“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.

“Nothing is so fatiguing as the eternal hanging on of an uncompleted task”
William James

“Much of the stress that people feel doesn’t come from having too much to do. It comes from not finishing what they started.”
David Allen

Simply getting started and taking action instead sitting around and discussing things or theorizing about them is one of the most common things that are stopping people from improving their lives.

But to keep going until something is finished can also be a big issue (it has certainly been so at times for me at least).

I have however found a couple of good solutions that help me. Today I would like to share 3 of them.

But first, just be careful with what tasks you aim to get done. Don’t think you have to finish everything you started. If a book sucks, read something else. Using this as an excuse to quit something that feels hard or unfamiliar is not a good idea. But there is no law that says that everything has to be completed.

Go for good enough.

One pretty big issue for me in the past was that I wanted to polish everything until it was “perfect”. The problem is just that such thinking often leads to many things not ever being finished.

So you have to find a balance for yourself where you do good work and don’t slack off but at the same time don’t get lost in trying to improve and polish something too much.

I have found that balance through experience.

It is also very important to be aware that nothing will ever be perfect. Striving for perfection can be pretty dangerous. Because you will never feel like you are good enough.

You have set the bar at an inhuman level. And so your self esteem stays low even though your results may be very good.

So just focus on gradually being more consistent instead trying to be perfect.

Realize that good enough is good enough. And that goes both for your work and for you.

Set a deadline.

Last year I set a deadline for when my second e-book should be finished. I had realized that just working on it and releasing it when it was done would not work. Because I could always find stuff to add to it. So I had to set a deadline. Sure, I still missed it by a few days but finally I did the last part of the work and was done with it.

Setting a deadline gave me a kick in the butt and it is generally a good way to help you to let go of a need to polish things a bit too much.

Use limits and rituals to keep your focus during the home stretch.

The last part of a project or a task can often feel pretty hard and it is easy to get lost in procrastination. By setting limits for how often you check email each day, how much time you spend on social networks and forums, how much time you take to make small everyday decisions you can over a month or two develop these things into habits that run automatically most of the time.

I limit my own checking of email, Facebook, blog statistics etc. to one ritual at the end of my workday where I just string all the checking together into one 20-30 minute session. This allows me to get the creative parts and the most important tasks of the day done early in the day when I am rested and focused and it prevents me from getting lost in everything else.

By incorporating limits like these into your lifestyle you are less likely to get distracted during the last part of the work and you can keep your eye on what’s important.

“Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.”
Marcus Aurelius

“Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.”
Marcel Proust

Circumstances can certainly make life unhappy. But a part – often a big part – of unhappiness comes from our own thinking, behavior and habits.

In this article I’d like to share 7 of the most destructive daily habits that can create quite a bit of unhappiness within and in your own little world.

But I’ll also share what has worked, what has helped me to minimize or overcome these habits in my life.

Bonus: Download a free step-by-step checklist that will show you how to overcome these 7 destructive habits (it’s easy to save as a PDF or print out for whenever you need it during your day or week).

1. Aiming for perfection.

Does life has to be perfect before you are happy?

Do you have to behave in a perfect way and get perfect results to be happy?

Then happiness will not be easy to find. Setting the bar for your performance at an inhuman level usually leads to low self-esteem and feeling like you are not good enough even though you may have had a lot of good or excellent results.

You and what you do is never enough good enough except maybe once in a while when feels like something goes just perfect.

How to overcome this habit:

Three things that helped me to kick the perfectionism habit and become more relaxed:

Go for good enough.

Aiming for perfection usually winds up in a project or something else never being finished. So go for good enough instead.

Don’t use it as an excuse to be lazy or to slack off.

But simply realize that there is something called good enough and when you are there then you are finished with whatever you are doing.

Have a deadline.

I set deadlines every time that start with a new premium guide. Because about a year ago, when I was working on my second e-book, I realized that just working on it and releasing it when it was done would not work.

Because I could always find stuff to add to it. So I had to set a deadline.

Setting a deadline gave me a kick in the butt and it is generally good way to help you to let go of a need to polish things a bit too much.

Realize what it costs you when you buy into myths of perfection.

This was a very powerful reason for me to let go of perfectionism and one I tell myself still if I find thoughts of perfection pop up in my mind.

By watching too many movies, listening to too many songs and just taking in what the world is telling you it is very easy to be lulled into dreams of perfection. It sounds so good and wonderful and you want it.

But in real life it clashes with reality and tends to cause much suffering and stress within you and in the people around you.

It can harm or possibly lead you to end relationships, jobs, projects etc. just because your expectations are out of this world.

I find it very helpful to remind myself of this simple fact.

2. Living in a sea of negative voices.

No one is an island. Who we socialize with, what we read, watch and listen to has big effect on how we feel and think.

It becomes a lot harder to be happier if you let yourself be dragged down by negative voices.

Voices that tell you that life will in large part always be unhappy, dangerous and filled with fear, worry and limits. Voices that watch life from a negative perspective.

How to overcome this habit:

Replacing those negative voices with more positive influences is very powerful. It can be like a whole new world opening up.

So spend more time with positive people, inspiring music and books, movies and TV-shows that make you laugh and think about life in a new way.

You can start small. For example, try reading an uplifting blog post or book or listen to an audio book while eating your breakfast one morning this week instead of reading the paper or watching the morning news on TV.

3. Getting stuck in the past and future too much.

Spending much of your time in the past and reliving old painful memories, conflicts, missed opportunities and so on can hurt whole lot.

Spending much of your time in the future and imagining how things could go wrong at work, in your relationships and with your health can create self-doubt and build into horrifying nightmare scenarios and playing over and over in your head.

Not being here right now in life as it happens can lead to missing out on a lot of wonderful experiences.

No good if you want to be happier.

How to overcome this habit:

It is pretty much impossible to not think about the past or the future.

And it is of course important to plan for tomorrow and next year and to try to learn from your past.

But to dwell on those things rarely help.

So I try as best as I can to spend the rest of my time, the big part of my time each day, with living in the now.

Just being here right now and being fully focused on these words I am writing and later as I cook and eat my lunch and work out be fully focused on doing that.

Whatever I am doing I try to be there fully and not drift off into the future or past.

If I do drift off then I focus only on my breathing for a few minutes or I sit still and take in what is all around me right now with all my senses for a short while.

By doing either of those things I can realign myself with the present moment again.

4. Comparing yourself and your life to others and their lives.

One very common and destructive daily habit is to constantly compare your life and yourself to other people and their lives.

You compare cars, houses, jobs, shoes, money, relationships, social popularity and so on.

And at the end of the day you pummel your self-esteem to the ground and you create a lot of negative feelings.

How to overcome this habit:

Replace that destructive habit with two other habits.

Compare yourself to yourself.

First, instead of comparing yourself to other people create the habit of comparing yourself to yourself.

See how much you have grown, what you have achieved and what progress you have made towards your goals. 

This habit has the benefit of creating gratitude, appreciation and kindness towards yourself as you observe how far you have come, the obstacles you have overcome and the good stuff you have done.

You feel good about yourself without having to think less of other people.

Be kind.

In my experience, the way you behave and think towards others seems to have a big, big effect on how you behave towards yourself and think about yourself.

Judge and criticize people more and you tend to judge and criticize yourself more (often almost automatically).

Be more kind to other people and help them and you tend to be more kind and helpful to yourself.

Focus on the positive things in yourself and in the people around you. Appreciate what is positive in yourself and others.

This way you become more OK with yourself and the people in your world instead of ranking them and yourself and creating differences in your mind.

And remember, you can’t win if you keep comparing. Just consciously realizing this can be helpful.

No matter what you do you can pretty much always find someone else in the world that has more than you or are better than you at something.

5. Focusing on the negative details in life.

Seeing the negative aspects of whichever situation you are in and dwelling on those details is a sure way to make yourself unhappy.

And to drag down the mood for everyone around you.

How to overcome this habit:

Overcoming this habit can be tricky. One thing that has worked for me is to kick the perfectionism habit.

You accept that things and situations will have their upsides and downsides rather than thinking that all details have to positive and excellent. You accept things as they are.

This way you can let go emotionally and mentally of what is negative instead of dwelling on it and making mountains out of molehills.

Another thing that works is simply to focus on being constructive. Instead of focusing on dwelling and whining about the negative detail.

You can do so by asking better questions. Questions like:

• How can I turn this negative thing into something helpful or positive?
• How can I solve this problem?

If I am faced with what I start thinking is a problem I may use a third solution, I may ask myself: who cares?

I most often then realize that this isn’t really a problem in the long run at all.

6. Limiting life because you believe the world revolves around you.

If you think that the world revolves around you and you hold yourself back because you are afraid what people may think or say if you do something that different or new then you are putting some big limits on your life.

How?

Well, you can become less open to trying new things and growing.

You can think that the criticism and negativity you encounter is about you or that it is your fault all the time (while it in reality could be about the other person having bad week or you thinking that you can read minds).

I have also found that my own shyness used to come from me thinking that people cared a great deal about what I was about to say or do.

How to overcome this habit:

Realize people don’t care too much about what you do.

They have their hands full with worrying about their own lives and what people may think of them instead.

Yes, this might make you feel less important in your own head.

But it also sets you free a bit more if you’d like that.

Focus outward.

Instead of thinking about yourself and how people may perceive you all the time, focus outward on the people around you.

Listen to them and help them.

This will help you to raise your self-esteem and help you to reduce that self-centered focus.

7. Overcomplicating life.

Life can be pretty complicated. This can creates stress and unhappiness.

But much of this is often created by us.

Yes, the world may be becoming more complex but that doesn’t mean that we cannot create new habits that make your own lives a bit simpler.

How to overcome this habit:

Overcomplicating life can involve many habits but I’d like to suggest a few replacement habits to what have been a couple of my own most overcomplicating habits.

Splitting your focus and having your attention all over the place in everyday life.

I replaced that complicating habit with just doing one thing at a time during my day, having a small to-do list with 2-3 very important items and writing down my most important goal on white board that I see each day.

Having too much stuff.

I replaced that habit with regularly asking myself: have I used this in the past year? If not then I will give that thing away or throw it away.

Creating relationship problems of any kind in your mind.

Reading minds is hard. So, instead ask questions and communicate.

This will help you to minimize unnecessary conflicts, misunderstandings, negativity and waste or time and energy.

Getting lost in the in-box.

I spend less time and energy on my email in-box by just checking it once a day and writing shorter emails (if possible not more than 5 sentences.)

So that I can spend more time on helping my newsletter subscribers, on improving my blog and on other things that are a win/win for you and me.

Getting lost in stress and overwhelm.

When stressed, lost in a problem or the past or future in your mind then, as I mentioned above, breathe with your belly for two minutes and just focus on the air going in and out.

This will calm your body down and bring your mind back into the present moment again. Then you can start focusing on doing what is most important for you again.

Here’s the next step…

Now, you may think to yourself:

“This is really helpful information. But what’s the easiest way to put this into practice and actually make a real change with these destructive habits in my own life?”

Well, I’ve got something special for you…

A free step-by-step checklist that includes all the steps in this article… save it or print it out so you have it for your daily life and for the next time when one of these 7 habits starts to drag you down.
Download it now by entering your email below.