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Dr. Mike Gosling

Thought For The Day

February 12, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

“We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts, we make the world.”

– Buddha Dhammapada Sutra (Hindu Prince Gautama Siddharta was the founder of Buddhism, 563-483 B.C.)

“Life is a series of events. Every event is an opportunity for change. And it is from the most painful events that you change the most.”

– Mike Gosling

“Always keep a dream in your pocket. Dream deep dreams and reach for the highest dreams.”

“A man’s reach should ere exceed his grasp, else what’s a heaven for?”

– Robert Browning

“An argument seldom proves anything, except that two people differ.”

“Unresolved anger is often the hidden source of low self-esteem.”

“Resentments don’t punish the other person; they punish us.”

“There is a gap between stimulus and response. The key to both our growth and happiness is how we use that gap.”

– Mike Gosling

“The fruit of love is service, which is compassion in action. Religion has nothing to do with compassion, it is love for God that is the main thing because we have all been created for the sole purpose to love and be loved.”

– Mother Teresa.

“Directly acknowledging feelings such as disappointment or anger, instead of making others guess at our feelings or having our feelings come out in other ways, is part of responsible communication.”

“The secret of a long life is to eat right and love what you do.”

– Dr. Leila Denmark <http://drleiladenmark.com/quotes/>

“Remember, anger is caused by your thoughts, not the actions of others.”

– Karen Gosling

“Like a river, my body changes as the moment changes, and if I could do the same, there would be no gaps in my life, no memory of past trauma to trigger new pain, no anticipation of future hurt to make me contract in fear.”

– Deepak Chopra

“Conquering others requires force. Conquering oneself requires strength.”

– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Only the present moment exists; past and future are mental projections. If you can free yourself of these projections, trying neither to relive the past nor to control the future, a space is opened for a completely new experience – the experience of ageless body and timeless mind.”

– Deepak Chopra

“God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

– Reinhold Niebuhr

“Whatever is flexible and flowing will tend to grow, whatever is rigid and blocked will wither and die.”

– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching

“Emotional distress is an illness of how you think; how you feel depends on how you think.”

– Mike Gosling

“The true test of intelligence is not how much we know how to do, but how we behave when we don’t know what to do.”

– John Holt

“I wanted to change the world. But I have found that the only thing one can be sure of changing is oneself.”

– Aldous Huxley

“Today, I will not strike out at those who cause me pain. I will feel my emotions and take responsibility for them.”

“Adventure is not outside a man, it is within.”

– David Grayson

“Doing what you don’t like is work.   Doing what you like is play.   I have never worked a day in my life.”

– Dr. Leila Denmark

“Part of self-acceptance is releasing other people’s opinions about you. Never let someone else’s opinion about you affect your own view of yourself. Be with people who make you feel good and leave the rest in the dust of your victories! ”

– Mike Gosling

“People are more amenable to change at a time of crisis. Watch out for the precipitating event; the “Oh Shit! experience.”

– Mike Gosling

Experience is not what happens to you; it is what you do with what happens to you.

– Aldous Huxley

“Acting “as if” can be helpful when a negative feeling begins to controls us. We make a conscious decision to act as if we are going to be fine.”

“Everybody needs someone to love, something to do, and something to look forward to.”

– Karen Gosling

“Listen with regard when others talk. Give your time and energy to others; let others have their way; do things for reasons other than furthering your own needs.”

– Larry Scherwitz

“Use positive assertion. Ask open questions. NEVER make statements: I think…, I believe….”

– Mike Gosling

“Our potential for helping others is far greater when we detach, work on ourselves, and stop trying to force others to change with us.”

“You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.”

“People are unrealistic, illogical, and self-centered. Love them anyway.”

– Mother Teresa

“If we don’t change our direction we will always end up where we are headed.”

– Old Chinese Proverb

“Anyone can give up, it’s the easiest thing in the world to do. But to hold it together when everyone else would understand if you fell apart, that’s true strength.”

– Author Unknown

“Life is not the way it’s supposed to be. It’s the way it is. The way you cope with it is what makes the difference.”

– Virginia Satir

“To laugh often and much,
to win the respect of intelligent people
and the affection of children,
to earn the appreciation of honest critics
and endure the betrayal of false friends;
to appreciate beauty,
to find the best in others,
to leave the world a bit better,
whether by a healthy child,
a garden patch,
or a redeemed social condition;
to know even one life has breathed easier
because you have lived,
this is to have succeeded.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Don’t wish for the wind to change, wish for the wisdom to set a better sail.”

– Jim Rohn

“Happiness is when one’s spiritual needs are met by an untroubled inner life. Happiness comes when your work and words are of benefit to yourself and others.”

– Author Unknown

“Mistakes are the portal of discovery.”

– James Joyce

“No milk after the baby is weaned!   No juice, no tea or Cokes.   Only water.   That cow out in the pasture never had a drop of milk after she was weaned, and look how strong and healthy she is.”

– Dr. Leila Denmark

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

– Mark Twain

“It’s better to be over the hill than under the hill.”

– Dr. Leila Denmark

“Dreams are whispers from your soul.”

– Marcia Wieder


Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: motivational quotes, thought for the day

Virgin Coconut Oil

February 11, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

coconut-oilEssential to emotional health is exercise and good nutrition. Since being diagnosed as a Type II Diabetic 0n May 29, 2011 at age 62, I have researched and taken lots of advice on how to reduce my blood sugar levels and improve my physical health. I now add a tablespoon of Banaban virgin coconut oil to my breakfast cereal.

It has become apparent that the growth of Virgin Coconut Oil and other Nature Pacific coconut food products has more than doubled in demand and popularity. It’s so good to see that here in western society we are finally starting to experience the benefits of coconut in our daily diets.

We are often asked, ” Is the popularity of Coconut Oil a fad?” Well the definition of ‘fad’ is something that becomes popular for just a short time. I think what has become apparent to all our customers (and is what our people back in the Islands have known for centuries) is that coconut definitely becomes a part if not a necessity in everyday life. Some of our customers that have had to go overseas to work are even getting us to ship their Virgin Coconut Oil to the far ends of the earth so they do not have to go without.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: nature pacific, virgin coconut oil

Mike’s Asia Pacific Kitchen – Lamb Vindaloo

February 11, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

Country: Sri Lanka

I believe that eating and sharing food with friends is a very emotional experience. In 1988 Karen was Senior Medical Social Worker, Gold Coast Hospital, Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. At the time we owned and operated the “Pineridge Hot-Food Takeaways” shop at Coombabah on the Gold Coast, Queensland. We served fish & chips, BBQ chickens, hamburgers, steak sandwiches, and Mike’s famous home-made pies, with recipes learned from James Elliott. Over the three years that we had the shop, I must have cooked over 15,000 pies of six varieties.

Maria had been visiting the Gold Coast from Melbourne looking for property. She had been involved in a car accident and became hospitalized with a badly broken leg that was strung-up in her hospital bed in the orthopedic ward. She was unable to be transferred. Monty to the rescue — with delicacies to keep Maria’s spirits high.

Monty and their 3 children arrived in Southport to support Maria. He and the children stayed at the Red Cross visitors’ quarters at the Gold Coast Hospital.

Maria was from Italy and Monty from Sri Lanka. Imagine the wide food choices in their household. Monty cooked for the family. Towards the end of their long stay on the Gold Coast, and with Maria recovered, Monty presented Karen with this wonderful dish of Sri Lankan Lamb Vindaloo as a thank you for the social work care Karen had given to Maria. It is a very special and delicate dish for me, with lots of emotion attached to it, given the new friendships we made. It’s sure to get the cook many compliments. Thank you Monty!

Ingredients

500 gms tender lean chopped lamb (or beef)

4 teaspoons curry powder

1 teaspoon chilli powder (or to taste)

chilli pieces (if desired)

curry leaves (if available)

2 cinnamon sticks

1/2 cup white vinegar

1/2 – 1 tablespoon tomato paste (to taste)

1 lge brown onion

5 pieces of garlic

2.5 cm piece of fresh ginger<

1 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon vegetable oil (or ghee)

2 cups water

Curry Powder

This dish is best cooked with Ceylon Marketing Department curry powder. This is a dark, almost black, curry powder and is difficult to find in most places. Other meat curry powders can be used.

Method

Cut the lamb into chunky pieces. Place in a bowl with 1/2 cup vinegar. Put aside to soak for up to an hour (I like to leave my lamb soak overnight).

Chop together the fresh garlic and ginger. Peel and slice the onion. Fry the garlic and ginger in 1 tablespoon of vegetable oil (I use ghee for the added flavour) until the garlic starts to turn brown. Add the chopped onion and fry until golden brown.

Next add your meat with vinegar and fry at moderate heat until the vinegar is virtually gone (about 20-30 minutes).

Add the tomato paste and stir. Add the chilli powder, chilli pieces, curry leaves, cinnamon sticks, and 1 cup of water. Let the meat and ingredients cook for 15 minutes. Add the salt and curry powder. Stir and add up to 1 cup of additional water. Turn the cooker to low heat and cook until ready (about an additional 15 minutes).

Serve with rice, pappadums, and shredded cucumber and yoghurt salad.

Mike’s Tip

Vindaloo is a sour Indian dish flavored with vinegar and hot indigenous spices. Lamb is a tender meat and needs to be cooked slowly. I like to add fresh mint leaves to Monty’s Sri Lankan Lamb Vindaloo straight after cooking.

As always, you are welcome to leave your comments below.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: lamb vindaloo, Mikes AsiaPacific Kitchen

Daniel Goleman on Emotional Intelligence

February 11, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

Daniel Goleman talks about how in order to be in a top profession a person needs, aside from a high IQ, the ability to be self-motivated and emotionally intelligent.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence

Power To Choose

February 11, 2013 By Dr. Mike Gosling

In sowing emotional leadership you are choosing to give to others in a way that honors their right to be heard, validated, and respected. – Dr Mike Gosling

Sowing emotional leadership is trusting in your emotional abilities and competencies to make no-lose decisions that will serve you and all those with whom you come into contact. Sowing emotional leadership is behaving with emotional intelligence. In sowing emotional leadership you are choosing to give to others in a way that honors their right to be loved, respected, empowered, and treated with dignity. In respecting others you are giving in to yourself; an action of conscious choice making – the habit of emotional leadership.

Deepak Chopra (1996)[1], in describing the Law of Karma, says;

Karma is both action and the consequences of that action. It is cause and effect simultaneously – because every action generates a force of energy that returns to us in like kind. There is nothing unfamiliar about the Law of Karma. Everyone has heard the expression, ‘what you sow is what you reap’. Obviously, if we want to create happiness in our lives, we must learn to sow the seeds of happiness. Therefore, karma implies the action of conscious choice making.

Whether you like it or not, everything that is happening at this moment is a result of the choices you’ve made in the past. Unfortunately, a lot of us make choices unconsciously, and therefore we don’t think they are choices – and yet, they are.

How often have your unconscious choices led you on the wrong path in your life? The place to begin is to define your path. Laurence (1990) [2] says;

Most of us have had a childhood of some confusion, misconception and insecurity. We either withdrew from, conformed to, or rebelled against life as we saw it. And we carry those patterns of behaviour and thinking into our adult lives. For the most part, we are living as a reaction to our childhood experiences and decisions. Our parents had their childhood influencing them! Round and round it goes unless we are freed from our past so that we can live freely in the present. It is ultimately our choice whether to stand still, or move forward in life. I sense that most people would choose an onward path – if only they knew how.

Conditioning has you entrapped in fixed patterns of thoughts, feelings, and actions. Events – people and circumstances – trigger automatic appraisals (auto-responders) in you that have not served you well. You have been programmed into making choices automatically. You are what you are today because of the choices you have made.

Whether you choose to go skydiving by jumping out of a plane at 10,000 ft, deep sea diving, traveling to exotic or dangerous places, or watch a love-story at the movies, you feel an emotion that has a positive or negative effect on your body. When you appraise something that is said to you as a manipulation, it will generate a different emotion in you than if you choose to accept it as a compliment.

Positive emotions will reduce your stress and help relax you physiologically. Negative emotions raise your stress levels and harm you physiologically. The resulting emotional constipation will stick with you as you hold your emotions in – refusing to experience them and let go. You will hold onto a sense of being stuck and unhappy with your life’s direction.

Power To Choose is about you regaining control over your thoughts and responses. Reframing your current thoughts, memory, values, beliefs, expectations, and predictions, in a way that your appraisal of them produces the response or reaction you want.

Power To Choose is you deciding to fully engage your emotional abilities to perceive, use, understand and manage your emotions intelligently. It’s about you empowering you. You have the power within you to make right choices in life. You choose who you want to be. You get to be whatever you choose to think.

Making no-lose decisions

“Be careful! You may make the wrong decision!”

Ever thought or heard this statement before?

One of your biggest fears is that you have made, or will make, a wrong decision.

Susan Jeffers (1987)[3] says;

The problem is that we have been taught, “Be careful! You might make the wrong decision!” A wrong decision! Just the sound of that can bring terror to our hearts. We are afraid that the wrong decision will deprive us of something – money, friends, lovers, status, or whatever the right decision is supposed to bring us.

Making decisions can be a stressful time for people as they weigh up the reasons “for” and “against” the choice they are about to make. You may even put off making a decision as a way of handling the stress of having to make it. Or to avoid hurting someone in whom you’ve placed your trust, or to whom you’ve made a commitment – especially if your decision now is to break that commitment. Eventually, making a decision is something you will need to do on your own, after taking into consideration all the advice you can gather.

Jeffers tells us that,

… all you have to do to change your world is change the way you think about it.” She presents decision making as a No-Win Model and a No-Lose Model seeing the Choice Point as where your inner voice rules – making it difficult to make a decision. The No-Win Model is where you are constantly reassessing your decision. Each choice seems to be a no-win choice. The multitude of choices that pop into your head, make it difficult to know which is the right choice. “Should I do this or should I do that? What if I go this way and that happens? What if it doesn’t work out the way I plan? What if …

no-lose-decisionsJeffers views the No-Lose Model as the way forward. “If you stand at the No-Lose Choice Point, your ‘fearless’ self takes over.” Making decisions using the No-Lose Model, is assisted by what you feel in your “gut” – in your abdomen. Trust your body in that it will tell you what it needs, to have absolute confidence in your ability to make decisions.

Making ‘right’ choices

Making ‘right’ decisions causes many people anxiety. How often have you weighed up all the ‘for and against’ factors before making a decision, and yet still not be completely sure that you have made the ‘right’ decision. You may ask yourself, “What if I’ve made a mistake? What if I should have chosen Path A instead of Path B”?

You will have heard the cliché, “If you’re not making mistakes now and then, you are not doing anything”. ‘Mistake’ is a label you always apply in retrospect. When you realize you could have done something more reasonable – even though, the decision was right at the time you made it. ‘Mistake’ is a label you apply to your behaviour at a later time, when your awareness has changed. How often have you heard someone say, “I have a gut feeling about this. I just know intuitively that it’s the right choice to make. It feels right.” This is your intuition speaking to you; your mind having an immediate insight to something. But it’s felt in your abdomen. You ‘know’ that you have made the right choice by the feeling inside you.

On making a ‘right’ choice, Chopra says,

When you make a choice – any choice at all – you can ask yourself two things: First of all, “What are the consequences of this choice that I’m making?” In your heart you will immediately know what these are. Secondly, “Will this choice that I’m making now bring happiness to me and to those around me?” If the answer is yes, then go ahead with that choice. If the answer is no, if that choice brings distress either to you or to those around you, then don’t make that choice. It’s as simple as that.

The emotional health challenge is about making healthy choices for your life. Sometimes it’s easier just to do nothing – or choose to do nothing! You get caught in the trap of it all being ‘too hard’. But with every choice you make you can create emotional health. Take action. Don’t wait for someone else to act, to help you. Otherwise, if you wait you will get pushed around. You see, there are two types of people – those who push and those who like to be pushed. Those who push see problems as a blessing. And if you have been blessed, be a blessing to others. Push forward with no lose decisions and exercise your gift of the power to choose.

 


[1]   Chopra, D 1996, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success: A Practical Guide to the Fulfillment of Your Dreams. Bantan Press, London. pp. 39-40.

[2]   Laurence, AM 1990, You’ve got what it takes. A Guide to self-discovery and effective living, Lotus Publishing House, Sydney, p. 4.

[3]   Jeffers, S 1987, Feel the fear and do it anyway, Random House, London. p. 111 – 117.

Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: Emotional Leadership Habits

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