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Who are you? What is your daily and weekly life really about?

Those not always easy questions to answer. So today I’d like to share three tips that have helped me to get to know myself a bit better and to see my life more accurately.

1. What part of you do you see in them?

What we see in others is quite often what we see in ourselves. And what irritates us in people may be what we don’t like in ourselves. What you judge in someone you are actually judging in yourself.

Therefore what you notice and what irritates you in others can teach you important things about yourself. Things you may not be aware of. In a way people can be like a mirror for you. A mirror that can help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself.

So, what people generally irritate you? What do you often judge or criticize people for?

What can that tell you about you?

2. Do the unusual thing.

When faced with a choice in your daily life, step back for a minute and think. Then take the option that is and feels unusual for you.

If you often back down just don’t for this one time. If you often get into arguments with people then just this one time don’t and instead just let it go or treat the other person with kindness. Do the opposite of what you usually do and see what happens (while using common sense of course). Do something new and something you wouldn’t expect from yourself.

This is a fun and great way to get new experiences and to learn things about the world and about yourself that you wouldn’t if you kept going like you usually do. It’s also a great way to be surprised about life as things often turn out more positively than in your fear filled daydreams if you just take action.

Getting stuck in the same old routine until it becomes a rut can suck the life out of you. Doing the unusual thing in small and big situations, no matter how it goes, is a great way to feel alive again and to reveal aspects of yourself that may have been hidden from you.

3. Journal.

Journaling is a fine way to get a more accurate picture of yourself and your life. A few ways that I have used journaling to get to know myself and my life are:

• Journal about how you use your time. Just write down what you do during one day. Or during one week. Write down what you spend your time on and how much time you spend on each thing. You may, as me, be surprised about how much time you waste on procrastinating and pretty pointless busy work. Even if you may have an image of yourself as an effective person.
• Journal about what you think. What do you think about during a normal day? Or a week? Write it all down. By doing so you can find recurring patterns of thought such as fears or maybe that you spend a lot of time regretting what happened in the past. Or you may find that you are actually a more positive person than you may think. This is a really interesting exercise because it can help you spot both positive things and negative things about yourself and just how accurate your current image of yourself is. You’ll probably run into some surprises.
• Journal about what you eat. I used this to lose weight. If you want to lose weight you have to consume less calories that you use. So how do you know what to eat and how much? You got to monitor it in some way. I used the free and very simple Fitday.com to monitor what I eat during the day. This is essential stuff. Because the three normal and most of the time actually pretty healthy meals I ate in the past consisted of the same amount of calories I used during the day. So little progress was made. To keep things within effective and healthy limits I think it’s important to monitor what you do. But not to get obsessed about these things though. The main point is to keep an eye on what you are actually doing instead of guesstimating a whole lot.

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“I can accept failure, everyone fails at something. But I can’t accept not trying.”
Michael Jordan

“Failures are finger posts on the road to achievement.”
C. S. Lewis

Failure can be quite the problem. And the fear of it can be paralyzing.

So what can you do to motivate yourself to take a chance, to overcome possible failure and to use it to your advantage?

Here are a few timeless words of advice.

Redefine failure.

“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”
Michael Jordan

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.”
Samuel Beckett

“An inventor fails 999 times, and if he succeeds once, he’s in. He treats his failures simply as practice shots.”
Charles F. Kettering

“Failure is simply the opportunity to begin again, this time more intelligently.”
Henry Ford

Failure is something that may need to be redefined within your mind. It’s not something to attach too much meaning to. But people do though.

If you look at successful people then you see that they have an abundance mentality. They know there are new chances and opportunities if they fail. And that there are lessons to be learned from failures. Those failures are necessary to achieve success. Without them you don’t get the feedback that is essential for your future success. And by making mistakes for yourself you get experience. Reading about someone else’s mistake or knowledge isn’t the same thing as experiencing it for yourself.

Failure is a learning experience. It can help you. But first you have to try. Without trying you aren’t going anywhere.

Accept it.

“A lot of new obstacles are coming, a lot of new feelings are coming, … I’m just taking it for what it is and learning from the mistakes I had this year.”
Michael Phelps

Acceptance is very helpful when you make a mistake or fail. You can resist the failure/mistake and beat yourself up. This creates a lot of inner suffering and new resistance. And that makes it emotionally harder to keep going and trying since you associate mistakes and failure with so much pain.

Acceptance is a more useful approach. It can help you to release yourself from slipping into old, conditioned patterns of self-hurting behaviour when something “negative” happens. You can instead see a situation such as a failure with fresh eyes.

And instead of beating yourself up or feeling sorry for yourself you can see the situation in a more positive and constructive way. Like for instance by looking for the lessons or the positive stuff in your failure. One of the greatest things about acceptance is that it can give you freedom from your old behaviour patterns and “you acting as you have always done”.

Take responsibility.

“A man may fail many times but he isn’t a failure until he begins to blame somebody else.”
John Burroughs

A very good point. As long as you own your mistakes and failures you can still learn. You can still adapt and find a better course to take.

But when you start blaming everyone or everything else then you don’t just look like a bitter failure. You also give you power away. The power over what you have learned so far and the power take action and do something. When you give that away it’s like you are sitting down on your hands and just giving up. You don’t have any power to move forward anymore.

Build inner strength.

“Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for great responsibilities”
Napoleon Hill

Failure and rejection won’t kill you. You may think that it does and it may feel like it almost will just after it has happened. But it won’t. Instead it makes you stronger. It makes you more confident in yourself. Because over time, by piling up the failures you truly understand that this isn’t such a big deal. You have handled it before and if it comes up in the future you know that you can handle it again.

By failing you build inner strength and gain understanding of how things work. This is crucial to be able to handle bigger responsibilities in life and to be able to grow.

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“People rarely succeed unless they have fun in what they are doing.”
Dale Carnegie

When you read this blog, other blogs and books on personal development it’s easy to get drawn into an atmosphere of this being really serious business.

And for someone who needs help it can be. If you are really out of shape or have a huge debt or haven’t had date in ages or just don’t know what to do with your life then it’s no fun.

However, as usual, I want emphasize what works here. And through my own experience these last few years I have discovered that taking this as deadly serious business makes things harder than they need to be.

So today I’d like to suggest a bunch of ways to make personal growth and achieving what you want more fun.

Think of it more as light and breezy fun rather than going to war.

No, you are not going to war. Thinking that you are can help you to ramp up enthusiasm and aggressiveness in the beginning. It seems to help you.

So you make any personal development goal – or just anything you want out of life – in to this epic struggle. Perhaps just in your mind or also by reading more and more about a topic.

The more you think and read about a topic the more complicated it seems in your mind and is also becomes “heavier”. What may have been pretty straightforward in real life becomes this huge struggle, where you are Rocky Balboa taking slow painstaking steps uphill against horrific odds. Yep, it’s a real inspiring thing as you struggle as the heroic underdog.

It’s also a great way to make things so much harder for yourself. It’s you putting up imaginary obstacles in your own mind that aren’t even there in reality. The Rocky way of thinking about these things is very seductive. But life becomes so much lighter and easier when you just let that stuff go.

It’s a bit counter-intuitive and it took me quite some time to understand this. You think that an overly serious attitude may seem like the right attitude to help you achieve your goal.

But a more relaxed and fun attitude where you tell yourself that what you are doing isn’t really that complicated, epic – millions of people have probably done what you want to do in last 1000 years or so – or super serious is often more effective to get the result you desire.

Of course, sometimes things will suck but I think that if you can approach things this way you’ll get more enjoyment on your path to your goal and you won’t put up extra obstacles on that path.

You can bring awareness to what you are thinking while on the daily walk on that path by asking yourself questions like “Honestly, am I overcomplicating this?” or ”Am I taking this a bit too seriously?”.

Find out what you have fun doing.

If you don’t like jogging don’t do it. Not everyone has be a runner to get exercise. Be curious and explore different options, perhaps soccer or table tennis is a better option for you? Finding what works and feels good for you makes it a lot easier to stick to the plan and be consistent each week rather than feeling like you have drag yourself to the gym again.

Detach from the outcome.

This is one of my favorite tips for making it easier to take action and to do so consistently. It makes the doing more enjoyable and there is less inner resistance or projections into the future that can screw things up.

I first got this tip from the ancient Sanskrit Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita. It says:

“To action alone hast thou a right and never at all to its fruits; let not the fruits of action be thy motive; neither let there be in thee any attachment to inaction”

This tells me to understand that I cannot control the results of my action. I can’t control how someone reacts to what I say or what I do. And that I should do what I do just because it is something I want to do rather than because of some outcome I’d like. But at the same time I should not let these two ideas lead me to become passive and get stuck in sitting on my hands and not taking action at all.

Basically, I do what I think is right and that is my responsibility. And then the rest (the possible results), well, that is not up for me to decide about or try to control. I let it go.

Now, I apply this when I do something. I can get motivated by future results before the doing the activity. But when I start doing any those activities I detach and change how I think. I just focus on showing up and doing. This may sound a bit weird or hard but after a while it gets easier and easier to do that shift in your mind and to not start projecting into the future while you are doing.

You can apply this to:

• Working out. By focusing on just showing up and doing the workout you won’t get discouraged when you haven’t lost x pounds after a week. You become more patient and more emotionally stable when you don’t think about losing that weight all the time. If you just show up and work out – and control what you eat – the pounds will come off.
• Blogging. If you don’t have to worry about what people may think about your next post then it becomes a lot easier to calmly write what you want instead of getting stuck in some kind of writer’s block.
• Social interactions. If you detach from an outcome such as someone liking you at a party or on a date then you’ll be less nervous. You won’t try to impress people. You will be more like how you are with your closest friends, relaxed and easy going. Just being yourself is an often cited and sometimes criticized piece of advice. By detaching from outcomes – while still of course using your common sense – it will be a lot easier to just be the best version of yourself.

Focus on the positive things from the past.

It’s easy to fall back into the common habit of focusing on your past failures. Doing so can make you feel like giving up. Or like this is a war. Or like getting out of your comfort zone is just one big hassle.

So I suggest changing your focus. Remember when things went well.

Awash your mind with positive memories.

Realise it can be fun to get out of your comfort zone despite what your mind and feelings might be telling you before you get started. Think back to the previous times when you have broken out of your rut. Focus on the positive memories, when you got out there, when you took a chance. And you’ll recall that it wasn’t so bad, it was actually fun and exciting and something new to you.

A lot of the time we automatically play back our negative experiences – or negative interpretations of events – in our minds before we are about to do something. And we forget about the positive memories and our previous, positive achievements. Avoid that trap. Let the fun and good memories flow through your mind instead and let things become easier.

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“Obstacles don’t have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don’t turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”
Michael Jordan

Basics such as motivation, setting goals and taking action are vital to get the success you want in any area of life.

But there are also other factors that play a part. Inner and outer obstacles that can stand in your way and make things harder than they need to be.

Today I’d like to explore three such things and how you can overcome these obstacles and make success easier.

1. Drama.

Drama can be a bit annoying. Both when it pops up in me and in other people. It’s annoying because it’s pointless, counterproductive and at the same time can be addictive.

When you are in drama-mode you make mountains out of molehills. You construct elaborate and huge problems based on some little thing that is often misinterpreted in dramatic and negative fashion to ignite the drama.

The drama in your mind can steal so much energy and time from you. So why do we do it?

Well, frankly I think it is sometimes just because people are under stimulated. Nothing much fun happens in the daily life. There are no real exciting goals to work towards.

The drama can not only add spice to your life but also be emotionally addictive. It brings you attention from other people. Instead of doing something that is actually hard and gaining admiration and attention that way it’s easier to just create drama.

So what do you do to decrease the drama within yourself? The answers are already above. You get a life and fill it with doing things that are important and fulfilling for you. You remain aware in your daily life so that when you are creating drama you can tell yourself that such thinking is silly and will just make everything seem bigger than it is and thereby make it harder to take action. And the less you accept drama from yourself, the less you will accept or be rattled by drama from other people.

By doing that you will realize that things are often simpler than you may think and that few things are that big of a deal really. You’ll be cooler and more levelheaded than you used to and you’ll focus on working on what you want. Because in the end that is more fun and fulfilling than creating drama to fill a void.

2. Small invisible barriers.

Why don’t people get regular exercise? One invisible barrier that I know comes up again and again is simply that they have to get to the gym. That takes effort. You have to get up from your couch, pack your gym bag and perhaps take a bus or drive to get there. And then you have to ride/drive home again.

After a long day at work or in school it’s very easy to go: “Eh, I’ll do that tomorrow instead” and remain on the couch.

And so you may get to the gym once every week instead of three times a week like you were planning on back during the holidays.

So you need to find ways to reduce or remove those barriers. I do my workouts right here at home. I lift weights and I do body weight exercises on my living room floor. This has eliminated that invisible gym barrier and helped me to be very consistent and work out three times a week.
Other ways to reduce the barrier would perhaps be to get exercise by going out running or going out biking. This will at least remove the hassle of getting to and from the gym.

Think about the small barriers that may be stopping you from doing things on a consistent basis. And find solutions.

Bonus tip: You can use small barriers to your advantage too. I did for instance remove the websites I got a bit too fond of from my bookmarks in Firefox. Now I have to type in the address or google for websites. This extra, very small barrier has helped me to check the websites far less than I used to. Oftentimes I forget to check them for many days and realize that they weren’t really that important after all.

3. You fall back into old patterns, thoughts and behaviors.

It is easy to fall back into your old patterns. If you have, for instance, been looking for problems in different parts of your life for years but adopted a more optimistic outlook lately it is still easy to snap back into that old, familiar place. Sometimes you start looking for problems just out of habit.

This can be an obstacle. It can make things messy as you one day feel optimistic and the other day are not so optimistic anymore. Sure, there are natural fluctuations from day to day. But there are also things you can do to reinforce your new self image and to prevent the old stuff from coming up or holding you back.

• Be aware during your day. When you become aware of a moment when you are slipping back into your old ways first accept that. Then let it go. This can help you let go of such things as soon as they appear and before they start to spiral and become bigger.
• Review and reexamine your past. If you are falling back into worrying for example, look at your past. How many of your worries in the last 3 years have actually come into reality? Sit down and really go through this past period. You will probably realize how little of what you feared and worried about that has actually happened. By doing so you can start to release that old thought habit more easily when it pops up because it has been really inaccurate so far.
• Get more experiences that support your new self image. This is the most important ingredient. To change and strengthen your new self image you mind needs proof. The proof is the experiences you have had. So if you really dive in and immerse yourself in something like fitness and work out every other/every day, read a lot about it all and are eating healthy stuff in a conscious way you change a lot about your day to day living environment. Expanding your comfort zone like this will be uncomfortable and a bit draining but it will quickly give you a lot of new experiences. This helps to you make a quicker change, gives you a stronger new self image and so you will more rarely slip back into those old thought patterns and behaviors.

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“Spring is when you feel like whistling even with a shoe full of slush.”
Doug Larson

“An optimist is the human personification of spring.”
Susan J. Bissonette

Spring is finally here in Sweden. Well, kinda. It’s more of feeling of spring I suppose in the way that Doug Larson so awesomely points out in the quote above.

But still. After a long and very cold winter it’s great to have some warmth, a few birds singing and see more smiling and enthusiastic faces as you walk the streets.

So I thought I’d share a few of my favorite sayings about spring that can help us to make this year the best one yet.

1. Make decisions at the right time.

“Never cut a tree down in the wintertime. Never make a negative decision in the low time. Never make your most important decisions when you are in your worst moods. Wait. Be patient. The storm will pass. The spring will come.”
Robert H. Schuller

I think this is a very good tip and something I wish I had thought about a few times in the past. When you are in the low time or a bad mood you can’t really see reality in an accurate way. Making important or negative decisions when you are in that headspace isn’t a good idea.

Nowadays I have a learned to just be still and wait out those angry clouds. Even if it feels like there is an urgent decision to be made (which isn’t always the case even though your clouded mind may fool you into believing that).

Then, when the mind is clearer it becomes a lot easier to make a good decision.

2. Be consistent to get some real results.

“One swallow does not make a spring, nor does one fine day.”
Aristole

To live a happier life and make a real change you can’t just take action or do things on a day when you feel inspired. Sure, the spring may give you a boost of energy and inspiration right now. But what will you do with that? Just surf on those good feelings for a day or a week? Or let it be a start to consistently taken action each day, even if that inspiration and initial enthusiasm may dissipate (which it pretty much always does)?

To take action more consistently here are a three good tips:

• Use a morning routine. I have mentioned this many times, both in my ebook and in various articles. The reason for that is that this is perhaps the most powerful tip I have found so far in this area. You simply set up a routine in the morning that you do as soon as you wake up. This works so well because what you do early in the day often sets the context for your day. As humans we have a strong tendency to want to be consistent with what we have done before. That’s one big reason why a bad start often leads to a bad day and a good start often leads to a good day. Read all about my and other people’s morning routines in this article.
• Don’t hurt yourself. This is a very important reason for me at least. When you disappoint yourself and don’t think and do as you really deep down want to you hurt yourself by lowering your self esteem. Whatever you do during your day sends signals back to yourself about what kind of person you are. Do the right thing like being effective, kind or go to the gym and you feel good. Get lazy, negative or just plain mean and you tend to feel worse after a while. You don’t get away, there is no escaping yourself. And there is always a price to pay. This is a powerful motivator to become a better person.
• Use reminders in your environment. What you do is simply to write down what you really want to make into a habit or a natural part of your life on something like a post-it or on your screensaver or in your cell phone. At the moment I use a small whiteboard on my wall that has stuff like “I make $5000/month” and “Keep things extremely simple” written down on it. I have found this to be very useful to keep myself on track, to keep my focus on the essential stuff and not get so distracted by everything around me.

3. Keep going.

“No winter lasts forever; no spring skips its turn.”
Hal Borland

Persistence might not exactly be the sexiest sounding quality. It might not sell a lot of products to people looking for the magic pill. But it is an immensely helpful quality to cultivate and put to use.

If you fail, what do you do? You dust yourself off, learn what you can from what happened and try again. If the success you are looking for won’t come that quickly – a pretty likely scenario – then you have to persist.

Persistence is one of the most useful qualities one can have. Not only because you will still be out there in a less competitive playing field as lot of other people have given up and gone home. But also because developing persistence will enable you to get what you want. It may just take a little longer than had hoped for. But if you keep going, if you refine your approach based on what you learn from experience and other sources then better times will come.

4. Winter makes the spring so much better.

“If we had no winter, the spring would not be so pleasant: if we did not sometimes taste of adversity, prosperity would not be so welcome.”
Anne Bradstreet

The winter of life is often in retrospect a gift. It makes you stronger. More empathic and understanding. It helps you out in some way and guides you. You can always look back at it when you feel down and be happy that you aren’t in that place anymore.

Your winter and adversities expands the spectrum of human experience, understanding and emotions for you. Your capacity for genuine gratitude increases because of it.

The sad times make the happy times even sweeter.

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“He who lives in harmony with himself lives in harmony with the universe.”
Marcus Aurelius

“Possession of material riches, without inner peace, is like dying of thirst while bathing in a lake.”
Paramahansa Yogananda

Finding peace within is a wonderful but also a difficult thing. It is easy to go looking for it in the wrong places.

So here are 5 timeless thoughts to help guide you to the places where you can actually find it.

1. Simplify.

“The simplification of life is one of the steps to inner peace. A persistent simplification will create an inner and outer well-being that places harmony in one’s life.”
Peace Pilgrim

Making thing simpler has certainly brought a lot of inner peace to my life. So, a few of my favorite suggestions on how to simplify your life:

• Use a limited to-do list. Only 2 or 3 of the most important things.
• Set limits. Set limits for daily checking of inboxes. I do it only once a day. Set time limits for small decisions and make them within seconds after you have thought about them to avoid procrastination and overthinking. Set time limits for tasks such as 15 minutes each day for answering emails or for using Twitter. Set a limit for commitments and say no to be able to feel less stress and produce better results.
• Remember to “keep things extremely simple”. I have written down that sentence on my white board and it is a daily and constant reminder that helps me when I lose my way.

2. Accept.

“Acceptance of others, their looks, their behaviors, their beliefs, bring you an inner peace and tranquility – instead of anger and resentment.”
Unknown

When you accept what is you stop feeding energy into resisting what is. You don’t make a problem more powerful and sticky in your mind. Instead, somewhat counter intuitively, when you accept what is it loses much of its power. It just is.

And you feel stillness inside. Now, accepting what is doesn’t mean to give up. It just means that you put yourself in a better position take action if necessary. Because now you can see more clearly, you can focus your energy towards what you want and take the appropriate action to change your situation.

3. Forgive.

“Inner peace can be reached only when we practice forgiveness. Forgiveness is letting go of the past, and is therefore the means for correcting our misperceptions.”
Gerald Jampolsky

By accepting what is it is much easier to let go of things and to forgive what has happened.

Forgiveness is important because as long as you don’t forgive someone you are linked to that person. Your thoughts will return to the person who wronged you and what s/he did over and over again. The emotional link between the two of you is so strong and inflicts much suffering in you and – as a result of your inner turmoil – most often in other people around you too.

When you forgive you do not only release the other person. You set yourself free too from all of that agony.

One thing to keep in mind is to not just forgive others but also yourself. By forgiving yourself – instead of resenting yourself for something you did a week or 10 years ago – you make the habit of forgiveness more and more of a natural part of you. And so forgiving others becomes easier too.

Also, what you think is a question of forgiving others you may sometimes – after some time and inner struggle – discover is just as much, if not more, about forgiving yourself rather than the other person.

4. Do what you enjoy.

“Never continue in a job you don’t enjoy. If you’re happy in what you’re doing, you’ll like yourself, you’ll have inner peace. And if you have that, along with physical health, you’ll have more success than you could possibly have imagined.”
Roger Caras

When you do what you enjoy there is a natural peace that arises within. You are in alignment with your outer world. This also leads to a lot more success than if you have a lot of inner turmoil and really don’t care that much for your work.

One of my favorite tips for finding things you enjoy or love doing is simply to explore life. To be curious and try things out and see what you think of them. This can bring many insights both about yourself and about how things really are when you do them rather than when they are just theories floating around in your head.

If you have read my ebook The 7 Timeless Habits of Happiness then you know that there is a whole chapter in it about finding and doing what you love with exercises and tips for further reading. So if you haven’t checked out the book yet, go to this page for instructions on how to get you own free copy.

5. Be careful with your inner peace.

“Never be in a hurry; do everything quietly and in a calm spirit. Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, even if your whole world seems upset.”
St. Francis de Sales

By using the tips above and by living in the present moment you can find a lot more inner peace. Not only during days when things go as planned. But also on days when your world is upset and things aren’t so easy. On such days your inner peace will be very useful to help you make good decisions and to get things done. So be smart, stay calm and be careful with your inner peace.

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“Never bend your head. Always hold it high. Look the world straight in the face.”
Helen Keller

One of the most common wishes people have seems to be to improve their self confidence. This can be a tricky thing and it is easy to start fooling yourself and making mistakes that keeps you stuck in place of low self confidence.

So today I’d like to share 3 mistakes I have made in the past and what I have done to move past them and to actually increase my self confidence.

I hope you find something helpful here.

1. You sit around and hope that you can solve it in your mind somehow.

Yes, a helpful component of raising your self confidence can be to for example positively visualize future events or using affirmations or afformations. But the most important part is what Eleanor Roosevelt said a long time ago:

“You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I have lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”

There is no way of getting around that.

You have to be willing to take action, to move out of your comfort zone and to face fear to increase your self confidence in a way that stays with you (not like when you pump it up temporarily by using different exercises or music for example). You have to be willing to take the punch and risk some emotional pain for a while.

And I won’t lie to you. Sometimes it will suck. You will go to bed and feel sick to your stomach and just hope the day will end. But many times you will feel great as you just move over that invisible barrier and face your fear. You may not even get the result you wanted but still feel great about yourself because you just dared to face that fear or take some action.

But what about the times you felt sick to your stomach and went to bed feeling not so good at all? Well, the next day you will wake up. And you realize that you are still here. You are intact and the earth keeps spinning and you get up for a new day. Life continues. But now you know deep down that you can handle things at least a little bit better because you could handle what happened yesterday. You have raised your confidence in yourself and become stronger.

And another thing is this: when you do things you don’t just build confidence in your ability to handle different situations. You also experience progressive desensitization. What that means is that situations – like for example public speaking or maybe just showing your latest blogpost to an audience out there – that made you feel all shaky become more and more normal in your life. It is not longer something you psyche yourself up to do. It just becomes normal. Like tying your shoes, hanging out with your friends or taking a shower.

It may seem scary now. But after having done whatever you fear a few to a dozen times or so you may think: “Is that it?”. You almost feel disappointed about how anticlimactic it has become. You may even get a bit angry with yourself and wonder why you avoided doing it for so long.

2. You focus on the wrong things.

If you focus on the wrong things then it will be a lot more difficult to gain the experiences that I wrote about in the section above. You may never get started at all. Or you see the world through a lens that won’t help you that much even if you gain some experiences that could help you.

So what do you do?

You learn to change how you view things. Here are three common problems and how to reinterpret them or change your focus from them altogether to help yourself out.

Stuck in fear.

When you are stuck in fear then it will be hard to start moving. But if you on the other hand shift to being curious your perceptions go SWOOSH! and the world just opens up. Curiosity is filled with anticipation and enthusiasm. It opens you up. And when you are open and enthusiastic then you have more fun things to think about than focusing on your fear.

How do you become more curious? One way is to remember how life has become more fun in the past thanks to your curiosity and to remember all the cool things it helped you to discover and experience.

Negative expectations and disaster scenarios in your mind.

One way to move past this vague fear of very improbable scenarios or that the sky might fall is to ask yourself: What’s the worst that could happen?

When you really ask yourself what the worst thing that could happen is you get a clearer picture, a bit of fear vanishes and you discover that the potential consequences are seldom as frightening as you first thought. By doing this you define the potential consequences and also discover that whatever might happen you can manage and recover from it.

Fear of failure.

Fear of failure can hold you back. But failure isn’t all that bad really. It can be very helpful if you choose to see it that way.
The thing is to reframe failure from being something that makes your legs shake to something useful and important for the growth of your self confidence and your overall growth as a human being.

Here are four ways that failure can help you out:

• You learn. Instead of seeing failure as something horrible you can start to view it more as a learning experience. When standing in the middle of a failure, you can ask yourself questions like: What’s awesome about this situation? What can I learn from this situation?
• You gain experiences you could not get any other way. Ideally, you probably want to learn from other people’s mistakes and failures. That’s not always easy to do though. Sometimes you just have to fail on your own to learn a lesson and to gain an experience no one can relate to you in mere words.
• You become stronger. Every time you fail you become more accustomed to it. You realize more and more that it’s not the end of the world. And, again, you get desensitized. You can handle things that would have been very hard to handle a few years back.
• Your chances of succeeding increases. Every time you fail you can learn and increase your inner strength. So over time you become more and more likely to succeed.

3. You don’t prepare.

Preparing yourself and educating yourself can be a big help to gain confidence. By for example rehearsing and rewriting your speech over and over you can pretty much learn it by heart. By doing research you can find breathing techniques that can quickly make you calmer and present. Or simple visualization techniques that make you feel more confident and positive as you step out on the stage.

This is obviously more work than not doing anything about the speech at all before you start giving it. But it can make a big difference in your confidence levels if you take the time to prepare yourself. And of course, the speech and the delivery of it will most likely be a lot better too.

So prepare and you will feel more comfortable and confident. Just don’t make the mistake of getting stuck in the preparation phase and using it as a way to avoid taking action and to avoid the possible pain that it may result in.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/cowboyneal/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

“The universe is change; our life is what our thoughts make it.”
Marcus Aurelius

“No one can give you better advice than yourself.”
Cicero

People like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca may have died thousands of years ago. But what they spoke about back then is still helpful today. Our outer circumstances may have changed dramatically over the last few thousands of years, but on the inside we seem to have stayed pretty much the same in many ways.

So here are seven of my favorite tips from the streets and palaces of ancient Rome.

1. It’s just a perspective.

“Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth.”
Marcus Aurelius

This is very important to remember. Not only to be able to chill out instead of getting into crazy fights and conflicts about any kind of issue in your daily life.

But also to stay open to different perspectives that can help improve your life instead of getting really defensive and never be able to admit that there may be a an even better way.

By keeping this mind open you become more accepting of other people and their perspectives and thoughts. And it becomes easier to see and find common ground instead of getting your focus stuck on differences.

2. You don’t have to create anger and other negative feelings.

“A quarrel is quickly settled when deserted by one party; there is no battle unless there be two.”
Seneca

Sometimes it is of course necessary to bring up and resolve a conflict. Often though, conflicts or quarrels are just a waste of time and a good way to create negativity within and in your environment. Perhaps someone wants to be right. Or release pent up emotions created elsewhere.

Avoid taking such bait by others or giving in to temporary negativity in yourself. Just let it go.

3. Will more solve your problems?

“For many men, the acquisition of wealth does not end their troubles, it only changes them.”
“It is not the man who has too little, but the man who craves more, that is poor.”
“What difference does it make how much you have? What you do not have amounts to much more.”
~ Seneca

Society is to a large degree built on getting more.

Of course, to a degree this is very useful. But it may not be the thing that will solve all your problems.
You may not find your answer or happiness in more. It may just alter your troubles and problems. And/or give you more of them. What is already there inside of you perhaps gets highlighted and magnified when you get more. Instead of getting whatever you want when finally making all that money your wanted you may find that greed, jealousy and selfishness within you and in your world increases.

You may have thought that when you finally arrived at that place your problems would just disappear. But the ego always wants more and is never satisfied.

So trying to fill yourself up with more – money, power, smartness, prettiness, a feeling of being more enlightened than others – and then finally becoming happy may become like trying to fill a bucket with a hole in the bottom.

4. Be patient.

“Patience is the greatest of all virtues.”
Cato the Elder

When I met people in real life and tell them about this blog they sometimes wonder how one can build a website with so many readers. I guess different people have different answers. Mine always includes being patient. I think that is one of the key factors why this blog has become pretty popular. I have just been patient and have seen it grow, sometimes slowly and sometimes very quickly.

I think people often make the mistake of giving up too early. Your mind probably has what it thinks is a reasonable timeframe for success. This might not correspond to a realistic timeframe though.

It’s useful to take a break from advertised perspectives – “You can double your income/lose 30 pounds in a just 30 days!” – and let more realistic perspectives seep into your mind. Learn from people who have gone where you want to go. Talk to them. Read what they have to say in books or online. This will not give you a complete plan but a clearer perspective of what is needed to achieve what you want.

5. Laugh

“It is more fitting for a man to laugh at life than to lament over it.”
“No one is laughable who laughs at himself.”
~ Seneca

Taking things too seriously can make life a lot harder and painful than it needs to be. It may be a common or “normal” way to look at things. But you are always free to choose how to view, react and think about things.

Taking things and yourself less seriously can really help you to decrease conflicts, anger, sadness and anxiety. And laughing at life and yourself releases tension and tends to make you less susceptible to the gray and dreary clouds of negativity that may plague others. Check out Lighten Up! for more on this.

6. Focus on clearing your own fields.

“It is the peculiar quality of a fool to perceive the faults of others, and to forget his own … You can’t clear your own fields while you’re counting the rocks on your neighbor’s farm.”
Cicero

What someone says about you may not be much of a reflection of you but of the person that said it. This is a good thing to remember whenever someone is saying something negative about you. It is even more useful to remember whenever you feel negatively about someone else. It can help you to learn more about yourself, what you fear and how you may be fooling yourself. It can be a reminder to go back to focusing on what needs to be cleared on your own fields.

7. Focus on doing what you think and feel is right.

“We cannot control the evil tongues of others; but a good life enables us to disregard them”
Cato the Elder

“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
Marcus Aurelius

“I have often wondered how it is that every man loves himself more than all the rest of men, but yet sets less value on his own opinions of himself than on the opinions of others.”
Marcus Aurelius

By letting go of the things that don’t really matter that much and instead focusing on what YOU think about things and doing what YOU think is the right thing you can save a whole bunch of time and improve your results and your self esteem. Doing so will also raise your sense of what you deserve in life, something that is vital to be able to go after what you want and to avoid self sabotage halfway to achieving your goal.

All of this will raise your opinion of yourself and you start to realize that what someone else says simply doesn’t make matter that much anymore (a welcome relief for sure).

Now, this may sound selfish. And it is. And that is OK. Because by improving your own life and making yourself stronger you are in a much better position to both help other people and yourself. And you may realize that what is most important in your life is something that can help other people too. Win-win is a pretty great solution.

Images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/notsogoodphotography/ / CC BY 2.0

“If you ask what is the single most important key to longevity, I would have to say it is avoiding worry, stress and tension. And if you didn’t ask me, I’d still have to say it.”

George F. Burns

One good life skill is to be able to chill out. To be calm in negative situations and not overreact about all kinds of things. Or invent big, big problems in your mind – or create them in your world as you drag other people in through arguments – by making mountains out of molehills.

By being able to chill out when needed to you will:

• Have a lot less stress, worry and pointless conflicts with other people.
• Waste less of your time on things that aren’t really that useful.
• Attract what you are. To be able to draw people who are more relaxed and positive about life into your life then you have to be that person yourself. People like to hang out with people who are like them (because it’s comfortable, because it brings more fun and success, because people have 24 hours in a day and so choices need to be made). Being someone that can be cool and relaxed about things is a positive and attractive social quality for any kind of relationship.

So how do you do it?

Well, here are four good tips:

1. Ask yourself if this even really matters.

By asking yourself the wrong questions you can make any little thing into a huge problem. By asking yourself better questions you can see things from a more helpful perspective.

• Who cares? Very simple. Asking yourself this makes you realize that no, this isn’t a big deal to fuss or worry about.
• Will this matter 5 years from now? If you ask yourself this question you will discover that if you put something into a more healthy perspective then few things matter that much.

2. Get a life.

If you find yourself sitting around too much and not having enough to do then it’s very easy to get stuck in thought loops and go into a downward spiral. Simply by filling your life with more fun activities and people you can become a lot more relaxed and less prone to overreacting about the little things.

So spend less time analyzing life and more time living and exploring it in whatever way you’d like. By doing so you are also often confronted with having to expand your comfort zones and perhaps face a fear. This leads to better self confidence and less fretting about if you can handle things that may come up.

3. What would someone else do?

This is a good way to find a new and more useful perspective. You simply ask yourself what someone else would do in your situation.

Maybe you ask yourself:

• What would Winnie the Pooh  do?
• What would James Bond do?
• What would mom or dad do?

The point is to play around and find a new perspective and drag yourself out of your current negative, stressed and confused headspace and see things in another light. Just doing that can often help you to calm down, realize that this isn’t a huge deal and help you to find a solution that you can apply.

4. Remember to keep things extremely simple.

At the very top of the whiteboard on my wall I have written down: “Keep things extremely simple”. This is a very useful thing to remind yourself of throughout any day. Whenever I feel I am making a thing bigger or more complicated than it is or I simply become confused or negative in some way I can look at the wall (or remember that sentence if I’m not at home) to help guide my thoughts back into a constructive and calm place.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/evilerin/ / CC BY 2.0

“What do you first do when you learn to swim? You make mistakes, do you not? And what happens? You make other mistakes, and when you have made all the mistakes you possibly can without drowning – and some of them many times over – what do you find? That you can swim? Well – life is just the same as learning to swim! Do not be afraid of making mistakes, for there is no other way of learning how to live!”
Alfred Adler

“Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new.”
Albert Einstein

I don’t really write much about blogging since this is a website about personal development. But once in a while I make an exception.

However, some of the mistakes and lessons I have learned are probably still helpful even if you don’t have a blog.

1. I didn’t proofread out loud.

If you proofread your article out loud then it’s much easier to catch strange sentences or missing/misspelled words. A simple and effective tip.

2. I worried too much about negative reactions. They were mostly in my head.

Out of all the feedback I have received over the last three years very, very little has been hostile, angry or nasty. So don’t let your fears about what people may say stop you from posting something or from starting your own blog.

3. I didn’t think looks mattered that much.

I changed the design of the blog last year and the rate of added subscribers and the offers from advertisers and all kinds of personal development businesses have increased. The blog looks more professional and therefore I believe it looks more trustworthy now than it did before. It leaves people with a better first impression.

No, the surface – or what may seem superficial – is not just what matters. But it does have a big impact. Don’t neglect it (in any part of your life).

4. I didn’t focus on email subscribers.

Articles about blogging often talk about the importance of RSS subscribers. Online marketers often talk about the importance of email subscribers. I have found from my own statistics that a lot more people actually reads a new article if it is delivered via email rather than via RSS. Putting email subscriptions in the spotlight has ensured that a lot more people will actually read what I write.

5. I forgot to backup the blog. Many times.

I have been lazy about this many times and every time the blog had some problems or went down for some reason for while I got stressed and angry at myself for not doing such a very simple thing more regularly. Don’t make that simple mistake.

6. I didn’t do proper research on hosting companies.

Back in the spring of 2008 my blog went down. It was down for about nine days. I called the support desk at my old hosting company here in Sweden each day. And each day they told me they would take a look at it and fix the problem. They didn’t. So after more than a week of frustration and phone calls I finally switched hosting companies.

Before making that switch I did some research for about an hour. I read blog posts about hosting companies with the best service. I checked out the website of magazine about internet here in Swedne that does a test every year to find the best hosting companies.

I suggest that you do such research before you start a blog or if you are thinking about switching. It will save you a lot of trouble and stress down the line. Things have run so much smoother with great support people that know what they are doing and will actually help you.

7. I took the wrong perspective for what I wanted.

This is a big mistake I made. I wanted to build and grow a blog to help myself in my own personal development, to help other people who needed some advice and to make this into a full-time gig.

But I was inexperienced and naively listened to too much advice and my own laziness that told me that you pretty much just had to write a bit about things you liked and then slap on some ads and you would be set. So I blogged inconsistently and so the blog grew inconsistently. I slapped on some ads that made me a bit of money but really not that much at all.

Nowadays I don’t view this as just as a blog. I view it as a business where the blog is one part. Last week I set up other parts like a new mailing list and my first own product in the form of the free 7 Timeless Habits of Happiness e-book.

If you want a blog where you share your thoughts then view it as a blog. But if you want to grow it faster and someday turn this into a part-time or full-time gig then I have found it to be much better to view it as a business. It makes it much easier to stay consistent with your work and to find new ideas and solutions both within and outside of yourself to help you to grow your business (and in many ways grow as a person too).

8. I didn’t focus enough on what is most important.

Like with anything else in life, if you want excellent results then focus on doing the most important things. Because there will never be time and energy enough to do it all. And if you don’t focus on the most important things then they are often not done at the end of the day since you kept yourself busy with other things.

What is the most important thing here? At least for me it has been content. Focus your time on writing the best content you can manage. Yes, connecting with people via email, other blogs and Twitter is important. And checking statistics can be fun. But you have to limit the time you spend on those things because without the content you are going nowhere.