If you’ve recently experienced something disheartening or traumatic in your life, just the thought of starting over can seem like too much. And maybe you’ve heard someone say, “you can’t run from your problems.” But according to Psychology Today, this can’t be further from the truth as there is immense power to be found when you start over and allow yourself a new beginning. In today’s article, we are discussing the power of new beginnings.
Your Outlook Is Everything
You’ve probably been told that your outlook on life is all that matters in success, and this is true. If you think everything is dark and dismal and headed for disaster, it likely will. When you commit yourself to start over or to begin again, you will do so by generating a positive outlook, or sense of optimism, at the thought. This optimism will help propel you forward and likely make your future much brighter no matter your journey.
Change Creates Power
Humans often naturally try to avoid change. But although you may think a change that has occurred isn’t a good thing, the human race thrives on the aspect of change. A new beginning is a special type of change. It is a change where you are committed to making something different about the future.
Of course, only you know what that truly is, which makes this change a good thing; it gives you back the feeling of power over your life. The power which you may have felt like you recently lost due to your trauma. Not only that but making the covenant with yourself to move towards a new start is a power move that will lead you to feel confident and ready to conquer your new world.
It Reminds You That Sky Is the Limit
If you have experienced trauma before, you might be knocked off the path from your last journey. And you may be feeling a bit lost. Besides a lack of optimism, you may feel like your dreams are now far from attainable. Help quell these feelings by thinking about what a new beginning would look like for you.
Visualize yourself happy and achieving your dreams somewhere else. It feels a little bit more real now, right? A new beginning is powerful in that it removes any limits you let trauma impose upon your life.
Whatever may have happened in your life, a new beginning is just what you need. Not only will starting over restore your optimism and power over your life, but it will also remind you where you are going and bring you back to the track of success.
If you need help, I offer mentoring services to my clients. Fill out the form below to schedule an appointment.
Change is often difficult and uncomfortable. And you may have a hard time knowing when it is time to make a change in your life. But, how do you know when it’s time to change? There are several signs you can watch out for, which can help indicate to you that it is truly best for you to make a change.
Read the information below and see if you can see yourself in any of these situations.
You Aren’t Proud of Your Friends
When your best friend calls you to tell you her exciting news, and all you can feel are feelings of anger and jealousy, this is a sign that something is making you unhappy in your own life. If this happens to you, take a good long look at what makes you unhappy in your life, and when you find it, start working towards changing it.
You Spend Lots of Time Daydreaming
Everyone daydreams sometimes, but if you are spending more time in your imagined future than the present, this is a sign that you need to change something within your life. Perhaps consider starting by turning one of your daydreams into an achievable goal.
The Difference It Can Make
So how do you know when it’s time to change? Let’s look at a few more situations and see if you can see more of yourself in them.
You Lie About How You Are Feeling
When your friend or coworker asks how you are, you should say you are great without having to lie. If you find that you’re always telling someone you are okay when you are not, this is a bad sign. You deserve to be happy, and you might have to make changes in your life for that to happen.
Your Development Is Just Lacking
You Know There Has To Be More To Life
You know the feeling. Maybe you get off work and sit in traffic and know there has to be something different out there, which is better for you. If you have these feelings, then change is most certainly a necessity in your life. Feeling like you need change is the most certain sign that you need change, and it’s time to listen to these feelings. You’ll feel better when you do.
Sometimes it may seem like staying the same is the easier choice in life. But if you find you are no longer proud of your friends, daydream all the time, and feel awful, this is a sign that it is time for you to make a change. And if you think there has to be more out there for you than there currently is, it is most definitely true, so take the leap and commit to making a change in your life. You’ll be so much happier with your life that you’ll wonder why you didn’t do it sooner.
How can I help you make changes in your life? I do offer mentoring as a service so if you’re interested, just fill out the form below. I’d be happy to help!
One simple way you can practice radical giving in your business is to be generous with your content marketing. Instead of making all of your content focused on you and what you can do, focus on providing value to your readers or listeners. To Create Radical Giving in Your Content you will need to be a little creative, but below are some great ideas of the ways you can do that.
Here are a few easy ideas you can use to create content that serves:
Curate Content from Other Bloggers
Don’t be afraid to tell your community about the bloggers you admire or link to their amazing content. You can’t serve everyone and even if you could, that would quickly get exhausting. There’s more than enough attention and applause to go around, so take some time to focus on content curation.
Curating valuable content lets you share brilliant ideas and fresh insights with your community. Plus, it gives you a chance to introduce your audience to experts in your niche that they should follow.
Ask a Friend for Help
Interview Industry Leaders
Another way to practice radical giving in your business is to interview industry leaders. You can do this through podcast episodes or by creating webinars where you feature an authority in their area of expertise.
When it comes to interviewing others, create a list of questions. Try to avoid questions that can be answered with a simple yes or no.
Instead, make sure your questions invite detailed responses from your interviewees. Generally, questions that start with “How…?” or “Why…?” get the most interesting answers and can create thought-provoking conversations.
Be a Big Giver
Add A Bonus to a Great Product
When you find a product you’d like to promote to your community, go the extra mile and give back. Offer a juicy bonus that only your buyers will get. This bonus could be a short report, an audio course, access to an upcoming webinar, or any other product you can think of.
The important thing to do with this is to make sure your bonus is relevant to the actual product being sold. For example, a great bonus for a product all about Facebook Advertising would be 50 Facebook-ready images.
Promote Others on Social Media
Don’t be afraid to use social media to promote others in your industry. If you’re reading a great article that is challenging the way you view your niche, tweet about it. If you stumble on a funny video that you think your community will relate to, share it on Facebook.
Make sure to tag the original creator on social media so they’ll see your promotion and be encouraged. You also want to do this so your audience will be able to click through and follow the thought leader you’re linking to. Create Radical Giving in Your Content by utilizing other people in your industry.
Use Others to Support You
Here’s a great article to read to help you with creating content:
Therese Kienast of Radical Leadershiprecommends that online business owners create more content. She says, “Don’t wait, create!” If you wait, you’re less likely to follow through and publish excellent content.
Instead, try to capture inspiration the moment it strikes. If you can’t right then, try to do it as soon as possible. This will keep your enthusiasm and energy revved up as you create and share your new content.
Today’s article is all about Sharpening Your Focus and some of the methods you can use to help with accomplishing this. What do you think of when you think about improving your ability to “focus”?
Eliminating External Distractions
There are obvious encumbrances to focus on: External factors like distractions and interruptions. To remove these, you first need to recognize what they are and then exercise the self-discipline to banish them from your “space” – at least for periods of time each day.
These distractions can include anything from email to people stopping by. They’re easy to identify, so you only need to devise a plan to deal with them and then carry it out. For some of us, saying “no” to old companions like Facebook and Snapchat is easier said than done. But the results are definitely worth the effort.
Eliminating Internal Blocks
These blocks aren’t so easy to identify, and there are plenty of them.
One type of block is a perceptual block. This happens when we perceive things incorrectly. For instance, when you don’t clearly understand what the problem is. You can come up with ineffectual solutions or not enough solutions. Has that ever happened to you?
Another type of internal block is emotional. Feelings can interfere with our thinking if we let them take over. For instance, have you ever been in a meeting where you didn’t understand the point that was being made? But you were afraid to ask because you felt you might look foolish? How about if you’re involved in something that requires taking a risk? Have you ever been convinced that making a certain move was the correct thing to do? But you didn’t do it because it might not work out? Or, just the opposite, have you ever been so excited about something that you didn’t think it through before taking action?
These are just some examples where emotions can get in way of focus and clear thinking. You can probably think of many more. I know I sure can!
Another block to clear focus is not having complete or correct information. It’s very frustrating to put a lot of time and energy into a project and then realize that the conclusion will be flawed due to a lack of supporting information. Sharpening Your Focus will help you with staying on task so you can get more done.
It’s a good idea to take a little time to sort out where you’re coming from perceptually, emotionally, and practically before initiating a project.
The Habit of Successful Focus
In their excellent book, The Power of Focus, Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, and Les Hewitt discussed the idea that successful living is all about cultivating the habit of focusing on the right things.
Here’s what they say:
“Life doesn’t just happen to be. It’s all about choices and how you respond to every situation. If you are in the habit of continually making bad choices, disaster often occurs. Your everyday choices ultimately determine whether you end up living with abundance or living in poverty. Consistent choices lay the foundation for your habits. And your habits play a major role in how your future unfolds.”
A habit is anything you do so often that it becomes easy. The rule of thumb is that it takes about 21 days to create a new habit. A really interesting fact is that once you do something 21 to 30 times, it’s harder not to do it than to do it.
Reprogram to Focus
The good news is that you can begin to reprogram yourself anytime. Once you learn about yourself – how you think and feel, and what you want in life – it will be easier to make the choices that will turn into habits that fulfill your goals. By Sharpening Your Focus you will have more time to do the things you really care about in your life.
Think about that. If you only changed four habits every year, in five years you would have 20 positive new habits. Imagine how much your life would change with 20 positive habits. You can make these changes in any area you choose. It could be your health, income, relationships, or any other area. 20 new habits could vastly change your overall lifestyle.
Here’s something that may be news to you: your outward behavior is the truth, while your inner perception of your behavior is often an illusion. What that means is that sometimes we let ourselves off the hook and see things in a rosier light than they really are. The first thing you should do to create new, positive habits is to make a list of all habits you think are unproductive. It’s important that you understand what’s holding you back so that you can change it. Seeing what you need to change and really committing to changing it are the two things you need to do to change any habit.
The 3 Step Process To Target
Canfield, Hansen, and Hewitt have created an easy-to-understand, three-step process for creating new habits:
Clearly identify your bad or unproductive habits – be very honest when you look at your habits and think about the long-term consequences.
For instance, as a smoker you might say,” How bad can a few cigarettes a day be?” but stop to think that 10 cigarettes a day for 20 years equal 73,000 cigarettes. That’s a dramatic example. Think about the difference that changing a few of your own habits will make in your life.
Define your new successful habit – The easiest way to change an old bad habit is to replace it with a new, good habit. Choose your new habit and picture all the benefits and rewards you will get from adopting your new habit.
Create a three-part action plan – For instance, if you’re giving up smoking, you could read some literature on how to stop smoking, substitute another activity for smoking, and start using a nicotine patch.
You must identify your old habit, clearly define your habit, and take action. Start with one habit. Focus on your three action steps and put them into practice. When you’re comfortable with the new habit, you can move to the next habit you want to change.
You may have heard the expression,” what we concentrate on, expands.”
It is so true. If you are looking for help in this area, I offer a FREE 15-minute consulting appointment to see if we can work together to help solve your focus issues. Contact me by using this link: FREE CONSULTATION
Today’s article is about tuning up your memory. Having a good memory is important, right? But have you ever stopped to consider just how important it is? The fact is that everything we do involves our memories. We can’t think without using our memories, and everything that we do unconsciously, like moving our lips and making sounds to speak or walking across the street, accesses our memory, which tells us how we did it the last time.
Did You Forget or Do You Care?
So, on one level, almost all of us have extremely good memories. These are the kinds of things we usually take for granted. We don’t really think about memory at all until we find we’ve forgotten something. We’d like to get better at remembering things at will, and there’s no reason why we can’t do that since we use so little of our brains.
Here’s what happens: first, we sense something (hear a statement, smell something cooking, and so on). Then an electrochemical pathway goes along neurons, across the synapses between the site of the sense and the brain. Remember, there are 10 million billion possible connections – so for our brains to remember the information accurately is an amazing feat. The more a certain pathway is activated, the better chance that memory will be created.
We have two types of memory – explicit and implicit.
Implicit memory (often-used pathways) allows us to do things automatically because they are so familiar since we’ve done them time after time.
Explicit memory involves things we have to remember consciously. As an example, you remember how to use the telephone automatically, but you need to consciously recall the telephone number you want to use.
We can’t improve our implicit memory with exercises, but you might want to try some of these techniques to improve your explicit memory.
Techniques for Improvement
MOTIVATION
Believe it or not, how much you want to or need to remember something plays a vital part in remembering it. If you commit yourself to remembering something and concentrate on it, your chances of remembering it are much better.
LEARNING PROCESS
Here’s another surprising fact: studies have shown that short bursts of activity help you remember something better and for longer. Many of us got through college pulling all-nighters, so we know they work. It’s true – they work better for remembering things short-term, like when you want to pass an exam. But working in short bursts of time helps us to remember things better over longer periods of time.
So, if you have something that you want to remember for a long time, don’t study for hours on end, but make a plan to study a part of the entire project, take a break, and go back to studying.
PHYSIOLOGICAL ALERTNESS
Studies have shown that we do not retain things when we are at low levels of alertness, such as in sleep, or at very high levels of alertness, such as in a panic or high stress. Our optimal level of alertness for learning and remembering is somewhere in between these two extremes.
Determine your own optimum alert state and save that time for learning things that are most important to you. Other things can be done when you’re less alert. This approach will give you the best chance of storing information in your long-term memory.
TIME OF DAY
Again, studies might surprise you. It had been previously thought that the best time for learning was in the morning. Studies are showing now that learning in the morning hours is better for short-term memory. Learning later in the day seems to be better for long-term memory.
REMEMBERING NAMES
Here’s an area where a lot of people are self-conscious. It’s embarrassing not to be able to remember someone’s name, especially when that person seems to have no trouble remembering yours. This is like every other aspect of memory. Some people are at a higher level of unconscious competence in this area. And they are remembering names by using a process even if they don’t know it.
If you make a conscious decision to remember someone’s name and follow these steps, you too will be successful in remembering names in the future.
Tips to Remember
Consciously decide to give this person respect by learning his name
Listen when you hear the name. It’s easy to be focusing on other things and let the name slip by.
Be certain that you hear his name properly. If there’s any doubt, ask him to spell it.
Visualize that you’ve written the name down. Doing this forces you to listen to it. This visualization is a surprisingly powerful technique.
Visualize the name itself. Seeing the name in your mind acts as a trigger. If you can associate it with something else like a town or a famous person, it becomes even stronger. Associate the person in front of you who belongs to the name with the name in your mind, so that the name and the person’s face are linked in your mind.
TRIGGERS for STUBBORN MEMORIES
You can probably relate to this – sometimes we have problems remembering things even though we very much want to remember them. Criminal investigations use techniques that can help us with recalling our own memories.
Here’s what you do:
Re-create the original conditions in your mind. See them as clearly as possible and use your senses. What was happening? How did you feel? Was it hot or cold? Were you tired, hungry, angry, at the time?
Pay attention to the details, even the unimportant ones. What do you see? Those images may help you bring other images to mind.
Try to see the situation from another point of view. For instance, if you were sitting in a chair the last time you saw your ring, pretend you’re standing in the doorway looking at the situation. What do you see now?
See the situation in reverse. In your mind, see the situation before you entered it. See the room before you came into it – what was happening then?
These “investigation” techniques are powerful for recalling stubborn memories.
So to help you with your own techniques, download your free Memory Technique Checklist right here.
