Valuing Yourself and Your Needs (As a Parent): This is about taking care of your OWN needs as a parent because when you consistently put yourself last to be taken care of and habitually continue to sacrifice your basic necessities to make everyone else happy…Essentially, what you’re teaching your children is that they’re here to be of service to others, then themselves. In other words, you’re teaching them to take advantage of you and use you as they please, which in turn communicates to them that they’re most likely to be used. To prevent this from happening, you need to set consistent limits that protect you from demands that could be overbearing and unfair. That way, you’re communicating that your basic needs are just as important as theirs. It’s true…often times parents that are constantly sacrificing themselves are idealized and praised by other parents. You know… the ones that have no hobbies, no friends and no avenue of enjoyment. Is this really desirable? Parents constantly stressed about the needs of others in the family are usually irritable, and unmotivated to try anything new, fun or exciting. How can parents do this long term with no outlet? Instead, us parents need to enjoy ourselves and focus on being re-energized. When you take good care of yourself, you provide the means to take better care of your children. Going out to dinner or cocktails, trips to the gym 3 or 4 times a week, date night with your spouse or even some alone time reading or going for a walk allows you to be a more productive, interested and patient parent.”

“Whenever you face crunch time in your life or business, mentally call a time-out in the game and focus on getting all the information you can about the situation before you make a decision or overreact.”

“There is more to life than just increasing its speed.”

“Disciplining yourself to do what you know is right and important, although difficult, is the high road to pride, self-esteem, and personal satisfaction. "  Brian Tracy ”

“Commit yourself to lifelong learning. The most valuable asset you'll ever have is your mind and what you put into it.”

“your ability to select your most important task at each moment, and then to get started on that task and to get it done both quickly and well, will probably have more of an impact on your success than any other quality or skill you can develop

“The biggest enemies we have to overcome on the road to success are not lack of ability and lack of opportunity but fears of failure and rejection and the doubts that they trigger.”

“You'll always get out of life what you put in-and you control what you put in.”

“You can’t decide to value your child sometimes, and then put a game of Farmville, or golf, or a scrapbooking session before kids on other days. Values are non-negotiable like that.”

“The most valuable tasks you can do each day are often the hardest and most complex. But the payoff and rewards for completing these tasks efficiently can be tremendous.”

“Courage is the ladder on which all the other virtues mount.” —CLARE BOOTHE LUCE When things go wrong, when you experience sudden reversals and disappointments, your natural tendency will be to respond with negativity, fear, and anger. Whenever you feel hurt or threatened by loss or criticism, you react to protect yourself with the fight-or-flight response. As a leader, your first job is to take firm control over your mind and emotions, and then to take control over the situation, in that order. Leaders focus on the future, not the past. They focus on what can be done now to resolve the problem or improve the situation. They focus on what is under their control, their next decisions and actions. You must do the same.”

“Those people who develop the ability to continuously acquire new and better forms of knowledge that they can apply to their work and to their lives will be the movers and shakers in our society for the indefinite future.”

“Your thoughts, vividly imagined and repeated, charged with emotion, become your reality.”

“The happiest people in the world are those who feel absolutely terrific about themselves, and this is the natural outgrowth of accepting total responsibility for every part of their life.”

“The essence of a successful business is really quite simple. It is your ability to offer a product or service that people will pay for at a price sufficiently above your costs, ideally three or four or five times your cost, thereby giving you a profit that enables you to buy and to offer more products and services.”