You’re probably bombarded by messages like “Don’t do this” or “Don’t do that” on a daily basis by media or by some other source.  While that sort of thinking might work to help you keep rules and regulations in mind, it’s not a very healthy outlook to keep for the other factors of your life.

The Power of Positive Thinking

As kindergarten as it might sound, thinking good and happy thoughts actually affects your outward disposition and behavior.  Job applicants are the most popular anecdotal example because those who think positively and believe that they will get the job are a lot more relaxed and confident.  Your behavior is a psychological aspect of yourself, so changing the way you look at things will definitely affect the way you walk, talk, and act.

And it’s not all about just thinking good things that makes a difference.  When you think positively and, say, imagine yourself achieving your goal, you keep yourself focused on the finished line.  Thus, your actions are more probable to bring you one step closer to that finish line.  When you think positively despite setbacks or difficulties, you keep yourself from getting distracted with negative comments, and you get back on the road a lot more quickly.

Visualize and Affirm

You can break down positive thinking into two components - one that stretches from the time you prepare yourself to the time you actually work for a goal and another for the period of time after you have made your effort.

Before you set out to meet the challenge, set a clear goal and visualize yourself achieving that goal.  In your head, see yourself making that grade or winning that competition.  See yourself shaking the boss’ hand as he tells you that you just got yourself the promotion.  Imagine yourself crossing that finish line victorious.  You might call it mere fantasy, but it’s actually very effective preparation.  It helps you tune out the small, irrelevant, and insignificant disturbances to allow you to focus more on where you want to go and how you can get there.

If you managed to reach your goal, celebrate.  Congratulate yourself.  It sounds like gloating, but it’s actually affirmation because you’re telling yourself that you did a great job and was, thus, able to achieve the goal.  Affirm the good traits you brought out and positive actions that you did.  Tell yourself that you were confident.  Tell yourself that you were focused.  Doing so makes it easier to tap into those same things the next time around.

If you don’t reach your goal, on the other hand, affirm and use positive language nonetheless.  Don’t tell yourself that you didn’t place first in the race.  Tell yourself that you won second, and that you’d like yourself to go faster and stronger next time.  You give yourself congratulations for whatever you were able to achieve while at the same time provide a strong motivation for practice and improvement.

Have you tried reading but you end up reading one line over and over again or you end up staring at a page for a considerable length of time?  This could be frustrating if you’re trying to study for an exam or you are trying to rush a work for a deadline.  Have you experienced talking to someone and finding your thoughts wandering?  Have you experienced sitting in class and finding out that an hour has passed and you didn’t hear any word that your professor said?  Concentrating can be a challenged for some people.

What is Concentration?

Simply put, concentration is a person’s ability to focus his thoughts in a particular direction for a considerable time without getting distracted by other things.  Everyone has the ability to concentrate.  Some people are quite good with concentrating.  There are people though who find it quite difficult to focus their attention in one particular thing without their thoughts wandering.  This can be quite frustrating.  If you find difficulty concentrating, you need to practice and develop your concentration skills.

Your ability to concentrate may depend on a lot of factors.  It can depend on your commitment to your work.  It can also depend on your enthusiasm for a project, an assignment, or a work.  If you don’t know how to go about doing the job, you might be quite disinterested and end up losing your concentration.  If you have problems and you are tired and stressed out, you’d have problems concentrating.  If the place is not conducive to concentrating, you might not be able to concentrate on your work at all.

Tips on How to Improve Your Concentration

If you want to improve your concentration skills, here are some tips that you can follow:
a.    Redirect your thoughts.  When you find your thoughts straying from what you should be concentrating on, redirect it.  Do not let it wander off.

b.    Set aside distracting thoughts.  Commit a time to what you should be concentrating on.  Do not allow yourself to be distracted by problems or worries.

c.    Setup an award system for yourself.  Promise yourself rewards for maintaining concentration.

d.    Create an inviting and calm environment to allow you to concentrate.

e.    Keep yourself fit.  If you are too sleepy to concentrate, it is highly doubtful if you’d be able to finish a paragraph of a book you’re reading.

f.    Do not force yourself if your mind keeps wandering.  It doesn’t help at all.

Is the office trying to kill you by boredom?  Do you have nothing to do on a beautiful summer morning?  You want to do something that could augment your income part time?  The management suddenly wants you to operate new software, a new product or implement a new process?  You could learn new skills to increase your productivity or maximize the use of your spare time.

Of course, learning something is not easy for many people like me who tend to settle on things that I could do better.  You need to exert effort and spend time to learn things as it happen.  While learning something can be quite fun, you should not waste part of your time, money, and effort in vain.  You should learn something new the ‘right’ way, i.e., forging what you know to attain what you want to learn.

Learn by using what you know

Learning can be a lot more fun and easier if you will try to learn by using what you already know.  If you’re fond of cooking, why not go up another level and learn to bake some cakes and pastries?  It would be lot more fun if you’re not messing up the entire kitchen.  If you know some techniques with some thread, why not try to learn some pattern making technique, like burlap and crochet?  With some basic knowledge on the things you do, you can forget about the hassles of learning it first and concentrate and doing it best.

Familiarity with gadgets and intricacies that comes with a certain skill would come handy if you want to learn another skill.  This is especially true for technical and scientific skills like carpentry and computer programming.  Save yourself from waste of time and save yourself from unwanted accidents by working on something that you can do without injuring yourself.

Do Not Be Afraid

Ultimately, learning something should give you the results you intended.  If you want to learn some bit of carpentry, you should learn how to make simple carpentry projects and not how sharp the saw would cut your fingers.  When you want to learn how to make cakes, you should learn how to mix a good batter, not how to spoil a good one.  By using a skill you have learned before, you can eliminate these and go straight on what is important.  Its important to make sure that learning process, while maybe difficult, is productive.

Do you feel that you are fulfilling your potential?  Are you satisfied with your job and feels like that is what you deserve?  Or do you think that you deserve better?  What you believe about yourself and your capabilities plays a huge role in your success.  If you limit yourself, then you will not try to venture out of the box that you have placed yourself into.  If you think that you can accomplish more, then you would be geared towards accomplishing what you believe you can still achieve.  Most of the time, people who believe that they have more to offer would end up proving the same thing to the world.

Factors to Consider When Determining Your Potential

You cannot sell yourself short.  However, you cannot be too confident.  A fish cannot fly, no matter how much it believes it can.  It can find ways definitely, and perhaps it can do the impossible and succeed, but it takes time.  So, you should be honest with yourself when you are analyzing your potentials.  The first factor that you have to consider is your options.  What are your options?  What is available to you?  Can you create these options?  The second thing that you have to consider is your strengths and weaknesses.  Be honest as much as possible when you analyze your capabilities and limitations.  Finally, the last factor that you have to consider is the resources available to you.  Do you have the things that you might need in order to pursue your potentials?

Tips on How to Fulfill Your Potential

After you have carefully analyzed the factors that would affect your potentials, you can then proceed to making the necessary changes in your life in order to allow room for growth and maximization of your full potential.  Here are some tips on how to fulfill these potentials:

a.               Start with wherever you are.  Do not waste time lamenting on what you think you need or what should be different. Instead, focus on what you have and grow from there.

b.                Focus on your strengths rather than on weaknesses, your success rather than your failure, what you’ve accomplished rather than what you wished you could have done.

c.                 Always make a conscious and wise choice.  Do not shirk from mistakes.  Learn from them.

d.            Have an open mind.  Do not limit yourself to what you believe things should be. Admit to mistakes and open your mind to possibilities.

e.                  Learn to improvise.

Whether you’re a student starting out or a practiced professional, the message that you probably get from the rest of the world sounds something like “Achieve everything.”  Day in and day out, you are bombarded with images of men and women from all over the globe, people who seem to have everything: prestige, position, and of course, money.  And it’s almost certain that, at one point or another, you wanted deep down to be like them.  But believe it or not, your hurried and harried lifestyle in today’s tech-connected and frenetic world might not lead you to the comfortable lifestyle of your dreams. 

Priorities, Priorities

Have you ever wished that you could be in two places at once?

People today want to do too much.  You have to be at a meeting by this time, but only after a family engagement two hours prior, and you have to leave by a certain time to make it to a social gathering afterwards.  All too often, the different aspects of your life – your career, your family, and your social life – have time demands that overlap each other.  At those times, you probably try to be in as many events as possible – to make the most of the time, supposedly – and, thus, feel worn and tired by the end of the day.

Instead of gathering all your appointments and then rushing through as many of them as possible in the course of a day, prioritize.  Set which ones precedence over another.  For example, you could set family reunions ahead of business functions, which could then be set over social gatherings.  Sure, you might not be able to get to as many events as with the other paradigm, but you get to do more and enjoy more at each event because you’re not so pressured with time.

A Change of Pace

The statement that 24 hours is insufficient in a day is a common complaint all over the world.  You’re not the only person who wants to do more, and so you’re not the only person rushing from one meeting to the next, reading papers and writing reports frantically in between.  You probably also bring some work home so you could supposedly do more for the day.  However, a very thin line exists between ‘hardworking’ and ‘overworked.’

Make sure that you take some time to slow down in each day.  Set a certain period, such as the hour immediately after you arrive home from work, to be your time for rest and quality time with the family.  Don’t let your days become just a single continuous blur of work just so you could earn more income because that sort of lifestyle could actually end up endangering your life with stress-related conditions.  Many studies have also proven that you’re sharper and more efficient at work when you take half an hour to an hour’s rest a couple of times throughout the day.  And you can bring that all the way to the boss.

One of the problems that working from home has, is that it is very difficult to differentiate between your personal life and work. It is very easy to get distracted by other members of the family. People at home, look at you as if you are off from work or as if you are not busy. They will ask for a lift or maybe to help them out in cooking, doing the washing or do an errand for them.

On the other hand, working from home might mean that you go to the other extreme and work from early in the morning till very late. When working from home, your office is the room next to your bedroom. There are no opening and closing hours, no colleague to distract you… just working from very early till very late from Monday till Sunday. It’s not easy to strike a balance between the two extremes. The following are some points that might help you benefit from the advantages that working from home has to offer whilst making sure that you don’t over do it.

Define your workspace

This can be easily done, by setting up your office in a separate room. You can maybe stick up a note saying “Office” and maybe the opening and closing hours (joking apart). Such seperation helps you to make the difference between your personal life and your working life. It will help other members of the family to differentiate when you are working and when you are not.

Set schedule

As I have stated above, set the opening and closing hours. Don’t wake up late because there will be no grumbling from your boss. Make sure you stick to the opening hours of your office. This applies to the closing hours. Don’t over do it. Ok fine, if it is a hard day, you need to put some extra effort to help trash more stuff. But don’t do it everyday. You have got a life to live!

Have a comfortable environment

Having a comfortable environment will help you work better and be more productive. It will also make you want to spend time in the working environment. If you have an uncomfortable chair and desk, you will be very tempted to go and work in the next room where the comfortable sofas are waiting for you.

Listen to music

Since you are most of the time alone in a room you will feel like sleeping. Music can help you keep the vibe. I don’t personally listen to music all the time. When I need to concentrate I turn it off. But when I am doing stuff that doesn’t need 100% concentration, I switch on music to help me stay awake, especially in the mornings.

A lot is said about how you can reach your goals. A common tip to reach your goals is to print your goals in a large font and stick them up to wall. This will make sure that every now and then you get reminded of your goals. It is also suggested that you read your goals everyday before you start working. This will remind you what are you aiming for and how does the work that you will do today help you in achieving the goals that you have just read.

Fine… the above are all good suggestions. But still doing the above religiously will not help you in reaching your goals if and only if you don’t own your goals. To own your goals means that the following two attributes must be present:

You have a say in the goal setting process.

Goals which have been imposed on you by an authority without even consulting you in the goal setting process tend to result in lack of ownership. It is vital to have a say in the goal setting process, since after all you are the person that is going to work towards that goal. The fact that you are allowed to state how difficult it is to reach a goal, propose ways and means how to reach a goal and define a deadline for a goal will make you work harder to reach what you have in the first place proposed.

You really want to reach a goal.

During the goal setting process, you have limited information on which you can decide on. Things sometimes do not go as planned and variables change, making it harder to meet deadlines and achieve goals. Having real desire in meeting goals means that you are flexible enough to accept changes and adapt yourself accordingly. While adapting yourself you might have to work extra hours, invest extra money or take extra risks.

Goal ownership really makes a difference. When you feel that you own something, you will push the limits and work hard for what you own. Now stop and think… look at the goals that you have stuck to your wall or monitor… be honest and say whether you really own them

It simply happens to everyone… we get bored of our everyday routine and we feel like not doing anything. Going through such a period in life is normal. The day seems to stretch itself and be longer than usual. But how do you go about to motivate yourself and get back that momentum that you used to have?

During such periods, instead of trying to force yourself in getting things done, I suggest that you be very selective in what you do. You should choose one item that you feel like doing but which has quite a high priority. The most important thing is that you feel like doing it. Make yourself think that the task that you have selected is the only thing that you aim to achieve that day. With that in mind you will get motivated to trash the task away so that you have the rest of the day off. From my experience, I can tell that after you finish off the task you will spend something like 10 to 20 minutes admiring the fact that you managed to break the chain and started moving again. Telling the truth, it is interesting that the above technique really works. What seems to be very difficult to get past, is so easy to beat with the right technique.I manage to get past tough periods of my life where I feel very bored and uninspired with the above technique. I would like to hear what you think of it. Have you ever tried it? Did it work? If not, what works for you?

Last week, I went to a leading consumer appliance store to buy a home appliance. I asked for help because I could not make up my mind on which appliance to choose out of two in particular. A young salesman approached me and started what seemed to me like a pre-learned keynote speech saying things like…

“Sir we are not like our competitors. We here value our customers.” - It was in the first place why I went to the store because I thought that they value me. But he made me ask myself, “Why is he emphasizing it? Maybe it’s not true and he wants me to believe it is?”

“Unlike our competitors we will replace your broken appliance if it is still in the warranty period.” - That is the definition of warranty no? I mean if something breaks down within the period of warranty it should be either fixed or replaced. But yet again he made me ask myself why is he emphasising it?

To cut a long story short, I thanked the salesman for his help and left the store. With the new questions that the salesman made me ask I felt that I’d better get some trusted advice from a couple of close friends.

This experience made me think and from it we can all learn that, when we speak we are instilling feelings in our listeners, be they a family member, friend, or colleague. The feelings that we instil in the people we are addressing are associated with us and what we say. In the case of the salesman, he instilled in me negative feelings which I automatically associated with the store he was representing.

On the other hand if you speak positively, people will associate positive feelings with you and what you do. Hence, next time when you speak, keep in mind what feelings you want to instil in your listeners and speak accordingly.

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