Image courtesy of Chelsea Grainger
Are you progressing in life, or are you just treading water?  This is a brief article intended to motivate you beyond stagnation into purposeful action, once and for all.  These are the steps I use to get things done.

Almost everyday I go to the gym, and almost everyday I see people in the gym who are unfortunately making very little progress.  Although these individuals frequent the gym quite regularly, they are experiencing very little change in their bodies.  This is quite the misfortune.

Today I want to discuss this phenomenon and explain the steps that cause some people to progress, while others stagnate.

You Must Grow

The reality is, if you’re not going forward, you are going backwards.  I think it’s interesting that one of the definitions of stagnate, is to decline.

We know that if living things are not growing and developing, they are dying, and who wants to die before their time?

In order to move from “stuck” into “rapid progress” the following 3 steps are requisite:

Step 1: Decide How Your End Result Will Look and Commit to Achieve It

You have to see your end result clearly.  It is just as difficult to get to a place you can’t see, as it is to come back from a place you’ve never been.  When I ran track as a child, they told us to never look to the left or to the right, but always stay focused on the finish line.  You must see the port in the harbor to which you are headed.

Additionally, you must commit to the vision of what you want to achieve.  You must draw a line in the sand and confess that you’re sick and tired of being sick and tired, before you will be able to go forward.  Nothing really happens until you get angry; nothing happens until you are tired of the pain.

Step 2: Simplify Your Life

When the lion tamer goes into the lion cage, he brings a pistol, a whip and a chair.  The chair is said to be the most efficient at controlling the beast.  Why is this?

When the bottom of the chair is pointed in the direction of the lion, the lion becomes unsure as to which leg to focus on, and begins to stagnate.

Don’t be like the lion with so many things to focus on that you can never make any progress.  Determine the critical steps needed for your success, and create the habit of performing only those steps everyday.  You must have laser focus; you can’t stroll to a goal.

Step 3: Act Now

Last, but never least, is to get into action today, because tomorrow never comes.  When you get into what you are calling tomorrow, you will rename it today.  Decide what your end result will be today, determine the critical steps needed to achieve it, and start performing those activities right now.

All of the self development material in the world is worthless, if we never act on it.  We’ve talked about progress long enough; it’s now time to apply what we know, so we may grow.

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Mr.SelfDevelopment is a guest blogger for PickTheBrain and the founder of MrSelfDevelopment.com.

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The Little Book of Productivity

When I’ve got a case of the blues, I sometimes cheer myself up by buying a new book or two on Amazon. Perhaps you have some similar habits: you know what cheers you up, whether it’s going shopping, eating a giant bag of chips, opening a bottle of wine, lighting up…

The problem is, a lot of these little habits don’t really cheer us up, and, over time, they can have a very negative effect on our health, our wallet, or both.

These are some perennially popular ones – and reasons why they’re not a good idea:

1.    Comfort  Eating

Do you ever turn to food when you’re bored, stressed, or feeling low?  Many of us have a long-established pattern of eating for emotional reasons – this may be something we learnt as small children, if parents gave us candy as a comforter (or to keep us quiet!)

The problem with comfort eating is that, even if a king-sized candy bar dulls our misery temporarily, we usually feel worse afterwards. If you’re trying to take care of your health, or lose weight, you’ll probably feel guilty for using your bad mood as an excuse to succumb to temptation.

A short-term sugar crash won’t do much for your state of mind, and your long-term health is likely to suffer if you regularly over-indulge in sweet, salty or fatty snacks.

2.    Alcohol or Cigarettes

When I realized in college that I often felt I “needed” a glass of wine at the end of the day in order to unwind and relax, I knew it was time to go teetotal for a while. You might be far from being an alcoholic – but that doesn’t mean you can’t have a drinking problem.

Turning to the bottle when you’re feeling blue isn’t going to help. At best, you might forget about what’s troubling you for an evening – but your problems will still be there the next day (and they may well be accompanied by a hangover). If you’re starting to feel that you “need” a drink in order to de-stress, be careful.

I’ve never smoked, but a few of my friends are smokers, and from what they’ve said, I know that cigarettes do provide some stress-relief. This comes, however, with a hefty price tag, both in monetary and health terms. If you’re putting off quitting because you can’t relax without a cigarette, start exploring some better stress-busting techniques.

3.    Shopping

There’s nothing wrong with using your money to buy things that bring you enjoyment. If you regularly go shopping to lift your mood, however, there’s a good chance that you’re buying a lot of stuff that you don’t really need and don’t really want.

If you get into the habit of shopping when you’re down, you’ll be more susceptible to succumbing to cunning marketing ploys. As with comfort eating, alcohol and cigarettes, excessive and unnecessary shopping won’t make you feel good about yourself the next day.

Plus, if your financial situation is a bit rocky, shopping will add to your worries.

So, if these popular mood-boosters don’t really work, what does? There are a whole host of things you might try, but three that are pretty much guaranteed to lift your mood are:

1.    Exercising

Don’t groan! Getting your body moving is a great way to boost your mood (and, of course, it’s good for your health). Have you ever had that satisfied, completely de-stressed feeling after a workout? Or have you ever gone outside to “walk off” some excess nervous energy, or to get some space and recover from a bad mood?

If you’ve tried exercising in the past, you’ll know how effective it is. Over here in the UK, doctors are increasingly encouraging patients with mild to moderate depression to exercise regularly – it can help people to manage their depression without the need for drugs.

2.    Doing Something for Others

Many volunteers find that giving their time and energy to a good cause helps them to feel fulfilled and satisfied, and that it can be a great way of meeting new friends with similar interests and values. Knowing that you’ve used one of your skills to help someone in need can give your confidence and your sense of self-worth a massive boost.

You don’t necessarily need to join a formal scheme as a volunteer. How about dropping in on a lonely neighbor, doing a favor for a friend, or taking the time to phone someone who you know will appreciate a chat?

3.    Get On With Something Absorbing

When you’re feeling down, it can be hard to feel motivated to start on anything. Perhaps you’ve got a stack of emails to reply to, but you just can’t face them. (Indeed, a backlog of work might even be the cause of your bad mood.) Maybe you’ve got a particular hobby or interest that you never seem to get time for any more.

Getting on with something – anything – can sometimes be enough to lift your mood. It might mean throwing yourself into work, or enjoying a chapter or two of an engrossing novel. Sometimes, all that’s needed for your mood to lift is to simply find an activity that occupies your brain.

How do you lift your mood when you’re feeling down? Do any of the above tips work for you, or do you have some of your own to add to the list?

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Time is our most valued asset. Our most precious resource.

Many people claim that they are overworked, over-stressed, and incredibly pressed for time. While I don’t know if that’s necessarily true or not, I can say that time is something that’s always on everybody’s mind.

In the personal development world, we often think of time as something we “spend,” and when we want to grab more time for an activity, time is something we then “create.” But is that really true? The fact is that you can never really create any more time than what you’ve been given. You can free up time. But you can never truly create more of it.

In this post, I want to explain four easy tips to help you find more time to do the activities you love. Let’s get to it!

1. Take an entire day off for relaxation.

The first tip I have might seem a bit counter-intuitive, but it’s worked wonders for me.

When you’re feeling as if you have too much on your plate, one of the best things you could ever do is clear everything off of your plate. Just let all nonessential responsibilities slide to the side for the day. True, something urgent might pop up, and you probably won’t be able to be relinquished of all of your responsibilities, but a day of relaxation can seriously free up your mind.

Instead of stressing out and trying to find little ways to cut corners here and there to free up time, take a day off just to let your mind think and relax. When the next day rolls around, see if you can spot any ways to more efficiently and productively schedule your time. By taking a day off, you gain an outsider’s perspective into your time management dilemma. You can take a step back, clear your mind, and tackle your challenges with a fresh perspective.

2. Swap time given to one activity with to another activity.

Fairly simple, right? Choose one activity that you do that really doesn’t need to be done, and replace it with a better activity.

Instead of watching TV for an hour, go build your online business. Instead of idly reading cheap romance novels that don’t have much inherent value, go connect with your family members and friends. With this method, you’re taking large chunks of time already devoted to certain activities and reassigning that time to something else.

3. Be consciously aware of what you’re doing.

Everybody’s been in those tricky situations where they’re pressed to meet a deadline and the project they’re working on isn’t quite done yet. Whether it be for school or work, you know the dreadful feeling of the clock ticking faster and faster as the deadline quickly approaches.

What happens to your productivity in these situations? It naturally shoots up like a rocket. When suddenly nothing else matters but the project that’s due in two hours, you somehow magically manage to get it completed. Why do you think this is? It’s because you were consciously aware of what you were doing. When you don’t have time to waste on anything, you become acutely aware of the time.

What if you lived your life like this, just for a day? For one day, don’t just go through your daily motions. Be totally aware of how you’re spending your time. Keep a clock by you at all times and notice what you’re spending your time on. Are you going to be speeding up certain tasks and taking your time with other ones? How is your time going to be managed if you completely realize that there’s only a certain amount of minutes in a day?

4. Trim the fat off of what you’re already doing.

Do you really need an hour to do a task that you know you can complete within 45 minutes? Go though all of the tasks you do, estimate the time it takes you to complete all of those tasks, and see if you can snip away extra minutes. Try doing hour tasks in 45 minutes; try doing 30 minute tasks in 20 minutes.

Some tasks will naturally take too long if you give yourself too much time, such as writing a new blog entry or cleaning up your house. Most of the time, it doesn’t take long at all for people to get into the flow of things, so they mindlessly procrastinate because they’ve given themselves so much time towards completion. Don’t let this happen to you! Force yourself to get your work done in less time, and then assign those minutes to something else worthwhile. Make a schedule and document the true value of time that needs to be dedicated to each task. If you’ve figured you can do something in 30 minutes, and you’ve laid out that plan for yourself, it is far easier to get it done within that allotted time.

Getting things done in a thought out, timely matter, will end up generating a lot more free time to spend on the things you really love doing. Not only will you accomplish more, but getting to the point and getting things done you will also free up your mind, so you are not distracted by all of the things you haven’t yet accomplished and you will be able to put your full energy into every moment.

What are some of your suggestions for reclaiming and reassigning your lost time?

Got a Self Improvement Question? Click Here!

Matt is a guest blogger for PickTheBrain.com and  is the founder of Refocused Living - a personal development blog dedicated to genuinely helping people out through all aspects of self-improvement.

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Image courtesy of Rosswell86

It has been 7 years since my graduation day and I still remember the excitement; I was relieved that the ”exam phase” of my life was over; I looked with enthusiam towards my first job. Little did I know that the “working world” would require an extraodinary effort and loads of other skills!

My journey on the career ladder would have been smoother, had I known a few important lessons. While there are many ”on the job” lessons, some things in life must be experienced, to be truly understood. What follows are 8 such career lessons, I wish they’d handed out to me along with my diploma.

1. Your career is not your life. Many of us rely heavily on our careers for satisfaction in our lives. We get immersed in the day-to-day rush of our work and discover that we no longer have the time, energy or inspiration.
For some people (my former self included), it’s as if our jobs are part of our bodies, and if we don’t see ourselves as successful in them, we feel almost physically unhealthy. As a result, we question ourselves when things aren’t going in the direction we hoped. Consciously separating your self from your career allows for a greater perspective on both.

2. Be indispensible (at least one area)
There are certain things that you can do, or that you can learn to do, that can make you extraordinarily valuable to yourself and to others. Identify your special areas of uniqueness and then to commit yourself to becoming very, very good in those areas.
Take stock of your unique talents and abilities on a regular basis. What is it that you do especially well? What are you good at? What do you do easily and well that is difficult for other people? Identifying what separates you from thoses around you, and concentrating on those skills will make your unique skill set invaluable and hard to replace.

3. Don’t grow stale in your career. We live in a world where technology is evolving rapidly. This has a direct consequence on your career. Stay up to speed on the latest happenings in your field. Read various articles and books to keep your mind sharp. Attend seminars at your present job if offered. Seek out mentors who can advise or educate you. Don’t become comfortable with the status quo or complacent about things you are already good at – you can always be better, so taket he time to find out how.

4. Guard your time like a hawk. At work, we often find ourselves bombarded with ‘urgent’ requests. All of these urgent requests can disrupt the thinking processes. Sometimes it may take twice as long to get something done, simply because of the interruption. Learn to say No (with good reason!) and prioritize your tasks.

5. Polish your people skills. You may do your job well, even so well that no one can complain. But you never seem to get ahead. Sound familiar?
People issues can be one of the main reasons people leave jobs. It can also be a cause for dissatisfaction and reduced productivity. Bottom line: you need people skills to move up.

6. Communicate effectively. No matter what career path you choose to follow, you have to have good written and oral communication skills to get ahead in your career.
Make a real effort to listen to everything that’s being said to you. Observe and learn from others who make it seem effortless.

7. Keep your cool. We sometimes forget that we are in a professional environment and tend to curse and behave like a teenager. Whatever happens, don’t explode or throw your arms up in resignation. Keep your mind clear at the worst of times and you’ll be able to handle anything. There’s nothing more respectable than being calm under fire. So take a deep breath, or a walk around the block, and find away to diffuse your frustration before you address whatever the problem is.

8. Shield your reputation. The people you hang out with will add value or break your good name. Also, if you spend time with people who gossip and tear others down, you are likely to catch it too.
So, identify ways to develop and maintain a professional image that is positive and genuine. Surround yourself with positive people who seek to grow and improve.
Looking back at your career, what has been most responsible for your success? Any lessons you would like to add to this graduation day handout?

Shamelle is a Guest Blogger for PickTheBrain and the founder of The Enhance Life, a blog offering real life wisdom, for modern life growth.

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