Monthly Archives: September 2022

How to Help African American Women with Breast Cancer

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By Inspirational Books Author Denise Turney

photo of smiling african american woman with natural hair holding white flower
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There is something about sickness and death that can make you want to hide, keep what’s happening to you secret. Yet, hiding and living with anxiety and fear doesn’t stop the progression of a disease. Facing a disease like breast cancer doesn’t make the process easier either, but it can lead to healing. If you reach out and do research, you’ll find that there is help for African American women with breast cancer.

Actions to Help African American Women with Breast Cancer

As with other diseases, education is a good start. Organizations like Sisters Network, Inc., Black Women’s Health Imperative, African American Breast Cancer Alliance and Susan G. Komen for the Cure offer educational materials you can read and learn more about what might be happening to your body. The American Cancer Society shares research work on prevention, treatments, childhood cancer and how the disease responds to other issues like COVID.

Regarding the power of knowledge, among the actions to help African American women with breast cancer, there is:

  • Virtual and in-person training to help reduce fear, as you become aware of what to expect during testing, treatment and recovery
  • Sharing the importance of performing monthly self-breast exams (a lot of women discover breast irregularities during self-exams)
  • Knowledge about what happens during mammograms, including questions to ask screeners and your physician
  • Information on where to get free mammogram screenings and other breast cancer support free of charge

Training and Prevention, Healing for African American Women with Breast Cancer

In addition to knowledge, training is important. You may need training to perform monthly self-exams effectively. Regular monthly self-breast exams can be performed in the shower or in another private area. After performing several exams, it will be easier to notice changes in the shape or feel of your breasts.

This leads to more ways to help African American women with breast cancer. Some of the ways had been previously mentioned. They are other support actions include:

  • Training from a healthcare practitioner (Your OBGYN is a great start. It’s important to partner with an OBGYN who you feel comfortable talking to about your body.)
  • Monthly self-breast exams (Getting to know your body is important.)
  • Mammograms (The American Cancer Society and The National Cancer Institute can help you find resources to get free or low-cost mammograms. Additionally, your OBGYN might know where you can get free or low-cost mammograms. Some employers also provide free exams.)
  • Treatment options (Discuss treatment options, including financial support that may be available for treatment options.)
  • Diet (A lot can change when you discover you have a disease like breast cancer. Path to healing might come, in part, through diet. Consider working with a dietician to learn how what you feed your body affects your overall health, including your emotional health.)

You Caring Means a Lot

If you’re a relative or friend of someone who’s dealing with breast cancer, your care means a lot. Just knowing that you care and are willing to invest the time and support to help a friend with breast cancer means a lot.

Of all the ways to help African American women with breast cancer simply being there, over the long run, might be an immeasurable gift. More ways that you could help are to:

  • Offer rides to doctor visits
  • Drive your relative or friend to and from treatments
  • Help care for or babysit young children
  • Attend support group meetings with your relative or friend
  • Pray with and for your friend
  • Cook meals for your friend. You could even prepare meals that are stored in the freezer, so all your friend has to do is put enough food in the oven to dine on for a day.

Get Permission and Keep Reaching Out

Because each person is different, get your family member’s or friend’s permission to help. However, if you see your friend or family member is struggling and trying to go it alone, continue to offer support. Calling and stopping by your relative’s or friend’s home just to say “Hello” is a way to show that you’re there and willing to be a support.

Just being there and listening is such a gift. Organizations that help African American women with breast cancer are in the resources section below. There are many other organizations that you can turn to, including local organizations, that help African American women with breast cancer. Some of these organizations might be affiliated with a local hospital or treatment center.

Resources:

  1. Sisters Network Inc. – https://www.sistersnetworkinc.org
  2. Black Women’s Health Imperative – https://bwhi.org
  3. African American Breast Cancer Alliance – http://aabcainc.org
  4. American Cancer Society – https://www.cancer.org
  5. Susan G. Komen for the Cure – https://www.komen.org

Easy Shortcuts to a Better Life

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By Books Author Denise Turney

blackboard with your life matters writing related to shortcuts for better living
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Easy shortcuts to a better life are linked to rest, peace and greater satisfaction. These shortcuts help you to live in your natural state, more in tune with how you were created to live. Think about it. As a child who was loved, you may have spent hours, if not entire days, in a cocoon of love, peace and restfulness. Yet, by the time you entered kindergarten, your habit of living in peace, love and restfulness may have started to slip.

Other People’s Expectations

Gone are days spent enjoying being alive. Enter in other people’s expectations of what you “should do” and “ought to be” like. Once this happens, it’s not enough to just be yourself. An invisible “ruler” of what a good kid is like, what your parents or caregivers most want you to mirror and other people’s hopes for the specific personality that you should develop starts to show up and solidify.

Before you know it, you start glancing at other people, monitoring their approval or disapproval of you. Spot someone frowning in your direction, and you might hang your head. Let someone smile at you, and your head and shoulders rise. During those instances of external approval, it’s easy to feel good.

If only this world were filled with nothing except people who appreciate you. Easy shortcuts to a better life might be a snap then.

Key Shortcut

Think about it. Are you more confident while surrounded by friends or while in the company of a crowd who has repeatedly made it clear to you that you are not enough? Furthermore, each instance when you felt insecure, uncertain and uncomfortable were you either recalling an experience when you felt unaccepted and unloved or were you being disapproved of in that present moment?

This brings up one of the easy shortcuts to a better life. To step into your better life, commit right now to consistently give yourself love. It doesn’t matter what another person says. Regardless of how anyone else looks at you, gossips about you or judges you, love yourself. Put your commitment into practice and you’ll always be loved.

Forget dismissing the importance of this act. The love that you give yourself is as valuable as the love that you receive from others. Love covers all, is whole and complete and has no variation. In other words, love that flows through you is as good as love that flows through your best friend, neighbor or anyone. So, love yourself. You’ll be taking a reliable shortcut to a better life.

What Do You Really Want?

Other easy shortcuts to a better life are to consider what you really want. Because you’ve likely received verbal and nonverbal messages from others about what they’d like for you to do with your life, you might think that you know what you really want when, in fact, you might not know. Instead, you might have spent the last 10 years working hard to be what you think someone you admire (or someone who you’re afraid of) wants you to be.

That’s definitely not the path to happiness and inner peace. Should that be the track that you’ve been living on, it’s time to start moving down a different path.

Get clear about what you really want – what you really want, not want someone else wants for you. Also, start to map out specific actions you could take to get what you really want.

Explore What You Really Want

For example, if you want to open a bookstore, start to map out how to find and build relationships with book distributors, wholesalers, publishers and hybrid authors, and identify realtors who have experience locating retail buildings in the areas that attract large numbers of book buyers.

Additionally, you could contact your local chamber of commerce and find out the specific business licenses that you need. That’s just a start. Each action that you take brings you closer to what causes you to experience joy.

More Easy Shortcuts to a Better Life

More easy shortcuts to a better life follow. Check them out. See if they aren’t easy to implement.

  • Revisit activities that you loved as a kid. Age and time are no reasons to eliminate daily fun from your life.
  • Read a good book, the kind of book that’s so good you can’t help but tell all your friends about it.
  • Explore the great outdoors. Get outside and have loads of natural fun! This is a favorite of the easy shortcuts to a better life.
  • Schedule time to hang out with friends one or more times a month. Don’t let a busy schedule rob you of opportunities to be with your friends.
  • Go for a drive to an area you’ve never been to before. You might be surprised at how being in a new environment picks you up.
  • Try your hand at the arts. After all, self-expression is one of the easy shortcuts to a better life.

Keep Seeking Easy Shortcuts to a Better Life

Honesty is a must to get from where you are now to the life that you truly want to live. Keep seeking more ways to tap into your inner peace and joy. Ideas about new actions that you could take to experience an increasingly good and better life might come as you travel.

In this situation, you might see someone living a full life while doing something you’ve yet to do. Exercise enough courage to try the new thing and you might find another way to shorten the time it takes to live a life that finds you feeling better, more vibrant and more alive.

So, get out and explore. Try new things. Meet new people. Laugh. Add a spirit of newness to each day. It’s your life. Make it wonderful!

How Busy Entrepreneurs Are Finding Inner Peace

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By Books Writer Denise Turney

photo of women stretching together doing exercise for inner peace
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Despite challenges, busy entrepreneurs are finding inner peace. It takes creativity and flexibility, but it can be done. Creativity and flexibility are must because entrepreneurs juggle a seemingly endless list of to-dos.

Sales, improved return on investment (ROI), attracting the right human capital and increasing productivity are areas that small business entrepreneurs focus on day in and day out. When sales are up and ROI is good, these focus areas can send entrepreneurs, including owners of indie bookstores, into a wave of euphoria. It’s easy to feel at peace then. Yet, the world of operating a small business isn’t always smooth.

Stressors for Small Business Owners

There’s turnover, eroding team morale, economic headwinds and fierce product competition to deal with. During these times, small business owners’ stress levels can skyrocket. Even the most resilient entrepreneur can feel overwhelmed after living through just three weeks of employee resignations, a drop in sales and a pick-up in customer complaints.

That’s why smart entrepreneurs do more than seek paths from nagging stress to inner peace, they find stress reduction shortcuts. Although each person is different, following are some paths that entrepreneurs have taken to reduce stress:

  • Stay focused on long-term goals. As a bookseller, if I’ve heard this once, I’ve heard it a thousand times. Keep your sights on the long-term goals. Admittedly, the capacity to pull this off relies a lot on the next stress reduction step.
  • Believe that they can succeed. It’s not enough to keep your sights on long-term goals. You actually need to believe that you can be successful doing what you love. You really have to believe it.
  • Strong financial habits. This applies at the individual and business levels. To operate with inner peace, entrepreneurs know what to invest in and what to turn away from. Additionally, they pay employees, consultants and freelancers based on what their business can sustain long-term.

Keys to How Entrepreneurs Are Finding Inner Peace

Staying in balance and at peace is no small trick. Hence, the reason entrepreneurs committed to living in peace have a dozen or more tools in their kit, including:

  • Determination is a must. To keep stress down and to deal with stress in healthy ways, they are determined. Simply put, determination fuels entrepreneurs through a major mistake. As an example, if your sales team closed 35% more deals over the last two years than at any other time in your company’s history and you started celebrating too soon or celebrated for too long only to see large clients exit, it’s your determination to succeed that could surface new ideas. This very example has happened. And it’s understandable. After all, sales are why you’re a for-profit organization. You should celebrate. To keep your bottom line strong, you should also keep your eye on your existing customers and not just celebrate each new customer who walks through the door. Focusing too much on either and not enough on the other could cost you large chunks of business.
  • Persistence is a must-have in a successful entrepreneur’s toolkit. While they persist, busy entrepreneurs are sure to be flexible. The last thing they will do is persist with a tactic that’s never going to work. Yet, they don’t give up. Instead, they are willing to look at the situation differently. They’re also willing to ask others for insight. Getting input from the right people opens them up to new opportunities, new ideas and more success.

Organic Paths to Inner Peace

As beneficial as these stress reducers are, there are more ways that busy entrepreneurs are finding inner peace. These next steps are good for business; they also have a positive impact on business owners’ overall health. Try adding one to three of these steps into your day, even if you own an indie bookstore and face days crammed with meetings with bookstore buyers, authors, publishing companies, distributors, publicists and marketing reps.

  • Get outside, move and breathe. Entrepreneurs serious about finding inner peace, get outside regularly. Regardless of where their business is located, they find creative ways to get outside year-round. While outside, they might enjoy a 30-minute walk. Or they might dine outdoors with a friend, ride a bike or exercise at a nearby gym that has an outdoor workout area.
  • Feed their body nourishing food and beverages. This means they might have to go with fresh water with a slice of lemon for lunch and dinner meetings. Eating green, leafy vegetables and fresh fruits that agree with their body is a priority.

More Ways Busy Entrepreneurs Are Finding Inner Peace

  • Meditate. Yes. Entrepreneurs are finding inner peace through appreciation. They appreciate simply sitting down and being still. They might start off by sitting still for two minutes in the morning and another two minutes at night. If that seems too long, they might start with one minute in the morning and another minute of stillness at night and work their way up to five to ten minutes twice a day. Not only can meditating bring entrepreneurs more inner peace, but meditating can help surface new business growth ideas.
  • Invest in a good night of sleep. Going to bed at the same time and reducing blue light in their bedrooms are ways entrepreneurs improve sleep. So too is drinking organic cherry juice or eating cherries, as cherries have natural melatonin. Perhaps above all, entrepreneurs are finding inner peace by working through conflicts an hour or more before they head to bed, giving their mind time to unwind.

Trust The Process

As simple as it sounds, they also seek help. That’s right. Entrepreneurs are finding inner peace by asking business partners to take on certain responsibilities. This one might be tough at the start of their careers, especially if they’re accustomed to handling critical projects themselves. Over time, they learn that as their business continues to grow, they need to start delegating.

Even more, for these business owners, seeking help aligns with trust. Since no one can succeed in an island-business environment, they learn early that they have to trust others.

Using an indie bookstore as an example, bookstore owners trust the delivery drivers to get new books to their stores. And they trust utility workers to ensure that the lights are on at their stores. Another event that they trust is the flow of book buyers into their bookstores. When it comes to stress reduction and inner peace, trusting the process (after they’ve done their best) is paramount.

Resources:

entrepreneur.com/article/271055

What’s So Great About Growing Up in the 1980s

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By Inspirational Writer and Books Author Denise Turney

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The 1980s is a favorite decade for millions of people and for good reason. It was the decade of the fax machine, handheld video games, the Walkman, video players and VHS movies, calculator watches, office superstores and road races. For homeowners who’d previously spent years climbing a ladder and painting a four-story house beneath the heat and humidity of a harsh summer sun, the growing popularity of house siding was a most welcomed trend.

Convenience Makes the 1980s Favorite Decade

My paternal grandparents took advantage of house siding. Gone were the days of my grandfather climbing up to the roof in the unrelenting heat of summer to chip old paint off the house, so that he could apply a smooth, fresh coat of paint to their house. It’s this that brings up a good point.

Much of what you love about the 1980s, especially if you grew up during the 1980s, may link to a welcomed convenience. With this in mind, it’s clear that each 10 years will likely produce a favorite decade, especially as advancing technologies afford us more convenience. But back to the 1980s, that sweet time. In addition to the previously mentioned gems, newly developed products and services that help to make the 1980s a favorite decade include:

  • Compact discs
  • DNA advancements
  • Disposable cameras
  • Personal computers
  • Answering machines
  • Enhancement of home security systems
  • Fitness clubs
  • Music videos

1980s Entertainment

Reality television, the godmother of much of today’s social media videos, took off during the 1980s. Back then, it was common to find yourself growing up watching shows like MTV’s The Real World. If nothing else, those early television shows served as proof that humans find each other remarkably interesting.

Reality television offered an air of authenticity that viewers may have found missing from soap operas. When it comes to sports, Sunday afternoon remained the biggest day of the week, especially as it regards professional football. The Pittsburgh Steelers “steel curtain” wasn’t as formidable as it had been during the 1970s, but it still felt good rooting for the team.

Finding your favorite movies was as easy as walking inside your local Blockbuster video store. During those “modern times”, it seemed as if Blockbuster would dominate the movie rental industry for decades. Considering that you had complete control over the types and numbers of movie videos that you rented, watching favorite movies could be as cheap as $5.

Remembering The 1980s Great Outdoors Pursuits

There were no streaming fees or cable television monthly rates to deal with. That could be why kids played outside, having fun engaging in a game of kickball, basketball, baseball or dodgeball with friends. You might have to rewind the clock in your mind, but if you go back, you might recall how children and adults filled parks during the 1980s.

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For some reason, people seemed to be more active, preferring the outdoors instead of staying inside the house occupying themselves with social media, computers, chat rooms and video games, as many people do today. Tossing frisbees (remember those?) at a nearby park was a popular weekend pastime.

It was rare, certainly not as often heard as it had been just a decade earlier, but you could still hear an ice cream truck ringing in the distance. Parents sent their kids to the truck to buy an ice cream cone or another treat for them, at the same time that they gave their children as little as a dollar for an ice cream treat that they, the children, could enjoy.

Loving Family Tradition Goes Back to the 1980s

Another tradition that was slipping away was the family tradition of sitting around the dining room table enjoying a homecooked dinner. The television was shut off. Parents and children discussed the events of the day. Talk about a wonderful time for family bonding.

Oh, and when school let it, school was out. Unless you had homework to do, once you walked off the school grounds, you often didn’t bother to gossip about classmates. There were no pictures passed around, and no one that you felt was more popular than you because he received more “thumbs up” than you did.

Due to the fact that there wasn’t ample cell phone usage during the 1980s, another thing that was left behind at the end of the day was work. Fortunately, it really was possible to get away during this favorite decade. Trouble and challenge seemed packed away during the evening.

The 1980s – A Sweet Time

Yet, that’s the way that days gone by often seem and feel. Still, the 1980s was a time of family, outdoors fun and less technological connections. In-person relationships were highly desirable, sought after and nurtured, not with text messages or instant messaging, but instead with face-to-face lunch meetings, nights at the movies and visits to live music events.

Pop music was in vogue. So too was the women’s singing group En Vogue, and what a group. Those women were classy, sharp and had beautiful, powerful voices. Still, the 1980s was more than music. There were sports, namely Carl Lewis, Evelyn Ashford and Edwin Moses, who dominated track and field, a carryover from the 1970s. The 1980s was also the decade when television in the United States stayed on past midnight.

For so many reasons, the 1980s was a favorite decade. For so many, perhaps you, it was a sweet time, not that it didn’t have its challenges. But, in the memory there are experiences that lend the 1980s a spirit of fondness.

Why Journal Writing Is Good For You

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By Novelist and Book Writer Denise Turney

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Journal writing is growing in popularity and for good reason, especially as it regards self-awareness. Yet, that doesn’t mean that the benefits are obvious. If you’ve felt stuck or like you’re living on a hamster wheel, you may be aware that hidden beliefs could sabotage your success. You also might know that it can take weeks or years of therapy or self-help work to identify and remove these sabotaging thoughts.

Journal Writing to Discover Hidden Beliefs and Open Up to Self-Awareness

What you might not be aware of is how effective writing in a journal could be in surfacing erroneous beliefs. However, to work, you can’t just write in journals every now and then. To gain from journal writing, it’s a good idea to do daily journaling. In addition to creating a brain routine, writing in a journal every day could help you to notice behavioral, emotional or mental shifts that you might otherwise have missed. This leads to the first benefit that you could gain after you start writing in a journal.

That first benefit is self-awareness. This is an important benefit because without self-awareness, you might not know that something is off. When you consider how fast things change in this world, not to mention how many distractions you face each day, it’s easy to see how you could overlook a slight change that’s building into a big problem.

Internal Shifts That Happen When Working with Journals

It’s these missed shifts that could develop into internal blocks. For example, if you were told that “you’re a slow learner” when you were a kid, you could have the seed to a potential block in your mind. After being told that as a kid, let’s say that you grew up and hadn’t heard anyone say anything about your learning abilities in two decades only to have someone comment that “you’re slow” this afternoon. Just hearing that could cause you to experience an internal shift.

But you might not be aware that you’d shifted. You might even shrug the comment off, telling yourself that another person’s voiced opinion has absolutely no impact on you. As good as that sounds, what you tell yourself is happening might not mirror exactly what’s going on.

Another point to consider is how one erroneous belief could cause a negative domino effect, which is certainly not what you’d want. Therefore, the sooner you spot and identify an internal shift, the better.

Writing in Journals Sharpens Self-Awareness

So, how does writing in journals sharpen self-awareness? Writing in a journal:

  • Puts mental and emotional states that you’re dealing with in front of you
  • Keeps these mental and emotional states in awareness, allowing you to work through them with power
  • Helps you dig through internal blocks, offering rewards with each breakthrough

If you write your dreams in journals, you could also start to spot subconscious routines that are holding you back quicker. Due to the fact that journaling is a private activity, you might enjoy the comfort that what you write is for you only. Years ago, there were journals that had a lock on them, a way to potentially offer more privacy. Today, you could simply keep your journals in a drawer or a locked space. The point is to feel comfortable with becoming more self-aware. Another point is to welcome the act of allowing different thoughts and emotions to surface from within you.

This is more helpful than repressing feelings and thoughts that you don’t want to face. It’s worth mentioning that it takes honesty and courage to do the type of journal writing that digs and brings erroneous beliefs to the surface (or to the level of your conscious mind). So, keep at it. In addition, reward yourself for being honest and open. The payoff could be deep and long lasting.

More Journal Writing Benefits

As it regards payoff, check out the below benefits associated with writing in journals. Not only could you become more self-aware after you engage in daily journaling, you might improve your communications skills. Other reasons why journal writing may be good for you include:

  • Improved writing skills – With more people communicating online, via text messages and email, strong writing skills have proving to have impact.
  • Track and monitor personal and career goals – Consider using a journal to write down short-term and long-term goals, followed by actions that you will take to achieve those goals. Use journals to track your progress.
  • Become more mindful – The more you see the connection between what you tell yourself and how you feel, you might become more aware of the impact that your words are having on other people.
  • Sharper brain – Because you’re writing and not typing in journals, you can exercise different parts of your brain while you journal. The frontal lobe, the part of your brain that deals with cognitive functioning goes to work while you write.

Love Acts

  • Trust – As you allow beliefs and emotions to surface without hard judgments, you could become more self-accepting. Trust is another takeaway that you could gain. The more you write down what you’re feeling and experiencing, the more you might trust yourself to face things you’d previously kept hidden from yourself.
  • Healing – Releasing thoughts you’d previously repressed can reduce stress. It can also open you up to healing.
  • Reflection – Over the years, you can return to your journals to spot recurring themes in your life. You could also come to know what symbols in your dreams mean. Looking back through journals you wrote in decades ago can also give you better insight into what’s coming next in your life.

Writing in journals is a way to put the responsibility for your life in your hands. Start writing in journals and you may begin to see just how much your thoughts, what you focus on, fears that you’ve been running from and emotions that you find attractive are mapping out your life. Even more, as you continue daily journaling, you might notice your successes more. You actually might take the time to acknowledge and celebrate forward steps that you take. This could be when writing in journals becomes an act of love for you.