14 Ways to Improve Your Life
Be Honest with Yourself
Many of us lie to ourselves about the reality of our current situation. We allow excuses to skew our outlook on our current situation and use those excuses to validate why we don’t take action to change our situation. You cannot solve a problem if the facts you have about the problem are inaccurate. If you want your life to change you have to start with being honest with yourself about where you really are. What’s really preventing you from obtaining your goals and what steps can you take to put yourself on better footing to reach those goals?
Ignore Others’ Negativity
Negative people will always exist. We all have people in our lives that are disguised as our friends when deep down they hate seeing you doing better than them. As your life improves you will encounter more and more of these individuals. Don’t allow these people’s negativity to make you bitter. If others display jealousy towards you it’s a sign that you are doing something right. Just because someone crosses paths with you doesn’t mean they were supposed to stay. Be willing to walk away from toxic relationships that are shackling you down and preventing you from reaching your goals. Cutting these toxic ties will create room for the new relationships that will take their place and carry you down the next path of your life.
Kill the Enemy Within
Start being more positive towards yourself. We often are our own worst critics. If someone said some of the things we said to ourselves every day about ourselves we probably wouldn’t be friends with that person. Yet we allow ourselves to talk down to ourselves about every aspect that we feel isn’t good enough. Yes, growth is a continuous process and you may not ever be satisfied with a particular aspect of your life, but take the time to appreciate how far you have come. A positive outlook can make a huge impact on how you tackle an event as well as the eventual outcome of that event.
Fear Is A Choice
Fear is the manifestation of thoughts about the future that do not currently and may not ever exist. Fear is the greatest limiting factor that traps most people into living mediocre lives far below what they are capable of and prevents them from sharing their true inner self with the world. Some of the greatest gifts that you possess and can share with the world require you to face your fears and step outside of your comfort zone. When terminally ill individuals were asked about what they would have done differently with their lives an almost unanimous trend was identified. It wasn’t that they wanted to go back and fix an event that didn’t go according to plan but to go back and take advantage of an opportunity that they were too scared to pursue. It was the actions that they didn’t do that was their greatest regret in life, not the times they tried and failed. So when your heart tells you to take that leap of faith go for it; for it’s better to try for it and fail than to spend the rest of your life always wondering what could have been.
Control Your Outlook
Your outlook dictates how you view the world. If your outlook on yourself is that you aren’t attractive, not good enough, a failure, or any other negative quality we may say about ourselves then your reality will become exactly that. We gravitate towards where our energy is and if your energy is spent on thinking negative thoughts that’s where you will go. You have to begin to make a conscious effort to reprogram the way you look at yourself.
Control the Content that Influences You
Reprogram your brain and control the content that you allow into your life. Our surroundings change our viewpoints. Stop watching the news. The news is designed to play on your emotions and sensationalize every story to draw you in. While you wait through an hour long news report see the weather report you end up hearing about a number of terrible tragedies which hijacks your emotional state. Limit the opportunities that you allow others to take control of your mental state and drive it in a direction that’s counter productive to you and your goals. Instead find ways to positively influence your mental state and get you motivated and excited to pursue your goals. We have a large selection of motivational videos on this site. Take the time to watch a few and find one that really parallels your current situation in life. Every morning when you wake up and are getting ready for the day throw on the video and listen to the message while you start your day. Try this for a week and notice how your attitude in the morning begins to change.
Develop Obtainable Goals
Write down your goals. Set realistic expectations for what you can realistically expect to achieve. Most people fail at their New Year’s Resolutions because they set unrealistic goals. They decide they’re going to go on a healthy diet that is dramatically different from what they do now. They decide they are going to go to the gym five days a week even though they don’t do any physical exercise right now. They decide they are going to cut out their daily vices. After a couple weeks they’ve already crashed and burned on all of their goals and end up accomplishing very little. If they had set smaller goals that were easier to maintain they would have ended up with better results in the long run. Treat your goals as large scale projects and break them down into small manageable pieces. If your goal is to clean up your diet start with something small like cutting out sugary drinks from your diet. Once you’ve accomplished this and can maintain it on a consistent basis add in another small goal like replacing your snacks with healthy substitutes like a piece of fruit. By following a path of small, sustainable goals you’ll develop a lifestyle that you can maintain permanently.
Be Patient
The greatest things in life take time. While the right opportunity might help jump start your goal, your success will be dependent on the amount of hard work and dedication that you put in before and after the opportunity. Success takes time. Be patient and don’t give up.
Don’t Go It Alone
Be willing to ask for help when you need it. Let’s face it, we all need a hand at various points in our lives. The reason that most businesses fail is because the owners try to do it all. Be willing to accept the fact that you aren’t an expert at everything. Sometimes it’s in your best interest to use an expert or to call in a favor so you can focus on what you need to focus on at that point in time. Make note of who was there when you needed them and make sure you return the favor. Take care of those who take care of you.
Always Put Your Health as a Priority
Take care of your social, financial, and physical health. If you allow any of these three concepts to fall too far it will bring down every other aspect of your life with it. Regardless of how busy your life is you have to take the time to keep your health a priority or you are putting an unnecessary handicap upon yourself. While it takes time to take preventative measures to maintain your health now it will be far worse later on in life when years of neglecting your health catches up with you in the form of a permanent health condition such as diabetes. Pay now so you don’t have to pay for it later.
Have Faith
Life does not go according to how we planned it. Chances are the road map you laid out for yourself has hit its fair share of roadblocks and you’ve had to make a few detours along the way. While this can be heartbreaking and discouraging trust that things will work out how they are meant to. Those events that derail us from our plans today might be putting us on course for where we are truly meant to end up. When everything in your life appears to be falling apart take a step back and evaluate the current path you are on. Life often goes awry when you aren’t on the path you are supposed to be on at that point in your life. Usually once you get back on to the correct path you are meant to be on your problems will start to go away. The small problems today might be warnings, saving you from encountering much bigger problems down the line. Have faith that things will work out how they are supposed to in the end and make the necessary adjustments when you need to get your life back on track.
Cultivate Your Social Circle
You are the average of the five people that you spend the majority of your time with. Most people will not help you become better than they are. Stop and think about the five people in your life that you spend the majority of your time with and that you allow to influence you the most. How many of these people are doing better than you? How many are doing worse than you are? If you are the strongest person in your group it’s time you start broadening your social circle. Start identifying people who are stronger than you in areas that you want to improve upon and take the time to develop strong relationships with these people. You want to surround yourself with people that are doing better than you are in life because they’re habits will rub off on you helping to propel you upward.
Now Is The Time
We have all said it, “I’ll get to that tomorrow.” There are no guarantees that you are going to wake up tomorrow. There are a lot of opportunities that were here yesterday that aren’t here today. We spend far too much effort waiting for the perfect time to make changes to our lives or to get something done that’s long overdue only to have that perfect time never arrive. It doesn’t matter if you are going through a rough time right now and now is not an ideal time to start work on a new goal. After you get out of this rough patch you might be heading right into another and another after that. As you wait for the rough patches to end there goes your goal six months or a year pushed out into the future waiting for that “perfect time”. This continuous pushing of goals happens over and over until you end up being the elderly person on their death bed regretting all the things you never got around to. Stop waiting for the perfect time or the perfect opportunity to arrive and kick the door in and make your own opportunity happen today.
You Have The Power to Be Great
Most people look at people who are recognized as a great person as being special and unique. In reality they are ordinary people who recognized the simple fact that they could be great. You have at least one person in your life right now that you are directly influencing with your actions and you don’t even realize it. Your actions and choices influence many others around you besides yourself. Someone else’s greatness cannot be unleashed until you do what you are supposed to do in life. Realize that there are far more people than you realize that are dependent on you reaching your goal. While you may not necessarily be the next Steve Jobs of the world you might be the one that influences the next Steve Jobs of the world to become great.