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Here are 10 ways you can begin right now to steer yourself toward a more fulfilled and happy life:. Life is made up of choices--some we regret, some we're proud of, some that will hurt us. Everything in your career and your life is a reflection of a choice you have made. If you want different results, start making different choices. People may believe that honesty won't win you many friends--but even if that were true, the friends you make with honesty will be the right ones.
Honesty is the cornerstone of all success, without which confidence and the ability to perform cannot exist. Once you realize perfect doesn't exist, you can ease up on yourself. There's no harm in being wrong or making mistakes, as long as you're willing to make corrections. Just be yourself, flaws and all, and let people see the real you.
Each of us is an imperfect human being, aware that we can't push away our failures and our flaws. Remember, winners aren't people who never fail but people who never quit. It's important to never let success get to your head or failure to your heart. The secret to getting ahead is to acknowledge your failures and have the wisdom to apply them to new opportunities.
Accept that you won't always make the right decisions. Your bad habits, faulty mindset, and degenerate environment. This is the same reason that many lottery winners go broke.
The lumpsum gets them ahead, but they still have the same habits, mindset, and environment. If you know that you need to stop drinking so much, stop drinking. If you know that you need to learn a skill to make more money, learn the skill. The most difficult part of this step is also the one that will yield the greatest result: You must simply distance yourself from the environment and people that reinforce the worst in you.
Not only does it affect your personal finances, but your emotions and self-esteem take a hit as well. It makes you hate life, yourself, and it kills your motivation to do better. Hitting the gym was tough when I was drinking heavy. But even tougher than that was hitting the gym when I worked at T-Mobile. I felt trapped, and this sapped my motivation in all things.
This feeling of hopelessness is what ultimately drove me to enlist in the military and start developing skills to make myself more valuable. If you want to improve your life, you need to develop a skill. It could entail working on a side business or learning a trade. For most of human history, the minimum requirement for survival was the ability to learn from your past.
Start learning from your mistakes. No one gets it right the first time. No one expects you to get it completely right the second or third time either. However, each iteration should be a dramatic improvement over the previous effort. Part of the learning process is self-reflection and analysis. You must be able to break down and dispassionately explain to yourself where you went wrong and what mistakes you made.
Additionally, you need outside input. This is why I stressed the importance of tough love earlier in this post: You should be constantly learning from your past — both your successes and failures. Aiming to accomplish something specific forces you to confront whatever is holding you back. Trying to achieve a specific goal also galvanizes your actions and mindset toward a particular task. It forces you to be disciplined. The mere act of pursuing a clear goal forces you to be proactive rather than reactive.
It replaces the bad habits which ruined your life. By taking deliberate constructive action, you make it difficult to behave self-destructively. Many of us live in fear of what will happen if we fail in our efforts. We fear others will ridicule us , we fear we will feel silly, and we fear we will end up even worse than our current position. To our monkey brains, maintaining the status quo feels safer, more predictable.
But we ignore something important:. The more likely scenario is that your bad habits continue to escalate, making your life worse as time marches on. You're just doing you right now. If they have a problem with it, it's theirs to have. Exercise, sleep well and eat right. Your mind and body are interconnected—if your body feels good, it's a lot easier for your mind to feel good.
5 days ago The world can be a very cruel and lonely place. But there are things that you can do to begin turning your life around. Whether you're in a job. In terms of building a successful career, work ethic trumps everything. What that means is doing your job and getting it done come hell or high.
The three tenets of having a body that's ready to take on the world? Exercising, getting enough quality sleep and eating healthily. If you don't have time for these, make time.
You owe it to yourself. As for exercise, try to get in a "session" 3 or 4 times a week. Whether that's hitting up kickboxing class or going for a walk with your dog, it's all good. Just get out there and stick with it.
Skeptical as to how this matters? Research says exercise can actually make you happier. That late night chalupa you decided to eat was a good idea. Only when it comes to your life, it actually matters. So get in your hours of sleep a night. It affects the other hours more than we'd like to admit. Your diet can also affect your mood. Little things can actually make the biggest of differences.
Jumping out of bed in the morning instead of hitting the snooze button can make you feel much more energized, despite logic to the contrary. Listening to uplifting music, leaving yourself positive little notes, rewarding yourself for strides made—it all builds up and can keep you on track. Change your alarm to something awesome. If you're anything like the rest of us, you wake up in the morning and all you can think of is, " So start out as positively as possible.
Change your alarm to something that invigorates you whether it's The Circle of Life or The Ride of the Valkyries is up to you. Part 2 Quiz How can you find a good mentor? Attend an addiction or treatment course. Think about the people in your life. Studies have shown that people who are successful and content generally have a routine they stick to. The routine they stick to probably isn't staying in bed all day and consuming buckets of fried chicken, sure.
But what's more important is that their routine allows them to conserve energy. When you have a daily routine, going onto autopilot allows you to expend mental focus on deflating and getting rid of problems that arise. You can only make so many decisions in a day and this routine allows you to save energy for the important stuff. Make your most important decisions on anything in the morning. You are less likely to be emotionally and physically exhausted. Decision fatigue is definitely a thing—like that poorly thought-out late night chalupa.
At night, we've done so much work all day, we throw caution to the wind and let our present selves make poor decisions for our future selves. So if something big presents itself, sleep on it. You want as much energy as possible to decide what the best course of action is.
It's a figure of speech for a reason! Do random acts of kindness. One of the easiest ways to get in the being-great-at-life zone is to focus on others. It's easy on you and it feels good—in addition to making the world a better place. And for just a second you get to forget about your problems and focus on someone else's. What's not to like? Helping others gives us a buzz unlike anything else. And doing so can get us out of a rut when we don't have enough energy to help ourselves. So whether it's donating some things to a thrift store or volunteering your time at the local homeless shelter, try it out.
Might as well build some good karma to be safe! Get yourself in line. No one can go from 0 to 60 in 3. We all need assistance and a shove in the right direction. No Olympian would start the race in a sitting position, you know? So whatever you need to do, do it. So sign up for that class. Get serious about your job search.
Succumb to online dating. Call your mom and make amends. Join the gym you've been driving by every day on the way home from work. The first step will be the hardest and it will all be downhill from there. Do what you've been wanting to do. You've got your mind right, you've got your body right, and now it's time to do that thing you've been wanting to do. That thing you've been too afraid to do. You've gotta bite that bullet. One foot at a time, regardless of how long your path to a turned-around life is. That class you've signed up for?
Initiate a family lunch. Get on that treadmill. Being amazed at yourself and the things you can create will be such a good feeling it'll be hard to stop. Consider this a diet for your soul. Any diet that isn't working needs to be dropped, so routine evaluation is necessary. Are you beginning to feel better? Are things slowly but surely falling into line? Could you up the efforts you're making? Just like you need to increase the intensity of your workouts as you progress, you need to keep pushing your mind, too. What works for you right now may not be enough in a few weeks' time.
Once you get a grip on the efforts you've started out with, add more and more. There are very few things in life you can go cold turkey on, and this isn't one of them. To a similar end, what you think will work might not. If that's the case, talk to your mentor and get advice on what you should do. Is it something you need to push through, abandon completely or is there a different tactic you should take?
Refuse to give up. You're in a very precarious position right now: So right now, focus on staying motivated. Focus on positive thinking. Focus on doing you. If you refuse to give up, guess what? They crop up without warning and sometimes unyieldingly so. The car breaks down, the relationship falters, the cravings get worse and worse. Knowing these will happen is important—that way, you're a little prepared and don't blame yourself. They happen to everyone and they're a part of life. You just gotta roll with the punches. Part 3 Quiz How can you avoid decision fatigue?
Go slowly into your new life. Talk to your mentor. It would be best to gain muscle, not just weight. To do that, you have to make your muscles grow by lifting objects that are heavier than you're used to, and eating extra protein, all day and especially right after the lifting. There are no shortcuts. One way or another, you must do those two things. If you can, join a group, class, or team coached by someone who knows what they're doing, so you don't hurt yourself. The New Rules of Lifting is a good book, but at least pay someone for a consult.
Regardless, get some expert advice. Remember to drink a lot of water and eat a lot of LEAN protein. Not Helpful 1 Helpful 4. How can I see the light in my life without doing anything serious or time consuming?