04 Dec What’s Your Secret Ingredient?

Everyone has their own unique emotional recipes to manifest the emotions that are most important to them.

When’s the last time you opened your Lifebook and revisited yours?

This month, the Lifebook Team got together and contributed their very own emotional recipes, complete with their ‘secret ingredients’ for creating them

Read the entries below and be inspired to revisit your own emotional recipes.  Then, share YOUR secret ingredients with us by commenting below!

Enjoy!

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Happiness
By:  Sandra Garest, Director of Customer Experience

Happiness requires consciousness and discipline to create and maintain. It is up to me to think through what it is that makes me happy and have the courage to go after it. I have taken total responsibility for my own happiness – it’s not up to someone else.

Relationships are at the heart of my happiness
I spend time with others who are joyful and inspirational. My family and friends are the most amazing gift I’ve been given.

My daily spiritual practice
I take time for myself in meditation or prayer, which helps me to identify with the idea that the soul is joy, and to realize that I am what I seek. My strong spiritual faith helps me to connect to what is real, to what is here now and to what has already been given to me.

Gratitude
Gratitude helps turn what I have into enough, and more. It is not the fulfillment of what I want, but the realization of how much I already have. When good things happen, even the very little ones, I celebrate them. I bask in the simple pleasures, and assume an “attitude of gratitude.”

Living on purpose, and doing what I love for a living.
When I am contributing to others and the well being of humanity, I feel better about my life and it brings me great happiness and fulfillment.

Being in great physical shape
I make time each day to do something for my health and fitness.  Taking care of my body inside and out makes me happy and confident.

Pampering myself
I schedule regular massages, facials and chiropractic appointments. These types of activities renew me, refresh me, bring rhythm to my life, lead me toward maximum health, and remind me of who I am and what is really important.

Excitement and Enthusiasm
By: Jessica Butcher, Director of Membership and Communications

I am an excited person.  I love nothing more than being lit up and inspired by life’s events.  To feel enthusiastic and excited about anything and everything.  Even the small things can get me jazzed.

I am dedicated to really tapping into the juice of this emotion, because it is crucial to my happiness and my creativity.  When I’m excited, I feel alive.  I feel awake to the possibilities around me.  Excitement is enchanting… like a spell you cast on your life that makes everything bigger, brighter and more electric.

To me, being an excited person means being a passionate person…. To be infatuated with my experiences, and delighted at my opportunities.  I strive to light up as often as possible.

Here are some things that excite me:

– Having trips and experiences planned (and looking forward to them)
– Traveling and experiencing new sides of the world
– Hosting and attending parties
– Dancing with friends
– Giving really awesome, creative gifts to others
– Embarking on new creative projects
– Trying new things, and doing things I normally wouldn’t do
– Taking leaps of faith
– Going on adventures, big or small
– Spontaneity
– Surprises (both giving and receiving)
– Change
– The feeling of growth, progress and evolution

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Ritual to Handle Stress
By:  Peter Scott, Lifestyle Consultant

Experience has proved to me, time after time, the enormous value of arriving at a decision. It is the failure to arrive at a fixed purpose, the inability to stop going around and round in maddening circles, that drives men to nervous breakdowns and living hells. I find that fifty percent of my worries vanish once I arrive at a clear, definite decision; and another forty percent usually vanish once I start carrying out that decision.

So, I banish about 90 per cent of my worries by taking these four steps:

1.  Writing down precisely what I am worried about.
2.  Writing down what I can do about it.
3.  Deciding what to do.
4.  Starting immediately to carry out that decision.

Focused, effective action improves every single area of my life.

Individualism
By:  Phillip Mitchell, Assistant Director of Customer Experience

Having a strong sense of self, and knowing that I am an individual, unlike anyone else, is important to me. Embracing the things that make me different and unique make me stand a part from others.

It is important to understand that everyone has different abilities and contributions to make. The collective contribution of all different types of people is an awesome thing.

I manifest the emotional experience of ‘individuality’ by putting myself in a position to offer something unique to the world. Any area that I can uniquely contribute to or help in creates this emotion. The emotion arises when I accomplish something that would not have come very easily or naturally to others. I make a conscious effort to utilize the gifts that are uniquely exclusive to me in a way that will influence others in positive ways.

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Equation to Eliminate Fear
By:  John Vieceli, Creative Designer

I’ve come to understand that a majority of my fears are rooted in a form of self-doubt or lack of confidence. So here is my recipe for the elimination of fear…

There are three ingredients in this recipe.

The first ingredient is to “employ a growth mindset”

It’s essential to shift your mindset from negative to positive. Look at fear as an opportunity. Fear becomes about the opportunity to discover, experience, and grow.  Once you have shifted the mindset, you are ready for the second ingredient.

The second ingredient is to “take purposeful action”

When you are in state of fear you are stagnating. Your mind tends to create divisions, barriers and possible worst-case scenarios. The most important thing is to move forward with purposeful action. The worst thing you can do is nothing at all, or to over-analyze. It doesn’t matter if the action results in success or failure. Simply taking action creates momentum which increases chances for success, and raises self-confidence.

The last ingredient binds the other two together and that’s “my Lifebook”

Action creates momentum, but is only beneficial if you know who you are and what you want out of life. Lifebook adds the purpose and direction to the action. To find and build more confidence in yourself you have to know yourself.

To expand means at some point you will have to face your fears.

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Vitality
By:  Benjamin Lawrence, Director of Finance and Operations

Maintaining a balanced emotional equilibrium is primarily dependent upon my vitality for life and mastering this emotion enables me to achieve success in many other life categories.

The success or failure of my quest for wisdom along a lifelong road to enlightenment is largely reliant upon my life force, my vitality.

In order to strive onward and upward through life, unburdened by the chaos that can cloud judgment and cast shadows on my positive world outlook, I must have mental vigor and soulful vitality.

I will use my vitality to feed my emotions positive thoughts so as to help elevate my mind above the mental barriers ever present in our society.

By living and growing with emotional vitality, my mental consciousness will grow independently and unaffected by the uninspired, negative norms that are commonplace in our day and age.

My character can be virtuous and upright, my health and fitness system can be structured and well executed, but nothing will have the most optimal impact without an emotional state that is constantly feeding off of vitality for life.

My ideal Life Vision is to strike a balance between emotions, nature, spirit, and commerce by living my life guided by a kindly heart, navigated by a virtuous moral compass, and fueled by an indomitable vitality for life.