Opening Doors with Kim

Kim Ades of Opening Doors lets you in on her frame of mind.

Monday, September 24, 2007

Happy Birthday to Me!

It’s my birthday on Friday. The celebration started tonight when my kids couldn’t wait to give me their gifts. As thrilled as I was to receive them, I really wanted to save them for Friday so that the celebration would not fade by the time Friday came around. But they were so eager that I had to open their gifts.

My daughter got me a necklace. It was a heart with Daughter written on one half and Mother written on the other half – the kind we both wear. It was sweet and it was her way of keeping us eternally connected. My son got me a CD with Grammy award winning songs. He knows how much I love music. I think he was trying to let me know that it was time to upgrade the music in my CD player. I wore the necklace and we played the CD and danced around in my bedroom for a while. They showed me moves I didn’t even know were possible. What can I say…my kids have groove!

It was all great – but the greatest part of the evening was the card they made for me. Here’s what it said…

“Mom you rock and you’re the best mom we ever had.
On your 30th birthday we’d like you to know that you’re the Best in the world.
Better than the rest.
With age comes wizdom and since you’re a year older you should be very wize.

We love you Mom,

Louis and Ferne”

What else could a mother ask for on her birthday? Jewelry, music, love and everlasting youth! Happy Birthday to me!

P.S. For those of you who are wondering…I’m not really 30 – they just thought it was time for me to finally graduate from my 29th year! I have them trained well!)

Sunday, September 23, 2007

The Baritone

With my son Louis in grade 6, and my daughter Ferne in grade 3, the start of a new school year brings new school subjects our way including those with cool new musical instruments. Louis was tasked with playing the baritone. I wasn’t even convinced that a baritone was an instrument until he proved it to me by googling it on line.

He spent two days spitting into his mouth piece as an attempt to ‘practice’ playing Yankee Doodle (yes, even Canadians know that one) when he proclaimed that he needed a protective pouch for his mouth piece and that we absolutely had to go to the dollar store to buy one. In the spirit of encouraging his enthusiasm for music, off we went to the dollar store, just the two of us. We headed straight for the protective mouth piece aisle and retrieved the pouch we came for when Louis said, “Mom, let’s go down the aisles one by one just for fun.” I knew it was his way of finagling the purchase of a few extra treats and gizmos and in order to extend our cherished one-on-one time together, I willingly obliged. We picked out some stuff that we really didn’t need like extra plastic containers for leftovers, double A batteries for our milk frother, a picture frame that says “family” and some bobby socks for Ferne, his sister, with little cat pom poms on the ankles.

As we were leaving the store, Louis said, “Shopping is good sometimes, it cleans you out.” Thinking of the $35 I just spent on one dollar items, I had to agree, but knew he was referring to a different kind of cleaning.

“What do you mean, Louis?”

“It cleans you out. If you are angry or pissed off or frustrated and you go shopping, you leave just feeling better and it’s all ‘hakuna matata.’ (A term he learned from the movie The Lion King meaning “no difficulties": no troubles, problems, worries or cares.)

What amazed me was his insight. This was not a conversation about shopping. It was a conversation about Frame of Mind. It was about how when you change your focus away from the things that frustrate you to things that calm you or excite you, your entire mood can change. Therein lies a secret: what you focus on is what becomes your life. But the bigger secret is this – you can deliberately change your mind if you want to by continuously focusing on the things that you want in your life. It’s called building the mind muscle and making it the single biggest priority in your life and understanding how crucial your thinking is to the quality of your life and your overall success.

Of course shopping isn’t for everyone – although it certainly works for some as a short term way to redirect one’s focus. Other things can work too… listening to music, exercising, watching a sitcom, talking with a friend, pretty much anything that makes you feel better. Here’s what I do… I write in a journal daily and focus my thoughts on the things I want to see, do, and experience throughout my life. The minute I write it down, it’s real and it’s permanent and I begin to create all the things I want. My Frame of Mind is the foundation of that creation and I work on it every day.

How about you? What do you do to focus your thoughts and shift your mind?

Thursday, September 20, 2007

The Robbers

My parents are Egyptian Jews with deep seeded cultural beliefs and customs. I am the baby in the family who decided to make an appearance 13 years after my brother and 15 years after my sister - I was the pleasant surprise. Between the food and the guilt, and the intensely over protective parenting approach, you can just imagine the loving cocoon in which I was enveloped as a child. While I grew up believing that I was everyone’s favorite, I instinctively knew that given the huge generational gap with my parents and the cultural disparity, I had to move away from the nest in order to maintain a tight relationship.

I now live in Toronto, and they live in Montreal but the distance does not impact our communication. I am very close with them – I speak to them nearly every day on the phone and visit them several times a year. Having not been to Toronto in over 2 years, they decided to come for a visit to make sure my life was in order.

That’s when my mother informed me about the robbers:

“Don’t leave the door unlocked when you are in the house, there are robbers.”

“Lock the doors in your car, and don’t leave your purse in the back seat, a robber can open the door while you are at a red light and steal it.”

“Don’t open your sunroof. A robber can jump in over the top and attack you.”

“Zip up your purse and keep it on your lap when you go to the washroom (restroom) in a public place because a robber can reach over the door and grab it if it’s hanging on the back of the door.”

So apparently my mother is afraid of robbers. She means well and she is unquestioningly trying to protect me from the evils of the world. It’s absolutely a sign of love but…

WHERE ARE ALL THESE ROBBERS???

My mother looks for them. And guess what? She finds them - in news papers, on T.V., on the radio, in conversations with her friends, in conversations she overhears, and even in her dreams. She expects to find them and she does. That is her reality. It’s what she pays attention to.

Your world is composed of what you focus on and your ‘reality’ is very much a function of what you expect. If you expect bad things to happen, they do. If you look for drama, chaos, and volatility, it just appears. Even when you don’t look for it, but wish it were gone, you are still focusing on that very thing and so it remains a factor in your world and it often grows. If you focus on what’s missing in your life, like money for instance, you get more of what’s missing – no money. If you focus on the fact that you are overweight, you stay like that, overweight.

Imagine spending all that energy focused on the things you want, like generating wealth, health, and happiness, and imagine expecting it to come your way? The likelihood of it appearing is significantly magnified when you can envision it and almost experience actually having it. The more you can see, taste, smell, touch, and emotionally feel what it’s like to obtain what you want, the closer you are to reaching it. In fact, it starts to head your way.

The most incredible thing is that you can choose what you want to focus on everyday. Just like brushing your teeth in the morning, it can become a habit to wake up in the morning and choose the thoughts that you will focus on for the day. Thoughts that bring you closer to the things that really matter in your life. Good thoughts, happy thoughts, thoughts of gratitude, excitement, anticipation, love.

It’s really all about your Frame of Mind. What thoughts will you choose for today?

Sunday, September 16, 2007

The Embrace

I arrived at the train station in Philadelphia both excited and a little bit tired after two presentations for Land America, the title company. I was headed to New York for the RIS Media conference. I had several pieces of luggage and required assistance onto the train from a porter. I sat on a nearby bench as I waited for his signal to walk toward the train. I looked around and took a quick scan at around the large hall. It was all but impossible not to notice a middle aged couple not too far away engaged in a long, passionate embrace. They caught my eye and held my attention, a little bit longer than appropriate. To my embarrassment, the Porter observed me fixed for so long on the scene and said “Stop looking, they should really just get a room.” But I could not stop looking. It was something about their embrace. It was something about their attire that made me imagine them as a couple from one of those movies with Mickey Rooney made years ago in black and white, like they were captured in time. Perhaps it was something about their age, their stance, and his disheveled hair. I was entranced.

The Porter let me know that it was time to go. He took my luggage onto a cart and said “follow me”. I did. He proceeded to walk toward the couple and made a stop to help the man. I noticed he was holding a stick. He was blind. The Porter took the man’s hand and fixed it firmly to his arm leading the way.

As we stepped into an elevator, the Porter informed me that the man had just gotten engaged that day. The gentleman spoke up and said “That explains all the kissing.” I broke into a smile.

I said, “Congratulations! When’s the wedding?”

“January 19th,” he replied.

Calculating a quick 4 ½ month engagement period, I said “Boy, you don’t waste any time.”

He said “Well, we’re both widows, we really don’t have any reason to wait.”

And in that moment I realized that there is almost never a reason to wait. It’s just something that we are used to doing. We are practiced at waiting for something to happen, for the time to be perfect, or the tide to swing our way. We just sit and wait and keep living our lives the same way as always, hoping that someday something wonderful will happen.

Waiting. Waiting.

What a costly use of time. Are you still waiting? What are you waiting for?