I’ve been working on a website for a very good friend of mine. He’s also one of my longest-running clients, and he’s been blogging a lot about abundance.
And I really like his take on it because one of the things he talks about is recognizing the abundance that’s already in your life. You know, I don’t really believe too much in this whole “sit back and (believe, visualize, expect) abundance and it’ll manifest for you” thing that’s been going around for some time now. Reminds me a little bit too much of the old joke about the guy who kept praying to win the lottery, and he prayed and prayed and prayed to win the lottery until finally he got an answer. And the answer was, “You gotta buy the ticket!”.
I believe that by recognizing the abundance that is already in our lives, by acknowledging the fact that if we share that abundance and that joy with others, if we look for ways to help ourselves find more abundance and help each other find abundance, that’s how we buy our ticket.
You can’t just sit around waiting for it to happen. You need to look around yourself. You need to help yourself recognize what you already have, recognize opportunities, and recognize how you can build on what you already have.
It’s not easy. There are days when you look around your life and you think there is no abundance there at all. None. Nada. Rien. But. If you look really closely, there always is.
There’s something, there’s some little thing that will come to you, that will say to you “Look. This is what you have. You know that things may be crappy right now, but this? This right here? This is good. This is yours. This is never going to go away. This is what you have in your life”.
You have family. You have friends. Perhaps you have a pet, a special place you go to, a piece of music that lifts you up. Do you have someone else’s garden that you walk past every day that brings you joy? You know the whole stop and smell the roses thing? There’s some truth to that.
Stop. Take a look around yourself. Take a look around your life. Start to recognize the good in your life, the abundance in your life, and stop dwelling on the crappy things.
One of my favourite sayings is: “Guilt is about the past, anxiety is about the future, and neither one of them will change a thing. That’s up to you.”
My friend Wayne has created a “Fill Your Life With Abundance” journal. Well, he calls it a planner, but it’s a great way of keeping track. I know that many people do gratitude journals or whatever kind of journaling they feel is good and proper for them in their lives, and for them, this is a good thing.
But I’m not very good at journaling. It’s too time-consuming, detail-oriented, it makes me think too much at the end of the day and I’m not able to sleep. I don’t have time to write a journal in the morning, ’cause I gotta get up and do my life. This abundance planner is wonderful because it’s in a document format, which means you can save it to your computer and load it into your word processor and fill it out. And I’ll tell you what, you can do it morning, noon, night whenever you find 5 minutes.
You can download the quarterly version. You can download the full year version. Use it for a while and you will see that it will start give you a really clear vision of where you are, what you’ve learned, what you need to learn, where you’re going and how you plan to get there. It’s a terrific, terrific tool to use.
For those of you who are already journaling, you can add it to your journaling process. And for those of us like me, who can’t journal, ’cause it just takes too much time? It’s a brilliant way to cut the time so that you can get it done without writing big long paragraphs or having to go on and on about it.
Anyway, that’s what I do now.
You can get any of the versions of the planner for free here
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