We all know that being grateful and appreciative is very beneficial, but have you ever thought of gratitude as one of the top life skills? Actually, it is more than that. Gratitude belongs in the category of advanced life skills because it can completely transform you life. In the face of challenges or mounting demands on your time, do you find it…
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7 Life Skills for Making Steady Progress
When it comes to change and growth, with the right life skills you can expect to make slow but steady progress. The idea of all or nothing and overnight success can be very appealing, but one reason so many people never achieve much is that big things take time. We may not want to hear it, but I deal in reality, not sales pitches. Whether you’re building muscle or losing fat, growing a business or developing a relationship, significant achievements are going to come slowly. It’s called growth. We live in …
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Does Your Perception of You Match What Others Think?
Have you ever wondered how other people really feel about you? If one of your friends, business acquaintances, or family members were to be completely honest about the way they view you, what do you think their perception of you would be? The reason I bring this up is that many people are inclined to see themselves very differently than others see them. It is a natural tendency to just assume that the perception of others is similar to our own. But in reality this is seldom the case because we all see life through our own unique emotional filters. It can be very enlightening to step back and try to analyze yourself from a …
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Personal Growth Starts with an Internal Program Upgrade
What do you do when you want your computer to perform a task that is currently beyond its ability? You upgrade it, right? Sometimes it is a major system upgrade and sometimes it is just a matter of upgrading a single program. But one way or another you make some internal changes so it will perform better. We all accept this concept; otherwise we wouldn’t be able to function online. In fact, we do this type of upgrading in many areas of life because technology moves forward and if we want…
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Can Productivity be a Trap?
Productivity is a good thing, right? The sense of accomplishment can certainly be a genuine source of joy and satisfaction. Sometimes though, we forget why we are striving to be more productive. Isn’t greater happiness the reason behind increased productivity? Don’t we convince ourselves that getting more done will finally give us the time for things we truly enjoy? Our pursuit of increased productivity, should result in increased happiness right? The trap we need to be aware of …
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How Do You View Risk?
If you’re not living the life you truly desire, what is it that keeps you from doing so? For many people, change represents a risk, and big change can represent an unacceptable degree of risk. What kind of risk? The risk that things will not work out the way we want them to. In other words, fear of the unknown. Whether we like our current reality or not, there’s a certain amount of security attached to doing things we’re familiar with. On the other hand, trying something new in order to improve our life creates room for a lot of what-ifs. What if I try and fail? What if I invest my time and energy and things…
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How to Deal With Anxiety and Panic Attacks
Anxiety is defined as a state of apprehension or fear resulting from the anticipation of a real or imagined threat, event, or situation. It is one of the most common human emotions experienced by people at some point in their lives. However, most people who have never experienced a panic attack, or extreme anxiety, fail to realize the terrifying nature of the experience. Extreme dizziness, blurred vision, …
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How to Start A Conversation
Do you ever feel like you need to improve your ability to start a conversation with someone you’ve just met? If so , don’t feel bad because in my coaching practice, one of the most common challenges faced by both men and women is how to start a conversation. Admittedly, there is plenty of information out there about how to start a…
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Create Success by Creating Value for Others
When you look at people who are at the top of their field, you will discover that they all have one thing in common. It really doesn’t matter what field they are in, they all do one specific thing on a consistent basis. Can you guess what that is? They are all busy adding value to …
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Why the Pareto Principle is Among the Top 10 Life Skills
Have you ever felt that you are so busy trying to keep up with your life that you just can’t get anything done? Do you find yourself constantly putting things off because you just don’t have enough time to do it all? Have you experienced the lack of progress that comes from never getting to the things that would make a real difference in your life? Maybe what you need is one of those life skills that gives you better leverage with whatever time and energy you have available. The Pareto Principle …
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When Lightning Strikes Your World
When you think of Oregon you naturally think of trees, right? Where I live there are trees for as far as the eye can see. In fact, I am literally surrounded by millions of acres of forest. As you can imagine, summer thunder storms that bring lightning to the region are a matter of concern. Almost without exception, …
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100 Ways to Overcome Stress
Stress comes in many forms and enters our lives through a multitude of channels. How can we deal with such a pervasive force? Clearly, there is no singular solution to such a complex issue, but there are simple steps that work well in the war against stress. Every single day dozens of people come to this blog looking for ways to overcome or counteract the stress they are experiencing. I hope this helps! 100 of my favorite stress busters 1. Forgive yourself for every mistake you’ve ever made. 2. Forgive others for their offenses against you. 3. Stop obsessing…
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The 3 Part Power Source Behind Goal Setting
We all know that goal setting is fundamental to the accomplishment of things large and small. Every super achiever has the ability to set and follow through on their goals. But, have you ever wondered what is actually behind the proven power of goal setting? Whenever a success strategy like goal setting has a proven track record for producing results, it can be advantageous to understand why. By identifying the power source behind goal setting , we immediately gain much greater insight into the value of each step involved. In addition, that understanding can help us to produce our …
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Would More Motivation Help You Accomplish Your Goals?
When we want to accomplish something important, we need to find an effective source of motivation to help move us from wanting to something to actually doing it. Very often motivation is the defining difference between success and wishful thinking because motivation is what compels us to take action. Never, never, never, never give up. ~Winston Churchill Granted, nobody likes to be under too much pressure. But a manageable level of pressure can provide the motivation we need to accomplish incredible things. One good way to provide that extra little push is to establish a timeline for completion. When used …
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Empower Yourself with Positive Self-Talk
It’s no secret that the way we communicate with others has a direct bearing on the quality of our relationships. Our words have the power to encourage or discourage, to build up or tear down. I am sure that we have all experienced the healing power of a kind word along with the pain of…
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Making Friends and Keeping Them
One of the most important features of beginning a new friendship is to not be scared or overly self-conscious. When making friends there is a tendency to make assumptions on what another person may be thinking. A guy may think, “I’d like to go over and talk to her, but she probably wouldn’t be interested in making friends with someone like me.” Meantime she is thinking, “I wonder why he never talks to me, he’s probably just not interested.” When making friends, avoid making assumptions. How can you possibly know what the other person is thinking? Remember, you don’t know them. Why …
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Seeing Your Place in the Big Picture
Imagine that you own a beautiful piece of property on top of a hill and you are going to build your dream house there. As you stand on your hilltop and look around, you realize that you have two completely different views to choose from and they are both spectacular. To the east your view includes a panorama of beautiful meadows framed by forest with the perfect little year-round creek winding through the middle. Can you picture that in your…
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Simple Solutions – 3 Questions to Change Your Life
I love simple solutions to seemingly complex issues, don’t you? So often we seem to complicate the daylights out of things by over-analyzing, dissecting and brainstorming. I gravitate toward simple solutions whenever possible. Asking yourself the right question is one of the simplest ways to shift your thoughts in a positive direction without jumping through a bunch of mental or emotional hoops. What are the right questions that can lead you to find simple solutions? In particular, those that stimulate your mind to consider new possibilities or interrupt old established response patterns. Basically, any question stimulates actions…
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Empty Nest Syndrome – The Other End of Parenting
When we are young, starting a family represents a major shift in focus. It requires us to think about the welfare and happiness of children who look to us for everything. It’s a wonderful and scary transition for young parents, one that involves every thread of their being. It’s amazing how fast we come to identify with…
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Protect Your Emotional Health from Negative Talk
We have scorpions in the forests of southern Oregon where I live, so I am going to use them in an illustrative way to make my point about emotional health. These nasty little critters can slip through the smallest of cracks and have lightning fast stingers. They are bad news on several levels. The sting of most scorpions is not deadly, but the poison they inject is extremely painful and can cause a number of complications. But from time to time they show up inside our house and seeing one walk across your living room carpet is not a comfortable feeling. The emotional poison of negativity Negative talk and conversations that lean in a negative direction are a lot like scorpions, but instead of…
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What’s the Value of Knowing Your Core Values?
Did you know that your personal core values play a huge role in determining whether or not you experience a sense of satisfaction from reaching your goals in life? Did you know that if you don’t take the time to figure out what your core values and standards are, you can easily undermine your own success without…
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Balancing Stress Instead of Being Consumed by It
Have you ever noticed how sometimes you will be going along feeling just fine, then all of a sudden, some little thing pushes you right over the edge? That’s how stress usually hits me. I won’t even have a clue that I’m approaching the stress zone until I respond inappropriately to something. Then there are those super resourceful times, you know the ones, when nothing seems to faze you and you feel almost stress proof. It’s like you can handle anything without getting the least bit rattled. In fact, I’m like that so much of the time that it really surprises me when I lose it over …
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Persistence and the Mule In The Well
This is a story about the persistence of an old mule. Sometimes when things look hopeless, it is shear persistence that can save the day. In fact, of all the qualities that can see you through tough times, persistence might be unmatched. Here’s the story… There was a farmer who owned an old mule and one day that mule fell into a dried out, abandoned water well. After assessing the situation carefully, the farmer reluctantly concluded that neither the mule nor the …
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Personal Development – Seeing and Believing
Our sense of sight is such an incredibly powerful source of input that we believe what we see even if everyone else thinks we are crazy. Once a picture has been uploaded to our brain, as far as we are concerned, it represents reality. We can use this analogy to illustrate a powerful personal development tool that we all came hardwired with. …