Quote

Some men see things as they are and say, ‘Why?’ I dream of things that never were and say, ‘Why not?’
George Bernard Shaw

2009. The Year of Many Changes

As we put the holidays behind us and dig ourselves out from underneath all of the holiday huppala, many of us engage in a ritual that any visiting alien might be puzzled by — New Year’s resolutions. Why do humans pick a single point in time each year to try and change certain things in their life, mostly behaviours and attitudes to help improve their lives, careers and relationships and make resolutions about them, and then proceed to fail at them within a three week period? Which brings us to right about now?

So, from a psychological perspective, it might be interesting to ask what exactly determines how many goals people set and how successful they are.

Research consistently finds that people who believe that self-control is something dynamic, changing and unlimited tend to set more resolutions. They believe it is possible if only they can put their minds to the task.

On the other hand people who believe that we all are born with a limited, set amount of self-control that one cannot change and who also have little belief in their own capabilities to carry out their own goals naturally do worse on obtaining their New Year’s resolution goals.

Basically, individuals with high self-esteem attribute failure to insufficient effort, while individuals with low self-esteem attribute failure to their own inability to cope. Higher self-esteem is generally correlated with a greater likelihood of achieving one’s goals.

What all of this means is that you’ll do better on your New Year’s goals if you believe that self-control is indeed an unlimited resource that we all have access to and can leverage with our resolutions. The more you believe in your own capabilities — high self-esteem — the more likely you will succeed as well. It also seems to help to set more goals, because you will be more likely to succeed at them if you do. While people with low self-esteem set fewer goals and always seem to go into the exercise with the self-fulfilling expectation of failing.

Over and above the self-confidence and high self-esteem you’re going to have to build the actual skills to make the changes you’re proposing for your life. For instance, it’s all fine and well to say you want to quit smoking. But do you really have any idea on how to do so? Researching the most effective methods for quitting ahead of time predicts better success in actually achieving your goal and of course, being ready to change mentally also helps. If you don’t want to change and so only make a half-hearted resolution to do so, don’t be surprised by your amazing lack of success.

So are you ready to give up on this year’s resolutions once again or are you going to give them another try? If you are ready to take them for another spin and want to have more success, do make sure you follow the following tips.

• Understand that you do not need to wait until the New Year to set some goals and/or aspirations for yourself. Turn everyday into an opportunity to change, grow, learn and evolve.
• Make a strong initial commitment to make a change.
• Have coping strategies to deal with problems that will come up.
• Keep track of your progress. The more monitoring you do and feedback you get, the better you will do.

Should you want more tips and ideas on how to be successful in coping with your challenges in life simply write to me on info@inspireyourmind.com and I will guide you on how to welcome change in your life.

Quote

“Concentrate all your thoughts upon the work at hand. The sun’s rays do not burn until brought to a focus.”
Alexander Graham Bell

You Think Therefore You Change

Every time we think, we change. We change the electrical impulses in our brain and we change the probability of what our next thought will be. So every thought we have, every dream we have, every fear we have, every emotional reaction we have changes the probability of what our next thoughts, emotions and reactions will be.

In other words we live in the playground of change for our entire lives, and the moment to moment choice that we have is whether we are going to enjoy the ride or whether we are going to get overwhelmed. It really is that simple. Problem is that the majority of people still believe that they have little to no control over the impact these changes have on us and especially our attitude towards them. What we don’t understand is that by learning to embrace change and flow with it we can have a direct influence all the things that are going to determine our future and also the future of the people around us.

In a sense we all have to learn to become surfers and learn to ride the giant waves of changes that are upon us. The next few years we will all be facing some massive changes to the way we think, behave and live. Being prepared therefore to learn to perceive the changes, and then finding ways to flow with them and compliment them will, in my opinion, become the most critical skills we can ever learn during this particular time. (Continued below)

Embracing Change

As a surfer you learn to monitor the changes in the power and the rhythms of the waves. Years of experience and determination and learning on smaller waves increase experience and the hunger to ride a giant wave.

First you need the motivation to learn to surf – to battle out to sea, pushing against the power and weight of the waves against your body. The sea spray entering your mouth and your nostrils adds to the tension and the anticipation as you watch and FEEL the changing rhythm of the ocean – waiting for the rush of energy before the wave that determines whether or not it is time for you to take it.

If you get the timing right, as a giant wave approaches you will ensure that the oncoming power-source of energy – which could grow to become 20 meters high and dwarf you. Your aim will be to ride the power of the wave and become a part of it. If you get it right, it will glide you along, and you will travel for miles, literally riding the energy of that wave to your total enjoyment, advantage and ecstasy.

If however you get the timing wrong, if you end up on top of the wave, or just beneath its crest, instead of riding the positive energy of the wave you will experience its negative power. The wave will break. The wave will break on you – and below you there will be space, sand or rocks. All the energy of that wave, that same wave, carrying you, on the surfboard, instead of transporting you to new heights, will smash you into the ground. You will have nowhere to go other then down. You will be bruised and grazed – and your ego severely dented.

The only difference between these two outcomes is that one of you went with the energy of the oncoming wave, literally with the flow of the wave and became a part of it. The other one didn’t. The difference in the outcome is absolute.

(Continued) Our relationship with life-changes is similar. Everything has its moment. If we miss that moment, then we may wander aimlessly for a while, or even risk being thrown aside by life. Just as the wave keeps grows and builds it’s strength and power for hundreds of miles, so, too, you build and progress through knowledge. If you learn how to ride these waves of change, learn how to use your self-belief and energy to go consciously with the flow of change, then you will be advantaged. If you don’t, change has the capacity to be highly destructive, and the adjustment can be a much longer and harder learning curve.

Quote

“What we resist persists.”
The Dalai Lama

Allow me to take this opportunity to welcome all the new members to my site. I am so glad that you have embraced my initiative and joined the hundreds of other open minded people from every corner of the world. It is a good feeling to be doing something so worthwhile and so widely appreciated and I thank you wholeheartedly for acknowledging my work.

May I also remind you that it’s your calling as much as it is mine to continue to share the useful and inspirational knowledge I share with you. With such knowledge we have the power to change the world. More importantly, within this knowledge that I share with you, find your own truth and allow it to guide you through this journey called life.

It is also important to point out that I am not a spiritual guru of any kind; I am just a regular guy who would like to continue to plant the seed of love and hope into people’s hearts, which in turn, will grow to self-awareness and truth.

I have finally understood that I am finally doing what I am meant to do and it brings me great joy, so once again thank you for your appreciation and feedback. It is an exciting time to be living, for the search for truth has accelerated more and more in the last few years for so many of us and we are now fast approaching a massive changing point. A new time era is now being born, an incredibly positive one too. But, to get through it we will need to be strong, brave, hopeful, positive, open-minded and above all open-hearted. For you will always find the biggest truths deep within your heart.

Yes, it is time to start challenging your old beliefs, because now is the time to start knowing and not believing

Quote

Ultimately, a true teacher cannot teach you anything, but can only remind you of what, on some level, you already know.

Happiness is Contagious

It is not very often that networks like CNN report on something inspirational and hopeful, however since it did happen I felt it was only fair to share it with you.

New research has shown that in a social network, happiness spreads among people up to three degrees removed from one another. That means when you feel happy, a friend of a friend of a friend has a slightly higher likelihood of feeling happy too.

The lesson is that taking control of your own happiness can positively affect others, says James Fowler, co-author of the study and professor of political science at the University of California in San Diego.

"We get this chain reaction in happiness that I think increases the stakes in terms of us trying to shape our own moods to make sure we have a positive impact on people we know and love," he said.

Sadness also spreads in a network, but not as quickly, the researchers found. Each happy friend increases your own chance of being happy by 9 percent, whereas each unhappy friend decreases it by 7 percent. This reflects the total effect of all social contacts.

When framing the question differently, the study found that you are 15 percent more likely to be happy if a direct connection is happy, 10 percent if the friend of a friend is happy, and 6 percent if it’s a friend of a friend of a friend.

Daniel Gilbert, professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of "Stumbling on Happiness," called the study "a stunning paper by two of the most respected scientists in the field" in a statement he e-mailed to CNN.

"We’ve known for some time that social relationships are the best predictor of human happiness, and this paper shows that the effect is much more powerful than anyone realized," Gilbert said. "It is sometimes said that you can’t be happier than your least happy child. It is truly amazing to discover that when you replace the word ‘child’ with ‘best friend’s neighbor’s uncle,’ the sentence is still true."

If you are the hub of a large network of people — that is, if you have a lot of connected friends or a wide social circle — you are more likely to become happy, the study found. But the reverse is not true.
"You might only have one friend or two friends or something like that, and if you become happy, you’re not going to try to get more friends. You’re probably going to stick with what worked in the first place," Fowler said.

It’s not just happiness that spreads in a social network. Fowler and Christakis have also looked at trends in cigarette smoking and obesity using the parts of the heart study network.

They found that when someone quits, a friend’s likelihood of quitting smoking was 36 percent. Moreover, clusters of people who may not know one another gave up smoking around the same time, the authors showed in a New England Journal of Medicine article in May.

Social ties also affect obesity. A person’s likelihood of becoming obese increased by 57 percent if he or she had a friend who became obese in a given time period, Fowler and Christakis showed in a paper in the New England Journal of Medicine in July 2007.

And, like happiness, both smoking behaviour and obesity seem to spread within three degrees of separation in a social network, Fowler said. Beyond three, things get fuzzier.

"Eventually you get out far enough in the social network that you’re competing with all these other cascades of happiness and unhappiness that are sort of battling it out," he said. "Happiness on average wins, but once you get far enough away from someone in a social network, it’s not possible to detect their effect anymore.

Now!Do You Really Want to Be Happy?

Like everything else in life, you have to earn your happiness, stop waiting for it to fall out of the sky because you deserve it. The fact that anyone would cling to unhappiness as fiercely as others cling to happiness is baffling until you begin to learn to look more closely at what you’re doing.

Please feel free to continue sending in your comments, questions and/or suggestions. I am genuinely interested in what you have to say and would appreciate it if you could continue to pass this knowledge forward and help expand our “Inspiring Minds” network by recommending this newsletter to friends and loved ones. Simply click here to fill in their details.

The level of your success in your career, finances, mental and physical well-being or love depends on this one thing alone - you must make a stronger commitment to yourself. This simply means that by making a stronger commitment to yourself you are telling your subconscious that you want to live your truth.

The most common question I’m asked by my online life-coaching members is:
“How can I stay motivated until I get what I desire in life?”

The answer to this question is not as complicated as many of you would have believed. All I tell them is to develop the discipline to dedicate at least 20 minutes of each day to improve the quality of their lives. Once they commit to doing this, they will become stunned by their sustained motivation and renewed zest for life.

As simple as this technique may sound, the majority of people throughout the world simply go through life with no sense of direction and a complete lack of passion for life. They do not realise that yet another week will be over soon and that if they continue to do things as they did last week, this week will be no better or happier for them than last week. The time to grow and improve is NOW!

Goals are mysterious things too - they spring into our minds motivating us to succeed, fuel fires of fantasy about success and new found happiness, inspire almost obsessive effort to move our lives forward, and then - suddenly the fire goes out. What once motivated you to succeed, drove you to get up early and work late, now weighs in your mind as a failure. Don’t despair. The aftermath of these best intentions often feels like failure, here are a few simple tips you can use every day, they will provide you with the necessary motivation to carry you through until your goal’s completion. However, it is going to take a little dedication from your end. Remember, the greatest athletes, entrepreneurs, musicians, scholars and scientists emerge only after they have dedicated at least three to five hours a day for a decade mastering their chosen field. Now, all I’m asking you to invest is 20 minutes of each day to yourselves.

Tip 1: Convince Yourself

Repeat your goal to yourself again, and again throughout the day. Simple statements repeated aloud often can trigger the subconscious into action. Choose your goal, and pick strong words that inspire you. Say them aloud, pay attention to what the words mean. If your goal is to practice the piano, say aloud "I will practice the piano and make beautiful music!" or "I will make my piano sing!" Each statement rephrases the initial goal, but does so in a way that refreshes and revitalizes the initial excitement of your goal.

Tip 2: Tell a Good Friend

Talk openly about why you want to pursue your goal in the first place, and what you hope to achieve. Talking with someone about possible outcomes and the steps along the way can make the goal more realistic in your mind. Each time you talk to someone, the goal becomes less of a secret desire, and more of a path you have chosen that your friends can encourage you on.

Tip 3: Just Do It!

There are mornings when we all hate getting out of bed, but hitting the snooze button on your alarm once more will not get anything done any earlier, or see you to success.
Feelings are not facts, but they can catch up to the facts in time - doing what you know you ought to be doing NOW will eventually bring you a feeling of satisfaction as well as relief.

Tip 4: Reward Yourself!

When you complete a step in your overall plan, reward yourself. Little rewards along the way can make the overall job seem more attainable. Rewards do not have to be overly expensive to provide a boost. Allow yourself a night off every time you are proactive towards your goal, or treat yourself to a movie or a night out once you have completed and accomplished a major task. The goal is important, but how you choose to do it can be where the fun is. As you think about what areas of your life you wish to succeed in, remind yourself how capable you are repeatedly. Every little step you take towards your goal will continue to reinforce this belief. However, your movement must be focused in only one direction, forward!
Goals are meant to stretch us and push into places we would not ordinarily go. Let this journey help you grow and evolve as an individual. Recognize that, although you will not always feel the same level of motivation, an unwavering commitment can make all the difference here and you can stay motivated to succeed. You already know what procrastination and low motivation is costing you. And you know deep down that nothing is going to change for the better until you learn how to take consistent and sustained forward action towards your goal.

Tip 5. Love Yourself a Little.

When it comes to motivating yourself to be a better person, to do better at work or to create a happier relationship you need to understand the importance of taking control of your self-talk. You really need to know how to motivate yourself through thick and thin. Do you ever pay attention to the thoughts inside your mind? Do you ever notice the way in which you talk to yourself? Now be honest! Is it true that you sometimes insult yourself, curse yourself and say horrible things about your abilities? If you spoke
like this regularly to the people you care about they would probably leave and never talk to you again. There is simply no excuse for treating yourself so badly. Start to talk to yourself the way you would talk to someone you deeply love. Be respectful, patient and understanding. Be slow to anger, quick to praise and be grateful for the opportunity to listen. Therefore remember to be on your best behaviour whenever you talk to yourself and you will find that you treat other people better as well. This in turn will cause people to respond more positively to whatever you say. These very people will be more inclined to help you get what you want.

Tip 6. Turn Up the Passion

Very often we go through our day with an internal dialogue buzzing away in the background. We mutter to ourselves about what we need to do without feeling particularly inspired to do anything other than what we have to do. This is not an effective strategy for self-motivation! What you need to do instead is to turn up the volume, inject some passion into your words and talk to yourself with enthusiasm. You would not have much luck motivating someone else to take action without putting some energy into your words. You need to do the same to motivate yourself and must learn how to be motivated at a moments notice! So, the next time you want to motivate yourself to do something - talk to yourself the same way you would if someone was standing before you waiting to be inspired. Speak loudly with passion and excitement either aloud or to yourself inside your head. The more energy you put into it the easier it will be to light the fire inside you that sparks you into action.

Tip 6. Know How to Feel Good

No matter how focused, positive and hard working you are there will still be days when nothing seems to go your way. It is on days like this that you must take charge of your brain and take control of your self talk. You need a back catalogue of memories you can replay to make yourself feel good. Music does it for me. I have so many songs I love to hear that I just pick one out and listen to it in my mind. In a moment I can listen to sounds that make me feel fantastic simply by choosing to. This is the secret to knowing how to be motivated in a way that works for you. One other way you can break the pattern of negative thinking is to play happy memories of people telling you how much they value and appreciate you. Hear them saying what a difference you are making and soak up those wonderful feelings of appreciation. Your motivation will soar and getting more done each day will just get easier and easier with eager people lining up to help you.

It really is your choice as to how you run your brain. Choose to feel great and your communication with yourself and the outside world will become remarkable. Use these tips repeatedly on a day-by-day basis and you will succeed in taking full control of your life, begin to feel secure and at peace like never before. I guarantee it!

A Passion for Life
Whatever your goals and aspirations may be, the key to success in life is the way you live it. You may not have a choice about exactly how things happen but you do have a choice about the way you respond to what happens.

Please feel free to continue sending in your comments, questions and/or suggestions. I am genuinely interested in what you have to say and would appreciate it if you could continue to pass this knowledge forward and help expand our “Inspiring Minds” network by recommending this newsletter to friends and loved ones. Simply click here.