Archive | October, 2009

Planning is Good, Doing is Better

A few months back, during a conversation with one of my mentors, he said something that I will remember for the rest of my life. “All this planning and focusing is good, but doing is better” was the exact phrase that came out of his mouth. It hit me like a ton of bricks. It was one of those “aha” moments we get every so often.

Now the reason he was saying this to me is because I had been working on a semi large project for that past month or so and I was really close to finishing it. However, I had stalled somewhat and found myself in a state of “planning and focusing” rather than “doing”. So, for weeks I was fairly unfruitful in churning out anymore work on this particular project. I was explaining to him where I was in the process and mid conversation is when he let out the phrase I will never forget. I know this may seem simple but it’s very profound. From that day forward my workflow has changed incredibly and productivity has increased tenfold.

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How Getting Used To Silence Can Help Your Productivity

Sitting alone in a quiet place can be a difficult experience. Without distractions, we can feel bombarded by unpleasant thoughts and emotions. All the ways we’re unhappy about ourselves and our lives come raging back into our awareness when there’s space for them to come up.

It’s no surprise, then, that our culture is hostile to silence. Everywhere we go, it seems, we’re confronted with some kind of noise—whether it’s background music in stores and restaurants, cars and airplanes going by, or something else. And when we’re alone, we often find ourselves habitually switching on the TV or radio to fill the emptiness.

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Why You Struggle to Connect With Others

In this day and age, it’s quite apparent that people are connecting everywhere. From the local pub to the cafe across the street, from the stands at the little league baseball field to one of the seemingly infinite number of online chat rooms, people are constantly connecting with each other.

Gone are the days of never talking to strangers. Gone are the days when people proclaimed that all chat rooms are dangerous. Gone are the days when your social circle was limited to your coworkers around the water cooler.

Thanks to our advances in communication, we can connect with whomever we want from wherever we want. If you so choose, you can have friends from all over the world while never stepping foot outside your front door (editor’s note: not recommended).

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3 Shortcuts to Faster, Easier Change

It takes time to make positive changes in our lives. Often, it’s not the external circumstances which are hardest to change – but our internal state. It only takes a few seconds to hand in your resignation letter and quit your job, but it can take months of slowly building your courage (and your emergency fund) before you get to that point.

And all too often, we feel as though we’re not making any real progress at all. Perhaps we’re trying to change a habit, but keep slipping back into old ways. Maybe we’re not sure what we want to change – but we know that we’re just not getting all that we could from life. Often, change can feel like one step forwards and two steps back.

Wouldn’t it be great if you had a shortcut to change? If you could get a clear map of where you need to go – and keep up the motivation needed to get there?

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You Are Already Whole

Some of us have had a tough go of it in life. We have had experiences, maybe starting at a very young age, that have affected our self-esteem, relationships, and ability to succeed in life. We might be dealing with depression or anxiety or have difficulty coping. These experiences are commonly called “wounds.” We feel damaged and strive to heal through psychotherapy and reading self-help books. We think that if we fix the broken parts of ourselves, we will eventually feel normal again.

The assumption embedded in this focus on self-improvement is that happiness (or contentment, peace) is a state that we might attain some time in the future once all our problems are solved. It is easy to forget, but essential to remember that: we are already whole.

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Healing Emotional Wounds

Are you wounded?

Have you ever tried to put some water on a fresh wound? If you have, you must have felt some pain. Water, which can never harm you if you were not injured, has just made you feel some pain when it touched your wound, simply because when we develop a wound we tend to become over sensitive to factors that didn’t bother us before.

The same goes for emotional wounds: What if you have some emotional wounds that are making you over-sensitive to factors that other people don’t even notice? All of these small things that are bothering you may be harmless on their own, but they hurt you because they touch your wounds just like the water did.

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6 Steps to Breaking Bad Habits

The rule of Habit: Every time you re-perform an activity it gets easier and easier to perform; to the point where virtually no mental effort will eventually be involved in the re-performance of the activity. The opposite of this is also true, whenever you refrain from an activity it becomes increasingly more difficult to perform, until you have virtually no desire to perform the activity.

We know that everything that appears in our life first originates from our thoughts. If a habit is in our life, we know the parents of that habit was, and continues to be our thoughts.

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