When you take little or no action, you will receive mediocre results. This is the law of the universe, and there isn’t anything that you can do to change it. Even winning the lottery requires you to take action by purchasing the lottery ticket in the first place. If you are unsatisfied with any areas of your life, maybe you are not taking the necessary steps to make things better.

1) Admit This – Knowledge Is Power Isn’t True

If you think knowledge is power, let me tell you it isn’t true. If knowledge is power, why aren’t the richest or most powerful positions in the world held by people who have pHDs and Masters? Knowledge itself isn’t powerful. Knowledge is only useful when it is incorporated with action.

Most people know it, but they don’t get it. Your life is going to stay the same if you are only reading more. You can turn your life around only when you had decided to make use of the acquired knowledge and take action to make things happen.

2) Have An End In Mind ñ Without One You Are Just Wasting Time

Know what you want and this will help to guide you along your journey. It is necessary to take massive action, but it will be useless if you do not know where you want to end up at. You need to keep rowing to move the boat forward. However, you will end up at places you don’t want to be if you don’t know where you are rowing towards.

If you do not know what you truly want to achieve in your life, find out what you are dissatisfied with. It is a good place to start. Be aware of your dissatisfaction in your life and set a goal to turn it around. Make it a goal to lose weight if you are dissatisfied with how you feel and look. Make plans to get out of debt. Find ways to start a business. Just get an end to your mind so you can start to work towards it.

3) Brainstorm For Strategies

You will need strategies if you want to reach your goal. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail. You may not have all the answers now, but you need the first set of strategies that you will take to start moving forward. You can improve upon your strategies afterward.

Brainstorm about all the strategies you have in your mind and write them down on a piece of paper. Brain dump everything on the piece of paper and don’t think about how silly the idea is. You are not going to evaluate during the brainstorming period. Evaluation will only hinder the process.

4) Evaluation

You need to find out whether your strategies are feasible and are they the 80/20 tasks that will provide you with major results. For your info, the 80/20 principle is the concept of identifying key tasks (20%) that will produce the greatest results (80%).

The common mistake during the evaluation period is to allow fear to make the decisions. After the brain storm session, most people will cross out many fabulous strategies due to fear. They will start to doubt their capability of carrying out that strategy. Don’t let fear hold you back. Ask yourself this question; “if you can’t fail, will you still do it?” If you do, most likely it will be a key strategy or task that you need to undertake.

Remember to identify the 20% tasks that will produce 80% of the results. Checking email is the 80% task that will produce 20% of the results. Writing an article or creating products are the 20% tasks that will produce 80% of the results for a blogger. You get the idea.

5) Start Moving

It is time to get to work. Your dreams will remain as it is unless you start to take action to turn it into reality. I believe you are going to take the necessary action or else you won’t be reading this article in the first place. Refer back to the strategies that you chose and derive specific action that you must take.

David Allen, the author of bestselling book Getting Things Done, mentioned one excellent idea in the book. If you want to tune your car, tuning your car should not be in your to do list. You can write ‘tune my car’ into your to do list if you are the car mechanic. If you’re not a mechanic, it is a good idea to break the task down into action steps that you can do instead.

This is the thinking process.

Tune my car – Find the name card of my favorite mechanic – Get the number of the garage – Call and schedule the appointment.

ìTune my carî is broken down into specific steps that you need to take in order to get things done. When your tasks are specific, it increases the probability of you doing it. If your to do list is filled with vague tasks, you are making it harder for you to take action. Life is hard enough, make things easier.

If you intend to write “tune my car” in your to do list, what is the next step you are going to take? You do not have a specific step to take in this case. You are making yourself procrastinate when your tasks are vague. It will be a completely different story if you write down ‘find the name card of my favorite mechanic’, followed by ‘get the contact number of the garage’ and lastly ‘call and schedule your appointment’.

Getting specific tasks out on your to do list can help you gain clarity, take action faster and build your momentum to take more massive action.

6) This Is The Secret Weapon You Can Use If You Are Reluctant To Take Action

Let me introduce you this idea, 5 Minutes Room Rescue, proposed by the FlyLady, who is an executive turned into an organization guru. The idea is to set your kitchen timer for 5 minutes. Next, rush to your dirtiest room and clean it up. When the timer buzzes, stop and you can stop with a clear conscience.

This powerful strategy can help you to kick-start yourself into taking massive action. Sometimes when you just don’t feel like doing anything, set a timer for 5 minutes and start doing it. Usually you will end up doing more than 5 minutes. It is hard to stop when you are seeing instant results.

To get you to start is the hardest task. However, it is hard to stop when you get started. This is where momentum will help to make things easier for you.

7) Review And Fine Tune

Taking massive action is terrific, but it won’t matter if it does not produce the results that you want. Make it a habit to do weekly or monthly review. Use numbers to help you track results. If you want to lose weight, track your weight monthly. Record them down on an excel sheet. If you want to start a business, create a time line and review it monthly to see how you are progressing.

The most important question that you need to keep asking yourself is whether are you getting nearer to your goals.

If what you are doing now is not getting you nearer to your goals, fine tune and change your strategies. If you are doing the right things, results will show. This is why tracking numbers and reviewing your progress is crucial. Once you start to see the results, you will be inspired and motivated to take massive action.

Vincent writes at HealthMoneySuccess, a personal development blog that teaches you how to change your life and design your desired lifestyle. Get his free ebook, Unleash Your Maximum Potential by signing up for his free personal development newsletter. You can subscribe to his blog to receive his latest updates and you can add him on Twitter @vincent_tan

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7 Steps To Positive Self Talk

Words That Heal and Empower

Nothing can be done without energy. A car without fuel wouldn’t get you to where you want to go because there isn’t any energy to power the engine that moves the car.

If there are two highly talented people with the same level of ability but one of them is lacking energy, most likely the person who is lacking energy will achieve much less as compared to the other who is full of energy because he is frequently lethargic and too tired to take massive action. If we take a look at successful people around us, most of them are full of energy and their high level of energy has definitely helped them to get to where they are today.

Two Types Of Energy

In order to be successful, there are two types of energy that we need: brain energy and body energy.

Brain Energy

Imagine if you are worrying everyday and can’t get negative thoughts out of your head — do you think that your brain is going to run smoothly and allow you to be more creative and productive during your work time? I doubt so.

Dwelling on a negative situation such as being rejected in a cold call or getting a parking ticket isn’t going to empower you and will merely drain your brain energy. Instead of focusing on the negatives, get rid of the negatives as soon as possible (pay the ticket fine immediately and let it go) to allow yourself to have peace of mind.

Here are some ways to build up your brain energy:

• Affirmation – There is a saying, “we are what we eat,” and this is true for our mind too. We are what we think, so by reading our own affirmations daily, we are feeding our mind with “healthy food” instead of junk food.
• Self Talk – Always take note of what you are saying when you talk to yourself. If you find yourself regularly talking to yourself with words that bring you down (e.g. ‘I am stupid,’ ‘clumsy’ or anything that doesn’t empower you), eliminate the bad habit and talk to yourself in a more empowering way.
• Eliminate Complains and Moaning – Whenever we complain and moan, we are draining our brain energy which we can put into better use. If you find yourself complaining too much, find things that you can be grateful for instead of complaining about things you can’t be.

Body Energy

Your body isn’t going to function in its optimal condition if the brain is lacking energy and vice versa. If you find yourself eating too much junk food, overweight by 50 lbs, smoke and drink regularly or lacking sleep, your body isn’t going to give you that extra energy to reach your goals.

Here are some ways that I personally use to help keep my body in shape and to generate that extra energy that I need to reach my goals.

• Morning routine – My morning routine consist of waking up, have a cup of water, 2 sets of exercises then followed by a healthy breakfast. I do this every morning without fail and this habit definitely helps me to get the heart pumping and also keeps me in an alert state of mind.
• Cut Back On Junk Food – I have to admit that it is hard to eliminate junk food altogether — cutting back on junk food will be a more sustainable option. If you are eating junk food everyday, set a goal to only eat junk food 4 times/wk. Gradually cut it down to 3 times/wk and eventually try to make it to once per week.
• 30 Day Challenge – This is a great way to help you create a new habit, made popular by Mr Steve Pavlina. I highly recommend you to start your own 30 day challenge to help you kick start your new healthy habit now.

Parting Words

Taking care of our mind and body will give us the extra energy needed to help us to overcome our obstacles in life and give us that extra push to achieve our goals. How about starting your own 30 day challenge today?

Vincent is the author of HealthMoneySuccess.com. If you like this article, you can subscribe to his blog to receive his latest articles or follow him on Twitter.

The internet has forever changed the way we gather information. In the past obtaining information could be tedious. If you wanted to get the financial report of a company and learn about its business, most probably you would need to visit the company personally to collect the financial reports and talk to the management. Now, with the help of the internet, anyone can easily learn the history of Walmart by googling it or searching for it on Wikipedia.

So the internet had greatly reduced the time it takes to gather information, but has it really made us more effective and efficient?

The Problem

My daily intake of information includes magazines, newspapers, news sites, email and my RSS Reader. I love the feeling of having information at my fingertips and the ability to instantly satisfy my curiosity by searching for information on Google. However, instead of getting more done, I have found my productivity has actually suffered. Because acquiring information on the internet is such an easy task, I often find myself flooded with too much new information. For an example, when I started blogging I searched for information on how to set up a blog. Google gave me so much information I didn’t know where to start. I’m also guilty of following too much blogs (currently 64) through my RSS reader. With that much to read, there is no doubt my productivity suffers if I try to clear all the unread articles.

With so much information available to us, there is a need to prevent information overload. The following are 3 tips to curb our tendency to over consume information.

3 Tips To Help Create A Low Information Diet

1. Focus

When I started blogging, I googled for topics on how to blog and found tons of information related to how to set up a blog, how to structure your blog post and how to increase your traffic. When I began to read an article on a certain topic, there would then be links in that article that I will click and be directed to another article on blogging. This just went on and on and in the end I was left feeling at loss and not knowing where to start. In order to solve this problem, I chose a single topic and stuck to reading articles on that topic. This stopped me from opening too much tabs with articles that I couldn’t possibly finish.

2. Regulate your email

Do you really need to subscribe to 20 newsletters on the same topic? It can be tempting to opt in to receive a newsletter out of fear that if we do not subscribe, we will miss out on something. But it is worth asking yourself if you truly need the newsletter or promotions and, if you don’t, to then unsubscribe. Reading email can be one of your biggest time wasters and if you do not control it, this activity can expand to take up lots of your time. Always have a specific time slot for reading email and reconsider reading all of the forwarded emails you receive.

3. Don’t Chase Blogs

Although I am following a lot of blogs, I do not try to clear my RSS reader by finishing reading all the articles. I choose a limited number of articles that I will read so that I don’t spend the whole day reading articles and doing nothing. By setting a limited number of articles to read, I take in less information and end up with more time to do other things.

Parting Words

The internet can be used to increase your productivity, but don’t allow it to bombard you with so much information that your productivity suffers. Handle the amount of information that you are taking in with care and let information be your friend instead of foe.

Do you maintain a low information diet? If so, what tips do you have for doing this?

About the writer: Vincent is the author of Hit Your Goals. If you like this article, you can subscribe to his blog to receive his latest articles or follow him on Twitter.