Your Success is Your Success!!

You are probably thinking that you should be well on the road to attaining the success that you have worked so long and so hard to attain. But, in all actuality, are you truly ready to receive your success, even though you have been saying that you want it and you’ve been looking forward to receiving it for many years? When it comes to the topic of success, you might want to ask yourself a few questions. Some of these questions are: ‘How do I define success?’ ‘What does success look like for/to me?’ And, ‘Why haven’t I attained the success I would like to attain?’ As well as, ‘What do I need to do differently in order to believe that I am successful?’

Success is an internal state of mind and a state of being. Too often, as human beings, we use external perspectives and material things to determine our level of success. We many times mistake material things as being the true and ultimate measure of our success. But, in reality, success is an inner state of being that grows and permeates your entire being, manifesting into the material and external attributes seen by others.

If your success is measured by the job position you hold, the car you drive, the clothes you wear, the man/woman you are with, the house you live in, the money in your bank account, as well as other material things; you have a problem. If and when these things and people are no longer in your life, you will then consider yourself a failure. And if you lack love for yourself, you don’t know how to accept yourself, and be with yourself, you are not successful. If success is a sense of being, YOU ARE SUCCESS and you are SUCCESSFUL!

The external and material things that you amass, only serve to elevate you to a new economic, social, political, and emotional level. However, they do not determine your level of success; you do! And if these material and external things and people no longer exist (which at some point they won’t), because you are grounded in your internal state of being, you will still exist, with a new sense of direction, a new plan of action, and a new sense of accomplishment, manifesting itself into an internal and external level of success.

Material things will fade away. However, the love and acceptance that you have for you will last forever! By the mere fact that you are who you are, dictates that you are successful! As a matter of fact, it is your internal love, your self-acceptance, as well as your self-confidence that permeates from the inside, empowering you to attain the material wealth you will eventually gain on the outside. Once you realize that YOU ARE SUCCESS, you will come to recognize and realize that no one…I mean no one can take your success from you. “YOUR success is YOUR success!

As you are aware, success can be a lonely place. You have been looking for your success, expecting it to come at any minute, but you’ve also struggled to get your mind right in preparation to receive it. I am sure that you have asked yourself, ‘Am I truly ready for success?’ ‘What will I do with it when I get it?’ ‘How will others view me once I become successful?’ ‘Will I have to share my success with others; and if so, how will I determine who they are?’

In order to recognize and behold the success that is inherently yours, you must stop looking at what you consider to be the success of others, in order to measure your level of success. For some of you, success occurred by happenstance; you weren’t expecting it. You knew that you wanted something(s) better and different in and around your life, and success just happened.

Yes, there were many who inherited material wealth and saw it as success. But the true measure of success is what comes through you…your mind, your heart, your spirit, and the work of your hands.

Successful people have taken the tools and information that they have gathered from other people and situations, as well as their own experiences to catapult them to various levels. They believed in their internal strength, in order for them to dream and imagine where they are, where they are going and the trajectory for which they would like to reach. Successful people have also developed plans for what they could have and want to have on the outside. They also had specific, realistic, written, and attainable goals and plans, with timelines.

When it comes to you recognizing and beholding your success in life, I am sure that you have struggled with additional questions, as well as various levels of fear and/or anxiety; so much so, that you will either miss it when it arrives; you will feel guilty about having it; or you will sabotage your chances of receiving your success. Hence, it is time for you to realize that if you have worked hard to accomplish your success, and you did not take anything from anyone or step on the heads and hands of others in order for you to gain your success, you have nothing to fear and you have nothing to feel guilty about. Also, it is time for you to realize that not everyone is meant to journey with you on your road to success or join you at the end of the road when you receive and celebrate your success.

It is time for you to rid yourself of the guilt and fear regarding the success you attain in life. You must also learn to recognize the people, situations, and circumstances that can contribute to you sabotaging the success that is meant for you. It is also time for you to make guilt-free decisions about the people you take with you and the ones you leave behind, on your road to success. Yes, you might want to take some of your family members with you, some of your friends with you, as well as a partner who has been a liability, not an asset. However, you must weigh your options and decide who are the people you want to sit at your ‘board of directors table.’ There should be a limited number of seats at your table. The seats you fill with others should be indicative of people who recognize that “Your Success is Your Success!” There is no place for jealousy and haters at your board of directors table or along your success journey.

You can relinquish any guilt that you might have about those who will engage in your success circle, once you have actually reached the level of success you have worked hard to attain, as defined by you, and only you. Get ready, get ready; YOUR success is knocking at YOUR door! Will you hear it, see it, and receive it?! GO GET IT!!

Steps to take in recognizing that “Your Success is Your Success”

1.     Love you first.  It is imperative that you have a relationship with you before you will be able to recognize your inner success and attain your external and material success.

2.     Be yourself.  Perpetrating a fraud never works! If you have to change who you are in order for you to reach your goals and declare yourself as successful, you will never be successful, because you will have walked in the footsteps of others and not your own. And they were probably perpetrating also.

3.     Be specific about what you are looking for and expecting as you seek your success.  Your needs and wants are imperative to attaining your success. You must have a specific, written, plan of action, which includes, realistic and attainable goals, timelines, and a contingency plan. If you are not sure as to what you are looking for on your road to success, you will probably settle for anything.

4.     Decide the people you need to keep and those you need to eliminate on your success journey. Recognize that some people will be assets and some will be liabilities. But the greatest recognition is that everyone cannot journey with you, especially the liability placeholders.

5.     Don’t be afraid to ask for help. Recognize the people in a position to help you along your journey and don’t be afraid to ask for help. You don’t know everything and everyone; and that’s okay!

6.     Recognize who got you to where you are and where you are going and don’t ever forget or hesitate to do so privately and publicly!  It is imperative that you recognize the power greater than you on a daily basis. This recognition includes you engaging in daily prayer and thanksgiving, before your success journey begins, on the journey to your success, and most certainly, praying continuously after you have attained your success. Trust God!

©2017; J. Morley Productions, Inc.; P. O. Box 1745; Decatur, GA 30031; 770-808-6570; www.doctorjoyce.com

Small Love Rituals to Keep Your Love Fire Burning

It has long been a ritual in America and other countries for lovers, almost lovers, want to be lovers, and sometimes used-to-be lovers to profess their feelings for and to one another on Valentine’s Day.  These rituals of professing one’s love and affection often include giving something to each other, such as candy, cards, flowers, other gifts, as well as engaging in activities with each other, such as going to dinner, to the movies, other events, and even going on trips. But, hold up! What happened to the other three hundred and sixty four days of the year? What did you do prior to Valentine’s Day and what do you plan to do after Valentine’s Day to profess your love and affection o the person who captures the eye of your affection?

Many of you have often used the mythical character Cupid as the symbol of showing your erotic love, affection, and desire for another. Valentine’s Day seems to be the most exclusive day when you are given permission to once again, like Cupid, draw back your bow and let your arrow fly. Many of you spend a lot of time wondering when and if you will be on the receiving end of someone’s love arrow, or if you will send your own love arrow. Some of you, because you are trying to love more than two people (which is a challenge), are also trying to figure out to whom you will be aiming your love arrow.

 Whether you are sending or receiving a love arrow for Valentine's Day, or any other day of the year, it is important for you to remember that love should be a two-way process. And if it isn't, you might begin to assess the situation you're in, and the person with whom you are in the situation. In all actuality, you might want to spend some introspective time engaging in an assessment of whether you are in a situation or a relationship.

On the other hand, a relationship means that you will share your erotic love, affection, and desires for another for more than one day of the year. In other words, in a true relationship, you will commit for the long haul, in a relationship of choice and not a situation of convenience.

I hope that you are not aiming your love arrow toward someone with whom you only expect to engage in a situation, because a situation is only a temporary state. A situation is not usually a reciprocated process. It will soon end, because you will not invest in it the way you invest in a relationship.

Like many others, in a situation, you forget that the same things it took to get your mate, it will take the same things for you to keep him/her. Remember those rituals you used to get him/her? They don’t matter in situations. However, they are essential in maintaining a healthy and positive relationship.

                                               

The reality is that many of you have forgotten the rituals you engaged in when you were shooting your Cupid arrow toward your mate. The small gestures of love, affection, and desire that you used to shower your mate when you were on the chase to get him/her must remain throughout time, if you want to keep him/her. And in some cases, you must engage in them more often.

If you aren’t careful to ensure that you are constantly placing love logs on the love fires of your relationship, you might find yourself alone. That love you thought you found on a two-way street will be lost on a lonely highway! As a fire must have more logs added to keep it burning, your relationship also needs love logs in the form of healthy and positive rituals consistently added to it, in order to keep the romance growing.

Love is action and not an announcement or a pronouncement! In order to keep your love flowing, and to keep your relationship moving forward and going stronger, you must take action on a daily basis to not only tell your mate how you feel about him/her, but to also take action to show him/her how you feel. It really doesn’t take that much. You did it when you engaged in the chase, now decide to continue it after the chase is over!

And in all actuality, when it comes to true love, you don't have to make grand entrances, have firework displays everyday, buy enormous and expensive gifts, travel the world, or become a poet laureate in order to increase the level of romance and love in your relationship. However, you must continue to do something positive and affectionate, no matter how small. It is the small, cutesy, funny, surprising, different, challenging, luring, and enticing things with which you started the relationship that will keep it going.

There are many small love rituals that you can engage in on a daily basis in order to increase the romance and love in your relationship. Increasing your romance and increasing your love strengthens and extends your relationship. There are specific love rituals that you can use to ensure that the fire within your relationship continues to burn hot. It is important to remember that you cannot wait until you only have embers left before you add additional logs in order to stoke the fire. You have to keep adding love logs while the love is still burning bright and hot. What’s love got to do with it? EVERYTHING, especially when you remember that love is ACTION and NOT a STATEMENT!

Here are a few small rituals that you can engage in in order to keep the fire in your relationship burning healthy and hot! And don’t be shy; steam only means that your love fire is still burning!     

• Take time on a regular basis to go down memory lane rekindling how you all first met.
• Make it a regular ritual to celebrate the anniversary of your first date. If the venue STILL exists, revisit it.
• Revisit the places you all frequented when the chase was taking place--the restaurant, movie, theater, or dance hall.
• Sit together in a comfortable place (the couch, the floor) and look at photos of exciting times, and places that you and your mate spent together, such as your first date.
• Celebrate your first lovemaking experience together. You can talk about it and recreate it as often as possible.
• Reminisce with each other as to what and why you fell in love with each other.
• Laugh together on a daily basis. Even when things might be tough, one of you has to take responsibility for keeping laughter in the relationship. It’s okay to joke in moderation.
• Get up with a kiss, and go to bed with a kiss for and with each other.
• Develop a handwritten note at least once a month, which documents the most positive characteristics that you STILL find in your mate. Frame it and post it in a conspicuous location for your mate to see on a daily basis  (living room or bedroom), reminding him/her how you STILL feel.
• Develop a “Five Wonderful Things I Love About Being with You” list, every six months and present it to your mate, over dinner, at breakfast, or just while relaxing together. Can you repeat the things you share? Yes you can. But, as your relationship progresses and grows, you should find more and more new things that you love about being with your mate, to share with him/her.
• Take a relationship checkup every six months. Write out what each wants to do and is willing to do to make each other’s lovemaking experience a day/night of fireworks. Present it to your mate. Evaluate your role in making the sparks continue to fly and don’t be afraid to see room for improvement.
• Develop handmade cards for each other for birthdays, anniversaries, and other special occasions that express your feelings for each other. This will show your mate how much personal time you are willing to invest and sacrifice for him/her in order to keep the love fire burning.
• Write a monthly pledge stating what you are willing to do for and with each other over the next six months in order to make your relationship even stronger. Share it with each other and take time each month to ensure that you are actually doing what you said you are willing to do.
• Engage in sharing a loving touch each and every day to help your love to stay.
• Establish a weekly date night that you all engage in each and every week. It can take place at home or outside of the home. Go dancing, to dinner, or get a massage. And if there are children, use the services of a friend, family member, or a babysitter to help while you and your mate enjoy each other. Nothing or no one should interfere with that date night.
• Pray together each and every morning before leaving home and each and every night before going to bed and.
• Learn how to say I love you, even when you don’t feel like saying it. Say it and show it!
• Learn to thank God on a daily basis for being blessed with having your mate in your life! Expressing gratefulness and gratitude to God opens doors for you to appreciate each other even more.

©2017; J. Morley Productions, Inc; P.O. Box 1745; Decatur, GA 30031; 770-808-6570; www.doctorjoyce.com; joyce@doctorjoyce.com  

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How to Use Your 2016 Lessons to Increase Your 2017 Blessings

Happy New Year!

Okay, let’s be real here! You have made your New Year’s Resolutions year after year, as you did for this New Year, but they seem to be recycled from one year to the next. I am sure that you are wondering why you seem no farther ahead at the start of 2017, than you did at the start of 2016, or the preceding years. But, have you ever taken the time to just stop in the midst of your years, at least every three months and ask yourself a few questions? What are you trying to resolve and/or accomplish during the year, that you did not resolve and/or accomplish during the previous yeas? What kept you from resolving and/or accomplishing what you set out to resolve and/or accomplish in previous years? Do these year after year promises involve a romantic or plutonic situation, employment, a move, finances, negative habits of procrastination, or any other negative habits that you have been trying to break for quite sometime? As a matter of fact, where are you trying to go and how do you plan to get there in 2017, that is different from where you were trying to go and where you where trying to get to in 2016 and other years?

Yes, I’ve given you quite a few questions for you to not only ask yourself, but to answer for yourself. Your past lack of accomplishments regarding your previous New Year’s resolutions probably occurred for many reasons. One of the major reasons for your lack of accomplishments in attaining the milestones that you set for yourself year after year, as each year winds down, has been because you have constantly overlooked your current position in life, moving on your own trajectory, and not the trajectory which has been established for you by a higher power. You have ignored the red flags that signaled for you to stop, closed your eyes and your mind to the yellow flags of caution, waived white flags of surrender when you should have continued moving forward on your journey, and your life’s realities were based on the life perspectives of others.

Somehow, each year you focused more on your failures, your setbacks, and what they took out of you or from you, rather than the messages to you and for you, as well as what you could get and take away from each year. And believe me, there were many messages and much for you to take away from each and every experience, each and every year.

Each year of your life has included let downs, setbacks, set asides, setups, pick-ups, and opportunities for you to get up, straighten up, and look up. However, too often, you have ignored the information afforded you through your life experiences, life circumstances, and life situations. With each of your life experiences, each life circumstance, and each life situation, whether good or bad, positive or negative, there is and has been a message. And with each message, there is and has been a lesson. But, if you didn’t look, if you didn’t listen to or hear the message, you most likely missed the lesson.  Hence, you learned absolutely little or nothing, and you wonder why you seem to be stuck in the same hole, with the same people, making he same amount of money, living in the same house, going in the same direction, on the same path to nowhere!

Lessons are for you to learn and grow, in order for you to successfully conquer your now situation (today) in preparation for your later position (tomorrow). Lessons are designed to help you to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again. In other words, lessons are gifts granted to you through God, so that you will surrender your membership in the insanity club. The people you deal with, the circumstances you face, and the situations you find yourself in might bring about some tough messages, but it is God who helps you to learn the lessons so that your next time won’t be a recycled time of the same experiences, while you expect different results.

But, if you have not learned from your letdowns, setbacks, and set asides, you will not see and be prepared for the setup being put in place for your great come back! What you thought would take you out and do you in in 2016 and previous years only strengthened you to stand tall and walk in your destiny in 2017. Instead of looking at what you didn’t accomplish in 2016 and past years as defeats, you can consider them a retreat, a part of the master plan to catapult you to the heights you are destined to achieve.

It is not so much that you have fallen, faltered, or failed; it’s what you learned about your fall, your falter, and your failure. It is also how you get back up or if you get back up. It’s imperative that in 2017, you finally recognize that for every lesson, there is a silver lining for a blessing for you. As it is what you do with the falls, falters, and failures of life that determine how and when your life gets on track or back on track, it is the same with the lessons shown to you each year. What you do with them has a profound impact on your current and future life directions.

You can make as many New Year’s Resolutions as you desire. Your resolutions are basically promises that you have made to yourself. However, promises without plans, directions, and steps to reach them are empty. It is time for you to make your resolutions or self-promises based on plans related to the lessons you have gathered and learned each previous year.

Your 2017 can and will be a much better year if you are willing to revisit the journey you took during 2016, in order to gather the lessons you learned, as well as the meaning of each lesson. Once you have documented your learned lessons, as well as the meanings for you, it is imperative that you devise a plan for you to let your 2016 lessons become and increase your 2017 blessings!    

The New Year is a time for you to:

·      Take the time to understand who you are

·      Finally accept who you are

·      Keep a daily journal, chronicling the lessons presented to you and before you…large and small

·      Accept where you’ve been (failures, frailties, successes)

·      Identify the lessons provided to and for you in 2016, that will move you forward in 2017; assess the assets & liabilities, using them accordingly

·      Recognize the difference between WHAT HAPPENED TO YOU & WHAT HAPPENED FOR YOU—Focus on WHAT HAPPENED FOR YOU!

·      Decide where you are going based on the lessons learned

·      Decide where you want to be based on the lessons learned

·      Decide to forgive yourself

·      Decide to love you unconditionally (including your falls, falters & failures)

·      Charge or recharge your spiritual connection or reconnect

·      Search & define the meaning of your life & the meaning for your life, for today and in the future

·      Decide to identify & walk in your destiny

·      Recognize that 2016 was but another chapter in your life; take what you need from it, glance at it every now & then, but move out of it & move into your 2017 chapter of life, with open eyes

·      Swallow your pride & recognize that everyone CANNOT & SHOULD NOT go with you into your 2017 next chapter of your life. Sort the people who are assets from those who are liabilities

·      Remember, the measure of who you are & where you are going, has to be determined by YOU & your own yardstick…not someone else’s yardstick

·      Develop new ideas

·      Develop new life directions (goals, with timelines & action steps)

·      Develop a NEW attitude—A WINNING ATTITUDE, moved by inner love, inner success, self-respect, and self-direction

·      Always remember to PRAY!

·      Don’t sweat the small stuff!

·      USE YOUR 2016 LESSONS TO INCREASE YOUR 2017 BLESSINGS!

©2016 J. Morley Productions, Inc.; P.O. Box 1745, Decatur, GA 30031; 770-808-6570; www.doctorjoyce.com