Making Changes - Start With A Baseline

 

Making changes in your life is great and it’s the way we grow and develop as people. Change is a constant process and is part of being human. When you embark on changing anything in your life, you need to start from where you are. However, if you’re not clear on where you are, it will be difficult to effectively make a change.

You have to start with a baseline.

Starting with a baseline is about figuring out where you are, and what you’re doing, so that you know exactly what needs to be changed. Whilst it may sound odd to suggest that we don’t know where we are, many of us are unaware of what we do day-to-day. Most of our thoughts and actions have become routine – they’ve become a habit.

If you want to lose weight, the first thing you would do is keep a record of what you’re eating, by keeping a food journal for a week. This gives you a baseline of your typical diet. You may be surprised to see, not only how much you were eating, but also what you were eating. 

Many people will likely find themselves consistently spending more money than they make, and this, I would expect, is because they’re not tracking what they’re spending, especially on a credit card.

Have you ever felt like you just don't have enough time to accomplish everything you need, or want, to do? Have you ever tracked the time you spend during the day to see how you’re spending it? When you do, it can make you painfully aware that you waste many hours, particularly through activities such as watching television or scrolling through social media.

Many of us are on autopilot and we’re simply not aware of what we’re doing. When you track something - and this works with anything - you have a real picture of where you are, and what needs to change.

Therefore, the first step in making any change is awareness. You have to become aware of what you’re doing and exactly where you are for any given area of your life before you can proceed forward.

Keeping a log of everything you do throughout your day, for a week or two, will help you keep track of how you’re using your resources and provide you with valuable information that will support the change you’re looking to make.

Track things such as how much money you spend, how long you exercise for, how many hours of sleep you get, how long you spend scrolling through social media or how long you spend working on your goals. Once you know the truth about where you are, you can start identifying what you can change to get you moving faster towards the life that you want.

Knowing where you are is like those guide maps that have an X printed next to "You are here". When you know where you are, you can see how to get to where you want to go.

Schedule Your Ideal Day

In this video clip, psychologist and author, Jordan Peterson, says that not only is it important for us to specify our goals, but we should also schedule our ideal day.

It’s important that we first set ourselves clear and specific goals, otherwise we will go through life not knowing where to aim our efforts. The setting of clear and specific goals also helps us to identify when we’re failing. If we don’t know we’re failing, we’ll just keep on failing.

Once we’ve set clear and specific goals, we then need to create a schedule, and stick to it.

The rule to remember when setting a schedule is that it’s not a prison that ties you into doing all the things that you feel you ‘should’ do, but instead it should be set up for the day that you want.

It’s important that you include your responsibilities and obligations in your ideal schedule, as you’ll need to manage those in addition to your desires. But you should ask yourself what the right ratio of responsibilities to reward is for your ideal day, and then negotiate with yourself through the day so that you balance your responsibilities with rewards.

“You need to know what your damn time is worth”

- Jordan Peterson

 

Perseverance: The Key To Success

 

Perseverance is continuing to do something in spite of the obstacles or difficulties that may arise. It is one of the best qualities to have, because with perseverance, success in your endeavours is almost guaranteed.

To persevere we need to have faith that we actually can succeed. If we don’t believe success is possible for us, we won’t be motivated to continue. If we don’t have much belief in ourselves, we’ll likely quit our efforts more readily. And when we quit, this seems to give credit to the idea that we couldn’t have succeeded anyway, which further decreases our belief in ourselves. Sadly, this negative loop can develop into a regular habit.

However, the opposite is also true. If we believe that we’ll succeed, then we're less likely to give up. We may encounter great difficulties or even defeats, but because we believe that we’ll ultimately succeed, even with failures, we just change our approach or adjust our goals a little and keep going. Because we keep trying and adjusting, we greatly improve our chances of success. The more we persevere in the face of challenges, the more it becomes a habit.

So, at the heart of success is the ability to persevere. But how do we encourage this quality in ourselves?

Be aware of when you have a desire to give up too early. Then take a pause and remind yourself that perseverance will almost always lead to success. When you start a new challenge or goal, make a promise to yourself that you’ll try it for a specific period of time and won’t quit before that time is up. Make the interval of time short if you need to, but no matter what, keep your promise and don’t quit before the allotted time. When the deadline arrives, you can then decide if your strategy is working and whether you should continue in the same manner, or if you need to make adjustments in your strategy. Allow yourself to abandon one strategy in favour of another if, after you’ve given it a fair trial, it either doesn’t appear to be working, or you think it could be done more effectively. Don’t ever quit on your goals if they’re truly meaningful to you, only change your strategies.

4 Tips To Help You Find Your Real Self Again

 

On the surface it may seem an odd idea that you could actually be anything other than who you really are. But from the time we can talk, we’re being programmed to “fit in”. We find ourselves conforming in order to please other people, whether that’s our parents, our teachers, our peers, our boss or society in general.

But you can find that often means that you have to suppress what you know is the real person inside. And the more you suppress who you truly are, the more you find yourself becoming frustrated with your life and the world around you. In fact, the harder you try to fit in and please other people, the further away from happiness and fulfilment you often seem to get.

Your relationship with yourself is the most important relationship you’ll ever have. Without a healthy relationship with yourself, it’s practically impossible to have a healthy relationship with anyone else.

If you’re ready to get reacquainted with someone you haven’t seen in a while – yourself – start with these 4 tips to help you rediscover the real you.

Tip 1: Quiet the noise in your head

You know that noise well! The voices that are constantly nagging you to do your daily chores, make other people happy, and conform to other people’s expectations. With all that noise going on, it’ll be impossible for you to hear anything that your true self is trying to tell you. This is why it’s important that this is the first step in finding your real self again. But how do you do that?

There are many ways that can help you do this. Meditation and mindfulness can help you to calm the thoughts going through your head. Setting up systems and simplifying your life, such as creating daily plans or unsubscribing from emails that you no longer read, helps you to reduce the clutter and chaos in your life, which helps you to start focusing on who you truly are and what you truly want in life.

Tip 2: Practice thinking about yourself in healthy ways

Your feelings of self-worth and deserve will have significant impacts on the quality of the life you live. The higher they are, the more abundance and happiness you’ll find enters your life. Conversely, the lower they are, the more lack and unhappiness you’ll experience. In order to improve the way you see yourself you must first believe that you are valuable, and that your real self has something to offer the world. 

One of the best, and easiest, ways to do this is through your self-talk. Since you talk to yourself more than everyone else in your life combined (that’s a lot of talk!), it’s up to you to establish healthy communication in your thinking. Consciously be aware of how you talk to yourself; write down the unhealthy things you say; challenge them; and replace them with facts and turn them around so that you’re telling yourself the healthy opposite. For example, if you find yourself saying something like “I never do anything right”, find examples in your life that prove this statement to be wrong. It doesn’t have to be a big success, it can be something really simple that you do every day but take for granted, and then change your self-talk to the opposite such as “I do things right. I did (example) right. I did (example) right. This time, I just made a mistake. I’ll learn from it and have better success next time.”

Tip 3: Listen to your heart

This sounds easy enough, but by the time we’re adults, most of us have stopped listening to our hearts and only go with our heads – a lot of which has been put there by other people. Those two must reconnect in order to find your real self. It’s easy to become accustomed to thinking about your feelings instead of really feeling them. Instead of asking yourself what you think about something, ask why it’s important. Your feelings are guiding you through life. If you consciously decide to do something, but you have a feeling that is either negative or doesn’t make you feel inspired, take the time to review what you’ve decided to do and try to break it down into why it might not be making you happy or inspired. However, be mindful that this may not be all bad. Sometimes we mistake excitement for fear, or we can want something so badly that we fear not getting it if we go for it, so it’s important to analyse why a decision we make is making us feel a certain way.

Tip 4: Be careful not to get hung-up on a specific goal

When you’re setting goals, it’s important to remember that what you’re really after is a feeling, such as respect, love or appreciation, as opposed to the expensive car, big house or a great partner. Keep an open mind to the feelings, and be willing to adjust the methods you use to achieve them. Determine not just your goals, but how they’ll satisfy who you really are. This will help to ensure that what you’re going after will truly satisfy you and fulfil your life.

When you accept your real self again, you'll make authentic and smarter choices, and these choices will stick because they actually fit who you are. People will start to appreciate and love you for who you truly are. Now, that's what you're really looking for in life, isn't it?

But first you have to learn to appreciate and love who you truly are, and the tips above will help you along that journey.

Brian Tracy’s Daily Habits Of Successful People

Most of what we do is the result of habit. So, it’s important that we form good habits and make them our masters, rather than allowing bad habits to form.

So, what are the daily habits of successful people?

Here are five daily habits that Brian Tracy says you should develop to be successful:

1. Set goals daily and be goal orientated

Some ways that can help you to do this are:

• When you go to sleep at night, think about your goals for the coming day.
• Make a list every day of all the little goals that you’re going to accomplish throughout the day.
• Keep a journal and write down your goals on a daily basis.
• Continually think about your goals throughout the day.

Remember that you become what you think about most of the time and you achieve what you think about most of the time. So, think about your goals most of the time.

2. Be results orientated

Results orientated people think about the most important things that they can do right now to achieve the most important results they want.

Write a list of all the things that you have to do and then prioritise the items on the list.

Once you’ve identified your highest priorities, ask yourself, “if I could only do one of the things on this list before I have to go away for a long time, what one thing would I want to make sure I get completed today”. Then discipline yourself to work on that one thing non-stop until you complete it.

3. Be people orientated

Everything that you’ll achieve in life will be with the help, support or co-operation of other people. So always think about what other people want or need from you, and how you can help them. Successful people are very focused on the most important people in their worlds – both personal and in business.

4. Stay health orientated

To be successful, you need a lot of energy. To have a lot of energy, you need to eat well, get regular exercise and get plenty of sleep.

5. Stay honest

One of the most important habits is that of maintaining good character and being honest. Always tell the truth, no matter the price.

6. Self-discipline

Self-discipline seems to be the foundation habit that makes everything else possible. One of the best definitions of self-discipline is the ability to make yourself do, what you should do, when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.

“Good habits are hard to form but easy to live with. Bad habits are easy to form but hard to live with”

– Brian Tracy

6 Tips To Reduce Feeling Overwhelmed In Your Work And Life

I‘ve worked in a corporate environment for many years, and I’ve seen many people who appear to be overwhelmed, tired and burned-out because they take on too much and end up suffering from the ‘too much to do / can’t stop now’ syndrome. I’ve been there myself a number of times, and without being aware of what I’m doing and putting in measures to take back control of my time and energy, I can find myself slipping back into this negative habit.

Are you also one of those people who can’t seem to stop “doing”? Do you always seem to have too much to do?

I’ve not met many people who haven’t felt overwhelmed at some point in their lives. Since it tends to feel uncomfortable, if not downright unpleasant, we tend to view it as negative and as a weakness. We quite often don’t want to admit that we’re feeling overwhelmed or to even talk about it, which can leave us feeling isolated and alone, which just makes the feeling worse. We’ll often deny we’re overwhelmed, either because we don’t know how to deal with the situation, or because we think others will look negatively at us, so we end up doing nothing about it, which only makes it worse.

Primarily, this syndrome occurs in our work life but it can carry over to our personal and family life, and it frequently does.

So, why do we do this to ourselves?

The main reason is that we can be so eager to please others and not feel like we’re letting them down, that we can take on far too much.

You might also find that you want to achieve a lot in your life, but instead of setting out plans for achieving your goals in a sensible time frame, you try to achieve too much at once.

Focusing on projects and trying to help others often begins with good intentions, but we can quickly and easily become overwhelmed if we don’t have a plan to balance our work and life.

Getting that project or task finished for your team, writing the copy for your website, starting your business, learning that new skill or responding to all those emails and messages, are all important – but having a balanced and healthy life is equally, if not more, important.

The good news is that this stressful pattern is telling you something important – it’s telling you that you need to change your lifestyle! Once you get this message, it’s easier to identify the steps that you need to take to shift out of this ‘take all work on’ behaviour, and quickly.

The following tips are helpful strategies that I’ve picked up from my experience, both in my professional and personal life. These strategies, whilst simple, can help you to reduce the feelings of being overwhelmed, so that you can refocus and make some necessary work/life balance decisions.

Tip 1: Stop what you’re doing for a few minutes and take a break. Go for a short walk, sit outside under a tree, meditate, breathe deeply, go to a movie, call a friend to have coffee and share what’s going on. This will help you to slow down all the rushing thoughts in your mind and get clear on all the tasks you’ve taken on.

Tip 2: Get a piece of paper and make two columns. In one column, list urgent things you need to do this week. In the other column, list those projects that you can delay to a later date, delegate to someone else or drop altogether. This will help you to identify where you need to, and can, spend your time and energy.

Tip 3: Eliminate all unnecessary things from your life. Do you have lots of clutter in your life? As we go through life we pick up many things, these can be both physical items and, ever increasingly, digital items. Unsubscribe from unnecessary e-mails; organise your desk, office and the rooms in your house to decrease clutter; stop attending unnecessary meetings; stop volunteering to help others unless it’s for something that you feel passionate about and gives you a sense of wellbeing. Don’t just look to clear out the things that you can see. The old saying “out of sight, out of mind” isn’t true when it comes to clutter or unresolved tasks in your life. Even though you can’t see these things, they’ll still take a lot of your mental energy until you either get rid of them or resolve them.

Tip 4: Reduce the time you spend with people who drain your energy. If you can, eliminate negative people from your life. But I recognise that you’ll have family and friends that you want to stay in touch with, or work colleagues that you can’t avoid, so instead of eliminating them from your life, try to reduce the time you spend around them. Assess the people around you. Do they support who you are? Do they only look at you to see what they can get from you? Do they raise your energy or bring it down? If they’re constantly bringing your energy down, minimise the amount of time you spend with them. This might seem like a harsh thing to say, but looking after your mental health is a priority, and negative people can have a detrimental effect on you.

Tip 5: Decide what’s most important in your life. If you want a balanced life, you’ll have to make some changes in your life to allow this to happen. Once you’ve identified what’s most important to you, you can start to identify time during your day and week which allows you to bring more of that into your life. If you haven’t identified your highest priorities in life, you’ll find that your lower priorities end up filling your day. Ensuring that your highest priorities are included in your daily life takes some time and planning, but it will be well worth the improvement in your life!

Tip 6: Take an action step today to make a change in your life! Call a friend who will support you; take a class on how to get better organised; sit down and plan your upcoming week to fit more of the things that are important to you into your daily life; or work with a coach who will support and motivate you to have a more balanced life.