How To Find Happiness Blog

One day, when I was a freshman in high school, I saw a kid from my class was walking home from school. His name was Kyle. It looked like he was carrying all of his books. I thought to myself, “Why would anyone bring home all his books on a Friday? He must really be a nerd.”

I had quite a weekend planned (parties and a football game with my friends tomorrow afternoon), so I shrugged my shoulders and went on. As I was walking, I saw a bunch of kids running toward him. They ran at him, knocking all his books out of his arms and tripping him so he landed in the dirt.

His glasses went flying, and I saw them land in the grass about ten feet from him. He looked up and I saw this terrible sadness in his eyes. My heart went out to him. So, I jogged over to him and as he crawled around looking for his glasses, I saw a tear in his eye. As I handed him his glasses, I said, “Those guys are jerks. They really should get lives.” He looked at me and said, “Hey thanks!” There was a big smile on his face. It was one of those smiles that showed real gratitude.

I helped him pick up his books, and asked him where he lived. As it turned out, he lived near me, so I asked him why I had never seen him before. He said he had gone to private school before now. I would have never hung out with a private school kid before. We talked all the way home, and I carried his books.

He turned out to be a pretty cool kid. I asked him if he wanted to play football on Saturday with me and my friends. He said yes. We hung all weekend and the more I got to know Kyle, the more I liked him. And my friends thought the same of him.

Monday morning came, and there was Kyle with the huge stack of books again. I stopped him and said, “Damn boy, you are gonna really build some serious muscles with this pile of books everyday!” He just laughed and handed me half the books. Over the next four years, Kyle and I became best friends. When we were seniors, began to think about college. Kyle decided on Georgetown, and I was going to Duke. I knew that we would always be friends, that the miles would never be a problem.

He was going to be a doctor, and I was going for business on a football scholarship. Kyle was valedictorian of his class. I teased him all the time about being a nerd. He had to prepare a speech for graduation. I was so glad it wasn’t me having to get up there and speak.

Graduation day, I saw Kyle. He looked great. He was one of those guys that really found himself during high school. He filled out and actually looked good in glasses. He had more dates than me and all the girls loved him! Boy, sometimes I was jealous.

Today was one of those days. I could see that he was nervous about his speech. So, I smacked him on the back and said, “Hey, big guy, you’ll be great!” He looked at me with one of those looks (the really grateful one) and smiled. “Thanks,” he said.

As he started his speech, he cleared his throat, and began. “Graduation is a time to thank those who helped you make it through those tough years. Your parents, your teachers, your siblings, maybe a coach…but mostly your friends. I am here to tell all of you that being a friend to someone is the best gift you can give them. I am going to tell you a story.”

I just looked at my friend with disbelief as he told the story of the first day we met. He had planned to kill himself over the weekend. He talked of how he had cleaned out his locker so his Mom wouldn’t have to do it later and was carrying his stuff home. He looked hard at me and gave me a little smile. “Thankfully, I was saved. My friend saved me from doing the unspeakable.” I heard the gasp go through the crowd as this handsome, popular boy told us all about his weakest moment.

I saw his mom and dad looking at me and smiling that same grateful smile. Not until that moment did I realize its depth.

(Source Unknown)

Exactly how do we go about pursuing happiness? We know happiness is far more than just money, fame or power. There are lots of people who have all three who are not especially happy. What are the secrets to living a happy, fulfilling life? Are there reliable road maps to happiness?

If you want to live a happy life, study happy people. Understand what they do, appreciate why it works so well and then adopt their behaviors and beliefs. This is the approach that was used to develop the Happiness Habit: Skills & Strategies of Habitually Happy People which will be released in book form later this year. Here are some secrets from habitually happy people:

Cultivate a sense of fun and share it with everyone you meet. Habitually happy people actually try to have a good time all of the time. Nay sayers cry, “Don’t be silly, you can’t expect to have a good time all of the time!” Habitually Happy people reply, “I can!” Or, “with an attitude like that you will never be happy!”

Exercise your freedom to choose happiness. Decide who you want to become, what kind of person you want to be. Define yourself as a happy, spiritually successful person. Let that goal become a sort of role that is genuine and authentic for you. Try to be your Best Self all of the time. When we don’t consciously decide what sort of person we want to be, our environment and experiences tend to define our identity and our destiny for us.

Rebel against people or situations that try to drag your spirits down. Don’t willingly or easily hand control of your thoughts, actions, feelings and well-being over to outside circumstances that can rob your happiness. Cultivate an indomitably strong, good spirit.

Choose emotional independence. Decide how you want to think and feel. Just because something bad happens, that doesn’t mean you have to feel sad. Remember, you must be at your best to do your best. Choose actions and attitudes that help you to succeed and be happy.

Make Goodness a Guiding Goal. We are always amazed how truly happy genuinely good people are. “Goodness for goodness sake,” one said. Habitually happy people are especially kind, caring and compassionate. The Dutch proverb that says, “Happy people are never wicked” was proven by our research.

Give freely and without strings attached. Habitually happy people are genuinely altruistic, they do good for the joy of doing good. They give without strings attached, they do not give just in order to get. Goodness is it’s own reward. They rarely pass up an opportunity to do good when it costs them little or risks them little.

Don’t be a people pleaser. Enjoy sharing joy and making other people happy, but don’t depend on other people’s approval to be happy yourself. We can feel good simply by knowing we have done well.

Take care of yourself, value yourself. Habitually happy people value their time, their talents and their resources. They continually develop themselves, strengthen their skills and gain a greater understanding of the world and the people around them.

Be adventuresome. Habitually happy people continually try new things and do new things to stay fresh and to constantly experience difference and change. It helps them grow and enhance their positive spirits. One commented, “I get bored with the same old stuff, I want each day to be new, different, something special.”

Don’t beat yourself up. Habitually happy people move from problems to solutions quickly. They know time spent dwelling on problems tends to reinforce mistakes they want to avoid. They don’t condemn themselves for errors. They channel their angst over their mistakes toward finding solutions or rectifying the problem. They do not intentionally hurt themselves.

Avoid The Fault Finding Feel Goods - Criticism, blame, ridicule, bigotry, all falsely elevate our sense of power and self worth by finding fault with something else. These feel goods are fed by a negative focus. You cannot be truly happy by continually finding fault, focusing on negatives, judging or criticizing. Habitually happy people don’t do these things and they avoid people who do.

Have high integrity and live according to your values. When you live by high, good values you can feel confident that, even if you fail, you have done YOUR best. Few things are worse than compromising your integrity and then failing. Habitually happy people cherish good values and live according to them.

Love is an active verb. Love is an action, it is something we do. It is an emotion we can decide to feel and project to others. It’s not just something that happens to us. Love propels happiness. The more we love, the happier we become.

Don’t be a snob. Happy people don’t have to feel better than others in order to feel good about themselves. They try to find something of interest and value in everyone they meet. And they try to touch each person they meet with a bright, positive spirit.

Continually celebrate success. Habitually happy people continually celebrate success, their own and other people’s success. This fuels everyone’s positive energy, confidence, desire to do well and propels people to achieve more.

Copyright 2005, Michele Moore. All Rights Reserved.

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Michele Moore is author of the Happiness Habit Blog, http://www.HappinessBlog.com and Happiness Habit: Skills & Strategies of Habitually Happy People which will be released later this year. See www.HappinessHabit.com for more information. She writes and speaks on the subjects of happiness, sparkle and well-being from her home in Atlanta.

Perseverance is about as important to achievement as gasoline is to driving a car. Sure, there will be times when you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, but you’ll always get out of the rut with genuine perseverance. Without it, you won’t even be able to start your engine.

The opposite of perseverance is procrastination. Perseverance means you never quit. Procrastination usually means you never get started, although the inability to finish something is also a form of procrastination.

Ask people why they procrastinate and you’ll often hear something like this, I’m a perfectionist. Everything has to be just right before I can get down to work. No distractions, not too much noise, no telephone calls interrupting me, and of course I have to be feeling well physically, too. I can’t work when I have a headache.” The other end of procrastination - being unable to finish - also has a perfectionist explanation: “I’m just never satisfied. I’m my own harshest critic. If all the i’s aren’t dotted and all the t’s aren’t crossed, I just can’t consider that I’m done. That’s just the way I am, and I’ll probably never change.”

Do you see what’s going on here? A fault is being turned into a virtue. The perfectionist is saying that his standards are just too high for this world. This fault-into-virtue syndrome is a common defense when people are called upon to discuss their weaknesses, but in the end it’s just a very pious kind of excuse making. It certainly doesn’t have anything to do with what’s really behind procrastination.

Remember, the basis of procrastination could be fear of failure. That’s what perfectionism really is, once you take a hard look at it. What’s the difference whether you’re afraid of being less than perfect or afraid of anything else? You’re still paralyzed by fear. What’s the difference whether you never start or never finish? You’re still stuck. You’re still going nowhere. You’re still overwhelmed by whatever task is before you. You´re still allowing yourself to be dominated by a negative vision of the future in which you see yourself being criticized, laughed at, punished, or ridden out of town on a rail. Of course, this negative vision of the future is really a mechanism that allows you to do nothing. It’s a very convenient mental tool.

I’m going to tell you how to overcome procrastination. I’m going to show you how to turn procrastination into perseverance, and if you do what I suggest, the process will be virtually painless. It involves using two very powerful principles that foster productivity and perseverance instead of passivity and procrastination.

The first principle is: break it down.

No matter what you’re trying to accomplish, whether it’s writing a book, climbing a mountain, or painting a house the key to achievement is your ability to break down the task into manageable pieces and knock them off one at one time. Focus on accomplishing what’s right in front of you at this moment. Ignore what’s off in the distance someplace. Substitute real-time positive thinking for negative future visualization. That’s the first all- important technique for bringing an end to procrastination.

Suppose I were to ask you if you could write a four hundred-page novel. If you’re like most people, that would sound like an impossible task. But suppose I ask you a different question. Suppose I ask if you can write a page and a quarter a day for one year. Do you think you could do it? Now the task is starting to seem more manageable. We’re breaking down the four-hundred-page book into bite-size pieces. Even so, I suspect many people would still find the prospect intimidating. Do you know why? Writing a page and a quarter may not seem so bad, but you’re being asked to look ahead one whole year. When people start to do look that far ahead, many of them automatically go into a negative mode. So let me formulate the idea of writing a book in yet another way. Let me break it down even more.

Suppose I was to ask you: can you fill up a page and a quarter with words-not for a year, not for a month, not even for a week, but just today? Don’t look any further ahead than that. I believe most people would confidently declare that they could accomplish that. Of course, these would be the same people who feel totally incapable of writing a whole book.

If I said the same thing to those people tomorrow - if I told them, I don’t want you to look back, and I don’t want you to look ahead, I just want you to fill up a page and a quarter this very day - do you think they could do it?

One day at a time. We’ve all heard that phrase. That’s what we’re doing here. We’re breaking down the time required for a major task into one-day segments, and we’re breaking down the work involved in writing a four hundred-page book into page-and-a-quarter increments.

Keep this up for one year, and you’ll write the book. Discipline yourself to look neither forward nor backward, and you can accomplish things you never thought you could possibly do. And it all begins with those three words: break it down.

My second technique for defeating procrastination is also only three words long. The three words are: write it down. We know how important writing is to goal setting. The writing you’ll do for beating procrastination is very similar. Instead of focusing on the future, however, you’re now going to be writing about the present just as you experience it every day. Instead of describing the things you want to do or the places you want to go, you’re going to describe what you actually do with your time, and you’re going to keep a written record of the places you actually go.

In other words, you’re going to keep a diary of your activities. And you’re going to be surprised by the distractions, detours, and downright wastes of time you engage in during the course of a day. All of these get in the way of achieving your goals. For many people, it’s almost like they planned it that way, and maybe at some unconscious level they did. The great thing about keeping a time diary is that it brings all this out in the open. It forces you to see what you’re actually doing… and what you’re not doing.

The time diary doesn’t have to be anything elaborate. Just buy a little spiral notebook that you can easily carry in your pocket. When you go to lunch, when you drive across town, when you go to the dry cleaners, when you spend some time shooting the breeze at the copying machine, make a quick note of the time you began the activity and the time it ends. Try to make this notation as soon as possible; if it’s inconvenient to do it immediately, you can do it later. But you should make an entry in your time diary at least once every thirty minutes, and you should keep this up for at least a week.

Break it down. Write it down. These two techniques are very straightforward. But don’t let that fool you: these are powerful and effective productivity techniques that allow you put an end to procrastination and help you get started to achieving your goals.

To Your Success,
Jim Rohn

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Article by Jim Rohn, America’s Foremost Business Philosopher. To subscribe to the Free Jim Rohn Weekly E-zine go to here.

Psychologists have proved what the playwright Oscar Wilde always suspected: optimists and pessimists really do look at the world differently.

Wilde once quipped that even when “we are all in the gutter, some of us are looking at the stars” — and now psychologists have shown he got it just right.

In a study they found that pessimists’ brains work better when they are staring downwards and that optimists’ minds function more quickly when they are looking upwards.

The finding suggests that the hangdog expression typically adopted by the miserable could have a purpose. They might be having sad thoughts but they are thinking them more efficiently than if they looked upwards.

More importantly, the research suggests new ways for diagnosing and treating conditions such as depression, according to Brian Meier, a psychologist at North Dakota State University who led the study.

Depression is one of the most common and debilitating psychiatric illnesses, affecting more than one in five people at some point in their lives and costing the National Health Service hundreds of millions of pounds a year.

In the study, researchers tested volunteers to find those with the strongest pessimistic and optimistic traits. Then the volunteers were asked to perform various cognitive tests while looking downwards and similar tasks while looking slightly upwards.

The results showed that the pessimists performed best while looking downwards, the optimists best when they looked upwards.

“Humans have linked words like up and down, night and day with positive and negative emotions ever since advanced thought evolved. These tests hint at the origin of that relationship,” said Meier.

It is possible that such postures can actually reinforce the moods that caused them, so people with pessimistic or depressive tendencies are perpetuating them through directing their gaze downwards.

“It suggests it may be possible to relieve depression simply by persuading them to break their habits and move their gaze upwards,” said Meier.

However, is it really fair to assume anyone with their eyes fixed firmly on the ground is depressed? Yes, according to Phillip Hodson, a fellow of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy. “It’s true if you feel down you look down. It’s a psychological as well as physical function,” he said.

“Football players drop their heads when they miss a penalty because their muscles go limp and they feel deflated. If they score, they get a shot of adrenaline, they breathe more deeply and stand up taller.”

Hodson is convinced that long-term pessimists and depressives also develop a very different view of the world and their role in it compared with others.

“They expect to do badly and so they become more prone to error and they have less joie de vivre,” he said. “They’ve probably had less sleep and are sluggish; and consequently they do see the world differently.”

Depression has been recognised for centuries. Its causes were, however, a mystery until recently and sufferers were often derided as malingerers.

Recent research has shown that depressives or long-term pessimists have subtle differences in their brain chemistry that may be partly genetic or could be caused by bad diets or other factors.

Lewis Wolpert, a professor of biology at University College London, suffered serious bouts of depression that he described as like being in a “black pit” in his renowned book Malignant Sadness.

Now recovered, Wolpert’s glittering scientific career also includes a Nobel prize and becoming a senior fellow of the Royal Society.

But the pessimism still sneaks through, as when Wolpert was asked to tell a recent interviewer of his original reasons for taking up science. “Maybe I thought my nose was too big and my penis too small,” he said, “I just wanted to understand what determined the shape of things.”

(info by Roger Dobson, Jonathon Carr-Brown and Tom Baird from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2087-1706116,00.html)

Get Better Results Than Ever Before

There are several principles of military strategy that you can apply to your business, every single day.

These can help you to think better and get better results than ever before.

Do The Unexpected

One really helpful military principle that can be applied to business is the Principle of Surprise. The principle of surprise says, “do the unexpected!” In sales and marketing, this means to be continually seeking ways to out-flank or upset your competition.

Do The Opposite of Before

Sometimes doing exactly the opposite of what you have been doing up till now can turn out to be the perfect solution. The natural tendency for a person, when they find themselves in a hole, is to dig deeper. In many cases, the solution is to go and dig somewhere else. Remember, the first law of holes is, “When you find yourself in one, stop digging.”

Follow-up and Follow-Through

A second military principle that applies to business is the Principle of Exploitation. The principle of exploitation emphasizes the importance of follow-up and follow-through. In business, this means that, when you get an opportunity, you exploit it to the fullest extent possible. If you have a great promotional idea or product or service, you sell all you can. You take advantage of your idea or breakthrough and use every opportunity to capitalize on it.

Work Harmoniously With Others

The third principle of military strategy that applies to personal and corporate thinking is the Principle of Cooperation. In business, this is often called the principle of synergy. In military terms, this is often called the principle of “concerted action.” In business terms, your ability to work effectively and harmoniously with other individuals and groups is more responsible for your success than any other quality.

Win the Cooperation of Key People

A key part of strategic thinking is for you to identify the individuals, groups and organizations whose cooperation you will require to achieve your goals. Make a list of them and then organize the list in order of importance. Then ask yourself, “How am I going to win their cooperation?”

Answer Everyone’s Favorite Question

Everybody wants to know, “what’s in it for me?” The effective executive is always looking for ways to help or assist others knowing that this is the only sure way to create within them a desire to help you to achieve your goals.

By doing the unexpected, by following up and following through, and by constantly looking for ways to get other people to cooperate with you, you will accomplish more in a shorter time than you might ever have imagined.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do immediately to apply these ideas in your business and in your work:

First, look at your job, especially the areas where you are experiencing frustration, and question whether or not there is a completely different way of approaching your problem or situation. Do the unexpected. Perhaps you should be doing exactly the opposite of what you are doing today. All success in business comes from surprising the competition in some way.

Second, identify the people, groups and organizations whose assistance you will need to achieve your goal. Continually look for ways to earn their support and cooperation by thinking in terms of what is in it for them.

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Article by Brian Tracy

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Not having fun? Don’t worry, everyone feels a little meh sometimes. But what if you never have fun? Well, you’re not alone there, either.

It’s called anhedonia, the inability to experience pleasure. “If you have anhedonia, it doesn’t mean you’re a curmudgeon or miserable,” says Ann Kring, an associate professor of psychology at UC Berkeley who studies the condition. Still, for people who have it, the bright peaks of pleasure we spend much of our lives chasing are flattened out.

Anhedonia can be temporary — during a period of mourning, for example — but it’s also a central feature of many depression and anxiety disorders, as well as schizophrenia. Kring’s work with schizophrenics has yielded a compelling paradox that may apply to others with anhedonia: “When you ask patients, ‘Do sunsets or good meals or time with friends bring you pleasure?’ they will inevitably say, ‘No, not so much,’” she explains. But when the researchers provided something pleasant such as a funny novel or a tasty drink, the subjects reported enjoying them a great deal. So it’s not that they can’t experience pleasure — it’s that they can’t anticipate it, or recall later having enjoyed things they’d actually enjoyed quite a bit.

Their pleasure thus trapped in the present, anhedonics rarely seek enjoyment. After all, anticipation, as any advertiser could tell you, is a key part of fun. Sometimes it even trumps the thing itself. “Looking forward to a meal at Chez Panisse, you think it’s going to be a ten, but when you get there it’s an eight or nine,” Kring says. “It’s not that it’s not a great meal, it’s that we tend to overestimate how much pleasure things will bring us.”

The desire to keep the Fun Meter cranked to ten is a particularly American trait, says Dr. Jeanne Tsai, an assistant psychology professor at Stanford who studies cultural influences on emotion. “Fun is really an American ideal,” she says. “We always ask ourselves ‘Are we having fun yet?’ and are always seeking entertainment and having a good time.” We’re supposed to be enthusiastic about our leisure time and passionate about our work, and studies of child-rearing books show we’re expected to make school and chores fun, too. Yet fun is open to cultural interpretation. Tsai has found that Americans equate “happiness” with feelings of elation and euphoria, while respondents from Hong Kong associate it with peacefulness and security.

With Americans, Tsai says, it’s not enough to just feel good — you have to express your elation, too. “If people ask how you’re doing, it’s not enough to say ‘Fine,’ you have to be ‘Great,’ and even if you’re not feeling that way you have to engage in the cultural script,” Tsai says. “If you don’t have the Julia Roberts smile, people think you’re depressed.”

She’s not kidding about the smile: Studies done by her Stanford lab comparing Caucasian and Hmong Americans found that not only did the white people smile more broadly and frequently than the Asians, but that depressed white people smiled as much as perfectly content Hmong subjects. We think of our smiles as clues to our secret inner state, when we’re actually on a sort of culturally preprogrammed autopilot.

What if you try to have fun, but don’t? Dr. Jacqueline Persons, director of the Bay Area Center for Cognitive Therapy in Oakland, says that when patients come to her complaining of a loss of pleasure, she introduces them to a therapy often used to treat anxiety disorders. Cognitive therapy is based on the idea that thinking patterns influence mood and behaviors — Persons says clients with anhedonia often stop pursuing activities in favor of holing up at home. “Like the anxious person who has predictions about catastrophe, the depressed person has predictions like, ‘I won’t enjoy it,’ or ‘It won’t be worthwhile,” Persons says. “The therapy is to help the patient identify those cognitions and to do an experiment and test if it’s true.” In other words, Persons sends anhedonics to a party. Beforehand, the patients rate how much they think they’ll like it, and once there, they rate it again. They often enjoy it far more than they’d expected.

All three experts agree that there’s a sort of natural gradient between people who want to grab life by the horns and those who prefer a cozy evening at home, and that too much pressure on people to feel good can make them feel … well, bad. “There’s a particularly high premium on happiness and getting out there and doing things in the Bay Area,” Kring says. “When you go back to work on Monday and people are like, ‘What did you do over the weekend?’ very rarely do you hear people say, ‘I sat at home and watched TV.’”

It wouldn’t hurt, Tsai says, if our fun-loving culture adjusted its view of happiness to recognize that not every good time has to be on the business end of a bungee cord. “If we broaden our definition to include those times when we’re feeling calm and peaceful,” says Tsai, “maybe you’ll find you’re happier than you thought.”

(info by Kara Platoni from http://www.eastbayexpress.com/Issues/2005-07-20/news/fun6.html)

The most important thing you do for your success is to take control of the suggestive elements in your environment. Be sure that what you are seeing and listening to is consistent with the goals you want to achieve.

Listen Your Way To Success

Listen to educational audio programs in your car. The average person drives 12,000 to 25,000 miles per year which works out to between 500 and 1000 hours per year that the average person spends in his or her car. You can become an expert in your field by simply listening to educational audio programs as you drive from place to place.

Take Courses In Your Field

Attend seminars given by experts in your field. Take additional courses and learn everything you possibly can. Learn from the experts. Ask them questions, write them letters, read their books, read their articles and listen to people with proven track records in the area in which you want to be successful.

Get Around The Right People

Associate only with positive, success-oriented people. Get around winners. As we say, fly with the eagles. You can’t fly with the eagles if you keep scratching with the turkeys. Get away from the go-nowhere types and above all, get away from negative people. Get away from negative coworkers. If you’ve got a negative boss, seriously consider changing jobs. Associating on a regular basis with negative people is enough in itself to condemn you to a life of underachievement, frustration and failure. Associate only with positive people. Get around winners.

Visualize Your Goals

The last thing before you sleep and the first thing in the morning, think about and visualize your goals as realities. See your goal as though it already existed. Your subconscious mind is only activated by affirmations and pictures that are received in the present tense. See your goal vividly just before you go to sleep. See yourself performing at your best. See the situations that you’re facing working out exactly the way you want them to.

Feed Yourself Mental Pictures

See yourself living the kind of life that you want to live. See yourself with the kind of relationships, the kind of health, the kind of car, the kind of home you really want. Visualize just before you fall asleep at night. The first thing you do when you get up in the morning is to feed yourself mental pictures. Those are the two times of the day when your subconscious mind is most receptive to new programming, when you fall asleep and when you wake up.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do, all day long, to keep your mind and emotions focused on your goals and financial success:

First, listen to audio programs in your car and when you travel around. Continue feeding your mind with a stream of high-quality, educational, motivational material that moves you toward your goal.

Second, resolve to associate with positive, optimistic people most of the time. Get around winners and get away from negative people who criticize, condemn and complain. This can change your life as much as any other factor.

———————-
Article by Brian Tracy

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Time is nature’s greatest “force.” Nothing can stop it; nothing can alter it. Unlike the wind, it cannot be felt. Unlike the sun, it cannot be seen. Yet, of all nature’s forces, time has the most profound effect on us.

Time remains constant, but our perception of it changes. When we focus on it, it slows down. When we turn our backs on it, it speeds up. Our illusion makes us think it is something tangible. We arrange it, divide it up, and give some to our friends. Sometimes we feel it is precious, at other times we waste it. We give it the power to heal when we say, “Time heals all wounds.” It can also kill, as when we live stressful lives because we “never have enough time.” On a day?to?day basis, nothing is defined and redefined in our minds as much as time. It’s a wonder we can still recognize it!

Herein lies our power. Because things are as we perceive them, we can choose to see time as a manageable commodity and live our lives according to that assumption. This is one of the secrets of successful people ? they work at shaping those things that others think are uncontrollable.

Efficient VS. Effective

In discussing time management, some people argue, “What we need to be is more efficient with our time!” Other people claim, “Let’s not worry so much about efficiency, let’s be more effective!”

Efficiency means doing things right. Effectiveness means doing the right things. Working efficiently is doing things with the least amount of wasted effort. Efficiency gets you from point A to point B via a straight line. Inefficiency goes in circles. Effectiveness means doing the things that yield results.

Many people, when learning about time management, ask the question, “Which should I work on first, efficiency or effectiveness?” In theory and practice, the best answer is to improve your effectiveness first. It’s much better to aim your sights at the result than to worry about the process. Too often we get bogged down in the means and lose sight of the end.

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Dr. Tony Alessandra, author of “Dr. T’s Timely Tips”, is available as a speaker for corporate and trade association meetings. Teleseminars and webinars are also available. Contact Holli Catchpole at SpeakersOffice: 1-800-222-4383 or Holli@SpeakersOffice.com

Time management is the central skill of success. Your ability to manage your time, to focus and channel your energies on your highest value tasks, will determine your rewards and your level of accomplishment in life more than any other factor.

Save Hundreds of Hours and Thousands of Dollars in Personal Advancement

Your mind is your most precious asset. You must be continually working to increase the quality of your thinking. One of the best ways is to turn driving time into learning time. Listen to educational audio cassettes in your car. The average driver, according to the American Automobile Association, drives 12,000 to 25,000 miles each year, spending 500 to 1000 hours that you spend each year in your car. That is the equivalent of 12 1/2 to 25 forty-hour weeks. This is the same as two full university semesters spent behind the wheel of your car each year.

Use Traveling Time as Learning Time

If you did nothing but use that traveling time as learning time, this decision alone could make you one of the best educated people of your generation. Many people have gone from rags to riches simply by listening to audio programs as they drive to and from work.

Attend Every Seminar

In addition, for personal and professional development, you should attend every seminar you can. You can often save yourself 100’s of hours of reading and researching by attending a seminar given by an authority in his or her field. You can learn ideas, techniques and methods that can save you hours, days, even months of hard work and research on your own.

Increase Your Income

Remember, to earn more, you must learn more. Your outer world of results will always correspond to your inner world of preparation. Continuous learning is the minimum requirement for success in any field.

Action Exercises

Now, here are two things you can do to put these ideas to work in your life immediately.

First, purchase an audio program that can help you to be happier and more effective today. Begin listening to it immediately. Resolve never to listen to music in your car when you can turn driving time into learning time.

Second, seek out seminars and training programs given by experts in your field. Sit close to the front, take careful notes, and apply the best ideas that you learn immediately.

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Article by Brian Tracy

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I am thankful…

For the taxes that I pay,
Because it means that I am employed.
For the mess to clean after a party,
Because it means that I have been surrounded by friends.
For the clothes that fit a little too snug,
Because it means I have enough to eat.
For a lawn that needs mowing, windows that need cleaning, and gutters that need fixing,
Because it means I have a home.
For all the complaining I hear about the government,
Because it means that we have freedom of speech.
For the parking spot I find at the far end of the parking lot,
Because it means I am capable of walking and that I have been blessed with transportation.
For my huge heating bill,
Because it means I am warm.
For the lady behind me in church that sings off key,
Because it means that I can hear.
For the pile of laundry and ironing,
Because it means I have clothes to wear.
For weariness and aching muscles at the end of the day,
Because it means I have been capable of working hard.
For the alarm that goes off in the early morning hours,
Because it means that I am alive.
And finally……. For too much e-mail,
Because it means I have friends who are thinking of me.

-Source Unknown