• What if your life didn’t always revolve around you and your weight loss?
• What if you deferred your thinking about food and started using your VALUE of empathy and your strength of COMPASSION?

Why not stretch your GRATITUDE strength and start of the New Year by helping someone else. Be a hero to a hospitalized child.

Check this out: wondercapes.com

Today I am going to talk about wonderful YOU. Your self-esteem and how to get more of it.

Maybe you struggled for years but your weight often won. Maybe you’ve had bariatric surgery and have terrifically maintained your weight. If so, KUDOS!

But if you fear Thanksgiving might derail you, and you might slip up, try this:

• Get off the whine wagon! “But it’s just one day!”
• Don’t make excuses! “But it is just one day!”
• Give yourself permission to BE A SUCCESS.
• Map out your eating plan BEFORE you sit down to the table.
• Make an intention that you are a winner at life and make choices that serve you

Use your CRITICAL THINKING and COURAGE personality strengths. KNOW ahead of time that what you focus on is HAPPY HEALTH. Think now good you will feel when you don’t suffer after you get up from the table.

Celebrate yourself and your winning without whining about scarcity. You have wonderful you and many things about which to be grateful. Stop and savor YOU.

Know that I send my love and am thankful that you are sharing time with me.

Big hugs,

Judy

Ninety-nine percent of the failures come from people who have the habit of making excuses.

~  George Washington

I just joined a creatively cool and upbeat month long GRATITUDE group. It’s fun, free, and its author is my wonderfully generous coaching friend, Annie.

Check out Annie’s invite :

Dear Positive Person,

I wanted to invite you and anyone you know who may be up for some positivity to an unusual website-based community event. It’s called the 30 Days of Gratitude Project and it will be running for the 30 days of November.

The idea is to bring together people in one place to practice the art of gratitude. The purpose is to do something positive in the world at a time when we thought people could use it.

As you already know, gratitude is pretty powerful stuff! Research has shown that practcing it can help people: feel more optimism and life satisfaction; have fewer health complaints and depressed feelings; and even exercise more, sleep better and be farther along on obtaining their short-term goals!

The project is free – open to everyone (you can even join as a family, group, work dept or class).

So if you think gratitude is something you would like more of in your life – we would love to have you join us.

just go to www.30DaysofGratitude.org and register. And of course you are welcome to spread the word to other potentially grateful people as well.

Hope all is well and positive in your life. Thanks for your time,

Annie Zirkel

Want to jack up your awareness of the joys in your life that perhaps you didn’t realize were simmering like warm apple cider after the first big frost?

Join me, pretty please? Let’s compare notes and watch our happiness steam up. Can’t you just smell that apple cider now?

Autumn colors of appreciation in your life now!

Hugs,

Judy

So how can YOU be grateful today? Even if you just get up from your chair and look outside. Get moving. Breathe in confidence and DO.

Do what? Anything…just move your body and find something to savor besides food. Notice the colors around you. Find beauty. Hear the birds.

It’s your life. Look for your good. You will find it!

Big hugs,

Judy

“The best things in life are nearest: breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet.”

~ Robert Louis Stevenson

Friends are flowers in the garden of life someone once said. My Mom would say that her flowers were her friends, too. Along with her 2-legged friends. The same few she has cherished for most of her almost 90 years.

Mom’s flowers, or at least some of them, are moving this week. I head to Delaware to transplant some her her beloved orchids, geraniums, and other treasured beauties to their new sunny spot outside her door at the Heritage House Assisted Living in Milford, DE.Their fragrance and sweet familiarity will hopefully brighten her days as her fractured back and ankle heel.

It will be bittersweet for me, as I see her there and not home. But she is such a trooper. Grateful to have a beautiful little room with wonderful staff who care.

So off I fly from WI to DE tomorrow. Yes, there will be a huge bouquet of flowers in my hand. None, I know, will mean so much to her as her sweet friends from her little greenhouse at home.

Pick a beautiful bunch of fresh wild flowers, or buy a colorful bouquet.

Whose life will you “brighten up” today?

A single flower’s visage opens worlds of love and memories.

Look what loving power you have!

Why not give yourself a blossom of love as well? You always deserve joy.

So set off some  personal fireworks. Remember those people people who light up your life like the 4th of July. If they are still around, call them, flash them an email, or go surprise them with a visit.

You are a wonderful legacy!

Do you ever wonder who your life has touched?  I bet people are saluting you today, too! You make a difference everyday just because you are you.

I salute and appreciate you. Have a wonderful holiday weekend!

Sometimes our light goes out but is blown again into flame by an encounter with another human being. Each of us owes the deepest thanks to those who have rekindled this inner light.

Albert Schweitzer