Appreciating your Life

"Joy has nothing to do with material things, or with man's outward circumstance... A man living in the lap of luxury can be wretched, and a man in the depths of poverty can overflow with joy.”

William Barclay

In this week’s post, we continue to explore ideas and distinctions for overcoming patterns of greeding and for ‘wealthing your life’ with true inner and outer wealth.

Accepting and appreciating your self

According to the father of Cognitive Psychology, Dr Albert Ellis, psychologically healthy people are usually glad to be alive and accept themselves simply because they are alive and have some capacity to enjoy themselves and appreciate their lives. “They refuse to measure their intrinsic worth by their extrinsic accomplishments, materialistic possessions and by what others think of them.”

This ability to appreciate your life circumstances and situations is a life enhancing adaptive coping strategy. It helps you overcome obstacles and buffers you against greed, stress and difficult life circumstances.

Sometimes patterns of greeding are a futile attempt to cope with stress or problems in life – “when the going gets tough, the tough go shopping” syndrome. But as we’ve seen in previous blog posts (e.g. Overcoming the hedonic treadmill), the satiation of desire never feels as good as the desire itself, leading to a vicious cycle of wanting more and more. Alternatively, by accepting and appreciating your self and your life and focusing on gratitude and appreciation you can overcome the life denying enemy to happiness of greed and selfishness.

The Blessings of Gratitude

Dr. Robert Emmons, a psychology professor at the University of California-Davis has spent the last decade studying gratitude. His research has shown that people who regularly practice grateful thinking are more than 25 percent happier, suffer lower levels of stress, are healthier and even sleep better. And I think you'd agree that these are all incredibly life enhancing things.

The practice of gratitude has also been found to be incompatible with negative emotions, and can inhibit feelings of envy, bitterness, anger, and greed. You simply can’t do greeding and other negative emoting while focusing on gratitude and appreciation. The expression of gratitude also stimulates moral behavior, such as kindness and helping, and increases social bonding.

What can you do?

So to increase gratitude in your life, use the easy and very beneficial Positive Psychology exercises covered in earlier and upcoming blog posts. For instance, make a practice of counting your blessings via a daily Gratitude Journal. In this process you write 3 or more things each day that you feel blessed with in life and really savour and appreciate them. Keep it beside your bed and fill it in each evening before sleep. Review it each morning.

Or use a Gratitude Rock or Item as a trigger to remind yourself to remember things you feel grateful for. I use a small beautiful rock I found on my favourite beach. I’ve placed my Gratitude Rock on my kitchen bench and every time I see it, I make a habit of using it as a reminder and trigger to think of something I truly appreciate about my life. It’s such a life enhancing thing to do, it feels great and I highly recommend it.

You can also send Gratitude Letters, emails or messages to those who have helped you and you appreciate. Just imagine how life enhancing receiving an unsolicited message of gratitude or appreciation will have been for one of your friends, family, mentors, colleagues or loved ones. And the wonderful thing is, giving gratitude has as much benefit and positivity for those who send it as for those who receive it.

Inner Wealthing - A spirit of generosity

In a sense it’s about creating and evoking a spirit of joy and generosity in your life and your interactions with others. There’s always something or someone you can feel grateful for or towards.

Generously celebrate your blessings, savor them and focus on the positives in your life. Even in the midst of the worst of life’s challenges, you can always choose to place your focus on past blessings and future possibilities. And truly, isn’t that incredibly life enhancing!


Awareness Questions – Savouring Gratitude

Ask Yourself:

• What are the blessings in my life? Who and what can I show appreciation for?
• What positive aspects of my life and my self can I fully savour and appreciate?
• How can I focus more on the delights and abundance of the simple joys in my life?

with appreciation and joy,

Grant

Satiating the Hunger of Greed

In this post I want to share with you a simple yet powerful and life enhancing technique based on NLP and Positive Psychology for overcoming greeding patterns and thereby ‘wealthing your life’.

Pattern interrupting greeding
Since greed utilises many of the same biological circuits as sexuality and hunger, you can satiate these primitive mechanisms by sending messages to your heart-brain and gut-brain to quell them. Remember also that positive emotions undo and inoculate against negative emotions and that gratitude and appreciation overcome greed.

The following technique uses heart-breathing and creative feeling to pattern interrupt the process of greeding.

Interrupt patterns of greed by:

• Recall an act of kindness you did for someone. Feel pleasure in having performed it. As you remember this experience fully, focus on breathing your feelings of love, caring and appreciation into your heart.

• As you are feeling deep and strong feelings of positivity, love, kindness and generosity in and around your heart, begin to expand and move these kind and loving feelings up into your head and down into your stomach and gut region. You can even send them lower into your groin region.

• Continue to breathe in feelings of love and kindness and spread and expand them throughout your body, with specific awareness to deep in your gut.

• Talk to your heart and gut-brains and tell them they are satiated. Reassure them they are well and that your life is filled with a wealth of happiness. Tell them you are satiated and replete.

You’ll find this technique is very powerful and can stop selfishness and greed in its tracks.

Practice it. Greeding comes from parts of your primitive multi-mind attempting to gain more and more because they have not received the message that you have achieved your outcomes and enough is now enough. By sending appropriate messages to your unconscious mind via your heart-brain and enteric-brain, you bring your system back into balance and stop the vicious cycle of patterns of greeding.


Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

life enhancing thoughts and smiles,

Grant

Overcoming the Hedonic Treadmill

"The secret of contentment is knowing how to enjoy what you have.”

Lin Yutang

There is a tendency in our lives to adapt to the prevailing conditions and for things, no matter how distorted or extreme to become ‘normal’ before long. Research has found that people who have either experienced incredibly positive events such as winning the lottery, and people who have experienced extremely negative events such as becoming blind or quadriplegic, have an initial positive or negative response respectively, then within less than a year largely revert to their normal levels of happiness. The joy and sadness of good and bad events tends to fade with time.

On the Hedonic Treadmill

In the field of Positive Psychology, this effect is called the ‘Hedonic Treadmill’ and it’s particularly germane to the subject of greed and wealth. Research on the hedonic treadmill has shown that as a person makes more money, their expectations and desires typically rise, resulting in no permanent gain in happiness.

Part of the process of greeding is the belief that the satiation of a desire will lead to ongoing positive feelings and experiences. But, as the research on the hedonic treadmill suggests, the initial positive response to satiating your desires will be fleeting. Before long, your feelings and levels of happiness will return to the norm, leaving you back on the treadmill. You’ll then need to increase your wants and desires and continue questing for more.

Unless you do something differently, over time you’ll end up stuck on this tiresome hedonic treadmill of greed and all it will ultimately achieve is leaving you feeling no better than before and with a constant unsatisfied need for more and more. As you can imagine, this is not particularly life enhancing... 

Shift your focus

The hedonic treadmill effect is particularly applicable to happiness based on pleasure.

Remember, research in Positive Psychology has shown there are three components to a happy life – pleasure, engagement and meaning. The antidote to the hedonic treadmill is to shift your focus from pleasure to a greater focus on engagement and meaning. By living a life filled with purpose and meaning and focusing on helping others you’ll experience a life that is deeply satisfying and doesn’t rely on an ongoing greed for pleasure and surface enjoyment.

Also, stop basing happiness on external objects and possessions. Instead, look to your own inner resources and competencies to generate joy and happiness in your life and the life of others. Watch out for patterns of greeding and hedonic treadmill effects in your life, and avoid them as the true life denying enemies they really are.

Success Strategy – Loving Kindness Meditation

Research by Positive Psychologist Dr. Barbara Fredrickson has shown that the practice of the Buddhist technique of Loving Kindness Meditation can mitigate the effects of the hedonic treadmill. When practiced for as little as an hour per week, Loving Kindness Meditation can enhance positive emotions and buffer against negative emotions such as greed, fear and envy.

Loving Kindness Meditation is a meditational practice in which you send out thoughts and feelings of love, kindness and well-being to all sentient beings. It involves 4 phases, with each phase lasting approximately 5 minutes. The meditation can be done as a visualisation in which you imagine and feel a sphere of love and light around yourself and then radiate it out from yourself. It can also be done as a verbal exercise in which you repeat phrases or mantras while remembering and recalling positive memories of love and kindness.

1. The practice begins by focussing on developing a loving acceptance of your self. This is the first phase. Fill yourself with thoughts, feelings and images of love, caring and acceptance. Repeat words like “I love and care for myself. I deserve happiness, health and love.” Visualise yourself filled with a radiant ball of love centered round your heart and radiating throughout your body and your life. Do this for 5 minutes.

2. The second phase involves meditating on loving kindness for someone you already care about and love. This could be a close friend, a parent, a lover, a mentor, teacher or benefactor. Concentrate on sending them feelings and messages of loving kindness. Visualise the light of your loving kindness and compassion spreading from your heart out to them, surrounding and filling them and their life.

3. In the next phase, you shift your visualisation and meditation to someone you are neutral to, perhaps a stranger or an acquaintance. Do this for 5 minutes also, before moving on to phase 4.

4. The final phase is more challenging. In this phase you focus on sending loving kindness to people that you dislike or who have been difficult or hostile towards you. Feel and imagine enveloping them in compassion, forgiveness and kindness. You can also spread your thoughts of loving kindness out to all beings in the world, encompassing all sentient creatures, all people.

True Inner Wealth

You will find that this meditation exercise feels fantastic and has a lasting effect that stays with you for many, many hours. Indeed, Dr. Fredrickson’s research shows that the more you practice the meditation the longer the effect lasts and spreads across the contexts of your life, generating emotional and psychological resources that support ongoing happiness and success. Now that is true life enhancing inner wealth!


peace and life enhancing thoughts,
Grant

And here is Dr Fredrickson's book on her research for those who want to learn more:

Positivity: Groundbreaking Research to Release Your Inner Optimist and Thrive

Producing vs Consuming

“Earn a dollar, spend 80cents... happiness!

Earn a dollar, spend $1.20... misery!!!”

In this weeks post, we continue exploring ideas and distinctions on ‘wealthing your life’ - how to create true wealth, joy and life enhancing happiness. Remember, the key with wealthing your life is to bypass the greed for mere money and instead build skills and strategies into your life for creating life enhancing wealth.

Let me share another story from my life...

Many years ago I worked with a fellow consultant who was constantly broke. Though he earned hundreds of dollars an hour, he had no money in the bank and no investments or assets to his name. His problem was he consumed more than he produced! He would waste his money on expensive meals, pointless and costly toys and high priced rental accommodation. Everything was hired, leased or rented. We called him ‘gadget boy’ because he always had to have the latest gadget or technology on the market and as soon as it was a few months old he would give it away to someone else.

He owned no real wealth of any sort and his outgoings were equal to or larger than his income. He often lived on a buffer of credit card debt while he waited for his next payment to arrive. I would occasionally have to loan him money just so he could eat a meal with me or fill his car with fuel. What a crazy life!

While he literally had a 6 figure income every year, he was one of the poorest people I know.

Thankfully, my father taught me from an early age the vital importance of producing more than I consume. He gave me the powerful thinking tool of the insight that ‘It’s not your incomings – it’s your outgoings’ that are crucial for generating wealth and living a great life. You see, you can earn a relatively modest income and be wealthier than my friend described above.

All you have to do is ensure that your expenses are much less than your income, and save the wealth that you thereby generate. Use that wealth to create investments and assets that in turn generate more income. Make your wealth work for you. Before long you’ll find you are rich in freedom and choice with a healthy buffer of wealth to support you no matter what happens in life – you’ll be financially free. It’s quite simple, maximise your incomings, minimise your outgoings and save the difference. Invest wisely and your wealth will steadily grow.

Thinking Tool – Produce more than you Consume

It’s not your incomings – it’s your outgoings!

Want to learn more, get a copy of my book: Avoiding the Enemies to HAPPINESS!

to your life enhancing success,
smiles,
Grant

Wealthing your life

"The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it."

- Thoreau

True life enhancing wealth goes beyond money and assets. Wealth is an attitude, a skill and a way of living. It’s about peace of mind, flexibility and generosity of spirit.

Research shows that more money doesn’t buy happiness. Once you have enough money for the basic necessities of a good life, more money tends to bring little additional and meaningful happiness and can even bring its own hassles and additional risks and responsibilities. Nevertheless, wealth provides freedom, choice and the ability to purchase life enhancing experiences and adventures such as overseas travel, inspirational adventure activities and the time and resources for advanced education.

In this and upcoming blog posts, I want to share with you some ideas and life enhancing strategies about wealthing your life. I hope you enjoy them and find them useful.

About Wealthing

The key to wealthing your life is to bypass the greed for mere money and instead build skills and strategies into your life for creating true wealth. Of course, I could write a whole book on Wealth Creating and many people have already done so. I highly recommend you read some.

However, I must stress that what follows is general life advice and in no way constitutes financial advice. For specific financial advice, pertinent to your life, personal situation and requirements, you should always seek professional advice from a registered Financial Advisor. With that disclaimer out of the way, let’s explore some tips, distinctions and thinking tools that support wealth creating.


Let me tell you a story...

Using Money

I was at a local produce market where I spied a flower stall filled with beautiful bouquets. “I know”, I thought “I’ll buy my beloved some beautiful flowers, she’ll love them”.

Now you see, since I teach and run workshops on negotiation I always like to practice my skills and techniques whenever I can. So I walked over to the vendor and started negotiating.

“How much discount will you give me now, for those two bunches of flowers, and make such a great customer like me, really happy?” I asked with a smile. With a cheeky glint in his eye, the vendor smoothly responded, “Ah, my friend, I can see you like a bargain. However, my prices are as low as I can go. So there’s no discount available. However, if you buy the flowers now, I can give you a bonus that is worth much more than a few dollars. How does that sound?”

We bartered back and forth for a few more rounds, as I attempted to determine how firm he was on not dropping his price and to find out what this ‘bonus’ was.

“I’ll give you some very powerful advice as the bonus” he said. “Advice that has such value it will make you much more money than you could ever get from the few dollars you could bargain on these flowers.” “And I’ll tell you what, if you don’t feel the advice is worth it, then I’ll give you the flowers for free. But I know you’ll see how powerful the idea I’ll share with you is.”

He had me very intrigued now. He’d done his negotiating job well. So I capitulated, and agreed to buy the flowers at the original price and waited anxiously for him to wrap the flowers and share with me his sage advice.

“Ok”, he said, handing me the flowers and taking my money. “When you first came over to my stall, I heard you say ‘I think I’ll spend a few dollars on these beautiful flowers for my beloved’, is that not true?”

“Yes”, I replied, “I do believe you are right.”

“Well”, he asked, “Once you have spent your money, what has happened to it?”

I pondered… what does he mean? What happens to money once you’ve spent it? I looked quizzically at him.

“It’s simple”, he smiled, “It’s gone! When you spend your money, it’s gone. You don’t have it any more.”

“However”, he continued, “if you ‘Use’ your money, rather than spending it, what happens?”

I looked at him, thinking… “I guess when you use money, you have created value with it and you still have the value”, I replied.

“Yes!”, he laughed, “you’ve got it! When you find yourself about to purchase something, ask yourself: will buying this use my hard earned money wisely or will it merely be spending it? Will this be the best use of my money? Do I really need to spend this money?”

“If you follow this powerful advice, you’ll find yourself generating true wealth. Your purchases will add value to your life and you won’t waste money spending it on frivolous purchases.” His face lit up with the biggest of smiles, as he asked, “Now tell me, isn’t that powerful advice, and isn’t it worth more than a couple of dollars saved on these beautiful flowers!”

Use money, don’t spend it!

He was right! It was fantastic advice: “Use money, don’t spend it!” What a powerful thinking tool. I thanked him profusely. He had added another useful distinction to my understanding of how to generate wealth in my life.

I truly suggest you commit this thinking tool to memory and use it and practice it every time you consider making a purchase. The tool orients you to questions of purpose, outcomes and value. Do you really need to make the purchase, will it be the best use of your money, will it add true wealth to your life? If not, then don’t make the purchase, save your money.

Use this life enhancing tool and you’ll find yourself growing and creating more wealth in your life. And stay tuned for some more life enhancing ideas, thoughts and distinctions on wealthing your life in upcoming blog posts.

Thinking Tool – Using Your Money Wisely

Use money, don’t spend it.