Your Kiss is on My List

“My list of the best things in life”  includes music that puts a smile on your face and makes you feel good all over.  Like my Blog post “Don’t Worry Baby”, music is great therapy and hearing the Hall and Oates classic “Your Kiss is on My List” immediately brought me back to the early days of dating my wife ( 30 years of marriage, and 35 years of dating).  Not only did it bring me back to the early years of my relationship with my wife but it also made it clear to me that we are constantly creating our own experiences in life.  And what may seem a simple coincidence is actually much more.

Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner.   Whether you call it Synchronicity or coincidence, I believe it all happens for a meaningful reason and it is up to you to figure out what the synchronicity in your life means.  So where am I going with Hall and Oates and Synchronicity ?  Well, something very interesting has been happening to me since I started writing this blog, meaningful and fulfilling synchronicity is started to appear daily, I am getting back into the zone where I was completely in control of my life and able to create things almost exactly as I wanted.  Miracles both large and small have started to happen but most importantly, friends, family and random people who have found my blog have started to have similar experiences.  I received an urgent text today from a business associate who has been reading my blogs who wanted to let me know what a great day she had and how everything was falling into place as she visualized it.  Now I know this particular person is very spiritual, has incredible faith, an awesome attitude and likes to read things like “The Secret” and similar works.  So she is understands the whole “knowing” thing that was the reason I started writing this blog in the first place.   What was really cool for me was that she created her day the way she always knew she could but she took the time to share her experience with me.   Her sharing of her experience today sent a positive shock through my body of knowing we can all create exactly the lives we want and that thought (good or bad) is contagious.  

Hall and Oates, what role do they play in today’s post ?  That’s another fun story I would like to share with you today because it is a great example of the incredible sychronicities in my life.   A few months back while searching Facebook for old friends, neighbors and business associates, I ran across Bren.  Bren or Brenda as I knew her back in the 60’s and 70’s was the cute Blonde from across the street in the neighborhood I grew up in.  Bren was a year younger than me but I had a crush on her during my entire elementary school experience.   Back then,  and I suppose at that age, you never hung around with girls in a grade below you and besides I never thought she had any interest in me.  But I always had that crush and anytime I had the chance to give her a ride on my Schwinn Apple Crate bike, I always was happy.   Well it turns out that Bren is a huge Hall and Oates fan, which was interesting because my wife when I started dating her in 1975  was also a huge Hall and Oates fan.  I have enjoyed Hall and Oates ever since my wife first played “She’s gone” for me from the “Abandoned Luncheonette” album.   So last week, I am checking out the news feed on Facebook and Bren posts that Hall and Oates are going to be in town and she wants to know who’s going with her ?.  I jokingly, immediately posted that I was going.  I really wanted to go but couldn’t justify spending the money at the moment.   So after posting my reply, I forgot about it, then late last week Bren sends me a message telling me that she has two extra tickets that my wife and I could have.   Wow,   I couldn’t believe the offer so I told Bren I just had to check with my wife to confirm.  Saturday rolls around and I tell my wife about Bren and the tickets, she was thrilled, so I immediately confirmed with Bren.  Now that was all incredible and fun but listen to this,  so my wife and I decide to go to a movie that afternoon, we decided to see “You Again” with Jamie Leigh Curtis.  Now, we decided to got to this movie just minutes after I confirmed with Bren about going with her to the Hall and Oates concert.  My wife and I really knew nothing about the movie except that Jamie Leigh Curtis  was in it.   So we are sitting in the  theater, eating a HUGE bucket of buttered popcorn when all of a sudden the couple in the movie are playing the Hall and Oates song “Your Kiss is on My List” on the radio, now that may seem like just a funny coincidence to you but to me it was synchronicity and a reminder to me that I played a role in the events that had just been created.  Even better, at the end of the movie and rolling into the credits, Hall and Oates and the cast of the movie sang “Your Kiss is on My List”.   While I always enjoyed that song, I never remembered the lyrics including the line “The Best Things in Life”, when I heard that, I knew the Universe was sending me yet another message about why happiness is the key to everything and when you know the outcome of your life, you can’t help but be happy.

You can have all of the Best Things In Life, you know you can, you just have to visualize your list of the best things and sit back and watch them show up.  I am adding something to my list of the best things in life, getting everyone to know they can create incredible experiences in their lives.  I know you can do it and I know that in my life, cancelling out the media has had a major impact and changed the way things are going for me.  I no longer listen to  or watch  any of the major news networks including my favorite Fox news, I don’t pay attention to the political nonsense going on in this country (I do intend to vote and I know my intuition will guide me to the right candidates),   I have turned off talk radio in favor of audio programs from Wayne Dyer, Mike Dooley and Joe Vitale.  Yes you could say I am brainwashing myself with positive, fulfilling and uplifting messages, and yes the brainwashing is working, I am washing out all the dirt and replacing it with clean new information.  I hope you will join me in creating incredible life experiences and if you get a chance, a text message, blog comment or email would be great, I love to hear about people and the great experiences they have created for themselves.  Get to work on your list of the “Best things in life” and make your life the best !

Related Articles

• The Hall and Oates revival (cbc.ca)
• Wandering the Aisles, Vol. 1: Hall & Oates for the Obsessed (popdose.com)

The Worst…Brings out our Best !

Watching TV for me consists of flipping through the channels trying to find something positive and inspiring to watch.  The History channel, the Learning channel and the National Geographic channel seem to be where I end up most.   Last week while surfing the channels I ended up coming across a commercial from a company called West Bend.  The West Bend I knew growing up made small kitchen appliances and certainly wasn’t in the business of creating inspirational commercials that not only sold their products but left you with a strong message.   This particular West Bend is an insurance company and their commercials center around being your best when you are faced with the worst.  I think it is a brilliant ad campaign and to follow it up with their tag line, “West Bend” “The Silver Lining Company” is even cooler.

Terry Lyles, America’s Stress Doctor and Human Performance Engineer, likes to say “Expect the best but prepare for the worst” . There are the practical applications of this thinking that we can apply to our everyday experience that helps us better cope with what ever we are facing and then there is the deeper and lasting application that can change your life.

I like to think that I have spent most of my 51 years life looking for the good in everything, that certainly was the case for the first 47 when I enjoyed incredible success and happiness in just about everything that I took on.  But over the last few years when my guard was down, I let the opinions of others influence my thinking.  When I was faced with what anyone else would consider a major issue, I no longer tackled it myself, I tried to tackle it by committee, unfortunately the committee wasn’t on the same page with me.  While I was saw the cup as half full, those that surrounding me always saw that cup as half empty and worried about all the bad stuff they expected to happen.  I had done a poor job of inspiring the troops and bringing them to the level that had always served me well.   All of sudden my knowing every situation would work out was outweighed by an army that expected it not to work out and worked hard and ultimately convinced me that in their opinion I was  not in their words a “realist”.  Funny thing though, for 47 years, my definition of being a “realist” worked pretty well for me, I made incredible amounts of money, bought my dream home, improved my dream home with more funds than I purchased it with, travelled all over the world, gave my kids everything and experience they could want and it was all easy because I knew I could create anything I wanted.  For 47 years, everything flowed to me like magic,  friends would tell me that everything I touched turned to gold and that I always landed on my feet when ever there was a down turn and you know what they were right.  Those first 47 years were incredible but it wasn’t the best I could do because I wasn’t as disciplined in regards to managing my thoughts as I needed to be.  I let the outside world seep in to my head, I let well-meaning friends and associates try to bring me back down to earth and they certainly did.

So after 47 years of living an incredibly fulfilling life, the wheels came off because I did not manage my thoughts efficiently or did they come off because the Universe needed to find a way to tell me to “kick it up a notch”  to really bring out the best that I could be.  The past 3 years were pretty horrible by anyone’s standards, losing my home of 25 years, losing many loved ones to cancer and other diseases and losing everything I had created materially during those first 47 years.   I needed the Worst, to shake me up so I could bring out the Best !  and baby you ain’t seen nothing yet !

Truly bringing out your best requires massive action and when it comes to managing your thoughts and getting your head in the right place it calls for massive infusions of “The Right Stuff”.  In my case,  the first thing I did was to quit listening to talk radio and news on TV while removing myself from the political discussion of the day.  Once you do that you realize that the least intelligent life forms on the face of the earth are our politicians and elected officials and it doesn’t matter which party they are in, they are all small thinkers focused on advancing a personal agenda.  The next thing I did was to fill my car and Ipod full of the most positive and enlightening audio material I could find.  And finally, I keep a personal written journal and a video journal to record my thoughts and to remind me of the reality I am going to create.  The next 51 years will be hundreds of times more incredible than my last 51 years.  The Universe has so much to offer and you can find it anywhere.

Let me leave you with a little story from last night while having a conversation with my son.  Another part of my massive action plan is that I have taken on additional positions ( I won’t call them jobs because I don’t see them as such)  that pretty much fill up 20 to 22 hours of each 24 hour day, 7 days  week.  One of those positions happens to be as a night manager at convenience/gas station.  I took the position because I truly wanted the opportunity to interact with people and see if I could make a difference in the lives of people who visit that store when I am there.  I didn’t even care what the position paid, I am not even sure I asked.  I think the person who hired me wasn’t sure what to think as he told me I was way over qualified for the position and I told him that was a good thing that I wasn’t even considering this a job.  I think he thought I was nuts, but he hired me anyway.  Back to the conversation with son who couldn’t believe his dad was going to work at a gas station.  He told he could get me a job working at the place he does unloading trucks and stocking shelves overnight for twice the money.  He also told me that how much you make is much more important than whether you enjoy what you are doing…really ?  The wisdom of a 22 year old ! and an illustration of how one person’s reality is totally different from someone else’s.  The bottom line is I look at everything I do as an adventure, as new experience, as something that may take places I have never been before.  Life is all about experiences and finding new and interesting experiences is most of the fun.  I wonder how much more people would enjoy life if they looked at every single thing they do as adventure that may take them well beyond what most people would think.     Whatever you do, let “The Worst..Bring out the Best” and soon you will understand that the worst is what gave you the best.

D.I.W.I.R.I.V.I.L.I.G.I.

Image via Wikipedia

Absolutely everything is possible if you can harness the power of your mind and put it to work for you. Choosing to always be happy no matter what the circumstances takes unbelievable discipline and personal mind control but it is possible and it can help you handle any challenge that comes your way.  After identifying the cause of my personal and business financial collapse of the last few years, I realized that in my 47 year run of creating exactly the life I wanted, I was always focused on the positive and for the most part always felt happy inside and out.  During the past few years when things started to go the wrong way,  I had people close to me asking me how I could be so happy with all the problems I faced, after a while, my personal mind control gave in and went to the dark side.  I started feeling sorry for myself, I started being sad and unhappy when people talked to me, I started feeling depressed, I started feeling stress and I started feeling overweight and sick.  Look at what I just wrote,  “I started feeling and being”  I did it ! nobody else did it, I made up my mind to feel bad and once I made up my mind that is exactly what I got, sadness, depression, stress and 50 extra pounds of FAT.  Guess what all that led to ?  Personal and business collapse !  I did it, not the economy, not the President or Congress, not the customer who didn’t pay (the customers paid until I changed the way I felt) I was totally responsible for creating the reality of the last few years directly as a result of my thoughts.

It has been a pretty good run since I woke up and realized what I was doing to myself.   I starting writing this blog, I started praying again several times a day, I started writing my life scripts and I started listening and reading 100% positive and productive information.  No more talk radio, mainstream media, newspapers or ridiculous reality shows, all I choose to fill my mind with is positive thoughts.  I can tell you that so far things were really starting to work well, I lost 16 pounds in about 6 weeks, money started showing up in my life in strange places and in strange ways (mostly unexpected, I take that back, I started to expect money to show up and it has),  I added a second full-time job that won’t conflict with my primary full-time job and overall what seemed like an impossible situation a few months ago has dramatically turned around.  Until yesterday, when worry crept back into my mind, I couldn’t figure out why I had feelings of worry and depression yesterday and the more I thought about it the worse I felt.  I went to bed last night for the first time in months not feeling the way I had been during this turnaround.  I woke up this morning and it hit me,  I had let my self-discipline slip, I hadn’t listened to positive input over the weekend, I listened to some negative talk radio, Sunday morning news shows and let some people close to me have their way with trying to get me to feel bad.  On my walk with my dog Flash this morning, I realized that I need to step things up, I need to shut out even more negative and unproductive input and I have to practice thinking positive and happy thoughts again.  I have to feel good and only I can do it.

I thought the best way to keep steady with anything is to have a system so during my walk this morning, Flash and I came up with a system to keep me on track. I am calling my new system, DIWIRIVILIGI,  Dream it, Write it, Read it, Visualize it, Live it, Get it !  those are the steps you need to do everyday to make sure you are creating exactly the life you want.  I know, all that stuff we learned in school is coming back to haunt you, unless you have 100% mastered feeling incredible 100% of the time, you must have a way to remind yourself of what you want and then you have to drill it into your head to keep it active.  This system is what I have personally been doing for the last few months, I have been dreaming about what I want for my life, writing it in a script that I email myself everyday, I read what I wrote to myself, visualize myself doing and having what I wrote, live like I have it and then get what I want when it shows up.   I can tell you that I haven’t been as disciplined with this as I need to be but even so, I can see things showing up on a daily basis that I wrote in my scripts just a couple of months ago.

I am making a commitment to myself to create exactly the life I want moving forward using my system that I have just outlined for you.  I am also adding a couple of modules to my system this week, RI, HI, DI  that would be “Record it, Hear it and Do it”  In addition to my primary system, I am going to record my scripts into a digital recorder, put them on a CD and listen to them everyday along with my other positive input.  I want to engage all the senses in creating an incredible life, I just need to figure out how to smell happiness now !

One of the coolest things I discovered over the past couple months is a web site called TUTs Adventurers Club  www.tut.com , if you go to this site you can sign up to receive “notes from the Universe via email”  They show up in the middle of the night and these emails are the first thing I read each morning.  It has been amazing to me to wake up, read the Universe’s email and see how closely it coincides with what I was actually thinking.  Here’s the email I received this morning:

If there’s something you want, Tim, anything at all, or if there’s something you need, no matter what it is, or if there’s something you’d like to change, please remember that all the bells and whistles of time and space were first hewn and blown in the windmills of one’s mind, long before they were ever dung or heard by hands and ears. Whatever you dream of, live it, live it now, as fully as possible, to whatever degree you can, in your thoughts, words, and deeds. And sure enough, as day follows night, as rains fall from pregnant clouds, and as melodies float from bells and whistles, your dream will come to pass.  It’s a sure thing,     The Universe

Thoughts become things… choose the good ones! ® © www.tut.com ®

I know, I know, Tim. Dung should be “rung.” But “dung” just kind of wrote itself… and made me laugh.

It is really fun getting these daily emails, kind of sets the tone for the day.  So today, take responsibility for creating exactly what you want in your life, it’s up to you, whether it’s up or down you have created it.

Teachers, Tests and a Lifetime of Learning

It is very interesting to me that since I started writing this Blog last week the Universe is putting me in touch with Teachers, giving me tests and allowing me to learn from what I am blogging about.  Now I am not talking about traditional teachers or tests, I haven’t gone back to College or a trade school, I am just running into people and having situations arise that I KNOW are the Universe’s (God’s) way of teaching me or testing me.  When I was on my walk with my dog “Flash” this morning, I was planning on writing about how Dr. Terry Lyles ( www.terrylyles.com) appeared in my life at a very tough time, while most people thought he was just a business partner and someone whose book I was going to publish, I saw him as a teacher who was brought to me by God to help my Wife and I deal with a very tough time.  My mother in-law was dying of cancer and Terry helped us both deal with the trauma associated with it.  Terry believes that every crisis or tragedy in our lives are actually gifts, which was what I was talkng about a few days back when I said that there is something good in everything, you just have to dig hard sometimes to find it.  Terry has worked with everyone from Professional athletes to first responders at ground zero (9/11) to the victims of hurricanes and Tsunamis.  Terry spent over a month working in a makeshift morgue in Thailand after the Tsunami helping people identify and deal with the loss of their loved ones.  Terry will be the first to tell you that this experience was one of the greatest gifts of his life.  One of the things that Terry taught me that sticks with me and helps me deal with any obstacle thrown in my way is the stories Terry tells of working with  theNavy Seals.  Most people when faced with danger run the other direction but the Navy Seals are taught to run toward the danger and deal with it head on.  This is something you need to do with the obstacles(danger) in your  life, run toward it and deal with it.  Running away, makes it fester and creates the stress that we all think we can’t handle.

First thing this morning, God throws a huge test at my feet, I had a letter forwarded to me about a business deal I am involved in that could have created a disastrous situation and maybe still will.   A few months back, I would have been extremely upset and fired off a nasty response, taking it personally that some would dare to do this.  But today, I took a deep breath and said to myself, there is something good here, I detached myself from the situation and suddenly the words for a positive email response were flowing through my fingers.  I sent the email and a few hours later got a response that I was afraid to look at but when I finally got the nerve to open the email, the response was the polar opposite of what I expected, I will even call it pleasant.   Now it may be that I just set the right tone with my original response but either way a volatile situation has now turned into a manageable situation and I am content that a positive solution will arise.  The key is stopping to recognize the tests that are presented to us everyday and looking for the teachers that come along to teach us in places we least expect it.

My friend from high school, Heidi, responded to a post I had about patience on my Facebook page today and she talked about the incident with the flight attendant on Jet Blue last week where a passenger was so out of control the flight attendant litterally  couldn’t deal with the situation and left the plane (with two beers and a trip down the inflatable slide).  Had the flight attendant realized that the unruly passenger was actually a teacher sent to teach him something, the outcome might have been much different.  Dr. Wayne Dyer talks alot about the teachers that show up in our lives and he specifically refers to the people that bother us the most as the people that are here to teach us what we really need to learn.  These teachers include the drunk at the baseball game that pours beer on your wife, the guy in the red camaro that cuts you off on the interstate, the snowboarder with the bad attitude that gets in your face or the umpire that calls a foul ball ball when you were actually hit in the wrist by the pitcher.  The next time someone really irritates you, instead of getting upset, think to yourself, what was this person sent here to teach me.  I think you will find that you will feel better, your blood won’t be boiling and you might actually learn something that makes you stronger.  This is just another way of looking for the good in every situation you are presented with.

I had a great lunch today with a very good friend who makes movies for a living, he had mentioned that he had read my blogs and appreciated the living in the now comments I had made.  We were talking about how today’s world with all of the economic worries and families in financial crisis that it has forced us to look at things differently.  It really is a great time to live in the now because no matter where you are Omaha, driving by the landfill on the South Side of Chicago, Glacier Park or North Minneapolis you will find amazing things to appreciate and be thankful for.  You have no idea what you are missing if you haven’t visited the worlds largest ball of twine or driven down West Broadway in North Minneapolis.  Everywhere you look there is something to appreciate and be thankful for and yes to enjoy !  You just have to live in the moment and learn to appreciate everything.  Today more than ever I appreciate the amazing friends I have and the people like Chris who I had lunch with who is so creative and interesting that the lunch was a seminar in itself.  So do yourself a favor, be alert and pay attention to every person that crosses your path, try to figure out what each one was sent here to teach you, what each obstacle or test was designed to teach you and how to appreciate the lesson plan that God has created for you.