There will come a point in your life when you feel that everything seems pointless. If you reach this stage, you need to try to look at your life and start considering what things you need to do to keep the fire in you burning. No matter how old you are, it is important to live a life that is full and happy.

If you no longer have the fire in your burning, there is a big chance that you will easily give up when trials and obstacles come your way. In order to make sure that your motivation to live and love stays strong, here are some tips.

1. Assess Your Life

The first step that you need to do is to take a look at your life. More often than not, people who are bored and unhappy do not really know the things that are beautiful and precious in their lives. They fail to stop what they are doing and to find time in assessing their achievements and losses. Once you have already determined what makes you feel down and bored, you can start to do something about it.

2. Set Goals

Many people who experience tragic or life threatening situations can stay strong and motivated to live because they have the reasons to survive. A cousin of mine who was trapped in a well for three days had the strong will to survive because his family is depending on him and he wants to be alive when his 12-year old daughter graduates from college. In order for you to stay motivated, you better know what you want to get out of life. Set goals so that you have something to look forward to in the future. Even if you are eighty years old, you can still set goals for your life.

3. Be More Positive

One sure way that can bring your motivation down is by thinking negatively. If you keep on thinking of the things that you cannot do and are not capable of achieving, you will surely start wallowing in self doubt and self pity. I once read an article about a woman born without arms who does not only drive a car, but also flies airplanes. If she can surpass hurdles in her life, there is no reason why you can’t do the same.

4. Count Your Blessings

Envy is something that can really put anyone down. Once you are green with envy, you tend to lose focus on your own goals and forget about the good things that are happening in your life. Instead of looking at the other side of the fence and feeling bad, you should try looking inside your life and count your blessings. There is really nothing wrong in admiring other people and wanting to have a comfortable life for as long as these desires will keep you motivated in achieving your goals and will contribute in making you live a comfortable and happy life.

5. Find a Hobby

Doing the same things over and over again can really make people bored. One way of making your life exciting and happy is by finding a hobby and learning new things. What you can do is to try enrolling in classes, like dance or photography, which will help you get excited and motivated. As for me, in order to keep me sane in a monotonous office environment, I collect comic books and toys.

6. Don’t Be Afraid to Change

Lastly, do not be afraid to change. Simply trying a new route to the office or eating at a new restaurant can help perk up your otherwise boring life. Having a new haircut or trying a new hair color may seem trivial for men, but they sure can give you a new image and make you feel afresh.

Author’s Bio:

Discover how you can achieve all that you want in life in The 77 Traits of Highly Successful People. Mark Foo has brought together 48 personal development bloggers and writers to co-author this success eBook that spells out all the success secrets. Claim your FREE copy of the eBook now at http://www.77SuccessTraits.com.

When you decide to find your passion, you’re making an important commitment to yourself. You’re saying that you’re a top priority and you’ll be finding the things in life that you truly enjoy. When you have a true passion for life you never feel like life is a chore. Your whole attitude and personality may even shift for the better.

If you want to love life, you need to pursue your passions. Don’t waste anymore time and get going!

Try some of the items on this list to light your fire:

1. Start with Your Talents. Everyone has a special talent or hobby. You don’t have to be the best at something, just come up with a subject that you enjoy. Pick something that always makes you happy. Pick an activity that always makes you lose track of time. You can then decide to take it one step further to make it your passion. Can you write a book on the subject? Can you become an expert? Can you make a career out of it? Ask yourself these important questions.
2. Be Open to New Experiences. Most people enjoy the comfort of living their lives in a similar fashion from day to day. Though if you haven’t yet discovered your passion for life yet, it probably isn’t going to just fall in your lap. You need to be open to new experiences because you never know where life will take you. Haven’t you ever gone into an experience with negative expectations only to discover that everything turned out quite the opposite? What if you tried new and exciting things every single day? *I have a good friend that used to be a wild twenty-something who fell in love with a girl. He wanted to impress her by going to a yoga class even though he had no interest in the subject. To make a long story short, the relationship didn’t last but he is now employed as a yoga instructor!
3. Communicate With People in Your Field. If you’re still in the brainstorming phase of finding your life’s passion and you don’t know whether or not you’d truly enjoy something, be prepared to ask questions. When you take the time to communicate with others you can learn a lot. Ask people who share your interests about their daily lives. Ask any question that you want! It may help you make up your mind.
4. Practice and Research. You don’t need to find your passion overnight. Although it does help if you find that you’re loving life in the process. It probably means that you’re on the right track. Practice skills that develop your passions and see if you can get yourself to branch on from an amateur level. Research the topics you enjoy in anyway you can like reading books or surfing the internet.
5. Face Your Fears You may not think that exploring your fears is a way to find your passion for life, but it can be. Fear is seen as a negative emotion, but it’s a strong emotion just like passion. Sometimes you’ll fear something because it’s something you truly care about. Maybe you fear failure in a subject that you always wanted to pursue. Work on exploring and dealing with your fears which may lead you right into your passions.
6. Never Give Up. The path to your passions is hardly ever easy; many people will tell you that they nearly gave up when they were dealing with the same subject. In order to find your passion, you need to dig down deep and tell yourself that you’ll stop at nothing. You need to believe in yourself because you truly never know what tomorrow will bring.

Ever wondered how great successful people achieved great success? You can find the answer in The 77 Traits of Highly Successful People. Mark Foo has brought together 48 personal development bloggers and writers to co-author the success eBook that spells out all of the success secrets of the very successful people. This eBook is available to you FREE and you can grab your free copy now at http://www.77SuccessTraits.com.

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Overcoming A Loss Of Motivation

Free Audio Books For Motivation

A fear of failure is one of the most common fears. It can be so scary that some people decide not to try at all in order to avoid failure altogether. In the end this just ends up being another kind of failure because you’ll never reach your full potential if you don’t even try.

Accepting Yourself

An important first step to overcoming fear of failure is accepting yourself. Once you accept yourself, you need to take it one step further and believe in yourself. This will come naturally to some, and some people will find that they need more work.

Think about specific situations in your life that you approached with confidence. That extra belief in yourself was likely the deciding factor between success and failure. You need to use that strong belief in yourself to combat fear.

Keep reminding yourself that success starts in your own mind. You need to have the right attitude because as soon as you don’t believe in yourself then failure is sure to follow. You might start to make excuses for yourself and you may even start blaming others or external sources. The way to get over the fear of failure is to stop making these excuses and take responsibility for your success.

Being Positive

Everyone has a bad day from time to time. That’s unavoidable. However, you do have the choice to think positively. You can turn a negative situation into a positive one with the right mindset.

You can stare failure in the face and combat fear with your outlook alone. Think about what the worst case scenario would be if you did in fact fail. Would it be the end of the world? What would be your game plan to pick yourself back up? Chances are that part of your fear of failure is a fear of the unknown. Once you think it through it may not seem quite as bad.

Ways to Combat Fear

You can work towards overcoming fear of failure in a number of ways. For starters, you can look at the situation as a chance to learn something. Always be on the lookout for the silver lining. If you do come face to face with failure, have the courage to pick yourself up and spend a good amount of time going over why you failed in that circumstance. That particular failure may have been required in your life in order for you to be lead to the path to success. If you allow the fear of failure to get the best of you, you wouldn’t have found the courage to even proceed.

Taking action is also a way to combat fear. If you have the right attitude, and plan for success, you just need to push yourself to go for it. Don’t overanalyze or think too much, just take some small actions.

When you’re in a particularly tough spot, you can always look for help from affirmations. These are short positive statements that are in the present tense. Tell yourself that fear is not getting the best of you. Tell yourself that you’re in the process of achieving great success. It may help you to relax and get out of the fear of failure mindset.

No One Is Perfect

When all is said and done, you should realize that no one is perfect. Of course you already know this, but many times that doesn’t stop people from being too hard on themselves. A fear of failure is also a fear of making a mistake. You can’t lead your life with a fear of making a mistake, because you’re bound to make them throughout your life. Just keep working on your attitude and your reactions and you’ll soon find success.

Author’s Bio:

Ever wondered how great successful people achieved great success? You can find the answer in The 77 Traits of Highly Successful People. Mark Foo has brought together 48 personal development bloggers and writers to co-author the success eBook that spells out all of the success secrets of the very successful people. This eBook is available to you FREE and you can grab your free copy now at http://www.77SuccessTraits.com.

Don’t Forget To Follow PickTheBrain of Twitter!

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Words That Overcome Fear and Dread

Words That Heal and Empower

“You can only get what you want, if you help enough other people get what they want.” – Zig Ziglar

One way to help other people is to empower them because by empowering them you could literally change their lives for the better.

Empower means “to give somebody power or authority” and also “to give somebody a sense of confidence or self-esteem”.

People always feel motivated and inspired when they feel empowered. And when they feel motivated and inspired by you, they’d be more than happy to help you achieve whatever you want.

Once you’ve mastered this ability to get people to help you voluntarily, it will make you a more powerful, effective and successful person.

I have listed some of the methods which you can adopt to empower other people.

1. Show More Appreciation

To empower someone, you have to make the person feel good about himself/herself. And the simplest way to achieve that is to express your appreciation for everything that person does for you, large or small.

Every one of us has a deep desire to feel appreciated and a sense of self-worth. If you could satisfy this craving of any individual, he/she would go to great lengths for you.

The most direct and also the simplest way to show your appreciation is simply to say – sincerely and honestly – “Thank you.”

So often in life, we have taken things for granted – especially towards those who are close to us – that we fail to say those two simple little, yet powerful words for the things that they have done for us. Instead, we often complain about the things they’ve not done for us.

It is time for us to start looking more deeply into the good of other people and tell them, “Thank you. I really appreciate that.”

By doing so, you’ll be helping yourself garner the greatest support from people to help you get to where you want.

2. Show Your Genuine Interest in Other People

Why do you think most people love dogs? Simple. Because dogs are born to be genuinely interested in people.

They’re always happy to be around you. They’d wag their tails, lick you, and jump around you to show you just how excited they are to have you here.

This showing of genuine interest in people is something we have to seriously learn from dogs. Yes, you heard me right. Learn this from dogs.

Everybody loves some attention, even though they may not seek attention openly or publicly. This is because attention shows us that somebody actually care about us. It shows us that our existence is not being ignored and neglected. It proves that we’re worth being taken notice of.

A genuine show of interest can do wonders in nourishing a person’s sense of self-worth. So, if you want to empower other people and help yourself at the same time, show your genuine interest in other people.

3. Show The Other Person He or She is Important

To blossom a person’s sense of self-worth to the ultimate, we have to always seek to make the other person feel important.

Sincere appreciation and recognition are the keys to making someone feel important. Take note that the keyword here is sincere because nobody wants to listen to cheap and insincere flattery. Insincerity will only backfire.

The first step to making a person feel important is to STOP TAKING HIM OR HER FOR GRANTED. And show deep appreciation.

If you want to make your team members feel important, you can try something like this:

“Ally, thank you for the great job done. Without your help, the project wouldn’t have been such a great success. You’ve proved to be a very important and worthy team player. And I hope you’d continue to offer this great support to help us move forward together.”

Or if you want to make your kids feel important, try this:

“John, thank you for being such a wonderful son. You’ve been the best gift to mum and dad. We’ve always been very grateful to having you in the family. We couldn’t have asked for anything better.”

And remember, when showing appreciation; always start with a simple “Thank you.”

4. Show Respect

Ego is a fundamental element of the human nature that, which if upset, can cause a major emotional upheaval.

Ego, in other words, means your self-concept. It is made up of two components, namely your self-esteem and your self-image.

Human beings will always strive to raise their level of self-esteem and self-image, or seek to protect them from being impaired by other people and circumstances.

Whenever you need to point out somebody’s fault, remember to show respect to his/her pride by doing it in a discreet manner so that he/she will not feel embarrassed.

By allowing their ego to remain intact, you’re in essence giving them a chance to remain empowered. One rule you need to adhere to in order to empower someone is to first not do anything to dis-empower him/her.

If you find someone that you could look up to, you can always go up to the person to tell him/her how much you respect what he/she has achieved or handled a dire situation or overcome an adversity.

Nevertheless, do remember the key to empowering a person is to be sincere and honest with your words and actions.

5. Give Encouragement Instead of Criticism

Now this is a common one. Whenever your kid, your spouse, or your employee makes a blunder or slip up in their responsibilities, how would you react?

You’d probably fly into a rage and make all sorts of crude remarks. No? Ok, maybe you’re more refined and well mannered that all you’d do is reproach them for committing the mistakes.

However, in spite of the placidness of the criticism, it is still not an empowering approach.

Perhaps you could try an approach like this one:

“Honestly Lesha, I’m disappointed that we didn’t manage to clinch the deal this time round. However, I do believe you’re a bright young lady, and I’m very confident that you have what it takes to clinch us the next deal. You would do whatever it takes to secure it for us, right? Correct me if I’m wrong.”

Now, that wouldn’t sound harsh, would it?

Every one of us has the magic power of empowering other people simply by generously giving praise and showing encouragement to help them realise their underlying potential.

“Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.” – Dale Carnegie

Now that you’ve learnt how to empower other people, so when and where should you apply each one of them? The answer is: all the time, everywhere.

Have you got any other suggestions on how we can empower other people? Please share them in the comments section below.

Mark Foo is a Personal Development Blogger @ TheBigDreamer.com  where he writes about success, personal finance, wealth creation and entrepreneurship to help people become better, wiser and richer.