Can you find the hidden leprechaun? (It’s a bit trickier this time) How is it possible to focus on the good, when there are also bad things that happen in the world? Have you ever been outside on a dark, cloudy day? All you can see is darkness, and then suddenly, almost imperceptibly at first, a ray of sunshine breaks through the clouds. Before you know it, that one of ray of light has brightened the entire sky. Yes, there are still clouds, but that one ray of light has cracked through the clouds and soon many of its other friendly rays of light have broken through until finally the color of the clouds has even changed from a grey color to a lighter color and then after some time the clouds will even disappear entirely. That is the nature of clouds, they will disappear and they will reappear. Your world is like that sky, sometimes it is dark and cloudy with just a few rays of light and other times your life is all sunny, with hardly any clouds in the sky. In your life, you will have seasons of each, just like in the world. You will have seasons that have more clouds and less sun, and seasons of more sun and less clouds just like in the winter it’s cloudy and in the summer it is hot and sunny. That is the nature of how the seasons work. In our lives, there will be winters and their will be summers and in the world at large there will be winters and their will be summers. No matter how dark the winter feels we can generally find at least a few rays of light. I have often been told that I am incredibley optimistic as if it were …

Can you be the first to comment and find the hidden leprechaun in the picture? Two Prime ministers were sitting in a room discussing affairs of state.  Suddenly a man bursts in, apoplectic with fury, shouting and stamping and banging his fist on the desk.  The resident prime minister admonishes him: “Peter,” he says, “kindly remember Rule Number 6,” whereupon Peter is instantly restored to complete calm, apologizes, and withdraws.  The politicians return to their conversation, only to be interrupted yet again twenty minutes later by a hysterical woman gesticulating wildly, her hair flying.  Again the intruder is greeted with the words: “Marie, please remember Rule Number 6.”  Complete calm descends once more, and she too withdraws with a bow and an apology.  When the scene is repeated for a third time, the visiting prime minister addresses his colleague:  “My dear friend, I’ve seen many things in my life, but never anything as remarkable as this.  Would you be willing to share with me the secret of this Rule Number 6?”  “Very simple,” replies the resident prime minister.  “Rule Number 6 is ‘Don’t take yourself so gosh darn seriously.’”  “Ah,” says his visitor, “that is a fine rule.”  After a moment of pondering, he inquires, “And what, may I ask, are the other rules?” … “There aren’t any.” What would happen in your life if you stopped taking it so gosh darn seriously? What would happen if you stopped treating everything as life and death? As I write this I’m watching my almost three year old nephew, Austin, jump up and down playing on a fort. He doesn’t take anything too seriously, he is always smiling and happy, and everyone that meets him, loves him for it. He always has a happy smile on his face and always makes me …

Have you ever attempted to achieve a big goal and failed horribly? I know that I have, so many more times than I can remember, and it is so frustrating. Sometimes it almost feels so much more frustrating that I almost wish I hadn’t set the goal in the first place. I have set the same goal the past quite a few years and have failed horribly every single time. As I think back to why I have set those goals it has been because I have felt behind for so much of my life. Even if I kept going, I would still be behind where I could have possibly been. This often wore on me, when I was in college I beat myself up for quitting football years before and always dreamed about what could have been? Yes, If I would have practiced every day diligently I probably would have been pretty good, but then again I also could have been one of those horror stories that you hear about that end up seriously injured, I don’t know and will never know. As I have been thinking about it though, I really believe that Heavenly Father has allowed me to go through so many things in my life to get me where I am right now. No, I didn’t play any sports in high school, I actually spent quite a bit of time playing video games back in high school, and no I wasn’t intending to be a professional video gamer–that wasn’t even a real thing back when I was in high school. I really hadn’t thought about this whole sports for a while, it’s not something I dwell on. However, yesterday, when I was working with two of my nephews on baseball it caused me to reflect. The …

Yesterday I sat on the deck, with the wind playfully rustling the trees; watching my almost 3 year old nephew, Aussie, play on his swing set. Suddenly, he was distracted from his play as he saw an object dart across the sky like a bullet and perch on the jungle gym about 20 feet from where he was playing. He looked curiously over at the brown object with an orange belly and back up to where I was sitting and said with his happy elf like smile, “Joseph, a bird, a bird.”  Knowing the desires of his tiny mind as he looked longingly towards the bird, I responded, “Aussie, if you chase it, it will fly away.” Yet, with a mischievous look in his eyes and as certainly almost all 3 year old little boys would do, he ran towards that bird and just as I had told him, the bird flew another 10 feet away. With the persistence of a door to door salesman, he kept charging towards that little bird and watched as the bird flew away again this time for good. Austin went back to playing with something else but I reflected on that moment for a bit longer. Now in the case of my little nephew, I don’t think he wanted to catch the bird. But what if he had? What if he had seen all those Disney videos like Snow White and wanted the bird to land in his little hand and sing to him on cue? Well being the “It’s Possible” guy, of course I had to see if it could even be done. No, I didn’t actually try to get a bird to land in my hand, but after the bit of research, I discovered it is possible to get a bird to …

(As Always Can you Be the First to Spot the Leprechaun?) Have you ever had a day that you felt totally sluggish and did nothing? How did you feel? Have you ever had a day that you were going out of your mind and way too stressed and you may have even snapped and yelled things you don’t want to repeat at your children, a spouse or a friend?  I know I have!! 😂😂 Now on the other hand have you had that day that you felt super productive, not too stressed, not too sluggish but just like goldilocks that just right amount of stress? How did you feel? Probably amazing! Everyone of us had a day like the ones listed above, but I want to focus on the last one, why is it that on the day you worked hard you felt great and even more vibrant and alive? It’s because you had the right kind of stress in your day! We need and crave the appropriate amount of stress in our lives. I will share another metaphor using a guitar below to illustrate this but first want to share how this has impacted me recently. I was in a group conversation last night with the author, Richard Paul Evans and we were all talking about what we wanted to accomplish this week, he said that he was going to write a certain amount of words. So I was feeling driven and I told him that I was going to write 10,000 words. Fortunately, he pushed back and asked if I had ever done that and I told him I hadn’t and he told me it’s actually a lot to do (The average book is only 85,000 words long.) So I cut it down to 5,000 words which was …

When Henry David Thoreau spent two years, two months and two days living in a cabin on Walden Pond; he wrote his master work Walden in which he says the following: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” ― Henry David Thoreau You and I, may never be given again such an opportunity as we now have to pause and take a moment of reflection. I feel that in the speed of life, we feel like we have to just pick a road and speed down it. But what if we didn’t? What would happen if you slowed down your life, not running from the next thing to the next? You may be wanting to tell me, Joseph, if I slowed down for even a moment, we would be broke and our family would starve or be out on the street. Sometimes when we are in the middle of a crisis at any point in our lives that is how it feels, but if we get a bit more curious than we realize that we have always been taken care of. A question I often ask people that are frantic, “Have you ever been without your basic necessities?” Almost always the answer is no, I have always been taken care of. Exactly! Heavenly Father always provides! In the bible in Matthew 6:34 it states, “take therefore no thought for the morrow. For the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself.” Then in Luke 12:27 it says, “consider the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say …

A popular classic novel, “A Tale of Two Cities” starts out with the words, It was the best of times, it was the worst of time, It was the age of wisdom, It was the age of foolishness, It was the epoch of belief, It was the epoch of incredulity, It was the season of darkness, It was the spring of hope, It was the winter of despair, I was contemplating how so many people can be feeling so differently during this pandemic that we are facing. In last week’s article I shared how we can turn this into a blessing. However, today’s article will discuss the question of how and why people can see this time period so differently. For myself, the first week or so I was nervous, scared and anxious; after that this has been one of the most peaceful and happy times I have experienced in quite a while. Now how is that possible? Well first let’s look at what I was doing in that first week. I was endlessly scrolling on Facebook and Instagram. I was also constantly checking COVID-19 statistics sites on the internet. I think I was trying to find answers. In the second week, while I still spent time on social media, I was not endlessly scrolling specifically for news related to the pandemic and I stopped checking the statistics of everything related to the pandemic. It’s important to understand that whatever we are focusing on we get more of, if you choose to focus on all of the bad things in the world you are going to see them, and if you choose to focus on the good you are going to see that. Think about this, remember when you were in high school and you sent a message to that …

For most of us, COVID-19 has flipped our lives upside down. But what if I told you maybe just maybe this is exactly what everyone of us needed. Before this happened, many of us were racing around trying to get a million things done. This pandemic has had each of ask the question, what is really important? Many of the places we would go beforehand, now we find ourselves asking if it’s a good choice. I have found myself praying more. I even find myself saying a simple prayer before going where other groups will be to know it is a good idea, and I wait till I get that peaceful feeling that tells me it is before going. I’d never really done that before. Maybe this pandemic is really just what we need. It has also reminded me in the past few weeks that we are not immortal, well-known people are dying and someday we will die too, but what if I told you that death is actually a blessing. It creates a reminder for each of us that we too have a limited amount of time to do our work on this earth, which means that we need to do the work we were meant to do today. In a wonderful conference that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day saints had yesterday, one of the speakers mentioned an excellent scripture, “Do Not Procrastinate the Day of your repentance.” What I heard  in this was, do not procrastinate the day of your IMPACT. We are seeing the signs of the times and regardless of that, each of us don’t know if we will be given tomorrow or even the rest of today before we are taken home to that GOD that gave us life. NOW is the …

How often do you say the words, if I had nothing better to do then I might do…? Well guess what, right now maybe be that time that don’t really have much better to do. There is no sports, unless you are watching reruns and highlights, there is no church, no gyms open, no concerts to go to. The world at least for the time being is pretty much closed. Sometimes, you may even find yourself like the girl in the picture above looking at the glass, longing to go back into the real world. What a crazy time its been these past few weeks! Have you felt it too? There’s almost a strange maybe even eerie feeling in the world, or maybe that’s everyone just starting to go crazy because of the people they are quarantined with all day. For the first week or so of being quarantined, I found myself looking at my phone, and scrolling endlessly through Facebook. As I thought about it even more, I realized that I was searching for answers, information or even a mental escape from all the Crazy noise in the world. And this week I have done much better at not spending AS much time on Facebook and Instagram searching for answers. Maybe, I have finally accepted the current situation of the world, and decided to use it to my advantage. In some ways, this quarantine has been a blessing. Not having the countless places to go including church, the gym, basketball, ice hockey and watching the countless sporting events of the Arizona Coyotes and Arsenal to name a few I have found myself spending much more time working on me and doing what I love. Yes, for the first few days I did find my self spending countless time watching …

Can you find the hidden leprechaun? Try and be the first to comment where he is! If you read my articles, you may have noticed that I haven’t been writing each and every week as I have wanted to do. Actually it’s been months since I have written. I have plenty of excuses for not doing it, but so does everyone else, so I won’t bore you with my own. The truth is for me it’s a love and hate relationship with writing. When they are flowing, generally I love them. However, when I am tired or just don’t feel like writing, sometimes times I have to sit and fight my keyboard, like a person wrestling a shoe away from a lion. No matter how I feel in the actual moment of writing, I ALWAYs am happy that I wrote them! We all face this battle each day, we really want to achieve [insert your big goal here] but each and every day we don’t always feel like doing the [ insert the daily work you need to do to achieve your big goal]. The same way that an elite runner that wants to win a race needs to show up each and every day at 5 am and running in the heat, cold or even rain and snow, we too need to show up and do the work towards our big goals. And on those days that you don’t have the energy or courage to do what you said you were going to do, don’t beat yourselves up just do better the next day!  Beating yourself up for your past choices never serves anyone. The truth also is that it just doesn’t matter how hard something is, the more we are consistent at doing it the easier it becomes. …