Staying Inspired, Effortless Success by Michael Neil

Sometimes as parents I feel like we get stuck in the day to day hamster wheel and after a while the joyful life seems to turn into a life of drudgery. Too keep myself inspired and help myself move forward as a person one of my many solutions is self-help, self-improvement or inspirational books. During any given month you'll find me listening on and off to some random audio book and sometimes YouTube videos (particularly ET's TGIM series). While improving my parenting and home making skills is not my goal in this, I find them deeply intertwined. As we learn to create our own successful lives, we can better help our children become their own unique brand of successful.

At the moment I'm listening to Effortless Success by Michael Neill courtesy of the amazing King County online library. I love it because it's easy to listen to in bits and pieces, a baby feeding here, a flossing my teeth there. It doesn't require a pen an pencil to jot down your current plan to change you life in 3 minutes, and I typically walk away with one or two interesting thoughts that I can share with my husband or chew on for a couple of hours or a couple of days.

The current thought I've been digesting is "What do you want? No. What do you really want?" This is a difficult question for me to answer because I'm not a particularly driven, passionate, this is my destiny I'm going to change the world type of person. I don't have an "I was born to do this."

After much thought I've decided there are a couple of things that I really, really want. I want to live my beliefs. I want raise a wonderful family. And I want to express myself as the creative, artistic person that I am. Nothing brilliant or earth shattering, but right now this what make me whole and complete.

This caused me to reflect on the thought that a woman's (or a man's :) song has many verses, and we are not intended to sing them all at once. Success seems to be less of an end goal and more of an constantly evolving, never perfect juggle where our physical, mental, emotional, social, and spiritual needs are mostly met. Sometimes one takes preeminence, sometimes one takes a backseat for a while, but none are denied. Yes I would like more sleep. No I don't get to be an artist nearly as much as I would like. But I've come to the conclusion that if you ask me "Are you living a successful life?" my answer is yes and I thank God daily for the ability to live such a life.