Take Time for your Life: A Personal Coach's 7-Step Program for Creating the Life You Want by Cheryl Richardson

Creating a life that you love takes courage, commitment, and hard work.

The most important part of your life is you.

Make the quality of your life your top priority.  A high-quality life starts with a high-quality you.

When a relationship is strong, it enriches your life and provides you with a sense of security. When it's weak, it wears you down and drains your energy.

You have a choice about how you live your life, about how you spend your time.  You can either continue with the way things are and hope it gets better, or you can do something about it.

Don't confuse tough choices with no choices.

You have choices about how to live your life -- it's just a question of how ready, willing, and able you are to make them.

How you spend your time reveals your true priorities. 

You deserve to live your life exactly the way you want.  If you don't pilot your own plane, someone else will.

The amount of energy used in holding back the truth and avoiding conflict is significant.

Self-care includes taking care of your financial health.

Each time you neglect to handle your finances in a responsible way, you send a direct message to your Wise Self that you are not a good candidate for more.

I began instead to help clients eliminate anything that stood in the way of living the spiritual, authentic life they desired. 

The care of your soul is a lifetime journey.

When the foundation of your life is in good shape (your priorities are straight, you've eliminated what drains you, you're developing financial reserves, etc.), you can begin to let go of setting goals and start to actually life a "goal-less" life.  Instead of deciding what you want, you can let Divine guidance direct you to what's next.

Nurture your soul with the "little things".

The Art of Extreme Self-Care by Cheryl Richardson

All quotes from Cheryl's book

When you catch yourself saying things such as “I never have time to do what I want to do”, what you’re really saying is “I don’t take time for my needs”. 

When you insist “I always end up doing everything myself”, the truth of what you’re really saying is “I don’t ask for help”.

When you hear yourself complaining “no one appreciates the things I do”, what you most likely mean is “I take on way too much, hoping that someone will notice and tell me how good I am or how grateful they are”.

There is nothing wrong with standing in someone’s shadow.  It can be a great way to learn.

When you put relationships before results, live with integrity, and care about how our actions affect the greater community, you too add spiritual value to the world.

When you realize that you are in charge of your life and your time is limited, your choices become more important. 

A high-quality life starts with a high-quality you!

If you want to live an authentic meaningful life, you need to master the art of disappointing and upsetting others, hurting feelings, and living with the reality that some people just won’t like you.

When hit with an unexpected life challenge, most of us revert back to the old coping strategies that kept us safe as kids.  For example, you may have taken refuge in your bedroom to avoid dealing with parents who always fought.  As an adult, when faced with a chaotic situation such as losing a job or dealing with challenges in your own marriage, you now find yourself isolating from others as a way to escape the stress.  You don’t ask for help.  You don’t reach out for emotional support.  And you don’t admit to yourself or others the way you really feel.  Instead, you suffer in silence.

Extreme self-care challenge:  discovering where you feel deprived.