growing as a person as long as the advice and growing is relevant to the core you!

You’ll never be truly happy if you just take advice…NO, go think about the advice; Is it relevant to your character, is it advice that you’ll also give to someone else! Taking advice, trying new things and making mistakes are all necessary for growth…and seeing that you’re going to be doing all these things why not filter through it all and grow in who YOU are and who YOU want to be!

There are a lot of interesting, funny, clever, amazing people out there and I admire them all for there accomplishments but even looking at how amazing they are I’d still prefer to just be me! It’s much more easier, exciting and adventurous to just be me and live my own life and tell my own story! You will only truly be happy if you become more of who you are each day, live your own story and dream your own dreams!

Andr Gide said something very true:” It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not”

So instead of trying to be someone else, rather embrace every part of who you are and have a lot of fun in the journey to self discovery!

It’s a new day and a new year!

What an amazing holiday! It wasn’t really adventurous or anything but I had a lot of time to reflect on 2011 and dream about 2012!

I read a book called “Your best year yet”, and basically it helps you to reflect on the past year and set goals for the following year. And through all of this I realized how much I’ve learned and thus grown sins the beginning of 2011 and that’s an amazing feeling; to know that you’re growing in character, faith, dreams, goals etc makes me feel that even though it was a tough year it was also a very good year!

As you go through the book, she basically gives you 10 questions to answer! You start with ‘What did I accomplish in the past year’, ‘ What were my biggest disappointments’, ‘What were the lessons I learned’ and so on. And in the last of the 10 questions you have to set 10 new goals for the following year and that excited me!

Now that I’ve got my 10 goals, rechecked my Strengths and have started to work again (still have to get used to waking up early again) I’m focused and ready for 2012!

Goodbye 2011 and hallo 2012…I’ve got big expectations of you!

 

 

Growth must be intentional-nobody improves by accident

I’m just finished reading John C. Maxwell’s book ‘The 4 pillars of success’ and what an amazing book. In the book he says that growth must be intentional-nobody improves by accident. And what a true statement!

We all want to learn and grow in who we are, our relationships, careers etc. but very few of us make the time to reflect, learn and grow. John Maxwell talks about setting aside 1 hour each day for your personal development. At first I must say it sounded like a lot; to take an hour of my day which I already don’t have seemed like a commitment that would be broken within the first week but I decided to make the commitment and see what happens! And oh my goodness, what a change…I’m more focused, committed&excited about who I want to be and where I want to go! That hour every morning sets the tone for my whole day! I don’t just sit and hope to find something to grow in that hour, I either read a book, spend time with God, worship, pray or have a learning discussion with my husband where we exchange our opinions and ideas about a topic whether it be relationships, leadership, mentoring, God etc. The learning process can be either a box process or a creative process, the only thing that matters is that it is a learning process!

Practice makes perfect

I have now started my blog after quite a struggle, just because the whole blog world is very new to me! But after a couple of hours I’ve started to slowly but surely figure out how it all works.

I must say throughout our lives we always try and try and try and we don’t always succeed but there are those very few who keep on trying and then eventually succeed! Napoleon Hill said:”Most great people have attained their greatest success just one step beyond their greatest failure.” What Napoleon said is such an interesting statement and the more I think about it the more I believe the statement! Those very few who’ve been remembered for doing something great, succeeding in something memorable are all people who’ve had a lot of failures before they’ve succeeded and have perservered beyond their doubts and fears! Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein are just a few of those people who practiced and practiced and practiced until it was perfect!

Benjamin and Albert weren’t any different from anyone else, they just knew how to perservere! If we take what we know and apply it to our goals and we learn from our mistakes and failures then we’re one step closer to succeeding and thus making what we practiced perfect!

Those who keep on trying will succeed, you can only fail once you’ve stopped trying!