Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/denemiles/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

“The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.”
W. M Lewis

“How soon ‘not now’ becomes ‘never’.”
Martin Luther

I love getting started with a new habit or project. There is excitement and a certain freshness ahead of you as you are about to get going.

But sometimes it stops there. At about to get going. Because “you don’t have the time”. Or it’s “not the right time right now”.

I have whole chapters on how I establish new habits, keep up the motivation after that initial enthusiasm perhaps has started to wane and on how to become more of a person of action in The Art of Relaxed Productivity.

But today I would like to share just three tips for that first, crucial step. Three steps that have worked for me over and over to get started with something and to grow.

Ask yourself: Do I really want this?

One reason that you may never seem to get started is because your heart is not in it. If you set a goal but it isn’t your goal then it will be hard to achieve or even getting started with it.

If you realize that it’s a goal set by people around you – parents, teachers, bosses or society in general – then, when possible, eliminate the goal and set a few goals you would like to achieve.

Or try to find you own motivation and reasons for achieving a goal rather than the ones people around you have set. This could put the goal in different light and suddenly you’ll feel a whole lot motivated to get started.

But you don’t always have to have a burning desire to do something to get going. I have begun something many, many times  just because I was curious. If you are curious but feel an inner resistance then the next two tips will be helpful.

Ask yourself: What is the worst that could happen?

If you feel like you can’t get started for some reason then ask yourself: what is the worst that can happen?

A lot of the fear we feel before getting started comes from fuzzy and foggy thoughts about what could happen. But if you actually imagine the worst realistic scenario then it’s often not as frightening as you thought. You won’t die or anything. And it won’t ruin the rest of your life.

Imagine the worst scenario and then try to create a plan how you could get on your feet again if that scenario, against all probability, should happen. You’ll then most often realize that whatever your fear is you could probably get back on your feet and back to your normal life pretty quickly once again.

Start the easy way.

If it feels like too big of an effort in your mind then you’ll come up with all kinds of reasons to not get started.

So start easy. Take a small step into something new.

• Go out running for just 10 minutes. Instead of running for 45 minutes. Or run for just 5 minutes and walk for 5 minutes. The important thing is to make the habit stick and you do that by actually doing it a whole bunch of times. Then you can slowly, step by step, increase the amount of time you spend running each time you are out.
• Work on something new for just 10 minutes. If you feel reluctant to starting with something new then commit to start doing actual work – not more planning or preparation – for just 10 minutes. Or for 5 minutes if 10 seems too much. Then do just 5 or 10 minutes of work on the new thing each day. After you have gotten started you will however often just continue working after those first few minutes minutes are up.

Getting started is often the hardest part so make it easy on yourself by initially setting the bar as low as you are comfortable with.

“The time to relax is when you don’t have time for it.”
Sydney J. Harris

Maybe you are on vacation right now and are trying to relax and release the pressure and tension from a year of school or work. And maybe you are soon going back again.

So what can you do to increase your sense of centeredness and relaxation not only during these remaining weeks of summer but also during this fall?

Well, here are six tips that have worked well for me. I hope you’ll find something useful.

Spend your time online in a very focused way.

One change I usually do during the summer is to minimize the time I spend online. I cut it down to the bare essentials. Basically that means I update the blog and send out new newsletters. And I check my email/Twitter/Facebook maybe once every other day. Of course, you may not have the option or want to make exactly those changes.

But you may want to try to cut down on your online time a bit. Maybe just check all the things you check online once a day. I have found that it makes me a lot more relaxed, focused on the most important things and leaves me with more time to use for other things.

Let go of what you “have to do”.

If you are feeling totally stressed out and wrapped up in everything you “have to do”, here is a good question:

“Will this matter in 5 years?”.

This is of course not an excuse for you to not do anything. But a reminder that the small things we get wrapped up in when we feel stressed are often not that important when you view it from a wider perspective.

In the end you can choose what you want to do and not do. There are of course consequences to everything that we do and that is something one must keep in mind. But I think it is very important to feel like you are in control of your own life to be able to stay centred and minimize stress and pressure. It’s important to choose what you want to do instead of always living in reaction and feeling controlled by outside forces all the time.

You may for example feel like you have all these things you “just have to do before the summer is over”. If such thoughts are stressing you out, you may want to choose to say no to some of those things.

And you might want to take a day where you take it easy and do pretty much nothing. It can do wonders.

Take 30 belly breaths.

This is one of the quickest and most consistent way to relax that I have found so far. It can be done anywhere and anytime. It’s great way to release pent up tension and to centre yourself in the present moment once again as you bring your focus to just the in- and out-breaths.

Here’s a simple instruction on what to do:

• Sit or stand up straight but in a relaxed way.
• Put your hands on your stomach. Using your stomach breathe in slowly through your nose. If you are doing it right your stomach will expand and you’ll feel it with your hands.
• Breathe out slowly through your nose.
• Breathe in and out 30 times. Take deep and slow breaths.

Act as you would like to feel.

Another simple tip you can use just about anywhere. Your emotions work backwards too. If you slow down then while walking, moving your body or talking you can often start to feel less stressed (compared to if you move/talk fast).

Slowing down to decrease stress goes for many other things you do in everyday life too like riding your bicycle, driving the car and eating.

Stop thinking the world revolves around you.

One great way to make your life unnecessarily hard and difficult is to assume that the world revolves around you. It can make you feel like you are trapped in a cage built out of social pressure. Not pleasant at all.

But is everyone watching everything you do? Thinking about you a lot and discussing what you said or did? Probably not. It’s very seductive to think they do because it makes you feel important and it gives you validation and attention. But they are probably spending their time worrying about their own challenges in life and what other people think about them.

It’s not easy to let go of the belief that the world revolves around you. But there are huge benefits such as decreased shyness and increased openness towards people and trying new things.

So you give up or decrease the importance you put on validation from the outside. And by doing so you can release a lot of pressure and stress and increase your own inner centeredness and freedom to feel that you can do what you want in life.

And as you do so you stop raising your self-esteem and increasing positive feelings about yourself through the validation people may give you (or at least you cut down on it a lot).

Instead you now raise the self-esteem and increase the positive feelings by doing more of what you think are the right things to do in life and by caring more about what you think and feel about yourself and how you are living your life.

Just accept how you feel right now.

Maybe you try out some of the tips above. And maybe they still can’t help you to shake that stress, inner pressure or whatever you are carrying around. I would then suggest just accepting that it is there. To tell yourself: “This is how I feel right now and I accept it”.

This may sound like you’re giving up. However, by accepting how you feel instead of resisting it you reduce the emotional energy that you are feeding into this conflict/problem. It then tends to just lose speed like a car that runs out of fuel. And oftentimes it becomes so weak after while that it just moves out of your inner focus and disappears.

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

“Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen.”

“We make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give.”

Winston Churchill is probably no stranger to anyone. He was an inspirational British leader during the Second World War.

He was also a writer, historian, poet, artist and the only British Prime Minister to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Here are a few of my favorite fundamentals from Churchill on how to improve your life.

1. Focus on what you are doing right now.

“It is a mistake to look too far ahead. Only one link in the chain of destiny can be handled at a time.”

“It is always wise to look ahead, but difficult to look further than you can see.”

When you start to look too far into the future then any task or project can seem close to impossible. And so you shut down because you become overwhelmed and start surfing the internet aimlessly instead. That is one of the reasons why it is good to plan for the future but then to shift your focus back to today and the present moment.

Then you just focus on taking the first step today. That is all you need to focus on, nothing else. By taking the first step you change your mental state from resistant to “hey, I’m doing this, cool”. You put yourself in state where you become more positive and open, a state where you may not be enthusiastic about taking the next step after this first one but you are at least accepting it. And so you can take the next step. And the next one after that.

The thing is, you can’t see the whole path anyway and it will shift and reveal itself along the way. That’s why the best of plans tend to fall apart at least a bit as you start to put it into action. You discover that your map of reality doesn’t look like reality.

2. Be concerned about action.

“I never worry about action, but only about inaction”

Yes, taking action can lead to failure, rejection or making mistakes. There is always a risk for that. But if you stay in inaction then you are pretty much guaranteed that nothing will change or improve.

How can you improve your action habit though? Three tips:

• Reconnect with the present moment. This will help you snap out of over thinking and just go and do whatever you want to get done. It is one of the best tips I have found so far for taking more action since it puts you in a state where you feel little emotional resistance to the work you’ll do. And it puts you in state where the right actions often just seem to flow out of you in a focused but relaxed way and without much effort.  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. Check out 7 more tips in 8 Ways to Return to the Present Moment.
• Lighten up. One way to dissuade yourself from taking action is to take whatever you are about to do too seriously. That makes it feel too big, too difficult and too scary. If you on the other hand relax a bit and lighten up you often realize that those problems and negative feelings are just something you are creating in your own mind. With a lighter state of mind your tasks seems lighter and becomes easier to get started with.
• 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.

3. Be an optimist.

“The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.”

“Attitude is a little thing that makes a big difference.”

“I am an optimist. It does not seem too much use being anything else.”

Focusing on what helps you sure makes a huge difference compared to if you keep focusing on what is wrong in every situation or what makes you more of a victim. It’s like living in two different worlds.

How do you make the shift to a more optimistic attitude? Well, it takes time. But gradually you can change it. Four of my own most favorite tips are:

• Take care of the basic fundamentals. This is for me the most important thing you can do to maintain and strengthen your positive attitude. How you eat, sleep and workout is huge factor. A good lifestyle, how you live your life on normal days determine how you feel, think and how much energy you will have.
  For example, exercising and keeping my testosterone levels pretty high consistently – I do that by focusing on free weight exercises that target many and big muscle groups – is a very simple way to get a lot of positive emotions to flow through my body automatically. A good workout always seems to do the trick.
• Positive influences. Fill your mind and emotional system with positive input from people, music and programs/books. Other people’s thoughts have a big influence and emotions are contagious. Limit your time with negative people. Reduce TV or magazines that may make you feel worse about what you don’t own or your body. Or just create fear and negativity within you (for instance a lot of news shows). Limiting negative influences can make it a lot easier to keep the positive attitude up.
• Set the context for your day. What you do early in the day often sets the context for your day. We have a tendency to want to be consistent with what we have done before. You can use that your advantage in few ways. You can for example do the hardest thing on your to-do list first. When it is done you’ll feel good about yourself and it makes the day feel easier and you’ll have less inner resistance to getting the rest of the tasks of the day done.
• Act as you want to feel. Act as if you are feeling positive. After a few minutes you will actually feel it for real. So smile. Use positive language. And so on. It feels weird at first but it really works.

Just practicing these four things in a consistent way can make a huge difference in your life.

4. Be persistent. Don’t give up.

“Continuous effort – not strength or intelligence – is the key to unlocking our potential”

“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Since society often tells us to look for quick fixes it’s easy to make the mistake of giving up to soon. After you have failed perhaps 1-5 times. That’s the “normal” thing to do. But what could have happened if someone just kept going after that? And for each failure learned more and more about what works?

I think people often make a mistake of giving up too early. Your mind probably has a reasonable time-frame for success. This might not correspond to a realistic time-frame though.

It’s useful to take a break from advertised perspectives and let more realistic perspectives seep into your mind. Learn from people who have gone where you want to go. Talk to them. Read what they have to say in books or online. This will not give complete plan but a clearer perspective of what is needed to achieve what you want.

Now, that’s not to say that you should never quit. But it can be helpful to keep going on your current path for a while longer.

And that’s not to say that you should do the same thing over and over in exactly the same manner. It’s better to do and get an experience. Take the lessons you can learn from that real life experience. And then adjust how you do things as you try again.

It obviously helps immensely if you find what you really like to do. And what you really, really want. Then you’ll find the inner motivation to keep going, to get what you want and to build on inner strengths like persistence.

5. Don’t lose the enthusiasm.

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.”

It’s very easy to get down on yourself and your results when things don’t go as planned. What was once enthusiasm can quickly become apathy and pessimism.

But how do you do keep up the enthusiasm after things have gone wrong and you just feel like giving up? Well, as I mentioned in the previous fundamental, it certainly helps to have something you really like doing and something you really want.

And the tips found in fundamental # 3 such as keeping your energy up, acting as you would like to feel and keeping away from negative influences work very well here too. A good additional tip is simply to ask better questions in “negative” situations. Instead of asking yourself why this or you suck ask yourself questions that empower you.

Questions like:

• What can I learn from this?
• What is the hidden opportunity in this situation?

6. Remember, most troubles never happen.

“When I look back on all these worries, I remember the story of the old man who said on his deathbed that he had had a lot of trouble in his life, most of which had never happened”

One final, quick thought. But a very important one. Most things you fear will happen never happen. They are just monsters in your own mind. And if they happen then they will most often not be as painful or bad as you expected. Worrying is most often just a waste of time.

This is of course easy to say. But if you think back and remind yourself of how little of what you feared throughout your life that has actually happened you can start to release more and more worry from your thoughts.

This makes it a lot easier to start doing more of what you really want in life. And to move through your day to day life with a lighter, happier and more optimistic attitude.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nerdegutt/ / CC BY 2.0

“Men’s natures are alike; it is their habits that separate them.”
Confucius

Most of us have one or a few habits that we consider bad and we’d like to get rid of. But how do you do it?

Today I’d like to share I have a few suggestions that have helped me and people around me greatly.

Here are 8 tips that can help you to finally get rid of that bad habit once and for all.

• Tell your friends and family. If you tell people around you that you will stop smoking or start working out three times a week then they will check up on you. And you will feel a social pressure to keep up with your promise now that it is let out into the world. I would recommend only telling people who you think will support you or be neutral. Negative people make things so much more difficult.
• Make it painful to not go through with it. This may not be for everyone but you could consider making a promise to someone. For example, if you stray off the path to better health by having French fries or a cigarette then you will give your friend 100 or 500 dollars. The point is to add some possible pain to keep yourself in check on days when you may feel a bit tempted.
• Listen to those who have gone where you want to go. Not to people who have no practical or real idea about what your challenge entails. It is important to get the best advice that actually works in real life. Seek it out in people around you, in the best books on the topic (check for the number of stars and read reviews on a site like amazon.com) and on blogs and forums that seem reliable.
• What will this lead to in 5 and 10 years? See your future self vividly in your mind. Where are you 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.
• Avoid temptations. Know what usually triggers your bad habit. Places where you are likely to spend too much money. Things in your cupboard that will not help you to get healthier and you should not have at home at all. And people that drag you down and back into your old ways.
• Replace it. If you stop doing one thing then it can leave a vacuum in your life. It’s easier to not relapse if you replace that space with a new habit. If you had chips and candy at home to snack on then have fruits and nuts to snack on when you feel the cravings. If you stopped checking social media and the internet for many hours each evening then replace that habit and space with reading more books or joining a club, sport or evening class.
• Don’t remove more than one habit at a time. It may seem like a good idea to overhaul your life all at once. When regular life, stress and lack of energy interfere it usually leads to failure. Don’t try to be Superman or Wonder Woman. Take it easy and change one habit at a time to dramatically increase the odds of real life success.
• Don’t make a huge deal out of it. If you think about it and talk about it all the time then it will feel like a huge deal to get rid of that habit. This will make each day much harder mentally and you may feel overwhelmed. Instead, keep it simple and realize that whatever habit you want to get rid of thousands if not millions of people have done so before. Yes, things do get tough from time to time. But there is no need to create a lot of extra drama around it and in the longer run make things more difficult than they need to be.

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

“Most people are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.”
Abraham Lincoln

“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 that has been opened for us.”
Helen Keller

Living a happier life often seems to be about living your big dreams and putting in a lot of work over a long time.

I agree that it is one part. But another part of happiness is here in small ways today.

So in this article I’ll share ten small tweaks I like making to find more happiness in my daily life. I hope you’ll find something here that you can use today to make your life better too.

[continue reading…]