Tag Archive for: personal growth

"Zoe's perspective of minimalism is pure joy. She brings years of experience as a mother and a wife to the table, paired with an ongoing love of the simpler life."--Brian Gardner, Founder of No Sidebar

"Minimalism for Families is a must-read for anyone wanting to explore minimalism but feels held back by 'having a family.' Zoe, a mother of four and a military wife, gives approachable, practical, actionable and direct advice. If you follow the guide set forth in Minimalism for Families, you'll be able to declutter every room in your house and maintain your simplified home once it's achieved."-- Rebecca Shern, MPH, RDN, Creator of minimalwellness.com

"Zoe Kim has written a book on minimalism for families that is practical, encouraging, and motivating. And I'm glad she did--we need more guidance like this in the world today."--Joshua Becker, founder of Becoming Minimalist

 

Organizing your home and leading a minimalist lifestyle can seem like a daydream for busy families―but it’s possible! Designed for families who want to declutter and embrace minimalism into their life and home, Minimalism for Families lays out a room-by-room strategy to conquer chaos and show your family how much more time, space, and energy you gain when you live with less.

Minimalism for Families contains:

  • An Introduction to Minimalism covering essential information including what minimalism is, its lifestyle benefits, and how to adopt and integrate the mindset into your life
  • A Plan for Every Room providing practical and realistic strategies for decluttering your family home one room at a time
  • Tips for Team Effort tactics for getting your family on board with minimalism, plus approaches to address resistance to minimalism as a lifestyle

Minimalism for Families features techniques to declutter and tidy up every room: Living Areas, Kitchen, Bedrooms, Home Office, Bathroom, Basements, Attics, and Other Storage Spaces.

Clean up your family home for a clear purpose with Minimalism for Families.

 

About the author:  Zoë Kim stumbled upon voluntary simplicity and minimalism 6 years ago through Zero Waste Home. She's a regular mom of four who found herself stressed and exhausted, spending more time doing things with her stuff than doing things with her family. It was in that stress and exhaustion that her desire to live lighter was born. As she shed her layers of possessions she began to see the real cost of her stuff—and it was way overpriced!

Zoë Kim is the creator of The Minimalist Plate, a website that inspires families to own fewer possessions to make room for what matters most. She is also a contributor at The Huffington Post and No Sidebar.

She is passionate about helping other families let go of what’s weighing them down so they can find and experience the freedom in owning less.
She lives outside Atlanta with her family.

 

Available from Amazon or The Book Depository

Yes those are affiliate links.  If you buy the book through them
I will make several cents - with thanks.  It all helps!

It is commonly understood that to exercise mastery on one's emotions is to master life itself. Developing emotional mastery goes a long way beyond just being less reactive to upsetting situations to being able to create a steady flow of positive healthy emotions on a regular basis, impacting every aspect of our lives. When we change the way we see things, the things we see change.

Emotional mastery or emotional intelligence is simply being aware and able to manage, control and understand one's own emotions and behavior and understand the emotions and behavior of others around us.

Here are seven ways to develop master your emotions:

1. Conscious Breathing: Just as your breath changes under emotional duress, conscious breathing can help you manage your emotions. Panicky breathing puts the body in a tense state, increasing heart rate, creating a state of anxiety. Deep relaxed breathing, reduces the heart rate, evens out blood pressure, gets more oxygen into your system and has an overall calming effect on the body.

2. Movement: Emotional mastery comes with having control over and being able to create emotional states in the body. The fact that emotions are "feelings" tells us that emotions live inside our bodies. Certain body postures are associated with people who, for example, are depressed, and other body postures are associated with people who are ecstatic.

The facial feedback hypothesis in psychology, proves the release of dopamine in the brain, when an individual is smiling, creating a wave of 'happy' even when sad.

Just moving around the body, exercising, running, dancing is enough to shift your mood tremendously.

3. Refocus: What we focus on becomes bigger, in essence we fuel the thoughts we choose to focus on, magnifying the feeling behind the thought. By simply shifting our focus to move past the event, or to a more pleasant thought associated with the experience, we expand that pleasant feeling thought, and thus shift our emotional state.

4. Reframing: looking at the situation from a different perspective. Before settling on one and only one story that 'THIS is how it is', find other ways of looking at the situation. It is not mere talk that every cloud has a silver lining. This is how optimism is cultivated. See things from a different angle, one that eases your mind than tenses you up more. It's worth spending time on changing the way we feel, cause one change doesn't go in vain, it effects our future reactions as well.




5. Gratitude: Cultivating an attitude of gratitude is life transformational. Being grateful is like putting on special glasses they bring to light all the blessings in life, which were otherwise overlooked and never appreciated, even during the most trying times. Habituating appreciation for not just the things in your life but even so much as attempting to see good in everyone and everything can be empowering in shifting the way you look at things.

6. Never Assume: The point of the matter is that an emotional reaction is simply a physical reaction to a given situation based on the beliefs you harbor in your subconscious that was a result of a previous encounter of a similar experience. An example of this could be 'There is something wrong with me, that at every job, my colleagues don't like me '. This is a belief that is made strong every time a colleague forgets to greet you, or reply to your email. There is a lesson behind every emotional reaction, and to master emotions, one should cultivate the curiosity to understanding the root or core belief that pushes you to react in a certain way. Emotional reactions can teach us something about ourselves that when understood and changed can avoid similar reactions in the future.

7. Meditation: Emotional mastery goes hand in hand with self-mastery. At the core of self mastery is self awareness. Meditation is a great tool to objectively view emotions, thoughts, events and behaviors. Meditation simply inculcates the ability to become the awareness behind a thought, than the thought itself. It distances the person from the emotion or thought, in essence the observed becomes the observer, distancing from the emotion and gaining an understanding of where it arises from. Meditation quietness and brings the mind to an altered state of awareness where things make sense and where one experiences overwhelming states of calm, tranquility, peace and relaxation. Meditation however isn't just limited to sitting crossed legged, eyes closed and focused on the breath. Meditation can refer to anything that quietness and focuses the mind, from constant traffic of thoughts to one thing. This can be brought about by creating a pattern by repeating mantras, jogging, listening to music, or simply listening to the breath.

In conclusion, we are in conscious control of how we feel. Developing the ability to deal with, change or create emotions leads to emotional mastery.

Beejal Parmar Founder & Senior Partner, True Aim Solutions

"The better you know yourself, the greater you will succeed, the happier you will be!" We help our clients discover what they need to know about themselves and others to achieve greater success and happiness in their career, business and life by providing various personality assessments and training needs analysis.

>>> We invite you to take our COMPLIMENTARY 3-minute test to discover the secrets of your personality and receive the FREE 'Personality Success Keys Guide'. Please take a moment to visit our website: http://PersonalitySuccessBlueprint.com

With the new year just around the corner, there are three powerful tips I'd like to share with you that'll not only make this your best year ever, but will lay the essential groundwork for abundance and prosperity beyond your wildest dreams for you and your loved ones in the years to come.

Here they are:

Powerful Tip #1 - Get your health in order.

In his book "The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules for Making Money", the infamous P. T. Barnum wrote:

"The foundation of success in life is good health: that is the substratum fortune; it is also the basis of happiness. A person cannot accumulate a fortune very well when he is sick. He has no ambition; no incentive; no force. Of course, there are those who have bad health and cannot help it: you cannot expect that such persons can accumulate wealth, but there are a great many in poor health who need not be so."

How true...

Good health *is* the very foundation upon which wealth is built.

As a matter of fact...

As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it in his book "The Conduct of Life":

"The first wealth is health."

Because, as he went on to explain:

"Sickness is poor-spirited, and cannot serve any one: it must husband its resources to live. But health or fullness answers its own ends and has to spare, runs over, and inundates the neighborhoods and creeks of other men's necessities."




Hmmm...

Just about says it all, doesn't it? 🙂

The bottom line is...

Just as it'd be far easier for you to build a house when you're healthy than when you're not...

Wealth, success, happiness, and love are a whole heck of a lot easier to "build" when you're healthy than when you're not.

It's that simple. 🙂

Powerful Tip #2 - Decide what you want to be when you grow up.

Let me ask you...

When you think of Bill Gates, what do you think of?

Software, right?

When you think of Warren Buffet, what do you think of?

Investments, right?

When you think of Michael Dell, what do you think of?

Computers, right?

When you think of Donald Trump, what do you think of?

Real estate, right?

When you think of Sam Walton, what do you think of?

Discount stores, right?

When you think of J. K. Rowling, what do you think of?

Books, right?

When you think of Ray Kroc, what do you think of?

Fast food, right?

When you think of Wayne Huizenga, what do you think of?

Garbage, right?

When you think of Oprah Winfrey, what do you think of?

Television, right?

When you think of Tiger Woods, what do you think of?

Golf, right?

Now...

Think about it...

Besides having "a lot" of money, by most anyone's standards, what do *all* these "rich" folks have in common?

The answer?

Simple...

They all made their "money", at least initially, just as all great fortunes have been made, in *ONE* business or profession, *NOT* ten different businesses or professions, *ONE* business or profession.

In other words...

They got rich by deciding what they wanted to be when they grew up, choosing the *ONE* business or profession they wanted to be in, and then they focused on that *ONE* business or profession until they "made it".

Therefore...

If "riches" and "wealth" are what *you* want...

That's *exactly* what you must do as well!

Decide what it is you want to be when you grow up...

Choose the *ONE* business or profession you want to be in...

Then focus *exclusively* on that *ONE* business or profession until you "make it"!

Powerful Tip #3 - Spend more high-quality time with your loved ones NOW!

I can't even begin to tell you how many people have emailed me, over the last several years, telling me they wanted a million dollars so they can spend more time with their loved ones, more often than not their children.

Yep...

I can see it now...

There they are in one room, beating their head against their computer monitor trying to figure out how to make a million dollars on the Internet, while their son or daughter quietly sits in another room wondering why mommy or daddy won't play with them.

Ridiculous?

Sure is.

Farfetched?

Not in the least.

As a matter of fact...

Sadly...

That's *exactly* how the vast majority of people spend their entire lives...

Don't you be one of them!

Here's the deal...

You don't need a million dollars to spend more time with your loved ones.

As a matter of fact...

You don't need any money at all to spend more time with them!

Father and child, pivotal parenting

All you need is to make the commitment and the time to do so.

With that thought in mind...

I wish you and your loved ones the absolute best of holiday seasons and a wealthy, healthy, successful, and happy New Year!
-----
© Tony Mase - All Rights Reserved

Tony Mase is a serious student of the works of Wallace D. Wattles and the publisher of the "The Personal Power Course: Ten Lessons in Constructive Science, Teaching You How to Use Your Own Subconscious Energies for Health, Prosperity and Personal Achievement" ebook by Wallace D. Wattles..

pursuit of happiness

To go by the words of Abraham Lincoln, "most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."

These words find support in what the famous psychologist Richard Lazarus explained in his Cognitive Mediational Theory(1991). In this theory, Lazarus proposed that the most important aspect of any emotional experience is how the person interprets, or appraises the stimulus that causes the emotional reaction. in simple terms, the happy man is he, who thinks he is.

Nobody's life is hunky-dory all the time. Every person has to face trials and tribulations, go through difficult times. He indeed, is wise, who chooses to put on the glasses of optimism and faith and interprets the events of his life as positively as humanely possible.

Life, if you look at it this way, is not a race. It is a hurdle race. You can't question the presence of hurdles. They will be there, for that's the nature of the sport. If you bang your head on the hurdles and try to remove them out of your path, you going against the flow, attempting the illogical and the fruitless.

Not just that,you are not putting your heart and soul to win the race, for your focus has actually slipped into some other territory. There is no way you are going to win in this manner. If you lose your strength at the sight of a hurdle, and ask "why such things happen to me all the time, WHY ME?", you yourself are delaying your victory.

Again, if you just sit there, waiting for the hurdle to disappear, you are only deceiving yourself.

Not just the best, but the only option you have is to jump over the hurdles, as and when they come, without creating any fuss.

It often helps if you are a person deeply connected to nature. Feeling low? Well then go smell the flowers, let the breeze kiss your hair, leave your slippers on the porch and let your feet feel the moist grass, savour the delightful courtship dance of the butterflies, go out in the sun and let the blameless blue of the winter sky be your confidante, let the zephyr carry your message to that distant companion. Go, fall in love with nature.

Learn to appreciate the beauty that the mundane things of everyday life have to offer. Just imagine life without the things you take the most for granted. You will know their value then.




Maintain a gratitude journal. list all those things, people and moments in it that had made you smile someday and that make your everyday life worth living. It can be your coffee mug, or a compliment your teacher paid you that fine day, anything. When you are low in spirits, just flip through its pages, and you will have a hundred and one things to be happy about.

It is often seen that people find it easy to forgive, but not to forget. What we don't understand is, forgiveness is incomplete in such a scenario. By repeating emotional episodes over and over in our mind, we inadvertently etch them in our memory. So, the key is to let go, to not think at all about anything unpleasant that we have been through.

Equally important is to first know ourselves. It is always desirable to keep the doors of improvement open, but we also need to learn to distinguish between comments that are credible and that are not. If you have put on a white dress and a friend of yours with black sunglasses comes and tell you that the black dress you have worn does not look good on you, and on top of that, you get upset on hearing that... well, to say the least, nothing can be more ridiculous.

Not to forget, nothing succeeds like success and the high one gets out of achievement is just unmatched.

Have a clearly defined goal, make sure it is challenging enough but realistic and put in every possible effort to achieve it. If you are able to achieve it, well and fine. If not, you did not lose either, in the actual sense of the term, for in the process, you actually grew as a person and learnt things you not have, had you not been in pursuit of the goal. At least you will not be amongst those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.

Last, but not the least, cultivate a taste for literature, for poetry. It will be with you when nobody else is. Go, live your days of happiness!!!!

Sudha Shashwati is a psychology major in University of Delhi and considers positive psychology to be her niche. She is an out and out humanistic psychologist, a hopeless romantic and a shouting optimist. When not drowned in literature, she loves spreading sunshine around through her writings at http://thelidislifted.blogspot.in

Here are some thoughts for finding and experiencing joy in your life. If there were one thing I could wish upon my family, friends and the readers of this [article], it would be joy in everything they do!

Know your purpose. Nothing will bring you joy more than knowing what it is that you are about on this earth. Not knowing brings sadness, wondering, fear and lack of fulfilment. Above all, find out what your unique purpose is here on this earth - then fulfil it! As you do, you will experience joy!

Live purposefully. This is a follow up to number one. It is one thing to know your purpose, but then you need to live according to that purpose. This is a matter of priorities. Let your actions and schedule reflect your purpose. Don't react to circumstances and let them cause you to live without your purpose fully in site. Living without your purpose will cause frustration. Living purposefully will bring you deep satisfaction and joy!

Stretch yourself. Don't settle into the status quo. That will leave you unfulfilled. Always look to stretch yourself. Whatever you are doing, stretch yourself to do more! Stretching yourself will break the limits you have set for yourself and will cause you to find joy in your expanded horizons!

Give more than you take. It brings happiness to accumulate. It brings joy to give away. Sure, getting the car you worked hard for will bring you a sense of satisfaction and even happiness. But it won't bring you joy. Giving something away to the less fortunate will bring you deep, abiding joy.

Surprise yourself, and others too. The words here are spontaneity and surprise! Every once in a while, do the unexpected. It will cause everybody to sit back and say, "Wow, where did that come from?" It will put a little joy in your life, and theirs.

Indulge yourself sometimes. Too much indulgence and you are caught in the happiness trap. Looking for the next purchase, celebration etc to bring you a little "happiness high." But if you will allow yourself an infrequent indulgence as a reward for a job well done and a life well lived, you will appreciate the indulgence and experience the joy of it.

Laugh a little - no, a lot! Most people are just too serious. We need to laugh a little - no, a lot! Learn to laugh daily, even if you have to learn to laugh in bad situations. This life is to be enjoyed! The next time you go to the movie rental store, get a comedy and let loose! Let yourself laugh!

Joy can be yours! Look for it, pursue it and enjoy it!

.........................................................
Chris Widener is an internationally recognized speaker, author and radio host. He is the author of five books and audio series as well as over 350 success articles. If you would like to order Chris' products, including his Newest Release, The Angel Inside as well as Live the Life You Always Dreamed Of, The Secrets of Influence or his CD series, The Extraordinary Leaders Seminar go to http://www.chriswidener.com or call 800-929-0434.

CHANGE BY CHOICE OR YOU'LL HAVE NO CHOICE BUT TO CHANGE

One of the most effective ways in dealing with stress is to change by choice. You see, if you don't change by choice, sooner or later, you'll have no choice,but to change. What do we mean by this? Our own conscious mind is constantly giving us feedback. It's like a barometer. How we're tracking in our life.

We need to look at this both in our personal life and we can look at it in business life to make things more effective and give us more options. When you change early, you have many options available and the job is easier. While we tend to resist change, let's face it, change is the only constant. Night changes into day, day into night. We change our clothes every day. We change the food we eat.

pivotal change

These are things that are easy to do, but when it comes to more serious things in our life, we tend to stick to our old ways because it takes more effort to make those changes. Let's look at it more in our personal life to begin with. What if you're put on a few kilograms, if you'd take note of this, your own conscious mind is giving you a signal, manifesting as a physical sense in your body that what you're doing isn't working.

It's easier to reign in when it's just a few kilograms, but if you ignore it, and the weight becomes more of a problem, it becomes a harder task, doesn't it? Also, other health problems may come into play. Then you not only have to make changes with how you're dealing with food, but now you have to change how you're going to deal with these other health problems. This compound becomes more difficult. Your options become restricted.

What do you do about if you know you need to lose weight? Instead of changing to the next fad diet that comes along, you need to change the relationship you have with food, because you know the last 20 diets didn't work, so why would you expect something different? If you have aches and pains in your body and you have a belief that it's just your age or it's just a part of your life and you adhere to this, and maybe it's even reinforced by other people telling you the same thing. The same limiting beliefs.

What if you were to change the way you think about. What if you will do things to become more flexible? Develop a more flexible body, and usually a flexible body and a flexible mind go hand and hand. Just as the same as a rigid body and a rigid mind go hand in hand and we get stuck in our ways.

As things get worse, become more complicated, our options become fewer. To the point where you have no more options. You either change or you pass a tipping point where nothing else can be done. By developing a flexible body and a flexible mind, this allows you to bend more before you're going to break. Work easier, cope with stress more effectively.




If you're suffering with stress, if you don't do the necessary things to deal with stress, then as the systems become overloaded, it could turn into anxiety if you don't deal with this effectively and pull it back to normal states of stress.

The final stage, when the resources run out more and more, this can lead into depression. This is when all resources have run out and the unconscious mind says, "I have nothing else available to you."

Let's look at this in the business world. There are always disruptors. We're seeing it in the transport industry at the moment, and the resistance to women in the boardroom, from those trying to adhere to the old ways, "We have always run the system, and we won't change. If they don't change, they'll have no more options and soon they'll be out of business.

To give you an example from a book of Forbes which is going back a few years now but it's still quite relevant. In 1987, Forbes celebrated their 70th anniversary and they put out a list of the top 500 companies. By the year 2000, just 13 years later, more than half of those companies were out of business. These were the companies that refused to change. They rested on their laurels and thought, "We've been successful. We don't need to change."

Any company that thinks "We've always done it that way, we're not going to change because this is a way it is and we've been running the industry are in for a rude shock. Well, the disruptors have always been there. Go way back to Gutenberg. The invention of the printing press. Look how amazing the invention of the printing press was, what a great disruptor it was at the time, but how it empowered people so much.

Nowadays, we have modern day disruptors. In the transport industry, and in the accommodation industry. Those that try to hold on those old ways, those who resist change, eventually get squeezed out because their options become fewer and fewer. Instead of resisting, play the same game, learn what the new rules are. When you take action early, this eliminates the stress because the bigger the problem gets, the more stress is involved. Then you've got to start putting more things into play to the point where you either change by choice or have no choice but to change.

Many people have the attitude that "If only the world would change, my life would be better".




You see, when you change, you alter the dynamics, so people, circumstances and events have no choice but to change. This empowers you to influence things for the better.

Over the next few years, 40% of jobs are just going to disappear. What are you going to do to stay ahead of the game? You need to be constantly looking, how can I improve things, how can I tweak this, what changes do I need to make NOW

SO, YOU HAVE THREE OPTIONS:

1. Do nothing, hold on to your limiting beliefs, and think you have no control over things.

2. Wait for the inevitable, to the point where you really do have no option but to change.

3. Change early, when you first get the sign, empower yourself, and take control of your life.

WHAT YOU NEED TO DO

Start looking at things in your life. Take notice of what your unconscious mind is telling you. These things that are manifesting in your life. Learn to read your barometer, know what to leave and what to change. Change early, change by choice or know that you eventually have no choice but to change.

Which choice are you going to choose?

Copyright 2016

Ray Goslin is the founder of Allstressmanagement.com Specialising in stress and pain management systems which allows you to Change by Choice with the "Lifestyle By Design Project" For more information go to https://allstressmanagement.com