The Benefits of Daydreaming

By Connie H Deutsch  |   Submitted On March 12, 2015

  

Many years ago, I read a book that talked about psychic ability being linked to imagination and daydreaming. When I came across those words I thought that this would probably eliminate me as a candidate because I have always been a very focused person.

Give me something that consumes my interest, and everything else is swept aside. I remember once sitting in my kitchen and doing a layout for a flyer that I was designing and I had a frozen pizza in the microwave. Instead of setting the timer at 3 minutes and 50 seconds, I had set it at 35 minutes.

I never saw the black smoke curling around the kitchen or enveloping me. All I saw was the layout of the flyer I was designing. That was focus. It left no room for daydreaming.

What I came to discover in later years, after my kitchen almost burned to the ground, was that in my own way, I was daydreaming and using my creativity on the flyer at the same time that I was so focused on the layout.

I had never thought of myself as being a daydreamer because so much of my life is reality-based, living in the real world, living in the moment.

It was only in later years that I realized that people can daydream when they are not concentrating hard on getting an answer, and in that daydream state, can come up with solutions to just about any problem. They can also come up with the kind of thinking that is described as thinking outside the box.

So what does this tell us about the way we educate our children? To my way of thinking, there should be certain times of the day that children are encouraged to think about how to solve problems, the daydreaming phase, and the rest of the time to try to solve the problems they were working on.

Some of our best ideas come to us in dreams or as we're waking up from a nap or from a night's sleep. Kubla Khan, a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is a perfect example of that. Upon waking up from an opium influenced dream, he set about writing the famous poem that came to him from his dream.

We might never be talented enough to write about Coleridge's Xanadu, but we all have the ability to tap into the creativity of our daydreams.

Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver.

Connie is the author of the books, "Whispers of the Soul," "A Slice of Life," "Whispers of the Soul for the Rest of Your Life," "From Where I'm Sitting," "View from the Sidelines," "Reaching for the Brass Ring of Life," "Purple Days and Starry Nights," "Here and There," "And That's How it Goes," and "The Counseling Effect." Her website: http://www.conniehdeutsch.com/ See more of her articles by clicking here ConnieHDeutsch Articles

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You're Worrying for Nothing

By Connie H Deutsch  |   Submitted On March 15, 2015

  

It seems almost universal - worrying about what other people think about you. When you get right down to it, people barely notice your angst unless it impacts on their life.

Case in point: the woman who cleans your house has an accident and will be in the hospital for several weeks and may be laid up for several months after she gets home. You feel sorry for her but your first thought will probably be, "Who can I get to clean my house?"

Then you go through a mental list of your friends and assorted contacts and wonder if any of them have a reliable housekeeper they can recommend, all the while making the appropriate sounds of commiseration for the terrible thing that happened to her.

It's not that you don't care about your housekeeper's plight, it's that you care more about your own situation.

I have watched people twist themselves inside out, never able to be happy with themselves or their life because they are so worried about what other people think about them. And my conclusion is that most people don't give them a moment's thought; they're too preoccupied with their own dramas.

If you think that sounds harsh, ask yourself what your first thought would be if you depended on someone to take care of your child and she called in sick just as you were about to go to a meeting to close a multimillion-dollar deal. Do you think of your babysitter or do you think of the multimillion dollar deal that might fall through because you can't be there?

It's next to impossible to not change who you are or not change your personality when you are so concerned about how you are being perceived. It's equally difficult to really care about other people when you care more about how these other people see you. It's as if you are play-acting, saying the appropriate things but thinking about yourself at the same time.

The solution that makes the most sense to me is to stop caring about the opinions of other people and start caring more about the quality of your life. I'm not advocating selfishness or lack of concern for other people. I'm merely saying that if you do the things that give you pleasure, you'll be happy and you will bring that happiness into the lives of the people with whom you interact. Results: win-win for all.

Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver.

Connie is the author of the books, "Whispers of the Soul," "A Slice of Life," "Whispers of the Soul for the Rest of Your Life," "From Where I'm Sitting," "View from the Sidelines," "Reaching for the Brass Ring of Life," "Purple Days and Starry Nights," "Here and There," "And That's How it Goes," and "The Counseling Effect." Her website: http://www.conniehdeutsch.com/ See more of her articles by clicking here ConnieHDeutsch Articles

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Do You Believe in Miracles?

By Connie H Deutsch  |   Submitted On March 24, 2015

  

I don't think I have ever heard so many stories about miracles as I've heard in the last ten years. In fact, I could probably count them on one hand until recently.

About forty years ago, a woman who had been diagnosed as completely paralyzed by every specialist in the county, and gone through every test available at the time, was the first time I witnessed a miracle. For all the years I knew her, she was dependent on her husband to take her everywhere, always pushing her in the wheelchair.

One day, they were in their apartment and she saw her husband fall down and die, right in front of her. The shock was so great that it must have triggered something in her. She got up and put her wheelchair away, and never used it again. She was no longer paralyzed.

Now we hear of people who have been in a coma suddenly waking up and remembering everything up to the moment when they went into a coma. One woman had been in a coma for five years and the first words out of her mouth was "I want to go to a Bob Seger concert."

We keep hearing stories about people who have been pronounced dead, waking up at their own funeral. Most of the time there are happy endings to that story but one man was so shocked, that he died of a heart attack at his own funeral.

Not that long ago, a woman gave birth to twins and one of them was stillborn. The doctor told her that the girl made it but the boy died. She took the boy into her bed and for two hours, she hugged him, touched him, told him she loved him and, all of a sudden, he started to move. He and his sister are both alive and well.

There are countless stories about people being in a coma for years and suddenly waking up. Some of them wake up speaking a foreign language and some wake up with a skill they had never had before. Recently, a premature baby who was thought to be dead, was buried and, when her father dug her up, she started to breathe.

We hear of people going into comas every day. Some of them last for decades and then they suddenly wake up. We hear of comatose people being declared brain dead, MRIs showing no brain activity for months on end, and then they suddenly wake up and they can talk and recognize people.

So, when I'm asked if I believe in miracles, my answer is, "I sure do. Where there is life, there's hope and, sometimes, where there isn't life, there is still hope."

Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver.

Connie is the author of the books, "Whispers of the Soul," "A Slice of Life," "Whispers of the Soul for the Rest of Your Life," "From Where I'm Sitting," "View from the Sidelines," "Reaching for the Brass Ring of Life," "Purple Days and Starry Nights," "Here and There," "And That's How it Goes," and "The Counseling Effect." Her website: http://www.conniehdeutsch.com/ See more of her articles by clicking here ConnieHDeutsch Articles

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Your Mind Is a Treasure Trove of Gold

By Connie H Deutsch  |   Submitted On March 26, 2015

  

I've never met a person who didn't have an idea for an invention or a story waiting to be told. It's like sitting on a gold mine and not digging for your treasure.

You may tell yourself that you've never had one but think about all the things you think about, all the things you complain about or think about how you would improve upon any given situation. And there you have it.

Those are the seeds that I'm talking about. Those ideas that germinate in your mind while you are standing in line to purchase something and the line isn't moving fast enough and, in your impatience, you tell yourself how it should be done.

The difference between you and the person who applies for a patent for an invention or who writes a story for publication is often just a matter of self-confidence, optimism, effort, courage, and determination.

I remember one time I was in my kitchen and the cord from an appliance couldn't be stuffed back into the little space reserved for it. I pushed and prodded, used a toothpick, a screwdriver, and assorted tools to try to get it in. It wouldn't go in.

As I stood there, exasperated with this surplus cord, I thought about a device that was so simple, that it was amazing no one had thought to market it.

I was quite young at the time and it never would have occurred to me to try to patent my idea or to market it. Many years later, there was my little invention in a catalog and it looked just like I had imagined it.

Whenever I meet people, they are always telling me that they could write a book about their life. But none of these people, no matter what their age, had ever tried to do it.

I don't think it's laziness that prevents them from writing their life story or patenting an invention. I think it may be a combination of things, e.g., not thinking that their idea is good enough or not being brave enough to try it. It could be fear of rejection, or fear of being mocked and not wanting to risk failure.

But I am absolutely sure that each one of us has a book within us and an invention that occupies a space in our minds. The trick is getting that mental door to open and release its treasures.

Connie H. Deutsch is an internationally known business consultant and personal advisor who has a keen understanding of human nature and is a natural problem-solver.

Connie is the author of the books, "Whispers of the Soul," "A Slice of Life," "Whispers of the Soul for the Rest of Your Life," "From Where I'm Sitting," "View from the Sidelines," "Reaching for the Brass Ring of Life," "Purple Days and Starry Nights," "Here and There," "And That's How it Goes," and "The Counseling Effect." Her website: http://www.conniehdeutsch.com/ See more of her articles by clicking here ConnieHDeutsch Articles

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