DV Achievement

Effectiveness vs Efficiency

2010-03-18T11:03:00.000-07:00

Efficiency AND effectiveness... two critical keys in any kind of success. Typically, businesspeople are the ones obsessed with those two concepts, because without effectiveness and efficiency, there can not be any productivity, progress, and obviously, profit.

Let’s have a brief look at what each concept actually means...

Effectiveness

Effectiveness, simply put, is knowing what’s the right thing to do and actually doing it. For instance, you want to carry out a certain task which needs some tools, which you don’t currently have, to get done. Furthermore, this task can be successfully completed with any kind of the various tools available in store. Each kind of those tools however, has some additional functions and features that make it a little bit different from the other, and of course, has its own price.

Now, it’s your own job to decide which kind of those tools is the RIGHT one for your own task. And you’ll be actually considering different things like, features and cost. So the key point here is to get something that’s right, and that can help you achieve your goal.

Efficiency

Efficiency, on the other hand, is doing the right thing right. In other words, efficiency is being able to do what you want to do in a way that’s considered good and more than satisfactory. Usually efficiency is referred to as the best use of the resources available to achieve a specific goal.

Back to the tools example above, after you decide which kind of tools is the more effective for your task, how you actually use the tool is going to determine your efficiency. That will be based on things like, how easy it is to get the task done with the tool, how much time does it take you to complete the task using the tool, how good is the outcome of your work, etc.

So basically, determining the kind of tools that is right for your mission is EFFECTIVE. On the other hand, using the tool right to successfully achieve the mission is EFFICIENT.

Personal Use

Obviously, effectiveness and efficiency should not be exclusively held by businesspeople, they must be applied by anyone who wants to make his/her life better and be successful, not only in business, but in every other area of life.

You should be seriously concerned with those two concepts because the degree of your decisions’ effectiveness can deeply and profoundly affect your life even in the early years.

For example, what are your plans for the future and how effective are they? How much is it effective to go to university and get a degree in engineering when all you want is to become an Internet entrepreneur who sells sports gear online? How much effective is it for you to hang out with friends that don’t support your own goals and vision, let alone believe in them as possible and attainable? How effective are your habits and daily actions? And how are they assisting you in achieving your personal and career goals?

Likewise, what are your working habits, and how efficient are they? How quickly can you achieve simple tasks, like, creating a short to-do list, or deciding what to wear for a meeting? How efficiently are you exploiting your available resources? And are you taking advantage of all the legitimate resources within your reach? How efficient is it to study for a major college exam while watching your favourite TV show at the same time?

When you start to assess various aspects of your life and view them from a effectiveness/efficiency standpoint, you’ll get to become more aware of all the garbage that’s keeping you away from what you truly want to reach in life. You will see things differently, and you’ll start dumping a lot of the stuff that’s been with you for years, draining your time, and energy, and making your dreams just another bunch of hopes and romantic fantasies.

Try to make those two concepts: effectiveness & efficiency, two critical keys in your personal and professional life. Make a list of the important things in your day-to-day life and that take up most of your time, like, your eating habits, Internet habits, studying strategies and techniques, large projects and commitments, etc. And view each one of these elements in the light of your big dreams and goals. Asking yourself those two critical questions: Is this right for me? Am I doing this the right way?

Make this simple criteria your assessment tool for adjusting and enhancing a lot of the key aspects of your life, in order to tailor it towards and make it in tune with your dreams and goals.

Do You Know How to Start A New Business

2010-03-12T10:55:00.000-08:00

What are the rules every new entrepreneur must abide with in the process of building a new business? What are the specific steps every new businessperson should follow to get the business running? What is the exact formula for success in business that never fails?

Well, if you are a person who has some experience with business and its operations, processes, and dynamics, chances are you know that answering those questions isn’t easy.

The reason being is that in fact there are no specific rules entrepreneurs must follow to be successful. Similarly, there are no particular steps that should be followed when creating and building a new business. And obviously, there is nothing called the formula for success.

Experts and gurus can talk about formulas for success all they want, but in reality and practicality there’s no such thing.

When a person is thinking seriously about starting a new business, and when s/he actually starts a new one, it’s common to experience a state of uncertainty. S/he will go through points where s/he is not sure what should be done in the business. It’s like staring at a blank screen that you’re asked to turn into an animated scene.

The problem most of the times rises from a lack of knowledge of the business. The person who’s building the business doesn’t know enough about it, doesn’t know any of the key people working in the field, hasn’t read enough about the industry and its ruling dynamics, etc.

I’m not saying that you should spend years studying the business and its environment. But at least you have to develop a general vision of the key pieces and how they all fit together.

When you look closer into the process of building a business from scratch you’ll notice a set of remarkable aspects that should be considered carefully. Those can be put into a set of questions that you must find answers to before jumping into action.

Those questions will help you get a focused view of your business. They will give you a sense of the business and how it should work. Remember that this is not meant to help you create rules or plans that you’re going to follow blindly, but rather, it’s an effective mental process where you start creating the business in your own inner reality, which gives it a huge chance of incarnation in the outer world.

1. What business are you in?

This is the first question that you must ask yourself and find a good answer to before even pondering the idea of developing a business plan.

If you don’t really know what business you’re in, if you the business owner feel confused about what you do for a living, it’s a safe bet to say that your customers will feel more confused about it. As a result, you’ll not be able to communicate the true message of your core business, and eventually, you’ll fail to connect with customers, and you sure know what follows.

So it’s basically crucial to know exactly what is it that will make you money. What is the thing, or things, that you’re going to do for customers that s/he will be willing to pay for.

What is the importance of the value you’re business will generate to your potential customers’ lives?

If you were asked by a customer, a friend, your spouse, what business are you in, would you be able to explain it in less than 15 seconds? What you will exactly say? Write it down in a neat and brief sentence.

Answering those questions will help your mind focus on the core of your business. And by the core of your business I mean the processes that are the essence of your business and that are responsible for generating the bulk of your revenues.

For example, Starbucks provides customers with a variety of products and merchandise such as, coffee, cold drinks, books, films, etc. But what’s the core business of Starbucks? Is it just selling coffee cups? Not really. The core business of Starbucks is providing customers with coffee, and other products, in a warm and conversational climate.

That’s the heart of Starbuck’s business. And that’s what most of its competitors don’t provide. Here we have a good model. A company that has something of value to customers, and that knows how to communicate this value to customers in such a way that allow the company to be a leader in the industry over many years.

If you’re planning to create an online business presence, as most businesspeople do today, the same thing must apply to your business.

Think how you’ll answer this question: “What business are you in?” through an email message, a chat session, a video, or any other medium you choose to reach your customers online through.

2. What is the nature of your business?

We’ve talked about the importance of knowing your core business and identifying the things that you do for the customers which they perceive as valuable and are willing to pay for. Now I want you to think about the activities, processes, systems, people, or any other elements that would facilitate the process of generating and delivering value to customers.

This is called in the business literature “supporting activities of the value chain”. This naming “the value chain” actually helps you visualize the process of value creation and delivery. So you have to view everything you do in business as a part of a long series of activities that allow you to generate and deliver genuine value to customers, and this process is what will generate you the real income.

This is the most efficient way of making money. Other than that your options are very limited, and ending up in prison is one of them.

Every single action you take contributes to and affects the flow of activities in the value chain. And conditioning your mind to view your actions plus the other elements of your business in this context will give you an advantageous perspective on the business as a whole.

But the really important thing here is that it’s not enough to just analyze and understand those value creating activities. What you need to do beside that is looking before and after those activities.

And what I mean by looking before and after the value creating activities is that you have to analyze and understand the relationship between those activities and your suppliers and between the same activities and your customers, plus, the general environment of your business. The environment of course includes your competitors, the market trends, and the industry as a whole.

Being able to understand the relationships between those different factors will give you the ability to efficiently manage those relationships in favour of your own profitability and allow you to establish mutually beneficial relationships with other entities.

Doing that plus foreseeing the business operating along a certain line of time, will give you more insight and allow you to get a general sense of the general direction your business will take in the next few months or, may be, years.

Now I know that change is so frequent that it’s not safe to strictly plan for a coming year anymore, but still planning is something that you should do and move proactively as events unfold as time goes by. However, you’re not supposed to do any planning at this stage.

You’re just getting a sense of the business and programming your mind to be able to handle whatever challenges you think you’re going to face during the process of building the business.

Let me give you a brief example of how to discover the nature of your business. Let’s say you’re starting an online retail store, you set down and start listing the suppliers you’re going to deal with, the materials and products you’re going to buy, along with other different things.

Then you list as much details as you find useful about your potential customers. You can list any kind of information you think is helpful in knowing customers, like, age, marital status, income, etc.

Then, you try to examine the general relationship between your suppliers and your business at one hand, and the customers and your business at the other hand. Then you draw a line that links your suppliers with the business and the business with the customers (do this in your imagination or on paper)

After that, start thinking about the transactions that will take place between all the three parts of the equation. How you’ll be paying your suppliers, how you’re going to get paid by your own customers, how you plan to deal with suppliers, what kind of relationship you want to build with them, and similarly, what kind of relationship you intend to build with your customers. Visualize yourself actually interacting with a customer. What body language will you use? How would you greet him/her?

3. How to keep the business alive.

How much money do you need to get the business running? How much money do you have to invest? How much money do you need to borrow? What party will you turn for to get the money?

Now after you answer all the basic money-related questions about the start up of the business, you need to narrow your focus to the very basic process of your business which we called earlier the core business. How much money does this process needs to generate value for one customer? Notice that you can answer this question in general terms since you can’t quantify value.

Value can be perceived differently by different customers, but what you want to do here is to generally estimate what it will cost you to make one customer happy as a result of one exchange.

For example, if your business is a fast food restaurant, what will a typical meal cost you to produce and deliver to a customer. If you have a website about sporting equipment, what will it cost you to offer a product, handle an order, and deliver it to the customer in the most efficient way.

Notice that you don’t need accurate numbers here; however just try to determine general figures. Or, if you can’t come up with any specific numbers yet, then estimate percentages. For instance, what is the percentage of gross margin you will have when you create and deliver value to a one customer (gross margin is revenues less cost of goods sold.)

You can play with this examining various faces and dimensions of the business like, wages, expenses, taxes, etc.

Another important point to think of is how long the starting capital will serve you? Are you expected to borrow more money during the starting phase? How much time do you expect it will take the business to generate more cash than you put in? And, what if you run out of the starting capital? What are your plans? Would you borrow more money? Or would you be OK with no salary for several weeks?

Would you be regularly increasing your investment in the business, or will you just start enjoying profits? Would you prey for growth and expansion, or would you be happy with a small and healthy business?

Also think of all the things that you can do to help facilitate your business performance and make its mission easier. What are the relationships you need to establish for that purpose? Who are the persons or organizations that you think can be of help to you and would be happy to collaborate?

What you’re doing here is previewing the business before it actually takes place in the real world. You are visiting the future and looking at how things will work when you get into the real work.

Again, you don’t have to create any plans, rules, or whatever. You’re even not deciding anything about the business, but rather, you’re just examining it and testing a variety of its conditions and details.

Do this process before starting out the new business, investing in any kind of equipment, tools or supplies, or even developing a business plan. When you answer those questions and let your imagination examines as many pieces of the picture as possible, you’ll all of a sudden gain clarity and vision and you’ll find yourself at a point where you just know what to do next without feeling uncertain or in doubt, because images, insights and ideas will start to flow through your mind effortlessly.

How to Make Better Decisions

2010-02-18T07:09:00.000-08:00

We all have to make big decisions at certain points in our lives. If you operate your own business, then making big decisions is likely to be a familiar task. But even those who don’t have their own businesses find themselves at various levels of their lives forced to make big decisions.

Let’s face it; making a big decision is not easy. It can be painful most of the times. That’s because big decisions affect important areas in our lives. Whether it be our business, health, lifestyle, or any other area.

One particular tactic that I find helpful in some cases is creating a space between me and the decision I have to make for a short period of time. Now, you sure don’t need to waste a lot of time in the processes of making the decision, especially if it’s a small one. But the point of this technique is to assist you in making big decisions that can impose a lot of pressure on you.

Why Is the Space Important?

How do you usually react to stressful situations? That’s right, by being stressed out. Stress is the natural reaction to any kind of demand, whether it’s physical, mental, emotional, etc. And when having to make a big decision, there’s a huge demand that’s imposed right on your shoulders.

By creating a space between yourself and the situation, you first dissociate yourself from the stressful state. This one benefit is extremely important as your brain’s performance tends to worsen and get less effective when its under pressure.

When you’re not stressed out, you’re decision making abilities and skills are more accessible and more easily exploited. When you are stress-free, you tend to think clearer and with much more effectiveness.

How to Create the Space?

When it comes to creating the actual space there are no right ways and wrong ways of doing it. That’s because there’s no one space that must be used by all individuals.

Please notice that the “space” here can be anything, like, doing an activity, being somewhere, doing nothing, etc.

The features of a good space:
• Enjoyable
• Effortless
• Not too long
• Make you feel good

So let’s apply those features to a solid and practical example. Suppose you own a medium-sized business and have to make a critical decision about which supplier to sign a contract with. This decision is very important because it will have direct impact on the business’s costs for years to come. But now you’re too tired and stressed and you know that when you make decisions in such a state you tend to make lousy decisions. So, what do you do? You think for a bit and then decide to wait until you’re feeling better, and to do something relaxing for that purpose. You then hurry home, take a great hot bath that makes your muscles relax and get rid of the all-day tension. During the bath, when you’re feeling totally relaxed and calm, a great idea pops up in your mind that you can use to make your decision.

And even if no ideas pop up in you mind, you’ll still benefit from this necessary space between you and the situation you’re in, because when you get back to work you’ll be much more capable of making a good decision.

Of course you can apply this to many aspects of your life. For example, if you’re a student who wants to create a good studying schedule for the exams, you’d better not do that when you’re feeling all the exams pressure over your shoulders, because you’re most likely to come up with a crappy schedule that do you more harm than good. Instead, go do something fun. Go play some video games, hang out with friends, or whatever that helps you relieve stress and come back to work.

I know you’re too smart to need to be told not to waste too much time on this. Obviously, half an our of video games playing would be more than enough to make you feel good, if videos games relax you of course, because for some people video games is a true source of stress. It all depends on what you like and makes your tension loosen.

From now on, make it a point to get yourself a relaxing and fun break before you try to make a big decision. Make sure to give yourself what it deserves to function efficiently, and you’ll see yourself making smart decisions like never before.

“I Don’t Know What to Do”

2010-02-07T08:14:00.001-08:00

I hear a lot of people saying that they don’t know what to do. They don’t know how to get out of debt, they don’t know how to start a business, they don’t know how to make money, and the list goes on and on.

People seem to be looking for a secret road that leads them to all the happiness and success they dream of. But the problem is: there’s no such thing.

You see, people get rich all the time. But there’s no one way that people take to become wealthy. If you study how a bunch of people had made their ways up, you’ll come across a set of different ways and strategies. So looking for one single way to get rich is neither reasonable, nor effective.

When you catch yourself saying: “I don’t know what to do” realize that you’re using the wrong mindset. In fact, saying that reveals a lot about how you approach your dreams and goals.

First of all, not knowing what to do means that you don’t know what you want. Think about it for a second. Let’s say you want to become a famous and successful musician. When you say to yourself: “I don’t know what to do” that means you don’t desire becoming a musician bad enough, because if did you’ll be saying to yourself something different. Instead of whining and complaining about not knowing what to do, you’ll be asking yourself: “What I can do right now to reach my goal of being a famous musician?”

In fact, when you really want something you stop being worried about how you will get it. When a child decides he wants a toy, he starts nagging his parents to get it for him no matter how expensive it might be. His parents may be broke and out of job, but he doesn’t care. All he wants is to get the fantastic toy he saw on TV. Now why does that happen? It’s easy to say that the child is not “mature” enough to understand the hardship of his parents, etc. But the reality is different. That child is really better than most of us. Why? Because at that young age he’s not conditioned yet to succumb to limitations, he’s not “mature” enough to settle for what’ possible. He simply doesn’t perceive anything as impossible. That’s why when he needs something really bad all he’s concerned with is getting it.

And you, as most of the people, may be the victim of negative conditioning that doesn’t allow you to think big enough without having a dizzy mind. You were taught by your family, teachers, and friends to be “realistic”, to think of what you can do right now, and forget about, or postpone your dreams.

But I want to tell you that being “realistic” is bullshit, because succumbing to what others had created for you is not the least intelligent. There is a lot of people who were strong enough, and ambitious enough to change and alter their realities with positive thinking and hard work.

So I want you each time you hear yourself saying: “I don’t know what to do” to quickly ask yourself this question “What I can do right now to achieve my biggest goals?”

You first have to decide what’s going to happen and what person you’re going to be in the future, and then you start looking for ways to make that happen.

When you take the conscious decision to achieve something, and you really mean it, then how you achieve it would stop to be an obstacle. That’s because you’ve already made the deal with yourself and the world. How you achieve it becomes a reflection of that conscious decision. It starts to seem like a “logical excuse” for the levels of achievement you reach.

So take the decision, create the intention, and let your focus and energy follow the direction of your dreams.

Using Your Past to Know Your True Motives for Greater Success

2010-02-06T17:40:00.000-08:00

If you were allowed to have a direct and clear look at what’s inside you, what do you expect to find out? How do you imagine your inner-world to be like?

Did you know that there are a myriad of worlds in which you actually live? In reality, you are a being with various forms of existence. Your physical body, for example is one of them, and your spirit is another. Some people think that their physical body is all they got, and I think that this is a pretty stupid way to think about any human being.

The reason why I think it’s a stupid way is because it actually narrows down your perspective and prevents you from realizing the abundance of resources and strengths you own, and blocks your consciousness from connecting with all the parts of your being.

Probably one of the most complicated parts of your being is your brain, which is in fact a part of your physical existence on this planet. Your brain stores all of your dreams, wishes, desires, emotions, memories, thoughts, and so on. As you notice here, your brain, as little in volume as it is, seems to contain a huge space of your existence.

In addition to possessing all of the mentioned things above, your brain also has a set of the most important resources you have inside yourself. You subconscious mind for example, has a tremendous information-processing power that can’t even be compared to that of your conscious mind.

Obviously to be able to make a good use of your mind, you need to know how it operates.

Fortunately, your mind is a very smart and pretty alive device. And one of the things that prove this point is the fact that you can’t actually achieve a goal that contradicts your personal standards and beliefs. That’s a part of the protection system your brain runs in order to defend your physical, and other parts of your being.

With that in mind, and to make sure that you have enough support from your own mind, you need to make sure that your conscious and subconscious intentions, and your goals are in alignment with your belief system, do not go against your own standards, and most important, go in line with your true motives.

That’s why it’s so important to have a close and careful look at what’s inside you.

As abstract as this may sound, it’s in fact easy to get a general and fairly clear picture of your inner-world that allows you to identify certain running patterns, subconscious desires and intentions, etc.

The clues of the past

One of the things that you can do is tracking your behaviours in the past. What were your motivations? What are the things you’ve done with enthusiasm? What did cause you the most disappointment, and why? How do you generally get motivated? Which of your personal goals don’t seem to engage you emotionally, and why?

By digging into your past you can get some telling and revealing clues that helps you clarify your most dominating desires and motives. That way, you get to know what turns you on, what makes you willing to fight, and what your standards are.

A personal example

I used to start a lot of projects in the past with drive and motivation to slack off and quit after a short period of time.

And when I sat down and carefully looked for the reasons, what really was going on, what made me motivated at first, and what caused me to loose my motivation later, I started to get a lot of insights.

For instance, I came to realize that money is not enough to be my primary reason for doing things. I found that what was firing my motivation was something deeper than money. Something that’s connected to a higher purpose. I discovered that the more happiness and benefits my projects bring to me AND people around me, the more those projects are likely to engage my enthusiasm and get me going.

A couple years ago, I invested a lot of money in an online business. I was so excited about starting a business that sells products online, especially after I heard a bunch of stories about people who were able to make much more money than ordinary people while working from home with no daily job. That was amazing to me. Having an online business meant to me the ability to make a lot of money from the comfort of my home.

So I purchased a web hosting service, a web design, and started creating a content that I would use to promote the products I’ll be selling.

But despite my excitement about the idea of this project, I was overwhelmed by a strong sense of resistance. It felt like what I was doing does not fully resonate with my inner and most deep desires and dreams. That in fact caused me to loose my enthusiasm and had to push my self and fight with it to get certain tasks done each day.

Consequently, I didn’t make it far enough to get the website up and running, and I ended up loosing all the money I invested in the project.

After a while, I got an idea. It seemed interesting to experience a lot of motivation for a project and face a lot of resistance when trying to make it a reality. That made me think that there were something hidden, something that I was not able to figure out. Although I wasn’t successful at finding out that hidden secret, I kept thinking and analyzing what happened to me.

And at a certain point I got it. What I found was that money was a good incentive indeed, but was not the only thing that mattered. What was attractive to me, besides making money, was having the freedom to live my daily life the way I like without being restricted to a specific workplace and having a bunch of tasks and errands imposed upon me. That was one of the most appealing aspects, and a one I wasn’t even consciously aware of.

Unfortunately, not knowing that important piece led me to be too much consumed with the money part, focusing all my efforts on creating a business with the primary purpose of making money. And I wasn’t even paying enough attention to creating processes that are fun and I’d love to do on a daily basis.
So all of these factors combined actually crippled my motion and caused the entire project to crash.

But anyways, I considered that experience, although unpleasant, an opportunity to gain valuable knowledge about myself, and more specifically, about my inner-world and the dominating patterns and desires in it. So I studied closely, created a plan, and started working on it. This very blog is a part of my plan, although it’s not the whole plan. I indeed intend to create a set of processes that provide me with the freedom I seek, allow me to tackle tasks I love working on, and give me the opportunity to make money online. Plus, being able to provide people with something valuable that can be helpful to them in their own lives, because I believe that the true value of a business is actually in what it can contribute to other people’s lives and how it can make the world a better place to live in, and any financial achievements actually follow naturally.

That’s a law of nature.

I’m sure you too have your own ideas and projects, and I want you to avoid the painful experience I just mentioned here. So please invest sometime getting to know yourself in order to identify what you desire, the way you prefer to work, what you want out of your work, what are the specific goals that you must achieve through your gaols, etc.

By knowing those things at a high level of clarity you’ll save yourself some time, energy, money, and maybe tears. And after all, we can’t be 100% sure that failure is not going to visit us, so we must be prepared to turn any failure into a valuable learning experience.

So what turns you on? Is it money, freedom, fame, helping others? Whatever it is, just know what you love and desire, make a deal with yourself, and get moving to achieve your projects in the most successful and deadly way you can.

The Burning Mountain- A Simple Motivational Technique

2010-02-03T07:34:00.000-08:00

If there was absolutely now choice available to you but to be successful, how would you act? Imagine you’re standing at a crossroad and there are only two directions that you can take. One direction leads to success and happiness, and the other one leads to failure and destruction. So if you can’t be successful you’re life will be ruined and you’ll not be able to live a normal life. I know this sounds tragic, unreasonable, and untrue (which it is), but I just want you to imagine that for a moment.

Now, I want to give you a picture that may help you imagine that situation more accurately and clearly. Let’s say you’re climbing up a burning mountain that has a safe cave on top. No matter how steep the way is, you have to keep going up quickly if you don’t want to end up being eaten by the fire. The fire is growing tremendously and chasing you, so you can’t even afford to stop for a second or two to take a breath.

What would you be thinking if you were in that situation? Would you even feel tired? Would you want to stop and have a nap? Would you feel the itch to check your twitter account or text message a friend of yours? How motivated would you be to take a quick and non-stop action in order to reach the top? Would you even think about abandoning your current way and turnaround? Would you stop to doubt your action? How hard would it be to convince yourself of the importance of what you’re doing?

I want you now to take a few seconds to fully envision that scenario and put yourself in the middle of action. Imagine yourself climbing up that steep and high mountain while the flames are chasing after you at high speed. Just imagine that situation and experience the feelings and reactions you’d go through in that case.

Now let’s apply that situation to your everyday life. Imagine that every single day of your life is just a burning mountain. Imagine that only by achieving your daily goals you can reach the safe top. Only by living up to your standards you can enter that safe cave which keeps all the fire out and only let the warmth in. In that case, how motivated would you be to take massive action towards the achievement of your goals? Do you need to aggressively push yourself to complete a certain task, no matter how hard or complicate?

In fact, by realizing and accepting just one single way, you unleash the power of your subconscious and tap into your deepest resources. I’m sure you know that as a human being, you’re very rich with natural resources that if properly and efficiently used, can give you a huge advantage and make you a tough winner.

But interestingly, most people go about their business oblivious to these invaluable resources available to them, and almost always tap into them in the most dangerous and critical moments of their lives. But ironically, the very resources we instinctively tap into for survival purposes when we’re faced by various dangers are the ones that can help us excel and create an abundance of value that’s extremely more than what we need to survive.

Such resources include intelligence, subconscious power, emotions, physical strength and efficiency, etc.

Most of the times we fail to achieve a goal, the reason is that we undercommit our own resources, internal and external ones alike. So we tend to blame it on external forces, like the people we work with, in order to avoid facing the truth.

For example, a young person may not deeply feel the need to loose that extra 30 pounds s/he carries around as body fat. But because the trend is to be fit and slim, and because “others” would admire him/her better, that person decides to go chasing after a goal that doesn’t truly inspire him/her. And what’s the expected result of that? The person would invest a low percentage of what resources s/he’s got in the process making success more challenging than it would be had that person dedicated as much of the resources as s/he possibly could.

Here the reason is not good enough to loose 30 pounds of extra body fat. But how would that person approach the goal if s/he was told by a doctor that losing the extra pounds is a matter of life or death? As ugly as it sounds, this situation is sure to give the person a boost of motivation to achieve the goal quickly and efficiently.

So how you take advantage of this fact? How can you tap more often into your inner resources and take more advantage of your human potential? How can you rely less on will-power (which never lasts), and more on natural motivation?

In fact, there are numerous ways to boost your motivation, but this article will just focus on a simple visualization technique that takes only few minutes a day and can be very effective in programming your mind to give you more support when working on your goals.

What you really need to do is shifting your thinking by getting your mind to view your own goals from a different perspective.

First of all, if a goal doesn’t inspire you enough, and if you don’t feel deeply and absolutely convinced and compelled by it’s results, then simply dump it. You’ll find that it’s much more expensive and painful to pursue goals that don’t resonate with your standards and don’t deeply fulfill your dreams and desires. It’s more expensive at all levels: money, emotions, relationships, etc.

So every time you set a goal for yourself make sure that it’s 100% compatible with your vision and that it makes sense to you. Then and only then you can take the decision to dedicate all the resources you can to the total completion of that goal.

But besides finding the right goals for you, you need to program your mind to attain that level of operation similar to the survival mode that let us tap into our inner resources more deeply.

Just set down quietly for a few minutes everyday, close your eyes, and imagine yourself on that burning mountain trying to reach the top while the flames are reaching you fast. Clearly picture this situation and imagine how you would be persistently and aggressively making your way up to the top where you can be safe from being burned.

When you practice this vision for a number of days in a raw it will become ingrained in your subconscious and will be reflected on your daily way of action. In other words, you’ll start to take more persistent and fatal action. You’ll tend to get done whatever you’re after efficiently and instantly. You will refuse to settle for what’s currently possible and keep working until you’ve achieved the incarnation of your own vision.

In addition to practicing this exercise each morning, you can also close your eyes and briefly re-experience the situation for a couple seconds during the day whenever you are faced by any problems of any sort. This will help you manage your negative emotions like, fear, frustration, anger, etc. It will also work as an effective procrastination buster.

Give this technique a try and see for yourself how much positive impact it will have on your daily performance.

How to Turn Around and Get Moving When You Feel Totally Stuck

2010-02-01T10:03:00.000-08:00

Have you ever found yourself trapped in the feeling of being stuck? Have you gone through moments where you thought that life had given you everything it has to offer, and that all that’s remaining for you is to wait for the end? Or even felt the urge to bring on that end voluntarily? Have you looked around and found nothing but darkness, hopelessness, and fear?

I’m glad to tell that you’re not alone in this sad world. I myself have suffered those exact states. I even thought of committing suicide multiple times in the past. But what keeps amazing me, year after year, is the tremendous ability of life to re-energise us, to hypnotize us, and make us oblivion to all the pain and sadness. If that was not the case, then a scary number of people would commit suicide. And what I mean by hypnotizing us is that life is always capable of finding a way to capture our senses. It’s always capable of giving us commands to which we often response positively, even though we’ve been suffering the most painful experience in our entire life, maybe just minutes ago. That’s like magic! That’s amazing.

Have you once been feeling totally suicidal and truly wanting to die, and after a ridiculous amount of time felt yourself regaining a positive state? Why was that the case?

Usually, we forget about all the shiny points in our lives in the tough times. We just become incapable of seeing any positive factors that might be good reasons for living on this planet. That’s because the negative thoughts, feelings, and events are holding us so firmly during those moments that we simply get completely consumed with them.

What’s really great is that once those negative “forces” start to fade away, even a little bit, the other factors in our lives, the positive ones, start to come back to us. They tend to play the role of a rescue squad that’s fully equipped to help us out of our misery.

The problem with this natural process is that it takes too much time. It takes enough time to make us feel spent and completely drained. And in today’s fast-pace world, we need to be fast and efficient in recovering so we can reserve our resources so they last longer and serve us more. The longer our resources are able to serve us, the better we are positioned and the more we are capable of handling stress, tiredness, and many other problems.

How to turn around

Now what can you do when you’re feeling totally stuck? What do you do when you don’t even know what to do? Where can you possibly go when the view is fuzzy and you can’t detect any reliable direction that might lead you out of this maze? How you deal with uncertainty? And how do you regain the sense of direction?

In this article I’m going to provide you with an effective strategy to deal with that state mentioned above. I’m going to show you a practical way to reshape your options, regain clarity, get focused, and move on again leaving all the negative feelings and thoughts behind.

But before I start, bear in mind that this state is not going to disappear from your life completely. That’s because it’s not a problem by itself, but rather, a symptom of the problem, which means that this feeling of being stuck and not knowing where to go is a signal that what you’re doing is not compatible with your inner reality. For example, you may be clinging to a job that’s paying you good but doesn’t deeply fulfill you, or deliver you the level of joy you expect to get from a job.

Or maybe you’ve lost your job, and you don’t know of any other way of making a living. And although this is a seriously bad situation to be in, it may have a lot of opportunities for you. It may push you out of your limits to figure out a way to make a living and still be able to live your personal dreams at a deeper level.
Whenever you feel stuck and lacking the sense of direction, know that it’s a feedback about what you’re doing, or not doing, that’s keeping you from achieving, or reaching what you truly and deeply desire. Although it can feel bad, it’s never as negative as it may seem.

With that attitude I’d like you to use the following strategy because this will help you get maximum results.

1. Define what you truly love and want.

This may seem obvious but it’s not that easy to identify what you truly love and wish to experience in life. That’s because you’ve developed a huge set of patterns that are holding you back and taking control of the mechanics of your every-day life. For example, you wake up each morning, take a shower, have breakfast, go to work, come back, etc. All of those activities are in reality parts of the patterns that are running themselves over and over again.

When you completely succumb to those patterns that develop through time, it gets really tough to feel what the ideal life that you desire deep inside yourself is like. You get to do everything by habit, and you get used not to dream, you get used to settle for what’s possible at the moment, not having enough courage or willingness to look into the future in order to spot any of the possible opportunities for making your dreams come alive.

This case is typical, and it’s nothing to fear from, because you can change that effectively and forever.

Although it’s not possible to break all the current patterns in your life at once, and it’s not preferable by the way, what you must do is identifying the things that you truly and honestly love and would like to have the most. It’s extremely important to be honest and as accurate as possible here. This is not an easy process, because what you love is not necessarily present in your daily job, or in your home, or even in your social environment. However, love is not affected by reality, nor is it controlled by any real or imagined limits you may be facing.
This is wonderful if you think about it. You’re true nature will continue to seek out things it loves even though every single detail in the external environment signals impossibility or hopelessness, but it takes a careful look inside to figure out what you really love.

Therefore, what you must refer to when identifying your loves is your own personal nature. Not your boss at work, not your spouse or partner, not your family, and not your favourite author either. No one else is capable of telling you what you love but yourself.

So, how do you find out what you love?

First of all, set in a quite place with a paper and pencil and nothing or no one to disturb you (turn off your cell phone or any other devices that might interrupt you during this exercise)

Then, start jotting down anything that comes to your mind regarding what you love most. At this level it’s ok to write anything comes to your mind. Don’t judge any idea, or even rethink it. Just let the ideas flow naturally from your mind through your hand to the paper.

After you’ve recorded all the ideas that came to you, you have to start carefully thinking and evaluating the results. That’s important because many ideas that aren’t honest representatives of your true nature might have found their ways to your list. You might have recorded your spouse, for instance, as your number one love, while you in fact, naturally feel that you love someone or something else. The problem here is that you might be afraid of causing any sort of problems or embarrassments in your social life. That’s why I suggest you to keep this list private and don’t let anyone else have a look at it.

After you’ve gone through the whole list and taken out any items that are not true loves of your own, you’re ready to head to the next step. But first, I’d like to give you some questions that can help you identify what you love:
• What were your dreams when you were a little child? What was the thing that you were always dreaming and fantasizing about? Did it take place in your reality or not?
• What is it (activity, state, thought, etc.) that you get tremendous pleasure as a result of experiencing or thinking of?
• Who is the person that you get excited (emotionally, sexually, etc.) when you’re in contact with or thinking about? How often do you think about that person?
• What activity you’ve done in the past that made you feel just happy, and you’d love to do again and again?
• What are the activities in your current job that you love to do and never get tired of? And what are the activities that you hate in that job and that make you hate the whole job as a result? (you can get to know what you love better by knowing what you hate too)
• What are the things that you feel your life is not complete without, and that you’ll be happier and more fulfilled when you get?
• What are the place/s that you’d love to visit? Or maybe you’ve visited in the past and made you feel happy?

The result will usually be a combination of people, activities, places, and objects. Knowing those will give you great clarity and make you more capable of setting the course of your life, which is what you’re going to do in the next step.

2. Create a list of clear long-term goals.

Long-term goals are those goals that define success for you. Those are really big goals that are intended to get you where you want during the course of your life.
You can easily create a bunch of long-term goals. Anyone can do it. But the problem is that most people set goals that don’t make sense to them. They are simply not the ones that motivate and inspire them.

To make sure that you set long-term goals that move you and stir your enthusiasm you have to make them in alignment with what you love. Think of it as a paradise. The paradise is what you love, and what will get you into that paradise is the strategies that you follow. And those strategies are primarily defined and shaped according to your biggest goals, which are the long-term goals of course.

So before you start setting your long-term goals, make sure you have your list of loves in hand. Then, start setting goals that have major significance to you and that define the path of your life at least for the next 5 years.

Examples of this kind of goals can be: writing a book, starting a business, getting into a relationship, purchasing a new home, joining a college, getting in shape, increasing your monthly income, and so on.

Keep in mind that long-term goals are meant to draw the big picture for you, so they shouldn’t be burdened with details. Of course they must be specific and clear, but the actual written goals must not be too long and fluffy. For example, although “I start a new online business in the first day of next April” is not the most specific or telling form, it’s still much better than: “Next April I start an online business which sells people products and services, and that starts generating income for me during the first month.” Of course you have to think about the product offering of your business, and for sure you need to have an income target, but those are details that shouldn’t be included in the written goal to start the business.

As it seems, income and products can make up long-term goals, but each one must be included in one separate goal of its own.

As much as your long-term goals draw a clear and exciting picture about your future, you’ll find yourself focusing on the right track, and it will get more and more effortless to spend your attention and energy where they are most needed.

3. Analyze your current projects and commitments.

What you’re doing right now, including your job, hobbies, everyday tasks, etc, can be used to predict your near future, and beyond.

Think about it for a second, if you’re living right now at a low level with respect to finances, physical fitness, business achievement, or any other aspect of your life, would it be reasonable to predict that you’re going to experience a radical shift in one or more of those areas in the coming month? Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that you can’t evoke massive change in your life in any amount of time, but I’m talking about how usually things go month after month if you keep succumbing to the current forces and patterns that are controlling your life.

With that in mind, it’s extremely important to have a clear view of the most important commitments in your life at this moment in order to be able to figure out where most of your energy and resources are being spent.

Take the time to list out all the projects, routines, tasks, activities, and other commitments that take most of your time in a typical week. This can be anything from your daily job to any other day-to-day tasks or chores you do (including any time you spend with your partner. )

Then, try to estimate the total time each item in the list is consuming each week in terms of hours. Next, give each item a rate according to its importance to your survival (i.e. how much the item contributes to your financial outcome each week.)

This will help you figure out what are the items that you’re doing out of necessity, which ones you’re doing because by habit, and what are the things that you do because you just love doing. You might come across some interesting findings here that you may decide to add to your list of the things you love.

Now the most important part of this step is comparing the results to the list of things you love. What items in your list of commitments help you move closer to the things you love? What items pull you away from what you love? What specific items you can directly link to items in the list of the things you love? What are the items that you’re currently doing but you really hate and would love to give up at any cost?

4. Carefully scan your environment

What kind of stuff you have at home and you are seeing every single day of your life? What aspects of your home make you feel good, and what are the ones that irritate you? Are there any people in your social network that are causing you pain or driving you nuts? What about your job? Who are the people you enjoy working with and get along with easily? Who are the people that you don’t quite like but find yourself obliged to work with? Do you have a good relationship with you boss? How do you feel about the way you make a living? Is it inspiring and empowering, or is it boring and draining? What are the things or people that you’d love to take out of your life entirely?

Answering those questions plus any additional ones that you feel will help you get clear vision about your daily environment will actually help you draw a clear map of this environment. It’s important to get to know the territory you live in every day, because then you’ll have the ability to accurately diagnose you’re problems and know what your roadblocks and obstacles are.

If you notice, the purpose of all the steps so far is to help you gain clarity and deep knowledge of your life. This will allow you to determine the sources of pain and joy, sadness and happiness, hopelessness and inspiration, and so on, in your life.

Again, create a list of the results you get and write each set of answers under the question they belong to.

5. Create a specific plan

Now it’s time to design a specific plan based on your findings. This plan will guide you out of your current situation to a place where you are better able to successfully seek out what you love and avoid what you don’t.

First of all, it’s important to specify a clear time-frame for this plan. In step 2 you set your long-term goals for at least 5 five years to come (actually you’re not obliged to abide by this range, it can be shorter or longer, but generally speaking, this range will provide you with a broad vision and help you allocate your resources strategically, spending them on the things that will still matter several years into the future.) But now, you want to create an action plan that specify and coordinates your actions in a specific period of time which is preferably shorter than 5 years.

I suggest that you create a plan for 6-12 months, which specify your objectives and goals during this period of time. The direction of the plan must be the same as your long-term goals, although some goals my take years to achieve.
In general, it’s advisable to focus on just one long-term goal, even if it requires years to be achieved. You’ll have much higher advantage and possibility of achieving the goal when all your senses, energy, and resources are concentrated on that goal.

Don’t fall into the trap of going back and forth between two or more goals, because the usual result is failure to achieve either one. If a goal is important enough to you, then it definitely deserves to have all your attention and dedication no matter how long it takes to achieve it.

Let’s say you pick up the goal to start your own website which you intend to turn into a business that makes you a living, and you estimate that it’s going to take you around 8-12 months to really establish the business and reach a level where it can stand on its own and generate enough cash for you to quit your job.
Even though that goal is good, and even though the time range may be reasonable and suitable to your capabilities and skills, it can be helpful to extend your vision to include several years into the future. For example, you decide a desirable monthly income that you’d like to reach after 3 years of running the business. So you create a “big picture” plan that generally lay out some of the details and points related to achieving that goal, and then you create, based on that plan, another plan that covers a shorter period of time, such as, six months, and this one should have all the details and strategies you’re going to use in order to reach full completion of the main goal, which is generating the monthly income you’re aiming at.

This process has helped me tremendously in figuring out what matters to me most, and what’s the single long-term goal that I want to focus all my energy on, especially in this period of time. I have a lot of long-term goals, and at a certain moment, I experience that feeling of total uncertainty, where I would go through the entire list and couldn’t choose one single gaol to focus solely on. May be that was because all my long-term goals are inspiring to me and resonate deeply with my inner desires and hopes.

One of my long-term goals, other than blogging on personal development, is writing a novel. And I love novels because they can be many things. They can be used to teach people, increase their awareness, direct their attention to critical matters, and much, much more.

By following this strategy of looking far into the future, seeing what will be the most important thing for me, let’s say, 3-5 years from now, I was able to determine which specific goal I prefer to choose right now. So after going through this whole process I was able to decide on starting my blog on personal development, which is a great way of helping others and myself to grow and improve life in many different ways. This aligns with my motive to write a novel, which is after all to serve others and deliver genuine value to them. And after I’m successful at establishing the blog and creating a wide base of readership, I’d move on to start writing that novel.

It’s seems to me in many different ways an effective strategy.

6. Make a decision and move on.

Now that you have determined what you love most, and set your long-term goals that are capable of keeping you busy for at least 5 years to come, and after you’ve studied your daily commitments, and then scanned your environment, and created the short-term and long-term plans, you have to take the most important step in this whole process.

Actually, there’s absolutely no point in knowing what you love if you’re not going to take the necessary steps that help you get and live what you love. That’s why you’ve created the long-term goals. They are the keys of the paradise.

Similarly, there is no point in setting goals, no matter how simple or large, if you’re not going to take action toward achieving them. And this action starts with any step you can take. Just take any action. Decide what you can do next, and actually do it. It doesn’t matter whether it’s something really simple, like, reading an article online about personal development, or more complicated like deciding a niche for your online business. What really matters is being decisive and confidently moving towards what you aim at.

I’d like you to notice that flexibility is very important. Setting long-term goals doesn’t mean that you have to follow those goals blindly even though some of them prove ineffective and irrelevant to you. You sure can eliminate some goals, and modify others as you see necessary. In addition to having a vision you should be proactive too.

Also, it’s needless to say that failure to achieve one goal should be a motive for achieving another one. Because every goal you fail to achieve is a lesson for achieving another one. Failing is learning. So every time you fail know that you’ve learned some valuable lessons. Capture those lessons, and keep going with the new gained knowledge.

It’s likely that you’ll start by now to get a flow of ideas and suggestions going through you, because after performing that process, you got clear on what you want and the direction that you’d like to take in life. This will make your subconscious think of ways to get that done. So it starts providing you with ideas and ways it thinks can help you make your dreams a reality. The power of this process lies in its ability to unleash the guidance of your subconscious mind which will be working hard to assist you through your journey toward success.
So it’s needless to say that you have to capture any idea that comes to your mind, write it down, and think where it can fit. As you keep recording your ideas when they come to you, you’ll first be able to take advantage of them, and second you’ll send your mind a strong message that says you’re interested in receiving whatever ideas or solutions it offers you, and that this action is welcomed and appreciated, which leads in fact to more and more fresh and helpful ideas.
Whenever you feel stuck and that nothing is working for you, and whenever you feel uncertain, or unsure about what you want to achieve, whenever you feel bad, come back to the lists you’ve created. Look at the list of the things you love, remind yourself of the reason for being here and for continuing to live life. This will recharge your imagination and provide you with enough inspiration to keep moving on.

Also, go through the other lists, re-read your goals over and over again (ideally every day) and have a look at your plans for achieving them. This will give you a sense of direction.

It’s helpful to go through the whole process again from time to time. This will help you regain your clarity to summon more discipline and willingness to keep going. Of course the first time you do this process it may take you some time to get done, it can be tough to complete, and may even cause you some confusion and make you feel a little bit lost, but that’s ok because after you get past the first tree steps you’ll get clearer and more focused and things will get easier and simpler.

Remember, the first time is the toughest. After you’ve successfully completed this process once, you’ll find it much easier to do in the second and third times. Of course by then you’ll not have to write everything over. After all, you love what you love. Indeed you may discover more things that you love, but generally speaking, if you really love something, it’s not likely that you’ll experience a shift in your feelings towards it, at least not in a short period of time. So, in the second time you do this process, you may want to go through your list of loves, and you may want to add, or may be delete, some items, and that’s it. The same thing applies for your long-term goals (unless you want to cross out goals that you managed to accomplish ).

You may need to update the information about your commitments and environment since a lot will change after you start implementing your plans, but you don’t really need to invest much time in those two areas as long as things are going well, because that can be unnecessarily exhausting. It’s most critical to do a full analysis of your commitments and environment in the fist time in order to gain a vision that’s based on realistic and true factors existing in your life. However, I recommend you to keep a journal in which you briefly record your observations regarding your commitments and environment, which can help you track the changes taking place in your life and to generally get a sense of the progress you’re leading.

Don’t waste your time. Give this process a try, and you’ll be astonished at the possibilities you hold to break free of this ugly state of feeling stuck and trapped in the dark corner. And you’ll hopefully start taking some serious action toward fulfilling the wildest of your dreams.

How to Shape your Life by Habit Creation

2010-01-31T08:29:00.000-08:00

We all know the power of habits. Habits rule! Think about it, you’re whole life is controlled by habits. We eat by habit, sleep by habit, and do a lot of other things by habit. We are the creatures of habit. Now how can this information possibly help you? In fact, if you recognize the massive power of habits and learn how the process of habit creation works, then you’ll be able to create your own habits and break the ones you don’t desire to be in your life. One of my favorite ways of creating new habits is what I call the 30-day habit creation plan, in which you decide on a habit you want to create like, writing, working-out, or whatever it is that you want to become a daily habit, and set 30 days on the calendar (or write them down as a list) and start practicing the activity during those 30 days, crossing out each day as you go forward.

Why this method is highly effective?

The 21-day rule

First of all, various studies have shown that we actually need 21 days to acquire a new habit. And you may ask: then why do you suggest me to aim for 30 days instead of just 21? And the answer is simple: you want to make the new habit a daily one for a long period of time (and perhaps for the rest of your life) so when you hopefully succeed at making up the new habit you’ll get past those extra 7 days and keep going. But the main reason for setting exactly 30 days is that by adding an extra week to the 3 basic ones, you’ll give yourself more room to get a taste of the habit and experience it thoroughly in order to examine the effects it has on your life.

Specific Time-frame

The second reason is that by setting a specific time-frame you’re giving your mind a clear target to hit, which is crucially important for this process. How many times have you started up a new project that requires a lot of commitment from you, whether it be related to time, money, effort, etc, and you’ve given up long before you reach success? There may be many reasons for that, but one of the most frequent one is that you’re not capable of conditioning your mind and body to make the new task (or set of tasks) a part of your daily routine. When you’re mind and body are conditioned to accept something, like doing a task on a daily basis, there’s virtually no way of failing to follow through. But for your mind to know what you’re trying to do, it has to have a kind of clear map, and a sense of direction. Setting a specific time-range is a perfect way of doing that.

Quitting is a legitimate option too

Notice that there’s another great benefit that you get by setting a time-frame for the new habit, which is that you are free to stop doing it after the 30-day period is gone. Let’s say you want to create the habit of working out each day, and you’re favorite form of working out is running in your neighbourhood every morning. So one morning, you put those pair of running shoes on after 7 days of doing it in a raw for the first time in your life, and just before you get out, you detect a strong feeling of resistance pulling you back. It’s like your entire body is begging you not to go out and do this 30-min run. It may suggest that you could do something more relaxing and fun instead. Maybe you can play some video games, or watch your favorite TV show, or, what about calling your long-time friend, the one that had been out of your mind for several months? You see, at this point, your mind and body are fighting aggressively against this new task that pushes you out of your comfort zone. And your mind is working hard to offer you a lot of tempting and attractive alternatives. You probably know that following through get a lot harder at this point than it was before you began the whole project, when you were totally excited and feeling motivated to reach success. The beauty of the 30-day method is that it allows you to give yourself the permission to stop doing the new task after the 30-day period is over. That way, you can convince your mind to support you through your challenge by making this agreement to stop doing the task if you feel you don’t like it after the 30 days or that it has no real value to add to your life.

New pathways in the brain

The fourth reason that makes the 30-day method really great is that by the end of the 30 days, you’ll find out that the new challenging task is not a challenge for you anymore. And that it has become all of a sudden a part of your daily life. That’s because the repeated action will create new pathways in your brain specifically for this task, which makes it a lot easier for you. At this point you’ll find it fairly easy to extend the project for another 30 days. You’ll notice how easy it will get to keep doing the new task, like working out, day after day and for as long as you wish. And this is exactly what you want. This is where the true power lies.

By mastering this process, you’ll have the key to creating real and lasting changes in your life.

I want you to think about this: what are the things that you think your life would be better off without? It may be the lack of focus you suffer from when you work on important tasks, or it may be that you waste a lot of time surfing the net and going through fluff material that doesn’t have any significance to your life, or whatever it is, just jot down what comes to your mind without judging it. It’s critically important to figure out the bad habits in your life, because you’ll come to realize that it’s your worse habits that cost you the most time.

Bad habits are often massive time consumers.

Let me give you an example. Some times I check my e-mail with the intention to spend only a few seconds on this task. I just want to check out the important e-mails and get rid of some of the spam that comes at me like crazy. So I start going through the list and I come across an e-mail sent to me by a friend that includes a link leading to a cool video on youtube.com, and I follow the link, I check out the video, and my eye catches an interesting title for another video, and I click on it, check it out, and you know the rest of the story. I may keep watching videos for a good full hour without even noticing it. Although I’m quite successful at keeping it under control now, there are always some minutes that slip out of my hand every now and then.

How to design your 30-day habit creation plan

I’m sure you too have some similar habits that are costing you valuable time right now. You don’t need to be hard on yourself, because habits like that are usually well established, so it takes time and dedication to get rid of them. But generally speaking, you can achieve a lot in just 30 days of your life.

A word of caution: don’t be extreme when designing your 30-day habit creation plans. For instance, if you’re currently wasting too must time watching videos on youtube.com, and if you’ve been doing this for quite a while, then it’s safe to bet that it’s going to be tough to change that habit. You’re used to it, it feels good, and may be it helps you forget (temporarily) some ugly problems in your life. That’s normal, and it may indicate some sort of emptiness in your life. Instead of setting the objective of the 30-day habit creation plan to be “completely avoid watching videos online”, you might choose to “avoid watching videos with little value and focus on watching videos that hold valuable content that can teach me something helpful.”

Also, since you’re concerned about wasting time (at least you should be), you may aim at reducing the time you spend on watching videos each day.

There’s an important key here, don’t aim at something negative. Don’t say I will stop eating chocolate completely during the next 30 days, because actually by saying that you’re directing your focus to what you don’t want, which is presumably stop eating chocolate. Instead it’s much more effective to say you’re going to stop watching chocolate AND you’ll start eating more kinds of healthy food, like, vegetables, beans, fruits, etc. That way you’re giving your mind an order to avoid something, and a target to hit during those 30 days at the same time. You’re telling you’re mind what you don’t want and you’re directing it to what you do want, so it knows where to focus all the energy you have.

Too easy, too hard

How hard the new task should be? Would it be valuable to gain a new habit if the basic task is not challenging to you? And how do you know when the task you’re setting is too easy or too hard?

Well, the answer to any of those questions basically depends on who you are since there are no right or wrong answers. But let me share my thoughts with you. First, I don’t believe that the value of a habit is measured by its level of difficulty. Many simple and easy tasks can do magic for your personal and career life if you can make them habits and incorporate them properly with your lifestyle. For example, the act of writing down a set of simple tasks you want to get done in a single day is in, and of itself, very easy to do. Yet, this act is proven to be very effective at helping people create better results in less time. Another example is drinking more cups of water during the day. How hard that can be? Yet it’s very good for your health to make it a habit.

You see, simple and easy tasks can make huge difference in many areas of your life. However, doing challenging work is also important for your growth and prosperity.

I usually don’t sit to write an article if I think that it will not add true and genuine value to my readers. I think about the article very thoroughly and try to find out what impact it will have on the reader, how it will make his life better and more fulfilling, how it will help him/her grow and make a better life. I make sure that when I write I do create something that’s worth reading. And as you probably know, this is not easy to do. It takes a lot of thinking, organizing, and research to be able to create writing of that kind.

Generally speaking, any habit is not valued based on its level of difficulty, but rather based on the value it adds to your life, and whether it makes your life more productive and fulfilling.

A good rule of thumb is to start with tasks that are easy to tackle and that you are pretty sure you can do, and then start making your way up, targeting more difficult and challenging tasks, like running for an extra 15 minutes, or writing for an extra 20 minutes, or dedicating more time to “real work” every day (checking e-mail and watching videos not includedJ), or whatever it is that its challenging for you.

How to get yourself motivated

The motivation to follow through and reach the point of success is important too. And in fact, you can motivate yourself through various ways.

One good and viable technique is to write down all the reasons you have for achieving your objective. For example, jot down all the reasons that come to your mind for gaining the habit of working-out on a daily basis.

When you know your reasons, your own reasons, not your parents’ or friends’, you’ll gain clarity and you’ll be able to decide whether it’s worth it to pay the price it takes to create the desired habit. Doing something challenging, physically or mentally, like, working out everyday, is not easy to make a habit. It takes effort, dedication, and a lot of sweat. And if you go chasing a target like that without having some deeply convincing and solid reasons, you’ll probably not get full support from your mind and body.

Another way to motivate yourself is visualization. Set down in a quite place for 15-20 minutes each day (preferably in the morning) and do nothing but visualize what it feels like to reach the last of the 30 days successfully. What changes will occur in your life? What value will be added to your life as a result of doing the task everyday for 30 days in a row? How will you feel about your self? How would you start to think about yourself afterwards? And will success empower you and increase your self confidence? Answering those questions will provide you with enough details that allow you to better see and feel what it it’s like to be successful.

You’ll be actually programming your mind to help you make your way successfully and more easily through the 30 days.

5 ways to remember your objective everyday

At the beginning of this mission, especially at the first one or two weeks, many people find it hard to stay focused on and to remember doing the task at the first place. This is typical at first since the new task has not become a habit yet. That’s to say that it hasn’t become a part of your life, and your mind and body are not conditioned to accept it as habit just yet.

To be able to remember doing the task each day you have to stay focused on the project the whole period. For that purpose, I suggest you follow those simple, yet very effective, techniques:

· Share the task with someone else
if you can get someone to do the task with you, like, doing the running session with you each day, then that’s great. If not, then you can share the task with others by kindly asking them to remind you about it. Or make a promise for someone whose opinion you care about that you’re going to do the task for the whole period. This one is very effective.

· Post reminders every where
Post notes that state clearly and specifically what your objective is. Post those notes on the walls of your bedroom, on the refrigerator door, in your office, and in every place you can, and that you expect to be in or visit during the 30-day period.

· Reward yourself
It’s a good thing to reward yourself for following through. Set a specific reward or a set of rewards that you want to give to your self and also specify when you’re going to do that. This will offer you more support from your brain which always seeks to get you what makes you feel happy and fulfilled.

· Think about the task
Take a few moments each night before you go to sleep to actually think about the task in ways that makes you feel good about it. What will this habit add to your life? Why will your life be better after gaining this habit? What you can do tomorrow to make it better than the way you did it last time? Also visualize your self doing the task and feeling good about it. You can repeat the same process in the next morning for more focus and to get the maximum benefit of programming your mind.

· Review the list of reasons
Create a list of reasons for doing the task (as I mentioned earlier in this article) which help you stay clear-headed and motivated. Be sure to review this list frequently (ideally everyday).

By following those steps you’ll find it very easy to stay focused and avoid forgetting your most important task of the day, which is the one you intend to make a daily habit.

What is the habit that you want to create in your life? What is the task that you’d like to make a part of your daily life? Is it writing? Exercising? Studying? Reading? Whatever it is, get a piece of paper and jot it down (or punch it into your computer). And on anther paper, write down all the reasons you have for creating that habit. Then, get another paper, and write down how you’ll make it happen and what are the resources available to you that you can use to support your journey.

Don’t start with something too big and too ambitious at first, a single habit, no matter how simple and easy, can do you wonders if it’s right for you, and help you save more time, get more done, and achieve more goals than you ever thought possible.