Sky Shouldn't Be The Limit

As children we have lots of dreams, becoming pilots, lawyers, rich and famous and even astronauts. But as our days and months turn into years and life happens we suddenly lose touch of our dreams, even worse we stop dreaming altogether.

After personal experience and watching people around me I have come to discover some truths, some of which I wish to share with you, hoping that you would reap the benefits.

Don't Be Afraid To Dream

Why are we afraid to dream? Why are we conditioned and brought up to be in a society that fights progression and stand in the way of dreams? As adults we put a bar on our dreams, we limit ourselves to what we could reach and confine our dreams to walls and ceilings not to outgrow the normal accepted standards. But I tell you even as adults' dreams should live on, and shouldn't be confined to what is possible and what is not. If you can dream it, then you can believe it, then you can find a way to achieve it. Don't stop dreaming and don't limit your dreams.

You Are Your Worst Enemy

So you have a dream you wish to make it a reality, but instead you let the demons in your head get to you first. The could I's, the what if's, the there are many out there like me, why would I be successful? I will tell you just STOP! Stop these negative thoughts and stop beating yourself down. If you have a dream and a passion to do something, it doesn't matter if a thousand or even million others are doing it before you, that shouldn't stop your drive to follow your own path and give it a try. You might feel scared, you might not know where to start, but with the right planning, organization and research you can build a foundation to put you on the right path to work on your dream. Just stop self-sabotaging yourself and believe that you too can do it, and even do it better than others!

Shut Out Negative Voices

When you share your passion and desires with others, wanting to spread your wings and fly, most likely you will hear many telling you "don't do it, why do it? You will waste your time for nothing?" Don't blame these people for saying so as they too were conditioned like you, not to believe in pursuing dreams, and are afraid of the unknown, and God forbid that you might actually succeed and leave them behind. When people bombard you with let-downs, walk away, don't listen and most important don't take it personally, it is not a measure of your capabilities it is a measure of their lack of confidence and fear. Instead use those negative comments to feed your desire for success even more and push you even further towards your goal. Instead find the people who support you and believe in you and pick you up when you fall down.

I Will Need An Arm And A Leg

Another thing that might be stopping you from working on your dream is finances. So you don't have the cash. Well sure that can put a damper on any project, but the truth is to start your own business you don't need that much initially. You could start at home and use social media platforms to help promote your product or business and with profit you make you can put back in your work and slowly grow. Don't think to be a millionaire you have to start out like one and don't forget that most successful entrepreneurs started from home.

Put Your Best Foot Forward

The best advice is to do your best. Work with all your heart and soul; don't get lazy because you are not getting a salary at the end of the month. Learn to discipline yourself in setting goals, targets, deadlines and stick to them. Work ethically and work hard, eventually you will see the fruit of your efforts.

Patience is Virtue

Perseverance is key to success. Even if you get rejections, even if you don't succeed at first, keep at it. If you believe in something and you put the work into it, then no matter what, you will eventually taste the sweetness of success even if it is something as self-satisfaction and gratification for trying. It will not happen overnight, and you will get moments of doubt, and feel it is easier to give up. But don't! You will never regret working hard but surely you will regret not trying your best and giving up too soon. Success takes time, so be patient it will be worth it in the end.

Enjoy The Ride

You do realize this is Your Dream we are talking about? And you are the one trying to make it come true, so there is no sense in pushing yourself to the point you lose sight to why you started in the first place. Learn to enjoy your journey. Every moment good or bad, is an opportunity to learn and grow, so might as well have fun doing it, in the end you are making memories to keep for life and things to look back on and smile not cringe.

And as Richard Branson once said, "A business has to be involving, it has to be fun, and it has to exercise your creative instincts." So I say don't be afraid to dream.

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What to Do When Fear is Holding You Back in Life: 6 Powerful Solutions

“When a resolute young fellow steps up to the great bully, the world, and takes him boldly by the beard, he is often surprised to find it comes off in his hand, and that it was only tied on to scare away the timid adventurers.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson

Fear.

It’s so easy to get stuck in it. To let it hold you back.

I have been there many times in my life.

The fear has, for example, held me back from:
Trying new things. It has held me back from trying something new for lunch or a new hobby because I feared I would have a bad experience or fail. And so I stuck to my usual routine and choices.
Asking someone out for a date. Because I didn’t want to risk being rejected or looking like a fool in eyes of other people.
Living my life like I deep down wanted to. The fear has held me in its grip and calmly explained to me that it would be best and most comfortable for me to stay where I am and to do nothing new. And many times I have sadly believed the fear and gotten myself stuck in a place where I honestly deep down didn’t want to be.

The fears we have are based in how we think about things. Destructive thought habits can create a lot of fear that is really unnecessary and damaging.

But there are also ways to handle these habits when they pop up and to – over time – replace them with healthier habits.

So today I’d like to share 6 destructive and fear-inducing thought habits and what to do instead of letting them roam free in your head.

1. You keep the fear foggy and undefined.

As long as your fear of doing something is foggy and undefined and just floating around in your head it will hold you back and often grow stronger with time.

What to do instead:

Ask yourself this question: what is the worst that could realistically happen?

And don’t just take a second or two to answer it.

Sit down with a pen and piece of paper. Take time to really think about it and to write out the realistic worst-case scenario.

This will:
Bring a lot of clarity to what you truly fear.
Defuse quite a bit of fuzzy fears or disaster scenarios that may have been bouncing around in your mind.
Help you to realize that you can often bounce back pretty quickly even if the worst-case scenario somehow becomes reality.

2. You keep the fear to yourself.
When you keep the fear to yourself then in my experience it can easily take charge of your imagination and build a horrific and paralyzing nightmare in your mind.

Just being alone with the fear makes it is easy to lose touch with reality.

What to do instead:

Writing it out as mentioned above can certainly help. Another step you can take is to share your fear with someone else.

By sharing and getting some level-headed input from a friend or family member that nightmare can often be quickly deflated and seen for what it really is.

And just talking about it to someone who truly listens will release a lot of your inner tensions.

3. You focus on aspects that will keep you stuck.

If you just focus on the negative things that could happen if you face your fear then it will be very hard to start moving forward.

What to do instead:

A change in perspective is needed.

You can get it by talking to your friend or family member and by exchanging ideas and experiences about what opportunities lie ahead if you move forward.

You do it by focusing on the positive and on why you want to move towards what you fear.

A few questions that have helped me to find the more constructive and positive perspective when I have faced a fear are:
What are the potential upsides that I want and can have by taking these actions?
What are the potential upsides in one year if I start moving on this path? And in five years?
And how will my life be in five years if I continue on the fearful path that I am on today?

Talk these questions over with someone. Or take out a piece of paper and write down the answers. Or do both.

4. You misinterpret the often little information you have.

It is easy to take very few experiences – maybe just one – and start seeing them as evidence of something permanent and frightening in your life.

What to do instead:

Question your fears and what they are based upon.

Again, sit down with that pen and a piece of paper. Think back to what evidence you have in your memories for a fear and a belief of yours.

Try to see the situation(s) that created your fear with fresh eyes today. Instead of the way you may usually see them.

Doing this helped me to for example reduce my fear of social rejection.

I looked back at a few situations from my past that formed and fueled that fear.

And I realized that:
Honestly, I may have just misinterpreted being rejected in some of those situations.
I often wasn’t rejected because it was something wrong with what I did but simply because we weren’t realistically a good match for each other. Or because the other person had a bad day or because he or she simply wanted to push me down to feel better about himself or herself in that moment.

This was an eye-opening experience and also helped me to understand that everything is not about me and what I do. And that our memories can often be pretty inaccurate and unhelpful if not reexamined later on.

And that our minds love to create patterns and conclusions based on very little evidence or few experiences.

5. You try to push the fear away.

When you try to deny a fear in your life, when you try to push it away or not think about it then it can often grow stronger.

What to do instead:

I have found in recent years that pushing the fear away can certainly work and help you to not be paralyzed from taking action. But I have also discovered that it can sometimes be more helpful to accept the fear.

To accept that it is there instead of for example trying to tell yourself to focus on the positive like a laser-beam.

That may sound a bit vague so here’s how I do it.
Breathe. Take a few breaths and focus only on the air going in and out to calm and center yourself a bit.
Tell yourself something like: “Yes, the fear is here. It simply is at this point in time.”
Take that feeling of fear in and just let it be there in your body and mind. It will be uncomfortable. But just for short while.

Because if you do then after a while – often just after a few minutes of discomfort in my experience – the fear starts to lose steam. It becomes a lot smaller or just seems to float away.

And it becomes a lot easier to think clear and constructive thoughts again.

6. You make it harder than it needs to be to take action.

If you think that you have to take action in a big, heroic and risky leap to overcome your fear then that may often lead to more fear and to not taking any action at all.

What to do instead:

A more helpful way to go about things is to not go all in at once. But to instead just dip your toes in. To take a small step forward but to do it today or as soon as you can.

And to take that first step slowly if you like.

The most important thing is that you start moving. That you start building momentum forward so that you can take more small and perhaps slow steps forward.

Doing things this way will not only build momentum but also self-confidence and expand your comfort zone. And all of this will make it a lot easier to take a bit bigger steps later on too if you’d like to.

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Rediscovering Yourself: Your Guide to Self-Improvement

Have you lost your way, drifting through the haze of life, living your life in never ending cycle, like you're stuck in a programming loop?

But it wasn't always like this, was it! You had a purpose once; something to look forward to, something to achieve in life, something to live for.

If you're truly looking to get back to the way things were, there is a way. Self-improvement is not an exact science. The approach that works varies with different individuals.

In our youth, we are bursting with energy where our emotions drive us to achieve the great and the good in our lives; both the negative and the positive feelings. As age progresses, and we cross into adulthood, a state of numbness settles in which shrouds our emotions from impacting our lives in any way. We become zombies.

To break free from this catatonic state, it is crucial that we get in touch with our inner self. How do we do that?

Its simple. Dream again!

Getting in touch with your emotions, even negative emotions like fear and guilt, can help motivate us to get our lives back in order. To help us rediscover our passion for all the good things this world has to offer, to gravitate us towards the goals we had buried inside us.

The fundamental question to address here is whether to focus on your passion or to do your duty and while we don't deny that our obligations are a priority in life such as our obligation to our families. To give time to our parents, our spouses and our children, our commitment to our career, to provide for that dependent on us and our responsibility as a member of our community. But these things does not necessarily mean that we forget to live.

A little kid lives in each of us. One who wanted to be an astronaut, an aircraft pilot or a fireman. Find that kid again. And while we cannot guarantee that all your dreams will come true, it will help you rediscover yourself.

There are few circumstances in life that you can change but keeping a positive mental attitude is the key to wade through these harsh waters. Once you're able to convince yourself that you're going to live life to the fullest, the task seems less like work and more like fun.

Always remember to find a release for the emotions bottled up inside you. It's better to explode rather than implode. An atomic bomb works on the principle of implosion. That will give you an idea of how dangerous it is.

On the other hand, if your emotions are spiraling out of control, it is also important to find ways to relieve that tension. Find activities you like, to release that pent up energy. Go to the gym, workout, get your body in shape, do sports, play a game of chess, write a novel, build a generator, design a house, run for President. Whatever takes your fancy. The world's your oyster.

And above all, remember to keep smiling. Life is a gift. You just have to unwrap it.

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Taking Charge Of Your Life Right Now

What does it take to take charge of your life? When does it make sense to make the kind of changes that taking charge of your life implies? When you want to take charge of your life, you have questions you need to answer.

Courage and Confidence

It takes courage and confidence to take charge of your life. You might not feel an abundance in these areas right now if you're looking at taking charge of your life. Yet you have been courageous and confident during previous times in your life. Life requires courage! Life demands confidence!

Courage enables you to consider what might be a better set of choices. Courage gives you the get up and go to pick yourself up and take action. Courage does not replace fear. Instead, courage allows you to go forward despite fear that might be suggesting that it's too risky to move in the direction of your dreams.

Confidence allows you to use your talents and abilities in new ways. Confidence puts your skills to work in different circumstances. Confidence does not remove doubt. Rather, confidence allows you to do what you know how to do. Regardless of the doubt you may be feeling. In spite of reminders that today's circumstances are not precisely identical to how you've used your skills in the past.

Change.

Change is inevitable. Life is filled with changes. Over the course of your lifetime, you'll live in an environment that presents many things to you, sometimes overwhelming you with the sense that your entire life is filled with change. As you face challenges and deal with change, it makes sense to adapt to the new situations that arise.

Taking charge of your life has to do with adjusting to the change as it occurs. Dramatic sudden change can leave your mind spinning. That's one time when taking charge of your life demands that you reach for all the courage and confidence you can muster.

Skills.

You'll need to learn new skills. Times of change instill new skills. You can decide that you're willing to use your courage and confidence to gain the skills you need.

In fact, deciding is taking charge of your life. Because that makes it happen. I've found that when I reach deep for courage and confidence, I can decide to take action. I take charge of my life! I find that leads to happiness.

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10 Ways Reading Enhances Personal Development

As a tween, I loved the Nancy Drew Mystery Series. I wanted to be like Nancy Drew. She had such a good head on her shoulders, even though she was constantly facing danger and never quite “hooking” Ned, the handsome guy whom the wealthy beautiful Helen was always throwing herself upon.

Through those characters, I was able to gain insight into the types of people I encountered in my daily life – character types – good, bad, selfish and unselfish, etc. This series probably began my love affair with books that continues today.

In high school, of course, we read all of the classics – To Kill a Mockingbird, Romeo and Juliet, The Grapes of Wrath, Moby Dick, Hamlet, The Glass Menagerie, Crime and Punishment, The Great Gatsby, A Tale of Two Cities, and more.

Why Reading Enhances Personal Development

I don’t remember ever not liking a book we were reading. That continued in college too. And as an adult, the love affair continues, although some non-fiction is added to the list now and then.

But fiction is the great teacher – contributing to our own personal development in at least the 10 following ways:


1) Insight into Human Nature

We meet every possible personality through reading, and we gain understanding of what motivates the behaviours of people.

We can study the characters that appear on those pages, watch them as they react and respond to one another, deal with conflict, and expose their strengths and weaknesses. We gain perspective on such things as unselfishness, greed, ambition, egoism – the types of personality traits we encounter in real life.

Through analysing these characters in literature, I have developed better methods of dealing with people in my world.


2) Problem-Solving

One of the great things about literature is that the main character always has a conflict and problems to solve.

How those problems are solved, and the process that is used, gives us great training on solving problems (often how not to solve them) with which we are faced in life.

Of course, Romeo and Juliet did not solve their problems well, and we learn from this play the dangers of impulsivity – a good lesson for teenagers. Avid readers come to learn how to avoid the mistakes that fictional characters often make.


3) Imagination

As we age, many of us lose the imagination that so entertained us when we were children.


When we are taken to new places and meet unique people, our imaginations are stimulated. We place ourselves in those surroundings and imagine what they must be like. Science fiction does that for me, as do historical novels such as A Tale of Two Cities.

James Michener was a master at stimulating the imaginations of his readers – we are able to put ourselves there, geographically and historically, as his saga unfold. Nurturing our imaginations allows new ideas and divergent thinking.

4) Vocabulary and Language Skills

Avid readers have much larger vocabularies than those who avoid the past-time. And the reading of good books provides models of good language and writing. Research shows that the language development, both oral and written, that is fostered from reading books, results in better learning all around.

Adults who have read a lot and who continue to read are able to grasp complex written material far easier, and they are better writers overall. These are career skills which are difficult to learn later in life.


5) Relief from Stress/Escape

The mental and physical effects of stress are well documented. To relive stress, we engage in a number of activities – physical exercise, meditation, and, yes, reading. Studies have shown that blood pressure is reduce during the act of reading.

And reading allows us to focus on something other than our stressors and problems. A good story line carries us away to another place – a much healthier form of escape than alcohol or drugs.


6) Readers Develop Empathy and Tolerance

Empathy is the ability to place yourself “into the shoes” of another and see a problem, a circumstance, and a behaviour from their perspective.

As we do this in our reading, so it transfers over to real life. We learn to be less judgement of others, understanding that we have not had the experiences that have formed their personalities.


7) Readers are More Interesting People
The exposure to history, politics, the law, and unusual places, becomes a store of knowledge that we hold in our memories.

This knowledge base allows us to converse on a variety of topics, both socially and professionally. People with large bases of general knowledge are more highly valued in the professional world.


8) Readers Gain a larger Perspective

Ignorance of other cultures, religions, and ethnicity fosters hostility and fear. Knowledge and understanding of all of these fosters communication, acceptance and tolerance.

Given the global perspective which all of us must develop, reading is the next best thing to actual experience. And when we do face actual experiences with cultures, belief systems and other ethnicity, we have the understanding to establish solid and mutually respectful relationships.


9) Readers See Cause/Effect Relationships

Seeing cause-effect relationships is a critical thinking skill that is highly valued. Through fiction, we are able to see how choices that people make have an impact not only on themselves but on others around them and sometimes on society as a whole.

Readers come to understand the need to consider all of the possible effects when hard choices need to be made.


10) Readers Have Important “Alone Time”

The world is a busy place. We spend our days surrounded by others, inundated with stimuli that bombard our senses and our minds. Sometimes, it is difficult to shut down all of that stimulation and get the rest we need.

When we read, especially at the end of the day, our worlds becomes quiet. Our brains begins to settle down and prepare us for rest. Readers have a much easier time falling asleep at night – who doesn’t need a good night’s sleep?



The benefits of reading cannot be over-stated.

They are intellectual, psychological, and healthy. But even more than that, reading takes to places in our minds that we would never go otherwise. Read on!

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