Take Time

Take time to think.

Time to feel. Time to celebrate. Time to consider. Time to visualize. Time to imagine. Time to dream. Time to create. Time to sort out. Time to reflect. Time to ponder. Time to process. Time to mourn. Time to mediate. Time to mull over. Time to wonder. Time to inquire. Time to marvel. Time to love. Time to laugh. Time to enjoy. Time to reconnect. Time to disconnect.

Time.

Time to take into your cells and process all the nuances and details, emotions and ideas, experiences and thoughts you experience every day.

Time to remember who you are.

Time to remember how powerful, resilient, strong and glorious you really are.

Everyday.

Without taking time, you end up reacting to life, rather than creating life.

Take time, it’s non-negotiable.

I bet like me and the other 108 million Americans you’ve not only tried to get healthy more than a few times this past year, but you’ve also contributed to the 20 million dollar diet industry in some way.

I bet like I was you are one of the every two Americans who suffers from one chronic disease (I don’t any longer!), or perhaps you are the one of the every four who suffers from 2 or more chronic diseases?

From 25 years of research and study, personal inquiry and experience, I know that you’ve got this whole healthy game wrong.

Getting healthy with lasting results is not about your next best recipe. Getting healthy with lasting results is not about a sporadic fitness practice either. Actually, getting healthy with lasting results is not even about getting healthy, or ‘we’ wouldn’t be so unhealthy and sick.

Read more here

Jon Kabat-Zinn, renowned creator of the Stress Reduction Clinic and the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society at the University of Massachusetts Medical School, and student and teacher of the benefits of mindfulness in our lives,  says:

Concentration is a cornerstone of mindfulness practice. Your mindfulness will only be as robust as the capacity of your mind to be calm and stable.

I’ve long admired Kabat-Zinns’s work and have attended workshops held by one of his highly trained educators. He is so very right that mindfulness can help us cope with stress, anxiety, pain, and illness.

But there is one very important variable missing that I’ve not heard anyone point to since immersing myself in the world of meditation and “mindfulness based stress reduction” (MBSR), or any other form of meditation.

What if you can’t concentrate? What if inflammation in your body, which of course means inflammation in your brain too, since your brain is part of your body, has impacted your ability to concentrate?

Do you try to meditate, to no avail and feel yourself a failure? And what happens with these feelings of failure? Where do they go? Do they manifest in other areas of your life, along with your inability to focus and concentrate? Who do you think you are now that you can’t focus and concentrate? How does your inability to focus and concentrate manifest in your life, at your the job, in your relationships, in your ability to keep up and produce results?

Alas, I work to empower those committed to healing their bodies and leveling up in all areas of life precisely because of the sequence of responses that result from the questions raised above.

Chronic disease and the backlash of it’s effects are not necessarily the first problem I am concerned with, however, as an Executive Health and Life Coach.

I am concerned with your quality of life. I am concerned with who you think you are as a result of the myriad chronic symptoms you experience, the myriad chronic symptoms that you consider your new normal, the myriad chronic symptoms that you attribute to ‘getting older,’ the myriad chronic symptoms that you correlate with your chronic disease and how these symptoms effect you and your life.

Healing your body is paramount. Paramount. Healing your body is paramount for you to achieve all that you are capable of achieving. Healing your body is paramount for you to create. To innovate. To deliver. To defy. To surmount. Accomplish. Solve. Assert. Aspire. Triumph. Dream. Imagine. Argue. Discover. Negotiate. Help. Explore. Influence. Laugh … and love. Yes, and to love on the level that exceeds the superficial realms of fleeting bliss. And to focus and concentrate long enough to choose clearly what is best for you “in your one wild and precious life.”

Healing your body is the first step to you bringing forth in your one lifetime the very best you have to offer.

Healing your body is essential if you hope to ever achieve all that you are capable of achieving.

Healing your body is flat-out non-negotiable to experience the deeper sweetnesses life has to offer.

Intuitively you know it’s time to pick up your health game.

Everyday, or most everyday you wake up feeling tired before your day even begins. You experience a chronic cough. Maybe stiff joints.

Perhaps lower back pain or belly bloat. Maybe even moodiness, brain fog and/or poor concentration… and it’s impacting your productivity at work, in your life, in your relationships and at home.

Feeling less than great is your new normal and you don’t like it.

You want to feel energetic again. You want to be able to exceed the results you once were able to consistently produce.

You want to focus your energy on moving forward and ‘squeezing more out of life,’ rather than focusing on chronic symptoms, doctors visits, medications and poor business and life results.

You want to reclaim “I am the Captain of my fate mode again,’ rather than reactionary mode preoccupied with symptoms.

I offer you a foundational credo from my coaching practice that I recommend to all my clients.

I call it Green 3-Ways.

Integrate Green 3-Ways daily and you will begin to shift the quality of your life in ways you never imagined possible from food alone.

Your energy will skyrocket. Your ability to focus, concentrate and remember will sharpen! Your digestion will get stronger and your moods will feel balanced.

Chronic symptoms will begin to subside and renewed energy and clarity will captivate your attention so much that you will feel compelled to up level your healthy eating and healthy lifestyle game.

Green Vegetable Juice

Fresh pressed green vegetable juice alone is a total game changer and my first recommendation for healing the body and reclaiming your health (yes think all the attributes associated with youth). Think an IV infusion of pure vitamin and mineral-water-rich, enzyme-active and phytonutrient laden fuel directed straight to your cells and tissues, and you’d be spot on.

Green vegetable juice requires no digestive fire (energy), so you deeply nourish every cell, tissue and organ in your body, without expending energy. Begin your day, ‘break your fast’ with green juice to support your body’s renewal, revitalizing and rebooting processes and seriously … watch the magic begin!

Green Smoothies

Green Smoothies are a hot-ticket healthy drink for many these days. Why? Essentially, you can create a whole, nutrient-dense ‘meal-in-a’glass’ as the best fast-food option possible. Think liquid salad with endless ways to ‘beef up’ the nutrition you want to add to your meal in very delicious blends.

Because smoothies are whole food combinations, they are more satiating than a juice and will easily hold you through that board meeting you’ve got to attend.

By adding ingredients like kale or spinach, almond butter or avocado, with fresh berries or a green apple, you retain all the fiber of each ingredient, so smoothies ‘hold you longer,’ and very easily stand in as a meal replacement. Do note, many pre-made or ‘smoothie-bar’ smoothies are laden with sugar and unhealthy additives, so are not a healthy alternative. If it works better for you to buy your smoothie, find a smoothie/juice bar that offers whole food and fresh blends made to order for you.

Green Salad

I recommend a ‘giant-sized’ salad as a meal everyday — yes, a salad that you once might have made for a first course for your whole family will now be your lunch or dinner.

Include your favorite green and/or wild lettuces, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and especially sprouts, avocados and olives. You can even make a salad of just simple greens, but do note that ingredients like sprouts peak in nutritional value, and avocados and olives will satiate you and satisfy you because of their healthy plant-based fats.

To dress your salad, I recommend two of my favorite, but ‘atypical’ mouth-watering delicious ‘dressings as ‘new’ lighter fare recommendations — fresh marinara or fresh salsa. Both ‘dressings’ will transform your salad to a whole ‘next-level-healthy-salad-experience’ while keeping fat to a minimum (No I am not recommending against healthy plant-based fats. Healthy fats are essential, but layering an oil based dressing on top of olives and/or avocados is more than you need.)

Even when on a business luncheon, ask your server to bring a side of marinara or salsa with your salad … everyone at the table will be envying you and your healthy choice!

When making your salad at home, I recommend, when possible, to buy your greens, lettuces and vegetables from your local farmer. Research says that local and seasonal produce peaks in flavor and nutritional density.

With this 3-way formula, including a green juice, a green smoothie and a ‘giant-sized’ green salad everyday, you will exponentially increase the density of nutrition you take in everyday.

You will decrease inflammation and lighten the digestive energy required to process the heavier foods we’ve all been acculturated to associate with common meal options.

Green 3-Ways will change your life in a very pleasing and unexpected ways!

Jim Rohn, one of the key voices from the personal development world, offers us an awesome ‘rags-to-riches’ story laced with commitment to goodness and excellence.

One of his quotes landed for me early on, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Rohn believed that by association, we adopt the thoughts, habits, actions and behaviors of the five people we spend most of our time with, which got me thinking about who I spent most of my time with and the ways they influenced my outlook and ideas of what is possible in life.

I would be telling a half-truth if I didn’t say how much this one idea shaped my life for the better.

But what I’ve seen over and over again among highly skilled execs is that instead of those top 5 inspiring them to the next level, they lose connection to themselves, their hopes, their dreams, and their vision of life because they are so driven by the lessons and successes of their mentors.

I’ve attended several events expecting to get to know a person better from their presentation and work, to only find yet another Tony Robbins ‘wanna-be.’ Events where original thoughts seemed missing, and replaced with filler-content, the no heart, no soul, no individuality, mass-produced regurgitation material and themes.

Admittedly, I got pulled into that mindset too, but I knew I was losing myself and my confidence in my voice and ideas.

So, I took these steps to free myself from the mindset of my top 5, to find my strongest voice, my unwavering conviction, my moral compass and my resolute confidence to deliver everyday. Read more here at Boston News Network

Did you ever have a dream-come-true-experience that you never even thought was possible? I had my dream-come-true-experience in the fall of 1995. My first semester at Mount Holyoke College.

It was a fall afternoon. Yes, my first semester as a full time student at our country’s first women’s college, an opportunity that never even existed on my radar. I was a young, single-mother, so such an opportunity did not even occur to me amidst my life of paying light and oil bills, Little League and “Monopoly,” mowing the lawn and buying groceries.

I sat in my usual chair at the mahogany table in her office. Sunlight poured through the two windows at the end of a room that felt more like a grandmother’s parlor, with two big-overstuffed, tapestry wing-chairs.

“Dear, don’t you know how to write with an active voice?” Read more here at Huffington Post 

The thing that stumps most of us about creating great health and energy is we don’t get that creating healthy eating and healthy lifestyle habits is really more about shifting our thoughts, shifting our mindset, than it is about the perfect recipe. The pursuit of the next best diet, the next best healthy eating program, and even the next best recipe stays front and center, like the proverbial gerbil on the ever-spinning-gerbil — wheel, without ever accessing the ginormous benefits that rise when vibrant health and soaring energy are achieved with approaches that produce results that last.

As a holistic health coach that’s studied health and wellness, personal development and human potential for 25 years, I’ve learned over and over again that I can guide clients to healthy eating practices all day long, but without implementing strategies that I learned from the success experts, the results are more often than not short-lived.

Success experts know the secrets to producing results that last — maybe not necessarily about health, but success is success, right?

I’ve discovered that the credos for success in any area of life can be applied to every area of life when we want to produce results.

Poor health and a lack of self-discipline led me to the world of health and self-discipline. Early in life I didn’t know the majesty of accomplishment self-discipline offered. It just didn’t exist on my radar.

But in 2006 I made the decision to own my health and my life in very new and meaningful ways and formed what I call “Save My Sass Incorporated.” I was very clear that I needed to own my life, my health and my word to myself in ways that empowered me, so I chose one goal. I was new to goal setting at the time and had heard that it was best if I started with one goal — nail it down, and grow my vision from there.

My one goal? I chose to juice fresh juice at least four mornings per week to see how it would impact my health and wellbeing. The success I created with that one goal set into motion a whole next-level life for me, from the whole next-level health I began to experience.

My daily commitment to juicing led to a whole-life transformation because of the enormous health benefits that one commitment triggered. Yes, that is when I began to notice a whole new horizon rising in front of me because I literally felt that much better. I now say to clients, it’s like the ‘stuff’ that bothers you will simply fall off your radar if you follow my lead with healing your body and training your mind. I began to feel so good that I no longer even saw the “stuff” that used to trigger me.

I apply the following four “secrets” I learned from success experts like a religion in all areas of life. As I’ve learned over and over, these four ‘success expert secrets’ will help you nail down results in your health and in every area of your life. Read here at Huffington Post

How many times have you kicked yourself for not achieving your full potential?

I’ve spent the past 25 years studying human potential and the challenges people experience everyday to better understand why some people produce such great success in their lives, and why some don’t.

My inquiry began many years back when I watched the lifestyle patterns of a very successful businessman who frequented a restaurant where I worked. Though I worked 50+ hours a week, I noted hard work alone was not the only necessary variable to achieving success. I learned that hard work matters, but I also learned that there are other important variables that contribute to achieving success, or not.

As I expanded my personal inquiry to gain a broader understanding of human potential and all that is possible, I identified five ways that will ensure you limit your success in life, that will ensure you stop reaching, growing and expanding if you don’t develop them.

Read more here at Boston News Network

Be true to you.

Be true to you. There is nothing worth having or doing in this one precious life, if it asks you to be anything less than your true you. Some will draw to you. Some will draw away. Let it all flow freely. We each have our own journey and flow is the natural process of life, so let go and flow with everything that comes and everything that goes, and always, always, always, Be true to You.