Month: May 2015

3 Ways to Become More Mindful During Your Workout

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Mindful Workout

You step on a treadmill and get into a groove after a long day at work. Thoughts of your looming to-do list might be racing through your head. Or maybe you’re stressing about family or financial issues. And before you know it, you’ve forgotten you’re even there, pounding away on that rubber strip like a mindless robot.

Like most people, you probably want to take your mind far away from the excruciatingly slow-ticking clock before you. But tuning into your feelings while working out is hugely beneficial to your mental and physical health. It provides an opportunity to reconnect with a piece of you that might have gotten lost amid your hectic life and puts you on track to achieve your goals.

Of course, it’s not always easy to process the sweat pouring from your face, your pumping heart rate, and loud breathing and fathom what it all means. And with the omnipresence of media and entertainment and the piling stresses of daily life, distractions are almost impossible to ignore. But by focusing on the now, you can come back down to reality and start making the most of your workouts.

What Will This Do For Me?

Checking in, even in a brutally hard workout, helps you gain a keener sense of how hard you’re working physically and in a broader context. When I remain in the moment, I can ask myself whether I’m benefitting from the activity at hand. In terms of exercise, I can more accurately gauge where I am: Is my heart rate up? Am I breathing harder? Am I challenging myself or plateauing?

While running mile 16 in an IRONMAN triathlon, I became so displaced that I failed to notice a woman spectator running next to me. She was telling me to smile because I had this amazing opportunity, and that connection brought me back to a present state and forced a smile across my face. Instead of trudging through the marathon portion and dwelling on the pain of it all, I realized it was a blessing and completely turned around my state of mind.

How Can I Be More Mindful?

By bringing awareness into your workouts, you can stimulate your mind and body instead of taking part in a mindless routine. Here are three ways you can be more mindful:

1. Drown Out Your Thoughts 

In our always-on society, no matter where you are, you’re probably connected to a device. Even outdoor noises like cars rushing by and strangers conversing can be distracting.

Because we’ve become so obsessed with thinking about other things, our minds often take over and pull us away from the moment. And in a snap, the moment has passed, and we can’t recall it.

If you want to tap into your unconscious mind, you have to quiet your thoughts. This quiet time allows you to use your mind rather than let your mind use you.

2. Build a Ritual

Establishing rituals is a great way to train your unconscious mind to be more present. Setting up a ritual can calm an overactive brain, even if it’s something as simple as dimming the lights. As humans, we respond to rituals because they take the worry about “what comes next” out of the equation and allow us to focus on what really matters.

3. Meditate

Meditation is powerful — and not just from a spirituality standpoint. It’s an amazing tool that gives you the chance to connect with something bigger than yourself; it just requires some willingness. As your breathing becomes slower and more deliberate, your anxieties slip away. Meditating before or after a workout for just five minutes can help you refocus and remind you of what you’re doing and why. Don’t just go through the motions; actually be there.

When I’m mentally present during a workout, I think about different parts of my body in a connected way. How do my ankles feel? How does it feel when I break a sweat? This adds a whole new mind-body connection that’s induced by the exercise. It’s not even emotional; it’s a gauge or checkpoint for how I’m feeling.

Of course, you’ll inevitably have days when you hit the pavement and use the stress and tension as fuel to push yourself. And when being unmindful can help you get through a slump, it can have a positive impact. But as long as you recognize that distractions are everywhere — and you hold the mental capacity to get back on track — you can start putting mind over body and make your workouts worthwhile.

Rick Martinez is the CEO and founder of Project BINK, a community and platform that guides people to purpose-driven happiness. Find out more about how to eliminate distraction and become more mindful in your career, workouts, and life on the Project BINK blog.

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10 Books To Inspire You To Get Rich

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Books are a key to success. It’d be hard to attain any kind of success without reading! Yet we are constantly flooded with so many books to read. It is important to be picky on the subject you chose to read, and if it is on being inspired to become rich with ease, here are some books I have taken my time to write about. I believe they will be really helpful in making your desire come true.

1. The Magic of Thinking Big by David Shwartz

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From the day of its release this book became an instant success. Written by Dr. David Shwartz, renowned expert on motivation and earning more money, it follows the adage according to Donald Trump, “if you are going to be big, you might as well think big.” This book offers you a methodical approach on how you can get the most out of your job, your marriage and family. It also helps you see the bigger picture on how you can make those big dreams become attainable.

2. Awaken the Giant Within by Anthony Robbins

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This book is a noted production by Anthony Robbins for his spiritual approach to attaining wealth. With the guidance from this book you can take control of your mental, emotional and physical factors of achieving goals and making those smart decisions that count.

3. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell

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This book illustrates that little things can really make an enormous difference in your life. It emphasizes tapping into the power of creativity and getting the best of the magic moments it offers. A small idea could ignite great things and lead to extraordinary and outstanding accomplishments.

4. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck

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It all starts from the mind. How we think and what we think about is what can lead us to immense success. Where we are supposed to be all starts from how we think it. According to psychologist Carol Dweck of the famous Stanford University, our mindset determines the success we can get from our business, relationships and even parenting.

5. Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries, Jack Trout

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Positioning methods could put you in the right place and distinguish from the rest of the pack. According to the authors of this book, how you position yourself could be in form of branding, management and marketing. To excel you have to understand the difference in consumer behaviors and trends. Positioning makes you seen and heard in a noisy marketplace.

6. Thick Face, Black Heart: The Warrior Philosophy for Conquering the Challenges of Business and Life by Chin-Ning Chu

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What this Asian author offers you is from ancient Chinese military wisdom. How you can apply these principles from the listed practices could determine how efficient you can be in your field of entrepreneurship and career. According to Success magazine, the information and material in this book could be as vital as that in Napoleon’s Hill bestseller, “Think and Grow Rich.”

7. Helping People Win at Work: A Business Philosophy Called “Don’t Mark My Paper, Help Me Get an A” by Ken Blanchard, Garry Ridge

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In this book the author identifies the secret of productivity and attaining more. According to them a satisfied worker will always attain more than an unsatisfied worker. It is important for business leaders and employers to help people attain more satisfaction at what they do and their success will propel your organization or career. The game plan is to help people win first and you will also win.

8. Rework by Jason Fried

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Co-founder of 37 Signals, Jason Fried talks about how you can start and be successful at owning your own business. Business ventures may be what will offer you the opportunity to get wealthy easier and exponentially. According to Jason Fried, becoming successful at your business goes beyond drafting a plan and approaching success through the conventional approach can be harmful.

9. How to Get Ideas by Jack Foster

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This book focuses on how you can develop new ideas which certainly will trigger your success and wealth. Jack Foster shares his techniques on how to generate amazing ideas and making them a part of your career and business endeavors.

10. Creativity Workout: 62 Exercises to Unlock Your Most Creative Ideas by Edward Bono

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In this book creativity is explained as an important element in career success and is discussed expansively. According to Edward Bono, creativity is not a skill for only a few people. Rather it is up to every one of us to tap into the creative juices that is actually present in every one of us.

To get rich with ease will not be so daunting if you take a shot at any of these books.

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6 Things To Do Every Day To Ensure You Stick To Your Goals

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Sticking to goals can be challenging. We all want better health, better careers, better jobs and to cast an impression on everyone that we are living fulfilled lives. Yet to reach our goals and make every minute of our time count requires commitment, consistency and hard work. Certain daily practices have to be observed to get the best out of us. Here are some things you have to ensure daily to reach your goals.

1. Involve others

You have to be accountable for the actions you are committing yourself to. Involve everyone around you, get them engaged and talk to them on how they can help you accomplish your goals. When you involve others you feel you have a responsibility towards them as well as yourself. Every day, make sure you are accountable to sticking to your goals. By joining groups or engaging others you have more motivation to reach your goals. For example if you want to read more, try joining a book club, if you want to be a better entrepreneur, join an entrepreneurial organization.

2. Visualize the rewards

Reaching a goal can be challenging, sometimes it can be overwhelming. When the journey becomes tough and difficult, try to stick to visualizing your successes every day. Wake up to visualize what rewards you will get from sticking to meeting your goals. If you want to lose some pounds, visualize yourself already underweight and benefiting from being underweight. The mind has a way of channeling your body and intentions to sticking to your goals and reaching them.

3. Break down your goals

Try to break down your goals into tiny chunks. The smaller the size of the goals, the more willing and prepared you are to meet them. For example, if you find it difficult getting out of the house and taking a workout at the gym, why not try to break the goal into making sure you are always dressed for the gym daily? By doing this you demonstrate you are moving in the right direction and you can keep the momentum to meet with the larger goal.

4. Reward yourself

For every progress you make daily towards reaching your goals, try to vindicate yourself and reward yourself. By doing this you appreciate yourself and the hard work you have put in for the day. When you reward yourself you program yourself to benefiting from a larger reward in the future. You also propel yourself to gaining daily rewards which can be enticing and motivating.

5. Measure your progress

It is easy to become frustrated when you are not getting instant results. Change can be slow and rewards are not always immediate. Still, progress can be measured even in tiny bits so take time to look back at where you are coming from. You don’t have to feel depressed about not making that major progress in an instant, but when you journal or snap pictures to document your progress, no matter how small, you will feel grateful and elated to see what difference you have made from where you are coming from up till now.

6. Believe in the possibilities

According to researchers, by believing in the possibilities of accomplishing a goal or a task you increase your chance of reaching it and eradicating whatever roadblocks or challenges you may face. Believe in what you can achieve. What self belief has over self control is that while self control can be depleted, self belief cannot. We all have an enormous reservoir of how much we can believe in ourselves. With believing in ourselves comes perseverance, determination and desire to meeting with our goals. Every day understand that what you need to keep on going is how you think of achieving your goals. Your goals are reachable if you think you can reach them!

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10 Things People Do Every Day Which Make Them Unproductive

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Everyone wants to get more done! Trying to aim for the stars could mean that you start paying attention to needless distractions that may just be entirely consuming your time. Instead of devoting attention to some of these things, why don’t you get them out of the way and focus on getting more results.

1. Procrastinating

Procrastination is a thief of time. Putting things off until later can hinder your productivity. Get your tasks done immediately, as soon as you can! If you have free time try taking on the tasks you have delayed for later.

2. Staying glued to social media

We all like social media. We all want to be connected with friends and be a part of the gossip. Yet this becomes an addiction for many. Perhaps you are unaware of it, but this could hinder your productivity. Stay away from those tempting gadgets and focus on getting your job done.

3. Not eating right

Eating right goes a long way to making you stay active and healthy. Many are not conscious of their diet and sometimes even skip meals. Doing this can cause mental and physical fatigue. Try eating right, make your mornings consist of diet related to carbon, fibre and protein rather than fatty foods that will quickly be broken down by the body and lead to exhaustion.

4. Not planning your day

Planning is very helpful to your daily success. How productive you can be depends on how much you have structured your day. By doing this you understand what is important and what should be prioritized. Not juggling up too many activities and trying to accomplish so many activities all at once can make things go frenetic and frustrating. Plan your day right and increase your productivity.

5. Multitasking

People feel they can do so many things at once. They feel by taking on so many tasks they can be more effective and achieve more, but studies show otherwise. Multitasking is a productivity killer as it affects our ability to learn and could be brain damaging.

6. Not taking a needed rest

Rest is very essential daily. Working so hard and being busy is not the same as productivity. To become more productive, you have to offer your body the rest it deserves. The human mind was designed to recharge and take breaks. So adjust your schedule to taking a break and finding the time to rest.

7. Trying to be perfect

We all cannot be perfect. You can be excellent at work but shooting for perfection would only hinder productivity. Try to aim for what you can reach and attain rather than those things that may appear unreachable. Being a unicorn can become a dreadful pursuit.

8. Not taking care of your health

Taking care of your health is pivotal to your success as ambition can be useless without a sound health. Make sure you are mentally, physically and emotionally stable. Treat your health properly. Take breaks, exercise regularly and eat right.

9. Not accepting responsibility

Accept responsibilities for everything that is before you. Don’t shy away from what you are meant to do or start delegating or assigning others to help you complete your tasks. By accepting responsibility you trigger a feeling of accomplishment. This incites happiness and stirs you to get more work done.

10. Not setting goals

Goals are important to success. By setting goals you can measure and track your progress. Setting goals has a way of steering you to finish a project or task when it has to be finished. The human mind loves deadlines and setting goals will signal your subconscious to taking action on your desires.

Take charge of your life and be in control and do not leave anything to chance. Although you may have built habits or unknowingly done these things every day, try to channel your energy into becoming more productive now.

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7 Thinking Patterns You Use to Distort Reality

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Are you using your thoughts to create the life you desire or is the way you think having a negative impact on your life? Unfortunately, most of us fall victim to distorted and disempowered thinking patterns that rob us of joy and cause unnecessary suffering.

If this sounds like you, there is no need to feel bad. Life doesn’t come with a manual that tells us how to control our thoughts and formal education doesn’t teach much if anything regarding that sort of thing.

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In this article, I will share seven common thought patterns that cause us to see situations in a distorted, negative way that is liable to cause misery, pain, and suffering. Make sure you aren’t sabotaging yourself with this sort of thinking and, if you are, find out why.

Discounting the Positive

It’s amazing how harsh we can be on ourselves, and this tendency makes it easy to forget the good things in life. Do you find yourself constantly zeroed in on the negative aspects of everything you do or obsessing over parts of yourself that you find undesirable? If so, you aren’t alone. I’m guilty of thinking this way, too, as are many other people.

For instance, you might receive compliments regarding a speech you’ve given and think, “Sure, they’re saying my speech was good, but that’s just because they are too nice to tell me the truth.”

This mindset can be quite damaging because it saps your motivation and gives you a reason to give up and stop moving forward. The following is a list of tips that can help you focus on the positive and become more objective and less judgmental about your accomplishments:

  • Accept compliments and don’t waste your energy questioning the sincerity of those who show appreciation
  • Write down all the positive comments you receive from others and review it whenever you’re feeling low.
  • Ponder everything you’ve accomplished in your life and make a list of it. Review the list whenever you feel the need to.

Assuming Your Feelings Are Always True

Do you feel like a loser because you’ve failed an exam? Do you think you feel ashamed because you weren’t able to accomplish something you intended to? No matter how real your feelings may seem, they are just emotions. They might feel intense or overpowering, but emotions have nothing to do with reality. They are simply the result of your interpretations (both conscious and unconscious) of what happens to you.

Learn to disassociate yourself from your emotions. Avoid saying, “I am” and try to give your emotions a different label. Instead of saying “I am angry,” for instance, say, “I am experiencing anger” to separate yourself from your feelings. Labeling emotions diminishes the response of the amygdala, the part of the brain that is responsible for the flight or fight response. It also increases activity in the prefrontal cortex, which contributes to rational thinking. Don’t try to suppress your emotions, simply acknowledge and observe them with detachment whenever possible.

Thinking You’re Psychic

You tend to assume you know what other people think about you. A example of this would be deciding an inexplicably quiet coworker doesn’t say much because she dislikes you. “I know what she thinks about me. I saw the way she looked at me,” you might think. “She doesn’t like me.”

In reality, you don’t know what she thinks about you. You can’t accurately assume what anyone thinks so take off your hat Sherlock Holmes! This coworker could be shy or having troubles of which you are unaware.People have misunderstood my words, actions, or attitude on many occasions. If other people can misjudge us so easily, then we can just as easily misjudge them.

When you try to read someone else’s mind or discern, you’re just projecting your thoughts about yourself onto them. Your self-image has a huge influence on how you believe others think of you. If, for instance, you are highly critical of yourself, chances are that you imagine people around you are highly critical of you as well. When this happens, you simply see the world in your version of reality. It can easily cause you to create a world where you feel your teachers, colleagues, or friends don’t appreciate you.

Worse yet, these feelings could become a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you believe that someone doesn’t like you, you’re likely to act differently around this person, and this alone may cause him or her to actually start disliking you!

Miscommunications and inaccurate assumptions can wreak havoc on relationships. If you sincerely want to know what people think about you, ask them! On a similar note, don’t expect the people in your life to know what you’re thinking.

Shoulds and Musts

Take a piece of paper and write five sentences that start with the phrase “I should”. Then ask yourself why you believe that you should do these things? Words we use every day have a tremendous influence over our lives. Words like “should” or “must” may seem innocuous, but they limit our choices in life. If you have too many “shoulds” in your life, it usually means that you have many expectations regarding how you must behave. These expectations stem from your belief system, which is often the result of what your parents or society have told you that you should/must do. If this belief system doesn’t align with who you truly are, you risk being a slave to expectations, “shoulds”, and “musts”, all of which put a damper on happiness.

After all, if you don’t behave the way you should, then you will likely punish or beat yourself up. That’s why “could” is a much more preferable word choice. “Could” gives you more freedom and isn’t so stifling. Instead of saying, “I should have done that,” for example, you could say, “I could have done that”.

Overgeneralisation

Overgeneralisations include thoughts like “I lost my job, I will never find a job again” or “I always do the wrong thing.”

Beware, when you find yourself using words like “never”, “always”, or “all the time” you are likely to overgeneralise. These three phrases are so absolute that they are rarely an accurate description of reality. More often than not, they are the result of subjective interpretations, which can be very destructive.

I recommend you to start take notice of the way you use these words when you talk to yourself, but also when you talk to your partner or other people. These kinds of words are usually not the words you want to use if you wish to create harmonious relationships.

Chain Reaction of Negative Thoughts

Have you ever taken the time to analyze what exactly happened the last time you felt depressed? Most of the time, the reason we get depressed is because we fail to interrupt an increasing flow of negative thoughts. Unfortunately, just one seemingly insignificant negative thought can be enough to create a chain reaction that turns into a downward spiral.

One day when I was a bit down I asked myself why and tried to discern the trigger event. I soon realized that the root of my low mood was a seemingly insignificant thought of which I wasn’t even particularly aware.

For instance, knee pain would negatively influence my mood so subtly that I would slip into destructive thought patterns faster than I could get a handle on them. It would go from “Why don’t I have a girlfriend?” to “I would like to do this or that, but I’m not smart enough.” Next was “I wish I could be as smart as my friend X” then “My friend Y is so confident, but he didn’t do anything to deserve it”. It was a downward spiral.

Does it happen to you, too? Analyze your most recent thoughts and try to pinpoint the very first thing that triggered your feelings. Was it really a big deal? Please don’t torture yourself with the worst version of yourself and your life by focusing your energy on all your problems at once. When handled on an individual basis, most problems aren’t that big of a deal. Refuse to link all of your problems to one another!

Adding Your Opinion to Facts

If we were to stick to the facts when thinking things over, we would avoid a great deal of grief. However, we’re often unable to avoid adding our little comments and opinions to the facts at hand. For most of us, these comments and opinions tend to be negative and only serve to make us feel bad.

An example of adding opinions to facts is evident in the phrase, “I lost $100,000 in the stock market. I’m a total failure!” The reality is that you lost $100,000 in the stock market. That part is factual. Your supposed status as a failure, however, is nothing more than your opinion.

A great way to stop bombarding yourself with damaging, self-critical opinions is to make a game of separating facts from opinions in your daily life. When you are hard on yourself, ask yourself whether the things you’re telling yourself are facts or opinions? You can extend this game to others as well. When people criticize you, ask if the person in question is telling you a fact about yourself or giving you their opinion.

Did you recognize your own thinking in any of these thought patterns? If so, how do you plan to stop distorting your reality and create a more positive mental state?

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