5 Ways To Reduce Stress And Find Joy And Be More Optimistic.

Stop paying attention to bad news. Get off the Internet. Read a book. Find the simple joys in life. Take in the cool crisp air of the morning. Don’t let the media influence your morning. Tune out. Find the beauty in life. Chop all the bad news out and you’ll find slices of joy you never knew existed!

Meditate. Find peace in the present moment. Learn to still your chattering mind.  There are so many ways to meditate these days. There is the traditional method of sitting still and paying attention to your outer breath.  Or download an app for your smart phone. I recently downloaded “ Meditation 4 Inner Wisdom” and loved its relaxing flow.

Don’t worry about stuff you can’t change. Work is incredibly demanding these days. Greece is falling apart. Winter is coming. I can either let these stressors roll around in my head like a mouse on a flywheel or pay attention to what I CAN change. What can you change in your life? Write it down and start making those changes. Let the rest of it go. Are you worrying about stuff you cannot change?  Let it go today and change what you have control over.

Exercise. I’ve been trying to lose 20 pounds with no results. I eat well but haven’t been eating fewer calories. Simple math. If I wish to continue to eat the same amount of calories I HAVE to exercise more. Today I got back on the elliptical running machine and did some weights. AND!!  And what? And exercise is one of the very best ways to reduce stress. It’s a double win! Let’s start an exercise routine today! One of the very best decisions you will have made, at any stage in your life.

Write your goals down. We constantly dream and plan in our heads. We stand around the water cooler and talk about living in a warmer climate, having more money or working in a dream career. Get those thoughts out of your head and onto paper! Make them concrete. Take the next step towards making them into reality. What is your biggest dream? What is the very next action you need to take to make your dream a reality? What is stopping you? Write it down today and write down the next step you need to take. Now you are on your way!!

Top 5 Goal Setting Tips

Be specific in your goals!

Study after study has proven the fact that creating and visualizing specific goals is much more motivating than vague ones. Lose 5 pounds next month is much clearer than” lose some weight”. Also a goal like “Paint the spare room on May 1^st” is not only more specific but makes you clear your calendar for that day.

Relate your goals to your amount of self control and your top priorities.

In the book Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson she mentions the fact that Barack Obama is having a hard time smoking and Oprah has a hard time staying thin.  The point is that we all have only so much self control. Oprah admits that her life is out of balance and that affects her weight.  I want to create another web site related to my business and IT expertise but when I get home I’m usually drained.  Decide where you will apply your self control because we all run out of steam. Our self control gets tired like a muscle being over trained and then our goals fail. What is your priority in life? What are your main goals? Maybe you can’t do them all.

Shape the world around you to reach your goals!

Our will power and goals are largely driven by our rational and emotional minds.  Our rational mind understands the positive effects of healthy eating habits and living a long life. Our emotional mind loves greasy or sweet foods that make us immediately happier during a miserable day.  To avoid using the mind shape the world around you. Do not buy sweets or greasy foods and bring them into the house. Have your money automatically go into a retirement account. Make it so you take away as much mind temptation as possible.  Shape the world around you.

Your habits rule 90% of your goals.

I eat 2 fruits and a small yogurt at 10:00 in the morning every work day. This is a very healthy snack and allows me to get in my daily fruit and avoid vending machines at work. To do this I shop at a fruit and vegetable market every Sunday morning. These are habits I’ve incorporated into my daily and weekly routines. If you set a life changing goal it will most likely create a life changing habit. Thus, losing weight, saving money, reducing weight or living your dream life will mean changing lifelong habits.  Decide what goals will turn into automatic habits and stick to them. Or you will fail over and over.  Decide on a couple of mini goals today! They will turn into great lifelong habits.

If you always fail at your goals get your ass kicked hard.

This website provides tools, tips and articles to help you make life changes. But I know from looking at statistics that most of you come in for a few minutes and then leave.  I’ve mentioned here that the $4.95 a month deluxe version of My Life Changes is cheaper than a MacDonald’s Happy Meal!  And this site has a ton of life changing information! But some of you prefer to pound back more hamburgers or cry in your mountain of debt.  It’s hard for me to kick your ass from here. So hire a coach. Why do you think Jillian Michaels of The Biggest Loser or Gordon Ramsey of Hell’s Kitchen are able to motivate people to lose huge amounts of weight or become world class chefs? Because they kick peoples ass and take them out of their comfort zone.  They make people realize their toughest goals can be met. Often they make people cry. Are you going to run to MacDonald’s now or cry in your bills again? Or are you going to do something about it? If not, go hire someone to kick you in the ass really hard.  You will need it.

Top 5 Posts of 2010

Here are links to my most popular posts of 2010. I would like to thank all of you for making My Life Changes one of the webs premier sites that provides inspiration and tools to make significant and lasting life changes.

5 Tips To Create Your Best Life For 2010

Five Small Ways You Can Make Yourself Happy

3 Proven Ways You Can Radically Change Your Life

5 Crucial Steps Toward A Dream Life – The Cutting Edge Series

Always, Always, Always Believe In Yourself

3 Proven Ways You Can Radically Change Your Life

There have been some fascinating news articles written lately about why we become fat, happy (or not), and have possibly stopped thinking for ourselves. Here are a few excellent ways to change your life for the better. Also please see the links below.

Educate yourself (learn about evolution) and your brain

My own journey towards truth and happiness began by reading about human beings, their evolution throughout the ages and also how the brain works. Why is salt, television, and smoking so common yet so bad for us? One reason is because we have let media or our friends (I’ll explain this later) influence us. How much time do you spend watching television and are you benefiting from it? Are all those McDonalds commercials good for you? How often do you read a non-fiction book? Do you understand why you have bad habits and addictions? Maybe it is because the brain actually rewires itself and the neurons and connections actually strengthen inside the brain as habits and addictions strengthen. There is nothing more important than picking up a book and educating yourself. I’ll give you a great link to a few good books and article.

Turn off the TV and advertisements

Where do you get your ideas and beliefs from? Do you get them from the television or the Internet?  Maybe you are becoming fatter, unhappy or lonely because you have not bothered to learn the scientific facts about obesity, happiness and relationships? Perhaps we are looking for a quick fix from the Internet (including Google solutions) or television and have learned to stopped thinking for ourselves. So shut off unnecessary social influences and start reading a book and talking to your friends. Talking to your friends is tremendously important to you. Here is why.

Make friends with similar interests

I told my friend about my love of small MacDonald’s hamburgers. I don’t eat them often but when I do they sure are yummy. My friend calls them “candy”. I think he is right, it is just white bread, a small piece of meat and a few condiments. Those small burgers are a small tasty snack but with almost zero nutrition. Almost like candy right?  So I don’t eat them as often. Studies have proven that our social networks and friends have a huge influence on us. In one study when one person becomes very fat, the spouse’s risk will increase 37 percent. If a friend became obese the risk to another friend went up 171%! So you see how our social networks and friends can influence us? Our habits and happiness are directly related to our social networks. We are people. We need each other. So our friends may make us happy but can be very unhealthy for us. Good idea to start thinking for yourself a bit more?

Click on these link for a few good book recommendations and a great article.

How To Overcome Addictions

The Buddy System:How Medical Data Revealed Secret To Health And Happiness.

5 Crucial Steps Towards A Dream Life – The Cutting Edge Series

The cutting edge series is a series of articles aimed at waking individuals up. Life is too short to let it pass by and phenomenal success is just around the corner if you apply these principals.

See your dream in your mind.

See yourself living the dream. Feel yourself already successful. Taste it. Don’t ever doubt yourself until you take the next step. I used to buy the magazine Robb Report and pick out which luxury items I wanted.  Now you take action.

Actions speak louder than words.

No talking about life’s unfairness. No complaining. No excuses. Either you take action now or get off the pot. Whatever goal you have, start it right now. Take that first step. When I stared this website I wrote out a business plan. It brought my thoughts out on paper. The rest is history. If you don’t take action I or this website can’t do a freaking thing to help you.

Watch your actions turn into progress.

Now you see that first seed blossom and you are amazed, you know now that your dream is born. That first chapter of a book is drafted, the website template is chosen or you bought that building, and things are taking shape. What was fuzzy is now coming into sharp focus. Small successes are attained, each one sending a glimmer of possibilities into your mind.

See the possibilities

With your dream finding the finishing touches, you begin to see the big and small picture. You find your friends buying your product. Your first sales deposit cold hard cash into your brand new business account. You are on cloud nine. You realize that people care. They want your product or service. They actually take out their wallet out and pay you for it! All that hard work paid off and you have total faith in yourself now.

Keep refining

Learn from your mistakes and make the best damn product or service the world has seen. You have total faith in yourself now, remember? Nothing can stop you now. There is no mountain big enough that you can’t move. The future holds a bright future for you and your dream life has arrived. You are living it. Does it get any better?

Five Small Ways You Can Make Yourself Happy

Enjoy each and every moment life has to offer.

The most important rule in life is to live in the present moment. Letting of the past, future, and all your trivial worries will by far be the best change you can make. Stop whinnying. Please stop complaining. Appreciate each and every moment from now on. Love life. Never take anything for granted. Every moment you lose to your worries is a moment lost forever. This is how people with terminal illnesses think. Life is too short. Every moment is precious. Find your Zen, right now.

Don’t leave this life without following your dreams.

Don’t be afraid to take chances. Write that book, comic strip or screen play. Go to the job interview. Take action right now! Don’t delay your dreams any further. There is absolutely no reason why you can’t take the first step towards your dream life today. There is no excuse. And as you take action and stay in the moment, you will be shocked how staying in the now helps.

Shut your shallow ego up.

Shut your ego up right now. Your ego brings up all your past conditions and failures to the surface. You are a human being who can make a conscious choice today to drop your ego and find the love within yourself that is always there. You are a magnificent human being, never forget that. Shut your ego up right now and send it packing.Your ego only makes you feel afraid. Say goodbye to it today.  

Buy yourself a treat once in a while.

Buy yourself a present. There are a million articles out there blabbering about the evils of being materialistic. Most of this is pure bullshit. There is nothing wrong with treating yourself with a nice purchase for all your hard work. So buy that car, plasma TV, or night out. But don’t think you are a better person because of that new car. You aren’t. It’s a piece of metal on wheels. Just because you are driving it doesn’t make you better than Bob next door. So buy yourself a treat, but don’t identify yourself with it. Once you identify yourself with your stuff you become a shallow, ego filled and empty person. Enjoy your treat for what it is. No more no less. Oh yes and please make sure you can afford it. That always helps. Or else you start worrying again.

Have dinner with your close friends.

It has been proven that life’s happiest moments occur when you are with your good friends. Have a dinner party and drinks at least once a week. Laugh. Cry. Joke. Have deep and meaningful conversations. Love life with your best friends. Watch the stars together. It just doesn’t get any better than this.

So what makes you happy?

If you enjoyed this post today, please do me a big favor and use the “Twitter” button down below (click on the + sign) to share it with your Twitter friends and followers (You can also share it on Facebook, Digg, or any of the other sites you see below as well).

How To Start An Internet Business

I will be sending out an E-mail to my nearing 5000 subscribers this week. Some have subscribed to the free version of www.mylifechanges.com and some to the deluxe paid version. I have had many people ask me how or why I started this business and I will now answer you.

Passion

I have had an intense passion to start my own business since as long as I can remember. I also have a deep passion for physiology, sociology, self development and also business. I am constantly reading (hundreds of books) and refining my own thoughts about what is the best life to live. I have also lived an interesting life, being adopted, and half Asian to European parents in North America. I have lived through a couple of very tough health issues that affected me both mentally and physically. Without the passion to try to make a difference in this world my web site would have never succeeded. I believe without a doubt in my mind that this is something I love to do. I love to provide great information. I love to write my own articles. I want you to learn and help me learn. Occasionally I just want to kick people’s asses really hard, because making life changes isn’t that hard. Just start. Today.

Money

Yes, I would love to make enough money to live off this site or at least nicely supplement my day income. I worked hard to design the website, I believe I am providing a valuable service (Do you want to change your life?) and I don’t want to give it away for free. I invested thousands of dollars in the initial start up when the technology was weaker and I required outside consultation. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money, unless that is your only objective. Then the passion is gone. I am competing on a global scale here. It is a huge market. For 5 dollars a month you can begin to understand and make life changes. Five dollars! Less than a Happy Meal… I think.

Drive

I work on the site after my day job (I have consulted and and worked at some of the most successful pharmaceutical and aerospace companies in the world). It isn’t always easy to do. But I can’t just quit my day job. I would be a fool to do that. So I find myself tapping away on the laptop at Midnight, researching and reading E-mails late at night. Now you can understand how passion comes into play. Without the passion in my blood this would have stopped many years ago. Yes, it takes work and drive, but this work is connecting me to thousands of people and I cannot ask for anything more.

Overcoming failure

I once lost all my feeds to my blog. I was severely disappointed and never understood what happened. So I had to start over and build back a reader base with lots more completion facing me. Just the thought of that can be discouraging. But I will not give up. I will keep learning from setbacks and I will grow stronger from them. The thing about having a business on the internet is that your completion is global and almost every idea has been tried. So there were plenty of times when I thought my idea was fantastic yet nobody cared. I thought people would swarm the site. This happens rarely. When it does, it is most likely because you have learnt from failures and found a winning formula.

Good Luck to you if you decide to follow this path. And send me an E-mail at terry@mylifechanges.com

I will be happy to answer you.

If you enjoyed this post today, please do me a big favor and use the “Twitter” button down below (click on the + sign) to share it with your Twitter friends and followers (You can also share it on Facebook, Digg, or any of the other sites you see below as well).

How to Become Very Happy Right Now

After having read a couple of hundred self help books over the last 15 years one of the conclusions I’ve come to is that happiness is a choice. Either we chose to be happy or we don’t. It’s that simple! We are all seeking happiness and we all have the ability to be happy in our central core. Our pure unconditioned inside self is happiness. And that happiness can be let out right now!

Why aren’t we happy? We aren’t happy because we are conditioned over the years to pay attention to many useless thoughts and worries from the outside world, that creates our inner troubled world. All our worries, anger, frustrations come from the world outside of our mind and heart. We are too fat. We don’t have enough money. We hate our jobs. We are conditioned to worry about these things and also inflict terrible self judgement upon ourselves because we aren’t measuring up to someone else’s standards. And with all this negative bombardment of thoughts we might have times of joy but never true contentment. What is stopping you from taking a nice walk outside right now? Only your thoughts.

You do have a core of happiness inside of you waiting to burst out. The only thing you have to do is let it out. Let go of judging yourself, let go of guilt and tell yourself you deserve to be happy right now. Don’t you deserve to be happy right now? Don’t you deserve to be happy for the rest of your life?

Just let yourself be happy right now. Just try it for a minute. Tomorrow morning get up and chose to be happy. Creating that choice in the morning will start you off to a happy day. Each happy day leads to a happy life.

You can read a million books, try to lose weight, count your pennies, change jobs and continue to find the ultimate solution to happiness. Or you can recognize that you have the potential to be happy right now. It has been in your heart all this time! You are the key to your own happiness! You can be happy right now.

Please consider this article for your website, blog or ezine. Permission to reprint if by-line stays intact and links are activated on the Internet.

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