Jacqui Thomas - Live your life your way

A lovely, no brain power required, chick flick.  Heart warming, light entertainment at its best.  A friend gave me this movie for Christmas on dvd.  One of those movies you can watch again and again.  Best enjoyed with chocolate biscuits and a snuggly rug.

This didn’t rate very highly with me, I’m afraid.  Trying to mix reality and animation doesn’t work in my book, I like a movie to be one or the other.  So when I took Samantha to the movies for a rainy day holiday treat, I was hoping for The Princess and the Frog, but I got vetoed.  It was supposed to be her treat, after all.  The chipmunks, and the chipettes, were cute and the music was cool, but the accompanying storyline and cast was disappointing in my opinion.  To be fair, though, Samantha really enjoyed it.

Mistakes are an essential part of the learning process and an inevitable part of life.  We all make mistakes, but some of them are bigger and have more serious consequences than others, especially if they involve our work or our personal relationships.  So how can we make the most of our mistakes and learn from them rather than being crippled and devastated by them?

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Jane Lucas – BJ’s Health & Fitness Centres Ltd

Jane started her career as a farmer’s wife teaching a few local ladies aerobics in the country.  Thirteen years later she’s recognised as a successful businesswoman, owning and operating three health & fitness centres in the Nelson / Marlborough region.

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There is actually a big difference between having a great lifestyle and a great life – but the two can easily become confused.

“Lifestyle” refers to things we buy to decorate our lives. Through our lifestyle choices we can buy an identity through brands. We can define how other people perceive us, so it can be a way of gaining acceptance and approval from them. A common term for this is “keeping up with the Joneses”. We want to control what people think of us and it can be tempting to do this through making sure we have the right “things” in order to be regarded in a certain way.

Your “life” on the other hand, is what you lead when you know what is important to you and you let that control your behaviour. Your life is made up of your choices and actions. Through our “life” we can create our own self esteem and pride through being true to our selves.

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I have to admit to having a bit of a soft spot for George Clooney, so any movie with him in it has a head start in my book.  An interesting, and I guess timely, look at issues of company restructuring and redundancy.  The makers of the film took  interviews of Americans who have been made redundant in the last year, which gave the movie genuine authenticity.  It also takes a look at individuals who bury themselves in their work at the cost of having real relationships.  I’ve made it sound like an intense documentary, but it still falls in the light entertainment category, albeit touching on real issues.

The very first step in creating your ideal life is to get very clear on what it looks like. This isn’t rocket science, it’s just much easier to get what you want if you know what that is.

Take some time to sit down and really think about this. If you could have your ideal life in 3, 6 or even 12 months time, what does it look like? Where are you living? What are you doing? Who is around you? What do you do in your spare time? How much money do you have? What do you look like? Read More

Have you set yourself some really big goals this year? Something you really want to achieve, but have no idea how yet? Is there a danger it might end up going in the “too-hard” basket and ending up back on the New Year’s resolution list again next year? 

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Mary Murray – Paradisos Cafe

Mary was a fulltime mother and housewife for all 24 years of her married life until her husband announced he was having an affair.  Left with nothing when he left, with no experience or business acumen whatsoever, Mary took on the cafe her husband had been in the process of starting, complete with thousands of dollars worth of debts, and made a go of it.

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Have you ever thought about how much energy you waste on little niggly, irritations? Those little things that you tolerate on a daily basis but that aren’t quite enough of a nuisance to do something about? You know the things I mean, the messy drawer, the tap that drips, the strange noise in the dishwasher, the pile of filing on the corner of your desk, the missing button on your favourite shirt, and the list goes on. While these are all small, insignificant things on their own, together they add up to a major drain on our energy. If you picture that all your energy is held by a polystyrene cup, and each of these irritations are represented with a pin prick, you can see that before long your polystyrene cup resembles a sieve and all your energy is fast disappearing! Read More