Showing posts with label Self-improvement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Self-improvement. Show all posts

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

10 Reasons to Appreciate Difficulties by Stacy C.


Life always finds ways to hand us challenges.

Sometimes the challenges are self inflicted because of poor choices
that we have made. Other times they are inflicted on us because of
poor choices that other people have made that directly or
indirectly influence our lives.

Many times challenges are just part of life.

No matter the cause of the challenge we can choose to face the
challenges in one of two ways.

We can choose to take the challenge head on and make the most of
them, seeing them as opportunities to grow as a person. OR we can
moan and complain about how unfair the world is and continue
finding the same challenges until we choose to take life's lessons
and use them to grow.

That is why we can find at least ten reasons to appreciate
difficulties that life throws our way! Following are ten reasons
that we can appreciate the difficulties in our lives.

10 Reasons to Appreciate Difficulties

1. If life was easy all of the time we would grow lazy and rarely
be motivated to change and grow. How motivated were you to change
and grow the last time that you were laying on a beach under the
sun and beautiful blue sky?

2. Difficulties often force us to change in ways that we never
would otherwise. When we are put in situations that make us
uncomfortable we see the need for a change in our own actions,
attitudes and thinking. (Assuming that we are looking to grow,
otherwise all we see is how other people need to change to make us
comfortable!)

3. You can inspire and encourage others towards personal growth and
development! Others can be inspired by you in many ways, whether
they are watching you from the sidelines or whether you share with
them how you overcame a difficulty when they are going through a
similar trial.

4. After you have come out of the difficulty and look back at how
you grew and overcame challenges you will feel great about yourself!

5. Each difficulty presents a learning opportunity, otherwise it
wouldn't be difficult. Look for the lesson to be learned, look as
hard as you need to because once you find that lesson it is
something that you will be able to carry with you for your whole
life!

6. Look at someone who hates challenges, look at how miserable they
are and how miserable they make people around them. Know that you
won't be like them, being controlled by circumstances rather than
being in control over themselves.

7. Challenges initiate creativity. It is said that difficulty is
the mother of all inventions, when people are in situations that
they don't like the successful people will use their creativity to
find ways to deal with the difficulties. Many inventions were
created this way and also many great works of art were created in
times of the artist's stress.

8. New relationships can be made through challenges. You could meet
people who have gone through the same challenges as you and develop
very strong bonds that will last years. Some challenges bring about
instant bonds. For instance, I'm a cancer survivor and there is an
instant connection when I meet someone else who is one as well.
There are plenty of other types of challenges which bring bonding
between people such as the loss of a loved one or surviving a
tragedy.

9. If you are a spiritual person your challenges present a unique
opportunity to reach out to your creator and also by finding other
ways to grow spiritually.

10. Each time that you successfully overcome a difficulty you will
have more confidence to successfully overcome the next challenge
that life throws your way. You will become stronger each time and
each event of personal growth through these challenges will build
on each other to make you stronger and stronger, more and more
confident!

Monday, December 7, 2009

Motivational Video

Hi readers,

Everybody needs a mentor or coach to push them to achieve their goals, whether they need it or not.

Monday, November 23, 2009

Will Smith Wisdom

Hi readers,

In this video, Will Smith shares his secrets of success.

Enjoy watching!

Saturday, November 14, 2009

Move Forward To Grow Wiser by Mark Foo


As you move forward, you grow wiser.

Move forward because standing still is the guaranteed way to fail. Moving forward, whether you walk through victories or defeats, is the only way you will learn and grow.

Every step you take brings you one step closer to your goals. While on the journey to your dreams, you gather wisdom from your experiences, which helps you make better decisions in the future. In doing so, you are setting yourself up for a life with no regrets.

Be eager to learn new lessons around you every day. You are mature enough to learn from the situations of others even before you face those situations yourself. When you experience a shortcoming, remind yourself that mistakes are simply lessons in disguise.

When you experience a personal victory, take note of successful strategies that you can use in the future. If you ever encounter failure, reflect on your actions in order to perform better the next time.

Open yourself up to new challenges with confidence allowing life to be your classroom. Each day, embrace life with the expectation that you will receive knowledge from the most unexpected places.

Be daring to venture into every day, even when you are surrounded by uncertainty, because being a risk taker pays off with new knowledge that you never would have acquired otherwise.

Today, choose to walk forth into your destiny with wisdom and direction. Embrace the opportunity to learn from the many sources of knowledge that engulf you. Your knowledge increases as you fearlessly accept the lessons you are being taught by life itself.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. What lessons has life taught you recently?
2. What unexpected knowledge can you find today?
3. How can you share your wisdom with others?

Thursday, November 12, 2009

Anything In The Horizon Is Possible by Mark Foo



As long as you think you can, anything in the horizon is possible.


Always be open to the possibility of success. Look for ways to succeed rather than excuses to fail, and so you'll enjoy the thrills of success. Confidence and an optimistic attitude are the traits that pave the way.

In the classic story, The Little Engine That Could, it was the smallest engine in the train yard that climbed the mountain to save the day. He just kept saying, "I think I can, I think I can, I think I can..." all the way up.

In the same way, you don't have to be the strongest, smartest, most beautiful, most educated, or most experienced person to succeed. All your lights don't have to be green in order for you to get started on your journey to success.

The world is filled with examples of people who've succeeded despite the tremendous odds against them! What makes the difference? Attitude!

Develop your winning attitude daily with affirmations and positive self-talk. Congratulate yourself for even trivial achievements because what are they? Successes of course!

If you feel your confidence waning, remind yourself of your past successes to build it back up again.

When you encounter a challenge, waste no time in continuing to move ahead. Just tell yourself, "I think I can," and jump right into searching for a viable solution.

Today, make your mantra to be "I think I can." Nothing is out of reach for you if you decide it is what you want. Your can-do attitude can always bring you success!

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. When you start toward a new goal, what is your attitude?
2. What goal have you achieved simply because you thought you could?
3. What's holding you back? How can you move past that and believe in the possibility of your success?

Sunday, November 8, 2009

Take Pride in Your Small Achievements‏ by Mark Foo


Take pride in your small achievements, for each step brings you closer to success.

Develop a bulletproof plan for success and let it keep you
fulfilled and motivated all along the way! It is your road map and every small task you accomplish is one step on the road to attaining your goals.

Divide every major goal in your life into a series of smaller goals that lead up to it. Then divide each of the smaller goals into a series of small, attainable tasks.

Once you take the time to figure out the smaller goals and tasks, you'll have a sure-fire plan for success. All you need to do is dive right in!

Schedule some quick and easy tasks for the beginning so that even large projects can be easily started. This helps you build your focus and momentum. Once you get going like this, it's easier to keep going, even when challenges arise because you'd already have the momentum to solve the problem and continue on.

Keep your plan flexible so that small detours around a challenge can still get you to your destination.

So in your plan, every task completed - every small achievement - is something to be proud of. Each task is an integral part of your journey to success. When you complete even the smallest one, celebrate your victory.

Today, make it a point to figure out your detailed plan for success and then jump right in to achieve those small victories on your journey.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. What is your plan for success?
2. What small steps can you put at the beginning to get yourself started right away?
3. Do you feel proud of yourself for your small achievements?

Friday, October 16, 2009

The #1 Reason Why Most Goals Never Manifest by Thomas Herold


I am sure you understand the idea of setting goals in life to empower yourself. Perhaps what you don't know is that goals require a constant stream of force behind them to keep them alive. In other words, you need to push them all the time to make them come true.

Constantly pushing of your goals, while necessary, is also detrimental to the effective manifestation of the goals themselves. Goals are artificially created by the mind and backed up by the concepts and beliefs that allow them to work.

Take away the concepts and beliefs that give them the foundation to live and your goals will evaporate in no time at all.


How Does This Look Like in Practice?

Let’s assume you've set a goal to lose weight. As you may already know, it is important to set each goal precisely. So losing weight, like any goal, should include exact particulars of what you want to accomplish. Let’s say you want to lose 25 pounds over the next three months, starting today. This goal needs a foundation to work. You need to have some sort of motivation that encourages you to accomplish this goal.

Perhaps one or more of the following acts as your motivation to lose the weight:
  • You want to look attractive to others
  • You want to look attractive to your partner
  • You believe that you are overweight
  • You want to fit into your favorite dress or pants again
You need a reason to lose the weight, something that can motivate you to achieve your goal. Whatever the reason behind the goal, you absolutely need to have one, otherwise you won’t have the motivation to even start.

Think of the reason as the decision to change something in your life and the motivation as the energy that affects that change.

The mere act of starting on any goal can be incredibly challenging as it involves being willing to change some of your usual behaviors and concepts in life. We all know what a challenge changing your behavior and concepts can be!

Behavior is changed in the physical domain while concepts are changed in the mental domain. This double whammy of both the physical and the mental is what makes a simple life change like weight loss such a challenge to bring off successfully.

Successful goals always come from a corresponding change in the mental domain.

Why is This?

Simply put, it is because your mind and your thoughts are what create your reality. If you change only your behavior, you will have only short-term success. In time, you will fall back into your old patterns of behavior – the very thing you tried to change in the first place!

So let's assume you are in the second month of your weight loss goal and your partner leaves you. What happens to your goal about losing weight? It doesn’t matter anymore, it diminishes and evaporates into thin air. You just took away both the foundation and the energy for accomplishing your goal. You no longer have a reason and you've lost your motivation.

The problem with goals is that they depend on life circumstances – and they are always forced by mental concepts.

How About Dreams?

Your dreams are powered by Source, by the ultimate power of consciousness. Your dreams are the recognition of what you can do with the unique gifts and talents you have brought into this life. Every person exists with a unique set of talents. These talents lead to a unique way of expressing themselves through various forms of creativity. Universal creativity is really what powers everything behind all manifestation.

With this creativity you are able to serve other people, and in return, you get rewarded with a form of energy. In Western civilization, the most common reward is often money, but creative rewards often come in many other energetic forms like status and recognition, authority, greater outreach to others and more.

In Summary:

You discover your strengths, gifts and talents. You find ways to use them that enrich and support society in practical ways. You are in service to others for serving others in this way is truly life’s ultimate purpose.

Your dreams are powered by your unique creative abilities. These abilities are like a never-ending fountain, the wellspring of your life. They will always be with you, in good times and bad. They are completely apart from and independent of mental concepts. They are powered by your true nature. You can deny them, but you can’t get rid of them.

Even on the worst day of your life, your dreams still exist. If you don’t live your dreams, you must constantly suppress them by engaging in mental concepts like:
  • I am too old to start
  • I don’t know how to do it
  • Nobody will be interested in it
  • My friends will hate me when I do it
  • You name it!
I have used the words force and power in association with goals and dreams. To understand the concepts behind these words, I highly recommend David Hawkins' book Power Versus Force. Here are a few definitions from the book that help explain the idea of power versus force:
  • Force is associated with the partial, power with the whole
  • Force must always be justified, power requires no justification
  • Force always creates counter-force and its effect is limited by definition
  • Force is a movement, power is a skill
  • Force always moves against something, power doesn’t move against anything at all
  • Force is incomplete and therefore has to be fed energy constantly
  • Power is total and complete in itself and requires nothing from outside
  • Force constantly consumes while power energizes, supplies and supports
  • Pow er gives life and energy, force takes these away
  • Power is associated with compassion, force is associated with judgment
  • Force requires proof and support, power is inarguable and not subject to proof
People who fulfill their dreams are the happiest people on earth.

They do what’s in their nature. In the end, it is completely irrelevant to them what kind of dreams they have. Dreams don’t need to fit into anything. They don’t need any approval. They don’t need any money to start.

Goals are temporary fixes of your mental desires that do not provide you with lasting happiness. The new car will get old and rusty, the new house will lose its charm over time, and if your goal is to create the perfect partner, you will begin to see your partner’s imperfections over time as well.

Your dreams are a recognition of what you truly are and how you can contribute to this world. You will never do anything else in life more important than this. In fact, in a very real sense there is nothing else in life but this. There is no true retirement from the contributions you can make in this life. You literally live the dream that is your life to your very last breath.

Why not start today to live your dreams in earnest?

Thursday, October 8, 2009

Learn To Enjoy Change by Mark Foo


Change is a blessing that you should learn to enjoy.

Be grateful for the gift of change. Without change, you would never be able to grow, learn new things, accomplish your goals, or look forward to anything different than what you've got. Even though you may resist change at times, you should learn to enjoy its possibilities.

Even when change is forced upon you and brings challenges, it opens new doors of opportunity. Do realise that a change that seems devastating can actually propel you into a better life!

Where would you be today if you had not lost that job, causing you to seek a better, more fulfilling path in life? How could you have the spouse you enjoy now if you had not left your old boyfriend/girlfriend behind?

Change is one of the blessings that come with the power of choice. You can choose to leave things the way they are, or change them to something better.

You can choose to waste your life fighting inevitable changes or take advantage of them and enjoy life. When life hands you lemons, choose to make lemonade!

Change allows you to learn and grow. As you strive to achieve your goals, embrace the changes in your life that bring you ever closer to success. With each change, you'll become more knowledgeable, stronger, and more confident that you can handle whatever life may bring.

Know that today brings its share of changes. Choose to welcome them all and allow yourself to enjoy all opportunities that come your way.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. What changes are you resisting in your life right now?
2. How can you embrace these changes and use them to improve your life?
3. Is there something you can change to move you closer to your goals?

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

The 5 Emotional Beasts that Prey on your Power to Manifest by Thomas Herold


Do you know the difference between a feeling and an emotion?

You may say that emotions are much deeper and stronger than feelings. From one viewpoint, that's true. However, here’s a detail about feelings that you may not know about: you can observe your feelings but not your emotions.

When you experience feelings you are the observer and in full control; when you experience emotions, you cannot remain the observer and you are not in control.

Emotions Seems to Have a Life of its Own

In most cases, you can only experience them and not control them. You are no longer in control – the emotions are! They act collectively as a kind of psychic clone of the more complete, more human you.

That's the reason why we have emotional reactions to things that we sometimes later regret. We scream at our partners, we leave our friends, and we smash things until they break. Mostly, this emotional clone is reactive, uncontrollable, and seemingly independent from our core selves.

The Wolf Story

A sage once said that each person has both a white and a black wolf inside himself that constantly fight each other. The black wolf is aggressive and reactive and the white wolf is calm and social. The winner of this battle is simply decided by which wolf we feed. Most of the time we are not aware that, more often than not, we feed the black wolf and not the white one.

What can be done about this?

The black wolf can only live inside when you create it in the first place. A black wolf is a black hole that sucks up your energy.

1. The Black Wolf Called Anger

Anger is the result of not taking 100% responsibility for your life. You created this wolf by reacting to an experience. Then you forgot that you created it. If you decide to take ownership of your creation, you must simply feel your way through the original experience. That feeling could be sadness, for example, but not anger.

Sadness is the original feeling and an angry black wolf is the emotional result.

Perhaps you blame someone else for your anger. By doing so, you make another person responsible for the wolf creation that is yours and yours alone! It’s important to remember that everything in this world is a creation of yours in one form or another, even things that seem to have nothing to do with you directly.

2. The Black Wolf Called Resentment

Resentment is very close to anger. When you harbor resentment, you limit the spectrum of your feeling nature and a major part of you closes down. When you resent someone, you are saying very forcefully that the other person is the problem, the cause and the fault, not you. You forcefully blame the other person so you don't have to look within.

You are declaring the other person, group or institution to be your enemy.


The problem is that resenting your enemy creates a dilemma that centers around the conflict that come from not taking full responsibility for the the situation. Ultimately, it is you who has the conflict, you who faces the dilemma, and you who began to harbor resentment.

3. The Black Wolf Called Blame

Like resentment, blame is not much different from anger. In both cases, you attempt to make someone else responsible for what you feel by creating an emotional reaction. Resentment and blame are different faces of this type of emotional reaction.

Resentment is a form of disappointment that seems to have its source on the outside. For example, should you get fired it seems logical that the cause is your employer. If such a calamity happened, there probably wouldn’t be much you could do about it. The cause seems to be external (your boss) even though your emotional reaction is generated within.

Everything changes when you accept that the cause is always you.

You created it (you took the job), you experienced and accepted the situation (you created a positive or negative environment in which to work), and you reaped the results (you got rewarded or fired). You alone are responsible for this wolf. Why did you create a black wolf when you could have just as easily created a white one?

4. The Black Wolf Called Guilt

Guilt is much like blame of others, but turned back on yourself. When you’re guilty, you actually take ownership of what you did. So why would you feel bad about it? Because you judge yourself as having taken the wrong action in a given situation.

You did it and now you are convinced it was wrong.

With a little introspection, you’ll realize that guilt does not come from the original situation or action itself, but from the self-imposed judgment after the action. This judgment is, in fact, an emotional reaction that questions the original action you took in a given situation. When things fall apart afterwards, you tell yourself, “I made a mistake; I did not want to cause this.” You blame yourself.

5. The Black Wolf Called Betrayal

This is one of the hardest beasts to tame. The emotion of betrayal runs deeply. Betrayal occurs mostly after you have trusted someone close who then fails to satisfy that trust in some fashion. By trusting someone, you opened yourself up to be in a vulnerable state.

At some point, your trust is betrayed or even used against you. You thought that you had correctly judged your confidant as trustworthy, but now you are being punished in some way. It just makes no sense – it hurts! Betrayal is the emotional reaction to this (perhaps completely justified) feeling of being hurt by another.

Negative Emotions are a Pack of Black Wolves

This pack is vicious, fast, and can be deadly. They hunt you from the outside, circling closer until they can attack within. They may stalk you for days, months, or even years. This pack follows some people to their graves, snapping and snarling all the way. The pack is energetic and invincible. Like black wolves, e-motions are negative energy in motion.

It's part of your creative manifesting power used against yourself!

You can eliminate them in a very short time – given the correct understanding of their nature and the techniques to vanquish them. The most potent weapon against them involves a miraculous inner process few practice completely, let alone fully understand.

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Give Yourself Permission To Be Imperfect by Mark Foo


Release yourself from any need to strive for perfection. Know that your imperfections help to make up the unique and wonderful person that you are.

Your imperfections enhance your beauty.
All you have to do is look toward nature to discover the beauty in imperfection.

In a grove of colorful trees in the fall, each tree is just as beautiful as the next, although not a single leaf is the same. With zebras, each one has imperfections in its stripes, which add to its unique beauty.

Realize that those who love you do not love you for being perfect, but for being who you are
- including all your imperfections. Your flaws are an integral part of the total package. If you were perfect, you would be a different entity altogether.

Your shortcomings enable you to grow and learn. Self-improvement brings the joy of success in knowing that you are getting better and better. If you were perfect, you would never feel this joy and you'd have nothing to aim for. You would wander aimlessly through life.

Your imperfections also bring variety to your life. Because you are imperfect, you change as life goes on. Process your experiences in your own unique ways and you are a little different from one day to the next.

Today, feel thankful for your imperfections
and look forward to the varied experiences and many blessings on your life journey.

Self-Reflection Questions:

1. How do you feel about your flaws?
2. What good things have your imperfections brought to you?
3. How can you be thankful for your flaws?