YOUR LIFE A-Z:QUALIFY

JUST BE -NOTHING ELSE REQUIRED

QUALIFY

Have you spent your entire life trying to feel QUALIFIED to be alive?  Are you approaching life as if you need to earn your right to exist?  That style of living is proving to be very burdensome isn’t it?  So today let’s reframe the word QUALIFY to work for you rather than against you.  To QUALIFY means declaring competency or adequate skill in a certain area.  For instance, one must have a QUALIFYING time to run the Boston or New York Marathons.  Why?  The main issue is safety.  If all marathon enthusiast could sign up for either of those marathons by just paying the fee then the streets and cities would be overbooked and overran with slow pokes who are going to take hours to finish. The slowpokes are not bad people, matter of fact, they are pretty amazing people because they are running twenty-six miles for the fun of it.  Those slow pokes have many alternative options for running marathons and need to choose from what is available to her/him.  The same applies to your daily life and daily choices.  You do not have to QUALIFY to be on this planet.  You do not need to QUALIFY to take up space or breathe the air around you.  You do however, need to QUALIFY with your head and heart that you are allowed to exist and then choose to exist well.  The important factor, as with marathon runners, is to live life for the fun of it.   Having fun in life is the QUALIFYING denominator that makes you human.

YOUR LIFE A-Z:ALERT

YOU WON'T SEE THE DRAGON FLY IF YOU ARE NOT ALERT

ALERT:

Being ALERT to the moment you are living in currently is the most important thing you can do on a daily basis.  ALERT has a sense of wakefulness about it and at times a sense of urgency to it.  Notice the colors, smells, textures, and nuances around you. Noticing is the action of awareness.  Alertness takes it one step further.  Notice what is different about your environment and then add the component of feeling to it.  How are you feeling good about the space you are in?   What can you change to help you feel better?  

If you took a moment and closed your eyes, what is the first thing that comes to your mind?  It came from your unedited gut.  It is attempting to tell you something important but you keep pushing it away.  This, “first thing,” might be as simple as remembering the dishes in the sink.  If so, just get up and do them.  But this “first thing” might be that gnawing thought that you are not happy at your job.  That is more complex, but still needs you to be ALERT and take action to do something different about it in order to be happier in your life.  Thus be ALERT!  Be ALERT to all of the nuances in your environment and your emotional belly so that you can live a life as deliberate and as happy as possible.  Being ALERT is having the “on” switch on in your emotional belly.  Be ALERT to it. 

YOUR LIFE A-Z ZEST

ZEST CAN BE MESSY. BUT WORTH THE EFFORT

ZEST

Finishing our first 26 Days on the Twenty Minute Coach ends with the word ZEST. Zest is that which enhances flavor, adding taste to what already exists.  Part of this year is building on what is already working for you.  What are your resources, strengths, accomplishments?  Take some time today to list them and really enjoy drinking them in.  It is easier to move forward in our lives, using the energy of the positive, rather than listening to the negative chatter that goes on like irritating static in the background.  Positive builds more positive.  Negative builds more negativity and is destructive.  Choose one thing from your positive list that you want to enhance over the next few days.  Add some flavoring to your choice.  What can you do to make it better? 

Zest, such as lemon or orange, creates a more enjoyable, gourmet taste to any of its desirable dishes.  What will help you feel more passionate about what you are already doing?  That in and of itself is the zest of life!  Enjoying more of what we love to do, and doing it better than we can even imagine is part of creating the life we love to live.  This is the year to get past just managing or coping with life.  It is also a year of understanding hope is a very passive energy that lures us into standing still and wanting things to change for us.  Embrace the change by adding some ZEST to your already successful start to the year.