Answer frequently, once in a while, or never to the following:

1. You have trouble getting out of bed in the morning?

2. You want to sleep all the time.

3. You have been thinking of suicide.

4. Nothing seems interesting.

5. You are no longer attracted to your partner, and you don’t know why.

6. Little things upset you more than they should.

7. You can’t find a job doing what you want to do.

8. You keep getting into fights with friends and breaking off friendships.

9. You can’t make up your mind about important things.

10. You’ve had a series of accidents or minor illnesses.

11. You go on buying sprees, getting things you don’t need.

12. Your allergies are getting worse.

13. You can’t sleep at night.

14. You’re eating (drinking, smoking, fighting, etc.) more than is good for you.

15. You burst into tears without knowing why.

16. You are afraid to be alone.

17. You find it hard to make new friends.

You should strongly consider therapy if you answered “once in a while” for ten or more of the above, or “frequently” for three or more.

I don’t know if I was born for Squidoo or Squidoo was made for me. I do know that I have found my favorite vehicle–a place to practice target marketing. I believe that everyone is in sales. By that I mean we are each trying to get our personal agenda met every day. So how do you make sales easy? Find your target market and people buy from you because you are providing them a service to buy what they want. I began my main blog, kathyberman.com (Changemaker: Reinventing Yourself), in November, 2004. After writing daily for 10-12 hours for over 2 years, I came to believe that the blog had too much information. I had decided during the first few months of blogging that I didn’t have the time to write about all I’ve learned in thirty years of recovery and answer comments.

Knowing that I would be in for a long, lonely road without comments didn’t deter me from the decision to exclude comments. I have always posted my email address and posted several times about new directions the blog was entering. Of course, my choice brought me no traffic. Although I have been consistently and continually online for over two years, I have no traffic. I read a lot of blogs that have high readership audiences and have never regretted my choice.

My Squidoo Published Lenses:

Squidoo Lens Page

http://www.squidoo.com/cmlens/

About Change

Do You Need a Life Change?

http://www.squidoo.com/changelife/

You Can Help Change the World

http://www.squidoo.com/changeworld/

How You Can Change Your Stress Level

http://www.squidoo.com/changestress/

About Changemaker

Use Changemaker to Start Your Own Groups

http://www.squidoo.com/changemaker/

Use Changemaker Test to Help Others

http://www.squidoo.com/changemakertest/

Changemaker Favorite Prayers

http://www.squidoo.com/cmprayer/

Helping Others With Changemaker Headquarters

http://www.squidoo.com/groups/changemaker

About Body, Mind and Soul

Mind, Body and Soul: Physical Healing

http://www.squidoo.com/physicalhealing/

Mind, Body and Soul: Emotional Healing

http://www.squidoo.com/emotionalfitness/

Mind, Body and Soul: Mental Healing

http://www.squidoo.com/mentalhealing/

About Diet

Are You Running Out of Energy?

http://www.squidoo.com/highenergydiet/

About Motivation

Goals are Dreams With a Deadline

http://www.squidoo.com/yourtrueself/

About Recovery

ACOA, Codependency and My Inner Child

http://www.squidoo.com/myinnerchild/

Recovery is a Return to Sanity

http://www.squidoo.com/twelvesteps/

About Spirituality

Coming Home to God

http://www.squidoo.com/spiritualpractices/

Changemaker Favorite Prayers

http://www.squidoo.com/cmprayer

About Squidoo

Why I Needed Squidoo

http://www.squidoo.com/lovesquidoo/

My Hobbies

My Favorite Photo Artists

http://www.squidoo.com/favphotoartists/

About the Author

A Sampler of My Life

http://www.squidoo.com/kathy/

Massive Change project explores the legacy and potential, the promise and power of design in improving the welfare of humanity. It originated as collaboration between Bruce Mau Design and the Institute without Boundaries in which we researched the capacities and limitations of human efforts to change the world for the better. The Change Your World Tour will present 300 future-focused proactive global concert expo events that will change the way people live.

Ninth Floor Project was started by Martin Kace. He has been living in a wheelchair for 5 ½ years and has adapted pretty well except for hugs and kisses from his loved ones. Much of his life is back to normal except he finds he takes stem cell politics personally. He thinks about the young people who would most certainly walk again if science were allowed to move forward. Instead they are doomed to live in their chairs while 400,000 embryos are trashed and incinerated every year.

OLPC—one laptop per child—is a potent learning tool created especially for the world’s poorest children living in the world’s most remote environments. The computers won’t be for sale but will only be distributed to schools directly through large government initiatives.

Zerofootprint helps you reduce your footprint by providing information, products and services to the global network of consumers and businesses that wish to reduce their environmental impact. It includes green products, green events and green stories. Under the ideas section is the zerofootprint challenge. The question: Is it possible to prove that simple ideas can bring massive change?

Tags: change, world, laptop, green products, humanity

-Frederick Buechner

ThinkSimpleNow :Creativity, Clarity and Happiness has a great article about using anger as a positive use of anger. The article is 15 Simple Ways to Overcome Anger.

The post suggests that the three ways to interrupt a behavioral pattern are by using NLP (neuro-liguistic programming). Wikipedia defines NLP as:” Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) is a theory of language, communication and thought together with an associated therapeutic method, which holds that people can improve the way they interact with the world by means of certain principles and techniques concerned with their use of language.”

The three ways are: visual (change your thoughts), verbal (change your language), and kinesthetic (change your physical position).

I will list the 15 suggested ways to overcome the negativity of anger:

(1)  Look up!!!

(2)  “What do you want?”

(3)  Eliminate: Don’t, Not, No

(4)  Finding the light

(5)  Surrender

(6)  Circle of influence

(7)  Gratitude exercise

(8)  Meditation

(9)  Breathing relaxation technique

(10) Laughter!

(11) Forgiveness

(12) Snap a rubber band

(13) Identify and eliminate your triggers

(14) Identify what anger brings

(15) Seek closure. Solve the problem.

I have decided to use each of my 6 blogs to catalog relating links for the following main categories. Each post will be about a specific aspect of each of the following categories:

(1)  Changemaker: Reinventing Yourself— Link lists for spiritual/religion/spiritual practices

(2)  Answers By Email: Changemaker Personality Test—Link lists for finding your passion/career/work/employment

(3)  Changemaker Groups—Link lists for social networks/facebook/twitter/myspace

(4)  Changemaker Library—Link lists for social issues/causes

(5)  Healing for You–Link lists for lifestyle choices/voluntary simplicity/sustainable living/homeschooling

(6)  High Energy Goals—Link lists for health/wellness/fitness/food/diet/exercise

I am beginning this new adventure of being a blog indexer today, Jan. 19, 2009. I hope that my service may be an aid to your life online.

“This, I believe, is the great truth: that each of us is a completely unique creature and that, if we are ever to give any gift to the world, it will come out of our experience and fulfillment of our own potentialities, not someone else’s.” Joseph Campbell

“Our society considers hard work, intense recreation, vigorous exercise, rushing through the day, excessive eating, frquent anger, occasional deep depression, and sex without love as “normal”, and we have become addicted to the brain chemicals that accompany these so-called normal behaviors.”
Paul Pearson

“I am convinced that knowledge and action are frequently synonymous, identical in the Socratic fashion. Where we know fully and completely, suitable action follows automatically and reflexively. Choices are made without conflict.”
Abrahan Maslow

In the self-discovery model of group healing, everyone in the group is a student. The sharing of power in relationships defines the health of the relationship. No hierarchy is needed when people enter groups to help each other. The leadership of the group can be shared by all on a rotation basis.

The group members in the self-discovery group must agree to follow guidelines that the group chooses. The main goal of the group should be short-term with the idea of splitting up to form new groups. Some people may choose to recycle–repeat the same group–before branching out to their own group. After 2-3 times recycling, the other group members may help with the formation of new group to a group member who needs more support.

The current (from 9/23/2006) definition of change agent from Wikipedia says that a change agent is someone who engages either deliberately or whose behavior results in social, cultural or behavioral change. Wikipedia also lists management stages for change and employee steps to commitment.

Last week when I was researching to see earlier referrals to change agents, I came upon an article from 1999 by Seth Godin. Seth is one of my mentors although we’ve never met.

Fast Company’s prototype issue was November 1993 and one of the main articles was about Gunther Pauli. Pauli as reported in this article was the CEO of Ecover. His concept was using a new business model. His products for cleaning used only natural soaps and renewable raw materials. In the process, he built the world’s largest ecological factory.

One of the earlier referrals to change agent is in the April 1997 issue about Bob Knowling. Knowling helped to transform Ameritech from the old company concepts to new company concepts. As reported, he convinced 30,000 employees to become part of community service, shifted millions of dollars of Ameritech Foundation money into high-leverage community actives, helped to revitalize the Chicago YMCA, and shared his passion to HOPE, Chicago’s largest inner-city manufacturing training center.

In a training guide for change agents, Annie Layne used the basics used by the Peace Corps to show concepts that could be used for any business.

Become a change agent where you are by reducing your beliefs and motivations to a mission statement or a single sentence to give you focus for your planned change.

All the talents you are good at on your present job will be talents that you’ll use on new jobs/careers. List the 10 aspects you feel comfortable with on a job. Don’t be afraid to change or modify your list.

Put it in a conspicuous place and check it over every day.
A career shift is easy after you understand the qualities you must have for any job. What are your interests and desires?

Career Questions:

Where do you see yourself five years from now?

Where do you see yourself ten years from now?

Is there something in your life that you want and don’t have?

What is stopping your moving forward?

What do you need to change today to make your career move forward?

Another author has suggested these questions:

1. What one subject can you enjoy talking about for many hours?
2. Do any of your hobbies involve working a lot with other people?
3. What specific concerns preoccupy your mind, breaking into whatever else you’re thinking about?
4. What do you most enjoy doing for others?
5. Let’s pretend you’ve reached the end of your life, and you’re in heaven looking back on it. What’s the one thing you want to be most happy about having done or having been?
6. Who ‘out there’ in the world have you come to care about the most? Who do you most want to help, enable, or reach? (You define the categories, whatever way you want. Go with your first instincts.)
7. Now, write down at least five of your life experiences that most gave you a sense of fulfillment and/or growth. (Don’t think about them until later — just write them down for now.) If more experiences come to mind, just keep listing them until you exhaust yourself. You’ll sort them out later.

The individual book excerpts are found on each of our other blogs. The schedule for each is:

(1) Answers by Email has creativity, core (basic), and health books under Books tag.

(2) Changemaker Groups has personal development books under Books tag.

(3) Changemaker Library has spiritual direction books under Books tag.

(4) Healing For You has meditation, peace of mind, and stress reduction books under Books tag.

(5) High Energy Life Plan has exercise and food books under Books tag.

For the Changemaker Library, we will be including the basic features of some books you may want to use. All of the books used are the choices of Changemaker without solicitation from any author or publisher. At the beginning of the post, we have listed the name of the book, the author, the ISBN number, and a link where you can order the book if you choose. The rest of the post includes actual content from that book for you to better be able to determine if this is a book for you.

I keep my special books together and use them frequently. I call them my textbooks as I seek direction time and time again from them. The Changemaker Library presently has 50+ books that we are recommending. This library can be acquired gradually either for your individual work or resources for the Changemaker Groups that you begin.