it ends today …

“A very small percentage of the people in this world will actually experience and live today. So many people will be stuck on another day, another time that traumatized them and caused them to spiritually stutter so they miss out on this day.”
Steve Maraboli

Stop it right now!

That’s right stop it.

Stop waiting for your life to begin.   Many people, people like you are just waiting for something to change.   Waiting, waiting and waiting.   Nothing happens, tomorrow will be the same as today if you don’t take action.

Life doesn’t happen to you, you make life happen.

I work with people who are stuck in a “can I do it tomorrow pattern?”.     When does tomorrow really appear?   Never, it is really easy to put it off again.

What dreams, what desires, or what plans do you have that are waiting for tomorrow?

An idea needs so energy so that it can blossom, that energy is called activation energy.   It is the same amount of energy that it takes to spring out of bed once the alarm has gone off.    How do you get out of bed?    Does it take multiple slaps of the snooze button before your toes touch the floor?   It does for a lot of people.   Hitting that snooze alarm over and over again is like waiting for tomorrow to come.

Do you believe you have the potential to do something new with your life?   Do you think that you can do whatever you really put your mind to?   Most people can do what they really want to do.    If you have a big enough WHY  you can do just about anything.   A big WHY followed by ACTION will generate a result.   Is the WHY big enough, will it drive you through tough times to achieve the result you want?

It is like going on a diet.   The WHY is to be healthy, alive and invigorated.   What happens is that the results are slow to come and then the belief that you can lose weight shrinks, and that shrinking belief lowers your potential to achieve a result so you quit taking action and the result is you don’t lose any weight.   It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.   Lose at a diet and you believe that you could lose at everything and as long as you believe that it becomes your truth.

Wouldn’t you like to turn that around?   Would you like to complete those things you attempt to start and create a positive momentum of great results?   You would wouldn’t you.

A flower blooms because it has a big enough WHY.   It’s your turn now.   Start today, start living the life you really want to live.

what would you do?

“I cannot teach anybody anything. I can only make them think”
― Socrates

Imagine that you have everything you wanted or needed, that your future is safe and secure, that your finances, health and relationships are exactly what you want.   What would you do?

What would you do?

Many people have three fundamental life questions.

Did I love?

Did I matter?

Did I make a difference?

How would you answer those questions?   How do you want to answer those questions?
Maybe it would look something like this,

overtaken by stress

“One channel is the Stress Channel and the other is the Peace Channel. We really do have a choice about what we listen to. The Peace Channel can only be heard when we are present in the moment, when we are in the now. To tune in to the Peace Channel, all we have to do is be, experience,notice, and naturally respond to what is arising in the moment. To tune into the Stress Channel, we just have to start believing our thoughts again. […] Eliminating stress is just a matter of tuning out the negative and tuning in the positive and just being, experiencing, and dancing to that music instead of the mind’s chatter.”
― Gina Lake

The tension built and grew until the language went foul.   I was listening to a person unload his stress through the use of language that wasn’t beneficial to his cause.   It was just more frustration piled upon frustration and the stress overwhelmed his ability to control his emotions and language.   The storm started small and just grew and grew and the more he talked the louder and more angry he became.   His anger didn’t solve the problem.

Anger is an outlet for stress.   It is a way of releasing the energy produced by the hormones that are leaking into the body.   In most places the sudden eruption of anger is not welcome or seen as a positive event.   This person is going to be looking for a job and his past haunts him.   Nightmares wreck his sleep, and tide of anger swells as he confronts images of a war he participated in.   The images won’t leave him alone.  What does stress really cost?

Others are swimming in a sea of work, unrelenting tides of email, and urgent issues build into a wave of stress reducing confidence, results and energy.  Imagine trying to go to sleep when thoughts of unfinished business race through the mind begging for some kind of answer.   Where is the joy in that kind of work?

What is your stress level?   What are you doing about it?

Your work or events in your life come to you four different ways

1. Urgent and important (get it done now or else)

2. Important but non urgent (this is the sweet spot )

3.  Urgent and unimportant (much of the email you get)

4. Unimportant and not urgent (maybe TV)

What is eating at you?   What is stopping you from getting what you want out of life?

To learn more about how stress impacts life, take a look at this video clip.

choices

“I won’t tell you that the world matters nothing, or the world’s voice, or the voice of society. They matter a good deal. They matter far too much. But there are moments when one has to choose between living one’s own life, fully, entirely, completely—or dragging out some false, shallow, degrading existence that the world in its hypocrisy demands. You have that moment now. Choose!”
― Oscar Wilde

You have a choice.

It is that you don’t want to do it, it is just that you don’t do what you want.   Our habits inhibit us from making the choices that allow us to grow and to experience  new things.   Our brains are so intent on staying the same and staying safe that making a choice to change for the better takes a supreme effort and most people are unwilling to choose change over being the same.

Our choices will dictate how we feel about a day, overwhelmed, satisfied or overjoyed.   For some people the day defines their mood, others their mood defines their day.  How do you choose your mood?   Why not be satisfied with an average day?   A day without the tiresome worry of doing more, a day that is filled with just enough, an average day.   What would it take to create an average day rather than a day stuffed with too much activity?  It is a choice.  What do you choose to make important?

Time management is about choices.   Some people are stuck with so much to do that they become depressed.   They seem to be putting all their effort into tasks that are neither important or urgent, it just feels that they are.   People that know how to master their time, focus on doing two things, the important and urgent, and the important and non-urgent tasks.  What do you focus on?

Here’s a simple way to decide what to do, use the ABC rule.   All things that are very important are done first as in if you don’t do them bad things happen, those are “A” choices.  Then there are “B” choices,  good things happen when I do these.  And there is the “C”  choice, these are the, nice to do when you have the time.  Where do people put their time in effort into, the “C” choices, often waiting for bad things to happen before they address those “A” choices, and neglect the “B” choices, the choices they really want to make.

Barry Schwartz (TED) thinks we have too many choices.  What do you think?

Create your own happiness project

Gretchen Rubin the author of “The Happiness Project” has a new happy project ready to launch in American stores, “Happiness at Home”.    Projects that you can do to increase your own happiness.   Happiness isn’t something that happens to us, it is something we create within ourselves.

Listen to Gretchen provide some happiness hints.  Getting started on being happier is something that you can do and it doesn’t cost a lot.   Becoming happier might mean giving something up, something that is energy draining.

Maybe your one of those people who for whatever reason gets stuck and delays doing the work you know you should do.   How do you get out of that rut of procrastination, here’s a tip.

The idea is to generate some fun ways to get excited about life everyday.  Small happiness moments that can elevate your mood and your view of life.    Thinking positive or in positive ways cultivates creative activity and creative activity provides benefits.   Negative thinking is often destructive and energy robbing and doesn’t generate much in benefits.   So why not change your way of thinking and put more time into building momentum for creative events in your life.

Start generating more happiness in your life today.   If you can’t do it by yourself hire a coach to work with you so that you can start living that life you really want to live.   Happiness matters.