Breezeway by FotoDawg

My 33rd AA birthday is November 24, 2009, but I always celebrate my recovery date on Thanksgiving. Thanksgiving Day, 1976 was the last time I drank alcohol so I have much to be grateful for every day. I have received the wonderful gift of my Constant Companion, the God of my understanding, and the wonderful love and support of my home group, Margate Cokesbury Group. Thanks to all of you for helping me through the worst six months of my life.

I have recently learned about creating a gratitude alphabet list. I really liked this idea because I could keep it current with changes as I experience them.

Some quick links about gratitude:

(1)  The Secret Power of Gratitude and How to Get It–

“Finding a sense of purpose can be as easy as doing what makes you happy. I found that living a life based on spiritual principles and helping others as much as I can makes me happy. That life is not a search for happiness but a by-product of right living. I used to think I had to change the world, you know, really make a difference! Today I look for my life purpose each and every day. My morning prayer is, “God, show me what you will have me do today and give me the strength and willingness to carry it out.” When I approach each day with this attitude, anything is possible!”

(2)  From Get Rich Slowly, a review of Happier which is a  book by Tai Ben-Shahar who teaches a class at Harvard about positive psychology. He lists these as exercises to encourage happiness:

• Create rituals. Ben-Shahar urges readers to do the things they love: reading, walking, gaming, knitting, whatever. But because it can be difficult to make time for these activities, he argues that we should create rituals around them. At a specific time every day, do the thing you love. For example, I’ve recently made it a ritual to walk a couple of miles to have lunch most afternoons. This makes me happy.
• Express gratitude. I don’t do this enough. Research indicates that you can enjoy a heightened sense of well being by keeping a daily gratitude journal. Just jot down five things you’re grateful for every day. It’s okay to repeat yourself from one day to the next. This exercise forces you to become conscious of the good things in your life.
• Set meaningful goals. When I was younger, I set goals that had little relation to who I was or what I wanted. I set goals based on what I felt was expected of me. For a goal to be worthwhile, it has to be related to your own interests. And it has to add something to your life. Pursuing meaningful goals can bring happiness to your life. (And note that it’s the pursuit of the goals that brings happiness, not the attainment of them.)
• Play to your strengths. Ben-Shahar is a fan of Appreciative Inquiry. (That website is awful, by the way — it’s written in jargon.) Appreciative Inquiry ignores the things that do not work and looks instead what has been successful. By focusing on past positive outcomes, you can build upon your strengths. Do what you’re good at. (This reminds me of Tim Ferriss’ philosophy in The 4-Hour Workweek: “Emphasize your strengths, not your weaknesses.”)
• Simplify. Ben-Shahar writes: “To raise our levels of well-being, there is no way around simplifying our lives. This means safeguarding our time, learning to say ‘no’ more often — to people as well as opportunities — which is not easy. It means prioritizing, choosing activities that we really, really want to do, while letting go of others.” As Derek Sivers recently wrote on his blog, if an opportunity doesn’t make you say “hell yeah!”, you’re better off saying “no”.

(3)  Marelisa Fabrega on her blog, Abundance Blog at Marelisa Online, lists these lessons from The Science of Getting Rich (Part Three):

(a)Get rid of the thought of competition

(b)  The importance of gratitude

(c)  The role of your will

Putrajaya Fiesta 2009 by good.to.br.A.stranger

Permanent Weight Loss: The Truth

“So if cosmetic reasons are not enough of a motivating factor for losing weight, knowing that it can severely impact your health might be. Although wanting to look good in your summer bikini might be a short term motivator it may not be enough to really compel you to make lasting changes to your lifestyle. Focusing on the risks to your health is a more serious matter that requires major changes and commitment to losing weight.”

“This leads into the next point which is that most people go on short term diets rather than committing to making lasting changes to their lifestyle. When the focus is on temporary diets, any short term weight loss usually doesn’t last and people gain the weight back. Diets focused on the short term are also not a lot of fun and many people end up abandoning them before reaching their goals.”

Better Health Through Fasting

“The restrictions–both caloric and behaviorally–can be good for us holistically because they serve as a means for disciplining ourselves all-year-around in a world in which we are too often self-absorbed and overindulgent. Fasting serves as a spiritual check, reminding us about issues of poverty and clean water supplies in the world and encouraging us to avoid overeating and wasting food. After all, way too much food ends up in garbage cans.”

Obesity Solutions- -Fat Loss 4 Idiots–A Quick Diet Plan

“Going on a quick diet plan can certainly help you in your efforts to lose weight. It would however not lead to lasting weight loss unless it is aided by a healthy lifestyle. It is plain logic, what is the use of going on a diet, losing some weight and then revert back to your “normal” diet of fast food and sugary soft drinks. Your weight loss aspirations are doomed to failure and you have wasted your time and money!”

Itchen Bridge by Rhys Jones

In starting our discussion of weight loss resources, we begin with these quick links chosen to help you get motivated. In the quick links, we give the post name, hot link to the post and small excerpt from the post.

Savoring and Mindful Eating

Mindful eating is about learning to savor food with intention and joy. Many people report that, with mindfulness, they learn to really savor the experience of eating and, paradoxically, feel full after just a few mindful bites. The Center for Mindful Eating defines the principles of mindful eating as:

• Choosing to eat food that is both pleasing and using all your senses to explore, savor and taste,
• Learning to be aware of hunger and fullness cues and letting these guide your decision to begin and stop eating,
• Acknowledging responses to food without judgment, and
• Becoming more aware of the positive and nurturing opportunities through food preparation and consumption.

Exercise to Lose Weight–No Gym Membership Required!

“When people think of how to exercise to lose weight, they often assume that they will have to buy a gym membership and workout for hours every day. Not true! Not only is it not essential, the image of pumping iron in the gym for hour after hour is a complete red herring, and here’s why..”

Why Exercise Won’t Make You Thin

“Yes, although the muscle-fat relationship is often misunderstood. According to calculations published in the journal Obesity Research by a Columbia University team in 2001, a pound of muscle burns approximately six calories a day in a resting body, compared with the two calories that a pound of fat burns. Which means that after you work out hard enough to convert, say, 10 lb. of fat to muscle — a major achievement — you would be able to eat only an extra 40 calories per day, about the amount in a teaspoon of butter, before beginning to gain weight. Good luck with that.”

Oprah and Dr. Oz Fight Back Against Acai Product Promoters

“Yesterday, Oprah Winfrey and Dr. Mehmet Oz filed suit against 40 peddlers of dietary supplements for falsely claiming that Winfrey and Oz endorsed these products.  Go Team O!  Ever since Dr. Oz praised health-promoting properties of the acai berry on Oprah’s show last year, internet marketers have been hard-selling and spamming all of us, intimating that their products were endorsed by Winfrey and/or Oz. In case you’ve been duped, neither has ever sponsored such a product—AND although you may have received a mailbox full of spam claiming that acai berry products could melt off the pounds, the Center for Science and the Public Interest says there is no evidence acai actually helps you lose weight.”

Solitude by Imapix

Many excellent posts exist that help us to organize the ways we can improve our lives. As someone who has been through a lot of personal and professional change, I always remember that the only rule for changing my life is to get into and stay in action. It usually doesn’t make any difference what I do as long as I do something.

One of my favorite bloggers, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, has written his Handbook for Life: 52 Tips for Happiness and Productivity. His suggestions for using these 52 tips are: (1) pick and choose the tips that are most helpful to you, (2) don’t do them all at once, (3) experiment, (4) none are guaranteed, and (5) these are not in any order.

From Nerds Do It Better, 100 simple ways to change your life for the better. This article is divided among the these categories:

1. Health—Good health is the foundation of a good life, so make these improvements, and they’ll resonate out to the rest of your life.

2. Social—Take these steps to change your social life for the better.

3. Emotional—Improve your emotional life with these simple strategies.

4. Financial—Make these changes to improve your life’s financial outlook.

5. Mental—Improve your mind by taking these simple steps.

6.Habits—Make these changes in your daily life to improve upon yourself.

7. Work—You spend so much time at work, but probably don’t often consider how you can improve upon this important facet of your life.

8. Community—Getting involved in your community is a great way to improve upon your life.

9. Environment—An excellent way to improve upon yourself is to reduce the negative impact you have on the world.

Some other quick links to improve your life:

My Top 10 Productivity Blogs for 2009 from organizeit.co.uk

GTD Refresh, Part 5: Building the Weekly Review Habit from lifehack.org

Singletasking: The Next Trend in Web Working?

How to Find Balance…in 13 Minutes

It Isn’t How Much You Do

Why You Do What You Do (And Why It Should Scare You)

Gracamayas-rojas by Junctions

Excerpt from one of today’s quick links–thechangingblog.com–

CHANGE might be required if:

• • You got the first job you could find out of college, and you’ve never felt passionate about it
  • Your health (mental or physical) is suffering because of your job
  • You’ve found a passion which, if only you’d known about it years ago, you’d have followed as a career.

GROWTH might be required if:

• • You know the work your company does is important, but your role is getting boring
  • You’re finding it hard to get on with your colleagues
  • You’d like to step up to the next level, within the same company

Arianna Huffington–The Huffington Post: When Will Dick Cheney’s Tower of Lies Finally Come Tumbling Down on Him?

Will Learning the Skills of Well-Being Help Us Grow Up?

New Spin on Why Women Are Pickier in Live–It May Be Because Men Typically Initiate Relationships

Can Smart Goals Make You Weathy?

Women’s Mental Health Hit Hard by Recession

The Difference Between Change and Growth–And Knowing Which You Need

Robert Scoble We’re Shipping Today: The Road to Building 43

What Really Prompts the Dog’s “Guilty Look”?

Internet-Based Therapy Effective in Treating Depression

3 Ridiculously Cheap, High=Quality Companies

Buddhists Return From Four-Year Retreat on Isle of Arran

Hate AT&T?  New iPhone, New Gripes About AT&T

NBC Executive Not Happy With Heidi, Spencer

Blue and Gold Macaw by Ralph and Jenny

New York Times–U.S. Inquiry Into Hiring at High-Tech Companies “The exact focus of the inquiry is unclear, but the people familiar with it said Justice Department lawyers appeared to be looking into whether the companies involved agreed to not actively recruit employees from each other.”

CNET News–Report: Social Networking Up 83 Percent for U.S. “Facebook enjoys the top spot among social networks, with people having spent a total of 13.9 billion minutes on the service in April of this year, 700 percent more than in April 2008, Nielsen said. Minutes spent on Twitter soared a whopping 3,712 percent to almost 300 million, versus around 7.8 million from the same month a year ago.”

Self Help Daily–Relax, For the Love of Your Brain cells, Relax! “Stress is the leading cause of mental decline.  I realize I just typed the same sentence twice, but I think it deserved twice the attention.  Here, according to Dr. Sears, is the reason why stress leads to mental decline:  When we feel stressed, our body produces the hormone cortisol.  In small to moderate amounts, it isn’t that big a deal.  Bothersome, yes, but nothing to panic over.  However, in larger amounts, get this:  IT BECOMES TOXIC TO YOUR BRAIN CELLS.  Toxic!”

The Business Insider: Silicon Alley Insider–Stephen Colbert Takes Over Newsweek “Stephen Colbert will guest edit the next issue of Newsweek. This is the first time anyone has ever guest edited the magazine in its 76 year history. We don’t think he’ll hold true to Meacham’s dream of “provocative (but not partisan) arguments,” but he’ll definitely bring a “unique voice.”

Stay N’ Alive–”With everyone up in arms over how Twitter will monetize and when it will happen, there has been one obvious missing link from the start.  Twitter has never had control over how Tweets get to the users.  They themselves have admitted the API gets used much more than their own Twitter.com site gets used, showing, to me, that there is a way, currently, Twitter could be monetizing.  Twitter has made it clear they do not intend to advertise through Tweets, which would almost certainly be rejected by their current user-base, already annoyed by the abundance of spam on the site.  What Twitter could do however, that is assuming they have control over the main methods users receive Tweets, aka their desktop clients, is insert ads into such a desktop client and their own website, unobtrusive to users.  Users will probably not even care at such ad placement, considering Google gets away with it, Yahoo and Microsoft do within their own search products.”

2.  “I started working with an amazing psychologist who turned my life around. He helped me see and discover that I had been telling myself all these negative things in my head, over and over, all these years. And I had believed every word. After a great deal of work doing Cognitive Thought Therapy*, I learned to catch myself when I started to say these negative things, to break the habit of negative thinking. I was able to stop and not get sucked into the black spiral that so easily could consume me. I learned to see the misconceptions that I had about myself.”

3. Simplemom.net has a cute banner line: Live simply, stay sane. Life hacks for home managers. Many bloggers post on this site. Simple Mom is written and edited by founder Tsh Oxenreider . In 2009, she welcomed five new monthly columnists, each sharing their own brand of expertise.

An excerpt from Tsh: )Your home: the best company to work for)–“Running a home is not unlike running a business, and you’re doing yourself (and your family) a disservice to treat it otherwise. If your home was Home, Inc., would it succeed? Would its accounts balance financially? Would your team members thrive and find satisfaction in spending most of their waking hours there?”

Cordiva is always great, but I especially liked her “The Most Important Lesson I learned as a Community Manager”.

Check out the creator of the WP theme I use (also Sara of Tampa uses it)–he is Vladamir Prelovic and the theme is “Amazing Grace”.

Darren Rowse has a new blog and is posting about the fun and joy of creating something new. It is called TwiTip and is about Twitter, of course.

David Seah, a writer I always enjoy, has discovered  C. S. Lewis’s The Four Loves. It is one of my favorite books of all time and teaches us the differences among agape, storge, phila and eros love.

ReadWriteWeb has “Online Tools for Career Discovery and Job Search.” Excerpt from the site:

“We recently launched a new product, Jobwire, to track who has been hired for new jobs in tech and new media. In this week’s episode of RWW Live, to be broadcast live at 3.30pm PST Monday (6.30pm EST), we will discuss the state of online tools for career discovery and job searching. We have executives from Path 101, Indeed and Simply Hired joining us.”

Gretchen Rubin: Friendship and Networking–She suggests bringing people together by joining or starting a group. She asks her readers for suggestions on getting people together. As usual, her readers give some interesting feedback:team building for church have food; putting people together by common interests; encouraging people to bring an extra friend will help to meet new people; inviting people to join in an organized hike (physical fitness and new contacts as well as renewing the older friends); and scheduling phone dates.

John Hollon: The Fine Art of Knowing When to Depart–John acknowledges that while it is hard to walk away from a situation, you will be able to keep self-respect by listening to the writing on the wall. I personally leave a position when I hear from two sources that are indirectly recommending something else for me. In this post he used Jerry Yang (Yahoo) and Steve Smith(editor of Spokane Spokesman-Review. The contrast is huge between the two men’s decision to stay or to go.