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Motivating yourself to achieve healthier habits

healthier

Habit is either the best of servants

or the worst of masters.

Nathaniel Emmons

Motivation is the single most important key to attaining any and all of your goals. If you cannot get excited about your goals, then achieving them can become hard work, drudgery and quickly abandoned. No one really wants to spend their days doing chores. Here are a couple of tips to help motivate you to succeed:

Reward yourself

If you have ever worked with children, you know that bribes work. Most of us grew up in homes with our parents and teachers saying things like, “Eat your vegetables and you can have more mashed potatoes,” or “Get an A on your work and you will get a gold sticker,” or “Clean your room and we can go to the park.”

As adults, people tend to drop this habit. You just do the work because you are supposed to, or maybe you don’t do the work as well as you could because there is no joy in it. Why not add the fun back in? Reward yourself. Notice that I didn’t say bribe. Reward yourself for your success. For example, if your goal is to stop eating after 6pm at night, then buy yourself your favorite coffee the next morning.

Use your friends

Friends can make goal-setting and achievement fun! Sticking with the ‘snacks after 6’ example from above, whenever you feel tempted to snack, why not call or text a friend. Share with them what’s going on and you can both laugh about it. That is one of many things that make friends valuable.

In exchange for helping to distract you from snacking, you could take your friend out for coffee in the morning. Friends can also join you in your goal. For instance, if you are looking to add some exercise to your routine, you can join a gym with some of your friends, or just meet up together each morning for a brisk walk. Now you are both working at getting healthier, and on the days when you really don’t feel like walking, knowing that someone else is waiting and counting on you will help get you out of bed and stay focused.

Journal

Record your successes. Journaling is a great tool to keep track of how you are feeling. It can also be very motivating looking through your journal at past successes. By sitting down and writing about your successes, when you are facing a difficult day, and you will, you can open up your journal and read your success entries. Remembering what it felt like to succeed will help you keep motivated during some of the tougher days.

Keep positive

A positive mindset and attitude are great motivators. When you are feeling positive and have a brighter outlook, it feels as though almost anything is possible. A good way to stay up, and motivated, is to take the time to write down a few solutions that you can use when you aren’t feeling so positive. This happens to everyone. Every living person has bad moments and bad days.

Being pro-active and planning for those tough times, and knowing how you can turn your frame of mind around, is a very useful tool to have in your arsenal. So what makes you happy? Puppies? Sunshine? Music? Jokes? None of these work for you? Go to the next step…

Attitude of gratitude

What in this life do you have to be grateful for?Making a point to remember what is good and right in your life tends to help put things into better perspective. When you are dealing with a particularly difficult time, and working out sounds less fun than cleaning the toilets, or all you can think of is that a burger and fries from the local drive-through will solve all of your problems, then it is time to get out a pen and paper.

Write down 5-10 things you are grateful for? This should help snap you out of your funk quickly. Once you remember what is good and right in your world, the gym will not sound or feel so bad. And that takeout food will no longer feel like a life preserver.

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Five Effective Steps to Overcoming Fears

fear

Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure.

The fearful are caught as often as the bold.

Helen Keller

Overcoming fears might appear simple in concept, but the actual application of the techniques is never easy, especially for the person directly involved. Depending on the intensity of the fear, some people may be able to confront it alone, while others will require a great deal of help from others. Nonetheless, it is important that you do something about it. When you are able to successfully work through some of your fears, you will open up more many more opportunities for personal and career growth.

Slow and steady keeps you on track

This works best with a high degree of fear. Here we are not talking simple fear like the fear of being rejected when asking someone out for a date. This kind of fear leaves you with an inability to take action in the presence of fear. So, take one small, initial step instead of aiming for a huge leap right away. Being able to get through the small steps safely and securely, should help boost your confidence enough to make the succeeding steps.

In order for you to build up courage and make that small step, clearly identifying your fear is absolutely essential. After taking several of these small steps successfully, you will be able to extend that new level of confidence into other areas of your life as well.

Find a motivation

Working to face and overcome fears is often a difficult process that requires time. But you shouldn’t be demoralized by the fact that it doesn’t happen instantaneously or overnight. One method for keeping yourself actively moving forward and making the effort that is required to combat your fears is by replacing your negative thinking processes and thoughts with different ones that motivate you.

One way to approach this in a more concrete fashion is to make a list of all of the benefits that you feel you will accrue by making a change, or changes, in your behavior that is specifically related to your fears. Seeing all the possible benefits that you might enjoy will help motivate you to get going in the advocacy of eliminating fear in your life.

Change the way you see things

Often, when people suffer from failure or rejection, it can spiral into more negative thoughts that can lead to some self-destructive behaviors. However, remember that everyone foes through setbacks at some point in their lives. This is a reality of life that you need to understand and embrace.

So, if failure or setback is bound to come to your doorstep, then it is incumbent upon you to change your view about failure and rejection. Instead of letting these things demoralize you, open your mind, and use it as a learning opportunity rather than as a punishment. Use it to help you pinpoint the areas of your life that you think need to be improved to meet with success.

Face reality

Most people’s fears are associated with unpleasant experiences from there the past or worries associated with their future. So, one of the most obvious ways that you can overcome such fears is to focus on the present, the “here and now.” Focus on learning to make plans and realizing them. You can make plans and act on them, or you can wear yourself down with worries and fears. If this is where you spend most of your time, stuck, then you will neither fail nor achieve anything.

Redefine… you

One of the most effective methods of working through your fear is to redefine yourself and how you will view and use your fear.

For any of this stuff to work, you must become an active participant in each of the steps in order to make effective progress in your fight against your fears. When you dedicate yourself to the fight and the process, all of these steps will eventually become second nature to you; you won’t have to think about them. Working through your fears also allows you to see the world in a more positive light, and a place where fear does not overshadow everything.

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Musings + Affirmations: I have a focused and uncluttered mind.

The mind of an adult is like an unbroken horse.

It will go in any direction except the one in which you want it to go.

St. Teresa of Avila

Affirmation: I have an uncluttered mind.

I am free of all random thoughts and distractions. Whatever I choose as my focus becomes the sole direction of my mind. And I am thankful for the ability to direct my thoughts.

Each and every moment, I can make choices about what I bring to pass in my life. I have often heard that what we think, we create, and I believe that this is true. Much of my creative power lies in my ability to choose my thoughts carefully.

My focus is singular.

I am capable of excluding all else from my mind except whatever I have chosen to focus on. If competing ideas arise, I consciously set them aside for examination at another time. I engage in this on a thought-by-thought basis, cultivating awareness of my mind’s contents so that I can choose its direction.

I am thankful for my ability to focus, which allows me to be truly centered in who I am and what I want to accomplish.

Since I can be truly present in each moment, I can also fully enjoy the blessings that come my way.

Today, I celebrate my mental clarity.

My focus has contributed substantially to all of my accomplishments. Because of my uncluttered mind, I am easily able to manifest my highest vision of myself. And I intentionally cultivate my focus at every possible opportunity.

Homework/ Self-Reflective Questions/ Journal Prompts:

1. What topics are easiest for me to focus on?

2. Are there directions in which I would rather devote my mental energy?

3. What can I do today to continue to cultivate an uncluttered mind?

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Education vs Brain usage…

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Stress: Does NOT do a body good

stressed out cat

Stress:

The confusion created when one’s mind overrides the body’s

basic desire to choke the living daylights out of

some jerk who desperately deserves it.

Unknown

Everyone takes it for granted that stress can have profound effects on your mental health. It can cause you to lose focus, or it can trigger episodes of depression or anxiety. It might affect your memory, and it can have a negative impact on your relationships with others. But did you know that stress can adversely affect our physical health as well?

What’s the physiology of stress?

In addition to the changes that stress brings out in your mind, it can cause a number of physiological responses. How does that work?

1. Alarm reaction

First, you experience a stress alarm reaction. This is what is commonly referred to as the “fight or flight” response. Hormones, pheromones, enzymes and other chemicals, including adrenaline and endorphins, flood into your bloodstream, and you experience a sudden burst of energy. This increases your blood pressure and your breathing rate. Digestion slows down, because you don’t need to digest for either of these situations. And, blood rushes to your major organs.

2. Stress resistance

Once the initial threat has passed, your body moves into a stage called stress resistance. The body begins to function somewhat normally again, but it is still on alert. It begins to repair any tissue damage that happened during the initial stage of stress.

3. Exhaustion

The third stage is stress exhaustion. This occurs when you experience ongoing stress. This is the stage where the most damage is actually done. The immune system will likely be suppressed because of the overload of certain chemicals. And this is the stage in which your cardiovascular system often suffers the most.

What is the physical result or toll?

The end results of too much stress can be detrimental to our health. The strain that it puts on your cardiovascular system can lead to heart disease, high blood pressure, even stroke. You might have difficulties with weight gain because of the changes in metabolism or in your eating habits. Are you a stress-eater?

Your immunity may become so impaired that you find that you are getting sick more often.

Stress can also affect your body in ways that are less serious but also bothersome. It can cause headaches and body aches. It might lead to skin problems, like acne. It can disrupt your normal sleep pattern. It can cause sexual dysfunction. And it can also make you more susceptible to allergy symptoms.

Some of the health problems that you already experience may be exacerbated by stress. This is particularly true for disorders that are connected to your nervous system, like as chronic pain, digestive issues, and bowel disorders. If these things are already present, excessive stress can make a bad situation worse.

Everyone experiences stress. It is a perfectly normal and unavoidable part of life. However, too much stress can cause a number of problems for you. That is why it is so important that you to learn how to deal with your stress and stressors quickly and effectively. Doing so will help reduce its harmful effects on both your mind and body.

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Leaders are lifetime learners

learning is required

True wisdom cannot be learned in a lifetime,

but can be revealed in a moment,

for it has always lived within each and every one of us.

Jonathan Lockwood Huie

Leaders, do not possess mindsets that adapt to failure, easily, if at all. Things go wrong, of course, but leaders do not call these things or themselves “failures.” They may refer to them as glitches, mistakes, bungles, setbacks, or even lessons; but rarely failing.

Keep moving forward

When one such leader was asked about the hardest decision he ever had to make, he answered that he did not know what a hard decision was. A leader will approach decision-making with the idea that there is a strong likelihood that they might be wrong. This doesn’t dissuade them. Quite the contrary, they just do the best they can with the information they have available, and worry about handling obstacles as they arise.

Not mistakes, lessons

Another, slightly different way of looking at this is to realize that you will make mistakes, everyone does. So, determine to make them as quickly as you can in order to learn the lesson, and move forward. That does not mean that you should make irrational or ill-informed decisions. A good leader doesn’t view making mistakes as negative or irrevocable. They feel free to press on and try something new or different. They have the deeply abiding belief that something useful is to be learned, and hopefully not at a super high cost.

Whether you consider yourself a leader or not, you are going to make your share of mistakes. Make use of them as learning tools and do your best to not make the same ones twice.

Intuition

Leaders also know the value of their “intuition”. While you shouldn’t base your actions and future on something as silly as tossing a coin, there is something to be said about your “gut” feelings about situations. Often business people become so involved with systems and checks-and-balances that they forget about that their gut instinct is what got them started down this road. Check in with it every now and then.

While it is not strictly logical, intuition does draw on a combination of things. It is not just a guess. But it is your best guess based on experience, knowledge, and analysis as well as a lot of internal or gut-generated information that you may have forgotten that you have access to.

Practice makes perfect. No, but it does make you better.

You become a stronger leader in your business by practicing being a leader. It is not a series of courses that you can take at your local business school. It is learned in the school of life as you continue to learn and grow in your business.

Model. Exemplify.

As a leader, you have to set standards for everyone’s behavior. Whether you think it is fair or not, you must set even higher standards for your own behavior. You must do this because appearances are often more important that facts. You have heard it before. Perception is reality. What someone sees is what they believe.

Do you maintain the appearance of leadership? Do you project a confident appearance of whatever is deemed as the “look of success” in your field? Always be conscious of presenting yourself as a confident, filled with enthusiasm, and as a strong leader of your team, whether that is 1 person or 100 employees.

You must always project yourself in a way to protect the faith that your people and your customers have in you and your organization.

Strong leaders know that leadership is a lifelong learning experience. And when they make a mis-step, they simply pickup, check out the lesson and continue to move forward. The ability to bounce back is a quality that every leader should have in abundance.

When you blunder, and you will, get up and try again quickly. As the old saw says, “The best strategy is to fail forward fast.”

Thoughts?

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Knowing yourself: Do you have the right (leadership) stuff?

the right stuff

The core to leadership strategy is simple:

To be a model.

Commit yourself to your own personal mastery.

Peter Senge

It is one of the responsibilities of a leader to be a role model. How can leaders become good to great role models? Becoming the master of your most important domain, you, will help you as an individual acquire self-knowledge and at the same time promote self-development and growth. It will help you better develop the following characteristics:

• Understanding the direction of your life and therefore the direction of their group or organization

• Recognize reality and remain grounded in it.

• Think creatively and think outside of the proverbial box.

• Understand and work with and for change.

• View yourself as a part of the whole system and feel more deeply connected to others.

• Fully embrace and understand your influence over others, and use it to benefit everyone.

Mission and vision

It is important that as a leader, you understand the vision and the mission of your organization completely. By understanding the missions and vision of your organization, you can help clearly identify those methods that can be used most effectively to achieve the organization’s goals. This discernment is enhanced by being able to identify, embrace and live according to your guiding values and your own personal goals.

Embrace, or at least accept change

Knowing yourself, and your “hot buttons” in particular, will help you deal with change better. Change is one of few constants in this world. Leaders and organizations should be open to change. Accepting that change is inevitable helps prepare leaders and organizations to also change their methods to be able to continue to move toward goal and mission.

Know yourself, know your team

This will also help you deal better with difficult situations and pressures. Knowing yourself well, also opens you to knowing other people better. This will invariably help you, as a leader and as a teammate deal with your team member’s weaknesses and strengths honestly.

Effective leaders should understand the critical difference between criticism and critiquing. You must know how to give feedback and criticisms without always sounding as if you are chastising the person you are speaking with. The intention behind providing honest feedback must always be to give support. It must never be used to control other people. Knowing yourself well helps you develop effective ways of managing your own emotions. This will help you do better at responding to situations rather than merely reacting.

Personal integrity

Personal knowledge instills integrity, authenticity and confidence in everyone, but is vitally important to you as a leader. These are the characteristics which will help you have a clear vision, and at the same time make clearer and more decisive actions. This will improve your credibility, your on-th-job performance and will likely have additional beneficial effects on your work like and career plans.

Basics Matter

It is important to get back to the basics. The core for any organization, and the heart of any business success relies on human capital. As a leader, you must believe that you are capable of influencing change.

The most important human capital that you must be able to manage is yourself. As you honestly assess yourself, your strengths, and yes, weaknesses, you can begin to understand the world and the people around you. Master yourself, and you can master your world.

And yes, you have the right stuff already within you!

Thoughts?

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Review: Inspired People Produce Results, @Jeremy_Kingsley

inspired-2

This is a short book that covers a lot of ground. Basically, Jeremy Kingsley has tried to encapsulate for us what makes leaders great, and how they get people to follow them. They do this by being inspiring them.

He lays out the characteristics of how inspiration works and how it moves individuals as well as companies forward.

Jeremy Kingsley reminds us that when you take the time to care for and about your employees and team members, they will give their very best efforts for you, often in ways that you cannot envision. It is the very character and authentic nature of the leader, not necessarily the specific tasks or actions, which inspires people to want to achieve remarkable results.

Perhaps the best summary of Jeremy’s book is found in the quote from Gen. H. Norman Schwartzkopf, ” Leadership is a combination of strategy and character. If you must be without one, be without the strategy.”

For any leader, new or seasoned, looking for better ways to lead people forward, and inspire them, this is a quick, must read.

Jeremy Kingsley, inspirational speaker, story-teller, and author, wants to help you inspire others. Pre-order your copy of Inspired People Produce Results at jeremykingsley.com, and receive three additional resources (at no charge) to help you inspire others and produce results.

Free sample chapter from @Jeremy_Kingsley’s new book, #InspiredPeople Download yours today: http://bit.ly/InspiredSample

How to lead better

Guest Post: Don’t Overthink Leadership, by Bill Treasurer

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Don’t Overthink Leadership

Lots of people lead without ever giving it a thought. Some of these are naturally gifted leaders, people who seem to have been born knowing how to lead the way others know how to play a piano or paint. Others may be terrible leaders but they don’t worry about it. In a scene from Raising Arizona, unpainted furniture magnate Nathan Arizona Sr. is talking with police after one of his young children has been kidnapped. Asked about the possibility of a disgruntled employee, he replies, “Hell, they’re all disgruntled. I ain’t running no damn daisy farm.”

But most of us who engage in leadership devote effort and energy to leading successfully. We think, we reflect, we read, we discuss, we consider, we weigh. Even if we’re action-oriented, we usually balance that action with analysis.

That tendency to analyze and think has spawned a thriving industry in leadership. Books, training packages, academic programs, consultants, magazines, websites, and blogs all address our need to think about leadership, to understand what we’re doing. But how much of it speaks to what leaders really need to know?

I happen to know a thing or two about the complexification of leadership. My graduate thesis addressed – take a deep breath – the efficacy of the initiation of psychological structure through the use of directive leadership styles as a negative correlate of role ambiguity and positive correlate of employee satisfaction in workplaces that have undergone a recent reduction in force. In the years since, I’ve made my living as a leadership writer, trainer, consultant, and coach.

Having come through all that education and experience, here’s what I’ve concluded: We leadership experts have made it harder for people to be leaders. Leadership doesn’t require SAT vocabulary words, fancy quadrant models, and research citations from obscure journals. Those things may speak to some people, but they leave a lot of potentially great leaders behind.

Maybe it’s time to get back to the basic idea of what leaders really are: Creators of opportunity for others, people who open doors. The most basic responsibility of a leader is to leave people better off than you found them. You do that by continually opening doors for the people you lead.

If we can hold ourselves successfully up to that simple, all-encompassing standard, we can feel good about our leadership role. If we can’t, no amount of analysis will help us.

Bill Treasurer is the Chief Encouragement Officer of Giant Leap Consulting. His latest book is Leaders Open Doors (www.leadersopendoors.com). Bill is also the author of the bestselling book Courage Goes to Work along with the training kit Courageous Leadership: A Program for Using Courage to Transform the Workplace. Bill has led courage-building workshops for such organizations as NASA, Accenture, CNN, PNC Bank, SPANX, Hugo Boss, Saks Fifth Avenue, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Contact Bill at btreasurer@giantleapconsulting.com, or on Twitter at @btreasurer (#leadsimple).

Reaching your goals successfully

success

In order to succeed, your desire for success should

be greater than your fear of failure.

Bill Cosby

How you choose to define success is entirely up to you. Everyone is busily searching for the key to the secret of success. The secret to success is that there is no secret. Once you have defined what success means to you, in specific terms, then it is up to you to get your act together and go get it. The rules are pretty simple. Here are a few cues that you can use to help you find your way forward.

1. You are 100% responsible for your life

Playing the victim, and blaming everyone from your parents to the government for your current state is the surest path to not going anywhere. To blame something or someone outside of yourself is the same as saying that they have control over your life and that you do not. Someone else’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality. If it does, it is because you have chosen that route.

2. Choose to live your life on purpose, not by chance or happenstance

What separates good positive motivational thinkers from the unsuccessful people around them is that they truly believe that they are doing what they were put here on earth to do. The difference between this life and just living, is that the latter is just getting through the week by looking for the path of least resistance.

But when you live your life on purpose, on your unique purpose, your main concern in life is doing the right job right. For the entrepreneur this means finding a cause that you can believe in and building your business around it.

3. Everything has a cost

You must be willing to pay the price for your dreams. Wanting a big house, a luxury car, and a million dollars in the bank are all very nice goals, and most people want these things, but are you willing to pay the necessary price to get them? This is one of the major significant differences between the successful and unsuccessful mindset.

4. Stay focused

Every single day you will be bombarded with hundreds of tasks, phone calls, messages, and everyone competing for your time, and pulling at you. Focusing requires that you choose to give up something in the present, because you are investing your time in something that will pay off better or different down the road.

5. Become the go-to expert

One of the most striking things that you will notice most successful people have in common is how seriously they take their profession. They strive to be the best at what they do, and do many things to continue to improve. If someone followed you around all day with a camera at work, would it be a recording that you would be proud of or would you be embarrassed by? You must make the decision today to work at being the best in your field. How? By finding out what the “best” people in your field are doing, and do what they do.

6. Plan out your goals. Write them down.

Write out your action plan or a life-map for how you’re going to achieve your goals. Trying to reach your goals without a plan is like trying to drive cross-country without an up-to-date map. A goal that isn’t written down is merely a wish or fantasy.

7. Never give in, never give up

When you are finally fully committed to achieving your goal, giving up is not an option. You must be willing do whatever it takes to make it happen. The power of perseverance is a truly awesome force. Think of the lowly inchworm. If it stopped to continually ponder the length of the trip from start to finish before it started, it probably would never move. From the worm’s viewpoint, the garden path must look like a trip to Mars. Never give up! Keep on going, and eventually you will get to the end of the journey.

8. Start today!

No one knows how much time they have left to accomplish their dreams and goals. But no one has forever. This is not a negative. It is a thought that should help “spur” you on. Go after what you want as energetically and as passionately as possible, for as long as you have.

Paper and pen/ pencil in hand… It’s time to begin your future.

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