Tag: personal development

Achieve Your Dreams

Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. – Coach Carter

Know Your Enemy

Who is your enemy? Who is stopping you from accomplishing that goal/dream that you have set ? Can you see them? Are you looking in the mirror?

The number one enemy to what you want to accomplish in life isn’t The Man, or the devil, or your boss that won’t promote you. Your number one, top of the list, enemy is YOU! We get in our own way more often than we will admit or like to admit. It’s a lot easier to blame someone else for our problems than it is to take responsibility for them. Once we do take responsibility for our life, then we can change our life. It can be the life that we dreamed of.

It's time to look in the mirror. There is greatness on the inside of you
It’s time to look in the mirror

Run your own race. It’s your life, it’s up to you on how your life turns out. What will be accomplished in your lifetime?  Choose to accomplish your dreams and build the life that you want. Too many times we settle for the life that society gives us. We can have an attitude that goes with the flow. Where we do the things that we think we’re supposed to do.

Where was I Going

I grew up in a middle class town where graduating from high school was a given and it was assumed that you would go to college. I’m grateful for this place and position that I’m in, but I’m also not going to settle for being average. A lot people learn from trial and error that college isn’t for them. In either case, I know I had not spent time thinking about what I wanted my life to look like. Most high school students would say the same thing. I don’t want a life that consists of working day in and day out with no impact on the world. I honestly don’t believe that most of us want that either. Yet, somehow we find ourselves in this very location.

I dream of a future where my children can work to pursue their dreams, not where they work because they need the paycheck. Does this happen with a average mindset? I don’t think it does. I look to others who have accomplished their dreams, not to compare myself but as inspiration that what I dream is possible.

Comparisons Will Stop You

Forbes recently published an article that dives into the effects of comparing ourselves to other people. The article highlights how comparing ourselves to what we see online can lead to a more negative view of ourselves . In a world of Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram we are comparing ourselves to someone else’s curated content.

Social media and reality tv have lead us to a place where we would rather watch people live their lives rather than live our own. In a time where we are supposed to be a more connected to the world, we’ve never been more isolated.

We need to run our own race. Not our friends race, not a celebrities race, but our own. The world needs the great ideas that you have on the inside of you. There is a light on the inside of you that needs to shine. We can do this! We were made to walk on water!

What is keeping you from going after your dream?

 

10 Easy Ways to Build Better Habits

“A long healthy life is no accident. It begins with good genes, but it also depends on good habits.” – Dan Buettner

I like this quote because I want a long healthy life.  Most of us would say the same. I’m convinced now more than ever before is a great time to be alive. We live in a time where you can really do just about anything that you can think of.

Life Assessment
Morning Routine

Habits Determine Everything

Start a business, grow an online following, or write a book, there’s nothing that is out of your reach. One of the main differences from people we see doing these great things and us, are that they have better habits than us.

From YouTube to podcast exerts, people that are successful in these different areas have developed habits that help them to be consistent. We like to think that they are an overnight success, but the truth is that they have been doing YouTube, writing, whatever it is, they’ve been doing it for years before we noticed.

I remember one time that I wanted to change my exercise habits. Well I wanted to actually have an exercise habit. I was looking to get into shape, but I wasn’t really looking to join a gym. So, I bought P90X. I did my research, got really excited about the program. I even did it for about 2 weeks. Something came up and then something else came up and before I knew it, P90X was in my basement and I had moved on.

Overnight Success?

Changing our lives is never an overnight success. It takes good habits that will push us toward our goal. Good habits lead to good character and a changed life. If you have a story like the above one that I had, you know what it’s like to start something, do it for a little while and then give up or forget about it. We have to be able to push through that cycle.

Here are some things we can do to establish better habits and stick to them.

  1. Start small, choose one thing
  2. Make it SMART, click here for what a SMART goal is
  3. Look at your schedule to see what you will be adding or subtracting to make room for this new habit
  4. Ask why. Make sure it’s really what YOU want, not what you feel you should do
  5. Establish some accountability
  6. Automate as much or as best as you can {I don’t know what this means, you might want to expound because it might help others like myself}
  7. Take small steps
  8. Celebrate the small victories along the way
  9. For goals or habits that are longer than a year, have times reviewing the habit/goal to see how you’re doing. I recommend every 90 days
  10. Stick with it, the longer you do it the more it will be a part of your makeup.

What habits are you looking to establish? What goals do you want to reach?

3 Ways Your Lazier than You Think

Are you a lazy person? If someone were to ask us this question we would answer an automatic, and defiant NO! With a closer look at ourselves and how we live our lives, we are lazier than we think we are. Can this be fixed? Absolutely it can, but we first must recognize it. Laziness is more about our habits and attitudes than about our DNA.

My Experience

Tell me if you’ve had this experience: I was walking behind someone. I wasn’t right up on them, but a decent way behind. As we’re approaching the door to this building, I see them reach over and press the handicap button and wait for the doors to open. This seemed so odd and lazy to me. The person wasn’t handicapped, didn’t have a lot of things they were carrying. It just seemed like they preferred to push the handicap button and not open the door with their hands. In full transparency, I have my four-year old son push the handicap button on doors to open them. I’m also teaching him to open doors for his mother and little sister. Some doors are still a little heavy for him to open by himself, so he will “push the button,” as he likes to call it. Watching this person, this able-bodied, healthy, person push the handicap button to open a door made me question myself and others. Are we lazier than we think we are. I believe that we are and that we’ve accepted some aspects of laziness into our lives and chalk them up to us “being the way we are.” Here are three ways that we are lazier than we think.

Don’t be THAT person

  • Not planning ahead. Most of us don’t plan ahead. Really plan ahead. We don’t plan our day-to-day. We tend to just have a mental rolodex of things we need to get done. This is lazy because there always seems to be something more important,  that we need to take care of right away. If we would plan our day the night before then, we would know what things are vitally important and what can be delegated or can accomplished later.
 
  • Waiting to do the hardest things. Whether at work or in our lives, the things that tend to cause us to be uncomfortable and are the hardest to accomplish we put off until the last moment. Lazy people do this. We want to tackle these things head on. Successful people aren’t afraid to ask for help or guidance along the way either.
 
  • Not investing in yourself. Lazy people settle for the way things are. They settle for being in a unfulfilling marriage, they settle with being unhealthy, they settle with having a mediocre job. Successful people invest in themselves. They want to be the best versions of themselves. The main reason behind it is because they want to do it for themselves. They’re not looking to impress others, but they want to get the most out of life.
  In what ways have you been lazy and what are going to do to change that behavior?