Jack Canfield - Life Lessons for Women: 7 Essential Ingredients for a Balanced Life

Jack Canfield

Mark Victor Hansen

Stephanie Marston, MFT

Backlist, LLC, a unit of

Chicken Soup for the Soul Publishing, LLC

Cos Cob, CT

www.chickensoup.com

Life Lessons for Women is the first book in a new line of Chicken Soup books. It is a true self-help book. We wanted to take the inspiration from the stories in the original Chicken Soup series and give you practical tools, exercises and information to support you in creating greater balance, love, health and joy in your life.

Over the years we have received tens of thousands of letters from you, our readers, expressing gratitude, sharing how a particular story affected you or asking for advice. This book is our effort to further provide the support and encouragement youve come to rely on from Chicken Soup.

Whether youre a stay-at-home mom managing a household, a career woman balancing work and family, a single mom who is trying to fill in all the gaps or a woman who is simply tired of being tired, Life Lessons for Women: 7 Essential Ingredients for a Balanced Life will unveil sensible secrets that will help you to value yourself, savor everyday experiences and find time to live with more joy, vitality and peace in the midst of a chaotic world. It will provide you with the keys to find balance and fulfillment in your complicated, stressful life.

The book is divided into seven Essential Ingredients. Each chapter contains the Chicken Soup stories you know and love; Life Lessons that draw out the best of each story; Basic Tools that contain suggestions that can support you in putting the lessons into practice; inspirational quotes; sidebars called Food for Thought and Questions Worth Asking that give you something further to ponder; and The Finishing Touch exercises to help you incorporate what youve just learned. All of these elements are designed to help you connect to what matters most to you, make conscious choices about how you invest your time and energy, and improve the quality of your everyday life.

It is obvious from your e-mails and letters that most of you struggle to focus on yourself, your needs and your dreams. Much of your value has come from your ability to understand other peoples needs and to fulfill them. Its one of your talents as women. Yet many of you want to bring yourself back into the equation. You want to begin to attend to your long neglected or forgotten needs and longings. You want to reinstate yourself at the center of your own life. But in order for this to happen, you need to learn to balance your responsibilities to others with responsibility to yourself, obligations with enjoyment, work with play, activity with rest.

When you begin to remember whats most important in your life, when you rekindle your hopes and dreams, when you recommit to your deeply held values and beliefs, you will rediscover your deepest yearnings and recover your joy, wisdom, passion, enthusiasm, self-confidence and vitalitythen you can create the life you were truly meant to live.

Life Lessons is a gift from us to you. It will help you rediscover your strengths, and recognize what you love and what you long for. It will show you how to transform your life one essential ingredient at a time. It was created to inspire you to find greater balance and fulfillment, and to reconnect with your passion. Whatever youve been longing to do, whatever youve been yearning to reclaim, now is the time.

It is with this in mind that we offer you Life Lessons for Women. May you experience the inspiration, support and encouragement you need to become the joyful, amazing woman you were meant to be.

Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen and Stephanie Marston

Love yourself first and everything else falls

into line. You really have to love yourself

to get anything done in this world.

Lucille Ball

I must undertake to love myself and to

respect myself as though my very life depends

upon self-love and self-respect.

JUNE JORDAN

I want you to write yourself a love letter, the instructor cooed. Close your eyes and see yourself as the most glorious person in the world. You are the ultimate beloved. Now open your eyes and write.

I shifted in the wooden chair. I had signed up for a two-hour class in Happiness, and I felt bombarded by positive pushiness, arch affirmations and bliss bombs. Already I had dutifully trooped into the bathroom, looked in the mirror and assured myself that I was beautiful. I tried not to notice that pimple lurking on my nose, the wrinkles wandering from my eyes, or the gorgeous blond next to me, whispering ardently (and truthfully) to herself, You are so beautiful.

Youre not writing, the teacher scolded. I sighed and rummaged in my purse for scrap paper. On the back of a grocery store receipt, I wrote: Dear Deborah, You need more time alone. Why are you constantly signing up for self-help classes? Get a grip. Yours, D.

I put down my pen and looked at my watch. Only fifty-six more minutes of Happiness. Once home, I reached into the mailbox, pulled out a clump of white envelopes and thought: Wouldnt it be great if one of these envelopes held a real love letter, from an inconsolable former lover, a secret admirer or a contrite ex-husband?

The mail was full of passions, pleadings and promises. A credit card company assured me that charging with them meant recharging the world. A long distance carrier swore if I would go the distance with them I would save money. A book club promised I could turn over a new leaf if I would just turn into one of their subscribers.

There was no piece of paper that hinted at the intriguing tint of my eyes or the vibrant color of my hair, no mention of the musicality of my voice or the tenderness of my touch.

The more I thought about it, the more appealing a love letter seemed. I brewed a cup of tea, sat at the kitchen table and mentally surveyed the terrain: my partner might fax me a loving quote, e-mail me a fond memo or leave me a sexy voice mail. But I knew no man who would write me a love letter.

So I decided to write one to myself. First, I put on some Johnny Mathis music, dribbled Obsession on my neck and lit the only candle I could find: a thin green birthday candle, which I wedged into a piece of seven-grain bread. Then I closed my eyes, hummed along with Chances Are and tried to remember the things I loved about myself. I felt as if I were wearing high heels I could barely walk in.

What were the words my high school hero used in his effusive love letter, written after our first kiss? You are the most real girl I know. Or the note my college crush had penned: You are the only girl I will ever love. I wonder if he later repeated the promise to each of his three wives.

Say whatever comes out, I encouraged myself, like the teacher had urged. I scribbled a few lines on the back of an old envelope, then decided, just this once, I would use some of the beautiful seashell-colored stationery I had bought for some mythical beloved. My hand was sweaty as I picked up my favorite pen.

Dear Deborah, I wrote, I admire the way you help other people. I know how hard you try and how much you worry about being good enough. Deborah, you are a good person. Yours, D.