New Year's Resolutions: Mistakes To Avoid + Be Successful

Most people look at the beginning of the year as a chance to change their lives,

However, I have seen that at least 50% of those who establish New Year's Resolutions or Big Goals for the New Year fail.

Reasons are that people are putting so much pressure on themselves to make New Year's Resolutions. or believe their lives will change at the stroke of midnight. Such extreme pressure sets your up for failing. Most people are in a fog from the holidays on January 1st that they don't even think about starting because they are tired or stressed.

For example, I had a client who for a couple years in a row said he was going to stop smoking for the New Year. He never did because he really felt pressure and in his heart really did not want to stop. This is so common to make such grand choices because people feel they are expected to make choices such as losing weight, stop smoking or other

habits that they really don't think about much the rest of the year.

How you can increase the likelihood of keeping a resolution or a new habit?

Whether is a New Year's Resolution or setting goals, people are more likely to success if they just take the time at the end of the year or when they are goal-setting to reflect. People should reflect on the past year or recent month to get a baseline or reference point on what they have been doing with their life and where they are at right now.

Asking 'heart-felt: questions are the key.

You must reflect before you make your choices.

1. Write down what you have done this last year.

Do these for different areas of your life such as work, relationships and self (self-care).

2. Ask yourself: What is missing in my life?

What have I not done yet?

3. Ask Yourself: What would I most likely to have in my life right now?

Image or picture what you most want in your life.

How would I feel in the next few years if I have not pursued my dreams and goals?

Don't be upset if you have negative thoughts or reactions, let 'inspirational dissatisfaction' motivate you.

The likelihood of making goals and developing a new habit are based on the questions what must be asked before goal setting. If you do not take the time to ask yourself these questions you are just shooting arrows in the dark at a target.

4. Goals:

After these questions then you are ready to make 2 to 4 goals.

Keep these tips in mind when you make your goals. To begin building new habits that support your goals or just wanting to make a change inhabits I suggest:

1. Start with small gradual moves or steps.

For example. if you want a new career or skills don't quit your job to go back full-time to school, take one course for a start and see if you like it. Break the goal down to tangible parts.

2. Break free of excuses

What may sound as valid reason for not working on your goals and new habits are really 'agony anchors' that hold you back. These are feelings of fear of change.

I hear from clients that they are 'too busy', 'I had no time this week' and other self-pity statements. This is never empowering. I have clients get a calendar or put in the cell phone calendar the day or evening they will work on their new goals and habits.

Example: If it is to go to the gym, schedule it in your calendar. Pre-plan and make this appointment with yourself. I am amazed how crowded my gym is in January and have many people stop going by Feb, because they have allowed many 'distractions" in their lives. Yes, things pop-up. If and when they do, immediately re-schedule your calendar when you will attend.

3. Don't share your goals or some of them with people who will act critical. Only tell those who will encourage and support you.

To become happier and more confident -- avoid emotional vampires. Unhappy people allow "emotional vampires" to suck their positive feelings right out of their skulls. Emotional vampires include people who put you down, criticize or mock you, or sabotage your dreams and aspirations. Never let snipers or negative people shoot holes in your boat. These types of people drain the life out of you.

Take survey of your life by making a list of people and situations you expose yourself to. Then, discard or limit people, habits or situations that keep you from feeling optimistic and happy. In other words, 'burn your bridges' if needed.

Example: I had a young client in her early 30's who wanted to train to run a half-marathon. She was very excited. She told her mother what she was planning to do and her mother looked at her and said, "you can't do that... " She was upset and learned very quickly this principle of enlisting those who are only positive and supportive.

Follow these tips and you will not only be successful in the New Year, you will feel happier and optimistic.

http://ezinearticles.com/?New-Years-Resolutions:-Mistakes-To-Avoid-+-Be-Successful&id=9842278

Transform Your Time and Your Life One Small Change at a Time

One-day-at-a-time.

How often have you heard that mantra? And how often have you actually acted on it?

It really is how change happens: - one-day-at-a-time. But we tend to forget that - either catastrophizing about missteps or getting complacent when we are doing well. And when we lose our one-day-at-a-time focus, we are very likely to lose our footing and lose ground.

Embracing a one-day-at-a-time perspective means, of necessity, starting and staying small. It's how you make this work for yourself. That's not to say you should not have big goals. More, it's to remember that big goals are brought to fruition by lots of small steps.

As Kyle Savikko wrote in a recent blog post, NOT staying small leads inevitably to disappointment.

It is then when we fall. We miss a day of working out. Forget to brush our teeth. Are too busy and get too distracted by the trials of life to write everyday... We miss the chance to fulfill our promise to ourselves to perform the habits.

One-day-at-a-time and your goals

So, how does this perspective work when you have really big goals?

Actually, it works quite well. You still have your goals - as big as your dreams. But you know, right down to your toes, that your path involves many incremental steps. If your goal is to create and sustain a new habit, you know that it takes a lot of repetition. Each step is important, but no one step makes or breaks things. Each link in the chain is vital but, honestly, in most situations, if you break the chain you can pick it up again and keep going.

There's a balance to maintain here. Each step is important, but it's a form of self-sabotage to make any single step into a make-or-break proposition. Encourage and energize yourself with your commitment to follow-through, but don't beat yourself up for a misstep. That will only distract you and get you stuck in self-criticism.

One-Day-at-a-Time Challenge

So, what's one change that you'll make in your life in the coming month, one-day-at-a-time.

For me, my commitment is to find time for meditation once a day - even if only for 5-minutes (but when I can, for longer). I know how this practice grounds and rejuvenates me - and it's one that I sometimes set aside when life feels hectic.

What small thing would you like to do, one-day-at-a-time, in the coming month? Remember, small steps are the stuff of important and transformational journeys.

We can all change our lives, one small change at a time.

http://ezinearticles.com/?Transform-Your-Time-and-Your-Life-One-Small-Change-at-a-Time&id=9449340

The Cost Of Taking Shortcuts

How do you define someone who is successful? Maybe they have results to show for their work - a lot of money, expensive car, big house, etc. This may look like success to you, but you don't really know how they achieved it. It could be luck or it could be doing the appropriate things to get them to that point.

I like to define success as your ability to achieve your desired outcome.

If your goal is to be a successful network marketer with a certain amount of money coming in every month and you have no idea how to achieve that, then you will start making the same mistakes that many others make.

Don't focus on what you think you must have to be successful. When you do this, your focus will turn negative when you don't see these things happening as fast as you would like. Now you find your motivation has changed and this will stop you from achieving what you want.

Change your definition of success. It's not about the results, but your ability to achieve those results.

You probably have big goals for your business. Maybe you want to quit your job, travel extensively, be around more for your family, time freedom, etc. But first you must develop certain abilities to get you to your goal.

Set milestones for yourself along the way. These will lead you closer to your goal instead of that mysterious, elusive goal out there in the future somewhere. Chunk it down. What is the closest, smallest, most achievable and believable goal you can achieve for yourself right now?

Once you start shifting your focus, things will become much easier because it's not longer a big, mysterious unattainable goal. Learn one skill at a time to get you there. Whether it be writing blog posts, creative emails, captivating videos, driving traffic to your website...

Become great at that skill. Learn it, master it and then become great at the next step.

This will almost make your success inevitable because everything will start to flow naturally. You are becoming that person and now have the ability because of the skills you are developing.

One more important thing is to make sure you have the right spirit behind your actions. Ask how you can serve other people. Do your best to serve others with the skills you have developed. Give value. Continue to do this and it will become like a ball of energy that keeps bringing you closer to your goal.

If you have the spirit of serving in mind, people will feel that. Focus on doing the things that will bring you results by developing your ability and serving others in the process. This will not only bring you the results you are looking for, but will also be much more fun and less stressful along the way.

http://ezinearticles.com/?The-Cost-Of-Taking-Shortcuts&id=9415950

The Proven, Reasonable and Totally Unsexy Way to Become More Successful

There is a common phenomenon in the world of personal finance called “lifestyle creep.” It describes our tendency to buy bigger, better, and nicer things as our income rises.

For example, say that you receive a promotion at work and suddenly you have $10,000 more of income each year. Rather than save the extra money and continue living as normal, you’re more likely to upgrade to a bigger TV or stay at better hotels or buy designer clothes. Your normal lifestyle will creep up slowly and goods that were once seen as a luxury will gradually become a necessity. What was once out of reach will become your new normal. 

Changing human behavior is often considered to be one of the hardest things to do in business and in life. Yet, lifestyle creep describes a very reliable way that human behavior changes over the long-term.

What if we adapted this concept to the rest of our lives?

Changing Your Normal

Let’s list some typical financial goals.

• I want to own designer jeans.
• I want to have a bigger house.
• I want to drive a faster car.

Here’s the interesting thing:

These big goals naturally happen as a side effect when we have the means to make them happen. When our purchasing power goes up, our purchases tend to go up too. That’s lifestyle creep.

What if similar side effects could happen in other areas of life?

Consider these goals:

• I want to add 10 pounds of muscle.
• I want to find a partner and get married.
• I want to earn six figures per year.
• I want to get a higher score on my test.
• I want to own a successful business.

What if we trusted that adding more muscle or earning more money or getting better grades would come as a natural side effect of improving our normal routines? In other words, as our normal habits improved, so would our results.

This idea of slightly adjusting your habits until behaviors and results that were once out of reach become your new normal is a concept I like to call “habit creep.” 

How to Practice Habit Creep

If you buy more things than your bank account can sustain, that’s not lifestyle creep. That’s called debt.

Similarly, if you adopt a bunch of new behaviors you can’t sustain, that’s not habit creep. In other words, the key is to avoid the trap of trying to grow too fast. Lifestyle creep happens so slowly that it is almost imperceptible. Habit creep should be the same way. Your goal is to nudge your behaviors along in very small ways.

In my experience, there are two primary ways to change long-term behaviors and improve performance for good.

1. Increase your performance by a little bit each day. (Most people take this to the extreme.)
2. Change your environment to remove small distractions and barriers. (Most people never think about this.)

Here are some thoughts on each one:

Increasing your performance. You have a normal way of living. For example, your current level of physical fitness is generally a reflection of how much activity you get on a normal day. Let’s say that your standard day requires you walk 8,000 steps. If you want to get in better shape, the standard approach would be to start training for a race or exercise more. But the habit creep approach would be to add a very small amount to your standard behavior. Say, 8,100 steps per day rather than 8,000 steps. You can apply this logic to nearly any area of life. You have a normal amount of sales calls you make at work each day, a normal amount of Thank You notes you write each year, a normal amount of books you read each month. If you want to become more successful, more grateful, or more intelligent, then you can use the idea of habit creep to slowly improve those areas simply by improving the way you live your normal day.

Changing your environment. There are all sorts of things we do each day that are a response to the environment we live in. We eat cookies because they are on the counter. We pick up our phones because someone sends us a text. We turn on TV because it’s the first thing we look at when we sit on the couch. If you change your environment in small ways (hide the cookies in the pantry, leave the phone in another room while you work, place the TV inside a cabinet), then your actions change as well. Imagine if you made one positive environment change each week. Where would your life creep to by the end of the year?

Changing Your Normal

The results you enjoy on your best day are typically a reflection of how you spend your normal day.

Everyone gets obsessed with achieving their very best day—pulling the best score on their test, running their fastest race ever, making the most sales in the department.

I say forget that stuff. Just improve your normal day and the results will take care of themselves. We naturally make long-term changes in our lives by slowly and slightly adjusting our normal everyday habits and behaviors.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/248745