8 Small Habits That Make My Daily Life Simpler, Easier and More Effective

 

 

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8 Small Habits That Make My Daily Life Simpler, Easier and More Effective

via The Positivity Blog | Increase Your Happiness and Awesomeness by Henrik Edberg on 4/28/10

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

"First we make our habits, then our habits make us."
John C. Noble

I often write about making big changes in your life. So today I'd like to mix that up and just look at eight small habits that make my life simpler, easier and more effective.

Feel free to use the comments section below to share your own small daily or weekly habits that you have found improves your life, even if it's just a little bit.

1. Keep everything in its place. If everything has its own place then it is whole lot easier to keep your home reasonably ordered and decluttered from day to day. This also helps you with your inner stillness as the outer environment affects how you feel on the inside. I also find it useful to always keep things in their place on me when I'm out and about. The wallet is always in the same pocket and my cell phone is always in the same place. If you have forgotten something and have this habit you'll quickly notice if something is not as usual and you can go back to fetch what you lost.
2. Go food shopping once a week. You'll save time, perhaps some money and I find that I do less impulse buying of unhealthy things too compared to if I go shopping when I am getting hungry.
3. Cook more food than you'll eat. I usually make two or three servings of what am about to eat. This cuts down on time that you spend on cooking and you'll have to do less washing up in general. Plus, it's good to have portions of food to bring to work to save some money. Or to have a meal that you can quickly reheat when you come home from school or work and you are starving.
4. Declutter for a few minutes in the morning. Keeping everything in its place works for the most part. But there is still usually a bit of clutter. You can spend a few minutes in the morning (or after your work day is done) to clean up your workspace, remove old coffee cups and clean up papers and books and put them in their proper place.
5. Write everything down. Otherwise you'll forget about your goals, great ideas or perhaps something funny or fascinating you heard. By writing things down you don't have to occupy your mind with having to remember everything. This lowers stress levels and gives you a clearer mind to use.
6. Pack your bag the night before. This very simple habit can alleviate quite a bit of stress in the morning. If you pack your bag before you go to bed then you don't have to run around in your house half panicked tomorrow while looking for your books or some important papers.
7. Reconnect each day with what you should be doing. On my wall there is a small white board. On the white board there are things written like "keep things extremely simple" and "stick to the schedule". These two reminders and a few more are always there. Whenever I lose my way during my day I can always just look at the wall to center myself and reconnect with what I should be doing and how I should go about it. I highly recommend doing this to stay on course.
8. Be 10 or 5 minutes early. This is a very simple tip that transforms those traveling times during your day into relaxing breaks instead of passages of time and space that only up your levels of stress and other negative feelings.

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Copyright 2006-2010 Henrik Edberg.

 

 

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6 Reasons to Focus on Liking Yourself, and How to Do It

 

 

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6 Reasons to Focus on Liking Yourself, and How to Do It

via The Positivity Blog | Increase Your Happiness and Awesomeness by Henrik Edberg on 4/23/10

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/insomnia90/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

"Nobody will think you're somebody if you don't think so yourself."
African-American proverb

"Self-love is not opposed to the love of others."
Dr. Karl Menninger

"Happiness is: Looking in a mirror and like what you see ."
Author Unknown

People have a need for affection and being liked. But it's very easy to make a mistake here and go about it the wrong way. Because while trying to get others to like you may seem like a simple and common solution there is an alternative. One that I find works better.

It is to focus on liking yourself more rather than trying to get people to like you.

Here are six reasons why I put my focus in that place. And after that a brief guide to how you can increase how much you like yourself.

1. Liking yourself gives you power and strength.

If you go for trying to get people to like you you'll most likely come off as needy and desperate a lot of the time. This is a bad position to put yourself in. Because liking and respecting yourself goes hand in hand with people liking and respecting you.

If you bend to other people all the time then they may like what you do for them. But they may not like you on a deeper level because there is a weakness and lack of confidence and personal power there.

2. People like people who like themselves.

What is attractive to a friend, an employer or a potential partner? To me, it seems like a lot of this boils down to people liking people who like themselves. Someone who likes him/herself is positive, confident, takes care of his/her health and opportunities in school/at work/in life.

3. More inner stability, much less of an emotional rollercoaster.

Getting compliments and being liked is wonderful. The problem is just that if you rely too much on validation from others then you let the outside world, other people, control how you feel. And that can be a real rollercoaster.

Because if you really need the positive validation from people then it's hard to avoid listening to their negative input. Or you may feel bad when there is a temporary lack in the validation. So what do you do? You let go of focusing on needing that input and replace it with focusing on validating and liking yourself instead.

4. Life becomes more fun and relaxing.

If you like yourself then it becomes natural to just be your best self and let people like the real you. Doing the opposite and trying to get people to like you leads to a lack of honesty in any kind of relationship and life becomes a like walking on egg shells while using different masks with different people.

5. What you think and feel about yourself flows over.

The more you like yourself, the easier it becomes to like, help and be kind to other people. How much you like or do not like yourself flows over into your world.

6. You minimize self sabotage.

If you don't like yourself, if you deep down don't really think you deserve what you go after then you will tend to sabotage for yourself. Perhaps in subtle ways. You may get a gut feeling that this success is wrong and so you start doing stuff that screws things up. If you like yourself there will be a lot less self made obstacles in your mind to overcome on your path to success.

How to like yourself more

So, the benefits sound pretty good. But how do you go about changing how you feel about yourself?

Here is a brief but in my experience very effective guide that works in real life.

Do the right thing.

I write about this a lot. That's because it's simple thing to keep in mind and if you live it then it can bring your awesome results.

When you do what you think is the right thing then your self esteem goes up. If you just coast then you tend to feel kinda lame about yourself. So do awesome stuff and you feel awesome about yourself. Do ok stuff and feel ok about yourself. This is not always an easy thing. But people who do the right thing get fine inner rewards (and often outer rewards too). What you do tends to correspond to what you get in the long run.

What is the right thing? Well, that's up to you to decide and it can vary from life to life and situation to situation. Some of the things I think is the right thing to do is to keep my life in order and organized, to workout regularly and take care of my health, to be positive and open, to spend time doing things I really like doing, to get out of my comfort zone and face fears and to be a person of action.

When you do the right thing you like yourself more and so the self sabotage decreases. The standards you set for yourself flows over to your world too. What you accept or don't accept from yourself is what you tend to accept or not accept from other people.

And what you think and do to the world around you – for example being judgmental or being open and kind – is how you tend to think about yourself and treat yourself too.

Don't take yourself for granted or focus on the wrong things. Appreciate yourself.

What you do or do not do has a huge effect on how you view yourself and how much you like yourself. But what you focus on in your mind is also important. Because if you do good things but then focus on small faults or failures then that won't help you.

So make a habit of focusing on appreciating the good things about yourself. Take two minutes right now to think about positive things about you or good things you have done and accomplished. Or take a few minutes tonight to write down five good things about yourself in a journal.

This extends to what you focus on in the world around you too. Because as I mentioned in the previous tip, what you focus on in the people around you tends to be how you see and treat yourself. So you may want to add five or ten things that you appreciate about the people around you to those journal entries and two minute appreciation sessions.

The more you do things like these, the more this kind of thinking will naturally pop up in your everyday life too. You are changing how you think about yourself and what you have a tendency to focus on.

If you found this article helpful, please share it with someone on Twitter and Stumbleupon. Thank you very much! =)

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Copyright 2006-2010 Henrik Edberg.

 

 

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How to Finish What You Have Started

 

 

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How to Finish What You Have Started

via The Positivity Blog | Increase Your Happiness and Awesomeness by Henrik Edberg on 3/23/10

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/muffmuff/ / CC BY-ND 2.0

Simply getting up from the chair, stopping all the theorizing and getting started is one of the biggest issues I believe people face. But to keep going until something is finished can also be a big issue (it has certainly been so at times for me at least).

I have however found a few solutions that work for me and help me to reach the finish line. Feel free to chime in with your own solutions that work for you in the comments.

Let go of perfectionism.

This has been a pretty big issue for me in the past. You want to polish everything until it is "perfect". The problem is just that such thinking often leads to many things not ever being finished.

So you have to find a balance for yourself where you do good work and don't slack off but at the same time don't get lost in trying to improve and polish something too much.

I have found that balance through experience.

It is also very important to be aware that nothing will ever be perfect. Striving for perfection can be pretty dangerous. Because you will never feel like you are good enough.

You have set the bar at an inhuman level. And so your self esteem stays low even though your results may be very good.

So just focus on gradually being more consistent instead trying to be perfect.

Realize that good enough is good enough. And that goes both for your work and for you.

Set a deadline.

A few months ago, I set a deadline for when my ebook should be finished. I had realized that just working on it and releasing it when it was done would not work. Because I could always find stuff to add to it. So I had to set a deadline. Sure, I still missed it by a few days but finally I did the last 30 percent of the work and was done with it.

Setting a deadline gave me a kick in the butt and it is generally good way to help you to let go of a need to polish things a bit too much.

Limit yourself in all kinds of ways.

The last part of a project or a task can often feel pretty hard and it's easy to get lost in procrastination. By setting limits for how often you check email each day, how much time you spend on social networks and forums, how much time you take to make small everyday decisions you can over a month or two develop these things into habits that run automatically most of the time.

By incorporating limits like these into your lifestyle you are less likely to get distracted during the last part of the work and you can keep
your eye on what's important.

Make it light, don't create a heavy cloud of drama, problems and complications in your mind.

Realize that much of this is in your head. Your perspective determines to a large degree what you see.

Your relationships to what you want to achieve are – just like your relationships to people – to a large extent just in your head. Try thinking that something is easy and simple instead of "heavy" and complicated and your perception of that external thing you want to achieve tends to change too. Experiment and find healthy and effective relationships to what you want to achieve instead of just seeing something like many people may do.

Bring awareness to you own thought patterns by asking yourself questions like:

"Honestly, am I overcomplicating this?" and
"What is the simplest and most straightforward solution to my problem?"

If you enjoyed this article, please share it on Stumbleupon and Twitter. Thank you very much! =P

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Copyright 2006-2010 Henrik Edberg.

 

 

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How to Get to Know Yourself Better: 3 Great Tips

 

 

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How to Get to Know Yourself Better: 3 Great Tips

via The Positivity Blog | Increase Your Happiness and Awesomeness by Henrik Edberg on 3/19/10

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/23912576@N05/ / CC BY 2.0

"He who knows others is learned;
He who knows himself is wise."
Lao-tzu

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

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

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

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

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

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

What can that tell you about you?

2. Do the unusual thing.

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

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

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

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

3. Journal.

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

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

If you enjoyed this article, please share it on Stumbleupon and Twitter. Thank you very much! =)

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Copyright 2006-2010 Henrik Edberg.

 

 

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via the electronic mayhem of Jack Davey. by the tripper . on 3/8/10

 

 

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Are These 3 Odd but Common Obstacles Standing in the Way of Your Success?

 

 

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Are These 3 Odd but Common Obstacles Standing in the Way of Your Success?

via The Positivity Blog | Increase Your Happiness and Awesomeness by Henrik Edberg on 3/8/10

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

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

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

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

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

1. Drama.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2. Small invisible barriers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Copyright 2006-2010 Henrik Edberg.

 

 

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Free African-American History Guided Tours at Oakland Cemetery on February 1...

 

 

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Free African-American History Guided Tours at Oakland Cemetery on February 13 & 24

via Atlanta on the Cheap by admin on 2/12/10

Oooh, I want to go to this: On Saturday, February 13, & Wednesday, February 24, the Oakland Cemetery will offer free guided tours. On the tour, you'll get a better understanding of...

 

 

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