Archive | August, 2009

How to Use Fear to Find Your Passion

We’ve all heard the phrase, “Do what you love.” The idea that we can and should do what we love doing in our work, and that we should choose experiences that make us feel good in life, was a pretty unconventional idea 20 years ago. These days, however, it’s an ideal that most of us believe in and want to live by.

So then why aren’t we all doing what we love? Why aren’t we all following our passion?

Do you know what you love?

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The 4 Things You Need to Succeed

I was talking to a friend yesterday who said the reason he hasn’t succeeded is because he doesn’t have the money to start his own business. He said, if only he had a good friend who could lend him the money he could succeed (he may have been referring to me as that “good friend,” I don’t know). But the reality is, you don’t need lots of money to achieve success.

There are 4 things that you need to succeed, and they don’t cost anything:

1. The first thing you need is “Time”.

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10 Simple Ways to Grow a Relationship

Anyone who has been in a relationship longer than 12 months understands how easy it is to fall into a rut. Today I challenge you to take responsibility for the state of your partnership and use your power to create excitement, joy and happiness that will last forever.

The following are 10 simple and powerful ways to grow a relationship:

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7 Foods That Make You Happier

Our mood can affect everything in our daily life. When we’re in a bad mood or depressed, we don’t feel like ourselves and we have a hard time concentrating or just making it through the day. When we’re happy, we feel on top of the world and ready to take on anything. The food we eat can have a great impact on our mood, and if you want to look and feel good then you need to be sure to include some of the foods that will naturally lift your spirits. Here we look at several foods that are sure to raise our spirits and make us feel happier overall.

1. Milk: those foods that are rich in calcium will naturally help to boost our spirits. Those that suffer from depression are told to take a calcium and Vitamin D supplement, and the good news is that 1-2 glasses of milk a day can be a natural mood booster that can help a person to feel happier and more productive.

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Who Says You Can’t Go Home? — I’ll Take Bon Jovi over Thomas Wolfe Any Day.

If you grew up and went to school in Western North Carolina back in the ‘70’s as I did, you couldn’t seem to escape Asheville NC writer Thomas Wolfe and his haunting admonition that “You can’t go home again”. It was one that seemed to threaten an unavoidable and ominous loss, turning up everywhere from lit classes to libraries to shelves in not a few homes.

Thomas Wolfe’s ghost haunted me all the way to my new college as I left home for my freshman year. Following career and family choices led me away from those same beloved mountains about which Wolfe wrote. His whispered doom came to tea a time or three over post-college years spent in the mid-west.

As life took me away, I assumed that the loss was part of the price we pay for simply moving forward through the days and years, another angst-ridden negative talisman hung about the bowed-down neck of life. In those days, it seemed smart and hip to be depressed and cynical. This old set of habitual thought ran head-long into my on-going quest to build a positive life and it demanded a reassessment.

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A Forgotten Key to Personal Growth

If you want tips on how to become more productive, how to increase your motivation or even just how to become more confident, there are more than enough resources out there. Many of us feel that all of these little steps ‘improve’ who we are and take us to the next level and in some ways I guess that’s true. On the other hand, I don’t like to think of this advice as changing us as people, but more like exposing who we really are.

Some people get obsessed with self growth and get hooked on looking for the next ‘secret’ and ‘tactic’ they can use to take their life, or just their personality, to the next level. Today I want to cover a personal growth key you may be totally neglecting, and one that probably has more effect on you than any other. What is that key, you ask? That’s easy: your health. As with productivity, motivation, confidence or any other aspects of life you feel are necessary to work on, there’s tons of information out there about your health. So much so in fact, that I’m sure you were already thinking that before my last statement. However, most of the health advice you read is about:

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15 Simple Ways to Get a Bit More From Life

Having just started a blog with the tagline “getting more from life”, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to do this myself! A lot of personal development or change advice focuses on the longer term (especially in areas like finance or career), but here I want to look at squeezing the most from the little moments and how to feel satisfied and fulfilled in the shorter term.

Some of the suggestions below are things I’m already doing, some are ones I plan to do. I’d love to hear some of yours too, so please do add to this list in the comments, if you have any favourites that I’ve missed out!

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