When you first commit to the goal to run a marathon, buy your own home, or lose 50 pounds, you’re ecstatic. You can’t wait to get started on making your dreams a reality.

If your goals is to lose 50 pounds, you might throw away all the junk food in your house, download a diet plan online and get a personal trainer. But after a few weeks, or even days, your preliminary enthusiasm wears off and you start thinking about whether this is really worth it.

So after your short burst of enthusiasm, what does it take to ensure that you stay motivated?

What’s helped me is creating a goal support system, a sort of “goal prop” if you will. We can use these prop to help us stay focused and committed, before following the path to our goal has become a habit.

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Everyone can get into a rut. What starts as one day where you don’t get much done, can turn into a week or two. Avoiding these streaks of laziness is the best solution, but what can you do when you’re stuck?

Getting Unstuck

The best way to get unstuck is to figure out how you got stuck in the first place. If you drive your car into a snowbank, the best way to get out is to get outside and look at the problem. But despite this suggestion, the first reaction is often to step on the gas, wasting more energy as you get even more stuck.

There are many ways you can get yourself into a streak of laziness. But I’ve found there are three big culprits that often cause you to get stuck, even though most people only blame one of them.

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Marcus Aurelius Antoninus was Roman emperor from 161 until his death in 180. A great thinker, Marcus embodied Plato’s ideal of the philosopher king to a considerable extent. He was a strong emperor, engaging in various wars in defense of the Roman empire for his entire reign, but he was also greatly concerned with social justice and welfare, even going so far as to sell his own possessions to alleviate people’s suffering from famine and plague (from which he died).

Marcus left behind a corpus of writing which, despite it’s antiquity, offers us some truly timeless wisdom. Here are six lessons we can learn from his observations on life.

Lesson #1: We Are Responsible for Our Own Experience of Life

“Such as are your habitual thoughts; such also will be the character of your mind; for the soul is dyed by the color of your thoughts.”

Much has been made recently of the (so called) ‘law of attraction.’ Before ‘The Secret,’ a wealth of writers had tapped into the idea that what happens in our mind is the most important thing in shaping our experience of life. From Norman Vincent Peal’s ‘Amazing Power of Positive Thinking,’ and Joseph Murphy’s ‘Power of the Subconscious Mind’ to

Wallace Wattles ‘Science of Getting Rich,’ all were taking about a truth which Marcus understood so may centuries ago.

Viktor Frankl said that between what happens to us and our response to it, there is a gap, and in that gap lies our whole experience of life. Steven Covey, in his ‘Seven Habits’ called our ability to widen this gap ‘being proactive.’ It is the first habit of a highly effective person to cultivate an awareness that s/he is in control. To coin a phrase, life is what you make it.

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Most people are on a quest to increase their productivity in order to do less and achieve more. Tips on how to organize your passwords, instructions on how to handle e-mail, advice to take creativity breaks, and information on how to apply Stephen Covey’s four-quadrant matrix are examples of advice that can help you become more productive.

However, the most important productivity tool that exists is your mind, and your moods have a powerful effect on your mind’s ability to function efficiently and effectively. Therefore, one of the most important things you can do to increase your productivity is learning how to self-regulate your moods. Fortunately, your body is fully equipped to help you do just that. Below you will find seven ways to help you self-regulate your moods.

1. Breathing

Since breathing is something we can easily control and regulate, it’s a useful tool for achieving a relaxed and clear state of mind. Andrew Weil, M.D.–a world-renowned pioneer in the field of integrative medicine, a healing approach which encompasses body, mind, and spirit–, advices the following: “Practicing regular, mindful breathing can be calming and energizing and can even help with stress-related health problems.”

One of the breathing exercises that he recommends is the 4-7-8 or Relaxing Breath, a natural tranquilizer for your nervous system. Simply place the tip of your tongue against the ridge of tissue just behind your upper front teeth, and keep it there through the entire exercise. Then follow these steps:

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Being an introvert is a bad thing, right? Well, a lot of people seem to think so, judging by the number of articles I’ve read about how to “cure” introversion. In response to these articles, I wrote The Introverts Strike Back, in which I argued that (1) introverts can’t become extraverts, and (2) they shouldn’t particularly want to.

First, let’s get clear on what we’re talking about. I’m going by the definitions used by the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. According to the MBTI, introverts get their energy from the internal world of ideas and images, and they feel drained if they spend too much time with people. On the other hand, extraverts (and yes, that IS the correct spelling as used in the MBTI) get their energy from the external world of people and things, and they go crazy if they spend too much time alone. It really has nothing to do with social skills, as evidenced by introverts like Jerry Seinfeld.

Whether you prefer the internal world or the external world, that preference is fixed. You can force yourself to act outside of your element, but an introvert can’t become an extravert and vice versa. Let’s face it, if hosting The Tonight Show for 30 years didn’t turn Johnny Carson into an extravert, I doubt tips like “say hi to more people” will do the trick.

However, introversion certainly has its advantages. For example, introverts make up a slight majority of the upper levels of government, the military, and the corporate world, despite being only 30% of the population. The social outcast doesn’t represent all introverts, any more than the dumb jock represents all extraverts.

But I’m not here to debate whether it’s better to be an introvert or an extravert. The fact is, we all have to interact with both types every day. Regardless of which type you are, you can greatly improve your relationships by learning to get along better with people of the other type. Here are some tips for getting started.

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Can the self be improved? What is the self, anyway? Does the currently popular “self-help movement” really help us or is it a paradoxical diversion from our true self?

I hope that you will help me in addressing these questions that have been increasingly pervading my thoughts as the term, self-improvement, is now so widely used, and quite often misused, that its meaning seems diluted, almost to the point of becoming abstract.

In fact, the more I think of it, the more I doubt that “self-improvement” is possible…

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There’s a mountain of personal development literature out there about improving the material circumstances of your life, mostly by making more money and becoming more productive. A topic that gets less coverage, however, is what we’re supposed to do with all the extra money and time these books, articles and workshops promise us.

Money and time, of course, aren’t valuable unless we have inspiring ideas about what to do with them. If you received $1 million tomorrow, for example, but you weren’t allowed to spend it on anything, it would be worthless to you. If you could add an extra hour to your day by eliminating procrastination, but you had no compelling vision of what to do with that hour, it wouldn’t be very useful. As Martin Hawes and Joan Baker write in Get Rich, Stay Rich, “to set out to make a lot of money for its own sake, without a bigger goal, is to doom yourself to a life of disappointment.” Nonetheless, many of us treat acquiring more money and time as the principal goals of our journey toward personal growth.

Some suggest that, beyond sheer survival, our quest for money and time is about being able to do more, and spend more time with, our loved ones and friends. For example, with more money and productivity, perhaps we could afford, and have the time, to take the family to a foreign country for a week. I think this answer is close to the truth, but doesn’t quite hit the mark. Merely spending more time with our loved ones—even if we do it in more expensive and exotic locales—doesn’t guarantee we’ll enjoy that time together. If relations between us are tense or uncomfortable, we may end up wishing we were back in the office.

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