Be the Best! 4 Tips for Personal Growth

By Aubrey D Bartolome

The year is almost over. In just a few weeks, we will say goodbye to 2012, and welcome another year. Let me ask you a question.

How much did you grow this year?

You may have felt that 2012 is not your year. Sure, you still have your job, a family, friends, but in the back of your mind, you think that there is something you're missing. You feel that there is something that needs to develop in you.

Personal development or personal growth can mean a lot of things. It can include activities that make you more self-aware, or being able to live to your full potential.

Embarking on a journey of personal growth is not easy, and it never ends. There is always something that will distract you, and there is always something that you need to learn. You don't need to be afraid of growing. The great thing about personal growth is that it's focus is you. You don't need to look at how others do it, you simply need to look inside yourself, see the things that need to change, and do something to make that change.

If you are not sure how you can do this, here are some tips you can start with.

1 - Raise Your Standards

If you feel like your life is in a rut, it's time to stop being contented with where you are now. Mediocrity is not included in personal growth. Know what you want, and keep working towards that goal. If you want that promotion, then do better work than you did before. You may have to sacrifice a bit of your time, but it will be worth it in the end.

2 - Stay Positive

There may be times in your journey in life that you will fail. You don't need to be negative about it. See the silver lining in any situation, and turn those stumbling blocks of failure into stepping stones to success.

3 - Know Yourself

You know that quote "if you don't stand for anything, you'll fall for anything"? Keep this in mind. Know what you value, and stand up for them. Don't give in to pressure and just believe in yourself.

4 - Invest in yourself

The worst place to be is at equilibrium. There is no such thing, when you stop growing you die. Try to learn something new, like a new habit (if you don't know how to cook, this may be the time to take lessons!), or maybe a new language, or Latin dancing! It doesn't matter what you try, just remember to have fun!

The next year can be your best year yet if you just take the time to grow. Start on your journey today and get ready for a great year to come!

Click here to find out more and get FREE eBook, "How to Increase Confidence in the 7 Main Areas of Life" NOW!

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Juggle Work and Home with Ease

by Nelson Berry

Managing home and work is never easy. It is double the stress. But you surely can rise above the challenge without pushing yourself to the limit. Lean how to deal with stress properly with these tips:

Separate them. Do not bring your work at your home, in the same way you should not carry your personal problems in your office. You do not get things done, and you will only feel bad about yourself because of it. Make the boundaries between your home and office very clear.

Relax, no matter where you are. Find a time to relax whether you are in your home or at work. It does not have to take a long time. A good stress reduction strategy is visualization.

Here is an example: Go to the bathroom for fifteen minutes, close your eyes, and take slow deep breaths. Count one to three for every breath you take. Inhale with your nose and allow the air to fill your lungs. Then exhale through your mouth slowly. While doing so, imagine yourself saying the following subliminal messages or affirmations:

I can handle whatever stress.
I imagine stress leaving out my body every time I exhale.
I can overcome all challenges.
If thing do not work out well today, there is always another day.

Repeat them as often as you can within the specified duration. Allow those subliminal messages to really go into your subconscious and change your thinking pattern and your feelings. By the time you walk out of the room, you will feel so refreshed and ready to get going.

Delegate. You do not have to carry the burden all on your own. A good stress relief is delegate tasks you know other people can do. That will also teach them to be more responsible. Moreover, doing so will help you finish a lot of your workload or chores.

Consider having a work-at-home job. One of the best stress management tips is to have an at-home work. Having a work-at-home job means less time on the road and out of the house. There is also less pressure as you can be more flexible with your own time.

If you are working a full-time job, you can talk with your boss and propose an at-home setup for you. If it does not work out, you can always start looking for plenty of online work.

Meditate. When you have so many responsibilities up your sleeves, it is easy to get so overwhelmed and worry about the future. Will I have the ability to accomplish them? Will they turn out all right?

One of the ways in coping with stress is to meditate. Through meditation, you become more conscious about the present moment. It also clears up your mind, so you can make sounder decisions.

Focus, focus, focus. One of the reasons why you are experiencing work stress is you multi-task. You will accomplish more if you will focus on one thing and stick to it until you get it done. It is the same thing with managing your household.

Nelson Berry is the Pioneer of Subliminal Messages Videos and Subliminal MP3s Audio Subliminal Messages online. Valued at $160, click for 4 Free Subliminal Messages Video!

Article Source: Juggle Work and Home with Ease

How To Successfully Change Your Thought Patterns

It has also been scientifically proven that our thoughts directly influence our lives and there is a wealth of information that can be found warning every one of the dangers of thinking negatively, and rightly so! Your thoughts affect your current health, your successes in life, your relationships, your finances, they influence everything. Your current reality is a mirror of the beliefs and thoughts you hold.

Just by changing the way you think, you can change your life. You have infinite power within you to influence your results and you would be naive not to harness this power. Researchers have shown us that we have on average between 50 000 to 70000 thoughts a day! How many of those thoughts are empowering you and how many of those thoughts are limiting you? It becomes clearer every day that positive thinking is not a sheer luxury but a must if you want to feel fulfilled and happier in life.

The results you have in your life now are come from your past thoughts. Very often, past thoughts become a vicious cycle in undermining current and future results. For example, imagine you are struggling in your business, you are not aware but every second thought you have is something like `I will never be successful` or `my business is going to collapse in a few months´ or ´I am a failure, I knew it´. What really plays out now is that your thoughts connect to emotions, bad thoughts leads to bad feelings and you act on your feelings. In this example, the business owner would make very different business decisions and take very different actions depending if he felt positive or not. Unfortunately, because he believes he will fail, he will most likely fail and he will mostly think that he was right too to be negative, which then reinforces this false belief and the cycle continues.

Because our thoughts are on automatic, most of the time we are not even aware we are having them. The first step is to become aware of the types of limiting thoughts you often have. Once you are aware of how many negative thoughts you have, you want to start to change the neurological patterns that have been formed. The more of the same thought you have, the more energy you are giving it and the more you are reinforcing that thought pattern. The neurons group and come together and are then more prominent in your awareness.

Simple Steps To Successfully Change Your Thought Patterns

• Identify – First you want to identify and acknowledge what types of thoughts you regularly have
• Awareness – The next steps is to create awareness around the thought. You want to understand where this thought/belief originates from. For all your negative thoughts, ask yourself if this is a belief or is it a fact, if it is a belief, how will you change it to empower you now?
• Replace – Now you want to replace this thought to one that is positive and will empower you.
• Repetition – You want to repeat the new thought in your mind so that now you are redirecting your energy to a positive thought and you are creating a new pattern. Every time you think that thought, you are reinforcing it.

You need to repeatedly re-direct your thoughts to the positive one every time. The substance that keeps the associated thoughts together doesn't have unlimited supply so the good news is that after a lot of repetition, the old neurons start to disconnect and the new positive thought patterns replace it.

Change does not happen overnight and unfortunately, there is no magic pill you can take to see results instantaneously. It takes effort, time, commitment and perseverance, but with anything in life, these are the key ingredients to successfully make the changes and achieve what we desire.

You can also try:

• Distancing – this is when you just let your thoughts slip past you without giving too much attention to them at all. 
• When you are aware that you are thinking negatively, tell the voice in your head ¨to shut up¨ or ¨sshh¨ 
• Do something active – If you feel like you are in a negative thinking rut and you can´t refocus, starting moving and do something active, this will help you to be distracted and change your focus for awhile.

Want 7 Simple Strategies to Triple Your Productivity? - Free Access to E-Course

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About the Author

Kirstin is a Productivity Coach who is passionate about helping individuals to successfully achieve their goals and create their ¨ideal¨ life. She works with her clients to close the gap between where they are now and where they want to be, while supporting them to overcome their obstacles, develop key skills and a mindset geared for success.

Goal Setting Activities

by Danyal Horton

Each one of us is likely to set goals in life voluntarily or unwillingly and strive to achieve those goals. We set goals to obtain improvement in many areas of life including vocation, personal situations, education, and business. The process is to come up with a few changes in our routine or introduce a few habits which are not present recently so that you can accomplish what we had in mind. These days business coaching and personal improvement periods educate you to set SMART goals, write them down, focus on them, and after that assign assets to achieve them. In this article we're going to discuss what is actually meant by SMART goals and what the different goal setting activities that will help to accomplish those goals are.

Concise explanation of SMART goals

When we say SMART, we mean goals that are Specific, Measureable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely - that is why the acronym SMART. Whenever you think of a goal, make sure it fits on the previously mentioned criteria. A particular goal is easy to carry out compared to a general goal. There must be ways to appraise the progress of achieving a certain goal. In case you have no idea where you are heading, there's no reason why you should keep on the same track. Build a guide to achieve a goal and strictly stick to it. Any goal must be realistic and practical so that you can achieve it within the available resources as well as time. And lastly you need to assign each goal a period of time frame and try to achieve it within that length of time. If you waste too much time on a goal that is not producing the actual results which you were expecting, you will not be able to attain the next level.

Goal Setting Routines - A Road Map

A target is normally set to change something and also to reach that point you must adhere to a step-by-step approach. Right here we are going to go over a number of goal setting routines that help you set SMART goals and achieve them in a practical way.

1. Research, research, research. Prior to setting a goal that is more likely to bring positive results in a short span of time, spend some time conducting research concerning the numerous available options and next picking out the one that matches your lifestyle.

2. Specify the type of goal you are interested in. There are two types of goals: short term and long term. You need to categorize all your goals in these two groups after which allocate resources correctly. In addition, every person has some professional goals and some personal goals that should be taken into consideration. You should try to create a balance between these two types of goals in order to achieve them in a timely manner.

3. Write down your goals. This could be the most significant component of goal setting activities that helps you to not only recognize all your objectives but also provides you with an opportunity to revisit your list from time to time in an effort to assess how well you're progressing. When you're done writing down your goals, focus on them so that you can assign resources available at one point to the most important goals.

4. Make your goals realistic. If your goals are too good to be true, it is time you improved them. The time frame you assign to one particular goal should also be practical; otherwise you might not be able to see the final results you are anticipating. This activity also demands determining what kinds of resources you'll need in order to achieve a particular goal.

Some people are more motivated than others but everyone can set goals in life and take steps to accomplish them no matter how trivial those goals are. Adhere to the afore-mentioned guidelines to achieve things in life that are essential to you. The first and most important step in goal setting activities is to decide what you actually want to do with your life and from that point on, pursue the road map to success!

Check on Goal Setting Activities For further discussion.

How to Reinvent Yourself and Win

By Lou Djankovic

Are you finding that you are on the same carousel and you keep on going around in a circle and not getting anywhere? And you believe that it's time to find out how to reinvent yourself and win the life that you always wanted. Well, you can!

To reinvent yourself it takes a few steps and done consistently will put on to the path. Let's start.

1. Decide what you want.

This is the most important of them of all and if you don't figure this one out, you will keep going around in circles and never be satisfied. Sit down and think what you really want. Take time out of your day and ask yourself this question and once you get the answer - write it down. Sometimes it will come to you instantly and other times you will have to ask yourself over a few sessions. But when you do figure out what you want, you have to take it out of your head.

2. Why do you want it?

Once you have figured out what you want, you have to ask the next important step, why do I want it. What will receiving this thing that you want give you? What will you look like when you have it? What will you be doing? How will you feel? How will your life improve from having this thing that you want or what will it bring you? These answers will fuel you to move.

3. Take action.

Once you have figured out the what and the why, it's time to do it. And you have to do this every day. It doesn't have to be world shattering but you need to do a little each and every day so that you get what you want. Success does not come from doing something once, you need to repeatedly do it and when you do receive it, STILL DO NOT STOP.

To reinvent yourself all you have to do is re-write your story. What kind of story do you want to have? You may have been told that you have to go to school and get a job and that's what you do for your life but is that TRULY what you want.

Once those three things are established, there are resources and programs that can help you understand how to carry out these changes to succeed.

Isn't it time for a change? Go ahead, you'll thank yourself for it later.

Want to learn more motivational and inspirational content, just go over to http://www.happythoughts.com.au and sign up for our newsletter.

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A journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step

Author: Claire Chapman

Take the first step...

What is it you want? Where do you want to go? Now you know where you are going, think about where you are now. What's the first thing that you need to do to get moving? If possible, do it today. Life is full of "if only" and "I couldn't because". Don't be someone full of regrets because of what you didn't do, be someone who is full of stories of what they have done.

Keep taking steps.... even if they feel like baby steps!

We all have those days where it feels like every step is painful, or there is something else to do, or it's just plain too difficult. It's the "don' wanna" cry of the tantruming two! Even if it's something really simple, take one step. Mark Forster talks about this when he says, "Just get the file out". It's only a small step, but it proves your intent. After all, after you've got the file out, it's not as difficult to do something with it, is it? Have any projects that seem to have been at a standstill? Just do one thing today to get moving on it. You probably already know what it is!

Enjoy it...

I've got a quote on my fridge that reads, "Remember that happiness is a means of travel, not a destination". Get there - have fun on the journey. Enjoy it when you get there rather than moving straight to the next place, next goal, and next challenge. Rest a while and glory in the fabulousness of what you have achieved. Tell everyone!

...And then work out what steps you want to take next!

You've achieved it - what's next? There are always new opportunities coming our way. What opportunities are you spotting right now that you are excited about? What's your first step for that?

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/motivational-articles/a-journey-of-a-thousand-miles-starts-with-a-single-step-2019.html

About the Author
The Fabulous Coaching Company is run by Claire Chapman a qualified life coach. For more information on The Fabulous Coaching Company you can also view www.fabulous-coaching-company.com where you can also sign up for a copy of her fortnightly ezine "Fabulosity"

Happiness Is Here, Happiness Is Now

by Christiana Senibo

Are you familiar with the phrase 'I'll be happy when I ....'
More importantly, does it sound like you?

The Cambridge dictionary defines happy as: feeling, showing or causing pleasure or satisfaction. So many times we wait for something or someone to make us happy. We believe we'll be happy when we get the promotion, meet that special person, buy the house, and maybe win the lottery.

Happiness is a decision. Make that decision everyday. Irrespective of what life throws your way, you can choose your state. You and not your situations should determine whether you stay happy or not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you won't have bad days, neither am I saying you shouldn't express your pain. I am saying irrespective of the pain and anger, choose to be happy. Acknowledge the situation (don't be in denial), express your pain (and you should) whatever way you want to, but after it's said, don't let it get the better of you. Don't let your disposition and attitude towards life become one of despair or rejection. I'm asking you to be like a thermostat which sets the temperature of a room. Whether it's hot or cold, the thermostat stays at a set temperature. It acknowledges the change in the environment; nonetheless it remains at the set temperature. The thermometer on the other hand is different; it fluctuates with different environmental conditions.

So the question is how? How do you stay happy when everything that could possibly go wrong happens? The following are some steps that have helped me stay happy in spite of:
Remember that regardless of what you are going through, someone else will gladly switch places with you. I remember listening to a song when I was younger in Nigeria where the singer complained of having sardines and beans for food. I thought to myself, oh my gosh!! I want to live in your country; where it's a sad thing to have sardines and beans for food. For me sardine and baked beans was luxury. My parents could only occasionally afford it and whenever they did it was a big deal! I would have gladly switched places with the singer.
See the opportunity in the situation. If you've been diagnosed with a terminal illness, see the opportunity life still presents by giving you time to make the most of your relationship with your loved ones. See it as a second chance to make the rest of your life great.
Decide that you are the boss of your life. Nobody and nothing (especially not pain) will take you captive without your permission. If you've acknowledged the situation and expressed your pain, then move on. Refuse to be constantly harassed by the pain or upsetting feeling. Refuse to be held captive by the pain or situation. Instead exercise your freedom by choosing a positive state.
Find the lesson. There's always a lesson hidden inside every negative situation. Finding the lesson enhances your life and makes you stronger. Don't forget life is not just about the destination, it's also about the process and who you become as a result. Finding the lesson puts the situation in perspective and makes it more manageable.
Imagine what your life would look like if you are a thermometer. You will be highly unpredictable and unreliable because one minute you are happy, then the next you are grumpy or sad; fluctuating with the different situations life throws your way. Imagine on the other hand what your life will be like if you are a thermostat, where you take control of negative experiences and decide that in spite of them you'll be happy anyway.

In the words of Martha Washington, "I am still determined to be cheerful and happy, in whatever situation I may be; for I have also learned from experience that the greater part of our happiness or misery depends upon our dispositions, and not upon our circumstances."

As you start your week, remember that happiness is a decision. And with every negative experience you encounter, determine that you and not the situation will decide your outcome.

Christiana is a Personal Transformation Strategist whose message of hope and possibilities inspire people to transform their lives, overcome adversity and unleash their full potential. She passionately motivates her listeners to step into their greatness and start living their dreams.

www.christianasenibo.com