Reclaim Your Dreams, It’s Time to Come Alive

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Have you settled for less in your life, when you used to dream that something bigger, something grander, was possible? Not only possible, but you knew for certain it would happen, didn’t you?

Then something happened…

You got responsibilities.

You had to be practical.

But you don’t have to follow the herd anymore. You can make your heart and your mind work together. You simply have to realize that this so-called “collective wisdom” is really a collective assumption.

Any of these old sayings (sleep walking mantras) sound familiar?

• Get a real job.
• Welcome to adulthood!
• Grow up.
• Keep your head down.
• It’s called work for a reason!

These are all fine and dandy. They may have been more applicable in say, your grandfather’s time. Labor was expected for the larger part of sunlight and there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to follow your passions (unless you liked mining coal).

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How to Beat the Plague of Limiting Beliefs

It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that limiting beliefs are, well… limiting. Duh, right?

Well, they’re not just limiting. They ruin lives. They keep us from being authentic and living the way we really want to live.

There are many times where I’ve wanted to say something, tell someone how I really feel. But I hold back. Why? Because I’m afraid of how they’ll respond. I’m afraid they’ll think I’m weird. What’s worse, is they might have similar beliefs. That could make things even more uncomfortable. So I keep my mouth shut. I stay quiet and try to forget about whatever it was that I really wanted to say. Or I just say something expected, something safe. And I feel like a little bit of my soul is repressed.

A more specific example is with my music. I play drums, djembe to be specific. I’ve always wanted to be a musician, and I’ve always liked rhythm. (Just ask my wife how much I tap on things.) For the longest time, I thought I didn’t have any rhythm. I thought because I was a white boy, it would be really hard for me to play the drums (white boys supposedly can’t dance, so why should they have any rhythm?). Anyway, I had all these limiting beliefs about what it was I could and couldn’t do and it held me back. I would practice and practice but I would still fumble and be off-beat. It wasn’t until I let go of my limiting beliefs about whether or not I had rhythm, that I started to really improve my playing.
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How to Use a Day Plan Without Wanting to Stab Your Eyes Out

If you’re a creative type like me — or if you simply have a soul — at some point in your life the thought of day plans and organizers has made you want to hurt someone. (Unless you’re the natural organizational and planner geek, then kudos to you. You can skip this article). I know, because I’ve been there. Creating and following a day plan is something I still struggle with. In fact, that’s why I’m writing about a day plan right now. I can’t even begin to fathom trying to follow a weekly plan. I’m just not at that level yet.

Anyway, we’re here to figure out how to follow a plan without inducing violent thoughts and suicidal tendencies.

So the purpose of a day plan is to get more done, right? It’s supposed to help you get things done, while reducing the stress of procrastination. You know that. But you can’t get past the feeling that following a plan is putting a noose around your neck and suffocating your spontaneity.
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How to Stay Committed to Long Term Goals

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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Finding Bliss: How to Reverse Engineer Happiness

The amount of time we spend seeking happiness in the future is mind boggling. We spend exorbitant volumes of time doing things that will supposedly make us happy at some future date.

• We educate ourselves to attain a better career.
• We work long hours to have more money.
• We exercise our minds and bodies for greater strength and intelligence.

We improve for the sake of improving that somewhere, at some distant point down the beaten road we’ll find happiness.

All the while we’re chasing happiness, we don’t realize the fatal, vicious circle we place ourselves in. We’ve habituated ourselves into placing our happiness in the future. We’ve conditioned ourselves into allowing happiness after some level of achievement, that never comes.

We fail to realize a fatal flaw in our logic: what matters most is how you feel. Now.
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How to Stay Motivated Without Wax & Wane

“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

We all know that true motivation stems from being passionate about what you’re doing. But there will still be times when your motivation will wax and wane. If there is one way to “hack” your success, remaining consistently motivated would have the biggest impact. A highly motivated person is likely to take action consistently. Without action, there are no results. Duh.

Some days we will inevitably feel more inspired than others. Especially when we’re not getting the results we want, or things are taking longer than we expected.

Here are some reasons our motivation tends to fluctuate:

• We’ve started to do what we love for a living (our passion has become work). We associate all the negative connotations we previously had with dispassionate work.
• We feel since we’re doing what we love as work, it’s become a must, rather than a want.
• The pressure of needing to produce has stifled our creativity. We start to avoid doing what we love.
• We’ve lost sight of the reasons we started our goals in the first place. We’ve become our own taskmasters and have lost touch with our original inspiration.

If we don’t exercise, our muscles will atrophy. In the same way, if we don’t regularly replenish the source of our inspiration, it too will begin to fade. The cure for this common ailment is to regularly regroup and remember why we started in the first place. We need a place we can refer back to, to cultivate our inspiration.
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How to Stay Focused: Vision Maintenance and the Minutiae Vacuum

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out the best way to stay focused and remain productive. We all know that doing what you love reverse engineers productivity. If you love what you do, you’ll obviously be more compelled to do it, rather than trying to place a productivity system on top of undesirable work.

But sometimes even that’s not enough. It’s easy to get sucked into the minutiae of life and lose focus. It’s easy to spend the majority of your time feeling productive, when most of what you’re doing won’t make a difference a week, a day or an hour from now. Some examples of this productivity illusion include:

• Spending inordinate amounts of time checking and responding to email.
• Organizing your desk for 3 hours a day.
• Detailing, updating, and maintaining calendars and to-do lists more than you actually work.
• Reading books, articles and blogs to learn and find inspiration, but not actually spending any time doing anything.

The Minutiae Vacuum

One of the most effective ways I’ve found to manage my time is to think about your work in terms of impact. By splitting your time up in between A, B and C tasks, it’s easier to get a handle on what is most important and how much time you’re spending spinning your wheels. A tasks are things that have a long term impact, 6 months to a year or more. B tasks are things that are important, but don’t have as much of a long term impact. They might range between 1-6 months. Finally, C level tasks are things that need to be done on a daily or weekly basis, but don’t have much of an impact outside of that time frame. So here’s the break down:
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How to Flex Your Way to Six-Pack Abs

It was the summer of 1998. I was 12 years old at the time and a frequent visitor to the local public swimming pool. Our family was doing well that year so each of my siblings and I had a Summer pass. Wow, a Summer pass! I felt on top of the world. I went to the pool religiously every day, right when they opened. I remember many of the teenage boys and men there had chiseled abs and washboard stomachs. I was just starting to like girls at the time and it seemed like all the boys with the muscular physiques were getting more attention from the ladies than I was. As soon as I realized this, that was the beginning of my quest to get ripped.

I started lifting some free weights that my dad had lying around the garage. That helped a little, but I was still self-conscious of my stomach. Keep in mind I wasn’t overweight. I was a lean kid. I wanted a chiseled stomach though, so every day at the pool I would constantly flex my stomach. When I flexed, it looked like I had more definition than I actually did, but who could tell right? So I flexed constantly. I flexed when I walked, I flexed in the pool, I flexed when I was laying down. I started doing it so much, I even flexed when my shirt was on. It just became a habit.

What I didn’t realize at the time was all this flexing had led to greater definition. Now even when I didn’t flex, you could see an outline of my abs. This may not seem like much, but for me it this was exciting.

As my obsessive flexing continued, more and more of the six pack under all those layers of skin started to come through.

I’m not suggesting you go around flexing your stomach all day long, but just think about all the time you’re not doing anything where you could take advantage of this:
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Why Do We Avoid Doing What We Love?

When we create, we come alive; we’re making love to life. We use our unique talents, perception and skills and make the intangible tangible. Most of us generally know what we want in life. For every person, the answer to what brings us joy will be unique. For some it’s playing guitar or dancing. For others it’s writing, hiking, spending time with family, photography, or drawing.

So if we know what makes us feel alive, why do we resist it? Why do we avoid doing what we love to do?

I think there’s a number of reasons that can help us explain this elusive phenomenon. Hopefully in discovering the blocks toward pursuing what is dearest to us, we can overcome them.

So why do we resist?

1. The inability to accept imperfections. Do you think that Mona Lisa was Da Vinci’s first painting? We think, if it’s not perfect, why bother? But when we pursue the creative act, it’s crucial that we suspend judgment. After all, you can always cull the fluff and ridiculous later.

What to do instead? Resist your temptation to have everything figured out before you start. Failure is fundamental to the creative process. If you don’t fail, you’ll never improve. Suspend your judgment and remember that whatever you don’t like, you can always take out or re-do.

2. Not respecting the gestation of improvement. Say you have a passion for dancing. The only problem is, you’d make a blind man cry. Remember that mastery of any art or skill takes time. No one starts out being a natural Michael Jackson. And anyway, look what fame did to him. Are you sure you want that?

What’s a poor Napoleon Dynamite to do? Respect the fact that mastering any skill takes time. Instead of thinking about all the things that aren’t right, think about what you can do now to improve.
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Your Greatest Teachers Might be Dead

Nearly all great minds have one thing in common; they had great mentors.

I’ve learned that if you don’t have any great teachers in your life, that doesn’t mean you should sit around and wait for one to find you. You need to be willing to seek them out. Fortunately, you have an endless number of great teachers to choose from. That is, if you accept that many of these great teachers will be dead.

Many of the greatest thinkers made a habit of documenting their discoveries. So while they are no longer alive, their words are still here, and in them their wisdom.

But before seeking out a great teacher, you first need to…
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