Taking Care Of Business



We’ve been revisiting the basic concepts of confidence, self-worth and self-acceptance over the past few weeks. Before we wander off piste to visit whatever else pops into my mind, it’s probably timely to take a look at the concept of service and how that fits with the inner-directed process of building self-confidence.

Whether or not we later embrace any form of religion in our lives, our early conditioning by the authority figures of our childhood sets up a credo – or set of commandments – by which we are exhorted to think always of others. That in itself is fabulous. What isn’t so great is the way that is subtly translated into a belief that we should always put others first, even when that comes at great personal cost to ourselves. Then, effectively, we are in sacrifice, not service. There’s a competing voice we hear daily, too, that says ‘nice guys finish last’ – reflecting the fact that we’ve become a more or less permanent ‘me’ generation. No wonder we’re confused.

For many of us, learning to tread the fine line between service and sacrifice is a life-long challenge, as we ricochet between giving till it hurts and shutting down because we have nothing left to give. We treat taking care of ourselves as a selfish act and question if it’s OK to be successful when so many others have so little. It’s a moral and ethical debate that can paralyse us from action in the outer world and prevent us from maintaining even the most basic of personal boundaries. Until we develop clarity on our own concept of service, then we will wage this inner war with ourselves, bouncing back and forth between sacrifice and service.

Marianne Williamson – one of the greatest spiritual teachers of this age – addresses how she wrestled with these issues in her new book, The Age of Miracles, recounting “I woke up once to a late-night epiphany that shone like a neon pronouncement: that the key to human salvation lies in our living for each other … The line I heard in my head that night was not ‘give away everything you own’. It was ‘live for others’. And I’ve wondered what the world would look like if we did.

“We’ve been so thoroughly programmed to look out for number one, as though ‘me’ is so much more important than ‘we’. But the shift from living for ourselves to living for others is clearly the spiritual imperative calling humanity back to the garden. What, then, about healthy boundaries? Does living for others mean I’m going to give everyone everything – as in my time, my energy, my money, my heart? I’ve tried to do that … be the paragon of self-sacrifice … never having time for myself, making myself wrong for wanting to take care of me, always running around to please or do for others. And it got me nowhere. If anything, it left me angry, resentful, vulnerable to thieves and feeling much more stuck in a rut on my spiritual path as opposed to being sped up on it. Wrecked half the time, I rarely showed up as my best for anyone.

“Healthy boundaries are loving; they show respect both to the person who sets them and to the person who’s asked to honour them. I think it’s best to seek a balanced life, at peace with ourselves and our own loved ones; then when we do turn our attention to the world, we can bring so much more to it. We bring a higher version of ourselves. According to A Course In Miracles, sacrifice has no place in God’s universe. Taking care of ourselves in a righteous way is meaningful service to a greater task because we cannot give what we cannot be. From that space of peace and the moderate behaviour it produces, comes more than enough money and time and energy to give to the world. Service is very serious work, but co-dependency is not.”

If we have any hope of eradicating the concept that taking care of self is innately a selfish act, then what we really need to learn to do is to receive without guilt. Many of us are hard-wired to give constantly and have little experience in receiving gracefully – whether that’s the love of another, a gift or even something as simple as a compliment. What lies beneath that inability to receive is a profound lack of self-acceptance – and often a deep self-loathing – that deflects any incoming appreciation like a computer firewall bounces back spam. You might be being given plenty of love and support, but without self-acceptance, it’s impossible to take it in.

The relationship therapists, Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, were shocked to find that even when clients were given the tools to provide the support their partners had asked for, those same partners couldn’t accept the love they were being offered. As they wrote in Receiving Love, “Who wouldn’t be eager to accept the gift of love freely given? We never thought about the fact that the ability to receive love isn’t natural and inborn for everyone. We have since discovered that some lucky souls blossom and heal when they are offered what they need. But most of us have some trouble taking in affection, praise, support, compliments or gifts from others. For some reason we are not always able to swallow, digest and use this food for the soul. We can taste these morsels of love, but we can’t digest them as nourishment. Like many people with food allergies, we are left craving the very thing we cannot digest.”

Bottom line, we will have no sustainable ability to offer anything to the world until we can first learn to nourish ourselves, and the bedrock of that nourishment is self-acceptance and self-esteem. Unless we think we’re worth something, all the love in the world is wasted on us as we remain incapable of truly receiving it. Having a deep sense of self-worth is an inner process and not a function of how we appear in the world – it’s not about what you do for a living, how you look, who you know or what you have. It’s about being at peace with who you are.

Neale Donald Walsch, author of Conversations With God, describes meeting the extraordinary Ram Dass, who was left disabled, wheelchair-bound,and barely able to speak after a stroke. He says, “I met Ram Dass, after his stroke, in a hotel room in Denver, and I want to tell you something, I never met a healthier man. I sat in that room with a master. I said, ‘Ram Dass, how are you?’ And he sat in his wheelchair and took a long time saying the words ‘ I am wonder-ful’. That’s health … that’s peace, that’s joy. And when you have so much happiness and peace and joy that you spend your life sharing it with everyone you touch, that’s enlightenment. You have become a master. When your life is no longer about you, has nothing to do with you, but is about everyone whose life you touch, you have become a master. For in the end, that is why you came here. Not to somehow ‘get better’, not to work on yourself. Consider the possibility that all the work you will ever need to do on yourself is already done. All you have to do is know that. Then you will realise that the wonderful message from Conversations With God is true – ‘There is nothing you have to do, nowhere you have to go, and there is no one you have to be, except exactly who you are being right now’.”

This week, learn to live the paradox that seeming to be selfish can be a selfless act. Take time out to nourish yourself, choose to receive compliments gracefully, and think of yourself with love and compassion. While you’re doing that, you can begin asking yourself what you can do to live for others – what’s your special form of service? How can you share your joy with those you touch?

As a final clue, I’ll leave you with a little more guidance and wisdom from Marianne Williamson, who says “So how then do we live for others? The best I can come up with is that service is a way of being. It means I can make the person who just carried my bags into the hotel room feel how much I appreciate what he did for me. Tip him generously as well, of course, but match the tip with an attitude of honour for what he does. Both are important. It means that in any moment, as part of my spiritual practice, I can do what I can to show love and respect for the person in front of me.”

Become a master of the fabulous art of true service, not sacrifice.


Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link inthe Favourite Sites section on the rightor by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com.
For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk.
All material © 2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 4 Feb 08)

The Heart Of Confidence


Not sure why – perhaps it’s the whole January new start thing – but I feel moved to do a bit of a back to basics riff on the principles behind I Am Fab. If you’re a regular reader, you’ll know this blog is dedicated to promoting self-confidence and ways to enjoy an authentic, meaningful life – even if that’s not entirely evident at first sight! The topics may meander around all sorts of themes, but the general principal is that being exactly who you are is just fine. There’s nothing you need do to fix yourself. In fact, it’s precisely the opposite – the limiting beliefs you hold about yourself are what stand in your way.

Confidence and authenticity are byproducts of getting comfortable with yourself, not striving to become some idealised image of perfection. If you want to be happy with yourself and your life, letting go and learning to love yourself are the major keys to success. With a little self-awareness, it’s relatively easy to take a look at your own self-imposed limitations, but most people find the ‘loving yourself’ part the hardest. As one friend complained recently, “all those books tell you to love yourself, but nobody tells you how to do it”. I’m always up for a challenge, so here goes …

Get Over The Idea That Loving Yourself Is Selfish

Let’s face it, most of us had a less-than-ideal upbringing when it came to any sense of a positive self-image. When you’ve had your parents, your teachers and any kind of religious influence coming down on you like a ton of bricks for anything that vaguely looked like it was ‘selfish’, taking care of yourself is not going to be a natural skill. The Judeo-Christian concept of ‘original sin’ reinforces the idea that we’re all somehow bad, need to be punished and have to be taught to be good.

For those reasons, accusations of ‘selfishness’ are powerful ways of shaming and manipulating, so anyone who wants or needs to control you will be ploughing that field for all they’re worth. However, what’s really selfish is not taking care of yourself. When you do that, you’re playing the burning martyr game, where you appear to be in sacrifice but are actually getting satisfaction from the pity of others or from feeling like a ‘good’ person. Genuine selflessness does not give to get.

Loving yourself and taking good care of yourself means you’ll be relaxed and generous with others, because you’ve made sure you have a well from which to give. You cannot give endlessly without draining yourself and sacrifice isn’t really giving anyway – it’s just a strategy to get attention or to shore up a poor self-image.

Watch Your Inner Dialogue

How you speak to yourself is indicative of how much love and esteem you have for yourself. What’s chattering away in your mind when you look in the mirror first thing in the morning? What do you say to yourself when something doesn’t work out for you? If you’re critical, blaming and punishing in your self-talk, that’s a clear indication that you need to work on being kind to yourself.

The first step to self-love is simple self-acceptance. Start looking kindly at yourself in the mirror. Pay yourself a compliment rather than chip away at what you don’t like about yourself. If something goes wrong, go easy on yourself. Don’t start beating yourself up or blaming yourself automatically. Maybe it’s just not the right time or even the right situation for you. Learn to grow from your mistakes, not be paralysed by them.

Celebrate Your Successes

So few of us have any kind of positive habit of celebrating our achievements – most of us move from milestone to milestone looking back at what went wrong, rather than what went right. You cannot develop a positive sense of self-worth if you constantly focus on your failings rather than your successes. Learn to make a discipline of reflecting on what you’ve achieved, rather than what you feel is lacking.

You can do that by celebrating milestones as they occur or even having a daily habit of listing three things you’re happy to have achieved at the end of each day. You might even enjoy a practice suggested by Esther Hicks and Abraham, called The Book of Positive Aspects, where you write down all your successes and positive achievements in a notebook so you can return to them on days when you’re not feeling that great about yourself.

As a starter for ten, why not just think of three things right now that you’re really proud of, that brought you the most joy or that are major achievements in your career or private life? Get in the habit of thinking positively about the way you’re living your life.

Set Clear Boundaries

This one’s an overspill from the ‘burning martyr’ syndrome. A lack of healthy boundaries will kick you into sacrifice, leaving you feeling drained, exhausted and worthless. Failing to take good care of yourself in light of the demands of others simply reinforces that you believe other people’s needs are more important than your own. It’s hard to feel good about yourself when what you need or feel simply doesn’t matter – to you or anyone else.

Boundary-setting is not about putting up fences, but of holding a strong centre and reacting appropriately in the moment. It’s about trusting that you’re the authority in your own life and that you know what’s right for you. It means saying ‘no’, even when that might feel uncomfortable, because you trust your own judgement. Strong boundaries protect you from being manipulated by the inappropriate demands of others and they reinforce to the world that you value yourself. That’s vital, because, believe me, if you don’t, no-one else is going to do that for you.

Make Positive Choices

Loving yourself isn’t just sitting around talking nicely to yourself – it’s about action and integrity. If you’ve decided you want to lose weight and you stuff your face with fast food, that’s not a positive or loving choice. You’re out of integrity with what you’ve declared you want and you’re not supporting your own physical well-being. If you’re hanging out with people who are manipulative or hyper-critical, then again you’re not making choices that say to yourself that you’re worth loving. If you’re tolerating any kind of relationship that’s destructive, that’s a massive blow to your ability to love yourself and to your self-confidence and self-worth.

Take a look at how the activities and people in your life support your total well-being. Where are you out of integrity with what you want for your life? Are you living the kind of life someone else has mapped out for you? Are you moving forward in the direction you really want to go or are you holding yourself back because of limiting self-beliefs or another person’s opinion?

Trust Yourself

People with low self-esteem are self-abandoning. They follow what others insist upon because they don’t love themselves enough to trust their own opinions and intuition. If something doesn’t feel right to you, you need to honour that. You don’t actually owe anyone an explanation for the decisions you make, so even if it’s just a hunch, value yourself enough to trust that and live by your own lights. Following your intuition is a way of loving and valuing yourself. Stop second-guessing your instinctive decisions and learn to trust yourself.

By taking action in support of your own feelings and inner guidance, you’re sending a strong message to yourself that you’re worth listening to and taking care of. When you really embody that, you’re sending that same message out to the world, loud and clear.

Just Relax – Drop The Judgement

When you love yourself, you can be OK with yourself exactly as you are. You don’t feel like you ‘should’ be anything other than your true self and you extend that generosity of spirit to others as well, making you a very easy person to be around. Learning to let go of all the judgements you hold on yourself and others is the most freeing and loving thing you can do for yourself.

That means dropping perfectionism and examining all the beliefs you have about success, so that you can develop a healthy sense of success on your own terms. Don’t strive for what looks good to others – if it’s not that important to you, forget about it. Embrace freedom and spontaneity. That allows you to open to new possibilities and creative expression you may not have considered. Let your mind open to your heart’s desire, not just what you think you can achieve or what you ‘should’ aspire to.

This week you have a seven-point plan to work on to build your self-worth and learn to love yourself. Give each one a try and see the difference. It might not be an overnight transformation, but stick to it and you’ll soon be noticing that you’re treating yourself more kindly and building a strong foundation of self-worth. What could be more fabulous than that?


Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link inthe Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 21 Jan 08)

Scary Monsters

I love all things quirky and nobody does it better than Louis Theroux. He’s on a quest to expose the most eccentric forms of human behaviour, via his documentaries for the BBC, in his own curiously laid-back style. Last night’s programme focused on the modern plague of plastic surgery and – in the interests of understanding the addiction to going under the knife – he even had some lipo of his own. That’s above and beyond the call of duty in my book, but he does tend to do total immersion in his subject.

A woman of only 26 was a plastic surgeon’s receptionist, so she’d already had numerous procedures and was moving on to breast realignment, lipo for the love handles and a nose job only a few months after what seemed to be a completely unnecessary tummy tuck. Another woman went for a complete body makeover in the hopes of getting her astonishingly shallow boyfriend back, but the ones who scared me the most were the men.

One guy looked like he’d been stuck in a wind tunnel for years with a face that was pinned back so tight it was a wonder he could speak, but the saddest case was the man in his fifties who’d clearly had plenty of facial work, plus implants in his pecs, a tummy tuck and bicep implants to make his arm muscles look bigger. Louis’ very innocent style of interviewing lulled him into revealing that he’d been called an ‘ugly bastard’ by his stepfather for years and still saw himself that way, hence all the effort he put into sculpting his appearance. Although he’d had therapy, there was still an enormous gaping hole in his self-esteem that he thought plastic surgery could fill.

That poor man will probably spend the rest of his life – and his bank balance – trying to overcome his lack of self-worth by applying a cure that will never work. Nothing that is based solely on external appearance and approval by others will ever make a person with low self-esteem feel good for any length of time. It’s a quick fix that’s ultimately detrimental if it masks the need to address a lack of self-acceptance and self-love. Renovating the outer without taking a look at the inner is just throwing a bit of window-dressing over the problem, and the same issues will continue to erupt in your life no matter how much money you throw at them.

If you find it difficult to accept yourself as you are, by all means work on the outer issues that bother you, but never forget that the real work is done inside your own mind. It’s not always possible to forget the types of taunts that man endured as a child, but it is possible to transform the relationship you have with those kinds of memories. What matters is not what occurred, but what we make it mean about us.

We can choose to live as though unkind words are the truth about us, or we can choose to see them as thoughtless and insensitive comments from people who were incapable of acting kindly towards us. When we unhook ourselves from the belief that we were treated badly because we deserved it, we free ourselves to become self-accepting and ultimately to develop a degree of self-love. Then, what we think about ourselves becomes far more important than what others think of us.

As Phillip Moffit wrote recently in Yoga Journal, “Transform does not mean to fix or make go away whatever trauma and scars you may be carrying from childhood: instead, you slowly develop a new relationship with your difficulty, such that it is no longer a controlling factor in your life.”

There’s no denying it’s a process that can take some time, but when you liberate yourself from the stories you’ve been told about who you are – and have continued to tell yourself over and over – those emotional scars can fade away. Like all scars, they’ll still be there, but they’ll have much less power to affect you. Then you can begin the work of building your own self-worth from within and become the authentic self you were always meant to be.

The effect of this kind of confidence is best described by the Dalai Lama, who has said, “With the realisation of one's own potential and self-confidence in one's ability, one can build a better world. According to my experience, self-confidence is very important. That sort of confidence is not a blind one; it is an awareness of one's own potential. On that basis, human beings can transform themselves by increasing the good qualities and reducing negative qualities.”

Not just this week, but every week, try to excavate at least one lie about who you are from the vaults of your memory and see it for what it is – someone else’s projection. So often people don’t even remember the comments that have wounded us, because they were said in anger, in passing or simply out of plain spite, yet we take them to heart and wound ourselves over and over with those words.

Especially, don’t let the words of someone you neither liked nor respected steal your sense of self-worth. Learn to let other people’s poison wash away and keep your self-esteem intact. This goes as much for the present as for the past. Make your opinion of yourself the priority and let other people’s judgements be seen for what they are – reflections of their own insecurities, projected on to you.

Be kind to yourself with what you perceive to be your failings and learn to celebrate your good qualities. Know that out of some of our most painful experiences the greatest wisdom can grow. The poet Antonio Machado knew this when he wrote, “I dreamt last night, oh marvellous error, that there were honey bees in my heart, making honey out of my old failures.”

Dream some honey bees tonight and let your heart – not your surgeon – do the work.

Click through to the Coach Fabulous advice column by using the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right or by going to http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. For alert emails on new postings, email subscribe@iamfabulous.co.uk. To contact me, email coachfabulous@iamfabulous.co.uk. All material © 2007 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 8 Oct 07)

Seven Keys To Self-Esteem

My one healthy addiction – apart from the recent development of a worryingly fervent devotion to yoga, pilates and stretch classes – is Hay House Radio. When they start a twelve-step programme for people who spend too much time listening to spiritual radio shows, I will be queueing up at the door. In my defence, I must say that as addictions go, this is a pretty damn good one. Every week there are talk shows on everything from medical intuition to archetypes and six-sensory awareness, so if your interests are anywhere near as quirky as mine, you’ll be in seventh heaven if you tune in to www.hayhouseradio.com.

One of my favourite show hosts is Dr Mona Lisa Schulz, who is a medical intuitive and the author of Awakening Intuition. In her latest show she spoke on the theme of over-giving and the underlying issues which drive that particular behaviour. As she discussed the question of self-worth, she used a model of seven basic areas of self-esteem. Feeling good about your capacities in each of these areas contributes to a healthy foundation of self-worth. While Dr Mona Lisa only touched very briefly on each of these areas in her show, I’m going to add a bit of I Am Fabulous philosophy to the mix, to show you how you can take a wide-ranging look at strengthening your own sense of self-esteem and confidence.

The first category is feeling good about your physical desirability. This is about feeling comfortable with how you look, not striving for an unachievable level of physical perfection. There are myriad ways to explore this one, from the obvious options of updating your wardrobe, to taking dance classes to learn to feel more relaxed and sensuous, or even something as simple as just looking in the mirror each morning and saying ‘I’m fabulous’.

Most of us would assume that there’s no downside to this one – after all, don’t we all want to look as good as we can? – but an overwhelming focus on superficial attractiveness and how much we appeal to others isn’t a healthy basis for sustainable self-worth. Like every other area we’re going to cover, none of them are effective in isolation. What you need to be aiming for is a balance, where there’s some degree of strength in each of them, so that no single thing can become a fragile basis for your self-esteem. That way, when any one area takes a dip, as inevitably it must in the normal course of life, your confidence will stay buoyant because of the strong foundations you have across the board.

Then comes financial prosperity and your capacity to make money. Being able to support yourself well brings self-empowerment and a sense of achievement. The level of prosperity you prefer is, of course, a very individual choice. Some people are happy with lesser levels of income and others find that they enjoy life more with plenty of luxury. Know what suits you and don’t apologise for it. Whatever level of income appeals to you is perfectly fine – it’s your life and your choice. The hidden trap here is over-identification with the amount of money you earn as the source of your self-esteem. I can’t emphasise this one enough: it’s not the money that’s bad, it’s reducing yourself to feeling worthless unless your bank account is overflowing that’s the problem.

The third area is your vocation and how you help people. You’ve heard plenty from me on this subject, about how important it is for your self-confidence that your work reflects the truth of who you are. It is soul-destroying to continue to show up every day trying to be something you’re not or to subject yourself to an environment that is unsupportive or destructive to you. Equally, we all want to feel that life has meaning and part of that search for meaning is to find a way to use your talents to be of service to others. The trap here is when your job or status becomes your identity, to the exclusion of all else. When that happens, burnout is just around the corner. Also, hidden within this area is the caution to remember that you’re worthwhile as a person regardless of what you do and that you do not need to earn love. We all need to develop the capacity to feel loveable even when we are not being of service.

Then there’s the very important area of your capacity to communicate and skilfully express who you are in the world. This one isn’t just about being articulate, but about making genuine connections with others and to feel heard. The most artful conversation isn’t going to be fulfilling if you aren’t expressing what you really feel to someone who is truly capable of hearing it. Ways to explore this one are to find new avenues of creative expression, deepening your friendships or opening up your social circle to include people who express themselves in ways that aren’t your usual cup of tea. The downsides to this one are obviously any sense of superiority or conceit about your capacity to express yourself, or being more concerned with your own expression than hearing others.

Hard on the heels of communication comes another intellectual concept – feeling good about your intelligence, your personality and how skilful you can be in the world. Expanding your horizons on this one can be a powerful boost to your self-esteem, particularly if you’ve felt limited in your capacity due to criticism from others. Some really pervasive beliefs about ourselves derive from early childhood criticisms and limiting statements made by people in authority in our family or school environments. If you have lingering memories of being told you’d never be good at something, surprise yourself and give it a try. Overcoming limitations strengthens your capacity to believe in yourself and your ability to face whatever may arise in the future. Again, the trap on this one can be intellectual conceit. Emotional intelligence is just as important as academic intelligence and often those who are justifiably proud of their intellectual capacity have developed it at the expense of any real emotional literacy. We’re meant to be rounded human beings, not just talking heads.

Now for my favourite topic – connection to spirituality and a capacity to handle your life purpose. This one is no surprise, as a sense of purpose and meaning can help you navigate even the darkest of circumstances. There’s so much to explore here, from learning about different faiths, to really examining what your own beliefs are and how they translate into action in the real world. The flipside to the positive aspects of spirituality is an ungroundedness and lack of connection between spiritual principles and how your life is actually lived. To feel that you are fully on purpose, you need to know that your actions are in integrity with what you believe.
The final area is your ability to nurture others. We’re not just hanging out here on the planet for our own good. Part of the journey is learning to support others in ways that are healthy for them and not detrimental to ourselves either. Suffocating someone with your attempts to help can actually hinder them in developing their own strength, confidence and individuality. Equally, over-nurturing means that you have over-identified with the giving part of your nature and need to learn to receive, to allow for a natural flow of give and take in your relationships.

Now that you’re familiar with each of the areas of self-esteem, take a look at how they’re working in your own life. Assess each individual area to see if it’s working well or if you’ve tipped into over-identification in any particular one. Give each one a mark out of ten and see how much you’re in balance overall. If you’re out of whack, come up with a couple of activities you could do in each area to redress the balance. Look for things you could let go of as well, such as beliefs or limiting behaviours. Immediate action isn’t always the answer. You might need a little more reflection to be sure that the actions you’ve chosen aren’t just a few more things on the to-do list that you’ll never get around to – that kind of behaviour just erodes your self-esteem even more.

This week, don’t just do this one on your own. Talk to a good friend, express your deepest feelings and make a plan of action together, so you’ll have support when you need it. And make it fun – part of learning to like yourself is realising that you don’t need to be fixed, you just need to relax and be OK with who you are. This is an exploration, not a chore, so be willing to laugh at your own limitations and get on with creating a joyful, balanced and more confident life for yourself.

Coach Fabulous is updated every Thursday at http://coachfabulous.blogspot.com. You can also use the link in the Favourite Sites section on the right. For alert emails on new postings, send a blank email to IAmFabulousCo@aol.com with 'Subscribe' in the title field. All material © 2006 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 21 Aug 06)