If I should have a daughter

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Art for Art's sake

Artist Ai Weiwei

According to John Huntsman of Time Magazine, "Ai Weiwei is the kind of visionary any nation should be proud to count among its creative class. He has drawn the world's attention to the vibrancy of contemporary Chinese culture. More important, Ai, 53, has shown compassion for his fellow citizens and spoken out for victims of government abuses, calling for political reforms to better serve the people. It is very sad that the Chinese government has seen a need to silence one of its most innovative and illustrious citizens. For the world, Ai continues to represent the promise of China."

Art can be dangerous. Very often artistic fame has proved dangerous to artists themselves. Mr. Ai’s work is not polemical — it tends towards the mysterious. But his immense prominence as an artist (he was a design consultant on the “bird’s nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics and was recently ranked No. 13 in Art Review magazine’s list of the 100 most powerful figures in art) has allowed him to take up human rights cases and to draw attention to China’s often inadequate responses to disasters (like the plight of the child victims of the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan Province or those afflicted by deadly apartment fires in Shanghai last November). The authorities have embarrassed and harassed him before, but now they have gone on a dangerous new offensive.




Ai Weiwei's Blog

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Vivienne Westwood talks to James Lovelock about the planet

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Why Your Facebook Friends May Not See Your Updates and What To Do About It

The Facebook News Feed, in the center column of the Home page, is where you see the posts of people, pages and groups that you follow on Facebook.

Many Facebook users are unaware that there are actually two feeds now, one labeled Top News and one labeled Most Recent. You'll see a link to both feeds on the upper right side of the News Feed.

By default, the Top News screen is visible when you visit your News Feed. This screen shows the "most popular" posts, meaning the ones that are getting the most "likes" and comments.

The Most Recent feed shows the most recent posts from your friends (rather than the most popular ones), but there are actually several options for viewing that feed. If you click on the Most Recent link, then select Edit Options, you will find two choices...read more........


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Should you buy a house in foreclosure?

How to Buy a House in Foreclosure

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How mindset affects your ability to take risks

Mindset, risk and the right career

Sometimes, in order to find a job that is right for you; that you enjoy; that you're passionate about, you may have to take a risk. That risk may involve time or money, or both. Considering potential changes to your present situation will probably elicit some degree of fear in most people, whether they have a positive or negative mindset. Either position affects how you deal with that fear. Fear can get in the way of finding happiness and living life to the fullest.

Your thoughts definitely affect how you view life. If you're coming from a negative place, you will undoubtedly respond to that fear in a negative way. You may have exaggerated feelings of inadequacy, worries about your performance ability, about other people's reactions, or even about issues outside your control. You will then unconsciously seek out confirmation of those negative thoughts. Conversely, if your thoughts are positive, you'll seek out positive choices and expect positive results.

A person's reality is influenced by the degree to which he appoaches life positively or negatively. Negativity is reality to the negative thinker. His thoughts make it so. The positive thinker, on the other hand, may also see reality, but he sees it in a different light. He may not reject or ignore reality, thinking that just because he approaches life in a positive way, his problems will disappear. Instead, he may simply look at his problems in a different light. He will probably look for creative solutions and choose to act in positive ways.

Making changes to you mindset

No one said it was easy, but it is possible. To begin with you need to think along the lines of three things: thought awareness, rational thinking, and the challenging of negative thoughts.

Thought awareness
According to an article on Mind Tools: http://tinyurl.com/9acyau, "...you are thinking negatively when you fear the future, put yourself down, criticize yourself for errors, doubt your abilities, or expect failure. Negative thoughts tend to flit into our consciousness, doing their damage and flitting back out again, with their significance barely even noticed. Since we may not realise that they were there, we do not challenge them properly, which means that they can be completely incorrect and wrong. These negative thoughts damage our confidence, harm performance, paralyze mental skills.." and prevent us from moving forward.

The article suggests that you observe your thoughts and become aware of what is going on in your head whenever you are confronted with...[ the fear of change]" As in a "stream of consciousness", think about the thing you're trying to achieve, but are afraid to do so. Do not suppress any thoughts. Then write your negative thoughts down. Or keep a daily log of negative thoughts. Every so often, look for patterns and repetitions.

Rational thinking
Approach your fears rationally. Analyze each of them honestly. Ask yourself if you have the training and experience to try something different. If not, go about finding ways to get it. Identify the risks in making changes and take steps to reduce those risks. Identify caveats and problems that may arise and plan ahead for what you or other people can do to solve or confront them.

Challenging negative thoughts
"When you challenge negative thoughts rationally, you should be able to see quickly whether the thoughts are wrong or whether they have some substance to them. Where there is some substance, take appropriate action. However, make sure that your negative thoughts are genuinely important to achieving your goals, and don't just reflect a lack of experience, which everyone has to go through at some stage."

Positive Thinking & opportunity seeking

By now, you should already be feeling more positive. The final step is to prepare rational, positive thoughts and affirmations to counter any remaining negativity.

(last article in a series on finding you passion)

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New Guest Post by Rebecca J Bradley

First of all I have to say a huge thank you to Nancy for asking me to come along and write a guest post for her blog. I was extremely flattered when she asked.

No sooner had she asked and I had agreed, than things started to go wrong. Nancy requested a personal type post, involving things such as my life, working, kids, mad female dogs with boy names and finding time to write and guess what? I let her down within the week simply because one of the other commitments got in the way of finding the time. Oh the irony.


But what does that say about my organisational skills? They do actually leave something to be desired, though I am working on them. Probably spending what little time I have, creating to-do lists that I then never find the time to do. Everything goes around in ever decreasing circles and I find I'm losing track of myself.


Maybe you think it's not very professional, but as of yet I'm not a professional writer. I do what I can when I can and the rest of the time life is there to kick me up the butt to remind me I'm not a fabulously wealthy best-seller yet.


The reason I had to let Nancy down in that first instance was a fairly important competition piece that had a deadline approaching and that I was no where near ready for. It was one of those competitions you wait all year for and give it your all. I had to focus hard on it and put in a lot of hours, but now it's done and it's gone and I have room to breathe again.


So time for writing and finding a balance with life, How do you do it? Well, I can give you plenty of examples of ways in which not to do it but I suppose the discussion point of this post is, how do we juggle life with aspirations to write and be published?


I work full time and have an hours travelling time each way to work and back. I then come home to a husband, two children, a female Springer Spaniel called Bob (it's actually Bobbie, but it's obviously just shortened to Bob) and a house that always looks in need of a tidy and all vying for attention.


As well as these, I have aspirations to write and have a crime novel be published. To help with this I have set myself a goal to read at least 40 books this year and put myself in for 12 writing competitions. I am attempting to build myself a platform by blogging and have a twitter and facebook account, then I have to find time to write. Typing all this up, I'm wondering myself how I'm going to manage this!


I multitask. A lot. I read in the bath, in bed and in my lunch break. I write blog posts on my phone when a thought comes to me and I read and comment on blogs while I'm eating my breakfast in a morning. I tend to work on my novel at weekends when the kids are playing with their friends and squeeze in another couple of hours through the week in an evening. I tweet on the move and facebook tends to come in last. It's exhausting trying to keep up with everything but I feel it's worth it. Writing is a massive dream I hope to one day achieve the goal of publication with, and for that, I must keep going.


How do you find time to do the day to day tasks and pursue your goals? And if anyone meets me coming backwards could you kindly point me back home.



You can find me on my blog at http://lifeinclarity.blogspot.com/
On twitter at http://twitter.com/rebeccajbradley
On goodreads http://www.goodreads.com/user/show/4694160-rebecca-bradley
And on facebook: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001747678931



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