Mine 2 Shine

  Day-60- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428 Find Three Great Friends Cultivating great friendships is one of the surest ways to find more happiness and joy in your life. Recent studies show that those with a wide circle of friends and family live longer, laugh more and worry less. But friendships, like all other good things in life, take time, energy and commitment. Having said this, few things will offer greater rewards. As one philosopher wrote many centuries ago, “There is nothing in the world more valuable than friendship. Those who banish it from their lives remove as it were the sun from the earth, because of all of nature’s gifts, it is the most beautiful and the most pleasing.” As I grew up, my father often said that the person with three great friends is a rich person indeed. I have never forgotten this advice and encourage you to take it to heart as well. To build deeper friendships, you must be willing to move out of your comfort zone, break t...

Day-59- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428 Write a Legacy Statement Someone once said to me that the first fifty years of life are dedicated to building one’s legitimacy while the last fifty are devoted to building one’s legacy. How true. So many of us spend the first half of our lives striving for achievement and struggling to gain respect. Once we have this legitimacy, whether it comes in the form of prestige or material possessions, we soon realize that something is missing. We then spend the remaining years of our lives trying to do what we should have done from the beginning: create a legacy. One day, my father posted a poem on the door of our fridge. It had been translated from Sanskrit and it read simply, “Spring has past, summer has gone and winter is here. And the song that I meant to sing remains unsung. I have spent my days stringing and unstringing my instrument.” These words were written by a man whose heart was filled with regret over a life...

Day-58- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428 In the most memorable scene of the wonderful movie Jerry Maguire, Tom Cruise’s character, a hard – driving sports agent, has just signed up one of the hottest draft picks in football. As he drives away form the athlete’s home in a state of utter joy, he impatiently searches from station to station on his car radio for the kind of song he can turn up loud and sing along to at the top of his lings. Finally, to his great delight, he finds it – Tom Petty’s hit “Free Falling.” And he begins to sing his heart out. Do you remember those times when you heard just the right song at just the right moment? Like Jerry Maguire, you started singing out loud and dancing with reckless abandon. In those moments, you felt fully alive, full of energy and truly happy. And all because you heard a few chords strung together in the right sequence. Music can do that to you. Music can lift your mood, put the smile back on your face and a...

  Day-56- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Become a Volunteer I find a great deal of wisdom in the ancient Persian proverb “I wept because I had no shoes until I saw a man who had no feet.” It is so easy to magnify our problems and lose sight of the many blessings we all have to be so very grateful for. Giving the gift of your time by volunteering to serve those who have less than you is an excellent way to remind yourself on a regular basis of the abundance that exists in your life. After a keynote speech on leadership I delivered to the sales team of a large insurance company, a man came up to me and told me he was one of the firm’s top producers. One of the reasons for his success, he said, was his habit of spending a few hours a week helping those less fortunate than he was. “Seeing what others don’t have keeps me awake to all the good things I do have. It prevents me from taking things for granted and,even more importantly, helps me make...

      Day-54- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Get a Coach One of the most effective ways to improve your personal and professional effectiveness and to rise to a new level of excellence is to find a mentor to coach you. Success in business and in life is a “connect the dots.” Process. All you need to do is find out the habits, disciplines and strategies that others have used to obtain their results and connect the dots by duplicating their actions. Once you follow the steps they have taken, in the order they have taken them in, you are bound to get the same results. A personal coach can illuminate your path, encourage you when times get tough and shave years off your learning curve. In my own life, I have been blessed with many mentors, people who have shown me the fundamentals of effective living and guided me in the right direction when I reached a crossroad. I found most of these special advisers by asking people whom I admi...

              Day-53- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Walk in the Woods You will never go wrong by spending time enjoying nature. There is something particularly special about walking in the woods. Your steps will feel lighter, a deep sense of inner quiet will flood your entire body and your creativity will flood your entire body and your creativity will flourish. As the famed Italian architect and painter Leonardo da Vinci said, “Through the window of the eye, the soul regards the world’s beauty… Who would believe that a small scene of nature could contain the images of the universe?” My favorite time of year is autumn. The leaves on the trees reflect the brilliant colors of the season and it’s the perfect time for long walks in the woods. Away from the noise of the city, the values I hold dearest grow clearer and I can contemplate some of life’s larger questions, questions that never seem to get answered in th...

            Day-52- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Create a Pure Environment One of the timeless truths of successful living can be stated simply: your thoughts from your world. What you focus on in your life grows, what you think about expands and what you dwell on determines your destiny. Life is a self – fulfilling prophecy – it gives you just about what you expect form it. As Helen Keller said, “No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new heaven to the human spirit.” Given this principle, the first step to becoming a happier, more serene person is to manage your thoughts and purify your thinking. One of the best ways to begin this inner work is to improve the quality of your personal environment. After a speech I gave to a large gathering in San Francisco, an elderly woman slowly walked up to me and held my hand, as people in their golden years often do. Loo...

          Day-51- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Drink Fresh Fruit Juice The foods you consume affects your moods as well as the clarity of your thinking. This is why the ancient sages ate only light foods. They knew that anything more would disturb the perfectly peaceful minds they had worked so hard to cultivate and disrupt their meditations on the true meaning of life. If you owned an expensive Formula One race car, you wouldn’t think of fueling it with anything less than premium – grade gas. Anything else would reduce its performance. So why would you put anything less than the best foods into your body, which is an even more valuable performance vehicle? Eating the wrong foods, in large quantities, will reduce your energy level, affect your health and prevent your mind from serving you to its fullest capacity. Realizing that for every greasy lunch you have, you will suffer a corresponding reduction in your level of mo...

        Day-50- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Day-50-Practice Forgiveness Forgiving someone who has wronged you is actually a selfish act rather than a selfless one. Letting go of the hostility and hatred that you may have allowed to bottle up inside you is actually something you do for yourself rather than for the benefit of the other person. As I teach in my life – coaching programs, when you bear a grudge against someone, it is almost as if you carry that person around on your back with you. He drains you of your energy, enthusiasm and peace of mind. But the moment you forgive him, you get him off your back and you can move on with the rest of the world. Mark Twain wrote that, “Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heal that crushed it.” Forgiveness is a great act of spirit and personal courage. It is also one of the best ways to elevate the quality of your life. I have discovered that every minute y...

      Day-49- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Remember the Rule of 21 As I wrote in The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, it takes about 21 days to develop a new habit. Yet most people give up on creating a positive life change after only the first few days when they experience the stress and pain that is always associated with replacing old behaviors with new ones. New habits are much like a new pair of shoes: for the first few days, they will feel uncomfortable. But if you break them in for about three weeks, they will fit a second skin. As human beings, we are genetically programmed to resist change and maintain a state of equilibrium. The condition, known as homeostasis , evolved naturally over time as a means by which our ancestors could survive constantly changing conditions. The problem is that the mechanism works to keep things as they are even when more favorable possibilities exist. And that is why we have such difficulty adop...

      Day-48- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Get Serious About Setting Goals Many speakers and authors encourage you to set goals but most have never explained why this is such a powerful discipline beyond saying something like “Something magical happens when you write down your goals on paper.” In my opinion, setting clearly defined goals for all the areas of your life works for three reasons. First, it restores a sense of focus in your world, a world that has become complicated by too many options. In this age we live in, there are simply far too many things to do at any given time. There are too many distractions that compete for our attention. Goals clarify our desires and, in doing so, help us to focus on only those activities that will lead us to what we want. Setting clearly defined goals provides you with a frame – work for smarter choices. If you know precisely where you are going, it becomes far easier to select those ...

      Day-44- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428 Develop Your Talents Norman Cousins once noted that “The Tragedy of life is not death, but what we let die inside of us while we live.” In a similar vein, Ashley Montagu wrote that “The deepest personal defeat suffered by human beings is constituted by the difference between what one was capable of becoming and what one has in fact become.” There is a difference between simply existing and truly living. There is a distinction between simply surviving and really thriving. The sad thing is that most people have lost sight of the human gifts that lie within them and have resigned themselves to spending the best years of their lives watching television in a subdivision. In my speeches, I often use the following story drawn from ancient Indian mythology to remind the audience that there is an abundance of potential and ability just waiting to be awakened within us if we will only allow it to see ...

    Day-43- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428   Build a Library of Heroic Books Few things make me happier than meeting someone who has read my books or listened to my audiotapes and hearing something like, “I was so moved and inspired after going through your material that I went out and bought ten more life improvement books and read them all. And you know what, they have completely transformed me.” I not only write books on life leadership, I am a dedicated student of them. As I mentioned in an earlier lesson, I spend countless hours in large bookstores combing the shelves for the latest treasure that will enlighten and educate me. I also frequently used book ships where I have picked up some of my most valuable books for only a few dollars (as I write this paragraph, I have a “pre-owned” copy of Maxwell Maltz’s classic Psycho Cybernetics on my desk, which still bears the sticker price of $ 2.95. Also on my desk is a copy of Seneca’s Let...

  Day-42- 101 day Reading Challenge- a Mine2Shine initiative-9789186428 Look for the Higher Meaning of Your Work One of my favorite magazines is Fast Company, it provides a refreshingly human look at the new world of work. In a recent issue, Xerox PARC guru John Seely Brown said something that really made me think: “The job of leadership today is not just to make money, it’s to make meaning.” In the old days, most of us were content to have a job that simply paid the bills. But now, we crave so much more in our work. We want fulfillment, creative challenge, growth, joy and a sense that we are living for something more than ourselves. In a word, we seek meaning. One of the best ways to find the higher meaning in the work you do is to use the technique of creative questioning to become aware of the impact your work has on the world around you. Ask yourself questions like, Who ultimately benefits from the products and services my company offers? Or What difference do my services my co...

Trial Day 3: Random Reading from Random Books - December 29th-Awaken the Giant within- Tony Robbins  How to get What you want  Ask yourself what you truly want in life. Do you want a loving marriage, the respect of your children?  Do you want plenty of money, fast cars, a thriving business, a house on the hill? Do you want to travel  the world, visit exotic ports of call, see historical landmarks firsthand? Do you want to be idolized by  millions as a rock musician or as a celebrity with your star on Hollywood Boulevard? Do you want to  leave your mark for posterity as the inventor of a time travel machine? Do you want to work with  Mother Teresa to save the world, or take a proactive role in making a measurable impact  environmentally? Whatever you desire or crave, perhaps you should ask yourself, "Why do I want these things?" Don't  you want fine cars, for example, because you really desire the feelings of accomplishment and prestige  ...

From 14 to Future 14-24 is the formative years of a human being’s life. It is the age where a lot of changes happen in a child’s mind and body that have the potential to influence a majority of their life changes in their whole of a lifetime. The most important part of a person’s life, his career takes its form during this period. The courses a child studies drive it. With this being today’s plight, it is high time to ensure that the students of today choose a right career of their choice and not based on the opinions and trends of the society. The best way to make a great career is to choose one which is most relevant to their fields of interests. A lot of self-introspection has to be done to identify one’s own interests even. Next step is to find out all their skills and talents. Then comes the important step of exploring all possible opportunities available to match all the three factors and choose a pertinent course of interest. We can always seek the advice of career counselors...

CAREER- OUR LIFE CARRIER If we consider the active life of any normal human being say 60 years, more than two thirds of it is spent entirely on the career. With career covering a major part of an individual’s life, a very important thing to think is    Are we living our career?    Is our career guiding our life? or    Is our life guiding our career? An alarming fact from collected statistics’ is that most of the people prefer to stay in the same field / job irrespective of their areas of interest/fields of study even if they are dissatisfied with their jobs. People want to play a safe game to the extent that they do not even want to try to take the risk to switch careers to different fields they like. They become complacent and settle for what they have got. This happens in more than 80% of the cases. With this being the case comes a lot of problems ranging from unemployment to under-employment, higher stress levels, lesser job satisfactio...

Find your purpose Live your Passion Who are all involved in shaping a child’s future? What does it take to live a contented life? How should an ideal profession be? How can one pursue his passion? Every single child in this world is born with immense talents and dreams. And through a very stage of life a child it child has  umpteen opportunities to develop his inborn talents or develop new talents. If the talents and skills are tapped and used effectively every individual can turn to become responsible leaders, entrepreneurs, individuals of the future society. But all that is possible only when their talents and skills are realized and their dreams and passions are recognized, given respect and supported Doing something which we like is the definite pathway to lead a contented life. Either we should love what we are already doing or should try to find and do something we love .The responsibility of navigating towards a child’s passion lies not in a single h...