Body & Soul
No matter how many times you put things off and delay your dreams, the big clock keeps ticking and your time continues to run out.
The recent deaths of legendary icons Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, and Michael Jackson have forced us to think about how short our lives are and that we never know when our last day will be.
The clock keeps ticking and won’t wait for us and we can’t wait either.
Don’t wait until you have more money.
Don’t wait for the “perfect” time.
Don’t wait until you’re older.
Don’t wait for the economy to get better.
Don’t wait for retirement.
Don’t wait for someone to help you.
Don’t wait until next month, next week, or until tomorrow. Don’t wait! You’ve got to go after what you need and want NOW!
“The tragedy of life is not that it ends so soon, but that we wait so long to begin it.” – W. M. Lewis
One of the biggest goal killers and opportunity killers are your own inhibitions.
Your concerns about what other people might think, your worries about failure or embarrassment, and your doubts are paralyzing you.
They’re keeping you trapped in a cocoon of mediocrity.
You won’t be able to escape until well; you don’t give a damn about what other people will think, of failure, or of some other repercussion.
To help you break out of your cocoon, here are 5 ways to crush your inhibitions.
1. Ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen?
When your inhibitions are getting out of control and forcing your mind to create all these minute concerns that add up and make you more and more nervous, you’ve got to stop for a second. Think and then focus on what could possibly be the worst thing to happen. More often than not, it won’t actually be a big deal.
For example; a lot of people are reluctant to ask successful individuals questions or for help because they fear what the person will say. And when it comes down to it, the worst they can say is “no.” Getting a “no” is often frustrating, but it’s not the end of the world.
2. Ask yourself: What’s the best that could happen?
Now that you’ve thought about the negatives, it’s time to focus more on the positives.
To motivate yourself beyond your inhibitions the best question you should consistently ask yourself is; “What’s the best that could happen?”
It could be an advancement in your career. You could make a new friend. And your life can change in a great way.
But no matter what the benefits are, pushing pass your inhibitions is almost always going to be more powerful than the negative circumstances that could arise.
3. Assess your “audience”
Embarrassment and wondering what other people might think is probably the biggest inhibitor for most people. It was for me, and unfortunately sometimes I still find myself fighting with it as it tries to hold me back. What has helped me a lot though is assessing my “audience” or the critics, friends and family, and strangers that may see what I’m doing or saying.
I usual assess them by asking these few questions:
- Where is their cynicism and negativity coming from?
- Are they jealous?
- Do they have their own insecurities?
- Will I ever see these people again?
4. Know you created your inhibitions
Throughout life, people criticized you and you’ve felt the taste of failure, but you’ve let those experiences fester in your mind and they’ve infected you with inhibition.
Knowing that you’re the one who created them will help you get over YOUR inhibitions.
5. Don’t give a damn
We have to stop caring so much about what other people think especially those with mediocre mindsets.
We have one shot at this thing we call “life” and worrying about what others might think and say is a waste of time. It keeps us from being ourselves and from living.
So in the end, give a damn about your life and stop giving a damn about what people may think and say of your aspirations.
This is a guest post.
Many of us are so caught up in the belief that just doing something automatically equates to achievement that we lose touch with the benefits and subtleties of not-doing.
What I’m referring to is getting better results from your efforts (and increasing the quality of that effort) by putting more focus into what you’re not doing; taking advantage of your natural system for optimization.
Let me explain,
Ever notice what happens when you go camping where there are no lights? As soon as the sun goes down you start getting sleepy, even if it is hours before you usually go to bed!
This is a biological rhythm programmed into our bodies to start the repair cycle that will attempt to heal the new, or old, injuries to our bodies and minds and replenish the energy we’ve expended during the day.
Once the sunlight fades over the horizon, cortisol levels (the wake hormone) reach their lowest point and melatonin (the sleep hormone) is released into the blood stream. The systems in our bodies that use energy and keep us awake are down-regulated to their lowest point, while the systems that repair and regenerate our bodies are up-regulated.
The catch is that we need to be asleep in order to fully benefit from this repair cycle.
(And our modern existence of 24 hour lights and immediate access don’t help matters.)
A quick explanation of brain wave function might be useful here.
There are 4 major brain wave categories:
1. Beta is normal waking consciousness – such as how you should be feeling now.
2. Alpha is clear, peaceful consciousness – such as during relaxation or meditation.
3. Theta is deep reflective consciousness – such as how you feel when you’re dropping off to sleep, or sleeping lightly.
4. Delta is unconsciousness – the deepest sleep you fall in to where you’re “dead to the world” and where most tissue repair tends to occur. You would, under normal circumstances, drop into delta sleep 4 or 5 times in the first 4-5 hours of sleep between ten p.m. and two to three a.m.
The normal systems of your body include two repair cycles. The first is the physical repair cycle which begins at approximately 10:00 pm and continues until about 2:00 am. Then the psychogenic repair cycle begins and ends around 6:00 am.
These start and stop times are general proximities. You may need to fine tune the exact timing to fit your individual needs and schedule, but two things are clear:
1. If you are sleeping during the hours other than those consistent with your natural repair cycles, you may not be revitalizing yourself. Anyone who has worked a graveyard shift knows about this.
2. If you’re staying awake until midnight staring at the computer screen, you’re body will not have the time to replace the energy expended during the day or repair your cellular wear and tear.
Not getting in enough delta wave sleep is like a repetitive strain injury to your hormonal system.
Take Action Today
If you want more available energy to use each day of your life and stay as healthy as possible, then you need to first let your body repair and regenerate!
5 Tips
1. Go to bed at the same time each evening.
2. Prepare for sleep an hour earlier by dimming the lights and avoiding flashing screens; computer, TV.
3. Don’t confuse being tired with being hungry; if you feel hungry late at night, go to bed!
4. Keep your bedroom cool and dark
5. Only use your bedroom for sleep (and maybe one other use, but no tv or computer use!)
Establish this routine and find out just how much more energy you’ll have to do the things you love.
Written by Patrick Welch
Patrick Welch is the founder of AllProactive, a coaching service that features a holistic approach to nutrition, exercise and stress control. www.allproactive.com
Each and every one of us has been and will be handed lemons from life.
Perhaps life wasn’t even kind enough, and just threw the lemons at you like it often did to me.
Most of us aren’t sure what to do with all these lemons, so we just let them sit there and rot.
Life didn’t intend for that to happen. Life wants us to make lemonade, but doesn’t give a recipe for it.
For years I waited for the recipe to come, but then I decided to take it into my own hands, rolled up my sleeves, and created a sweet, delicious, and refreshing recipe for lemonade using life’s lemons.
I call it Life’s Lemonade.
The ingredients
- Patience
- Positivity and a good sense of humor
- Hope
- Self-reflection
- Goals and dreams
- Adversity and failure
Directions
First, get together your goals and dreams. They’re your pitcher and glasses for the lemonade to go into because if you want to take adversity and turn it into something sweet, you’ll also need something that the lemonade can be used in, drank and benefited from.
Next, you need to juice life’s lemons.
Take the biggest adversities you’ve ever been dealt throughout your life. Don’t think about any of the negatives that you’ve obtained from them, you need to reap what’s good about these lemons.
Add in a little self-reflection while you juice these lemons. Think of similar questions to these:
- How have I grown stronger from the adversity?
- What tough lessons did I learn?
- What did it teach me about myself? Am I stronger than I think? Smarter than I think?
- What did the adversity teach me about others?
Now that you’ve got a lot of juice, you need to toss in sugar for sweetness. For sugar in life’s lemonade you need to tap into positivity and a good sense of humor.
Adversities are really just opportunities in harder to open packages. And like any opportunities in life, you need to be in a positive and open-minded state to seize such chances. They won’t be captured when you’re in a bad mood and your head is down, because you won’t even see the opportunities.
Now it’s time to fill your “pitcher” with some cold water.
When cold water is dumped on you, it gets your attention, shocks you a bit, and gets your blood pumping. To get yourself pumped up, you need some inspiration to get you off your seat.
Look up these individuals for incredible stories of people who battled tremendous odds and came out on top:
- Nick Vujicic
- Dick and Rick Hoyt
- Chris Gardner
- Jason McElwain
Dump the inspiration from these amazing individuals into your pitcher. Then the last ingredients you have to mix in are patience and hope.
Patience because life’s lemonade may not be ready right away; the ingredients need to chill and incorporate more. It takes time to see and enjoy the benefits of turning adversity into prosperity. But putting in hope will keep you positive and knowing that you will definitely reap the sweet lemonade, with time.
That’s it! It’s a simple recipe for complicated problems, but in the end life’s lemonade turns out delicious and refreshing.
“It is not length of life, but depth of life.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
We all hope to live for a hundred years. We believe that 100 years guarantees we’ll have lived life to its fullest.
However, it doesn’t matter how long we live, it’s how much we do and how much life we have in our days.
You may be stalling until you retire or until the kids move out or until you make enough money to really enjoy life. But you can’t do this. Who knows when your time will be up?
So do yourself justice and focus on how well, not how long, you live.
Move to the edge, look over, put your arms up, take that leap of faith, and dive deep into life.
Purpose
If you really want to experience what it means to be alive, then you need to figure out your purpose in life. It’s the foundation or the diving board you must dive into life from.
Knowing your purpose unleashes so much joy and motivation. It also brings you peace of mind.
If you don’t believe you have a purpose, you’re merely in denial and avoiding a difficult subject. It’s understandable; thinking about your purpose in life can bring about a lot of questions and revelations.
I previously wrote an article entitled “5 easy pieces to piecing together your purpose in life” that really simplifies the process of discovering your purpose, but it also makes it very effective.
Bring your past forward
Most of us have memories that we want to forget. But doing so is like cutting out chunks of our lives.
To really live you need to accept and embrace all the adversities and events you went through. They have taught you so many lessons that you need now.
Do infrequent things frequently
Living means to do new things. Existing means you’re just doing the same old thing.
Cut down on planning and start doing
Planning is essential. You need to know where you’re heading in life, but a lot people over do it, instead of just doing it!
You can plan and plan, but nothing will happen until action is taken.
Stop turning age into a barrier
This goes for the old and for the young.
You’re never too young or old to figure out your purpose, achieve goals, change, or start being happy. Each day is a new opportunity. You have 365 opportunities each year.
Don’t seek perfection
Seek to grow and to learn, but don’t seek to reach a state of perfection, because being perfect is as good as being dead.
Your body may stop growing, but your mind doesn’t. So be sure to engage in as many topics as you can, even if you don’t like them. Growth needs an open mind to work.
Get to really know your family members
It’s kind of sad and frustrating that we often don’t get to really know our family members. I guess we get so caught up in work and in what we call “life” that we forget to talk to our family members about their past, present, and future.
Get to really know yourself
To really know yourself, you need to experience new situations, both good and bad, and sometimes let them get out of your hands. You also need to meet people from different races, backgrounds, and regions. Then you should reflect on the way you reacted to them and what you liked and didn’t like about that.
Death
Don’t be afraid to think about it every once and awhile. You shouldn’t dwell upon it or fear it, but thinking about death always puts things into perspective. Troubles, money, adversities, and set-backs seem to disappear. They’re no longer that big.
Thinking about your death is also great motivation to jump back in the game and seize every second you’ve got.
“To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.”
- Oscar Wilde
How do you dive deep into life and live it to the fullest? Please share your tips, quotes, stories, and advice in the comment section below.
Related articles:
- The art of getting off your ass
- Popping the procrastination bubble you’re stuck in
