Beating The Culture of Fear

istock_000004523720xsmall.jpgYou hear it on the news every day, the list of things you’re supposed to be afraid of today (and just how afraid you should be). Whether it’s killer cholesterol in your food, hidden terrorist cells or menacing muggers on the street, it seems that you can hardly draw a breath these days without the risk of inhaling a fatal dose of fear.

But is there, really, all that much to be afraid of? Let’s take a look:

Well, for starters, you’re almost seven times more likely to die in a car accident than to face any violent assault. And yet I’d be willing to be that most of you feel far more at risk crossing a parking lot at night than climbing into your car in the bright light of morning. (http://www.nsc.org/lrs/statinfo/odds.htm) And as far as terrorists go, you’re more likely to be crushed by a vending machine than die in a terrorist attack. (http://www.mattbarr.com/archives/2006/09/your_chance_of.html) Remember that the next time you start to get irate about those potato chips that won’t drop down.

So why are we so afraid of these things? It’s a combination of intentional information manipulation and poor risk assessment skills.

Let’s consider these things separately. (more…)

7 Steps To Achieve Anything You Desire

istock_000004843996xsmall.jpgDo you believe you can have anything you desire? Some people do, and they seem to have a knack for going after what they want and getting it. They appear to have some secret that whatever they touch turns to gold. While others struggle with achieving their desires and seem to meet with frustration and failure. No matter what they do, they seem to come up short.

According to the movie “The Secret” and the Law of Attraction, you create from the inside out. There is a certain formula you can follow by creating the mindset that will manifest what you want. By utilizing our minds to focus on what we want and keep the doubts at bay, we have a better chance of achieving our desires. The master achievers in business are more focused on the outer world, and suggest you follow a plan and specific actions. They have

I think the recipe for success lies somewhere between both–the inner thoughts and preparation and the outer actions and planning. If you can master your mindset, find an effective plan of action, and stick to it, you have an excellent chance of succeeding in achieving your goals.

Here are 7 steps that offer you a practical formula to achieve anything you desire: (more…)

Life Sucks? What to Do About It

istock_000004190374xsmall.jpgHave the doldrums got you down? Too many negative hits in a row making you feel like the target at a carnival shooting gallery?

Sometimes, life just sucks.

We all have off days, bad experiences and emotional lows. But if that sucking noise has gone from an occasional hiccup to a full-fledged Hoovering, it’s time to step up and do something about it:

Play hookey. (more…)

5 Steps To Move From Concern to Content

Many of us spend a lot of time being concerned about every aspect of our lives and often miss out on the sweet feeling of contentment. Concern causes stress, anxiety, and upset, while contentment elicits feelings of peace, confidence, acceptance, and fulfillment. That sounds like a great place to be.

istock_000005985442xsmall.jpgYet, if we’re not feeling content with our lives, how do we get to that place of self-acceptance, self-love, and self-appreciation? Where we feel everything is right with the world, and even when it isn’t, we can handle whatever comes up. Where we can give up the constant nagging concerns that haunt our every waking, and sometimes sleeping moments. Where we can continue to strive for more, if we want it, while being perfectly okay with where we are.

Here are some strategies I’ve discovered over my years of coaching that can help you experience more contentment in all areas of your life: (more…)

8 Essential Ingredients to Master Your Time

Being rich is having money; being wealthy is having time. – Margaret Bonnano

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Sometimes it’s hard to believe we all have the same 24 hours/day and same 7 days/week. While some people seem pretty organized and on top of things, many of us find ourselves running out of time. At the end of the day, there are still so many items on our to-do list and we don’t feel like we’ve accomplished all that much. We thought technology would ease our time pressures, but with overflowing email accounts and lost hours surfing cyberspace, it’s done just the opposite. Then juggling our work and personal lives seems to make it impossible to ever get control of our time.

If you feel like you are a slave to the clock, you’re not alone. Time management books, classes, and even software are plentiful and among some of the most popular how-to subjects. They offer myriad solutions to an age-old problem. Maybe you’ve read some of the books or taken some classes only to find you slip back into your old habits.

In order to master your time, you’ll need to take a little time to plan your strategy so that you can end your stress-filled days. I know it doesn’t seem like you have time for one more thing, but this is a top priority and will bring you back to more control of your time. You’ll need to create a schedule not only to include what you intend to accomplish, but for unexpected interruptions, most of which cannot be avoided. When we don’t leave space for those surprises, we wind up angry, frustrated, and feeling even more out of control of our time.

Here are some key solutions that I have found to be very effective. Follow these 8 essential ingredients to master your time: (more…)

How Committed Are You?

istock_000005050572xsmall.jpgDo you often find yourself making a commitment to do something, then not doing it and making excuses instead? We tend to do this more often with ourselves than others. We are less likely to break commitments with our clients, co-workers, friends, or family. If we say we will do something, we are pretty sure we will stick to that agreement.

Then what happens when we make commitments to ourselves and then break them? Why do we hold ourselves as less important than others? Think about this. Do you make commitments to yourself like exercising every day, or practicing meditation, or doing some action item on your list that will take you closer to a goal? And then time runs out, and you don’t do what you said you would do, and make excuses, rationalizations, and bargains. You might say, “Well I didn’t walk a half hour today, so I’ll walk one hour tomorrow.”

Take a look at what commitments you make with yourself that you seem to break a lot. How important are these agreements? Will they make a difference in your life? Will they help you reach your goals? Sometimes all we have to do is one thing every day to move toward our goals. But we even sabotage that small effort.

Catch yourself when you’re breaking a commitment. (more…)

10 Great Productivity Web Sites

istock_000005793898xsmall.jpgLet’s face it – we can all use a little help when it comes to streamlining our lives. But improving productivity problems can be a bit of a paradox. We’re so busy that our lives tend to get clogged up with tasks left undone, half-digested projects and poorly thought out systems, which impairs our productivity. But because of all these obstacles, we’re too busy make the time to uncover all the best tips, ideas and tricks that can help unblock our flow.

Luckily, making life easier for you is my job. And I’ve compiled a list of some of the best places to go for the best tips, tools and resources for improving productivity at home, at work, dealing with technology and more. (more…)

Develop Good Habits to Achieve Your Goals

istock_000005659015xsmall.jpgEveryone has good habits and bad habits…things we do well and things we can improve. Unfortunately, identifying our bad habits is the easy part. Changing them, however, is not.

Just look at all of the people who make New Year’s resolutions. Every January 1st, millions upon millions of people resolve to change – to lose weight, to stop smoking, to quit drinking, or to save money. By January 31st, only a fraction of those people even bother to hold out any hope. Most have already given up on their goals.

It takes at least two to three weeks of focused, repeated behavior for an act to become a habit. Take stock of your life and find the habits that are keeping you from success, then commit to changing them, one at a time. If you try to do too much at once, you will only set yourself up for failure. (more…)

The Speed of Life

The speed of life these days is growing faster and faster. But while we continually develop better tools to help us manage our time and whiz through our tasks more efficiently, the end result isn’t more time – it’s more work. How does that happen? Because, as futurist David Zach says, these tools don’t give us more time, they simply give us more choices. “The problem is, we don’t know how to choose.”
(http://www.davidzach.com/docs/david_zach_playing_with_the_future.pdf)
istock_000006191773xsmall.jpgSo, instead of enjoying the time freed up by using a word processor and copier to make a classroom’s worth of handouts (instead of typing them up three at a time using a typewriter and carbon paper), we simply use that time to do more work. And since each step of our working day has several “time-saving tools” assigned to it, the end result is that we wind up shoehorning tasks into every last second of the day.

Whereas before we might take a breather on the porch during a summer day while the bread baked in the stifling kitchen, today we simply turn on the bread machine and go on to the next chore in our air-conditioned houses. Instead of sitting and talking while dinner cooks in the oven, we zap a meal in the microwave and are back to our desks in just a few minutes.

In order to get free of this tyranny of the tools, it’s important to step back and take a look at what you’re doing, why you’re doing it and how important it is to you.
(more…)

5 Signs It’s Time to Slow Down Fast

istock_000005226426xsmall.jpgIt wasn’t too long ago that I was close to hitting the breaking point in my own life – but I had no sense of this at the time. You see, when you’re flying high on success, you don’t always recognize the warning signs of an impending crash. What ends up happening is that the pressure to be everything to everyone slowly begins to erode the quality of your experiences and relationships. It’s only when you’re about to self-destruct that you suddenly wake up and realize what you could have done better and what you shouldn’t be doing at all.

Here are some signs from SlowDownFast.com that it may be time to hit the brakes and learn to cruise life in the slow lane: (more…)