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Good Morning from Maine! #Gratitude to all!
Today's Best You Daily Inspiration and Journal Prompt is about your community.
Best You Daily will help guide you and your lifestyle to be the very best they can be. Following a few of my thoughts you'll find a journal prompt closer to the end of this blog. I hope you'll follow with me, as each day, I intend to give us all something to think about and/or write about through Best You Daily. We’re here to talk about your best life in 2017 and beyond. We’re here to learn to make some lasting changes in our lives.
I'm consistently in awe of other people. I always have been and always will be completely fascinated by how hard people work, the service to others and our impact on each other. I love words like respect, consistency, honor, discipline, excellence, love, and peace. If you've read my book, you know that I tried to organize the first draft into the ABC's of life based on words I love. I even did an off-shoot video of the book bringing the words to the forefront even though the book isn't organized like that at all anymore.
To me, words have meaning. Moreso, living your life according to your values, beliefs, goals, and challenges with those words in mind matters a lot to me. I'm rambling a bit here to get to my point. (I know, I ramble here and there.) My point today is about your footprints.
I'm very curious if you are aware of what footprints you are leaving as you go along in life. Not the kind of "yah, yah, yah, Elizabeth, I know - footprints..." I mean the conscious kind of footprints. They may even have to be intentionally left until you train your brain and retrain your brain that each and every nanosecond of your life matters and in each moment you leave a footprint.
Some of us are stuck. We re-trace our footprints over and over again in our mind. We beat ourselves up for bad paths, bad choices and honestly, we even "second-trace" our good ones a lot too!! For many of us, our best isn't enough and we keep the quest alive.
This post is inspired by a homeless-looking person I chatted with today. I was taking our dog to the groomers, which is a luxury item. I was feeling all happy and suddenly felt this overwhelming, horrid guilt when I pulled up next to a homeless-looking person begging on the corner of the turn I was making. Now I see these folks all of the time, but today was a new person. He had a sign that indicated he was a Veteran. A lot of questions rolled through my mind and a lot of comments. In short, I paused and wondered why in the world a Veteran would ever be begging on a street corner. It's not ok for anyone and makes me sad, but for some particular reason, this really got me.
All sorts of answers started to pop up in my mind, so I decided to roll down the window and actually ask him. I promised not to share what I had learned from him, however, it was so profound that all I can think of is that old saying, "Never judge a book by it's cover." Take those first 30 seconds of whatever pops up into your mind with everyone you meet and put them in a drawer. You can always take them out again if you happen to be accurate afterall, but most of the time, people are far deeper and more complicated than those first 30 seconds.
When I drove away, the next thing that happened was a radio news announcement about the people in Puerto Rico and how a photo taken before from space shows everything lit up and now most of it is in darkness.
The world needs you. The world needs us. That's the real breaking news.
BEST YOU DAILY JOURNAL PROMPT and EXERCISE:
Whatever is going on in your world, I'd like to invite you to pause for one solid day. Take a day off. Take a complete break from your normal routine. Take one day and make it a day of complete service to someone else. Donate your time and do not seek recognition for it. It's not a day to write a check and keep your momentum going. You can do that also if you can. But this is a day, where you go volunteer somewhere doing something completely out of your comfort zone. Make yourself super uncomfortable and exist in another's shoes for several hours.
Please share your experience with the group if you feel comfortable.
About Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino
Elizabeth Hamilton-Guarino is a 19-year veteran of the financial services and regulatory compliance training industry. Now, a recognized leader in personal development, Elizabeth is the founder and CEO of The Best Ever You Network, a brand with more than one million followers in social media and over two million radio downloads on The Best Ever You Show.
With a mixture of humor and grace, Elizabeth helps people root in gratitude, discover motivation and implement positive, lasting change. An expert in mentoring people to market their strengths and achieve brand excellence, she works with clients worldwide to illuminate their light within, develop their best life and become their Best Ever You with gratitude-based behavior and belief systems.
Elizabeth’s book PERCOLATE – Let Your Best Self Filter Through (Hay House, 2014) has been called “charming” by Publisher’s Weekly, with “an ingenious extended coffee metaphor.” Guarino also ranks consistently as one of the top 40 social CEOs on Twitter and was just named a favorite by Oxford Said Business School. Her hashtags #BestEverYou and #TipstoBeYourBest are widely circulated.
Follow Elizabeth on Twitter @BestEverYou