Personal Development
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7 Ways Happiness Can Improve Your Health
Happiness is an important ingredient in a healthy life. Many studies indicate that happiness plays a major role in your health, whether it’s living a healthy lifestyle or reducing the amount of chronic pain – happiness is the solution to many health woes. 1. Encourages Healthy Living According to studies, happier people are almost twice as likely to eat more fresh vegetables than people who state that they are not happy. Eating more produce will automatically improve your health over eating a diet high in processed food. 2. Provides Energy When you tend to eat better, you tend to end up with more energy. It’s hard to imagine it but…
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10 Benefits of Meditation
Why do so many people use and promote meditation? The answer is because it works. Meditation is successful for many reasons. Meditation Decreases Anxiety Some people have what is known as too much fight or flight syndrome. Their gut instincts tell them they are in danger when they are really not. Meditation can help ease anxiety. There’s a neural pathway which leads to the part of our brains in which we need to determine whether or not we are in real, imminent danger. For some, those connections are so strong we feel we are in danger when we are not. When taking on the practice of meditating, this connection can…
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How to Nurture Creative Thinking
There might be times you find yourself lacking in creativity. The cause for your lack of creativity can be for different reasons. It could be you haven’t been using your creative muscles regularly and they’ve become hidden. There are many tricks you can use to improve your creative thinking. One of the best ways to keep yourself inspired to create every day is to have rituals in place that you use regularly and routinely. Having routines that inspire you conditions your brain to tap into your creativity easily. Some examples of a ritual might be to Read in the morning. Listen to music every day. Meditating for 5 minutes. Deep…
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A Guide to Dealing with the Growing Tiredness & Boredom of the New Normal
This pandemic is no longer an exciting (but scary) novelty. We’re a couple months into this lockdown and crisis, and it’s starting to wear on many of us. We experience it as boredom, tiredness, exhaustion. We experience it as ongoing burden, and can’t wait for it to be over. We lose patience, and want to do anything else but this. That all makes sense. It’s also exactly why we have difficulty sticking to habit changes, to long-term deep commitments, to ongoing projects and long-running challenges. It’s one thing when things are new, novel, exciting, fresh. It’s a completely different thing when things are boring, dull, tiring, burdensome. What would it…
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Don’t Let Labels Limit You
How many different assessments have you taken that classified you as having a certain personality type, strengths, and so on? Maybe you did a Myers-Briggs assessment, the Strengths Finder test, the Kolbe test, or other assessments, and they told you something about yourself. Perhaps this started with learning your astrological sign and discovering that you were supposed to be a certain way because of when and where you were born. When I was in high school, I took a test called the Kuder Occupational Interest Survey. It said that career-wise, I was most aligned with becoming a computer programmer. Second was a forester. And third was a math teacher. I…
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Defining Happiness for Yourself
The dictionary defines happiness as “the state of being happy.” Unfortunately that definition doesn’t even begin to give you any clarity about the idea, feeling of, or state of happiness. So, how do you define happiness? Let’s look at some different things that happiness can be, but realize that in truth, happiness is in the mind of the beholder. Your Needs are Met – When a person is happy, they usually don’t even have any needs that aren’t being met to the level they want them to be met. It doesn’t mean that someone is not having a hard time it’s all about how you make what you have fill…
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Embrace the Unknown to Grow
You’ve probably heard the saying by Roy T. Bennet, “You never change your life until you step out of your comfort zone; change begins at the end of your comfort zone.” It’s true that during the times you step outside your element, you experience who you really are. It’s about facing our fears and doing things we are passionate about. We often live our lives with the “I cannot,” “I don’t want to,” or “it’s too difficult” thoughts that keep us stuck and unhappy. It’s only until we realize that when we stop letting our negative thoughts control us, that we find our true self. Stepping into the unknown is…
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The Joy of Bone Exhausting Work
Over the last week, my family and I moved to a new home, away from San Diego and into the suburbs east of Los Angeles (to be near family). As usual, we did all the moving ourselves, and it was exhausting! We don’t have a crazy amount of stuff for a family our size, but all of our furniture seems to be made of incredibly dense, heavy wood. Even with three strong sons helping me move, we were all wiped out after one day of loading a huge moving truck, and another day of unloading. Sore and tired, to the bone. I’m still recovering. But I have to say, this…
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Give Yourself a Competitive Edge
Everyone wants to have a competitive edge in business and in life – something that makes them stand out from the crowd and that increases the likelihood of success. Learn to leverage strategic thinking and your mindset and you can create a competitive edge for yourself. Why Competitive Edge Is Important In today’s market, there are millions of products and services available to take care of the needs of individuals and businesses alike. Being able to identify and exploit the features and benefits of your product or service and show how it is better or different from your competition is your competitive edge. It will provide your business with the…
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How To Be Accountable To Yourself
Using an accountability buddy to help you consistently stick with a habit or work on a goal is fine as a temporary measure to get yourself into the flow of action, but it’s also a crutch. Ultimately you want to be accountable to yourself first and foremost, not to a buddy, team, company, organization, app, or external entity. That may sound counter-intuitive, especially if you’re accustomed to external accountability. External factors can increase your sense of accountability because you don’t want to let other people down. You want to do your part to pitch in. That’s understandable. But externals don’t last. At some point you’ll move on from the school,…
