If you’re like me, you love getting gold stars, check marks, A+’s, smiley faces… I really like being recognized because it shows me that people value me and the things that I do. From the big (a tough project at work) to the small (the dishes), it feels great when someone says “thank you” or “great job.” I really appreciate it when people appreciate me.

But…

People don’t always recognize your efforts. It happens. But I find that I want that credit! It’s not enough to enjoy the feeling of doing good, I want someone else to call me out.

Sometimes if I don’t get recognized for something, I feel resentful and the good feelings I had about my accomplishment go out the window. This can happen when I’m helping someone, too. A selfless act can turn selfish when my efforts aren’t appreciated. If I do someone a favor and they don’t say “thanks,” I take it very personally. And sometimes when I do anonymous good, I want that star so badly that I end up telling someone just to get that pat on the head.

I think the reason I crave approval so much is because I actually deny giving it to myself. It’s time to let other people off the hook and start recognizing myself. If I were to start giving myself credit for all the things I do, I wouldn’t need that outside approval. It would still be nice, but I wouldn’t be resentful if I didn’t get it.

Besides, only I know all the things I do in a day. No one else can thank me for everything. Only I can. So I’m going to start giving myself credit… even for putting the dishes away.

(We’ll just gently sweep the fact that it’s been AGES since a post under the web carpet and proceed apace…)

I spend a lot of energy thinking about what I want, which is to say what I lack, which is to say where I feel poor. Money, recognition, time… I often find myself wanting more of these things. Today it occurred to me that after months (OK, years) of wanting more time to myself, I am time rich. Thinking “I am time rich” made me feel luxuriant, blessed, wonderful. There are still 24 hours in my day – I had no more time than I used to – but I’ve started using the time I have in new and different ways.

Before this morning I was time poor. I thought about how I either didn’t have enough time or how I was squandering the time that I have. By saying that I am time rich (again, what a great feeling!), I started to see it. This week I planted three pots (biodegradable – love you, Mother Earth!) of herbs and cooked Indian food for the first time. However small, I contributed to growth and experienced new things. I enriched my life.

So I am making an effort to find other areas where I am rich and don’t even realize it. I may have to call it out on faith before I’m able to see it. Money? Rich. Recognition? Rich. Love? Rich. Happiness? Rich. Now that I’ve said it, I look for supporting evidence. Just like the law of attraction, the Secret, the rules of visualization… the more I see that supports the theory that I am rich, the richer I will be.

The richness of life can reveal itself slowly. The beautiful blossoms that burst forth in April have lain dormant for months and spent weeks working their way through tough brown coatings to reveal tender greens, deep purples, bright pinks and delicate whites. Go easy on yourself for what’s happened in the past. Open your eyes and take a look around you now. It’s never too late.

Where are you rich?

2009 was a hellish year. Whether we were dealing with uncertainty at work, in our pocketbooks or at home, 2009 seemed a tumultuous year for almost everyone I know. Personally, I’m glad to be seeing it go, but not without some reflection, of course, on the things I experienced and learned from it.

My only resolution in 2009 was to love myself unconditionally. On a scale from 1 to 10, I’d give myself a 7 for my work this year. There were some periodic ups and downs, but from where I started, I think a 7 is an amazing accomplishment!

Some of the areas that my resolution really helped me to develop in were career and health.

I started off the year with uncertainty at my workplace. The old me would have told myself that I was somehow to blame due to the quality of my work, even though everything I knew and believed told me otherwise. Instead, thanks to my study of Field Theory at The Field Center, what I learned to do was change my mind. I changed worry and blame to alignment on the truth. The truth was that I’ve wanted to work from home for some time and the Universe (or Field) was just trying to give me that. As soon as I changed my mind, my career path became clear and I was offered a position working from home.

Being patient and caring with myself is also what led me to lose over 20 pounds this year. Slow and steady wins the race… I have a little over 10 more pounds to go to win this race, but without the space I’ve given myself to lose this weight in my own time, I surely would have given up by now.

2010 will involve much of the same work for me – unconditionally loving myself and using my Field Training to bring alignment into more aspects of my life.

I wish you all the same for a Happy New Year!

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end.

~ Seneca

Sometimes there is so much going on that I don’t even know where to start. What usually happens next is absolutely nothing. I end up not being productive at all and getting bored in the process.

To make matters worse, I start thinking about how I’m not doing anything and what’s wrong with me and blah blah blah.

Next I take my side in this and say, “you work so hard, you deserve a break” or “I’ll get it done another time” or some other handy excuse.

Before I know it, I’m in the middle of my own philosophical argument and – surprise! – still not accomplishing anything.

I find it’s less a matter of where to start, but when. If I decide to start now, I will find a place. But if I get so caught up in where to begin, five hours will go by in a flash and I’ll be drained from the mental effort of simply being overwhelmed.

If you’re with me, then close your eyes, take a deep breath and open your eyes. Start there. Start now.

Have you heard the expression, “the days are long, but the years are short”? I’ve been thinking about it a lot recently… especially with the hours of daylight dwindling. When I leave for work in the dark and come home in the dark, the days don’t seem long at all. Except I’ve noticed that when I’m tired, down, drained and someone asks me how I am, I tend to say, “It’s been a long day.”

So, which is it? Long or short?

“Long”… dragging along, lots going on, etc. “Short”… so much great stuff happening that time just flew by.

I say it’s time to turn that around. Let’s have the short days be the rough ones that we are glad to see fade in our rearview mirror. Let’s have the long ones be the good ones that we can wrap around us like a comfy blanket (or Snuggie). Let’s savor little moments, be present, put down the Blackberry, talk to someone, really taste our food, take a moment to laugh. Let’s open our eyes to all the good in our lives.

When someone asks me how my day was, I want to say, “It was wonderful. What a beautifully long day!”

I’m a to do list junkie. Ask anyone that knows me. At any given point in the year I’ve got 3 different lists of goals – short-term, mid-term and long-term. I’ve got a to do list at work, a to do list at home, I even help people make their own lists and teach them how to keep track of them!

The other day, as I was using my lists to create my schedule for the week, it occurred to me that I wasn’t scheduling any time for things that were, well… fun.

I have a tendency to do this. To use the satisfaction of a job well done and the checking off of daily tasks as the stuff that sustains me while I tell myself there will be time for fun when this list of things is complete. I’m sure you can see the problem already? For a person like me, that list of things to do will never be complete. I will always find more to add to it!

So, I’ve been making a point to add something to my list for myself each week. Today it was going for a walk with my dog – a walk that I’ve been promising him we’d go on for much too long to admit. It’s funny. Watching him wade through an ice cold stream, and turn around with his big doggy smile while he waited for me to catch up made me feel much more satisfied than any neat, little check mark would.

And it’s taught me a lesson: it’s important to include things in our daily tasks that are just for ourselves. Things that nurture and sustain our sense of peace and happiness, otherwise, all those check marks will be for naught. Maybe it’s savoring a cup of fresh tea during a moment of silence when the kids are napping, maybe it’s scheduling a much needed mani/pedi. Whatever it is, you’ll thank yourself and so will your lists. You’ll find yourself much more motivated to complete more of the tasks on your list if you feel the benefits of at least one of them instantly.

Happiness? Check.

Last night I watched the Emmy Awards and amidst the sea of ho-hum speeches and performances, one stuck out in my head. Jon Cryer, who won for Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy, jokingly said that he used to think awards were shallow and meaningless tokens, but now saw them as they really were: a true measure of a person’s worth. The audience laughed, but this got me thinking more seriously…

How many times do we look to something outside ourselves to tell us our worth?

Why not recognize ourselves? I think it’s time we start seeing our value, independent of others. We all have strengths, gifts to give, something that makes us special.

When others recognize us, it does feel good. But we don’t have to rely on anyone else to tell us our worth. We can do that for ourselves every single day.

So, today, the winner is… us.

Nobody can go back and start a new beginning, but anyone can start today and make a new ending.

~ Maria Robinson

One of the first classes I took as an art student was called Basic Design. The professor was a bit of a nut ball who liked to talk about her “artist’s days” in New York City in the 40′s, before she had to “retire to motherhood”. And for the duration of the term, all we did was arrange basic shapes like triangles, circles and squares into different patterns to see what kind of designs we could make. I loved it. Even if it was tedious being restricted to a few simple shapes, it was equally as challenging to make myself create something original and balanced each time.

Part of each lesson included looking at the patterns in some of the master works, and I remember there was a whole week we studied the art of M.C. Escher. I like Escher on both a technical and intellectual level. His work is nothing if not balanced. And definitely original.

There is a level of detail that draws you in. You get the feeling you could look at one illustration for hours and still find something you didn’t notice before. And you can, because Escher played with negative space – the space between things, to put it plainly. If you are looking at a painting of a bowl of fruit on a table, for example, with a peach and a cherry precariously placed at the edge of the table, the space between the loose fruit and the bowl would be negative space. Likely, nothing would be there, except maybe wall paper.

But Escher used his negative space and this played with my idea of “good and bad”. Often, we make the word “negative” space mean something “bad”, when right here in front of my eyes, Escher made it mean something was there. And it wasn’t necessarily bad. It just was.

What if we all made our negative space – the times when we think nothing positive is happening – mean something actually is there and that it’s not necessarily bad?