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all media and speaking is prohibited. Learn to turn down the static of the mind so you can appreciate more before doing more: > The Art of Living Foundation (Course II1)— International—( www.artofliving.org ) » Spirit Rock Meditation Center in California ( http://www.spiritrock.org ) > Kripalu Center for Yoga and Health in Massachusetts ( http://www.kripalu.org ) » Sky Lake Lodge in New York ( http://www.sky-lake.org ) 2. Make an anonymous donation to the service organization of your choice. This helps to get the juices flowing and disassociate feeling good about service with getting credit for it. It feels even better when it’s pure. Here are some good sites to get started: »Charity Navigator (www.charitynavigator.org) This independent service ranks more than 5,000 charities using criteria you select. Create a personalized page of favorites and compare them side by side, all free of charge. »Firstgiving (www.firstgiving.com) Firstgiving.com allows you to create an online fund-raising page. Donations can be made through your personal URL. I have used Firstgiving in coordination with a nonprofit called Room to Read to build schools in both Nepal and Vietnam, with more countries pending: www _firstgiving.com/timferriss and www .firstgiving.com/timferriss2. If you specifically want to help animals, for example, you can click on a related link and access websites for hundreds of different animal charities, and then decide which one you want to donate to. The UK version of the website is http://www.justgiving.com. » Network for Good (www.networkforgood.org) Visitors to this website will find links to charities in need of donations as well as opportunities to do volunteer work. They can also set up an automated credit card donation online. 3. Take a learning mini-retirement in combination with local volunteering. Take a mini-retirement—six months or more if possible—to focus on learning and serving. The longer duration will permit a language focus, which in turn enables more meaningful interaction and contribution through volunteering. For the duration of this trip, note self-criticisms and negative self-talk in a journal. Whenever upset or anxious, ask “why” at least three times and put the answers down on paper. Describing these doubts in writing reduces their impact twofold. First, it’s often the ambiguous nature of self-doubt that hurts most. Defining and exploring it in writing —just as with forcing colleagues to e-mail—demands clarity of thought, after which most concerns are found to be baseless. Second, recording these concerns seems to somehow remove them from your head. HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_013986