Archives for May 2011

Children Sing for Our Brave Troops

May 27, 2011 by Joi 6 Comments

The talented and precious children singing for our troops (past and present) in the video above were a Tussing Elementary 3rd grade class. I’d like to add my family’s sincere gratitude, admiration, and brotherly love to the ones above. To the brave men and women who serve now, or have ever served, you sacrifice more than anyone should ever be asked to sacrifice. I’m, literally, speechless with gratitude.

You are all heroes and I know God rewards heroes. May He bless each and every one of you and everyone you love.

Have a wonderful Memorial Day weekend and while we’re all eating hamburgers, hot dogs, and bbq chicken with our loved ones, we should pause to think about those who have given up their chance to do so, so that people they haven’t even met CAN.

Again, speechless.

A Look at Life by The Eagles

May 26, 2011 by Joi 1 Comment

Is life sometimes unfair? Absolutely. Does life often snatch victory right from your hands and replace it with an epic failure? You bet. Can past mistakes and personal losses seem to heavy to carry? Most of the time, actually. Could you legitimately write a thousand and one “done me wrong” songs? At least! But, every now and then, we just have to LITERALLY take a few verses from a song by The Eagles and Get Over It!

GET OVER IT

by The Eagles

I turn on the tube and what do I see
A whole lotta people cryin’ ’don’t blame me’
They point their crooked little fingers at everybody else
Spend all their time feelin’ sorry for themselves
Victim of this, victim of that
Your momma’s too thin; your daddy’s too fat

Get over it
Get over it
All this whinin’ and cryin’ and pitchin’ a fit
Get over it, get over it

You say you haven’t been the same since you had your little crash
But you might feel better if I gave you some cash
The more I think about it, old billy was right
Let’s kill all the lawyers, kill ’em tonight
You don’t want to work, you want to live like a king
But the big, bad world doesn’t owe you a thing

Get over it
Get over it
If you don’t want to play, then you might as well split
Get over it, get over it

It’s like going to confession every time I hear you speak
You’re makin’ the most of your losin’ streak
Some call it sick, but I call it weak

You drag it around like a ball and chain
You wallow in the guilt; you wallow in the pain
You wave it like a flag, you wear it like a crown
Got your mind in the gutter, bringin’ everybody down
Complain about the present and blame it on the past
I’d like to find your inner child and kick it’s little a$$…

Get over it
Get over it
It’s gotta stop sometime, so why don’t you quit
Get over it, get over it….

More Quotes About Life.

Scribe SEO Plugin Review: Take Two

May 25, 2011 by Joi 2 Comments

Since my original Scribe SEO Plugin Review, the mega minds behind the plugin have taken its SEO power even further. It’s all about KEYWORDS, CONTENT, and LINK JUICE. See, Tiger blood has nothing on LINK JUICE. Tiger blood does link juice’s laundry.

And likes it.

I get a lot of e-mail from men and women who want to know more about blogging and web publishing. Some want to make their living from the sport full time, others want to generate a little extra income, and some are simply seeking new creative outlets and ways to reach out and tickle the world’s fancy. Apparently they think I’m quite the fancy tickler :\ so I get questions from complete newbies, people who have been doing this for some time, and from bloggers who have singed hair from major burn out. Fortunately I love e-mail buddies, so we go back and forth and back and forth again. E-mail’s frightfully overlooked. Unlike social media sites, it doesn’t cut you off at a certain number of words. In case you haven’t noticed, I have the gift of gab.

When doling out my wisdom (spewing the few facts I know) and sharing my experience (trial and error, rinse and repeat), I find myself giving different variations on the same advice:

Buy your own domain
Use WordPress and don’t even THINK about anything else
Never try to be anyone you’re not
Write about things you know and care about
WordPress Theme? It depends on the needs of your particular website/blog. I intentionally have the BIG THREE on my various sites: The Thesis Theme, StudioPress Themes, and Woo Themes. I could have easily gone exclusively with any of the three, but as a web publisher with many websites, I wanted to try each of them and see where each one’s strengths were. I keep a very close eye on the performance of each website – I mean, I do this full-time for a living. Web publishing isn’t a hobby for me, it’s my career. When it’s your career and everything professionally is at stake, you dot you each i and cross each t very carefully. In the way that each kitchen appliance has a particular function and place in your culinary endeavors, each of these themes is beautiful for particular needs. If you were to tell me what you were looking for with a particular website or blog, I could tell you which of the three I’d recommend but, honestly, you couldn’t go wrong with any of these themes. Some people get pretty worked up and passionately defend or attack other themes, but as someone who works with each one on a daily basis, I can tell you this – like it or not, they each rock. It all comes down to what you’re looking for, how much know how you have (and how much you need the theme to do most of the work for you). I’ll be honest with you, sometimes I’d kind of like to go with one theme exclusively – it’d make it easier for my brain when it came to upgrading or updating, as each one requires different actions, different steps, etc. But, as it is, my different sites require different themes – so it is what it is. Why does each one of these themes have to be so killer?!?! I actually love the fact that different theme developers are pushing one another to UP their games. They’re bringing out the best in one another and, as someone who benefits from them being at their best, I’m all for it!
Scribe SEO Plugin. You need it. I don’t care how long you’ve been at it – this is something you need in your arsenal. Personally, I think I’ve given the tools in these bullet points in the order of importance – Your own domain, followed by a great theme, followed by the Scribe SEO plugin. While the theme wars will continue, when it comes to premium plugins, Scribe SEO stands alone. Basically, having the Scribe SEO plugin on your blog is equivalent to having an SEO expert sitting beside you each time you sit down to work. Some of the greatest minds in SEO and website development have poured their knowledge into this plugin and, honestly, it’s pure gold. If you read Self Help Daily regularly, you know that I don’t pitch many products to you. Self Help Daily is about helping you get the most out of yourself. However, when there are tools that can help you do just that, I have no problem pitching away. I want you to be the best you can be and I want you to get everything from life that you want – and then some! So when I extol the virtues of things I love such as the Scribe SEO plugin or my beloved NordicTrack, know that I believe 100 percent that they can get you there.

There are a lot of things you can’t control online. Google’s updates, who follows you on Twitter, who befriends you on Facebook, who links to you, who Diggs you, and so on. It’s even hard to control your page rank. People who once linked to you may all of a sudden remove your link or disappear entirely. It happens and it isn’t pretty.

However, like all things in life, you can’t worry about the things that are out of your hands. You have to take care of the things that are right there in the palms. YOU are in complete control of your domain, the theme(s) you use, the content you write, and the extra push-to-the-front-of-the-line power that Scribe SEO can give you. If you haven’t read my original Scribe SEO Plugin Review, I urge you to do so now. Everyone needs an edge and Scribe can give it to you.

The Scribe SEO plugin is 100 percent easy to use and even easier to install. I’ll let you in on a little secret, it’s fun too. Seriously, using this plugin to tweak your writing is a really fun challenge. It isn’t just fun, it’s Angry Birds fun.

Make each moment count double!
~ Joi

Self Talk: Never Underestimate its Life-Altering Power

May 24, 2011 by Joi 1 Comment

If you’re looking for ways to feel happier and overcome feelings of loneliness and sadness, one of the first places you should look is inside your own mind! When it comes to happiness, very often our thoughts and self talk make us or break us. Read on for a delightfully colorful man who has this thing figured out.

There’s a particular stretch of town that I travel a couple of times a week. It’s a nice quiet drive, a huge change from taking the bypass which is anything but quiet. Personally? I’m a fan of quietness. This road runs through an amazingly interesting part of our town with some pretty colorful characters. One man, in particular, always catches my eye. On the rare occasions that I don’t see him, I’m half tempted to pull over to the side of the road and wait for him – he always makes me smile. I call him the “Happy Walking Man” and I’ll never forget the first time I saw him.

I nearly rear-ended the car in front of me.

He’s probably in his early sixties. He has dreads but a very, very receding hairline (to the tune of being bald on top). The thing that’s so remarkable about this man is his happiness. He wears it head to toe. The first time I saw him, he was doing some sort of a happy walk and talking to himself. You could see his joy from a mile away. Somehow my inquisitive nature wanted to take a second look to see if my buddy was singing or talking and I determined that he was definitely talking… the determination came just in time – right before the front of my vehicle met the back of the one in front of me.

Each time I’ve seen him since, he’s wearing the same smile. Sometimes he talks, sometimes he just walks.

I was telling one of my daughters about him recently and a couple of things I’d been thinking about kind of gelled together.

First of all, before you say anything, I know that the odds of my guy having both oars in the water are slim. It’s entirely possible that Happy Walking Man is blissfully unaware that he ever owned an oar. That’s all completely irrelevant because he’s the hero of this post – and heroes don’t have to play by anyone else’s rules.

I’ve always been a HUGE champion of positive thinking and believe with all my heart that our own thoughts and self-talk shape and define our world. I also firmly believe that many people who claim to be…..

sad
lonely
depressed
blue
miserable
angry
bitter
resentful
etc…

… simply need a new script to follow when they’re talking to themselves.

Take for example the mother of a houseful of young children. She’s with them day in, day out for over 20 years. The house and mini-van are completely filled with noise, singing, giggling, arguing, and excited chatter about everything from Sesame Street to Justin Timberlake. Father Time has no regard for her or anyone, so he marches along (possibly with the gait of Happy Walking Man). The kids grow up, go to school, get married, and do all sorts of things that don’t involve giggling or trips to McDonald’s.

“Mommy” wakes up one day and is “Mom.” The once rowdy house is completely still – more still than she ever thought anything could possibly be and trips to the grocery store are suddenly as quiet as a librarian on her lunch break. Early in the transition, it would be easy (so easy) for her to tell herself that she’s lonely and that things are too quiet. It’d be natural (so natural) for her to curse Father Time and demand that he return her “babies” to her.

You may have guessed that I’m the “mom” in the illustration and I refused to take the easy and natural route. I mean, can you say MISERABLE??! I remember the first 9 or 10 trips alone to the store. I’ll confess that tears came a few times. Then I decided that I was simply telling myself the wrong things. I’d find myself thinking, “It’s too quiet!” or “I’m lonely!” – Then I thought, “Well, no wonder you’re sad – you’re setting the stage perfectly for that!”

I started using the time alone for meditating, planning out articles I wanted to write, quizzing myself on things like state capitals and famous quotes and listening to my Patsy Cline CD (something a couple of my girls would have disowned me for!). I replaced, “It’s so quiet!” with “This is so relaxing.”

When I walk through the house during the afternoon and the only sounds are birds chirping in the yard, I don’t bemoan, “The only sound around me is birds,” I smile and say, “The only sound I hear is birds.”

I think this is the place where so many of us mess up – whether we’re mothers or fathers or not. We all get far too comfortable with thinking the same thoughts over and over again. They become a pattern, and if they’re the wrong kinds of thoughts and if they’re negative self talk, we’re penning our own doom.

One of my daughters was talking a few weeks ago about something she loves to read about: “Flipping.” The only flipping I know of is what gymnasts do, so I had to ask her what flipping she was talking about. She said that she was fascinated at the process of buying houses that needed work, fixing them up, and selling them for more money than you paid for them. I’m still not as impressed as the flipping done by gymnasts, but I have to admit, it does sound interesting.

When we “flip” our thoughts, we get much more out of it than money. If we can take thoughts that need makeovers and fix them up, we get a whole new life and new found happiness.

Spend a little time with your own thoughts. Periodically ask yourself, “What am I thinking right now?” You may be surprised! You may find yourself in the middle of a thought like, “I’m so lonely…” and catch yourself. You might just argue with yourself.. “No, I”m not lonely! My cat is right beside me and my husband will be home in two hours. I’m not lonely, I”m relaxed!”

Sometimes we get into a recurring pattern of thinking the same thoughts. Some people, after going through a particularly tough couple of months (or even years) will find themselves thinking, “I am just so down..” But if they were to cross-examine their statement, they’d find that they aren’t so down after all. They simply grew accustomed to saying so!

Our self talk and our thoughts either build us up or they tear us down. They CONSTRUCT or they DESTRUCT.

Take your self talk and hold it accountable. Flip it so far you don’t even recognize it!

If your self talk is sad, cheer it up.
If your self talk is defeated, build it up.
If your self talk is on repeat, mix it up.
If your self talk makes you cry, shut it up!

If you can, picture the hero of our article strolling along the street. His smile is bright enough to light up three counties. What do you think he’s saying to himself? It’s darn sure not, “I’m lonely” and he’s not singing the blues. He’s enjoying the heck out of life. He may not know where the day is taking him, but he’s already packed his smile. Well played, Happy Walking man, well played.

Make each moment count double and make each thought count for something.

Happiness is Closer Than You Think

May 17, 2011 by Joi 6 Comments

“People with many interests live, not only longest, but happiest.” – George Matthew Allen

I’ve had several AWESOME conversations with online friends this past week. We’ve revealed secrets, hopes, and regrets. We’ve even opened up a few cans of worms to pick through. That’s usually a lot of fun. So the robins tell me.

The topic in a few of these discussions has been happiness. It’s something everybody wants and wants desperately. The problem is that every now and then life will hand you a situation that sort of stands like a wall between you and precious happiness. You can’t climb over the wall, can’t crawl under the wall, and you darn sure can’t wave a magic wand and make the wall disappear. So, what do you do? Sit on the dark side of the wall feeling sad, lonely, and as down as you’ve ever felt in your life?

I should say not.

When you can’t climb over to happiness, you have to invite it over to you. It CAN climb walls, crawl under walls, and even plow right through them. If happiness were a baseball player, it’d be Albert Pujols. If it were an actor, happiness would be Chuck Norris. If it were a superhero, it’d be Hawk Girl. If it were… okay, you get the picture.

When asked for my advice on happiness, whether it’s from an empty nester, someone with relationship problems, or anyone who finds themselves on the wrong side of the wall, a few of the first things I always say are:

Get busy!
Nurture your interests.
Develop more interests.
Always have something to look forward to. Always.

Regardless of WHY a wall stands between you and happiness, the secret to happier days lies in the four keys above. I’m not claiming that they’re miracles (I’ll leave those to God – they’re His specialties) but they WILL help you find the happiness you’re looking for.

GET BUSY

This one’s pretty self-explanatory, so I’ll kind of rush through it. Staying busy is, to an extent, a good antidote for the blues. However, there is a danger of becoming too busy and trying to do too much. When we’re feeling down, for whatever reasons, we need to treat ourselves especially well. That, of course, includes plenty of rest. So, while you should try to keep your mind occupied and your body busy, do so within reason.

NURTURE YOUR INTERESTS

Whether you’re feeling unhappy or not, you should always nurture your interests and involve yourself as often as possible in your favorite hobbies. They’re especially helpful when we’re feeling a little off our game. When my oldest daughter, Emily, got married and (oddly enough) moved into her own place with her husband, I have to admit… I had some blue-tinged days. The beautiful girl I normally shared morning cups of coffee was no longer in my kitchen and I was one sad mom.

I decided to throw myself into some of my favorite interests. For example, I love all things National Geographic. So I subscribed to their wonderful magazine and have spent hours lost in fascinating locals. Also, I’m a huge history buff, so I threw myself into self-appointed history “lessons.” I’d pick a new subject each week and see how many things I could learn about that subject.

On a lighter note, I’m a baseball fanatic, so I memorized where each of the 3o teams has spring training. Information I will surely never use – but it was a fun endeavor and if you ever need to phone a friend, you know who to call!

I also found happiness with other interests:

spending time with my family and cats
cooking
gardening
reading
walking
watching movies
bird watching

Think about your own interests, then throw yourself at their mercy! After all, our interests make us smile and isn’t that what we’re looking for when we’re feeling blue?

DEVELOP MORE INTERESTS

Once you’re busy with your favorite interests, consider adding to your repertoire. The more, the better, right? Weather permitting, maybe you could take up gardening, tennis or golf. All three if you’re really feisty. Pick a few subjects that you know absolutely nothing about and learn all you can about them. Below are a few to get your brain cells humming:

Civil War Era
World War I & II
Cake Decorating
Presidents and First Ladies
Ancient China
Soap Making
Candle Making
Europe
Photography
States & Their Histories
Botany
The Oceans
Birds
Polar Bears
Gangsters! Bonnie & Clyde, Dillinger, Lucky Luciano (I don’t even know who that is – fingers crossed that he was a gangster), Al Capone, Billy the Kid, Frank James, Jesse James…

Learning new things (whether their information or hobbies) is exciting. It’s great, great fun and most of the time is completely free. What part of that isn’t a good time waiting to happen?

ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO

One of the keys to real happiness is to make sure you always have something to look forward to – whether it’s favorite tv shows throughout the week, sports on tv, Friday night trips to the theater, lunch with your kids, etc. Make a point of setting up particular events – events that happen on specific days.

Also, plan get-togethers and holiday parties. Lining up the menu, practicing new desserts, buying decorations, and generally planning the whole affair will give you plenty of things to look forward to and get excited about.

Then, when the big day comes, wow everyone with your mad knowledge of Jesse James.

As for me, I’m off to research Lucky Luciano. Isn’t it weird how a name can come to you out of the blue? Maybe I was visited by his ghost… okay now I’m just creeping myself out.

Children Sing for Our Brave Troops