Create What You Love: 4 Steps to Improve Your Life

My attitude in life is this: Everything is perfect as it is, and everything can be improved. Love is the power that makes things grow, mature, and become harmonious and beautiful. Here are four steps to use love in ways that improve your life.
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Detail of woman's hands making heart shape, sea
Detail of woman's hands making heart shape, sea

My attitude in life is this: Everything is perfect as it is, and everything can be improved. It is good to appreciate and celebrate your life's circumstances as they are. Then you can move on to making everything better. How do you improve what is? You apply love in some manner. Love is the power that makes things grow, mature, and become harmonious and beautiful. Here are four steps to use love in ways that improve your life:

Use love to build a beautiful and healthy body.

If you do not love yourself, you will be unkind to your body. If you do love your body, to the contrary, you will act in ways that make you healthy and vibrant. Beneath your self-destructive or unhealthy tendencies lurks disrespect or disregard for your body, neither of which is love. Building a loving relationship with your body begins by understanding what you want. Let me assure you that you do not want to be a couch potato! Instead, you probably want freedom from pain and illness, a full range of motion in all joints, sensory organs with ample sensitivity to enjoy the environment, and physical strength and vitality sufficient to enjoy life.

Use love to create the work you enjoy.

When you love what you do, you create your own job. Even if you are an employee, hired to do particular work, enthusiasm for your job can enable you to accomplish what is expected of you in about half the time. The rest of your time, you can attend to what is really needed. Often the most critical aspect of the work is unassigned, because nobody knows what it is. When you love your work, however, you take initiative and go beyond expectations -- unleashing creativity for surprising results. Within a short time, you mold your job to be predominantly what you love doing.

If you work for yourself, you can get buried in details and become terrified of risks. The antidote is to feel how important your work is to yourself and others. The emotional direction is more important than the rational plan. To sustain the high energy and self-motivation you need for success, use your emotion. With love for your customers, your product, your staff, or the way that work makes you feel about yourself, you adapt your work to yourself, and success follows.

Your boss or customers cannot anticipate the amount of creativity and effectiveness that comes from loving your job. Most people expect the ordinary worker; then you show up instead! When you pour love into your work, doors open and enable you to do what you enjoy.

The challenge is what to do if you do not love your work. One response is to practice gratitude for having something to do -- something that others need, or something that enables you to contribute in ways that others appreciate. Another response is to leave your current work and find out how to do what you love. Time is our greatest resource in life! Spending your time on and paying attention to things you do not love is a waste of your life and will not bring success.

Use love to develop the relationship you want.

Relationships are built on love, and that love has to be renewed continually. In the beginning of the relationship, you think you have found an extraordinary partner, only to discover that you are with an ordinary person. The person is the same -- first with the influence of your love, and then without. The one you fell in love with is still there, waiting to be uncovered again by the creative power of your love.

With the benefit of your respect, admiration, praise and even adoration, whoever you are with will blossom into an ever more amazing person, baffling you with his or her greatness. Be careful to avoid the three things that will close the heart of your lover: criticism, indifference and pessimism. Be the first to say, "I'm sorry, please forgive me." Love makes it easy to forgive, and forgiveness flows fast, before a hurt can harm you. Look for beauty, harmony, nobility, and joy in your beloved, and you will find what you look for. Then shower your beloved with compliments for what you have seen, so as to solidify that quality in his or her psyche.

Use love to build a better world.

Whether standing in a checkout line, talking on the phone to a salesperson, or having tea with a friend, you may realize that you are relating to a person who is suffering from loneliness, pain, or some kind of despair. In such a condition, this individual is not likely to treat you as you would like. Pay no attention to the way this person treats you, and focus instead on how you can uplift this person's heart -- through a thought, smile, word, or some act of kindness and appreciation.

With love strong in your heart, you may find that another person's rudeness or disregard stems from that person's fear of what you think of him or her. As soon as you show love, you change the relationship. Your loving heart is like a sun that dispels the darkness in the hearts of others. The change of feeling loved will immediately result in a changed behavior toward others. In this way, you have the power to catalyze a growing chain of love.

For more by Susanna Bair, click here.

For more on love, click here.

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