Do you ever wonder how you got where you are? Have you considered the circumstances and events that brought you to this point in your life?
In his book, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, Aron Ralston recounts the steps and choices he made that led him ultimately, to a life-threatening situation that changed his life. If anything had been different, it could have resulted in an entirely different outcome.
Picture yourself for a moment. It’s 12:30 am on the 1st January. You and your friends are cooling off from the countdown and start thinking about the future. What goals do you have? Are they short or long-term? How achievable are they?
It’s not just when setting New Year’s Resolutions, either. We tend to focus on what the end goal looks like rather than the journey required to get there. It’s all well and good picturing yourself in your new apartment or job, but not focusing enough on the small wins required to reach that stage could prove detrimental in the long run. After all, day-to-day life doesn’t consist of big, life-changing actions. It’s the ‘grind’ – small, consistent actions that propel you towards bigger targets.
So, to keep those in mind, it’s worth remembering the difference between short-term and long-term gratification. Let’s say your goal is to get in shape for the summer. It’s challenging to turn down a delicious takeaway, for example, because the long-term gratification gained from choosing the healthy option is too far into the distance to perceive and benefit from. Short-term gratification – the taste and ease that comes with a takeaway – is immediate and therefore more desirable for your present self.
What do successful people all have in common? Money? Fame? Fantastic lifestyles? Maybe! But one thing that really sets them apart from everybody else is failure. That’s right! Successful people embrace failure as a way to succeed.
It might seem counter-intuitive to think failure can aid in the path to success, but when you hear the reasons why successful people find failure to be helpful, you might start to rethink how you view failure in general.
Life is full of challenges. Not everything we attempt or wish for will materialize the way we’d hoped. But seeing failure and adversity as part of the process can help put things into perspective.
Business woman Arianna Huffington said,
“We need to accept that we won’t always make the right decisions, that we’ll screw up royally sometimes – – understanding that failure is not the opposite of success, it’s part of success.”
Being resilient is not necessarily something you’re born with, but you CAN learn it. Even if you didn’t have the environment or opportunity to build skills of resilience as a child, it’s not too late.
In the pantheon of self-improvement buzzwords, ‘empowerment’ feels among the boldest. To empower is to literally give power to yourself. It feels intimidating in its grandiosity – as if the act of personal empowerment requires a life-changing act (or something to remember, at least.) It may feel difficult, then, to actively push for a personally empowered life. However, misvaluing its importance in the grand self-improvement scheme of things is an error not worth committing. To personally empower yourself allows you to organically grow confidence as you can firmly say yes, I did choose myself today. Achievements become more likely when you instil empowering levels of confidence in your mindset.
How are things working for you? Is your life going the way you thought it would?
If you’re like most people, there are things that could be better. There are most likely some areas of your life that you’d like to change or improve upon.
So, if you want to make changes, how would you go about it? What could you do to implement new thoughts, feelings and experiences?
Well, if you want to change your life, one way to do it is to change the way you think. Here are five mindset shifts that may help you to do just that.
Much like our memory of it, time ebbs and flows; its pacing is irregular and distorted. To make the most out of a day, then, time management is a potent weapon in the fight against unproductivity. Unprioritised, a lack of time management leads to days wasted, incomplete work and damaged self-esteem.
It can feel difficult to manage your time for optimum productivity – errands, work, and travelling are things most people do frequently that eat into the day. However, it’s not all doom and gloom.
Developing an efficient method for managing time is the easiest way to hack your internal system and maximise productivity. That starts with the simple tips the rest of this article will outline.
A productivity-based mindset is the high achiever’s bread and butter. When everything boils down to day-to-day life – the ‘grind’ – productivity is the beating heart of everything we do and produce. Every Miles Davis song, any groundbreaking new medicine and any shiny new skyscraper is the result of productive people coming together to work and achieve great things.
A low drive for productivity is a challenge pretty much everyone faces at some point in life. Letting it fester can drag the most ambitious person down to the depths of dissatisfaction. Typically, the more productive we are, the better about ourselves we feel. That sense of accomplishment is unrivalled and does wonders for our self-esteem levels, so when we’re unable to replicate it consistently, it can affect more than just work. Errands such as food shopping require productive energy to carry you from one task to the next. Without it, things can pile up and weigh you down.
Do you believe that setting goals is an important ingredient in success? Or to put it another way, how successful do you think you would be if you didn’t have goals? If you got up every day and allowed your day to unfold without direction, how do you think it would turn out?
Although having free time to relax and just let whatever happens form your day can be nice on occasion, most of the time if you want to reach your dreams and desires, you have to make an effort. And that effort involves goals and planning.
Life is like navigating a journey. And the first step in any journey is knowing where you want to go.
Most people have heard the phrase, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.” The idea, of course, is to make the best of what is dealt to you. If things aren’t quite what you wanted, try to make it into something else.
Although it may not be quite as simple as it sounds, it can be possible to change a negative thought or situation into a positive one. By practicing techniques that help you to alter your perspective and see things in a different way, you may be able to turn your “lemons” into “lemonade.”
Artist Mary Engelbreit said,
“If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.”
Let’s take a look at a few ways to reframe the negatives into positives.
