Bernice Maria Paolozzi answers a few questions on how she lives her life

Eastern Culture found me in Ireland! In 1999 my ex husband and myself had a very successful media, printing and publishing company. When we separated my children were 2 and 7. I had to change my work and financial structure for work/life balance. So I had to re create myself. I began to do more project management.

I was asked to project manage an awareness campaign of a Hindu Royal Family High Priest from Indonesia Visiting Ireland. I was also asked to project manage an awareness campaign for a Prof. Buddhist Monk, Prof. Ringu Tulku www.bodhicharya.org visiting Ireland in 1999 looking to build a school and clinic for 2000 children in Tibet.

I had to study both Hindu and Buddhist methodologies in culture and medicine to be able to create the awareness campaign for the Irish culture audience and integrate both together. From those two projects I was invited to visit His Holiness the Karmapa www.kagyuoffice.org in India and the Hindu Royal Family in Mother Temple in Indonesia. I did both at Christmas Time of that year as Christmas Time can be a challenge for newly separated people so traveling supported my new growth in developing myself as a Single mother.

2. How have you integrated Eastern culture into your everyday life?

I believe once you travel to different cultures, listen and learn, you tend to bring the good photos, memories and culture ethics home with you that you felt while being in that country and then you decide to integrate it into your everyday life to make you a more pleasant interesting worldly person.

3. Your everyday life would be considered quite unusual. Can you give an example of your typical “everyday”?

I don’t believe my everyday life is unusual, I believe I live a very balanced health aware typical day. I believe from an Eastern point of view the everyday way westerners live is destroying their environment and physical bodies filling their environment and bodies full of chemicals.

The wonderful Dr Edward Group III www.ghchealth.org explains it this way:

‘Let’s pretend that your body is a car. Every 3000 miles or so you need to have your oil and filters changed because they’ve become caked with sticky black grunge from your engine. This build up of sludge forces your body to work harder to keep the car moving. All this extra work increases the wear and tear on your engine, and if something isn’t done about it, eventually your engine will break down’

So I believe this is what has happens with the western world’s bodies and environment. I have designed my typical day to consciously work on not ‘caking my body and environment with black grunge’. Eastern methods teach you to take total responsibility for your body, mind and environment. These disciplines go back over 5000 years and have been very successful.

I tend to be a very experimental observant person so have fun sitting thinking about ‘how does ink get out of a pen?’

4. How do your children react to your extraordinary achievements?

The children are now 20 and 14 and have traveled to most every culture in the world so they easily integrate, are very worldly and enjoy different cultural people, foods and environment.

They have no fear of the unusual.  I am very proud of both of them. They both love to get out there and experience everything at least once, so they are both high achievers.

5. You won a Stevie Award… was that in honour of your son?

I would say my son Stevie is an Award onto himself. Yes, we had some fun with the name of the award and it made him feel proud of his mam.

6. And your daughter is an upcoming model?

I don’t know about up and coming, I received a call from an old friend a while ago who said Nadia was being quoted as the Top Model for Ireland and now she has won best Model in Ireland with entertainment.ie Nadia cares for others, has high integrity, is open to new ideas, has a rare style, never lets doubt stop her doing what she wants, loves talking and sharing her thoughts, and has courage to try anything at least once.

7. What would you consider the most important thing Irish people could do right now to improve their financial circumstances?

Learn how to break through and not break down, I wrote an article to explain this called “Ireland’s current work life transformation” – copy enclosed. I wrote this article to support people to understand what was going on globally as I was hearing people saying “I don’t know what happening, I don’t know what to do”. It was like they were in a sea of confusion. Not a nice place to be. You can’t go forward if you don’t have clear goals and targets. You require to know your discipline and freedom in balance, to plan, prepare and then proceed forward to reach your goals.

Every one is going to go through different financial ups and downs. It’s the people that know how to breath through a crisis or “up, out and over it” that will be ok. A lot of people have forgotten they are just not their money. They started to believe they were their house, car, clothes, jewellry and forgot who they really were. That’s how the confusion started. People require to find their balance again and figure out who they really are and that they are not just of value to their friends, family, community by the material assets they own. People are much more powerful than that.

When I was in the EU Parliament last November  I was with 200 Asian adults and 54 multi cultural young. One of the young said ‘I am tired of the bank system telling me because I don’t have assets I have insufficient funds, I am tired of the banks telling me I have low credit so I can’t do the things I enjoy. I am tired of the bank system labeling me as blacklisted just because I didn’t repay my bills on their timing.’ This made me realise the current banking model and system was outdated and requires to be more human value and people-focused rather than paper pushing, computer graded, machine-focused which give a label to a person from a computer machine view. Humans have feelings and emotions. Machines are emotionless. So to me it is a bit crazy having an emotionless machine telling young people how they should be labeled in their society and community and the machine telling people what their financial value is according to a machine ranking computer system.

In the East your value comes from your wisdom of your achievements, expertise and experience in life. This is graded by other people, it is not graded by computer machines. So I do believe the western people have given their power away too much to Financial Computer Machines and they require to take their power back. And I do believe the Financial Institutions got a bit carried away with themselves and began to think they were some type of Untouchable Icons or Gods. I do believe it will be the young people now who will get us out of this mess and so we must support them first as much as possible. Ireland has a great advantage as it has the biggest population of young people for Europe. So we must support the young people now to achieve the goals and targets of getting us out of the Financial Mess. It is very clear the young don’t want to work with the Old Traditional Models and they want to create their own new financial Models and we all should support them in achieving that goal.

So it’s simple - we require to breakthrough not breakdown. We require mentors and masterminds with entrepreneurial skills around us now.

8.  What would be your advice for dealing with the immense challenges we are being faced with?

I would advise the following:

That’s each person’s individual choice, it can be 30 seconds, 1 hour, 1 day, 1 week, 1 year or never. A person’s position of strength or a country’s position of strength depends on every one taking immediate action to become their own best health care provider, their own best financial advisor, their own best family advisor. Taking total responsibility or doing the old fashioned blame game is a waste of time. Become a Positive Now Person, which means start thinking and being solution focused and not crisis, negative, drama focused. That is why I have recently spent the time to develop and create the iPositive Now information Hub so people can access the information and then go implement the tools and techniques on it in their daily lives right away. Do it right NOW.

10. Will you run for Mayor and President?

Sure, I will try anything at least once and if it doesn’t effect others in a negative way I will have more fun doing it !