by Opator | Mar 10, 2022 | Changing Personal Habits
Thanksgiving is a beautiful holiday, but there are many reasons to be grateful all year.
Be Thankful All Year
I love Thanksgiving. It is a great feeling to be thankful for everything in our life when everybody else is doing the same thing. This enormous mass of grateful energy coming together brings up lots of beautiful feelings in everybody. Thanksgiving is a day of peace, good feelings, good food, and good interactions with family. People try not to judge each other as much as they do on different days. Even newspapers and television have good stories to tell to conjure warm, positive, and thankful feelings in us.
Many people celebrate this day just because it is a tradition; it is something that everyone in society and their family has been doing for a while, so they also get on the bandwagon. I used to be like that. When I was younger, I celebrated Thanksgiving because everybody else did, but even if I wanted to, To be thankful and feel grateful for the essential things in life was something I didn’t know. I grew up thinking that material things could give me happiness; I believed that having more money in the future would make me a happy and grateful person.
After many pleasant and unpleasant experiences, I learned that material happiness is excellent but short-lasting. I also learned that daily gratitude is required for lifetime pleasure. So, though I still love Thanksgiving Day today, and I am extra grateful on that day, I strive to be thankful.
More money and more material stuff won’t make you happier. Neither will more recognition, more college degrees, and more awards. You may mistakenly believe they will. After all, it is nice to be recognized for something good that you did or to receive lots of money regularly. But these are temporary. They will fill a temporary gap, and once the excitement of the moment is gone, you have to go back to “chopping wood and hauling water.”
On the other hand, being happy and grateful for the things you have and for who you are NOW will create an unbelievable snowball of positive and grateful energy that will bring you much material and non-material wealth. It doesn’t mean you can’t have dreams and goals and want your life to become better and better. You can still have all of that, but you will only GET all of that if you are thankful now.
Here is a starter list on the path to being thankful all year long:
- Be Thankful for Your Health: health is the essential item of all; you can’t fully enjoy what life offers without health. You may earn more if you wish. But if you have lost your health, sometimes you cannot regain it.
- Be Thankful for Being Alive in a Beautiful World: though we hear much bad news on television, radio, etc., the world is full of incredible people that are giving and grateful and do beautiful deeds.
- Be Thankful for Having the Capability of Accomplishing Anything You Want: this is true for all human beings; if you think you can, you will.
- Be Thankful for Little Things: be thankful for being able to sleep on your bed, to live where you live, to play or talk to your children, to have a car, do not have a car, to eat good food, to be able to walk, to be able to think and reason, etc. Gratitude for the little things can greatly enhance your life.
These four ways of being thankful are just the very beginning. Start a gratitude notebook, and every day, write five things you are grateful for. Make sure to share this with others. Then, every year on Thanksgiving Day, you can be thankful for how grateful your entire year has been.
“Thanksgiving points to a key lesson from the Law of Attraction: Practice gratitude. Counting our blessings increases our pleasure and energizes us. It’s physiologically impossible to be stressed/negative and thankful simultaneously. “Thanking your employees may excite and engage them.” – John Assaraf.
by Opator | Mar 10, 2022 | Changing Personal Habits
The start of a new year heralds many New Year’s Resolutions that are likely to go unkept. So beat the odds with these tips for keeping New Year’s Resolutions.
Millions of people throughout the globe make New Year’s resolutions. However, while New Year’s Resolutions are meant to be personal goals that help individuals be better people, unmet resolutions often leave people feeling as though they have failed themselves.
Keeping New Year’s Resolutions can be made easier with planning and self-checking throughout the year. These simple tips will help make your new year goals more achievable.
Set Specific New Year’s Resolutions
You need to establish clear objectives to know when you’ve reached them. For example, rather than losing weight or saving money, aim to lose 30kg or save $5,000. It will help you keep your target in sight and provide further motivation to continue with your resolution.
Resolve to Be More Realistic
Unrealistic aspirations lead to failure and disappointment. So while it is great to dream big, it is also essential to bear in mind the hurdles you may face while achieving your goal. For example, don’t aim to lose 100kg or save $20,000 as you are likely to become overwhelmed by the task and fall off the wagon.
Share Your New Year’s Resolution with Someone
By letting a friend or family member in on your goal, you will be establishing your cheer squad. This person will be able to check in on your progress from time to time, spur you on when you are losing faith in yourself, and help you celebrate your success at the end of it all. Then, of course, you may repay the favor by assisting someone with their resolution.
Take Baby Steps Toward Your Goal
Many resolutions are made to break years of bad habits such as smoking, spending, or overeating. It can take a long time to shake these habits, so begin by setting small goals such as “not to buy new clothes for a week,” then a fortnight, and then a month. By taking smaller steps, you will experience small wins regularly and feel better about yourself.
Reward Yourself for Meeting Smaller Goals
As you achieve the small wins mentioned above, reward yourself for your hard work with something that will help keep you motivated. For example, if your New Year resolves to lose weight, celebrate your efforts with new clothes; opt for a lovely dinner (without the alcohol) if you’re trying to quit drinking. And if you’re trying to save money, reward yourself with something cheap or free but no less enjoyable, such as an hour-long bubble bath and home facial.
New Year’s Resolutions are set to boost our self-esteem and pride in our accomplishments. Adhering to these suggestions increases your chances of sticking to your commitment and enjoying a pleasant, productive new year.
by Opator | Mar 10, 2022 | Changing Personal Habits
Pursuing Your Dreams
What is a dream? No, not your dreams. I’m talking about the ones that happen when we are awake. Dreams are those things that we would love to accomplish in our lives.
The problem with dreams these days is that they are hard to make into reality. No one dreams about something that is easily accomplished. For example, no one ever dreams of walking down the sidewalk because that is something that we do every day. There is nothing extraordinary about it. Hence, it cannot be a dream.
What I wonder is, are dreams too hard, or are we too lazy. What I mentioned before is accurate. Objectives are not easily accomplished, so many plans stay dreams and never become realities. We like to think of achieving something complicated, but we shrug it off as too hard when doing it.
Why don’t more individuals follow their passions?
Most of us lack the discipline to make a dream a reality. So many young boys, including myself, have dreamed of playing professional sports. We used to go out on the court or the field and imagine ourselves playing a professional game and making that game-changing play. Yet, when it came to working hard at the game to be better than anyone else around us, we quickly gave up at the first sign of opposition.
How many adults are the same way? How many of us have a dream job that we wanted and pursued, but when the first person in the industry told us, “no,” we quickly threw in the towel and settled seeking a paying job? How many of us have dreamed of looking a certain way, but when it came to eating less and exercising more, we quickly gave up and said it was all hopeless?
Dreaming is ok. We do it. It is only human to imagine our world how we would like it to be. What is wrong is to quit on your dream at the first sign of opposition. M.J. was dismissed from his tenth-grade squad. Imagine if he had stopped in his dreams as most of us do. We would never have seen one of the greatest players ever play the basketball game if he had left at the first sign of opposition. Don’t quit on your dreams!
by Opator | Mar 10, 2022 | Changing Personal Habits
Imprecise New Year’s resolutions are made to be broken. Design a personal development program using SMART goal setting for a solution that works.
New Year’s resolutions seem broken: the most popular fail. Yet, they are the most desired changes in oneself and the most complex changes to stick to because they deal with ingrained habits or personality quirks. Give up? Laugh it off? If a resolution is essential, the intelligent thing to do is do a little goal-setting.
Top New Year’s Resolutions
According to USA.gov, the following are popular new year resolutions.
- Less alcohol
- Educate yourself
- Better job
- Exercise
- Weight loss
- Budgeting
- De-stress
- Don’t smoke
- Save cash
- Travel
- Become a volunteer
Readers are sure to have their variations to add to this list, but if they are phrased in this way, they are bound to fail.
Don’t Design a Poor Personal Development Programme.
The above New Year’s resolutions are woolly, imprecise wishes because they are do not incorporate sound goal-setting features. For example, “I want to get fit or get a better job” carries no more mental weight or a sense of purpose than “I want to make six million dollars and retire.” So they will always be on a wish list, doomed to fail because the motivation is not there or the means to achieve or measure results.
If making a New Year’s resolution means anything more than breaking open a fortune cookie and reading the slogan, it must be approached in an entirely different, purposeful way. The above statements could be turned into a great personal development program.
Setting Goals for New Year
Don’t wait for someone at the New Year family celebration to say, “What’s your New Year resolution?” That’s when the imprecise, poor goal setting happens. Instead, prepare for the moment right now. The better the preparation and motivation, the better the chance of the resolution working. If it matters, pay attention. Applying the SMART principle is a time-honored process for goal setting that seminar presenters and personal trainers trot out. The idea may be old-hat, but use it to the personal development goal chosen for a New Year’s resolution, and it will help.
SMART Goal Setting the New Year’s Resolution
The SMART principle means applying the acronym to any project. Make a decision
- Specific
- Measurable
- Achievable
- Relevant and Realistic
- Time-framed
A glance at the list of resolutions published by USA.gov reveals that none meet these criteria. To illustrate, let’s use the SMART approach to losing weight. Of course, some settings may have to be adjusted as progress is made down the list.
To make this Goal specific: set an amount: I want to lose 10 kgs
Make the Goal measurable: Weight loss is one of the easy things to measure – select a date with the bathroom scales. Decide how often and when progress checks will be made.
Make the Goal achievable: If you want to lose 5 kg in a week, common sense says, it’s not an attainable goal. Instead, a more extended period of lowered expectations might be required. Likewise, it is not achievable if other aspects of the dieter’s life, such as poor health, might preclude dieting.
Make the Goal relevant and realistic: if the person who wants to lose 10 kgs already only weighs 50 kg, it’s not pertinent or practical – it is just plain risky.
Make the goal time-framed: This is important. Set a realistic time frame – say 20 weeks – to lose 10 kgs. By all means, set a longer time frame – one year to lose 10 kgs. Intermediate goals and progress checks have become more critical now. If the dieter is satisfied to lose 10 kilograms over one full year, it makes sense to ensure that approximately 1 kg is lost each month.
In addition to the SMART principle, it is a great idea to force yourself to examine progress at particular times and have a failsafe mechanism in place. For example, have a friend circle a date on their calendar when they must demand your results and help you achieve the Goal if you faltered.
Re-state New Years Resolutions as Measurable Goals
The waffly resolution Lose weight could become: I will lose 5 kilos by December 24, 2011, measuring and charting my weight loss on Friday each week. If I find on February 31 that I have not lost a whole kilo, I will seek help from my friend Jenny.
Perhaps this all seems like too much trouble. Nevertheless, it is essential to remember that people make new years resolutions because they are dissatisfied with some aspect of their lives. So what’s the point of complaining year after year and not taking intelligent steps to make a change. This year’s resolution could be the one that changes your life for good.
by Opator | Mar 10, 2022 | Changing Personal Habits
We can’t wait until we experience a massive amount of pain to get motivated to change.
We are all conditioned to move towards happiness and away from pain and discomfort. People hire therapists to find out what is wrong with them and receive treatment for their problems. In my experience, clients rarely lack knowledge of what is wrong with them or what is needed to improve. Self-motivation to change is always the limiting factor.
My transition from Behavioral Therapy to Professional Coaching was a natural and concise improvement resulting in quicker and more sustainable results for my clients. Coaching is action-oriented, which always results in goal achievement, whether the client and I deal with addictions, anger management, or obesity. My philosophy is that we devote 5% of our energy to the problem and 95% to the solution. Unfortunately, I have found that therapy is often the other way around, which explains why many people remain in therapy for years instead of days or weeks.
Awaken to your Potential and Thrive
People struggle with taking consistent action – applying what they know regularly. We are all self-driven by nature but have grown mentally lazy due to faulty acquired mental programming. Since birth, we have been taught to depend on people and things instead of ourselves. People are also conditioned to believe what someone tells them, often accepting it as fact at face value without verifying themselves. We forget about our intuition – our internal truth gauge that is available at every moment to direct our lives and verify whether someone or something is correct.
We do not have to wait until we experience a massive amount of pain to get motivated to change. A promising sign of emotional maturity is recognizing when a life adjustment is needed and taking action immediately. Pain is a great motivator, no question about that; There are times when we don’t get a second chance, like when we have a heart attack because we didn’t move for a long time.
Change starts and ends with self-honesty, which is born of self-love. Self-love is inherent; however, we forget who we are because of our acquired emotional and mental baggage. So, regardless of what people think of you, it’s essential to believe positively about yourself. Once you get beyond just intellectually understanding this and come to know this as truth, that you are the source of your psychosis, change starts to happen.
We must wholeheartedly take full responsibility for ourselves and realize there is no benefit in living below our potential. The momentary comfort that we experience by remaining complacent and content causes inevitable regression as growth is a continual process of forwarding motion.
Make a promise to live your best life and reach your full potential because when we live a low-quality life, we affect ourselves and the rest of the world.
