For several reasons, resin furniture has become a popular alternative to wooden furniture created for outdoor use. It looks similar to painted wood, but it is much easier to care for. Unlike stained or painted wood that you may have to retouch every few years, resin requires little maintenance. You can clean it easily. Because it is durable, it holds up well to outdoor use.

Natural resin is a solid or semisolid substance that various plants secrete. It may be used to manufacture various products. Resin furniture, however, is made from synthetic resins. The synthetic varieties behave much like the natural ones, and they share some common properties. But the synthetic kind is used mostly for manufacturing plastics. Therefore, consumers concerned about conserving trees may find this class of furniture a suitable alternative. Also, consumers concerned about the constant manufacturing of new plastics should know that poly resin furniture is made from recycled plastics.

These are not your average plastic deck chairs. Check some of the available patio products, and you will find that resin furniture looks similar to painted wood furniture. When you shop for patio pieces to expand your collection, you can find everything from tables and chairs to rockers, gliders, and swings. The furniture comes in a variety of colors, sizes, and styles. Brown, white, black, green, yellow, pink, blue. Adirondack, high back, low back, Mission, Savannah, Nautical. The options are just as numerous as the ones you will find in any other material.

If you’ve ever cleaned any plastic deck chairs or other plastic furniture, you’ll understand why resin furniture is so easy to maintain and clean. A wipe with a damp cloth is all you need to swipe away dust and sticky spills. If the furniture becomes heavily soiled, you can use a hose without fearing that you will damage an expensive wood piece. A little soap and water should suffice for extra cleaning power. Other materials may require special cleaning products. In addition, wood furniture often takes longer to clean and dry. Moisture can’t soak into resin furniture.

Wood furniture also requires more regular maintenance. If you have a stained or painted wood piece, you usually have to reapply stain every few years or touch up the paint. If peeling occurs, you may have to sand and repaint the whole piece. This maintenance requires a seasonal evaluation of the furniture’s condition. It can also require a considerable investment of time if the furniture needs extensive maintenance. Resin, on the other hand, needs no such retouching or repainting, while you can enjoy the same painted look.

Resin requires little maintenance. It cleans up with minimal effort and time. You can find products in all kinds of styles and colors. The material holds up well to outdoor use. Rain and snow don’t cause it to rot like certain woods, chip and flake like certain paints, or rust like certain metals. It’s made from recycled plastic. For these reasons, resin furniture has become a popular choice for shoppers of outdoor furniture.

Source by Rachelle Dawson

Most of the time, you only need one bed per room and usually it’s simple enough to find a single or double bed to suit your needs. However, what do you do if sometimes you need a double bed and sometimes you need a twin bed arrangement? Well, have you ever heard of zip and link beds? These beds are ideal for people who need alternative arrangements and whose needs change from time to time.

For example, a hotel will often need to change the way a room is laid out depending on the guests. So, hotel divan beds are usually zip and link beds which basically means they can function as two single beds or as a large double. It’s very helpful to have something like this because once you’ve bought this kind of thing, little is required to change the arrangement.

Most of the time, you can find a range of beds on the web and these days, buying what you need is easy. Zip and link beds are also now available on the web and if you’re looking for a large number of them, you can usually take advantage of bulk discounts – whereas the prices for single ones are usually quite good.

Depending on what it is that you need, you may want to consider other kinds of zip and link beds. Divan beds are usually the best kind available and are certainly the most reputable brand. Just be sure to consider all your options before you make any decisions or part with any of your hard earned cash.

Investing in something like this is a great idea – even if you aren’t running a hotel, it’s a good idea because you can then adapt your arrangement according to your needs. So if you have guests staying, they can choose between sharing a bed or having a separate sleeping space.

Zip and link beds are a relatively new invention but they are certainly an invention that is going to be around for a while. Beds are something that are usually large, clunky and hard to maneuver whereas zip and link technology means that you don’t have to worry about this sort of thing anymore.

Source by Kayleigh B Bray

In this series of articles it proposed to cover the following topics. In this article I have discussed the first one given below. More articles describing the other listed topics below may soon be published.

• Meaning of Bookkeeping
• Definition and objectives of Bookkeeping
• Accounting Systems
• Branches of Accounting
• Uses of Accounting
• Limitations of Financial Accounting
• Explanation of important Accounting terms
• The Accounting Cycle
• Responsibilities of an accountant
• Importance of data in accounting
• Parties interested in accounting information

In today’s world of ours every activity is with some motive, i.e. purpose. In most of the cases. The purpose is to earn profit while in other cases the purpose may be social welfare, providing education, healthcare, etc. Whatever may be the purpose the activity is likely to be an organized affair. Every organization has to use resources-material, labor, services, capital and to work effectively the people in the organization require information. Money must be spent carefully. If a person spends carelessly, a day would come when he will be left with no money. Same can be said about a business. A business receives money from different sources like sale of goods, sale of assets, receipt of various incomes like rent, interest, commission etc. It has to spend money on items like expenses, purchases etc.

A business man should manage his business in such a way that he should receive more than he spends, other wise he will be in trouble because he will have to meet out expenses from the original amount invested by him for starting business. Thus capital of the business will be reduced due to this loss. If this process is allowed to continue for a long time then the whole capital of the business will be washed away. If the businessman manages his affairs in an efficient way and if receipts are more than the payments year after year it prospers and grows in size.

So, it can be said that profit increases the capital and loss reduces it. It should be kept in mind that profit or loss is the result of cost of goods sold and sales. In actual practice, if a business is to be run at profit then it has to sell goods at such a price as will enable him to meet out not only expense on account of cost of goods sold but also other expenses like, rent, salary, interest, insurance etc. Thus for making a profit either sales should be kept sufficiently high to meet out all expenses or expenses should be kept low so that they are fully met out of sales. Besides it, business also maintains certain properties i.e. furniture, building, machinery, equipment etc. Similarly, it also borrows money from time to time. In order to keep property in good condition, to pay back in time the debts, to keep down expenses, and to increase sales it is necessary to keep a constant watch, it is necessary that the proprietor of the business is kept well informed of the behavior of these items.

With a view to supply such information the art of accounting was developed. It supplies the following information to traders :

(1) How much will be the total earnings during the period;

(2) What will be the expenditure during the period on salaries, wages, lighting, insurance, rates and taxes etc;

(3) How much will be the profit or loss;

(4) How much will be the capital and causes of its increase or decrease; (5) Nature and value of assets possessed by the business;

(6) Nature and amount of liabilities;

(7) Customers who owe to the business and the amount in each case;

(8) Suppliers to whom the business has to make payments and the amount in each case; and

(9) Other facts for filing sales tax or income tax returns.

Meaning of Bookkeeping

Book-keeping is that branch of knowledge which tells us how to keep a record of financial transactions. The need for recording such transactions arise because

(1) it is difficult to remember the various financial payments and receipts taking place during a period of time;

(2) in modem forms of business organizations the control of business rests with different persons and the results are to be reported to the owners;

(3) the financial information is, required for the purposes of costing, budgeting, forecasting and planning; and

(4) Book-keeping records are to be submitted to various government agencies like Income Tax and Sales Tax’ authorities for taxation purposes.

Most of us do maintain some kind of a written record of their income and expenditure. The essential idea behind maintaining such a record is to show the correct position regarding income and expenditure. Such a record should be clear and systematic so that it can be easily understood. It should show to whom a payment has been made when and what for. The need for maintaining a record of income and expenditure in a clear and systematic manner has given rise to the subject of book-keeping. Book-keeping can as such be defined “as an art and science of recording business transactions in a systematic and, chronological order”.

The necessity of recording all the transactions clearly and systematically can not be over emphasized. Goods may be sold on credit to several persons. The latter would pay the price of the goods to the vendor later. The vendor would like to know, from time to time what amount is due and from whom. However, strong one’s memory may be, one cannot hope to remember all the details regarding all the transactions. Apart from this, the object of business is to earn profits; and every merchant likes to know at the end of a financial year how much profit he has earned during the course of the year. For this purpose, he would need a lot of factual information which can be derived from written or computerized records of transactions, provided such records have been properly kept; in modern times using a computer software like HiTech Financial Accounting. As such proper maintenance of books of accounts is indispensable for a businessman.

Source by Anil Kumar Gupta

In this article, we will discuss some methods and techniques that a new entrepreneur can use to get started in marketing and advertising their business. Of course, this information is not meant solely for brand new businesses, anyone can use them, but the article will primarily focus on a startup company.

Before we dive into the meat of this topic, let’s take a brief moment to define exactly what advertising and marketing are. For one, advertising is marketing, but marketing is not advertising. This may seem a bit strange, but let’s explore it further. For advertising, it’s simple, advertising is a direct form of marketing with a very straight forward purpose, to get people in the door, to get the phone to ring, or to get them to click to your website. Where the line becomes blurry is when we speak about marketing. Marketing is a far more ethereal concept. But since this is not the main topic of this article, let’s say in short that marketing is the management of perception. In other words, attempting to influence what people think of you, and therefore, how they feel about using your services or buying your product.

For example, the friendliness of your wait staff, or the cleanliness of your office, or the care you take in the landscaping of your hotel, all these things are marketing. And often, they are the most overlooked, because most people think of marketing only as advertising.

With this in mind, let’s begin in earnest to discuss the topic of this article, how you can advertise and market your new business. Well, as mentioned in the last paragraph, let’s start with the free stuff. What should be the simple stuff, but often is not. And this is the perception that you are giving about yourself and your company. Sit down and make a list of all the things that you can change, if need be, about your company now. Things that don’t cost you any more money or much time. For example, the neatness and atmosphere of your office or facility, if you have one. Spruce it up, put a few plants in, invest in a couple of plug-in air fresheners, and do what you can for the outside appearance, the “curbe appeal” if you will. Focus on your staff, are they well groomed, well dressed as appropriate to your customers, and are they outgoing and personable. Smiling and friendly employees, including you, go a long way in closing sales. Be sure that you and your people are quick to respond to calls, emails and the like. Keep in mind that the number one need of all people is to feel important, so if you can project that to your clients, that they are important to you, you will almost guarantee success.

Now, before we move on to another tip, let’s make it clear that this article is not meant to be an in depth exploration of this topic. That would really take a book. This is just meant to give you a few ideas and get those creative juices flowing.

The next thing to think about, and preferably before you have created any of your printed material, signage or website, is uniformity. To put it another way, your business cards should look like your signs, which should look like your flyer, which should look like your website, which should look like the side of your trucks. This is a key component of branding. And building a solid brand that people identify with quality and also with you is hugely important. So no matter what you do graphically, be sure that everything has a nice, uniform look and feel.

Now, a big area to focus on, and one that is relatively cheap, even with a complex application, is your website. Whether you are selling products online or just want to showcase your company, a quality website presence is an absolute must today. One of important reason is that now, over 97% of people do all there research into new products and services online. Even direct referrals will still want to check you out on the web, be it with their computers or their hand held devices. But equally, if not more, important than this is that the internet offers a huge amount of marketing opportunities that can expose you to new customers like never before. With the use of search engine optimization, blogging, social media, video marketing, article marketing, and link building, just to name a few methods, your website can be put in front of a large number of targeted eyeballs at a fraction of the cost of more traditional marketing and advertising methods.

As for advertising, this is a bit more difficult to pin down. Different businesses have different techniques that work for them. What works for a restaurant may not work for a lawn care company. What draws attention for a furniture store may not be as effective for a bar. The thing to do is to do some research into your particular type of business and see what is working for others like you. Also, if you know your target audience, then you can devise some cost-effective methods for reaching them directly, be it through radio or TV ads, direct mail, street level marketing, shows, billboards and so on.

Keep in mind the old marketing creed of AIDA, Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. This is what any advertising and / or marketing campaign should be built around. So no matter what you do, plan it out before hand with these four steps.

Now, not to be too vague, although it’s hard not to be with such a huge and diverse topic, here are a couple of starter points. First, tweak those elements in your business you can control without spending money. Then create a series of visual pieces, a business card for you and anyone else who may come in contact with customers, a brochure, a flyer, vehicle lettering and of course, a quality logo. Put up a good website. Not a cheap do it yourself thing, but a real, professionally created application and tie all yoru other material to it. Promote that site as much as possible, both on and offline. Invest in some internet marketing, both pay per click and in someone to do the organic work of promoting you. You can get quite a lot on a small budget here.

Do not be afraid to consult a professional. A good advertising and marketing firm can help you with all of these things, and with other more expensive methods, such as creating videos, filming your TV commercials, writing and producing your radio spots, strategizing mailing and other campaigns, and more. Promoting your company is a lot like being lost in a dense forest, and sometimes having a guide who knows the way can be of immense benefit, and is often the best use of your marketing budget.

Source by Scott W Cook

Gas fireplaces have become very popular with hotels and who doesn’t like a fireplace in your room. If you have never owned one, make sure you understand how easy it is for children to get burned by touching the hot glass fronts of these fireplaces.

Hotels love an easy to use fireplace for their guests and gas has become the popular choice. You also find them in the lobby of many hotels. All you do is turn a wall switch on and it starts right up and heats up rapidly. Unfortunately, since 2006, burn centers across the country have seen an increase in the children’s burns seen on their hands from the glass fronts on gas fireplaces. From 1999 to 2009 there have been 2,000 children ages 5 and younger who have suffered injuries from gas fireplaces, as reported by Children’s Hospital in Colorado. Children are naturally attracted to the flicker of the flame and are curious, but many times they just accidentally fall and get burned that way. Fireplaces are located in the family area of many hotel rooms and that is where kids play. It is much easier to keep children out of a kitchen when the oven is on.

One of the problems is that the glass on the front of a gas fireplace retains a temperature high enough to burn skin for up to 30 minutes after the fireplace is turned off. If you don’t own a gas fireplace, you just wouldn’t always think this is the case. Many newer gas fireplaces do come with fireplace safety screens installed on them, but older models did not. This is the problem. Touching the hot glass is so much more dangerous than touching a hot screen that rests in front of the glass panel. The smooth glass just melts the skin on your hand so quickly that for children, with slower reaction times, the skin actually sticks to the smooth hot glass.

A good safety screen will rest 1/2″ away from the glass and helps to reduce the surface temperature of the screen, but it also keeps your hand from coming in contact with the glass. Fireplace safety screens also provide an attractive fireplace makeover for oldermodel units. So the next time you check into a hotel with a gas fireplace, check to see if a safety screen is installed and educate your children to the dangers of hot surfaces.

Source by Michael J Dorsey

Brand building is never easy as it involves winning the trust and confidence of an audience. Your business should stir the imagination of target users as only then can it expect to serve them in some capacity. Clearly, marketing efforts are needed so that your brand’s message and ideas can be conveyed to the right audience in a perfect manner. This is where events do help as they are a great tool in taking the business to the prospects in true sense and ensuring realization of potential. Events are hosted so that brands can communicate with the people that matter the most.

Clearly, a lot is at stake with events and they have to deliver come to help entities realize their all-important target of brand building. That’s why the target should be on making the event as memorable and worthwhile as possible. For that, event organizers do the best of preparations, merge the merits of art and engineering, create stunning designs and make events a value addition. To top it all, high-quality furniture are used to lace the event with visual glows and order of the highest variety. This is how the attention of guests’ is grabbed and the occasion is leveraged to the hilt.

Further, there are companies into the business of renting out furniture in various shapes, sizes, colors, designs and hues so that events turn out to be the best in all aspects. Right from chairs, sofa seating, stools, benches, tables, bars and plinths, these companies are ready to rent out all types of furniture to add great value to event of any nature. So, whether your business has decided to launch a new product or you want to spread out some messages, a well-organized event can do all and contribute a great deal in brand building for sure.

What’s more, there are inventive, high quality event furniture to rent and make the occasion full of value in every sense. The best part, these pieces are available at affordable prices giving organizers a freedom to have them fitted at right places and fill in visual charms of unrivalled variety. Using these furniture, any event can leverage a creative-led approach and stand out from the crowd in a big manner. This is what brands do need as they have a big task at hand – to reach out to the audience and give them the impression of being unique in some sense.

Similarly, businesses across industries can benefit from events and furniture on the hire basis and realize their potential in true sense. You should look to get the most and best out of event furniture hire so that more people can understand your vision and grasp your ideas. Cost should never be a consideration with events and with furniture available for hire at affordable rates, you can’t get a better deal for brand building measures for sure. So, hire a top event organizer, convey you goals and wishes and let a top-class occasion is exhibited to the world.

Source by Abhilash Tyagi

In the spring of 1997, I spent a wonderful day with Dr Omar Amin in Phoenix, Arizona. Dr Amin is one of the most respected and sought-after parasitologists in the world and runs the Parasitology Center Inc in Scottsdale, Arizona.

He gave me a copy of his paper ‘Understanding Parasites’ in which there was a sentence that has always stuck in my mind: “A recent inspection of an expensive restaurant in Los Angeles showed that 100% of all employees (not just servers) had fecal matter under their nails”.

Fecal matter and disease (particularly parasites) generally go together. With our cities offering cuisine from increasingly exotic regions of the world, this carries a higher incidence of parasite-borne diseases, especially if these regional foods are undercooked or even raw: Dutch herring, steak tartar, ceviche, sashimi, sushi for example. Tapeworm is high on the list of ‘residents’ in these foods as is the Anisakid Worm.

A food-handler with poor personal hygiene will more than likely increase the exposure and risk of pathogenic organisms spreading. Years ago kitchen staff wore gloves and hairnets when handling food. They don’t seem to do this any longer although regular hand-washing habits may be mandatory nowadays.

University of Gondar, Ethiopia

In 2003, 127 food-handlers working in the cafeterias of the University of Gondar and the Teachers Training College there were fingernail-tested. These café’s were selected because the mass-provision of foods is a likely source of transmitting infections. Fingernail contents of both the hands and stool specimens were collected from all 127 food-handlers. In addition to fecal matter under the fingernails, the following was found:

– Coagulase-negative staphylococci (41.7%) by Staphylococcus aureus (16.5%), Klebisella species (5.5%), Escherichia coli (3.1%), Serratia species (1.58%), Citrobacter species (0.8%), and Enterobacter species (0.8%).

– Shigella species were isolated from stool samples of four food-handlers (3.1%). None of the food-handlers was positive for Salmonella species and Shigella species in respect of their fingernail contents.

Thankfully no intestinal parasites were detected from fingernail contents, but intestinal parasites were detected in their stools:

– Ascaris lumbricoides (18.11%), Strongyloides stercoralis (5.5%) Entamoeba histolytica/dispar (1.6%), Trichuris trichiura (1.6%), hookworm species (0.8%), Gardia lamblia (0.8%), and Schistosoma mansoni (0.8%); 1.6% of the study subjects were positive for each of A. lumbricoides, T. trichiura, hookworm, and Giardia lamblia.

It’s clear from this and many other studies that food-handlers are a potential source of infections. It’s not only food handlers though. To give you an idea of where and how contamination occurs, here are a couple of lists.

The 10 ‘dirtiest’ jobs:

1. Teacher/day-care worker

2. Cashier (bank, post office, supermarket, fast foods etc)

3. Policeman

4. Animal control officer

5. Janitor, plumber

6. Computer repair (using dirty keyboard/mouse)

7. Doctor or nurse

8. Laboratory scientist

9. Rubbish collector

10. Meat packer

Here are some of the dirtiest places you’ll touch in your day:

1. Supermarket trolley handle

2. Office keyboard (not yours) and mouse

3. The button on a public or office drinking fountain

4. Door handles – toilet, refrigerator and microwave at office and home

5. Vending machine buttons

6. The kitchen sink in your home

7. Your toothbrush, if left near to a flushed toilet (always close the toilet lid!) and the toothbrush holder

8. TV remote control (hotels and home)

9. Anywhere around household pets (including sandboxes)

10. Escalator handrails

11. The buttons on ATM’s, lifts, video game controllers

12. Petrol pumps

13. Car steering wheels, especially with multiple drivers

Next time you go out for a drink, think before you dip your fingers into the bowl of peanuts on the bar. Alongside the nuts will be fecal matter and urine residue. Then of course there’s that lemon wedge in your drink:

“I worked in restaurants for years and here is what I saw. The lemons and limes were delivered and put into the walk-in cooler. When the bartender needs a hand full of them he would go grab them by putting them in his apron. He would then slice them up on a cutting board and put them into cups and place them on the bar. Customer # 1 orders a beer and pays for the beer. The bartender stuffs the cash into the register. Customer # 2 orders a vodka and soda with a lemon. Bartender reaches into the ice bin and fills the cup, grabs a lemon and squeezes the lemon into the drink. At no time does any water touch the fruit or his hands and this goes on all day. Money, ice and fruit. Oh, and the occasional trip to the john.”

Men generally have more germs under their fingernails than women but there are more germs found under artificial nails than under real ones.

There is of course hope…

Viruses and bacteria are an integral part of our lives. There are billions of them in and around us. A strong, healthy immune system will generally take care of most of the daily threats we pick up from that dirty supermarket trolley or domestic pet but being conscious about this is also valuable.

Some Nail Facts:

— onychopathy is the study of fingernails and toenails.

— Fingernails are essentially dead cells that are made of a protein called keratin – the same stuff as our hair. We’d get along fine without them but they’re great at help us do fiddly things like gripping things better, text messaging and scratching ourselves. They also absorb some of the stress that the tip of the finger bones would otherwise have to bear.

— Fingernails grow quicker when you’re young, faster on your more active hand and more in summer than winter. They also grow faster on pregnant women.

— Dry nails? Just drink more water.

On a final health note…

Try not to drink straight from aluminium cans. If you buy canned drinks and bring them home, wash the tops as they may carried a virus called Leptospirosis.

There’s much scaremongering on the internet about people dying from drinking out of unwashed cans. I’m not sure about the accuracy of that but if there’s any truth here, it would be because the victim had such a depleted immune system, offering little if any resistance to the invading bacteria.

Tests have shown that some aluminium cans carry dried rat urine containing Leptospira i. Cans are usually stored in rat-infested warehouses and delivered direct to retail stores without cleaning! Just so you know.

Let’s keep the exposure to a minimum.

Source by Graeme Dinnen

Laminate flooring is terrific, but it’s certainly not perfect. You’d be hard-pressed to find a flooring material that was. If you’re looking to make a well-informed decision about your next flooring material, you must consider all aspects of the laminate – information that might be hard to come by during an intense sales pitch.

It Doesn’t Look Like Real Wood

Laminate isn’t real wood, but it’s designed to replicate the grains and texture of hardwood. Because it is a synthetic product, laminate won’t have the individuality of a naturally occurring hardwood, and the boards might be a different size and shape thank hardwood planks making the pattern distinctive.

Laminate floors are installed using interlocking pieces wider than the individual planks of hardwood. This means the seaming is different in most cases. The grain of laminate flooring is artificially created, so it also lacks individuality. The grains tend to repeat themselves over and over again as there are only so many patterns actually printed on a number of laminate flooring boards.

If the artificial nature of laminate floors bothers you, you should investigate the higher end market of the material. At the top of the laminate spectrum, much more care is taken to create a look that matches not only the colors and grain of hardwood, but the feel and visual appeal as well. You might be surprised by what manufacturers can do.

It Chips

Laminate is comprised of many layers sealed together with the top layers creating the actually wood pattern and protective layer. Hardwood is a solid plank with essentially the same material throughout, but laminate only has color on one portion of the plank. When something strikes laminate flooring at the wrong angle or with some force, the abused portion of the floor might chip.

When laminate chips the top layers flake off leaving a small, often white, hole behind. The lighter, often white, portion is the exposed layers underneath the colored potion. If you have a darker laminate, this light portion is very visible. With hardwood, you’d be able to at least spot finish the area, but you can’t refinish laminate.

Of course to chip laminate, you have to be rather rough on your flooring as this is an almost indestructible material. But when it happens, there aren’t many options available. You might be able to color in the chip with a dark marker and let it pass. Or, if the chip is in the right area, a rug might completely hide it. Your final option would be to pull out the plank that is affected and replace it. If done carefully, this will completely remove the chip and leave nobody the wiser.

It Hurts My Back

When you’re used to the cushion of carpet, any hard material, such as laminate, stone, tile or hardwood will give your back and legs a bit more of a workout. By installing one of these materials, you’ve effectively removed the half inch of cushiony carpet pad that used to be under your feet and put the product directly on the hard surface underneath.

Your flooring will be beautiful, but it can be hard on your back – especially if your posture is poor. To help with back pain caused by hard flooring, try adding cushion a different way.

Wear house shoes – Instead of being barefoot, throw on a pair of house shoes with rubber or thicker soles.

Stand up straight – Slouching on any surface is bound to hurt your back, but hard surfaces make the pain evident more quickly. Stand up straight to help your back take the pressure.

Sit down – Rather than standing or walking around your house, position comfortable chairs and barstools about so that you can sit while sorting the mail, jotting down a shopping list and completely the countless other small tasks you usually do on your feet.

Source by Tom Willmar

Have you ever stopped and evaluated your thoughts for authenticity? We go through our lives with fixed beliefs about ourselves. The tapes that automatically kick in without your knowledge. These are the thoughts that we hold ourselves captive with. The ego is firmly in charge, and will tell you that you must rerun events from your past over and over again. Who said what to whom, who did something to someone else. How someone may have hurt your feelings or made you feel less than. As the years go by, these negative thoughts add up until you get to the point that you are in a negative pattern, just circling the drain.

Imagine my surprise when I realized one day, that I could control my own thoughts. I always thought that was just who I was. I believed my own thoughts, that told me I was an awful person, that I had no reason to be alive. I honestly did not know that it was my own true self that could shut my negative voice down. The day I finally understood that I could control my own self-destructive ego was the day my life began anew.

Instead of running from reality, I began to embrace life and change my perspective on the things I always took for granted. Miguel Ruiz states “You will only accept as much abuse as you heap on yourself”. The truth in this statement can change your life. Knowing that the awful things that your brain wants you to be believe about yourself are not true will free you up to begin to experiment with things that you always just knew you could not do.

My journey began the day I was moved to pick up a paintbrush and paint a picture. I was not sure where this bizarre idea had come from but I went with it and a desire to learn something new just took over. When learning to draw I was shown that the way you look at something is not necessarily how it truly is. I started to understand that the things you deal with in life are not the way they appear either. I have made the mistake of thinking my journey was over, several times. I don’t make that mistake anymore. Everyday is filled with a lesson of some sort. Through the years people would ask me if I could draw. My pat response was “I can’t draw a straight line with a ruler”. Turns out, I had never tried because the fixed tapes in my head had always told me I couldn’t.

Until I made all these new discoveries, I would have gone to my grave believing I had done all I could do to get my songs published. People would always ask me if I had submitted my work to anyone. I tried a few times but my brain would just say, what’s the use. Instead of taking a chance I just took my place on the bar stool and drank my reality away. I guess I just thought the record producer would knock on my door one day, and demand to buy my songs.

If you actually take a minute and examine your reactions to your life, you will be amazed at what you will find. There is no one on the planet who was more self-defeating than I was, and if it can change my life I know it can change yours. Take Me to the Truth by Sanchez & Viera says that, “Our brains do not have our best interest at heart”. You can shut your ego down and improve the quality of your life. A slight shift in perception is all that needs to occur. Just take a minute and ask yourself if the things you take for granted are true. It’s as simple as that. Once you identify one or two beliefs you hold about yourself, the rest will follow. Sometimes they will follow faster than you can deal with. If this happens just cut yourself some slack and give your true self time to catch up.

If you are guilty of negative self talk, that is the place where you begin. Experiment with it because it does take a little practice. At first I had to catch myself every minute of the day, but as time went by it became easier and easier. I found out that I never really listened to people because the noise in my head was so loud I did not actually hear them.

As your outlook becomes more positive you will see serendipity just take over your life. Things that you just can’t explain will occur and leave you speechless. If you are abusing yourself, chances are you are being abused by other people. Give yourself a chance and stop the cycle. There is another way to live and if you just shed a little light on that negative voice it will make all the difference.

Source by Lori Phillips