My home page for the internet is Louise Hay’s Affirmation page, so every time that I go online I have a nice affirmation there waiting for me. Today the affirmation was “I balance my life between work, rest and play. They all get equal time.” Hmmmm. How true is this statement in your life?

Do you balance work, rest, and play? I realised (somewhat to my horror!) that, in my case, playtime really comes in only if I’ve ‘booked’ time to play – like my day at the beach last week, or going to see Hamlet in Stratford tonight – or if I have time ‘left over’ to play after I’ve worked and rested! The end result is that playtime is getting about 20% of my time at most. RUBBISH!

Enough already! It’s time to bump playtime up the priority list! I admin I have gotten into bad habits lately. I’ve been busy and working quite a lot…and because I am good at self care, resting a lot too…but at the expense of playtime! Shocking.

And what’s worse, I know that I am better at this balance than most people I know. Many are very unbalanced (in terms of “work, rest and play” that is – not mentally unbalanced!), and the big missing ingredient is playtime. It’s heart-breaking to see, because playtime makes you come alive, playtime is fun, playtime is vital to you having a happy life – let’s face it, how much better do you feel when you’ve been on holiday? And why?
Because you’ve had uninterrupted playtime!

Holidays are all about recharging your batteries and devoting yourself to having some fun…and then we come home and forget to play for another 11 months and 2 weeks. It’s foolish to neglect your fun muscles – if they get flabby you’ll get miserable. I’m sure I don’t really need to extol the virtues of play – you know yourself that when you take part in activities that you enjoy, you feel better.

So when was the last time you deliberately took part in an activity you enjoy and made a conscious choice to savour that playtime? Why not start tonight? Instead of sitting numbly in front of the idiot box, make an effort to do something playful and fun (if that’s tv for you, ok…but as long as you’re actively enjoying it, not just wobbed out in front of it!). You see people, it’s time to take playtime seriously!

Something to play with

Part 1: What is the balance of work, rest and play in your life? 60/30/10? 40/40/20? Have a guess at the proportions – your best guess will be quite accurate! What can you do TODAY to start restoring the balance (especially the playtime bit!)?

Part 2: What do you do to play? Aim to get a list of 100 things (it might take time, but you can do it!).

Part 3: Do something off that list DAILY.

This is a syndicated article, courtesy of Syndicate Kahuna

More about…

• affirmations
• Goal setting

On the other hand, when we “do it right” how often to we give ourselves a pat on the back? We are our own worst critics, but the only value in that is the headache we get from constantly whacking ourselves. Other people will tell us “good job,” why can’t we tell ourselves that? Heck, we’ll tell THEM “good job,” but say that to ourselves? It just doesn’t feel right, right?

In the interest of starting down that path of “learning to think in a positive manner” here are ten steps to thinking positively.

1 – Focus on where you want to go, not where you’ve been. We’ve all made mistakes. Now it’s time to think about what we want to do to take the next step forward. Set small, positive goals, think about them, and accomplish them.

2 – Learn to forgive yourself and others. Most of us are wherever we are in life because we put ourselves there. We all make bad choices from time to time, and now it’s time to let that go. It’s called forgiveness and we really can forgive ourselves for bad choices. The next step is to move forward and consistently work to make better choices.

3 – If the glass is half full, then fill it. Optimists are right at least as often as pessimists and have a lot more fun. There’s nothing wrong with taking that half-full glass and filling it the rest of the way.

4 – Look for positive role models. We all need to find someone who inspires us. Maybe that person is someone who overcame a major handicap or maybe it’s just someone who put one foot in front of the other, year after year, and came out very nicely in the end. Or maybe it’s someone who just worked his or her pants off and won the big prize. Let that person be an inspiration.

5 – Change your atmosphere. Instead of listening to the news all the time put on a CD with a good motivational speaker or uplifting music. Most of the news is repeated many times a day and it’s not intended to make us feel good.

6 – Headlines (including news stories) are designed to surprise, shock, and otherwise yank you into a story, Disaster and scandal sell, or so the publishers think. Read something uplifting instead. Visit your bookstore or library and make note of all the motivational type books they have available. Get one that feels right and read it.

7 – Read something positive everyday, preferably when you get up and right before you go to bed. Then think about it, in a positive way. Grab that book you picked up in step 6 and read it for 15 minutes morning and evening for 30 days.

8 – Visualize good things happening. It’s too easy to visualize bad things happening. Bills, what the other person will say, “what if this happens…” and so on. Visualize the good thing happening. Visualize the project going well (whether it’s homework or that next presentation) and people telling you that it was “good stuff!”

9 – Mistakes are something to learn from, not a bat to whack ourselves with. We all make mistakes, it’s how we use them to move on that makes us better. So what if we “blew it” on the last effort, there is always a next time and we can always learn from what happened and do things differently the next time. That’s how we improve.

10 – Dreamboarding is the practice of placing images of “what you want out of life” on a piece of posterboard and placing it where you can see it. As a reminder of where you want to take yourself and what you want to have. Some people have found dreamboarding to be very powerful.

Thinking in a positive manner is as much a habit as is thinking in a negative manner. The reason negative thinking is so easy is because we’ve had so much practice with it. Practice the positive thinking tips to overcome the bad habits and replace them with new ones.

Everyone, from you and me to those awesome Olympic athletes, has a set of habits and these habits either move us forward or hold us back. If we can learn the habits of the successful people, and practice them, then we also will move forward.

I was asked recently by someone, posting on my self  motivation blog, what were the best self motivational books that I  have read. Although there are several thousand of these books  published each year I have come to the conclusion that there is very little  that can be added to the many words of motivational wisdom that have  been written over the last century and a half.

From the early pioneers like Napoleon Hill to today’s monumental giants like Tony  Robbins it’s been said that we arrive on this  planet without an instruction manual. I think for that reason alone there  is not just a thirst for knowledge, but a greater need for a guide on how to survive life which drives the market for  the self-motivation books.

You don’t need to have suffered a deep psychological trauma to want to invest in one of these guides, but for those who say you can’t deal with serious issues like depression then I disagree. Where my own doctor and a clinical psychologist were unable to help me a number of the books on my all time classic list gave me the support to get my life back on track.

However, it’s not reading self motivational books that gets results. It’s taking action on the advice that is given therein. So my advice is read a small number of self help books, but take a lot of action if you want to significantly improve your life.

Can motivational books bring happiness? Now there is a million dollar question! This depends on your definition of happiness of course. Many people would define it as achieving a certain amount of wealth, however many wealthy people say that wealth in and of itself doesn’t bring happiness. Many wealthy people are very comfortable, generous, self confident, and are quite happy with their lives, but it’s not due to having wealth. It’s due to having their heads in the right place, perhaps because many of them have read and used these books.

The truth is that happiness is not a destination, it is more a state of continually striving to achieve goals, achieving them, and setting more goals to strive to achieve. If that’s your definition then I think self motivational books will help you and my list of all time classics have certainly helped me in that respect.

There are many out there who will disagree with my choice of self motivational books and have their own favorites all I can say  to them is that these are the ones that gave me the focus and the necessary poke in the ribs to take action and I still revisit them for ideas.

Syndicated courtesy of Syndicate Kahuna

Joel has another killer post at Fearless Dreams:

Laughter and jokes and play are undervalued in our serious adult world.

We think of all of these as entertainment, just a way to escape the stress and burdens of a threatening world which weighs us down.

Do you ever feel like you’re carrying more than you can bear?
Laughter picks up those burdens, and takes them away from us, if only for a moment.

A break from our worries is great.
But laughter is much more than an escape.

Laughter can heal.

Here’s the rest: Are You Afraid to Laugh?

Wow. What a show, from just about any way that you want to look at it.

The Chinese are reported to have spend 50 billion dollars on the event, with all the new construction, festival, support services, coordinating upwards of a million volunteers, training, consumes, infinite tiny little details, etc.

And the athletes. Wow. Forget for a minute the issues about a few of them being under-aged, or on drugs, or flopping, or even the what China is like being the scenes.

The athletes are the show. The pageantry is awesome, but it’s not the show. The show is all about the years of training, work, and sacrifice that it takes just to be considered for the Olympic team, much less hit the gold. Imagine the habits that have to be formed and the attitude that these people need to develop.

Nerves? Part of the training they work on is getting past the nerves and the fear. Hard enough doing a talk in front of your group at work, now imagine doing a routine on the balance beam in front of 4 billion people.

How many times does a sprinter work on the launch? How about that little bend over they do when crossing the finish line?

Most of the actions these people do they’ve done to the point where they become habit, and how many times does one have to practice a Vault for that habit to happen?

Getting the Focus

They’re way beyond the “Ok, now I have to do this thing this way and I have to look for this point and I hope I don’t…” With the rare exception where concentration cracks a bit they’ve developed the habit (yeah, I say it’s a habit) of focusing exactly what they want to do and on shutting out all distractions.

I’d even say that most of them aren’t even aware of the audience when they’re doing whatever their event or routine happens to be, especially for the short events. Obviously in a team sport, such as Soccer, the teams are aware of the audience and their cheers and jeers. Still, the habits and the focus are where they have to be.

Now I’m the last person anyone would ever think of as Olympic material, but I did some Martial Arts for awhile. At times the going was easy and at times it was just hard. They easy parts were when I had the training habit down and a routine established, which made the concentration easy.

It’s way too easy to lose that habit.

Even the little habits, much less what it takes to Pole Vault in front of a billion or two people, can drop out of whack with surprisingly little effort.

But if we can find a way to lock in the actions and thoughts which create good habits then we’re on the road to where we want to be. Obviously all those marvelous Olympians, even the one who weren’t competitive, had those habits.

Nothing’s stopping us from developing ours, but the “how” part can be hard, and a little help is nice. The Athletes have their coaches, mentors, support, etc. and there’s not reason that we can’t have the same.

There’s a book which will help you on this path: the Habit guide.

It’s a great way to start building the right habits that are needed to hit your goals, even if they aren’t balance beam routines.

Get your copy of this very helpful book, here.

More Resources for Creating Good Habits:

Millionaire Mindset to Achieve Financial Freedom – Repeated action leads to good habit. Good habits lead to positive character. Positive character and attitude lead to phenomenal result and destiny. Begin to take action and make our dreams become real. Inspiring Journey To Financial …

Good Habits Are Hard to Break – You can train yourself to create mostly positive outcomes on a daily basis in your life by developing good habits. How often have you walked away from some sort of minor catastrophe, disaster or accident, in the kitchen or otherwise, …

Charlotte Mason Blog Carnival: Good Habits Edition – I can’t think of a better way to keep motivated in our endeavors to create good habits than the experiences she shares in this entry. She shows how putting down a new “habit rail” brings more freedom to your life. …

Habits: how to create good ones – 2. I want to relinquish myself from my need from sugar. 3. I want to feel accomplished. HOW DO I CREATE GOOD HABITS? I googled: How to create healthy habits and came across this great blog. Creating Healthy Habits …

Back To School – 17 Good Habits For A Successful Life – It is an indicator of whether you mean what you say and can be trusted. Do not introduce doubt about this into people’s minds by showing up later than expected. Create the habit of being punctual now and you won’t have to worry. …

The Habit guide – The Habit Guide shows you how to live a happy, healthy lifestyle for good. Perfect for newbies and seasoned health seekers alike, Mike Kinnaird reveals every step-by-step detail you must know to finally lose weight, get healthy and set yourself free…”

Stress also comes with a lot of costs that aren’t obvious. If you break a leg you go to the emergency room and they put you back together.  The costs, if you’re paying for it, are quite visible. But with stress… consider the money for the headache pills, relaxation therapies, etc.

Here’s a clip:

We all know that a stress-filled existence is responsible for nail biting and dark circles under the eyes. But we may not realize the heavy toll it can extract from our bank account. Chronic stress, the kind you experience when the demands of life exceed your ability to cope, increases your risk of developing ailments ranging from the common cold and gum disease to obesity and heart diseases. This, in turn, will cause you to pay more for medical treatments, insurance and dental work. If you need more incentive to do something about your stressful lifestyle, consider these potential costs:

Here’s the rest – How Much Money Does Your Stress Cost You?

“I can’t remember… where I put that report… the name of their contact person… where my glasses are… where I left my pencil… whether I locked the door… whether I unplugged the iron…”

This is commonly called absentmindedness and often seems to become more prevalent as you get older. However the phrase, “I can’t remember,” may not be accurate. You cannot forget what you did not remember in the first place. Absentmindedness is actually a memory problem.

So much of what we do is performed unconsciously. It is exacerbated by our present work-whirl of multitasking where it can be difficult to stop and be present in the moment. Since you are already mentally onto the next tasks, you do not take the time to imprint on your mind all the pieces of the current situation.

Yet if you want to increase long-term productivity, using memory triggers to improve short-term recall can give you more time every day. Let’s use the missing report as an example. When it first landed on your desk, you might have glanced at it and set it aside to review in detail later. Did you consciously form an image of where you placed it, or were you already moving on to the next item as you added it to one of the other piles surrounding you?

Two major memory tools are links and substitutions. A key in using these for maximum results is to find silly things to connect. Suppose, for instance, that report you cannot find was a draft of the new budget.

Link: You might think about placing it next to your calculator because they both have numbers on them. Just the thought of doing that forces you to be conscious of your actions.

Substitution: Budget: “I bet they will not budge for the IT software request.” Then the silly connectors happen when you envision locking the report in a drawer that won’t budge, and the whole IT department comes in and together they try pulling out the drawer.

Try the same techniques when you meet someone.

Link: Denise. I’m originally from New York where Italians were a big part of the community. I can’t tell you how many times I heard the comment, “Da Niece? How’s da nephew?” Silly, yes, but it was an immediate association.

Substitution: Next focus on a facial feature that stands out. Build a silly picture from that. It will help you remember the face too, and the connection will form. “Da Niece has quite da nose!” Now exaggerate that and see both da niece and da nephew snooping around like bloodhounds.

Simply by the act of searching for a facial feature and a connection, you pay attention. You become a better listener and your memory will improve because you are focusing on the present, not looking past that person to the next one with whom you want to talk.

Are you thinking that there is no way you have time to stop and consciously track everything that you do? Be assured that once the procedure becomes a habit, it will not take long to process each incident. You will not lose time backtracking to verify that you did something or waste precious minutes finding something.

If you want to save time, don’t forget…and you cannot forget something you did not remember in the first place!

© Denise Landers, Key Organization Systems, Inc.

You enjoy every day more as you reflect upon accomplishments and a plan for a fulfilling tomorrow. Systems for effortlessly organizing your office and time are the practical keys to your happier reality. See these systems in action improving lives at http://www.KeyOrganization.com.

Out of Control?
Are you in control of your life?
Life is wonderful, and dangerous and unpredictable.

Sure, you pretend that you have everything under control.
But you know that’s not true.

Pretending to be in control makes you feel safe.
And everyone wants to feel safe.

It’s hard to think about personal growth, enjoying life, or anything else, when you don’t feel safe.

The problem is that most of the world is completely beyond your control.
You’re surrounded by possibility, and asked to make hundreds of choices on what to buy, what to do, and what media to listen to.

And most of these choices don’t matter at all.

Read the rest here: Three Ways to Escape Confusion and Take Control

The short answer is this: concentrate on thinking the thoughts you want to think, all the time, every time. Catch yourself sliding into the negative thinking? Immediately replace it with positive thinking. Find something to think positively about.

The long answer is here: How to Start Thinking Positively and Stop the Negative Thinking

More Resources on How to Think Positive Thoughts:

Daily Affirmation – Unwind and relax – Warning: prolonged use of positive thinking may create a permanent positive attitude. . If you like this affirmation, try these ipopins. ipopins are one minute affirmations that can be listened to like a song from your iPod, …

Self Fulfilling Prophecies – Making your Future Better – Part 1 – It’s kind of hard to think positive and have a positive forward outlook when almost every article which comes out in the news about those with ADHD is telling us how dreadful we have it and how future success for those ‘afflicted’ with …

Wise Words: Think Positive – “Whether you think you can or think you can’t—you are right.” –Henry Ford. Change your thoughts today. If you think you can’t do something, then you probably won’t be motivated to try. If you stay focused and have faith in what it is …

The Power of Positive Thinking – It is quite common to hear people say: “Think positive!”, to someone who feels down and worried. Most people do not take these words seriously, as they do not know what they really mean, or do not consider them as useful and effective. …

Intuition – 3. Think positive! A worry-free, fear-free state could do so much to improve your intuitive ability. By staying positive, you attract good energy that would be able to easily recognize imminent feelings and events. 4. Just let go. …

I’m evaluating a multi-media course on blogging from the folks at Simpleology. For a while, they’re letting you snag it for free if you post about it on your blog.

It covers:

• The best blogging techniques.
• How to get traffic to your blog.
• How to turn your blog into money.

I’ll let you know what I think once I’ve had a chance to check it out. Meanwhile, go grab yours while it’s still free.