“Smell is a potent wizard that transports you across thousands of miles and all the years you have lived.”

“The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched – they must be felt with the heart.”

“What I am looking for is not out there, it is in me.”

Deaf. Blind.

Helen Keller didn’t start out back in the 1880’s with the cards stacked in her favor. But with the help of patient people she learned to communicate better with the world and went on to write books, work for women’s right to vote and became on of the most inspiring people of the 20:th Century according to Time Magazine.

Keller obviously summoned and created a great deal of courage and character to be able to do all that she did. Here are a few of her brave, tough, reality expanding thoughts.

Use your experiences to build character.

“Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experiences of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired and success achieved.”

To get real results you have to try things out, perhaps fail and then learn from those failures and try again. And that may not always be pleasant. Even if you view failures and mistakes like learning experiences they can still sting, especially shortly after they happened.

But you can also know that when it stings you have at least done something and that you can gather lessons from this. Instead of a feeling safe but also vaguely feeling that you’re not living up to your potential as you sit on your hands doing or trying nothing. As Keller says, you cannot develop character and success through quiet and ease. You must do things and go through things to become stronger and wiser.

Don’t cling to your illusion of safety.

“Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. The fearful are caught as often as the bold.”

“Security is mostly a superstition. It does not exist in nature…. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.”

You cannot sit on your hands and take it easy and hope to get things done. At least not the things you really want to get done (which often may be the things you fear doing).

Why do people sit on their hands and get comfortable in their ease and quiet though? Well, one big reason is because they think they are safe there. But the truth is what Keller says; safety is mostly a superstition. It is created in your mind to make you feel safe. But there is no safety out there really. It is all uncertain and unknown.

You may get layed off.
Someone may break up with you and leave.
Illness will probably strike.
Death will certainly strike in your surroundings and at some point come to visit you too.
Who knows what will happen an hour from now?

This superstition of safety is not just something negative. It’s also created by your mind so you can function in life. No point in going all paranoid about what could happen a minute from now day in and day out. But there is also not that much point in clinging to an illusion of safety. So you need to find balance where you don’t obsessed by the uncertainty but also recognize that it is there and live accordingly.

So you stop clinging to your safety life also becomes a whole lot more exciting and interesting. You are no longer as confined by an illusion and realize that you set your limits for what you can do and to a large extent create your own freedom in the world. You are no longer building walls to keep yourself safe as those walls wouldn’t protect you anyway. You can instead start your own daring adventure. Perhaps slowly at first, but still.

Face reality head on.

“People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant.”

How to view reality is a tricky thing. On one hand, it’s very useful to keep a positive attitude and view your world through that.

But you also have to avoid using positivity as a way to repress real problems in your life. Repressing won’t help you. It will just keep the problem away as time passes and oftentimes deepens and complicates the problem / conflict.

So you have to face reality for what it is in a way too. And as you probe deeper into your life and your surroundings what you come up with will not always be pleasant. One example would be the previous point in this article about safety.

But to grow I think you have to arrive at these conclusions too. Because as tip # 1 in this article says, you have to go through things to develop character, strength and success. I also think you need to arrive at the unpleasant conclusions to gain a deeper understanding.

And although these conclusions may be unpleasant at first they may also be a gateways and turning points for you. They can over time provide some real leaps of growth for you. If you face them and explore them and start to draw understanding and lessons from them. And then start to rewrite your map of the world.

You choose how you treat yourself. And how you want to be treated.

“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.”

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.”

One of the age old words of wisdoms I have heard repeated over and over basically says that no one can make you feel inferior without your consent. So even though it may sound counterintuitive, deep inside you do to a large extent decide how the world treats you.

You decide if you let an insult hurt you or if you just reject that gift. You also decide how you want to be treated by the way you behave and how you feel about yourself within. How you feel about yourself and how you feel entitled to/expect to be treated by other people will come through perhaps not in your words but in the important non-verbal communication. Your body language and voice tonality – a big, big part of communication – will give people signals and feelings about how you feel about yourself and what you expect and feel entitled to.

So you do to a large extent create other people’s responses to you. And that starts with how you feel about yourself. One awesome way to self-sabotage here is to fall into self-pity and victim thinking. It can paralyze you and get your thoughts spinning in all kinds of unproductive and unhelpful ways. Sometimes for a very long time.

Sure, self pity and victim thinking gets you attention from others and can make you feel special. But if you look at things from a larger perspective you also realize how it paralyzes your life. When you’re stuck in self-pity you won’t get much good done, neither for you or anyone else. At least not in the way that you could be doing things and feeling good about life if you gave up those destructive thought patterns.

One last and important thing on this topic: people around you will reinforce how you feel about yourself by treating you as they think is appropriate. That reinforces your self-image. This social feedback can be a powerful force that strengthens your and other people’s image of you. No matter if that image is one filled with victim thinking or if it’s one with high self-confidence and positivity.

Impossible is nothing.

“While they were saying among themselves it cannot be done, it was done.”

Yeah, the sub-heading for this section might sound a like an exaggeration. But Keller and the people around her really pulled something amazing off. Becoming such an inspirational figure from such a bad starting point at that point in history couldn’t have been easy at all. It was probably something no one expected.

And isn’t life and history full of those things? People standing in groups of various kinds saying that things can’t be done. And then someone goes for it and does it anyway.

The opinions of others can be helpful. But to take them as fact could be very limiting. Perhaps all of them don’t say things because they know much of those things but because they are stuck in a pessimistic perspective. Or want to cling to the safety they have created within.

Keep on keeping on.

“We can do anything we want to do if we stick to it long enough.”

Now, doing amazing things will probably not happen over a weekend. One big reason that people don’t get what they want may just be that they give up too soon. Perhaps because of a magic pill mentality where their expectations about success are stuck within a too small time-frame.

To get the results you have stick with it. You have to persist. Not all people do. So the longer you persist the thinner the playing field can become. But how can you persist?

Three suggestions:

• Find what you really, really want to do. This will give you the sustained inner motivation to keep going.
• List the reasons why to keep going. It’s easy to forget about all the good things that can come out of keeping on going. So you need to remind yourself. Write down all the reasons why you are doing what you are doing and review that piece of paper regularly.
• Shape your own little world. Choose what you let into your mind. Choose the books, music, movies and people that will inspire and support you. Minimize the negative influences from media, various websites and naysayers. Don’t let other people and influences pull you down and back to where you started.

Be open and flexible.

“When one door of happiness closes, another opens; but often we look so long at the closed door that we do not see the one which has been opened for us.”

This is one of my favorite quotes. How often do we not miss the window of opportunity in a new situation just because we are still angry, sad or frustrated about that other door that just closed?

To me this is another powerful reason to remind myself to stay in the present. To not get stuck and hung up on missed opportunities. When you are living in the present – which is a way to live on the positive and open part of the emotional scale too – and not stuck in the past I have found that it’s a lot easier to find the hidden opportunities in any situation.

So whenever you see a door of happiness closing, take your eyes off it at least pretty shortly after. And instead of letting your awareness linger on what is in the past, use your time and focus to find the new opportunity to continue your daring adventure.

If you found this article helpful, please share it on Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon. Thank you very much! =)

Image by tony (license).

[hana-code-insert name=’social down’ /]“Everything is something you decide to do, and there is nothing you have to do.”
Denis Waitley

“If you wait to do everything until you’re sure it’s right, you’ll probably never do much of anything.”
Win Borden

Perhaps the most important thing you can do to improve your life is simply to do things. To take action and learn along the way.

Here are five suggestions for “do-habits” that are very helpful to adopt to radically improve your life.

1. Do it first thing in the morning.

How you start your day tends to have a big influence on that day. It sets the context in your mind. I believe that one key to better consistency and improvement in your life is what you do early in the day. Two ways to get a good start to your day are these:

• Do the hardest/ most important/ most uncomfortable thing first in your day. If you start your day by doing it you will feel relieved. You feel relaxed and good about yourself. And the rest of the day – and your to-do list – tends to feel a lot lighter and easier to move through. It’s amazing what difference this one action makes.
• Start small. To get from a state where you just feel like sitting on your chair and doing nothing much to one where you take action over and over you can do this: start small. Getting started with your biggest task or most difficult action may seem too much and land you in Procrastinationland. So instead, start with something that doesn’t seem so hard. One of my favorites is simply to take a few minutes to clean my desk. After that the next thing doesn’t seem so difficult to get started with since I’m now in a more of a “take action” kind of mode. Experiment with this one and the previous tip and see which one that suits you the best. Or mix them up as you wish.

2. Do it one more time.

Don’t give up too soon. It is very easy to give into feeling that you done something enough times and it will never work. You have tried it as many times as you would expect people to do. But these expectations I believe are often a bit unrealistic.

Society, TV and advertising tell us that there is an almost instant solution to any of our problems. You can easily lose 30 pounds within a month. Or with little work and time invested have another extra 20 000 dollars in the bank.

So it is not unreasonable to think that success will come quickly. But instead of doing something as many times as you think others have done it, talk to and read about people who have actually done what you want to do. This will give you a more realistic picture of reality.

Oftentimes you may have to do it more than one more time. But I have often found that doing it just one more time, doing it that extra time even though you may start to feel that this won’t work, can bring the results you want in many cases. I actually feel a little bit of excitement sometimes when I feel like giving up because then I remember that at this point success is often not that far away.

3. Do the unusual thing.

When faced with a choice in your daily life, step back for a minute and think. Then take the option that is and feels unusual for you.

If you often back down just don’t for this one time. If you are often get into arguments with people then just this one time don’t and instead just let it go or treat the other person with kindness. Do the opposite of what you usually do and see what happens (while using common sense of course). Do something new and something you wouldn’t expect from yourself.

This is a fun a great way to get new experiences and learn things you wouldn’t if you kept going like you usually do.

Getting stuck in the same old routine until it becomes a rut can suck the life out of you. Doing the unusual thing in small and big situations, no matter how it goes, is a great way to feel alive again.

4. Do less.

How do you find time to do what you really want? How do you not get caught up in minor tasks and fill you day with them?

By setting limits. By being a bit ruthless and cutting down on the least important stuff. At some point you will probably have to be honest with yourself and realize that you can never fit all that you want into your day or week. Something has to go. Not only because it takes up time. But also because you only have so much energy, focus and creativity available during your day. If spend it on the less important things then all of that will be gone each day before you get to the big stuff.

It may not be fun to give up a couple of those TV-shows or hanging out on Facebook. But to make room for something new you sometimes have throw out a couple of old things.

5. Do your best.

Why should you do your best? Why not coast a bit and do just what is expected?

Three reasons:

• You get better results. Sometimes immediately. Often not right away, but as all your awesome work adds up you start to see new and exciting results.
• You raise your self esteem. When you do what you think is the right thing – like doing your best – then your self esteem goes up. If you just coast then you tend to feel kinda lame about yourself. So do awesome work and you feel awesome about yourself. Do ok work and feel ok about yourself.
• Deservedness. When you feel awesome about yourself you do also feel like you deserve more in life. So you go after it and you won’t self-sabotage as much when opportunities pop up.

If you found this article helpful, please share it on Facebook, Twitter and Stumbleupon. Thank you very much! =)

“I’ll be floating like a butterfly and stinging like a bee.”

“I wish people would love everybody else the way they love me. It would be a better world.”

“A man who views the world the same at fifty as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.”

I’m guessing Muhammad Ali doesn’t need a long introduction. As an amateur he won the Olympic Gold. He then went on to become a three-time World Heavyweight Champion.

And in 1999, Sports Illustrated and the BBC named him as “the Sportsman of the Century”.

But what can we learn from one of the best boxers of all time?

Well, here are five tips from Muhammad Ali on how to break through the barriers in the world and in your mind.

1. Take a risk.

“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.”

To get what you really want you will pretty much always have to take risks. Of course, that can be scary.

So how can you overcome this, take a leap and take the risk? I don’t have some simple and easy solution. But I do have a few tips.

• Really, really want it. When you really want it simply becomes easier to push through the inner resistance you feel. You are so motivated to achieve whatever it is you want that the risk may be scary but smaller than your desire.
• Ask yourself: what’s the worst that could happen? We often build big, negative fantasies in our heads of what may happen if we do something. Huge scary monsters. But probably 90 percent of what you fear never comes into reality. This is of course easy to say. But if you remind yourself of how little of what you feared throughout your life that has actually happened you can start to release more and more of that worry from your thoughts.
• Detach from the outcome. When you are actually doing and taking the risk in real-time detach from the outcome. Just focus on what’s in front of you. Things will become easier. You’ll create less inner anxiety and pressure for yourself. And you will perform better because you are totally focusing on what’s right in front of you and not weighing yourself down with a lot of self-created negativity and doubts.

Every time you take the leap and take a risk – even if things might not go your way that time – you can build confidence in yourself. By getting more experiences where you took action instead of sitting on your hands it will over time becomes easier to start moving in the direction you desire and take a chance.

2. Steer clear of self-sabotage and creating inner obstacles.

“It isn’t the mountains ahead to climb that wear you out; it’s the pebble in your shoe.”

This is a big problem because often you don’t even know that you are for example self-sabotaging. You think that the thought loops that spinning around in your head is reality. But you can’t predict the future. But you are so stuck in your thoughts that you believe them as if they where the absolute truth.

Again, one way to gain a sober perspective is to ask: what’s really the worst that could happen? And then you can make a plan to handle that worst case scenario if it were to come into reality.

Another important thing here is to do what you think is the right thing in life as much as you can. Why? Because when you do that you start to build an image of yourself as someone who deserves the good things that come to him/her. Self-sabotage comes from thinking that you on some level simply aren’t worthy of what you want. So you sabotage for yourself along the way to get yourself back into the place or level of success you feel you deserve. So you have to make yourself feel more deserving.

Doing the right thing isn’t always easy. But you choose to go and work out instead of lying on the couch and watching TV. You choose to be kind instead of petty or judgemental. You choose to take a chance instead of not taking it. And a lot of the time you might not do the right thing. But by just increasing the number of times you do it during your week little by little you can really change how you view yourself. And over time this habit can become stronger and stronger.

Now, another essential thing to avoid self-sabotage and creating mind-monsters is this…

3. Keep your self-talk positive.

“It’s the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief. And once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.”

“I am the greatest, I said that even before I knew I was.”

“I’m so fast that last night I turned off the light switch in my hotel room and was in bed before the room was dark.”

If you are always negative and down on yourself it will be a lot more painful and sometimes pretty much impossible to achieve what you want. Keeping the self-talk in your head positive is essential. You can make that easier to by following the tips above.

Another helpful thing is just to be mindful of how you think about things. To say “Stop!” and cut off negative thought threads before they become strong. Just cut them off as often as you alert enough to do so. And replace them with more positive thought spirals by asking yourself questions like “What’s awesome about this?” and “What can I learn from this?”.

Keeping your self talk positive may seem cheesy or uncool. But beating yourself up all the time is far worse and really not helping you at all.

Plus, the thing is that your self-talk is contagious. Because how you talk to yourself affects how you feel. And as we know from bumper stickers, enthusiasm (and any other feeling) is contagious. And as we know from Ali, this self-talk can also start to seep out into what you say out loud too.

As you interact with people, there is always a social feedback loop. People tend to treat you as you see yourself and as a reaction to how you make them feel. Someone with very positive self-talk will probably be perceived as confident and positive and therefore be treated a certain way. Someone who thinks s/he is a loser and is always down on him/herself may be met with sympathy but also irritation or simply that people tend to avoid that person.

And since people and support is essential to just about any success you may desire your self-talk – and how you talk out loud – becomes very important.

Now, the social feedback loop is about what you really feel about yourself. Not that you repeat affirmations all day that you don’t believe in. So you need to start doing the right thing too, because positive real-life experiences have a deeper impact on how you feel about yourself than just making the self-talk more positive. At least in my experience.

4. Don’t make a big deal out of it.

“It’s just a job. Grass grows, birds fly, waves pound the sand. I beat people up.”

So you create a more positive self-image by doing the right thing and keeping your self-talk more positive. But it’s also a good thing to not go overboard. To not grow a huge ego and come off as arrogant or well, like a jerk.

This may be a bit counter-intuitive but not making a big deal out of what you are good at have some big benefits.

• Less defensiveness and negativity. I could for instance create a big ego around the fact that I have many readers on this blog. And that would feel awesome for a while. But sooner or later my head would become too big and I would come off in negative way. And if people would question what I am saying I would start to feel more and more threatened and nervous. Because I would have a big image to live up to and defend each day. I think it’s a lot easier to keep the self-talk positive but also just be a guy who knows some stuff, has done some things and write about all of that.
• Makes the doing easier and more enjoyable. If you think it’s a big deal then it becomes a big deal. And things become unnecessarily hard and complicated. You start to create monsters in your mind again. Your ego may want you to think that it’s big, big deal because it means that you are a big, big deal too. That effect is enjoyable but makes the doing harder and less fun after a while as the inner pressure starts to ramp up.

5. Use your emotional leverage to succeed.

“Only a man who knows what it is like to be defeated can reach down to the bottom of his soul and come up with the extra ounce of power it takes to win when the match is even.”

If you are here or have an interest in personal development then you have probably hit a point sometime in your past where you said “Enough of this! Something has to change”. Or you felt like you hit rock bottom. Now that isn’t fun. But as Ali says, it’s also there you can find that extra motivation and power to push through.

If you were unhealthy and overweight you feel like you never want to go back to that again. If you didn’t get anything done, procrastinated all day and felt like crap you don’t want to go back to that. If you were buried in a mountain of debt you want to never go back to that place or headspace again.

When you have had enough you will find a way to change your life. And I’m not saying that you should be driven by a fear to never return back to where you were. But to simply remind yourself of how it where back then when things get tough. And realize that yes, it may be hard right now. But it is temporary. And it’s definitely better than it used to be.

Your worst times may not be fun at all when they are happening. But later on they can be some of the most helpful and powerful experiences of your life.

Image by Wolfgang Staudt (license).

[hana-code-insert name=’social down’ /]“Let him that would move the world first move himself.”
Socrates

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”
Plato

“Nothing endures but change.”
Heraclitus

“What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven into the lives of others.”
Pericles

Obviously, old greeks like Plato, Epictetus and Aristotle were really sharp. And what they talked about over 2000 years ago is just as relevant and useful today. Our outer circumstances may have changed dramatically over the last few thousands of years, but on the inside we seem to have stayed pretty much the same in many ways.

Here are just 7 of my favourite fundamentals from that place and time. I hope you will find them as helpful as I have.

1. If you are going your own way, prepare for reactions.

“If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid.”
Epictetus

I believe this is very relevant to self-improvement. And something that is holding people back, no matter how much tips or knowledge they have about how to make their lives better. The fear of social rejection is strong in many people.

If you start changing then people may react in different ways. Some may be happy for you. Some may be indifferent. Some may be puzzled or react in negative and discouraging ways.

And that’s OK. Most likely they won’t react as negatively as you may imagine. Or they will probably at least go back to focusing on their own challenges pretty soon.

2. To get what you really dream about out of life, you have to wo/man up.

“Courage is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others.”
Aristotle

So to make some real changes you must accept that you may look foolish. You will need courage to actually apply what you have learned on this blog or through other sources. This is one common sticking point. The problem is not that you don’t have the correct tips or solutions. It’s simply that you avoid facing what you fear (even though you mind might still be telling you that the solution does not lie there but rather in gathering more information).

If this is something that you do often then you have to increase your courage. So, how can you do that?

You have to take action and face your fear.

Maybe not what you want to hear, but in my experience and from what I have learned from others this is probably the best way to build courage and self confidence.

You can make this a bit easier though. Three of my own favourite tips for doing that are:

• Be curious. When you are stuck in fear you are closed up. You tend to create division in your world and mind. You create barriers between you and other things/people. When you shift to being curious your perceptions and the world just opens up. Curiosity is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and enthusiastic then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear. How do you become more curious? One way is to remember how life has become more fun in the past thanks to your curiosity and to remember all the cool things it helped you to discover and experience.
• Be present. This will help you snap out of overthinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done. This is also probably the best tip I have found so far for taking more action in life since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. One of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on your breathing for a minute or two.
• Realize that failure won’t kill you. It is when you face your fears that you discover the thing that billions of people throughout history have discovered before you. Failure won’t kill you. Nor will being wrong. The sky will not fall down. That’s just what people that haven’t faced their fear yet think. Failure is actually a great way to learn things about yourself and life. And to make yourself tougher and more courageous.

3. What they say might not really be about you.

“People often grudge others what they cannot enjoy themselves.”

“The unhappy derive comfort from the misfortunes of others.”
~ Aesop

Criticism that may be valid should be taken seriously. But negativity directed towards you is often not about you. It’s more about someone else having a bad day, week or year and directing their negative energy at anyone passing by in their life.

This ties back to fundamental #1. So much complaining and negativity that people put out into the world is about how they feel about themselves and their lives. The problem is just that we are often so focused on own lives that we take every negative thing said to us personally. But the world doesn’t revolve around me or you.

So remember those two quotes when someone’s directing negativity towards you.

And more importantly, remember those quotes when you feel the need to lash out towards someone. Ask yourself what the real problem in your life is. And what you can do about it.

Instead of just lashing out and feeding more negativity into your and someone else’s life.

One thing you can pretty sure of is that the more people try to boost their own value and temporary positive feelings by putting someone else down, the worse they feel about themselves and their lives. And that goes for you and me too of course.

4. Discard the things that aren’t helping you.

“The most useful piece of learning for the uses of life is to unlearn what is untrue.”
Antisthenes

Some of what you learn in life is simply social conditioning that is fed to you over and over as you grow up. And so you believe that it is true. But you have to realize that some of the things you have picked up may not serve you in the best way. But you may have simply grown so comfortable with those beliefs that you cling to them – no matter how negative they are – like a safety blanket.

Another thing is that was once true for you may not be true anymore. As you improve yourself you have to let go of your past and your old self-image to be able to move forward fully. You have to accept that you have changed and then keep your focus steadily on your new areas of interest so you don’t slip back into your old – and so familiar and comfortable – self over and over again.

Also, if you have learned read a lot about personal development then you might have a lot of tips on different topics in your head. To simplify your life and thinking you might not need 25 ways to handle nervousness.

Articles with that many tips can be helpful but it’s important to try that stuff out for yourself and see what tips that work most effectively for you. And then simplify so you always know what action to take if you get nervous for example. Instead of having your mind so cluttered with information that you become paralyzed and take no action at all.

5. Your wishes may not be all that they are cracked up to be.

“We would often be sorry if our wishes were gratified.”
Aesop

Here is one of those beliefs that you may hold but may want to let go off to live a happier life.

We wish for something. A new car, a new job, a new relationship or perhaps a new pair of shoes. And perhaps you think: “if I only get this thing, then I’m home, then I’ll feel happy and good all around”.

And then you get it. And it’s awesome. But often for just a while. And then you may feel like maybe something went a bit wrong. Like it didn’t fulfil you or complete you like you thought it would.

Why? Well, after while when you get used to something, when it becomes normal, then the ego tends to want more once again.

Or maybe you can’t enjoy something for what it is because even though your environment changes, you are still the same. The same person with the same outlook on life. With the same self-imposed barriers for your own success and happiness and maybe self-sabotaging behaviour. And until you take a look at those things you may find yourself repeating the same patterns over and over. When you are the same, you often tend to get the same results over and over again.

Our wishes can also often come through accompanied by unexpected and not so pleasant side effects. Things may seem just perfect when you dream about them. In reality, it can become a little more complicated and messy.

Now, new things or people can be great. But if you think this one thing or person will fix all your problems or if you focus on the wrong aspects – what is not perfect, how can I get more etc. – instead of the positives and gratitude then you may find yourself always looking for the next thing and create quite a bit of unhappiness within.

6. Focus on building helpful habits.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
Aristotle

Becoming really good at something or making real improvement in your life isn’t about short spurts now and then when you feel like it. It’s about habits and consistency.

Here are two tips that have been helpful for me to establish new habits in my life.

• The 30 day challenge. You have probably read about this old personal development concept from for example Steve Pavlina. Basically, you make a deal with yourself to do one thing for just 30 days (one example: exercise every day) and no more than that. But after those 30 days you may discover that your mind will have become so accustomed to this new behaviour that it will be easier to continue doing it than stop doing it.
• Just focus on the process. While doing something for those 30 days you focus on the process rather than the results. I for instance use this when I workout. I don’t take responsibility for the results in my mind. I take responsibility for showing up – even the days when I don’t feel like it – and doing my workout. The results come anyway from that consistent action. And this makes it easier for me to take this action and establish the new habit when I know that is all I need to focus on. Instead of using half of the energy and focus I have available on hoping that I “reach my goal real, real soon”. Focus on the process and you will be a lot more relaxed and likely to continue than if you stare yourself blind on the potential results that never come as quickly as you want to and puts you on an emotional rollercoaster from day to day.

7. Suffering is optional. And so is happiness.

“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”

“I must die. Must I then die lamenting? I must be put in chains. Must I then also lament? I must go into exile. Does any man then hinder me from going with smiles and cheerfulness and contentment?”

“It is not death or pain that is to be dreaded, but the fear of pain or death.”
~ Epictetus

Suffering is optional. And so is happiness. What you choose to think about determines how you feel. It may seem “normal” and be common to go through a lot of mindmade suffering after the initial pain that ignited the suffering. And it’s easy to slip back into old thoroughly ingrained thought habits. But you don’t have to. You can learn to gain more control over your happiness and suffering.

One tip that I have found helpful for this is to learn to reconnect as much as possible with the present moment. Suffering is to a large extent created when your mind is thinking thoughts about either the past or a possible future. As mentioned already in this article, one of the simplest ways to connect with the present moment is just to keep your focus on your breathing for a minute or two.

It is also very useful to realize that you are not your thoughts or emotions. They are just things that are flowing through you. But they are not you. You are the one observing them. This realization can gradually free you more and more from keeping negative thought and emotions going. Whenever they arise and you realize that you aren’t them and that you don’t have to identify with them then their power over you fades away.

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“Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.”
E.L Doctorow

“Whether or not you write well, write bravely.”
Bill Stout

“Writing is the hardest way of earning a living, with the possible exception of wrestling alligators.”
Olin Miller

I usually don’t write much about writing. But today, as I am working on my next book and am writing a lot, I felt like mixing things up a bit and bringing in some variation.

So here are five timeless tips on writing. I suppose this article could be useful if you are a blogger but also if you’re a writer of some other kind. Perhaps one with an unfinished novel still waiting in the drawer.

1. It won’t always be easy.

“Every writer I know has trouble writing.”
Joseph Heller

“Inspiration is wonderful when it happens, but the writer must develop an approach for the rest of the time… The wait is simply too long.”
Leonard Bernstein

When I started writing articles about music and film in Swedish quite a few years ago I used to wait for inspiration to come. I did the same thing when I first started blogging. I don’t do that anymore.

Inspiration can show up on its own, waltzing in through a door or a window. But doing things that way makes work inconsistent – both in quality and quantity – and you spend a lot of time waiting.

It’s often better to just start working. For the first minutes what you do may suck quite a bit and it’s hard going. But after a while inspiration seems to catch up with you. Things start to flow easier and your work is of a higher quality.

So don’t limit yourself to the moments where you feel inspired or you feel like the moment is just right to do something. Act instead. A lot of the time you can find inspiration along the way.

2. Remove.

“Even the best writer has to erase.”
Spanish Proverb

“I try to leave out the parts that people skip.”
Elmore Leonard

“When you wish to instruct, be brief; that men’s minds take in quickly what you say, learn its lesson, and retain it faithfully. Every word that is unnecessary only pours over the side of a brimming mind.”
Cicero

Not much to add here. Get to the point quickly and you’ll have a better chance of getting through to the one you writing to. Just like when you are talking to someone in real life.

3. Be wholly alive and be present.

“The most solid advice for a writer is this, I think: Try to learn to breathe deeply, really to taste food when you eat, and when you sleep really to sleep. Try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might, and when you laugh, laugh like hell. And when you get angry, get good and angry. Try to be alive. You will be dead soon enough.”
William Saroyan

Be present and alive with whatever you do. Focus on what’s in front of you. This is not an easy habit to cultivate.

But I have found that over time you can learn to spend more and more time in the now.

In this space your writing will be easier and you may be surprised at how wonderful some of the things that flow out of you are. Again, this is useful in conversations too.

When you start to think too much you are going down a slippery slope. Your communication becomes overly complicated, unclear and with less emotional power behind it.

4. Write, write, write.

“If you would be a reader, read; if a writer, write.”
Epictetus

Good old Epictetus. Always gets to the point quickly. Just like when playing tennis you need to put in the hours. Maybe not the easy answer one wants to hear. But massive amounts of practise tend to sharpen your skill considerably in just about any field.

5. Focus on your truth.

“Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it.”
C.S Lewis

When you write I think it’s better to focus less on being original and more on expressing what you feel is the truth. What you feel has some truth to it often has truth to a lot of other people too. Because we are all pretty much the same. And the truth tends to get through to people. When you read something that tells the truth you can feel it in your body and in how it resonates with your emotions and thoughts.

This is not easy though. And the people that do it a lot often have a lot of courage. But I think it’s something to strive for.

Few things under the sun are new. Things often just seem new to someone because that person hasn’t heard about them before. But most of the time some guy talked about it many hundreds or thousands of years ago. In personal development, loads of people borrow from people like Buddha. And he probably borrowed stuff from some guy no-one can remember anymore.

I’m not saying that people do not add new things and parts of themselves when they express truths that have been said over and over throughout the ages. I’m just saying that you shouldn’t get too hung up on being original because a big part of human interaction and communication is being able to really connect, relate to and understand each other in some way. And you can do that by telling your truth.