I want to recommend the Virtual Consulting services of Organization by Design at http://www.dressingwell.com.

Circa 2005 I bought the Mary Lou Andre book Ready-to-Wear about choosing and using your wardrobe.

For an initial $300, you can hire the services of an image consultant to talk with you via telephone. You e-mail her as an attachment up to 10 photos of yourself wearing outfits. She analyzes how you can improve and talks to you in a half-hour telephone consultation. Then she e-mails you hyperlinks to products you can buy online.

Going on, you can enlist the consultant for $75/per half-hour telephone talk.

I’m telling readers about this in here because it’s the perfect solution for anyone that wants to create a professional wardrobe for going on job interviews, or to assemble clothes you can wear on dates, or to discover the items that fit and flatter your body and your style, for whatever occasion you’d like help with.

I’ve used this service at least 3 times since I had the original first-time consultation.

It’s well worth the money. The way I see it: some people spend money on cigarettes or street drugs or alcohol. Instead of doing that (hardly advisable) you can splurge on the Virtual Consulting service.

The consultant can also tell you your body shape and your face shape to advise on the most flattering eyeglasses or hem lengths for jackets and pants and skirts.

If you love fashion, you might just get hooked on this service.

No kidding: it’s well worth trying out. The Virtual Consulting option is also available for men.

There you go.

I like the idea that a person gets to have a second or third act in their lives.

My life didn’t lift off until I obtained my library science degree when I was 35 years old.

It’s not ever too late to do something new or to make a positive change in your life.

The photographer who shot me for my author website was 55 years old when he decided he wanted to get a job and stop collecting SSI. He retired with a stash of cash years later.

I attended school with a woman who was in her early seventies too. She had the desire to get a library degree even though she was at a time in her life when most people are winding down.

Doing what you want to do or what you love in your older years is payback for the struggle and hard times you experienced early in life at the hands of an illness.

You can find new things to do and love when you turn 50 or older.

I turn 50 in the early spring. Our lives aren’t over until they’re over. Each of us has good years ahead of us. I firmly believe that the best is always yet to be: tomorrow can be better than today.

The Aveeno skincare advertisement got it right:

“The best way to predict the future is to create it.”

Today is the only lovely day. No other day exists. Everything we do today can bring us closer to a better tomorrow. Even if things aren’t so good now we can expect that the future can be different and things can change.

Having a second or third act?

It’s entirely possible.

I talk about this more in Flourish: the beauty of setting lifelines not deadlines.

Using the term deadline indicates there’s an end: a result you achieve that is the end, that the process is over at a certain point in time.

This isn’t helpful because often people set goals that are restrictive, impossible to achieve because the deadline is too soon. Rome isn’t built in a day, neither are goals completed quickly. Nothing worth having comes without effort.

You can’t undo years of personal neglect in two or three months and then quit. Goal-seeking behavior is a lifestyle not an endpoint, so to keep striving to maintain health is imperative.

The gym has a whiteboard in the entrance foyer. Every week a new quote is written down. Last week the whiteboard proclaimed: “Don’t seek to be skinny by Tuesday. Strive to be fit. Fitness is forever.”

It’s true: setting a strict deadline to live up to demoralizes you, sets you up to fail. It’s better to remember that changing your life is a long-term process. It starts one habit at a time. Then you change another behavior. And so on.

It takes kindness and patience on the road to a new you. Focus on what you did do instead of what you couldn’t do. Cheer yourself on for pounding the treadmill 2 times instead of beating yourself up for not doing it 4 times.

I suspect a lot of goals people set aren’t based in science. Read the book Changeology by John C. Norcross because he details a scientifically-proven method of changing, a technique to make lasting changes.

We need to remember that it’s not ever too late in life to change something we’re not happy about, either an aspect of our lives or about ourselves. Completing one goal should not be the end; it should be the stepping-stone to other goals.

That’s why the mantra “Fitness is Forever” sums it up well: change is a process, and it’s not the result that counts.

The first part is the hardest. It’s often 80 percent mental, 20 percent the action: in terms of achieving success.

So: set a lifeline, not a deadline.

Engaging in goal-seeking behavior in recovery as in life is the secret to being successful in having the kind of life you want.

Achievements are something to work towards not wait for. Wishing for things to happen won’t magically make the results appear.

This is the number-one reason I recommend writing down goals and reviewing them as often as you feel you need to. Do two things each day to advance yourself in the direction of your dream(s).

A reputable female researcher suggests a person should set challenging goals to have the best chance of obtaining them. Framing in your mind an outcome that is easy to achieve makes you less likely to take repeated action to go for it.

I recommend starting out by obtaining an easy win only because for most people diagnosed with schizophrenia there might have been so few wins in their life before they got sick. Once you rack up this win, you can act resilient to set goals slightly beyond your reach.

It’s your choice whether you keep your goal(s) private or share them with a trusted friend or family member. Either way is fine whatever you decide.

The key is to not quit. Setbacks are often only temporary on the road to long-term success.

Often a dream is no more than an intention you tell yourself in the quiet of your own head. The intention takes on a force of its own and your thoughts start to rumble, urging you on because to not do what you want to do isn’t acceptable anymore.

Try. And try again if you don’t succeed.

It took me 10 years to be able to publish my memoir.

No kidding.

I’ve created this WordPress site to better organize the themes from the Left of the Dial blogger account.

The Flourish page details information from my two non-fiction recovery books.

The Left of the Dial page excerpts scenes from my memoir and continues to be the source of upbeat, optimistic posts.

The Reviews page is the place for the ongoing book reviews and other reviews about things such as DVDs and other blogs.

I expect to fine-tune the writing here at the WordPress site to be consistent in when I post.

I strive to post on the Flourish page on Monday and Thursday. I strive to publish on the Left of the Dial page on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. I strive to post on the Reviews page at least once a week.

As always:

I’m happy to read your comments.

This blog will talk about techniques in my book.

I wanted to detail using binders. You can put your blinders on in a good way to be blind to the self-doubt that comes on.

The doubt will come on as surely as church bells chime out every hour in some places. The self-doubt is a part of life. To overcome doubt I recommend using binders to store information on different topics to keep you armed with hope and faith that you can do what you want to do.

I have binders for goals, recipes, fitness and fashion. The fashion binder is a look book of magazine photos I’ve torn out to refer to for possible outfits to create. The fitness binder contains Internet print-outs on health and nutrition. The goals binder documents the things I want to achieve throughout my life.

In Flourish I detail a specific strategy for setting goals.

I recommend using binders because they’re handy reference tools for quickly getting information at your fingertips to help you succeed in life.

Buy the ones with clear sleeves on the front and back so that you can insert inspirational quotes on the covers to read to be uplifted. Get tabbed dividers to section out each sub-topic.

I will talk shortly in the Reviews section of my WordPress site about a magazine that’s nifty for finding information to place in binders.

Each of us can use our doubt as a motivating force to be resilient and tackle new goals. Using the binders can help in this regard.

I’d love to hear from others who might use this technique. Has it worked for you? What else can you recommend?

My goal is to uplift and inspire readers that you can go to school or work and have a good life even though you live with a mental health challenge.

For those of us who are able to do this I offer hope because I’ve seen with my own eyes what’s possible.

One of my favorite quotes is from the Adidas store marquee on Lower Broadway in Manhattan: Impossible is Nothing. It’s a riff on challenging yourself to do what seems impossible, as if doing it is a piece of cake.

It’s not a piece of cake. Yet it can be done. As hard as life can get living with a mental health condition, it can be a good life often a better life at the same time.

In August 1990 I obtained a job as an administrative assistant to the director at an insurance firm. This was unheard of: for a person diagnosed with schizophrenia to be employed at any kind of job.

This risk paid off and I’ve been employed at jobs ever since.

That’s how I firmly believe if you want to go to school or get a job you deserve to try. A fortune cookie implores: “There is no shame in failure, only in quitting.”

It might take trying on different school majors or types of jobs before you’re able to find the one that’s a right fit with your personality and talents and what you’d like to do.

At HealthCentral, the editors cribbed something I wrote: “The only real failure is the failure to try.”

You can believe in yourself when others don’t. You can dare risk trying to do something and see how it goes. If at first you don’t succeed, you can try it a different way or change the goal to achieve something different.

Risking change can be scary. It can bring on self-doubt. That’s OK. Doubt can be a force that motivates you more so than a fear that deters you. Accept that the doubt will come on and remember the other times you tried to do something new and were successful.

If you haven’t tried this before, you might start out with a goal you can achieve and then progressively set the bar higher as you go along.

I’ll end here with the motto of Olympic champion Gabby Douglas:

“Dream. Believe. Achieve.”

This is easier said than done so my two books will give strategies for how to do this.

I can think of no better motto.

The concept of woodshedding goes back to December 2002.

Dr. John Strauss, Professor Emeritus of Yale University Medical school wrote an article in a newsletter about On Recovering From Schizophrenia:

“A lot of people with psychiatric problems talk about the importance of this kind of period of what we call ‘wood-shedding.’ That comes from the world of jazz, when a musician will go into the ‘wood shed’ when they’re trying to do something new. They’ll practice when out of the public eye. They’ll work things out by themselves.

When you see somebody or if you are somebody who has that kind of plateau, you don’t know that they’re going to stop there. In fact, it’s a fairly common thing that happens to quite a few people who then go on to improve significantly.”

Dr. Strauss admits there are no recipes and that different people do different things to help themselves and some people do opposite things, like spend time by themselves instead of with people.

A plateau is not the endpoint. There is no endpoint in recovery.

Only continual self-growth and the capacity for everyone to change their lives for the better in whatever fashion they’re able to.

Giving up on ourselves is not the answer even when others might not think we can recover. You can believe in yourself even when others do not.

Woodshedding. It’s something to think about.