Most men lead lives of quiet desperation, and go to the grave with the song still in them.

Every day, we have the option to live with passion, be open to possibility, and reach for the stars. We have the freedom to boldly live, laugh, and love.

Don’t wait for permission. Begin today. Choose to be inspired and motivated enough, to live without limits. Get off the couch and do something! Let go of your fear, get gutsy, and get going.

My daughter, Kristy was recently promoted to a manager’s position for New Balance. She’s a dynamo that’s determined to leave a mark on the world. In spite of being born without a right hand, she plays soccer, basketball and participates in triathlons.

On December 4th, Kristy and her fiancé are getting married at the 12th mile mark during the Las Vegas Rock N Roll marathon. How crazy, sexy, and cool is that?

Living a life bold life is unique to everyone. Begin where you are. Use your talent, enthusiasm and drive to make a meaningful difference in your day and your world. Have fun! Every positive action, you take matters. Everything small move counts!

Strategies to suck the marrow out of life:

1. Wake up and smell the day

Set your mood every morning by becoming aware of your first thoughts. Refuse to hit the snooze button. Rise above ordinary.

Go outside, take a deep breath and express your gratitude for being alive. Take a long walk or run and while you’re at it, smell the day!

2. Thrive on simplicity

Don’t complicate you life. To me, less is more, because I don’t want to clutter my mind or home. I have been influenced by minimalists Tammy Strobel, Courtney Carver, and Leo Babauta. I no longer purchase anything new until the old is worn out. My car, a VW beetle is 12 years old. It will be the last car I ever own. I simply discovered, I don’t want or need another.

3. Be adventurous

After turning 57 in March, I decided to challenge myself by running a ½ marathon in Seattle, WA. Hubs and I have never visited the West Coast and decided it was time. The run turned out to be fantastic. Feeling fit makes aging more acceptable! We also visited Portland, Oregon and Victoria BC, Canada before returning to Phoenix. We’re currently thinking about visiting San Diego with our grandchildren in August.

4. Know your tribe

I want to chill with the ‘difference makers.’ People who have honest intentions to make the changes they want to see in the world. Weird, juicy, bold, and fun, this crowd honestly believes the best is yet to come. They are committed to making it happen. I don’t have time or energy for mainstream gloom and doomers.

5. Be open to new opportunities

Blogging has allowed me to connect and know people from all over the planet. The world is changing faster than anyone can keep up. This is a time of rapid growth and opportunity.

It’s your chance to be a part of a great transformation. Keep an open mind and heart. There’s no reason to fear the future. Instead decide what part you want to play in designing it and jump right in.

With today’s technology and information, we have the power and the tools to fill our days with delight and celebration.

6. Make your life happy

Choose positive intentions and thoughts. Do good, serve others. Don’t bother with judgment, gossip, or comparisons. Memorize the Anasasi quote, “No matter what you think, you have no idea what is really going on.”

I believe the five most beautiful words in the English language are, ‘I love you’ and ‘thank you.’ Choose to live on life’s edge. Calculated risk taking is a way of life for bold people. Don’t hesitate to take a step in a bold direction, ever!

7. Create good times for yourself

Think of them as “Life’s Coming Attractions.” Take time to enjoy and appreciate family, friends, food, music, children, your elders, blue skies, sunshine and ordinary moments. Invest time in your relationships, have dinner by candlelight. Nothing is more important than the love you regularly give and receive.

8. Create your own health care plan

In order to live a grand life, commit to a healthy lifestyle. No one is more responsible for your health than you! Make a plan, get active. If you eat crap, you’ll feel like crap.

Your emotional and spiritual health is just as important as your physical health. Get help and support if you need it. Make feeling good a priority. Live in the no excuse zone.

9. Fall in love with life

Give your life everything you’ve got. Write that book, take that vacation or call that date. Life is difficult, tragedy happens. It’s what makes us interesting, human and capable. Celebrate your imperfection and your mistakes. Don’t die with your music still inside of you!

Tess Marshall is a speaker, author, fear shattering, calculated risk taker, and obsessed with being bold. Her blog, The Bold Life is a juicy mix of inspiration, spirituality, and personal development. Download for free her guide, “Peace, Love, and Connection” at The Bold Life and follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

‘The world is governed by imagination.’ Napoleon Bonaparte

John Lennon challenged us to imagine. Walt Disney inspired us with his imagination that all began with a mouse. Monet forced us to see new visual interpretations as he splashed colour on to the canvas with his imagination. Beethoven filled us with awe as he scratched notes on to a manuscript with his imagination.

Great buildings were designed and constructed as a direct outpouring of someone’s imagination. Imagination created the Grand Canyon, the Pyramids, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Wall of China, and so much more. Our world is full of the manifestations of someone’s imagination.

So my question to you is this – how are you going to tap into the power of your own imagination to govern your world?

Don’t allow the imagination of others to rule your world. Take charge – for you have sufficient imagination to take full control of your own life.

‘Govern Your World’ Strategies

Here are few strategies that have helped me, and they might just inspire you.

Lock yourself away. That’s right. We live in such a distractive world fuelled by technology that no serious imagination can be tapped into if you are constantly interrupted by life’s noise.

There are a range of ways you can do this. Here are a few that have worked for me…

A. Hire a motel room for 3 days and take with you a personal development book that asks you lots of questions to spark a conversation in your brain. Also take with you a notebook and pen if you like to write, or a sketchbook if you like to draw. Maybe you would like to record your voice or even video yourself as you speak out your imaginary ideas.

A couple of books that I can highly recommend for this exercise are:

• The Magic Of Thinking Big by David J. Schwartz

• How to be Happy Though Rich By Peter Daniels

B. Take yourself to a quiet coffee shop for 1 to 2 hours each morning before you go to work and begin the process of designing your life by tapping into your imagination with the above tools at hand.

C. Spend time interacting with nature by taking long bush walks. Keep a notepad or your smart phone handy just in case and idea suddenly surfaces.

D. Read with purpose. Before starting to read a personal development book ask yourself the question: ‘What one idea in this book am I seeking to discover that will spark my imagination?’

E. Identify your passion and ask yourself, ‘If time and money weren’t an option how could I use my passion to make the world a far better place? What can be my contribution?’

F. Use this question when you start to imagine – ‘What if…?’

G. Read autobiographies about other imagin-eers and say, ‘If they could, then why not me?’

H. Interview those who are living the life you aspire to live and ask them to tell you their story – of where they were and how they got to where they are today.

Turn your imagination into imagin-action as soon as possible. Dreams are to be acted upon. Remember that ‘to begin is half done’, and as I read recently ‘the bad news is that time flies, but the good news is that you are the pilot’.

You are the governor of your world by tapping into your imagination.

Be the imagin-eer – the builder of your dreams and the creator of your extraordinary life.

Let me ask you a question: Imagine where you will be in 5 years. Where will that be?

Motivational Memo: To imagine is to conceive, and to believe is to give birth to great achievements.

Update: Please click on this link for more information about The new Mind Alchemy course. All the links to the downloads have now been removed. I would like to thank all 800+ readers who expressed an interest in this course and for everyone who completed the course the first time round, it is becasue of you I could make the course better.

Before we start

You can still join the course by Clicking here

A few readers are now blogging about their experiences on the course, and it would be great to lend your support:

Stacy Claflin – Grow With Stacy

Marty BoneIdol – Living Life in Chapters

Derek Breuning – Tech Life

Stephen – New Life Starts Here

Read the interview I have done with Angela Artemis from Powered by Intuition

Read the interview I have done with Sandi Faviell from DevaCoaching

Watch an interview I made with Suzie Cheel on Mind Alchemy

Mind Alchemy Day 4

Okay, after yesterday’s mammoth exercise it’s time for something a little easier, just a little.

Today we are going to be looking at your personal vision statements.  These will added to your outcomes worksheet on day 5, and work to help keep you focused and motivated toward your outcomes in life.

What are personal vision statements

A personal vision statements is a statement of intent with regards to your outcomes in life.  It’s similar to a mission statement, but whilst a mission statement encompasses ALL that you stand for in life, a vision statement covers specific outcomes.

Look at some of these vision statements from some famous companies:

Macdonalds:

“McDonald’s vision is to be the world’s best quick service restaurant experience. Being the best means providing outstanding quality, service, cleanliness, and value, so that we make every customer in every restaurant smile.”

Nike:

“To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete*

in the world”

* If you have a body, you are an athlete.

Your vision statements are going to be personal to you and apply to each individual outcome you will achieve in life.  As mentioned before, an outcome is something you want to achieve in the future, and we’ll discuss this at length tomorrow.

For now I’d like you to go back to day 2′s exercise.  You should have written down 4 outcomes you wanted to achieve.  We are going to use these 4 outcomes to practice writing your vision statements.

Today’s exercise

Download today’s exercise sheet here

Vision statement guide

The aim of a vision statement, in this course, is to write a concise statement, 2-3 sentences long that will capture the essence of what you do to achieve your outcome and the feelings, and emotions you feel when have achieved your outcome.

The aim is not to be specific here, the aim is to capture the whole, rather than the pieces that make it up, in other words we are not concerned about how you are going to achieve the outcome we are concerned broadly with the feelings and emotions you have when you have achieved it.

Example vision statement

As an example I will share with you one of my vision statements:

Outcome: I feel amazing, have a deep sense of freedom, and satisfaction  as my business is generating, at least, £10,000 per month in profit, whilst helping others realise their dreams in life.

Vision statement: I provide high quality information products that are affordable, exciting, and help everyone who reads them, whilst building up genuine and amazing relationships with my readers and partners. I wake up every morning bursting with energy, excited, and grateful that I have  the ability, knowledge, and deep motivation to keep writing better products.

You’ll notice, in the example above, that the outcome is a little more specific, whilst the vision statement looks at the way I feel when the outcome has been achieved.

Purpose of vision statements

The purpose of a vision statement is to energise you, to stimulate your creativity, to motivate the hell out of you, you feel the outcome, see it, smell it, taste it and it gets your blood pumping.  The feeling is like Christmas morning; you’re all pumped up ready to run through to the living room to open your presents, you can see the presents in your mind, you can hear yourself ripping off the wrapping paper, you can feel the elation as you can see what you asked for from the big man in the red suit, it’s all too much, you feel overwhelmed, and almost burst like a water filled balloon.  That is the purpose of a vision statement. (sorry, got a bit carried away there )

Get outside your comfort zone

When I first started writing my outcomes (I used to call them goals) down and keeping them in a folder, in my money category I used to say things like ‘I am earning £1,500 per month doing something I love’ and do you know what, I am earning £1,500 per month doing something I love; an addiction worker.  However I was way inside my comfort zone.  Now I am a little more specific and think about what I could comfortably live on and realise all my dreams at the same time.  I don’t want to win the lottery, I want to do something I love doing and get paid well for it but still be my own boss, and take care of my family.  £10,000 per month is a figure I came up with, as I originally thought ‘it would be great to earn £5,000 per month’, then I doubled it and said ‘I am earning £10,000 per month’, then I took off all the overheads I would have to pay and added  ‘I am earning £10,000 per month, in profit’, so I got a little outside my comfort zone.

I once read a quote from a story:

“You don’t get million dollar ideas from a ten dollar vision”

Something amazing happens when you do something like this.  Originally I could see no way of earning £5,000 per month, however when I doubled it  and then made it a profit of £10,000 per month, the £5,000 per month did not seem that big an outcome to shoot for.  When we expand our level of expectation, we demand and expect more of ourselves and our minds begin to work for us in ways that we couldn’t have imagined.  Your mind wants a challenge, Give it one!

Tomorrow

Tomorrow is going to be another massive day for everyone.  This is when we will be working on our outcomes for 2011 and beyond.  I promise this is going to be amazing for you.  We will tie together everything we have learned over the last few days and wrap it up into something we can work on every day for the next lifetime.   Until tomorrow my fellow Mind Alchemists……..

Action follows a thought…

This course is about taking action, and to become pro active in changing your life.  Take time to do this exercise and really think about it throughout the day.  You don’t need to wait until tomorrow to take steps to improve your ‘Wheel of Life’, but with the support and encouragement from all the members we can help each other and support each other, but ultimately ‘you have to bring something to the table!’

Your thoughts

As always it’s good to talk about your experiences and share it with the rest of the members of the course, so let us know how this exercise went for you and if you gained any insights or had any revelations about yourself or your life.

You can share your thoughts at Mind Alchemy Facebook Group

You can Tweet using the hashtag #MindAlchemy

Or of course you can leave a comment below.

It is a ‘hot’ question that I’ve had over 17 years to find the answer to. That’s roughly how long I’ve been practicing the ‘art’ of regular physical activity.

But I don’t tell you this to boast. I say it so you feel the long journey it’s taken me to bring you the 5 iron-clad steps below. And my confidence that these 5 steps will help you implement exercise into your daily routine (if you acted on them).

A few points to keep in mind when you read the following list though:

– This is a concise list – for people who want to know how and are not afraid of doing the legwork.

– There is a lot more to know about fitness of course – I’m trying to simplify the points for easy access.

– If you have been exercising for a long time, it’s likely the points below will still apply, but you’d need to dig a lot deeper to find your answers – you simply have more experience…

– I recommend that you try to move every day of your life – especially if you have a computer-based job. Now it doesn’t mean intense 1-hour workouts each day. It means have 3-5 proper workouts, and the rest you can fill in with walks after dinner. Taking the kids to the park and playing with them. Even flying a kite counts.

Finally, for those of you who will have an argument that moving every day is a bit much to ask, consider this:

Do you only eat 2-3 times a week? Would you only brush your teeth that many times a week? What about breathing as often?

And before you suggest that exercising is neither of the above, please understand that movement is VITAL for the human body. It affects every bit of it.

I can repeat all those “benefits of exercising” pointers given by every popular magazine, but I know you know those already – so I won’t waste your time.

So let’s get going…

1. Make IT interesting and fun.

Yes – make sure that whatever you commit yourself to doing 4-5 times a week is actually something you enjoy.

Often I meet people who’ll say things like – “But I hate doing weights.” or “I can’t stand running on a treadmill.” (uh-yeah – if you stand on a treadmill whilst it’s on…).

You don’t have to do anything you dislike. The point is that there are just so many ways of keeping fit and healthy daily – that there has to be something or a few things that you’d be OK with doing.

Here are some viable options for you to explore (bearing in mind none of these will make you an athlete, but will keep you in good shape providing your diet isn’t appalling).

- Exercise and dance DVDs.
- Home exercise equipment like the TRX by Fitness Anywhere.
- Yoga – classes or at home.
- Pilates.
- Stop-start sports like tennis, rugby, football, squash, badminton etc.
- HIIT workouts – these are my favorites – full body workout in less than 30 minutes and can be done in any 3 by 2 m location.
- Jogging/Sprinting/Running – preferably in an HIT formation.
- Hiking.
- Combat/military style training.
- oh and my least favorite… the GYM.

… there just has to be something you like in that list.

If you’re like me, and you get bored easily – then combine your favorites in a 5-a-week workout schedule and go for it.

2. Make time for IT.

Look at your schedule – see when and how long you can spare if you absolutely committed to doing this 5 times a week.

Look for uninterrupted slots of 30 to 50 minutes. The truth is that you can get away with doing 12 to 21 minutes for the workout, but you have to factor in some time for getting ready and showering afterwards and so on.

So your minimum really is 30 minutes – including everything.

Write down what time you can do for each of the 5 days you commit to. Then write down what activity you’ll do.

Put them in your diary with reminders – that way at least you’ll feel guilty when you look at your schedule and decide to cancel.

3. Make IT a priority.

This one is critical. In fact this one alone is good enough for some people. Most of us know we should exercise, and we’re even willing to ‘suffer’ a little.

But until we decide that we just WILL do it and it’s very important to do it, nothing seems to get going.

Just make it important enough in your mind to not skip your sessions.

4. Find a reason to do IT.

And this step reinforces the one above. Ask yourself – why is it important to you to exercise?

BTW, this is a very powerful way to get leverage on yourself to do just about anything.

The thing is – everything in your life that’s been difficult to achieve – has been achieved because of your reason WHY. If you have a strong enough reason to do something – you will.

So if you don’t have one by now – make one. Just make sure it’s YOUR real WHY.

5. Just stop making excuses – Just Do IT!

This one’s actually a bit of a “truth with empathy” addition from me )

You’re an intelligent human being. You know why you should workout. You know it’s vital for your health and mind. So just get off your butt and start moving. Stop making excuses. Stop postponing it. Just start doing!

You may already know that motivation (motive – action) is one of the keys that determine success or failure. If you feel that you’re having trouble properly motivating yourself, it’s time for you to act. Not tomorrow, but today.

Consider the following ways to motivate yourself today:

Get spiritual. Don’t be afraid to get in touch with your spiritual side. When you discover some answers to life’s tough questions, it brings you clarity, and you may be more likely to work harder to achieve your desires.

An important part of spirituality is your life purpose. Discovering your life purpose is the best thing you can do!

Set goals. Which are your dreams? You might lack drive because you don’t have a goal. If you aren’t even sure what you’re working towards, you’ll have difficulty taking action.

If you have a large goal, break up the goal into a series of small, achievable tasks and set each task as a separate goal. This helps you maintain impulse because you’re constantly achieving your goals. You can see the results of your hard work!

Hold yourself accountable. In order to ensure that you don’t stray from your chosen path, evaluate your progress every week. Determine how you can do better the next week.

If you find that it’s difficult to keep yourself accountable, don’t be afraid to ask for help. You may enjoy having others check up on you to make sure you stay on task. A life coach will be of great help.

Think positive thoughts. Negative thinking and lack of motivation go hand in hand. You can increase your enthusiasm by concentrating on replacing your negative thinking patterns. Replace negative feelings with optimism and positive thoughts and images.

When you catch yourself feeling down, make an extra effort to seek the silver lining. It’s always there. If you take the time to look hard enough, you’ll find it.

Make a change. If you think you’ve tried everything without results, perhaps you should consider a life change. Maybe there’s a reason why you’re feeling this way.

If you don’t feel inspired to work toward your major life goals, consider some alternatives that may be more in line with your true desires. If you’re having trouble taking action toward everyday chores, see if you can find a way to hire some help.

Always keep in mind that “the time is now”. Put procrastination into your past and you’ll feel happy and accomplished at the end of the day, instead of stressed out or regretful.

When you’re motivated, life is more fulfilling. Use these strategies to wake up your motivation and enjoy the difference!

If you want to read that article, click here:

But if you want a secret to the implementation and usage of the personal development material you are using – here it is: you need to personalise the change you want to make for yourself. A little later I’m going to show you a very powerful method of doing so.

I want to briefly define ‘implementation’. Implementation is where you make the things you were planning actually happen. It’s where the rubber hits the road. It’s where you start pedalling and the chain gets engaged and you go somewhere. Only for some of us, we pedal and the bike doesn’t move because the chain’s come off….

Why might this be? Let’s go back to childhood for a minute. (We won’t stop long!)

Have you ever seen any normal child suffering from lack of motivation to explore and implement? There is a reason we move objects off the low shelves, cover plug holes and use rubber door stoppers!

What I’m trying to say is that we naturally want to learn by doing and by doing so we naturally learn. We play, and we learn. To alter a phrase by the great inventor Thomas Edison (who made the light-bulb and telegraph) we are not squeamish about exploring because we realise that all of life is a great experiment.

Have you ever seen a two year old not wanting to try something new out? So what happens? Well, it varies but for many people their natural curiosity gets blunted by adult indignation: “Don’t touch that!” “No”.

I’m not saying it’s all our parents’ fault (although I did go through that phase) but that older people around us, (mostly because of their own problems and lack of nurturing) tell us things we believe because we don’t know any better. And those things are usually limiting and toxic.

If the ability to implement could be thought of as a conduit from mind-to-muscle then for many of us it is clogged up worse than the kitchen sink. If you keep tipping ‘yuk’ down a sink eventually the water won’t go anywhere. If you keep stifling the desire to take action that comes from great thoughts, neither will you…!

What does it really mean to ‘know’ something?

Secondly, here in the West we seem to have a strange delusion about what it means to ‘know’ something.

In the Ancient Far East the Aramaic speaking peoples’ word for ‘word’ meant a simultaneous combination of thinking and doing. This is well expressed by a statement of Jesus who said to the people around him: “If you are truly my disciples (learners and followers) then you will obey my teachings. Then you will know the truth and the truth will set you free.” (John 8:31-32)

Pick that apart a bit. Essentially Jesus said: When you take the actions and think the way I command you to do, that doing will reveal the Truth to you. And then the Truth that you now know (because you experienced it) will set you free. No doing, no experiencing – no real knowledge – and no Truth or freedom.

Some of us Westerners, when asked about a subject we are familiar with, say, “I know that” – and we mean, “I’ve memorised a fact about it”. But I suspect, if you have been into personal development for a while, that you know a few people who can tell you far more about the subject than they can demonstrate has actually turned up in their lives.

You might be one of those people. I certainly was, and have a lot of catching up to do from 15 years of reading… but I now have some decent implementation methods now, methods that get from mind-into-muscle and start producing real behavioural changes.

Making the change ‘personal’

Personalisation is one of those methods. Here, we are using a particular method called ‘identification’. This is something we do all the time when we say:

“I am a man/woman/coach/lawyer etc.”

These identifications – ‘I’ = some concept, are usually not harmful unless our conceptualisation of these roles are destructive. For me, I am a man, a husband, a father, a Christian, a coach and trainer and a lot of other things.

Identification is one of the most powerful change-creating frames of mind. Who we ARE affects our perception of our entire being and how we act. Michael says “…identifying sends commands to your neurology to consider the two “the same” and “real”. (p124)

Basically, we are more likely to act in a way consistent with who we think we ‘are’.

This, of course, has a negative side as well…

When we say ‘I am’ a failure, worthless, stupid etc. then we identify our one level of our selves (the ‘I’) as being absolutely equivalent with the concept. And the effect can be to frame out any positive ideas about ourselves completely. We need to be careful what we identify ourselves with!

So if we want to create radical shifts we can deliberately identify ourselves with an idea and it will often pervasively affect our thinking and behaviour. The trick is to do it on purpose.

As L. Michael Hall notes in his book Achieving Peak Performance “once you set this [identity frame], violation will generate one of the greatest pains we humans experience – the pain of being untrue to ourselves. It leads to feeling incongruent…inauthentic…hypocritical… wrong etc…”

Up front I will say I trust you will identify with an idea that is healthy for you and those in your life. That’s the ecology check done…!

The Personalisation Pattern

This pattern is adapted from one in Achieving Peak Performance.

The Pattern:

Choose a frame (idea, belief, state, emotion, value etc) that you want to identify with. This will be ‘x’.

1)     If you were to choose something you would consciously like to identify/equate yourself with, what would it be?

Example: I am a business man

2)     As you imagine what it would be like for you to be x  does it fit in all areas of your life? Does this personalising have the kind of quality that you want? What happens when you personalise it by saying “This is about me?”

Example: well, I want to make sure I am an ethical business man so I need to adjust this description a bit – “I am an ethical businessman.” When I say “this is about me” then it seems ok but I’ll need to work it into my identity as its not yet.”

3)     Imagine something that you truly own, something that you would not let anyone take away from you (body parts are good for this) and when you fully feel the state of ‘mine’, think about this x, and claim it by affirming loudly ‘mine’, ‘mine’, ‘mine’ until you feel the sense of ownership settle into your body.

Example: I own my heart. No-one can take this from me. It’s MINE!

4)     Identify yourself with the frame by recalling a time that you had the experience of being so connected with something it seemed like part of you. It could have been a toy, a pet, a boy or girlfriend, a town or city. As you think about this thing, NOW think about the x you desire as part of your identity. I have found completing the description “I am someone who…”

Example: I am someone who thinks in terms of systems, profits, adding value and so on.

Imagine how you would look, feel, speak and act. Make it bright, colourful, vivid and dramatic. ‘Try it on’. Enjoy the ‘me’ with this frame of mind.

5)     Now notice what it’s like as you imagine moving into the days and weeks to come with this self-definition…do you like this? Is it ecological for all your relationships?”

Example: Yes, as long as I confine doing this to the areas of my life where I do business, it’ll be fine.

There are numerous implementation techniques around. The NLP swish pattern can act as one as well but I advise you to use this technique wisely. If you have any concerns, get a professional (like me!) to work with you.

One other way to kick start the process of implementation is to do what William James, the father of psychology said: “Never leave the scene of a decision without taking some action, however small.”

Translating what we ‘know’ into what we ‘do’ is important as it underscores our entire personal growth. I urge you to study this important subject as a fundamental life-skill. Mastering implementation can enable you to become an exemplar and a leader in your field – and you can.

God bless

Doug Cartwright

]]> http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/want-real-change-this-time-it%e2%80%99s-personal/feed/ 19 http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/top-ways-to-stay-motivated/ http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/top-ways-to-stay-motivated/#comments Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:19:02 +0000 Jonathan Beebe http://www.stevenaitchison.co.uk/blog/?p=1896 Motivation is something that can either make or break your aspirations, and I notice that when my personal sense of motivation is high, my current “status” is right up there with it. With that realization, I started analyzing the times when I was feeling motivated, and the times where I was in need of some, and managed to find at least six main things that contribute to my motivation. After some thought I realized, the things that contribute my motivation would, for the most part, apply to everyone.

Before I get into those six things, however, it’s important to know beforehand the things that could put your motivation in a slump, so you can avoid them as you follow my tips on staying motivated:

Discouragement: This is probably the number one motivation killer. When something negative happens, or you pick up on cues that cause you to feel discouraged, immediately your motivation begins to be leeched away as if a vampire came up and began sucking it right out of you. The best thing to do before you get started on a new venture is to simply affirm to yourself that you won’t allow yourself to get discouraged, no matter how bleak things begin to look.

Lack of Focus: When you have a billion different things on your mind due to lack of focus, it’s hard to stay motivated about… well… whatever it is you’re trying to stay motivated with. The best thing to do is to get your productivity in order, so you have allotted time for each of the different things you need to be dealing with… this will help you to focus on the task at hand and leave room in your mind for motivation.

Pessimism: If you’re the type of person to see the bad in everything, and expect the worst so that you can be happy with whatever comes along, you’re really setting yourself up for failure. How in the world can you stay motivated when you’re expecting everything to fall apart around you? Exercise optimism, and when things don’t go your way, instead of feeling like a fool, exercise the following six tips to keep yourself motivated…

Optimize Your Energy

If your running low on “fuel”, it’s hard to be motivated by anything, let alone stay motivated. When you’re feeling ill, just the thought of getting up to do simple tasks such as going outside to check the mail feels like a major leap. So the first thing you should do to keep your motivation high is to optimize your energy.

My number one way to remain energetic is to maintain a healthy sleeping cycle. I used to have extremely unstable sleeping habits. Some nights I’d be up nearly til morning, finally go to sleep when I couldn’t hang on anymore, wake up in the afternoon, and the cycle continued until it seemed as though I was doing night shift one half of the month, and day shift the second half. During this time, my energy was at an all-time low, I’d take long naps almost everyday, and as a result, many of my days ended up being extremely short.

Once I started going to bed at a decent time, whenever I felt tired, and set my alarm to wake me up nice and early every morning. Now my energy is at an all-time high, and I don’t even get tired in the mid-afternoon which is when I’ve always had a tendency of getting sleeping and wanting a nap.

Of course, other factors can contribute to your energy such as your eating habits, how much you are hydrating, your physical fitness, and even your morale, which I’ll get into next.

Optimize Your Mood

Your current mood and current level of happiness plays a huge role in staying motivated. Think back to the last time you were in a horrible mood. It probably took an enormous amount of strength to get yourself to want to do anything, much less doing meaningful things that you’d ideally want to stay motivated with.

The best way to keep your mood high is to address the things that stress you out, learn how to overcome your habits of worrying, and start managing your time more effectively. Normally bad moods are caused by being exposed to uncomfortable, or less than ideal situations that you feel like you have no choice but to go through.

For example, those who are overly grumpy in the morning probably don’t have a very relaxing morning routine. It’s most likely either very hectic, stressful, and full of responsibilities that they don’t feel like taking care of right when they wake up… as a result, their mood suffers.

Write Down Your Motives

If you have a good idea beforehand of exactly why you’re doing something, it makes it easier to stay motivated, so be sure to write your reasons down. When you are in a slump that’s making it hard to stay motivated, remind yourself exactly why you’re doing what you’re doing, and where it’s going to get you. This is the time to discard any pessimism. Don’t tell yourself all the reasons why you might fail, or why this and that’s not going to work out.

Remind yourself all the reasons you gave yourself when you began working towards the thing you’re trying to achieve. Think of new things and add to your “list” as time goes on.

Find Your Inspiration

When you first start out on a new venture, before you begin your course of action, you most likely had an initial source of motivation. Often it’s inspiration from an external source. For example, before I started writing my own blog, I looked at other bloggers who started with nothing and grew a huge subscriber base. I used that as inspiration, reminding myself that if they can do it, there’s no reason why I can’t too. I used the success of others to help fuel my motivation, and to this day, I still do.

Set Milestones and Reward Yourself

Define specific milestones, or “checkpoints” on your new venture, and reward yourself for reaching them. If it’s a big task at hand, this will help you to get through it all by lightening your overall load into manageable “pieces”. Imagine if you were supposed to write 31 essays. It would be pretty hard to do them all at once, but the task becomes much easier if they were spread out over the course of a month (1 per day). In the end you’d still have 31 essays completed, but the work load would have been much lighter and easy to manage.

Only you can know exactly how to reward yourself, but just make sure it’s something you wouldn’t allow yourself to take part in unless you’ve reached a milestone.

Take Action Regularly

Sometimes when you’re feeling lazy and unmotivated, the best way to get going is to well… just get going! Force yourself to take action, and while it may be hard at first, it shouldn’t take too long for your brain to get into the right “gear” with what you’re doing, and your motivation should pick up at some point along the way. So if all else fails, just do and do some more, and eventually after repeating this process your mind will convince itself that it’s just easier to be motivated from the start.

Make motivation a habit.

Once I discovered all the things I just mentioned, I began applying them to my life immediately. Now, I rarely ever experience feelings of discouragement, lack of focus, and I seem to be filled with positivity most of the time. Motivation seems to come fairly easy now, and I can’t say it would be that way for me had I not made a conscious effort to make the six things I mentioned part of my daily routine.

My suggestion is that you try it out, see if it works for you, and modify as needed for your own personal needs. I challenge you to monitor the factors that contribute to your own motivation levels and experiment with different things. Eventually you’ll have the perfect motivation “plan” that’s tailored specifically to fit your needs alone.

Good luck, and stay motivated!

I hope you enjoy this collection as much as the last

Another 22 of the best motivational videos online

T Harv Eker – The millionaire mind

Dan & Jennifer – The secret to relationships

 In this article, I will look at ways of raising our energy in order to manifest our desires quicker.

If our body and mind is sluggish, it goes without saying that you will not be able to concentrate properly on your desires. If you cannot concentrate on your desires, it will be very difficult to manifest them. Both body and mind have to be flowing with energy in order to send out and receive energy to and from others.

Your whole body is an energy circuit, your brain is the controller of this energy circuit and your mind is the sender and receiver of the excess energy. Your body needs a certain amount of energy to function and once it gets its fill, it has excess energy to give out. It’s this excess energy that we can utilise to attract our desires in life.

5 ways to raise our energy

Physical – If we are physically in good shape and our bodies are functioning well we can raise our energy levels, I don’t mean you have to be an Olympic athlete, I am talking about eating well, exercising, all the usual stuff you hear about staying fit. This will help in our quest to raise our energy levels. Some of the ways in which we can aid the physical part of raising energy are:

• Eating well – There are literally thousands of websites offering free information on eating well, and deep down we all know what is good for us (basically anything that tastes good, in excess, is bad for our bodies). If you are a person with a big appetite you can start raising your energy immediately by eating what your body needs and not what your brain thinks it needs. What if you eat more than you need? It’s your choice! Everything in life has a choice attached to it if you choose to eat more than your body needs then that’s your choice.

• Keeping fit – we don’t need to go running every day but if we do at least some exercise every day, we are keeping our hearts strong. A healthy heart keeps blood pumping round our bodies effectively and reaches our bodies organs in order to nourish them. The trick to a fitness regime is making it a habit. A good blog on this is Craig Harpers blog

Mental – How are we to keep mentally healthy if we don’t have a proper gauge? Are we ‘normal’ if we follow how everybody else acts and behaves in our circle? That is a subjective question; however, I think we all know roughly when we are behaving within the limits of what is acceptable in society.

To keep mentally healthy we can rid ourselves of stress and there are hundreds of ways to do this: meditate, pray, practice solitude, practice being in the moment, do something you love, spend time with your family; anything that gets you thinking about what’s important in life.

Spiritual – This can be mistaken for being mentally healthy and in some respects can go hand in hand. However Spiritual health is something very different from mental health.

When we are being spiritual we are thinking of others we are forgetting our ego and thinking about the plight of others whether it be family, friends, or others less fortunate in the world. It is also thinking about the bigger questions in life, which can lift us up onto another level, if only for fleeting moments.

One of the best things we can do to lift ourselves spiritually is to practice gratitude. I don’t mean pray, I mean count your blessings each morning, start with the fact that you are alive and work from there.

Food – we all know which foods are good for us and if we practice eating more fresh food the natural energy from these foods naturally gives us more energy.

Morals and values – This is another area, which can greatly enhance our energy. It is another area in which most of know right from wrong and practicing being moral and having good values comes naturally for most of us. Religion, race and culture are forgotten when it comes to morals and values, as we know what is right and how we should treat others.

If you would like to practice good values, you have to sit down and write down the values and principles you want to practice. Having it down on paper can make it more concrete in our minds and easier to practice.

Conclusion I do believe that raising our energy can greatly enhance our ability to attract more desires into our lives. The law of attraction works better when there are fewer blockages in our minds, our bodies and our spirit.

Some more resources

Yoga and weight loss benefits of Yoga

Balancing body energy

Four body energy system

If you have been using the law of attraction in your life, you’ll know sometimes that it might not work as well as you would want. Why is this?

Speaking from my own point of view, as I cannot say what your experiences will be like, there are 3 components to the law of attraction. I have read lots of articles and a few books on the Law of Attraction and they all give more or less the same advice. However I have tweaked all the information and experimenting I have done on my own and come up with thefollowing three three components:

The intention

Your intention is literally a statement of intent, something you want to achieve or have in the future. When I make my intentions I state the intention in the present tense while looking into the future. For example one of my intentions is to become a professional blogger so I would word it:

‘I am now a professional blogger, I have my own blog training business, I teach and write articles every day and love it and get paid for doing it’

Whilst saying this statement, internally or out loud, I visualise myself working as a professional blogger. I see myself teaching other people blogging, I see myself giving seminars. I see myself sitting at home during the day and writing my articles and talking on the phone with other bloggers.

Another important aspect of the intention is to clear any resistance to the intention. With my previous example I still have resistance as I know I have to help provide for my family so my current job needs to be kept on. This is a blockage and a major blockage but I am working on it bit by bit.

The power behind the intention

This is another important aspect that a lot of people miss and it is the power or the force behind the intention. Before setting your intention gear up toward it and muster as much energy around the intention as you can. When I muster up the energy I delay the intention and build it up to such an extent as to have an excited feeling in my stomach that needs to be released. The only analogy I can think of is that feeling when you are absolutely bursting on a pee and you have to hold it for a few hours and then at the moment you go to the toilet and pee, it’s a fantastic feeling of release and pleasure.

When you know roughly what your intention is and you can see it in your mind, make it clearer and get excited about it. Do this during the day when you are working, think about it, don’t talk about it, but think about it all day or for a few days.

When you are ready to release the intention plan 15 – 30 minutes alone and release your intention and make it focused and visualise it, hear it, sense it, smell it. Give it all your five sense and release it and let it drift out to wherever it goes to manifest.

The action toward the intention

In the past I have stated the intention and let it go and thought about it occasionally. I didn’t like this way of doing it and have now come to a more powerful way, for me, of achieving the intention. I work toward it and think about it often.

Right now I am working toward my dream of becoming a pro blogger. I am going into affiliate marketing, I am blogging for other people, and I am making more money with AdSense, all in the hope that I will make enough money
to either pay off the mortgage or make a lot more than I can working for a living.

I have found this a much better way of manifesting my intentions than the old way I was using of simply stating the intention and then letting it go.

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Experimenting

There are lots of different ways of making your intentions come into alignment with the present. Experimenting with lots of different ways is a good way to get to know what works for you. The more you do it the more you will get to know the blockages that may be hampering your efforts. Don’t give up with it and it can take some time to release those blockages. I found the biggest blockage is belief. I have chosen to believe in this way of thinking as I have seen it working for me.

Of course if I wanted to I could find other ways of explaining the events that have happened in my life without the intention-manifestation model. You can find proof of anything in life depending on the way you are inclined. So it is with the law of attraction.

I am a logical man and question everything and I questioned the law of attraction for a long time. When I started trying it and seeing results I tweaked it and then installed the new belief that it works for me. You have to do the same. Tweak it or leave it.

Your stories

Let me know of any interesting stories you have with the law of attraction and your experiments with this or if you think it is all a lot of rubbish, either way it would be good to hear from you.