The Power of Vision

As a child, you may have dreamed of doing something great one day. That was the beginning of your "vision". Everyone knows that vision means having the ability to see. When you have a vision for your life, you see a future that you want to make real. If your vision is powerful and compelling enough, it can provide the impetus to turn the future you envisaged in reality, because every vision, no matter how fantastic it may seem at first, has a potential to become a reality.

The individual who has not guiding vision is like a ship drifting at sea t no set course. On the other hand, the person with strong vision sees possibilities in their future, which they are determined to realize. The power of vision inspires creativity and resourcefulness and empowers you to reach your full potential.

You can do anything with the rest of your life - what will that be? We are too quick to see things that are beyond our current capabilities as impossible, now and for all time, and so we give up before we've even begun. Yet, if you take a good look around you, you'll probably find someone like you currently doing precisely the thing that you wrote off as unacheivable.

Your life vision needs to be bifocal, taking on both your immediate and your distant future. You must focus not only on your ultimate goal, which in some cases may lie may years ahead, but also on the intermediate objectives along the way, such as the exams you might need to pass each year to graduate from college.

At very practical level, your vision serves to organize your goals and priorities within a clear time frame and sets for you a direction and a destination. It draws on what is important to you - your values, hopes, and dreams. The intermediate goals that you set help you to identify benchmark achievements along the route. In this way, your vision gradually builds, gathering momentum as you move toward your destination, energizing you and motivating you to keep going until you reach your goal.

Think about how your life would look if you identified a master plan and then deployed every available resource and opportunity in order to achieve that purpose. That would be your vision. Such a vision might look something like this: I will be very successful in my career and enjoy it very much; i will live in my ideal home and have everything I need to live comfortably and happily; I will share my life with those I love - my families and friends - and have plenty of time to enjoy leisure activities with them; I will make sure that i get enough exercise, sleep and proper nourishment to maintain my mind, body and spirit in peak shape; I will control my finances so that I can adequately provide for my family's needs; I will make steady progress toward the goals I have set for my life's achievement and legacy.

You can create your vision through a combination of thought and action. Start by identifying the values and principles that guide you in life; next, create objectives to achieve those important things over time; then prioritize to make the best use of your time and be sure that the most important things get accomplished. You will have to manage your time well to be highly successful in your efforts. As you take these steps, your vision will materialize, but it will not be set in stone - you will need to refine it regularly throughout the rest of your life, as you continue to seek balanced living.

Ensoul #3

It is difficult only when you say it is

Approach to Dating

1. Make Eye Contact: Catching a person's eye is the best way to begin. A simple, non-staring look conveys interest, especially if followed by a smile. Eye contact is only good when you want to talk to someone. If you're uncomfortable about someone who is attempting to make eye contact with you, break eye contact and do not follow up anymore
2. Ask Questions: Questions are good conversation starters. Sometimes they're your best avenue to get to know the person.
3. Be Sincere: Sincerity is a genuine desire to know someone If you want someone to be sincerely interested in you, be sincerely interested in that person.
4. Be Friendly: Friendliness is always attractive. This is a quality that invites conversation. Friendliness says, "I want to get to know you." but use a balanced approach to friendliness. Avoid being overly friendly with people you met.
5. Be Humorous: Humor is great icebreaker and can defuse a tense situation. Use it often, but use it wisely.

Start Another Stream

One of the worst things you can do is to permit a continuous trickle of worry across the mind, because like water it will ultimately dig a huge trench. Then every thought you think will be drained into this channel of fear and worry and come up tinctured with anxiety. You will be a person full of fear and worry.

The way to obliterate this is to start another stream. Let a stream of faith run across the mind and go deeper and deeper as you absorb faith thoughts into your consciousness - and after a while, it will undercut the channel of fear and worry which will then fall into the Chanel of faith, and a great river of faith will surge through your mind so that every thought will come up bright and resplendent, optimistic and hopeful, and life will be good, very good. Cultivate a channel of faith to give you deep security which you need.

Balanced Living

The modern world places great emphasis on personal choice. In an average day we all make countless decisions - there's a range of products for every need, a computer command for every circumstance, a sandwich filling for every palate. All this gives us unprecedented opportunities to shape our lives in lots of small ways. However, having to make so m any choices, often with little or no time in which to consider them, can become overwhelming. How do you decide which options will enhance, rather that detract from, the balance of your life?

Technological advances, such as satellite communications and e-mail, now make it easy to contact people anywhere in the world anytime. The internet offers easy access to vast amounts of information that in the past would have taken days,  or weeks, to collate; and computer technologies enable us to do more in less time than ever before. Other modern  conveniences abound - for example, fast foods, cellphones, and air travel. If we can fulfill our responsibilities at home and at work more quickly than before, then theoretically, we should have more time to relax and enjoy ourselves. If only life were that simple.

All these benefits of modernity have negative consequences as well as positive. In the computer age it's easy to fall into the rap of spending more and more time at work trying to become even more productive. Fast foods have contributed to an increased prevalence of obesity and diabetes in developed countries. Ease of travel can result in our being away from family and friends more than is good for us. And being accessible outside working hours to clients or co-workers via our cellphones can cause work concerns to invade our home life.

We are more likely than previous generations to change job regularly and to move to different regions or even different countries. On the one hand, this flexibility gives us a great chance to meet new people and simple a wide variety of cultural and working environments. On the other hand, it may make our lives feel unstable, especially as the growing trend for organizations to hire people on fixed-term contracts means that often our job changes are dictated to us.

In identifying the choices that are right for you, the first thing o need to develop is a clear and compelling vision, so that you always stay focused on your goals and priorities when scrolling through the often bewildering range of options available

Pasta with Parsley & Parmesan

Ingredients:

• 450 g dried penne pasta
• 175 g unsalted butter
• 4 tbsp chopped fresh flat-leaf parsley
• 225 g Parmesan cheese, grated
• salt

Preparation:

• Cook the pasta in a large saucepan of boiling salted water for 10-12 minutes, or until tender but still firm to the bite. Drain and tip into a warmed serving dish
• Add the butter, parsely, and toss well until the butter and cheese have melted. Serve immediately with the remaining Parmesan cheese handed separately.

3 Strikes and You're Out

Want to come across in a negative way? You will if you come up to bat with these dating techniques.

Strike 1: Be arrogant. Let the person know that you're doing him or her a favor by even talking. Keep the conversation centered on yourself.

Strike 2: Be impatient. Keep looking at your watch or looking for someone better looking to come along. Don't waste a lot of time - just get the phone number.

Strike 3: Be insincere. Pretend that you're interested in what the person is saying. Communicate only enough interest to get what you want: that person's phone number or to get asked out.

Ensoul #2

It is not the amount of money you pay for something that makes it valuable. It is valuable only to the extent of how much it has added to your joy of living.

Sauvignon Blanc

Sauvignon Blanc can often be very fruity and pungent. Nonetheless, light, lean Sauvignons do exists on the form of Sancerre and Pouilly-Fume and other wines from the cool Loire Valley.

Some lighter, crisper style of Sauvignon are made in the coolest New World vineyards, such as Tasmania, Waipara/Canterbury in New Zealand, Casablanca Valley in Chile and Elgin in South Africa. These wines major on tangy citrus fruit rather than the richer, fruitier styles more generally seen in the New World.