Hello again folks. Its been a while since I’ve bent your electronic ears with some of my hyper positive cheer leading, so I figured I’d come back and discuss a subject we all need help with at various points in our life – Confidence.

When you get down to it, nothing in life is more important to your individual success than confidence in yourself, your goals and your abilities. If you seek success in a group project, you must have confidence in your team and your coaches which in turn must also have confidence in you. We all like talking about that moment when we are truly confident in ourselves and (almost) our actions, so FIRST let’s talk about that least desirable part of our own quest for confidence. I mean that part in the beginning when you don’t have much confidence at all.

Most of us have heard one person over time mention that sometimes you gotta fake it till you make it. I’m not breaking news by mentioning it here. That said, in your quest for bullet proof, unflappable, no doubt,  REAL confidence (part 3 of this series) the truth is that you have to start out fake. Completely FAKE.

Before you get all high and mighty on me, let me tell you this: if the alternative to faking it is to have zero confidence, I would gladly choose to have “fake confidence” for a few months while I build some real confidence. OK So how do you fake confidence?

Exaggerate! Exaggerate your abilities, your skills, your everything. This is different than boasting or bragging about yourself although from the outside it might look the same to a third person. It’s about doing some positive self-talk to yourself in a bid to put up high your morale and reinforce your self-image which is crucial to confidence. Look in the mirror and tell yourself – “sure you can do that!”.

Let’s be honest here, when you are building confidence, a mirror is the first place to start because that person is the only one who will listen to you. Choose a thing that you want to increase your confidence in and start telling people you are better at it than you are. When other people know that you have (said you have) skills in a certain area, they will start expecting you to demonstrate those skills. Here comes the important part. That pressure will cause you to study and work on that skill so that when you are eventually called on to demonstrate it, you will have something to show.

Something? Oh yeah, at first when you do something new, you are not going to be a champ at it but you are better off than you were before you did it and you have a new baseline to build confidence upon. To put it in another way, the next time you do it, if you do it a little better you will be more confident in your ability.

Those lessons are painful up front guys but all the rejection or falling on my face all seem funny when I look back on them with a confident mind so the trip was definitely worth the pain.

One of the biggest human shortfalls is the easiness to lose perspective in moments of crisis or adversity. Most problems whether global or local, large or small,collective or individual are linked with this issue of perspective. The way we look at any given situation or problem determines whether we fail and succumb to its pressure or succeed in creatively find a solution to it.

Perspective is the way we see things and filter our reality. Reality is not seen as it is although this is naively and implicitly assumed in our conceptual model of the world.

The Gap we fill in our Heads

There is always a gap between objective reality and the way it is represented in our heads through concepts and mental models. That gap is filled by the many assumptions, presuppositions and categorizations we use to speedily make sense of the noisy and incomplete picture of the reality around us.

For example you are doing your usual jog in the park when you arrive at a part where you see flashing red and blue lights round a bend behind some trees and bushes. You quickly make a mental picture of it. You conclude that it is probably an unfortunate case of an ambulance with paramedics assisting a jogger who had a heart failure. You come to this conclusion partly informed by the fact that you have seen quite a number of 65+ joggers using the park before and you have also heard of a similar case happening lately. This is your interpretation based on partial information and past cases.

You could also conclude that it is a police car on a crime scene owing to the fact that you have witnessed a similar case in the same park two years a go. You also know that the area around the park is dodgy, the hour is late and such accidents are not infrequent.

So our perspective sometimes depends on things that although can lead us to a correct judgment in a probabilistic kind of way, they are not always based on truthful premises but rather on partial fragments on information and past experiences. It is also influenced by our motivation of the moment. Our emotional predisposition will lead us to interpret one scenario as against another possibly skewing our perspective as we do so.

Distorted Realities

There are a million examples of how perspective influences and determines our perception of the world in everyday life but I wish to focus on one particular situation which I think we all fall victims to: Our perception of the scale and durability of a problem when we face temporary setbacks.

We all have experienced this on many occasions in our life: Everything is going fine until something happens that totally disrupts our momentum. We then fall prey to worrisome thoughts and finally end up feeling stuck and helpless.

The biggest problem we face in these situations is not one of resources, fortune or fate. The problem is one of perspective.

The general tendency is to believe or think that the predicament or downturn we are experiencing is not a temporal one but a permanent one. This is of course false but it shows how our perspective on things get skewed when we are stressed or anxious about some problems. We momentarily lose touch with reality and with it we lose our ability to think straight and see the full facts as they are.

Our mental model of reality becomes jumbled up and our focus debilitated. We become immobilized with fear and our creative resources blocked. The inability to see past the present circumstances is a very natural human fallibility.

So the question is: How do we train ourselves to become expansive in moments in which we are naturally inclined to feel stuck & limited? How do we shake ourselves awake from the illusion that we are stuck with a problem forever?

Ask, Allow and Imagine:

I would like to present 3 tips one can follow when we are feeling stuck or anxious about a problem:

1. Ask yourself a few questions: Can this problem be solved? Did I solve similar or bigger problems before? Am I all alone in this or are there people I can turn to for help and advice? Is this problem caused by circumstances which are related to a particular moment in time? Is this problem as serious as it seems?

2. Do not try to solve the problem. This may sound paradoxical but the thing is that as we ceaselessly try to control and act on the problem we create more stress and hence limit our creative powers. Instead of trying just allow it to be for a while. Just ask yourself to find a creative solution to it and let it flow without straining yourself to apprehend or find answers to it. You will notice that by allowing it to settle you will relax and finally the solution will come intuitively and spontaneously. Your subconscious mind would have had the time to work on it without the constant interruption of your conscious mind trying to gain control.

3. And finally visualize the problem as being just a minor patch in a long stretch of timeline. Visualize yourself in a week or month’s time being completely past the problem and surmising to the fact how you managed to creatively get past the dip.

Procrastination is certainly a malaise that afflicts the vast majority of people from time to time in all areas of life.

Some people find procrastination more difficult to overcome at work, some others in dealing with home chores, financial and organizational matters or just about anything that entails a little effort to sort out.

A lot of stuff has been written about the subject tackling it from different angles such as:

1. Defusing counter-productive beliefs that sabotage your efforts

2. Being aware of those inner fears that immobilize you into action and

3. Practical approaches that help you overcome procrastination such as positive self-talk, visualization, affirmations, etc.

These are all valuable and effective methods to deal with procrastination as has been proven time and time again by people from all walks of life.

However the truth is that there is a mission key without which the above methods are rendered futile and ineffective. This is the element of readiness or the do it now factor.

It took me some time to appreciate this. What was frustrating me before that, was the fact that I had grasped the methods but was still not translating them in practice. Something was missing.

If you want to do something– Do it Now

It’s a small easy step really but a critical one. You can have the right knowledge, the best planning, the right goals and the right motivation but if you do not have the readiness to start now sometimes all those things turn to nothing.

I had learnt that the most effective way to beat procrastination is to start doing something even if you feel a lot of resistance towards it. This is because the biggest resistance and inertia stands between you not doing the action and you taking the action. Once that gap is closed, by taking the first step, the resistance drastically drops down and your willingness and motivation shoots up.

We all know what this means. How many times did we put off doing a particular task but then once we put our hands to it, we happily pushed through it like a breeze?

Sometimes we keep putting off things and bringing up excuses. Some other times we even understand our unwillingness to do something and know what are the problems causing our procrastination. But even more often we overlook the fact that it is our readiness to start off the deal that is the biggest hurdle.

Once we set things in motion, the rest flies

So next time you procrastinate about doing something and find yourself struggling hard to start off something, just bring to mind that it all gets easier once you start doing it.

The mind creates an illusion of how difficult, boring, distasteful and unrewarding the task is, but that bubble is burst once the task is initiated.

This is a guest post by Henri Junttila at WakeupCloud

We all cry after inspiration. If you’re a blogger, you probably feel like there isn’t enough to go around, but what you don’t know is that there is an infinite amount of it floating all over the place. All you have to do is tap into it and that is exactly what you will learn to do in this article.

Why wait for something that is all around you? I have an abundance of ideas jotted down and more coming to me all the time. The more open you are to new possibilities, the more “ideas” you will receive.

There is no right way to go about this, so this article is meant as a suggestion only, because what works for me may not work for you. Try the tips in this article and see how they feel. They might give rise to new methods of grabbing inspiration. When that happens, make sure you share it with us!

3 Ways to Be Inspired

1. Meditation. Sitting down for 10-15 minutes of meditation is one of the best ways to be inspired whenever and wherever you want. Sit down, focus on your breath for 5 minutes and observe the thoughts that pop into your mind. What are you thinking about? Is there a problem looming about that you can write about? The possibilities are endless.

2. Walk. Taking a walk is a time-proven way of clearing your mind. When you clear your mind, you allow inspiration to enter. Remember that saying: if your cup is full, then no more inspiration (information) can enter. Make sure your mind is clear and crisp. You will see that the inspiration has always been there.

3. Listen. Most people miss the fact that inspiration is everywhere because they do not listen. Step out of your mind and your thoughts for a while and enjoy what is right in front of you. Sit in silence as often as you can. A lot of people today are scared of the silence, because they cannot face their mind. Constantly distracting yourself will get you nowhere. Turn everything off and just listen. Let your thoughts pass.

Being Okay with What Is

As I said above, there is no one way to do this. We all want certainty. We want that one method that is guaranteed to work. If there’s one thing that I have learned during my short lifetime it is that nothing is certain.

Listen to your own feelings, thoughts and inspiration. You will most certainly feel inclined to do something. Maybe your thoughts flow when you play ice hockey. Maybe you are struck with inspiration when you talk to people.

Whatever it is, embrace it and use it, because it is there for a reason.

Henri Junttila is a lifestyle superhero and the father of the Wake Up Cloud, a blog about small ideas that produce big results. Subscribe now and follow him on twitter

Ever since I’ve started my personal blog, The Skool of Life,  I have always been an avid user of mind-maps. I love mind-maps because they give you an opportunity to for free form thinking.  When it comes to goal setting, I highly recommend you consider the power of goal setting, autosuggestion, commitment and consistency. I also urge you to give in depth consideration to the question “How often do you decide not to brush your teeth?”  These things will get you really geared up for rapid progress towards your goals. But, let’s talk about dissecting your goals.

No matter what your goal, one of the key components of goal accomplishment is ACTION. Often this is where were get caught up and end up giving up on our goals.  By using a mind map to dissect your goal you’ll find that coming up with actions to make progress towards your goal will be much easier. Let’s take a look at this in 2 concrete examples.

3 Examples of Goals for which I used a Mind-map

Earn 5000 dollars per month in disposable income: One of the things that you’ll find by going through this exercise is that you will brain dump tons of ideas that you didn’t have before.  For example, I recently started posting ads on craigslist for my services and have started to pick up freelance business.

Improved Confidence and Charisma in Social settings: While I’m not antisocial and don’t have any real issues talking to people, it’s definitely an area that I want to master to a point where I have natural charisma. As I dissected this goal more, it made me want to understand characteristics of charismatic people. I also discovered several worthwhile actions to take which included affirmations, visualization, and even listening to some new tape programs specifically focused on charisma.

Using  a Mind-map to Find Your Dream Job: One of the mistakes I’ve seen people make in finding their dream job is that they just use a job title or keywords. But, wouldn’t it make more sense to make a mind-map of all the ideal characteristics of your dream job. When I did this, I got a whole new list of search results and options for positions that interested me.

Implementing this process into your goal setting efforts:

1.    Write down your top 10 goals
2.    Put each goal on a mind-map
3.    Identify a series of actions for each goal
4.    Find the easiest actions you can take immediately
5.    Wash, Rinse Repeat

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this and how you come up with the appropriate actions towards goal setting.

As I was driving to work this morning, car radio tuned in on BBC world news, I listened in complete stupor to the incredible story of an extraordinary man – Geoff Holt.

Geoff has set out to sail across the Atlantic Ocean single-handedly in his sailing yacht ‘Impossible dream’ from the Canary Islands to the Caribbean. There is one slight barrier to his amazing journey – a barrier Geoff has amazingly demonstrating can be leaped over – he is wheelchair bound with limited movements in his arms and hands.

He is already the first quadriplegic sailor to sail around Britain a feat he describes as his ‘personal Everest’. His courage, determination and positive outlook on life are not only admirable and inspiring but truly exemplar. You should listen to this man – his humble words convey an immediate shot of motivation and respect to life.

At the end of his 3000 mile journey, which he describes as truly emotional (no doubt of that), he landed on an Island called Tortola on the British Virgin Islands, specifically to a place called Garden Bay where 25 years ago he had suffered neck injuries during shallow sea water diving – an accident that led him to his disability.

Geoff says that he chose the place because he wants to ‘lay some ghosts to rest’. What is amazing though is that he did not say this in a bitter, repressed kind of way. On the contrary he radiantly tells the BBC journalist that his disability was a blessing in disguise that gave him the amazing opportunity to meet his wife (which was and still is his nurse) and to have a wonderful son, his now seven year old Timothy.

Listening to Geoff as he was being interviewed on the radio was truly inspiring. You could hear the shining splendor of a transformed and enlightened soul beaming through his words. “I am a happy man he exclaimed” and the tone of his voice clearly doesn’t betray his positive state of mind.

Geoff is an outstanding example of strength of spirit, resilience and excellence in human character. He is a living interpretation of the saying: “Life is not what happens to you but what you make out of it”.

Not only did he carry on with his life, marry and build a family after being physically challenged but he set out to reach dreams and adventures with a burning heart.

No doubt that his amazing success came from a strong set of beliefs. “We can achieve anything”, he said “if we truly believe in ourselves and just get out there without being afraid of failing”. Failing is good, it’s an inevitable lesson in life we should wisely embrace and make profit out of it.

Learn more about Geoff on his website.

If you are anything like me then you embraced the words “eat, drink and be merry” during the holidays.  While I didn’t do nearly as much drinking during the holidays, as in years past, the 7 day cruise to Mexico I took with my parents allowed for plenty of eating. In fact there were days when I couldn’t decide between desserts so I’d just order both of them. Sometimes I’d even double up on appetizers. So if you want to eat to your heart’s content I highly recommend a cruise.

Alright, I’ll get back to the point. There’s a good chance that your holiday eating habits were not exactly healthy. Food that you eat is generally buttery, artery clogging wholesome goodness. Add some booze to that and there’s a reason you only eat like this during the holidays (supposedly).  So let’s look at getting back into the swing of a healthy routine.

1. Water: First things first. We want to start flushing all this crap out of the system. In general most people don’t drink enough water.  I had a friend from Denmark who told me that he had stomach problems for a while and by drinking a liter of water a day for 3 months, they all went away.  You might not have stomach problems, but regular consumption of water is a good thing so I recommend keeping some at your desk, in your car, or wherever you are.  Hydrating will refresh your system quite a bit.
2. Fruits: One thing you want to do is incorporate water rich foods into your diet. I learned this from Tony Robbins. Fruits are a great way to do that. As cheesy as the old saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor away” might be there is plenty of truth to that. Many people often get sick after the holidays because their systems are clogged full of crap.  Eat lots of fruits and you can avoid that. Additionally fruits give you a nice energy boost without a crash.
3. Greens: Greens are another thing you want to incorporate into your diet not just after the new year, but on a regular basis. People who eat lots of greens often seem to have lots of energy. There are so many benefits to eating lots of green vegetables that I’m going to leave it to Google to tell you what they are.
4. Ditch Desserts: I love, love, love anything dessert-like. I have a sweet tooth to say the least and on my cruise when I had the options of 7 desserts, I was in such bliss that I would often order two. I can’t honestly tell you I plan on ditching desserts. But, give yourself a few weeks off from the desserts. You’ll be glad you did and you’ll feel more confident in your ability to be disciplined.
5. Ditch Fast Food: I ate quite a bit of fast food in the last few months because it was cheap. But, I plan on eating much healthier now that I have a job. If you must eat fast food, try to stick to something like subway that gives you an opportunity for plenty of veggies and water rich food.
6. Exercise: This should be the most obvious of all. A friend told me once that the simple weight loss formula was “eat less and exercise more.” While I know that’s not the easiest thing for many people and some people aren’t blessed genetically, it’s still worth incorporating into your life. If you do this, you’ll find your overall energy level is higher and you will be happier. Exercise releases endorphins so that will make you happier and allow you to have the energy to focus on what you want to accomplish in 2010.

Talents are the world’s best assets for its future. On a collective and global level, it is in society’s best interest to encourage and nourish new talents through education, training and development programs and other means of knowledge transfer.

It must make sure to provide individuals with adequate and fair opportunities to develop their potential and help them invest in their future. This assures a fair return in social contribution and participation.

On an individual level, it is also in everyone’s best interest to look after themselves and make sure to cultivate and make good use of their talents. There is nothing more dissatisfying than living a life with wasted talents and nothing more enriching than being in perfect line with your true potential.

Unleashing your talent is therefore a superlative prerequisite to excellent living both personally and socially.

One of the most difficult problems in a person’s life is finding one’s true purpose and part of that problem is unleashing hidden talents and making use of them in everyday life.

Here are a few tips which can help to provide the right setting for unleashing and cultivating your talents with the least amount of friction and stress.

1. Identify your talents through awareness and inner focus. This means placing more attention towards inner feelings and motivations and ask yourself questions such as: “What drives me?”, “What type of work or activity puts me in the right mood?”, “what makes me happy and never makes me tired working on it?”

2. Recognize your talents and accept them with an open heart. Sometimes talents are suppressed because of fear of disapproval or social pressure. Be fearless in finding your talents. Talents are pure and powerful. Be grateful for whichever talents you possess.

3. Don’t be judgmental or critical about them. You cannot say “I’m not very good at this” when you haven’t trained or developed it yet. And even if so, you have to give it space to grow more. Criticism and perfectionism can bury a talent instead of developing it.

4. Assess your talents with an analytical mind (not a critical mind) and try to objectively ask practical questions such as: “What is my level of knowledge/expertise in this subject? “What objective do I want to reach with this talent?”, “How long will it take me to develop it and how much time am I ready to invest in it?”, “How can I organize my life around this talent?”.

5. When you are sure you have a talent you want to develop, put it on top of your priority list and declutter your mind from other objectives which are not conducive to helping you develop those talents. Keep it simple and focused.

6. Don’t try to reach too much in one go. Plan it ahead and spread it out over practical and down to earth timeframes.

7. When your heart is resolute to develop a talent, it is important to start now. Often, we recognize what we have to do, how to do it and where to do it but not when to do it. We have all the knowledge and the willingness but not the readiness. Our mind starts deferring it because of some excuse or other. You may not have a perfect start but who does? It’s important to start now.

How to sharpen your talents:

1. Practice, practice, practice: No matter how naturally talented a successful person is, he or she will tell you that there is not other way but to practice. Practice is the key to maintain and improve on your talents.

2. Learn, explore and expand: With so much information freely available about practically anything, it is easy to increase knowledge about your subject. Read books, blogs, articles, watch videos and widen your knowledge. The broader the perspective, the richer your talent will grow.

3. Ask, share and reflect: Networking and leveraging on other people’s knowledge is still one of the fastest and most productive way to learn. Go into forums, online communities, blogs, webinars, whatever, and be open to ask others, share your experiences and most of all stop to reflect on what you learned. Reflection gives you space to cement information into knowledge.

As the bells of the New Year are heard from the distance, we are reminded that a fresh, new start is within our reach. It is far too easy to carry with us the things that troubled us, the habits we’ve developed but regret, and even the excuses we’ve made for what would otherwise be productive.

So what are some ways we can progress into the new year with full intention and dedication towards a fresh, new start? Here are a few things I have done in the past or am currently doing as we speak. Some of them may work for you and some of them may not, but at this point you may as well try them, right?

• Take out a piece of paper and a pen. Now, with the next 5 minutes set aside- sans interruption- make a list of 9 things you accomplished last year. Whether big or small, this should put the last 365 days into perspective and having it on paper in front of you makes it easier to recognize your achievements.

• On the reverse side of the same paper, make a list of the 10 things you’d like to accomplish in 2010. Now, you are already setting 2010 as a year that will surpass that of 2009 in the realm of achievements. Unlike a new year’s resolutions list, this list doesn’t have to be about things you’d like to change, but things you’d like to DO. Be proactive.

• Take a road trip. As I do every holiday season, I get on a plane, in a car, in an RV or on a boat and venture out into the unknown. For me, this has a very therapeutic effect because when I return home after the 1st of the year, I see things from a fresh perspective. If you like spending New Year’s eve and day with friends and family at home, try spending the 1st of the year in a place you’re unfamiliar with.

Change something that you use on a daily basis, whether it’s switching your toothbrush holder from the left side of the sink to the right side or leaning out your entire refrigerator and freezer, making even a small change in your daily routine will break old patterns of thinking. For some this works great, for others, not so much. But again, it can’t hurt to try it!

Ring in the new year with the intention and dedication to start anew. Don’t bother making a list of resolutions, it will only make you feel overwhelmed by the changes you need to make in your life. Instead, acknowledge your successes and motivate yourself to step it up a notch!

Happy New Year!

Happiness is a subject which invokes a lot of interests and a wide range of opinions. It seems that every living person on this planet has some form of opinion of what happiness is or ought to be.

That happiness is desirable is definitely one thing that is universally agreed upon. The diversity of opinions blossoms on how one should reach happiness.

Religion, Science, Philosophy and spiritual disciplines speak of happiness in different lines that diverge in all sorts of directions.

Religion and world philosophies have tried to seek the truth of happiness in the inner and spiritual sphere of human life while recently Science has been trying to study and analyze some common factors that are conducive to, or symptomatic of, happiness.

I thought it would be interesting to gather some well known facts about happiness from different fields and put them together in one list.

Here are a few I picked:

1. Happiness is not dependent or proportional to income. It’s a recorded fact that 37% of people on Forbes’ list are less happy than the average American. From past studies, it has resulted that happiness only varies with income till a certain threshold is reached (approximately average income and quality of life). Beyond that it doesn’t really make a difference.

2. Social conditions such as civic rights and individual freedom are a prerequisite of happiness but not completely necessary. The more a country has civic liberty and just laws, the more its inhabitants tend to be happy. But a lot of exceptions can be found, at least on an individual level if not on a collective one. There are volumes of stories of people who have found happiness and meaning in life in the midst of terrible hardships and injustice.

3. Dan Gilbert, who has researched happiness extensively, tells how lack of choice sometimes begets happiness. In one experiment, people were asked to choose a painting from a set which they could take home for free. Half of them were given the choice to return it and exchange it for another after a given time if they were not happy with it. The others were not given this choice at all. It turned out that those which were not given any choice were most happy with their original choice unlike those which hadn’t.

4. Happiness is more a question of inner predisposition than external factors. In fact several studies have shown that external factors are only 10% responsible for happiness. Inner predisposition such as attitude, relationships and outlook on life make up 50% of this contribution.

5. Social support and meaningful relationships are key ingredients to happiness. People who have strong relationships and meaningful social ties tend to be much happier than those that are secluded, lonely or disconnected.

6. The happiest people are those who are living and working what they are passionate about irrelevant of financial return or compensation.

7. Another key factor to happiness is living your authentic aspirations, free from social pressures and the influence of peer consensus and approval.

8. Physical activity promotes happiness. Certain studies showed that after exercising for 20 minutes, 3 times a week, happiness levels increased by 10-20% in all subjects just after 6 months.

9. Happy people are healthier in general. It is also shown that happy people produce as much as 50% more antibodies than people who are unhappy or depressed.

10. Pets can reduce blood pressure and stress which in turns promotes happiness.

11. People who tend not to take things personally or hold grudges are far happier than those that do.

12. Happiness lies also in appreciation and contentment. It is a well known cliché to find people who have a lot but are eternally dissatisfied with everything and those who possess very little but are happy and grateful for what they have.

13. The world population is on average less than 65% happy.

14. Another known constant in the happiness formula is optimism. Having an optimistic outlook on life can make a whole lot of a difference to how you respond to situations and how happy you can be as a result of that.