Treasure Yourself (12 page)

you’ll ever require, to have the life that you want. All you need is a healthy dose of determination, a

significant measure of focus, a sprinkle of passion and a couple of handfuls of positivity!

Getting Personal:

– Is your energy focused or scattered?

– What is your most important goal right now?

– What do you need to do to keep your energy focused on achieving this goal?

don’t forget to say ‘thank you’…

Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we

have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance,

chaos to order, confusion into clarity. It can turn a meal into

a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend.

Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace

for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.

~ Melody Beattie

Gratitude is everything… Being grateful helps create a positive attitude. Gratitude shifts your focus from

what you don’t have to all that you do have. I try my best to live from the point of gratitude, which means

focusing on the positives, and share my life and its rewards when I can. Whenever I am tired or maybe

feeling a little sorry for myself I make a mental note of all the things I have to be grateful for. Gratitude

helps me when I’m on a swimwear shoot and it’s snowing; or when I’m getting up at 4am for work. I

remind myself that everything I do is moving me towards my goals. Being grateful gives me an immediate

boost in energy and brings me back into the moment.

There are many things in my life that fill me with gratitude. All the love in my life, my family and my

friends, old and new, are at the top of my list. Being Australian and growing up in such a naturally

beautiful country is something I deeply appreciate. Having the opportunity to travel the world and visit

amazing places while experiencing different cultures and meeting interesting people is something I truly

treasure. I have a healthy body, eyes to see the world and a voice to speak my mind. I am grateful for my

career, all the people I have met along the way and a wonderful support team. I am also grateful for my

gorgeous little dog Frankie, who is such a ray of sunshine in my life.

Simply being grateful can change your whole perspective on life. If ever I am having a bad day or if

things aren’t going quite to plan and I feel like giving up on my dreams, I take a step outside my world and

then I get to see just how lucky I am. I encourage you to do that. Next time you are feeling down, take a

trip to a mall, a homeless shelter or a children’s hospital and take a look around. When we take time to

acknowledge everything around us, we get to appreciate just how lucky we really are. Being grateful

allows me to see life for what it is and gives me the opportunity to live in every moment. You’ll find that

once you make a conscious effort to be grateful, you’re happy more often and the things that might have

been depressing or stressful before don’t factor in as often. Being grateful is actually good for your health.

When I remind myself of everything I am grateful for I no longer have the need to dwell on the past or

worry about the future. I realise that all that has happened is finished and all that will happen is ultimately

part of my path moving forward. The moment I am feeling ungrateful I take a walk outside for a reality

check.

Gratitude can come from the smallest experience. Once, during an exhausting day, I was feeling

annoyed about some extra work I had to do, so I stepped inside my dressing room to take a break and

collect my thoughts. Playing on the television screen was a movie I had just seen the week before, The

Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith. This particular scene had Will Smith’s character and his son

spending the night on the floor of a public bathroom because he didn’t have any other place to go and was

still struggling to find work to take care of his son. Being reminded of that one scene changed my attitude

immediately and reminded me to appreciate everything in my life and to not take anything for granted.

Dealing with negativity… Handling negativity within yourself, with others or particular situations is

challenging. I do my best to rise above it and focus on the people in my life who are supportive. It is the

negative people in the world who give you the opportunity to be really grateful for all the nurturing and

wonderful people that surround you. The things that matter to me the most are people and nature; nothing

is more important than showing your love and appreciation for the people in your life and the natural

environment that surrounds and nourishes you.

A great way to focus on being more grateful is to keep a gratitude journal, which you can write in every

day. In this way not only are we more aware of the good things in our life by writing them down but we

also remember the contribution of others and how we fit into the bigger picture. One day you can write

about how grateful you are for your apartment that you live in and all the things you enjoy about having

your own place. Another entry might be about how much you appreciate your friends and family. You can

even write about the delicious breakfast you had that morning! I’m especially grateful for the times during

the day that I can step outside and feel the sun on my skin and take a moment to breathe in the fresh air.

When I remind myself of this moment, it triggers the memory and I almost feel like I’m there again. The

best way to go about this is if you try to be creative and think outside the box. You might have five main

things you are grateful for every day but make it a point to try to notice the unexpected things that you can

appreciate and be grateful for.

Sometimes it’s even helpful if you take a minute to look at the difficult times you’ve been through.

When I think of something challenging that has happened, whether it is something personal or

professional, I can look at where I am now and see how far I have come and how much I have grown from

every experience along the way.

Getting personal:

– What are you grateful for?

– What are the positive things in your life right now?

– What or who inspires you?

– How can you show your gratitude more often?

the glass is always half full…

The benefit of being positive is something that we hear continuously. Bestselling authors have written

about it, psychologists have papers on this topic and no doubt you’ve heard it pop up from time to time in

conversation. ‘Be positive’, ‘stay positive’, ‘you need to have a positive attitude’, have become standard

phrases that we use when appropriate, but what does it actually mean?

What gave me a clearer outlook on this was some research that Dr Masaru Emoto conducted on water

crystals. Dr Emoto did a study on how energy, thoughts, words and even music affected water. He started

by freezing a tiny portion of water that had been taken from various parts of the world and photographed

their molecular structures. He made some amazing discoveries on how saying words of love and gratitude

around water, even thinking it, could change its structure into something like the form of a beautiful

snowflake and how saying negative words could make the water structure look eroded and splotchy.

Taping words of ‘hope’, ‘peace’, ‘thank you’, and ‘I love you’, to glasses of water had a profound effect

almost immediately, as well as the words ‘hate’, ‘you fool’ and ‘sick’.

Scientists have long proven that everything is made out of energy. If we break things down we can see

how matter is made out of atoms, and if you break that down further you’d see that atoms are just vibrating