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I’m grateful to Lexi Sundell for including my post, How to Cross the Gap From Knowing to Doing in the Carnival of Creative Growth. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Lexi’s work, she is not only a talented painter and blogger, but is also a Senior Thought Leader at Personal Development Partners. In that role Lexi contributes tremendous insight and advice to people seeking to improve their lives through personal development tools and techniques.

Normally, a membership at Personal Development Partners costs $19.95 a month, but for a very limited time, you can purchase a lifetime membership for $57! If you aren’t familiar with PDP at all, it is a community of people who have come together to take the information they have gathered from years of study and support each other in applying it to actually improve their lives. In short, it is part group therapy, part peer coaching, and part butt-kicking!

I’ve been active at PDP for about 6 months now and I can definitely say that it is the nicest, most helpful, most success-oriented community I’ve ever participated in. Because there is a cost involved in being a member, the people who are active on the message boards are all committed to gaining positive results as well as offering genuinely useful advice.

I am certainly going to take advantage of this steal of an offer, and I hope you will too!

Other Resources
I would be a very bad blogger if I mentioned a carnival appearance and didn’t highlight some of the other outstanding posts. My personal favorites from this carnival are:

• 24 Weekly Actions for Creating Lasting Success from The Next 45 Years. Alex Blackwell gives you some very concrete steps to set up your week for serious achievement.
• Overwhelm: How to Break Your Life Down into Manageable Parts from Slow Down Fast! David B. Bohl has been putting out great posts for many months now, and this one is no exception. In this post he explains how to do some charting and time auditing to get a handle on your multitude of roles in life.
• How to Get Rid of Excuses NOW and Start Living the Kind of Life You’ve Always Wanted is from the new-to-me blog Super State. Discovering unfamiliar blogs is a great reason to peruse carnivals, by the way. Arin Vahanian encourages us to practice some mindfulness to catch ourselves in the act of making excuses and finding ways to reframe them as choices. It’s a helpful practice that I’m going to work with.

I’m honored that my post Are You Working With an Old Reality? How to Change Paradigms was featured in this week’s Personal Development Carnival at Alex Blackwell’s excellent blog, The Next 45 Years. It’s especially ego-boosting because Alex only chose 10 submissions this week.

All of the other submissions are great, but I wanted to highlight two that I think align with the interests of NSRT readers.

Are You For Real? is great question. Fortunately, David Bohl at Slow Down Fast has some answers for us - as well as many tips for becoming more authentic in your communications.

How to Find Your True Purpose is a thought provoking article by Todd Goldfarb at We The Change (I love that title!!). Hint: it’s all about being driven by your internal purpose rather than external circumstances.

I hope you’ll spend some time today reading through the carnival and the other helpful entries.

Never the Same River Twice was featured in two carnivals this week.

What Is Adaptive Capacity? was featured in the Carnival of Small Business which was hosted by CA at Atlantic Canada’s Small Business Blog. Some of the posts I found most useful here are:

• Does your business pass the “Charlie the Plumber” test… in which Carol Bentley helps us become more picky about who we do business with.
• Nikole Gipps has resolved to do less this year (one of the best resolutions I’ve ever heard). She shares steps she’s taking in Less, Part 1: Time.
• Wanda Grindstaff asks Does Your Business Model Support Your Income Goals? This post asks some hard questions about whether the dream of owning a business is the best route to financial independence.

Having Goals Will Make You Blind! earned a place in the Doing it Differently Blog Carnival at Today is That Day. Aaron Potts started this carnival to features post about “stepping outside of the box and living our lives in ways beyond the ‘norm’!” You’ll find plenty of out of the box thinking in these posts:

• Stephen Martile’s post simply titled Change is both inspiring and useful. He suggests an exercise for getting fired up about the future and moving your life forward.
• I’m definitely still in the process of detoxing from Christmas cookies, so I really appreciate Tupelo Kenyon’s question, Is Food Your Medicine or Poison?
• No Prodigal Son is a new blog for me, but after reading Atlas Will Shrug, which talks about resistance to change in relation to environmentally-friendly technologies, I’ll be sure to stop by again.

I hope you’ll stop by both of those carnivals and visit the other entries. My thanks to the hosts for including NSRT.

My thanks to David Bohl of Slow Down Fast for including Having Goals Will Make You Blind! in this week’s Carnival of Personal Development and Happiness. David did a great job filling in for Alex Blackwell, who is taking a little break.

The carnival is filled with lots of great posts that will both teach you and help you apply your learning. Some of my favorites include:

4 Reasons to Become a Generous Giver. Matthew Paulson at American Consumer News touches on a subject that is near and dear to my heart: personal philanthropy. There a lot of emotional and financial reasons to give to charity, especially during tax time.

Lorraine Cohen at Powerful Living suggests Creating a Theme Year as an alternative to New Year’s Resolutions. Once you’ve identified a theme, she helps you through a series of questions that will increase your chances of following through on that theme.

Steven Aitchison at Change your thoughts contributed the very funny and inspiring GOYA method for Personal Development. I don’t want to give away any secrets, so I’ll just say it deals with getting started on any task.

It’s been a while since I submitted to a Blog Carnival, so I’m happy to say that my post, Recipe For a Personal Development Weekend - With Pictures is featured in this week’s Personal Development Carnival. As always, the carnival features lots of great posts. A few of my favorites were:

• Is Working Smart Really an Alternative to Working Hard? at Grad Money Matters. I’d like to think it is, but  this post makes a good argument to the contrary!
• 25 Fun Ways to Pamper Your Body and Increase Your Vitality at We the Change. Lots of good suggestions here. I haven’t been to a comedy show in a very long time, so I may have to explore that soon.
• 10 Things You Wish You Had Never Learned at The Next 45 Years. This is a pretty deep post and caused me to take a little time for self reflection. I would have to say that I wish I had never learned that daydreaming is childish.

Take some time to read through some of the rest of the carnival offerings. Also, a big thanks to Lyman for hosting the carnival despite his need for a break.