Tag Archives: New People

Variety Pack

Spectrum- An assorted range of responses, individuals, ideas, etc. 

The experiences in life are the things that build your life. Not the things you buy or own but the people you choose to spend your time with, the places you go, the activities you take part in, and the thoughts you want to contemplate the higher spectrum of these things you find in your world, the more well rounded your experience will be.

It seems too many people are working very hard to provide as little variety in their experience as they can. You are always looking for reasons to separate yourself from others and creating a false sense of “us” vs. “them.”  There are no real teams in the human experience, and we are all unique individuals who are connected to our humanity.  Today the challenge is to increase the spectrum of responses you have to live, people you accept, and ideas you agree as accurate about yourself.  It begins with a conscious effort to look at the thoughts you focus on each day, the emotions attached to them, the words you speak because of this affecting the world, and the actions taken in your life.

A Box of Chocolates

People are one of the biggest influences in your life. The spectrum of folks you allow into your life is going to determine the ideas you entertain, the enjoyment you have in doing things, and just the overall happiness and joy you have in your life. Surround yourself with people who are focused on material things and shallow pursuits, and you will find life a rather unhappy happenstance. But choose your people more wisely, and you will find the experience a much more positive one.

Look at the things you discuss with a friend or acquaintance and the energy attached to it. How do you feel after the conversation? Are you drained, or are you fulfilled? Back away from those that drain you and gravitate toward those that fulfill you. These are the people of ideas, possibilities, understanding, and growth.  Variety is essential to accumulate in your tribe because new insights and knowledge will come with them. Choose honesty, kindness, understanding, character, and you will have a substantial spectrum of folks providing positive to your life and avoiding negative things.

Responding With Thought

It is easy to develop a subconscious program of response. A stimulus or situation arises, and you respond out of hand one particular way or another. But learning each case in life is different and unique and may deserve a new or different level of response to be appropriate and thoughtful in all things.  Increase the spectrum of your answers, and you will increase your ability to become a more positive influence in all the lives you touch, including your own.

To respond by the impulse to a specific type of stimulus or action will cause you to stereotype and group things. That means you are not giving situations a chance to teach you before you judge them and dole out your rote thought, emotions, words, and actions surrounding them. Instead, take a moment and look at each moment and create a broader spectrum of responses you can choose from. This will allow you to grow and to influence things in your life more kindly and gently. Rather than being a robot of responses, be a caring responder with a spectrum of offers to others.

Idea Creator

Ideas are the real currency in the world. All things provide an opportunity to seek a new perspective and to develop a broad spectrum of views. Each situation you are exposed to gives you an excellent opportunity to develop ideas that can make that experience better, more efficient, and more productive for all involved.  Look at your life and the way you move through your day.  Start there and come up with ideas allowing you to get more out of your life, get up earlier, move a little faster, changing your schedule of activities. Each little change can have a significant impact if you develop and implement new ideas.

New ideas are hard to implement because a new design means change, and we are programmed to be suspicious of change. It can be great, but it can also be a painful experience, so better to stick with the prevailing situation than to risk a bad experience. But it could result in a better life, and nothing ventured means nothing gained. New ideas will be the things that are going to separate you from the crowd and allow you to thrive in any circumstance. Your creativity of ideas is the only limit you have in all of your successes. Increase the spectrum of ideas you are exposed to, and you will increase the number of ideas you have.

You should use many things in life to grow as a person for each item you understand. We are either getting better in life, or we are getting worse, and it’s right about all areas of our life, work, creativity, relationships, how we treat others, practicing positive thinking, or any other thing. Take a moment and look at the simple ways you can focus on something and expand the spectrum of factors contributing to it.  It will all begin with the thoughts you entertain about that particular thing, the emotions naturally attached to them, the words you use to express your ideas to the world, and the actions you decide to take, which affect the world in the way you want.

Quotes

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

“To change ourselves effectively, we first had to change our perceptions.”― Stephen R. Covey

“We sit silently and watch the world around us. This has taken a lifetime to learn. It seems only the old are able to sit next to one another and not say anything and still feel content. The young, brash and impatient, must always break the silence. It is a waste, for silence is pure. Silence is holy. It draws people together because only those who are comfortable with each other can sit without speaking. This is the great paradox.” ― Nicholas Sparks, The Notebook

“Humans see what they want to see.”― Rick Riordan

 

I Was So Scared that Day

I was so scared that day……..

The date was October 24, 2014 and my hands were trembling as I opened the double glass doors which would lead me inside of the gym that would become a vital part of my life.  At the time I didn’t know that. I knew I needed to do something to get in shape, I had let myself go for too long.  Most of my life I had kept in pretty good shape, but life led me to move away from that and I just turned 48 and didn’t feel good about life, I needed to get back in shape. I made the decision to commit for 60 days straight and see what happened.  I opened the door, walked in and my life started to change in a good way.  I did my 60 days, then 100, then 200 and continue to this day. I don’t workout every day, but most days I do. I have been able to build muscle, and lose fat and feel better now than I did at any point in my life.  It was the challenge of starting something new I needed to get over and once I did that and changed my personal paradigm fitness has been a part of my life and it made me look at the rest of my life to see where I could make some changes. I had to learn to accept new things in life and add them to the things I had known.

Seeking Different Things

New experiences come to us all the time, that is the spice that life gives us.  New people, places, situations, and thoughts can come to us at any moment and will always be available to us in order to allow us to move along the path of life. All lives are going to have new things in them, just as the child moves from first to second grade and eventually graduates from our educational system, so are the new things life put there to push you to learn what you need to know in order to become the best version of yourself.  Of course, we have to be willing to accept them and work with them in order for these things to provide us with all the positives we deserve. There is an art in adding the new things in the world to the things already known. Developing this skill will make you an A student at life, so let’s look at new things and see where we stack up today.

Some Positive Steps

The past is a tricky location to visit because the only way to get there is in your mind. Our minds tend to have a fuzzy recall when it comes to remembering things. We tend to focus on the positive and forget the negative. When new things come into your life we should view the past from a supportive perspective.  Don’t let the past limit you and dismiss new experiences out of hand.  Focus on the visible evidence in front of you right now to build reinforcement for the new pattern of life that you have a chance to grow from right now.  Self-reflection in a positive manner where you use true examples available to reinforce the new learning experience.  This is where you connect the new to the known in your mind.

It is important to do this connecting without bias, because often the ego we construct in our mind, pushes all things that have a remote chance of providing pain out of the way. Try to let each experience stand on its own and provide its own lesson. Evaluate the value of a new connection, activity, or thought on the merits it actually provides you and not the ones you perceive them to contain. By doing this you make all of the experiences real, factual things and avoid exercises in wishful thinking and fantasy.

Change is Real

You will really start to accept the new and tie it to the known in your life by creating an anchor to your feelings with real examples. A foundation of knowledge already exists in each of us and some things have been proven true. Attaching the new experiences to the known by making them the next logical or sensible step in the progression of your experience.

Use your power of refection to create these connections. I am sure there are some people who can create these connections organically with little effort. I am not one of them. It requires my time to look for and recognize the connections I have with the new and the known.  All time spent in contemplative thought is an opportunity to become a better, more productive person in all facets of life.  How does what I already know, apply to the new situation? What new skills do I need to create and develop?

Taking time to identify the knowledge and experience you already have and deploying it in a new way is how we grow.  This is a skill that can be applied to any new thing and the connections between the new and the known become stronger. It is also a skill to correctly identify the people who might help you with understanding the new or to support you through the changes.

In a work situation, a mentor is an invaluable resource to help guide you.  How better to learn the answers then from someone who has already taken the test. Your journey will be unique and you have to develop the skills to survive, but there is nothing wrong with learning from someone who has been there and done that before. Properly identifying the good assets from the bad is a skill and will impede or speed up your development of connecting the new to the known is the result. But the most important coach you will ever know is the one that is inside of you. Look to your instinct to help guide you through all of these things.

The Best is There for You

When you look at the new things you are creating in your life, it will begin in your imagination. Some will tell you to write it down over and over again like a magic spell, but I don’t think it’s necessary. All you need to do is to create a vision of what you want and to follow it.  You don’t need to waste time trying to convince yourself that you deserve the new, better experience, you just need to take action steps toward the new and by accepting into the already established patterns of life. You will replace old patterns and programming in your mind that don’t provide any value for you anymore, with new thoughts, actions, and people in your life.  It is natural and understanding to experience fear at the beginning of any new thing. Action will overcome fear every time, whether you are starting a new workout routine, a new job or a new relationship.  Move forward. Take your new experiences and integrate them with the things already known.

“You know how creative people are, we have to try everything until we find our niche.” ― E.A. Bucchianeri

“When you make the decision to start something new, first figure out the jobs you want to do. Then position yourself to play where no one else is playing.” ― Whitney Johnson

“I realized something on the ride. I realized if I wait until I’m not scared to try new things, then I’ll never get to try them at all.” ― Marie Sexton

Build Your Adventure Pack

The purpose of life is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.”
― Eleanor Roosevelt

Why We Need Adventure Packs

My adventure Pack
My Adventure Pack

In a conversation with a friend, they mentioned that they always kept a pack of items in their vehicle, just in case there was a cause to go on an adventure that day.  It got me to thinking that each of us should create our own “Adventure Packs” for whatever each day might bring us.  There are many things that you could do every day to make your life more of an experience if you wanted to.  I figured that why not set the tone and expect something adventurous by carrying an adventure pack, just in case.  Think of all of the adventures you might be missing out on just by not having one. The pack doesn’t have to be fancy or anything, it can just be a bag with a few of the necessities an adventurer might need.   I think there are many different experiences that can qualify as adventures, here is a short list of adventures you might have.

Physical Adventures Are Good For You And Fun

physical adventure with an adventure pack
My pack is always ready.

These are the most prevalent kind of adventures, I think, the ones that take you somewhere, on a hike, or a walk, or around the bend to see what is there.  In your daily activities, you might see a road that you wanted to walk down, or even a park you wanted to visit, to see what was there.  What is stopping you? If you have an adventure pack with a bottle of water, sun screen, a light jacket, then you will be ready for this type of excursion.  The benefits of these types of activities are improved health which is good for your heart, your mind and your soul.  The difference between a thought and an experience is action, so don’t be afraid to take that action step. Make sure you keep a snack in your adventure pack so that you will always have the energy to carry out the adventure in front of you.

Social Adventures Good For Your Mind

adventure pack for fun
Adventure packs are light weight and make you smile

These are the ones that involve getting together with someone in a social situation, going for coffee or breakfast just for the sake of socialization.  Your adventure pack doesn’t even need to have much in it to carry on this type of excitement.  If you have a strong desire to connect then you really don’t need to do anything other than a little money to pay for whatever you eat.  Most often when you visit with old friends you will have revelations and memories about yourself and them that you had forgotten a long time ago. Life is a can be a long road and it is a much happier experience when you travel it with friends. So always keep a little extra cash in your adventure pack, just in case the opportunity to connect comes up.

Simple Things which are Great

There are a bunch of simple adventures that you can experience with just a little bit of energy and imagination.  On any clear night, you have access to one of the grandest adventures on earth, the night sky.  When you make the effort to get where the lights of civilization are not a factor you can view the stars and any time you do this, you can’t help but be swept up in the power and wonder of the vastness of space.  Each star billions of miles away has a story, and you are just a very small and insignificant spec to whatever story is happening there.  You can also have the same kind of adventures at any natural wonder, a river, a lake or the ocean.  You will have to travel with your adventure pack to get to these locations most likely, but keep a map in your adventure pack and you will never get lost on your journey.

Doing Something for Others

adventure pack for visiting
My pack usually has enough to share, if not we’ll make due.

Having an adventure pack handy should allow you the freedom to help someone else.  There are many people who don’t really need anything other than a visit and a kind word.  This adventure is very low-cost and will never be out of demand.  If you don’t know who needs this type of adventure from you, look around.  There are hospitals and nursing homes with people in them who would like nothing more than a friend to talk to and share their stories with.  This is why it is always important to keep a handy list of topics with you at all times.  Remember that any commonality is a conversation in and of itself.  A sport, a team, a performance or anything that you can relate to in any way can create a conversation that will pick up someone’s day.  This type of adventure is doubly good because it is good for the person you visit and it is good for you.

In the end, there is no shortage of ways that you can enjoy life more than you do right now.  If you are already filling your life with adventures, then perhaps it is time to add new people to them.  The more the merrier is a great theme to follow as you move through life.  It is true that the more people you share your life with, the richer you will feel.   So create your own adventure pack and hit the streets, life is nothing more than an adventure waiting to happen.

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