Showing posts with label self-improvement. Show all posts
Showing posts with label self-improvement. Show all posts

Sunday, October 04, 2009

Life Changing Habits!

Most of the time we do things, say things unconsciously and then regret uttering them…

Here’s a simple method of turning your life around - Make these Breakthrough habits part of your life and positive things will begin rapidly. no warrantees though and you can’t sue since this is free advice! However, it has high degrees of certainties that if followed, in general, provides desirable results… and perhaps bring you what you’ve been missing.

Practice these Habits and watch what happens.

The First Habit

Let go of your negative feelings. Pay attention to what you’re saying, thinking and doing. Watch all the time. Stay awake to what’s happening. Be on the lookout all the time. When you see some negative thought, you stop it. When you see some negative feeling, you stop it. When you see you’re taking some negative action, you stop it.

If what you’re thinking, feeling, saying or doing is negative, end it. Stop it.

If I hand you a red-hot metal rod you drop it in a split second, right? Negative feelings, words, thoughts, actions, all those are hot metal rods. Drop them. Negative, not-liking, disapproval, negativity is burning up your life just like a red-hot fireplace metal rod burns up your hand.

Drop the negative feelings like you would drop a hot red metal rod.

Here’s the test. Is it negative? Then, it’s negative and hurting your life. Drop it.

The Second Habit

Hold in mind what you want. Hold in mind means what you keep in your mind or visualize. Hold in mind means the thoughts and feelings that occupy your mind all the time.

You get what you hold in mind. Whatever is occupying your mind, your thoughts and your feelings, is what you manifest in the material world. It’s the law of attraction.

Positive attracts positive, negative attracts negative. Love attracts love. Negative attracts more negative. Positivity is the same energy as positive, success, abundance, health, money, peace.

If you hold in mind “I can’t,” you’re right, you can’t. If you hold in mind “I don’t have it,” you’re right, you don’t have it and you aren’t going to have it. You’re holding the wrong thing in mind. You’re holding in mind what you don’t want.

Fake it until you make it. Stop thinking you don’t have it. Hold in your mind only what you want. Prove it to yourself. Make a good effort. What do you have to lose? If I’m right you get to have everything.

If I’m wrong, you’re no worse off. Here is a little hint: If it doesn’t work, it’s because your mind talked you out of doing it. Your mind talked you out of making a decision. Your mind talked you out of being determined and persistent. You (like everyone else on the planet) have spent your entire life collecting negative feelings.

Here’s another hint: You can easily see what you’re holding in your mind. Watch what you’re saying all the time. Watch what you’re thinking. And, you can see what you’re holding in your mind by paying attention to your feelings.

Now remember, this is not about affirmations. This is not about hanging signs around your house and car. This is about holding in mind what you want. You do that by dropping thoughts, words or feelings which express what you don’t want.

The Third Habit

Make a commitment to be positive and loving, in spite of what’s happening. Decide: “I’m going to be positive and loving in spite of whatever is happening.” Make that your motto.

Be positive in spite of what happens. You live your life automatically reacting with emotions you learned as small kid.

You’re not a kid anymore (at least I hope so, if you have the patience of reading this!), but you’re still doing the same thing. End the habit of automatically reacting. It’s just a decision. Something happens that seems to be negative. You react. You leave the present moment and you go off. Does that ever solve anything?

Anger, breaking into hysteria, feeling bad because someone gave you a dirty look or disagreed with you? Negative, negative behavior doesn’t do anything for you except make you more negative and non-loving.

It never solves anything. It never helps anything. Perhaps you know that. Perhaps you even agree with me, because you have experienced it yourself many, many times. But we all like to avoid a decision. However, I strongly recommend that you make a decision - I am going to be loving and positive in spite of whatever happens.

Remember the hot metal rod? Begin by letting go of the hot metal rod called negative, non-loving reactions. Try it. Prove it to yourself. Be positive and loving in spite of whatever happens, whatever is going on, whatever they’re doing or saying. Be positive and loving and watch what happens.

When you’re positive and loving in spite of whatever, you’re moving over to the side of love. Love conquers all. Love transforms. Love is the answer.

Try to be positive and loving in spite of whatever happens. Should I be saying that – “Try”? As Yoda once told Skywalker – there is no try… you either do it or don’t.

I bet, you will be one of the happiest and you will have most of the things that you want in life. Of course I am not some crazy nut telling you that be positive and think that you are going to get a million dollars tomorrow and perhaps in a month or two, you would get it. Of course not. The world, the universe does not work that way. One has to direct conscious thought and then follow up with relevant actions to get from point A to point B. what positive thinking helps with is ensuring that we do not get discouraged if the journey from point A to Point B happens to long, tiring and arduous.

Prove it to yourself. I always thought good luck was something mysterious that happened to people for no good reason. Now perhaps I am beginning to understand.

Monday, September 21, 2009

The clutter in our lives

As sat quietly in my living room this afternoon, the thought occurred to me - Why would anyone want to carry around needless burdens? That's what clutter is. It drains one's energy, slows one's progress, and eats away at our limited time and space. Left unabated, it spreads all over one's life becoming emotional, mental, and physical clutter.

Have you gone through several iterations of de-cluttering, only to feel like you really didn’t make much progress? The likely reason for this is that our lives are filled with clutter, rather than us just having a few areas of clutter.

Our lives tend to accumulate clutter in every corner – on our desks, in our drawers, on our shelves at home, in our closets, in our computers, even in the activities that we do and our relationships!

We start out in life unfulfilled, with nothing, and we start acquiring stuff. At some point, we peak (the top of the curve) when we have enough. That’s the magic thing that we’re always looking for: enough.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the endowment effect.

The endowment effect (also known as divestiture aversion) is a hypothesis that people value a good or service more once their property right to it has been established. In other words, people place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not. In one experiment, people demanded a higher price for a coffee mug that had been given to them but put a lower price on one they did not yet own. The endowment effect was described as inconsistent with standard economic theory which asserts that a person's willingness to pay (WTP) for a good should be equal to their willingness to accept (WTA) compensation to be deprived of the good.

The effect was first theorized by Richard Thaler. It is a specific form, linked to ownership, of status quo bias. Although it differs from loss aversion, a prospect theory concept, those two biases reinforce each other in cases when the asset price has fallen compared to the owner's buying price. This bias has also a few similarities with commitment and attachment.

Loss aversion, by the way, was first proposed as an explanation for the endowment effect - the fact that people place a higher value on a good that they own than on an identical good that they do not own - by Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler (1990). Loss aversion and the endowment effect lead to a violation of the Coase theorem - that "the allocation of resources will be independent of the assignment of property rights when costless trades are possible"

Sigh… here I go again, getting too deep into the technicalities of what and why we clutter our lives with stuff we don’t often need or need to hang on to… we start acquiring from the day we are able to and that age is pretty low for humans…

But, of course we don’t stop acquiring. We enter the zone when we begin having more than enough, and therefore begin accumulating clutter. And most of us accumulate it all of our lives. The sad thing is, we don’t just have more stuff than we need, and we now have stuff we don’t need that demands our attention in some way: we have to maintain it, fix it, continue to make payments on it, store it,

So we start becoming less fulfilled instead of more so.

I can give numerous examples, but the most relevant one seems to be the thousands of books, some going back to my college days of over 10 years ago which I still hoard or my wife’s jewelry: enough to start a store. Closets full of clothes I haven’t worn in a long while, and so on.

Clutter is usually thought of as things we acquire or accumulate. And, when you stop and think about, the clutter goes beyond purchases: we also clutter our lives with activities that are of no real value to us – like watching serials which serve no practical purpose except to pass the time. I guess, most of us end up doing it unconsciously. The things we don't do, but should do, clutter our mind with apprehension and stress. Unwritten letters, unpaid bills, unanswered phone calls, and unattended tasks and obligations take their toll on our lives. They create a slow energy drain and are as distracting as an endless humming in our head. We can free ourselves from such needless headaches by taking the time to do whatever needs to be done. We can't do everything, but we should do the essentials

So, what do we do? We can do some de-cluttering. It seems to me, though, that what we most need to work on is our constant desire to fill our lives with more “stuff,” be that unnecessary purchases or activities that are of no value. I only suggest it as something we should be aware of and work on to the extent that we can on avoiding it or getting out of the trap that we lay for ourselves.

I don’t have any advice for you on how to do that, at least not at this time, but I did come across a good article by Chuck Gallozzi – and while there is no mystical answer to anything there, it does offer some practical advice!