How To Maintain Your Self Improvement Course

Once you have decided on a self improvement course, you will face moments along your journey where it seems that you are not making progress toward your goal. It is but natural.

Staying in the course when the results do not seem to be coming can be challenging. But then, you must not give up when you are pursuing a dream.

Stay on your self improvement course. Do not jump overboard. If you believe in your dream and is willing to see it through, you will surely enjoy the sweet reward of success when you arrive at your destination.

Below are four tips for staying the self improvement course.

1. Stay positive.

Your mental attitude toward your situation is very important. If you think possibilities, you will be better able to focus on the opportunities that are present in setbacks or delays.

Try to become your own dictator when you surrender your will to negative thoughts. Keep a positive attitude. You know that you have what it takes to succeed.

Tell yourself to think thoughts that will lift your spirit and renew that desire to succeed.

2. Pull versus Push.

It is not possible to push a rope. Neither can you make any progress by pushing and forcing it to move to your liking.

Experts will tell you that you need to make yourself "attractive" so that you can effortlessly draw to yourself what you want in life. This will also move you away from seducing or pushing in order to produce the outcome that you desire.

What have you been attracting to your life? Are you the one doing the pushing or the pulling?

3. Be persistent.

Continue on taking action daily toward your dreams and goals. Patience and persistence are the crowning qualities of self-confident champions.

Think of the gardener who plants a seed and then waits for it to sprout and grow. He waters and nourishes the seed even when he does not see immediate results, having faith that the seed will develop into a beautiful plant.

Like the gardener, do not think of what you see and what is going on today. Look ahead in the future and what your actions now will result to.

What can you do today to achieve your future plans?

4. Have a success partner.

Having a success partner to encourage and support you especially when you are down or frustrated can make the difference in achieving a goal.

Sometimes our vision is blurred by distraction or discouragement. Having a supportive partner who wants big things for you and believes in you can help you stay the self improvement course.

You can do it on your own, but you do not have to do it alone. You have a choice.

Why not have a success partner who will stick with you not only through the good times but also through the bad times?

Elbert Hubbard "Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer to your goal."

Nobody told you that the self improvement course you have chosen to trek is easy. But with enough willpower and the perseverance to go on, you will finally reach that long awaited destination which is success.

Stress Management

They say there's more than one way to skin a cat. The same goes when you start tearing your hair out with all the frustration, grief, anxiety, and yes, stress. It's a state of mental conditioning that is like taking that bitter pill down your throat, causing you to lose your sense of self, and worse your sanity. Just thinking about it can drive anyone off the edge.

And they say that the proactive ones are already living off the edge.

As one stressed-out person to another, I know how it feels, and believe me there are many variants when it comes to stress. Coping with life, and carrying the problems that may or may not belong to you can scratch away the little joy and happiness that you can carry once you head out that door. You can't blame them for being like that; they have their own reasons, so much like we have our reasons to allow stress to weigh us down. They say that stress is all in the mind, well, what's bugging you anyway?

There are several ways to manage stress, and eventually remove it out of your life one of these days. So I'll try to divide it into a seven-day course for you and I promise it's not going to be too taxing on the body, as well as on the mind.

1. Acknowledge stress is good
Make stress your friend! Based on the body's natural "fight or flight" response, that burst of energy will enhance your performance at the right moment. I've yet to see a top sportsman totally relaxed before a big competition. Use stress wisely to push yourself that little bit harder when it counts most.

2. Avoid stress sneezers
Stressed people sneeze stress germs indiscriminately and before you know it, you are infected too!

Protect yourself by recognizing stress in others and limiting your contact with them. Or if you've got the inclination, play stress doctor and teach them how to better manage themselves.

3. Learn from the best
When people around are losing their head, who keeps calm? What are they doing differently? What is their attitude? What language do they use? Are they trained and experienced?
Figure it out from afar or sit them down for a chat. Learn from the best stress managers and copy what they do.

4. Practice socially acceptable heavy breathing
This is something I've learned from a gym instructor: You can trick your body into relaxing by using heavy breathing. Breathe in slowly for a count of 7 then breathe out for a count of 11. Repeat the 7-11 breathing until your heart rate slows down, your sweaty palms dry off and things start to feel more normal.

5. Give stressy thoughts the red light
It is possible to tangle yourself up in a stress knot all by yourself. "If this happens, then that might happen and then we're all up the creek!" Most of these things never happen, so why waste all that energy worrying needlessly?

Give stress thought-trains the red light and stop them in their tracks. Okay so it might go wrong - how likely is that, and what can you do to prevent it?

6. Know your trigger points and hot spots
Presentations, interviews, meetings, giving difficult feedback, tight deadlines…. My heart rate is cranking up just writing these down!

Make your own list of stress trigger points or hot spots. Be specific. Is it only presentations to a certain audience that get you worked up? Does one project cause more stress than another? Did you drink too much coffee?

Knowing what causes you stress is powerful information, as you can take action to make it less stressful. Do you need to learn some new skills? Do you need extra resources? Do you need to switch to decaf?

7. Burn the candle at one end
Lack of sleep, poor diet and no exercise wreaks havoc on our body and mind. Kind of obvious, but worth mentioning as it's often ignored as a stress management technique. Listen to your mother and don't burn the candle at both ends!

So having stress can be a total drag, but that should not hinder us to find the inner peace of mind that we have wanted for a long time. In any case, one could always go to the Bahamas and bask under the summer sun.

Genuine Happiness Comes from Within

Life isn’t the sweetest candy. Sometimes, when I feel like the world is just too heavy, I look around and find people who continued to live fascinating and wonderful lives. And then thoughts come popping into my mind like bubbles from nowhere – "How did their life become so adorably sweet? How come they still can manage to laugh and play around despite a busy stressful life?" Then I pause and observed for awhile… I figured out that maybe, they start to work on a place called ‘self’.

So, how does one become genuinely happy? Step 1 is to love yourself.

My theology professor once said that "loving means accepting." To love oneself means to accept that you are not a perfect being, but behind the imperfections must lie a great ounce of courage to be able to discover ways on how to improve your repertoire to recover from our mistakes.

Genuine happiness also pertains to contentment. When you are contented with the job you have, the way you look, with your family, your friends, the place you live in, your car, and all the things you now have – truly, you know the answer to the question “how to be genuinely happy.”

When we discover a small start somewhere from within, that small start will eventually lead to something else, and to something else. But if you keep questioning life lit it has never done you any good, you will never be able to find genuine happiness.

I believe that life is about finding out about right and wrong, trying and failing, wining and losing. These are things that happen as often as you inhale and exhale. Failure, in a person’s life has become as abundant and necessary as air. But this should not hinder us from becoming happy.

How to be genuinely happy in spite all these? I tell you… every time you exert effort to improve the quality of life and your being, whether it is cleaning up your room, helping a friend, taking care of your sick dog, fail on board exams and trying again, life gives you equivalent points for that.

Imagine life as a big score board like those which are used in the NFLs. Every time you take a step forward, you make scoring points. Wouldn’t it be nice to look at that board at the end of each game and think to yourself “Whew! I got a point today. I’m glad I gave it a shot.”, instead of looking at it all blank and murmur “I didn’t even hit a score today. I wish I had the guts to try out. We could have won!” and then walk away.

Genuine happiness isn't about driving the hottest Formula 1 car, nor getting the employee of the year award, earning the highest 13th month pay, or beating the sales quota. Sometimes, the most sought after prizes in life doesn’t always go to the fastest, the strongest, the bravest or not even the best.

So, how do you become genuinely happy? Every one has his own definition of 'happiness.' Happiness for a writer may mean launching as much best selling books as possible. Happiness for a basketball rookie may mean getting the rookie of the year award. Happiness for a beggar may mean a lot of money. Happiness for a business man may mean success.

So, really now, how do we become genuinely happy? Simple. You don't have to have the best things in this world. It's about doing and making the best out of every single thing.

When you find yourself smiling at your own mistake and telling your self "Oh, I'll do better next time", you carry with you a flame of strong will power to persevere that may spread out like a brush fire. You possess a willingness to stand up again and try – that will make you a genuinely happy person.

When you learn to accept yourself and your own faults. You pass step 1 in the project "how to become genuinely happy." For as long as you know how to accept others, you will also be accepted. For as long as you love and know how to love, you will receive love ten folds back.

Self Improvement Guide Worth Reading

There are different books and seminars that can help you gather some self improvement guide. All these sources are against the negative factors in your life.

This self improvement guide is intended to offer you the best solutions to eliminate these factors for good. Or at least to reduce it drastically.

Work, meetings, deadlines, appointments, telephone calls, shopping, taking the dogs out etc. – all these are things most people have to accomplish daily.

Most of the times, on the waiting list there are other things like: family, friends and even ourselves.

Sometimes we discover too late that the points mentioned on the waiting lists are, in fact, the most important and, unfortunately, sometimes, we don’t realize this at all, so find ourselves wondering for what reason we are so unhappy.

All this people know that time is more than money – time means, first of all, life and, more than that, it means our lives.

That is way we have the obligation not to surrender in stressful situations and to go fighting for the joy of living.

Let us not forget also that deficient management of time can produce tremendous health problems, both at the physical and mental level.

But there is good news! Time can be domesticated – we can make it, in certain manner, obey us. First step in implementing this process is to identify the elements that robe your time. Normally, they are divided into two groups:

The external factors (unexpected phone calls, very long phone conversations, unplanned visits, the policy of open doors, not sufficiently trained personnel, frequent meetings, interruptions caused by colleagues, friends and family etc.)

The internal factors – related strictly to our own persons (priorities and objectives that change, the lack of a daily working plan, lack of self imposed deadlines, the tendency to take care of too many things at the same time, disorder, lateness in resolving the conflicts, incapacity of saying no, lack of decision, tiredness).

By reading the above enumeration, you probably pictured recalled all the similar situations that you went through. Now, all you have to do is to find a way to defeat and eliminate them, so that you can be the mater of your own time again.

Here are three possible ways in which you can do that:

Get used to write everything down. It is useful, especially if you have a bad memory. Otherwise you might fail to remember to go to important meetings, to make important phone calls, to answer messages you promised you would answer.

You can also write down great ideas and inspirations that occur to you in the most unexpected moments.

Make a list of priorities. It takes you very little time to draw it and you can even do it while you’re having your morning coffee. Write down, the things you need to do that day, in the order of their importance and urgency.

Learn to say no. One big mistake that a lot of us make is that we put other people’s problems in front of ours. Nevertheless, by helping them in a bad moment for us, we give rise to frustration, stress and we find ourselves unable to respect previous engagements.

Creating Effective and Efficient Relationships

Relationships of all kinds are often perceived as very delicate things, that require extra effort to maintain. However, a relationship can also be something that can provide security and can also be long lasting despite many trials.

Building an effective and lasting relationships is a necessity for several reasons. For example in a group or organization, the well being of the people depends on how efficient and effective that group or organization works.

The group or organization is also dependent on how the members work well with the management.

An ineffective group or organization can really be very frustrating. An effective group or organization can also ask so much on their members, that sometimes the members would be having no life outside the walls of the area where they work or sacrifice the other aspects of their life just to meet deadlines. For an organization or group with this kind of scenario, relationships can be stressed or suffer from breakdown.

People or other entities who depend on these groups or organization also suffer.

Society is defined as a web of relationships, which requires all parties to work and contribute their share in order to achieve a common goal. Having a relationship that is good, where cooperation and respect are manifested, can make society work better. In this way each member works for the good of the whole and towards achieving a common goal. This can only be attained with effective and efficient relationships.

Understanding the other parties' feeling and position creates an effective and efficient relationship. The easiest method to understand what is important to another party is to ask them what they want and listen to what they have to say. When the other party realizes this, they would feel the importance given to them

Effective and efficient relationships require parties to openly express their feelings and positions on all matters pertinent on the relationship. Assuming that the other party understands our needs and give us when we need it without asking for it is not a good practice.

Respect is the key to relationship. In order to create a more effective relationship, parties should treat each other with respect. We can show respect just by listening to the other party and by trying sincerely to understand how they function. You can also show respect to other parties by confirming that they are doing everything they can.

The opposite of respect is quick forming of judgments based on unfounded facts and prejudice.

Respect is the very foundation for a great relationship. This also means respecting yourself and respecting others.

Another key area in forming an effective relationship is to tackle differences of the other party directly. Differences between parties or people are quite interesting. For example in a conversation where each party listens to the other party, you may observe that each is having two different perspectives.

Work towards a win-win solution for both parties.

This can be done when at least one party acknowledges that the relationship is important. That party would then exert more time, effort and energy to understand the other party's needs and deal with it to get it out of the way. Should they fail, it is comforting for that party to know that they tried.

Effectively listening and no pre-judging. This is important if parties are to understand each other.

Informal discussions are conducive for parties. They bring out issues and concerns comfortably. They also feel more relaxed making them think more clearly.

Developing an atmosphere where the other party can express their feelings when they need to.

When parties fail to express whatever is on their mind or their feelings, it can get in the way of building an effective relationship.

Parties should be aware that certain things exist naturally but should be controlled in any dealings in any relationship. Human nature is one. Some of these things found in a relationship also include a history of stereotyping or mistrust, blaming the other person or party for a strained relationship, excluding the other party's feelings when focusing on a task, no clear and defined objectives, roles and expectations of each party in a relationship is also unclear.

Relationships are important to anyone, addressing issues and problems right away is a must to further improve the relationship. As they say 'No man is an Island'.