Top Ten Tips on How to Get and Stay Motivated

Learning how to get and stay motivated isn't always an easy task. It's especially difficult when you're dreading the task at hand and are inclined to procrastinate. Below, are the Top 10 Tips to help you get motivated - and back on track. They will also help you stay on track so you achieve your goals and be even more successful.

1. Find what drives you. Are you driven by your own needs, by the need of your family, or by someone else? How about the needs of your clients? Are you willing to work 10-hour days because your client is in a pinch or because you desire the end result? Maybe your drive comes from paying off your debt and providing a better life for your family. ACTION STEP: Find what drives you and then exploit it to stay motivated and focused. Write it down and post it at your work station where you will see it frequently throughout the day.

2. Visualize the end result. Zoning in on the end result is one of the key steps in being able to understand how to get motivated. When you accomplish a goal, you feel a sense of excitement or triumph. ACTION STEP: Visualize how you'll feel once you accomplish each goal. Make a to-do list for the things you'd like to do once you get this task out of the way. Maybe you'll take a mini vacation with your significant other, make an appointment to get a massage, or take a day off and play golf. Hang that list where it will remind you frequently of the desired result.

3. Reward yourself. Aren't rewards the biggest motivator? Give yourself a tiny prize every time you accomplish something on your to-do list. Motivate yourself with a cup of coffee, a break to read your favorite books, or the time to take that vacation. ACTION STEP: Set up small rewards for each goal you achieve. Staying motivated is a heck of a lot easier when you've got something exciting in the immediate future to look forward to.

4. Change your scenery. Sometimes, it's just difficult to get motivated when you're looking at the same four walls hour after hour. Occasionally, all you need is a change of scenery to get the ball rolling. ACTION STEP: Shake things up by changing your scenery. If it's a nice summer day, get some work done while sitting on your porch. If you live in the city, head to a coffee shop and plop yourself down into a nice cushy chair, get a latte and get to work.

5. Plan ahead. Creating a realistic schedule is essential when trying to understand how to get motivated. ACTION STEP: Give yourself a set amount of time to complete each task and then move on. If you're not done before times up, save the task for the end of the day and reprioritize your to-do list for the following day.

6. Divide responsibility. You're not just an entrepreneur; you also have personal responsibilities that need your attention. If you have a spouse or children, consider delegating some responsibilities to them. Instead of using your break to drive to the post office and mail bills, ask your significant other if they have time to do it before he or she heads to work. If you usually wake up early to clean the house, give your 13-year old $20 to clean the house three times each week. ACTION STEP: Hold a family and/or team meeting to divide responsibilities throughout your household (and office) so you can free up your most valuable time to taking on the most high-impact actions.

7. Remember why you do this. You obviously became an entrepreneur for a reason. Perhaps you have a passion for what you do or it allows the flexibility you need in your schedule. Maybe your income provides great benefits to you or your family that would otherwise be minimal if it were not for your business. ACTION STEP: Constantly be mindful of why you do what you do - it's one of the best ways to easily get and stay motivated.

8. Use fear. This may seem like a dirty little trick, but sometimes it's a necessary evil to truly learn how to stay motivated. If you are unable to connect with why you do what you do, perhaps thinking of what would happen if you didn't will remind you. You may use this only as a last resort if nothing else seems to be working. ACTION STEP: Think of what you could lose if you don't get the task at hand completed. Analyze what's at stake and let the fear of losing these valuable things pump you into getting motivated!

9. Raise the Bar. Successful entrepreneurs know that constantly raising the bar is the true key to self improvement. Raising the bar each time you reach a goal will force you to advance your skills, become a strategic thinker and ultimately thrust you towards completing your responsibilities in a more efficient manner. ACTION STEP: Raise the bar every month or even every week. If you have a goal in mind, step it up one or two more notches, yet it must still be believable for you. You'll soon start to see your motivation (and your ability to achieve more) sky rocket.

10. Break a Sweat. It's no secret that exercising boosts your confidence and helps you stay motivated. Get active and clear your thoughts by taking a jog in the park each morning, swimming a lap in your pool during your lunch break or speed walking with your dog before work. Any kind of physical activity for thirty minutes or longer will help you get motivated and boost your levels of endorphins. ACTION STEP: Commit to 30-minutes per day of any type of exercise. Use your personal preference (morning, afternoon or night) to use your peak energy to the best advantage.

Follow these tips and action steps to help you get and stay motivated and you will continue to move closer to achieving your goals. Remember, it's about staying focused and disciplined, taking many positive steps forward while minimizing or eliminating the backwards steps, and committing to doing what it takes to get you where you want to be.

Learn How To Have A Happy Day

Every morning is a fresh opportunity for your life to take a new path. The day is at your disposal and can be anything that you want it to be. The real question is how to you ensure that you have a happy day?

Many people believe that they have no control over the day ahead of them. That everything happens by fate and that they are simply in for what life has in store for them. However, that is not true. There are some things that you can do to ensure that you have a happy day.

The first thing that you need to do is choose your attitude. It's easy to allow yourself to have your emotions swayed by the circumstances that you are in. Unfortunately this often leads to you feeling more negative than positive.

Rather than allowing that to happen it is better to choose your attitude and to stay strong in that choice. It is surprising how much of an effect your choice in attitude can have on your day. When you have a positive attitude you can take bumps in the road in stride.

One of the easiest ways to have a happy day is to simply put a smile on your face. When you smile it activates your muscle memory reminding you of times that were happy. That can make you feel more happy in a very short period of time. The great thing about a smile is that it doesn't take a lot of effort to make happen, yet it can bring about a significant change in your mood.

Another way to put yourself in a more positive mood is to count your blessings. All too often you may find yourself taking what you have for granted. This does not just mean material things. It can also mean those intangible things like love, faith, and security.

Take some time each and every day to cherish the blessings that you have in your life and realize how lucky you are to have them. Recognizing these things can instantly make you feel more happy and content each and every day.

To make yourself feel satisfied and happy it is also a good to finish things that you have started. It is not uncommon to have unfinished projects lying around, but these projects tend to hang over your head and overshadow everything that you do. The best thing that you can do to make yourself more happy is to finish some of those projects. That sense of satisfaction will bring a smile that you will not soon lose.

If all else fails one way to give yourself an emergency shot of happy is to take the focus off of yourself. Spend some time lending a hand to someone in need. This could be someone that you know or even someone that you don't. Sometimes volunteering to help others is exactly what you need to do to realize how much you have in your own life and how happy you should be in your life each and every day.

Top Five Self-Help Apps to Improve Your Life

In addition to enhancing our job productivity and allowing us to have access to social networks on-the-go,

smartphones and tablets can also help us to improve our mental well-being and become more content and self-actualized.

It’s not really that surprising that self-help applications are becoming more popular than ever as buying apps from iTunes and the Android Market become increasingly available to professionals, academics, and master’s degree students. These applications help balance out the power of electronics today and their ability to distract us from our responsibilities.

MyThoughts+

Getting work done while you’re down in the dumps is a hard task to accomplish. Many people swear by the power of positive thinking. Noted cartoonist Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip Dilbert, credits his uncanny ability to devise hilarious comic strips with his positive attitude.

MyThoughts+ displays positive affirmations on a customizable background, transitioning from one quote to the next while playing soothing music in the background. If you can’t afford a mountain retreat to the Himalayas, MyThoughts+ just might be the next best thing.

LiveHappy

One of the best ways to accomplish any goal or complete any task is to break it down into manageable, bite-sized pieces. LiveHappy is an application which helps cultivate optimism in your daily activities.

Based on the book, The How of Happiness, by Sonja Lyubomirsky, LiveHappy helps you to keep track of your personal progress as you work towards obtaining inner peace. It features a built-in personality test as well as plenty of tips and tricks on conceptualizing a happier you.

iStress

Not only is stress a detriment to your daily well-being, it is a contributing risk factor in illnesses ranging from heart attacks to strokes. iStress is a comprehensive stress management application which features a number of helpful exercises aimed at reducing stress and encouraging positive thinking.

It includes a compendium of motivational sayings and affirmations to help you reduce your stress levels when you feel overwhelmed. It also allows you to keep a journal of positive or negative thoughts and emotions so that you can identify stress triggers and avoid them in the future.

Gratitude Journal

Brought to you by the good people at Happy Tapper, Gratitude Journal is a fun way to give thanks for what you’ve got. Too often in life, we focus on the negative and completely forget about all the positive things that happen to us. Gratitude Journal gives you an easy way to keep a log of what you’re thankful for that you can turn to when you’re down.

The Habit Factor

Most of us are creatures of habit. We tend to perform at our best when we incorporate positive habits into our daily routine. The Habit Factor is a tracking app that allows you to set goals and commit to forming good habits.

You can use the application to monitor your adherence to your resolutions and check them off as you accomplish them. If you’re trying to form good habits in your personal and professional life and stick to them, it helps to have a constant reminder like the one The Habit Factor provides.

In Conclusion

We’ve often been told by self-help authorities that happiness comes from within. Despite being a cliché, the sentiment remains true. Getting your house in order has a lot of direct and indirect benefits. Happy people are more successful, tend to earn more, and have better relationships with those around them in general.

The best way to get to that happy place is to help yourself. After all, nobody in the world understands what makes you happy better than yourself. The applications listed above should help you in taking the first step towards achieving happiness.

Is personal development for me?

We all share the need for sleep, shelter, nourishment and care; beyond that we need money to bring us choices in life and to thereby reduce our stress. There are many people in our society today that are very unhappy with their lives for one reason or another. Whatever reason they have for being unhappy, there is undoubtedly a way to change it. Sometimes it requires a change in career, or situation. Other times it is simply a change in the way that people think. Sometimes, it is both. This is what personal development is all about.

Personal development is the study and practice of improving one’s life, especially our career, education, relationships, health, happiness, productivity, spirituality, and other personal goals. Common aspects of personal development include goal setting, motivation, changing habits, improving awareness, identifying one’s values and beliefs, self-actualization and a lot more.

Personal development groups have tended to involve an 'expert/guru' and, by inference, less 'developed' or less 'enlightened' members of the audience.

Personal development really only involves becoming aware of what you are actually like, what you'd like to change about yourself, and if it is changeable, learning how to do just that!

Personal development does not involve diagnosing or treating an illness or injury.  A key characteristic of someone who wants to practice personal development is that they are generally healthy and normal individuals who are able and willing to move forward in their lives. In other words, they want to become peak-performing individuals.

There is a vast amount of information and resource on the internet, and in book stores on personal development plus its early influences including Ancient philosophy, Eastern and Western religions, Psychoanalysis, Hypnotherapy, and Humanistic Psychology.

But even with all this great information, many are probably confused on where they should get started. That is a big reason why I write on this blog.

One of the important steps toward personal development is to set obtainable goals. This is not to say that your dream is not obtainable. But if you constantly think about the goal of being a millionaire with a successful family, you will feel pretty frustrated and hopeless as that goal seems so far out of reach. Setting obtainable goals simply means that you set goals that lead to the ultimate goal.

It is really about taking steps. When you decide that you need food in your refrigerator, it does not automatically appear. You must make a grocery list, go to the grocery store, shop for items, purchase them, bring them home, and put them in the fridge. Obtaining a large goal is much the same way. You will not get there overnight. It takes going through a series of steps, or smaller goals, to find your way.

Keep in mind, however, that personal development isn’t necessarily for everyone. Some people don’t need this kind of material. And some people just actively refuse it. I like to respect everyone’s values and goals no matter what they may be (even if it is to have no values or goals).

Personal Development – Starting a better life Now!!

Personal Development is hugely misunderstood by many people, I know this for sure, I was one of those people who believed that Personal Development was for the weak, the insecure, the people who were struggling with their own identity or with life in general. When I was first introduced to Personal Development I pushed it away. If I'm being honest I felt insulted that anyone would suggest that I needed any development in my life.  Nothing could be further from the truth. Personal Development is for the strong, courageous, non conformist thinkers who recognize that they are powerful individuals capable of great achievements and know that the only way possible to be your best is to work on yourself every single day for the rest of your life.

Personal development is the pursuit of learning, developing, honing and mastering the skills that help you become the best that you can, with all that you have. It is the reaching for, and realizing of your full potential as a human being.  All human beings are responsible for their actions so it makes sense to direct those actions towards successful outcomes with a focused attitude. We were never introduced to this kind of thinking in school or by our peers and as a result many people today journey through life without any clear understanding of their amazing potential. That's what's so important about studying Personal Development, it gives you other alternatives to your usual mundane way of thinking.

When we talk about Personal Development several things come to mind. For some this can mean many different things. Some examples may include:

- Learning how to set and keep goals.

- Learning how to manage their time and be efficient

- Getting a better job

- Improving relationships

- Reducing stress

- Change their physical appearance

- Create a better financial platform 

 and the list goes on..... 

Regardless of the reason most of us are looking for ways to improve our lives and be happier. However most of us don't get what we want because we don't know exactly what it is that we want. Most of us fail because we never begin. Most of us need to change the way we see ourselves. Some of us just need a little boost of confidence.

The hardest part in dealing with any major challenge is taking the first step, however once you do, there is a surprising positive and snowball effect. You will begin to feel good about what you're doing and you'll want to take further steps.
You will want to keep improving yourself and to become the very best that you can be.

Your continuing journey of personal development will make you aware that there is so much more knowledge and information to be discovered, and uncovered, than you ever thought possible - knowledge about yourself, knowledge about others, knowledge about life and the world around you. A fantastic life experience controlled by you, if you make a start.

Personal development is about wanting and pursuing new experiences, knowledge and excellent relationships. Nothing should be left out in your pursuit of finding your future self and life fulfilment.

"Learning is the best of all wealth;


it is easy to carry,


thieves cannot steal it,


the tyrants cannot seize it;


neither water nor fire can destroy it;


and far from decreasing, it increases by giving."
(Naladiyar (c.5th~6th century,))