With all the driftwood on the beach after recent big storms, some people see debris spoiling the usually pristine sands. Others see a gift for creativity.
What do you see when everything goes pear-shaped and plans fall apart?
I used to not like mornings. Monday mornings were the worst. I liked them so little that I thought of Sunday as the impending doom … that made my weekends even shorter.
One day it dawned on me that if I lived to be 70 holding on to this feeling about Mondays, I’d have discounted 10 whole years of my life. Ten years — 520 Mondays lost, crashed, and burned — due to a bad attitude. I had to find a way to get and stay motivated. I had to get back my Mondays. I was pretty sure that I didn’t have enough future left to be throwing away 10 years like a fool.
Monday mornings made feel like a giraffe — all gawky and spotted, all sleepy eyed and too tired to chew my food. I needed motivation. But I wasn’t sure I knew how to do it. It would take some experimentation. I got down to it.
Who wants to sleepwalk through life? I had things that needed doing.
Motivation, without it, we move slower. We’re susceptible to distraction and procrastination. Inside a company or working from home, what fuels our success is motivation — that reason, that determination to make something good happen.
I figured out early that it wasn’t such fun to be unmotivated. In fact, it was both stressful and boring. I didn’t like myself much and maybe that is what struck that match that got the home fires burning. Once I made it a quest to motivate myself, the rest was mostly easy. Here are 7 ways I found to motivate yourself even on Mondays!
It’s no accident nature puts on such a great show at sunrise – it inspires, invigorates, and motivates human beings. Try to see it. Don’t just look at walls, windshields, and buildings.
The trick to motivation is knowing that every bit of it is in our control. Even if we start to go off track, we can go back to number 7 and choose again to be in a good mood. Then start all over at Number 1 … No day is lost until we give it up.
It’s your day. It’s your life. You’ve got 7 ways to own every day.
Why would you spend a minute in unmotivated and boring?
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
When I saw this watercourse this week at the beach it made me think of the quote:
Follow One Course Until Successful- anon
Are you a follow one course type or do you follow many courses?
What is successful for you?
The rules, values, and ideas we learned growing up served us in those situations and settings. Some of those rules, values and ideas are universal to humanity, but others were built from the goals people who . Yet we often keep living by those rules long after we’ve left the group, society, or culture from which they came. We still use rules from grade school peer groups to define ourselves and make decisions as adults. The values, rules, and ideas imprint deeper and last longer than the channels for which they were developed to build, serve, and protect.
In my high school, it was a social and a fashion faux pas to EVER wear red shoes. Yet my friends who went to a Chicago high school had never heard of that “law.” It was stunning and amazing that these attractive, fun, funny, intelligent kids could live so effortlessly cool wearing red shoes whenever they wanted. It took outright clear thinking on my part to choose to set aside that rule — The tragedy was that it didn’t occur to me to stop following the red shoe rules until long after high school, long after it was even a remotely useful rule.
In every group, society, and culture that we belong, we use rules, values, and ideas to identify ourselves as members of the group, align our goals and define our roles. We use those rules, values, and ideas to attract like-minded thinkers and to channel our energy in the useful directions. But no single set of rules, values and ideas carries over completely to the next universe of people.
In increments we’ve learned to look outside us — to our parents, teachers, friends, bosses — for answers for the keys to navigate those elusive rules, values, and ideas that define good behavior and outline the clearest path to our success. What meet instead is other people who have also learned to look outside themselves.
The rules, values and ideas we collect over time grow and gather. Each one we add comes from someone else. We keep adding in more to those we’ve picked up and combine them in our own ways to make our own sense. The rules, values and ideas don’t leave our minds when we move on with our lives.
Rules, values, and ideas are like people in the way that few will fit us well-enough to earn the place of a life-long friend.
Who built the rules, values, and ideas that fuel the decisions you make?
If you haven’t named the values, rules, and ideas that are your friends for life, fair chance the answer is: not you.
Every new teacher, location, clan, situation, culture, corporation, church, organization, school, or troop offers new rules, ideas, and values slightly different from the last. Yet no person, group, or association has to live one moment of your life.
Think about that.
It’s your life.
No one has walked a mile in your shoes.
No one knows what you wish in the middle of the night.
Choose your values.
Make your rules.
Have your own ideas.
Be effortlessly cool in your red shoes.
Be your own unique value proposition.
Live your own life.
Are you ready to move the useless rules out of your head and get to a new sort of productive?
Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!
Itâs the end of the first week of January. Did you already start slipping on some of those resolutions? Well quit beating yourself up, youâre not alone. The mystical pull of January 1 gets us every year. We take deep breaths, ponder the future, and muster up the guts to make some decisions about our lives and our businesses. And then….life happens.
Hereâs the most important trick: Every morning is January 1. Every moment is January 1. You can make a decision right this very second to take action on one of your primary goals. In fact, stop reading this right now and go do one thing that will get you closer. Send that email, follow up with that customer, finish that report, call your grandmother. Weâll wait.
……….if youâre back, then you did your one action, right? If you didnât, go away and do it now!
…and…see how easy that was? Now keep the momentum going by allowing yourself to have space in the day (or evening) to proactively plan the next day, week, month, in increments you can handle. If you want to wake up on December 31, 2012, having accomplished something big, then you need to chip away at it all year long. And you need to have periodic check-ins with yourself so that you can course-correct if necessary.
Iâll share my check-in secret sauce. Itâs a hot pink Moleskine that goes everywhere with me. In the front are the big goals for the year, and then broken-down goals for each month that will draw me closer and closer throughout the year. There is no one-size-fits-all method, but the key is to avoid drifting.
Now go and take the second step. And write down what the third, fourth, and fifth steps will look like.
Feel free to brag about your audacious action in the comments. Weâll do this together.
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Author’s Bio: Rosemary OâNeill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out their blog. You can find her on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee
Thank you, Rosemary!
You’re irresistible!
ME “Liz” Strauss
Someone needs to tell the political candidates that personal empowerment is not about power over others. Rather, it is understanding that you are in charge of your own life.
People who are personally empowered know that happiness is an inside job. They donât wait for someone else to make them happy and they can take care of their own needs for affection.
In other words, there is no finger pointing and blaming others for your lack of performance. You are willing to take responsibility for your actions. OK, so now itâs very obvious that most political candidates have no personal empowermentâthey are just power hungry.
I make this distinction between power and personal empowerment because they are two very different things and people often assume that to be empowered is to be powerful.
Wrong.
Empowerment is a process where you do something, reflect on your actions, assess whether you made the right choiceâand whyâand continue on. This progression is a very important piece of the puzzle because personal empowerment acknowledges complete responsibility for self and the choices that are made. It is strong enough to look at itself and say, âBadly done, Emma. Badly done,â and then move on, taking with it lessons learned from the experience.
Personal empowerment is not for wimps. It takes a strong character to look at oneself with honesty and decide what to keep and what to throw out.
Life unfolds in phases. As we look back over time, we can see when we felt empowered and when we did not. Each time period has itâs own characteristics.
We all spent time as students when our lives revolved around classes, teachers, and other students. The academic calendar was central to all of our planning. Life as a student is a unique time.
Similarly, we are always in different phases of life as we mature and circumstances change. Life is a series of interconnecting phases. So when we stop to take that honest look at ourselves, we will be empowered only to the degree to which we understand what phase of life weâre in.
Our life is bigger than a single moment. The things that we cherish, the goals that motivate us, and the issues we wrestle with are connected to the period in which we currently find ourselves.
We feel lack of personal empowerment when we are unable to make choices that are always in our own best interest. Indeed, it is impossible to feel empowered if we cannot identify the issues that hold us back. We feel out of control when we try to live up to the expectations of others. We give power over our life to others when we allow them to define success or achievement.
But when we let others generate ideas and solutions for our issues, we are no longer taking the lead.
We become the ultimate follower when we are no longer the leader of our own life.
As an FBI counterintelligence agent, the first phase of a recruitment operation was to identify the target. This meant collecting as much information as possible about the targetâs past and current situation, as well as aspirations for the future. Every investigation starts with understanding the nature and character of the NOW phase.
Here is a list of typical questions used in FBI recruitment operations to help agents get clarity about the issues and specific needs of the person weâre investigating. These same questions may also help you define the phase of life you are now living in. It is impossible to attain personal empowerment without understanding the nature and character of your current phase of life:
To attain personal empowerment, itâs important to understand the key issues in your life and decisions you are being asked to make during this phase.
What kinds of thoughts, impressions, experiences, etc. came to you during this exercise? What are some key insights in this phase of your life? How do these empower you?
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Author’s Bio:
LaRae Quy was an FBI agent, both a counterintelligence and undercover agent, for 25 years. She exposed foreign spies and recruited them to work for the U.S. Government. Now she explores the unknown and discovers the hidden truth via her blog Your Best Adventure. You can find her on Twitter as @LaRaeQuy
Thanks, Larae!
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Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz on your business!!