Life's Challenges

Sometimes the world appears
To be spinning out of control.
Sometimes there seems to be no end
To the distressing news.

Sometimes it feels like troubles
Are being piled on top of troubles.
Sometimes it can look as if there
Could never be a way forward.

And yet, that way forward is always
As close as your next thought.
For no matter how difficult and discouraging
Life may have become, with each dawning moment,
A new world of positive possibilities opens up to you.

From the darkest depths of despair,
Hope does indeed grow and take flight.
Out of difficult situations, new strategies emerge
For creating real value and spreading life's goodness.

Remember that the future does not have to be
An extension of the past.
For you can act right now to create
That future out of the abundance of positive possibilities.

Life always has its challenges,
And those challenges are what enable you
To bring real value to life.
Whatever the circumstance,
Step boldly forward and
Choose to move the world positively ahead.

10 Deadly Sins of Negative Thinking

The way to overcome negative thoughts and destructive emotions is to develop opposing, positive emotions that are stronger and more powerful. - Dalai Lama Life could be so much better for many people, if they would just spot their negative thinking habits and replace them with positive ones. Negative thinking, in all its many-splendored forms, has a way of creeping into conversations and our thinking without our noticing them. The key to success, in my humble opinion, is learning to spot these thoughts and squash them like little bugs. Then replace them with positive ones. You'll notice a huge difference in everything you do. Let's take a look at 10 common ways that negative thinking emerges get good at spotting these patterns, and practice replacing them with positive thinking patterns. It has made all the difference in the world for me.

10 Deadly Sins of Negative Thinking

1. I will be happy once I have _____ (or once I earn X). Problem: If you think you can't be happy until you reach a certain point, or until you reach a certain income, or have a certain type of house or car or computer setup, you'll never be happy. That elusive goal is always just out of reach. Once we reach those goals, we are not satisfied we want more. Solution: Learn to be happy with what you have, where you are, and who you are, right at this moment. Happiness doesn't have to be some state that we want to get to eventually it can be found right now. Learn to count your blessings, and see the positive in your situation. This might sound simplistic, but it works.

2. I wish I were as ____ as (a celebrity, friend, co-worker). Problem: We'll never be as pretty, as talented, as rich, as sculpted, as cool, as everyone else. There will always be someone better, if you look hard enough. Therefore, if we compare ourselves to others like this, we will always pale, and will always fail, and will always feel bad about ourselves. This is no way to be happy. Solution: Stop comparing yourself to others, and look instead at yourself what are your strengths, your accomplishments, your successes, however small? What do you love about yourself? Learn to love who you are, right now, not who you want to become. There is good in each of us, love in each of us, and a wonderful human spirit in every one of us.

3. Seeing others becoming successful makes me jealous and resentful. Problem: First, this assumes that only a small number of people can be successful. In truth, many, many people can be successful in different ways. Solution: Learn to admire the success of others, and learn from it, and be happy for them, by empathizing with them and understanding what it must be like to be them. And then turn away from them, and look at yourself you can be successful too, in whatever you choose to do. And even more, you already are successful. Look not at those above you in the social ladder, but those below you there are always millions of people worse off than you, people who couldn't even read this article or afford a computer. In that light, you are a huge success.

4. I am a miserable failure I can't seem to do anything right. Problem: Everyone is a failure, if you look at it in certain ways. Everyone has failed, many times, at different things. I have certainly failed so many times I cannot count them and I continue to fail, daily. However, looking at your failures as failures only makes you feel bad about yourself. By thinking in this way, we will have a negative self-image and never move on from here. Solution: See your successes and ignore your failures. Look back on your life, in the last month, or year, or 5 years. And try to remember your successes. If you have trouble with this, start documenting them keep a success journal, either in a notebook or online. Document your success each day, or each week. When you look back at what you've accomplished, over a year, you will be amazed. It's an incredibly positive feeling.

5. I'm going to beat so-and-so no matter what I'm better than him. And there's no way I'll help him succeed he might beat me. Problem: Competitiveness assumes that there is a small amount of gold to be had, and I need to get it before he does. It makes us into greedy, back-stabbing, hurtful people. We try to claw our way over people to get to success, because of our competitive feelings. For example, if a blogger wants to have more subscribers than another blogger, he may never link to or mention that other blogger. However, who is to say that my subscribers can't also be yours? People can read and subscribe to more than one blog. Solution: Learn to see success as something that can be shared, and learn that if we help each other out, we can each have a better chance to be successful. Two people working towards a common goal are better than two people trying to beat each other up to get to that goal. There is more than enough success to go around. Learn to think in terms of abundance rather than scarcity.

6. Dammit! Why do these bad things always happen to me? Problem: Bad things happen to everybody. If we dwell on them, they will frustrate us and bring us down. Solution: See bad things as a part of the ebb and flow of life. Suffering is a part of the human condition but it passes. All pain goes away, eventually. Meanwhile, don't let it hold you back. Don't dwell on bad things, but look forward towards something good in your future. And learn to take the bad things in stride, and learn from them. Bad things are actually opportunities to grow and learn and get stronger, in disguise.

7. You can't do anything right! Why can't you be like ____ ? Problem: This can be said to your child or your subordinate or your sibling. The problem? Comparing two people, first of all, is always a fallacy. People are different, with different ways of doing things, different strengths and weaknesses, different human characteristics. If we were all the same, we'd be robots. Second, saying negative things like this to another person never helps the situation. It might make you feel better, and more powerful, but in truth, it hurts your relationship, it will actually make you feel negative, and it will certainly make the other person feel negative and more likely to continue negative behavior. Everyone loses. Solution: Take the mistakes or bad behavior of others as an opportunity to teach. Show them how to do something. Second, praise them for their positive behavior, and encourage their success. Last, and most important, love them for who they are, and celebrate their differences.

8. Your work sucks. It's super lame. You are a moron and I hope you never reproduce. Problem: I've actually gotten this comment before. It feels wonderful. However, let's look at it not from the perspective of the person receiving this kind of comment but from the perspective of the person giving it. How does saying something negative like this help you? I guess it might feel good to vent if you feel like your time has been wasted. But really, how much of your time has been wasted? A few minutes? And whose fault is that? The bloggers or yours? In truth, making negative comments just keeps you in a negative mindset. It's also not a good way to make friends. Solution: Learn to offer constructive solutions, first of all. Instead of telling someone their blog sucks, or that a post is lame, offer some specific suggestions for improvement. Help them get better. If you are going to take the time to make a comment, make it worth your time. Second, learn to interact with people in a more positive way it makes others feel good and it makes you feel better about yourself. And you can make some great friends this way. That's a good thing.

9. Insulting People Back Problem: If someone insults you or angers you in some way, insulting them back and continuing your anger only transfers their problem to you. This person was probably having a bad day (or a bad year) and took it out on you for some reason. If you reciprocate, you are now having a bad day too. His problem has become yours. Not only that, but the cycle of insults can get worse and worse until it results in violence or other negative consequences for both of you. Solution: Let the insults or negative comments of others slide off you like Teflon. Don't let their problem become yours. In fact, try to understand their problem more why would someone say something like that? What problems are they going through? Having a little empathy for someone not only makes you understand that their comment is not about you, but it can make you feel and act in a positive manner towards them and make you feel better about yourself in the process.

10. I don't think I can do this I don't have enough discipline. Maybe some other time. Problem: If you don't think you can do something, you probably won't. Especially for the big stuff. Discipline has nothing to do with it motivation and focus has everything to do with it. And if you put stuff off for “some other time”, you'll never get it done. Negative thinking like this inhibits us from accomplishing anything. Solution: Turn your thinking around: you can do this! You don't need discipline. Find ways to make yourself a success at your goal. If you fail, learn from your mistakes, and try again. Instead of putting a goal off for later, start now. And focus on one goal at a time, putting all of your energy into it, and getting as much help from others as you can. You can really move mountains if you start with positive thinking.

Being Overly Optimistic

It is good to be optimistic as it can keep our spirit up and optimistic people tend to achieve what they want to achieve. Isn't that true? Yes, that is what the experts or everyone is saying. But how true is this theory that being optimistic is beneficial to us?

Let us take a look at The Secret. The theory of The Secret is that you will need to keep thinking about what you want in order to attract it to your life. So naturally this means that you will need to be optimistic and think only about the positive. I am not saying that being positive is a wrong thing to do but I am questioning whether it is the best approach?

I had seen people who embrace the theory of being optimistic in every situation and it does well for them because they feel happier at that very moment. But it seems like to be that they are being blinded by their optimism that they lose their perception of reality. They drift to the future and lost sense of what is right in front of them now.

Let us take a look at an example. Let's say John has a goal and his goal is to achieve financial freedom. But his situation right now is not favourable. He is working in a 12 hours a day job and earning $1500 per month. He decided to adopt the optimistic approach, be optimistic, think positive and hoping that things will get better.

Optimist Approach vs Realist Approach

How many of you believe that staying optimistic is going to help John achieve financial freedom? Yes, The Secret says so that staying optimistic and thinking positive will attract the scenarios to help him get his dream job and earn $100,000 per year. But I am sure that this approach will not work out well.

To be fair to The Secret, I got to agree that staying optimistic to a certain extent does help to keep the mind sane. But this approach isn't really the best way to achieve what you want in life. So what if John takes another approach instead? – The Realist Approach.

John has a goal to achieve financial freedom and he is stuck in his day 12 hours day job earning $1500 per month. He chose to be aware of his current situation. He knows that what he is doing now is not going to get him to where he wants to be. The reality, the harsh facts and true numbers are staring in his face. He want to change and he knows that he is not optimistic about his current situation and in fact, he felt pessimistic about his future if things are going to continue the way it is. This is the point where he decided to change because is aware of his present situation.

Which approach do you think is the better one? The optimistic approach where John just stays optimistic and think positive or the realist approach where John is aware of the truth right now and decided that he needs to fix it in order to move on?

Just staying positive and overly optimistic puts you into a self denial mode and eventually you will become the world's biggest liar by lying to yourself everyday. You lose your sense of reality (not earning enough money now) and escape to the future (financial freedom). This is not a very smart thing to do because if you do not fix your problems of today, the problem will still be there tomorrow. The problem doesn't go away if all you do is to be optimistic of the future and stay ignorant of the problem staring at you now.

Parting Words

What I want to reinforce here is that you will need to avoid letting optimism take over your sense of reality. If you are unhealthy, broke or unhappy, it is a problem that you need to fix now. Don't hold on to the thought that things will be better tomorrow when you are not taking any action to fix it. If nothing had been done, things are going to stay the same way! What do you think? Do you think the realist approach or the optimist approach works better?

Don't be Conditioned to Lose

An eagle's egg was placed in the nest of a prairie chicken.

The egg hatched and the little eagle grew up thinking

it was a prairie chicken.

The eagle did what the prairie chickens did.

It scratched in the dirt for seeds. It clucked and cackled.

It never flew more than a few feet because that is what

the prairie chickens did.

One day he saw an eagle flying gracefully and majestically

in the open sky. He asked the prairie chickens:

"What is that beautiful bird?" The chickens replied,

"That is an eagle.

He is an outstanding bird, but you cannot fly like him

because you are just a prairie chicken."

So the eagle never gave it a second thought,

believing that to be the truth. He lived the life of and

died a prairie chicken, depriving himself of his heritage

because of his lack of vision.

What a waste! He was born to win,

but was conditioned to lose.

Do not let people or situations or even yourself

condition you to lose in life.

How To Fix The Systems In Our Lives?

Life is made up of a series of systems which can be changed to make our lives better.

We all have systems going on in our lives: sleep, career, hobbies, relationships, money management, goals, personal hygiene, health, eating, etc.

I believe one of the key components of a successful life is to be able to manage all the systems in our lives as efficiently and as painless as possible.

For example if we have a health problem, we have to look at the system of health in our life, dissect it and find out where the problem is lying and look at ways of fixing it.

Similarly if we have a problem with managing our money, we dissect the money management system and look for the reasons we cannot manage our money correctly, and then look at ways of fixing it.

What I've come to realise is that when these systems are working well our lives tend to go well and everything is hunky dory, but when one of the systems fail, it causes the others to fail in some way as well. It's like a cog in a machine, if one of the cogs break then it effectively breaks the whole machine.

Sleep is a system which has a set of subsystems, which, if tweaked correctly, can help us to get a great night sleep, give us more energy and allow us to sleep less. We just have to look at sleep as a whole, break it down and then start tweaking what's not working.

Then, when I started looking at other areas of life I soon realised than we can do this with almost every area of our life.

If you think about it we are a system of habits.

Most of our life is made up of things we do every day, day in day out and it doesn't change much. This might make us humans sound dull and uninteresting but it's a good thing really as it keeps our lives together, it keeps us from feeling stressed as we know pretty much what we are going to be doing this time next week, we know where we will be celebrating Christmas, we know when we are going on holiday, we know when we are going to work, when we sit down for dinner, when we have to study and the list goes on. So, because we are going to live our lives like this wouldn't it make sense to make it the best system we could and make things run smoothly and even make it work for us, and make it better.

The Systems In Our Lives

One of the first things to do is look at every system in your life just now and assess it. The simple way to assess it is just give it a mark out of 10, nothing fancy, a quick, intuitive mark which tells you how well you think that particular part of life is going.

Look at some of the systems below, add some of your own and give them a mark out of 10:

· Health

· Career

· Marriage

· Relationship with children

· Money

· Life Goals

· Friends

· Sleep

· Diet

· Spirituality

· Fun

I will give you an example of the diet system in your life and how it can be analysed:

Suppose a person's diet is not going so great, so it would be time to look at his diet and figure out why he only scored it 6 out of 10. And that would be the next part; to drill down on the system and find the sub-systems in order to tweak it as much as possible.

Looking at the subsystems

Once we recognise that something isn't quite right with one of the systems in our life we can then drill down on it to find out why it's not working and aim to look at fixing it.

In case of Diet one can ask following questions (subsystems):

· What do I eat?

· What do I drink?

· How many calories do I consume?

· What type of bread do I eat?

· When do I eat?

· What foods make me sluggish?

· What are the staple foods I eat?

Etc.

From the example above you can ask a lot of questions about the system of your diet and look at each different sub-system and start to tweak it. It would be a matter of testing and tweaking until you get that particular system of your life just right, and keep on tweaking it until it is near perfect.

Of course there could be two or three sub-systems that work hand in hand to affect the overall harmony of the whole system. So you might think your diet is not that great and you keep putting on a few pounds no matter how little you eat, but it could be you're eating late at night and hardly anything during the day. This means that your body is storing fat during the day as it thinks you're not eating enough and you're releasing fat at night, but not as much due to your expending less energy when you are sleeping.

Looking At All Your Sub-Systems

When you start to look at all the systems of your life in turn and drill down on them and look at the sub-systems you can really get a handle on the things that you need to do to improve your overall life.

This is just a brief overview of looking at the systems in your life and I hope it makes sense and is useful in your life.

I would also recommend a great book for further reading on this called Work The System by Sam Carpenter.

10 Beliefs That Could Hold You Back In Life

I have spoken a lot about beliefs and how to change them to make your life better. There are certain beliefs that a lot of people believe and I think it's time to address these.

We are initially given beliefs from our parents, teachers, peers, TV and media. When we are young we think adults know more than us so we generally trust in what they say. However as we get older we form our own beliefs about the world. However some of the residual beliefs from our childhood can remain. Sometimes they have remained without us knowing about them.

Here are some beliefs that may be residual, see if you recognise any of them and change them.

· If You Fail At Something You Are A Failure: This is perpetuated at school and throughout our days of turning into an adult. We are encouraged to win at all costs. If I fail at something, and I have many times, I try again, and again, and again until I get it right. If you believe that "if you fail at something you are a failure" then that means everyone in the world is a failure. Don't hold yourself back by believing this. Install a new belief.

· Why Change It If It's Not Broken: I don't mean changing for the sake of changing. I am talking about improving upon existing appliances, processes etc. We need change to move on with life and you will always come up against people who don't like change, avoid them if you can. If you see something that could be improved try and implement it.

· You Are Not Skilled Enough To Go For It: Nobody in life is skilled enough until they start doing it. If you want to do something just start doing it, don't stress about not getting into university to do a degree in computing, just do it until you get in. The internet has more information than you will get at university, college or school it's just a matter of finding it. If you are good and you sell yourself well, you will get noticed.

· You Are Too Old To Start Something New: The average life expectancy in the UK is about 75 for men and 79 for women and it is similar in the US and Europe . This will change and soon we'll be seeing the average life expectancy at 100. This means we are never too old to start something new. Starting a new venture is a great way to keep the brain active and to keep motivation up for living. I believe we are a nation of people who expect to die at around 75 or so, so what happens? We do. If we expect to live to 100 we would do more changing, feel less inhibited by time. Just do it.

· Believing God Is An Entity Outside Your Control: You control God, not the other way about. When I say God, I mean a spiritual force, I don't mean the bible and all that as that is obviously not to be believed literally. God is a force within you, when you pray, you are praying to yourself, when you ask forgiveness you are asking yourself for forgiveness. Nobody in this universe controls you, you control the force within you, never let go of that belief. You do not need anybody or anything to allow you to live your own life, live it for yourself and help others to live theirs.

· You Won't Amount To Anything: The very fact that you are alive says that you are special. If you want to be extraordinary you have to put in the effort. Every single one of us has a talent we don't know about or have not yet been recognised for. Try everything to find something that you love. I am a great believer in change; you don't have to do one thing all your life. Change your lifestyle many times until you find a path you love and are willing to work on.

· The World Does Not Revolve Around You: The whole universe is all about you. Every single person on this planet has a different world going on inside their heads. You see the world differently from me and I see it differently from someone else. Therefore the world is about you. Tell me now: what are you going to do to change your world?

· Nobody Believes In You: I believe in you, but my opinion is worth nothing, everybody's opinion is worth nothing. Work on believing in yourself and work on letting go of needing others to believe in you. As soon as you start believing in yourself other people will start believing in you, but let go of needing their belief.

· You Will Never Make That Amount Of Money: I have heard this so many times. You will make exactly what you expect to make. If I say to myself `There is no way I could make a million pounds' my brain will not look for ways of making that million. If I am determined enough to make a million my brain will help me look for ways of making it, no matter how outrageous the idea, at least you will be creating ideas.

· There Is Nothing You Can Do About It: Rubbish! You can change any aspect of your life you just can't see it yet. Some people never get past this and it's such a shame. Life can be hard and it takes guts to make the decision to change your life, but you can change it. Know what you want, know the steps you have to take and then change it.