The concept of paying yourself first can also be applied to loving and forgiving. Sometimes to love and forgive ones self is a payment of a different kind, and the value is priceless.

Ii is an art of letting go of stuff, that to let go of a habit, internal program, or to change your attitude toward someone or something, the first place to begin is with the person in the mirror. And by the way, I have not perfected that art of letting go of stuff for it is a never-ending process of learning that will last a lifetime.

Paying yourself first, when it comes to forgiveness means – starting with you. Forgiving your self is the only way that you will be able to forgive any one else. It is true.

Letting go of stuff includes forgiveness. Walt Kelly, in a 1970 Pogo comic strip wrote, “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” I interpret that to mean that we must first point fingers at us, before pointing them at anyone else. Constantly asking, what was my role in this situation? What was my role in the failure of this relationship? What was my role in the altercation with that person? What was my role as I argued with that person? The list of phrases and situations to articulate in forming the end of the question, “what was my role…” is endless.

Just as we should be liable for our role, we must also be willing to forgive our selves for our part, particularly if the outcome of a particular situation was unwanted.

Begin with you. Forgive yourself first. Love yourself the most. By doing these things, you will in effect, pay yourself first.

How do you forgive yourself? It is just as easy as financially paying yourself first. You must love yourself enough to do so. You must make a sacrifice. You must change your thought patterns. I will give you some steps for forgiving your self. But first let me talk a little more about this whole forgiveness thing, ‘cause it is important.

Forgiving yourself is crucial to forgiving others. According to Harvey Mackay, if you want to get even with someone, then forgive and really get them back. Forgiveness allows you to move from a place of pain and suffering to a place of peace and harmony. For many, holding on to pain, anger, frustration, resentment, and the like is slowly eating away at your mental and spiritual being, and eventually will destroy your physical being. So forgive, and begin with you.

Here are some steps that will put you on the path for self-forgiveness.

1. Make a list of those you need to forgive (be honest and include your self)

2. Forgive your self by literally looking in the mirror, at you, and saying, “I forgive you for…”

3. Give yourself permission to forgive by making a claim that it is okay for you to forgive those on your list.

4. Now, when you forgive those on your list, you must accept their response, no matter what it may be. They may not accept your forgiveness. If they do not accept, you must still accept that and let it go. You can’t force them to accept your forgiveness. Remember you are doing this for you, not for them.

5. Contact each person on your list and genuinely forgive them by saying to them, “I forgive you for…”.

This procedure of forgiving my not always be easy, but it is definitely worth it. You may find that you will be spiritually fed if you allow yourself to experience this or some other process of self-forgiving. Forgiving allows you to become better at the art of letting go of stuff, which then allows you to move forward in your life. So pay yourself first and forgive the one who matters the most – you.

Cigarette smoking is a personal choice. However, if you are deciding to stop smoking, you may already realize that quitting needs more than willpower or scaring yourself with statistics of why smoking is bad.

Usual smoking termination systems often don’t work in the long term because they do not address the real reasons that people smoke. Listed below are five often unidentified reasons that people smoke. These reasons might surprise you.

Before you engage in your stop smoking process, take some time and identify the important underlying drives of why you choose to smoke. By understanding those real reasons, you can generate a personalized stop smoking plan that incorporates new strategies of coping and dealing with life.

1. Smoking Is a Lifestyle Coping Tool

For many people, smoking is a reliable lifestyle coping tool. Although every person’s specific reasons to smoke are unique, they all share a common theme. Smoking is used as a way to suppress uncomfortable feelings, and smoking is used to alleviate stress, calm nerves, and relax. No wonder that when you are deprived of smoking, your mind and body are unsettled for a little while.

Below is a list of some positive intentions often associated with smoking. Knowing why you smoke is one of the first steps towards quitting. Check any and all that apply to you.

• Smoking is pleasant and relaxing
• Acceptance – being part of a group
• As a way to socialize
• Provides support when things go wrong
• Smoking is stimulating
• A way to look confident and in control
• Keeps weight down
• Rebellion – defining self as different or unique from a group
• Something to do with your mouth and hands
• Shutting out stimuli from the outside world
• Shutting out emotions from the inside world
• Something to do just for you and nobody else
• A way to shift gears or changes states
• A reminder to breathe
• An way to feel confident
• A way to shut off distressing feelings
• A way to deal with stress or anxiety
• A way to get attention
• Marking the beginning or the end of something
• Coping with anger, stress, anxiety, tiredness, or sadness

2. Smoking Tranquilizer

The habit of cigarette smoking is often used to tranquilize emotional issues like anxiety, stress, or low self-esteem. In addition, smoking provides comfort to people with conditions of chronic pain and depression. Smokers with emotional stress or chronic pain often turn to smoking as an attempt to treat their pain. For instance, they may use it to reduce anxiety, provide a sense of calmness and energy, and elevate their mood.

The mental association between smoking and pain relief can make quitting quite difficult, as can the increased short-term discomfort that quitting smoking adds to a person already suffering with chronic pain, depression, or emotional distress. What are effective ways for people with chronic pain – whether physical or emotional – to make the decision to quit smoking? First, evidence shows that in people who suffer chronic pain, smokers have more pain than nonsmokers do. Also, accept that smoking cessation may indeed make you feel worse in the short run, but may be key to regaining enough vitality to live fully with pain.

3. The Feel Good Syndrome

Smoking is a way to avoid feeling unpleasant emotions such as sadness, grief, and anxiety. It can hide apprehensions, fears, and pain. This is accomplished partly through the chemical effects of nicotine on the brain.

When smoking, the release of brain chemicals makes smokers feel like they are coping and dealing with life and stressful emotional situations. Nicotine brings up a level of good feelings. Cigarette smokers are aware when nicotine levels and good feelings begin to decrease, and light up quickly enough to stay in their personal comfort zone. However, they may not realize that avoiding their feelings is not the same as taking positive steps to create a life of greater potential and meaning.

Perhaps these emotional responses are due not to withdrawal, but due to an increased awareness of unresolved emotions. If smoking dulls emotions, logically quitting smoking allows awareness of those emotions to bubble up to the surface. If emotional issues aren’t resolved, a smoker may feel overwhelmed and eventually turn back to cigarettes to deal with the uncomfortable feelings.

4. Smoking Makes You Feel Calm and Alive

Smokers often say that lighting up a cigarette can calm their nerves, satisfy their cravings, and help them feel energized. Indeed, nicotine in tobacco joins on to receptors in your brain that release “feel good” chemicals that can make you feel calm and energized all at once. Smoking acts as a drug, inducing a feeling of well-being with each puff. But, it’s a phony sense of well-being that never produces a permanent satisfying or fulfilling result. Smoking lures you into believing that you can escape some underlying truth or reality. However, smoking doesn’t allow you to actually transform your day-to-day life and live connected to your deeper hopes and dreams.

Instead, when you smoke, the carbon monoxide in the smoke bonds to your red blood cells, taking up the spaces where oxygen needs to bond. This makes you less able to take in the deep, oxygen-filled breath needed to bring you life, to active new energy, to allow health and healing, and bring creative insight into your problems and issues.

5. You Are In The Midst Of Transition

If you previously quit smoking, and then resumed the habit once again, consider the idea that perhaps you are in the midst of some “growing pains.” Perhaps you were feeling dissatisfied with some aspect of your life and contemplating making change. However, developing spiritually, emotionally, and physically brings with it the experience of discomfort. Old beliefs rise up, creating sensations of hurt, pain, sadness, anxiety, and uneasiness. You were feeling dissatisfied, restless, ready to change, but then felt the fear that change often ignites.

Smoking provides an escape from those uncomfortable feelings. However, smoking also brings an abrupt halt to personal transformation and the evolution of self. Although painful, these feelings are necessary in your personal development. Learning to accept feelings in a new way can help lead you out of disempowering or limiting beliefs, and into a life filled with greater happiness, satisfaction, contentment, or purpose. When you stop smoking and start breathing – conscious, deep, smoke-free, oxygen-filled breaths – your evolution will start up once again.

Why Do You Smoke?

If you smoke, then you do so because the act of smoking is personally meaningful to you. Therefore, if you are considering quitting, take some time and explore the reasons underlying your decision to smoke. Become interested, observe yourself, and get curious. Allow yourself an opportunity to turn into a smoking journalist, ready to uncover an intriguing mystery. Before lighting up your next cigarette, ask yourself:

a. What would I do with the energy that is freed up from smoking cessation?

b. How will smoking help or change the situation?

c. What situations make me smoke the most?

d. What emotions or feelings am I trying to avoid or deny?

e. If I didn’t smoke right now, what would I feel? How would I handle that feeling?

f. What positive functions do I believe smoking provides me?

The most important factor in stopping smoking is a genuine desire to stop smoking. You were not a born smoker; it’s something you learned to do. Learning new ways of coping with stress is possible, as is learning new ways to relax and raise confidence levels. Use the reasons presented above as clues to uncover the underlying reasons why you smoke. Then, in addition to making a firm decision to stop smoking, also make a compact plan to address your underlying needs. You’re not only kicking the habit, you’re also creating a new balance with your body, mind, and self!

Without a doubt one of the greatest encumbrances to the health and longevity of our relationships is the balance in the relationship between self protection and extending our self to promote the relationship.

Togetherness

Also in a “perfect relationship” we would take steps to foster the relationship. We would mull over the needs and weaknesses of the other, we would spend time cultivating common interests, working through conflicts in a sensitive ways and compromising on many levels for the greater good of the relationship.

Detachment

Preferably in a “perfect relationship” we are able to protect ourselves by being able to say no when we need to walk away from conflict, go outside the relationship to meet certain emotional, intellectual, and friendship needs, or just be free to pull away temporarily to nurture ourselves.

Our relational responsibilities

This is basically a personal responsibility issue. We all have a commitment to be as healthy as possible and when we choose to forsake healthy behaviors we cannot meet other obligations. The bottom line is whenever your own well being is in direct contrast to fostering a relationship you are out of balance and you and the relationship will inevitably suffer.

This is without a doubt one of the dynamics most commonly wrapped up in my clients lives no matter what other issues they are dealing with. If you were not raised in a family (and many were not) that taught personal self-care as a good and healthy thing this may be foriegn to you. For example:

-It is good to step back from a relationship when you have become a sounding board for a habitual whiner.

-It is good to say no if you can’t freely say yes.

-It is not good and healthy to have a personal policy that always puts others needs before your own.

-It is good and even imperative to remove all support from someone who is engaging in self-destructive behavior.

In some families obligation to one’s self is seen as disloyalty or disrespect. Where openly speaking your mind is considered rude and unloving. It can be difficult to begin bring balance to these situations. But across the board to achieve a healthy meaningful relationship with anyone means finding the balance between fostering self-care and nurturing the relationship.

Out of balance

If we make a mistake on one side or the other the relationship will bear. Whether we become personally distressed because the relationship has taken too high of a priority and we become unhappy and drained, or we detach to such a degree the bonds of the relationship begin to erode and weaken. Maybe it no longer meets the needs commonly associated with a healthy relationship love, connection, shared activities, emotional support etc.

Could your busy life be the cause of your child’s temper bad temper? When baby has a meltdown or a toddler has a blowup, we often lay the fault on everything. But, could the increasing number of tantrums be much less physiological in origin than we would care to believe? Are we guilty of being more attentive to our children when they are bad than when they are being good?

No doubt that illness can make a baby irritable and ill tempered. We all have had the unpleasant experience of being awakened from a sound sleep by a child screaming from the pain of an earache or some other physical problem. These episodes are completely unrelated to the garden variety temper tantrums that might result from a parent interfering in some delightful activity that might be causing chaos like spreading peanut butter on the wallpaper.

It’s explicable that your child would be unhappy under these circumstances, but what about those times when for no reason the temper crabbiness burst forth for no reason? If there is no illness or unwanted reprimand to blame it on, what could be the cause? Perhaps the root of the problem is found in the behavior of the caretaker or parent in charge rather than some underlying condition on the part of the child.

Modern parents have a lot on their hands. They want a career with the money and accomplishments that comes with it as well as a warm and loving family. Sadly, neither careers nor families can flourish under these neglectful circumstances. Unless the family is nourished and tended there are a number of things that may go awry. Temper tantrums are often a manifestation of a child that is feeling lonely or uncared for. Put quite simply, the child is acting up to get more attention.

I have seen more than one case where a smiling, sunny tempered baby turned into a very angry behavior problem because mom and dad didn’t see the warning signs. A mild mannered baby was taken for granted and virtually ignored. At some point the child began to think that the way to get more attention was to whine. Parents are encouraged by childcare experts to overlook occasional whining so when a low level complaint is not heeded; the volume goes up until the whine becomes a scream or a temper tantrum on a grand scale.

Once things go this far, the fix is not an easy one. It is far easier for children to be given the praise and attention that they long for for being good than to have to deal with temper irritability and learn how to handle them later.

    Simple tips for Effortless Success

• Gain confidence, let go of your limiting doubts, and begin to achieve your goals.

• Changing yourself from the inside out will improve your relationships with those you value most.

• Letting go of all the fear, anger, anxiety and stress will result in a vastly improved health and quality of life.

• Learn to reclaim your decision-making ability from your limiting emotions

• Develop the ability to make stronger and clearer choices

• Achieve your goals and aspirations as opposed to sabotaging them

• Learn to change yourself from the inside out and make those changes permanent

• Learn techniques for dissolving resistance

• Experience peace, harmony and unqualified happiness

• Greater ease, effectiveness, and joy in daily activities

• Communicate more open and effectively

• Understand the nine emotional states and how to uncover and live as “peace”Recognize how resistance is slowing your progress and what to do about it

• Understand the most powerful goal crafting and creation process