Praise the positive! As much as possible, praise them. That does NOT mean to over-praise or be un-genuine. Praise the behaviors you want to see, and ignore the ones you don’t want to see. Children want your attention and will do anything to get it. This applies most especially to bad behavior. It also applies to relationships in general. Spouses, friends, co-workers, people who ride your bus, the woman with two small children struggling her way through the grocery store. Everyone you encounter can benefit from a little praise, or a compliment.

A misbehaving child can and should be ignored as much as possible. That is the root of ‘Time Out’. If the child is misbehaving to get attention, giving them attention (even negative attention) will perpetuate and strengthen the bad behavior. Unless there is a safety issue (theirs or someone else’s) ignore it. When they figure out that negative behavior doesn't work, they will try something else -- something that you can reward, praise, or encourage. And the opposite is also true...

Timeout is only effective if it is used properly -- one quiet minute for each year of age (must be consecutive) is just about perfect. It should be in a quiet area, just close enough to the rest of the family to make the child feel left out, and just far enough away that the rest of the family seems to be paying no attention to the timed-out child. Once the time has been served, the child may choose when to rejoin the family. Remember, you are teaching them to master their own emotions. Work yourself out of a job. Once they have self-control, a more complex response is called for (see the rule just above this one).

Discipline and punishment are NOT the same thing. Do the first one, not the second. I know, that way is so much harder, but do it anyway. The lesson is learned much better when the consequence is both tied to the crime and fits it. As in: If homework is forgotten at school, grounded for a month is much less effective than if you create some homework for the child that evening (once again the dictionary or the Bible are great sources for this.) If they have done something mean or disrespectful, a far more effective consequence is to do something nice for both the person they harmed and a stranger (perhaps filling boxes for Operation Christmas Child, volunteering at “Feed My Starving Children”, a Food Bank, or....).

You are NOT your child’s best friend. You are the parent. You set the rules and enforce them. Your primary job as a parent is to work yourself out of a job. When your children are grown (over 21 and out of your house) you can and should have a friendship with each of them. If you’ve done the previous rule with grace and love, this will come easily, if not, you must now do the extra work to correct this.

Your primary responsibility as a parent is to work yourself out of a job by mentoring your child into a well-adjusted, responsible adult. In other words, you teach, mentor, and guide them into being responsible and knowledgeable adults. If you aren’t doing this, you’re doing it wrong.

The Swedes say, “Friends double our joy and divide our grief”. Make and keep a few really dear friends. They will be ‘Moses’ hands’, and you will be Aaron or Hur to them as well. Also, make your family, your friends. That doesn’t apply to parenting (until your children are fully grown).

God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you did or didn't do. Martin Luther called this “Grace Alone” look it up -- you’ll love what you find!

When you feel the urge to judge another, remember that you will be judged by the same standard you apply to others. This does not mean that you are okay if you just don’t do the same ‘terrible’ thing, it means that your heart will be judged as well as your behavior.“For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” -- Matthew 7:2 and "Do not judge, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn, and you will not be condemned. Forgive, and you will be forgiven.” -- Luke 6:37 (For the truly dense: the person taking office supplies home from work is as equally guilty as the bank robber. It’s just that one ‘sin’ is more obvious. Be careful where you throw stones!)

Before you judge another, seek to understand. (Walk a mile in their moccasins.) Everyone has challenges in their life. Never waste an opportunity to come along side of another and help them.

With a pencil and a library card you can go anywhere, do anything, and neither one is very costly.

Philippians 4:13 says “I can do all things through Him who gives me strength.” You can do ANY thing, but not EVERY thing at the same time.

If it is no longer useful to you, bless someone else with it. By the time your youngest child goes to school, you don’t need the baby bathtub anymore, but you probably know someone who does need it. If you outgrow it, change your preference, or have too many of an item, you can bless someone rather than let it moulder in a closet.

Don’t “hoard” the good stuff. Use the pretty table cloth. Burn the pretty candles. Work the Mixmaster into the ground. If something breaks, celebrate the pleasure it brought, and repair, replace or repurpose. (In that order!) If the cost of an item makes you avoid using it, it was NOT a wise purchase.

Living within your means does not mean you can’t have a wonderful life. The things that matter most aren’t things, cost no money, and their value is priceless.

AVOID credit cards, but if you must use one, pay it off every single month. Your credit will really suffer if you build up debt. Live within your means.

Start saving for retirement with your first paycheck. The power of compound interest is your friend. Never mind if you don’t quite understand it yet, when you figure it out, you’ll be SO glad you started when you did.

As my Grampa used to say, “And another thing,...” Your housing expense (rent or mortgage) should not exceed 25% (¼th) of your monthly income. Do not be swayed by fast talkers who say otherwise. If you spend more than that, you will be perpetually in a panic. Also, tithe, AND put at least 10% of your monthly income in savings. (So are you beginning to see a pattern here? 25% for housing, 10% into each tithe and savings, means you’ve already spent almost half of your monthly income and we haven’t even factored in food, utilities, insurance, and transportation.)

While we are talking about money stuff, before you start spending your raise, inheritance, or whatever money, make sure you have either a savings account or an envelope in your top dresser drawer (or where ever you want your secret stash to be) that equals or exceeds SIX months worth of living expenses. This lessens the panic when you suddenly have a car repair, child’s braces, new fridge, job loss or any of the other ‘surprises’ in life.

There is an old standard about what to do when you find yourself in a bad financial position: “If it ever comes down to either/or, make your car payment or repair before your mortgage, because you can live in your car, but you can’t drive your house to work.” That’s not bad advice if your circumstances change suddenly, but I'll take it a step farther... Don’t accrue debt in the first place. Don’t take on an expensive car (payment) because you think you deserve it, or want to impress someone else. Save your pennies if you must, but PAY for your car rather than have a car payment. There is nothing wrong with saving toward a goal. That’s the smart way to do it.

In honor of the new year, and all the resolutions you are tempted to make, here are some tips on goal setting.

Step 1: Sit down with pen and paper and do some dreaming. No kidding, this part is serious business. Let your mind wander a little and try to see the life you really want. REALLY see it. Do you want to go to college, buy your first house, or something else? In your mind, try to picture what living that dream would look like. Does your home have one or two stories? Is your car a sports car or a station wagon?

At this stage, you have a magic wand (you really do, it's called your "pen"). Anything is possible. No limitations (those will come later). Look at all facets of your life. If you had no limitations (pretend time, money and other things are no obstacle) what would your life look like? How involved would you be in your church? What hobbies would be part of your life? I love to China Paint and do all kinds of Needlework, as well as design Counted Cross-stitch patterns, so those would fit into this section of my plan. Sports or physical activities? Travel? What role would you play in the lives of your children or grandchildren? What kinds of things would you be doing with your friends?

This might take several sessions. You might want to, right now, schedule an hour a week into your calendar for this. Call it "GOAL SETTING" or something else that sounds serious and professional, and don't let anything stop you from keeping that appointment with yourself. Later, this time can turn into refining your plan or re-organizing. In the beginning, you might want to take an entire afternoon. Or, you might want to leave it out on the diningroom table, or somewhere else that you can "doodle" with it whenever you have a bit of free time.

For now, just get those thoughts on paper. Later you'll turn them into goals and action plans. You can call it, "The Road To Our Success", “Dreams Of My Future”, or something else that resonates with you. Create a "Goals & Dreams" book. Maybe in a loose-leaf binder, a pre-bound thing that's like a dozen sheet protector pages bound together, a photo album with those "magnetic" sheet pages, a journal-type book, or a scrapbook. Another good way to display your goals and dreams is with a bulletin board or one of those folding poster board things. Choose something that fits your personality, and works best for you. I started with little scraps of paper (post-its, index cards, and note-pad sheets) that I kept together in a little plastic sleeve. Now I have a photo-album with different kinds of sheets in it. Sheet protectors for full-sized sheets of paper, and those sheet protector kinds of pocket-pages for photos.

This is where you can get creative. If one of your goals is to have a new car, go on-line and find out all you can about it. Go to a car dealer and get their brochure on it. Take someone with you and have your picture taken test-driving it.
Really see those goals in as much detail as possible. Go to Michael's (the craft store) and get some scrapbooking stuff to accent it. Go to a travel agent and got some travel brochures. Some goals might have several pages, and will have more after you accomplish it and add some pictures of your success. Find articles about it.

Eventually your book will be a combination of achieved goals as well as ones you are working toward. It's a great reminder to have when you feel dismal. It's a great "pick-me-up" when the day has been full of frustration. I even have some of those original scraps of paper goals in mine. One is just a page from a small note book, on which I had written: "Achieve President's Club", and then scratched out "how". It says: Sell $10,000 (at that time) in cycle. 20 campaigns at $500 each. (I started part-way into the cycle). I have that sheet mounted on a piece of colored paper along with a picture of that Mrs. Albee statue that I cut out of the President's Club Recognition brochure from that year. And a photo-copy, cut out of the Recognition Statement from the campaign I earned it in. (I made it in 16 campaigns by-the-way.)

This book is not just to motivate you. It will help motivate your children to set and achieve goals of their own. Share it with your family, and encourage them to contribute ideas of things to work toward like a family vacation, a new car or that swing-set they’ve always wanted. One person I know, wanted to take her family to Mexico for her daughter’s 15th birthday (which is a big thing in that culture) to celebrate her heritage as her mother, grandmother, etc., had. She achieved her goal, they went, and now pictures of that event are in her book.

You can add all kinds of things to it. If you attend an event, save the invitation and have your picture taken there. Include any kind of incentive or event and as many things as you can think of that contribute to it. Tickets, fortunes from cookies, small calendar pages, swatches and paint chips. Cut pictures from magazines. The more things you include, the more real it becomes in your mind (which will help keep you motivated on those challenging days). Also include information and pictures when you achieve it.

Step 2: Start planning how you will turn those "dreams" into goals. Like my example above about achieving "PC". What will it take to achieve your goal? Then break that down into manageable sized pieces. One Rep I know, broke achieving PC down into not only what it took each campaign, but how much she needed to sell in a single day. Make your steps small enough to be achievable, but big enough to make you stretch a little. Make all of your goals "SMART". If you don't know what SMART goals are, there's lots of info on the internet about SMART Goals. Goals should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic and Ttimely.

Step 3 & 4: Start tracking yourself. Are you achieving above, below, or right on? What adjustments do you need to make? Adjust as you go along. Some things will work, some won't. Some will work for a while and then need freshening. Don't let your goals or your enthusiasm stagnate. If it no longer motivates you, change it so it does.

Step 5: Make sure you reward yourself along the way. I have short-term goals for each week as well as long term goals for the next several years. When I accomplish a step I reward myself. Sometimes it's only a SUBWAY sandwich, or a DAIRY QUEEN Sundae, some times it's a bigger item like a piece of jewelry. Always have something immediate you are working toward on the way to the big goals. This will help you stay motivated and enthusiastic. Share those achievements with people you care about, like friends and family. Let others know what you’ve achieved and encourage them to make their dreams a reality too.

Step 6: After you achieve a goal, give yourself a little time (ten minutes or so, only half-kidding) to wallow in your success and enjoy your reward. But don't end the day without a new goal. You need some reason to wake up in the morning and start in again.

I wish you great success!

As Bill Gates said, “life isn’t fair”. Don’t waste time, energy or love on what could have been. It’s okay to wallow in sadness if you must, but after an hour of really giving it your best “sad”, get up and do something kind for someone else. Repeat as often as necessary. You will find that you spend much less time angry or sad, and passing on a blessing helps you feel more positive. Random acts of kindness are especially sweet if you do them in secret! Blowing your own horn about having done them reduces their effectiveness.

Both the forest and the trees are important. When you feel overwhelmed, pay no mind to the whole project, the whole of your life, etc. Look for one small step you can take. The best one to choose is one that will take 5 minutes or less. You need a small victory and you need it now. Build up to bigger steps. Once in a while, step back and look at the whole. Never let one of them make you lose track of the other.

The BEST thing you can do for your children is to love your spouse. You’ve probably heard that somewhere before, but it’s not only worth saying again, it’s worth saying often. For one thing, you are modeling marriage for your children. How will they ever pick good partners and create good marriages if they’ve never seen it modeled? YOU and your spouse are teaching them how to behave in a marriage, so don’t just give them a good example, make it a great one. Kiss your spouse in front of them. Flirt a little. You don’t have to show them the private areas, but you should show them the affection you have for your spouse. AND, another thing, part of making children feel “safe” is making sure they know your family unit is SAFE. This is more than not being abusive toward your spouse, it’s letting them see your little disagreements and that you not only work them out, you do it with love. Let them see you have differences of opinion, and still love each other like mad. They need to see conflict managed well. One more thing and I’ll stop for now…. Loving your spouse in the presence of your children includes past relationships as well. If your spouse was previously married, you need to “love” those ex-es and their new spouses as well. You don’t have to be lovey-dovey, but you do have to be cordial. If there are animosities or bad feelings, keep them out of the children’s sight. In our present age of blended families, this becomes more important all the time. It even stretches back into grandparents and blending. Children have a sixth sense for disharmony -- don’t let them find it in your family.

When everything feels like it’s ‘too ----’. Stop and take a deep breath -- in through your nose and slowly out through your mouth. Repeat up to a total of three times. Don’t do more, it will cause you to hyperventilate and possibly pass-out. Neither is helpful to the situation. A few deep breaths will give your mind a moment to find calm. It will have a soothing effect on your blood pressure/heart rate. And will stall things long enough for you to have a thought or two. Then, proceed to the next step...

Use words correctly. ‘Toward’, ‘anyway’, and ‘regard’, do NOT have an ‘s’ on the end of them. Don’t put one there. The same is true with a ‘t’ at the end of ‘across’. A ‘moot point’ is one that doesn’t matter. It is not ‘mute’ (silent) nor ‘mood’ (an emotion). ‘Tack’ is gear for an horse, so if you change your ‘tack’, you’re trying something different. ‘Tact’ is a good thing to practice, but doesn’t apply directly to trying another solution. If you want someone to know something for sure, the phrase is: “If some other person thinks that something I don’t want to happen will, they have another THINK coming.” They do not have another THING coming. Words that begin with a vowel or an ‘h’, get ‘an’ before them. The rest get a single ‘a’. Ir-regardless and un-thaw are not only not words they imply the opposite. Remove the first syllable and you’re correct. ‘There’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ are not interchangeable. Neither are ‘your’ and ‘you’re’.

Using the same word or phrase over and over, (and for that matter: swearing/cursing) is lazy. There are hundreds of thousands of words available to you. Expand your mind and your vocabulary, and USE them. It will also help keep people from tuning you out because they’ve heard it all before. God created the good people at Merriam-Webster, Oxford, and American Heritage to make this easier for you. Take full advantage of this blessing.

The only constant is change. No matter how good or bad anything is, it will change. You can speed this up by being a catalyst! If you're still breathing, you can still make a difference. If you have an opportunity to do something, do it. If the opportunity isn't just sitting there waiting for you, MAKE your own way in. Be creative! There is always something you can do. btw: there is ALWAYS something to be thankful for. If you're stuck in a rut, start looking at the things in your life that you can be thankful for. Often this will give you an idea (or many) of some change you can make. Embrace change. Make it your friend, and get out and make a difference!

DREAM! And if you’re going to bother to have a dream, make it a good one. Once you have a dream, don’t let anyone wear you down or talk you out of it. Most people give up just before things were about to fall into place. Hang on just a little while longer.

Plan ahead, and plan for it to change as well. Flexibility is as important as knowing what you’re going to do next. Before you go to bed, know three things you will do the next day. Also know that in the blink of an eye, everything can change. Be neither distressed nor unprepared. “Go with the flow”, doesn’t mean don’t plan, it means don’t get upset by the unexpected. At the same time, the old adage, “Failure to plan on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part,” applies in both directions.

Laughter really is the best medicine. Laugh everyday. Most things in life, you will laugh at some day. Don’t waste time. Start now. Especially, laugh at yourself.