How Confident Are You in Yourself?

This is the million dollar question people ask themselves on a daily basis. The truth is, you can start to improve your life much more quickly than you might think.

So many people get caught up in the idea that they don't have any self confidence that it becomes almost impossible for them to realize that they can attain it. All it really takes is a little time and patience, not to mention a lot of effort. It is definitely worth it and it has the power to completely transform your life if you will just let it.

You may not know it, but confidence actually means "with faith." You can have faith in a Higher Power, faith in yourself or just simple faith that everything is going to be okay. If you really want to have more self confidence, it is important that you start having faith in yourself and your abilities. You can think of this as exercising the most important muscle in your body. Instead of running a marathon or playing sports, you can use this particular muscle to start feeling better about yourself.

How do you actually accomplish this and put this advice into action? The first thing you can do is think positive. If you have to, force yourself to list positive things about yourself, about your day and about those around you. Listen to positive music in order to create more balance in your life. Most importantly, do not beat yourself up every time you make a mistake or you fall short of a goal. Everyone has room to grow and improve and you can take every failed opportunity as a teaching moment in order to learn something for the future.

You can also focus on the things that you're good at. In short, figure out what you are passionate about and then pursue it with everything you have. If you are interested in and passionate about several things, pursue all of these things in order to find out which one interests you the most. Perhaps you'll actually have more than one path in your life as you accomplish many things. No one ever said you had to decide on only one thing.

You can also develop more self confidence if you find someone to confide in. Like everyone else, you will have days where you are so frustrated that you don't know what to do with yourself and you are tired of trying to figure it out. Fortunately, that won't happen to you every day but when it does, it sure is comforting to have a trusted friend that you can talk to. If you don't feel like you have the one you can talk to, find a support group online. The bottom line is to realize that no one is perfect and that you need to have a support system that makes you feel comfortable.

Once you have started developing more self confidence and you see your life improving, one of the best things that you can do is mentor others. There are plenty of people who are in the same boat as you once were and they need help, too.

Remember, you are in control of your life- no one else is. That puts you in the driver's seat and it also gives you the unique opportunity to look back on how you felt when you had your worst days and help someone else get through theirs.

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Three Steps to Live a More Powerful Life

Most of us are living below our potential. We let opportunities slip past. We don't ask for what we want. We don't give all we can. We desire more, but we don't make it happen. We are all capable of more. I know that you are capable of more. Reaching higher potential is simple but will require work and action. Here are three steps to live your life to the fullest.

First, know what you want. It sounds simple and obvious but many of us are living through our own personal zombie apocalypse. We let inertia carry us through life. So fearful of change and the unknown, we continue doing the same passionless job day after day, year after year, until much of our life has slipped by. Knowing what you want can be an intense process. Start by questioning yourself and writing everything down. What excites you? What do you despite? What makes you want to get out of bed in the morning? What keeps you in bed when you should be up? Track your thoughts and feelings for a week or two. Then read over it and look for patterns. Look for those negatives you need to eliminate from your life and start dreaming up positive alternatives.

Second, create an action plan. Once you understand what it is that you want, break it down into a number of manageable steps and objectives. Draw a path between where you are and where you are looking to go. Create a strategy that supports your goals. Understand that everyone has three budgets: Time, Energy (physical, emotional, spiritual) and Income. In the short term, these budgets are largely fixed. That is spend an extra hour doing one thing, then you are going to spend an hour less doing something else. Look for those few vital behaviors that will lead to the greatest benefit. Create daily habits around those vital behaviors. For example, getting in shape may require a daily activity habit. Growing a business will likely require a daily habit of calling potential customers. Measure your input.

Third, work your action plan. Success comes from a combination of motivation, determination and positive habits. Create an environment that will lead to success by eliminating or minimizing obstacles. Your environment and associates should make it easier to do the positive actions and more challenging to do the negative actions. Create obtainable milestones and simple habits. Enlist someone to help hold you accountable. Stop frequently and make sure you are still on track to accomplish your goal. If not, adjust as necessary.

Reaching any goal, whether it is a personal, financial, health or relationship goal, can be reached using this process. Don't make the process more complicated than these three steps and don't delay. Get started today.

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3 Powerful Tips to Help You Have Your Best Year Ever

Here are 3 powerful steps you can take to free yourself from frustration and to start enjoying the good life so many are enjoying right now:

1) Know "where you are." Have you ever been lost in a residential area and no one was around to ask for directions? Now if you are somewhat familiar with the area, it's easy to just turn around here and there and find your way back. But the worst part about being lost is when we are lost and we haven't a clue where we are.

So, where exactly are you on your journey now? Do you know exactly how much money you owe? And how many assets you have? What are your strengths? And what are your weaknesses? Here's a good exercise to help you know "where you are":

Draw a map of your life and make every square a city. Name each square with an aspect of your life. One city can be your family, friends, knowledge of your field, spirituality, work, charity, financial, etc. Then rate each city from one to ten. Ten means you are doing extremely well, and one means it needs immediate help.

What I just shared with you is like having a balance sheet for your life. Put all your weaknesses on one side and your strengths on the other side. Put your strengths to work and strengthen your weaknesses. You can read more books, go back to school or find a mentor. Perhaps you can learn 50 to 100 power words this year in order to get a verbal advantage. Whatever you do, keep in mind that a better year begins with a better you. The readers of No Condition is Permanent know about this.

2) Do an inventory of friends. That's right. Make a list of who your friends are, and how they relate to the direction your life is going in. When companies want to increase their revenue, they get rid of unnecessary employees or ones that are holding them back. So when you are ready to increase your worth, you need to get rid of unnecessary friends. I am talking about those that only cause you grief and are a pain in the "you know what."

If you want to accomplish great things, you need to surround yourself with great people or people who have accomplished great things. You might say, "well, how do I find these great achievers you are talking about?" If you own a copy of No Condition is Permanent, refer to it for the answer.

You and I know fully well that some so-called friends are not worth the aggravation. They are draining, and they sap the life out of you. Consider this: Small people are always talking about things, but great people talk about ideas and concepts. Do you find yourself mentally stimulated when you are with your friends? If you are not, then you should be.

3) Quit killing time. Have you ever heard people say, "I'm just killing time." If they only realized how precious time really is. I have a wealthy friend who once told me that he can make millions of dollars any time he wants. He can purchase more homes, cars, and other luxuries. But the only thing he can never buy himself is more time.

His point is that he values his time more than his money. Wow! People who have little regard for time always find themselves engaging in activities that have nothing to do with improving their lives or that of those around them. They are routine people. They just do the same old things; they are just going through the daily motions. They love to shoot the breeze and just chill.

Listen, you are entering a new year, and you are not getting any younger. You may have lost so many opportunities. As a reader of my newsletter, you are important to me. I can't stand by and watch you squander your time and procrastinate. That's why I am encouraging you to find out "where you are" and start taking action to change your life. Take my advice. Inventory your friends and stop killing time.

I wish you all the best in this year!

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7 Secret Ingredients Of A Happy Life

Anything that you could ever want more of, or any factor that you would consider important to YOUR happiness and achieving a happy life can be placed in one of seven categories of success.

These seven ingredients to a happy life are considered with everything ever written or discovered on happiness, success and self-improvement. They characterize the life and accomplishments of all high-performing men and women. They include everything you could ever want.
How To Achieve Your Ideal Life

Your ideal life is a blending of these seven ingredients to a happy life in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment.

By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim at. You engage in positive thinking. You can then measure how well you’re doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want self-improvement in your life.

1) Peace Of Mind
The first of these seven ingredients to a happy life, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. Because of this, you strive for it all your life. You usually evaluate how well you are doing at any given time by how much inner peace you enjoy.

Peace of mind and positive thinking is essential for the optimal performance and happy life of all human groupings, from your relationships with your friends and family to the business and organizations in which you work.

2) Health And Energy

The second ingredient to a happy life is health and energy. Just as peace of mind is your normal and natural mental state, health and energy is your normal and natural physical state.

3) Loving Relationships

The third ingredient to a happy life is loving relationships. These are relationships with people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how you are doing as a human being. Happiness or unhappiness in life comes from your relationships with others, and it is your relationships with others that make you truly human.

4) Financial Freedom

The forth ingredient of a happy life and success is financial freedom. To be financially free means that you have enough money so that you don’t worry about it continually, as most people do. It is not money that lies at the root of all evil; it is the lack of money. Achieving your own financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. It is far too important to be left to chance.

A feeling of financial freedom is essential to your self-improvement and to the achievement of any other important goal and you cannot be truly free until and unless you have enough money that you are no longer preoccupied with it.

5) Worthy Goals And Ideas

The fifth ingredient of a happy life is setting worthy goals and ideals. Perhaps your deepest subconscious drive, according to Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, is the need for meaning and purpose in life. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need positive thinking to get there. You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to the world.

Happiness has been defined as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You can only be happy with yourself when you are working step by step toward something that is really important to YOU.

6) Self Knowledge And Self-Awareness

The sixth ingredient to success and a happy life is self-knowledge and self-awareness. Throughout all of history, self-knowledge has gone hand in hand with inner happiness, positive thinking and outer achievement. To perform your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do.

7) Personal Fulfillment

The seventh ingredient to a happy life is a sense of personal fulfillment. This is a feeling that you are becoming everything that you are moving toward. It is the realization of your full potential as a human being. Your happy life begins with self-improvement and ends with a personal fulfillment that you have accomplished all that you wanted to.
Take Action

Take the brush of your imagination and begin painting a masterpiece on the canvas of your life. It is for you to decide clearly what would make you the happiest in everything you are doing.

Decide what is right for you before you decide what is possible. Create your ideal life in every detail. Don’t be concerned about the process of getting from where you are to where you want to go. For now, just focus on positive thinking and creating a vision of your perfect future.

Thank you for reading my blog on The Seven Ingredients to a Happy Life. I hope you will take some time to think about what YOU want to achieve in YOUR life and begin your self-improvement today!

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Accept Who You Are

What is self-acceptance? How do you accept yourself? When you discover, yourself do you just stay like that? Well, these are the questions that an individual asks him or herself. Many people don't accept for who they are. And most of these people end up being failures.

Let us first describe what self-acceptance is. Self-acceptance involves accepting your weakness and negative habits. But the question is, do you accept and do nothing about your weaknesses or attitude? Do you give in to your laziness and look for excuses for leaving everything as it is? Well when you accept yourself and not doing any improvement to improve your habits, then that is not technically self-acceptance.

Self-acceptance. 

Many people don't usually understand the term self-acceptance. The term self-acceptance itself is not well explained either. In self-acceptance, accepting yourself is only the first step of the long journey of self-improvement. Just acceptance does not contribute to any self-progress and self-improvement in any way. A point to be duly noted is that you do not accept your fate or life as it is.

Weaknesses habits 

You must first become aware of your weaknesses habits and your personality. You must look at yourself as you currently are. After you have accepted who you are, then you begin to put yourself in a better or improved position, unlike the current one you are in.

Knowing yourself

knowing yourself opens the doors of possibilities of your capabilities. Through that, then you can devise ways to improve yourself. Self-improvement requires the understanding and deeply knowing your character; habits quit the comparisons you make of yourself with other people and knowing your capabilities or the lack of them. Doing this will comfort you by getting rid of guilt, bring about happiness and lightness

I accept myself as I am 

"This is who I am. I accept myself as I am. I take my failure, my fate, my achievements and this is how it will always be". This is just an excuse that many people make to feel better because of maybe constant failings or regular unpleasant occurrences. The first thing that should be noted is that these deficiencies happen because of not genuinely engaging yourself or self-assessment.

No one is a failure or a disappointment. All it takes is for a person to know his or her personality, habit, character and failures then, start building from there. Then initiate the improvement process. Sooner or later, you will be amazed at what you can do.

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Are You Self-Aware?

Self-awareness is having a high degree of understanding about yourself. It's awareness of your habits, emotional tendencies, needs, desires, strengths, and weak points. Having a high level of self-awareness is a powerful tool. It permits you to alter your life better, given that you know how you tick. Those that do not have self-awareness often find life to be frustrating.

Cultivate your self-awareness:

1. Notice your thoughts. Unless you have actually been practicing meditation for years, your mind is constantly churning through ideas and endlessly offering commentary. You can't simply take a look at a tree and appreciate it, your mind has to comment, "That's a beautiful tree." Then it's off to the races.

Notice your thinking patterns. What are you thinking when you're feeling nervous? Tired? Intrigued? Walking down the street? Notice how comparable circumstances lead to similar idea patterns.

Do you judge people and circumstances? Do you invest a great deal of time considering the past or the future? Do you expect the worst to take place or the very best? Or do you embrace a mindset of, "Let's just see what takes place"?

2. Notice your sensations. Exactly what are you feeling throughout the day? What do you feel while you're eating? Driving to work? Lying in bed? Waiting in line? Once you've noticed your feeling, question it. What am I feeling? Why? Exactly what do I need right now? How do I normally react in this scenario? Is that wise?

3. Understand how you handle frustration or psychological discomfort. A big chunk of your time is invested trying to make yourself feel better. If you feel a little annoyed or uncomfortable, then you might invest a significant quantity of time and energy attempting to alter the scenario or the others around you to fix those negative sensations.

Do you aim to manage others? Do you attempt to sidetrack yourself? Is your very first impulse to leave the scenario? Do you browse the internet or eat a huge bowl of ice cream?

4. Analyze your friendships. Where do you find your good friends? Are most of your relationships long-lasting or short? When your friendships end, exactly what is the typical cause? What types of individuals do you choose to be pals with? What kinds of individuals do you avoid?

5. Analyze your intimate relationships. Do you see a pattern in the type of people that you've been involved with? Exactly what are the unfavorable characteristics they all share? Why do you believe those people interested you?

Exactly what were your drawbacks in your relationships? Are you clingy? Jealous? Too concentrated on work? Cannot communicate your needs? Think about how you contributed to the failure of your relationships.

Have you changed your approach from relationship to relationship, or do you continue to duplicate your errors?

6. Keep a journal. There's no better method to discover yourself than to record your thoughts, feelings, and experiences each day. Research studies have actually shown that we don't remember our past very accurately, so record it while it's still fresh in your mind. Make certain to include your low and high points for the day.

Keep in mind how well you ate and slept, too. You might find some useful details.

Produce a practice of writing in your journal for at least 15 minutes every day.

You'll begin to notice patterns and discover a lot about yourself.

Understanding yourself might be the most important piece of your self-development puzzle. If you don't understand yourself, it's hard to apply all the great info available today. Maintain an awareness of your ideas, feelings, and actions. Examine and question them. You'll be surprised by what you discover.

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Why You Should Improve Your Emotional Intelligence Before A Job Search

In today’s volatile employment market it is difficult to land a job that we want, like and are good at doing. It is even more difficult to do that without honing all of our skills to perfection.

When job-hunting, most of us focus on our achievements, our brains, appearance, and personality. That is all good, but there is one thing that gets overlooked on a constant basis: emotional intelligence.

Emotional intelligence is an important bit of the puzzle, something that employers are testing for extensively, even though it is a soft skill. Years ago, research showed that employees with average IQ will outperform employees with higher IQ.

It was a bit of a head-scratcher; you would assume, logically, that a smarter person would perform better at any given task.

The research proved otherwise and, ever since, emotional intelligence has been the tipping factor when it comes to deciding between two, otherwise, similar job applicants.

What is Emotional Intelligence?

Emotional intelligence is something intangible within us all, something deeply rooted that helps us understand ourselves and understand others.

It is a set of skills that govern how we perceive ourselves, how we control our emotions, how we manage our time, but also how good are we at relating to other people, their experiences, and their emotions.

Some people are, unfortunately, emotionally stunted. They are not all that good at socializing, reading social cues, or showing empathy towards their fellow man.

This can be a detrimental factor if you are looking for a job. Luckily, your emotional intelligence is something you can work at and, with practice, you will get a lot better at managing yourself and other people as well.

3 Reasons to Improve Your Emotional Intelligence

Benefits of improving your emotional intelligence are numerous; it is a skill that when developed to a degree, will help you in both your personal and professional life. Before embarking on a long and trying process of job search, it is important to challenge ourselves and to see what we are actually after.

Boosting EI will help you in few categories that are crucial for job success. First of those things is self-awareness. Emotionally intelligent people have a clear-cut understanding of who they are and where they are headed.

They are able to be brutally honest towards themselves, evaluating their strengths and weaknesses with ease. This is an important competency to have when looking for employment.

Being honest towards yourself, understanding what you are suited for and can actually do, means that you are less prone to wasting your or the interviewers time.


1. Self-Awareness


Self-awareness is something that helps us recognize our feelings. It allows us to rule over them instead of letting them get the best of us.

Bursts of self-pity or anger, when displayed during an interview, do not get you on the top of the list of candidates. Self-awareness comes coupled with self-regulation. People who are composed and able to think before they act are also much better at reacting to change.


2. Motivation

Motivation is also influenced by emotional intelligence.

Although motivation is governed by many things, it is important to note that people with higher emotional intelligence are motivated mostly by immaterial things and they are willing to sacrifice short-term success for a long-term vision.

Building up you emotional intelligence will help you put things in perspective, so when you show up for an interview you will not be a deflated, old tire, but a motivated, highly productive individual that can contribute to the company in many ways.

Interviewers pick up on those things.

3. Empathy & Social Skills

Empathy and social skills are the most important weapons in the arsenal of emotional intelligence. Empathy in particular; it enables you to pick up signals from other people, to sense how they are feeling and to adjust your behavior accordingly.

This can be a very handy tool during an interviewing process; in fact, it is an important skill to have when going through life in general. Empathetic people are great listeners and are easy to confide in; they make for naturally born leaders.

They are open and appreciate the opinion of other people. In short, they are a kind of people every company wants to hire.


Summary

So if you are currently looking for employment, you’re smart and capable and have achieved great results in the past, but are unsure of where you stand with emotional intelligence, test yourself.

Take a deep look at all the things we mentioned above and assess how good you are at them.

If you think you are not very good at some of them, practice! The brain is a marvelous instrument and you can condition it to adapt and to change.

Use emotional intelligence strategies to help you achieve your goals; listen more attentively, curb your reactions, try to put yourself in the shoes of other people. It will make a better person and a better employee!

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