Feb 9th 10
Posted by Aldohas in Personal Development, happiness, stress
You often see articles on ways to unwind and relax after a stressful day, which I always find useful, but for me the most important advice would be to get to the source of the problem, and cut stress out before it even happens.
By careful editing of your life, and changing certain habits, you can eliminate most (not all) sources of stress in your life.
I don’t believe that a stress-free life is possible. Stress is a response to challenges in life, and a life without challenges is too boring to contemplate. However, I do believe that most of the stress in our lives is unnecessary, and that it can be eliminated by taking some simple (and some not-so-simple) steps. It can’t be accomplished overnight — I’ve been eliminating stressors in my life for awhile now, and I’m still not done. But I think it’s a worthwhile goal.
Let’s first take a look at an example — it’s a little extreme, but it exemplifies the typical stressors in people’s lives. Let’s say Fred gets up in the morning, waking up late, and now has to rush to get ready. He’s so rushed that he spills his coffee on his shirt and has to change, a nicks himself shaving. He heads out the door and then has to go back in the house because he forgot his wallet. He gets in the car and realizes he forgot his keys.
Now he’s on the way in to work and is in the middle of rush-hour traffic — and his temper starts to flare after someone cuts him off. He’s honking at people, cursing, and arrives to work late and in a bad mood. He snaps at someone and is surly all morning. His desk is covered in piles of paper, and he can’t find that report he needs to work on. His inbox is overflowing and his email notification is going off, and he sees he has 36 messages to respond to. He knows he’s late on two projects and his boss isn’t happy. He’s got to finish 5 tasks before the 11 a.m. meeting, and he’s got meetings all afternoon.
You get the idea. His day does not go well, and he hits rush-hour traffic on the way home. He gets home late, exhausted, completely stressed, his mind still on his late and as-yet uncompleted projects, his still-full inbox and email inbox, and all the stuff piling up that he has to work on tomorrow. The house is a mess and he snaps at his family. His kids have not put things away exactly where he told them to put them away, so he begins to yell at them. He has a quick, greasy dinner in front of the TV and zones out before falling asleep late.
Again, this is a bit extreme, but you can see through this illustration some of the things that stress people out. There are many more, of course, and I won’t cover all of them here.
But these sources of stress can be eliminated with a little thought.
Here’s how:
1. Identify stressors. This is the most important step of all, as identifying the things that stress you out in your life is the first step towards eliminating them. Take 10 minutes to think about what stresses you out during the day. What weekly occurrences stress you out? What people, activities, things cause stress in your life? Make a Top 10 list, and see which of them can be eliminated, and start to weed them out. For those that can’t, find ways to make them less stressful.
2. Eliminate unnecessary commitments. I did a post on editing your commitments before … apply those concepts here. We all have many commitments in our life, starting with work but also including commitments related to kids, our spouses, things to do at home, other family, civic, side work, religious, hobbies, online activities and more. Consider each of them, the amount of stress they provide, and the value you get out of them. Edit brutally, and take steps today to remove the ones that stress you out the most.
3. Procrastination. We all do this, of course. But allowing stuff to pile up will stress us out. Find ways to take care of stuff now (form a Do It Now habit) and keep your inbox and desk clear. See 20 Procrastination Hacks for more ideas.
4. Disorganization. We’re all disorganized to some extent. Even if we’ve organized something, and created a great system for keeping it that way, things tend to move towards chaos over time. But disorganization stresses us out, in terms of visual clutter, and in making it difficult to find stuff we need. Take time to get things in your life organized, starting with your desk and the papers in your home, and moving on to other areas.
5. Late. Being late always stresses us out. We have to rush to get ready, rush to get there, and stress out the whole time about looking bad and being late. Learn the habit of being early, and this stress disappears. Make a conscious effort to start getting ready earlier, and to leave earlier. This also makes driving less stressful. Time yourself to see how long it actually takes to get ready, and how long it actually takes to get somewhere. You’ve probably been underestimating these times. Once you know these times, you can plan backwards so that you show up 10 minutes early each time. It’s a good feeling.
6. Controlling. We are not the Master of this Universe. I know we sometimes wish we were, but acting as if we are is a sure way to get stressed out. Trying to control situations and people cannot work, and only serves to increase our anxiety when it doesn’t work. Learn to let go, and accept the way that other people do things, and accept what happens in different situations. The only thing you can control is yourself — work on that before you consider trying to control the world. Also learn to separate yourself from tasks and to delegate them. Learning to let go of our need to control others and the situations around us is a major step towards eliminating stress.
7. Multitasking. Having multiple tasks going on at the same time might seem productive, but in actuality it slows us down from actually focusing on a task and completing it — and it stresses us out in the meantime. Learn to single-task.
8. Eliminate energy drains. If you’ve analyzed your life (in Step 1) and found things that stress you out, you might have also noticed things that drain your energy. Certain things in our life just cause us to be more exhausted than others, with less value. Identify them, and cut them out. You’ll have much more energy and much less stress. Happiness ensues.
9. Avoid difficult people. You know who they are. If you take a minute to think about it, you can identify all the people in your life — bosses, coworkers, customers, friends, family, etc. — who make your life more difficult. Now, you could confront them and do battle with them, but that will most certainly be difficult. Just cut them out of your life.
10. Simplify life. Simplifying, of course, is a major theme of Zen Habits. Simplify your routines, your commitments, your information intake, your cluttered rooms, the mass of stuff going on in your life … and have less stress as a result. Start with Edit Your Life and then look through the other simplicity articles.
11. Unschedule. Create more open periods of time in your life. It’s not necessary to schedule every minute of our lives. Learn to avoid meetings, keep wide open blocks of time where we either work on our important tasks or batch process the smaller ones. When someone asks to schedule a meeting, first try to get it done through email or phone … if that doesn’t work, avoid having it scheduled. Ask them to call you and see if you’re free at that time. You will love having an open schedule.
12. Slow down. Instead of rushing through life, learn to take things slow. Enjoy your food, enjoy the people around you, enjoy nature. This step alone can save tons of stress.
13. Help others. It may sound contradictory to add more tasks to your life by trying to help other people (you’ve got enough to do), but if you were to add anything to your life, this should be it. Helping others, whether volunteering for a charity organization or just making an effort to be compassionate towards people you meet, not only gives you a very good feeling, it somehow lowers your stress level. Of course, this doesn’t work if you try to control others, or help others in a very rushed and frenetic way — learn to take it easy, enjoy yourself, and let things happen, as you work to make the lives of others better.
14. Relax throughout the day. It’s important to take mini-breaks during your work day. Stop what you’re doing, massage your shoulders and neck and head and hands and arms, get up and stretch, walk around, drink some water. Go outside and appreciate the fresh air and the beautiful sky. Talk to someone you like. Life doesn’t have to be all about productivity. You should also avoid using online activity too much as your de-stressing activity — get away from the computer to relax.
15. Quit work. This one’s drastic, and probably too drastic for most. But in most likelihood, your work is your absolute biggest stressor. Getting out of your 9-to-5, automating your income, and finding something you truly love to do, that you’re passionate about, will create a positive life and much less stressful one at that. Give it a little thought before dismissing it — there might be possibilities here you haven’t considered.
16. Simplify your to-do list. I’ve written about this before, but attempting to do everything on your long to-do list will definitely stress you out. Learn to simplify your to-do list down to the few essential tasks, and you will enjoy the process much more.
17. Exercise. This is common advice for stress relief, and that’s because it works … but it’s also a stress prevention method. Exercising helps relieve the stress buildup, it gives you some quiet time to contemplate and relax, and just as importantly, it makes you more fit. A fitter person is better equipped to handle stress. Another important factor: being unhealthy can be a major stressor (especially once you have to go to the hospital), and exercise can help prevent that.
18. Eat healthy. This goes hand-in-hand with exercise as a stress prevention method, of course. Become healthier and a major source of stress will disappear. Also, I’ve found that greasy food, for me, puts me in a worse mood and can contribute to stress levels immediately.
19. Be grateful. This might not be as obvious as some of the others, but developing an attitude of gratitude (I sound like a preacher with that rhyme!) is a way of thinking positive, eliminating negative thinking from your life, and thereby reducing stress. Learn to be grateful for what you have, for the people in your life, and see it as a gift. With this sort of outlook on life, stress will go down and happiness will go up. That’s a winning formula.
20. Zen-like environment. Take time to declutter your desk (as mentioned above) and even once you do that, continually edit your desk and working space, and the things in your home, until you’ve created a simple, peaceful, Zen-like environment. It will be much less stressful to work in an environment like that than a more cluttered and distracting one.
source : Zenhabits.com
Originally posted 2009-01-04 20:35:03. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Feb 9th 10
Posted by Aldohas in Personal Development
photo credit: alter1fo
Dreams and Goals in Life
The purpose of Personal Development and Self Improvement is to aid you accomplish your goals in life. Both are planned to give you the accomplishments you need to reach whatever it is that you would like to accomplish. Just could personal development or self improvement actually improve your living situations?
Well, the role of both self improvement and personal development is to do barely that. They’re both only instruments that are used to control you will succeed in your decided life fields. They’re desgined to aid you get happier on the inside and more satisfied with what you have on the outside in any are you decided to employ them!
You could not at present know how to proceed. So what type of personal development goals should you adjust? How do you begin to build up self improvement goals that will direct you to freedom, a bigger feeling of felicity, aid you accomplish a better life-style and at last produce a lot of success in your life? This question is not simple to answer as success implies dissimilar things to another people. Hence, whenever you would like to become successful you essential first have a clear agreement of what success means to you!
A wonderful technique to get a clear on what success means for you is to ask yourself the question, “what would I do whenever I knew I could not fail?” Allow yourself to enjoy in the mental image that is developed. The imagination that is made in your mind will present you what you actually desire in life and from this visual sense you are able to see what success means to you.
From the second a human is born he/she has a natural power to acknowledge what it is they desire and a belief that they could have it. We grow ambitions and dreams at a very early age. Even so as we turn older we are in condition to think that these dreams are not possible or are simple fantasies of our imagination. You are steered to get a good training so that you are able to find a good job that will allow you to get a mortgage, get married, have children and live a ‘normal’ life.
Along the time almost people accomplish their mid twenties they have all but given up on their dreams or even buried what those dreams are. They’ve convert conditioned into trusting that they’re incompetent of reaching what they desire in life. This primal belief forms the foundation of their self image and the rest of their mental attitudes are build on it!
The Role of Personal Development
It is the purpose of personal development and self improvement to take out these conditioned mental attitudes from your inner mind and release you to pursue the life flow that you preferred for yourself. By the use of personal development and self improvement you are able to begin today to take away mental conditioning that you accepted from well-meaning family, peers and teachers
Additionally you will also be guided to take away all those negative mental attitudes that have been given to you along not so well-meaning people and those you’ve developed yourself through negative life experiences. While this isn’t all of the time an easy or enjoyable journey to take the advantages that you’ll get from acquiring it are immeasurable and make it really worthy.
The freedom that you can feel from taking away just one negative mental and negative emotional pattern is akin to the feeling of rest and tranquillity you feel after extreme workout. Taking away a lot of negative mental attitudes and emotional stress from your mind and body is a feeling and experience that is really hard to describe to someone who has never experienced it themselves.
photo credit: Evan Prodromou
There are at your disposal a lot of personal development and self improvement techniques that are designed to assist you reach this goal. Now these instruments and techniques are not designed to show you the way to become financially free but alternatively are designed to free you from your own inner resistance to being financially free. A lot of people think this is a waste of time and would rather to be given bit by bit instructions to build financial wealth and I was once among them. However, it did not matter how much effort I used or how many ‘guaranteed’ methods I followed my financial situations didn’t improve and many times actually grew worse.
Why was this? Were the projects I was following just not good enough to make wealth? Were the people peddling these rags to wealth formulas just conning me out of my money? Was gaining riches barely pure fortune like winning the lottery?
The answer to whole of the above questions is no!
The plans I followed had worked for thousands and made them wealthy! The people selling me the products and formulas had entirely made their fortunes using the very same formulas they were trying to teach me! It was only after a great deal of hardship and a lot of learning lessons that I discovered the reality – acquiring wealth has nothing to do with being lucky!
It was not that these matters weren’t good enough to produce the wealth I craved it was that I THOUGHT I wasn’t good enough. When you hold a negative self image and have a negative view of yourself and your abilities it’s very difficuly to reach success no matter how much attempt you put into it! This is why it is of paramount importance to first take away the negative conditioning that is holding you back in life.
Your mental attitude, which is only compiled of thoughts and feelings, is responsible for your actions. Thought is the creator of action! All action you perform, no matter how small or big, first begins in your mind as a thought. For each one thought begins as a feeling.
Think of when you met your last partner. You first felt the attraction. This grew into a thought or series of thoughts about meeting the person. Then you performed some action to make that happen. Bring to mind a time when you meet with your friends to have a social gathering. You had the feeling that you’d like to have any fun, or be with your friends, were feeling alone etc. And then you had the thought. Then you performed the action.
Whenever your actions are moved by your thoughts and feelings and your attitude is compiled of thoughts and feelings do you believe you could succeed at a given task whenever you hold a negative mental attitude about it or your ability to succeed at it?
At one time you embrace personal development and begin to apply any of the myriad of self improvement instruments to take away your negative mental attitudes you’ll naturally find yourself becoming more successful in life. You actions will be more positive and you will unconsciously perform the correct actions that will lead you to success. I am sure you can know see how important it is to set some personal development goals. Not only will you see improvement in your self, you will also see many symptoms of success added unto you!
Originally posted 2009-05-11 00:39:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Feb 9th 10
Posted by Aldohas in Personal Development, goal setting
photo credit: nDevilTV
Among the most beneficial contributions we could give to ourselves and our family is to get better people. To accomplish this, we require personal development goals. These development goals will determine who you’ll become following year, in 10 years, and for lifetime.
Personal development goals are a way of developing new skills, increasing our consciousness, broadening our understanding and maturating of our body, mind and soul. Our personal loyalty to development is the driving force behind the setting of development goals.
Through personal development goals you can discover your weaknesses, your short-comings, and character defects and how you’re going to improve them.
There’s no denying that the world we life in is turning more and more sophisticated. There’s a global market place with fierce rivalry. We require to be capable to add new skills on an ongoing basis. We need to get adaptable, capable to accommodate to new thoughts and challenges. In order to succeed we need to embracing change and bear the challenges that it brings.
Suitable skills are moving from conventional technical abilities to personal abilities, which is where the rules of personal development and success come in. The ability to set and achieve goals, coupled with discipline and perseverance will be required to succeed in the future.
Even the human relationship we have are getting more difficult. This is because our human relationship have become more complex. We altogether battle with a sort of problems from day one. Whether it’s in our relationships, businesses, finances, or health, we altogether have problems. One solution is to upraise our level of awareness, to develop beyond our present situation, and have a certain destination of what we would like to reach altogether these factors.
Set your own goals. This will pave the way to a successful personal growth plan.
Do you have a detailed set of goals for your life? There are a lot of people in certain businesses that are continually challenging themselves with motivation, success and personal development or else they barely won’t last.
Whenever your friends and family assure you to take the comfortable road, don’t hear to them. Whenever you’ve already set your goal, continue on. Acknowledge that you are in a choice group for very few people have ever made that first step forward.
People have a trend to stay acting the same things again and again. There is always that thought that everything is good enough. In the end, things will become redundant. We have to keep developing with the changing world and continue growing to get better than we already are. This is the purpose that our goals will play.
It’s very significant to remember that goals are not stable. As our circumstances change, without doubt our goals will as well need to modify. It’s crucial to remember that when your conditions change, review and, when requirement, adjust your goals. The first rule of development goals is to complete the goals you set for yourself.
Originally posted 2009-05-09 00:30:36. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
Feb 9th 10
Posted by Aldohas in Affirmation, Personal Development, Self Esteem
image credit : apenny
Self-esteem issues appears to be among the strongest emotions that challenge many women today. It has become a woman’s first worry when she awakens, and her last worry before she sleeps.
It’s said that we’re all born with a natural self-esteem, but through the worlds concerns about power and control, we have been trained to worry about what others think of us and how we can please them. We have forgotten how to love ourselves and treat ourselves with respect. We’re taught that loving ourselves is selfish and will only make us appear conceited, which will turn people off.
If weren’t allowed to learn how to love ourselves, then how can we learn to allow others to love us? We cannot feel love and positive esteem for ourselves if we focus all of it on others first. If we do, we then run the risk of offering all of our inner feelings to someone and not getting anything in return. At this point we begin to feel resentment, cheated and even lower in our ability to ever love again.
People that have scars from resentment and abuse are the hardest people to love. They’ve the highest low self-esteem walls to climb. Shortly, they’re unreachable. This isn’t a good thing at all.
When a person says altogether honesty that they’re suffering from a low self-esteem issue, I take that very seriously. This is a true cry for help. They are at the bottom of their pit and are asking for help to bring out. They’re at a point where they’ll expect you to love them and take care of them as they’d themselves. In other words, we all know the worst thing a person can do is expect their partner to be a mind reader.
Well, when a person is suffering from a low self-esteem, trust me, they do expect just that. They will expect for you to just know what they need. They only have faith in you. They’ve lost faith in themselves long ago and they’ve no recourse. This places a very huge burden on your shoulders as their partner. This isn’t a good thing!
No one will ever be able to feel what another person feels inside. No one will ever be able to love another as they can love themselves. No one can read our minds. No one can do for us, what needs to be done to make us feel inner peace. It’s our responsibility to ourselves to love us first.
You really must know who you are to start. To be able to fulfill your needs and desires and goals in life, you need to identify with your wants. You cannot do any of this if you don’t concentrate on you. You need to be all about you for a time. No one can do this for you, so just do it!
This is called finding your space. Your space is a very, very important place to just find yourself in peace without any distractions. Just you and your thoughts. Learning about your self-esteem also means that you must come to terms with this question, “How badly do you want to have a higher self-esteem” ? If you really want it, then you’ll find it. You have been trained to un-love yourself, so it’s not impossible to retrain yourself to love you again.
Your environment is also important in helping you feel positive vibes. For you to truly accept yourself unconditionally, you must look beyond the simple quick fix motto’s that are plaguing television and magazines, such as diets that will make you a better you, or take this pill and you will be a new you. Ugh, there are so many misconceptions out there. It seriously boils down to your mind and your heart. Love yourself as you would like to be loved. Love yourself as you prefer to love someone! Just be you! That is a very good thing!
Remember, “HABITS”? Well that’s exactly what you need to do. Create loving you habits and respecting you habits. Think of it as your very first self-esteem day. You wake up, you stretch and hug your partner or just yourself. Even hugging your pillow is a good hug. You’ve no memory of any other feelings.
You love yourself. You’ve no other intention but to take care of you. You look in the mirror and stick your tongue out and roll your eyes inward and smile! Smile at you because you love who you are. Ti’s a very good thing to be able to smile at you for no other reason than it is good to be you!
Please don’t get me wrong here. Life will still challenge you with its ups and downs. You’ll still have to deal with all the negative things that your day will unravel. But the difference is, you will be doing it from clear, fresh, positive self-esteem eyes. Nothing will defeat you finally. Oh, it may give you a run for your money, but you’ll override all of it with your smiles and love for yourself. Imagine the confidence that will shine inside of you. Your reactions will be out of love and understanding. They’ll no more be from resentment and hate. This is a good thing!
Remember also that anything worth having doesn’t come easily. When it’s been attained or learned, it remains forever. This too is a good thing! Many women have experienced the highs and the lows of self-esteem, you’re so not alone in this battle to find a better you!
To finally have the gift of self-esteem won’t bring you happiness, that is something that comes after. But it will bring you a deep awareness of who you’re. A new respect for you. A genuine love for yourself and the confidence to soar! Finding your self-esteem saves your world, not anyone else’s. But it does give you the strength to help others to find theirs. So Ladies, please follow me into the world of a very high self-esteem.
Dorothy Lafrinere
http://www.womensselfesteem.com
http://www.justblogme.com/Dorothy
Originally posted 2009-05-03 05:26:32. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
