Your Daily Quote - Excellence

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit." 
- Aristotle 

Money and Worth

What's your worth?

Another powerful snippet of Michelle Master's workshop

Your Daily Quote - Don't Waste Your Present

“Let him who would enjoy a good future waste none of his present.”

Roger Babson

I guess this calls for great planning and goal setting skills!

Elena Long

Beliefs Filters

How does your belief system work, filtering only the experiences that align with it?

Your Daily Quote - Man of Value

Try not to become a man of success, but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Einstein

Creating Stories and Metaphors for Change

Stories, or as we often call them, metaphors, are a very powerful tool not only when creating creating characters for novels and movies, but when we want to give a powerful example with a moral, and help create a lasting change. Story with a morale for the children - whether as a parent or a teacher, or our clients, in your role as a life coach.

Author Joseph Campbell studied myths and tales, and identified that most of them share the same "formula", which he called: The Hero's Journey.

Stages of the Hero's Journey

There are twelve steps to the hero’s journey:

1.      Ordinary World: This step refers to the hero's normal life at the start of the story, before the adventure begins. 

2.      Call to Adventure: The hero is faced with something that makes him begin his adventure. This might be a problem or a challenge he needs to overcome. 

3.      Refusal of the Call: The hero attempts to refuse the adventure because he is afraid. 

4.      Meeting with the Mentor: The hero encounters someone who can give him advice and ready him for the journey ahead.  

5.      Crossing the First Threshold: The hero leaves his ordinary world for the first time and crosses the threshold into adventure.  

6.      Tests, Allies, Enemies: The hero learns the rules of his new world. During this time, he endures tests of strength of will, meets friends, and comes face to face with foes.

7.      Approach: Setbacks occur, sometimes causing the hero to try a new approach or adopt new ideas. 

8.      Ordeal: The hero experiences a major hurdle or obstacle, such as a life or death crisis. 

9.      Reward: After surviving death, the hero earns his reward or accomplishes his goal. 

10.  The Road Back: The hero begins his journey back to his ordinary life.

11.  Resurrection Hero - The hero faces a final test where everything is at stake and he must use everything he has learned.  

12.  Return with Elixir:  The hero brings his knowledge or the "elixir" back to the ordinary world, where he applies it to help all who remain there.  


Here is a little task for you - can you track the steps of some famous characters and match them to the stages of the Hero’s Journey? The Lion King, or Fight Club, are great examples.

Storytelling is an art in itself, but what it is most powerful for, is the influence it can have on our lives in achieving a desired transformation that lasts and help you grow.

Elena Long

Your Coach to Success

The Habit Change Cheatsheet: 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior - part 2 of 2

BY LEO BABAUTA

6. Know your motivations, and be sure they’re strong. Write them down in your plan. You have to be very clear why you’re doing this, and the benefits of doing it need to be clear in your head. If you’re just doing it for vanity, while that can be a good motivator, it’s not usually enough. We need something stronger. For me, I quit smoking for my wife and kids. I made a promise to them. I knew if I didn’t smoke, not only would they be without a husband and father, but they’d be more likely to smoke themselves (my wife was a smoker and quit with me).

7. Don’t start right away. In your plan, write down a start date. Maybe a week or two from the date you start writing out the plan. When you start right away (like today), you are not giving the plan the seriousness it deserves. When you have a “Quit Date” or “Start Date”, it gives that date an air of significance. Tell everyone about your quit date (or start date). Put it up on your wall or computer desktop. Make this a Big Day. It builds up anticipation and excitement, and helps you to prepare.

8. Write down all your obstacles. If you’ve tried this habit change before (odds are you have), you’ve likely failed. Reflect on those failures, and figure out what stopped you from succeeding. Write down every obstacle that’s happened to you, and others that are likely to happen. Then write down how you plan to overcome them. That’s the key: write down your solution before the obstacles arrive, so you’re prepared.

9. Identify your triggers. What situations trigger your current habit? For the smoking habit, for example, triggers might include waking in the morning, having coffee, drinking alcohol, stressful meetings, going out with friends, driving, etc. Most habits have multiple triggers. Identify all of them and write them in your plan.

10. For every single trigger, identify a positive habit you’re going to do instead. When you first wake in the morning, instead of smoking, what will you do? What about when you get stressed? When you go out with friends? Some positive habits could include: exercise, meditation, deep breathing, organizing, decluttering, and more.

“Habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time.” – Mark Twain

11. Plan a support system. Who will you turn to when you have a strong urge? Write these people into your plan. Support forums online are a great tool as well — I used a smoking cessation forum on about.com when I quit smoking, and it really helped. Don’t underestimate the power of support — it’s really important.

12. Ask for help. Get your family and friends and co-workers to support you. Ask them for their help, and let them know how important this is. Find an AA group in your area. Join online forums where people are trying to quit. When you have really strong urges or a really difficult time, call on your support network for help. Don’t smoke a cigarette, for example, without posting to your online quit forum. Don’t have a drop of alcohol before calling your AA buddy.

13. Become aware of self-talk. You talk to yourself, in your head, all the time — but often we’re not aware of these thoughts. Start listening. These thoughts can derail any habit change, any goal. Often they’re negative: “I can’t do this. This is too difficult. Why am I putting myself through this? How bad is this for me anyway? I’m not strong enough. I don’t have enough discipline. I suck.” It’s important to know you’re doing this.

14. Stay positive. You will have negative thoughts — the important thing is to realize when you’re having them, and push them out of your head. Squash them like a bug! Then replace them with a positive thought. “I can do this! If Leo can do it, so can I!” :)

15. Have strategies to defeat the urge. Urges are going to come — they’re inevitable, and they’re strong. But they’re also temporary, and beatable. Urges usually last about a minute or two, and they come in waves of varying strength. You just need to ride out the wave, and the urge will go away. Some strategies for making it through the urge: deep breathing, self-massage, eat some frozen grapes, take a walk, exercise, drink a glass of water, call a support buddy, post on a support forum.

16. Prepare for the sabotagers. There will always be people who are negative, who try to get you to do your old habit. Be ready for them. Confront them, and be direct: you don’t need them to try to sabotage you, you need their support, and if they can’t support you then you don’t want to be around them.

17. Talk to yourself. Be your own cheerleader, give yourself pep talks, repeat your mantra (below), and don’t be afraid to seem crazy to others. We’ll see who’s crazy when you’ve changed your habit and they’re still lazy, unhealthy slobs!

18. Have a mantra. For quitting smoking, mine was “Not One Puff Ever” (I didn’t make this up, but it worked — more on this below). When I wanted to quit my day job, it was “Liberate Yourself”. This is just a way to remind yourself of what you’re trying to do.

19. Use visualization. This is powerful. Vividly picture, in your head, successfully changing your habit. Visualize doing your new habit after each trigger, overcoming urges, and what it will look like when you’re done. This seems new-agey, but it really works.

20. Have rewards. Regular ones. You might see these as bribes, but actually they’re just positive feedback. Put these into your plan, along with the milestones at which you’ll receive them.

21. Take it one urge at a time. Often we’re told to take it one day at a time — which is good advice — but really it’s one urge at a time. Just make it through this urge.

22. Not One Puff Ever (in other words, no exceptions). This seems harsh, but it’s a necessity: when you’re trying to break the bonds between an old habit and a trigger, and form a new bond between the trigger and a new habit, you need to be really consistent. You can’t do it sometimes, or there will be no new bond, or at least it will take a really really long time to form. So, at least for the first 30 days (and preferably 60), you need to have no exceptions. Each time a trigger happens, you need to do the new habit and not the old one. No exceptions, or you’ll have a backslide. If you do mess up, regroup, learn from your mistake, plan for your success, and try again (see the last item on this list).

23. Get rest. Being tired leaves us vulnerable to relapse. Get a lot of rest so you can have the energy to overcome urges.

24. Drink lots of water. Similar to the item above, being dehydrated leaves us open to failure. Stay hydrated!

25. Renew your commitment often. Remind yourself of your commitment hourly, and at the beginning and end of each day. Read your plan. Celebrate your success. Prepare yourself for obstacles and urges.

26. Set up public accountability. Blog about it, post on a forum, email your commitment and daily progress to friend and family, post a chart up at your office, write a column for your local newspaper (I did this when I ran my first marathon). When we make it public — not just the commitment but the progress updates — we don’t want to fail.

27. Engineer it so it’s hard to fail. Create a groove that’s harder to get out of than to stay in: increase positive feedback for sticking with the habit, and increase negative feedback for not doing the habit. Read more on this method.

28. Avoid some situations where you normally do your old habit, at least for awhile, to make it a bit easier on yourself. If you normally drink when you go out with friends, consider not going out for a little while. If you normally go outside your office with co-workers to smoke, avoid going out with them. This applies to any bad habit — whether it be eating junk food or doing drugs, there are some situations you can avoid that are especially difficult for someone trying to change a bad habit. Realize, though, that when you go back to those situations, you will still get the old urges, and when that happens you should be prepared.

29. If you fail, figure out what went wrong, plan for it, and try again. Don’t let failure and guilt stop you. They’re just obstacles, but they can be overcome. In fact, if you learn from each failure, they become stepping stones to your success. Regroup. Let go of guilt. Learn. Plan. And get back on that horse.

Your net worth to the world is usually determined by what remains after your bad habits are subtracted from your good ones. – Benjamin Franklin

  

Source:

http://zenhabits.net/the-habit-change-cheatsheet-29-ways-to-successfully-ingrain-a-behavior/

The Habit Change Cheatsheet: 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior -part 1 of 2

The Habit Change Cheatsheet: 29 Ways to Successfully Ingrain a Behavior

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit. – Aristotle

Our daily lives are often a series of habits played out through the day, a trammeled existence fettered by the slow accretion of our previous actions.

BY LEO BABAUTA

But habits can be changed, as difficult as that may seem sometimes.

I’m a living example: in tiny, almost infinitesimal steps, I’ve changed a laundry list of habits. Quit smoking, stopped impulse spending, got out of debt, began running and waking early and eating healthier and becoming frugal and simplifying my life and becoming organized and focused and productive, ran three marathons and a couple of triathlons, started a few successful blogs, eliminated my debt … you get the picture.

It’s possible.

Today I thought I’d put the best tips all together in one cheatsheet.

Keep it simple
Habit change is not that complicated. While the tips below will seem overwhelming, there’s really only a few things you need to know. Everything else is just helping these to become reality.

The simple steps of habit change:

1. Write down your plan.

2. Identify your triggers and replacement habits.

3. Focus on doing the replacement habits every single time the triggers happen, for about 30 days.

That’s it. We’ll talk more about each of these steps, and much more, in the cheatsheet below.

The Habit Change Cheatsheet
The following is a compilation of tips to help you change a habit. Don’t be overwhelmed — always remember the simple steps above. The rest are different ways to help you become more successful in your habit change.

1. Do just one habit at a time. Extremely important. Habit change is difficult, even with just one habit. If you do more than one habit at a time, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Keep it simple, allow yourself to focus, and give yourself the best chance for success. Btw, this is why New Year’s resolutions often fail — people try to tackle more than one change at a time.

2. Start small. The smaller the better, because habit change is difficult, and trying to take on too much is a recipe for disaster. Want to exercise? Start with just 5-10 minutes. Want to wake up earlier? Try just 10 minutes earlier for now. Or consider half habits.

3. Do a 30-day Challenge. In my experience, it takes about 30 days to change a habit, if you’re focused and consistent. This is a round number and will vary from person to person and habit to habit. Often you’ll read a magical “21 days” to change a habit, but this is a myth with no evidence. Seriously — try to find the evidence from a scientific study for this. A more recent study shows that 66 days is a better number (read more). But 30 days is a good number to get you started. Your challenge: stick with a habit every day for 30 days, and post your daily progress updates to a forum.

4. Write it down. Just saying you’re going to change the habit is not enough of a commitment. You need to actually write it down, on paper. Write what habit you’re going to change.

5. Make a plan. While you’re writing, also write down a plan. This will ensure you’re really prepared. The plan should include your reasons (motivations) for changing, obstacles, triggers, support buddies, and other ways you’re going to make this a success. More on each of these - tomorrow.

Source:

http://zenhabits.net/the-habit-change-cheatsheet-29-ways-to-successfully-ingrain-a-behavior/

7 Solutions That Can Save a Relationship - part 3 of 3

By Carol Sorgen

Relationship Problem: Conflict

Occasional conflict is a part of life, according to New York-based psychologist Susan Silverman. But if you and your partner feel like you're starring in your own nightmare version of the movie Groundhog Day -- i.e. the same lousy situations keep repeating day after day -- it's time to break free of this toxic routine. When you make the effort, you can lessen the anger and take a calm look at underlying issues.

Problem-solving strategies:

You and your partner can learn to argue in a more civil, helpful manner, Silverman says. Make these strategies part of who you are in this relationship.

·         Realise you are not a victim. It is your choice whether you react and how you react.

·         Be honest with yourself. When you're in the midst of an argument, are your comments geared toward resolving the conflict, or are you looking for payback? If your comments are blaming and hurtful, it's best to take a deep breath and change your strategy.

·         Change it up. If you continue to respond in the way that's brought you pain and unhappiness in the past, you can't expect a different result this time. Just one little shift can make a big difference. If you usually jump right in to defend yourself before your partner is finished speaking, hold off for a few moments. You'll be surprised at how such a small shift in tempo can change the whole tone of an argument.

·         Give a little; get a lot. Apologise when you're wrong. Sure it's tough, but just try it and watch something wonderful happen.

"You can't control anyone else's behavior," Silverman says. "The only one in your charge is you."

Relationship Problem: Trust

Trust is a key part of a relationship. Do you see certain things that cause you not to trust your partner? Or do you have unresolved issues that prevent you from trusting others?

Problem-solving strategies:

You and your partner can develop trust in each other by following these tips, Fay says.

·         Be consistent.

·         Be on time.

·         Do what you say you will do.

·         Don't lie -- not even little white lies to your partner or to others.

·         Be fair, even in an argument.

·         Be sensitive to the other's feelings. You can still disagree, but don't discount how your partner is feeling.

·         Call when you say you will.

·         Call to say you'll be home late.

·         Carry your fair share of the workload.

·         Don't overreact when things go wrong.

·         Never say things you can't take back.

·         Don't dig up old wounds.

·         Respect your partner's boundaries.

·         Don’t be jealous.

·         Be a good listener.

Even though there are always going to be problems in a relationship, Sherman says you both can do things to minimize marriage problems, if not avoid them altogether.

First, be realistic. Thinking your mate will meet all your needs -- and will be able to figure them out without your asking -- is a Hollywood fantasy. "Ask for what you need directly," she says.

Next, use humor -- learn to let things go and enjoy one another more.

Finally, be willing to work on your relationship and to truly look at what needs to be done. Don't think that things would be better with someone else. Unless you address problems, the same lack of skills that get in the way now will still be there and still cause problems no matter what relationship you're in.

Source:

http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/guide/7-relationship-problems-how-solve-them

Tony Robbins - Hour of Power

Are you experiencing stress?

Anxiety?

Your Daily Quote - Money

Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver.

Ayn Rand

7 Solutions That Can Save a Relationship - part 2 of 3

By Carol Sorgen

Relationship Problem: Money

Money problems can start even before the wedding vows are exchanged. They can stem, for example, from the expenses of courtship or from the high cost of a wedding. The National Foundation for Credit Counseling (NFCC) recommends that couples who have money woes take a deep breath and have a serious conversation about finances.

Problem-solving strategies:

·         Be honest about your current financial situation. If things have gone south, continuing the same lifestyle is unrealistic.

·         Don't approach the subject in the heat of battle. Instead, set aside a time that is convenient and non-threatening for both of you.

·         Acknowledge that one partner may be a saver and one a spender, understand there are benefits to both, and agree to learn from each other's tendencies.

·         Don't hide income or debt. Bring financial documents, including a recent credit report, pay stubs, bank statements, insurance policies, debts, and investments to the table.

·         Don't blame.

·         Construct a joint budget that includes savings.

·         Decide which person will be responsible for paying the monthly bills.

·         Allow each person to have independence by setting aside money to be spent at his or her discretion.

·         Decide upon short-term and long-term goals. It's OK to have individual goals, but you should have family goals, too.

·         Talk about caring for your parents as they age and how to appropriately plan for their financial needs if needed.

Relationship Problem: Struggles Over Home Chores

Most partners work outside the home and often at more than one job. So it's important to fairly divide the labor at home, says Paulette Kouffman-Sherman, author of Dating From the Inside Out.

Problem-solving strategies:

·         Be organized and clear about your respective jobs in the home, Kouffman-Sherman says. "Write all the jobs down and agree on who does what." Be fair so no resentment builds.

·         Be open to other solutions, she says. If you both hate housework, maybe you can spring for a cleaning service. If one of you likes housework, the other partner can do the laundry and the yard. You can be creative and take preferences into account -- as long as it feels fair to both of you.

Relationship Problem: Not Making Your Relationship a Priority

If you want to keep your love life going, making your relationship a focal point should not end when you say "I do." "Relationships lose their luster. So make yours a priority," says Karen Sherman, author of Marriage Magic! Find It, Keep It, and Make It Last.

Problem-solving strategies:

·         Do the things you used to do when you were first dating: Show appreciation, compliment each other, contact each other through the day, and show interest in each other.

·         Plan date nights. Schedule time together on the calendar just as you would any other important event in your life.

·         Respect one another. Say "thank you," and "I appreciate..." It lets your partner know that they matter.

Source:

http://www.webmd.com/sex-relationships/guide/7-relationship-problems-how-solve-them