Freedom is Never Free. There is always a cost involved.
By · Comments
You have to love a nation that celebrates its independence every July 4, not with a parade of guns, tanks, and soldiers who file by the White House in a show of strength and muscle, but with family picnics where kids throw Frisbees, the potato salad gets iffy, and the flies die from happiness. You may think you have overeaten, but it is patriotism. ~Erma Bombeck
Irena at home in Poland at age 91, in 2001.
Irena Sendler
For our Independence Day, I was looking for a good message and theme to send out for expressing how I feel about America and the freedoms upon which the country was founded. This story was sent to me by my mother:
There recently was a death of a 98 year-old lady named Irena. During WWII, Irena, got permission to work in the Warsaw Ghetto,as a Plumbing/Sewer specialist.
She had an ‘ ulterior motive ‘ … She KNEW what the Nazi’s plans were for the Jews, (being German.) Irena smuggled infants out in the bottom of the tool box she carried and she carried in the back of her truck a burlap sack, (for larger kids.) She also had a dog in the back that she trained to bark when the Nazi soldiers let her in and out of the ghetto.
She was caught and the Nazi ‘ s broke both her legs, arms and beat her severely. Irena kept a record of the names of all the kids she smuggled out and kept them in a glass jar, buried under a tree in her back yard. After the war, she tried to locate any parents that may have survived it and reunited the family. Most of course had been gassed.
Those kids she helped got placed into foster family homes or adopted. Last year Irena was up for the Nobel Peace Prize … She was not selected. * Al Gore won, for a slide show on Global Warming… (Oh, by the way, it’s climate change now. Not global warming.)
Please share this story of a truly courageous, freedom-loving soul with your friends, family, and children. May she rest in Peace.
Check out her website at:
This is the spirit of American Freedom. This is why Jews, Muslims, Christians and peoples of all nations flock to the United States. Let’s hope and pray our tradtitions continue today and in the future.
Editing your Beautiful Life.
By · Comments
Edit Your Life. Don’t accept a rough draft for publication. You are the Editor-in-Chief for your life. Life is freely given to all of us, but you can edit, modify or delete entire “scripts” out of your life.
Here is a lifestyle tip that has helped me to be a lot happier, and healthier. It the era of 15 second sound bites and the overwhelming abundance of information available to us through television, radio, the Internet, the skill of editing, deleting and filtering out what is not wanted or desired is extremely important. Dare I say, vital?
To know what you should edit, delete and filter out of your life, you will need to know what it is you really want. If you aren’t sure of the results you are looking for then how will you ever know if you are getting them?
Write the Laundry List. Having a written list of what it is you really want is absolutely necessary for success but do you know how many people have written goals? 2%. Only two people out of every hundred will take the time to think about life and write. Then we wonder why 2% of the population control 60% of the wealth in the country! That’s a clue.
Of course, it’s not just about the money. Most lottery winners compound their problems by having access to large amounts of cash. Moral discipline lacking, most, not all, lottery winners tend toward excess, poor decisions, momentary pleasures and lack an expressed purpose in life.
This formula works: Thoughts lead to feelings; Feelings lead to actions; Actions lead to results. If you don’t like your results, you have complete editorial control to change your thoughts!
The Passion Test
There is a book by this name that you can order and read but the test is quite simple. Start with a notepad (or computer) and write the sentence, “In my ideal life, I________________
Then fill in the blank with a ‘to be’, ‘to do’, or ‘to have’ verb that pinpoints who you are and your desires in life. Do at least 10 or 15 of these sentences and you can keep doing them if you like the exercise. Mark Victor Hansen teaches you should have a list of 101 things you want to do before you expire.
It’s important to do at least 15 if you can because we are going to edit and mark the list with your top five. Here are my top five in this present moment but I do have the freedom to edit the list and change it at anytime.
1. In my ideal life, I give value to every person I meet. (This sets a context for every interaction I have with any human being and gives me the edge I want.)
2. In my ideal life, I weigh 165 and enjoy excellent health. (This safeguards me from pigging out and eating the wrong kinds of foods and fats.)
3. In my ideal life, I provide a great environment for my family. (This keeps me focused on my family goals.)
4. In my ideal life, I have excellent friends and business partners. (This reminds me to spend time with quality people)
5. In my ideal life, I earn twice as much as I spend. (This keeps me creative, actively engaged in doing more and doing better.)
Of course the side effect of wanting to save money in this manner is that I learned a lot about my health habits and then there are more benefits to boot. It is true that all diets work and all diets fail. Guess who makes the difference? Point your thumb into your chest and say, “ME.”
It’s how big a reason and what is your “Why?” Why do you want this and how badly do you want this? Michael Jordan attended Laney High school in Wilmington, North Carolina, but as a 5-11 skinny sophomore, he was cut from the varsity basketball team. The summer before his junior year, he grew to 6-3 and began his path to super-stardom. Instead of giving up after failing to make the team, Jordan used it to spur himself to greater achievements, practicing hour after hour on the court.
“Whenever I was working out and got tired and figured I ought to stop, I’d close my eyes and see that list in the locker room without my name on it,” Jordan said, “and that usually got me going again.” It may not be that unusual for a high school sophomore to grow 4 inches in one summer but it was a manifestation of his extreme desire, of his competitiveness that caused him to work extremely hard and grow and make the team as a junior. He made the team and led his school to the state championship.
An interesting side note, Jordan was the one who introduced longer basketball shorts to the game as he always wore his North Carolina shorts under his NBA shorts. Others followed. How embarrassing is it to watch those games from the eighties see those tall, grown men in those skimpy shorts? Thank God for Michael Jordan and longer shorts!
Back to editing. I should edit my stories too. I had originally gotten down to 165 when I first started using Res-Q 1250. Over time, with holiday eating and a more sedentary life style (working at a computer replaced swinging a hammer), my weight had crept back up to 180. I am a mere 5′8″ so the Body Mass Index (BMI) charts that insurance companies use to determine a portion of your insurability pegged me as “overweight”. According to the Insurance companies, I should weigh between 125 and 164. This is normal range for my height. I am going to include a link to a BMI chart and calculator here with the disclaimer that I don’t think it is the only predictor of good health. I think if I weighed 125 at my age, the wind would knock me over. It’s a numbers game that insurance companies play. I want to win the game, that’s all.
http://www.consumer.gov/weightloss/bmi.htm#Determine
All diets work and all diets fail. What ensures success is finding one that resonates, makes sense and works for you. I like the Isagenix program (see http://www.isamiracles.com/) because the nutritional products have made it easy for me to replace empty junk calories with nutritional calories. I have lost my gut in one month. I usually weigh in between 168 and 170 these days so about 5 more pounds to go. The interesting thing is that by curbing my intake and sticking to the replacement shakes, I found the innate intelligence of my body making some decisions for me.
For example, without realizing it, I stopped coffee. I just “forgot” to make it and after several days realized, I didn’t need it. No one said, “you must stop coffee” it just happened. And I can still drink a cup when I like but I am not dependent on it. Likewise, when I go grocery shopping, I spend much more time in the fruits and vegetable sections and avoid all the process foods altogether. That also happened “by itself.”
Really, losing weight has two parts. 1) Burning more calories than you consume. Add weight training to your exercise program brings a lot of benefit. Fat gets morphed into muscle. You will look better and feel better too. 2)Take in nutritional calories. It’s a no-brainer with a program like IsAgenix as the nutrition is already there for you and the cravings for the bad stuff disappears on its own. The Res-Q Trim system works too if you can exercise and follow the meal plans provided.
Who’s in Charge? There is only one person in charge and that is you. Choose your activities based on your “Ideal Life” list; choose your friends; choose your life; choose your health. Choose your habits. You are in charge, make no mistake about it. Congratulations on your new posting as Editor-in-Chief of your life. Don’t accept anything less.
Jay Abraham is a great visionary and can bring things to their base elements.
Why do some entrepreneurs gain levels of success so much higher than others? Most often, it’s due to the fact that they have a better philosophical strategy. They approach dealing with prospects and clients with a deep desire to really help and solve their problems. They have an external focus of how they can serve and not an internal focus of what they can get. I call it the Strategy of Preeminence.
Would you want to buy something from someone who just wants to sell or from someone who is protecting you and is looking out for your best interest? The first thing I want to do is change how you define your customers.
========================================
Customer: A person who purchases a commodity or service
Client: A person who is under the protection of another
========================================
Even if you call your buyers customers it’s important to think of them as clients. The strategy of preeminence simply means that you will not let your clients buy more or less than they need to get the results they seek. It’s a powerful yet simple strategy that can transform your business.
I’m always amazed at how many business people will say and do whatever it takes to make a one time sales rather than taking time to understand the client’s desired outcome. And then having the courage and moral obligation to tell the client what they really need. Sure, you may end up with a smaller initial sale, but you will have made a new friend. And they will buy again and again and send you referrals.
You must set the strategy of preeminence at the beginning of your relationship before someone buys from you. You can do this by becoming a trusted friend or advisor- so this needs to be a part of your presentation. Create a presentation or system that automatically includes how you worry, care, and show concern for your clients even if they decide to buy elsewhere.
You must commit yourself to a level of study that most of your clients will not want to undertake. The strategy of preeminence will help you avoid concentrating on your wants and needs and puts them where they belong —-on your clients. Imagine a father walking into a store to buy a bike for his son, what is he looking for? What does he need? Does he just want a piece of metal on two wheels? Of course not.
He’s looking for one of the most joyful experiences of a lifetime—teaching his son to ride a bike. He wants a memory that he can tell his grandkids. He wants to hear his son yell,” Look dad. No hands.” So, do you sell this father the most expensive bike in the store? Maybe if that’s the best solution to his problem. But you definitely should tell the father that you’ve seen hundreds of dads come in to buy their child’s first bike and you know how wonderful this occasion is. And possibly a less expensive model would be better because so many kids crash their bikes.
You might also want to mention that the dad should make sure he has collision insurance on his car. You make the sale and you also become a trusted advisor. The father realizes that you didn’t just sell him a bike but you protected him. He became a client. In a couple of years his son will need a new bike or he may have other kids who want new bikes. Where do you think he will go to buy it?
If you focus on giving value and advice instead of manipulating, you win over many more prospects. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen in over 30 years of working with businesses is that they focus on the wrong thing. They fall in love with their product, service, or company. However, falling in love with your clients means taking responsibility for their well-being.
You have to put their best interests ahead of your own. Here’s a few ways to establish the strategy of preeminence:
You are not just selling information, you are selling qualitative leadership.
You have to develop empathy for where your prospective clients are.
You have to adopt a different mentality to be preemptive.
Being preemptive means that you are the only viable solution to a problem, that you are the only one who understands.
You have to want to help people and connect the dots for them.
Make a commitment to start practicing this strategy in your business today and watch your results soar.
Pavane at Johns Hopkins
By · Comments*****My Story and I am sticking to it.*****
I was on a ward of Johns Hopkins in Baltimore yesterday. A junior family member had an appointment with a doctor there. I waited in the day area where patients, doctors and nurses were going about their routines.
If you ever wondered why anyone would live in Baltimore, Johns Hopkins is a pretty good reason. For the 17th consecutive year, The Johns Hopkins Hospital has topped U.S.News & World Report’s annual rankings of “America’s Best Hospitals.”
What I witnessed yesterday was humanity, fraility, medicine and the hippocratic oath in total synergy. It was like poetry in real life. It was a form of dance that could be labelled a “pavane.”
The scene, a young foreign doctor, of which Hopkins has several thousand, working with an 83 year old woman confined in a wheel chair. He was taking the lady’s blood pressure. “90 over 50, that’s low. Here you put on the stethoscope and listen”. The lady had a hard time hearing her pulse coming through the instrument. “Here, you take my blood pressure.”
The doctor strapped the BP device on his own arm and had the patient listen for his arterial pulse.
When the woman patient continued having a hard time to hear the pulse through the stethoscope, he offered that she could listen to his heartbeat. “It’s easier to hear the heartbeat.” Then he had the woman listen to her own heart beat. 30 minutes later he was still having her “play” doctor, alternating with her, who would be the “doctor” and finally moved into helping understand why she was being asked to take a new medicine.
Now I have a least one reason to believe that as a teaching institution, Hopkins could very well be the best, at least in my mind and in the mind of an 83 year old woman patient in residence there.
That’s my story and I am sticking to it.
25 Year Study Points to fruits and vegetables
By · CommentsResearchers followed more than 88,000 healthy women for almost 25 years. They examined their food choices and looked at how many had heart attacks and strokes. Those who fared best had eating habits similar to those recommended by the government to stop high blood pressure.
The plan, called the DASH diet, favors fruits, vegetables, whole grains, low-fat milk and plant-based protein over meat.
Women with those eating habits were 24 percent less likely to have a heart attack and 18 percent less likely to have a stroke than women with more typical American diets.
Those are meaningful reductions since these diseases are so common. About two in five
Previous research has shown this kind of diet can help prevent high blood pressure and cholesterol, which both can lead to heart attacks.
The new study appears in Monday’s Archives of Internal Medicine.
People might think, “I don’t have high blood pressure, so I don’t have to follow it,” said
About 15,000 women in the study had diets that closely resembled the low blood pressure diet. They ate about twice as many fruits, vegetables and grains as the estimated 18,000 women whose diets more closely resembled typical American eating habits.
Although the study only followed women, Fung said men would probably get similar benefits from the approach.
The study was limited because it merely tracked the women and their habits for 24 years. That’s a less rigorous method than randomly assigning equal groups of women different diets and comparing results. But that would be extremely difficult to do for such a long time.
Given that limitation, Dr. Laura Svetkey, director of Duke University’s hypertension center, said the study provides the best evidence yet of important long-term benefits from a low blood pressure diet.
“It’s nice to see research that really is aimed at helping people with prevention in a very practical way,” Svetkey said. She noted that the DASH diet, which stands for Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension, is available free on the National Institutes of Health Web site. The study was funded with NIH grants.
Dr. Nieca Goldberg, medical director of
“There has to be a greater emphasis on the way we live our lives,” she said.
“The first wealth is health.”
This email is intended exclusively for the persons to which it is addressed. This communication may contain information that is privileged or confidential. If you are not the named addressee, you are not authorized to read, print, retain, copy or disseminate any part of this message. The information provided in this email is for informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for advice from your physician or other health care professional.
Heartfelt Thought for Valentine’s
By · CommentsValentine’s Day may bring to mind heart-shaped boxes filled with chocolates, but please take just a moment today to consider the state of your real heart.
As women, we are somewhat protected from heart disease, at least until menopause. That’s one of the wonderful attributes of having estrogen coursing through our veins. This hormone keeps up our HDL (”good”) cholesterol. Over time, though, especially after menopause, our risk of heart attacks catches up with that of men.
Because more women are living longer, cardiovascular disease has actually surpassed cancer as the No. 1 cause of death among women. According to The American Heart Association, in 2004 around 460,000 women died from heart disease in the United States, compared to 270,000 from all types of cancer (of which 41,000 were from breast cancer).
Since cancer screening and treatment for women have advanced so far, we now need to focus on better screening and prevention of heart disease in women. This goal becomes even more important as our collective girth grows and time for healthy meals and exercise dwindles.
I don’t know about you but, personally, I have yet to sign up for that yoga class, and last month I managed to make exactly one home-cooked dinner. Unfortunately, my own poor habits are all too common. I just happen to be lucky to have genetics on my side - no one in my family has had a heart attack or stroke in their golden years (yet).
During my stint of working in a hospital’s Cardiac Intensive Care Unit, I met plenty of folks who had suffered the agony of a heart attack or stroke or, worse, were admitted again and again to the unit for specialized chronic cardiac care.
Beyond these disorders are all the other associated blood vessel problems, such as narrowing of the carotid artery by plaques (carotid stenosis) or a bulge in the wall of the aorta (aortic aneurysm), conditions that require risky surgeries to prevent life-threatening events.
I can still hear the words of a patient who had severe heart disease: “I wish I could go back and take that cholesterol medicine to have avoided all this.”
The medicines mentioned by this patient, called statins, are certainly capable of changing the future of heart disease. They have been proven to reduce the rate of first and repeat heart attacks. But, starting right now, you can take other, more straightforward steps to avoid such an outcome yourself.
So when you see those adorable silk chocolate boxes this holiday, be reminded that you can care for your own precious heart!
© 2007 Johns Hopkins University. All Rights Reserved. This article from Johns Hopkins University is provided as a service by Yahoo. All materials are produced independently by Johns Hopkins University, which is solely responsible for its content.
Work Out Like T.O. - Bodylastics!
By · CommentsWork Out Like Terrell Owens! Results may vary!
Honestly, this is one of the most sensible programs that gets results and doesn’t cost much! Check it out.
GoDaddy.com
By · Comments GoDaddy.com is just one of those companies that make it easy to do business with. They are a company with an excellent reputation and I just love their phone support. When you are ready to register a domain, or need hosting, use Godaddy.com. That is who I use.
GoDaddy.com Hosting Plans
1ShoppingCart.com
By · CommentsI highely recommend 1shoppingcart.com
There are dozens of Shopping Cart software vendors. How can you make sure you find the right one? We scour the internet for the most respected and professional shopping cart solutions, and rigorously investigated their various pros and cons. Whether you are setting up a small internet business, or a robust international shopping website, we will help you make the right decision in buying shopping cart software.
What is a shopping cart? It is special software (either than runs on your website, or runs on a third-party website) that turns your website into a full-featured ecommerce shopping site. Good shopping cart software is friendly to search engines, can remember all your customers, and can even power an affiliate program that can boost sales on your website.
Increase your sales by 100% Guaranteed!
Click Here to Enter 1ShoppingCart.com
Testimonial: I took in a large boatload of money last year using 1shoppingcart.com! Very easy to use and help is only a phone call away when I couldn’t figure something out!
-Owner of OptimalHealthRSQ.com
Aweber.com - What it’s for
By · CommentsI recommend Aweber.com for Email and Auto Responders
Every internet marketer needs a quality opt-in email autoresponder system to communicate with prospects and customers. I met Tom, the founder at the Big Seminar in Atlanta and was fascinated with his expertise. Don’t hesitate to pay the small subscription that is used by little guys and big guys. Corporate customers includes the likes of American Express Inc.
Solutions
Located in Newtown, PA AWeber Communications develops and manages online opt-in email newsletters, follow-up automation, and email deliverability services for small business customers around the world. Customers access our website 24/7 to manage and send their newsletters to recipients who have specifically opted in on their website to receive that information.
Expertise
AWeber’s founder, Tom Kulzer, believes very strongly in ethical opt-in email marketing and has developed strong policies and procedures to prevent abuse. With zero tolerance for spam abuse Tom is frequently called upon to speak at industry anti-spam conferences. Email deliverability management is large part of daily operations to ensure that the opt-in newsletters for AWeber’s thousands of small businesses around the world are reliably delivered. This is also a frequent topic of conference speeches and telephone conference calls. AWeber’s Education team also hold weekly live video webinar training sessions teaching the basics of ethical opt-in email marketing.
Quality
The entire AWeber team is dedicated to providing fast, reliable, cost effective, fully supported follow up and newsletter solutions. We back up those technical solutions with quality customer service that can’t be found with competitors.
We are a privately held, profitable company in business since 1998.
Sign up: Aweber.com