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Happiness Tips

An incredible method on how to overcome ‘fear’

fearThe Kaizen Way: “When you improve a little each day, eventually big things occur. When you improve conditioning a little each day, eventually you have a big improvement in conditioning. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but eventually a big gain is made. Don’t look for the big, quick improvement.  Seek the small improvement one day at a time.  That’s the only way it happens-and when it happens, it lasts. ” -John Wooden (American Basketball Hall of Fame as a player and as a Coach)

I just finished reading a fantastically practical book by Robert Maurer Ph.D. (a psychologist and clinical professor at the UCLA School of Medicine) where he talks about how to apply the ‘Kaizen Way’ to people’s lives. How to use the principles to overcome fear, achieve results and find more success in your life. Like me, you have probably heard the term ‘kaizen’ before, but not sure of what context it operates in. So let me first explain it, and then show you how you can use it to change or achieve some amazing results in your own life.

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Goal Setting Tips

ELITE Goal Setting: Tip 2 – Are you growing

Blog-8This Goal Setting Tip by Carl Massy is: It is very important to have a goal in your life that is difficult for you to achieve and will challenge you. If you don’t have a difficult or challenging goal in your life it is possible that you will feel like you are not moving forward.

Here is why: Have you ever thought what happens to a plant that is not growing? You guessed it. It is busy dying. We, like the plants, have an inherent need to grow. If we ever feel that we are not growing, it actually gives us a sense that we are stuck or moving backwards.

The other thing about growth is that we do not grow without resistance. It is like training muscles in the gym. If you use a weight that is too small (i.e. there is little or no resistance) your muscles will not grow. Muscles – like our emotions – need resistance to grow.

So…if you don’t have a goal in your life that is stretching you, or challenging you, or making you feel uncomfortable; then it is time to start thinking about (and getting clear on) what it is that you really want, which will cause you to grow.

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Physical Activity

The easiest, smallest and most flexible exercise prop

activityI do a fair amount of travelling and depending on where I am staying the access to fitness training facilities can be a little limited. My bicycle hardly packs up nicely into my travel bag. Especially these days as you try to get all of your travel kit into a carry-on bag so you can save a few bucks on the flight and get out of the airport asap. So recently I made a more concerted effort to find the best travel prop.

And I think I have found one of the best exercise props around! It is essentially a large rubber band. Who was the genius who came up with that? I want to give them a big hug because it just made my staying in shape when I travel or am short of time, so much easier. And because they are so simple, you can come up with numerous different exercise combinations, which you will see in this very informal video that I recorded between the serious stuff (sort of) in the studio the other day.

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Goal Setting Tips

ELITE Goal Setting: Tip 1 – Being Crystal Clear

Blog-8This month’s Goal Setting Tip is: I am doing a lot of research on Goal Setting these days and so I wanted to share with you some of the best stuff that I have found. So from now on I will include a regular Goal Setting Tip. 

 

The September Goal Setting Tip is:

When you write out your Goal (and YES you do need to write your Goal out), write it as if you were going to hand your Goal statement to a subcontractor and they are going to fulfil your request.

Here is the key: Is this subcontractor going to understand exactly what you want or is it too vague for them to know where to start? Will they get the order wrong? Your Goal needs to be 100% clear so that the subcontractor (your subconscious mind and life itself) can deliver you or bring you to exactly what you want.

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Goal Setting Tips Happiness Tips Physical Activity

What are you really capable of?

trophyThis is a story. A real story. A story of trials and triumphs. It is even a story with a happy ending. And there are plenty of lessons in it we can all take away. Myself included. It is about someone – a normal every day someone – that realised that you can continue to aim big regardless of where you are in life. Best of all, it shows we are a winner, the moment we make a definite choice and then step off in the direction of that goal. The result we achieve is much less important than the feeling that we gave it ‘our best shot’.

I met Leanne over a year ago now, through a mutual friend of ours, when she was just at the point of deciding to make her ‘comeback’ and decided to use our 30-Day Happiness Challenge as a springboard. She was 39 years old and on the cusp of turning 40. She had a daughter that was just over one year old, another daughter who was six, two young step-sons, the sometimes inherent challenges of step-family life and ex-spouses and a head full of thoughts. Hardly the stage setting, you would think, for the decision to become the number 1 Water Ski Racing champion in the world. In fact most of us would think that she was about to bite off a lot more than she could fully chew…but it was George Bernard Shaw who said “Reasonable people adapt themselves to the world. Unreasonable people attempt to adapt the world to themselves. All progress, therefore, depends on unreasonable people.”

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Happiness Tips

The lesson we all need to learn

lightbulbI am going to tell you a story, which as we know is one of the best ways to learn. In fact all the greatest orators have been great story tellers.

Now I am not implying that I am a great orator. I like to think more of myself as someone who is good at making mistakes and then not being too embarrassed to tell others about what a complete and utter dill I was at the time. Here is one of those stories where I was a bit of a dill, or what psychologists like to call the power of ‘group-think’ (not quite the same result as a ‘think tank’ or ‘mastermind group’). It all started when…

It all started at 11:30pm on 16th of August, 1969 on a pleasantly cool north Queensland night…

Sorry. I will spare you the 27 years of antics that lead us to the current story. It was 1996. I had managed to convince the Australian Army that I needed a year off (to travel the world) and that I would be diligently returning when my travels were done (and to think I tell myself that I am no good at sales pitches). So here I was in March 1996, over in Lake Louise, Canada; getting ready for a kick-arse ski adventure. I had friends whom I could stay with, free lift tickets, half-priced ski gear and I was ready to rock and roll on the slopes.

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Goal Setting Tips Physical Activity

How would you like to be smarter?

smartNow this is just a short article on how to make yourself smarter. It is really quite simple, but not many people actually ‘practice’ the simple steps necessary. In fact a lot of people practice exactly the opposite and as a result make themselves dumber. That sucks. 

I have a simple system in life where I say that every choice we make in life puts us closer to the CRAP end of a continuum or closer to the GREAT end. And obviously (I hope ;-)), the aim is to spend over 80% of your time up the GREAT end.

So now back to being smarter. There is obviously a number of things that you can do along the way, but I believe that when it comes time to make that GREAT decision; the aim is to be as relaxed as possible.

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Physical Activity

Breath-walking is ‘meditation in action’

powerwalkingI know so many people that are aware that meditation is super great for them in so many ways but are so ‘wired’ that the ability to sit down quietly and empty their mind is just too far of a stretch. So I think that what I am about to share with you might be just the thing to get some of the positive benefits of ’emptying your mind’ without having to still still for 30 mins each day. The little gem I am about to share is called ‘breath walking’ and the video below shows you an actual demonstration of it too.

I actually call breath-walking a form of ‘active’ meditation and if doing still meditation is beyond you for now it is a great place to start. I first heard about breath-walking from Anthony Robbins who said Massachusetts Institute of Technology (the MIT from ‘Good Will Hunting’ for the non-Americans) ran a number of tests and spoke highly of the positive benefits. Which included stimulating the lymphatic system

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Happiness Tips

Find out what is holding you back and what to do about it?

pauseI started writing this ‘note’ on Facebook, but I couldn’t really do it justice by trying to say everything in 420 words or less. You would not get the true benefit of my own personal experience with a limiting and very disempowering belief. What I am going to do it to briefly explain my personal experience and then talk about the methods you can use to overcome or move through the limitations that exist.

So I realised in the last few months that I have a pretty strong disempowering belief that says: “it is bad to interrupt or inconvenience people”. I am pretty sure that I picked up this belief statement during my childhood, innocently enough, when I got a clip around the ear or told to be quiet and not interrupt. Sounds harmless enough and it is pretty harmless when we are 7 years old, but now let’s fast-forward that belief about 35 years…to a time where I am growing and ‘promoting’ my new business.

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Goal Setting Tips

Creating versus Picking

paintI had the good fortune of working with someone recently and they made the comment to me that they are often not comfortable or happy with the work contracts that they pick. They have a feeling once they start it that perhaps it was not the best choice and maybe they chose it for the wrong reasons – like the number of zeros on the pay-check, or the prestige of the organisation they would work for, or the country where the contract is. So I want to bring out two great strategies and lessons here.

 

STRATEGY 1: values-based decision making

This is something I was considering as I was riding my bicycle through the rice fields the other day. It was essentially making decisions based on our deeper values. Which we probably think we do automatically. Maybe. And maybe sometimes we habitually make decisions, without being conscious of what values are being met or not met.

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