“No matter where you go – there you are”
Confucius

At the heart of what I like to call relaxed productivity there some destructive things you want to avoid.

One of them is the grey zone. It is a twilight zone of the mind.

The grey zone is basically when you are thinking and worrying about work when you are at home. Or when you are thinking about your home life and challenges there when you are at work.

Not a very uncommon habit. But why do you want to avoid it?

Three powerful reasons why I try to stay away from it as best as I can are:

• You become less effective. When you are stuck in thinking about your home life or your private life in some way or form at work then you are not fully focused. You are distracted and that impacts how well you can do you your work.
• You become less motivated and energetic. Being stuck in the grey zone sucks a lot of extra emotional and mental energy. It adds a lot of stress. And all of this often causes you to feel fatigued and your motivation to do something well or to explore new opportunities tends to sink like a rock.
• You might wind up with relationship troubles. One the most important things in any kind of relationship is to truly be there when you are there. To not still be at work in your mind when you are having dinner with your partner, playing a game with your child or hanging out with friends. Being somewhere else is one of those things that do not only annoy the people you are with but also can erode relationships.

Now, how do you go about replacing this habit with something better?

I recommend keeping the reasons above in mind as much as you can during your day. Being conscious about how this habit can damage your life is a good first step towards smarter habits.

A few more things that work well for me are:

1. Take a break every hour.

If you are never free from work for example, if you are never switching things up then your mind will naturally think about work, work, work all day long.

So to break the habit of being in the grey zone it is essential to first fully focus on work. And then to fully focus on relaxing and rejuvenating your mind and body. By focusing 100% on both work and rest each day it becomes easier to fully switch between these modes.

So I usually work for about 45 minutes. Then I take a 15 minute break and I do something totally different. I may take a short walk, eat a small snack, watch half an episode of the Simpsons or just lie down on the couch and read a book.

One thing that has worked well for me is to use a kitchen timer – or the timer on your cell phone – to make sure your work period or your rest period does not become too long.

2. No work after 7 o’clock in the evening.

When you work from home it is easy to start working too much or whenever you feel like it. This can however add stress, get you stuck in the grey zone or just make you spin in circles and get very little of importance done.

So I have set a limit and I do no work after 7 o’clock in the evening. This allows me to wind down after a day of work so that I can sleep well and spend my time with friends or my girlfriend and truly be there with them.

3. No work on weekends.

This is another way of dividing up your work zone and your relaxation or home zone. To be able to fully focus during the weeks and do your best you need slightly longer periods of rest and rejuvenation. Let your weekend be that time.

So if you can, shut off your cell phone.

I work online quite a bit during the weekdays, so during the weekends I often take at least one day when I do not go online at all. And during almost all weekends nowadays I do not check email or do other regular checks online. This certainly makes it easier to not think about work on weekends.

4. Have other important things to do.

By not working after a specific time in your day, by not working on weekends you will have more time when you are truly there with your family and friends. This will also, for example, help you to not feel guilty about not spending enough quality time with them and give you more time and energy to do awesome stuff together and to work on challenges or issues you and the other person(s) might be having.

And so by doing things this way you are also less likely to get stuck in the grey zone at work and think about something that is happening in your family or with a friend.

By setting the limits described above it becomes easier to do the mental switch between fully focused work, fully focused family/friend time and fully focused rest time.

By having important stuff in your life besides work like a hobby, a sport, the people around you and various adventures you can have together it also becomes easier to not get stuck in thinking about what you need to do tomorrow or on Monday at work.

Instead you can fully be where you are right now and recharge yourself. And that makes a big difference in the quality of your life both in the long- and short-term.

If you found this article helpful, then please share it with someone else by using the buttons below. Thank you! =)

Image by ·Insomnia· (license).

[hana-code-insert name=’social w twitt face’ /]“You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
Buddha

“Low self-esteem is like driving through life with your hand-break on.”
Unknown

Your self-esteem is one of the most important things in life. It is one of those things that will make a huge difference for you if you work on it.

As you raise your self-esteem you will for instance:

• Feel more deserving and trusting in yourself. This will allow you to more fully explore your own potential and start going for your dreams and happiness. Instead of holding yourself back in life because you do not think you deserve good things or because of fear of failure, rejection etc.
• Live as you want. Not just when it comes to your goals and dreams. But also in the way that you will be better at standing up for yourself, asking for what you really want, saying no and to not feel pressured by shoulds or perfectionism.
• Stop feeling lousy about yourself and start feeling that you are OK and good. Sure, life still has its ups and downs with better self-esteem but those ups and downs also become easier to handle. And if you become more understanding, accepting and loving of yourself then just about any day in life will become better and happier than it used to be.

Those are a couple of reasons why I have created my brand new course, the Self-Esteem Course. It will launch on Tuesday as the headline mentions. At 13.00 EST (that’s 18.00 GMT) to be more specific and during the first week of the launch you can get it at 30% off.

But that is not the only thing about self-esteem that I wanted to share today. I also wanted to share three simple ways that you can start using today to start raising or to better maintain your own self-esteem.

1. The daily self-appreciation journal.

It is easy to get lost in basing your self-esteem on just what you accomplish, on what you get done in a day or week. But basing your self-esteem on just that makes it pretty unstable.

One way help yourself out with that and with appreciating what is good and awesome about you is to use a self-appreciation journal.

You can do that by taking out a pen and notepad (or use a word processor on your computer or cell phone) every evening for a week. There you write down 5 things you appreciate about yourself. But make sure that you do not only write down accomplishments. Also write down good stuff related to your core-self esteem. By that I mean things that always there no matter how you perform at work or in school. It could be things/traits like your sense of humor, your kindness, your honesty, wisdom, creativity and so on.

If you like, continue to make this kind of journaling a habit of yours after the first week is up.

2. The stop word or stop-phrase.

We all have an inner critic. The critic can spur you on to get things done and to behave in way that gains acceptance from the people around you. But it can also drag you and your self-esteem down.

The inner critic whispers or shouts thoughts in your mind. It could be thoughts like:

• You are lazy and sloppy too, now get to work.
• No one really likes you for who you are.
• You always fail in relationships.
• You aren’t good at your job at all and someone will figure that out and throw you out.
• You are worse or uglier than someone else.

Now, the inner critic can as I mentioned help you to be productive and so on. But there are alternatives that are better. If you want to become more effective then it will for example be healthier and more productive to remind yourself of your major reasons for doing what you do each day. You could write down the most important reasons why you are focusing on this project, on these classes in school and so on and put that note where you will see it every day.

But, as you start going on that other, healthier path, you also have to stop the critic so it does not start to drag you down. You have to talk back to it.

You can do so by simply creating a stop word or stop-phrase that you say or shout in your mind whenever your critic pipes up with a distorted and self-esteem hurting thought.

Simply say: Stop!

Or use something else. I like these two phrases:

• No, no, no, we are not going there!
• No, that is just stupid.

They have worked well for me to get the inner critic to shut up. Try these ones out or create one that feels good and works for you.

Then use it to not get dragged down by your own inner critic when it may get triggered by for example criticism or a mistake in everyday life. And as you use the word or phrase and it becomes a habit and as you find healthier paths towards what you want your critic will pop up up less and less.

3. Be kind and understanding towards others (and yourself).

By being kinder towards and more understanding of others if becomes easier to do the same to yourself. One simple way to focus on being more understanding and kind when you feel the need to judge someone is to use helpful questions. One I find to be really effective is:

What parts of this person can I see in myself? How is he or she like me?

This one helps me to shift my perspective from what is different and what I feel the need to judge to what we have in common instead. This tears down the mental barriers between us and I can feel closer to and more understanding of this person.

Try it out whenever you feel the need to judge someone, no matter if it is someone close to you or someone you don’t even know.

By doing so it becomes more natural to extend and use this more understanding and kind frame of mind when you view yourself too. And by behaving in this way towards others you will feel better about yourself and in that way raise your self-esteem too.

If you found this article helpful, then please share it with someone else by using the buttons below. Thank you! =)

“The one who asks questions doesn’t lose his way”
African Proverb

Creating the habit of asking myself better questions on a daily basis is one of the most helpful things I have done for myself.

It is a very simple thing to do and after you have done so for a month or so the question tends to often pop up automatically when you need it. And over time this little thing can have a huge positive impact.

Today I’d like share 5 of my favorite questions that I use to simplify my life and to keep it simple. And at the end of this post I’ll share what I have spent most of my time with lately.

If I was just told that I had to go away for a conference tomorrow and it would last for a whole week then what would I spend today doing?

This is a wonderful question that quickly helps you get your priorities in check.

If you feel lost at the start of your week or day or get lost in busy work then stop. Then ask yourself this question to refocus on the absolutely most important.

Who cares?

A very simple but a very powerful question. Whenever you feel like delving into some nitpicking or some pettiness ask yourself this question. Or use it whenever you feel an overwhelming need to be right in some discussion.

Yes, nitpicking or having to be right can give you sort of high. You feel good. But it’s a dirty high. It never lasts for long. And you just create a lot of negativity in the long run outside of yourself and within yourself as your self-esteem goes down.

Asking yourself “who cares?” is a way to lighten up, to not take every little thing so seriously. It’s a way be more open and relaxed with yourself and the people around you. It’s simply a way to be cool about stuff.

Am I right here, right now?

This is one can be very helpful.

Both because it’s very easy to slip out of the present moment and back into negative and pointless thought loops about the past/future. And because it’s very beneficial to spend pretty as much of the time in your day as possible in the now. Why? A couple of important reasons:

• Improved social skills.
• Improved creativity.
• You appreciate your world more.
• Stress release.
• Less worry-warting and overthinking.
• Openness.

If I find I’m not in present moment I reconnect with it by for instance:

• Belly breathing. I take belly breaths and just focus my breathing for a minute.
• Keeping the focus on the current external surroundings for minute. For example right now, I can look out of my window and see the buss traveling up the hill next to my house. I see the plants in my window that probably need some water. I hear the humming of the computer-fan and the sound of the traffic going by. I feel that the floor is a bit cold. I use my senses to take in the world around me right now and to reconnect with the present moment.
• Taking action. Taking action and doing things – especially things you love doing – tends to put you in the present moment a lot of the time. It works pretty well for me at least.

Will this matter in 5 years?

This one can really puts things into perspective. It can make just about any difficulty that you are having right now seem a bit trivial and not as important and heavy as you had imagined the last few days, weeks and months. You may discover that you had expanded a problem and made it a lot more terrifying than it actually is. And you may discover that you can actually solve it more easily than you thought while you were in a somewhat panicked state of mind.

Can I let this go?

So much of our time is often spent not here but in the past. We relive old conflicts and arguments. We replay negative situations that may have happened last week or a really long time ago.

A terrible thing about this is how it is considered such a normal thing. People just do it day after day and in many cases year after year. It is a horrible waste of energy and the time you have here.

In some cases you may have to take action to resolve an old situation and get closure. You perhaps bring up the situation with the people involved to get them to understand and for you to better understand them too. And/or maybe you apologize or forgive.

But in many cases you can just let it go. Well, just letting it go is perhaps something of an oversimplification. But a few steps that have helped me to become better at letting go are these:

• Be ready to give up the benefits of not letting go. You may not want to let go because it makes you feel superior to someone else or because it makes you feel like a victim and so you receive attention and sympathy. To let go you have give up benefits like these.
• Accept it and then let go. I like acceptance. I like it because when you accept something instead of resisting it you stop feeding more energy into your problem and making it even bigger. A bit counterintuitive. This is also useful when it comes to letting go. If you first accept what you want to let go you aren’t so emotionally attached to it and still feeding it with your focus and energy. And so it becomes less powerful and easier to just drop. As long as you resist it then it will be hard to let it go.
• Let it go if it shows up again. In my experience it’s pretty common that what you let go shows up in your thoughts again. And that’s OK. Just let it go each time it shows up. After a while it stops showing up.

Coming very soon: The Self-Esteem Course
.
Over the last few months I have been working hard and I am now very happy to announce that my latest and what I believe may be my most helpful and important product so far is almost finished.

The Self-Esteem Course is a 12 week course in how to raise and maintain one of the most important things in life: your self-esteem.

And it will be launching in little over a week.

Why is self-esteem so important? Well, with a low sense of self-esteem you tend to simply not like yourself very much at all. You hold yourself back from exploring life and all your potential and dreams because you feel such things are for other people but not you. Or you stay in your unhappy place in life because you do not feel like you deserve more or could realistically go after what you really want.

It is not a good place to be in and no matter what tips or strategies you may learn for handling life better in a practical way – like with productivity or social skills – this shaky or very weak self-esteem foundation will hold you back and you’ll remain stuck even though “you know what you should do” to improve your life.

Over the past years I have improved my own self-esteem a lot and learned how to handle daily obstacles that could drag it down. What has worked, the best things I have found is what I’ll share in this course with practical action-steps to follow each week.

If this is something you’re interested in, be on the lookout next week for more information on the exact launch date and time and the special offer on the course that you can get during the launch week.

If you found this article helpful, then please share it with someone else by using the buttons below. Thank you! =)

“If you’re in a bad situation, don’t worry it’ll change. If you’re in a good situation, don’t worry it’ll change.”
John A Simone

“Don’t judge each day by the harvest you reap, but by the seeds you plant.”
Robert Louis Stevenson

Not all days start off well. And sometimes you just wind up having a bad day.

But there are ways to turn it around.

Now, days can turn out bad in different ways. And have different solutions.

In this article I’d just like to share 5 general steps I often use to change my thoughts and emotions during a bad day. Going through these steps often allows me to change what is inside of me and so that allows me change the day for the better too.

1. Think.

The first step when I’m having an unmotivated, sad, tired day or one where I wind up in one negative situation or more is to use my mind.

How? Well, I start to see my day from a better and more helpful viewpoint by using questions.

So you can ask yourself questions like:

• Will this matter 5 years from now?
• Who cares?
• What can I learn from this situation?
• What is the opportunity in this situation?
• What is one small action, one small step I can take to start turning this day or situation around?

2. Use your body.

If I can’t think myself out of the situation, if that doesn’t change my thoughts then work with my body instead.

I work out with free weights for maybe 30 minutes. Then inner tensions lift from my body and mind. A pessimistic viewpoint tends to get replaced.

And I feel more powerful, energetic, positive and focused when I am done.

A much better headspace and bodyspace to be in to turn that day around.

3. Accept what is.

It is often a natural impulse to try to deny negative feelings or thoughts when they show up in your life. Perhaps you try to not think about it, perhaps you try to push that feeling away. Or you tell yourself that you need to focus like a laser beam on the positive by using the questions from step #1.

I have found that in many cases it is actually better to just accept that the negative feelings and th0ughts – or whatever are left of them after having worked through step #1 and #2 – are here right now (although it can be hard to sometimes convince your brain that this is a good option as it wants to deny or reject what is).

By accepting that you feel this way and that these thoughts are floating in your mind you stop feeding more energy into them and you stop making them strong. After a few minutes of fully taking in this uncomfortable feeling and thoughts and accepting that they are here then they start to lose steam. They just seem to float away and you once again feel more open and are able to think more clearly.

4. Tap into gratitude.

This one can be helpful too. Perhaps not when you are having really bad day. Or not right away, if you feel shocked or totally overwhelmed emotionally.

But after a while, when you have calmed down a bit then it can be helpful to tap into a bit of gratitude.

Because your pain and sorrow can in retrospect be a gift.

Your sorrow expands the spectrum of human experience, understanding and emotions for you. You become more grateful because of your sorrow. The sorrow carves deeper. And the deeper it carves, the more joy you will also be able to contain. The sad times make the happy times even sweeter.

So the bad times can help us to enjoy and appreciate the good times even more. But I have also found that when I have a pessimistic mood or low energy or no motivation or all of them then that can help me to think in new ways about things. My lowest days often turn out to be some of my most creative days.

So the bad day may not feel good. But I also know that it often will bring me positive things based on how things have turned out in the past when I was in the same situation.

5. Just be with your day.

This last step is more of a reminder if you can’t seem to get the steps above to work. Because that happens too. But it can also be another way to tap into acceptance and to help yourself.

Now, this blog was never about life being perfect or positive or awesome all the time. That is just perfectionism rearing its ugly head. This blog is about replacing unhelpful habits with better ones. It is about raising the percentages of times where you can handle things in a better way both in your everyday life and when big things happen.

But there are still natural valleys and peaks in life.

And a bad day will sometimes just be a bad day. And that is OK. That’s life.

If you found this article helpful, then please share it with someone else by using the buttons below. Thank you! =)

“Any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts.”
Arnold Bennett

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
Anais Nin

Why are you reading this blog?

Probably because you want to make a positive change in your life. Perhaps you want to improve your social skills, simplify how you work or change your attitude and how you think.

Now this is great. But it is seldom that easy. There may be obstacles outside of you. There are almost certainly obstacles inside of you.

In this article I’ll explore some of those common obstacles that can make change so hard and how to get around them.

You don’t want to change.

Maybe you think you want to change something. But is it really your wish? Or is it the wish of your parents, boss, partner, friends or society?

If you don’t really want to make the change deep down then it will be very hard to go the distance. Yes, you can begin but if there is no inner drive to do it then you will lose motivation easily and feel like giving up all the time after a while.

What to do about it: Sit down and really think about whose goals you are working towards. If they are not yours then think about what you can do to stop working on them and spend more time on your own consciously chosen goals instead.

If you still have to go on with may have started as someone else’s goal – perhaps your boss has told you to do something and you can’t just ditch that if you want to keep your job – then find your own reasons for working on that goal. Brainstorm and write them all down. Review that paper and make the goal into more of your goal and know why you are working towards it for you own sake.

Your environment is holding you back.

If you are for example trying to lose weight then it will be a lot harder if the people around you are eating junk food every day. If you are trying to think more positively then it will be a lot harder if you hang out with negative people all the time and watch the news and negative and fear-inducing TV-shows too much.

What to do about it: Change your environment in a ways that will support you. That’s doesn’t mean that you have to take drastic measures like never talking to some friend or family member again to cultivate a more positive attitude.

It may just mean that you cut down on seeing the most negative people/TV-shows etc. that much and replace that with more time with positive people and positive media consumption. By doing that the process will be so much easier.

If you are trying to lose weight then find people with similar goals that you can spend some time with each week. Even if it’s just via an online forum of some sort.

Carve out some time and a space for yourself with people and motivational and educational information – books, blogs, magazines etc – that will support you as you move towards your goal. Also, by involving more people and/or for example signing up for courses somewhere you will feel commitment to people you like and a bit of positive social pressure to actually go there when you are supposed to instead of slacking off on the sofa.

One common problem with the social environment is that you perhaps fear what people may think if you make change. Well, in my experience people are seldom as harsh as you think they will be. They are most often supportive or simply not that interested/neutral to you making changes.
People are most often focused on their own goals and challenges in life. Or what other people may think of them. You are not the center of the universe.

You feel like giving up after one or three failures.

When you are really young then you probably don’t build failure up to be this huge thing. You learn to walk, fall down and ding your head and get up again. The same goes for learning to ride your bike.

But through influence from school and society failure becomes this increasingly more frightening thing. Sure, as you get older the stakes become higher and you can lose more if you fail. But I do think people often exaggerate the effects failure will have simply because they feel frightened.

What to do about it: Most of the time the sky will not fall if you fail. People will not mock you. Life just goes on. But you have to do things to gain this understanding. You will not get it just by reading these words and all the other things by people who have said the same thing for centuries.

Your mind has to experience failure – or the possibility of it – over and over to make the fear of failure to lot smaller. That has at least been my experience.

You may however find motivation in that failure teaches you things books/blogs cannot. By changing your perspective to a more curious one and seeing failure more as a learning experience than something to fear it becomes easier to handle.

You don’t feel enough pain yet.

Why do people change? Oftentimes I think they have simply had enough. The pain of staying as you are becomes too big and you seriously start looking for a positive way forward.

What to do about it: Besides waiting until the problem becomes pretty much unbearable you can try to see your future self vividly in your mind.

Ask yourself: What will this lead to in 5 and 10 years? Where am I going?

Towards massive debt, a heart attack, serious illness and severe restrictions in your future? Do you want go to that place where it is very likely that you will wind up if you don’t make a change? Then see your future self where you have made the positive change. What positive and awesome things has it brought you in 5 years and in 10 years? See it all in your mind. And remind yourself of the positive and negative consequences by writing them down and reviewing them whenever you feel like quitting and going back to your old ways.

Vividly seeing the probably very real future consequences of not changing can be that nudge you need to get serious about improving something in your life.

You don’t know how to practically make the change.

This is a common obstacle. Fortunately, nowadays we have the Internet so it’s a lot easier to find practical solutions to the problems many people have faced before you.

What to do about it: Ask yourself what have other people before you or around you have done to improve their situation?

Talk to people who have made the change you want to make (lose weight, quit smoking, improve the social life etc.). Or if you can’t find anyone, read the top rated books on Amazon.com on that topic or read blog articles.

But make sure that you take advice from someone who has actually been in your shoes and gone where you want to go. Find a way that suits you. It may not be the first method or system you try. So be patient. Keep moving forward towards the things you want most in your life.