There are many things in life that may seem out of reach now, but it must be realized that you never have to stop growing.  You must ask yourself what you want most in life.  Then set out to get it.

Appreciate Failure

It’s important that you understand and accept that you will fail many times when attempting to achieve any major goal.  It is the goals that are most difficult to attain that are most worth achieving.

Failure is merely a stepping stone on the path to great success.  However, it is up to you to decide whether you will take that next step beyond failure or go back to your humble beginnings.

Failure offers the opportunity to growth.  It brings with it wisdom.  It shows you a way that does not work and offers suggestions of ways that might.  Failure is a gift to the determined.  It is a gift that offers insight to a new world and a new reality.

Failure sheds light on a new area in your life that few would dare enter.  You must have courage to carry on in spite of initial failure, for subsequent efforts lie outside your comfort zone.

Stay Hungry For Success

While failure will discourage the average person, it offers new hope to those who are hungry for success.  This new hope lies in new-found wisdom.  Your failures are your greatest teaching tools.  They show you what you did right and what you did wrong.  By fixing some things that you didn’t do adequately enough to succeed, you will grow your power.

Your power is your ability to succeed.  With each failure, this power is tested.  The weak will turn around and yield to the power of failure.  The strong, on the other hand, will seize the opportunity to increase their power by adding to their knowledge and their character.

Build Strength in Character and Keep Growing

Carrying on with a mission after initial failure takes a strong character.  It takes someone with an inspired vision and an unyielding passion.  If you are going after your goal with a purpose, you will keep striving for the right path until you find it.

Remember, each incorrect path you take brings you one step closer to the correct path, as long as you don’t go down that same wrong path again.

Ultimate success in life is all a matter of allowing yourself to keep growing.  Keep adding to your wisdom.  Keep experimenting with new ideas.  Keep creating new visions.  Keep pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and challenging yourself to experience all that life has to offer.

Though your greatest goals may seem out of reach now, you have the ability to keep growing in order to reach them.

About the Author

Matt Maresca is a motivational entertainer and creator of My Life Motivation, a self improvement website dedicated to helping people discover their true passion to live life with a purpose. Matt’s focus is on beginning with building self esteem and self confidence to improve your life from within.

Read more in: Motivation, Personal Development.

The One Surefire Secret That Can Help You Succeed

Everyone wants to be successful in life but only a small percentage of people manage to become successful, why is that?

Is it because people don’t work hard? No, some people work really hard and they never reach what they want

Is it because they didn’t try?
No, lots of people tried to succeed and failed

So what is the secret to success?
And how can you become successful even if you face lots of obstacles in your daily life?

Ask any successful person about the secret of his success and he will tell you the same thing. Success is all about trying enough number of times until you manage to find out the right way that works

Need a proof?

If this sounds weird or if you want a hard proof that reaching success is all about trying enough number of times then read the following real life examples:

• Thomas Edison failed nine hundred ninety nine times before he succeeded in inventing the lamp On the 1000th trial!!!, right after doing that people asked him, how did you manage to bear all that criticism and keep going? He answered each time it didn’t work I never said “I failed” but I only said I discovered a new way how to not invent the lamp
• Henry Ford lost all of his fortune 6 times and each time he bounced back and rebuilt his empire.
• Walt Disney’s idea of creating a cartoon character called “Mickey Mouse” was rejected more than 5 times until he managed to find someone who supported the idea and then Mickey came to life.
• English novelist John Creasy got 753 rejection slips before he published 564 books and became a famous writer!
• Most people know that Warren buffet the richest man in the world made his money from investments but what the majority of people don’t about Buffet is that his tutor recommended that he chooses another career other than finance because he believed that it doesn’t suit him!

Maybe those people were exceptions?

Do you think that those people were exceptions and that you can’t be as persistent as them?

No they weren’t, because you did that too long ago! Remember when you were learning how to walk? How many times did you fall? Why did you keep going? Because it this point you believed that its possible and that’s why you never stopped trying

I want you to watch any child trying to hold a door knob for the first time, you will find that the child will hold the objects incorrectly many times before it manages to find out the right way.

That’s how the learning process works, we learn through negative feedback which means that we have to do wrong things in order to learn how to avoid our mistakes the next time

So why do people fail to succeed?

Those who fail aren’t the ones who don’t try hard enough
They aren’t the ones who are pessimistic
They aren’t the ones who don’t try

But they are the ones who give up after few failures because they don’t understand that reaching success is only a matter of trying and tying until something works for them.

If Walt destiny lost hope long ago Mickey, Disney land and the Walt Disney corporation wouldn’t have came to life and I wont have even mentioned his name in this post

Now imagine the kind of things that would never exist in this world if you gave up too soon!!

Success is all about the number of tires!
And if you need any more proofs just ask any successful person

Written by M.Farouk Radwan
The founder of http://www.2knowmyself.com, The Ultimate source for self understanding

Read more in: Guest posts, Personal Development.

Happy For No Reason

I’d like to offer you an review of a course I’ve recently gone through – the Happy For No Reason course by Marci Shimoff. As you know, being happy and motivated are some of the strongest features of my nature, and so it gives me a pleasure to suggest something you might really use to be happier.

What Happy For No Reason is about

The name of the course kind of gives the idea away – you can and should be happy, and there shouldn’t be a certain reason for that.

For some people this is more obvious than for others, but happiness is one of the basic things you have been given in this life. You don’t have to earn it (however it’s a popular belief that you do), it doesn’t need much effort to be truly happy (again, many people just refuse to accept how simple being happy really is), and making someone else happy doesn’t mean you’re giving your own happiness away – instead, you gain back just by seeing how your smile and attention can make somebody’s day.

Marci had done a great job of analyzing the most common reasons people feel unhappy, and results of her research are presented in a simple to follow guide. All the material is presented on audio CDs, but you need to work with the guidebook to record your thoughts and track your progress as you get used to being a happier person.

Seven Steps to Being Happier

Without giving too much away, I’d like to touch briefly on how Marci can help you.

All the material is organized into seven major steps to your happiness. These steps combine a few lessons each, helping you to take care of your mind, heart, body and soul and achieve a true transformation. There are happiness habits offered along the way, 3 for each of the seven steps. To help you gain an even better understanding of the material, Marci has taken interviews with her friends and colleagues on topics relevant to each of the seven steps. Some of the names you can easily recognize, while others may not mean much to you if it’s going to be one of your first courses – but either way the interviews are great because each one of them is an inspiration on its own.

If you had been reading books on personal development and had taken steps towards improving yourself and changing your views on life, you will probably recognize a quite familiar pattern of a complex, organized approach to becoming a happier person. Like all the other aspects of your well-being, happiness requires changes in everything you think and do, even though some of the changes may not follow the desired direction right away.

What to expect from the course

Marci’s work had been the best course I’ve taken so far (and the first one from Learning Strategies I’ve looked into), and I’m pleased to be able to recommend it.

I’m quite a happy person myself, so going through the course didn’t help me change overnight (especially since its’ advised that you take plenty of time, about a week for each step) into the happiest person on the planet. Still, it was great to learn a few new habits and to simply take the time to think more about being happy and making it possible for my family to feel happier too.

Even though the course focuses on all the improvements and positive changes, it invariably helps you address the negativity which prevents you from enjoying life as it is.  It is very important to firstly recognize the things which make you unhappy, and then to reassure yourself that hardly any of these things can prevent you from being happy in the long run. If you choose to be happy and agree with yourself to maintain your happiness, it will quickly stop being a task and turn into one of your most natural states.

So here’s what to expect from the Happy For No Reason course:

• if you’re unhappy or even plan miserable, you’ll feel better and learn the ways to gradually rediscover the joy and happiness once again.

• if you’re doing okay but lack the happiness spark in your life, you’ll certainly get an idea or two to go from feeling not-too-bad to a really-good kind of experience

• finally, if you’re mostly happy already – you’ll draw new inspiration from the interviews and get ideas on how to make happier someone who means a lot to you

I had spent a few weeks working on this course and definitely enjoyed it, especially the interviews. I’m not sure if it’s going to change your life and I can’t promise it will make you a happy person, but if you’re ready to take a few steps in this direction – who knows how far you will get? Good luck!

Read more in: Personal Development, Reviews.

It was a great lecture, and I enjoyed it a lot. I have heard about Tony before, and did read quite a few articles and posts on mind mapping. Finally, I really like the approach and use a software version of it for some of the creative processes of mine. But I’ve yet to read a single book by Tony, so it was great to hear all his most known sayings in person with vivid examples and explanations.

On creativity

Studies prove that babies and kids up to 3-5 years are the most creative individuals among most of us, they are 95% creative in solutions and reactions to life. As we grow, our creativity somehow drops. By the time we are students graduating from a college, we’re only 25% creative on average, and most of the adult life we’re only 10% creative.

Now, this is what many people say is normal. But I really liked Tony’s point of view when he said: normal is not natural.

Naturally, human creativity only grows with age. It is true! If we look at our history and culture, there are countless examples of people who created most important and influential works of their lives in their last, not first, years. Da Vinci, Verde, many others- they all spent their lives perfecting their art and their mind, only feeling ready for their masterpieces by the age which most people consider to be a hard rock bottom of their creativity.

On human brain and our activity

A revelation for the audience was that on average we use less than 1% of our brain’s abilities. Tony asked everyone to guess the percentage and we all had a quick discussion about it. I was the most pessimistic of my group with 3-5% activity range. I must say, less than 1% was a shock even to me!

So why not spend a bit more? Why not use this amazing tool available to us – our mind?

We take for granted the common limitations like the degrading memory or inability to constantly come up with creative solutions to our challenges. But once again, this normal situation shouldn’t be considered natural: if we only spend some time developing our mind’s abilities, consciously concentrate on getting better at creative thinking and writing, our mind will flourish and keep amaze ourselves and everyone around us with incredible results.

What it takes to be a genius

Not much, really! We all are quite equal when it comes to out potential for becoming the next world-famous genius.

Here are the two distinctive ways to tell geniuses apart from everyone else:

1. A genius has great and big daydreams.

Think and plan to make it big, don’t limit your future achievements by agreeing with yourself what’s possible and what’s not in your current situation. Your brain follows the images it sees or gets through self-affirmations, so unless you have big daydreams and plan to produce something incredibly powerful and useful for as many people as possible, you won’t achieve much.

Humble thoughts will get you even more humble results, so prepare yourself for achievements of your lifetime by daydreaming something massively good.

Example: Thomas Alva Edison  didn’t just dream of inventing a light bulb, instead he put all his knowledge and persistence together to invent a whole system of electric lighting to be used by all the mankind: light bulbs, electricity generators, electrical wiring and a range of sockets, plus much more. His vision of providing the light to everyone at any given time helped him make it through thousands of failed experiments before he finally made a breakthrough.

2. Genius works to make daydreams come true, to make them real

This is another thing not many of us pay attention to – it’s not enough to just have a vision, an idea which can potentially be useful. You have to be prepared to work on this idea, to make mistakes and face failures, to resist opinions of others and to persistently make progress towards your ultimate goal.

When you think about it, it does take a lot to be curious and unstoppable in a genius-like way – quite possibly, this is what makes some people successful and others unsuccessful – just their being faithful to their own daydreams!

Your brain needs a diet to stay active and healthy

If you want to make sure your brain stays active throughout all the years and increases its activity and potential instead of slowly degrading as you age, here’s some of the things you should include in your daily life:

1. Plenty of oxygen – this essentially means regular exercise

2. Sensory stimulation – be creative and re-discover your own senses – touch, smell, taste and see things as if you suddenly became a different, much more curious person

3. Lifelong learning – never stop discovering new subjects and expanding your knowledge – even if something is not directly related to your career, pick a topic every year to read a book about or watch an educational TV series on

4. Take plenty of rest – enough sleep, regular showers and relaxing physical activity when your mind gets distracted from its everyday worries – running is a great activity for this.

5. Friendship and love – be friendly and kind to people; make new friends regularly and try to stay connected with all the generations and not only your own age group; fall in love and enjoy this wonderful experience

6. Eat healthy food – nutrition is very important for your body and brain in particular

That’s it. Tony spoke of many more things which fascinated me, and I’m sure I’ll learn more as I read his works in the future (I’ve brought a book in mind-mapping which he signed for me during one of the breaks!), but these notes above is what I’ve taken home from that evening. Hope you enjoyed the article and will use some of the advice, I can see how even some of it can really make a long-lasting positive change in our lives.

Read more in: Personal Development.

• DLM: How To Get Better Sleep While Spending Less Time in Bed
• Whakate: What is Wrong with GTD?
• Whakate: The Closed List: Regaining Control Over Your Day
• Zen Habits: Sound of Silence
• Mark and Angel: 22 Tips to Increase Productivity

Hope you like these too, and if there are posts you enjoyed last week and would like to share – just post links in the comments area!

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’ve never seen anything like it before, nothing less than amazing!

EepyBird’s Sticky Note experiment from Eepybird on Vimeo.

Read more in: Personal Development.

It was bound to happen: I’ve joined Twitter! Some of you probably know that it’s a micro-blogging platform with tiny (up to 140 characters) updates you can leave through your browser or many specialized applications.

It would be great to get connected, so look me up:

http://twitter.com/PerfectBlogger

Please leave your Twitter name in comments below as well!

Read more in: Personal Development.

Sharing your knowledge, especially if it’s useful and unique, isn’t always easy. There are plenty of reasons why you should do this, but somehow it’s very easy to get stopped by negative assumptions. In today’s post, I’d like to share my opinion on sharing knowledge, and ask for yours in return.

Naturally, most of us feel competition. Even in your own team, you’re bound to think now and then of how good or bad your performance is compared to that of other team members. While this is absolutely natural, you shouldn’t let such a competition spirit get in the way of you sharing the knowledge with others.

The Truth About Sharing Knowledge

One of the worst things you can do is to refuse sharing the knowledge with your team. When you do this, you may have your own reasons, but even if you tell them, your peers would get their own, very different ideas.

One of the most common reasons for not sharing is the fear of losing your unique advantage. I used to think that it’s always best to have a unique skillset within a team, and never share any of the knowledge with others. The more you know of things nobody else knows, the better. Boy, was I wrong in such thinking!

The truth is, all the knowledge must be shared. If you think a bit longer, you will understand that no matter how good you are, if you work for a company and act on behalf of a certain team of people – this implies that everything you know or learn must be shared. You are paid for achieving collective results, and if this means teaching others how to do everything you’re capable of, then do your best and show them. You are not paid for making life harder for other team members just because you’re not feeling like sharing something.

Being open with your team and freely sharing anything you know is one of the major signs of you being comfortable where you are. Being a great team player depends on your comfortable participation in every process of such a team, including knowledge exchange. In addition to this, shared knowledge ensures your team stays safe should anything unexpected happen to you – even if you’re temporarily unavailable, your team members will be quite comfortable covering for you with the information you had previously shared with them.

There is a certain point in your professional life, when you suddenly see how most of your fears were really amateur. In fact, I’m sure that every fear you have about your job becomes silly at some stage of your career. Every single one of your fears can and will be smiled upon one day – you’ll look back and laugh how you were afraid of doing something so simple or easy. It’s just a matter of time and a subject to your ever-expanding experience.

Common Fears and How to Overcome Them

With this in mind, I’m going to save you the trouble of figuring out most of the competition fears which stop so many people from sharing their knowledge. I’m giving you the false statements similar to the ones I myself had once believed to be true.

Before we start: Using this opportunity, I’d like to apologize for my behavior to some of the people I’ve been lucky enough to work with in my career so far. I also thank you, for if it wasn’t for the support and guidance from some of you, I would have never changed for the better.

Here they are, the statements which you should never accept, long with my advice on how to act in every situation:

Fear of Not Having Unique Skills

False statement: If you don’t have a unique skill, you will no longer be needed in your team and will probably be fired.

Yep, that’s exactly how I looked at sharing knowledge at some stage in my life (the first years of my career, to be precise). Now, I admit that some companies support and promote such a behavior among their employees, but without cooperation and shared knowledge it’s impossible to have people function as a team.

My advice: Skills, not matter unique or not, can’t really be shared. They are your own ways of doing things, of applying the knowledge the most effective way. Your knowledge can and should be shared, but skills are always going to be yours – there will never be two people on a team with exactly the same skills, so you shouldn’t worry about it. If you explain everything you know to others, you will only gain wider acceptance as an authority.

Losing Your Roles and Positions Within a Team

False statement: If I give away everything I know, my services will no longer be needed as other team members will be doing everything themselves

My advice: if you have so much knowledge you worry about sharing it, you’re probably an avid learner. This means it will never become possible for you to give everything away, because you’ll be learning something new almost every day. If others start doing more based on the knowledge they get from you, this will give you a chance to work on new and perhaps more exciting projects.

You know what? Eventually there comes a time when you want to move on. When you’re no longer feeling like you’re giving most value by staying in your position and doing what you currently do. And guess what – until you have your knowledge properly shared, you won’t be able to leave your functions behind!

Another common way this happens is that you become so unique and so good ad your particular functions, that everyone else in your team wants you and only you to keep doing it! Sometimes your colleagues won’t let you work on other things just because this will mean you’ll have to abandon some of the common functions you’ve been doing so far. For them, it can be an unnecessary risk – nobody knows how good you’ll be at new things, but everyone knows you’re really good with your current functions. So, before you decide that you want to move on to something new, be sure to get into the habit of sharing.

Shared Knowledge Reducing Your Chances to be Promoted

False statement: If I share everything, I will never stand out enough to be promoted

My advice: you never get promoted based on the knowledge you possess, it’s always to do with your experience and results – both measuring your ability to apply the knowledge.

You can get hired partially because of your vast knowledge, yes. But promotions usually happen because you grow out of your position by accepting more responsibilities and doing more. This happens not because your professional knowledge grows, but because your become more aware of processes in your organization and recognize the potential for improvements. The higher you are in your career, the more personality-based your success is, and the less it is dependent on your professional skills. The value you bring to the team or organization is rarely based only on your knowledge of the processes, it’s increasingly more to do with how comfortable you are doing what you do and taking on new projects and challenges.

Sharing Knowledge To Be Successful

Sharing knowledge is one of the best things you can do to become a great team player and ultimately a leader. It is essential not only for the success of people around you, but for your own success in the first place. The more you share, the more people respect you. The more respected you feel, the more you’re willing to share. The more you give away, the more new opportunities come your way.

Perhaps my advices won’t cover every possible situation you can find yourself in, but they’re drawn from my own experience. I know how hard it is to learn from somebody else’s mistakes and not your own ones, but my advice stays the same – learn to share the knowledge, and you’ll thank yourself later.

Finally, if you recognize the common fears of sharing knowledge or have some of your own – leave them in a comment, I’m sure it will help someone.

Read more in: Mastering Habits, Personal Development.

The first edition of a podcast is now up, and it’s based on the 3 Rules To Help You Fight Procrastination article.

What is a podcast?

Podcasts are usually quite short (5-15min) audio recordings accessible from your website or through one of the many podcast catalogues. Podcasts are very similar to blogs in a way that they’re like an information channel which you can subscribe to, thus constantly getting the latest editions for you to listen to. Many blogs have grown their popularity due to podcast service; at the same time, many podcasts became even more successful than the original idea or a website which started them off.

How do your listen to a podcast?

Websites usually have some kind of a widget – an on-page audio player with basic controls (play/pause, seek and volume) which allows you to start listening to a podcast. For my blog, you will find a widget like this in the sidebar:

To get started, simply click the play button!

What can you expect from Personal Development blog podcasts?

There will be 2 monthly podcasts, initially going back and voicing some of my previous posts, but with a plan to start covering new articles.

Right now, it is planned to cover the posts from the website, which means podcasts will be yet another way for you to get the best of the information I have to offer. I think, however, that there’s nothing wrong with posting unique podcasts in the future – something which has never been posted on my pages before.

Tune in to the first edition, and let me know what you think!

Read more in: Personal Development.

This is a guest post by Mark McManus from MuscleHack.com. Mark is a muscle and nutrition enthusiast who has spent years in independent research finding the most effective strategies for building the body of your dreams. Mark will help you build muscle & lose fat. He is the author of the book ‘Total Six Pack Abs‘, the guaranteed system for burning fat & sculpting chiseled abs.

There is something you can do which can improve virtually every area of your life.

Weight-training

You say, “Weight training can enhance my quality of life?” Yes it can.

Any fitness program can, but here’s a few brief reasons why weight-training beats them all…

1. Less fat, more muscle. Weight training burns calories all day long. You’ll lose fat and build muscle. Ladies, you’ll get that toned look. Fellas, you’ll be brawnier and more defined. With resistance training, it’s not just about weight-loss but about body recomposition, losing body-fat and gaining lean muscle tissue.
2. It’s not exhausting. Long-distance running, for example, is fatiguing to say the least. If you workout correctly, you can be in and out of the gym in 30-45 mins max, taking 2 minute breaks between sets.
3. Increased Strength. Weight-training obviously beats them all for strength gains, this can come in handy in your every day life.

Ok, with that said, how can training like a bodybuilder improve your life in general? Glad you asked.

Here’s 5 ways weight training can enhance your quality of life:

1. More energy – Energy begets energy. People tend to see the amount of energy they feel as only a result of calorie intake. However, you know as well as I do, that movement and activity make you feel energetic. Lack of movement makes you lethargic, regardless of how much you eat – it’s simply a fact of physiology. Movement in the form of exercise, causes the desire to move more, creating a positive feedback cycle of energy and enthisiasm. With weight training, you’ll perform brief workouts almost every day which ensures that you’ll feel vibrant and passionate in all other areas of your life!
2. Excitement – As readers of this blog, you know all about goal-setting. However, how many of your goals produce quick, tangeable results? Using an effective workout plan can produce remarkable results. In a few short weeks you can see your body change before your eyes! I don’t know of many things more exciting than that.
3. Confidence – Looking good makes you feel confident. It’s not vanity, it’s empowerment. Apart from the fact that your physical body will make you feel confident, you’ll begin to ask yourself, “If I can control my body with the conscious use of my will, what else can I control?” This is the beginning of unbounded confidence and a mental attitude that will propel you to success.
4. Sexual attractiveness – No point in dodging this one. Your physical appeal and magnetism will increase. That’s great news for single people and also great news for the spouses of those of you in relationships ;)
5. Better Health. Here’s some health benefits of weight-training:
   • Increased muscular strength
   • Reduced body fat mass and increased lean body mass
   • Strengthened tendons and ligaments
   • Positive changes in lipid profile (cholesterol & triglycerides)
   • Improved bone strength and density
   • Improved glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity (warding off diabetes)
   • Increased metabolic rate – You’ll burn more calories even when resting
   • Decreased blood pressure

So what are you waiting for? You can get your free workout plan here, get started with a bodybuilding diet, and head over to the bodybuilding forum anytime where you’ll meet people who’ll be glad to offer help and support.

Read more in: Personal Development.

Here’s a link: Exam Success: Top Tips from Brilliant Blogs (I’m really honored to be among the brilliant company there, thanks for including my tip!)

Read more in: Personal Development.

I’ve been using the Evernote organizer for quite some time, it’s the best offline organizer I’ve seen – even the free edition. You can create, organize and easily search notes with text, web clips, images, handwriting and even digital ink!

Evernote guys have been working on online version of their organizer for the past few months, and have released the Evernote service as a private (invitation-only) beta. There’s a browser version of the service with web-clipping add-ons for typical browsers, and there are clients to access the Evernote Beta from Windows and Mas OS X.

For today only, the Giveaway of the Day site is doing a promotion of the Evernote products: you can download the latest full version of their Evernote 2.2 organizer (full version means you have a functionality which automatically recognizes and indexes text in all the images of your notes in Evernote, among many other improvements), and – the best news – you can get an invitation to the Evernote Beta service!

I’ve already activated my account, and you have 15 hours left to do the same if you’re interested. If you’re after the traditional Evernote software (regular price is $49.99, by the way!), be sure to download it right away as it has an activation which will only work for another 15 hours.

If you want to avail of these amazing offers, please go to the Giveaway of the Day: Evernote beta page.

Read more in: Personal Development.

“The more man meditates upon good thoughts, the better will be his world and the world at large.”
- Confucius

We all have a voice inside our head that chatters to us constantly about the day-to-day situations we find ourselves in. It’s one of the main ways that we interpret external data by constructing conversations internally with ourselves. Although we all have this voice (or more often than not, several different ones) we have our own particular versions, some of which can be more helpful than others.

Does your voice support and encourage you when things aren’t going quite as planned or does it become aggressive, whiny, rude, pessimistic and thinks nothing of tearing a strip off you? Is it often far more hostile and abusive to you than you ever would be to other people?

I once heard this voice likened to that of a bad tempered, miserable, old duck! Yes that’s what I said, a duck. Close your eyes and you can hear the voice in your head now quacking away at you. You may not have noticed it’s duck-like aquatic qualities before, but now you can. Do you know why you can? It’s because inside your own head you can hear whatever you want to hear. You can of course hear your own voice in whatever tonality that you care for, or if you’d prefer you could be listening to yourself in the dulcet tones of Jimmy Stewart or James Earl Jones or even Oprah Winfrey. The options are as limitless as your own imagination.

So with all the people to go at, why on earth would anybody ever pick the desperate duck? That’s a real tough question to answer. I regularly have people tell me that there isn’t any voice inside their head in the first place and I usually respond with “So you’re dead then?”

The fact is we have had years to perfect our quacking and it happens so quickly and so unconsciously that many people have stopped noticing it. We mess up at something and the voice is sitting there in the background ready to chime in “Quack, you’re a failure, you never do anything right, you’re an embarrassment.” Even when something goes well it can still undermine with “Quack, you just got lucky, wait until they find you out.” It’s so insidious and so good at its job that it’s barely noticeable, but the overall negative effect on you can be enormous. It has a drip-drip effect that serves over the course of time to make you believe that what it’s saying is true. Which in turn makes it so. It sets your own reality for you. That’s what I said; a duck sets your reality for you.

So maybe it’s about time to shut the duck up or at least make him or her a little bit more friendly and supportive. We do need a voice inside our head, so let’s pick one that we like. You can drop the duck or whatever you have now and chose a voice that makes you feel good. We still want to be able to get the message across, so don’t make it so chilled and laid back that you never take any notice of it. You can even choose two, three or as many voices as you want for different occasions. The only criteria being that the voice should always support you, always be helpful, never aggressive and it never puts you down.

Wouldn’t that be great, a voice that treats you with the respect that you deserve, the kind of respect that you like to offer to other people? If you perfect this, and it does need practice to break some embedded habits, then I guarantee you will feel a great deal better about yourself.
Question: What does your duck say to you?

If you have enjoyed this article you can buy Tims book in either Hardback or eBook format at www.adaringadventure.com or read his blog at http://www.adaringadventure.com/blog/wordpress

Read more in: Personal Development.

Did you know that 2 out of 3 people have no idea what their personal strengths are? Top achievers, in contrast, fully recognise their talents and develop them into strengths on a regular basis.

If you were looking for a chance to make a giant leap in self-improvement, then I’ve got great news for you!

It just so happens that Warren Davies from Strengths Research is investigating the effect of personal strengths development on happiness, and is offering everyone a chance to participate in his research.

I think a chance to recognize my personal strengths and be able to benefit from them the most for the rest of my life is definitely worth an hour and a half of my time, so I’ll probably participate.

What is Strengths Research about?

The experiment involves identifying your personal strengths using an online questionnaire, and then using some of these strengths in new and different ways for one week, to see if this has any effect on how you feel. In previous studies, people became happier and less depressed when doing this, and I expect the same to happen here. You will be sent all the instructions and all the questionnaires you need by email, which you will complete and email back to me. Upon completion of the experiment, you will be entered into a prize draw to win £30.

What you are required to commit to?

1. Complete some questionnaires taking around 1 hour
2. Use your personal strengths in different ways over a period of 1 week (full instructions will be given for this)
3. Complete some questionnaires at the end of the 1 week period, taking around 20 minutes
4. Complete some follow up questionnaires in 1 month, taking 10-15 minutes

What you will gain from Strengths Research

1. You will be entered into a prize draw to win £30
2. Knowledge of your personal strengths
3. In previous experiments in this area, people were found to be happier, less depressed, and experience more positive emotions

If you are interested in taking part, contact Warren at strengthsresearch@yahoo.com and he will send you the questionnaires and all the information you need to get started. For more information, check the strengthsresearch.co.uk website.

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Framing questions in a positive way is a must-have skill for anyone who plans to be successful. Asking positive questions requires some discipline before you feel how they help you be more effective, and it takes time to learn to see the good side in everything, but I’m going to make it all a bit easier for you.

Today I’d like to share with you some principles which are key to positive questions. If you believe you don’t know how to ask anything in a positive way, let’s see how I can help you. If you can relate to anything written below, please leave a comment – I’d love to discuss positive questions in more detail and your opinion will definitely help me identify future topics.

Learn to see the good side of things

One of the most basic things, seeing the good side in everything, may be tricky if you never tried this concept before.

How about this: every problem is a challenge, and every challenge has a good reason behind it. We just have to look really hard to see it, and one of the ways to do it is to simply start with – you guessed right – simple but positive questions:

• What is good about this?
• What is the positive way to describe it?
• What is the best thing I can do right now?
• What benefits does it give me?
• What can I learn from it?

These questions can and should be asked about any challenge you find yourself facing. The most important rule for them is this: by definition, positive questions get only positive answers. If some negative thought tries to get into one of your answers – throw it away. Positive question accepts only positive answer! No exceptions.

Example of Positive Questioning

At work, you are given a task which you don’t understand. The result isn’t clear, but the stakes are high and the deadline is very real. There’s the typical pressure, and this naturally makes you nervous.

Positive questions may help you turn this whole situation around, and here’s how:

What is good about this situation? It’s a challenge. The stakes are high – which means you will get rewarded when you get it done.

What is the positive way to describe it? It’s an opportunity for you to learn something new, get a very important task done and recommend yourself as someone people can count on.

What is the best thing you can do right now? You should talk to your boss or your colleagues to confirm what exactly the task is. Just full understanding of the task alone will make the task much easier to accomplish.

What benefits does this assignment give me? Plenty: you will acquire some new relevant knowledge. You will boost your confidence level when you accomplish such a tricky task. You will earn the trust of your colleagues. You can even get promoted for doing something like this!

What can I learn from it? Once the task definition and a list of objectives are confirmed, you should be able to list a few new things you will learn from working on it. Sometimes it will be knowledge specific to your field, in others you will only acquire or improve general skills like problem solving, project management basics, communication skills, improve your brainstorming or presentation skills. When you put this into perspective – that any challenge, no matter how negative it seems, teaches you something new and useful – it starts meaning a lot.

Learn to see the good side of things! If you’re given a challenge, look for ways to get maximum benefit from it, not how to get rid of it with minimal embarrasment.

Ban all the negativity

That’s right! Agree with yourself to not tolerate the negativity anymore!

First of all, you should stop yourself from being negative. This includes, but is sadly not limited to, the following things you have to stop:

• calling yourself stupid, slow, fat, ugly, or anything else
  Simply stop doing this, once and for all. Remember: every time you say something like this to yourself, you’re reassuring your mind of the partial truth in what you’re saying. And since we ALWAYS exaggerate the negativity in such exclamations, you’re slowly but surely making things only worse. Stop!

• using negative affirmations
  This is simple. Every time you need to give an answer to any question, give it whichever way you want, but don’t use the negative affirmations.If you’re asked for a name of a friend which you can’t remember, instead of saying “I can’t remember”, say “Let me think, I should definitely remember”.If some question seems to hard to answer, instead of getting back to the “I can’t” right away, use every way possible to reassure yourself you can answer it. The reality of most challenges is that they’re only challenging because of some situtional constraints. You may not be able to give a definite answer only because you’ve forgotten an important name, however you may now the rest 90% of the story. Still, instead of explaining it, you would rather say “I don’t know”.

• reporting positive progress in negative terms
  That’s a very common issue for everyone. We tend to use negative words in reporting any kind of progress, thus diminishing the little positive steps in the right direction.If your goal is to lose 5kg, and you’ve lost 2kg so far, you’ll more likely to say “I’m still too fat” than “I’m in great shape and almost hit my target”.It’s unbelievable how much insecurity we plant in our minds by simply not recognizing the success we’ve already seen.If you haven’t finished 2 tasks out of 5 on your list, instead of saying “I haven’t completed 2 tasks of 5″, say “I’ve got 3 major tasks out of the way! 2 more to go”.Wording is everything. Don’t let the negative terms make your accomplishments smaller than they really are!A well-known example: a visit to a physician. Given the same situation, one of the doctors might say “75% of people in your situation recover without any problem”. The other one could give the same piece of information by saying “25% of patients in your situation never make a recovery”. Can you guess which diagnosis most people would like to hear, and which of the two physicians they like prefer talking to?Yo see, the same information sounds and makes people feel very differently depending on the words used to deliver the message.Stop using negative affirmations! There are no things you can’t do and no things you don’t know. There’s only a bit more time you may need to concentrate on improving yourself or thinking how to best present the solution.

Look for new angles in each challenge

Next time you find yourself in a dreadful situation, take the time to recognize all the possible ways to look at it and extract something useful out of the experience.

The most important thing about recognizing the good about seemingly bad is to expect the positive outcome, to look for this with a certainty. Something positive has to be in any situation, and that’s what you need to do – find it.

Now, I’m not suggesting you try to fool yourself. When the situation looks awful, don’t pretend everything’s great if you don’t believe it. But find just one good reason to go on, and settle on it. Don’t expect this reason to outweight all the negativity of the challenge. In many cases, it won’t be possible.

But working out the habit to see good in everything you do, recognizing the positive possibilities no matter how small they are compared to the rest negativity is exactly how you eventually learn to look at each and every challenge from the positive side.

Eventually, you will learn to see the good instantly, and feel like you really have to try hard to understand what can be so bad about each situation – you will turn things around in your mind.

Read more in: Personal Development.

Leo Babauta from Zen Habits hase once again proved to be one of the most brilliant people I’ve ever had the privilege of reading. He has lifted all the copyrights from his posts and his recent e-book, Zen To Done (buy it here) and wrote about this in his recent post: Open Source Blogging: Feel Free to Steal my Content.

It’s a brave move, and one with quite a few cons which would seem obvious to any seasoned blogger: people can steal his every article and repost it without giving Leo any credit for it, such reposting will likely hurt his website’s rankings in search engines and search results. Someone could reprint his book and never even mention him, let alone pay him for his wonderful writing.

Still, Leo found his own reasons for releasing all the content, and preferred to worry about potential problems when they actually happen (or maybe he decided not to worry about them at all). I regard this as a definite sign of a true greatness. Leo focuses on writing his content and helping as many people as he can, and if sharing all of his wisdom for free hurts his website rankings or makes him earn less, he is willing to accept this.

In his post, Leo says that he would prefer for people to give him credit for using his works, but if it’s about money – they don’t have to pay him anything, and he will be happy simply knowing that some part of the money they make goes to some good cause.

Leo admits he’s no Shakespeare, but I can clearly see he takes every right step to becoming a truly admired and well-known author – someone who writes for the people, not for the editors, and aims for the greater good for all, not higher e-book sales.

Leo has inspired many bloggers to start their projects or to change the way they blog. His blog is one of a very few which I always have the time and motivation to read in my Google Reader. He is one of the leaders in personal development community, and has a very recognizable style to his posts, indeed bringing simplicity to many of the questions and challenges in our lives.

Well done, Leo! I’m sure your blog will do just fine. Keep the great content coming, and if you ever write another book and decide to sell it, I’ll buy it again. Your credit, your popularity and your thousands of readers and followers are well deserved. Thank you!

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I hope you all had a good Christmas break, and welcome you to the new year of 2008!

Everything suggests this will be an exciting year full of positive changes, and I wish you to have the courage to dream and follow your dreams!

I’m excited to be back, and will start posting new articles later this week.

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I still enjoy reading your posts, and just realized that I would really like to stay connected with many readers and friends found through this blog. One way of doing this is using social networks. I’m a member of a few communities, and if you ever decide to join one of them – I’ll be happy to see you in my friends list.

Here are just a few ways for us to stay in touch:

StumbleUpon

I’m not as active there as I used to be, but still enjoy a lot of traffic generated by my SU friends and never miss an opportunity to thank them for doing this by bookmarking and sharing their posts and websites. Visit me here: http://nightly.stumbleupon.com

9rules

I’ve been a member of the 9rules network for more than a year, and with the recent upgrade the website has grown to be much better in many ways. I think the productivity community is great, and I’m proud to be a part of it!

My 9rules profile page: http://9rules.com/member/967

Flickr

Another great website where I have many friends. I also quite like browsing the most recent and most popular photos there, it really helps to stay connected. I hear professional photographers do not always approve the taste of Flickr users, but still find tons of photos which are far better than anything I’ve done to the moment.

My flickr page: http://www.flickr.com/photos/greys

Facebook

Facebook is the most recent addition to my social networking, but the most fun one as well. I really enjoy meeting new people and staying up to date with all the recent developments in the lives of my friends, and Facebook is great for this.

My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/people/Gleb_Reys/655301784

LinkedIn

I use LinkedIn mostly for business contacts – that’s where many recruiters approach me regarding my Unix skills and availability, and that’s also how I stay in touch with others in the same industries – blogging, Unix, personal develoment.

If you have a LinkedIn account and want to join my network – please do: http://www.linkedin.com/in/greys

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Typical blogging questions

- what’s better – a blogger.com account or my own domain and blog?
- how to find best hosting?
- what blogging software to use?
- how to optimize the blog for search engines (SEO)?
- how to upgrade the WordPress blog?

These and many other inquiries regularly arrive to my inbox from new and seasoned bloggers all over the world. I’ve helped many people fix existing problems or start new blogs, and gradually this led me to an idea of making our lives much easier.

I’m considering offering a blog hosting service with PersonalDevelopment.ie, and would like to hear your advice on whether such a service will interest you.

Do-It-Yourself hosting

You can reate a new blog as a subdomain of PersonalDevelopment.ie, something like http://yourname.personaldevelopment.ie. You get to choose the exact name for the blog, and most likely you’ll have an installation of WordPress to manage on your own.

If you simply want to benefit from having a good-looking and relevant domain name, and will happily maintain your copy of WordPress installation, this will probably meet your expectations.

Managed hosting

Very similar to the previous option, but I take the WordPress management off your hands – I will carry out coordinated (by email) upgrades of WordPress for your blog, will upgrade plugins, etc.

If you want to concentrate on your content and the value your blog will bring, but keep the peace of mind – that’s the option for you.

Managed hosting – your own domain

If you like the idea of someone managing your blog and keeping it up to date, but would like to stay with the domain name you already own, this should be possible for us to arrange.

Migrate existing blog to PersonalDevelopment.ie

If you already have a blog, and would like to migrate it to either of the above plans – I will be working with you to ensure your old blog redirects all the requests to their new location in a SEO-friendly manner.

This post is merely a request for your comments. If there is enough interest, I will present a full offer at some later time, but I want to make sure it will cater for all your needs and concerns, hence the questions :) If you believe you will benefit from any of the services above, please tell me why, and possibly hint how I can make it all work even better for all of us. There can be free and paid options available, as I’ve got a few ideas on this.

I can’t promise anything at this time, as there’s quite a few things to work out – personal and technical, but when there’s a will – there will be a way :)

Questions?

Have you got any other ideas on hosting your blogs with PersonalDevelopment.ie? Are you interested in one of the options I’ve listed? Do you have any questions? Please ask in comments or contact me directly.

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FINALLY I’ve got around to updating the Personal Development page at the Million Dollar Wiki.

It was great to hear everyone’s opinions and definitions of personal development, and I believe the What is Personal Development group project to be very successful – it served the purpose and joined our minds to find that wholesome description of what personal development is and isn’t about.

Needless to say, the project highlighted quite a few areas of my own improvement and development, and I’ll be sure to use these skills when starting and hosting my next writing project.

THANK YOU ALL for participation!

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Please be sure to contact me when your post is up: trackbacks don’t always work and sometimes your emails are the only way for me to know and be able to share your thoughts with others.

Thank you for submitting your entries!

This week saw only one post, but I like it very much:

• Three Steps of Personal Development by Lyman from Creating A Better Life

There was also two definitions left in the comments area:

Andy from Ego Development said:

Personal development and investing in your person is the most profitable investment to do.
We all wish to grow satisfaction and success in our personal carrier , to reach happiness and peace in our personal and family life as everyone desire but few find it …
Personal development is hard work, so don’t look for shallow quick fixes. Instead here you will learn practical ideas to make important changes in your life, both big and small, so you can get your life on track and start living up to your true potential.

and Mike from Magic Hats said this

To me, personal development is:

If you ever wish that you could do something better, you need personal development.

If you ever wish you didn’t have a particular bad habit like biting your nails, over-eating or smoking cigarettes, you need personal development.

If you ever wish you had more nerve, courage or enthusiasm, you need personal development.

If you ever wish you didn’t get so nervous in certain situations or with certain people, you need personal development.

If you ever wish you could concentrate better or be more objective, you need personal development.

Thanks for these great definitions, guys!

Here are all the links to previous weeks:

• What Is Personal Development by Maria from Never The Same River Twice
• What Personal Development Means To Me by Lorraine from Powerfull Living
• Self Improvement by Marco from Self Improvement Emporium
• What Personal Development Is To Me by Rick from Shards of Consciousness
• Personal Development: An Inspired Journey Along A Road Less Travelled by Simone from Outfit Inspirations
• What Is Personal Development by Tejvan from the Sri Chinmoy: Inspiration blog

The deadline for submitting your entries is October 31st, 2007. This means that I’ll keep posting all the submissions every Friday until the end of this month.

Thanks for your help and attention so far, and hope to see more of your submissions soon! The more people participate, the better definition for the personal development we will end up with.

Read more in: Personal Development.

Please be sure to contact me when your post is up: trackbacks don’t always work and sometimes your emails are the only way for me to know and be able to share your thoughts with others.

Thank you for submitting your entries! I really like this week’s ones:

• What Is Personal Development by Maria from Never The Same River Twice
• What Personal Development Means To Me by Lorraine from Powerfull Living
• Self Improvement by Marco from Self Improvement Emporium

And here are the previous week’s ones in case you missed them:

• What Personal Development Is To Me by Rick from Shards of Consciousness
• Personal Development: An Inspired Journey Along A Road Less Travelled by Simone from Outfit Inspirations
• What Is Personal Development by Tejvan from the Sri Chinmoy: Inspiration blog

I would like you all to have enough time to think about personal development and submit your entry, and so I’m thinking of leaving this writing project open for a few weeks. The deadline for submitting your entries is October 31st, 2007. This means that I’ll keep posting all the submissions every Friday until the end of this month.

Thanks for your help and attention so far, and hope to see more of your submissions soon! The more people participate, the better definition for the personal development we will end up with.

Read more in: Personal Development.

Please be sure to contact me when your post is up: trackbacks don’t always work and sometimes your emails are the only way for me to know and be able to share your thoughts with others.

Thank you for submitting your entries. I knew the topic was vast, but the submissions so far proved it to be even more overwhelming than I expected. Have a look for yourself:

• What Personal Development Is To Me by Rick from Shards of Consciousness
• Personal Development: An Inspired Journey Along A Road Less Travelled by Simone from Outfit Inspirations
• What Is Personal Development by Tejvan from the Sri Chinmoy: Inspiration blog

I would like you all to have enough time to think about personal development and submit your entry, and so I’m thinking of leaving this writing project open for a few weeks. The deadline for submitting your entries is October 31st, 2007. This means that I’ll keep posting all the submissions every Friday until the end of this month.

I know some of my friends will definitely been writing their thoughts on personal development pretty soon: Ed Mills, Lorraine Cohen and Mark McManus. The more people participate, the better definition for the personal development we will end up with.

Thanks for your help and attention so far, and hope to see more of your submissions soon!

Read more in: Personal Development.

How does this make your experience on Personal Development even better? Here’s a show intro:

Better Comments

Not only do your comments look a bit better now thanks to restyling, but they also support avatars!

Since this blog is often visited and commented by members of the MyBlogLog communities, your avatars are now magically shown in every comment you leave. How cool is that?!

Ratings for each article

For every single post, there is now a way for you to show me how you liked it. Needless to say, such an attention from you will be invaluable to me and will be greatly appreciated.

Ratings look like a set of starts which you can move your mouse pointer over and click once the desired selection is made. These stars appear automatically on individual posts pages at at top of each article. You can also see immediately whether others liked the article, and how many people have chosen to share their opinion so far (it’s just the starts – no comments and no names, so you can be honest and unbiased in your ratings).

Let me know what you think. If there’s anything else you’d like to see changed/improved about this blog – just leave a comment and I’ll see what I can do. Thanks!

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I’ve been thinking about the topic for it a lot, and after many great ideas which will undoubtedly be expressed in the future group writing projects, I’ve finally realized that it’s hard to find a better question than the one I get asked by many people on a regular basis:

what is personal development?

So that’s the challenge for this writing project. Please think the question over and come up with the best definition of personal development in your book. There are no limitations – you can have a lengthy article about it or sum it all up in just one sentence – I’ll be interested in any opinions I will get.

Why I do this

You have probably heard about the Million Dollar Wiki project. It’s a wiki project which sells pages for $100 each, and has a limit of only 10 thousand pages to be sold. The aim of a project is to build a collection of most useful pages on popular topics. And I’m positive that Personal Development is one of them.

I have purchased my Personal Development page on that wiki a while ago, and would like to make it a hub of the most useful links to everything about personal development.

I obviously can’t do the justice to such a vast topic on my own, and that’s why I think I would like the community to help me make this wiki page the best resource possible.

I plan to compile an introductory page to topics around personal development on the wiki page, and will provide a list of links back to all the contributors throughout the page.

I would welcome any other ideas you have regarding this wiki page, too – please leave a comment to this post or contact me directly.

Reasons to participate

Every participant will benefit from this project in more than one way. Most obvious advantages will be:

• help others learn the benefits of personal development
• get your word out – let others know what you think
• use your chance to get onto the Personal Development page at the Million Dollar Wiki.
• get exposure to your website or blog
• explore new exciting blogs in personal development field
• get more traffic to your blog

How to participate

First of all, write your definition of personal development. Here are just some ideas to get started:

• What does personal development mean to you? Feel free to define the topics and areas comprising this topic.
• What characterizes personal development most? How does one decide what’s personal development and what is not?
• What are your personal areas of focus in personal development? Share your wisdom by identifying the most important things to concentrate on.

Once your definition is complete, please use the contact form to submit it – please be sure to leave your correct email and double-check the link to your article. I will be compiling and posting a list of submissions every week.

There’s much more to every project than just submitting your own work, though. Please take your time to:

• check out the submissions of other participants
• comment on other blogs, share new ideas and make friends
• link to the Personal Development wiki page, link to this post and link to the articles you particularly liked
• subscribe to the Personal Development blog feed and feeds of others

Get the most out of this project

These projects work best when those participating don’t only submit posts of their own but when they read and interact with others who submit posts. Here’s how you can do this:

• Spread the word – announce this project on your blog
• Read the submissions of others
• Make friends with those you like the submissions of (comment, email – get to know them)
• Link up to those who you resonate with (some bloggers write a top 5 or 10 list each day of the submissions that they like the best)
• Use social networks to bookmark participants – Stumble, Digg, and do anything else you like to help each other promote your posts

Thank You

It’s been great fun to be part of the personal development community, and I would like to thank you all for reading this blog, sharing ideas, suggesting links and being one of the most friendliest fields of the webspace I’ve ever known.

I can’t wait to see and share your first submissions, so wait no more and get writing! Good luck!

Read more in: Personal Development.