Get Organized. Stay Motivated. Enjoy Life.
I just wanted to share with you a list of websites today, looks really promising: The Life Hack Community at Listible.
It gets more and more attention, so I expect the ratings to promote really the best sites to the top of the list. It’s useful and interesting right now, and I’m sure it will be even more useful in the future.
I’m a strong believer that in order to be successful in virtually anything, you first have to become conscious about it. You have to be able to understand why and what it is you’re going to achieve, and to also be absolutely conscious about how long it’s going to take you and what is the price you’re prepared to pay.
Steve Pavlina has just posted a great article: 10 Ways to Become More Conscious. I like his style a lot, and I agree with his point of view on most occasions. In this article of his, Steve gives you his ten reasons to become more conscious. Each of the reasons has a one-liner explaining the idea of it, so when all of them combined, they look like some a code of conduct or even ten commandments.
Here they are – the ten rules. I strongly suggest you read the full article though:
1. Truth. Truth raises your consciousness. Falsehood lowers it.
2. Courage. Courage raises your consciousness. Cowardice lower
3. Compassion. Compassion raises your consciousness. Cruelty lowers it.
4. Desire. Desire raises your consciousness. Apathy lowers it.
5. Attention. Attention raises your consciousness. Distraction lowers it.
6. Knowledge. Knowledge raises your consciousness. Ignorance lowers it.
7. Reason. Reason raises your consciousness. Irrationality lowers it.
8. Conscious people. Conscious people raise your consciousness. Unconscious people lower it.
9. Energy. Energy raises your consciousness. Disease lowers it.
10. Intention. The intention to raise your consciousness raises it. The intention to lower your consciousness lowers it.
My personal 3 strategies to stay conscious would be these:
Nothing is as important in reaching goals as the first action steps you take towards the goal as soon as you’re committed to achieving it.
As strange as it sounds, many people feel like they’ve failed in their personal development. They feel the need to recover from it in order to successfully move on. Since I personally don’t believe you can fail with your personal development, I thought an article explaining my point of view on such matters might actually help.
Personal development is a process, not an event
Before I talk about anything else, let me make a statement: personal development is a life-long process, not an event. Thus, you can’t miss it and never get another chance to experience it – a chance to improve something about yourself is always around.
Once started with personal development, you will feel the urge and need to develop yourself mentally, emotionally and spiritually on a constant basis.
After you see the first results of self-improvement, you will not be able to drop it – you will get hooked up and will use every opportunity to improve something else about yourself.
There is no such thing as failure
I like this quote by Anthony Robbins a lot. In full, it goes like this:
“There is no such thing as failure. There are only results.“
Even more so with personal development: you can’t, and you won’t fail, if you have the right attitude.
If you already read books or listen to audio materials on personal development, chances are that you’ve isolated a few areas of yourself which need improvement. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you, but it clearly shows your dedication to pushing the bar even higher for yourself.
Well, here’s some good news for you: becoming aware of your weaknesses or areas to be improved, is a huge advantage on its own. To you this means, that even if you had only agreed that some things about yourself could be improved, but had no chance or no courage to actually do something about them, you already have made positive progress!
Remember it: you cannot fail with your personal development!
There is no harm in trying
As with anything else, it is very important that you actually try doing something in order to improve yourself. What I’m saying is this: if you are not sure whether some actions on your personal development plan will work or not, do them anyway! Anything you do, no matter how insignificant it might seem, will make a positive difference in the end. You may not see any immediate results, but you will improve eventually.
Sometimes, you have to try something only to get experience. This gained experience will help you make better decisions and take proper actions trying some other parts of your personal development.
Don’t know about you, but to me it’s always better to try my best at something and not get the perfect result from the first attempt, than to never even try it.
Having not reached the goal, I will learn as much as I can from the mistakes made, and will definitely approach the same problem at a later time, just to test it again and see if I can cope with it using new experience. I never give up easily, just because I believe that you can achieve anything if you try your best. And it simply takes way too many attempts for me to be absolutely sure that I’ve tried everything I could to achieve my goal.
One very good thing such an approach gives me is certainty: I’m much more sure about my ability to get through many problems I face, simply because I know I’ll keep trying no matter what.
From the other hand, deciding to not even try something has very negative impact. It will not only discourage you from many other things, seemingly independent from what you’re giving up on, but it will also haunt you for many days (weeks and sometimes even years) to come. As time will pass, you will feel more and more confident about facing the original challenge, and you will also start getting really irritated with yourself for not trying your best back when you had the opportunity. You’ll be lucky if it’s not too late to do it, but quite often the chance is gone.
You should know: with personal development it’s never too late to start, but I advise you make the decision to improve yourself once and forever, and then fearlessly try anything that might help you improve.
Find ways to motivate yourself
Personal development is a constant process. It is very easy to get started, but it is impossible to finish. You’ll be constantly improving yourself throughout your life, so you might as well learn how to get and stay motivated about your self-growth.
Think about it this way: millions of people go through their lives without any questioning. They spend year after year, not even hoping to improve anything. Some people are genuinely happy, of course, but the majority is simply too weak and too lazy – and so, due to one reason or another, most of them never find the courage, time or motivation to get started with their personal development.
Compared to them, you’ve already made a giant leap forward: you’ve made a decision to improve. You’ve made a commitment, and you have taken the first few steps. Why stop now, that you’ve gone this far?
One very simple way of staying motivated about your personal development is to make a small improvement every day. You don’t have to make a big change or transform completely, but as long as you consciously improve something really small about yourself on a regular basis, you’re on the right track and you’ve got all the reasons to feel good about it.
Personal development opens limitless opportunities to you, because it’s a process of bringing your enjoyment of life and your self-growth to such highs which in the past were never thought possible. You not only can, but you most definitely will outgrow yourself: that’s the whole idea of personal development. Isn’t it motivating enough, to spend every day of your life changing and growing better?
Goal setting: do you know your goals?
Quite often, the disappointment comes from wrongly chosen goals. Failing in something most often means not failing to make progress, but failing to get the result you wished for. So it is very important to be able to understand where your frustration comes from in order to react.
Because your personal development is a process and not an event, you have to be conscious about a few things.
For instance, You’re not going to reach a point in your life when you’ll be 100% finished with your personal development. Just accept it, and never make it your goal. Otherwise, you’ll end up doing the right things, growing personally more and more, and still not being able to enjoy the results, because you’ll be waiting for some final state of mind which you simply can’t reach.
This is probably one of the cases when it is very appropriate to suggest: enjoy the process! Personal development is about constant self-growth and improvement, and as you grow, you’ll be setting higher and higher goals in your development, and therefore achieving more and more.
Well, hopefully you now get the picture and understand that there is really no way you could possibly fail with your personal development. Some results might take longer to show, but you will get there eventually.
Learn to enjoy your self-improvement, and always remember: one of the signs of being successful in personal development is genuinely enjoying the process of it!
For those of you who are more comfortable with reading emails than subscribing to RSS feeds, I’ve just created a way for you to subscribe to my regular email updates.
You should find the subscribe form on the side panel of every page of my blog, and it will only take few seconds for you to activate your subscription. The registration form is also found on my Email Updates page, if you prefer.
As of right now, email updates will be just exactly what it says – regular updates delivering the latest articles on personal development straight to your inbox. If I see a lot of interest in email service, I may also create a weekly or monthly feature which will have additional information never posted on this blog.
Let me know what you think, I’m open to any suggestions, as always!
I recently came back to a wonderful habit of attending our gym during a lunch break at work. Due to personal reasons, I couldn’t use it for about 2 months, and it feels great to be back. What’s even better is that I had no struggle with getting back into the routine – everything happened in a very smooth and natural way.
There are few reasons making this comeback a success, and I just wanted to write them down for you, as they are universal and can be applied to almost any habit you’re trying to work out or get rid of.
Pain and pleasure
According to Tony Robbins, anything we do is motivated by pain and pleasure. No matter what we’re trying to do in our lives, we’re doing this to either avoid pain or to gain pleasure.
As simple and obvious as it sounds to me now, it was quite a revelation when I read his theory on this just a few months ago. And it still surprises me to see how universal this rule of pain and pleasure really is. It applies to everything we do or plan to do, and it’s possible to explain any action of ours by simply pointing to the pain or pleasure which motivated us to act.
What also was noticed by Tony is that we’re somehow much more motivated by pain than by pleasure. In other words, we’ll be willing to do much more in order to escape some pain than we’ll do to gain some pleasure.
So, one of the reasons my gym comeback is so easy, is simply because I got used to a habit of working out so much (I’ve been doing it for pretty much the past 6 month before I had to abandon the habit), that it gives me a great pleasure to work out. And it’s also almost physically painful not to work out, because my muscles are not getting the usual strain and I’m not feeling as fit as I’m used to unless I regularly work out.
My pain and pleasure motivations are clear to me. Here they are:
Pain of not going to gym:
Pleasure of attending gym:
These are just a few, the actual list of my pain and pleasure motivations for attending gym is much longer.
Establish associations properly
With habits, it is especially important to stay conscious of your painful and pleasurable aspects associated with them. The key to successfully mastering a particular habit is to place the right pain and pleasure motivation associations around it.
To fully control your habit, it is absolutely crucial to have both pain and pleasure associations related to it, this way you’re doubling the chance of success by gaining the advantage of being motivated by both pain and pleasure.
Take a few minutes of your time and write down all the good reasons for gaining a particular habit, making note of every little association you can come up with. Go wild! Extrapolate the results you’re going to get by following through with the habit, and imagine what you’re going to feel like 5 or 10 years later if your habit is successfully mastered. Make sure you don’t rush your thoughts and very carefully select every motivating reason.
Now, take even more time to write down all the negative impact you’ll see by not following through with this habit. Note the first and most important few things which come up when you’re thinking of the habit, and then gradually work your way down to the tiniest painful details of how not having a habit in your life might turn out. Again, thinking far in the future will greatly help.
It was very easy for me to start my gym sessions this time around, because I have all the proper associations already in place. Here are just a few of them:
Working out:
NOT working out:
Know exactly what you want
It will only help if you have a list of goals related to each habit you’re working on, so that you can constantly and regularly review them and see whether you’re moving off course or still following the original plan of yours.
With working out, it’s dead simple to establish just the goals you need. Read some appropriate literature, talk to your instructor and write down a thorough plan for your training. Everything is quite measurable, so you’ll have no problem getting your expectations in a form of how many minutes you should spend warming up or doing cardio, how many sets and reps of a particular exercise you’ll do, etc. And once there is a through plan, it will be easier for you to stick to it by just reviewing it as often as you feel necessary to ensure you’re making progress.
Mastering habits isn’t easy, but knowing simple principles I’ve explained above is bound to simplify the process for you. Pain and pleasure can be very motivating, and so it is only natural that you improve your chances of success by employing the appopriate accociations.
Have you ever had a brilliant idea? The one which seemed wonderful at a time, yet you weren’t motivated enough to make a note of it, or you genuinely had not a chance to jot it down? The regret of not acting immediately on such an idea is capable of causing a major nervous breakdown – simply because you will blame yourself for letting such an opportunity go.
I know I’ve had quite a few of such ideas lost forever, before I had finally decided to never let any of them go. After all, if there is only one brilliant idea I get in many years, I simply can’t afford losing the chance to be proud and successful it gives me!
What are the main reasons you let ideas go away?
For me, these reasons were the following:
This is when I get both upset and irritated. Especially if I don’t remember anything about my idea at all. Somehow it would make it feel as if I let the greatest chance of my life go away. The thing is, if I can remember at least some part of the idea, it may be a relieve to realise it wasn’t such a great idea anyway. But when I don’t remember anything, it is very upsetting.
I’ve narrowed this problem down to not being able to write my ideas down when I was driving my car. By the time I would enter my office, the idea would be lost. Quick change of the environment around you is bound to distract you from whatever it is you were thinking.
So in situations like this, even a simple trick can make dramatic difference.
For me it was getting the cheapest kind of a paper notepad with pencil, and putting them into the plastic door pocket in my car. Now, whenever I get a really good idea, I can always write it down if I’m parked, or if I’m not, I know that I won’t have to leave my car and risk forgetting the idea.
I also make an effort to concentrate on the idea even more. Turn off the music, and start developing the idea – adding more possible features to it and looking for possible ways to make the idea even a greater one will help you remember it better. When I finally arrive, I don’t leave my car until the idea is written down. And if it needs be, I can always tear one of the notepad pages to take the important note with me and then put the task into my electronic ideas repository.
It is very common that the best ideas come unexpected, and seem irrelevant to the topic you’re trying to think of. That’s okay! Take the note, and you can classify the idea later!
Write your every idea down
Get into the habit of writing your ideas down. Make it one of your first steps towards a really successful life. Never let your ideas go, because:
For all the ideas you come up with, there’s a rule of thumb: save them. Write them down, and even if you never feel like analyzing these idea, that’s okay. Someday you’ll read one of them accidentally while looking for some other useful information, and you’ll be shocked at how much sense it will make to you.
Learn the habit of writing every idea down. It could be a short phrase or even a word, but if it inspired or interested you for even a second, write it down immediately. This way, you will never let an idea go, and who knows, maybe one of your ideas will be the greatest discovery of tomorrow?