It's all in how you carry yourself

An usual night of dreams that felt like reality and reality that felt like a dream led to waking to what so far has appeared to be a perfect morning, the sort that fills you with a calm, peaceful feeling, which is exactly what I needed to start me off the right way and get into what I wanted to talk about today.

One of the things that has always calmed me down, and if you know me well then you know how very important that is, is taking pictures. Normally I stay away from taking pictures of people and stick to shots of sunsets and nature, shots like this one here that I took with my point and shoot

But the shots that I always wanted to get kept eluding me because I just wasn't equipped with the proper tools, which meant that I was going to have to actually get a professional grade camera to shoot things like this

I took this shot this past Saturday while wondering around testing the new camera, and MAN did I need to do so with the way things were going. I needed to be calmed more than ever. But in my travels the random events of life seemed to open up to show me some things that maybe I needed to see.

I have no idea who these people are, but he had just proposed to her as I happened to walk by, and they asked me to take a picture for them so that they could remember it. It was nice to be a part of their special moment, even in a very small way, so I took one of my own.

For whatever reason, I've always been a guy that people have done that with. I get asked to take pictures for people all the time. There constantly seems to be someone coming to me for directions, even when I'm in a city that I've never been to before. We don't approach just anyone for this sort of thing, you know that as well as I do. Every one of us has been in a similar situation before, and you have to have a certain comfort level with the stranger you're asking just from how they appear to be.

Well, 93% of all communication is in our body language. We literally say way more to the people surrounding us by the way we're standing around and the look on our faces than with any of the garbage that flies from our mouths. That aura, that energy that emanates, speaks to everyone in proximity.

When I saw this woman in the picture above me she was working with small children, helping to make their day at the park a fun and memorable one. I happened to pass three times while snapping my photos, and with each pass I couldn't help but notice the calm and easy demeanor she displayed and the softness about her. This picture does nothing to do her justice, but even here you can see that in her face. There was a grace, an elegance about her that just melted my heart, and though I doubt very much I'll ever see her again, instantly I thought I saw someone special and it stirred a change in me.

Our chance encounters with the people that walk in and out of our lives are often not a thing to latch on to and hold, but an opportunity to change the way we look at things, what Marianne Williamson calls miracles in her great book A Return to Love.

I'm always talking about the lack of a certain something in our starlets these days, which of course filters down to all the women in our society, that ladies like Olivia De Havilland (up top) had so much of that it poured from them on the screen and moved you.

Where are the Princess Grace Kelly's of the world, the kind of woman that even 30 years after her death the very mention of her name still echoes the embodiment of the word her parents chose to call her by.... Grace.

Or Ingrid Bergman, who you really could believe great men, the Victor Lazlo's of our lifetime, would endure almost anything to get back to, to live for, to inspire them to fight for a better world, or give it all up for.

And of course my all time favorite, Audrey Hepburn. They just don't make women like this anymore.....

Except they do. A chance encounter with a random girl just being herself opened my eyes to something that I either didn't believe that could ever exist again, or perhaps that I had been looking in the wrong places, at the wrong people, for all along. And I began to think about myself, casting the same light on who I am and the way that I act that I had been burning the ladies of the world with.

I've stated in the past how John Wayne was once the embodiment of what is was to be the American man and how as a kid growing up this is what I too was supposed to be, why I often act the way that I do, rough and tumble, out there for everyone to see, A MAN BABY, YEAH! But the truth of the matter is that I'm really probably more like Ash from Army of Darkness in all the wrong ways

"Are all men from the future loud mouth braggards like yourself?"
"No, just me baby.... just me"

Dr. Wayne Dyer always says that you do not attract what you want into your life, you attract what you are, something I firmly believe. When you carry that into the people in your life, if you act like an animal, you'll attract other animals. Act like ghetto trash, you'll attract ghetto trash. Act like Ash... you get deadites

So it's really no wonder that this is the type of woman that I've been finding when I look.

But the woman at the park had me inspired to be more than what I've become, to find all the best parts of myself and have that be the face that I show to the world. In NLP we have a technique that we call modeling, and by that we mean to find someone that displays the characteristics that you want to have yourself and model the way that you behave after the way that they do it. And if you want classy, elegant women in your life, then you have to be more like a man that would be in the same circles of that sort of person. You have to be Cary Grant.

Well, I'm not nearly that good looking, nor am I suave or sophisticated. I may be too much of a Shanty Queens slob sitting on the curb, rough around the edges to hope to pull that off naturally without coming off as try hard. But that doesn't mean I have to be loud and obnoxious either, and I find that when I'm at my best, it's when I'm being the strong, quiet type that takes care of his responsibilities and doesn't worry about the rest. So I may be better off as the Ed Burns type

Well... maybe I don't have his looks either, but if you want to attract a better quality of person in your life, then you have to be a better person. And it's all in the way that you carry yourself. So rather than worrying about who's out there and how good they are, instead concentrate on who you are and how good you can be.

Then the truly beautiful ones will find you.
So who do you want to be?

Later people