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Challenges with affirmations

2009-06-30T15:18:36Z

I’ve been using affirmations for years and majority of the time without any positive result. The affirmations that are playing in the background in my mind, without any conscious help from me seemed to be the only ones consistently working and producing results (negative that is)

But consciously repeating affirmations have been very disappointing to me.

One famous affirmation is “I love myself!” I’ve repeated this affirmation hundreds of times daily without any result showing for it.

What is your mother tongue?

You maybe fluent in English but what is your mother tongue? Try repeating the affirmations in your mother tongue and see if that makes more impact.

What language do you think in?

Even if you speak English, you have to find out what language you think in. What language do you dream in? I think and dream in English so it’s much better but there have been instances where these English affirmations had no effect on me.

What language was used when you were a child?

A lot of our negative self talk is basically just a repetition of what adults around us used to say when we were kids. If adults told you that you were no good, that you were lazy, that’s what you’ll notice yourself affirming to yourself subconsciously.

In order to effectively overcome those negative affirmations, you have to find out when it all started. By that you should be able to find out in what language were they spoken to you. That’s the language you want to use to combat those negative affirmations.

Even if you speak English fluently and even think and dream in English now, language that was used when you were a child has a very strong affect on you.

Do these words even mean anything to you?

Affirmations such as “I love myself”, “I love everything about myself”, “I forgive myself”, “I approve of myself” did not produce any kind of emotion in me. I kept repeating them over and over but nothing happened.

I even tried repeating these affirmations in my mother tongue but still nothing.

Louise Hay gives examples of people starting to use affirmation (while looking at themselves in the mirror) “I approve of myself” and how they got so upset that they started crying, some of them threw the mirrors away, some of them yelled and screamed and ran out! I would be ecstatic if I had emotions like those. It would mean that I’m getting somewhere.

Why was that?

I finally realized it was because the words such as “love”, “forgive”, “approve” do not hold any meaning to me. I was brought up in a culture where these words are taboo, they’re just not used, or they’re just used so commonly that they lose their meaning.

I might as well be affirming in Chinese because that’s what these words were to me.

So, I tried using words such as “I like everything I do”, “I like everything about myself” and now I was able to feel a little bit which was still infinitesimally more than before!

Before repeating any affirmations just ask yourself if what you are affirming even has any meaning to you. If it doesn’t, like in my case, then find out what would work, what evokes any kind of emotion in you that is similar in nature. Emotions could be negative or positive, doesn’t matter, as long as there is some feeling evoked by using those words

I’ve had to do a lot of experimentation on every single affirmation. I repeat it with feelings and strong emotions and in different languages to find out what works better for me.

So, don’t give up on just yet. There are challenges with affirmations but if done properly they can be very rewarding indeed!

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Saying good bye to cable TV

2009-06-28T03:24:35Z

I’ve been meaning to cancel my cable for a while now. Problem is that I really enjoy watching tv. As an experiment I once gave up tv watching for about two months using strictly my will power and self discipline.

After that I started watching tv again. There is nothing better than watching some show, that you enjoy, after coming home from work. I enjoy mystery shows the most. These days there are a ton of mystery shows. Anytime you turn the tv on, you’re bound to find something to watch.

Killing brain cells

I am not joking but it really feels like I’m getting dumb if I keep watching tv. I have realized that I can’t think, can’t concentrate, can’t even do simple things effectively while watching tv. Every time I have needed to concentrate I have had to turn the tv off.

As I really love to think, tv is actually coming in my way. My mind seems cloudy and foggy even after the tv is off.

But I just did not want to resort to using discipline again as that just doesn’t seem to last.

Even now I’m sitting watching “Without a trace”. I don’t really watch this show but it’s on right now so why not!?

Cable tv discount ended

Recently all my discounts ended for my cable tv. I could have called and negotiated better discounts once again as I always have been doing but I decided against it.

I called and cancelled the cable!!! Wuhooo!!!

Well, I have until 24th of July before it’s cancelled.

Instead of using strictly discipline, I am changing my environment to change myself. If you want to stop smoking, you stop hanging out with people who smoke. If you want to stop watching tv, you cancel your cable!

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How much time does your job take daily?

2009-06-28T03:25:40Z

If you’re an employee of a company, have you ever thought about how much time your job actually takes from your day?

I was thinking about this recently. It’s so easy to say that I work 9-5, thus 8 hours a day but why was I feeling so burnt out all the time!?

That’s when I started adding up all the hours relating to my job.

Commuting for work: 1 hour 45 minutes one way, thus 3 hours and 30 minutes daily

Time at work: 7 hours and 30 minutes (if I eat at desk so no lunch) to 8 hours

Time to unwind from work: at least 1 hour

Time to prepare for work (getting ready, preparing lunch and so on): 45 minutes to 1 hour

Total time spent around my job: 12 hours and 45 minutes to 13 hours and 30 minutes

No wonder I feel so tired all the time! I spent majority of my day going to work, preparing for work and at work!

That brings another interesting question. How much am I really making an hour then? My hourly rate is going to go down quite a bit if I divide by 13+ hours instead of regular 8 hours!

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Increase your pull ups: 2 to 14 in 3 months

2009-06-28T03:26:14Z

This is last year’s story. I had not done any sort of weight training for a number of years. I tried doing pull ups and I could barely do only two! I was not over weight and seemed like I was in decent shape but still two is two! No getting around it!

That’s when I decided to see if I could increase the number of pull ups I could do. Pull ups or chin ups to me are the same thing. Ones I am referring to are where hands are about should width apart and palms facing you.

Grease the Groove

I decided to try Pavel Tsatsouline’s grease the groove method. It’s quite interesting.

Basically, you do a number of reps through out the day. Trick is to never exert yourself and you should feel fresh after every set.

For example, if you can do 10 pull ups, then max you should be doing at any given time is maybe 4-5. As you can do those without really forcing yourself. Do 4-5 (40-50% of your max) through out the day. Slowly increase your intensity by either doing more reps per set or doing them more times (more sets) during the day.

I started doing 1 pull up 3-4 times a day. Slowly I increased to 2 reps, then 3, then 4 and so on.

I would do these for maybe two weeks straight then check my max number of pull ups over the weekend and then take a day or two off after that to recuperate.

I had a pull up bar at home that would go around the door frame. It was awesome until it broke my door frame.

Anyhow, I did one set in the morning, one set at night after work and 1-2 sets during work. Doing it at work was where it got interesting. I found a bar at one of the stalls in the washroom so I started doing the pull ups there.

The washroom door had a combination lock so I would always know when someone was punching in the code in order to enter and that was perfectly safe for me. It gave me enough time to stop doing the pull ups and be washing my hands before anyone entered. Perfectly natural!

One day that combination lock broke so instead of fixing it, they just totally took the whole knob and lock out. Now people could just come in without any warning.

One day a senior manager walked in and I quickly stopped but he noticed what I was doing. I don’t think he ever told anyone but he would look at me differently now.

That kind of put a stop to my pull ups at the washroom stalls at work. And now the door frame being broken by my home pull up bar so I couldn’t do them at home either.

That’s when I stopped doing them but not before doing 14 pull ups all the way up to all the way down, with perfect form!

Needless to say I was quite impressed with myself and with this system by Pavel Tsatsouline.

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How do you know when someone is staring at you?

2009-06-28T03:26:31Z

Try staring at someone for a few seconds and more than likely they’ll turn around and look at you. Why is that? And how is that?

I’ve noticed this many times. If someone’s looking at me I invariably feel that and I can even feel which direction the “stare” is coming from.

I’ve also tried this with many different people. I pick someone and try staring at them for about 5 seconds or more. Most of these are people that are not looking straight at me or coming toward me. They’re either standing/walking perpendicular to me so I can see their side profile, or they have their backs towards me, so walking/standing with their backs to me.

I’d say that more than 90% of the people can feel that I’m staring and they turn and look at me.

It’s just one of those things that I’ve noticed but haven’t really thought about as to the why! I’m sure there is some explanation to it but I don’t know yet. Hmm…

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Real estate investors’ meeting

2009-06-28T03:26:48Z

Over the weekend I attended a real estate investors’ meeting. I am not yet ready to invest in real estate so why did I attend this meeting?

It all goes back to the law of attraction and changing our vibrational state. Like I mentioned in a previous article, in order to change our vibrational state, one way is to put ourself in a different environment. In an environment that is more fitting to the person we want to become.

As an experiment I’ve been meeting different people who’re interested in investing in real estate. I am a real estate sales person as well so I can sell property but investing is a different ball game all together.

Coming from poverty, the idea of investing in real estate scares me as I do not have the money even now to buy an investment property. The fact that I would have to deal with tenants and any problems that might arise from them also discourage me. So, I thought this would be perfect.

There was a real estate investors’ meeting this past weekend which I attended. Every single person there had an investment property besides their principle residence. Every single person seemed to have a lot of money just sitting in the bank. They were talking about using 20%-25% down payment versus using 35% down payment to buy another investment property. An Indian person there with broken english was the star of the evening. Very helpful and one of the most positive people I’ve met. He apparently had recently just bought 60 properties.

I felt very uncomfortable sitting there. All sorts of negative emotions were coming out. I started to feel quite bad and poor sitting amongst them. I felt like there wasn’t much I could contribute to the meeting as well.

But then I reminded myself the reason for me being there. Near the end of the conversation I was feeling a lot more comfortable there.

Another reason I loved being there was because each one of these people had actually stepped outside the box. Where people at my work are totally conditioned to be employees for the rest of their lives, these people had actually realized that it was possible to be financially independent without a job.

Being around people like these could not hurt me in any which way!

So, the trick is: put yourself amongst people who’re where you want to be. Stay there until it starts to feel comfortable to be there. That’s when you know your vibration has changed and that’s when you’ll automatically start to attract things that’ll actually bring you closer to your goal! Easy, right?!

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One way to change your vibration

2009-06-28T03:27:06Z

As I mentioned in the previous posts, law of attraction responds to our current vibration. It is very important to realize what vibrational state we are in. That will determine what stuff enters our life, what we attract into our lives.

Changing Vibrations

Fake it until you make it! This still holds true. We’ve heard this many times but how many of us have put it to use and how many of use actually know how to use this to our advantage?

One of the ways to change your vibration is to put yourself in an environment that corresponds to your future self’s reality.

If you have been a negative person all your life, you can pretty much guarantee that that’s your normal vibration. Now if you want to change yourself into a more positive person it’s going to require some work on your part. Your subconscious is going to put up some resistance for sure.

Ask yourself if you were a really positive person what would you be doing? How would your house be? How would health be? What would you be eating, driving, wearing and so on? Then incorporate as many of those things into your life right now.

If it’s hard to imagine how your life would be if you were a lot more positive person, then look around and find someone who’s already like that and see how their life is.

Better yet find out a group of people who are a lot more positive than you and hang out with them. It’s going to feel quite uncomfortable for you at the beginning but stick with it. Soon your vibration will shift to match their vibration and before long you’ll realize that you’ve become a more positive person.

Now that you’re emitting a more positive vibration, you’re going to start to attract positive results. And that’s all there is to it

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Big gap between my blog posts

2009-06-28T03:27:31Z

I am sure you’ve noticed that I did not write any blog posts between September 2008 and June 2009. That is quite some time to go without writing anything.

So, what happened?
Basically, a whole bunch of things happened. It all started with my hosting company’s server going down for quite a while. That sort of slowed me down. At the beginning of this year it was the issues with taxes so been busy with that.

But mostly what hurt my motivation was reading other popular blogs. Most of the popular blogs seemed to make blogging appear very hard. That can be very discouraging. There are all sorts of things to discourage a beginner.

You have to be able to write perfect posts. So, what are perfect posts? No spelling mistakes, no grammar mistakes, something that is not too long but not too short, something that can captivate audience’s attention, something original, write for human and not for search engines, write from experience, write quality content, create your own theme or get someone to create a theme for you and not just use a default template and on and on.

Then you have to know all about SEO. Learning about SEO is no easy task as well especially if you’re not that familiar with internet marketing.

You have to know about blogging templates, feedburner, alexa, google ranking etc.
You have to learn how to use keywords, how to use proper keywords, how often to use them with in blog posts.

And I’m sure I’m forgetting quite a bit right now.

But the most discouraging thing is lack of support out there by popular blogs. If you ask for advice they tell you to buy their product or hire them or get them to review your site for a few hundred dollars.

In all this you can easily lose perspective and give up.

Recently I checked my blog and I noticed that a few people had commented on some of my posts. That felt quite wonderful! Not only commented but people had found some ideas helpful.

That’s when I realized what my original purpose of this blog was. It was to share my experiences as I experimented with various self development techniques.

It’s not like I hadn’t done anything in that area. In fact I had done quite a bit. In the last year and a half I’ve learned more than probably in my life before that. Or I should say that recently everything has started to make sense and I’ve been applying various things and getting results.

That is something that can definitely someone else as well.

Keeping that in mind, I started blogging again.

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Why do more women seem to exercise than men?

2009-06-28T03:28:45Z

I have been noticing for the past few years now that there are waaaaayyy more women that are running than men in downtown Toronto! Why is that?

I’ve been working in downtown Toronto for the past few years now. We’re pretty close to Lake Ontario as well. So, sometimes I go walk by the lakeshore. No matter where I go I have noticed that there are indeed more women outside than men.

More women are walking to work in the mornings and walking back in the afternoon. More women are biking in downtown. More women are jogging, running, roller blading! During lunch time I see them just go out for a jog by the lake as well. I would see you see at least 5 women for every man you see walking, jogging etc.

Why is that though?

I mean it’s always nice to see more women outside than lots of men But I really thought about it.

Is it because women are a lot more health conscious than men? If that’s the case then why is that? Do they really believe in remaining healthy?

Or is it because of the media? How we’re shown images of out of this world women with perfect proportions. We all know the kind of negative impact media has on us, especially the young kids these days. But is it possible that that negativity is also imbedded with in ourselves?

Are there more women that are health conscious because of low self esteem? Is it because they really want to be in good shape because it’s considered supposedly ugly to be a little over weight?

I’ve actually noticed how women that look good actually advanced fairly rapidly with in the work place. Not only that but they’re also treated differently than a little over weight women. A beautiful woman giving you an attitude and you might understand but an over weight one doing the same thing and you would never understand and actually treat her totally differently. I’ve seen this happen actually. An over weight woman was giving attitude to a few people at my work and they started commenting on how fat and ugly that woman was and she was still giving attitude and how if she was pretty they would actually understand her behaviour.

So, is that the reason that more women are into health than men?

What if they actually learned to totally love themselves for who they are? Is that possible? Of course it is possible but may not be as easy as it might be for men. I spoke to a friend of mine about this and he said that a man could be fat and ugly and still get girls as long as he had money but it’s very hard for women in this world to attract men as easily if they’re over weight.

This post is not something I intended to write. It’s just me thinking out loud basically. I’ve seen what low self-esteem can do to a person. I’m really curious to know how different people would be if they accepted themselves as who they are and totally approved of themselves.

Maybe we should have some sort of an experiment. Take someone who’s really into health and fitness but with low self-esteem and then help them fall in love with themselves and see what happens then.

On the other hand if you love yourself you treat yourself much better anyways. So, you would be really conscious of your health as well. hmm.. that doesn’t take me any closer to an answer.

Maybe conclusion is: if you like yourself and are happy with yourself and that’s why you’re health conscious then that’s wonderful but if you’re exercising constantly because you want to maintain a certain figure because you believe you would look more beautiful if you were a certain weight, then that’s not good!

Love yourself completely no matter how you look. Fall in love with yourself because no matter where you are, you are the only one that’s going to be accompanying you. So, you might as well make yourself your own friend rather than an enemy

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Walk to work

2009-06-28T03:29:04Z

I never realized until recently that a lot of people from my work actually walk to work from the union station. Union station is in Toronto downtown. This is where all the trains meet basically. People from different cities take trains to come downtown to work.

I had spoken to some people and they had mentioned that they walked to work from there. It’s about 3 kms from there to work. That seemed like quite a distance to me until I started meeting more and more people who were walking daily back and forth.

Benefits

As you can imagine, this has tremendous benefits! This way one does not have to exercise afterwards. At least not cardio workout. You walk 6 kms daily and that’s more than enough. Keeps your heart strong, keeps you in good shape, good stamina, low fat, slim figure and all the rest of the benefits that come along with it.

Actually, I took that walk a few times as well now. It’s a very pleasant walk. Some people are able to cover it in 20 mins but it easily takes me around 25+ minutes. While I was walking I noticed that there were a ton of people walking. I noticed so many new shops that I had never noticed before while I was driving by or taking the bus.

I realized that it was actually quite beautiful. Very nice buildings, new ones and really old ones. I felt good while walking as well. Felt a lot lighter by the time I got to work. Felt great! Not only that but I have walked back at the end of the day as well!

Sometimes on the way back there are other colleagues from work who’re walking back so we don’t even realize where the time has gone. It couldn’t be better! I’ve been thinking about starting some walking or running program and this fit perfectly because it still leaves me with free time after work to do other stuff.

Disadvantages

I didn’t realize this at first. Actually no one that walks with me realized it that we started to stink!!! Not terribly and not in the morning but on the way home. We were just feeling so happy until I met someone after my walk who noticed that I had started smelling of sweat.

If I took the subway home, where there are people all jammed together, I used to hate it when people were sweating and that body odour was all around. And now to think that I might be one of those people is a very disconcerting thought.

I spoke to some other people and they said that they tried everything to get rid of it like carrying a deoderant with them etc but nothing helped.

But they all said that they never had a problem getting a seat because of this. hehe… talk about putting a positive spin on it!

No matter what I love walking to work. It’s one way that I can easily get some exercise. It’s a beautiful walk indeed and I also realized if I don’t walk too fast and just walk at a comfortable pace I am ok. No body odour!

I try walking in the shade as well and the weather has been unusually cool for the month of june here in Toronto. So far so good!

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