Don’t Put Off Taking Action, Change Direction Instead

If you made new year’s resolutions on New Year’s Day and haven’t yet started on them, a day later, it may be that you picked the wrong thing to change. The same consideration applies any time you take on a goal, and a day or more goes by with no action toward the goal itself. It makes sense to look at the obstacles that are getting in your way and pick one of those as the focal point of your efforts.

Action, Not Lists

Today is New Year’s Day, the energy of a fresh start is in the air . . . and people are writing lists of new and different things they want to do this year.

Now, I like lists, but there is a problem with lists of things to do that refer to an extended period of time, such as a year or a month. These lists tend to sit around, untended, for days at a time — and while they’re waiting, the energy drains out of them. People come back to these lists after a few days and don’t find any of the New Year’s Day feeling in them.

If you want to write a list for the new year, I can suggest a more successful kind of list.

What It Means to Go Too Far

If you have too many possessions or too many things to do, you know how easy it is to go too far. In principle, possessions and things to do are good to have, but you can end up with too many of them without knowing where they all came from. In the Shamanic Economist blog today, I write about what it means to go too far:

Going Too Far: Getting Past Minimizing and Maximizing

New Proof of the Power of Sleep

We have all observed that people look better after a full night of sleep. Now a research team has measured this scientifically. At BBC News: Beauty sleep concept is not a myth, says study.

The idea of people needing “beauty sleep” has acquired some scientific backing, according to a Swedish study. . . .

The authors wrote in their paper published in the British Medical Journal: “Sleep deprived people are perceived as less attractive, less healthy and more tired compared with when they are well rested.”

The Hassles of Law of Attraction

If you’ve heard anything about Law of Attraction, you’ve surely heard that what you focus on matters. You tend to get results you intend in the areas that you focus on. The areas you forget about, you tend to neglect, and your results are those of entropy rather than intention.

It is not just a matter of focus. Emotion matters also. When you feel strongly about something, it lends clarity and intensity to your thoughts, and this gives the thoughts more power. Thus, The Secret advises, “Feel good,” and Tony Robbins, “Live with passion.”

Gratitude for Desperados

In concerts this year, the Eagles are playing “Desperado” as their final song. It seems fitting. The song’s warning about the perils of seeking peace of mind in material things comes at a time when a lot of people are struggling, working harder than ideally they should, to control their material surroundings.

Patience in a World of Illusion

Progress doesn’t always come in neat, straight lines. It can be messy and look like a mistake when you come across it, but it doesn’t have to be criticized just because it hasn’t yet come together in a way that makes sense on the surface.

This is one of the threads that runs through the book Walking Through Illusion by Betsy Otter Thompson. This book imagines Jesus almost in the role of a self-improvement coach telling the life stories of the people around him. In every story, there is always something out of place or happening out of sequence. It seems easy to point to where the problem is — indeed, they are all familiar, everyday problems on the surface — but in each case, Walking Through Illusion suggests a gentler, less stressful way of looking at it.

Work and Resentment, or How to Manifest a Million Dollars

Most people feel some degree of resentment about the work they have to do. This is an emotional pattern that not only affects the way people approach work, but also their approach to money, to-do lists, and clutter.