Tag: positive mindset

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Learn to Laugh More Often

Sometimes you can make yourself feel happier and more successful by simply seeking out more laughter. A daily habit that will pay off big time is simply not taking life or yourself too seriously while finding ways to laugh about funny things even if they’re hard.

 

Developing the habit of laughter simply requires that you give yourself permission to laugh and let go and seek out more humor. Let’s look at several ways you can bring more laughter into your life.

 

  • Spend Time with Funny People – When you really want to feel light, there are likely people in your life that you can make sure you spend time with. When you hang out with funny people, it will rub off on you.

 

  • Try New Experiences Often – One way to bring laughter back into your life is to keep trying new things. When you open your life and mind to new experiences, you also open yourself up to funny things happening to you that are out of the norm of what might happen if you just do the same thing day in and day out.

Tips to Help You Practice Positive Thinking

  • Watch Your Favorite Funny Go to Sitcom or Movie – Sometimes, you have to pull out the big guns and watch a rerun of something that made you laugh when times were good. Bringing laughter back into your life in any way you can is a healthy habit that pays off for years to come.

 

  • See The Situation from a New Perspective – Everyone sees things from their own perspective and information bubble when you realize that you can become more like a child or a baby or a first-time parent by opening up your world to new ideas and perspectives.

 

  • Go to a Comedy Club Show – Choose the type of humor you like but burst through your comfort zone and go to a comedy show near you. You may not even realize that people still do comedy shows at clubs, and you don’t even have to put up with smoking nowadays if you don’t want to.

 

  • Understand Human Nature – When you know how humans really behave, on average, it’s a lot easier to see what is happening to you through the eyes of experience. When you understand that this is just how things are, it is way funnier than when you think it’s only happening to you.

 

The great thing about bringing more laughter into your life is that it pays off in numerous ways. It will lower the stress you’re experiencing, which will lessen your chances of experiencing stress-related diseases like obesity that lead to serious cardiovascular disease. Not only that, but it’s like you’re also doing a ton of sit-ups to your stomach muscles. It’s a way to get in shape that doesn’t feel like work at all.

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Eat One Meal a Week with Your Extended Family or Close Friends

One thing that is very important for your long-term happiness, even if you’re the biggest introvert alive, is the strength of your relationships within your family and your connection to the world at large. Study after study shows that maintaining a connection to others regularly is essential for health and happiness and is directly correlated with longevity.

Positive Attitude

A favored way to stay connected to someone is through sharing a meal. Everyone has to eat, and eating is an emotional experience for human beings. When you share an emotional experience with other humans, it connects you. This is probably why we’ve invented so many food-related holidays and even associate funerals with food.

 

Along with other positive ways to connect like phone calls, emails, and text messages – enjoying a regular meal with those who are important in your life, or those you desire to be important in your life, will make a huge difference in how connected you feel to them and how connected they feel to you.

 

If one of your long-term life goals is to have strong, loving, and powerful relationships, you know that focusing on the long term is the most effective way to impact this part of your life as it’s what you do over time that impacts today, and what you do today that impacts tomorrow. How your relationships feel about you will be about combining the last memorable connections weighted toward the last time you were together.

 

Since you understand this and want to start now forming daily habits that change your life and set you up for success, start setting aside one day a week, at a minimum, for enjoying a meal with someone in your extended family or to share a meal with someone outside of your family.

 

One week it might be that you enjoy lunch with Aunt Alice, and the next week it might be drinks and wings with a business connection – it’s okay to mix it up as long as you make it a habit to clear your schedule to enjoy a meal with someone outside your immediate family on a weekly basis.

 

This one addition to your calendar and act will keep you connected to the world at large and expose you to new ideas and thoughts, as well as solidify a deeper connection to those you choose to meet again and again. Plus, it may even push you out of your comfort zone and allow you space to discover new things and interests.

Write Down 3 Things You’re Grateful for Each Day

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Daily Mindset Habit: Own Your Own Happiness

Growing up watching stories about heroes saving others, or people finding their “other half,” or worse, watching your own family member waste away after the love of their life dies as if the life they have of their own is without value.

 

The truth is, love is great, and you should experience all the love you want to, in all its forms, but how other people feel about you should not define your happiness. You define your happiness, and it’s what you do or don’t do and ultimately how you feel about yourself that makes you happy or not happy.

 

Once you start practicing the daily mindset of owning your own happiness, the world will open up to you in ways that you may not have considered. To accomplish owning your own happiness, practice each of these attitudes each day.

 

Accept Yourself

 

Getting to know you also means that at some point, you have to accept who you are, flaws and all. That doesn’t mean you use the flaws as an excuse. No – instead, you discover ways to overcome the flaws. If you’re short, you get a stair step to help, and you don’t give up.

 

No one is suggesting that you accept anything that is changeable about yourself. Whether through exercise or surgery, if you can change something and determine it’s important to change it, do so. Do it because you think it’s important. Otherwise, accept who you are as you are now.

 

Fix Yourself

 

As mentioned above, while you are self-accepting about things that you can’t change, after all, you’re born who you are born to be, and you cannot change much, but what you can change and do have control over is very powerful. When you identify things you don’t like that you can fix, decide right away to start fixing it by adding daily habits that help into your schedule.

 

For example, if you’re self-aware enough to realize that you tend to pack on extra weight around the middle, which is a health issue, and your long-term plans include living until you’re 90 despite your genetic predisposition to heart issues adding in daily heart-healthy activities, and eating a low-fat vegan diet will pay off big time over the years even though it feels like a very small change today.

 

Express Yourself

 

One thing that shows that a person has manifested into a complete adult human being is expressing who you are without shame and concern about other people’s feelings. This does not mean you lack empathy either, and it simply means that you don’t ask permission to be who you are, and you’re not afraid to set boundaries surrounding how people behave around you.

 

The way this may look in your schedule today is a 30-minute anti-anxiety meditation session an hour before you meet up with your mother-in-law. You want a good relationship with her. You know it’s contentious, so you do all you can to calm yourself before the meeting, and then you’re in the best possible position to have a good day.

 

Finally, the more you value yourself, the happier you’re going to allow yourself to become. People who value their time and themselves aren’t afraid to say no to what they have no joy in doing. They are not people-pleasers, they’re self-pleasers, but they have a high level of morality too in that they’re empathetic to others, but they’re not going to be used or walked on.

 

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Daily Mindset Habit: Value Your Time Over Everything Else

If you’ve ever been told that you have the same 24 hours as the next person, pay close attention to this post and take this daily mindset habit idea to heart. A mindset of the rich that differs from their non-rich counterparts is that the rich tend to place a high value on their time.

 

Time Not Money is Finite

 

We love acting like money, and certain natural resources are so limited, but the truth is, it’s time and not money that is finite. And due to money, you can actually buy other people’s time, thus placing a higher value on your time than theirs.

 

For example, if you know that your time is worth $100 an hour because that’s how much your boss pays you or how much you bill your clients, why would you wait in a 30-minute line to return a $10 item? Likewise, why would you spend an hour grocery shopping when you can pay someone enabling you to earn more money?

 

Calculate The Worth of Your Time

 

Part of the problem is that most people have never calculated the worth of their time. They know how much their boss pays them, or they know how much they want to bill their clients, but often these numbers are completely arbitrary and are simply the “going rate” that is not based on reality either. In fact, if more people established the worth of their time based on reality, they’d demand a lot more money from their employers.

 

Most HR departments use the number of 2080 yearly hours to designate full-time work. So even if you’re on a salary, they’re going to say that you earn your paycheck by working full time, which is equal to 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year, for a total of 2080 hours.

 

This HR department magic number ends up on the companies compensation records as part of the benefits of the job and health insurance, paid time off (PTO), and other compensation. This is a great place for you to start figuring how much your time is worth but doesn’t consider the entire picture. After all, if you’re on salary, you don’t work only 40 hours a week.

 

So, to calculate your hourly worth, let’s focus on what you would like your life to be like, not what it currently is. If you want a specific lifestyle, go ahead, and add up what that would really cost. Then add in how much you want to work, not how much you do work, and that is your hourly worth even if you’re not there yet.

 

For example, if you want to earn 120K a year before taxes by working 20 hours a week, that equates to only 1040 hours of work a year, making your hourly worth over $115 an hour. Knowing this, since you don’t love mowing your lawn, you should jump at the chance of paying Billy down the street $50 bucks a week to keep your lawn nice because it’s worth it to you based on how much your time is really worth according to your life design.

 

Some Things Are Priceless

 

One thing the rich have figured out that hasn’t been passed down to the masses is that some things are priceless. Your child’s birth, their first birthday, kindergarten graduation, and anything that takes you away from those types of things – the things that will never happen again – should come at a much higher price and even be considered priceless. When you start to think of your own time as priceless and irreplaceable, productivity becomes almost automatic because you know there is no time to waste.

 

When you truly understand not only the value of your time, but the probability of the length of your life, and how you cannot go back in time, or forward, and that you only have right now – when you really get that – it becomes so much easier to habitually value your time above all else – because your time is the most precious thing you have. You cannot get it back once squandered.

 

How to Create Repeatable Workflows for Better Time Management

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Daily Habits to Encourage Positive Thinking and Outlook

When you start making the good things you do into habits, suddenly everything you want to change seems easy. Want to lose weight? Just eat 100 fewer calories a day, move an hour a day, and while the change won’t be noticeable or hard to stick to, the results over a long time, such as a year, will be dramatic.

 

  • Start Your Day with Uplifting Music – Even if you think you like listening to negative music to get your anger out, the truth is that it does affect your mind and inform your thoughts. There is a time and place for everything, so first thing in the morning, feed your mind with positive music. It can help to pick one pick me up song that works no matter what to listen to.

 

  • Reframe Roadblocks as Challenges – How you think of things and word things makes a difference in how you react. If you can use positive language to reframe the things that get in your way or threaten to get in your way, you’ll naturally teach yourself how to overcome them.

 

  • Use Positive Words to Frame Your Life – When you are talking about your life, even if something is less than perfect, use positive language to talk about it or think about it. When you do that, it will make you feel more satisfied and happier with your life.

 

  • Ignore Other People’s Drama – Whether it’s work-related, HOA-related, or family-related if the drama isn’t something you have any control over, you want to ignore it. You only have control over one person, yourself, not anyone else. The more you realize and accept that, the less bothered you’ll be about the drama going on in the world.

 

  • Fill Your Mind with Hopeful Thoughts – It’s natural to sometimes go toward the negative, but you can change that by purposefully filling your mind with hopeful thoughts about the world and your own personal life.

 

  • Keep a Gratitude Journal – Each evening, write down three things you are grateful for that happened today. This is going to help you focus on the positive even as you sleep tonight.

Daily Habits to Encourage Positive Thinking and Outlook

  • Tell One Person or Organization Thank You Each Day – It’s one thing to write about your thankfulness in your private journal, but how about letting someone in your life know that they are important to you. People like getting told that they did something good. They’ll remember you.

 

  • Surround Yourself with Other Positive People – While shunning others doesn’t come off as all that positive, the more you surround yourself with those who are also positive, the more you’ll feel positive. It’s really just another version of the whole “birds of a feather” idea, and while it’s a stereotype, it’s mostly true.

 

  • Focus On Mindfulness – One thing that breeds discontent more than almost anything is expectations and living in another time, whether the past or the future. The more you can focus on what you are experiencing right now, the more satisfaction in life you’re going to feel.

 

Nothing here takes more than a few moments of your time each day, but if you tie the behavior to something you do each day, you can turn positive thinking into a habit grounded in reality and fuel your life in a positive direction.

 

 

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Daily Organizational Habit: Prepare Your Clothing in Advance

One of the things you can incorporate into your daily life to ensure more happiness and success is to be more organized. When you’re more organized, life just goes much more smoothly. While some people seem to be born organized, those who aren’t can simply start developing the habit of organization by getting prepared for everything they do in advance.

 

Developing the habit of preparing your clothing in advance for everything you do will help cut down on anxiety and encourage better daily cleaning and organizational habits regarding your clothing and bedroom. Plus, you’re going to look and feel better each day at the office, even if your office is at home.

 

Planning all your clothing choices in advance will do more for you than you may think, in addition to looking more fashionable due to choosing clothing based on what you’re going to do, the weather, and other factors instead of being in a rush – you’re going to get these benefits too.

 

  • You’ll Feel Less Stressed Out – When you’re not rushing around trying to match things, you’re so much less likely to suffer from anxiety about getting dressed. If you have thought it out and picked something that makes you feel good, you’re going to have a better day.

 

  • You Will No Longer Have Outfit Regrets – You know as well as I do that if you don’t plan your clothing choices, things go wrong. You don’t have the right undergarments for that thing, so you can’t wear it, or sadly, you did and saw the pictures later and regretted it. When you plan in advance, you know the outfit looks great and makes you feel great, or you don’t even want to own it anymore.

 

  • You’ll Save Time – When you are scheduling time to plan the outfits you are going to wear, you will actually spend less time doing it. The main reason is that you’ll cut down on the tornado effect of rushing around tossing things on the floor or bed that you choose not to wear and then having to clean that up at some point.

 

  • You’ll Get More Wear from What You Own – When you aren’t planning your outfits, you end up wasting. But something amazing happens when you start planning – you start wearing more of what you own and buying things you will wear. It’s a win-win side effect all the way around.

 

  • You’ll Appear More Professional – When you have planned an outfit, you’ll also take the time to get the cat fur off your coat, shine up your boots, and pick things that look good on your body for the purposes you need them.

 

  • You’ll Feel Better About Yourself – If you look like an unkempt person all the time, even if you say you don’t care what you look like, you’ll feel bad about yourself. You don’t have to wear makeup or business suits but planning a look and getting cleaned up each day feels good.

 

The best way to accomplish this is first to get your wardrobe to make sense to you. Most people like to change out their closets seasonally, and some people have good luck organizing their closets by style and color or season and color or type and color. How you organize it will depend on your own needs, space, and lifestyle.

 

Then, to prepare an outfit, check your calendar for tomorrow to find out what you’re going to do that day and check the weather conditions you’ll need to be prepared for to maintain your comfort and safety. Note what type of self-care you need to be comfortable in the outfit, including hair styles, accessories, footwear, and so forth, so that you aren’t caught off guard as you get ready in the morning.

 

Organize your Environment for Success!

 

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Learn and Practice the Philosophy of Stoicism

There is no way for you to learn everything you need to know about this life philosophy from one blog post or article. However, if you’ve never even heard of the idea, just being exposed to this idea and what it really means can help you live a better and more successful life.

 

Live a Good Life of Virtue and Good Character

 

Firstly, a stoic believes that living a life of virtue and good character is the answer to living a happy and fulfilled life. To live this type of lifestyle, it takes introspection and an understanding of your own personal values, principles, morals, and willingness to live them.

 

You Are Responsible for Yourself

Are You Really Being Accountable?

 

Secondly, a stoic believes it’s within your power to be who you are and who you want to be and that you are fully 100 percent responsible for your own life and how you feel about it, but you cannot control what you cannot control. Therefore, a stoic will focus on controlling what is controllable.

 

Want Less Experience More

 

Thirdly, a stoic puts more stock in having experiences and learning new things over having more stuff or buying the most popular thing. That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily a minimalist, but they don’t just buy things for no reason or status purposes and actively focus on wanting less.

 

Accepting of Reality

 

Finally, stoics understand that they will not live forever. They are accepting that they’ll die at some point and live their life with that in mind. For example, if statistics show that walking fast 45 minutes a day extends life, and the stoic can make that happen because they have legs and the time to walk, they’re going to do it without struggling about the why or what-ifs surrounding the stats.

 

If you’re not sure who you are yet, or how you want people to think of you after you’re gone, take the time to discover who you are and how to become the person you want to be. If you are often considering the legacy you’re going to leave behind, it’s a lot easier to make the right choices when you have an options. Suppose you are fully accepting that you control your own reactions to the things that happen to you and not the other way around. In that case, it becomes a lot easier to make good choices minding your own personal ideals over what other people might think about it right now.

 

You can learn more about stoicism by reading books about philosophy like:

 

 

 

But you can also join groups about stoicism on Reddit, Facebook, and other social media sites that offer communities. There are also many useful YouTube videos about the philosophy of stoicism that you can get a lot out of.

 

 

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Organize your Environment for Success!

When it comes to daily habits that breed success, being organized can’t be understated. Getting your environment organized and keeping it that way will pay off in big ways.

 

Some people experience issues with being organized isn’t due to having some organizational block, but it’s more about not really understanding that there are better ways to get organized for success than just putting things away and being uncluttered.

Your Lack of Focus Is Getting in Your Way

Here are some ways to think about organization so that your entire environment is set up to make success easy for you, whether at home or work.

 

  • Use Your Planner – Whether you use electronic or paper versions, you can’t beat incorporating the habit of using a planner into your daily life to help you be more successful. When you have it all in one place, you can easily look at your days, weeks, months, and years and make the best use of that time. Don’t rely on memory. Write everything down you want to do and block out the time to do it.

If you know your Goal

  • Set Goals Properly – Make it a habit to set up your goals properly to what steps are necessary to be successful and how long it will take to do them. For example, if you want to start making money from your podcast, don’t just start podcasting; take the time to plan your podcast, plan your marketing, and plan each action you need to take to make it all work.

 

  • Make Daily Lists – From your planner the night before take a look and make a list of actions you will take tomorrow to achieve what’s in your planner. Organize the list with the top 3 priorities on the top and be willing to move anything after three to the next day.

 

  • Create Activity Zones – Whether home or office, the best way to organize is to set up activity zones. Putting everything away every time is a roadblock that will stop you from doing more. If you want to bake cookies, you shouldn’t have to redo your entire kitchen for an hour, and you should be able to go over to the baking zone and start within five minutes. The same thing if you’re writing a novel, if you have a writing area set up and ready to go, you can simply move to that writing zone and get it done during the block of time you set aside to do it.

 

  • Have a Place for Everything – Spending time creating the right storage and space to do the things you want to do will help a lot. It’s hard to get motivated to do much when the tools you’re using aren’t right, or the space you’re doing it in isn’t set up right. Spend the time and money investing in setting up your space to do what you want to do in it.

 

  • Be Consistent – No one wants to spend four hours cleaning a cluttered room and area on Saturday. Instead, make it a habit to consistently pick up and clean as you go so that you never have to do that. If you set up routines for each time of day where you habitually do certain behaviors, you won’t need any willpower. Check out com for some prewritten cleaning and organizing routines you can copy.

 

If you make it a habit to clear up right away and set up things for the next time, right away – you’ll experience a lot less procrastination and get a lot more done. Your productivity will increase exponentially just by simple organizational practices each day. The great thing is that most of it will become a habit quickly because the payoff is fast.

 

 

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Exercise For 5 Minutes Each Morning

An important habit to incorporate into your day is to move your body more. Sitting and being sedentary is worse for your health than even being a cigarette smoker, assuming the smoker is physically active.

Walking

Short Term High-Intensity Exercise Benefits Health

 

According to a 2018 study at an Australian University, two minutes of exercise at a high intensity in the morning may be just as good for you as 30 minutes of exercise. Plus, moving boosts your serotonin levels and puts you in a happy mood the rest of the day, not to mention you’ll jump-start your metabolism and thus maintain a healthier weight easier.

 

Morning Exercise Eliminates the Need for Willpower

 

Most of us have good intentions to move more, but we often allow an entire day to go by without ever doing the intentional exercise we planned. This ends up backfiring and causing us to be less healthy and less productive due to increased fatigue and brain fog that happens when you’re sedentary.

 

Make It a Habit

 

From this day forward, right after you get up, as soon as you can move well, do a three-minute warm-up plus two minutes of high-intensity movements until it becomes a habit for you within thirty minutes of rising each day. Since it’s just five minutes, you don’t have to prepare as much as if you were going on a bike ride or a longer run.

 

Mix Up Your Movements or Just Do the Same Thing

 

Some ideas are jumping jacks, jump roping, pushups, jogging in place, jogging down your driveway, squats, running up and down your stairs. Whatever it is that you do, do it at full intensity for just two minutes. You can exercise more later, but this is just something you do upon rising each day before you have your coffee or get ready for the day.

 

The benefits of working out like this each morning are that you’ll feel more energetic all day long, you’ll be more alert, focus better, and due to all that, be a lot more effective in whatever you need to do. Making the workout only five minutes long, including warm-up and the high-intensity two-minute workout, helps eliminate any excuses because you don’t need any equipment, gym, or set up to do this fast workout. But, one thing is clear, it will set you up for a much more successful day.

Avoid Burnout: How to Exercise and Sleep More

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Are You Really Being Accountable?

If you want to achieve your business goals or live a happier life, you must learn how to be more accountable. Accountability means that you take ownership and responsibility for yourself—no matter what challenges and things get in your way.

Are You Really Being Accountable?

It’s excluding excuses from your way of life and harnessing values that increase your productivity. When you better understand how your actions or lack of activities affect everyone around you, you can better control what needs to be done or improved to accomplish your goals.

 

The following are a few ways that can help you become more accountable to achieve more quarterly and daily goals:

 

Honesty Is the Best Policy

Be honest with the mistakes you have made or situations you experience. If you find yourself making excuses or blaming others, then it’s likely you are not accountable for your actions and responses.

 

Understand Expectations Clearly

Take responsibility and learn your expectations inside and out. Don’t wait for others to provide the information for you or use the excuse you didn’t know. Ask as many questions as possible so that you can find resources that build you up.

 

Celebrate Wins and Quickly Forgive Faults

While it is crucial to track your strengths and weaknesses to be more accountable, you should also forgive yourself and quickly move on. You don’t want the process to be about self-doubt and abuse.

 

You want to recognize it for what it is, then figure out what you need to improve and forgive yourself. Owning your mistakes does not mean you should dwell on them. In fact, that only keeps you behind longer. It is okay to make mistakes. You are only human, but not owning up to them or evaluating where you need to improve only harms you in the long run.

 

Value Your Time

When you don’t take accountability, you are using up time no matter if it’s obvious or not. While it can be hard to own up to mistakes, it is even worse to repeat them repeatedly until it’s too late.

 

Have Weekly Check-Ins

Have weekly check-ins with an accountability partner, mentor, or perform self-assessments. Partners and self-assessment tests are valuable as they can ensure and guide you on the right path. They can give you the tough love and recognition you need to take responsibility for yourself and do the work required.

 

As you can see, accountability is a crucial skill needed to increase your productivity and success of your business. It’s about being honest with yourself and what you want from life and evaluating your actions and processes to get there.  If you don’t take accountability, you can be sure you won’t realize your fullest potential.