In Business and Life: Books that strive to Motivate and Inspire Us

Filed Under Business Life, Motivation/Inspiration | 3 Comments

A Weekly Series by Teresa Morrow

I’m Teresa Morrow, Founder of Key Business Partners, LLC and I work with authors and writers by managing their online promotion. As part of my job I read a lot of books (and I love to read anyway!). I am here to offer a weekly post about one book I am working with and one book I have put on my reading list. The books will cover topics such as social media (Facebook and Twitter), organization, career building, networking, writing and self development and inspiration.

Where Did The Gift Go?

This week I would like to start off with a book I have read and working with entitled Where Did the Gift Go? by Ricky Roberts III.

I believe we all need inspiration in our lives, sometimes more than others. What I really enjoyed about Ricky’s book is the honesty and devotion to his message throughout the book. He writes about the gifts we each have within us to live our greatest lives and how we can regain these gifts at any time we want.

I would like to share with you a brief excerpt from “Where did the Gift Go?”:

“In this book, I ask, “Where did the Gift Go?”. I say the gift is here, right now, just to be. It’s in the essence of who you are and how you choose to live every moment that you are given. Live your life!
If you were to take ten people on a timeline, chances are they will all fall in different places on it. Naturally
some come in the world at the same time, or leave at the same time, but the chances of them coming and going at the same exact time are unlikely…”
“I, my friend, can tell you the exact moment of one thing, and that is your life, the gift. It is now!”

I see it, even in myself many times, I get going so fast, I don’t slow down long enough to really appreciate the gift of life staring me in the face. Each moment we are here on earth, we can make a difference within ourselves and help others do the same.

If you wish to pick up a copy of Where did the Gift Go? you can pick it up on Amazon.

About Ricky: At the age of seventeen, after being stabbed nine times, Ricky realized a higher calling in his life and has been driven to work that purpose since then. He is devoted to this path of service and is passionate about making a difference wherever he can.

Drive

Now is time for me to showcase a book I have not read but it is on my reading list. This week my choice is Daniel Pink’s latest book, Drive: The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us.

About the book:
From Daniel H. Pink, the author of the bestselling A Whole New Mind, comes a paradigm-shattering look at what truly motivates us and how we can use that knowledge to work smarter and live better.

Most of us believe that the best way to motivate ourselves and others is with external rewards like money—the carrot-and-stick approach. That’s a mistake, Daniel H. Pink says in, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, his provocative and persuasive new book. The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our world.

About Daniel:
I was born on the American east coast. Then I was reared (that’s the word we use) in the American midwest — where I enjoyed a steady diet of team sports, public libraries, and 70s sitcoms. After punching my ticket at a few outposts of what was once called “higher education,” I went to work, got married, and had kids.

If you would like a copy of Drive, go here on Amazon.

Again, I hope you have enjoyed this week’s post of these two books on motivation and inspiration. If you have read either or both of these books, please comment and share with us your thoughts.

Beach Notes: Priceless Beach Art

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

Installation: “Flotsam, upright, after the storm”, Duranbah Beach, February 2010

Materials: Sand, found objects (timber)

Artist: Some Anonymous Surfer Dude

Duranbah (accent on the second syllable, as in Duran Duran) Beach is only used by board riders and boogie boarders. Walking there one morning this week after big storms, we saw trees, branches, seaweed and various other bits of flotsam and jetsam strewn along the beachfront. Then this, with the upright pole definitely not even a freak effect from the storm.

Tantalizing.

We were reminded of many contemporary art exhibitions in trendy galleries we have visited. Only here there was no cheap wine and crackers, no little card explaining in artspeak what the work “means”. Nor any red sticker, or price tag

Literally, priceless.

Look around. Find some priceless creation today in your neighbourhood.

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

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Beach Notes: What Goes into Effortless?

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by Guest Writers Suzie Cheel and Des Walsh

A couple of times recently we have seen this man at our local beach, Rainbow Bay, with a didgeridoo ( or yidaki), the traditional Australian Aboriginal musical intrument.

This day we saw and heard him playing with the end of the “didge” submerged at the water’s edge.

My thought was that there might be some spiritual explanation, connecting with the spirits of the sea, etc. A bit of a web search suggests something more mundane. Evidently the exercise of playing the instrument in this way trains the diaphragm and builds the player’s ability to maintain the constant pressure to produce the long drawn out sounds that are such a feature of didgeridoo playing.

So we think he was not just blowing bubbles or even communing with the spirits of the sea, so much as practising, training his body to support his playing.

Of course, we could have asked. But when we came back, he was gone and we have not seen him on subsequent days.

Inspirational thought from this? When you watch and listen to an indigenous or even a skilled non-indigenous Australian play the didgeridoo for an extended period, it seems so effortless. And maybe it is. But as with many apparently effortless displays of high level skills, such as those of a champion sports person, there is usually many hours of practice, training and self-discipline that have gone into that “effortless” performance.

Suzie Cheel & Des Walsh

Watering Ideas at the Reflecting Pool

Filed Under Motivation/Inspiration, Successful Blog, Writing | 14 Comments

A Guest Post by
Pamir Kiciman

Browser tabs are great. Emails, tweets and feeds update so you can switch tabs and see what it is. But what happens when you switch in the middle of a juicy post, mindmap or other creative jaunt? You break continuity at the mercy of an insatiable beast. And breaking continuity can spell disaster for your output.

Ideas are ephemeral. The act of putting them down is a way of preserving them. The mind already computes at high speed and distraction is just too easy. I often wish I didn’t know about ALT-TAB (I’m a PC) which easily switches this in-progress Google doc to that third-party app which just dinged!

After all, it’s the real-time web and it HAS to be important.

What was I saying?

Ideas and the Mind

Fortunately the mind can be harnessed. In fact its real power becomes available only when it is. Why? Because the mind is layered and each layer has its own fluctuation. To get to the layer where ideas are generated, surface fluctuations have to be stilled.

Say you’re a diver and your favorite body of water is very turbulent one day, so you don’t go in. On another day conditions are perfect and you dive. When you do, you find treasures that couldn’t be seen from the surface.

The mind’s fluctuations are called brainwaves. There are four basic brainwaves: beta, alpha, theta and delta, each with its specific cycles per second. Brain states are a combination of these with one or two emphasized depending on the state.

Delta is sleep, but also the deep unconscious (darkest ocean depths). Theta is serene, meditative awareness (depths sunlight penetrates). Alpha is relaxation and comfort (floating atop gentle currents). And beta is conscious functioning in the world (driving to the ocean).

Some ocean creatures that live where sunlight doesn’t reach have bioluminescence which is a wonder to see. The unconscious (delta) may be dark but it stores treasures. In theta we access some of that, and all our creativity. Alpha relates to fantasy and visualization. Beta is logical thinking, problem solving and external attention.

Trouble with beta is that too much of it leads to a churning of unfocused thoughts. And without alpha there isn’t creative recall, for alpha is the bridge from reflection to output.

Single-tasking is actually a form of reflection. The reflective mind is concentrated and unified, making use of logical processes and intuitive ones. To produce anything, everything has to move in the single direction of that thing. Multitasking is like being a jack of all trades, but master of none.

Flowing with Ideas

An idea won’t reach fruition unless you engage the “reflecting pool.” You may not even craft the idea at all. For example, “attentional-blink” happens when two pieces of information are given in rapid succession and the brain doesn’t process the second one because it’s still thinking of the first. You have to flow with an idea and follow it.

The reflective mind is a flow state, which can also erect a dam so an idea can concretize. Often reflection takes place best at times other than the moment of creation. In fact, it’s way of life, an orientation. Your accumulated reflections establish a resource from which you draw at the time of production. There’s in-the-moment reflection too, but without a cultivated well this dries up fast.

Inner and outer stillness engenders reflection, and dipping daily into an alpha-theta state solidifies it. Really good ideas are submerged. The inmost layers of the mind will gladly let them surface but you have to be present. If you’re gasping for oxygen in the infostream, you can’t be present.

There are some apps below to ‘force’ reflection and one-pointedness, but in the end this is an internal discipline that must be developed. Interiorizing the mind is where ideas are watered. Here are some ways to do so:

• Look into the distance
• Look at nature or a cityscape
• Watch the sky or sunrise/sunset
• Watch and/or listen to water
• Look at inspirational images
• Turn on a fountain
• Use a rain stick back and forth
• Play a drum with a steady beat
• Read wisdom literature
• Learn breathing and relaxation techniques
• Learn meditation

I’ll be monitoring this space so please use comments to give your input and ask questions so we can dive deeper together.

Useful apps:

• Writer
• Doodim
• Dropcloth
• Rescue Time
• Mind42

—-
Pamir Kiciman, BA, RM, CHt is a Classical/Original Usui Reiki Teacher, Meditation Coach, Healer. He writes at the Reiki Help Blog. You can find him on Twitter as @gassho.

Thanks, Pamir! I’m going to take my time exploring those tools!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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