United States and It's Fabulous 50

I just finished reading a wonderful article by Jim Rohn "Reaping a Multiple Reward". As I finished this article I started reflecting on one of my rewards from seeds that I had sown and I would like to share it with you.

It started when I was 21, I just got married to my high school sweetheart and had been working for one of the largest privately owned developers in Tulsa. To me my life could not be better, great husband and great job. I worked hard and gave 110% to my employer and I quickly reaped rewards. I started moving up the corporate ladder. I started as an administrative assistant in HR, then to administrative assistant to the CFO, then moved on to a assistant manager in the marketing department. I love my corporate job. I had a burning desire to learn and was always up for new challenges. My burning desire was paying off... I was rewarded with great pay and lots of respect. They valued my opinions and viewed me as a go to person. I did what it took to get the job done.

At age 25, I gave birth to my first daughter and now with that motherly instinct I had the desire to be a stay at home mom and raise my baby girl. It seemed like everything was falling into place like I had always dreamed. As a few months passed, something keep telling me that I needed to go back to work. Three months later, I did just that. I returned to work and I was able to resume my prior position. Within a month, I had mastered self discipline and was able to balance my personal life and work....so I thought!

This is when my life began to unfold, my young marriage would soon be something of the past. Not because I went back to work, but because I realized that my husband did not have the same desire to raise a family. He did not want the commitment of raising a family. Spending all his free time with his so called friends became his desire. That is when I realized I must do something about it, this was not how I had pictured raising my daughter. After several months of trying to reconcile with my husband and trying to get him to come home to be with his family, I could see that there was no light at the end of the tunnel. I filed for a divorce when my daughter was 6-months old, I was scared and did not know how I was going to raise a baby by myself, but I knew in my heart that is what I needed to do.

I was now labeled as a single parent. I had all the responsibilites of a new home, car payment, utilities, cost of raising a baby on my own, but I had the self disciple and knew that I could do it!

I wanted to have life balance and be able to teach my daughter values, that if you have the burning desire and the passion you can do anything that you want. I instilled in her at an early age to follow your Dreams, never give up.

Now 23 years later, I know that the seeds that I sowed paid off. My daughter is 23, she graduated from UofA with a BS in Family Studies and Human Development and a minor in Business. She has moved to Dallas to follow her dream since she was a little girl... to be a DCC! She has stayed focused on her dream and has not let go. I do take credit for that... and she always tells me that I am her ROCK! I am a very proud parent!

I left the corporate world four-years ago to pursue my desire to work for myself. I have a successful online marketing company working from home. It wasn't easy at first working from home, I had to apply self discipline. I soon realized that just because I worked from home I could not treat my business as a hobby. In order to have success, you have to apply self discipline and treat it as a million dollar business. Self discipline is key to your success.

You see, I did not wait for things to deteriorate so drastically, before I imposed discipline in my life. I seen that things needed to change and I took that leap and made those changes. I am grateful that I did.

I hope you have enjoyed reading this short reflection of my life and how "reaping what you've sown" can have a large impact on your life.

With that being said I would like to leave you with a excerpt from Jim Rohn's "Reaping a Multiple Reward" article that inspired me.

For every disciplined effort, there are multiple rewards. That's one of life's great arrangements. In fact, it's an extension of the Biblical law that says that if you sow well, you will reap well.

Here's a unique part of the Law of Sowing and Reaping. Not only does it suggest that we'll all reap what we've sown, it also suggests that we'll reap much more. Life is full of laws that both govern and explain behaviors, but this may well be the major law we need to understand: for every disciplined effort, there are multiple rewards.

What a concept! If you render unique service, your reward will be multiplied. If you're fair and honest and patient with others, your reward will be multiplied. If you give more than you expect to receive, your reward is more than you expect. But remember: the key word here, as you might well imagine, is discipline.

Everything of value requires care, attention, and discipline. Our thoughts require discipline. We must consistently determine our inner boundaries and our codes of conduct, or our thoughts will be confused. And if our thoughts are confused, we will become hopelessly lost in the maze of life. Confused thoughts produce confused results.

Remember the law: "For every disciplined effort, there are multiple rewards." Learn the discipline of writing a card or a letter to a friend. Learn the discipline of paying your bills on time, arriving to appointments on time, or using your time more effectively. Learn the discipline of paying attention, or paying your taxes or paying yourself. Learn the discipline of having regular meetings with your associates, or your spouse, or your child, or your parent. Learn the discipline of learning all you can learn, of teaching all you can teach, of reading all you can read.

For each discipline, multiple rewards. For each book, new knowledge. For each success, new ambition. For each challenge, new understanding. For each failure, new determination. Life is like that. Even the bad experiences of life provide their own special contribution. But a word of caution here for those who neglect the need for care and attention to life's disciplines: everything has its price. Everything affects everything else. Neglect discipline, and there will be a price to pay. All things of value can be taken for granted with the passing of time.

That's what we call the Law of Familiarity. Without the discipline of paying constant, daily attention, we take things for granted. Be serious. Life's not a practice session.

The most valuable form of discipline is the one that you impose upon yourself. Don't wait for things to deteriorate so drastically that someone else must impose discipline in your life. Wouldn't that be tragic? How could you possibly explain the fact that someone else thought more of you than you thought of yourself? That they forced you to get up early and get out into the marketplace when you would have been content to let success go to someone else who cared more about themselves.

Your life, my life, the life of each one of us is going to serve as either a warning or an example. A warning of the consequences of neglect, self-pity, lack of direction and ambition... or an example of talent put to use, of discipline self-imposed, and of objectives clearly perceived and intensely pursued.

To Your Success,
Jim Rohn

If you have a burning desire to live the life of your dreams and work from home, please feel free to check out my new 'Stealth Marketing' system...a brand new concept.

http://blog.sandirenteria.com

by Denis Waitley

By re-energizing and renewing yourself frequently, you will avoid burnout and become much more motivated and productive. Don’t keep your nose to the grindstone for years and wait for retirement to travel. Balance and consistency are the keys. Enjoy the process, not just the result. Don’t fight the passing of time. Don’t fear it, squander it, or try to hide from it under a superficial cosmetic veil of fads and indulgences. Life and time go together. Do enjoy each phase of life. Do make the most of each day, and draw maximum joy from each moment.

Many people today are concerned with quality time – time generally defined in part as that spent on recreation, personal pursuits, time with children, spouses and friends. While I certainly believe quality time is important, I believe two other aspects of time are equally important.

First, one must also spend quantity time. The average father spends less than 30 minutes each week in direct one-on-one communication with each of his children. How can we possibly expect good family relationships with so little communication?

Second, one must spend regular time. Many supervisors and company presidents go for weeks, even months, without seeing many of their employees. There’s no substitute for regular meetings and open forums in which managers and team members can share ideas.

Time has a dual structure. On one hand, we live our daily routines meeting present contingencies as they arise. On the other hand, our most ambitious goals and desires need time so that they can be assembled and cemented. A long-term goal connects pieces of time into one block. These blocks can be imagined and projected into the future as we do when we set goals for ourselves. Or, these blocks of time can be created in retrospect as we do when we look back at what we’ve accomplished.

It’s not in the image of our big dreams that we run the risk of losing our focus and motivation. It’s the drudgery and routine of our daily lives that present the greatest danger to our hopes for achievement. Good time management means that you maximize the daily return on the energy and mental effort you expend.

Ways to maximize your time productivity:

• Write down in one place all the important contacts you have and all of your goals and priorities. Make a back up copy, preferably on CD, DVD or Zip disc. Write down every commitment you make at the time you make it.

• Stop wasting the first hour of your workday. Having the chat and first cup of coffee, reading the paper, and socializing are the three costliest opening exercises that lower productivity.

• Do one thing well at a time. It takes time to start and stop work on each activity. Stay with a task until it is completed.

• Don’t open unimportant mail. More than a fourth of the mail you receive can be tossed before you open or read it, and that includes e-mail.

• Handle each piece of paper only once and never more than twice. Don’t set aside anything without taking action. Carry work, reading material, audiotapes and your laptop computer with you everywhere you go. Convert down time into uplink time.

• Spend twenty minutes at the beginning of each week and ten minutes at the beginning of each day planning your to do list.

• Set aside personal relaxation time during the day. Don’t work during lunch. It’s neither noble nor nutritional to skip important energy input and stress-relieving time. Throughout the day, ask yourself, “What’s the best use of my time right now?” As the day grows short, focus on projects you can least afford to leave undone.

• And as we said at the beginning of this message, take vacations often, mini-vacations of two or three days, and leave your work at home. The harder you work, the more you need to balance your exercise and leisure time.

Action Idea: Plan a relaxing 3-day vacation within the next three months without taking any business work with you. Reserve it on your calendar this week.

-- Denis Waitley