As the CEO (Chief Energizing Officer) at Hartful Living including GaiaHart.com and BizBuilderCards.com; I’m a Messenger and Mentor for women entrepreneurs, connecting them to their capacity to energize their work and their lives in the art of living Hartfully. At BizBuilderCards.com, you can make a living through giving with greeting cards and gifts to build your network net worth as an additive to your current business or an easy way to send gratitude and kindness to the world.
LUV: Taking Customer Service to the Next Level
July 18, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Just recently returning from a Professional Speakers Convention, where my Arizona speaker colleague who is blind, Larry Colbert was attending. He and his canine companion, Banner, are popular members of our local National Speakers Association chapter. I received this email and with tears in my keyboard just had to share this story of what happened to Larry on Friday the 13th. This is a testament that speaks to the heart of what customer service is all about. It’s not just about smile training, it’s the basic human compassion for another and to do the right thing in times of need, no matter what it takes, no matter if it’s in the training manual or not. That day, the folks at Southwest didn’t even know that Larry was one of their passengers, as there are lots of airlines in that terminal at Sky Harbor in Phoenix. They rose to the occasion anyway.
Rest assured this story has already been forwarded to the head honchos at Southwest Airlines to commend them and their people on doing the right thing. They truly live up to their stock market codename: LUV.
Grab a tissue and read on, then pass this along to your colleagues and friends in the customer service field. Thanks to my friend and speaking colleague, Beth Terry for passing along this photo of Banner the Wonder Dog.
Here’s a brief description of the event as written by Sandy DeNeui (girlfriend extraordinaire…)
– – – – – – – – –
Yesterday, Friday the 13th came with more than one miracle for Larry and his guide dog Banner. Larry and Banner were on their way to a speaking
engagement in Nevada. Larry took a cab from his house to Sky Harbor.
Somehow, and that looms as the huge unanswered question, Banner received a gash in his leg while riding in the back seat of the cab. Larry said that Banner yelped and jumped from the floor boards onto the seat shortly before they arrived at the airport. This was highly unusual because Banner is extremely well trained, but since Larry cannot see, he didn’t realize that Banner was injured, so he got his bag and holding Banner’s harness, proceeded into the airport.
Larry said that Banner just led him along as if nothing was wrong…. then a man (Phx airport security), stopped them and asked if he could help. I guess that is when the urgency of the situation came to light.
Later, Troy (South West Customer Service), the young man who saved Banner’s life, told me that Banner would most certainly have gotten Larry to the airplane and bled to death in the process if someone had not intervened. But the ground crew employees of South West Airlines took it upon themselves to change Banner’s fate.
Larry telephoned me and said… “I need your help, Banner is hurt.” I knew by the sound of his voice that this was a real emergency. I blasted out of the house and across town to the airport. On the way I telephoned the vet’s office to alert them that we would be coming in…. and carried an on going conversation with Larry and one of the South West Airline employees. When I finally arrived a police car with emergency lights on had cleared a place for me to park…. a walkway had been cleared through the throng of onlookers…. Banner was on the floor with Larry beside him, and eight or ten uniformed people some kneeling some crouching were gathered around Banner, who was in great distress.
Larry was splattered in blood from his waist down, there was blood everywhere and on everyone. Troy lifted Banner and carried him to the car. I
didn’t realize it at the time, but Troy’s hand was clenched around Banner’s leg to stop the flow of blood. Banner, Troy and Larry got in the back seat of my car and away we went. When we arrived at the vet’s three young women emerged with a stretcher and rolls of tape. They wrapped the leg right there, so that Troy could release his grip, but Troy who by then was like a family member, carried Banner inside, sans stretcher.
Banner underwent surgery almost immediately. He had sliced the major vein to his leg and nicked an artery, and those employees of South West Airlines who left their posts to render aid quite simply kept Banner alive until Dr. Bastek could work her magic. Troy told me many hours later that he was still in shock from the whole experience…. and that he felt a bond with Banner and Larry that he didn’t want to lose track of.
Larry took a later flight to Las Vegas for his speaking engagement. He said that the legend of Banner preceded him and that every South West employee he met along the way asked about Banner (who is recovering nicely).
All in all, it was a Friday the Thirteenth to remember… and a time to realize that there are everyday people out there just waiting to be heroes.
I saw dozens of heroes yesterday. I am attaching a photo of Banner that was taken just this evening at Larry’s house.
I had the honor of having Banner stay with me here in Mesa after being released from the hospital. Larry managed just fine with his “white stick”
on his engagement in Nevada. He said he missed the freedom that Banner allows him, and of course was worried about Banner too. The South West Airline employees sent Banner the flowers and balloon in the photo as a get well gift. I think he really liked it! What a weekend! Those employees were more than heroes….. they were angels in disguise.
“It takes action to achieve vision!” Larry C. Colbert, Speaker & Author Check out Larry’s new video at: <http://www.DrivingVision.com>
www.DrivingVision.com
A Dozen Energizing Super Foods
July 16, 2007 | Posted in Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
I discovered the power of nutritional cleansing a couple years ago when I moved from a house with black mold to a home in a drier climate. After doing a program of nutritional cleansing, ridding my body of toxins and drinking shakes that flooded my body with the proper nutrition. I realized a few things:
No more aches and pains that once irritated me.
My cholesterol dropped over 50 points.
I dropped 25 pounds in a few months and several clothing sizes.
My clarity and focus became much greater and my usually high energy went through the roof.
My craving for certain foods ceased and my taste for foods became sharpened. Everything tasted better.
Here are a dozen Superfoods that you can introduce into your daily or weekly routine to help pump up your energy and cleanse your body of toxins or boost your immune system so you can be more resilient to stress.
1. Flax Seed – a great source of omega-3 fatty acids – especially for vegetarians like me who don’t eat Salmon or other fish to get those essentials to help prevent Alzheimers, obesity, sunburn and even depression. Flax Seed also has high levels of lignans, a natural anti-oxidant to help maintain breast and colon health. It has 75 times more lignans than any other plant source – just 2 tablespoons equals about 30 cups of broccoli. It’s also a rich source of fiber.
2. Blueberries – high in fiber, vitamin C and antioxidants to help improve motor skills and memory.
3. Cinnamon – It is an anti-bacterial and can help reduce blood sugar levels and can produce a brain boost by smelling it.
4. Kale – Loaded with beta carotene to keep eyes health and fights off certain cancer cells.
5. Pumpkin – A potent anti-oxidant to reduce the risk of cancer and heart disease, high in vitamin A and carotenoids.
6. Soy – Can help reduce cholesterol and the risk of osteoporosis, Alzheimer’s certain cancers, and kidney disease as well as help with menopausal symptoms.
7. Walnuts – The mono-saturated (good) fat in walnuts is believed to reverse some of the effects of eating foods high in saturated fat. Also filled with omega-3 fatty acids.
8. Avocado – The combination of fat, protein and carbs is ideal in this fruit and it’s high in glutathione, which blocks op to 30 different carcinogens.
9. Oats – Filled with both types of fibers – soluble to help reduce cholesterol and keep the heart health and insoluble to support the digestive system.
10. Dark Chocolate – whoopeeee! It’s rich in flavenols that boost hte production of nitric oxide in blood vessels and it can lower blood pressure and improve circulation.
11. Whey – It can help with mood levels, depression, fills you up so you don’t feel hungry and optimizes muscle and improves insulin sensitivity. It supports serotonin levels and boosts the immune system aiding in the fight against cancer. It helps support the body’s overall biochemistry and weight management systems.
12. Isagenix Nutritional Cleansing Superfoods – is a program packed with different products filled with Superfoods. Their fruit drink contains superfruits in a powder form that can give you an entire day’s supply of your fruit in one drink. Their healthy greens drink can supply your leafy green veggies. Their vanilla and chocolate shakes are made from whey and using their cleansing system along with their shakes and 30-day cleansing program can render dramatic results. See below some before and after shots of me and my friend, Sue. The results are on the inside and the outside when using these products and natural Superfoods.
Give me a call at 866.386.2896 or send an email to Gail@YourEnergyExpert.com for more info on these Superfoods and nutritional cleansing…or check out the link above for videos and other info on the toxins that bombard us every day and how we can cope with it and energize our lives.
Claim Your Independence
July 4, 2007 | Posted in Living Hartfully, Wealthy Woman | By Gaia Hart
Ten years ago this holiday week, I put myself on house arrest to write my first book. It was Independence Day and I decided to claim my independence from the shackles of a tyrant boss and a job from hell by writing the first of many books and articles on how to energize your life. That book was the springboard to my career and financial independence as an entrepreneur, professional speaker and author. My life was never the same after the book was published by Labor Day – quite possibly the fastest book to be written and published on record in just 2 short months. I was determined to get on the fast track of working for myself.
Now I’m working on the third edition of the book, it may be turned into a workbook so it’s more interactive…it’s been on the back burner while other ventures are bubbling over. It’s been an exciting ride and there’s lots more to come. Many different ways to claim independence: from administrivia, from housework, from yard work, from running errands in order to reclaim my time for the things that matter. Outsourcing is a wonderful thing.
How can you restake your claim on your independence this holiday? What can you do to outsource some of your time so you can reclaim that time back for the things that matter? Can you start a new side business that will earn passive income so you can claim independence from a j-o-b? Call me at 480-802-0103 and I’ve got some ideas for you to create your own cash machine to get you on your path to true financial independence. There’s nothing more energizing than feeling your freedom and knowing you can fly. Freedom is a wonderful thing. In what other ways can you claim your independence and also celebrate your interdependence with those who matter most?
Happy Independence Day!
Celebrate Your Point of Enoughness
July 2, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully, Wealthy Woman | By Gaia Hart
Americans seem to be on the treadmill of always striving and never arriving. The deal it, that you’ve got to know when you reach your point of “enoughness” so you know when you can celebrate your arrival. When do you really arrive? Where are you arriving? Have you taken time to actually know what you want to accomplish in order to know you’ve arrived? Once you’re there, do you move the finish line?
Some say that they’ll keep moving the finish line as long as it’s still fun to achieve. Some say they’ll never reach it, or else what’s the point after the finish line, death? Or retirement? What’s after retirement? What’s after death? Another finish line?
Having goals keeps up energized. It’s not even the fact that we reach a particular goal, it’s just having something just out of our grasp that we keep reaching for that keeps us motivated, excited and keeps us moving forward and also keeps our energy up. What are you looking forward to? Are you putting enough things into your life to look forward to? How do you know when you have reached your point of enoughness? Authors Vicki Robin and the late Joe Domenguez stated in their book Your Money or Your Life, that after your point of enoughness, there is a dimishing return of satisfaction and the way to fulfillment is through giving. Giving to your community, giving to others, giving of your knowledge, giving some of your share of the pie. How are you giving of yourself to keep yourself and other energized? Take stock of what you really need to energize your life and to be at your point of enoughness, then take the time to celebrate.
Time = Money = Life Energy
June 29, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully, Wealthy Woman | By Gaia Hart
Forget the Euro, time is the currency of the new millennium. Unlike money, which can be earned back and recreated after it’s spent; time cannot be earned back once we spend it. So we need to spend it wisely and in alignment with our values, goals, wants and needs. Be purposeful about the use of your time and guard your time as you would guard your vault, it’s more precious.
We all know that time = money. But it also equals our life energy. When we spend time doing something, like work, we are exchanging our life energy for money. Being aware of how we are spending our life energy will help us decide whether or not we are making good choices with our time and with our life.
Rethink your spending habits of your time and your money. For instance – if you make $10 per hour and want an item that costs $100, then you would need to exchange at least 10 hours of your time for that item. Is that item really worth at least 10 hours of your life to have? In essence, you make far less than your official hourly wage, when you consider the time it takes to commute, buy lunch, buy work clothes, buy gas or subway tokens to get to work. It really boils down to maybe half of your official hourly rate, so that item for $100 realy is costing you about 17 hours of your life….is it worth it?
Make wise choices on how you spend your time and how you spend your money and you will reap richer rewards in the area of your life energy. Be very aware of your boundaries for your time and spend your time on the things and with the people that matter.
Your Transitions, Your Calling, Your Energy
June 28, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
In the past two weeks I’ve received a dozen phone calls and emails from others telling me of their life transitions and seeking a bridge from what they’ve been doing to what they want to be doing for the next phase of their life. Many have been doing what they think they ‘should’ have been doing, they either studied it in school, they were good at it, or they just got very comfortable, but now bored with it. Three of these people just quit their jobs and others told me they couldn’t believe how much energy they felt after their last day. It’s called FREEDOM. I just received an ezine that stated: employees commisserate and entrepreneurs brainstorm. Enough said on that one.
Note to self: just because you are good at something doesn’t meant you should be doing it as a career.
How do you know you are doing what you should be doing or to stop doing what you’ve been doing? It can be summed up from a passage from The Seat of the Soul:
“When the depest part of you becomes engaged in what you are doing, when your activities and actions become gratifying and purposeful, when what you do serves both yourself and others, when you do not tire within but seek the sweet satisfaction of your life and your work, you are doing what you were meant to be doing. The personality that is engaged in the work of it’s soul is bouyant. It is not burdened with negativity. It does not fear. It experiences purposefulness and meaning. It delights in its work and in others. It is fulifilled and fulfilling.”
As a person experiences “flow”, where their knowledge, skills, abilities and talents are met with the appropriate challenge, all time and space stand still – they are in the zone. That is when you know you are on the right path. When you take the Tingle Test – when you think about your profession and you get chills and tingles just thinking about a career move or an experience, you are on the right path. If the thought of that experience doesn’t move you or thrill you, then you are probably not moving towards your calling.
When you get antsy with your job, then start researching and journaling and finding the delicious intersection of what you love, what you’re good at and what the world needs and will pay for. When you’re on target, it will ignite your energy like you never dreamed.
Lighten Up: Your Energy, Your Light
June 25, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
Continuing with this light theme and how your energy and light are intertwined, I found a passage from the book “>The Seat of the Soul that is paraphrased below.
You are a system of light and the frequency of your light depends upon your consciousness. When you shift the level of consciousness, you shift the frequency of your light: negative feelings bring on a different frequency of light than positive feelings. Emotions are energy in motion and are currents of energy with differnt frequencies. When you choose to replace a lower-frequency current of energy such as anger with a higher-frequency current of energy such as forgiveness, you raise the frequency of your light.
When you choose to feel negative feelings, despair, worry, or other lower-freqency emotions, then your body feels physically depleted because it has merged with an energy current of lower frequency. Whereas a joyous person abounds with energy, feels bouyant and is running with a higher-frequency current of energy pulsing through their system.
Your thoughts create different emotions, thus different energy and a different light through you. Lower-frequency system pull energy from higher-frequency systems. If you are unaware of your emotions and your thoughts, your frequency will be lowered by and you will lose energy to a system of lower frequency than your own. By choosing your thoughts and by selecting which emotional currents you will release and which you will reinforce, you determine the quality of your light. You determine the affects that you will have upon others, and the nature of the experiences of your life.
Light represents consciousness – are you walking around unconscious or fully aware? Are you on auto pilot, commuting to the same work day after day and not feeling that it matters or that it’s not making a difference. Or are you completely conscious of your energy, your activities and the meaning behind them? Are you consciously attracting the things you want into your life and giving thanks for them with your attitude of gratitude, or are you just showing up for life each day? What kind of light is radiating from you? What are you doing to illuminate more in your life? What would it take for your light to shine brighter?
You Make the Call – Gruntled or Disgruntled
June 24, 2007 | Posted in Leading Hartfully, Living Hartfully | By Gaia Hart
We always have a choice – a choice to be an energy radiator or an energy drain. We also have a choice to either accept or reject somebody else’s energy they are projecting onto us. We have a choice to take it personally, or to mirror back their energy, or to let our own light shine onto them whether it will be connected to their own bright light or overshadow their dark light. When we let our own light shine on, we increase our resilience and cast a light on others.
Light opens up darker spaces, so I choose to let my light shine into some of the shadows that may come into my life. For instance, I once spent a blissful holiday in Santa Fe at a B & B that fell a little short of the expectations for the room, but the breakfasts were aaaaaahmazing. Their chef on the first day was simply charming, had incredible food and was a delight to be around. It set the tone for a perfectly heavenly day with divine company on a glorious sunny day in their courtyard. Her light shown onto her food, her guests, and you could feel it in the air.
The next day a different chef put a decidedly negative flair to the whole affair. Her demeanor was much more of one who had to be there for her job, rather than one who delighted in serving her artistic creations to others and bask in their delight. Her edgy, prickly attitude tried to sneak into my deliriously happy day and get me cranky.
We have choices to be either gruntled or disgruntled, to live our life and invite work into our life we are leading anyway, or to make work out of life. One chef shared her love of life through her cooking and the other just worked at it, and it showed that she had to be there to pick up a pay check.
When you have a choice, why not choose between being happy and deliriously happy instead of happy or grumpy. We don’t always have control over what comes to us (in fact, very little control over what comes to us.) but we do have a choice in how we react to it. How are your reactions lately? What do you choose to be… gruntled or disgruntled…it’s up to you. You can make the call and you decide on your energy level and what to do with it and how others affect it. You can mirror back their light or let yours outshine the darkness. Focusing on shining your light will boost your resilience when you decide to be gruntled.