Month: July 2017

Are you stuck in a job you don’t like? Working a job you don’t find inspiring? Feeling as though you’re just existing, rather than living life to the fullest?

If you answered yes to any of those questions, then it’s high time to press pause for a few hours and really sit down and think about what you want to “be,” and what you want to do with your life.

It’s advice you’ve probably gotten before, and when you’ve heard it in the past, you’ve probably read that the first necessary step is to sit down and make a list of where you see yourself in X number of years, or something similar.

There’s value in that, but that in itself can be limiting.

Instead of taking that approach, ask yourself two questions:

Firstly, if you could do anything in the world with a 100 percent chance of success, what would you do? Secondly, if money was no object, what would your life look and feel like?

Spend some time visualizing the answers to both questions before you start writing them down, and then do so. Write about your answers vividly and in detail. At that point, you’ve got a pretty clear picture of the idealized version of where you want to be and what you want to do.

Of course, blue sky thinking only gets you so far. Once you’ve got the idealized image of what you want to do with your life, now comes the hard work of finding a way to get as close as you can to the idealized image you created.

That happens in stages. It’s a rare person who can turn their life on a dime and in a matter of days to make that vision a reality. The good news is that you don’t have to. You can make one or two small changes, try them on for size, and then proceed further, and with each change you make, you bring yourself closer to realizing the image you started with.

There’s no time like the present – what do you want to do and be? What’s your purpose in this life? Only you can say.

We live in an “always on” world. Just about everything you want is at your fingertips, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. It’s fabulous, but it’s also exhausting because it has created the expectation that we are “always on” and doing things 24/7. That kind of pressure can be relentless, and it makes it increasingly harder to strike a good balance in your life.

Between the pressures of your job, increasingly longer work hours and the pressures of home and family, stress is all but inevitable in our modern world. The question, then, is how to deal with it, and unfortunately, there is no class for that.

Below, you’ll find some quick and easy-to-implement things you can do, starting today, to knock your stress level down several notches. Ready for some stress relief? Let’s go!

1) Walk – preferably in the woods: Every day, you should block out at least fifteen minutes to just unplug. Get away from your desk, your family, your friends and anything else that’s adding stress to your life. Science has shown that a fifteen minute walk every day will reduce your stress levels by as much as 25 percent. That figure is doubled if you walk in the woods, so if you have some trees near where you live, take full advantage of that fact!

2) Get more sleep – It may sound silly, but the very best way to do this is to set a regular bed time and stick to it! Don’t eat anything in the hour before bedtime, and turn your thermostat down a few degrees, because studies have shown that we sleep better when it’s cooler. Most Americans only average 6 hours of sleep a night, and our bodies need 8-9. Is it any wonder that so many of us are stressed?

3) Live the list – Making an ordered list of the things you have to accomplish is another simple but powerful tool when it comes to reducing stress, because it gives you a finite number of things to focus on throughout the day. Order your list by priority so that you take care of the most critical things first, then work your way down to the less important stuff. It gives you a sense of accomplishment and satisfaction as you cross each item off!

If you start attempting to reduce your stress with these three simple tips, you’ll find your stress levels falling rapidly, and you’ll be much happier and healthier for it.

Change is inevitable.

That phrase sounds trite, and perhaps even cliché, but it’s true, and everyone knows it.

Unfortunately, knowing it and accepting it are two very different things, and the latter is orders of magnitude more difficult than the former. Most people are of the mindset that things aren’t supposed to change. While everyone has a different threshold, all of us crave order, stability and predictability to one degree or another, and change disrupts that. It throws our world into chaos and uncertainty, which increases stress.

There’s really only one way to deal with change, and that is acceptance. Things change. That’s the nature of the world we live in, and there’s no use fretting about it or worrying over it. Doing that will only get you down. Besides, who says all change is bad? What it really represents is an opportunity.

Sure, when your world changes around you, there will invariably be an adjustment period, but more often than not, change brings with it new and unexpected opportunities, which are good things. Sometimes, chance brings things you never would have had the opportunity to experience or take advantage of if it hadn’t happened.

Of course, it goes without saying that not all change is good, but worrying about it isn’t going to keep it from happening. Again, the best thing you can do for yourself is to accept it, evaluate it with honest eyes, look for new opportunities hiding within the changing landscape and deal with the downsides as they come.

That is a far better, far healthier attitude to take than to allow the fact of inevitable change to get you down. If you go down that road, you doom yourself to a life of depression and uncertainty, and the more you try to hold onto the way things are, the more frustrated you’ll find yourself becoming. Don’t do that to yourself. There’s a better way!

No man (or woman) is an island. If you want to accomplish anything of importance, either in your personal or business life, you’re inevitably going to need the help of others at some point. You’re going to need a team to bring your vision or project, whatever it may be, to life.

Unfortunately, most people don’t have a clear idea of how to build a good, strong team that functions like a well-oiled machine, and the absence of this skill can make it much harder to achieve whatever goals they’re aiming at. Below, you’ll find some simple guidelines that will put you firmly on the path of building a world-class team, which will improve your chances of succeeding at whatever goal you’re chasing.

• It Starts With Vision – Before you can even think about assembling a team, you’ve got to have a crystal clear vision of what you want to achieve. What specific goals will you and your team be seeking to accomplish? What skills do you lack in terms of bringing the project to life? That will tell you which people you need to start attracting to your cause.

• Build Excitement And Commitment – Once you know who to start looking for in terms of building your team, the next part is salesmanship. You’ve got to pitch your idea to the experts you need and gauge their responses. It’s not enough that the person you’re talking to has a skill you need. That person also has to be genuinely excited by what you’re trying to do, because excitement breeds commitment, and commitment is the fuel that will see your project to the finish line.

• Collaboration Is A Must – Go ahead and dispense with the notion that you’ve got all the answers. You don’t. No one does, and you chose the members of your team not just for their expertise and enthusiasm for your project, but for their ideas. Accept them. Give them the space and the autonomy to add their thinking to your vision. As long as their ideas fit with the vision you’ve outlined, let them grow and flourish.

There’s obviously more to team building than just this, but if you start with these three simple points, you’ll go a long way toward building a solid, capable team that can accomplish just about anything you can dream of.