5 Ways To Be More Grateful For The Life You Are Living!

Here are 5 Ways to Be More Grateful For The Life You Are Living Today!

1. Remember the Bad. To be grateful in your current state, it is helpful to remember the hard times that you once experienced. When you remember how difficult life used to be and how far you have come, you set up an explicit contrast in your mind, and this contrast is fertile ground for gratefulness.

2. Watch your Language. Grateful people have a particular linguistic style that uses the language of gifts, givers, blessings, blessed, fortune, fortunate, and abundance. In gratitude, you should not focus on how inherently good you are, but rather on the inherently good things that others have done on your behalf.

3. Think Outside the Box. If you want to make the most out of opportunities to flex your gratitude muscles, you must creatively look for new situations and circumstances in which to feel grateful.

4. Ask Yourself Three Questions. Utilize the meditation technique known as Naikan, which involves reflecting on three questions: “What have I received from __?”, “What have I given to __?”, and “What troubles and difficulty have I caused?”

5. Go Through the Motions. If you go through grateful motions, the emotion of gratitude should be triggered. Grateful motions include smiling, saying thank you, and writing letters of gratitude.

If you would like to delve deeper and begin your SHIFT today, head on over to The90DayShift.blogspot.com

3 Steps For Successful Goal Setting

1. Develop confidence.

You must develop confidence to take actions that will advance you and your business or career. But building confidence is not as simple as it sounds. The most successful people are those who can manage the contradictions of life; who are aware of but not constrained by their limitations. Insecurity disables us from conquering our inner demons and making something of our lives. Arrogance makes us come off as know-it-alls, which erodes our level of influence, and after a while people will stop listening to us. Confidence is the balancing act between pride and uncertainty, and it is a work in progress.

You must develop confidence to take actions that will advance you and your business or career.

2. Talk it out.

You need to surround yourself with trusted friends and mentors who will be honest with you about your performance and what areas need improvement. Listen to them. Listen to yourself.

This ability to simultaneously doubt and trust yourself is at the core of effective self-assessment. For example, many people find themselves repeatedly crashing into the same brick wall, never changing course. If I find myself blocked at every turn—whether because of people above me or perhaps by some competitive situation—I step back and regroup. When we encounter multiple failures, our nature is to blame circumstances, other people, the equity of the universe. But we also have to step back and ask, Could it be me?

This is where the ability to have a cognitive discussion with yourself comes in, where you can disengage and look at the situation with a longer view. That perspective is critical to determining whether your actions are helping or hurting you and your organization.

3. Make your move.

You can carefully plot your own success and evaluate your effectiveness as you go along, but at the end of the day, you have to get out there and play in traffic. You are never going to be totally trained or prepared; there is no schedule of required classes. You have to meet people, develop relationships and swap best practices. You have to make things happen. Trust your healthy self-confidence and inner gyroscope to keep you on the right course.

The Bonus Step is 4. Hold YOURSELF ACCOUNTABLE.

I hope you enjoyed the three tips for successful goal setting, if you're ready to make the SHIFT visit The90DayShift.com to ENROLL!

The Golden Rules of Goal Setting

1. Set Goals That Motivate You

When you set goals for yourself, it is important that they motivate you: this means making sure that they are important to you, and that there is value in achieving them. If you have little interest in the outcome, or they are irrelevant given the larger picture, then the chances of you putting in the work to make them happen are slim. Motivation is key to achieving goals.

Set goals that relate to the high priorities in your life. Without this type of focus, you can end up with far too many goals, leaving you too little time to devote to each one. Goal achievement requires commitment, so to maximize the likelihood of success, you need to feel a sense of urgency and have an "I must do this" attitude. When you don't have this, you risk putting off what you need to do to make the goal a reality. This in turn leaves you feeling disappointed and frustrated with yourself, both of which are de-motivating. And you can end up in a very destructive "I can't do anything or be successful at anything" frame of mind.

2. Make an Action Plan

This step is often missed in the process of goal setting. You get so focused on the outcome that you forget to plan all of the steps that are needed along the way. By writing out the individual steps, and then crossing each one off as you complete it, you'll realize that you are making progress towards your ultimate goal. This is especially important if your goal is big and demanding, or long-term. 

3. Stick With It!

Remember, goal setting is an ongoing activity not just a means to an end. Build in reminders to keep yourself on track, and make regular time-slots available to review your goals. Your end destination may remain quite similar over the long term, but the action plan you set for yourself along the way can change significantly. Make sure the relevance, value, and necessity remain high.