You don’t have to be rich or married to dress up and rule. Sign up now for some of life’s pleasures and start with Fredericks of Hollywood coupons. Live it up Being single, you need to live within your means – in style. It does not mean that being single you have to be miserly and shabby. Nights do not have to be cold and lonely because you need a sweet loving man to warm you up. To know how blessed you are read the ballad of a wife: When I was single, Lord I dressed so fine Now that I’m married, Lord, I go ragged all the time Lord, don’t I wish I was a single girl again. Sometimes women make the foolish mistake of saving things for special occasions. A dress kept in a box, waiting for a blitz in the Ritz which never comes, or a slinky little black dress waiting for the big night that goes pffttt are sad memories of what could have been. So, single girls have fun and live it up. You don’t have to be rich to be a star in your own boudoir and rule. Well girls, you don’t have to have a guy in your life to enjoy Fredericks outfits from intimate apparel to costumes. Grab those Fredericks of Hollywood coupons and get as much as $15-$75 off from a $100 to $250 purchase. The marvels of single blessedness This is a standard question asked of any single girl. You shouldn’t dread this question. There is no hard and fast rule that, by 22, you should raising kids and doing the laundry. It is not also against the law to be single – man or woman. But it is a crime not to enjoy life because you are single. One of the best things in life single girls enjoy is shopping without the guilt. With Fredericks of Hollywood coupons, they can be Angelina Jolies, Jennifer Anistons, Hillary Duffs, and Ashley Judds. What’s there to stop them? You can wake up to a morning without the hassle of preparing breakfast for a hungry army of children. Have a sandwich and drink a cup of coffee, shower, dress-up, and you’ll be ready for a long day ahead. After work, you can stop at the bar with friends or grab a bite. At home, you can latch on to your PC and hunt for jewelry or Fredericks of Hollywood coupons. If there’s a concert, leave your computer, go out, and join your friends and swing. Life is uncomplicated for single girls if they play their cards well. So, worrying about not being hitched or wondering when the right man is going to show up at the door is a waste of time and energy. Enjoy your show Dress up and be merry. Enjoy all those beautiful lingerie, gowns, and accessories with Fredericks of Hollywood coupons. While life is still uncomplicated, have fun. Being single and young happens only once in a lifetime, so make the right choices in matters of the heart and shopping.

It’s a New Year with probably yet another long list of resolutions. But will you actually do them? Or are you the type of person that has the best of intentions and sets goals but can never seem to get started on them, or you half-start them and never find the time or motivation to finish them? Well don’t worry, you’re not alone! We all suffer from procrastination at some point in our life. The good news is that there is a cure. Just think “SNOW” and follow these 4 steps: STEP 1: STOP The reason you procrastinate is because the emotional force or feeling isn’t strong enough to propel you to take action forward. A positive feeling is being counteracted by a negative feeling, making you feel neutral, unmotivated and leaving you sitting on the fence. The problem comes when we feel guilty about it. This adds to the emotional hot pot! So the first step is to simply STOP rather than struggle. STEP 2: NOTICE Be observant. What is it that you’re actually avoiding? What is driving the negative emotion or feeling for the activity at hand? What are you afraid might happen? Writers are notorious procrastinators. With good intentions they’ll sit down in front of the key board, but will quickly become distracted by the pile of washing in the corner, that layer of dust on the shelves and those dishes that need washing. For writers, usually it’s the fear of not writing anything readable that stops them from writing at all. This is the counter-force. Notice what your counter-force is. STEP 3: ORDER When you bring order into a situation, it is incredible how it can make things feel a little simpler. So the best thing to do is to is take out a piece of paper and simply write a list of all the steps involved. The secret is to break them down into really detailed small steps (e.g., take the file off the shelf, place it on the table, open it to page 10, etc.). You’ll find yourself whizzing through your list and it’s this momentum that carries you through the rest of the task. STEP 4: WHISTLE Yes, you read correctly. Once you’ve written your list, simply take the first step and whistle while you work. Try it doing it now without smiling! You’ll notice that it quickly shifts your mood and makes you realize how ridiculous you’re being. It’ll help you take that all important first step, and then motivate you to move on to the next one. By taking small steps forward, before you know it you’ll have finished completely. And what’s more, you would have done it with a smile on your face too! Finally, don’t let procrastination hold you back from reaching your goals and highest potential this year. If you’d like some extra support and inspiration to stay motivated and on track, why not sign up for my free downloadable One Big Gulp! Kit, which you will find at www.onebiggulp.com. Remember, it’s your life, your choice, so live your greatest life!

By definition, a legacy is something that comes down to someone from a predecessor or from the past. Most of us want to leave behind some kind of legacy for our children and grandchildren, or for future generations. Many people think of a legacy only in terms of some financial bequest or gift. Those with the means to do so might build a wing on a hospital or fund a professorship or a scholarship. And these are wonderful and meaningful ways to leave behind a legacy. But a legacy can mean many things besides money or endowed professorships or hospital wings. A legacy can also be wisdom or a contagious commitment to improving the community, or even the story of our lives – the good times and the bad times – and the important life lessons we learned. Some people simply want to try to teach future generations so they will not make the same mistakes. There are many ways to leave a meaningful legacy, even if you are not wealthy. Here are a few ideas to start your thinking about the kind of legacy you might want to leave behind. 1.Share the stories your predecessors passed down to you. Many stories are actually living accounts of history. If they are not passed down, they are lost. Whether you record them on audio or video storage or you write them down, it is safe to assume that somewhere down the line someone will be interested in those stories. Another way to leave family stories behind is to work with your local library or an internet site and let them help you record the stories. 2.Share your thoughts on the big events of your lifetime. Each of us has lived through a time of many monumental historical and social events and changes. Your thoughts and reactions to those events tell the stories from different angles. Your point of view might be very important to future generations. Share your actions, but also share your reactions – your thoughts and feelings. Share your thoughts about how those events changed your life and the lives of others. 3.Share your reasons for the deeply held beliefs and commitments of your life. Share the principles by which you live. It is often fairly easy for later generations to get a sense of what we did in our lives. It is not always so easy to understand why we did things or made choices. Understanding how your beliefs influenced your life might help someone else discover a helpful approach to directing their lives. 4.Share the stories of why some of the things you will leave behind are important to you. It is not uncommon for a grandchild to be left some seemingly insignificant item when a grandparent passes on. It means far more when they are also given an explanation of why you cherished the item and why you chose that individual to have the item when you are gone. 5.Share the joys in your life and the intangible things that made you who you are. Write or record for the next generation why you love, for example, jazz or classical music. Tell them what it brings to your life. Leave behind a list of the books you found meaningful and think everyone should read – and tell them why. Each of us is a link in the chain of life. Every part of the legacy we leave behind keeps a chain intact. The parts of the legacy we don’t pass on may be lost forever. No matter who you are, where you live, or what you did for a living, you are a unique and important individual. Your experience matters. As you design your personal legacy, don’t forget to pass on the extremely important intangibles that give life true meaning. by Dr. Cynthia Barnett

The most powerful concept in persuasion is framing. When we look at the overall, big picture we can see most everything we do and say as a frame. When I suggest examples based on religion and politics, I’m not (NOT!!) endorsing one side or another. I’m simply showing where our blind spots exist, where we have holes in our arguments. if you have a belief that you fervently or fanatically believe in, you might just be blind to the other side of the issue. When we talk about the pro-life/pro-choice debate, the other side, no matter which side you’re on, is absolutely wrong. No ifs, ands, or buts. The other side is NEVER going to accept your point of view. It’s just not an option. There are some that are so certain that this is not a “choice” but murder. Others believe it’s not a frame at all, but an elimination of a woman’s choice to have freedom over her body. There is no in between, no gray area for either side. I have absolutely no interest in changing your deeply held beliefs, but my goal is to simply point out that all of these beliefs, ultimately, are different frames. The ability to reframe is to tell our truth, life the way we see it. It requires us to repeat things deeply carving neuro pathways that show us what to think in any given situation, with any given group or idea, in any setting. Without naming names, think of the major coffee chain, the one that’s taking over the world. They’re responsible for putting little mom and pop cafes out of business. They charge A LOT. They may even be slightly overrated. AND yet, they are fair to their employees even providing part time workers with health insurance. They buy their product from sustainable coffee growers in ‘third world’ (another frame) countries. They also have a delicious organic iced decaf mocha. It’s possible all of these statements are true at once. Maybe it doesn’t matter a lick to you either way. But they are beliefs and as a result, they are frames. You can do this with everything. Try health care providers, for example. They are ‘miracle workers’, they’re caring, nurturing, overpaid, shills for big pharmaceutical and insurance companies. Your beliefs may include none of these descriptions. At the very least, you can see that each statement is a frame. We’ve all had good and bad experiences with health care providers and these experiences necessarily color the way you view the profession. If your first memory was of being ill and having to be hospitalized, then that would have an enormous imprint on a fear of hospitals. At the same time, the procedure may have saved your life. This might not help adjust your frame because the negative experience of illness and pain, would be overshadowed by the positive experience of being alive. Only through multiple positive experiences would that change the neuro pathways that make you fear health care providers/hospitals. It is my hope that in repeating the importance of frames, some of you may begin to view the whole world as a series of frames.

Have you ever been convinced to walk away from your dreams by people who manage to throw enough self doubt at you to win that war of attrition? The constant day in and day out negativity that pushes you to give up your dreams and conform to something you’re not? “What are you nuts? You can’t do that!” “Oh there’s another hair brained scheme!” “Get Real! Go get a real job!” “Who do you think you are? You aren’t something special, stick to the things you can handle.” “What are you stupid or something? Why do you think you can do that?” “How on earth are you going to accomplish that?” Lambasting you with negativity, giving you the message “Who are you to become an author, or an inventor, or any number of other things your dreams may lead you to?” The litany goes on and on… We are taught to focus on the impossibility of our dreams as adults, why things “can’t be done”; to hide behind the “how” instead of understanding that the first step is to reconnect with our dreams in a magnificent flight of imagination. Don’t worry about the “how” first; the means will come to you as part of the process. The question of “How are you going to do that?” is so often used as a weapon against us by negative people, proof of our “imminent failure.” We are told to prematurely focus on the “how” before the “what” and this stops the process before it has even begun. The energy you generate by focusing on the what, will bring forth the how. Planning is a wonderful thing, there is nothing wrong with that, however if you focus on the fact that you “don’t” know how yet, then you will miss all the possible “how’s” that show up when you begin to truly entertain that dream first. The fact of the matter is that we possess more personal power than we even know…I read a definition of personal power once that said that it is: “Your capacity to dream without limits and fulfill those dreams through your imagination.” I’m afraid I do not recollect the author but I like the way they put it. The ability to manifest our own reality is the power of creation itself. I believe that developing these abilities is a gift to ourselves and the world. It can be a long and sometimes difficult journey to re-discover those qualities in ourselves after years of being trained to deny their existence. We use our personal power as children without even knowing what we are doing but then we are trained what to believe, how to think, and to limit ourselves by having our perception and interpretation of the world dictated to us by our conditioning. As a child our personal power is limitless, but as we grow older it so often remains untapped. So how do we overcome this onslaught of negativity that assaults our dreams, threatening to drown them out of existence? We must learn how to reinforce our mental immune systems. I call it “mental martial arts” ~ the ability to shatter belief systems that imprison the mind, body and spirit. We must earn our Black Belts as Dreamers! So what is a Black Belt Dreamer? Why the concept of Mental Martial Arts and the term of “Black Belt Dreamer?” Because a Black Belt in martial arts is the highest rank of achievement in the skills of self-defense and mental discipline. In my newly published book “Becoming a Black Belt Dreamer ~ Unleash The Dream Warrior Within!” I have defined a focused, strong, step-by -process on how to stand your ground against the onslaught of daily negativity and nay-Sayers in your lives. This process utilizes martial arts philosophy and techniques, applying them to mental self defense, building up our mental immune system to fight to regain and protect that which is most precious; our ability to dream. Perhaps it would help to give you a little history on the subject and what it means to me. In my life I have had to lean how to defend myself, not just physically, but mentally, emotionally and spiritually as well. As a child I grew up in a cult environment where I was constantly told I was worthless, useless and undeserving of love. I endured years of emotional and mental abuse. I grew up without knowing my biological father, watched helplessly as my mother was repeatedly robbed of her money and as my brother was exiled from the family at a young age. As devastating as this story sounds, it led me to one undeniable conclusion: I am a conqueror! At my lowest points in life (there’s been more than one), a powerful and imaginative warrior was always there to rescue me. Now I know that warrior was me! What started out as a passion for martial arts has expanded into far more than that, it became not just a means of learning physical self-defense and mental discipline, but also fueled my ability to defend myself spiritually and emotionally as well through the turmoil of a very restrictive and challenging upbringing. Why am I telling you this story? Because I strive to use my own experiences of oppression, abuse and isolation as real-life examples that every individual has the power to transcend any situation – no matter how hopeless it seems. That is how I became The Black Belt Dreamer – fighting, surviving and winning against all odds. I believe that regardless of our mistakes, traumas and tragedies, we all have an inner dream warrior that empowers us to walk through the fires o f life and create the reality we truly desire. Listen to a message from Lyca Shan and find out more about: “Becoming a Black Belt Dreamer ~ Unleash The Dream Warrior Within!” here: http://www.blackbeltdreamer.com/Newsletter/BBDNewsletter.html