Last weeks webinar was when The Franklin Makeover exercise was introduced. This exercise was based on a part of Benjamin
Franklin’s Autobiography.  The focus of the exercise is to improve 13 virtues a person has.  Here is how it works.

First you would rate these 11 virtues. 1 being the one you want to improve the most, 11 being the one you have the most already.

• Self‐Control
• Discipline
• Enthusiasm
• Courage
• Persistence
• Specialized Knowledge
• Imagination
• Decisiveness
• Well‐Organized
• Taking Initiative
• Pleasing Personality.

The exercise is laid out on a table or a spread sheet of 8 columns x 14 rows.   In the first box in row one should read “Week Number” then the following boxes should name the days of the week.

The second row first box should have #1 for the week number, and which virtue you want the greatest improvement on.  For me its “Specialized Knowledge”.

There are 13 slots you must fill out.  The 2nd one and the 13th one is already filled out for you.  Week #2 – Kindness and #13- See God in Others.  The rest is up to you fill out the other 10 in the order you rated them.

Starting at the beginning of the week, add one small dot (or tick) in the square for the corresponding day every time that you noticed that somebody (or you) have displayed that virtue.  For instance, like today, I made somebody lunch and they complemented how good it was. So that would be two ticks in the Kindness/Friday box.  Look for as many as possible, not just the large and obvious but the small things matter to.

In a sense our subconscious mind is like a child playing the game “Monkey See, Monkey Do”.  When our conscious mind points out to our subconscious mind consistent displays of the virtues, eventually, the subconscious mind will automatically start to mimic them.

The Franklin Makeover is another exercise that is easier said than done for me. When I first read through the 13 virtues , I thought I could at least spot 5 to 10 of each of them easily. I quickly learned that I could only spot the bare minimum each day.  It’s like a Easter Egg Hunt for me.  The objective is simple, but when it comes to it, finding the eggs (or in this case the 13 virtues), it was quite difficult to accomplish. Some of these virtues were easy to find right away, and some others are not so easy. Of course it depends on the day as well. Although this is a due-able exercise, but it isn’t as easy as I was expecting. Am I the only one experiencing temporary blindness with this?

These last past few weeks has keep me busy with chores *cough* *cough* services and enjoying the holidays. Although I struggled to maintain my Honor Requirements during this period, I did what I could, that’s including on Christmas Day, but I slipped on missing a few things.

For instance on Boxing Day (or December 26 for those that don’t live in Canada), I missed my morning reading of The Greatest Salesman in the World. On the 26th, after our company left, I felt pretty crumby. I’m not sure if it was because I missed that reading, or if it was because the Christmas rush had passed, but later that day I felt like I was missing something in my pit of my stomach, and felt unusually depressed. I don’t ever remember having this feeling before. I was trying to understand why I am felt the way I did, and really the only thing I could think of was that I missed that morning read! I never missed a beat on my The Greatest Salesman in the World readings otherwise, and never felt like that since then either. After celebrating Christmas, New Years, and my 24th Birthday (that was on Jan. 6th by the way), I’m now ready to get back to my usual routines and to continue uncovering my Golden Buddha.

Happy New Years!

“Rudy” is the first movie I’ve watched this brand new year. Unfortunately I don’t own it on DVD….. yet. 😛

Although I’m not into sports, I do enjoy watching based-on-true-life-story movies like Remember The Titans, Iron Will or The Blind Side. Rudy is based on the story of Daniel E. ‘Rudy’ Ruettiger, determined to overcome the odds and fulfill his dream of playing for Notre Dame football team despite being told that he was “too small” to play college football. (I totally relate being small by the way.) 😉

DMP – Definite Major Propose
Rudy’s DMP was to play for the Notre Dame Football Team.

MMA – Master Mind Alliance
There were several people that rooted for Rudy and his dream. And when Rudy needed it, they pushed him to keep chasing his dream.

PMA – Positive Mental Attitude
All through the movie there is evidence of Rudy’s positive mental attitude. His brothers laughed at him when he announced that he would play for Notre Dame one day. His Dad tells him to give up his dreams because it hurts those around him. His fiancee wouldn’t wait for him to finish university. With all of these negative and emotional influences, Rudy persevered.

There were a couple of scenes that he introduced himself to key people that he is going to be working with that will be a part of his DMP even before it happened. Like introducing himself to the coach for the first time. Rudy wasn’t even in that university to be considered to be on the team, and replies as though he is already on the team and tells the coach that he looks forward to working with him.

POA – Plan of Action
In in order for Rudy to play for the Notre Dame he had to attend the University of Notre Dame. Due to his marginal grades he had to do his early college work at the nearby Holy Cross College. He put in a lot of work despite being told there was only a slim chance he would be able to attend NDU.

When you hold your dream close, live it everyday, and surround yourself with positive dream believers, concentrate your efforts to achieving your dreams, they can come true. It’s easy to become distracted by other things that life throws at us or to just give it up because we allow the naysayers to suck our passion out of our dreams. Its a choice that is presented to us several times EVERY day. What we chose is what determines how much closer we are at the end of the day and where we start from the next day. Inch by inch, choice by choice, decision by decision we can live our DMPs.

First off, I want to say Merry Christmas to you all! I’m imagine that I’m not the only one that has the Christmas Rush. The astonishing thing for me about this year’s Christmas is that I’m sticking with MKMMA and doing my Christmas Duties was effortlessly completed, without even stressing as much as I use to! Looking back now these last few days makes me feel like that scene of the 1994 movie The Santa Clause when Scott Calvin aka ‘Santa Claus’ (Tim Allen’s Character) went to the Doctor to know why is he gaining a lot of weight and grow a lot of facial hair so quickly. I sure that I wasn’t like Jacob Marley from A Christmas Carol, these chains of my Old Blue-Print are clearly coming right off!

I’ve been noting that a part of my DMP is really coming out this last past few weeks: “I promise to continue to do my household chores with more joy and enthusiasm. I promise to continue to give up procrastinating doing the little marketing and social networking tasks I need to do to grow my businesses.” Although I wasn’t focusing on building any of my businesses, I noticed that I wasn’t procrastinating as much on everything I do, instead I was more enthusiastic! It’s rather kinda startling for me on how different things are getting 😛 and we’re only a little more than half way done this incredible journey of MKMMA!

I’m referring to the 50 minute exercise from this weeks webinar as “The Jaw Dropping Exercise” because my jaw was aching after reading my card over and over out loud while I looked at myself in the mirror for 50 minutes. Not sure if I suppose to read it out loud in this exercise, but I did it that way. When I first started this exercise it felt rather clunky and weird. But as I continued doing it, the exercise felt more and more normal and I felt tremendously uplifted and a feeling of a quiet peace. I also noticed that I was actually giggling a lot about myself throughout this exercise, which made me very grateful because I’m typically the kind of person that is down on myself. Which by the way is one of the things I want to improve on with the MKMMA course.

It sounded like a silly long exercise that I didn’t want to do (be quiet and go away already old-blueprint! I’m not leaving!), but it was a phenomenal exercise for me once I completed it! Because of this exercise, I felt that I have a greater sense of direction.

I was recently thinking about how the food I eat and the peptides and the frontal lobe may come to be involved together. Before MKMMA I noticed after eating something that contains loads of floor or sugar, or worse, both, causes me to become very VERY irritable. So in case anyone sees me eat anything like pancakes, brownies, donuts, chocolate bars, you name it, I’ll get really cranky, so sorry in advance if your around me! The scene, you shouldn’t feed Gremlins after midnight comes to mind for me when I thought about this. This is the thing what I was thinking, how can you focus on being positive when you’ve ate foods that makes you feel physically down.

Even though I have practically eliminated a lot of things from my diet already, like drinking soda pop, fast food, most breads and things that contain flour, it surprises me how much those things affected my mood and emotions. Boy I tell ya, I felt like somebody that was drinking all night, only for me that was after drinking 1 can of Cola-Cola or Root Beer or an A&W burger and fries! It also really surprised me that having junk food just for an occasional treat could really drag me down and feeling, not only dead tired but mean and with a negative attitude about everything around me. I could hear myself saying stuff like… I dont want to read that right now, I’ll do it tomorrow. This will never change anything… blah blah blah. A total contradiction of what we are trying to accomplish with MKMMA.

Although True Health isn’t one of my PPNs, I find it rather interesting how much what we choose to eat comes into play when working on positive thoughts, emotions and actions. We really are what we eat, and its another choice that I have total control of. So if you are struggling with negative thoughts and emotions even after following the MKMMA routine faithfully, consider looking at your diet. What you ate recently may had an affect on your concentration, enthusiasm, thoughts, moods, etc towards your Requirements and ‘services’.

I have found it very comical this week that I have been hearing the phrase “Do It.”, “Just Do It.”, or “Do It Now.” more and more frequently, either if it’s off a movie, a flyer, Facebook, and many other places. I see my subby is getting the memo. 🙂

I am also proud to say that I have noticed that I am becoming more and more positive towards myself and everything else around me. Before MKMMA I was much more negative towards things than what I am now. One of them being that “I don’t want to become a negative person.” I catch myself when I nit pick about what I don’t like in myself time to time. I find that I beat myself up if I’m not 100% perfect on work projects and then fall short. Or having pet peeves on having relatively small unwanted habits that I find irritating in others. I notice that I’m not doing that very much anymore, and focus more on what I am grateful for instead.

I believe talking to my “Future Self” is helping me greatly in this case because I see my “Future Self” as an Outgoing Positive individual that effortlessly help others without even realizing it.

I can’t believe we are almost half way through this incredible journey, I’m excited to meet the New Me at the end of this journey.

This was another week that just flew right by. The biggest challenge for me was to just keep up with the daily honorable tasks again. I could list a whole slew of excuses why I couldn’t keep up, like shoveling snow (that’s right, I’ve said that four letter curse word). This led me to believe my old blue blueprint is putting up a real hard fight to stay in control. That Ol’ Blue Print of mine seems to stick to the same answer, when I know I must give it a 100%: “….Riiight….”

Although I’m regrettably slipping to my old self this week, I do see a lot of things improved within myself compared to what I use to be when I started MKMMA. Like instead of dreading doing daily services like washing the dishes, or taking the dogs for a piddle, I tend to focus more and more on the plans on achieving what I want out of life, what I want to become and being more grateful of what I already have right now! Knowing that persistence is key, I keep telling myself: Do It Now, Do It Now, Do It Now!

The fight of positive thinking is still continuing for me this week, it reminds me of the fight scene between Sherman Klump and Buddy Love in The The Nutty Professor. I keep thinking positive thoughts right after negative ones as instructed, and when I start thinking of what to write for my next blog post, I always think what I have difficulty with in this week of this amazing journey of MKMMA, rather than what’s actually going right! Not only I caught it myself, but, someone actually pointed that out to me earlier this week as well.

It was rather an interesting week other than swatting at negative thoughts like annoying mosquitoes, in fact I feel happier and more relaxed than I use to be during the previous weeks. The thing though is that there’s still a negative voice that keeps popping up that tries to put a dampener on my Good Vibes, but I keep thinking to myself “KEEP THINKING AND FEELING GOOD”, I know that negative voice is likely those pesky peptides in my mind screaming Feed Me, Feed Me Now!!! I’m really looking forward in whats to come next week.

No opinions (unless someone asks for it) and no negative thinking….. you can imagine this is NOT easy. What I thought of first was the scenes in Analyze That when Paul Vitti (Robert De Niro’s character) is trying his best to go clean from his Mob Life while trying working on a few new jobs, one of them being a Jewelery Store Clerk.

This was really what goes through my mind these last past few weeks, “Crap, that’s an opinion.” or “WOW, what a Negative Thought!”. It’s clear that these are deeply rooted habits, like somebody that is a mobster his entire life, then all of a sudden he try’s to go clean. Clearly not an easy goal to achieve at first, in fact having a few negative thoughts was something I have noticed in myself before I have started here with MKMMA (Ok ok I admit, I have ALOT of Negative thoughts!). I do believe that I have slowed down my negative thinking, but it is still something that I have great difficulty on overcoming. I suppose you can’t eliminate negative thinking entirely, but I surly have more negative thoughts than positive ones. Which that makes me think of Sideshow Bob on The Simpsons when he walks on the same rakes and hits him in the face when he turns around and walks the other direction.

There’s even times I also even stop to think to myself “Is ‘Good Morning!’ a opinion?” Yup it is. But the thing is, I figured that kind of opinion is an “programmed opinion”, because its what we were taught to say to somebody when we first seen him or her today. So I think saying something like Good Morning, Good Day, Good Afternoon, Good Evening, or my personal favorite “Good Morning” quotes…

is fine to say, I think this is one of those exceptions that goes under “If somebody asks for your opinion”.

The jist for me with the “Replace every negative thought immediately with a positive thought.” reminds me of the “Good Idea, Bad Idea” segment from Animaniacs but in reverse, “Bad Idea, Good Idea”:

For me the first few days doing this exercise, I was pretty forgetful, but surprisingly it become easier within the first few days. I still catch myself though when I get caught up with somebody elses opinion, especially negative ones. Although this exercise  is becoming easier for me compared to earlier this week, it’s still pretty difficult to completely avoid it since I over hear what somebody else says what they seen or heard off the TV, a magazine, Facebook or some other news driven media.

With the practice this week, what I’ve keep thinking to myself now is: “Just focus on the *POSITIVE* Dillon, no need to get into that big steaming pile of Male Cow Poo!”, then think whats the positive version of what previously thought moments before.