Get Organized. Stay Motivated. Enjoy Life.
Well, my dear readers, it’s time for all of us to spend time with families and enjoy the holidays season!
I would like to thank everyone who has visited this blog in 2006 and supported me, without your help I would not have found the motivation to support this blog for this long.
I wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!
I will not be posting until early January, so I’ll see you then! Happy holidays, everyone!
Well folks, it’s been almost a year of me working on Personal Development Ideas, and I have to admit it’s been a thrilling experience.
I’d like to offer you my list of top 10 personal development ideas I’ve learned from working on this site. I’ve found them to be so useful and powerful, that I really think you could use some of them too – give some of them a try and you’ll be amazed how much you will benefit. The list is in no particular order, as only you will know how important each idea really is in your life.
Read books regularly. Write articles or posts.
Your brain needs new information daily to keep developing, and reading new books is one of the best ways to do just that. Find a few minutes a day to read books on personal development, and it will help you grow even if you don’t find any terribly useful ideas in any book.
A hint for personal development readers: stop searching for that revolutionary book that will solve all your problems! There is none. You should be happy if you get an idea or two of each book, and even them will probably be only fine-tuning your existing experience and not introducing something entirely new.
Be sure to write something, too – it will benefit you in a number of ways, from improving your handwriting/typing skills and raising your spelling knowledge to allowing you analyze the material you’ve read, process it and produce your view of it. Writing greatly helps you to memorize things, so reading books on personal development and then posting your thoughts on the same topic in your blog will have a double effect of learning some important life lessons.
Wake up earlier
There are many articles explaining all the benefits of waking up earlier. My 5am mornings have helped me identify the following:
Ask positive questions
By simply changing the way you ask questions, you can transform your whole life: get into a good mood more often, solve complex problems and find unique solutions in even the worst situations.
I’ve explained why you need to learn this skill in my Positive Questions article:
Positive questioning is here to help you boost your confidence level, and do it the quick, easy and natural way. Asking positive questions means assuming you’re good enough to find the answer, and this way of asking yourself is a sure way to approach the right solution.Asking yourself positive questions and generally taking a positive approach to any task will take most of possible pressure and nervousness off your shoulders, leaving your mind clear and sharp, ready to solve even the hardest problems.
Learn to fail. It’s part of your success
I’ve accepted failures as a very natural part of my life long time ago. The only person who doesn’t fail is the one who doesn’t do anything.I suggest that you learn to fail successfully:
Any failure is a measure of a progress. If you can say you’ve failed in something, this usually means you’ve actually tried some things out and worked rather hard to do your best. And so, your efforts were not futile, albeit not enough to make you absolutely successful this time. It doesn’t mean you didn’t make any progress though!
Apply yourself, make sure you learn from your mistakes – and you’ve got yourself one of the best recipes for success in the long term. Do this consistently, use some planning in addition to it, and you’ll be doing better than 90% of all the people around you!
Do Your Goal Setting
It is absolutely vital to set your goals, otherwise how would you know whether you’re achieving them or not? To ensure you set your goals right, use some of my 3 golden rules of goal setting:
Focus on important things
Don’t waste your time on something which is not really important. Stop worrying about petty things and events, if they can’t have a major impact on your life. Slow down and take a note of aspects of your life which are really important to you. Learn to focus on what you want to improve.It’s so easy to let important things pass you by these days, that mastering the skill of focusing on what’s really important is a benefit you can’t afford to miss. Working on this aspect of your personal development will help you in long-term to achieve a much quicker and easier switch of your focus, which is a really useful skill to have. Just imagine being able to fully engage in your work as soon as you arrive, and to easily stop thinking of your work as soon as you leave for home?
Focus also helps you concentrate on achieving the desired result by simply making everything else less visible and noticeable for a period of time. Learning to focus means ignoring all the noise and working on the real goal.
Master your habits
It is quite possible (and actually not so hard) to work out the habits you want and to get rid of the habits you don’t need.Take control of your habits by finding the pain and pleasure associated with every habit, and by focusing on them as needed.
I’ve mastered many habits over the past year, and what I can tell is that after just a few months and a few habits successfully mastered, you will gain both the knowledge and the confidence needed for controlling any habit you want.
Here are just a few things you can make a habit to make yourself a better person and enjoy your life in ways never possible:
Get organized
Organize your workplace and your home office, designate areas and time for processing your email and other incoming information like letters, magazines, newspapers and print-outs. Get rid of all the stuff you don’t need, and learn to do it during your processing sessions. For instance, if you have time in the morning to read your emails – go through all the new mails and decide on the next action right there for each email in your inbox – put useful information into appropriate folders and delete useless emails right away. Label the rest so that it’s easy for you to later see what emails need to be replied first.
Organize your contacts and your books, and learn more about personal finance. Staying organized isn’t an easy task, but trust me, it’s the best approach. If you don’t organize anything, you will eventually start missing important meetings, forgetting emails and losing money. No wonder getting organized costs huge sums of money when professional consultants come to your office and do it for you. Why wait till this happens, when you can easily get and stay organized by spending just a mere 5-15 minutes a day?
Plan ahead and manage time effectively
Start planning everything you do, and be sure to review your plans now and then to reflect on why some things on your list did or did not happen. You should plan for everything – including your time off and holiday breaks, hobbies and other activities.
Get into a habit of planning your week ahead, even if it’s just a high-level overview of what has to be done.
Managing your time effectively means working out a number of skills like reviewing and prioritizing your plan and actions. I seems that I always have time to do things, and in most cases I achieve this by simply planning only as much as I can realistically do, and reviewing my progress regularly to stay focused and prioritize tasks effectively.
Use 2 minutes approach in everything you do (taken from my Finding Time For Everything article):
Our life isn’t about sacrifices, but if there are any we’re making at all, then time is definitely one of them. To do anything, you have to put your time to it. So whenever a new opportunity arises, don’t simply throw it away by saying you have no time. Take the 2 minutes approach again. Look at the opportunity. See it a goal. See what the positive sides are. Try and quickly break it into some steps, and try to predict the time commitment required for each.
Finally, make some effort to reclaim your time: book time for regular commitments, track your time with time-sheets and review your plans regularly to see where most of your time is spent. Once you have all the information, you will be surprised how easy it really is for you to find an extra hour or two a week.
LoveYou can’t grow personally without love for many things. You’ve got to love yourself and enjoy self-growth and constant improvements you’re making. You need to love what you’re doing – it will benefit everything you do, be it something at work or at home. Love your family and cherish your friends. Be caring and genuinely interested in others.
Here are the words by Beatles which say it best:
There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.
Nothing you can sing that can’t be sung.
Nothing you can say but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy.
There’s nothing you can make that can’t be made.
No one you can save that can’t be saved.
Nothing you can do but you can learn how to be in time
It’s easy.
All you need is love, all you need is love,
All you need is love, love, love is all you need.
That’s all I’ve got for you today. I’d like to thank you for your interest and your patience, and use this opportunity to wish you success in your personal development. Try making some of these ideas part of your life, and I’m sure you will enjoy a healthier, happier and more balanced life. Let me know how it works out, will you? ;)
Brian Kim has just posted an excellent article about his Different Way of Looking At Failure. It resonates with some of my thoughts so much, that I decided to make my comments on this a separate post.
I’ve always been a believer that failures make you stronger. I take them as a natural part of my life, and also a crucial part of my personal and professional development. It’s a part of the game you can’t play without. You have virtually no chance to be successful in anything without failing at some stage along your way.
At the same time, the more I talk to people, the more I realize how lucky I am to have such a natural positive look on failures. Most people don’t have it, and it’s rather hard for them to even accept my point of view, let alone to learn the approach and start using it in their lives. So I think that we all can only welcome posts like Brian’s, cause they give us additional understanding of what happens when we fail, and gives us the motivation we need to keep trying until we succeed.
Most failures are rarely irreversible. If you fail once, you’re likely to get another chance to try again later, and its your willingness to give it another go that determines your chances for a success. If you feel too depressed about failing and never find the courage to try again, you may never notice how much you’ve benefited and grown from your failure:
…you will experience pain after you hit failure, but if you rest and feed yourself with more information, knowledge, experience, and ideas, the next time you go at it again, you’ll realize you are stronger than before because of it. It’s that time from the moment you fail to the next time you tackle your goal that makes you stronger than before, provided that you intend to go at it again. If you don’t, you’ll never realize that you were stronger than before and you’ll never start hitting that favorable cycle.
In one of my earlier posts, Quick Recovery, I’ve already given you my advice on failures:
Accept it – everyone fails, and not always it’s due to the personal qualities and features. Quite often there is absolutely nothing you could do. There is nothing anybody could do. So all you do in such situations is to accept this and think one step forward – what needs to be done next to make up for the opportunity you’ve just lost.
I notice now that so far I’ve only spoken of failures as something that happens everyday, perhaps because I’m so used to the idea. But Brian talks about your first failure, which is always the most painful one. That’s an excellent angle, and I’ll definitely write on this topic someday myself.
Your first failure will hurt. Big time. It’ll likely happen during the beginning of your journey, at that long stretch of plateau before you go to the next level. However the moment you experience that failure, the MOMENT you experience that failure, you are stronger than before. It’s only when you go to tackle your goal again that you truly begin to realize it.
You should definitely go and read the whole post yourself, I’m sure you’ll find it useful: Different Way of Looking At Failure.
The new wave of tag game had been going around last few weeks, and so it was only a matter of time before somebody tagged me. Thank you, Lyman Reed, for doing so! I’ve really enjoyed reading 5 things about you, and even though I usually find games of tagging a bit childish, I for some reason actually liked this one around, and so I’m in.
Read on to find out five things you probably didn’t know about me.
1) Origins of my name
Since both my first and last name are quite short, it’s usually quite problematic for people to guess where I come from. But it all is quite simple, once I explain. Gleb is a truly Russian name I’ve been given after my grand-father. He had a brother, and they both were named Boris and Gleb after the first Russian saints. The really interesting coincidence though is that myself and my older brother (from my father’s first marriage) are also Boris and Gleb.
Reys is the way I spell my last name in English, although it should have been Reiss as it’s of German origin. Due to some circumstances beyond our control, my father has got his last name changed from Reiss to Reis when he lost his passport a long time ago, and so I inherited the last name like Reis. But since I studied English in school, I liked Reys way of spelling it better, and it’s not this big a deal because neither spelling allows English speakers pronounce the name properly (it sounds like Rays in Russian – Глеб РейÑ). I also have many people thinking I’m Spanish and spelling my last name like Reyes.
2) I’ve always liked talking to others
This in itself isn’t probably that big a secret, but not many of you know that you can trace back to my kinder-garden years the fact that I have always found it much easier to talk to girls, and not guys.
Girls always trusted me their secrets and we somehow found such a deep level of understanding that it always felt special. I’ve enjoyed great relationships with my classmates in both school and university, and still find it fascinating how much girls have to say. I’ve obviously been charmed by a particular lady for the past 6+ years, and she’s been a great wife to me, but recently our interest is being taken over by the new addition to our family – baby Elizabeth.
3) I was among the first 5 pioneers in my class
Back in my primary school years, I was among the first 5 pupils to become a pioneer because of my excellent marks. If you don’t know it yet, pioneer movement was a organization for children, similar in many things to Scouting. It obviously was an honor to be accepted. Not everyone made it, but most children eventually did become pioneers, maybe a few weeks or months later.
4) My astrological sign is Libra
If you’re familiar with astrology, this will immediately tell you a number of my character qualities:
5) I believe in true love
People who know me personally are probably aware of this, but for others it’s definitely something to note. I believe in true love, and always give all of me to the person I’m with. I find it much easier to go through my life because I’m always in love with so much – my family, my life, my work and many other wonderful things that quietly happen in this world and only get noticed by a few of us.
I am eternally grateful for the love I have in my life, and I cherish every moment I get to spend with my family.
That’s it. Let me know how you found these revelations, I do hope you’ve found them amusing and interesting enough!
In the spirit of the tag game, I would like to learn 5 things about the following 5 people:
While I check new comments and links to this blog daily, I haven’t posted in a while. I never realized it was this long though. Looking at the archive page just now revealed the horrible truth: there hasn’t been a single post here in December!Many things have happened in the past weeks, and I would like to reflect on them a bit before getting back into my routine of posting new articles.
My mother went back home after spending 3 months with us
These must have been some of the greatest months we’ve had – she helped us tremendously by minding Elizabeth while both myself and Jane were going to work, and I took a week off to spend the last few days with mom and Elizabeth – so we did some shopping together and explored new and not very new (to me, that is) parts of Dublin.
We have spoken of so many things during her stay with us! Once again, I have discovered many things about my mother, which made me love her even more. She has a very strong personality, and it amazes me how she managed to accomplish many things in her life in situations where others could easily give up.
I’m also very happy to see her being proud of me. She loved Elizabeth from the very first sight, and all of us got on really well. Everything in our daily life was new to mom, and not speaking English made things even more challenging. Still, just like I said, she has grown personally a lot, and enjoyed her trip back home through Gatwick and Heathrow much more than her flight to us.
Our little Elizabeth turned 10 months old
It happened just last Monday, and her birthday also coincided with the first full day she had to spend at her creche.
I will have a separate post about the whole creche experience, but for now I’ll just confirm something most parents already know: it’s VERY hard to let your little angel go. I’ve spent a few days leaving her there at the creche for an increasing amount of time (first day – 1 hour, then – 2 hours, last day – 4 hours) to help her get used to a new environment, and she cried. All children do, because up to that point they were lucky enough to only know you and your closest relatives and friends. So it’s hard for both your baby and yourself to get started with creche.
Today marks her full day two at the facility, and all her minders confirm she’s getting used to everything: smiles a lot, plays with toys, eats and even tries some sleep. I guess I’m fine as well – although it is still hard enough to leave her there in the morning and run away even if she cries.
Jane had finished another round of her exams
That was quite an event, cause she had to struggle really hard to find time for her study lately. The last few months she had been studying a few hours every evening, and that’s not an easy task after a full working day and with constant temptations to drop everything and play a bit with your lovely baby girl :)
Again and again I understand that I’m not very fond of such long-term study projects. I much rather prefer a single exam with a given set of topics/subjects, where I can decide myself how and when to prepare. I then get fully focused on my preparation for a few days and then pass the exam.
With studies Jane has, she does at least 2 exams each term and they involve two 300-500 page books of accounting theory and math problems to solve.
We all were glad to have Jane back, and now we enjoy long dinners and evening movies together.
I’ve given a tech talk at work
I was nominated to present a tech talk prepared by our colleague from San Jose, and while the topic was purely technical (Linux), it was challenging enough a speech – mainly because it was supposed to be an introduction to Linux for people not necessarily familiar with Unix. These talks you have to keep well-worded, entertaining and easy-to-follow enough to engage everyone in the audience.
I’ve got tons of positive comments after the talk, and slipped only by 1 minute for a 45minute talk – which I think is a pretty good result. I’ve also visited my local ToastMasters club for the first time, and liked it a lot. I guess I’ll join the group a few more times and then become a member – I really liked the atmosphere and could see the benefits people get from such meetings right away.
There you have it – a short history of the last 3 weeks. It all happened so quickly! It still seems like most of these events were just yesterday, yet looking at my calendar I can see some of them are almost a month old. Oh well, time waits for nobody! I better get on with new challenges and things to do, and – of course – keep you posted about my experiments.
I wish you all a great day (if it’s only a morning – have a good morning, and obviously you’re more than welcome to enjoy your good evening or even good night if that’s the case), and I’ll talk to you later!
Please take a moment to leave me a comment, I’d love to hear from you.