Constant ImprovementsDedicated To The Constant And Never Ending Improvement In All Areas Of Our Lives

We all have times when our problems seem to be overwhelming – I know, I’ve faced some tough times in my life. You don’t seem to be able to make any progress, everything seems hopeless, there’s no way out of the mess your in… Maybe you’ve experience this state, or it’s even happening to you now.

Like so many people you end up looking outside yourself for the root cause of the problem. You blame other people, the government, society… the list of people and circumstances at fault can be endless.

The first challenge you face, or are facing, is to realise that the cause is almost always within your mind… How you respond to circumstances is key, the best form of help is mental self help.

Of course bad things happen to you, and people and circumstances beyond your control can contribute to them to some extent – your car could get wrecked as a result of someone else’s actions, or an downturn in the economy could mean that your firm ended up laying you off.

But even in these things you have some element of control… It’s rare for everyone to loose their jobs, and even if they do, some people will have worked at developing skills that they can use to quickly find another job. Or in the case of the car accident, you might have been in the wrong place at the wrong time as a result of some other decision that you made.

… So, to cut a long story short, you’ve got to understand that you are responsible for your circumstances, and you are the best person to do something about it. Very often your problems are greatly magnified in your own mind. Mental self help can assist you in overcoming your problems.

Of course, there are people out there who can help you and if you can find them, you should let them help you. However, their efforts will be tremendously reinforced if you take positive mental self help steps yourself.

Some suggestions for mental self help

Accept that most of the problem is within you. Once you have made this vital step, you need to take ownership for your own results in life and accept the responsibility for changing them.

Accept that while circumstances may look absolutely terrible today, with consistent and persistent effort, little by little you can change them. Ask yourself “how will this all look in 5 year’s time”. Will it really seem as significant as it does today – more often than not, the anwer is no.

All this is to say take the long view – over time your mind has the power to overcome tremendous obstacles. Mental self help is the best form of help you can get. Look at some examples of people who have overcome seemingly overwhelming circumstances to produce outstanding lives.

One example is the astrophysicist Stephen Hawkings, confined in a body wasted by motor neuron disease, yet able to produce amazing discoveries about the fundamental nature of our universe and write books about it!

Realise that you are not alone – no matter how bad your circumstances, it is very unlikely that you are the first person, or even the only person today, who is facing them. Look around you to see how other people have overcome similar problems – you might find some ideas that inspire you!

Although mental self help is very powerful, look for outside help to give you support and encouragement on your journey from where to are today to where you want to be. Make sure that you will also get accountability – don’t mix with others who are “happy being miserable”, only with people who really want to make things better.

Final thoughts

You may be down in the trough of despair today, however, no matter how bad things seem, you have the power to pull yourself out of it and even go on achieve bigger and better things than you ever have before.

The mental self help techniques in this article can help you to put things in to perspective and start the journey away from your present state of hopelessness to one where you are living the life you want and you are in control. Find more mental self help information on my website.

You can get a free e-course the success principle. Visit my website for more resources, articles, and support materials about success and personal growth.

Kevin John has spent many years helping businesses owners, aspiring business owners, and private individuals to develop the understanding and skills needed to achieve the success that they want.

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Goal Setting involves setting specific, measurable and time targeted objectives. In an organizational or business context, it may be an effective tool for making progress by ensuring that participants are clearly aware of what is expected from them, if an objective is to be achieved. On a personal level, Goal setting is a process that allows people to specify then work towards their own objectives - most commonly with financial or career-based goals. Goal setting is a major component of Personal development.

Importance of writing down your goal!

Goal setting really is far more effective when specific steps are integrated with written time frames and dates to document our thinking. Reality: Written goals clarify thinking, objectify their potential, and reinforce commitment. Another secret of successful people is that they keep their written goals visible and review them daily. One famous study from Yale in 1953 said that the 3% of Yale graduates who had written goals had more wealth years later than the other 97% of the class combined.To reinforce the study conducted by Yale, l read a book recently titled “Look within or Do without” by Tom Bay. According to Mr Bay, Harvard Business School did a study on the financial status of its students 10 years after graduation and found that:

- As many as 27% of them needed financial assistance.

- A whopping 60% of them were living paycheck to paycheck.

- A mere 10% of them were living comfortably.

- And only 3% of them were financially independent.

The study also looked at goal setting and found these interesting correlations.

- The 27% that needed financial assistance had absolutely no goal setting process in their lives.

- The 60% that were living paycheck to paycheck had basic survival goals;such as managing to live paycheck to paycheck.

- The 10% that were living comfortably had general goals. They thought they knew where they were going to be in the next five years.

- The 3% that were financially independent had written out their goals and the steps required to reach them.

Yes, the result of this study seem a little too perfect, but l’m not suprise at the overall implication. On personal experience, my life was in a shambles until l begin to set goals and write them down, as well as planning my days that l started to witness significant improvement and success in my life and family. Then without goal setting, l was working more and getting less in return for my effort. Why? The answer is simple! No direction and focus.

I understand why you’d not want to write down your goals.Writing down goals seems so contrived.So banal.You think that it may work fine for someone less intelligent - much less individualistic but that’s not for you.

That’s what l used to feel. For years, felt that way about,and made fun of, anything of positive thinking, personal power, or self-help. Then, almost by accident, l stumbled onto Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People Program and that changed the way l thought about self-help.

If goal setting can work for Harvard Business School Graduates, shouldn’t it work for you too? And Let me live you with this quote by Joseph Addison “There is nothing we receive with so much reluctance as advice”.

Pius Victor Ephenus is the owner of Life Changing Avenues.Com He has put together educating resources, tips, and tools in the area of business development - internet affiliate marketing - blogging - online email marketing - opt in list building - internet marketing resources - reviews, that will of good benefit to your business.

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Innovation is a talent that everyone has but many people would refute that idea. If you’ve ever marvelled at somebody’s creative ability, you too can generate that same ability but it takes time. Everyone is born creative. The box of crayons in kindergarten were not limited to those who possessed potential; because the truth is, everybody has potential of one type or another.

Remember how long it took to learn to ride a bike or drive or to never commit the same mistake again. It’s the same with new ideas. It takes practice and a lot of time before this mind function develops fully. In this article you will find suggestions on how to incorporate this potential into your life.

Ignore what other people say. Follow your own instincts. Allowing for the input of others will only disrupt your evolving ideas. If you have an original idea, don’t waste time and effort trying to make people understand. They won’t. You will probably only receive adverse criticism. If all those geniuses had listened to their peers, we would probably still be living in the middle ages.

You need to spend time nurturing your potential. I cannot stress this strongly enough. This will also involve time management but with a little discipline you’ll be able to manage both.

Exercise. Take a walk. Run a mile or two. Send all those endorphins coursing through your veins. Exercising certainly clears and relaxes your mind and allows the imagination to run free.

Record your dreams. Some of those dreams you would never have thought of in your conscious mind. If you’ve had these dreams before and you probably have, this shows the untapped imagination you have within. So jot down those dreams. They may just ignite that imaginative spark in you.

Find your own style. You can always tell a Van Gogh from a Matisse. You’ll know Hemingway wrote something by the choice of words on the paper. You are the same. People will appreciate your originality more because it is uniquely yours and no one else has thought of those ideas. That ability allows people to see how valuable an asset you are.

Don’t hide behind nifty gadgets or tools. You don’t need the most expensive set of paints to produce a masterpiece. The same with writing. You don’t need some expensive fountain pen and really smooth paper for a bestseller. In fact, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book of the Harry Potter Series on bits of tissue. So what if you’ve got an expensive SLR camera if you’re a lousy photographer? Who cares if you’ve got the latest laptop if you can’t write at all? The artist actually reduces the number of tools he has as he becomes better at his craft: he knows what works and what doesn’t.

Nothing will work without passion. What wakes you up in the mornings? What keeps the flame burning? What is the one thing that you’ll die if you don’t do? Sometimes people with talent are overtaken by people who have greater ambitions. Think the hare and the tortoise. Somebody once said that if you’re not doing something that you want to do, then you don’t really want to do it. That’s true. Sometimes you want something so badly that you’ll allow nothing to get in your way. That is passion. Passion will keep you going.

Don’t worry about inspiration. You can’t force it; inspiration hits when you least expect it to and you should prepare for those unpredictable yet inevitable moments. An idea could strike you on the subway, yet alas, you have no sheet of paper on which to scribble down a thought that could change your life. Have a pen and paper with you at all times. Don’t make that same mistake again.

All these suggestions should encourage you to be alert to new possibilities. Bear in mind that you’re doing these things for your own satisfaction and not anyone else’s. Soon enough people will start to notice, enabling you to maintain a much higher profile as you increase and constantly tap your inner potential.

Michael Russell

Your Independent guide to Self Help

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Success is defined by many different people in many different ways. Usually, a person’s definition of success is actually an explanation of how they measure that success. According to the Webster’s Dictionary, success is “the achievement of something desired, planned, or attempted.” By this definition of success, we are successful in some form or fashion every single day, throughout the day!

When people discuss whether or not they are successful, they are really discussing their personal measurement of success. Different people measure success in different ways. A housewife with little income may consider herself to be a success if her children are successful, well-mannered, productive members of society. However, a businessman may feel that the housewife is not a success because she is well in debt and does not have much of monetary value.

How you measure success will be determined by your core values. What are your core values? These are the beliefs that you hold to strongly in everything that you do. They can be spiritual, material, emotional, or social in nature. There are many exercises available in self-help books and websites on the web that will help you to discover your core values and beliefs. With these values, you will be able to determine how you measure success.

Likewise, you can determine your core values by how you already measure the success of yourself and others. If you feel that you are not successful unless you have a high tech computer, your own home, and a substantial bank account, then your core values are likely to be more material in nature. If you feel that you are not successful because you do not have time for church and family, then your core values are probably spiritual in nature. If you feel that you are not successful because you do not have time for yourself, your core values are primarily emotional in nature. Finally, if you feel that you are not successful because you have lost friendships on your path up the career ladder, then your core values are more social in nature.

Understanding your core values and beliefs are the best way to find happiness in success. When you understand your core values and apply them to your every day life and career path, you will find that your feelings of success or lack thereof will change drastically. This feeling of success will, in turn, create happiness and balance in your life, as well as self-confidence and emotional well-being.

Mario Churchill is a freelance author and has written over 200 articles on various subjects. To achieve Success and Happiness and to earn more money checkout his website today.

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Understanding the mind’s role in motivation and behavior is one of the most critical elements in fitness success. If you struggle with changing habits and behaviors or if you can’t get motivated, then even the best training and nutrition program is not much help.

A fascinating fact about your subconscious mind is that it’s completely deductive in nature. In other words, it’s fully capable of working backwards from the end to the means. If you “program” only the desired outcome successfully into your “mental computer,” then your subconscious will take over and help you find the information and means and carry out the actions necessary to reach it.

Many people are familiar with affirmations and goal-setting as ways to give instructions to your subconscious mind. But perhaps the ultimate mental training” technique is visualization. In one respect, affirmation and visualization are the same, because when you speak or think an affirmation first, that triggers a mental image, being as the human brain “thinks” in pictures.

You can use visualization to plant goals into your subconscious mind. You simply close your eyes, use your imagination and mentally create pictures and run movies of your desired results. If repeated consistently with emotion, mental images are accepted by your subconscious as commands and this helps with changing habits, behavior and performance.

Although there are some new and creative ways to use visualization, (which you are about to learn), this is not a new technique. Visualization has been used formally in the fields of sports psychology and personal development for decades and philosophers have discussed it for centuries:

“If you want to reach your goal, you must ’see the reaching’ in your own mind before you actually arrive at your goal.”

- Zig Ziglar

“The use of mental imagery is one of the strongest and most effective strategies for making something happen for you.”

- Dr. Wayne Dyer

“Perhaps the most effective method of bringing the subconscious into practical action is through the process of making mental pictures - using the imagination.”

- Claude Bristol

“There is a law in psychology that if you form a picture in your mind of what you would like to be, and you keep and hold that picture there long enough, you will soon become exactly as you have been thinking.”

- William James, 1842-1910, Psychologist and Author

Despite these glowing endorsements and a long track record, some people can’t get past feeling that this is just a “hokey” self-help technique. Rest assured, however, that visualization is an effective and time-tested method for increasing personal success that has been used by some of the highest achievers the world.

The Soviets started to popularize visualization in sports psychology back in the 1970’s, as detailed in Charles Garfield’s landmark book, “Peak Performance.” They dominated in many sports during that period, which validated visualization anecdotally.

In the last 10-15 years, there has been some groundbreaking new brain research which has validated visualization scientifically. Here’s something that was written recently by Dr. Richard Restak, a neuroscientist and author of 12 books about the human brain:

“The process of imagining yourself going through the motions of a complex musical or athletic performance activates brain areas that improve your performance. Brain scans have placed such intuitions on a firm neurological basis. Positron emission tomography (PET) scans reveal that the mental rehearsal of an action activates the prefontal areas of the brain responsible for the formulation of the appropriate motor programs. In practical terms, this means you can benefit from the use of mental imagery.”

So much for being a “cheesy” self-help technique.

Although visualization is widely used today, even people who are familiar with it often don’t realize its many applications. Arguably the most common use of visualization is by athletes, musicians and other performers as a form of “mental rehearsal.” Research shows that “practicing in your mind” is almost as effective as practicing physically, and that doing both is more effective than either one alone.

A common use of visualization in the fitness context is “goal visualization.” In your mind’s eye, you can see yourself having already achieved your physique goal or your ideal goal weight. You can also visualize a specific performance goal such as completing a difficult workout or a heavy lift like a squat or bench press.

One creative way you can use mental imagery is called “process visualization.” Once you’ve set your goals, it’s easy to come up with a list of the daily habits, behaviors and action steps necessary to reach your goal. So write down the action steps and visualize them - the entire process, not just the end result. See yourself food shopping and grabbing fruits, vegetables and lean proteins, ordering healthy foods from restaurant menus, saying no to sodas and drinking water instead, and going to the gym consistently and having killer workouts. Some people visualize their entire “perfect day” as they would want it to unfold. When you do this as vividly, emotionally and in as much detail as you can, you will be neurologically priming your brain to carry out those behaviors.

The least known of all mental imagery techniques is called “physiology visualization.” An example would be picturing the fat burning process in your body or seeing the muscle fibers growing larger and larger. Using this technique, could it be possible that you might be giving subconscious instructions to your body’s cells, organs and tissues?

Well, consider the work of Dr. Carl Simonton, a physician and cancer researcher who taught his patients (as one part of a comprehensive program), how to visualize powerful immune cells devouring the cancer cells. I’m not suggesting that you can cure cancer or materialize a lean and muscular body just by visualizing, (there’s a step in between thought and manifestation - it’s called action - a step that many self help ‘experts’ forget to mention). However, thoughts and mental images are the precursors to action and the fact that a mind-body connection definitely exists makes this an exciting prospect.

Scientists have established the mind-body link in many contexts, and not just by the existence of a placebo effect. There’s also direct evidence as in the way emotional stress can contribute to physical disease. The mind does influence the body! The mere fact that a branch of science has been devoted to this area is proof that it deserves critical investigation and is not just the domain of infomercial self help gurus. The science is called psychoneuroimmunology.

Using “physiology visualization,” you could, even in the middle of a workout, imagine the fat burning process taking place, and visualize fat being released from adipose tissue storage in your abdominal region or elsewhere. You could see the free fatty acids entering your bloodstream, being carried to the working muscles and being burned for energy in the muscle cells. You could also visualize the physiology of muscle growth.

To make your imagery as accurate and detailed as possible, my best suggestion is to refer to an anatomy & physiology textbook that shows pictures of fat cells, blood vessels, myofibrils, motor units, sarcomeres, and cell organelles like the mitochondria, so you know what the structures look like. You could also get more details about the processes by looking up lipolysis, hypertrophy or beta oxidation.

Even if you had no idea what the internal structure and workings of the body were like, you could still use this method. Your body responds to mental imagery even if it isn’t anatomically correct. We know from the field of hypnosis that the subconscious mind responds well to metaphor – maybe even better than literal suggestions. Facts and logic are the domain of the conscious mind, while emotion and metaphor can slip right past the conscious and into the subconscious. Dr. Simonton often wrote about his young patients who created (metaphorical) mental images of immune system cells as “knights in shining armor”, slaying “the dragon” of cancer cells.

One of your greatest mental powers is imagination. You can visualize anything you want and you can embellish and exaggerate your imagery as much as you want. For example, you could imagine the free fatty acids being burned for energy in the “cellular powerhouse” - the mitochondria - and you could imagine the mitochondrion as a fiery furnace… “incinerating” the fat! I think it’s a pretty cool idea to “see” your fat cells shrinking and visualize your body as a “fat burning furnace.”

Should you not believe that there’s anything to the physiology visualization technique, that’s ok, because we know that the subconscious is deductive. Just give it a goal, tell it what you want and it will get you there automatically by altering your attention and behavior. Therefore, we can be confident that physiology visualization will be effective even if only as a subconscious directive about your desired goal. If science someday provides us with conclusive evidence that visualization actually does cause cellular - physiological changes in the body, well, that’s just all the better.

Tom Venuto is a natural bodybuilder, an NSCA-certified personal trainer, certified strength & conditioning specialist (CSCS), certified master practitioner of NLP and author of the best selling diet e-book, Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle. Tom teaches you how to lose fat without drugs or supplements using the little-known secrets of the world’s best bodybuilders and fitness models. Learn how to get rid of stubborn fat and turbo-charge your metabolism by visiting http://www.BurnTheFat.com , home of Burn The Fat, Feed The Muscle and http://www.BurnTheFatInnerCircle.Com , the Internet’s premier members-only fat loss support community

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